In the fourth picture Sol kneels before Mithras. (Cf. pl. XXIVa.)

These last two pictures show that Mithras has arrogated to himself the strength of the sun and become its lord.

He has conquered his animal nature (the bull).

Animals represent instinct, and also the prohibition of instinct, so that man becomes human through conquering his animal instinctuality.

Mithras has thus sacrificed his animal nature—a solution already anticipated in the Gilgamesh Epic by the hero’s renunciation of the terrible Ishtar.

In the Mithraic sacrifice the conquest of instinctuality no longer takes the archaic form of overpowering the mother, but of renouncing one’s own instinctive desires.

The primitive idea of reproducing oneself by entering into the mother’s body has become so remote that the hero, instead of committing incest, is now sufficiently far advanced in the domestic virtues to seek immortality through the sacrifice of the incest tendency.

This significant change finds its true fulfilment only in the symbol of the crucified God.

In atonement for  Adam’s sin a bloody human sacrifice is hung upon the tree of life.126 (Cf. pl. XXXVI.)

Although the tree of life has a mother significance, it is no longer the mother, but a symbolical equivalent to which the hero offers up his life.

One can hardly imagine a symbol which expresses more drastically the subjugation of instinct.

Even the manner of death reveals the symbolic content of this act: the hero suspends himself in the branches of the maternal tree by allowing his arms to be nailed to the cross.

We can say that he unites himself with the mother in death and at the same time negates the act of union, paying for his guilt with deadly torment.

This act of supreme courage and supreme renunciation is a crushing defeat for man’s animal nature, and it is also an earnest of supreme salvation, because such a deed alone seems adequate to expiate Adam’s sin of unbridled instinctuality.

The sacrifice is the very reverse of regression—it is a successful canalization of libido into the symbolic equivalent of the mother, and hence a spiritualization of it. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 398

Humanity came to its gods by accepting the reality of the symbol, that is, it came to the reality of thought, which has made man lord of the earth.

Devotion, as Schiller correctly conceived it, is a regressive movement of libido towards the primordial, a diving down into the source of the first beginnings.

Out of this there rises, as an image of the incipient progressive movement, the symbol, which is a condensation of all the operative unconscious factors—“living form,” as Schiller says, and a God-image, as history proves.

It is therefore no accident that he should seize on a divine image, the Juno Ludovici, as a paradigm.

Goethe makes the divine images of Paris and Helen float up from the tripod of the Mothers99—on the one hand the rejuvenated pair, on the other the symbol of a process of inner union, which is precisely what Faust passionately craves for himself as the supreme inner atonement.

This is clearly shown in the ensuing scene as also from the further course of the drama.

As we can see from the example of Faust, the vision of the symbol is a pointer to the onward course of life,

beckoning the libido towards a still distant goal—but a goal that henceforth will burn unquenchably within him, so that his life, kindled as by a flame, moves steadily towards the far-off beacon.

This is the specific life-promoting significance of the symbol, and such, too, is the meaning and value of religious symbols.

I am speaking, of course, not of symbols that are dead and stiffened by dogma, but of living symbols that rise up from the creative unconscious of the living man. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 202

The ritual event that takes place in the Mass has a dual aspect, human and divine.

From the human point of view, gifts are offered to God at the altar, signifying at the same time the self-oblation of the priest and the congregation.

The ritual act consecrates both the gifts and the givers.

It commemorates and represents the Last Supper which our Lord took with his disciples, the whole Incarnation, Passion, death, and resurrection of Christ.

But from the divine point of view this anthropomorphic action is only the outer shell or husk in which what is really happening is not a human action at all but a divine event.

For an instant the life of Christ, eternally existent outside time, becomes visible and is unfolded in temporal succession, but in condensed form, in the sacred action: Christ incarnates as a man under the aspect of the offered substances, he suffers, is killed, is laid in the sepulchre, breaks the power of the underworld, and rises again in glory.

In the utterance of the words of consecration the Godhead intervenes, Itself acting and truly present, and thus proclaims that the central event in the Mass is Its act of grace, in which the priest has only the significance of a minister.

The same applies to the congregation and the offered substances: they are all ministering causes of the sacred event.

The presence of the Godhead binds all parts of the sacrificial act into a mystical unity, so that it is God himself who offers himself as a sacrifice in the

substances, in the priest, and in the congregation, and who, in the human form of the Son, offers himself as an atonement to the Father. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 378

The traditional view of Christ’s work of redemption reflects a one-sided way of thinking, no matter whether we regard that one-sidedness as purely human or as willed by God.

The other view, which regards the atonement not as the payment of a human debt to God, but as reparation for a wrong done by God to man, has been briefly outlined above.

