THE ARYAN CHRIST: THE SECRET LIFE OF CARL JUNG

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Part 1 of 2

Chapter 6: Sun Worship

If one honors God, the sun or the fire, then one honors one's own vital force, the libido.
-- C. G. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, 1911

Not even the most recent scientific discoveries ... which teach us how we live, and move, and have our being in the sun, how we bum it, how we breathe it, how we feed on it -- give us any idea of what this source of light and life, this silent traveller, this majestic ruler, this departing friend or dying hero, in his daily or yearly course, was to the awakening consciousness of mankind. People wonder why so much of the old mythology, the daily talk, of the Aryans, was solar: -- what else could it have been?
-- Friedrich Max Muller, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, 1878

What I am now about to say I consider to be of the greatest importance for all things "that breathe and move upon the earth" ... but above all others it is of importance to myself. For I am a follower of King Helios. And of this fact I possess within me, known to myself alone, proofs more certain than I can give. But this, at least, I am permitted to say without sacrilege, that from my childhood an extraordinary longing for the rays of the god penetrated deep into my soul.
-- Julian, Emperor of Rome, "Hymn to King Helios," 362 C.E.

Who can possibly understand the true source of the archaic, rejuvenating energies that pulsed through C. G. Jung in the years following his encounters with Otto Gross and Sabina Spielrein? Not only did sexual energy surge through him with a power that frightened him, but terrifying, decidedly Wagnerian visions of Teutonic figures such as Wotan and Siegfried and of the cosmic dramas of Greek mythology dominated both his waking fantasies and his nocturnal dreams. He had been a man who prided himself on the rational control of his thoughts, of his ability to maintain composure in the face of psychosis, a man who devalued a spontaneous fantasy life as weak, sick, repulsive. But soon he found that he could not regulate the swirling modern chaos in his own psyche.

Between September 1909, when it was clear that the transformational process had begun, and September 1912, when he published his confirmation of his loss of faith in Freud and in the Judeo-Christian god, Jung's attitude toward the unconscious mind changed profoundly. At first believing the unconscious mind to be an entirely personal and individual warehouse of memories, he came to see it as the source of ancestral wishes and tendencies -- and even experiences -- that were inherited biologically through a type of vitalistic mechanism, a generalized life-force called the libido. By September 1912 he made it clear to Freud and to his own circle in Zurich that this powerful energy of life was not only the sex drive, as Freud had maintained, but should be viewed as a more generalized force of nature whose currents carried ancestral spiritual longings through biological channels.

During these three years, Jung developed the idea that the unconscious mind was the result of a long, phylogenetic, evolutionary process. Just as the human body is a living museum of evolutionary history, so too is the human psyche. And since the most potent ideas of human concern are religious ones, we should discover the spiritual symbols of our ancestors deep within the unconscious mind of each individual. That is, looking at the evolutionary development of the human species, the most recent, and therefore most powerful, influences on present human experience would be racial or tribal ones. In Jung's new view, religious needs were biologically based. The peoples of pagan antiquity, closer to our prehistoric ancestors, celebrated their sexuality in their spirituality and were therefore less plagued by neuroses and psychoses than modern Europeans. Jung forged these insights into the theory that a life could only be meaningful if one's religious beliefs and sexual practices resonated with those of one's racial ancestors.

Everything in the world is in a state of evolution, human consciousness included. Man has not always had the consciousness he now possesses; when we go back to the times of our earliest ancestors, we find a consciousness of a very different kind. At the present time man in his waking-life perceives external things through the agency of his senses and forms ideas about them. These ideas about the external world work on his blood. 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. There then lived within the blood not only what the senses had received from the external world, but also that which is contained within the bodily form; and as that bodily form was inherited from his ancestors, man sensed their life within himself.

If we think of a heightened form of this consciousness, we shall have some idea of how this was also expressed in a corresponding form of memory. 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. In those times, when they said, "I have experienced such and such a thing," they alluded not only to what had happened to themselves personally, but also to the experiences of their ancestors, for they could remember them.

This earlier consciousness was, it is true, of a very dim kind, very hazy as compared to man's waking consciousness at the present day. It partook more of the nature of a vivid dream, but, on the other hand, it embraced far more than does our present consciousness. The son felt himself connected with his father and his grandfather as one "I," because he felt their experiences as if they were his own. And because man was possessed of this consciousness, because he lived not only in his own personal world, but because within him there dwelt also the consciousness of preceding generations, in naming himself he included in that name all belonging to his ancestral line: father, son, grandson, etc., designated by one name that which was common to them all, that which passed through them all; in short, a person felt himself to be merely a member of an entire line of descendants. This sensation was a true and actual one.

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.

The important thing to bear in mind here is, that in olden times there was a hazy clairvoyance, from which the myths and legends originated. This clairvoyance could exist in the nearly-related blood, just as our present-day consciousness comes about owing to the mingling of blood. The birth of logical thought, the birth of the intellect, was simultaneous with the advent of exogamy. Surprising as this may seem, it is nevertheless true. It is a fact which will be substantiated more and more by external investigation; indeed, the initial steps along this line have already been taken.

But this mingling of blood which comes about through exogamy is also that which at the same time obliterates the clairvoyance of earlier days, in order that humanity may evolve to a higher stage of development; and just as the person who has passed through the stages of occult development regains this clairvoyance, and transmutes it into a new form, so has our waking consciousness of the present day been evolved out of that dim and hazy clairvoyance which obtained in times of old.

At the present time everything in a man's environment is impressed upon his blood; hence the environment fashions the inner man in accordance with the outer world. In the case of primitive man it was that which was contained within the body that was more fully expressed in the blood. 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.

-- The Occult Significance of Blood, by Rudolf Steiner

Polygamy unblocked the rays of this inner source of light and heat that had been eclipsed by centuries of monotheism and the monogamy crushingly demanded by Judeo-Christianity. Otto Gross had taught him that, but Gross fused this knowledge of the morally corrosive effect of polygamy with efforts to bring about an associated change in political consciousness and thereby incite revolution and anarchy. What Jung desired instead were additional psychotherapeutic methods to effect spiritual rebirth. He sought potent new symbols of transformation to bring about changes of consciousness in large numbers of people. He became increasingly certain of his own destiny as the man who would deliver such redemption to humanity but was uncertain of the means of achieving it. After a dream pointed the way, he knew the secret he was looking for was buried in the accounts of pagan regeneration.

Once Jung charged down this intellectual path there was no stopping him. To be sure, a multitude of others had preceded him on this quest. In German Europe at that time legions of scientists and artists, bohemians and bourgeoisie, were fervently seeking much the same thing. And, when we listen carefully to their voices through the cacophony of historical events that took shape beginning in 1933, we can hear the faint singing of their hymns to the sun.

"I often feel I am wandering alone through a strange country"

It all began with a dream aboard the ship that carried Jung and Freud back to Europe after they attended the Clark University Conference in September 1909. Jung found himself descending layer by layer -- spatially and temporally -- into the foundations of a large old house. As the story is told in MDR, Jung left a "rococo style salon" on the top floor for a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century dwelling on the ground floor. [1] He then descended a stone stairway that led to a room from "Roman times," and then farther down to a "low cave cut into the rock" where, at the lowest levels, he found the remnants of a primitive culture: pottery, scattered human bones, and "two human skulls."

In MDR, Jung credits this dream for giving him his first idea of a collective unconscious. In a 1925 lecture in which he gave a slightly different version of it, he told his audience that he had "a strongly impersonal feeling about the dream," indicating, at least to him, that it was less a product of his own personal unconscious than something akin to a message from the great beyond. [2] Later in life he told E. A. Bennett something different that calls into question the mystical nature of Jung's interpretation. In Bennett's account, Jung associates the supposedly "impersonal" material from the collective unconscious with some very personal thoughts: "When he reflected on it," wrote Bennett, "later the house had some associations in his mind with his uncle's very old house in Basel which was built in the old moat of the town and had two cellars; the lower one was very dark and like a cave." [3] In any event, the dream did stir something in Jung that put him on a different track entirely.

Immediately after his return home, Jung began to visit archeological sites so that he could observe ongoing excavations. He began an intensive study of mythology and Hellenistic spiritual practices in the classical scholarship of his day. "Archeology or rather mythology has got me in its grip," Jung wrote to Freud on October 14, 1909. [4] This became a familiar theme in their correspondence over the next two and a half years.

As a boy, Jung had wanted to become a classical philologist or an archeologist. His newfound project reawakened these childhood fantasies. "All my delight in archeology (buried for years) has sprung into life again," he told Freud. [5] Soon, however, his study of mythology took on an almost obsessive quality, and mythological figures began to intrude in his daily fantasies and dreams. On February 20, 1910, he told Freud, "All sorts of things are cooking in me, mythology in particular." [6] By April 17, he was afraid of the effect that his researches might have been having on his mental state: "At present I am pursuing my mythological dreams with almost autoerotic pleasure, dropping only meager hints to my friends .... I often feel I am wandering alone through a strange country, seeing wonderful things that no one else has seen before and no one needs to see .... I don't yet know what will come of it. I must just let myself be carried along, trusting to God that in the end I shall make a landfall somewhere." [7] By February 15, 1912, Jung was in a panic. "I am having grisly fights with the hydra of mythological fantasy and not all its heads are cut off yet. Sometimes I feel like calling for help when I am too hard-pressed by the welter of material. So far I have suppressed the urge." [8]

Jung's efforts were not in vain. Even as early as the end of November 1909 it was clear that he had developed a new theory for psychoanalysis that would have profound racial implications for its future.

The phylogenetic unconscious

In the spring of 1909, Jung had resigned from his post at the Burgholzli and saw patients privately in his consulting room at his new home in Kusnacht, approximately seven miles southeast of Zurich. Although not a move of great distance spatially, it was for Jung, psychologically. From his new home on Lake Zurich, in a letter to Sigmund Freud, Jung outlined for the very first time the contours of his new racial theory of the unconscious:

I feel more and more that a thorough understanding of the psyche (if possible at all) will only come through history or with its help. Just as an understanding of anatomy and ontogenesis is possible only on the basis of phylogenesis and comparative anatomy. For this reason, antiquity now appears to me in a new and significant light. What we now find in the individual psyche -- in compressed, stunted, or one-sidedly differentiated form -- may be seen spread out in all its fullness in times past. Happy is the man who can read these signs! The trouble is that our philology has been as hopelessly inept as our psychology. Each has failed the other. [9]

By Christmas, Jung had employed the assistance of one of his young psychiatrists at the Burgholzli, Johann Jakob Honegger. As he told Freud (December 25, 1909), he entrusted to Honegger everything that he knew "so that something good may come of it." By now Jung was even more convinced that he was on the verge of a breakthrough, for he was having "the most marvelous visions, glimpses of far-ranging interconnections which I am at present incapable of grasping." Again he confirmed to Freud the new direction of his thinking: "It has become quite clear to me that we shall not solve the ultimate secrets of neurosis and psychosis without mythology and the history of civilization, for embryology goes hand in hand with comparative anatomy." [10]

One of Jung's strengths -- and indeed his "genius" -- was his remarkable ability to synthesize highly complex and seemingly unrelated fields of inquiry. Early in his career, Jung attempted to use the lessons learned from his experimental researches using the word-association test to explain the phenomenon of hysterical "repressions" in psychoanalysis and the alternate personalities of "spirits" that arose during mediumistic trances. His theory that the normal human mind was made up of unconscious complexes -- semiautonomous clusters of images, thoughts, and feelings organized around a specific motif or thematic core -- was his overarching explanation for these phenomena. Later, when he first consciously identified himself with Freud and the psychoanalytic movement, he tried to integrate that complex theory with psychoanalysis in a wide range of publications, his most famous being a small book on the psychology of dementia praecox. [11]

By November 1909, Jung's clinical experience had stimulated him to cast his intellectual net even wider. What Jung already saw as his intellectual "project" was nothing less than a grand synthesis of psychoanalysis with evolutionary biology, archeology, and comparative philology. If Jung found a way to integrate psychoanalysis with these esteemed sciences, so revered as the finest of German scientific contributions to the world in the late nineteenth century, it would be a coup of major proportions for the psychoanalytic movement. It would confirm Freud and Jung's claims that psychoanalysis was a science that could spur the development of insights in other disciplines. With its analysis of word associations as a method of recovering the past of an individual, the techniques of psychoanalysis perhaps most resemble those of comparative philology, which attempts to recover the original cultural and linguistic forms. And, like psychoanalysis, philologists, too, are interested in how the laws of language seem to be related -- or are identical -- with the laws governing the operation of the mind. It is no wonder that Freud encouraged Jung along these paths, but it was a project that would ultimately rend psychoanalysis -- at least in Switzerland -- along ethnic and racial lines.

Jung wasted no time. He gave his psychiatric assistants extensive reading assignments from the works of classicists, archeologists and philologists on the mythological systems of pagan antiquity. Two of them -- Spielrein and Jan Nelken -- published extensively documented articles making use of their knowledge of mythology to analyze the hallucinations and delusions of patients with dementia praecox. Honegger was the first to present his findings in public at a conference in 1910. A fourth disciple from an asylum outside Zurich, Carl Schneiter, entered the picture a bit later and published a similar vindication of Jung's views in 1914. [12]

Jung assigned his assistants to go into the back wards of their respective asylums and collect mythological material from psychotic patients, almost as if each new hallucination or delusion was an exotic new species of flora or fauna to analyze and catalog. Until Jung assigned them books on mythology, it is a safe bet that these young physicians had little formal training in mythology or archeology. Armed with their new knowledge, they entered the wards and found exactly what Jung told them to look for: ancient pagan gods in the unconscious of their patients.

And the ones they found most often in the most "regressed" psychotic patients -- just as Jung said they would -- were various pre-Christian solar deities: sun gods.

Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido

Jung's psychiatric assistants funneled new clinical material to him that confirmed the presence of pre-Christian mythological motifs in psychotic patients. Jung immediately put this wealth of evidence into his magnum opus, which would put him and psychoanalysis on the map. First published as two long articles in a psychoanalytic journal in 1911 and 1912, Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (Transformations and symbols of the libido) appeared as one book in the latter year. [13]

It is a strange book. It was judged so in its day and it remains so now. Without the proper keys to unlock the book's argument, the reader is hopelessly lost. However, to Jung's disciples -- and to the mystically minded from all quarters of bohemia -- it was received as a stunning revelation, a celebration of neopagan life.

Jung's book has at least two separate agendas and can be read in at least two ways: first, as an attempt to syncretize the methodology of psychoanalysis with those of the esteemed sciences of comparative philology, comparative mythology, and evolutionary biology; second, as a blending of different philosophies of regeneration or rebirth. Psychoanalysis thus became not only a science but also a path of cultural and individual revitalization -- which, indeed, it had become for Jung by the time he started the book in 1910. [14]

The writing of this book mirrored a transformation process in Jung himself, the result of which was the loss of his Christian identity and the development of a compensating new vital experience of God. Jung's starting point was a small article published by an unusual American woman, Miss Frank Miller, which contained a series of poetic musings and accounts of her personal visions. [15] She had all the gifts of a spiritualist medium, and she knew it. Many of her visions and experiences could even be interpreted as evidence of reincarnation or of a spirit world. However, after studying in Geneva for a time with Theodore Flournoy, she decided to write an article demonstrating that all of the material arising spontaneously from her "creative imagination" could be traced to things she had previously seen, read, or heard. In effect, she was writing to support Flournoy's thesis that all creative productions were the result of new combinations of previously memorized material whose source had long been forgotten -- in other words, cryptomnesia.

