Apocalypse Archetype – Class 6 by Edward Edinger

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• The image of measuring out a temple
• The image of a woman, adorned with the sun, standing on the moon
• The image of war in Heaven and the casting of Satan out of Heaven
• The image of the beast from the sea and the beast from the ground
• The image of the number of the Beast
• Q&A

Introduction

This is class number 6 on the apocalypse archetype and we’ll be covering chapters 11, 12 and 13 of the Book of Revelation.

The image of measuring out a temple

The first item that we’re presented with in tonight’s material is a rather strange image starting out with chapter 11, we read:

"11:1 I was given a long cane as a measuring rod, and I was told, ‘Go and measure God’s sanctuary, and the altar, and the people who worship there;
11:2 but leave out the outer court and do not measure it, because it has been handed over to pagans – they will trample on the holy city for forty-two months.[*a]"

That’s all we hear about the measuring, but I wanna pay a little attention to it because I think it’s significant. As with so much of the material in the Book of Revelation its prototype is found in one of the other visionary books and especially in the Book of Ezekiel and that’s the case concerning this image to because if we go to Ezekiel chapter 40, starting at the beginning of the chapter, Ezekiel describes another one of his visions, he says:

"40:1 In the twenty-fifth year of our captivity, at the beginning of the year, on the tenth day of the month, fourteen years after the destruction of the city,[*a] the hand of Yahweh came on me.
40:2 In a divine vision he took me away to the land of Israel and put me down on a very high mountain, on the south of which there seemed to be built a city."

Ezekiel was in Babylon this time.

"40:3 He took me to it, and there I saw a man who seemed to be made of bronze. He had a flax cord and a measuring rod in his hand and was standing in the gateway.
40:4 The man said to me, ‘Son of man, look carefully, listen closely and pay attention to everything I show you, since you have only been brought here for me to show it to you. Tell the House of Israel everything that you see.’"

What then proceeds is a very lengthy description in which Ezekiel watches this man measuring out a temple, all the dimensions of a temple, and the dimensions are all described. In some Bibles for instance in the N.I.V. Study Bible pictures are even provided of this visionary temple that is described in Ezekiel. It’s described so precisely that it can be drawn, even though it never existed. You see, at the time of Ezekiel’s visions the temple at Jerusalem had already been destroyed, so there was no temple, the Jews were in captivity. Likewise at the time of John’s vision the temple had been destroyed by Titus in 70 A.D., so there was no temple then either, and it’s never been rebuilt.

So what’s going on here is that John is being told to measure a visionary temple. Not an actual temple. That’s a kind of strange business, isn’t it? For the precise approach of quantitative measuring to be applied to visionary subject matter. And as with all this material it brings up the question, what does it mean? Measuring is a careful, rational, analytic procedure in preparation for the actual construction. So what’s happening at this moment is that John is becoming an active participant in the divine drama that’s going on, he’s not just a passive recipient at this moment. The moment that passes and it doesn’t come up again but nevertheless here it is. And I see it as evidence of the psychological fact that there must be the Ego’s active participation in understanding and completing the purposes of the unconscious, once activated. The Ego must participate in the construction of the temple of the Self. It just doesn’t happen miraculously while the Ego watches passively. And in that regard I’d remind you of the dream of Max Zeller’s, the temple dream that I spoke of earlier in our sessions, the dream he had of a vast temple being constructed and various people working it.

The image of a woman, adorned with the sun, standing on the moon

Next item, perhaps the most important one in the whole Book of Revelation, considered psychologically. Beginning of chapter 12 we read as follows:

"12:1 Now a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman, adorned with the sun, standing on the moon, and with the twelve stars on her head for a crown.
12:2 She was pregnant, and in labour, crying aloud in the pangs of childbirth.
12:3 Then a second sign appeared in the sky, a huge red dragon which had seven heads and ten horns, and each of the seven heads crowned with a coronet.
12:4 Its tail dragged a third of the stars from the sky and dropped them to the earth,[a] and the dragon stopped in front of the woman as she was having the child, so that he could eat it as soon as it was born from its mother. 
12:5 The woman brought a male child into the world, the son who was to rule all the nations with an iron sceptre,[b] and the child was taken straight up to God and to his throne,
12:6 while the woman escaped into the desert, where God had made a place of safety ready, for her to be looked after in the twelve hundred and sixty days."

