Carl Jung on the "Holy Ghost"

THE HOLY GHOST


234 The psychological relationship between man and the trinitarian life process is illustrated first by the human nature of Christ, and second by the descent of the Holy Ghost and his indwelling in man, as predicted and promised by the Christian message. The life of Christ is on the one hand only a short, historical interlude for proclaiming the message, but on the other hand it is an exemplary demonstration of the psychic experiences connected with God’s manifestation of himself (or the realization of the self). The important thing for man is not the dewvbjjLevov and the bp^vov (what is “shown” and “done”), but what happens afterwards: the seizure of the individual by the Holy Ghost.

235 Here, however, we run into a great difficulty. For if we follow up the theory of the Holy Ghost and carry it a step further (which the Church has not done, for obvious reasons), we come inevitably to the conclusion that if the Father appears in the Son and breathes together with the Son, and the Son leaves the Holy Ghost behind for man, then the Holy Ghost breathes in man, too, and thus is the breath common to man, the Son, and the Father. Man is therefore included in God’s sonship, and the words of Christ “Ye are gods” (John 10:34) appear in a significant light. The doctrine that the Paraclete was expressly left behind for man raises an enormous problem. The triadic formula
of Plato would surely be the last word in the matter of logic, but psychologically it is not so at all, because the psychological factor keeps on intruding in the most disturbing way.

Why, in the name of all that’s wonderful, wasn’t it “Father, Mother, and Son?” That would be much more “reasonable”
and “natural” than “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” To this we must answer: it is not just a question of a natural situation, but of a product of human reflection 9 added on to the natural sequence of father and son. Through reflection, “life” and its “soul” are abstracted from Nature and endowed with a separate existence. Father and son are united in the same soul, or, according to the ancient Egyptian view, in the same procreative force,”Reflection” should be understood not simply as an act of thought, but rather as an attitude. [Cf, Psychological Types, Def. 8. EDITORS.] It is a privilege born of human freedom in contradistinction to the compulsion of natural law. As the word itself testifies (“reflection” means literally “bending back”), reflection is a spiritual act that runs counter to the natural process; an act whereby we stop, call something to mind, form a picture, and take up a relation to and come to terms with what we have seen. It should, therefore, be understood as an act of becoming conscious.

Ka-mutef. Ka-mutef is exactly the same hypostatization of an attribute as the breath or “spiration” of the Godhead.10
This psychological fact spoils the abstract perfection of the triadic formula and makes it a logically incomprehensible construction, since, in some mysterious and unexpected way, an important mental process peculiar to man has been imported into it. If the Holy Ghost is, at one and the same time, the breath of life and a loving spirit and the Third Person in whom the whole trinitarian process culminates, then he is essentially a product of reflection, an hypostatized noumenon tacked on to the natural family-picture of father and son. It is significant that early Christian Gnosticism tried to get round this difficulty by interpreting the Holy Ghost as the Mother.11 But that would merely have kept him within the archaic family-picture, within the tritheism and polytheism of the patriarchal world.

It is, after all, perfectly natural that the father should have a family and that the son should embody the father. This train of thought is quite consistent with the father-world. On the other hand, the mother-interpretation would reduce the specific meaning of the Holy Ghost to a primitive image and destroy the most essential of the qualities attributed to him: not only is he the life common to Father and Son, he is also the Paraclete whom the Son left behind him, to procreate in man and bring forth works of divine parentage. It is of paramount importance that the idea of the Holy Ghost is not a natural image, but a recognition of the living quality of Father and Son, abstractly conceived as the “third” term between the One and the Other. Out of the tension of duality life always produces a “third” that seems somehow incommensurable or paradoxical. Hence, as the “third,” the Holy Ghost is bound to be incommensurable and paradoxical too. Unlike Father and Son, he has no name and no character. He is a function, but that function is the Third Person of the Godhead.


The Holy Spirit depicted as a dove descending on the Holy Family, with God the Father and angels shown atop, by Murillo, c. 1677.

237 He is psychologically heterogeneous in that he cannot be logically derived from the father-son relationship and can only be understood as an idea introduced by a process of human reflection. The Holy Ghost is an exceedingly “abstract” conception, since a “breath” shared by two figures characterized as distinct and not mutually interchangeable can hardly be conceived at all. Hence one feels it to be an artificial construction of the mind, even though, as the Egyptian Ka-mutef concept shows, it seems somehow to belong to the very essence of the Trinity.
Despite the fact that we cannot help seeing in the positing of such a concept a product of human reflection, this reflection need not necessarily have been a conscious act.

It could equally well owe its existence to a “revelation,” i.e., to an unconscious reflection, and hence to an autonomous functioning of the unconscious, or rather of the self, whose symbols, as we have already said, cannot be distinguished from God-images. A religious interpretation will therefore insist that this hypostasis was a divine revelation. While it cannot raise any objections to such a notion, psychology must hold fast to the conceptual nature of the hypostasis, for in the last analysis the Trinity, too, is an anthropomorphic configuration, gradually taking shape through strenuous mental and spiritual effort, even though already preformed by the timeless archetype.

238 This separating, recognizing, and assigning of qualities is a mental activity which, although unconscious at first, gradually filters through to consciousness as the work proceeds. What started off by merely happening to consciousness later becomes integrated in it as its own activity. So long as a mental or indeed any psychic process at all is unconscious, it is subject to the law governing archetypal dispositions, which are organized and arranged round the self. And since the self cannot be distinguished from an archetypal God-image, it would be equally true to say of any such arrangement that it conforms to natural law and that it is an act of God’s will. (Every metaphysical statement is, ipso facto, unprovable). Inasmuch, then, as acts of cognition and judgment are essential qualities of consciousness, any accumulation of unconscious acts of this sort 13 will have the 12 For this seeming contradictio in adjecto see “On the Nature of the Psyche” 0954/55 edn., p. 383).

The effect of strengthening and widening consciousness, as one can see for oneself in any thorough analysis of the unconscious. Consequently, man’s achievement of consciousness appears as the result of prefigurative archetypal processes or to put it metaphysically as part of the divine life-process. In other words, God becomes manifest in the human act of reflection. The nature of this conception (i.e., the hypostatizing of a quality) meets the need evinced by primitive thought to form a more or less abstract idea by endowing each individual quality with a concrete existence of its own. Just as the Holy Ghost is a legacy left to man, so, conversely, the concept of the Holy Ghost is something begotten by man and bears the stamp of its human progenitor. And just as Christ took on man’s bodily nature, so through the Holy Ghost man as a spiritual force is surreptitiously included in the mystery of the Trinity, thereby raising it far above the naturalistic level of the triad and thus beyond the Platonic triunity. The Trinity, therefore, discloses itself as a symbol that comprehends the essence of the divine and the human. It is, as Koepgen says, “a revelation not only of God but at the same time of man.”

