My last sacrifice post ended with Hesse killing his fictional character Knectht rather than himself (as, years before he had unwisely tried to do to himself). My sacrifice posts began with my lhasa apso Chauncey expressing anger by shaking his toy sheep, but not even destroying it let alone attacking us. The commonality between all the sacrifices was substitution of a symbol for the desired event but too many of the sacrificers I mentioned got caught up in that symbol–thought, for instance, that the gods really did need human blood or that the Jewish people really were the cause of all the Fatherland’s sufferings.
In Mysterium Conjuntionis (419-20), C. G. Jung relates a story told to him by his good friend, the Sinologist Richard Wilhelm, who had just returned from China. In the province where he was staying, a drought was turning into a famine. The missionaries prayed, the Chinese performed rituals, but to no avail. So a rainmaker was called. Three days later the rains came. At Wilhelm’s question, the rainmaker answered that the area had lost its attunement to the Dao (the way of the universe) and so there was drought. Even entering the area deranged him from attunement. For three days, he waited until he synchronized with the Dao; then, the province had as well: the rains came.
Particularly, on Martin Luther King’s day, waiting sounds like a mistake. African Americans waited over a hundred years for the promise of freedom to be fulfilled and in the 1960s it did not seem any closer. What King did was change the kind of waiting. It had been a making do and trying to ignore or adapt to the oppression. King waited like the rainmaker with the dream clearly in mind. Others resorted to violence or dissociation but standing in protests, walking in marches, he was waiting as a purposeful act. He did not get caught up in the symbols employed in protest and see any one of them as the final goal, but watched the horizon knowing that the rain clouds would come. Whether a sufficiency of them have come yet is another matter. But some did. And above all, he taught the right kind of sacrifice, the right kind of waiting.
Holistic Unconscious: 