Étienne Perrot, picture page 84 of the special edition

of ‘Le Monde Inconnu’, dedicated to Alchemy.

October 20_1978 issue.

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🌿Today’s sharing from the Blue House of Via-HYGEIA is an introductory sampler, first of a planned series, dedicated to Étienne Perrot-born on November 29, 1922 in Audierne, France & died on December 17, 1996 in Fontainebleau, France-known as a Jungian psychologist and an influential dream interpreter.

🌿We have discovered the talent and generous scholarship of Étienne Perrot many years ago when we bought his translation from the German of Michael Maier’s ‘Atalanta Fugiens‘ (Editions Médicis 1969 & Editions Dervy  for its 1997 re-issue) and then his translation from the German of Richard Wilhem’s translation and commentaries of the ‘Yi Jing, the book of transformations‘ (Editions Médicis for the 1973 French Edition in 2 volumes and 1983 and 2007 for the second and third reprint in 1 volume).

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🌿Western alchemy and a Chinese wisdom oracle and divinatory calculus, East and West in their most ‘right brain approaches’ of the worlds they mirror, as they call for Intuition and Revelations, the translator reveals himself through his translation choices: ‘The sentence only becomes clear when a lightning has surged unveiling its global signification: then, the different parts of the whole start to organize themselves, each bringing light to the others.‘ or ‘In the study of a Chinese classical text, it matters less to analyze the written characters used by the author, but more to strive to ‘participate’ to his thoughts.’ (translator’s foreword, page XVI).

These two statements are also valid for his translations of Maier’s celebrated alchemical text, as the same method is also needed due to the play of words, voluntary semantic slides and riddles, the power of the images invoked, the symbols displayed within a tight weaved story, didactic parts offering keys to unveil deeper levels of interpretations: ‘The brightness of the images ought not to overshadow the interest for the discourses. Obviously, the deciphering of them is not at once easy. The author, while appearing giving didactic expositions, proceeds by allegories, associations, allusions.’ (page 37, translator’s foreword).

🌿 The end of the Sixties and the early Seventies were times of great transformation, sociologically, politically and environmentally. Étienne Perrot, loyal and devoted Jungian analyst and psychologist, felt a very strong call to respond positively to the rising crisis and started to walk his own path with his second wife, Francine Saint René Taillandier-Perrot with the creation of their own publishing company, La Fontaine de Pierre, becoming the main publisher in French of core Jungian luminaries and of their own seminal work.

Étienne Perrot felt drawn to a personal journey towards the source and origin of psychoanalysis, dreams (Sigmund Freud, The interpretation of Dreams, 1889) and started what would be a success and would become very influential in French society: to have held for thirty weeks on a popular French radio, France Inter, daily interpretations of dreams of auditors, responding in direct to callers. Here is what the presentation of the book that was born from this bold experience, ‘Les Rêves et la Vie‘ (Dauphin Editions for its 5th edition-2007): ‘Étienne Perrot interpreted listeners’ dreams on the airwaves of France Inter, with Henri Gougaud & Jacques Pradel. The result of this extraordinary adventure, presented here, brings together a collection of dreams analyzed with the full scope of their ‘transforming’ symbolism. This book marks an important date in the history of contemporary thought. It renovates and updates ‘traditional alchemy’ and offers a way out of the dead end of psychoanalysis by returning to the true source: the depth of the soul, the mother of dreams and ‘fountain springing with eternal life.’ The uninterrupted public interest in this book since the 1980’s makes it a reference work today.’

🌿We share here one final quote, to grace our little introduction. It tells us what happened to Etienne Perrot and what may have been the crowning of his well lived life, it is called ‘The Narrow Gate‘: ‘Here is the program I propose to each of you. Jung revealed to us, among other brilliant simplicities, that the path to this restoration is found in the thread that our dreams unravel at night. Of course, it is a risky undertaking, and we will return to its perils shortly. But it is the path, it is the narrow gate, and the constricted way to which this gate leads. Once you agree to take it, this way gradually broadens until it becomes the path of infinity, the path of eternity.’ (Etienne PERROT-Excerpt from Cahier 13, 1981).

