Death is foreshadowed by the first signals of old age, which
appear even today too soon for pleasure. How much sooner in the
primitive past! When the woman of forty-five was a hag and the
warrior of fifty an arthritic cripple, when, moreover, disease and
the accidents of the hunt and of battle were everyone's immediate
experience, Death was a mighty presence who had to be faced
boldly even within the safest sanctuary, and whose force had to
be assimilated.
...
The Hawaiian tree with the deceptive branches, of which one
side seems to be alive but the other dead, suggests the Eddic
World Ash, Yggdrasil, whose shaft was the pivot of the revolving
heavens, with the World Eagje perched on its summit, four stags
running among its branches, browsing on its leaves, and the
Cosmic Serpent gnawing at its root:
The ash Yggdrasil suffers anguish,
More than men can know:
The stag bites above; on the side it rots;
And the dragon gnaws from beneath. 91
It is the greatest of all trees and the best, the ash where the gods
give judgment every day. Its limbs spread over the world and
stand above heaven. Its roots penetrate the abyss. And its name,
Yggdrasil, means "The horse of Ygg," whose other name is Odin;
for this great god once hung on that tree nine days, in the way of a
sacrifice to himself.
I ween that I hung on the windy tree,
Hung there for nights full nine;
With the spear I was wounded, and offered I was
To Odin, myself to myself,
On that tree that none may ever know
What root beneath it runs. 98
We have here certainly hit upon a series of images aptly
contrived to render certain hopes, fears, and realizations concerning
the mystery of death, such as might well have arisen spontaneously
in many parts of the world in the minds of those facing the dark
gate. Or, since these images of the tree or man that is at once dead
and alive do not appear in isolation, but always amid comparable
contexts of associated motifs, should we not look for signs of a
prehistoric distribution of the syndrome from a single myth-
making center to the rest of the world? In the puberty rites we
found the imagery of the androgyne associated with a tree or
great pole. Here we again have the tree, and again a dual associa-
tion: not the duality of male and female, but that of life- and
death. Are these two dualities mythologically related? To realize
that they may indeed be linked, one need only thinlr of the Bible
story of the First Adam, who became Adam and Eve and fell by
the tree, bringing into the world both death and its counterbalance,
procreation. Add to this, then, the figure of the Second Adam,
Christ, by whose death on the "tree" eternal life was given to man,
and a key to the structuring of the many-faceted image will have
been found. It is a threshold image, uniting pairs-of-opposites in
such a way as to facilitate a passage of the mind beyond anxiety.
...
It is not in the writings of Sigmund Freud but in those of Carl
Jung that the most profound analytical consideration has recently
been given to the problem confronting all men throughout the long
last portion of the human cycle of life: that, namely, of the ir-
resistible approach of King Death. "A human being," Jung once
wrote,
would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if
this longevity had no meaning for the species to which he be-
longs. The afternoon of human life must have a significance
of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life's
morning. The significance of the morning undoubtedly lies in
the development of the individual, our entrenchment in the
outer world, the propagation of our kind and the care of our
children. But when this purpose has been attained and even
more than attained shall the earning of money, the extension
of conquests, and the expansion of life go steadily on beyond
the bounds of all reason and sense? Whoever carries over into
the afternoon the law of the morning that is, the aims of
nature must pay for so doing with damage to his soul just
as surely as a growing youth who tries to salvage his childish
egoism must pay for this mistake with social failure. Money-
making, social existence, family and posterity are nothing but
plain nature not culture. Culture lies beyond the purpose of
nature. Could by any chance culture be the meaning and pur-
pose of the second half of life?
In primitive tribes, we observe that the old people are al-
most always the guardians of the mysteries and the laws, and
it is in these that the cultural heritage of the tribe is ex-
pressed."
"As a physician I am convinced that it is hygienic," Jung de-
clares elsewhere, with an apology for employing such a clinical
term with reference to religion, "to discover in death a goal toward
which one can strive; and that shrinking away from it is something
unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its
purpose. I therefore consider the religious teaching of a life here-
after consonant with the standpoint of psychic hygiene. When I
live in a house that I know will fall about my head within the
next two weeks, all my vital functions will be impaired by this
thought; but if, on the contrary, I feel myself to be safe, I can
dwell there in a normal and comfortable way. From the staijd-
point of psychotherapy it would therefore be desirable to think of
death as only a transition one part of a life-process whose
extent and duration escape our knowledge." And in fact, as Dr.
Jung then notes and all of us well know, "a large majority of
people have from time immemorial felt the need of believing in a
continuance of life. In spite of the fact that by far the larger part
of mankind does not know why the body needs salt, everyone
demands it none the less because of an instinctive compulsion. It
is the same in things of the psyche. The demands of therapy,
therefore, do not lead us into any bypaths, but down the middle of
the roadway trodden by humankind. And therefore we are thinking
correctly with respect to the meaning of life, even though we do
not understand what we think." 10
Observations such as these have earned for Dr. Jung the reputa-
tion of being a mystic though actually they are no more mystical
than the recommendation of a hobby to a mind becoming ossified
in its office task would be. Jung has here simply said that in the
afternoon of life the symbolism of King Death does in fact conduce
to a progressive inclination of the energies of the psyche, and hence
to maturity. Nor does he think it necessary, or even possible, to
"understand" the ultimate secret of the force of such symbolic
forms. For, as he asks,
Do we ever understand what we think? We understand only
such thinking as is a mere equation and from which nothing
comes out but what we have put in. That is the manner of
working of the intellect. But beyond that there is a thinking
in primordial images in symbols that are older than historical
man; which have been ingrained in him from earliest times,
and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up
the groundwork of the human psyche. It is possible to live the
fullest life only when we are in harmony with these symbols;
wisdom is a return to them. It is a question neither of belief
nor knowledge, but of the agreement of our thinking with
the primordial images of the unconscious. They are the source
of all our conscious thoughts, and one of these primordial
images is the idea of life after death. 101
Ageing: How would you cope?
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Originally Posted by Æmeric
I'm certainly looking forward to the next 20 years of my life, and I haven't reached my zenith yet. In fact, I fully believe that my best years are still to come. 
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