Fifth Wednesday Post

Carl Jung, Occultist

A longstanding tradition on this blog has it that whenever a month has five Wednesdays, the readers get to propose topics for the fifth Wednesday post, and whichever proposal fields the largest number of votes becomes the topic for that post. This time, the winning theme was the archetypal teachings of Carl Jung, the famous Swiss occultist.

One of the most influential occultists of the twentieth century. Oh, wait…

Oh, excuse me, I should have said “psychologist,” shouldn’t I?  Certainly he marketed himself as a psychologist during his life, and his followers have by and large defined him and his ideas in those terms after his death. It’s unquestionably true that he attended medical school, specialized in psychology, did postgraduate study at the then-famous Burghölzli psychiatric hospital, became a student of Sigmund Freud, and published a whale of a lot of papers in psychological journals. By and large, it’s only two  groups of people who have raised questions about Jung’s bona fides as a scientific psychologist, and it’s fair to say that both groups are fairly marginal these days.

The first of these groups comprises many of Jung’s critics. Richard Noll, the author of The Jung Cult and The Aryan Christ, is perhaps the best known of those just now. Some of my readers may be familiar with Freud’s claim that every male child secretly wants to murder his father and possess his mother. Whether this is true or not in general—I have my doubts—it certainly describes a distinct category of literature about modern psychology, the authors of which are pretty obviously out to murder (or at least commit character assassination against) some famous psychologist and possess (or at least score points against) the school they founded.

Worth reading, but not for the reasons Noll had in mind.

Noll is one of these. I found both his books worth reading, though probably not for the reasons he had in mind. His discussion of Jung can be summed up without too much inaccuracy as, “The man was an occultist. Did you hear me? An occultist. Oh, the horror! AN OCCULTIST!!!” To which I and a great many other occultists, who belong to the second of the marginal groups mentioned a little earlier, responded by perking up our ears and saying, “Was he? How very interesting! I wonder what the occult community can learn from him?”

The point Noll made might be easiest to grasp if we slip sideways through the ectoplasmic flux into a slightly different timeline than the one we’re used to. Having landed in the city of Beneficence, Rhode Island—yes, it’s called Providence in our timeline—we stroll over to the nearest upscale bookstore and start to browse the shelves. Here’s the occult section, where there’s a decent selection of books about the magical system of the Ordo Peregrini Orientem, or OPO. In case you don’t happen to be familiar with one of the most colorful organizations of the twentieth century occult revival, let me fill you in.  The Order of Journeyers to the East, which is what the Latin name means, was founded in 1921 by two influential Swiss occultists named Carl Jung and Hermann Hesse, and its colorful symbols and ceremonies have been an important influence on the occult scene ever since.

The bookstore we’re in testifies to that.  On the shelf are several copies of Liber Novus, Jung’s visionary narrative of the experiences that inspired the OPO, which is required reading for the order’s initiates; next to those is a tell-all volume by Francis King, The Secret Teachings of the O.P.O., which recounts the mysterious “symbols of transformation” members of the order use in their quest for the mystical state of Individuation; then there’s a volume on the highest and most complex teachings of the OPO, which use a strange game played with glass beads to synthesize all human knowledge into mandala-like patterns. It’s heady stuff, but all things considered, it’s not that different from the teachings of other occult schools of the same vintage.

Violet Firth, one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century. Oh, wait…

Then we turn to a nearby shelf where books on psychology are waiting. Here you’ll find a shelf full of books about Firthian psychology—yes, it’s got a fancier name, but nobody uses that now except for pedants. The Firthian school was founded in the early twentieth century by two English psychologists, Violet Firth and E.A. Crowley, who both started out as fairly orthodox Freudians but went their own way in the 1920s, founding a system that makes much use of images and ideas drawn from myth, legend, and (whisper it) occultism.

On the shelf is a copy of Firth’s early book The Machinery of the Mind, followed by Sane Psychoanalysis (a collection of essays) and then by one of her novels, The Goat-Foot God, a fictional account of a man’s inner journey from neurosis to robust psychological health. Over here you’ll find The Vision and the Voice by Crowley, an account of some of the work he did with active imagination, and then a hefty volume, Psychology in Theory and Practice, Crowley’s magnum opus, still a commonly studied volume among Firthians despite its eccentricities.

Ah, but over here is a pair of books by somebody named Lon L. Ardrich, The Firth Cult and The British Christ, going on at great length about how Violet Firth was actually an occultist. Those sparked a lot of debate when they first came out, but then Firth’s private book of visionary material saw print, after many years being kept under wraps by her heirs; it’s titled The Cosmic Doctrine, and it pretty much settled the matter, proving just how deep she was into occultism. Now nobody’s quite sure what to make of Firth and Crowley—well, except for members of the OPO and other occult orders, who are saying, “How very interesting! I wonder what the occult community can learn from them?”

I really think Hesse would have been a first-rate occult teacher. As it was, he was a helluva novelist.

At this point, let’s do the time warp again (it’s just a jump to the left!) and plop back into the timeline we normally infest. Here, of course, Carl Jung was a famous psychologist, a student of Freud who went his own way, and Hermann Hesse was a Nobel Prize-winning author, one of Jung’s good friends, who used Jungian ideas extensively in his later novels  Liber Novus, better known as The Red Book, was kept under wraps by Jung’s heirs until the copyright ran out, but is widely available now; you can find Jung’s “symbols of transformation” in quite a few of his books, including one titled Symbols of Transformation, and the mysterious game features in Hesse’s last and most intricate novel, The Glass Bead Game.  (The volume by Francis King is The Secret Rituals of the O.T.O., i.e., the Ordo Templi Orientis or Order of Templars of the East.)

In our timeline, with a certain madcap symmetry, it was left to Violet Firth and Edward Alexander Crowley to go into occultism instead of Jung and Hesse. Firth took the pen name Dion Fortune, Crowley changed his first name to Aleister, and both became leading figures in twentieth century occult circles. The books of theirs I cited exist, of course, though Sane Psychoanalysis is actually titled Sane Occultism and Psychology in Theory and Practice is Magick in Theory and Practice. Nor, of course, was The Cosmic Doctrine ever squirreled away by Fortune’s heirs as as source of potential scandal: it’s been on the bookshelves of serious occultists since it first saw print not long after her death.

Crowley in a thoughtful moment, perhaps contemplating a career as a maverick psychologist.

It’s worth taking a moment, to finish the thought experiment I’ve indulged in here, to think through what Firth and Crowley would have had to do if they had decided to market themselves as psychologists rather than occultists. Firth actually had the relevant training—she qualified as a Freudian psychoanalyst in the early days of the British psychoanalytical scene, when a college degree wasn’t yet required—and Crowley could have done the same easily enough. Crucially, though, they would have had to camouflage the obviously occult side of their studies. Both of them included the tarot in their systems; that would have had to go. Both of them used magical rituals straight out of the Golden Dawn tradition; those would have had to go.

Less blatantly occult practices such as scrying in the spirit vision would have had to be given some harmless label, such as “active imagination,” and when they had students make talismans they would have had them make those according to spontaneous personal designs, not traditional ones out of the old handbooks of magic. Dreams, which offer convenient access to the astral plane, might have featured much more significantly in their work, and of course the astral plane itself and the other subtle planes of being, along with much else, would have had to be relabeled in psychological jargon—calling the astral plane “the collective unconscious” or what have you would have been essential. Finally, they would have had to keep their revealed books, The Cosmic Doctrine and The Book of the Law respectively, locked away so that nobody discovered the obviously occult inspiration behind their work.

The remarkable thing is that this book is at least as much about psychology as it is about occultism.

That is to say, the changes they would have had to make to escape detection as occultists were exactly the changes that Carl Jung made when he assembled his system of psychology.

It’s not as though Jung didn’t have unrestricted access to the occult traditions of his time, after all. Switzerland was a hotbed of occultism in his youth; a cousin of his was a spiritualist medium, and Jung’s doctoral dissertation—titled On the Psychology of So-Called Occult Phenomena—focused on her trance mediumship and its psychological implications. From Toni Wolff, who was by turns Jung’s patient, one of his lovers, and a core member of his inner circle of students, he learned astrology, and routinely cast his patients’ horoscopes in order to plan the course of therapy he meant to use with them.

His volumes on the symbolism of alchemy show just how deeply he got into that branch of occult teachings, and his published seminars on kundalini yoga and related topics show the attentiveness to Eastern traditions that was so common in the occult scene of his time. He ran with many of the leading occultist and occult-adjacent intellectuals of his time, and had close connections with Monte Verità, the Swiss commune that basically invented the Sixties counterculture forty years in advance and also played a crucial role in the history of the Ordo Templi Orientis, the order on which I modeled the “OPO” of my earlier narrative. It’s no exaggeration, in fact, to say that Jung was up to his eyeballs in the occult milieu of early twentieth century central Europe—and so he had to know exactly what he was doing.

The Sixties were far more derivative than most Boomers will admit. This is Monte Verità in the 1930s.

Furthermore, what we may as well call Jung’s occult teachings fit neatly into the history of occult thought in the modern Western world. Eliphas Lévi, whose Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic launched the modern magical revival when it was originally published in 1855, set in motion a fascinating transformation in occult thought. For more than a millennium before his time, the main currents of Western occultism all assumed that magical power came from outside the self.  Mages used prayer and the sacred names of God to make contact with the sources of magical force, or they tapped into flows of power that were believed to descend from the stars and planets, or (if they were corrupt enough) they tried to bribe or browbeat spirits and demons into doing things for them.  The idea that the individual human being might have sources of power in himself or herself was nowhere on the map.

Lévi changed that. A devout if rather eccentric Christian, he held that each human being had the inborn power to direct the astral light, the subtle force through which magic functions, but that most people never grasped their own capacity to shape their lives. That way of thinking caught the imagination of the age, and it joined with two other currents in alternative culture—the tradition of subtle-energy work set in motion by the Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer three quarters of a century before Lévi, and the New Thought psychology launched by the American healer Phineas Parkhurst Quimby at the same time as Lévi’s first publications.

Helena Blavatsky, inventing the concept of occultism. It’s astonishing how much of modern alternative culture she kickstarted.

The result was the core tradition of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century occultism in the English-speaking world. It would be fair, in fact, to call it “occultism” pure and simple, since that word was introduced to the English language by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky as her label for the broader movement of which her Theosophical Society offered a somewhat idiosyncratic take.  From this perspective, alongside magic—which takes power for its keynote and uses ritual as its central practice—and mysticism—which (at least in the West) takes love as its keynote and uses prayer as its central practice—we have occultism, which takes wisdom for its keynote and uses meditation as its central practice.

This, in turn, is the tradition in which Carl Jung’s work has its natural place. Like other systems of occultism, Jungian psychology seeks to reshape the jumbled mess of the ordinary human personality, not by opening the self to the divine through love as mysticism does, not by sheer force of will backed up by paraphysical powers as magic does, but by a process of insight that leads the mind of the seeker into its own depths, where it encounters the transrational powers that underlie human consciousness and awakens a new and more enduring center of identity. Jung called the process individuation and the new center of identity the Self; other occult schools have other names for the process and the center of identity, but it’s not exactly hard to translate between Jung’s terms and those of his more obviously occult contemporaries.

The fact that Jung’s system had to avoid any obvious connection to occult traditions, during all those years that it pretended to be a system of psychology, is actually an advantage to occult students today. It’s one of the weaknesses of our modern popular culture that so few of us grasp the power provided by limits. Just as the hard walls of a cylinder and a piston can turn the steam that whistles from your teakettle into horsepower, and the rigidity of your bones gives your muscles something to work against, limits imposed on a tradition become a source of strength. Forced to work within strict limits, a tradition pushes those things it can work with much further than it would have done otherwise.

Jung certainly knew how to craft a talisman. This is from The Red Book.

This, in turn, Jungian psychology did. Jungian practitioners took active imagination (their term for the exercise occultists call “scrying in the spirit vision”) at least as far as the Golden Dawn ever did, and took dreamwork much further than any Western occult school known to me.  Their work with art, and especially with the process of painting or drawing inner imagery until this evolves into mandalas (their term for what the rest of us call “talismans”), has opened up possibilities that the rest of the occult community has yet to explore. Jungian analyses of myths and symbols likewise pick up where most other occult teachings leave off.  Thus there’s a great deal that today’s occultists can learn from Jung and other Jungian writers and teachers.

We may want to get to work on that fairly soon, though, because the Jungian movement as currently constituted is frankly on its last legs just now.

Jungian psychology never was really an effective way to treat severe mental illness, and Jung and his students pitched it accordingly in their time. It marketed itself primarily, to rephrase the title of one of Jung’s popular books, to modern people in search of a soul.  Just as Freud targeted the crippling neuroses that the nineteenth-century terror of sexuality made inevitable, Jung targeted the subtler but equally damaging neuroses that nineteenth-century rationalism made just as inescapable, and both men did their work well:  after Freud it was impossible to keep pretending that nice people didn’t have sexual cravings, and after Jung it was impossible to keep pretending that the human psyche was nice and clean and reasonable, with nothing in common with the world of myth, symbol, and dream.  In that way, both men contributed greatly to the betterment of life in the Western world—but by the same token, both men also guaranteed that their successors would eventually run out of patients.

All of the classic talk therapies have been having the same problem in recent decades.

The downside of that process has been landing hard on Jungian therapists for decades now, and the situation promises to get worse. Partly that’s because the pharmaceutical industry has managed to turn psychiatrists into little more than pill pushers, and the medical industry has settled for drugging patients into numbness instead of, you know, helping them to solve their problems. (I don’t think this is any kind of accident. As the wry slogan goes, “a patient cured is a customer lost.”)  Partly it’s because, as already noted, Jungian therapy isn’t all that effective as a treatment for serious mental illness, and so insurance companies are increasingly balking at paying for it. I think the largest share of the difficulty, though, is simply that so many of Jung’s insights have become such commonplaces in modern life that the troubles that once drove many people to Jungian therapists no longer happen anything like so often as they once did.

This doesn’t mean that Jung’s work has lost its value. It means, rather, that the audience for Jungian theory and practice has shifted. The people who might benefit most these days from studying Jung’s ideas and putting his methods to use aren’t the ones he and the first few generations of his students treated, the people who had strayed into neurosis after losing their sense of values, purpose, and meaning, and needed to plunge into themselves to get back to a normal level of functioning. Rather, they’re people who can already function quite well but want to go further, to embrace their own inner potentials to function above the merely normal level.

Dion Fortune in ritual garb. Archetypal? She’d have been the first to agree.

That is to say, they’re occultists, or potential occultists.

One of the central teachings of occultism is that each of us can be much more than we allow ourselves to be. Every human being contains the potential for magnificence:  that’s how one of my teachers used to phrase it. The fact that so many of us settle for so much less, that we crawl like worms when we could stride like titans, is the great tragedy of our species. Carl Jung grasped that, and he offered a tolerably well-stocked toolbox of methods for digging down through the mental detritus to unearth the buried keys of our potential magnificence; he also recognized, like so many other occultists, that those keys fit locks within the self. With this in mind, it may well be time for those of us already committed to that quest to see what we can do about finding a place for Jung’s legacy in the traditions of modern occultism.

180 Comments

  1. Beautifully framed. My spiritual director (and herself a Jungian analyst) suggested analysis for me precisely to drive a reasonably balanced person of spiritual interest on a deepening quest towards their fullness. Magnificence is a work in progress (!) but I am deeply grateful for the prompt and in the second analyst I found a like-minded practitioner of Jung as a ‘magus’ rather than a psychoanalyst!

  2. Nicholas, thank you. This is good to hear; I’ve considered finding a Jungian analyst to work with, partly because I think it would benefit me and partly because it would be a great opportunity to learn an interesting system of occultism. I’ll give that serious thought at this point.

  3. another great piece, thank you very much for writing this. Jung was my introduction to occultism, and i’m glad to see him get his due. i’ve often wondered how much more magic-adjacent his work would have been were his milieu less strictly protestant, but your point about limits is solid.

  4. What a fascinating piece of writing on Jung. I appreciate it, especially as a preparation for reading The Red Book which is on my list of “must-reads.” I’m currently (and have been for a while) amidst reading primary and secondary literature on Hermeticism, and here is where my question comes in. I am intrigued by your crisp categorization of magic (power/ritual), mysticism (love/prayer), and occultism (wisdom/meditation). Hermeticism seems to defy such a neat separation, its discourses bringing all these elements into play. So how do you regard a practitioner who is drawn to all the elements across the categorization you present (and one who also recognizes the necessity of tempering “power” with love and wisdom)? Is such a practitioner trying to do “too much”? You may have other thoughts, beyond my particular question, on navigating the magic/mysticism/occultism distinction. I’d love to hear them. With thanks!

  5. “Carl Jung grasped that, and he offered a tolerably well-stocked toolbox of methods for digging down through the mental detritus to unearth the buried keys of our potential magnificence…”

    You mentioned scrying, dreamwork and art via mandalas; did Jung write on meditation / contemplation?

  6. Very interesting! The psychology/psychiatry profession is perhaps the most hidebound and materialistic on the planet…I’ve been a student of prominent psychiatrist and practitioner of regression hypnotism, which he has used quite effectively to treat victims of both childhood and past life traumas…(Dr. Weiss is also the author of Many Lives, Many Masters, and other works on the subject..)
    Anyway, a professional friend of his was brought up before a Psychiatry Board of review for using such techniques..Dr. Weiss testified that his friend was merely using Jungian techniques, at which point the inquiry ended…The magic word was Jung…..Dr. Weiss was quite amused by this….

  7. In preparation for this post, I read a book of Jung’s that was clearly intended for a general readership, The Undiscovered Self. Throughout, Jung was implying that there was a third path that was not State-sanctioned materialism, or organized religion, and that “primitive” peoples are better at walking it because they don’t have highly abstracted organized religion or materialism.

    His claim that the collective unconscious is somehow stored in our genes seems to me like a tactic to get his concept past rationalist censors, rather than something he actually believed.

    I have a question. Are our representations of the physical world constructed on a cordoned-off part section of the astral plane? If so, do (some of) the barriers between it and the outside astral plane dissolve during sleep, allowing for dreams, or does the mind travel into other parts of the astral plane to dream? If I am technically experiencing the astral plane right now, my thoughts must take place outside my representation of the material plane.

    And it’s clear to me that a lot of dream interpretation involves guessing which mental plane concepts emanated down into dream imagery.

  8. Thank you John for this, long anticipated, post on Carl G. Jung.
    I only had one brief brush with a jungian psychiatrist in my youth, an I am ashamed to say I was to clueless to take advantage of the opportunity.
    Still, decades later, Carl Jung has become one of my inspirations/ role models/ exemplars of what a human being is capable of. And a fine challenge to imitate in my own way. There was an old documentary, in black and white, that at the time really impressed me.
    Then there is Herman Hesse. It would not have Schockes me, if the man was a practicing occultist. Certainly he was well read in it. Several of his books use occult material, and are detailed enough, that he at least had to have observed and consulted occultists in real life.

    Thank you and beast regards,
    Marko

  9. John,
    how do you view the recent resurgence of interest in Jung’s ideas among young men and also perhaps even a sympathy to them among mainstream American Christians via the lectures of Jordan Peterson? Just a watered down internet fad? Early stirrings of a Second Religiosity? None of the above?

  10. At this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts. Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.

    If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.

