Re: The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung
Posted: Sun Dec 01, 2013 1:23 am
PART 1 OF 6
Liber Novus: The "Red Book" of C. G. Jung [1]
SONU SHAMDASANI
C. G. JUNG is widely recognized as a major figure in modern Western thought, and his work continues to spark controversies. He played critical roles in the formation of modern psychology, psychotherapy, and psychiatry, and a large international profession of analytical psychologists work under his name. His work has had its widest impact, however, outside professional circles: Jung and Freud are the names that most people first think of in connection with psychology, and their ideas have been widely disseminated in the arts, the humanities, films, and popular culture. Jung is also widely regarded as one of the instigators of the New Age movement. However, it is startling to realize that the book that stands at the center of his oeuvre, on which he worked for over sixteen years, is only now being published.
There can be few unpublished works that have already exerted such far-reaching effects upon twentieth-century social and intellectual history as Jung's Red Book, or Liber Novus (New Book). Nominated by Jung to contain the nucleus of his later works, it has long been recognized as the key to comprehending their genesis. Yet aside from a few tantalizing glimpses, it has remained unavailable for study.
The Cultural Moment
The first few decades of the twentieth century saw a great deal of experimentation in literature, psychology, and the visual arts. Writers tried to throw off the limitations of representational conventions to explore and depict the full range of inner experience -- dreams, visions, and fantasies. They experimented with new forms and utilized old forms in novel ways. From the automatic writing of the surrealists to the gothic fantasies of Gustav Meyrink, writers came into close proximity and collision with the researches of psychologists, who were engaged in similar explorations. Artists and writers collaborated to try out new forms of illustration and typography, new configurations of text and image. Psychologists sought to overcome the limitations of philosophical psychology, and they began to explore the same terrain as artists and writers. Clear demarcations among literature, art, and psychology had not yet been set; writers and artists borrowed from psychologists, and vice versa. A number of major psychologists, such as Alfred Binet and Charles Richet, wrote dramatic and fictional works, often under assumed names, whose themes mirrored those of their "scientific" works. [2] Gustav Fechner, one of the founders of psychophysics and experimental psychology, wrote on the soul life of plants and of the earth as a blue angel. [3] Meanwhile writers such as Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault assiduously read and utilized the works of psychical researchers and abnormal psychologists, such as Frederick Myers, Theodore Flournoy, and Pierre Janet. W. B. Yeats utilized spiritualistic automatic writing to compose a poetic psychocosmology in A Vision. [4] On all sides, individuals were searching for new forms with which to depict the actualities of inner experience, in a quest for spiritual and cultural renewal. In Berlin, Hugo Ball noted:
Within this cultural crisis Jung conceived of undertaking an extended process of self-experimentation, which resulted in Liber Novus, a work of psychology in a literary form.
We stand today on the other side of a divide between psychology and literature. To consider Liber Novus today is to take up a work that could have emerged only before these separations had been firmly established. Its study helps us understand how the divide occurred. But first, we may ask,
Who was C. G. Jung?
Jung was born in Kesswil, on Lake Constance, in 1875. His family moved to Laufen by the Rhine Falls when he was six months old. He was the oldest child and had one sister. His father was a pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church. Toward the end of his life, Jung wrote a memoir entitled "From the Earliest Experiences of My Life," which was subsequently included in Memories, Dreams, Reflections in a heavily edited form. [6] Jung narrated the significant events that led to his psychological vocation. The memoir, with its focus on significant childhood dreams, visions, and fantasies, can be viewed as an introduction to Liber Novus.
In the first dream, he found himself in a meadow with a stone-lined hole in the ground. Finding some stairs, he descended into it, and found himself in a chamber. Here there was a golden throne with what appeared to be a tree trunk of skin and flesh, with an eye on the top. He then heard his mother's voice exclaim that this was the "man-eater." He was unsure whether she meant that this figure actually devoured children or was identical with Christ. This profoundly affected his image of Christ. Years later, he realized that this figure was a penis and, later still, that it was in fact a ritual phallus, and that the setting was an underground temple. He came to see this dream as an initiation "in the secrets of the earth." [7]
In his childhood, Jung experienced a number of visual hallucinations. He also appears to have had the capacity to evoke images voluntarily. In a seminar in 1935, he recalled a portrait of his maternal grandmother which he would look at as a boy until he "saw" his grandfather descending the stairs. [8]
One sunny day, when Jung was twelve, he was traversing the Munsterplatz in Basel, admiring the sun shining on the newly restored glazed roof tiles of the cathedral. He then felt the approach of a terrible, sinful thought, which he pushed away. He was in a state of anguish for several days. Finally, after convincing himself that it was God who wanted him to think this thought, just as it had been God who had wanted Adam and Eve to sin, he let himself contemplate it, and saw God on his throne unleashing an almighty turd on the cathedral, shattering its new roof and smashing the cathedral. With this, Jung felt a sense of bliss and relief such as he had never experienced before. He felt that it was an experience of the "direct living God, who stands omnipotent and free above the Bible and Church." [9] He felt alone before God, and that his real responsibility commenced then. He realized that it was precisely such a direct, immediate experience of living God, who stands outside Church and Bible, that his father lacked.
This sense of election led to a final disillusionment with the Church on the occasion of his First Communion. He had been led to believe that this would be a great experience. Instead, nothing. He concluded: "For me, it was an absence of God and no religion. Church was a place to which I no longer could go. There was no life there, but death." [10]
Jung's voracious reading started at this time, and he was particularly struck by Goethe's Faust. He was struck by the fact that in Mephistopheles, Goethe took the figure of the devil seriously. In philosophy, he was impressed by Schopenhauer, who acknowledged the existence of evil and gave voice to the sufferings and miseries of the world.
Jung also had a sense of living in two centuries, and felt a strong nostalgia for the eighteenth century. His sense of duality took the form of two alternating personalities, which he dubbed NO. 1 and 2. NO. 1 was the Basel schoolboy, who read novels, and NO. 2 pursued religious reflections in solitude, in a state of communion with nature and the cosmos. He inhabited "God's world." This personality felt most real. Personality NO. 1 wanted to be free of the melancholy and isolation of personality NO. 2. When personality NO. 2 entered, it felt as if a long dead yet perpetually present spirit had entered the room. NO. 2 had no definable character. He was connected to history, particularly with the Middle Ages. For NO. 2, NO. 1, with his failings and ineptitudes, was someone to be put up with. This interplay ran throughout Jung's life. As he saw it, we are all like this -- part of us lives in the present and the other part is connected to the centuries.
As the time drew near for him to choose a career, the conflict between the two personalities intensified. NO. 1 wanted to pursue science, NO. 2, the humanities. Jung then had two critical dreams. In the first, he was walking in a dark wood along the Rhine. He came upon a burial mound and began to dig, until he discovered the remains of prehistoric animals. This dream awakened his desire to learn more about nature. In the second dream, he was in a wood and there were watercourses. He found a circular pool surrounded by dense undergrowth.
In the pool, he saw a beautiful creature, a large radiolarian. After these dreams, he settled for science. To solve the question of how to earn a living, he decided to study medicine. He then had another dream. He was in an unknown place, surrounded by fog, making slow headway against the wind. He was protecting a small light from going out. He saw a large black figure threateningly close. He awoke, and realized that the figure was the shadow cast from the light. He thought that in the dream, NO. 1 was himself bearing the light, and NO. 2 followed like a shadow. He took this as a sign that he should go forward with NO. 1, and not look back to the world of NO. 2.