240 The Gnostic interpretation of the Holy Ghost as the Mother contains a core of truth in that Mary was the instrument of God’s birth and so became involved in the trinitarian drama as a human being. The Mother of God can, therefore, be regarded as a symbol of mankind’s essential participation in the Trinity. The psychological justification for this assumption lies in the fact that thinking, which originally had its source in the self-revelations of the unconscious, was felt to be the manifestation of a power external to consciousness. The primitive does not think; the thoughts come to him. We ourselves still feel certain particularly enlightening ideas as “in-fluences,” “in-spirations,” etc. Where judgments and flashes of insight are transmitted by unconscious activity, they are often attributed to an archetypal feminine figure, the anima or mother-beloved. It then seems as if the inspiration came from the mother or from the beloved, the “femme inspiratrice.” In view of this, the Holy Ghost
would have a tendency to exchange his neuter designation for a feminine one. (It may be noted that the Hebrew
word for spirit ruach is predominantly feminine.) Holy Ghost and Logos merge in the Gnostic idea of Sophia, and again in the Sapientia of the medieval natural philosophers, who said of her:

“In gremio matris sedet sapientia patris” (the wisdom of the father lies in the lap of the mother). These psychological relationships do something to explain why the Holy Ghost was interpreted as the mother, but they add nothing to our understanding of the Holy Ghost as such, because it is impossible to see how the mother could come third when her natural place would be second.

241 Since the Holy Ghost is an hypostasis of “life,” posited by an act of reflection, he appears, on account of his peculiar nature, as a separate and incommensurable “third whose very peculiarities testify that it is neither a compromise nor a mere triadic appendage, but rather the logically unexpected resolution of tension between Father and Son. The fact that it is precisely a process of human reflection that irrationally creates the uniting “third” is itself connected with the nature of the drama of redemption, whereby God descends into the human realm and man mounts up to the realm of divinity.


242 Thinking in the magic circle of the Trinity, or trinitarian thinking, is in truth motivated by the “Holy Spirit” in so far as it is never a question of mere cogitation but of giving expression to imponderable psychic events. The driving forces that work themselves out in this thinking are not conscious motives; they come from an historical occurrence rooted, in its turn, in those obscure psychic assumptions for which one could hardly find a better or more succinct formula than the “change from father to son,” from unity to duality, from non-reflection to criticism. To
the extent that personal motives are lacking in trinitarian thinking, and the forces motivating it derive from impersonal and collective psychic conditions, it expresses a need of the unconscious psyche far surpassing all personal needs.

This need, aided by human thought, produced the symbol of the Trinity, which was destined to serve as a saving formula of wholeness in an epoch of change and psychic transformation.
Manifestations of a psychic activity not caused or consciously willed by man himself have always been felt to be daemonic, divine, or “holy,” in the sense that they heal and make whole. His ideas of God behave as do all images arising out of the unconscious: they compensate or complete the general mood or attitude of the momment, and it is only through the integration of these unconscious images that a man becomes a psychic whole. The “merely conscious” man who is all ego is a mere fragment, in so far as he seems to exist apart from the unconscious. But the more the unconscious is split off, the more formidable the shape in which it appears to the conscious mind if not in divine form, then in the more unfavourable form of obsessions and outbursts of affect. 15 Gods are personifications of unconscious contents, for they reveal themselves to us through the unconscious activity of the psyche.

Trinitarian thinking had something of the same quality, and its passionate profundity rouses in us latecomers a naive astonishment. We no longer know, or have not yet discovered,what depths in the soul were stirred by that great turning
point in human history. The Holy Ghost seems to have faded away without having found the answer to the question he set humanity. ~Carl Jung,Psychology and Religion, Pages 157-163.

Carl Jung: Christ as an Archetype of the Self

The oldest known icon of Christ Pantocrator – Saint Catherine’s Monastery. The two different facial expressions on either side emphasize Christ’s dual nature as both divine and human.

226 The Trinity and its inner life process appear as a closed circle, a self-contained divine drama in which man plays, most, a passive part. It seizes on him and, for a period of several centuries, forced him to occupy his mind passionately with all sorts of queer problems which today seem incredibly abstruse, if not downright absurd.

It is, in the first place, difficult to see what the Trinity could possibly mean for us, either practically, morally, or symbolically. Even theologians often feel that speculation on this subject is a more or less otiose juggling with ideas, and there are not a few who could get along quite comfortably without the divinity of Christ, and for whom the role of the Holy Ghost, both inside and outside the Trinity, is an embarrassment of the first order. Writing of the Athanasian Creed,

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

to the Symbolum Quicuinque has abjured the laws of human thought.” Naturally, the only person who can talk like that is one who is no longer impressed by the revelation of holiness and has fallen back on his own mental activity. This, so far as the revealed archetype is concerned, is an inevitably retrograde step: the liberalistic humanization of Christ goes back to the rival doctrine of homoiousia and to Arianism, while modern anti-trinitarianism has a conception of God that is more Old Testament or Islamic in character than Christian.

227 Obviously, anyone who approaches this problem with rationalistic and intellectualistic assumptions, like D. F. Strauss, is bound to find the patristic discussions and arguments completely nonsensical. But that anyone, and especially a theologian, should fall back on such manifestly incommensurable criteria as reason, logic, and the like, shows that, despite all the mental exertions of the Councils and of scholastic theology, they failed to bequeath to posterity an intellectual understanding of the dogma that would lend the slightest support to belief in it.

There remained only submission to faith and renunciation of one’s own desire to understand. Faith, as we know from experience, often comes off second best and has to give in to criticism which may not be at all qualified to deal with the object of faith. Criticism of this kind always puts on an air of great enlightenment that is to say, it spreads round itself that thick darkness which the Word once tried to penetrate with its light: “And the light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.”

228 Naturally, it never occurs to these critics that their way of approach is incommensurable with their object. They think they have to do with rational facts, whereas it entirely escapes them that it is and always has been primarily a question of irrational psychic phenomena. That this is so can be seen plainly enough from the unhistorical character of the gospels, whose only concern was to represent the miraculous figure of Christ as graphically and impressively as possible. Further evidence of this is supplied by the earliest literary witness, Paul, who was closer to the events in question than the apostles. It is frankly disappointing to see how Paul hardly ever allows the real Jesus
of Nazareth to get a word in. Even at this early date (and not only in John) he is completely overlaid, or rather smothered, by metaphysical conceptions: he is the ruler over all daemonic forces, the cosmic saviour, the mediating God-man.

