CHAPTER VI THE BATTLE FOR DELIVERANCE FROM THE MOTHER
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Jung, C. G. (Carl Gustav) and Hinkle, Beatrice M.
“He descended into the depths, splitting the earth with a straight foot.”[607]
He is said to have originally been a maiden named Kainis, who, because of her complaisance, was transformed into an invulnerable man by Poseidon. Ovid pictures the battle of the Lapithæ with the invulnerable Kaineus; how at last they covered him completely with trees, because they could not otherwise touch him. Ovid says at this place:
“Exitus in dubio est: alii sub inania corpus
Tartara detrusum silvarum mole ferebant,
Abnuit Ampycides: medioque ex aggere fulvis
Vidit avem pennis liquidas exire sub auras.”[608]
Roscher considers this bird to be the golden plover (Charadrius pluvialis), which borrows its name from the fact that it lives in the χαράδρα, a crevice in the earth. By his song he proclaims the approaching rain. Kaineus was changed into this bird.
We see again in this little myth the typical constituents of the libido myth: original bisexuality, immortality (invulnerability) through entrance into the mother (splitting the mother with the foot, and to become covered up) and resurrection as a bird of the soul and a bringer of fertility (ascending sun). When this type of hero causes his lance to be worshipped, it probably means that his lance is a valid and equivalent expression of himself.
From our present standpoint, we understand in a new sense that passage in Job, which I mentioned in Chapter IV of the first part of this book:
“He has 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.”—Job xvi:12–13–14.
Now we understand this symbolism as an expression for the soul torment caused by the onslaught of the unconscious desires. The libido festers in his flesh, a cruel god has taken possession of him and pierced him with his painful libidian projectiles, with thoughts, which overwhelmingly pass through him. (As a dementia præcox patient once said to me during his recovery: “To-day a thought suddenly thrust itself through me.”) This same idea is found again in Nietzsche in Zarathustra:
The Magician
Stretched out, shivering
Like one half dead whose feet are warmed,
Shaken alas! by unknown fevers,
Trembling 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
Bending, writhing, tortured
With all eternal tortures,
Smitten
By thee, crudest huntsman,
Thou unfamiliar God.
Smite deeper!
Smite once more:
Pierce through and rend my heart!
What meaneth this torturing
With blunt-toothed arrows?
Why gazeth thou again,
Never weary of human pain,
With malicious, God-lightning eyes,
Thou wilt not kill,
But torture, torture?
No long-drawn-out explanation is necessary to enable us to recognize in this comparison the old, universal idea of the martyred sacrifice of God, which we have met previously in the Mexican sacrifice of the cross and in the sacrifice of Odin.[609] This same conception faces us in the oft-repeated martyrdom of St. Sebastian, where, in the delicate-glowing flesh of the young god, all the pain of renunciation which has been felt by the artist has been portrayed. An artist always embodies in his artistic work a portion of the mysteries of his time. In a heightened degree the same is true of the principal Christian symbol, the crucified one pierced by the lance, the conception of the man of the Christian era tormented by his wishes, crucified and dying in Christ.