The Nuclear Bomb and the Fate of God
On the First Nuclear Fission
WOLFGANG GIEGERICH / Spring 1988
(Stuttgart)
Dr. Giegerich presented versions of this lecture in Chicago, Newport, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Dallas, and Buffalo during a tour in January 1985. He is the editor of Gorgo: Zeitschrift f, archetypische Psychologie u. bildhaftes Denken; has lectured at several recent Eranos conferences; and is a Jungian analyst in private practice. Other papers by Wolfgang Giegerich in English have appeared in Spring 1975, 1917, 1979, 1984.
If you look at a medieval painting, such as of the Dutch school, you have to step up to it very closely in order to appreciate its details. Each hair in a fur collar, each blade of grass, seems to be painted separately. If, however, you were to stand just as closely in front of the painting of a French Impressionist, you would see only spots of paint but no picture. Every picture prescribes to the viewer the distance appropriate to it. This is not only true for paintings but also for all subjects of contemplation, including those of theoretical reflection. For this reason, very much depends on whether we find the `correct' distance to our theme, the nuclear bomb. For if we step up to it too closely and view it merely from within our immediate present, only within the context of today's power blocks and disarmament negotiations, only within the context of our personal fears of survival, then we will have only an essentially reduced perception of the bomb.
Finding the Appropriate Standpoint
The nuclear bomb threatens life in its entirety. This means we must find a standpoint that grants the bomb the widest possible horizon within which alone it can unfold its full essence. For whatever has the power to put our world as a whole at stake must be a kind of equivalent of this world in a nutshell and as such be thoroughly interwoven with and deeply rooted in the history and reality of our Western world at large.
The context of today's survival problem and power politics allows only for a very limited perception of the bomb. Our picture of it would be just as reduced if we were to understand it merely personalistically —as the expression of our repressed aggressions, our "hypertrophic patriarchal tradition," our hybris and our sorcerer's apprentice attitude, to mention just a few of the commonest clichés. The nuclear bomb in its phenomenology is so immense and so inhuman that, although a man-made object, it nevertheless extends far beyond the merely human into the dimension of the ontological and theological, into the dimension of Being and of the Gods. Only on this plane can we hope to do some justice to its dreadfulness.
Yet, I do not speak as a theologian but as psychologist and phenomenologist. As such, I am convinced that whenever it is a question of fateful turning points, be it in history or in our personal lives, we have to look round at the Gods and their fate. The Gods and what happens to them are quite simply and naturally the articulation of that background in the collective psyche in which the great decisions of historical import take place, decisions which in turn are the frame within which the life and thought of each historical period take place. I do not postulate Gods in a metaphysical manner, and much less do I propagate them as objects of faith. I merely stay with the phenomenology of the God images as they actually occur. These I consider to be the point at which something of the hidden back-ground of the historical-psychological existence of man becomes visible to us in concrete shapes or faces, so that we are not merely conditioned by this background from behind like dull objects but can, as is fitting for conscious humans, relate to them face to face. Thus we can establish and cultivate a psychological connection which without God images would not be possible: psychological culture and cult, therapeia, religio—as the careful observation (relegere) of the archetypal dominants binding (religare) our perceptions, thinking, and behavior.
The fate of God that we have to consider in connection with our theme seems to me to take place in the events that we are told about in the Old Testament story of the worship of the Golden Calf (Exod. 32).
The Story of the Golden Calf as Psychological Dominant
I do not want to read this story as a historical document with the question in mind, What actually happened and what did it mean within the context of its own age and for the religious life of the Jews? Neither will I be concerned with questions of textual criticism, sources, authorship, and of the revisions the text may have undergone. That approach turns the tale into a mere object of inquiry, displaced into the distance of a remote and exotic past that is basically indifferent to us. Paradoxically, the search for the "original" meaning of the story and the "original" intentions of its authors does not take us back to the true origins; it rather produces an artifact, the reconstruction of a bygone past made possible only by means of ingenious scientific methods. It is not that I mean to doubt the correctness of historical reconstructions. I merely think that they can never lead us to the origin but only to something essentially derived: abstract history.
The origin is not found in the critical "original language" edition of a text, nor by way of exact knowledge about the historical facts surrounding the text; rather, the origin is the Bible story as it was told to us in childhood in our mother tongue—in a, theologically speaking, possibly quite untenable form—and especially as it has likewise for centuries been told to our forefathers, who certainly were untouched by historical-critical concerns. Only as such is the story alive in the Western psyche. All critical scholarship comes too late; it follows along behind the actual image rooted in the depth of our being and of our tradition. All scientific research presupposes this image and is of course, in the last analysis, only undertaken for its sake and because it excited the scholar's curiosity in the first place.
It is the tragic error of the Christian Occident to have taken the historically or theologically "correct" for the real and thus to have thought that true Christianity could be found in the most sophisticated and purest interpretation of the Christian doctrine. This fiction made us blind to the actual effects of our religion by allowing us to rest content with our better judgment and to think that, on account of the scholarly correction of our ideas, the primitive image were over and done with. But the simple image was not pushed into non-existence by the corrected view; it merely disappeared from our field of vision, so that it could be in action all the more undisturbed. It retains its own "will," which is not necessarily in accordance with the best theological exegesis, and wants to materialize itself (rather than the "true intention"). Even under the surface of the most learned theology, it is the simple image that is really believed and has motive power. Our better judgment, precisely because it is better, higher, merely conscious, is not and has never been of psychological and historical importance, having no transformative power—as long as it has not seeped down to become, after a long time, a new image in the psyche in its own right. Only the primitive image is historically potent, in the individual as well as with peoples.
Therefore, I would like to read the story of the Golden Calf as the psychologically real image which was implanted, like a seed, into the receptive psyche of the peoples of the beginning Christian West and, after a period of incubation lasting for several centuries—usually called the "Middle Ages"—started to sprout until it finally bore mature fruit in our century. I try to listen to it as a part of that "myth" in which we live and which sustains the ontological constitution of the Western world.
This story is, so to speak, a story of the collision of two worlds. One is situated in the lowlands and is characterized by an animal-shaped image of God cast from metal to whom the worshipping people bring offerings and in whose honor they celebrate a holiday, releasing themselves playfully to the celebration. The other world is a mountain peak1 and is characterized by an invisible, transcendent God in the heights, by a code of moral laws engraved in stone tables, and, on the part of God as well as on the part of Moses, by a fierce wrath against the celebrating people.
Moses, hot with anger, the Word of God in his mind and the tables of the law in his hands, smashes the stone in his wrath. Bursting as an outsider into the playful crowd, he disrupts the sacred celebration and pulverizes the animal image. To Aaron, who until now had guilelessly entered into the innocent enactment of the ritual, he gives a bad conscience, so that Aaron is now embarrassed and feels the need to justify himself. And finally he forces everyone into a decision: "Who is on the Lord's side? Let him come unto me." He commands his followers to take their swords and to go throughout the camp from gate to gate and to slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor. "And there fell of the people that day about three thousand men."
