JUNG,
CARL GUSTAV (OCCULTIST)
Carl Gustav Jung is very topical at the moment with
the almost superstar status that Professor Jordan Peterson of Toronto
University has on the social media.
Peterson is a great admirer of Jung’s psychology. Bishop Robert Barron of the U.S.A., whilst
admiring Peterson’s latest book Twelve
Rules for Life, has a caveat: “I have the same concern about Peterson
that I have about both Joseph Campbell and Jung, namely the Gnosticism tendency
to read Biblical religion purely psychologically and philosophically and not at
all historically.... every Christian has to accept the fact that the God of the
Bible is not simply a principle or an abstraction, but rather a living God who
acts in history”.
Hans Kȕng also had reservations about Eugen Drewerman,
another devotee of Jung. “Kȕng notes
Drewerman’s unconcern for truth and immodest attempt to ‘commandeer’ the gospel
texts and persons for psychology, reducing matters, as Kȕng subsequently puts
it, to mere ‘esoteric-symbolic self-discovery’”. (Gerald O’Collins, S.J. Tablet 5/6/93, p.723)
Colin Wilson says that Jung’s theories about the
mythic realm were often irrelevant.
Wilson, in his Lord of the
Underworld : a Study of Jung, said Jung “was determined to drag in his
mythic theories whether they fitted or not.
This could explain why a surprising number of Jung’s cases ended in
failure”. (p.131) A lot of Christians initially welcomed Jung
because he seemed to contradict the atheist Freud. But many seem absolutely ignorant of the real
Jung: his propensity to plagiarize and
his dangerous dabbling in the occult, which has led many Christians to do the
same. Before he died, Jung came to admit
that not only Philemon, but the many other entities that he and his family had
cultivated for years were not part of his famous collective unconscious, but in
reality dangerous independent beings: ‘I
have to admit that the spirit hypothesis yields better results in practice than
any other’. (Collected Letters, Vol.1,
p.43)
The American author and publisher, Rochelle Gibler,
says “Here was the man who gave scientific credibility to the consciousness
movement eventually admitting that the entities he thought of as part of his
collective unconscious were, after all, hostile beings existing outside the
inner workings of the mind. He was
forced to confess that the most sensible explanation for this activity was, in
fact, the spirit world. As so many
others have since discovered, it was the altered state of consciousness that he
so avidly sought, and advocated for others, that nearly destroyed him in the
end. Yet all of this remained hidden”. (The Power of Miracles: the Truth Behind
Spiritual Healing. Hodder Headline PIC,
London, 1998)
‘Hidden’ like the repudiations by Jean Paul Sartre,
Abraham Maslow and William Coulson of theories associated with them. It is little known that Sartre disavowed his
writings, subscribing instead to the idea of a living God who created us with a
purpose and a plan.
Also, Coulson and Maslow recanted their previous views
of the non-directive method, but that too was kept hidden from many by
publishers who had to sell their books!
(cf. F.E. Fox and D.W. Virtue, Homosexuality, p.102)
Hopefully these articles below will alert Christians
to Jung’s late-in-life repudiations of some of his theories which were later
buried by vested interests. St. Paul
says that the “Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the
faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons”. (1 Tim. 4:1-2). This certainly applies to Jung and it is
disturbing to find priests and pastors, Catholic and Protestant alike,
consecrated religious and laypeople, including seminarians, promoting “things
taught by demons” and doing the devil’s work in promoting Carl Jung, who was an
ardent racist: “Living together with barbaric races, especially with negroes,
exerts a suggestive effect on the laboriously tamed instinct of the white race
and tends to pull it down”. (C.G.
Jung) “The reason the Son of Man
appeared was to destroy the devil’s work” (1 John 3:8) not to promote it!
Jung, the dabbler in all things occultic, was
frequented by demonic entities all his life and tried to give rational
explanations for this demonic activity, e.g. his theory of synchronicity,
described by Jung as a “meaningful coincidence of two or more events where
something other than the probability of chance is involved”.
For example “Jung described a situation of
synchronicity where he came to notice a half man, half fish symbol. He was then served fish for lunch. Someone joked about making an ‘April fish’ of
another. In the afternoon one of his
patients showed him a picture of a fish.
