Nietzsche: “With his grandfather, however, doth time cease.”
LECTURE V 15 February 1939
Profjung:
I find here two contributions. One is a prayer, but because I am not
God I cannot fulfil it.
The other is from Mrs. von Roques: “There is a
Russian fairy tale of a Czar who bade his three sons ‘seek his traces and
pick his flowers.’
The two elder sons do not succeed, although they are
given the best horses.
But the youngest son takes the poorest horse,
transforms it (by killing and magic) into the best of stallions, sits on it
backwards and thus rides to his grandfather’s cellar, strengthens himself
by drinking his grandfather’s wine, takes saddle and head-harness
from there, and then is able to fulfill his task.
In this case the ‘grandfather’
(dead) is regression ‘pour mieux sauter,’ and is probably ‘pars
pro toto’ for all the other side. (Perhaps it is also the first step on the way.)
Feeling at home there gives him (the hero) the necessary strength and
possibilities.”
I am not quite clear about this.
Mrs. von Rogues: Nietzsche says in the fourth verse in part 11: … he
who is of the populace, his thoughts go back to his grandfather,-with
his grandfather, however, doth time cease.”
In this story, it is a going
back also, but it has a more positive meaning; with Nietzsche it is negative.
Prof jung: Naturally it would be negative, but it also has a positive
meaning-that the grandfather, as the term denotes, is the aggrandized
father.
In your fairy tale the grandfather is the primordial being
that asks the great question, or sets the great task.
Mrs. von Rogues: The father sets the task, and then the hero goes
back to the grandfather.
Profjung: Well, the grandfather really sets the task.
He is the origin,
because he is the representative of the altjiranga, which means psychologically,
the representative of the collective unconscious.
Since the
collective unconscious, through the archetypes, sets the task, it is often
called “the grandfather” directly. The primitives use that very term.
They call those powers that make people do the particular things,
“grandfathers.”
They are the originators of the arts and crafts, for instance,
and they have the knowledge of the country, the planting and
hunting, the knowledge of medicinal herbs, and so on; all that is the
grandfather’s work: he taught it.
But by “the grandfather” they mean
the half man, half beast, that was in the beginning, in the alcheringa
time, when they performed all those labors and tasks on the earth
which became the models for mankind-what they must do in order to
attain their ends.
For instance, the half man, half beast-whatever he
was-once came to a spot where he planted rice, which means that he
transformed into rice, became the rice man, as you can still see.
A stalk
of rice has roots, a stem, a head, and even hair on the head; the roots
are the feet, the stem is the body and neck, the grain is the head, and
the little spikes are the hair.
So it is clear that the grandfather was
transformed into rice.
And from that he transformed into something
else, perhaps a bird.
He is even believed to have transformed into a hoe
which clearly consists of a head and a neck and a body.
Mrs. von Roques: So the hero goes back to the grandfather, and
Nietzsche also.
Prof. Jung: Yes, the grandfather is simply the primordial image of
the hero: the hero is embodied in the grandfather; or the grandfather
is the first model of what a hero should be.
The head man of a certain
water-totem, for example, is a sort of grandchild of the grandfather,
because he knows best what the alcheringa grandfather has done in order
to produce the water-he transformed perhaps into rain-so he
will repeat by a magic ceremony what the alcheringa ancestor did: he
will be the rain-maker. Nietzsche is all depreciation.
To him the grandfather’s
time conveys absolutely no meaning except that it is old-fashioned
and antiquated-old nonsense even.
We only spoke of the other
significance of the grandfather because of Nietzsche’s peculiar remark,
“With his grandfather, however, doth time cease.”
He says those
people who have the views of the grandfather never see further back,
but merely repeat the ways and the words of the grandfather, because
that is the only knowledge of history they possess.
But curiously
enough that fits in-that is exactly what happens with the primitives.
Beyond the third or fourth generation there is nothing.
Then comes
the alcheringa time and there time comes to a standstill: as the Central
Australians say, the time when there was no time.
Only when man appeared
was there time, and even then, having a time, they are still surrounded
by no time because altjiranga is eternal.
So the grandfathers,
half man and half beast, have only gone underground; they sank down
their relics.
Therefore, there are certain sacred spots in which their respective
ceremonies are celebrated, and they cannot be celebrated anywhere
else.
In modern times farmers have taken land which originally belonged
to the natives, and if they happened to occupy such a sacred place, the
primitive was in this way killed.
The vital ceremonies can only be celebrated
in that one place, and if that is used for agriculture or any other purpose, it is desecrated. They cannot perform the alcheringa rites because
the necessary food cannot be supplied.
The relationship to nature
is lost because the relationship to the ancestors is lost-only there are the altjirangamitjinas present and accessible. It is as if their connection
with nature had been severed, and then those people are doomed;
they decay when they lose the inner connection.
All those primitive
tribes are fertile and quite well off as long as they live in their natural
haunts and have their natural religious relationship with nature, but
the moment that is disrupted, they are gone.
Then they form a sort of
physical and mental proletariat-no good for anything. Like the socalled
“mission boy” in Africa, who is no good at all.
He is an animal
speaking a sort of Christian slang which he doesn’t understand. One
sees at once that it is all bunk.
They say, “I am a good Christian like
you, I know all those fellows, Johnny and Marky and Lukey”; and
when one asks about Jesus, they say he is a grasshopper and sing a
hymn “Jesus, our grasshopper.”
To preach a highly developed religion,
which even we do not understand, to such people is utterly ridiculous.
Our missionaries work pure magic out there: they teach them
prayers which they repeat with their lips, but their hearts cannot follow.
Of course the missionary is much too uneducated to understand
what he is doing.
Even in the Catholic church where the priests are
supposed to have a good education, one must seek far to find one who
can tell you about the symbolism of the Mass or any other rite; they are
just magically caught and don’t know what they are doing. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1528-1530
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