Now if you’ve read the material I suggested in Jung’s Answer to Job, you will know how important Jung considers this particular passage to be in the Book of Revelation. It’s something of a foreign body, because except for the one phrase “the son who was to rule all the nations with an iron sceptre”, there are no other Biblical references, in other words this particular event that takes place is outside the tapestry, the fabric of interconnected allusions that all the rest of the Book of Revelation is consisted of. It’s a foreign body in the material, so to speak.

The conventional interpretation and the strain as evident that has to be made to impose this interpretation. The conventional interpretation is that, I’m gonna call her the Sun-Moon Woman, because she’s clothed in the Sun and her feet are on the Moon, so she’s intimately connected with both Sun and Moon, so for our purposes of description we’ll call her the Sun-Moon Woman. Conventional interpretation seems to be most common is that this Sun-Moon Woman represents the community of God’s people. So if you’re coming from the standpoint of Israel it represents the community of Israel and if you’re coming from the standpoint of Christianity it represents the community of the Church. And the child is considered to be the messiah, Christ, which doesn’t fit at all, since he’d been born long ago. And he’s being caught up to Heaven immediately after birth is thought of as Christ’s ascension. Again, quite a strain. In some cases there is an attempt to equate the Sun-Moon Woman with Mary, naturally if that woman is the one giving birth to the messiah then she would have to be the Virgin Mary, but that likewise is a great strain. In an interesting variation that I came across as I was looking over some Jehovah’s Witness theology is that according to their current theology anyway the Sun-Moon Woman is Jehovah’s symbolic wife. That’s kind of an interesting idea coming out of a fundamentalist sect. Kind of surprised me. Anyway, this passage Jung attributes great importance to. In paragraph 711 here’s some of what he has to say, in Answer to Job:

"[711] This vision is altogether out of context. Whereas with the previous visions one has the impression that they were afterwards revised, rearranged, and embellished, one feels that this image is original and not intended for any educational purpose."

I’m skipping a bit.

"[711] … it is all part of the heavenly hieros gamos, whose fruit is a divine man-child. He is threatened with the fate of Apollo, the son of Leto, who was likewise pursued by a dragon."

Let me stop here for a moment. The imagery is indeed a clear reference to the Greek myth of Leto giving birth to Apollo and Artemis. Zeus had a relation with Leto, generating Hera’s jealousy and Leto was pregnant with twins but Hera pursued her by directing the python to follow her and also denying permission in effect for any country to give her rest to give birth, so that no country would accept her. And what eventually happened was that Apollo and Artemis were born on the floating island of Delos, see it didn’t really exist, it was just floating, but once the birth took place it rooted and became substantial Island. And shortly after Apollo’s birth he then slew the python that had been pursuing Leto, he caught up with it at Delphi and the python was slayed there. Now look at the comparison here. It’s a very close comparison. Leto gives birth to the Sun and the Moon. We forget that fact when we call them Apollo and Artemis, but that’s the cosmic level of the Apollo-Artemis pair. Sun and Moon. That means then that the Sol-Luna coniunctio existed on an unconscious basis in Leto before the births. And when they were born then a separatio took place. That’s the psychological level in happening as of the Greek psyche at that stage of theirs.

