The animal god


 "In our western world, the fixation of the process of separation from our instinctual/archetypal lives has been pronounced, resulting in overly intellectualized, sublimated, and devitalized removal from ourselves and our depths", Stanton Marlan writes in his book C.G.Jung and the alchemical imagination (2021). While the separation of consciousness from instinct is necessary for development of consciousness of the kind we know, the separation may cause dangerous and unbearable alienation if there is no kind of reunion between the individual and the instinctual and archetypal layers of the psyche.  

Jung and many jungian analysts have described how encounters with animals in dreams and visions may symbolically represent attempts of the psyche to reestablish a connection between the conscious mind and the unconscious. The animal is a symbol for the part of the psyche which goes down into the subhuman and yet reaches above everyday consciousness, to the animal god. In an individual, this wanting to connect with the animal god may express both an individual desire and an experience of the unbalance in the collective psyche. The reintegration of the split-off instinctuality may bring about a deep transformation, renewal and revitalization of life.

Dream image: A wolf and a lion have escaped prison, and I am being asked to help catch them and bring them back into captivity. I hesitate to do so, because I know deep down I want them to be free.

Dream image: I am walking in the forest. Out of the forest on both sides come hundreds of wolfs running past me. The wolfes have freshly caught venison in their mouths. Some humans are slowly coming after them, in a failed attempt to catch the wolfes. I feel happy about the wolfes running freely, that they are so many and seem so strong and vital.

Dream image: A frog comes visiting, sitting in the windowsill, staring at me. For some reason I get really scared and the frog disappears. The next morning the frog is back, sitting outside my window in a lotus position. I look at it and feel like I am hit by lightning. I realize that the frog and all of nature is sacred, conscious and communicating with us, that we are nature and connected with the web of life.

In dream-images and mythology animals may be seen as symbols of the instinctual and archetypal layers of consciousness. In egyptian mythology the gods are often pictured as partly or entirely animal. Heqet, the egyptian godess of fertility, was often represented in the form of a frog, and the frog was in Egypt also seen as  representing the sacred cycle of death and rebirth, transformation. In hinduism Ganesha, a god with an elephant head, is the god of new beginnings. These animal gods are guiding us to the potential and creativity which lie dormant in the split off layers of the individual and collctive psyche.  







  

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