Jung took Frank Miller's visions and poetry and argued just the opposite: that these could not possibly have been the creation of new combinations of hidden memories but instead were evidence of a phylogenetic layer of the unconscious mind that could produce pre-Christian symbols from pagan antiquity. From the time the first part of Wandlungen appeared in a journal in 1911, Jung never again entertained the possibility that mythological content in his patients' dreams or psychotic symptoms were anything but evidence of a phylogenetic or "collective" unconscious layer of the human mind.

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny

The basic theory of Wandlungen is based on the famous formula "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," popularized at the end of the nineteenth century by the German zoologist and evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel, who almost single-handedly introduced Darwinism to the German public. Haeckel actively promoted the notion that evolution was progressive and purposeful. His biological theories were a blend of Darwinism, Lamarckianism, and the old German Romantic biology of Goethe. Haeckel was the first to argue -- as Jung would analogously about psychoanalysis -- that biology was first and foremost a historical science, involving the historical (not experimental) methodologies of embryology, paleontology, and especially phylogeny.

Jung's favorite areas of study in medical school were comparative morphology and evolutionary theory -- areas that Haeckel dominated. Jung's fascination with Haeckel predates medical school, however. In MDR he tells of a dream in which he found a great circular pool in a forest clearing. In this pool, "half immersed in the water lay the strangest and most wonderful creature: a round animal, shimmering in opalescent hues, and consisting of innumerable little cells, or of organs shaped like tentacles. It was a giant radiolarian, measuring about three feet across." [16] To Jung, this dream was a prophetic message from beyond, presaging a destiny as a natural scientist and physician. Haeckel's exquisite color illustrations of radiolaria had appeared in popular science books and magazines, and we know that Jung read such magazines as a teenager. He could have picked up his knowledge of radiolaria only from Haeckel. [17]

What is so unusual about this dream, however, is its incongruity with reality, never explained in MDR or in any of the scores of Jungian retellings of this magical story. A radiolarian is a tiny sea organism enclosed in an intricate spherical -- and beautiful -- exoskeleton. But it is a microscopic organism; one cannot see a radiolarian clearly with the naked eye. There are no three-foot long radiolaria as magnified in the sacred monster of Jung's dream. The inflation of a simple natural phenomenon into a giant, otherworldly spectacle is a signature stroke of Jung. His application of Haeckel' s "biogenetic law" to stages of cultural evolution and to the evolution of human consciousness is just one more example.

Haeckel's biogenetic law -- "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" -- was derived from his historical researches in biology, and profoundly influenced not only evolutionary biology but also theories of the mind in psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. The notion that the stages of individual development (ontogeny) could be shown to replicate, in order, the stages of the development of the human race from lower forms of life (phylogeny) was a compelling theory. Both Jung and Freud adopted such thinking in their own work, though they rarely referred to Haeckel.

Jung believed that changes in the libido over time could be discerned through the study of ancient religions and cultures. If he could identify certain stages of transformations of the libido over time that corresponded with the transformations of libido in a developing individual, psychoanalysis could rightly claim it had unlocked the secrets of life and of history. Jung knew he was the man to do it.

Throughout the layers of mythological references in Wandlungen, Jung eventually blends Haeckel's ideas with those of Freud and Bachofen into a new model of the human mind: Freud's stages of psychosexual development (the infantile period of polymorphous perversity; the preoedipal, incestuous period of strong attachment to the mother; the phallic stage; and then the genital stage) all seem to correspond with the descriptions of Bachofen's stages of cultural evolution (hetairism; matriarchy; the transitional Dionysian period; and then patriarchy). Haeckel's law provides the unifying biological and evolutionary key.

Having outlined the basic skeleton, Jung needed to provide evidence of symbolic content from contemporary patients and from the cultures of the past that would fit each of these stages.

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Part 2 of 2

"Whoever has in himself God, the sun, is immortal, like the sun"

Perhaps the defining characteristic of Wandlungen is that it seems to be bursting with religious symbolism, much of which refers in one way or another to the sun. If one opens this massive tome arbitrarily, solar myths or sun-hero myths or solar-sexual interpretations are likely to spill forth. Jung viewed these ancient myths as historical records of the transformation of the libido, and maintained that the most apt metaphor for this spiritual-sexual energy or life-force is the sun. "The comparison of the libido with the sun and the fire is really analogous," he argued. [18]

• Ib. Sun-god: Shamanistic Eskimo idol, Alaska. P: From Wirth, Der Aufgang der Menschheit, Pl. XI, fig. 1.
Veneration of the Buddha’s teachings as a sun-wheel: Stupa of Amaravati, India, 2nd century A.D. Government Museum, Madras. P Guirand, Mythologie générale, p. 330.
• Va. Veneration of the Buddha’s teachings as a sun-wheel: Stupa of Amaravati, India, 2nd century A.D. Government Museum, Madras. P Guirand, Mythologie générale, p. 330.
• VII. The winged sun-disc, above the King: Throne of Tut-Ankh-Amon, 14th century B.C. P: Courtesy of the Griffith Institute, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
• IXa. Winged sun-moon disc and tree of life: Hittite relief, Sakjegeuzi, northern Syria. P: From Orientalische Literaturzeitung, XII (1909) : 9, Pl. II, fig-2.
• XIa. The King, attended, sacrifices to the sun-god: Stele of King Nabupaliddina, Babylon, 870 B.C. British Museum. P: Museum.
• XXXIIb. The sun-eating lion of alchemy: From a manuscript, St. Gall Bibliothek, 17th century. P: Courtesy of the Ciba Archives, Basel.
• XXXIV. Demon eating the sun: Stone, eastern Java, 15th century. Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden, P: Museum.

3. The Voyage of the Sun: Late Egyptian. From Schaefer, Von ägyptischer Kunst, Pl. LIII, fig. 1.
4. Germanic sun-idol: Woodcut from Botho, Sachsisch Chronicon. P: British Museum.
5. The life-giving Sun: Amenophis IV on his throne: Relief, Egypt. Drawing from Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians, II, p. 74.
7. The Sun’s hands: Relief, Spitalkirche, Tübingen. Rubbing from Erich Jung, Germanische Götter und Helden, fig. 2.
24. Nut giving birth to the Sun: Relief, Egypt. Drawing from Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians, II, p. 101.
39. The four corners of the zodiac: sun and moon in centre: Coptic. Woodcut from Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus.

-- Symbols of Transformation: An Analysis of the Prelude to a Case of Schizophrenia, by C.G. Jung

Solar references began to proliferate in part 1 of Wandlungen, in the chapter entitled "The Song of the Moth." Here Jung attempted an analysis of a short romantic poem by Miller entitled "The Moth to the Sun." Jung interpreted this poem from a religious perspective, claiming that the longing of the moth for the "star" was in reality the longing of the poetess for God. Jung followed the chain of associations that led to the conclusion that God and star and sun are indeed one, but he went further. His interpretation brought him close to an idea that clearly obsessed him from 1910 until the end of his life: that God is not the distant, transcendent, absolute god of Judeo-Christianity, but instead is the libido that lives within us all.

In the second poem where the longing is clearly exposed it is by no means the terrestrial sun. Since the longing has been turned away from the real object, its object has become, first of all, a subjective one, namely, God. Psychologically, however, God is the name of a representation-complex which is grouped around a strong feeling (the sum of libido). Properly, the feeling is what gives character and reality to the complex. The attributes and symbols of divinity must belong in a consistent manner to the feeling (longing, love libido, and so on). If one honors God, the sun or the fire, then one honors one's own vital force, the libido. It is as Seneca says: God is near you, he is with you, in you. [19]

With this passage Jung echoes the testimonial literature of Pietism. Pietists such as Count Zinzendorf (mentioned in Wandlungen) and even Schleiermacher were profoundly interested in the experience of the "god within" as a burning fire. Jung inundates the reader with a dizzying array of similar metaphors of what one would find if one looked inward, claiming that "divine vision is often merely sun or light," and making repeated references to "the inner light, the sun of the other world." Jung even says, "Whoever has in himself God, the sun, is immortal, like the sun." [20] Page after page is filled with analyses of sun-hero myths, like those of Hellenistic paganism or of Teutonic heroes such as Siegfried and Arminius, with rebirth and redemption the eternally recurring themes. Even Christ is analyzed as a sun god and is therefore "identical" with these self-sacrificing Germanic hero-gods.

Near the end of part 1, Jung provides a statement by comparative philologist Ernest Renan, a former theological student who lost his faith through his philological researches and became a celebrity after writing the shocking Vie de Jesus in 1863, in which Jesus was treated as a historical figure and not as a god-man. His philological work led him and others to take the spiritual beliefs of pre-Christian peoples quite seriously and argue that the sun worship of ancient peoples was more consistent with a modern scientific world than Judeo-Christian orthodoxies. In the passage from Dialogues et fragments philosophiques (1876) that Jung cites, Renan made the following claim: "Before religion had reached the stage of proclaiming that God must be put into the absolute and ideal, that is to say, beyond this world, one worship alone was reasonable and scientific: that was the worship of the sun." [21]

Aryans and Semites

The period between the publication of the first part of Wandlungen in the autumn of 1911 and its second part in the autumn of 1912 gave rise to tremendous pressures in the relationship between Jung and Freud. Jung's fascination with the fusion of religious and mythological impulses with the cultural and therapeutic goals of psychoanalysis -- so evident in the first part of Wandlungen -- accelerated the splitting of their union along national, religious, and racial fault lines.

There is no doubt that as an assimilated Jew and atheist living in Christian-dominated Austria-Hungary while political anti-Semitism was on the rise, Sigmund Freud could only see danger in Jung's fantasies about overtly spiritualizing the psychoanalytic movement. Jung, for his part, saw Freud's continued reticence about this -- and about issues near to his heart such as spiritualistic and paranormal phenomena -- as increasingly oppressive, dogmatic, and authoritarian. Never one for obeying authority, he came to resent Freud and boldly differed with his master in his public statements. By the summer of 1912, a split not only between Jung and Freud but also between Zurich and Vienna was feared by all concerned. Half gestures and cautious peace offerings attempted to patch the differences between the Viennese and the Swiss; they didn't work.

Perhaps one of the most unfortunate results of the split was the heightening of ethnic tensions and the charges of anti-Semitism. Such tribal prejudices exist in the Freudian and Jungian communities even today. To some degree this was to be expected of Freud and Jung. Cultural, linguistic, and -- many claimed -- biological differences between European Jews and Aryans were supported by the evidence generated by nineteenth-century comparative philology and Lamarckian evolutionary biology. At the time it was widely and firmly believed that these historical factors influenced the psychology of modern individuals. Such racialist thinking dominated the cognitive categories of educated persons and made sense in the world of the fin de siecle, lacking the Hitlerian taint such ideas have today. Volkish propagandists (not only pan-Germanists, but pan-Slavists and Zionists), it is true, perverted the scientific literature for their own ends, but no one -- Freud and Jung included -- was immune from such assumptions about human nature.

The issue of Aryan and Semitic differences is raised occasionally in the Jung-Freud correspondence. We know that they discussed the topic while on a stroll through New York City's Central Park in 1909. In the voluminous correspondence between Freud and his Jewish colleagues, such as Karl Abraham and Sandor Ferenczi, he reminds them continually that they need the Swiss Christians to further the movement, and that, in any case, he believes Jung to be the man of the future. But it is only after the breach between Jung and Freud seems certain that the psychoanalytic movement begins to be polarized between Christian and Jew, Aryan and Semite.

By July 1912, Freud was becoming aware of how dangerous and divisive Jung's phylogenetic hypothesis had become. By this time Jung had converted most of his Swiss-German and Christian colleagues to the notion that organic memories of ancestral impulses were more important than individual memories. "They are now doubting the influence of infantile complexes and are at the point of already appealing to racial differences in order to explain the theoretical disparity," Freud complained to Sandor Ferenczi on July 28, 1912. "Jung must now be in a florid neurosis. However this turns out, my intention of amalgamating Jews and goyim in the service of [psychoanalysis] seems now to have gone awry. They are separating like oil and water." [22]

Whether neurosis or psychosis was the true culprit, there is no doubt that the writing of Wandlungen resulted in a personal and spiritual change in Jung that he had not foreseen. When he finished part 2 in 1912 he was no longer a Freudian. Nor was he a Christian or a monotheist.

This was the beginning of an Aryan science of psychoanalysis in Zurich. It was the beginning of Jung's return to his Volk, and to the inner fatherland.

***

In September 1912, Jung gave a series of lectures at Fordham University in New York City in which he publicly distanced himself from Freud's exclusively sexual libido theory. At the same time, part 2 of Wandlungen appeared in a psychoanalytic journal. Freud read it, aghast. Here was not only proof of Jung's defection from the movement, but for the first time Freud began to realize that Jung's development of a theory of the unconscious based on racial or phylogenetic factors had swept him directly into some very dangerous cultural currents.

Part 2 begins innocently enough. Jung picks up the argument exactly where he had left off: solar mythology and sun worship. The prose here is even more expansive, exuberant, mystical. Something has clearly happened. Forgetting for a moment the psychoanalytic nature of the work, he waxes poetic on the first page in the language of a prophet or a religious mystic. And his reference to the sun as a symbol of the "visible god" of this world echoes the "Hymn to King Helios" of Julian the Apostate, using an image borrowed by pantheists -- including Giordano Bruno, Goethe, and Haeckel -- for centuries thereafter. Jung wrote:

The sun is, as Renen remarked, really the only rational representation of God, whether we take the point of view of the barbarians of other ages or that of the modern physical sciences .... [T]he sun is adapted as is nothing else to represent the visible God of this world. That is to say, that driving strength of our own soul, which we call libido .... That this comparison is no mere play of words is taught to us by the mystics. When by looking inwards (introversion) and going down into the depths of their own being they find "in their heart" the image of the Sun, they find their own love or libido, which with reason, I might say with physical reason, is called the Sun; for our source of energy and life is the Sun. Thus our life substance, as an energic process, is entirely Sun. [23]

To whom was Jung speaking when he used language like this?

In Wandlungen, Jung reflects his mastery of the nineteenth-century literatures on comparative philology and classical archeology. These interlocking disciplines were considered the jewels of German science. They were also the academic disciplines that legitimized the argument that there was scientific evidence for the vast cultural, linguistic, and biological differences between the Aryan and Semitic races.

It is from the science of comparative philology that the familiar cognitive categories of Indo-Aryan (now Indo-European) and Semitic arose. [24] In the first half of the nineteenth century, before the great advances in the experimental methods of the physical and biological sciences, the systematizing methods of philosophy and, in particular, philology were the models for all other sciences. Philology arose to prominence in Germany as a consequence of the intense cultural fascination that Germans had with all things Greek. As a politically fractured nation united only by Kultur, Germans looked to the culture of the ancient Greeks as the crowning achievement of the Aryan peoples and aspired to be their heirs. This Graecophilia, or "tyranny of Greece over Germany" (as scholars have termed it), provided a wealth of pagan "guiding fantasies" to the German Romantics and others throughout German culture. [25] Schoolchildren had to learn the sagas of Greek and Roman mythology as well as ancient German mythology before they could understand the poems of Goethe or Schiller that they had to memorize.

In MDR, Jung remembers being "forced to copy prints of Greek gods with sightless eyes" in drawing class. [26] Like thousands of others, Jung struggled through a classical education in which Greek and Latin played a significant role. Ernest Jones confessed in his memoirs, with no small embarrassment, that what struck him most about his initial contacts with Jung and Freud was their frequent and spontaneous quoting of "Latin and Greek passages by memory during their conversations and being astonished at my blank response." [27] The pagan gods resided in the unconsciousnesses of many educated Germans.

