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  • Queen, Mother, Wise Woman and Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Feminine

    Queen, Mother, Wise Woman and Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Feminine

    This article complements the concepts explored in my article “Archetypes of the Mature Masculine” and applies them to the other half of humanity—women. In doing so I apply the same principles, not in a mechanistic way, but in the spirit of Jung’s archetypes and their rationale. Let’s start with a few words of C. G. Jung himself, when he talks about the Anima.

    Feamaland Male Shadow Triangle
    Male Shadow Triangle Source: King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette

    Thomas Moore and Douglas Gillette adopted and extended Jung’s approach in their exploration of the masculine psyche by using the collective archetypes of the King, the Warrior, the Magician, and the Lover. Obviously those four male archetypes can be translated and mapped in female clusters of virtues, specific attributes associated with four major female archetypes: the Queen, the Mother, the Wise Woman and the (female) Lover found in history and  myths. This has been done before.

    Jean Shinoda Bolen, a Jungian psychiatrist, published in 1984 “Goddesses in Every Women: A New Psychology of Women”. She came up with seven feminine archetypes, based on ancient Greek mythology. Each Goddess represents a primordial image for women’s personality; they are: Hestia, Athena, Demeter, Aphrodite, Hera, Artemis, Persephone. Jennifer Baker and Roger J., Woolger in 1989 included only six of the Goddesses taking away Hestia. I think that is still a bit inflated, narrow and not powerful enough. I get lost on the many fairies and goddesses, and I miss the most powerful female Archetype – The Mother – of which C.G. Jung had written at great length.

    Toni Wolff, colleague and presumable lover of Carl Jung, identified four feminine archetypes:  Mother, the Amazon, the Hetaira, and the Medial.  Wolff at the first glance comes closer, but her model is a male-centered quadruple (male Anima structure) instead a male-female archetype symmetry: This is most evident in Wolff’s definition of the Amazon, who represents more a female in good contact with  her Animus, furthermore the semi-divine Queen is missing, while her Hetaira is not quite a full lover.

    Emma Jung, the wife of C.G. Jung, wrote two very concise papers about Animus and Anima. Those two functional complexes represent symmetrically the personality component of the opposite sex and, at the same time the image of the opposite sex. By their fundamental nature, Animus and Anima symbolize primal masculinity and femininity in general. In other words, the Anima figures represent the archetype of the feminine. Emma Jung gives various narratives of the Great Mother like Cybele, of Prophetess and the Love Goddess and animal or mixed human-animal semi-goddess motives like the swan-maiden in the Edda. Emma Jung refers to her husband, stating the male archetype is the one of meaning and the female archetype primarily of life. And indeed, life as such to me is about birth and death – between is wisdom, spirituality and individuation (redemption), if one is unlucky only staring at the Dow Jones.

    To me the reproductive Mother archetype is not only neatly symmetrical to the destructive warrior archetype, it is definitely a primary one. No individual is completely masculine or feminine though, good or evil, right or wrong. Tyrants and Weaklings for instance represent an imbalance, a shadow or missing quality of power, a failure to employ virtues, and a negative female Archetype drains away all male energy. Females in myths representing the Anima appear often in multiples e.g. three or nine like the Nordic Valkyries. Quadruple qualities, however, take later in account the important (particularly for C.G. Jung) number four. A quadruple seen by C.G. Jung might be thought of as the cross, a mantra or cardinal points that must be balanced in the fully realized being.

    Archetypes

    C.G. Jung totally differs from Sigmund Freud and most of his colleagues in that he thought (wo)men as “homo religious”. Freud’s deep fear of spiritualism was rooted in his urge, to establish psychoanalysis as science. Jung’s own approach to religion was complex, unorthodox, and open to the speculative ranging from affinity to Catholicism and Eastern thoughts to gnosis and alchemy. He recognized and valued collective cultural patterns (archetypes) but also individual enlightenment or at least development to find a person’s whole being (individuation).  He felt those were dismissed by modern positivistic science and political systems which recognizes only the material world and denies or claim any spiritual dimension (totalitarian systems with personal cult).
    The acceptance of the spiritual dimension allows us to understand holistic a person, society, cooperation —the complex of (conscious and unconscious) beliefs, attributes, and virtues that defines that entity.  Key to this understanding is Jung’s concept of the archetype. According to Jung, “The concept of the archetype is derived from the repeated observation that, for instance, the religious myths and fairytales of world literature contain many symbols which are manifestations of those archetypes”. There is a good book from his former assistant Jolande Jacobi about archetype, symbols and complexes to clarify Jung’s slight ambiguity using those terms over his lifetime.

    Proposed set of female Archetypes

    Significantly, female in myth and art can serve as vehicles for both the understanding and the modeling of these female archetypes. Jung’s theoretical framework of the human psyche follows Taoist principles and is remarkably symmetrical; the extrovert is balanced by the introvert; the material outer world by the inner world, the masculine principle—the Animus (Yang within the Yin) — is balanced by the feminine principle, the Anima (Yin within the Yang). Jung also favored strongly the number four and following Jung’s idea of the complementarity of opposites, a similar foursome archetype can be identified and used to provide a foundation for the understanding of the unique qualities that characterize the female psyche.

    All four representations of the archetypes have one positive (right amount – fullness) and 2 negative poles (deficit or surplus). For example, the positive lover archetype embraces the world with passion whereas the negative poles are the seductive (or promiscuous) lover and the frigid (or selfish) lover. One can see every woman (or girl) somewhere between these three extremes.

    • The Queen is the semi-divine leader responsible for the safety and well being. History and art have shown that every society must have not only a wise leader who is entrusted with guiding his people to success and comfort but navigate in unknown territory towards redemption. The responsibilities of the Queen are mainly on the unconscious side, but worldly benefits and virtues must be many as well. And if the Queen fails in her duties she is traditionally disposed and evil prevails. Her shadow sides are tyrant and weakling both disposing male energies.
    • The Mother is like the Warrior today the most controversial of the archetypes, because of  ideological former and current stereotypes. The two male (warrior) shadow sides are the Sadist and the Masochist. The Mother is a life giver who maintains humanity as the warrior clears the space for renewal and change. The prototype of the mother is, well – the mother.  But there are shadows here too – the careless and the devouring mother.
    • The Wise Woman, represents Logos according to Jung a feminine principle, is the archetype behind a multitude of professions like doctors, but also lawyers, teachers and priests. She sees the unseen. She is the prophetess, mediator and communicator of secret knowledge, the healer, counselor, teacher, and spiritual. The Wise Woman always has a tendency to abuse her power, being the negative , the witch.
    • The Lover like the feminine principle Eros manifests energy and fertility of the nature. The gendering of Eros and Logos and synergy is a consequence of Jung’s anima/animus synergy. Lovers are at ease with our own deepest and most central values and visions. And only through union of the feminine and the masculine our culture and personality prospers and grows. The “me- society” of the impotent is sterile and without compassion and destroys any spiritual dimension.

    All these roles could be fulfilled by one person. The shaman as a holistic archetype has the King’s capacity to lead, the Mother’s capacity to care and the Lover’s capacity to value someone or something enough to fight.

    C_G_JUNG_FEMALE_ARCHETYPES
    C_G_JUNG_FEMALE_ARCHETYPES Copyright @fallenangel, permission to mirror on fair usage policy with reference to owner.

    Despite the visible presence of men in political power and economic power in various cultures, social and hidden political power has been disproportionately exercised by women. Western culture has its religious sources in the Jewish-Semitic and the Greco-Roman political and philosophical traditions and of course Christianity. They were distinctly patriarchal on the outside, but quietly influenced by women. The success of Christianity was mostly based on  reaching out to females essentially with ancient female archetypes. Christianity entered the drama of ancient life—and, in particular, Roman urban culture—rather late in the play. Savvy architects with great insight —not to mention foresight— understood  ancient female archetypes as critical success factor for the spectacular growth rate of Christianity. If you look at the gospels and apocrypha  and the early church, you find little patriarchy at all. I have written here in my “Jungian journey through a land of heretics and Mary Magdalene” how vivid the archetypes of lover (Mary Magdalene), mother ( Holy Mary)  and wise women were.

    In the Western, Eastern and Orthodox political, religious, and economic spheres, however, the majority of kings has been male. In those cases, where women have been called upon to lead empires, they have exercised male-like leadership, even literally assuming a male role. Nonetheless, most cultures, including Hindu and Buddhist regarded women’s roles in the family highly. Tribal societies, of course dominated by the male Warrior archetype, have integrated the original matriarchal social system in parallel. All of these cultural frameworks employ both powerful male and female symbolism. Honor and respect is not enough. However. It is quite ironic, that in such a geographic proximity, there were major civilization, one as Egypt, which thrived on freedom for women for almost two thousand years, and others, predominantly some Muslim context, because having been much more restrictive of female freedom, have arguably suffered distinctive social and economic disadvantages, but gaining now not only demographically for this very reason.

    The Queen – Power

    The Faerie, the Goddesses—The Great Mother, the Wise Woman and the female Lover are found within the secondary C.G. Jung literature and in feminist and/or New Age books Goddesses are everywhere. Not so the Mother and only as a recent addition the Queen. As is the case with her male counterpart, the King, the Queen is the most holistic and temporal (worldly) of the female archetypes. But also the most simple to map to the Moore model. There have been weak and evil Queens and Kings at all times. The image of Queen serves as a center for the mature ordering of things; it includes and transcends the other archetypes of the Feminine. Ideally, all “leading” human would, to a greater or lesser degree, embody the ideal King or Queen. Now it  is evident, that the “Good King” in the temporal realm is an archetype of a good statesman. But recently we have many female leaders of the state. The acceptance is with ease, but they reflect more often an archetype of the Mother than of the Queen. One female politician’s nickname is even  “mom” and this is uttered in the context of the cold cruel mother. Why those symbols can be created so easily? Because, as we see below, all this female archetypes were here for thousands of years. Tell me what calendar (lunar, solar, event) you have and I can tell in which archetypical context you live (open or hidden). As societies moved from pre-historic to complex civilizations, their calendar system adopted from nature and weather calendars to direct observation and lastly to calculated calendars (see here). In these transitions, the switch from lunar calendars to solar calendars (pure solar, lunar-solar or solar-lunar) represented changing dominance of male or female archetypes (see here).

    The Queen
    The Queen

    In former times, the worldly Queen was also a priest, warrior and mother – sometimes even the ultimate archetype, the Self or goddess. It was rare, but did happen. One example, born in the 15th century BC, Hatshepsut, daughter of Tuthmose I and Aahmes, both of royal lineage, gained the throne upon the death of her father. To have a female Pharaoh was unprecedented. Although there were no wars during her reign, she proved her sovereignty being a master politician, and an elegant stateswoman with enough charisma to keep control of an entire country for twenty years.  In all, Hatshepsut accomplished what no woman had before her. She ruled the most powerful, advanced civilization in the world, successfully, for twenty years. Another  example, the mother and the father of a family would model them. In those not so rare cases where women become leaders of nations, the archetypical Queen may take visible form, wise or foolish, caring or cruel. Just as the King is not born as a King, but must start life as a divine child, so does the Queen. A powerful embodiment of this archetype is the Pharaoh, like in Egypt were those roles merged. Another example is Nefertiti, who oversaw the first semi-monetheistic attempt. Here the Queen Nefertiti and the Heretic Pharaoh Akhenaten became a mediator to an all-powerful God abstraction, the source of complete cosmic power – the sun (see here) and below.  As is true of her male counterpart, the Queen was the symbol for the leader of a nation as divine couple. However, all the essential attributes of the archetype of the Queen are present in any real woman wherever she plays a leading (if only herself) role, regardless of the scope her real responsibilities—be she queen of an empire, a nation, a clan, or her own family.

