“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.“

The motif of birth in a cave is also very ancient. This symbol is associated particularly with the winter solstice, when the sun has traveled to its far- thest point away from the tilted earth and the light is in the nadir of the abyss. That is the date of the birth of the god Mithra, who is lord of light. He was born we recall that his mother is the Earth-holding a rock- hewn weapon in his hand. Mithra was the principal competitor with Christianity, in the period of the first three centuries. The Christmas date was placed on December twenty-fifth, which was the solstice time, in order to compete with the Lord of Light, Mithra. No one really knows when Christ was born. It was settled on December twenty-fifth for mythological, not historical, reasons,

The cave has always been the scene of the initiation, where the birth of the light takes place. Here as well is found the whole idea of the cave of the heart, the dark chamber of the heart, where the light of the divine first ap- pears. This image is also associated with the emergence of light in the be- ginning, out of the abyss of the early chaos, so that one senses the deep resonations of this theme.

There are two explanations_

One explanation is that the human psyche is essentially the same all over the world. The psyche is the inward experience of the human body, which is essentially the same in all human beings, with the same organs, the same instincts, the same impulses, the same conflicts, the same fears. Out of this common ground has come what Jung has called the archetypes, which are the common ideas of myths.

They are elementary ideas, what could be called “ground” ideas. These ideas Jung spoke of as archetypes of the unconscious. “Archetype” is the better term because “elementary idea” suggests headwork. Archetype of the unconscious means it comes from below. The difference between the Jungian archetypes of the unconscious and Freud’s complexes is that the archetypes of the unconscious are manifestations of the organs of the body and their powers. Archetypes are biologically grounded, whereas the Freudian unconscious is a collection of repressed traumatic experiences from the individual’s lifetime.

FOR THOSE WHO have not refused the call, the first encounter of the hero-journey is with a protective figure (often a little old crone or old man) who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass.

“In every primitive tribe,” writes Dr. Géza Róheim, “we find the medicine man in the center of society and it is easy to show that the medicine man is either a neurotic or a art is based on the same mechanisms psychotic or at least that his as a neurosis or a psychosis. Human groups are actuated by their group ideals, and these are always based on the infantile situation.” “The infancy situation is modified or inverted by the process of maturation, again modified by the necessary adjustment to reality, yet it is there and supplies those unseen libidinal ties without which no human groups could exist.”” The medicine men, therefore, are simply making both visible and public the systems of symbolic fantasy that are present in the psyche of every adult member of their society. “They are the lead- ers in this infantile game and the lightning conductors of common anxiety. They fight the demons so that others can hunt the prey and in general fight reality.”

And so it happens that if anyone-in whatever society-under- takes for himself the perilous journey into the darkness by descend- ing, either intentionally or unintentionally, into the crooked lanes of his own spiritual labyrinth, he soon finds himself in a landscape of symbolical figures (any one of which may swallow him) which is no less marvelous than the wild Siberian world of the pudak and sacred mountains. In the vocabulary of the mystics this is the second stage of the Way, that of the “purification of the self,” when the senses are “cleansed and humbled,” and the energies and interests “concentrated upon transcendental things”; or in a vocabulary of more modern turn: this is the process of dissolving, transcending, or transmuting the infantile images of our personal past. In our dreams the ageless perils, gargoyles, trials, secret helpers, and instructive figures are nightly still encountered; and in their forms we may see reflected not only the whole picture of our present case, but also the clue to what we must do to be saved.

“I stood before a dark cave, wanting to go in,” was the dream of a patient at the beginning of his analysis; “and I shuddered at the thought that I might not be able to find my way back.”, “I saw one beast after another,” Emanuel Swedenborg recorded in his dream book, for the night of October 19-20, 1744, “and they spread their wings, and were dragons. I was flying over them, but one of them was supporting me.”10* And the dramatist Friedrich Hebbel recorded, a century later (April 13, 1844): “In my dream I was being drawn with great force through the sea; there were terrify- ing abysses, with here and there a rock to which it was possible to hold.”” Themistocles dreamed that a snake wound itself around his body, then crept up to his neck and when it touched his face became an eagle that took him in its talons and, carrying him upward, bore him a long distance, and set him down on a golden herald’s staff that suddenly appeared, so safely that he was all at once relieved of
his great anxiety and fear.  The specific psychological difficulties of the dreamer frequently are revealed with touching simplicity and force:

“I had to climb a mountain. There were all kinds of obstacles in the way. I had now to jump over a ditch, now to get over a hedge, and finally to stand still because I had lost my breath.” This was the dream of a stutterer.

“I stood beside a lake that appeared to be completely still. A storm came up abruptly and high waves arose, so that my whole face was splashed”; the dream of a girl afraid of blushing (ereuthophobia), whose face, when she blushed, would become wet with perspiration.

* “I was following a girl who was going ahead of me, along the dark street. I could see her from behind only and admired her beautiful figure. A mighty desire seized me, and I was running after her. Suddenly a beam, as though released from a spring, came across the street and blocked the way. I awoke with my heart pounding.” The patient was a homosexual; the transverse beam, a phallic symbol.5

* “I got into a car, but did not know how to drive. A man who sat behind me gave me instructions. Finally, things were going quite well and we came to  a plaza, where there were a number of women standing.

The basic story of the hero’s journey involves giving up where you are, going into the realm of adventure, coming to some kind of symbolically rendered realization, and then returning to the field of normal life.”