Therefore those mystery cults were all concerned with the hope of immortality. It was the going back to the god, to eat the divine body and drink the divine blood-whatever the sacred drink or food may have been.
In that way they renewed and strengthened their own being so that they could stand life again.
It was a sort of spiritual bath and wasoften expressed in that form; one finds that in certain Dionysian cults, and the piscine of the early Christians was a bath really.
In another placewhich has been excavated in Pompeii, fish symbolism was found exactly like the Christian fish symbolism, the initiate being a fish in the water and then emerging renewed.
Being submerged under water meansgoing down into the unconscious, and there in the depths one is no longer single and separated, one is all-embracing, one is the creative godhimself.
This extraordinary experience is really the purpose in goinginto the unconscious, and that was a conscious act in the old mystery teachings.
With us it is obsolete; we can only understand it as a sort ofsentimentality unless one knows what such an experience really means. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 151-152
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