🌿We have the project to translate excerpts from Étienne Perrot’s major works in the coming autumn and winter as due Via-HYGEIA Bibliotherapy translations, but first, today, we will give you some wonderful quotes taken from a French blog called ‘Étienne Perrot and his Work‘, hosted by one of his student, Patricia C.. It covers many subjects and themes and it is an amazing work of gratitude and loyalty. English by ChatGPT to give you a taste of what is to come 🙂 (See link below).

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THE FOUNDATION OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

P.G (Patrice Galbaud): There are always skeptics, you know. Among the people listening to us, there are certainly many who are thinking, ‘What are they talking about? They are visionaries,’ etc. I think what you are saying is entirely serious. Can we say that dream interpretation can replace psychoanalysis?

F.S.R.T. (Francine Saint-René Taillandier): Naturally.

E.P. (Étienne Perrot): It is quite significant that you ask such a question because, after all, at the core of psychoanalysis is a book by Freud called ‘The Interpretation of Dreams‘ and Freud’s statement: ‘The dream is the royal road to the unconscious.’ So, it’s paradoxical that we have reached a stage where psychoanalysis has been sidelined from dreams, and we say, ‘either this or that.’

The reason for this is very simple: Freud was overwhelmed by his material. We can refer listeners to Jung’s account in ‘My Life‘. To contain what he called ‘the black sludge of occultism,’ he created sexual theory. I am not one to diminish the importance of sexuality in our concrete life, in the unconscious life, and in dreams, but we cannot base an explanation of humanity solely on sexuality elevated to a dogma, a unique god, one might say.

So what happens?

Dreams do not fit into the framework of Freudian theory and sexual theory, so dreams quickly challenge the interpretation given by psychoanalysis and by the psychoanalyst himself. Consequently, dreams are set aside. It must be said that this also occurs, to a large extent, in Jungian circles. Why?

Because, even today, at least my generation, those over fifty—I’m sixty—is steeped in a rationalism instilled in us at school, and it struggles to connect directly with symbols and inner energy.

Jung, as I mentioned earlier, had an adventure based on dreams. To convey what he had to convey, he invented concepts, while saying, ‘They have only provisional importance; I don’t care about the words; what matters is the experience.’

What he predicted happened, as he described very clearly. After his death, what he called ‘fire and wind’ became ‘dead pharmaceutical preparation.’ And he said, ‘The gods have been buried in marble and gold; I will be buried in paper’—that is, in conceptualization, dry things.

So, in response to your question (Can dreams replace psychoanalysis?), I would say: We, like religious reformers, return to the sources; we return to the source of psychoanalysis, to dreams, the royal road to the unconscious, and we return to the source of Jung’s adventure, which is an adventure of trust in life, expressed through the dynamism of dreams….

Source: Étienne Perrot, Excerpt from a France Culture broadcast (April 10, 1983), Cahier 24, 1983.

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Transformation

Q.: You speak of death and rebirth, but in the I Ching, there is no mention of death and rebirth. It talks about endings and beginnings.

E.P.:Yes, but it’s the same thing.

Q.: Is it about transformation?

E.P.: What you’re saying is interesting. When we say “death,” there’s this Western, rationalist, individualist reaction within us that sees death as an end, a final point, whereas both the I Ching and the exploration of the inner world, in any form—especially in the form of dreams—show that death is always a beginning. The death of one thing is the beginning of another. The alchemists used to say: “The decay of one is the generation of another.” This is an extremely optimistic view. It’s our phoenix: what dies is automatically reborn.

Q.: Yet there is still a paradox: You talk about death and rebirth, and you say that man is immortal. Why do you talk about his death and rebirth if he is immortal?

