Learning History
“It’s a poetic communication with a lot of philosophical content, essentially made for a popular audience, written and re-written–perhaps amended and changed and written by several different hands over time and so forth. And it’s not about literally existing people, it’s about mythologically existing people. They are metaphors for the Divine and metaphorical or mythological ways of communicating philosophical truths to ordinary people.”
Adi Da Samraj
Preface: Toward the Recovery of Meaning in Sacred Narrative
This essay began as part of an ongoing dialogue about the place of myth and sacred narrative in the formation of religious identity, cultural continuity, and psychological transformation. The figure of Abraham—so central to Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions—emerged as a pivotal subject, not merely as a person of historical interest, but as an archetype whose significance reverberates across millennia.
Our inquiry drew upon the careful philological and historical work of William Turnbull Pilter in The Pentateuch: A Historical Record, particularly his extended meditation on the names Abram and Abraham and their linguistic roots in Semitic and Babylonian traditions. Alongside this, we brought into conversation a remarkable dialogue by the contemporary spiritual teacher Adi Da Samraj, recorded in 2004, in which he deconstructs the function of myth, sacrifice, ritual kingship, and even the story of Abraham, reading them as ritualized dramas in the evolution of human consciousness.
To this dyad, we have now added a third voice: Carl Jung, whose Answer to Job confronts the psychic and theological consequences of the Abrahamic tradition. Jung’s psychological reading—particularly his recognition of the God-image as one that evolves within the human psyche—provides a powerful lens through which to interpret the contradictions and transformations embedded in the Abraham story.
Through weeks of comparative reading and reflective correspondence, what began as a set of fragmented notes and marginalia coalesced into a full narrative essay. We sought not to assert a fixed position but to trace the tension—and the possible synthesis—between the historical-critical view, the transformative spiritual vision, and the deep structures of archetypal psychology.
Central to this endeavor was the integration of a passage written by Adi Da, not in his role as philosopher or theologian, but as a psycho-spiritual diagnostician. His reflections on the “return of the repressed” and the meaning of true transformation, drawn from his early writings, allowed us to frame the story of Abraham not only in terms of myth and covenant, but also as a mirror to the drama of individuation and spiritual maturation.
What follows is a meditation born of scholarship, mysticism, and the wish to recover a language adequate to both the ancient and the immediate.
The story of Abraham stands at the intersection of religious myth, personal transformation, and the emergence of covenantal consciousness in the ancient Near East. Whether read historically or spiritually, Abraham is not merely a patriarch of ethnic lineage; he is the archetype of one called out of old patterns into the unknown—the journeyer, the exile, the seeker of a transcendent promise.
In William Turnbull Pilter’s philological excavation of Abraham’s names—Abram and Abraham—we see the ancient Semitic understanding of naming as destiny. “Abram,” meaning “The Exalted Father,” may have originally referred to a divinized or ancestral figure, while “Abraham,” as interpreted in Genesis, becomes “the father of a multitude.” The renaming signals not only a personal covenant with Yahweh, but a transition in meaning: from a localized, perhaps polytheistic identity to a universal mandate—“all nations will be blessed through you.”
Yet this transformation is not simply linguistic or genealogical. Adi Da Samraj, in a sweeping 2004 dialogue, reframes such mythic stories—including that of Abraham—not as literal history but as ritual psychodramas, rooted in the sacrificial systems of agricultural and astrological societies. He describes how ancient kings were ritually sacrificed for the renewal of the land; how myths of resurrection and ascension predate Christianity by millennia; and how figures like Oedipus, Osiris, and even Jesus serve archetypal functions in a cycle of sacrifice, transformation, and renewal.
Carl Jung, in Answer to Job, presents yet another angle: the Abrahamic tradition is not only a story about man’s obedience to God, but a profound psychic tension in the evolving God-image itself. For Jung, Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac is an expression of humanity’s confrontation with an omnipotent but morally unintegrated deity. That tension reappears in the story of Job, where Jung argues that it is Job—not Yahweh—who represents the higher moral consciousness. In this light, the Abraham story is a beginning: the beginning of an individuation process not only for man, but for God within man.
A Triangular Reading: Jung, Pilter, and Adi Da on Abraham
Where William Turnbull Pilter provides the philological and historical-linguistic analysis of Abraham’s names and cultural setting, and Adi Da exposes the mythic and psycho-spiritual drama embedded in scriptural forms, Carl Jung brings a third and equally crucial dimension: the archetypal evolution of God and man within the human psyche.
In Answer to Job, Jung dares to suggest that Yahweh evolves—not only in humanity’s perception, but in Yahweh’s own awareness. The encounter with Job reveals, to Jung, a God who is omnipotent but not yet fully moral—who requires incarnation (in Christ) to reconcile divine omnipotence with divine justice and love.
If Abraham’s test—the near-sacrifice of Isaac—represents the beginning of a personal covenant, then Job’s trial represents its psychological culmination: a breaking point in which blind faith alone is no longer sufficient. Jung saw Job not as merely faithful, but as morally superior to God as then portrayed. Job becomes the mirror in which Yahweh sees His own shadow.