    * * *
    This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.

    May Jennifer, who is now 36+ weeks into pregnancy with the baby still in breech position, have a safe and healthy pregnancy, may the delivery go smoothly, and may her baby be born healthy and blessed.

    May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.

    May Viktoria have a safe and healthy pregnancy, and may the baby be born safe, healthy and blessed. May Marko have the strength, wisdom and balance to face the challenges set before him. (picture)

    May Linda from the Quest Bookshop of the Theosophical Society, who has developed a turbo cancer, be blessed and have a speedy and full recovery from cancer.

    May Matt, who is currently struggling with MS related fatigue, be blessed and healed such that he returns to full energy; and may he be enlightened as to the best way to manage his own situation to best bring about this healing.

    May NPM/Nick’s 12-year-old Greyhound Vera, who passed away on 1/20, be blessed and comforted, and granted rest and a peaceful transition to the next life. (1/23)

    May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.

    May MethylEthyl, who recently fractured a rib coughing, heal without complications, and have sufficient help for the move that she and hers are making at the end of the month.

    May Sub’s Wife’s major surgery last week have gone smoothly and successfully, and may she recover with ease back to full health.

    May David/Trubrujah’s 5 year old nephew Jayce, who is back home after chemotherapy for his leukemia, be healed quickly and fully, and may he, and mother Amanda, and their family find be aided with physical, mental, and emotional strength while they deal with this new life altering situation. (good news update!)

    May Mindwinds’s dad Clem, who in the midst of a struggle back to normal after a head injury has been told he shows signs of congestive heart failure, be blessed, healed, and encouraged.

    May Corey Benton, who is currently in hospital and whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, be healed of throat cancer. He is not doing well, and consents to any kind of distance healing offered. [Note: Healing Hands should be fine, but if offering energy work which could potentially conflict with another, please first leave a note in comments or write to randomactsofkarmasc to double check that it’s safe] (1/7)

    May Christian’s cervical spine surgery on 1/14 have been successful, and may he heal completely and with speed; and may the bad feelings and headaches plaguing him be lifted.

    May Open Space’s friend’s mother
    Judith
    be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from cancer.

    May Bill Rice (Will1000) in southern California, who suffered a painful back injury, be blessed and healed, and may he quickly recover full health and movement.

    May Peter Van Erp’s friend Kate Bowden’s husband Russ Hobson and his family be enveloped with love as he follows his path forward with the glioblastoma (brain cancer) which has afflicted him.

    May Daedalus/ARS receive guidance and finish his kundalini awakening, and overcome the neurological and qi and blood circulation problems that have kept him largely immobilised for several years; may the path toward achieving his life’s work be cleared of obstacles.

    May baby Gigi, continue to gain weight and strength, and continue to heal from a possible medication overdose which her mother Elena received during pregnancy, and may Elena be blessed and healed from the continuing random tremors which ensued; may Gigi’s big brother Francis continue to be in excellent health and be blessed.

    May Scotlyn’s friend Fiona, who has been in hospital since early October with what is a diagnosis of ovarian cancer, be blessed and healed, and encouraged in ways that help her to maintain a positive mental and spiritual outlook.

    May Peter Evans in California, who has been diagnosed with colon cancer, be completely healed with ease, and make a rapid and total recovery.

    May Jennifer and Josiah, their daughter Joanna, and their unborn daughter be protected from all harmful and malicious influences, and may any connection to malign entities or hostile thought forms or projections be broken and their influence banished.

    * * *
    Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.

    If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.

  11. I seem to recall, from reading The Devil’s Chessboard, that Martha (Cl0ver) Dulles, wife of the infamous Alan, was a long time patient of Jung. I rather suspect that Ms. Dulles’ mental and emotional difficulties were the natural and painful result of being married to a powerful sociopath.

  12. Wonderful essay. I’ll want to dig out some of my old Jungian books and reread them before hopefully being ready to tackle The Red Book.

    On a less personal note: I’m not sure I agree that Jungian psychology is doing poorly because it succeeded. I suspect rather that, like all forms of genuine occultism, it asks too much of its initiates (i.e. patients), while pop-psychology asks little and permits much. Plus there’s a half-century worth of history in which Jung has suffered from disrepute by association.

    If I remember correctly, after Freud has largely achieved the cultural victory against sexual neurosis, he tried to retool his form of psychoanalysis to address the crisis of meaning and purpose, but for Freud, like with the behaviorists, it took the form of trying to get them to grin and bear it. This lead to the rebellion by the humanistic psychologists like Carl Rogers in the 60’s and 70’s, who derided the Freudian/behaviorist ideal of the “organizational man.”

    This rebellion against psychoanalysis did not really distinguish between the schools of Freud, Adler, and Jung — it all had to go. This hostility to psychoanalysis was then adopted by both Religious Right and the Skeptic movement, though on somewhat different grounds, and in Jung both saw an enemy who would not commit to either orthodox Christianity or thoroughgoing materialism.

    The result was that by the time we got to the brief flowering of the New Atheist movement, its members were serenely able to return to the old rationalist naivities about the power of logic and science to replace superstition and mythology in the human mind and in society. And the final nail in the coffin of any hope of Jung becoming respectable again was probably the rise and fall of Jordan Peterson, who briefly made Jung cool again among young men but then crashed and burned under the influence of prescription opioids and has alienated many of his former fans with his more recent political statements.

    Going back to the humanistic psychologists, while they were rebelling against Freud’s poor answer to the crisis of meaning, they unfortunately didn’t actually have a better answer. So they ended up idolizing the rebellious individual, who hopefully would eventually find some sense of meaning and purpose, and this merged with political activism to create the mental health crises we have today.

    While pill-pushing is the dominant form of treatment, humanistic psychology survived in an even more degraded form when the self-help genre took off in the 80’s and 90’s, and it’s been highly influential among educators, counselors (including clergy), and media. Media targeting young men and especially young women is saturated with feel-good truisms that trace back to humanist pop-psychology.

    So while unquestionably there are some elements of Jungian psychology that have entered the mainstream, I don’t think that’s the primary reason for Jungianism’s precarious circumstances.

  13. Even though I am probably not familiar with all of Jung’s archetypes, the one I do know that resonates with me the most is “The Orphan” (no, I’m not going to sing “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow” for anybody). It’s probably because I feel like less of an Orphan here than anywhere else on the Internet is probably why I gravitated to your original blog in the late two-thousands. It probably also explains my dalliance with neo-primitivism (well, that and a class case of what is known as “reaction formation”) that I was indulging around that same time!

  14. I quite enjoyed that jump to the left into a parallel world where Jung and Jesse were full blown, openly practicing occultists – though I imagine it’s the pelvic thrust that would really drive Freud insane. 😉

    In any case, do you have any recommendations for where someone with an interest in occultism who’s never read Jung might start with reading Jung?

  15. “The fact that so many of us settle for so much less, that we crawl like worms when we could stride like titans, is the great tragedy of our species.”

    I can see the overlap here with ecology. In industrial society we have exchanged greatness and beauty for comfort and convenience. Just look at your average suburban couch potato.

  16. Fascinating essay JMG. I have been looking forward to this post and you did not disappoint!

    I’ve read a decent amount of Jung, and I still don’t think I’ve ever encountered a straightforward description of Active Imagination as a practice. There are a lot of references to it, and I have heard that Mary-Louise Von Franz does explain it in her writings but I haven’t tracked that down.

    In your opinion, is there anything to the Active Imagination technique that one cannot get from the scrying methods described in your occult books? I’m still not 100% clear if Active Imagination requires use of painting, sculpture or other visual arts. If so, that does sound different from scrying which is centered on meditative visualization.

  17. @James Swanson,

    I recommend starting with any basic overview of Jung’s work. C.G. Boeree’s chapter in his online personality theories book about him is a good one to start with, as is Eugene Pascal’s Jung to Live By: A Guide to the Practical Application of Jungian Principles for Everyday Life. (Man and His Symbols is Jung’s official introductory book but it’s denser than you need.)

    After reading at least one of those, I recommend you read Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which gives you an amazing feel for how he actually saw his ideas applying in real life.

  18. Leo, Protestantism is no obstacle to occultism — the Rosicrucian movement originated among Lutheran occultists in 17th century Germany, for example, and most of the members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn were Anglican Christians. I grant that the Protestant impulse tends to downplay ritual in favor of meditation, and formal structure in favor of spontaneity, but those are simply choices of means.

    Eileen, any characterization of the sort I’ve essayed here should be taken as an abstract conceptual model, not a description of individual people! Most people I know who are into the occult practice some blend of all three of the patterns I’ve sketched out; I certainly do. (I’m primarily an occultist, but prayer is also an important part of my practice and I use magic when I have some specific goal that it’s well suited for.) Some traditions focus on just one of the three general approaches I’ve sketched out, but here again there are others — Hermeticism among them — that provide all three options and let the individual sort it out.

    Earthworm, not in the works of his that I’ve read, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he slipped it in somewhere.

    Pyrrhus, I’m delighted to hear that. I see Jung as a kind of avatar of the alchemical Mercury, with all the trickster qualities that implies.

    Marko, you’re most welcome. Hesse was certainly familiar with occultism from early on — his novel Gertrude includes a minor character who is a Theosophist, and although Hesse’s viewpoint character is somewhat skeptical it’s a good clear portrayal. I tend to see Demian as his most occult-friendly book, and there may well have been some practice behind that remarkable portrait of the interactions between the lower and higher self!

    Ashlar, it’s too early to tell. It might be a flash in the pan, or it might be the beginnings of a very serious and worthwhile intellectual/cultural/spiritual movement. I’m certainly hoping for the latter. Do you know of any way to get some mainstream talking heads to denounce Jung? That might help things along.

    Quin, thank you for this as always.

    KM, oh, no doubt Freud was showing off the hem of his slip there.

    Justin, if the OPO existed I’ve had joined it decades ago! As for the Seven Sermons to the Dead, those are in The Red Book — those and some of the mandalas are the parts that Jung allowed to be published during his lifetime.

    Mary, they may also have been among the weaknesses of hers that left her vulnerable to marrying the guy in the first place.

    Slithy, interesting. The humanistic psychologists I read back in the day were generally much less critical of Jung (and also Reich) than they were of Freud and his more doctrinaire followers. That said, both the religious right and the skeptics (two branches of the same fundamentalist tree) were violently hostile to Jung for theological or atheological reasons, so your argument stands. But I think the rise of fantasy fiction and the other frankly myth-friendly elements in our society also played a very important role.

    Mister N, I think a lot of people resonate with that archetype these days; I certainly do.

    Justin, you can certainly bring him up for a future fifth Wednesday!

    James, I wondered how many readers would catch that blast from the past. As for Jung, I recommend Man and his Symbols and Modern Man in Search of a Soul to start with — they’re basically oversized sales brochures for Jungian therapy, but they’ll give you a good sense of the basics. After that, I recommend Symbols of Transformation to plunge into the core ideas of the tradition.

    Enjoyer, yep. One of the lessons of ecology is that the individual organism only thrives if the local environment thrives too; the degradation of our environments — including such built environments as homes and cities — is a major factor in the degradation of our lives.

    Samurai_47, active imagination = scrying in the spirit vision, full stop, end of sentence. (I’ve read von Franz’s book and several other bits of Jungian literature that clarify the subject.) Active imagination is one of the things that, in Jungian circles, you’re supposed to learn from a qualified therapist — it’s part of their stock in trade — but scrying as such is easy to learn on your own.

  19. Great post! But “Firthian paychology” – ahem, sounds a lot like a Freudian slip! Many psychologists do pad their service price.

  20. Two thoughts.

    1) Your analysis of Jung’s work losing its efficacy and its core patient group reminds me of a comment by William James that if New Thought ever became the dominant belief of the status quo, it would lose its power to function, and some other marginal technique would take its place. Partly, because it works by curing the errors of the actual dominant beliefs, and partly because it isn’t as sexy and thus benefits less from the shocking power it has as a fringe idea.

    2) Jungian analysts may be having a rough time, but judging by the random Youtube videos coming up in my feed and comments I’ve heard from quite a few people who know nothing of either psychology or occultism, Jung is experiencing quite a popular revival of interest. Most of it centers on the shadow, anima/animus, etc., but I wouldn’t be surprised to see ordinary people begin to take it farther. His archetypes are playing a helpful role for a lot of Millennials and Gen-Zers. Some of them are missing the point, or reworking them into other systems, but I guess that’s how movements of thought proceed.

  21. @JMG:
    Ah, if I had the schedule for a vacation. From job, from houe, from studing, … Iwould sit down on a nice coutch and reread Damien. Ahhh…
    @Mister N:
    If your story qualifies you for “the Orphan”, seeing as it is, as told, very much like mine. Then you are not alone. And this is coming from a literal orphan 🙂

  22. Ashlar and JMG,

    There have been a number of mildly critical articles about RFK in mainstream news outlets in the last couple of days. It’s not exactly denunciation, but several of them mention the influence of “philosopher Carl Jung’s” writings on RFK overcoming drug addiction. So he’s another controversial public figure who promotes Jung along with Jordan Peterson. You have to hunt for it, but the work in question is Sychronicity.

  23. I too was intrigued by your crisp categorization of magic (power/ritual), mysticism (love/prayer), and occultism (wisdom/meditation). But I couldn’t help but think of it in terms of the Holy Trinity. With the Holy Spirit corresponding to magic. God the Father corresponding to mysticism, and God the Son corresponding to occultism.

    I have been listening to some interviews about Jung on youtube.
    And one thing that was said has been giving me much to meditate on was this statement
    “wisdom is a climb down from the spiritual heights.”
    I had previously assumed that Wisdom was the highest good.
    It is interesting to see it as more limited and practical than pure Spirituality.

    for those who do videos this one is good.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpUhL6yujWc

  24. JMG,
    Thanks for this.
    FYI to those curious about active imagination. Robert Johnson’s Inner Work gives a clear, solid overview of the practice of engaging in active imagination and working with dreams.
    Pierre

  25. “Partly that’s because the pharmaceutical industry has managed to turn psychiatrists into little more than pill pushers, and the medical industry has settled for drugging patients into numbness instead of, you know, helping them to solve their problems. (I don’t think this is any kind of accident. As the wry slogan goes, “a patient cured is a customer lost.”)”

    I think there’s another major factor: one of the most dangerous things for our current political and social order is people who are able to think clearly. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the drugs used by the pharmaceutical industry for psychiatric problems are alll remarkably good at numbing the spirit and dulling the mind; nor that they are pushed so hard on the kind of children who ask hard questions or refuse to do what they are told because it does not make sense to them….

  26. What I really like about Jung is he still has enough credence with more open minded ‘everyday’ mostly materialist types that I can get away with sending something like the following interesting piece on the new developing age without it being immediately shot down as an initial opening of a discussion of where we might be headed in the next little while.

    ‘Jung’s “Platonic Month” and the Age of Aquarius’
    https://jungiancenter.org/jungs-platonic-month-and-the-age-of-aquarius/

  27. JMG, I count it a positive result of pre-Agent Steinem feminism that many women today no longer feel and believe that we must cling to social position and social respectability at all costs.

    Thank you for mentioning Monte Verita; I was not sure you knew about that group.

  28. “Ah, but over here is a pair of books by somebody named Lon L. Ardrich”

    Somebody loves their anagrams…

  29. I’ve read more thought downstream of Jung (James Hillman, Marie von Franz, June Singer) than I have of Jung… though the same older teenager down the street who turned me on to punk rock gifted me a copy of Man and His Symbols when I was in junior high. One of a few doors he opened for me…

    That includes the Red Book. When I was a teenager visiting the library and going into the 133 section and the 299s and other sections of the library, one book that haunted my mind was the Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons of the Dead by Steven Hoeller. I need to go deeper into the source, but his massive texts always looked fairly intimidating. Though I read one off parts, on synchronicity, UFOs, and various commentaries, the appendix to the Secret of the Golden Flower and stuff like that.

    It’s like there are certain books I need to study to close certain loops that started when I was younger. If I was journaling, and in a way I am, I would say these are untapped potentials for this incarnation. For instance, I was talking about Godel, Escher, Bach awhile ago… I did finish reading some “warm up” math books before to feel better able to tackle it. And for those of you who are interested in the quadrivium, I did write a review of Music by the Number: From Pythagoras to Schoenberg by Eli Maor, which I mentioned before:

    https://igloomag.com/reviews/music-by-the-numbers

    One of the cool things in that book was a description of Mike Sterilings Bernouli Involute stringed spiral instrument, but I digress.

    I’d like to see dreamwork further revived in western occult traditions. I still recommend, with just a few reservations, the work of Robert Moss (mostly the classification of some of it as “shamanic”). Moss wrote a good bit of stuff about Wolfgang Pauli and Jung… a fascinating friendship there. But again, I need to read upstream more in this area.

    For that matter, surrealism, and its use of dream imagery and symbols, has a lot of untapped potential for helping break us of the dead ends and failures of imagination this society of spectacle is caught up inside.

    So many threads to follow and weave.

  30. So let’s get right to it: What books of Jung’s would you recommend the aspiring occultist to start with? (I ask as though I don’t already have a big backlog of occult tomes to wade through.)

  31. Dear John,

    as one of those who consistently voted for this topic until it finally won, let me say: what a beautiful essay!

    Oddly enough, I came to occultism through Jung, via von Franz. As I’ve related before, one of her books helped me very much during an existential crisis, which then made me read everything by her that I found. Quickly I realized that it was really the world view behind it all that intrigued me, and which made perfect sense to me. She didn’t play down the occult aspects of this world view (she wrote chiefly for other Jungians, so there was no need to make it seem respectable) but then again she didn’t say, ‘this is a form of occultism’. When I then encountered occultism, mainly through your writings, everything fell into place: ‘Wait a minute, this mysterious “scrying” is simply active imagination? …’

    Jungianism also helped me realize that there was a serious third option besides bland atheist-materialism and doctrinaire religion, and thus find my way into the kind of druidical heterodox Christianity I inhabit today.

    Anyway, this all reminds me of your remark in ‘Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth’ that in the early 1900s many occultists used psychological language because back then, psychology spoke about culture’s blind spots, and that today ecology could serve a similar role. I wonder if there are any closet occultists right now who are generally seen as ecologists …

    Sheldrake is also an interesting case. Sure, he mainly presents himself as a sort of maverick biologist, which he is, but it’s clear that he knows a lot of occult stuff too, and he’s not afraid to talk about subtle bodies and the consciousness of the sun.

    Also, I sometimes attend talks at a certain learned society of parapsychologists, and the speakers there use occult concepts freely and without explanation (so they assume everyone in the audience knows them). Then again, parapsychology is itself an outsider field, so there’s less need to pretend respectability there.

  32. Hi JMG,
    Thank you for a very thought provoking article. I really appreciate the last paragraph:
    “One of the central teachings of occultism is that each of us can be much more than we allow ourselves to be. Every human being contains the potential for magnificence: that’s how one of my teachers used to phrase it. The fact that so many of us settle for so much less, that we crawl like worms when we could stride like titans, is the great tragedy of our species. ”

    About 20 years ago I had to take a basic psychology class in order to enter into an MA program in psychology and I felt utterly horrified when the teacher exclaimed quite confidently that it’s impossible for humans to actualize. It’s really unfortunate how much the psychotherapy industry, like the pharma industry, views peoples’ challenges as illness and calls their clients “patients” as though they are broken.

