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dimanche, 28 octobre 2018

The Fallacy of Progress

progrès,progressisme,philosophis,anthropologie,konrad lorenz,alexis carrel,carl gustav jung

The Fallacy of Progress

Our “progressive” obsessions for change neglect to consider consequences. Change is demanded for the sake of a fad or a slogan: “equality,” “democracy,” “reproductive rights” . . . Even a word of caution is damned as “reactionary,” “old-fashioned,” or “fascist.” Traditions, customs, and beliefs are regarded as being as transient as the planned obsolescence of computers. The assumption by the “positivists” is that history is a straight line from “progress” and “primitive” to “modern,” and that anything or anyone who stands in the way is what Marx, in The Communist Manifesto, vehemently damned as a “reactionist.”

The “positivist” assumption was a conscious break with the past; its founder, de Condorcet,[1] [2] was an ideologue of the French Revolution, albeit meeting his fate like many others. Marx was in the same mold. Under the impress of the same zeitgeist, Darwinism was applied to social history and economics and used to justify another type of revolution: the industrial, and nineteenth-century positivists, including Social Darwinists, confidentially saw the nineteenth century as the culmination of all hitherto existing societies. This optimism among the highest intellectual circles was cogently expressed by A. R. Wallace, who was next to Darwin in importance in propounding the theory of evolution: “Not only is our century superior to any that have gone before it but . . . it may be best compared with the whole preceding historical period. It must therefore be held to constitute the beginning of a new era of human progress . . .”[2] [3]

As a reminder that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are trapped in the same mental straitjacket of “progress” and, ironically, that historical perspectives have not “progressed” beyond the dogmatic assumptions of de Condorcet, Marx, or Wallace, influential academics such as Francis Fukuyama assure us with the same certainty that liberal democracy, under the auspices of the United States, is not only the culmination of all hitherto existing history, but that it is equally applicable to all humans. Moreover, once its universal dispensation has been achieved, this will be literally “the end of history,” and there will be global happiness via production and consumption, and aesthetics will have become so deadened that there is no differentiation between Beethoven and pop.[3] [4] This description is not a spoof or satire.

What is assumed is that man, as a “higher animal,” is so detached from nature that he can mold himself into whatever form he desires, and that the method and aim are justified by a preconceived ideology that shows it to be “true,” whether as Jacobinism, Marxism, or Free Trade. Man, through “social laws,” is above all organic and ecological considerations. It is erroneous for conservatives to assume that Marxism is based on “environmentalism,” considering that the Marxist doctrine states that by changing the environment – under socialism – human nature is thereby changed. Rather, Marxism regards the laws of ecology, just as much as “biologism,” as the laws of Mendelian hereditary, and Marxist regimes tried to overcome both.[4] [5] Hence, doctrines that insist that man is subject only to social laws and the laws of production – that is, doctrines of economic reductionism, whether of the socialistic or capitalistic varieties (both stem from the same outlook) – insist in a hubristic manner that humanity is impelled towards a Promethean conquest of all nature, and can without restraint impose its will upon the universe. What is required is an understanding of the laws of social progress that circumvent all others. How cynical that Marxists entered en masse into the ranks of the ecological and “green” movements – initiatives of the Right – after the Marxist failure to make any headway among the “international proletariat,” that only existed in the imaginings of reading-room ideologues!

The restraint that was so condemned by Marx as “reactionism,” and meets the same chorus of hatred today by “progressives” of all persuasions, is the anchor of tradition. So far from being a regressive personality trait, it is a trait of mature wisdom, drawing on the accumulation of millennia of experience and epigenetically conveyed over generations as “culture” and “custom.” It is what is ridiculed by the “progressives” – who, in their feigned intellectualism, have discarded, obscured, slandered, or buried those who really did seek to understand the nature of being human, whether as philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Anthony Ludovici, and Oswald Spengler,[5] [6] or as scientists, such as the physiologist Alexis Carrel, the zoologist Konrad Lorenz, the psychologist Carl Jung, or the present-day biologist Rupert Sheldrake.[6] [7]

jungCGp.jpgCarl Jung

Carl Jung, father of analytical psychology, made the point that Western man’s psyche is not keeping pace with his technology. The levels of our unconscious are multi-layered, reaching back to primordial existence, yet Western technology has exponentially leaped ahead, leaving behind the anchorage of tradition in the acclaimed “march of progress.” Jung wrote of this:

Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The “newness” of the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no place in what is new. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in things that have just come into being. We are certainly far from having finished with the middle ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend. Nevertheless we have plunged into a cataract of progress which sweeps us into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it take us from our ranks. The less we understand of what our forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts.[7] [8]

The psyche becomes fractured in contending with a discrepancy between millennia of ancestral experiences and the jolt of what is “modern,” and which aims to discard such primordial wisdom as redundant. Mentally fractured individuals create socially-fractured entities still inaccurately named “societies,” with a multitude of social pathogens. Jung considered the ultimate aim of the individual to be “individuation,” the integration of the fractured parts of the psyche of the individual, and beyond that, of the collective unconscious of the race and of society.

carrelmic.jpgAlexis Carrel

Alexis Carrel was a Nobel Prizewinning physiologist. He departed from the safety, comfort, and fame of life in the United States to return to his native France in a time of need to work during the war with the National Revolutionary regime of Marshal Petain. Carrel was also concerned with the degeneration and fracturing of “modern man” caused by progressivism. In his best-selling 1937 book, Man the Unknown, Carrel addressed these problems:

[M]en cannot follow modern civilization along its present course, because they are degenerating. They have been fascinated by the beauty of the sciences of inert matter. They have not understood that their body and consciousness are subjected to natural laws, more obscure than, but as inexorable as, the laws of the sidereal world. Neither have they understood that they cannot transgress these laws without being punished.

They must, therefore, learn the necessary relations of the cosmic universe, of their fellow men, and of their inner selves, and also those of their tissues and their mind. Indeed, man stands above all things. Should he degenerate, the beauty of civilization, and even the grandeur of the physical universe, would vanish . . . Humanity’s attention must turn from the machines of the world of inanimate matter to the body and the soul of man, to the organic and mental processes which have created the machines and the universe of Newton and Einstein.[8] [9]

Carrel, like Jung, was not a materialist; he regarded the “soul” as important, if still not understood by science. Science has resolved very little of the great questions of life, wrote Carrel, and civilization was having a degenerative affect:

We are very far from knowing what relations exist between skeleton, muscles, and organs, and mental and spiritual activities. We are ignorant of the factors that bring about nervous equilibrium and resistance to fatigue and to diseases. We do not know how moral sense, judgment, and audacity could be augmented. What is the relative importance of intellectual, moral, and mystical activities? What is the significance of aesthetic and religious sense? What form of energy is responsible for telepathic communications? Without any doubt, certain physiological and mental factors determine happiness or misery, success or failure. But we do not know what they are. We cannot artificially give to any individual the aptitude for happiness. As yet, we do not know what environment is the most favorable for the optimum development of civilized man. Is it possible to suppress struggle, effort, and suffering from our physiological and spiritual formation? How can we prevent the degeneracy of man in modern civilization? Many other questions could be asked on subjects which are to us of the utmost interest. They would also remain unanswered. It is quite evident that the accomplishments of all the sciences having man as an object remain insufficient, and that our knowledge of ourselves is still most rudimentary.[9] [10]

In a conclusion similar to that of Jung on the discrepancy between the exponential advances of mechanical and material civilization and of the human conscious and unconscious, Carrel warned:

The environment which has molded the body and the soul of our ancestors during many millenniums has now been replaced by another. This silent revolution has taken place almost without our noticing it. We have not realized its importance. Nevertheless, it is one of the most dramatic events in the history of humanity. For any modification in their surroundings inevitably and profoundly disturbs all living beings. We must, therefore, ascertain the extent of the transformations imposed by science upon the ancestral mode of life, and consequently upon ourselves.[10] [11]

Modern civilization finds itself in a difficult position because it does not suit us. It has been erected without any knowledge of our real nature. It was born from the whims of scientific discoveries, from the appetites of men, their illusions, their theories, and their desires. Although constructed by our efforts, it is not adjusted to our size and shape.[11] [12]

KL-portr.jpgKonrad Lorenz

Konrad Lorenz, the father of the science of ethology, the study of instinct, gave a warning from an ecological viewpoint, that the abandonment of customs and traditions is steeped with dangers which are likely to be unforeseen. Culture is “cumulative tradition.”[12] [13] It is knowledge passed through generations, preserved as belief or custom. The deep wisdom accrued by our ancestors, because it might be wrapped in the protection of religions and myths, is discounted by the “modern” as “superstitious” and “unscientific.” Lorenz referred to the “enormous underestimation of our nonrational, cultural fund, and the equal overestimation of all that man is able to produce with his intellect” as factors “threatening our civilization with destruction.”

Giambattista Vico,[13] [14] a precursor to Spengler, tried to warn about this superficiality of intellectualization and its rejection of tradition – including religion – at the time of the Renaissance, the much-lauded beginning of the epoch of the West’s decay. Ibn Khaldun attempted the same when there was still something left of the Islamic civilization,[14] [15] on the verge of becoming fellaheen, as Spengler called such spent civilizations, or historically passé. We can say the same about Cato, and many others faced by the “progressives” of their own civilization when entering upon the epoch of decay. “Progress” is one of the great illusions of our time, just as it was in the analogous epochs of other civilizations over the course of thousands of years.[15] [16] If Jeremiah, Cato, or Herodotus were to be transported to this time in the West, they might laugh or sneer at the banal slogans of our “progressives” and “moderns,” and reply, “I’ve seen it all before . . . and it does not end well.”

