KILLINGS:
PSYCHOLOGY’S PLATONISM AND THE MISSING LINK TO REALITY
The nickname for John Knox, the stern reformer of the Scottish Church, was “Kill Joy.” It might appear that I am a new pretender to this title, having deliberately chosen to speak about killings at a Festival of Archetypal Psychology. Won’t images of cruelty and violence crush any festive mood in the bud? The impression of this “kill joy” attitude is deepened when, at the very beginning of this Festival, I raise the question if there is something, if we really have something to celebrate. What is it that a festival of archetypal psychology can celebrate?
Of course, in the Disneyland idea of festival, the very point of festivities is to be utterly pointless. Only if you celebrate nothing, celebrate just for the fun of it—festivals for festivals’ sake—can the absolute carefreeness and pure entertainment value of festivities demanded by the spirit of Hollywood be guaranteed. But the trademark of archetypal psychology is that it is conceived as a psychology with ground and substance, a psychology “with gods.” And from an archetypal perspective, a festival must have a god at its core, because this is what makes a festival a festival in its true sense. He or She is the substance celebrated by the soul in its festivals. To celebrate archetypal psychology for its own sake would be not only self-complacent but self-defeating. A psychology “with gods,” however, might be equipped for a true festival and entitled to celebrate. For then it has a substance authenticating it and giving it depth.
But is archetypal psychology really a psychology with gods? Or is the talk about gods in archetypal psychology merely a kind of glamorizing jargon, fundamentally removed from that reality that once was referred to by the word “gods?” What I mean is perhaps best illustrated by an anecdote told about Walter F. Otto, the noted author of The Homeric Gods, who believed in the Greek gods as realities and believed he could behold them even in our modern world. Another famous classicist, Karl Reinhard, is supposed to have once asked Otto, “So you are convinced, Mr. Otto, of the reality of Zeus?” Otto answered, “Yes.” Reinhard asked, “Do you pray to Zeus?” Again the answer was, “Yes.” Thereupon Reinhard said, “But then you must also sacrifice bulls to Zeus."1 Reinhard’s point here is well taken. There is not much left of Zeus if he is deprived of the sacrifices to him. You cannot give up bull sacrifices and nevertheless think that Zeus remains Zeus. In those times that knew about Gods, there could not be a festival celebrating a god without a bloody sacrifice as the festival’s climax. For it was above all this sacrificial killing which made the point that the festival was to have and which brought about the divine presence which turned the day into a festive or holy day in the first place.
It is obvious that we moderns cannot offer bloody sacrifices to the Gods anymore and that we therefore probably cannot celebrate a true festival anymore. But as my contribution to this gathering, I want to try, by way of as close an approximation to the real thing as is possible for me, to at least restore some sense of what sacrificial killings were about, some sense of them as the primordial soul-making. I do this mindful of the fact that Jungian psychology proper began with Jung’s chapter on “The Sacrifice” in his book later entitled Symbols of Transformation. For as Jung himself stated, he was well aware of the fact that writing this chapter on the meaning of sacrifice was tantamount to sacrificing his friendship with Freud and thus to the parting of the ways of Freudian psychoanalysis and Jungian analytical psychology.
Sacrifices, and this means sacrificial slaughters, were an all-pervasive phenomenon in most civilizations the world over. Throughout the year, and year after year, they would be regularly performed on all sorts of occasions. They not only had their place in private religious life, but were a constituent element in the life of the state. Politics could not be thought of apart from bloody sacrifices. The main task of emperors and kings was to supervise the correct performance of sacrifices. No war, oath, treaty, contract, marriage, border crossing, home construction—and of course no festival—without immolation. This is how it was in Europe down to late antiquity, and elsewhere until recently.