    Thankfully, this is changing in small corners of the psychotherapy world where really effective offerings are becoming available that actually acknowledge that a human being’s inherent movement is towards aliveness. That underpinning in the new approaches supports the reality that literally every person has the potential for magnificence.

  33. I’ve long thought that the best benefit of occultism is to be taught it when mentally well. It is of limited use, and perhaps dangerous, if taught when sick. This naturally limits any Jungian approach. I remember once approaching a Jungian therapist when I needed a bit of help, his answer was he couldn’t possibly help me… So no surprises if it’s on its last legs. A sane society would teach this stuff all of the time, so that if things went bad for an individual, they’d have something to work with. In the absence of prior training, all the mind can do is go to instinct or panic when it encounters a situation it isn’t aware of, and that I think underlies a lot of mental illness.

    I still have trouble reconciling the general dislike of modern psychiatry and medications amongst occultism. It’s one area where I think there is a blind spot and things are in binaries. Centuries, if not millenia of exorcisms, faith healing, etc, didn’t do much for most cases of psychosis. It took the chance creation of chlorpromazine, the first anti psychotic, to basically clear large asylums overnight. A trained army of Jungians couldn’t have done that.

    I get that prescription medications are over prescribed and over abused, and incidentally, the older ones seem to be the better ones, probably because they were developed with genuine care in mind, but any future system of medicine and psychology has to find a place for them in balance and moderation.

    I have a theory that with all of us being in the time of Saturn, there’s a reason that medication, being more closely tied to the material plane, can get better results than the older traditions say it will, and whilst I think this may be limited to the astrological age we are in, our systems do need updating accordingly.

  34. Most excellent Archdruid JMG, thank you so much for this deep dive into Jung! There’s a LOT there, and I am very tantalized by your intimation at the end that you have more to say on the subject: “…it may well be time for those of us already committed to that quest to see what we can do about finding a place for Jung’s legacy in the traditions of modern occultism.” Yes, yes!

    A note to the commentariat: The Red Book is a bit of a commitment in several ways. It weighs eight pounds! It stands 40 CM tall on the bookshelf! For many people’s houses, it is the proverbial “Elephant in the room” just due to its bulk. Hard to miss! And it has a cost commensurate with its dimensions…

    The Red Book is the result of Jung’s “confrontation with the unconscious.” As such, it could be seen as a chronicle of a mental breakdown. But what a magnificent breakdown!

  35. I realize this is reaching a bit, and perhaps it’s just coincidence, but your note about working within limits seems particularly apropos given the release of DeepSeek this past week. There’s already claims the Chinese company who created it “cheated” by re-training on not-so-OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but that doesn’t take away from the achievement as much as Silicon Valley would like it to. I think there’s a lesson that needs to be fully understood there, and as always, you seem to be around the target even when writing on a 5th Wednesday.

    Indeed, it might be fair to say, given DeepSeek, given all the sanctions, given the puffery of the Golden Golem of Greatness (JHK hat-tip) that the lesson of living/working within limits just might be the most important lesson we didn’t know we needed to learn right now. Kudos to you for bringing it to the forefront….

  36. @JMG

    I may well be overstating the hostility from the humanists. I can believe that early on there was more sympathy, during the heady days of the 60’s and 70’s. But most of them seemed happy to fall in line once materialism became de rigueur in academia the 80’s.

    That shift also more or less killed dead the “fourth force” of transpersonal psychology that was emerging to replace the humanists and address their shortcomings. From what I can tell, by the 90’s or 00’s, transpersonal psychology got only the occasional nod that maybe possibly there was something there, and that only because Abraham Maslow, who often stands above even Carl Rogers among the heroes of humanistic psychology, had been among its founders.

    You’re also certainly right about the rise of fantasy media, though as I’m sure you realize, in the last decade we’ve seen a concerted attempt to bowdlerize it to conform to the dreary pieties of progressive ideology. Thankfully the tide is turning on that, but I suspect that the damage has been done and the fantasy fad will soon be on its way out, much like the superhero fad is now. By then, of course, we’ll be well into the Second Religiosity, so a larger share of the population will be getting their myth from actual ritual.

    So, thinking about it, your argument that Jungian therapy is a solution in search of a problem also stands.

    (As a post script: you might be amused to know that Wilhelm Reich is still popular in some radical Leftist circles. The section on anarchist child-rearing in the “An Anarchist FAQ” — which was for a long time and may still be the de facto standard reference on anarcho-socialist theories — cites Reich extensively while also distancing themselves from his orgone theories.)

  37. @Bryan Allen, et al…

    There is a paperback laymans version of the Red Book available. I got the library to buy it when it came out.

    Similar to Hall’s Secret Teachings of All Ages, the deluxe editions are nice to have from a bibliophilic pov but there are other cheaper editions you can find.

  38. Beautiful, thank you.

    I am wondering if the psychology of political leaders is quite different than the average person’s , being at the top of a pyramid of power, and due to the pile of unwholesome things they had to do get there?

    Have some psychologists studied those profiles?

  39. “Do you know of any way to get some mainstream talking heads to denounce Jung? That might help things along.”

    Oh, I’m almost positive there’s someone, somewhere right now as we speak denouncing him as a white privileged male, fascist, racist, misogynist, transphobic bad guy…. sorry, ahem… bad “person”.

  40. I’m delighted to see this topic covered…it was well worth the wait! I can almost see the Mercurial twinkle in your eye as you celebrate Jung’s undeniable occultist essence.

    Samurai_47: The Red Book is a vivid demonstration of what Jung meant by “active imagination.”

    In his essay “The Transcendent Function,” (Collected Works Volume 8; The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche), Jung gives a detailed decription of the process, designed for Jungian analysts working with patients.

    In C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Marie Louise von Franz presents her understanding of active imagination in the chapter “The Journey to the Beyond.” She writes that the first detailed description of active imagination that Jung published was in his introduction to Richard Wilhelm’s The Secret of the Golden Flower (1929).

  41. I’m coming around to the idea that if one really wants to straighten oneself out psychologically, one can’t avoid topics, concepts, and experiences that fall into the “occult” category. Recently I discovered the work of the psychiatrist Phil Stutz. He has a talk therapy practice and became frustrated with the lack of results for patients with traditional therapy. So he developed a set of tools, which are essentially mini spiritual exercises. They have helped a lot of people and he has a considerable following now. Here’s the thing: he can’t, and doesn’t avoid the fact that the reason they help people is that they create connections with “higher powers” in the “spiritual realm.” He and his collaborators seem slightly embarrassed about this, and they explain the tools in a wink-wink, semi-apologetic way. He is a slightly irascible old guy from the Bronx which I find charming. To paraphrase, “we don’t know what these powers are, but they work. Just shut up and do the exercises and you will experience it for yourself.”

    It is a long way from Carl Jung, who has a hyperintellectual approach. Stutz’ tools are very pragmatic exercises to be used throughout the day. I just thought it was fascinating because he is a bona fide psychiatrist and there he is describing his clinical tools as spiritual higher powers.

  42. Mr. Greer:

    I was interested in discussing with you a possible podcast interview, and leaving this comment is the only way I can find to connect with you.

    Might you have an email address at which I can email you regarding this?

    Thank you for your consideration.

    Mike Mercier

  43. Hrmmmmm……… The power of limits.

    The best of modern civilization may be in front of us if we accept limits.

    Climb down from the Faustian Spiritual Goal of pursuing the Infinite / universal on the physical plane and embrace the limited and particular on physical plane. Limit the pursuit of the infinite/ universal to Mathematics.

  44. Ecosophian, yep. See my comments above.

    Kyle, James was right, of course — no ideology can solve its own problems, and the ideology of the mainstream is always the main source of problems in a society. As for the revival of Jung, I’m glad to see it — I hope it goes places.

    Marko, agreed!

    Samurai_47, why, I already knew that I like RFK Jr., and that gives me another reason.

    Dobbs, hmm! That works. As for wisdom as a descent from the heights, synchronicity strikes again; just a couple of mornings ago I was meditating on a passage of Manly P. Hall that pointed out that a person isn’t virtuous because he has virtues, he’s virtuous because he can use his virtues intelligently. The visions of the mountaintop are subject to the same rule…

    Pierre, thanks for this.

    Anonymoose, there’s that!

    Jay, interesting. Thanks for this.

    Mary, no argument there. As for Monte Verità, I spent quite a while back a few years following up clues relating to early 20th century central European occultism, and then more recently did a lot of reading about the circles around Jung and Hesse. Both of those led straight to Monte Verità.

    Anonymous, I thought most of my readers knew that. Look up Fred Halliot sometime.

    Justin, my intro to the whole panoply of Jungian ideas was a more or less downstream work, Emma Jung’s The Grail Legend — which remains a fave of mine, and well worth reading. As for threads to weave together, gods, I know.

    Cliff, I’ll quote myself above: “I recommend Man and his Symbols and Modern Man in Search of a Soul to start with — they’re basically oversized sales brochures for Jungian therapy, but they’ll give you a good sense of the basics. After that, I recommend Symbols of Transformation to plunge into the core ideas of the tradition.”

    Robert K, Sheldrake’s a fascinating case. Either he’s independently rediscovered Dion Fortune’s core concepts — his “morphogenetic fields” are an exact equivalent of the “tracks in space” from The Cosmic Doctrine, for example — or he’s another canny occultist who’s managed to disguise himself as a scientist.

    Angelica, good gods. What a miserable worldview that teacher had! I’m glad to hear that there are constructive changes at work in the psych field.

    Peter, as I noted in my post, Jungian methods aren’t really suited to serious mental illness. I’d agree, too, that there are some cases that have to be treated by chemical means, especially in acute episodes, but drugs alone aren’t a complete treatment. They’re also massively overprescribed, many of them have ghastly side effects, and the evidence suggests that no small number don’t actually work. Nor was the emptying of asylums necessarily all that much of a success — a very large number of homeless people are mentally ill, and would be much better off in an old-fashioned county farm, where they could be fed, sheltered, and kept safe.

    Bryan, there’s a reader’s edition of The Red Book that’s much smaller and less overwhelming. Mind you, I have the gargantuan facsimile edition on my shelves…

    Doug, I’m watching that whole sequence of events with great interest. More on this in a future post!

    Slithy, I see the massive effort by the corporate wokester scene to abolish fantasy fiction and put a stuffed, mounted, and insanely dull facsimile thereof in its place as testimony to just how much power the untamed imagination has, and just how frightened the current elite is of that. The recent fantasy fad may be on its way out, but that opens a window of opportunity — what’s passed for fantasy in the post-Tolkien era has been a very narrow slice of the much livelier and more interesting fantasy that was around earlier (and had a brief but potent resurgence in the 1970s).

    Tony, good question. My guess is that there’s not much difference, since domination and unwholesome activities are quite common much further down the social pyramid, and the tendency to demonize political leaders has more to do with the projection of the Shadow archetype than anything else.

    Ashlar, sure, but most people just tune out that sort of vacuous cant these days. Something other than a string of clichés would be helpful for what I have in mind.

    Goldenhawk, thank you. I had fun with it, as you doubtless noticed.

    Samurai_47, funny. Thanks for this.

    Michael, please put through a comment marked “Not For Posting” with your email address and some information about your podcast, and I’ll be in touch.

    Dobbs, you’d think that would be dawning on more than a few people at this point…

  45. “I think the largest share of the difficulty, though, is simply that so many of Jung’s insights have become such commonplaces in modern life …” I’m somewhat skeptical about this claim. At least judging from my own experience I’d say one of the great benefits of a Jungian approach to things is that it rather subtly hints at depths beyond the shallow waters we’re normally dawdling in. In this way, it opens up new space and allows us to change our position and perspective on things. That’s how I would characterize the Jung-inspired therapeutic work that I have witnessed so far – it does not aim at changing the client in some way or teaching him some behavioral techniques, but its aim is to allow the client a different, more profound perspective on his life and life in general and let things unfold from there.

    The obvious “weakness” of this approach is that the client needs to be able to draw conclusions from his new perspective and further that he is able to derive sensible action from there. Anybody who is not ready to take action for some reason will simply refuse to acknowledge the new perspective and from there on it goes nowhere, at least for the moment. Another general “weakness” of a Jungian approach that it leans very heavily on the rational intellect as a means of transportation to new depths.

    Judging from this perspective, I’d say the main reason for a decline in interest in a Jungian approach is a spreading sense of indifference and idleness (or one could also say futility and numbness) in the populace, accompanied by a general decline of intellectual capacity. Everything has become vague and equal, without contrast and depth and there are more narcotics – chemical and otherwise – available than possibly ever before. Many people don’t even seem to be aware of the possibility of something else than the shallow waters they’re told to be in. Why move? But of course the depth are there anyway and sometimes dangerous for the unaware. The fact that so many people fell victim to the C19-psychosis could possibly be seen as some evidence for this.

    Greetings,
    Nachtgurke

  46. Hello JMG and thank you for terrific essay on Jung. I’m embarrassed to say that as much as I was appreciating your insights as I read the post, my mind was saying “wait, what? – was that really a picture of Violet Firth/ Dion Fortune with her hair down, literally?” Or did I miss some aspect of the joke? Perhaps I missed “the step to the right”😉 but I thought all the pics of the majestic Dion Fortune were limited to the very few I’d seen.

  47. Thanks a lot for this post! I’m immensely grateful to Jung (and Marie-Louise von Franz) for their work, which has helped make sense of many things in my life. There seems to be a porous, blurry interface between deeply held core beliefs and archetypes, the personal and the impersonal, that I’m in the thick of learning about.

    About mandalas: was there ever any connection between Jung and Manly Hall?

  48. JMG, I have a question. I don’t follow what sort of patients Jung and company helped when they started out. I understand the patients and the conditions that Freud helped, unacknowledged sexual desire, causing necrosis. What was it about 19th century rationalism that he was treating and why don’t we have that now.

    Thanks
    Will O

  49. Just want to extend my appreciation for your writing this, JMG. Perfect timing for my life. Brings so much together. Thank you kindly.

  50. JMG–if you want another example of an author scoring points against the founder of a school of psychology there is _Freud: the Making of an Illusion_, by Frederick Crews. Crews is actually an English professor whose work I first encountered in _The Pooh Perplex_, a parody of literary criticism case book with humorous essays on the depths of the works concerning Winnie the Pooh. In the work on Freud, Crews uses recently released journals and other new evidence to completely destroy any idea of Freud as an honest researcher or scientist. The book goes after its subject like one of those tomahawks with a club on one side and a blade on the other. As a point of occult interest Crews also wrote about the “recovered memory” movement and the role of Freuds work in that. Since the “recovered memories” frequently had a Satanic component the whole thing had a bad effect on the occult and Pagan scene.

    Rita

  51. Oddly, the image of Dion Fortune Staring at the McGuffin that you use is one that I would describe as “most likely to be bogus”. It appears as far as I know only at Theosophy Wiki (https://theosophy.wiki/en/Dion_Fortune). It looks nothing like any of the actual attested images of Violet Firth/Dion Fortune, who has very different hair, a different facial structure, and more plausible period clothing. The image of Fortune as priestess is more plausible, and seems to have come from some Theosophical archive, but the facial structure does seem a bit off.

    Compare the attested images of Fortune as a teenager (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/4e/Dion_Fortune.jpg/220px-Dion_Fortune.jpg), Fortune as a schoolgirl (https://eruizf.com/martinismo/autores/dion_fortune/dion_fortune.jpg), Fortune ., Fortune as a child poet (https://www.hermetics.org/images/jpg/Dion-Violet-Firth-The-Bystander-March-14-1906-5.jpg), Fortune with her husband (https://www.controverscial.com/Fortune_WEB.gif), and so on. These other images have appeared widely in books by people with close connections to Fortune and her circles.

    I’d be happy to be corrected, but I think that image of Fortune Adoring the McGuffin is probably a mis-attribution.

  52. In what ways, if any, do you suppose Jung’s occultism may have contributed to his being a great doctor, and in particular a great healer?

  53. After all these years we finally get the reading list that we’ve been asking for. On the other hand the timing does seem rather auspicious.

  54. “ The recent fantasy fad may be on its way out, but that opens a window of opportunity — what’s passed for fantasy in the post-Tolkien era has been a very narrow slice of the much livelier and more interesting fantasy that was around earlier …”

    This sounds like good news to me. I can’t wait to see the wacky fun fantasy that presumably must be on its way.

  55. Re: your division of magic, occultism, and mysticism:

    I thought about this, and I think that the path of the magician ultimately leads to willing that things happen with your entire unified will, and becoming a god who can direct forces and influence events when he achieves Gwynfydd. But to do so, he needs to have decent relations with higher powers and ease his load of bad karma. But those are secondary considerations for him.

    The path of the mystic leads to becoming a saint, angel, or maybe even vessel of one’s deity.

    The occultist gains self-knowledge and probably becomes a more subtle sort of spirit or deity than the former magician.

    While meditating, it occured to me that Faustian society probably hates magic* partly because a popularization of effective magic would threaten monopulization of power and the ability of the culture to pursue its grand goals.

    *I wondered why Faustian culture has been hostile to magic even though acquiring ever more power and control appeals to its worldview of linear progress.

  56. I haven’t studied Jung, but I’ve been studying alchemy. @Dobbs’ comment about Wisdom being a climb down from the spiritual heights and JMG’s comment about virtuous is using virtues intelligently made me think it might be a good time to share a model I’ve been working on.

    Model is posted here https://i0.wp.com/druidalchemist.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Model-of-the-Planes.jpg?w=642&ssl=1 (and on my Dreamwidth).

    @Dobbs, I think Wisdom would be considered a climb down because it is not a Unity, but rather part of the first duality.

    @JMG, in my model, Intelligence is on the Spiritual Plane, in the central position. Right Action (which aligns with using virtues intelligently in my mind) is also in the central position, but on the Astral. (And Herakles has to demonstrate Right Action to move from the Physical-Etheric to the Astral…)

    (And JMG, after reading your post, I think I shall have to study Jung, too. Like JPM said, so many threads…)

  57. @Dobbs

    Thats why the infinite expansion went physical, the metaphysical pursuit of Faustian Culture was maxed out in the 18th century. Calculus, irrational numbers etc and their expression in orchestral music, got to the very limits of the abstract pursuit of infinity and had no where left to go. This is always when civilisation sets in and breadth in the physical realm takes over from depth in the metaphysical.

  58. Back when I was seeking out a psychoanalyst, as my completely unrecognized kundalini awakening began to really spiral out of control, I was absolutely convinced that I needed to find a Jungian analyst. That galvanizing clarity may well have been a deep gift from my kundalini awakening, as it offered up various tools useful towards its own integration into my thoroughly disoriented Self.

    The Jungian analyst that I eventually worked with had not ever gotten a masters degree in psychology, sociology, or any other supposedly related field. She had her masters in divinity, and that, I have to say, made all the difference! What an extraordinarily rich several years those turned out to be. Marion utilized several esoteric techniques for accessing her soul’s innate understanding during our sessions. A few of those I still don’t have any idea how they worked, such as holding a hand along the bridge of her nose, separating off the right and left visual fields from each other. Of course, she always practiced those occult techniques as surreptitiously as possible, so I never broke off my narrative to ask her precisely how they worked. That I do regret.

