Hillman: One More into the Fray

ONE MORE INTO THE FRAY
A Repsonse to Wolfgang Giegerich’s “Killings"

JAMES HILLMAN

My admired colleague and well-loved friend Wolfgang Giegerich has fallen into three fallacies in his Spring 54 article, “Killings,” which I won’t let pass, although argument in the style of Re-Visioning Psychology no longer exercises me as it once did. Still, something stirs; so, as in days of old I gird my loins to contest his challenge.

To pulp trees in order to publish one more intellectual argument can be justified only by the significance of the issues at stake. In this case, the issues are: Are the gods real, or is archetypal psychology merely indulging in “glamorizing jargon?” Can we have a living soul in human beings unless death by means of animal sacrifices is placed in the center of life? Is killing truly the basis of civilization? Or, as Giegerich says: “The birth of the gods, piety, soul and consciousness, culture itself did not merely arise from the spirit of killing but from actual killings” (p. 8). I urge each reader of what follows to read and take fully to heart Giegerich’s remarkable pages in Spring 54 to which this is a respectful response, tho’ with metaphorical knife unsheathed.

The contest is necessary because Wolfgang Giegerich’s thought is the most important Jungian thought now going on—maybe the only consistent Jungian thought at all. He is pre-eminent among Jungian writers, and his analyses of the plight of the soul of psychology and of humankind boldly stares into the face of the shadow in our times and offers no false hopes. His training and cultivation in English have benefited his style with accuracy and grace so that you never feel you are hearing the voice of a non-native speaker. His pieces in Spring ever since taking down Erich Neumann in Spring 1975, his lectures at Eranos in the 1980s (which some of our colleagues were too outraged to attend), his editorship of Gorgo: A Review for Archetypal Psychology and Imagistic Thought (in German), together with like-minded dark seers Alfred Ziegler and Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig, has kept a vision of ruthless truth alive during the Disney days of consumer health and happiness.

Although he’s a Jungian analyst in Stuttgart, Giegerich cannot be classified as archetypalist, classic or developmentalist. He is his own man and, like many of us, his territory does not jibe with the cute cuts and cubbyholes of Samuels’s system or the Goldenberg rules of Jungian styles according to generations. Giegerich is too dark, too ornery, too learned, too soul-searching and too genuinely a Mensch. He is so thoroughly radical that even Ivan Illich was shocked speechless and wanted to depart the room upon hearing Giegerich’s paper in Dallas, in which he argued that the omnipresent and omnipotent destructive force of the nuclear bomb is the only true face of the living God today—a theme presented in his massive work Psychoanalyse der Atombombe (some of which has been edited by Clayton Eshleman and published in his journal Sulfur).

Giegerich’s aim at essence and the steady, tireless penetration, like that Energizer rabbit that goes on and on and on, fearlessly, scorpionically, and blithely driving to the very end point and leaving the reader there, unredeemed, except by the profound satisfaction of having the case entirely exposed-this is his treasured ability. And so is this short piece, “Killings,” true to his style, even if I claim, and hope to show it to be vitiated with fallacies.

First, the fallacy of historical models. You may recall Giegerich’s argument, so effectively spoken at the Festival of Archetypal Psychology at Notre Dame, Indiana (1992). There he said that the gods of archetypal psychology are not real because they are not observed with rituals as in the past. Rituals made the old gods real, and examination of Hellenic and Hebraic rituals shows that the gods asked for actual blood sacrifices. To have real gods, we must have real sacrifices as performed in the ancient world and also in those societies formerly called “primitive.”

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. (p. 8)

(I am refraining from quoting Giegerich at length since what he says is readily readable in Spring 54, appropriately called “The Reality Issue.” And that is the core issue between Giegerich and myself—“reality”—which I shall take up presently.)

Now, granting a key role of ritual in the human relation with gods, are the styles of ritual, and for thinking about ritual—and thus for your and my relation with gods—to be modeled upon the archaic and antique? Must gods in the present be observed by mimesis of the past, doing what we suppose they did? Could we even do as they did with the kind of consciousness we now enjoy? If the way forward in the relation to the gods is by going back to historical models, then Giegerich’s grasp of religious reality, his piety, is fundamentalist, i.e., the right relation is the literal repetition of history. Such rituals would be much like taking the words of the Bible as literal directions for living life. Fundamentalism. Moreover, says Giegerich, if you don’t attend to the gods according to the historical model, you don’t have real gods. “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” (p. 6).

