Carl Jung on Elijah, Salome and The Serpent

I told you last time about the dream concerning the killing of the hero and then the fantasy about Elijah and Salome. Now the killing of the hero is not an indifferent fact, but one that involves typical consequences.

Dissolving an image means that you become that image.

Doing away with the concept of God means that you become that God.

This is so because if you dissolve an image it is always consciously, and then the libido invested in the image goes into the unconscious.

The stronger the image the more you are caught by it in the unconscious, so if you give up the hero in the conscious you are forced into the hero role by the unconscious. Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 95.

Besides Elijah and Salome, there was a third factor in the fantasy I began to describe, and that is the huge black snake between them.6 The snake indicates the counterpart of the hero.

Mythology is full of this relationship between the hero and the snake.

A northern myth says the hero has eyes of a snake, and many myths show the hero being worshipped as a snake, having been transformed into it after death.

This is perhaps from the primitive idea that the first animal that creeps out of the grave is the soul of the man who was buried.

The presence of the snake then says it will be again a hero myth.

As to the meaning of the two figures, Salome is an anima figure, blind because, though connecting the con- scious and the unconscious, she does not see the operation of the unconscious.

Elijah is the personification of the cognitional element, Salome of the erotic. Elijah is the figure of the old prophet filled with wisdom.
One could speak of these two figures as personifications of Logos and Eros very specifically shaped.

This is practical for intellectual play, but as Logos and Eros are purely speculative terms, not scientific in any sense, but irrational, it is very much better to leave the figures as they are, namely as events, experiences.

As to the snake, what is its further significance? Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Pages 96-97.

Carl Jung: When Elijah told me he was always with Salome, I thought it was almost blasphemous for him to say this.

In those days I saw a compensatory principle that seemed to show a balance between the conscious and unconscious.

But I saw later that the unconscious was balanced in itself.

It is the yea and the nay.

The unconscious is not at all exactly the opposite of the conscious.

It may be irrationally different.

You cannot deduce the unconscious from the conscious.

The unconscious is balanced in itself, as is the conscious.

When we meet an extravagant figure like Salome, we have a compensating figure in the unconscious.

If there were only such an evil figure as Salome, the conscious would have to build up a fence to keep this back,
an exaggerated, fanatical, moral attitude.

But I had not this exaggerated moral attitude, so I suppose that Salome was compensated by Elijah.

When Elijah told me he was always with Salome, I thought it was almost blasphemous for him to say this.

I had the feeling of diving into an atmosphere that was cruel and full of blood.

This atmosphere was around Salome, and to hear Elijah declare that he was always in that company shocked me profoundly.

Elijah and Salome are together because they are pairs of opposites. Elijah is an important figure in man’s unconscious,
not in woman’s.

He is the man with prestige, the man with a low threshold of consciousness or with remarkable intuition.

In higher society he would be the wise man; compare Lao-tse.

He has the ability to get into touch with archetypes.

He will be surrounded with mana, and will arouse other men because he touches the archetypes in others.

He is fascinating and has a thrill about him.

He is the wise man, the medicine man, the mana man.

Later on in evolution, this wise man becomes a spiritual image, a god, “the old one from the mountains” (compare Moses coming
down from the mountain as lawgiver), the sorcerer of the tribe.

He is the legislator.

Even Christ was in company with Moses and Elijah in his transfiguration.

All great lawgivers and masters of the past, such as for example the Mahatmas of theosophical teaching,
are thought of by theosophists as spiritual factors still in existence.

Thus the Dalai Lama is supposed by theosophists to be such a figure.

In the history of Gnosis, this figure plays a great role, and every sect claims to have been founded by such a one.

Christ is not quite suitable; he is too young to be the Mahatma.

The great man has to be given another role. John the Baptist was the great wise man, teacher, and initiator, but he has been depotentiated.

The same archetype reappears in Goethe as Faust and as Zarathustra in Nietzsche, where Zarathustra came as a visitation.

Nietzsche has been gripped by the sudden animation of the great wise man.

This plays an important role in man’s psychology, as I have said, but unfortunately a less important part than that
played by the anima. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Pages 100-101


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