“Being enlightened is no reason for confronting transmitted tradition with hostile arrogance,” stated Lorenz. Writing at a time when the New Left was rampant, as it is today under other names, Lorenz observed that the attitude of youth towards parents shows a great deal of “conceited contempt but no understanding.”[16] [17] Lorenz perceived a great deal of the psychosis of the Left as a pathogen in the social organism, as it remains today: “The revolt of modern youth is founded on hatred; a hatred closely related to an emotion that is most dangerous and difficult to overcome: national hatred. In other words, today’s rebellious youth reacts to the older generation in the same way that an ‘ethnic’ group reacts to a foreign, hostile one.”[17] [18]

What is of interest is that Lorenz saw this as a youth subculture that was tantamount to a separate, foreign ethnos, when a group forms around its own rites, dress, manners, and norms. In the biological sciences this is called “pseudospeciation.” With this new group identity comes a “corresponding devaluation of the symbols” of other cultural units.[18] [19] The obsession with all that is regarded as “new” among the youth revolt was described by Lorenz as “physiological neophilia.” While this is necessary to prevent stagnation, it is normally gradual and followed by a return to tradition. Such a balance, however, is easily upset.[19] [20] In the psychology of individuals, fixation at the stage of neophilia results in behavioral abnormalities such as vindictive resentment towards long-dead parents.[20] [21] This lack of respect for tradition is aggravated by the breakdown of traditional social hierarchy, mass organization, and “a money-grabbing race against itself”[21] [22] that dominates the Late West.

Since Lorenz wrote of these symptoms of Western decay during the 1970s, the Western social organism has continued to fracture, and as one would expect, it has been exponential – a collective rush to insanity that is ironically upheld as “healthy” by humanistic psychologists, who are themselves afflicted with the psychosis and produce papers and books “proving” that, to cite the latest “progressive” fad, one’s gender is a matter of choice. Again we confront the ideological opposition to “biologism” that kept Lysenko in a job.

Destruction of Symbols is Symbolic

There is now the presence – vastly greater than in Lorenz’s time – of actual ethnoi that have no attachment to the West, but maintain a great resentment. There is also further pseudospeciation among women in terms of radical feminism and “gays,” possessing their own manners, rites, dress, terms of speech, and even their own flags and other symbols. They are united in their hatred of the West, denigrated as “white patriarchy”; with its symbols being torn down and its heroes ridiculed as “dead white males.” The destruction of the traditional symbols of one’s forefathers is a redirected form of matricide and patricide that became a doctrine during the psychotic days of the New Left, among the “Weathermen” and Yippies and so on during the 1960s, when Charles Manson became a revolutionary hero, and Jerry Rubin rejoiced in the death of his mother – who, had it not been for cancer, he would have had to murder.[22] [23] We currently witness the group psychosis of the New-New Left in the compulsion to destroy Confederate monuments, and the frenzied, atavistic hitting and kicking at toppled bronze statues with the frenzy of the Italian mob kicking at the lifeless bodies of Mussolini and Clara Petacci.

This vandalism of the symbols and monuments of tradition is a substitute for murder, such as is unleashed during revolution, like that directed at Confederate memorial statues; by official decree at the statues of General Franco in Spain; and the recent abortive effort to get a statue of New Zealand colonial officer Colonel Marmaduke Nixon torn down, presumably as the beginning of a process, through a colossal distortion of colonial history.[23] [24] It is in each case an example of trying to obliterate the tradition that serves as an anchor, without which hubris leads to self-destruction. In other circumstances, these types – and they are types – would have been burning churches in Spain, or destroying ancient monuments in Iraq.

Notes

[1] [25] Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955).

[2] [26] A. R. Wallace, The Wonderful Century (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1985).

[3] [27] Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History? [28]”, The National Interest, Summer 1989.

[4] [29] K. R. Bolton, The Decline and Fall of Civilisations (London: Black House Publishing, 2017), pp. 121-124.

[5] [30] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of The West (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971).

[6] [31] Rupert Sheldrake, “Morphic resonance: Introduction [32].”

[7] [33] C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), pp. 235-236.

[8] [34] Alexis Carrel, Man the Unknown (Sydney: Angus & Robertson Ltd., 1937), Preface, p. xi.

[9] [35] Carrel, I, p. 1.

[10] [36] Carrel, I, p. 3.

[11] [37] Carrel, I, p. 4.

[12] [38] Konrad Lorenz, Civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), p. 61.

[13] [39] Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1948).

[14] [40] Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, tr. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1969).

[15] [41] Bolton, The Decline and Fall of Civilisations, passim.

[16] [42] Lorenz, p. 64.

[17] [43] Lorenz, p. 64.

[18] [44] Lorenz, pp. 64-65.

[19] [45] Lorenz, p. 69.

[20] [46] Lorenz, pp. 69-70.

[21] [47] Lorenz, p. 73.

[22] [48] Jerry Rubin, Growing (Up) at 37 (New York: Warner Books, 1976), pp. 140-142. This is followed with a few elaborations that enter new realms of psychosis. See K. R. Bolton, The Psychotic Left (London: Black House Publishing, 2013).

[23] [49] Farah Hancock, Newsroom, September 8, 2017, “South Auckland’s Uncomfortable History [50].”

Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: https://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: https://www.counter-currents.com/2018/10/the-fallacy-of-progress/

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[50] South Auckland’s Uncomfortable History: https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2017/09/07/46506/south-aucklands-uncomfortable-memorial

 

samedi, 21 avril 2018

Françoise Bonardel: Jung et la Gnose

Carl-Gustav-Jung.jpg

Françoise Bonardel

Jung et la Gnose

Françoise Bonardel présente son dernier ouvrage Jung et la Gnose paru aux éditions Pierre Guillaume de Roux. Soutenez nous.
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lundi, 21 décembre 2015

Wotan as Archetype: The Carl Jung Essay

odin__the_allfather_by_vyrilien-d93f35w.jpg

Wotan as Archetype:
The Carl Jung Essay

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com

In the denazification atmosphere following World War II Carl Jung, founder of analytical psychology, found himself accused of having ‘Nazi’ sympathies. While Jung was a man of the ‘Right’[1] his essay explaining Hitlerism as an evocation of Wotan as a repressed archetype of the German collective unconscious put him on the long suspect list of intellectuals who were accused of being apologists for National Socialism.[2] He was fortunate to have been in a neutral nation in the aftermath of World War II.

Certainly, Jung’s school of psychology does not endear itself to the Left in general and to the large numbers of Jews in psychology. A recent biographer states of Jung’s falling out with his mentor Sigmund Freud:

Freud himself was inclined to believe his problems with Jung typified a general incompatibility between Jew and gentile, that Jung hated the ‘Jewishness’ or psychoanalysis and wanted to substitute a Christianised version. Here was irony indeed. Freud had wanted Jung to be an apostle to the gentiles, to prevent psychoanalysis from becoming a Jewish sect. But Jung played the role of St Paul in a quite different sense. Just as Paul had substituted neo-Platonic ‘Christology’ for the original teachings of Jesus, so Jung proposed a psychoanalysis purged of the elements that had kept Freudianism ghettoised as a construct of Viennese Jews.[3]

Hence, when Jung gave his ‘lecture on Wotan, which was first published in 1936,[4] and republished after the war as part of a collection of analytical observations on the modern world,[5] he did so as a doctor diagnosing a phenomenon; not as a political crusader. He was offering observations and explanations in detached, scholarly manner, which is always difficult for many in academia to understand.

Archetypes

Jung’s conception of the psyche as comprising three ‘layers’, including the collective unconscious, is briefly explained in this volume in my essay ‘Odin and the Faustian Imperative’, where Jung’s ‘Wotan’ essay is also mentioned. Archetypes, in Jungian psychology, are prototypes of symbols that are inherited and reside within the unconscious. These symbols transcend the individual psyche and are inherited from the collectivity of our ancestors. They are therefore both universal at the most primal level, in the sense of there being a ‘human race’, and they are also racially specific, in the sense that the ‘human race’ became differentiated (assuming that it was not always so), and differentiate further in terms of culture.

Wotan is an archetype of the Germanic collective unconscious. In explaining the influence of psychic forms on humanity, Jung returned to the archetype of Wotan in a letter to his friend, the Chilean diplomat and writer Miguel Serrano. Jung when writing this in the 1960s was attempting to suggest remedies for the modern predicament of civilised man. While eschewing the mass society that was being accelerated by technology, Jung stated that modern man, or at least the Westerner, must try to find his individual identity without retreating into hyper-individualism: ‘He can only discover himself when he is deeply and unconditionally related to some, and generally related to a great many, individuals with whom he has a chance to compare, and from whom he is able to discriminate himself.’[6]

Within this wider association of the individual there are layers of inherited ancestral experience passed on through millennia; deposited in the individual’s personal unconscious, which is itself a part of the collective unconscious, the reoccurring motifs becoming protosymbols or archetypes. The psyche is like a storehouse or memories not only pertaining to one’s own experiences but also to the collective experiences of one’s forebears, embracing the wider sense of the race and culture, and ultimately the history of a more universal memory at its most elemental, universal level. The layers of the psyche might be seen as analogous to the layers of the human brain, which is a physiological record of cerebral evolution that includes the most primal, the limbic system and the central core, and the most recent, the cerebral cortex.

According to Jung, the ‘Gods, Demons and Illusions’ are names for the inherited inhabitants of the psyche, individually and collectively:

…they exist and function and are born anew with every generation. They have an enormous influence on individual as well as collective life and despite their familiarity they are curiously non-human. This latter characteristic is the reason why they are called Gods and Demons in the past and why they are understood in our ‘scientific’ age as the psychical manifestations of the instincts, in as much as they represent habitual and universally occurring attitudes and thought forms. They are the basic forms, but not the manifest, personified or otherwise concretised images. They have a high degree of autonomy, which does not disappear, when the manifest images change.[7]

Repressed psychic complexes continue to influence not only the individual, but also the collectivity. It is commonly enough known that repression causes mental illness in an individual. However, the same principle applies to repression in entire nations and cultures. If these repressed complexes are not identified and integrated, they manifest in other, unhealthy, ways. A Jungian explanation of repression is that:

There is general agreement that many of the things in the unconscious have become unconscious as a result of repression[…]. This means that there are some things that are unconscious that, at one time or another, have been conscious, and ‘repression’ is a word used to indicate that this has happened. Repression is very closely connected with forgetting.

