Salomé, by Henri Regnault (1870)
Salomé – Figure in Christian mythology who won the head of John the Baptist because of her seductive dance of the seven veils. Salomé, alongside the prophet Elijah, appears in C.G. Jung’s Liber Novus (Red Book) as a guide and teacher in his personal mythology. Jung refers to the encounter with Salomé and Elijah as a mystery play and he understood and ultimately related to Salome as an anima (soul) figure who connected him to emotion and feeling. Salomé’s blindness Jung interpreted as a way for psyche to express the feeling mode of the soul which experiences and relates to life through the emotional senses rather than thinking or forethought, which are types of sight oriented processes and are Elijah’s powers.
