Fin

Man, just look at that grand old pipe of his...

  

Yes, trusty followers, I have yet again returned from a brief hiatus to kindle a light in the darkness of being! Last week I was on a sacred voyage to Verona and Venice, and I managed to put in a brief stop in Florence as well! Now what did I learn from this travel, loyal acolytes? Enough to keep your humble minds running around in confusion while chasing the miraculous bait of splendid and grandiose illumination that my blessed website will leave dangling in front of your eager and zealous noses! But lest ye collapse in pitiful catatonia and sordid apathy, clutching the armrests of your cheap, ignominious Ikea-chairs and abundantly soiling your menial undergarments, let me offer some concluding remarks on Jung, so that we can next move on to other topics!

                            

For Jung, myth is of fundamental importance: it is an assertion of the unconscious that comes closest to capturing the meaning of the archetypal experience in words. Without it we are lost and separated from the connection with the unconscious that is necessary for individuation, the process which Jung considered to be the objective of all human existence. Through individuation every human being comes to his own in the world as a single, unique individual, fully self-realized and morally conscientious. But Jung was always quick to add a clinical dimension to his theories, for he was first and foremost a psychiatrist, though one that was not completely free of any self-inflating tendencies, I must add. Myth was also a practical tool for Jung, as he believed that it could form a sort of signpost to which you could guide yourself as the unconscious kept on bombarding you with superfluous symbols and meaningful images. Remember that Jung thought that schizophrenics simply lacked the ability to properly prevent the unconscious from dominating the conscious, and that however much we would like to block out the unconscious altogether in our modern society (although now that Jung’s been dead for so long, maybe I should speak of post-modern society, or beyond-post-modern, or in the words of German dance music-luminary Scooter: “Hyper, hyper!”), it would always find a way to express itself.

In any case, Jung himself already skated close to the edge of pseudo-mysticism with his analytical psychology (and especially the ardent devotion that his followers brought to bear on it), but in these days Jung has for an important part been claimed by New Age-enthusiasts as the principal agitator against the maladies and insecurities of the digital age, who unquestionably demonstrated that, yes, there really is a Goddess in every woman! (You are wrong; there is only one in MY girlfriend). These witless dolts of course never bother to read one letter of his vast oeuvre in the original German, nor do they concern themselves with the many clinical papers that he wrote. Thank the stars therefore that there is this blog, and that you found it!

I bet you experienced my glorious return not unlike this: “I turned around to see the voice that was speaking to me. And when I turned I saw seven golden lampstands, and among the lampstands was someone like a son of man, dressed in a robe reaching down to his feet and with a golden sash around his chest. The hair on his head was white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire. His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, and coming out of his mouth was a sharp, double-edged sword. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance.” (Revelation 1:12-16)

 Is this what you saw with your mind's eye while reading this post, devoted reader!? Be honest!

Oh yeah, I took this in the dome of Verona.

Keep on truckin’!

Until the next!

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!)

Even More Jung!

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 4^th century CE, the festival of Attis was celebrated around the spring equinox (according to the Julian calendar), from March 22^nd to the 27^th. Attis was believed to have been resurrected on the 25^th, 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!