[…] although we may have forgotten something there is an important sense in which it is still ‘there’ in our psyche and this is what we mean by saying that it is unconscious.[8]

wotan1.jpgThe things that are repressed are those that undermine our image of ourselves if we remembered them.[9] Hence, the Germanics, having been a Christian folk for centuries, were required to repress their ancestral Heathenism, and Wotan thereby became an archetype relegated to the ‘shadow’ of that folk’s collective unconscious, but continuing to exist nonetheless. While repression might play a healthy role in individual development, it is usually undesirable. The Jungian, David Cox, continues:

The first reason why repression is more bad than good is that it means losing some part of oneself. When we wholly forget something we have thought or done, or something that has happened to us it is not merely a matter of forgetting that thing, we also refuse to see that we are the sort of person capable of behaving in the way that we did […]. It may be that there are things that would be so destructive to a man’s character if he did not repress them that it is much better that they should remain repressed, and it is certain that there are right times for everything, so that it might be that it is better not to recover a repressed memory at some particular time.[10]

The second reason why repression is liable to have negative consequences is that,

[…] although the result of repression may be that we do not know about a particular tendency within us, that tendency is still there and it is liable to interfere with our conscious aims. […] Repressed tendencies are able to cause all kinds of peculiar distortions in our behaviour, just because we do not known about them. When we realise that we have tendencies of a particular kind we can do something about trying to control them, but so long as they remain unconscious we can exercise no control over them whatsoever.[11]

In understanding the concepts of repression, the shadow and the collective unconscious, one begins to see why Jung approached Hitlerism with a hopeful attitude, in that this was a manifestation on a mass scale of potentially individuating an entire nation by means of uncovering the repressed archetype and channelling it to conscious good, rather than letting it fester in subterranean, and ultimately destructive manner. Such a raising to consciousness was, regardless of the final outcome, a necessity, because the Germanics still had these unresolved complexes that were entering into the technological age. It seems to have been something that had been awakened by the combined savagery and technology of World War I, and as the poem (cited below) of the soldier Hitler indicates, he was already coconscious of this in 1914.

When a patient seeks assistance from an analyst, the latter aims to bring to consciousness the repressed complexes that are unconsciously influencing the individual. The same pattern of repressed memories and complexes reside within the collective unconscious of a people. Jung in witnessing the mass resurgence of Germanic primeval passions, called the archetype from the ‘shadow’ or repressed aspect of the Germanics ‘Wotan’. To Jung this was of more relevance than a study of social, political and economic phenomena in understanding the sudden and often frenzied mass mobilisation of the Germans under Hitler. Of Wotan Jung stated to Serrano that:

When, for instance, belief in the God Wotan vanished and nobody thought of him anymore, the phenomenon originally called Wotan remained; nothing changed but his name, as National Socialism has demonstrated on a grand scale. A collective movement consists of millions of individuals, each of whom shows the symptoms of Wotanism and proves thereby that Wotan in reality never died, but has retained his original vitality and autonomy.

Our consciousness only imagines that it has lost its Gods; in reality they are still there and it only needs a certain general condition in order to bring them back in full force. This condition is a situation in which a new orientation and adaptation is needed. If this question is not clearly understood and no proper answer is given, the archetype, which expresses this situation, steps in and brings back the reaction, which has always characterised such times, in this case Wotan.[12]

While much of a sensationalist nature has been written about Hitler being possessed by demons, or controlled by occult forces, etc.,[13] from the Jungian perspective it is relevant to ask whether Hitler was the individual through which the Wotan archetype was ‘brought back in full force’, manifesting in ‘a new orientation and adaptation’? Hitler seems to have been conscious of the Wotanistic force coming to consciousness in the trenches of World War I, when he wrote a ‘strange poem’[14] during the Fall of the first year of that war:

I often go on bitter nights
To Wotan’s oak on the quiet glade
With dark powers to weave a union –
The runic letters the moon makes with its magic spell
And all who are full of impudence during the day
Are made small by the magic formula!
They draw shining steel – but instead of going into combat
They solidify into stalagmites.
So the false ones part from the real ones –
I reach into a nest of words
And then give the good and just
With my formula blessings and prosperity.[15]

The poem reads like a choosing and initiation of Wotan’s Einherjar in the trenches of the war in readiness for the black and brown shirted battalions that were to be formed largely from veterans. Toland remarks that a few weeks later Hitler ‘made a portentous prophesy to his comrades: “You will hear much about me. Just wait until my time comes”’.[16]

Of the problems confronting modern Western man who had entered the technological age without having integrated the psychic layers from previous epochs, and which therefore laid repressed, the Germans were the most problematic. The imposed Christian veneer was thinner among them than others, according to Jung, and the Heathen gods nearer the surface. The repressed Wotan archetype made Germans as a collectivity prone to mass hysteria, which did not, however, preclude a generally normal life, just as the individual hysteric could generally be normally functional. It was recognised in history as the furor Germanicus, and this was what Hitler was channelling.[17] When Jung wrote his essay on Wotan he did so in order to show how his theories on the collective unconscious had been verified. It was a warning to modern man to recognise and integrate what was being repressed before the archetypes of the ‘shadow’ burst forth in an overwhelming, destructive manner.

The concept of the ‘shadow’ is important in analytical psychology. While the ‘shadow’ connotes all that it dark and devilish that has been repressed by civilised man, it also carries creative impulses and sound instincts. According to Jung, all archetypes develop favourable and unfavourable effects. They reflect a polarity or what Jung called a complexio oppositorum.[18] The Jungian analyst seeks to unite these conflicting opposites within the individual to create an integrated or total person, or what in Jungian psychology is called ‘individuation’; what Jung called a ‘whole’[19] person. This might also be seen as the psychological counterpart to Hegel’s historical dialectic of history: that of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The analogy occurs to McLynn, who writes that ‘individuation’ is: ‘as in Hegel’s system, the self-actualisation of the ultimate world principle, which in Jung’s terms is the objective psyche. Jung’s system is thus a psychological version of Hegel’s objectification of history’. [20] This is why Jung advocated a ‘wait and see’ approach to the rise of Hitlerism, rather than immediate and hysterical denunciations, as this was a potential unfolding of a psychological dialectic and there existed the possibility of a collective individuation for an entire people. It might also provide an example of how mankind could enter the technological age, when, as Jungians assert, his psyche is still influenced by previous layers of unconscious psychic experience dating from millennia.

Jung’s Essay: ‘Wotan’

The essay ‘Wotan’ was written in 1936, three years after the Hitlerite assumption. Jung had contact with the German Faith Movement, allied to Hitlerism, and knew its leader Jacob Hauer, who had attended Eranos Conferences at Ascona, Switzerland, where he had impressed Jung with his talks on the racial unconscious by using Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious as a predicate.[21] Jung insisted even after the war that since every archetype contains both good and evil, it was impossible to immediately know what course National Socialism would take.[22] As for the essay itself, Jung had observed that in Germany it ‘is that an ancient God of storm and frenzy, the long quiescent Wotan, [that] should awake, like an extinct volcano’,[23] while in Soviet Russian a worship of science manifested also in violent eruption against the metaphysical.

The embryonic manifestation had been observed among German youth in the aftermath of World War I, who roamed the countryside to commune with nature, reverting to the Heathen ethos in a world of technology that had become nihilistic. Jung noted that Wotanist rites had even attended the manifestation:

We have seen him come to life in the German Youth Movement, and right at the beginning the blood of several sheep was shed in honour of his resurrection. Armed with rucksack and lute, blond youths, and sometimes girls as well, were to be seen as restless wanderers on every road from North Cape to Sicily, faithful votaries of the roving god.[24]

Jung was here referring to the generically named wandervogel and other similar groups that rebelled against bourgeoisie materialism, beginning during the late 19th Century. It was the start of a movement that was a reaction against the modern world, which ended up contributing to the emergence of the hippie movement during the 1960s and 1970s, [25] heavily influenced by German immigrants.[26] Gordon Kennedy directly relates this return to nature that manifested in Germany among the youth to the revival of Germanic Heathenism and to Wotan and other ancient Gods.[27] Kennedy and Ryan describe this as ‘a huge youth movement that was both anti-bourgeois and Teutonic Pagan in character, composed mostly of middle class German children, organized into autonomous bands’. [28]

The atavistic resurgence could have taken different forms to that of Hitlerism, but as Jung and others observed, Hitler was a magician, a ‘medicine man’, and an ‘avatar’,[29] able to give form and expression to the Germanic ‘shadow’. In 1937 Jung described Hitler as ‘a medium… the mouthpiece of the Gods of old…’[30]

From the wandervogel and similar movements of disaffected youth, the atavistic revolt was taken over by the masses of unemployed, among whom were many war veterans, whose roaming was not through the hills and countryside but through the depressed streets of Weimer Germany.

