"In terms of Jung's concept, every archetype is in its essence an unknown psychic factor and therefore there is no possibility of translating its content into intellectual terms. The best we can do is circumscribe it on the basis of our own psychological experience and from comparative studies, bringing up into light, as it were, the whole net of associations in which the archetypal images are enmeshed."

C.G. Jung supplies us with another useful analogy:

"...we have then to describe and explain a building the upper story of which was erected in the nineteenth century, the ground floor dates from the sixteenth century, and a careful examination of the masonry discloses the fact that it was reconstructed from a dwelling-tower of the eleventh century. In the cellar we discover Roman foundation walls, and under the cellar a filled-in cave, in the floor of which stone tools are found, and remnants of glacial fauna in the layers below. That would be a sort of picture of our own mental structures. We live in the upper storey, and are only dimly aware that our lower storey is somewhat old-fashioned. As to what lies beneath the superficial crust of the earth we remain quite unconscious..."

"Again and again we find it is useful to imagine the unconscious as having several layers. The higher up, the closer to consciousness; the deeper down, the further away. Those layers also correspond, more or less, to the historical evolution of civilization. Each layer blends into a yet deeper, more primitive and earlier stage of mankind..

Very often in fairy tales, one gets into that deeper layer by falling down a well or into a chasm or a hole in the ground. But sometimes this motif is characterized by a hidden door beyond there is a stairway leading downward. When there is such a human construction, it points to the fact that the deeper layers of the unconscious were once connected with consciousness, though they have long since been forgotten or repressed. But the structure, the possibility of going deeper, is still there. You don't need to fall; you can go step by step."

"The primordial image or archetype is a figure, whether it be a daemon, man or process, that repeats itself in the course of history whenever creative fantasy is freely manifested. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. If we subject these images to a closer investigation, we discover them to be the formulated resultants of countless typical experiences of our ancestors." C.G. Jung.

"…forced to stay where the third feather had fallen. He sat down and was sad. Then all at once he saw that there was a trap-door close by the feather. He raised it up, found some steps, and went down them."

Or in another version:

"…Dummling who had to stay where the third feather had fallen. Dummling sat down and was very sad, but then suddenly he noticed that there was a trapdoor beside the feather. He lifted it up, found steps descending and went down into the earth. "

"If there is a trapdoor and then steps leading into the earth, it is not the same as if there were just a natural cavity. Here, human beings have left their traces; perhaps here has been a building, or perhaps this is the cellar of a castle of which the upper part has long ago disappeared, or it was once a hiding place of a former civilisation. " p. 51

"Interestingly, Widengren (*) demonstrated that the ancient motif of ascension to an audience before a heavenly god was replaced, in the Arabic Hermetic literature, by the motif of entering a subterranean chamber where Hermes sits enthroned, holding a book in his hand. Widengren suggested that the descent of Balinas (the Arabic Apollonius of Tyana) to acquire the Emerald Table of Hermes, along with variant narratives, blended the motif of an initiatory ascension with the motif, found in Egyptian and Hellenistic tales, of the discovery of a book in a subterranean chamber. The motif of the cave of initiation, which found its widest audience through the tale of Aladdin in the 1001 Nights, may also have been influenced by Porphyry's On the Cave of the Nymphs (Taylor 1969), in which a passage in Homer was allegorized as an image of the cosmos. Whatever its sources, the motif of an alchemical initiation by means of a subterranean itinerary is earliest attested in the writings of medieval Arabic Hermetists. By this route, the motif of ascension in late antique Hermetism was likely historically antecedent not only to such celebrated European alchemical motifs as the Cave of the Philosophers, but also to the climactic encounters in Novalis' Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1796) and Ferdinand Ossendowski's Beasts, Men and Gods (1922). "

Dan Merkur, Stages of Ascension in Hermetic Rebirth, University of Toronto, published online  by Esoterica, http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/Merkur.html/

Widengren, Geo. 1950. The Ascension of the Apostle and the Heavenly Book. Uppsala Universitets Arsskrift 1950:7. Uppsala: A.-B. Lundequistska Bokhandeln.

EXPLORING THE UNCONSCIOUS

I often encounter the idea that exploring the Unconsciousness is a great danger. Perhaps only the priests with their money-tables and the therapists with their cash-registers would like to think they have copyright on the unconsciousness. We are unconscious of the fact that we have bad breath; that we talk in our sleep, we are unconscious of our body language, of the fact that we never flush the toilet, or leave the seat up, and so on.

I have come to the conclusion, that the unconsciousness, is not only to be found in the dark corners of the human psyche, and the recesses of the past, but exists as well as flourishes, in bright daylight, in the here and now. Perhaps this is what Alchemy had in mind when it talks about the precious Stone of the Philosophers being found on a dung heap.

There are paradoxes at work here, which it is not our duty to flatten out, into one-dimensional linearity.