Jung's famous "tower" at Bollingen
What’s that anonymous internet fiend? Do you want to be caught up to the heights of love? Is it your most cherished desire to become one with God and burn with the devouring fire of charity in a mystical blaze of ecstatic rapture? Enter ye! Come forth and drink deep, heavy draughts from the cup of spiritual illumination and righteous contemplation in the next part of my authoritative exploration on Jung and myth!
According to Jung, myth can play two slightly different roles, either in the life and well-being of the individual or that of the entire society. For a society myth plays the role of compensation. Myths are devices that save a culture from slipping into one dominating tendency and help to retain a properly balanced attitude. Jung states this most clearly in his book Flying Saucers. A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (1959). For Jung the various rumors about UFO’s and extraterrestrial life were the product of the fears and anxieties of the Western world over the possibility of nuclear winter and the growing threat of overpopulation. This fear, not properly understood and combined with the predominant emphasis on the conscious and its occupation with technology and spaceflight, gave rise to a psychic projection in the form of flying saucers.
The image of the flying saucer is essentially a modern version of the savior myth. In Jung’s mind the need for a savior arises whenever opposite energies are almost irreconcilably divided, which was exactly the case in the forties and fifties of the previous century: Jung considered the consciousness of that age to be split and this tension constellated the archetype of the self. As an archetype whose primary occupation is unity and balance, the accompanying archetypal image of the self relates to wholeness and order, hence the circular form of UFO’s in many instances. For Jung a flying saucer was the Western equivalent of the mandala (Sanskrit: “essence having”), an important circular symbol of ritual and spiritual power in Hinduism and Buddhism. Mandalas also appeared in times of “psychic confusion and perplexity” to superimpose order on the resultant chaos.
Jung addressed the consequences and dangers of such psychic chaos in his essay Wotan (1936, originally written for the Neuer Schweizer Rundschau). Commenting on the rise of National Socialism in Nazi-Germany, Jung believed that the German nation, ever prone to militarism, was seized by the archetype of war, of which the Germanic god Wotan was one of the most famous archetypal images. Wotan was an ancient god of storm and battle frenzy, but also a deity of magic and a restless wanderer who bartered his eye away in exchange for a drink from the fountain of wisdom and knowledge.
What happened in Germany was that the people came to identify themselves too much with one aspect, or archetype, of their culture without counterbalancing it. A natural penchant for war should normally be balanced by a heightened concern for love, but the German people were getting too caught up in the “restless, violent, stormy side” of Wotan’s character. For Jung this kind of group-identification was full of inherent dangers, because it was always accompanied by a regression of the conscious level of the participants.
The scrutinous reader will not have missed an apparent contradiction here. In Flying Saucers Jung termed the identification of people with the archetype of the self as a positive development, while in Wotan (but also elsewhere) he warns of the dangers of identifying too much with one specific archetype. The archetype of the self, however, is of paramount importance to Jung. The self is a synonym for the process of individuation, a central theme to every person’s life, regardless of whether this is consciously perceived or not. According to Jung, everybody yearns for wholeness, or becoming a complete person. While this is a wholeness that can never be completely attained, it is nevertheless the goal of all human life.
With this notion Jung emulates Aristotle’s teleological conception of the universe; even going as far as using the term entelechy to denote the individuation process. Entelechy comes from the Greek entelecheia which Aristotle explained as “having one’s end within”. It refers to the inner drive of every organism to realize its own unique completeness, which Aristotle thought explained the entire course of nature. Just like an acorn will always want to become an oak tree, so a person always strives for wholeness (or individuation).
This yearning for individuation is the underlying cause of every myth and other expressions of the unconscious. For Jung psychic figures were usually twofold, while the process of individuation was concerned with the “creative union of opposites”, which was thus reflected in the accompanying myth. Viewed in this way, archetypal images like the Greek goddesses Demeter and Persephone (mother and daughter/maiden) come to represent wholeness for the female psyche, because they are in fact two aspects of the total experience of womanhood. Even the myths of various “child-gods” point towards individuation. The divine or semi-divine child (like Hermes, Heracles and Horus) later goes on to become a culture hero or savior god so that it “symbolizes the pre-conscious and post-conscious essence of man”. (Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, p. 178) Here Jung means that the child-archetype is in principle the seed that inherently carries the potential to become the whole.
