LECTURE VII 5 March 1930
Last time we came to the strange conclusion that the hermaphroditic figure of that singer in the church really could be a symbol for a god, and today we have to discuss the conclusion still further.
It is rather unexpected, but we have to admit that there are plenty of good reasons for it.
I told you that when one reaches such an extraordinary conclusion it is difficult to realize what it means, and it would be particularly difficult in this case to make the dreamer see that it was justified.
As a matter of fact when I analysed this dream with him, I did not point out such a possibility; I saw that it was indicated but I refrained from discussing it with him. Do you know why?
Dr. Deady: There has been no indication that he was prepared for it in the previous dreams and it would be liable to start a resistance in him.
Dr. Jung: Yes, that was the reason which forbade it, for from the dream itself, one can see that he is still under the influence of his memories, he still has a fixed idea about all these matters, so necessarily if one used the word god, he would at once compare his former conception with it and then one would be up against a tremendous resistance.
It is not because he would be offended intellectually of course-from that point of view he has long since criticized his old concept of God and laid it aside-but because he has no other.
He remains, therefore, simply identical with whatever he was taught, the traditional ideas. Moreover, to some people today, even talking of religion almost amounts to obscenity.
It is exceedingly unpopular to discuss religious matters with people who are in any way connected with science; they are shocked and one risks being condemned as utterly unscientific.
One can say anything one pleases about sexual matters and be considered surely scientific, but religion is discredited.
I remember a story in that connection, under the title "Things One Should Not Talk About."
The writer was dining with a Colonel.
It was a man's dinner, a very good dinner, and they had arrived at the cigars, at which point, he says, one can talk about anything under the sun, any obscenity, with the exception of one thing.
He said to his host, "Tell me, Colonel, what is your relation to God?" and shocked that man out of his wits.
There is a peculiar taboo on these matters, and in dealing with such a man as our dreamer, who is perfectly decent, intelligent, and well-educated, yet under the prejudice of our time, one must be exceedingly careful.
But here where we are concerned with an impartial discussion, we must go into it at length because it is no small matter to use that term which has received such an extraordinary valuation in the course of time.
If I called it the voice of a demon to a Greek audience of two or three thousand years ago, there would have been no trouble.
They would have immediately accepted it, because the concept of the individual daimon was perfectly familiar to them.
Socrates had his daimon.
Everybody has his synopados, the one who follows with and after, the shadow, understood as the individual daimon.
The very word I would have used-demon-would not have suggested anything mysterious and evil any more than divine
But divine did not have the connotation that we give to it.
It was the daimon, something tremendous, intensive, powerful, neither good nor bad necessarily; it simply did not enter the category of good and evil, it was a power.
At a more primitive level, the term mana would be used, with more the connotation of the animus or the anima-a soul.
Or the soul-serpent, who speaks to you, or has command of you, at times helpful and at times a nuisance perhaps.
That is the original conception of divine, the daimon, a power that may be superior, or may quite violently interfere with one.
Even the more properly divine Olympian gods were not removed to a place of sacred inaccessibility.
They were thought to be powerful and holy, but outside all our categories of good and evil.
They often behaved very scandalously, they had most obscene, even sodomitic love affairs, but that did not disturb people in the least.
That a God should take the form of a bull or a swan to carry out his love designs did not shock intelligent humanity in those days.
But when civilization had developed to a certain extent, and when the categories of good and evil had become more distinct, then people made a joke of the gods, who became ridiculous chiefly on account of their love affairs.
They behaved in a shameful way, which surely would have been offensive to mortals if they had indulged themselves in the same way.
That was one of the most powerful weapons of the Christian Apologists, which practically broke the necks of the old gods, and from that time on, the concept of a god developed chiefly on the side of a more sacred inaccessibility, until the absolute God was discovered, who was absolutely good, absolutely spiritual, all the evil sides being removed to a dark corner where devils dwelt.
So the term demon became a term for evil beings.
Not only the Greek gods were removed but the old gods of Genesis, and the Germanic gods, Wotan, Thor, and all the rest of them.
We use the names of the gods for dogs' names now.
So the concept of God became exceedingly one-sided, and that is the situation in which our dreamer finds himself.
