from: Cynthia Chung from Through A Glass Darkly <cynthiachung@substack.com>
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date: Jan 21, 2024, 6:03 PM
subject: The Shaping of a World Religion: Carl Jung and The Land of the Dead – Descending into the Underworld PART VII
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“What is more general is a rejection of Christian tradition in the name of a supposedly broader and more efficient method from achieving an individual and, by the same stroke, a collective renovation. Even when these ideas are naively or even ludicrously expressed, there is always the tacit conviction that a way out of the chaos and meaninglessness of modern life and that this way out implies an initiation into, and consequentially the revelation of, old and venerable secrets. It is primarily the attraction of a personal initiation that explains the craze for the occult. As is well known, Christianity rejected the mystery-religion type of secret initiation. The Christian ‘mystery’ was open to all; it was ‘proclaimed upon the housetops,' and Gnostics were persecuted because of their secret rituals of initiations. In the contemporary occult explosion, the ‘initiation’ – however the participant may understand this term – has a capital function: it confers a new status on the adept; he feels that he is somehow ‘elected,’ singled out from the anonymous and lonely crowd. Moreover, in most of the occult circles, initiation also has a superpersonal function, for every new adept is supposed to contribute to the renovation of the world.” - Mircea Eliade “The Occult and the Modern World” (1974) “To bear a God within one’s self signifies just as much as to be God one’s self…There are even plainer traces, to be sure, in the ‘becoming-one-with-God’ in those mysteries closely related to the Christian, where the mystic himself is lifted up to the divine adoration through initiatory rites…These representations of ‘becoming-one-with-God’ are very ancient. The old belief removed the becoming-one-with-God until the time after death; the mysteries, however, suggest this as taking place already in this world.” - Carl Jung “The Psychology of the Unconscious” (1916)[1] “Before religion had reached the stage of proclaiming that God must be put into the absolute and ideal, that is to say, beyond this world, one worship alone was reasonable and scientific: that was worship of the sun.” - Carl Jung “The Psychology of the Unconscious” (1916)[2] “The
ethical problem of sexual freedom really is enormous and worth the sweat of
all noble souls. But 2000 years of Christianity can only
be replaced by something equivalent…[an] irresistible mass movement… That was the beauty and purpose of classical religion, and from which God knows what temporary biological needs has turned into a Misery Institute. Yet what infinite rapture and wantonness lie formant in our religion, waiting to be led back to their true destination! A genuine and proper ethical development cannot abandon Christianity but must grow up within it, must bring to fruition its hymn of love, the agony and ecstasy over the dying and resurgent god, the mystic power of the wine, the awesome anthropophagy[3] of the Last Supper – only this ethical development can serve the vital forces of religion.” - Carl Jung “Freud/Jung Letters”[4] (Jung letter to Freud written early 1910) The Position of This Email Within The Shaping of a World Religion: From Jesuits, Freemasons, & Anthropologists to MK Ultra and the Counter-Culture Movement.This Email Part VII is the seventh instalment to the series “The Shaping of a World Religion: From Jesuits, Freemasons, & Anthropologists to MK Ultra and the Counter-Culture Movement.” For the previous instalments see Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV. [And find ] Part V and Part VI are included in the section to “The Shaping of a World Religion: Carl Jung and the Land of the Dead”. This [email] paper is part of this series. The Ghost Dance religion (the focus of Part I to IV of this series) was summarised in the introduction to Part V. It is important for the reader to be aware that this was a millennial religion that promised the Native Americans a “New Dawn” prophecy. This millennial religion was given to them by a “white man” as the legend goes and throughout its spread in the 1700s and 1800s, showed evidence of manipulation by the Jesuits, Scottish Rite and the Mormon Freemasonic headquarters at Salt Lake City. William Sargant, pioneer of Tavistock & MK Ultra mind control techniques in his “Battle for the Mind” (1957), who will be discussed in detail later in this series, was especially focused on methods of sudden “religious” conversions. A subject that the Jesuits clearly excelled at and can be observed with phenomenal success in the case of the Ghost Dance. It appears the Ghost Dance was to become a prototype for what would later shape the counter-culture movement which, whether one likes to admit it or not, came hand-in-hand with MK Ultra de-patterning.[5] In fact, Carl Jung would play a prominent role in developing this “art” of psychological de-patterning and dissociation techniques that would play a major role in shaping MK Ultra (this will be discussed further in this paper and the instalments that will follow). As this paper will make the point, this was not some unhappy outcome, where the “good” works of Jung were used for “bad” intentions, but rather that this was largely recognised by Jung himself, who spoke frequently with Allen Dulles[6] - the father of MK Ultra. It is here that we will resume our story…*** As Jung’s letter [6] to Freud, cited above, makes abundantly clear, Jung was very much thinking about how to shape a “mass movement”. Not just a “mass movement” in the “sciences” or the “field of psychology” but a “religious mass movement.” As will soon be demonstrated, in Jung’s mind, this new religion of modernity would be based upon his unique approach to psychoanalysis. These thoughts were first revealed out loud at the beginning of the year 1910 in Jung’s correspondences with Freud. In August 1910 Jung again discusses the theme of a millenarian religion of psychoanalysis. He writes to Freud that the opponents to psychoanalysis: “are saying some very remarkable things which ought to open our eyes in several ways…All these mutterings about sectarianism, mysticism, arcane jargon, initiation, etc., mean something…that has all the trappings of a religion.”[7] Thus, Jung is acknowledging here that the opponents of the psychoanalytic movement are critical due to its too many similarities with that of a religious movement. Jung does not refute this charge, but is rather saying that the psychoanalytical movement must recognise this fact for themselves and “open our eyes.” In this same letter to Freud in response to this criticism of being a “religion,” Jung suggests a counter-offensive strategy, that 1. psychoanalysis should seek to create an elite, to protect itself against its critics, and 2. through this elite’s powerful influence, facilitate the ushering in of a “Golden Age” on earth.[8] Jung writes to Freud (again in the same letter): “And finally, [psychoanalysis] thrives only in a very tight enclave of minds. Seclusion is like a warm rain. One should therefore barricade this territory against the ambitions of the public for a long time to come…Moreover [psychoanalysis] is too great a truth to be publicly acknowledged as yet. Generously adulterated extracts and thin dilutions of it should first be handed around. Also the necessary proof has not yet been furnished that it wasn’t you who discovered [psychoanalysis] but Plato, Thomas Aquinas and Kant, with Kuno Fischer and Wundt thrown in. Then Hoche will be called to a chair of [psychoanalysis] in Berlin and Aschaffenburg to one in Munich. Thereupon the Golden Age will dawn.”[9] One should ask themselves the question, if psychoanalysis is indeed a science and is a form of treatment that is intended to help its patients get better, why the need for secrecy? The reader should be aware that this secrecy continues to this day and one cannot call themselves a “Jungian analyst” by simply going through schooling to become a psychologist or a psychiatrist. In order to qualify as specifically a “Jungian analyst” one must first go through sessions with a recognised Jungian analyst, which typically consists of no less than 100 hours at a cost (in the mid-1990s) of approx. $10,000 to $15,000,[10] today it is roughly $25,000 to $30,000. This must be done by all candidates before even applying to an approved Jungian training institute, which then requires an additional ‘six to ten more years of training’ which can cost up to $100,000 (in the mid-1990s),[11] today this is roughly $200,600. This is truly an education for an “elite”, that is, those who can afford to become Jungian analysts have already qualified themselves as partaking to a privileged elite in economic status, which usually garners a great deal of influence in society. Thus, it was no wonder that Jungian psychoanalysis first became fashionable in the United States amongst its banking and intelligence circles. In 1913, Edith Rockefeller traveled to Zurich to be treated for depression by Carl