The Occult World of CG Jung

[rosie]

I have submitted this fascinating article about Jung as it was his books and essays that opened up my mind years ago to "The Age of Aquarius" and what it actually meant. This was long before the "new age wave" took over this info, actually, this is were they probably received most of it from (in my humble opinion)


For starters:
How a near-death experience transformed the psychologist's attitude to the world of mysticism and magic

On 11 February 1944, the 68-year-old Carl Gustav Jung – then the world’s most renowned living psychologist – slipped on some ice and broke his fibula. Ten days later, in hospital, he suffered a myocardial infarction caused by embolisms from his immobilised leg. Treated with oxygen and camphor, he lost consciousness and had what seems to have been a near-death and out-of-the-body experience – or, depending on your perspective, delirium. He found himself floating 1,000 miles above the Earth. Seas and continents shimmered in blue light and Jung could make out the Arabian desert and snow-tipped Himalayas. He felt he was about to leave orbit, but then, turning to the south, a huge black monolith came into view. It was a kind of temple, and at the entrance Jung saw a Hindu sitting in a lotus pos*ition. Within, innumerable candles flickered, and he felt that the “whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence” was being stripped away. It wasn’t pleasant, and what remained was an “essential Jung”, the core of his experiences.

He knew that inside the temple the mystery of his existence, of his purpose in life, would be answered. He was about to cross the threshold when he saw, rising up from Europe far below, the image of his doctor in the archetypal form of the King of Kos, the island site of the temple of Asclepius, Greek god of medicine. He told Jung that his departure was premature; many were demanding his return and he, the King, was there to ferry him back. When Jung heard this, he was immensely disappointed, and almost immediately the vision ended. He experienced the reluctance to live that many who have been ‘brought back’ encounter, but what troubled him most was seeing his doctor in his archetypal form. He knew this meant that the physician had sacrificed his own life to save Jung’s. On 4 April 1944 – a date numerologists can delight in – Jung sat up in bed for the first time since his heart attack. On the same day, his doctor came down with septicæmia and took to his bed. He never left it, and died a few days later.
more at link: http://www.forteantimes.com/features...f_cg_jung.html

Now to the meat of the subject:
THE AGE OF AQUARIUS
In the 1920s, he plunged into a study of the Gnostics – whom he had encountered as early as 1912 – and alchemy. It was Jung, more than anyone else, who salvaged the ancient Hermetic pursuit from intellectual oblivion. Another Hermetic practice he followed was astrology, which he began to study seriously around the time of his break with Freud. Jung informed his inner circle that casting horoscopes was part of his therapeutic practice, but it was during the dark days of WWII that he recognised a wider application. In 1940, in a letter to HG Baynes, Jung speaks of a vision he had in 1918 in which he saw “fire falling like rain from heaven and consuming the cities of Germany”. He felt that 1940 was the crucial year, and he remarks that it’s “when we approach the meridian of the first star in Aquarius”. It was, he said, “the premonitory earthquake of the New Age”. He was familiar with the precession of the equinoxes, the apparent backward movement of the Sun through the signs of the zodiac. By acting as a backdrop to sunrise at the vernal equinox, each sign gives its name to an ‘age’ – called a ‘Platonic month’ – which lasts roughly 2,150 years. In his strange book Aion (1951), he argues that the ‘individuation’ of Western civilisation as a whole follows the path of the ‘Platonic months,’ and presents a kind of “precession of the archetypes”. Fish symbolism surrounds Jesus because He was the central symbol of the Age of Pisces, the astrological sign of the fish. Previous ages – of Taurus and Aries – produced bull and ram symbolism. The coming age is that of Aquarius, the Water Bearer. In conversation with Margaret Ostrowski-Sachs, a friend of Hermann Hesse, Jung admitted that he had kept this “secret knowledge” to himself for years, and only finally made it public in Aion. He wasn’t sure he was “allowed” to, but during his illness he received “confirmation” that he should.

[Beth]

Interesting stuff rosie, I'll have to look into this a little more. Thanks for sharing.

[wynderer]

Hi Rosie -- i was very into Jung in my 20s & my early 30s -- i think he was one of the wisest humans to have walked on Earth -- thanks for this info

i hope you will not think i am hijacking your thread by adding this: there is a biography of Jung by Barbara Hannah, an English woman who took care of him while he was dying -- a couple of times he had visions while out of his body [preparing to leave it] which he told her when he came back -- one time she wrote that he came back 'visibly shaken' & told her that he had seen Earth in the not-so-distant future -- he said that much of Earth had been destroyed, but 'Thank God, not all of it'

[kriya]

Thanks for sharing Rosie, great article!

