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These words are not my own and I take no credit for them. I share them here as a resource for anyone seeking personal growth or as source material for their own creative expansion of the collective.
Carl Jung, On Wotan, US Archive PDF, pg. 6
A mind that is still childish thinks of the gods as metaphysical entities existing in their own right, or else regards them as playful or superstitious inventions… But since the gods are without doubt personifications of psychic forces, to assert their metaphysical existence is as much an intellectual presumption as the opinion that they could ever be invented… Our mania for rational explanations obviously has its roots in our fear of metaphysics, for the two were always hostile brothers. Hence, anything unexpected that approaches us from the dark realm is regarded either as coming from outside and, therefore, as real, or else as a hallucination and, therefore, not true. The idea that anything could be real or true which does not come from outside has hardly begun to dawn on contemporary man.
Rosy-fingered Eos, so often mentioned in Homer and called Aurora by the Romans, caressed, too, with those fingers the first early morning of the Archipelago.
…the principal thing was that some kind of clean, pure feeling does live within us, existing apart from all our convictions, and right then it dawned upon me that I had not spoken out of conviction but because the idea had been implanted in me from outside. And because of this I was unable to reply to him, and I merely asked him: "Do you believe in God?" "Of course," he answered tranquilly.
At one level, these and other nature gods can be thought of as images of the most-ancient parts of your brain. Your brain stem controls your breathing, heart rate, digestion, and sleeping. Your limbic system, the next part of the brain to evolve in our species, is related to your emotions, sexuality, and fighting behaviors.
There is a fine old story about a student who came to a rabbi and said, "In the olden days there were men who saw the face of God. Why don't they any more?" The rabbi replied, "Because nowadays no one can stoop so low." “One must stoop a little in order to fetch water from the stream.”
In the experience of the self it is no longer the opposites “God” and “man” that are reconciled, as it was before, but rather the opposite within the God-image itself.
The myth of Horus is the age-old story of the newly risen divine light. It is a myth which must have been told after human culture - that is, consciousness - had for the first time released men from the darkness of prehistoric times.
For untold ages men have worshiped the great god who redeems the word by rising out of the darkness as a radiant light in the heavens.
These astonishing discoveries showed me that practically all the burning questions had nothing to do with everyday life, but belonged, like my ultimate secret, to "God's world," which it was better not to speak of.
What, indeed, was God's character? What would we say of a human personality who behaved in this manner?
It was then that it dawned on me: I must take the responsibility, it is up to me how my fate turns out. I had been confronted with a problem to which I had to find an answer. And who posed the problem? Nobody ever answered me that. I knew that I had to find the answer out of my deepest self, that I was alone before God, and that God alone asked me these terrible things.
To me it seemed that one's duty was to explore daily the will of God. I did not do that, but I felt that I would do it as soon as an urgent reason for so doing presented itself.
In his trial of human courage God refuses to abide by traditions, no matter how sacred. In His omniscience He will see to it that nothing really evil comes of such tests of courage. If one fulfills the will of God one can be sure of going the right way.
Hence there was no question in my mind but that God Himself was arranging a decisive test for me, and that everything depended on my understanding Him correctly. I knew, beyond a doubt, that I would ultimately be compelled to break down, to give way, but I did not want it to happen without my understanding it, since the salvation of my eternal soul was at stake.
I know — and here I am expressing what countless other people know — that the present time is the time of God's disappearance and death.
An Indian creation myth relates that the god Brahma, standing on a huge, thousand-petaled lotus, turned his eyes to the four points of the compass. This fourfold survey from the circle of the lotus was a kind of preliminary orientation, an indispensable taking of bearings, before he began his work of creation.
How long can human beings be successful without falling victims to their own pride or, in mythological terms, to the jealousy of the gods?
Because we cannot discover God's throne in the sky with a radiotelescope or establish (for certain) that a beloved father or mother is still about in a more or less corporeal form, people assume that such ideas are "not true." I would rather say that they are not "true" enough, for these are conceptions of a kind that have accompanied human life from prehistoric times, and that still break through into consciousness at any provocation.
The myths gave explicit shape and form to a reality that people sensed intuitively. They told them how the gods behaved, not out of idle curiosity or because these tales were entertaining, but to enable men and women to imitate these powerful beings and experience divinity themselves.
We find much the same pattern in Egypt, though Isis is less powerful than Anat. Osiris, the first king of Egypt, teaches his people the science of agriculture. His brother Seth, who aspires to the throne, assassinates him, and Isis, his sister and spouse, roams the world, searching for his body. When she finds the corpse, she can only revive him long enough to enable him to conceive Horus, a son to continue his line, before he expires again. Then Osiris's body is cut into pieces, and each fragment is buried, like seed, in a different place throughout Egypt. He becomes the ruler of Duat, the world of the dead, and is also responsible each year for the annual harvest, his death and dismemberment ritually enacted alongside the cutting and threshing of the crops. The god of the dead is often also the god of the harvest, showing that life and death are inextricably entwined. You cannot have one without the other. The god who dies and comes to life again epitomises a universal process, like the waxing and waning of the seasons. There may be new life, but the central feature of the myth and the cult of these dying vegetation gods is always the catastrophe and bloodshed, and the victory of the forces of life is never complete.
As Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa (335-395), had explained, Father, Son and Spirit were not objective, ontological facts but simply ‘terms that we use' to express the way in which the 'unnameable and unspeakable' divine nature adapts itself to the limitations of our human minds.
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