Later, towards the end of the Weimar Republic, the wandering role was taken over by thousands of unemployed, who were to be met with everywhere on their aimless journeys. By 1933 they wandered no longer, but marched in their hundreds of thousands. The Hitler movement literally brought the whole of Germany to its feet, from five-year-olds to veterans, and produced a spectacle of a nation migrating from one place to another. Wotan the wanderer was on the move. He could be seen, looking rather shamefaced, in the meeting-house of a sect of simple folk in North Germany, disguised as Christ sitting on a white horse. I do not know if these people were aware of Wotan’s ancient connection with the figures of Christ and Dionysus, but it is not very probable.[31]

Wotan, the wanderer, had inspired the wandervogel and other youth, as Kenndey and Ryan stated in their study of the counter-culture movement. He now assumed his role as leader of the Wild Hunt, as his ‘avatar’ began to gather up the aimless, wandering masses:

Wotan is a restless wanderer who creates unrest and stirs up strife, now here, now there, and works magic. He was soon changed by Christianity into the devil, and only lived on in fading local traditions as a ghostly hunter who was seen with his retinue, flickering like a will o’ the wisp through the stormy night. […].[32]

With the imposition of the Christian veneer on a folk whose God had been driven into the ‘shadows’, waiting to be evoked, Wotan had continued to make his presence felt on the peripheries of consciousness of the Germanics as an elusive figure, the leader of the Wild Hunt, who was now being called back to conscious expression in his role as pre-eminent God. Jung states that Wotan had been kept in sustenance by Germany’s literary figures, and in particular by Nietzsche, who was a seminal influence on Jung’s thinking.[33] The Wotanic force had too often been identified with its Classical Dionysic form by academe, but there seems little point in referring to a Classical archetype for a Germanic one, other than as mean of analogy. Jung stated of this literary tradition that kept the Wotanic force alive, albeit in Classical mode:

The German youths who celebrated the solstice with sheep-sacrifices were not the first to hear the rustling in the primeval forest of unconsciousness. They were anticipated by Nietzsche, Schuler, Stefan George, and Ludwig Klages. The literary tradition of the Rhineland and the country south of the Main has a classical stamp that cannot easily be got rid of; every interpretation of intoxication and exuberance is apt to be taken back to classical models, to Dionysus, to the peur aeternus and the cosmogonic Eros. No doubt it sounds better to academic ears to interpret these things as Dionysus, but Wotan might be a more correct interpretation. He is the god of the storm and frenzy, the unleasher of passions and the lust of battle; moreover he is superlative magician and artist in illusion who is versed in all secrets of an occult nature.[34]

Jung sees Wotan in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra,[35] although Nietzsche seems to have been writing unconsciously under the influence of the hidden god:

Nietzsche’s case is certainly a peculiar one. He had no knowledge of Germanic literature; he discovered the ‘cultural Philistine’; and the announcement that ‘God is dead’ led to Zarathustra’s meeting with an unknown god in unexpected form, who approached him sometimes as an enemy and sometimes disguised as Zarathustra himself. Zarathustra, too, was a soothsayer, a magician, and the storm-wind.

Jung quotes from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to show the analogous nature between the two, drawing specifically on these figures as conjurers of storms:

And like a wind shall I come to blow among them, and with my spirit shall take away the breath of their spirit; thus my future wills it.

Truly, a strong wind is Zarathustra to all that are low; and this counsel gives he to his enemies and to all that spit and spew: ‘Beware of spitting against the wind’.

And when Zarathustra dreamed that he was guardian of the graves in the ‘lone mountain forest of death’, and was making a mighty effort to open the gates, suddenly. A roaring wind tore the gates asunder; whistling, shrieking, and keening, it cast a black coffin before me.

And amid the roaring and whistling and shrieking the coffin burst open and spouted a thousand peals of laughter.

The disciple who interpreted the dream said to Zarathustra:

Are you not yourself the wind with shrill whistling, which bursts open the gates of the fortress of death?

Are you not yourself the coffin filled with life’s gay malice and angel-grimaces?

Nietzche’s Zarathustra seems to be a perfect poetic expression of Wotan, as well as being a prophetic insight into the ‘wind with shrill whistling, which bursts open the gates of the fortress of death’ in Germany less than forty years later? To buttress his case for what might be considered as Nietzsche’s own unconscious possession by the God, Jung sites three poems by Nietzsche that had been written over the course of several decades. The poems show that although Nietzsche was unconscious of the identity of this ‘Unknown God’, Jung continues, he was certainly aware of the god’s existence and influence upon him. It indicates also something of the still very subterranean life of Wotan in the collective unconscious of Germans that Nietzsche was not able to put a name to the God, despite its obvious Wotanic character:

In 1863 or 1864, in his poem To the Unknown God, Nietzsche had written:

I shall and will know thee, Unknown One,
Who searchest out the depths of my soul,
And blowest through my life like a storm,
Ungraspable, and yet my kinsman!
I shall and will know thee, and serve thee.

Twenty years later, in his Mistral Song, he wrote:

Mistral wind, chaser of clouds,
Killer of gloom, sweeper of the skies,
Raging storm-wind, how I love thee!
Are we not both the first-fruits
Of the same womb, forever predestined
To the same fate?

In the dithyramb known as Ariadne’s Lament, Nietzsche is completely the victim of the hunter-god:

Stretched out, shuddering,
Like a half-dead thing whose feet are warmed,
Shaken by unknown fevers,
Shivering with piercing icy frost arrows
Hunted by thee, O thought,
Unutterable! Veiled! Horrible one!
Thou huntsman behind the cloud.
Struck down by thy lightening bolt,
Thou mocking eye that stares at me from the dark!
Thus I lie.
Writhing, twisted, tormented
With all eternal tortures.
Smitten
By thee, cruel huntsman,
Thou unknown – God!

When Nietzsche famously declared ‘God is dead’, clearly there was the need to attach a clarification. This ‘Unknown God’ was anything but dead and had Nietzsche in his grip. If Hitler was the ‘avatar’ of Wotan, Nietzsche was the scribe and prophet. Jung refers to a mystical experience that Nietzsche had which indicates a state of possession by Wotan as an archetype:

This remarkable image of the hunter-god is not a mere dithyrambic figure of speech but is based on an experience which Nietzsche had when he was fifteen years old, at Pforta. It is described in a book by Nietzsche’s sister, Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche. As he was wandering in a gloomy wood at night, he was terrified by a ‘blood-curdling shriek from a neighbouring lunatic asylum’, and soon afterwards he came face to face with a huntsman whose ‘features were wild and uncanny’. Setting his whistle to his lips ‘in a valley surrounded by wild scrub’, the huntsman ‘blew such as a shrill blast’ that Nietzsche lost consciousness – but woke up again in Pforta. It was a nightmare. It is significant that in his dream Nietzsche, who in reality intended to go to Eisleben, Luther’s town, discussed with the huntsman the question of going instead to ‘Teutschenthal’ (Valley of the Germans). No one with ears can misunderstand the shrill whistling of the storm-god in the nocturnal wood.

Was it really only the classical philologist in Nietzsche that led to the god being called Dionysus instead of Wotan – or was it perhaps due to his fateful meeting with Wagner?

wotan2.jpgThe imagery has the characteristics of Wotan as leader of the Wild Hunt. It is in this role that Wotan had survived his relegation to the ‘shadow of the German collective unconscious, which enabled him through the centuries to re-emerge into consciousness. It is in this role that Wotan has manifested from Scandinavia to Switzerland. Nietzsche’s dream contains all the primary elements of the myth. It is in forests at night that an unwary traveller might encounter a frightening countenance of Wotan, with the cry of ‘Midden in dem Weg!’, while his fellows shout ‘Wod! Wod!’[36] Nietzsche as a lad of 15 had encountered the ‘Unknown God’ as Wotan in the form of the Wild Huntsman, but had never recognised him. Despite his later poetic descriptions of the ‘Unknown God’ who is unmistakably Wotan, his identity remained obscured by Nietzsche’s Classical preoccupations. Jung continues with another prophetic vision among the Germans of the return of Wotan:

In his Reich ohne Raum, which was first published in 1919, Bruno Goetz saw the secret of coming events in Germany in the form of a very strange vision. I have never forgotten this little book, for it struck me at the time as a forecast of the German weather. It anticipates the conflict between the realm of ideas and life, between Wotan’s dual nature as a god of storm and a god of secret musings. Wotan disappeared when his oaks fell and appeared again when the Christian God proved too weak to save Christendom from fratricidal slaughter. When the Holy Father at Rome could only impotently lament before God the fate of the grex segregatus, the one-eyed old hunter, on the edge of the German forest, laughed and saddled Sleipnir.

Hence, when Hitler triumphed over Germany Jung regarded the role of archetypes in explaining the phenomenon as of more use than political or sociological interpretations:

We are always convinced that the modern world is a reasonable world, basing our opinion on economic, political, and psychological factors. But if we may forget for a moment that we are living in the year of Our Lord 1936, and, laying aside our well-meaning, all-too human reasonableness, may burden God or the gods with the responsibility for contemporary events instead of man, we would find Wotan quite suitable as a causal hypothesis. In fact, I venture the heretical suggestion that the unfathomable depths of Wotan’s character explain more of National Socialism than all three reasonable factors put together. There is no doubt that each of these factors explains an important aspect of what is going on in Germany, but Wotan explains yet more. He is particularly enlightening in regard to a general phenomenon, which is so strange to anybody not a German that it remains incomprehensible, even after the deepest reflection.

Perhaps we may sum up this general phenomenon as Ergriffenheit – a state of being seized or possessed. The term postulates not only an Ergriffener (one who is seized) but, also, an Ergreifer (one who seizes). Wotan is an Ergreifer of men, and, unless one wishes to deify Hitler – which has indeed actually happened – he is really the only explanation. It is true that Wotan shares this quality with his cousin Dionysus, but Dionysus seems to have exercised his influence mainly on women. The maenads were a species of female storm-troopers, and, according to mythical reports, were dangerous enough. Wotan confined himself to the berserkers, who found their vocation as the Blackshirts of mythical kings.

A mind that is still childish thinks of the gods as metaphysical entities existing in their own right, or else regards them as playful or superstitious inventions. From either point of view the parallel between Wotan redivivus and the social, political, and psychic storm that is shaking Germany might have at least the value of parable. But since the gods are without doubt personifications of psychic forces, to assert their metaphysical existence is as much an intellectual presumption as the opinion that they could ever be invented. Not that ‘psychic forces’ have anything to do with the conscious mind, fond as we are of playing with the idea that consciousness and psyche are identical. This is only another piece of intellectual presumption. ‘Psychic forces’ have far more to do with the realm of the unconscious. Our mania for rational explanations obviously has its roots in our fear of metaphysics, for the two were always hostile brothers. Hence, anything unexpected that approaches us from the dark realm is regarded either as coming from outside and, therefore, as real, or else as a hallucination and, therefore, not true. The idea that anything could be real or true which does not come from outside has hardly begun to dawn on contemporary man.

