The Shaping of a World Religion: Carl Jung and The Land of the Dead – Descending into the Underworld PART VII
The Shaping of a World Religion: Carl Jung and The Land of the Dead – Descending into the Underworld PART VII
“What is more general is a rejection of Christian tradition in the name of a supposedly broader and more efficient method from achieving an individual and, by the same stroke, a collective renovation. Even when these ideas are naively or even ludicrously expressed, there is always the tacit conviction that a way out of the chaos and meaninglessness of modern life and that this way out implies an initiation into, and consequentially the revelation of, old and venerable secrets. It is primarily the attraction of a personal initiation that explains the craze for the occult. As is well known, Christianity rejected the mystery-religion type of secret initiation. The Christian ‘mystery’ was open to all; it was ‘proclaimed upon the housetops,' and Gnostics were persecuted because of their secret rituals of initiations. In the contemporary occult explosion, the ‘initiation’ – however the participant may understand this term – has a capital function: it confers a new status on the adept; he feels that he is somehow ‘elected,’ singled out from the anonymous and lonely crowd. Moreover, in most of the occult circles, initiation also has a superpersonal function, for every new adept is supposed to contribute to the renovation of the world.”
- Mircea Eliade “The Occult and the Modern World” (1974)
“To bear a God within one’s self signifies just as much as to be God one’s self…There are even plainer traces, to be sure, in the ‘becoming-one-with-God’ in those mysteries closely related to the Christian, where the mystic himself is lifted up to the divine adoration through initiatory rites…These representations of ‘becoming-one-with-God’ are very ancient. The old belief removed the becoming-one-with-God until the time after death; the mysteries, however, suggest this as taking place already in this world.”
- Carl Jung “The Psychology of the Unconscious” (1916)[1]
“Before religion had reached the stage of proclaiming that God must be put into the absolute and ideal, that is to say, beyond this world, one worship alone was reasonable and scientific: that was worship of the sun.”
- Carl Jung “The Psychology of the Unconscious” (1916)[2]
“The ethical problem of sexual freedom really is enormous and worth the sweat of all noble souls. But 2000 years of Christianity can only be replaced by something equivalent…[an] irresistible mass movement…I imagine a far finer and more comprehensive task for [psychoanalysis] than alliance with an ethical fraternity. I think we must give it time to infiltrate into people from many centers, to revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth, ever so gently to transform Christ back into the soothsaying god of the vine, which he was, and in this way absorb those ecstatic instinctual forces of Christianity for the one purpose of making the cult and the sacred myth what they once were – a drunken feast of joy where man regained the ethos and holiness of an animal.
That was the beauty and purpose of classical religion, and from which God knows what temporary biological needs has turned into a Misery Institute. Yet what infinite rapture and wantonness lie formant in our religion, waiting to be led back to their true destination! A genuine and proper ethical development cannot abandon Christianity but must grow up within it, must bring to fruition its hymn of love, the agony and ecstasy over the dying and resurgent god, the mystic power of the wine, the awesome anthropophagy[3] of the Last Supper – only this ethical development can serve the vital forces of religion.”
- Carl Jung “Freud/Jung Letters”[4] (Jung letter to Freud written early 1910)
This is the seventh instalment to the series “The Shaping of a World Religion: From Jesuits, Freemasons, & Anthropologists to MK Ultra and the Counter-Culture Movement.” For the previous instalments see Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV.
Part V and Part VI are included in the section to “The Shaping of a World Religion: Carl Jung and the Land of the Dead”. This paper is part of this series.
The Ghost Dance religion (the focus of Part I to IV of this series) was summarised in the introduction to Part V. It is important for the reader to be aware that this was a millennial religion that promised the Native Americans a “New Dawn” prophecy. This millennial religion was given to them by a “white man” as the legend goes and throughout its spread in the 1700s and 1800s, showed evidence of manipulation by the Jesuits, Scottish Rite and the Mormon Freemasonic headquarters at Salt Lake City.
