Jung - 31/jan/2025
Added 2025-01-31 17:24:52 +0000 UTCJUNG
Jung is perhaps the most influential occultist of the 20th century. His contributions to the vestigial field of psychology got us out of Freud. Where Freud theorized the psyche was a machine defined by sexuality, driven by sexuality, and that kept all the trauma in the trunk, Jung’s model of the psyche is a complex interplay between the multiple aspects of the self. This was undoubtedly a step forwards for the study of psychology, and opened the door for a far more complex and nuanced understanding of the human mind. That said, I call him an occultist because he was one. Every single one of his theories, down to the letter, is steeped in the study of western esotericism. For better and for worse.
Jung was a philosopher of experience. Child of a profoundly religious household and fascinated with the religious writings and mythological epics of history, Jung wanted to understand why some things felt important, and others didn’t. This train of thought has regular stops in the occult, and Jung practically threw himself onto the tracks.
Take the concept of synchronicities. The human experience is filled with little coincidences. Something bad happens and it starts to rain. A dove lands on the windowsill while you and a friend make up after a fight. Something strange and inexplicable occurs on Halloween night. Jung wonders why these little coincidences feel meaningful. Obviously, your emotions are not emitting invisible rays of energy that manipulate the weather or the flight patterns of birds. But, Jung supposes, the rain is associated with sadness, isn’t it? So what is the nature of this association? Why do we associate those two things? And why do we seem to associate those two things across cultures and time periods? A fair and legitimate question to ask!
Jung posits that rain and sadness are aspects of some fundamental mechanism in the mind, both expressions of some psychological tool that our mind uses to measure the world. Jung calls these fundamental psychological tools Archetypes. You parents had the same archetypes, and they were passed down to you genetically. From the moment of your birth, your ability to understand the world was defined by the archetypes passed down to you.
Sharp-brained readers may have caught something. “Hey,” you might have said “Isn’t that just the medieval doctrine of correspondences?” Yes dear reader, yes it is. But where a medieval magician might say that sadness and rain share a nature because they are both ruled by the planet Saturn, Jung says that rain and sadness share a nature because they are aspects of a similar archetype, a sort-of internal planet Saturn of the mind that the brain uses to understand the world.
For something to be true about the human mind, it needs to be true about every human mind, ever, across all of time and space. If you’re trying to map the psyche, history –especially occult history– is full of weirdos with some weird brains. If something is true for the average joe in 1920, and an unwashed itinerant mystic in 1320, you might be onto something. This is where I admire Jung’s ambition, and where his mission, for lack of a better term, begins to fall apart.
In an effort to fit the sheer breadth of humanity into a unified theory of the mind, corners had to be cut. I don’t want this section to become a Jung Criticism extravaganza. My understanding of Jung is specific, and far from comprehensive, but there are some specific claims he made that must be addressed.
The major corner he cut, is that Alchemy is a purely spiritual practice. Indeed, Jung claims that all alchemical literature, throughout the entirety of history, is actually coded spiritual writing. This is not true. However, this is not to say that alchemy was never spiritual. Many historical alchemists hailed from the clerical classes of their respective cultures. Their understanding of the world was fundamentally one created by god. There are religious elements to alchemical writing, but no two alchemists have the same relationship to god. Additionally! This is not to say that alchemical literature never had a personal, self-transformative aspect! The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, one of the most influential occult texts ever produced, deals with this exact concept. Alchemical imagery, used as the backdrop for a story of spiritual transformation. My personal theory is, that Jung saw the psychological elements in Chymical Wedding, and applied that same logic to his readings of Zosimos and Jabir Ibn-Hayyan.
We are talking about Jung because his work made up roughly a third of the New Age. Remember that God died back in 1882. Nietzche was there and he saw it happen. Traditional modes of religious thought, as in the dominant position that religious institutions held in western society, was on the way out. Jung was one of the first philosophers to attempt to tackle what that meant for society. As a result, Jungian ideas are very good at melding old religious ideas with new secular ones. This gave him a position in popular culture reminiscent of our good friend Burach Spinoza, an occasional favorite of both theists and anti-theists. Additionally, all of this was happening during the dawn of mass media. His ideas were disseminated into popular culture in ways that cannot be traced back to any one text or thinker. Concepts of archetypes, divine feminines, and synchronicities, popped up all over the place, from geopolitics to Feminism.
Jung loved tarot cards and astrology. He wanted to understand why tarot cards feel like the produce meaningful advice. But. His theories almost invariably terminate in something along the lines of ”what if this is the result of some unseen occult force?”
The man is fascinated by magic. But, he wants it to be real. He attempts to construct theories of the mind which allow space for magic.
Personally, I find it a bit silly. Look at it this way:
If you understand that tarot cards are just bits of paper, tweaked by artists and lay-theologians over the years to produce interesting and meaning-dense little stories, magical only in the sense that it was created by people who call themselves magicians, they still work. Even the staunchest most skeptical atheist can learn what the images mean, shuffle the deck, and interpret those images. You don’t need any occult forces or para-psychological archetypes or mysterious quasi-divinities for the cards to work, because they are cards. I’ll take it a step further: if you start thinking of tarot cards in terms of para-psychological archetypes and occult forces and quasi-divinities, you’re only muddying the waters aren’t you? Adding variables and giving undue spiritual importance to what is fundamentally just a deck of cards doesn’t make the cards work any better, does it? But, understanding the history of the cards, the legacy of the ideas behind the symbology, the people and cultures and ideas that informed their design, that does deepen your understanding of the cards as an object, and thus deepens your ability to tell little stories with them. The way I see it, the cards work best if you know magic isn’t real.