Jung and contributed generously to the Zurich Analytical Psychology Club. She would later become a Jungian analyst with a full-time practice in the States attracting many socialite patients. She also paid for Jung’s writings to be translated into English in order to help disseminate his ideas. Paul (son of Andrew Mellon, co-founder to the Mellon National Bank) and Mary Mellon financed the Bollingen Foundation, dedicated to disseminating Jung’s work. In 1957, Fortune magazine estimated that Paul Mellon, his sister Ailsa, and his cousins Sara and Richard Mellon were all among the richest eight people in the United States with fortunes between $400-700 million each (around $3.7-6.5 billion in today’s dollars). Through these initiatives, there was a spill over of the ideas of Ascona into the circles of the rich and powerful. British central banker Montagu Norman and members of the Dulles family also went under Jungian analysis. It was rather ironic that it was through this select “elite” that made up the “core initiates” of Jungian psychoanalysis that would in turn popularise it within the counter-culture movement which thought of itself as “sticking it to the man.” The typical adherents of the counter-culture movement were completely unaware that the resources and ideologies they were being suddenly influenced by to bring about their New Age, as a means of supposedly opposing the corruption of capitalism and imperialism, came from the very grouping they thought they were fighting against. Richard Noll writes in The Jung Cult:[12] “In February 1912, Jung finished his famous chapter, ‘The Sacrifice,’ for his second part of Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido. In later years he often remarked how it signaled his final separation from Freud…The chapter on ‘The Sacrifice’ does indeed explicitly reject Freud and his libido theory and contains thinly veiled Mithraic allusion to this effect. …It was in very late 1911 or very early January 1912 that Jung’s remarkable essay, ‘New Paths in Psychology,’ appeared in a Swiss popular culture journal, Rachers Jahrbuch fur Schweitzer Art und Kunst. This essay is the first public evidence we have from Jung that he is not only interested in breaking with the cult surrounding Freud…but in specifically forming his own psychoanalytic movement based on Nietzschean metaphors of liberation and self-sacrifice. The ‘New Paths’ essay is a fin-de-siecle manifesto of a new cultural movement…He calls for an intrapsychic overthrow of custom, a revolution in the internalized European traditions that enslave the individual personality. …The problem is the conflict between staying on the old paths of nineteenth century bourgeois-Christian culture or giving in to the exploration of new ones that initiate the individual into modernity. How can one be brought into the twentieth century and be renewed or reborn in a degenerating world? For the answer Jung refers to a famous line from the Mithraic Liturgy that he once suggested to Freud as a motto for psychoanalysis: ‘Give up what thou hast, then thou shalt receive!’[13] Those who wish renewal and rebirth through the new agent of cultural and personal transformation – psychoanalysis – [as Jung writes] ‘are called upon to abandon all their cherished illusions in order that something deeper, fairer, and more embracing may arise within them.’ And, most significantly for the mystery-cult hypothesis advanced here: [Jung writes] ‘Only through the mystery of self-sacrifice can a man find himself anew’[14].” Today, the Jungian framing of the world and of “the self” is dominant. There are many who claim to be adherents to Jung’s teachings, however, one must acknowledge that only those who have gone through the actual initiation to become a Jungian analyst can know its deepest implications, its best kept secrets… Bachofen’s Sonnenkinder: The Children of the Sun The ideology of Johann Jakob Bachofen was briefly introduced in Part V of this series as well as its influence on Otto Gross, the first disciple of Freud, who would be successful in proselytizing Jung into his radical ideology that found its base in Ascona while being treated by Jung for “psychosis” at the Burghölzli Mental Hospital in Switzerland. [The relevance of Ascona will be discussed in further detail in future instalments but for now one can refer to my paper “The Origins of the Counterculture Movement: A Gathering of Anarchists, Occultists and Psychoanalysts for a New Age.”] Recall that at the center of Gross’s ideology was the freedom to do whatever one wishes, very similar to the Thelema maxim of Aleister Crowley “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” who happened to also have his base of operations at Ascona. Coincidence? A central tenet to Gross’s ideology was the return to neopagan worship, specifically as outlined by the work of Johann Jakob Bachofen who outlined evolutionary stages of humankind (1. Aphrodite- the tellurian phase, 2. Demeter – the lunar phase, 3. Dionysus – the brief transitional phase) before they reached the ideal Apollonian man, the ultimate perfection of humankind. “Sun worship” was a central tenet to the neopagan elements in German völkisch movements that were prevalent at this time. This was regarded by Gross as the “cure” to what ailed society as a reaction to the tide of civilization. And this is what Jung would also adopt as a central tenet. Jung would become a prominent player in Ascona including the Eranos Conferences (more on this in future instalments). Renowned psychiatrist and criminologist who is considered by some to be the founding historiographer of psychiatry, Henri Ellenberger in his book The Discovery of the Unconscious, an encyclopedic study of the history of dynamic psychiatry published in 1970 has done much to uncover the vast influence of Bachofenian ideology within the psychiatric circles of Freud and Jung, as well as Nietzsche[15] who also in turn had a great deal of influence on Gross and Jung. Ellenberger writes in his The Discovery of the Unconscious, that “The influence of Bachofen’s ideas reached psychiatric circles through various channels, and his influence on dynamic psychiatry has been immense.”[16] The first formulation of Bachofen’s ideas can be found in his 1861 book Das Mutterrecht (The Law of the Mothers). As already mentioned Bachofen had outlined four evolutionary stages and had identified the Demeter stage as the true phase of the “law of the mother” (Das Mutterrecht), which Bachofen identifies as the lunar phase in which agriculture became the economic and social basis of a society identified with Mother Earth. According to Bachofen, in the Demeter stage, ‘the most serious crime in this society was matricide. The body and the earth were glorified and the intellect or Geist (spirit) were not. The night and the darkness of subterranean caves were exalted as sacred, and so nocturnal and subterranean initiations into mysteries began in this era’.[17] In addition to this, according to Bachofen, ‘there was also a fascination with the dead and contact with their spirits. Bachofen thought that the Eleusinian mysteries of the Hellenistic world had their origins in this period of matriarchy. Indeed, the great goddess of this era was none other than Demeter, the mother-goddess of Eleusis.’[18] For those who may not be aware, Demeter’s other incarnation was that of Cybele, Earth Mother goddess and counterpart to the castrated vegetation God Attis, and also Gaia. See Matt Ehret’s recent essay for a further elaboration on this connection. |
Ellenberger diagrammed how the exact sequence of stages in Bachofen corresponds to Freud’s stages of psychosexual development: the ancient hetairic period corresponds to the infantile period of “polymorphous perversity”; matriarchy resembles the pre-oedipal, incestuous period of strong attachment of the mother; the transitional Dionysian period is presented by the phallic stage; and patriarchy by the genital stage.[19]
‘In Freud, Bachofen is perhaps the (unacknowledged) basis of psychoanalytic ontogeny; in Jung, Bachofen is the key to psychoanalytic phylogeny. Haeckel provides the unifying key from evolutionary biology: “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” [Haeckel is discussed in Part V of this series.] This, in a nutshell, is the basic structure of the theory of the mind that Jung develops in Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido [Jung’s Psychology of the Unconsious].’[20]
Richard Noll writes in The Jung Cult:[21]
“Jung, well aware of the negative reception of Bachofen by scholars in the primary centers of science in German Europe, the universities, does not dare to cite [directly from] the eccentric Bachofen’s works. However, beginning with the chapter entitled ‘The Unconscious Origin of the Hero’ in part 2 of Wandlungen [Psychology of the Unconscious], it is Bachofen’s theory of human development that Jung uses as his basis for identifying the strata of transformations of the libido that he has excavated in his study of the phylogenetic unconscious. Indeed, this chapter in particular is pure Bachofen and sets the stage for Jung’s discussion of hero myths and their relation to the mother complex in the remainder of the book.