For the sake of better understanding and to avoid prejudice, we could of course dispense with the name ‘Wotan’ and speak instead of the furor Teutonicus. But we should only be saying the same thing and not as well, for the furor in this case is a mere psychologizing of Wotan and tells us no more than that the Germans are in a state of ‘fury’. We thus lose sight of the most peculiar feature of this whole phenomenon, namely, the dramatic aspect of the Ergreifer and the Ergriffener. The impressive thing about the German phenomenon is that one man, who is obviously ‘possessed’, has infected a whole nation to such an extent that everything is set in motion and has started rolling on its course towards perdition.[37]

It is evident from the above passages that Jung was observing a phenomenon and explaining its origins, in a detached, scholarly manner. However, for many in academia detached, scholarly objectivity regarding such matters is tantamount to being a ‘Nazi sympathiser’, and one can only apparently escape the smear by hysterical declarations of opposition reading more like political tracts than to try to examine a phenomenon in a clinical manner, and thereby perhaps render some genuine service to mankind. Jung was observing what was taking place in Germany on a collective basis, as he would observe and analyse a patient as an individual. He was also offering an early warning where the phenomenon might lead, once the ‘psychic force’ of Wotan had been unleashed, which might assume the role of leader of the Wild Hunt, pitilessly taking all before it, rather than as his role of muse who had shortly before inspired the happy wanderings of thousands of German youngsters, as they hiked the countryside, far and wide, singing to the tunes of mandolin and guitar in joyous rejection of the materialistic and technological epoch,[38] and which now manifested in the Hitler Youth and League of German Maidens. Jung contiues:

It seems to me that Wotan hits the mark as an hypothesis. Apparently he really was only asleep in the Kyffhauser mountain until the ravens called him and announced the break of day. He is a fundamental attribute of the German psyche, an irrational psychic factor which acts on the high pressure of civilization like a cyclone and blows it away. Despite their crankiness, the Wotan-worshippers seem to have judged things more correctly than the worshippers of reason. Apparently everyone had forgotten that Wotan is a Germanic datum of first importance, the truest expression and unsurpassed personification of a fundamental quality that is particularly characteristic of the Germans. Houston Stewart Chamberlain[39] is a symptom which arouses suspicion that other veiled gods may be sleeping elsewhere. The emphasis on the German race – commonly called ‘Aryan’ – the Germanic heritage, blood and soil, the Wagalaweia songs, the ride of the Valkyries, Jesus as a blond and blue-eyed hero, the Greek mother of St. Paul, the devil as an international Alberich in Jewish or Masonic guise, the Nordic aurora borealis as the light of civilization, the inferior Mediterranean races – all this is the indispensable scenery for the drama that is taking place and at the bottom they all mean the same thing: a god has taken possession of the Germans and their house is filled with a ‘mighty rushing wind’. It was soon after Hitler seized power, if I am not mistaken, that a cartoon appeared in Punch of a raving berserker tearing himself free from his bonds. A hurricane has broken loose in Germany while we still believe it is fine weather.[40]

Atavistic resurgence had conquered ‘reason’, which itself often had assumed forms – and continues to do so – that are irrational and take on religious manifestation, giving testimony to the irrational forces that continue to guide man, whatever the rationalist veneer. Hence, the ‘Enlightenment’ gave rise to the antagonistic Cults of ‘Reason’ and of ‘Nature’ among the French Revolutionaries, whose ideologues unfurled the banner of ‘science’, only to become manifest in the spectacle of an actress adorned, classical style, as the ‘Goddess of Reason’ upon the altar of Notre Dame Cathedral in 1793, while scientific materialism in the USSR deified the corpse of Lenin by mummifying it and entombing it within a stepped pyramid.[41]

odin-eight-legged-horse.jpg

While the Germanic armies reasserted the fury of the Teutons with Wotan unbound, was the reaction of the Allies any less ferocious? One cannot ask such questions in a scholarly manner now any more than in Jung’s time, without expecting to be vilified as a ‘Nazi sympathiser’. We are bound by a moral dichotomy that owes its origins to a God of a different culture. However, might it not be said, given such unusual phenomena as the hangings at Nuremberg[42] or the Morgenthau Plan for the post-war extermination of the Germans and the obliteration of their statehood,[43] that the reaction against the Wotanic storm from out of Germania, was a storm of another type from out of the Levant? Here confronting Wotan was Yahweh, the tribal God of Vengeance, who had metamorphosed over centuries under the impress of the Westerner and assumed the form of the ‘Aryan Christ’,[44] but who was now reasserted in all his ancient tribal fury as a jealous Levantine God of War[45] at the head of the Allied armies. A God moreover whose storms of fire literally incinerated hundreds of thousands in the cities of Dresden, Hamburg, and others. Elsewhere in the ‘Wotan’ essay, Jung alludes to this historical phenomenon of confrontation with a foreign God, referring to Yahweh:

It has always been terrible to fall into the hands of a living god. Yahweh was no exception to this rule, and the Philistines, Edomites, Amorites, and the rest, who were outside the Yahweh experience, must certainly have found it exceedingly disagreeable.[46]

What made Jung hopeful in regard to Hitlerism was that the evocation to conscious recognition of the Unknown God offered the potential opportunity to recognise atavistic impulses and deal with them positively, as the analyst deals with the repressed complexes of the individual, which might then be integrated in a positive and creative manner. It was a mass experiment in analytical psychology that might provide lessons to other peoples and cultures to resolve their inner conflicts.

It is above all the Germans who have an opportunity, perhaps unique in history, to look into their own hearts and to learn what those perils of the soul were from which Christianity tried to rescue mankind. Germany is a land of spiritual catastrophes, where nature never makes more than a pretense of peace with the world-ruling reason. The disturber of the peace is a wind that blows into Europe from Asia’s vastness, sweeping in on a wide front from Thrace to the Baltic, scattering the nations before it like dry leaves, or inspiring thoughts that shake the world to its foundations. It is an elemental Dionysus breaking into the Apollonian order. The rouser of this Tempest is named Wotan, and we can learn a good deal about him from the political confusion and spiritual upheaval he has caused throughout history. For a more exact investigation of his character, however, we must go back to the age of myths, which did not explain everything in terms of man and his limited capabilities, but sought the deeper cause in the psyche and its autonomous powers. Man’s earliest intuitions personified these powers as gods, and described them in the myths with great care and circumstantiality according to their various characters. This could be done the more readily on account of the firmly established primordial types or images which are innate in the unconscious of many races and exercise a direct influence upon them.

Jung now comes to another of his controversial theories; that archetypes became racially differentiated with the differentiation of mankind into races. Jung had elsewhere said of these racial differences that are present in the collective and individual unconscious:

Thus it is a quite unpardonable mistake to accept the conclusions of a Jewish psychology as generally valid.[47] Nobody would dream of taking Chinese or Indian psychology as binding upon ourselves. The cheap accusation of anti-Semitism that has been levelled at me on the grounds of this criticism is about as intelligent as accusing me of an anti-Chinese prejudice. No doubt, on an earlier and deeper level of psychic development where it is still impossible to distinguish between an Aryan, Semitic, Hamitic, or Mongolian mentality, all human races have a common collective psyche. But with the beginning of racial differentiation, essential differences are developed in the collective psyche as well. For this reason we cannot transplant the spirit of a foreign race in globo into our own mentality without sensibility injury to the latter, a fact which does not, however, deter sundry natures of feeble instinct from affecting Indian philosophy and the like.[48]

Given the recognition of racial differentiation in analytical psychology, Jung was therefore able to interpret the actions of nations according to their archetypes, such as their Gods, stating of this in his ‘Wotan’ essay:

Because the behaviour of a race takes on its specific character from its underlying images, we can speak of an archetype ‘Wotan’. As an autonomous psychic factor, Wotan produces effects in the collective life of a people and thereby reveals his own nature. For Wotan has a peculiar biology of his own, quite apart from the nature of man. It is only from time to time that individuals fall under the irresistible influence of this unconscious factor. When it is quiescent, one is no more aware of the archetype Wotan than of a latent epilepsy. Could the Germans who were adults in 1914 have foreseen what they would be today? Such amazing transformations are the effect of the god of wind, that ‘bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, nor whither it goeth’. It seizes everything in its path and overthrows everything that is not firmly rooted. When the wind blows it shakes everything that is insecure, whether without or within. […][49]

However, racial differentiation does not account for the character of the archetypes. Given that, according to Jung, the mind is comprised of inherited layers, not only are the characteristics of the mind inherited on a racial basis but also on a cultural basis. While, as previously mentioned, our brain is comprised of organs that reflect different levels of evolution, from the limbic system to the cerebral cortex, similarly, the unconscious reflects an inherited cultural legacy. This means that ‘modern man’ has been pushed into technological civilisation, and change has been increasing exponentially. Modern man’s psyche is not entirely — not even mainly — ‘modern’. Layers of the mind exist which are inherited from prior cultural epochs, including the most primal. Jung explained this cogently in his autobiography:

If the unconscious is anything at all, it must consist of earlier stages of our conscious psyche… Just as the body has an anatomical prehistory of millions of years, so also does the psychic system. And just as the human body today represents in each of it parts the result of this evolution, and everywhere still shows traces of its earlier stages – so the same may be said of the psyche.[50]

Further, Jung stated of this:

Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The ‘newsness’ of the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no place in what is new. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in things that have just come into being. We are certainly far from having finished with the middle ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend. Nevertheless we have plunged into a cataract of progress which sweeps us into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it take us from our ranks. The less we understand of what our forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts […].[51]