Of course, as I said, he has not the dogmatic idea of God, he does not believe in the Church God, but that does not change the concept, only the validity of his belief.
The concept itself remains the same with nothing to take the place of that depreciation.
I would have had to go into a long dissertation about the history of that concept, and for practical purposes it was perfectly sufficient to say:
Here is a voice that asserts itself individually
I pointed out that he only believed in collective values, and that the voice stood for individual values.
That is all I told him, but the material which he gives in his associations shows clearly that the unconscious was attributing divine values to that voice, which means theoretically that the figure of the singer is in the place of his depreciated concept of God.
Here we see something exceedingly interesting happening under our eyes, namely how the historically depreciated concept of God is replaced by the ancient individual daimon.
We might call it a sort of regression to a time from two to six thousand years ago when the idea of an absolutely supreme god had not yet arisen, and where the divine element was only the voice within, the voice of the dream.
In this man, then, the religious process begins three or four thousand years ago, at that stage where the individual daimon, the soul-serpent, speaks to him and clearly says: This is your god.
It is pretty awkward and if I should rub it in too much, he would naturally be scared, because he would assume that such a god-that thing, that hermaphrodite-might tell him something shocking which would interfere with his collective values.
If I were to insist upon the importance and divinity of that voice it would simply scare him and he must not be scared, or he never will dare to stand up for himself-providing that he believed me.
But I am fairly sure that he would not believe me because we are utterly disinclined to believe that anything can happen in our psychology which would amount to a superior power.
We are all naturally disposed to believe that our psychology is "nothing but," that there is nothing in
This idea naturally starts from the fact that the contents of our consciousness are certain acquisitions, individual experiences, and among them there is nothing that would prove the existence of a superior power.
It is everyday life; strange things happen perhaps, big experiences, but one has some sort of an explanation for them, and if not criticized too carefully, one can say it is nothing but one's own subjective psychology.
One can say, with the lunatic whom I once treated, "Tonight I disinfected the whole heavens with corrosive sublimate3 and no god was discovered!"
You see that is our conscious standpoint, or perhaps one says: "Je nai pas besoin de cette -hypothese:''
So if I should say to such a man that the voice in his dream was divine and should be taken seriously, as the command of a superior power, he would not believe me and he would not trust it.
The main objection that people make is: "But what is the authority of the voice? Anybody can have fantastic dreams, but to what would it lead if everybody listened to that voice which they hear? If you think in terms of the eleven thousand virgins, all listening to their voices, the world would become a lunatic asylum, everything would become impossible in the next minute."
This is our prejudice.
Mind you, this man is the son of a clergyman, so he had the theological vein in him.
He may be quite liberal and enlightened, but there is the Protestant Christian.
Mrs. Henley: This man was interested in theosophy, so why should he be such a sceptic?
Dr. Jung: That is all very well when you read it in books, but when you are confronted with that voice it is a different matter; if it should say to our patient, "Now undress and give all you have to the poor, take your bank account and give it to the poor of Zurich," he would be scared out of his wits, and he assumes that the voice might say that.
Or the voice might say, "Go to your wife and tell her you are in love with that girl."
Sure enough he would rather die than do it. There is the trouble-when it becomes reality.
It is all very well when you read in books about the incarnations of the Buddha and the spiritual life, because that doesn't hurt the bank account, but when it gets in to the family, there is nobody there, a clear field, then to hell with the whole philosophy.
You see I have had many discussions with theologians and they all accuse me of psychologism, of relativizing God as a psychological factor, assuming that I represent God as nothing but a psychological factor in people which they can take out of their pockets and put in again whenever they like.
They all assume that psychology is a rational sort of game in which metaphysical facts are handled as merely psychological combinations.
They do not know that I look at psychology as a field of facts.
For instance, if it were a science of the stars, of their movement according to such and such laws, I would not assume that I could give different laws to the stars, that I hold them in my pocket, or that I could pull Saturn down and approach it to the sun.
That is what theologians do and therefore they assume that I do the same. Psychology to me is an empirical science.
I observe but I do not invent.
As astronomers painfully observe celestial bodies in their law-abiding movements-facts in the heavens-so I observe psychological movements, where one is dealing with autonomous factors of extraordinary power and where one simply studies the ways of those powers.