The ritual slaughters were not performed in secret. The public experienced the priest’s killing blow upon the human or animal to be sacrificed in its physical and sensuous concreteness. They saw the blood spouting, smelled its sweetness as well as the old blood covering the god’s altar layer by layer from the thousands of earlier sacrifices. A main act of religion is the shedding of blood, the slaughter, with the subsequent burning of parts of the animal, and the communal feast of the congregation. “Not in pious conduct, not in prayer, singing and dancing alone is the god experienced most powerfully, but also in the death blow of the axe, in the blood trickling off and in the burning of the thigh pieces … The fundamental experience of the sacred is the sacrificial killing … For this killing is ‘acting’ pure and simple, rezein, operari, from which the [German] word ‘Opfer’ is derived, a designation that euphemistically conceals the core of this ‘acting.‘ “ So writes Walter Burkert in his fundamentally important book on Greek sacrificial rites.2 In ancient Israel, too, the burnt offering was to burn “upon the altar all night unto the morning … for a sweet savour … unto the Lord” (Lev. 6). And even today the Roman Catholic priest must still perform the Sacrifice of the Mass, which, even if only in highly sublimated form, is nevertheless still a bloody sacrifice.
Sacrifices not only extend into the present, they also reach back into Paleolithic ages. On the basis of prehistoric findings Herbert Kühn was able to put forth the thesis that “sacrifice is the oldest form of religious act.” 3 Ritual killings of humans have been represented by Müller-Karpe as a phenomenon as early as the Paleolithic.4 But above all we have to realize that hunting—big-game hunting—was originally a sacrificial act, and the hunt may date back as much as two million years. Eliade says, “The killing of the hunted animal amounts to a sacrifice.”5 In 1946, Karl Meuli was able to demonstrate amazing parallels between particulars of Greek sacrificial rites and the practices of hunters and pastoralists as well as the hunting practices of the mesopaleolithic.6 In an extraordinarily illuminating paper on “The Nature of the Spear,” Heino Gehrts7 brought to light the sacrificial meaning and the sacrificial character of the primordial hunt from within, and Burkert shows that the sacrificial rites are a continuation of early hunting practices and hunting experience at a time when mankind had proceeded from a hunting to an agricultural civilization. Burkert also points out that the transition to hunting is perhaps the decisive ecological change contrasting man from the other primates and that the time of the hunting societies comprises the largest part of human history by far, an estimated 95 to 99 percent.
Just imagine: 95 to 99 percent of human history was determined by huntsmanship, i.e., by killing, and not only as one incidental form of acquiring food, but as the center out of which human existence acquired its meaning. And of the remaining 10,000 years since the invention of agriculture, for at least 8000 years mankind’s social, political, cultural and religious being was grounded in and derived from sacrificial slaughter and sacrificial blood. Every house was literally based on a sacrifice, on an animal or human ritually killed during the building ceremony and immured in the foundation.
If millennia of humanization centered around killing and blood, and if hunting practices represented the crucial ecological change from primates, humanization came about precisely through man’s killing activities. The birth of the gods, piety, soul and consciousness, culture itself did not merely arise from the spirit of killing but from actual killings. René Girard, too, even though from a different mindset than mine, moralistic and judgmental, came to the conclusion that “all useful activities must derive from murder,”8 as he derogatively puts it. This helps us to understand why a philosopher who certainly was no advocate of violence could state that “killing still is the most noble activity.” We could even say it is the essentially human action. And by using the formula homo necans (killing man) as the title of his book, Burkert himself gives killing its place in the very definition of man.
It would be a mistake to consider the primordial hunt as man’s animal heritage. That is precisely what it is not. First of all, hunting is a new and by no means self-evident acquisition with respect to the other primates. Man is not naturally equipped with an instinctual apparatus enabling him to prey. He only took on the beast-of-prey behavior in the course of his humanization. It is something artificial for him, requiring tremendous contra-natural efforts at overcoming the natural fears and inhibitions characteristic of the species. Secondly, the transition to the hunt cannot be explained by practical necessity. It has been established that it was not lack of food and hunger that necessitated the invention of hunting. Carrion and small animals would have been sufficient for man’s meat requirements, as they were for the pre-human species of Australopithecus and Homo habilis, who did not yet hunt but were nevertheless successful Furthermore, in hunting societies the hunters generally contribute no more than about twenty percent to the diet.9 Thus the hunter’s killing is from the very beginning fundamentally different from the strictly biological hunting behavior of beasts of prey. Human killing from the outset is an undertaking whose origin is in soul and mind, not biology and nature. It stems from psychological and spiritual necessities, the need for meaning. The early hunter’s killing is genuinely human.