It always makes a crucial difference by which "mythical" images we are collectively informed. We have been brought up with this story; this image of a massacre executed upon the worshippers of the Golden Calf out of a zeal for the true God has been implanted into the soul of Western man for two thousand years. It has grown deep roots there and has stamped traumatic fears upon us. We all live under the spell of this massacre. The shock goes deep. Ever since the call "Who is on the Lord's side? Let him come unto me" rang out, it time and again has reverberated afresh in the depth of our being. And since then an incurable rift goes through the "people" in our soul, infecting all our thoughts and experiences and molding them according to its image.
As far as our more noble aspirations are concerned, we have since then been placed a priori on the one side, on the side of the true God, regardless of whether we know it and like it or not, and we must, whether we be believers or not, fear nothing more than to slip to the other side, that of the worshippers of the Golden Calf, the side of the slain ones. We have no choice as long as we do not consciously work through the trauma of this split. But simultaneously with the upholding of the one side (that of the Lord), the other side, that of idolatry, is constellated, too, and our split-off, more primitive instincts succumb by necessity more and more to the ever increasing fascination that the earthly image, now decried as an idol, holds for us. For that rift splitting the world apart exists only as the opposition, i.e., the separated unity, of both sides. Without idols, no "true" God, and without this God, no "false" Gods.
Uncovering the Story's Unspoken Issue
If we follow the perspective of the narrator, then this is a story of the children of Israel's unfaithful falling away from their true God who brought them out of the land of Egypt, and of their subsequent punishment. If, however, we see through the didactic intention of the narrative report to its latent content, we obtain an entirely different picture. Old Testament scholarship informs us that the Hebrew word translated as "calf" is not actually intended to refer to a calf in this story but is meant as a disparaging term for the image of a bull that in fact was the object of worship.
Even more important: Jahwe himself originally had a bull nature, in accordance with all ancient semitic religion. This shows through even in later times, as in Amos 1: 2: "The Lord will roar."2 The tribal God of the Israelites, the God of trust, was, to be sure, a youthful God, but with him the Israelites went back to the most ancient religious tradition of the Near East, back to the highest God of the ancient Semites, El elion (Gen. 14), the Lord of Heaven and God of the World.3 This God is constantly apostrophized in the Ugaritic texts as "Bull El." This means that the image of the bull worshipped by the Children of Israel in our story and known to us under the name of the Golden Calf was not a different, alien God in opposition to the high God, but it was this very God himself!
From this point of view, our story is not merely one of rebellion and infidelity. Rather, this story narrates a fateful event in the history of this God himself. This scene dramatically announces a change within God. God separates himself from an aspect of himself. God's nature splits. The celebrating people were by no means disloyal; on the contrary, they did what had up to now always been well-pleasing to God. But now they are surprised, even descended upon out of the blue, by this change in God, which for the first time progressive Moses seems to have envisioned. And as always when there are changes in the divine sphere for which human consciousness is not prepared, humans have to pay dearly.
In the ancient Near East there do not seem to have been strictly theriomorphic Gods such as there were in Egypt (the bull Apis). Rather, one typically finds the connection of anthropomorphic Gods with animals as their attendants; i.e., a deity in human shape is shown sitting on a throne while his feet rest on bulls. The bull provides the pedestal for the godhead. Also, there is a widespread cult continuing into late antiquity whereby the empty throne of the deity was erected in order to invite the deity, considered essentially invisible, to come down. In the story of the Golden Calf, we might understand the image of the bull as a pedestal erected for the purpose of inviting the invisible high God to descend and manifest himself.
The animal as symbol or pedestal of an anthropomorphic or invisible deity already suggests an inner differentiation in the nature of God. The animal aspect as pedestal has become a literally lower aspect of this God; the bull has turned into a mere attendant who accompanies the God, even if he still remains his foundation, whereas the God himself is obviously set off from the animal by way of his human shape, or even more so as an essentially invisible God—he who once himself carried the title "Bull." But even this removed and raised deity nevertheless remained essentially connected to his animal. This was he himself in his visible aspect, and the bull image possessed the power to draw the invisible aspect down.
However, what happens in our story is that God pushes off, as it were, from the bull, from his animal base, and takes off for the highest heights. Moses' sword thus does not merely separate the people into two halves; it does not only slay the three thousand faithful to the Calf; but that sword cuts the last threads binding God to his former divine shape as bull. Thus, this is a tale of the birth of God as we know him through a splitting of Being as such, a tale of the birth of the notion of God dominant still today and informing the ontological constitution of our world.
The New God
What is the notion of God resulting from the dissociation in God's nature? First, God casts off his visibility once and for all and becomes a totally invisible God. The real bull was also an epiphany of the God. Even the invisible God of the ancient Near East was "based" on his visible pedestal. God needed a visible animal image in order to become present. For, to speak with Thomas Mann, "How would you behold the God, if not in the animal?"4 Now there can be no epiphanies any more. God is only present in faith and in the preaching of his word.
Secondly, God ceases to be a world-immanent power and rises to the height of a completely supernatural, transcendent, extramundane God. Only as such is it possible for God to turn into the creator in the biblical sense, i.e., a creator from naught. The mythical Gods were natural phenomena—thunder, grain, sun, ocean, death—and not extramundane creators of the world. Even the essentially invisible God of Asia Minor did not break out of the world but was the phenomenon of an immanent, invisible force in the world.
Thirdly, this God grows into the absolute monotheistic God. As long as God was bull-shaped, there could not be just one God, as sure as there were, in addition to the bull, also sun, sea, lightning and thunder, etc. As a visible shape, he by necessity had to be particular, one God beside or perhaps also above many others but, even if above them, then nevertheless only as primus inter pares.
Fourth, along with the bull shape, God rejects his animal nature and defines himself from now on as 'pure' spirit.
Fifth, he loses his bodily, concrete reality, gradually turning into an idealized idea. I say gradually, for only with the New Testament is the process of the thorough idealization of God as pure love completed and God totally identified with this ideal of himself. The place of epiphany, of his manifesting himself in earthly reality as he happens to be at each instance, is now taken by revelation, i.e., the verbal statement about his true nature. Because epiphany is no longer a possibility for God, he must require faith, belief in his statements. Epiphanies spoke for themselves. They were God's unreflected and uncensored self-representation through his actual behavior in the world. You did not have to, indeed you could not, believe in Baal, the storm God, or in Astarte, the Goddess of love and war, because you had them in war and storm before your eyes and were exposed to their workings. On the contrary, a self-commentary that is no longer confirmed in sensate reality depends on belief and faith and requires an unbroken stream of professing witnesses.
