Sacrificing Your Son, Your People, or Yourself

Reviewing Carl Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious Mind, Part 5: Tackling Jordan Peterson’s Reading List

Carl Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious is not something I can summarize in a short essay, so I decided to create bite-sized chunks of what I’m getting from it.

Whether it is Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac, the Aztecs sacrificing (in reality) their own people, or Christ sacrificing himself, this idea of sacrifice has been wrestled with for thousands of years.

Jung discusses it at length in Psychology of the Unconscious with its own chapter. This quote stood out to me and helps to link what Jung is thinking to what Dr. Peterson often describes when discussing sacrifice.

“The comparison of the Mithraic and the Christian sacrifice plainly shows wherein lies the superiority of the Christian symbol; it is the frank admission that not only are the lower wishes to be sacrificed, but the whole personality. The Christian symbol demands complete devotion; it compels a veritable self-sacrifice to a higher purpose, while the Sacrificial Mithriacum, remaining fixed on a primitive symbolic stage, is contented with an animal sacrifice. The religious effect of these symbols must be considered as an orientation of the…