One cannot assume that one ought to change their course any more than the stars in the heavens.
The psyche is greater than myself; it is not in the hollow of my hand.
If I could observe the Olympian gods in their movements, I would not assume, because I discover some little detail of their behaviour, that I have them in my pocket, and no more do
I assume that I have any kind of power in relation to psychological facts.
You see in our human life, psychology is a supreme factor.
If it happens that a majority of human beings get a new idea in their heads, they can turn the whole world upside down.
Look at the Russian Revolution. Look at the outburst of Islam.
Who would have thought that such a thing could start in those Bedouin tribes of Arabia?
But it did-bringing people into the foreground who had never played any role in history before, and it spread over half of Europe, nearly as far as Switzerland.
Yet it was nothing but an idea, a psychological fact. Look at what Christianity has done to the world. And what brought about the Great War?
Surely not economic factors alone. It was an idea, and what power was in it! An extraordinary thing, lunacy without parallel.
Now those are psychological facts.
Sometimes you see it in the life of an individual, a perfectly good intelligent person; but one crazy idea gets hold of that person, one little inherited factor which obsesses the whole
machinery and destroys that life completely; and not only that life but the life of the whole family.
And then one complains of psychologism.
But the theologian is used to giving orders to God, he tells him how he should behave.
He has got him in writing, and he says: You are not God any longer if you do not behave as you did two thousand years ago
He has taken God's freedom away from him.
That point of view plays a considerable role in our patient too, so that he is in many ways disinclined to assume that such a voice could be divine.
Yet from our theoretical point of view it is indispensable that we see what the unconscious is doing, and here is a case where we have to admit that we are attributing divine values
to the voice within.
Now what does that mean? The divine voice, as I said, is simply a mana value-a powerful voice, a sort of superior fact which takes possession of one.
That is the way.
And where there is a demonstration of divine power, it does not come under the category of natural phenomena but it is a psychological fact.
When human life is inferior, when conscious intentions are disturbed, there one sees divine intercession, intercession through the unconscious, through powerful fact.
Naturally one has to dismiss moral categories altogether.
The idea that God is necessarily good and spiritual is simply a prejudice made by man.
We wish it were so, we wish that the good and spiritual might be supreme, but it is not.
To arrive again at a primordial religious phenomenon, man must return to a condition where that functioning is absolutely unprejudiced, where one cannot say that it is good or that it is evil, where one has to give up all bias as to the nature of religion; for as long as there is any kind of bias, there is no submission.
My Somali friend in Africa gave me very good teaching in that respect.
He belonged to a Mohammedan sect, and I asked him about Khidr, the god of that particular cult, about the ways in which he appears.
He said: "He may appear as an ordinary man, like myself or like that man there, but you know that he is Khidr, and then you must step right up to him, take both his hands and shake them, and say, 'Peace be with thee,' and he will say 'Peace be with thee,' and all your wishes will be granted. Or he may appear as a light, not the light of a candle or a fire, but as a pure white light, and then you know this is Khidr."
Then, bending down, he picked up a blade of grass and said: "Or he may appear like this."
There is no prejudice, there is supreme submission.
God can appear in any form he chooses.
But to say God can only appear as the spiritual one, as the supreme one, according to the rules of the Church, is man-made bias, inflation; to prescribe to that phenomenon what it ought to be, and not accept what it is, is not submission.
So I say that our dreamer would only be able to accept our interpretation on the basis of complete submission, leaving all his prejudices and accepting that whenever and wherever that voice speaks he has to submit.
Of course, that scares people out of their wits-the idea of a fact outside of them, or inside if you like, that could suddenly come up and say, "not what you want but what I want!"
In the Church they are very careful to judge the case first and see whether such a command is convenient, whether it is in accordance with the rules of good behaviour, or respectability, etc.
If it is all that, then you obey.
But if the voice says something that is against all your cherished prejudices, against your illusions, against your wishes, then it is a different consideration.
So you had better assume that there is no such voice! But that is not submission, and where is the superior guidance?
Our ambition is to be masters of our fate. And why should we not be able to make our lives according to our intention? Sure enough, it would be most desirable if we could arrange our lives to correspond to our desires and ambitions,
but it does not work. Now, why cannot people take their lives in their hands and arrange them according to their own ideas?
