the Divine Comedy of Dante, the Book of Genesis, and the timeless

temples of the Orient? Until the most recent decades, these

were the support of all human life and the inspiration of philosophy,
poetry, and the arts. Where the inherited symbols have been
touched by a Lao-tse, Buddha, Zoroaster, Christ, or Mohammed—
employed by a consummate master of the spirit as a vehicle of
the profoundest moral and metaphysical instruction -obviously
we are in the presence rather of immense consciousness than of
darkness.
And so, to grasp the full value of the mythological figures that
have come down to us, we must understand that they are not
only symptoms of the unconscious (as indeed are all human
thoughts and acts) but also controlled and intended statements
of certain spiritual principles, which have remained as constant
throughout the course of human history as the form and nervous
structure of the human physique itself. Briefly formulated, the
universal doctrine teaches that all the visible structures of the
world—all things and beings—are the effects of a ubiquitous
power out of which they rise, which supports and fills them during
the period of their manifestation, and back into which they
must ultimately dissolve. This is the power known to science as
energy, to the Melanesians as mana, to the Sioux Indians as
wakonda, the Hindus as shakti, and the Christians as the power
of God. Its manifestation in the psyche is termed, by the psychoanalysts,
libido.' And its manifestation in the cosmos is the structure
and flux of the universe itself.
The apprehension of the source of this undifferentiated yet
everywhere particularized substratum of being is rendered frustrate
by the very organs through which the apprehension must
be accomplished. The forms of sensibility and the categories of
human thought,' which are themselves manifestations of this
power,3 so confine the mind that it is normally impossible not