William Sargant, pioneer of Tavistock & MK Ultra mind control techniques in his “Battle for the Mind” (1957), who will be discussed in detail later in this series, was especially focused on methods of sudden “religious” conversions. A subject that the Jesuits clearly excelled at and can be observed with phenomenal success in the case of the Ghost Dance. It appears the Ghost Dance was to become a prototype for what would later shape the counter-culture movement which, whether one likes to admit it or not, came hand-in-hand with MK Ultra de-patterning.[5]
In fact, Carl Jung would play a prominent role in developing this “art” of psychological de-patterning and dissociation techniques that would play a major role in shaping MK Ultra (this will be discussed further in this paper and the instalments that will follow). As this paper will make the point, this was not some unhappy outcome, where the “good” works of Jung were used for “bad” intentions, but rather that this was largely recognised by Jung himself, who spoke frequently with Allen Dulles[6] - the father of MK Ultra.
It is here that we will resume our story…
***
As Jung’s letter to Freud, cited above, makes abundantly clear, Jung was very much thinking about how to shape a “mass movement”. Not just a “mass movement” in the “sciences” or the “field of psychology” but a “religious mass movement.” As will soon be demonstrated, in Jung’s mind, this new religion of modernity would be based upon his unique approach to psychoanalysis. These thoughts were first revealed out loud at the beginning of the year 1910 in Jung’s correspondences with Freud.
In August 1910 Jung again discusses the theme of a millenarian religion of psychoanalysis. He writes to Freud that the opponents to psychoanalysis:
“are saying some very remarkable things which ought to open our eyes in several ways…All these mutterings about sectarianism, mysticism, arcane jargon, initiation, etc., mean something…that has all the trappings of a religion.”[7]
Thus, Jung is acknowledging here that the opponents of the psychoanalytic movement are critical due to its too many similarities with that of a religious movement. Jung does not refute this charge, but is rather saying that the psychoanalytical movement must recognise this fact for themselves and “open our eyes.” In this same letter to Freud in response to this criticism of being a “religion,” Jung suggests a counter-offensive strategy, that psychoanalysis should seek to create an elite, to protect itself against its critics, and through this elite’s powerful influence, facilitate the ushering in of a “Golden Age” on earth.[8]
Jung writes to Freud (again in the same letter):
“And finally, [psychoanalysis] thrives only in a very tight enclave of minds. Seclusion is like a warm rain. One should therefore barricade this territory against the ambitions of the public for a long time to come…Moreover [psychoanalysis] is too great a truth to be publicly acknowledged as yet. Generously adulterated extracts and thin dilutions of it should first be handed around. Also the necessary proof has not yet been furnished that it wasn’t you who discovered [psychoanalysis] but Plato, Thomas Aquinas and Kant, with Kuno Fischer and Wundt thrown in. Then Hoche will be called to a chair of [psychoanalysis] in Berlin and Aschaffenburg to one in Munich. Thereupon the Golden Age will dawn.”[9]
One should ask themselves the question, if psychoanalysis is indeed a science and is a form of treatment that is intended to help its patients get better, why the need for secrecy?
The reader should be aware that this secrecy continues to this day and one cannot call themselves a “Jungian analyst” by simply going through schooling to become a psychologist or a psychiatrist. In order to qualify as specifically a “Jungian analyst” one must first go through sessions with a recognised Jungian analyst, which typically consists of no less than 100 hours at a cost (in the mid-1990s) of approx. $10,000 to $15,000,[10] today it is roughly $25,000 to $30,000. This must be done by all candidates before even applying to an approved Jungian training institute, which then requires an additional ‘six to ten more years of training’ which can cost up to $100,000 (in the mid-1990s),[11] today this is roughly $200,600. This is truly an education for an “elite”, that is, those who can afford to become Jungian analysts have already qualified themselves as partaking to a privileged elite in economic status, which usually garners a great deal of influence in society.
Thus, it was no wonder that Jungian psychoanalysis first became fashionable in the United States amongst its banking and intelligence circles. In 1913, Edith Rockefeller traveled to Zurich to be treated for depression by Carl Jung and contributed generously to the Zurich Analytical Psychology Club. She would later become a Jungian analyst with a full-time practice in the States attracting many socialite patients. She also paid for Jung’s writings to be translated into English in order to help disseminate his ideas.
