The Symbolic World

About this atlas

A map of C. G. Jung's symbolic thought — the recurring images, figures, and operations of alchemy and the psyche, and the links Jung drew between them.

Grounded & verified

Every connection is anchored to a specific paragraph (§) of the Collected Works, shown with a short verbatim quote and its Bollingen page. Every citation (marked ✓) was independently checked by a second AI reviewer against the full source paragraph — claims that were unsupported, reversed, or conflated were corrected or rejected before publication. Nothing here is a paraphrase or a guess.

What is mapped

This atlas maps claims, not pages. For the core volumes, Jung's central, repeated theses — what a symbol is, what it corresponds to, on whose authority — are mapped completely; passing amplifications and one-off variants are sampled, not exhausted. Like a good map it keeps every mountain and river without printing every hill: the deeper claim-inventory of a chapter grows batch by batch, and each addition passes the same verification gate.

How to explore

Six regions group symbols by kind — the Psyche, the Opus, the Materia, the Symbols, the Figures, and Motifs & Traditions.
Search a symbol (top right) to fly to it.
Click a node to read its grounded connections; click a connection to walk onward through the graph.
Filters (left) narrow by Collected Works volume or by kind of link.
Scroll to zoom, drag to pan.

Verification status

Every citation carries a status dot: ● human-validated (a person checked the paragraph), ● AI-verified (machine gates and audits only, so far), ● disputed (public objection on record). Human validation is ongoing; amber is the honest default, not a defect.

Reading a citation

Each link is tagged with its provenance: jung-asserts (his own interpretation), jung-reports-parallel (a tradition he cites without endorsing), or jung-quotes-source (a named source, e.g. Paracelsus). Click a citation's ✓ to see its verification record. Quotes are brief excerpts for study; the full text lives in the Collected Works.

A standing offer

Every connection names its exact paragraph — anyone with the Bollingen edition can check any link in about two minutes. If you find a connection its cited paragraph does not support, that finding falsifies the link, and we will correct or remove it and say so publicly. Every citation's verification record includes a dispute button and a confirm button — if you check a paragraph and it holds, say so: reader confirmations are the human tier of the verification chain and enter the edge's public record. Outcomes of both are published in the verification log. The construction pipeline's measured error rates are published with the project.

Watch it being built

The graph's construction is itself public: every batch's passage through the pipeline — proposal, quote check, independent review, cross-vendor check, merge — is recorded in the construction log, with links to the underlying commits. Nothing entered this atlas by an unrecorded path.