The symbol and the sacred

Where the symbol first outranks the drive. Read the turn itself: the image stops being a disguise for an instinct and starts being the thing that carries the meaning.

• Psychology of the Unconscious1916

The method while it is still showing its work. These are papers, not a system, and the hesitation in them is the point.

• Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology1917

The numinous named, before psychology can file it. Otto's claim is that the holy is its own category and does not reduce to the moral or the rational.

• The Idea of the Holy1923

Caravaggio gives the scene no distance to stand back at. The knife is at the throat, the angel has the wrist, and this is the terror Otto names.

Forty years later the same passage goes quiet. Rembrandt reads Abraham, not the knife.

Neither hand is illustrating the text. Each is deciding what the passage is about, and they decide differently.

The case that the creed is the sane reading. It closes the run by refusing the frame the first three books work inside.

• Orthodoxy1908

Put the run on one axis and the gap is the lesson. Four books written between 1908 and 1923 have been reading three pictures painted between 1603 and 1645. The psychology is late and the images are old, which is Jung's own claim about where the material comes from.