In this connection the dragon clearly appears as the symbol for an "unconscious nature-spirit," as "the wisdom of the earth"; and therefore, seen from the Christian standpoint, it represents at the same time the Pagan conception of the world in which experience of the Deity, or of the spirit, was projected into the material reality of the world. In antiquity, man experienced the Deity through a feeling of being gripped and moved by the phenomena of nature: in the rustling of the Dodonean oaks, in the murmuring of a fountain, in the starry heavens and the glow of the rising sun. In these he saw the manifestations of the highest power. This form of experience, however, had obviously become unsatisfying, even destructive, and as the dream shows it had to be "surmounted" rather than overcome. The process of withdrawing the projection of the Gods, as dominants of the unconscious, from nature had actually already begun in the Stoa, which interpreted the Olympians as the embodiments of definite psychic characteristics, but only again in favor of a "subtle material" conception of the spirit, as having a fiery, ethereal nature: the all-pervading and all-ruling Nous. But it was Christianity which first took the real step towards a purely spiritual, extra-mundane conception of God. It is the realization of this fact which is represented in Perpetua's ascent over and beyond the dragon to a heavenly place. Consequently in the vision, the dragon stands for the danger of slipping back into the old Pagan spiritual attitude, out of which the ladder shows the way to higher consciousness. As a feminine and chthonic being, however, the dragon also means Perpetua's own instinctive soul, her will to live and her feminine reality which she tramples underfoot and disregards as she steps beyond....Perpetua becomes, so to speak, entirely a "spirit" (hence her masculinity). In the Excerpta ex Theodoto, quoted by Clement of Alexandria, we likewise read that the masculine always unites directly with the Logos, but that the feminine, after a process of becoming masculine, enters the Pleroma together with the angels; wherefore it is said that woman is transformed into a man and the earthly Church into angels.

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It is singular also that St. Paul should speak of himself as "a prisoner [desmios] of Jesus Christ," or of being "in the bonds of the Gospel." The psychological meaning of such a confinement is unmistakable. Imprisonment under whatever circumstances implies restricted freedom of action and isolation from the surrounding world. It is a sequestration, a voluntary or involuntary state of introversion, which in certain cases may be brought about by a state of possession -- that is, by being fascinated with an unconscious content. In this way the unconscious images (therefore the dreams) which formed the initiation process of the mysteries were activated. That is why the prison is often an initial symbol of the process of individuation in the dreams of modern people.

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If we ask ourselves what is actually taking place autonomously in the collective unconscious, we can perceive a splitting-up, as it were, of the archetype into a light and a dark aspect. This happened first of all to the image of God itself, inasmuch as the ambivalent, primordial father Yahweh approached the human sphere in the form of the two Sons of God, Satan and Christ...In Rhabanus Maurus' list of figurae, for instance, nearly all the typi (allegorical images), such as fire, eyes, and lion, have one aspect which alludes to Christ and another which alludes to the devil. The splitting-up of the image of God, and at the same time of all the other archetypal images, into two aspects appears to be connected -- as C. G. Jung states in his Eranos article on the mother archetype -- with the differentiation of feeling and, consequently, of moral judgment in Western man, which subsequently made it impossible for him to endure the paradoxical character and moral ambivalence still retained, for instance, by the Indian gods.