Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life and Teachings
By
Gary Lachman
An Excerpt:
The Occult World of C. G. Jung*
On 11 February 1944, the
68-year-old Carl Gustav Jung -- then the world's most renowned living
psychologist -- slipped on some ice and broke his fibula. Ten days later,
in hospital, he suffered a myocardial infarction caused by embolisms
from his immobilised leg. Treated with oxygen and camphor, he lost
consciousness and had what seems to have been a near-death and
out-of-the-body experience -- or, depending on your perspective,
delirium. He found himself floating 1,000 miles above the Earth. Seas
and continents shimmered in blue light and Jung could make out the
Arabian desert and snow-tipped Himalayas. He felt he was about to leave
orbit, but then, turning to the south, a huge black monolith came into
view. It was a kind of temple, and at the entrance Jung saw a Hindu
sitting in a lotus position. Within, innumerable candles flickered, and
he felt that the "whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence" was being
stripped away. It wasn't pleasant, and what remained was an "essential
Jung", the core of his experiences.
He knew that inside the
temple the mystery of his existence, of his purpose in life, would be
answered. He was about to cross the threshold when he saw, rising up
from Europe far below, the image of his doctor in the archetypal form of
the King of Kos, the island site of the temple of Asclepius, Greek god
of medicine. He told Jung that his departure was premature; many were
demanding his return and he, the King, was there to ferry him back. When
Jung heard this, he was immensely disappointed, and almost immediately
the vision ended. He experienced the reluctance to live that many who
have been 'brought back' encounter, but what troubled him most was
seeing his doctor in his archetypal form. He knew this meant that the
physician had sacrificed his own life to save Jung's. On 4 April 1944 -- a
date numerologists can delight in -- Jung sat up in bed for the first
time since his heart attack. On the same day, his doctor came down with
septicaemia and took to his bed. He never left it, and died a few days
later.
Jung was convinced that he hadn't simply hallucinated,
but that he had been granted a vision of reality. He had passed outside
time, and the experience had had a palpable effect on him. For one
thing, the depression and pessimism that overcame him during WWII
vanished. But there was something more. For most of his long career, he
had impressed upon his colleagues, friends, and reading public that he
was, above all else, a scientist. He was not, he repeated almost
like a mantra, a mystic, occultist, or visionary, terms of abuse his
critics, who rejected his claims to science, had used against him. Now,
having returned from the brink of death, he seemed content to let the
scientist in him take a back seat for the remaining 17 years of his
life.
Although Jung had always believed in the reality of
the 'other' world, he had taken care not to speak too openly about this
belief. Now, after his visions, he seemed less reticent. He'd had, it
seems, a kind of conversion experience, and the interests the
world-famous psychologist had hitherto kept to himself now became common
knowledge. Flying saucers, astrology, parapsychology, alchemy, even
predictions of a coming "new Age of Aquarius": pronouncements on all of
these dubious subjects -- dubious at least from the viewpoint of modern
science -- flowed from his pen. If he had spent his career fending off
charges of mysticism and occultism -- initially triggered by his break
with Freud in 1912 -- by the late 1940s he seems to have decided to stop
fighting. The "sage of Kusnacht" and "Hexenmeister of Zurich", as Jung
was known in the last decade of his life, had arrived.
ALL IN THE FAMILY
Yet
Jung's involvement with the occult was with him from the start --
literally, it was in his DNA. His maternal grandfather, Rev. Samuel
Preiswerk, who learned Hebrew because he believed it was spoken in
heaven, accepted the reality of spirits, and kept a chair in his study
for the ghost of his deceased first wife, who often came to visit him.
Jung's mother Emilie was employed by Samuel to shoo away the dead who
distracted him while he was working on his sermons.
She herself
developed mediumistic powers in her late teens. At the age of 20, she
fell into a coma for 36 hours; when her forehead was touched with a
red-hot poker she awoke, speaking in tongues and prophesying. Emilie
continued to enter trance states throughout her life, in which she would
communicate with the dead. She also seems to have been a 'split
personality'. Jung occasionally heard her speaking to herself in a voice
he soon recognised was not her own, making profound remarks expressed
with an uncharacteristic authority. This 'other' voice had inklings of a
world far stranger than the one the young Carl knew.
This
'split' that Jung had seen in his mother would later appear in himself.
