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31 October 1934 LECTURE 4 Zarathustra Seminar
Dr. Jung:
Here is a question by Mrs. Baumann: “In the fourth chapter, Zarathustra preaches the value of the body. Now that he buries his body for the sake of being a free spirit, does that mean that he didn’t realize what he said before, or is it simply a swing back?
It seems to me it is one of those complicated places.
Nietzsche didn’t realize what he wrote himself, and so Zarathustra was unable to emphasize the body more.”
It is not so complicated in reality.
Sure enough, it is part of the message of Zarathustra to preach the importance of the body, otherwise his message would have no basis; the idea of individuation, as he preaches it in that chapter, implies the body.
You cannot individuate if you are a spirit; moreover, you don’t even know how spirit feels because you are in the body. So if you speak of individuation at all, it necessarily means the individuation of beings who are in the flesh, in the living body.
It is of course meant to become a reality, or it would remain only a good idea in the mind-one would be individuated because one had such an idea in one’s head.
People ordinarily think that a right thought must be throughout, not realizing that it is only a very small noise in the attic, and the rest of the house is as it always was, nothing having happened at all.
The head, the brain is only a small part of the body.
It is just an illusion when you think the right thought in your head means a reality; it is a reality as far as a thought reality reaches; the thought itself is real, but it has not become a reality in space. It has not been expressed by the whole of you.
So Zarathustra has the right idea no doubt: he includes the body in the process of individuation, and he emphasizes it because without the body there would be only a disincarnated spirit.
But inasmuch as Zarathustra himself is a thought-being-he is really just an archetypal spirit who has the right idea-it is not the man Nietzsche.
Nietzsche is not the Superman, but he identifies with Zarathustra naively because he is so swallowed up by that archetype from the collective unconscious.
He intuited it because it is a figure of such mighty attraction; his whole life was sucked in by it and the body could go by the board.
That special body, the man Nietzsche, simply disappeared behind it.
Therefore, there is nobody left to receive Zarathustra’s message.
Zarathustra speaks his own message, using the means of the body of Nietzsche, and the ordinary human being Nietzsche does not exist.
He could not stand up against Zarathustra; he was completely dissolved.
He ought to take a stand against Zarathustra and then something else of course would happen; he would be able to realize the message.
He would not speak as if Zarathustra or the Superman were talking.
He would say: “A spirit has spoken to me.”
The real prophet does not identify with Jahveh. He only stands for his word. ‘
He receives the word and says Jahveh speaks, not he himself.
Nietzsche does not think for a moment that Zarathustra is a spirit in its own dignity and right.
He always interpenetrates. He is that spirit somehow.
The perfectly good message Zarathustra delivers does not reach the man Nietzsche
because he is in no relation to that teaching; he is not a part of the audience.
Nowhere in Zarathustra can you find a place where Nietzsche really appears; he is nowhere among the audience.
He is the preacher, but he does not listen at the same time.
The man Nietzsche should appear among the friends or disciples of Zarathustra.
We should encounter a passage where he says, “I met Zarathustra, I saw him,” or “He spoke to me.”
Then we would be sure that he made a difference between himself and Zarathustra, and then only could he realize Zarathustra’s teaching. He would look at his own body, and would ask himself how he could translate Zarathustra’s teaching into his own life.
The whole thing would have taken an entirely different course; we would behold an entirely different spectacle, and not the tragic fate brought about through that identification.
No matter what the teaching of a spirit may be-a spirit may teach all sorts of things-the question is always whether it reaches the preacher himself or not, whether there is anybody who can make it real.
That is, of course, the problem.
You see, Zarathustra has not been made real; you must search far for anybody who has made Zarathustra’s teaching real.
It is tremendously difficult to make it real because it reaches you in your most personal
life, and sure enough, you cannot reach high tones any longer when you are concerned with that problem.
Mr. Baumann: There are certain examples. Dante, for instance, experienced everything with Virgilius.’ There were two in that case.
Dr. Jung: That is a good example.
He makes a difference between himself and the dynamis; he is not identical with the psychopompos.
Virgilius is to him of course this same archetype, but it is a different kind of teaching.
It is the message of the Middle Ages.
But the future idea is already appearing when Dante reaches Paradise, for at the very
summit of Paradise is the mystical rose in which individuation is indicated.
