Carl Jung on Wine Anthology
Just as Christ left behind his redeeming blood, a true pharmakon athanasias in the wine, so Agni is the soma, the holy drink of inspiration, the mead of immortality CW5 ¶ 246
We cannot slay death, as we have already taken all life from it. If we still want to overcome death, then we must enliven it. Therefore on your journey be sure to take golden cups full of the sweet drink of life, red wine, and give it to dead matter, so that it can win life back. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 244.
1500 years ago St. Benedict could pour the new wine into new bottles; or rather, the seeds of a new culture germinating in the decay were bedded in the new spirit of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 225.
It [Eros] is not form-giving but form-fulfilling; it is the wine that will be poured into the vessel; it is not the bed and direction of the stream but the impetuous water flowing in it. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 365.
1500 years ago St. Benedict could pour the new wine into new bottles; or rather, the seeds of a new culture germinating in the decay were bedded in the new spirit of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 225.
A genuine and proper ethical development cannot abandon Christianity but must grow up within it, must bring to fruition its hymn of love, the agony and ecstasy over the dying and resurgent god the mystic power of the wine, the awesome anthropophagy of the Last Supper-only this ethical development can serve the vital forces of religion. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 18.
The I Ching can change me, if I have the patience to meditate. It is like a wine of noble vintage. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 56.
“It is well known that Jung was a connoisseur of wine.” “Cocktails he detested.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 135.
The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid. ~Carl Jung; CW 8; Para 774.
The pagan religions met this danger by giving drunken ecstasy a place within their cult. Heraclitus doubtless saw what was at the back of it when he said, “But Hades is that same Dionysos in whose honour they go mad and keep the feast of the wine-vat.” For this very reason orgies were granted religious licence, so as to exorcise the danger that threatened from Hades. Our solution, however, has served to throw the gates of hell wide open. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 182
Wouldn’t it be the bread and the wine?
Prof Jung: Yes, the redeeming blood-drops would be the blood of Christ. And he says they drew even those from the body and the earth.
Mrs. Jung: Wouldn’t it be the bread and the wine?
Prof. Jung: Yes, the red wine is the blood, and the substance of the earth is the bread, and that is the body and the blood of Christ.
He calls them sweet and poisonous, because he says our morbidity comes from the fact that we live by the metaphysical instead of the physical principle-we live by the spirit but the spirit is nothing but our imagination.
There again he is lacking in psychological criticism, for what is imagination?
From their misery they sought escape, and the stars were too remote for them.
Then they sighed: “0 that there were heavenly paths by which to steal into another existence and into happiness!” Then they contrived for themselves their by-paths and blood draughts!
This is of course a blasphemous desecration of the communion.
Beyond the sphere of their body and this earth they now fancied themselves transported, these ungrateful ones.
But to what did they owe the convulsion and rapture of their transport? To their body and this earth. That is plain.
They were not grateful to the body, allowing themselves to be transported in their ekstasis away from this earth to a heavenly place.
But the very ekstasis is due to a convulsion of their humble servant, the body.
If the body did not help them, they would not have an ekstasis.
How can an ekstasis be brought about otherwise? If they are in the body, then they can step out of it; the body indirectly helps the ekstasis.
And of course if you ill-treat the body, it can throw you out of the house entirely, out of your body. It is like ill-treating objects.
You know, objects are inanimate things; they lie about heavily, have no legs or wings, and people are often quite impatient with them. For instance, this book would like it very much better, I am sure, if it were lying near the center of the table where it is safe, but I have put it on the edge. It is an awkward position for that poor creature of a book.
It may fall down and get injured. If I am impatient, if I touch them in an awkward way, it is a lamentable plight for the poor objects.
Then they take their revenge on me.
Because I illtreat them they turn against me and become contradictory in a peculiar way.
I say, “Oh, these damned objects, dead things, despicable!” and instantly they take on life. They begin to behave as if they were
animated living things. You will then observe what the German philosopher tells about the die Tilcke des Objekts.
And the more you curse them, the more you use speech figures which insinuate life into them.
For instance
, “Where has that book hidden itself now? It has walked off and concealed itself somewhere.” Or, “The devil is in that watch, where has it gone ?”
Objects really take on dangerous qualities with people who are particularly impatient with them: they jump into your eyes, they bite your legs, they creep onto a chair and stick up a point upon which you sit-such things.
You will find many beautiful examples in that book by Vischer. What spectacles can do, for instance!
If there is a chair with a concealing pattern, my spectacles will seek it and become invisible, the contours merging with the pattern.
And, of course, buttered toast will never fall on the unbuttered side.
And the coffee jug will most certainly try to get its spout under the handle of the milk pot, so that when you lift the coffee pot you pour out the milk.
But such things only happen to people who are impatient with objects-then the devils go into the objects and play the most extraordinary stunts. ~Zarathustra Seminar, Page 351-352
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