Slaughter

To slaughter an animal is to make it edible for humans. (See also Sacrifice.) In this way, there is a positive quality in the act that can suggest transformation; something dead is made into something life-giving (one life gives birth to another). Like the blacksmith and other craftsmen, the butcher takes something unusable and makes it useful.

At the same time, there is something much more brutal about slaughter, as the butcher kills before cutting it into pieces. If there is an "assembly line" principle in the work he performs mechanically, the dream image likely refers more to thoughtless killing than to transformation and similar concepts. Slaughter is also a euphemism for brutally and perhaps indiscriminately killing—a particularly bloody act is referred to as a slaughter, where there is hardly any trace of a positive outcome.

As an archetypal image, slaughter reappears in ritual contexts. The bull is slaughtered, sacrificed, and eaten to establish a connection between the participants of the ceremony and Dionysus, and so on. In Christian symbolism, this "primitive" ritual also appears. The Mass is a kind of slaughtering of Jesus (the bread and wine, that is, the body and blood), which is followed by the consumption of the son of God, symbolically similar to the ancient Greek ceremonies. According to some Christian rituals, the bread is cut with the words: "As the Lamb of God, He was led to the slaughter," and so forth.

Slaughter or butchering of an animal can also be related to the symbol of dismemberment, namely a division, a kind of analysis of the unconscious instinct.

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