Christ exemplifies the archetype of the self.
“Our discourse necessarily brings us to Christ, because he is still the living myth of our culture….Christ exemplifies the archetype of the self. He represents a totality of a divine or heavenly kind, a glorified man, a son of God sine macula peccate, unspotted by sin. ” Carl Jung, Aion, Page 37.
The Holy Ghost, Christ, Anti-Christ, Crucifixion
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
“The continuing, direct operation of the Holy Ghost on those who are called to be God’s children implies, in fact, a broadening process of incarnation.
Christ, the son begotten by God, is the first-born who is succeeded by an ever-increasing number of younger brothers and sisters.
There are, however, neither begotten by the Holy Ghost nor born of a virgin. . . .
Their lowly origin (possibly from the mammals) does not prevent them from entering into a close kinship with God as their father and Christ as their brother.” – Carl Jung; Answer to Job
Image: The Holy Spirit depicted as a dove descending on the Holy Family, with God the Father and angels shown atop, by Murillo, c. 1677.
“Although the attributes of Christ (consubstantiality with the Father, co-eternity, filiation, parthenogenesis, crucifixion, Lamb sacrificed between opposites, One divided into Many, etc.) undoubtedly mark him out as an embodiment of the self, looked at from the psychological angle he corresponds to only one half of the archetype.
The other half appears as the Anti-Christ.
The latter is just as much a manifestation of the self, except that he consists of its dark aspect.
Both are Christian symbols, and they have the same meaning as the image of the Savior crucified between two thieves.
This great symbol tells us that the progressive development and differentiation of consciousness leads to an ever more menacing awareness of the conflict and involves nothing less than a crucifixion of the ego, its agonizing suspension between irreconcilable opposites. ~Carl Jung
“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
Assimilation of the Christ image
[Carl Jung on the “Assimilation of the Christ-image” and the Passion of Christ.]
If the adept experiences his own self, the “true man,” in his work, then, as the passage from the “Aquarium sapientum” shows, he encounters the analogy of the true man—Christ—in new and direct form, and he recognizes in the transformation in which he himself is involved a similarity to the Passion.
It is not an “imitation of Christ” but its exact opposite: an assimilation of the Christ-image to his own self, which is the “true man.”
It is no longer an effort, an intentional straining after imitation, but rather an involuntary experience of the reality represented by the sacred legend.
This reality comes upon him in his work, just as the stigmata come to the saints without being consciously sought. They appear spontaneously.
The Passion happens to the adept, not in its classic form—otherwise he would be consciously performing spiritual exercises—but in the form expressed by the alchemical myth.
It is the arcane substance that suffers those physical and moral tortures; it is the king who dies or is killed, is dead and buried and on the third day rises again.
And it is not the adept who suffers all this, rather it suffers in him, it is tortured, it passes through death and rises again.
All this happens not to the alchemist himself but to the “true man,” who he feels is near him and in him and at the same time in the retort.
The passion that vibrates in our text and in the Aurora is genuine, but would be totally incomprehensible if the lapis were nothing but a chemical substance.
Nor does it originate in contemplation of Christ’s Passion; it is the real experience of a man who has got involved in the compensatory contents of the unconscious by investigating the unknown, seriously and to the point of self-sacrifice.
He could not but see the likeness of his projected contents to the dogmatic images, and he might have been tempted to assume that his ideas were nothing else than the
familiar religious conceptions, which he was using in order to explain the chemical procedure.
But the texts show clearly that, on the contrary, a real experience of the opus had an increasing tendency to assimilate the dogma or to amplify itself with it.
That is why the text says that Christ was “compared and united” with the stone.
The alchemical Anthropos showed itself to be independent of any dogma. ~Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Page 349, Para 492.
