Self as continuing incarnation

Edinger’s The Creation of Consciousness reads Jung’s Answer to Job as announcing a myth for modern man: the Self — the unconscious God-image — seeks its own realization through the conscious ego, and the ego is “commandeered by the transpersonal psyche (God, Self) and drafted like Job into the service of making it more conscious” (Edinger 1984). The Incarnation is read not as a single past event but as an ongoing psychological process: “Yahweh’s incarnation in Christ is incomplete. It left out of account Yahweh’s dark side.” The task falls to the individuating ego to humanize what the dogmatic event did not include — “the images require to be understood and the energies as affects require containment and humanization. These images and affects can quite properly be called Yahweh-images and Yahweh-affects. They are expressions of the original, unconscious Self” (Edinger 1984).

The theme makes explicit what Aion had already implied: the Self is not static. It seeks consciousness, and the history of religion records its successive self-symbolizations — fish, Christ, Antichrist, lapis, quaternity. Each symbol registers what the previous could not hold. The fourth (the shadow, the dark side, the feminine) presses against the triadic structures of Christian dogma; the axiom of Maria Prophetissa surfaces in modern dreams precisely because the cultural container for the Self has not yet reconciled what the Self itself contains.

The thread places Edinger in the Jungian core not as elaborator but as systematizer of a myth Jung named but did not fully narrate: the Self is a God in the process of becoming conscious through the human ego.

Sources

• carl-jung: Answer to Job as revelation of the dark side of Yahweh
• edward-edinger: The Creation of Consciousness as systematic reading of that revelation
• edward-edinger: ego as “drafted like Job” into the Self’s service (1984)