The whole pre-Christian and Gnostic theology of the Near East (some of whose roots go still further back) wraps itself about him and turns him before our eyes into a dogmatic figure who has no more need of historicity. At a very early stage, therefore, the real Christ vanished behind the emotions and projections that swarmed about him from far and near; immediately and almost without trace he was absorbed into the surrounding religious systems and moulded into their archetypal exponent.

He became the collective figure whom the unconscious of his contemporaries expected to appear, and for this reason it is pointless to ask who he “really” was. Were he human and nothing else, and in this sense historically true, he would probably be no more enlightening a figure than, say, Pythagoras, or Socrates, or Apollonius of Tyana.

He opened men’s eyes to revelation precisely because he was, from everlasting, God, and therefore unhistorical; and he functioned as such only by virtue of the consensus of unconscious expectation. If nobody had remarked that there was something special about the wonder-working Rabbi from Galilee, the darkness would never have noticed that a light was shining. Whether he lit the light with his own strength, or whether he was the victim of the universal longing for light and broke down under it, are questions which, for lack of reliable information, only faith can decide. At any rate the documentary reports relating to the general projection and assimilation of the Christ-figure are unequivocal.

There is plenty of evidence for the co-operation of the collective unconscious in view of the abundance of parallels from the history of religion. In these circumstances we must ask ourselves what it was in man that was stirred by the Christian message, and what was the answer he gave.

229 If we are to answer this psychological question, we must first of all examine the Christ-symbolism contained in the New Testament, together with the patristic allegories and medieval iconography, and compare this material with the archetypal content of the unconscious psyche in order to find out what archetypes have been constellated. The most important of the symbolical statements about Christ are those which reveal the attributes of the hero’s life: improbable origin, divine father, hazardous birth, rescue in the nick of time, precocious development, conquest of the mother and of death, miraculous deeds, a tragic, early end, symbolically significant manner of death, postmortem effects (reappearances, signs and marvels, etc.).

As the Logos, Son of the Father, Rex gloriae, Judex mundi, Redeemer, and Saviour, Christ is himself God, an all-embracing totality, which, like the definition of Godhead, is expressed iconographically by the circle or mandala.6 Here I would mention only the traditional representation of the Rex gloriae in a mandala, accompanied by a quaternity composed of the four symbols of the evangelists (including the four seasons, four winds, four rivers, and so on). Another symbolism of the same kind is the choir of saints, angels, and elders grouped round Christ (or God) in the centre. Here Christ symbolizes the integration of the kings and prophets of the Old Testament.

As a shepherd he is the leader and centre of the flock. He is the vine, and those that hang on him are the branches. His body is bread to be eaten,and his blood wine to be drunk; he is also the mystical body formed by the congregation. In his human manifestation he is the hero and God-man, born without sin, more complete and more perfect than the natural man, who is to him what a child is to an adult, or an animal (sheep) to a human being.

These mythological statements, coming from within the Christian sphere as well as from outside it, adumbrate an archetype that expresses itself in essentially the same symbolism and also occurs in individual dreams or in fantasy-like projections upon living people (transference phenomena, hero-worship, etc.). The content of all such symbolic products is the idea of an overpowering, all-embracing, complete or perfect being, represented either by a man of heroic proportions, or by an animal with magical attributes, or by a magical vessel or some other geometrically, by a mandala. This archetypal idea is a reflection of the individual’s wholeness, i.e., of the self, which is present
in him as an unconscious image. The conscious mind can form absolutely no conception of this totality, because it includes not only the conscious but also the unconscious psyche, which is, as such, inconceivable and irrepresentable.

231 It was this archetype of the self in the soul of every man that responded to the Christian message, with the result that the concrete Rabbi Jesus was rapidly assimilated by the constellated archetype. In this way Christ realized the idea of the self. But as one can never distinguish empirically between a symbol of the self and a God-image, the two ideas, however much we try to differentiate them, always appear blended together, so that the self appears synonymous with the inner Christ of the Johannine and Pauline writings, and Christ with God (“of one
substance with the Father”), just as the atman appears as the individualized self and at the same time as the animating principle of the cosmos, and Tao as a condition of mind and at the same time as the correct behaviour of cosmic events. Psychologically speaking, the domain of “gods” begins where consciousness leaves off, for at that point man is already at the mercy of the natural order, whether he thrive or perish. To the symbols of wholeness that come to him from there he attaches names which vary according to time and place.

232 The self is defined psychologically as the psychic totality of the individual. Anything that a man postulates as being a greater totality than himself can become a symbol of the self. For this reason the symbol of the self is not always as total as the definition would require. Even the Christ-figure is not a totality, for it lacks the nocturnal side of the psyche’s nature, the darkness of the spirit, and is also without sin. Without the integration of evil there is no totality, nor can evil be “added to the mixture by force.” One could compare Christ as a symbol to the mean of the first mixture: he would then be the middle term of a triad, in which the One and Indivisible is
represented by the Father, and the Divisible by the Holy Ghost, who, as we know, can divide himself into tongues of fire. But this triad, according to the Timaeus, is not yet a reality. Consequently a second mixture is needed.
233 The goal of psychological, as of biological, development is self-realization, or individuation. But since man knows himself only as an ego, and the self, as a totality, is indescribable and indistinguishable from a God-image, self-realization to put it in religious or metaphysical terms amounts to God’s incarnation. That is already expressed in the fact that Christ is the son of God. And because individuation is an heroic and often tragic task, the most difficult of all, it involves suffering, a passion of the ego: the ordinary, empirical man we once were is burdened
with the fate of losing himself in a greater dimension and being robbed of his fancied freedom of will. He suffers, so to speak, from the violence done to him by the self. The analogous passion of Christ signifies God’s suffering on account of the injustice of the world and the darkness of man. The human and the divine suffering set up a relationship of complementarity with compensating effects. Through the Christ-symbol, man can get to know the real meaning of his suffering: he is on the way towards realizing his wholeness. As a result of the integration of
conscious and unconscious, his ego enters the “divine” realm, where it participates in “God’s suffering.” The cause of the suffering is in both cases the same, namely “incarnation,” which on the human level appears as “individuation.” The divine hero born of man is already threatened with murder; he has nowhere to lay his head, and his death is a gruesome tragedy. The self is no mere concept or logical postulate; it is a psychic reality, only part of it conscious, while for the rest it embraces the life of the unconscious and is therefore inconceivable except in the
form of symbols. The drama of the archetypal life of Christ describes in symbolic images the events in the conscious life as well as in the life that transcends consciousness of a man who has been transformed by his higher destiny. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Religion

Carl Jung on Father, Son and Spirit

FATHER, SON, AND SPIRIT I have dwelt at some length on the views of the Babylonians and Egyptians, and on Platonist philosophy, in order to give the reader some conception of the trinitarian and Unitarian ideas that were in existence many centuries before the birth of Christianity.