Paul (son of Andrew Mellon, co-founder to the Mellon National Bank) and Mary Mellon financed the Bollingen Foundation, dedicated to disseminating Jung’s work. In 1957, Fortune magazine estimated that Paul Mellon, his sister Ailsa, and his cousins Sara and Richard Mellon were all among the richest eight people in the United States with fortunes between $400-700 million each (around $3.7-6.5 billion in today’s dollars).
Through these initiatives, there was a spill over of the ideas of Ascona into the circles of the rich and powerful. British central banker Montagu Norman and members of the Dulles family also went under Jungian analysis.
It was rather ironic that it was through this select “elite” that made up the “core initiates” of Jungian psychoanalysis that would in turn popularise it within the counter-culture movement which thought of itself as “sticking it to the man.” The typical adherents of the counter-culture movement were completely unaware that the resources and ideologies they were being suddenly influenced by to bring about their New Age, as a means of supposedly opposing the corruption of capitalism and imperialism, came from the very grouping they thought they were fighting against.
Richard Noll writes in The Jung Cult:[12]
“In February 1912, Jung finished his famous chapter, ‘The Sacrifice,’ for his second part of Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido. In later years he often remarked how it signaled his final separation from Freud…The chapter on ‘The Sacrifice’ does indeed explicitly reject Freud and his libido theory and contains thinly veiled Mithraic allusion to this effect.
…It was in very late 1911 or very early January 1912 that Jung’s remarkable essay, ‘New Paths in Psychology,’ appeared in a Swiss popular culture journal, Rachers Jahrbuch fur Schweitzer Art und Kunst. This essay is the first public evidence we have from Jung that he is not only interested in breaking with the cult surrounding Freud…but in specifically forming his own psychoanalytic movement based on Nietzschean metaphors of liberation and self-sacrifice. The ‘New Paths’ essay is a fin-de-siecle manifesto of a new cultural movement…He calls for an intrapsychic overthrow of custom, a revolution in the internalized European traditions that enslave the individual personality.
…The problem is the conflict between staying on the old paths of nineteenth century bourgeois-Christian culture or giving in to the exploration of new ones that initiate the individual into modernity. How can one be brought into the twentieth century and be renewed or reborn in a degenerating world? For the answer Jung refers to a famous line from the Mithraic Liturgy that he once suggested to Freud as a motto for psychoanalysis: ‘Give up what thou hast, then thou shalt receive!’[13]
Those who wish renewal and rebirth through the new agent of cultural and personal transformation – psychoanalysis – [as Jung writes] ‘are called upon to abandon all their cherished illusions in order that something deeper, fairer, and more embracing may arise within them.’
And, most significantly for the mystery-cult hypothesis advanced here: [Jung writes] ‘Only through the mystery of self-sacrifice can a man find himself anew’[14].”
Today, the Jungian framing of the world and of “the self” is dominant. There are many who claim to be adherents to Jung’s teachings, however, one must acknowledge that only those who have gone through the actual initiation to become a Jungian analyst can know its deepest implications, its best kept secrets…
Bachofen’s Sonnenkinder: The Children of the Sun
The ideology of Johann Jakob Bachofen was briefly introduced in Part V of this series as well as its influence on Otto Gross, the first disciple of Freud, who would be successful in proselytizing Jung into his radical ideology that found its base in Ascona while being treated by Jung for “psychosis” at the Burghölzli Mental Hospital in Switzerland. [The relevance of Ascona will be discussed in further detail in future instalments but for now one can refer to my paper “The Origins of the Counterculture Movement: A Gathering of Anarchists, Occultists and Psychoanalysts for a New Age.”]
Recall that at the center of Gross’s ideology was the freedom to do whatever one wishes, very similar to the Thelema maxim of Aleister Crowley “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” who happened to also have his base of operations at Ascona. Coincidence?
