Italy

On his two visits to the tomb in Ravenna of the Empress Galla Placidia who died in AD 450, Swiss psychologist Carl Jung found his mood affected by the atmosphere of the place. On his second visit, in 1933, Jung moved from the tomb to the Baptistry of the Orthodox. There he was immediately struck by the mild blue light filling the room from no apparent source. In place of the windows that Jung had seen on his first visit there now appeared four great blue mosaic designs of astonishing beauty.

They seemed to be depicting maritime events, exactly fulfilling a promise made by the Empress that if she was safely carried across the sea she would build the Basilica of San Giovanni as thanks to the gods, adorning it with mosaics depict ing the perils of the sea. Jung attempted to buy photographs of the mosaics but could not find any. He asked a friend visiting Ravenna to purchase some for him and was told that he would not find any photos because the mosaics did not exist. Jung was astonished to hear this, and the lady who had been with him apparently refused to believe it as she too had seen them with her own eyes

. An analysis in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research in 1963, by Professor Sir Cyril Burt, suggests that there are some fundamentally blue images in the Baptistry and that some of the specific themes described by Jung may have come to him from images he had seen in the Bible. Such an explanation does not explain the woman’s vision; perhaps Jung influenced her interpretation of the existing images if not, then a ‘psychic’ explanation is still open.

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