Still More Jung

Hermes/Mercurius: the patron of alchemy. Later in his life, alchemy became something of an obsession to Jung, as he considered it to prefigure his own analytical psychology,

Woe is me! Too long have I kept you rabid dogs from the endless well of purposeful and momentous revelation that constitutes my brain! These last few days I was too preoccupied with the myriad phenomena of life´s small matter (all for the cultural enrichment and intellectual redemption of the world, of course)! I also presumed that after last time’s sensational piece your fragile senses would be relentlessly assaulted by the apparition of deer-like ghouls with huge erect phalluses intending to prod large, beaming needles in your grey matter in order to rob you of the enlightened knowledge that you gained from this website. Don’t worry, these are normal side-effects in the quest to supreme understanding. But now I have come to tell you that the drought is no more! Prepare yourself for yet another part in the elucidation of Jung’s psychology and philosophy!

For Jung the confrontation with the unconscious was one of the most difficult undertakings of a person’s life and he often likened it to the various hero myths of antiquity. Jung saw the unconscious as duplicitous and dangerous, but not essentially destructive or evil. The first hurdle a person had to take in coming to an understanding of the unconscious was to confront and integrate one’s shadow, because this is the figure nearest to the conscious mind. In Jung’s mind an individual had to first become aware of the dark and negative aspects of the own psyche, before it could become capable of sound moral judgment  and continue on the path towards individuation.

The problem of evil, which Jung wrote extensively on throughout his works, but specifically in Answer to Job (1958), was for him basically a creation of the conscious mind. For Jung, good or evil are not actually “natural” categories of existence, but are created by our own conscious reflections. Behavior is primarily deemed evil because it is socially unacceptable and so it becomes repressed. What faults Christianity is that it portrays evil as an outward and uncontrollable source in the guise of the devil or Satan. The failure to recognize it as an immanent tendency leads to a projection which can no longer be properly resolved by the conscious mind. The key is to accept evil as a part of the personality, but not to let it dominate. Repressing the shadow only causes it to be projected as an outward force working against man, the same way as in Nazi-Germany the deficits of that society were projected onto the Jews, while there was only identification with the invincible warrior strength of Wotan. The dangers of not properly integrating the unconscious and the shadow are great and stand in the way of all psychological progress.

One of the most famous archetypal images of the shadow is the trickster that is found prominently in the myths of Native Americans. According to Jung the trickster is not malevolent by nature, and his mischief eventually has a positive effect as well. We can even find something of a savior-like quality in the trickster, because he (like all other archetypal images save those of the self) personifies an aspect of the process towards individuation. Only by recognizing the negative aspects of the psyche can a positive, higher consciousness arise, the same way that the trickster’s mischief and escapades eventually lead to the betterment of mankind. 

For Jung the self, just like God, is the product of a coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites).  Later Christianity failed to comprehend this notion when it classified God as omnibenevolent and Satan as the source of evil. For Jung Jesus and Satan, or rather Lucifer exemplified the two necessary halves of the Christian Godhead that together constituted the whole. Lucifer was simply God’s shadow, His dark half, but not evil as such.

 In Jewish tradition Lucifer was originally a fallen angel who had refused to bow down before Adam, because he considered himself to be the superior creature. Lucifer is Latin for “Light Bringer” and this is the term used in the Vulgate to translate the Hebrew Helel Ben-Schachar (“Son of the Dawn”) found in Isaiah 14:12. In ancient times these expressions were used to refer to the planet Venus, the brightest star of the firmament in the evening and morning. The satan (no capital letter) from the Book of Job is, as prosecutor, a member of God’s court, his name meaning “accuser” or “adversary” in Hebrew. Lucifer/Satan is thus unmistakably a part of the same divine energy as everything else is. Jung rightly points out that even Jesus shares in Lucifer’s nature and refers to himself as “the bright and morningstar” in the book of Revelations. Jung thus observed in the Christian dogma the self (God, ultimately unknowable and unattainable), the ego-personality (Jesus) and the shadow (Lucifer/Satan).

Satan/Lucifer on his way to tempt Adam, by Gustave Doré

The alchemical spirit Mercurius was for Jung a shadow-figure just like Lucifer or Satan. Mercurius embodies a dualism in himself as all psychic images tend to do. Just as Jesus and Mercurius or Lucifer refer to the opposites in the divine nature, so they also embrace these opposites in themselves. Mercurius is the mysterious twilight emblem of the self, while Jesus is its daylight idol; so clear and definite that “whatever differs from him must appear not only inferior but perverse and vile.” (Jung, Alchemical Studies, p. 235) 

Alchemy and especially it symbolism, was one of Jung’s chief interests in later life, specifically because he believed that the alchemical doctrine retained the original function and meaning of myth and religion while Christianity was debasing it:

“The lapis [lapis philosophorum, “philosopher’s stone”] formulates an aspect of the self which stands apart, bound to nature and at odds with the Christian spirit. It represents all those things which have been eliminated from the Christian model. But since they possess living reality, they cannot express themselves otherwise than in dark Hermetic symbols. The paradoxical nature of Mercurius reflects an important aspect of the self-the fact, namely, that it is essentially a complexio oppositorum, and indeed can be nothing else if it is to represent any kind of totality.”

