The first half of the twentieth century, plus a dozen years past midpoint—Jung's days in the sun—were indeed awash with mysterious winds and submerged currents of the soul—Jung's realms of exploration—capable of roiling the surface waters up to storm force. The names differed: racial destiny, dialectical materialism, progress, the will of the people, the Freudian unconscious, the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Nothing that happened was what it seemed, either in individual life or the affairs of nations: invisible hands, of the sort best perceived by true modern gnostics, it was agreed on all sides, controlled, from deep within, the world of appearances of what nonetheless prided itself on being an age of sceince, reason, and democracy. The trouble was that those outward vehicles of modernity never were really large enough to guage fully all the vagaries of indvidual passion, or the fate of dynasties. There needed to be more, unplumbed depths teeming with depth charges, explaining why things were sometimes but not always as science, reason, or the democratic process expected them to be, and interpreting the world in terms acceptable to both modernity and the mystical tides behind modern history. To this endeavor Jung contributed generously.
The Sovereignty of Individuation
Paradoxically and significantly, in light of the immense German failure, the only solution Jung had to offer for the ills of mass man was individual—individuation, the harmonious rearrangement of the archetypes on an individual basis and within a modern individual. More and more this became apparent as Jung contemplated the Nazi disaster. As he confronted the land of blond beasts across the border, there was less than before in his everflowing writings about rootedness and lost communalism, and more about the reconstituted individual as the only hope. Mass man, always the bane of modernity to Jung, increasingly became only "mass psychosis." In "The Undiscovered Self" (1957), after showing that even the "religious forces," though in principle a possible focal point for resistance to totalitarianism, can be absorbed by the omnipotent state, Jung comes to his chief hope, the transformed individual. " Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the
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man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself." 68 As Hans Schaer has pointed out, if "modern man" cannot avail himself of a universal symbol, the process must now set in which Jung called individuation. 69 That will depend on discovering individual symbols, for Jung put little stock in demythologizing, or the translations of unconscious contents into the bloodless generic abstractions so beloved of a certain sort of modernist; concrete mythic images are the real meat of the unconscious, and if the individual does not find his or her own symbols in the carefully crafted ways of the best religions or skilled analysis, one is more than likely to seek them out in debased forms in the psychic epidemic or the battlefield.
Jung once spoke of three kinds of man: the good Christian, Catholic or Protestant, who lives unquestioningly in his faith and so does not need psychology; "modern man" who is fully selfconscious, rational, extraverted, and unconnected with his past and so all too vulnerable to the unconscious; and finally "Jungian man," modern in rejecting traditional Christianity but willing to reinterpret it in the light of analytic psychology. 70 In this respect Jung's "cult" bears to the modern world something like the status of Gnosticism over against conventional Christianity in the ancient world, and Jung came to realize this.
Gnosticism was a presence in the intellectual world of Jung's postwar years. The discovery of a new library of Gnostic texts at Nag Hamadi in Egypt in 1945 had drawn fresh and exciting attention to the ancient heresy. Carl Jung himself had an indirect part in making this material available to the scholarly world and the public, at a time when a turbulent political climate in Egypt caused severe difficulties. The only portion of the remarkable find to leave Egypt in the 1950s was a group of texts that came to be known as the "Jung Codex," purchased by the Jung Institute of Zurich in honor of the master's eightieth birthday; the prestige of the great psychologist's name helped pave the way for that acquisition.
In the first chapter we noted the use of the term gnostic by the political scientist Eric Voegelin at around the same time in a negative sense, to mean a presumed but in the end futile knowledge of the secret laws of history and human nature. We observed that Jung shared a similarly pessimistic view of the social order, though the labels might well be reversed. What Voegelin called gnosticism was the political expression of Jung's mass man and his psychic epidemics, under a
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mana personality and the glamour of his ideology; Jung's gnosticism was the individual's way out of such a whirlpool world. He employed the term in a positive sense;
gnostic was the name of those who escape from society by turning within. There is, however, the gnostic god Abraxas who was a significant figure in Jung's personal pantheon, and who can represent an attitude beyond good and evil, in the sense that this deity stood for recognition and assimilation of the Shadow archetype. To Jung's mind, however, what he once called "gnostic morality" was not necessarily unscriptural however it may confound conventional morality: it was God's command to Hosea that he marry a whore, or Jesus' parabolic commendation of the unjust steward. 71
Actually, both Voegelin and Jung reshaped real gnosticism to their own ideological purposes. The ancient bearers of the name were not political in Voegelin's sense, but viewed all aspects of the outer world with deep suspicion, as the enslaving work of bent archons who did not wish humanity well. Jung, especially the later Jung, could so view the social order, but he was not as pessimistic as the gnostics in their metaphysical despair; he proposed not individuation out of the world but into it.
Jung implicitly accepted the six characteristics of gnosticism described by Voegelin—dissatisfaction, belief that the cause of dissatisfaction is that the world is poorly organized, belief that salvation is possible, that the world can be changed by a historical process, that change can come about through human action, and that to accomplish it requires gnosis, true secret knowledge—as proper diagnostic criteria. But he more and more internalized them to the individual psyche rather than the social or political realm, substituting psyche for world. Once asked what one could do to help the world in its terrible condition, he reportedly responded, "Help yourself and you help the world." 72 He was, of course, always most interested in the psyche. He got into trouble with the notion that gnostic "salvation" was different for different races because of their differing collective unconsciousnesses. But it seems to have become clear to him in the end that this idea was a false gnosis. The true inward gnostic salvation requires nothing but free space. All it demands of the outer world is to be left alone so the therapeutic process can advance. One gains no positive inner salvation from any of the world's social or political movements.
Voegelin was, incidentally, not pleased with any sort of "selfsalvation," and he may well have had Jungianism in mind along with other soteriological venues. "Selfsalvation through knowledge has its
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own magic, and this magic is not harmless," for though understandable it runs away from the world at the cost of only increasing its disorder. Gnosticism did not solve the problems of the ancient world, Voegelin thought, but its deteriorating civilization was instead renewed "by that movement which strove through loving action to revive the practice of the 'serious play' (to use Plato's expression)—that is, by Christianity." 73 But Jung's individuation came out of the Nietzschean, late romantic rejection of both normative Christianity and Enlightenment clarity and reason. It favored the more convoluted and subterranean process of healing the world by healing the psyches that are the real makers of history, even if that healing required their withdrawal from the world to be reforged in a gnostic shop.