Carl Jung, Shaman of the West

If you want to know what a true shaman of the West would be like, consider Carl Jung, as he is now revealed in his Red Book. He culled the material for the Red Book - whose fine calligraphy and vivid illustrations and decorative features make it resemble a medieval illuminated manuscript - from the journals and 'black books" he kept during the years of his "confrontation with the unconscious", when he walked the razor's edge between madness and genius. As he describes it, the "spirit of the depths" ripped him out of the comfortable, rational assumptions of the "spirit of our times" and dragged him, night after night, through the terrifying stages of Underworld initiation.          

       In a crater in a dark and terrifying world below, where black snakes threaten to destroy a red sun, he meets the prophet Elijah and his "daughter" Salome, the evil beauty responsible for the decapitation of John the Baptist in the Bible. Salome tells Jung - to his amazement and confusion- that they are brother and sister, the children of Mother Mary. Disbelieving and fearing for his sanity, Jung yells at her that she and the Elijah figure are only "symbols". Elijah reproves him, saying, "We are just as real as your fellow men. You solve nothing by calling us symbols." Jung's Elijah also instructs him that "your thoughts are just as much outside your self as trees or animals are outside the body." [1]    

   While he is trying to continue to lead a normal life, as a prominent psychoanalyst and the father of five children. Jung's sense of reality is being shaken by the raw power of his night visions, and by synchronistic phenomena during his days when he feels the forces of a deeper world pushing through. In December 1913, in a well-cut suit, he gives a polished lecture to the Zurich Psychoanalytical Society. Three nights later, he tells Elijah, "It seems to me as if I were more real here" - in the Underworld - "yet I do not like to be here." [2]   
     As Jung confessed, anyone reading the last chapters of Liber Primus, the first part of the Red Book, out of context might conclude that the author was crazy. Brilliant and erudite, but crazy. Yet from such perilous adventures out there beyond the roped-in precinct of sanity, Jung derived his ideas about "psychological objectivity", one of the most stimulating elements in his later work. From his dialogues with his dream characters and his efforts to integrate and balance the powers that moved with them he developed his practice of active imagination. He told the Dutch artist Roland Horst that he developed his work Psychological Types from 30 pages of his Red Book [3], apparently the pages in which the encounters with Elijah and Salome take place and in which - after Jung has been squeezed by a giant black snake until the blood gushes out of him and his head has become that of a lion - Salome tells him, "You are Christ". [4]
     Looking back on this passage in his inner and transpersonal life in 1925, from across the divide of the catastrophic Great War that some of his visions had foreshadowed, Jung told a seminar that "You cannot get conscious of these unconscious facts without giving yourself to them. If you can overcome your fear of the unconscious and can let yourself go down, then these facts take on a life of their own. You can be gripped by these ideas so much that you really go mad, or nearly so. These images...form part of the ancient mysteries; in fact, it is such fantasies that made the mysteries." [5]
     "I fell into the mystery," Jung states after he has been squeezed by the black snake and saluted by Salome [6]. Reading the Red Book, we see the enormity of the price Jung paid for his wisdom, and come to appreciate the extent of his courage and eventual self-mastery. This is a record of a thoroughly shamanic descent to the Underworld, and of long testing and initiation in houses of darkness from which lesser minds and feebler spirits might never have managed to find their way back.

  

REFERENCES

1. C.G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus edited by Sonu Shamdasani (New York: Norton, 2009) 249

2. Red Book 248

3. Stephan Hoeller, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead(Wheaton, IL: Quest, 1985) 6.

4. Red Book 252.

5. Jung, Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1925 edited by William McGuire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991) 98-99.

6. Red Book 254.

For more on this theme, please read "The Dream Shaman of Switzerland" in my book Dreaming the Soul Back Home.

Graphic: Jung's Philemon, from the Red Book.

"Dreams are the facts from which we must proceed": a tribute to Jung

I have studied Jung's Red Book and read most of his recently-published Black Books, but Memories, Dreams, Reflections is the book I most treasure by this great depth psychologist and dream traveler and the one I constantly recommend to those who are just starting to explore his work. Here is a modest tribute.