Love,

Kriya

[rosie]

thanks everyone! Please add any other info regarding Jung, there is so much to see between the lines of his life, that one
could get lost in the enormity of it all!

quote:
"In his memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung wrote that meaning comes “when people feel they are living the symbolic life, that they are actors in the divine drama. That gives the only meaning to human life; everything else is banal and you can dismiss it. A career, producing of children, are all maya (illusion) compared to that one thing, that your life is meaningful.”

Interesting art done while under analysis from Jung.
The creative process of the Swiss artist Peter Birkhäuser (1911-1976) took a striking turn when he entered midlife. A successful and influential graphic artist, Birkhäuser entered a deep depression and sought answers in the ideas of C.G. Jung. He entered analysis with Marie-Louise von Franz and developed a friendship with Jung himself. As it became more difficult for Birkhäuser to finish his creative assignments, he began to illustrate images from his dreams. Over the course of 35 years, he kept notes on over 3400 of his dreams, and his work increasingly focused on the images emerging from his unconscious. His new work was not well-received by the art community of the time, but, viewed today, his vivid paintings bear striking testament to the disruptive and transformative reality of the individuation process. Few artists have so powerfully evoked the uncanny otherness of the unconscious.


in love & light

[Victoria Tintagel]

Thank you Rosie! Carl Gustav Jung is one of my favorites and he gave the world tremendous tools to understand archetypes, the unconscious and much more. Carl Gustav Jung, Joseph Campbell, Wolfgang Goethe, Tolkien and Herman Hesse are fine examples of early 20th century lightworkers. Here are 2 links to radio interviews with Jung.

By Tom Colls for the BBC Today programme includes a radio interview with Carl Jung from 1955
Documentary about the life and work of Carl Gustav Jung.

www.all-about-psychology.com/carl_jung.html

http://www.cosmolearning.com/.../bbc...l-gustav-jung/

[Deega]

Hi Rosie,

Love your post on Jung, interesting!

All my blessings.

Deega

[Peter UK]

One of Jung's greatest contributions without doubt, was Synchronicity.

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by Peter UK (here)
One of Jung's greatest contributions without doubt, was Synchronicity.

Yes.

• Carl G. Jung - Synchronicity - An Acausal Connecting Principle
  http://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/Carl...0Principle.pdf

[ulli]

Not to forget Jungian astrology

Posted by Peter UK (here)
One of Jung's greatest contributions without doubt, was Synchronicity.

[leavesoftrees]

Mysterium coniunctionis; Aion and Symbols of transformation. Three books to read again and again

[Cara]

A fascinating journey into the soul/psyche is recorded in Jung’s Lieber Novus or Red Book.

It’s very different from his other books: it almost discards the academic, psychoanalytic and instead delves directly into the world of psyche. He wrote it in a kind of mediaeval calligraphy and illustrated it richly - it is a visual exploration as well as a language based one.

Here is a quotation from the book:

"My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you-are you there? I have returned, I am here again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you, I am with you. After long years of long wandering, I have come to you again. Should I tell you everything I have seen, experienced, and drunk in? Or do you not want to hear about all the noise of life and the world? But one thing you must know: the one thing I have learned is that one must live this life.

This life is the way, the long sought-after way to the unfatholnable, which we call divine. There is no other way, all other ways are false paths. I found the right way, it led me to you, to my soul. I return, tempered and purified. Do you still know me? How long the separation lasted! Everything has become so different. And how did I find you? How strange my journey was! What words should I use to tell you on what twisted paths a good star has guided me to you? Give me your hand, my almost forgotten soul. How warm the joy at seeing you again, you long disavowed soul. Life has led me back to you. Let us thank the life I have lived for all the happy and all the sad hours, for every joy, for every sadness. My soul, my journey should continue with you. I will wander with you and ascend to my solitude."

And here is one of his illustrations:



Peter Kingsley (classics scholar and mystic) recently wrote a tome on the Red Book; it’s called Catalfaque. Here he is talking about it with Murray Stein, Jungian analyst:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=uWaeqeIi82g

[Peter UK]

Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life.

Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, “If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.”

It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. Through him the distinction was clarified between myself and the object of my thought. He confronted me in an objective manner, and I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me.




Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections