Then I walk into the welcoming house where Izdubar should find healing.
I come to a quiet dark garden and a secluded house.
I hide Izdubar under the drooping branches of a tree, go up to the door of the house, and knock.
An old maid opens.
I ponder the door, it is much too small.
Izdubar will never go through it.
Yet a fantasy takes up no space!
Why did this excellent thought not occur to me earlier?
I hurry back and with no difficulty squeeze Izdubar into the size of an egg and put him in my pocket.
Then I walk into the welcoming house where Izdubar should find healing. ~Carl Jung, Vol. III, Page 129
For Jung’s commentary on this entry, see LN, pp. 295-98.
He said the following to Aniela Jaffe concerning these sections:
“You will also recognize that which is driven by fear in my imaginations, namely in my attempts to depict how one can elude such a dreadful entanglement.
You can see this most clearly in the chapter on the devil.
Or, for example, in the chapter featuring Gilgamesh-Izdubar.
It is really quite stupid; why do I need to rack my brains how the dead giant might be helped.
But I a fantasy.
But I would still know that I had failed.
have gone to great lengths to find a solution, quite unperturbed about how ridiculous this was.
I had to find a formula through which this fantasy could assume its full significance, and yet set me free at the same time.
In a sense I paid for the ridiculous solution I found with the insight that I had captured a God, so to speak.
These imaginations are a virtually hellish mixture of the ridiculous and the sublime.
It cost me so very much that I was trapped like a mouse by such ridiculous unrealities, and that I could then free myself with utmost courage and my victim’s goodwill.
It is like fooling a person who is drowning in a bathtub that it is actually the ocean” (MP, pp. 147- 48) . ~The Black Books, Vol. III, Page 130-131, fn 120
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
Oh Izdubar. Divine one, how wonderful! You are healed!
At night, when everything calmed down, I put my hand into my pocket and retrieved the egg. It was a real egg with a white hard shell.
I placed it on the rug in the middle of the room and carefully opened it.
Something resembling smoke rises up from it to the ceiling of the room and suddenly Izdubar’s frame is standing before me, enormous and complete.
His limbs are also whole and I find no trace of lameness on him.
It’s as if he had awoken from a deep sleep.
Izdubar: Where am I? How narrow it is here and how dark and how cool? Am I in the grave?
Where was I?-It seemed to me as if I had been outside in the universe over and under me was a black an endlessly black star-glittering sky-and I was in a passion of unspeakable yearning-streams of fire broke from my radiating body-I surged through blazing flames –
I swam in a sea that wrapped me in the living fires-full of light,- full of longing- full of eternity-I was ancient and perpetually renewing myself- swirling down from the heights to the depths, and whirled glowing from the depths to the heights hovering around myself amidst fiery glowing clouds-as raining embers beating down like the foam of the surf, engulfing myself in stifling heat- suddenly, once again, blazing up glowing white-embracing and rejecting myself in an enormous game.
Where was I?-I was completely sun.
Jung: Oh Izdubar. Divine one, how wonderful! You are healed!
Izdubar: Healed? Was I ever sider Who speaks of sickness?
I was sun- completely sun. I am the sun.
An inexpressible light breaks from his entire body, a light that my eyes cannot grasp.
I must cover my face so as not to turn blind-I cast my face to the ground as the cover does not protect my eyes.
“You are the sun, the eternal light-most powerful one, forgive me for carrying you- ~The Black Books, Vol. III, Page 131
Roscher notes, “As a God, Izdubar is associated with the Sun-God” (Ausjahrliches Lexikon der Griecliischen und Romischen Mythologie vol. 2 , p. 774).
The incubation and rebirth of Izdubar follows the classic pattern of solar myths.
In Das Zeitalter des Sonnengottes, Leo Frobenius pointed out the widespread motif of a woman becoming pregnant through Immaculate Conception and giving birth to the sun god, who develops in a remarkably short period of time. In some forms, he incubates in an egg. Frobenius related this to the setting and rising of the sun in the sea (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1904, pp. 223- 63) .
Jung cited this work on a number of occasions in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido.
He got to know Frobenius at Count Keyserling’s School of Wisdom in the 1920s (MP, p. 18). ~The Black Books, Vol. III, Page 131, fn 124
