Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

78 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

from Egypt was an exodus from the East, from the unconsciousness of Man . . . Psychologically they were to emerge from what psycho-analysts call the collective unconscious into individual consciousness; and doctrinally, they were to form a bridge, under the aegis of Jehovah, between the East and the West, between the Universal Impersonal Godhead of Brahma and the Individual Personal Godhead of Him whom they called the Messiah . . . That was, we believe, the task imposed upon the Jews, the mission they chose or were chosen to fulfil. What is more, they made a complete success of it! Their tragedy, and the world’s tragedy, is that they failed to realise it.4?

It was the Jewish people who gave birth to Jesus, “the greatest event in psychology as well as in history.” Through the birth of Christ “God was born of Man, and the race that had performed the prodigy was the Chosen people.”*? But when He appeared amongst them they failed to acknowledge Him. This was perhaps not too surprising since He refused to declare himself a Jew and his claims and doctrines were in contradiction to those of the Jews. According to Mitrinovic, from the perspective of the development of the world and humanity, the beliefs of the Jews had served their purpose once Christ was born.

Like a husk that had protected the seed until it was ready to fall, Jehovah was obsolete from the moment that Jesus appeared; and with Jehovah went everything which the Jews had hitherto been taught to regard as religion.

In Mitrinovic’s eyes, Jehovah had been merely a “transitional ‘phantasm, unconsciously designed to form a bridge between Brahma and Christ.” Consequently, once Christ, the “Individual and Personal Deity, flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone” had emerged, the mission of the Jews had been completed, they were “no longer anything in particular; they were only one of the races of Mankind . . .°4

The psychology of the Jewish people reflected their history. On the one hand they were a ‘chosen’ people with a divine call and mission—the origin of their sense of their distinctive uniqueness amongst the races of the world. On the other hand, they finally betrayed their mission when they rejected Christ and what he symbolised, the assumption by humanity of what had previously been considered to be solely God’s responsibility for the development of the world—hence the sensitivity of the Jews to criticism.

For Mitrinovi¢, writing in 1920, the practical choice facing the Jews was “Zion or assimilation.” The pull of Palestine he likened to the hold that a father exerts over an individual, even in adulthood. The Father, in the case of the Jews, being the unconscious of the world represented by