Modern man exists in a technological world, the progress of which is exponential, but his psyche is not able to keep pace with the change. His mind does not ‘progress’ in similar exponential manner. It is a problem also considered by the great physiologist Alexis Carrel, another man of the ‘Right’:[52]

The environment which has moulded the body and the soul of our ancestors during many millenniums has now been replaced by another. This silent revolution has taken place almost without our noticing it. We have not realized its importance. Nevertheless, it is one of the most dramatic events in the history of humanity. For any modification in their surroundings inevitably and profoundly disturbs all living beings. We must, therefore, ascertain the extent of the transformations imposed by science upon the ancestral mode of life, and consequently upon ourselves.[53]

[….] Human beings have not grown so rapidly as the institutions sprung from their brains […].Modern civilization finds itself in a difficult position because it does not suit us. It has been erected without any knowledge of our real nature. […].[54]

Odin_hrafnar.jpg

Despite this veneer of technological civilisation and the cult of rationalism and science, as well as the veneer of Christianity, the ancient archetypes do not disappear; they are repressed and lurk in the ‘shadows’ of the collective unconscious. Returning to Jung’s ‘Wotan’ essay:

It was not in Wotan’s nature to linger on and show signs of old age. He simply disappeared when the times turned against him, and remained invisible for more than a thousand years, working anonymously and indirectly. Archetypes are like riverbeds which dry up when the water deserts them, but which it can find again at anytime. An archetype is like an old watercourse along which the water of life has flowed for centuries, digging a deep channel for itself. The longer it has flowed in this channel the more likely it is that sooner or later the water will return to its old bed. The life of the individual as a member of society and particularly as a part of the state may be regulated like a canal, but the life of nations is a great rushing river which is utterly beyond human control, in the hands of One who has always been stronger than men. […] Political events move from one impasse to the next, like a torrent caught in gullies, creeks and marshes. All human control comes to an end when the individual is caught in a mass movement. Then, the archetypes begin to function, as happens, also, in the lives of individuals when they are confronted with situations that cannot be dealt with in any of the familiar ways. But what a so-called Fuhrer does with a mass movement can plainly be seen if we turn our eyes to the north or south of our country. […][55]

Jung saw this return of Wotan as the resurgence of the true Germanic character that had been repressed for centuries, which would not be restrained forever and would break forth somehow, for good or ill. He regarded ‘German Christianity’ as an aberration that was not true to the German character. Jung considered that this force should be openly acknowledged and integrated into the modern German folk, rather than being sublimated into any form of ‘Christianity’. He wrote of the desirable form in which German religiosity should take as being the return to Heathenism:

[…] ‘The German Christians’ are a contradiction in many terms and would do better to join Hauer’s ‘German Faith Movement’. These are decent and well-meaning people who honestly admit their Ergriffenheit and try to come to terms with this new and undeniable fact. They go to an enormous amount of trouble to make it look less alarming by dressing it up in a conciliatory historical garb and giving us consoling glimpses of great figures such as Meister Eckhart, who was, also, a German and, also, ergriffen. In this way the awkward question of who the Ergreifer is is circumvented. He was always ‘God’. But the more Hauer restricts the world-wide sphere of Indo-European culture to the ‘Nordic’ in general and to the Edda in particular, and the more ‘German’ this faith becomes as a manifestation of Ergriffenheit, the more painfully evident it is that the ‘German’ god is the god of the Germans.

One cannot read Hauer’s book without emotion, if one regards it as the tragic and really heroic effort of a conscientious scholar who, without knowing how it happened to him, was violently summoned by the inaudible voice of the Ergreifer and is now trying with all his might, and with all his knowledge and ability, to build a bridge between the dark forces of life and the shining world of historical ideas. But what do all the beauties of the past from totally different levels of culture mean to the man of today, when confronted with a living and unfathomable tribal god such as he has never experienced before? They are sucked like dry leaves into the roaring whirlwind, and the rhythmic alliterations of the Edda became inextricably mixed up with Christian mystical texts, German poetry and the wisdom of the Upanishads. Hauer himself is ergriffen by the depths of meaning in the primal words lying at the root of the Germanic languages, to an extent that he certainly never knew before. Hauer the Indologist is not to blame for this, nor yet the Edda; it is rather the fault of kairos – the present moment in time – whose name on closer investigation turns out to be Wotan. I would, therefore, advise the German Faith Movement to throw aside their scruples. Intelligent people will not confuse them with the crude Wotan-worshipers whose faith is a mere pretense. There are people in the German Faith Movement who are intelligent enough not only to believe, but to know, that the god of the Germans is Wotan and not the Christian God. This is a tragic experience and no disgrace. It has always been terrible to fall into the hands of a living god. Yahweh was no exception to this rule, and the Philistines, Edomites, Amorites, and the rest, who were outside the Yahweh experience, must certainly have found it exceedingly disagreeable. The Semitic experience of Allah was for a long time an extremely painful affair for the whole of Christendom. We who stand outside judge the Germans far too much, as if they were responsible agents, but perhaps it would be nearer the truth to regard them, also, as victims.[56]

Here Jung is advising that the best course for German religiosity to take is an overt recognition of the primacy of Wotan, without being mixed with an ‘Aryan Christ’ or Indo-Aryan scriptures from the East, all of which were popular among German folk-nationalists, who sought a wider ‘Indo-European’ heritage for Germanics stretching to India and Iran. Hence Jung advised to return to the fundamentals that had shaped the German folk, without attempting to synthesise Christ, the Eddas and the Upanishads into a ‘German Faith’ that would still not give Wotan his full realisation. ‘Indology’ had emerged primarily in Germany during the latter half of the 19th Century, as scholars and especially philologists drew connections between the wider Indo-European family of peoples, and found the relationship of Sanskrit to German, English, Latin, etc. and analogies between Hinduism and Germanic Heathenism. As for Christianity, this was now considered an ‘Aryan’ religion, if not in origin at least in the manner by which it was remoulded to fit the pre-existing character of the Germanics. One of the most influential of the 19th century German scholars, Ernst Renan, wrote that, ‘Originally Jewish to the core, Christianity over time rid itself of nearly everything it took from the race, so that those who consider Christianity to be the Aryan religion are in many respects correct’.[57] Such ideas influenced the leading Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg.[58] However, Jung apparently did not embrace any such pan-Aryan notions, and insisted on a divide between East and West regardless of the racial components in the former. Whatever the primeval commonality between Indo-Aryans and Germanics, these had long since been subordinated to the distances that had emerged over millennia that had manifested in a differentiation of archetypes. From Jung’s perspective, it was as unsatisfactory for a Germanic to embrace Indic spirituality as it was for him to embrace the Jewishness of Christianity, as both were alien to the Germanic psyche. As previously alluded to, Jung was to later write of the ‘sundry natures of feeble instinct … affecting Indian philosophy and the like’,[59] when he warned of the negative character of being influenced by foreign archetypes. This is why Jung expressed hope in the work of the German Faith Movement, and evidently sought a purified Wotanism.

However the German Faith Movement never came close to the governing circles of the Reich, and sought unsuccessfully to gain some type of recognition as the ‘true religious expression of Nazism’.[60] What Hauer desired was the creation of a ‘Religious Working Group of the German Nation’ that would encompass the Christian churches along with his own movement, as distinct from their being rivalry between them.[61] Despite the popular literature attempting to link Nazism with paganism, there was little support among the Reich leadership for incorporating Wotanism despite the Heathen rites and allusions to Wotanism among the Hitler Youth, certain influences in the SS, and elsewhere. Although dismissive of the resurgence of a Wotanist religion, Hitler did however see the benefit of Wotanist elements in showing youth ‘the powerful working of divine creation’.[62] What Hitler desired from a pragmatic viewpoint was the union of the Christian denominations within a single Reich Church with himself as head of that Church,[63] in the same manner as the British monarch is recognised as head of the Anglican Church.[64] Hauer of the German Faith Movement sought dialogue with German Christianity, as indicated above, and regarded a German Christian as standing closer to his movement than a non-German pagan.[65] Jung hoped for a more clear-cut approach from the German Faith Movement, as the main body of Wotanism in Germany. He would see nothing good coming from the suggestion of blurring the contrast between Wotanism and ‘Aryan Christianity’, but would see it as a hindrance to the evocation to full consciousness of the Wotan archetype.

If we apply our admittedly peculiar point of view consistently, we are driven to conclude that Wotan must, in time, reveal not only the restless, violent, stormy side of his character, but, also, his ecstatic and mantic qualities – a very different aspect of his nature. If this conclusion is correct, National Socialism would not be the last word. Things must be concealed in the background which we cannot imagine at present, but we may expect them to appear in the course of the next few years or decades. Wotan’s reawakening is stepping into the past; the stream was dammed up and has broken into its old channel. But the Obstruction will not last forever; it is rather a reculer pour mieux sauter, and the water will overleap the obstacle. Then, at last, we shall know what Wotan is saying when he ‘murmurs with Mimir’s head’.[66]

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Unleashing a force such as that represented by Wotan represented dangers that Jung clearly recognised. Like a dammed river, its unleashing had the potential to follow a course of ecstatic creative energy or destruction to the point of self-destruction. It has the potential to nourish or to drown. Jung’s pessimism in regard to the world situation increased, and he saw nothing good coming out of the post-war, technology-obsessed, hyper-rationalistic world. He was appalled by the rise of communism, but saw the West’s opposition to it as being ‘entirely bankrupt of countervailing ideas’. ‘Jung thought that the West was faced by four main problems in its deep structure: technology, materialism, lack of individuality and lack of integration. [67] Wotan had been both ineptly summoned by half-conscious acolytes and then beaten back by Yahweh, and nothing was resolved in favour of the West.

Notes 

[1] Jung never repudiated his praise for Franco or Mussolini. F McLynn, Jung: A Biography (London: Black Swan, 1997), pp. 351-352.

[2] Martin Heidegger being another primary example. See: Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life (London: Fontana Press, 1993).

[3] F McLynn, op. cit., pp. 228-229.

