Jung is not hedging here — he is making a precision claim about the nature of the archetype, and it matters that Pauli's shadow falls across the page. The archetype itself is never available to experience. What you encounter in a dream, in a symptom, in the sudden grip of an emotion that seems larger than its occasion — these are effects, not the thing. The analogy to quantum physics is not decoration: Pauli's work on the exclusion principle was built entirely on inferring structure from observable consequences when the underlying reality refused direct inspection. You cannot photograph an electron; you can only watch what it does to the equipment around it. The archetype operates on the same logic.

This should unsettle anyone who believes they have grasped an archetype through experience. The numinous charge, the image, the mythologem that erupts in a dream — these are the model built from effects, not the source. Which means the soul's images are always secondary constructions, always already interpretations, never raw transmission from some unmediated depth. The ground stays hidden. Depth psychology, honestly practiced, is not a descent to bedrock — it is a progressive refinement of the model you build from what keeps arriving at the surface.