1935 6 February LECTURE III Zarathustra Seminar
Prof Jung:
I have a contribution by Mrs. Baynes.
“Here is a curious parallel between the last verse in the chapter on the Backworldsmen and one of Wilhelm’s commentaries on the I Ching. Nietzsche says: ‘More uprightly and purely speaketh the healthy body, perfect and square-built: and it speaketh of the meaning of the earth.’ ”
You probably noticed that peculiar expression, the “four square” body.
The body is of course very much the earth, and “it speaketh of the meaning of the earth” means that inasmuch as the body has produced consciousness, it produces the meaning of the earth.
If you could give consciousness or a creative mind to a book for instance, or to any kind of object, it would speak its contents; give consciousness to wood and it speaks the meaning of wood; give it to stone and it speaks the meaning of stone.
Then Mrs. Baynes goes on. “Wilhelm is commenting on the second line in the hexagram Kun, the Receptive, Earth, and he says: ‘Heaven has a circle for its symbol, and the earth a right-angled quadrangle. Thus right-angledness is an original attribute of the earth.’ ”
Kun is the sign of Yin, and the absolute Yin hexagram with six weak lines is the receptive sign; Kun is the conceiving earth.
The first line of that hexagram is:
If you tread on frost, firm ice is not far away.
The hoar-frost is not quite solid, it crumbles, but ice is solid.
That is the quality of the Yin: it is cold and solid, the northern side of the mountain; it is night, humidity, the earth.
Then going on with the description of the earth, the second line is:
Straight, right-angled, large.
Even without purpose, nothing remains unfurthered.
This means that even without purpose things move or are helped to move.
Then the third line:
Hidden lines, we can remain steadfast.
If perhaps you are in the service of a king, Seek not works, but bring to fruition!
This shows that if one remains persistent in the hidden, unspoken purpose, then the very nature of the earth, the hidden lines in the earth, will lead you.
You are as if in the service of a king; you have no purpose because the king has the purpose.
The hidden king, the king dormant in the earth, is the ruler or the leader.
And “Seek not works but bring to fruition” means “Don’t go about as if you didn’t know what to do, seeking works out of your own invention, but follow up the thing which is there already and accomplish it.”
It is all blind doing; it is the doing in the night, following dark intimations, the concealed lines.
The fourth line says:
A tied-up sack. No blame; no praise.
The idea is that one is as if tied into a dark sack.
You cannot escape, you cannot see, you are entirely passive, and therefore no blame and no praise attaches to your position.
And the fifth line is:
Yellow undergarment brings the highest good fortune.
Yellow is the color of the earth and the desired middle way.
So it means the correct inner attitude, which would be an adaptation to oneself; as an outer garment is an adaptation to the world.
If you have a correct attitude to the things within, it brings good fortune.
The German word is Heil which originally meant a bit more, almost salvation.
But good fortune in the I Ching usually refers to worldly good fortune; it is often
used for direction in an entirely worldly enterprise.
Before a person starts a business, for instance, he asks one of the Taoist soothsayers to cast the I Ching oracle, and in that case what is called the judgment at the beginning of each sign is chiefly used.
That is the oldest interpretation-dating from the eleventh or twelfth century B.C., the time of King Wen and the Duke of Chau-and there it is said whether a sign is in general good or bad.
It might say: “Great good fortune without blame,” for example, or, “It is now a good time to cross the great water.”
Such indications are all the person who asks the question wants to know, as a rule.
The deep moral implications of the subtle lines which follow are usually not mentioned. But of course anybody with a subtle mind would ask the oracle less for his worldly than for his spiritual good-in order to find the right way through the chaos or labyrinth of his own soul.
Mrs. Baynes particularly calls my attention to the second line, “straight, right-angled, large,” which refers to the earth.
Wilhelm worked out the Commentary on the I Ching with the help of Lau, that old Chinese sage who initiated him, and concerning this line, it says:
“Heaven has the circle for its symbol and the earth the right-angled square. Thus the four square quality is the original or primordial quality of the earth.”
In the old symbolism of the cosmogonic forces in Chinese philosophy there is a center which is called Kian, (“heaven”) from which four elementary forces-all with special names-emanate into the spaces of the earth, which is square like this:
And around this quadrangle are the moving qualities of Yin and Yang as even and odd numbers, which are at the same time the qualities of the elements: fire, water, earth, metal, etc.