I discovered Jung in high school and devoured many volumes of his Collected Works when I was an undergraduate, though I probably failed to digest the most difficult passages. In the midst of the psychic storms of 1987-8, I turned to Jung again, to see how he made sense of his own "confrontation with the unconscious". My main source book was Memories, Dreams, Reflections, his life story as recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé based on conversations he began when he was eighty-one.
     His great life crisis began in 1912, after his break with Freud. For several years, he lived in a house of the spirits. The contents of his dreams and visions seemed to be spilling over into his physical life, producing poltergeist-like phenomena and apparitions that his children could see. Night after night, he descended into a dark and thrilling Underworld where he met mythic characters who seemed to him to be entirely real and transpersonal. He often felt he was under an avalanche of psychic events, "as if gigantic stones were tumbling down upon me." His survival required him to draw on a "demonic strength" that brilliant, mad Nietzsche  had lacked.
    He kept seeing patients, but stopped lecturing at the university and ceased publishing for three years, no longer confident that he could make sense of things for other people. He had no mentor now, in the ordinary world. He sought stability through his family, his continuing work with clients, through painting and through "hewing stone", building a miniature stone village that he thought he was making in collaboration with his eleven-year-old self.
    He realized that he had to reclaim beginner's mind. He said to himself, "Since I know nothing at all, I shall simply do whatever occurs to me." Then he took the shaman's plunge. "I consciously submitted myself to the impulses of the unconscious." 
    Central to Jung's ability to restore his inner compass was his daily recording of dreams. Now divorced from theory, his main preoccupation was to set down an unedited, uncensored chronicle of his experiences. "Dreams are the facts from which we must proceed." This was one of his central discoveries, and it is one of the most helpful statements that has ever been made about dreams and dreamwork. Let's start with the facts of the dream, leaving aside theory until we have recovered as much of the experience as possible.
     This was confirmation for me of the method I was obliged to improvise in my own time of testing. I journaled my dreams and visions as exactly as possible, giving each a title noting the time and duration of each experience. I most required clarity when my experiences rebuffed interpretation and linear thinking. I found it essential to disentangle the reports of inner adventures from other material so that their nature and content was not blurred. I underlined Jung's statement that "otherwise the material would have trapped me in its thicket, strangled me like jungle creepers" and put a big check mark in the margin. Exactly right.
    In his storms of emotion, Jung sought to let images take form. Images gave him a way to work with the raw power of emotion rather than being torn apart by it. He was learning how to harvest images and rework them through what he later called "active imagination" in the laboratory of his own psyche.
    He recorded the facts of his inner experiences even when he found the content nonsensical, repugnant or freakish. In this way, he hoped that instead of being drowned by the contents of his inner life, he would gain a means of navigation. 
    He felt himself pulled into the Underworld. Instead of resisting, he let himself drop and began a harrowing journey of Underworld initiation, played out over years rather than hours, reminiscent of the shaman's path of tests and ordeals. In this time, he found an agreed form for an inner guide: an old man with the horns of a bull and wings of kingfisher blue that he named Philemon. "It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche."
    Near the end of his life, Jung observed that "all my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912, almost fifty years ago. Everything that I accomplished in later life was already contained in them, although at first only in the form of emotions and images." 
    He had had a plan for his life, to become a professor and pursue a scientific line that had seemed clear to him. "But then, I hit upon this stream of lava, and the heat of its fires reshaped my life." What overthrew his plans and expectations also gave him the prima materia for a greater life work. "That was the primal stuff which compelled me to work upon it, and my works are a more or less successful endeavor to incorporate this incandescent matter into the contemporary picture of the world."
    On my own stormy path of initiation in 1987-1988, I felt immense affinity for the great shaman of the West who spoke those words, and took comfort and courage from his example. I felt the deep truth of his ringing assertion that "he who takes the sure path is as good as dead", and spoke those words aloud, as I walked with my dogs to the old white oak behind the house, and scrambled up the slippery banks of the creek to the highest of the waterfalls.

The most important statement for me in Memories, Dreams, Reflections is this:"All day long I have exciting ideas and thoughts. But I take up in my work only those to which my dreams direct me." This is equally true for me.
     Many days a week I embark on research assignments that dreams have given me, often before doing anything else in a day. I dreamed of yesterday of writing a scholarly paper.Since then I have been investigating its subject: the life and mind of Princess Marie Bonaparte, Freud's patient and patron. Popups of synchronicity and the play of shelf elves in my large and lively home library give me further prompts for research when I am dreaming with my eyes open. Jung understood this very well too.

 

The Gates of Anamnesis

Essential knowledge comes to us through soul remembering: through reclaiming the knowledge that belonged to us, on the level of mind or spirit, before we came into the body in our present life experience. This has been central to my understanding of everything since I was in my early teens, when I received instruction from an interesting mentor.