Whether these ideas were handed down to posterity as a result of migration and tradition or whether they arose spontaneously in each case is a question of little importance.

The important thing is that they occurred because, once having sprung forth from the unconscious of the human race (and not just in Asia Minor!), they could rearise anywhere at any time.

It is, for instance, more than doubtful whether the Church Fathers who devised the homoousios formula were even remotely acquainted with the ancient Egyptian theology of kingship. Nevertheless, they neither paused in their labours nor rested until they had finally reconstructed the ancient Egyptian archetype.

Much the same sort of thing happened when, in A.D. 431, at the Council of Ephesus, whose streets had once rung with hymns of praise to many-breasted Diana, the Virgin Mary was declared the ‘birth-giver of the god who worshipped Mary after the manner of an antique goddess.

Her cult had its chief centres in Arabia, Thrace, and Upper Scythia, the most enthusiastic devotees being women. Their provocations moved Epiphanius to the rebuke that “the whole female sex is slippery and prone to error, with a mind that is very petty and narrow.”

It is clear from this chastening sermon that there were priestesses who on certain feast days decorated a wagon or four-cornered seat and covered it with linen, on which they placed offerings of bake-meats “in the name of Mary”, afterwards partaking of the sacrificial meal.

This plainly amounted to a Eucharistic feast in honor of Mary, at which wheaten bread as eaten.

The orthodox standpoint of the time is aptly expressed in the words of Epiphanius: “Let Mary be held in honor, and let the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost be adored, but let no one adore Mary.”

Thus the archetype reasserted itself, since, as I have tried to show, archetypal ideas are part of the indestructible foundations of the human mind. However long they are forgotten and buried, always they return, sometimes in the strangest guise, with a personal twist to them or intellectually distorted, as in the case of the Arian heresy, but continually reproducing themselves in new forms representing the timeless truths that are innate in man’s nature.

Even though Plato’s influence on the thinkers of the next few centuries can hardly be overestimated, his philosophically formulated triad cannot be held responsible for the origins of the Christian dogma of the Trinity. For we are concerned here not with any philosophical, that is conscious, assumptions but with unconscious, archetypal forms.

The Platonic formula for the triad contradicts the Christian Trinity in one essential point: the triad is built on opposition, whereas the Trinity contains no opposition of any kind, but is, on the contrary, a complete harmony in itself. The three Persons are characterized in such a manner that they cannot possibly be derived from Platonic premises, while the terms Father, Son, and Holy Ghost do not proceed in any sense from the number three. At most, the Platonic formula supplies the intellectual scaffolding for contents that come from quite other sources.

The Trinity may be conceived platonically as to its form, but for its content we have to rely on psychic factors, on irrational data that cannot be logically determined beforehand.

In other words, we have to distinguish between the logical idea of the Trinity and its psychological reality. The latter brings us back to the very much more ancient Egyptian ideas and hence to the archetype, which provides the authentic and eternal justification for the existence of any Trinitarian idea at all.

The psychological datum consists of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

If we posit “Father” then “Son” logically follows; but “Holy Ghost” does not follow logically from either “Father” or “Son.”

So we must be dealing here with a special factor that rests on a different presupposition. According to the old doctrine, the Holy Ghost is (a real person who is sent by the Son and the Father).

The (procession from the Father and the Son) is a “spiration” and not a “begetting,” This somewhat peculiar idea corresponds to the separation, which still existed in the Middle Ages, of “corpus” and “spiramen,” the latter being understood as something more than mere “breath.”

What it really denoted was the anima, which, as its name shows, is a breath-being (anemos = wind). Although an activity of the body, it was thought of as an independent substance (or hypostasis) existing alongside the body.

The underlying idea is that the body “lives,” and that “life” is something superadded and autonomous, conceived as a soul unattached to the body. Applying this idea to the Trinity formula, we would have to say: Father, Son, and Life the life proceeding from both or lived by both.

The Holy Ghost as “life” is a concept that cannot be derived logically from the identity of Father and Son, but is, rather, a psychological idea, a datum based on an irrational, primordial image.

This primordial image is the archetype, and we find it expressed most clearly in the Egyptian theology of kingship.

There, as we have seen, the archetype takes the form of God the father, Ka-mutef (the begetter), and the son. The ka is the life spirit, the animating principle of men and gods, and therefore can be legitimately interpreted as the soul or spiritual double.

He is the “life” of the dead man, and thus corresponds on the one hand to the living man’s soul, and on the other to his “spirit” or “genius.” We have seen that Ka-mutef is a hypostatization of procreative power.

In the same way, the Holy Ghost is hypostatized procreative power and life-force.6 Hence, in the Christian Trinity, we are confronted with a distinctly archaic idea, whose extraordinary value lies precisely in the fact that it is a supreme, hypostatic representation of an abstract thought (two-dimensional triad).

The form is still concretistic, in that the archetype is represented by the relationship “Father” and “Son.” Were it nothing but that, it would only be a dyad. The third element, however, the connecting link between “Father” and “Son,” is spirit and not a human figure.

The masculine father-son relationship is thus lifted out of the natural order (which includes mothers and daughters) and translated to a sphere from which the feminine element is excluded: in ancient Egypt as in Christianity the Theotokos stands outside the Trinity.

One has only to think of Jesus’s brusque rejection of his mother at the marriage in Cana: “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” (John 2:4), and also earlier, when she sought the twelve-year-old child in the temple: “How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” (Luke 2 149).

We shall probably not be wrong in assuming that this special sphere to which the father-son relationship is removed is the sphere of primitive mysteries and masculine initiations. Among certain tribes, women are forbidden to look at the mysteries on pain of death.

Through the initiations the young men are systematically alienated from their mothers and are reborn as spirits. The celibacy of the priesthood is a continuation of this archetypal idea.

The intellectual operation that lies concealed in the higher father-son relationship consists in the extrapolation of an invisible figure, a “spirit” that is the very essence of masculine life.

The life of the body or of a man is posited as something different from the man himself.