Mrs. Crowley: Because they cannot see clearly enough. They cannot get outside.
Dr. Jung: You would say because our consciousness is too restricted? Too blind? That is a perfectly good standpoint.
Mrs. Sigg: It could not be managed because there is always interference from others.
Dr. Jung: Naturally if there is too much interference one must consider means; one must act within one's limits.
We cannot assume that everybody would have divine omnipotence.
We would not accept and would not wish for that; we can act only according to our natural means.
As Mrs. Crowley points out, our consciousness is naturally limited, we are only conscious of a little section of the world.
Our sight only reaches to a certain distance, our memory is insufficient, our perceptions are insufficient, and many things happen which we are too blind to see-blind moles.
Think of all the sense perceptions we cannot catch which would be important for our orientation.
I remember a very good illustration of that: A man who was hunting tigers in India had climbed a tree in a place where game was plentiful, and sat there waiting quietly in the dark for his prey to come along.
Then he felt a light breath of air, a gentle evening breeze, and he suddenly got frightened and began to tremble.
He reasoned with himself that it was foolish, and the wind subsided and he lost his fear.
After a time the wind rose again, this time stronger, and he was again in terror.
There was no danger apparently, but he was sweating with fear and this time his panic was so great that, in spite of tigers, he just dropped down to the ground and started to run away.
No sooner was he down than the tree crashed to the ground.
He thought it was the hand of God, Providence, that saved him.
But as a matter of fact a man who lived in that country could easily have seen that the tree would fall; it was unmistakably hollowed out by termites.
If he had examined the base of the tree he would have seen it. His eyes had seen it probably, but the impression did not get through to consciousness.
Then his unconscious slowly began to work and told him that the tree was perforated by termites and that when the night wind arose there might be an accident.
There is always danger when termites are about; even in houses one must be careful. In camp one must look after the tent-poles every few days for fear of the little tunnels built by those extraordinary insects.
I know a case where a man had left some etchings hanging up in his house when he shut it up for a couple of months, and when he returned the etchings were gone.
The glasses were there stuck to the walls, cemented, so that they could not fall, but when he touched the frames he found that they were only pulp.
The termites had eaten them from within, everything was crumbling.
That is what a hunter should know and what he surely did know, and yet in his eagerness he overlooked that dangerous possibility.
Our insufficient consciousness makes us overlook the vital necessities of our nature, if they interfere with our personal momentary desires which the next day will be entirely unimportant.
And so we forget about the eternal things, the things that will be of the most importance in the long run.
On the other hand, it is exceedingly necessary to be able to concentrate, or we shall be inept dreamers.
There is the great dilemma.
To drive a car, one must be conscious.
An engine-driver cannot afford to dream, he must have tremendous concentration. In our daily life in our overcrowded civilization, we have to be conscious, and so we become blind moles on the other side.
Therefore those ideas of a wonderful and spiritual God become utterly insufficient because they give us no guidance.
It is almost a philosophical concept; it has no life of its own, it is man-made, and our actual psychology realizes that.
We need to find an orienting principle, a function besides our consciousness, which will give us warning as the hunter was warned; so that in case of deviation or danger we get some point of view which we would not have thought of consciously.
Obviously our dreamer is now at such a point; he is quite convinced that there is no way out and that he has only my authority to help him.
I told him that I could not solve his problem, but I knew that such things could be solved in a peculiar way; I said that I had seen such cases and that if we analysed his unconscious we might find a solution.
So he was willing to try. I said that because I was really convinced that after a while we would strike that factor outside our consciousness.
I was hoping for nothing less than divine intercession. I did not know what to do, I only hoped that something would begin to work in him when our human intelligence could not find a way.
That voice was really the beginning of a sort of autonomous function to him, bringing out a point of view which he really did not possess at all.
It was a tremendous manifestation of an unconscious function which formerly was called the individual daimon, or the individual guide, or an oracle, or an ancestral spirit.
Or on a very primitive level this voice was projected into objects, animals spoke to people, the soul serpent, or the totem animal, or a tree gave a command which had to be obeyed.
If that voice is listened to, one will have a chance of a more complete life, because one lives then almost as if one were two people, not one alone, and there will be a whole sphere of knowledge and experience in which all functions, all ideas, will enter besides our ordinary consciousness.
