Bread And Wine

Grain and wine therefore have something in the nature of a soul, a specific life principle which makes them appropriate symbols not only of man’s cultural achievements, but also of the seasonally dying and resurgent god who is their life spirit.

Jung argues that grain and wine are polyvalent symbols bearing a ‘fourfold layer of meaning’ — agricultural, cultural, mythological, and sacramental — grounded in a ‘corn spirit’ or vegetation numen whose depth makes simple allegory inadequate.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the uttering of the words of the consecration signifies Christ himself speaking in the first person, his living presence in the corpus mysticum of priest, congregation, bread, wine, and incense, which together form the mystical unity offered for sacrifice.

Jung analyzes the moment of consecration as the psychological culmination of the transformation rite, wherein bread and wine become constitutive elements of the corpus mysticum rather than mere liturgical props.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

how the bread became Christ’s body and the wine and water Christ’s blood. And I say unto thee, ‘The Holy Spirit is present and does those things which surpass reason and thought.’

John of Damascus argues that the transformation of bread and wine exceeds rational comprehension and is accomplished solely by the supernatural energy of the Holy Spirit, making faith the only adequate epistemic mode.

John of Damascus, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

if God the Word of His own will became man … can He not then make the bread His body and the wine and water His blood?

John of Damascus grounds the Real Presence in a parallelism with the Incarnation: the same divine Word who assumed flesh can transmute bread and wine, making denial of the Eucharistic conversion theologically self-undermining.

John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, 2021thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The soul of bread which remembers and contains the mysteries of the dark earth has become subservient to a more spiritual fantasy of quick energy, purity. This transformation of bread was prepared for in the beginning of Christianity.

Sardello contends that the spiritualization of bread inaugurated at the Last Supper severed it from its chthonic, Eleusinian roots, displacing a soul-full connection to death and the underworld with a purely pneumatic symbolism.

Sardello, Robert, Facing the World with Soul: The Reimagination of Modern Life, 1992thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The Host is lifted up towards the cross on the altar, and the priest makes the sign of the cross over it with the paten. The bread is thus brought into relation with Christ and his death on the cross; it is marked as a ‘sacrifice’ and thereby becomes sacred.

Jung reads the oblation of the bread as the inaugural act of ritual spiritualization, initiating the process by which a material substance is progressively transformed into a vehicle of the sacred.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the substances of bread and wine are said to be changed into the substance of something else in such a way that this new substance is contained altogether within the same boundaries … the new substance must affect all our senses in exactly the same way as the bread and wine would affect them, if no transubstantiation had taken place.

Descartes engages transubstantiation as a philosophical test case, arguing that his account of extension and boundaries can accommodate the Church’s teaching that substance changes while sensory appearances remain constant.

Descartes, René, Meditations on First Philosophy, 2008supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Melchisedec (‘teacher of righteousness’), is, according to Hebrews 7:1, king of Salem … comes to meet Abraham with bread and wine. This sequence is probably not accidental — it forms a sort of crescendo.

Jung traces the sacrificial prefigurations in the Mass canon — Abel, Abraham, Melchisedec — identifying Melchisedec’s offering of bread and wine as the typological apex anticipating the Eucharist.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The alchemist now partakes of the immortal essence of the filius philosophorum by a true communion … Mary was called the ‘cellar-keeper of the whole Trinity, who giveth of the wine of the Holy Spirit, pouring it out to whom she will.’

Von Franz demonstrates that Aurora Consurgens re-enacts Eucharistic communion in alchemical language, with the wine of the Holy Spirit functioning as the transformative substance through which the adept appropriates the filius philosophorum.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

His blood thus offered, is the pagan prototype of the wine of the Christian sacrifice of the Mass … the one life immortal lives in all, which is namely the very god whose symbol is the vine.

Campbell positions the Dionysian vine and the blood of the dying-rising god as the direct mythological antecedent of the wine in the Christian Mass, situating the Eucharist within a universal archetype of sacrificial renewal.

