by Ruth Snowden
Gnosticism was a religious and philosophical movement, which probably originated in around the fourth century BCE. There were many different Gnostic sects, all concerned with knowledge of the occult and the magical. Gnosis is derived from a Greek word, meaning ‘knowledge’.
Jung studied Gnosticism in depth from about 1918 until 1926. His interest first arose because he was keen to establish historical and literary links with his ideas about human psychology. He saw his analytical psychology as being fundamentally a natural science but he was well aware that, because of the nature of the beast, it was easy to introduce personal bias to his findings. He needed some kind of credibility and he thought that this might be achieved if he could demonstrate parallels between his own thinking and that of the Gnostics.
Jung discovered that mythological ideas within Gnosticism had great relevance to his ideas about the human psyche. In Gnostic thinking, nature and creation are fundamentally flawed and separated from the original true God. The world is ruled over by its creator, who is not really the original god, but a sort of ‘half-god’ or ‘demi-urge’. He is assisted by seven beings called ‘archons’, who try to enslave people and prevent their return to the original divine realm. Gnosis was supposed to offer a key to the return to the divine.
Jung saw this myth as being symbolic of the individuation process, where the soul goes on its own inner spiritual quest, seeking inner unity with the Self. At the start of the quest, it is as blind to its true nature as the Gnostic soul is to the nature of the true god. Jung was excited about this because it seemed to show that his ideas were not new. Eventually, however, he decided that Gnostic teachings were too remote and obscure – they had been formulated a very long time ago, and any knowledge of them was mainly recorded by Christians, who were rivals to the Gnostics.
ALCHEMY
Alchemy was very popular during medieval times, but its roots stretch back much further. The best-known aspect of alchemy is the idea of trying to turn base metals into gold, but there was a lot more to it than that. The ultimate goal was an inner transformation of the alchemist’s psyche, and it was this aspect that interested Jung the most. He saw alchemy as bridging the frustrating gap between ancient Gnosticism and modern sciences, such as chemistry, and the psychology of the unconscious. Alchemical thought coincided in surprising ways with his own ideas about the unconscious, so Jung saw alchemy as the historical counterpart of his analytical psychology that he had been looking for. This gave more substance to his ideas.
Alchemy is full of fantasy images, which Jung soon realized were archetypal in nature. This was important because he realized that understanding historical ideas could be vital in understanding the psychology of the unconscious. The idea of turning base metal into gold was rooted in still earlier ideas about the four elements – earth, air, fire and water. Every physical form was supposed to contain these four elements in different proportions. If one could somehow alter the balance, then bingo – base metal into gold! Success depended very much on the alchemist’s state of mind, which naturally had to be pure, so prayer and meditation were part of the practice.
Jung was intrigued to find alchemical imagery cropping up in the dreams of patients who were going through the individuation process. He studied the alchemical method and found that it went through a series of stages, each one of which could also represent a stage in the development of the maturing psyche.
• Nigredo (‘blackness’) corresponds to the start of analysis, when a person begins to break down the barriers between conscious and unconscious. This stage is often accompanied by depression, as the person begins to face the inner darkness of the shadow.
• Albedo (‘whiteness’) corresponds to the gradual cleansing of the psyche. People often confront and converse with archetypes at this stage and, interestingly, the alchemists reported meeting all kinds of frightening archetypal beings wandering around their labs.
• Rubedo (‘redness’) is the final stage, corresponding to resolution of psychic conflicts and the balancing of opposites. Jung remarked that much of his work was concerned with this type of balancing process.
THE I CHING
Jung developed a special interest in the I Ching, an ancient Chinese method of divination. From ancient times the Chinese have seen creation as being made up of intertwined male and female energies, each carrying the seed of the other. This is represented by the well-known black and white yin and yang symbol.
The universe is in a constant state of change as the two primal forces flow in and out of each other. This idea of wholeness and the balancing of two opposite forces fit in very well with Jung’s ideas, and the yin and yang symbol is another example of the archetypal mandala. To consult the I Ching, yarrow stalks or coins were usually used. Short and long stalks, or the two sides of a coin, represented the two primal forces. The stalks or coins were thrown and the random patterns they made interpreted by using a special book of wise sayings. Jung, in the peace of his retreat at Bollingen, used reeds in place of yarrow stalks.
Consulting the I Ching…
Jung was fascinated by the results he obtained from I Ching readings. He found many meaningful connections with his own thought processes, which he could not explain to himself. He began to use the I Ching with his patients too, and found that a significant number of the answers given were relevant to the patients’ problems. For example, a young client was wondering whether he should marry a certain girl. When the I Ching was consulted it gave the reply: ‘The maiden is powerful. One should not marry such a maiden.’ The girl seemed suitable, but deep down the young man was afraid that she would soon become like his dominating mother.
