1. Mithraic and Christian Totemism

Mithraic and Christian Totemism

Cornwall Seminar

Of the archaic symbols which may arise to take the place of the missing impersonal attitude, Totemic ideas are perhaps the most frequent and the most important.

1. Mithraic totemism, which produces a re-identification with the Bull of Mithras; this will manifest itself in bull-like shouting.

2. Christian totemism. This gives identification with the Little Lamb, when one becomes very meek, and adopts a martyr-like attitude. This is archaic; it is indecent, something to be ashamed of. When one has lived through these things, then, as an individual, to go back to it is dirty, obscene. When one is far from it one can look back at it and be interested scientifically in it. But if you get such a regression with archaic symbols, you will get a recrudescence of symptoms, because you are going back to the original slime. This happens when you are too intellectual in the conscious.

When we get a step beyond Ecclesiastical Christianity, we are in a position where our formulated impersonal attitude is defective. We are in a new situation and there is a lack of new attitude in the conscious, and already an old collective attitude has been constellated in the unconscious. (If a very personal problem becomes unconscious, it is probably because it was molded on an archetype which has sucked it down.)

The impersonal attitude is linked up with the pure manifestation of the basic principles: the masculine logos, and the feminine ores. When you are capable of a pure manifestation of a pure Logos or Eros, you will have a pure impersonal attitude. Christ was incarnate Logos or order, end also incarnate Eros or Love of God. The mystic movement of the worship of the Sacred Heart came up re Christ and also are the worship of the Virgin, sword piercing her heart, but later development transferred the heart into
Christ. Christ contains all projections.

Men projected head and called him the Logos, and women projected heart and called him Love. An unconditioned attitude demands sacrifice; so that sacrifice Is correlated to such an unconditioned attitude. But beware of equating it to the Christian idea of self-denial end so forth, which to many people is easy, while the opposite is the real sacrifice, and  is equivalent to the unconditioned attitude. ~Carl Jung, Cornwall Seminar, Page 16.