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/articles/3847/the_occult_world_of_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.
http://i29.tinypic.com/ae64wl.jpg

in love & light :wub:

[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

www.cosmolearning.com/.../bbc-face-to-face-carl-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]

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

Yes.


Carl G. Jung - Synchronicity - An Acausal Connecting Principle
http://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/Carl%20G.%20Jung%20-%20Synchronicity%20-%20An%20Acausal%20Connecting%20Principle.pdf

[ulli]

Not to forget Jungian astrology


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 (http://philemonfoundation.org/published-works/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:

https://damiengwalter.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/sl4fd2186e.jpg

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


41636

Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

[Bill Ryan]

Copying this new post by Helvetic on his thread:

(https://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?1383-The-Continuing-Search-For-The-Truth&p=1668968&viewfull=1#post1668968)~~~

Gary Lachman | The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl G. Jung (4K Reboot) | May 20, 2025

Source: New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove (https://www.youtube.com/@NewThinkingAllowed)

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Description:

Gary Lachman is the author Jung The Mystic: Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life and Teachings as well as over twenty other books on topics ranging from the evolution of consciousness to literary suicides, popular culture and the history of the occult.

He has written a rock and roll memoir of the 1970s, biographies of Aleister Crowley, Rudolf Steiner, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Emanuel Swedenborg, P. D. Ouspensky, and Colin Wilson, histories of Hermeticism and the Western Inner Tradition, studies in existentialism and the philosophy of consciousness, and about the influence of esotericism on politics and society.

In this interview, rebooted from 2019, he maintains that Carl Jung always had an interest in the esoteric and occult, going back to his childhood. His own mother would, occasionally give voice to an alternative personality, as did Jung, himself, as a child.

As an adult, his break with his mentor, Sigmund Freud, precipitated an emotional crisis that led him to use a method of active imagination to explore hypnogogic realms. To find historical precedent for such explorations, he delved into gnosticism, alchemy, astrology, divination, and Eastern mysticism.

[shaberon]

He is a case of "what is authority?"


Tibet had taken in European missionaries since the 1600s. Many of them converted to Catholicism!

Then, let's find the first "Tibetologist", the Jesuit Desideri (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_in_Tibet#:~:text=During%20his%20six%2Dyear%20stay,Desideri%20became%20the%20first%20 Tibetologist.):


Between 1718 and 1721 he composed five works in the Classical Tibetan literary language, in which he sought to refute the philosophical concepts of rebirth (which he referred to as "metempsychosis") and Nihilism or 'Emptiness' (Wylie: stong pa nyid; Sanskrit: Śūnyatā), which he felt most prevented conversions from Tibetan Buddhism to the Catholic Church. In his books Fr. Desideri also adopted and utilized multiple philosophical techniques from Tibetan literature for scholastic argumentation. Fr. Desideri also used multiple quotations from the dharma and vinaya, and even brought the Scholasticism of St. Thomas Aquinas into a debate with the nihilistic Madhyamaka philosophy of Nagarjuna to argue his case for "the superiority of Christian theology." Further Jesuit missions to Tibet and the publication of Fr. Desideri's writings were later forbidden by the Vatican's Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, and his writings remained in unpublished manuscript form until the 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries.


Okay. It starts with superiority. Of course; they were busy taking over the world for the Pope.

Then there was Abbe' Huc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89variste_R%C3%A9gis_Huc) in the 1800s.

Slightly later, a British soldier had procured a manuscript from a Tibetan. He forwarded it to:


W. Y. Evans-Wentz


and we get perhaps the first sympathetic translation.

This is what was studied by C. Jung, who put in a foreword to subsequent editions, of Bardo Thodol or "Book of the Dead".

Our concern with most of those people is they are too intellectual.

Did Jung actually get it? I don't think he did.

The difference between us--I as a later recipient of said manuscript--would at the least be sympathy. I picked it up as possible help for what I was experiencing.

For what it's worth, that was after years of Jung's protege's presuming to help me.


I don't think I can blame Jung for trying to cast filth all over it like the religious people. However I think he is mostly responding to the words. To me, there is a definite meaning which is hard to search for and say in words, but I can sense the closeness of the author(s) to what I was trying to think or express.