These form a sort of vortex; the whole system is rotating.
That is the idea of the basic structure of the world. “On the other hand, movement in a straight line,” the Commentary goes on, “is an original attribute of the creative power, and quantity (greatness) is such an attribute. All four-square things have their root in the straight line and in their turn form corporeal entities. Now the Kun, the receptive, conceiving quality of the earth, adjusts itself to these qualities of the creative power and makes them its own. Thus out of the straightness of the creative power, the straight line, there develops a square, and out of a square, a cube. That is the surrender of Kun, the conceiving earth, to the original intimation of creative power.”
In other words, this creative power which is just a straight line, like an arrow or the course of a projectile, is translated by the three dimensions of space into bodies; that is the origin of bodies.
From all this, one can appreciate the depth from which Nietzsche drew his speech symbolism.
Probably he himself was not conscious of the meaning of that four-square; if somebody had criticized him severely for using such an expression, and asked just why the earth should be four-square, it is possible that Nietzsche might have yielded and said, “Oh, let that expression go, it is not absolutely indispensable.”
But it is indispensable in a deeper sense.
For the idea that the earth is four-square has been found at a tremendous depth in the collective unconscious, here as well as in China, and probably all over the world.
Mr. Allemann: The four square is in the muladhara chakra.
Mr. Baumann: The Egyptians had the same idea about the form of the world: there were four principles.
Prof Jung: Do you mean the four monkeys and the four toads that watched the creation of the world?
Mr. Baumann: There were different conceptions about it; there were four gods, and four couples of gods, and then they have four principles which mean time, space, materia, and power.
Prof Jung: There is also the idea that the four-square quality of the temples really meant the earth: the four-square altar was understood to be a symbol of the earth.
But I am not so certain about these interpretations.
The only source for the philosophical interpretation of Egyptian symbolism is Plutarch.
Iamblichus is not absolutely reliable, he is a bit fantastical sometimes; unfortunately it is not on a sound basis.
That the old Egyptians had philosophical interpretations we know from Herodotus as well as Plutarch, but we have very little material to prove what the interpretations actually were.
The Greeks were the main source.
The later speculations are quite unreliable, based upon mere air or intuition-which is of course not a recognized scientific principle.
Now we will go on to the next chapter: “The Despisers of the Body,” where Zarathustra continues to preach the paramount importance of the body.
He elaborates upon the meaning of the body and makes some very curious discoveries.
To the despisers of the body will I speak my word.
I wish them neither to learn afresh, nor teach anew, but only to bid farewell to their own bodies-and thus be dumb.
“Body am I, and soul,” so saith the child. And why should one not speak like children?
But the awakened one, the knowing one, saith: “Body am I entirely, and nothing more; and soul is only the name of something in the body.”
This statement sounds entirely materialistic, as if the soul were really nothing but a derivative of chemical processes in the body.
It is unfortunate that Nietzsche always uses the word body instead of saying “the living body,” for the dead body surely never produces a soul; and what a living body is we don’t know exactly.
We only know that there is such a thing and that it has decidedly different qualities from a dead body.
The dead body has the disagreeable quality of decomposing very quickly; it suddenly becomes the physical process of chemical decomposition or oxidation.
While the living body is always striving against decomposition, it is in the highest degree synthetic; from simple chemical bodies in the foodstuff, it builds up extremely complicated synthetic substances, which are kept on that level without being destroyed
by oxidation.
So there is an additional secret in the living albumen which science does not know, and it is that living body which produces something like a psyche.
You see, if he said: “Living body am I entirely,” it would be correct and the materialistic mistake would not be possible.
Of course, it makes all the difference in the world whether a body is living or dead.
Now, one can say that psyche is an accompaniment of the living body, or even that it is produced by the living body, that it is a derivative; this is, at all events, a perfectly workable hypothesis, and you know science for a relatively long time now has proceeded upon that assumption.
Of course, it is sound materialism for people to take it for granted that they know what a living body is.
But no intelligent man would believe that he knows what life is; only idiots believe that they know, in the way of a sous entendu, or a silent premise.
The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd.
This is a very important and interesting statement.
You see, inasmuch as the living body contains the secret of life, it is an intelligence.
