The world hangs on a thin thread…

and that is the psyche of the man

 Carl Jung

 

 

Text :

 From  The Rebel in The Soul-  ancient Egytian papyrus

Paintings see here

 

 

 

• Transcript:

Jung: The world hangs on a thin thread, and that is the psyche of man. Nowadays we are not threatened by elementary catastrophes. There is no such thing [in nature] as an H-bomb; that is all man’s doing. WE are the great danger. The psyche is the great danger. What if something goes wrong with the psyche? You see, and so it is demonstrated to us in our days what the power of the psyche is of man, how important it is to know something about it. But we know nothing about it. Nobody would give credit to the idea that the psychical processes of the ordinary man have any importance whatever. One thinks, “Oh, he has just what he has in his head. He is all from his surroundings, he is taught such and such a thing, believes such and such a thing, and particularly if he is well housed and well fed, then he has no ideas at all.” And that’s the great mistake because he is just that as which he is born, and he is not born as “tabula rasa,” but as a reality.

Paintings From  The Rebel in The Soul-  ancient Egytian papyrus

• Interviewer: Jung had a vision at the end of his life of a catastrophe. It was a world catastrophe.

Marie-Louise von Franz: I don’t want to speak much about it. One of his daughters took notes and after his death gave it to me, and there is a drawing with a line going up and down, and underneath is “the last 50 years of humanity.” And some remarks about a final catastrophe being ahead. But I have only those notes.

Paintings From  The Rebel in The Soul-  ancient Egytian papyrus

 

• Interviewer: What is your own feeling about it, the world situation?

von Franz: Well, one’s whole feeling revolts aginst this idea but since I have those notes in a drawer, I don’t allow myself to be too optimistic. I think, well, we have always had wars and enormous catastrophies, and I have no more personal fear much about that. I mean at my age, if you have anyhow soon to go— so or so egocentrically spoken. But the beauty of all the life— to think that the billions and billions and billions of years of evolution to build up the plants and the animals and the whole beauty of nature— and that man would go out of sheer shadow foolishness and destroy it all. I mean that all life might go from the the planet. And we don’t know— on Mars and Venus there is no life; we don’t know if there is any life experiment elsewhere in the galaxies. And we go and destroy this. I think it is so abominable. I try to pray that it may not happen— that a miracle happens.

Paintings From  The Rebel in The Soul-  ancient Egytian papyrus

• Interviewer: Do you find that young people that you see now are aware of that? That it’s in their consciousness?

von Franz: Yes it’s partly in their unconscious and partly in their consciousness, and I think in a very dangerous way, namely, in a way of giving up and running away into a fantasy world. You know, when you study science fiction, you see there’s always the fantasy of escaping to some other planet and begin anew again, which means give up the battle on this earth, consider it hopeless and give up. I think one shouldn’t give up, because if you think of [Jung’s book] Answer to Job, if man would wrestle with God, if man would tell God that he shouldn’t do it, if we would reflect more. That why reflection comes in. Jung never thought that we might do better than just possibly sneak round the corner with not too big a catastrophe. When I saw him last, he had also a vision while I was with him, but there he said, “I see enormous stretches devastated, enormous stretches of the earth. But, thank God it’s not the whole planet.” I think that if not more people try to reflect and take back their projections and take the opposites within themselves, there will be a total destruction.

Paintings From  The Rebel in The Soul-  ancient Egytian papyrus

“The supreme madness is to see life as it is and not as it should be, … things are only what we want to believe they are ...” Jacques Brel

Read: Personal myths in light of our modern-day “reality”

This comprehensive collection of writings by the epoch-shaping Swiss psychoanalyst was edited by Joseph Campbell, himself the most famous of Jung’s American followers. It comprises Jung’s pioneering studies of the structure of the psyche – including the works that introduced such notions as the collective unconscious, the Shadow, Anima and Animus – as well as inquries into the psychology of spirituality and creativity, and Jung’s influential “On Synchronicity,” a paper whose implications extend from the I Ching to quantum physics. Campbell’s introduction completes this compact volume, placing Jung’s astonishingly wide-ranging oeuvre within the context of his life and times. Read here

• Jung and Alchemy

Jung’s interest for alchemy starts from two directions. One is the necessity to find a historic parallel to his own discoveries of the unconscious psychic life. The second refers to the series of dreams which have evoked the new research course, on which Jung talks at length in his autobiography: Memories, Dreams and Reflections.

 “Before I discovered alchemy – writes Jung – I had a series of dreams which dealt with the same theme. Beside my house stood another, that is to say, another wing of annex, which was strange to me. Each tie I would wonder in my dream why I did not know this house, although it had apparently always been there”. This strange part of the house revealed its meaning finally: “The unknown wing of the house was a part of my personality, an aspect of myself…”

This part was unconscious and would reveal itself as an interest for the in-depth study of medieval alchemy.

This study was announced definitively in the dream from the year 1926 when Jung dreams himself being captive in the 17^th century. “Not until much later did I realize that it [the dream] referred to alchemy, for that science reached its height in the seventeenth century”.

Alchemy is a symbolic representation of the “individuation process In the serious alchemy, believes Jung, processes arising from individual psyche are described encoded. Peculiar terms that alchemy operates with, such as prima materia, unus mundus, Mercurius, filium philosophorum, lapis and many more are decrypted by Jung through an arduous work of over 10 years.
His develops and parallels are described at length in his book Psychology and Alchemy , an essential piece of work for the ones studying interestedly analytical psychology, the individuation process and the exploration of the unconscious through dream interpretation.

“We could resume Jung’s vast experience with alchemy in the next two quotations:

“Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed the bridge on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious”.

 “Only after I had familiarized myself with alchemy did I realize that the unconscious is a process, and that the psyche is transformed or developed by the relationship of the ego to the contents of the unconscious”.

More about alchemy, archetypes and dream interpretation may be found in Psychology and Alchemy, the book Jung has dedicated to the analysis of the relationship between alchemical symbolism and the individuation process. Read here

• Jung, Aquinas, and the Aurora Consurgens: Establishing a Relationship with God

The reunion of a man with God is the subject of a medieval text which aggregates excerpts from the Bible and Arabic alchemical texts that had recently become available in Europe. The Aurora Consurgens personifies God as Wisdom, a spiritual being who not only formed the world in the beginning but is also a guide to men to return to God subsequent to their separation at the Fall.

The union of feminine Wisdom and a man is aligned with pairs of opposites such as spirit and soul, and is also conflated with the union of a man and a woman. While the text is perhaps falsely ascribed to St. Thomas, it is consistent with his ideas so that it may be explicated using his writings on the Trinity, psychology, angels, and Greek philosophy. From there, correspondence is established with C. G. Jung‘s concept of archetypes, and the text is subsequently interpreted from the perspective of analytical psychology.

It is identified how interaction of archetypes associated with the union of a man and a woman provide an explanation for the process of redemption given in the Aurora. A similar process of redemption is identified in other writings from the beginning of the Christian era up to the modern teachings of the Catholic Church. Read more here

• Mysterium Coniunctionis, Alchemical Psychology, and Self-Development

“The alchemical operation consisted essentially in separating the prima materia, the so-called chaos, into the active principle, the soul, and the passive principle, the body, which were then reunited in personified form in the coniunctio or ‘chymical marriage’… the ritual cohabitation of Sol and Luna.” -Carl Jung, ‘Mysterum Coniunctionis’

The history of science in the West is inextricably linked with the development of alchemy. This is also true for the Islamic world, for even the word ‘alchemy’ itself comes from Arabic. Modern chemistry emerged from alchemy as did certain elements of psychology. Alchemy reigned supreme in a world before the separation of the value spheres brought about by the Scientific Revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This separation (heavily accentuated by both scientific developments and scholarship in the nineteenth century) has obscured these foundations for quite some time. That Isaac Newton was an alchemist has been known to scholars for some time. Economist John Maynard Keynes had this to say about Newton in the 1940s:

“ He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.”

 

With the separation of the value spheres and the rise of empiricism, alchemy went into decline. Chemistry separated from it over the course of the eighteenth century. Interest in alchemy did reemerge, however, but only in the twentieth century. Psychologist Carl Jung was drawn to the imagery present in alchemical texts (which he also collected) and saw similarities between these and reports of what patients claim to have encountered in their dreams. Jung’s interest in exploring the symbolism present in alchemy led to a reassessment. Alchemy was not merely a primitive attempt at chemistry, nor a hocus pocus quest for immortality and riches. The quest of the modern reader of alchemical texts is to do so from a holistic perspective — a reintegration of the value spheres and a deep analysis of what is actually being sought after. One can assume, though one does not necessarily have to, that the alchmeists of old were searching for something, something they understood at a deep level but were not exactly able to articulate fully. Yes, this quest was not exactly parsed out from what we today would recognize as scientific inquiry because this was the world before popularizing the scientific method allowed for a clear, though limited, understanding of particular elements and phenomena in the world.

“Jung said that science is nested in a dream. The dream is that if we investigated the structures of material reality with sufficient attention and truth, that we could then learn enough about material reality to then alleviate suffering: To produce the philosopher’s stone — to make everybody wealthy, to make everybody healthy, to make everyone live as long as they wanted to live or perhaps forever. That’s the goal — to alleviate the catastrophe of existence. The idea that the solutions to the mysteries of life that enable us to develop such a substance, or multitude of substances, provided the motive force for the development of science. Jung traced that development of the motive force to over the period of 1,000 years. Jung went back into alchemical texts and interpreted them as if they were the dream upon which science was founded. Newton was an alchemist, by the way. Science did emerge of out alchemy. The question is, what were the alchemists up to? They were trying to produce the philosopher’s stone, which was the universal medicament for mankind’s pathology.” -Jordan Peterson

This analysis will focus on the works of Carl Jung, Jean Piaget, and Jordan Peterson. Additionally, it will be practically-oriented. The point of studying alchemical psychology is not to be able to articulate obscure theories or satisfy academics — modern theologians, in many respects. No, the point will be to focus where the rubber meets the road, so to speak — to focus on abstract ideas as they relate to human behavior and motivations. Alchemy gave birth to modern science and it has much to offer with regard to a psychological understanding of the human condition. Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning (1999) unites Jungian psychology with Piagetian developmental psychology in a daring attempt to explain the human condition and the heroic path, mediating between the forces of order and chaos.

In Mysterium Coniunctionis, Carl Jung uses the symbolism of unions between male and female to highlight the dynamic transformations which occur in several conjunctions (understood as the transformation of the individual from a lesser to a higher state). This focus on the union of opposites goes back centuries in alchemy.

“That which is below is like that which is above and that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing”

-from the Emerald Tablet (attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, though likely from a 6th-8th century Arabic writer)

The above comes from a cryptic piece of Hermetica (wisdom texts associated with the teachings of the primordial teacher Hermes Trismegistus) which was translated into English in the seventeenth century by Isaac Newton. The text goes on to employ the imagery of sun and moon as father and mother. In alchemy, the sun symbolizes sulfur and the moon mercury.

MAGNUM OPUS, PRIMA MATERIA, AND TRANSMUTATION

Ask anyone with a smattering of knowledge about alchemy what the purpose is and they will likely tell you about the quest to turn base metals into gold or seek immortality. With the rise in popularity of Harry Potter, they may mention the ‘sorcerer’s stone’ or Nicholas Flamel (a fifteenth-century Parisian who became relatively wealthy and was believed to have prolonged his life substantially). There is some truth to this (though, Flamel died in his 70s in 1418 and legends of his survival do not appear until the seventeenth century). His biographer (in 1994) Laurinda Dixon wrote “ Flamel was a real person, and he may have dabbled in alchemy, but his reputation as an author and immortal adept must be accepted as an invention of the seventeenth century.”

Magnum opus, or great work, has special significance when it comes to alchemy. The ‘great work’ of alchemy refers to the process of making the philosopher’s stone. The philosopher’s stone refers to a legendary substance capable of turning base metals into gold as well as being able to prolong life and allow people to become immortal. The prima materia, first matter, is essential that which is necessary to create the philosopher’s stone. Identifying what the prima materia is is not quite clear, as it has been associated with many concepts. Perhaps the clearest way to explain it is to associate it with ether or chaos. For the sake of an alchemical psychological analysis, let’s us proceed with an understanding of prima materia as a kind of chaos but with an understanding that it has been linked to the following in the seventeenth century: microcosms, poison, moon, serpent, dragon, and Mercury.

MERCURY, MERCURIUS, HERMES, HERMES TRISMEGISTUS

Hermes Trismegistus was proportedly a primodrial teacher, an ancient sage and contemporary of Moses. He was believed to have been the author of a series of texts known as the Corpus Hermeticum. Trismegistus means ‘thrice-greatest.’ Hermes Trismegistus is associated with a wisdom tradition which has been dated to the first centuries CE (and, thus, not in the time of Moses) and with Greek-based syncretism in Egypt in Late Antiquity. Hermes Trismegistus is associated with both the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. In alchemy, Hermes or Merucry (Mercurius) is associated with the moon and with that which draws one’s attention.

PIAGET, PSYCHOLOGY, and SELF-DEVELOPMENT

“Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality. They are more or less isomorphic to transformations of reality. The transformational structures of which knowledge consists are not copies of the transformations in reality; they are simply possible isomorphic models among which experience can enable us to choose. Knowledge, then, is a system of transformations that become progressively adequate.” -Jean Piaget, ‘Genetic Epistemology (1968)

Jean Piaget was a development psychologist who established a model with stages of development. One of his goals was the reconciliation of science and religion. His theory of cognitive development centered on childhood, the mistakes children of different ages make while trying to solve problems, and how they played games.

“Knowledge does not begin in the I, and it does not begin in the object; it begins in the interactions….then there is a reciprocal and simultaneous construction of the subject on the one hand and the object on the other.” -Jean Piaget, as quoted by Jordan Peterson in ‘Maps of Meaning’ (p.409)

Piaget analyzed the development of morality from prosocial behavior to the understanding of more abstract ideas. Jordan Peterson outlines a development of morality, based on the ideas of Piaget and Jung (among others) in his Maps of Meaning and lecture material online. From a bottom-up analysis this begins with prosocial behavior. From this, we get symbolic representations of what prosocial behavior might look like. Then we get articulated systems of religious propositions and, finally, philosophy. One of the points of this analysis is that understanding comes before articulation. Peterson uses the example of children playing a game of tag. The children understand how to play the game but each child will give a slightly different explanation of the rules of the game when asked what they are. The understanding of prosocial behavior is, thus far more ingrained and important than the approximate abstract articulation.

A NOTE ON THOMAS KUHN AND PARADIGM SHIFT

Jordan Peterson traces moral developments before the advent of complex articulated mythological or scientific systems. He notes the impact of Thomas Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shift in the history of science. Kuhn’s idea is that old scientific ideas become subsets of new scientific conceptions, generally speaking, rather than simply being pushed aside as outmoded and primitive (historiographically speaking, the old way of thinking of scientific advance has been referred to as a triumphalist history of scientific ideas). Newtonian physics, for example, has become a subset of Einsteinian physics. Moreover, old scientific theories often yield important information derived from bottom-up (experience-centric) processes and the reasons why they are wrong or problematic should not be cast aside as mere ignorance.

“To my complete surprise, that exposure to out-of-date scientific theory and practice radically undermined some of my basic conceptions about the nature of science and the reasons for its special success.
Those conceptions were ones I had previously drawn partly from scientific training itself and partly from a long-standing avocational interest in the philosophy of science. Somehow, whatever their pedagogic utility and their abstract plausibility, those notions did not at all fit the enterprise that historical study displayed. Yet they were and are fundamental to many discussions of science, and their failures of verisimilitude therefore seemed thoroughly worth pursuing. The result was a drastic shift in my career plans, a shift from physics to history of science and then, gradually, from relatively straightforward historical problems back to the more philosophical concerns that had initially led me to history.”

-Thomas Kuhn ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ (1962)

Thomas Kuhn influenced countless numbers of people with his ideas. Those influenced by him include Jean Piaget and Jordan Peterson. Quoting Carl Jung, Peterson states:

“What happens to the (paradigmatic) representational structure in someone’s mind (in the human psyche, in human society) when anomalous information, of revolutionary import, is finally accepted as valid?” — and then answered it (my summary): “What happens has a pattern; the pattern has a biological, even genetic, basis, which finds its representation in fantasy; such fantasy provides subject material for myth and religion. The propositions of myth and religion, in turn, help guide and stabilize revolutionary human adaptations.” -from ‘Maps of Meaning’ (p.405)

MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE SELF — THE ULTIMATE ‘CLEAN YOUR ROOM’

In Mysterium Coniunctionis, Carl Jung brought together his various streams of interest. This was his last major work and extended the work of Jean Piaget in terms of analyzing moral development in the individual. He did this by delineating a symbolic series of unions between male and female elements. This was an extension of his interests in both psychology and alchemy. The male is representative of the ‘known’ and the female the ‘unknown.’ In a relatively recent video, Jordan Peterson outlines the three conjunctions.

First Conjunction: mind (male) and emotion (female) — the purpose here is to integrate one’s rationality and passions.

Second Conjunction: united rational and emotional identity (male) and the way one acts (female) — emphasis on stopping performative contradictions and acting out what one says one will do, full embodiment in the world

Third Conjunction: The united self (male) and the world itself (female) — essentially a pantheistic and holistic perspective, viewing one’s self as inseparable from the world.

Jordan Peterson focuses in Maps of Meaning on the relation between order and chaos and between the explored (masculine) and unexplored (feminine). His work is an extension, in many respects, of that of Carl Jung. The transformation of the individual in this process is associated with the alchemical attempts at transformations of the metals into gold. In his analysis of alchemy, Jordan Peterson spends a great deal of time delineating alchemical outlooks, comparing and contrasting them with modern scientific ones. One of the points he hits on is that the alchemical procedural was historically evaluative.

“Phenomena that emerge in the course of goal-directed behavior are classified as most fundamentally with regard to their relevance, or irrelevance, to that end…Since our behavior is motivated — since it serves to regulate our emotions — it is very difficult to construct a classification system whose elements are devoid of evaluative significance. It is only since the emergence of strict empirical methodology that such construction has been made possible. This means that pre-experimental systems of classification such as those employed in the alchemical procedure include evaluative appraisal, even when they consist of terms such as “matter” or “gold” that appear familiar to us.” -Jordan Peterson ‘Maps of Meaning’ (p.408)

For Jordan Peterson, the force which moves between order and chaos is the hero, mythologically speaking. The archetypical hero is that person with one foot in order and one in chaos. Order provides context/tradition and stability (represented by the ‘Wise King’) but could become corrupt and is blind (represented by the ‘Tyrannical King’). In chaos can be found useful tools to help the hero extend explored territory (the descent into the underworld and heroic journey).

“Alchemical matter was the “Stuff” of which experience was made — and more: the stuff of which the experiencing creature was made. This “primal element” was something much more akin to “information” in the modern sense.” -Jordan Peterson ‘Maps of Meaning’ (p.408)

Jordan Peterson is famous, in part, for telling people to ‘clean their rooms.’ What he is emphasizing here is getting people to orient themselves properly in the world by expanding their domain of competence at a modest level. Everyone likely has a room or some space that they can make a little bit better than it is at present. This is the beginning of a kind of character development, based in the Jungian conjunctions, which lead the individual to a fulfilling existence through getting as close to the archetypes as possible.

Read here Mysterium Coniunctionis, Carl Jung

• Jung and the Monotheisms

Jung and the Monotheisms provides an exploration of some of the essential aspects of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Leading Jungian analysts, theologians and scholars – including Baroness Vera von der Heydt, Ann Belford Ulanov and Murray Stein – bring to bear psychological, religious and historical perspectives in an attempt to uncover the nature and psychology of the three monotheisms. The editor, Joel Ryce-Menuhin, is especially concerned to bring both the essential and comparative elements of the religious psychology of Islam to the attention of the contemporary reader and to provide a forum for an increased dialogue between the three monotheisms. Read here