    Marion also had an up-close and personal view of the various stresses fracturing apart the Jung Institute in New York, which I only got a second-hand view of from my boyfriend’s long-term and rather less-than-successful therapy with that institute’s director. Marion and I used to crack up about the Jung Institute’s being unable to “contain the opposites” within itself, as it splintered apart in factionalism. Ah, good times, those were the days! Little could I have imagined then how vast were the unexplored depths of the Self, which I had just barely begun to notice peeking up above the surface of my subconscious.

  59. The limits imposed by trying to stay well outside of one’s adversaries’ radar do tend to cause the most impressive bursts of creativity to take place out along the fringes, or, shall I say, up against those limits. A well-policed consensus doctrine may strangle all the life out of its own depleted soil, but what extraordinary fertility it confers on the land outside of its stranglehold.

    I wonder what kind of a dismissable funny-hat-wearing occultist Jung would have become had he not decided to try to make an incognito pass in the heart of respectable society? I also wonder what kind of a respectable social scientist John Michael would have become had he not decided to try to stay completely outside the mainstream culture’s radar altogether?

    With so many different ways of avoiding detection to choose from, how is an aspiring occultist to decide which set of limits might best enrich his efforts? Obviously, that would be a rhetorical question, given “and to keep silent.” Shhh!

  60. I read a little from Jung some years ago. One thing I do remember is a statement that the archetypes are “complexes of instinctive behavior”. Could someone please elaborate on this?

  61. Nachtgurke, your first factor would have been just as true in 1925 as it is in 2025, and yet Jungian therapy was wildly popular then and is fading out now. As for “indifference and idleness,” oddly enough, those are exactly the sort of things that were said about the “lost generation” of the 1920s. That is to say, I’m as unconvinced by your explanation as you are by mine.

    Jill, I found it on a Theosophical website; I’m entirely willing to believe that it’s inaccurate — and posting it here seemed like a good way to get people to check on it.

    Jbucks, I don’t know of any connection between them. Hall’s exposure to mandalas, which led to his very solid book on the subject, was by way of Shingon Buddhism, into which circumstantial evidence suggests he took layman’s initiation; his book on mandalas includes far more detail on the two Shingon mandalas, the Vajradhatu and Garbhadhatu mandalas, than any English source known to me until quite recently.

    Will, Jung’s typical patients by and large did everything “right” — they were successful, respected, integrated into society, and going slowly crazy because their lives seemed hopelessly devoid of meaning and value. Within the worldview of 19th century materialism that was incomprehensible — remember that orthodox psychologists rejected the idea of unconscious thought as a contradiction in terms and insisted that the surface level of the mind was all there is, so the very idea of unconscious or half-conscious inner needs was anathema to them. Jung did as much as anyone to change that.

    Randall, you’re most welcome and thank you.

    Rusty, it’s a fun thought, isn’t it?

    Rita, Freud’s been the object of several such campaigns; Jeffrey Masson’s Assault on Truth is another very Oedipal volume.

    LeGrand, so noted. Yes, that’s where I got it; I’m very poor with faces, so I figured posting it here would be a good way to check its bona fides.

    Kevin, my take is that a lot of people needed occultism in their lives, and Jung figured out a respectable way to get it to them.

    KVD, it’s not the first time I’ve listed those books…

    Kevin, here’s hoping!

    Patrick, my goals as an occultist are less colorful; I’d like to be wiser than I am.

    Jim, thanks for this — I’ll see if I can find a copy.

    Random, interesting. Thanks for this.

    Christophe, I considered two options. The first, during my first pass through college in the 1980s, was a career as a botanist focusing on the ecology of mosses and other primitive plants in the forest understory: the kind of specialty that’s so far from anything controversial that I could have gotten away with almost anything under suitable pseudonyms. The second, in my second pass through college in the 1990s, was a career in history of ideas focusing on Renaissance and early modern Hermeticism, which was a hot field then and remains so today. Either one might have worked, but I chose otherwise.

    Mary, sure. If you read up on the study of animal behavior you’ll find that the instincts, in practice, are very often triggered by specific stimuli, often visual: for example, baby geese are born programmed to treat the largest moving object in their immediate vicinity as Mom, and follow it around. (Konrad Lorenz used to get himself adopted by goslings that way.) Since humans, like other primates, rely especially on visual stimuli, images are what trigger our instincts — and the archetypes are the deep patterns that underlie those images. This one’s the archetypal image of Dad, aka the Wise Old Man; this one’s the archetypal image of the lover, aka the animus, and so on.

  62. I am with Legrand Cinq-Mars #56 on the Theosophical photo purporting to be of Violet Firth. It does not appear to me to be the same individual as in the attested photos of Dion Fortune. In those photos there is a noticeably shorter vertical distance between her eyes and eyebrows. They’re quite compressed. That with her short lips and her square-jawed serious expression give her the air of a stolid no-nonsense upper-middle-class woman. Whereas the woman we see in the Theosophical photo has a rather dreamy look that reminds one more of Julia Margaret Cameron’s famous photo of the actress Ellen Terry.

    In the Theosophical photograph, the woman does not appear to me to be looking at the McGuffin. Her eyes are not focused on it. Rather she is looking in its direction, but past it.

  63. @JMG

    I meant the idealized ultimate outcome over multiple lives pursuing one of those paths (which is probably unlikely, since you wrote that we don’t choose what our upcoming lives will be). At this early point, I don’t know what my own goals are in regards to this (if I get results from magical practice or improve at meditation, I might develop concerte ones).

  64. Clarification: I’m sure my higher self is nowhere near ready to attempt to achieve a form of enlightenment (I would not even be good at parenting, much less whatever tasks post-humans get) and my goals should assist whatever I am supposed to accomplish in this life.

  65. What CG Jung an Occultist!?! They guy who practically named Synchronicity. How could it be!! I kid. 😉

    First my favorite quote from the TV show Frasier, context is a call in radio show for psychiatric advice.

    “Although I feel perfectly qualified to fill Frasier’s radio shoes, I should warn you that while Frasier is a Freudian, I am a Jungian. So there’ll be no blaming Mother today!”

    Secondly I do like that you mentioned the Monte Verità sanctuary/co-op. They might be useful to take some notes from for the shape of the future. I have mentioned this before a few months back but there is a great book on the Libensreform movement that predates even them. Folks that we would now label hippies even though I think they would not appreciate that one bit, these folks had some real integrity (if you ignore Gypsy bootz).

    Below I have linked the book ‘Children of the Sun’ that is a great summary of that movement and the folks who shaped it.

    A neat little link to all this is the Gusto Grazier section that does mention that Herman Hesse lived win the wilderness with Grazier for about 3 months. While he wasn’t too impressed with it once the romance wore off, it did influence him for later in life.

    Do note – if you are spending you work time conversing with a druid instead of testing the limits of Microsoft Excel and you endurance for the banal – do be aware there is a lot of nudity in this book, so best not to bring it up in that context.

    https://archive.org/details/children-of-the-sun

  66. I find it interesting how in the new Nosferatu movie by Robert Eggers, the resident “van Helsing” figure, Prof. von Franz is a thinly-veiled reference to Jung himself. He’s a Swiss psychologist with unorthodox theories who quit academia to focus on alchemy, not to mention he’s named after Marie-Louis von Franz, one of Jung’s most famous student. The movie itself, without spoiling too much, casts the eponymous vampire as a metaphor for the Shadow, and the Professor is the only person in the whole cast who actually gets what’s going on.

    (there’s a pretty hilarious line in which after von Franz analyzes Emma and coming to the conclusion that she’s possessed by a demon, his student asks if he means she’s just crazier than they thought, and the Professor answers with “no, I mean an actual demon!”)

  67. @JMG & PETER “I’d agree, too, that there are some cases that have to be treated by chemical means, especially in acute episodes, but drugs alone aren’t a complete treatment. They’re also massively overprescribed”

    It is funny sad to see how modern anti-depressants have been used. The original intention was for them to provide temporary relief from issues for a few months so that you could get enough mental space to address the larger issue. That is a very rational use of these and it was a response to the issue that these only work for a while get used to the drug – and after that you become dependent just to feel ‘normal’.

    Doctors, super-mega-globa-pharm, policy makers etc figured it was much better for them to turn them into a diet rather than a treatment. Unless absolutely necessary, try not to turn drugs into diet.

  68. Meanwhile, in another alternate timeline, conservative Christian preachers warn their flock not to read the ‘dangerous and satanically inspired’ fiction of famous occultist C. S. Lewis. His most beloved work is a heptology of children’s novels illustrating the nature of the seven planets in beautiful stories, and its villain is a fundamentalist Christian pastor who is really only interested in power over people and gets swept up by forces that he, in his rigid and unimaginative worldview, does not even begin to understand. Lewis’s clever and learned essays on occult themes are full of highly quotable aphorisms which are passed around the occult scene like mantras.

  69. … oh, and to add to my little fantasy: In their sermons against Lewis, those conservative Christian preachers recommend their listeners to go to some good Christian imaginative literature instead. For instance the lovely books by a somewhat eccentric Catholic priest from Austria named Rudolf Steiner, well-known as a Catholic apologist and author of Christian children’s novels full of obvious Catholic allegories. True, he may have been a bit too close to Teilhard de Chardin and other heretical Catholics, and serious occultists have no trouble recognizing the occult world view that informs all of his fiction, and there are some rumours that he may have been involved with the Theosophical Society in his youth … but that doesn’t stop those Christian preachers from upholding him as a paragon of orthodoxy.

  70. “Freud: the Making of an Illusion_, by Frederick Crews.” aka, “Fred on Freud.”

    Masson’s book is good too, and there’s a chapter on Freud in “The Culture of Critique.” My own experience with trying to read Freud back in the day was frustration. So much of what he came up with seemed purely arbitrary. I thought, whatever this was, it was not science. I want Jung to be more cogent.

  71. My experiences with Jung have been mixed.

    When I first had my brain injury (yes, time is different with TBIs), I used Mandalas to recover my sanity. I did a deep dive into the world of mandalas and Jung. I colored them daily and kept it up for two years. The whole experience was healing and helped me and my brain to know each other. I never thought that circles would be so healing.

    Then a few years later, a Pagan Atheist (who shall remain nameless) decided he was a Polytheist since he believed in Jung and his archetypes. To the twit, he thought Gods were archetypes, and archetypes were Gods. He kept hammering all of us all over the Internet with this. Then, I felt ill thinking about Jung.

    My personal exploration into Gods and archetypes stopped cold. I couldn’t continue thinking without bringing up the stupid twit’s ideas. Meanwhile, said twit moved on to other things and stopped promoting Jung.

  72. “If you explore the many ways that nature achieves innovations through evolution you will see that limitations were its breeding ground for developing strengths.” — A commentary on Hexagram 35, Jin/Chin.

    Active Imagination, in a literal sense, is just what this culture needs to access the Field of fallow dreams that can yet be revitalized by fertilizations from the upper astral plane.

    The dream journal is an ark-hive of images and characters to be drawn into storylines and murals, compositions, songlines, a dream track in space tracing out new maps across a (re)animated landscape.

  73. About the Collective Unconscious, and all that.

    How much is that generated by people, and how much is outside of people such as something else from the Cosmos. Like an ecology of souls who live elsewhere and appear in dreams or as ghosts, or whatever.

    I ask this since I woke at the same time as the two aircraft crashed in the Potomac River last night. I had a feeling of total darkness and dread. Then a sense of souls leaving. I didn’t know about the crash until this morning.

    How much of that was the Collective Unconscious and how much was something else. Or does it matter?

  74. @JMG

    I don’t know if this is off-topic or not, but as this post is about occultism, I’d just like to share an experience that I recently had, while listening to some beautiful Hindustani classical music: so I was listening to a dhrupad performance in the raga Malkauns, which is a nocturnal raga meant to be listened to/sung/played on an instrument, sometime around midnight. It was approximately around 12:15 am or so, and I suddenly felt a great sense of strongly positive, but not excited, emotion. I wasn’t asleep or anything, I was wide awake, more awake than I am even in the late afternoons (which is when I’m at my peak alertness on a daily basis), but everything was quiet and still, except for the music, and the music wasn’t jarring or anything; rather, it was soothing, yet had a feeling of a great ancient and benevolent power to it, and I was full of love (not of the romantic variety) towards literally everyone in my life, even the ones I’m not on very good terms with, and automatically wished the best for them. After the feeling subsided, I felt a great urge to go down, and take the car to the Shiva temple near my house, and prostrate myself fully in front of the shivalinga, in the manner of lying down on my stomach on the floor, with my hands outstretched and folded in the sense of praying; it was only because it was so late at night, that reason ultimately got the better of my emotions, and I decided not to go, and instead prayed in my home altar to Lord Shiva (who is coincidentally my family deity too) and thanked Him for everything He has done for me, and requested Him to keep everyone of my loved ones safe, content and happy. The interesting thing is this: this experience that I had came about because of listening to the raga Malkauns, which is not only of Shaivite origin, but also literally means Shiva – the word Malkauns is a compound name derived from the names of the two ancient ragas that ancient musicians combined to create the raga Malkauns, namely Malav and Kaushik, with the former being a Sanskrit word for garlands, and the latter being the Sanskrit word for “one who catches and controls snakes”, and thus, the combination of the two means “one who catches and controls snakes to the extent of being able to wear snakes as garlands”, i.e. Shiva. So, as an occultist, what do you make of this experience? Is there any occult angle to this, or is it simply a “the music was so good that it gave me goosebumps” thing, which I’m probably misinterpreting as a religious experience?

  75. JMG said ” Everything has become vague and equal, without contrast and depth and there are more narcotics – chemical and otherwise – available than possibly ever before. ” That sounds very Neptunian to me!

  76. Oops! It was “Nachtgurke” who said that! My bad.

    @JMG #67: In my observations, the main difference between the 1920’s Lost Generation and today’s Gen-Xers is that today’s doesn’t have the former’s’ sense of fun.

  77. This article is so timely! I’m in the middle of writing an article about combining the Lullian Art with active imagination for writing fiction. I’m using Jung’s term rather than scrying because it’s for a general audience. I haven’t actually read any Jung, though. Do you know which Jung book has his discussion of active imagination?

  78. For those interested in active imagination, there is a very complete exposition in the book “Inner Work” by the Jungian analyst Robert Johnson. The third section of the book details the method (preparation, dialog, the role of values, and the final step of ritualization) as completely as I have seen and provides examples tailored to different purposes. I did a quick reread of the section 3 last night after reading this Wednesdays article, and in addition to active imagination, I found, surprisingly, that section 3 also touches on the relation of active imagination to magic, occultism, the spiritual exercises of I. Loyola, and discursive meditation.
    The book also details the deam work very nicely in section 2, and is, overall, a thoughtful and circumspect guide for individuals interested in applying Jungian techniques for personal growth and understanding.

  79. About the DF pic: I have to say I came to a different conclusion than
    LeGrand @56. I’m pretty good with faces, and looking at lips, nose and eyelids, I think it just might be her (although yes, very much out of character – but may be the point?)
    However, I have strong bias as always desired more pictures of her.
    Thank you for posting JMG and appreciate LeGrand’s research points.
    (I feel a bit shallow for focusing on picture yet, “imagery “ is integral part of Jungian world-view😉)

  80. On Active Imagination (rant/draft 1)

    Scarcity can be good for the human soul. Fully Automated Luxury Communism / Capitalism makes the muscles of body and mind atrophy. In absence of gravitas everything becomes trivia, fodder for game shows when so much that could be saved is in jeopardy. The grindstone sharpens individuals and society giving them a precise edge. Freedom requires this sharpness. Dullness prevails when no work of our own is required, when there is no block to thrust against.

    Boredom with the way things are becomes an asset. Boredom was a gift to Generation X. Combined with feral free time it gave us an era of analog creativity: zines, scenes, bands, music you could hear, people you could touch, words printed on paper to be found like treasures. The absence of the ease of the internet search meant that finding the others was valuable. While there is nothing wrong with copying off the successful innovations of the past, Star Trek replicators will only lead us further down the path of replication crisis.

    Growing bored again can be a form of salvation, because boredom will lead to daydreams and other forms of active imagination that require us to think of alternate ways of doing, being, relating.

    So much criticism of new music criticism from the late Mark Fisher (Ghosts of My Life) and Simon Reynolds (Retromania) has focused on how in love with the past it is, we must remember, not only that pop will eat itself, but that these previous eras todays regeneration of musicians feel called to, lived in a quieter media environment where there mind had more freedom to roam. Because of this freedom the imagination was sharp, because it had been whetted against the grindstone of boredom. Now we have what music historian Tim Mohr called “too much future” in his book Burning Down the Haus. While we aren’t living behind the Berlin wall with the stasi following our every move, we are living in a world of extensive digital surveillance, where the digistasi are collecting our data to readvertise at us in service to an algorithmic propriety that flattens the contours our imaginations might otherwise give in absence to this spectacle.

    The “too much future” of the youth behind the berlin wall was in response to the way everything was preplanned for them. Meanwhile the punk rockers in Thatcher’s England had declared “no future” because it had all been eaten up and what was left was getting fed to the wolves of neoliberal economics. Todays youth and the Gen X parents who gave birth to them, have a different set of problems and predicaments. The force feeding of predicted tastes as channeled by cool merchants recuperating any vital signs of autonomy and putting them into an endlessly scrolling tube that drips content, not creations. Putting firm limits onto these feeds that create positive feedback loops of reinforced artificial idiocy is one way to curb escalating brain drain.

    The imaginative dissonance of negative feedback is needed to put the brakes on these severed signifiers. The sign of the times are all there, but we would do well to tune into layer of symbols that exists beyond what W.B. Yeats called our “daily trivial minds.”

    Passive imagination is the dead end in a space station become tomb, that fully automated luxury capitalism / communism leads to. This is the “Tomb of the Cybermen” prophesied by Doctor Who (Season 5, 1967). A living culture, while informed by cybernetics as systems, can be resurrected from this imaginative stasis, by seeking out contact with the microrganisms of the living soil, and macroorganisms of winter starlight. Enjoyed down here on earth, the light from those stars does not have to be filtered through the protective lenses and glass on the space station tomb.

    Other tomes are available if we would read them. We can check them out from the akashic ark-hives, from the library on the dream plane in the upper, from the library on the inner, where you don’t need to know morse code or computer code to make contact. When our nervous system gets touched by beings of intelligence from these other planes of there, and when we develop the disciplines needed to translate those flashes into works of active imagination, we will began to see the rise of new transcendental mentalities. The old faith of staunch materiality will be replaced as the seeds for new perceptive organs root and grow like upside down trees rooted in aether.

    After the harvest of past culture made by the eminently copy-able nature of the internet has reached its past pull date, those souls born with a cellphone in their hand will enter a winter of deep hibernation. Deep listening, deep dreaming, deep sleep in the womb of earth, embraced and suckled at the teat of the bear mother as the light from midnight stars begin to trace out new songlines, faint tracks in space to be explored and walked down by others who receive the seed transmissions.

    Listen, in the wake of internet noise music of talking heads analyzed conundrum.

    Listen in the boredom, the radio chatter of banal algo-arithmetic of suerpvised society, turned down.

    Listen, and the distant sound of Sirius can still be heard.

  81. re: Dion Fortune pix
    Kevin (#68) makes good points. Note too that Fortune/Firth had straight hair, with no images of her with a frizzy perm. In general, her attested pictures show her as having fair, straight hair. She is sometimes described as a red-head, although of course photos from that period are B&W, and do not show color.