In the evening another person showed him an embroidery of sea monsters
and fishes. The next morning his next
patient shared with him a dream she had about fish”. The writer of this article goes on to say
that “synchronicity can actually be quite unnerving, especially when certain
symbols.... keep appearing”.
I would go further and say not only “unnerving” but so
frightening it can lead to paranoia. For
those in exorcism or deliverance ministry they frequently come across examples
like this and it seems to be part of the devil’s “tricks” that St. Paul talks
about in Ephesians 6:10. Anyone who does
the devil’s work (or even opposes the devil’s work) is subject to the devil’s
“tricks” – coincidences happen that can drive them crazy.
Rochelle Gibler (see below) mentions that after a
conversation with a Professor James Hyslop of Columbia University, Jung
conceded that Hyslop was right in that the metaphysical phenomena Jung
experienced all his life “could be explained better by the hypothesis of
spirits than by the qualities and peculiarities of the unconscious”. By ‘spirits’ Hyslop means demonic spirits.
This is particularly true of Jung’s theory of
synchronicity, delivered as a lecture in 1951.
He mentions a patient who recounted a dream of a golden scarab beetle
and then there was a knocking on the window pane and when Jung opened it, a
golden-green scarab beetle flew in!
Colin Wilson says this is a genuine instance of synchronicity, but Jung
“confuses the issue by mentioning more examples of ESP and precognition as well
as telepathy”, - not synchronicity. (C.
Wilson, Lord of the Underworld, p.113f)
All of these experiences, I think, could be “explained
better by the hypothesis of spirits than by the qualities and peculiarities of
the unconscious”. Those who dabble in
the occult can experience psychic phenomena like ESP, precognition, telepathy
and other demonic phenomena like “unnerving” coincidences. A survey of psychologists and psychiatrists
in Latin America were virtually unanimous in seeing these practices as
contributing to madness. (B. Kloppenburg
ofm, Pastoral Practice and the Paranormal, p.56). Kloppenburg is very critical of Jung’s part
in popularising the occult. So Churchmen
encouraging people to get in contact with the child within or embracing one’s
shadow self may, in fact, be opening people to the demonic.
A lot of myths, fairy tales and folklore that Jung was
so enamoured of, with their giants, dwarves, gnomes, trolls, goblins, werewolves,
vampires and snakes (particularly snakes) are also the stuff of dreams of many
demonised people and not just harmless archetypes.
Nearly everything in Jung’s work is vitiated by the
occult/demonic world in which he and his family lived – for generations. So he knows no better, this includes his
weird ideas on gender. Pope Francis has
said “gender ideology is demonic”. Ed Hird
maintains that “part of the gender bending and gender blending of our
post-modern culture is rooted in Jung’s androgynous teaching about the
so-called anima and animus”. (Carl Jung
and the Gnostic Reconciliation of Gender Opposites. www.edhird.com)
Jung described the anima and animus as “psychological
bisexuality”. Richard Noll of Harvard
University comments that Jung’s first encounter with the feminine entity he
later called the anima, seems to have begun with the use of mediumistic
techniques”. (R. Noll, The Jung Cult,
p.202/3) Mediums, of course, contact
demons.
Jung’s blasphemous dream of God defecating on Basle
Cathedral is, I think, “explained better by the hypothesis of spirits”, as
demonised people often experience blasphemous dreams or visions, or indulge in
blasphemous talk or conduct.
Another blasphemous dream:
“When younger, Carl Jung had a life-changing dream of a
subterranean phallic god which reappeared ‘whenever anyone spoke too
emphatically about Lord Jesus’. Jung
commented that “...the ‘man-eater’ in general was symbolized by the phallus, so
that the dark Lord Jesus, the Jesuit and the phallus were identical”. This “initiation into the realm of darkness”
radically shaped Jung’s approach to Jesus:
“Lord Jesus never became quite real for me, never quite acceptable,
never quite lovable, for again and again I would think of his underground
counterpart... Lord Jesus seemed to me in some ways a god of death... Secretly, his love and kindness, which I
always heard praised, appeared doubtful to me...” Jung later confessed to
Sigmund Freud that as a boy he had been ‘the victim of a sexual assault’. To what degree, I wonder, was Jung’s ‘revelation’
of the phallus god a fruit of childhood sexual abuse?” (edhird.com)
One of the devastating effects of childhood sexual
abuse is that the victim seems to become demonised by the trauma. Francis Mac Nutt says that “spirits of trauma
are the most common category of evil spirits that afflict people” and “they
enter a person, not through the victim’s sin, but through someone else’s”. (Deliverance from Evil Spirits, Baker House,
1995, pp,182f) It also seems to lead to
a heightened libido in the victim and it is well known that Jung had a voracious
sexual appetite and had a virtual harem of “Jungfrau”, as they were called.