    He was one of my invisible companions. He usually appeared at my bedside in the middle of the night, when I was drifting in a twilight state of consciousness in that place between sleep and awake. He presented himself as a radiant young man from the eastern end of the Mediterranean. He came from a Greek community on the coast of the country we now call Syria.
     His name was Philemon. Many years later, I discovered another Philemon, but this was the first time I had heard this name. This beautiful young man spoke to me in the language of the Platonists. He told me, “Everything important, everything you need to know that matters comes to you by way of anamnesis.”  The brain of my fourteen-year-old self did not previously contain that difficult word anamnesis. You can actually find anamnesis in an English language dictionary. However, it is not exactly household word. It's Greek and Philemon was using it in a very special sense.
     Anamnesis literally means “remembering”, but it's about more than remembering what you put on the grocery list or what you read in that textbook. Anamnesis in the doctrine of the Neoplatonist philosophers anamnesis is about remembering what belongs to us on the level of soul and spirit. Remembering perhaps the reasons we came here in the first place, why we took on embodiment in this life. It is as important as that. To regain such essential knowledge requires the practice of soul remembering.

    I learned later that in another Greek school of philosophy, attributed to Pythagoras, anamnesis is also about remembering your connection with a series of personalities living in other times. These may be reincarnational experiences, but there may be even more going on. Through anamnesis, you come to recognize that you are connected with personalities in other times and other dimensions and you can communicate with each other. When you do that, you bring together the knowledge of many selves. You start to see how your present life story is part of a much larger pattern. You find it possible to draw together lessons and gifts from many members of your multidimensional family.
     Heady stuff for a teenage boy in Canberra, Australia. I could do a little research, and was already reading Plutarch, but I was only able to unfold what all of this was about when I got to university and had access to a real research library. We did not have Google back in those days.
     When I read Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections at seventeen or eighteen, I discovered that Jung had a guide he called Philemon.  Jung’s Philemon looked very different from mine. His portrait is in the Red Book. Jung saw him as an old man with a long beard, bull horns and wings of kingfisher blue.He said that his Philemon taught him "the objective reality of the psyche"; that what we see as subjective or interior phenomenon are also out there. The contents of the psyche are also objective. They are both personal and transpersonal.

Over all the years, anamnesis has remained one of the most important words in my personal vocabulary, and soul remembering is central to my teaching and practice. We came here for a reason. We may or may not love the reason when we remember it, but we are here for a reason and we come here with stories from before this life. We want to remember those stories. We come here with soul kin, with a soul family extended over space and time. We want to remember more about that and start to connect consciously with our soul family. They will know us.  They will know us. They reach to us as we reach for them. As the Irish mystic AE affirmed, Your own will come to you.

Painting by AE (George Russell)

Dreaming with Jung through a Crisis of Shamanic Emergence

The night of my birthday in 1988. I entered the rooms of a tailor in Manhattan. I wanted to have a new suit made but did not like the fabrics he had in stock. When I left the tailor’s shop, the city was different. There was the sense that hidden things were pulsing behind the scenes. Still bent on new clothes, I entered the menswear section of an upscale department store. I pulled a suit off the rack. It fitted perfectly and the price was right. It seemed to have pinstripes. When I looked at the label, it read “Shamanic.”

    Now aware I was dreaming, I examined the pattern more closely. The “pinstripes” were actually minute designs, a magical language I could not yet translate. The collar was unusual. I realized it was animal fur. My first impression, of a pinstriped “power” suit, was an illusion. I had chosen a power suit of a different kind: a shaman’s outfit, of skins and furs with magical charms.

    I dreamed I was among ancient shamans in Europe. Some of these shamans boasted that they had the power of the “taurs,” but their powers were limited. They wanted knowledge from me that they did not have, but I turned away from them because it seemed that they wanted power for self-aggrandizement and to make war on the people over the next hill. I found an old man who looked like Jung, smoking a pipe and carefully laying one stone on another.

    I turned back to Jung. In the midst of a midlife crisis that I came to understand was a process of shamanic ordeal and initiation, recently relocated to a farm in rural New York, I was in urgent need of a guide.  I had discovered Jung in high school and devoured many volumes of his Collected Works when I was an undergraduate, though I probably failed to digest the most difficult passages. In the midst of the psychic storms of 1987–1988, I turned to Jung again, to see how he made sense of his own “confrontation with the unconscious.” My main source was Memories, Dreams, Reflections, his life story as recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé, based on conversations he began when he was eighty-one.

    His great life crisis began in 1912, after his break with Freud. For several years, he lived in a house of the spirits. The contents of his dreams and visions seemed to be spilling over into his physical life, producing poltergeist-like phenomena and apparitions that his children could see. Night after night, he descended into a dark and thrilling Underworld where he met mythic characters who seemed to him to be entirely real and transpersonal. He often felt he was under an avalanche of psychic events, “as if gigantic stones were tumbling down upon me.”  His survival required him to draw on a “demonic strength” that brilliant, mad Nietzsche had lacked.

    He kept seeing patients but stopped lecturing at the university and ceased publishing for three years, no longer confident that he could make sense of things for other people. He had no mentor now, in the ordinary world. He sought stability through his family, his continuing work with clients, through painting, and through “hewing stone,” building a miniature stone village that he thought he was making in collaboration with his eleven-year-old self.

    He realized that he had to reclaim beginner’s mind. He said to himself, “Since I know nothing at all, I shall simply do whatever occurs to me.” Then he took the shaman’s plunge. “I consciously submitted myself to the impulses of the unconscious.”

    Central to Jung’s ability to restore his inner compass was his daily recording of dreams. After his break with Freud and his theory, Jung's main preoccupation was to set down an unedited, uncensored chronicle of his experiences. “Dreams are the facts from which we must proceed.”  This was one of his central discoveries, and it is one of the most helpful statements that has ever been made about dreams and dreamwork. Let’s start with the facts of the dream, leaving aside theory until we have recovered as much of the experience as possible. 

    This was confirmation for me of the method I was obliged to improvise in my own time of testing. I journaled my dreams and visions as exactly as possible, giving each a title and noting the time and duration of each experience. I most required clarity when my experiences rebuffed interpretation and linear thinking. I found it essential to disentangle the reports of inner adventures from other material so that their nature and content were not blurred. I underlined Jung’s statement that “otherwise the material would have trapped me in its thicket, strangled me like jungle creepers” and put a big check mark in the margin. Exactly right.

    In his storms of emotion, Jung sought to let images take form. Images gave him a way to work with the raw power of emotion rather than being torn apart by it. He was learning how to harvest images and rework them through what he later called “active imagination” in the laboratory of his own psyche.

    He recorded the facts of his inner experiences even when he found the content nonsensical, repugnant, or freakish. In this way, he hoped that instead of being drowned by the contents of his inner life, he would gain a means of navigation.

    He felt himself pulled into the Underworld. Instead of resisting, he let himself drop and began a harrowing journey of Underworld initiation, played out over years rather than hours, reminiscent of the shaman’s path of tests and ordeals. In this time, he found an agreed form for an inner guide: an old man with the horns of a bull and wings of kingfisher blue that he named Philemon. “It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche.”  

    Near the end of his life, Jung observed, “All my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912, almost fifty years ago. Everything that I accomplished in later life was already contained in them, although at first only in the form of emotions and images.”

    He had had a plan for his life, to become a professor and pursue a scientific line that had seemed clear to him. “But then, I hit upon this stream of lava, and the heat of its fires reshaped my life.”  What overthrew his plans and expectations also gave him the prima materia for a greater life work. “That was the primal stuff which compelled me to work upon it, and my works are a more or less successful endeavor to incorporate this incandescent matter into the contemporary picture of the world.”

    I felt immense affinity for the great dream shaman of the West who spoke those words, and took comfort and courage from his example. I felt the deep truth of his ringing assertion that “anyone who takes the sure road is as good as dead,” and spoke those words aloud as I walked with my dogs to the old white oak behind my farmhouse and scrambled up the slippery banks of the creek to the highest of the waterfalls.
    Jung labeled his years of psychic struggle and self-healing his "confrontation with the unconscious". I liked the relative mildness of this term, barely hinting at the tremendous raw power of the energies that raced through our psyches like wild bulls. My own confrontation with the unconscious gave me the material for more than a dozen books and put me on the road of a dream teacher, for which there was no career track in my culture.

Text adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Image: Bull of Lascaux

