The Nixie occupies a distinctive and recurring position in the depth-psychological corpus as an emblematic figure of the anima in her elemental, non-human aspect. Across Jung’s own writings — from the alchemical commentaries of the Collected Works to the mythological essays co-authored with Kerényi — the nixie appears as a water-spirit whose fish-tail or aquatic nature signals the threshold between human consciousness and the undifferentiated depths of the unconscious. Jung treats the nixie as both a Kore-variant and a manifestation of the anima proper: she is that figure whom the adept ‘catches’ in the Liber mutus image, just as she is identified in the index to the Practice of Psychotherapy as an explicit guise of the anima. Emma Jung’s treatment of Melusine enriches this picture, foregrounding the nixie-form as the secret, renewing, non-human element that must periodically be honored and not violated. Jung’s alchemical commentary on Paracelsus extends the figure further: Melusina as water-nixie, stirred into human form by the Scaiolae (the psychic functions), embodies the transformative encounter with the feminine unconscious in its most numinous register. The tension in the corpus runs between the nixie as seductive, potentially fatal lure and as the carrier of the liquor Sophiae — wisdom distilled from the very deceptions she embodies.
Melusina, being a water-nixie, is closely connected with Morgana, the ‘sea-born,’ whose classical counterpart is Aphrodite, the ‘foam-born.’ Union with the feminine personification of the unconscious is, as we have seen, a well-nigh eschatological experience
Jung identifies Melusina-as-nixie with Morgana and Aphrodite, framing union with this water-spirit as an eschatological encounter with the feminine unconscious.
, Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907thesis
as imaginatio, speculatio, phantasia, and fides, they ‘intervene’ and stimulate Melusina, the water-nixie, to change herself into human form. Dorn thinks of this as a ‘vision appearing in the mind’ and not as a projection on a real woman.
Jung explicates Paracelsus’s Melusina as a water-nixie who is activated into human form by the four psychic functions, constituting an inner vision rather than an outer projection.
, Alchemical Studies, 1967thesis
Melusine’s condition was that she be allowed once a week to return to her element and resume her nixie form. This is the secret which may not be spied upon. The non-human, the natural, in this case the fish tail, must not be seen.
Emma Jung reads Melusine’s periodic return to nixie form as the necessary renewal of the non-human, elemental dimension of the psyche — a secret that must not be violated.
, Animus and Anima, 1957thesis
The ‘acts of Melusina’ are deceptive phantasms compounded of supreme sense and the most pernicious nonsense, a veritable veil of Maya which lures and leads every mortal astray.
Jung characterizes the nixie’s acts as simultaneously wisdom-bearing and deceptive, requiring a discriminative distillation process to extract the liquor Sophiae from illusion.
, Alchemical Studies, 1967thesis
An occasional variant is the nixie or water-sprite, who betrays her superhuman nature by her fish-tail. Sometimes the Kore and mother figures slither down altogether to the animal kingdom
Jung identifies the nixie as an occasional modulation of the Kore archetype, distinguished by her fish-tail as a mark of superhuman, non-human nature.
, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949thesis
He is fishing, and has caught a nixie. His soror mystica, however, catches birds in her net, symbolizing the animus. The idea of the anima often turns up in the literature of the 16th and 17th cent.
Jung cites the Liber mutus image of the adept fishing up a nixie as an iconographic expression of the anima, paired with the soror mystica’s capture of animus-birds.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting
matrix of divine figures, 293; as nixie, 320*1; reconciles and unites, 301/f; representative of collective unconscious, 293
An index entry in the Practice of Psychotherapy explicitly catalogues the nixie as one of the anima’s guises alongside her role as matrix of divine figures and representative of the collective unconscious.
, The Practice of Psychotherapy: Essays on the Psychology of the Transference and Other Subjects, 1954supporting
as nixie, 320*1; reconciles and unites, 301/f; representative of collective unconscious, 293; and Shakti, 293; as soul, 259
A parallel index cross-references the nixie with Shakti and soul as convergent guises of the anima within the alchemical-therapeutic framework.
, Collected Works Volume 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy, 1954supporting
nixie(s), 24ff, 184, 222, 371
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious index lists the nixie across multiple significant passage-clusters, indicating its recurrent treatment throughout that volume.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting
water-nixie, 176, 182; -nymph, 143
An index entry in the Alchemical Studies volume distinguishes the water-nixie from the water-nymph and locates it in the aquatic symbolic cluster alongside Mercurius.
, Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907supporting
Wilhelm K. Grimm. Deutsche Mythologie. Vol. I, Chaps. XVI, IV, 1835.
Emma Jung’s footnotes cite Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie as a source for nixie and related water-spirit lore, situating the figure within the Germanic folkloric tradition underlying the depth-psychological appropriation.
, Animus and Anima, 1957aside