Re: The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement
Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2018 4:06 am
Part 2 of 2
Keyserling and the School of Wisdom
Those Germanic souls for whom sun worship struck a deep chord and who may not have been comfortable in the growing fusion between the Monistenbund and the politics of German nationalism between 1914 and 1920, or those who perhaps no longer found Theosophy or Anthroposophy attractive, could find a home in Darmstad t after the Great War, with the circle gathered around Keyserling (1880-1947), who has been called "the most influential guru of Central Europe between 1918 and 1933." [59] After almost dying from a dueling wound in 1900, Keyserling began to explore philosophy and metaphysics, and also developed close connections with Wagnerism and the Bayreuth Circle. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who was to emerge as one of the most dominant figures in Bayreuth, dedicated a book to Keyserling on Kantian philosophy that was published in 1905. [60] This book, and many others written and published around this time, contained Chamberlain's racial theories of the Aryan Christ and the superiority of Aryan biology and culture. [61] Keyserling, in turn, dedicated his own first philosophical work to Chamberlain. [62]
Keyserling maintained a friendship with Chamberlain until the latter's death in 1927 and sought his financial support (unsuccessfully) for establishing his School of Wisdom in 1920. Chamberlain was perhaps the leading racial theorist and internationally perhaps the best-known anti-Semite at the turn of the century, and so with the change in the political climate after the start of World War II Keyserling denied he had shared these views with Chamberlain, "somewhat implausibly," in the view of historian Geoffrey Field. [63]
Whether or not Keyserling was anti-Semitic, it is certainly clear that he was unabashedly a volkisch German in his metaphysical outlook. The work that won him international fame, Das Reisetagebuch eines Philosophen of 1918 (first English translation: The Travel Diary of a Philosopher, 1925), is an esoteric biography of his travels around the world in 1911. He wrote the work on his estate in Estonia between 1912 and 1918 where he waited out the war. It is primarily a volkisch exposition on how geography shapes the souls of the inhabitants of each of the lands he visits. Keyserling's work is thus very much an exaltation of the mid-nineteenth-century concept of Bodenbeschaffenheit, the "formative forces of the soil." The places he visits give him the necessary stimuli to expound on his philosophy, and India reminds him of the religious practice closest to his heart: sun worship. He writes:
The School of Wisdom was a forum for the teaching of yoga and other esoteric doctrines, as well as a place where once or twice a year conferences were held where Keyserling and noted scholars could lecture. [65] The School opened in 1920 and was in operation annually until only 1927 when in-house organizational tensions between strong personalities halted the programs. After this, Keyserling devoted much of his time to traveling. A final special tenth anniversary meeting in 1930 drew approximately three hundred people. When the Eranos Conferences began in Ascona, Switzerland, in 1933, many of these same lecturers began to appear in this new venue. Jung was the most prominent of them.
The School of Wisdom was to be the vehicle through which Keyserling trained his metaphysically superior elite to lead the spiritual reawakening of the world. His goal was "to develop sages from fragments of men" and to develop "the true leader of the future." [66] In the late 1920s he sought funding for a new "church of the intellect" that would be organized "aristocratically and hierarchically." [67] By 1929 Keyserling could express great confidence in the eventual success of the few who were the metaphysically "chosen" agents of cultural change in the modern world:
Among the most prominent lecturers at Keyserling's Schule der Weisheit were Richard Wilhelm (1873-1930), the famous German expert on Chinese religion and the translator of the I Ching (published by the Eugen Diederichs Verlag), and Jung, who became a close personal friend of Wilhelm's. [69] In an appendix to MDR on Richard Wilhelm, Jung says, "I first met Richard Wilhelm at Count Keyserling's during a meeting of the 'School of Wisdom' in Darmstadt. That was in the early twenties. In 1923 we invited him to Zurich and he spoke on the I Ching at the Psychology Club." [70] Jung, Keyserling, and Wilhelm knew each other well, and the bulk of Jung's missives between 1927 and 1930 in his collected Letters are to these two men. [71] The letters to Keyserling are filled with solicited interpretations of Keyserling's dreams and indicate that Keyserling looked up to Jung as a quasi-guru. Jung's letters to Wilhelm are warmly collegial and ever-encouraging. [72]
During the late 1920s and early 1930s Jung wrote three very positive reviews of volumes of metaphysical social criticism published by Keyserling. [73] In the final review, from 1934, Jung even goes so far as to tell the world that Keyserling "is, in the truest sense, the mouthpiece of the Zeitgeist, or, to be more accurate, the Zeitgeist of the spiritual man .... Keyserling's mediumistic gifts have gathered together the loose, fluttering, fragmentary thoughts of a whole epoch." [74]
BODENBESCHAFFENHEIT: VOLKISCH LANDSCAPE MYSTICISM
In a symbolic gesture of the volkisch sympathy between Jung and Keyserling, Jung wrote an essay on how the "earthly environment" shapes the human soul specifically for a book that Keyserling edited, Mensch und Erde (1927). By this point Jung had already moved away from a purely biological or racial model of the unconscious mind (in fact, he had done so by 1916 when he proposed a collective unconscious) and instead embraced the more transcendental claims of mysticism and old Romantic Naturphilosophie. However, as we saw, the volkisch movement, with the prominent backing of Haeckel, continued to embrace quasi-Lamarckian notions of Darwinian pangenesis that gave scientific justification for such environmental influences.
The idea of Bodenbeschaffenheit gained further scientific credibility in an age of increasing materialism through a volume by the German natural scientist Bernhard von Cotta, Deutschlands Boden: Sein Bau und dessen Einwirkung auf das Leben der Menschen (Germany's Soil: Its Construction and Effect on the Life of Humans), published in 1853. [75] Cotta's thesis was to demonstrate "what influence the geological structures of countries have on their peoples." [76] The union of Volk with landscape, of Blut und Boden, was supported by Cotta's vision of "ideal natural regions" that were interpreted by other volkisch commentators as justification for the idea of a German nation-state as an organic, natural body. Such "soft inheritance" was still a credible idea in some German scientific circles at the turn of the century. Sounding very much like Keyserling in his Travel Diary, Jung makes the following claims of pangenesis:
As evidence, Jung cites the "marked differences" between Spanish, North African, German, and various Russian "varieties of Jews." He then goes on to predict the "Indianization of the American people," who were originally a "predominantly Germanic people." As evidence, Jung recalls watching "a stream of workers coming out of a factory" in 1912 in Buffalo and remarking to a friend that "I should never have thought there was such a high percentage of Indian blood." His American friend laughingly told Jung there wasn't a drop of Indian blood in any of them. Backpedaling, Jung deduced that it must have been the geography that shaped their phenotypic expression, not "Mendelian units" (genes). In an effort to further back up this typically volkisch logic, Jung cites the anthropometric work of the noted American anthropologist Franz Boas, whom Jung claims "has shown that anatomical changes begin already in the second generation of immigrants, chiefly in the measurements of the skull." [78]
The first indication of Jung's fascination with the idea of Bodenbeschaffenheit that was used so extensively by members of the Volkstumbewegung (especially by its most racist and anti- Semitic elements) is a report in a letter to Freud dated 6 April 1910 that he is reading a book by Maurice Low, The American People: A Study in National Psychology (1909), that "holds the climate largely responsible for the frequency of neurosis in America." Although the effect of climate in causing psychopathology is an idea dating to the ancient Greeks, Jung then gives it a decided volkisch twist by surmising, "Perhaps a harshly continental climate really is ill-suited to a race sprung from the sea." [79] Such logic could be reversed to argue that Jews whose ancestors were Semites from an arid, dry desert land do not fit in in Europe. Although Freud does not respond to Jung's comment, he was acutely aware that such logic was a major element in anti- Semitic rhetoric at this time.