As the sixth and last characteristic of the new notion of God that results from the splitting of God, I mention literalism. The original worship was directed to the image, the phenomenon. The worshippers of the Golden Calf did not by any means, we may presume, mistake for God the Golden Calf as object in the positivistic sense, because in a ritualistic culture such a mere object did not yet exist. No, God was the visible sight of the golden luster and the powerful bull shape, the sight of the image shining forth from that which we today would call a dead object. And the worshippers of the Golden Calf did not by way of mystification "believe" in the image as if it were anything different from what it actually was: an image, nothing more. For everybody knew of course that it had just been cast from their own jewelry. But: anybody could immediately see from the bull's radiating imaginal quality that this is God. The essence of God was originally precisely in the radiation and in the numinosity inherent in this metaphoric shine.
By pushing off his image as bull, God also casts off from himself all shine and appearance5 and establishes himself as a literal God. This means not only a God of worded, inscribed commandments but also a God who is unambiguously and unquestionably, exclusively God. Because he has rid himself of anything sensate and earthly, he can declare himself "the true God" behind sensate reality and can be posited in a metaphysical sense as literally, I would almost like to say positivistically, existing. Faith is the mode of that relation to the godhead in which the latter is taken literally and as absolute, in the last analysis as the highest entity. Faith and its counterpart, doubt, are primarily concerned with the existence of God ("for he that cometh to God must believe that he is"—Heb. 11:6). Accordingly, the question of the existence of God has for centuries been in the center of the thinking about God; the greatest minds wrestled with the problem of the proofs and disproofs of His existence. The question of the existence of mythical Gods never cropped up, could not crop up. In the mythical situation, the only important question is the Who? (Which one?) and the How? of the manifestation of those who shine into our lives as self-evidently and unquestionably as the sun.
We must bear in mind the dialectics of this process of dissociation. Through the split in his nature, God rose above himself and ascended to previously unsuspected heights. He was able to acquire a literal existence. He turned into the pure and true God, the absolute. All this is not simply a gain, but also a loss. The rise to the absolute is, as an absolvere (a detaching), at the same time a deprivation: God suffered a considerable loss in substance and is, as the infinite, only an infinitely diluted remainder of what he once was, having exchanged the status of a phenomenal reality for the impoverished status of an assertion that is dependent on being believed in order to obtain the conviction of reality. This is in complete contrast to the saturated and imperturbable existence that is the property of the mythical Gods from the very beginning. Their being-in-the-world, however, did not have the quality of a literal, positive-factual existence but only that of epiphany, of phenomenal manifestation. In other words, God was only able to acquire his literal existence by paying the price of his substantiality, sell-evidence, and worldly embodiment. Only by abandoning his sensate reality, only through his mystification, was he able to become absolute spirit and true God.
The Invention of Idolatry and the Destruction of the Earth
Simultaneously with God's self-exaltation,6 sensate reality was pushed to a lower level. It is one and the same action—Moses' sword-stroke—that enthroned the true God and established idolatry "for the first time." In this simultaneity of upwards and downwards movement, the degradation of the image to the status of a false God has an inner priority. Only because the narrative of the Golden Calf is the didactic story of the invention of idolatry can it also be the story of the establishment of the "true" God. The fight against idols is the mode in which both "Golden Calf" (in the idolatrous sense of the term) and "true God" come into being. For without the idols and before any fight against them, there were no idols but only mythical Gods. God (in the sense of the true God) and idol—both equally distant from the mythical Gods—are the same, though not alike, so that wherever you find actual idolatry you can suspect the "true God" in the background, and in the environment of any worship of the true God you can count on idolatry in some way. Idolatry and service to the true God, even if they be opposites, are twins.
Moses' pulverizing and melting down the Golden Calf is an assault on the imaginal quality of reality as such, an assault that receives its express theological foundation in the commandment, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness" (Exod. 20:4), which also belongs to the context of our tale. Moses reduces the reality of God to "mere matter": dust instead of divine image. Just as God becomes a literal God, so does matter in a positivistic sense originate here, if we extrapolate somewhat. It is this act which gives rise for the first time to the idea of something earthly that is "nothing but" earthly, for it is deprived of its imaginal shine. As God becomes worldless by his obtaining absoluteness, so earthly reality becomes Godless.
It is crucial to see here that God's abandoning the visible bull figure did not mean that the bull could remain as he had been before. For God pushed off from it as from his pedestal and by doing so pushed it into the depths. This treading down, made evident in our story by Moses' grinding down of the Calf, means that the same deimagization that was God's lot also happened to the things of this earth. God's exodus from sensuous reality into absolute spiritualization, on the one hand, and the destruction of the imaginal shape of things on the other are mutual reflections of each other, Moses' sword being the mirror, as it were, holding the two mirror images apart.
To be sure, it took centuries until the divine image was completely pulverized. Only with our present-day worldview has the program established in this story been fulfilled and all of reality dismantled into the "dust" of molecules, atoms, and subatomic, elementary particles to which, as to the ultimate and actual reality, all things having a visible shape can be, nay, must be reduced. At first, however, things retained their form for more than two thousand years. The destruction of their imaginal quality, which produced literalism, must not itself be understood literally. It is not so much the shape and image of things that is destroyed but rather the imaginal nature of their shape, their divine radiance, their golden shine, their numinous brilliance: the moving power of the image. The imaginal nature that real things once had is now reduced to the mere form of matter (morph, forma), so that now only a formal understanding of the image is left. This means that the imaginal is now understood literalistically and thus has been subsumed by its very opposite. The image deprived of its imaginal nature has of course been ground to powder much more radically than if all things formed had been literally pulverized.
The Nuclear Explosion and the Primary Uprising of the Will
So far, we have looked at the divine process only as a separation in two parts: the animal (that has been reduced to a biological understanding and can therefore be idolized) and the true God. But what happened comprises more than that. A split into two involves three aspects. The original unity that united the two and is concealed by that unity is released from the original whole as the Third of the Two along with the dissociation. For this dissociation into mere bull and pure God to become possible in the first place, their original imaginal nature, which held the two and gave to both God and bull their full essence, must first be taken away from both. The complete description of what happened in our story thus runs as follows: first, God's rise into the heights of imageless spirit (transcendence); second, the bull's or, more generally, earthly reality's being pushed down into the non-imaginal state of mere matter (empirical positivity); and third, the elimination altogether of the imaginal from the prevailing ontology.
What happened here is an enormity. It is the First nuclear fission, the nuclear fission, the splitting of the nucleus of Being: the image. This first splitting was what made possible the nuclear explosions of modern physics. What we are dealing with here is not a matter only for students of religious history. It is an ontological explosion upsetting the foundations of existence, of Being as such. For Being in its innermost nucleus is anchored in imaginality.