It is also a plurality which is gathered up in one mind, for the body is extended in space, and the here and the there are two things; what is in your toes is not in your fingers, and what is in your fingers is not in your ears or your stomach or your knees or anywhere else in your body.
Each part is always something in itself.
The different forms and localizations are all represented in your mind as more or less different facts, so there is a plurality.
What you think with your head doesn’t necessarily coincide with what you feel in your heart, and what your belly thinks is not what your mind thinks.
The extension in space, therefore, creates a pluralistic quality in the mind.
That is probably the reason why consciousness is possible.
Different things are represented, and these are always supposed to be in a field of consciousness, in a sort of extension, that is.
Yet you feel that the whole, that plurality, is drawn together and referred to something you call “I”; it is referred to a center which you cannot say has extension, as little as you can say of a thought that it has extension.
Thought is a disembodied something because it has no spatial qualities.
So “I” is as if it were something abstract, yet in a vague way it coincides with your body; when you say “I” you beat your chest for instance, to emphasize the “I.”
You see that with primitives: whenever they speak of themselves, they say “Me! Me!”-emphasizing their body.
They even go as far as to be very particular about their shadows which they think belong to the body; they are just as offended, they consider it as much an outrage, when you step upon their shadow as when you give their body a kick. To that extent is the body identical with the ego consciousness in primitive man.
We don’t include the shadow, and our ego is more detached from the body, but our ego concept is for that reason abstract, and therefore less spatial: it has almost no spatial quality.
To say “My body is myself” sounds to us like a metaphor or a plastic manner of speech; when you say “I” you don’t usually mean this unworthy body that sits here.
But the primitive is weighed down by the fact that the “I” is chiefly the body, and that expresses itself in an entirely different way also; namely, he only refers to that center of the ego which affects his body.
For instance, a thought which does not affect the working of his stomach or the act of breathing or the palpitation of his heart, does not exist.
The only thought which he has consciously, is one which affects him physically, through the skin, or the muscles, or the position of his body, or the function of his intestines.
It is as if a thought which did not upset the regularity of the respiration would be non-arrive, not psychical.
That explains why a primitive is quite unable to fill his whole day with consciousness, there are hours on end when he is just sitting, gazing into space, and thinking nothing at all.
Of course, all the time a psychical movement does take place in him, but such thoughts are subliminal; they don’t reach consciousness because they are not underlined, or supported, by physical disturbances.
Therefore, certain negro tribes hold that thinking is done in the stomach exclusively; so only thoughts that upset your digestion would be authentic.
The Pueblo Indians say thinking is done with the heart, and that the people who believe
they think in the head are obviously mad: so all Americans are of insane mind.
I had to correct myself very quickly in order not to be reckoned as American, to agree that only that is thought or consciousness which affects the heart or the breathing, the anahata region.
Of course, there are numbers of ideas or emotions or representations or perceptions which definitely upset the act of breathing.
Watch the curve of your breathing, and you see that if something is said, or you hear a sound, or if there is any other disturbance, your breathing is instantly affected, particularly when you are just starting to speak, when you are gathering up breath to have the necessary volume of air to produce the sound.
The next stage is the throat where the sound is made, speech, and there are a vast number of people on the level of thinking in words only; when there isn’t a word to designate a thing, when they cannot hear it or see it printed, then the thing doesn’t exist.
Because they see a word, they think there must be the corresponding thing in existence.
For instance, Kant says in his Critique of Pure Reason, that because people say “God,” they think God is.
The psychical center of millions of people is in the throat; somebody shouts a string of tremendous words and they all think, “Now something has happened, isn’t it marvelous?
It must be true.”
Yet the words mean nothing whatever.
If they would only use this thing up in their heads, this inexorable light, they would
see it was perfect nonsense.
But somebody has produced a world, made a reality, by making a string of words, and they accept it; they take it seriously without hesitating one single moment as to whether it makes sense or not.
Of course, it cannot be denied that a number of people have climbed a bit higher and arrived at the level where even words don’t produce worlds, but they are rare, a very small percentage of the population.
Mr. Baumann: Some psychological tests were recently tried on me, and I discovered that unless words were associated with a sight or a sound, I could not remember them.
Prof Jung: Yes, it is of course necessary to associate things with the body in order to keep them.
You have to visualize them, to project things out into the field of vision as if they were optical realities.