Other than the "Mind and Earth" essay in Keyserling's 1927 book, perhaps the most nakedly volkisch essay Jung ever wrote was "Uber den Unbewusste" (translated as "The Role of the Unconscious" in the Collected Works), which appeared in a popular Swiss monthly in two parts in 1918. [80] This essay is important not only because of its volkisch theories, but also because it is the first major new piece to be published by Jung after his 1916 proposal of a collective unconscious, which he refers to in this 1918 essay as the "suprapersonal unconscious" as well. According to Jung, "Christianity split the Germanic barbarian into an upper and a lower half, and enabled him, by repressing the dark side, to domesticate the brighter half and fit it for civilization." This is, of course, the familiar distinction that runs throughout Germanic culture since the time of Goethe between the natural man and his contemporary, imprisoned civilized counterpart. In volkisch contexts, speaking of the Germanic barbarian is not necessarily an insult but may be an idealization of the purely instinctual man. "But," Jung adds, "the lower darker half still awaits redemption and a second spell of domestication." [81] This lower half of the Germanic soul is rooted to the earth (its "chthonic quality," Jung terms it) and "is found in dangerous concentrations in the Germanic peoples." [82]
However, Jung says that "in my opinion this problem does not exist for Jews," because Jews are not "rooted" to the land as the Germanic peoples are. The Jew "is domesticated to a higher degree than we are, but he is badly at a loss for that quality in man which roots him to the earth and draws new strength from below." Furthermore, "The Jew has too little of this quality -- where has he his own earth underfoot? The mystery of the earth is no joke and no paradox." [83] Jung's use of the concept of rootedness to explain psychological differences between Aryans and Jews places him squarely within the volkisch tradition of his day, for as Mosse explains:
Jung additionally says in this 1918 essay, "The soil of every country holds some such mystery. We have an unconscious reflection of this in the psyche; just as there is a relationship of mind to body, so there is a relationship of body to earth." [85] Therefore, since the relationship of Jews to the earth is different than that of the Germanic peoples, the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Adler could only apply to Jews. "But these specifically Jewish doctrines are thoroughly unsatisfying to the Germanic mentality; we still have a genuine barbarian in us who is not to be trifled with." [86] This Germanic barbarian within is, according to Jung, an "anti-Christian" one, and although Jung warns it can "turn against us" (that is, against Germans like Jung), "it is a still untouched fortune, an uncorrupted treasure, a sign of youthfulness, an earnest of rebirth." [87] Reaching this hidden pagan layer of the collective unconscious within not only redeems the individual, but can lead to the birth of a new world, for as Jung says, "in reality only a change in the attitude of the individual can bring about a renewal in the spirit of the nations. Everything begins with the individual." [88]
As is clear from his 1918 and 1927 essays, Jung openly held this common idea of volkisch mysticism during the 1920s, and found it so important that he taught it to American and British disciples who most likely would not have a contextual understanding of the Germanic cultural heritage of this philosophy. Perhaps most importantly, they would not have fully understood its political use by the anti-Semitic elements in the volkisch movement to establish the superiority of the Aryan peoples of verdant Northern Europe over those Semitic peoples whose inferior souls were shaped by millennia in the dry, arid lands of the Middle East. On 13 January 1925, during a trip to the United States, Jung gave a talk to a group of American disciples in the apartment of Kristine Mann (1873-1945), a physician and one of the first Jungian analysts in America. According to the notes in the diary of another major disciple, Esther Harding (1888-1971), Jung "spoke on racial psychology and said many interesting things about the ancestors, how they seem to be in the land. As evidence of this, he spoke about the morphological changes in the skulls of people here in the USA. and in Australia." [89]
Jung's 1925 seminar on analytical psychology contains more evidence of his reliance upon nineteenth-century geographical and geological metaphors to express the forces at work in his psychological theory. His 6 July 1925 lecture contains a diagram of the human personality in the form of a geological chart, which Jung calls his" 'geology' of the personality." [90] It is a useful example of how Jung utilized well-known concepts and images from evolutionary biology and the earth sciences to make his more metaphysical ideas comprehensible to his students.
This is how Jung describes the relationship of the individual to the collective unconscious according to this diagram:
Jung's use of the geological metaphor of the fiery magma of the earth's core as the central fire that connects all life, human and nonhuman, is related to an image that Jung invokes frequently during this period: that of the sun as the core of the human personality. This image of the psyche is represented in Jung's very first mandala drawing of 1916. [92] Indeed, geographical diagrams depicting a cross-sectioning of the earth and its magma core can indeed be seen as representing a fiery sun or star embedded at the center of the earth. If one accepts the theory that the earth was originally jettisoned from the sun, then indeed the hot core of the Earth is truly "sun." In a sense Jung owes this metaphor of the human personality, in part, to the Naturphilosophen for whom the earth was an anthropomorphized entity with its own soul or, indeed, psyche. [93] Psychotherapy could thus be imagined as a mining expedition or geographical exploration to reach the central source of life at the "core." As we shall see in a later chapter, this was indeed the case in the analysis of Hermann Hesse by one of Jung's disciples.
Both scientists and occultists have proposed a dynamic hot core similar to a sun deep within the planet. The French naturalist and philosopher the Comte de Buffon (1707-1788) believed that the earth had once been a fireball flung off from the sun, and that the crust was therefore the cooling exterior of a still volatile and extremely hot core of star matter. The material of the human body, it could thus be claimed, was made of star matter, making us all Sonnenkinder, "children of the sun." The often-cited maxim of the alchemists that was so dear to Jung, "as above, so below," thus takes on new meaning, as does another of Jung's favorite images -- the account of Apuleius (through the character Lucius) in Metamorphoses (Book 11) who claims "I saw the sun in the middle of the night" ("nocte media vidi solem") during a subterranean Isaic mystery-cult rite of initiation. Naturalists since the eighteenth century cited the worldwide prevalence of volcanoes and their lava flows as compelling scientific evidence of a hot molten core beneath the earth's crust, and the hypothesis of central heat or a central fire was a primary assumption of the vulcanist or plutonist school of geologists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. [94] Geophysics and Naturphilosophie commonly overlapped at many junctures.
Thus, cross-sectional images of the planet since that time show a mandala-like sequence of concentric circles, indicating the Earth's various geological strata, with a central glowing spherical core of intense heat at its center. Such illustrations were common in the German popular-science journals that began to appear in the 1850s and would have been familiar images to the adolescent Jung. Jung's "geology of the personality" is hence based on a vulcanist or plutonist geophysical vision borrowed from his training in the natural sciences.
Also significant in Jung's 1925 lecture is his clear statement that he does not consider the collective unconscious to be solely inside the brain and nervous system. Since it can be located outside the brain, Jung says that "on this basis the main body of the collective unconscious cannot be strictly said to be psychological, but psychical." [95] This is an early appearance of a theoretical distinction Jung would make later in his career (in 1946) about the transcendental, quasi-physical, quasi-psychological, "psychoid" nature of the archetypes. Jung borrowed the term "psychoid" (as an adjective, not a noun) from the twentieth-century version of speculative Naturphilosophie and vitalism expounded by Bleuler, on "the natural history of the soul." [96] Both Bleuler and Jung attempted to distinguish themselves from the more nakedly vitalistic use of the term "die Psychoide" by Hans Driesch (1867-1941). [97] Jung's own full return to Naturphilosophie is never so clear as when he remarks,
With these examples of his mystical geological vision of the human personality, and from his relationship to Keyserling and others who shared this vision, we can see how deeply connected Jung remained to individuals and ideas in the volkisch movement and its occult establishment. Jung's vocal connection to the Volk was not fully understood by his predominantly American and British disciples of the 1920s, nor especially those who entered Jung's Kusnacht-Zurich orbit in the 1930s and who, in the aftermath of Hitler, could only see these ideas as belonging to the heritage of another volkisch movement of this era: National Socialism.