E.P.: Precisely because he dies in one form to be born in another form. It’s transformation. “Transformation” is the key word in what I’m presenting to you. The first book I published was the translation of the I Ching, and I insisted on avoiding the word “mutations,” which seemed too harsh to me and evoked bureaucratic transfers (I was a civil servant), in favor of “transformation.” This word is the key term for Jung. Then I published “The Way of Transformation.” This transformation is indeed an extremely optimistic element: it is always a renewal. An old form disappears to be changed, and this gives us someone like the old Jung, who was very young at eighty-five because he had embraced transformations, meaning he had accepted deaths. It’s easy to talk about this from a stage, but to live it is much more difficult; I’m the first to know that, and perhaps that’s why I have the right to talk about it. The secret is to fully enter into the transformation, to cling to nothing, and to say what you seemed to think earlier: “It’s over, it’s over!” You accept that it’s over, and it will start again.

Our tragedy is that we don’t fully and completely enter into death, and that’s why we don’t resurrect. If someone agrees or is forced by destiny to completely let go of what they have, well, they will emerge renewed, and they will be a true phoenix.

That’s how phoenixes are raised.

Source: Étienne Perrot, excerpt from Cahier 19, 1982

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A Direct Language

E.P.: The language I have used may have surprised some of you. For some, it is familiar. These are the ones who have undertaken individual inner work; they listen to their dreams and gather symbols that they have learned to appreciate and explain, as far as one can explain a symbol, so they can receive the symbolic, direct language spoken here. As for others, who are participating in our work for the first time, they may feel that the vocabulary and the world are hermetic, reserved for initiates, so to speak. In fact, this is both true and not true. The initiation required to receive and understand this language is the initiation one gives oneself. If one is willing to listen to one’s inner self and dreams, one will see the stone, the flower, the star, the mud too, the abyss, and the rest.

I must repeat: if, in stepping away from the shore of psychological explanation, I decided some years ago, with increasing vigor and audacity, to speak this direct language, it is because it echoes a voice that resonates deep within an ever-growing number of French people, not to mention the rest of the world, which I know little or not at all at this level. The repeated experiences I had on the radio allowed me to reach an extremely broad audience, not only in France but in the French-speaking world, and even among French-speaking people in other language countries. There, I observed with what intensity the depths of the soul expressed itself in symbols, with what insistence it cried out, waiting to be heard and to receive a response. In our chaos, in our almost total spiritual darkness, there is an order and a light that seek to assert themselves.

And if I repeat this, it is not with the conviction of a preacher or propagandist but with the certainty of a naive child placed before a staggering reality. The broadcasts on France-Inter in 1978-1979 were an important event: I refer here to the book ‘Dreams and Life‘, which excellent minds consider to be fundamental and from which more than one person draws the knowledge on which courses, lectures, and seminars on dreams are based.

Chinese philosophers say, when speaking of what Confucius presented, that it is the way of humanity, and it is as futile to try to make a church or state institution out of the way of humanity as it would be to try to make a state matter out of the air, which belongs to everyone and which no one has thought of nationalizing until now. You cannot monopolize the inner world. No one can make it their property, no one can exploit it. Certainly, some will try, but it will be to the detriment of the people they claim to help because they will captivate them, reduce them, limit them, instead of expanding them, instead of allowing life to take its unpredictable and all-powerful course within the being.

Source: Étienne Perrot, excerpt from Cahier 22, 1983 from the book ‘Dreams and Life’.

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 Dreams, Today

The path of dreams is unpopular, and one can contrast or differentiate between “psy” and dreams. Common opinion identifies or associates, not without reason, the psychologist or psychoanalyst with a person who holds power. I am well aware of the anxiety that grips you when you are in front of a psychologist, and you feel immediately crushed, overwhelmed by your complexes.

Dreams are the opposite. If someone comes with a dream, we kneel before the dream, that is, before the person who is in front of the dream. It is the dream that is the master, not us. The dream is the anti-power, the dream is the power of life, the dream is the freedom and liberation of life within us. The path of dreams is the path of liberation that we have sought from the East, but which is impractical as the East teaches it because we are Westerners, and we need to rediscover the moisture and dynamism of images.

