C.G. Jung writes that: "The child is the potential future" and when the child-motif appears to an individual it usually is an "anticipation of future developments, even though at first sight it may seem to be a retrospective configuration. Life is a flux, a flow in the future, and not a stoppage or backwash. It is therefore not surprising that so many of the mythological saviors are child-gods.¹⁴
 
"Sometimes the 'child' looks more like a child-god," and "by nature wholly supernatural." Sometimes he is "more like a young hero" whose "nature is human but raised to the limits of the supernatural -- he is 'semi-divine.'" When the god appears in close association with a symbolic animal, he personifies the collective unconscious "which is not yet integrated in a human being." The supernatural quality of the hero includes human nature and thus represents a synthesis of human consciousness with the unconscious which is not yet humanized, hence 'divine.' "Consequently he signifies a potential anticipation of an individuation approaching wholeness."¹⁵
 
"Psychologically speaking... the 'child' symbolizes the pre-conscious and the post-conscious nature of man. His pre-conscious nature is the unconscious state of early childhood; his post-conscious nature is an anticipation by analogy of life after death. In this idea the all-embracing nature of psychic wholeness is expressed. Wholeness is never comprised within the compass of the conscious mind -- it includes the indefinite and indefinable extent of the unconscious as well. Wholeness, as a matter of empirical fact, is therefore of immeasurable extent, older and younger than consciousness and enfolding it in time and space. This is not speculation, but an immediate psychic experience... The child has a psychic life before it had consciousness."¹⁶
 
1998