If Hillman coined the phrase the "poetic basis of mind,"7 1 would like to extend this idea and speak of the poetic basis or imaginal quality of Being. And if Jung said, image is psyche, we may now add that Being has image and soul quality. God-and-bull (world) were what they were only by virtue of their imaginal nature.
In correspondence with the nuclear explosions of physics, we can describe the three aspects of the First nuclear fission as follows.
- God's divine nature, which is the first component of the image, is raised to the heavens and becomes purely spiritual. It thus radiates with an unheard-of intensity. This is what physicists call the "star" in nuclear explosions.
- The second component of the image, the earthly-sensuous, is reduced to mere nature, to God's creation, no longer divine in its own right. This is what is called "nuclear ash." Nuclear ash is not only an empirical product of the nuclear explosions of the twentieth century; reality at large has ontologically been nuclear ash for more than two millennia. Stripped of its inherent divinity, the world became accessible in its empirical nakedness to the scientific research and technical exploitation of a much later age. The gold of the Golden Calf could never have been subjected to a chemical analysis, the bull could never have been used for biological experiments, because the predicate "God" radiated forth from them.
- The release of the Third of the Two, the imaginal quality, through the exploding apart of the image freed tremendous energy, just as do the nuclear fissions of physics. This released energy, first, gave God the momentum for his takeoff into transcendence; second, supplied the world with the power for its demonization and for the immense increase in realness that it experienced—we will return to this later; and, third, produced what we call in metaphysics and psychology the Will. The age-old story of the 'Golden Calf is thus, in the context of the history of our Christian West, also the myth of the birth of the modern ego, whose innermost essence is the will.8
Psychology considers the ego to be a certain central complex in the personality. But it is much more. Above all, it is also the mode in which this complex has interpreted and constituted itself to begin with. But even this is not all. As an archetypal power, the ego transcends the psychological in the personalistic-human sense of the word and is, in its comprehensive meaning, the modern mode of being of everything that is, the mode of being of God, the world, and man. It is not we who have an ego; the ego or the will has us and our world. Just as the nuclear explosions of physics are triggered by the bombardment of uranium with electrons, so the blow of the sword sets the ontological nuclear fission in motion. The blow of the sword, however, is the way in which the Will comes into being. It is the expression of the tremendous zeal that seizes Moses and that is only the reflection in a human of that zeal to which, in the same story, God has just professed himself ("I the Lord thy God am a jealous God" —Exod. 20 : 5). But the blow of the sword is not the result of a will (zeal) existing prior to it as its cause or motivation. Rather, by bursting the imaginal mode of Being apart, the blow of the sword is the primary uprising of the will, the act through which the will releases itself into existence for the "first" time. The will is born out of itself, out of the "sudden" exercise of willing. It is its own origin. Since this is the nature of the will, every act of willing will have the same violent character of a blow of the sword cutting Being apart and of a "first" breaking out of the imaginal world.
It was an act of will that blasted God, earthly reality, and the nature of man, all three, out of the medium of the anima, i.e., of the imaginal, and thus subjected them to the will or ego established by this very act of subjugation. If Nietzsche defined the essence of the world as the "Will to Power," he precisely characterized the innermost metaphysical quality of Being, without however realizing that this was only the quality of Being as it resulted from the ontological nuclear fission. Will is not the quality of primal Being. Despite his intention, Nietzsche—by proclaiming the Will to Power as the supreme principle—was serving as the mouthpiece of the Christian Creator-God, an agent of enforcement in the history of the onto-logical nuclear fission, one of the final executors of the will of Moses.
The Will as Supreme Ontological Principle
As long as Being was immersed in the imaginal realm of the anima, the faces of Gods looked at man from within things. This means that things laid a claim on man. Things and situations of themselves demanded this or that treatment; they were binding. As images they directly affected, by virtue of their numinosity, the instinctual psyche and thus led to that behavior that we call ritual. Ever since the decline of epiphany and the exodus of the Gods from this world into transcendence, the binding force has gone out of things and situations themselves. This force has been released and now has a separate existence in the shape of absolute ethical norms. To these man has to bestow, by an act of will and by his own spiritual effort, any power and reality they may have, because they have no force of their own.
The human ego and its moral attitude now carry the whole burden of responsibility since the divine glance coming forth from reality no longer quite naturally leads to the soul's ritual activity at the instinctual level. The ethos of the ritualistic age was moored in external reality itself. Not only man's actions, but the objective world, was, so to speak, ethical in itself. Ethics encompassed both, man and reality. In the case of moralistic ethics, however, man stands all alone with his moral responsibility vis-à-vis the world of things, which is now without obligation and subject to arbitrary decisions. Things have no will and claim of their own any more; they are, as one says, "ethically neutral."
In that moment when things are no longer the images of Gods, but have their God as their extramundane creator outside of themselves, they have become fair game, mute objects for study and exploitation. Hence, a moral law imposed from above becomes a necessity in order to restrain the use of the now outlawed reality. Thus, the story of God's splitting himself off from the Golden Calf inevitably also had to be the story of the Ten Commandments cut in stone tables; that is, the story of a change from the psychological and ritualistic relation to the world to a spiritual and moralistic one, and at the same time the story of the installation of man into his new mode of being as the willing one.
This reification of reality, however, is not the work of men. Rather, to be exploitable dead matter is the actual nature of things ever since they ceased being divine images and became created things, things made by God. For it is only secondarily and in a roundabout way, i.e., only if man believes in the extramundane creator with a precarious act of faith constantly subject to temptations, that a certain image quality can be supplied to them. But this will always remain a secondhand imaginal quality, an imago dei infinitely removed from God himself.
The second component of the image, God, has also been immersed and subjected to the element of the ego–will, just as was the case with earthly reality. God is now outside the world so that he no longer speaks to the soul through visible epiphanies and no longer forces the overwhelming impression of his unquestionable reality upon it. God is nothing any more by himself; he is now only an idea, a flatus vocis, completely subject to the accidentalities and vicissitudes of man's faith. Only indirectly, only through a spiritual act of man (faith) can God be supplied with that power that gives him a secondary reality. Faith is the volitional affirmation that man bestows upon God. And without this boost from man, "God" remains an empty word, as the history of the modern world proves. Faith thus has a contradictory nature. By what it says as the content of its belief, it sets God up as the creator; but by what it does, by what the act of faith itself amounts to, it makes the reality of God dependent on man's will. Not God creates man in his image, but Ego creates God.
