Jungians interpreters seem unable to take a logical look on Jung's life and teachings.
Murray Stein, the reknowned Jungian analyst wrote about the events surrounding the writing of Jung's The Seven Sermons to the Dead in 1916. In his book Jung's Map of the Soul, Stein recalls the episode of the front door bell ringing without anyone showing at the door:
Jung tells of how one Sunday afternoon in 1916, as he was sitting in his living room on Seestrasse in Kusnacht, he sensed a heavy emotional atmosphere in the house. The members of his household seemed tense and irritable. He did not understand why, but the air seemed charged with the presence of unseen figures. Suddenly the doorbell rang. He went to answer it, but no one was there. Yet the knocker was clearly moving. He swears he saw it move. By itself! When the maid asked who had rung the bell, Jung said he did not know since there was no one at the door. It rang again. This time the maid also saw the knocker move. He was not hallucinating. And then Jung heard the following words suggest themselves:
The dead came back from Jerusalem, where they found not what they sought. They prayed me let them in and besought my word, and thus I began my teaching ...
He decided to write these words down. More came:
Harken: I begin with nothingness. Nothingness is the same as fullness. In infinity full is no better than empty. Nothingness is both empty and full. As well might ye say anything else of nothingness, as for instance white is it, or black, or again, it is not, or it is. This nothingness or fullness we name the PLEROMA.
Over the next few days Jung took down, as if by dictation, a Gnostic text entitled “Seven Sermons to the Dead.” This teaching, delivered in the words and under the identity of the ancient Gnostic master, Basilides, is a message that came to Jung from the archetypal realm of the psyche.¹
One could expect from a teenager to be seized by the magic of that story because he has not yet received what the responsibilities and the harshness of life normally give. His life experiences are too few and he has not been confronted with enough serious problems to which he has to find a logical answer. His logic is insufficient by a lack of experience. This is a normal occurence in young people.
But what we have in the quote above is the perception of a grown man, an adult in the evening of his life, believing that Jung had a revelation in the words and under the identity of the deceased gnostic Basilides that came from the archetypal realm of the psyche by dictation. What he sees in this episode is the wonderful and magical world of the Jungian mystique, a world of revelations, visions, predictions, ghosts and super powers. To Murray, the writing of the Seven Sermons is a magical and miraculous occurrence, an event similar to those of the life of a saint or a prophet. That inability to differentiate what is reality from what is fiction is a serious problem in the field of Analytical psychology. In fact, Murray is not the only one to show that kind of childishness, most of the Jungian interpreters show the same characteristic.
A normal grown man or woman would have many doubts about the story above. Many reasons could explain the bell ringing before invoking ghosts or the dead. Children playing, defective bell, etc. Humans, as we know, are easily fooled by their perceptions. In the same manner, Jung's intuition related to the text of the Seven Sermons could also have a reasonable and logical cause instead of believing and promoting that it was dictated from above.
THE ARIADNE'S THREAD IN JUNG'S LIFE
There is a thin thread, an Ariadne's thread in Jung's life that Jungians do not understand. This thread logically explains his interests, his research and his books. Because Jungians are not able to see that thread, they are forced to believe in the magical world of Jungian mystique. Let us see what that thread is.
On December 21st, 1913, Jung had a transcendent experience. This is what he later called a conjunction of opposites or, in latin, a conjunctio oppositorum. Mystical experiences are always an extremely numinous symbol of conjunction of opposites that enters consciousness for a short moment. For Jung, it was his mental experience of becoming the deus leontocephalus or Aion god and seeing himself as the crucified Christ. This is the conjunction of the opposites me-God or me-universe (particle-whole).
In The Red Book, he titled the section where he recalled his experience as MYSTERIUM. A clear indicator of the importance of that experience to him. That experience changed his whole worldview and his psychology. He never stopped, after that, searching for the meaning and the cause of that experience. This is why he turned to the study of Gnosticism. His first intuition was that the gnosis of the Gnostics were mystical experiences and his research proved he was right (layed out in his book AION).