Or you have to project them into the sphere of sound, as it were, and you do that best by using the word.
Otherwise you cannot stabilize things.
It is exceedingly difficult to think in absolutely abstract terms; even the most abstract mathematician uses signs-letters and numbers and formulas-in order to give body to utter abstractions which could not be kept in mind at all if not translated into something like a body.
So what Nietzsche is saying here about the importance of the body is quite correct.
His point of view that the soul is a mere derivative of the body is rue insofar as we are unable to establish anything psychical without the aid of the body, without the aid of the connection with physical things.
A complete abstraction is really impossible.
It is wordless; it has no affinity with anything that could be called matter, and therefore is well-nigh non-existent.
The highest center in the chakra system, Sahasrara, would be the complete abstraction.
It is utterly beyond any physical likeness or affinity.
It is really non-existent because any kind of existence is always linked up with extension or body.
Now, we must consider this phrase “a war and a peace.”
You see, a plurality of things only exists or can exist because they contradict each other.
For instance, if you have a peculiar sensation in your hand, and at the same time in your foot, there is a conflict between the two; one is above and the other below, and you don’t know whether you should look first here or there.
So all the pluralistic elements of your mind can be the cause for a conflict, if it is only the struggle for the priority of attention-you don’t know to which you should attend first.
It is also like a flock and a shepherd; the flock consists of a plurality, and if the units of a flock disperse, the shepherd must gather them together.
And so the ego consciousness is the shepherd of a flock of psychical units, and if the shepherd is killed, the flock disperses.
That would be schizophrenia.
The splitting of the mind is a separating of the units, and then each unit behaves as if it were a little ego consciousness, and if there is a remnant of the shepherd left somewhere, if his ears at least remain, he will hear voices.
The units behave like little egos and they speak with sheeplike intelligence.
One observes the same phenomenon in mediumistic experiments, where certain fragments of the mind are split off.
The psyche is exceedingly dissociable.
The fact that the mind really is based upon a plurality makes this a serious danger.
One also observes very frequently in schizophrenics that as soon as the flock disperses, as soon as the war breaks out, the fragments of consciousness are projected into different parts of the body, so that they begin to speak with a certain amount of
consciousness.
I would call the attention of those among you who read German to that book by Staudenmayer called Experimentelle Magie.
He had voices in different parts of his intestines, for instance.
It is a very frequent thing that patients localize their voices somewhere in the body.
We say quite normally, “It was as if my heart said to me,” or, “as if I heard a voice within.”
But schizophrenics hear voices coming out of their feet or head or eyes.
I have a patient who says: “Today I have voices in my upper lip.”
Or, “Now they are occupied with my navel.”
The voices are also personified as infinitely small men, who in thousands, like ants, walk over the body.
That famous case, Schreber, was such a fellow.”
He found dozens of little men upon his eyelids, trying to raise or lower them, or walking upon his skin; and time and again one of the little men lost his independence and merged with the patient’s consciousness.
He always got angry and cursed when that happened.
That would be a relative dissociation-the parts are not all absolutely independent; at times they join on again.
It would be as if the frozen surface of a lake were broken up so that fragments were drifting on the surface, and then occasionally two pieces would join and freeze together and become a unit again.
That is the moment when the little man says “Damn it!”-and merges with consciousness.
An instrument of thy body is also thy little sagacity, my brother, which thou callest “spirit”-a little instrument and plaything of thy big sagacity.
From this sentence you can see that Nietzsche treats the spirit very much on the same basis as the mind: he makes little or no difference between the two.
That is the fatal mistake which was made in the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.
They identified mind and spirit, which came from the fact that they had lost the empirical understanding of what spirit really is.
The spirit descended to the level of mind, and particularly the mind which consists of words.
That vast majority of people whose minds consist of words conquered the small minority whose minds consist of thought-and they in turn conquered those whose minds consist of spirit.
So the spirit slowly descended from its celestial place to the level of intelligent thought,
which of course was not as it should be, but better than when it descends still further and becomes mere words.
That idea is not my invention. It occupied very different minds in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
Mauthner has written a philosophy on the basis of the mind being speech; he thinks that mind is derived chiefly from language, that mind is speech.’
You find these connections in the Upanishads also.
And Anatole France says: “What is mind other than sound, an utterance, L’aboiement d’un chien?”