A central tenet to Gross’s ideology was the return to neopagan worship, specifically as outlined by the work of Johann Jakob Bachofen who outlined evolutionary stages of humankind (1. Aphrodite- the tellurian phase, 2. Demeter – the lunar phase, 3. Dionysus – the brief transitional phase) before they reached the ideal Apollonian man, the ultimate perfection of humankind. “Sun worship” was a central tenet to the neopagan elements in German völkisch movements that were prevalent at this time. This was regarded by Gross as the “cure” to what ailed society as a reaction to the tide of civilization. And this is what Jung would also adopt as a central tenet. Jung would become a prominent player in Ascona including the Eranos Conferences (more on this in future instalments).
Renowned psychiatrist and criminologist who is considered by some to be the founding historiographer of psychiatry, Henri Ellenberger in his book The Discovery of the Unconscious, an encyclopedic study of the history of dynamic psychiatry published in 1970 has done much to uncover the vast influence of Bachofenian ideology within the psychiatric circles of Freud and Jung, as well as Nietzsche[15] who also in turn had a great deal of influence on Gross and Jung.
Ellenberger writes in his The Discovery of the Unconscious, that “The influence of Bachofen’s ideas reached psychiatric circles through various channels, and his influence on dynamic psychiatry has been immense.”[16]
The first formulation of Bachofen’s ideas can be found in his 1861 book Das Mutterrecht (The Law of the Mothers). As already mentioned Bachofen had outlined four evolutionary stages and had identified the Demeter stage as the true phase of the “law of the mother” (Das Mutterrecht), which Bachofen identifies as the lunar phase in which agriculture became the economic and social basis of a society identified with Mother Earth. According to Bachofen, in the Demeter stage, ‘the most serious crime in this society was matricide. The body and the earth were glorified and the intellect or Geist (spirit) were not. The night and the darkness of subterranean caves were exalted as sacred, and so nocturnal and subterranean initiations into mysteries began in this era’.[17] In addition to this, according to Bachofen, ‘there was also a fascination with the dead and contact with their spirits. Bachofen thought that the Eleusinian mysteries of the Hellenistic world had their origins in this period of matriarchy. Indeed, the great goddess of this era was none other than Demeter, the mother-goddess of Eleusis.’[18]
For those who may not be aware, Demeter’s other incarnation was that of Cybele, Earth Mother goddess and counterpart to the castrated vegetation God Attis, and also Gaia. See Matt Ehret’s recent essay for a further elaboration on this connection.
Ellenberger diagrammed how the exact sequence of stages in Bachofen corresponds to Freud’s stages of psychosexual development: the ancient hetairic period corresponds to the infantile period of “polymorphous perversity”; matriarchy resembles the pre-oedipal, incestuous period of strong attachment of the mother; the transitional Dionysian period is presented by the phallic stage; and patriarchy by the genital stage.[19]
‘In Freud, Bachofen is perhaps the (unacknowledged) basis of psychoanalytic ontogeny; in Jung, Bachofen is the key to psychoanalytic phylogeny. Haeckel provides the unifying key from evolutionary biology: “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” [Haeckel is discussed in Part V of this series.] This, in a nutshell, is the basic structure of the theory of the mind that Jung develops in Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido [Jung’s Psychology of the Unconsious].’[20]
Richard Noll writes in The Jung Cult:[21]
“Jung, well aware of the negative reception of Bachofen by scholars in the primary centers of science in German Europe, the universities, does not dare to cite [directly from] the eccentric Bachofen’s works. However, beginning with the chapter entitled ‘The Unconscious Origin of the Hero’ in part 2 of Wandlungen [Psychology of the Unconscious], it is Bachofen’s theory of human development that Jung uses as his basis for identifying the strata of transformations of the libido that he has excavated in his study of the phylogenetic unconscious. Indeed, this chapter in particular is pure Bachofen and sets the stage for Jung’s discussion of hero myths and their relation to the mother complex in the remainder of the book.
