All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment in symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, which is to say, as archetypes of the unconscious. No doubt this discovery is hardly credible as yet.

Jung contrasts the near-universality of religious imagination in earlier cultures with modernity’s weakened symbolic life. For him, the “gods” do not simply vanish; rather, their energies and patterns reappear psychologically as archetypes—recurring, impersonal structures of the collective unconscious that shape experience, fantasy, and behavior. The “impoverishment in symbolism” suggests that when a culture loses living myths and rituals, it becomes harder to recognize these forces in their traditional, numinous forms; they are “rediscovered” in a reduced, internalized register as psychic factors. Jung’s final remark underscores how counterintuitive this move was (and remains): treating deities not as metaphysical beings but as psychologically real patterns.