17 August 2020
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| Representation of Wotan as "Dezember" in Festkalender, by the German painter Hans Thoma (1839-1924) |
Another way that Jung has influenced me are his insights about German identity and the Wotan Archetype. Even before his mortal life, Jung inherited the memories and qualities of his ancestors, as with every individual even when not conscious of one's inheritance. One of his prized possessions was a robe from his paternal grandfather and namesake, Karl Gustav Jung (1794-1864), a Basel physician originally from Mannheim. The robe was in the black-red-gold colors of the nationalist revolution that tried to unify the German states, as Karl participated in Romantic ceremonies seeking to build a sense of cultural unity among descendants of the various German tribes.(1) The earliest record of the Jung family was in Mainz, beginning a trail from Rhineland to Schwaben and finally to Switzerland. On his maternal side, the Preiswerks, Carl Jung inherited the gift of second sight or "active imagination" from his grandmother. Jung believed this side had the ability to communicate with their ancestors despite their Swiss Reformed background.(2)
Jung stressed the centrality of ancestors and personal myth to a fulfilling life: "A man is not complete when he lives in a world of the statistical truth. He must live in a world of his biological truth. Man has always lived in the myth and we think we are able to be born today and to live in no myth, without history. That is a disease. It's absolutely abnormal! Because man is not born everyday. He is once born in a specific historical setting with specific historical qualities and therefore he is only complete when he has a relation to it, to these things. It's as if you are born without eyes and ears when you are growing up with no connection to the past. From the established method of natural science you need no connection to the past. You can wipe it out. That is a mutilation of the human being."(3)
In his seminar before the Guild for Pastoral Psychology, London, in 1939, he warned about this lack of the myth: "We have no symbolic life, and we are all badly in need of the symbolic life. Only the symbolic life can express the need of the soul - the daily need of the soul, mind you! And because people have no such thing they can never step out of this mill - this awful, banal, grinding life in which they are nothing but."(4) Much like Joseph Campbell warned of the dire consequences of a lack of an initiation rite, so too did Jung stress the importance of myth and symbol for a society: "Just as the individual's conscious mind needs to be brought into greater harmony and balance with the countervailing tendencies of the unconscious, so a particular culture needs to readjust its collective perspectives through the agency of myth and symbol. It is the mythmaking artist who discovers the compensatory archetypal image that the age and culture require for greater balance."(5)
As I noted in Part 1, in addition to the personal Unconscious there is a Collective Unconscious defined by Jung as a repository of ancestral memories and inherited traits beyond the purely biological. These are experienced through symbols and images he called archetypes: "There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the forms of images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action."(6) While some primal symbols are universal, the vast majority are highly specific according to culture: "No doubt, on an earlier and deeper level of psychic development, where it is still impossible to distinguish between an Aryan, Semitic, Hamitic, or Mongolian mentality, all human races have a common collective psyche. But with the beginning of racial differentiation, essential differences are developed in the collective psyche as well."(7)
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| "Wodans wilde Jagd" (1882) by the German-American painter Friedrich Wilhelm Heine (1845-1921) |
Underneath his own Swiss Protestant Christian background was lurking a deeper pre-Christian layer indigenous to his Germanic ancestors. Unable to find it immediately within Switzerland (at least in the early stage of his journey), he was fascinated by tribal peoples worldwide - and indeed we can learn much about our own ancestors from parallels with these other indigenous peoples. Jung read the 1912 work Inside Australia, by the Australian anthropologists Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen. From their work Jung gleaned this wisdom of the Aboriginals: "Certain Australian Aboriginals assert that one cannot conquer foreign soil, because in it there dwell strange ancestor-spirits who reincarnate themselves in the new-born. There is a great psychological truth in this. The foreign land assimilates its conqueror."(8) Likewise, Christianity could only convert our ancestors by changing itself to absorb and co-opt our own traditions, often thinly veiled under a "Christian" folklore veneer. Jung was conscious of this reality, proposing a "primitive" Shadow whose repressed elements will eventually pour out seeking accommodation in some form as he wrote in 1918:
"Christianity split the Germanic barbarian into an upper and a lower half, and enabled him, by repressing the dark side, to domesticate the brighter half and fit it for civilization. But the lower, darker half still awaits redemption and a second spell of domestication. Until then, it will remain associated with the vestiges of the prehistoric age, with the collective unconscious, which is subject to a peculiar and ever-increasing activation. As the Christian view of the world loses its authority, the more menacingly will the 'blond beast' be heard prowling about in its underground prison, ready at any moment to burst out with devastating consequences. When this happens in the individual it brings about a psychological revolution, but it can also take a social form."(9)
When his former student, Dr. Constance Ellen Long, an American psychologist living in England, fell under the influence of exiled Russian esotericist Pyotr Ouspenskii, Jung counseled her to look within her own heritage in a letter dated 17 December 1921: "Gnosis should be an experience of your own life, a plant grown on your own tree. Foreign gods are a sweet poison, but the vegetable gods you have raised in your own garden are nourishing. They are perhaps less beautiful but they have [illegible]. You shall not make totems of foreign trees. No one shall keep you else you trespass your limits; but blessed be the place where we meet the beginning of our limitations. Beyond one's frontiers there is not but illusion and misery, because there you arrive in a country of the wrong ancestor spirits and the wrong charms....Why do you look for foreign teachings? They are poisons, they did not come out of your blood. You should be on your own feet, and you have your own rich earth below them. Why should you listen to the word of a man who is off his own soil? Truth is tree with roots. It is not words. Truth only grows in your own garden, nowhere else. Only feeble men eat the food of a stranger. But your people need a strong man, one who gets his truth in his own roots and out of his own blood."(10)
On 26 May 1923, Jung wrote in a letter to the German author Oskar A.H. Schmitz (1873-1931): "We cannot possibly get beyond our present level of culture unless we receive a powerful impetus from our primitive roots. But we shall receive it only if we go back behind our cultural level, thus giving the suppressed primitive man in ourselves a chance to develop. How this is to be done is a problem I have been trying to solve for years....The existing edifice is rotten. We need some new foundations. We must dig down to the primitive in us, for only out of the conflict between civilized man and the Germanic barbarian will there come what we need: a new experience of God." He touched upon the unbridgeable gulf between native Germanic spirituality and the new conquering faith that was a hybridization of Semitic religion with the imperial Roman cult: "The Germanic tribes, when they collided only the day before yesterday with Roman Christianity, were still in the initial state of a poly-demonism with polytheistic buds. There was as yet no proper priesthood and no proper ritual. Like Wotan's oaks, the gods were felled and a wholly incongruous Christianity, born of monotheism. The Germanic man is still suffering from this mutilation." Attempts to fill this void by turning to Eastern spiritual paths were "a morbid sign" that would only "make the original injury worse."(11)
This passage contains a remarkable insight despite some of the verbiage used that on the surface may seem influenced by classical and monotheist ideas about the native peoples of central and northern Europe - i.e. "civilized" vs. "barbarian". This is resolved when we realize the "primitive" Jung meant as the most primal ways of the unconscious, stripped down to the most real and authentic self, especially since he seemed to be lamenting what modern society had become. The "new experience" was not monotheistic, as even the word "God" has Germanic origins conveying multiplicity not "oneness". Jung recognized surviving "polytheistic buds" within the Christianity accepted by the Germans, creating a hybrid bowing to a foreign god while holding to many indigenous folk traditions. It was "poly-demonism" because the Christians turned the gods of the peoples they were conquering either into saints or as "demons", depending on expediency. The gods were "felled" symbolically by the Christian missionaries' destruction of oaks and other sacred trees, such as Donar's Oak or the Irminsul. But as the divine could not be destroyed, these deities remained latent within the unconscious and the landscape itself. Jung warned against trends to fill this yearning through Eastern traditions rather than one's heritage.
