Eros

Eros & Psyche

“The kernel of all jealousy is lack of love.” C.G. Jung 

Love is the essence of joy and pain, love is the essence of life and death. This post contains a few quotes on love, to which may make you think. This post is of Eros , a brief introduction to his mythology, as it relates to our current world and psychology. The quotes are from C.G. Jung work and Ernest Becker’s the Denial of Death. Enjoy, hope it makes you think on the concept of love, life and death.  

“At the beginning there was only Chaos, Night (Nyx), Darkness (Erebus), and the Abyss (Tartarus). Earth, the Air and Heaven had no existence. Firstly, blackwinged Night laid a germless egg in the bosom of the infinite deeps of Darkness, and from this, after the revolution of long ages, sprang the graceful Love (Eros) with his glittering golden wings, swift as the whirlwinds of the tempest. He mated in the deep Abyss with dark Chaos, winged like himself, and thus hatched forth our race, which was the first to see the light.” The Eleusinian Mysteries 

“Eros is a kosmogonos, a creator and father-mother of all higher consciousness.” 

“We are in the deepest sense the victims and instruments of cosmogonic “love”… Love’s something superior to the individual, a unified and undivided whole. Being a part, man cannot grasp the whole. He is at its mercy. He may assent to it, or rebel against it; but he is always caught up by it and enclosed within it. He is dependent upon it and is sustained by it. Love is his light and his darkness, whose end he cannot see. “Love ceases not” – whether he speaks with the “tongues of angels,” or with scientific exactitude traces the life of the cell down to its uttermost source. Man can try to name love, showering upon it all the names at his command, and still he will involve himself in endless self-deceptions. If he possesses a grain of wisdom, he will lay down his arms and name the unknown by the more unknown, ignotum per ignotius – that is, by the name of God. That is a confession of his subjection, his imperfection, and his dependence; but at the same time a testimony to his freedom to choose between truth and error.” C.G. Jung 

Denial of death preface: 

“Eros, the urge to the unification of experience, to form, to greater meaningfulness. One of the reasons, I believe, that knowledge is in a state of useless overproduction is that it is strewn all over the place, spoken in a thousand competitive voices. Its insignificant fragments are magnified all out of proportion, while its major and world-historical insights lie around begging for attention. There is no throbbing, vital center. Norman O. Brown observed that the great world needs more Eros and less strife, and the intellectual world needs it just as much. There has to be revealed the harmony that unites many different positions, so that the “sterile and ignorant polemics” can be abated.” Xvii