Currents · by Frater Custos · 15-minute read

Jung and esotericism

A Swiss psychiatrist spends sixteen years writing and painting a book he does not publish, buys hundreds of alchemical ones, and ends by handing the West the vocabulary in which it still speaks today about symbols, coincidences and the inner life. The question is not whether he was a mystic. It is what he believed he was doing.

In 1902 a twenty-seven-year-old physician defends a doctoral thesis at Zurich on a girl who speaks with the dead. The medium is fifteen at the start of the sittings, her name is Hélène Preiswerk and she is his cousin; in the text she becomes «S.W.», out of academic discretion. The thesis is entitled On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena and it does not conclude that spirits exist: it concludes that within that girl there exist partial personalities, autonomous fragments that know things she does not know she knows. It is Carl Gustav Jung's first published work, and it is already his whole career in miniature: he takes the occult material seriously, and explains it without recourse to the supernatural.

This doubleness — seriously, but not literally — is the thing almost everyone gets wrong about Jung, in both directions. Some make him a practising occultist and some a scientist who dealt with symbols by chance. The papers say something else, and they say it clearly.

The book he did not want to publish

Between 1913 and about 1930, Jung fills a volume bound in red leather with texts calligraphed in Gothic script and with hand-painted illuminations. He calls it Liber Novus; everyone calls it The Red Book. Inside there are dialogues with inner figures who speak to him and answer him: Elijah, Salome, a winged old man named Philemon, of whom Jung would write that he taught him the objective reality of the psyche, that is, that thoughts can have a life of their own like the animals of a forest.

He did not publish it. His children did not publish it. It appeared in 2009, forty-eight years after the author's death, edited by Sonu Shamdasani, and it changed the discussion: from that moment it is no longer possible to maintain that Jung's interest in visionary material was a marginal curiosity. It was the workshop from which all the rest came.

In the middle of those years, in 1916, Jung writes and has privately printed the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, seven sermons to the dead, and attributes them to Basilides of Alexandria, a 2nd-century Gnostic. It is not a forgery meant for the market: it is a text that circulates among friends, and the fiction of the ancient author is declared by the style. But it is the point at which the distance between the psychiatrist and the material he studies grows thinner than anywhere else.

Alchemy, and what Jung saw in it

The way in has a name and a date. In 1929 the sinologist and missionary Richard Wilhelm publishes Das Geheimnis der Goldenen Blüte, «The Secret of the Golden Flower», a Chinese manual of inner alchemy, and asks Jung for a European commentary. Jung writes it, and from there he does not stop: he assembles one of the largest private libraries of alchemical texts of the twentieth century and devotes two major works to the subject, Psychology and Alchemy (1944) and Mysterium coniunctionis (1955-56), the latter finished at the age of eighty.

The thesis is precise, and needs stating properly because it is summarised badly. Jung does not maintain that the alchemists transmuted metals, nor that they concealed a spiritual doctrine beneath a chemical language. He maintains that, working for centuries on a matter whose chemistry they did not know, they projected onto the processes of the crucible the processes of their own psyche — and that the alchemical treatises are therefore an involuntary, and extraordinarily rich, documentation of the inner life of men who believed they were describing lead. Alchemy interests him as an archive, not as a technique.

Synchronicity, and the limits of what it says

In 1952 Jung publishes Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, in a volume shared with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, Nobel laureate. It is the most cited and least read text of his work. The proposal is that there are meaningful coincidences — an inner event and an outer one that match without either causing the other — and that the criterion of meaning cannot be reduced to that of cause.

What it does not say: it does not say that thought produces events, it does not supply a procedure for distinguishing a meaningful coincidence from a trivial one, and it does not claim to have demonstrated anything. Within that essay Jung also inserts an astrological experiment on pairs of horoscopes of married couples, looking for recurrent aspects between Sun, Moon and Ascendant. The experiment has met with severe statistical criticism — on the selection of the sample, on hypotheses formulated after the fact, on the size of the effects — and Jung himself, in the text, admits that the results might be the product of chance and that his own expectation might have influenced them. It is one of the most honest and most ill-treated pages of his output: those who cite it in favour of astrology and those who cite it as proof of credulity are both reporting it wrongly.

Eranos, the I Ching, and the network of relations

From 1933, at Ascona on Lake Maggiore, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn organises the Eranos conferences: an annual meeting of historians of religion, orientalists, philologists and psychologists. Jung becomes its point of reference, and for thirty years Eranos is the place where his psychology meets Henry Corbin, Mircea Eliade, Károly Kerényi, Gershom Scholem. It is through this network, more than through Jung's books, that a great part of the Jungian influence on twentieth-century religious studies passes.

To Wilhelm's German translation of the I Ching Jung prefixes a foreword that is, in effect, the first public application of synchronicity: he consults the book about the book itself, and reports the answer. Here too the formulation is cautious — he speaks of a method for observing one's own state of mind, not of a working divination.

1933, and the part that cannot be brushed aside

In 1933 Jung takes the presidency of the Allgemeine Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie, the international psychotherapy society, after the president Ernst Kretschmer had resigned following the Nazi seizure of power in Germany; and he takes over the editorship of the society's journal, the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie. In 1934 he publishes there a text in which he distinguishes between an «Aryan» and a «Jewish» psychology, maintaining that the Aryan unconscious has potentialities and tensions that the Jewish unconscious does not know, and reproaching Freud for having applied Jewish categories to Germanic patients.

On this there are two readings, and both must be reported because both have arguments. The defence: Jung maintained that he had accepted the presidency in order to keep an international structure alive and to protect Jewish colleagues, and he did in fact obtain that Jewish doctors expelled from the German section could remain individual members of the international organisation; he later spoke of an «error» and a «slip». The charge: that text exists, it is signed, it was published in a context in which those categories had immediate material consequences, and no protective intention cancels it.

It is not this page's task to pass a verdict. It is this page's task to say that the text exists, that it is of 1934, that it is in the Zentralblatt, and that anyone presenting Jung without mentioning it is giving an incomplete portrait — just as anyone who reduces him to it is.

What Jung was not

He was not a Theosophist. He knew the Theosophical literature, he cited it, and he judged its quality severely: he regarded it as symptomatic material — interesting because it shows what the West was in need of — not as a doctrine to be accepted. No adherence, no affiliation.

He was not a practising occultist. No membership of initiatic orders is on record, he did not practise magical rituals, and his relation to spiritualism is exhausted, on the active side, in the youthful sittings documented by the 1902 thesis. The active imagination that he practised and taught is a psychological technique, however unorthodox.

He did not say many of the things attributed to him. Under Jung's name a considerable quantity of unsourced aphorisms circulates, often consolatory in tone, which are not to be found in the corpus. The rule is the one that holds for Einstein and for Gandhi: if a sentence is perfect against a sunset background, the source must be looked for before citing it.

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