Further
Reading:
Paul C. Vitz, Psychology as Religion : the Cult of
Self-worship.
Rieff, Philip, The Triumph of the Therapeutic.
Kilpatrick, William, Psychological Seducution : The
Failure of Modern Psychology.
APPENDIX
1
Rochelle
M. Gibler, The Power of Miracles,
Hodder Headline Books, 1998. pp.186-188
JUNG’S
DARK SECRET
Carl Jung is revered throughout the world, millions
laud him in the belief that his methods are the answer to some of the most
impenetrable problems of the human mind.
There are detractors, of course, especially those who deride the
importance he placed on dreams. But what
few of his critics – and still fewer of his fans – realise is that Jung had a
dark secret: he was a lifelong
participant in the arts of the occult.
At just three years of age Jung reported his first
vision. Not that this was surprising in
his family, where supernatural experiences appear to have been common for
generations. Several of his family had
been involved with séances. It was said
that his mother’s home was so full of spirit activity that she had to make an
effort to keep ‘it’ (the mystical force) contained, so that her father, a
Protestant minister no less, could write his Sunday sermons. Jung’s grandmother once went into a trance
for three days, during which she described with uncanny accuracy people unknown
to her, whose existence was subsequently proved. Later, after her death, Jung’s grandfather
held séances to contact his wife and it is claimed that he had lengthy
conversations with her. (1)
As we know, this type of activity is passed on, as new
members of each generation cultivate contact with the spirit world. The ties get stronger and the manifestations
become more apparent. Given Jung’s
family history, it was therefore entirely natural that he should have been
deeply attracted to the occult.
Apparently, after his split with Freud in 1912, Jung’s spirit
manifestations increased, horrifying him and leading him to the brink of
suicide. It was at about this time that
a new mentor arrived on the scene:
Philemon, a spirit guide. Jung,
aware of the response, that this was likely to attract from his colleagues and
followers, felt it impossible to share such an experience with them. He knew it would have harmed his reputation
irreparably. So it remained a
secret. Even his doctoral thesis,
entitled ‘Psychology and Pathology of
So-called Phenomena’, was hushed up to avoid controversy.
Until this time Jung had argued that all minds were a
part of something he called the collective unconscious, which he described as
the source of unknown powers. He
repeatedly defined the impulses of the unconscious as ‘exteriorisations’, but
he eventually rejected the theory in favour of the spirit world. He wrote, ‘Philemon represented a force which
was not myself.... It was he who taught
my psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche.... He was a mysterious figure to me. At times he seemed to me quite real, as if he
were a living personality. I went
walking up and down the garden with him, and to me he was what the Indians call
a guru. (2)
Eventually, Jung came to suspect that not only
Philemon but the many other spirit entities that he and his family had
cultivated for years were not part of his famous collective unconscious but, in
reality, dangerous independent beings.
He once wrote: ‘Hardly had I been
in bed for half an hour than everything was there as before; the torpor, the
repulsive smell, the dripping....
something brushed along the walls, the furniture creaked.... there were
rustlings in the corners.... The
phenomena grew still more intense during the following weekend.... I cautiously suggested to my host that the
house might be haunted, and that this might explain the surprisingly low
rent.... The fifth weekend was.... unbearable.... there were rustlings,
creakings, and bangings, from outside, blows rained on the walls. I had the feeling there was something near
me, and opened my eyes. There, beside me
on the pillow, I saw the head of an old woman, and the right eye, wide open,
glared at me.... I leapt out of bed with
one bound, lit the candle and spent the rest of the night in an armchair.... my
health had suffered under these experiences....
I consider it out of the question that it was a delusion of the senses.