That is the end of the Christian mandala, the highest realization of the time, and the mystical rose is the future.
And it is Nietzsche, or Zarathustra, who continues, who takes up the eternal thread and carries it further, bringing the idea of the mystical rose down into the being of man.
Of course, there were other expressions of it in the meantime: medieval alchemistic philosophy, and Master Eckhart, and Faust, and many other stepping stones led to that transformation of the human mind or the human psychology.
Now, here is a question by Miss Hannah: “When Zarathustra, in the last paragraph of section g, says ‘I will o’erleap them that loiter and delay,’ is he not identifying with the jester and giving away again the whole positive meaning of the chapter?”
He is most certainly identifying with the jester there; as Zarathustra, he is also the jester.
You remember we made that out in our famous equation.
He is the jester and he is destructive inasmuch as he is going to jump over the man Nietzsche, for that loitering one is the body he has buried.
The ordinary man who is in the body is inert: he loiters, he hesitates, he cannot follow those high intuitions.
Therefore, Zarathustra will jump over the man Nietzsche, as the jester jumped over the
rope-dancer.
Miss Hannah continues: “It seems to me that the chapter contains, as well as the extremely positive perception ‘follow yourself,’ a very good description of why no human being could live up to being a friend of Nietzsche’s, including himself.”
Inasmuch as Nietzsche is identical with Zarathustra, of course nobody could possibly be a personal friend to him; nobody can deal with such an identification because it means an inflation.
One cannot form a personal relation with a person who has an inflation; anybody with an inflation is neurotic, and it is absolutely impossible to form a relation with a neurotic, because one never knows with whom one is dealing.
A neurotic is always a yea and a nay.
One thinks one is perfectly safe in assuming this, and then one discovers something else, so naturally all relations are upset in the long run.
One can of course deceive oneself for a certain length of time; one can live under an illusion, having a relation only to the positive side of the neurotic, but after a while one will be confronted with the negative side and then one will see the mistake.
And so Nietzsche, inflated by that archetype Zarathustra, was inhuman; a person who is assimilated by such an archetype is necessarily not human.
He is a Superman, and how can one have a friendship with a Superman?
Absolutely impossible. One can only worship him as a superior being.
But I wouldn’t drink a glass of beer with a Superman. One cannot eat at the same table; one can only hold communion where he is the lord. Is your question answered, Miss Hannah?
Miss Hannah: Yes, quite. But what I really meant was: was it not his impatience that really destroyed his relationships and his own life?
The impatience of intuition?
Dr. Jung: Well, that impatience expresses itself very strongly in the figure of Zarathustra. He is urgent, pressed by time; he wants to deliver his message, he cannot wait.
I mentioned that later chapter where he is seen descending to hell through the volcano and where a voice says: “Es ist Zeit, hochste Zeit.”
That shows how impatient he is to tell his message, as if he felt his impending doom, the degeneration of the brain which began soon after.
In Ecce Horno you already see traces of it, the first symptom occurred only four or five years later.
So it was really immediately before the gate was closed that Zarathustra was able to deliver his message.
Dr. Howells: You don’t put that to his own nature? You put it rather to the doom that was awaiting him?
Dr. Jung: I would say it was also an intuition of the doom.
We are almost
forced to such an assumption on account of the clear indication
of the catastrophe in the death of the rope-dancer; there Nietzsche
predicts his own fate.
Miss Iannah: Would it not have been possible, if he had curbed that impatience, to have avoided the doom?-if he had been more considerate to the human animal?
Dr . .Jung: Then the case would have been quite different; we cannot say what would have happened if the old Romans had had rifles and gunpowder.
Mrs. Baynes: I think you said at the beginning of the Seminar last spring that it was a question whether the events were going to transpire in the pure collective unconscious or the collective conscious. If he has parted with his body as a human being, could we say the rest of the book transpires in the pure collective unconscious?
Dr. Jung: One could formulate it like that. But it is happening really in the collective consciousness.
Inasmuch as Zarathustra is written and spoken, it is already part of consciousness.
You see, as long as it is the collective unconscious, it is as if contained in the person or individual; but inasmuch as it becomes spoken, manifest, it is in the collective consciousness.