To go on with our discussion of the hermaphrodite, we are coming now to the consideration of the fact that he has a Jewish facial type.
The associations in connection with that are, as you know, chiefly the Jewish characters in Der Golem and also the fact that he thinks Meyrink himself must be a Jew.
So there is ample evidence that this divine figure has a Jewish character.
But when I use the word divine, you must never connect it with the ordinary use of that word, I mean it in the antique sense, a mana figure.
Have you -- --an-y-id@a-wh-y-that-figuFe-sheuld-be-Jewish?
Miss Howells: I think it takes on the quality of the inferior man.
It represents a shadow figure.
Dr. Jung: And why should that be Jewish?
Miss Howells: Because it represents a much older civilization, or perhaps it represents a race to which he has an antipathy. Before, it was a Greek.
Dr. Jung: But why should he not take the character of Greek or any other older civilization? Why just a Jew?
Mrs. Sigg: On account of his own religious teaching.
Dr. Jung: Perhaps you do not know that all Protestant Europeans have the Jew in their unconscious, just as the American has the Negro, and still farther down, the Red Indian.
We can explain that through the fact that the Jewish element in our population is a minority and that the minority represents the minor qualities of our character.
Then, moreover, we have not only the Jew in reality as a minority that lives with us, but we have the Jew within as well, in the fact that our religious teaching is derived from the original Jewish religion.
We have been brought up on the Old Testament and believed in the Old Testament, so we might expect to be consciously Jewish. Why is that only in the unconscious?
Mrs. Sigg: Because Christians are not clear, they have not thought it out that the Semitic element is so strong in our religious teaching.
Dr. Jung: Yes, but how would that Jewish element show in the Protestant?
Dr. Deady: In the Torah, the Law, rationalism?
Dr. Jung: Yes, one could say they were expressed by the standpoint of the law.
Dr. Deady: That is what our Puritans did with the Old Testament.
Dr. Jung: But it is not only a Puritan affair, it is a Catholic affair just as well. Where there is a trace of anti-Semitic antipathy, one can be sure that there is a Jew in the unconscious.
Dr. Deady: Is it true that the Jew has ever become Christianized?
Dr. Jung: In a way it is true, the Jew today is quite christianized, his psychology has taken on an absolutely Christian quality.
He has not remained behind the times, he has developed as much as we the European Jews are quite different from the North African Jews whom I have seen and studied. I analysed a Jew from Baghdad, for instance. Now this peculiar fact that the modern European contains a Jew in the unconscious is much emphasized under certain conscious conditions. Do you know what those conditions would be?
Mrs. Sigg: In Germany, when they put too much libido into their business projects, they project all that into the Jew.
Dr. Jung: That is quite right. You find this unconscious figure of the Jew chiefly with those Protestants and Catholics where the real god is the yellow god. But you find it also in perfectly idealistic, nice people whom one could not reproach as being particularly money-lovers. Who are they?
Dr. Baynes: People in love with law.
Dr. Jung: Yes, just those people whose standpoint is the law, because the law is not given by God, it is made by man.
That standpoint was essentially overcome by early Christianity.
In the Epistles of Paul, one is impressed again and again by the fact that the law does not come from without, they were redeemed from that law, reborn; there was a revolution against that law.
But now, see what our people have done, Catholicism is built up exclusively upon the authority of the law, and Protestantism also.
Dr. Deady: More Jewish than the Jews!
Dr. Jung: Yes, they called their children by Jewish names.
My maternal grandfather, for instance, who was a great Puritan, gave Jewish names to his children. His conviction was that they spoke Hebrew in heaven, so he became a professor of Hebrew in order to be able to read the newspaper there.
Dr. Deady: The Puritans in New England gave such severe punishments.
They had no milk of human kindness.
Dr. Jung: That is the reason why they have a Jew in the unconscious.
Because they believe in the Law, believe in authority, they quietly slip back to the standpoint of the Old Testament, only they call it something else.
They call it the Church-Protestant or Catholic. But the real God is respectability and law and there is no freedom at all. Naturally our dreamer is of that kind.
To express myself in the words of St. Paul, "He is the child of the unfree one of the lower city and not of the city above."
