The Battle for Deliverance from the Mother
For Jung, the hero is a symbol of the developing ego’s libido.
By libido, Jung means not simply desire or psychological energy but psychological purpose as well.
For him, the hero myth expresses the ego’s desire to replace dependency upon the unconscious with self-direction—a purpose that
necessitates an ambivalent struggle with the mother, who symbolizes the unconscious.
441 Once again we recognize the typical elements of a libido myth: original
bisexuality, immortality (invulnerability) through entry into the mother (splitting the mother with the foot), resurrection as a soul-bird, and production of fertility (rain).
When a hero of this type causes his lance to be worshipped, he probably does so because he thinks it a valid equivalent of himself.
442 From this standpoint the passage in Job, which we quoted in Part I [not included here], appears in a new light:
He hath set me up for his mark.
His archers compass me round about,
He cleaveth my reins asunder, and doth not spare
He poureth out my gall upon the ground.
He breaketh me with breach upon breach,
He runneth upon me like a giant.
443 Here Job is voicing the torment of soul caused by the onslaught of unconscious desires; the libido festers in his flesh, a cruel God has
overpowered him and pierced him through with barbed thoughts that
agonize his whole being.
444 The same image occurs in Nietzsche:
Stretched out, shivering,
Like one half dead whose feet are warmed,
Shaken by unknown fevers,
Shuddering from the icy pointed arrows of frost,
Hunted by thee, O thought,
Unutterable! veiled! horrible one!
Thou huntsman behind the clouds.
Struck to the ground by thee,
Thou mocking eye that gazeth at me from the dark:
Thus do I lie,
Twisting, writhing, tortured With eternal tortures, Smitten
By thee, cruel huntsman,
Thou unknown—God!
Smite deeper!
Smite once more!
Pierce, rend my heart!
What meaneth this torturing
With blunt-toothed arrows?
Why gazest thou again,
Never weary of human agony.
With sardonic gods’-eyes, flashing lightning?
Why wilt thou not kill,
Only torture, torture?
445 No long-drawn explanations are needed to see in this comparison the martyred and sacrificed god whom we have already met in the Aztec crucifixions and in the sacrifice of Odin.
We meet the same image in depictions of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, where the glowing, girlishly tender flesh of the young saint betrays all the pain of renunciation which the sensibility of the artist projected into it.
An artist cannot prevent his work from being coloured by the psychology of his time.
This is true in even higher degree of the Christian symbol, the Crucified pierced by the lance.
It is a true symbol of the man of the Christian era, tormented by his desires and crucified in Christ.
446 That the torment which afflicts mankind does not come from outside, but that man is his own huntsman, his own sacrificer, his own sacrificial knife, is clear from another poem of Nietzsche’s, where the dualism is resolved into a psychic conflict through the same symbolism:
O Zarathustra,
Most cruel Nimrod!
Erstwhile hunter of God,
Snare of all virtue,
Arrow of evil!
And now
Self-hunted,
Thine own quarry,
Thyself pierced through …
Now
Alone with thyself,
Split in thine own knowledge,
Amidst a hundred mirrors
To thine own self false,
Amidst a hundred memories
Uncertain,
Languishing with each wound,
Shivering with each frost,
Strangled in thine own snares,
Self-knower! Self-hangman!
Why didst thou hang thyself
With the noose of thy wisdom?
Why hast thou enticed thyself
Into the old serpent’s Paradise?
Why hast thou stolen
447 The deadly arrows do not strike the hero from without; it is himself who hunts, fights, and tortures himself. In him, instinct wars with instinct; therefore the poet says, “Thyself pierced through,” which means that he is wounded by his own arrow.
As we know that the arrow is a libido-symbol, the meaning of this “piercing” is clear: it is the act of union with oneself, a sort of self-fertilization, and also a self-violation, a self-murder, so that Zarathustra can justly call himself his own hangman (like Odin, who
sacrifices himself to Odin).
One should not of course take this psychologem in too voluntaristic a sense: nobody deliberately inflicts such tortures on himself, they just happen to him.
If a man reckons the unconscious as part of his personality, then one must admit that he is in fact raging against himself.
But, in so far as the symbolism thrown up by his suffering is archetypal and collective, it can be taken as a sign that he is no longer suffering from himself, but rather from the spirit of the age.
He is suffering from an objective, impersonal cause, from his collective unconscious which he has in common with all men.
448 Being wounded by one’s own arrow signifies, therefore, a state of introversion.
What this means we already know: the libido sinks “into its own depths” (a favourite image of Nietzsche’s), and discovers in the
darkness a substitute for the upper world it has abandoned—the world of memories (“Amidst a hundred memories”), the strongest and most influential of which are the earliest ones.
It is the world of the child, the paradisal state of early infancy, from which we are driven out by the relentless law of time.
In this subterranean kingdom slumber sweet feelings of home and the hopes of all that is to be.
As Heinrich says of his miraculous work in Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Sunken Bell:
It sings a song, long lost and long forgotten,
A song of home, a childlike song of love,
Born in the waters of some fairy well,
Known to all mortals, and yet heard of none.
449 Yet “the danger is great,” as Mephistopheles says, for these depths fascinate.
When the libido leaves the bright upper world, whether from choice, or from inertia, or from fate, it sinks back into its own depths, into
the source from which it originally flowed, and returns to the point of cleavage, the navel, where it first entered the body.
This point of cleavage is called the mother, because from her the current of life reached us Whenever some great work is to be accomplished, before which a man recoils, doubtful of his strength, his libido streams back to the fountainhead—and that is the dangerous moment when the issue hangs between annihilation and new life.
For if the libido gets stuck in the wonderland of this inner world, then for the upper world man is nothing but a shadow, he is already moribund or at least seriously ill.
But if the libido manages to tear itself loose and force its way up again, something like a miracle happens: the journey to the underworld was a plunge into the fountain of youth, and the libido, apparently dead, wakes to renewed fruitfulness.
This idea is illustrated in an Indian myth:
Vishnu sank into a profound trance, and in his slumber brought forth Brahma, who, enthroned on a lotus, rose out of Vishnu’s navel, bringing with him the Vedas, which he diligently read. (Birth of creative thought from introversion.)
But through Vishnu’s ecstatic absentmindedness a mighty flood came upon the world. (Devouring and destruction of the world through introversion.)
Taking advantage of the general confusion, a demon stole the Vedas and hid them in the depths.
Brahma then roused Vishnu, who, changing himself into a fish, plunged into the flood, fought the demon, conquered him, and recaptured the Vedas. ~Carl Jung, Aspects of the Masculine, Para 441-449
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