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JAINISM tion, the voices of the angels sing out from on high: “Redemption to the Redeemer.” The sacred blood of Christ, that is to say, has bcen redeemed from the curse or spell that was nullifying its operation. And again, in Wagner's cycle of the Ring of the Nibelung, a pagan parallel to this motif is developed in almost identical terms. Brünnhilde quiets Wotan's sufferings, putting to rest the All-Father of the universe, when she returns the Ring to the primeval waters and sings to Wotan: “Ruhe nun, ruhe, du Gott!" —“Rest now, rest, thou God!" The enlightened individual, perfected through suffering, all-knowing through compassion, selfdetached through having conquered ego, redeems the divine principle, which is incapable, alone, of disengaging itself from its own fascination with the cosmic play.56
The Mask of the Personality
ULYSSES, in the Homeric epic, descended to the netherworld to seek counsel of the departed, and there found, in the murky twilight land of Pluto and Persephone, the shades of his former companions and friends who had been killed at the siege of Troy or had passed away during the years following the conquest of the town. They were but shadows in that dim realm; yet each could be recognized immediately, for all preserved the features that had been theirs on earth. Achilles declared that he would prefer the hard and joyless life of an obscure peasant in the broad daylight of the living to the melancholy monotony of his present 58 Cf. Zimmer, The King and the Corpse, pp. 51-52.
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