Jung - 29/jan/2025

JUNG

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?

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, and Jung knows this is the medieval doctrine of signatures. Which begs the question, why is he trying to work the medieval doctrine of signatures into psychology? 

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 want to correct Jung’s assertion that alchemy is purely spiritual. But also make note that it did have religious and cultural elements. 

• Broke with Freud on many important point, specifically, he helped divorce psychology from overreliance on sexual experience. Where freud believed that every element of the psyche went back to sex in increasingly abstract and complicated ways, Jung did not believe that

  • Freud’s model of the psyche was driven by sexuality, and kept all the trauma in the trunk, as it were

  • Jung believed in a collective unconscious, Freud did not

  • Freud believed sexuality is what shaped a person, where Jung was a proponent of a lifetime spiritual growth

  • Freud had a biological, mechanistic psychology, whereas Jung was more centered around meaning.

• 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.