The stone Jung's builders rejected

Jung dreamed of a tower and he built it, on old church land at the edge of the village of Bollingen, on the shore of the Obersee basin of Lake Zürich. He started work soon after his mother’s death in 1923. What began as a simple neo-medieval tower with a pointed roof grew, in successive waves of inspiration and construction, into a small castle. Jung embarked on the final phase of construction after his wife Emma’s death in 1955, adding a high upper room he called the chapel to the middle building between what were now two towers. He painted the walls with scenes of other times, and filled the room with things that took him “out of time, out of the present.”
    He always refused to install electricity and indoor plumbing. He lived here like a farmer of an earlier time, pumping his own water, chopping wood for his fire, lighting his candles and oil lamps, cooking his hearty stews. He spent several months of the year at Bollingen. He came for solitude and simplicity, leaving behind his patients, his lecture room audiences, and his persona as professor and professional analyst. He went about in old, comfortable clothes, and was often to be seen in overalls and even, on occasion, washing a pair of jeans. He did the best of his creative writing here in the last period of his life.
     Very often, if you were nearby, you could hear the tap of Jung’s chisel or the clang of his hammer. He worked here with stone as well as paper, covering many surfaces with images and inscriptions. He called the whole place his “confession in stone”. Some of the things he carved were there for any visitor to see, some were hidden. One of the hidden inscriptions read in Latin Philemonis sacrum Faust poenetentia [sic] which means “Sanctuary of Philemon, Penitence of Faust”. 

     Philemon was the name by which Jung knew the spiritual guide whose importance is fully revealed in the Red Book, the guide who, as he wrote, convinced him of the objective reality of the psyche and its productions. Philemon is also the name, in the myth, of a kindly old man who gives hospitality to gods who are traveling in disguise – and is killed, together with his gentle wife, through the greed and megalomania of Faust, the model of heedless Western man, in Part II of Goethe’s Faust.
     When he was writing his essay on synchronicity, Jung carved the face of a laughing Trickster on the west wall of the original tower.
     Jung’s confession in stone contains many images that spark fire in the imagination but do not immediately yield explanation, except where Jung has added words, always in Greek or Latin, which he read fluently. Here is a woman reaching for the udder of a mare. Here is a bear behind her, apparently rolling a ball. Here is Salome. Here is a family crest.
      The best story of Jung’s stone work involves the block that was not supposed to be delivered. Jung wanted to build a wall for his garden. He engaged a mason who gave exact measurements for the stones required to the owner of a quarry while Jung was standing by. The stones were delivered by boat. 

     When unloaded, it was clear at once that there had been a major mistake. The cornerstone was not triangular, as ordered. It was a perfect cube of much larger dimensions, about twenty inches thick. Enraged, the mason ordered the workmen to reload this block on the boat. Jung intervened, saying, “That is my stone! I must have it.” He knew at once that the stone his mason had rejected would suit him perfectly for a purpose he did not yet understand.
     Fairly soon, he decided to chisel a quotation from one of his beloved alchemists on one side of the cube. But something deeper was stirring, through affinity between Jung and the stone itself. On a second face of the stone, he saw something like a tiny eye, looking at him. He chiseled a definite eye. 

    Around it he carved the shape of a little hooded figure, a homunculus. He had a name for this figure, Telesphoros. The name means “one who guides to completion”. In Greek mythology, he is a son of Asklepios, the patron of dream healing. This figure was a recurring archetype in Jung’s inner life, one he sought to give physical form with pen and chisel and, as a boy, with a pocket knife. When he was ten years old, Jung carved a little manikin of this kind from a school ruler and kept it hidden in a box. He regarded this as his first great secret in life, and “the climax and conclusion” of his childhood. 

     Now, around Telesphoros, he chiseled words in Greek that came to him. In Memories Dreams Reflections they are translated as follows:

Time is a child – playing like a child – playing a board game – the kingdom of the child. This is Telesphoros, who roams through the dark regions of this cosmos and glows like a star out of the depths. He points the way to the gates of the sun and to the land of dreams.

The broken first sentence is a loose translation of one of the most mysterious and compelling fragments of the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Key words are open to rival translations. The word Jung renders as time is aion for which “time” is perhaps not a strong enough rendering. A recent translation of the line from Heraclitus offers this: “Lifetime is a child at play, moving pieces on a board. Kingship belongs to the child.” 
      I wonder whether Jung played with the idea, as he chiseled, that what Heraclitus was talking about was a secret law of manifestation, perhaps none other than what Jung dubbed synchronicity. Beyond logic, beyond causation as it is commonly understood, the play of forces outside time determines what happens within the human experience of time. Play is what we must be most serious about. Play in the spirit of the child, who plays without concern for consequences, because the play is the thing.      

     So, I suggest: “Synchronicity is a child at play, moving pieces on a board.” On our side of reality, we see the pieces move, but not the hand that moves them or casts them.

Merlin's cry

One side of Jung's cube remains blank. He said near the end of his life that he had an idea for it, never realized: "Do you know what I wanted to chisel into the back face of the stone? “Le cri de Merlin!” For what the stone expressed reminded me of Merlin’s life in the forest, after he had vanished from the world. Men still hear his cries, so the legend runs, but they cannot understand or interpret them."

Adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. All rights reserved.