----- I would like to begin with this beautiful quotation at the end of Jung's book Modern Man in Search of a Soul:

"The living spirit grows and even outgrows its earlier forms of expression; It freely chooses the men [and women] in whom it lives and who proclaim it. This living spirit is eternally renewed and pursues its goal in manifold and inconceivable ways throughout the history of mankind. Measured against it, the names and forms which men have given it mean little enough; they are only the changing leaves and blossoms on the stem of the eternal tree."-----

In a letter written in August, 20th 1945, Jung said that the main interest of his work was not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. In his experience, it was the experience of the numinous, at first veiled and difficult to perceive, and often manifesting in a frightening or unrecognised form, which ultimately heals, restores and illumines the soul. -----

How can we define the numinous? In his book, The Idea of the Holy, Rudolph Otto describes it as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. It is what powerfully fascinates and attracts us. Yet we fear and defend ourselves against it because it is altogether beyond the range of our normal experience. It is wholly "other." Because it is wholly "other" it can arouse in us unusual and intense feelings of awe, dread, terror, rapture, ecstasy and wonder. The entire religious history of humanity has developed from the experience of these unusual feelings in individuals. We would not respond to the numinous with these feelings unless there was something in us that recognised it and fell back in awe before it. This picture is 12,000 years old - an image of an encounter with the numinous - from the original Lascaux cave.

A shaman flies like the bird on his staff to another realm where he will encounter the soul of the slain bison. Recently, palaeontologists have interpreted the hand prints on the cave walls of Palaeolithic man as images of reaching through the stone wall of the cave to touch the invisible reality that was sensed to lie beyond it. The hand, so to speak, reached through to touch the beyond. The role of the shaman, like that of the hand, was to connect the tribe with the unseen "other" side. From at least 35,000 BC. the cave was the focus of elaborate rituals of connection. Today the church or cathedral or the therapist's room may serve exactly the same purpose - to connect us with something we may neither know nor understand. The original meaning of the word therapist is "one who serves the gods."

Anne Baring