This view seems to me to be better suited to the power situation as it actually exists.

The sheep can stir up mud in the wolf’s drinking water, but can do him no other harm.

So also the creature can disappoint the creator, but it is scarcely credible that he can do him a painful wrong.

This lies only in the power of the creator with respect to the powerless creature.

On this view, a wrong is imputed to God, but it is certainly no worse than what has already been imputed to him if one assumes that it was necessary to torture the son to death on the Cross merely in order to appease the father’s wrath.

What kind of father is it who would rather his son were slaughtered than forgive his ill-advised creatures who have been corrupted by his precious Satan?

What is supposed to be demonstrated by this gruesome and archaic sacrifice of the son? God’s love, perhaps? Or his implacability?

We know from chapter 22 of Genesis4 and from Exodus 22:29 that Yahweh has a tendency to employ such means as the killing of the son and the first-born in order to test his people’s faith or to assert his will, despite the fact that his omniscience and omnipotence have no need whatever of such savage procedures, which moreover set a bad example to the mighty ones of the earth.

It is very understandable, therefore, that a naïve mind is apt to run away from such questions and excuse this manoeuvre as a beautiful sacrificium intellectus.

If one prefers not to read the Eighty-ninth Psalm, the matter will not end there. He who cheats once will cheat again, particularly when it comes to self-knowledge.

But self-knowledge, in the form of an examination of conscience, is demanded by Christian ethics.

They were very pious people who maintained that self-knowledge paves the way to knowledge of God. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 661

The future indwelling of the Holy Ghost in man amounts to a continuing incarnation of God. Christ, as the begotten son of God and preexisting mediator, is a first-born and a divine paradigm which will be followed by further incarnations of the Holy Ghost in the empirical man.

But man participates in the darkness of the world, and therefore, with Christ’s death, a critical situation arises which might well be a cause for anxiety. When God became man all darkness and evil were carefully kept outside.

Enoch’s transformation into the Son of Man took place entirely in the realm of light, and to an even greater extent this is true of the incarnation in Christ. It is highly unlikely that the bond between God and man was broken with the death of Christ; on the contrary, the continuity of this bond is stressed again and again and is further confirmed by the sending of the Paraclete.

But the closer this bond becomes, the closer becomes the danger of a collision with evil.

On the basis of a belief that had existed quite early, the expectation grew up that the light manifestation would be followed by an equally dark one, and Christ by an Antichrist.

Such an opinion is the last thing one would expect from the metaphysical situation, for the power of evil is supposedly overcome, and one can hardly

believe that a loving father, after the whole complicated arrangement of salvation in Christ, the atonement and declaration of love for mankind, would again let loose his evil watch-dog on his children in complete disregard of all that had gone before.

Why this wearisome forbearance towards Satan?

Why this stubborn projection of evil on man, whom he has made so weak, so faltering, and so stupid that we are quite incapable of resisting his wicked sons? Why not pull up evil by the roots? ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 693

[1551] There were very good reasons why the Catholic Church has carefully purified Christ and his mother from all contamination by the peccatum originale.

Protestantism was more courageous, even daring or—perhaps? —more oblivious of the consequences, in not denying—expressis verbis—the human nature (in part) of Christ and (wholly) of his mother.

Thus the ordinary man became a source of the Holy Spirit, though certainly not theonly one.

It is like lightning, which issues not only from the clouds but also from the peaks of the mountains.

This fact signifies the continued and progressive divine incarnation.

Thus man is received and integrated into the divine drama.

He seems destined to play a decisive part in it; that is why he must receive the Holy Spirit.

I look upon the receiving of the Holy Spirit as a highly revolutionary fact which cannot take place until the ambivalent nature of the Father is recognized.

If God is the summum bonum, the incarnation makes no sense, for a good god could never produce such hate and anger that his only son had to be sacrificed to appease it.

A Midrash says that the Shofar is still sounded on the Day of Atonement to remind YHWH of his act of injustice towards Abraham (by compelling him to slay Isaac) and to prevent him from repeating it.

A conscientious clarification of the idea of God would have consequences as upsetting as they are necessary.

They would be indispensable for an interior development of the trinitarian drama and of the role of the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit is destined to be incarnate in man or to choose him as a transitory dwelling-place. “Non habet nomen proprium,” says St. Thomas; because he will receive the name of man.

That is why he must not be identified with Christ.

We cannot receive the Holy Spirit unless we have accepted our own individual life as Christ accepted his.

Thus we become the “sons of god” fated to experience the conflict of the divine opposites, represented by the crucifixion. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1551