Perhaps most of the continuing controversy over whether Jung (or Keyserling, for that matter) was or was not a Nazi, or was anti-Semitic, -- an argument that is often framed in unenlightening black or white dualistic terms -- can be resolved by offering a third way: the larger context of pre-Nazi era volkisch philosophy that both was and was not used by Nazis and anti- Semites for their own ends. Perhaps what many critics are sensing in Jung is his essential volkisch identity, of which there is much evidence. Jung's is not merely a folk-psychology, but a "Volk-psychology." The claimed evidence of the active, open espousal of anti-Semitism or Nazism by Jung is, in my opinion, less directly compelling (hence the greater controversy over it), and is perhaps more fruitfully framed -- from the historian's point of view -- in its deeper volkisch context. As historians such as Mosse have continually stressed, anti-Semitism and National Socialism, while derivatives of this volkisch tradition, are not to be regarded as completely identical with it and its multiple offshoots, of which Jung and his analytical psychology is only one of many. It would make sense from a historical point of view to see overlaps between those in Jung's circle (himself included) with those in National Socialist circles during the 1930s, as indeed has been documented. [99]
NEOPAGANS IN SWITZERLAND
Switzerland has a many-centuries-old tradition of being a land of heresy and unconventional sects. During the Middle Ages the Free Spirits, Waldensians, and even the Cathars made inroads into the lives of many in this region. [100] Southern Germany and Switzerland were primary centers of the Reformation of the sixteenth century, and the splintering of Protestantism into insular "sects" continued in Switzerland until the present century. The official Swiss census of 1 December 1888 counted 10,697 persons living in sects but only 8,384 Jews in a total population of 2.9 million, dominated by 1.7 million Protestants and 1.2 million Roman Catholics. [101] Although most of these sects were somehow connected with Christian ideas, there were some that operated as charismatic cults with bizarre belief systems that promoted intergenerational incest, the ingestion of urine and sperm, and other unconventional spiritual practices that led to their separate category in the Swiss census. The Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922) became fascinated with such sects near the end of his life and produced four publications of psychoanalytic ethnography that focused on two charismatic leaders of one such Swiss sect. [102]
Between 1900 and 1920 a Munich to Ascona countercultural axis seemed to be in full operation, making this circuit somewhat similar in spirit if not in size to the California of the 1960s. Switzerland and southern Germany became the home of these neopagan, sun-worshiping, nudist, vegetarian, spiritualist, sometimes anarchist, sexually liberated groups experimenting with new life-styles or a new experience-based philosophy of life. [103] Aschheim refers to these groups as "varieties of Nietzschean religion." [104] Taking their inspirational cue from Nietzsche's proclamation that "god is dead" in Also Sprach Zarathustra, they created their own forms of personal religion. When describing her impressions of the materially impoverished but spiritually adventurous life-style of these Bohemian colonies in Switzerland, Marianne Weber uses the same word that her husband Max employed to describe the essence of charisma: ausseralltagliches ("extraordinary," or "out of the everyday routine of life"). [105] Swiss authorities were considered relatively benign compared to the more heavy-handed Austrian or Bavarian police. The groups operating in this Swiss version of the fin-desiecle New Age -- some of them with volkisch concerns but most probably not -- have been documented in Green's extraordinary work. [106]
Some neopagan groups took their sun-worshiping ideas from ancient Persian sources. At the turn of the century there was a resurgence of both scholarly and Theosophical interest in Persian mythology (primarily Zoroastrianism or Mazdeanism and Mithraism). The proximate cause of some of this interest in the 1890s was no doubt due to Nietzsche, as "Zarathustra" was the name used in Greek writings for Zoroaster (circa 600 B.CE.), the prophet who converted the early (probably shamanistic) Indo-Iranian peoples to his religion based on the supreme deity Ahura Mazda. Zoroastrian religion went through many revisions over one thousand years and in its latter forms is especially noted for its dualism and hierarchies of demons and angels. Classical scholars such as Franz Cumont (1868-1947) from Belgium traced the Hellenistic mystery cult of Mithras (100-400 C.E.) to ancient Persian roots, and Richard Reitzenstein (1861-1931) from Germany founded an entire school in the history of religions devoted to tracing the Iranian roots of Gnosticism, although this monomaniacal fascination with Iranian origins in the work of these two scholars has been rejected in recent years. [107]
The fascination of the Germans with Persian (Aryan) origins began during the Romantic Era of the early 1800s. Although Gustav Fechner (1801-1887), at first a professor of physics and later one of philosophy at the University of Leipzig, is best known for his Elemente der Psychophysik of 1860 (a work that is regarded as the first textbook in modern experimental psychology), he wrote many metaphysical works as well. [108] One of these, the Zend-Avesta (1851), a work of Romantic natural philosophy, takes its name from the title of the sacred books of the ancient Iranian Zoroastrians. [109] Zoroastrian solar mythology was extensively discussed by Muller in many of his publications. Jung himself cites Muller in this regard in his Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido. These, too, had found their way into occultist literature and in the earliest writings of Blavatsky in the 1870s.
By 1900 enough of the scholarly information had begun to seep into Theosophical publications and other occult literature, making such mythology available to neopagan cults. Around 1900 a "Cult of Mazdaznan" was founded in the United States by a German immigrant from Poznan, Otto Hanisch (1854-1936). Hanisch, who used an Iranian-sounding alias (Ottoman Zar-Adusht Ha'nish), alleged that he was born in Tehran and that his cult was a remnant of the Zoroastrianism of ancient Iran. The cult was based on vegetarianism, solar mysticism, and other practices derived from Hanisch's idiosyncratic interpretations of the Zend-Avesta. By 1910 the cult had spread to Europe and appears to have been based in Herrliberg, Switzerland (ten miles from Zurich) under the leadership of Karl Heise, a Zurich bookshop assistant, and a former student of Guido von List. Near Zurich, Heise was the charismatic leader of a commune ("university," as the cult described it) called "Aryana" that practiced solar worship and vegetarianism. As James Webb notes, "The university was known as 'Aryana"' because "only the fair-skinned 'Aryan' races were permitted to become bearers of the new ideal." [110] Heise was a dominant figure on the Zurich occultist scene around 1910 and wrote many books on topics such as sun worship, reincarnation, and the astral body that were published between 1907 and 1919. [111] It has been suggested that the Mazdaznans included several influential members of the Bauhaus movement and thus influenced German aesthetics, but by 1916 the group had moved its headquarters to California. [112] Today the group seems to be most alive in France, and some occult bookshops in Paris have their own Mazdaznan sections for the group's more recent metaphysical and vegetarian literature.
It is not known if Jung knew of Heise or if he read any of Heise's occult works (none are listed in Jung's posthumous Bibliothek catalog), but it is interesting to note that it is precisely during this time (late 1909-1910) that Jung becomes fascinated with the literature on Zoroastrianism and Mithraism -- and their basis in ancient Iranian solar worship. [113] We do, however, have solid evidence from a late period that Jung was aware of this solar-worshiping cult so near to his base of operations, as he mentions, in an essay published in 1928, the Mazdaznan in the same sentence with "Christian Science, theosophy, [and] anthroposophy" as examples of extra-Christian "individual symbolformation" cults. [114] Jung appears not to have known Hanisch, for in remarks made during his "Zarathustra Seminar" in May 1934, Jung discounts the rumor that Nietzsche met Hanisch or his cult members in Leipzig as a student and hence got his idea for Zarathustra from them. Jung is also unaware that the cult originated in a later period. Jung is incorrect in his statement that "He [Hanisch] is certainly not the originator of the Mazdaznan sect; it is of older origin," thus also appearing not to have known Hanisch but did know of Hanisch's claims of an ancient origin for the Mazdaznans. [115]
Yet it is interesting that the first issue Jung chooses to clarify for his audience in his Zarathustra seminar is a critical denial of the role of the cult of the Mazdaznans as an influence on Nietzsche and therefore, by extension, on Jung himself. Given the fact that Jung was well aware of the Mazdaznans, and especially considering the prominent place Jung gave this cult among the other well-known occult traditions in his 1928 statement, it is probable that he did at least know of Heise and the sun worship of the Mazdaznans but did not want a public association with the cult or its philosophy with his own ideas.
NEOPAGANS IN ASCONA AND AT THE BURGHOLZLI
Thus this thriving neopagan movement was operating within Jung's Switzerland and could not have escaped his attention. In addition to the countercultural, antipolitical neopagans were the many highly nationalistic members of the German Youth Movement who could be seen hiking through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland during these years, some of whom were fully imbued with the sun-worshiping rituals and pantheistic literature of Diederichs and his publishing company. Many of the casualties of these groups would inevitably end up at the Burgholzli. The most prominent casualty with Asconan neopagan beliefs -- the renegade psychoanalyst and anarchist Otto Gross (to be discussed later) -- was admitted and treated by Jung in 1908. He was no doubt one among several.
The Burgholzli was the largest psychiatric-treatment facility in Switzerland and was therefore easily accessible on the countercultural route between the Bohemian districts of Schwabing in Munich and the village of Ascona. Absinthe, cocaine, morphine, opium, and other substances sometimes went along with the Nietzschean "new ethic" with tragic results, and spiritual purification rituals involving fasting, unusual diets, excessive hiking, and so on, could sometimes induce a brief psychotic reaction. An analogous influx of similar patients appeared in psychiatric hospitals and clinics during the "Psychedelic Era" of the 1960s, and continues even today. The hallucinations and delusions of these spiritual explorers could indeed contain the components of the mystical ideas and symbolism they had studied in their search for pagan regeneration. Such was the nature of a small portion of the institutionalized patient population of the Burgholzli from which Jung made his clinical observations and from which he and his assistants (starting in 1909) collected data for the "phylogenetic" layer of the unconscious from which he derived his later (1916) theories. It was hardly a patient population free of exposure to occult or mythological material, whether through Theosophical or scholarly publications (especially those published by either the Eugen Diederichs Verlag or Verlag B. G. Teubner, or through direct participation in neopagan cult rituals.
Ascona, as Green has documented, grew into a spiritual center of sorts and was frequented by such gifted creative individuals as Hesse, D. H. Lawrence, Gross, Duncan, Mary Wigman, Rudolf von Laban, Keyserling, Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Paul Tillich, Weber (ironically, in 1913 and 1914), and in later years, Jung. Ascona, the countercultural mecca with its own circum~ ambulated qa'ba (Monte Verita) and bearded and long-locked Naturmenschen in Tannhauser-like sandals, became the site of the famous Eranos Conferences that Jung so dominated and which started in 1933. [116] Indeed, Carl and Emma Jung annually stayed in a villa on the "Mountain of Truth" (Monte Verita) itself. [117] By the time of the Eranos Conferences, however, the Naturmenschen were becoming scarce, for Ascona had begun to take on the air of a resort for the wealthy and "artistic" communities that it maintains today.