So whatever happens now is happening in a collective consciousness because it is the life of a personified idea. It is no longer in the collective unconscious; if it were there we would not know of it.
Mrs. Baynes: I thought that he was just speaking as if through a loudspeaker from the collective unconscious.
Dr. Jung: Yes, that is true, but through the speaking, it becomes collective consciousness.
That transformation of the collective unconscious into the collective consciousness is what one calls revelation, and any revelation that really comes from the collective unconscious is like a megaphone because it is a message spoken to many; it reaches a crowd because it expresses a collective thought.
So inasmuch as Zarathustra has expressed the collective thought, he has become part of the collective consciousness.
Mr. Baumann: Does that mean that it wouldn’t necessarily go into his individual consciousness?
Dr. Jung: It can be quite aside from the individuality.
It is often as if Nietzsche did not exist, or did not know what he was saying.
Therefore, many revelations take place through completely unconscious individuals; they speak through a trance. It is even the primitive assumption that a revelation always takes place through an unconscious body, in a sort of trance.
Suddenly a spirit seizes the person and he becomes unconscious or gets into a state of ekstasis and utters the revelation.
He speaks the divine word, and afterwards can remember nothing of it.
It is even a criterion of the revelation from the collective unconscious, that the individual is put out completely while it is happening; the typical medicine-man often behaves like that.
Well now, we spoke last time of the nature of the message, the continuation of the Christian idea.
It is an absolute law of the development of religious thought that it evolves as it were out of itself.
On a certain level of consciousness religious thought is expressed by many gods, say, or by demons, or by images; and they have their individual biographies.
They are generated in such and such a way; they are born of such and such parents; they do such and such things; and are for such and such a purpose.
And it is all assumed as a sort of concrete event which has taken place or is taking place-that the gods live on Olympus, for instance, or in certain trees, or any such idea.
Now, this concrete manifestation of the gods contains the next step-the next religious form that is-in a symbolic way.
In what the gods do or in what happens to them, is given at the same time the symbol of the subsequent stage; so one could say that the subsequent stage of religious thought is always the interpretation on the subjective stage.
It is like a dream where there is a sort of concrete action, a concrete performance of concrete people, yet the whole thing represents a thought.
If you analyse it, integrate the imagery of the dream, and understand that Mr. & Mrs. So-and-So who appear in the dream are only aspects of your own psychology, then it becomes clear that you have been enacted as a play in the dream in order that a thought could be performed which is not your thought, but one that has come to you which ought to be realized.
So the end of the dream interpretation is that all the performances are understood as concretizations of a thought which existed before and which caused the dream; through that play on the stage of the dream consciousness, this particular thought was conveyed to your waking consciousness.
One sees the same thing in the continuous revelation of religious thought, which is a sort of dream of the collective unconscious as a whole, different scenes being on the stage at different times.
For instance, for the time between 2000 B.C. and too B.C., the dream-what we might call the divine thought-is staged in such a way.
In the mythology and religions of that age, you find the manifest dream which they took for the real thing.
Then another age comes when all the old gods decay, when they are no longer true, and there we have a new setting; the stage is now formed and a new play takes place.
And this play contains the interpretation of the former one, apparently an entirely different play is enacted, yet it is an interpretation of the former one.
Egypt, for example, was the foremost cultural power in the Near East. It lasted longer than Babylon, which was destroyed by the Persians while Egypt was still guarding the old traditions.
Egypt is chiefly responsible for the drama of the collective unconscious between 4000 and 100 B.C.
The main religious thought which was handed down through the ages was the divinity of the Pharaoh, the king; and the god-man, the savior, the Osiris, the image of the soul.
Osiris was an original god of Egypt, just as old as Ra, yet he was always different from Ra, the sun god.
He was a sort of god-man, the dying and resurrecting hero god. He was first understood to be a god and then he became the soul, the Osiris, of the Pharaoh.
As the king was in a way Ra, he was also Osiris, the dying and resurrecting hero.
So Osiris became the mediator between the gods and men.
Therefore, the surface of the walls of the temples are covered on the outside with representations of he worldly feats of the king, and inside with pictures of the god-king having intercourse with the gods.
Outside, he is the great figure of the land, the political hero, with little warrior figures round him, little soldiers to slay his enemies; and inside the temple, he is the god-man who converses with the gods.