In the scientific search for the ultimate origins of the human race, comparative philologists played a central role in the decades before Darwin and Haeckel shifted the focus of this quest to evolutionary biology and ethnology. It was thought that by comparing and analyzing the similarities and the differences between languages that the original families of humankind could be identified. The Indo-Aryan group and the Semitic group were the most researched linguistic and cultural families in the nineteenth century.

Furthermore, comparative philologists such as Renan and Friedrich Max Muller -- the two men most responsible for bringing the cultural and linguistic (but not biological) differences between Aryans and Semites to scientific respectability -- believed that the very thoughts, feelings, and cultural (especially religious) beliefs of prehistoric groups could be determined through philological analysis. Philologists believed that everyday language contained living relics from our ancestors, as if the image of an event that happened millennia ago could still be fresh today if one could find the linguistic key to unlock the secret code to peer into the past.

Muller claimed to have found this key to wisdom. Jung borrowed it and applied it to the hallucinations and delusions and fantasies and dreams of his contemporaries. "When I finished [Wandlungen], I had a peculiarly lucid moment in which I surveyed my path as far as I had come," Jung recalled in 1925. "I thought: 'Now you have the key to mythology and you have the power to unlock all doors.'" [28] There is no way for us now to fully understand Jung's strange book or the basis of the racialist thought it is based on unless we first understand Jung's reliance on the works of Muller and his "solar mythologists."

From 1856 until his death, Muller and his solar mythologists developed a theory -- indeed, a "science" -- of mythology that dominated late-nineteenth-century thought. [29] As with Freudian psychoanalysis in the twentieth century, Muller's solar mythology was a totalizing world view and system of interpretation that claimed to find the ancient pagan gods of the sky and the sun alive and well in the very words we speak. "Why, every time we say 'Good morning' we commit a solar myth," said Muller. [30] He and his colleagues argued that the appearance and the disappearance of the sun and its worship as a source of life was the true basis of all mythological systems of the past, but particularly that of the Aryans, the race that they had studied most. Sun worship was the original natural religion of the ancient Aryan peoples. Since the Aryan races had occupied and dominated Europe for the past several thousand years, all native European pre-Christian religions could be traced back to the worship of the sun. This was true even in the Iranian, Indian, Greek, Roman, and Germanic civilizations that predated the first Aryan ones -- the "mythopoetic age," as Muller called it.

"Is everything the Dawn? Is everything the Sun?" Muller asked in a famous passage. "This question I had asked many times before it was addressed to me by others ... but I am bound to say that my own researches lead me again and again to the dawn and the sun as the chief burden of myths of the Aryan race." [31] To Muller, the sun god of the ancient Aryans was in the languages of their descendants.

To Jung, God was in the blood, and this was his rationale for seeking and finding solar myths in the symptoms of psychotic patients at the Burgholzli and in Miss Frank Miller, whom he regarded on the verge of psychosis even though he had never met her. In highly disturbed patients a biologically based disease process eroded the normal covering of repressive defense mechanisms, some of which he thought were biologically inherited in a quasi-Lamarckian fashion from centuries of civilization and Christianity. The erosion of the thick mask of defense mechanisms released archaic material from the deepest strata of the unconscious mind. Given that Jung and most of his patients were of Aryan stock -- a group, unlike the older and more "civilized" Semites, who had practiced their natural religion of the sun and the sky until Christianized only one thousand years ago -- it is no surprise that symbols of the sun arise again and again. This fact was consistent with the science of philology as he knew it from the books of Renan and Muller. It was also consistent with biology and race.

"He seems to be Christ himself"

Ernest Jones complained to Freud in December 1912 that "Jung is going to save the world, another Christ (with certainly anti-Semitism combined)." [32] Freud concurred. "I thank you for your very just remarks about Jung. In fact, he behaves like a perfect fool, he seems to be Christ himself, and in the particular things he says and does there is always something of the [rascal]." [33]

After the formal break in personal relations between the two men in January 1913, Zurich and Vienna never seemed so far apart. On June 8, Freud wrote to Ferenczi, "You are right. Our dear Swiss have gone crazy." Then, confirming that the source of tension in the movement emanated from a complex fusion of religion and racialism, he observed:

On the matter of Semitism: there are certainly great differences from the Aryan spirit. We can become convinced of that every day. Hence, there will surely be different worldviews and art here and there. But there should not be a particular Aryan or Jewish science. The results must be identical, and only their presentations may vary. Certainly my remark about the Interpretation of Dreams should be taken in this way. If these differences occur in conceptualizing the objective relations in science, then something is wrong. It was our desire not to interfere with their more distant world view and religion, but we considered ours to be quite favorable for conducting science. You had heard that Jung had declared in America that [psychoanalysis] was not a science but a religion. That would certainly illuminate the whole difference. But there the Jewish spirit regretted not being able to join in. [34]

By the end of 1913, however, Jung did not share Freud's enlightened opinion that there should not be a specifically Aryan or Jewish science. Psychoanalysis had to raise the consciousness of humanity to a higher level through a religious outlook. The only problem was that such a conception of psychoanalysis could no longer have a place for Jews.

The beginnings of an Aryan psychoanalysis

The last psychoanalytic congress that Jung attended -- the fourth, in 1913 in Munich, at which he was reelected president of the international movement -- confirmed the disintegration of old personal relationships and the birth of new alliances. One personal relationship that ended was the torrid extramarital affair between Lou Andreas-Salome and the Swedish physician and psychoanalyst Poul Carl Bjerre. They had met through a mutual friend during a visit to Sweden in 1911. Comparing him to her former lover, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Andreas-Salome noted in her private journal, "Both blonde haired, with sensuous mouths, splendid brows, otherwise rather different." [35]

Freud met Bjerre in January 1911 and reported to Jung that the Swede "is rather dry and laconic, but ... a thorough and serious thinker." [36] By 1916, in a book on the history of psychoanalysis and its techniques, Bjerre openly criticized Freud for exaggerating the importance of sexuality. [37] Although Bjerre helped to found the first Swedish psychoanalytic society, he nonetheless became persona non grata to Freud and the Viennese. Today his works have been forgotten everywhere but in Sweden.

After Bjerre confirmed that he was sympathetic to Jung's side in the war against Freud and the Viennese, their personal relationship heated up. On November 10, 1913, Jung wrote to Bjerre, complaining that Freud had recently attempted to discredit him. [38] Although we do not know exactly what Freud said to Maeder, Jung had sent a sharp letter of complaint to Freud about it on October 27. [39] Jung continued to complain to Bjerre about being accused of partisanship against the Viennese at the Munich congress and emphasized his wish to raise his efforts to a new level for the benefit of all. Yet the Viennese continue to be a sore point with him.

Near the end of the letter, Jung made a statement that reveals his inner thoughts and sets the tone for much of the way he conducted his own movement in the years that followed, years in which his movement took on the nature of an Aryans-only cult of redemption and rebirth. This is the first piece of hard evidence to surface regarding his racialist outlook during this early period in his career. To Poul Bjerre, Jung said simply: "Ich war zuvor kein Antisemit, jetzt werde ich es, glaube ich." [40]

"Until now I was no anti-Semite, [but] now I'll become one, I believe."

Sun worshipers in German Europe

Jung's massive hymn to the sun could not have come at a more opportune time in German cultural history. All around him, in places such as Bavaria, Thuringia, and Ascona, German-speaking youths were on the march. They were hiking, singing German folk songs, reading Novalis, Goethe, Haeckel, Wilhelm Bolsche, Hesse, and Madame Blavatsky, wearing swastika pendants and runic rings, bathing nude in the sun, and dancing around bonfires on the days of the summer solstice -- the ancient German festival of the "changing sun" (Sonnwendfest). They carried banners with the ancient Aryan "sun wheel" on them, a symbol of god that could be found in the ancient homelands of the Aryans -- Iran and especially India -- in the form of circular mandalas. And they sang hymns of praise to the sun.

Because of decades of Volkish speculation about the consequences of the work of philologists such as Muller and Renan, there was an extraordinary revival of interest in not only the symbolism of sun worship but also its practice. [41] The natural religion of the ancient Aryans -- and indeed, of all humans if one were to speculate far enough -- was revived by a multitude of groups all over Germany, Austria, and especially Switzerland, where cults and heretical sects had blossomed for centuries. Some actually performed group rituals in honor of the sun.

But sun worship was just one element in a confused mass of cultural contradictions that beset Germany in the three decades preceding the First World War. From the racialist right to the anarchist left a culture of "progressive reaction" against industrial capitalism was on the rise. All of the values that formed the foundation of the industrial order -- repressive Judeo-Christian antihedonism, utilitarianism, and rational thought -- were confronted with new philosophies of life or of pure experiences that exalted myth over history, impulsive action or deed over conscious reflection, and feeling or intuition over rational thought. This progressive reaction, as historian Jost Hermand has termed it, was manifest in a profound sense of loss, a sense that a spiritual connection with nature and the cosmos had been sacrificed with the rise of a more highly mechanized, industrialized, and urbanized civilization. [42]

Much of the sense of loss was expressed in metaphors of degeneration and decay. Civilization had ruined human beings by forcing them into unnatural, cramped, urban environments. Diseases physical and mental were hatched in some places, and the medical science of the day believed that such damage to an individual could be passed down to successive generations. Racial renewal, whether for the individual or society as a whole, was associated with new attitudes toward sexuality and eroticism. There was a cry to recover the Volk -- that mystical union of a people with its blood and landscape -- from the degenerate industrialized masses. The iron cage of "civilization" -- Judeo-Christian beliefs and other political and value systems -- had to be cast off in order to recover true culture, the primordial ground of the soul, the Volk. There was only one solution: recover the "archaic man" within, allowing a rejuvenating return to the chthonic powers of the Edenic, Aryan past. [43]

It is no coincidence that these same ideas are expressed time and again by C. G. Jung, especially in the first sixty years of his life.

The multifaceted Volkish movement (Volkstumbewegung) had a broad plan for Germanic society: at the individual level, the taking of cures, abstinence from alcohol, nudism, vegetarianism, the eating of health foods, contact with the ancestors through spiritualist practices, and hiking through Nature were all remedies to erase the sense of profound loss that so many suffered. At the level of culture, a cleansing of the Aryan race through eugenics and deportations was proposed.

Inspired by Herder, Schleiermacher, Ernst Mortiz Arndt, and Turnvater Jahn [Friedrich Ludwig Jahn], throughout the nineteenth century the movement grew increasingly influential as the Germans sought their place in the sun. After German unification in 1871, Volkish energies fueled the establishment of a multitude of lodges, clubs, societies, and so on, all devoted to spiritual renewal. Some of these groups were motivated by blood mysticism and fantasies of reform through a return to the worship of the old Aryan gods.

As early as 1814, Arndt had proposed a return to the celebration of the summer solstice as a way to return politically fragmented Germans to their cultural and religious roots. It was left to future leaders to bring his dream into reality. Eugen Diederichs, the famous Jena publisher of many of the new texts of this mystical, Volkish, neoromantic movement, was one of them. He personally led sun-worshiping rituals with his youth-movement disciples beginning in 1904, expressing the beliefs of so many of them when he said, "My view of god is this, that I regard the sun as a source of all life." [44] The youth organization of the Monistenbund -- inspired and led by Haeckel -- sponsored sun-worshiping festivals each summer solstice. Haeckel himself was not a practicing neopagan but loved the spirit of the movement. In 1910, the year Jung got lost in sun-hero myths while researching Wandlungen, a Monistenbund journal reproduced this hymn to the sun:

We are all children of the sun. Out of its womb our planet was born. An eternal law of nature compels us to be within its sphere and influence. The immensity of space is cold, still, lifeless -- our luminous mother sun, warming and ripening our fruit, appears as the simple, true element of life. Our ancestors knew this in ancient times. Thus their justifiable joy when the sun made its slow victorious spiral across the sky. They then remembered that all those trees, which concealed their greenness in the wintertime, were consecrated to the god, Wotan. [45]

Others wanted a Wagnerian twist to their Volkish neopaganism. They gathered in bearskins and made ritual sacrifices of animals to Wotan, Thor, Baldur, and other Teutonic deities. They studied the symbols of the ancient Norse runes and took visionary journeys to meet with members of an ancient spiritual brotherhood. There were dozens of groups like these, large and small. They convinced themselves that they were chosen, like the grail knights in Wagner's Parsifal, to seek and protect the Holy Grail -- in this case, the spiritual purity of Aryan blood. The most famous of these was the Tannenberg Foundation of General Erich Ludendorff, war hero and, later, a coconspirator in Adolf Hitler's failed putsch in 1923. The symbol of Ludendorff's organization was the hammer of Thor. Like many in German culture at the turn of the century, Ludendorff wanted to eradicate Christianity and replace it with an Aryan faith. As one commentator on the neopagan movement in Germany revealed, "In line with the Tannenberg program for the restoration of the ancient Germanic religion, General Ludendorff, accompanied by a few young men, would from time to time retire to the forests near Munich, where a bonfire was lighted and a horse sacrificed in honor of Thor, the god of thunder." [46]

Jung was aware of these groups, but it is unlikely that he participated in any of them. After 1913, Jung rarely deviated from the role of the chieftain of his own tribe in Kusnacht and Zurich. But the cult participation of his clinical associates and of the patients they treated in hospital wards and in their consulting rooms, is an open question.

"An attempt to use old cults to achieve new religious possibilities"

On the bohemian circuit and around the world, Jung's Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido was such a countercultural success that in the years following the German edition of 1912 and the English translation of 1916 (under the title Psychology of the Unconscious), Jung began to receive spiritual pilgrims from around the world who came to him to help them experience the mythic layers of their own unconscious minds.

For Franziska Grafin zu Reventlow [Fanny zu Reventlow], whom Ludwig Klages called a "pagan saint," the Schwabing-to-Ascona counterculture was "a spiritual movement, a niveau, a direction, a protest, a new cult, or rather an attempt to use old cults to achieve new religious possibilities." [47] "Fanny," as she was called, was a friend and possibly a lover of Otto Gross, and the author of a thinly veiled autobiographical novel known as Herrn Dames Aufzeichnungen. It was written during the period (December 1911 to summer 1912) that Jung was working on part 2 of Wandlungen, and was first published in 1913. As Jung's dreams swirled with images of Dionysus and the terrible Great Mother Goddess and sun heroes such as Siegfried, Fanny Reventlow sat at her desk and called forth an entire decade of personal experiences. In the magic theater of her mind she witnessed the passionate discussions in the cafes of Schwabing over the mystical nature of race and blood -- carriers of the "primordial pagan substances" that emerged in the dreams of modern individuals. [48] These were times in which Dionysian bacchantes and Bachofenian hetaira were reincarnated in young women who walked the streets of Munich and danced naked in the sacred groves of Ascona. She remembered pagan costume balls during Fasching and ritual sacrifices to the Great Mother Goddess.

Is it just a coincidence that Jung was obsessed with these very issues at the very same point in history? Is it just a coincidence that this is the time when Jung, too, became a pagan who said the old gods were still alive within us?

The new pagans' artistic prophet was Karl Hoppner, better known as Fidus. [49] More than any other artist, Fidus captured the youthful spirit of the counterculture. In Theosophical journals, in Simplicissimus and Jugend, on postcards and posters, his breathtaking sun-worshiping images seemed to be everywhere in the first quarter of the century. Nude, long-haired, blond young Aryans -- sometimes wearing jewelry made of Runic symbols or swastikas -- looked skyward and raised their arms to the sun. The image most often associated with Fidus -- the motif of the Lichtgebet (Prayer to the light), based on the Norse so-called Lebensrune or "life rune" -- depicts a nude man, legs together, arm upraised in a Y-shaped posture.