This led to the idea of a ka or immortal soul, able to detach itself from the body and not dependent on it for its existence.

In this respect, primitives have extraordinarily well developed ideas about a plurality of souls.

Some are immortal, others are only loosely attached to the body and can wander off and get lost in the night, or they lose their way and get caught in a dream.

There are even souls that belong to a person without being lodged in his body, like the bush-soul, which dwells outside in the forest, in the body of an animal.

The juxtaposition of a person and his “life” has its psychological basis in the fact that a mind which is not very well differentiated cannot think abstractly and is incapable of putting things into categories. It can only take the qualities it perceives and place them side by side: man and his life, or his sickness (visualized as a sort of demon), or his health or prestige (mana, etc.).

This is obviously the case with the Egyptian ka. Father-son-life (or procreative power), together with rigorous exclusion of the Theotokos, constitute the patriarchal formula that was “in the air” long before the advent of Christianity.

The Father is, by definition, the prime cause, the creator, the auctor rerum, who, on a level of culture where reflection is still unknown, can only be One. The Other follows from the One by splitting off from it.

This split need not occur so long as there is no criticism of the auctor rerum so long, that is to say, as a culture refrains from all reflection about the One and does not start criticizing the Creator’s handiwork.

A feeling of oneness, far removed from critical judgment and moral conflict, leaves the Father’s authority unimpaired.

I had occasion to observe this original oneness of the father world when I was with a tribe of Negroes on Mount Elgon.

These people professed to believe that the Creator had made everything good and beautiful.

“But what about the bad animalsthat kill your cattle?” I asked. They replied: “The lion is good and beautiful.” “And your horrible diseases?” “You lie in the sun, and it is beautiful.”

I was impressed by their optimism. But at six o’clock in the evening this philosophy came to a sudden stop, as I was soon to discover.

After sunset, another world took over the dark world of the Ayik, who is everything evil, dangerous, and terrifying. The optimistic philosophy ends and a philosophy of fear, ghosts, and magical spells for averting the Evil One begins.

Then, at sunrise, the optimism starts off again without any trace of inner contradiction.

Here man, world, and God form a whole, a unity unclouded by criticism. It is the world of the Father, and of man in his childhood state. Despite the fact that twelve hours out of every twenty-four are spent in the world of darkness, and in agonizing belief in this darkness, the doubt never arises as to whether God might not also be the Other.

The famous question about the origin of evil does not yet exist in a patriarchal age.

Only with the coming of Christianity did it present itself as the principal problem of morality.

The world of the Father typifies an age which is characterized by a pristine oneness with the whole of Nature, no matter whether this oneness be beautiful or ugly or awe-inspiring.

But once the question is asked: “Whence comes the evil, why is the world so bad and imperfect, why are there diseases and other horrors, why must man suffer?*’ then reflection has already begun to judge the Father by his manifest works, and straightway one is conscious of a doubt, which is itself the symptom of a split in the original unity.

One comes to the conclusion that creation is imperfect nay more, that the Creator has not done his job properly, that the goodness and almightiness of the Father cannot be the sole principle of the cosmos.

Hence the One has to be supplemented by the Other, with the result that the world of the Father is fundamentally altered and is superseded by the world of the Son. 202 This was the time when the Greeks started criticizing the world, the time of “gnosis” in its widest sense, which ultimately gave birth to Christianity.

The archetype of the redeemer-god and first man is age-old we simply do not know how old. The Son, the revealed god, who voluntarily or involuntarily offers himself for sacrifice as a man, in order to create the world or redeem it from evil, can be traced back to the Purusha ofIndian philosophy, and is also found in the Persian conception of the Original Man, Gayomart.

Gayomart, son of the god of light, falls victim to the darkness, from which he must be set free in order to redeem the world. He is the prototype of the Gnostic redeemer-figures and of the teachings concerning Christ, redeemer of mankind.

It is not hard to see that a critique which raised the question of the origin of evil and of suffering had in mind another world a world filled with longing for redemption and for that state of perfection in which man was still one with the Father.

Longingly he looked back to the world of the Father, but it was lost forever, because an irreversible increase in man’s consciousness had taken place in the meantime and made it independent.

With this mutation he broke away from the world of the Father and entered upon the world of the Son, with its divine drama of redemption and the ritualistic retelling of those things which the God-man had accomplished during his earthly sojourn.

The life of the God-man revealed things that could not possibly have been known at the time when the Father ruled as the One. For the Father, as the original unity, was not a defined or definable object; nor could he, strictly speaking, either be called the “Father” or be one.

He only became a “Father” by incarnating in the Son, and by so doing became defined and definable.

By becoming a father and a man he revealed to man the secret of his divinity.

One of these revelations is the Holy Ghost. As a being who existed before the world was, he is eternal, but he appears empirically in this world only when Christ had left the earthly stage. He will be for the disciples what Christ was for them.

He will invest them with the power to do works greater, perhaps, than those of the Son (John 14: 12).

The Holy Ghost is a figure who deputizes for Christ and who corresponds to what Christ received from the Father. From the Father comes the Son, and common to both is the living activity of the Holy Ghost, who, according to Christian doctrine, is breathed forth (“spirated”) by both.

As he is the third term common to Father and Son, he puts an end to the duality, to the “doubt” in the Son.

He is, in fact, the third element that rounds out the Three and restores the One.

The point is that the unfolding of the One reaches its climax in the Holy Ghost after polarizing itself as Father and Son.

Its descent into a human body is sufficient in itself to make it become another, to set it in opposition to itself.

Thenceforward there are two: the “One” and the “Other,” which results in a certain tension.

This tension works itself out in the suffering and fate of the Son 10 and, finally, in Christ’s admission of abandonment by God (Matthew 27:46). 205 Although the Holy Ghost is the progenitor of the Son (Matthew 1:18), he is also, as the Paraclete, a legacy from him.

He continues the work of redemption in mankind at large, by descending upon those who merit divine election. Consequently, the Paraclete is, at least by implication, the crowning figure in the work of redemption on the one hand and in God’s revelation of himself on the other.

It could, in fact, be said that the Holy Ghost represents the final, complete stage in the evolution of God and the divine drama. For the Trinity is undoubtedly a higher form of God-concept than mere unity, since it corresponds to a level of reflection on which man has become more conscious.

The trinitarian conception of a life-process within the Deity, which I have outlined here, was, as we have seen, already in existence in pre-Christian times, its essential features being a continuation and differentiation of the primitive rites of renewal and the cult-legends associated with them.