Jung begins this very important chapter by once again reviewing his phylogenetic hypothesis of part 1: [Jung writes] ‘The unconscious is generally diffused, which not only binds the individuals among themselves to the race, but also unites them backwards with the peoples of the past and their psychology. Thus the unconscious, surpassing the individual in generality, is, in the first place, the object of a true psychology, which claims not to be psychophysical.’ [Source: Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious] Jung then also reviews his syncretic discussion of solar myths and psychoanalysis of this previous section
[Jung writes[22]]:
‘Comparison with the sun teaches us over and over again that the gods are libido. It is the part of us which is immortal, since it represents that bond through which we feel that in the race we are never extinguished. It is life from the life of mankind. Its springs, which well up from the depths of the unconscious, come, as does our life in general, from the root of the whole of humanity, since we are indeed only a twig broken off from the mother and transplanted.’ [Source: Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious.]
Jung then introduces Bachofen through a discussion of his own archaeological observations. Jung tells his readers that, ‘In the antique collection at Verona I discovered a late Roman mystic inscription in which are the following representations.’ [Source: Psychology of the Unconscious] Jung then reproduces these four symbols, beginning with an obvious representation of the sun. Jung says: ‘These symbols are easily read: Sun-Phallus, Moon-Vagina (Uterus)’.
What is remarkable is that these four images represent exactly, and in the correct temporal order, the stages of human cultural evolution identified by Bachofen. Patriarchy is the Apollonian stage represented by the Sun; the phallus represents the transitional Dionysian phase; the moon is the stage of matriarchy and the vagina (uterus) is the stage of undifferentiated hetaerism.”
According to Jung’s theory using a Bachofenian-Haeckelian framework, the most regressed psychotics thus, were seen as stuck in the earliest evolutionary stage, the “tellurian” phase, and thus tellurian symbology would play a prominent role in their delusions and hallucinations.
The tellurian phase, as suggested by Bachofen played a prominent role in the earliest societies and thus, tellurian symbology would be expected to play a prominent role in what shaped the “psychology” of those societies and cultures. According to Bachofen, in the deepest tellurian stratum, earth symbols would be found fused together, especially in bisexual forms.
It was Otto Gross who introduced Jung to Bachofen’s works.
Otto Gross is the most prominent and best recorded patient admitted to the Burghölzli with Asconan connections and a significant knowledge of mythology, occultism, and the Hellenistic mystery cults, however, he was most certainly not the only one. ‘Jung reports that, from 1904 to 1907, 1325 patients were admitted to the Burghölzli, and we may conjecture that this number was probably not too different for the next four-year period of 1908 to 1911.’[23]
Thus, it is important to ask the question “How many of these patients at the Burghölzli were Asconans, and/or Theosophists, or others with mythological knowledge about sun worship and Bachofenian matriarchal symbolism?” Certainly, due to the close proximity of Burghölzli to Ascona, Ascona is only a 2 ½ hour drive from the Burghölzli Mental Hospital in Switzerland, it should be assumed that a great deal of these patients were in fact part of this grouping of specialised knowledge. And this would be the very grouping that Jung would base his studies on that supposedly proved and validated his theory of the collective unconscious.
Jung continues his solar references with increased frequency starting in the chapter “Song of the Moth”, in his Psychology of the Unconscious, where he writes “Her longing for God resembles the longing of the moth for the ‘star’.” Star is a synonym for sun. Jung then ‘dizzyingly unites the following in an associative chain of equivalences: the sun – the phallus – brightness – god – father – fire – libido – fructifying strength and heat – hero.’[24] To conclusively back up this argument, Jung mentions his famous case of the “Solar Phallus Man.”
The Solar Phallus Man was a patient institutionalized at the Burghölzli Mental Hospital, who had a hallucination (or perhaps delusion) that the sun had a phallic tube hanging from it that produced the wind.
Noll writes:
“Jung told the story of the Solar Phallus Man time and time again throughout his life as conclusive evidence of a collective unconscious. As one scholar has correctly observed, the Solar Phallus Man ‘carried on his shoulders the weight and burden of proof of the Collective Unconscious.’
The Solar Phallus Man, Jung and his disciples claimed, had hallucinations and delusions with content that resembled an ancient Hellenistic magical text from the second century CE, and therefore this was convincing proof of a phylogenetic or (later) collective unconscious.”[25]
Thus, Jung was claiming that this hallucination that resembled an ancient Hellenistic magical text, could not have been known by the patient and the fact that the patient saw this in a hallucination meant he must have “remembered” it as part of a “collective memory” of the past, the collective memory from the Land of the Dead, aka the collective unconscious.
