ABSTRACT
C.G. Jung had much to say about several of H.R. Haggard’s novels, especially She (1886/ 2006), the tale of a journey by Ludwig Horace Holly, his adopted son Leo Vincey, and their man-servant Job to present-day Mozambique where they encounter Ayesha (pronounced ass-ah), the She of the book’s title, an ancient, virtually immortal, and fully veiled woman. In Collected Works Jung frequently referred to her as an anima figure and emphasized that the novel was an example of a “visionary” text. More extensive commentary appeared in his 1925 seminar (Jung, 1989), in which She was both homework assignment and discussion topic. Although the discussion clearly supported the visionary nature of Haggard’s text, neither Jung nor his seminar participants identified it as such, and they offered much speculation about the novel’s autobiographical (psychological) elements. In the mainstream criticism, there has been some mention of the transpersonal nature of Haggard’s composition process but no mention of the 1925 seminar.1 The present chapter, therefore, first establishes that Jung was correct in naming She a visionary text, and it then uses the visionary and psychological modes as a framework for explicating and correcting the statements that he and his colleagues made about the novel. A coherent theme unifies this analysis. Although the seminar discussion fell short in various ways, it properly suggested that, for Holly, there is no renewal. In confronting the unconscious, he does not achieve full individuation but instead, through projection, experiences enantiodromia, a swing from inveterate misogyny in England to anima projection and possession with Ayesha in Africa.
