Carl Jung: This is important for the chthonic powers.

Dear N., 10 August 1956

I was very pleased to hear that you now have house and land of your own.

This is important for the chthonic powers.

I hope you will find time to commit your plant counterparts to the earth and tend their growth, for the earth always wants children-houses, trees, flowers-to grow out of her and celebrate the marriage of the human psyche with the Great Mother, the best counter-magic against rootless extraversion!

With best regards to you and your dear husband,

Always your faithful

C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 320

Carl Jung's Letter to Upton Sinclair

Dear Mr. Sinclair, 7 January 1955

Having read your novel Our Lady1 and having enjoyed every page of it, I cannot refrain from bothering you again with a letter. This is the trouble you risk when giving your books to a psychologist who has made it his profession to receive impressions and to have reactions.

On the day after I had read the story, I happened to come across the beautiful text of the “Exultet” in the Easter night liturgy:

Although I am peculiarly sensitive to the beauty of the liturgical language and of the feeling expressed therein, something was amiss, as if a corner had been knocked off or a precious stone fallen from its setting. When trying to understand, I instantly remembered the be­wildered Marya confronted with the incongruities of the exorcism, her beautiful and simple humanity caught in the coils of a vast his­torical process which had supplanted her concrete and immediate life by the almost inhuman superstructure of a dogmatic and ritual na­ture, so strange that, in spite of the identity of names and biograph­ical items, she was not even able to recognize the story of herself and of her beloved son.

By the way, a masterful touch! I also remembered your previous novel3 about the idealistic youth who had almost be­come a saviour through one of those angelic tricks well known since the time of Enoch (the earthly adventure of Samiasaz4 and his an­gelic host). And moreover, I recalled your Jesus biography.5 Then I knew what it was that caused my peculiarly divided feeling: it was your common sense and realism, reducing the Holy Legend to human proportions and to probable possibilities, that never fails in knocking off a piece of the spiritual architecture or in causing a slight tremor of the Church’s mighty structure. The anxiety of the priests to suppress the supposedly satanic attempt at verisimilitude is therefore most convincing, as the devil is particularly dangerous when he tells the truth, just as he often does (vide the biography of St. Anthony of Egypt by St. Athanasius).

It is obviously your laudabilis intentio to extract a quintessence of truth from the incomprehensible chaos of historical distortions and dogmatic constructions, a truth of human size and acceptable to com­mon sense. Such an attempt is hopeful and promises success, as the “truth” represented by the Church is so remote from ordinary under­standing as to be well-nigh unacceptable. At all events, it conveys nothing any more to the modern mind that wants to understand since it is incapable of blind belief. In this respect, you continue the Strauss-­Renan tradition in liberal theology.

I admit it is exceedingly probable that there is a human story at the bottom of it all. But under these conditions I must ask: Why the devil had this simple and therefore satisfactory story to be embellished and distorted beyond recognition? Or why had Jesus taken on unmis­takably mythological traits already with the Gospel writers? And why is this process continued even in our enlightened days when the original picture has been obscured beyond all reasonable expectation? Why the Assumptio of 1950 and the Encyclical Ad caeli Reginam7 of Oct. 11, 1954?

The impossibility of a concrete saviour, as styled by the Gospel writers, is and has always been to me obvious and indubitable. Yet I know my contemporaries too well to forget that to them it is news hearing the simple fundamental story. Liberal theology and incidentally your laudabilis intentio have definitely their place where they make sense. To me the human story is the inevitable point de depart, the self-evident basis of historical Christianity. It is the “small beginnings” of an amazing development.

But the human story—I beg your pardon—is just ordinary, well within the confines of everyday life, not exciting and unique and thus not particularly interesting. We have heard it a thousand times and we ourselves have lived it at least in parts. It is the we—known psychological ensemble of Mother and beloved Son, and how the legend begins with mother’s anxieties and hopes and son’s heroic fantasies and helpful friends and foes joining in, magnifying and augmenting little deviations from the truth and thus slowly creating the web called the reputation of a personality.

Here you have me—the psychologist—with what the French call his deformationpro professionnelle. He is blase, overfed with the “simple” human story, which does not touch his interest and particularly not his religious feeling. The human story is even the thing to get away from, as the small story is neither exciting nor edifying. On the con­trary, one wants to hear the great story of gods and heroes and how the world was created and so on. The small stories can be heard where the women wash in the river, or in the kitchen or at the village well, and above all everybody lives them at home. That has been so since the dawn of consciousness. But there was a time in antiquity, about the fourth century B.C. (I am not quite certain about the date.

Being actually away on vacation, I miss my library!), when a man Euhemeros8 made himself a name through a then new theory: The divine and heroic myth is founded upon the small story of an ordinary human chief or petty Icing of local fame, magnified by a minstrel’s fantasy. All-Father Zeus, the mighty “gatherer of clouds,” was orig­inally a little tyrant, ruling some villages from his maison forteupon a hill, and “nocturnis ululatibus horrenda Prosperpina”9 was presum­ably his awe-inspiring mother-in-law. That was certainly a time sick of the old gods and their ridiculous fairy stories, curiously similar to the “enlightenment” of our epoch equally fed up with its “myth” and welcoming any kind of iconoclasm, from the Encyclopedie10 of the XVIIIth century to the Freudian theory reducing the religious “illusion” to the basic “family romance” with its incestuous innuendos in the early XXth century.

Unlike your predecessor, you do not insist upon thechronique scandaleuse of the Olympians and other ideals, but with a loving hand and with decency like a benevolent peda­gogue, you take your reader by the hand: “I am going to tell you a better story, something nice and reasonable, that anybody can accept. I don’t repeat these ancient absurdities, these god-awful theologou­mena11 like the Virgin Birth, blood and flesh mysteries, and other wholly superfluous miracle gossip. I show you the touching and simple humanity behind these gruesome inventions of benighted ecclesiastical brains.”

This is a kind-hearted iconoclasm far more deadly than the frankly murderous arrows from M. de Voltaire’s quiver: all these mythological assertions are so obviously impossible that their refuta­tion is not even needed. These relics of the dark ages vanish like morning mist before the rising sun, when the idealistic and charming gardener’s boy experiments with miracles of the good old kind, or when your authentic Galilean grandmother “Marya” does not even recognize herself or her beloved son in the picture produced by the magic mirror of Christian tradition.

Yet, why should a more or less ordinary story of a good mother and her well-meaning idealistic boy give rise to one of the most amazing mental or spiritual developments of all times? Who or what is its agens? Why could the facts not remain as they were originally? The answer is obvious: The story is so ordinary that there would not have been any reason for its tradition, quite certainly not for its world-wide expansion. The fact that the original situation has developed into one of the most extraordinary myths about a divine heros, a God-man and his cosmic fate, is not due to its underlying human story, but to the powerful action of pine-existing mythological motifs attributed to the biographically almost unknown Jesus, a wandering miracle Rabbi in the style of the ancient Hebrew prophets, or of the contemporary teacher John the Baptizer, or of the much later Zaddiks of the Chassidim12



The immediate source and origin of the myth projected upon the teacher Jesus is to be found in the then popular Book of Enoch and its central figure of the “Son of Man” and his messianic mission. From the Gospel texts it is even manifest that Jesus identified himself with this “Son of Man.” Thus it is the spirit of his time, the collective hope and expectation which caused this astounding transformation not at all the more or less insignificant story of the man Jesus.

The true agens is the archetypal image of the Cod-man, appearing in Ezekiel’s vision13 for the first time in Jewish history, but in itself a considerably older figure in Egyptian theology, viz., Osiris and Horus.

The transformation of Jesus, i.e., the integration of his human self into a super- or inhuman figure of a deity, accounts for the amazing “distortion” of his ordinary personal biography. In other words: the essence of Christian tradition is by no means the simple man Jesus whom we seek in vain in the Gospels, but the lore of the God-man and his cosmic drama. Even the Gospels themselves make it their special job to prove that their Jesus is the incarnated God equipped with all the magic powers of a kurioV tvn pneumatwn.14 That is why they are so liberal with miracle gossip which they naively assume proves their point.

It is only natural that the subsequent post-apostolic de­velopments even went several points better in this respect, and in our days the process of mythological integration is still expanding and spreading itself even to Jesus’ mother, formerly carefully kept down to the human rank and file for at least 500 years of early church history. Boldly breaking through the sacrosanct rule about the defina­bility of a new dogmatic truth, viz., that the said truth is only definibilis inasmuch as it was believed and taught in apostolic times, explicite or implicite, the pope has declared the Assumptio Mariae a dogma of the Christian creed.

The justification he relies on is the pious belief of the masses for more than 1000 years, which he considers sufficient proof of the work of the Holy Ghost. Obviously the “pious belief” of the masses continues the process of projection, i.e., of transformation of human situations into myth.

But why should there be myth at all? My letter is already too long so that I can’t answer this last question any more, but I have written several books about it. I only wanted to explain to you my idea that in trying to extract the quintessence of Christian tradition, you have re­moved it like Prof. Bultmann in his attempt at “demythologizing” the Gospels.

One cannot help admitting that the human story is so very much more probable, but it has little or nothing to do with the prob­lem of the myth containing the essence of Christian religion. You catch your priests most cleverly in the disadvantageous position which they have created for themselves by their preaching a concrete his­toricity of clearly mythological facts. Nobody reading your ad­mirable novel can deny being deeply impressed by the very dramatic confrontation of the original with the mythological picture, and very probably he will prefer the human story to its mythological “distortion.”

But what about the euanggelion, the “message” of the God-man and Redeemer and his divine fate, the very foundation of everything that is holy to the Church? There is the spiritual heritage and harvest of 1900 years still to account for, and I am very doubtful whether the reduction to common sense is the correct answer or not. As a matter of fact, I attribute an incomparably greater importance to the dogmatic truth than to the probable human story.

The religious need gets nothing out of the latter, and at all events less than from a mere belief in Jesus Christ or any other dogma. Inasmuch as the belief is real and living, it works. But inasmuch as it is mere imagination and an effort of the will without understanding, I see little merit in it. Unfortunately, this unsatisfactory condition prevails in modem times, and in so far as there is nothing beyond belief without understanding but doubt and scepticism, the whole Christian tradition goes by the board as a mere fantasy. I consider this event a tremendous loss for which we are to pay a terrific price. The effect becomes visible in the dissolution of ethical values and a complete disorientation of our Weltanschauung.

The “truths” of natural science or “existential philosophy” are poor surrogates. Nat­ural “laws” are in the main mere abstractions (being statistical averages) instead of reality, and they abolish individual existence as being merely exceptional. But the individual as the only carrier of life and existence is of paramount importance. He cannot be sub­stituted by a group or by a mass.

Yet we are rapidly approaching a state in which nobody will accept individual responsibility any more. We prefer to leave it as an odious business to groups and organizations, blissfully unconscious of the fact that the group or mass psyche is that of an animal and wholly inhuman.

What we need is the development of the inner spiritual man, the unique individual whose treasure is hidden on the one hand in the symbols of our mythological tradition, and on the other hand in man’s unconscious psyche. It is tragic that science and its philosophy discourage the individual and that theology resists every reasonable attempt to understand its symbols.

Theologians call their creed a symbolum,15 but they refuse to call their truth “symbolic.” Yet, if it is anything, it is anthropomorphic symbolism and therefore capable able of re-interpretation.

Hoping you don’t mind my frank discussion of your very inspiring writings,
I remain, with my best wishes for the New Year,

Yours sincerely, C. G. JUNG

P.S. Thank you very much for your kind letter that has reached me just now. I am amazed at the fact that you should have difficulties in finding a publisher.16 What is America coming to, when her most capable authors cannot reach their public any more? What a time!

Carl Jung: I am puzzled about your conception of Christ and I try to under­stand it.

Dear Victor, Bollingen, 10 April 1954


Your letter has been lying on my desk waiting for a suitable time to be answered. In the meantime I was still busy with a preface I had promised to P. Radin and K. Kerenyi. They are going to bring out a book together about the figure of the trickster.2 He is the collective shadow. I finished my preface yesterday. I suppose you know the Greek-Orthodox priest Dr. Zacharias? He has finished his book representing a reception, or better—an attempt—to integrate Jungian psychology into Christianity as he sees it. Dr. Rudin S.J. from the Institute of Apologetics did not like it. Professor Gebhard Frei on the other hand was very positive about it.

I am puzzled about your conception of Christ and I try to under­stand it. It looks to me as if you were mixing up the idea of Christ being human and being divine. Inasmuch as he is divine he knows, of course, everything, because all things macrocosmic are supposed to be microcosmic as well and can therefore be said to be known by the self. (Things moreover behave as if they were known.) It is an astonishing fact, indeed, that the collective unconscious seems to be in contact with nearly everything. There is of course no empirical evidence for such a generalization, but plenty of it for its indefinite extension.

The sententia,therefore: animam Christi nihil ignoravisse4 etc. is not contradicted by psychological experience. Rebus sic stantibus, Christ as the self can be said ab initio cognovisse omnia etc. I should say that Christ knew his shadow—Satan—whom he cut off from himself right in the beginning of his career. The self is a unit, consisting however of two, i.e., of opposites, otherwise it would not be a totality. Christ has consciously divorced himself from his shadow. Inasmuch as he is divine, he is the self, yet only its white half. Inasmuch as he is human, he has never lost his shadow completely, but seems to have been conscious of it. How could he say otherwise: “Do not call me good … .“?

It is also reasonable to believe that as a human he was not wholly conscious of it, and inasmuch as he was uncon­scious he projected it indubitably. The split through his self made him as a human being as good as possible, although he was unable to reach the degree of perfection his white self already possessed. The Catholic doctrine cannot but declare that Christ even as a human being knew everything. This is the logical consequence of the perfect union of the duae naturae.

Christ as understood by the Church is to me a spiritual, i.e., mythological being; even his humanity is divine as it is generated by the celestial Father and exempt from original sin. When I speak of him as a human being, I mean its few traces we can gather from the gospels. It is not enough for the reconstruction of an empirical character. Moreover even if we could reconstruct an individual personality, it would not fulfill the role of redeemer and God-man who is identical with the “all-knowing” self.

Since the individual human being is characterized by a selection of tendencies and qualities ties, it is a specification and not a wholeness, i.e., it cannot be individual without incompleteness and restriction, whereas the Christ of the doctrine is perfect, complete, whole and therefore not individual at all, but a collective mythologem, viz, an archetype. He is far more divine than human and far more universal than individual.

Concerning the omniscience it is important to know that Adam already was equipped with supernatural knowledge according to Jewish and Christian tradition,6 all the more so Christ.

I think that the great split7 in those days was by no means a mis­take but a very important collective fact of synchronistic correspond­ence with the then new aeon of Pisces. Archetypes, in spite of their conservative nature, are not static but in a continuous dramatic flux. Thus the self as a monad or continuous unit would be dead. But it lives inasmuch as it splits and unites again. There is no energy without opposites!

All conservatives and institutionalists are Pharisees, if you apply this name without prejudice. Thus it was to be expected that just the better part of Jewry would be hurt most by the revelation of an ex­clusively good God and loving Father. This novelty emphasized with disagreeable clearness that the Yahweh hitherto worshipped had some additional, less decorous propensities For obvious reasons the ortho­dox Pharisees could not defend their creed by insisting on the bad qualities of their God. Christ with his teaching of an exclusively good God must have been most awkward for them. They probably believed him to be hypocritical, since this was his main objection against them.

One gets that way when one has to hold on to something which once has been good and had meant considerable progress or improvement at the time. It was an enormous step forward when Yahweh revealed himself as a jealous God, letting his chosen people feel that he was after them with blessings and with punishments, and that Cod’s goal was man. Not knowing better, they cheated him by obeying his Law literally. But as Job discovered Yahweh’s primitive amorality, God found out about the trick of observing the Law and swallowing camels.

The old popes and bishops succeeded in getting so much heathen­dom, barbarism and real evil out of the Church that it became much better than some centuries before: there were no Alexander VI,9 no auto-da-fes, no thumbscrews and racks any more, so that the compensatory drastic virtues (asceticism etc.) lost their meaning to a certain extent. The great split, having been a merely spiritual fact for a long time, has at last got into the world, as a rule in its coarsest and least recognizable form, viz, as the iron curtain, the completion of the second Fish.10

Now a new synthesis must begin. But how can absolute evil be con­nected and identified with absolute good? It seems to be impossible. When Christ withstood Satan’s temptation, that was the fatal moment when the shadow was cut off. Yet it had to be cut off in order to enable man to become morally conscious. If the moral opposites could be united at all, they would be suspended altogether and there could be no morality at all. That is certainly not what synthesis aims at. In such a case of irreconcilability the opposites are united by a neutral or ambivalent bridge, a symbol expressing either side in such a way that they can function together.

This symbol is the cross as interpreted of old, viz, as the tree of life or simply as the tree to which Christ is inescapably affixed. This particular feature points to the compensatory significance of the tree: the tree symbolizes that entity from which Christ had been separated and with which he ought to be connected again to make his life or his being complete. In other words, the Crucifixus is the symbol uniting the absolute moral opposites. Christ represents the light; the tree, the darkness; he the son, it the mother. Both areandrogynous (tree = phallus).12 Christ is so much identical with the cross that both terms have become almost in­terchangeable in ecclesiastical language (f.i. “redeemed through Christ or through the cross” etc.).

The tree brings back all that has been lost through Christ’s extreme spiritualization, namely the elements of nature. Through its branches and leaves the tree gathers the powers of light and air, and through its roots those of the earth and the water. Christ was suffering on account of his split and he recovers his perfect life at Easter, when he is buried again in the womb of the virginal mother. (Represented also in the myth of Attis by the tree, to which an image of Attis was nailed, then cut down and carried into the cave of the mother Kybele.13 The Nativity Church of Bethleh

The first attempt is moral appreciation and decision for the Good. Although this decision is indispensable, it is not too good in the long run. You must not get stuck with it, otherwise you grow out of life and die slowly. Then the one-sided emphasis on the Good becomes doubtful, but there is apparently no possibility of reconciling Good and Evil. That is where we are now.

The symbolic history of the Christ’s life shows, as the essential teleological tendency, the crucifixion, viz, the union of Christ with the symbol of the tree. It is no longer a matter of an impossible reconciliation of Good and Evil, but of man with his vegetative (= unconscious) life. In the case of the Christian symbol the tree however is dead and man upon the Cross is going to die, i.e., the solution of the problem takes place after death.

That is so as far as Christian truth goes. But it is possible that the Christian symbolism expresses man’s mental condition in the aeon of Pisces, as the ram and the bull gods do for the ages of Aries and Taurus. In this case the post-mortal solu­tion would be symbolic of an entirely new psychological status, viz. that of Aquarius, which is certainly a oneness, presumably that of the Anthropos, the realization of Christ’s allusion; “Dii estis.”

This is a formidable secret and difficult to understand, because it means that man will be essentially God and God man. The signs pointing in this direction consist in the fact that the cosmic power of self-destruction is given into the hands of man and that man inherits the dual nature of the Father. He will [mis]understand it and he will be tempted to ruin the universal life of the earth by radioactivity. Materialism and atheism, the negation of God, are indirect means to attain this goal.

Through the negation of God one becomes deified, i.e., god-almighty-like, and then one knows what is good for mankind. That is how destruction begins. The intellectual schoolmasters in the Kremlin are a classic example. The danger of following the same path is very great indeed. It begins with the lie, i.e., the projection of the shadow.

There is need of people knowing about their shadow, because there must be somebody who does not project. They ought to be in a visible position where they would be expected to project and unexpectedly they do not project! They can thus set a visible example which would not be seen if they were invisible.

There is certainly Pharisaism, law consciousness, power drive, sex obsession, and the Wrong kind of formalism in the Church. But these things are symptoms that the old showy and easily understandable ways and methods have lost their significance and should be slowly replaced by more meaningful principles. This indeed means trouble with the Christian vices. Since you cannot overthrow a whole world because it harbours also some evil, it will be a more individual or “local” fight with what you rightly call avidya.

As “tout passe,” even theological books are not true forever, and even if they expect to be believed one has to tell them in a loving and fatherly way that they make some mistakes. A true and honest introverted thinking is a grace and possesses for at least a time divine authority, particularly if it is modest, simple end straight. The people who write such books are not the voice of God. They are only human. It is true that the right kind of thinking isolates oneself. But did you become a monk for the sake of congenial society? Or do you assume that it isolates only a theo­logian? It has done the same to me and will do so to everybody that is blessed with it.

That is the reason why there are compensatory functions. The in­troverted thinker is very much in need of a developed feeling, i.e., of a less autoerotic, sentimental, melodramatic and emotional relatedness to people and things. The compensation will be a hell of a conflict to begin with, but later on, by understanding what nirdvanda17 means, they18 become the pillars at the gate of the transcendent function, i.e., the transitus to the self.

We should recognize that life is a transitus. There is an old covered bridge near Schmerikon19 with an inscription: “Alles ist Ueber­gang.”20 Even the Church and her sententiae are only alive inasmuch as they change. All old truths want a new interpretation, so that they can live on in a new form. They can’t be substituted or replaced by something else without losing their functional value altogether. The Church certainly expects of you that you assimilate its doctrine. But in assimilating it, you change it imperceptibly and sometimes even noticeably. Introverted thinking is aware of such subtle alterations, while other minds swallow them wholesale. If you try to be literal about the doctrine, you are putting yourself aside until there is nobody left that would represent it but corpses. If on the other hand you truly assimilate the doctrine you will alter it creatively by your individual understanding and thus give life to it. The life of most ideas in their controversial nature, i.e., you can disagree with them even if you recognize their importance for a majority. If you fully agreed with them you could replace yourself just as well by a gramophone record. Moreover, if you don’t disagree, you are no good as a directeur de conscience, since there are many other people suffering from the same difficulty and being badly in need of your understanding.

I appreciate the particular moral problem you are confronted with. But I should rather try to understand why you were put into your actual situation of profound conflict before you think it is a fundamental mental mistake. I remember vividly your charta geomantica21 that depicts so drastically the way you became a monk. I admit there are people with the peculiar gift of getting inevitably and always into the wrong place. With such people nothing can be done except get them out of the wrong hole into another equally dubious one. But if I find an intelligent man in an apparently wrong situation, I am inclined to think that it makes sense somehow. There may be some work for him to do. Much work is needed where much has gone wrong or where much should be improved. That is one of the reasons why the Church attracts quite a number of intelligent and responsible men in the secret (or unconscious?) hope that they will be strong enough to carry its meaning and not its words into the future. The old trick of law obedience is still going strong, but the original Christian teach­ing is a reminder. The man who allows the institution to swallow him is not a good servant.

It is quite understandable that the ecclesiastical authorities must protect the Church against subversive influences. But it would be sabotage if this principle were carried to the extreme, because it would kill the attempts at improvement also, The Church is a “Durchgang” [passage] and bridge between representatives of higher and lower consciousness and as such she quite definitely makes sense. Since the world is largely sub principatu diaboli, it is unavoidable that there is just as much evil in the Church as everywhere else, and as everywhere else you have got to be careful. What would you do if you were a bank-clerk or a medical assistant at a big clinic? You are always and everywhere in a metal conflict unless you are bliss­fully unconscious. I think it is not only honest but even highly moral and altruistic to be what one professes to be as completely as pos­sible, with the full consciousness that you are making this effort for the weak and the unintelligent who cannot live without a reliable support. He is a good physician who does not bother the patient with his own doubts and feelings of inferiority. Even if he knows little or is quite inefficient the right persona medici might carry the day if seriously and truly performed for the patient. The grace of God may step in when you don’t lose your head in a clearly desperate situation If it has been done, even with a lie, in favor of the patient it has been well done, and you are justified, although you never get out of the awkward feeling that you are a dubious number. I wonder whether there is any true servant of God who can rid himself of this profound insecurity balancing his obvious rightness. I cannot forget that crazy old Negro Mammy22 who told me: “God is working in me like a clock—funny and serious.” By “clock” seems to be meant something precise and regular, even monotonous; by “funny and serious” compensating irrational events and aspects—a humorous seriousness expressing the playful and formidable nature of fateful experiences.

If I find myself in a critical or doubtful situation, I always ask myself whether there is not something in it, explaining the need of my presence, before I make a plan of how to escape. If I should find nothing hopeful or meaningful in it, I think I would not hesitate to jump out of it as quick as possible. Well, I may be all wrong, but the fact that you find yourself in the Church does not impress me asbeing wholly nonsensical. Of course huge sacrifices are expected of you, but I wonder whether there is any vocation or any kind of meaningful life that does not demand sacrifices of a sort. There is no place where those striving after consciousness could find absolute safety. Doubt and insecurity are indispensable components of a complete life. Only those who can lose this life really, can gain it. A “complete” life does not consist in a theoretical completeness, but in the fact that one accepts, without reservation, the particular fatal tissue in which one finds oneself embedded, and that one tries to make sense of it or to create a cosmos from the chaotic mess into which one is born. If one lives properly and completely, time and again one will be confronted with a situation of which one will say: “This is too much. I cannot bear it any more.” Then the question must he answered: “Can one really not bear it?”

Fidem non esse caecum sensum religionis e latebris subconscientiae erumpentem,23 etc., indeed not! Fides in its ecclesiastical meaning is a construction expressed by the wholly artificial credo, but no spontaneous product of the unconscious. You can swear to it in all innocence, as well as I could, if asked. Also you can teach, if asked, the solid doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas, as I could if I knew it. You can and will and must criticize it, yet with a certain discrimination, as there are people incapable of understanding your argument.Quieta movere24 is not necessarily a good principle. Being an analyst, you know how little you can say, and sometimes it is quite enough when only the analyst knows. Certain things transmit themselves by air when they are really needed.

I don’t share at all X.’s idea that one should not be so finicky about conscience, it is definitely dishonest and—sorry—a bit too Catholic. One must be finicky when it comes to a moral question, and what a question! You are asked to decide whether you can deal with am­biguity, deception, “doublecrossing” and other damnable things for the love of your neighbour’s soul. If it is a case of “the end justifying the means,” you had better buy a through ticket to hell. It is a devilish hybris even to think that one could be in such an exalted position to decide about the means one is going to apply. There is no such thing, not even in psychotherapy. If you don’t want to go to the dogs morally, there is only one question, namely “Which is the necessity you find yourself burdened with when you take to heart your brother’s predicament?” The question is how you are applied in the process of the cure, and not at all what the means are you could offer to buy yourself off. It depends very much indeed upon the way you envisage your position with reference to the Church. I should advocate an analytical attitude, which is permissible as well as honest, viz, take the Church as your ailing employer and your colleagues as the unconscious inmates of a hospital.

Is the LSD-drug mesca1in?25 It has indeed very curious effects— vide Aldous Huxley26 —of which I know far too little. I don’t know either what its psychotherapeutic value with neurotic or psychotic patients is. I only know there is no point in wishing to know more of the collective unconscious than one gets through dreams and intuition. The more you know of it, the greater and heavier becomes our moral burden, because the unconscious contents transform themselves into your individual tasks and duties as soon as they begin to become conscious. Do you want to increase loneliness and misunderstanding? Do you want to find more and more complications and increasing re­sponsibilities? You get enough of it. If I once could say that I had done everything I know I had to do, then perhaps I should realize a legitimate need to take mescalin. But if I should take it now, I would not be sure at all that I had not taken it out of idle curiosity. I should hate the thought that I had touched on the sphere where the paint is made that colours the world, where the light is created that makes shine the splendour of the dawn, the lines and shapes of all form, the sound that fills the orbit, the thought that illuminates the darkness of the void. There are some poor impoverished creatures, perhaps, for whom mescalin would be a heaven-sent gift without a counterpoison, but I am profoundly mistrustful of the “pure gifts of the Gods.” You pay very dearly for them. Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.27

This is not the point at all, to know of or about the unconscious, nor does the story end here; on the contrary it is how and where you begin the real quest. If you are too unconscious it is a great relief to know a bit of the collective unconscious. But it soon becomes dangerous to know more, because one does not learn at the same time how to balance it through a conscious equivalent. That is the mistake Aldous Huxley makes: he does not know that he is in the role of the “Zauberlehrling,” who learned from his master how to call the ghosts but did not know how to get rid of them again:

It is really the mistake of our age. We think it is enough to discover new things, but we don’t realize that knowing more demands a cor­responding development of morality. Radioactive clouds over Japan, Calcutta, and Saskatchewan point to progressive poisoning of the uni­versal atmosphere.

I should indeed be obliged to you if you could let me see the ma­terial they get with LSD. It is quite awful that the alienists have caught hold of a new poison to play with, without the faintest knowl­edge or feeling of responsibility. It is just as if a surgeon had never leaned further than to cut open his patient’s belly and to leave things there. When one gets to know unconscious contents one should know how to deal with them. I can only hope that the doctors will feed themselves thoroughly with mescalin, the alkaloid of divine grace, so that they learn for themselves its marvellous effect. You have not finished with the conscious side yet. Why should you expect more from the unconscious? For 35 years I have known enough of the col­lective unconscious and my whole effort is concentrated upon prepar­ing the ways and means to deal with it.

Now to end this very long epistle I must say how much I have ap­preciated your confidence, frankness, courage and honesty. This is so rare and so precious an event that it is a pleasure to answer at length. I hope you will find a way out to Switzerland.

The winter, though very cold, has dealt leniently with me. Both my wife and myself are tired, though still active, but in a very restricted way.

I am spending the month of April in Bollingen procul negotiis29 and the worst weather we have known for years.

Cordially yours, C. G. JUNG

Carl Jung Letter to Upton Sinclair

Dear Mr. Sinclair, 7 January 1955

Having read your novel Our Lady1 and having enjoyed every page of it, I cannot refrain from bothering you again with a letter. This is the trouble you risk when giving your books to a psychologist who has made it his profession to receive impressions and to have reactions.

On the day after I had read the story, I happened to come across the beautiful text of the “Exultet” in the Easter night liturgy:

Although I am peculiarly sensitive to the beauty of the liturgical language and of the feeling expressed therein, something was amiss, as if a corner had been knocked off or a precious stone fallen from its setting. When trying to understand, I instantly remembered the be­wildered Marya confronted with the incongruities of the exorcism, her beautiful and simple humanity caught in the coils of a vast his­torical process which had supplanted her concrete and immediate life by the almost inhuman superstructure of a dogmatic and ritual na­ture, so strange that, in spite of the identity of names and biograph­ical items, she was not even able to recognize the story of herself and of her beloved son.

By the way, a masterful touch! I also remembered your previous novel3 about the idealistic youth who had almost be­come a saviour through one of those angelic tricks well known since the time of Enoch (the earthly adventure of Samiasaz4 and his an­gelic host). And moreover, I recalled your Jesus biography.5 Then I knew what it was that caused my peculiarly divided feeling: it was your common sense and realism, reducing the Holy Legend to human proportions and to probable possibilities, that never fails in knocking off a piece of the spiritual architecture or in causing a slight tremor of the Church’s mighty structure. The anxiety of the priests to suppress the supposedly satanic attempt at verisimilitude is therefore most convincing, as the devil is particularly dangerous when he tells the truth, just as he often does (vide the biography of St. Anthony of Egypt by St. Athanasius).

It is obviously your laudabilis intentio to extract a quintessence of truth from the incomprehensible chaos of historical distortions and dogmatic constructions, a truth of human size and acceptable to com­mon sense. Such an attempt is hopeful and promises success, as the “truth” represented by the Church is so remote from ordinary under­standing as to be well-nigh unacceptable. At all events, it conveys nothing any more to the modern mind that wants to understand since it is incapable of blind belief. In this respect, you continue the Strauss-­Renan tradition in liberal theology.

I admit it is exceedingly probable that there is a human story at the bottom of it all. But under these conditions I must ask: Why the devil had this simple and therefore satisfactory story to be embellished and distorted beyond recognition? Or why had Jesus taken on unmis­takably mythological traits already with the Gospel writers? And why is this process continued even in our enlightened days when the original picture has been obscured beyond all reasonable expectation? Why the Assumptio of 1950 and the Encyclical Ad caeli Reginam7 of Oct. 11, 1954?

The impossibility of a concrete saviour, as styled by the Gospel writers, is and has always been to me obvious and indubitable. Yet I know my contemporaries too well to forget that to them it is news hearing the simple fundamental story. Liberal theology and incidentally your laudabilis intentio have definitely their place where they make sense. To me the human story is the inevitable point de depart, the self-evident basis of historical Christianity. It is the “small beginnings” of an amazing development.

But the human story—I beg your pardon—is just ordinary, well within the confines of everyday life, not exciting and unique and thus not particularly interesting. We have heard it a thousand times and we ourselves have lived it at least in parts. It is the we—known psychological ensemble of Mother and beloved Son, and how the legend begins with mother’s anxieties and hopes and son’s heroic fantasies and helpful friends and foes joining in, magnifying and augmenting little deviations from the truth and thus slowly creating the web called the reputation of a personality.

Here you have me—the psychologist—with what the French call his deformationpro professionnelle. He is blase, overfed with the “simple” human story, which does not touch his interest and particularly not his religious feeling. The human story is even the thing to get away from, as the small story is neither exciting nor edifying. On the con­trary, one wants to hear the great story of gods and heroes and how the world was created and so on. The small stories can be heard where the women wash in the river, or in the kitchen or at the village well, and above all everybody lives them at home. That has been so since the dawn of consciousness. But there was a time in antiquity, about the fourth century B.C. (I am not quite certain about the date.

Being actually away on vacation, I miss my library!), when a man Euhemeros8 made himself a name through a then new theory: The divine and heroic myth is founded upon the small story of an ordinary human chief or petty Icing of local fame, magnified by a minstrel’s fantasy. All-Father Zeus, the mighty “gatherer of clouds,” was orig­inally a little tyrant, ruling some villages from his maison forteupon a hill, and “nocturnis ululatibus horrenda Prosperpina”9 was presum­ably his awe-inspiring mother-in-law. That was certainly a time sick of the old gods and their ridiculous fairy stories, curiously similar to the “enlightenment” of our epoch equally fed up with its “myth” and welcoming any kind of iconoclasm, from the Encyclopedie10 of the XVIIIth century to the Freudian theory reducing the religious “illusion” to the basic “family romance” with its incestuous innuendos in the early XXth century.

Unlike your predecessor, you do not insist upon thechronique scandaleuse of the Olympians and other ideals, but with a loving hand and with decency like a benevolent peda­gogue, you take your reader by the hand: “I am going to tell you a better story, something nice and reasonable, that anybody can accept. I don’t repeat these ancient absurdities, these god-awful theologou­mena11 like the Virgin Birth, blood and flesh mysteries, and other wholly superfluous miracle gossip. I show you the touching and simple humanity behind these gruesome inventions of benighted ecclesiastical brains.”

This is a kind-hearted iconoclasm far more deadly than the frankly murderous arrows from M. de Voltaire’s quiver: all these mythological assertions are so obviously impossible that their refuta­tion is not even needed. These relics of the dark ages vanish like morning mist before the rising sun, when the idealistic and charming gardener’s boy experiments with miracles of the good old kind, or when your authentic Galilean grandmother “Marya” does not even recognize herself or her beloved son in the picture produced by the magic mirror of Christian tradition.

Yet, why should a more or less ordinary story of a good mother and her well-meaning idealistic boy give rise to one of the most amazing mental or spiritual developments of all times? Who or what is its agens? Why could the facts not remain as they were originally? The answer is obvious: The story is so ordinary that there would not have been any reason for its tradition, quite certainly not for its world-wide expansion. The fact that the original situation has developed into one of the most extraordinary myths about a divine heros, a God-man and his cosmic fate, is not due to its underlying human story, but to the powerful action of pine-existing mythological motifs attributed to the biographically almost unknown Jesus, a wandering miracle Rabbi in the style of the ancient Hebrew prophets, or of the contemporary teacher John the Baptizer, or of the much later Zaddiks of the Chassidim12



The immediate source and origin of the myth projected upon the teacher Jesus is to be found in the then popular Book of Enoch and its central figure of the “Son of Man” and his messianic mission. From the Gospel texts it is even manifest that Jesus identified himself with this “Son of Man.” Thus it is the spirit of his time, the collective hope and expectation which caused this astounding transformation not at all the more or less insignificant story of the man Jesus.

The true agens is the archetypal image of the Cod-man, appearing in Ezekiel’s vision13 for the first time in Jewish history, but in itself a considerably older figure in Egyptian theology, viz., Osiris and Horus.

The transformation of Jesus, i.e., the integration of his human self into a super- or inhuman figure of a deity, accounts for the amazing “distortion” of his ordinary personal biography. In other words: the essence of Christian tradition is by no means the simple man Jesus whom we seek in vain in the Gospels, but the lore of the God-man and his cosmic drama. Even the Gospels themselves make it their special job to prove that their Jesus is the incarnated God equipped with all the magic powers of a kurioV tvn pneumatwn.14 That is why they are so liberal with miracle gossip which they naively assume proves their point.

It is only natural that the subsequent post-apostolic de­velopments even went several points better in this respect, and in our days the process of mythological integration is still expanding and spreading itself even to Jesus’ mother, formerly carefully kept down to the human rank and file for at least 500 years of early church history. Boldly breaking through the sacrosanct rule about the defina­bility of a new dogmatic truth, viz., that the said truth is only definibilis inasmuch as it was believed and taught in apostolic times, explicite or implicite, the pope has declared the Assumptio Mariae a dogma of the Christian creed.

The justification he relies on is the pious belief of the masses for more than 1000 years, which he considers sufficient proof of the work of the Holy Ghost. Obviously the “pious belief” of the masses continues the process of projection, i.e., of transformation of human situations into myth.

But why should there be myth at all? My letter is already too long so that I can’t answer this last question any more, but I have written several books about it. I only wanted to explain to you my idea that in trying to extract the quintessence of Christian tradition, you have re­moved it like Prof. Bultmann in his attempt at “demythologizing” the Gospels.

One cannot help admitting that the human story is so very much more probable, but it has little or nothing to do with the prob­lem of the myth containing the essence of Christian religion. You catch your priests most cleverly in the disadvantageous position which they have created for themselves by their preaching a concrete his­toricity of clearly mythological facts. Nobody reading your ad­mirable novel can deny being deeply impressed by the very dramatic confrontation of the original with the mythological picture, and very probably he will prefer the human story to its mythological “distortion.”

But what about the euanggelion, the “message” of the God-man and Redeemer and his divine fate, the very foundation of everything that is holy to the Church? There is the spiritual heritage and harvest of 1900 years still to account for, and I am very doubtful whether the reduction to common sense is the correct answer or not. As a matter of fact, I attribute an incomparably greater importance to the dogmatic truth than to the probable human story.

The religious need gets nothing out of the latter, and at all events less than from a mere belief in Jesus Christ or any other dogma. Inasmuch as the belief is real and living, it works. But inasmuch as it is mere imagination and an effort of the will without understanding, I see little merit in it. Unfortunately, this unsatisfactory condition prevails in modem times, and in so far as there is nothing beyond belief without understanding but doubt and scepticism, the whole Christian tradition goes by the board as a mere fantasy. I consider this event a tremendous loss for which we are to pay a terrific price. The effect becomes visible in the dissolution of ethical values and a complete disorientation of our Weltanschauung.

The “truths” of natural science or “existential philosophy” are poor surrogates. Nat­ural “laws” are in the main mere abstractions (being statistical averages) instead of reality, and they abolish individual existence as being merely exceptional. But the individual as the only carrier of life and existence is of paramount importance. He cannot be sub­stituted by a group or by a mass. Yet we are rapidly approaching a state in which nobody will accept individual responsibility any more. We prefer to leave it as an odious business to groups and organizations, blissfully unconscious of the fact that the group or mass psyche is that of an animal and wholly inhuman.

What we need is the development of the inner spiritual man, the unique individual whose treasure is hidden on the one hand in the symbols of our mythological tradition, and on the other hand in man’s unconscious psyche. It is tragic that science and its philosophy discourage the individual and that theology resists every reasonable attempt to understand its symbols. Theologians call their creed a symbolum,15 but they refuse to call their truth “symbolic.” Yet, if it is anything, it is anthropomorphic symbolism and therefore capable able of re-interpretation.

Hoping you don’t mind my frank discussion of your very inspiring writings,
I remain, with my best wishes for the New Year,

Yours sincerely, C. G. JUNG

P.S. Thank you very much for your kind letter that has reached me just now. I am amazed at the fact that you should have difficulties in finding a publisher.16 What is America coming to, when her most capable authors cannot reach their public any more? What a time!

Carl Jung: We are men and not gods. The meaning of human development is to be found in the fulfilment of this life.

I am a psychologist and empiricist, and for me the meaning of life does not lie in annulling it for the sake of an alleged "possibility of transcendental existence" which nobody knows how to envisage.

We are men and not gods. The meaning of human development is to be found in the fulfilment of this life.

It is rich enough in marvels. And not in detachment from this world.

How can I fulfil the meaning of my life if the goal I set myself is the "disappearance of individual consciousness"?

What am I without this individual consciousness of mine?

Even what I have called the "self" functions only by virtue of an ego which hears the voice of that greater being. C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 381

Carl Jung on Drugs: LSD and Mescaline

Is the LSD-drug mesca1in? It has indeed very curious effects— vide Aldous Huxley —of which I know far too little.

I don’t know either what its psychotherapeutic value with neurotic or psychotic patients is.

I only know there is no point in wishing to know more of the collective unconscious than one gets through dreams and intuition.

The more you know of it, the greater and heavier becomes our moral burden, because the unconscious contents transform themselves into your individual tasks and duties as soon as they begin to become conscious.

Do you want to increase loneliness and misunderstanding? Do you want to find more and more complications and increasing re­sponsibilities?

You get enough of it. If I once could say that I had done everything I know I had to do, then perhaps I should realize a legitimate need to take mescalin.

But if I should take it now, I would not be sure at all that I had not taken it out of idle curiosity.

I should hate the thought that I had touched on the sphere where the paint is made that colours the world, where the light is created that makes shine the splendour of the dawn, the lines and shapes of all form, the sound that fills the orbit, the thought that illuminates the darkness of the void.

There are some poor impoverished creatures, perhaps, for whom mescalin would be a heaven-sent gift without a counterpoison, but I am profoundly mistrustful of the “pure gifts of the Gods.”

You pay very dearly for them. Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.

This is not the point at all, to know of or about the unconscious, nor does the story end here; on the contrary it is how and where you begin the real quest. If you are too unconscious it is a great relief to know a bit of the collective unconscious.

But it soon becomes dangerous to know more, because one does not learn at the same time how to balance it through a conscious equivalent.

That is the mistake Aldous Huxley makes: he does not know that he is in the role of the “Zauberlehrling,” who learned from his master how to call the ghosts but did not know how to get rid of them again:

It is really the mistake of our age. We think it is enough to discover new things, but we don’t realize that knowing more demands a cor­responding development of morality.

Radioactive clouds over Japan, Calcutta, and Saskatchewan point to progressive poisoning of the uni­versal atmosphere.

I should indeed be obliged to you if you could let me see the ma­terial they get with LSD. It is quite awful that the alienists have caught hold of a new poison to play with, without the faintest knowl­edge or feeling of responsibility.

It is just as if a surgeon had never leaned further than to cut open his patient’s belly and to leave things there. When one gets to know unconscious contents one should know how to deal with them.

I can only hope that the doctors will feed themselves thoroughly with mescaline, the alkaloid of divine grace, so that they learn for themselves its marvellous effect.

You have not finished with the conscious side yet.

Why should you expect more from the unconscious? For 35 years I have known enough of the col­lective unconscious and my whole effort is concentrated upon prepar­ing the ways and means to deal with it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II to Victor White dated 10 April 1954 [excerpt]

The complete letter may be found at this link:

Carl Jung: My intellect can envisage the latter possibility, but the whole of my being says "No" to it.

To Miguel Serrano

Dear Sir, 14 September 1960
Your letter of May 7th, 1 960, is so vast that I don't know where to begin answering it.

The way towards a solution of our contemporary problems I seem to propose is in reality the process I have been
forced into as a modern individual confronted with the social, moral, intellectual, and religious insufficiencies of our time I recognize the fact that I can give only one answer, namely mine, which is certainly not valid universally, but may be sufficient for a restricted number of contemporary individuals inasmuch as my main tenet contains
nothing more than: Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own, i.e., the true expression of your individuality.

As nobody can become aware of his individuality unless he is closely and responsibly related to his fellow beings, he is not withdrawing to an egoistic desert when he tries to find himself.

He can only discover himself when he is deeply and unconditionally related to some, and generally related to a great many, individuals with whom he has a chance to compare and from whom he is able to discriminate himself.

If somebody in supreme egoism should withdraw to the solitude of Mt. Everest, he would discover a good deal
about the amenities of his lofty abode but as good as nothing about himself, i.e., nothing he could not have known before.

Man in general is in such a situation in so far as he is an animal gifted with self-reflection but without the possibility of comparing himself to another species of animal equally equipped with consciousness.

He is a top animal exiled on a tiny speck of planet in the Milky Way.

That is the reason why he does not know himself; he is cosmically isolated.

He can only state with certainty that he is no monkey, no bird, no fish, and no tree.

But what he positively is, remains obscure. Mankind today is dreaming of interstellar communications.

Could we contact the population of another star, we might find a means to learn something essential about ourselves.

Incidentally we are just living in a time when homo homini lupus threatens to become
an awful reality, and when we are in dire need to know beyond ourselves.
.
The science fiction about travelling to the moon or to Venus and Mars and the lore about Flying Saucers are effects of our dimly felt but none the less intense need to reach a new physical as well as spiritual basis beyond our actual conscious world.

Philosophers and psychologists of the XIXth and XXth centuries have tried to provide a terra nova in ourselves, that is, the unconscious.

This is indeed a discovery which could give us a new orientation in many respects .

Whereas our fictions about Martians and Venusians are based upon nothing but mere speculations, the unconscious is within the reach of human experience.

It is almost tangible and thus more or less familiar to us, but on the other hand a strange existence difficult to understand.

If we may assume that what I call archetypes is a verifiable hypothesis, then we are confronted with autonomous
animalia gifted with a sort of consciousness and psychic life of their own, which we can observe, at least partially, not only in living men but also in the historic course of many centuries .

Whether we call them gods, demons, or illusions, they exist and function and are born anew with every generation.

They have an enormous influence on individual as well as collective life, and despite their familiarity they are curiously non-human.

This latter characteristic is the reason why they were called gods and demons in the past and why they are understood in our "scientific" age as the psychic manifestations of the instincts, inasmuch as they represent habitual and universally occurring attitudes and thought-forms.

They are basic forms, but not the manifest, personified, or otherwise concretized images.

They have a high degree of autonomy, which does not disappear when the manifest images change.

When f.i. the belief in the god Wotan vanishes and nobody thinks of him any more, the phenomenon, called Wotan originally, remains; nothing changes but its name, as National Socialism has demonstrated on a grand scale.

A collective movement consists of millions of individuals, each of whom shows the symptoms of Wotanism and proves thereby that Wotan in reality never died but has retained his original vitality and autonomy.

Our consciousness only imagines that it has lost its gods; in reality they are still there and it only needs a certain general condition in order to bring them back in full force.

This condition is a situation in which a new orientation and adaptation are needed.

If this question is not clearly understood and no proper answer given, the archetype which expresses this situation steps in and brings back the reaction which has always characterized such times, in this case Wotan.

As only certain individuals are capable of listening and of accepting good advice, it is most unlikely that anybody would pay
attention to the statement of a warning voice that Wotan is here again.

They would rather fall headlong into the trap.

As we have largely lost our gods and the actual condition of our religion does not offer an efficacious answer to the world situation in general and to the "religion" of Communism in particular, we are very much in the same predicament as the pre-National-Socialistic Germany of the twenties, i.e., we are apt to undergo the risk of a further but this time worldwide Wotanistic experiment.

This means mental epidemics and war.

One does not realize yet that when an archetype is unconsciously constellated and not consciously understood, one is possessed by it and forced to its fatal goal.

Wotan then represents and formulates our ultimate principle of behaviour, but this obviously does not solve our problem.

The fact that an archaic god formulates and expresses the dominant of our behaviour means that we ought to find a new religious attitude, a new realization of our dependence upon superior dominants.

I don't know how this could be possible without a renewed self-understanding of man, which unavoidably has to begin with the individual.

We have the means to compare man with other psychic animalia and to give him a new setting which throws an objective
light upon his existence, namely as a being operated and manoeuvred by archetypal forces instead of his "free will," that is, his arbitrary egoism and his limited consciousness.

He should l earn that he is not the master in his own house and that he should carefully study the other side of his psychic world which seems to be the true ruler of his fate.

I know this is merely a "pious wish" the fulfillment of which demands centuries, but in each aeon there are at least a few individuals who understand what man's real task consists of, and keep its tradition for future generations and a time when insight has reached a deeper and more general level.

First the way of a few will be changed and in a few generations there will be more.

It is most unlikely that the general mind in this or even in the next generation will undergo a noticeable change, as at present man seems to be quite incapable of realizing that under a certain aspect he is a stranger to himself.

But whoever is capable of such insight, no matter how isolated he is, be aware of the law of synchronicity.

As the old Chinese saying goes: "The right man sitting in his house and thinking the right thought will be heard a 100 miles away."

Neither propaganda nor exhibitionist confessions are needed.

If the archetype, which is universal, i.e., identical with itself always and anywhere, is properly dealt with in one place only, it is influenced as a whole, i.e., simultaneously and everywhere.

Thus an old alchemist gave the following consolation to one of his disciples: "No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you."

It seems to me that nothing essential h a s ever been lost, because its matrix is ever-present within us and from this it can and will be reproduced if needed.

But only those can recover it who have learned the art of averting their eyes from the blinding light of current opinions,
and close their ears to the noise of ephemeral slogans.

You rightly say with Multatuli, the Dutch philosopher: "Nothing is quite true" and should add with him : "And even this is not quite true."

The intellect can make its profound statement that there is no absolute Truth.

But if somebody loses his money, his money is lost and this is as good as an absolute Truth, which means that he will
not be consoled by intellectual profundity.

There is a thing like convincing Truth but we have lost sight of it, owing the loss mostly to our gambling intellect, to which we sacrifice our moral certainty and gain thereby nothing but an inferiority-complex, which-by the way-characterizes Western politics.

To be is to do and to make.

But as our existence does not depend solely upon our ego-will, so our doing and making depend largely upon the dominants of the unconscious.

I am not only willing out of my ego, but I am also made to be creative and active, and to be quiet is only good for someone who has been too-or perversely-active.

Otherwise it is an unnatural artifice which unnecessarily interferes with our nature.

We grow up, we blossom and we wilt, and death is ultimate quietude-or so it seems.

But much depends upon the spirit, i.e., the meaning or significance, in which we do and make or-in another word-live.

This spirit expresses itself or manifests itself in a Truth, which is indubitably and absolutely convincing to the whole of my being in spite of the fact that the intellect in its endless ramblings will continue forever with its "But, ifs," which however
should not be suppressed but rather welcomed as occasions to improve the Truth.

You have chosen two good representatives of East and West.

Krishnamurti is all irrational, leaving solutions to quietude, i.e., to themselves as a part of Mother Nature.

Toynbee on the other hand believes in making and moulding opinions.

Neither believes in the blossoming and unfolding of the individual as the experimental, doubtful and bewildering work of the living God, to whom we have to lend our eyes and ears and our discriminating mind, to which end they were incubated for millions of years and brought to light about 6ooo years ago, viz . at the moment when the historical continuity of consciousness became visible through the invention of script.

We are sorely in need of a Truth or a self-understanding similar to that of Ancient Egypt, which I have found still living with the Taos Pueblos.

Their chief of ceremonies, old Ochwiah Biano (Mountain Lake) said to me : "We are the people who live on the roof of
the world, we are the sons of the Sun, who is our father.

We help him daily to rise and to cross over the sky.

We do this not only for ourselves, but for the Americans also.

Therefore they should not interfere with our religion.

But if they continue to do so [by missionaries J and hinder us, then they will see that in ten years the Sun will rise no more."

He correctly assumes that their day, their light, their consciousness, and their meaning will die when destroyed by the narrow-mindedness of American rationalism, and the same will happen to the whole world when subjected to such treatment.

That is the reason why I tried to find the best truth and the clearest light I could attain to, and since I have reached my highest point I can't transcend any more, I am guarding my light and my treasure, convinced that nobody would gain and I myself would be badly, even hopelessly injured, if I should lose it.

It is most precious not only to me, but above all to the darkness of the creator, who needs man to illuminate His creation.

If God had foreseen his world, it would be a mere senseless machine and man's existence a useless freak.

My intellect can envisage the latter possibility, but the whole of my being says "No" to it.

Sincerely yours,

C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 592-597

Carl Jung: We are men and not gods

To Meggie Reichstein

Dear Dr. Reichstein, 2 August 1957

Thank you very much for the great trouble you have taken in working through Sumantri Hardjo Rakosa's book on "The Conception of Man in Indonesian Religion as a Basis for Psychotherapy," and for furnishing such a clear report of its contents.

Your resume of his remarks on my psychology was most helpful.

They paint a picture of the limitations of his understanding.

You are right in supposing that the author hasn't grasped much of my thinking. In his ideas he remains stuck in the traditional outlook of the East.

He mistakes me for a philosopher, which I am quite definitely not.

I am a psychologist and empiricist, and for me the meaning of life does not lie in annulling it for the sake of an alleged "possibility of transcendental existence" which nobody knows how to envisage.

We are men and not gods.

The meaning of human development is to be found in the fulfilment of this life.

It is rich enough in marvels.

And not in detachment from this world.

How can I fulfil the meaning of my life if the goal I set myself is the "disappearance of individual consciousness"?

What am I without this individual consciousness of mine?

Even what I have called the "self" functions only by virtue of an ego which hears the voice of that greater being.

I fear I have saddled you with a thankless task in working through this book.

That you have discharged it with such patience and lucidity was a very great help.

With best regards,

Yours sincerely,

C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 381

Carl Jung's Vision and the Island of Kos

To Arnim Haemmerli

Dear Colleague, 25 October 1955

Now that the flood of letters on and around my eightieth birthday has abated somewhat, I can at last get down to thanking you for
your card from Kos and your highly appreciated letter of 4.VIII.

Your letter from Kos moved me deeply, since your late brother, who attended me when I had my cardiac infarct in 1944, was associated with Kos in a mysterious way.

In my delirious states the image of your brother appeared to me, framed by the golden Hippocratic wreath, and announced-at that point I was already 2 500 km. away from the earth and was about to enter a rock temple hollowed out of a meteorite-that I had no permission to go any further from the
earth but had to return to it.

From the moment of this vision I feared for the life of your brother, since I had seen him in his primal form as Prince of Kos, which signified his death .

I discovered only afterwards that the great physicians of Kos styled themselves (kings ).

On 4 April 1 944 I was allowed to sit up on the edge of the bed for the first time, and on that day your brother took to his bed, never to rise again .

With warm thanks and best wishes for a speedy recovery from your operation,

Ever sincerely yours,

C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 273

The Earth has a Soul: C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology & Modern Life

“Matter in the wrong place is dirt.

People get dirty through too much civilization.

Whenever we touch nature, we get clean.

You may not associate such bold, earthy sentiments with Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung, but he was, in fact, deeply concerned over the loss of connection with nature.

He considered natural life to be the “nourishing soil of the soul.

Who has time for a natural life these days? What would it look like if we did?

Those of us destined to live through this turbulent period of history, the declining phase of Western civilization, could perhaps use a wise elder who stands slightly outside the modern world yet knows it well enough to offer guidance.

Jung shows the knowledge of an historian who understands how the dissociation from nature came about; he reaches out with the empathy of a healer who shares our plight; and he advises with the common sense of a country doctor how to live “in modest harmony with nature.”

Jung addresses not only the individual but also our culture as a whole, as an entity that itself is suffering and in need of help.

The title of the book, “The Earth Has A Soul” is taken from a 1958 letter in which Jung refers to “the old idea that every country or people has its own angel, just as the earth has a soul.

We find that Jung uses the words soul, spirit and psyche somewhat interchangeably.

“Psyche” is Greek for soul, life, and breath; so psyche is Nature itself.

In the Visions Seminars that he gave in the early 1930s, Jung remarked that “the earth has a spirit of her own, a beauty of her own.”

Spirit is the inside of things and matter is their visible outer aspect.

Jung’s main contribution is restoring to Nature its original wholeness by reminding us that “nature is not matter only, she is also spirit.”

A brief anecdote illustrates Jung’s apperception of the living spirit within Nature:

I once experienced a violent earthquake, and my first, immediate feeling was that I no longer stood on solid familiar earth, but on the skin of a gigantic animal that was heaving under my feet.

It was this image that impressed itself on me, not the physical fact.”

Historical eras oscillate between an orientation toward matter or spirit.

We are living in a period when the material aspect of Nature is emphasized; it is often said that we are materialistic.

But this is not quite the case, since matter actually receives very little respect due to its having been robbed, as Jung notes, of its spirit –
“The word ‘matter’ remains a dry, inhuman, and purely intellectual concept.

How different was the former image of matter—the Great Mother—that could encompass and express the profound emotional meaning of the Great Mother.”

In a 1923 seminar, Jung identified four elements that have undergone the most severe repression in the Judeo-Christian world: nature, animals, creative fantasy, and the “inferior” or primitive side of humans, which tends to be mistakenly conflated with instinct or sexuality.

It is a general truth that the earth is depreciated and misunderstood…For quite long enough we have been taught that this life is not the real thing…and that we live only for heaven.

Our loss of connection with Nature is thus neither a practical nor a psychological problem but a religious one, as this statement by Joseph Henderson emphasizes:

“Nature has lost her divinity, yet the spirit is unsure and unsatisfied. Hence any true cure for the neurosis…would have to awaken both spirit and nature to a new life. The relevance of this theme for us today may be that it is a problem we are still trying to solve on too personal, psychological a level, or on a purely cultural level without fully realizing it is at bottom a religious problem and not psychological or social at all.” Shadow and Self, page 279.

Jung grew up (b.1875) in conditions largely unchanged since the Middle Ages and lived to see the emergence of the techno-industrial age (d.1961)…

Although there are others today who offer clarity about how our ruptured relationship with Nature could be repaired, I believe that only Jung speaks in both the discursive voice of a modern doctor who is able to explain, and the mythic or poetic voice of a tribal healer, who is able to enchant. By incorporating wisdom from the depths of the psyche, Jung reaches not only our modern mind but also the aspect of our being that he termed archaic, natural, primordial, or original

This unusual capacity to span both the archaic and the modern arose from his actual background with its deep roots in his ancestral lineage and certain significant experiences such as his seminal dream at age 34 about our species’ phylogenetic history.

It concerned a multi-storied house in which the furnishings and construction style of each level represented different historical periods.

The top floor was the present, the level below the 16th century, the first floor below ground the Roman era, and in the deepest level was a dusty cave containing bones, shards and tools from a neolithic culture.

He came to view the dream as an objective picture not only of European history but of the historic composition of the human psyche, the stories signifying successive layers of consciousness. This interior opening… provided Jung with access to the various stages of consciousness, including what he came to call “the primitive within myself”.

Consciousness: the blessing and curse of humankind.

We are beset by an all-too-human fear that consciousness – our Promethean conquest – may in the end not be able to serve us as well as nature. Collected Works,8, par 750)

Jung contended that Nature herself deigned to produce consciousness because without it things go less well.

Though we tend to prize it as a fine achievement, Jung impolitely reminds us that consciousness is also our own worst devil because it helps us invent “every thinkable reason and way to disobey the divine will. Letters I, Page 486.