Jung begins this very important chapter by once again reviewing his phylogenetic hypothesis of part 1: [Jung writes] ‘The unconscious is generally diffused, which not only binds the individuals among themselves to the race, but also unites them backwards with the peoples of the past and their psychology. Thus the unconscious, surpassing the individual in generality, is, in the first place, the object of a true psychology, which claims not to be psychophysical.’ [Source: Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious] Jung then also reviews his syncretic discussion of solar myths and psychoanalysis of this previous section
[Jung writes[22]]:
‘Comparison with the sun teaches us over and over again that the gods are libido. It is the part of us which is immortal, since it represents that bond through which we feel that in the race we are never extinguished. It is life from the life of mankind. Its springs, which well up from the depths of the unconscious, come, as does our life in general, from the root of the whole of humanity, since we are indeed only a twig broken off from the mother and transplanted.’ [Source: Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious.]
Jung then introduces Bachofen through a discussion of his own archaeological observations. Jung tells his readers that, ‘In the antique collection at Verona I discovered a late Roman mystic inscription in which are the following representations.’ [Source: Psychology of the Unconscious] Jung then reproduces these four symbols, beginning with an obvious representation of the sun. Jung says: ‘These symbols are easily read: Sun-Phallus, Moon-Vagina (Uterus)’.
What is remarkable is that these four images represent exactly, and in the correct temporal order, the stages of human cultural evolution identified by Bachofen. Patriarchy is the Apollonian stage represented by the Sun; the phallus represents the transitional Dionysian phase; the moon is the stage of matriarchy and the vagina (uterus) is the stage of undifferentiated hetaerism[i].”
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Included in Richard Noll’s ‘The Jung Cult’, pg. 170.
According to Jung’s theory using a Bachofenian-Haeckelian framework, the most regressed psychotics thus, were seen as stuck in the earliest evolutionary stage, the “tellurian” phase, and thus tellurian symbology would play a prominent role in their delusions and hallucinations.
The tellurian phase, as suggested by Bachofen played a prominent role in the earliest societies and thus, tellurian symbology would be expected to play a prominent role in what shaped the “psychology” of those societies and cultures. According to Bachofen, in the deepest tellurian stratum, earth symbols would be found fused together, especially in bisexual forms.
Otto Gross is the most prominent and best recorded patient admitted to the Burghölzli with Asconan connections and a significant knowledge of mythology, occultism, and the Hellenistic mystery cults, however, he was most certainly not the only one. ‘Jung reports that, from 1904 to 1907, 1325 patients were admitted to the Burghölzli, and we may conjecture that this number was probably not too different for the next four-year period of 1908 to 1911.’[23]
Thus, it is important to ask the question “How many of these patients at the Burghölzli were Asconans, and/or Theosophists, or others with mythological knowledge about sun worship and Bachofenian matriarchal symbolism?” Certainly, due to the close proximity of Burghölzli to Ascona, Ascona is only a 2 ½ hour drive from the Burghölzli Mental Hospital in Switzerland, it should be assumed that a great deal of these patients were in fact part of this grouping of specialised knowledge. And this would be the very grouping that Jung would base his studies on that supposedly proved and validated his theory of the collective unconscious.
Jung continues his solar references with increased frequency starting in the chapter “Song of the Moth”, in his Psychology of the Unconscious, where he writes “Her longing for God resembles the longing of the moth for the ‘star’.” Star is a synonym for sun. Jung then ‘dizzyingly unites the following in an associative chain of equivalences: the sun – the phallus – brightness – god – father – fire – libido – fructifying strength and heat – hero.’[24] To conclusively back up this argument, Jung mentions his famous case of the “Solar Phallus Man.”
The Solar Phallus Man was a patient institutionalized at the Burghölzli Mental Hospital, who had a hallucination (or perhaps delusion) that the sun had a phallic tube hanging from it that produced the wind.
Noll writes:
“Jung told the story of the Solar Phallus Man time and time again throughout his life as conclusive evidence of a collective unconscious. As one scholar has correctly observed, the Solar Phallus Man ‘carried on his shoulders the weight and burden of proof of the Collective Unconscious.’
The Solar Phallus Man, Jung and his disciples claimed, had hallucinations and delusions with content that resembled an ancient Hellenistic magical text from the second century CE, and therefore this was convincing proof of a phylogenetic or (later) collective unconscious.”[25]
Thus, Jung was claiming that this hallucination that resembled an ancient Hellenistic magical text, could not have been known by the patient and the fact that the patient saw this in a hallucination meant he must have “remembered” it as part of a “collective memory” of the past, the collective memory from the Land of the Dead, aka the collective unconscious.
Jung writes in his 1911 publication of Part I of Wandlungen:
“Honegger [Jung’s assistant] discovered the following hallucination in an insane man (paranoid dement): The patient sees in the sun an ‘upright tail’ similar to an erected penis. When he moves his head back and forth, then, too, the sun’s penis sways back and forth in a like manner, and out of that the wind arises. This strange hallucination remained unintelligible to us for a long time until I became acquainted with the Mithraic Liturgy[26] and its visions.”[27]
The Mithraic Liturgy ‘is a text from the Great Magical Papyrus of Paris, part of the Greek Magical Papyri. The modern name by which the text is known originated in 1903 with Albrecht Dieterich, its first translator, based on the invocation of Helios Mithras (Ἥλιοϲ Μίθραϲ) as the god who will provide the initiate with a revelation of immortality.’[28]
However, as Noll points out there are a great number of holes that surround this story. First off Jung strangely begins to treat the story of the Solar Phallus Man as his own and erases Honegger completely. Rather conveniently, Honegger commits suicide in 1911, the year Jung would first publish the story of the Solar Phallus Man which would make up the basis for his theory on the collective unconscious. Honegger’s personal papers also went missing that same year.
Jung also lies about the date at which the patient had their delusion as having begun in 1906, when Honegger only started his work in 1909, thus the patient’s hallucination, which was recounted shortly afterward, had to have occurred in either 1909 or 1910. Keep in mind that the dates are important since Jung is making the claim that it was impossible for the patient to have had any previous knowledge of the existence of this Mithraic Liturgy.
According to Jung, the first published account of the Mithraic Liturgy contained in the Greek Magical Papyri was in a small book by Dieterich entitled Eine Mithrasliturgie, published in 1910. A copy of which Jung owned in his own library. However, it eventually comes to Jung’s attention that this is in fact the second edition, the first edition was published in 1903. It is known that Jung was indeed aware of this since in the Collected Works footnote it is written “As subsequently learned, the 1910 edition was actually the second, there having been a first edition in 1903. The patient had, however, been committed some years before 1903.”[29]
Yet Jung continued to claim publicly that the first edition was published in 1910 as seen in his interview with Freeman in 1959:[30]
[Freeman] “But how could you be sure that your patient wasn’t unconsciously recalling something that somebody once told him?”
[Jung] “Oh, no. Quite out of the question, because that thing was not known. It was in a magic papyrus in Paris, and it wasn’t even published. It was only published four years later, after I had observed it with my patient.”
There is also the other matter that just because the patient was institutionalized at the Burghölzli starting in 1903 does not mean that the patient could not have come into contact with such material through widely available Theosophical literature in German or, even through the work of Friedrich Creuzer or Johann Jakob Bachofen. ‘As Ellenberger was the first to notice, Creuzer contains a brief discussion of the motif of a solar phallus (Sonnenphallus) in the third volume of his Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker.’[31] Noll points out that ‘in the introduction to Das Mutterrecht, Bachofen makes the statement that “the phallic sun, forever fluctuating between rising and setting, coming into being and passing away, is transformed into the immutable source of light”.’[32] Thus, there is no reason to assume that the Solar Phallus Man would not have had contact with such references to the Mithraic Liturgy, prior to or during his institutionalisation, that were quite popular and prevalent during this time.
There are even further contradictions to this story, as Noll points out, by the fact that Jung cites in his Wandlungen the 1907 Theosophical work by G.R.S. Mead which also contains a translation of the Mithraic Liturgy (with Theosophical commentary) to which Mead clearly indicates is based off of Dieterich’s Eine Mithrasliturgie. Mead’s work was published three years before Dieterich’s 1910 second edition. And finally, by the fact that Jung’s very own copy of Dieterich’s work in his library (which is preserved to this day), which he claimed to have thought was the first edition, is clearly marked as a second edition.