[4] C G Jung, ‘Wotan’, Neue Schweizer Rundschau, Zurich, March, 1936, No. 3.

[5] C G Jung, ‘Wotan’, Essays on Contemporary Events (London: Kegan Paul, 1947), Chapter 1.

[6] C G Jung to Miguel Serrano, Zurich, 14 September 1960; in M Serrano, Jung & Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 84.

[7] C G Jung to M Serrano, ibid., pp. 84-85.

[8] D Cox, Analytical Psychology: An Introduction to the Work of C G Jung (Suffolk: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973), pp. 59-60.

[9] D Cox, ibid., p. 61.

[10] D Cox, ibid., p. 62.

[11] D Cox, ibid., pp. 63-64.

[12] C G Jung to M Serrano, op. cit., p. 85.

[13]T Ravenscroft, The Spear of Destiny (Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1973), J H Brennan, The Occult Reich (New York: Signet, 1974), F King, Satan and Swastika (St Albans, Herts.: Granada, 1976), etc.

[14] J Toland, Adolf Hitler (New York: Doubleday & Co, 1976), p. 64.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] C G Jung, Collected Works (Princeton University Press, 1970), Volume 10, p. 185.

[18] C G Jung, Psychological Types (London: Kegan Paul, 1933), p. 55.

[19] C G Jung, Collected Works, ‘The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious’, (1959) Vol. 9, Part 1, p. 275.

[20] F McLynn, op. cit., p. 300.

[21] R Cavendish (ed.) Encyclopaedia of the Unexplained (London: Arkana, 1989), J Webb, ‘Carl Gustav Jung’, p. 129.

[22] C G Jung, Collected Works, Volume 10, op. cit., p. 237.

[23] C G Jung, ‘Wotan’, Essays on Contemporary Events, op. cit., Chapter 1.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Before its subversion and derailing by drugs and Leftist doctrines, hippie-ism was a self-reliance, back-to-the-land movement, that eschewed modernism and technology. In a recent Television documentary on the New Zealand hippies, entitled ‘Dirty Bloody Hippies’, one of the pioneers of this movement in New Zealand commented that the movement was destroyed by the introduction of drugs, with ‘Americans coming over giving away free LSD’. Interestingly, the use of LSD by the CIA and the recruiting of psychedelic guru Timothy Leary by CIA operative Cord Meyer, is now well known.

[26] G Kennedy and K Ryan, Hippie Roots & The Perennial Subculture (Ojai, California: Nivaria Press, 2004), p. 6.

[27] G Kennedy (editor) Children of the Sun: A Pictorial Anthology: From Germany to California 1883-1949 (Ojai, California: Nivaria Press, 1998), p. 7.

[28] G Kennedy and K Ryan, Hippie Roots, op. cit., p. 15.

[29] C G Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, (ed.) W McGuire & R F C Hull (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 126-128.

[30] P Bishop (ed.) Jung In Contexts (London: Routledge, 1999). See: http://www.scribd.com/doc/6919618/JUNG-IN-CONTEXT1

[31] C G Jung, ‘Wotan’, op. cit.

[32] C G Jung, ‘Wotan’, Ibid.

[33] F McLynn, op. cit., pp. 46, 241.

[34] C G Jung, ‘Wotan’, op. cit.

[35] F Nietzsche (1885) Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975).

[36] K H Gundarsson, ‘The Folklore of the Wild Hunt & the Furious Host’, from a lecture delivered to the Cambridge Folklore Society at the house of Dr H R Ellis Davidson. Printed in Mountain Thunder, issue 7, Winter 1992.

[37] C J Jung, ‘Wotan’, op. cit.

[38] G Kennedy (ed.) Children of the Sun, op. cit., pp. 69-70.

[39] Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a Germanophilic Englishman, whose magnum opus, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, was a seminal influence on both Wilhelmian Germany and National Socialist ideology. See: H S Chamberlain, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (London: John Lane Co., 1911).

[40] C G Jung, ‘Wotan’, op. cit.

[41] An illustration of Lenin’s pyramid can be seen at: http://rst.gsfc.nasa.gov/Sect6/Sect6_12a.html (accessed on 10 July 2011).

[42] Note the analogy with the Purim celebration commemorating the hanging of Haman as the enemy of Israel, along with his sons. Esther 7:9-10, 9:25.

[43] J Bacque, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation 1944-1950 (London: Little Brown & Co, 1997), passim.

[44] See: K R Bolton, ‘Odin and the Faustian Imperative’, herein. Wotan had also assumed the form of the ‘Aryan Christ’ and there was an unresolved dichotomy between Wotan and this Gothic Christianity within Hitler’s Germany that was not resolved, and was also alluded to in the ‘Wotan’ essay in regard to the German Faith Movement. Note also that Jung also mentions Wotan as being ‘seen, looking rather shamefaced, in the meeting-house of a sect of simple folk in North Germany, disguised as Christ sitting on a white horse’. In regard to the conflict between Wotan and the ‘Aryan Christ’ within National Socialist Germany see: R Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity 1919-1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), passim.

[45] Deuteronomy 2: 34, etc.

[46] C G Jung, ‘Wotan’, op. cit.

[47] One of Jung’s primary reasons for breaking with Sigmund Freud was that he considered Freud was projecting Jewish traits onto humanity without account for these differences. This of course brought accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ against Jung.

[48] C G Jung, Collected Works (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953), Vol. 7, p. 149, footnote 8.

[49] C G Jung, ‘Wotan,’, op. cit.

[50] C G Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Pantheon books, 1961), p. 348.

[51] C G Jung, ibid., pp. 235-236.

[52] K R Bolton, ‘Alexis Carrel: A Commemoration’, Counter-Currents, http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/11/alexis-carrel-a-commemoration-part-1/#more-6258

[53] A Carrel, Man the Unknown (Sydney: Angus and Robertson Ltd., 1937), Chapter 1: 3.

[54] A Carrel, ibid., Chapter 1: 4.

[55] C G Jung, ‘Wotan’, op. cit.

[56] C G Jung, ibid.

[57] R Steigmann-Gall, op. cit., p. 108

[58] Alfred Rosenberg sought to show early in his magnum opus (1930) that Jesus was from a region that had been established by ‘Nordic’ Amorites’, Galilee (p. 6). The problem with Christianity was the influence of Paul undertaking a consciously Jewish mission, whilst John represented the ‘aristocratic spirit’. (pp. 35-37). The Myth of the Twentieth Century (Torrance, California: The Noontide Press, 1982).

[59] C G Jung, Collected Works, 1953, op. cit.

[60] R Steigmann-Gall, op. cit., p. 110.

[61] R Steigmann-Gall, ibid.

[62] R Steigmann-Gall, ibid., p. 143.

[63] R Steigmann-Gall, ibid., pp. 188-189.

[64] R Steigmann-Gall, ibid., pp. 257-258.

[65] R Steigmann-Gall, ibid., p. 149.

[66] C G Jung, ‘Wotan’, op. cit.

[67] F McLynn, op. cit., p. 513.

Source: Woden: Thoughts and Perspectives, vol. 4, ed. Troy Southgate (London: Black Front Press, 2011).
 

vendredi, 12 novembre 2010

Last Encounter with Carl Jung

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Last Encounter with Carl Jung

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

Translated by Alex Kurtagić

Author’s Note:

This is a translation of the article by Serrano published by the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio in 1961, following Carl Jung’s death.

It’s six in the morning, 8 June. I open the doors to my room in New Delhi—doors which open to a small white terrace, already fulgurating with sunlight. The tremendous June heat starts early in the day. I am partially naked, and in a moment I will begin my yogic exercises of sun adoration, “Suryanamaskar.” The trees’ incredible verdure, even in this weather, and the birdsong of infinity, greet me. A servant, who is from around these parts, approaches me with that measured step of the Indians and says to me, “Salam, Sahib.” It’s his respectful greeting. He hands me a piece of paper. It’s a telegram. I open it without hurry, almost absent-mindedly. I see that it comes from Zurich and it surprises me that this is the case. I begin reading and I am perplexed. The telegram reads as follows: “Dr. Jung died peacefully yesterday at noon. Best wishes.” It is signed by Beiley and Jaffe: the young lady that kept him company, who walked him home—an extraordinary woman—; and his private secretary, a Swiss citizen.

A great sadness immobilizes me right there—my eyes are moist, perhaps because of the intense sun, or perhaps not. It was so recently that I had been with Dr. Jung, at his house in Küsnacht, next to Lake Zurich. I might have been the last foreign friend to see him. The news has hit me in the depths of my soul. I have had the enormous fortune of having been prefaced by Jung—that, having been the first and last time that he penned a preface for a purely literary work.

I received a letter from him at the time of our last year’s earthquakes in Chile. He said, “Even if modern men of science will not accept it, there is a relationship between Nature and the soul. Mother Nature now attunes itself to our civilization and begins also to visit destruction. Unfortunately, it has been your country’s turn this time. I have thought of Chile so much lately!”

The remembrance flies, I see its image, it’s on my mind. So very recently I arrived at his house, amid a fine rain. Jung’s house is in the outskirts of Zurich, in Künsnacht. At the entrance’s portal there is a phrase in Latin that reads, more or less, “Think or not in God. He is always present.” Inside there are paintings and beautiful objects, antique engravings, mediaeval paintings. I was received by Ms. Beiley, who invited me into a small living room, where she served us tea.

We talked about Dr. Jung. She told that me he had not been well during the last few days, feeling very tired as a result of working intensively on a 80-page essay he had written in longhand, as usual, directly in English for an American publication, and due to appear soon with the title “Man and his Myths.” Ms. Beiley is very worried, as Jung has said to her, “I wish to go, but you tie me here.” She does not believe him, as she thinks that Dr. Jung is still interested in life and the Earth. He has told me that “to die is also to go to Jung’s collective Unconscious, only to then, from there, go back to the realm of forms, of forms . . .” Hesse has also told me that “Jung is a giant, a giant mountain in our time.” And he has asked me to forward Jung his greetings—“the steppe wolf’s greetings,” he has said.