Laurens van der Post, a close friend and disciple of Jung's who is noted for his many books on his experiences exploring Africa, reports inviting Jung many times to join him on yet another voyage to the "dark continent" after Jung's fieldwork in Kenya in 1925. According to van der Post, Jung replied that before he could allow himself to return to Africa, "I found so much witchcraft in Switzerland I felt that I had to deal with all this witchcraft first." Perhaps we may now have a little clearer understanding of Jung's remark by understanding his Switzerland, which apparently did indeed have its share of neopagans and others participating in an occult underground -- and, indeed, noted persons such as himself at play in the network of the occult establishment.
Keyserling and the School of Wisdom
Those Germanic souls for whom sun worship struck a deep chord and who may not have been comfortable in the growing fusion between the Monistenbund and the politics of German nationalism between 1914 and 1920, or those who perhaps no longer found Theosophy or Anthroposophy attractive, could find a home in Darmstad t after the Great War, with the circle gathered around Keyserling (1880-1947), who has been called "the most influential guru of Central Europe between 1918 and 1933." [59] After almost dying from a dueling wound in 1900, Keyserling began to explore philosophy and metaphysics, and also developed close connections with Wagnerism and the Bayreuth Circle. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who was to emerge as one of the most dominant figures in Bayreuth, dedicated a book to Keyserling on Kantian philosophy that was published in 1905. [60] This book, and many others written and published around this time, contained Chamberlain's racial theories of the Aryan Christ and the superiority of Aryan biology and culture. [61] Keyserling, in turn, dedicated his own first philosophical work to Chamberlain. [62]
Keyserling maintained a friendship with Chamberlain until the latter's death in 1927 and sought his financial support (unsuccessfully) for establishing his School of Wisdom in 1920. Chamberlain was perhaps the leading racial theorist and internationally perhaps the best-known anti-Semite at the turn of the century, and so with the change in the political climate after the start of World War II Keyserling denied he had shared these views with Chamberlain, "somewhat implausibly," in the view of historian Geoffrey Field. [63]
Whether or not Keyserling was anti-Semitic, it is certainly clear that he was unabashedly a volkisch German in his metaphysical outlook. The work that won him international fame, Das Reisetagebuch eines Philosophen of 1918 (first English translation: The Travel Diary of a Philosopher, 1925), is an esoteric biography of his travels around the world in 1911. He wrote the work on his estate in Estonia between 1912 and 1918 where he waited out the war. It is primarily a volkisch exposition on how geography shapes the souls of the inhabitants of each of the lands he visits. Keyserling's work is thus very much an exaltation of the mid-nineteenth-century concept of Bodenbeschaffenheit, the "formative forces of the soil." The places he visits give him the necessary stimuli to expound on his philosophy, and India reminds him of the religious practice closest to his heart: sun worship. He writes:
The more I advance in recognition, the more do I profess sun-worship myself .... Metaphysical recognition is nothing else but this becoming-conscious of the profoundest elements of being .... Thus, all sun-worshippers are right before God. For the man who believes in myths, there are no facts in our sense; he knows nothing of the sun of the physicist. He prays before what he feels as the immediate source of his life. The man of later days, whose emancipated intellect raises the question of correctness in the first instance, must, of course, deny sun-worship; for him there is only the fact of astronomy, and this is undoubtedly no divinity. The spiritualized being does justice once more to the ancient faith. He recognizes in it a beautiful form of expression of a true consciousness of God. He knows that all truth is ultimately symbolic, and that the sun expresses the nature of divinity more appropriately than the best conceptual expression. [64]
The School of Wisdom was a forum for the teaching of yoga and other esoteric doctrines, as well as a place where once or twice a year conferences were held where Keyserling and noted scholars could lecture. [65] The School opened in 1920 and was in operation annually until only 1927 when in-house organizational tensions between strong personalities halted the programs. After this, Keyserling devoted much of his time to traveling. A final special tenth anniversary meeting in 1930 drew approximately three hundred people. When the Eranos Conferences began in Ascona, Switzerland, in 1933, many of these same lecturers began to appear in this new venue. Jung was the most prominent of them.
The School of Wisdom was to be the vehicle through which Keyserling trained his metaphysically superior elite to lead the spiritual reawakening of the world. His goal was "to develop sages from fragments of men" and to develop "the true leader of the future." [66] In the late 1920s he sought funding for a new "church of the intellect" that would be organized "aristocratically and hierarchically." [67] By 1929 Keyserling could express great confidence in the eventual success of the few who were the metaphysically "chosen" agents of cultural change in the modern world:
The spiritually minded minorities are more spiritual today all over the world, and that in a deeper sense than ever before .... In the eighteenth century, the masses believed in everything, the elite in nothing; today, even those of the elite who twenty years ago were at best indifferent to spiritual questions are either grasping the reality of the spirit or groping for it. And from the point of view of the future, the spiritually minded minorities count more than any minorities have ever counted in the past. [68]
Among the most prominent lecturers at Keyserling's Schule der Weisheit were Richard Wilhelm (1873-1930), the famous German expert on Chinese religion and the translator of the I Ching (published by the Eugen Diederichs Verlag), and Jung, who became a close personal friend of Wilhelm's. [69] In an appendix to MDR on Richard Wilhelm, Jung says, "I first met Richard Wilhelm at Count Keyserling's during a meeting of the 'School of Wisdom' in Darmstadt. That was in the early twenties. In 1923 we invited him to Zurich and he spoke on the I Ching at the Psychology Club." [70] Jung, Keyserling, and Wilhelm knew each other well, and the bulk of Jung's missives between 1927 and 1930 in his collected Letters are to these two men. [71] The letters to Keyserling are filled with solicited interpretations of Keyserling's dreams and indicate that Keyserling looked up to Jung as a quasi-guru. Jung's letters to Wilhelm are warmly collegial and ever-encouraging. [72]
During the late 1920s and early 1930s Jung wrote three very positive reviews of volumes of metaphysical social criticism published by Keyserling. [73] In the final review, from 1934, Jung even goes so far as to tell the world that Keyserling "is, in the truest sense, the mouthpiece of the Zeitgeist, or, to be more accurate, the Zeitgeist of the spiritual man .... Keyserling's mediumistic gifts have gathered together the loose, fluttering, fragmentary thoughts of a whole epoch." [74]
BODENBESCHAFFENHEIT: VOLKISCH LANDSCAPE MYSTICISM
In a symbolic gesture of the volkisch sympathy between Jung and Keyserling, Jung wrote an essay on how the "earthly environment" shapes the human soul specifically for a book that Keyserling edited, Mensch und Erde (1927). By this point Jung had already moved away from a purely biological or racial model of the unconscious mind (in fact, he had done so by 1916 when he proposed a collective unconscious) and instead embraced the more transcendental claims of mysticism and old Romantic Naturphilosophie. However, as we saw, the volkisch movement, with the prominent backing of Haeckel, continued to embrace quasi-Lamarckian notions of Darwinian pangenesis that gave scientific justification for such environmental influences.
The idea of Bodenbeschaffenheit gained further scientific credibility in an age of increasing materialism through a volume by the German natural scientist Bernhard von Cotta, Deutschlands Boden: Sein Bau und dessen Einwirkung auf das Leben der Menschen (Germany's Soil: Its Construction and Effect on the Life of Humans), published in 1853. [75] Cotta's thesis was to demonstrate "what influence the geological structures of countries have on their peoples." [76] The union of Volk with landscape, of Blut und Boden, was supported by Cotta's vision of "ideal natural regions" that were interpreted by other volkisch commentators as justification for the idea of a German nation-state as an organic, natural body. Such "soft inheritance" was still a credible idea in some German scientific circles at the turn of the century. Sounding very much like Keyserling in his Travel Diary, Jung makes the following claims of pangenesis:
Just as, in the process of evolution, the mind has been molded by earthly conditions, so the same process repeats itself under our eyes today. Imagine a large section of some European nation transplanted to a strange soil and another climate. We can confidently expect this human group to undergo certain psychic and perhaps also physical changes in the course of a few generations, even without the admixture of foreign blood. [77]
As evidence, Jung cites the "marked differences" between Spanish, North African, German, and various Russian "varieties of Jews." He then goes on to predict the "Indianization of the American people," who were originally a "predominantly Germanic people." As evidence, Jung recalls watching "a stream of workers coming out of a factory" in 1912 in Buffalo and remarking to a friend that "I should never have thought there was such a high percentage of Indian blood." His American friend laughingly told Jung there wasn't a drop of Indian blood in any of them. Backpedaling, Jung deduced that it must have been the geography that shaped their phenotypic expression, not "Mendelian units" (genes). In an effort to further back up this typically volkisch logic, Jung cites the anthropometric work of the noted American anthropologist Franz Boas, whom Jung claims "has shown that anatomical changes begin already in the second generation of immigrants, chiefly in the measurements of the skull." [78]
The first indication of Jung's fascination with the idea of Bodenbeschaffenheit that was used so extensively by members of the Volkstumbewegung (especially by its most racist and anti- Semitic elements) is a report in a letter to Freud dated 6 April 1910 that he is reading a book by Maurice Low, The American People: A Study in National Psychology (1909), that "holds the climate largely responsible for the frequency of neurosis in America." Although the effect of climate in causing psychopathology is an idea dating to the ancient Greeks, Jung then gives it a decided volkisch twist by surmising, "Perhaps a harshly continental climate really is ill-suited to a race sprung from the sea." [79] Such logic could be reversed to argue that Jews whose ancestors were Semites from an arid, dry desert land do not fit in in Europe. Although Freud does not respond to Jung's comment, he was acutely aware that such logic was a major element in anti- Semitic rhetoric at this time.