Just as the gods of these mysteries become extinct, so, too, do the mysteries themselves, only to take on new forms in the course of history.

A large-scale extinction of the old gods was once more in progress at the beginning of our era, and the birth of a new god, with new mysteries and new emotions, was an occurrence that healed the wound in men’s souls.

It goes without saying that any conscious borrowing from the existing mystery traditions would have hampered the god’s renewal and rebirth.

It had to be an entirely unprejudiced revelation which, quite unrelated to anything else, and if possible without preconceptions of any kind, would usher into the world a new and a new cult legend.

Only at a comparatively late date did people notice the striking parallels with the legend of Dionysus, which they then declared to be the work of the devil.

This attitude on the part of the early Christians can easily be understood, for Christianity a The relation of Father to Son is not arithmetical, since both the One and the Other are still united in the original Unity and are, so to speak, eternally on the point of becoming two.

Hence the Son is eternally being begotten by the Father, and Christ’s sacrificial death is an eternally present act did indeed develop in this unconscious fashion, and furthermore its seeming lack of antecedents proved to be the indispensable condition for its existence as an effective force.

Nobody can doubt the manifold superiority of the Christian revelation over its pagan precursors, for which reason it is distinctly superfluous today to insist on the unheralded and unhistorical character of the gospels, seeing that they swarm with historical and psychological assumptions of very ancient origin. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion.

Carl Jung: Pre-Christian sources of the Trinity Concept from Greece.

III. GREECE In enumerating the pre-Christian sources of the Trinity concept, we should not omit the mathematical speculations of the Greek philosophers. As we know, the philosophizing temper of the Greek mind is discernible even in St, John’s gospel, a work that is, very obviously, of Gnostic inspiration. Later, at the time of the Greek Fathers, this spirit begins to amplify the archetypal content of the Revelation, interpreting it in Gnostic terms. Pythagoras and his school probably had the most to do with the moulding of Greek thought, and as one aspect of the Trinity is based on number symbolism, it would be worth our while to further examine the Pythagorean system of numbers and see what it has to say about the three basic numbers with which we are concerned here. Zeller says: “One is the first from which all other numbers arise, and in which the opposite qualities of numbers, the odd and the even, must therefore be united; two is the first even number; three the first that is uneven and perfect, because in it we first find beginning, middle, and end.” The views of the Pythagoreans influenced Plato, as is evident from his Timaeus; and, as this had an incalculable influence on the philosophical speculations of posterity, we shall have to go rather deeply into the psychology of number speculation. The number one claims an exceptional position, which we meet again in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages. According to this, one is not a number at all; the first number is two. Two is the first number because, with it, separation and multiplication begin, which alone make counting possible. With the appearance of the number two, another appears alongside the one, a happening which is so striking that in many languages “the other” and “the second” are expressed by the same word. Also associated with the number two is the idea of right and left, and remarkably enough, of favourable and unfavorable, good and bad. The “other” can have a “sinister” significance or one feels it, at least, as something opposite and alien. Therefore, argues a medieval alchemist, God did not praise the second day of creation, because on this day (Monday, the day of the moon) the binarius, alias the devil, came into existence. Two implies a one which is different and distinct from the “numberless” One. In other words, as soon as the number two appears, a unit is produced out of the original unity, and this unit is none other than that same unity split into two and turned into a “number.” The “One” and the “Other” form an opposition, but there is no opposition between one and two, for these are simple numbers which are distinguished only by their arithmetical value and by nothing else. The “One,” however, seeks to hold to its one-and-alone existence, while the “Other” ever strives to be another opposed to the One. The One will not let go to the Other because, if it did, it would lose its character; and the Other pushes itself away from the One in order to exist at all. Thus there arises a tension of opposites between the One and the Other. But every tension of opposites culminates in a release, out of which comes the “third.” In the third, the tension is resolved and the lost unity is restored. Unity, the absolute One, cannot be numbered, it is indefinable and unknowable; only when it appears as a unit, the number one, is it knowable, for the “Other” which is required for this act of knowing is lacking in the condition of the One. Three is an unfolding of the One to a condition where it can be known unity become recognizable; had it not been resolved into the polarity of the One and the Other, it would have remained fixed in a condition devoid of every quality. Three therefore appears as a suitable synonym for a process of development in time, and thus forms, a parallel to the self-revelation of the Deity as the absolute One unfolded into Three. The relation of Threeness to Oneness can be expressed by an equilateral triangle, A = B =: C, that is, by the identity of the three, threeness being contained in its entirety in each of the three angles. This intellectual idea of the equilateral triangle is a conceptual model for the logical image of the Trinity. In addition to the Pythagorean interpretation of numbers, we have to consider, as a more direct source of Trinitarian ideas in Greek philosophy, the mystery-laden Timaeus of Plato. I shall quote, first of all, the classical argument: “Hence the god, when he began to put together the body of the universe, set about making it of fire and earth. But two things alone cannot be satisfactorily united without a third; for there must be some bond between them drawing them together. And of all bonds the best is that which makes itself and the terms it connects a unity in the fullest sense; and it is of the nature of a continued geometrical proportion to effect this most perfectly. For whenever, of three numbers, the middle one between any two that are either solids or planes [i.e., cubes or squares] is such that, as the first is to it, so is it to the last, and conversely as the last is to the middle, so is the middle to the first, then since the middle becomes first and last, and again the last and first become middle, in that way all will necessarily come to play the same part towards one another, and by so doing they will all make a unity. In a geometrical progression, the quotient (q) of a series of terms remains the same, e.g.: 2: i === 4 : 2 =; 8:4 = 2, or, algebraically expressed: a, aq, aq. The proportion is therefore as follows: 2 is to 4 as 4 is to 8, or a is to aq as aq is to aq. This argument is now followed by a reflection which has far reaching psychological implications: if a simple pair of opposites, say fire and earth, are bound together by a mean, and if this bond is a geometrical proportion, then one mean can only connect plane figures, since two means are required to connect solids: Now if it had been required that the body of the universe should be a plane surface with no depth, a single mean would have been enough to connect its companions and itself; but in fact the world was to be solid in form, and solids are always conjoined, not by one mean, but by two. Accordingly, the two-dimensional connection is not yet a physical reality, for a plane without extension in the third dimension is only an abstract thought. If it is to become a physical reality, three dimensions and therefore two means are required. Accordingly, the god set water and air between fire and earth, and remade them, so far as was possible, proportional to one another, so that as fire is to air, so is air to water, and fire as air is to water, so is water to earth, and thus he bound together the frame of a world visible and tangible. For these reasons and from such constituents, four in number, the body of the universe was brought into being, coming into concord by means of proportion, and from these it acquired Amity, so that united with itself it became indissoluble by any other power save him who bound it together. The union of one pair of opposites only produces a two dimensional triad: p2 + pq + q. This, being a plane figure, is not a reality but a thought. Hence two pairs of opposites, making a quaternio (p* + p*q + pq 2 +

Carl Jung: Pre-Christian parallels to the Trinity in Babylonia…

[Pre-Christian parallels to the Trinity in Babylonia…~Carl Jung]

In proposing to approach this central symbol of Christianity, the Trinity, from the psychological point of view, I realize that I am trespassing on territory that must seem very far removed from psychology.

