The Paradoxical Power of Myth
So obviously all that can be done is to awaken mass men from their dreams by individuation, to be achieved through opening channels to the unconscious, including the archetypes and the collective. Myth and ritual can have a very important role in this awakening process, for they are able to penetrate mass man's amnesia and recall to some level of consciousness the archetypes and finally the mandala of full human/divine glory they embody when realized and in balanced harmony. Jungian works like Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious are full of studies of the Trickster, Kore, Fairy Tales, the Mother and Child archetypes, the last (as the marvelous child, the puer aeternas, the Christ Child) being the emblem of rebirth and new transformed selfhood.
Once awakened, the archetypes can then fairly contend for the soul of the persona and forge it as with hammer and anviclass="underline" "Between them," Jung said, "the patient iron is forged into an indestructible whole, an 'individual.'" 74 Iron must be heated to a burning red to be forged, and one can perhaps see why the upsurge of Wotan "like an extinct volcano" roaring back to fiery life in National Socialism could have given Jung a glimmer of hope, since at least connections were once more being made between conscious and unconscious. But it was quickly evident this effort had very badly misfired; it prematurely released nothing but raw and therefore destructive energies of the unconscious, with no truly conscious control at all, naught but that of the infantile dream state of mass man with a hysterical mana person
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ality as psychopomp. It was no breakthrough, but the worst of both sides: semiconscious mass mind energized by the fires from below.
Jung was undoubtedly confirmed in this realization by his belief that the way out can only be individual; there is little hope in mass movements or political action, for they are generally part of the problem instead, annealing mass man more than healing him. Yet Jung nonetheless felt free to apply on an individual basis the same mythic potions that had been so disastrously potent when the intoxicants were quaffed by mass man and his manamaniac leaders. They are indeed powerful draughts: One can perceive the specific energy of the archetypes when one experiences the peculiar feeling of numinosity that accompanies them—the fascination or spell that emanates from them. . . . The universal hero myth, for example, shows the picture of a powerful man or godman who vanquishes evil in the form of dragons, serpents, monsters, demons, and enemies of all kinds, and who liberates his people from destruction and death. The narration or ritual repetition of sacred texts and ceremonies, and the worship of such a figure with dances music, hymns, prayers, and sacrifices, grip the audience with numinous emotions and exalt the participants to identification with the hero. If we contemplate such a situation with the eyes of a believer, we can understand how the ordinary man is gripped, freed from his impotence and misery, and raised to an almost superhuman status, at least for the time being. 75
Obviously these exaltations could save or destroy.
The Burkean Jungian State
Jung seemed able to hold out no hope that modern humanity could produce any satisfactory political solution it its dilemmas. Regarding his views of democracy, Volodymyr Walter Odajnyk wrote, in Jung and Politics:
Jung does not espouse liberal democracy as a generally applicable, ideal form of government. Rather, he holds an organic view of the relationship between the individual, the society, and the state, so that, where there is no historical, social, and political basis for a democratic order, it is unwise to graft it on by decree. Moreover, given his opinion of the pernicious influence of sheer numbers, Jung would certainly argue that democracy is possible only on a small scale. 76
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Perhaps the small scale is reflected in Switzerland, for in 1928 he wrote of his democratic homeland as a "European center of gravity," despite its stolid and conservative citizens. 77 Again, after the war, he was able to say, "Living as we do in the middle of Europe, we Swiss feel comfortably far removed from the foul vapours that arise from the morass of German guilt." 78 He feared countries larger than Switzerland; here we see something of Jung's real character as a political man in the context of a real time and place: his own nation. The basic impression one gains from his "Swiss" writings is that Jung was conservative in a traditionalist, democratic sense, more instinctively than ideologically; it is better for a society to be, like Switzerland, open, democratic, stupid, frustrating, and changing only slowly, than to be carried away by psychic epidemics. For what such a small, isolated society could really mean is a society of individuals bound by natural and traditional orders, rather than the hollow idols of mass man, and one in which the only salvation was through the full individuation of the individual.
Perhaps Jung's claim that Switzerland escapes "the morass of German guilt" will strike many readers as excessively smug. Here arises another complexifying twist to the Jungian picture. Jung may have been right in saying that many Swiss, even German Swiss, disdained Nazidom and hoped for an Allied victory during the war. Yet widely publicized revelations have now demonstrated that Swiss banks profited from Nazi money, including moneys stolen from Jews who perished in the holocaust.
More controversial charges have also alleged that antiSemitic figures in the Swiss wartime government slowed the mountain nation's acceptance of Jewish refugees.
None of this is very creditable to Switzerland, but serves to show that Jung no doubt shared the national attitude of most of his countrymen, who appeared to be convinced that Switzerland was basically good but, as a small state surrounded by far more powerful and often far more dubious powers, had no choice but to do business wherever it could and keep on reasonable terms with all sides. Jung's efforts at psychoanalytic statesmanship emanating from Switzerland may need to be seen partly in this light; he probably thought he was acting in the way most of his fellows would have thought was the only way one could act in such a situation.
Alan Morris Schom has found evidence, published in a report sponsored by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, that, contrary to Jung's assertion to the British Esther Harding, Nazi groups and sympathizers
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with the German cause were present in Swiss cities and towns, even villages, everywhere among the nearly 70 percent of the Swiss population that is German linguistically and culturally, the Switzerland of which Jung was a part. 79 There is even a photograph of parading, swastikawearing Nazis in Zurich, Jung's city, in 1941. Germans volkish literature had broad distribution in Switzerland and antiSemitism as well as fervent anticommunism was widespread. In a companion report, Schom has shown that not only was it exceedingly difficult for Jewish refugees from the Nazi terror to become Swiss citizens, conditions in Swiss refugee camps were often very harsh. 80 All this involved blatant discrimination between Jewish and nonJewish immigrants and refugees, and was the result of policies set by highranking antiSemitic Swiss officials. Moreover, although outandout proNazis and activist (as compared to attitudinal) antiSemitism may have represented only a minority, Switzerland was also bound economically to the Axis cause: by 1942, 97 percent of Swiss exports went to Germany, and there were also the Nazi arrangements with Swiss banks. All this, and many other indications of proGerman sympathies during the war years, have been since suppressed in Switzerland, Schom declares. 81