He is still in the Old Testament condition. Yet now we see that that voice in him which really disturbs the hymn, which sings a different tune, is of the Semitic type. Here is apparently a complete contradiction.
One would assume that, being Jewish, he would believe in the law, yet here is an individual of that type who upsets the community by singing a different tune.
Mrs. Crowley: I think it is not so strange when you remember the prophets. They were also against the law.
Dr. Jung: Yes, in that prophetic element the other side of the Semitic comes out.
You see, when a Christian speaks of the Jew he sees one side only.
He sees the ten tribes that were really criticized by God, and not the two that were holy, who contained the prophetic element. (That is a Jewish saying, not my invention.)
The dreamer's point of view is that the voice is a discreditable one and should not be, he has the racial resentment against it, it looks to him as if the Jewish element should be depreciated.
While as a matter of fact it may have a different meaning, that may be a prophetic voice, and then it would mean: "You will sing a different song!-you will upset that community singing!"
For the time being it is only delegated to his shadow, but it is prophetic and means: that is what you will come to!
Now there is still a detail that we have to deal with.
In the latter part of the dream he encounters the singer again and hears him remark that he just wanted to show for once that he could sing.
He remarks this to a new man who joined him, the son of the singer and a friend of the dreamer, who steps in and reproaches his father for disturbing the community.
Now what about that? The son, a friend of the dreamer's, blames his father, the singer.
Mrs. Sigg: It seems to me that in Germany the old Jewish God is taught in the churches and so the children do not sing, "O du frohliche." For children the psychology is not clear. It kills every belief of a good God.
Dr. Jung: They are impressed with the fact that they are sinful from the beginning.
But tell me, why does that son reproach his father? Who is that friend of the dreamer?
Dr. Schlegel: If the singer is God, the son would be Christ.
Dr. Jung: Yes, and he would be the friend of the dreamer, and would reproach his father when he sang the wrong tune.
Is that clear? The question is: is Christ the son of the God of law or the son of the God of the prophets?
Dr. Deady: The son of the God of the prophets.
Dr. Jung: Of course. The real Christ is the God of freedom.
But how do you explain his reproaching his father for upsetting the community singing?
Dr. Schlegel: He is the mediator between the conscious and unconscious points of view. It is too difficult for the dreamer to accept this new melody for the moment.
Dr. Jung: You think that Christ says to his father: "Hush! don't sing such things! Too upsetting!"
Or one could make another kind of raisonnement, that Christ, as he is preached in churches and ordinarily understood, would surely be the son of the God of the law and not the son of the God of freedom.
Listen to what the Catholic Church has to say about Christ, and what you hear every Sunday in a Protestant church!
So here is the son who is against the father, and there is the element that he appears as a friend of the dreamer, the friend of man.
But in writing the dream-text, our patient puts in brackets, " Yet I do not know that man in reality at all."
Something put in brackets in the report of a dream is like a violent protest-a sort of exclamation shouted from the gallery.
The dreamer exclaims against the idea that this man should be his friend, he says he is a perfect stranger.
So we must doubt the quality of that man.
We are probably safe in assuming that there is something doubtful and ambivalent about that figure, and that is true of the figure of Christ, because we have two entirely different
conceptions of him.
There is the Church conception of Christ, and then another which has more to do with the truth, namely, Christ as the illegitimate son of a woman named Miriam, by an Egyptian
soldier, Pandira. Therefore Jesus was called "J esu hen Pandira. "
That is only one legend, but they all coincide in the idea that he was an illegitimate son and as such was a sort of outcast and naturally had a tremendous feeling of inferiority.
"What good can come out of Galilee?"
He was in the wrong corner anyway, and that would produce an enormous amount of ambition, particularly in an intelligent boy.
His first fight with the Devil was with his own power-devil, his worldly ambition, and he had the greatness to renounce it.
Thus he achieved spiritual greatness.
So he went to one of the schools of the Therapeutae, a religious sect who left the world to live a contemplative life in schools or monasteries.
They were teachers and healers, and they had a rather wide-spread spiritual and philosophical influence, and were also well-known for their dream interpretation.
There is an instance of that in the history of the Jews by Josephus
A prefect of Palestine called in one of those men to interpret a dream.