Fidus's images tell us much about the neopagan culture in German Europe at the turn of the century. Aryanist sun-worshiping imagery, runic symbols, swastikas, and towering pillars of fire are synthesized with male and female figures, often nude, who symbolized the great cosmic principles of the Masculine and the Feminine. Typically there are polar opposites united within or just under a circle that symbolizes god as the sun -- the primordial ground of all being. In one book illustration by Fidus from 1897, the Masculine and the Feminine are united in a Janus-like bust depicting the Aryan ideals of male and female beauty. This syzygy, this union of opposites, is surrounded by solar rays and crowned by an encircled swastika, a solar symbol of regeneration and eternal recurrence. Fidus contributed this and other similar illustrations to a series of publications by the Berlin Theosophist Max Ferdinand Sebaldt von Werth on the sexual magic and sexual religion of the ancient Aryans. [50] The Aryanist and occultist theory popular in bohemian circles was that the universe had been created from a primordial fiery chaos out of which the first two principles to emerge were the Masculine and the Feminine. Only from the eternal tension between these opposites, the eternal joining and separating of the two, could the creative force, the primal energy of the sun or fire be released. On the individual level, only the integration of the Masculine and Feminine principles within the soul could restore the connection with the internal solar fire. In the writings of Sebaldt and other Volkish mystics, this blazing primal energy was also associated with the blood. Therefore, to release the creative potential of an entire race, eugenics would be necessary to create pure prototypical Aryan males and females who could then produce progressively superior progeny.

-- The Occult Significance of Blood, by Rudolf Steiner

Except for the explicit advocacy of eugenics, all these symbols and themes appear in Wandlungen and form the metaphoric core of Jung's theory of psychological types, his famous concepts of the anima and the animus, and his ideas concerning the structure and dynamics of the psyche.

Among the Asconans who read Jung -- particularly Wandlungen -- and who were treated by him or his assistants in Zurich were Hermann Hesse and Rudolph von Laban. Laban had read Wandlungen and shared it with his colony of Dionysian dancers in Ascona, including Mary Wigman, who would develop an intellectual passion for psychoanalytic literature. Her "Witches' Dance" spooked audiences in Munich and thrilled pagans in Ascona. The occultist Aleister Crowley also briefly passed through Ascona, read Psychology of the Unconscious, and found it useful inspiration for his own writings on ritual magic. [51]

During the war years, and especially after 1916 when word had spread about the new bohemian twist analytical psychology had taken in Zurich, Asconans flooded the consulting rooms of Jung's colleagues. In the creative container that Jung said a therapy session should be, they revealed their dreams and their drawings, their poems and their dances. They were pagans and welcomed for their paganism. In the cafes of Zurich, they gossiped about their analysts, wildly analyzed one another's dreams, offered one another the latest Theosophical or Anthroposophical publications, shared coffee, cocaine, and encouragement.

The prose of Jung's Hymn to the Sun radiated from the pages of his book with a power that could seduce the spiritually hungry. Jung wrote with conviction derived from a personal experience so tremendous, so cosmic, that he could arouse the desire of others to want it, too. But what exactly was this electrifying experience?

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PART 1 OF 2

Chapter 7: The Story of Deification

Awe surrounds the mysteries, particularly the mystery of deification. This was one of the most important of the mysteries. It gave the immortal value to the individual -- it gave certainty of immortality. One gets a peculiar feeling from being put through such an initiation.
-- C. G. Jung, June 8, 1925

There is a significant, deliberate omission from Jung's alleged autobiography. [1] The information Aniela Jaffe left out of Memories, Dreams, Reflections is crucial to understanding Jung, the metaphors he chose for his method of psychotherapy, and the early development of analytical psychology. Indeed, it forms the core of his "personal myth," elements of which he kept secret but that can now be revealed with a contextual analysis of this important material.

Aniela Jaffe based the chapter in MDR known as "Confrontation with the Unconscious" on "a number of passages from a seminar delivered from March to July 1925 in which Jung spoke for the first time of his inner development." [2] (By then Jung delivered his lectures entirely in English.) Extensive notes were kept and typed by Cary F. de Angulo, checked for accuracy by Jung, and then, in November 1925, copied and distributed to the seminar participants. But until a published edition of the complete seminar notes appeared in 1989, those wishing to read this remarkable document needed at least one hundred hours of "approved" analysis and the permission of one's analyst.

What could have been so important in Cary de Angulo's notes that Jaffe chose to keep it out of MDR and that it was kept from many of Jung' s own disciples for more than sixty years? Why were the secrets about Jung that it contained considered forbidden fruit for so long?

What is missing is an entire episode from Jung's life, and arguably the most important one.

In December 1913, Jung deliberately and repeatedly induced trance states using methods he had learned from his experience with spiritualism. This technique, which he would later call "active imagination," sparked a series of intense visionary experiences that Jung interpreted as his direct mystical initiation into one of the most ancient of the pagan mystery cults of the Hellenistic world.

Jung became an initiate into this brotherhood during an extraordinary epiphany.

His head changed into that of a lion and he became a god. He became the Deus Leontocephalus, the lion-headed god whose image is found in the sanctuaries of the mystery cult of Mithras (first to fourth centuries C.E.). Jung became a god known to us as Aion.

Near the end of his life Jung published a book in 1951 on "the phenomenology of the self" named after this god, with a striking frontispiece photograph of Deus Leontocephalus. We can only conclude that throughout his life Jung must have been haunted by the mystery of his initiation. To him it was the revelation of his secret self, of the god within, of the great and unspeakable mystery of the imago dei.

After Jung underwent the mystery of deification in December 1913, his personal and professional life changed markedly. Within a few months he resigned from the presidency of the psychoanalytic movement and withdrew from his lecturer position at the university. He maintained his private practice in Kusnacht, and his sexual relationship with Toni Wolff intensified. He continued his visionary explorations and researches into mythology and the history of religion. He gathered his core disciples around him and gave them special lectures on "complex psychology," psychological types, and mythology. By 1916, he began to teach his disciples that analysis was an initiation into the mysteries of the impersonal, the transpersonal, or the collective unconscious. By 1917, he transformed the imaginal entities he met in his visions into elements of his new poetic brand of analytical psychoanalysis.

He developed a model for his movement that set him apart from all other forms of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, or any other secular form of healing. Jung based the social and psychotherapeutic practices of the "Zurich school" on the ancient mystery cults of the Hellenistic world. From Jung, his disciples learned to participate in the most ancient of mysteries, whose roots reached back into the mythopoetic age.

The defining moment in the secret story of Jung's life and movement happened the day that he was deified. We need to understand why this is so and understand the deeper significance of Jung's own interpretation of the ancient mysteries. Stripping away the false mask of idealization constructed by his disciples reveals the dark face of the god he had truly become.

"Why do you worship me?"

At the very heart of MDR is the chapter "Confrontation with the Unconscious." [3] For many of his modern readers who regard MDR as a gospel or a new spiritual dispensation, this chapter is the holiest of holies. The stories of Jung's visionary journeys of December 1913 and his additional prophetic visions and dreams subtly model the process of transformation that Jung considered necessary before one could truly become an individual. The chapter offers the promise of such magical experiences to others. He insists that such an ordeal is dangerous and that not everyone can survive it. But the official version of Jung's 1913 visions leaves out the most important ingredient in the recipe for individuation, the experience that all of his therapeutic techniques were designed to bring about: a new experience of god through one's own self-deification.

Let us now compare Jaffe's version in MDR with Jung's own confession in a 1925 seminar. Jaffe's version is taken largely from the brief remarks Jung made at the end of the lectures on May 11 and June 1, 1925. Jung induced a dissociative altered state of conscious and made a visionary "descent" into the unconscious, which he refers to as the Land of the Dead. Once in this other realm, he met an old man with a white beard and a young girl who was blind. The old man introduced himself as Elijah. Jung was "shocked" to learn that the girl was named Salome. Elijah assured him that this couple "had been together since eternity." With them was a large black snake, which had an affinity for Jung. "I stuck close to Elijah because he seemed to be the most reasonable of the three, and to have a clear intelligence. Of Salome I was distinctly suspicious." [4]

In the fall seminar notes, Jung amplified these figures with references to motifs in mythology and symbolism. He explained that the snake is associated with hero myths. Salome is "an anima figure." Elijah represents "the wise old prophet," and "a factor of intelligence and knowledge." But, Jung added, "it is very much better to leave these experiences as they are, namely as events, experiences." [5]

One point on which these two versions diverge is the important figure of Philemon, Jung's imaginal guru. In MDR, he reveals that this figure, a "pagan" having "an Egypto-Hellenistic atmosphere with a gnostic coloration," developed out of the Elijah figure in subsequent fantasies. [6] Besides covering almost an entire wall in Jung's hermetic Tower at Bollin gen, images of the wise old Philemon grace the illuminated manuscript pages of Jung's secret transformation diary, the "Red Book." Philemon is not mentioned in the 1925 seminar.

Jung's initial voyage into the underworld was followed by a second: the long suppressed story of Jung's deification.

Jung told his audience that "a few evenings later, I felt that I should continue. So again I tried to follow the same procedure, but it would not descend. I remained on the surface." [7] He felt it was an "inner conflict" that prevented him from going down. After resolving this, he felt he could go on.

Jung looked about him. He saw Elijah on a rocky ridge, a ring of boulders, which he thought was a "Druidic sacred place." Inside, the old man climbed up on a mounded Druidic altar, and then both Elijah and the altar began to shrink while the walls grew larger. Jung noticed a tiny woman, "like a doll," who turned out to be Salome. He also saw a miniature snake and a house.

The walls around Jung kept growing. Suddenly he realized that he had been descending. "I was in the underworld," he said.

When they all reached bottom Elijah smiled at him and said, "Why, it is just the same, above or below."

Then it happened.

"Salome became very interested in me, and she assumed I could cure her blindness. She began to worship me. I said, 'Why do you worship me?' She replied, 'You are Christ.'"

Jung objected. But Salome persisted. She insisted that he was Christ.

Jung told her, "'This is madness,'" and he said that he "became filled with skeptical resistance." But events would soon prove she was right.

Then I saw the snake approach me. She came close and began to encircle me and press me in her coils. These coils reached up to my heart. I realized as I struggled that I had assumed the attitude of the crucifixion. In the agony and the struggle, I sweated so profusely that the water flowed down on all sides of me. Then Salome rose, and she could see. While the snake was pressing me, I felt that my face had taken on the face of an animal of prey, a lion or tiger. [8]

Jung then offered to his stunned audience some rather formulaic interpretations of his experiences in terms of his type theory. But in a meaningful shift of focus that must have taken only a few minutes during the spoken lecture, Jung then compared his experience with those of the ancient mysteries. "You cannot get conscious of these unconscious facts without giving yourself to them .... These images have so much reality that they recommend themselves, and such extraordinary meaning that one is caught. They form part of the ancient mysteries; in fact, it is such figures that made the mysteries."

Jung's interpretation here is clear: his visions were an initiatory experience into the mysteries of pagan antiquity. These mystery cults provided all the symbols of transformation necessary for a personal renewal or rebirth. Further, they were at the deepest level of the unconscious mind, available to one and all who wished to descend to the ancestral unconscious or to go on a heroic "night sea journey" through its murky depths. The gods awaited one there.

The climax of the initiation into the mysteries, however, was the "mystery of deification," which gave "certainty of immortality." Jung's statement of his own deification is remarkable:

One gets a peculiar feeling from being put through such an initiation. The important part that led up to the deification was the snake's encoiling of me. Salome's performance was deification. The animal face which I felt mine transformed into was the famous [Deus] Leontocephalus of the Mithraic Mysteries. It is the figure which is represented with a snake coiled around the man, the snake's head resting on the man's head, and the face of the man that of the lion. This statue has only been found in mystery grottoes (the underchurches, the last remnants of the catacombs). The catacombs were not originally places of concealment, but were chosen as symbolical of a descent into the underworld. [9]

After presenting a few historical details concerning Mithraism, Jung told his audience: "It is almost certain that the symbolical rite of deification played a part in these mysteries." He then identified the Leontocephalus as "Aion, or the eternal being," which, he said, was derived from an Iranian deity whose name means "the infinitely long duration."

He described a museum piece he had once seen, a Mithraic amphora that bore the image of a flame with a lion on one side and a snake on the other. To him, these were to be interpreted psychologically as "opposites of the world trying to come together with the reconciling symbol between them." Significantly, "The lion is the young, hot, dry July sun in the culmination of light, the summer. The serpent is humidity, darkness, the earth, winter."

Jung closed this remarkable lecture with a return to the initiatory climax of deification in the ancient mysteries: "In this deification mystery you make yourself into the vessel, and are a vessel of creation in which the opposites reconcile."

An unidentified person in the audience then asked Jung the date of this "dream," and Jung replied, "December 1913. All this is Mithraic symbolism from beginning to end." [10]

***

Before we can understand the true meaning of Jung's initiation, some questions must be answered: What did Jung have in mind when he spoke of the ancient mysteries? How did he come to the notion that, at the absolute climax of the initiatory rites of these ancient mystery cults, the humble human initiate becomes a god? What were the Mithraic mysteries and why would Jung entertain the fantasy of becoming an initiate into them? What was the most likely source of these remarkable visions? Why were the mysteries of Mithras such an important model for his own circle of disciples in Zurich? And what did it mean when Jung mixed Christian and pagan elements in his own deified self?

To find these answers, we must leave our narrative and enter a lost world of fin-de-siecle classical scholarship, which reflected a mentality quite different from our own.

Jung's sources on the ancient mysteries

Perhaps it is best to explore first the most probable source of the contents of Jung's initiation. In the spring of 1925, after Jung finally revealed the story of his 1913 visionary descent to the Land of the Dead and his meetings with otherworldly entities, he said to his audience: "I had read much mythology before this fantasy came to me, and all of this reading entered into the condensation of these figures." [11]

Is Jung inadvertently admitting here that cryptomnesia played a role in generating the content of his visionary experiences and dreams? Is it possible that these experiences were more personal than transpersonal, more mundane than mystical?

Jung's years of maturation were characterized by an unusually potent convergence of familial and cultural preoccupations with the spirituality of Aryan antiquity, with heredity, evolution, memory, the superiority of direct experience or intuition over reason, and the direct contact with ancestors or the Dead. Like many in Jung's generation, becoming a "modern" meant questioning the very foundations of one's bourgeois-Christian identity and even rejecting it.

Jung, of course, knew the general aspects of the ancient Hellenistic mystery cults before he became obsessed with archeology and mythology following his trip to America in September 1909. But much of his imaginings about the rituals of these cults came from the work of six scholars, four of whom were his contemporaries. All of the metaphors Jung later used to describe his theories and methods of treatment and the otherworldly terrain of the collective unconscious and its archetypes had their basis in this literature.