In his university days, the interplay between these personalities continued. In addition to his medical studies, Jung pursued an intensive program of extracurricular reading, in particular the works of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Swedenborg, [11] and writers on spiritualism. Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra made a great impression on him. He felt that his own personality NO. 2 corresponded to Zarathustra, and he feared that his personality NO. 2 was morbid. [12] He participated in a student debating society, the Zofingia society, and presented lectures on these subjects. Spiritualism particularly interested him, as the spiritualists appeared to be attempting to use scientific means to explore the supernatural, and prove the immortality of the soul.
The latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of modern spiritualism, which spread across Europe and America. Through spiritualism, the cultivation of trances -- with the attendant phenomena of trance speech, glossolalia, automatic writing, and crystal vision -- became widespread. The phenomena of spiritualism attracted the interest of leading scientists such as Crookes, Zollner, and Wallace. It also attracted the interest of psychologists, including Freud, Ferenczi, Bleuler, James, Myers, Janet, Bergson, Stanley Hall, Schrenck-Notzing, Moll, Dessoir, Richet, and Flournoy.
During his university days in Basel, Jung and his fellow students took part in seances. In 1896, they engaged in a long series of sittings with his cousin Helene Preiswerk, who appeared to have mediumistic abilities. Jung found that during the trances, she would become different personalities, and that he could call up these personalities by suggestion. Dead relatives appeared, and she became completely transformed into these figures. She unfolded stories of her previous incarnations and articulated a mystical cosmology, represented in a mandala. [13] Her spiritualistic revelations carried on until she was caught attempting to fake physical apparitions, and the seances were discontinued.
On reading Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Text-Book of Psychiatry in 1899, Jung realized that his vocation lay in psychiatry, which represented a fusion of the interests of his two personalities. He underwent something like a conversion to a natural scientific framework. After his medical studies, he took up a post as an assistant physician at Burgholzli hospital at the end of 1900. The Burgholzli was a progressive university clinic, under the directorship of Eugen Bleuler. At the end of the nineteenth century, numerous figures attempted to found a new scientific psychology. It was held that by turning psychology into a science through introducing scientific methods, all prior forms of human understanding would be revolutionized. The new psychology was heralded as promising nothing less than the completion of the scientific revolution. Thanks to Bleuler, and his predecessor Auguste Forel, psychological research and hypnosis played prominent roles at the Burgholzli.
Jung's medical dissertation focused on the psychogenesis of spiritualistic phenomena, in the form of an analysis of his seances with Helene Preiswerk. [14] While his initial interest in her case appeared to be in the possible veracity of her spiritualistic manifestations, in the interim, he had studied the works of Frederic Myers, William James, and, in particular, Theodore Flournoy. At the end of 1899, Flournoy had published a study of a medium, whom he called Helene Smith, which became a best seller. [15] What was novel about Flournoy's study was that it approached her case purely from the psychological angle, as a means of illuminating the study of subliminal consciousness. A critical shift had taken place through the work of Flournoy, Frederick Myers, and William James. They argued that regardless of whether the alleged spiritualistic experiences were valid, such experiences enabled far-reaching insight into the constitution of the subliminal, and hence into human psychology as a whole. Through them, 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. Automatic writing brought to light subpersonalities, and enabled dialogues with them to be held. [16] For Janet and Prince, the goal of holding such practices was to reintegrate the personality.
Jung was so taken by Flournoy's book that he offered to translate it into German, but Flournoy already had a translator. The impact of these studies is clear in Jung's dissertation, where he approaches the case purely from a psychological angle. Jung's work was closely modeled on Flournoy's From India to the Planet Mars, both in terms of subject matter and in its interpretation of the psychogenesis of Helene's spiritualistic romances. Jung's dissertation also indicates the manner m which he was utilizing automatic writing as a method of psychological investigation.
In 1902, he became engaged to Emma Rauschenbach, whom he married and with whom he had five children. Up till this point, Jung had kept a diary. In one of the last entries, dated May 1902, he wrote: "I am no longer alone with myself, and I can only artificially recall the scary and beautiful feeling of solitude. This is the shadow side of the fortune of love." [17] For Jung, his marriage marked a move away from the solitude to which he had been accustomed.
In his youth, Jung had often visited Basel's art museum and was particularly drawn to the works of Holbein and Bocklin, as well as to those of the Dutch painters. [18] Toward the end of his studies, he was much occupied with painting for about a year. His paintings from this period were landscapes in a representational style, and show highly developed technical skills and fine technical proficiency. [19] In 1902/3, Jung left his post at the Burgholzli and went to Paris to study with the leading French psychologist Pierre Janet, who was lecturing at the College de France. During his stay, he devoted much time to painting and visiting museums, going frequently to the Louvre. He paid particular attention to ancient art, Egyptian antiquities, the works of the Renaissance, Fra Angelico, Leonardo da Vinci, Rubens, and Frans Hals. He bought paintings and engravings and had paintings copied for the furnishing of his new home. He painted in both oil and watercolor. In January 1903, he went to London and visited its museums, paying particular attention to the Egyptian, Aztec, and Inca collections at the British Museum. [20]
After his return, he took up a post that had become vacant at the Burgholzi and devoted his research to the analysis of linguistic associations, in collaboration with Franz Riklin. With co-workers, they conducted an extensive series of experiments, which they subjected to statistical analyses. The conceptual basis of Jung's early work lay in the work of Flournoy and Janet, which he attempted to fuse with the research methodology of Wilhelm Wundt and Emil Kraepelin. Jung and Riklin utilized the associations experiment, devised by Francis Galton and developed in psychology and psychiatry by Wundt, Kraepelin, and Gustav Aschaffenburg. The aim of the research project, instigated by Bleuler, was to provide a quick and reliable means for differential diagnosis. The Burgholzli team failed to come up with this, but they were struck by the significance of disturbances of reaction and prolonged response times. Jung and Riklin argued that these disturbed reactions were due to the presence of emotionally stressed complexes, and used their experiments to develop a general psychology of complexes. [21]
This work established Jung's reputation as one of the rising stars of psychiatry. In 1906, he applied his new theory of complexes to study the psychogenesis of dementia praecox (later called schizophrenia) and to demonstrate the intelligibility of delusional formations. [22] For Jung, along with a number of other psychiatrists and psychologists at this time, such as Janet and Adolf Meyer, insanity was not regarded as something completely set apart from sanity; but rather as lying on the extreme end of a spectrum. Two years later, he argued that "If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us." [23]
Jung became increasingly disenchanted by the limitations of experimental and statistical methods in psychiatry and psychology. In the outpatient clinic at the Burgholzli, he presented hypnotic demonstrations. This led to his interest in therapeutics, and to the use of the clinical encounter as a method of research. Around 1904, Bleuler introduced psychoanalysis into the Burgholzli, and entered into a correspondence with Freud, asking Freud for assistance in his analysis of his own dreams. [24] In 1906, Jung entered into communication with Freud. This relationship has been much mythologized. A Freudocentric legend arose, which viewed Freud and psychoanalysis as the principal source for Jung's work. This has led to the complete mislocation of his work in the intellectual history of the twentieth century. On numerous occasions, Jung protested. For instance, in an unpublished article written in the 1930s, "The schism in the Freudian school," he wrote: "I in no way exclusively stem from Freud. I had my scientific attitude and the theory of complexes before I met Freud. The teachers that influenced me above all are Bleuler, Pierre Janet, and Theodore Flournoy." [25] Freud and Jung clearly came from quite different intellectual traditions, and were drawn together by shared interests in the psychogenesis of mental disorders and psychotherapy. Their intention was to form a scientific psychotherapy based on the new psychology and, in turn, to ground psychology in the in-depth clinical investigation of individual lives.