(3)
After a conversation with Professor James Hyslop of
Columbia University about ‘the proof of identity (spirits), Jung said, ‘He
admitted that, all things considered, all these metaphysical phenomena could be
explained better by the hypothesis of spirits than by the qualities and
peculiarities of the unconscious. And
here, on the basis of my own experience, I am bound to concede he is
right. In each individual case I must of
necessity be sceptical, but in the long run I have to admit that the spirit
hypothesis yields better results in practice than any other’. (4)
Towards the end of his life, Jung became a victim of
the forces in which he submitted his unconscious, the very same forces that
caused the slow disintegration of his psyche, which all those who court occult
powers inevitably experience at some point.
His struggle to remain in control was evident as he wrote, ‘I needed a
point of support in “this world”, and I may say that my family and my
professional work.... remained the base to which I could always return.... (or)
the unconscious contents could have driven me out of my wits.... I have a
medical diploma from a Swiss university, I must help my patients, I have a wife
and five children, I live at 228 Seestrasse in Kusnacht – these were
actualities which made demands upon me and proved to me again and again that I
really existed, that I was not a blank page whirling about in the winds of the
spirit, like Nietzsche (who died insane).
(5)
Jung, like so many others before and after him, came
to the same unfortunate conclusions about the source of mystical powers and
poltergeist activity. Here was the man
who gave scientific credibility to the consciousness movement eventually
admitting that the entities he thought of as part of his collective unconscious
were, after all, hostile beings existing outside the inner workings of the mind. He was forced to confess that the most
sensible explanation for this activity was, in fact, the spirit world. As so many others have since discovered, it
was the altered state of consciousness that he so avidly sought, and advocated
for others, that nearly destroyed him in the end. Yet all of this remained hidden.
References:
1. I am
indebted to Dave Hunt’s, The New
Spirituality (op. Cit., note 11, pp.65-6, 111) for his revelations on Jung’s involvement with the occult.
2. Memories, Dreams and Reflections, C.G.
Jung, Pantheon Books, USA, 1963, p.208.
3. Psychology and the Occult, C.G. Jung,
Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1977, pp.146-152.
4. Collected Letters (Volume 1), C.G. Jung,
Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1973,
p.43.
5. Op.
Cit., note 23, p.214.
APPENDIX
2
Paul
Likoudis reviews Aryan Christ: The
Secret Life of C.G. Jung, a book written by Richard Noll.
In the past 30 years, a “quiet revolution” has taken
place in the Catholic Church as the psychoanalytical teachings of Carl Jung,
replaced those of Jesus Christ, St. Paul, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas
in the “mainstream” of Catholic teaching in Western Europe and the United
States – a revolution which most Catholics have not yet noticed.
How odd that the Swiss psychoanalyst, who considered
himself the founder of a new religion to replace traditional Christianity, who
wrote of his own “deification” as a lion-headed god from an ancient Aryan
mystery cult, should achieve such pre-eminent status.
Odder yet, in our post-Holocaust world, that Jung, a
virulent anti-Semite whom the British Foreign Office wanted tried at the
Nuremberg war crimes trials as a Nazi pseudo-scientist, should be embraced as a
spiritual guide by millions of Catholics seeking psychological healing.
Even odder is the fact that Jung, an “apostle for
adultery”, who believed in (and practiced) polygamy, who devoted his life to
overthrowing patriarchal society and reviving the ancient pagan gods of the
libido, should have his “insights” into masculinity and femininity and
sexuality upheld by a woman, Dolores Leckey – who has headed the U.S. bishops’
Marriage and Family Life Office in their national conference for 10 years!
These bizarre developments in the Catholic Church have
not yet had the hearing they deserve, but a new book by Richard Noll, a
clinical psychologist and lecturer in the history of science at Harvard
University, should generate some long-overdue discussion.
Two years after publishing The Jung Cult (Princeton University Press), which demonstrated that
Jung deliberately founded a new religious movement, Noll is back with The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of C.G.
Jung (Random House), which presents even more explosive revelations
detailing Jung’s obsession with overthrowing orthodox Christianity.
Noll shows how Jung was, in many ways, the product of
his environment. He was the grandson of
an apostate Catholic and physician, Karl Gustav Jung, who rose high in Masonic
and Illuminati circles. The elder Karl
might have been – Carl Jung believed he was – the result of an adulterous
affair between K.G’s mother and Goethe;
at any rate, adultery and Masonic mysticism and occultism would continue
racing through the Jung genes.