But now look what happens with the parallel event in Revelation. The Sun-Moon Woman in Revelation who is the parallel to Leto is connected to Sun and Moon already as separate entities. And her birth is a single birth. So the Revelation Sun-Moon Woman gives birth to one child, a union of the opposites, the reverse phenomenon to what happens with the birth of Apollo and Artemis from Leto. Now, Jung alludes to this in paragraph 712:

"[712] The son who is born of these heavenly nuptials is perforce a complexio oppositorum, a uniting symbol, a totality of life. John’s unconscious, certainly not without reason, borrowed from Greek mythology in order to describe this strange eschatological experience, for it was not on any account to be confused with the birth of the Christ-child which had occurred long before under quite different circumstances."

What happened then as soon as the child was born in Revelation he was taken up or caught up, as most translations put it, to God and his throne and Jung makes the comment then at this point in paragraph 713:

"[713] This would seem to indicate that the child-figure will remain latent for an indefinite time and that its activity is reserved for the future."

I think we can say that this particular visionary episode embedded in the very middle of the Book of Revelation is the living heart of this vision understood psychologically. It’s buried in the midst of all the sound and fury of the apocalypse, it’s a relatively quiet little episode. See, it’s a clearly and utterly authentic spontaneous expression of coniunctio symbolism which demonstrates its authenticity by the very fact that it’s outside the elaborate fabric of textual parallels in which the rest of the text is contained and the fact that its imagery derives from pagan source verifies its psychological authenticity. Jung says as much in paragraph 713:

"[713] The fact that John uses the myth of Leto and Apollo in describing the birth may be an indication that the vision, in contrast to the Christian tradition, is a product of the unconscious.21 But in the unconscious is everything that has been rejected by consciousness, and the more Christian one’s consciousness is, the more heathenishly does the unconscious behave, if in the rejected heathenism there are values which are important for life—if, that is to say, the baby has been thrown out with the bath water, as so often happens."

And indeed the supreme value is to be found embedded in this so-called heathen or Greek imagery because it’s the imagery of wholeness, it’s a symbol of wholeness. It’s the image of totality, the coniunctio, that is, that particular baby.

The image of war in Heaven and the casting of Satan out of Heaven

Alright, next item. In chapter 12 starting with verse 7 we read the following:

"12:7 And now war broke out in heaven, when Michael with his angels attacked the dragon. The dragon fought back with his angels,
12:8 but they were defeated and driven out of heaven.
12:9 The great dragon, the primeval serpent, known as the devil or Satan, who had deceived all the world, was hurled down to the earth and his angels were hurled down with him.
12:10 Then I heard a voice shout from heaven, ‘Victory and power and empire for ever have been won by our God, and all authority for his Christ, now that the persecutor, who accused our brothers day and night before our God, has been brought down.
12:11 They have triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the witness of their martyrdom, because even in the face of death they would not cling to life.
12:12 Let the heavens rejoice and all who live there; but for you, earth and sea, trouble is coming – because the devil has gone down to you in a rage, knowing that his days are numbered.’"

This is an exceedingly interesting image, psychologically. War in Heaven. And the casting of Satan out of Heaven. See, only now, at this decisive moment that John is witnessing in his vision does the decisive split occur in the Pleroma – in the Unconscious – between the two sides of the godhead. Now finally the persecutor has been cast out of Heaven, down to Earth and the split in the divine entity between good and evil has occurred, or to use the terminology that Jung frequently speaks of Satan, the second son of Yahweh has been born. See, it’s very interesting that Christ had already announced this event in the 10th chapter of Luke where we read Christ saying:

"10:18 He said to them, ‘I watched Satan fall like lightning from heaven."

So, either that was a premonitory view or on some level it had already taken place. Another very interesting aspect of this imagery that brings it closer to our own time is Milton’s use of it in Paradise Lost. I have not made a study of the legendary sources that Milton used for his poem but he didn’t just make up his theme out of his head, he had sources for it. There were legendary sources of the … and of course even Genesis alludes to them briefly and the Book of Enoch expands on that allusion considerably that there were fallen angels in the early days, in the times of Noah especially. But the theme that Milton uses is that Satan’s being cast out of Heaven precedes the fall of Adam and Eve and that indeed the Serpent’s temptation of Even had been preceded by the casting of Lucifer out of Heaven.