His was not a unique perspective but rather one held by indigenous peoples the world over, including many Native American elders and thinkers who have similarly spoken on the need for all peoples, including those of European descent, to look back into their tribal ways to truly know and heal themselves. During my stay on the Oglala Lakota Pine Ridge reservation in summer 2010, I received such advice to reconnect to the spirituality of my own European tribal heritage but beholden to Abrahamism I wasn't having any of it then - much as it took Jung years to fully appreciate the Unconscious (as the repository of one's ancestral memories and qualities) and its Archetypes which are highly cultural specific. There are certain symbols recurring on a universal level, but ultimately the Archetypes are tied to how a tribe or people relate to their surrounding landscape and themselves.
The Santee Dakota poet and musician John Trudell seemed to hold a similar definition of "civilized" as Jung, when he said about "the tribes of Europe": "I would suggest every person of European descendancy, that you go and you study – you want to know more about who, your reality? Go and study your tribal ancestry and see how you got civilized. Alright? See how you got civilized. Because terrible things happened. And these terrible things, these are what altered the perceptional reality."(12) Trudell described "spiritual" vs. "religious" perceptions of reality, mirroring Jung's distinction between the Unconscious and Conscious. This monotheistic view that reduces divinity to one, psychologically obscures the multiplicity of one's self and socially breeds leveling political monoliths. Such a "monadic" worldview seeks by its very nature to uproot, convert and universalize all human diversity into a juggernaut of its own distorted image. The Dakota historian and writer Vine Deloria Jr. observed:
"If the propensity of whites during the summer of 1971 to grasp some bit of authenticity by locating, excavating, and embracing Indian skeletal remains can be interpreted as a frantic attempt to discard their own physical, cultural, and spiritual heritage, then the collective psyche of white America was indeed in deep trouble."(13) "A religious universality cannot be successfully maintained across racial and ethnic lines...instead of the message of universal salvation and/or fellowship, ethnicity will almost always triumph....Most likely religions do not in fact cross national and ethnic lines without losing their power and identity. It is probably more in the nature of things to have different groups with different religions....The past history of the West is eloquent testimony to the fact that a universal religion crossing ethnic lines does not lessen wars; it tends to increase them until one particular ethnic group comes to dominate the religious beliefs of the whole group with its own cultural values. Besides the importance of land in religion, the existence of a specific religion among a distinct group of people is probably a fundamental element of human experience."(14)
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| Illustration of Wotan by Carl Emil Doepler (1824-1905) for Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, 1889 |
Before Jung, many German artists and philosophers of the Romantic era were tapping into the Wotan Archetype to such an extent that the assimilated Jewish poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) observed: "Christianity - and this is the fairest merit - subdued to a certain extent the brutal warrior ardor of the Germans, but it could not entirely quench it; and when the Cross, that restraining talisman, falls to pieces, then will break forth again the ferocity of the old combatants, the frantic Berserker rage whereof Northern Poets have said and sung so much. The talisman has become rotten, and the day will surely come when it will pitifully crumble to dust. The old stone gods will arise then from the forgotten ruins and wipe from their eyes the dust of centuries, and Thor with his giant hammer will rise again, and he will shatter the Gothic cathedrals."(15) And further: "No, memories of the old German religion have not been extinguished. They say there are greybeards in Westphalia who still know where the old images of the gods lie hidden; on their death-beds they tell their youngest grandchild, who carries the secret. In Westphalia, the former Saxony, not everything that lies buried is dead."(16) The German Idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) wrote in a lengthy passage:
"Every nation has its own imagery, its gods, angels, devils, or saints who live on in the nation’s traditions, whose stories and deeds the nurse tells to her charges and so wins them over by impressing their imagination. In this way these tales are given permanence. In addition to these creatures of the imagination, there also live in the memory of most nations, especially free nations, the ancient heroes of their country’s history, i.e., the founders or liberators of their states scarcely less than the men of valor in the days before the nation was united into a state under civil laws. These heroes do not live solely in their nation’s imagination; their history, the recollection of their deeds, is linked with public festivals, national games, with many of the state’s domestic institutions or foreign affairs, with well-known houses and districts, with public memorials and temples. Every nation which has its own religion and polity, or which has made wholly its own any part of the religion and culture it has acquired from other peoples, has had its own national imagery of this kind. consider, for example, the Egyptians, the Jews, the Greeks, the Romans. The ancient Germans too, the Gauls, the Scandinavians, had their Valhalla (the home of their gods) as well as their heroes who lived in their songs, whose deeds inspired them in battle or filled their souls with great resolves on festal occasions, and they had their sacred groves where these deities drew nearer to them. Christianity has emptied Valhalla, felled our sacred groves, extirpated our national image as a shameful superstition, as a devilish poison, and given us instead the imagery of a nation whose climate, laws, culture and interests are strange to us, and whose history has no connection with our own. A David or a Solomon lives in our popular imagination, but our own country's heroes slumber in learned history books."(17)
This awakening was happening at a time of great social changes, so that artists and intellectuals in many countries re-examined their own national antiquities to fill the spiritual void. The English novelist D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) wrote in the words of the Aztec Quetzalcoatl: "So if I want Mexicans to learn the name of Quetzalcoatl, it is beause I want them to speak with the tongues of their own blood. I wish the Teutonic world would once more think in terms of Thor and Wotan, and the tree Igdrasil. And I wish the Druidic world would see, honestly, that in the mistletoe is their mystery, and that they themselves are the Tuatha De Danaan, alive, but submerged. And a new Hermes should come back to the Mediterranean, and a new Ashtaroth to Tunis; and Mithras again to Persia, and Brahma unbroken to India, and the oldest of dragons to China."(18) This corresponded with one of Jung's influences, the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), who felt that every nation and people had their own cultural "soul" while still championing individuality and affirming "the same species of man throughout the whole earth." For Jung, just as there was an individual Shadow so too were there collective Shadows - full individuation could be achieved only by integrating the repressed unconscious self into the conscious self on both an individual and collective level.
Centered around an animistic worldview, every people innately felt that an individual's body and mind resonated with the frequencies of a specific landscape, tied to the collective deeds and actions of their ancestors (the individual's own actions were symbolically "weaving" their strands into the overall Web of Wurt in the continental Germanic worldview). With the various categories of divinities there were mutual exchanges of energy, including with divinities tied to the landscape and with one's ancestors. These can be tapped into and activated by the individual to connect with their Collective Unconscious, aligned with their individual Conscious. This in a nutshell is what indigenous tribal peoples the world over knew as their own Folk or Ethnic Faith - synonymous with their culture and contrary to the "revealed" universalist organized religions - such as this definition by the European Congress of Ethnic Religions: "By Ethnic Religion, we mean religion, spirituality, and cosmology that is firmly grounded in a particular people's traditions. In our view, this does not include modern occult or ariosophic theories/ideologies, nor syncretic neo-religions." Aside from Jung, other thinkers who have elaborated on the need for an authentic spirituality rooted in the past and a landscape and not modern neo-religions to fill the spiritual void have included the Italian Julius Evola and the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa.
In the early 1930s, Jung corresponded with Jakob Wilhelm Hauer (1881-1962), a German Indologist and volkisch scholar whose experience in India awakened him to his own ancestral faith and led him to establish the Deutsche Glaubensbewegung (German Faith Movement). In 1934, Hauer gave a lecture on number symbolism that cited Jung's ideas on the Collective Unconscious and in turn influenced the Swiss psychologist. However, the two soon drifted apart as Hauer and his movement became increasingly political, tied to the National Socialists, while Jung transcended politics.(19) Much is made by Jung's critics of him identifying that Party with the Wotan Archetype, but he actually saw many manifestations of it and those tended to be on the cultural rather than political level. So too could it manifest on different levels - positive and negative - depending on how those repressed memories are processed and integrated.
Towards the end of his life, Jung developed a friendship and correspondence with the Chilean diplomat Miguel Serrano (1917-2009), most known for his work on esoteric and occult matters. In a letter to Serrano dated 14 January 1960, Jung defined various ways the Unconscious makes its presence felt socially: "The unconscious or whatever we designate by this name presents itself to you by its poetic aspect, which I envisage chiefly from its scientific and philosophic - or perhaps more accurate - from its religious aspect The Unconscious is surely the Pammeter, the Mother of All (i.e., of all psychical life), being the matrix, the background and foundation of all the differentiated phenomena we call psychical: religion, science, philosophy and art. Its experience - in whatever form it may be - is an approach to wholeness, the one experience absent in our modern civilization. It is the avenue and via regia ['royal highway'] to the Unus Mundus ['one world', to Jung the ultimate source from which synchronicities both derived and returned]."(20)
This passage seems to recognize a divine consciousness animating the cosmos, although it fails to recognize its inherent multiplicity. Indeed, Serrano later became known for a doctrine called "Esoteric Hitlerism" - an inherently monotheistic concept ("one leader, one system, one party") despite utilizing ancient Mythology. It was centered around a henotheistic consolidation of the multiplicity in the figure of Wotan (almost to the exclusion of all other deities), and was also an inversion of a masculine solar principle (the "Black Sun", with no precedence in historical Germanic Mythology) - ignoring the fact that the ancient Germans, contrary to the Greeks and Romans, personified the sun as feminine (Sunna) and the moon as masculine (Manni). While certain Jewish figures lamented the 1930s as a return to Paganism over Abrahamism in Europe, the Swiss Jung was prone to see the Wotan Archetype as sweeping into many Germans' consciousness simultaneously, independent of politics. As he wrote in his letter to Serrano on 14 September 1960:
"A collective movement consists of millions of individuals, each of whom shows the symptoms of Wotanism and proves thereby that Wotan in reality never died, but has retained his original vitality and autonomy. Our consciousness only imagines that it has lost its Gods; in reality they are there still and it only needs a certain general condition in order to bring them back in full force. This condition is a situation in which a new orientation and adaptation is needed. If this question is not clearly understood and no proper answer given, the archetype, which expresses this situation, steps in and brings back the reaction, which has always characterized such times, in this case Wotan."(21)
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| Illustration of Wotan by Johannes Gehrts (1855-1921) |
Far from being tied to political dogma, Jung generally warned of the worship of the State as a new religion, displaying the same fanaticism as those religions of the past: "Brass bands, flags, banners, parades and monster demonstrations are no different in principle from ecclesiastical processions, cannonades and fire to scare off demons." The State is treated as "a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is expected," with any Statist appeal to individual rights "only camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it": "State slavery is a form of worship."(22) His words are prescient for our modern situation, with new ideological trends elevated to a new religion - the apocalyptic Extinction Rebellion cult, Covidianism, the dogmatic "Woke" intersectional religion - with traditional features of organized ("revealed") religions as salvation, atonement, penance, seeking to convert others, going on "crusades/jihads" against "heretics" and "unbelievers", etc.. In Jung's mistrust of the State, I found yet another agreement for me as an Anarchist/libertarian.
Mythology is about knowing one's psyche, the cosmos, and nature through allegories and metaphor. Jung grasped this profound truth - mythology being the highest truth - through his work on Archetypes. Some modern Pagans/Heathens/Asatruar see the Archetype approach as "atheistic", but given our Polytheism it would follow there are also multiple layers to know and understand deities and myths. If there is a consciousness within all things, so too are there in Archetypes - it doesn't make them any less "real" except to those perhaps carrying over some Abrahamic baggage where there is only "one" way to conceive of the divine. I certainly grappled with this and also some political baggage in the beginning of my own Pagan journey. Connected to the landscapes, contained within the memories of a people, Archetypes live on within a people and can reveal themselves in a myriad of ways. An Archetype is also a model to emulate.
Wotan or Wodan is a multifaceted god we can relate to and emulate in many different ways as varied as individuals. His 'Wode' being the personified wind or divine breath, the battle frenzy of warriors, it comes from the same "inspiration" as the words of a writer or a poet. His ordeal on the World Tree was truly about "killing" himself to himself so as to discover the enlightenment within, the immortal command to "Know Thyself". The Runes are not only letters and symbols but each laden with deep esoteric meanings about the psyche, cosmos, nature and memories - thus related to the Unconscious. Wotan's healing abilities, such as with Balder's horse in the Merseburg Charms, can be emulated to "heal" both physical and spiritual maladies. His great "shamanic" abilities offer general ways to sense there is more than just one physical reality; his leadership over the Wild Hunt in some folklore showing the "veils" between life and death, physical and spirit worlds, can be thin and obscure within the overall cycle of life, death and rebirth.