    In general, she is often misrepresented in internet (and other!) articles, even by people who have done some research. Note that the picture of Fortune in the Golden Dawn Wiki (https://goldendawnwiki.com/dion-fortune/) is quite obviously Moina Mathers, and has long been published as such.

    I don’t know how to contact the Theosophy Wiki, and from what little I know how to see, the dubious picture was uploaded by one person, and has no other provenance. The robed picture is another matter It was uploaded by the webmaster, and the costume design is more appropriate to the period (could almost by a Pamela Colman Smith design). But it still has no provenance; the hair is surprisingly dark, and I’m not sure about the jaw line.

    At any rate, in the absence of any further comments or data, I will stop here, and try to say something about the main topic if I can at some point today.

  82. Apologies for adding one more item on the Dion Fortune image subtopic — she is not the only person misidentified on the web.

    This site (https://globalbizarre.com/dion-fortune/) identifies a well-known picture as “Aleister Crowley with Dion Fortune”, when it is clearly nothing of the sort.

  83. I’m not going to respond further to the discussion on the maybe-not-Dion-Fortune photo. That doesn’t mean those of you who are interested in it have to shut up — it’s just that I’ve said my piece and will step back at this point.

    Patrick, tell you what, if I ever achieve supreme enlightenment I’ll look you up (it shouldn’t be hard in that state of consciousness!) and let you know what I find out. 😉

    Michael, thanks for this.

    Ben, hmm! Interesting.

    Michael, thank you for this! That’s exactly the issue, of course. Psychiatric meds are powerful and can be extremely harmful if abused, and the entire bias of the medical industry is to encourage and enable their abuse.

    Robert, that timeline is very, very close to this one! Lewis was much more knowledgeable about, and sympathetic to, certain aspects of occultism than he ever admitted in public. Compare The Hideous Strength to Dion Fortune’s teachings on polarity and Arthurian legend and it’s kind of hard to miss who he’d been reading. I wish that Steiner had written children’s novels, though — he’d have been good at it.

    Phutatorius, of course Freud wasn’t a scientist, though — like Jung — he pretended to be one. He was a revolutionary who figured out it was safer and more effective to throw books instead of bombs.

    Neptunesdolphins, my condolences. Some mighty wizard needs to come up with an amulet that banishes pompous twits.

    Justin, true enough!

    Neptunesdolphins, Jung was never entirely clear about the sources of the collective unconscious. My take, based on my own experiences, is that it’s shaped by all souls, human and nonhuman, living and dead.

    Viduraawakened, it sounds like a powerful experience. Since it wasn’t my experience, and I wasn’t even there at the time, I have no idea what to make of it.

    Patricia M, a good point.

    Industrial, Jung never explained active imagination in detail in print. Marie-Louise von Franz has a book on the subject titled Active Imagination, and there are some other discussions by later writers which have been mentioned in this thread. Your basic approach works, btw — the Lullian art is a very effective way to generate initial themes, and active imagination is a good way to develop them and give them life.

    Jim, how annoying. The library system here in Rhode Island doesn’t have it.

    Justin, that needs to be turned into a staplebound xeroxed pamphlet with barely comprehensible b&w clip art illustrations, and left in strange places where the right people will find them.

    Anselmo, thanks for this.

  84. Your crystal ball is peering into sirius ideas in my mind. I”ll say no more for now.

    “Modern man does not understand how much his “rationalism” (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic “underworld.”
    ―Carl Jung, “Man and his Symbols”

  85. Mmmh, given that I love both Sheldrake and Lewis, and that I’ve read and enjoyed ‘The Sea Priestess’ and ‘Sane Occultism’, I feel like maybe I should take a deep dive into Dion Fortune’s works …

  86. Justin Patrick Moore wrote, “The grindstone sharpens individuals and society giving them a precise edge. Freedom requires this sharpness. Dullness prevails when no work of our own is required, when there is no block to thrust against. Boredom with the way things are becomes an asset.”

    Whoo, child, somebody done caught fire over there! What kind of magical portal are you currently passing through, man? Those are clearly some monumental blocks you’ve learned how to expertly thrust against. Congratulations!

    Do you know what sort of initiation you’ve been undergoing, or is it all still overwhelmingly murky and unfamiliar? Certainly your nervous system has been lit up by some of those beings you reference in “When our nervous system gets touched by beings of intelligence from these other planes of there, and when we develop the disciplines needed to translate those flashes into works of active imagination, we will began to see the rise of new transcendental mentalities.” They are always reaching out to touch us, but it is rare that we find the necessary courage to reach back and invite in their overflow.

  87. Thanks for posting this topic, JMG.

    Albeit I am an Orthodox Christian, I have a lot of time for Jung, in the same way that a lot of the early Church Fathers made use of the best parts of pagan Greek philosophy.

    However, (as I said when I nominated this topic), I have a few serious reservations about Jung’s work, which I would like to hash out on this discussion board. I will post these one at a time, to give everyone a chance to weigh in on each before I post the next one.

    My first has to do with his famous essay Answer to Job, which Jung considered his best writing. My understanding of Jung’s thesis is, that the Creator God (Yahweh) needed human beings (in this case, job) to gain self-awareness. Until He put Job through the third degree, Yahweh was a mostly unconscious demi-urge, and only gained “insight” though His unjust treatment of Job.

    This implies that the creature (Job) is somehow “superior” to the Creator! In a way, it is Feuerbach over again. The potential for massive ego-inflation, to my mind, should be obvious. Indeed, the essay seems to me to be “ego-inflation run riot.”

    I find it truly surprising that Jung would not see this (perhaps he did, and I just missed it?).

    Such is my question and concern. I now turn it over to the commentariat to show me what (if anything) I am missing here!

  88. This is not the set of overlapping ideas I was expecting!
    I suspect that some of the popularity of medication for psychiatric purposes is that almost no one can afford the intensive interaction with a psychiatric professional at the level required to manage severe disturbances of emotions or perception. (Not my field of expertise!) Reddit enthusiasts are estimating that between currency conversion and inflation that Sigmund Freud charged the equivalent of $100 per session, and that price tag is higher for current practitioners in the United States.
    Does the present enthusiasm for legalized marijuana count as medication? I’m unsure of how widely cannabis was used in the sixties and seventies, compared to now, where many states have legalized sale and use.

  89. Justin, a fine quote, and very apropos.

    Robert K., she’s worth reading. I recommend her novels as the best starting place.

    Michael, ah, but Jung didn’t believe in the god of Christian religion the way you do. He saw gods as archetypes of the collective unconscious, which can only come to consciousness in conscious beings such as you and me. That doesn’t make the human individual greater than the god — the archetype is still far more powerful, not to mention eternal and numinous — but it implies that just as the human needs something from the god, the god also needs something from the human. As it happens, I think Jung was wrong here; I think the gods are reflected in, rather than part of, the deepest strata of consciousness — but it’s worth being aware of exactly what he was trying to say, and to respect the fact that his most basic presuppositions are not yours.

    Sylvia, that’s certainly an issue. Did you know that early in the psychoanalytic movement, training was made available for lay therapists — Dion Fortune was one of these — and there were do-it-yourself books meant to teach you how to psychoanalyze your friends? Once psychoanalysis was restricted to psychiatric professionals, of course it became unaffordable to most people. The restriction of medical practice to a self-interested and self-selecting group of professionals usually has that effect.

  90. Very interesting post, JMG. Thanks. I’ve met a few Jungian “psychologists” over the years, but never really dived into what that meant. Now I know more.

    I was already aware that there’s a significant overlap between the fields of “religion” and “philosophy”. As a lifelong Agnostic, neither one particularly appealed enough to me to learn more about them, until the concept of a “second religiosity” associated with Decline came into the picture with your posts, courtesy of Mr. Spengler. I figured it was time to learn a bit more as the Decline would drive more people into a state of desperation, and in turn, more answers of the question, “What should I do?”

    Now it seems that religion, philosophy, psychology, occultism, and even sociology appear to overlap quite a bit, perhaps along with psychiatry and other fields. It’s more of a confused jumble for me than ever. Lots of individual perceptions and definitions are mixed in with varying terms that often try to describe the same thing.

    Now I think I understand Christianity’s draw for the masses. “…the one way, the truth and the light” certainly clarifies things. Especially for people who don’t want to hurt their head thinking.

  91. Dear JMG,

    Thank you for the post and the inspiration.
    I’m wondering if Jung and Dion Fortune had direct correspondence with each other?
    And also if I understood well, the work within the subconscious started by Levi in our modern times. What did the people know about the subconscious before our time, the people of the Renaissance, the Greeks, Egyptians? How did they related to it? I guess they were not as illiterate on that subject like us. How and when did that knowledge faded away?
    Thank you

  92. Hi John Michael,

    Anyone who thinks that I as a child would want to have killed my dad and possessed my mother is a stark raving loony. It’s a preposterous claim, and frankly speaking, could only be made by someone who’d never met her. Far out, the lady had some issues. Don’t you love sweeping generalisations? And perhaps methinks that Freud was expounding upon his own shadow there?

    Thanks for the virtual tour of the book store – lovely places. One never knows what treasures may be sitting on an otherwise overlooked dusty shelf.

    I must say, your expectations are rather high! 😉 You do realise that in order to do such work as you proposed, a person must exercise what will they can bring to bear upon the subject and then restrict their focus to that end? I guess it doesn’t hurt to ask. As you probably already know, my will is directed on other tasks.

    Cheers

    Chris

  93. @Christophe, since you asked: Thank you for the kind words. It means quite a lot to me. I certainly have been feeling creative. That draft is part of something that’s percolating in my mind, a series of essays or short novella- length nonfiction book in response to a lot of stuff I’ve been reading.

    I hadn’t thought of all that happened last year exactly as an initiation, though, you are right. In many ways it is, and I’ve had to go through some changes because of these things. I had my first book published last June, have had my work featured in a few prominent electronic / experimental music magazines, been interviewed a few times (the latest here, which people can listen to: https://www.wvxu.org/show/cincinnati-edition/2025-01-27/radio-phonics-laboratory-justin-moore-music and another one, in written form is here: https://moonbuilding.substack.com/p/issue-29a-2-august-2024 ). I gave a few book talks culminating in a book launch party / talk / signing this past December.

    I also did a radio version of my book talk on WAIF which people can listen to here:
    https://www.mixcloud.com/sothismedias/the-radio-phonics-laboratory-radio-hour/

    That substack I linked too who also interviewed me for their print zine, put my book in their top ten music books of the year. I was well chuffed as my British friends might say. From the book sales I’m able to put a good chunk of money towards this car repair bill I have coming up (valve cover gasket, timing belt, brakes), to keep my 2002 Toyota on the road. I still need to keep my day job at the library of course : ) I wouldn’t last long on my book sales if I had to rely on them alone.

    This new level of attention, even though its not enough to sustain my writing full time yet, is a definite initiation. I had thought of it that way in my mind in many ways, but not articulated it as such. It’s been an a psychological adjustment. I’m sure Jung and Hesse can help me out some more in that regard!

    I’m thinking of doing a periodic ‘zine as well. I’ve done them in the past, eight issues of The Dyslexicon, and a few of Seeds from Sirius, the latter during some extra downtime I had in the first year of the pandemic. The kind of writing I did there would be perfect for release in ‘zines though I do envision it as a small book too.

    I think it is fair to say none of it would have been possible with the support of my wife, and supportive parents and siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends who helped me, people who opened doors for me.

    Aside from family there are my practices. When I quit drinking in 2015, and stopped smoking pot about four years before that, I was able, after a brief time of setting aside occult study, pick it back up with the Order of Essenes, and now working my way through the Golden Section Fellowship material, with a side helping of MOE and I Ching study. All of this certainly gives my creative endeavors a boost.

    At the same time I put in a lot of effort in writing and radio. I tried to write my first novel in the fifth grade, and haven’t kept the pen down much since, even if a lot of it was journaling or things that aren’t publishable. I put in a lot of time on the radio basically from 1998 until now. Starting with pirate radio from 1998-2000 with my show The Psychedelicatessin, then going to community radio in 2001 to 2014 being one of the hosts of Art Damage and On the Way to the Peak of Normal respectively on WAIF (JMG and Dimitry Orlov were among some of my favorite call-in guests), then getting my ham radio license in 2015. Starting around 2018 I was back on WAIF as a fill in for Trash Flow Radio, which I still do a couple times a year or more, and then getting involved with DJ Frederick and One Deck Pete on Free Radio Skybird and Imaginary Stations. Those are both DJ Fredericks shows but I contribute 15 minute segments too… fulfilling the dream of doing shortwave radio. I still have my eye on doing a Radio Play miniseries of deindustrial fiction. Radio is a hard habit to kick.

    And of course I’m still writing my column for New Maps (the next issue will be coming out I’ve been assured), and started writing some music criticism again for Igloo Magazine. Here is another recent review of the book America’s Greatest Noise: https://igloomag.com/reviews/frans-de-waard-americas-greatest-noise-korm-plastics

    I have some other longer pieces of writing in the drawer, waiting, and I’m chipping away at others. We’ll see what happens.

    The GSF work certainly gives my creativity a boost. In fact, having something to ground those energies in, in terms of writing and radio is very helpful, as is the day job, chores around the house, and relationships with friends and family.

    For now I just got to continue to make and do and see where it goes. Though I’ve had and have my problems, its all been a blast, and the good parts wouldn’t have been as sweet without the contrast to the parts of my life that were harrowing and tough. In general though, things in my life have gotten much more stable and better since I quit drinking and became more disciplined in my practices.

    Wishing you, & other people here success in their endeavors.

  94. “early in the psychoanalytic movement, training was made available for lay therapists — Dion Fortune was one of these — and there were do-it-yourself books meant to teach you how to psychoanalyze your friends”

    I used to joke that the vocation I aspired to was Streetcorner Prophet, Freelance Psychotherapist.

    The professionalization of things really has serious downsides. I guess that professionalization might be why James Hillman had to write that book of dialogues with Michale Ventura, “We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy–And the World’s Getting Worse.”

    I looked into seeing a Jungian and it was going to be way out of my price range… as are most therapists. It’s really expensive. It’s much cheaper to talk to a trusted friend or spiritual advisor (when those spiritual advisors haven’t rebranded themselves as life coaches, anyway.) The “sponsor” in recovery movement is another version. They’ve done the work of the 12 steps, and presumably have some experience in prayer and perhaps meditation, and can guide the newcomer. I would say lay therapy has a direct corollary with the work ministers / priests would often be doing for their group as well: counseling people through the problems life inevitably brings. Recoupling therapy back into occultism & spirituality is a good start, as a way to bring these tools into the area where they can be used for the good of people, outside of having to pay exorbitant fees to talk about your problems with someone you can trust.

    I think it shows the state of alienation in friendships, family relationships, and other community people we used to be in touch with (ministers, shamans, spiritual people of some kind) that we had to go pay someone to talk to about the things that are troubling us, when talking to an elder or wise friend and the like is what got many people through in the past. Not that the tools of psychotherapy aren’t useful. I of course think the Jungian tools are very much. And because of the limits society was in at the time when he formulated them, and the limits he imposed, we now have those tools.

  95. I almost went into the field of psychology (one of my college majors, the other being Japanese) precisely because of Carl Jung and a few others who blended psychology with occult practices but backed out at the last second precisely because insurance has largely replaced therapy with pill pushing.

    The Jung quote from comment 94 is certainly worth meditating on, especially in regards to civilizational collapse.

    “Modern man does not understand how much his “rationalism” (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic “underworld.”

  96. While this wasn’t my preferred topic, the essay turned out to be much more interesting than I’d expected, so thank you for this. Maybe even one of your best in a long time in my opinion. Not that I’m complaining in the least about your other recent output, but I really enjoyed both the playfulness with the alternate history and the elaboration of the main topic with Jung. Half a decade ago I would have had no idea who any of these people were, but thanks to your writings over the years I knew enough to read the first part with a smile on my face when I realized what was going on. Change in consciousness in accordance with will, indeed.

    Other than expressing appreciation I don’t really have a reasoned throughline for this comment, more just a few scattered observations as I read the essay:

    “when they had students make talismans they would have had them make those according to spontaneous personal designs, not traditional ones out of the old handbooks of magic.”

    Isn’t that pretty much what more “modern” magic along the lines of sigils and chaos magic does? And I get the impression many materialists who get into magic and occultism start at that end of things.

    “Forced to work within strict limits, a tradition pushes those things it can work with much further than it would have done otherwise.”

    Hopefully this isn’t too far off topic, but your thoughts here made me think of the debate over “authenticity” vs innovation in Heathenry and other reconstructionist religions. Specifically the idea (which I might have gotten from Isaac Hill?) that Odin or the Gods more broadly specifically chose to preserve those specific scraps of “lore” we’ve got from the Iron Age over the other options to give us a palette of symbolic elements that end up working well together. Like how, say, we have the particular rune poems we do, but not any of the many other ones that might very well have existed. So the strict limits of historical preservation give us a common framework and starting point, and forces us to build a new tradition around these elements. At the same time it’s a base to build all kinds of interesting new material the ancients would never have imagined, like the Heathen GD or Hodge Rose’s Soul Lore explorations.

    “Every human being contains the potential for magnificence: that’s how one of my teachers used to phrase it. The fact that so many of us settle for so much less, that we crawl like worms when we could stride like titans, is the great tragedy of our species.”

    For me this is one of the most beautiful of your many beautiful turns of phrase, and infinitely more affirming and hopeful than the Religion of Progress with its Star Trek fantasy. This outlook is one important reason I decided to ditch materialism and give occultism and magic an honest try: the idea that it’s not a dogma you need to subscribe to, it’s a set of tools to make yourself a better and more conscious version of yourself.

    One of the things I’ve always liked about your approach is that when people bring up various suggestions and ideas, your usual response is some variant of “sure, that’s neat, why don’t you make that happen yourself”? This confidence in your readers’ competence is inspiring, and this same outlook shines through in your quote here.

    And speaking of the Heathen GD, since I just got my paper copy to go with the digital and read your back cover endorsement again: maybe these two traditions do seem very different at first glance, but the more I think about it, the more I think the GD and Heathenry as I understand them are very good fits for each other in many ways. I think the idea of taking charge of yourself and striding like a titan instead of crawling like a word should be irresistible to any good Heathen. 😉

    In any case, thank you again for a stand-out essay.

  97. Jung and Freud throwing books instead of bombs; I think that’s quite apt. Franz Boas too? (at a time when other revolutionaries were doing otherwise)

  98. Drhooves, good. Yes, psychology, philosophy, religion, sociology, magic, mysticism, and occultism, not to mention a few other fields, are all different attempts by the proverbial blind men to discuss the nature and uses of elephants.

    YarrowMoon, as far as I know, Fortune and Jung never corresponded, though she studied his writings and applied them to her occult work. As for the subconscious mind, that’s one of the odd things about comparative psychology. It was quite common for ancient and nonwestern peoples to talk about different parts of the mind, some more or less rational, others passionate and instinctive, but as far as I know nobody else had the idea that the passionate and instinctive part of the mind was excluded from consciousness. I suspect the culture of emotional repression that came in with Protestant Christianity may quite literally have created the personal unconscious out of what the ancient Greeks called thumos, the unreasonable, passionate, willful part of the mind.