Nietzsche

As a medical student in the 1890s, Jung absorbed the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, who was a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel before turning to philosophy. From him Jung first became intoxicated with the mysteries of blood and sexuality and underground initiation in the ancient cults of Dionysus. Nietzsche was also the source of Jung' s first fascination with Zoroastrianism and ancient Iranian spirituality via his depiction of the prophet Zarathustra in Also Sprach Zarathustra, which Jung later claimed was a record of "one of the first attempts in modern times to come back to the immediate, individual initiation." [12]

Creuzer

If there can be said to be one central, non-mystical source of Jung's concepts of the phylogenetic and collective unconscious it is the writings of Friedrich Creuzer, who was a professor of ancient literature at Heidelberg University in the nineteenth century. [13] On November 8, 1909, Jung wrote to Freud, "Now I am reading the four volumes of old Creuzer, where there is a huge mass of material." [14]

Creuzer's four-volume Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Volker besonders der Griechen, originally published between 1810 and 1812, was the first truly comprehensive scholarly source in German for information concerning the spirituality of antiquity, especially about the Greco-Roman mystery cults. As a result, it contained information that was widely disseminated throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Central to Creuzer's work was a hypothesis on which much German scholarship in the nineteenth century was based; namely, that Greek mythology was the best paradigm through which to study all pagan religions', regardless of which part of the world they were from. And Creuzer, like so many others, believed that Greek mythology was a corruption of a prehistoric spiritual worldview, the Urreligion of all human beings that had existed for thousands of years before languages and cultures diverged. Creuzer (as Bachofen and Blavatsky and so many others) was convinced that a careful study of the surviving artifacts of pagan antiquity could reveal key elements of the hidden "secret doctrine" of the prehistoric ancestors of us all. Jung shared their views and made Creuzer's work required reading for his assistants. Thus, Creuzer's personal biases framed the type of mythological data collected from the delusions, hallucinations, and dreams of institutionalized patients with psychotic disorders. They also framed the type of material that would be ignored as well, because as dutiful assistants Honegger, Spielrein, and Nelken would disregard anything that wasn't "mythological" in the sense that Creuzer (and Jung) maintained.

Albrecht Dieterich

Beginning in the 1890s, there was a renaissance in classical archeology. No doubt reflecting the intellectual climate of the fin de siecle, classicists became interested in the ancient mystery cults and their special brand of personal religion. In part, this new scholarship reflected a cultural interest in the irrational and the experiential, but it also reflected the tremendous interest in ancient mysteries that was stimulated after 1875 by Madame Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society. Blavatsky claimed to have been an initiate into the mysteries of the goddess Isis, and the social structure of the Theosophical movement was set up, like the Freemasons, as a step-by-step process of initiation into ancient occult wisdom. This new scholarship on the ancient mysteries was a method of scientifically investigating the reality of these cults.

Jung borrowed extensively from Albrecht Dieterich. Dieterich's books on the ancient Gnostic god known as Abraxas, on the heroic "night sea journey," on the cult of Mother Earth, and on a fragment from the Greek Magical Papyri known as the Mithraic Liturgy all provided Jung with numerous metaphors that are familiar to Jungians today, [15] It is probably from Dieterich's book on the Mithraic Liturgy that Jung derived his conviction that an initiation into the mysteries of Mithras involved a selfdeification process. Dieterich identifies as central liturgical images of the Mithraic mysteries the mystical union of "man in god and god in man" and the unio mystica (erotic union) of humans with a god.

No one reads Albrecht Dieterich today, but he clearly must be remembered when we attempt to reconstruct the hidden history of C. G, Jung and find the original sources of so many of his ideas.

Richard Reitzenstein and Franz Cumont

In the introduction to his book Ancient Mystery Cults, Walter Burkert, a classical philologist and a leading contemporary authority on ancient Greek religion, credits Richard Reitzenstein and Franz Cumont for "setting the pace" of scholarship on the Hellenistic mysteries at the turn of the century. [16] Of the two, the Belgian scholar Cumont was far more of an influence on Jung. [17] Cumont was not only an authority on the Mithraic mysteries but also on the use of astrology in antiquity. However, he is most famous for his writings on the Mithraic cult, and they were a seminal influence on Jung. [18]

K.H.E. De Jong

Perhaps the most forgotten of the scholars whom Jung absorbed during his intense period of mythological studies was the Dutch classicist Karel Hendrik Eduard De Jong. De Jong, a lecturer at the University of Leiden, produced a book in 1909 that is one of the long-lost classics of the literature on Hellenistic mysteries, Das Antike Mysterienwesen in religionsgeschichtlicher, ethnologischer und psychologischer Beleuchtung (The ancient mysteries in light of the history of religion, ethnology, and psychology). [19] This book fascinated Jung, and with good reason: it was a detailed dissertation offering ethnological and psychological interpretations of the experiential phenomena reported by initiates into the ancient mysteries. While reading it, one cannot but be struck by how close De Jong is to the spirit of the works that Jung began producing with Wandlungen (in which he cites De Jong).

De Jong's book is a masterpiece of interdisciplinary scholarship, and when it appeared no other work on the ancient mysteries quite like it existed. After reviewing the major Hellenistic mystery cults (those of Eleusis, Isis, Mithras, and Dionysus), he addressed the classical literature on Egyptian and Greek magic. However, the bulk of the book is devoted to his explanation of the extraordinary initiatory experiences of the ancient mysteries in terms of modern phenomena. De Jong was fascinated with the literature on altered states of consciousness, and he reviewed the clinical literature on hypnosis and hysteria to find clues to the behavior of the ancients. He made use of the occultist literature of Theosophy and the literature on psychical research (especially the accounts of the spiritualistic trance performances of mediums). De Jong even cited Jung's 1902 doctoral dissertation concerning Helly Preiswerk. [20] He explored the phenomena of spiritual disciplines and occult sciences such as yoga and the Kabbalah and mined the ethnographic literature on primitive cultures in Africa, Asia, Australia, and North and South America for clues to their religious use of trances, especially by shamans.

In short, De Jong's book was a major stimulus for Jung's own syncretization of psychoanalysis, psychology, spiritualism, primitive religion, and Hellenistic mysteries in the theories he developed after 1913. Jung differed from De Jong in that he turned these insights into a claim about the nature of reality and developed techniques that enabled his patients and colleagues to directly experience the transformative power of the mysteries.

But what exactly were the mysteries?

Mysteria

Mysteria were the secrets of eternity imparted through initiation into a particular mystery cult of the Greco-Roman or Hellenistic world (fourth century B.C.E. to fourth century C.E.). Each mystery cult based the form of its rites of initiation on the narrative elements in its hieros logos, or "sacred myth," the central story of its divinity or divinities. This mystery-cult legend usually involved heroic wanderings by the cult divinity that were then ritually reenacted in public processions (such as the majestic state-sponsored procession from Athens to Eleusis) or in dancing (such as by the maenads in the Dionysian mysteries).

Whether the initiation was into the mysteries of Dionysus, Eleusis (the Greek site where Demeter and Persephone resided), the Great Mother, Isis, Mithras, Sabazios, or the Kabeiroi, the goal was essentially the same: the spiritual and psychological transformation, rebirth, or renewal of the initiate and the opportunity for a better life through direct contact with a transcendent realm of gods, sometimes through a ritual descent to the underworld. This underworld was the Land of the Dead, the realm of the ancestors, or, according to nineteenth-century German Volkish scholars, the "inner fatherland." As many twentieth-century classical scholars have suggested, the initiation into the ancient mysteries was a form of personal religion and served a special psychotherapeutic function in the pagan world. [21]

According to Walter Burkert, "Mysteries were initiation rituals of a voluntary, personal and secret character that aimed at a change of mind through an experience of the sacred .... [They] were a form of personal religion, depending on a private decision and aiming at some form of salvation through closeness to the divine." [22] Participation in the mysteries was not obligatory or unavoidable, unlike participation in organized religions as we know them. "Mysteries are to be seen as a special form of worship offered in the larger context of religious practice .... Mystery initiations were an optional activity within polytheistic religion, comparable to, say, a pilgrimage to Santiago di Compostela within the Christian system," explains Burkert. [23]

Mystery initiations were rites of passage during which the initiate became separated (symbolically and physically) from normal social interactions or norms of behavior. During the initiatory process, the candidate was regarded first as in a marginal, threshold state in which the boundaries between the sacred and the profane were blurred. Later, the initiate passed through an aggregation or "reincorporation" stage. [24] He or she then re gained community rights and obligations of a clearly defined type that were commensurate with the new identity. What changed for the initiate was his or her personal status vis-a-vis a particular deity, not necessarily his or her social position. In many instances the initiations could be repeated in a process of continual rebirth. This was true for the Eleusinian mysteries, for the many centers of the mysteries of Dionysus, and every twenty years or so for the mysteries of the Great Mother.

By seeing the mysteries or having them revealed, the passage is made from one state of being to another. In the words of an individual who had seen the mysteries of Eleusis, "I came out of the Mystery Hall feeling like a stranger to myself." But what these initiates actually saw is itself a mystery, for secrecy was the essential element of these cults, and history attests that the ancients were able to keep secrets to a remarkable degree.

Although the mysteries conveyed to the initiates a sense of a better life, particularly in the underworld, the ancient mysteries were not religions of salvation because they were not religions as we know them. Burkert notes insightfully that "the constant use of Christianity as a reference system when dealing with the so-called mystery religions leads to distortions as well as partial clarification, obscuring the often radical difference between the two." [25] Cumont and Reitzenstein were particularly guilty of this form of distortion. Cumont once referred to the "loss" of the "liturgical books of paganism" as the most regrettable one in the "great shipwreck" that lost so much of the literature of antiquity. Reitzenstein likewise believed that these "oriental religions" were bound together by shared, systematized articles of faith. Although each of the mystery cults was based on a central myth, perhaps even kept in a written form along with sacred ritual instruments in a cista mystica ("secret casket"), there is no evidence that such binding credos or pagan theological works ever existed. [26]

Yet the ancient pagan mysteries continued to occupy the imagination of humankind in an only nominal Christian Europe. Throughout the centuries their symbols and initiatory rites, their gods and goddesses, daemons and genii all found their way into the occult underground in the traditions of Gnosticism, Hermeticism, alchemy, astrology, the Kabbalah, the Tarot, ritual or ceremonial magic, Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, and especially in the occult revivals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They live on in the works of C. G. Jung and those who practice therapy in-his name.

The Hellenistic mysteries

Most of Jung's scholarship on the ancient mysteries began in earnest in October 1909, and the understanding of them that he carried throughout his life was based on the classical scholarship available around that time. Like most scholars, he read specific literatures in phases throughout his life as his interests changed. Based on his published correspondence, his bibliographic references, and the dates of publication of the books in his personal library, we know that Jung read very little new material on the Hellenistic mystery cults after 1912 or so. Instead, he read more widely in the literature on Gnosticism (primarily the works of the Theosophist G.R.S. Mead), [27] the patristic Christian literature, and ancient Germanic mythology and religion. By the late 1920s, Jung's dominant interest was alchemy, and in his later works alchemical metaphors replace those of Hellenistic mysteria that characterized his earlier thought. However, he integrated the core themes of the ancient mysteries into his alchemical studies, believing not only that the symbols were similar, but that both the mysteries and alchemy were, at their core, secret, underground, anti-orthodox Christian spiritual movements that promised individual redemption and rebirth.

Jung studied the ancient Hellenistic mysteries as precursors to the vitalistic movements of his day in which direct experience and the development of intuition were paramount over mere reason. Neither the details of public ritual processions, nor the political, social, and economic context of the Hellenistic mystery cults were of any major interest to him. This fact is indicative of Jung' s whole approach to the scholarship of others that he used in his own works. These external details were unnecessary historical facts that hid the true, living, eternal essence of the mysteries. Mystery, not history, was the bread of life.

The aspects of the ancient mysteries that did interest Jung were the initiates' reports of the direct experience of a transcendental realm of gods and the cryptic symbolism associated with such extraordinary experiences. He was particularly fond of a famous passage in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius in which he reported the climax of his initiation into the mysteries of Isis. The passage below reveals the passion for secrecy in the mysteries:

You would probably inquire quite eagerly, attentive reader, what was then said and done. I would tell you, if it were lawful; you would get to know all, were it lawful for you to hear. But both ear and tongue would incur equal guilt through such daring curiosity. Yet you are probably racked by religious longing, so I shall not torture you with prolonged anguish. Listen, then, but believe, for my account is true: I approached the boundary of death and treading on Proserpine's threshold, I was carried through all the elements, after which I returned. I saw the sun flashing brightly in the middle of the night [nocte media vidi solem]. I approached close to the gods above and the gods below and worshipped them face to face. Behold, I have related things about which you remain in ignorance, though you have heard them.

Therefore I shall recount only what can be communicated without guilt to the understanding of the uninitiated. [28]

Here we find a motif that greatly interested Jung: the image of a sun (or a star) in the depths as the central image of the god within.

Imagining Mithras

Jung's view of Mithraism was largely Cumont's Christianized one: Mithras was an ancient Iranian solar god (like Helios) and a god of correct behavior and order (like Apollo). He is referred to as Sol Invictus, the "invincible sun." Mithraism had survived from the old dualist Mazdean religion of ancient Persia but adapted itself to the Roman empire. Though only men could participate in these mysteries, Mithraism's wide geographical spread "from the banks of the Black Sea to the mountains of Scotland to the borders of the great Sahara Desert" could mean that it was the main rival to Christianity. [29] Cumont thought this was true because both rose in prominence at about the same time. Indeed, he argued, if historical events had gone a little differently, the Western world would be Mithraic and not Judeo-Christian today. There was perhaps even a voluminous Mithraic Liturgy akin to that of the Christian church, but it did not survive antiquity.

There were seven grades to the Mithraic mystery initiations, and they involved sacramental feasts at which bread and water were consecrated and at which blood was offered as a sacrifice in ceremonies involving priests in robes who offered prayers, sang hymns, and rang bells -- as in the Roman Catholic church -- at the holiest moment of the ritual: the unveiling of the ubiquitous image of Mithras killing a bull, the tauroctony. [30] Indeed, practically all of the elements of Mithraism that Jung refers to over his lifetime can be found in the chapter of Cumont's The Mysteries of Mithras entitled "The Mithraic Liturgy, Clergy, and Devotees."

Recent scholars have called into question almost all of Cumont's basic assumptions about the Iranian origins and "sacramental" ceremonies of Mithraism. Using the same archeological and textual evidence that Cumont compiled, while hunting down new evidence and deducing new theories, Mithraic scholars now offer very different interpretations of the mysteries. The main difficulty is simple: although there is a wealth of archeological material that is well preserved because the Mithraeums were built underground, there is not a single recorded account of the central myth of Mithraism, nor does Mithraic iconography provide us with the story. Any interpretation of the myth of Mithras, then, is an imagining, a reconstruction.

If Jung broke through to the eternal realm of the phylogenetic or collective unconscious, as he believed, and experienced an authentic Mithraic process of transformation, then non-Cumontian elements might appear in the structure of his December 1913 visions. They do not. All of the elements of Jung's initiation can be derived from Cumont and other scholars Jung read. This once again raises the issue of whether all of his experiences were based on cryptomnesia. If so, the collective unconscious may still be said to exist, but only on the shelves of Jung's personal library.

However, a review of the aspects of Mithraism that touch upon Jung's personal symbols of transformation sheds new light on secrets that Jung never openly acknowledged, secrets so personally profound that he only hinted at them in public. In part, they concern Sigmund Freud.

