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Elijah is one of the most popular figures in Jewish folk-lore. He visits every Jewish home on Passover eve, and towards the end of the Seder, the festive meal celebrating the Exodus from Egypt, the door is opened for him. The children glue their eyes on the special goblet of wine filled for him, the Elijah cup, to see how much he has drunk. This numinous figure, who ascended to heaven in a chariot of fire drawn by horses of fire (2 Kings 2:11), had become a legendary figure already in Biblical times. In post-Biblical writings, the Talmud, the Kabbalah, end in Hasidism, his figure has been widely enriched. Further mythological features attached to his person make him, as Jung has written, a living archetype. Jung in fact chose the figure of Elijah to demonstrate how to establish the existence of an archetype (CW 18, para. 1518ff.). He sees Elijah as representing both the collective unconscious and the self (Ibid., para. 1526).
The author of this book has been occupied with the Elijah theme for a number of years. Thanks to his intimate knowledge of and deep involvement with Jewish religious teachings, he has been able to present us with a fund of amplificatory material from the original Hebrew and Aramaic sources. For example, the Aggadah, the more legendary and imaginative elements of the Talmud, sees him not only as the severe and over-zealous champion of the Lord depicted in the Biblical narrative, but also, since then, as the one who directs pious souls to their place in heaven, and who brings sinful souls to heaven for the Sabbath. On earth he reveals himself (Giluy Eliyahu) to scholars as a teacher, counsellor and friend, to further their spiritual development, not shrinking however, from stern admonitions at times. His knowledge far surpasses that of the human mind. Confronted with widely divergent opinions of scholars, he states that God values every one of them as true. To the Jungian reader his features as psychopompos, guru or wise old man revealing the para