Jung sets the loss of connection with Nature in the overall context of the development of consciousness over the millenia.

To describe how it evolved, he drew on the analogy of the multi-storied house from his 1909 dream.

The floors above ground represent recent historical periods; its foundations, the phylogeny of our species.

To the latter he applied the awkward term the collective unconscious.

He observed that people today often leave the whole of their lives to the direction of consciousness, thereby forgetting that it is merely the visible surface over the immense living foundation below.

The analogy of a multi-storied house is very useful in understanding how it is that we can go against Nature if we forget that we are also part of Nature.

In 1952, Jung was interviewed by Ira Progoff, who asked if individuation didn’t always involve consciousness.

Jung replied, “Oh, that is an overvaluation of consciousness” and explained that individuation is the natural process by which a tree becomes a tree and a human a human; he said that consciousness can just as well interfere with the natural growth process as aid it.

Jung felt that Western consciousness was seriously one-sided in that it has expanded in the spatial dimension but not in the temporal, for we do not have a sense of living history.

Consciousness is a very recent acquisition, still quite fragile and easily disrupted.

Jung pointed out that, in the West, consciousness has been developed mainly through science and technology—not through art, social interaction, cultural development, or spirituality.

The unconscious has been left behind, and is thus in a defensive position. (Letters II, Page 81)

“We in the West have come to be highly disciplined, organized, and rational.

On the other hand, having allowed our unconscious personality to be suppressed, we are excluded from understanding primitive man’s civilization.

The more successful we become in science and technology, the more diabolical are the uses to which we put our inventions and discoveries. (C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews & Encounters, Page 397)

The cloning of life forms, the development of nuclear and laser weaponry, the surgical alteration of genders, and the genetic modification of food are some of the most recent “diabolical” discoveries we have come up with—without adequate consideration of their moral or psycho-social repercussions.

By focusing almost singularly on developments in the outer physical world, what we have neglected is ourselves, our own inner nature.

As Jung poignantly put it, “Nobody would give credit to the idea that the psychic processes of the ordinary man have any importance whatsoever.”
C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews & Encounters, Page 304)

We now witness increasingly unfortunate accidents that illustrate all too well the points Jung made about the dire consequences neglecting our own unconscious foundation can have: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and the Valdez spill were caused by individuals suffering from sleep deprivationgoing against Nature.

When Jung warns that the unconscious may rebel suicidally if it is put in an inhuman position, we need only think of these instances and the devastating consequences they have had.

Consciousness is a gift and could be used to go along with Nature, were we to align it in that direction.

Jung’s concern was that, as a very young species, we have an inflated idea of our own importance…

conclusion was that we have reached the limit of our evolution and can go no further until we attend not to the development of more consciousness, but to an unbiased understanding of all that we are:Discovery of the unconscious means an enormous spiritual task, which must be accomplished if we wish to preserve our civilization.”(Letters, I, Page 537)

Carl Jung: I am not concerned with what is “believable” but simply with what is knowable.

To Bernhard Martin

Dear Dr. Martin, 7 December 1954

It is very kind of you to submit your manuscript to me for an opinion.

I have taken the liberty of marking it with numbers in pencil where a change in the text seems necessary.

You “know” of that which is beyond the psyche only through belief, not through knowledge.

I do not write for believers who already possess the whole truth, rather for unbelieving but intelligent people who want to understand something.

Without the psyche you can neither know nor believe.

Therefore everything about which we can speak at all lies in the psychic realm; even the atom is in this sense a psychic model.

I grant you that the believer will learn nothing from my Answer to Job since he already has everything.

I write only for unbelievers.

Thanks to your belief, you know much more than I do.

Since my earliest youth I have been made to feel how rich and how knowing the believers are, and how disinclined even to listen to anything else.

I do not hesitate to admit my extreme poverty in knowing through believing, and would therefore advise you to shut my book with a bang and inscribe on the inside of the jacket: “Nothing here for the believing Christian” -a sentiment with which I am in complete agreement.

I am not concerned with what is “believable” but simply with what is knowable.

It seems to me that we are not in a position to “generate” or “uphold” belief, for belief is a charisma which God giveth or taketh away.

It would be presumptuous to imagine that we can command it at will.

For the sake of brevity my comments are rather direct and outspoken.

I hope you won’t mind this, but will see how different are the two planes on which the discussion is moving.

Without in any way impugning belief, I confine myself to its assertions.

As you see, I even take the highly controversial new dogma at its face value.

I do not consider myself competent to judge the metaphysical truth of these assertions; I only try to elucidate their content and their psychological associations.

The assertions are, as you yourself admit, anthropomorphic and therefore can hardly be considered reliable with respect to their metaphysical truth.

You as a believer take the stand that the proposition “God is” has as its inevitable corollary God’s Existence in reality, whereas Kant irrefutably pointed out long ago (in his critique of Anselm’s proof of God) that the little word “is” can denote no more than a “copula in the judgment.”

Other religions make equally absolute assertions, but quite different ones.

But as a psychologist on the one hand and a human being on the other I must acknowledge that my brother may be right too.

I do not belong to the elect and the beati possidentes of the sole truth, but must give fair consideration to all human assertions, even the denial of God.

So when you confront me as a Christian apologist you are standing on a different plane from me.

You cling to “believing is knowing,” and I must always be the loser because de fide non est disputandum any more than one can argue about taste.

One cannot argue with the possessor of the truth.

Only the seeker after truth needs to reflect, to inquire, to deliberate, for he admits that he does not know.

As a believer you can only dismiss me out of hand and declare that I am no Christian and what I say is useless, indeed harmful.

Well, gunpowder was a dangerous invention, but it also has its useful applications.

It is notorious that everything can be used for a good or a bad purpose.

Hence there was no valid reason for me to keep silence, quite apart from the fact that the present state of “Christendom” arouses a host of doubts in people’s minds.

As a doctor I have to provide the answers which for many of my patients are not forthcoming from the theologian.

I myself have politely requested the theologians to explain to me what the attitude of modern Protestantism is as regards the identity of the Old and the New Testament concept of God.

Two didn’t answer at all and the third said that nobody bothers any more about God-concepts nowadays.

But for the religious-minded person this is a matter of burning interest, which was one of my motives for
writing Answer to Job.

I would like to recommend Prof. Volz’s Das Daemonische in Jahwe to your attention, and as for the New Testament I pose the question: Is it necessary to placate a “loving Father” with the martyr’s death of his son?

What is the relation here between love and vindictiveness?

And what would I feel about it if my own father exhibited that kind of phenomenology?

Such are the questions of the unbelieving religious man for whom I write.

To him applies the amiable (predestinarian) principle of Matt. 13: 12: “Whosoever hath, to him shall be given,” etc.

But “illis non est datum,” these lost sheep of which another, equally authentic logion says that Christ was sent only to them.

Those who cannot believe would at least like to understand: “Putasne intelligis quae legis?” (Acts 8:30).

But understanding begins at the bottom of the mountain on top of which the believer sits.

He already knows everything much better and can therefore say: “Lord, I thank thee that I am not so dumb and ignorant as those down below, who want to understand” (cf. Luke 18:11).

I cannot anticipate a thing by believing it but must be content with my unbelief until my efforts meet with the grace of illumination, that is, with religious experience.

I cannot make-believe.

To conclude with an indiscreet question: Don’t you think that the angel of the Lord, wrestling with Jacob, also got a few hefty cuffs and kicks? (So much for my “scandalous” criticism of Yahweh!)

I know my Answer to Job is a shocker for which I ought to offer a civil apology (hence my motto).

Yours sincerely,

C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 197-199.

Carl Jung: It means an intensification and enhancement of life...

To Karl Kerenyi

Dear Professor Kerenyi, 12 July 1951

The rapid appearance and handsome format of Einfiihrung in die Mythologie came as a surprise.

It is pleasant to know that this book has now found its niche.

The experiences you are having will inevitably befall anyone who knowingly dips into the primordial world of eternal images.

He reaches beyond himself and bears out the truth of the old alchemist's saying: maior autem animae pars extra corpus est.

You are right : seen in relation to their archetypal background, banal dream-images are usually more instructive and of greater cogency than "mythologizing" dreams, which one always suspects are prompted by reading.

The case you report is very interesting: it is a consistent working out of the archetypal model.

I would be extremely interested to hear more details of your experiences sometime.

I can imagine that for a mythologist the collision with living archetypes is something quite special.

It was the same with me; only for me it was the encounter with mythology.

It means an intensification and enhancement of life-with a pensive side-glance at the genius vultumutabilis, albus et ater.

That the ripples of your life and work are spreading far and wide is in the highest degree gratifying and an occasion for hearty congratulation!

With very best regards,

Yours sincerely,

C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 19