Mircea Eliade's novel Forêt Interdite [The Forbidden Forest], whose mythic signification is evident,… belongs to the current inspired by the depth psychology of Jung. Eliade's book can be defined as the meditation of a man upon the thousand-year history of his people, with all the risks and calamities that this implies. (p. 390)
I find it logical to relate [his] "prohibited forest," the symbol of a definitive realization in the beyond, in what Eliade himself called in another novel "the celestial marriage," to the Jungian "Mandala." If in effect we conceive the human drama, in general, as the search for equilibrium, according to a process of individualization, it is evident that "to dream in the forest" means that one has arrived at interior equilibrium, at a final phase in a process of psychological healing. And healing here means salvation, in the most spiritual sense possible. "Santé" and "salut," in French, imply the same finality. And it seems important to me to indicate, at the end of these notes concerning Eliade's novel, that the "prohibited forest," the collective myth of Romanian history, the image of a general salvation …, represents here a perfect psychic ideal, the visible form of a goal reached in the inner self of the two personages in the novel.
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