What follows from the fact that the compulsion toward self-sacrifice arises from the awakening of the immortal part of the soul, which in Jungian analysis is called the awakened individuational impulse (see The Path of Individuation and the Care of the Soul)?
What does the incarnated god (the archetype of the whole personality) receive in return for the suffering of its incarnation in a human being?
The answer Jung gives to this question is: it gains consciousness.
The reward for the suffering involved in the incarnation of the god in the human being is self-knowledge.
This is the light that wells up from within, and the true essence of alchemical gold.
More on this subject can be found in the excerpt below from Marie-Louise von Franz’s book The Golden Ass of Apuleius.
“Psychological healing always leads to an expansion of the personality.
It brings into play more life and more aspects of the personality. We can say that the greater part of neurotic disturbances are due to the fact that the ego has closed too many of its shutters to those realities of life that want to enter. This is why healing coincides with an expansion of consciousness. For the human being this means access to religious experience, the discovery of a deeper meaning of life, and of healing emotions.
But in the mirror process this also means the descent of the ingenious, omnipotent god into the miserable limitation of human existence.
A concept from Christian theology illustrates this: the process of kenosis (from the Greek, meaning “emptying,” “self-dispossession”). This means that Christ (while still with the Father, before the incarnation, as the Logos—the Johannine Logos) possessed the fullness of the Father, the all-pervading unity with the divine world, without determination. Then he emptied himself—ekénōse heautón, as Saint Paul writes—which means that he relinquished his all-encompassing fullness and unity in order to become mortal.
The human being is elevated through the realization of the inner Christ (for example, through receiving Christian teaching), and Christ is lowered through his descent into the human world. This is also expressed through his birth in the stable. What Christian theology says about Christ’s kenosis is in fact a specific representation of a general archetypal event.
Every time a god incarnates, this process of kenosis is carried out for him—a process of narrowing—while at the same time human consciousness expands…
Through modern Freudian and Jungian analysis, human beings have begun to discover this substructure of the human psyche and to see that the motives of our fate arise from there and, passing through the filter of the personal unconscious, transform and influence consciousness. In the analytical process we use the word integration for what happens, meaning that the ego relates to these contents, enters into Auseinandersetzung, a confrontation with them, recognizing them as a deeper part of its own psychic substructure.
What actually happens if one adopts a mirror-like, symmetrical point of view and looks at things from the side of the archetypes?
The archetypes are the gods of polytheistic paganism. The Greek gods are the archetypes in the collective Greek psyche. What happens to the gods if this process of integration takes place? The relationship is never only one-sided, so the gods are drawn into the human sphere, and in the reciprocal movement the ego expands its consciousness.
This is the process of the incarnation of the god.
In fact, the beginning of this process is not located here. Very often we see that in the impulse toward individuation and integration it is the god who wants to incarnate. Only secondarily is the ego touched and drawn into the process. This explains why the initial dreams in analysis are often not that the ego encounters divine figures, but that the god has decided to incarnate. The ego has no idea about this and looks elsewhere—there have been financial or marital problems—and it still does not know what is being enacted on the other side.
Very often, the creative initiative of the process of individuation comes from the other side.”
— Marie-Louise von Franz, Golden Ass of Apuleius: The Liberation of the Feminine in Man
Note:
This is not a verbatim quotation from the English original. The passage above is a translation from Bulgarian, based on a secondary rendering of the text, and therefore cannot be considered an exact citation of von Franz’s original wording.