    The Mother – Creator

    This is the one archetype that is distinctly different for male and female development. Just as the Warrior is the most natural complement to the King and embodies a set of virtues that are necessary to defend the Kingdom, the Great Mother is the most natural complement to Queenship – and the King. The explosive, destructive energy of the  male Warrior archetype is balanced by the reproductive energy of the female Mother archetype. This is most evident in Kali-Ma the terrible mother. The Hindu religion has a myriad of Gods and Goddesses  and the most revered Goddess is Kali. She is usually pictured wearing a necklace of skulls and girdle of human hands, dancing on the body of her consort, Shiva. In many attributes the Mother clearly complements the Warrior. Wagner’s Valkyries, those tough maidens who took worthy fallen warriors to Valhalla also served as sources of inspiration for heroic action. Just as the Warrior appears most fully when he gives himself over to death in an act of self-denial, the Mother appears most fully when she gives birth. Warriors take life, Mothers give life. This is the source of her power. Both places them outside any human power; thus, she has the power to inspire, to create. Kali, in this aspect is said to be “The hungry earth, which devours its own children and fattens on their corpses.

    The great and cruel mother
    The great and cruel mother

    But the Mother archetype is also the symbol of all that is fair, all that is beautiful, all that transcends material existence. These concepts are not merely ornamental niceties, but are at the very center of Being. Indeed, in their mythological thinking, the Ancient Greeks recognized the importance of Skills in their concept of the Nine Muses—each the inspiration and source of such humane gifts as poetry, music, and history.  In their philosophical thinking, the Greeks recognized Beauty is an essential attribute of the Absolute Good. The Mothers’ virtues are intangible and ethereal; they often had been be self-sacrificial.  Consider the holy Mary and the real-life women who have embodied legions of Virgin-Martyrs venerated by the early Church attest to the power of the self-sacrificing, inspirational but unreachable mother. As a powerful archetype the “feminine” aspect the Mother come up in the Christian quadruple  conception of the Holy Mother.

    Like all archetypes, the Mother can appear as a shadow, the distant and cruel mother. Like any shadow, the cruel mother is not bad or evil. The cruel mother energy links  itself to the male archetype counterpart the warrior. Both are associated with death and destruction – actual physical death.  For instance the Hindu goddess Kali embodies a cruel mother, whose destruction is in the service of creation.

    The enigmatic chief queen Nefertiti (Neferneferuaten) of Akhenaten’s (Echnaton) is the most mysterious and interesting of all the ancient Egyptian queen and an example of a possessive mother symbol. Little is known about her and his overpowering mother Tiye  influence on the androgynous Pharaoh, who brought down the Egyptian empire with his daring cultural and religious revolution (see here).  After a few loving years, in which the couple celebrated publicly family life with six children, they separated. Close to her end, she reacted again, as it is believed that Nefertiti sent a frantic letter to the Hittite King Suppiluliumas after Tutankhamun died, begging the longtime enemy of Akhenaten and Egypt, for a marriage with one of his sons.

    cybele
    cybele

    In one of the oldest cults imported into Rome, the Great Mother Cybele’s major attributes was, that she protected people at war and, as such, was often shown wearing a crown of city walls symbolizing the defense she offered adherents. Also, as an earth-mother deity in origin, she bestowed fertility and governed creatures of the wild—ancient portraits show her riding in a chariot pulled by lions—and in both aspects she appealed to the Roman public whose lifestyle was still, for the most part, agrarian. Besides that, her powers included the ability to cure disease and predict the future, making Cybele an all-purpose deity if ever there was. I have written here about the  clash of male and female Archetypes in classical Rome. She was an ancient fertility goddess whose worship is thought to have spread from Anatolia to Greece in the Archaic period (c. 800-500 BC) and mysterious rites were performed in the name of Cybele — as they were for the other earth mother type goddesses, like Demeter and Isis. It is worth to note the ambiguity, which makes it possible to align many female mother archetypes with the lover and the warrior but not the queen.

    The Wise Women – Spirituality

    I like to think that psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein a woman in the shadow of C. G. Jung and Sigmund Freud (see here), resembles the archetype of the Wise Woman or Queen (in exile). The archetype of the Wise Women inhabits not ethereal regions where all appears as bright and luminous, the Wise Women inhabits like the magician the shadows. She is at home near the earth, even inside the earth, inside the dark, moist, primordial womb, the source of all fertility. The Wise One is no longer young. She started as precious child, but is mature now, rooted. She is likely to be old. Like a priest, she may have even loved, but she has now transcended all sexuality and reproductivity and has reached a state of superior wisdom.

    The Wise Women
    The Wise Women

    Also in contrast to her male counterpart—the Magician— a non spiritual mind seeks not to penetrate beneath the surface of things and probe the mysteries of nature, rather, she looks inward into the mysteries of Being. This earthly knowledge extends to the body and more specifically to the very distinct realities of the female body, with its mysteries of fertility and procreation. Women who knew this much were much respected and feared. Mary Magdalene might be one of the wise women, Kassandra was one and in a way every midwife. Male resented them and worldly institutions persecuted this source of feminine power because it lay out of their control.  Antigone was one The mortal daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta she openly defied her evil uncle King Creon to bury her brother, Polydices. Creon sentenced her to be buried alive. Many Wise Women were later  accused of being “witches”.Saint Augustine of Hippo, the most influential Christian theologian argued around 400 AD that, neither Satan nor witches had supernatural powers and only pagan can believe this. In 1208, however, Pope Innocent III opened an attack on Cathar dualistic heretics who believed in a world in which God and Satan, both having supernatural powers, in a perpetual war. Many adherents of this secret dualistic sect had migrated into Germany and the Savoy where the first witch hunt started. It was natural for both Wise women and Magician, to seek separation from the world, but being a single woman – especially with low status and without children, was a major source of suspicion. Their quest for special knowledge requires long hours of solitude for study and reflection. Most often, both become a seer, an adviser. The Queen of Sheba, one of the most famous figures in the Bible visited King Solomon in Jerusalem after hearing of his great wisdom. According to legend, King Solomon was not only the wisest man in the land, but he also had magical abilities and could command demons. The Queen of Sheba tests Solomon’s wisdom, asking him many questions and giving him riddles to solve. He answers to her satisfaction and then he teaches her about his god Yahweh and she becomes a follower. The two most famous queens of Egypt Hatshepsut and Nefertiti  were also high priests and Wise One’s. Another powerful and inspiring embodiment of the archetype of the Wise One outside Christianity, is the gnostic Figure of Sophia.

    Sophia__Wisdom
    Sophia__Wisdom

    As equally powerful Christian archetype the “feminine” aspect the Wise Women come up in the Christian Trinitarian conception of the Holy Spirit. Who is Sophia? Literally, she is Wisdom, because the Greek word Sophia means “wisdom” in English. More than that, she has been revered as the Wise Bride of Solomon by Jews, as the Queen of Wisdom and War (Athena) by Greeks, and as the Holy Spirit of Wisdom by Christians. Solomon was considered to be married to Sophia. One of the many layers of symbolism attributed to the Song of Songs (also known as Song of Solomon or Canticle of Canticles) is that it speaks of Solomon’s marriage to Holy Sophia. Sophia surfaced in the Eastern Christian tradition with the construction of the Hagia Sophia cathedral in Constantinople (converted to a Mosque 1453 and today a Muslim museum in Istanbul). Sophia has survived in the West today, in the form of Gnosticism. Sophia plays a very active role in Jung’s Answer to Job (Hiob), where she also completes  Quaternity.

    Lover – Eros

    The fourth archetype of the mature feminine is the Lover, or Eros. The Lover is a life-affirming and sometimes hedonistic archetype which dislikes rigid order and sterile knowledge. But without love, without compassion those are nothing. I would argue that self-sacrifice belongs there too. The lover energy, arising as it does from the Oedipal child, is the source of spirituality and fertility. It is the attachment of the child to the parent of the opposite sex, accompanied by envious and aggressive feelings toward the parent of the same sex.

    The Sin Adam and Eve
    The Lover

    A powerful female mythological archetypical lover complex runs deep in Eastern and Western Civilizations. In the cradle of civilization, it started with Astarte and Ishtar. Some scholars hold Astarte was a prototype of the Virgin Mary. Their theory is based on the ancient Syrian and Egyptian rituals of celebrating Astarte’s rebirth of the solar god on December 25th. Other counterparts are Isis of Egypt, Kali of India, and Aphrodite and Demeter of Greece and Venus of Rom. In China you have the archetype of the Green Snake and White Snake and the holistic archetype of Tao, which to me is the perfect example of the Self, integrating female and male love..

    Thus, the Lover intrudes powerfully into humanity’s collective consciousness and enthusiastic, connects with followers, inspiring them to accomplish the difficult deeds. The intoxication of love opens an alternate reality with its own truths which separates those in the grip of the Lover from mundane concerns. Thus, as is the case with the male Lover, the female Lover gains enormous powers of transcendence, but she, and he, are subjected to “the other” and therefore lack the freedom of the other archetypes. This is the power and limitation of the hierosgamos—the cosmic marriage of opposites. Without Jesus, our life would be meaningless, incomprehensible; Jesus explains our life. Joan of Arc, whose last recorded words before she was burnt at the stake were: “I pray you, go to the nearest church, and bring me the cross, and hold it up level with my eyes until I am dead. I would have the cross on which God hung be ever before my eyes while life lasts in me. Jesus, Jesus!” It appears again that the Lover archetype is essential. Of course, there is also the dark story of Salome, the infamous daughter of Kind Herod, has fascinated many painters for centuries. Paintings of her equally infamous dance with John the Baptist’s head evoke a sensual, evocative atmosphere.Salome’s story first appears as a fragment in the New Testament Gospel of Mark, where she dances in exchange for the head of John the Baptist on a silver charger, at her mother’s behest. In the Gospel version, the burden of wickedness thus falls upon Salome’s mother, Herodias, and Salome’s virtue remains ambiguous.

    salome-with-the-head-of-st-john-the-baptist
    salome-with-the-head-of-st-john-the-baptist

    Salome dances as a femme fatale for her stepfather, Herod Antipas, defying Herodias. The beheading of the Baptist is Salome’s own idea, for which she will pay with her own ghastly death. Nevertheless, John, the Evangelist, comes to prepare the way of Messiah with a new gospel of love, succeeds in coaxing the Judean princess to a personal epiphany, for the soul of Salome is not the same fetid sink as her mother’s. “Speak again,” Salome exhorts him, “Thy voice is as music to mine ear…. Speak again…and tell me what I must do.” But just when a prophet’s wisdom might have done some good, John is out of ideas, saying: “I will not look at thee. Thou art accursed, Salome….”

    Conclusion

    What can we learn from the examination of the archetypes of the mature feminine ? First, female like male, in order to fulfill their wholeness properly, would do well to embody the best qualities represented by all of their archetypes. When men and women do this, they model these archetypes inspire both of them on the path of virtue and spirituality. The archetypes are viable because they furnish us with a short-cut, an intuitive way to grasp the essence of a group of attributes that connects directly with the unconscious mind. Instead of patient intellectual analysis of each individual attribute of leadership, the ethos of each archetype is immediately accessible through a complex of cultural pattern which are instantly recognized even trans-cultural. These archetypes are emotional and spiritual pictures that have an immediate effect on individuals and groups. This effect is readily apparent when one compares the phrase “The Good King” with “a King who is good, strong, wise, just and so on”. The first phrase is incomparably richer in context and seems “alive” compared to a list of adjectives to describe a particular King. It evokes an instant visual image that has an immediate appeal. This is why the old Greek epics, the Bibles stories and Wagner’s opera are so powerful.

    Archetypes – actually “archetypes per se”- are, are cultural patterns and by their very nature, are universal and here to stay. Like the physical heritage, stored in our genes, cultural patterns are saved in our collective consciousness. They can be invoked or forgotten, or even suppressed. But even in materialistic, matriarchal or patriarchal cultures, that are hostile to spirituality, to the male. or the feminine, archetypes cannot forever be suppressed. Once more, external like internal suppression of archetypes is a case of too much, or of too little, of a needed cultural model for humanity to survive and for the individual to live a meaningful life. However, archetypes can be invoked as symbols any time — hence their power to manipulate, to motivate, to influence. There is much to contemplate in these archetypes which can be mapped with political, mythic and culture examples. The self-evident interpretation and its usefulness is overwhelmingly convincing.

