ABSTRACT
There is a metaphysical dimension to the wanderer's experience—specifically, his hallucination is an extrapsychic event in which his dead friends come to help him make a transition, and they withdraw when he decides to stay in the world and embrace classical wisdom and Christian faith. Jung would find this interpretation hard to swallow, as he signals in his essay “The Soul and Death” (1934). He writes, “I shall certainly not assert now that one must believe death to be a second birth leading to survival beyond the grave,” though he acknowledges that all the great religions do so (CW 8, 804/408). Earlier, in “The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits” (1920), he reduces souls to autonomous complexes from the personal unconscious and spirits to complexes from the collective unconscious (CW 8, 591/312), so that spiritual manifestation is simply a matter of projection. Though acknowledging “universal reports of … post-mortem phenomena in the form of ghosts and haunting,” he is convinced that “ghosts and suchlike have to do with psychic facts of which our academic wisdom refuses to take cognizance, although they appear clearly enough in our dreams” (CW 8, 598/316; my emphasis).