Jung writes in his 1911 publication of Part I of Wandlungen:
“Honegger [Jung’s assistant] discovered the following hallucination in an insane man (paranoid dement): The patient sees in the sun an ‘upright tail’ similar to an erected penis. When he moves his head back and forth, then, too, the sun’s penis sways back and forth in a like manner, and out of that the wind arises. This strange hallucination remained unintelligible to us for a long time until I became acquainted with the Mithraic Liturgy[26] and its visions.”[27]
The Mithraic Liturgy ‘is a text from the Great Magical Papyrus of Paris, part of the Greek Magical Papyri. The modern name by which the text is known originated in 1903 with Albrecht Dieterich, its first translator, based on the invocation of Helios Mithras (Ἥλιοϲ Μίθραϲ) as the god who will provide the initiate with a revelation of immortality.’[28]
However, as Noll points out there are a great number of holes that surround this story. First off Jung strangely begins to treat the story of the Solar Phallus Man as his own and erases Honegger completely. Rather conveniently, Honegger commits suicide in 1911, the year Jung would first publish the story of the Solar Phallus Man which would make up the basis for his theory on the collective unconscious. Honegger’s personal papers also went missing that same year.
Jung also lies about the date at which the patient had their delusion as having begun in 1906, when Honegger only started his work in 1909, thus the patient’s hallucination, which was recounted shortly afterward, had to have occurred in either 1909 or 1910. Keep in mind that the dates are important since Jung is making the claim that it was impossible for the patient to have had any previous knowledge of the existence of this Mithraic Liturgy.
According to Jung, the first published account of the Mithraic Liturgy contained in the Greek Magical Papyri was in a small book by Dieterich entitled Eine Mithrasliturgie, published in 1910. A copy of which Jung owned in his own library. However, it eventually comes to Jung’s attention that this is in fact the second edition, the first edition was published in 1903. It is known that Jung was indeed aware of this since in the Collected Works footnote it is written “As subsequently learned, the 1910 edition was actually the second, there having been a first edition in 1903. The patient had, however, been committed some years before 1903.”[29]
Yet Jung continued to claim publicly that the first edition was published in 1910 as seen in his interview with Freeman in 1959:[30]
[Freeman] “But how could you be sure that your patient wasn’t unconsciously recalling something that somebody once told him?”
[Jung] “Oh, no. Quite out of the question, because that thing was not known. It was in a magic papyrus in Paris, and it wasn’t even published. It was only published four years later, after I had observed it with my patient.”
There is also the other matter that just because the patient was institutionalized at the Burghölzli starting in 1903 does not mean that the patient could not have come into contact with such material through widely available Theosophical literature in German or, even through the work of Friedrich Creuzer or Johann Jakob Bachofen. ‘As Ellenberger was the first to notice, Creuzer contains a brief discussion of the motif of a solar phallus (Sonnenphallus) in the third volume of his Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker.’[31] Noll points out that ‘in the introduction to Das Mutterrecht, Bachofen makes the statement that “the phallic sun, forever fluctuating between rising and setting, coming into being and passing away, is transformed into the immutable source of light”.’[32] Thus, there is no reason to assume that the Solar Phallus Man would not have had contact with such references, prior to or during his institutionalisation, that were quite popular and prevalent during this time.
There are even further contradictions to this story, as Noll points out, by the fact that Jung cites in his Wandlungen the 1907 Theosophical work by G.R.S. Mead which also contains a translation of the Mithraic Liturgy (with Theosophical commentary) to which Mead clearly indicates is based off of Dieterich’s Eine Mithrasliturgie. Mead’s work was published three years before Dieterich’s 1910 second edition. And finally, by the fact that Jung’s very own copy of Dieterich’s work in his library (which is preserved to this day), which he claimed to have thought was the first edition, is clearly marked as a second edition.