You see, that is the bodily basis of the mental phenomenon, and the bodily
accompaniment from which what we call “psyche” develops.
So in coming down from the heights of the spirit, you get first into the plurality of thoughts, then into the vaster plurality of words, and you wind up with the barking of a dog-the utterance of mind in its origin was of course like the barking of a dog.
That has led to the philosophy of Klages who identifies spirit and intellect, or mixes them up with mind, till spirit has become utterly unrecognizable; he fights the spirit as a destroyer of life.
If he knew what the spirit was, he never could assume that, for spirit is originally a most effervescent thing, like the opening of a champagne bottle.
It is most emotional, really a culmination of life.
The German word Geist expresses it; the etymology of that word points to an effervescence, a welling up.
The Latin word spiritus means just wind, and the Greek word animas has no spiritual meaning; it also means wind.
Therefore, in the miracle of Pentecost, the descent of the Holy Ghost, there was the phenomenon of a great wind.
Then the word pneuma in antiquity meant chiefly prana, the breath of life, and prana is characteristic of the living being.
The living being is filled with the pneuma; there is no life without it.
And it is by no means a mistake that the concept pneuma, which originally had no spiritual meaning whatever, later on under Christian influence took on that meaning.
That was logical because spirit is a culmination of life, by no means destructive.
But the intellect, this demon of words, is a destroyer of life; the more the mind becomes words the less there is life substance.
It becomes just thin like words-or inasmuch as words are sound only, flatus vocis, a breath of voice.
Miss Wolff: Doesn’t “to mind” also mean to memorize? “I mind” means I remember.
Prof Jung: Well, that also hangs together with the fact that abstract thoughts, in order to be kept, must be associated with the body; that is minding or remembering something.
Mrs. Jung: I think we got this idea of the word as being spirit from the Bible, where the world was created through God.
And in the New Testament, in the Evangel of St. John, it says the Word was God and
God was the Word, which seems to put the word very high indeed.
Prof Jung: Yes, but the German Wort does not mean Logos exactly.
Logos is the original conception, and the Logos has a peculiar quality; it is a higher concept than n6us, the Greek word, which can be translated by “mind,” but both these words designate a sort of cosmogonic principle.
In Gnosticism the cosmogonic principle is the equivalent of the Logos.
In the more differentiated philosophy of Philo Judaeus, who is the real originator of the Logos philosophy, the Gospel of St.
John, that same principle is the Logos, and the Logos is divine.
It is God. Now the Logos surely originally had to do with the word and therefore could be so translated, but the word was considered the creative factor in Egypt.
Therefore, the inscription on the temple of Ptah: “What he speaketh becomes.”
I should say that peculiar exaltation of the term Logos, meaning word, comes from the idea that it was the word which expressed the spirit.
But the fact was, that they were filled with spirit and then they made words; while we make words and assume that we are filled with spirit.
That is just the difference.
They only spoke when the spirit filled them.
When they were gripped by the effervescence of the spirit, they spoke even in different tongues, even in unintelligible words, according to the account of the glossolalia in
the New Testament.
And in that, the word is like matter.
It is the definiteness of the divine impulse, the divine creative spirit.
That inscription on the temple of Ptah shows very clearly this creative, becoming reality of the divine impulse, which is in itself beyond words and beyond bodies.
It is prior to all creation, having no form; but as soon as it comes into the space of the world it takes on definiteness.
It creates matter.
Therefore, in the Tantric philosophy, matter is defined as the definiteness of the divine thought.
You see, ancient philosophy really started from a different reality than ours, from a very different psychology.
Speech was very unwieldy then. You can see what trouble Plato had to express certain ideas which to us are now definite conceptions; he had to use parables and all sorts of means in order to express his philosophical thought.
The famous parable of the cave belongs to the theory of cognition, we say nowadays,
but he had to express it by that clumsy apparatus.
In reading medieval philosophy, one has to struggle with an extraordinary clumsiness of language.
The original German was unspeakably heavy and difficult.
There is the same trouble in reading the very elegant Latin of Stoic philosophy or the New Platonists; that language was just not differentiated enough to express subtleties.
Greek was in a way much subtler, but in comparison with a modern language, that also was exceedingly archaic.
So they always were under the pressure of spirit, which made it a very real thing to them, and they felt the word as the visible face of the spirit.
