the horned serpent

Just as our bodies evolved out of earlier forms, so have our minds. That the body and its constituent parts have changed over time is undeniable when we consider, for example, the appendix, which at one time served a now-unknown digestive function, but exists today merely as a vestigial remain whose only purpose, it sometimes seems, is to cause trouble.

Likewise, the human psyche has evolved from a primeval and truncated animal mind which consisted mostly of instincts and their closely associated instinctive fears, and only gradually over time acquired the capacity for rational and abstract thought. Dr. Jung in his "Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams" observes that "This immensely old psyche forms the basis of our mind, just as the structure of our body is erected upon a generally mammalian anatomy," and adds that "(T)he experienced investigator of the psyche cannot help seeing the analogies between dream images and the products of the primitive mind, its représentations collectives, or mythological motifs."

To illustrate this principle of the persistence of pre-human elements in the human mind as they continue to manifest in even modern myths and legends such as "Superman," Jung uses the example of real dreams dreamt by a child and preserved in the form of stripped-down fairy tales. He wrote:

I particularly remember the case of a man who was himself a psychiatrist. He brought me a handwritten booklet he had received as a Christmas present from his ten-year-old daughter. It contained a whole series of dreams she had had when she was eight years old. It was the weirdest series I had ever seen, and I could well understand why her father was more than puzzled...each dream begins with the words of the fairytale: "Once upon a time..." The amazingly potent images of the little girl's dreamscape were as follows:

1. A "bad animal" appears, a horned serpent that kills and devours all the other animals. But God, who is actually four gods, comes from the four corners and brings back all the animals the monster has eaten.

2. The dreamer ascends to heaven where people are celebrating pagan dances, then descends to hell where angels are doing good works.

3. A mob of small animals comes to frighten the dreamer. They then grow to a huge size, and one of them eats her.

4. A mouse is penetrated by worms, then snakes, then fishes, then humans. Then the mouse becomes human.

5. She looks at a drop of water under a microscope and sees that it is full of branches.

6. A bad boy has a lump of dirt, from which he breaks off pieces to throw at people passing by. When they get hit, they also become bad.

7. A drunken woman falls into the water and comes out sober and changed into a better person.

8. In America, many people are rolling on an ant heap and getting attacked by the ants. The dreamer panics and falls into a river.

9. She is in a desert on the moon, and sinks so far down into the dirt she ends up in hell.

10. She touches a shining ball she sees in a vision. Vapors come out of it, then a man comes and kills her.

11. She is very sick, and birds come out of her skin and cover her completely.

12. Clouds of gnats hide the sun, the moon, and all the stars except one, which then falls on the dreamer.

A person would have to be singularly unimaginative or obtuse not to see the mythological elements in several of these dreams, or the shortened stems of fairy tales and legends of monsters, trolls, magic animals, and elves. Some are fairly easy to interpret, such as number five, which appears to be a very short version of the origin of the earth.

Keep in mind that all these wonderful and powerful images sprang fully formed from the mind of a child. One might argue that she had absorbed some of these ideas from religious education, but Jung reports that her parents were the type of moderns who knew the Bible only through hearsay, and were not at all religious. She could only have gotten these images and "stories" as she styled them from the subconscious, primeval, and instinctive regions of her mind. This is the stuff dreams are made of, and nothing reveals the evolution of the human mind so well as the persistence and consistency of this kind of subconscious imagery from prehistory and beyond down to the present.