"True" God and "False" Gods: The Moralization of Being
At this juncture, let us deepen our analysis of the dissociation of Being in the sense of an ontological nuclear fission. God's split from his image as bull has consequences for the categories of Being as such. What is split here, in the last analysis, are the true and the real. The God resulting from the split is the "true" God; what is left of the bull after the split is, to be sure, visible and tangible, in other words real, but it is only an idol, a false God. Thus, we can also say that this First nuclear fission parts God's truth and his reality.
Truth and reality are big words, with manifold meanings depending on the underlying philosophical framework. What is the philosophical basis of my use of these terms? None. I do not apply to our theme the terms truth and reality as prefabricated metaphysical constructs and as elements of my philosophical "system." I do not claim that there is indeed such a thing as God's truth or that I have knowledge of the truth of God. Rather,
I take the word "truth" and its meaning from our tale. We see that in the story of the Golden Calf a God comes into being who claims to be "the true God." "Truth" in this emphatic, absolute sense is posited here "for the first time," so to speak. I am only concerned with that kind of truth that God claims for himself; whether it has any validity outside of the fantasy and terminology of this mythical tale is of no interest in this context. For "the absolute" or "per se" is, as we see, established by this very story, so that methodologically it would make no sense whatsoever to postulate as an a priori and a necessary category of thought what is only a product of a particular event in Western mythology, the splitting of the image.
One can phenomenologically describe the event in our story as follows: all of God's truth, i.e., God's godhood (or the predicate God or also the pure idea of a God), is extracted from the God images and is isolated as a purified distillate of godhood. On the one hand, God turns into the ideal of a God which lacks a convincing realness. On the other, an earthly reality of God arises whose numinosity becomes more and more insistent but is denied the recognition as divine. The word "idol" is the resulting compromise formation in Freud's sense. In this word there lie both the acknowledgment of the real, numinous power that certain realities have over the soul and, at the same time, the denial of the predicate God for this numinous impact that we feel.
The enormity of what happened here may not have come home to us yet. Originally, truth and realness belonged together as a matter of course. The real was also the true and the true only true to the extent that it was real. The situation in which truth and reality are the same, even though not alike, has the character of phainesthai, appearance, shine. It is the situation of mythical or ritualistic reality. Most clearly, the essential oneness of the true and the real that we find in the mythical world is illustrated in a conversation between C. G. Jung and a chief of the Pueblo Indians. For the chief and his people, the sun was the divine Father. Jung asked the chief whether he did not think that the sun was a ball of fire, shaped by an invisible God. Jung, in other words, used the argument of Augustinus: "God is not the sun, but He who made the sun."9 For the Indian this was, Jung tells us, the most awful blasphemy. He merely answered, "The sun is God. Everyone can see that." "This is the Father; there is no Father behind it."10
This Pueblo chief insisted that the numinous effects of real phenomena on the psyche be granted wholehearted acknowledgment as God. There is nothing behind the phenomenon. And, therefore, also no mere "external reality." What manifests itself and impresses the soul (including, above all, the primordial image of manifestation or shine itself: the sun) is true by virtue of its shining, and there is no other notion of truth here. For this reason reality had to be binding and obligatory in itself. It bore in itself Truth, i.e., God's godhood, and thus the supreme soul value. The meaning of truth in this context is something that binds or even compels us and that is acknowledged by us without reserve. We must admit that 2 X 2 = 4. Today, however, truth in philosophical or religious contexts is a totally different category from reality. That the nuclear bomb is real inasmuch as it deeply fascinates and frightens us does not at all mean that it is something unquestionably true in today's sense of the word and that it has binding power over our attitude to it. On the contrary, we have to degrade it along with everything truly numinous into an idol, indeed into something satanic, since the usual subjectivist degradation of numinous factors as a mere illusion or delusion does not seem to succeed in the case of the bomb.
Actually, of course, there can be no false Gods. For either they are Gods, then they are not false, or they are something else, then they are not false either. The real is simply what it is, and in this lies the unshakable truth of everything that exists. There is no true and false weather, no true and false trees; there are many kinds of weather and trees. "The true God" is about as meaningful as a statement like "Only sunshine is true weather; rain is false weather." Opinions and statements can be false, but not realities. With the words "idol" and "false Gods," however, one does not criticize a wrong opinion. Rather, a reality—the numinosity of the golden bull, of the sun, of the thunderstorm—is being degraded.
As long as reality bore in itself the predicate truth, anything having that type of effect on the soul (which by way of abbreviation I want to indicate only with the one word "numinosity") was itself God or daimon. The actual effect was the only measure of truth. Now, however, the factual effect no longer counts. What and where God is, is determined by a predecided definition laid down in dogma. We now know a priori that certain things, even if they are highly real and numinous, cannot be God, because they must not be God. In this way we get a new formulation for the paradox mentioned earlier: that God by having risen into the highest height of the absolute has in truth submitted to an ideal or standard and that conversely he can be the "true God" only insofar as he subordinates himself to a norm. God now obeys a super-ego, as it were. He cannot simply be and appear as he is; he does not have free play for his nature but must comply with a once-and-for-all fixed standard (summum bonum, pure love) which is immunized against his real behavior by dogma, doctrinal office, and inquisition. It is this that gives the new nature of God the character of an ego-ideal.
The Change in the Nature of the Image
The destruction of the divine image has not done away with the imaginal quality altogether. It is not that formerly man lived in an imaginal world whereas today we do not. The image has only undergone a fundamental change in quality. The mode of being of the image has become different but not diminished. In fact, the image underwent the same tremendous intensification into a distillate of image that we have seen occurring with respect to God's truth. It is readily apparent that there has been an unheard-of inflation of the image, so that we now live in an absurdly imagistic time. Never has the world been so swamped with images: posters, magazines, prints, art books, comics, television, advertising on almost every wrapping, vast collections of pictures in city museums, printed fabrics and wallpaper. . . . In addition, there is an inflationary increase in figurative uses of language, puns and the like, again showing the dominance of the image.
Once the image was the manifestation of something. In the image of the bull, the sharply defined inner essence of the bull—the bull God—showed itself. The image always conveyed a reality as a numinous Other distinct from the image itself; but in such a way that the numinous reality manifested itself immediately in the image, shining forth from it, though without being identical with it. The image had an irreducible substantial content, for the sake of which it was image and to which it surrendered itself. Thus the image was image by helping its substantial content to presence, to manifest in such a way that the image was subsumed by its activity of showing its subject. The image was `holy' inasmuch as its reality served to show truth.
The image presented in advertising or television shows has freed itself from any dependence on its content. It is the totally unleashed, purified image, showing only itself. It is no longer there for the purpose of showing something. The image in advertising is absolutely indifferent to what it shows or is an image of. In this indifference lies its complete freedom and thus its absoluteness. For one and the same product you could advertise by means of an image of the tough life of cowboys just as easily as with the opposite image of a refined society living a luxurious life. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony can be the musical background to a soap commercial just as well as to a commercial for cognac or a political party. What matters is only that it is pure show and that it has brought its presence to the highest degree of forcibleness.