I’m going to show you how fluid this image is. It floats around in history and come to rest here and there and meander. Let me read you a few of the lines that describe this in the very beginning of Book 1 of Paradise Lost. Milton has talked about Adam and Eve and their fall and he goes on:

"Who first seduc'd them to that foul revolt?
Th' infernal Serpent; he it was, whose guile
Stird up with Envy and Revenge, deceiv'd
The Mother of Mankind, what time his Pride
Had cast him out from Heav'n, with all his Host
Of Rebel Angels, by whose aid aspiring
To set himself in Glory above his Peers,
He trusted to have equal'd the most High,
If he oppos'd; and with ambitious aim
Against the Throne and Monarchy of God
Rais'd impious War in Heav'n and Battel proud
With vain attempt. Him the Almighty Power
Hurld headlong flaming from th' Ethereal Skie
With hideous ruine and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In Adamantine Chains and penal Fire,
Who durst defie th' Omnipotent to Arms."

It’s the same image as the Book of Revelation, pretty exactly. Set by Milton at the very beginning of human history as told ecclesiastically. But it does not fit the canonical material at all because as Rivkah Kluger has demonstrated in her book The Image of Satan in the Old Testament and as the Book of Job makes very clear Satan had access to Heaven throughout Old Testament times. He wasn’t cast out of Heaven. He come and go.

Now another very interesting feature is that Milton should write this classic account of this particular archetypal image at that particular time. He wrote in the 17th century. And as I understand it and is indicated in the material that Jung presents in Aion Satan did fall out of Heaven about 1500 A.D. with the visible advent of the Antichrist. Another way of putting it is that the God-Image fell out of metaphysical projection about 1500 A.D. for the creative minority of Western humanity and in lodging itself in the vicinity of the Ego it reversed polarity because whenever transpersonal energies are touched by the Ego they become Luciferian. They become inflationary. So the Revelation text says with the casting out of Satan from Heaven:

"12:12 Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time."

That’s how the Authorized Version puts it. That particular passage indicates that Heaven – the Collective Unconscious – is cleansing itself of a troublesome character and bathing it off on the Ego. Earth equals Ego in symbolic understanding. And that indeed is what’s happened in the last 500 years of the Christian aeon. You see there is than this vast extension of conscious human energies and initiatives in all areas that have become more and more obviously inflationary. That characteristic has reached such proportions that scarcely anyone can disregard it.

Another interesting feature of this image is seen in Blake’s series of engravings to the Book of Job of which I have a little book on. Blake follows the Biblical account pretty straightforwardly. Engraving number 15 is a picture of Yahweh showing Job his underside, namely Behemoth and Leviathan. Picture number 16 is an image of Satan being cast out of Heaven into Hell, below the Earth. That has nothing to do with the Book of Job. It’s not mentioned at all. What’s it doing there? It’s as though Blake’s Unconscious with uncanny perspicacity slipped that image in right at that point because that’s the point where Job made the discrimination concerning the 2 sides of Yahweh’s nature and at that moment then Yahweh and Satan got separated. I find it quite a remarkable phenomenon concerning how the authentic psyche can reveal itself to a creative artist when he is dealing with the relevant material that permits the revelation.

The image of the beast from the sea and the beast from the ground

OK. Going on to the next item now. Chapter 13, verse 1:

"13:1 Then I saw a beast emerge from the sea:[a] it had seven heads and ten horns, with a coronet on each of its ten horns, and its heads were marked with blasphemous titles.[b]
13:2 I saw that the beast was like a leopard, with paws like a bear and a mouth like a lion;[*c] the dragon had handed over to it his own power and his throne and his worldwide authority."

And then skipping down to verse 11:

"13:11 Then I saw a second beast;[*g] it emerged from the ground; it had two horns like a lamb, but made a noise like a dragon.
13:12 This second beast was servant to the first beast, and extended its authority everywhere, making the world and all its people worship the first beast, which had had the fatal wound and had been healed."

