CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

19 OCTOBER 1932
according to Apuleius, where the initiate at the end of the ceremony was
put upon the pedestal and worshiped as the god Helios, the deification
that always follows the baptismal rite. 4 You are born into a new existence;
you are a very different being and have a different name.
One sees all that very beautifully in the Catholic rite of baptism when
the godfather holds the child and the priest approaches with the burning
candle and says: Dono tibi lucem eternam” (I give thee the eternal
light)—which means, I give you relatedness to the sun, to the God. You
receive the immortal soul, which you did not possess before; you are
then a “twice-born.” Christ receives his mission and the spirit of God in
his baptism in the Jordan. He is only a Christus after baptism because
Christus meant the anointed one. He too is “twice-born.” He is now
above the ordinary mortal that he was as Jesus, the son of the carpenter.
He is now a Christus, a nonpersonal or symbolic personality, no longer
a mere person belonging to this or that family. He belongs to the whole
world, and in his life it becomes evident that this is a very much more
important role than if he were the son of Joseph and Mary.
So maõipÖra is the center of the identification with the god, where one
becomes part of the divine substance, having an immortal soul. You are
already part of that which is no longer in time, in three-dimensional
space; you belong now to a fourth-dimensional order of things where
time is an extension, where space does not exist and time is not, where
there is only infinite duration—eternity.
This is a worldwide and ancient symbolism, not only in the Christian
baptism and the initiation in the Isis mysteries. For instance, in the religious
symbolism of ancient Egypt, the dead Pharaoh goes to the underworld
and embarks in the ship of the sun. You see, to approach divinity
means the escape from the futility of the personal existence and the
achieving of the eternal existence, the escape to a nontemporal form of
existence. The Pharaoh climbs into the sun bark and travels through the
night and conquers the serpent, and then rises again with the god, and
is riding over the heavens for all eternity. That idea spread in the later
centuries, so that even the nobles who were particularly friendly with the
Pharaoh succeeded in climbing into the ship of Ra. Therefore one finds
so many mummies buried in the tomb of the Pharaohs, the hope being
that all the bodies in the tombs would rise with him. I saw something very
touching in a newly excavated tomb in Egypt. Just before they had
locked up the tomb of this particular noble, one of the workmen had put
a little baby that had recently died, in a miserable little basket of reeds
4 Lucius Apuleius, The Golden Ass, translated by Robert Graves (London, 1950), 286.
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