At around the age of 12, he literally became two people. There was his
ordinary boyhood self, and someone else. The
'Other,' as Carl
called him, was a figure from the 18th century, a masterful character
who wore a white wig and buckled shoes, drove an impressive carriage,
and held the young boy in contempt. It's difficult to escape the
impression that in some ways Jung felt he had been this character in a past life. Seeing an ancient green carriage, Jung felt that it came from
his
time. his later notion of the collective unconscious, that psychic
reservoir of symbols and images that he believed we inherit at birth, is
in a sense a form of reincarnation, and Jung himself believed in some
form of an afterlife. Soon after the death of his father, in 1896 when
Jung was 21, he had two dreams in which his father appeared so vividly
that he considered the possibility of life after death. In another,
later dream, Jung's father asked him for marital advice, as he wanted to
prepare for his wife's arrival. Jung took this as a premonition, and
his mother died soon after. And years later, when his sister Gertrude
died -- a decade before his own near-death experience -- Jung wrote that
"What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our
imagination and feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate
conception of it." [1]
TABLES AND KNIVES
Jung's
mother was involved in at least two well-known paranormal experiences
that are recounted in practically every book about him. Sitting in his
room studying, Carl suddenly heard a loud bang coming from the dining
room. He rushed in and found his mother startled. The round walnut table
had cracked from the edge past the centre. The split didn't follow any
joint, but had passed through solid wood. Drying wood couldn't account
for it; the table was 70 years old and it was a humid day. Jung thought: "There certainly are curious accidents." As if she was reading his mind
Emilie replied in her 'other' voice: "Yes, yes, that means something."
Two weeks later came a second incident. Returning home in the evening,
Jung found an excited household. An hour earlier there had been another
loud crack, this time coming from a large sideboard. No one had any idea
what had produced it. Jung inspected the sideboard. Inside, where they
kept the bread, he found a loaf and the bread knife. The knife had
shattered into several pieces, all neatly arranged in the breadbasket.
The knife had been used earlier for tea, but no one had touched it nor
opened the cupboard since. When he took the knife to a cutler, he was
told that there was no fault in the steel and that someone must have
broken it on purpose. He kept the shattered knife for the rest of his
life, and years later sent a photograph of it to psychical researcher JB
Rhine.
SPIRITS AFOOT
By this time Jung, like
many others, was interested in spiritualism, and was reading through the
literature -- books by Zollner, Crooks, Carl du Prel, Swedenborg, and
Justinus Kerner's classic The Seeress of Prevorst. At the
Zofingia debating society at the University of Basel, he gave lectures
on "The Value of Speculative Research" and "On the Limits of Exact
Science", in which he questioned the dominant materialist paradigm that
reigned then, as today. Jung led fellow students in various occult
experiments, yet when he spoke to them about his ideas, or lectured
about the need to take them seriously, he met with resistance.
Apparently he had greater luck with his dachshund, whom he felt
understood him better and could feel supernatural presences himself. [2]
Another who seemed to feel supernatural presences was his
cousin, from his mother's side of the family, Helene Preiswerk. In a
letter to JB Rhine about the shattered bread knife, Jung refers to Helly -- as she was known
-- as a "young woman with marked mediumistic
faculties" whom he had met around the time of the incident, and in his "so-called' autobiography
Memories, Dreams, Reflections he remarks that he became involved in a series of seances with his relatives
after the incidents of the bread knife and table. Yet the seances had been going on for some time
before
the two events, and at their centre was Helly, whom Jung already knew
well and who, by all accounts, was in love with him. This is an early
sign of his somewhat ambiguous relationship with the occult.
Helly
would enter a trance and fall to the floor, breathing deeply, and
speaking in old Samuel Preiswerk's voice -- although she had never heard
him. She told the others that they should pray for her elder sister
Bertha, who, she said, had just given birth to a black child. Bertha,
who was living in Brazil, had already had one child with her mixed-race
husband, and gave birth to another on the same day as the seance. [3]
Further seances proved equally startling. At one point, Samuel Preiswerk
and Carl Jung Sr -- Jung's paternal grandfather -- who had disliked each
other while alive, reached a new accord. A warning came for another
sister who was also expecting a child that she would lose it; in August
the baby was born premature and dead. [4]
Helly produced further voices, but the most interesting was a spirit named Ivenes, who called herself the
real
Helene Preiswerk. This character was much more mature, confident, and
intelligent than Helly, who Jung described as absent-minded, and not
particularly bright, talented, or educated. It was as if buried beneath
the unremarkable teenager was a fuller, more commanding personality,
like Jung's 'Other'. This was an insight into the psyche that would
inform his later theory of "individuation", the process of "becoming who
you are". Helly did blossom later, becoming a successful dressmaker in
France, although she died young, at only 30.