Thus, either we are to conclude that Jung is wholly incompetent in judging such things, and thus calls into question his entire work on the collective unconscious, with claims that none of his patients had previous knowledge of the mythologies and symbols they were describing, or that Jung and his colleagues were purposefully distorting evidence in order to keep the story of the Solar Phallus Man alive in order to justify Jung’s “discovery” of the collective unconscious, which again would call into question his entire work on the collective unconscious. No matter how one looks at it, the “scientific” basis for which the collective unconscious rests, is on rather dubious ground.
In fact, in early 1909, Jung had left his position at Burghölzli to go into private practice in Küsnacht and in the winter of 1909 ‘he assigned his three psychiatrist assistants who were still at the Burghölzli – Spielrein, Jan Nelken, and Honegger – to read the works of Creuzer, who will be introduced shortly, and others on mythology and archaeology and to collect data from the institutionalized patients there as evidence for a phylogenetic layer of the unconscious mind. Creuzer’s particular slant on mythology and especially the mysteries thus frames, indeed biases, the data that Jung and his assistants claimed as pure and scientific.’[33]
In other words, Jung was asking for his assistants to seek out confirmation of mythological symbology in their patients in order to confirm and substantiate Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious. Thus, any symbology or imagery of an object could be “interpreted” as having its basis in ancient mythology. The patients were there to receive treatment from someone they believed to have insight into what made them mentally unwell, who were they to disagree with such interpretations?
And as we see by 1910, most of the case studies of Jung and his disciples are devoid of much personal history and instead focus on the mythological interpretation of fantasies and dreams dissociated from the real-life circumstances of the subject.[34] The only criteria for deciding whether a patient could have had pre-existing knowledge of such mythologies were 1. their occupational level and 2 their educational level,[35] despite the fact that such mythologies had become quite popular in the spiritualist and theosophical circles which in turn had become a fad, especially in Switzerland and Germany at the time.
The unreliability of such claims that the patient had zero contact with such mythologies prior to their fantasies or dreams is seen in the case of Kristine Mann who ‘claimed had an unconscious connection to alchemical ideas despite having had no interaction with this in her life, which was not true, she had been heavily involved in Swedenborgian circles’ and ‘had exposure to occult literature and ideas – including alchemical symbolism - long before her contact with Jung.
’[36] Whether Jung was aware of this or not does not take away from the fact that the claim that Kristine Mann was a case study proving the existence of the collective unconscious is a fraudulent claim. It also does not help the matter that Kristine Mann would become a prominent Jungian analyst and was the second in the United States (after Edith Rockefeller) to practice Jungian psychoanalysis.
Thus, in the case of Mann, another question arises, were those who wanted to be initiated into the selective Jungian circle of “elites” encouraged to make fraudulent claims, as well as extravagant payments, that would advance the field they wished to be the wielder of amongst a select privileged few?
Noll writes:
“Given the fact that Honegger, Nelken, and Spielrein were primed to look for certain mythological information consistent with the phylogenetic hypothesis, they obviously would tend to ignore other information that would be considered irrelevant to it. And given the century of Hellenic mythological education in German countries; the wide distribution of Theosophical materials; the equally available and more highly regarded folkloric, Gnostic, mythological, and solar-worshiping pantheistic publications of Diederichs Verlag; and the nearby neopagan movement between Schwabing-Munich and Ascona, such mythological material was not hard to find among the inpatients of the Burghölzli. It was from these patients that the scientific proof was allegedly found for an archaic, impersonal strata of the psyche.”[37]
Despite this, the story of the Solar Phallus Man remains the basis for Jung’s collective unconscious as well as a justification for why the solar myths play a central role amongst the collective unconscious of the Germanic people in particular.
Using the four Bachofenian symbols (as depicted in the above image) as the basis of his evidence, Jung writes:[38]
“Let this suggestion suffice – that from different directions the analysis of the libido symbolism always leads back again to the mother incest. Therefore, we may surmise that the longing of the libido raised to God (repressed into the unconscious) is a primitive incestuous one which concerns the mother.”
Jung from this point, proceeds to compare the travels of the sun in the sky to the typical wanderings of the hero in hero myths. ‘Dying and resurrected “redeemers” such as Gilgamesh, Dionysus, Hercules, Christ, and Mithras, are cited by Jung as examples of wandering heroes. Heroes wander because they are like the sun, which “seeks the lost mother.” The sun rises from and goes back to a mysterious realm in its wanderings each day, the Goethean “realm of the mothers.” Therefore, hero myths are solar myths.’[39]
Jung concludes:
“But the myth of the hero, however, is, as it appears to me, the myth of our own suffering unconscious, which has an unquenchable longing for all the deepest sources of our own being; for the body of the mother, and through it for communion with infinite life in the countless forms of existence.”[40]
Jung then ends this chapter with a long reproduction from Goethe’s Faust, in which Faust makes his initiatory descent into the eerie realm of the mothers.
In Friedrich Creuzer’s immensely influential work Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, published between 1810 and 1812, we find the first comprehensive study in the German language for information about ‘spirituality of antiquity, especially the ancient mystery cults of the Greco-Roman world.’[41] Volume 3 of Creuzer’s work is concerned with ‘the themes of “heroes and daimons” in ancient Greek spirituality, the Dionysian mysteries, and Orphic cosmology, the entirety of volume four is devoted to the cult of the “Two Goddesses” (the Greek Demeter and Persephone, or the Roman Ceres and Proserpina) at Eleusis and the Eleusinian mysteries.’[42]
Noll makes the point that ‘when Goethe wrote the famous descent to the mothers scene in the second part of Faust that so captivated Jung, he used the original descriptions of the Eleusinian mysteries of Pausanias and Plutarch cited by Creuzer as well as Creuzer’s own contemporary descriptions.’[43]
Noll writes:[44]
“What is of note is that when writing this scene in late 1829 and early 1830, as we know from his [Goethe’s] comments to Eckermann and from other sources, Goethe had in mind the ritual descent of the initiate of the Hellenistic mysteries of the ‘Two Goddesses’ of Eleusis, the mother-goddess Demeter and her daughter, the maiden (Kore) Persephone.[45] Although no firm evidence exists of what the initiatory experience entailed for the initiate into the Eleusinian mysteries, it is generally assumed that the initiate saw some representation or had a vision of Persephone in the underworld, which then gave the initiate ‘better hopes’ for his or her position in the afterlife. In other words, the mysteries revitalized and redeemed the initiate through the ritualized descent to the underworld of the mothers…The Eleusinian mysteries – which were formally conducted for more than one thousand years – is one of the greatest kept secrets of antiquity.
…
The remainder of Wandlungen is subsequently predicated on Bachofen’s theory of prehistoric hetaerism and matriarchy and how hero myths reveal that a return to the mother is somehow revitalizing – just as the initiate in the Eleusinian mysteries experienced renovation through contact with the transcendental realm of gods. The sun hero descends to the realm of the mothers (or into Mother Earth) where he typically does battle and reemerges reborn. This is a classic scenario ritually enacted in the Hellenistic mysteries. The star, therefore, is another expression of the sun in the night sky of the Motherworld or as the sun descended into the subterranean depths of Mother Earth.
However, in Wandlungen, Jung is claiming that there is ontogenetic and phylogenetic evidence that through a return to the realm of the mothers (the deepest strata of the unconscious) within each of us, we are reborn. Their first step to this new life is through introversion, when one’s ‘libido sinks into its “own depths” ’ into what Jung refers to, significantly, as ‘the world of memories.’ Yet rebirth occurs only if this process of introversion is then reversed and one returns to the abandoned ‘upperworld’.”
