Searching for somewhere to rest, they were barred from a thousand homes. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid narrates how Jupiter and Mercury went wandering disguised as mortals in the hill country of Phyrgia. Jung’s fantasy figure was based on the figure of Philemon who appeared in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and in Goethe’s Faust. He formulated and expressed everything which I had never thought. was simply a superior knowledge, and he taught me psychological objectivity and the actuality of the soul. Speaking with Aniela Jaffé, his close friend and colleague, he recalled, In his memoirs, Jung reported that he would often converse with Philemon as he strolled in the garden of his lakeside home in Küsnacht, Switzerland. One of the most significant figures is Philemon. These fantasies were also from part of the narratives which he recorded in his now legendary Red Book. In these, Jung narrated some of his decisive experiences and spoke of a few of the fantasy figures that he had encountered. Partial accounts of this period may be found in the notes of his seminar given in 1925 on Analytical Psychology (prepared by Cary Baynes) and also in Aniela Jaffé’s biography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, published posthumously in a heavily edited form. 1 To Jung, he represented superior insight and functioned like a guru to him. Thereafter, Philemon played an important role in Jung’s fantasies. During this intense period, Jung was struck by the synchronicity of finding a dead kingfisher, a bird rarely seen around Zürich, in his garden by the lakeshore. After the dream, Jung painted the image, because he did not understand it. Out of the blue, he saw an old man with kingfisher wings and the horns of a bull flying across the sky, carrying a bunch of keys. Jung saw a sea-blue sky covered by brown clods of earth that appeared to be breaking apart. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung recounted the dream in which this figure first appeared to him. The Philemon Foundation is named for a figure that appeared to Jung in a dream in 1913.

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