There is one man, a great figure who is very present to me—Krishnamurti. Krishnamurti denies the dream; he wants to liberate life without the dream. I have tried; I know K.’s path well—it is impractical. Similarly, mysticism. You mentioned Marie-Madeleine Davy earlier; I know her work well and hold her in high regard.

I could say that, broadly speaking, my wife and I come from a Christian background, and we know Christian mysticism well. But Christian mysticism is the past. Today, we cannot live like John of the Cross, we cannot live like Teresa of Ávila. The primary reason is that these people excluded the devil.

Yet the devil is one of the first realities that imposes itself upon us in dreams; it is what we refuse, it is what is labeled as evil. We learn that evil and good are complementary, like Yin & Yang in Chinese philosophy.

Evil is not something to be cast into outer darkness. We have the evidence that we are participating in the restoration of the mystical path, but in a concrete way, in a way that is livable for people today.

Source: Étienne Perrot, excerpt from Cahier 24, 1983.

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Spiritual Aspiration

In the general spiritual collapse, amid the threats that weigh upon us from all sides, individuals are being drawn back to themselves. And if we are being drawn back to ourselves, it is because we see clearly that there is no salvation elsewhere. The grand material promises that were made to us, we have seen their limits, for man does not live by bread alone.

As for those who speak to us of spiritual realities, we unfortunately see that very often they strive to believe in them, but their hearts are not in it, which is why their words resonate so little within us. And meanwhile, this spiritual aspiration that exists within each individual continues; it finds its language, and that language is one of symbols, one of varied experiences—often occurring at night—that express themselves like surges, like calls of life to accomplish within individuals what collective authorities can no longer provide us. This may seem a bit abstract to you. Let me explain more clearly.

Jung, and we following him, have observed that if we begin to pay attention to what happens within us, especially at night in dreams, we see images rise to the surface—baroque, extravagant images, but they contain meaning. If these images are interpreted, they provide a progression, a development, that translates into growth. It begins, as the alchemists said, with the seed, and the seed develops and produces flowers and fruits.

Source: Étienne Perrot, Cahier 16, 1981.

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Vision

We have a vision that is the fragmented vision of the individual. This is a Western inheritance. We were taught that we are limited, weak, ignorant, that the abyss of being, if it exists, is unfathomable and inaccessible.

The image I developed for you earlier, on the radio, this dynamism that I showed you and, I hope, transmitted to you, suggests another vital attitude that is not new and is that of a large part of humanity, especially traditional India.

Life is of divine essence; our reality is eternal, immortal, and our limited individual vision is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope, looking backward.

This vision I proposed to you, of the stone fountain, helps us place ourselves, through faith—through a tested faith that begins as a simple working hypothesis but quickly proves fruitful—at the level of this transpersonal source that is within us. Then, there are no more problems because this source is located beyond problems, beyond dialectics, beyond limited duration.

I am not omniscient; I am not infallible, but there is omniscience and infallibility deep within me. I know this reality is there; I do not know it clearly, but it knows itself and knows me. And I know that the true attitude, my truth, is to let it express itself in me and to show me what it wants to show so that I may know it, love, and act.

Source: Étienne Perrot, excerpt from Cahier 18.

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The Essence of Alchemy

P.G.: But alchemy is not what it used to be.

E.P.: Yes, it is—it’s just that today, the essence of alchemy can be revealed. What was once presented obscurely in grimoires, and whose authors didn’t always fully understand what it meant, is now becoming clearer. I sought in alchemy the Western path to realization after having journeyed to the East, like many, for 15 years. I told myself, “There is something in the West, and it is alchemy.” I had no idea what it really was.

And one day, by chance, I came across a book in English by a psychologist, C.G. Jung, which in English translation was titled ‘Psychology and Alchemy‘. This book determined the course of my life. I told myself, “This is it—it’s extraordinary! A well-known psychoanalyst has rediscovered the secret of the ancient adepts.” It seemed unbelievable to me, and it took me five, maybe six years, to convince myself that the unbelievable was true. The final veil fell when I read Jung’s autobiography, which is the account of a quest driven by dreams. He was propelled by dreams towards alchemy. And there, he realized that what he was seeking was described in the ancient grimoires under various names: the Philosopher’s Stone, the Terrestrial Sun, the Little God, the Earthly God, the Total Man, etc.