Here we see again that the imaginal quality too has been subjugated to will. Only an image freed into indifference to its content can arbitrarily be used and exploited for any purpose; only by submitting wholly to the will can the image free itself from being bonded by its subject as a numinous reality of substance and ascend into absoluteness. Therefore the purpose of financial profit that is intricately connected with advertising confirms the absoluteness of the image and is a condition for it. The financial exploitation of the image is the very guarantee that the image has indeed absolutely overcome its substantial content and now is shown solely for the purpose of show.
When we hear of an exploitation of image, we tend to react with moral condemnation. Advertising and television are considered base and inferior. That is the general consensus, even if this consensus does not seem to detract from their reality and popularity. But, after what we discussed above, we can no longer think in this condemnatory fashion, because that thought pattern was the very cause of what we now, looking through its glasses, would be condemning. We therefore must try to appreciate advertising, television, and today's whole flood of images as the modern form of image worship—as the authentic and only possible way to worship the image of the Christian God.
For what is the image of the Christian God? This God has just now in our story issued a prohibition: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness. . . . This prohibition is only directed against the natural deities, not against pictorial representations of Jahwe himself.11 What is rejected here is therefore the worship of the natural inasmuch as it claims to be substantial and divine of its own accord; and what is eo ipso demanded is a cult of a God image that has left all traces of the natural behind and has no substantial content, in other words, is an imageless image. This exactly corresponds to the new nature of God who has shaken off his natural reality and purified himself into an idealized `unreal' abstraction, into an image in the public relations sense of the word. The Christian God's existence is not substantial; it lies solely in his prestige, the effect of his `public relations,' in his being believed in by his `true believers,' his `fans.' In brief: he has his essence in the public opinion held of him. For the definition of his nature ("highest good," "true word," "all love") does not contain particular substantial qualities. It only names, quite abstractly, the relation to his public (love, message, Father) or the reputation that he wants to be known to have (summum bonum). Thus he lives entirely for and is reduced to his public image, whereas the old Gods only became present, only had their epiphany in the image and as image, but what showed forth in the image was their qualitative substantiality and particular essence. Now, the image is empty, even if it portrays the richness of the whole world; it does not make anything manifest any more, positing itself as an end in itself—pure prestige.
A main difference between the so-called pagan Gods and the Christian God lies, not in that the former are worshipped in images and the latter not, but in the transformation of the nature of the God image. We today worship the God image of our God just as much as the ancients worshipped their God images. The only difference is that our God image does not have the sensual shape of a natural phenomenon or of a cast, painted, or carved image, but rather the abstract and absolute shape of image per se: the image of public relations. The numinosity once invested in what the image manifested now belongs to the "image for the sake of image." We need images, more and more images, no matter what of.
The absolute God can only be a single one (monotheism : "that they might know thee the only true God" — John 17:3), and by the same token there is, and can only be, one single absolute image, no matter in how many different "versions" it occurs. It makes no difference whether it is the image of God, or of a politician, business firm, product, or private person—it is always one and the same thing that is shown in the image (in the public relations sense of the word) thanks to its total indifference to any specific content: prestige as such, the praise of the name for the name's sake; not of a particular name, for this would again be the name of something or somebody. Inasmuch as it is God's qualitative nature to be image (public opinion as such), any activity cultivating the prestige of something (of one's own image or of the image of a product or organization, or whatever) is an enactment of God's, nature and as such a sacred act—the cult or worship of our God image. With every image in advertising or public relations, the absolute God celebrates his ever-new triumph of the absolute God over his substantial bull shape.
In order for Christianity to overcome polytheism definitively, it had to become absolutely indifferent to any particular content of the image, indeed to the very idea of a content. Holy images were merely representations, functional aids, not in themselves holy. Thus, Christianity also had to become indifferent to its own doctrinal contents, its own iconography and mythical substance. The literal theological substance of Christianity, as it is still preached today by the churches, is the last pagan remnant, as it were, in Christianity itself. Only where this remnant of the natural and substantial has been completely transformed into function, and only where the intended noetic contents are totally transmuted into objectively existing form, has Christianity reached its accomplished shape: advertising, entertainment, tourism, public relations, ego-psychology, theory of information, and cybernetics—as shocking as this insight may at first seem. For behind every content that insisted on its remaining content, be it as Christian as can be, there would always be lurking one of the mythical Gods, a segment of the autonomous divinity of the natural world—idols.
To still today consider "actual" Christianity to be Christianity in its express theological form would mean to think that the Christian promise could be adhered to by the mere echoing of it instead of by making it good and to think that the task set by the Christian vision could be fulfilled by the monotonous repetition of this task instead of by its execution. Theological discourse could only be a preliminary representation of the Christian religion because it was Christian only "accidentally," only by virtue of the conscious intention of the speaking person. With advertising, to mention just one example, this is no longer the case. It is by virtue of the necessities of its essence and independently of the accidentalities of human intentions that advertising is the constant proclamation of salvation and the constant confirmation in the belief in salvation. Here, Christianity (the preaching of the Gospel = the good news and the mission to convert) is no longer a subjective attitude: it has changed over into an objective existence, working its reality upon us even against our `wills.'
The Demonization of Reality
As God's truth was heightened more and more until it reached the absolute summit in the New Testament, his reality became inferior. The suppression of God's reality into the status of idols or, later on, of the devil, however, does not mean that God's reality remained frozen in its old condition. On the contrary, only God's idealized person as pure spirit and
pure love was frozen once it had reached its highest possible form with the New Testament. For how could the absolute still progress; how could a truth that has been split from its reality continue to develop? God's truth had reached its end. Not so God's reality, now having become inferior. In fact, active fermentation and development were reserved for it.
As long as sensate reality bore the predicate `God,' it was securely moored in and bound by the name of God. On account of its divine nature, the mythical world bore a pleromatic fullness and gravity in itself which prevented things from striving beyond themselves into boundlessness (hybris, Titanism). This changed in that moment when reality was cut off from its inner mooring in the middle ground of the imaginal by a blow of the sword. From then on things did not have their ontological center, their center of gravity in themselves. That center had been transferred from within them into transcendence, so that the things of this world were brought into an ontological state of inevitable unrest since they now had to yearn for their center in a ceaseless striving. Since then, to use formulations by Nietzsche, the world is rolling from its center into the X, similar to a stream that wants to go to its end12—a process that began imperceptibly and became clear to everyone only during the modern age.