Jung began to wonder how such meaningful answers could emerge from the I Ching. How did the connection between the inner, psychic event and the outer, physical event come about? Jung suggested the idea of ‘acausal parallelism’, by which he meant that two events could be connected in some way, without one necessarily having to be the direct cause of the other. He later used the word ‘synchronicity’ to express this idea.
SYNCHRONICITY
Science has tended to train people to think that A causes B which causes C, in a neat orderly, linear fashion. Related events are thus connected by cause and effect – an idea known as ‘causality’. Jung wondered if a ‘law of synchronicity’ could be established, contrasting with the ‘law of causality’. He was very excited by the idea of discovering a place where psychology and physics could meet and some scientists, notably Nobel Prize winner Wolfgang Pauli (1945, Nobel Laureate in Physics), were interested in Jung’s ideas. Modern quantum physics seems happy to accept acausal effects in its physical theories. Physicists have even suggested that physical bodies can sometimes have an effect on one another without any apparent exchange of energy taking place between them. The universe seems to consist no longer of facts, but of possibilities.
Jung was especially interested in the more startling coincidences, those that seemed to be so meaningful that it was virtually impossible for them to have occurred by chance alone. Simple coincidences, such as reading a new word in the paper and then immediately coming across it in the crossword, did not hold quite such fascination for him.
For example, he was listening one day to a young woman patient who was relating to him a dream about being given a golden scarab. As she spoke he heard a tapping on the window, and on opening it he found a scarabaeid beetle, the local equivalent of the golden scarab. The woman was so surprised by this event that it changed her whole way of thinking, breaking down her rational defences and leading to new mental maturity. The scarab, as Jung pointed out, is an archetypal symbol of rebirth. Such archetypal symbolism often seems to crop up in connection with synchronous events.
ASTROLOGY
Jung was interested in astrology because it also tied up with his ideas about archetypes and the collective unconscious. He did a great deal of careful research, learning how to draw up natal charts and finding out how they linked up with events in people’s li
ves. He was fascinated by the idea that a person’s private world could be affected by far-reaching aspects of cosmic activity. He was not at all interested in the generalized astrology that appears in newspapers and magazines.
Jung decided that astrology would be a good way of doing experiments to show synchronicity at work as a natural law in its own right. He studied the birth charts of married couples to see if the positions of the planets in the two natal charts tied in with the marriage event. If this could be shown to happen then he would have established a meaningful acausal link. He did not find a direct correlation but what he did find was equally fascinating. He found that the results of analysis varied according to who was doing the analysis. In other words, a person’s subjective expectations were somehow mirrored in the results. Modern physics is beginning to see this as a real possibility – the observer can affect the results of an experiment simply by the act of observing.
AS ABOVE SO BELOW
Jung’s view of the human psyche in many ways reflected the ancient occult maxim ‘as above so below’. For him, events in the outer world of material things were often reflected in the inner world of the psyche. This effect could also take place in reverse, with the individual affecting the surroundings. Jung discovered that as patients got deeper into therapy, synchronous psychic events became more frequent in their lives. He concluded that a human being is not an isolated psyche, but part of a vast network of interacting energy that can affect us in many unexpected ways. Since psyche and matter are part of the same unfathomable universe, and are in constant contact with each other, Jung thought it possible that they represented two different aspects of a whole. As in so many ways, his thinking here was way ahead of his time.
Jung felt that a lot of personal psychological problems arose from a sort of family or cultural karma – problems that had not been resolved by one’s forebears were passed on to be sorted out. He said that many problems are more to do with the social environment than the individual and are therefore linked to the collective unconscious. Jung observed that so far psychological therapy had been slow to take this into account.
Jung’s view of the world was often subjective, concentrating on the inner world of dreams, visions and synchronous events. He saw his life’s quest as being one of achieving understanding of his own unconscious, and so in many ways the inner world was even more important than the outer world. At times he would deliberately try to shut himself off from the sensory input of the outside world and spend time alone in order to enter his own rich inner world. He said that it is essential to listen to the voice of the unconscious in order to balance the historical psychological aspects of our psyche with the ever-changing conditions of the present.
Through his esoteric studies, in the peace and silence of his retreat at Bollingen, Jung was able to achieve this state of being and ‘see life in the round’.
SUMMARY
Nowhere is the difference between Jung and his former mentor Freud more apparent than in the place given to spirituality and religion in their thought. For Freud, an out-and-out atheist, religion was simply a delusion, little more than an outsized projection of the ‘superego’, the part of the psyche that, he thought, regulated and admonished the ego. The study of the psyche could not allow anything as ‘irrational’ or ‘unscientific’ as spirituality. Jung, by contrast, was much more open to religion and saw spirituality as a necessary part of the development of the psyche. Indeed, in the second ‘half’ of the process of individuation, it should, he believed, become the individual’s main concern.