From the moment I delved into this, dreams came to me as well—I had alchemical dreams. And then, one fine day, I had to externalize what was inside me, and which was consuming me. I became Jung’s translator…

Source: Étienne Perrot, excerpt from Cahier 24, 1983.

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The Language of Birds

It happens quite often that I have people in front of me whose dreams I interpret, where there are extremely simple enigmas. They are so simple that one doesn’t think of them, and when one is led to understand more than once because the dream itself obliges us to, we say, “Ah, I hadn’t thought of that!” We might not have been “dull” enough yet, as Pascal said when talking about the conditions of faith. We do not become (falsely) intelligent at home; we become dull, in the Pascalian sense, so that this joyful, childlike science, the science of the poor in spirit, may emerge.

This synchronicity, these external and internal listens, these double readings, we first learn them in dreams. Dreams teach us to decode reality—dreams, as is well known, very often take materials from waking life, but it is to teach us to read them differently. This reading contains a very important element, which is the decryption of words according to laws that are not causal, but phonetic, following the mode of formation of puns. This is what is called “the language of birds,” and this, precisely, is what alchemists called “the joyous science.” As a dream told me, this is where the heart of the secret lies (Qur’an, Surah XXIII).

Why? Because it explodes language and our reason with it, but not in a destructive way that places us in delirium; rather, it delivers the essence of words, providing us with a meaning in a simple and profound way, situated beyond reason. And it is a synchronicity since the encounter between the form of the word and the non-causal meaning revealed in its phonetic reading comes from a chance, but a meaningful chance. For example, “feu” in French means both the element “fire” which destroys forms, and “late” (“feu monsieur untel” meaning the late mister so & so), an expression coming from the past of the verb “to be”: “fut, formerly: feu.”

Source: Étienne Perrot, excerpt from Cahier 16, 1981.

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The Guardian of the Threshold

Q.: In mystical Western traditions, there is reference to the guardian of the threshold. Can you give us some details about that?

E.P.: The guardian of the threshold, Sir? Well, it has a name in modern psychological language, and we all know it: it is anxiety. The guardian of the threshold is the personification of anxiety. In dreams, it appears in various forms, the very forms present in fairy tales and traditional stories: the dragon, the fierce animal, the giant, the witch, the mage, etc. But in inner evolution as we observe and practice it—that is, when we have to confront these forces—we see these hostile presences gradually transform into helpful realities. The lion (I just saw it) will become a friendly dog that comes to lick the hands of the dreamer, and so on. It is always the same process: the integration of energy…

Source: Étienne Perrot, excerpt from Cahier 17, 1982.

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The Realization of the Androgyne

Q.: In Jung’s perspective, there is the integration of the opposite sex.

E.P.: That’s right: the realization of the androgyne. It is simple in theory, but very subtle when it comes to living it in practice. A magnificent dream of androgyny will not prevent one from experiencing the tribulations of love afterward. One must always remember that inner realization happens at a certain level and allows the course of individual life to continue.

The sage who has discovered the eternal sustenance will still continue to have his coffee with milk every morning and feel hungry at noon. If he can fast like Therese Neumann or some others, it will not necessarily be seen as a factor of canonization in my eyes. These are anomalies that certainly have meaning and significance, but cannot be considered exemplary. If there is a traditional model of destiny that we aspire to, it is that of the Taoist sage who, at the end of his journey, sells vegetables at the market.

Of course, he may occasionally bring about happy things: trees bloom along his path (these are synchronicities), but he is an ordinary man. In a less picturesque and “more spiritual” manner, it is the situation of the Buddhist bodhisattva who, having reached nirvana—meaning, having achieved a certain level of himself, extinguished desire—returns to humanity and takes on again the passions and infirmities of human life in order to better help his brothers and guide them to liberation. We aspire to true humanity, to total humanity, not to a retreat from humanity.