Other than the "Mind and Earth" essay in Keyserling's 1927 book, perhaps the most nakedly volkisch essay Jung ever wrote was "Uber den Unbewusste" (translated as "The Role of the Unconscious" in the Collected Works), which appeared in a popular Swiss monthly in two parts in 1918. [80] This essay is important not only because of its volkisch theories, but also because it is the first major new piece to be published by Jung after his 1916 proposal of a collective unconscious, which he refers to in this 1918 essay as the "suprapersonal unconscious" as well. According to Jung, "Christianity split the Germanic barbarian into an upper and a lower half, and enabled him, by repressing the dark side, to domesticate the brighter half and fit it for civilization." This is, of course, the familiar distinction that runs throughout Germanic culture since the time of Goethe between the natural man and his contemporary, imprisoned civilized counterpart. In volkisch contexts, speaking of the Germanic barbarian is not necessarily an insult but may be an idealization of the purely instinctual man. "But," Jung adds, "the lower darker half still awaits redemption and a second spell of domestication." [81] This lower half of the Germanic soul is rooted to the earth (its "chthonic quality," Jung terms it) and "is found in dangerous concentrations in the Germanic peoples." [82]
However, Jung says that "in my opinion this problem does not exist for Jews," because Jews are not "rooted" to the land as the Germanic peoples are. The Jew "is domesticated to a higher degree than we are, but he is badly at a loss for that quality in man which roots him to the earth and draws new strength from below." Furthermore, "The Jew has too little of this quality -- where has he his own earth underfoot? The mystery of the earth is no joke and no paradox." [83] Jung's use of the concept of rootedness to explain psychological differences between Aryans and Jews places him squarely within the volkisch tradition of his day, for as Mosse explains:
The term rooted was constantly invoked by Volkish thinkers -- and with good reason. Such rootedness conveyed the sense of man's correspondence with the landscape through his soul and thus with the Volk, which embodied the life spirit of the cosmos. It provided the essential link in the Volkish chain of being. Moreover, rural rootedness served as a contrast to urban dislocation, or what was termed "uprootedness." It also furnished a convenient criterion for excluding foreigners from the Volk and the virtues of rootedness. In addition, the concept of rootedness provided a standard for measuring man's completeness and his inner worth. Accordingly, having no roots stigmatized a person as being deprived of the life force and thus lacking a properly functioning soul. Rootlessness condemned the whole man, whereas rootedness signified membership in the Volk which rendered man his humanity. [84]
Jung additionally says in this 1918 essay, "The soil of every country holds some such mystery. We have an unconscious reflection of this in the psyche; just as there is a relationship of mind to body, so there is a relationship of body to earth." [85] Therefore, since the relationship of Jews to the earth is different than that of the Germanic peoples, the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Adler could only apply to Jews. "But these specifically Jewish doctrines are thoroughly unsatisfying to the Germanic mentality; we still have a genuine barbarian in us who is not to be trifled with." [86] This Germanic barbarian within is, according to Jung, an "anti-Christian" one, and although Jung warns it can "turn against us" (that is, against Germans like Jung), "it is a still untouched fortune, an uncorrupted treasure, a sign of youthfulness, an earnest of rebirth." [87] Reaching this hidden pagan layer of the collective unconscious within not only redeems the individual, but can lead to the birth of a new world, for as Jung says, "in reality only a change in the attitude of the individual can bring about a renewal in the spirit of the nations. Everything begins with the individual." [88]
The morality now prevailing ‘gilds, deifies, transports beyond the tomb, the non-egoistical instincts of compassion, self-denial, and self-sacrifice.’ But this morality of compassion ‘is humanity’s great danger, the beginning of the end, the halting, the backward-glancing fatigue of the will, turning against life.’ ‘We need a criticism of moral values. The value of these values is first of all itself to be put in question. There has hitherto been no hesitation in setting up good as of higher value than evil, of higher value in the sense of advancement, utility, prosperity, as regards man in general, including the future of man. What if truth lay in the contrary? What if good were a symptom of retrogression, a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic, by means of which the present should live at the cost of the future? Perhaps more comfortably, less dangerously, but also on a smaller scale, more basely? So that precisely morality would be to blame for the fact that the highest might and splendour possible to the human type should never be attained? So that morality should be precisely the danger of dangers?’
Nietzsche replies to these questions thrown out by him in the preface to the book Zur Genealogie der Moral, in developing his idea of the genesis of present morality.
He sees at the beginnings of civilization ‘a beast of prey, a magnificent blond brute, ranging about and lusting for booty and victory.’ These ‘unchained beasts of prey were free from every social restraint; in the innocence of their wild-beast conscience they returned as exultant monsters from a horrible train of murder, incendiarism, rapine, torture, with an arrogance and composure as if nothing but a student’s freak had been perpetrated.’ The blond beasts constituted the noble races. They fell upon the less noble races, conquered them, and made slaves of them. ‘A herd of blond beasts of prey, a race of conquerors and masters, with military organization’ (this word ‘organization’ should be noticed; we shall have to revert to it), ‘with the power to organize, unscrupulously placing their fearful paws upon a population perhaps vastly superior in numbers, but still amorphous and wandering—this herd founded the State. The dream is dispelled which made the State begin with a contract. What has he to do with contracts, who can[422] command, who is master by nature, who comes on the scene with violence in deed and demeanour?’
In the State, then, thus established there were a race of masters and a race of slaves. The master-race first created moral ideas. It distinguished between good and evil. Good was with it synonymous with noble; evil with vulgar. All their own qualities they felt as good; those of the subject race as evil. Good meant severity, cruelty, pride, courage, contempt of danger, joy in risk, extreme unscrupulousness. Bad meant ‘the coward, the nervous, the mean, the narrow utilitarian, and also the distrustful with his disingenuous glance, the self-abasing, the human hound who allows himself to be abused, the begging flatterer—above all, the liar.’ Such is the morality of the masters. The radical meaning of the words now expressing the concept ‘good’ reveals what men represented to themselves as ‘good’ when the moral of the masters still held sway. ‘The Latin bonus I believe I may venture to interpret as “the warrior.” Provided I rightly trace bonus to a more ancient duonus (compare bellum, duellum, duen-lum, in which it seems to me that duonus is contained). Bonus, then, as a man of discord, of disunion (duo), as warrior: whereby it is seen what in ancient Rome constituted the “goodness” of a man.’
The subjugated race had naturally an opposing morality—the morality of the slaves. ‘The slave looks with envy on the virtues of the powerful; he is sceptical and distrustful; he has the cunning of distrust towards everything honoured by them as “good.” Conversely, those qualities were distinguished and glorified which served to ameliorate the existence of sufferers. Here the place of honour is given to compassion, to the complaisant hand ready to help, to the warm heart, to patience, diligence, humility, friendliness, for those are here the most useful qualities, and almost the only means by which the burden of existence can be borne. Slave-morality is essentially utilitarian morality.’
For a certain period the morality of masters and slaves subsisted side by side, or, more accurately, the one above the other. Then an extraordinary event occurred—slave-morality rebelled against master-morality, conquered and dethroned it, and set itself in the place thereof. Then ensued a new valuation of all moral concepts. (In his insane gibberish Nietzsche names this ‘transvaluation of values’—Umwerthung der Werthe.) That which, under the master-morals, had passed for good was now esteemed bad, and vice versâ. Weakness was meritorious, cruelty a crime; self-sacrifice, pity for the pain of others, unselfishness, were virtues. That is what Nietzsche terms ‘the slave revolt in morality.’ ‘The Jews[423] have brought about that marvel of inversion in values. Their prophets have melted into one substance “rich,” “godless,” “wicked,” “violent,” “sensual,” and for the first time minted the word “world” as one of opprobrium. In this inversion of values (to which belongs the use of the word “poor” as a synonym of “holy” and “friend”) lies the importance of the Jewish race.’