Therefore, it was to them divine.
There was the same feeling in old China where every scrap of written paper was carefully collected by special people in order that it should not be soiled or lost, because the hieroglyphic or the writing was sacred.
A written book was magic because it was the apparition of the spirit.
That was the antique point of view, but in the subsequent differentiation of speech, the original phenomenon of the spirit was more and more lost sight of, and the word was then in place of the spirit.
One sees that in the development of the Christian church; the real spirit is almost extinct, and only the printed word is left.
Therefore, we cling to the word of the Bible.
In the first centuries the four gospels were not even considered as a revelation of God.
They were supposed to be useful books of an uplifting character, good to read, but nobody thought that they were the word of God revealed by immediate divine inspiration.
That was a later invention, when they were seeking an authority instead of the spirit which was lacking.
Read St. Paul and you can see how the spirit works. He was still under the pressure.
His words are the stammering of the spirit; but we took it as the refinement of the spirit, the word itself as spirit–a great mistake.
The word is merely what is left of the spirit after the spirit has passed.
So modern development led first to the descent of the spirit into mind, and from mind into words, and then the spirit was utterly gone, so that we don’t know what spirit is. We must make an effort to remember what it was.
But anybody who has the faintest knowledge of spirit knows that it is the culmination of
life. It is even the greatest intensity of life.
Dr. Escher has just asked me about a very complicated philosophical problem, the question of the relationship between spirit and mind or intellect, which I cannot explain fully.
This is exceedingly disputable ground and much depends naturally on the definition given to the phenomena.
You see, I propose to call spirit such and such a thing, and mind such and such a thing, and with such a proposition we can discuss, but if “mind” can mean anything and “spirit” can mean anything,
it is impossible. That is just the trouble, just what I was saying.
Mind and spirit are nowadays so confused that the words are used interchangeably, as in German you use the word Geist for simply anything.
It has also the connotation of esprit for instance, and one speaks of esprit de vin, Weingeist, the “spirit of alcohol.”
Of course, alcohol was called spiritus because it is a volatile substance detached from a liquid by distillation, it is the volatile substance which goes over into the alembic.
Geist is also an expression for a psychological concept, but we have to separate these terms: otherwise, we get entangled in all the nonsense which is happening now.
For example, Klages thinks the spirit is the destroyer of life, which is contradictio in adjecto, the spirit has always been the creator of life.
The orgiastic madness of antiquity is prana, the breath of life.
A god fills you with his prana, or his pneuma or wind, and you become an air-being, which is of course a ghost or a soul; even body becomes breath.
That was the original concept.
Prof Reichstein: Could one not say it depends upon which side the libido is at the moment? For instance, we could say that nowadays people don’t need to become more airlike than they are already. When the chthonic part is more emphasized, the libido is withdrawn from the spirit side and it drops down and becomes less differentiated.
Prof Jung: Well, it has dropped down, that is the devil.
You see, we have to detach from that intellectual thing.
Prof Reichstein: It seems to be quite necessary, because otherwise the earth would not have enough force.
Prof. Jung: Quite. That we should emphasize the body is Nietzsche’s message, and it is also the message of materialism, that is granted.
We should emphasize the body, for thus we give body to concepts, to words.
And we should insist on the fact that they are nothing but words since the spirit is gone, that there is no life in them-they are dead things, outside life.
We should return to the body in order to create spirit again; without body there is no spirit because spirit is a volatile substance of the body.
The body is the alembic, the retort, in which materials are cooked, and out of that process develops the spirit, the effervescent thing that rises.
Nietzsche returned to himself, isolated himself from the whole world, crept into his own retort and underwent this process.
Then suddenly he discovered that he was filled with a new orgiastic enthusiasm which he called his experience of Dionysus, the god of wine.
You see, that is the spirit. Dionysus is the god of prophecy, of prophetic dreams, and he is the god of the body.
In the latter part of Zarathustra there is a beautiful poem where Nietzsche describes how he was digging down into himself, working into his own shaft; there you can see how intensely he experienced the going into himself, till he suddenly produced the explosion of the most original form of spirit, the Dionysian.
Mr. Baumann: In the beginning of Faust there is a monologue where he was considering which was first, spirit, the word-or the deed, the action. Wasn’t he putting the spirit into the body there?