He receives the blessing or the sign of ankh from the hands of the gods, or he offers the ankh to the gods.
They receive life from him through the royal offering.
Now, this figure of Osiris is very clearly an anticipation of Jesus or of the Christus idea, so clearly that even the Catholic church-which is rather hesitant in such matters-permits the theory that Isis and the Horus child are an anticipation of Mary and the Christ Child, as Osiris is an anticipation of the Lord Jesus.
The Christian idea was chiefly influenced by the mystical ideas of Egypt; there were similar ideas in Babylonian culture, but I think the main origin of Christianity is to be found in Egypt.
So the figure of Christ, to us an entirely symbolical figure, is the interpretation of that old Osiris myth of Egypt.
But he was not a symbolic figure to the early Middle Ages or to antiquity.
He was a real fact, as the mother Mary was of course a virgin.
All those things happened in reality, and in the Catholic church you are still forced to believe in the absolute fact of the virgin birth.
Of course, we cannot help seeing that it must be symbolic.
Even if the man Jesus existed at all, the story of his life is not historical.
It is clearly mythology, like the mythology of Attis, or Adonis, or Mithras; that was all syncretistically put together into the figure of the Christus.
We are not quite imbued with the conviction that the crucifixion, the virgin birth, and the story of the temptation is symbolism, and therefore we know something which former ages have not known.
Our problem now is: what does it mean? what is our interpretation?
Zarathustra is, to a certain extent, an interpretation of our Christian idea. And individuation is now our mythology.
Then what is individuation?
It is a great mystery, a boundary concept: we don’t know what it is.: We call it the uniqueness of a certain composition or combination, and beyond that we can say nothing about it.
To us it is a reality, yet it is a reality just on the boundary line of human understanding, and in two thousand years they will probably say that the whole idea of individuation was nothing but symbolism.
And then they will have some new idea to tell about: there will be another Zarathustra perhaps, or any other attempt.
A sort of revelation will take place which will suddenly put an entirely different light upon the hitherto prevailing theory.
You see, if Zarathustra had appeared two thousand years ago, if he had been a Buddha in the first century, for instance, when Buddhism began to spread over Tibet and Southern China, he would have been one of the great teachers of the Mahayana with a red or a yellow hat.
We are still too close to have any relation to it, any historical perspective, but at
a future time-assuming that people continue as they have done hitherto-they may say Zarathustra is the great teacher, the red hat teacher or something of the sort.
They will perhaps invent a name.
Miss Wolff: I have just looked over a book by Herder in which he gives the myths of all people.!
And in speaking of Zoroaster, he says his great idea was that man was perfection of creation.
It is remarkable that this idea has been seen by Herder, who knew, of course, very little of the Persian religion.
I thought Nietzsche must have read it and perhaps been affected by it somewhat.
Dr. Jung: Yes, Nietzsche considered the choice of the name to be of great historical importance, because he held that Zoroaster the Persian was really the inventor of the moral conflict between good and evil, a fact which is hardly to be denied.
As he lived in about the eighth century B.C., he probably had the priority of that idea.
So Nietzsche says that Zoroaster must come back in order to make restitution.
Therefore: his aspiration to be beyond good and evil.
This is of course the idea of liberation from the pairs of opposites which is indispensable for the integration of the individual.
Individuation is impossible as long as one is split into pairs of opposites.
They must be overcome; how, of course, is the great question, but it must be done from a standpoint which is beyond good and evil.
Nietzsche himself felt that symbolically when he wrote an important part of Zarathustra in Sils Maria, “six thousand feet beyond good and evil.”
He felt raised to the seat of the gods, above all the conflicts of the low plains where the herd dwells.
From that height he was able to unite the pairs of opposites, to be free of doubt, to create a standpoint which is the reverse of old Zarathustra’s moral conflict.
So it is quite certain that Nietzsche knew about Zoroaster and was strongly impressed with the fact that he was really the first one to make man conscious of himself.
For nobody becomes conscious of himself without the conflict: we need the conflict.
As long as we are not living according to our own choice we cannot know of ourselves.
We must be able to choose for ourselves.
Miss Wolff” In other mythologies the gods played an important part,
but with Zoroaster man is the important thing. He perfects creation.
