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.
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