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PART 2 OF 2

The sacrifice: killing the bull

Following the standard position of scholars of his day, Jung interpreted Mithras strictly as a sun god. More recent interpretations of Mithras and the Mithraic symbolism of the tauroctony, the bull slaying, suggest an even greater role for Mithras: that of kosmokrator, ruler of the entire cosmos, a deity powerful enough to shift the structure of the stars, constellations, and planets. Mithraic scholar David Ulansey argues persuasively for an astronomical and astrological interpretation of Mithraic iconography. [31] According to Ulansey, Mithras was a greater power than the sun, and indeed Mithraic iconography contains many so-called investiture scenes in which the sun god Helios bows on one knee before Mithras. [32] However, there are also many images of Mithras and Helios dining or riding in a chariot together, and since in the Greco-Roman world the role of cosmic ruler was more often attributed to the sun, Mithras and Helios might be equals. In Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido Jung compares their relationship to that of Christ and Peter. Jung also made the connection between Elijah and Mithras, noting that both are depicted as ascending in a fiery chariot, and he repeated Cumont's speculation that "early Christian paintings of the ascension of Elijah are based partly on the corresponding Mithraic representations. [33] In this way, he is able to disregard cultural context and equate Mithras and Elijah and Christ as two sides of the same ahistorical coin.

To be fair, Jung did make an attempt at a historical explanation, essentially arguing that Christianity in part deliberately borrowed and renamed pagan motifs as a way to attract disaffected pagans. A reversal of sorts occurred when, for a brief shining moment, paganism overtook Christianity in a final resurgence. When, in 361, Julian the Apostate resurrected polytheistic paganism as the religious philosophy of the Roman empire, he offered the Mithraic mysteries as a substitute for Christianity. At least, so Jung believed. In a letter to Freud of June 2, 1910, Jung wrote that "Julian the Apostate, for instance, reintroduced them as being the equivalent of Christianity." [34] As Jung knew, Julian alluded to knowing secrets about the sun god in his "Hymn to King Helios."

We should remember that in Jung's 1913 visions the figure of Elijah acts as an adviser and a sage but only acts as a kosmokrator when he guides Jung through a rapid descent to the bottom of the world. Perhaps the illuminated pages of Jung's mysterious "Red Book" could shed more light on the Elijah/Mithras identity, but we must await further evidence of what Jung himself (or his imaginal spirit guide Philemon) privately thought about these initiatory visions and why they are Mithraic from beginning to end.

Of what significance could the image of Mithras slaying the bull have to Jung and his secret Mithraic identity? Let us first imagine the classical tauroctony, the only image found universally in Mithraic cult sites and the central icon of Mithraism: Mithras is typically depicted as wearing a Phrygian cap (a felt cap that would have represented someone from the eastern reaches of the Roman empire). His left knee is on the back of a bull, pinning it down. With his left hand he is pulling the head of the bull back by its nostrils, and with his right hand he is slaying the bull by plunging a dagger or sword into its neck. Mithras' s cape is usually billowing out in a curved shape behind him, and on its interior are sometimes depicted seven stars -- the seven planets known to the ancient world. A scorpion is generally depicted attacking the bull's testicles, but other figures are also shown -- namely, a snake, a dog, a raven, and sometimes a lion and a cup. The tip of the bull's tail takes on the form of an ear of grain. Two torchbearers, Cautes and Cautopates, are dressed like Mithras and hold torches pointed up and down, respectively.

One intriguing theory of the meaning of the tauroctony is Ulansey's astronomical interpretation. The key component is the fact that the spring and the autumn equinoxes occur within the period of one of the twelve zodiacal constellations and that they proceed backward through the zodiac every 2,500 years or so. Since about 4000 B.C.E. the precession of the spring equinoxes has moved from Taurus to Aries to Pisces and, soon, will move to Aquarius. In brief, the discovery of the precession of the equinoxes led Stoics in Tarsus to "hypothesize the existence of a new divinity responsible for this new cosmic phenomenon, a divinity capable of moving the structure of the entire cosmos and thus a divinity of great power." [35] Mithras was this deity, and he is seen killing the bull because the act symbolizes the ending of the cosmic age of Taurus just prior to the age in which Mithraism was born.

The Mithraic tauroctony is explored repeatedly in Jung's fateful chapter in Wandlungen, "The Sacrifice." This image obviously held deep significance for him. His interpretation was that Mithras was the "sacrificer and the sacrificed," but "it is only his animal nature that Mithras sacrifices, his instinctuality." [36]

Yet the text holds another layer of meaning. In MDR, Jung reports that he waited two months before writing this chapter because he knew that his new ideas on the nature of the libido would cost him his relationship with Sigmund Freud. By 1912, Jung had been deeply immersed in attempts to try to make sense of the tauroctony for at least two full years, and the problem had fascinated Freud for the same amount of time. The image was consistent from Scotland to Italy to Anatolia; it clearly meant something. The killing of the bull, the scorpion biting the bull's testicles, and so on were symbols that were begging for a psychoanalytic interpretation.

As their correspondence shows, Freud and Jung did not see eye to eye on the meaning of the Mithraic mysteries. And their disagreement over the tauroctony is a telling sign of the dominance of Mithraism over psychoanalysis in Jung's own personal symbolic system. In a letter sent in June 1910, a month after Jung's first public lecture on the psychological interpretation of mythological and Mithraic material, Freud offered Jung his interpretation of the bull slaying: It was "the killing of the animal ego by the human ego, as the mythological projection of repression, in which the sublimated part of the human being (the conscious ego) sacrifices (regretfully) its vigorous drives." [37] Jung disagreed. Instead, he told Freud, "there must be something very typical in the fact that the central symbol of fecundity, the useful and generally accepted (not censored) alter ego of Mithras (the bull) is slain by another sexual symbol. The self-sacrifice is voluntary and involuntary at once (the same conflict as in the death of Christ)." [38]

Here we see the beginnings of Jung's firm but polite rejection of Freud, dismissing the psychoanalytic role of an unconscious censor that keeps the instincts out of awareness and putting forth instead a more pagan interpretation that views the Mithraic bull as an accepted alter ego of Mithras.

There is yet another, more poignant meaning of the tauroctony for Jung, and, indeed, it forms part of a secret encased in the cista mystica of Jung's life and work. Jung notes in this same letter of June 26 that, "the Mithras myth has undergone an adaptation to the calendar." [39] This reveals that Jung has read Cumont and has likewise noted the astronomical and astrological basis of Mithraic symbolism. Jung may have initially taken up the study of astrology to decipher Mithraic symbolism. "My evenings are taken up largely with astrology," he wrote to Freud on June 12, 1911, further reporting that, "I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth." [40] In 1911, Antonia Wolff had entered Jung's life as his assistant, and she is believed to be the one who taught him astrology.

He knew that the astrological sun sign of Sigmund Freud, born on May 6, 1857, was Taurus, the bull. The centrality of the Mithraic tauroctony in "The Sacrifice" now takes on new meaning: it symbolizes the triumph of Jung's broader concept of libido over the strictly instinctual (sexual or venereal) libido theory of Freud. More important, it symbolized Jung's sacrifice of Freud. His final break with Freud is therefore heralded with every reference to the "killing of the bull" in ''The Sacrifice." We know for certain that while writing "The Sacrifice" in early 1912, Jung connected the Mithraic tauroctony with the astrological sign Taurus and with sexuality in a very suggestive footnote to the section in which the tauroc tony is discussed in detail: "Taurus is astrologically the Domicilium Veneris." [41] This was no doubt another hint to Jung' s readers that this chapter contained veiled references to his knowing sacrifice of his relationship with Freud and Freud's sexual theory of libido.

Did Jung's fascination with the Mithraic image of the slaying of the bull feed into Freud's fears that Jung had a death wish against him? Freud was a master of the language of symbolism and would cast an analytic glance on any obsessions, especially those of a trusted disciple who may have harbored secret desires to slay the father.

Leonthica: Jung the Leo/Jung the Leontocephalus

A closer look at the initiatory process in the mysteries of Mithras reveals a fact about Jung's life that has been hidden for more than eighty years.

Based on some remarks by the Christian apologist Jerome and on archeological evidence (primarily from the Mithraeum of Felicissimus at the Roman seaport at Ostia), we know that there were often seven grades of initiation into the Mithraic mysteries. They were, in ascending order, corax (raven), nymphus (embryo), miles (soldier), leo (lion), perses (the Persian? the son of Perseus?), heliodromus (sun runner), and pater (father). Most of the references that survive concern leo and pater, and we know next to nothing of perses and heliodromus. According to the ancient observer Pallas (cited by Porphyry), while the members of the corax level of initiates were called "servants," those of the grade leo -- known as the leones -- were welcomed as full "participants" in the mysteries. Indeed, as the scholar R. L. Gordon observed, reaching the grade leo marked a "large shift in status, from some stage of preparation to 'membership.'" [42]

In light of this information I have reached this conclusion: As late as 1925, twelve years after his first experiments with active imagination, Jung continued to interpret those experiences as an initiation into the leo grade of the Mithraic mysteries. This special level of initiation into the Mithraic mysteries was known as the Leonthica. Jung, however, never publicly revealed this fact.

To verify that Jung had prior knowledge of the significance of the grade of leo, we need look no further than his primary source of inspiration: Franz Cumont. In The Mysteries of Mithras, Cumont wrote: "We may conclude from a passage in Porphyry that the taking of the first three degrees did not authorize participation in the mysteries Only the mystics that had received the Leontics became Participants and it is for this reason that the grade of Leo is mentioned more frequently in the inscription than any other." [43] Jung admitted his knowledge of the grade of leo in only two places in all of his writings: a footnote in Wandlungen (1912) and in his book Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955-56) when comparing the Mithraic grades of initiation to the stages in the alchemical opus: "Each of these stages stands for a new degree of insight, wisdom, and initiation, just as the Mithraic eagles, lions and sun-messengers signify grades of initiation." [44]

What did it mean to become one of the leones in the mysteries of Mithras? And what did his status as leo mean to Jung?

The objects associated with the grade of leo depicted on the mosaic floor of the Mithraeum of Felicissimus at Ostia give us some clues: a fire shovel, a sistrum (a "sacred rattle" associated with Egypt and imported as part of the ritual instruments of the cult of Isis), and a thunderbolt. Fire is associated with the grade of leo, as it is with the astrological sign of Leo, which was Jung's sun sign. The thunderbolt was a symbol of Zeus, and in the classical world the constellation Leo was under the tutelage of Zeus. [45]

In the Hellenistic world, lions held a special status among animals. It was believed that they could be divided into two categories, as human beings with intelligence and moral acumen and as gods who could mete out divine retribution. Furthermore, lions were thought of as "fire-filled and as intimately associated with the sun," and their powerful fiery breath was a vehicle of divine punishment, for fire is a purifying agent. The initiate who attained the status of leo, therefore, assumed powers attributed to lions.

Therefore, the cluster of symbols associated with the status of leo mirrored those of lions: sun/fire/purity/mediation (between men and gods)/ the constellation Leo. Jung revealed his knowledge of this symbolic cluster in his amplification of the leonine qualities of the lion-headed god and a special Mithraic amphora in the 1925 seminars. And as we know from Jung's later work, these symbols form part of the transformation process in the alchemical opus as well.

In his December 1913 vision, Jung assumed the stance of the crucified Christ and then was transformed into the lion-headed god. Could these passages from his readings in archeology and mythology have provided him with the necessary elements that were cryptomnesic ally "condensed," as he put it, into his visionary "deification"? It certainly appears so.

But if we are to believe Jung and accept that there is a phylogenetic or collective unconscious from which these experiences actually originate, we face the problems that he would never attempt to resolve: cryptomnesia and the cultural diffusion of myths and symbols. Not once -- ever -- would Jung attempt to conclusively rule out these alternate hypotheses for the phyllogenetic or collective unconscious.

The mystery of deification

We do not know enough about the rituals of Mithraic initiation or their associated beliefs, so it is impossible to state conclusively that the culmination of the Leonthica was the transformation of the initiate into the Deus Leontocephalus. But it is clear from Jung's reading of Cumont and the archeological research he did in preparation for Wandlungen that he believed the process of "becoming-one-with-god" was the climax of the initiation process in the Mithraic mysteries. To Jung, this would mean becoming one with Mithras, or donning a lion's mask (as Cumont describes) and becoming one with the Deus Leontocephalus.

Jung believed, based on his reading of Cumont, that becoming a "participant" in the mysteries at the grade of leo conferred an eternal status on the individual. This may be conjectured from the specific form the lion-headed god took -- a variant of Aion, the Hellenistic god of eternity.

In a series of lectures he gave in England in 1935, Jung gave his description of this deity:

In the cult of Mithras there is a peculiar kind of god, the key god Aion, whose presence could not be explained. But I think it is quite understandable. He is represented with the winged body of a man and the head of a lion, and he is encoiled by a snake which rises up over his head .... He is Infinite Time and Long Duration. He is the supreme god of the Mithraic hierarchy and creates and destroys all things .... He is a sun-god. Leo is the zodiacal sign where the sun dwells in summer, while the snake symbolizes the winter or wet time. So Aion, the lion-headed god with the snake round his body, again represents the union of opposites, light and dark, male and female, creation and destruction.

The god is represented as having his arms crossed and holding a key in each hand. He is the spiritual father of St. Peter, for he, too, holds the keys. The keys which Aion is holding are the keys to the past and future. [46]

As the scholar Howard Jackson has observed, the "crucial attributes" of the lion-headed god are "the serpent-entwined body, the wings, the clutched keys." [47] Jung's own deification experience did not include the wings or the clutched keys, but these aspects were part of the very first manifestation of the imaginal figure that evolved out of Elijah: Jung's guru, Philemon. In MDR Jung reports that at some point after December 1913, the figure of Philemon first appeared to him in a dream of "a winged being sailing across the sky." He was "an old man with the horns of a bull," perhaps indicating once again a Mithraic influence. "He held a bunch of four keys, one of which he clutched as if he were about to open a lock. He had the wings of a kingfisher with its characteristic colors." [48]

It is now clear that Jung' s spirit guide Philemon appears to be based on elements generally associated with Aion, although in Jung's mind there seems to be a blending of Mithraic and Gnostic elements. By 1916 he began to link his self-identity and personal destiny with the Gnostic heresies and even took on the pseudonym (and literary voice) of the second-century Gnostic leader Basilides of Alexandria in an unusual treatise we shall consider in the next chapter.

Thus, the elements of mythological and archeological knowledge concerning Mithraism and Gnosticism that became important to Jung are condensed into Philemon, another symbol of the self for Jung, a transformed imago dei that became dominant in his life when he began to move from his fascination with the Mithraic mysteries, circa 1910-14, to Gnosticism, circa 1916. In the 1930s, Jung absorbed both into the grand symbolic system of alchemy.

"I have had experiences which are ... 'ineffable,' 'secret'"

Until Jung's "Red Book" and his personal papers are put at the disposal of scholars, we will have no more information about what he really thought and felt about his initiation into the mysteries of Mithras. But confirmation -- of sorts -- that Jung did indeed believe in the reality of this experience can be found in a letter he wrote to Bernhard Baur-Celio on January 30, 1934.

Baur-Celio had written to Jung asking if he possessed any "secret knowledge" beyond what he had already written about. Jung sent him a highly provocative -- and appropriately mysterious -- response. It is a truly remarkable letter.

Jung admitted, "I have had experiences which are, so to speak, 'ineffable,' 'secret,' because they can never be told properly and because nobody can understand them (I don't know whether I have even approximately understood them myself)." [49] He acknowledged that these experiences were also "dangerous," because he would be called mad if he revealed such things. They are "catastrophic" because if Jung told them publicly, "the prejudices aroused by their telling might block other people's way to a living and wondrous mystery." They were "taboo" in the sense of the ancient mysteries and, lapsing into Greek, Jung claimed his experiences were a "sanctuary" protected by a "fear of the gods."

Jung then gave a hint of these experiences by citing a suggestive passage from Goethe's Faust, Part 2 (act 5, last scene).

The deepest cave gives shelter
Lions in silence roam around
Friendly and tame
Protecting holy ground
The sanctuary of love.