The Jewish ‘slave-revolt in morality’ was an act of vengeance on the master-race which had long oppressed the Jews, and the instrument of this vast vengeance was the Saviour. ‘Has not Israel, by the very subterfuge of this “Redeemer,” this seeming adversary and destroyer of Israel, attained the final goal of its sublime rage for vengeance? Does it not belong to the secret black art of a truly grand policy of vengeance, of a far-seeing, underground, slowly-gripping, foreplanning vengeance, that Israel itself should deny the proper instrument of its vengeance before the whole world, as something deadly inimical, and nail him to the cross, in order that the “entire universe,” viz., the enemies of Israel, might unhesitatingly bite at this very bait? And on the other hand, would it be possible, by all the refinement of intellect, to imagine a more dangerous bait? Something that should resemble in enticing, intoxicating, bewildering, corrupting power that symbol of the “holy cross,” that awful paradox of a “God on the cross,” that mystery of an ineffable final and utmost cruelty, and self-crucifixion of God for the salvation of man? It is at least certain that sub hoc signo Israel, with its vengeance and transvaluation of all values, has hitherto triumphed again and again over all other ideals, over all nobler ideals.’
To this passage I would most specially direct the reader’s attention, and beg him to transform into mental images all that jingle and clatter of words. Well, then, Israel wished to revenge itself on all the world, and therefore decided to nail the Saviour to the cross, and thereby create a new morality. Who was this Israel which conceived and executed the plan? Was it a parliament, a ministry, a ruler, a popular assembly? Was the plan, before ‘Israel’ set about realizing it, submitted for general deliberation and resolution? Before the total insanity of this string of words can be distinctly seen, an effort must be made to bring clearly to the mind, in all its actual details, the event described by Nietzsche as premeditated, intended, and of conscious purpose.
Since the Jewish slave-revolt in morality, life, till then a delight, at least for the powerful and bold, or the nobles and masters, has become a torment. Since that revolt the unnatural holds sway, under which man is becoming dwarfed,[424] enfeebled, vulgarized, and gradually degenerate. For the fundamental instinct of the healthy man is not unselfishness and pity, but selfishness and cruelty. ‘No injury, violence, exploitation, annihilation, can in itself be a “wrong,” inasmuch as life operates essentially—i.e., in its fundamental functions—by injuring, violating, exploiting, annihilating, and is absolutely inconceivable without this character. A legal regulation ... would be a principle hostile to existence, a destroyer and dissolver of man, a mark of lassitude, a crime against the future of man, a secret way to nothingness.’ ‘There is at present universal enthusiasm, even in scientific disguises, concerning coming conditions of society in which the exploiting character is to disappear. That sounds in my ears as if someone should promise to invent a life which should abstain from all organic functions. Exploitation does not belong to a decayed, imperfect, or primitive society: it belongs to the essence of living things, as organic function.’[375]
Thus the fundamental instinct of man is cruelty. For this, in the new slave-morality, there is no place. A fundamental instinct, however, is not to be uprooted. It still lives and demands its rights. Hence a series of diversions have been sought for it. ‘All instincts, not discharged outwardly, turn inwards. Those terrible bulwarks with which political organization protected itself against the ancient instincts of freedom—and punishments belong to the front line of these bulwarks—had for their result, that all those instincts of the savage roaming at large were turned backwards and against man. Animosity, cruelty, the joy of pursuit, of sudden assault, of change, of destruction—all that turns itself against the possessors of such instincts is the origin of a “bad conscience.” The man who, from the absence of external foes and opposition, forced into the oppressive constriction and regularity of custom,[425] impatiently tore himself, persecuted, gnawed, hunted, maltreated himself—this animal which it is sought to “tame,” wounding himself against the bars of his cage; this destitute creature, consumed with homesickness for the desert, who had to create his adventures, his places of torture, his insecure and dangerous wildernesses, out of his own self—this fool, this yearning, despairing prisoner, became the inventor of the evil conscience.’ ‘That inclination to self-torture, that retreating cruelty, of the human brute, forced into inner life, scared back into himself, he who had invented evil conscience that he might torture himself, after the natural outlet of this wish to inflict pain was stopped up,’ formed also the concept of guilt and sin. ‘We are the inheritors of the vivisection of conscience and of animal self-torture of thousands of years.’ But all administration of justice, the punishment of ‘so-called’ criminals, the greater part of art, especially tragedy, are also disguises in which primitive cruelty can still manifest itself.
Slave-morality, with its ‘ascetic ideal’ of self-suppression and contempt of life, and its tormenting invention of conscience, allowed the slaves, it is true, to take vengeance on their masters; it also subjugated the mighty man-beasts of prey and created better conditions of existence for the small and weak, for the rabble, the gregarious animals; but it has been pernicious to humanity as a whole, because it has prevented the free evolution of precisely the highest human type. ‘The collective degeneration of man to that which, in the eyes of socialistic ninnies and blockheads of the present day, seems their “man of the future”—their ideal!—this degeneration and dwarfing of man to the perfect herd animal (or, as they say, to the man of “free society”), this brutalizing of man to the animal pigmy of equal rights and pretensions,’ is the destructive work of slave-morality. In order to discipline humanity to supreme splendour we must revert to nature, to the morality of the masters, to the unchaining of cruelty. ‘The well-being of the most and the well-being of the fewest are contrary standpoints of valuation; we will leave it to the simplicity of English biologists to hold that the first as such is undoubtedly of the higher value.’ ‘In opposition to the lying watchword of the privilege of the majority, in opposition to the desire for abasement, humiliation, levelling, for the downward and duskward of man,’ we must sound forth ‘the watchword of the privilege of the minority.’ ‘As a last indicator of the other way appeared Napoleon, man most unique, and latest born of all time, and in him the incarnate problem of the aristocratic ideal as such,—Napoleon, that synthesis of the inhuman and the superhuman (Unmensch und Uebermensch).’
The intellectually free man must stand ‘beyond good and[426] evil’; these concepts do not exist for him; he tests his impulses and deeds by their value for himself, not by that which they have for others, for the herd; he does that which causes him pleasure, even when, and especially when, it torments and injures—nay, annihilates others; for him holds good the secret rule of life of the ancient Assassins of the Lebanon: ‘Nothing is true, all is permissible.’ With this new morality, humanity will finally be able to produce the ‘over-man.’ ‘Thus we find, as the ripest fruit on its tree, the sovereign individual, resembling himself alone, freed again from the morality of custom, the autonomous super-moral individual (for “autonomous” and “moral” are mutually exclusive)—in short, the man of his own, independent, long will.’ In Zarathustra the same thought is expressed dithyrambically: ‘“Man is wicked,” so spake to me in consolation all the wisest. Ah, if only it is yet true to-day! For wickedness is man’s best strength. Man must become better and more wicked, so I teach. The greatest wickedness is necessary to the best of the over-man. It might be good for that preacher of little people that he suffered and bore the sins of man. But I rejoice in great sins as my great consolation.’
-- Degeneration, by Max Nordau
Speaking of the word 'humanity', Fichte wrote: 'If one had presented, to the German, instead of the Roman word "humaneness'' its proper translation, the word "manhood", then ... he would have said: "It is after all not so very much to be a man instead of a wild beast!" This is how a German would have spoken — in a manner which would have been impossible for a Roman. For in the German language, "manhood" has remained a merely phenomenal notion; it has never become a super-phenomenal idea, as it did among the Romans. Whoever might attempt to smuggle, cunningly, this alien Roman symbol' (viz., the word 'humaneness') 'into the language of the Germans, would thereby manifestly debase their ethical standards ...' Fichte's doctrine is repeated by Spengler, who writes: 'Manhood is either a zoological expression or an empty word'; and also by Rosenberg, who writes: 'Man's inner life became debased when ... an alien motive was impressed upon his mind: salvation, humanitarianism, and the culture of humanity.'