Like the Unconscious, Wotan represents the repository of ancestral memories across lifetimes of both an individual and people - and similar Archetypes of other peoples convey that same principle in other names and realities. The preceding is what the Wotan Archetype represents to me and what I've come to realize - it is my understanding while others may come to a different understanding, but neither is necessarily more "true" than the other. Towards that end, I encourage people to study for themselves Jung's important essay "Wotan"(23) - as relevant now as when it was written in 1936. It is available online(24) so is very accessible to anyone who desires to know the Wotan within and without, no matter if we know him as Wotan, Wodan or Óðinn depending on where our ancestry is rooted. I would also encourage people to relate to the unique Archetypes rooted in their ancestral lands to truly know themselves, their past and where they are going.
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Footnotes:
(1) From an online documentary by one Oscar Turner, "Carl Jung on Identity, Collective Unconscious, and Racial Soul".
(2) Richard Noll. The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung. New York: Random House, 1997, pp. 24-28.
(3) In one of his later interviews, quoted in the 1985 documentary directed by Mark Whitney: "The Matter of Heart: The Extraordinary Journey of C.G. Jung into the Soul of Man".
(4) The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 18: The Symbolic Life, Princeton University Press, pp. 625-630.
(5) Jung, On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry; quoted in Thomas Sheridan. The Druid Code: Magic, Megaliths and Mythology. Ireland: Street Druid, 2017, pp. 125-126.
(6) The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 9, Part 1: The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious, trans. R.F.C. Hull. New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1959, p. 48.
(7) The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 7: Two Essays in Analytical Psychology, trans. R.F.C. Hull. New York: Pantheon Books, 1953, p. 149fn8.
(8) Jung, "Mind and Earth," 1927-1931, p. 103; quoted in David Tacey. Edge of the Sacred: Jung, Psyche, Earth. Sydney: Harper Collins, 1995, p. 134.
(9) Jung, Über das Unbewusste (The Role of the Unconscious), 1918; quoted in Tacey, op. cit., p. 132.
(10) Quoted in Noll, op. cit., pp. 258-259.
(11) C.G. Jung Letters, Vol. 1, 1906-1950, eds. Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffé, Princeton University Press, 1973.
(12) From a speech by John Trudell, "What It Means To Be A Human Being," given in San Francisco, 15 March 2001. Transcript: <https://ratical.org/many_worlds/JohnTrudell/HumanBeing.html#keep_the_balance>. The specific points about people of European heritage were recorded and available online under "The Tribes of Europe".
(13) Vine Deloria, Jr. God Is Red: A Native View of Religion. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1994, p. 18.
(14) ibid., pp. 210, 289.
(15) Heinrich Heine. Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland (Religion and Philosophy in Germany), 1834; Boston: Beacon Press, 1959, pp. 159-160.
(16) Quoted in Max Brod. Heinrich Heine, trans. Joseph Witriol. London: 1956, p. 21.
(17) Hegel. The Positivity of the Christian Religion. Berne: 1795, Part II, § 1. “Is Judaea, then, the Teutons’ Fatherland?”
(18) D.H. Lawrence. The Plumed Serpent. London: Martin Secker Ltd., 1926.
(19) Petteri Pietikainen, "The Volk and its Unconscious: Jung, Hauer and the 'German Revolution'," Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 35, No. 4, October 2000, pp. 523-539.
(20) Miguel Serrano. C.G. Jung & Hermann Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships. New York: Schocken Books, 1975, p. 68.
(21) ibid., p. 85.
(22) Jung. The Undiscovered Self: The Problem of the Individual in Modern Society. New York: New American Library, 2006, pp. 15-16, 23-25.
(23) Jung, "Wotan," in The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 10: Civilization in Transit. New York: Pantheon Books, 1953-1979, pp. 179-193.
(24) For example: <http://www.philosopher.eu/others-writings/essay-on-wotan-w-nietzsche-c-g-jung/>.