We know from the early cave paintings as well as from recent hunting cultures that the hunt does not occur as an immediate biological event, but is a ritual. It was a sacred action occurring in a sacred space. This space was separated from the sphere of everyday life through various rites d’entrée, through sexual abstention and sequestering the prospective members of the hunting party, and later again through desacralizing rites leading back into the ordinary world. Gehrts has shown that the 150,000 year old hunting spear of Lehringen, the oldest known, is not simply a practical instrument but above all a ceremonial utensil and carrier of meaning. In the spear the male had his self (it was therefore not in himself!). Likewise the blood shed in the hunt was not merely the biological juice of life. Rather, the sacrificial animal’s blood was collected by the women in a basket (in which they had their selves) and taken into their village, so that from it the inhabitants might “partake of the fullness of power, partake of the sacrificial gain.” We also know that for the early hunter the hunted animal itself was his close relative, his “brother” or “father” or “god,” not just a meat supply. What does this mean? In the hunted or immolated animal man knows himself. Via his killing the animal or a human in the case of human sacrifices, man gained his initial self-knowledge, his first awareness of himself, which would later articulate itself in his images and stories of gods.
Killing was thus the main act in which the first negation of the animals environment, and ipso facto the primordial opening of what we call the world of man, takes place. It is the pivot between the immediate, natural life of the living creature and the cultural existence of man which is posited, mediated from the outset. With the early hunter’s terrific killing thrust of the spear, with the sacrificer’s shocking blow of the axe, man did not merely hit, as did the beast of prey, some indifferent Other and thus something of no further concern beyond its food value. He also hit and killed his own Other, and thus himself. In this he did not literally destroy himself as a living creature, he only killed himself logically as the merely-biological creature. The one who died as merely-biological being had simultaneously risen as mental, conscious human, and thus made his first entrance into the state of being as soul. The transition from gatherer to big-game hunter did not have the evolutionary purpose of providing new food sources for one particular species of animal, Homo erectus or Homo sapiens, and thus contributing to its survival. It had the much more radical purpose of effecting the breakthrough into a qualitatively new dimension, that of the mind and the soul, of consciousness. Man does not come into the world through birth or through learning, nor by natural development, evolution, or growth. Man must himself bring about his coming into the world and his coming to consciousness through his own incisive acts and sufferings—initially and ever anew.
This is a very different “Origin and History of Consciousness” from that provided by Erich Neumann, whose envelopment in an ahistorical, archetypal fantasy I demonstrated in my “Fundamental Critique”10 seventeen years ago, without at that time positing a theory of my own.
The killing thrust of the spear or axe is a blow into the dullness of animal life. It was the soul itself that with the shock of the killing blow shocked itself out of the darkness of merely-biological existence. In this darkness it violently opened up for itself for the first time soul-space as a small island. Within vegetative and animal life’s impenetrable, pasty substantiality the mercilessly descending blow tore open a certain free space, and the blood gushing forth from the open wound ignited a light. The myth of the separation of the world parents, Heaven and Earth, who originally had been sandwiched in constant cohabitation, leaving their offspring no space to breathe and no light to live in—here in the act of the sacrificial blow from within the dullness of biological life and into it—here this myth is a momentary event. What is told in the myth as a cosmic story was once an actual deed and event in the real, concrete life of man. By contrast to the undistanced immersion of animal life in its own affective and instinctual processes, this literally incisive event brings a reflective distance to just those processes, and thereby a clearance. As separation of Heaven and Earth, this blow with the axe breaks open Jonathan Z. Smith’s difference between “map” and “territory,” Heidegger’s ontological difference between that which is and its being, and Hillman’s psychological difference between archetypal perspective and that which is seen from this perspective.
As the sacrificial animal or human breathes his last, the god, the image—meaning—is generated. But the image is still completely immersed in the act itself. Meaning here is primarily within, and as the event, it is not a conscious feeling experience of meaning, nor yet a positivized meaning as intellectual content. There is no Marxist superstructure here, no platonistic realm of ideas. The imaginal, the psychological, which later articulates itself at first in the form of Gods and spirits and then as images and ideas and still later as concepts, is only as the negated, killed merely-biological life.