With the lead of Bleuler and Jung, the Burgholzli became the center of the psychoanalytic movement. In 1908, the Jahrbuch fur psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen (Yearbook for Psychoanalytic and Psychopathological Researches) was established, with Bleuler and Freud editors-in-chief and Jung as managing editor. Due to their advocacy, psychoanalysis gained a hearing in the German psychiatric world. In 1909, Jung received an honorary degree from Clark University for his association researches. The following year, an international psychoanalytic association was formed with Jung as the president. During the period of his collaboration with Freud, he was a principal architect of the psychoanalytic movement. For Jung, this was a period of intense institutional and political activity. The movement was riven by dissent and acrimonious disagreements.
The Intoxication of Mythology
In 1908, Jung bought some land by the shore of Lake Zurich in Kusnacht and had a house built, where he was to live for the rest of his life. In 1909, he resigned from the Burgholzli, to devote himself to his growing practice and his research interests. His retirement from the Burgholzli coincided with a shift in his research interests to the study of mythology, folklore, and religion, and he assembled a vast private library of scholarly works. These researches culminated in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, published in two installments in 1911 and 1912. This work can be seen to mark a return to Jung's intellectual roots and to his cultural and religious preoccupations. He found the mythological work exciting and intoxicating. In 1925 he recalled, "it seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making. I went about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analyzing them. I read a Greek or a Negro myth as if a lunatic were telling me his anamnesis." [26] The end of the nineteenth century had seen an explosion of scholarship in the newly founded disciplines of comparative religion and ethnopsychology. Primary texts were collected and translated for the first time and subjected to historical scholarship in collections such as Max Muller's Sacred Books of the East. [27] For many, these works represented an important relativization of the Christian worldview.
In Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, Jung differentiated two kinds of thinking. Taking his cue from William James, among others, Jung contrasted directed thinking and fantasy thinking. The former was verbal and logical, while the latter was passive, associative, and imagistic. The former was exemplified by science and the latter by mythology. Jung claimed that the ancients lacked a capacity for directed thinking, which was a modern acquisition. Fantasy thinking took place when directed thinking ceased. Transformations and Symbols of the Libido was an extended study of fantasy thinking, and of the continued presence of mythological themes in the dreams and fantasies of contemporary individuals. Jung reiterated the anthropological equation of the prehistoric, the primitive, and the child. He held that the elucidation of current-day fantasy thinking in adults would concurrently shed light on the thought of children, savages, and prehistoric peoples. [28]
In this work, Jung synthesized nineteenth-century theories of memory, heredity, and the unconscious and posited a phylogenetic layer to the unconscious that was still present in everyone, consisting of mythological images. For Jung, myths were symbols of the libido and they depicted its typical movements. He used the comparative method of anthropology to draw together a vast panoply of myths, and then subjected them to analytic interpretation. He later termed his use of the comparative method "amplification." He claimed that there had to be typical myths, which corresponded to the ethnopsychological development of complexes. Following Jacob Burckhardt, Jung termed such typical myths "primordial images" (Urbilder). One particular myth was given a central role: that of the hero. For Jung, this represented the life of the individual, attempting to become independent and to free himself from the mother. He interpreted the incest motif as an attempt to return to the mother to be reborn. He was later to herald this work as marking the discovery of the collective unconscious, though the term itself came at a later date. [29]
Liber Novus: The "Red Book" of C. G. Jung [1]
SONU SHAMDASANI
C. G. JUNG is widely recognized as a major figure in modern Western thought, and his work continues to spark controversies. He played critical roles in the formation of modern psychology, psychotherapy, and psychiatry, and a large international profession of analytical psychologists work under his name. His work has had its widest impact, however, outside professional circles: Jung and Freud are the names that most people first think of in connection with psychology, and their ideas have been widely disseminated in the arts, the humanities, films, and popular culture. Jung is also widely regarded as one of the instigators of the New Age movement. However, it is startling to realize that the book that stands at the center of his oeuvre, on which he worked for over sixteen years, is only now being published.
There can be few unpublished works that have already exerted such far-reaching effects upon twentieth-century social and intellectual history as Jung's Red Book, or Liber Novus (New Book). Nominated by Jung to contain the nucleus of his later works, it has long been recognized as the key to comprehending their genesis. Yet aside from a few tantalizing glimpses, it has remained unavailable for study.
The Cultural Moment
The first few decades of the twentieth century saw a great deal of experimentation in literature, psychology, and the visual arts. Writers tried to throw off the limitations of representational conventions to explore and depict the full range of inner experience -- dreams, visions, and fantasies. They experimented with new forms and utilized old forms in novel ways. From the automatic writing of the surrealists to the gothic fantasies of Gustav Meyrink, writers came into close proximity and collision with the researches of psychologists, who were engaged in similar explorations. Artists and writers collaborated to try out new forms of illustration and typography, new configurations of text and image. Psychologists sought to overcome the limitations of philosophical psychology, and they began to explore the same terrain as artists and writers. Clear demarcations among literature, art, and psychology had not yet been set; writers and artists borrowed from psychologists, and vice versa. A number of major psychologists, such as Alfred Binet and Charles Richet, wrote dramatic and fictional works, often under assumed names, whose themes mirrored those of their "scientific" works. [2] Gustav Fechner, one of the founders of psychophysics and experimental psychology, wrote on the soul life of plants and of the earth as a blue angel. [3] Meanwhile writers such as Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault assiduously read and utilized the works of psychical researchers and abnormal psychologists, such as Frederick Myers, Theodore Flournoy, and Pierre Janet. W. B. Yeats utilized spiritualistic automatic writing to compose a poetic psychocosmology in A Vision. [4] On all sides, individuals were searching for new forms with which to depict the actualities of inner experience, in a quest for spiritual and cultural renewal. In Berlin, Hugo Ball noted:
The world and society in 1913 looked like this: life is completely confined and shackled. A kind of economic fatalism prevails; each individual, whether he resists it or not, is assigned a specific role and with it his interests and his character. The church is regarded as a "redemption factory" of little importance, literature as a safety valve ... The most burning question day and night is: is there anywhere a force that is strong enough to put an end to this state of affairs? And if not, how can one escape it? [5]
Within this cultural crisis Jung conceived of undertaking an extended process of self-experimentation, which resulted in Liber Novus, a work of psychology in a literary form.
We stand today on the other side of a divide between psychology and literature. To consider Liber Novus today is to take up a work that could have emerged only before these separations had been firmly established. Its study helps us understand how the divide occurred. But first, we may ask,
Who was C. G. Jung?
Jung was born in Kesswil, on Lake Constance, in 1875. His family moved to Laufen by the Rhine Falls when he was six months old. He was the oldest child and had one sister. His father was a pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church. Toward the end of his life, Jung wrote a memoir entitled "From the Earliest Experiences of My Life," which was subsequently included in Memories, Dreams, Reflections in a heavily edited form. [6] Jung narrated the significant events that led to his psychological vocation. The memoir, with its focus on significant childhood dreams, visions, and fantasies, can be viewed as an introduction to Liber Novus.
In the first dream, he found himself in a meadow with a stone-lined hole in the ground. Finding some stairs, he descended into it, and found himself in a chamber. Here there was a golden throne with what appeared to be a tree trunk of skin and flesh, with an eye on the top. He then heard his mother's voice exclaim that this was the "man-eater." He was unsure whether she meant that this figure actually devoured children or was identical with Christ. This profoundly affected his image of Christ. Years later, he realized that this figure was a penis and, later still, that it was in fact a ritual phallus, and that the setting was an underground temple. He came to see this dream as an initiation "in the secrets of the earth." [7]
In his childhood, Jung experienced a number of visual hallucinations. He also appears to have had the capacity to evoke images voluntarily. In a seminar in 1935, he recalled a portrait of his maternal grandmother which he would look at as a boy until he "saw" his grandfather descending the stairs. [8]
One sunny day, when Jung was twelve, he was traversing the Munsterplatz in Basel, admiring the sun shining on the newly restored glazed roof tiles of the cathedral. He then felt the approach of a terrible, sinful thought, which he pushed away. He was in a state of anguish for several days. Finally, after convincing himself that it was God who wanted him to think this thought, just as it had been God who had wanted Adam and Eve to sin, he let himself contemplate it, and saw God on his throne unleashing an almighty turd on the cathedral, shattering its new roof and smashing the cathedral. With this, Jung felt a sense of bliss and relief such as he had never experienced before. He felt that it was an experience of the "direct living God, who stands omnipotent and free above the Bible and Church." [9] He felt alone before God, and that his real responsibility commenced then. He realized that it was precisely such a direct, immediate experience of living God, who stands outside Church and Bible, that his father lacked.
This sense of election led to a final disillusionment with the Church on the occasion of his First Communion. He had been led to believe that this would be a great experience. Instead, nothing. He concluded: "For me, it was an absence of God and no religion. Church was a place to which I no longer could go. There was no life there, but death." [10]
Jung's voracious reading started at this time, and he was particularly struck by Goethe's Faust. He was struck by the fact that in Mephistopheles, Goethe took the figure of the devil seriously. In philosophy, he was impressed by Schopenhauer, who acknowledged the existence of evil and gave voice to the sufferings and miseries of the world.
He ran around, he ran about,
His thirst in puddles laving;
He gnawed and scratched the house throughout.
But nothing cured his raving.
He whirled and jumped, with torment mad,
And soon enough the poor beast had,
As if he had love in his bosom.
-- Faust, by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Historical subjects have a decidedly detrimental effect only when they restrict the painter to a field chosen arbitrarily, and not for artistic but for other purposes. This is particularly the case when this field is poor in picturesque and significant objects, when, for example, it is the history of a small, isolated, capricious, hierarchical (i.e., ruled by false notions), obscure people, like the Jews, despised by the great contemporary nations of the East and of the West. Since the great migration of peoples lies between us and all the ancient nations, just as between the present surface of the earth and the surface whose organisms appear only as fossil remains there lies the former change of the bed of the ocean, it is to be regarded generally as a great misfortune that the people whose former culture was to serve mainly as the basis of our own were not, say, the Indians or the Greeks, or even the Romans, but just these Jews....
Further, to this class belongs a newspaper report from Hall of March 1851: "The band of Jewish swindlers which we have mentioned, was again delivered up to us with obbligato accompaniment." This subsuming of a police escort under a musical expression is very happy, although it approaches the mere play on words.
-- The World as Will and Representation, by Arthur Schopenhauer, translated by E.F.J. Payne
Let us also not forget the chosen people of God, who, after they had, by Jehovah’s express and special command, stolen from their old and faithful friends in Egypt the gold and silver vessels which had been lent to them, made a murderous and predatory excursion into the Promised Land [*] with the murderer Moses at their head, in order to tear it from the rightful owners, also at Jehovah’s express and repeated commands, knowing no compassion, and relentlessly murdering and exterminating all the inhabitants, even the women and children (Joshua x., xi.); just because they were not circumcised and did not know Jehovah, which was sufficient reason to justify every act of cruelty against them. [* Tacitus (Histories, Book V, chapter 2) and Justinus (Book XXXVI, chapter a) have described the historical basis for the book of Exodus, which is as instructive to read as it is amusing, providing a picture of the historical basis for the other books of the Old Testament. There we learn (in the passages cited above) that the Pharaoh no longer wished to tolerate the presence of the creeping, obscene Jewish people in the pure land of Egypt, infected, as they were, with filthy and dangerously infectious diseases (scabies), so that he put on board ship and expelled from the Arabian Coast. It is true that a detachment of Egyptian soldiers were sent after them -- not to bring back the wonderful Jews, whom they wished to get rid of, after all, but rather, to get back the golden vessels which the Jews had stolen -- stolen, namely, from the temples of the Egyptians. Who would lend anything to such rabble on trust? It is also true that the detachment of soldiers was destroyed by a natural catastrophe. There were great shortages of all necessities on the Arabian coast -- mainly water. So up rose some insolent character [Moses] who promised to go fetch everything the Jews needed, if they would only follow and obey him [Moses]; after all, he had seen wild asses, etc. etc.
The reason I consider this the historical basis for the book of Exodus is because it is obviously the prose upon which the poetry of the book of Exodus was constructed. Even if Justinus (i.e., Pompeius Trogus) is guilty of a single anachronism in this regard (i.e., according to our assumptions, which are based on the book of Exodus), that doesn’t bother me; to me, 100 anachronisms are nowhere near as dubious as a single miracle. The above mentioned two Roman classics also indicate the degree to which the Jews have been detested and despised at all times and by all nations: the reason for this may lie in the fact that they were the only people on earth who believed in no future life apart from this earthly life, i.e., human beings were regarded as animals. The Jews are the scum of the earth, but they are also great masters in lying. [Auswurf der Menschheit, aber große Meister im Lügen].
-- Parerga und Paralipomena (Diogenes edition of Schopenhauer's original complete works in German), by Arthur Schopenhauer, translated by Mrs. Rudolf Dirks, footnote translations by C. Porter
Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew, is nothing but the personification of the whole Jewish race. Since he sinned grievously against the Saviour and World-Redeemer, he shall never be delivered from earthly existence and its burden and moreover shall wander homeless in foreign lands. This is just the flight and fate of the small Jewish race which, strange to relate, was driven from its native land some two thousand years ago and has ever since existed and wandered homeless. On the other hand, many great and illustrious nations with which this petti-fogging little nation cannot possibly be compared, such as the Assyrians, Medes, Persians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Etruscans and others have passed to eternal rest and entirely disappeared. And so even today, this gens extorris, this John Lackland among the nations, is to be found all over the globe, nowhere at home and nowhere strangers. Moreover, it asserts its nationality with unprecedented obstinacy and, mindful of Abraham who dwelt in Canaan as a stranger but who gradually became master of the whole land, as his God had promised him (Genesis 17:8), it would also like to set foot somewhere and take root in order to arrive once more at a country, without which, of course, a people is like a ball floating in air. Till then, it lives parasitically on other nations and their soil; but yet it is inspired with the liveliest patriotism for its own nation. This is seen in the very firm way in which Jews stick together on the principle of each for all and all for each, so that this patriotism sine patria inspired greater enthusiasm than does any other. The rest of the Jews are the fatherland of the Jew; and so he fights for them as he would pro ara et focis, and no community on earth sticks so firmly together as does this. It follows from this that it is absurd to want to concede to them a share in the government or administration of any country.
-- Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, by Arthur Schopenhauer, translated by E.F.J. Payne
Schopenhauer was Eckart's favorite philosopher, and he took many of his ideas if not his very weltanschauung from The World As Will and Idea. He explained he saw the world in terms of 'good' and 'evil,' with the German and Jew representing opposites. This idea was a common thread which ran through the 'folkish' movement, but with erudite quotes from Schopenhauer and others Eckart was a prime mover of this belief. In short, he saw two impulses inherent in man, 'world-affirmation' and 'world-denial.' World-affirmation meant a complete surrender or submission to one's baser, all-too-human instincts; whether it be sensual, decadent, or materialistic. World-denial was its counterweight, the constant striving for something more than earthly desires, the faustian wanderlust which could not be explained, only felt. Eckart thought man must have an occasional respite from his inner strivings, but that a firm balance must be kept between the two extremes.
-- Dietrich Eckart, by William Gillespie
Schopenhauer called the Jew 'the dregs of mankind,' 'a beast,' 'the great master of the lie.' How does the Jew respond? He establishes a Schopenhauer Society. Likewise, the Kant Society is his work, in spite of the fact that -- or, rather, because -- Kant summarily declared the Jewish people to be a 'nation of swindlers.' The same with the Goethe Society. 'We tolerate no Jews among us,' said Goethe. 'Their religion permits them to rob non-Jews,' he wrote. 'This crafty race has one great principle: as long as order prevails, there is nothing to be gained for them,' he continued. He categorically emphasized: 'I refrain from all cooperation with Jews and their accomplices.' All in vain; the Jewish Goethe Society is still there. It would even be there if he himself had expressly forbidden such knavery."
-- Bolshevism From Moses to Lenin: "A Dialogue Between Adolf Hitler and Me," by Dietrich Eckart
Jung also had a sense of living in two centuries, and felt a strong nostalgia for the eighteenth century. His sense of duality took the form of two alternating personalities, which he dubbed NO. 1 and 2. NO. 1 was the Basel schoolboy, who read novels, and NO. 2 pursued religious reflections in solitude, in a state of communion with nature and the cosmos. He inhabited "God's world." This personality felt most real. Personality NO. 1 wanted to be free of the melancholy and isolation of personality NO. 2. When personality NO. 2 entered, it felt as if a long dead yet perpetually present spirit had entered the room. NO. 2 had no definable character. He was connected to history, particularly with the Middle Ages. For NO. 2, NO. 1, with his failings and ineptitudes, was someone to be put up with. This interplay ran throughout Jung's life. As he saw it, we are all like this -- part of us lives in the present and the other part is connected to the centuries.
As the time drew near for him to choose a career, the conflict between the two personalities intensified. NO. 1 wanted to pursue science, NO. 2, the humanities. Jung then had two critical dreams. In the first, he was walking in a dark wood along the Rhine. He came upon a burial mound and began to dig, until he discovered the remains of prehistoric animals. This dream awakened his desire to learn more about nature. In the second dream, he was in a wood and there were watercourses. He found a circular pool surrounded by dense undergrowth.
In the pool, he saw a beautiful creature, a large radiolarian. After these dreams, he settled for science. To solve the question of how to earn a living, he decided to study medicine. He then had another dream. He was in an unknown place, surrounded by fog, making slow headway against the wind. He was protecting a small light from going out. He saw a large black figure threateningly close. He awoke, and realized that the figure was the shadow cast from the light. He thought that in the dream, NO. 1 was himself bearing the light, and NO. 2 followed like a shadow. He took this as a sign that he should go forward with NO. 1, and not look back to the world of NO. 2.
In his university days, the interplay between these personalities continued. In addition to his medical studies, Jung pursued an intensive program of extracurricular reading, in particular the works of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Swedenborg, [11] and writers on spiritualism. Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra made a great impression on him. He felt that his own personality NO. 2 corresponded to Zarathustra, and he feared that his personality NO. 2 was morbid. [12] He participated in a student debating society, the Zofingia society, and presented lectures on these subjects. Spiritualism particularly interested him, as the spiritualists appeared to be attempting to use scientific means to explore the supernatural, and prove the immortality of the soul.
The latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of modern spiritualism, which spread across Europe and America. Through spiritualism, the cultivation of trances -- with the attendant phenomena of trance speech, glossolalia, automatic writing, and crystal vision -- became widespread. The phenomena of spiritualism attracted the interest of leading scientists such as Crookes, Zollner, and Wallace. It also attracted the interest of psychologists, including Freud, Ferenczi, Bleuler, James, Myers, Janet, Bergson, Stanley Hall, Schrenck-Notzing, Moll, Dessoir, Richet, and Flournoy.
During his university days in Basel, Jung and his fellow students took part in seances. In 1896, they engaged in a long series of sittings with his cousin Helene Preiswerk, who appeared to have mediumistic abilities. Jung found that during the trances, she would become different personalities, and that he could call up these personalities by suggestion. Dead relatives appeared, and she became completely transformed into these figures. She unfolded stories of her previous incarnations and articulated a mystical cosmology, represented in a mandala. [13] Her spiritualistic revelations carried on until she was caught attempting to fake physical apparitions, and the seances were discontinued.
On reading Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Text-Book of Psychiatry in 1899, Jung realized that his vocation lay in psychiatry, which represented a fusion of the interests of his two personalities. He underwent something like a conversion to a natural scientific framework. After his medical studies, he took up a post as an assistant physician at Burgholzli hospital at the end of 1900. The Burgholzli was a progressive university clinic, under the directorship of Eugen Bleuler. At the end of the nineteenth century, numerous figures attempted to found a new scientific psychology. It was held that by turning psychology into a science through introducing scientific methods, all prior forms of human understanding would be revolutionized. The new psychology was heralded as promising nothing less than the completion of the scientific revolution. Thanks to Bleuler, and his predecessor Auguste Forel, psychological research and hypnosis played prominent roles at the Burgholzli.
Jung's medical dissertation focused on the psychogenesis of spiritualistic phenomena, in the form of an analysis of his seances with Helene Preiswerk. [14] While his initial interest in her case appeared to be in the possible veracity of her spiritualistic manifestations, in the interim, he had studied the works of Frederic Myers, William James, and, in particular, Theodore Flournoy. At the end of 1899, Flournoy had published a study of a medium, whom he called Helene Smith, which became a best seller. [15] What was novel about Flournoy's study was that it approached her case purely from the psychological angle, as a means of illuminating the study of subliminal consciousness. A critical shift had taken place through the work of Flournoy, Frederick Myers, and William James. They argued that regardless of whether the alleged spiritualistic experiences were valid, such experiences enabled far-reaching insight into the constitution of the subliminal, and hence into human psychology as a whole. Through them, 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. Automatic writing brought to light subpersonalities, and enabled dialogues with them to be held. [16] For Janet and Prince, the goal of holding such practices was to reintegrate the personality.
Jung was so taken by Flournoy's book that he offered to translate it into German, but Flournoy already had a translator. The impact of these studies is clear in Jung's dissertation, where he approaches the case purely from a psychological angle. Jung's work was closely modeled on Flournoy's From India to the Planet Mars, both in terms of subject matter and in its interpretation of the psychogenesis of Helene's spiritualistic romances. Jung's dissertation also indicates the manner m which he was utilizing automatic writing as a method of psychological investigation.
In 1902, he became engaged to Emma Rauschenbach, whom he married and with whom he had five children. Up till this point, Jung had kept a diary. In one of the last entries, dated May 1902, he wrote: "I am no longer alone with myself, and I can only artificially recall the scary and beautiful feeling of solitude. This is the shadow side of the fortune of love." [17] For Jung, his marriage marked a move away from the solitude to which he had been accustomed.
In his youth, Jung had often visited Basel's art museum and was particularly drawn to the works of Holbein and Bocklin, as well as to those of the Dutch painters. [18] Toward the end of his studies, he was much occupied with painting for about a year. His paintings from this period were landscapes in a representational style, and show highly developed technical skills and fine technical proficiency. [19] In 1902/3, Jung left his post at the Burgholzli and went to Paris to study with the leading French psychologist Pierre Janet, who was lecturing at the College de France. During his stay, he devoted much time to painting and visiting museums, going frequently to the Louvre. He paid particular attention to ancient art, Egyptian antiquities, the works of the Renaissance, Fra Angelico, Leonardo da Vinci, Rubens, and Frans Hals. He bought paintings and engravings and had paintings copied for the furnishing of his new home. He painted in both oil and watercolor. In January 1903, he went to London and visited its museums, paying particular attention to the Egyptian, Aztec, and Inca collections at the British Museum. [20]
After his return, he took up a post that had become vacant at the Burgholzi and devoted his research to the analysis of linguistic associations, in collaboration with Franz Riklin. With co-workers, they conducted an extensive series of experiments, which they subjected to statistical analyses. The conceptual basis of Jung's early work lay in the work of Flournoy and Janet, which he attempted to fuse with the research methodology of Wilhelm Wundt and Emil Kraepelin. Jung and Riklin utilized the associations experiment, devised by Francis Galton and developed in psychology and psychiatry by Wundt, Kraepelin, and Gustav Aschaffenburg. The aim of the research project, instigated by Bleuler, was to provide a quick and reliable means for differential diagnosis. The Burgholzli team failed to come up with this, but they were struck by the significance of disturbances of reaction and prolonged response times. Jung and Riklin argued that these disturbed reactions were due to the presence of emotionally stressed complexes, and used their experiments to develop a general psychology of complexes. [21]
This work established Jung's reputation as one of the rising stars of psychiatry. In 1906, he applied his new theory of complexes to study the psychogenesis of dementia praecox (later called schizophrenia) and to demonstrate the intelligibility of delusional formations. [22] For Jung, along with a number of other psychiatrists and psychologists at this time, such as Janet and Adolf Meyer, insanity was not regarded as something completely set apart from sanity; but rather as lying on the extreme end of a spectrum. Two years later, he argued that "If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us." [23]
Jung became increasingly disenchanted by the limitations of experimental and statistical methods in psychiatry and psychology. In the outpatient clinic at the Burgholzli, he presented hypnotic demonstrations. This led to his interest in therapeutics, and to the use of the clinical encounter as a method of research. Around 1904, Bleuler introduced psychoanalysis into the Burgholzli, and entered into a correspondence with Freud, asking Freud for assistance in his analysis of his own dreams. [24] In 1906, Jung entered into communication with Freud. This relationship has been much mythologized. A Freudocentric legend arose, which viewed Freud and psychoanalysis as the principal source for Jung's work. This has led to the complete mislocation of his work in the intellectual history of the twentieth century. On numerous occasions, Jung protested. For instance, in an unpublished article written in the 1930s, "The schism in the Freudian school," he wrote: "I in no way exclusively stem from Freud. I had my scientific attitude and the theory of complexes before I met Freud. The teachers that influenced me above all are Bleuler, Pierre Janet, and Theodore Flournoy." [25] Freud and Jung clearly came from quite different intellectual traditions, and were drawn together by shared interests in the psychogenesis of mental disorders and psychotherapy. Their intention was to form a scientific psychotherapy based on the new psychology and, in turn, to ground psychology in the in-depth clinical investigation of individual lives.
With the lead of Bleuler and Jung, the Burgholzli became the center of the psychoanalytic movement. In 1908, the Jahrbuch fur psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen (Yearbook for Psychoanalytic and Psychopathological Researches) was established, with Bleuler and Freud editors-in-chief and Jung as managing editor. Due to their advocacy, psychoanalysis gained a hearing in the German psychiatric world. In 1909, Jung received an honorary degree from Clark University for his association researches. The following year, an international psychoanalytic association was formed with Jung as the president. During the period of his collaboration with Freud, he was a principal architect of the psychoanalytic movement. For Jung, this was a period of intense institutional and political activity. The movement was riven by dissent and acrimonious disagreements.
The Intoxication of Mythology
In 1908, Jung bought some land by the shore of Lake Zurich in Kusnacht and had a house built, where he was to live for the rest of his life. In 1909, he resigned from the Burgholzli, to devote himself to his growing practice and his research interests. His retirement from the Burgholzli coincided with a shift in his research interests to the study of mythology, folklore, and religion, and he assembled a vast private library of scholarly works. These researches culminated in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, published in two installments in 1911 and 1912. This work can be seen to mark a return to Jung's intellectual roots and to his cultural and religious preoccupations. He found the mythological work exciting and intoxicating. In 1925 he recalled, "it seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making. I went about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analyzing them. I read a Greek or a Negro myth as if a lunatic were telling me his anamnesis." [26] The end of the nineteenth century had seen an explosion of scholarship in the newly founded disciplines of comparative religion and ethnopsychology. Primary texts were collected and translated for the first time and subjected to historical scholarship in collections such as Max Muller's Sacred Books of the East. [27] For many, these works represented an important relativization of the Christian worldview.
In Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, Jung differentiated two kinds of thinking. Taking his cue from William James, among others, Jung contrasted directed thinking and fantasy thinking. The former was verbal and logical, while the latter was passive, associative, and imagistic. The former was exemplified by science and the latter by mythology. Jung claimed that the ancients lacked a capacity for directed thinking, which was a modern acquisition. Fantasy thinking took place when directed thinking ceased. Transformations and Symbols of the Libido was an extended study of fantasy thinking, and of the continued presence of mythological themes in the dreams and fantasies of contemporary individuals. Jung reiterated the anthropological equation of the prehistoric, the primitive, and the child. He held that the elucidation of current-day fantasy thinking in adults would concurrently shed light on the thought of children, savages, and prehistoric peoples. [28]
During the long reign of Queen Victoria and her son Prince Edward Albert (later King Edward VII), American collaborators of the Fabian circles, typified by William James (1842-1910), developed intimate relations with British Fabian institutions including the "Cambridge Apostles", the Royal Colonial Institute and its associated Scottish Rite Freemasonic Lodge (now the Chatham House Royal Institute of International Affairs), the Society for Psychical Research, the H.G. Wells-allied New Republic magazine, and others.
As the founding chairman of Harvard University's Psychology Department, James helped launch a new dimension of religious insanity, beyond the earlier episodic "Great Awakenings." In a famous series of lectures at Edinburgh University, published under the title Varieties of Religious Experience, he proposed that Edwards' type of terror-induced "religious experience" be enhanced with drugs. "Borderland insanity, crankiness, insane temperament, loss of mental balance, psychopathic degeneration," he argued, were necessary for creative thought, including a sense of the spiritual. He pointed out that drunkenness has been traditionally the best way to "get religion," but added the suggestion that nitrous oxide, ether, and other drugs ought also to be used.
In these lectures, James also promoted the British oligarchy-sponsored occultist Theosophical movement of Madame Blatvatsky and Annie Besant, and other strange religions which had been promoted to prominence after the Civil War.
-- The CCF and the God of Thunder Cult, by Stanley Ezrol & Jeffrey Steinberg
In this work, Jung synthesized nineteenth-century theories of memory, heredity, and the unconscious and posited a phylogenetic layer to the unconscious that was still present in everyone, consisting of mythological images. For Jung, myths were symbols of the libido and they depicted its typical movements. He used the comparative method of anthropology to draw together a vast panoply of myths, and then subjected them to analytic interpretation. He later termed his use of the comparative method "amplification." He claimed that there had to be typical myths, which corresponded to the ethnopsychological development of complexes. Following Jacob Burckhardt, Jung termed such typical myths "primordial images" (Urbilder). One particular myth was given a central role: that of the hero. For Jung, this represented the life of the individual, attempting to become independent and to free himself from the mother. He interpreted the incest motif as an attempt to return to the mother to be reborn. He was later to herald this work as marking the discovery of the collective unconscious, though the term itself came at a later date. [29]
All those things which have come down to us in the legends and myths of various nations, and which touch upon human life, will in our day undergo a peculiar transformation with regard to the whole conception and interpretation of human nature. The age is past in which legends, fairytales, and myths were looked upon merely as expressions of the child-like fancy of a people....
Anyone who has ever looked into the soul of a people is quite well aware that he is not dealing with imaginative fiction or anything of the kind, but with something very much more profound, and that as a matter of fact the legends and fairy-tales of the various peoples are expressive of wonderful powers and wonderful events.
If from the new standpoint of spiritual investigation we meditate upon the old legends and myths, allowing those grand and powerful pictures which have come down from primeval times to influence our minds, we shall find, if we have been equipped for our task by the methods of spiritual science, that these legends and myths are the expressions of a most profound and ancient wisdom....
This is a matter which at first is bound to excite surprise. And yet he who probes deeper and deeper into the ways and means by which these fairy-tales and myths have come into being, will find every trace of surprise vanish, every doubt pass away; indeed, he will find in these legends not only what is termed a naive and unsophisticated view of things, but the wondrously deep and wise expression of a true and primordial conception of the world....
Occult investigation shows decisively that all the things which surround us in this world -- the mineral foundation, the vegetable covering, and the animal world -- should be regarded as the physiognomical expression, or the "below," of an "above" or spirit life lying behind them. From the point of view taken by occultism, the things presented to us in the sense-world can only be rightly understood if our knowledge includes cognition of the "above," the spiritual archetype, the original Spiritual Beings, whence all things manifest have proceeded....
[T]he highest form of the nervous system, such as is possessed by mankind in general at the present stage of evolution, takes from the more highly developed astral body material for the creation of pictures, or representations, of the outer world. Man has lost the power of perceiving the former dim primitive pictures of the external world, but on the other hand, he is now conscious of his inner life, and out of this inner life he forms, at a higher stage, a new world of images in which it is true only a small portion of the outer world is reflected, but in a clearer and more perfect manner than before....
Just as by means of the brain the external world is experienced inwardly, so also by means of the blood this inner world is transformed into an outer expression in the body of man....
The blood absorbs those pictures of the outside world which the brain has formed within, transforms them into living constructive forces, and with them builds up the present human body....
Thus the blood stands midway, as it were, between the inner world of pictures and the exterior living world of form. This role becomes clear to us when we study two phenomena, viz., ancestry -- the relationship between conscious beings -- and experience in the world of external events. Ancestry, or descent, places us where we stand in accordance with the law of blood-relationship. A person is born of a connection, a race, a tribe, a line of ancestors, and what these ancestors have bequeathed to him is expressed in his blood. In the blood is gathered together, as it were, all that the material past has constructed in man; and in the blood is also being formed all that is being prepared for the future.
When, therefore, man temporarily suppresses his higher consciousness, when he is in a hypnotic state, or one of somnambulism, or when he is atavistically clairvoyant, then he descends to a far deeper consciousness, one wherein he becomes dreamily cognizant of the great cosmic laws, but nevertheless perceives them much more clearly than the most vivid dreams of ordinary sleep. At such times the activity of his brain is in abeyance, and during states of the deepest somnambulism this applies also to the spinal cord. The man experiences the activities of his sympathetic nervous system; that is to say, in a dim and hazy fashion he senses the life of the entire cosmos. At such times the blood no longer expresses pictures of the inner life which are produced by means of the brain, but it presents those which the outer world has formed in it. Now, however, we must bear in mind that the forces of his ancestors have helped to make him what he is. Just as he inherits the shape of his nose from an ancestor, so does he inherit the form of his whole body. At such times of suppressed consciousness he senses his ancestors within him, even as during his waking consciousness he senses the pictures of the outer world; that is to say, his forbears are active in his blood, and at such a time he dimly takes part in their remote life....
Everything, therefore, of which he has been the recipient as the result of sense-experience, lives and is active in his blood; his memory is stored with these experiences of his senses. Yet, on the other hand, the man of to-day is no longer conscious of what he possesses in his inward bodily life by inheritance from his ancestors. He knows naught concerning the forms of his inner organs; but in earlier times this was otherwise....
A person experiencing no more than what he perceives by his senses, remembers no more than the events connected with those outward sense-experiences. He can only be aware of such things as he may have experienced in this way since his childhood. But with prehistoric man the case was different. Such a man sensed what was within him, and as this inner experience was the result of heredity, he passed through the experiences of his ancestors by means of his inner faculty. He remembered not only his own childhood, but also the experiences of his ancestors. This life of his ancestors was, in fact, ever present in the pictures which his blood received, for, incredible as it may seem to the materialistic ideas of the present day, there was at one time a form of consciousness by means of which men considered not only their own sense-perceptions as their own experiences, but also the experiences of their forefathers....
We must now enquire how it was that this form of consciousness was changed. It came about through a cause well known to occult history. If you go back into the past, you will find that there is one particular moment which stands out in the history of each nation. It is the moment at which a people enters on a new phase of civilisation, the moment when it ceases to have old traditions, when it ceases to possess its ancient wisdom, the wisdom which was handed down through generations by means of the blood. The nation possesses, nevertheless, a consciousness of it, and this is expressed in its legends.
In earlier times tribes held aloof from each other, and the individual members of families intermarried. You will find this to have been the case with all races and with all peoples; and it was an important moment for humanity when this principle was broken through, when foreign blood was introduced, and when marriage between relations was replaced by marriage with strangers, when endogamy gave place to exogamy. Endogamy preserves the blood of the generation; it permits of the same blood flowing in the separate members as flows for generations through the entire tribe or the entire nation. Exogamy inoculates man with new blood, and this breaking-down of the tribal principle, this mixing of blood, which sooner or later takes place among all peoples, signifies the birth of the external understanding, the birth of intellect....
In those early times the recollection of ancestral experiences was inherited, and, along with this, good or evil tendencies. In the blood of the descendants were to be traced the effects of the ancestors' tendencies. But, when the blood was mixed through exogamy, this close connection with ancestors was severed, and man began to live his own personal life. He began to regulate his moral tendencies according to what he experienced in his own personal life. Thus, in an unmixed blood is expressed the power of the ancestral life, and in a mixed blood the power of personal experience....
Modern science has discovered that if the blood of one animal is mixed with that of another not akin to it, the blood of the one is fatal to that of the other. This has been known to occultism for ages. If you mingle the blood of human beings with that of the lower apes, the result is destructive to the species, since the one is too far removed from the other. If, again, you mingle the blood of man with that of the higher apes, death does not ensue. Just as this mingling of the blood of different species of animals brings about actual death when the types are too remote, so, too, the ancient clairvoyance of undeveloped man was killed when his blood was mixed with the blood of others who did not belong to the same stock.
-- The Occult Significance of Blood, by Rudolf Steiner
Reflecting Ether: It has heretofore been stated that the idea of the house which has existed in the mind can be recovered from the memory of nature, even after the death of the architect. Everything that has ever happened has left behind it an ineffaceable picture in this reflecting ether. As the giant ferns of the childhood of the Earth have left their pictures in the coal beds, and as the progress of the glacier of a bygone day may be traced by means of the trail it has left upon the rocks along its path, even so are the thoughts and acts of men ineffaceably recorded by nature in this reflecting ether, where the trained seer may read their story with an accuracy commensurate with his ability....
Taking a more detailed view of the several divisions of the Region of Concrete Thought we find that the archetypes of physical form no matter to what kingdom they may belong, are found in its lowest subdivision, or the "Continental Region." In this Continental Region are also the archetypes of the continents and the isles of the world, and corresponding to these archetypes are they fashioned. Modifications in the crust of the Earth must first be wrought in the Continental Region. Not until the archetypal model has been changed can the Intelligences which we (to hide our ignorance concerning them) call the "Laws of Nature," bring about the physical conditions which alter the physical features of the Earth according to the modifications designed by the Hierarchies in charge of evolution. They plan changes as an architect plans the alteration of a building before the workmen give it concrete expression. In like manner are changes in the flora and fauna due to metamorphoses in their respective archetypes.
When we speak of the archetypes of all the different forms in the dense world it must not be thought that these archetypes are merely models in the same sense in which we speak of an object constructed in miniature, or in some material other than that appropriate for its proper and final use. They are not merely likenesses nor models of the forms we see about us, but are creative archetypes; that is, they fashion the forms of the Physical World in their own likeness or likenesses, for often many work together to form one certain species, each archetype giving part of itself to build the required form.
The second subdivision of the Region of Concrete Thought is called the "Oceanic Region." It is best described as flowing, pulsating vitality. All the forces that work through the four ethers which constitute the Etheric Region are there seen as archetypes. It is a stream of flowing life, pulsating through all forms, as blood pulsates through the body, the same life in all forms. Here the trained clairvoyant sees how true it is that "all life is one."
The "Aerial Region" is the third division of the Region of Concrete Thought. Here we find the archetype of desires, passions, wishes, feelings, and emotions such as we experience in the Desire World. Here all the activities of the Desire World appear as atmospheric conditions. Like the kiss of summer breeze come the feelings of pleasure and joy to the clairvoyant sense; as the sighing of the wind in the tree-tops seem the longings of the soul and like flashes of lighting the passions of warring nations. In this atmosphere of the Region of Concrete Thought are also pictures of the emotions of man and beast.
The "Region of Archetypal Forces" is the fourth division of the Region of Concrete Thought. It is the central and most important region in the five Worlds wherein man's entire evolution is carried on. On the one side of this Region are the three higher Regions of the World of Thought, the World of Life Spirit and the World of Divine Spirit. On the other side of this Region of Archetypal Forces are the three lower Regions of the World of Thought, the Desire and the Physical Worlds. Thus this Region becomes a sort of "crux," bounded on one side by the Realms of Spirit, on the other by the Worlds of Form. It is a focusing point, where Spirit reflects itself in matter. As the name implies, this Region is the home of the Archetypal Forces which direct the activity of the archetypes in the Region of Concrete Thought. From this Region Spirit works on matter in a formative manner.
***
Under the rule of the Race-spirit, the nation, tribe or family was considered first -- the individual last. The family must be kept intact. If any man dies without leaving offspring to perpetuate his name, his brother must "carry seed" to the widow, that there might be no dying out (Due. XXV:5-10). Marrying out of the family was regarded with horror in the earliest times. A member of one tribe could not become connected with another without losing caste in his own. It was not an easy matter to become a member of another family. Not only among the Jews and other early nations was the integrity of the family insisted upon, but also in more modern times. As previously mentioned, the Scots, even in comparatively recent times, clung tenaciously to their Clan, and the old Norse Vikings would take no one into their families without first "mixing blood" with him, for the spiritual effects of haemolysis, which are unknown to material science, were known of old.
All these customs resulted from the working of Race- and tribal-spirit in the common blood. To admit as a member one in whom that common blood did not flow would have caused "confusion of caste." The closer the inbreeding, the greater the power of the Race-spirit, and the stronger the ties that bound the individual to the tribe, because the vital force of the man is in his blood. Memory is intimately connected with the blood, which is the highest expression of the vital body.
The brain and the nervous system are the highest expression of the desire body. They call up pictures of the outside world, but in mental image-making, i.e., imagination, the blood brings the material for the pictures; therefore when the thought is active, the blood flows to the head.
When the same unmixed strain of blood flows in the veins of a family for generations, the same mental pictures made by great-grandfather, grandfather and father are reproduced in the son by the family-spirit which lived in the hemoglobin of the blood. He sees himself as the continuation of a long line of ancestors who live in him. He sees all the events of the past lives of the family as though he had been present, therefore he does not realize himself as an Ego. He is not simply "David," but "the son of Abraham"; not "Joseph," but "the son of David."
By means of this common blood men are said to have lived for many generations, because through the blood their descendants had access to the memory of nature, in which the records of the lives of their ancestors were preserved. That is why, in the fifth chapter of Genesis, it is stated that the patriarchs lived for centuries. Adam, Methuselah and the other patriarchs did not personally attain to such great age, but they lived in the consciousness of their descendants, who saw the lives of their ancestors as if they had lived them. After the expiration of the period stated, the descendants did not think of themselves as Adam or Methuselah. Memory of those ancestors faded and so it is said they died.
The "second sight" of the Scotch Highlanders shows that by means of endogamy, the consciousness of the inner World is retained. They have practiced marrying in the Clan until recent times; also in Gypsies, who always marry in the tribe. The smaller the tribe and the closer the inbreeding, the more pronounced is the "sight." ...
Later, man was given free will. The time had come when he was to be prepared for individualization. The former "common" consciousness, the involuntary clairvoyance or second-sight which constantly held before a tribesman the pictures of his ancestor's lives and caused him to feel most closely identified with the tribe or family, was to be replaced for a time by a strictly individual consciousness confined to the material world, so as to break up the nations into individuals, that the Brotherhood of Man, regardless of exterior circumstances, may become a fact. This is on the same principle that if we have a number of buildings and wish to make them into one large structure, it is necessary to break them up into separate bricks. Only then can the large building be constructed.
-- The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, by Max Heindel
Assassin's Creed is an award-winning historical action-adventure open world stealth video game developed by Ubisoft for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X. The bulk of the game takes place during the Third Crusade, with the plot revolving around a sect known as the Secret Order of Hashashin (Assassins). The player is in reality playing as a modern-day man named Desmond Miles, who through the use of a machine named the "Animus", is allowed the viewing and controlling of the protagonist's genetic memories of his ancestors, in this case, Altaïr ibn-La'Ahad, a member of the Assassins. Through this plot device, details emerge of a struggle between two factions, the Knights Templar and the Assassins, over an artifact known as a "Piece of Eden", an ancient artifact used to control minds. The game primarily takes place during the Third Crusade in the Holy Land in 1191....
Story: Desmond Miles, a bartender, is kidnapped by the Abstergo Corporation. There, Desmond is forced to interface with the Animus, a device that is able to replay the genetic memories of the user's ancestors. In Desmond's case, they seek information about his ancestor Altaïr ibn La-Ahad, an Assassin during the time of the Third Crusade. Within the Animus, Altaïr's memories reveal that he was attempting to stop Robert de Sablé from taking an artifact from a temple, but broke all three of the Assassins' Brotherhood's tenets in the process ((1) stay your blade from the flesh of an innocent (2) always be discreet (3) do not compromise the brotherhood). The Brotherhood leader, Al Mualim, demotes Altaïr to the rank of Novice, and assigns him the task of assassinating nine people to regain his former status.
As Altaïr completes the assassinations, he finds that each was a member of the Templars searching the area for "Pieces of Eden", artifacts similar to the one de Sable attempted to steal. Altair finds and accuses de Sable in front of King Richard. King Richard makes the two fight and lets God decide who is telling the truth. Altaïr eventually faces de Sable in front of King Richard, and kills him; (Richard says that since Altair killed de Sable God chose him and he was therefore telling the truth but Atair denies this by saying God had nothing to do with this and Altair was simply the better fighter) with his dying breath, de Sable reveals the existence of a tenth Templar: Al Mualim. Returning to the Brotherhood, Altaïr finds Al Mualim in possession of a Piece of Eden that is able to control people's minds. Altaïr is forced to fight his way through innocents and assassins under Al Mualim's control (with the help of Malik and other assassins still loyal to the creed) to reach Al Mualim, and engages him in battle. Altaïr eventually sees through Al Mualim's tricks using the artifact (Al Mualim says he tried to control Altair's mind but somehow it didn't work), and kills him. Upon approaching the artifact, Altaïr is surprised to find it displays a projection of the Earth marking several spots around the globe.
At this point, Desmond is brought out of the Animus, his purpose served. He comes to learn that Abstergo is a front for the modern-day Templars. Abstergo is now set to use the locations on the map seen by Altaïr to find more Pieces of Eden, believing that they must collect the artifacts to control the world's population in order to stave off the projected end of the world in 2012. Desmond's life is spared by Lucy Stillman, one of the Abstergo scientists who is actually an Assassin mole. Left alone in his locked room, Desmond discovers (through "the Bleeding Effect" from his time spent in the Animus) that he can observe numerous messages in blood on the walls and floor left by a previous test subject (Subject 16) that foretell the end of the world.
-- Assassin's Creed (video game), by Wikipedia