the timboucher experience

The cross as bait

I just remembered a really awesome drawing in Jung’s book, Psychology and Alchemy. It’s taken from a 12th century manuscript called The Hortus Deliciarum. The image is a picture of God acting as a fisherman. He is using the “sevenfold tackle of the line of David with the crucifix as bait” to capture the great beast, Leviathan. The line of David, of course, if Jesus’s ancestry, and Jesus can be seen dangling on the baited hook of the cross.

I *think* this may be a reference to chapter 41 in the book of Job, where Job says:

1 Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? 2 Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn? 3 Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee? 4 Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant for ever? 5 Wilt thou play with him as with a bird? or wilt thou bind him for thy maidens?

In any event I really liked this picture. But it also got me thinking about the situation in reverse. What if it’s actually Satan who is using the cross as bait to capture people? Like those deep sea angler fish, how they have that little glowing lantern thing that protrudes from their forehead, and other weird deep sea fish swim up to it, and then WHAM! It might look something like this:

Either way, it’s a pretty neat trick, I think. Actually, thinking about it, this second image might be more appropriate from a Gnostic point of view. Some of them believed that the symbol of the cross really was sort of a trap, set up by the archons and the Demiurge. They railed against the idea that the pathway to salvation was through suffering. They believed that it was through the personal knowledge of the divine, gnosis. So from that perspective, the picture with the deep sea angler is actually dead on.