The Promise of Easter
“God is reality itself.” ~Carl Jung
“What happens in the life of Christ happens always and everywhere. In the Christian archetype all lives of this kind are prefigured.” ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Religion
“We all must do what Christ did. We must make our experiment. We must make mistakes. We must live out our own version of life. And there will be error. If you avoid error you do not live.” – Carl Jung; C.G. Jung Speaking
“The divine process of change manifests itself to our human understanding . . . as punishment, torment, death, and transfiguration.” -Carl Jung; Alchemical Studies
“The God-image in man was not destroyed by the Fall but was only damaged and corrupted (‘deformed’), and can be restored through God’s grace. The scope of the integration is suggested by the descent of Christ’s soul to hell, its work of redemption embracing even the dead. The psychological equivalent of this is the integration of the collective unconscious which forms an essential part of the individuation process.” -Carl Jung; Aion
Carl Jung on Resurrection.
Mysterium Coniunctionis (Collected Works of C.G. Jung Vol.14
The utter failure came at the Crucifixion in the tragic words, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
If you want to understand the full tragedy of those words you must realize what they meant: Christ saw that his whole life, devoted to the truth according to his best conviction, had been a terrible illusion.
He had lived it to the full absolutely sincerely, he had made his honest experiment, but it was nevertheless a compensation.
On the cross his mission deserted him. But because he had lived so fully and devotedly he won through to the Resurrection body. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, pp. 97f.
The state of imperfect transformation, merely hoped for and waited for, does not seem to be one of torment only, but of positive, if hidden, happiness.
It is the state of someone who, in his wanderings among the mazes of his psychic transformation, comes upon a secret happiness which reconciles him to his apparent loneliness.
In communing with himself he finds not deadly boredom and melancholy but an inner partner; more than that, a relationship that seems like the happiness of a secret love, or like a hidden springtime, when the green seed sprouts from the barren earth, holding out the promise of future harvests.
It is the alchemical benedicta viriditas, the blessed greenness, signifying on the one hand the “leprosy of the metals” (verdigris), but on the other the secret immanence of the divine spirit of life in all things. ~Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, par. 77, note 215.
When Nietzsche said “God is dead,” he uttered a truth which is valid for the greater part of Europe. People were influenced by it not because he said so, but because it stated a widespread psychological fact. The consequences were not long delayed: after the fog of -isms, the catastrophe. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, CW 11, par. 145.
We are living in what the Greeks called the Kairos the right moment for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time . . . is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self,” Civilization in Transition, CW 10, par. 585.
In Picture 10, begun in Zurich but only completed when Miss X again visited her motherland, we find the same division as before into above and below. The “soul-flower” in the centre is the same, but it is surrounded on all sides by a dark blue night sky, in which we see the four phases of the moon, the new moon coinciding with the world of darkness below.
The three birds have become two. Their plumage has darkened, but on the other hand the goat has turned into two semi-human creatures with horns and light faces, and only two of the four snakes remain. A notable innovation is the appearance of two crabs in the lower, chthonic hemisphere that also represents the body.
The crab has essentially the same meaning as the astrological sign Cancer. 6 Unfortunately Miss X gave no context here. In such cases it is usually worth investigating what use has been made in the past of the object in question. In earlier, prescientific ages hardly any distinction was drawn between long-tailed crabs (Macrura, crayfish) and short-tailed crabs (Brachyura). As a zodiacal sign Cancer signifies resurrection, because the crab sheds its shell. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 604
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