Dr. Jung: Quite so. That corresponds with the idea of the integration
of the moral conflict, for in the moral conflict man takes on a sort of divine role.
It is not left to God alone to fight the devil, or, as the Persian religion expressed it, it is not left to the light alone to fight the darkness.
Man enters the battlefield: one could say as the living god, as the manifestation of god in the flesh.
All these ideas are exceedingly old, but they formerly expressed themselves in peculiarly concretized forms.
Each new level of civilization has given a new interpretation, and there is a sort of progress; things are getting more and more to the subjective stage of interpretation.
It is as if we were concerned with a dream that had an exceedingly impressive surface, a very convincing picture with strong emotions, so that we have great difficulty in getting
away from the impression of the complete situation.
But after a while we are able to discover the thought behind it all and then we can integrate the figures of the dream.
For instance, you dream of somebody who seems to be far below your level, a person, say, who is despicable, simply impossible, a person entirely different from your tastes, and you cannot see how you are that person.
But if you meditate long enough about the dream, you discover the secret doors leading to yourself, where you can see the spot in which you are identical with him. ‘
Then you can integrate the figure; then you arrive at the subjective stage of your interpretation.
Formerly the devil was outside.
If anyone did something bad it was because a devil had tempted him.
Or a spirit had possessed him and forced him.
Nobody was responsible: there was no moral responsibility.
But now nobody can use that excuse.
Now he has to say: I am the devil, I am the sinner.
Mr. Baumann: I think this process by which the figure of god becomes symbolical is like the idea of the god going back into the sky, or the stars, or into any idea of remoteness; it happens in every religion to a certain extent. For instance, the Greek gods lived on the earth, on Olympus, and then in the Roman Empire came the idea of the pantheon of the gods. They were removed to the sky.
Dr. Jung: That is true.
You know, there were attempts in antiquity to transform the absolutely concrete gods of Olympus into more mental beings.
They became ideas. Jupiter, for instance, was made into a philosophical concept.
And at the same time, in their concrete form, those primitive gods degenerated completely.
They became ridiculous and were neglected.
They just decayed and vanished, and were then superseded by Eastern religions imported from Palestine, Asia Minor, Egypt, etc.
This process happened everywhere at that time.
The Egyptian priesthood had become highly philosophical, so that a god of the fifth or fourth century B.C say, was no longer concrete; it was already a philosophical idea. Naturally for the vulgar people it was still a concrete god, as is the case in India today.
For instance, Professor von Glasenapp, a German Sanskritist, told me of meeting a Brahman in a temple where the people were worshipping a gorgeous and thoroughly barbarous sculptured image of Vishnu.’
The two men were walking up and down in the courtyard, talking of the Upanishads, and von Glasenapp asked the priest why he allowed those people to worship such
an image if he believed in that philosophy.
And he replied: “But can they grasp the Upanishads? Let them worship the image, because in this the whole philosophy of the Upanishads is expressed.”
That is a very superior point of view, and I am certain that the Egyptian priests
had such a philosophy too, but it was so well guarded that it never was betrayed.
Surely the subsequent world of ideas, the apparently sudden explosion of that enormous fantastical philosophy called “The Gnosis” is due to the ideas of the Egyptian priesthood.
They were no longer held sufficiently within the precincts of the temples; something filtered through the walls.
But the main body of their ideas died out simply because they were never betrayed.
We know precious little of them.
So I am convinced that early Christianity originated in the secret teaching which somehow filtered through when the temples became obsolete and the religious forms of Egypt began to degenerate.
The fact that there was, in the time immediately before and after the appearance of Jesus, an enormous development of thought of a very new and different kind, is too unaccountable otherwise.
Plutarch, who was an Egyptian initiate, gives in his book about Isis and Osiris the philosophical interpretation of their mysteries.
And Herodotus, many centuries before, was an initiate, but he was not allowed to speak about them.
The initiations probably consisted of a sort of philosophical teaching in which the secret meaning of the images, the sacred signs, and names was explained.
There are many very obvious symbolic allusions on the Mithraic monuments, for instance, which must have been explained to the initiates.
The rites were always secret because the secret meanings were spoken or alluded to.
And the early Christians also had their mysteries.
Baptism and communion belong to the mysteries: baptism was initiation.
Mr. Baumann: Would one not say that Christ had turned into a philosophical idea?