I am a man. As Marie-Louise von Franz would say, the cultivation of the anima refines a man’s sensitivity and intuition, making him undoubtedly different in relationships with the opposite sex, and vice versa for a woman, thanks to the cultivation of the animus, the inner man.

But a man remains a man, and a woman remains a woman, even if each has dreams of androgyny, and if this inner realization allows them to resolve, in an unexpected way, the tensions they encounter in their relationship with the opposite sex.

Source: Étienne Perrot, excerpt from Cahier 14, 1981.

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The Way of Fire

Our way is the way of fire. This way, I received from Jung. I was visited by Jung in the form of a flame of fire, a fire that engulfs the whole being. We are not in the intellectual domain of comparing symbols, but in the domain of shamanic dynamism. We have received a shamanic initiation. What does that mean? It means that forces have come upon us, conveyed by… “the invisible,” particularly by this Swiss psychiatrist who authored complete works in about twenty volumes and who, within himself, was a flame of fire—associated with water. That is what we have received, and that is what we transmit.

One can spend a lifetime immersed in Jung’s work, making comparisons, creating files, writing theses, while missing the essence, which, it must be said, remains difficult to grasp in Jung’s work because, once again, his place, his era, and his vocation forced him to obscure and temper the fire. That is why a living, vital word, like the one I am aware of transmitting to you, is absolutely essential to enliven these books, with the possible consequence that all the books may be burned, and one might say like St. Thomas Aquinas after his revelation when he had nearly completed his Summa Theologica: “Now, after what I have seen, everything I have written (everything I have read) seems to me like straw,” meaning fit to be burned. Alchemists also say that at a certain point one must whiten the atone, bring the unconscious to consciousness, project light into darkness, and tear up the books.

God knows how useful written work is! I survived for thirty years thanks to books. It was books that led me to Jung. But it may happen that the work must be set aside to enter the laboratory, where books become obstacles after having been auxiliaries, where it is the confrontation of living substance with living substance, energy with energy, spirit with spirit, and body with body.

Source: Étienne Perrot, excerpt from the lecture-debate “The Liberation of Love or the Secret of Transmutation,” held on March 6, 1981, in Paris.

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Mythology

Q.: Does mythology appear in dreams?

E.P.: Of course. Let’s take the most classic opposition made by Nietzsche, between Apollo, the solar god, the principle of light, roughly associated with Christ, and Dionysus, the god of the bacchanal, the god of wine, etc., opposed to the rigor and hieratic nature of Christianity. Well, there is a type of dream that is extremely common: we might call it “the bacchanal in the church.” The church, that place of silence, more or less fruitful silence, where boredom, convention, and anxiety are now more present than authentic fervor, the bubbling and warmth of the soul, the church becomes a place of orgy. I find that such dreams often occur in people who are linked to religious practice. These dreams have a liberating effect on them. Conversely, someone who has too free a life in this area will be brought back to austerity. I know someone who is very inclined toward instinctual life, who periodically dreams that she finds herself in a convent and is subjected to a strict rule, after which she is, of course, sent back to another mode of life.

Source: Étienne Perrot, excerpt from notebook 20, 1982.

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Lucius

The final chapters of “The Metamorphoses” or “The Golden Ass” by Apuleius, a Roman novel from late antiquity, also demonstrate how dream events and daytime events are connected. This story depicts the long initiatory process and the slow transformation of the light-hearted Lucius through a very painful nigredo (his transformation into an ass), of which Bottom’s misadventure, adorned with a donkey’s head and seducing Titania—a striking example of the conjunction of opposites, where the too-bestial meets the too-aerial—may be a reminiscence. (A Via-Hygeia note: a reference to Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’). In his donkey form, Lucius endures many hardships before his “conversion,” triggered by a vision, restores his original form. The book concludes with his initiation into the mysteries of Isis and Osiris. Not only does Isis appear to him in visions and dreams to dictate her will, but he is also instructed in a dream when to request initiation, while the designated priest for the ceremony is informed in the same way.