    Women should be aware of her animus and thus with the aspects of the four male archetypes and for men to mature, they must meet and integrate their anima and learn from the four female archetypes. How does it look in your family or relationship? Suppression of an archetype only results in denial of attributes and spiritual resources that we, as humans, need. If one comes to terms with the Shadow and the Soul, one will encounter the enchanted castle with its King and Queen. This is a pattern of wholeness and individuation. The opposites of the outer and the inner life are now joined in marriage. Great power arises from this integration. Be aware of pretended or real archetypes in the public realm. For example, look at your (male or female) politicians: Does one of them have the virtues of those positive archetypes?

    Looking beyond herself, women should care how and if divine couple symbols (syzygy images) are invoked. Pharaoh and his Queen, Christ and the Church, God and Israel are syzygy images. Do we still have Divine Couples (Syzygy) and Divine Triads in the spiritual realm? The believer who aspires to be the “bride of Christ” is modeling his or her experience in response to the syzygy archetype. Next our hope is from the Child Archetype, a pattern with a promise of new beginnings. The birth of the Christ Child who unites Heaven and Earth, God became Man and God, is one of those powerful archetype creating a triad. Triads, like for example the Egyptian triad of Isis, Osiris and Horus are predecessors symbols of the Trinity. When the Mother Archetype joined the Holy Trinity Jung’s Quaternity was formed.

    What I am trying to say in a nutshell, is this: Good Kings (and Queens) need to encompass two Quaternities. Not only take care of your own set archetypes, which enhances your temporal virtues, we need also to understand our opposite sex archetypes – of our Animus or our Anima. According to C.G. Jung this will lead you to our Shadow, and if we integrate the Shadow, that opens us to our Self – the divine in us – or at least a communication path to it. God or goddesses are both holistic and androgen. The yin yang symbol from ancient China represents the belief that everything in the universe consists of two forces that are opposing but in need for each other. The Great Mother Cybele was Mother (in a narrow sense) and Warrior symbol.

    Copyright 2011-2014 stottilien.com – Text and illustrations may be used indicating stottilien.com ownership.

    Bibliography Links

    • Emma Jung. Animus and Anima – Two Papers
    • STRUKTURFORMEN DER WEIBLICHEN PSYCHE wolff Structural forms of the Feminine psyche (http://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00001582/00001)
    • C.G. Jung Four Archetypes (Routledge Classics)
    • C. G. Jung Archetypen (dtv, Bd. 11)
    • King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette (Aug 16, 1991)
    • Tao Te Ching The idea of the Ying-Yang duality
    • Jacobi, Jolande, Die Psychologie von C. G. Jung – Eine Einführung in das Gesamtwerk, mit einem Geleitwort von C. G. Jung [Gebundene Ausgabe]
    • Jacobi, Jolande, Complex/Archetype/Symbol in the Psychology of C.G. Jung (Bollingen Series) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]
    • Theologische Aspekte der Tiefenpsychologie von C. G. Jung (Patmos-Paperback) (German Edition) by Herbert Unterste (1977)
    • Mandala: Bilder aus dem Unbewussten (German Edition) [Hardcover] 2.Auflage Olten 1977
    • Jung, C. G., Jaffé, A. (1962): Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken von C. G. Jung. Aufgezeichnet und herausgegeben von Aniela Jaffé. Olten: Walter
    • Jung, C. G., Kerényi, K. (1951): Einführung in das Wesen der Mythologie. Zürich: Rhein
    • C. G. Jung Grundausgabe CW 18

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  • Burning Ahmed Baba and Alexandrian library – Is Sufism haram?

    Burning Ahmed Baba and Alexandrian library – Is Sufism haram?

    Books burning in fire

    Islamists in Mali destroyed a number of Sufism tombs in the ancient city of Timbuktu, which in the last year fell under control of a separatist insurgency. Home of the prestigious Sankore University, Timbuktu was an intellectual and spiritual capital and a centre for the propagation of Sufism (an Islam faction) throughout Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries. Its three great mosques, Djingareyber, Sankore and Sidi Yahia, recall Timbuktu’s golden age. “The destruction is a divine order,” said a spokesman from Ansar Dine, a radical outfit with alleged links to al-Qaeda. Ansar Dine  or “defenders of the faith” in Arabic is group led by a prominent leader of the Tuareg rebellion in the 1990s which wants the imposition of strict Sharia law across Mali.The Associated Press Posted Jan 28, 2013 @ 07:32 AMSEVARE, Mali (AP) — Islamist extremists torched a library containing historic manuscripts in Timbuktu, the mayor said today, as French and Malian forces closed in on Mali’s fabled desert city. 

    All of this is haram

    According to BBC the “spokesman” went on: “God is unique. All of this is haram (forbidden in Islam). We are all Muslims. Unesco is what?” According to reports, the militants teared down the centuries-old mausoleums of Muslim holy men in Timbuktu. As many as half of the city’s shrines have been destroyed in a display of fanaticism. When driven out of Timbuktu by the French, the leaving “activists” burned down the Ahmed Baba library which is a real tragedy, because so much of Sufi and African history, literature and learning was lost forever. Build by the South African government in 2009, the Ahmed Baba Institute was named after a Timbuktu-born scholar and held thousands of priceless manuscripts in its climate-controlled, underground vaults. Ancient books of culture, geography, science are now all torched up 20,000 scholarly manuscripts lost.

    Memories come up when in March 2001, Taliban fighters and grandees blew up the famed giant 6th century statues of the Buddha in Afghanistan.The Taliban also rampaged through the national museum which I visted in the seventies, smashing any art depicting the human form, considered idolatrous under their hardline interpretation of Islam. In all, they destroyed about 2,500 statues. Or of the final destruction of the ancient world’s single greatest archive of knowledge, the Library of Alexandria, which was burned down by Caliph Omar 640 AD when the Muslims took the city of Alexandria. Upon learning of “a great library containing all the knowledge of the world” the conquering general supposedly asked Caliph Omar for instructions. The Caliph has been quoted as saying of the Library’s holdings, “they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous.”  It is somewhat ironic that Alexandria was the center of Monophysitism, a Christian heresy  weakening Byzantine and Roman power.

    Ignorance

    Too many critics of Islam, including atheists, fail to appreciate just how diverse and varied Islam can be, much more than Christianity. This is especially true when it comes to Wahhabi Islam, the primary religious movement in Saudi Arabia. Saudis are aligned with the West to bring down all somewhat secular dictatorships in the region. In the puritanical strain of Islam adhered by most radical Sunni (like Taliban and Salafists) but also fundamentakist Shiites, veneration of Sufi saints – which remind on Christian saints – counts as idolatry a heretical practice that cannot be tolerated. It is against modernity, secularism, and the Enlightenment which orthodox Islam do fight — and it is this anti-secularism, anti-modernism which helps drive extremism, even to the point of cultural terrorism. Militants bearing guns, pickaxes and shovels reduced to rubble the tomb of Sidi Mahmoud, who died in 955 A.D. They have also knocked down tombs of two other prominent medieval saints, Sidi Moctar and Alpha Moya.

    Who controls the history controls the future
    Who controls the history controls the future

    Both South Africa and the Libya of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi were involved in efforts to revive the fortunes of the ancient city and its artifacts. South African researchers involved in a project to preserve the Timbuktu manuscripts have had word that most of the treasures survived in private libraries and secure locations.Mohamed Mathee of the University of Johannesburg told  a News Channel, “It seems most of the manuscripts are OK. These manuscripts are with families and are safe.”  All those events in the new millennium have highlighted that we are today’ in a ideological war is fought with more than just weapons – just as Samuel Huntington has written in his a powerful and disturbing book in the late nineties.

    International outrage with little understanding of the Islam has been swift to blame “Islamists”. But beyond understanding history (and Islam) better, there’s little anyone can do to stop this wretched bout of iconoclasm. History is littered with the debris of toppled temples and smashed idols. Salafists and others who also believe in a more orthodox brand of Sunni Islam harbor a particular animosity toward Sufism, whose mystical interpretation of the divine affords a more heterodox faith, steeped sometimes in local pre-Islamic traditions and a reverence for saints and deceased wise men. Islam, as it spread outside the Arabian world, did so in some part through the peaceful teachings of Sufi orders and wandering monks — not just under the hooves of conquering Arab armies. Yet, recently under the Arab Spring, Sufi shrines have come under attack from emboldened and radicalized puritans in countries like Egypt and Libya by Muslim brotherhood and Salafist; in Pakistan, the Taliban and its affiliates have waged a sectarian war on Sufis, systematically targeting dozens of tombs and Sufi sites, while killing hundreds of devotees. In Persia the orthodox Shiites did not much less harm.
    The many holy places and old libraries of Timbuktu, once a prominent center of Islāmic learning in the 15th and 16th centuries, were preserved for centuries as a result of the city’s remote location on the path of now collapsed salt and gold-trade routes. In single-minded devotion to the word of the Koran, the orthodox Islam cares little for the juridical wisdom of generations of Timbuktu’s theologians who critically examined Islam’s founding holy text. The attack on Timbuktu’s cultural heritage is just one more attack against history and the values it carries — values of tolerance, exchange and living together. It is an attack against the physical evidence about the Islam’s majority livelong struggle against freedom, science and mysticism.

    Wisdom

    The Ahmed Baba Institute had nearly 30,000 manuscripts, which are being studied, catalogued and preserved. Four basic types have survived:

    • key texts of Islam, including Korans, collections of Hadiths (actions or sayings of the Prophet), Sufi texts and devotional texts
    • works of the Maliki school of Islamic law
    • texts representative of the ‘Islamic sciences’, including grammar, mathematics and astronomy
    • original works from the region, including contracts, commentaries, historical chronicles, poetry, and marginal notes and jottings, which have proved to be a surprisingly fertile source of historical data.

    Some manuscripts themselves are also of special importance to their owners to prove noble descent or land and property ownership. But they are also proof of Africa’s pre-Islamic culture, which the Islam claimed (and radical despise) like any culture Islam took over and claimed of its own.

    According to the 17th-century historian Abdurrahman As-Sadi, the history of the West African desert region could be divided into the rise and fall of three great empires – ancient Ghana, medieval Mali and the Songhay empire. Located at a hub of commercial exchange between Saharan Africa, tropical Africa and Mediterranean Africa, Timbuktu was a magnet that attracted both men of learning and men of commerce. It benefited from the gold trade , however, the most profitable trade items in Timbuktu were books. Buying them was considered a socially acceptable way of displaying wealth and a great source of prestige.  As the empire of Ghana declined, the Mali empire took its place. King Sundiata Keita of Mali conquered ancient Ghana in AD 1240, and two generations later, Islam became the dominant religion of the Malian cities and Arabic became the language of scholarship. Described as the ‘Latin of Africa’, Arabic was useful for communicating between tribes such as the Bambara, Fulani, Hausa, Mossi, Songhay and Tuareg who all spoke different languages. Just as Latin in medieval Europe was associated with Christianity, Arabic in medieval Africa was associated with Islam, and just as Europeans adopted the Latin script to write their own languages, Africans used the Arabic script to write theirs.

    Mali became indepdent 1960
    Mali became indepdent 1960

    The Sankoré University mosque was built in about AD 1300 with funding from a woman of the Aghlal, a religious Tuareg ethnic group. There were a number of challenges to Malian hegemony. ‘The Tuaregs began to raid and cause havoc on all sides. The Malians, bewildered by their many depredations, refused to make a stand against them.’ Mali lost control of Timbuktu in 1433. Once a tributary to the Mali empire, the Songhay became independent as Mali declined.  The gold traders and the scholars of Timbuktu were also treated harshly and many fled. Timbuktu benefited under the reign of the Askiya kings by tax and slavery privileges and rose to intellectual dominance in the region.  The Sankoré University mosque was the main teaching venue  but classes were also taught at the Great Mosque and at the Oratory of Sidi Yahia. Public libraries were established and employed calligraphers to copy books.

    Timbuktu was also a religious city. According to a West African proverb: ‘Salt comes from the north, gold from the south and silver from the country of the white men, but the word of God and the treasures of wisdom are only to be found in Timbuktu.’ There is a local legend that the city is guarded by 333 renowned saints as well as numerous lesser ones, and surrounding Timbuktu like a rampart are the chapels where the saints are buried. Saints and chapels are of course an anathema to orthodox Islam. According to the Sufis, a saint is a Muslim mystic, usually a scholar, who has achieved such closeness to God as to possess special powers.