When Jung wrote The Seven Sermons to the Dead in 1916, he was into gnosticism for at least two years. The sermons are not an intuition or a dictation for the realm of the archetypes. It is a well-organized and fully thought lesson on conjunction of opposites in Gnosticism. It may have been written in three nights (approx. 20 pages which is not much) but it was certainly well prepared.
The Ariadne's thread continues with his essay The Transcendent Function also written in 1916. In the essay, he linked transcendent experiences to active imagination and the integration of the unconscious. The problem with that essay is that Jung did not proceed to its publishing in the months and years that followed its preparation. Something was too dangerous for his career in this essay. It was finally published in 1958 after some students of the C. G. Jung Institute found it. He knew at that moment that no one would be able to understand it because no one has understood his alchemical studies in Psychology and Alchemy (1944).
In 1921, he published the book Psychological Types where the chapter 5 is entirely dedicated to the study of transcendent experiences he thought were caused by an accumulation of psychic energy in the unconscious.
In 1928, he received The Secret of the Golden Flower, a chinese treatise on mystical experiences. He found in it the description of a conjunction of opposites or a mystical experience. That was the beginning of his three decades long research on alchemy.
Alchemy was for Jung the Holy Grail. He found in it the continuation of Gnosticism. Nowadays, we tend to see the alchemists as some ignorant and strange people searching to transform lead into gold but this is far from the truth. The alchemists were the finest intellectuals of their time and they invested a lot of time and money in their grimoires. Those books were extremely expansive to produce. Their knowledge was so important and dangerous that they needed to protect themselves from the Church and the Inquisition. That explains their overly symbolic writings.
Jungians still think that those alchemists were doing active imagination before their laboratory experiences but this is an illogic and romantic view. The experiences of the alchemists did not needed a laboratory because all maneuvers were mental. Their goal was to consciously produce mystical experiences, a domain reserved to the Church. The Philosopher's stone, the rebis, the homonculus, the son of the philosophers, the pearl of great price and the conjunction of opposites were all allegories and synonyms to the mystical experience phenomenon. Jung found the apex of alchemy in Gerhard Dorn's alchemical opus. Dorn was teaching a system with three successive conjunction of opposites or mystical experiences that Jung stated to be close to the psychological experience.
When we follow the Ariadne's thread in Jung's life, it explains a lot and his books become surprisingly clear.
Murray missed the thread in Jung's life and he resorted to magic as did his whole generation of analysts. In the quote below, he shows that he knew that Jung was studying gnosticism before writing The Seven Sermons but he cannot bring himself to adopt a logical view on that episode and still believe that it came spontaneously to Jung.
Of course one knows that Jung was very interested in Gnosticism prior to this visitation and that he had read many fragments of ancient Gnostic texts, so there were undoubtedly many connections to this visionary experience in his living room and library. Yet this was also a highly imaginative and creative new work, albeit in the form of a grandiose religious text, and it came spontaneously from the depths of Jung’s own psyche. He was not simply quoting from memory—even cryptomnesia does not account for it, since it cannot be found elsewhere in the classic texts of Gnosis. Nor was he trying deliberately to write in the style of the Gnostics. This writing was not intentional. In retrospect it can be seen that this text, which was completed in about three days, contains the seeds of many ideas that Jung would work out in the following decades in more rational intellectual and scientific terms.¹
When one let himself sink in the sweet and soft world of the mother or the wonderful and magical world of Jungian mystique, it is very difficult to escape it. One needs to become conscious of his projections and integrate what they mean in order to free oneself from the power of the unconscious. In other words, one needs to become an adult.
If any help is needed, look for a good Jungian analyst!!!🤣
¹ Stein, Murray. Jung's Map of the Soul. Open Court. 2010 p. 162-163
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