-- The Open Society and Its Enemies, by Karl R. Popper
As is clear from his 1918 and 1927 essays, Jung openly held this common idea of volkisch mysticism during the 1920s, and found it so important that he taught it to American and British disciples who most likely would not have a contextual understanding of the Germanic cultural heritage of this philosophy. Perhaps most importantly, they would not have fully understood its political use by the anti-Semitic elements in the volkisch movement to establish the superiority of the Aryan peoples of verdant Northern Europe over those Semitic peoples whose inferior souls were shaped by millennia in the dry, arid lands of the Middle East. On 13 January 1925, during a trip to the United States, Jung gave a talk to a group of American disciples in the apartment of Kristine Mann (1873-1945), a physician and one of the first Jungian analysts in America. According to the notes in the diary of another major disciple, Esther Harding (1888-1971), Jung "spoke on racial psychology and said many interesting things about the ancestors, how they seem to be in the land. As evidence of this, he spoke about the morphological changes in the skulls of people here in the USA. and in Australia." [89]
Jung's 1925 seminar on analytical psychology contains more evidence of his reliance upon nineteenth-century geographical and geological metaphors to express the forces at work in his psychological theory. His 6 July 1925 lecture contains a diagram of the human personality in the form of a geological chart, which Jung calls his" 'geology' of the personality." [90] It is a useful example of how Jung utilized well-known concepts and images from evolutionary biology and the earth sciences to make his more metaphysical ideas comprehensible to his students.
This is how Jung describes the relationship of the individual to the collective unconscious according to this diagram:
I have often been asked about the "Geology" of a personality, and so I have tried to picture this after a fashion. Diagram 10 shows individuals coming out of a certain common level, like the summits of mountains coming out of a sea. The first connection between certain individuals is that of the family, then comes the clan which unites a number of families, then the nation which unites a still bigger group. After that we could take a large number of connected nations such as would be included under the heading "European man." Going further down, we would come to what we call the monkey group, or that of the primate ancestors, and after that would come the animal layer in general, and finally the central fire, with which, as the diagram shows, we are still in connection. [91]
A = Individuals.
B = Families.
C = Clans.
D = Nations.
E = Large Group (European man, for example).
F = Primate Ancestors.
G = Animal Ancestors in general.
H = "Central Fire."
Figure 1. Jung's diagram of the geology of the human personality (from Analytical Psychology, p. 133).
Jung's use of the geological metaphor of the fiery magma of the earth's core as the central fire that connects all life, human and nonhuman, is related to an image that Jung invokes frequently during this period: that of the sun as the core of the human personality. This image of the psyche is represented in Jung's very first mandala drawing of 1916. [92] Indeed, geographical diagrams depicting a cross-sectioning of the earth and its magma core can indeed be seen as representing a fiery sun or star embedded at the center of the earth. If one accepts the theory that the earth was originally jettisoned from the sun, then indeed the hot core of the Earth is truly "sun." In a sense Jung owes this metaphor of the human personality, in part, to the Naturphilosophen for whom the earth was an anthropomorphized entity with its own soul or, indeed, psyche. [93] Psychotherapy could thus be imagined as a mining expedition or geographical exploration to reach the central source of life at the "core." As we shall see in a later chapter, this was indeed the case in the analysis of Hermann Hesse by one of Jung's disciples.
Both scientists and occultists have proposed a dynamic hot core similar to a sun deep within the planet. The French naturalist and philosopher the Comte de Buffon (1707-1788) believed that the earth had once been a fireball flung off from the sun, and that the crust was therefore the cooling exterior of a still volatile and extremely hot core of star matter. The material of the human body, it could thus be claimed, was made of star matter, making us all Sonnenkinder, "children of the sun." The often-cited maxim of the alchemists that was so dear to Jung, "as above, so below," thus takes on new meaning, as does another of Jung's favorite images -- the account of Apuleius (through the character Lucius) in Metamorphoses (Book 11) who claims "I saw the sun in the middle of the night" ("nocte media vidi solem") during a subterranean Isaic mystery-cult rite of initiation. Naturalists since the eighteenth century cited the worldwide prevalence of volcanoes and their lava flows as compelling scientific evidence of a hot molten core beneath the earth's crust, and the hypothesis of central heat or a central fire was a primary assumption of the vulcanist or plutonist school of geologists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. [94] Geophysics and Naturphilosophie commonly overlapped at many junctures.
Thus, cross-sectional images of the planet since that time show a mandala-like sequence of concentric circles, indicating the Earth's various geological strata, with a central glowing spherical core of intense heat at its center. Such illustrations were common in the German popular-science journals that began to appear in the 1850s and would have been familiar images to the adolescent Jung. Jung's "geology of the personality" is hence based on a vulcanist or plutonist geophysical vision borrowed from his training in the natural sciences.
Also significant in Jung's 1925 lecture is his clear statement that he does not consider the collective unconscious to be solely inside the brain and nervous system. Since it can be located outside the brain, Jung says that "on this basis the main body of the collective unconscious cannot be strictly said to be psychological, but psychical." [95] This is an early appearance of a theoretical distinction Jung would make later in his career (in 1946) about the transcendental, quasi-physical, quasi-psychological, "psychoid" nature of the archetypes. Jung borrowed the term "psychoid" (as an adjective, not a noun) from the twentieth-century version of speculative Naturphilosophie and vitalism expounded by Bleuler, on "the natural history of the soul." [96] Both Bleuler and Jung attempted to distinguish themselves from the more nakedly vitalistic use of the term "die Psychoide" by Hans Driesch (1867-1941). [97] Jung's own full return to Naturphilosophie is never so clear as when he remarks,
We cannot repeat this distinction too often, for when I have referred to the collective unconscious as "outside" our brains, it has been assumed that I meant hanging somewhere in mid-air. After this explanation it will become clear to you that the collective unconscious is always working upon you through trans-subjective facts which are probably inside as well as outside yourselves. [98]
With these examples of his mystical geological vision of the human personality, and from his relationship to Keyserling and others who shared this vision, we can see how deeply connected Jung remained to individuals and ideas in the volkisch movement and its occult establishment. Jung's vocal connection to the Volk was not fully understood by his predominantly American and British disciples of the 1920s, nor especially those who entered Jung's Kusnacht-Zurich orbit in the 1930s and who, in the aftermath of Hitler, could only see these ideas as belonging to the heritage of another volkisch movement of this era: National Socialism.
Perhaps most of the continuing controversy over whether Jung (or Keyserling, for that matter) was or was not a Nazi, or was anti-Semitic, -- an argument that is often framed in unenlightening black or white dualistic terms -- can be resolved by offering a third way: the larger context of pre-Nazi era volkisch philosophy that both was and was not used by Nazis and anti- Semites for their own ends. Perhaps what many critics are sensing in Jung is his essential volkisch identity, of which there is much evidence. Jung's is not merely a folk-psychology, but a "Volk-psychology." The claimed evidence of the active, open espousal of anti-Semitism or Nazism by Jung is, in my opinion, less directly compelling (hence the greater controversy over it), and is perhaps more fruitfully framed -- from the historian's point of view -- in its deeper volkisch context. As historians such as Mosse have continually stressed, anti-Semitism and National Socialism, while derivatives of this volkisch tradition, are not to be regarded as completely identical with it and its multiple offshoots, of which Jung and his analytical psychology is only one of many. It would make sense from a historical point of view to see overlaps between those in Jung's circle (himself included) with those in National Socialist circles during the 1930s, as indeed has been documented. [99]
NEOPAGANS IN SWITZERLAND
Switzerland has a many-centuries-old tradition of being a land of heresy and unconventional sects. During the Middle Ages the Free Spirits, Waldensians, and even the Cathars made inroads into the lives of many in this region. [100] Southern Germany and Switzerland were primary centers of the Reformation of the sixteenth century, and the splintering of Protestantism into insular "sects" continued in Switzerland until the present century. The official Swiss census of 1 December 1888 counted 10,697 persons living in sects but only 8,384 Jews in a total population of 2.9 million, dominated by 1.7 million Protestants and 1.2 million Roman Catholics. [101] Although most of these sects were somehow connected with Christian ideas, there were some that operated as charismatic cults with bizarre belief systems that promoted intergenerational incest, the ingestion of urine and sperm, and other unconventional spiritual practices that led to their separate category in the Swiss census. The Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922) became fascinated with such sects near the end of his life and produced four publications of psychoanalytic ethnography that focused on two charismatic leaders of one such Swiss sect. [102]
Between 1900 and 1920 a Munich to Ascona countercultural axis seemed to be in full operation, making this circuit somewhat similar in spirit if not in size to the California of the 1960s. Switzerland and southern Germany became the home of these neopagan, sun-worshiping, nudist, vegetarian, spiritualist, sometimes anarchist, sexually liberated groups experimenting with new life-styles or a new experience-based philosophy of life. [103] Aschheim refers to these groups as "varieties of Nietzschean religion." [104] Taking their inspirational cue from Nietzsche's proclamation that "god is dead" in Also Sprach Zarathustra, they created their own forms of personal religion. When describing her impressions of the materially impoverished but spiritually adventurous life-style of these Bohemian colonies in Switzerland, Marianne Weber uses the same word that her husband Max employed to describe the essence of charisma: ausseralltagliches ("extraordinary," or "out of the everyday routine of life"). [105] Swiss authorities were considered relatively benign compared to the more heavy-handed Austrian or Bavarian police. The groups operating in this Swiss version of the fin-desiecle New Age -- some of them with volkisch concerns but most probably not -- have been documented in Green's extraordinary work. [106]
Some neopagan groups took their sun-worshiping ideas from ancient Persian sources. At the turn of the century there was a resurgence of both scholarly and Theosophical interest in Persian mythology (primarily Zoroastrianism or Mazdeanism and Mithraism). The proximate cause of some of this interest in the 1890s was no doubt due to Nietzsche, as "Zarathustra" was the name used in Greek writings for Zoroaster (circa 600 B.CE.), the prophet who converted the early (probably shamanistic) Indo-Iranian peoples to his religion based on the supreme deity Ahura Mazda. Zoroastrian religion went through many revisions over one thousand years and in its latter forms is especially noted for its dualism and hierarchies of demons and angels. Classical scholars such as Franz Cumont (1868-1947) from Belgium traced the Hellenistic mystery cult of Mithras (100-400 C.E.) to ancient Persian roots, and Richard Reitzenstein (1861-1931) from Germany founded an entire school in the history of religions devoted to tracing the Iranian roots of Gnosticism, although this monomaniacal fascination with Iranian origins in the work of these two scholars has been rejected in recent years. [107]
The fascination of the Germans with Persian (Aryan) origins began during the Romantic Era of the early 1800s. Although Gustav Fechner (1801-1887), at first a professor of physics and later one of philosophy at the University of Leipzig, is best known for his Elemente der Psychophysik of 1860 (a work that is regarded as the first textbook in modern experimental psychology), he wrote many metaphysical works as well. [108] One of these, the Zend-Avesta (1851), a work of Romantic natural philosophy, takes its name from the title of the sacred books of the ancient Iranian Zoroastrians. [109] Zoroastrian solar mythology was extensively discussed by Muller in many of his publications. Jung himself cites Muller in this regard in his Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido. These, too, had found their way into occultist literature and in the earliest writings of Blavatsky in the 1870s.