Jung concludes this section in his Psychology of the Unconscious:
“But if the libido succeeds in tearing itself loose and pushing up into the world above, then a miracle appears. This journey to the underworld has been a fountain of youth, and new fertility springs from this apparent death.”[46]
Jung would use his psychotherapeutic technique of “active imagination” to allow individuals direct access to this revitalizing realm of the mothers, or the underworld of the ancestors or Land of the Dead. ‘But as his discussion of the “Terrible Mother” in his chapter on the “Symbolism of the Mother and of Rebirth” suggests, this descent is not necessarily a pleasant experience. Indeed, although it may be revitalizing for some, “annihilation” may ensue from the hero’s “battle for deliverance from the mother”.’[47]
The Underworld of the Mothers: Self-Deification vs Self-Annihilation
“Give what thou hast, then thou shalt receive.”
- Carl Jung quoting from the Mithraic Liturgy in a letter to Freud. The Mithraic Liturgy ends with some advice from Zeus, which Jung scribbled in the upper margin of a famous letter to Freud of 31 August 1910, suggesting it should be adopted as a “motto for psychoanalysis.”[48]
As already discussed in Part VI, Jung was quite familiar with séances, mediumistic techniques and trances. ‘Jung’s interest in spiritualism gave him ample experience of how one may deliberately enter a dissociative state, or trance, that allowed such automatism as automatic writing or even alternate personalities to emerge. Jung had observed this at seances, and indeed, his entire mother’s side of the family (including Jung’s maternal grandfather, Samuel Preiswerk) seemed to have regularly engaged in discourses with spirits. Jung’s first encounter with the feminine entity he later called the anima seems to have begun with his use of such mediumistic techniques.’[49]
In October 1913, Jung, who begins to have repeated visions of Europe being destroyed in a sea of blood, decides that the best therapy for his distress is to write his visions down. Jung describes this in his Analytical Psychology as such: “While writing once I said to myself, ‘What is this I am doing, it certainly is not science, what is it?’ Then a voice said to me ‘That is art’.”[50]
Jung describes his thought process as at first wondering whether his unconscious was forming an alternate personality. Jung decides to further engage with the voice using the technique used by mediums, whereby he lends his own voice for the “other voice” to speak through.
Jung writes: “I thought, well, she has not the speech centers I have, so I told her to use mine, and she did, and came through with a long statement. This is the origin of the technique I developed for dealing directly with the unconscious contents.”[51]
‘Jung is therefore admitting here that his psychotherapeutic technique of active imagination is based on the techniques of spiritualism. In this sense, too, Jung’s method is akin to that of the völkisch groups who also borrowed the techniques of spiritualism in order to contact nature spirits, Teutonic ancestors, and the Germanic gods.’[52]
Noll writes in The Jung Cult:
“Rather than simply regarding the feminine voice as a ‘spirit control’ like Blavatsky’s mahatmas, Jung looked to his scientific theory of the phylogenetic unconscious to solve the difficulty. At this time (October 1913) Jung still adhered to the model of the phylogenetic unconscious [which was discussed in Part V of this series]… It had a basis in Haeckelian biology and the strata of the phylogenetic unconscious matched the stages of human cultural evolution proposed by Bachofen. Therefore, [Jung concluded] the voice was of an archaic goddess who ruled during the early matriarchal stages of human existence.”
Jung writes in his Analytical Psychology:
“[I] thought for a time that the anima figure was the deity. I said to myself that perhaps men had had a female God originally, but, growing tired of being governed by women, they had overthrown this God.”[53]
Noll continues:
“This is pure Bachofen. Jung also seems to have derived his theory of the psychological-type differences in women from Bachofen as well. As Jung remarks earlier in the 1925 seminar, ‘As you know I think of women as belonging in general to two types, the mother and the hetaira.’
Jung later abandoned this Bachofenian idea of an archaic feminine god within and later referred to this feminine entity in men as the anima. However, for a time, Jung used this technique of speaking out loud first in his own voice, and then in a feminized voice, as psychotherapy, but then later conducted the dialogue in the form of automatic writing.
Thus during November 1913 Jung felt, as he put it, as if ‘I was in analysis with a ghost and a woman.’ The following month was when Jung had his deification experience and initiation into the ancient Aryan/Mithraic mysteries.”[54]
In his Wandlungen (Psychology of the Unconscious), ‘Jung offers the psychoanalytic term “libido” as a mystical substitute for “vital force”[55] or even “God.” Just as we feel the surge of vital power within us as living biological beings, so then are we also experiencing the god within.’[56]
Noll writes:[57]
“As we shall see, the experience of the god within was always a key promise of Jung and his method of psychotherapy, as Homans astutely noted, and it is indeed a central part of Jung’s repudiation of traditional Christianity that offered a God that was distant, transcendent, and absolute. In the pages of Wandlungen we see the first liturgical exegesis of these core Jungian concepts.”
In his Wandlungen, Jung compares the Book of Revelation with the Mithraic Liturgy, saying that:
“The visionary images of both texts are developed from a source, not limited to one place, but found in the soul of many diverse people, because the symbols which arise from it are too typical for it to belong to one individual only. I put these images here to show how the primitive symbolism of light gradually developed, with the increasing depth of the vision, into the idea of the ‘sun-hero,’ the ‘well-beloved’.”[58]
Recall that the Mithraic Liturgy is a text from the Great Magical Papyrus of Paris based on the invocation of Helios Mithras (Ἥλιοϲ Μίθραϲ) as the god who will provide the initiate with a revelation of immortality.
The Mithraic Liturgy’s likely provenance in Egypt, where evidence of the Mithraic cult is rare, presents a major obstacle to regarding it an authentic liturgy. Thus, one should keep in mind (as we will see is the case for a great deal of these so-called authentic Eastern mysteries/religious works[59]) they are often fraudulent and are thus not truthful historical representations of what they claim to represent.
Jung ends his Part I of Wandlungen writing: “Before religion had reached the stage of proclaiming that God must be put into the absolute and ideal, that is to say, beyond this world, one worship alone was reasonable and scientific: that was worship of the sun.”[60]
Jung begins his Part II of Wandlungen with:
“The sun is, as Renan remarked, really the only rational representation of God, whether we take the point of view of the barbarians of other ages or that of the modern physical sciences…the sun is adapted as nothing else to represent the visible God of this world, That is to say, that driving strength of our own soul, which we call libido…That this comparison is no mere play of words is taught to us by the mystics. When by looking inwards (introversion) and going down into the depths of their own being they find ‘in their heart’ the image of the Sun, they find their own love or libido, which with reason, I might say with physical reason, is called the Sun: for our source of energy and life is the Sun. Thus our life substance, as an energic process, is entirely Sun.”[61]
Noll writes:[62]
“The remainder of part 2 of Wandlungen is primarily an exposition on the hero and themes of sacrifice. It is this part of the book that Jung sees as containing the book’s central message, for as he said during a seminar in 1925 about Wandlungen: ‘The problem is brought to focus in my mind was that of the hero myth in relation to our own times.’[63]Typical mystery-cult scenarios such as going down into Mother Earth to receive one’s initiation (usually a battle or struggle of some sort), which is translated into psychoanalysis as finding the wellsprings of one’s own libido through a process of introversion.
In part 2 Jung introduces his interpretation of Wagnerian opera, with Siegfried equated with Christ as sun heroes, ‘reborn sons,’ and as self-sacrificing gods. They are also equated with Mithras, a solar deity from an ancient Hellenistic mystery cult.[64]”
Franz Cumont (1868-1947) was a Belgian archaeologist and historian who was the first to make a comprehensive, descriptive and interpretive collection of all of the known archaeological monuments, inscriptions, texts, and references relating to Mithraism from antiquity, in his two-volume Textes et Monuments Figures Relatifs Aux Mysteres de Mithra. Mithras was an ancient Iranian solar god (like Helios) and a god of correct order and behavior (like Apollo). He is referred to in inscriptions as Sol Invictus, the ‘invincible sun.’
Jung’s himself refers to Franz Cumont as the “foremost authority on the Mithraic cult” in his Wandlungen.[65]
Noll writes:
“Cumont insisted that Mithraic mystery invitations involved sacramental feasts at which bread and water were consecrated and at which blood was offered as a sacrifice in ceremonies involving robed priests who offered prayers, sang hymns, and rang bells – as in the Roman Catholic Church – at the holiest moment of the ritual: the unveiling of the ubiquitous image of Mithras killing a bull, the famous tauroctony that Jung reproduces in his Wandlungen. Indeed, practically all of these basic elements of Cumontian Mithraism – which Jung refers to repeatedly throughout Wandlungen and, indeed, throughout his life – can be found in a single chapter of Cumont’s book on The Mysteries of Mithras entitled, ‘The Mithraic Liturgy, Clergy and Devotees’.”[66]
Tauroctony is a modern name given to the central cult reliefs of the Mithraic Mysteries in the Roman Empire. The imagery above depicts Mithras killing a bull, hence the name tauroctony after the Greek word tauroktonos (ταυροκτόνος, "bull killing"). The above carving is Tauroctony scene on side A of a two-sided Roman bas-relief. 2nd or 3rd century, found at Fiano Romano, near Rome, now on display in the Louvre. In the upper corners are Helios with the raven, and Luna, Sun and Moon.
Noll writes in The Jung Cult:
“The other Mithraic scholar who was approvingly and repeatedly mentioned by Jung in Wandlungen and later works is Labrecht Dieterich (1856-1908). Dieterich was a professor of classical philology and religion at the University of Heidelberg from 1903 until his death. Along with [Max] Weber and other prominent scholars from many disciplines, Dieterich participated for many years in a discussion group on religion (which they called the ‘Eranos’ circle), started in 1904 by theologian Gustav Adolf Deissmann, where he undoubtedly presented summaries of his research on Mithraism and the Greek Magical Papyri.
Dieterich’s Eine Mithrasliturgie of 1903 posited that certain key passages from the famous Greek Magical Papyri were parts of an authentic Mithraic Liturgy. This particular section of Greek Magical Papyri begins with an announcement that it is a revelation from ‘the great god Helios Mithras.’ It then goes on to describe the celestial ascent of the initiate and a series of prayers of invocation that result in the appearance of, among other entities, Mithras: ‘a god immensely great, having a bright appearance, youthful, golden haired, with a white-tunic and golden crown and trousers, and holding in his right hand a golden shoulder of a young bull.’ Given these characteristics, it is not difficult to see how Jung could easily equate Mithras with the golden-haired Teutonic hero of Wagnerian opera, Siegfried.”[67]
Noll continues:
“In several places in Wandlungen, Jung juxtaposes Mithraism with Christianity as ‘the two great antagonistic religions, Christianity on the one side, and Mithraicism on the other,’[68] especially since both rose in prominence in the Roman empire at about the same time (100-400 CE). Here Jung is following Cumont (and before him, Renan) in arguing that, if historical events had gone a little differently, the Western world would be Mithraic and not Judeo-Christian today. [Burkett translate Renan’s famous line as follow “if the growth of Christianity had been halted by some mortal illness, the world would have become Mithraic” Source: Ernest Renan Marc Aurele et la fin du monde antique Burkett Ancient Mystery Cults pg. 3] Jung repeated this line…in Wandlungen and in his 1925 seminars on analytical psychology.
…The rivalry between Mithraism and Christianity is the rivalry between an ancient Aryan sun god and a Semitic god. Here Jung follows Cumont, who refers to Mithras as ‘the old Aryan deity.’ Indeed, the very first line of Cumont’s The Mysteries of Mithra tells us that, ‘In that unknown epoch when the ancestors of the Persian were still united with those of the Hindus, they were already worshippers of Mithra.’ This ‘unknown epoch’ is, of course, the Mullerian ‘mythopoetic’[69] Aryan epoch of tribal prehistory so often addressed in nineteenth-century scholarship.
Jung imagines Mithraism to be a form of nature worship and not a form of religion forged in the iron cage of civilization, as Christianity had been during the Roman empire. Jung says that Mithraic worship is ‘nature worship in the best sense of the word; while the primitive Christians exhibited throughout an antagonistic attitude to the beauties of this world’[70]
…The natural Urreligion of the prehistoric Aryans was Jung’s idea of the true source of all the Hellenistic mystery cults (e.g. the Great Mother, Isis, Osiris, Dionysus), but this was especially true of Mithraism. Mithraism was a direct survival of the Urreligion from the primordial homeland or Urheimat of the ancient Aryans, the Indo-Iranian region. In Jung’s view, based on the scholarship of his day, the ancient Greco-Roman mystery cults were all based on the experience of rebirth for their initiates through special secret rites of initiation that focused on the transformative experience of becoming one with god. In the Mithraic cult, therefore, this would mean becoming one with an ancient Aryan god. The Aryan peoples – unlike the Semites – held onto their natural religion longer than any other group and were thus closer to the Urreligion of the sun and sky of all original humans.
In light of the historical method of psychoanalysis offered by Jung for uncovering evidence for the phylogeny of the human soul, his geophysically informed vision is plain: in the individual psyche there are strata that comprise the sediment of two thousand years of Christianity. Two thousand years of Christianity makes us strangers to ourselves. In the individual, the internalization of bourgeois-Christian civilisation is a mask that covers the true Aryan god within, a natural god, a sun god, perhaps even Mithras himself. This is as true as the scientific fact that within the earth is glowing sun-matter that is hidden by thousands of years of sediment as well. In society, too, Christianity is an alien mask that covers our biologically true religion, a natural religion of the sun and the sky. The scientific proof are the cases of patients with dementia praecox documented by Jung and his Zurich School assistants (Honegger, Nelken, and Spielrein) that demonstrate that there is a pre-Christian, mythological layer of the unconscious mind. It is archaic and corresponds to the thought and especially to the souls of our ancestors. It does not produce purely Christian symbols, but instead it offers images of the sun as god.”[71]
Jung’s own consciousness of his German völkisch identity is boldly revealed in a letter of 26 May 1923 to Oskar Schmitz (1873-1931), a writer and a pupil of Jung’s who introduced Keyserling to Jung’s work in 1922 and who arranged for Jung to speak at the Keyserling’s School of Wisdom (more on this in a future instalment). In this letter Jung clearly identifies himself as a descendant of the pagan Germanic tribes who had the ‘foreign growth’ of Christianity grafted onto them and argues against having any other alien philosophies from the Orient taught to those of Germanic heredity.[72]
Jung writes in his letter to Oskar Schmitz:[73]
“These antecedents do not apply to us. The Germanic tribes, when they collided only the day before yesterday with Roman Christianity, were still in the initial state of a polydemonism with polytheistic buds. There was as yet no proper priesthood and no proper ritual. Like Wotan’s oaks, the gods were felled and a wholly incongruous Christianity, born of monotheism on a much higher cultural level, was grafted onto the stumps. The Germanic man is still suffering from this mutilation. I have good reasons for thinking that every step beyond the existing situation has to begin down there among the truncated nature-demons. In other words, there is a whole lot of primitivity in us to be made good.
It therefore seems a grave error if we graft yet another foreign growth onto our already mutilated condition. This craving for things foreign and faraway is a morbid sign. Also, we cannot get beyond our present level of culture unless we receive a powerful impetus from our roots. But we shall receive it only if we go back behind our cultural level, thus giving the suppressed primitive man in ourselves a chance to develop. How this is to be done is a problem I have been trying to solve for years…We must dig down to the primitive in us, for only out of the conflict between civilized man and the Germanic barbarian will there come what we need: a new experience of God. I do not think this goal can be reached by means of artificial exercises.”
‘A 1916 document included later in this volume demonstrates how Jung sought to solve this problem practically by developing his own method of giving individuals – through analysis – a “new experience of God,” and uses symbols of völkisch mysticism such as Parsifal, Goethe and even the “World Tree,” a very common symbol invoked at this time by völkisch Germans as a reference to Wotan and his sacred groves as an alternative to the Semitic Christian “tree” (crucifix) of Jesus.’[74]
***
Beginning in 1913 Jung begins to reanalyze his childhood memories and dreams which he would record in his Black Book and later Red Book diaries. Suffice to say that this process was greatly tinged by Jung’s desire to substantiate his theory of a “collective unconscious.”