This statement presumes to define the nature of a god (the historical fallacy slipping into the theological fallacy of defining God), as if Zeus could not be any damn way he might want to be, requiring all sorts of attentions today that may not have occurred to him 2500 years ago. I don’t mean history shows progress; I mean only that there are varieties of religious experience so that privileging rituals of one era may make us miss opportunities in another. Quite possibly Zeus remains Zeus even without the bull, because other sorts of sacrifices, other sorts of rituals are offered to him.

Yes, culture today, here, Western, at close of an eon, requires rituals indeed; but what kind and in what style? “The soul first made itself through killing. It killed itself into being. That is why I consider sacrificial killing as primordial soul-making” (p. 12). Giegerich speaks in the past tense-and that’s history! What about soul-making now? Must the same literal blood be shed as was supposedly shed in ancient Greece and Palestine? Have the gods fled, as Giegerich says, because we no longer shed literal blood? Or, do we still shed blood in another way, or rather, do we shed another kind of blood for them today, and so they are present in another way? If I read Giegerich rightly, there is no other kind of blood, only the one fundamental kind: literal, concrete, red, flowing in animal veins. Fundamentalist blood.

I listen to historical tales—and am guilty of referring to them widely and regularly—more as aides memoires, as sounding boards for echoing life today or as bass chords giving resonance to the little melodies of daily life. I do not see them as a master matrix against which we measure today and thereby decry our loss. For me history is a helper, maybe a wise mentor, but not a master. There is no Golden Age neither back then nor still to come-it’s all in the mind. That the Greeks killed a bull for Zeus and a pig for Demeter does not require us to do the same, anymore than a Christian must be nailed to a wooden cross in order to give devotion to that god. The kinds of needs that Zeus and Demeter place on my soul and their requirements for recognition seem to me to be ever-puzzling, and it is this uncertainty which keeps me attentive and them mysterious.

Remember: what the Greeks said their gods asked for above all else, and perhaps only, was not blood; it was not to be forgotten, that is, to be kept in mind, recollected as psychological facts. For me, that’s the value of history. It keeps events in mind, lest we forget. So, the task is re-finding again and again ways of remembering the divine and human, and not repeating what once worked assuming it goes on working. Above all, the task of re-finding means abandoning complaint, abandoning nostalgia, not bemoaning the lost connection in a dürftige Zeit (dry time). For the complaint only limns the desolation of today against a vividly meaningful “history,” driving the sacred ever farther from the secular and leaving contemporary life without divine presences, a condition which Giegerich describes in the last desperate sentence of his paper as “the emptiness, meaninglessness, unrealness.”

A corollary of the historical fallacy is romantic atavism: a return to the worship of the spear, the ax, and the hunter/warrior. I do, indeed, want to speak of killing as metaphor, as an “as if,” and not as a hard fact. The task today, said Robert J. Lifton, after his studies of Hiroshima and Holocausts, is “to imagine the real”—so as not to have the real occur as history. It is the task to imagine the knife, the blood, the bull and the death, to feel fully the dying animal—which is indeed possible once we reduce our belief in historical facts and increase our attention to imaginal facts. Must we have actual bulls to feel their imaginal presence? Certainly not in my dreams or visions or works of art or theater. Let us turn to the Gods not with knives in hands, in search of rituals to contain our passionate desperation; rather let us imagine their claims, beseeching the powers to tell us what they want now, how we may serve them now. History cannot answer the question, nor our ideas of history. Only they can. The first turn back, is back to them. Their reality does not belong only to history.