The importance that Jung reserved for myth as regards the healthy psychic life of the individual is something that is not to be underestimated. Jung often lamented the fact that myth no longer seemed to exist in the contemporary society (at least not in its original form) and that especially Christianity was to blame for this through its “demythologizing” of the story of Jesus. For Jung, the power of the story of Jesus lay in its symbolic value, and not the literal interpretation of it, which was only needlessly complex due to the contradictory nature of the Gospels.
Indeed, Jung often stated that people should identify themselves with either a myth or a mythical figure to regain some sense of the religious experience and by default the balance between the conscious and the unconscious. Jung himself was passionately gripped by the myth of Attis and had even carved a small shrine to the Phrygian rebirth-deity near his house in Bollingen. The fascination that Jung had with this figure is easy enough to explain, because Attis was one pre-eminent savior gods of antiquity and thus a prime embodiment of the self.
Attis’ myth knows many versions but he is always portrayed as the son or lover of Kybele or Agdistis. In most myths Attis usually ends up castrating himself in a madness inflicted on him by Kybele/Agdistis, or he is gored by a boar. Originally a figure of Phrygian origin, Attis’ story and cult later became widely popular in Greece and Rome. In Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough (a massive multi-volume work, published between 1890 and 1915, and that’s not even counting the abridged versions) Attis is interpreted as one of the dying and rising gods equated with vegetation and fertility, akin to Osiris and Adonis and considered to be one of the prefigurations of Jesus. In Phrygia and Lydia however, Attis figured as an intermediary between the earthly and the heavenly sphere and his myth served as a legitimization for the royal dynasty.
Bust of the Phrygian deity Attis. Yes, I know, the resemblance between him and me is uncanny, isn't it?
In Rome Attis’ cult was established around the second century BCE and here he was primarily worshipped as the consort of Kybele, also a deity of Phrygian origin. For the Romans she became the prime embodiment of the Magna Mater (Great Mother). Priests in the service of Attis and Kybele used to regularly castrate themselves in imitation of the young god and an indispensable rite connected with the mystery religion was the taurobolium, in which initiates literally showered in the blood of a sacrificed bull. The evergreen pine tree became an important symbol of Attis’ resurrection and identifying image for cult members.
In the early 4th century CE, the festival of Attis was celebrated around the spring equinox (according to the Julian calendar), from March 22nd to the 27th. Attis was believed to have been resurrected on the 25th, the same date as the Passion of Jesus. The festival was marked by ceremonies of purification and the shedding of blood, and it was at this time that candidates for the priesthood emasculated themselves to show their devotion.
As such, it is easy to see the parallels between a figure like Attis and Jesus. In fact, Attis is only another deity in a long line of “dying and suffering gods” like the Sumerian Dumuzid, the Assyrian Tammuz, the Persian Mithras and many in between. (This complex of the so-called “dying and suffering gods” is one of the earliest and most popular themes of comparative mythology. IF you ask me nicely I might tell you more about it another time…) For Jung, the myths concerning these deities, and specifically that of Attis, were expressions of the “two-facedness of nature”. (Jung, Symbols of Transformation, p. 159) The symbolism of these sacred narratives typified the dualism of life that was resolved in a “creative union of opposites”.
Jung saw the myth of Attis and Kybele/Agdistis as a balancing of the conscious with the unconscious through the dynamic of the mother-son relationship. Attis was a figure that derived his life-force from his mother, not only through his birth but also through his incestuous relationship with her (she was at once his parent and lover). The evergreen pine tree, equivalent to the Cross of Jesus, was a maternal symbol, but, in true dual fashion, also resembled the son. Thus, the entire mythical cycle represented the force of the libido and a longing for the mother, resolved by the castration of Attis which denoted the sacrifice of this libido. The mother here stands for the unconscious, so that an unnatural longing to identify too much with the unconscious is balanced by a reinstatement of consciousness.
Onwards, faithful disciples! Next part coming soon!
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