    Ahmed Baba

    Ahmed Baba, the Sufi scholar after whom the burned down library was named, studied Arabic grammar and syntax, astronomy, logic, rhetoric and prosody. Textbooks were purchased and copied on a number of subjects, including astronomy, astrology, botany, dogma, geography, Islamic law, literary analysis, mathematics (including calculus and geometry), medicine, mysticism, morphology, music, rhetoric, philosophy, and occult sciences. The works of the Greek astronomer Ptolemy were basic references for Islamic astronomy. The Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle were also common. The Greek physician Hippocrates was popular, as well as the Persian medical philosopher-scholar Avicenna. The Timbuktu manuscripts mainly comprise Korans, Koranic exegesis, collections of Hadiths, writings on Sufism, theology, law and other closely related disciplines. By the 15th century, Timbuktu scholars were producing original works as well as compiling new versions and commentaries on established texts. The reading and writing of poetry was important in these cultures. Among the Timbuktu documents are verses devoted to the Prophet and to the adoration of a particular woman or man, and poems.  A number of manuscripts were written in Ajami – Arabic script used to write local languages – with botany, diplomatic correspondence, occult sciences, poetry and traditional medicine.

    Sufism

    There are three main branches of Islam – Sunni, Shiite and Sufi. Sunnis make up about 85 percent of the Muslim population globally, while Shiites account for about 15 percent. The two split over differences of who should succeed the Prophet Muhammad but are further subdivided.

    • Sunni follows a strict, literal interpretation of the Quran and the life of Muhammad with the Sunna as core teaching. Wahhabism is an austere form of Sunni dominant in Saudi Arabia for which Muslims more often use the term Salafism.
    • Shiism is the smaller of the two major branches of Islam. It developed after the death of Muhammad, when his followers split over who would lead Islam.
    • Sufism  is an Islamic mystic tradition with followers around the world. Sufis tend to identify with either Sunni or Shiite Islam. Many Muslims are critical of Sufism as an unjustified innovation.
    Shia Faction of IslamSunni Faction of IslamSufis/Sufism
    10-15% of all MuslimsMajority of Muslims 
    Shia means “faction,” refers to “faction of Ali.”Sunni means “tradition,” adheres to orthodox traditionSuf means “wool,” considered the Mystics of Islam.
    Iran center and home of most Shia, 88% of Iranians are Shia (Shi’i), In Iraqi 96% are Muslim and over 50% of them are Shia (Shi’i), though Iraq was ruled by minority Sunnis. Reverse Syria if you consider Alawis (12er ) to be Shiites.Grew out of Umayyad dynasty. World-wide 85% of Muslims are Sunni.Developed in reaction against the excesses of the Sultans and Caliphs (who wore silks, satins), specifically the Caliphate of Damascus in the Umayyad dynasty, Sufis wore course wool garments in protest.
    Succession and Leadership
    Believe in Ali and the Imams as rightful successors of Muhammad, but not in first 3 Caliphs. Ali was first of 12 successive legitimate Imams. Succession was to be hereditary.Acknowledge each of the first four Caliphs as rightful successors to Muhammad.Value deliberate simplicity, meditation rather than just a formalistic following of the rules.
    Look forward to Messianic return of the last recognized Imam. Muhammad al-Mahdi, last Imam, disappeared 900 CE, went into “hidden realm”, was sinless. Ayatollah Khomeini (1900-1989) believed by many to be the return of the last Imam.Through the ages, Caliphs rule “in God’s name.”Sufis gathered around shaikhs (masters) and formed faqirs (orders or communities). Rabi’a (1717-1801 CE) was a Sufi poet whose poetry spoke of God’s Love  similar to Christianty Al-Ghazzali (1058-1111) first Sufi to bring the faction into mainstream Islam.
    Imam holds an exalted position, Ayatollah refers to most important Imams.Imam is a prayer leader. Sunnis approach God directly, there is no clerical hierarchy.Sufi Shaikhs are the masters. Wandering monastic culture
    Teachings and Scripture
    Characteristic is the continual exposition and reinterpretation of doctrine by the clerics.Believe in entire body (canon) of life and teachings of Muhammad as found in Qur’an and hadiths (sayings and traditions of Muhammad). Sayings and traditions are interpreted by scholars in Islamic schools.Qur’an is full of symbolism, each verse has from 7 to 70 meanings. Believe in three approaches to the divine: mysticism of Love (heart knowledge), Ecstatic (visionary knowledge) and intuitive discernment (mental knowledge)
    Both Sunni and Shia factions believe in the Sharia, the comprehensive law derived from the Qur’an (revelations of Muhammad) and the Sunnah (sayings or interpretations of Muhammad).Believe in fana (extinction) of separateness from God and “remembering” that “there is nothing but God.”
     Scholars carry on debate in Islamic Schools. Science of Tradition refers to Islamic scholarship and rating of specific writings (rated sound, good, weak, or infirm)Influenced by Christianity and Gnosticism (life is a spiritual journey—want to know God/Allah now not just after death), Persian Zoroastrianism and Hindu Mysticism
    Shia Faction of IslamSunni Faction of IslamFufis/Sufism
    Fundamentalist approach to Islam, interpretation by clericsQur’an applies to everyday life, public life is shaped by the Qur’an. Saudi Arabia considered model of proper Islamic stateCalled “the Heart of Islam,” highest experience in life is experience with Allah, can get face to face with Allah/God

    Sufism has been, especially in the West, portrayed and regarded as a valuable and legitimate part of the Islamic faith. Anybody somewhat familiar with the complex interaction of religions will agree  with this statement “considerable ink has been spent by modern scholarship on the ‘origins’ of Sufism in Islam, as to how far it is ‘genuinely’ Islamic and how far a product, in the face of Islam, of outside influences, particularly Christian and Gnostic.”  The historian Rahman seems to hint that some of this ink has been wasted, as he concludes that “outside influences must have played an accessory role and these no one may deny, but they must have supervened upon an initial native tendency.”  Sufism  goes beyond the Five Pillars of Islam are which are obligations which are required of every Muslim: shahadah (statement of faith), salat (prayers), zakat (alms), sawm (fasting), and hajj (pilgrimage).

    History of religions
    History of religions

    A thorough and critical examination of historical and present day Sufism, quickly reveals the influence of numerous religious ideas foreign to Islam.  Zoroastrianism had also an intimate contact with Islam like Gnostic Manichaeism. Zoroastrianism provided first of all a vocabulary for Sufi poets and symbols of angelology and cosmology transparent in the light of gnosis.  Most orthodox scholars would be perplexed by this conclusion, especially when it is considered that Zoroastrianism (and pre-Christan Gnostic) predated Islam by over 1000 years.

    The further one delves into Sufism from a content perspective, the more clear it becomes that both the origins and content of Sufism show the inclusion of religious ideas and influences alian and contradictory to orthodox Islam. The scholar Elliot Miller states that “[being] based on experience rather than doctrine, Sufism has always been more open to outside influence than other forms of Islam… in addition to early influences from Christianity, one can find elements of Zoroastrianism, Neoplatonism, Hinduism, and other diverse traditions.”

    Christological_heresies_in_Jesus_Human_Divine

    While Sufi teachings have been influenced by various religions, their practices also bear close similarities to those of Hinduism and other mystical religions of the East. The Sufi orders are led by shaikhs, who play the same role as Hindu gurus.  Most Sufi orders still consider the five pillars of Islam to be essential, and practice them piously, however they go far beyond this, aiming to spiritual awakening. Central to all of these practices are ritual “invocations of the Divine Name,” also known as dhikr, which can be done either silently or in a chant. Here similarities with Hindu mantras are unmistakable.  The evidence of Sufi borrowings from other Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Zoroastrianism is certain. The similarities in teachings and ritual are overwhelming. It is no surprise then that the goals of Sufism reflect their pantheism and monism.

    Echoes of Eastern ( and Western) mystic religions are of course distinctly contrary to Muslim orthodoxy but its mystic quest for spirituality has embraced all sorts of religion. How then, in conclusion, does the evidence presented, reflect not only on the nature of Sufism, but on the very nature of Islam itself? Sufism is clearly a reaction or response to what was lacking in early Islam. The very strength of Islam, in its reliance on a simple creed  combining religion, law (and power of a non-secular state) and the five pillars of practice, proved to be the very weakness of Islam. The design of the Islamic ideological system had allowed, however, for rapid expansion and political aggression. Another area of weakness in Islam, which helped lead to the problem of Sufism, is found in the inherent synthesism (and gnosticism) of Islam. Here the vagueness caused by the doctrine of the indescribably Allah (a main concept common of Gnosticism) allowed in essence creating a contradictory belief system. The orthodox ulama developed their theology borrowing and changing what they viewed as their ‘Judeo-Christian’ roots (including Chrisiam heresies), while the Sufis were largely influenced by Eastern mystics.

    Sufism, with its radical mystic concepts, is  for orthodox Islam not a legitimate part of Islam, if Islam is narrowed to a logically coherent set of beliefs. For Sufism not only points to a lack of spirituality in Islam, but also contradicts orthodox Muslim teachings – in the process clearly opening the door to all the world’s religions. One more door of many, now was violently shut by orthodox Islam in Timbuktu which goes deliberately back to its origional  political and ideological purpose as mean of expansion.“It’s truly alarming that this has happened,” Mayor Ousmane Halle told The Associated Press by telephone from Bamako. “They torched all the important ancient manuscripts. The ancient books of geography and science. It is the history of Timbuktu, of its people.” After Islamists seized Timbuktu last April they began imposing a strict Islamic version of Shariah, or religious law, across northern Mali, carrying out amputations and public executions. Women could be whipped for going out in public without wearing veils.

    Conclusion

    The golden age of Timbuktu came to an end with the collapse of the Songhay empire following the invasion by Morocco, when an Arab-European army invaded Songhay in 1591 and destroyed it. The invaders confiscated gold and other resources, enslaved the Songhay scholars – including Ahmed Baba, who was deported to Morocco – and attempted to confiscate Timbuktu’s archives. The “Liberation of Libia” hailed by the Western press, threw what was once one of West Africa’s most stable democracies once again into chaos: the rebellion in the north gained ground with Gaddafi’s fighters and weapons moving over the border into Mail and effectively capturing half the country afterwards splintering on religious lines, with Salafist factions clashing with more secular elements. Western military intervention dimly disguising economic interests started after hundreds of thousands of Malians have been forced to flee their homes as refugees. Fears of an escalating humanitarian crisis have been publicized but the writings on the wall have been ignored. You see a pattern of wisdom and ignorance here? Yes, I do too. Please note, this is an essay out of general interest (and sympathy) to religion even if not my belief. I am neither Muslim nor scholar.

  • C.G. Jungs Self in Quaternio Series of Aion – Jesus or Abraxas?

    C.G. Jungs Self in Quaternio Series of Aion – Jesus or Abraxas?

    C. G. Jung had shown a pronounced and informed interest in Gnosticism and Alchemy. This is evident in the Quaternio Series of the Self in his book. “Aion”.  In his early works “Seven Sermons to the Dead” (“Die sieben Reden an die Toten ”) and “The Red Book” (recently published) he perceived the outstanding psychological relevance of Gnostic insights. Was Jung really a Gnostic? I seems to me, that “Aion” and another late work The “Answer to Job” give some evidence to the assertion: No, he wasn’t.

    Quaternity in religion and psychoanalysis

    It is true that C.G. Jung saw in Quaternity a divine concept and welcomed the proclamation by the Pope Pius XII in the year 1950 adding the Catholic Holy Virgin Mary, expanding so the Christian Trinity. Neoplatonic philosophy ( and many other metaphysics e.g. Mayan) contained what Jung has called the element of “fourness,” or quaternity, that seems to be so prominent an aspect of the life of the unconscious collective landscape across various cultures. This quaternity is – as the one of the Christian cross – a (3+1) structure, meaning that three parts are equal and the fourth is the “totally different”. One of the most important ramifications, however, unacceptable to some Christians, of the Jungian quaternal recipe is bringing back the original nature of evil and its personification in the real or mythological being of the evil.