Just as God's truth cut off from his reality had striven for the highest heights like a released balloon, so conversely reality, separated from the name of God and thus unleashed, could, and had to, strive to advance its earthly realness to unheard-of degrees of intensity in order to correspond to the intensification reached by the predicate `God.' The tremendous amount of energy, released by its separation from God's truth, was now available for its completely autonomous development. The whole strength formerly invested in the ritual binding of reality, and thus in reality's trueness, was now for the sole benefit of reality pure and simple. This means reality was charged enormously; it was demonized. Reality too was supposed to acquire a literal existence instead of an imaginal one. The latest result of this development is the nuclear bomb. With it, a degree of reality has been reached behind which the wildness and danger of the bull and all other former God-animals, including Leviathan and Behemoth, fade to nothing.
Natural reality has intensified into technological reality. God's animal shape tied into the entire complex of life has been surpassed by the abstract and absolutely unleashed machine shape of God. As God's truth underwent, with the God of pure love and true word, a stylization into the absolute ideal cleansed from all reality, so also reality, released from its bondage to God's truth, intensified into the sheer distillate of realness. Nuclear energy is, as it were, realness as such, realness absolute, cleansed from all the "cinders" of the ideal that by necessity were originally incorporated in the real.
Our Real Experience of God
With this situation, however, development is reversed. The nuclear bomb is so frighteningly real that it simply forces consciousness to recognize it as an undeniable truth—ugly, depraved, deadly, but still truth. The long degraded and repressed reality has caught up again with that consciousness that had been exclusively fixated on pure truth. In the shape of the bomb, God's repudiated reality demands from us repayment with interest of a gigantic debt, demands the name of God which was withheld from reality for more than two millennia, the unreserved recognition of reality as true God. Western mankind owes reality worship, having disparaged it as idol, false Gods, Mammon, Moloch, Kingdom of Satan, the secular, and the like. Western man has praised God's truth to the skies, indeed so highly that in the end it evaporated; but he disowned reality like a bastard, even though this reality powerfully attracted man's greed (consumer goods), his curiosity (science), and his industry (big business), thereby proving its irresistible numinosity. Through faith, by believing, mankind abandoned itself blindly to God's own idol of himself.
Here, we must not forget that it was God himself who cut himself off from his reality and commanded that it be disparaged. With his zeal, God himself pursued his upward stylization to the absolutely true God and demanded faith in this image of himself. But as the psychotherapist would owe something to his patient if he were to believe blindly the latter's self-representation instead of also perceiving his unconscious reality, so God too has been betrayed in a deeper sense precisely because mankind believed his self-representation and complied with the degrading of God's reality pursued by God himself. It would seem to have been man's task to be more perspicacious and to try the spirits with critical alertness.
C. G. Jung repeatedly stressed that psychological hygiene requires consciousness to distinguish itself from those archetypal truths that might come over it. It is vital for us not to succumb to them. Above all in therapy, the analyst has to pay dearly for taking the neurotic conjectures of his patient literally. For the unconscious reality pushing to the fore from within the pathology insists on being seen as what it is despite all well-meaning intentions on the part of consciousness. Even the patient himself ultimately wants to be recognized in his reality, as strong as his defenses against such a recognition may be at first and as much as he may insist, in his conscious words, on his truth, i.e., his idealized self. Does not similarly God's reality in the shape of the bomb insist on recognition without reserve—even against his conscious self-revelation as pure love and creative truth? Does not God too want to be seen in his reality?
What in the shape of the nuclear bomb is knocking at our door and wants to be received into consciousness is nothing else but God's own reality, that reality that he had centuries ago cast away in the form of the bull image and thereby unleashed. Therapeutically, it is an indispensable necessity that the unleashed be bound again, that what has been split-off be united with its other half. It must not be said again: He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But the binding of the unleashed cannot take place in technology or by political techniques alone. It must also, even primarily, take place psychologically on the objective level of the psyche, i.e., in our ontology and theology. For only then is it not constantly threatened by a collapse of our good-will but is firmly grounded in a foundation that supports ourselves too. God's reality must finally be given back its truth, withheld from it for so long. And for that reason I say: The nuclear bomb is God.
It is not I who deifies the nuclear bomb. Objective phenomenology has long done so. In view of the bomb, must we not, to quote Schleiermacher, have the feeling of our absolute dependence? Is the nuclear bomb not, to speak with Tillich, our ultimate concern? In its face, must we not confess, to use Luther's phrase, "Did we in our own strength confide, Our striving would be losing" ? Is it not, to cite Rudolf Otto, the numinous power of our age? It is the supreme ruler over our existence or non-existence. It has the power to drive hundreds of thousands of people to public demonstrations, a modern variety of sacred processions. It causes boundless fears, shows itself to man in countless dreams. And above all, according to its telos it is all-permeating radiation (radiance), blazing heat, burning fire, all-crushing pressure-wave.
This is what we actually experience. Can we recognize this experience as binding for our thinking and speaking ? Do we allow our experience to tell us what name to give to it—or will we be blind to it, and do we situate our thinking and speaking in a cut-off realm of consciousness? Ultimately, the question is whether we grant, along with C. G. Jung, that phenomenological experience possesses ontological binding power or whether from a suspended spiritual position we de-realize our psychological experience as "merely" psychological, "merely" subjective. Jung grounded "psychological truth" in the "reality of the psyche." He said an idea "is psychologically true inasmuch as it exists," and similarly he said about physical reality, by way of example, that "an elephant is true because it exists."13 Jung thus brought down the notion of truth from transcendent heaven onto phenomenological earth. "Higher" truth is no longer literally above the world, but it is the depth and essence of the real world itself. If therefore our real experience binds our thinking and speaking, then we must say, the nuclear bomb is God, our true God, the God of the Christian West in his reality.
If, on the other hand, we cling to a certain idea of God and immunize it against all actual experience, then we would be pretending to have an absolute knowledge about who and how God is and what and how he can by no means be. In order for us to have such a knowledge, in order for us to possess a transcendent standard by which to measure the divine or not-divine qualities of real phenomena, we would have to be transcendent ourselves or even be superior to God. If, however, our finite nature and the finite nature of our knowledge come home to us, we must understand that we are irrevocably encompassed by our phenomenal world and are thus dependent on acquiring not only our knowledge about individual phenomena, but also the criteria by which to judge them, from phenomenological experience itself.
We do not know "the true God" (as negative theology itself insists), and this is so even if God himself sets up a particular image of himself as the true one and demands faith in it. That God is the "true God" or the absolute is only his attribute or name, only the content of an archetypal structure. As such a content, the statement is true (psychological truth), but this of course does not mean that the archetype of the absolute is himself in fact absolute (just as Muhammed Ali by saying "I am the greatest" must not necessarily be the greatest). We could only think so if our consciousness were infected by the archetypal idea of the absolute or the "true God" as if by a virus and, in an unending attack of "feverish" megalomania, had forgotten its irrevocably finite nature. Is not the mere flirtation with the idea of the infinite a presumption for mortal man? For finite consciousness would not be truly finite if it could in any way have access to something infinite. Is it not time to awaken from this Western frenzy and to see that the idea of an absolute, infinite God is itself a most finite, human, and seasonable idea?