    Chris, I ain’t arguing. Freud’s psychological theories applied, to the extent that they applied at all, to middle class Protestant and Jewish Europeans in the late 19th and very early 20th centuries, the walking wounded of the Victorian reality wars. His work was successful enough that he eliminated the conditions that made his career possible. As for my expectations, why, of course. That’s true of every kind of work, for that matter — if you don’t focus your efforts toward your goal, you accomplish nothing in life.

    Justin, oh, I know. I might be able to afford a Jungian therapist now, when I arguably no longer need one. That’s one of the reasons I’d like to see Jung’s teachings picked up by the occult scene, so that they could be made available to people who can’t afford a therapist. As for Hillman and Ventura, it’s a fascinating book, as much because of what they didn’t talk about as what they did. I definitely recommend giving it a read, if you haven’t already.

    Dennis, it’s an amazingly apropos quite, but it doesn’t apply as much now as it did in Jung’s time.

    BorealBear, glad you enjoyed it. Yes, Austin Osman Spare (who invented the most common modern method of sigil construction) was in many ways part of the same current as Jung, though he didn’t claim to be a psychologist. “Authenticity” to my mind is a euphemism for “fundamentalism” — there’s zero evidence that the ancients gave a rat’s rump about the subject (in fact we know they didn’t, as they borrowed the runes from a northern Italic alphabet — how inauthentically Nordic!). It’s quite probable that the gods picked and chose what survived, with an eye toward seeing whether their future worshippers had the brains and the guts to do something interesting with it. I’m glad you liked the turn of phrase; one of the things I’ve always appreciated about the gods of Heathenry, ever since I first encountered them in children’s books on mythology, is that they have no tolerance for cringing.

    Phutatorius, Boas was another skilled practitioner of the art. I’ve got a lot of role models. 😉

  99. The Hillman Ventura book convinced me not to major in psychology, and was one of the reasons, but not the only reason, I ended up dropping out of college. I was going to go into Psychology and Religious Studies. The latter was a subfield of the philosophy dpt. and I would have a good advisor there, but the head of the psychology department was a raging behaviorist and more or less ridiculed me for taking an interest in Wilhelm Reich who I read a lot of in those years, following Israel Regardie’s trail of breadcrumbs. When I went to see a student counselor, they turned me on to the book, and said I should read it. So when that term ended I didn’t end up staying, though I really liked my job at the student library and being able to go to the pirate radio station…

    I’ll definitely recommend a post on Reich as Mesmerist next time we have the opportunity to vote for a topic, though.

  100. Only tangentially-related but…

    Has anyone else noticed that the word “psychic” is coming back into use in its old meaning of “to do with the psyche”? I remember when, prior to several years ago, the word “psychic” was reserved for mediums and “psychological” was preferred in basically all other contexts, which made reading Freud, Jung, and other old psychologists somewhat jarring.

    I would have thought that, if anything, the replication crisis being sparked by furor over a highly-publicized study providing evidence for parapsychological phenomenon would have permanently consigned “psychic” to the dustbin but instead it seemed to have made a comeback shortly afterward. Very odd.

  101. Greetings magical elemental list in the interwebs…..well had to chime in for good ole
    Gustavo. When i first started my own music endevour, my own from top to bottom not other peoples music, it was done with the idea of shadow work, and went as far as only using our shadows when we performed, well the rest is a novel in itself, boy what reality check and that is a novel within itself. The other thing wanted to mention is peter kingsley’s catafalque has a worthy argument that Carl’s work is strictly esoteric work and the psychology part was a cloak for the profane(that was my interpretation)? Just saying! It gets better and Better John.

  102. @106 BorealBear

    Maybe Elon Musk’s attempt to get to Mars with the backing of the Trump administration will fail so overwhelmingly he’d put the final nail in the coffin on the Star Trek future.

  103. JMG, thanks for this post! Super interesting and it’s been a long time coming.

    Justin Patrick Moore, Thanks for the rant on Active Imagination! A good prompt to re-quit TV (and more). Your writing style in it reminds me of Robert Anton Wilson.

  104. “your first factor would have been just as true in 1925 … ‘indifference and idleness,’ oddly enough, those are exactly the sort of things that were said about the ‘lost generation’ of the 1920s. ”

    I don’t know too much about the 20s and consider my knowledge about history rather limited. But interestingly, quite a few who are far better read than myself point to similarities between the past 20s and today’s 20s. Well I guess back then there has been some receptivity for mass psychosis in the general population, too. Jungian therapy didn’t save the world when it was flourishing and today it’s even fading out – hard times. It would be very interesting to know, how effective Jung himself considered his approach in the depth of his own mind. To pay some tribute to “the other side”, I read some critics of Jung, especially for his display of antisemitism. And it’s true that in the 20s he has written some rather nasty pieces, although they all sound quite scientific. But, as even his critics acknowledge, already when he wrote his essay Wotan, his writings didn’t contain any hints to antisemitism anymore. In his letters to Pauli, Jung provides some hints that the intellectual heavy lifting necessary for furthering his work is cause to serious health problems. I wonder whether Jung himself was in some way shaken to his core – his earlier writings suggest that he himself was very “ergriffen” for some time, and his later writings suggest that he had realized this. Raspberry Jam? I realize my above characterization of a Jung-inspired approach sounds rather subtle – but it isn’t. It can be a source for serious unrest and chaos and one might rightfully ask whether you just replace one problem with another, larger one. It can work, but not everybody can stomach it. Which, too, was probably the same a hundred years ago. Be it as it may, the Jungian approach is fading out, as most things do after some time. I don’t propose to know the reason. Maybe or maybe not the visible reasons we consider as possible are not even causes at all, but just “synchronicity”.

    Cheers,
    Nachtgurke

  105. This is really a complex issue — the historical and biographical intertwining of psychology and psychotherapy with occultism and esotericism. While the pata-historical alternative timeline is amusing, and an informative counter-example, it misses some important features.

    In no particular order: Freud actually was a scientist (with all necessary reservations about the verb “to be”). His laboratory work had to do with neurons of squids. He faced real barriers in getting neurological research gigs, and found a viable career path in clinical work, which, while training in France, led to his experiences with hysteria and hypnosis, which led on to his development of his own ideas and methods. (He sometimes spoke of psychoanalysis as not so much a cure as a research method, and that’s a point that would deserve extensive exploration. Freud was an early member of the Society for Psychical Research, by the way.) It is this “careerist” attitude that is often criticized by more recent critics, as though, having been shut out of a professorial career, he should have been more willing to embrace high-minded poverty. It is also part of the tension that made his relationship with Jung so fraught.

    Jung came from a line of Protestant pastors, and one of his major concerns was to avoid stepping on the toes of the religious. Much of his “I’m just doing psychology here” attitude was concerned not so much with avoiding being seen as an occultist, as avoiding being seen as making theological or religious claims. At the same time, he was on extensive contact with religious figures — and did a seminar series on the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. He was much less shy about the parapsychological issues, which was one of the overt causes of his tension with Freud, as in the notorious “exteriorization” incident.

    Early in their relationship. Freud had hopes for Jung (with his medical background and position, his laboratory work, and his Protestant pedigree and social position) as a way for psychoanalysis to escape being merely a Jewish thing. For both med, to some extent, science functioned as a kind of defense — against old religious entanglements, for one thing. (Jung’s defenses were less robust, and he was forced to deal with material that, initially, he had no way of containing.) In a sense, both were re-traumatized: Freud in his relationship with the Gentile world; Jung in his relationship with a father figure.

    (In an important sense, all the figures in early psychoanalysis were quite at sea, and most so when they thought they know what they were doing. It was only through their own bitter experience, and that of their patients and colleagues, that they began to develop ways of dealing with what they were doing. In this sense, Fortune, with her dual background, was in a somewhat better position to cope with the complexities.)

    It may see ironic that young Jews, like Victor Neuburg and Israel Regardie, received their Kabbalah from Gentile Kabbalistic magicians, rather than from Jewish sources that, after all, were not absent, either in London or in New York. But I suppose that actual Jewish Kabbalah, as available in the Chasidic world, was too close, just Jung could only approach Boehme through gnosticism and alchemy, rather than through his ancestral connections, and Freud could only deal with Moses (and monotheism) from the distance of analytical speculation.

    And this doesn’t even mention the complexities of other analysts and esotericists, all of whom formed a majestic tangle that even now isn’t easily to clarify.

  106. @JMG, and all,

    I recently finished a book titled “Decoding Jung’s Metaphysics: The Archetypal Semantics of an Experiental Universe’, by an interesting fellow named Bernardo Kastrup. Reading has become physically difficult for this once voracious reader, as my eyesight deteriorates. As such (plus the fact I was trying to read two other books at the same time), it took a long time for me to finish this book. I am going to go right back to the beginning, now with some grounding in the concepts and Kastrup’s writing style (and subtle sense of humor), and see if I can get into a better groove.
    Wish I’d read it after this week’s essay and comments! It will be much more interesting now, I reckon.
    Kastrup is a very interesting cat – a metaphysical idealist. He has youtube vids out there like ‘Is Materialism Dying?’ and other good stuff. He runs the Essentia Foundation, hosting authors that write about a lot of stuff that would be of interest to many of you here, including you JMG. https://www.essentiafoundation.org/
    Has anyone else read this book? What did you think?

  107. Justin, I’m glad you escaped the jaws of the academic trap. Reich and Mesmer are certainly worth discussing in parallel, though another figure — Reichenbach — is crucial to bridge the gap between them.

    Slithy, hmm! I hadn’t noticed that. How fascinating.

    Hawk, thank you. I haven’t read Catafalque — interesting to know that Kingsley drew the same conclusions I did, Jung has been important in my creative life as well, for what it’s worth.

    Nachtgurke, the parallels between the 1920s and the 2020s are real; I hope we don’t have to go through an equivalent of the 1930s, though!

    LeGrand, so noted. I certainly acknowledge that Freud trained in the sciences and did scientific work early on, but much of his work reads like literature rather than science — the grand example is of course Civilization and its Discontents, which I tend to think of as the book that makes Bachofen look respectable. The grand tangle you mention, in which occultism, psychoanalysis, spirituality, and European alternative culture are all major threads, is of course a massive issue, and it’s one of the things I tried to point out here within the narrow limits of a 3000-word essay.

    Sgage, I’ve heard of Kastrup but haven’t read him yet. I’ll have to remedy that.

  108. Thank you for the informative article, Mr. Greer!
    While this mind-twisting exercise – Fortune and Crowley are psychologists, Jung and Hesse are occultists – is fun, does it have any purpose without drawing a conclusion that there is particular archetype in play? We can probably come up with other dyads like those, and label people “occultists” or “psychologists” or “practitioners of psychosynthesis” or “shamans” or “psychonauts” interchangeably, but what’s the point? Let’s hear what archetype is active here, and what are its properties!

  109. It seems with Jung, Dion Fortune, and Freud as being products of European culture in the background lurking is the Bible, God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, Judaism, Christianity all of which is being transmuted, used, a source of inspiration and insight, denied but still .kept around but at the same time hopefully transcended and universalized, an uneasy mixture.
    As a young adult after receiving the Lord in a typical evangelical way, meeting God in a felt real way, and then moving away from a new age, eastern religions approach. I decided to be confirmed and received into the Episcopal church. The ritual of the Episcopal Church is outwardly quite traditionally Christian and replete with Bible reading, essentially a Protestantized Catholic mass. The purpose of the confirmation on paper is an empowerment of the Holy Spirit effected by an anointing and laying on of hands by a bishop. Even then the Episcopal church was rife with clergy just going through the traditional rituals with their true beliefs elsewhere. I was hoping for a true empowerment. The confirming bishop was into Jung and had no apparent knowing of the classic Christian god in at least in what he spoke about with the confirmands. I went through an empty ceremony. Kept seeking the Spirit on my own and later ended up receiving the gift of tongues in an encounter with the Spirit. I did later have a wonderful vision of the Transfiguration light of Christ emanating from the large broken loaf used in an Episcopal communion service so my experience there was by no means a total waste!

  110. Re the collective unconscious, Jung must have known about prehistoric cave paintings found deep underground in places like Altamira and Lascaux. This practice seemed to have gone on for at least a few tens of thousands of years. But he died before the paintings were found in Borneo that apparently predated those in Europe, the point being that it seemed to be a widespread and common trait to need to depict things and especially animals in deep and dark places. Anyway I wonder what he made of this behavioral trait if anything and whether he connected it to the idea of the collective unconscious.

  111. Hi JMG,

    This was every enlightening, thank you.

    Your comparison of:
    Mysticism = “The divine through love”.
    Magic = “Sheer force of will backed up by para-physical powers”.
    Occultism = “Process of insight that leads the mind of the seeker into its own depths”.

    Made me think of the three classical Indian paths, Bhakti (Love), Karma (Will/Action) and Jnana (Intellect/Knowledge) Yogas.

    By the way, I haven’t come across the photo of Dion Fortune before. Thanks for sharing it.

  112. “Sheldrake’s a fascinating case. Either he’s independently rediscovered Dion Fortune’s core concepts — his “morphogenetic fields” are an exact equivalent of the “tracks in space” from The Cosmic Doctrine, for example — or he’s another canny occultist who’s managed to disguise himself as a scientist.”

    I wouldn’t be surprised if the latter is true. I once saw an interview with Jung in which he was asked if he believes in god. His answer was something like ‘I don’t believe, I know’. Sheldrake has the same air of a personal / direct knowledge of higher worlds about him.

    bk.

  113. Levkin, this essay isn’t about archetypes, it’s about social interpretations. My point is that Jung, Hesse, Fortune, and Crowley were all engaged in the same business, but our society assigns them to different categories due to labels like “occultist” and “psychologist.” If we ignore the category labels and recognize them as participants in the same broad movement of exploration, it becomes a little easier for those of us on one end of that movement, the occult end, to make use of the very productive tools and approached Jung pioneered. (If people on the psychological end of the same movement want to make use of the stuff we occultists have worked up, that would be great, too, but I’m not holding my breath — they’d have to surrender a lot of social status and risk being consigned to the fringes, the way we are.)

    BeardTree, yeah, the Episcopal Church in the US is one of the mainstream denominations that abandoned their historic faith most completely over the 20th century. If they don’t reclaim it in a hurry, a lot of nice church buildings will be up for sale in the next half century or so, because you’re far from the only person who’s noticed the spiritual vacuum in that denomination — its congregations have been shrinking dramatically for decades.

    Smith, I don’t recall reading anything of his that discusses it, but I haven’t read all his writings yet by any means. It’s certainly a fine archetypal image!

    Kevin, good. I was in fact thinking of the different Hindu yogas when I traced out that distinction.

    BK, that’s been my suspicion all along, too.

  114. Hello JMG,
    Thank you for the post. It’s a great summary. Yes, psychology with the psyche in mind leads to occultism.
    I’d like to comment on archetypes and synchronicity. In the open post, I brought up the possibility that Trump is an American Gorbachev – the guy who unleashed the changes (Perestroika) the depth and consequence of which he couldn’t imagine. There is something that I want to add. Gorbachev’s reign was plagued by multiple accidents. Some of them were tragedies for generations to come like Chernobyl and some were almost funny like a 19-year-old German guy landing his Cessna on Red Square and embarrassing the entire Russian Air Defence. The tragedy of American Airlines flight 5432 made me think, “OMG, here it is… like that scarab beetle on a window”. I already lived through such times…
    There was a ditty during Gorbachev’s times. It went something like that:
    Perestroika is a factor.
    They blew Chernobylsky Reactor,
    They sank the ship, which was a bane.
    They missed Mathias Rust’s plane,
    And some c…nt who’s high on crack
    Made a train run off track.

  115. Its worth an immense amount John……agree about the 1920’s there is a big difference in how we communicate though. So i doubt we will have the thirties thing maybe more 1840’s thing is what my heart tells me. But this is much longer discussion. because what followed after the telegraph is very important if we use past predictors, the telephone was not universally used yet. Tech has an elemental influence to folks. Thanks again JMG

  116. @JMG @Kevin #121: I see the same story told in the Judgement of Paris: each of the goddesses’ gifts is a means of bringing unity to the discordant soul. The mage gives the apple to Hera (Power), and gains dominion over the earth. The occultist gives the apple to Athene (Wisdom), and gains victory in war. The mystic gives the apple to Aphrodite (Love), and marries the most beautiful girl in the world.

  117. @JMG re: labels. “Give the mundanes a word they can relate to.” Which varies with the times one is in.
    About the Episcopal Church, which I was raised in – yes. And apparently, there’s an old (as modern times go) tradition in England of paying polite lip service without belief. “Yes, Vicar, anything you say….”

    Down here, over the past 5 1/2 years, I’ve seen residents born and raised Methodist start attending the local baptist Church, or the Pentecostal Services held by a volunteer preacher in the Village Chapel. One of the ex-Methodists said, back then, after her church got a new, ‘up-to-date’ preacher, “I go to church to worship God, not play kindergarten games.” Of course, this is the South.

  118. Just chiming in to say I love the post, thank you jmg! And all the comments are, as usual, thought-provoking. This is the best place on the internet, for sure.

  119. An equivalent of the 30s is a frightening perspective. I’ve briefly read your delineation of Trumps inauguration chart. I read it as if it can well be that forces have been set in motion that may already be beyond control. At least in Germany it feels like this. The talking of a polarized of even fractured society is going on for some years now – I don’t know if you have followed the recent events around the (almost) post-Merkelian CDU tolerating AfD votes on their motion in the parliament. CDU-chief Merz cringed (wasn’t there some talking here about the gods dislike for cringing?) and failed and I second the perspective eugyppius laid out on his substack – this will either lead the CDU to come to their senses or destroy it. For now, this looks like a big defeat. Anyway, the real rifts are just beginning to show and polarization is reaching for new heights – I fear there’s still some way to go until we reach the maximum. There’s no one willing or capable to steer – and the self-proclaimed Alternative has imo demonstrated this, too, by Weidel licking the boots of Elon (despite of this, all this screaming of “election interference” is hypocritical, anyway).

    You know, all this talking and thinking about archetypes and magic and the fate of civilizations and stuff is making me more and more silent and withdrawn. The moment I finally realized that I’m not a spectator of life but part of it had arrived some years ago but the conclusions are still slowly and continuously dawning. Talking about steering… I wonder if it will ever be possible to reach some kind of confidence and certainty again (the thing is, whenever such a question pops up there’s some voice telling me “you know the answer”. Oh well, the answer maybe, but the way?).

    Cheers,
    Nachtgurke

  120. Thank you for a very thought-provoking article. Are you perhaps thinking of doing a bunch of these as a book on modern occult figures? As I recall, you did posts on Steiner and Blavatsky.

    On Earth-BR549, E.A. Crowley’s poem “Violet Sublime” probably hails Firth as his Platonic beloved, his chaste Beatrice, his Woman Clothed with the Sun!

    On a more serious note, Noll’s main point was not simply that Jung was an occultist, but that his theory is rooted in the same völkisch neo-paganism as Hitler and the Nazis. For example, his early theory of the archetypes–inspired by scientific ideas that now seem outmoded or romantic–gave them a racial or nationalistic character (the tectonic metaphor) that had to be downplayed after the war in favor of a more universalistic reading. Noll complains that the “Jung Cult” (and the Jung family) has intentionally covered up these features of Jung’s thought.

    I remember liking Masson’s “My Father’s Guru.” Oedipal it may be, but I grew up reading Paul Brunton, and was grateful for this perspective on him.

