SACRIFICE OF THE HERO AND MEETING THE SOUL, IN CARL GUSTAV JUNG

About the epoch of his breaking off with Freud, Jung had the following dream:

“I was with a brown unknown young man, a savage, in a solitary rocky mountain. It was before the dawn, the east sky was already clear and the stars were becoming extinct. Then Sigfrid's horn resounded for the mountains and I knew that we had to kill him. We were armed with guns and were stalking him in a steep strait. Suddenly, Sigfrid appeared in the high of the summit of the mountain, with the first nascent sunbeam. In a car of skeleton, he was descending rapidly for the rocky slope. When he doubles a corner, we shoot on him and he collapsed, wound of death. Full of disgust with myself and with repentance for having destroyed something so big and beautiful, I tried to flee, stimulated by the fear, since they could discover the crime. Then it began to rain copious and I knew that all the fingerprints of the crime would remain erased. I had escaped to the danger of come to light, the life could continue, but an unbearable feeling of fault was staying."

After narrating the dream, Jung expresses the impact that it stamped on his conscience:


“When I woke up I pondered over the dream, but it turned out to me impossible to understand. Therefore, I tried to fall asleep, again, but a voice said, "you have to understand the dream immediately!” The interior agitation was increasing until the terrible instant in which the voice said: "if you do not understand the dream you will have to shoot yourself!”In my bedside table, there was a loaded revolver and I was frightened. Then I returned to ponder and suddenly I understood the sense of the dream: "this is the problem that it appears to the world!” Sigfrid represents what the Germans wanted to realize, namely, to impose his own will heroically. "Where there is a will one finds a way!”The same thing I wanted. However, it was not possible now, yet. The dream was showing that the attitude that was taking on bodily form by means of Sigfrid, the hero, already was not adapted to me any more. That is why he had to be murdered.  

Later I experienced great pity, as if I had shot on me. In this event was expressing my secret identity with the hero, as well as the suffering that the man experiences when his ideal and his conscious attitude is forced to sacrifice. Nevertheless, it was necessary to give end to this identity with the ideal of the hero; since it exists something slightly higher than the will of the Ego and to which it is necessary to submit. (…) The brown savage who had accompanied me and who properly had taken the initiative of the crime is an incarnation of the primitive shadow. The rain shows that it was eliminating the tension between the conscious and the unconscious.

In spite of the fact that it was then not possible to me to understand the meaning of the dream yet, because the scanty indications there were liberated new forces that helped me to take my experiment with the unconscious until the end."

Jung agrees with midday clarity that, in the precise moment in which he had the dream, he did not know what that dream meant. But an interior voice, proceeding from the unconscious, warned him about the importance of understanding the sense of that dream, immediately. In addition, on having pondered it, he could meet on his interpretation: The death of the hero within . In addition, he realized that this problem, that was affecting him, was a dilemma that was concerning to the western world. The death of the hero means the dismantlement of the modern believing pretension, according to which, it is only because the will power and the power that grants the managing of the top functions of the conscience, the human being can achieve all his intentions -definitively, heroic hybris or, as the Analytical Psychology names it, an inflation-, where there is a will, there is a way!, forgetting that it exists universal laws that we are all subordinated. The above-mentioned fundamental principles or archetypes operate beyond the limited light of our conscience, which moves away increasingly from the necessary state of balance. It is not of surprising, so, that the immense majority of the Europeans declare themselves atheistic or agnostic. Nevertheless, similar attitude makes be afraid of the worst, because the dissociation of the personality becomes increasingly marked and, so, a danger of one conflagration. 

Likewise, as we have indicated before, when the conscience moves away from its instinctive substratum, from the unconscious, this one will acquire the features of an authentic daimon, represented by the Christianity with the image of the Devil, the face conceals of God. The alarming extension of the terrorism does not leave place to doubts; it is the most tangible sample of the danger that besiege to the modern humanity. Before similar proof of savagery, it begins some compensatory reactions that adopt the form of sects, congregations or Christian groups, which is the case of the evangelical ones, the Jehovah's Witnesses, the African Methodists, etc, as already happened in the origins of the Pisces Era. This illustrates that Christianity, like, on the other hand, also happens  with the Judaism and the Islamism, says nothing at all to the modern man., yet Though the big religions try to show the custody of the eternal truths legitimately, the certain thing is that they have to pay a tax: the loss of the temporary apparel in which they re-dress. In addition, in the contemporary world, it is not possible to support the inflexible attitude that characterizes to any monotheistic religion. To a certain extent, the psychologist understands the pretension of any religion to be proclaimed as authentic and unique, and that it conceives that its god is the real God. Ultimately, any religious conversion, if it is real, will exclude any observation of relativity. If it is genuine, it will have the character of being absolute, unique and unrepeatable for those who experience it. Because of this, Marie-Louse von Franz says the following:

"This way, we are situated in a terribly contradictory situation, because to have a religious experience there is needed a kind of absolute obligation, but this is irreconcilable with the reasonable fact that there are many religions, and a lot of religious experiences, and that the intolerance is really Barbarian and obsolete. The possible solution would be that every individual was retaining his own experience and was taking it like absolute, agreeing the fact that others have different experiences, linking the necessary absolute condition only to oneself: for me this is absolute (there is neither relativism, nor any other possibility), but I must not extend the limits to the field of the others. And this is what we try to do. We try that people have a religious experience without collectivizing it and giving the wrong step of insisting that it should be also valid for others. It must absolutely be valid for me, but it is a mistake for me to think that the experience that for me is absolute has to apply to others."

In certain way, the dream has a bearing on what happens when the individual suffers a real irruption of contents from the unconscious. The conscience confrontation with the unconscious products could be understood as an authentic religious experience, that, as Marie-Louise von Franz declares:

"It would mean an experience that cannot be reached by the intellectual effort, or exercising the concentration, or the yoga, or the exercitia spiritualia, but rather in a Self experience, which we only could have if we accept the unconscious and the life mysteries, and the difficulty of living through the own conflict.”

It is a question, therefore, of ego’s death and Self renaissance. Theme that I have referred a few lines above, and that I have expounded with sufficient detail in my essay on the union of the opposite ones, where I have exemplified it in the figures of both magicians protagonists of the J. R. Tolkien epic, The Lord of the rings: Gandalf-Saruman, among others.