Dr. Jung: As soon as we say of a thing that it is symbolic, it is already a philosophical idea, whether it is formulated or not.
The idea of Christ is only just becoming a philosophical idea, for there are people who still think he is personal, a real man, a real presence, and they grow quite afraid when one says otherwise.
The Lord Buddha was a man like Jesus; he was real, but he has become a symbol.
He is not even called by his real name; that is a ritual name.
Or he is called the Tathagata, meaning “the perfect one, the accomplished one.” He is a symbol; he is the idea of perfection.
And so Christ is for us the idea of a human individual that has attained to the state of perfection.
Prof Fierz: He was named Jesus and we call him Christ.
Dr. Jung: Yes, by giving him a ritual name, we have already declared him to be a symbol.
Christna means ointment, and Christ is the anointed one, the baptized one; he is the symbol of the initiated one.
His real name is most ordinary. Jesus is a name like Muller or Smith.
Mrs. Crowley: Would you not say that, in the main, the more philosophical these gods have become-the more they have become abstract ideas-the less vital they are as gods? They seem to be so bloodless and lifeless.
That image of Sophia is nothing compared with Isis.
Dr. Jung: Yes, they evaporate into thin smoke, but then the idea itself takes a new form which is exceedingly vital.
For instance, the old idea of Osiris being one complete god evaporated and became the Osiris of the king.
Then it was the Osiris of the grand vizier, and the high priest, and the treasurer, and so on; and finally it was just everybody.
Smith and Jones and everybody had their Osiris.
The Osiris of Mr. Smith was a perfectly good Osiris, but with that the whole idea was banalized.
Osiris became a sort of immortal genius of everybody and no longer had any particular value.
So that symbol vanished and was replaced by a new idea, namely, a ne\· man.
And the new idea suddenly became exceedingly vital, because he was a man and a king at the same time; the great point was that, though he was a king, yet he was from the low ones.
He was even of disreputable birth; human misery was a cradle for the divine man.
That of course was a great message.
But now the idea of individuation, as portrayed by the symbol of Christ, the divine man, is thin smoke because it is abstract; while for Mr. Smith to discover that he is an individual is at least two million volts.
You know what it meant for all the low ones, the prostitutes and the tax-collectors and the illegitimate children and the illegitimate mothers, to know that from among them the god-man had come; so you can appreciate what it means when Mr. Smith discovers that he is an individual.
Now, Zarathustra rightly wants to find his companions; it is a mistake only if he seeks his companions instead of himself, instead of his own humanity or his body.
If Zarathustra were a real man and had accomplished the Superman in himself, it would be quite natural that companions would come to him. He would not go to seek them. Have you ever heard of gold running after people? ‘
The gold is hidden in the clefts of the earth and is just waiting; it is always gold in itself and will always be sought for.
If there is really a good thing, it is sought for: that is the characteristic of the good thing.
The mountain comes to the prophet, the prophet never goes to the mountain.
If any prophet is seen going to the mountain, you may know he has made a mistake.
He had much better stay at home and leave the mountain to itself.
Therefore, all this missionary talk here is of course the hunger.
If anybody wants to “missionarize” the world and to tell people what is good for them, it means that he is hungry; he wants to fill his belly with the corpses of other people.
His own ideas are hungry, his own soul; and other people are feeding his thoughts and appetites because he is unable to feed them himself.
If you discover what you call a truth, you should test it, try to eat it.
If it feeds you it is good, but if you cannot live by it and only assume it ought to feed other people, then it is bad.
The real test is that your truth should be good for yourself.
Not one clog is coming to sniff at it if it doesn’t feed yourself. If you are not satisfied with it, if you cannot enjoy it for twenty, fifty years, or a whole lifetime, it is no good.
If you are hungry, if you think your companions must be redeemed, and that
they must be grateful to you on top of all, then you make a mistake: you may know the idea is no good.
So don’t play the missionary.
Don’t try to eat the goods of others.
Let other people belong to themselves and look after their own improvement: let them eat themselves.
If they are really satisfied, then nobody should disturb them.
If they are not satisfied with what they possess, they will probably seek something better; and if you are the one who has the better thing, they will surely come and get if from you.
It is an exaggeration, therefore, that Zarathustra wants to entice many away from the herd.