    In “Aion” (collected works 9ii) Jung summarizes his researches into the phenomenology of the Self, good and evil seen from Christianity, Alchemy and Gnosis . “Answer to Job” an interpretation of a book in the bible,(“Antwort auf Hiob”)  maybe interpreted as gnostic answer to the Bible  but to me is more a subtile but well-meaning ironic description of the omnipotent god Yahweh of the Old Testament who needs the reflection of the human Job to send his son Jesus to become a just God (again). In this article I want to investigate C.Jung’s starting point and journeys in regards to Jesus. C. G. Jung was a prolific writer and practitioner of psychoanalysis. The reader is invited to consult the C. G. Jung’s Work for expansion on the theme in this essay or to follow the links in this article (indicated in blue).

    Small recurs to Gnosticism

    Gnosticism is the knowledge of transcendence arrived at by way of interior, intuitive knowing (Gnosis). Gnosticism was primarily defined in Christian context also including pre-Christian religious beliefs common to early Christianity, Hellenistic Judaism, Greco-Roman mystery religions, Zoroastrianism (especially Zurvanism), and Neoplatonism. Gnosticism goes hand in hand with Kabbalah, which is the esoteric or mystic religion of Rabbinic Judaism. These occult teachings deal with magic, hypnotism, sorcery and all sorts of pagan practices collected throughout centuries borrowing from different cultures. The mixing of all these pagan traditions turned into a complicated set of Gnostic teachings with all sorts of perverted doctrines added to “Christian” mingling its pure and simple teaching with theosophy and even magic. Gnostic thought were stamped out by Christianity in a struggle of life and death. The Gnostic teacher Carpocrates, as opposed to the official Christian dogma that salvation is the result of a single, unrepeatable event – the crucifixion of Jesus – postulated this process as continuing through a number of lives of earth.  Abraxas, the summation and ruler of the sevenfold planetary spectrum, is thus the true archetype of man’s potential freedom and independence from unconscious psychological pressures and compulsions.

    The Nag Hammadi library, discovered in upper Egypt in 1945 provided a cache of new gnostic documents and its psychological importance was pointed out by C.G. Jung. After his death and the publication of his autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, and the Red Book, it became also clear that Jung underwent an intense period of spiritual experience between 1912 and 1917. The only fragment of his writings from that period which he permitted to be published was The Seven Sermons to the Dead, using terminology and style of second century Gnosticism. Jung attributes the authorship to Basilides, a Gnostic sage who taught in Alexandria around A.D. 125-140 (see below). It is clear, however, that Jung disagreed with Gnostics (and Buddhism) on the ultimate goal of the individual to return to a supreme, other-worldly re-unification with the Pleroma ( the superior unknown God) as this would be a total identification with the unconscious.

    Small recurs to Evil

    We can argue then that there are three types of evil. The first is relative, caused by the perception of the human mind which labels things it does not accept as evil. The second arises from imbalance. This evil originates in an action that comes at the wrong time for the wrong reasons and which causes much damage as a result. The evil that thus occurs is neither relative nor absolute but falls someplace in-between. The third type is absolute evil. It arises from imbalance but feeds on evil itself and soon grows like a cancer to spread through the body that gave rise to it. One can only fight this evil by trying to find one’s own balance and relationship to the Self.

    In his work The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious Jung restated the message contained in the Second Sermon when he says: “Evil is the necessary opposite of good, without which there would be no good either. It is impossible to even think good out of existence.” Jung was insistent evil to be real, for he felt that western humanity, dwarfed the picture of evil. In Civilization in Transition he wrote that evil “is of gigantic proportions, so that for the Church to talk of original sin and to trace it back to Adam’s relatively innocent slip-up with Eve is almost a euphemism. The case is far graver and is grossly underestimated.”

    If you recall my article Can Hitler go to heaven? The evil presented in Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot. you can only see them as anything but evil, if we take Jung’s point of view seriously. Of course there are many other kinds of what seems to be pure evil in the world. According to Jung, good and evil are not two opposite poles of a linear dimensionality. They resemble a circle wherein going far enough in either direction is likely to associate one with the opposite polarity. He said that there is no good that cannot produce evil and no evil that cannot produce good.

    Aion: Phenomenology of the Self

    Aion is one of a number of major works that Jung wrote during his seventies that were concerned with the relations between psychology, alchemy and religion. He is particularly concerned in this volume with the rise of Christianity and with the figure of Christ. He explores how Christianity came about when it did, the importance of the figure of Christ and the identification of the figure of Christ with the archetype of the Self. A matter of special importance to Jung in his seventies – the problem of opposites, particularly good and evil – is further discussed and the importance of the symbolism of the fish, which recurs as a symbol of both Christ and the devil, is examined. As a study of the archetype of the self, Aion complements The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.

    Jung does not decodes events in dreams and associated unconscious products as a facade behind which the true meaning lies, but takes those events themselves as important symbols. Hence, “symbols” must not be misunderstood. To Jung the symbol manifests an unconscious product in conscious form. To appreciate why symbols mean so much to Jung, we need to understand symbols are a bridge for religions which are an object with universally projected contents. That is why there are so much symbols in religion and also why Jung spent so much time looking into the meaning behind religious symbols, and symbols in other fields such as alchemy.  Symbols have often an irrational element, as well as a rational part. Within Jung’s Framework the specific process of successfully acknowledging and integrating the meaning behind (formerly) unconscious contents to the consciousness is called “individuation” and results in the individual achieving the realization of the “Self”  and thus finding transcendence, which is the main theme in this book. The story of the self and Jesus in his book resembles closely the story of the human psyche that loses its connection with the collective unconscious and needs to be rescued by the Self.

    Jung compares in this book also his concept of “self” with other teachings. Jung had never qualms about reducing religion or magic to a psychological process. However, that is not to say it is then worthless in the practical field, because Jung is dedicated to showing precisely how large a factor the psychic realm is in ordering our lives. It must not be forgotten that for Jung, Buddhism itself was originally a result of projected unconscious contents, and the broad parallels are there. In dualistic Gnostic  teaching, the Self is reached when we have rid ourselves of opposites. Jung’s reflections had long been influenced in the thought of the ancient Gnostics to such an extent that he quotes In Aion Second Book XIV Hipolytes: to him were Gnostics psychiatrists. One may go so far to considered them the virtual roots of his  ‘depth psychology’.

    In the light of such recognitions one may ask: “Is Gnosticism a religion or a psychology?” The answer is (in the broad sense) both, just like Jung’s thoughts can be interpreted religiously. Most mythologies found in Gnostic scriptures have psychological relevance and applicability. For instance, the basic Gnostic myth to Aeons, intermediate deific beings who exist between the ultimate, True God and ourselves. They, together with the True God, comprise the realm of Fullness (Pleroma) wherein the potency of divinity operates fully. The Fullness stands in contrast to our existential state, which in comparison may be called emptiness.  The false creator God  bears a close resemblance to the alienated human ego that has lost contact with the  Self. One of the aeonial beings who bears the name Sophia (“Wisdom”), referred to by C.G. Jung many times in his works,  is of great importance to the Gnostic world . Analogies of this sort exist in numbers.

    Highly interesting are Jung’s diagrams in Aion (CW 9ii, penultimate chapter) in which Jung summarizes his researches into the phenomenology of the Self. In those diagrams Jung works his way through 2000 Years of Christian (and Gnostic) symbols of the Self. Using four octahedrons (double pyramids, i.e. one the platonic solids), he clearly tries to enhance the trinity of religion (Christianity) and science (space, time, causality) with a fourth dimension (his concept of synchronicity).

    The Moses Quaternia

    The Moses Quaternia
    The Moses Quaternia

    Lower Adam corresponds to the ordinary mortal man Moses corresponds to the culture hero and lawgiver, personalised ally to the ‘father’ Zipporah corresponds to the ‘higher mother’ as the daughter of a king and priest Moses and Zipporah represent the ‘royal pair’ for the ordinary man (Lower Adam) which for Moses corresponds on the other hand to his ‘higher man’ (Higher Adam) and his anima, Miriam The higher man is synonymous with the ‘spiritual, inner” man, who is represented in the quaternio by Jethro Such is the meaning of the quaternio when seen from the standpoint of Moses. But since Moses is related to Jethro as the lower Adam, or ordinary man, is to Moses, the quaternio cannot be understood merely as the structure of Moses’ personality, but must be looked at from the standpoint of the lower Adam as well.

    The extended (shadow) Moses Quaternia

    The Extended Moses Quaternia
    The Extended Moses Quaternia

    Extensions of the ordinary man’s psychic structure downwards, towards the subhuman, the dark and evil side represented by the shadow – the extended Mose. Homo carnalis refers here to the human Mose as opposite of the spiritual lead. The black woman is his wife. The negative anima is represented by Miriam who was the sister of two powerful biblical figures, Moses and Aaron. Her name derives from the root Mary, Mariamne, or Maria, meaning “bitterness.” She remained steadfast in her determination to free the Hebrew people from the pharaoh’s oppression. But Miriam was human, and not perfect. For her pride and insubordination to the power of God working through Moses, she became afflicted with a disfiguring skin disease (leprous’).  Miriam ‘spoke against’ Moses and even stirred up his brother Aaron against him. because of the black(Ethiopian) woman whom he had married.

    The paradise Quaternia.

    The Paradise Quaternia
    The Paradise Quaternia

    The snake symbol brings us to the images of Paradise, trees and earth. This amounts to an evolutionary regression from the animal Kingdom back to plants and inorganic nature, epitomized in alchemy by the secret of matter, the lapis. Here lapis is not to be understood as the end product of the opus but rather as its initial material. This arcane substance was also called lapis by the alchemists.”  Lapis–a unity, often stands for the prima materia in general, consists of four elements or has to be put together from them.
    prima materia–a bit of the original chaos (increatum of Paracelsus) which was believed to be hidden somewhere in metals, particularly in mercury, or in other substances. Not in itself a simple thing (massa confusa). Elements are not united but merely coexistent in chaos, they are hostile to one another and will not unite of their own accord–must be combined through the alchemical procedure. Represents and original state of conflict and mutual repulsion. Splitting up or unfolding of the original unity into the multiplicity of the visible world.

    The Lapis Quaternio

    The Lapis (Alchemy) Quaternia
    The Lapis (Alchemy) Quaternia

    This primary substance is round (masa globosa, rotundum) like the world and the world soul; it is the ‘stone that has spirit’, in modern parlance the most elementary building-stone in the architecture of matter, the atom, which is an intellectual model. The alchemists describe the ’round element’ now as a primal water, now as a primal fire, or as pneuma, primal earth, or ‘corpusculum nostrae sapientiae’, the little body of our wisdom. As water or fire it is the universal solvent, as stone and metal it is something that has to be dissolved and changed into air (pneuma, spirit).
    Zosimos calls the rotundum the omega element, which probably signifies the head. The skull is mentioned as the vessel of transformation in the Sabaen treatise…the vas is often synonymous with the lapis, so that there is no difference between the vessel and its content; in other words, it is the same arcanum.

    In the hierarchical series of those four, Good and evil are clearly shown to arise from a deintegration of the central Serpens node, “the point of maximal tension in the psyche.” In the Serpens node itself, these extreme opposites presumably coexist without contradictions. In these Aion diagrams, Jung shows two distinct forms of the archetypal Self. Evil (Diabolos) and Good (Christos) arise only in the first hierarchical form of the Self. They do not occur at all in the circular forms of the Self—the ouroboric, rotational.