There are a lot of complicated details that I don’t have the time to venture into regarding the particulars here but I want to concentrate on the overall meaning of these two beasts, because they’re what carry the major psychological content of this particular section. The two beasts are Leviathan and Behemoth. Leviathan is the sea monster and Behemoth is the land monster. And it’s one of the aspects of the apocalypse archetype that with the opening up of the Unconscious with the coming of the Self in all its tumultuous phenomena that both the spiritual transpersonal energies and animal transpersonal energies come on the scene. The book that I alluded to earlier – The Dreaming of the End of the World by Michael Ortiz Hill – which has a collection of apocalyptic dreams in it refers to a dream parallel to this imagery. According to this dream reported by Hill:

"So much heat had been generated deep down in the Earth from the atomic explosions that earthquakes forced long dormant dinosaur eggs to the surface where they had hatched."

That’s an almost precise modern parallel to this image of the appearance of the 2 monsters you see. Now these 2 creatures, Leviathan and Behemoth came up first in Job. Chapter 40 of Job. Yahweh is answering Job out of the whirlwind and I read a bit of it:

"40:7 Brace yourself like a fighter, now it is my turn to ask questions and yours to inform me.
40:8 Do you really want to reverse my judgement, and put me in the wrong to put yourself in the right?
40:9 Has your arm the strength of God’s, can your voice thunder as loud?
40:10 If so, assume your dignity, your state, robe yourself in majesty and splendour.
40:11 Let the spate of your anger flow free; humiliate the haughty at a glance!
40:12 Cast one look at the proud and bring them low, strike down the wicked where they stand.
40:13 Bury the lot of them in the ground, shut them, silent-faced, in the dungeon.
40:14 I myself will be the first to acknowledge that your own right hand can assure your triumph.
40:15 Now think of Behemoth; he eats greenstuff like the ox."

And its strength is glorified for some verses. The He goes on Leviathan too:

"40:25 Leviathan, too! Can you catch him with a fish-hook or run a line round his tongue?"

You see as part of His overpowering manifestation to Job He brings on what Job called his menagerie. You see these are the images of the primordial psyche. They’re the underside of Yahweh what Jung refers to in Answer to Job as the abysmal world of shards and in the apocalypse that we’re examining they come into overt manifestation for all to see. So we see again and again that transpersonal energies are falling into the Ego. Heavenly energies fall out of Heaven, demonic spiritual energies rise up from confinement in Hell, and brute animal energies rise from the sea and the Earth into visibility.

Also the presence of Behemoth and Leviathan establish an explicit connection between the Revelation and the Book of Job. And I think that helps us to understand better why Jung chose to discuss these 2 specific texts in his book Answer to Job. You know the first half or so of the book is about the Book of Job and the last portion is about the Book of Revelation. And the symbolic continuity is clear, I think. Because Job’s individual ordeal was a kind of prelude to the collective ordeal that is pictured by the apocalypse. And just as Jung’s Answer to Job provides us with the understanding – the meaningful understanding – of Job’s ordeal so it also provides us an understanding of the apocalyptic events that are pictured in the Book of Revelation and the events that we are now in the midst of. The apocalypse is now going on in the collective psyche. And once you get some awareness of this symbolism you’ll be able to see it for yourself, you don’t have to have any great prophetic powers because it’s already visible. All you have to do is to look below the surface and see what is happening psychologically at the level of the collective psyche.

I don’t think the significance of Answer to Job can be overestimated. Just because it does provide us with an understanding of not only what’s going on when we have an individual Job ordeal it also provides an understanding of what’s going on in the collective psyche that we willy-nilly have to be participant observers in. There’s no other source of understanding for instance of the Jewish holocaust except Answer to Job, that provides the answer, providing you understand what Jung is talking about. That requires a little work to.