Thus, either we are to conclude that Jung is wholly incompetent in judging such things, and thus calls into question his entire work on the collective unconscious, with claims that none of his patients had previous knowledge of the mythologies and symbols they were describing, or that Jung and his colleagues were purposefully distorting evidence in order to keep the story of the Solar Phallus Man alive in order to justify Jung’s “discovery” of the collective unconscious, which again would call into question his entire work on the collective unconscious. No matter how one looks at it, the “scientific” basis for which the collective unconscious rests, is on rather dubious ground.
In fact, in early 1909, Jung had left his position at Burghölzli to go into private practice in Küsnacht and in the winter of 1909 ‘he assigned his three psychiatrist assistants who were still at the Burghölzli – Spielrein, Jan Nelken, and Honegger – to read the works of Creuzer, who will be introduced shortly, and others on mythology and archaeology and to collect data from the institutionalized patients there as evidence for a phylogenetic layer of the unconscious mind. Creuzer’s particular slant on mythology and especially the mysteries thus frames, indeed biases, the data that Jung and his assistants claimed as pure and scientific.’[33]
In other words, Jung was asking for his assistants to seek out confirmation of mythological symbology in their patients in order to confirm and substantiate Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious. Thus, any symbology or imagery of an object could be “interpreted” as having its basis in ancient mythology. The patients were there to receive treatment from someone they believed to have insight into what made them mentally unwell, who were they to disagree with such interpretations?
And as we see by 1910, most of the case studies of Jung and his disciples are devoid of much personal history and instead focus on the mythological interpretation of fantasies and dreams dissociated from the real-life circumstances of the subject.[34] The only criteria for deciding whether a patient could have had pre-existing knowledge of such mythologies were 1. their occupational level and 2 their educational level,[35] despite the fact that such mythologies had become quite popular in the spiritualist and theosophical circles which in turn had become a fad, especially in Switzerland and Germany at the time.
The unreliability of such claims that the patient had zero contact with such mythologies prior to their fantasies or dreams is seen in the case of Kristine Mann who ‘claimed had an unconscious connection to alchemical ideas despite having had no interaction with this in her life, which was not true, she had been heavily involved in Swedenborgian circles’ and ‘had exposure to occult literature and ideas – including alchemical symbolism - long before her contact with Jung.’[36] Whether Jung was aware of this or not does not take away from the fact that the claim that Kristine Mann was a case study proving the existence of the collective unconscious is a fraudulent claim. It also does not help the matter that Kristine Mann would become a prominent Jungian analyst and was the second in the United States (after Edith Rockefeller) to practice Jungian psychoanalysis.
Thus, in the case of Mann, another question arises, were those who wanted to be initiated into the selective Jungian circle of “elites” encouraged to make fraudulent claims, as well as extravagant payments, that would advance the field they wished to be the wielder of amongst a select privileged few?
Noll writes:
“Given the fact that Honegger, Nelken, and Spielrein were primed to look for certain mythological information consistent with the phylogenetic hypothesis, they obviously would tend to ignore other information that would be considered irrelevant to it. And given the century of Hellenic mythological education in German countries; the wide distribution of Theosophical materials; the equally available and more highly regarded folkloric, Gnostic, mythological, and solar-worshiping pantheistic publications of Diederichs Verlag; and the nearby neopagan movement between Schwabing-Munich and Ascona, such mythological material was not hard to find among the inpatients of the Burghölzli. It was from these patients that the scientific proof was allegedly found for an archaic, impersonal strata of the psyche.”[37]
Despite this, the story of the Solar Phallus Man remains the basis for Jung’s collective unconscious as well as a justification for why the solar myths play a central role amongst the collective unconscious of the Germanic people in particular.
Using the four Bachofenian symbols (as depicted in the above image) as the basis of his evidence, Jung writes:[38]
“Let this suggestion suffice – that from different directions the analysis of the libido symbolism always leads back again to the mother incest. Therefore, we may surmise that the longing of the libido raised to God (repressed into the unconscious) is a primitive incestuous one which concerns the mother.”