That something as dreadful as the nuclear bomb is supposed to be God is nothing strange as far as the history and phenomenology of religion are concerned. Even the Christian God was dreadful at the times of the Old Testament. Of course this is in sharpest contrast to his self-revelation as love. But maybe we can apply to our topic a differentiation that Kafka14 once used and say on the basis of our actual phenomenological experience: yes, truly, God is love, but still more truly is he the terror of Being or, as Jung once formulated it, the all-mighty shadow, the fear that fills heaven and earth.15 Yes, indeed, God is his truth, but still more truly is he his reality. Truly—still more truly: this is the relationship that prevails between consciousness and the unconscious, between idealized self and reality.
New Primitivity
The statement "The nuclear bomb is God" cannot be taken literally. It would be absurd. Rather, this statement explodes our customary literal notion of God as well as our literal understanding of the bomb as a merely technical object. I cannot "believe" in the bomb as God. For then I would have idolized it. But neither can I look for God behind it, behind reality, and attribute a literal existence above the whole world to him. Ultimately this would be an idolization as well, inasmuch as idolatry means that a split-off, partial aspect is worshipped as God in its own right. Let us keep in mind what the Pueblo Indian said: "The sun is God. Everyone can see that. He is the Father, there is no father behind him." This worshipped sun is of course not the reduced sun of physics or astronomy. It is the full-fledged original sun, the image that looks at the soul from within the sun's depth. In the same vein, the nuclear bomb is not God as an object of physics but as the real image of the absolute terror that it throws into the soul and that fills the soul with fear and awe, or it is the image of that inconceivable radiance before which we could not hide our face any more but would have to retreat to fallout shelters. Here we do not have to mystify: everyone can see that.
We don't have to look for anything behind the phenomenon. The real, unreduced sight of the nuclear bomb is God. Literalism, or the metaphysical relation to Being, has been overcome, and Being is grounded again in the metaphorical image, in appearance, in the phenomenal shine. The notion of God that had been raised to the metaphysical heaven and shelved there has come back down to earth, so that reality can be credited again with the binding power of truth, i.e., with the attribute God, simply because it is so dreadfully real. Nature and spirit are no longer the ultimate components of the world, no longer absolute opposites. They are returned to the psyche, and the psyche in return is reinstated in its hereditary rank as that which surrounds us on all sides and has nothing outside of itself.
We for our part return with this metaphorical, psychological, phenomenological position into a new primitivity—if you wish, into a kind of "animism," which, as you know, comes from anima. As Jung once stated in a conversation with a man of the church, "I am a primitive; you are a civilized man." When Jung reported this conversation, he added, "In a certain way, this man is much more wonderful than I am. He can [on account of the means of grace of the church] be a saint; I cannot be a saint—I can only be a nigger, very primitive, going by the next thing—quite superstitious."16
If we stick to the next best in this quite "naive" way, then we will, I assume, go down on our knees in view of the dreadful terror and the unspeakable radiance looking at us from within the nuclear bomb. Then the worship of the Golden Calf, interrupted at that time, could be concluded, but on the completely new level of the absolute that we have meanwhile arrived at. Does not God's reality, does not his dreadfulness, does not the nuclear bomb demand of us that we worship it? Is worship not the only real possibility of its propitiation? With worship I of course do not mean to approve of it, to be "for" it. I simply mean that we correspond to the actual experience in our soul by a conscious recognition of the substance of this experience. I mean that we expressly take our place in that which actually is. I mean, figuratively speaking, the dance around our Golden Calf. Can you imagine this? A mankind that dances around the bomb? A mankind whose hardening and contentiousness, whose power competition and protesting would be softened in the dance, a mankind that would swing into the "atomic" music of Being? And a bomb that would not have to be used any more, because it would be the center authorizing the dance? A bomb, which as that center would bind man and by binding us would also be itself bound?
- On the psychological meaning of peaks and lowlands, cf. J. Hillman, "Peaks and Vales," in Puer Papers (Spring Publ., 1979), pp. 54-74.
- Realenzyklopädie fur protestantische Theologie 9 (1901): 704-13. We may also remember here that Jesus on the cross, in the hour of utter despair, quotes Psalm 22 ("My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?") in which we also find images of being cornered by brutal animals ("Many bulls have compassed me: strong bulls...have beset me round"—Ps. 22:13). Cf. J. Hillman, "Betrayal," in Loose Ends (Spring Publ., 1975), pp. 69f. In the moment when the image of the God of trust is shattered, the bull returns.
- Ulrich Mann, "Ikone and Engel als Gestalten geistleiblicher Mittlerschaft," in Eranos Yearbook 52—1983, pp. 1-53, esp. p. 21.
- Thomas Mann, Joseph and seine Brüder (S. Fischer, 1976), p. 512 (chapter "Nachtgespräch" in Joseph in Ägypten, my translation).
- It is interesting to note that the shine was transferred from God to Moses (Exod. 34 : 30 — "And when Aaron and all the children of Israel saw Moses, behold, the skin of his face shone; and they were afraid to come nigh him").
- On "self-exaltation" ("Selbst-über-hebung"), see W. Giegerich, "Beitrag zur Polytheismus-Diskussion," Gorgo 2 (1979) : 61-69.
- J. Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. xi.
- On the will and the original uprising of the will, see esp. M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2 vols. (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961). The psychological connection between ego and will (and animus) is touched upon in J. Hillman, "Anima (II)," Spring 1974, esp. p. 143.
- Augustinus, "In Johannis Evangelium," XXXIV, 2, col. 2037, tom. III/2: Non est Dominus sol factus, sed per quem sol factus est.
- I quote from the reports of this encounter in Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, rev. ed. (New York: Pantheon, 1973), pp. 250f., as well as in CW 18, §688.
- Ulrich Mann, "Ikone and Engel," pp. 9f.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Wille zur Macht, §1.5 and "Vorrede," §2.
- CW 11, §4f.
- Franz Kafka, "Das Urteil," in Das Urteil and andere Erzahlungen (Frankfurt and Hamburg: Fischer Bücherei, 1952), p. 21: "Ein unschuldiges Kind warst du ja eigentlich, aber noch eigentlicher warst du ein teuflischer Mensch!"
- C.G. Jung, Briefe, vol. 1, ed. A. Jaffe (Olten: Walter, 1972), p. 412 (letter to Arnold Künzli, 16 March 1943).
- CW 18, §682.
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