As for the manuscript, is it really a Buddhist Book of the Dead, absolutely not. We have one. That's not it. The material studied is a *small* drop in the much larger Kagye' or "Hundred Deities" meditational system. This is not in my lineage so I can only speak of it in parallel.


I think it's great that Jung at least accepted that numerous topics were worth studying. In perspective, it's a bit like horror movies; until there was such a thing. In the 1700s, there was already great and widespread interest in things like palmistry and fortune telling, and it really got going and boiled over to death and seances and so forth. Then especially with the Rosetta Stone there was great interest in Tarot. Finally you get a wave of literature from exotic locations and every weird and strange thing we can think of is in a piquancy, an ever roiling cauldron of excitement and many new devotions. By the time Jung is legitimizing some of it into academia, we get automobiles and films and things that displace the fever for psychic and other adventures.


I can say he was an inspirational success in exactly one way.

It turns out the Neurosciences Department of Brown University has the most amazing tour of Jampa Lhakhang (https://library.brown.edu/cds/BuddhistTempleArt/appendA.html) Maitreya Temple in Upper Mustang, Nepal.

That's because they studied the effects of mantra on human physiology.

A little Tibetan geography is revealed by using this temple in Technologies of Self (https://navinkumar.com/2019_March_NK_Catalog.pdf) by T Jain 2019:



One 15th example from the Ngor monastery places all remaining mandalas outside of the main mandala, following the depiction found in the murals of the Sarvadurgati Parisodana mandala at Jampa Gompa.


That, for most purposes, would be the Book of the Dead.

It actually starts on the walls of the oldest continuously-operating Buddhist institution in Ladakh:



The earliest Tibetan painting from the SDPT is found in the murals of Alchi Dukhang, the oldest building in the
monastic complex at Alchi.

The Alchi murals, however, only depict the primary
mandala fron the text, and its assembly is of 33 deities, as it
depicts only four of the eight Offering Goddesses.
Murals depicting mandalas from the SDPT also feature
prominently at the 15th century murals at Jampa Gompa
commissioned by the King Ame Pel of Lo Manthang,
for which wall layouts, photographs, and transcription of
inscriptions can be found online.

It gives another link to Brown's Temple photos (https://library.brown.edu/cds/BuddhistTempleArt/jampa.html).

As you see this is not Kagye'.

The pdf has around a ten-page article in "Ontological Hierarchies". As its main subject, I notice it begins this way:



FORM III TIBETAN TECHNOLOGIES OF SELF 61

Karmapa 3 Rangjung Dorje (1284 - 1339) 62


which is what I mean when using any terms such as "our" or "my". It means that H. H. Karmapa III is the primary Tibetan exegete of Indian Yogacara that was exterminated by the Mughals in the 1200s.

I see him as much more of a custodian than an innovator.

The main things he has are completely Indian.


I am sure that the ability to provide this information through the internet has Jung's actions behind it. However if we were to critique that some followers such as Bernays and others have perversely misused some of the concepts for advertising or militancy, this would still be the reply. Nothing inspired by this branch of Jung's work has anything to do with us. Nepal and Ngor is like a sacred crossing.

I have no idea what that particular author is saying about it, but, the interest has revealed the core sources beyond the "Jungian strand".

[Johan (Keyholder)]

Jung's book "AION", can be downloaded here: https://dn790006.ca.archive.org/0/items/collectedworksof92cgju/collectedworksof92cgju.pdf

Unusual book and maybe a good idea to put it in the Avalon Library?





From Bill:
THX, and added to the library here. (https://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/Carl%20G.%20Jung%20-%20AION.pdf)
:thumbsup:

[leavesoftrees]

Jung's book "AION", can be downloaded here: https://dn790006.ca.archive.org/0/items/collectedworksof92cgju/collectedworksof92cgju.pdf

Unusual book and maybe a good idea to put it in the Avalon Library?





From Bill:
THX, and added to the library here. (https://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/Carl%20G.%20Jung%20-%20AION.pdf)
:thumbsup:


This was Jung’s last published book. It requires a number of readings. Jordan Peterson thinks it’s the most terrifying book he’s ever read.

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