The Other Bollingen

 

Carl Gustav Jung, the great dream shaman of Switzerland, built a personal sanctuary near the village of Bollingen on the northern shore of Lake Zürich and called it his Tower. He was partly inspired by childhood fantasies of a castle on an island on a lake.  As his project expanded, he envisioned it as an architectural model for the structure of the psyche, and an inner stronghold. He started construction of the first tower in 1923 after the death of his mother. He added an upper story to the main house in 1955 after the death of his wife Emma.  He wrote that “these two dates are meaningful because the Tower is connected with the dead.”
     Shortly before his death, Jung dreamed of the “other Bollingen”, its counterpart in another world. The place was suffused with sourceless light. The deep voice he had come to trust told him his new home had been completed and was now ready for him to move in. Then he saw a mother wolverine teaching her child to dive and swim in a stretch of water.
     In her beautiful biographical memoir of Jung, infused with her intimate knowledge of him, Barbara Hannah recalls that he had often dreamed of this Other Bollingen, in various stages of construction, and had always understood that he was seeing a location on the Other Side of death. The new dream made it clear to her that he would soon be leaving to go to the Other Bollingen. “In fact, it may have been this dream that loosened his strong tie to his earthly Bollingen.”* 
      What has he learned and accomplished in his new home in the Imaginal Realm? What does he now know about soul and its transformations? Has he composed a new book? Has he raised the Tower higher? I provide possible answers to these questions in my story "The Other Bollingen" in Mysterious Realities.

* Barbara Hannah, Jung, His Life and Work: A Biographical Memoir (Boston: Shambhala, 1991) 344