The Archetypal Symbolism of Animals: Lectures Given at the C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich, 1954-1958

This work presents lectures by Barbara Hannah, a pupil and close friend of C.G. Jung, on the symbolic meaning of a selection of wild and domestic animals. Jung felt that the animal was sublime, that it was indeed the 'divine' side of the human psyche. He believed that animals, far more than humans, live in contact with a 'secret' order within nature itself, in close connection with the 'absolute knowledge' of the unconscious. In contradistinction to man, animals follow their own inner laws beyond good and evil - and in this is a kind of superiority. This selection includes material on the serpent, the lion, the cow and the bull and the lectures illustrate how, in the light of consciousness, archetypal images of animals are positive and helpful, and how our animal nature can become the psychic source of renewal and natural wholeness.