But everything to do with religion, everything it says, impinges so closely on the human soul that psychology cannot, in my opinion, afford to overlook it.

A conception like the Trinity pertains so much to the realm of theology that the only one of the profane sciences to pay any attention to it nowadays is history.

Indeed, most people have ceased even to think about dogma, especially about a concept as hard to visualize as the Trinity.

Even among professing Christians there are very few who think seriously about the Trinity as a matter of dogma and would consider it a possible subject for reflection not to mention the educated public.

A recent exception is Georg Koepgen’s very important book, Die Gnosis des Christenturns, which, unfortunately, soon found its way onto the Index despite the episcopal “Placet.”

For all those who are seriously concerned to understand dogmatic ideas, this book of Koepgen’s is a perfect example of thinking which has fallen under the spell of Trinitarian symbolism.

Triads of gods appear very early, at a primitive level. The archaic triads in the religions of antiquity and of the East are too numerous to be mentioned here.

Arrangement in triads is an archetype in the history of religion, which in all probability formed the basis of the Christian Trinity.

Often these triads do not consist of three different deities independent of one another; instead, there is a distinct tendency for certain family relationships to arise within the triads.

I would mention as an example the Babylonian triads, of which the most important is Anu, Bel, and Ea. Ea, personifying knowledge, is the father of Bel (“Lord”), who personifies practical activity.

A secondary, rather later triad is the one made up of Sin (moon), Shainash (sun), and Adad (storm). Here Adad is the son of the supreme god, Anu. Under Nebuchadnezzar, Adad was the “Lord of heaven and earth.”

This suggestion of a father-son relationship comes out more clearly at the time of Hammurabi: Marduk, the son of Ea, was entrusted with Bel’s power and thrust him into the background. Ea was a “loving, proud father, who willingly transferred his power and rights to his son.”

Marduk was originally a sun-god, with the cognomen “Lord” (Bel); he was the mediator between his father Ea and mankind. Ea declared that he knew nothing that his son did not know. Marduk, as his fight with Tiamat shows, is a redeemer.

He is “the compassionate one, who loves to awaken the dead”; the “Great eared,” who hears the pleadings of men. He is a helper and healer, a true savior.

This teaching about a redeemer flourished on Babylonian soil all through the Christian era and goes on living today in the religion of the Mandaeans (who still exist in Mesopotamia), especially in their redeemer figure Manda d’Hayya or Hibil Ziwa.

Among the Mandaeans he appears also as a light-bringer and at the same time as a world-creator. Just as, in the Babylonian epic, Marduk fashions the universe out of Tiamat, so Mani, the Original Man, makes heaven and earth from the skin, bones, and excrement of the children of darkness.

“The all-round influence which the myth of Marduk had on the religious ideas of the Israelites is surprising and this at a time when the worship of Marduk was nearing its height.

Hammurabi felt himself the god of a new aeon [the aeon of Aries], which was then beginning and the suspicion is probably justified that tacit recognition was given to the triad Anu-Bel-Hammurabi.

The fact that there is a secondary triad, Sin-Shamash-Ishtar, is indicative of another intra-triadic relationship. Ishtar appears here in the place of Adad, the storm god.

She is the mother of the gods, and at the same time the daughter of Anu as well as of Sin.

Invocation of the ancient triads soon takes on a purely formal character. The triads prove to be ”more a theological tenet than a living force.”

They represent, in fact, the earliest beginnings of theology. Anu is the Lord of heaven, Bel is the Lord of the lower realm, earth, and Ea too is the god of an “underworld,” but in his case it is the watery deep.

The knowledge that Ea personifies comes from the “depths of the waters.” According to* one Babylonian legend, Ea created Uddushunamir, a creature of light, who was the messenger of the gods on Ishtar’s journey to hell.

The name means: “His light (orrising) shines.” Jeremias connects him with Gilgamesh, the hero who was more than half a god.

The messenger of the gods was usually called Girru (Sumerian “Gibil”), the god of fire.

As such he has an ethical aspect, for with his purifying fire he destroys evil.

He too is a son of Ea, but on the other hand he is also escribed as a son of Anu. In this connection it is worth mentioning that Marduk as well has a dual nature, since in one hymn he is called Mar Mummi, ‘son of chaos/ In the same hymn his consort Sarpanitu is invoked along with Ea’s wife, the mother of Marduk, as the “Silver-shining One.”

This is probably a reference to Venus, the femina alba.

In alchemy the albedo changes into the moon, which, in Babylonia, was still masculine. Four may signify totality, just as it does in the case of the four sons of Horus, the four seraphim in the vision of Ezekiel, and the four symbols of the evangelists, consisting of three animals and one angel.

The ideas which are present only as intimations in Babylonian tradition are developed to full clarity in Egypt.

I shall pass lightly over this subject here, as I have dealt with the Egyptian prefigurations of the Trinity at greater length elsewhere, in an as yet unfinished study of the symbolical bases of alchemy shall only emphasize that Egyptian theology asserts, first and foremost, the essential unity (homoousia) of God as father and son, both represented by the king.

The third person appears in the form of Ka-mutef (“the bull of his mother”), who is none other than the ka, the procreative power of the deity. In it and through it father and son are combined not in a triad but in a triunity.

To the extent that Ka-mutef is a special manifestation of the divine ka> we can “actually speak of a triunity of God, king, and kay in the sense that God is the father, the king is the son, and ka the connecting-link between them.”

In his concluding chapter Jacobsohn draws a parallel between this Egyptian idea and the Christian credo.

Apropos the passage “qui conceptus est de Spiritu Sancto, natus ex Maria virgine,” he cites Karl Earth’s formulation: “There is indeed a unity of God and man; God himself creates it. … It is no other unity than his own eternal unity as father and son.

This unity is the Holy Ghost.” As procreator the Holy Ghost would correspond to Ka-mutef, who connotes and guarantees the unity of father and son.

In this connection Jacobsohn cites Earth’s comment on Luke i : 35 (“The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God”):

“When the Bible speaks of the Holy Ghost, it is speaking of God as the combination of father and son, of the vinculum caritatis.”

The divine procreation of Pharaoh takes place through Ka-mutef, in the human mother of the king. But, like Mary, she remains outside the Trinity.

As Preisigke points out, the early Christian Egyptians simply transferred their traditional ideas about the ka to the Holy Ghost.

This explains the curious fact that in the Coptic version of Pistis Sophia, dating from the third century, Jesus has the Holy Ghost as his double, just like a proper ka.

The Egyptian mythologem of the unity of substance of father and son, and of procreation in the king’s mother, lasted until the Vth dynasty (about 2500 B.C.).

Speaking of the birth of the divine boy in whom Horus manifests himself, God the Father says: “He will exercise a kingship of grace in this land, for my soul is in him,” and to the child he says: “You are the son of my body, begotten by me.” “The sun he bears within him from his father’s seed rises anew in him.”

His eyes are the sun and moon, the eyes of Horus. We know that the passage in Luke 1:78!: “Through the tender mercy of our God, whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us, to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,” refers to Malachi 4:2: “But unto you that fear my name shall the sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings.”

Who does not think here of the winged sun-disc of Egypt? These ideas passed over into Hellenistic syncretism and were transmitted to Christianity through Philo and Plutarch.

So it is not true, as is sometimes asserted even by modern theologians, that Egypt had little if any influence on the formation of Christian ideas. Quite the contrary.

It is, indeed, highly improbable that only Babylonian ideas should have penetrated into Palestine, considering that this small buffer state had long been under Egyptian hegemony and had, moreover, the closest cultural ties with its powerful neighbor, especially after a flourishing Jewish colony established itself in Alexandria, several centuries before the birth of Christ.

It is difficult to understand what could have induced Protestant theologians, whenever possible, to make it appear that the world of Christian ideas dropped straight out of heaven.

The Catholic Church is liberal enough to look upon the Osiris-Horus-Isis myth, or at any rate suitable portions of it, as a prefiguration of the Christian legend of salvation.

The numinous power of a mythologem and its value as truth are considerably enhanced if its archetypal character can be proved.

The archetype is “that which is believed always, everywhere, and by everybody,” and if it is not recognized consciously, then it appears from behind in its “wrathful” form, as the dark “son of chaos,” the evil-doer, as Antichrist instead of Savior a fact which is all too clearly demonstrated by contemporary history. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Religion; Pages 112-126.

Carl Jung: Study yoga you will learn an infinite amount from it but do not try to apply

The power of the yogi operates within limits acceptable to his environment.

The European, on the other hand, can blow up mountains, and the World War has given us a bitter foretaste of what he is capable of when free rein is given to an intellect that has grown estranged from human nature.

As a European, I cannot wish the European more “control” and more power over the nature within and around us.

Indeed, I must confess to my shame that I owe my best insights (and there are some quite good ones among them) to the circumstance that I have always done just the opposite of what the rules of yoga prescribe.

Through his historical development, the European has become so far removed from his roots that his mind was finally split into faith and knowledge, in the same way that every psychological exaggeration breaks up into its inherent opposites.

He needs to return, not to Nature in the manner of Rousseau, but to his own nature. His task is to find the natural man again.

Instead of this, there is nothing he likes better than systems and methods by which he can repress the natural man who is everywhere at cross purposes with him.

He will infallibly make a wrong use of yoga because his psychic disposition is quite different from that of the Oriental.

I say to whomsoever I can:

“Study yoga you will learn an infinite amount from it but do not try to apply it, for we Europeans are not so constituted that we apply these methods correctly, just like that.

An Indian guru can explain everything and you can imitate everything. But do you know who is applying the yoga? In other words, do you know
who you are and how you are constituted?” ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 234

Carl Jung: We can only rise above nature if somebody else carries the weight of the earth for us.

We can only rise above nature if somebody else carries the weight of the earth for us.

What sort of philosophy would Plato have produced had he been his own house-slave?

What would the Rabbi Jesus have taught if he had had to support a wife and children? if he had had to till the soil in which the bread he broke had grown, and weed the vineyard in which the wine he dispensed had ripened?

The dark weight of the earth must enter into the picture of the whole. In “this world” there is no good without its bad, no day without its night, no summer without its winter.

But civilized man can live without the winter, for he can protect himself against the cold; without dirt, for he can wash; without sin, for he can prudently cut himself off from his fellows and thereby avoid many an occasion for evil.

He can deem himself good and pure, because hard necessity does not teach him anything better.

The natural man, on the other hand, has a wholeness that astonishes one, though there is nothing particularly admirable about it. It is the same old unconsciousness, apathy, and filth.

If, however, God is born as a man and wants to unite mankind in the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, he must suffer the terrible torture of having to endure the world in all its reality.

This is the cross he has to bear, and he himself is a cross.

whole world is God’s suffering, and every individual man who wants to get anywhere near his own wholeness knows that this is the way of the cross. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Pages 178-179.

Carl Jung: What is the use of imitating yoga if your dark side remains as good a medieval Christian as ever?

The grasping of “the whole essence of these teachings” seems also to be the whole essence of “self-liberation.”

The Westerner would take this to mean: “Learn your lesson and repeat it, and then you will be self-liberated.”

That, indeed, is precisely what happens with most Western practitioners of yoga.

They are very apt to “do” it in an extroverted fashion, oblivious of the in-turning of the mind which is the essence of such teachings.

In the East, the “truths” are so much a part of the collective consciousness that they are at least intuitively grasped by the pupil.

If the European could turn himself inside out and live as an Oriental, with all the social, moral, religious, intellectual, and aesthetic obligations which such a course would involve, he might be able to benefit by these teachings.

But you cannot be a good Christian, either in your faith or in your morality or in your intellectual make-up, and practice genuine yoga at the same time.

I have seen too many cases that have made me skeptical in the highest degree.

The trouble is that Western man cannot get rid of his history as easily as his short-legged memory can.

History, one might say, is written in the blood.

I would not advise anyone to touch yoga without a careful analysis of his unconscious reactions.

What is the use of imitating yoga if your dark side remains as good a medieval Christian as ever?

If you can afford to seat yourself on a gazelle skin under a Bo-tree or in the cell of a gompa for the rest of your life without being troubled by politics or the collapse of your securities, I will look favourably upon your case. But yoga in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue, or in any other place which is on the telephone, is a spiritual fake. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 802.