Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 by C.G.Jung: Volume 1 by C. G. Jung

Author:C. G. Jung [Jung, C. G.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781317529996
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

LECTURE IV

13 February 1935

Prof. Jung: We have a series of questions this morning. The first is by Mrs. Baumann: “In speaking about the spirit I cannot help thinking of Germany today and the ‘high wind’ blowing there. You once spoke about it in the seminar and in that connection I would like to ask if the backward movement of the swastika cannot be linked up with the backward movement of the Platonic year? I mean that since the manifestation is collective and racial, the swastika symbol might be turned backwards to mark the movement into Aquarius. It might be collectively valid for the tree of mankind, instead of the sun-moving swastika.”

This is a bit involved. Of course I did not mention the swastika but was there something in particular in what I said last time which prompted this question, except that I was speaking of the spirit?

Mrs. Baumann: Only in the sense that so many people are talking about the backward movement of things.

Prof. Jung: By the backward movement, do you mean the so-called regression in Germany—going back from Christianity to heathendom for instance?

Mrs. Baumann: Yes, and the swastika itself is running backward. And you were saying that the meaning had gone out of spirit, descended to the mind, and then to words.

Mrs. Leon: You said that the spirit had to go back into the body.

Prof. Jung: That is it. The main emphasis is entirely on the body, and the descent of the spirit into the sphere of the body; in those paragraphs we dealt with last time, Nietzsche says that the spirit is reduced to a mere plaything of the body. And looked at from a spiritual point of view that is terrible regression, a movement backwards quite definitely. Ask any good Christian and he will say so. Therefore, Nietzsche has been accused of every unspeakable crime; he has even been made responsible for the world war. So the idea of the backward movement is quite justified, and I am glad to enter upon your question.

Mrs. Baynes: It seems to me the picture is terribly confused by hitching up this backward movement to the constellation of Aquarius.

Prof. Jung: Now wait! We are jumping enough already. Mrs. Baumann asks first about the actual spiritual movement in Germany, and she links this movement, which is a regression, to archaic symbolism and an archaic point of view in general; and she asks whether this movement is expressed also in the swastika which is moving backwards. You know, according to Buddhism, the movement to the left is not so much a backward movement as it is a wrong movement. It is a general idea in India as well as in Tibet, that in going round the stupa or what they call the tchorten (a sort of shrine, the equivalent of our cross, or those little chapels in the country with a picture of a saint), you must move round it in the way the sun goes; otherwise it is wrong. So the rotation

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