Baptism

The archetypal symbolism of baptism is related to purification and rejuvenation, which transcends the ego—indeed, death and rebirth, initiation into a higher state.

This cluster of ideas can also be relevant in dreams about bathing, showering, swimming, and so on—it involves a kind of dissolution (the alchemists' solutio) of the current attitude or its equivalent, and a resurrection with a new one.

The sins washed away through baptism can be understood as unconscious shadow qualities—purity here means consciousness. "If one is psychologically pure, one does not contaminate one's surroundings with shadow projections." (Edinger 1994, p. 73.) "The personal unconscious is the shadow and the inferior function, in Gnostic terminology the sinfulness and impurity that must be washed away by baptism." (CW 14, par. 257.)

Baptism has two main aspects, according to Edinger: cleansing from sins and being incorporated into a sacred community, "and both of these things happen with each descent into the unconscious." (1995, p. 161.) (To be cleansed means to become aware of one's shadow sides, not that they disappear; to be incorporated into a community here means finding a new, conscious relationship to oneself and others.) (See also Washing and Water.)

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