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MOTHER NATURE — Rich Depths of Ancestral Soil
Personified as the living being of Mother Nature, Jung described nature as God’s world and will and the domain of his personality no. 2, soul, and self. To Jung’s eyes, the earth had a soul, including animals, and art itself was a natural process that grew instinctually out of humanity like a perennial rhizome from the rich depths of ancestral soil. The one lament of the dead, daemons, and the sin of Christ in The Red Book was that they did not live their animal. In serving the dead in The Red Book Jung lived his animal by embodying his anima (the Latin root of animal, or soul) and reclaim humanity’s ancestral animal nature. In this art-based methodology atoning nature within and without in the body as a part of the natural world can be seen as a goal.
Affirming Herman Hesse’s belief “that the right road is simply one which is in agreement with nature, Jung (1977) said that “man should live according to his own nature; he should concentrate on self-knowledge and then live in accordance with the truth about himself “(p. 463). “Nothing in all the world welcomes this new birth, although it is the most precious fruit of Mother Nature herself, the most pregnant with the future, signifying a higher stage of self-realization. That is why Nature, the world of the instincts, takes the ‘child’ under its wing: it is nourished or protected by animals” (Jung, CW 9i, para. 285-287)
“I want to be freed neither from human beings, nor from myself, nor from nature; for all these appear to me the greatest miracles. The only important thing is to follow nature." C. G. Jung



"The earth has a sou." C. G. Jung


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