    Quaternio series: Moses - Shadow - Paradise - Lapis Quaternio
    Quaternio series: Moses – Shadow – Paradise – Lapis Quaternio

    Quaternio series; Man culminates in the of a good God, but rests below on a dark and evil principle (Devil or serpent). The serpent has its compliment in the Paradise Quaternio which leads into the world of plants and animals. Indeed, this serpent actually dwells in the interior of the earth and is the pneuma that lies hidden in the stone. The symmetrical compliment of the serpent, then, is the stone (earth) or in symbolism, the alchemical stage, whose central idea is the lapis which compliments the serpent. The stone is, however, not a human ego but a collective entity, a collective soul an hermaphrodite.The point of greatest tension between the opposites…(is)…the double significance of the serpent, which occupies the center of the system. Being an allegory of Christ as well as of the devil, it contains and symbolizes the strongest polarity into which the Anthropos falls when he descends into Physis. The ordinary man has not reached this point of tension: he has it merely in the unconscious, i.e., in the serpent.The Round is the primary substance (rotundum) like the world and the world soul; it is the ‘stone that has spirit’, in modern parlance the most elementary building-stone in the architecture of matter. The alchemists describe the rotundum the omega element.

    The hierarchical Quaternio series shows the highest central node, the Anthropos, evolving in four deintegrations  and reintegrations from the lowest central node, the rotundum. In doing so, it passes through four quaternios. A quaternio is a structure composed of two pyramids sharing a common base. If the apex of one pyramid points upward, the apex of the other necessarily points downward. It might be possible to construct a fifth quaternio above the Anthropos. It might deintegrate into God-Shekinah and Jesus-Mary, his mother. The reintegration would occur in the next higher central node which could be named simply “God.” But here the upward progression seems to end. What is beyond God? Jung addresses this particular problem by asking, rhetorically, what his diagram would be if its hierarchical nature were destroyed by bending it around so that the lowest node, rotundum, lay next to the highest node, Anthropos?

    In the circular Quaternio series

    Quaternio series circular
    Quaternio series circular

    the lowest node moves “upward” toward increasingly more comprehensive integrations.Can this upward movement continue indefinitely? Obviously it cannot. Much more can be said about the cricular one. For the present discussion of evil it is only necessary to point out that Evil belongs only to first quaterino. There is no place for Evil in the structure of second. Again, both good and evil arise from disintegration of the Serpens node, the “point of maximal tension in the psyche.

    Jung’s View on Jesus “Answer to Job”

    Jung agrees with all modern scholars of antiquity and biblical scholar that Jesus existed. He also does not question his metaphysical importance. His thoughts of Jesus must be seen from his framework and are strictly restricted strictly to psychoanalytic dimensions. He writes extensively in Aion about Jesus as a symbol (manifest and visible) of the archetype Self. But not the full Self. Since Jesus is all good, he feels that is missing his Shadow. The shadow is of course the devil (which was in Answer to Job als God son and Jesus brother). That Jesus was crucified by the order of the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate is given great significance in the Quaternio series of his book Aion: The serpent is the central node and mediator between Jesus and Lucifer. In his book Aion Jung consistently opposes this summum bonum view of God. Jung, in his psychological works puts a strong emphasis on this (see also my article C. G. Jung’s “Antwort auf Hiob” und das “Johannes Evangelium”).  According to his theory of wholeness being the conjunction of opposites, Jung always affirmed conscious existence after death and, since one opposite is not possible without the other, neither is “good” or “bad” in itself as single entity.   As long as many, if not the majority of us, expect all problems to be solved outside of ourselves, they will be beset by “inhumanity upon inhumanity, holocaust upon holocaust”. To him Christianity of the old Testament has not solved the problem of evil. It flirts with two great metaphysical forces, Good and Evil (or God and the Devil), but always opts for the final supremacy of God. Lucifer is only a “fallen angel” whose true place is in the heavenly court.

    The story of Job, as seen by Jung in his Book Answer to Job (1952), is therefore  the culmination of the Old Testament leading to the Gospel: Job sees that “You (Yahweh) are not a man” (Job 9:32). When Yahweh finally appears to him, Job hopes for an explanation of why he, an honest and just man, had been sent such undeserved afflictions. Yahweh seems unaware of any ethical dimension whatsoever. He overwhelms Job by recounting his creative acts. Job does not so much see evil in Yahweh as he sees a mass of unbalanced forces (as in the Kabbalah and Taoism). Job accepts that he cannot expect justice from God as long as God is primarily identified with His power, His omnipotence. Job realizes that God himself is evolving. Thus Job is able to say, “I know that my redeemer liveth” (Job 19:25). That is, Job intuitively knows that God will evolve in himself the ethical sense that Job already has: to distinguish Right/Wrong and Good/Evil. Another move that Christianity makes is to assert that all good comes from God and all evil comes from man.

    Jungs View on Abraxas  “Seven Sermons to the Dead”

    With Abraxas (Greek Ἀβρασάξ, Ἀβράξας) Jung described Egyptian Gnostics of Basilides in Alexandria around the 2nd century the symbol of the highest Nikolaos, from which emerged the five primal forces Geist(nous), Word (logos), Providence (Phronesis), Weisheit(Sophia) and power as well as moral perfection and inner peace.The name Abraxas is presented on amulets with the head of a cock, dragon’s feet and a whip in his hand. Later, he is recorded as having the head of a king and demon’s feet. He was seen by the Basilidians (after Basilides), a group of twelfth century heretics) as the supreme god which claimed that Abraxas sent Jesus Christ to earth in the form of a benevolent spirit

    Basilides integrated various Christian Jewish, Persian, and neo platonic traditions to a dualistic view of the world. The early Christianity was heavily Gnostic-influenced. Gnostic directions also in Judaism and even Islam has its Gnostics (the Sufis). The gnostics believe that the core of every human is a “divine spark”. The spark of the divine is immortal, he exists outside of time and space. As long as the man but has not recognized its true state, he remains trapped in this world and must reincarnate again and again in a new body. Every once an envoy from the world of light comes but (Christ plays this role in the Gnostic Christians) at the material level in order to connect the souls that have become ripe with the light power of God, and to enable them to escape the access of the false God, the demiurge.

    The Abrahamic God (which describes Jung in “Answer to Job” is this demiurge. Therefore, early Gnostic Christians have roundly rejected the old testament.The Gnostics see Abraxas as Supreme God, good and evil in an entity “Whole”, who sent Jesus as God’s (Yahweh) son in the world.

    Followers of Basilides believed that the body of Jesus Christ was an illusion, visited while here on Earth. From this supreme deity which the followers of Basilides worshipped, emanated seven divine powers (according to the number of planets), the first realm from the gradually decreasing clarity 364 more ghost kingdoms, each with seven “eons”. If one summarizes the entire realms of spirits in the secret word Abraxas or Abrasax,  it contained the seven Greek letters which correspond numerically calculatedto  the number 365. Abraxas is classified under the Egyptian gods. He was depicted on amulets with a whip in his hand. been. The Mystic Word Abracadabra was derived from his name. These Gnostic symbols were adopted by many companies, operated the magic and Alchemy.

    C.G. Jung  wrote in “The seven Sermons of the dead” under the pen name Basilides about Abraxas. According to C.G. Jung Abraxas – man cannot be redeemed without that Satan is understood and integrated . But how will Satan, who represents evil, will be integrated? Jung asserts, only by a way to lift the evil (the shadow) in the consciousness. Before we are not fully aware of our our deeper spiritual needs we will not achieve the individuation, which creates a more and more mature personality.  The “Seven Sermons to the Dead”  was privately printed, without copyright or date, sometime between 1920 and 1925, and distributed only to a select group of friends.  The text is available for the interested in the internet.  But there is a significant translation of Stephan A. Hoeller in his book “The Gnostic Jung” in which Hoeller not only interprets “The Seven Sermons as a Gnostic document, but also claims that Jung himself was a modern Gnostic. The Gnostic Jung is essentially an attempt – and a very interesting one at that – to interpret the Seven Sermons. Along the way, Hoeller, an almost worshipful admirer of the “Wise Man of Küsnacht” as he calls him, gives us a clear, skillful elucidation of some of Jung’s essential ideas. But the question is: Was Jung really a Gnostic is answered with the late work.

    Conclusion

    Gnosticism may possess both a psychological and a religious authenticity. Gnostic psychology and Gnostic religion need not be exclusive of one another but may complement each other within an implicit order of wholeness. Gnostics have always held that divinity is immanent within the human spirit, although it is not limited to it. The convergence of Gnostic religious teaching with psychological insight is thus quite understandable. The Red Book reveals the experiential, Gnostic roots of Jung’s psychology and certainly Jung studied Gnostic thought and his works are liberally sprinkled with references to them. But he never called himself a Gnostic. Without doubt Jung’s kind of psychoanalysis was different. Mental illness was considered to be a divided or incomplete condition and health as a state of spiritual wholeness – or near wholeness which could be reached through a process Jung called individuation. Jung always insisted that his writings were based upon empirical evidence and personal experience – it seems he was be worried to be accused of mystical or metaphysical theories but he connected them very often explicit to (catholic) Christianity.

    This essay has delineated some of the main ways in which Jung can help us to understand the real meaning behind Christianity and Gnostics. It is not comprehensive and exhaustive, but shows how we as humans have a tendency to neglect our unconscious side, and the pressing need to recognize and integrate its contents (achieve individuation).  In plain English, Jung shows us, particularly in Aion  the salutary and prospective character of Religion.

    References

    CW9(i) = Jung, C.G. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol.9, Part I, The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious  Zürich 1951, Rascher

    CW9(ii) = Jung, C.G. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol.9, Part II, Aion Zürich 1951, Rascher

    Jacobi, J. The Psychology of C.G. Jung.  Zürich 1961

    Jung, C.G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections, London: Harper Collins, 1995, PG213.

  • Can Hitler go to heaven? The evil presented in Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot.

    Can Hitler go to heaven? The evil presented in Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot.

    The problem of evil has been a subject of interest in religion and philosophy.  For our purpose here we want to approach the question in a inductive and  psychoanalytic way looking at historic persons: Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot: what is evil and what is the cause of it.  If we consider them evil – and I do – what criteriums have those in common; was their evilness a process (of their power) or their power a result of their evilness?  The article uses a clustering methodology, statistics and C.G. Jung’s Archetypes particularly the concept of the Shadow. Jung describes the shadow as those inferior aspects of the psyche that we (or culture we socialize into) dislike and suppress. The shadow sometimes contains unhealthy (evil) energies that the powers of civilization have apparently quelled but is not a synonym for or necessarily evil. For the most part, the shadow lies beyond the threshold of awareness, saying “…it is quite within the possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of his nature, but it is a rare and shattering experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil.”

    What is evil – can you measure it?

    But first, how do we define evil? Webster defines it as morally reprehensible. Some say, there are two kinds of evil:  (moral) of men and of  impersonal (natural) or wicked powers (demons). Her we look only on moral evil (or sin), such as murder, rape, abuse, terrorism, or genocide. Something may be said to be evil when it takes human life, or if it causes humans to suffer in an inhumane way. Massive killings innocent and powerless is evil. Enslaving people against their will would be evil. One person killing another innocent person is evil.  Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot did all of this.

    Hostage taking during the Olympic Games
    Munich 1972 The Face of Terror Hostage taking during the Olympic Games

    Evil is merely an extension of the baseness of our nature. It is our shadow. Without us, evil does not exist. Evil is simply the absence of good (or god). Just as darkness is the absence of light and cold the absence of heat. Evil can only be defined in (our) relation to the good or (god). Good and Evil are the overarching opposites of all experience. They form a synergy, paired opposites. Each exists only in relationship to the other. Without their relationship, both would cease to exist.

    For simplicity I will omit simple political left/right categories and value statements of means and rationalization – simply we assume the more were killed the more evil was and some qualifiers.  If evil is measurable, than it has substance. It is a present force like gravity, magnetism, etc… these things were unknown to us before we understood them and could measure them. We’ve taken evil for granted. The time will come when even Non-Christians  “discover” that it is as real as anything else in this “physical” world. Is implication can be indirectly seen like Dark Matter.

    Correlate evil and power?

    There is definitely an affinity of evil and power. If one follows C.G. Jung, power is even is a (reciprocal) function of love.

    “Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.” —The Psychology of the Unconscious, 1943

    The psychoanalytic C. G Jung analyzed Hitler and Stalin for the American Government during the second war. To him a complex  – and the Shadow is a functional complex –  has the capacity to gain autonomy and to escape the control of its creator to rise beyond it origins to reach an independent, and terrifying, reality.  An evil complex or (Evil) may take then control both in people and in the universe. Jung’s concept is, however one of an absolute evil which cannot be eliminated even with great effort, but only be controlled by examination of our dark side.