Starting in December 1913, Jung begins to deliberately induce visionary experiences he later terms “active imagination.” In these visions he descends into the Underworld and meets mythological figures. By 1916, Jung begins to describe a wise old man named Philemon, who becomes Jung’s spiritual guide. Jung refers to these beings living as “the land of the Dead.”
Noll writes:[75]
“In the spring of 1925, when Jung ‘spoke for the first time of his inner development’ he was forty-nine years old, awaiting the completion of the first half-century of life on 26 July. When the year began he was in the United States and had visited with the sun-worshipping Taos Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. On 23 March of that year he began a weekly seminar in Zurich – apparently his first in English – on the broad topic of his analytical psychology.
…In the familiar version [Jaffe’s MDR version], Jung uses the techniques of active imagination to make a descent into the unconscious, the land of the dead, where he meets an old man with a white beard and a beautiful young girl, who is blind. The old man introduces himself as ‘Elijah’ and Jung is then ‘shocked’ to learn the girl is ‘Salome.’ Elijah assures him that this couple ‘had been together since eternity.’ With them was a large black snake, which had an affinity for Jung. ‘I stuck close to Elijah because he seemed to be the most reasonable of the three, and to have a clear intelligence. Of Salome I was distinctly suspicious’[76].”
In the 1925 seminars Jung explains the snake is associated with hero myths. Salome is “an anima figure, blind because, though connecting the conscious and unconscious, she does not see the operation of the unconscious.”[77] In Jung’s “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” (MDR), Salome is blind because “she does not see the meaning of things.”[78] Elijah represents “the wise old prophet,” a “factor of intelligence and knowledge.” ‘In MDR, Jung reveals that this figure, “a pagan” with “an Egypto-Hellenistic atmosphere with a Gnostic coloration,” developed out of the Elijah figure in subsequent fantasies and dreams.[79]’ Though strangely, ‘Philemon is not mentioned in the 1925 seminars.’[80]
Jung descends a second time into the Underworld. ‘Jung thought the climax of the initiatory rites of passage in the ancient Teutonic and Hellenistic mysteries involved a self-deification, a becoming one with god. In these visionary experiences of 1913, Jung himself undergoes such an initiation.’[81]
Noll writes:[82]
“Jung tells his 8 June audience that, ‘a few evenings later, I felt I should continue. So again I tried to follow the same procedure, but it would not descend. I remained on the surface.’[83] He felt it was an inner conflict that prevented him from going down into the underworld. He imagines ‘a mountain ridge, a knife edge, on one side a sunny desert country, on the other side darkness.’ He then sees a white snake on the light side and a black snake on the dark side, and a fight ensues that Jung feels is a fight between ‘two dark principles.’ When the head of the black snake turned white and was defeated, Jung felt he could go on.
He then sees Elijah on a rocky ridge, a ring of boulders, which he interprets as a ‘Druidic sacred place.’ Although such ancient rings of megaliths were well known to Jung, it is interesting to note that just such an image appears on the title page of what is often included as the sixth volume in Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Volker, the second volume of Franz Joseph Mone’s Geschichte des Heidenthums (History of Paganism) of 1825, which concerns ‘the religions of the southern Germans and the Celtic peoples.’…Jung may have used these images from Mone/Creuzer as initial stimuli for active imagination – which is how Jung describes the technique in later writings…
Inside, the old man climbs up a mounded Druidic altar, and then both Elijah and the altar begin to shrink in size while the stone walls get larger. He sees a tiny woman, ‘like a doll,’ who turns out to be Salome. A miniature snake and a house are also seen. Jung then realizes, as the walls keep growing, ‘I was in the underworld.’ When they all reach bottom, Elijah smiles at him and says, ‘Why, it is just the same, above or below’[84].”
Jung completes the tale in his Analytical Psychology as such:[85]
“Then a most disagreeable thing happened. Salome became very interested in me, and she assumed I could cure her blindness. She began to worship me. I said, ‘Why do you worship me?’ She replied, ‘You are Christ.’ In spite of my objections she maintained this. I said, ‘This is madness,’ and became filled with skeptical resistance. Then I saw the snake approach me. She came close and began to circle me and press me in her coils. The coils reached up to my heart. I realized as I struggled that I had assumed the attitude of the Crucifixion. In the agony and the struggle, I sweated so profusely that the water flowed down on all sides of me. Then Salome rose, and she could see. While the snake was pressing me, I felt that my face had taken on the face of an animal prey, a lion or a tiger.”
Jung in this same lecture compares this experience with that of the initiates in the Hellenistic mysteries:
“You cannot get conscious of these unconscious facts without giving yourself to them…these images have so much reality that they recommend themselves, and such extraordinary meaning that one is caught. They form part of the ancient mysteries; in fact it is such figures that made the mysteries.”[86]
It appears Jung, who is clearly stating that such imagery he experienced in his “vision” is to be taken quite seriously, that through this “mystery of deification” that he had experienced, he had been given a “certainty of immortality.”
Jung continues to interpret his experience as such:[87]
“Awe surround the mysteries, particularly the mystery of deification. This was one of the most important of the mysteries; it gave the immortal value to the individual – it gave certainty of immortality. One gets a peculiar feeling from being put through such an initiation. The important part that led up to the deification was the snake’s encoiling of me. Salome’s performance was deification. The animal face which I felt mine transformed into was the famous [Deus] Leontocephalus of the Mithraic mysteries, the figure which is represented with a snake coiled around the man, the snake’s head resting on the man’s head, and the face of the man that of a lion. This statue has only been found in the mystery grottoes (the underchurches, the last remnants of the catacombs). The catacombs were not originally places of concealment, but were chosen as symbolical of a descent to the underworld.”
Jung further reemphasizes this last line again later in the lecture and says “It is almost certain that the symbolical rite of deification played a part in these mysteries.” ‘He then proceeds to identify the Deus Leontocephalus as “Aion, the eternal being,” who derived from a Persian (Zoroastrian) deity whose name means “the infinitely long duration.” In closing this astounding lecture, Jung once again returns to his theme of initiatory deification in the ancient mysteries: “In this deification mystery you make yourself the vessel, and are a vessel of creation in which the opposites reconcile.”[88].’[89]
For Jung, the figure of Aion became his secret image of his god within, his imago Dei, and in later years he entitled a book “Aion: Researches in the Phenomenology of the Self” (1951). Aion contains a frontispiece photograph of a famous statue of this Mithraic deity that todays stands in a hallway in the Vatican Museum through which one must exit when leaving the Sistine Chapel.[90]
The image of Jung’s vision of being encoiled by a snake with Jung’s face having become the face of a lion or tiger is shown at the very beginning of his book “Aion: Researches Into the Phenomenology of the Self.” This thus shows that such a vision had become central to Jung’s identification of the phenomenology of self, his journey towards a self-deification transformation. Below the image is written “The Mithraic god Aion, Roman 2nd-3rd century.”
Drawing of the leontocephaline found at a mithraeum in Ostia Antica, Italy (190 CE; CIMRM[35] 312). Portrayal of the Mithraic Kronos (Aion) included within Franz Cumont’s The Mysteries of Mithras. Jung directly refers to Cumont’s work on Mithraism several times in his Wandlungen
Noll writes:
“…it must be remembered that according to the scholarship of Jung’s day Mithraism was a survival of ancient Zoroastrianism, thus giving it a direct link with the earliest Aryan homeland (Urheimat) and peoples. An initiation into the most ancient of Aryan mysteries. This makes Jung’s self-deification and travels in the ancestral lands of the dead directly akin to the völkisch visionary initiations into the Teutonic mysteries by List, his Armanen, and the other Ariosophist groups[91] who were doing exactly the same sort of procedure at exactly the same time as Jung.