He would quite rightly be called a robber by the shepherd.
The sheep want to be with the shepherd, for otherwise the wolves eat them.
He says he doesn’t want to be the shepherd dog of a herd, so he should leave them with
the shepherd; they are much better off with a real shepherd than they would be as companions of that hungry wolf Zarathustra.
If he wants to have companions, let him go with the wolves; then he can hunt in a
pack. With the sheep it is much too easy.
You see, that is the attitude one ought to take with reference to the problem of individuation: no mission work, no preaching, and no enticing little children from their nurses, or sheep from the shepherd.
Let them be with the shepherd, it is much better.
People accuse me of a particularly characterless attitude as to religious convictions because I say if anybody wants to be in the fold of the Catholic church, let him remain there.
Or let him remain a Protestant if he finds his way in it and his life.
That is a contradiction to them, but it is no contradiction.
Some people want twenty degrees, and others want twenty-two degrees. Why not?
Let them have it. Some people don’t like to eat meat, others want to live on it.
Well, do so, it doesn’t concern me.
For to be Catholic simply means that one is Catholic, and to be Protestant means that one is Protestant.
Or if you believe in Islam, it simply means that you are the kind of man who believes in Islam.
You could not possibly believe in Islam here because it doesn’t suit our climate in the least, but down on the Red Sea and thereabouts, you understand why those people
can believe in Islam, why it is so much better than Christianity.
Christianity is most degenerate there.
When I saw the mosques and compared them to the Greek Orthodox church, I understood; I would have gone with Islam by all means, if only in order to clear out that
whole lampisterie. The Christian churches in the East are filled with bunk, and the dirty priests are awful; you wish they had a basin in which to wash themselves.
And the hypocrisy and the lowdown barbaric worship of images!
It makes you feel like Christ when he drove all those money-changers out of the temple.
Islam is a decent religion in comparison.
We get the wrong side of it because only theologians are interested in religions, and they are of course against religions other than their own, so they paint them black.
I was amazed to find Islam so much more spiritual than Eastern Christianity, which is only a degenerate remnant of Christian Gnosticism.
You see, certain countries, certain climates, make you naturally prefer a certain way of dealing with the great secrets.
If you live in India, for instance, and are not infected with the Indian spirit, then you are
just a sad specimen.
A missionary living in the East, who wants to convert Indians or Chinamen, and is not sensitive enough to be affected by the specific spirit of the country, is a very melancholy spectacle.
Men like Richard Wilhelm or Hauer were instantly open to it, for it is greater and better than our views in certain respects.
Of course, it would he stupid to seek technology in Shanghai or in India, and it is
stupid to believe we can bring them any religious ideas.
We can bring them a certain amount of sentimentality, but their inner development is much greater than ours.
Of course, it does not express itself outwardly, but does our Christianity express itself outwardly? Can you show anything that would prove the particular influence of our Christianity upon politics for instance?
Not a trace of it.
Mr. Baumann: But I think India and China expressed something several centuries ago.
Dr. Jung Well, moderately.
But we had better not try to prove by external manifestations the truth of internal development.
Things were always a bit tough everywhere, so I would not lay too much stress on it.
If you know how the first Christians behaved-who were supposed to be such marvelous people-you become modest.
It is surely better not to insist upon moral achievements.
Of course, it is in a way the criterion if they do not show.
Things that don’t show are usually better than those which do; people who show are always a bit questionable.
They don’t do really, they only show.
Well now, the idea of being active and violating others also shows in Zarathustra’s idea of the decalogue, the tables of values.
He says: “Behold, the good and just! Whom do they hate most? Him who beareth
up their tables of values, the breaker, the law-breaker:-he, however, is the creator.”
But he is the destroyer!
No good breaking the tables of values, they are weak enough already; you had better hold that little bit of value together.
They need no particular wildness because they will break up all by themselves and altogether too early; we know from history that values begin to break up long before there are new ones to take their place.
Therefore, we always go through a time of destruction when people are without orientation and without laws.
Usually only the greatest misery forces people to create new laws and new values.
If Zarathustra were not so impatient, the man Nietzsche could follow him.
He could give Zarathustra the right rhythm, prevent him from being too impatient.
Then he would not talk of breaking the tables of values.