When man entered history, he was from the outset equipped with all his body organs, such as heart, liver, and kidneys. But he was not equipped with a consciousness as a finished product, with a naturally given soul, which in addition to its existence would—for whatever reasons—have been full of terrible aggressions exploding at times in acts of violence. This for the simple reason that the soul does not belong to the category of ontic organs—entities. Soul is not. Soul cannot be thought of in ontological terms. Soul is logical life, and as such is self-generating. In man and through him the soul generated and edified itself by means of innumerable incisive acts. The soul first made itself through killing. It killed itself into being. That is why I consider sacrificial killing as primordial soul-making The soul freed itself, within its immersion in the merely-biological, from this immersion—from an immersion, however, that continues to exist even after it has been overcome.
The dullness of animal existence had consisted in the fact that the reaction to whatever was encountered had to be more or less automatic (affective, instinctual), exclusively in the service of the biological purpose of securing and heightening life. Homo necans—the killing man—burst asunder this being bonded by naked biological interests through his blow with the axe or his thrusting the spear. For with this tremendous deed he logically broke through life’s boundary to death, by which boundary the living organism is completely enclosed; he thus inflicted the experience of death upon himself, while still in life, and made this experience the basis of his own, no longer merely-biological life.
It was not the relative of the primate who achieved the killing of animals with hunting. It was the soul that within this relative of the primate, and contrary to all his natural anxieties and resistance, forced this killing, so that by killing the animal outside the soul would wound and kill itself (soul still immersed in primate existence). It would thus see the light as human soul and as consciousness. It is for this reason that the primordial hunter and immolator can say what a Babylonian sacrificing priest said: “This deed [sacrificial slaughter]—all the gods performed it; not I performed it.”11 The sacrifice is not an ego action. It is the self-reflection of the soul, through which it generates itself, and not in the spiritual medium of thought but in the material medium of action.
According to Daniel 8: 11, Antiochos Epiphanes’s crime against Jerusalem was that “by him the daily sacrifice was taken away” from Jehova. All gods need sacrifices. Why? Because they have their existence, their reality, only in the sacrificial blow and blood. Our idea is that God or gods are existing entities (if we accept the notion of God at all. But in ancient times, gods were nothing else but the trembling of the soul vis-à-vis the blow with the axe, a trembling that like the vibration of a musical string fades out in time and is therefore in need of renewal. Man could still easily slip back by degrees into the dullness of the merely-biological existence, forfeiting the clearance generated by immolation.
In the sacrificial blow, the soul drove the god images or archetypes into itself. Each killing blow imprinted the specific archetypal image in the soul afresh. The archetypes are here not simply a priori. There is not an inexhaustible store of archetypal images given with the world. Man has to contribute to their generation: by sacrum facere (making sacred, sacrificing). Just as for the Pueblo Indians, as we hear from Jung, the sun does not travel merely by nature across the sky, it needs continual help from humans, through ritual. The blow and the blood are “facts” in the literal sense, results of the soul’s own making, and left with their shocking effect an indelible impression in the soul, one that bestowed on the divine an unquestionable reality. Millenia after the abolition of bloody sacrifices, the shock that had made the soul shake, deepened and renewed in thousands of sacrifices, still has an echo, which today we call an archetypal or numinous experience. The mythical image that once deeply engraved itself into the soul through sacrificial killing is even today capable of setting the soul vibrating—a faint resonance of that shudder which formerly made the soul quiver in awe.
But it is a faint resonance and no more than a resonance. Since the gods no longer have a basis in the reality of the soul’s experience through real blood and real sacrifice—ever since Zarathustra, Isaiah, the Psalmist, the Orphics and the Pythagoreans criticized the bloody sacrifices—the images have become fainter, the gods more abstract and subjective, and a convincing meaning of life ever harder to come by. For without blood, gods who impart meaning cannot survive They need daily sacrifices as their nourishment, for gods are not existing entities. They are results of the soul’s acting, but they are not any less real. Indeed, they are the only reality that is really real. The blood shed together with the sensuality and actuality of this experience provided the gods with doubtless reality. You did not have to believe in that Zeus to whom just now a bull had been sacrificed before your eyes, the taste of whose meat you had just now communally enjoyed, the smell of whose blood and burning you still had in your nose. And you could not believe in him. For you had witnessed his renewed generation in the sacrificial slaughter. You still felt it in your bones.