Jung has been unwell, it is true, but he’s afflicted by no illness. That day he had felt better  and even got up to receive me. Ms. Beiley asks that we go upstairs, but also that I don’t stay long so as not to tire him. We entered his study. And there was Jung, on a chair, next to the window facing the lake. He’s wearing a Japanese robe that makes him look like a Zen Buddhist monk, an old samurai, or a magus from earlier times. He is haloed by a crepuscular light, and he is surrounded by alchemical engravings and a great paining of the Hindu god Shiva on the summit of Mount Kailash.

He smiles with that smile of his, filled with cunning, wisdom, and benevolence. He reaches for his pipe, but fails. I tell him, “What a beautiful Japanese robe.” It is a ceremonial robe. Out of my pocket I take box from Kashmir that I have brought him as a present. He looks at it and says, “It’s made out of turquoise.” And then he adds, “I’ve never been to Kashmir. I traversed the South of India; Madora—all those very ‘interesting’ places.” He then talks to me about the Hindus and the Chinese; he makes reference to a book by a Chinese master of Zen Buddism, whose name I can’t remember now, and he tells me that it is the best he has read on the subject. I transmit Hermann Hesse’s greetings and I relate my conversation with that writer about death. I explain that I have asked him whether it is important to know that there is something beyond death. Jung meditates for a while and states that the question has been posted incorrectly—that I should have asked whether there is reason to believe that there is something beyond death.

085_MiguelSerrano.jpgI now ask Dr. Jung, “And what do you believe? Is there?” He answers, “if the human mind can operate independently of the brain, then it operates independently of space and time. And if it operates independently of space and time, it is incorruptible.”

And what do you believe, Dr. Jung? What do you think?

I have seen men wounded by bullets to the brain during the war who have a lost all brain function and who nevertheless have dreams and are able to remember them afterwards. What is it they dream? There are small children, who don’t yet have a defined self, whose consciousness is diffuse and spread over their bodies, yet who have deep and personal dreams that mark them for the rest of their lives. There is no self there. What is that other they dream?

Do you believe, Dr. Jung, that there exists something like a subtle body, an astral body, the “Linga-Sarira” of Hindu philosophy, which detaches itself upon death?

I don’t know. I have seen objects materialize and mediums move objects from afar without touching them with their physical bodies.

And Dr. Jung continues:

Sometime ago I was very ill, almost in a coma; everybody thought that I would die and maybe even that I was suffering greatly, because in this condition one’s body makes people believe that one is suffering. But in reality I felt as if I were floating and experienced a marvelous sense of freedom. I remembered it afterwards.

Dr. Jung always wore on his right hand a ring with a Gnostic gem. An Egyptian gem. We spoke about the meaning of that ring, and he explained, “All these symbols are alive in me.” His memory and culture, even at the age of 85, was incredible.

At times he spoke like a poet, like a magus, like a mystic. One time he said to me, “My message is not wholly understood; only poets understand it.”

Now I ask him:

What will happen to mankind in the coming technological supercivilization? Do you think that, in twenty years, anyone will care about the spirit of symbols, in the midst of the era of interplanetary journeys, with the Sputniks, the Gagarins, and the Shephards? Will not the spirit come to appear passé?

Dr. Jung smiles cunningly and states:

Sooner or later man will have to return to himself, even if from the stars. All this that is happening now is an extreme form of escapism, because it is easier to reach Mars than to find oneself. If man doesn’t find himself, then he faces the greatest of dangers: his own annihilation. On journeys into outer space there is also an unconscious attempt to solve the gravest of all problems that man will have to face in the future: overpopulation.

Dr. Jung was going to continue talking about this very important topic when Ms. Beiley entered the room to say that Dr. Jung’s daughter and son-in-law were waiting. I had not fulfilled my promise of a brief conversation.

But now I know it doesn’t matter, because mine was to be his last interview. And something perhaps told me that this was the case, for when I reached the door I stopped and turned my head. Jung sat there staring at me, with a soft smile and lifting his hand in a gesture of farewell. His last one. The hand with the Gnostic ring. I bowed, respectfully.

Source: http://www.wermodandwermod.com/newsitems/news251020101138...

mercredi, 18 février 2009

JUng and the Völkisch Movement

 

 

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Jung and the Volkisch Movement

Kerry Bolton



Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), in founding Analytical Psychology did so as a break and a contradistinction from the psychological school of his mentor Sigmund Freud. The Jungian and the Freudian stand as the contrasts between the Germanic and the Jewish world-views in the realm of psychology. Indeed it has been suggested that Freud's observations were largely derived from mainly Jewish patients.

Jung commented: "... It is a quite unpardonable mistake to accept the conclusions of a Jewish psychology as generally valid."

The Jewish spirit that infuses Freudianism has been remarked upon by others qualified to speak, both Jew and Gentile. The Jewish historian Howard Sachar considered the chief motivation of the Jewish Freudians to be, "the unconscious desire of Jews to unmask the respectability of European society which closed them out... The B'nai B'rith Lodge of Vienna for example delighted in listening to Freud air his theories." (Sachar, The Course of Modern Jewish History).

Thomas Szasz, professor of psychology, State University, NY, wrote of Freud's "anti-Gentilism" as being "an important aspect of his personality and predilections."

Collective Unconscious

Jung gave science an important contribution with his theory that there is not only an individual unconscious but also a collective unconscious, including a racial or ethnic unconscious impacting significantly upon the individual and determining his very Being and Identity. It was a scientific development and elaboration of the concept held by Germanic philosophers such as Johann Gottfried von Herder, postulating that each people, or nation, has its own "soul."

Jung stated: "No doubt on an earlier and deeper level of psychic development, where it is still impossible to distinguish between an Aryan, Semitic, Hamitic, or Mongolian mentality, all human races have a common collective psyche. But with the beginning of racial differentiation, essential differences are developed in the collective psyche as well."

Jung indicated what this means in practical terms, as for example when politicians and religious dogmatists try to impose a multi-racial society. Jung wrote: "For this reason we cannot transplant the spirit of a foreign race in globo into our own mentality without sensible injury to the latter, a fact which does not however deter sundry natures of feeble instinct from affecting Indian philosophy and the like."


The Shadow

Another major contribution from Jung was his theory of individuation, or the Total Being brought into effect by integrating one's repressed unconscious into the conscious Self. To this process which is central to Jungian therapy Jung applied the German word Heilsweg, the "sacred way" of healing. On his way towards individuation one confronts the repressed unconscious or Dark side of oneSelf referred to by Jung as The Shadow Self.

In keeping with Jung's theme of the collective unconscious, not only the individual but an entire nation or ethnos possess its own unique collective 'Shadow.' This is what Jung addressed to the Germanic nation when he wrote,

We cannot possibly get beyond our present level of culture unless we receive a powerful impetus from our primitive roots. But we shall receive it only if we go back behind our cultural level, thus giving the suppressed primitive man in ourselves a chance to develop. How this is to be done is a problem I have been trying to solve for years... The existing edifice is rotten. We need some new foundations. We must dig down to the primitive in us, for only out of the conflict between civilized man and the Germanic barbarian will there come what we need; a new experience of God...


Völkisch Movement

Jung saw the primitive or Shadow of the Germanic folk repressed by a millennium of Christian moral bondage. When what is natural to an individual or an entire folk is repressed it will out eventually in some form or another. It was Jung's concern that the Germanic Shadow be brought to consciousness with the result of a collective individuation of the whole folk. He had stated in 1919, the very year Hitler joined the newly formed German Workers Party: "As the Christian view of the world loses its authority, the more menacingly will the 'blond beast' be heard prowling about in its underground prison, ready at any moment to burst out with devastating consequences."

Jung's desire to see the Germanic folk individuate brought him into contact with the energetic volkisch movements that had emerged during the late 19th century and were ever more determined with the humiliation of Germany and Austria following World War I. Likewise, these movements saw the compatibility of Jungian psychology with their own ideology.

One of the volkisch theorists was Jacob Hauer, founder of the Nordic Faith Movement. He became involved with Jungian conferences and associations during the 1930's. In 1934 he gave a lecture on number symbolism which had a great influence on Jung, and during the course of the same lecture Hauer used Jung's concept of the collective unconscious to suggest the existence of a racial unconscious with racial symbolism.

The year previously the National Socialists had assumed power, an Jung wrote his essay Wotan, stating that the NS Reich was summoning forth the repressed Shadow or Wotanic unconscious of Germany. In 1936 he wrote: "The depths of Wotan's character explain more of National Socialism than all the economic, political and psychological factors put together."

With rivalry for spiritual allegiance in NS Germany between the so-called "German Christians" who had Germanized Jesus, and the pagan, anti-Christian volkisch movement, Jung expressly condemned the former and urged Germans to throw their whole support behind Hauer's movement to bring forth that "new experience of God," of Wotan. He described Hauer as "god (i.e. Wotan) possessed," and Hauer's activities as "the tragic and really heroic efforts of a conscientious scholar."

To Jung the Old Religion was very much alive, albeit underground and waiting to resurface. He wrote:

No, memories of the old German religion have not been extinguished. They say there are greybeards in Westphalia who still know where the old images of the gods lie hidden; on their death beds they tell their youngest grandchild, who carries the secret... In Westphalia, the former Saxony, not everything that lies buried is dead.

In our present time, with the European soul buried beneath excessive materialism and superficiality, and the dying, putrescent vestiges of a thousand years of Judeo-Christian spiritual repression, Jung provides an insight whereby the European folk as a collectivity might find its way back to a sense of being. As that great exponent of European Being, the existentialist philosopher and supporter of National Socialism, Martin Heidegger himself has written:

The past of human existence as a whole is not a nothing, but that to which we always return when we have put down deep roots. But this return is not a passive acceptance of what has been, but its transmutation.