Carl Jung, Humanistic Psychology, and the Land of the Dead

By Jonas E. Alexis

At the end of the nineteenth century and around the dawn of the twentieth century, there was a form of revival in much of Europe precisely because a number of writers and intellectuals began to mistrust Christianity.[1]

As a result, many were drawn to other available sources for revolutionary purposes. One of those sources was the occult, which included freemasonry and other Jewish magic such as Cabbala.[2]

The Shelleys for example practiced occult rituals and sexual liberation as a form of enlightenment. Scholars like Richard Holmes argue that

“Shelley secretly turned to the Masonic conception of revolutionary brotherhood as a viable form of reform organization. He was attracted especially by its occultism, its tight communal solidarity, and ‘seeding’ of subversive political ideas.”[3]

Miranda Seymour of the University of Nottingham declared that Mary Shelley was not “impervious to the romance of secret societies.” In fact, by 1814, she eagerly “devoured stories of Adam Weishaupt and the society of the Illuminati.”[4]

Mary actually “decided to send Victor Frankenstein to university [in Ingolstadt, the birth place of Weishaupt]. Ingolstadt is where he animates his creature…”[5] Yet the Shelleys were far from alone.

William Butler Yeats for example took strange drugs such as mescaline and joined occult groups such as the Theosophical Society and the Golden Dawn. The Golden Dawn in particular put a heavy emphasis on Kabbalistic magic “and occult rituals and progressive initiations.”[6]

The hashish club in Paris was frequented by writers such as Alexander Dumas, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, etc. Their initiation into the occult through strange drugs invariably led many of them to produce obscene and what one could call satanic works.

Baudelaire, one of the most decadent poets in the nineteenth century, wrote The Flowers of Evil, The Litanies of Satan and other works while high on hashish and other drugs.

Baudelaire likened hashish to sorcery and magic,[7] took it as a form of enlightenment,[8] and embraced radically blasphemous themes in his work. His Litanies of Satan has been picked up by avant-garde artist Diamanda Galas, who uses her performances to promulgate Baudelaire’s dream to unsuspecting audience.

Flaubert got involved in sexual liberation and eventually contracted venereal disease (he recounted some of his sexual voyages in The Desert and the Dancing Girls and Flaubert in Egypt).

Like Oscar Wilde, Flaubert engaged in sexual relationships with boys, a passion which he pursued in lands as distant as Lebanon. Speaking like a laboratory scientist, Flaubert wrote after one of his sexual acts, “To be done well, an experiment must be repeated.”[9]

Guy de Maupassant, a protégé of Flaubert, followed the same sexual libertine and ended up having syphilis as a result.

Rimbaud, who found the occult to be very appealing and who made use of occult theories and practices including the Cabbala,[10] produced A Season in Hell after a long life of drugs and homosexuality.[11]

Rimbaud, who ended up pursuing a decadent sexual life,[12] saw Christianity as a religion of enslavement and “attacked Christ as the chief of power.”[13]

Across the British channel, Aleister Crowley was having similar feeling about Christianity. He wrote,

“Indeed, my falling away from grace was not occasioned by any intellectual qualms; I accepted the theology of the Plymouth Brethren. In fact, I could hardly conceive of the existence of people who might doubt it. I simply went over to Satan’s side and to this hour I cannot tell why.”[14]

One cannot go “over to Satan’s side” without becoming a revolutionary. Crowley quickly became a 33rd-degree mason, a black magician who got involved in sexual magic,[15] and a revolutionary in the strict sense of the term.[16] shortly after his satanic conversion, he wrote,

“I say today: to hell with Christianity…I will build me a new Heaven and a new Earth…I want blasphemy, murder, rape, revolution, anything bad.”[17]

In short, there were numerous writers and revolutionaries who were willing to, in the words of Jim Morrison of The Doors, “break on through to the other side.”

Both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung attempted to do just that, and both were willing to leave their scientific training behind and embrace what is commonly known as occultism and magic.

Freud himself used to take drugs as a form of spiritual enlightenment, and even one of his famous disciples, Ernest Jones, was quite surprised that Freud would abandon the scientific enterprise and go into magic through strange drugs.[18] Carl Jung, who was raised Protestant, wrote his thesis on the occult.[19]

Men like Jung who were trained in the sciences quickly plunged into the occult—and when they moved to that realm, they never returned to their scientific states in a practical sense.[20]

As we all know, the occult cannot be subject to scientific testing, and both Freud and Jung quickly perceived that a paradigm shift was needed in order to convince the scientific mind to embrace Freud’s and Jung’s occult doctrine.

Since the study of the occult is not a scientific enterprise, Jung’s theory was quickly and almost universally recognized for its lack of scientific evidence by many of his followers.

Some, like Frederick Crews and others, began to be angry precisely because they thought and hoped that evidence was going to be marshaled for the edifice of psychoanalysis.

But after years and years of waiting, no evidence was on the way. Crews had to denounce the school and call it a legend.[21]

Others remained at their posts largely because of political and professional reasons, not scientific ones. Richard Noll argued that Jung, like Freud, “consciously, and repeatedly, lied about his evidence…” But Noll, who still admired Jung, was attacked by Jungians for saying that Jung lied. Noll moves on to say,

“Jungian analysts, most of whom have no formal medical, psychological or scientific training promote Jungism as a popular neopagan religion of sorts.

“For example, Edward Edinger, a well-known American Jungian analyst and a physician, like Storr, openly preaches that Jung’s ideas are a ‘New Dispensation’ to replace the Jewish and Christian ones of the Old and New Testaments of the Bible.

“Andrew Samuels, the holder of an academic chair at Essex University in Jung’s ‘analytical psychology’’ and a Jungian analyst himself, has been silent on the issues of Jung’s deliberate fraud and the additional lack of scientific support for most of Jung’s post-1916 constructs.

“Although the number of its members runs into the thousands, there has never been a position paper from the main association of Jungian analysts concerning the scientific status of Jung’s theoretical constructs.

“And with good reason: new patients would stop knocking at their door if the truth were more widely known.”[22]

Right after Noll published his work on Jung, Princeton University Press began to receive phone calls and letters “from readers around the world expressing objections to the conclusions” of the book.

“Many people who objected to the book never read it, and their reactions came from what others—often their Jungian analysts—told them was in it.”[23]

Even the Jung family had objected to the archival documents and urged Princeton to cancel Noll’s second edition of the book. Noll writes,

“Princeton University Press is the publisher of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung and of many occultist works like I Ching, Esther Harding’s The I and the Not-I, and Erich Neumann’s bizarre works of mystical/Jungian archeology are, like the Collected Works, part of the publishing program that has earned Princeton—and the Jung family substantial sums over the years.

“Given the fact that the Jung family and the Jung estate are important to this Ivy league publisher when complaints about my book came from Switzerland, the editors of Princeton University Press took it quite seriously—so seriously, in fact, that in February 1995 the director of Princeton University Press, two editors, and a retired consultant all flew to Zurich for a weekend of meetings with the Jung family, the agents of the Jung estates (Niedieck Linder), and the keepers of the flame at the Psychological Club in Zurich.

“As I was told by my editor after her return from Zurich, Franz Jung—C.G.’s 86-year-old son—and others in Zurich demanded that The Jung Cult be immediately taken out of distribution.”[24]

Noll made it clear that “to preserve the image of Jung as a guru-like holy man or god-man,” many Jungians “all kept quiet or lied about the evidence” and the actual historical account of Jung. Noll writes,

“For a variety of complex reasons, there seems to be a great need on the part of not only Jungian analysts but also Jung’s family to keep him out of historical view.”

However, others could not support the Freudian and Jungian fraud. Perhaps the saddest moment in the history of psychoanalysis is portrayed in the life of Alan Stone, a professor of law and medicine at Harvard and a former psychoanalyst.

Stone, after forty years, left psychoanalysis and provided a frontal attack against it because of its lack of scientific inquiry and its deceptive nature.[25]

It was obvious to Stone that Freud, like Jung, was more interested in promoting an ideology for fame and money rather than in scientific pursuits.[26] This became clear when Stone examined one of Freud’s patients, Horace Frink.

Frink was an American psychoanalyst who was infatuated with a patient of his. After learning that the woman was rich, Freud told Frink to divorce his wife and marry the woman.

In order to convince Frink even more, Freud told him that he was also homosexual and in order to absolve himself from that behavior, he needed to follow Freud’s advice.

In addition, Freud told the woman to divorce her husband and marry Frink. It was obvious to some that Freud wanted a piece of the woman’s money, as he himself wrote to Frink:

“Your complaint that you cannot grasp your homosexuality implies that you are not yet aware of your fantasy of making me a rich man. If matters turn out all right let us change this imaginary gift into a real contribution.”[27]

Frink’s wife and the woman’s husband died shortly after Frink and the woman got married. The marriage did not last long either, and Frink “soon sank into psychotic depression and was driven to repeated suicide attempts.”[28]

Freud put things into proper perspective when he admitted that clients are simply “trash,” and they are “only good for making money out of and for studying, certainly we cannot help them.” He added that psychoanalysis “may be worthless.”[29]

That Freud was more interested in making money than in truth is bad enough, but the real tragedy is that the cancer that he projected to the West is still with us in one form or another. Why do you think the pharmaceutical industry keeps making billions upon billions of dollars by creating new diseases?[30]

This brings us to a central issue in our analysis here: modern psychology largely draws its tenets from a number of “masters.”

Furthermore, the “masters”—Freud, Jung, Adler, Fromm, Maslow, Rogers, and Laing—used their worldviews in order to provide a replacement for Christianity and the Western/classical definition of man, spirit, and the soul.

Not only that, many of those “masters” were strongly involved in the occult. Carl Rogers for example channeled the spirit of his dead wife through a Ouija board—hardly a scientific enterprise.[31]

Maslow’s humanistic psychology, along with existentialism, “grew out of Nietzsche’s proclamation that God is dead.”[32] If God is dead, then someone will have to take His place. And for Maslow, psychology is the new savior:

“I sometimes think the world will be saved by psychologists—in the very broadest sense—or it will not be saved at all.”[33]

Maslow’s “research” was far more sheer speculation and nonsense than scientific inquiries. Milton writes:

“While at Columbia he managed to recruit almost a hundred female subjects for in-depth personal interviews that covered such topics as masturbation, sexual fantasies, and homosexual experiences.

“The interviews supported his hypothesis that women who scored high in self-esteem were also more likely to be sexually active and much more open to experimentation.

“The study was unprecedented and considered shocking by some; his supervisor, Dr. [Edward L.] Thorndike, couldn’t even bring himself to read the interviews. It was also a daringly original piece of work that many researchers would have mined for the rest of their careers.

“Maslow, however, grew disillusioned with the project. He had found that women with low self-esteem—in other words, those who were shy or just modest—were extremely reluctant to answer his questions, while more dominant women were at times a bit too eager to cooperate.

“He was even more suspicious of the responses of the small number of male subjects he had interviewed; most of them, he thought, exaggerated to make themselves seem more experienced than they actually were.”[34]

Being a friend of Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead (lesbians themselves), who popularized the idea that Western culture has suffered enough under the dictatorial rule of Christian tradition, it was not a surprise when Maslow later wrote his own work Toward a Psychology of Being. Benedict in particular was like a mother to Maslow:

“Abe’s volatile mix of ambition and insecurity made him one of Ruth Benedict’s favorites. She took him out to lunch, encouraged him to broaden his cultural horizons, and counseled him to be less driven and more ‘Eastern’ in his outlook.

“In Maslow’s eyes, she became almost a surrogate parent—the calm, supportive, cultivated mother he never had. Maslow was so smitten with Benedict that he gave his first child, Ann, the middle name Ruth in her honor.”[35]

Maslow was also an associate of Alfred Kinsey, the sex guru and part-time disciple of Satanist Aleister Crowley:

“In 1945, returning to his earlier interest in human sexuality, Maslow agreed to help Alfred Kinsey recruit subjects on the Brooklyn College campus.

“Kinsey took his fellow sex researcher on a walking tour through Times Square, pointing out the pimps and prostitutes plying their trade—an eye-opening experience for Maslow…Maslow kept his promise to help Kinsey find subjects.”[36]

Maslow’s Toward a Psychology of Being was popular in the early 70s not because it presented rigorous explanations of “being,” but because, as Milton argues, some of its teachings were congruent with the hippie revolution, particularly his chapter on “the Peak-Experiences.”

These “Peak experiences” were what the drug gurus and drug addicts were experiencing. Maslow in fact was a close friend of Timothy Leary. Leary was so thrilled with what Maslow had written in the book that he invited the author to take drugs with him, which Maslow never did.

Edward Hoffman, a secular psychologist, wrote in Adler’s biography:

“Certainly, Adler emulated Nietzsche’s belief in the importance of will or intentionality as a powerful force guiding individual and social life.

“Likewise, both thinkers regarded successful people as those who were fully able to express their creative, striving impulses rather than meekly submit to society’s dictates. They also share an aloofness toward religious involvement.”[37]

Both Freud and Jung were guilty of flirting with the occult. Jung’s involvement with occult ideas and practices is well documented by his biographers, and his occult activities began to germinate after many séances with his cousin Helene Preiswerk. He was so steeped in magic that he used to tell friends, “They would have burned me as a heretic in the Middle Ages.”[38] Biographer Frank McLynn writes:

“At the 1895 séances…Helene communicated with Jung’s paternal and maternal grandfathers and produced a remarkable impersonation of Samuel Preiswerk’s voice and lecturing style.

“While ‘possessed’ she spoke in High German instead of her usual Basel dialect and afterward could remember little of what she had said during the session, except that she was convinced the spirits of the dead had spoken through her mouth.

“When the coven of spiritualists regrouped in 1897—Jung was by now coming to the end of his second year in medical school—Samuel Preiswerk “came through” again, this time with a proselytizing message, in which he urged Helene to set up a national home for Jews in Palestine and then to convert them to Christianity.

“This puzzled the listeners, for in his lifetime Samuel Preiswerk had been an ardent Zionist but not a convertor. After about a month, however, Helene fell into a different sort of trance, which Jung described as ‘semi-somnambulic,’ in which she remained aware of her surroundings while making contact with the spirits.

“In this state, she revealed a secondary personality in herself and said that her name was “Ivenes.” This new personality was dignified, ladylike, calm, poised and serious, in contrast with Helene herself, who was inclined to giddiness and instability; Helene tended to go in for table-turning and automatic writing, Ivenes for revelations about the past.”[39]

Jung’s maternal grandfather, Samuel Preiswerk, was chief of the Protestant clergy of Basel and a professor of the Old Testament at the Evangelical Institution in Geneva. Although he was known to be well-trained, Preiswerk, like many others before and after him,

“would talk to the spirit of his deceased first wife in weekly séances while locked in his study, much to the dismay of his second wife and the fascination of his children, including his favorite, Emilie.”

Emilie herself, the youngest of the twelve children, had paranormal experiences with the dead. After a crisis at the age of twenty, she began to fall into regular trances, an occurrence that continued throughout her life.[40]

But it was the séances in 1895 that proved to be a key point in Jung’s life. Jung wrote of this experience,

“For myself, I found such possibilities extremely interesting and attractive. They added another dimension to my life; the world gained depth and background.”[41]

The following year, Jung plunged into occult reading while he was going to medical school. His goal, as Noll puts it, was to put “the mediumistic phenomenal” which he had learned through the séances with Helene “into a wider intellectual context outside traditional Christianity thought.”[42]

The massive information he had accumulated through his reading helped him understand the spirit world better when he later again began to get involved in séances with Helene in 1897. By that time, Jung had already

“turned the séances from a parlor game into a more serious affair, at times inviting his medical-student colleagues to witness [Helene’s] phenomena and to make their own judgments.”[43]

The lessons that Jung learned from the séances had a profound influence on him, much more than “most of the instruction he received in medical school.”[44]

In the process, when many occultists and spiritualists would call the spirit entities Jung encountered through the séances as demonic, Jung called them “complexes,” “unconscious personalities,” or “splinter personalities.”[45] But as Noll puts it, it was ultimately “the realm of the gods.”[46] This terminology became the primary basis of Jung’s life, and eventually his doctoral thesis.[47]

By that time, Jung was no longer a novice in the occult. Famed psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor (who was at one time Sigmund Freud’s associate) wrote that Jung’s home became

“a haunted house. It seemed to be filled with ghostly entities. His eldest daughter saw a white figure, snatched off her bed at night. His nine-year-old son dreamed of a fisherman and drew his picture.

“The head was a chimney from which flames were leaping up and smoke was rising. From the other side of the river where he was fishing, the Devil came flying through the air cursing that his fish had been stolen.

“Above the fisherman, an angel was hovering and answered the Devil: You cannot do anything to him; he only catches bad fish.”[48]

At one point,

“the front doorbell began ringing frantically. Several people could see the doorbell as it rang, but no one was ringing it. The ringing of the bell by unseen hands occurred in the afternoon on a bright summer day.

“As the poltergeist operates in daylight, we may suspect the young daughter as the focal center of this disturbance. However, Jung assumed full responsibility for these happenings, even though he could not understand how the dead were involved.”[49]

During that time, Jung declared that

“the whole house was filled as if it were a crowd present, crammed full of spirits. They were packed deep right up to the door…

“As for myself, I was all a-quiver with the question, ‘For God’s sake, what in the world is thing?’ Then they cried out in chorus, ‘We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought.’

“That is the beginning of the Seven Sermons. Then it began to flow out of me, and in the course of three evenings the thing was written. As soon as I took up the pen, the whole ghostly assemblage evaporated…The hunting was over.

“These conversations with the dead formed a kind of prelude to what I had to communicate to the world about the unconscious: a kind of pattern of order and interpretation of its general contents.”[50]

The eventual product of those three nights was Jung’s book Seven Sermons to the Dead.[51] Stephan A. Hoeller and others also mention that Jung was involved in automatic writing,[52] a purely occult technique which was practiced by nineteenth-century occultist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky[53] and which later became quite common among some writers such as William Butler Yeats.[54]

Moreover, automatic writing became a conduit through which Hollywood actors and actresses received messages. People such as Rudolf Valentino (and his wife Natasha), Greta Garbo, Mae West, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, Rosanne Barr, Shirley MacLaine, etc., had all practiced automatic writing.[55]

Like Blavatsky’s famous book, The Secret Doctrine, L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics,[56] and Aleister Crowley’s The Book of the Law—all of which came strictly out of automatic writing—much of Jung’s own work came out of the pagan ideas which later got dressed in “scientific” or Jungian terms. Through spiritualistic experiences, we are told in Jung’s The Red Book,

“mediums became important subjects of the new psychology. With this shift, the methods used by the mediums—such as automatic writing, trance speech, and crystal vision—were appropriated by the psychologists, and became prominent experimental research tools.

“In psychotherapy, Pierre Janet and Morton Prince used automatic writing and crystal gazing as methods for revealing hidden memories and subconscious fixed ideas….”

The Red Book implicitly defended Jung’s use of automatic writing by saying, “Jung’s dissertation also indicates the manner in which he was utilizing automatic writing as a method of psychological investigation…

“Jung had extensive experience studying medium in trance states, during which they were encouraged to produce waking fantasies and visual hallucinations, and had conducted experiments with automatic writing.”[57]

Noll certainly created a stir in the academic world by arguing that Jung’s sole purpose in indulging in the occult was that Jung wanted to create a new religion, which had nothing to do with scientific enquiry. Noll writes,

“With the creation of his religious cult and its transcendental notion of a collective unconscious in 1916, Jung had already left the scientific world and academia, never to really return (despite later pleas for the scientific nature of his analytical psychology).”[58]

Jung himself declared,

“The knowledge I was concerned with, or was seeking, still could not be found in the science of those days. I myself had to undergo the original experience…It was then that I dedicated myself to service of the psyche.

“I loved and hated it, but it was my greatest health. My delivering of myself over to it…was the only way by which I could endure my existence and live it as fully as possible.”[59]

Jung’s first encounter with the dead in 1895, writes Noll in another work, was “like a coven of white witches—first gathered in secrecy to contact the spirit world.”[60]

The questions are: why did Jung leave the scientific and academic world? What did he find in return? And what was he looking for in the first place?

Jung found in the occult not only a supernatural power that seeks to destroy the foundations of Christendom, but also a power that guaranteed that occult ideas in the name of “science” or “psychology” would spread far and wide.

“By 1916, in ‘The Structure of the Unconscious,’ Jung attacks the scientific worldview and defends the validity of occult movements like Theosophy, Christian Science, the Rosicrucians, and those who practice ‘folk magic’ and astrology by arguing that, ‘No one who is concerned with psychology should blind himself to the fact that besides principles and techniques, humanity fairly swarms with adherents of quite another nature.’”[61]

Following his predecessors, like Friedrich Nietzsche, Jung’s analysis, Noll tells us, was an attempt to destroy Christendom and its influential power over the individual.[62] Noll goes on to say:

“Jung was waging war against Christianity and its distant, absolute, unreachable God and was training his disciples to listen to the voices of the dead and to become gods themselves.”[63]

Jung continued: “We are cut off from our earth through more than two thousand years of Christian training.”[64]

For Jung, the time to break with the “Christian training” had come, and the age of a new religion had arisen. Jung believed that Western culture had suffered much under the wings of Christianity, and that the time for a new revelation was long overdue.

He repeatedly stated that Christianity failed to answer life’s fundamental questions and man’s bold quest for knowledge and for penetrating the mysteries of life.[65]

Moreover, Christianity emphatically condemned occult divinations and pagan practices. It was not long before Jung found himself in constant battle with Orthodox Christianity.[66]

Hence, psychoanalysis, Jung’s archetypal image, and new terminology such as “unconscious” had to be introduced into mainstream thought in order to properly seduce the masses into the new religion. These terms did not have their development out of a scientific need, but because people like Jung wanted to rationalize the occult and indeed sexual liberation. Jung, along with Freud, became one of the noted figures to merge occultism with modern psychology.[67]

This became clear when Jung moved to other points in his covertly occult system. In fact, he made repeated references to the occult and Gnosticism throughout his writings and lectures.[68]

In order to embrace Jung’s new religion, all individuals “are called upon to abandon all their cherished illusions [Christian doctrines] in order that something deeper, fairer, and more embracing may arise within them.”[69]

Jung intuitively knew that his writings were not science. They were coming from a female spirit entity whom Jung identified through automatic writing:

“While I was writing once I said to myself, ‘What is this I am doing, it certainly is not science, what is it?’ Then a voice said to me ‘That is art.’ The voice turned out to be that of a woman Jung knew…

“[Jung] decided to interact with the voice, insisting in his own spoken voice that what he was doing was not art. To further engage the voice, Jung used a technique used by the spiritualist mediums:

“‘I thought, well, she has not the speech centers I have, so I told her to use mine, and she did, and came through with a long statement. This is the origin of the technique I developed for dealing directly with the unconscious contents.’”[70]

McLynn likewise documents that Jung’s idea of the unconscious clearly came out of “his experience of séances…[which] made him decide to become a psychiatrist.”[71] McLynn goes on to say that even though Jung went to medical school, his “true university was the series of séances with Helene.”[72]

This certainly explains why Jung was heavily attracted to the occult—including astrology. He wrote to Freud,

“I made horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth…I dare say that we shall one day discover in astrology a good deal of knowledge which has been intuitively projected into the heavens.”[73]

Eric Fromm agrees that Jung’s new religion was a frontal attack against all religion.[74] More importantly, Jung was heavily possessed—and he was aware of it.”[75]

These demonic manifestations taught Jung what he could not have learned through scientific data. Of some of his spirit guides, particularly Philemon and Ka, Jung wrote:

“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…

“It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche…I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend…Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight…To me it was what the Indians call a guru…

“And the fact was that he conveyed to me many an illuminating idea. I did a painting of [Ka, another demonic figure], showing him in his earth-bound form, as a herm with base of stone and upper part of bronze…Ka’s expression has something demonic about it…

“Philemon has a lame foot, but was a winged spirit, whereas Ka represented a kind of earth demon…Philemon was the spiritual aspect, or “meaning.” Ka…was a spirit of nature…In time I was able to integrate both figures through the study of alchemy.”[76]

It was this spirit guide, Philemon, that was responsible for bringing about much of Jung’s work.[77] Jung did not stop here; he “induced a dissociative altered state of conscious and made a visionary ‘descent’ into the unconscious,” and this world was named the Land of the Dead.

There Jung met three personalities: an old man named Elijah, a young blind girl named Salome, and a large black snake. Jung seemed to have loved that experience, as he tried to do it again. On his second time, he saw the same personalities.

But Elijah was on a rocky ridge; Salome this time looked like a doll, and a miniature snake. Salome, to Jung’s surprise, began to adore and worship Jung and kept telling him, “You are Christ,” a claim which Jung at first resisted.

Then the snake began to get involved. Jung told us:

“Then I saw the snake approach me. She came close and began to encircle me and press me in her coils. These coils reached up to my heart. I realized as I struggled that I had assumed the attitude of the crucifixion.

“ In the agony and the struggle, I sweated so profusely that the water flowed down on all sides of me. Then Salome rose, and she could see. While the snake was pressing me, I felt that my face had taken on the face of an animal, a lion or tiger.”[78]

These experiences, as Noll puts it, were clearly steps “into the mysteries of pagan antiquity.” And one simply cannot separate Jungian psychology from it. It is purely a form of Jung’s deification. Jung wrote again,

“One gets a peculiar feeling from being put through such an initiation. The important part led up to the deification was the snake’s encoiling of me. Salome’s performance was deification.”[79]

In a nutshell, Jungian psychology is not science but paganism dressed up in “scientific” terms. In fact, as Noll describes, Jung’s pagan worship of the sun, his reading of the occult and ancient esoteric mysteries, his visionary descent to the Land of the Dead, his flirting with mystery initiations—which seem to resemble a sort of occult pact—are obvious in his life and work.[80]

In fact, Jung admitted that some of his experiences were not only “secret” and “dangerous” but “catastrophic” should they be revealed publicly. Therefore, Jung kept many of his activities as a “sanctuary,” shielded by a “fear of the gods.”[81]

Jung cites a passage from Faust to prove that his secret activities must remain secret, otherwise Jungian psychology ceases to have power over us. Jung

“cultivated a special relationship with Wotan, whom he believed to be the true god of the Germanic peoples of Europe. Wotan came to him in a dream in the form of a wild huntsman as a sign he was taking the soul of Jung’s mother with him to the Land of the Dead.

“Wotan appeared in other guises as well throughout Jung’s life. Eugen Bohler, who was on very intimate terms with Jung from 1955 onward, recalled that Jung ‘had several intuitions with death—of the death of his mother before the First World War and the death of his wife. On both occasions there was Wotan…He had a dream of Wotan riding in the sky…

“Wotan is also a psychopompos, one who leads the souls of the dead, like Hermes.’ Bohler added, ‘Jung had several dreams with Wotan flowing, so to speak, beside him on the lake when he was at Bollingen.’”[82]

Call him Wotan or by other names, but the fact is that for Jung it was not science but plain old occultism and magic. For Jung, it was these spirit entities that

“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.”[83]

With the publication of Jung’s posthumous The Red Book,[84] scholars are now even discovering some of the dark and occult world of Jung. And if you hope to find scientific inquiry in that particular book, good luck.

CITATION

[1] Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: The Origin of a Charismatic Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

[2] See Nandor Fodor, Freud, Jung, and Occultism (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1971).

[3] Quoted in E. Michael Jones, Monsters from the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film (Dallas: Spence Publishing, 2000), 55.

[4] Miranda Seymour, Mary Shelley (New York: Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2000), 448.

[5] Ibid., 111.

[6] Richard Ellman, Yeats: The Man and the Mask (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 89; for other sources, see R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Susan Johnston Graf, W. B. Yeats: Twentieth-Century Magus (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, Inc., 2000); Nevill Drury, Stealing Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Modern Western Magic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[7] Rosemary Lloyd, Baudelaire’s World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 83.

[8] See for example Theophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire: His Life, 1915 (Ithaca: Cornell University Library, 1915).

[9] Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 203-204.

[10] See Enid Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1968), 100-110

[11] Graham Robb, Rimbaud (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000).

[12] See for example Charles Nicholl, Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa, 1880-91 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999).

[13] For Rimbaud, see Enid Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud (New York: New Directions, 1961), 100-110; Graham Robb, Rimbaud: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Wallace Fowlie, Rimbaud and Jim Morrison: The Rebel as Poet (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 62

[14] Quoted in Lawrence Suntin, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 25.

[15] See Hugh B. Urban, Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006).

[16] See for example Tobias Churton, Aleister Crowley: Spiritual Revolutionary, Romantic Explorer, Occult Master—and Spy (London: Watkins Publishing, 2014).

[17] Quoted in Israel Regardie, The Eye of the Triangle: An Interpretation of Aleister Crowley (Tempe, AZ: Falcon Press, 1986), 207.

[18] Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 81-84.

[19] See Carl G. Jung, Psychology and the Occult (Princeton: Princeton Univ Press, 1978).

[20] See Richard Noll, The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung (New York: Random House, 1997).

[21] See Frederick Crews, Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend (New York: Penguin Books, 1999).

[22] Richard Noll, “Folk Fictions,” Times Higher Education, November 25, 1996.

[23] Preface to the second edition, published by Free Press.

[24] Ibid.

[25] See Ethan Watters and Richard Ofshe, Therapy’s Delusions: The Myth of the Unconscious and the Exploitation of Today’s Walking Worried (New York: Scribner, 1999), 64-67.

[26] Ibid., 66-67.

[27] Ibid., 66.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Quoted in Jones, Libido Dominandi, 137.

[30] For further study, see Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield, The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Robert Whitaker, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America (New York: Random House, 2010); Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche (New York: Free Press, 2010); Irving Kirsch, The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Anti-Depressant Myth (New York: Basic Books, 2010); Thomas S. Szasz, The Medicalization of Everyday Life (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2007); Alan V. Horwitz, Creating Mental Illness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); David Healy, The Anti-Depressant Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); David Healey, Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression (New York: New York University Press, 2004).

[31] See William Kirk Kilpatrick, The Emperor’s New Clothes (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1985), 176-177.

[32] Joyce Milton, The Road to Malpsychia: Humanistic Psychology and our Discontents (New York: Encounter Books, 2002), 57.

[33] Ibid., 56.

[34] Ibid., 44-45.

[35] Ibid., 46.

[36] Ibid., 52.

[37] Edward Hoffman, The Drive for Self: Alfred Adler and the Founding of Individual Psychology (Boston: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1994), 83.

[38] Claire Dunne, Carl Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul (New York: Parabola Books, 2000), 150.

[39] Frank McLynn, Carl Gustav Jung (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996), 41; also Noll, The Aryan Christ, 26-30.

[40] Ibid., 25.

[41] Dunne, Wounded Healer of the Soul, 21.

[42] Noll, The Aryan Christ, 30.

[43] Ibid., 38.

[44] Ibid., 40.

[45] Ibid., 41, 49.

[46] Ibid., 41.

[47] Ibid., 47-52.

[48] Fodor, Freud, Jung, and Occultism, 87.

[49] Ibid., 29.

[50] Dunne, Wounded Healer of the Soul, 55-56; emphasis added; also Stephen A. Hoeller, The Gnostic Jung, 7.

[51] Noll, The Aryan Christ, 190-161.

[52] Stephen A. Hoeller, The Gnostic Jung and Seven Sermons to the Dead (Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 2006), 8.

[53] Noll, The Jung Cult, 65-67.

[54] See Brenda Maddox, Yeat’s Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1999).

[55] See for example Emily W. Leider, Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolf Valentino (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 6, 241-243, 410; Antoni Gronowicz, Garbo: Her Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990); Kenny Kingston, I Still Talk to… (Newport Beach, CA: Seven Locks Press, 2000). Roseanne Barr, My Life as a Woman (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 84. Shirley MacLaine, Going Within: A Guide for Inner Transformation (New York: Bantam, 1990), 25. Natasha herself declared, “The more we investigated this remarkable gift of automatic writing, the more convinced we became of the great truth which lay behind it….[Rudolf] soon made the discovery that he also was mediumistic and could receive automatic writings.” Natasha Rambova, Rudolf Valentino: A Wife’s Memories of an Icon (Hollywood, CA: 1921PVG Publishing, 1926 and 2990), 48, 49, 51. Incredibly, it was through those séances and automatic writings that the Valentinos got many of the scripts for their performances.

[56] See for example Hugh B. Urban, The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard (New York: Henry Holt, 1987); Bent Corydon and L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madmen? (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1987); Jon Atack, A Piece of Blue Sky: Scientology, Dianetics, and L. Ron Hubbard (Secaurus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1990).

[57] C. G. Jung, The Red Book (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 8-9; introduction by Sonu Shamdasani.

[58] Noll, The Jung Cult, 269.

[59] Dunne, Wounded Healer of the Soul, 57.

[60] Noll, The Aryan Christ, 22.

[61] Dunne, Wounded Healer of the Soul, 270.

[62] Noll, The Jung Cult, 257.

[63] Ibid., 224.

[64] Dunne, Wounded Healer of the Soul, 152.

[65] See Hoeller, The Gnostic Jung, 27.

[66] Ibid., 28.

[67] Ibid., 31.

[68] Ibid., 28.

[69] Noll, The Jung Cult, 200.

[70] Ibid., 202-203.

[71] Frank McLynn, Carl Gustav Jung (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996), 43.

[72] Ibid., 44.

[73] Richard Webster, Why Freud was Wrong: Sin, Science, and Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 385.

[74] Eric Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion (New York: Vail-Ballou Press, 1978), 16.

[75] Dunne, Wounded Healer of the Soul, 5.

[76] Ibid., 53-54.

[77] See Noll, The Aryan Christ, 2-3.

[78] Ibid., 123.

[79] Ibid., 124.

[80] Ibid., 120-147.

[81] Ibid., 140.

[82] Ibid., 146.

[83] Carl Jung, Dreams, Memories, Reflections (New York: Random House, 1961), 178.

[84] See Carl Jung, The Red Book (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).

Jonas E. Alexis, Assistant Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book Zionism vs. the West: How Talmudic Ideology is Undermining Western Culture. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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