Jung from this point, proceeds to compare the travels of the sun in the sky to the typical wanderings of the hero in hero myths. ‘Dying and resurrected “redeemers” such as Gilgamesh, Dionysus, Hercules, Christ, and Mithras, are cited by Jung as examples of wandering heroes. Heroes wander because they are like the sun, which “seeks the lost mother.” The sun rises from and goes back to a mysterious realm in its wanderings each day, the Goethean “realm of the mothers.” Therefore, hero myths are solar myths.’[39]
Jung concludes:
“But the myth of the hero, however, is, as it appears to me, the myth of our own suffering unconscious, which has an unquenchable longing for all the deepest sources of our own being; for the body of the mother, and through it for communion with infinite life in the countless forms of existence.”[40]
Jung then ends this chapter with a long reproduction from Goethe’s Faust, in which Faust makes his initiatory descent into the eerie realm of the mothers.
In Friedrich Creuzer’s immensely influential work Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, published between 1810 and 1812, we find the first comprehensive study in the German language for information about ‘spirituality of antiquity, especially the ancient mystery cults of the Greco-Roman world.’[41] Volume 3 of Creuzer’s work is concerned with ‘the themes of “heroes and daimons” in ancient Greek spirituality, the Dionysian mysteries, and Orphic cosmology, the entirety of volume four is devoted to the cult of the “Two Goddesses” (the Greek Demeter and Persephone, or the Roman Ceres and Proserpina) at Eleusis and the Eleusinian mysteries.’[42]
Noll makes the point that ‘when Goethe wrote the famous descent to the mothers scene in the second part of Faust that so captivated Jung, he used the original descriptions of the Eleusinian mysteries of Pausanias and Plutarch cited by Creuzer as well as Creuzer’s own contemporary descriptions.’[43]
Noll writes:[44]
“What is of note is that when writing this scene in late 1829 and early 1830, as we know from his [Goethe’s] comments to Eckermann and from other sources, Goethe had in mind the ritual descent of the initiate of the Hellenistic mysteries of the ‘Two Goddesses’ of Eleusis, the mother-goddess Demeter and her daughter, the maiden (Kore) Persephone.[45] Although no firm evidence exists of what the initiatory experience entailed for the initiate into the Eleusinian mysteries, it is generally assumed that the initiate saw some representation or had a vision of Persephone in the underworld, which then gave the initiate ‘better hopes’ for his or her position in the afterlife. In other words, the mysteries revitalized and redeemed the initiate through the ritualized descent to the underworld of the mothers…The Eleusinian mysteries – which were formally conducted for more than one thousand years – is one of the greatest kept secrets of antiquity.
…
The remainder of Wandlungen is subsequently predicated on Bachofen’s theory of prehistoric hetaerism and matriarchy and how hero myths reveal that a return to the mother is somehow revitalizing – just as the initiate in the Eleusinian mysteries experienced renovation through contact with the transcendental realm of gods. The sun hero descends to the realm of the mothers (or into Mother Earth) where he typically does battle and reemerges reborn. This is a classic scenario ritually enacted in the Hellenistic mysteries. The star, therefore, is another expression of the sun in the night sky of the Motherworld or as the sun descended into the subterranean depths of Mother Earth.
However, in Wandlungen, Jung is claiming that there is ontogenetic and phylogenetic evidence that through a return to the realm of the mothers (the deepest strata of the unconscious) within each of us, we are reborn. Their first step to this new life is through introversion, when one’s ‘libido sinks into its “own depths” ’ into what Jung refers to, significantly, as ‘the world of memories.’ Yet rebirth occurs only if this process of introversion is then reversed and one returns to the abandoned ‘upperworld’.”
Jung concludes this section in his Psychology of the Unconscious:
“But if the libido succeeds in tearing itself loose and pushing up into the world above, then a miracle appears. This journey to the underworld has been a fountain of youth, and new fertility springs from this apparent death.”[46]
Jung would use his psychotherapeutic technique of “active imagination” to allow individuals direct access to this revitalizing realm of the mothers, or the underworld of the ancestors or Land of the Dead. ‘But as his discussion of the “Terrible Mother” in his chapter on the “Symbolism of the Mother and of Rebirth” suggests, this descent is not necessarily a pleasant experience. Indeed, although it may be revitalizing for some, “annihilation” may ensue from the hero’s “battle for deliverance from the mother”.’[47]