This leads to the second, the ontological fallacy, by which I mean the mistake of declaring what is real. Yes, it’s a mistake, since what is not real? What does not have some kind of being? Moreover, Giegerich’s ontological fallacy consists of two components that make the fallacy, especially for psychologists, particularly dangerous. Compelled as he is by historical accounts of actual killings, he (a) locates reality in actual facts, and (b) privileges actual facts over other kinds of reals:

We live in a world of ideals, demands, imperatives, formulas, utopias, principles, programs whose reality is by definition wanting … we live fundamentally in a superterrestrial world of ideas, cocooned in irreality, and psychology does its best to help install and envelope human existence in this bubble … you are still stuck with the senses, with aisthesis, with imagination and intuition, which … can only yield abstractions and never connect us with reality. (p. 16)

Of all these occasions “whose reality is by definition wanting,” metaphor carries a particular onus. In response to something I wrote about animal sacrifice, Giegerich writes: “If the dismemberment is only a metaphor, the transformation that it is to bring about is only metaphorical. What is wanted is real transformation. The psychological point, it seems to me, is the ‘fact,’ after all” (p. 16).

Hold on here: If this “superterrestrial world of ideas” is where we fundamentally live, then these are the facts! Abstractions are real indeed. They determine; more, they are the actualities of our lives, despite Giegerich’s calling them “irreality” and dismissing their ontological status. Moreover, his “only metaphorical” sounds like the reverse echo of Kant’s disdain for actual facts as “nur empirisch.” I hear in Giegerich the struggle of the German mind to get out of the mind and into “reality"” by means of substantiating suffixes (-keit, -beit, -tum) and wrestling with questions of Ursprung, Wesen, Grund (Origin, Being, Reality); much as the French mind is forever trying to find a way around Descartes, and the American mind trying to make a philosophically valid case for the practical.

Anyway, by kinds of reals, I mean all the kinds he already lists—ideals, principles, imagination, intuition, abstraction, metaphor, etc. There are abstract reals like mathematical axioms and physical laws; ideal reals like theological gods; actually occurring reals like traffic accidents and contingent reals like symptoms; logical reals like contradiction; economic reals like poverty and wealth; biological, artistic, and social kinds of reals; and perhaps before all others, linguistic semantic reals.

None of these is necessarily prior and thereby more real than any other. To claim that any one of them is prior, more basic, more necessary or more inclusive is to privilege one real over another and therewith reveal your position in the philosophical spectrum, which god you are serving. Besides, the real you elect as first says which fantasy of reality your soul inhabits—and which one it has most trouble seeing through as a fantasy, because it believes this elected fantasy is really real.

But thought has to start somewhere—and that’s the value of ontology. It gives a sense of being, of ground, of essence, of solid footing on which to imagine the cloud-capped towers of philosophical system-building. The starting point is always an unexplained postulate, an assumption, a leap of faith, or what Paul Kugler calls “a miracle.” Or what I call a fantasy. You see, I take ontological statements about what’s real, about facts and actuality, as fantasies. My first reality, the miracle to which I adhere, is psychic reality. I follow Freud’s radical break with historical literalism and Jung’s remarkable clarification of fantasy. In other words, I am philosophically a Jungian mainly because I follow Jung’s psychic ontology: “The psyche creates reality every day. The only expression I can use for this activity is fantasy” (CW 6: 78). This seems not enough for Giegerich: he demands something harder, “the fact.” For him, for something to be real (ontological reality), it must be an actual hard fact, like knives into animals. Whitehead might call this an example of the fallacy of “misplaced concretism,” that is, hypostasizing the idea that hard facts are reals so that we believe the idea of killing is a hard fact, and that hard facts are really real, because we believe the idea of them. Facts are hard, however, only when they are taken literally, when we forget that fantasy creates everyday reality.

My point here is that the experience of death does not require the ritual sacrifice of actual animals because the imagination, the metaphor, the abstraction, of this act is no less an actual fact—unless we attribute primary ontological status to actual knives and blood. He does. I don’t.

His ontological fallacy gives priority to the knife and the blood; my “fantasy” gives priority to the imagination of this act. And I would further add that only when the imagination fully transposes the act of killing into sacrifice does killing become ritual and yield the experience of soul that Giegerich, and I, are both seeking. Again, the reality of the imagination is primary—how it enacts the act, transforms the act, animates the act. Otherwise, it’s just another butchering or roadkill, indifferent.

Let me take another tack in this attack on his ontology. Let’s try to see through Giegerich’s identification of the real with “accomplished fact” (italics his), such as killing an animal in ritual. So, let’s transpose this discussion about the nature of real being into an alchemy lab.