  121. Inna, that’s an unnerving point. I’m quite aware that you may be right and Trump will turn out to be America’s Gorbachev, the figure whose ill-considered reforms set forces in motion that sweep away the entire American system and plunge us into an unexpected future. I’ll keep an eye out for more accidents…

    Hawk, well, we’ll see!

    SDI, hmm! Yes, that works very well indeed. Thank you.

    Patricia M, and these days the Anglican Church only attracts about 3% of the English population; the only reason it hasn’t imploded completely is that it gets government support. Kindergarten games didn’t help, admittedly.

    Helen, thank you. A very large part of that is that I have the best commentariat on the internet!

    Nachtgurke, yes, I’ve been watching the situation in Germany closely. I see it as a bellwether for the future of Europe; it’s when democracy freezes up around irreconcilable divisions that people turn to tyrants. As for silence and withdrawal, that’s a useful stage in the work: the route is always there — “there” being as far as possible from where you are now — and back again.

    Ambrose, of course — but the völkisch neopaganism that provided one important set of inputs to the Nazi movement was simply one offshoot of the broader occult movement, and other branches of occultism were just as influential in the cobbled-together hodgepodge that was Nazi ideology. When occultism goes septic, as of course every ideology does from time to time, Nazism is one of the things that can result from it, just as Stalinism is a septic expression of scientific materialism and the Inquisition a septic expression of Christianity.

  122. Have just come to read the essay, but before I do, and before it slips my mind, there was/is an interesting podcast I listened to that compares the recent/ongoing congressional interviews of Kennedy and Gabbard as a magic show. I’d love a John Michael Greer comment on that! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlE9ny_hvyM

  123. I’m veering OT here, but I keep seeing parallels between the US today and the Soviet Union of the late 80-s. It’s better to be prepared…
    Back then, seemingly random and small events had huge consequences. For example, Gorbachev used Mathias Rust’s landing on Red Square to fire dozens of highest-ranking military guys who opposed many of his shenanigans. They were the type of people who couldn’t care less about capitalism, communism, or any other
    -ism. They were entrenched and corrupt, yet they understood power, leverage, and material resources. Were they there to make sure that every i was dotted and every t was crossed during the Russia-Ukraine divorce in 1991 maybe we wouldn’t have this tragic war today; yet Gorbachev got rid of them in 1987 after that crazy guy landed on Red Square.
    Today I’m watching the events around me uneasily… What will Donald Trump do?

  124. Justin Patrick Moore #104 on the usefulness of Jungian ideas for psychotherapy:
    I had bad experiences with the two Jungian analysts I saw, and my experiences may serve as a cautionary tale for others. When I’d talk about having trouble dealing with a nasty person or abusive family member, they’d immediately respond with “That’s your SHADOW!” (Well, maybe, but some people are just plain toxic, and the common-sense solution is to avoid them.) When I tried to talk about having been sexually assaulted as a child, one of the analysts said “If you’re angry about that, it’s because you’re judging yourself for your own sexual process of working things out.” (Yes, those were her exact words; I think this was derived from the Jungian idea that anyone you have trouble with is actually a reflection of yourself – or something.)
    I did find a much better psychotherapist who actually helped me by encouraging me to talk about my feelings, and listening with respect and empathy. He described the two people I’d seen as “cookie-cutter Jungians” who impose Jungian concepts on people automatically, and substitute jargon for therapy.
    Neither of the first two people were licensed to practice as psychotherapists, and the better guy was. I’d encourage anyone considering therapy to ensure that the therapist is licensed and that the license is in good standing. While that doesn’t guarantee good therapy, it screens out the worst practitioners, and shows a willingness to be held accountable.

  125. I discovered Jung when I was a teenager, and I was instantly and irrevocably fascinated. I recorded and interpreted my dreams for many years (I only stopped when I stopped remembering my dreams due to a lot of bad stuff happening in my life – and I see the inability to remember my dreams as a form of spiritual sickness). I never dared to do Active Imagination, partly because the books I read stressed that you should only go deeper under the supervision of a trained therapist, and I couldn’t afford one.
    When I came across the ‘gods are archetypes’ stuff on the internet years later, I was amazed that this theory apparently led people to adopt a ‘nothing but’-attitude towards gods. I also thought that archetypes and gods were different names for the same phenomenon, but that didn’t make them harmless to me! After all, Jung had always stressed the autonomy and superior power of an archetype vs. one’s conscious self/ego. It seemed to me the ‘nothing but’-crowd didn’t understand at all what an archetype is. It’s not something you make up in your mind. It’s not dependent on you. It’s not a part of you. Rather, you are a part of ‘it’, in the sense that you’re a creation of the ecology that Jung called the collective unconscious.

    The thing that fascinated me the most was synchronicity. It seemed to lend itself to a definition of magic as the ability to deliberately constellate synchronicities – not that I had any idea how to do that, and I also didn’t find an explanation in the books I read. An archetype is activated (how?), and manifests on several layers of reality simultaneously: ‘inside’ your mind and ‘outside’ in the world. Since both manifestations stem from the same root, they overlap or correspond in meaning. If one *could* do this deliberately (not ‘causing’ it in the strict sense, since it’s an acausal principle), one could bend the probabilities in one’s favor. I admit I was more drawn to thaumaturgy than theurgy – it seemed more exciting 😉

  126. Thanks JMG for another very informative and thought-provoking post! Following on your and LeGrand’s very interesting conversation (if I may) I really appreciated your point about much of Freud’s work reading like fiction. I agree, and more specifically I feel Freud is the 20th century’s foremost writer of Gothic fiction, though it is cast in a materialist psychological idiom–the human mind standing in for the haunted castle or manor house, repressed memories manifesting as seemingly inexplicable behaviors standing in for ghostly or other supernatural apparitions, and so on. Obviously this is a necessarily reductive comparison here, but my broader point is twofold: 1) the great 19th-century Gothic writers were, I suspect, well aware they were exploring the human psyche in their work; 2) I am not dismissing Freud as a “mere” fiction writer. To your point, creative geniuses from seemingly very different (even opposed) disciplines–psychology/occultism or psychology/literature–are often participating in a common intellectual and, dare I say, spiritual exploration.

  127. Hadashi, thank you, but I don’t do videos.

    Inna, I wonder if you’ve ever read this article by my old sparring partner and fellow peak oil blogger Dmitry Orlov:

    https://www.resilience.org/stories/2006-12-04/closing-collapse-gap-ussr-was-better-prepared-collapse-us/

    His point, writing almost twenty years ago, is that the US is deeply vulnerable to the same kind of collapse that ended the Soviet Union. Trust me, you’re not the only one wondering what Trump’s goimg to do next — not least because his people have now taken control of the money-disbursing machinery of the government, and are starting to talk about what they’re finding…

    Yavanna (if I may), thanks for this. I appreciate the caution.

    Athaia, I had a similar reaction to my first Jungian book, Emma Jung’s The Grail Legend (which, oddly enough, I’m rereading right now). Of course I was also studying magic by then, so figuring out how to constellate synchronicities in accordance with will was a little easier… 😉

    James, hmm. Freud as Gothic novelist! Yeah, that works — and as a novelist, I don’t take that as a dismissal at all. I don’t think psychoanalysis could have happened in the first place without the close analysis of individual consciousness that was such a potent theme in 19th century fiction.

  128. JMG,

    Also worried about Trump being America’s Gorbachev given how dependent our economy is on what can only be described as overly financialized shenanigans. What unnerves me the most is how many people are projecting halcyon days ahead given the divine intervention that protected Trump. He seems to believe himself that he’s been chosen by God to make American great again.

    I’m more concerned that he’s been hand-picked by Coyote to level the playing field by leveling the field.

  129. Indeed, I did :))… and many of his early books. I never met Dmitry Orlov but I understood his references well as he and I were probably born within walking distance of each other. Venturing a forecast is an intellectual pursuit. Living through this analogy is something else entirely. He was perhaps right back then, though lately, his transformation is
    a psychological riddle and one of the tiny pieces of the crazy puzzle that is our time. How could a person capable of such a nuanced analysis ever switch to jingoistic gibberish? Ronald Reagan called the USSR The Evil Empire. Dmitry is now calling the US The Evil Empire. Well, Reagan was a politician, Dmitri doesn’t have this excuse. If only evil was in possession of a driver’s license with the address stated clearly… life would be so much easier!

  130. JMG, I have now read your essay twice and am unable to understand what is “collective unconscious”. I admit having trouble with the notion of unconscious mind at all. What I find is that memories swim up to the top of my mind, but I gather the “unconscious mind’ is something different? If unconscious mind is the seat of instinct, then it is not properly speaking mind at all.

    I gather that “collective unconscious” is something other than that collection of spoken and unspoken agreements which hold a society together?

  131. Carl Jung had an early circuitous influence in the creation of the Alcoholics Anonymous. AA’s founder, Bill Wilson, had met with Ebby Thacher, who had been helped by Roland Hazard, who was a former alcoholic patient of Young’s. Ebby passed on what he had been taught by Hazard, who had himself been instructed by Young, regarding alcoholic recovery. Young’s approach stressed a “vital spiritual experience” when it came to alcoholic recovery. This “spiritual experience” became the cumulative goal of the Twelves Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. I could hardly imagine a doctor today suggesting a “vital spiritual experience” as a cure or therapy in a scientific journal.

  132. Speaking of fiction and archetypes, I’ve noticed them cropping up periodically in the form of the villains of fairy tales, songs, novels, and murder mysteries. In my youth, the usual villains were powerful middle-aged alpha males – the archetype of the Ogre. The two best examples are current novels of Laurie King, who is about my age, and the songs of the late Jim Morrison.

    Give the wheel a quarter-turn, and the archetype that pops up as the villain is the powerful middle-aged woman,driven by a ruthless vanity – today’s Karen. The archetype is the Witch or the Devouring Mother. In fairy tales, the Wicked Stepmother. The Disney version of “Tangled” played to that one.
    Or – well, Ariel Moravec just now popped up and handed me her own $.02. Because she really DID kill Ariel’s brother Daniel. Theodore’s son, and his only son, which broke his spirit once and for all.

    To the great noir writers, the villain was often the Femme Fatale – and I note the movie “Chinatown” turned that one on its head to reveal the Ogre behind the Femme Fatale. And so on and so on.

    When the same themes pop up in folk tales, fairy tales, cartoons, novels, murder mysteries, and rock songs, I sense some strong archetypes coming to the surface like great whales.

    Oddly enough, I’ve noticed that the young Hero who ousts a corrupt elder or brings order out of chaos a la Joseph Campbell, is often the one who becomes the Ogre later on.

  133. Hi John Michael,

    Haven’t things gotten interesting of late? I read the Gorbachev comments above, but I sort of see your new President as representing a group of people who are changing the order of business in new directions, because what’s been done to date is unsustainable. The debt games the west are playing are crazy and history suggests the outcome. Sooner or later the order of things was going to change for better or worse, and someone had to be at the helm when it does. The mere fact that the existing order of elites lost their grip on power, tells me how bad things are behind the scenes.

    I really look forward to hearing what you have to say about the energy story in the near future.

    Cheers

    Chris

  134. Dennis, I know. The giddy optimism of the Trumpistas is understandable — they’re actually having the chance to win for a change, after so many defeats — but it may lead them straight into a quagmire. We’ll have to see.

    Inna, it’s something that happens to certain intellectuals — including some very bright ones — when they get older. Unfortunate.

    Mary, yes, it’s something completely different from that. Here’s a decent Jungian discussion of it.

    https://frithluton.com/articles/collective-unconscious/

    Lee, interesting. Thanks for this.

    Patricia M, hmm! I realized Ariel had that kind of mother partly because of Ariel’s own emotional life, which has been shaped in reaction against that, and partly because I’d read a lot of accounts of the sort of pressure teens face from parents who have a kind of economic Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and insist on making their children act out parental fantasies of success in a world that isn’t remotely like the one in which the parents grew up. You’ve made me think about being sure to include other kinds of villains besides those two…

    Chris, I see Trump as a character in an action flick — hero or villain, take your pick. He’s just grabbed the steering wheel of the big truck, having shoved the former driver out the open door; the truck’s rocketing down the road at high speed, it has a heavy load, and he’s trying to make a sharp turn. The question is whether he makes the turn, or jackknifes and skids out of control…

  135. Smith, JMG et al.

    Some of Jung’s thoughts on prehistoric cave art appear in this excerpt from his 1929 Dream Analysis Seminar:

    https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/2020/08/23/carl-jungs-dream/

    “Much earlier, from the Paleolithic Age, there are those remarkable rock-paintings (in the caves of Altamira in Spain, for example), naturalistic representations of animals — the horse, the reindeer, the mammoth, etc….And a wonderful rock-drawing of a rhinoceros with the tick-birds on its back has been discovered in Rhodesia; there is also one of a charging rhino with muscles taut, that is most amazing from the naturalistic point of view.”

    Several paragraphs in this vein follow, including some interesting remarks on the symbolism of the cross..

  136. Re: Trump possibly being America’s Gorbachev

    IIRC, JMG’s inauguration chart possibly indicated that Democrats might win the November 2026 midterm elections, despite them currently being demoralized and unpopular with Independents. So the next couple years will probably not be smooth sailing for the MAGA movement or most Americans.

    Maybe more of the costs of Trump’s policies can be borne by the PMC rather than the working class– that and the end of woke excess might be the silver lining of a difficult time.

  137. Another awesome essay JMG! Particularly;
    “…magic—which takes power for its keynote and uses ritual as its central practice—and mysticism—which (at least in the West) takes love as its keynote and uses prayer as its central practice—we have occultism, which takes wisdom for its keynote and uses meditation as its central practice.”
    This could become a mandala– Three axes, magic-ritual-power; mysticism-prayer-love; occultism-meditation-wisdom– forming a six-spoked wheel that meets in the middle, which is… I’d have to meditate on that one. Or three interlocking rings, any two of which fall apart if the 3rd one isn’t there.
    Would you or my fellow readers consider that a Mandala is really an aid for meditation that is meant to fully engage the visual cortex, the most powerful tool of the human mind?
    Do we have any descriptions of how Jung created his mandalas? Did he draw and re-draw them over and over again until they reached their final forms? Were they images held in his mind until clear enough to record?
    For what its worth, just as an experiment, I tried telling the openart AI graphics utility to make me a mandala using your description. It failed miserably; couldn’t even make a six-spoked wheel when told explicitly to do it. There are a lot of things computer utilities simply can’t help us do.

  138. “He’s just grabbed the steering wheel of the big truck, having shoved the former driver out the open door” – I think that’s a big difference. You have somebody who seems to have rather consciously grabbed the wheel and – having learned by experience – has not only shoved out the former driver but also most of his buddies. That’s a big difference to Germany, for example. I don’t think we have anybody here who has this level of determination and will for action. If his actions are enough or even sensible in the end, time will tell. There’s been some talking about the immovable object and the irresistible force, which might describe the situation close enough.

    Cheers,
    Nachtgurke

  139. “Ronald Reagan called the USSR The Evil Empire. Dmitry is now calling the US The Evil Empire.” –Inna #139

    “America it’s them bad Russians.
    Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them
    Russians.
    The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She
    wants to take our cars from out our garages.
    Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Readers’ Digest.
    Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy
    running our fillingstations.” -Alan Ginsberg, Howl

    It seems to me this obsession with Russia that we’ve had for so long is a classic projection of the shadow, on a collective scale. I don’t know how it is in Russia, and how they have seen the USA over the past century +, but the reverse could also be true.

    We make great mirrors for each other to shout at.

  140. Inna# I fear that the phenomenons that you linked between the present situation of USA and the Perestroika times’ URSS is not due to any jungian sincronicty , but to political factors wich I prefer not explain for not causing you fear and disgust. Acording with my suposition, these tragic disgraces will repeat many times during the next weeks or months and even could be very much dramatic.
    Take care of your shelf.

  141. >Trump will turn out to be America’s Gorbachev

    Then who is going to step up to get tarred and feathered as Yeltsin, I wonder? Gotta say, whatever else you have to say about Trump, he doesn’t use chemical crutches to cope with stress.

    I think that whatever was in his ear they shot off was holding him back, some part of him died back in July, gone for good. They created this.

  142. >the figure whose ill-considered reforms set forces in motion that sweep away the entire American system

    Gorby had to deal with the consequences of decades of bad decisions made by other people. I guess if he was smart, he would’ve run from the job in the first place. When he took charge, I believe the USSR was on the verge of collapse already. He managed to keep it chugging for a few more years. Thankless job.

    Same here, they’ve kept kicking the can and kicking the can and kicking it for decades too. Someone was always going to have to take those bad decisions to the face.

    I think Trump has bought us 2 years, that’s my spidey sense of it right now. Use them wisely.

  143. @ JMG #144
    Re your link, which says: “The term ‘Collective’ refers to psychic contents that belong not to one individual but to a society, a people or the human race in general.”

    Reading this, I began to wonder if there is any reason not to think of these psychic contents held in common AS a commons, instead of as a collective. The reason it might be of benefit to do so is that we might begin considering how to mutually become owners, tenders and carers of, and beneficiaries of our shared commons, while carefully protecting it from “the tragedy of the commons”…

    Up until now, the concept of a “collective unconscious” has presented itself to me more in the guise of an ocean in which to drown or feebly swim, rather than a more layered ecology in which to participate.

    Anyway, I’m off to do some musings upon this topic, which at present is only a spore, or seed of an unformed thought.

    I welcome anyone else’s musings, though…

  144. @Justin Patrick Moore #149,
    Oh yeah, famous Howl… them beatniks 😉
    As far as the projection of the shadow and making of mirrors go, the US and Russia seem to do a great job of providing these services to each other. That’s what the good enemies are for :))

  145. I always get caught up in comments and get down into the hundreds before I get around to saying a word of my own but first I just need to tell @Justin Patrick Moore re: comment#87, that beauty was at 11:11 on my birthday I realized after I had copied and pasted it into my notes. “Freedom requires this sharpness” was a theme that following night around a fire with a group of people who I would say are all occultists at some level of development and comfort with framing themselves as such, but we were gathered around an agricultural shared project. I’ve never felt so surrounded by people who can correctly see the lack, the culture that used to be, that used to guide daily habits and practice towards sane cohabitation with each other and the whole world, the culture that was devoured in favor of the industrial-consumer-anticulture. This is the second time I’ve heard your framing of occultist/mystic/magician energies and I liked it so much the first time I made it my substack bio: Seeking the trifold path – the love of a mystic, the power of a mage and the wisdom of an occult scientist. As far as Trump shoving the former driver out the door and grabbing the wheel, as someone who secured a decent-size govt grant in the new-ag space which under biden was called “climate-smart commodities” and is still probably mostly useful and could have some other name, definitely the govt is shaking inside the agencies. It’s inconvenient if one is a small business and the grant grew the company pretty dramatically and so payroll depends on being able to file claims, but I understand why he wants to shake things up, and our situation is unusual, I mean most grants went to universities and big companies and so on and very few to small businesses.

  146. “…couldn’t even make a six-spoked wheel when told explicitly to do it”

    It’s trained on Jungian principles; it can only do four spokes.

  147. “The question is whether he makes the turn, or jackknifes and skids out of control…”

    Or jumps the truck over the canyon like in Dukes of Hazard.

