Madness is a special form of the spirit
Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you.
Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life…If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature…Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical.
Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.” ~Carl Jung; Red Book; Nox Tertia; Page 298.
My soul spoke to me in a whisper, urgently and alarmingly: “Words, words, do not make too many words. Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it?
Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner?
You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life.” ~Carl Jung, Red Book, Page 298.
Instinct wants to be transformed into spirit
In his study entitled “The Incest Taboo and the Virgin Archetype,” John Layard makes clear that the word “virgin” was not synonymous with “chaste” in either its Greek or Hebrew origins.
Referring to the Virgin Mary and to other mothers of divine heroes, he says, It would appear that to be a virgin in the mythological sense the woman must conceive outside or before the marriage bond. . .
What then do we mean by “virgin”? It may help us to examine those ways in which we use the word which are not directly concerned with sex.
We speak of a “virgin forest” as being one in which the powers of nature are untrammelled and untouched by man.
But we can think of this from two diametrically opposite points of view.
We can think of it either from the view of the agricultural pioneer, who would regard it as something to be destroyed and uprooted as soon as possible; or else we can think of it from the point of view of a nature lover who would regard the virgin forest with awe as a supreme manifestation of pregnant nature, and who would oppose all the most enlightened efforts of the agriculturalist or town-builder to destroy its primitive beauty,—who would, in fact, treat it as inviolably holy.
The one would represent “law and order” and the other ”nature”.
So that we have here two opposite principles, both valid, the law of man in apparently open conflict with the law of God.
Yet it is the law of God, the untrammelled law of pregnant though as yet chaotic nature that we dub “virgin”, and it is the reduction of that chaos which we call Law and Order.
Thus in this sense the word “virgin” does not mean chastity but the reverse, the pregnancy of nature, free and uncontrolled, corresponding on the human plane to unmarried love, in contrast to controlled nature corresponding to married love, despite the fact that from the legal point of view sexual intercourse within the marriage bond is the only kind which is regarded as “chaste”.
It will be seen that this argument has landed us in the midst of a paradox, a paradox only to be solved either
a) by regarding the whole biblical story of the Virgin Birth as purely allegorical, which the Church asserts it is not, it being, as she maintains, a unique historical event; or else
b) by reconciling the two through the realization that instinct wants to be transformed into spirit, and that the Virgin Birth is the supreme example of this having been achieved, that is to say that Our Lady’s womanhood was so complete and so closely united with God that it became self-reproductive. — Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin, Page 80.
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