Accordingly, as we have seen, Jung was extremely open to the world’s spiritual traditions, religions and mythologies as he sought to deepen, extend and buttress his own ideas. It is precisely this huge diversity of esoteric interests that has largely caused varying reactions to Jung’s work. Some have seen him as a genius or a guru, whereas others have slated him as a charlatan.
FACT-CHECK (ANSWERS AT THE BACK)
1. How might we best sum up Jung’s attitude to spirituality?
a) It is irrelevant to psychology
b) It plays a central role in the psyche
c) It is a delusion
d) It plays a marginal role in individuation
2. What was wrong with traditional Christianity, in Jung’s view?
a) It did not acknowledge the positive role of sexuality
b) It did not acknowledge the feminine aspect of the Godhead
c) It did not acknowledge evil
d) It did not acknowledge the dark side of God
3. The Christian Old and New Testaments show…
a) That God is good
b) That God is evil
c) God undergoing a process of individuation
d) None of the above
4. Buddhism particularly appealed to Jung because…
a) Enlightenment comes from within
b) It emphasizes the shadow aspect of the divine
c) It believes in the eventual extinction of the self through enlightenment
d) All of the above
5. How might we best sum up Jung’s understanding of Western and Eastern traditions?
a) Contradictory
b) Complementary
c) Irreconcilable
d) None of the above
6. What is Gnosticism?
a) A Jung-inspired hippie cult
b) The religion of ancient Egypt
c) A religious and spiritual movement of the late Classical world
d) None of the above
7. In alchemy, Jung found…
a) Parallels with the process of individuation
b) A way to get rich quick
c) A bridge between Western and Eastern spiritual traditions
d) A bridge between Gnosticism and Jungian psychology
8. What is the significance of the alchemical stage of albedo?
a) The extinction of the psyche
b) The resolution of psychic conflict
c) The cleansing of the psyche
d) The birth of the psyche
9. Why was Jung especially interested in the I Ching?
a) As a method of divination
b) Because of its ideas about two balancing forces
c) Because he saw connections in it to his ideas about ‘synchronicity’
d) All of the above
10. What is synchronicity?
a) When things happen at the same time
b) Another word for coincidence
c) The coincidence of psychic events outside the ‘normal’ laws of cause and effect
d) None of the above
Jung’s influence has extended worldwide, making him one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century:
• His ideas about the collective unconscious and archetypes have given us new insights into the human psyche.
• His interest in dreams has expanded our understanding of the unconscious.
• Many of his ideas about personality have become part of everyday thinking.
• His fascination with mythology, religion and the paranormal has encouraged people to develop new thinking about spiritual psychology.
Jung used various therapeutic approaches, particularly:
• exploring symbolism in dreams and fantasies
• amplification of symbols by exploring archetypal connections
• free association, following trains of spontaneous connected thoughts
• active imagination, using methods like drawing, painting, drama or writing
• balancing of opposites in order to achieve greater integration in the psyche.
Jungian analysts are trained worldwide and there are many institutions devoted to expanding his ideas.
TRAVELS
Jung travelled a lot during his life in order to learn about cultures that were different from his own. He visited North Africa more than once, and discovered abundant archetypal presences there: for example, he described the rising sun as being like a vast and powerful go
d. There were strangely synchronous events too – for example, on arrival at Sousse, he was astounded to see a sailing ship with two lateen sails that he had once painted.
Jung was struck by the way time seemed to slow down more and more the further he travelled into the Sahara. He described an encounter with a figure all swathed in white and seated on a black mule whose harness was studded with silver. This man rode by without offering any greeting, but his proud bearing, and the sense that this person was somehow wholly himself, struck Jung as a stark contrast to the average European, who was characterized by a driven attitude and suppression of emotion. He concluded that the great scientific and cultural achievements of Western culture had been gained at the expense of intensity of living, forcing down into the unconscious much that is real and life-giving.
In New Mexico, this point was again brought strongly home to Jung by a Pueblo Indian chief, who graphically described the typical white man’s face as cruel, staring and driven. He thought the white men were mad, because they thought ‘with their heads’. Jung, surprised, asked him what he thought with himself, and the man indicated his heart – ‘We think here,’ he said. The Pueblo people had a strong belief that their religion was of benefit to the whole world, because they worshipped and encouraged the sun on its daily course across the sky. Jung concluded that this gave the people a sense that their lives were cosmologically meaningful: it was this deep sense of connectedness that had been lost by so-called civilized Western man.