So the fruit of the tree is eaten and the inevitable consequences unfold.
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche
The development of Ego Consciousness is a ‘crime’ against the original state of Wholeness that preceded it.
Reparations must be made to the unconscious for this ‘crime’. That is what Jungian Psychology tries to accomplish. Edward F. Edinger
Note: A complete citation is needed.
“The drama of temptation and fall begins when the original state of passive inflation turns into the active infla- tion of a specific deed.
The serpent’s whole approach and appeal is expressed in inflationary terms—when you eat of this fruit, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God.
So the fruit of the tree is eaten and the inevitable consequences unfold.
It all begins because Adam and Eve dare to act on their desire to be like God.
The myth depicts the birth of consciousness as a crime which alienates man from God and from his original preconscious wholeness.
The fruit is clearly symbolical of consciousness.
It is the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which means that it brings awareness of the op- posites, the specific feature of consciousness.
Thus, according to this myth and the theological doctrines that rest on it, consciousness is the original sin, the original hyhris, and the root cause of all evil in human nature.
However, others have understood it differently.
The Ophites, a Gnostic sect, worshipped the serpent.
They had essentially the same view as modem psychology.
To them the serpent represented the spiritual principle symbolizing redemption from bondage to the demiurge that created the Garden of Eden and would keep man in ignorance.
The serpent was considered good and Yahweh bad.
Psychologically the serpent is the principle of gnosis, knowledge or emerging consciousness.
The serpent’s temptation represents the urge to self-realization in man and symbolizes the principle of individuation.
Some Gnostic sects even identified the serpent in the Garden of Eden with Christ.
Eating the forbidden fruit marks the transition from the eternal state of unconscious oneness with the Self (the mindless, animal state) to a real, conscious life in space and time.
In short, the myth symbolizes the birth of the ego.
The effect of this birth process is to alienate the ego from its origins. It now moves into a world of suffering, conflict and uncertainty.
No wonder we are reluctant to take the step to greater consciousness (Picture 4).”Edward F. Edinger, Ego and Archetype, Page 19.
Carl Jung on the “Tree.”
Children’s Dreams: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1940
[Carl Jung on the “Tree.”]
The tree is the world tree.
Odin was hanged on a tree.
Also, the wood for the Christian cross comes from the tree of paradise.
Christ is crucified on the tree of life.
Strangely enough, the cross has a feminine meaning.
It symbolizes the woman, the cruel woman, in whose arms Christ died.
There is a legend that Mary talks to the cross, which she addresses as “mother cross,” how cruelly she would treat her son.
Here, too, the tree as a cross takes the place of the mother who, however, was completely depersonalized.
She is the mother of death.
The mother gives birth, and at the end of life, as earth, she again receives the dead in herself.
In a Maori myth, death is the old ancestress Hine-nui-te-po.
She sleeps with her mouth open.
Maui, the hero, wants to overpower her in order to defeat death.
He has arranged with all creatures that none of them make a sound when he creeps into her mouth.
But a little bird cannot stifle a laugh.
Hine-nui-te-po wakes up and snaps her mouth shut.
So that’s how Maui finds his fate.
The ancestress is in the past, but also in the future.
She is the beginning and the end.
The Madonna too, the heavenly mother, has her hellish counterpart in the devil’s grandmother; likewise, Kwannon, the goddess of mercy, has a hellish manifestation.
In the East it is not believed that deities can be good only.
Also the mother has got a reverse side, like the mirror; there she becomes the tree of the dead, in which the dead are buried.
A Germanic legend recounts: the last men on earth vanish again in the tree from which they originally came out.
There has to be a consciousness that mirrors the world; otherwise, the world would not exist at all.
The primitive man still had a premonition that the world will cease to exist when consciousness ceases to exist.
This will be when the forest reappears; Earth will belong to the forest.
The tree is the vegetative, unconscious life, which will emerge again when human consciousness has been extinguished.
Death, as he appears in the magic mirror, is a “hanging” [Aufhängung].
Hanging is a ritual in sacrifice.
Christ too was called the “hanged” by the pagans.
On the other hand, death is also characterized by the motif of dismembering.
This connection is also evidenced historically: the relation to Wotan and Dionysus.
Dionysus is the dismembered one. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Pages 83-84.