Explaining why he did not go to the sacrifices anymore, Plotinus is supposed to have said, “They [the gods] must come to me, not I to them.” This anecdote beautifully reveals the platonistic fallacy, the reduction of soul-making to its one passive half, that of receiving, of vision, imagination. Its active half, that of our making, of sacrificial act and fact, has been dropped.
Sacrifice as an institution has been abolished for almost two thousand years. There is no way back, and of course we cannot even wish to return to it, despite the cultural and soul loss incurred through this abolition. For us moderns the empirical act of killing is no longer capable of being in itself a logical act. For us it is just plain murder. History, the development of consciousness, removed us from that place where literal deeds could truly carry logos-meaning for us and could thus in reality transform the logic of our existence. Formerly the sacrificial blow performed the miracle of actually driving non-existing logos or soul into carnate actuality. It thereby gave body to bodiless logos or soul, making them real. The outrageous blow cutting into the intactness of the living animal or human, married, indeed welded, irreal logos or soul to enfleshed reality. Biology was deposed as the primary basis of human existence and mind or psyche installed. Now for better or worse, man lives in an inverted world, namely in mind or soul, and has his body as well as the so-called outside world only within them.
In a letter, Jung noted with astonishment that consciousness receives hardly any direct information about the inner processes of the body, and that the unconscious (dreams, etc.) also hardly ever refers to the body. He spoke of “the strange gap between mind and body” and said, “One would have to expect that the soul would receive immediate and comprehensive information about each change in the interior of the body animated by it. That this is not the case requires an explanation."12 But this expectation is only the expectation of "natural consciousness,” which imagines consciousness and soul as a kind of natural, continuous extension or further development of the organism. Soul and consciousness, however, are not natural. They are contra naturam. They owe their existence to a revolution, to the logical negation of life, to the intrusion of death violently disrupting the continuity and intactness of the sphere of biological life. For death to truly intrude and shock life out of “the innocence of becoming” (Nietzsche) and thus into consciousness, it couldn’t be just the innocent death that is a natural event of life. It had to be the unnatural, outrageous act of killing. Hillman stresses the soul’s special relationship to death and the underworld. We add that this relationship is due to the soul’s origin in the intentional act of slaughter violating life’s innocence, and in the conscious affirmation, indeed celebration, of this grave offense as the new foundation of existence: human existence.
Given the overwhelming impressiveness of the institution of sacrifice—its significance and intensity, its temporal and geographic extent—is it not amazing that Jungian, archetypal psychology has not taken note of it, not considered it as a primary mode of soul-making? Psychology in its innocence took only the one abstracted half of the archaic heritage into account, the meaning and image aspect of the beautiful myths and symbols, and believed itself entitled to claim for this mere half the name, “reality of the psyche.” Archetypes as archetypes in themselves and images in an imagistic understanding, just as Platonic forms, are removed from all historical deeds and from the logical but real action of the soul. They are completely cleansed of all blood and of all traces of a violent act. Psychology’s “gods” are paper tigers. They are immunized from the actual world relation of an age and culture. Nobody thinks that the archetype, arche-typos, has its origin in a real typos, namely a “blow” with the axe. The innocence of consciousness is preserved.
The motif of sacrifice has therefore also only been understood as symbolic. Great attention has been paid to stories of dismemberment, stories of Osiris, Dionysus, Zosimos, and to their importance for the transformation of the soul. But the obvious insight has been eschewed that they reflect actual killings, dismemberments, and restitutions as age-old hunting and sacrificial practices. Safely and harmlessly, they are defined as symbols or metaphors, and not real Joseph Campbell even tried to claim for them “a logic of ‘make-believe’-‘as if.’ ”13 Even Hillman, who after all introduced the term soul-making and the idea of pathologizing as soul-making in the early days of archetypal psychology, thought that the statements in myth about killings or dismemberment “have a meaning, not on the positivistic level of historical fact, but on the imaginal level. They are symbolic expressions … The psychological point in these discussions is not ‘the fact’ … but that gruesome and horrible images, that is, spontaneous psychopathological fantasies, play a central role in the transformation mystery of the psyche.”14 But if the dismemberment is only a metaphor, the transformation that it is to bring about is also only metaphorical. What is wanted is real transformation. The psychological point, it seems to me, is the “fact,” after all.