Now according to an apocryphal book called the Syrian Apocalypse of Baruch Leviathan should rise from the sea with the advent of the messiah. Jung alludes to this particular quote in Aion in paragraph 178 and the same source also states that Behemoth shall be revealed and they shall both become food for the survivors. Now Jewish legend elaborated this theme quite beautifully, it’s a theme that I consider of sizable importance psychologically and I talked about it in the Bible and the Psyche and gave some quotes. I brought that along. Page 159:

"When the Messiah comes according to a legend there will be a great messianic banquet at which the flesh of Behemoth and Leviathan will be eaten and the Garden of Eden state will be restored."

And then I quote material that I take from Raphael Patai’s collection of The Messiah Texts:

"In that hour the Holy One, blessed be He, will set table and slaughter Behemoth and Leviathan and prepare a great banquet for the pious and He will seat each one of them according to his honor and the Holy One, blessed be He, will bring them that was preserved in grapes since the 6 days of creation and He fulfills the wishes of the pious rising from the throne of glory and sits with them and He brings all the fine things of the Garden of Eden."

And another one:

"And the Holy One, blessed be He, will expound to them the meanings of a new Torah which He will give them through the Messiah in that hour, the Holy One, blessed be He, takes the keys of Gehenna and in front of all the pious gives them to Michael and Gabriel and says to them: 'Go, and open the gates of Gehenna and bring them up from Gehenna' and Gabriel and Michael stand over the wicked in that hour and wash them and anoint them with oil and heal them of the wounds of Gehenna and clothe them in beautiful and good garments and take them by their hand and bring them before the Holy One, blessed be He."

Isn’t that a refreshingly different version from what we’re reading in this particular apocalyptic text? You see in this legend we have an image of reconciliation of authentic totality emerging. Except for the mandala vision at the end in the main body of the material we have a whole series of very violent separatio images, you see. And that has to be understood as the necessary psychological process that was required for that stage of development of the collective psyche. But the idea of the messianic banquet is that the primordial psyche is going to be assimilated.

The image of the number of the Beast

OK, next item. The very end of our assignment, the end of chapter 13. After talking about the beast who requires himself to be worshiped, Curry has certain references to the Roman emperors of the time you know, some of whom did claim personal divinity. But at the end people are going to be branded with the name of the Beast or with the number of its name:

"13:18 There is need for shrewdness here: if anyone is clever enough he may interpret the number of the beast: it is the number of a man, the number 666[*i]."

Some of you may remember from the Mysterium course that one of the chapters of Mysterium Coniunctionis is the enigma of Bologna which gathered a great many different interpretations to it through the centuries and Jung called it psychic flypaper. This particular image, the number of the Beast 666, is also a psychic flypaper. It’s generated innumerable projections through the centuries.

Groups uniformly project their enemies on the number 666. And they do that because in antiquity letters were used for numbers and you can juggle around the name of a person, you can put it in Latin or Greek or Hebrew or you can move the name around until the number comes up right, that’s not too hard to do. But just a few of the projections that have landed on this flypaper over the centuries, probably more than any other it was associated with Nero. The phrase “Nero Caesar” was considered to add up 666. Or some other persecuting caesars also were brought in. Certain Christian fathers thought it referred to the Gnostic ogdoad, because the Gnostics were their greatest enemy. When the reformation came some thought that it referred to the Catholic Church. If they described the Catholic Church as καθολικὴ ἐκκλησία – “katholiké ekklésia” then they could get 666 out of it. Or some thought it was the pope and if they call them παπαισκος – “papaiskos” that would work out. And the Church returned the favor and applied it to Luther and they both applied it to مُحَمَّد – Muhammad. And in recent times it’s been applied to Napoleon and to Hitler.