    In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tse also presents the idea that evil is  created by missing wholeness. If there is no concept of good, there would be no concept of evil. Good and evil dependently  arise together. Like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of quantum physics, that two complementary properties of a particle are not at the same time as exactly measurable, it is only the creation of dualistic concepts that allows for the perception of evil. In the whole, or the Tao, there would be no evil, for only that which is natural and appropriate would occur. 

    “The higher the sun rises, the less shadow it casts” —Lao Tse

    Religious believers wrestling with the emotional problem of evil may ask God in desperation, “Why?”. It is my view, that evil originates as a symptomatic expression of disharmony and it should not be attributed to either God or humans exclusively. Just as it is erroneous to blame a patient for becoming ill, it is wrong to blame either God or humanity for the origins of evil, which rises instead from the condition of the cosmos as a whole and as a result of the free will given to us. Both human and divine can cooperate in the evolution of the world and in the effort to create harmony. Harmony of this nature is found in the conjunction between God and humanity. That eases the logical tension in the following three statements: (1) God is all-powerful and all-good, (2) Men are neither, and (3) evil exists.

    It occurred to me reading their memoirs, that three definite non-Nazis and intelligible, creative persons who worked closely with Hitler, could all not bring the Hitler of the thirties and of the forties together. His architect, Speer but also the brilliant director Leni Riefenstahl and the economic genius Hjalmar Schacht  all asked, “Why?”.

    Can even Hitler go to heaven?

    A Benedictine monk, did say recently to me “even Hitler could go to heaven if he had confessed”.  Highly political incorrect, but within the “concepts” of Catholicism (and C.G. Jung).  Confess (or realize) your sins and you will connect to God (to your Self).

    According to Taoism even in the best possible world evil is necessary for its completion – two sides of a coin – there is no good without evil. C.G. Jung’s concept of integration calls for the integration of the Shadow into consciousness. Evil is real. Even if  you consider it not as personal, it is not merely an illusion.

    Will hitler go to heaven?
    Will hitler go to heaven?

    Christians often question  whether God is both all-powerful and all good. Evil is a result of people’s’ free will, so God is not accountable for evil. But even though Non-Christians want to think that they are autonomously in charge of everything, as Freud and C.G. Jung discovered their will is free only in the sense that they are only free to act in the conscious realm. According to C.G. Jung Humans are not absolutely free before the work out their shadow and complexes and reach their Self.  This models  adds to the Christians view problem of evil. Psychology and Religion do convincingly claim, evil is part of everybody.

    Religious dimension of evil

    Hitler’s, Stalin’s, Mao’s and Pol Pot’s approach had all in common that they all wanted to form new people. Their leadership cult and the state basically asked for religious obedience. If one looks closely we find, that the concepts of totalitarian religions and systems are similar. In their focus is hate, essentially hate religions against clearly defined external groups or simply against everybody, which in the last essence is self-hate.

    During an interview with H. R. Knickerbocker, first published in Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan (January 1939), in which Jung was asked to diagnose Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Stalin, later published in Is Tomorrow Hitler’s? (1941), by H. R. Knickerbocker, C.G. Jung remarked: “There is no question but that Hitler belongs in the category of the truly mystic medicine man. As somebody commented about him at the last Nürnberg party congress, since the time of Mohammed nothing like it has been seen in this world. His body does not suggest strength. The outstanding characteristic of his physiognomy is its dreamy look. I was especially struck by that when I saw pictures taken of him in the Czechoslovakian crisis; there was in his eyes the look of a seer. This markedly mystic characteristic of Hitler’s is what makes him do things which seem to us illogical, inexplicable, and unreasonable. … So you see, Hitler is a medicine man, a spiritual vessel, a demi-deity or, even better, a myth.”

    In reference to the Nazi fervor that had gripped Germany like a religion C.G. Jung said 1938:

    “Hitler’s ‘religion’ is the nearest to Mohammedanism, realistic, earthy, promising the maximum rewards in this life, but with a Moslem-like Valhallah into which worthy Germans may enter and continue to enjoy themselves. Like Mohammedanism, it teaches the virtue of the sword. Hitler’s first idea is to make his people powerful because the spirit of the Aryan German deserves to be supported by might, by muscle and by steel.

    Perhaps my reasoning can be seen as biased, but I very much feel what Jung was saying does also relate to the 21st century issue of terrorism and religious extremism. The noted Jungian Psychologist J. Marvin Spiegelman’s stated in an article entitled “C. G. Jung’s Answer To Job:A Half Century Later”: “Jung had mentioned, in passing,that he felt the spirit of Islam in the military passion of the Nazis, without casting any aspersion on the religion of Islam itself. Rather, he sensed that passion, armed with divine mission, something missing from the West for some time, was a primitive invasion of soulless Europe.”  One might say, it is quite possible to apply this statement of C.G. Jung (in German it sounds even more prophetic) to the postmodern German romanticism of today’s Left.

    goetterdaemmerung
    goetterdaemmerung

    Hitlers rise was indeed in line with German idealistic anti-intellectualism of the “Romantic Area”  and quite contrary to the materialistic approach of the Communists.  C G. Jung foresaw the events “a “powerful eruption” of the collective unconscious, the “awakening of Wotan from thousand years sleep”, and the uprising of the Germanic soul in Nazi Germany against the “rationalism”. C.G. Jung called Hitler in the interview with US-Journalist H. R. Knickerbocker, also “a spokesman of the German soul, whose power was founded not politically, but magically, and… anti-intellectual”. He qualified also Stalin and Mussolini – equally unflattering. While Hitler’s economic success enabled him to better the life of the German’s after he took power, Stalin’s, Mao’s and Pol Pot’s vision (illusion) failed to provide even the most basic items and food. They brought chaos and hunger and needed to create zones of death and violence for all citizens. Certainly it helped Hitler, that he did not come to power due to a bloody civil war, but essentially was voted for and enabled by the elite , which he employed – used – later for his purposes. They thought they would control him. Within a year he controlled them, got rid of his political enemies and even the left wing of his own party. His welfare policies were essentially state subsidies for the lower middle class and (sometimes perfide) support for families. Like the Mao and Stalin regime, he indoctrinated the young and women.

    The rat race is over the pigs won.
    The rat race is over the pigs won.

    Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot simply had to reign with mass killings and famine – they had no other means. Anyone (former comrades, peasants, workers, common soldiers) could be anytime the enemy. Their regime created permanently enemies because of the huge gap between promises and reality and did not integrate the cultural history of their people but aimed to stamp it out. George Orwell’s iconic 1984 stand as perfect examples of this societal structures Jung warns against. Granted, all dystopian literature set in a totalitarian future could fall into this category, but two of his books are probably the two best examples of the genre. Animal Farm, and Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-four show totalitarian systems and are highly relevant today.

    Modeled after the Stalinism, the basic pattern was repeated by Mao’s Big Leap and the Cultural Revolution, by Pol-Pot. It’s about state totalitarianism, and if you look too much to right or to the left you become a road-kill again.

    Hitler

    Hitler based his power chiefly upon the lower middle class, workers (if not communists) and farmers (if not catholic).  The Germans are highly impressionable and indeed go extremes; are always a bit unbalanced. They desire to cosmopolitan, world citizens; easily lose their national (or cultural) identity. They like to be always to outdo others – the longer Hitler is dead, the larger the Hitler resistance movement grows today. Simply a psychologic projection of teir own shadow. But Hitler became also an international trademark (manifested symbol of the archetype) of Evil, which transcendents cultural borders even more than Mao and even more than Stalin. Everybody shudders and project all (of their) evil on him (and all the choose to connect with him) to feel all good.  Why is that so?  From a Jungian view, the alleged evils that Hitler saw in his enemies, were none other than his own shadow impulses. A shadow is a functional complex and is energy which can be utilized. Hitler mediated the power of the shadow with a charisma that charmed and swayed a great number of  people in an outside Germany. C.G. Jung classifies Hitler as an archetype of a seer or shaman. By integrating our dark impulses, we gain some degree of mastery over them.  In the beginning Hitler seem to be dimly aware of his shadow and his intuitive power. With the support of highly capable non-Nazis he definitely improved not only economic and political conditions of Germans. Germany was able to break the chains of her reparation payments and came out of the Great depression induced by the US banking and stock crash. Hitler was admired and politically supported by almost all foreign politicians and his party in the begin even funded by international investors. Himself of inferior taste in art, only a few great artists particularly in the movie industry worked for Hitler visualizing the mystic they felt around him.

    leni-riefenstah explaines her facination with Hitller
    leni-riefenstah explaines her facination with Hitller

    Process of Evilness: But when the war  began, and after initial successes brought defeats, his the shadow gripped Hitler’s personality. His righteousness and own truth become reality. The war in Russia was a turning point. The Germans entered a zone of in which terror and war had reigned from 1914 with terror from 1919. The Barbarossa campaign became a war with rules Stalin was comfortable with, a war of extinction.  Evil fueled (or consumed) itself.

    Numbers: From 1942, carbon monoxide was used at the polish death factories and Holocaust spread to the rest of occupied Europe, other Jews were gassed by hydrogen cyanide at Auschwitz-Birkenau.  Overall, according to the historians the Germans, with much local assistance, deliberately murdered about 5.4 million Jews an all in all. Such plans, though unfulfilled, provided the rationale for the bloodiest occupation in the history of the world. The Germans placed Soviet prisoners of war in starvation camps, where 3.1 million perished from hunger or were shot. A million Soviet citizens also starved during the siege of Leningrad. In “reprisals” for partisan actions, the Germans killed about 700,000 civilians in grotesque mass executions. There are claims Germans killed about 11 million non-combatant during war. All in all, the figure of 11 million non-combatants rises to more than 12 million if including foreseeable deaths from deportation and hunger.

    Intentions: In Hitlers mind he was the grand chief of a supposed master race and everything “other” was to be eradicated including the Germans who failed to prevail. Hitler came to power with the intention of eliminating the Jews from Europe; the war in the east changed this intention to mass killing. Hitler killed civilians almost exclusively in connection with the practice of racial imperialism and when he invaded the Soviet Union with elaborate colonization plans.  It has been said by many historians Germany bears the chief responsibility for starting first and second word war. That, besides we are living now in the area of pre-emptive wars, that should be qualified further, if not even urther investigated.

    Methods:  Under cover of the war the Nazi regime also killed the handicapped and others deemed unfit in a large-scale “euthanasia” program that brought asphyxiation by carbon monoxide to the fore as a killing technique a predecessor of killing by gas. Germans took so many Soviet prisoners of war in part because Stalin ordered his generals not to retreat. The Germans shot so many civilians in part because Soviet partisans deliberately provoked reprisals. As has been said, a lot of death in the occupied zones were also connected with Stalin’s policy to force his citizens to stay in combat or to-be combat zones. Furthermore, the Germans shot more than a hundred thousand civilians in Warsaw in 1944 after the Soviets urged the locals to rise up and then declined to help them.

    Stalin

    Even after reading a few books Stalin is still emotional remote to me.  I was only once in Russia on business and my connection to it is merely through my father who fought them. Emotional impressed I was of the story of “Hotel Lux” and of Trotsky murder in Mexico City. I once even visited Trotsky’s house there, which is a little private museum run by his grand son.

    In “Diagnosing the Dictators Hitler, Stalin, Mussalini, 1938” C.G. Jung saw Mussolini and Stalin, as chiefs or strong men in their own right. To him Stalin as destructive force:  Lenin, created; Stalin is devouring the brood. He is a conquistador; he simply took what Lenin made and put his teeth into it and devoured it. He is not even creatively destructive. Lenin was that. He tore down the whole structure of feudal and bourgeois society in Russia and replaced – it with is own creation. Stalin is destroying that. Mentally, Stalin is not so interesting as Mussolini, who resembles him in the fundamental pattern of his personality, and he is not anything like so interesting as the medicine man, the myth—Hitler. Anybody who takes command of one hundred and seventy million people as Stalin has done, is bound to be interesting, whether you like him or not. No, Stalin is just a brute—a shrewd peasant, an instinctive powerful, beast—no doubt in that way far the most powerful of all the dictators.