The discipline of alchemy teaches that we think different kinds of thoughts and form different experiences of reality in different moments of the alchemical opus. When the psyche is immersed in nigredo, it imagines reality to be heavily materialized, and the soul knows itself by going downwards and backwards (reduction) into darkness, hells of suffering, remorse, regret, resistance. Its natural tendency in these times is to be stuck with the materialized, historical facts of its existence. The past is utterly real and explains the present. There is a stubborn literalism and what once was called “psychotic concretism”—metaphors, symbols, hunches, reveries can appear only as “hard facts.” The psyche feels loss—“emptiness, meaninglessness”—and it focuses by means of a single viewpoint (monocular vision).

Only as the opus blues and then whitens, does the psyche begin to imagine hard facts that have seemed until now to determine its being-—”95 to 99% of human history”—in a more artful and fantastic manner. From the viewpoint of the nigredo they’re mere fantasies and seem sheer irreality, lunacy, anima poetics, airy nothings, “only metaphorical,” much as Giegerich accuses the mythologizings of archetypal psychology: “you are still stuck with the senses, with aisthesis, with imagination and intuition, which … can only yield abstractions and never connect us with reality” (p. 16). But metaphor, etc., is the reality of the albedo. This, too, is reality. Giegerich allows only one kind of real as he allows only one kind of ritual. Monotheism governs both his historical and ontological fallacies. And what could cause greater consternation to an archetypalist pagan than to detect monotheistic thinking in an archetypalist friend.

A similar relativization of the “real” occurs in Kundalini yoga (cf. Spring 1975 and 1976 for Jung’s Commentaries). The shift to Anahata and then Visuddha (heart-and-lung area and then throat) gives primary reality to the ephemera of feelings, to fleeting fantasies rather than to the perduring facts of Muladhara. It is a breathy, airy, imaginative relation with the world, “lifted above the earth,” as Jung says, rather than the intense and immediately personal physicality of the belly and bladder regions. Before Visuddha, thoughts, words, images, intuitions do not carry the conviction of reality; after Visuddha, they take on the triumphant strength of an elephant and bear full weight.

Different rooms of the lab, different places on the Kundalini tree qualify different senses of reality. What is real depends on where one is. As Ed Casey might say, “getting placed” is the first ontological move. Literalism, whether historical or ontological, belongs to a specific place in the opus; even the hardest of facts dissolves when the opus moves.

My third accusation could be called the fallacy of Lutheran concretism. I am talking blood. In his Psychological Types, Jung distinguishes between Luther and Zwingli (the German and the Swiss Reformations) in terms of the doctrine of transubstantiation. What happens to the wine and bread during Mass? In what way is the God present—concretely or symbolically, literally or spiritually, physically or psychologically, in sense or in mind?

[Luther] claimed the actual presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Communion … [H]is imagination was spellbound by the concretism of the material presence of the sacred body … [T]he actual contact with the “real” and material in the Communion, and the feeling-value of this contact for Luther himself … prevailed over the evangelical principle, which maintained that the word was the sole vehicle of grace and not the ceremony. (CW 6: 96–97]

(Do notice here Jung’s reference to the word as vehicle of grace and not the physical ceremony: albedo, visuddha. “In contrast to the Lutheran standpoint,” Jung goes on to say, “Zwingli championed a purely symbolic conception of the Communion. What really mattered for him was a ’spiritual’ partaking of the body and blood …” (Ibid., 98).

This same essential division between Luther and Zwingli appears again in the division between Freud and Jung in regard to their fantasies of the dynamic drive in the soul. Freud’s is sensuous, physical, biological, sexual; Jung’s is an abstraction purposely not limited by content, like the energy concept in physics. Freud’s is called “libido” echoing concrete erotics; Jung’s, “psychic energy,” a general principle echoing natural science. From a Jungian standpoint, Freud’s “libido” is too narrow and chained to materialism; from a Freudian position, Jung’s “psychic energy” is too universalized and empty to be real.

And here we are in the 1990s, Giegerich and I, working each other over as we struggle with the same archetypal issue. For Giegerich, as for Luther and Freud, how keep the sensuous feeling of psychological acts even as we symbolize? For me, as for Zwingli and Jung, how recognize the body of the word, without depending on literal embodiments?