(Alchemical Studies, p. 242)

           

In alchemical practice Jung saw a prime example of the process of individuation. For Jung alchemy was not just the practice of turning base metals into gold, but it revealed a larger esoteric wisdom expressed in a mythical language. Alchemy was concerned with the hieros gamos, the sacred marriage of opposites, and provided a compensatory undercurrent to the Christian doctrine that rendered good and evil apart and antithetical to each other. The underlying philosophy of alchemy was one of the redemption of man from the world of matter, akin to that of Gnosticism: “Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed the bridge on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.”(Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 227)

Gnosticism was in Jung’s mind the creed that had originally managed to retain the correct sense of religion when Christianity went wrong. In Gnostic thought God is absolutely unknowable and transcendent. He is not the creator of the physical universe and in fact its absolute antithesis. The creation is the work of an ignorant demiurge (from the Greek demiourgos, “public or skilled worker”; the generic term for a creator deity) that emanated out of God.  Out of God thirty such emanations flow, called the pleroma (“fullness”). But even these pleroma do not know God’s true essence. When Sophia (the Wisdom of God) tried to inquire into the nature of God she fell from the pleroma, and either thus created the universe or gave birth to the demiurge. However, during the fall sparks of the true divine energy had also come down to the world of matter and became lodged in the spirit (pneuma) of man. This part therefore always longs to reconnect with its source (the true God), but due to its immersion in the flesh and soul of the body it remains unconscious in man. That is why the Logos (Word of God), incarnated in Jesus, had come down to teach the world how to return to God. Liberation from the bonds of the material world is thus only possible by recognizing the divine spark within.

This line of reasoning continued in alchemy. According to the practitioners of alchemy the soul of man had become enchained in matter as well and had to be freed. What was at stake for the alchemist was the redeeming of humankind and nature, mirrored in the practice of “subliming” base metals:

“(…) for just as the alchemist transformed lead into silver, and silver into gold, so too he posited for matter, in his anthropomorphic view of it, a similar change, from body to spirit to soul. And in the frame of his doctrine, he identified this escalation with the renewal of man, to which he assigned the same chain of transmutations to reach the goal of redemption. “

(Henry & Renée Kahane, “Hellenistic and Medieval Alchemy” in: The Encyclopedia of Religion, p. 193)

     

It is not difficult to see how Jung was drawn towards the doctrines of Gnosticism and alchemy, and how he saw in them the same basic postulates as in his theories of psychology. Like the Gnostics and alchemists, Jung believed that modern man suffered from an existential crisis due to the loss of psychic balance. Because religion, or rather Christianity, had forsaken its own myth a disruption had come to exist between the conscious and the unconscious. But there will always remain a psychic yearning for wholeness by reconnecting with the unconscious, which mirrors the desire of the spirit to reconnect with the true God in Gnosticism. The unconscious can only seemingly be repressed and will always continue to express itself; it is just that we no longer understand its messages now.

According Jung the misapprehension of these messages and the accompanying neglect of the unconscious was one of the sources of many social problems. What exists today is an overvaluation of consciousness and its capabilities. Because of this, man remains ignorant of the unconscious. The two forces can no longer be conjoined to a higher, transcendent unity and remain bipolar. In this way, the right wholeness and self-knowledge cannot be attained and evil will continue to run rampant, for it is not understood and only attributed to others. The failure to find evil within causes us to celebrate our advances in morality, virtue and altruism, but also causes us to remain perplexed at crimes that keep on being committed in spite of this. The 20^th century has often been hailed as the age of the greatest social and scientific progress, but this progress was also used for some of the greatest destruction and atrocities that human beings ever visited upon each other. For Jung there can be no change to this situation, if we do not heed the saving grace of myth and how it provides us with the capacity to have insight into our own minds and attain true self-knowledge:  a self-knowledge that recognizes good and evil for what they truly are, and is able to properly resolve them in a way that does not give priority to either of them, but simply to being. That is why the alchemical notion of the philosopher’s stone arising out of the sacred marriage provides a perfect analogy for Jung’s own theory of individuation: it is a converging of two opposites that constitutes a new transcendent unity.

Whew! I think I’ll offer some concluding remarks next time. In the meantime, be sure to drink your nightly offering of soma, that’ll keep the frightening visions away! (Yeah right!)