‘Little in Length, Mighty in Strength’

In a modern series of visions in which the figure of the wise old man occurred several times, he was on one occasion of normal size and appeared at the very bottom of a crater surrounded by high rocky walls; on another occasion he was a tiny figure on top of a mountain, inside a low, stony enclosure. We find the same motif in Goethe’s tale of the dwarf princess who lived in a casket. In this connection we might also mention the Anthroparion, the little leaden man of the Zosimos vision, as well as the metallic men who dwell in the mines, the crafty dactyls of antiquity, the homunculi of the alchemists, and the gnomic throng of hobgoblins, brownies, gremlins, etc. How “real” such conceptions are became clear to me on the occasion of a serious mountaineering accident: after the catastrophe two of the climbers had the collective vision, in broad daylight, of a little hooded man who scrambled out of an inaccessible crevasse in the ice face and passed across the glacier, creating a regular panic in the two beholders. I have often encountered motifs which made me think that the unconscious must be the world of the infinitesimally small. Such an idea could be derived rationalistically from the obscure feeling that that in all these visions we are we are dealing with something endopsychic, the inference being that a thing must be exceedingly small in order to fit inside the head. I am no friend of any such “rational” conjectures, though I would not say that they are all beside the mark. It seems to me more probable that this liking for diminutives on the one hand and for superlatives – giants, etc – on the other is connected with the queer uncertainty of spatial and temporal relations in the unconscious. Man’s sense of proportion, his rational conception of big and small, is distinctly anthropomorphic, and it loses its validity not only in the realm of physical phenomena but also in those parts of the collective unconscious beyond the range of the specifically human. The atman is “smaller than small and bigger than big,” he is “the size of a thumb” yet he “encompasses the earth on every side and rules over the ten-finger space.” And of course the Cabiri Goethe says: “little in length / mighty in strength.” In the same way, the archetype of the wise old man is quite tiny, almost imperceptible, and yet possesses a fateful potency, as anyone can see when he gets down to fundamentals. The archetypes have this peculiarity in common with the atomic world, which is demonstrating before our eyes that the more deeply the investigator penetrates into the universe of microphysics the more devastating are the explosive forces he finds enchained there. That the greatest effects come from the smallest causes has become patently clear not only in physics but in the field of psychological research as well. How often in the critical moments of life everything hangs on what appears to be a mere nothing!

 

– Carl Jung. CW9.1 ¶ 408