The tarantula dance, the madness caused by the tarantula
“Revenge is in thy soul: wherever thou bitest, there ariseth blackscab; with revenge, thy poison maketh the soul giddy!”[Nietzsche]
This of course refers to the tarantula dance, the madness caused by the tarantula.
You see, that idea suggests something one very often encounters when people approach their inferior function; they have attacks of vertigo or nausea for instance, because the unconscious brings a peculiar sort of motion, as if the earth were moving under their feet, or as if they were on the deck of a ship rolling in a heavy swell.
They get a kind of seasickness; they develop such symptoms actually.
It simply means that their former basis, or their imagined basis, has gone certain values which they thought to be basic are no longer there-so they become doubtful and suspended in a sort of indefinite atmosphere with no ground under their feet, always afraid of falling down.
And of course the thing that is waiting for them underneath is the jaws of hell, or the depth of the water, or a profound darkness, or a monster-or they may call it madness.
And mind you, it is madness to fall out of one’s conscious world into an unconscious condition. Insanity means just that, being overcome by an invasion of the unconscious.
It is madness to fall out of one’s conscious world into an unconscious condition. Insanity means just that, being overcome by an invasion of the unconscious.
Consciousness is swept over by unconscious contents in which all orientation is lost.
The ego then becomes a sort of fish swimming in a sea among other fishes, and of course fishes don’t know who they are, don’t even know the name of their own species. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1088-1089