By indulging in such highly personal self-disclosure about his life in the 1925 seminars, Jung was modeling the way for his disciples to follow if they, too, wanted to be redeemed by initiation into mysteries that would give them the ‘certainty of immortality.’ Jung had already been teaching his patients and disciples the technique of active imagination by 1916, and indeed it became a practical method for contacting a transcendent realm of the dead, ancestors, or gods.
By contacting and merging with the god within, true personality transformation would then follow. Jung had, then, by this time very much left the realm of science (even in its nineteenth-century sense) and had founded a mystery cult or personal religion. This was a mystery cult that promised a direct experience of the transcendent and that rivaled the major occultist (Theosophy, Anthroposophy) and mystical völkisch movements of his day in their common search for renovatio.”[92]
Jung’s method for “true personality transformation” or the dissociation or fragmentation of self will be discussed further in the next instalment. And how this methodology became a core tenet of Ascona via the Eranos Conferences, which would later shape the counter-culture movement and the creation of the Esalen Institute.
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Footnote:
[1] Carl Jung. Psychology of the Unconscious (1916). paras. 150-151.
[2] Ibid. para 155n.
[3] Anthropophagy means the eating of human flesh by humans.
[4] Edited by William McGuire, Freud/Jung Letters. pg. 294 (Letter 178 J).
[5] Again, this will be explored in great detail later in this series, however, for now one can read my essays “Huxley’s Ultimate Revolution: The Battle for Your Mind and the Relativity of Madness” and “Gaslighting: The Psychology of Shaping Another’s Reality or How Mass Perception is Manufactured.”
[6] According to The Guardian article “Carl Jung, part 2: A troubled relationship with Freud – and the Nazis” It has come to light that Jung operated as a spy for the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA). He was called "Agent 488" and his handler, Allen W. Dulles, later remarked: "Nobody will probably ever know how much Prof Jung contributed to the allied cause during the war." Knowing what Allen Dulles was doing during the war, this does not put Jung in very good light. See my book that discusses the nefarious activities of Allen Dulles in detail: “The Empire on which the Black Sun Never Set: The Birth of International Fascism and Anglo-American Foreign Policy.”
[7] Edited by William McGuire, Freud/Jung Letters. pg. 346 (letter 206 J).
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Richard Noll. The Jung Cult (1994). pg. 281
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid. pg. 197-200.
[13] Carl Jung. New Paths in Psychology.
[14] Carl Jung. New Paths in Psychology. para 437.
[15] Henri Ellenberger. The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970). Pg. 218-223.
[16] Ibid, pg. 222.
[17] Richard Noll. The Jung Cult (1994). pg. 163-164.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Henri Ellenberger. The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970). pg 223.
[20] Richard Noll. The Jung Cult (1994). pg. 170-171.
[21] Ibid. pg. 169-170
[22] Carl Jung. Psychology of the Unconscious (1916). para 315.
[23] Richard Noll. The Jung Cult (1994). pg. 174.
[24] Ibid, pg. 121
[25] Ibid, pg. 181
[26] The "Mithras Liturgy" is a text from the Great Magical Papyrus of Paris, part of the Greek Magical Papyri, numbered PGM IV.475–834. The modern name by which the text is known originated in 1903 with Albrecht Dieterich, its first translator, based on the invocation of Helios Mithras (Ἥλιοϲ Μίθραϲ) as the god who will provide the initiate with a revelation of immortality. The text is generally considered a product of the religious syncretism characteristic of the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial era, as were the Mithraic mysteries themselves. Some scholars have argued that it has no direct connection to particular Mithraic ritual. Others consider it an authentic reflection of Mithraic liturgy, or view it as Mithraic material reworked for the syncretic tradition of magic and esotericism.
The codex containing the text was acquired by the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1857. It is thought to date to the early 4th century AD, though Dieterich proposed a date of composition as early as 100–150 AD. Its likely provenance in Egypt, where evidence of the Mithraic cult is rare, presents a major obstacle to regarding it an authentic liturgy. [Source: Wikipedia: Mithras Liturgy.]
[27] Carl Jung. Psychology of the Unconscious (1916). para 173.
[28] Wikipedia: Mithras Liturgy.
[29] Carl Jung. The Concept of the Collective Unconscious. para 105n.
[30] McGuire and Hull. C.G. Jung Speaking, pg. 435.
[31] Friedrich Creuzer. Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, 3:335.
[32] Johann Jakob Bachofen. Myth, Religion and Mother Right. pg. 114-115.
[33] Richard Noll. The Jung Cult (1994). pg. 180.
[34] Ibid. pg. 185.
[35] Ibid
[36] Ibid. pg. 186
[37] Ibid. pg. 184
[38] Carl Jung. Psychology of the Unconscious (1916). para 317.
[39] Richard Noll. The Jung Cult (1994). pg. 172
[40] Carl Jung. Psychology of the Unconscious (1916). para 317.
[41] Richard Noll. The Jung Cult (1994). pg. 179
[42] Ibid. pg. 179
[43] Ibid. pg. 179
[44] Ibid. pg. 173
[45] This is documented in the volume by Harold Jantz, The Mothers in Faust: The Myth of Time and Creativity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969).
[46] Carl Jung. Psychology of the Unconscious (1916). para 459.
[47] Richard Noll, The Jung Cult (1994), pg. 174
[48] Edited by William McGuire, Freud/Jung Letters. Letter 210 J
[49] Richard Noll, The Jung Cult (1994). pg. 202
[50] Carl Jung. Analytical Psychology. pg. 42
[51] Ibid. pg. 42
[52] Richard Noll. The Jung Cult (1994). pg. 203
[53] Carl Jung. Analytical Psychology. pg. 46
[54] Richard Noll. The Jung Cult (1994). pg. 203-204
[55] Vital force was discussed in Part V of this series.
[56] Richard Noll. The Jung Cult (1994). pg. 120
[57] Ibid. pg. 120
[58] Carl Jung. Psychology of the Unconscious (1916). paras. 180
[59] The Tibetan Book of the Dead is an example of this whereby its first translation into English for mass consumption in the West was a fraudulent translation where great liberty was taken in its translation as well as whole sections were added that were not contained in the text of the original. More on this in a future instalment.
[60] Carl Jung. Psychology of the Unconscious (1916). paras. 155n
[61] Ibid. para 201.
[62] Richard Noll. The Jung Cult (1994). pg. 122
[63] Carl Jung. Analytical Psychology.
[64] Carl Jung. Psychology of the Unconscious (1916). Paras. 335-41
[65] Carl Jung. Psychology of the Unconscious (1916). pg. 83
[66] Richard Noll. The Jung Cult (1994). pg. 124
[67] Ibid. pg. 125-126
[68] Carl Jung. Psychology of the Unconscious (1916). pg. 66
[69] This will be discussed further in a future instalment.
[70] Carl Jung. Psychology of the Unconscious (1916). para. 127
[71] Richard Noll. The Jung Cult (1994). pg. 126-127
[72] Ibid. pg. 127
[73] Jung Letters: I 1906-1950 pg. 39-40
[74] Richard Noll. The Jung Cult (1994). pg. 135
[75] Ibid. pg. 210-211
[76] Carl Jung & Aniela Jaffé. Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961). pg. 181
[77] Carl Jung. Analytical Psychology. pg. 89
[78] Carl Jung & Aniela Jaffé. Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961). pg. 182
[79] Ibid. pg. 182
[80] Richard Noll. The Jung Cult (1994). pg. 211
[81] Ibid. pg. 211
[82] Ibid. pg. 211
[83] Carl Jung. Analytical Psychology. pg. 95
[84] Ibid. pg. 96
[85] Ibid
[86] Ibid 37
[87] Ibid 98
[88] Ibid 99
[89] Richard Noll. The Jung Cult (1994). pg. 214
[90] Ibid. pg. 214
[91] List, his Armanen and the Ariosophists were discussed in Part VI of this series.
[92] Richard Noll. The Jung Cult (1994). pg. 214-215
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