The soul’s relationship to the night and night vision is embodied in the mythic figures of Lilith (night) and Eve (evening) as well as the relationship to the darkness as the unconscious. Jung’s soul testified to this night vision when she said that: “The soul of humanity is like the great zodiacal wheel (seen in the night sky) that rolls along the way,” adding that, “Everything that comes up in a constant movement from below to the heights was already there. There is no part of the wheel that does not come around again” (p. 394).

 

Comparing the cyclical movement of the night sky’s return to the return of human history as “giving birth to the ancient in a new time” and the purpose of the soul of humanity through the “inborn properties of human nature” (p. 394), Jung said that “it belongs in the essence of forward movement that what was returns” (p. 394).  Like the clock’s hand turning around the circle of time, charting both day and night, we must learn to see in the darkness of dreams, visions, and prehistory as a time held in dreams and visions.

​

 “There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul.”

C JUNG