Noll introduces the reader to Carl Jung in 1895, when
the 20-year-old medical student is among a circle of his female kin engaged in
a séance, contacting the spirits of their dead relatives. These séances, described by Jung himself and
narrated by Noll in spine-chilling detail, “marked the opening of a door that
never completely closed, an invitation to countless discarnate voices and
prescient entities that Jung would consult and teach others to consult for the
rest of his life. Spiritualists
techniques of visionary-trance induction not only introduced Jung to his
deceased ancestors, but also the spirits and gods of the Land of the Dead, who,
under various pseudonyms of psychological jargon, remained his travelling
companions along the trails of life”.
From the years 1900 to 1909, Jung was engaged in
clinical research at the renowned Burgholzli, where he specialized in dementia
praecox (schizophrenia). By the time he
left, he had made his reputation as a leading psychologist in Europe, and had pioneered
many of the treatments and coined many of the phrases which are now standard
tools of the trade.
During his time at the Burgholzli, Jung wrote a letter
to the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, concerning a patient, Sabina
Spielrein (with whom Jung later had an adulterous affair – one of many), thus
beginning a short-lived, but affectionate, relationship during which Freud
anointed the younger Jung his heir apparent – a device which he hoped would
liberate psychoanalysis from the charge that it was a “Jewish affair”.
By 1910, Jung had come to see in psychoanalysis a
replacement for traditional Christianity, which he made clear in a Feb. 10th,
1910 letter, replying to Freud’s query on whether it would be wise to join the
International Order for Ethics and Culture.
I imagine a far finer and more comprehensive
task for (psychoanalysis) than alliance with an ethical fraternity. I think we must give it time to infiltrate
into people from many centres, to revivify among intellectuals a feeling for
symbol and myth, ever so gently to transform Christ back into a soothsaying god
of the vine, which he was, and in this way absorb those ecstatic instinctual
forces of Christianity for the one purpose of making the cult and the sacred
myth what they once were, a drunken feast of joy where man regained the ethos
and holiness of an animal. That was the
beauty and purpose of classical religion. [See Appendix 3 below]
Noll comments:
This explosive effusion of Christian and
Dionysian imagery and visions of psychoanalysis as an “irresistible mass
movement” and as a living replacement for orthodox Christianity could only have
reminded Freud of certain Nietzschean, Wagnerian, Volkish neopagan cultural
themes that would appeal primarily to Germanic Christian-Aryans.
Freud’s response was a reprimand. Jung’s zealotry was clearly off-putting. “But you mustn’t regard me as the founder of
a religion”, Freud said. “My intentions are
not so far-reaching.... I am not
thinking of a substitute for religion.
This need must be sublimated”.
Noll, however, does not mention that when Jung penned
that letter in 1910, Freud had reason to worry:
Anti-Semitism was rife in Central Europe. Government sanctioned, underwritten by
wealthy industrialists, nurtured in the universities, public schools, and cafes,
anti-Semitism was the key ingredient
in the rising wave of Volkish and neopagan ideologies extraordinarily popular
in Germany.
The
Case of Otto Gross
Before their eventual split, however, Freud passed on
to Jung for treatment at the Burgholzli a client, one Otto Gross, described by
Noll as “one of the most dangerous men of his generation, a threat to the
bourgeois-Christian universe of German Europe...”
Gross was the great breaker of bonds, the loosener,
the beloved of an army of women he had driven mad.... He coaxed one
lover/patient to suicide, and then another patient died under similar
circumstances....
He was a Nietzschean physician, a Freudian
psychoanalyst, an anarchist, the high priest of sexual liberation, a master of
orgies, the enemy of patriarchy, and a dissolute cocaine and morphine
addict. He was loved and hated with
equal passion, an infectious agent to some, a healing touch to others. He was a strawberry-blonde Dionysus.
Gross, the son of the founder of modern scientific
criminology, would become – Freud not excepted – the greatest single influence
on Jung, the man who persuaded him of the therapeutic value of adultery as a
cure for every kind of neurosis.
Of the many fascinating characters Noll describes
entering and exiting Jung’s world, Gross is by far the most intriguing and one
of the most important: “Through Otto
Gross, psychoanalysis first leapt from the bourgeoisie to the bohemian
counterculture, beginning a literary and artistic fascination with Freudian
theory that continues to this day”, observes Noll.