    Numbers: For the Soviets during the Stalin period, the analogous figures are approximately six million killed non-combatants rising to almost twelve million including starvation. This total figure of civilians deliberately killed under Stalinism of six million one must add indirect deaths of Stalin’s own people during the war. Million of Russian civilians would routinely left to starve in battle areas the Germans would invade after destroying any infrastructure and housing (scorched earth policy) even city battle areas like Stalingrad.

    instinctive powerful, beast
    Shadow- instinctive powerful, beast

    The Russian soldiers were not better off. Political commissars and NKDW in their back would shot them if they retreated. About two million ended up prison battalions, often used for human wave front assaults where their survival rate was a few days. After the war Russian POWs were screened and often sent to Gulags or shot.In pure numbers Stalin’s regime killed far, far more people than Hitler and less than Mao. Discussion of numbers, however, can blunt our sense of the horrific personal character of each killing and the irreducible tragedy of each death.

    Judging in detail and  from the Soviet records, the number of people who died in the Gulag the total figure for the entire Stalinist period is likely between two million and three million. In 1937, as his vision of modernization faltered, Stalin ordered the Great Terror in 1930s.  At the war’s end the Soviets killed tens of thousands of people in their own “reprisals,” especially in the Baltic states, Belarus, and Ukraine. Some 363,000 German soldiers died in Soviet captivity. The Great Terror and other shooting actions killed another million people.

    The largest human catastrophe of Stalinism was the famine of 1930–1933, in which more than five million people died. Of those who starved, the 3.3 million or so inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine who died in 1932 and 1933 were victims of a deliberate killing policy related to nationality. In early 1930, Stalin had announced his intention to “liquidate” prosperous peasants (“kulaks”) as a class so that the state could control agriculture and use capital extracted from the countryside to build industry. Tens of thousands of people were shot by Soviet state police and hundreds of thousands deported. Those who remained lost their land and often went hungry as the state requisitioned food for export just like Mao did 1958. The first victims of starvation were the nomads of Soviet Kazakhstan, where about 1.3 million people died. Stalin requisitioned grain in Soviet Ukraine which ensured mass death.

    Intentions: Beyond the numbers killed remains the question of intent. Stalin killed civilians almost exclusively in connection with the practice of eliminating large numbers of its own citizens particularly the elite and peasants. Mass murder in the Soviet Union also involved national and ethnic motivations, disconcertingly close to the Nazi ones. Indeed it was Stalin, not Hitler, who initiated the first ethnic killing campaigns in interwar Europe. Until World War II, Stalin’s regime was by far the more murderous of the two. Nazi Germany began to kill on the Soviet scale only after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in the summer of 1939 and the joint German-Soviet invasion killing 200,000 Polish civilians, each regime responsible for about half of 200 000 deaths.

    Methods: Most of the Soviet killing took place in times of peace, some related more or less distantly to an ideologically flawed vision of modernization but mostly class warfare, one might say warfare against its own citizens and any human standard and nature.

    Mao

    Mao is more present in my generation than Stalin. Furthermore I worked in China and Asia on many occasions, this causing a desire to understand culture and history of China. I observed, that Mao is an icon, which still deeply influences Chinese emotions. When I worked in Beijing during the late nineties I got invited by a local resident consultant (an expat) to a dinner party at a very chic ethnic event restaurant.  Expats and local people from all over China would  dance after work together. The open spirit, however, became immediately sober when a Mao Zedong-double entered the stage.

    20080722.sosie-mao-double
    20080722.sosie-mao-double

    The faces of the Chinese colleagues, of all Chinese, froze and some timidly touched the fabric of the actors costume, 20 years after Mao Zedong’s death, as if to make sure that “he” will not come back. Recently, more than ten years later,  I read the book of Frank Dikötter  Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe .

    Numbers: Somewhere near the Stalinist ledger must belong the forty million or more Chinese starved during the Great Leap Forward, as Mao followed Stalin’s model of collectivization and industrialization. In pure numbers Mao’s regime killed far, far more people up to 78 million.

    Intentions:  Mao’s popularity grew into an unbreakable faith in him around the time of Cultural Revolution. The people’s image of him became less like a great leader, but almost like a god. He was always right to the people and they gave in their complete trust. Through posters, school, media and personality, Mao was successful in creating the cult. His little red book became more a bible like than a piece of political philosophy writing.  Even I own one. The failure of the Great Leap Forward was caused by unmanageable goals ignoring local problems and situations  but foremost basic economy even logic. Shoddy quality wasted rare resources. Of course it is hard for government to control centrally a big country. Like in Russia  feedbacks to correct policies did not exist, because the terror and pressure inside the regime was to high and delegated top down. The cult of personality with Mao set free an evil autonomous complex in the masses. With total belief in Mao, especially the young Red Guards, like Pol Pot’s followers later, did not doubt their actions during the Cultural Revolution. The violent and cruel class struggles against intellectuals labeled rightist became a Shadow of revolutionary spirits.

    Methods: Most of the Chinese killings took place in times of peace, and was also related more or less distantly to an ideologically flawed vision of modernization and class warfare. During the Cultural Revolution organized starving as a mean of getting rid of segments of Chinese intensified. It was highly centralized mismanagement that can lead a country to disaster. All checks like tradition, family and religion were swept away leaving everybody, particularly the weak,  exposed without restraint to cruelty, pure arrogance, boundless ignorance and a merciless disregard of farmers, workers and even party members. Between the years 1959 and 1961, 30 to 45 million people were starved, killed or worked to death as a result of Mao Zedong’s failed attempt at industrialization in this period of the great leap. Research of using newly opened local archives makes his estimate all too credible  that the death toll of this famine alone reached 45 million people. The Chinese cultural revolution caused the death of another 30 million people (according to the current Chinese government).

    Conclusion:

    The assumed special quality of Nazi racism and evilness is diluted by the historical observation that Stalin’s motivations were often similar national or ethnic. The starving caused by failed industrialization policies or flawed visions can never be seen as a price to pay to enlightenment or to create a new man.  Stalin evilness was intentional violence as its own purpose. Mao was equally untouched by the death of double-digit millions of Chinese.  Both fought a war against the nature, reason and their own people. The Nazis planned to eliminate the Jews in any case,  but their evilness was fueled by the war against Stalin. Hitlers, Mao’s, Pol Pots, Stalin’s illusion of new societies, new men and totalitarian state religion crashed. A talk in NYC from Dikötter, which gives insights who the Hong-Kong history scholar is and what general conclusions he derived you find here.  When human beings are deprived of any means to own their living they reduced to numbers and seen as livestock – result versus costs: anyone who is old, weak, sick, unwilling or just inconvenient would be starved to death or killed. It is Dante’s hell – the opposite from imago dei.

    The geat faime
    The geat faime

    Were these dictators Archetypes of men’s inherent evil or absence of God? Both. Do numbers explain evil? No, not alone. Never forget: “History is the story of the Past, told at present for present purpose”.

    • Pol Pot (Cambodia, 1975-79) 1,700,000
    • Mao Ze-Dong (China, 1958-61 and 1966-69, Tibet 1949-50) 49-78,000,000 (around 40 million during the great leap) – Numbers disputed
    • Adolf Hitler (Germany, 1933-1945) 12,000,000 (5.8 million jews killed in concentration camps, plus non-combatants killed during WWII plus 2.6 million Russian POWs to die from hunger)
    • Jozef Stalin (USSR, 1932-53) 20-11,000,000 (the gulags plus the purges of the Great Terror plus Ukraine’s 5 millions famine) – Numbers disputed
    •  (Japan, 1941-44) 5,000,000 (civilians in WWII)

    Hamburg. "I wanted to do something extraordinary". Sir Harris
    Hamburg. “I wanted to do something extraordinary”. Sir Harris

    (Germany, 1933-1945) Civilians killed by Allied Aerial Bombardment  635 000 and Expulsion/Deportation Civilian Dead/Missing 1,260,000

  • (Turkey, 1915-20) 1,200,000 Armenians (1915) + 350,000 Greek Pontians and 480,000 Anatolian Greeks (1916-22) + 500,000 Assyrians (1915-20) – Numbers disputed
  • (Belgium Congo, 1886-1908) 8,000,000
  • Art and violence – evil and free will

    Art and violence – evil and free will

    Whether we like to admit it or not, we always have a choice to do evil. We can deny it as much as we want. We’re always as free as we want. There was a well written article by Cristian Mihai, discussing the connection between art and violence. In the end his question turned out to be about free will. I agree with his conclusion w’re the only ones responsible for our actions.

    The author uses a good analogy – martial arts training. It actually refers to the archetype of the warrior. One learns to fight by fighting. But it doesn’t makes necessarily a violent person. Because there is what the author calls convention and I would call rules, ethical reflection maybe moral.

    Georg Gross - The retreat

    The martial art example reveals the philosophical question behind the art topic (as well as some hints to the answer). Are we ultimately responsible for our deeds? Answer – yes we are. “We” translates in “you and me” as individual and our cultural entity (family, society, nation). While it may be an influencing factor, it is not wise, simply to shift the blame to art, to the media, to computer games, to weapons, to the not (yet) developed cortex. Violence has been always present. and it always needed the effort of the individual and culture (moral, ethic, religion, law) to restrain it.

    “The psychoanalytic C.G.Jung said under the impression of the second world war: We need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself. He is the great danger, and we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man, far too little. His psyche should be studied, because we are the origin of all coming evil.”

    Simpler said, We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. The Shadow, as C.G. Jung defined it, is in us. “Omne bonum a Deo, omne malum ab homine, i.e., “All good from God, all evil from man.” said the great (religious) philosopher Augustine of Hippo (Augustinus).

    AugustineOfHippo
    AugustineOfHippo

    The free will, as Augustine sees it, differentiates man from animals.

    Having said said, we not only deny the existence of the evil by shifting the blame to something impersonal but indeed intoxicate ourselves by shallow entertainment, consumerism,  graphic violence, “sex, drugs and rock en roll” and psycho-pharmaca.

    Some turn from violence to hard science. While I largely agree that most social sciences and the bankrupt humanities are not helpful, the belief of hard sciences as savior (physics, biology, chemistry, informatics, evolutionary psychology, cognitive and neurosciences) is mechanistic and naive. Their potential solutions to prevent evil, might create evil – might create a world, in which I do not want to live in. Lack of empathy is widespread today like a mental illness. That lack seems to be even collective. In that respect, we all,  whole societies are ill. And it is a lack of empathy (or love)  that allows one to enact violence upon another living creature. I doubt, empathy levels can be enhanced through neurobiology and scientific designer drugs or information technology nor through tons of social workers.

    Now is art to blame? What is art today, most of the stuff might not even be art. 1979 Francis Ford Coppola’s haunting, hallucinatory Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now  was graphic and violent,  but visionary. It has been said, that  Coppola made art out violence by aesthetic means, thus legitimizing it. Goethe wrote 1774 a book, “Die Leiden des jungen Werther”, about an unfilled love in which the main character commits suicide.  Followers dressed in this fashion, and committed suicide in the double digits. The imitations of the Werther figure in real life, which were in suicide attempts and suicides, started a discussion about media effects, which runs up today. Since the 1970s, the psychology deals with the phenomenon of “media-mediated imitation”. Think also of the Danish caricatures, which resulted in many deaths –  the problem is global now.

    Will the easy fix help, should we forbid art (books,paintings, movies… Goethe),  forbid, internet, forbid weapons, forbid media?

    No, we have to think, feel and act properly and raise our kids within a minimum ethical context. With love (and also with fathers).  We must rely on science, as well as on metaphysics, common sense and psychology to cope with reality. but even more on intuitive understanding (“our inner self”) .  Free will is possible, it is possible to understand our genetic and biographical patterns of behavior, at least to an extent. It is called individuation. Still shooting massacre will happen. Lucky, if one can pray then, at least.

    FallenAngel (stottilien:http://wp.me/p2bcCT-15R)