Take your God with you. Bear him down to your dark land where people live who rub their eyes each morning and yet always see only the same thing and never anything else. Bring your God down to the haze pregnant with poison, but not like those blinded ones who try to illuminate the darkness with lanterns which it does not comprehend.

Instead, secretly carry your God to a hospitable roof. The huts of men are small and they cannot welcome the God despite their hospitality and willingness. Hence do not wait until rawly bungling hands of men hack your God to pieces, but embrace him again, lovingly, until he has taken on the form of his first beginning.

Let no human eye see the much loved, terribly splendid one in the state of his illness and lack of power. Consider that your fellow men are animals without knowing it. So long as they go to pasture, or lie in the sun, or suckle their young, or mate with each other, they are beautiful and harmless creatures of dark Mother Earth. But if the God appears, they begin to rave, since the nearness of God makes people rave. They tremble with fear and fury and suddenly attack one another in fratricidal struggles, since one senses the approaching God in the other.

So conceal the God that you have taken with you. Let them rave and maul each other. Your voice is too weak for those raging to be able to hear. Thus do not speak and do not show the God, but sit in a solitary place and sing incantations in the ancient manner:

Set the egg before you, the God in his beginning.
And behold it.
And incubate it with the magical warmth of your gaze.

HERE THE INCANTATIONS BEGIN.

Christmas has come. The God is in the egg.
I have prepared a rug for my God, an expensive red the land of morning.
He shall be surrounded by the shimmer of magnificence of his Eastern land.

I am the mother, the simple maiden, who gave birth and did not know how.
I am the careful father, who protected the maiden.
I am the shepherd, who received the message as he guarded his herd at night on the dark fields.
I am the holy animal that stood astonished and cannot grasp the becoming of the God.
I am the wise man who came from the East, suspecting the miracle from afar.
And I am the egg that surrounds and nurtures the seed of the God in me.

The solemn hours lengthen.
And my humanity is wretched and suffers torment.
Since I am a giver of birth.

Whence do you delight me, Oh God!
‘He is the eternal emptiness and the eternal fullness.
Nothing resembles him and he resembles everything.
Eternal darkness and eternal brightness.
Eternal below and eternal above.
Double nature in one.
Simple in the manifold.
Meaning in absurdity.
Freedom in bondage.
Subjugated when victorious.old in youth.
Yes in no.

Oh
light of the middle way,
enclosed in the egg,
embryonic,
full of ardor, oppressed.
Fully expectant,
dreamlike, awaiting lost memories.
As heavy as stone, hardened.
Molten, transparent.
Streaming bright, coiled on itself.

Amen, you are the lord of the beginning.
Amen, you are the star of the East.
Amen, you are the flower that blooms over everything.

Amen, you are the deer that breaks out of the forest.
Amen, you are the song that sounds far over the water.
Amen, you are the beginning and the end.

One word that was never spoken.
One light that was never lit up.
An unparalleled confusion.
And a road without end.

I forgive myself these words, as you also forgive me for wanting your blazing light.

Rise up, you gracious fire of old night.
I kiss the threshold of your beginning.
My hand prepares the rug and spreads abundant red flowers before you.
Rise up my friend, you who lay sick, break through the shell.
We have prepared a meal for you.
Gifts have been prepared for you.
Dancers await you.

We have built a house for you.
Your servants stand ready.
We drove herds together for you on green fields.
We filled your cup with red wine.
We set out fragrant fruit on golden dishes.
We knock at your prison and lay our ears against it.

The hours lengthen, tarry no longer.
We are wretched without you and our song is worn out.
We are miserable without you and wear out our songs.
We spoke all the words that our heart gave us.

What else do you want?
What else shall we fulfill for you?

We open every door for you.
We bend our knees where you want us to.
We go to all points of the compass according to your wish.
We carry up what is below, and we turn what is above into what is below,as you command.
We give and take according to your wish.
We wanted to turn right, but go left, obedient to your sign.

We rise and we fall,
we sway and we remain still,
we see and we are blind,
we hear and we are deaf,
we say yes and no,
always hearing your word.

We do not comprehend and we live the incomprehensible.
We do not love and we live the unloved.
And we evolve around ourselves again and comprehend and live the understandable.
We love and live the loved, true to your law.

Come to us, we who are willing from our own will.
Come to us, we who understand you from our own spirit.
Come to us, we who will warm you at our own fire.
Come to us, we who will heal you with our own art.
Come to us, we who will produce you out of our own body.
Come, child, to father and mother.

We asked earth.
We asked Heaven.
We asked the sea.
We asked the wind.
We asked the fire.

We looked for you with all the peoples.
We looked for you with all the kings.
We looked for you with all the wise.
We looked for you in our own heads and hearts.

And we found you in the egg.
I have slain a precious human sacrifice for you,a youth and old man.
I have cut my skin with a knife.
I have sprinkled your altar with my own blood.
I have banished my father and mother so that you can live with me.
I have turned my night into day and went about at midday like a sleepwalker.
I have overthrown all the Gods, broken the laws, eaten the impure.
I have thrown down my sword and dressed in women’s clothing.
I shattered my firm castle and played like a child in the sand.
I saw warriors form into line of battle and I destroyed my suit of armor with a hammer.
I planted my field and let the fruit decay.
I made small everything that was great and made everything great that was small.
I exchanged my furthest goal for the nearest, and so I am ready.

However, I am not ready, since I have still not accepted that which chokes my heart. That fearful thing is the enclosing of the God in the egg. I am happy that the great endeavor has been successful, but my fear made me forget the hazards involved. I love and admire the powerful. No one is greater than he with the bull’s horns, and yet I lamed, carried, and made him smaller with ease. I almost slumped to the ground with fear when I saw him, and now I rescue him with a cupped hand. These are the powers that make you afraid and conquer you; these have been your Gods and your rulers since time immemorial: yet you can put them in your pocket.

What is blasphemy compared to this? I would like to be able to blaspheme against the God: That way I would at least have a God whom I could insult, but it is not worth blaspheming against an egg that one carries in one’s pocket. That is a God against whom one cannot even blaspheme.

I hated this pitifulness of the God. My own unworthiness is already enough. It cannot bear my encumbering it with the pitifulness of the God. Nothing stands firm: you touch yourself and you turn to dust. You touch the God and he hides terrified in the egg. You force the gates of Hell: the sound of cackling masks and the music of fools approaches you. You storm Heaven: stage scenery totters and the prompter in the box falls into a swoon. You notice: you are not true, it is not true above, it is not true below, left and right are deceptions. Wherever you grasp is air, air, air.

But I have caught him, he who has been feared since time immemorial; I have made him small and my hand surrounds him. That is the demise of the Gods: man puts them in his pocket. That is the end of the story of the Gods. Nothing remains of the Gods other than an egg. And I possess this egg. Perhaps I can eradicate this last one and with this finally exterminate the race of Gods. Now that I know that the Gods have yielded to my power – what are the Gods to me now? Old and overripe, they have fallen and been buried in an egg.

~Carl Jung, Liber Novus