The Grave in the Meadow

Jung's first dream

When psychologist Carl Jung was a little boy of three or four he had a dream which preoccupied him for the rest of his life. He found himself in a meadow behind the local vicarage and sexton’s farm. He discovered a rectangular hole with steps going underground. He hesitantly descended. There was an arch with a green curtain which he pushed aside to find a dark chamber. In this chamber was a red carpet that led to a platform with a king’s throne on it. On the throne was a large phallus that he mistook at first for a tree trunk “twelve to fifteen feet high and about one and a half to two feet thick.” It stood motionless, gazing upward with its single eye. While it was impressive it also caused little Carl to fear that it might leap off of the throne “like a worm and creep toward” him. His fear increased and then “outside and above” him he heard his mother’s voice say "Yes, just look at him. That is the man-eater!" causing Carl to wake up in terror (MDR, 11-12).

This dream kept Jung from having the same relationship with Christ that his family of parsons had had:

Lord Jesus never became quite real for me, never quite acceptable, never quite lovable, for again and again I would think of his underground counterpart… (MDR, p13)

This may have been because the church’s depiction of Jesus was one-sided. God, Mary and Jesus were exclusively good while everything evil was united in the devil. Or, as Jung’s protégé Marie-Louise von Franz put it:

The Christian myth is deficient…in excluding matter and treating matter as dead and the realm of the devil. And in not facing the problem of the opposites, of evil.(Remembering Jung Pt 1, 51min)

Dividing things into “all bad” and “all good” is called “splitting” and is a sign of immaturity and a symptom of neuroticism. This splitting separates the earthen phallus from the body of the church and the spirit of the sun. The church divides itself from the earthy drives of matter that the phallus symbolizes and buries it underground in its backyard.

In the dream Jung’s attitude toward the phallus was ambivalent as opposed to the attitude of the church and his mother. He enters the underground room fearfully but most of his descriptions are positive. The curtain is “sumptuous”, the throne is “a wonderfully rich golden throne,” “magnificent”. The phallus is initially impressive but it becomes frightening when Jung imagines it creeping off of the throne. It is then that his mother’s voice cuts in “from outside and above,” where the vicarage is, with her one-sided judgment of the phallus, “the man-eater”. Her unambivalent judgment creates the crescendo of his fear.

The church too has a one-sided attitude toward the phallus and this makes it unbalanced. It is one of the things missing from the church. “Whenever anyone spoke too emphatically about Lord Jesus” Jung would remember the throned phallus underground meditating on the light above it (MDR, 13). Humans are ambivalent like symbols and to repress the phallus makes them incomplete, deformed, disfigured. This is part of “…the ‘psychological sin’ which Christ committed: ‘he did not live the animal side of himself’ (Red Book, 335). And when the animal is repressed it doesn’t die, it comes out in obsessions and archetypal possession. Perversion and abuse are results of this. Purity produces pollution.

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In dreams the mother is not only the biological mother but the Mother archetype. Jungian Erich Neumann describes this archetype in his book The Great Mother and The Origins and History of Consciousness. When describing the terrible side of the Mother archetype Neumann uses an Aztec myth as an example. “As goddess of death, the Great Mother bears the obsidian knife…the youthful son is dismembered or castrated.” At this stage of the development of consciousness the maternal archetype controls all of her children and the phalli of her sons belong to her. They only exist as “her fecundator” and are then dispatched (Great Mother, 192).

In Greek mythology the fertility god Priapus was the son of Zeus and Aphrodite. Hera found out about their affair and when Aphrodite was in labor she offered to soothe her pain. She placed her finger on Aphrodite’s belly relieving the pain but also causing the child to be deformed. The child’s deformity was a large and constant erection. Aphrodite was horrified by Priapus and left him to die of exposure. Jungian James Hillman connects this maternal revulsion and abandonment of male sexuality to the men, possessed by Priapus, who expose themselves to others. They are saying “Here I am. Look at what was rejected. I am beautiful despite what my mother says” (Pink Madness, 21min). It is Hera, the maternal goddess of marriage who only wants erections to be used for procreation, that is the source of Priapus’ deformity and his perverse (“turned”, “twisted”) actions. Priapus is the only ugly child of Aphrodite and the only one touched by Hera. To her, arousal is obscene unless it serves the community (Pink Madness, 36min).

The attitude of the Terrible Mother archetype agrees with the phallophobia of the patriarchal church which would like to keep the phallus separate and buried beneath the earth in the shade of the church. Their silhouettes loom like:

Gregory and John and men divine

Who rose like shadows between Man and god

Till that eclipse, still hanging under Heaven

Was worshipped by the world o’er which they strode

For the true Sun it quenched…

- Shelley, The Triumph of Life

Consider the grave in the meadow, stone-lined in the stern shadow of the vicarage; a little boy descending stony steps; a green curtain pushed aside exposing a golden throne at the end of a blood red path; a fleshy tower vigilant and still — then the voice of the Mother, “outside and above,” like a dark cloud, a black gash across the sky, severing the golden tether between the silent sun and the patient phallus gazing upward, cum unus oculus, toward the light behind all gods.