By 1900 enough of the scholarly information had begun to seep into Theosophical publications and other occult literature, making such mythology available to neopagan cults. Around 1900 a "Cult of Mazdaznan" was founded in the United States by a German immigrant from Poznan, Otto Hanisch (1854-1936). Hanisch, who used an Iranian-sounding alias (Ottoman Zar-Adusht Ha'nish), alleged that he was born in Tehran and that his cult was a remnant of the Zoroastrianism of ancient Iran. The cult was based on vegetarianism, solar mysticism, and other practices derived from Hanisch's idiosyncratic interpretations of the Zend-Avesta. By 1910 the cult had spread to Europe and appears to have been based in Herrliberg, Switzerland (ten miles from Zurich) under the leadership of Karl Heise, a Zurich bookshop assistant, and a former student of Guido von List. Near Zurich, Heise was the charismatic leader of a commune ("university," as the cult described it) called "Aryana" that practiced solar worship and vegetarianism. As James Webb notes, "The university was known as 'Aryana"' because "only the fair-skinned 'Aryan' races were permitted to become bearers of the new ideal." [110] Heise was a dominant figure on the Zurich occultist scene around 1910 and wrote many books on topics such as sun worship, reincarnation, and the astral body that were published between 1907 and 1919. [111] It has been suggested that the Mazdaznans included several influential members of the Bauhaus movement and thus influenced German aesthetics, but by 1916 the group had moved its headquarters to California. [112] Today the group seems to be most alive in France, and some occult bookshops in Paris have their own Mazdaznan sections for the group's more recent metaphysical and vegetarian literature.
It is not known if Jung knew of Heise or if he read any of Heise's occult works (none are listed in Jung's posthumous Bibliothek catalog), but it is interesting to note that it is precisely during this time (late 1909-1910) that Jung becomes fascinated with the literature on Zoroastrianism and Mithraism -- and their basis in ancient Iranian solar worship. [113] We do, however, have solid evidence from a late period that Jung was aware of this solar-worshiping cult so near to his base of operations, as he mentions, in an essay published in 1928, the Mazdaznan in the same sentence with "Christian Science, theosophy, [and] anthroposophy" as examples of extra-Christian "individual symbolformation" cults. [114] Jung appears not to have known Hanisch, for in remarks made during his "Zarathustra Seminar" in May 1934, Jung discounts the rumor that Nietzsche met Hanisch or his cult members in Leipzig as a student and hence got his idea for Zarathustra from them. Jung is also unaware that the cult originated in a later period. Jung is incorrect in his statement that "He [Hanisch] is certainly not the originator of the Mazdaznan sect; it is of older origin," thus also appearing not to have known Hanisch but did know of Hanisch's claims of an ancient origin for the Mazdaznans. [115]
Yet it is interesting that the first issue Jung chooses to clarify for his audience in his Zarathustra seminar is a critical denial of the role of the cult of the Mazdaznans as an influence on Nietzsche and therefore, by extension, on Jung himself. Given the fact that Jung was well aware of the Mazdaznans, and especially considering the prominent place Jung gave this cult among the other well-known occult traditions in his 1928 statement, it is probable that he did at least know of Heise and the sun worship of the Mazdaznans but did not want a public association with the cult or its philosophy with his own ideas.
NEOPAGANS IN ASCONA AND AT THE BURGHOLZLI
Thus this thriving neopagan movement was operating within Jung's Switzerland and could not have escaped his attention. In addition to the countercultural, antipolitical neopagans were the many highly nationalistic members of the German Youth Movement who could be seen hiking through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland during these years, some of whom were fully imbued with the sun-worshiping rituals and pantheistic literature of Diederichs and his publishing company. Many of the casualties of these groups would inevitably end up at the Burgholzli. The most prominent casualty with Asconan neopagan beliefs -- the renegade psychoanalyst and anarchist Otto Gross (to be discussed later) -- was admitted and treated by Jung in 1908. He was no doubt one among several.
The Burgholzli was the largest psychiatric-treatment facility in Switzerland and was therefore easily accessible on the countercultural route between the Bohemian districts of Schwabing in Munich and the village of Ascona. Absinthe, cocaine, morphine, opium, and other substances sometimes went along with the Nietzschean "new ethic" with tragic results, and spiritual purification rituals involving fasting, unusual diets, excessive hiking, and so on, could sometimes induce a brief psychotic reaction. An analogous influx of similar patients appeared in psychiatric hospitals and clinics during the "Psychedelic Era" of the 1960s, and continues even today. The hallucinations and delusions of these spiritual explorers could indeed contain the components of the mystical ideas and symbolism they had studied in their search for pagan regeneration. Such was the nature of a small portion of the institutionalized patient population of the Burgholzli from which Jung made his clinical observations and from which he and his assistants (starting in 1909) collected data for the "phylogenetic" layer of the unconscious from which he derived his later (1916) theories. It was hardly a patient population free of exposure to occult or mythological material, whether through Theosophical or scholarly publications (especially those published by either the Eugen Diederichs Verlag or Verlag B. G. Teubner, or through direct participation in neopagan cult rituals.
Ascona, as Green has documented, grew into a spiritual center of sorts and was frequented by such gifted creative individuals as Hesse, D. H. Lawrence, Gross, Duncan, Mary Wigman, Rudolf von Laban, Keyserling, Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Paul Tillich, Weber (ironically, in 1913 and 1914), and in later years, Jung. Ascona, the countercultural mecca with its own circum~ ambulated qa'ba (Monte Verita) and bearded and long-locked Naturmenschen in Tannhauser-like sandals, became the site of the famous Eranos Conferences that Jung so dominated and which started in 1933. [116] Indeed, Carl and Emma Jung annually stayed in a villa on the "Mountain of Truth" (Monte Verita) itself. [117] By the time of the Eranos Conferences, however, the Naturmenschen were becoming scarce, for Ascona had begun to take on the air of a resort for the wealthy and "artistic" communities that it maintains today.
Laurens van der Post, a close friend and disciple of Jung's who is noted for his many books on his experiences exploring Africa, reports inviting Jung many times to join him on yet another voyage to the "dark continent" after Jung's fieldwork in Kenya in 1925. According to van der Post, Jung replied that before he could allow himself to return to Africa, "I found so much witchcraft in Switzerland I felt that I had to deal with all this witchcraft first." Perhaps we may now have a little clearer understanding of Jung's remark by understanding his Switzerland, which apparently did indeed have its share of neopagans and others participating in an occult underground -- and, indeed, noted persons such as himself at play in the network of the occult establishment.