I don’t have anything more to say about the number as a total, but thinking of it as a triplicate of the number 6, as a double emphasis on that number might be worth a little reflection. Symbolically the number 6 the chief idea that’s attached to it is that it’s known as the marriage number. And the reason for that is that – well, reason in quotation marks, you understand, when you’re thinking symbolically symbolic reasons don’t follow the same logical pathway as rationality does – it’s the product of the first 2 prime numbers 2 and 3. The other more cogent reason I think is that it represents the union of a pair of triads as signified geometrically by 2 triangles. This imagery was used in alchemy. The upward pointing triangle is the sign for fire and the downward pointing triangle is the sign for water and when they are superimposed, when they are married then you get the so-called Solomon’s Seal. That’s the 6 pointed star. Now there’s nothing obviously negative about that symbolism initially. However, when you consider what’s likely to happen when you bring fire and water together when you think of the conflict that’s going to be generated then you may begin to see how the number 6 can indeed be a quite negative number.

I think of the number 6 as an image of the coniunctio under the aegis of the number 3, which is the aegis of the Ego. As another way of looking at it too that might account for 6 as a negative number. In the first series leading to quaternity – 1, 2, 3, 4 – number 2 is the demonic number. The reason for that is that number 2 generates the “other” which has a sinister component as you find that in such terms as “duplicity” and “double cross” and “doubt”, they’re all cognate with “two”, twoness. Now in the second series of 4 – 5, 6, 7, 8 – number 6 occupies the same relative position as number 2, you see and it presents the second triangle in conflict with the first triangle. That’s a little speculative and you can take it or leave it but it’s the sort of reflection that this kind of imagery induces when one’s trying to understand what makes the number 6 so diabolical in the Book of Revelation.

On the board I have another reference to the symbolism of the number 6 that I talk about in Ego and Archetype in interpreting a dream there that particular image of the hexagon came out of the dream that seemed to have some dark aspect to it. That doesn’t show through on the board very well but I know when I was working on that material and I had that particular sketch on my desk one day and 8 year old daughter came by and when she looked at it she shouted: “it looks like the mask of the dark deity”. It doesn’t show up the board but it’s another possible allusion to the sinister aspect of the number 6.

Q&A

Alright. Well we have a few minutes left now so I think I’ll take this opportunity to respond to a question or two.

Question: It’s my understanding which may or may not be correct that you would regard that Jesus in John’s vision to be John’s experience of the deposit in the Collective Unconscious which was left by Jesus the man. However do you feel there’s also an existing ongoing Jesus who exists outside of that deposit, who is both aware of that deposit and of this experience of John. Similarly does the resurrected body refer only to these deposits or is there some form of consciousness continues for individuals at least for victorious individuals following death?

Answer: I’m trying to think where it is in Jung that he talks about the significance of the historical Jesus in relation to the archetypal content that he was carrying. I’m not sure where it is but you wouldn’t have much trouble finding it, if you looked in the general index. His point is that the historical Jesus was another human being who had certain extraordinarily qualities but happened because of the timing to be the recipient of a massive collective projection and the description of that projection has so overlaid the gospel accounts that it’s impossible to separate the historical Jesus from the archetypal overlay that was projected onto him by the collective psyche. Here and there if one closely and perceptively one can detect authentic passages of unique individuality that can’t be derived from the psalms or from the Book of Enoch or from some other traditional location, but there are very few. This is all from the empirical psychological standpoint, you see and Jung is not making any metaphysical pronouncements at all and faith can hold whatever convictions it has without being touched by this because as Jung says in a number of places he’s not addressing his remarks to those happy possessors of faith, he’s talking to those people have dropped out of containment in a faith and are searching for some authentic understanding of what religious phenomena means. So it’s not so much a matter of the historical Jesus leaving a deposit at least at this stage of things as it is of the archetypal symbolism being projected on the the historical Jesus but then the fact that event took place and therefor the archetype manifested for the first time in human history that fact then became a deposit in the archetypal psyche so that there was a kind of a circular happening. It came from the Unconscious and it returned to the Unconscious but having gone through the process of being incarnated and having passed through the consciousness of a countless number of individuals who were caught up in the religious convictions that were generated.

Alright, that will be enough for tonight. I’ll see you next week.