Besides the three fallacies, I find fault with Giegerich’s activist and humanist approach to the gods, his return to the standard standpoint of an ego: what are we doing about it; let’s do some-thing; get out the knife. When he writes, “Gods are not existing entities. They are results of the soul’s acting …” (p. 13), is he not confusing soul with ego? The soul’s primary acting, according to Jung as I said above, is fantasy. Fantasy makes the reality. As Vico said, the gods are universali fantastici, universals of imagination, real existents of the imaginal-if Giegerich can accept the imaginal to be as “real” as the logical.

The question of “doing something” is an old one. Giegerich refers to an anecdote in Plotinus who rebuked the theurgists in his day because they wanted to draw down the Gods and influence fate through magic rituals. Plotinus said, as Giegerich observes, ”It’s not for me to go to them; it is for them to come to me.” I take Plotinus to be saying: it’s not a matter of human will; it is a matter of grace whether they take part in our life. My position sounds close to the Catholic fiat mihi, let it be done to me, a position of receptivity. Giegerich, however, finds receptivity too passive; he interprets Plotinus as follows:

This anecdote beautifully reveals the platonistic fallacy, the reduction of soul-making to its passive half, that of receiving, of vision, imagination. Its active half, that of our making, of sacrificial act and fact, has been dropped. (p. 14)

This astounds me because intellection, imagination, vision, are intense and exhausting actions. Giegerich’s own works, to wit. Besides, poiesis means “making.” “Soul-making” means psycho-poetics, as David Miller pointed out years ago. The soul is “made” poetically, aesthetically, imaginatively, intellectually, and without that vision which perceives myths in acts, sacrifice is merely a bloody mess.

By the way, about that knife. Karl Kerényi (I’m calling on my back-up here), who knew as much about Greek gods and rituals as Walter Burkert on whom Giegerich relies, wrote: “Evil in Greek mythology can be symbolized by the knife" (“The Problem of Evil in Mythology,” in Evil, edited by the Curatorium of the C. G. Jung Institute, Zurich [Northwestern University Press, 1967], p. 15). He said this in context of discussing the Buphonia or bull-killing rituals which he says gave the participants a dreadful sense of wrong-doing and was enacted as a kind of murder trial. According to Kerényi, the knife is evil because it makes horrible separations: the sickle of Kronos cutting apart heaven and earth; the sword severing Orpheus’s head from his body; and murderous Medea butchering family. And that is how Giegerich, too, is using the knife: to separate; to cut the human world from gods, which would consequently kill off archetypal psychology.

I have been bullying you readers for years arguing that the gods can’t be cut off, that they inhabit our subjectivity and govern our acts. Whether invoked or not invoked, they are present (as Jung wrote over the lintel of his house). That same W. R. Otto, whom Giegerich puts down via Karl Reinhard (his backup man) maintained that the gods could not not exist. The question, said Otto, is not how did the gods depart; the question is: how did we lose sight of them? What has happened to us that we cannot find them since they, by nature and definition, are athnetos, immortal, indestructible, unable to be dead?

The cry that went through antiquity at the beginning of the Christian era, “Great Pan is dead,” was simply a piece of Christian propaganda. Tell a big enough lie and it becomes believable truth. This lie lasted two thousand years. The Christian revolution wanted Pan dead, but he couldn’t be and his continued existence as Devil, as Nightmare Demon, as Panic, and as nature and all the other ways and means he shows himself lays the Christian bravado to rest. For them, yes, Pan was dead because they denied nature’s spontaneous vitality in a value system that was not of this world.

Possibly the gods themselves fear the separating knife. They do not carry the blade that cuts apart. Artemis, Apollo, Ares, Athene, Eros, bear spears and arrows of deep penetration. Perhaps the gods can be “killed” only by being cut off. Hence they ask not to be forgotten. Rituals help remembering; that’s all, but that’s plenty.

Whether they can be killed, that is, actually disappear from all memory is doubtful. For the gods, too, are said to be bound by moira, fate. They, too, may not overstep their limits, one of which is not to die. Let us say they are forced to immortality as we are forced by the same moira to mortality. Existence is their fate! Neither ritual nor logic (Giegerich appeals to both), nor faith (the Christian method of keeping God alive are necessary to maintain their existence.