They could be preserved a little longer.
They are weak enough: they will break up without our help.
It is not necessary to destroy churches.
Nobody attacks Islam, but the mosques are empty; nobody attacks Protestantism, but innumerable people never go to church on Sundays.
To break up things is merely the impatience of inflation.
Now, just at the end of this section he says something which is remarkable:
“To the lone-dwellers will I sing my song, and to the twain dwellers; and unto him who hath still ears for the unheard, will I make the heart heavy with my happiness.”
This is not well translated in the English text, but you get it in the German.
Einsiedler is one man alone, the one-dweller, literally; and Zweisiedler are the two-dwellers.
But that is not a real word, it is something funny in his style; and that always indicates a secret thought behind, which did not come through properly.
It is like queer things in dreams; a peculiarity or a disturbance of the image betrays the interference of a secret thought behind.
You see, it would be enough if he said: “I am preaching to the lonely ones.
They shall be my companions, for the lonely ones can appreciate my teaching.
They are not satisfied and are seeking the Superman together with myself; as they are lonely, I am lonely, etc.”
That would make a perfectly nice end to this chapter.
But no, it must be: “Zwei-siedler”; there are couples apparently, two alone together.
Of course one can have a romantic idea about it-he and she-but that is surely not what
Nietzsche is thinking of.
It must be two lonely people together. Now why the one and the two?
Mr. Baumann: Is it like Nietzsche and Zarathustra, the splitting up of one person?
Dr. Jung: Yes there is a great problem behind.
One alone would be good enough for Zarathustra, the lonely one, the anchorite; two is already society, a relationship.
When I am one I am this man; when I am two I am another man.
As soon as you are with somebody else you are different, you are the collective man.
So he makes here the attempt at preaching to the collective man, the thing which he had just refused to do. He said he never would speak to the herd again.
But here two of the herd come in; he cannot get away from it.
That is an important problem and there is historical proof of it.
You know, the theory is that the Evangels were originally derived from the so-called Aramaic collection of sayings of Jesus.
But in the excavations at Oxyrhynchus those famous fragments of papyrus were found which contain sentences and anecdotes of Jesus, just as if they had been put down from hearsay; and they are all parallels of the sayings in the New Testament.
They were written without the knowledge of the Evangels and are therefore older-just as Paul did not know the Evangels when he wrote-so they date presumably from the very early years of Christianity.
Now, in the New Testament, you remember, the text is: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”
But the text in the papyrus is: “Jesus said: ‘Whenever there are two they are not without God, and wherever there is one alone I say I am with him; raise the stone and there thou shalt find me, cleave the wood and there am I.’ ”
You see what has happened.
His teaching was really: “Where there is one alone I am with him most definitely.
Whatever you do I am with you; raise the stone and there you shalt find me; in your activity, in what you do, in whatever your individual occupation is, I am found, I am present in it.”
It is the idea of individuation obviously, because no matter how humble the thing you may do, it is yourself expressed in the way in which you do it.
Jesus is in it; you find him in it: “Cleave the wood and there am 1.” “But when there are two they are not without God.”‘
Yes, the collective man is not without God, but when you are alone, then Christ is within.
So the original teaching was that it is an entirely individual affair.
That is proved by another fragment, the famous fragment about the animals.
Jesus said: “Ye ask who are those that draw us to the kingdom if the kingdom is in heaven?”-meaning obviously: who can pull us up over the horizon with our heavy bodies, how can we reach the kingdom above?
“And Jesus answered: ‘The fowls of the air and all beasts that are in the earth or upon the earth, and the fishes of the sea, these are they which draw you; and the kingdom of heaven is within you; and whoever shall know himself shall find it. Strive therefore to know yourselves and ye shall be aware that ye are in the city of God, and ye are the city,’ ”
You see, it is as clear as daylight: this is the idea of individuation.
Of course, modern Christianity fights against that point of view.
Their idea is that when there are two or three together in Christ’s name, He is with them, but when there is one alone, then the devil is with him.
They believe one’s own society is always bad.
We have arrived at a complete depreciation of the human soul: it doesn’t pay to look after your soul.
Be a sheep in collectivity, for when you are alone the devil is with you.
Now, the teaching of Zarathustra is again the teaching of the original revelation. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 202-218