Gross was the prophet of a “sexual communism”, and
among those he inspired were D.H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, and a host of other
writers and artists. During Jung’s and
Gross’ long periods of psychoanalysis, Gross captivated Jung with his theories
of sexual liberation, his Nietzscheanism, and his utopian dreams of
transforming the world through psychoanalysis”.
The analysand became the teacher. Writes Noll:
During
the course of their time together, Gross offered Jung forbidden fruit. After a period of tormented consideration,
Jung finally bit. Jung’s conception of
what constituted a ‘sin’ changed; ‘Doing evil’ could have a beneficial effect
on the personality by freeing one from ‘one-sidedness’ and putting one back in
touch with an Edenic instinctual being. Jung came to believe that not giving in
to a strong sexual impulse could result in illness or even death. These are all ideas that everyone who knew
Jung for any length of time would hear him urge on others.
Once Jung submitted to the temptations Gross offered,
profound alterations in his concepts on the place of sexuality and religion in
life took place. Because they denigrated
the body and sexual activity – especially outside of holy matrimony – the
repressive orthodoxies of Christianity now seemed to him to be the true enemies
of life. Sexuality had to be brought
back into spirituality.
By 1912, Jung found another model – the spirituality
of pagan antiquity – that he held sacred.
Although Gross did not share Jung’s fascination with spiritualism or the
occult, his “religion” was finding ways to rejuvenate and indeed redeem
humankind through the sacrament of uninhibited sex. Jung soon learned of the spiritual sacredness
of sex through personal experience and implored others to consider the call of
the flesh.
“Jung is also indebted to Otto Gross
for the concepts of extraversion and introversion....
the fundamental ideas of Jung’s theory of “psychological types”.
Gross died in a sanatorium in 1920.
The
Religion of Sex
Many of Jung’s patients became his devoted “apostles”. Noll brilliantly introduces us to them, and
we watch as they physically and mentally (to say nothing of spiritually)
deteriorate.
There is Medill McCormick, part-owner of The Chicago Tribune, who suffered from
both alcoholism and depression. In a
1909 letter to his wife, Ruth Hanna McCormick, he disclosed that Jung had
prescribed mistresses as a cure for his ills.
He rather recommended a little flirting, and
told me to bear in mind that it might be advisable for me to have mistresses -
that I was a very dangerous and savage man, that I must not forget my heredity
and infantile influences and lose my soul – if women would save it.
Jung similarly recommended adultery to Henry A.
Murray, the psychologist and personality theorist at Harvard University, when
Murray was contemplating divorcing his wife – and, of course, Jung was taking
his own advice. While his wife was
bearing children, Jung brought his mistress, Toni Wolff, to live with him.
By
the time Murray met (Jung and Wolff) in 1925, (they) had been lovers for more
than a decade. And they, too, were
convinced that they had founded a new religion.
They believed in a new faith in which former sins and evils became
necessary for spiritual rebirth. God –
no longer One would emerge from individual visionary experiences and automatic
writing as a multitude of natural forces or entities that were both good and
evil, writes Noll.
It was a religion conceived through polygamy.
Then there are Harold McCormick (cousin of Medill),
heir of International Harvester, and his wife, Edith Rockefeller, daughter of
John D. Rockefeller. Without Edith, Noll
speculates, Jung might never have
succeeded – for she poured her family’s fortune into publicizing him on
this side of the Atlantic, even while her own life deteriorated via the
standard course: psychoanalysis,
adultery, divorce, alienation from her larger family, and, eventually, a lonely
death in the Drake Hotel in Chicago.
It makes painful reading.
Then there is the case of Constance Long, a British
physician who never married. After her
professional experiences during World War I and her contact with Jung, Long
began to develop her theories on bisexuality and hermaphroditism. Her theories posited that there are no
exclusively masculine or feminine genders, but each person is a blend of both.
These notions, daring for the time, have now become
part of the contemporary vocabulary through such authors as the U.S. bishops’
long-time marriage and family life director, Dolores Leckey.
No one should be surprised that Noll’s book reads like
a walk through a mental hospital: it
is. It is full of sick people, generally
the idle rich searching for a cure for their profound angst; or, in the case of
Constance Long, someone seeking a spiritual support for her lesbianism.