Then, in the familiar style of mystery-cult initiates from Lucius Apuleius to Julian the Apostate, Jung demurred: "And already too much has been said."

But in the remainder of the letter, Jung devalued the notion of simple belief in one's experience of the divine in favor of knowing the living reality of one's experience. And he directly tied an encounter with the unconscious to the promise of renewal in the ancient initiations: "the exploration of the unconscious has in fact and truth discovered the age-old, timeless way of initiation .... Now it is not merely my 'credo' but the greatest and most incisive experience of my life that this door [to the unconscious mind], a highly inconspicuous side-door on an unsuspicious-looking and easily overlooked footpath-narrow and indistinct because only a few have set foot on it-leads to the secret of transformation and renewal." Here, two decades after his original visions, Jung still interpreted them within a Mithraic framework.

Jung regarded his own visionary experiences as the path to redemption -- "individuation" as he called it after 1916 -- that could be taught to others. Analysis became an initiatory process, a descent into the unconscious mind in order to spark a process of individual transformation through a direct encounter with the transcendental realm of the gods. Just as the Last Supper became the central event upon which the mystery of Communion in the Roman Catholic Mass was based, Jungian analysis became a ritualized reenactment of Jung's own inner drama, a story of heroic confrontation with the gods that is enshrined as the sacred myth of analytical psychology. For those who survived an encounter with the god or gods within, Jung promised rebirth as a true "individual," free from all the repressive mechanisms of conventional beliefs about family, society, and deity. The successful survivors of such pagan regeneration became reborn, spiritually superior "individuated" beings.

But there is much more that Jung isn't telling here. In the troubled times of the First World War when Jung forged the Jungian mysteries, they had a deeper significance for his core group of disciples, most of whom were Swiss by birth but German through the deeper bonds of blood and soil.

"The old Aryan deity"

The key to understanding the Jungian mysteries and their historical roots -- at least as Jung perceived them -- can be found in Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido. In Wandlungen, Jung followed Cumont (and Ernest Renan before him) in his wistful view that if historical events had gone a little differently, the Western world would be Mithraic today instead of Judeo-Christian. He makes reference to the cultural and spiritual war between "the two great antagonistic religions, Christianity on the one side, and Mithracism on the other." [50] To Jung, the grand solar, astronomical, and astrological symbolism of Mithraism indicate a form of nature worship that could not have been the more recent product of civilized human life. The mysteries of Mithras are nature worship "in the best sense of the word; while the primitive Christians exhibited throughout an antagonistic attitude to the beauties of the world." [51]

Jung's derisive attitude toward Christianity as a product-of civilization is even more apparent in the following indictment: "In the past two thousand years Christianity has done its work and has erected barriers of repression, which protect us from the sight of our own 'sinfulness.' The elementary emotions of the libido have come to be unknown to us, for they are carried on in the unconscious; therefore, the belief which combats them has become hollow and empty. Let whoever does not believe that a mask covers our religion, obtain an impression for himself from the appearance of our modern churches, from which style and art have long since fled." [52]

Mithraism was far older than Christianity, which only arose in the first century C.E. With its solar symbolism and shamanistic deification rites in which initiates take on animal powers, it had direct ties to the original nature religion of all human beings.

Jung fully believed that the mysteries of Mithras were his direct experiential link to the ancient Aryans. Cumont referred to Mithras as "the old Aryan deity" who found new names and new faces in the religions of ancient India and Iran, [53] areas thought to be the homeland of the Aryans. It is probably for this reason that Jung found the Mithraic mysteries so meaningful, and why he placed a greater emphasis on this cult over the other, less Aryan, Hellenistic mysteries.

It is not surprising that between 1909 and 1914, Jung and his assistants (Honegger, Spielrein, Nelken, and Schneiter) found that the mythological elements in psychotic symptoms in patients were survivals from ancient Aryan cultures ranging from India, Iran, Greece, and Rome to the ancient Teutons. Other than the occasional biblical reference and solar symbolism, they never once found exclusively Semitic mythological symbols in these patients. This was consistent with the scientific research program of the Zurich School, since in order to prove the validity of the phylogenetic hypothesis, mythological symbols from Aryan sources should predominate among psychotic Germanic patients.

Jung interpreted the discoveries of the Zurich School in the following manner: Within each native European there was a living pre-Christian layer of the unconscious psyche that produced religious images from the Hellenistic pagan mystery cults or even the more archaic nature religions of the ancient Aryans. This phylogenetic unconscious does not produce purely Christian symbols but instead offers pagan images, such as that of the sun as god. If the sediment of two thousand years of Judeo-Christian culture could be disturbed (as in psychotic mental diseases with a physiological component, such as dementia praecox), then this Semitic "mask" might be removed, and the biologically true images of the original "god within" could be revealed: a natural god, perhaps a god of the sun or stars like Mithras, or matriarchal goddesses of the moon or blood, or phallic or chthonic gods from within Mother Earth.

It was precisely these images that dominated the ancient Hellenistic mysteries that most fascinated Jung: the mysteries of Mithras, the Eleusinian mysteries, the mysteries of Dionysus, the Great Mother, and Isis-Osiris. Many of these images also overlap with the alleged mysteries of the ancient Teutons and perhaps even the Aryan Urreligion. [54] To Jung, the mystery cults of antiquity kept alive the ancient natural religion of human prehistory and were a corrective antidote to the poison of religions -- like Judaism and Christianity -- that had been forged by civilization.

Jung regarded Christianity as a Jewish religion that was cruelly imposed on the pagan peoples of Europe. Since Judaism was the product of an older and higher level of civilization than that of the European pagans, it had separated people from nature. The Aryans of Europe, especially the German peoples, had been civilized only a thousand years ago and were therefore closer to their ancestors and their Urreligion of the sun and the sky and sacred groves of trees. Semitic cultures, cut off from the primordial source of life, did not have mysteries in which a direct experience of the gods could be attained through initiation rituals. They were, therefore, cut off from the renewal and rebirth that such mysteries offered the Aryans. In his book on the Mithraic Liturgy, Albrecht Dieterich compares the central image of rebirth in ancient India, the mysteries of Isis, and other Aryan cultural contexts but notes that "the Jews do not have this image." [55] Only Aryans could receive the sacrament of redemption.

Jung often referred to the ancient mysteries as the "secret" or "hidden" or "underground" religions and their social organizations as the secret or hidden churches that kept alive the divine spark from the dawn of creation. This leads us to an obvious conclusion. When Jung became one with Aion in his visionary initiation experience, in his imagination he was not only becoming a full participant in the mysteries of Mithras; he was experiencing a direct initiation into the most ancient of the mysteries of his Aryan ancestors. His new science of psychoanalysis became the twentieth-century vehicle of those mysteries. Most important, as his initiation experience also entailed assuming the stance of the crucified Jesus as he metamorphosed into Aion, Jung thereby became the figure that fueled the fantasies of thousands of Volkish Germans and European and American anti-Semites at the turn of the century: the Aryan Christ.

The Aryan Christ

At first glance, it seems to be a paradox. An Aryan Christ? Isn't that a contradiction in terms? But for personal and cultural reasons -- an affirming resonance of the inner with the outer -- this symbol of paradoxical divinity made sense to Jung in ways that are difficult to understand today. As a magician, healer, and, most important, as a redeemer, the god-man Christ fas cinated and repulsed Jung since childhood. But nonetheless, when Jung began to have fantasies of leading a movement to revitalize humanity spiritually, first through psychoanalysis and then with his own movement, the living presence of Christ in his ancestral soul proved to be an irresistible model. This was true even though Jung had fully accepted his new pagan self-identity by December 1913. In an age dominated by a widely accepted Volkish worldview, it is perfectly understandable that Jung's self-deification would take this form.

For many decades before Jung became conscious that he was the Aryan Christ for a new age, there had been a wide-ranging debate in German culture not only about the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth, but about whether he was 100 percent Jewish. Fables of all sorts about non-Semitic tribes of Aryans being the original occupants of the Holy Land who may have transmitted their blood to Jesus, or of the true biological father of Jesus being a Roman centurion, circulated within Volkish circles. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a member of the inner circle at Bayreuth after Richard Wagner's death, was an internationally recognized proponent of these views at the turn of the century. His best-known work, the two-volume Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (The foundations of the nineteenth century) of 1899, was widely read and discussed. In it, Chamberlain argued that there are too many Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, or Aryan elements in the tenets of Christianity and in the personality of Jesus to believe that Christ or his ideas were in any way Jewish. Using philological and historical evidence, Chamberlain claimed it is a mistake to believe that only the Semitic races were in Galilee in the years before the birth of Jesus. He placed the "Hellenes" in the area at that time and argued that the population could not possibly have been entirely Semitic. And, he argued, given the Aryan characteristics of Jesus and his ideas and given that race is perhaps the most important determinant of personality, the modern view of Jesus should be revised. The biology of race should replace language and cultural history as determinants of ethnicity, especially that of Christ. In a characteristic passage, Chamberlain said:

Yet it will not do simply to put race aside as a negligible quantity; still less will it do to proclaim anything directly false about race and to let such an historical lie crystallize into an indisputable dogma. Whoever makes the assertion that Christ was a Jew is either ignorant or insincere; ignorant when he confuses religion and race, insincere when he knows the history of Galilee and partly conceals, partly distorts the very entangled facts in favor of his religious prejudices or, it may be, to curry favor with the Jews. The probability that Christ was no Jew, that He had not a drop of genuinely Jewish blood in his veins is so great that it is almost equivalent to a certainty. To what race did He belong? This is a question that cannot be answered at all. [56]

But statements such as "Christ ... became the God of the young, vigorous Indo-Europeans" leave little doubt that Chamberlain believed him to be a superior product of the Aryan race. [57] To be sure, many theologians objected to this revisionism, but such racialist philosophy was quite popular and was considered to be based on good science. Even Jung quotes from this work in a footnote in Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido. [58] Given Chamberlain's fame as a leading racialist thinker and anti-Semite, this citation must have leapt off the page at Freud and his Jewish colleagues. Indeed, most of Freud's statements that Jung was anti-Semitic started in 1912, the year the second part of Wandlungen appeared.

Richard Wagner tended to believe such stories about the Aryan racial elements of Jesus.His opera Parsifal is laden with images of the young knight Parsifal as a pagan Christ-figure and redeemer. Jung experienced the Wagnerian mysteries of Parsifal as a young man and they moved him deeply. The focus of the story is a holy order of knights whose duty is to guard the Holy Grail. This chalice filled with the blood of Christ was a potent Volkish symbol as the sacred container of pure Aryan blood.Spiritual redemption and renewal sprang from the mystical power of blood, which must be protected at all costs. When Parsifal arrives on the scene, all is not well in the community of Grail knights. The holy spear that lanced the body of Christ -- and that therefore has tremendous healing properties -- has been stolen by the evil magician Klingsor with the help of the seductress Kundry, who by her own account is Jewish. Amfortas, sovereign of the Grail kingdom, lies in perpetual agony from a wound that never heals, inflicted by Klingsor with the magic spear. The Grail is therefore unguarded and vulnerable to Klingsor. Parsifal, a stranger to the knights, stumbles into his role as hero, retrieves the spear, heals Amfortas with a touch of its tip, redeems the fallen Kundry through an act of love, and restores order to the kingdom. In the final act, accompanied by Wagner's "transformation music," Parsifal waves the Holy Grail over a congregation of the Teutonic Grail knights as everyone sings out the final mystical words of the drama, "Highest healing's wonder / Redemption to the Redeemer!"

Based on an entry in Cosima Wagner's diaries, many commentators have argued that this last line meant that Jesus, the Christian savior and god, himself needed to be redeemed from his Jewish origins. [59] Others dispute this. But undoubtedly, Parsifal is a Volkish epiphany and the highest dramatic expression of the longing for an Aryan Christ. And Bayreuth itself, the only place where one could see a full performance of Parsifal before 1913, was hailed by Volkish enthusiasts as the new mystery-cult site where the great Aryan mysteries would reach their full expression. [60]

Beliefs such as these were held by a great number of educated persons not only in German culture but in the entire Judeo-Christian world at the turn of the century. Yet even for persons who lapsed occasionally into anti-Semitism -- like Jung and many German scholars and theologians -- it was difficult simply to erase every trace of Christianity because of its Semitic origins. Instead, the myth of an Aryan Christ comforted those bourgeois members of the Volk who simply could not turn to the worship of the sun or retreat to the Teutoberg forest to make animal sacrifices to Wotan or Thor. As the historian George Mosse notes in his magisterial analysis of the Volkish movement, "another tendency of Volkish thought" was "to substitute the image of the Yolk for the person and function of Christ." [61] Transpositions and substitutions that stretched the bounds of logic were presented as solutions for racially cleansing the body of Christ.

"Teach us the secret runes!"

Some Volkish scholars and their readers found their inspiration in a remarkable manuscript that had been written in Old Saxon around 830 C.E. but published for the first time in modem German in 1830. This untitled manuscript, which its publisher titled the Heliand (Savior), is the first rendering of the New Testament gospel into the language of the ancient Germans. [62] In this Saxon Gospel, Jesus is Germanized in his role as a chieftain of a group of warrior companions (the apostles). Since the author of this ninth-century text was attempting to speak directly to the hearts and minds of his Northern European contemporaries, who were still largely pagan, Jesus here takes on the familiar attributes of Wotan. Christ the chieftain is a magician, like Wotan, and knows the secrets of the runes. Also like Wotan, who had the ravens Nunin and Hugin (memory and mind) perched on his shoulders, Christ the chieftain often has a dove -- a symbol of the Holy Spirit -- on his.

Jung cultivated a special relationship to Wotan, whom he believed to be the true god of the Germanic peoples of Europe. Wotan came to him in a dream in the form of a wild huntsman as a sign he was taking the soul of Jung's mother with him to the Land of the Dead. [63] Wotan appeared in other guises as well throughout Jung's life. Eugen Bohler, who was on very intimate terms with Jung from 1955 onward, recalled that Jung "had several intuitions about death -- of the death of his mother before the First World War and of the death of his wife. On both occasions there was Wotan, the German god who is said to dominate Northern Europe. He had a dream of Wotan riding in the sky .... Wotan is also a psychopompos, one who leads the souls of the dead, like Hermes." Bohler added, "Jung had several dreams with Wotan flowing, so to speak, beside him on the lake when he was at Bollingen." [64]

Perhaps Jung was right that Wotan was the living god of the German people. In Jung's own Switzerland, even to this day, double-beamed Turstkreuze (Wotan-crosses) still watch over the landscape in the hinterlands of the canton of Luzern, awaiting the return of Wotan's wild hunt for souls. [65]

***

In the Nineteenth Song of the Heliand, the mighty chieftain Himself, the Rescuer, the Son of the Ruler, the Guardian of the Land, the Chieftain of Mankind, was surrounded by his warrior companions on a mountain. [66] They eagerly awaited his instructions. He spoke to the twelve heroes, telling them of many wondrous things, but they wished to know more than words.

"Gerihti us that geruni!" one of the more intelligent men cried out. "Teach us the secret runes!"

The Powerful One said, "When you want to speak to the Ruling God, to address the most powerful of all kings, then say what I now teach you." The magic spell he taught them we know, in a different form, as the Lord's Prayer.

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Chapter 8: Zurich 1916: Abraxas and the Return of the Pagan Gods

Sermo VII

Yet when night was come the Dead again approached with lamentable mien and said: "There is yet one matter we forgot to mention. Teach us about man!"

