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