Now place that alongside Adi Da’s assertion that the “ascetic knife is merely a sacrifice by Abraham, the father in us”—a dramatic gesture of righteousness unaware of its deeper psychological violence. To Adi Da, the sacrifice is not about obedience but about the fear of growth, the unwillingness to include the infant self, the rejected Narcissus within.
And with Pilter, we see that the very name Abraham encodes this movement: from “The Exalted Father” (Abram) to “Father of a Multitude” (Abraham)—a shift from isolated spiritual authority to inclusivity, to the integration of previously exiled parts.
Thus:
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Pilter roots the myth in ancient linguistic and cultural matrices.
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Jung interprets it as the psyche’s encounter with the numinous Other, wrestling with divine injustice.
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Adi Da pushes the drama inward—showing how both sacrifice and covenant are psychospiritual symbols of the ego’s necessary transformation into love and relationality.
In this triangulated view, Abraham is not a mere founding father but a threshold figure, standing at the intersection of history, psyche, and spirit. The “mandate” of Abraham is no longer just a divine command—it is a call for creative transformation in the human heart.
Adi Da’s psychological writings converge with this insight. He links the Abrahamic sacrifice to the “ascetic knife,” an unconscious paternal force that seeks to slay the child within—the “infant self” that represents our arrested development. True transformation, he insists, comes not through violence but through love. It is not the destruction of the sinner, but the healing of what has been exiled.
He writes:
“The return of the repressed is not a mere return of unconscious contents but a return of the exiled self… We can only hope to transform and liberate him by a creative effort. The ascetic knife is merely a sacrifice by Abraham, the father in us, righteously called but unaware of all the implications of the sacrifice.”
Here Abraham becomes not a distant patriarch but an image of ourselves. The tension between the call to faith and the impulse to control—between obedience and fear—is the very terrain of our inner life. The “exalted father” becomes a symbol of the superego, the inner lawgiver. The new name, “father of a multitude,” may well signify the integration of previously exiled parts of the self—the crowd of inner voices now included in a new wholeness.
This reframing allows us to see Abraham’s journey as the human journey: the movement from mythic bondage into relational wholeness. Pilter, through his detailed analysis of Semitic naming conventions, shows how Abraham’s story links Babylonian, Amorite, and Canaanite traditions. Jung exposes the archetypal crisis of divine-human tension. Adi Da, through esoteric psychology and critique of ritual religion, exposes the psycho-spiritual dimension underlying these traditions.
What Abraham’s story reveals—when not reduced to dogma or defended as literal history—is the human thirst for transformation. It is about the possibility that the past, however blood-soaked or mythologically framed, may be redeemed—not by repressing it, but by creatively and lovingly integrating it.
In the end, Abraham is not just the “father of nations.” He is the name for the possibility that myth may become mandate—not a command from an outer god, but a calling from within: to grow, to love, and to be whole.
Integration and Individuation: Jung and Adi Da on the Path to Wholeness
In the final phase of this inquiry, a critical synthesis emerged around the shared insight of Carl Jung and Adi Da Samraj: that true transformation is not achieved by repression, submission, or sacrifice alone—but through a process of integration, in which all rejected or exiled aspects of the self are recognized and reintegrated.
In Jung’s model, the healing of the psyche—what he calls individuation—depends on confronting the shadow, integrating contradictions, and reconciling the ego with the Self. In Answer to Job, he presents the drama not only as Job’s trial, but as God’s confrontation with His own split nature. The human being, especially through moral awareness, becomes the mirror in which God sees Himself. Jung provocatively suggests that the Incarnation is God’s own move toward wholeness.
Adi Da, while writing from a different tradition, articulates a similar inner dynamic. His critique of Abraham’s “ascetic knife”—the willingness to sacrifice the child—identifies the act as the violent repression of the infant self, the very parts of us that most need love, not judgment. True sadhana, in his view, is the process by which we re-include what has been excluded—not indulging it, but transforming it through relationship, love, and spiritual intensity.
For both, healing is not a moral performance, but a deep psychic and spiritual integration. The Abrahamic drama—of calling, exile, sacrifice, and promise—can then be read not as a command to obey blindly, but as a call to grow consciously. Abraham’s true mandate is not the slaying of the innocent, but the reconciliation of the divided self.
Thus the story becomes archetypal: not simply “Abraham’s” story, but ours.
Bibliography
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Adi Da Samraj. The Knee of Listening. Middletown, CA: Dawn Horse Press, 2004.
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Adi Da Samraj. Transcripts from 2004 dialogue sessions with devotees (unpublished oral teachings).
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Carl Jung. Answer to Job. In The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol. 11. Princeton University Press.
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Pilter, William Turnbull. The Pentateuch: A Historical Record. London: Hodder and Stoughton, early 20th century.
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The Holy Bible. Genesis 14–17.
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Brown, Francis; Driver, S.R.; Briggs, Charles A. Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906.
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Dozy, R. Die Israeliten zu Mekka. Leipzig: 1864.
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Hommel, Fritz. Ancient Hebrew Tradition. London: Rivingtons, 1897.
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Skinner, John. A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1910.
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Perowne, J. J. Stewart. The Book of Psalms: A New Translation. London: Bell and Daldy, 1871.
This essay is intended to complete Beezone’s inquiry into the history and nature of the figure of “Abraham.”
https://beezone.com/bee/abraham-and-the-limits-of-historical-meaning.html