  148. Forgive me for posting something so off-topic (and feel free to delete it), but:

    I think I’ve worked out what Trump bullying Canada about becoming the 51st state is about: I think he’s clearing the way for Conservative Party candidate Pierre Poilievre to become Canada’s next Prime Minister.

    From what I’ve gathered, many Canadians now want a sharp turn rightward but are reluctant to vote for anyone who might be the Canadian version of Donald Trump. But with Trump blustering about making it the 51st state, he gave Poilievre an opening to denounce Trump, which he’s taken.

    More generally, the bluster and recent tariffs also seem to have reawakened a patriotic spirit in what Trudeau had defined as the “first postnational state.” As X user TheAgeOfShoddy recently put it, commenting on a Reddit post by a Canadian declaring an intention to boycott American goods over the threatened tariffs:

    “Understand that this is progress. You’re not reading about how Canada is a genocide state on illegal stolen land, you’re not reading about how it has to Do Better, or how its biggest challenge is the effect of climate change on drag queens. It almost sounds like a real country.”

    https://x.com/TheAgeofShoddy/status/1885904691709747681

  149. @Justin Patrick Moore #149 I’ve long thought that many Russian policies in the last few decades reflect a certain concept of America, even as our government and its supporters denounce American degeneracy, hypocrisy and imperialism (the main three shouting themes, by the way). Religious conservatism is a case in point, since much of it on the state level seems more closely patterned after that of the American religious right than the indigenous religious conservative tradition. (For instance, much of it is aimed at suppressing “the propaganda of homosexuality”, but historically homosexuality was simply not seen as that major a concern here, though a known and denounced sin. Haphazardly banning books with favourable references to homosexuality was, at least initially, justified as done for the sake of the children – again much more a recent American theme than a historical Russian one.) Of course, those “family values” policies are introduced in the name of combatting Western influence and protecting Russian values. Then there was the synthetic attempt to create a right-wing establishment party and a left-wing establishment party, nominally opposed to each other but in effect pursuing most of the same policies (but the left-wing one underperformed by too much and eventually found it necessary to merge with leftist patriotic conservatives, who are at least less imitative). Russia Today is a more successful example, being our version of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, giving voice to Western dissidents who are much better at criticising actual Western societies and getting through to other discontenteded Westerners than we could ever be. Obviously there are limits to this copying, if only due to lasting differences in underlying institutions and geopolitical situations. But… while I am not sure that Russia and America are each others’ mirrors, their ruling elites certainly seem inclined to treat each other as such from time to time.

  150. —.——

    “When occultism goes septic, as of course every ideology does from time to time, Nazism is one of the things that can result from it, just as Stalinism is a septic expression of scientific materialism and the Inquisition a septic expression of Christianity.”
    One thing this blog has guided me to think about is the septic state of the idealism in whatever form of ideology. I’ve always had a nose for power and had the George Carlin sense of ‘human rights’ but that it’s the act of trying to force a wild world into the straightjacket of xyz ideology that actually generates the most violence is a theme this blog pushed me to think about more deeply. And I love the septic metaphor, what a quick path to the heart of the matter!!!

    So meanwhile on the theme of action hero trump taking the wheel and also re: wagner’s abandonment of triumphant arc of history, I thought you all would like this from IM1776 about how trump marks a return to Realpolitik

    ‘Realpolitik emerged from the wreckage of Germany’s doomed 1848 revolution, following an era of rapid development, wild utopianism, and widespread unrest not entirely dissimilar to ours. From exile, failed revolutionary Ludwig von Rochau reflected on the events of 1848 and concluded that his generation had become intoxicated by their own ideals, mistaking the power of words for political power. ‘

  151. Jackson Browne “Lawyers in Love” (1983)

    I can’t keep up with what’s been going down
    I think my heart must just be slowing down
    Among the human beings, in their designer jeans
    Am I the only one who hears the screams?
    And the strangled cries of lawyers in love

    God sends his spaceships to America, the beautiful
    They land at six o’clock and there we are, the dutiful
    Eating from TV trays, tuned into Happy Days
    Waiting for world war three while Jesus slaves
    To the mating calls of lawyers in love

    Ooh-sha-la-la-ooh
    Ooh-sha-la-la-ooh
    (Ah-oh), ooh-sha-la-la-ooh
    Ooh-sha-la-la-ooh

    Last night I watched the news from Washington, the Capitol
    The Russians escaped while we weren’t watching them
    Like Russians will
    Now we’ve got all this room, we’ve even got the moon
    And I hear the U.S.S.R will be open soon
    As vacation land for lawyers in love

    Wikipedia: The song’s title was proposed by Browne’s brother-in-law, who said that “all Los Angeles looked like it had been designed by lawyers in love”.

    So many references to contemporary America…

  152. Goldenhawk, thanks for this!

    Patrick, and that’s another issue, of course.

    Emmanuel, you could probably find out by comparing the Black Books — facsimiles of Jung’s own dream and active-imagination notebooks — with the Red Book, which was the final form. As for AI, somehow that doesn’t surprise me at all. I wonder if they can be made to draw any holy symbol…

    Nachtgurke, understood. If nobody grabs the steering wheel of the truck, though, over the cliff you go.

    Other Owen, there are plenty of possible Yeltsins!

    Scotlyn, hmm! That’s a fascinating idea, and I think a worthwhile one.

    Slithy, it’s at least possible. I’d assumed Trump was basically a blowhard, until this last two weeks — he’s landed on the DC bureaucracy like Jackie Chan jumping into the middle of a crowd of baddies, and his kicks and punches are finding targets with impressive speed and precision. Either he’s grown a great deal over the last four years or he’s got some very, very capable people advising him now who weren’t helping him in 2016.

    AliceEm, thanks for this. That comment by von Rochau would make a fine epitaph for Woke.

  153. @Scotlyn (#153):

    I think you’ve hit the nail om the head here. It does seem to me to be a commons rather than a collective.

  154. Speaking of “woke” – here’s Kaiser on “We Have Never Been Woke, by a sociologist named Musa Al-Gharbi. ”

    Kaiser puts in his $0.02 to very good effect, pointing out the strengths of Al-Gharbi’s anlysis of the contemporary woke elite, and the weakness of his historic parallels (“No, neither the 1930s nor the 1990s were any kind of a Great Awakening, as Kaiser points out.” And the weakness of some of Kaiser’s own arguments, such as the following:
    “[Al-Gharbi] mentions the critical, much-ignored fact that a plurality of poor Americans are white. (That is why I do not believe that white skin, in and of itself, confers any privilege at all any more.)”

    If Kaiser truly believes that last statement, I have to disagree with him.

  155. Just a quick one on from my previous comment that Jung is a great way to introduce esoteric thinking to those coming from the more mainstream.
    I’m again glad he didn’t overtly promote his occult ‘roots’ as I spotted this in the Gruaniad of all places:

    https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2025/feb/04/middle-age-midlife-carl-jung
    ‘Why middle-aged people have a duty to be self-centered’
    ‘ “For a young person it is almost a sin, or at least a danger, to be too preoccupied with himself; but for the aging person it is a duty and necessity to devote serious attention to himself,” Jung wrote in his 1931 essay The Stages of Life. ‘

    You just never know where that serious attention might take you…and a few readers of that piece if they delve deep enough.

  156. Other Owen @ 151: “I think that whatever was in his ear they shot off was holding him back, some part of him died back in July, gone for good. They created this.”

    How very comforting an explanation. Sorry, and nothing personal, but I don’t buy it. Republicans control the Presidency, Supreme Court and both Houses of Congress. Whatever comes down the pike in the next two years, good, bad or ugly, the Rs own it.

    AliceEm @ 155: ” the industrial-consumer-anticulture”. I love that phrase. I might like to use it. Are you asserting copywrite?

    Slithy Toves @ 158, Now that is the first believable explanation I have seen of the “51st state” theme. Do, please keep in mind, should there ever be negotiations for a continental union, you Canadians are entitled to a lot more than 2 Senators and a handful of congresscritters.

  157. Dennis Michael Saywers wrote, “…Trump. He seems to believe himself that he’s been chosen by God to make American great again. I’m more concerned that he’s been hand-picked by Coyote to level the playing field by leveling the field.”

    It sounds to me like you and Trump may be relating to the very same insight about the import of the time we’re living through, similar to wise men looking at different ends of an elephant. Being hand-picked by Coyote is by definition being chosen by a god. So the remaining divergence in your insights would be whether or not leveling the playing field turns out to be a different outcome than making America great again. That makes for an interesting question.

    Perhaps the only way to allow a decadent and dying hegemon to recover any of its lost sanity is to break apart all the warped myths holding it together in its degraded form. Perhaps the painful process of shattering apart our most cherished and delusional myths is the only way to rediscover any of the actual greatness we so thoughtlessly discarded. I’m not saying that any American is going to be overly enthusiastic about passing through our own equivalent of Russia’s Krokodil decade under Yeltsin, but that may well be the only way to purge the hopey halucinatory ideologies under which we’ve fallen sway.

    A mere decade of chaos to slip free from the bonds of more than a century of ideological malarkey doesn’t sound like such a bad deal to me. Worth noting is that the pithy “make America great again” slogan makes absolutely no claim as to how long that lofty goal may take, nor how much mayhem may need to be endured on the way to that promised land. Coyote strikes again!

  158. @166 Mary Bennett

    The term anticulture might come from the book Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen. (“Liberalism” here means the foundational assumptions underlying both classical and left-liberalism). Over time, organic local cultures were replaced by mass consumerist anticulture imposed from the top down (and according to the author, that is a bad thing).

  159. A very interesting article and comments! Jung is a psychologist I have the most time for – it is so refreshing to have an unabashedly teleological perspective on human development. Also, taking myth, religion and weird experiences seriously is unfortunately so rare in respectable circles, that encountering Jung giving them their due becomes a pleasantly shocking experience.

    I do have some reservations about Jung though. First, he was not a very good writer – his theoretical constructions are rather vague, either because he himself wass unsure about the nature of phenomena that he was describing (and giving the pioneering nature of his approach that would be legitimate), or because he wanted to hide his debt to occult teachings to gain more cred with the scientific crowd. Either way, he was in no way as clear or persuasive as Freud, which possibly accounts for the latter’s greater influence. Jung was also much more comfortable citing obscure texts than discussing clinical cases, giving his output an unappealingly abstract tone.

    I also feel that Jungian riffings on ancient myths appear rather arbitrary – a myth means something, but in an interpretation of a different thinker it might mean something completely different. Now a myth’s versatility is one of its strengths, but it does not provide strong support for the claim that these correspond to a stable, objective structure of some kind. And archetypes seem to be pulled out of thin air according to momentary needs of a discussion rather than discovered as objective phenomena.

    I guess my main objection to Jung is his famous proclamation that gods existing is a psychological fact – he might have had more nuanced views on the matter but this one is of stunning banality. And I am not sure whether it was Jung himself or his disciples who basically posited that what we called gods once we now call neuroses and complexes – that seems to be an enormous category error. Whether one believes in gods or not, they cannot be simply equated with psychological states.

    Despite these reservations, I find Jung and Jungians very stimulating. I imagine Jungian analysis might be an amazing experience, but, as mentioned in the main posts and the comments, it would be a rather middle class and expensive one, and not easily available. I hope that some of Jung’s insights and derived practices will become accessible through more popular means.

  160. @Slithy Toves (and others interested in Canada/Greenland),
    Julius Ruechel has published two very interesting articles on “Trump’s War on Global Socialism”, one on Greenland (https://juliusruechel.substack.com/p/trumps-war-on-global-socialism-part) and one on Canada (https://juliusruechel.substack.com/p/trumps-war-on-global-socialism-part-14f).
    Short version of Canada article: Canada is no longer a safe neighbor for America… drugs (manufacturing and distribution), terrorists, partnering with China. The author thinks Canada has a choice of becoming one (or several) states or it can become a US territory. (And if I’m interpreting the author correctly, he thinks American controlling Canada is not a Trump thing or even a Republican thing. Apparently they’ve not been able to build oil and gas ports on the BC coast (where it could be shipped to China) ever. It is just Trump that is bringing things to a head.) A fascinating read!

  161. Emmanuel Goldstein wrote, “Would you or my fellow readers consider that a Mandala is really an aid for meditation that is meant to fully engage the visual cortex, the most powerful tool of the human mind?”

    Well, that very much depends on the type of mandala you’re talking about.

    Tibetan sand mandalas, protected over the course of weeks of creation by rigorously controlled body movements, constitute elaborate rituals of cooperative behavior, whose visual outcome seems of rather secondary importance. The sneeze-suppression and other extreme body awareness required for the creation of sand mandalas in themselves constitute the meditative state sought out by the monks. The muscle movements that then lead to the destruction of such painstakingly detailed work reinforce just how much sand mandalas are actually kinesthetic experiences for their participants, rather than visual representations for others.

    Mandalas worn as talismans can encourage changes of consciousness through several different sensory experiences. A talisman that is always kept hidden under clothing, only to be touched or clutched as a reminder of its presence and influence over one’s person, may exert its primary influence through the sense of touch or through a kinesthetic sense of proximity.

    Regardless of those outlying examples, mandalas do originate as visual stimuli, aiding in the contemplation of complexities beyond our understanding. To decode which mandalas work their magic through senses other than the visual, simply consider whether replacing said mandala with an innocuous picture of a kitty cat would particularly lessen its impact on the person focusing on it as a tool for heightened consciousness.

  162. @mary Bennett 166 – by all means use the phrase 🙂 I don’t currently make time to write much outside of this forum… the more people who consider that we have been many of us raised in an industrial-consumer anticulture, the more people might consciously try to develop something else.

  163. Scotlyn wrote, “Up until now, the concept of a “collective unconscious” has presented itself to me more in the guise of an ocean in which to drown or feebly swim, rather than a more layered ecology in which to participate.”

    What a fascinating idea, that we are active participants in the collective unconscious, subtly influencing it by cooperating more with extant or countercyclical trends arising within it. I like that a lot!

    With the archetypes manifesting as nodes or repositories of associated values and meanings on the mental plane, I’m not sure that we could hope to budge them in their true form, but we can certainly distort or redirect healthy human perception of them. That’s what was taking place during the mass formations of the Cultural Revolution and Nazism. That’s also what was aimed at during the attempted mass formations of the great Covid panic and the Woke revolution. Each of those distortions maps perfectly onto a tragedy-of-the-commons situation taking place in the collective unconscious, with a rotating cast of profiteers looking to exploit the wealth of our common heritage.

    Any cynical distortions of archetypes (interpreted as naturally rebalancing nodes of value and meaning) would yield up assorted false virtues and hypocrisies, which we have certainly been living under a deluge of for quite a while now. If the archetypes themselves never budge through all of our vain efforts, then any energy we pour into attempting to countercyclically resist those false virtues and hypocrisies propped up to mask the true archetypes from recognition will simply end up feeding energy into the falsified versions. Rather than futilely fighting against distracting strawmen, we would want to abandon them altogether, ditching any false virtues and deserting hypocrisies peddled our way.

    Now that the Woke mind virus is finally getting deserted en masse, new distortions and misdirections are being minted to keep us ever distracted from interacting with the actual patterns underlying the cosmos. MAGA triumphalism and America’s supposed winning of a stalemate in Ukraine will eventually be dropped like hot potatoes, but only after having distracted millions from paying attention to reality for another few years. Meanwhile, the archetypes patiently bide their time, knowing well that, when everything else has failed us, we will eventually turn away from all the misleading masks to glimpse the unimaginable energies hidden behind them. The only question is how many lifetimes it might take us to begin waking up — fortunately, the archetypes have all the time in the world to wait for us to catch up.

  164. All this talk about annexing Canada as the 51st state somewhat amuses me. Some years back, there was a bit of pearl-clutching over how a secret agreement had been forged to merge The U.S., Canada, and Mexico into one supernation called The North American Union, and that this was a BAD thing! (NAFTA was just the first step!) There was even new currency made up, called “the Amero”, which had already been printed and quietly distributed – so quietly, in fact, that almost nobody noticed, and everyone continued to use the good old U.S. dollar, the Canadian dollar, and the peso. (My comment at the time was that the new currency would fail immediately, because the vending machines would not take them. 😀 ) And now, apparently, not only are we merging with Canada and, if not merging with Mexico, then at least dictating policy for it, but we’re adding Greenland to the Union (in case we run out of ice?) And we are assured that all this is a GOOD thing!

  165. @Christophe #171
    The purpose of sand mandalas is to bless the area where they were created. Afterwards the sand is deposited in a local river. A mandala is an overhead view of a celestial palace, centred on Mount Meru. It is considered meritorious to create such images because they are sacred and auspicious symbols.

  166. Goldenhawk #145, thanks for digging out Jung’s lecture. It was interesting, especially the commentary on the cross.

  167. @Patrick 168 and @Mary Bennett 155
    I never read Why Liberalism Failed, tho I went and got the text now and use “anticulture” the same way he does. as in the close of his introduction, [let’s do] “practices more than theories, the building of resilient new
    cultures against the anticulture of liberalism.” It is also more or less the same way Bayo Akumalafe uses “whiteness” to designate not a skin tone or specific caucasian/euro cultural and/or colonial heritage but rather to designate the-scourge-trying-to-white-out-all-culture…
    But I will say in skimming tone of “Why Liberalism Failed,” I hate it. While I LOVE Revolt of the Elites by Christopher Lasch which I am reading right now and is pointing to the same phenomena in more clear and beautiful and to the point prose.

  168. Thanks for a great article, JMG. Jung was my introduction to occultism and esotericism, by way of a video game called Elden Ring. Some fans have explored the story and lore of Elden Ring through the lens of the Jungian psychology and hermetic alchemy and have written fascinating essays on these topics. The creative director of Elden Ring, Hidetaka Miyazaki, often has many nods to Western and Eastern esoteric practices in his games. I know it’s just a video game to many others, but it has led me down a path of spiritual discovery and I’m hoping it can serve as a vector for spiritual growth for others.

  169. JMG Inna, I’ve been thinking similar things to your dialogue over the last week or so. Apart from the political ramifications (on whatever “side” you are on), the administrative potential of letting teenagers (nothing wrong with teenagers – but they don’t have the knowledge or skills to administer the mammoth organisations they are dealing with) control huge parts of the federal apparatus, open up huge risks of all sorts of things going wrong in the near future (which is of course is what some of the extremist billionaires want to happen). MAGA people sure didn’t vote to lose their farms, the little healthcare, or the poverty support they currently have. And that’s before you even start to think of what technologists in Russia, China, Iran etc might be cooking up.

    Perhaps it’s time for the States to organise a Constitutional Convention, and amend the Constitution to abolish the Federation and the Federal Government… then everyone (MAGA, Democrats, and the few Republicans that are left) get what they want 🙂

Courteous, concise comments relevant to the topic of the current post are welcome, whether or not they agree with the views expressed here, and I try to respond to each comment as time permits. Long screeds proclaiming the infallibility of some ideology or other, however, will be deleted; so will repeated attempts to hammer on a point already addressed; so will comments containing profanity, abusive language, flamebaiting and the like -- I filled up my supply of Troll Bingo cards years ago and have no interest in adding any more to my collection; and so will sales spam and offers of "guest posts" pitching products. I'm quite aware that the concept of polite discourse is hopelessly dowdy and out of date, but then some people would say the same thing about the traditions this blog is meant to discuss. Thank you for reading Ecosophia! -- JMG

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