But what is the resolution?
It is always something ancient and precisely because of this something new, for when something long since passed away comes back again in a changed world, it is new.
To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation.
This is the creation of the new, and that redeems me.
Salvation is the resolution of the task. The task is to give birth to the old in a new time.
The soul of humanity is like the great wheel of the zodiac that rolls along the way:
Everything that comes up in a constant movement from below to the heights was already there.
There is no part of the wheel that does not come around again.
Hence everything that has been streams upward there, and what has been will be again.
For these are all things which are the inborn properties of human nature. It belongs to the essence of forward movement that what was returns. [260]
Only the ignorant can marvel at this.
Yet the meaning does not lie in the eternal recurrence of the same. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, The Way of the Cross, Page 311.
Footnote 260:
The Draft continues:
“Everything is forever the same and yet not, for the wheel rolls along on a long road. But the way leads through valleys and across mountains.
The movement of the wheel and the eternal recurrence of its parts is essential to the carriage, but meaning lies in the way.
Meaning is attained only through the wheel’s constant revolution and forward movement.
The recurrence of the past is inherent in forward movement. This can only baffle the ignorant person.
Ignorance makes us resist the necessary recurrence of the same, or greed allows the wheel to toss us up and away in its upward movement because we believe that we will rise ever higher with this part of the wheel.
But we will not rise higher, but deeper; ultimately we will be at the very bottom.
Thus praise standstill, since it shows you that you are not bound to the spokes like Ixion, but sit alongside the charioteer who will interpret the meaning of the way to you” (pp. 469-70).
In Greek mythology, Ixion was the son of Ares. He tried to seduce Hera, and Zeus punished him by binding him to a fiery wheel that rolled unceasingly.
