Divinity and humanity should remain preserve. [Image 45]
The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition (Philemon)
You need to undertake only half of the way; he will undertake the other half If you go beyond him, blindness will befall you. If he goes beyond you, paralysis will befall him. Therefore, and insofar as it is the manner of the Gods to go beyond mortals, they become paralyzed, and become as helpless as children.
Divinity and humanity should remain preserved, if man should remain before the God, and the God remain before man. The high-blazing flame is the middle way; whose luminous course runs between the human and the divine.
The divine primordial power is blind, since its face has become human. The human is the face of-the Godhead. If the God comes near you, then plead for your life to be spared, since the God is loving horror.
The ancients said: it is terrible to fall into the hands of the living God. They spoke thus because they knew, since they were still close to the ancient forest, and they turned green like the trees in a childlike manner and ascended far away toward the East. Consequently they fell into the hands of the living God.
They learned to kneel and to lie with their faces down, to beg for pity; and they learned to live in servile fear and to be grateful. But he who saw him, the terrible beautiful one with his black velvet eyes and the long eyelashes, the eyes that do not see but merely gaze lovingly and fearfully; he has learned to cry out and whimper,
so that he can at least reach the ear of the Godhead. Only your fearful cry can stop the God. And then you see that the God also trembles, since he stands confronting his face, his observing gaze in you, and he feels unknown power.
The God is afraid of man. If my God is lamed, I must stand by him, since I cannot abandon the much-loved. I sense that he is my lot, my brother, who abided and grew in the light while I was in the darkness and fed myself
with poison. It is good to know such things: if we are surrounded by night, our brother stands in the fullness of the light, doing his great deeds, tearing up the lion and killing the dragon.
And he draws his bow against ever more distant goals, until he becomes aware of the sun wandering high up in the sky and wants to catch it. But when he has discovered his valuable prey; then your longing for the light also awakens. You discard the fetters and take yourself to the place of the rising light. And thus you rush toward each other.
He believed he could simply capture the sun and encountered the worm of the shadows. You thought that in the East you could drink from the source of the light, and catch the horned giant, before whom you fall to your knees. His essence is blind excessive longing and tempestuous force.
My essence is seeing limitation and the incapacity of cleverness. He possesses in abundance what I lack. Consequently I will also not let him go, the Bull God, who once wounded Jacob’s hip and whom I have now lamed. I want to make his force my own.
It is therefore prudent to keep alive the severely afflicted so that his force continues to support me. We miss nothing more than divine force. We say; “Yes, indeed, this is how it should or could be. This or that should be achieved.”
We speak thus and stand thus, and look about us embarrassed, to see whether somehow something will occur. And should something happen, we look on and say: “Yes, indeed, we understand, it is this or that, or it is similar to this or that.” And thus we speak and stand and look around to see whether somewhere something might happen. Something always happens, but we do not happen, since our God is sick.
We have seen him dead with the venomous gaze of the Basilisk on his face, and we have understood that he is dead. We must think of his healing. And yet again I feel it quite clearly that my life would have broken in half had I failed to heal my God. Hence I abided with him in the long cold night. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Day One, Page 281, Image 45.
