The Turning Back of Atmavictu

INSCRIPTION TRANSLATION :

“The accursed dragon has eaten the sun, its belly being cut open and he must not hand over the gold of the sun, together with his blood. This is the turning back of Atmavictu, the old one. He who destroyed the proliferating green covering is the youth who helped me to kill Siegfried.”

-This reference is to Liber Primus, ch. 7, “Murder of the Hero.” Atmaviktu first appears in Black Book 6 in 1917. There is a sculpture of him in Jung’s garden in Küsnacht. In “From the earliest experiences of my life” Jung wrote: “the unconscious supplied me with a name. It called the figure Atmavictu – the ‘breath of life.’ It is a further development of that quasi-sexual object of my childhood, which turned out to be the ‘breath of life’, the creative impulse. Basically, the manikin is a kabir” (From the Earliest Experiences of My Life, pp. 29-30, Cf. Memories, pp. 38-9).