Prof. Jung: Faust is already modern in that Goethe felt that the word alone was not enough.
But it is the only available term to translate Logos, for Logos is most certainly not action.
For the antique man, however, it was action, the word was the action of the spirit.
Mr. Baumann: Wasn’t the word more a command?
Prof. Jung: Later on it became a command, but at that time it was the pneuma, which means the face of God, the Angel of the Face in the Old Testament.
The Sufi conception of Allah, Khidr, is the Angel of the Face. It is the visibility of God, the face of the pneuma.
The angel of the word, or the god of the word, is the visibility of the word.
Therefore Christ, being God’s son who became flesh, is the word.
Mr. Allemann: For many people I think there is still the word of power; the mantra has spirit or energy behind it.
Prof. Jung: But reversed energy.
The mantra is the word which is supposed to open the magic door and is used in order to produce magic effects.
It is a piece of old memory.
It once was the face of God, and for those people in whom a bit of the old spirit is still alive, it can produce magic effects; but to us it means nothing. It is a word.
Mrs. Fierz: Originally the word was not at all clear; it was dark, and therefore it carried the secret meaning.
Prof. Jung: Yes, the words of God were the words of an oracle, for instance.
And the words were dark; they were not concepts but the expression of the divine power.
It was not necessary to understand.
One had only to accept the divine word and one had accepted God.
But you see, we expect words which we understand, and then they are just words.
So a mantra means a world to people to whom it means anything at all, but to us it means nothing.
For we simply judge by the words, or we judge by the extraordinary aspect of symbols.
We find Mithraic symbols in a grotto, and ask what they mean, or think perhaps that they are foolish or poor.
We don’t know what spirit has created them, nor what spirit is behind them.
Those symbols were expressions of a tremendous phenomenon. In themselves they are just traces, the footprints of something that has passed.
But the footprints, of course, are not the being; you see, those people really beheld the being and therefore paid little attention to the footprints.
Only when the thing had passed, when people were asking if there was anything left, they said, “Ah, here are footprints,” and then they made a great story about them.
So our situation is exactly reversed: we are now in the age where there is nothing but words, footprints-but we can do nothing with them, they are dead.
Therefore, we must turn away from them and go back to the source where the whole thing began originally.
And here is a message: Zarathustra says to go back to the body, go into the body, and then everything will be right, for there the greatest intelligence is hidden.
Out of that living body everything originally has come.
Well, that is true. One can say nothing else.
“Ego” sayest thou, and art proud of that word.
But the greater thing-in which thou art unwilling to believe-is thy body with its big sagacity; it saith not “ego,” but doeth it.
Here Nietzsche or Zarathustra prepares our minds for a very important insight; namely, it is not “I” that is intelligent.
When we say “I,” we mean our minds and think that whatever we can know of ourselves is known.
That is a very curious prejudice.
Only yesterday, for instance, a relatively intelligent lady was in my consulting room-apparently she has read many books-and she told me of her peculiar neurosis.
Then she said, “And the most interesting thing is that my neurosis has no cause whatever, absolutely none; it has no meaning and no reason.”
I said, “Then it is a present from heaven, for I never heard of a neurosis that was without cause.”
“Yes,” she said, “it must be something like that because really there is no cause for it, I know everything about myself.”
Perfectly harmless and innocent! She is absolutely aware of her psychology!
There is a mountain, but she has not seen it.
At the end of the hour she knew that something had been done in her which she had not done.
She has been done; she has lived something which she did not understand, which she did not know-and it lived her.
It is a great discovery that below or aside from one’s psyche, or consciousness, or mind, is another intelligence of which one is not the maker, and upon which one depends.
You see, Freud’s great fear is that there may be something outside which is not “I”; to say there is a greater intelligence outside of one’s own mind means that one must be crazy. Like Nietzsche.
Unfortunately for Freud, Nietzsche was not the only one who had such thoughts; it was the conviction of all the thousands of years before Nietzsche, that man’s intelligence was not the last word, that even his mind was the result of something behind the
screen-that we are not the makers, but we are made.
Your mind is not the creative god that makes a whole world jump into existence out of nothing.
There is a preparation.
There is, prior to consciousness, an unconscious out of which consciousness once arose, and that is an intelligence which surely exceeds our intelligence in an indefinite way. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 356-371