The hero is an extraordinary being who is inhabited by a daemon, and it is this that makes him a hero. That is why the mythological statements about heroes are so typical and so impersonal ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 536

The treasure which the hero fetches from the dark cavern is life: it is himself, new-born from the dark maternal cave of the unconscious where he was stranded by the introversion or regression of libido. Hence the Hindu fire-bringer is called Matarisvan, he who swells in the mother. The hero who clings to the mother is the dragon, and when the hero is reborn from the mother he becomes the conqueror of the dragon. ~Carl Jung, CW 5. Para 580

Taken purely as a psychologem the hero represents the positive, favourable action of the unconscious, while the dragon is its negative and unfavourable actionnot birth, but a devouring; not a beneficial and constructive deed, but greedy retention and destruction. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 580

The hero who sets himself the task of renewing the world and conquering death personifies the world-creating power which, brooding on itself in introversion, coiled round its own egg like a snake, threatens life with its poisonous bite, so that the living may die and be born again from the darkness ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 592

The hero is himself the snake, himself the sacrificer and the sacrificed, which is why Christ rightly compares himself with the healing Moses-serpent and why the saviour of the Christian Ophites was a serpent, too. It is both Agathodaimon and Cacodaimon. In German legend we are told that the heroes have snake’s eyes ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 593

He [The Hero] is the one who has the great longing for an understanding soul-mate ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 465

He[The Hero] is the seeker who survives the adventures which the conscious personality studiously avoids. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 465

He [The Hero] it is who, with a magnificent gesture, offers his breast to the slings and arrows of a hostile world, and displays the courage which is so sadly lacking to the conscious mind. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 465

He [The Hero] is the measure against which the man who comes in contact with such a women is compared with, being relentlessly set up as the ideal who receives direct punishment from her should he ever be otherwise. `Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 465

The animus, a typical “son”-hero, true to his ancient prototype, is seeking the mother. This youthful hero is always the son-lover of the mother-goddess and is doomed to an early death ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 466

As Otto Rank has shown with a wealth of examples, the hero is frequently exposed and then reared by foster-parents. In this way he gets two mothers ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 494

An excellent example of this is the relation of Heracles to Hera. In the Hiawatha epic, Wenonah dies after giving birth, and her place is taken by Nokomis. Buddha, too, was brought up by a foster-mother ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 494

The foster-mother is sometimes an animal, e.g., the she-wolf mother of Romulus and Remus, etc. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 494

The hero’s father is often a master carpenter or some kind of artisan. According to an Arabian legend, Terah, the father of Abraham, was a master craftsman who could cut a shaft from any bit of wood, which means in Arabic usage that he was a begetter of excellent sons. In addition, he was a maker of images ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 515

The will can control them [the impulses] only in part. It may be able to suppress them, but it cannot alter their nature, and what is suppressed comes up again in another place in altered form, but this time loaded with a resentment that makes the otherwise harmless natural impulse our enemy ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 51

I should also like the term “God” in the phrase “the will of God” to be understood not so much in the Christian sense as in the sense intended by Diotima, when she said: “Eros, dear Socrates, is a mighty daemon” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 51


According to the dogma she is only beata, not divine. Moreover, she represents the earth, which is also the body and its darkness. That is the reason why she, the all-merciful, has the power of attorney to plead for all sinners, but also why, despite her privileged position (it is not possible for the angels to sin), she has a relationship with the Trinity which is rationally not comprehensible, since it is so close and yet so distant ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 123

In any serious case the choice is limited by the kind of revealed image one has received. Yahweh and Allah are monads, the Christian God a triad (historically), the modern experience presumably a tetrad, the early Persian deity a dyad. In the East you have the dyadic monad Tao and the monadic Anthropos (purusha), Buddha, etc. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1611

God is a datum formulated as the “highest good” signifying the supreme psychic value, i.e., a concept endowed with the highest and most general significance in determining our thoughts and actions ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 67.

The God-concept coincides with the particular ideational complex which concentrates in itself the maximum amount of libido, or psychic energy ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 67

An idea psychologically different in different people e.g., God is the belly, or money, science, power, sex, etc.a concept varying according to the localization of the highest good ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 67

If one worships God, sun, or fire, one is worshipping intensity and power, in other words the phenomenon of psychic energy as such, the libido. Every force and every phenomenon is a special form of energy ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 128

Form is both an image and a mode of manifestation. It expresses two things: the energy which takes shape in it, and the medium in which that energy appears. On the one hand one can say that energy creates its own image, and on the other hand that the character of the medium forces it into a definite form ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 128

One man will derive the idea of God from the sun, another will maintain that it is the numinous feelings it arouses which give the sun its godlike significance. The former, by attitude and temperament, believes more in the causal nexus of the environment, the latter more in the spontaneity of psychic experience ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 128

Since, psychologically speaking, the God-image is a complex of ideas of an archetypal nature, it must necessarily be regarded as representing a certain sum of energy (libido) which appears in projection ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 89