In the chapter on “The Passion of Constance Long”,
Noll discloses – for the first time, based on Long’s diary, Jung’s view of
himself as a “heresiarch of the first order”.
In this letter of January, 1920, filled with spiritualized eroticism and more than just a touch of
Gnostic philosophy, Jung told Long how to discover the little child, the
god living within her.
This child in its infinite smallness is your
individuality, wrote Jung, and with
practice, it is a god – smaller than small yet greater than great. The primordial creator of the world, the
blind creative libido, becomes transformed in man through individuation (i.e.,
doing whatever you want), and out of this process which is like pregnancy,
arises the divine child, a reborn god.
Please do not speak of these things
to other people. It could do harm to the
child.
Noll explains: If there was ever any doubt that Jung was
quite self-consciously the charismatic leader of his own mystery cult, this
private letter to his disciple should dispel it. Jung considered himself a heresiarch of the
first order, a redeemer who offered redemption to others so that they, too,
could be involved in the grand work of bringing to life the new god that was
trapped within everyone, waiting to be released.
Fitting
In
Many Catholic readers of Aryan Christ will find especially valuable Noll’s final chapter,
“From Volkish Prophet to Wise Old Man”.
This chapter situates Jung in his era, a time when Volkish ideologies of
racism and anti-Semitism, occult spirituality, sun worship, neopaganism, and a
farrago of pseudo-scientific philosophies prevailed.
At the heart of these potent ideologies that prepared
the Germans for the Third Reich was a bitter anti-Catholicism nurtured for over
a century in the state schools, the universities, and popular literature.
Noll shows, via a letter Jung wrote to Oskar Schmitz
in 1923, that Jung considered Christianity a foreign growth on Germany. Like Wotan’s oaks, Jung lamented, the gods were felled and a wholly
incongruous Christianity, born of monotheism on a much higher cultural level,
was grafted onto the stumps. The
Germanic man is still suffering from this mutilation.... We must dig down to the primitive in us, for
only out of the conflict between civilized man and the Germanic barbarian will
there come what we need; a new experience of God.
Not surprisingly, as Richard Wolin wrote in his review
of Noll’s book, published in the Oct. 27th issue of the New Republic, Jung adored Hitler.
In a January, 1939 interview with Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan, Jung described Hitler in
glowing terms: 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 Nuremberg party congress, since the time of
Mohammed nothing like it has been seen in this world. This markedly mystic characteristic of
Hitler’s is what makes him do things which seem to us illogical, inexplicable,
curious, and unreasonable... So you see,
Hitler is a medicine man, a form of spiritual vessel, a demi-deity, or, even
better, a myth.
Richard Noll’s Aryan
Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung, powerfully documents Jung’s life’s
mission to subvert and overthrow the Catholic Church and traditional
Christianity, the human wreckage he left in the wake of carrying out his goal,
and his unsavoury associations, including individuals involved in supporting
Hitler on his rise to power. Some of the
more minute details will be surprising such as Noll’s revelation that an
official with the International Harvester Company helped Hitler design his Nazi
flag.
How odd, then, that Jungian spirituality is a staple
in Catholic education, Catholic spirituality, and Catholic retreat centres
across America. How could it
happen? Those who read Noll’s book might
not find the answer to that question, but they will find themselves reflecting
time and time again on Pope Paul VI’s lament:
The smoke of Satan has entered the
Catholic Church.
APPENDIX
3
On a personal note:
Jung would probably have relished the Dionysian orgy
dream of Gustav Von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s Death In Venice which seems to have cult status amongst gays.
Gustav is a professor who has an infatuation with a
pretty little Polish boy in Venice and furtively pursues him everywhere,
indulging in crude fantasies of Greek gods and their orgies with sex slaves and
catamites:
“He trembled, he shrank, his will was steadfast to
preserve and uphold his own god against this stranger who was sworn enemy to
dignity and self-control. But the
mountain wall took up the noise and howling and gave it back manifold; it rose high, swelled to a madness that
carried him away. His senses reeled in
the steam of panting bodies... His heart
throbbed to the drums, his brain reeled, a blind rage seized him, a whirling
lust, he craved with all his soul to join the ring that formed about the
obscene symbol of the godhead [ i.e. the phallus] which they were unveiling and
elevating, monstrous and wooden, while from full throats they yelled their
rallying cry”.