They were rather like analysts.
One of them was John the Baptist, and Christ went to his school and he was initiated by him, as we know from his baptism in the Jordan. Then somehow he disagreed with him.
Now, happily enough, the writings of John have been discovered; it was always known that they existed, but it is only recently that they have been translated.
In the book of Johanna we find the whole discussion between Johanna and Jesu hen Miriam, the deceiver.
That is the title under which he is introduced, because he betrayed the mysteries according to their point of view.
John reproaches him for having handed out the great mysteries of life to the people, and Jesus defends himself, saying that he is right in doing so.
Curiously there are two opposing standpoints, neither one yielded, and the scales remain in complete balance-John is right and Jesus is right. One says: do not spread it abroad, the people will spoil it.
The other says: I give it for the sake of the people, for love.
So Jesus became a great reformer and a great healer, and then he got into trouble with the official Church, which in that time, of course, meant political trouble, so they had to do away with him.
Like Socrates. The ordinary human life, one could say, and if you look at it that way, you see that he was a man of great freedom of mind, who was working for the betterment of humanity.
He was a man who wanted an increase of consciousness, a better understanding amongst human beings, more love and more knowledge of the heart.
And see what the Church has done with it! If Jesus should come back today and have an audience with the Pope at the Vatican, they would say: "It is awfully nice, anything new, but it is really awkward!-With the best of will, we couldn't change it."
Dr. Deady: Change it! They would give him three months in prison!
Dr. Jung: Well, there are these two evaluations.
There must be order, there must be tradition, there must be law, because man is really evil.
Probably the majority of people here in this room would not need the police.
I consider myself above stealing my neighbour's apples and I would not burn down his house, therefore I need no police.
But the police are necessary because at least half of mankind is really rotten, and they need the Church because they would make bad use of their freedom.
The majority of people must live in prison, otherwise they can't live at all, and that is the reason for laws and organizations.
So one could say that the bringer of freedom, Jesus, was really calling for the law, and John, who preserved the light from falling into the blackness of the masses, would abuse it.
For if one doesn't let the light into the darkness, what is the use of the light?
The followers of John are reduced to about three thousand people, and I doubt if even the priests understand their holy writings now.
They are mostly silversmiths and they only eat drowned meat; it must not be slaughtered, they must drown whatever they eat, their chickens, goats, or sheep, and they eat with averted faces.
That is all that they got out of it.
And when you read the original text you are amazed at its extraordinary beauty.
But if you look at what they have done with Christianity, it is equally ridiculous.
So, you see, we have two different conceptions, an ambivalent figure.
On the one side the traditional Saviour, and on the other a man who meant something quite different from what the Church means today.
One realizes that in reading Paul, who expresses himself clearly enough; one can see that his conception of the spirit was absolutely different from the spirit of our Protestantism.
So we can understand that the figure of the friend who silences his own father is a very ambiguous one.
On the one hand it could mean that it is very nice of him to reproach his father for having upset the community song-it really should be hushed up, that different voice, because it is damned awkward.
On the other hand it is almost treachery to try to deprive the dreamer of the primordial religious phenomena and the real solution of the problem.
So here again is that same terrible dilemma. Shall it be the law?
Or shall it be freedom? It must obviously be both.
There must be law and police because human beings are devils, and there must be freedom because there are decent human beings also.
Therefore there will eternally be doubt. Shall it be given out, or shall it be concealed? Christ said, you should not put your light under a bushel.
But if you let it shine what will happen?
Mr. Holdsworth: It will be put out!
Dr. Jung: Yes, or perverted-made into power. So the dream touches on a very delicate problem.
Of course this is not very convincing and I did not mention a word of all this to my dreamer, but when it comes to a theoretical discussion we must bring in all that material.
I know his subsequent development.
He would not have had the necessary knowledge at first, for many of the things I mentioned just now are relatively unknown.
You see, the best things are always kept back.
For instance, theologians would not speak of those sayings of John, though they are more authentic than the Gospels and of a time previous to the Gospels.
To mention one example, there is the Gospel text: "When two or three are gathered together in my name"13 etc., but the rendering in the original text is: "When there are two together they are not without God, but when there is one alone I am with him."
There, you see what the Church has done. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Pages 507-523
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