We live in a world of ideals, demands, imperatives, formulas, utopias, principles, programs whose reality is by definition wanting. All we have to offer as to their realization is the helplessness of “shoulds” and “oughts,” of hopes and wishful thinking. In other words we live fundamentally in a superterrestrial world of ideas, cocooned in irreality, and psychology does its best to help install and envelop human existence in this bubble. Indeed, maybe psychology is the main stronghold of irreality. Hillman therefore rightly criticizes it under the label of psychology’s narcissism. But his move “from mirror to window” is a move within the same bubble, and not a move that would link us to actuality. For whether mirror or window, you are still stuck with the senses, with aisthesis, with imagination and intuition, which ever since we have become humans living in the inverted world, can only yield abstractions and never connect us with reality. As far as I can see, there has only been one mode in all of known history by which the soul was truly able to access or generate actuality. This was the sacrifice. In such cultures, man needed no ideals, no hope, no utopia that would have had to be put into practice. He had his practice and his fulfillment behind him, in the past tense, in the sacrificial act that had already been performed. He lived from an accomplished fact, a fact, however, that was not positivistic but in itself logical and soul-making. It was the true metaphor, actually transporting what was beyond the borders of life—death—into the center of life, inverting the order of being.
For more than two thousand years the soul has closed this access to actuality for itself, its hitherto only access. Since then Western mankind has lived on its reserves, on the remainders of the resources of meaning generated in the ages before. Having given up sacrifice, we have no way of replenishing those resources. As these resources become more and more exhausted, humanity has unwittingly drifted into irreality and abstraction. The irreality is absolute inasmuch as it appears in the guise of its opposite: “positivistic reality.” Unless the soul finds some way other than sacrificial killing to truly generate and reach reality, I cannot see how life could ever again be rooted in a real meaning and not just a phony substitute; how humanity could truly come into the world and down to this earth, transforming the world into a human world.
I believe there is such a fundamentally other access to reality, but it is still missing. It still lies in the future. Perhaps it will be found sooner if we are willing to admit that it is a missing link, and to suffer uncompromisingly the emptiness, meaninglessness, unrealness that its missing entails.
NOTES
Quoted from Erika Simon, Die Götter Griechenlands (Hirmer, 1969), 11; my translation.
2. Walter Burkert, Homo necans: Interpretationen altgriechischer Opferriten und Mythen (De Gruyter, 1972), 9f.; my translation
3. Herbert Kühn, “Das Problem des Urmonotheismus” (Abh. Mainz, 1950), 22, 17. Quoted in Burkert, Homo necans, 21; my translation.
4. H. Müller-Karpe, Handbuch der Vorgeschichte, vol. 1: Altsteinzeit (C. H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1966).
5. Mircea Eliade, Geschichte der religiösen Ideen, vol. 1 (Herder, 1985), 17.
6. K. Meuli, “Griechische Opferbräuche,” Phyllobolia für Peter von der Mühll zum 60. Geburtstag (Benno Schwabe & Co., 1946), 185–288.
7. H. Gehrts, “Vom Wesen des Speeres,” Hestia 1984/85 (Bouvier Verlag, 1985), 71–103.
8. René Girard, “Generative Scapegoating,” in Violent Origins: Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, edited by Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly (Stanford University Press, 1987), 120.
9. Georg Baudler, Erlösung vom Stiergott: Christliche Gotteserfahrung im Dialog mit Mythen und Religionen (Kösel/Calwer 1989), 103.
10. Wolfgang Giegerich,”Ontogeny = Phylogeny? A Fundamental Critique of E. Neumann’s Analytical Psychology,” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1975): 110–29.
11. Ancient Near Eastern Texts (ANET),334–38, quoted in Burkert, Homo necans, 18f.; my translation.
12. To John R. Smythies, 29 February 1952, in C. G. Jung, Briefe II: 1946–1955, edited by Aniela Jaffé with Gerhard Adler (Walther-Verlag, 1972), 252; my translation.
13. Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, vol. 1 (Viking, 1970), 22–25.
14. James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis (Northwestern University Press, 1972), 276f.
Spring: An Annual of Archetype and Culture 54 (1993): 5–18
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