Carl Jung on Homesickness.
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To Sandor Torok
Dear Sir, 29 April 1959
Your question about homesickness is one that I can answer only from the standpoint of an empirical psychologist.
Homesickness in this sense is a special phenomenon, possibly a symptom, that has two aspects: either one is still clinging on to the memory of the original homeland, or one thinks one is still clinging to this memory-image but has unconsciously projected into it the conception of a longed-for goal.
This is so with all those people who, when they return to their homeland, or come back to the situations for which they are homesick, are bitterly disappointed.
There are people who because of their homesickness cannot accustom themselves to any new situation.
But then they would never have accustomed themselves to their homeland either.
Others, who identify with their homeland, youth, and origins, regard them as a kind of lost paradise and yearn to get back again.
A Kabbalist has said that after the Fall God removed paradise into the future.
They long to get back but don’t know that it is the future they long for.
Others, again, have reversed their homesickness and labour under the delusion that things will be much better in the future than they are in the present.
But all of them share the same illusion that the goal is somewhere to be found in outward things and conditions, without realizing that psychologically they already carry it within them and always have.
If they knew that, the question of homesickness would be answered once and for all.
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 503-504
You see, the tension between Christ and the devil is in consciousness!
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In this way then, a completely new redeemer concept arises.
However, it is in no way true, for instance, that out of this Behemoth (which is closer to God, so to speak, because it lives in the mountains) the Christ figure arises.
Rather, it is the lapis philosophorum, the filius philosophorum, that arises from it. That is already a prelude to the later development of the first and second millennia after Christ.
You see, the tension between Christ and the devil is in consciousness!
The figure of Christ is anticipated in a completely different way; it is anticipated in Egypt.
That is the dying and resurrecting god of the Near East. It goes back to the fifth millennium before Christ, to the figure of Osiris.
That is a pure pneumatic figure, while the differentiation of the Leviathan is actually already forming compensation for the pneumatic
principle from pre-Christian times, because the pneumatic principle became predominant with Greek philosophy approximately during the time of the Greek Golden Age, when the ancient gods had already reached their end.
They had already been discredited in the time of Homer; so already seven to nine hundred years before Christ they had in large part forfeited their credit owing to their all-too-human qualities [Allzu-Menschlichkeit]. ~Maud Oakes, Stone by Stone, Page 189
[The Ancient Greeks and the Formation of Man.]
And founding on the formation of man from the dust, the philosophers constantly term the body earthy. Homer, too, does not hesitate to put the following as an imprecation:—
“But may you all become earth and water.”
As Esaias says, “And trample them down as clay.” And Callimachus clearly writes:—
“That was the year in which
Birds, fishes, quadrupeds,
Spoke like Prometheus’ clay.”
And the same again:—
“If thee Prometheus formed,
And thou art not of other clay.”
Hesiod says of Pandora:—
“And bade Hephæstus, famed, with all his speed,
Knead earth with water, and man’s voice and mind
Infuse.”
The Stoics, accordingly, define nature to be artificial fire, advancing systematically to generation. And God and His Word are by Scripture figuratively termed fire and light. But how? Does not Homer himself, is not Homer himself, paraphrasing the retreat of the water from the land, and the clear uncovering of the dry land, when he says of Tethys and Oceanus:—
“For now for a long time they abstain from
Each other’s bed and love?”
Again, power in all things is by the most intellectual among the Greeks ascribed to God; Epicharmus—he was a Pythagorean—saying:—
“Nothing escapes the divine. This it behoves thee to know.
He is our observer. To God nought is impossible.”
And the lyric poet:—
“And God from gloomy night
Can raise unstained light,
And can in darksome gloom obscure
The day’s refulgence pure.”
He alone who is able to make night during the period of day is God. In the Phoenomena Aratus writes thus:—
“With Zeus let us begin; whom let us ne’er,
Being men, leave unexpressed. All full of Zeus,
The streets, and throngs of men, and full the sea,
And shores, and everywhere we Zeus enjoy.”
He adds:—
“For we also are
His offspring; . . . . ”
that is, by creation.
“Who, bland to men,
Propitious signs displays, and to their tasks
Arouses. For these signs in heaven He fixed,
The constellations spread, and crowned the year
With stars; to show to men the seasons’ tasks,
That all things may proceed in order sure.
Him ever first, Him last too, they adore:
Hail Father, marvel great—great boon to men.”
And before him, Homer, framing the world in accordance with Moses on the Vulcan wrought shield, says:—
“On it he fashioned earth, and sky, and sea,
And all the signs with which the heaven is crowned.”
For the Zeus celebrated in poems and prose compositions leads the mind up to God. And already, so to speak, Democritus writes, “that a few men are in the light, who stretch out their hands to that place which we Greeks now call the air. Zeus speaks all, and he hears all, and distributes and takes away, and he is king of all.” And more mystically the Boeotian Pindar, being a Pythagorean, says:—
“One is the race of gods and men,
And of one mother both have breath;”
that is, of matter: and names the one creator of these things, whom he calls Father, chief artificer, who furnishes the means of advancement on to divinity, according to merit. ~Clement of Alexandrea, The Stromata, Pages 988-990.
