Time is a child — play­ing like a child — play­ing a board game — the king­dom of the child. This is Tele­spho­ros, who roams through the dark re­gions of this cos­mos and glows like a star out of the depths. He points the way to the gates of the sun and to the land of dreams.

In 1950 I made a kind of mon­u­ment out of stone to ex­press what the Tower means to me. The story of how this stone came to me is a cu­ri­ous one. I needed stones for build­ing the en­clos­ing wall for the so-called gar­den, and or­dered them from the quarry near Bollin­gen. I was stand­ing by when the ma­son gave all the mea­sure­ments to the owner of the quarry, who wrote them down in his note­book. When the stones ar­rived by ship and were un­loaded, it turned out that the cor­ner­stone had al­to­gether the wrong mea­sure­ments; in­stead of a tri­an­gu­lar stone, a square block had been sent: a per­fect cube of much larger di­men­sions than had been or­dered, about twenty inches thick. The ma­son was fu­ri­ous and told the barge men to take it right back with them.
 But when I saw the stone, I said, “No, that is my stone. I must have it!” For I had seen at once that it suited me per­fectly and that I wanted to do some­thing with it. Only I did not yet know what.
 
The first thing that oc­curred to me was a Latin verse by the al­chemist Ar­nal­dus de Vil­lanova (died 1313). I chis­eled this into the stone; in trans­la­tion it goes:

Here stands the mean, un­comely stone,
‘Tis very cheap in price!
The more it is de­spised by fools,
The more loved by the wise.

This verse refers to the al­chemist’s stone, the lapis, which is de­spised and re­jected.
 Soon some­thing else emerged. I be­gan to see on the front face, in the nat­u­ral struc­ture of the stone, a small cir­cle, a sort of eye, which looked at me. I chis­eled it into the stone, and in the cen­ter made a tiny ho­muncu­lus. This cor­re­sponds to the “lit­tle doll” (pupilla) — your­self — which you see in the pupil of an­other’s eye; a kind of Kabir, or the Tele­spho­ros of Askle­pios. An­cient stat­ues show him wear­ing a hooded cloak and car­ry­ing a lantern. At the same time he is a pointer of the way. I ded­i­cated a few words to him which came into my mind while I was work­ing. The in­scrip­tion is in Greek; the trans­la­tion goes:

Time is a child — play­ing like a child — play­ing a board game — the king­dom of the child. This is Tele­spho­ros, who roams through the dark re­gions of this cos­mos and glows like a star out of the depths. He points the way to the gates of the sun and to the land of dreams. ^1)↓

These words came to me — one af­ter the other — while I worked on the stone.
 On the third face, the one fac­ing the lake, I let the stone it­self speak, as it were, in a Latin in­scrip­tion. These say­ings are more or less quo­ta­tions from alchemy. This is the trans­la­tion:

I am an or­phan, alone; nev­er­the­less I am found ev­ery­where. I am one, but op­posed to my­self. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known nei­ther fa­ther nor mother, be­cause I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and moun­tains I roam, but I am hid­den in the in­ner­most soul of man. I am mor­tal for ev­ery­one, yet I am not touched by the cy­cle of aeons.

In con­clu­sion, un­der the say­ing of Ar­nal­dus de Vil­lanova, I set down in Latin the words “In re­mem­brance of his sev­enty-fifth birth­day C. G. Jung made and placed this here as a thanks of­fer­ing, in the year 1950.”
 When the stone was fin­ished, I looked at it again and again, won­der­ing about it and ask­ing my­self what lay be­hind my im­pulse to carve it.
 The stone stands out­side the Tower, and is like an ex­pla­na­tion of it. It is a man­i­fes­ta­tion of the oc­cu­pant, but one which re­mains in­com­pre­hen­si­ble to oth­ers. Do you know what I wanted to chisel into the back face of the stone? “Le cri de Mer­lin!” For what the stone ex­pressed re­minded me of Mer­lin’s life in the for­est, af­ter he had van­ished from the world. Men still hear his cries, so the leg­end runs, but they can­not un­der­stand or in­ter­pret them.
 Mer­lin rep­re­sents an at­tempt by the me­dieval un­con­scious to cre­ate a par­al­lel fig­ure to Par­si­fal. Par­si­fal is a Chris­tian hero, and Mer­lin, son of the devil and a pure vir­gin, is his dark brother. In the twelfth cen­tury, when the leg­end arose, there were as yet no premises by which his in­trin­sic mean­ing could be un­der­stood. Hence he ended in ex­ile, and hence “le cri de Mer­lin” which still sounded from the for­est af­ter his death. This cry that no one could un­der­stand im­plies that he lives on in unre­deemed form. His story is not yet fin­ished, and he still walks abroad. It might be said that the se­cret of Mer­lin was car­ried on by alchemy, pri­mar­ily in the fig­ure of Mer­curius. Then Mer­lin was taken up again in my psy­chol­ogy of the un­con­scious and — re­mains un­com­pre­hended to this day! That is be­cause most peo­ple find it quite be­yond them to live on close terms with the un­con­scious. Again and again I have had to learn how hard this is for peo­ple.
 C. G. Jung from “Memories, Dreams, Reflections”