In Jung's dissertation on the seances,
On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena,
he describes Helly unflatteringly as "exhibiting slightly rachitic
skull formation", and "somewhat pale facial colour", and fails to
mention that she is his cousin. He also omits his own participation in
the seances, and dates them from 1899 to 1900, whereas they had started
years before. Gerhard Wehr politely suggests that "[T]he doctoral
candidate was obviously at pains to conceal his own role, and especially
his close kinship relationship, thus forestalling from the start any
further critical inquiry that might have thrown the scientific validity
of the entire work into question." [5]
In other words, Jung the
scientist thought it a good career move to obscure Jung the occultist's
personal involvement in the business.
THE POLTERGEIST IN FREUD'S BOOKCASE
In
1900, the 25-year-old Jung joined the prestigious Burgholzli Mental
Clinic in Zurich. Here, he did solid work in word-association tests,
developed his theory of 'complexes', and initiated a successful
'patient-friendly' approach to working with psychotics and
schizophrenics. It was during his tenure that he also became involved
with Freud. From 1906, when they started corresponding, to 1912, when
the friendship ruptured, Jung was a staunch supporter of Freud's work
and promoted it unstintingly. There were, however, some rocky patches.
One centred on the famous poltergeist in Freud's bookcase. Visiting
Freud in Vienna in 1909, Jung asked him about his attitude toward
parapsychology. Freud was sceptical and dismissed the subject as
nonsense. Jung disagreed, and sitting across from the master, he began
to feel his diaphragm glow, as if it was becoming red-hot. Suddenly a
loud bang came from a bookcase. Both jumped up, and Jung said to Freud: "There, that is an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorisation
phenomenon!", Jung's long-winded circumlocution for a poltergeist, or "noisy spirit". When Freud said
"Bosh!", Jung predicted that another
bang would immediately happen. It did. Jung said that, from that moment
on, Freud grew mistrustful of him. From Freud's letter to Jung about the
incident, one gets the feeling that he felt Jung himself was
responsible for it.
This isn't surprising; Jung
did
manifest numerous paranormal abilities. While in bed in a hotel room
after giving a lecture, he experienced the suicide of a patient who had a
strong "transference" on him. The patient had relapsed into depression,
and shot himself in the head. Jung awoke in his hotel, feeling an odd
pain in his forehead. He later discovered that his patient had shot
himself precisely where Jung felt the pain, at the same time Jung woke
up. More to the point, a visitor to his home once remarked about Jung's "exteriorised libido", how
"when there was an important idea that was not yet quite conscious, the
furniture and woodwork all over the house creaked and snapped."
THE RED BOOK
It was Jung's
break with Freud that led to his own 'descent into the unconscious', a
disturbing trip down the psyche's rabbit hole from which he gathered the
insights about the collective unconscious that would inform his own
school of 'analytical psychology'. He had entered a 'creative illness',
unsure if he was going mad. In October 1913, not long after the
split, Jung had, depending on your perspective, a vision or
hallucination. While on a train, he suddenly saw a flood covering
Europe, between the North Sea and the Alps. When it reached Switzerland,
the mountains rose to protect his homeland, but in the waves he saw
floating debris and bodies. Then the water turned to blood. The vision
lasted an hour and seems to have been a dream that had
invaded
his waking consciousness. Having spent more than a decade treating
mental patients who suffered from precisely such symptoms, Jung had
reason to be concerned. He was ironically rather relieved the next
summer when WWI broke out and he deduced that his vision had been a
premonition of it.
Yet the psychic tension continued. Eventually
there came a point where Jung felt he could no longer fight off the
sense of madness. He decided to let go. When he did, he landed in
an eerie, subterranean world where he met strange intelligences that 'lived' in his mind. The experience was so upsetting that for a time
Jung slept with a loaded pistol by his bed, ready to blow his brains out
if the stress became too great.
In his
Red Book -- recently published in full
-- he kept an account, in words and images, of the
objective, independent entities he encountered during his
"creative illness" -- entities that had nothing to do with him personally, but who
shared
his interior world. There were Elijah and Salome, two figures from the
Bible who were accompanied by a snake. There was also a figure whom Jung
called Philemon, who became a kind of 'inner guru' and who he painted
as a bald, white-bearded old man with bull's horns and the wings of a
kingfisher. One morning, after painting the figure, Jung was out taking a
walk when he came upon a dead kingfisher. The birds were rare in Zurich
and he had never before come upon a dead one. This was one of the many
synchronicities -- "meaningful coincidences" -- that happened at this
time (for more on Jung and synchronicity, see FT171:42--47). There were
others. In 1916, still in the grip of his crisis, Jung again felt that
something within wanted to get out. An eerie restlessness filled
his home. He felt the presence of the dead -- and so did his children.
One daughter saw a strange white figure; another had her blankets
snatched from her at night. His son drew a picture of a fisherman he had
seen in a dream: a flaming chimney rose from the fisherman's head, and a
devil flew through the air, cursing the fisherman for stealing his
fish. Jung had yet to mention Philemon to anyone. Then, one afternoon,
the doorbell rang loudly, but no one was there. He asked: "What in the
world is this?" The voices of the dead answered: "We have come back from
Jerusalem where we found not what we sought," words that form the
beginning of Jung's strange Seven Sermons to the Dead, a work of
"spiritual dictation", or "channelling", he attributed to "Basilides in
Alexandria, the City where the East toucheth the West".
GHOSTS IN THE HOUSE
By
1919, WWI was over and Jung's crisis had passed, although he continued
to practise what he called "active imagiation", a kind of waking
dreaming, the results of which he recorded in the
Red Book. But
spirits of a more traditional kind were not lacking. He was invited to
London to lecture on "The Psychological Foundations of the Belief in
Spirits" to the Society for Psychical Research. He told the Society
that ghosts and materialisations were "unconscious projections". "I have
repeatedly observed," he said, "the telepathic effects of unconscious
complexes, and also a number of parapsychic phenomena, but in all this I see no
proof whatever of the existence of real spirits, and until such proof is
forthcoming I must regard this whole territory as an appendix of psychology."
Scientific enough, no doubt, but a year later,
again in England, he encountered a somewhat more real ghost. He spent
some weekends in a cottage in Aylesbury rented by Maurice Nicoll (later a
student of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) and while there was serenaded by
eerie sounds, while an unpleasant smell filled the bedroom. Locals said
the place was haunted and, on one particularly bad night, Jung
discovered an old woman's head on the pillow next to his; half of her
face was missing. He leapt out of bed and waited until morning in an
armchair. The house was later torn down. One would think that, having
already encountered the dead on their return from Jerusalem, Jung
wouldn't be so shaken by a traditional English ghost, but the experience
rattled him; his account of it only appeared 30 years later, in 1949,
in an obscure anthology of ghost stories.
When his lecture for the SPR was reprinted in the
Collected Works
in 1947, Jung added a footnote explaining that he no longer felt as
certain as he did in 1919 that apparitions were explicable through
psychology, and that he doubted "whether an exclusively psychological
approach can do justice to the phenomenon". In a later postscript, he
again admitted that his earlier explanation was insufficient, but that
he couldn't agree on the reality of spirits because he had no experience
of them -- conveniently forgetting the haunting in Aylesbury. But in a
letter of 1946 to Fritz Kunkel, a psychotherapist, Jung admitted:
"Metapsychic phenomena could be explained better by the hypothesis of spirits
than by the qualities and peculiarities of the unconscious."
A similar uncertainty surrounds his experience with the
I Ching,
the ancient Chinese oracle, with which he began to experiment in the
early 1920s and which, like horoscopes, became part of his therapeutic
practice. Although he mentioned the I Ching here and there in his
writing, it wasn't until 1949, again nearly 30 years later, in his
introduction to the classic Wilhelm/Baynes translation, that he admitted
outright to using it himself. And although he tried to explain the
I Ching's efficacy through what would become his paranormal
deus ex machina,
synchronicity, Jung admits that the source of the oracle's insights are
the "spiritual agencies" that form the "living soul of the book", a
remark at odds with his quasi-scientific explanation. Ironically, his
major work on "meaningful coincidence", Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle
(1952), written with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, provides only one
unambiguous example of the phenomenon, and readers who, like me, accept
the reality of synchronicity, come away slightly baffled by Jung's
attempt to account for it via archetypes, quantum physics, statistical
analysis, mathematics, JB Rhine's experiments with ESP, astrology,
telepathy, precognition, and other paranormal abilities, all of which
read like a recrudescence of Jung's "I am a scientist" reflex.
THE AGE OF AQUARIUS
In
the 1920s, he plunged into a study of the Gnostics -- whom he had
encountered as early as 1912 -- and alchemy. It was Jung, more than
anyone else, who salvaged the ancient Hermetic pursuit from intellectual
oblivion. Another Hermetic practice he followed was astrology, which he
began to study seriously around the time of his break with Freud. Jung
informed his inner circle that casting horoscopes was part of his
therapeutic practice, but it was during the dark days of WWII that he
recognised a wider application. In 1940, in a letter to HG Baynes, Jung
speaks of a vision he had in 1918 in which he saw "fire falling like
rain from heaven and consuming the cities of Germany". He felt that 1940
was the crucial year, and he remarks that it's "when we approach the
meridian of the first star in Aquarius". It was, he said, "the
premonitory earthquake of the New Age". He was familiar with the precession of
the equinoxes, the apparent backward movement of the Sun through the signs of
the zodiac. By acting as a backdrop to sunrise at the vernal equinox, each sign
gives its name to an 'age' -- called a 'Platonic month' -- which lasts roughly 2,150 years. In his strange book
Aion
(1951), he argues that the 'individuation' of Western civilisation as a
whole follows the path of the 'Platonic months,' and presents a kind of "precession of the archetypes". Fish symbolism surrounds Jesus because
He was the central symbol of the Age of Pisces, the astrological sign of
the fish. Previous ages -- of Taurus and Aries -- produced bull and ram
symbolism. The coming age is that of Aquarius, the Water Bearer. In
conversation with Margaret Ostrowski-Sachs, a friend of Hermann Hesse,
Jung admitted that he had kept this "secret knowledge" to himself for
years, and only finally made it public in Aion. He wasn't sure he was
"allowed" to, but during his illness he received "confirmation" that he should.
Although
the arcane scholar Gerald Massey and the French esotericist Paul Le
Cour had earlier spoken of a coming Age of Aquarius, Jung was certainly
the most prestigious mainstream figure to do so, and it is through him
that the idea became a mainstay of the counterculture of the 1960s and
'70s. This was mostly through his comments about it in his book
Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky
(1958), in which he argued that UFOs were basically mandalas from outer
space. During his crisis, he had come upon the image of the mandala,
the Sanskrit 'magic circle', as a symbol of psychic wholeness, and he
suggested that 'flying saucers' were mass archetypal projections, formed
by the psychic tension produced by the Cold War that was heating up
between Russia and America. The Western world, he argued, was having a
nervous breakdown, and UFOs were a way of relieving the stress.
Jung
wrote prophetically that "My conscience as a psychiatrist bids me
fulfil my duty and prepare those few who will hear me for coming events
which are in accord with the end of an era.... As we know from ancient
Egyptian history, they are symptoms of psychic changes that always
appear at the end of one Platonic month and at the beginning of another.
They are, it seems, changes in the constellation of the psychic
dominants, of the archetypes or 'Gods' as they used to be called, which
bring about... long-lasting transformations of the collective psyche. This
transformation started... in the transition of the Age of Taurus to that
of Aries, and then from Aries to Pisces, whose beginning coincides with
the rise of Christianity. We are now nearing that great change... when the
spring-point enters Aquarius...." Ten years later, The Fifth Dimension
(whose very name, appropriated from the title song of The Byrds' third
LP, suggests the cosmic character of the Mystic Sixties) had a hit song
from the hippie musical Hair echoing Jung's ideas, and millions
of people all over the world believed they were witnessing "the dawning
of the Age of Aquarius".
JUNG THE MYSTIC
Jung
died in 1961, just on the cusp of the 'occult revival' of the 1960s, a
renaissance of magical thinking that he did much to bring about. He was
also directly responsible for the "journey to the East" that many took
then, and continue to take today. Along with the
I Ching, Jung gave his imprimatur to such hitherto arcane items as
The Tibetan Book of the Dead,
Taoism and Zen, and without his intervention it's debatable if these
Eastern imports would have enjoyed their modern popularity. That he was
in many ways a founding father of the Love Generation is seen by his
inclusion on the cover of the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club
Band album, although Jung himself would have thought "flower power"
sadly naive. Although for all his efforts he has never been accepted by
mainstream intellectuals, his effect on popular culture has been
immense, and our contemporary grass roots, inner-directed spirituality,
unfortunately associated with the New Age, has his name written all
over it. Jung himself may have been equivocal about his relationship
with mysticism, magic, and the occult, but the millions of people today
who pay attention to their dreams, notice strange coincidences and
consult the I Ching have the Sage of Kusnacht to thank for it.
Notes
[1] Quoted in Vincent Brome:
Jung: Man and Myth, Scientific Book Club, 1979, p277.
[2] Brome, op. cit. p68.
[3] Deidre Bair:
Jung: A Biography, Little Brown, 2004, p48.
[4] Ibid. p49.
[5] Gerhard Wehr:
Jung: A Biography, Shambhala, Boston, 1987, p72.
* This excerpt reprinted with permission of publisher. Copyright C 2010 Gary Lachman. All Rights Reserved.