Source: Étienne Perrot, excerpt from notebook 19, 1982.

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Suffering & Joy

Only suffering pushes us, forces us into self-examination. It “humanizes” us, making us simple, true, and warm. It is the right moment for imagination to be born: the need to communicate everything that happens within us—doubts, anxieties, progress, setbacks, cold and warmth, tenderness or the rage of rebellion, hope or despair. Everything begins to move if we allow these feelings to flow freely: like a turbulent river, like the howling wind or the tearing knife at first. But gradually, the waters calm, the wind settles, and the wound heals. And the inner music flows unobstructed, in complete freedom.

Joy, on the other hand, doesn’t question itself. It is there, self-sufficient. It laughs, exalts, blooms, and purrs. Why would it question itself? No, no, especially not! Let it remain, let it never leave me!

Source: Étienne Perrot, excerpt from notebook 24, 1983.

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Mercury

Among the moving letters we receive from listeners, I want to mention one. It comes from a young Breton woman who, she says, feels surrounded by forces she cannot define. In her letter, there is a sense of discomfort and modesty that turns into irony toward herself and her vocabulary. ‘Thus,’ she says, ‘a voice spoke to me some time ago and said: ‘Élisabeth must take care of mercury.’

‘We have a book on alchemy in our possession,” she comments, “which I consulted, but it did not provide much enlightening information. And then, listening to your show on the new alchemists, I learned that Mercury is psychic energy! That changes everything!‘

Source: Étienne Perrot, excerpt from notebook 3, 1979.

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Virginity

I think of a phrase from Mme Guyon, who said of God: “He only regards as virgins those who are totally dispossessed.”

Our virginity is that: it is the abandonment of personal views, the abandonment of what we have that is proprietary and therefore limited, in order to undo and open ourselves to the immensity that is deep within us and which, passing from moment to moment through our entire being, renews itself and renews us with it, and in this way keeps us in a freshness, a novelty, a constant virginity.

Source: Étienne Perrot, excerpt from notebook 22, 1983.

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The Dimension of Love

Love is a life, Love is a living being, Love is a power. The liberation of Love is the liberation of love, but also the liberation through love. The liberation of Love can only be achieved through love. The agent of the liberation of Love is Love itself. It is he who must inspire my words, it is he who must pass through this channel to reach you, to reach within you the source where it may be captive, to burst forth as a fountain and, from there, to spread.

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The undertaking is ambitious. It may be attempted because it is not human, it is dictated by Love. The era no longer wants human words. It needs something else, it needs a salvation, a salvation that comes from elsewhere, that is, from the deepest part of the individual, from what transcends the individual…

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Q.: When Jung speaks of individuation, he does not emphasize this dimension of love that you are presenting tonight.

E.P.: Jung did not say everything. He was the great specialist of what is called understatement. He repeated, “I am a psychiatrist.” At the end of his memoirs, he says in substance, ‘I have found myself constantly confronted with the mystery of love. But here I declare myself powerless like Job. I put my hand over my mouth.’ There is a beautiful admission of modesty. We know that at the end of his life, he told someone, ‘Who would believe that this old man was also a great lover?‘ I can finally tell you that, one of the last times my wife and I met Marie-Louise von Franz in Kusnacht, we talked about this subject and I said to her as I was leaving, “Jung’s path is the path of love,” and she replied, ‘Yes, Jung’s path is the path of love.’ Only, it is not obvious. If I speak of love, it is precisely to bring to light this central dimension or, to use a more precise language, this transforming agent that is the agent of all individuation, of all realization, of all reconciliation of opposites, and which is the secret fire of the alchemists. Let us not forget that Jung found his language with the alchemists, that he is the restorer of alchemy, and that the great arcane, the arcane of the arcana of the alchemists, is the secret fire, and they call themselves philosophers by fire. And what is fire, if not love?

Source: Étienne Perrot, excerpt from: Cahiers de gaie science et d’alchimie selon C.G. Jung, Editions de la Fontaine de Pierre (2nd quarter 1981) and public remarks made on March 6, 1981, in Paris.

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