What then is necessary? Sensuous imagination. Gods exist as images; that’s their reality. Psychic reality. Fantasy powers. Powers of fantasy. They can be celebrated, honored, reinforced by rituals but they do not exist by virtue of rituals any more than their existence is tied to the mythical narratives about them. As psychic realities they are present anywhere to the heart of sensuous imagining and the mind’s eye that sees imagistically, imaginatively. Poetically man lives upon the earth. They are there in trees and water-holes, in seasons and times of days, in doorways and bank buildings, in animals and cries in the night. They are ever present anywhere to the sensuous imagination, and if you want to get rid of gods, you restrict imagination. You get rid of images. The battle raging for centuries and politely called the Iconoclast Controversy smashed and burned images in order to rid the Christian world of pagan remnants. By reducing images to allegories and controlling the sensuous imagination the converted psyche was clear-cut for the erection of abstract theologies, for a god who, because intangible, because unsensuous, had to be believed in. Credo replacing aisthesis. Bull’s blood seems marvelously rich after two thousand years of vampiric draining.

The very modes which Giegerich finds flaky and thin—the senses, aisthesis, imagination, intuition, vision, metaphor (pp. 14, 16)—are the modes by which the gods present themselves. But can you say something is not there because you can’t find it? Giegerich can’t find them because he has cut himself off from them by denigrating this “passive half” of soul-making. Instead, he looks to rituals where they ought to be rather than where they actually are. Like, right under his nose. So, I suggest that my friend look into those feelings of despair with which his paper ends. He has the best nose in the business for searching out the god in the disease (Jung), as for instance his great two volumes on the nuclear bomb. What about the gods in his despair? What god governs his literalism? Is it Luther’s? What god makes him feel so empty, “to suffer uncompromisingly” (p. 17)—Hades? Saturn? Hekate? Demeter? Prometheus? Certainly not Zeus. I think my Romantic Platonism brings more bull in that god’s expansive honor than do Giegerich and Hegel.

Before I close, I shall indulge this Platonism further with a piece from Plotinus (more than a backup man, my Hausarzt and bodyguard) that Harriet Eisman in response to Giegerich at Notre Dame reminded me of. It comes at the close of the Enneads (6.9.9). And I suggest readers look at the whole passage because its about the dance of the soul which, as Plotinus says in the preceding section, “belongs to the realm of intellect.” From Plotinus I learned that it’s the psyche’s intellectual activity, the Active Intellect in philosophical terms, that generates the reality of the gods. (I am combining Armstrong’s and McKenna’s translations):

In this choral dance or choiral song, the soul sees the spring of life, spring of intellect, beginning of being, fount of good, root of soul … they are eternal … So, they also abide; so long as the sun shines, so long there will be light. We have not been cut away; we are not separate … we breathe and are preserved because that Good has not given its gifts and then gone away, but gives on for ever … Our being is the fuller for our turning thither; this is our prosperity; to hold aloof is loneliness and lessening … There the soul takes its rest...and it thinks there, and is not passive … [L]ife in that realm is the active actuality of intellect; and the active actuality generates gods, brings forth beauty, brings forth righteousness, all moral good.

This gives one reply to Giegerich’s major assertion about the existence of the gods—“for gods are not existing entities. They are the results of the soul’s acting …" (p. 13). The action is precisely one of intellection, an imaginative dancing intellection, which is what Giegerich decries all through his piece, splitting such action from body along the tried and tired divisions of mind-passive vs. body-active, blood-real vs. metaphor-abstract.

So now, at the end, we are back to Giegerich’s principal question: How do the gods stay alive? “For without blood gods who impart meaning cannot survive. They need daily sacrifices as their nourishment …”

Neither Giegerich nor I mean that humans make gods, that gods are projections of our needs and there for our satisfaction. I think we both mean that gods require something from the soul for their continued reality. For him, this seems to mean killing; for me, it is what the Greek gods and goddesses themselves demanded: not to be forgotten. This remembrance is precisely what archetypal psychology has been insisting upon all along.

For Giegerich, this is not enough. Giegerich’s answer, following from the three fallacies, must call for something concrete, like killing of animals. My answer says that the concrete killing is already going on, but that the killing is without ceremony, without sacrifice, without gods. The repression of the mythical imagination and the gods into which it opens has rendered the killing null and void. We have the killing, but it is severed from the gods, so that it serves only secular purposes—high-protein diet, speedy transportation, economic profit, weekend sport, medical research, etc. The animals have been corralled into giving up their lives for the only one god left that is truly universal, omnipresent, omnipotent, observed faithfully in thought and action, joining all human kind in daily acts of devotion: The Economy. That’s the god we nourish with actual animal blood. Even I would call this a “hard fact.”

So one way to go would be to re-connect the gods to the facts—blessings at harbors as the net hauls come in; little marker stones at the roadside commemorating a roadkill; images of the animal in its pride pasted over the cold bins in the supermarket; animal stories on the menus of duck and pork and loin of lamb; service by school children in the dog pound and the neutering surgery; instructional visits to the pet-food cannery. Absurd, banal, trivial? Would these concrete gestures satisfy Giegerich’s requirements for concrete ritual? Or is something still missing? Just remembering animal slaughter, concrete as possible, will not restore the holiness Giegerich is calling for; and anyway it’s not the concrete that re-instates the holy. What is already real is not more real by adding concrete.

Moreover, we cannot force the god or goddess to be present at the slaughter, or invent rituals with a positivistic kind of piety. Giegerich is against positivism, and says so. I am, too, but what else are his real actions but the bricks with which positivism builds its kind of temples? Programs that would make positive connections between facts and myths by inventing rituals show the foolishness of attempting to move imaginal necessities into hard facts. Such maneuvers employ the faulty instrument of the Western ego to restore relations with the gods, the very instrument that so proudly divested itself of gods to begin with. In fact, it is the sacrifice of that ego, its killing, that Jung considers (“Transformation Symbolism in the Mass”) the central content of a nourishing ritual. Even if that ego were to lay itself down upon the altar, it is doubtful the Gods would find it nourishing.

I propose that we’ve got things the wrong way round. It’s not more bulls and pigs that need the knife, but the god for whom they are already dying, The Economy. Only deicide can revalue what the animals are already performing. Only taking down the dominant god can release the soul to be made again by poiesis and release the animals from only secularized slaughter. Precisely this deicide is what archetypal psychology has been about since its inception twenty-five years ago, and ever since. On the one hand, it has continually maintained a running engagement with Christianism (e.g., my Inter Views, Chapter 5) because Protestantism and Capitalism belonged together at their start and still run together toward their finish. While, on the other hand, archetypal psychology has continually evoked the mythical imagination of pagan powers, probably the only powers in the whole wide world who haven’t got a cent.

So finally, after all this to-do, I accuse Giegerich—by failing to feel the reality of archetypal psychology—of a reversion to Protestantism. For the reals, the hard facts to which he appeals as truly real are those of the scientistic-secular-economic demythologized world. Thus his piece is tinged with that Europessimism of a culture that cannot escape from its Romantic longing to reverse its history because it is incapable of imagining any other way to the gods.

Whereas we in a different geography on this side of the Atlantic can appropriate the myths of European culture because the pagan figures of Greece and Rome were never local. They were always for us and still are imaginational—literary, aesthetic, poetic, inspirational—landing on our soil but never autochthonous to it. Because to begin with they were never real in Giegerich’s sense, they are always real in my sense, and therefore their reality can never fade as long as they are remembered, that is, kept in mind. That’s how they survive. If, however, the mind is an escape from Giegerich’s reality, then they, too, are escapes.

From what? They offer a land of magical realism to give home to this hemisphere’s transcendent longings, at the same time allowing us to escape from the concretism of America’s fundamentally earthbound religiosity. The imagination they enrichen confirms that this world—contra Giegerich’s desire for a “human world”—despite all its human horrors is nonetheless a constant miracle of delusional grandeur. They give us vision. Vision makes the world real; aisthesis makes it bearable; rhetoric makes it speakable; poiesis, illusional; and rhapsody, illogical. Not Hegel; Whitman. The gods are our prosperity.