Campbell, Joseph, The Mythic Image, 1974supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

If some persons called the bread and the wine antitypes of the body and blood of the Lord, as did the divinely inspired Basil, they said so not after the consecration but before the consecration, so calling the offering itself.

John of Damascus refutes symbolic or memorial interpretations of the Eucharist by clarifying that patristic language calling bread and wine ‘antitypes’ refers only to the pre-consecrated elements, not to the transformed substance.

John of Damascus, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

we were to incorporate him into ourselves. This seemed to me so preposterous an impossibility that I was sure some great mystery must lie behind it.

In autobiographical recollection, Jung identifies his childhood intuition about Communion bread and wine as the inaugural moment of his recognition that religious ritual carries a hidden psychological depth irreducible to memorial observance.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the ‘corn of wheat’ in John 12:24, which dying ‘bringeth forth much fruit,’ refers to Christ … a ‘spiritual husbandman,’ who ‘committed his body as seed to the sterile field. That body was the grain.’

Von Franz traces the patristic identification of Christ as grain-seed through patristic sources, linking the bread symbolism of the Eucharist to a broader agricultural-death-resurrection complex also operative in alchemy.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the first century question, whether Christianity was a mystery religion or the mystery religion of which all the others were refigurements is relevant.

Campbell frames the Eucharistic bread and wine within the comparative-religion question of whether Christianity represents the culmination of all mystery-religion symbolism, implying that the Last Supper rite inherits and transforms an archaic initiatory tradition.

Campbell, Joseph, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor, 2001supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The rite performed by the priest as the highest mystery of Christian … The grain, once ground and cooked in water with a seasoning, produces the kykeon which the initiate drinks, just as Demeter did.

Burkert draws a structural parallel between the Eleusinian kykeon — grain ground, cooked, and consumed as initiatory act — and the Christian Eucharistic rite, grounding both in a primal nexus of aggression, nourishment, and sexuality.

Burkert, Walter, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 1972supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The fact that the Eucharist was also celebrated with water shows that the early Christians were mainly interested in the symbolism of the mysteries and not in the literal observance of the sacrament.

Jung cites early variants of the Eucharist — including aquarian celebration — as evidence that the original impulse behind the rite was symbolic-psychological rather than strictly literalist or doctrinal.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

no DIONYSUS same soil which let man earn his bread only after much toil and trouble grew the miracle of solace, deliverance, and joy — the drink which was offered … to those burdened with sorrow.

Otto places bread and wine in dialectical juxtaposition as the dual gifts of a single soil — bread the product of toil, wine the Dionysian miracle of consolation — underscoring the chthonic-ecstatic polarity at the core of their symbolism.

Otto, Walter F, Dionysus Myth and Cult (1965), 1965supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

when the priest, quoting the words of Christ at the Last Supper, pronounces the formula of consecration … first over the wafer of the host … then over the chalice of the wine.

Campbell cites the Mass formula of consecration to illustrate how ritual play-belief operates in the highest symbolic acts of civilization, with bread and wine as the focal objects of a transformative performative utterance.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

in the commixtio, on the other hand, the body, or particula, is steeped in wine, symbolizing spirit, and this amounts to a glorification of the body. Hence the justification for regarding the commixtio as a symbol of the resurrection.

Jung interprets the commixtio — the immersion of the consecrated bread particle in the chalice wine — as a ritual reversal of baptism and a symbolic enactment of resurrection through the spiritualization of the body.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

we ought to have wine — that alone brings sudden recovery and unpremeditated health! … ‘We have provided for wine,’ he said … ‘So nothing is lacking but bread.’

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra deploys bread and wine as symbols of vital sustenance opposed to ascetic water-drinking, inverting Eucharistic resonance in a characteristically ironic staging of the Last Supper’s elemental gifts.

Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →