A longstanding tradition on this blog has it that whenever a month has five Wednesdays, the readers get to propose topics for the fifth Wednesday post, and whichever proposal fields the largest number of votes becomes the topic for that post. This time, the winning theme was the archetypal teachings of Carl Jung, the famous Swiss occultist.
Oh, excuse me, I should have said “psychologist,” shouldn’t I? Certainly he marketed himself as a psychologist during his life, and his followers have by and large defined him and his ideas in those terms after his death. It’s unquestionably true that he attended medical school, specialized in psychology, did postgraduate study at the then-famous Burghölzli psychiatric hospital, became a student of Sigmund Freud, and published a whale of a lot of papers in psychological journals. By and large, it’s only two groups of people who have raised questions about Jung’s bona fides as a scientific psychologist, and it’s fair to say that both groups are fairly marginal these days.
The first of these groups comprises many of Jung’s critics. Richard Noll, the author of The Jung Cult and The Aryan Christ, is perhaps the best known of those just now. Some of my readers may be familiar with Freud’s claim that every male child secretly wants to murder his father and possess his mother. Whether this is true or not in general—I have my doubts—it certainly describes a distinct category of literature about modern psychology, the authors of which are pretty obviously out to murder (or at least commit character assassination against) some famous psychologist and possess (or at least score points against) the school they founded.
Noll is one of these. I found both his books worth reading, though probably not for the reasons he had in mind. His discussion of Jung can be summed up without too much inaccuracy as, “The man was an occultist. Did you hear me? An occultist. Oh, the horror! AN OCCULTIST!!!” To which I and a great many other occultists, who belong to the second of the marginal groups mentioned a little earlier, responded by perking up our ears and saying, “Was he? How very interesting! I wonder what the occult community can learn from him?”
The point Noll made might be easiest to grasp if we slip sideways through the ectoplasmic flux into a slightly different timeline than the one we’re used to. Having landed in the city of Beneficence, Rhode Island—yes, it’s called Providence in our timeline—we stroll over to the nearest upscale bookstore and start to browse the shelves. Here’s the occult section, where there’s a decent selection of books about the magical system of the Ordo Peregrini Orientem, or OPO. In case you don’t happen to be familiar with one of the most colorful organizations of the twentieth century occult revival, let me fill you in. The Order of Journeyers to the East, which is what the Latin name means, was founded in 1921 by two influential Swiss occultists named Carl Jung and Hermann Hesse, and its colorful symbols and ceremonies have been an important influence on the occult scene ever since.
The bookstore we’re in testifies to that. On the shelf are several copies of Liber Novus, Jung’s visionary narrative of the experiences that inspired the OPO, which is required reading for the order’s initiates; next to those is a tell-all volume by Francis King, The Secret Teachings of the O.P.O., which recounts the mysterious “symbols of transformation” members of the order use in their quest for the mystical state of Individuation; then there’s a volume on the highest and most complex teachings of the OPO, which use a strange game played with glass beads to synthesize all human knowledge into mandala-like patterns. It’s heady stuff, but all things considered, it’s not that different from the teachings of other occult schools of the same vintage.
Then we turn to a nearby shelf where books on psychology are waiting. Here you’ll find a shelf full of books about Firthian psychology—yes, it’s got a fancier name, but nobody uses that now except for pedants. The Firthian school was founded in the early twentieth century by two English psychologists, Violet Firth and E.A. Crowley, who both started out as fairly orthodox Freudians but went their own way in the 1920s, founding a system that makes much use of images and ideas drawn from myth, legend, and (whisper it) occultism.
On the shelf is a copy of Firth’s early book The Machinery of the Mind, followed by Sane Psychoanalysis (a collection of essays) and then by one of her novels, The Goat-Foot God, a fictional account of a man’s inner journey from neurosis to robust psychological health. Over here you’ll find The Vision and the Voice by Crowley, an account of some of the work he did with active imagination, and then a hefty volume, Psychology in Theory and Practice, Crowley’s magnum opus, still a commonly studied volume among Firthians despite its eccentricities.
Ah, but over here is a pair of books by somebody named Lon L. Ardrich, The Firth Cult and The British Christ, going on at great length about how Violet Firth was actually an occultist. Those sparked a lot of debate when they first came out, but then Firth’s private book of visionary material saw print, after many years being kept under wraps by her heirs; it’s titled The Cosmic Doctrine, and it pretty much settled the matter, proving just how deep she was into occultism. Now nobody’s quite sure what to make of Firth and Crowley—well, except for members of the OPO and other occult orders, who are saying, “How very interesting! I wonder what the occult community can learn from them?”
At this point, let’s do the time warp again (it’s just a jump to the left!) and plop back into the timeline we normally infest. Here, of course, Carl Jung was a famous psychologist, a student of Freud who went his own way, and Hermann Hesse was a Nobel Prize-winning author, one of Jung’s good friends, who used Jungian ideas extensively in his later novels Liber Novus, better known as The Red Book, was kept under wraps by Jung’s heirs until the copyright ran out, but is widely available now; you can find Jung’s “symbols of transformation” in quite a few of his books, including one titled Symbols of Transformation, and the mysterious game features in Hesse’s last and most intricate novel, The Glass Bead Game. (The volume by Francis King is The Secret Rituals of the O.T.O., i.e., the Ordo Templi Orientis or Order of Templars of the East.)
In our timeline, with a certain madcap symmetry, it was left to Violet Firth and Edward Alexander Crowley to go into occultism instead of Jung and Hesse. Firth took the pen name Dion Fortune, Crowley changed his first name to Aleister, and both became leading figures in twentieth century occult circles. The books of theirs I cited exist, of course, though Sane Psychoanalysis is actually titled Sane Occultism and Psychology in Theory and Practice is Magick in Theory and Practice. Nor, of course, was The Cosmic Doctrine ever squirreled away by Fortune’s heirs as as source of potential scandal: it’s been on the bookshelves of serious occultists since it first saw print not long after her death.
It’s worth taking a moment, to finish the thought experiment I’ve indulged in here, to think through what Firth and Crowley would have had to do if they had decided to market themselves as psychologists rather than occultists. Firth actually had the relevant training—she qualified as a Freudian psychoanalyst in the early days of the British psychoanalytical scene, when a college degree wasn’t yet required—and Crowley could have done the same easily enough. Crucially, though, they would have had to camouflage the obviously occult side of their studies. Both of them included the tarot in their systems; that would have had to go. Both of them used magical rituals straight out of the Golden Dawn tradition; those would have had to go.
Less blatantly occult practices such as scrying in the spirit vision would have had to be given some harmless label, such as “active imagination,” and when they had students make talismans they would have had them make those according to spontaneous personal designs, not traditional ones out of the old handbooks of magic. Dreams, which offer convenient access to the astral plane, might have featured much more significantly in their work, and of course the astral plane itself and the other subtle planes of being, along with much else, would have had to be relabeled in psychological jargon—calling the astral plane “the collective unconscious” or what have you would have been essential. Finally, they would have had to keep their revealed books, The Cosmic Doctrine and The Book of the Law respectively, locked away so that nobody discovered the obviously occult inspiration behind their work.
That is to say, the changes they would have had to make to escape detection as occultists were exactly the changes that Carl Jung made when he assembled his system of psychology.
It’s not as though Jung didn’t have unrestricted access to the occult traditions of his time, after all. Switzerland was a hotbed of occultism in his youth; a cousin of his was a spiritualist medium, and Jung’s doctoral dissertation—titled On the Psychology of So-Called Occult Phenomena—focused on her trance mediumship and its psychological implications. From Toni Wolff, who was by turns Jung’s patient, one of his lovers, and a core member of his inner circle of students, he learned astrology, and routinely cast his patients’ horoscopes in order to plan the course of therapy he meant to use with them.
His volumes on the symbolism of alchemy show just how deeply he got into that branch of occult teachings, and his published seminars on kundalini yoga and related topics show the attentiveness to Eastern traditions that was so common in the occult scene of his time. He ran with many of the leading occultist and occult-adjacent intellectuals of his time, and had close connections with Monte Verità, the Swiss commune that basically invented the Sixties counterculture forty years in advance and also played a crucial role in the history of the Ordo Templi Orientis, the order on which I modeled the “OPO” of my earlier narrative. It’s no exaggeration, in fact, to say that Jung was up to his eyeballs in the occult milieu of early twentieth century central Europe—and so he had to know exactly what he was doing.
Furthermore, what we may as well call Jung’s occult teachings fit neatly into the history of occult thought in the modern Western world. Eliphas Lévi, whose Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic launched the modern magical revival when it was originally published in 1855, set in motion a fascinating transformation in occult thought. For more than a millennium before his time, the main currents of Western occultism all assumed that magical power came from outside the self. Mages used prayer and the sacred names of God to make contact with the sources of magical force, or they tapped into flows of power that were believed to descend from the stars and planets, or (if they were corrupt enough) they tried to bribe or browbeat spirits and demons into doing things for them. The idea that the individual human being might have sources of power in himself or herself was nowhere on the map.
Lévi changed that. A devout if rather eccentric Christian, he held that each human being had the inborn power to direct the astral light, the subtle force through which magic functions, but that most people never grasped their own capacity to shape their lives. That way of thinking caught the imagination of the age, and it joined with two other currents in alternative culture—the tradition of subtle-energy work set in motion by the Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer three quarters of a century before Lévi, and the New Thought psychology launched by the American healer Phineas Parkhurst Quimby at the same time as Lévi’s first publications.
The result was the core tradition of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century occultism in the English-speaking world. It would be fair, in fact, to call it “occultism” pure and simple, since that word was introduced to the English language by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky as her label for the broader movement of which her Theosophical Society offered a somewhat idiosyncratic take. From this perspective, alongside magic—which takes power for its keynote and uses ritual as its central practice—and mysticism—which (at least in the West) takes love as its keynote and uses prayer as its central practice—we have occultism, which takes wisdom for its keynote and uses meditation as its central practice.
This, in turn, is the tradition in which Carl Jung’s work has its natural place. Like other systems of occultism, Jungian psychology seeks to reshape the jumbled mess of the ordinary human personality, not by opening the self to the divine through love as mysticism does, not by sheer force of will backed up by paraphysical powers as magic does, but by a process of insight that leads the mind of the seeker into its own depths, where it encounters the transrational powers that underlie human consciousness and awakens a new and more enduring center of identity. Jung called the process individuation and the new center of identity the Self; other occult schools have other names for the process and the center of identity, but it’s not exactly hard to translate between Jung’s terms and those of his more obviously occult contemporaries.
The fact that Jung’s system had to avoid any obvious connection to occult traditions, during all those years that it pretended to be a system of psychology, is actually an advantage to occult students today. It’s one of the weaknesses of our modern popular culture that so few of us grasp the power provided by limits. Just as the hard walls of a cylinder and a piston can turn the steam that whistles from your teakettle into horsepower, and the rigidity of your bones gives your muscles something to work against, limits imposed on a tradition become a source of strength. Forced to work within strict limits, a tradition pushes those things it can work with much further than it would have done otherwise.
This, in turn, Jungian psychology did. Jungian practitioners took active imagination (their term for the exercise occultists call “scrying in the spirit vision”) at least as far as the Golden Dawn ever did, and took dreamwork much further than any Western occult school known to me. Their work with art, and especially with the process of painting or drawing inner imagery until this evolves into mandalas (their term for what the rest of us call “talismans”), has opened up possibilities that the rest of the occult community has yet to explore. Jungian analyses of myths and symbols likewise pick up where most other occult teachings leave off. Thus there’s a great deal that today’s occultists can learn from Jung and other Jungian writers and teachers.
We may want to get to work on that fairly soon, though, because the Jungian movement as currently constituted is frankly on its last legs just now.
Jungian psychology never was really an effective way to treat severe mental illness, and Jung and his students pitched it accordingly in their time. It marketed itself primarily, to rephrase the title of one of Jung’s popular books, to modern people in search of a soul. Just as Freud targeted the crippling neuroses that the nineteenth-century terror of sexuality made inevitable, Jung targeted the subtler but equally damaging neuroses that nineteenth-century rationalism made just as inescapable, and both men did their work well: after Freud it was impossible to keep pretending that nice people didn’t have sexual cravings, and after Jung it was impossible to keep pretending that the human psyche was nice and clean and reasonable, with nothing in common with the world of myth, symbol, and dream. In that way, both men contributed greatly to the betterment of life in the Western world—but by the same token, both men also guaranteed that their successors would eventually run out of patients.
The downside of that process has been landing hard on Jungian therapists for decades now, and the situation promises to get worse. Partly that’s because the pharmaceutical industry has managed to turn psychiatrists into little more than pill pushers, and the medical industry has settled for drugging patients into numbness instead of, you know, helping them to solve their problems. (I don’t think this is any kind of accident. As the wry slogan goes, “a patient cured is a customer lost.”) Partly it’s because, as already noted, Jungian therapy isn’t all that effective as a treatment for serious mental illness, and so insurance companies are increasingly balking at paying for it. I think the largest share of the difficulty, though, is simply that so many of Jung’s insights have become such commonplaces in modern life that the troubles that once drove many people to Jungian therapists no longer happen anything like so often as they once did.
This doesn’t mean that Jung’s work has lost its value. It means, rather, that the audience for Jungian theory and practice has shifted. The people who might benefit most these days from studying Jung’s ideas and putting his methods to use aren’t the ones he and the first few generations of his students treated, the people who had strayed into neurosis after losing their sense of values, purpose, and meaning, and needed to plunge into themselves to get back to a normal level of functioning. Rather, they’re people who can already function quite well but want to go further, to embrace their own inner potentials to function above the merely normal level.
That is to say, they’re occultists, or potential occultists.
One of the central teachings of occultism is that each of us can be much more than we allow ourselves to be. Every human being contains the potential for magnificence: that’s how one of my teachers used to phrase it. The fact that so many of us settle for so much less, that we crawl like worms when we could stride like titans, is the great tragedy of our species. Carl Jung grasped that, and he offered a tolerably well-stocked toolbox of methods for digging down through the mental detritus to unearth the buried keys of our potential magnificence; he also recognized, like so many other occultists, that those keys fit locks within the self. With this in mind, it may well be time for those of us already committed to that quest to see what we can do about finding a place for Jung’s legacy in the traditions of modern occultism.
Beautifully framed. My spiritual director (and herself a Jungian analyst) suggested analysis for me precisely to drive a reasonably balanced person of spiritual interest on a deepening quest towards their fullness. Magnificence is a work in progress (!) but I am deeply grateful for the prompt and in the second analyst I found a like-minded practitioner of Jung as a ‘magus’ rather than a psychoanalyst!
Nicholas, thank you. This is good to hear; I’ve considered finding a Jungian analyst to work with, partly because I think it would benefit me and partly because it would be a great opportunity to learn an interesting system of occultism. I’ll give that serious thought at this point.
another great piece, thank you very much for writing this. Jung was my introduction to occultism, and i’m glad to see him get his due. i’ve often wondered how much more magic-adjacent his work would have been were his milieu less strictly protestant, but your point about limits is solid.
What a fascinating piece of writing on Jung. I appreciate it, especially as a preparation for reading The Red Book which is on my list of “must-reads.” I’m currently (and have been for a while) amidst reading primary and secondary literature on Hermeticism, and here is where my question comes in. I am intrigued by your crisp categorization of magic (power/ritual), mysticism (love/prayer), and occultism (wisdom/meditation). Hermeticism seems to defy such a neat separation, its discourses bringing all these elements into play. So how do you regard a practitioner who is drawn to all the elements across the categorization you present (and one who also recognizes the necessity of tempering “power” with love and wisdom)? Is such a practitioner trying to do “too much”? You may have other thoughts, beyond my particular question, on navigating the magic/mysticism/occultism distinction. I’d love to hear them. With thanks!
“Carl Jung grasped that, and he offered a tolerably well-stocked toolbox of methods for digging down through the mental detritus to unearth the buried keys of our potential magnificence…”
You mentioned scrying, dreamwork and art via mandalas; did Jung write on meditation / contemplation?
Very interesting! The psychology/psychiatry profession is perhaps the most hidebound and materialistic on the planet…I’ve been a student of prominent psychiatrist and practitioner of regression hypnotism, which he has used quite effectively to treat victims of both childhood and past life traumas…(Dr. Weiss is also the author of Many Lives, Many Masters, and other works on the subject..)
Anyway, a professional friend of his was brought up before a Psychiatry Board of review for using such techniques..Dr. Weiss testified that his friend was merely using Jungian techniques, at which point the inquiry ended…The magic word was Jung…..Dr. Weiss was quite amused by this….
In preparation for this post, I read a book of Jung’s that was clearly intended for a general readership, The Undiscovered Self. Throughout, Jung was implying that there was a third path that was not State-sanctioned materialism, or organized religion, and that “primitive” peoples are better at walking it because they don’t have highly abstracted organized religion or materialism.
His claim that the collective unconscious is somehow stored in our genes seems to me like a tactic to get his concept past rationalist censors, rather than something he actually believed.
I have a question. Are our representations of the physical world constructed on a cordoned-off part section of the astral plane? If so, do (some of) the barriers between it and the outside astral plane dissolve during sleep, allowing for dreams, or does the mind travel into other parts of the astral plane to dream? If I am technically experiencing the astral plane right now, my thoughts must take place outside my representation of the material plane.
And it’s clear to me that a lot of dream interpretation involves guessing which mental plane concepts emanated down into dream imagery.
Thank you John for this, long anticipated, post on Carl G. Jung.
I only had one brief brush with a jungian psychiatrist in my youth, an I am ashamed to say I was to clueless to take advantage of the opportunity.
Still, decades later, Carl Jung has become one of my inspirations/ role models/ exemplars of what a human being is capable of. And a fine challenge to imitate in my own way. There was an old documentary, in black and white, that at the time really impressed me.
Then there is Herman Hesse. It would not have Schockes me, if the man was a practicing occultist. Certainly he was well read in it. Several of his books use occult material, and are detailed enough, that he at least had to have observed and consulted occultists in real life.
Thank you and beast regards,
Marko
John,
how do you view the recent resurgence of interest in Jung’s ideas among young men and also perhaps even a sympathy to them among mainstream American Christians via the lectures of Jordan Peterson? Just a watered down internet fad? Early stirrings of a Second Religiosity? None of the above?
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.
May Jennifer, who is now 36+ weeks into pregnancy with the baby still in breech position, have a safe and healthy pregnancy, may the delivery go smoothly, and may her baby be born healthy and blessed.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Viktoria have a safe and healthy pregnancy, and may the baby be born safe, healthy and blessed. May Marko have the strength, wisdom and balance to face the challenges set before him. (picture)
May Linda from the Quest Bookshop of the Theosophical Society, who has developed a turbo cancer, be blessed and have a speedy and full recovery from cancer.
May Matt, who is currently struggling with MS related fatigue, be blessed and healed such that he returns to full energy; and may he be enlightened as to the best way to manage his own situation to best bring about this healing.
May NPM/Nick’s 12-year-old Greyhound Vera, who passed away on 1/20, be blessed and comforted, and granted rest and a peaceful transition to the next life. (1/23)
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
May MethylEthyl, who recently fractured a rib coughing, heal without complications, and have sufficient help for the move that she and hers are making at the end of the month.
May Sub’s Wife’s major surgery last week have gone smoothly and successfully, and may she recover with ease back to full health.
May David/Trubrujah’s 5 year old nephew Jayce, who is back home after chemotherapy for his leukemia, be healed quickly and fully, and may he, and mother Amanda, and their family find be aided with physical, mental, and emotional strength while they deal with this new life altering situation. (good news update!)
May Mindwinds’s dad Clem, who in the midst of a struggle back to normal after a head injury has been told he shows signs of congestive heart failure, be blessed, healed, and encouraged.
May Corey Benton, who is currently in hospital and whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, be healed of throat cancer. He is not doing well, and consents to any kind of distance healing offered. [Note: Healing Hands should be fine, but if offering energy work which could potentially conflict with another, please first leave a note in comments or write to randomactsofkarmasc to double check that it’s safe] (1/7)
May Christian’s cervical spine surgery on 1/14 have been successful, and may he heal completely and with speed; and may the bad feelings and headaches plaguing him be lifted.
May Open Space’s friend’s mother
Judith be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from cancer.
May Bill Rice (Will1000) in southern California, who suffered a painful back injury, be blessed and healed, and may he quickly recover full health and movement.
May Peter Van Erp’s friend Kate Bowden’s husband Russ Hobson and his family be enveloped with love as he follows his path forward with the glioblastoma (brain cancer) which has afflicted him.
May Daedalus/ARS receive guidance and finish his kundalini awakening, and overcome the neurological and qi and blood circulation problems that have kept him largely immobilised for several years; may the path toward achieving his life’s work be cleared of obstacles.
May baby Gigi, continue to gain weight and strength, and continue to heal from a possible medication overdose which her mother Elena received during pregnancy, and may Elena be blessed and healed from the continuing random tremors which ensued; may Gigi’s big brother Francis continue to be in excellent health and be blessed.
May Scotlyn’s friend Fiona, who has been in hospital since early October with what is a diagnosis of ovarian cancer, be blessed and healed, and encouraged in ways that help her to maintain a positive mental and spiritual outlook.
May Peter Evans in California, who has been diagnosed with colon cancer, be completely healed with ease, and make a rapid and total recovery.
May Jennifer and Josiah, their daughter Joanna, and their unborn daughter be protected from all harmful and malicious influences, and may any connection to malign entities or hostile thought forms or projections be broken and their influence banished.
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“Firthian paychology”
Possible Freudian slip, or just a typo?
You knocked it out of the park! I love stepping sideways through ectoplasmic flux, especially if it gets me a bit closer to becoming an initiate of the OPO.
I’m pretty sure Septem Sermones ad Mortuos is also on the reading list for prospective seekers.
I seem to recall, from reading The Devil’s Chessboard, that Martha (Cl0ver) Dulles, wife of the infamous Alan, was a long time patient of Jung. I rather suspect that Ms. Dulles’ mental and emotional difficulties were the natural and painful result of being married to a powerful sociopath.
Wonderful essay. I’ll want to dig out some of my old Jungian books and reread them before hopefully being ready to tackle The Red Book.
On a less personal note: I’m not sure I agree that Jungian psychology is doing poorly because it succeeded. I suspect rather that, like all forms of genuine occultism, it asks too much of its initiates (i.e. patients), while pop-psychology asks little and permits much. Plus there’s a half-century worth of history in which Jung has suffered from disrepute by association.
If I remember correctly, after Freud has largely achieved the cultural victory against sexual neurosis, he tried to retool his form of psychoanalysis to address the crisis of meaning and purpose, but for Freud, like with the behaviorists, it took the form of trying to get them to grin and bear it. This lead to the rebellion by the humanistic psychologists like Carl Rogers in the 60’s and 70’s, who derided the Freudian/behaviorist ideal of the “organizational man.”
This rebellion against psychoanalysis did not really distinguish between the schools of Freud, Adler, and Jung — it all had to go. This hostility to psychoanalysis was then adopted by both Religious Right and the Skeptic movement, though on somewhat different grounds, and in Jung both saw an enemy who would not commit to either orthodox Christianity or thoroughgoing materialism.
The result was that by the time we got to the brief flowering of the New Atheist movement, its members were serenely able to return to the old rationalist naivities about the power of logic and science to replace superstition and mythology in the human mind and in society. And the final nail in the coffin of any hope of Jung becoming respectable again was probably the rise and fall of Jordan Peterson, who briefly made Jung cool again among young men but then crashed and burned under the influence of prescription opioids and has alienated many of his former fans with his more recent political statements.
Going back to the humanistic psychologists, while they were rebelling against Freud’s poor answer to the crisis of meaning, they unfortunately didn’t actually have a better answer. So they ended up idolizing the rebellious individual, who hopefully would eventually find some sense of meaning and purpose, and this merged with political activism to create the mental health crises we have today.
While pill-pushing is the dominant form of treatment, humanistic psychology survived in an even more degraded form when the self-help genre took off in the 80’s and 90’s, and it’s been highly influential among educators, counselors (including clergy), and media. Media targeting young men and especially young women is saturated with feel-good truisms that trace back to humanist pop-psychology.
So while unquestionably there are some elements of Jungian psychology that have entered the mainstream, I don’t think that’s the primary reason for Jungianism’s precarious circumstances.
Even though I am probably not familiar with all of Jung’s archetypes, the one I do know that resonates with me the most is “The Orphan” (no, I’m not going to sing “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow” for anybody). It’s probably because I feel like less of an Orphan here than anywhere else on the Internet is probably why I gravitated to your original blog in the late two-thousands. It probably also explains my dalliance with neo-primitivism (well, that and a class case of what is known as “reaction formation”) that I was indulging around that same time!
Next up, Wilhelm Reich, Mesmerist Extraordinaire
I quite enjoyed that jump to the left into a parallel world where Jung and Jesse were full blown, openly practicing occultists – though I imagine it’s the pelvic thrust that would really drive Freud insane. 😉
In any case, do you have any recommendations for where someone with an interest in occultism who’s never read Jung might start with reading Jung?
“The fact that so many of us settle for so much less, that we crawl like worms when we could stride like titans, is the great tragedy of our species.”
I can see the overlap here with ecology. In industrial society we have exchanged greatness and beauty for comfort and convenience. Just look at your average suburban couch potato.
Fascinating essay JMG. I have been looking forward to this post and you did not disappoint!
I’ve read a decent amount of Jung, and I still don’t think I’ve ever encountered a straightforward description of Active Imagination as a practice. There are a lot of references to it, and I have heard that Mary-Louise Von Franz does explain it in her writings but I haven’t tracked that down.
In your opinion, is there anything to the Active Imagination technique that one cannot get from the scrying methods described in your occult books? I’m still not 100% clear if Active Imagination requires use of painting, sculpture or other visual arts. If so, that does sound different from scrying which is centered on meditative visualization.
@James Swanson,
I recommend starting with any basic overview of Jung’s work. C.G. Boeree’s chapter in his online personality theories book about him is a good one to start with, as is Eugene Pascal’s Jung to Live By: A Guide to the Practical Application of Jungian Principles for Everyday Life. (Man and His Symbols is Jung’s official introductory book but it’s denser than you need.)
After reading at least one of those, I recommend you read Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which gives you an amazing feel for how he actually saw his ideas applying in real life.
Leo, Protestantism is no obstacle to occultism — the Rosicrucian movement originated among Lutheran occultists in 17th century Germany, for example, and most of the members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn were Anglican Christians. I grant that the Protestant impulse tends to downplay ritual in favor of meditation, and formal structure in favor of spontaneity, but those are simply choices of means.
Eileen, any characterization of the sort I’ve essayed here should be taken as an abstract conceptual model, not a description of individual people! Most people I know who are into the occult practice some blend of all three of the patterns I’ve sketched out; I certainly do. (I’m primarily an occultist, but prayer is also an important part of my practice and I use magic when I have some specific goal that it’s well suited for.) Some traditions focus on just one of the three general approaches I’ve sketched out, but here again there are others — Hermeticism among them — that provide all three options and let the individual sort it out.
Earthworm, not in the works of his that I’ve read, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he slipped it in somewhere.
Pyrrhus, I’m delighted to hear that. I see Jung as a kind of avatar of the alchemical Mercury, with all the trickster qualities that implies.
Marko, you’re most welcome. Hesse was certainly familiar with occultism from early on — his novel Gertrude includes a minor character who is a Theosophist, and although Hesse’s viewpoint character is somewhat skeptical it’s a good clear portrayal. I tend to see Demian as his most occult-friendly book, and there may well have been some practice behind that remarkable portrait of the interactions between the lower and higher self!
Ashlar, it’s too early to tell. It might be a flash in the pan, or it might be the beginnings of a very serious and worthwhile intellectual/cultural/spiritual movement. I’m certainly hoping for the latter. Do you know of any way to get some mainstream talking heads to denounce Jung? That might help things along.
Quin, thank you for this as always.
KM, oh, no doubt Freud was showing off the hem of his slip there.
Justin, if the OPO existed I’ve had joined it decades ago! As for the Seven Sermons to the Dead, those are in The Red Book — those and some of the mandalas are the parts that Jung allowed to be published during his lifetime.
Mary, they may also have been among the weaknesses of hers that left her vulnerable to marrying the guy in the first place.
Slithy, interesting. The humanistic psychologists I read back in the day were generally much less critical of Jung (and also Reich) than they were of Freud and his more doctrinaire followers. That said, both the religious right and the skeptics (two branches of the same fundamentalist tree) were violently hostile to Jung for theological or atheological reasons, so your argument stands. But I think the rise of fantasy fiction and the other frankly myth-friendly elements in our society also played a very important role.
Mister N, I think a lot of people resonate with that archetype these days; I certainly do.
Justin, you can certainly bring him up for a future fifth Wednesday!
James, I wondered how many readers would catch that blast from the past. As for Jung, I recommend Man and his Symbols and Modern Man in Search of a Soul to start with — they’re basically oversized sales brochures for Jungian therapy, but they’ll give you a good sense of the basics. After that, I recommend Symbols of Transformation to plunge into the core ideas of the tradition.
Enjoyer, yep. One of the lessons of ecology is that the individual organism only thrives if the local environment thrives too; the degradation of our environments — including such built environments as homes and cities — is a major factor in the degradation of our lives.
Samurai_47, active imagination = scrying in the spirit vision, full stop, end of sentence. (I’ve read von Franz’s book and several other bits of Jungian literature that clarify the subject.) Active imagination is one of the things that, in Jungian circles, you’re supposed to learn from a qualified therapist — it’s part of their stock in trade — but scrying as such is easy to learn on your own.
Great post! But “Firthian paychology” – ahem, sounds a lot like a Freudian slip! Many psychologists do pad their service price.
Two thoughts.
1) Your analysis of Jung’s work losing its efficacy and its core patient group reminds me of a comment by William James that if New Thought ever became the dominant belief of the status quo, it would lose its power to function, and some other marginal technique would take its place. Partly, because it works by curing the errors of the actual dominant beliefs, and partly because it isn’t as sexy and thus benefits less from the shocking power it has as a fringe idea.
2) Jungian analysts may be having a rough time, but judging by the random Youtube videos coming up in my feed and comments I’ve heard from quite a few people who know nothing of either psychology or occultism, Jung is experiencing quite a popular revival of interest. Most of it centers on the shadow, anima/animus, etc., but I wouldn’t be surprised to see ordinary people begin to take it farther. His archetypes are playing a helpful role for a lot of Millennials and Gen-Zers. Some of them are missing the point, or reworking them into other systems, but I guess that’s how movements of thought proceed.
@JMG:
Ah, if I had the schedule for a vacation. From job, from houe, from studing, … Iwould sit down on a nice coutch and reread Damien. Ahhh…
@Mister N:
If your story qualifies you for “the Orphan”, seeing as it is, as told, very much like mine. Then you are not alone. And this is coming from a literal orphan 🙂
Ashlar and JMG,
There have been a number of mildly critical articles about RFK in mainstream news outlets in the last couple of days. It’s not exactly denunciation, but several of them mention the influence of “philosopher Carl Jung’s” writings on RFK overcoming drug addiction. So he’s another controversial public figure who promotes Jung along with Jordan Peterson. You have to hunt for it, but the work in question is Sychronicity.
I too was intrigued by your crisp categorization of magic (power/ritual), mysticism (love/prayer), and occultism (wisdom/meditation). But I couldn’t help but think of it in terms of the Holy Trinity. With the Holy Spirit corresponding to magic. God the Father corresponding to mysticism, and God the Son corresponding to occultism.
I have been listening to some interviews about Jung on youtube.
And one thing that was said has been giving me much to meditate on was this statement
“wisdom is a climb down from the spiritual heights.”
I had previously assumed that Wisdom was the highest good.
It is interesting to see it as more limited and practical than pure Spirituality.
for those who do videos this one is good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpUhL6yujWc
JMG,
Thanks for this.
FYI to those curious about active imagination. Robert Johnson’s Inner Work gives a clear, solid overview of the practice of engaging in active imagination and working with dreams.
Pierre
“Partly that’s because the pharmaceutical industry has managed to turn psychiatrists into little more than pill pushers, and the medical industry has settled for drugging patients into numbness instead of, you know, helping them to solve their problems. (I don’t think this is any kind of accident. As the wry slogan goes, “a patient cured is a customer lost.”)”
I think there’s another major factor: one of the most dangerous things for our current political and social order is people who are able to think clearly. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the drugs used by the pharmaceutical industry for psychiatric problems are alll remarkably good at numbing the spirit and dulling the mind; nor that they are pushed so hard on the kind of children who ask hard questions or refuse to do what they are told because it does not make sense to them….
What I really like about Jung is he still has enough credence with more open minded ‘everyday’ mostly materialist types that I can get away with sending something like the following interesting piece on the new developing age without it being immediately shot down as an initial opening of a discussion of where we might be headed in the next little while.
‘Jung’s “Platonic Month” and the Age of Aquarius’
https://jungiancenter.org/jungs-platonic-month-and-the-age-of-aquarius/
JMG, I count it a positive result of pre-Agent Steinem feminism that many women today no longer feel and believe that we must cling to social position and social respectability at all costs.
Thank you for mentioning Monte Verita; I was not sure you knew about that group.
“Ah, but over here is a pair of books by somebody named Lon L. Ardrich”
Somebody loves their anagrams…
I’ve read more thought downstream of Jung (James Hillman, Marie von Franz, June Singer) than I have of Jung… though the same older teenager down the street who turned me on to punk rock gifted me a copy of Man and His Symbols when I was in junior high. One of a few doors he opened for me…
That includes the Red Book. When I was a teenager visiting the library and going into the 133 section and the 299s and other sections of the library, one book that haunted my mind was the Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons of the Dead by Steven Hoeller. I need to go deeper into the source, but his massive texts always looked fairly intimidating. Though I read one off parts, on synchronicity, UFOs, and various commentaries, the appendix to the Secret of the Golden Flower and stuff like that.
It’s like there are certain books I need to study to close certain loops that started when I was younger. If I was journaling, and in a way I am, I would say these are untapped potentials for this incarnation. For instance, I was talking about Godel, Escher, Bach awhile ago… I did finish reading some “warm up” math books before to feel better able to tackle it. And for those of you who are interested in the quadrivium, I did write a review of Music by the Number: From Pythagoras to Schoenberg by Eli Maor, which I mentioned before:
https://igloomag.com/reviews/music-by-the-numbers
One of the cool things in that book was a description of Mike Sterilings Bernouli Involute stringed spiral instrument, but I digress.
I’d like to see dreamwork further revived in western occult traditions. I still recommend, with just a few reservations, the work of Robert Moss (mostly the classification of some of it as “shamanic”). Moss wrote a good bit of stuff about Wolfgang Pauli and Jung… a fascinating friendship there. But again, I need to read upstream more in this area.
For that matter, surrealism, and its use of dream imagery and symbols, has a lot of untapped potential for helping break us of the dead ends and failures of imagination this society of spectacle is caught up inside.
So many threads to follow and weave.
So let’s get right to it: What books of Jung’s would you recommend the aspiring occultist to start with? (I ask as though I don’t already have a big backlog of occult tomes to wade through.)
Dear John,
as one of those who consistently voted for this topic until it finally won, let me say: what a beautiful essay!
Oddly enough, I came to occultism through Jung, via von Franz. As I’ve related before, one of her books helped me very much during an existential crisis, which then made me read everything by her that I found. Quickly I realized that it was really the world view behind it all that intrigued me, and which made perfect sense to me. She didn’t play down the occult aspects of this world view (she wrote chiefly for other Jungians, so there was no need to make it seem respectable) but then again she didn’t say, ‘this is a form of occultism’. When I then encountered occultism, mainly through your writings, everything fell into place: ‘Wait a minute, this mysterious “scrying” is simply active imagination? …’
Jungianism also helped me realize that there was a serious third option besides bland atheist-materialism and doctrinaire religion, and thus find my way into the kind of druidical heterodox Christianity I inhabit today.
Anyway, this all reminds me of your remark in ‘Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth’ that in the early 1900s many occultists used psychological language because back then, psychology spoke about culture’s blind spots, and that today ecology could serve a similar role. I wonder if there are any closet occultists right now who are generally seen as ecologists …
Sheldrake is also an interesting case. Sure, he mainly presents himself as a sort of maverick biologist, which he is, but it’s clear that he knows a lot of occult stuff too, and he’s not afraid to talk about subtle bodies and the consciousness of the sun.
Also, I sometimes attend talks at a certain learned society of parapsychologists, and the speakers there use occult concepts freely and without explanation (so they assume everyone in the audience knows them). Then again, parapsychology is itself an outsider field, so there’s less need to pretend respectability there.
Hi JMG,
Thank you for a very thought provoking article. I really appreciate the last paragraph:
“One of the central teachings of occultism is that each of us can be much more than we allow ourselves to be. Every human being contains the potential for magnificence: that’s how one of my teachers used to phrase it. The fact that so many of us settle for so much less, that we crawl like worms when we could stride like titans, is the great tragedy of our species. ”
About 20 years ago I had to take a basic psychology class in order to enter into an MA program in psychology and I felt utterly horrified when the teacher exclaimed quite confidently that it’s impossible for humans to actualize. It’s really unfortunate how much the psychotherapy industry, like the pharma industry, views peoples’ challenges as illness and calls their clients “patients” as though they are broken.
Thankfully, this is changing in small corners of the psychotherapy world where really effective offerings are becoming available that actually acknowledge that a human being’s inherent movement is towards aliveness. That underpinning in the new approaches supports the reality that literally every person has the potential for magnificence.
I’ve long thought that the best benefit of occultism is to be taught it when mentally well. It is of limited use, and perhaps dangerous, if taught when sick. This naturally limits any Jungian approach. I remember once approaching a Jungian therapist when I needed a bit of help, his answer was he couldn’t possibly help me… So no surprises if it’s on its last legs. A sane society would teach this stuff all of the time, so that if things went bad for an individual, they’d have something to work with. In the absence of prior training, all the mind can do is go to instinct or panic when it encounters a situation it isn’t aware of, and that I think underlies a lot of mental illness.
I still have trouble reconciling the general dislike of modern psychiatry and medications amongst occultism. It’s one area where I think there is a blind spot and things are in binaries. Centuries, if not millenia of exorcisms, faith healing, etc, didn’t do much for most cases of psychosis. It took the chance creation of chlorpromazine, the first anti psychotic, to basically clear large asylums overnight. A trained army of Jungians couldn’t have done that.
I get that prescription medications are over prescribed and over abused, and incidentally, the older ones seem to be the better ones, probably because they were developed with genuine care in mind, but any future system of medicine and psychology has to find a place for them in balance and moderation.
I have a theory that with all of us being in the time of Saturn, there’s a reason that medication, being more closely tied to the material plane, can get better results than the older traditions say it will, and whilst I think this may be limited to the astrological age we are in, our systems do need updating accordingly.
Most excellent Archdruid JMG, thank you so much for this deep dive into Jung! There’s a LOT there, and I am very tantalized by your intimation at the end that you have more to say on the subject: “…it may well be time for those of us already committed to that quest to see what we can do about finding a place for Jung’s legacy in the traditions of modern occultism.” Yes, yes!
A note to the commentariat: The Red Book is a bit of a commitment in several ways. It weighs eight pounds! It stands 40 CM tall on the bookshelf! For many people’s houses, it is the proverbial “Elephant in the room” just due to its bulk. Hard to miss! And it has a cost commensurate with its dimensions…
The Red Book is the result of Jung’s “confrontation with the unconscious.” As such, it could be seen as a chronicle of a mental breakdown. But what a magnificent breakdown!
I realize this is reaching a bit, and perhaps it’s just coincidence, but your note about working within limits seems particularly apropos given the release of DeepSeek this past week. There’s already claims the Chinese company who created it “cheated” by re-training on not-so-OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but that doesn’t take away from the achievement as much as Silicon Valley would like it to. I think there’s a lesson that needs to be fully understood there, and as always, you seem to be around the target even when writing on a 5th Wednesday.
Indeed, it might be fair to say, given DeepSeek, given all the sanctions, given the puffery of the Golden Golem of Greatness (JHK hat-tip) that the lesson of living/working within limits just might be the most important lesson we didn’t know we needed to learn right now. Kudos to you for bringing it to the forefront….
@JMG
I may well be overstating the hostility from the humanists. I can believe that early on there was more sympathy, during the heady days of the 60’s and 70’s. But most of them seemed happy to fall in line once materialism became de rigueur in academia the 80’s.
That shift also more or less killed dead the “fourth force” of transpersonal psychology that was emerging to replace the humanists and address their shortcomings. From what I can tell, by the 90’s or 00’s, transpersonal psychology got only the occasional nod that maybe possibly there was something there, and that only because Abraham Maslow, who often stands above even Carl Rogers among the heroes of humanistic psychology, had been among its founders.
You’re also certainly right about the rise of fantasy media, though as I’m sure you realize, in the last decade we’ve seen a concerted attempt to bowdlerize it to conform to the dreary pieties of progressive ideology. Thankfully the tide is turning on that, but I suspect that the damage has been done and the fantasy fad will soon be on its way out, much like the superhero fad is now. By then, of course, we’ll be well into the Second Religiosity, so a larger share of the population will be getting their myth from actual ritual.
So, thinking about it, your argument that Jungian therapy is a solution in search of a problem also stands.
(As a post script: you might be amused to know that Wilhelm Reich is still popular in some radical Leftist circles. The section on anarchist child-rearing in the “An Anarchist FAQ” — which was for a long time and may still be the de facto standard reference on anarcho-socialist theories — cites Reich extensively while also distancing themselves from his orgone theories.)
@Bryan Allen, et al…
There is a paperback laymans version of the Red Book available. I got the library to buy it when it came out.
Similar to Hall’s Secret Teachings of All Ages, the deluxe editions are nice to have from a bibliophilic pov but there are other cheaper editions you can find.
Beautiful, thank you.
I am wondering if the psychology of political leaders is quite different than the average person’s , being at the top of a pyramid of power, and due to the pile of unwholesome things they had to do get there?
Have some psychologists studied those profiles?
“Do you know of any way to get some mainstream talking heads to denounce Jung? That might help things along.”
Oh, I’m almost positive there’s someone, somewhere right now as we speak denouncing him as a white privileged male, fascist, racist, misogynist, transphobic bad guy…. sorry, ahem… bad “person”.
I’m delighted to see this topic covered…it was well worth the wait! I can almost see the Mercurial twinkle in your eye as you celebrate Jung’s undeniable occultist essence.
Samurai_47: The Red Book is a vivid demonstration of what Jung meant by “active imagination.”
In his essay “The Transcendent Function,” (Collected Works Volume 8; The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche), Jung gives a detailed decription of the process, designed for Jungian analysts working with patients.
In C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Marie Louise von Franz presents her understanding of active imagination in the chapter “The Journey to the Beyond.” She writes that the first detailed description of active imagination that Jung published was in his introduction to Richard Wilhelm’s The Secret of the Golden Flower (1929).
I’m coming around to the idea that if one really wants to straighten oneself out psychologically, one can’t avoid topics, concepts, and experiences that fall into the “occult” category. Recently I discovered the work of the psychiatrist Phil Stutz. He has a talk therapy practice and became frustrated with the lack of results for patients with traditional therapy. So he developed a set of tools, which are essentially mini spiritual exercises. They have helped a lot of people and he has a considerable following now. Here’s the thing: he can’t, and doesn’t avoid the fact that the reason they help people is that they create connections with “higher powers” in the “spiritual realm.” He and his collaborators seem slightly embarrassed about this, and they explain the tools in a wink-wink, semi-apologetic way. He is a slightly irascible old guy from the Bronx which I find charming. To paraphrase, “we don’t know what these powers are, but they work. Just shut up and do the exercises and you will experience it for yourself.”
It is a long way from Carl Jung, who has a hyperintellectual approach. Stutz’ tools are very pragmatic exercises to be used throughout the day. I just thought it was fascinating because he is a bona fide psychiatrist and there he is describing his clinical tools as spiritual higher powers.
Mr. Greer:
I was interested in discussing with you a possible podcast interview, and leaving this comment is the only way I can find to connect with you.
Might you have an email address at which I can email you regarding this?
Thank you for your consideration.
Mike Mercier
Hrmmmmm……… The power of limits.
The best of modern civilization may be in front of us if we accept limits.
Climb down from the Faustian Spiritual Goal of pursuing the Infinite / universal on the physical plane and embrace the limited and particular on physical plane. Limit the pursuit of the infinite/ universal to Mathematics.
Ecosophian, yep. See my comments above.
Kyle, James was right, of course — no ideology can solve its own problems, and the ideology of the mainstream is always the main source of problems in a society. As for the revival of Jung, I’m glad to see it — I hope it goes places.
Marko, agreed!
Samurai_47, why, I already knew that I like RFK Jr., and that gives me another reason.
Dobbs, hmm! That works. As for wisdom as a descent from the heights, synchronicity strikes again; just a couple of mornings ago I was meditating on a passage of Manly P. Hall that pointed out that a person isn’t virtuous because he has virtues, he’s virtuous because he can use his virtues intelligently. The visions of the mountaintop are subject to the same rule…
Pierre, thanks for this.
Anonymoose, there’s that!
Jay, interesting. Thanks for this.
Mary, no argument there. As for Monte Verità, I spent quite a while back a few years following up clues relating to early 20th century central European occultism, and then more recently did a lot of reading about the circles around Jung and Hesse. Both of those led straight to Monte Verità.
Anonymous, I thought most of my readers knew that. Look up Fred Halliot sometime.
Justin, my intro to the whole panoply of Jungian ideas was a more or less downstream work, Emma Jung’s The Grail Legend — which remains a fave of mine, and well worth reading. As for threads to weave together, gods, I know.
Cliff, I’ll quote myself above: “I recommend Man and his Symbols and Modern Man in Search of a Soul to start with — they’re basically oversized sales brochures for Jungian therapy, but they’ll give you a good sense of the basics. After that, I recommend Symbols of Transformation to plunge into the core ideas of the tradition.”
Robert K, Sheldrake’s a fascinating case. Either he’s independently rediscovered Dion Fortune’s core concepts — his “morphogenetic fields” are an exact equivalent of the “tracks in space” from The Cosmic Doctrine, for example — or he’s another canny occultist who’s managed to disguise himself as a scientist.
Angelica, good gods. What a miserable worldview that teacher had! I’m glad to hear that there are constructive changes at work in the psych field.
Peter, as I noted in my post, Jungian methods aren’t really suited to serious mental illness. I’d agree, too, that there are some cases that have to be treated by chemical means, especially in acute episodes, but drugs alone aren’t a complete treatment. They’re also massively overprescribed, many of them have ghastly side effects, and the evidence suggests that no small number don’t actually work. Nor was the emptying of asylums necessarily all that much of a success — a very large number of homeless people are mentally ill, and would be much better off in an old-fashioned county farm, where they could be fed, sheltered, and kept safe.
Bryan, there’s a reader’s edition of The Red Book that’s much smaller and less overwhelming. Mind you, I have the gargantuan facsimile edition on my shelves…
Doug, I’m watching that whole sequence of events with great interest. More on this in a future post!
Slithy, I see the massive effort by the corporate wokester scene to abolish fantasy fiction and put a stuffed, mounted, and insanely dull facsimile thereof in its place as testimony to just how much power the untamed imagination has, and just how frightened the current elite is of that. The recent fantasy fad may be on its way out, but that opens a window of opportunity — what’s passed for fantasy in the post-Tolkien era has been a very narrow slice of the much livelier and more interesting fantasy that was around earlier (and had a brief but potent resurgence in the 1970s).
Tony, good question. My guess is that there’s not much difference, since domination and unwholesome activities are quite common much further down the social pyramid, and the tendency to demonize political leaders has more to do with the projection of the Shadow archetype than anything else.
Ashlar, sure, but most people just tune out that sort of vacuous cant these days. Something other than a string of clichés would be helpful for what I have in mind.
Goldenhawk, thank you. I had fun with it, as you doubtless noticed.
Samurai_47, funny. Thanks for this.
Michael, please put through a comment marked “Not For Posting” with your email address and some information about your podcast, and I’ll be in touch.
Dobbs, you’d think that would be dawning on more than a few people at this point…
“I think the largest share of the difficulty, though, is simply that so many of Jung’s insights have become such commonplaces in modern life …” I’m somewhat skeptical about this claim. At least judging from my own experience I’d say one of the great benefits of a Jungian approach to things is that it rather subtly hints at depths beyond the shallow waters we’re normally dawdling in. In this way, it opens up new space and allows us to change our position and perspective on things. That’s how I would characterize the Jung-inspired therapeutic work that I have witnessed so far – it does not aim at changing the client in some way or teaching him some behavioral techniques, but its aim is to allow the client a different, more profound perspective on his life and life in general and let things unfold from there.
The obvious “weakness” of this approach is that the client needs to be able to draw conclusions from his new perspective and further that he is able to derive sensible action from there. Anybody who is not ready to take action for some reason will simply refuse to acknowledge the new perspective and from there on it goes nowhere, at least for the moment. Another general “weakness” of a Jungian approach that it leans very heavily on the rational intellect as a means of transportation to new depths.
Judging from this perspective, I’d say the main reason for a decline in interest in a Jungian approach is a spreading sense of indifference and idleness (or one could also say futility and numbness) in the populace, accompanied by a general decline of intellectual capacity. Everything has become vague and equal, without contrast and depth and there are more narcotics – chemical and otherwise – available than possibly ever before. Many people don’t even seem to be aware of the possibility of something else than the shallow waters they’re told to be in. Why move? But of course the depth are there anyway and sometimes dangerous for the unaware. The fact that so many people fell victim to the C19-psychosis could possibly be seen as some evidence for this.
Greetings,
Nachtgurke
Hello JMG and thank you for terrific essay on Jung. I’m embarrassed to say that as much as I was appreciating your insights as I read the post, my mind was saying “wait, what? – was that really a picture of Violet Firth/ Dion Fortune with her hair down, literally?” Or did I miss some aspect of the joke? Perhaps I missed “the step to the right”😉 but I thought all the pics of the majestic Dion Fortune were limited to the very few I’d seen.
Thanks a lot for this post! I’m immensely grateful to Jung (and Marie-Louise von Franz) for their work, which has helped make sense of many things in my life. There seems to be a porous, blurry interface between deeply held core beliefs and archetypes, the personal and the impersonal, that I’m in the thick of learning about.
About mandalas: was there ever any connection between Jung and Manly Hall?
JMG, I have a question. I don’t follow what sort of patients Jung and company helped when they started out. I understand the patients and the conditions that Freud helped, unacknowledged sexual desire, causing necrosis. What was it about 19th century rationalism that he was treating and why don’t we have that now.
Thanks
Will O
Just want to extend my appreciation for your writing this, JMG. Perfect timing for my life. Brings so much together. Thank you kindly.
Okay who else suddenly wants to form the OPO?
JMG–if you want another example of an author scoring points against the founder of a school of psychology there is _Freud: the Making of an Illusion_, by Frederick Crews. Crews is actually an English professor whose work I first encountered in _The Pooh Perplex_, a parody of literary criticism case book with humorous essays on the depths of the works concerning Winnie the Pooh. In the work on Freud, Crews uses recently released journals and other new evidence to completely destroy any idea of Freud as an honest researcher or scientist. The book goes after its subject like one of those tomahawks with a club on one side and a blade on the other. As a point of occult interest Crews also wrote about the “recovered memory” movement and the role of Freuds work in that. Since the “recovered memories” frequently had a Satanic component the whole thing had a bad effect on the occult and Pagan scene.
Rita
Oddly, the image of Dion Fortune Staring at the McGuffin that you use is one that I would describe as “most likely to be bogus”. It appears as far as I know only at Theosophy Wiki (https://theosophy.wiki/en/Dion_Fortune). It looks nothing like any of the actual attested images of Violet Firth/Dion Fortune, who has very different hair, a different facial structure, and more plausible period clothing. The image of Fortune as priestess is more plausible, and seems to have come from some Theosophical archive, but the facial structure does seem a bit off.
Compare the attested images of Fortune as a teenager (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/4e/Dion_Fortune.jpg/220px-Dion_Fortune.jpg), Fortune as a schoolgirl (https://eruizf.com/martinismo/autores/dion_fortune/dion_fortune.jpg), Fortune ., Fortune as a child poet (https://www.hermetics.org/images/jpg/Dion-Violet-Firth-The-Bystander-March-14-1906-5.jpg), Fortune with her husband (https://www.controverscial.com/Fortune_WEB.gif), and so on. These other images have appeared widely in books by people with close connections to Fortune and her circles.
I’d be happy to be corrected, but I think that image of Fortune Adoring the McGuffin is probably a mis-attribution.
In what ways, if any, do you suppose Jung’s occultism may have contributed to his being a great doctor, and in particular a great healer?
After all these years we finally get the reading list that we’ve been asking for. On the other hand the timing does seem rather auspicious.
“ The recent fantasy fad may be on its way out, but that opens a window of opportunity — what’s passed for fantasy in the post-Tolkien era has been a very narrow slice of the much livelier and more interesting fantasy that was around earlier …”
This sounds like good news to me. I can’t wait to see the wacky fun fantasy that presumably must be on its way.
Re: your division of magic, occultism, and mysticism:
I thought about this, and I think that the path of the magician ultimately leads to willing that things happen with your entire unified will, and becoming a god who can direct forces and influence events when he achieves Gwynfydd. But to do so, he needs to have decent relations with higher powers and ease his load of bad karma. But those are secondary considerations for him.
The path of the mystic leads to becoming a saint, angel, or maybe even vessel of one’s deity.
The occultist gains self-knowledge and probably becomes a more subtle sort of spirit or deity than the former magician.
While meditating, it occured to me that Faustian society probably hates magic* partly because a popularization of effective magic would threaten monopulization of power and the ability of the culture to pursue its grand goals.
*I wondered why Faustian culture has been hostile to magic even though acquiring ever more power and control appeals to its worldview of linear progress.
On Mount Veritas, Martin Green’s book Mountain of Truth is an absolute blast!
I haven’t studied Jung, but I’ve been studying alchemy. @Dobbs’ comment about Wisdom being a climb down from the spiritual heights and JMG’s comment about virtuous is using virtues intelligently made me think it might be a good time to share a model I’ve been working on.
Model is posted here https://i0.wp.com/druidalchemist.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Model-of-the-Planes.jpg?w=642&ssl=1 (and on my Dreamwidth).
@Dobbs, I think Wisdom would be considered a climb down because it is not a Unity, but rather part of the first duality.
@JMG, in my model, Intelligence is on the Spiritual Plane, in the central position. Right Action (which aligns with using virtues intelligently in my mind) is also in the central position, but on the Astral. (And Herakles has to demonstrate Right Action to move from the Physical-Etheric to the Astral…)
(And JMG, after reading your post, I think I shall have to study Jung, too. Like JPM said, so many threads…)
@Dobbs
Thats why the infinite expansion went physical, the metaphysical pursuit of Faustian Culture was maxed out in the 18th century. Calculus, irrational numbers etc and their expression in orchestral music, got to the very limits of the abstract pursuit of infinity and had no where left to go. This is always when civilisation sets in and breadth in the physical realm takes over from depth in the metaphysical.
Back when I was seeking out a psychoanalyst, as my completely unrecognized kundalini awakening began to really spiral out of control, I was absolutely convinced that I needed to find a Jungian analyst. That galvanizing clarity may well have been a deep gift from my kundalini awakening, as it offered up various tools useful towards its own integration into my thoroughly disoriented Self.
The Jungian analyst that I eventually worked with had not ever gotten a masters degree in psychology, sociology, or any other supposedly related field. She had her masters in divinity, and that, I have to say, made all the difference! What an extraordinarily rich several years those turned out to be. Marion utilized several esoteric techniques for accessing her soul’s innate understanding during our sessions. A few of those I still don’t have any idea how they worked, such as holding a hand along the bridge of her nose, separating off the right and left visual fields from each other. Of course, she always practiced those occult techniques as surreptitiously as possible, so I never broke off my narrative to ask her precisely how they worked. That I do regret.
Marion also had an up-close and personal view of the various stresses fracturing apart the Jung Institute in New York, which I only got a second-hand view of from my boyfriend’s long-term and rather less-than-successful therapy with that institute’s director. Marion and I used to crack up about the Jung Institute’s being unable to “contain the opposites” within itself, as it splintered apart in factionalism. Ah, good times, those were the days! Little could I have imagined then how vast were the unexplored depths of the Self, which I had just barely begun to notice peeking up above the surface of my subconscious.
The limits imposed by trying to stay well outside of one’s adversaries’ radar do tend to cause the most impressive bursts of creativity to take place out along the fringes, or, shall I say, up against those limits. A well-policed consensus doctrine may strangle all the life out of its own depleted soil, but what extraordinary fertility it confers on the land outside of its stranglehold.
I wonder what kind of a dismissable funny-hat-wearing occultist Jung would have become had he not decided to try to make an incognito pass in the heart of respectable society? I also wonder what kind of a respectable social scientist John Michael would have become had he not decided to try to stay completely outside the mainstream culture’s radar altogether?
With so many different ways of avoiding detection to choose from, how is an aspiring occultist to decide which set of limits might best enrich his efforts? Obviously, that would be a rhetorical question, given “and to keep silent.” Shhh!
I read a little from Jung some years ago. One thing I do remember is a statement that the archetypes are “complexes of instinctive behavior”. Could someone please elaborate on this?
Nachtgurke, your first factor would have been just as true in 1925 as it is in 2025, and yet Jungian therapy was wildly popular then and is fading out now. As for “indifference and idleness,” oddly enough, those are exactly the sort of things that were said about the “lost generation” of the 1920s. That is to say, I’m as unconvinced by your explanation as you are by mine.
Jill, I found it on a Theosophical website; I’m entirely willing to believe that it’s inaccurate — and posting it here seemed like a good way to get people to check on it.
Jbucks, I don’t know of any connection between them. Hall’s exposure to mandalas, which led to his very solid book on the subject, was by way of Shingon Buddhism, into which circumstantial evidence suggests he took layman’s initiation; his book on mandalas includes far more detail on the two Shingon mandalas, the Vajradhatu and Garbhadhatu mandalas, than any English source known to me until quite recently.
Will, Jung’s typical patients by and large did everything “right” — they were successful, respected, integrated into society, and going slowly crazy because their lives seemed hopelessly devoid of meaning and value. Within the worldview of 19th century materialism that was incomprehensible — remember that orthodox psychologists rejected the idea of unconscious thought as a contradiction in terms and insisted that the surface level of the mind was all there is, so the very idea of unconscious or half-conscious inner needs was anathema to them. Jung did as much as anyone to change that.
Randall, you’re most welcome and thank you.
Rusty, it’s a fun thought, isn’t it?
Rita, Freud’s been the object of several such campaigns; Jeffrey Masson’s Assault on Truth is another very Oedipal volume.
LeGrand, so noted. Yes, that’s where I got it; I’m very poor with faces, so I figured posting it here would be a good way to check its bona fides.
Kevin, my take is that a lot of people needed occultism in their lives, and Jung figured out a respectable way to get it to them.
KVD, it’s not the first time I’ve listed those books…
Kevin, here’s hoping!
Patrick, my goals as an occultist are less colorful; I’d like to be wiser than I am.
Jim, thanks for this — I’ll see if I can find a copy.
Random, interesting. Thanks for this.
Christophe, I considered two options. The first, during my first pass through college in the 1980s, was a career as a botanist focusing on the ecology of mosses and other primitive plants in the forest understory: the kind of specialty that’s so far from anything controversial that I could have gotten away with almost anything under suitable pseudonyms. The second, in my second pass through college in the 1990s, was a career in history of ideas focusing on Renaissance and early modern Hermeticism, which was a hot field then and remains so today. Either one might have worked, but I chose otherwise.
Mary, sure. If you read up on the study of animal behavior you’ll find that the instincts, in practice, are very often triggered by specific stimuli, often visual: for example, baby geese are born programmed to treat the largest moving object in their immediate vicinity as Mom, and follow it around. (Konrad Lorenz used to get himself adopted by goslings that way.) Since humans, like other primates, rely especially on visual stimuli, images are what trigger our instincts — and the archetypes are the deep patterns that underlie those images. This one’s the archetypal image of Dad, aka the Wise Old Man; this one’s the archetypal image of the lover, aka the animus, and so on.