Man is a gateway, through which from the outer world of gods, daemons, and souls ye pass into the inner world; out of the greater into the smaller world. Small and transitory is man. Already is he behind you, and once again ye find yourselves in endless space, in the smaller one or innermost infinity. At immeasurable distance standeth one single Star in the zenith.

This is the one god of this one man. This is his world, his pleroma, his divinity.

In this world is man Abraxas, the creator and destroyer of his own world.

This Star is the god and the goal of man.

This is his one guiding god. In him goeth man to his rest. Toward him goeth the long journey of the soul after death. In him shineth forth as light all that man bringeth back from the greater world. To this one god man shall pray.

Prayer increaseth the light of the Star. It casteth a bridge over death. It prepareth life for the smaller world and assuageth the hopeless desires of the greater.

When the greater world waxeth cold, burneth the Star.

Between man and his one god there standeth nothing, so long as man can turn away his eyes from the flaming spectacle of Abraxas.

Man here, god there.

Weakness and nothingness here, there eternally creative power.

Here nothing but darkness and chilling moisture.

There wholly Sun.

Whereupon the Dead were silent and ascended like the smoke above the herdsman's fire, who through the night kept watch over his flock.

-- Philemon, through the gateway known as C. G. Jung, Summer 1916 [1]

In the spring of 1916, as the First World War raged outside the borders of Switzerland and Zurich recovered from its worst outbreak of influenza in recent memory, more than forty eager souls gathered around C. G. Jung to hear the logos, the word of the law. It was as if after a difficult ascent along an arduous and secret path, they found themselves at a precipice, at the edge of an old aeon, and could not quite yet comprehend the brilliant vista of the new age that lay before them.

Even then they knew they were to be the first of a new spiritual race of saviors. Even then they knew that the work they did on their own individual souls would bring all of humanity to a higher state of consciousness. Many were called but few were chosen for special redemption in Zurich, while brother rose against brother and Death rode triumphantly across Europe. "The great problems of humanity were never solved by general laws, but only through a regeneration of the attitudes of individuals," Jung wrote in December of 1916. [2] The spiritual rebirth of the human race would begin in Zurich with them.

Almost everyone in the room that day was civilized as Swiss and Christian -- an accident of history, of time and place of birth -- but German by culture, language, and the eternal bond of shared blood, landscape, and Fate. Their guide, their "New Light," the charismatic Doctor Jung, spoke to them in the language of their ancestors, in the sounds that resonated with memories deep within their collective soul, in the common German of their Volk. He spoke to them of things of the spirit, of the necessity of descents and self-deification and rebirth, of Holy Orders like theirs whose guiding symbols of transformation were the Holy Grail, the crucifix wound with roses, and the Tree of Life from which Wotan hung upside down in self-sacrifice so that he could learn the secrets of the runes.

Jung spoke slowly, deliberately, and with great solemnity. And with good reason. The year 1916 rewarded years of tremendous dreams and visions that pushed him to the brink of insanity and suicide. He had been practicing a highly dissociative trance-induction technique that enabled him to travel to the realm of the gods and to talk to entities such as Philemon, the spiritual guru who functioned as his spirit control in the way that Ivenes had served Helly Preiswerk. He had also established an ongoing dialogue with an inner feminine voice that he later called the anima. At times he would allow this female entity to take over his own vocal cords and would spend entire evenings in his study asking questions in his own voice and then answering himself in the falsetto of this entity whom he originally thought was one of the ancient female gods of matriarchal prehistory. Later, the anima became many things: his "soul," the voice of the eternal Feminine that Goethe spoke of in the last lines of Faust; the image of Persephone, who lived in the underworld "realm of the Mothers" (the unconscious) and was seen by initiates into the Eleusinian mysteries; the living symbol of the Wholly Other or of the unconscious itself; and the rejected feminine aspects of his own nature that he needed to integrate with his own one-sided, conscious male identity in order to achieve a state of wholeness through psychological hermaphroditism.

"Jung ... could not submit to a personal God"

His former colleagues in the psychoanalytic movement were now his enemies. They cruelly spread rumors about him -- many based on fact -- and they wrote thinly veiled attacks on him in the guise of scientific papers. One, written by Ernest Jones in 1913, diagnosed him as suffering from a "colossal narcissism" because of his "god-complex." [3] Uncannily, Jones described that man with a god complex as having the belief that he is a god and as having "rebirth fantasies" and dreams of renewing the world. Such a man, claimed Jones, purposefully shrouded his personality with "a cloud of mystery" and was obsessed with "omnipotence phantasies." In addition, Jones said such men maintained an interest in religion to the point where it degenerated into mysticism, and that, being so godlike themselves, "they cannot suffer the existence of any other God." This was a hatchet job on Jung, but it contained elements of truth.

Alphonse Maeder knew this better than most. As a colleague and ally of Jung during the years of the psychoanalytic movement and during the early years of the Zurich School and the Psychological Club, Maeder was first attracted, then repulsed, by Jung's attitude toward religion. At the 1913 Munich conference both Maeder and Jung presented papers in which the "prospective" and goal-directed nature of the unconscious mind was stressed over the causal and reductive approach of the Viennese. This meant, in part, that the unconscious was thought to have a prophetic function, anticipating future developments in the personality. Operating under such assumptions, the analyst became a kind of prophet or clairvoyant who could tell the future of the patient. This places the analyst in a role similar to that of a spiritual adviser or guru, and psychoanalysis openly crosses the line into magic and religion. Yet this was precisely what attracted so many, including Maeder, to Jung in the first place.

But by the years of the First World War it became increasingly clear to those around him that while Jung may have been using the metaphors of Christian spirituality to convey psychological ideas, in reality he had a deep-seated hostility to the Christian way of life. "I think Jung had a very strong individuality which could not submit to a personal God," said Maeder. "I mean, a religiosity without this concrete factor was very, very serious and important for him. But in the Christian way of submission, it is different." Maeder said that "Even up to his last day he had a complex against the Church and her mission. He could never use the word 'Church' without swearing; it remained a real father complex." [4]

The consequences of Jung's Freudian and Christian apostasies were severe. The wild visions from within and the hurtful attacks from without began to take their toll. Jung became paranoid at times, emotionally labile, given to quick fits of anger and rage. His disciples, particularly his male associates, found him intolerant of their ideas and therefore intolerable. Many of his male colleagues broke from him. He kept a loaded pistol next to his bed and vowed to blow his brains out if he ever felt he had entirely lost his sanity. Toni Wolff helped him through this troubled time, and somehow he made it.

Jung spoke solemnly and carefully on that day in 1916, for he was speaking of his innermost experiences, the sacred rhythms of his soul. He revealed the path of initiation, self-deification, and recovery that he had trod, and he was now sharing his formula for regeneration with his disciples for the first time in a public forum. Jung did this, however, without any explicit reference to himself. He would not be ready to reveal his own self-deification experience in a public setting until 1925.

In private, however, within the safe container of his analytic sessions with his most trusted patients, Jung had no resistance to confessing the content of his visions. Sometimes he showed them his magical volume of illuminated manuscript pages that gave concrete form to his visions and dreams and that contained almost six hundred pages worth of his fantasies and conversations with Philemon and other discarnate entities. The "Red Book," as this pagan bible or transformation journal was later known, was begun in 1914 and completed in 1930. His patients could only stare in awe as Jung shared with them his book of life. This intimacy only strengthened their belief that Jung was indeed a holy man, a prophet for a new age, and that they were blessed to be in his presence.

Two early supporters of Jung who were there that day in 1916 were Tina and Adolph Keller. Adolph was a pastor and an author of books that blended religious wisdom and psychoanalytic insights, and Tina was later a physician and psychotherapist. Her analysis with Jung had begun in 1915 and continued, on and off, for some time. Tina Keller was one of the privileged few who caught glimpses of the oracular side of Jung during her analytic sessions with him. "It was during the First World War, and Dr. Jung would occasionally allude to his overwhelming experiences," she recalled in a memoir written in 1968 for the C. G. Jung Biographical Archives Project. [5] "Once he mentioned that they had caused his hair to turn grey; another time he spoke of the relief he had felt when the outbreak of the war showed him that his visions of blood and destructions were precognitions and did not indicate the threat of psychosis, as he had feared." Such talk made a profound impression on the young woman who, by her own admission, was preoccupied with religious issues. "Whenever Dr. Jung spoke of these experiences I could feel his emotion. Coming to analysis at that time one entered a very special atmosphere."

Jung also shared with Tina the early paintings of his visions that would form the illuminated manuscript pages of his "Red Book." "Dr. Jung was of course gaining experience in those early years," she said. "What he said was tentative, and I believe he was often quite mistaken. He often spoke of himself and his own experience. Sometimes he would show a picture he was painting as illustration of a point he was making. One felt accepted into the very special atmosphere of the discovery of the inner world and of its mystery. No wonder the fascination he exerted."

Tina Keller's memories of those exciting times invoke the spirit of the circle around Jung and confirm the role of the First World War in the intensification of their feeling that they were special and part of a movement that might save the world from madness. "I was one of a group gathered around an explorer trying to penetrate life's mysteries," she recalled. "We were listening with eager anticipation. During the First World War, in the midst of the feeling of catastrophe, when cultural values were breaking down, when there was general consternation and disillusionment, a small group around Dr. Jung participated in his vision of an inner world unfolding."

However, she added, "Many of us were later disappointed. The vision was too vast and leads into the future." The Kellers, Alphonse Maeder, Hans Triib, and others eventually distanced themselves from Jung because they could not renounce their Christianity. They could not break with the faith of their families. They could not follow Jung into a neopagan promised land no matter how beautiful the realm of gods and goddesses and ancestors looked to them.

But others could.

In the spring of 1916, Jung was only forty years old, but already to many he was a wise old man. As a healer, his powers were, by all accounts, extraordinary. Jung did indeed bring light and life back into the souls of many who came in contact with him. As the guiding light of the Psychology Club, Jung was the incarnation of the spiritual principle of their sacred order. And he promised redemption to his redeemers.

"The struggle with the Dead and the descent into Hell are unavoidable"

The first words out of Jung's mouth at the 1916 meeting referred directly to his secret epiphany of December 1913, when he became the Aryan Christ. [6] "In the symbol of Christ lies an identification of the personality with the progressive tendency of the collective soul," Jung said. In 1916, the terms "collective soul" and "collective unconscious" were used interchangeably. Jung said the collective soul had "various aspects," both bad and good, both female and male. One is a regressive tendency, "represented by the Terrible Mother." The other "contains the symbols of redemption for suffering humanity" and is symbolized by Christ. Jung explained that both the human and divine are united in Christ, which is why Christ is the "God-man."

In an individual, especially one plagued by visions and dreams and overwhelmed by the inner mythological symbols shooting forth from the collective unconscious, Jung warned of the danger that "this identification of the personality with the collective unconscious manifests itself always in the phenomenon of self-deification." But this is the unavoidable first step to true individuation. "It is therefore a question of the overcoming of self-deification, which might also be compared with the Death of Christ, a death of the greatest agony." This overcoming of the grandiosity and inflated self-image that comes from experiencing the god within -- indeed, from becoming a god oneself -- is the second and most crucial step to surviving these awful trials.

Jung said that the "freeing of the personality" from the power of the unconscious is "one of the most painful tasks to be accomplished on the road to development to full individuality." But, by doing so, by trying to overcome one's new godlike state, there arises "a chaos, a darkness and a doubt of all that exists, and of all that may be." Indeed, Jung said, hell itself opens up. "This moment brings a feeling of great danger. One is quite conscious of standing before death."

But this separating of the individual personality from the collective soul "seems to disturb phylogenetic ally certain pictures or formations in the unconscious -- a process which we still understand very little, but which needs the greatest care in treatment." And just what are these pictures or formations? In this public lecture, Jung was careful to stay away from what he really meant: transpersonal entities or gods like the ones he regularly met with in his own visions and in those experienced by many of his patients. For the most part, Jung stayed close to the mask that he used to cover up the true essence of the phenomena he described.

But then he said something tremendously interesting.

The process of personality transformation becomes a cosmic drama in which an individual struggles with the spirits of the Dead. But the patient / initiate also serves as a guide or psychopomp -- like Hermes or Wotan -- who can bring the Dead to eternal rest. In other words, Jung told his audience that the work they did on their individual souls in psychotherapeutic treatment would not only heal them and make them whole individuals, but in the process they would redeem their ancestors as well.

"The struggle with the Dead is terrible ... " said Jung. "Here too the parallel with Christ continues. The struggle with the Dead and the descent into Hell are unavoidable. The Dead need much patience and the greatest care. Some must be brought to eternal rest, others have a message to bring us, for which we must prepare ourselves. The Dead need time for their highest fulfillment, only after full duty has been done to the Dead can man return slowly to his newly created personality. This new individuality thus contains all vital elements in a new constellation."

All around him Jung must have seen the astonished, enthralled faces of his people.

"In studying Christ's Descent into Hell I was surprised to find how closely the tradition coincides with human experience. This problem is therefore not new, it is a problem of general mankind, and for this reason probably too, symbolized through Christ." Jung no doubt studied Christ's descent into hell through his own visionary descents. (In this forum, in the presence of persons he may not have known very well, Jung was very careful to stick to Christian metaphors, giving himself the persona of a Christian.) Ancient mystery-cult initiations always involved a descent of sorts and an ordeal before the initiates saw or became a god themselves. Jung knew this from his own experience. It was no longer a matter of believing, it was a matter of knowing, but he wasn't about to let this out in public just yet. In Zurich in 1916, the success of Jung's social experiment was not assured. His next rival, his next Judas, could very well be in the Club. He had to be careful.

Jung said that he would attempt to "elucidate this problem more fully in a work on the Transcendental Function." He did indeed write such an essay in 1916, but it was not published until 1957, and then only in a small, privately printed booklet. [7] It is one of the most important essays Jung ever wrote, because in it he describes in great detail his method of analyzing dreams and his mediumistic psychotherapeutic techniques.

Most of that essay concerned itself with the technique Jung called active imagination -- the suspension of the critical function of the conscious ego to allow images and feelings to arise from the unconscious mind. One's inner voice could also be found in this way, and like a medium one could speak to it and establish an ongoing dialogue with it, as it represented a higher intelligence in the unconscious mind that was not bound by time and space. Automatic writing, which Jung called "writing from the unconscious," became one of his characteristic prescriptions to his patients. Active imagination could also take the form of making drawings and painting, fashioning things with one's hands, or -- like the dancers from Ascona -- using body movement to express the messages coming from the Dead or other entities in the unconscious. The instinctual, archaic "man" could be freed through such techniques, and once a dialogue was established between the conscious and the unconscious minds, the transcendent function came into play. In current parlance, it was like mediumship or channeling. To Jung, the transcendent function was the process of integrating the unconscious contents with the conscious mind that would lead to the creation of a New Man, a spiritual Ubermensch, who could then save the redeemable remainder of humanity. In 1916, Jung called this process of creating a spiritual Ubermensch the "Menschwerdung," becoming a complete human, or the "individuation process."

Conscious of the spiritual metaphors that would have the greatest impact on his Swiss-German audience, Jung turned to Wagner's Parsifal. But here, too, he referred back to his initiatory visions of wise old Elijah and the erotic Jewess Salome, transposed into the operatic characters of Gurnemanz (an old Grail knight) and Kundry (the Jewish temptress whom Parsifal redeems). Jung gave his audience the following example: "On Good Friday Parsifal comes back to the Gralsburg [the fortress in which the Grail knights live and protect the Holy Grail]. He is entirely in black, the symbol of death, and his visor is closed. The belief in being able to fulfill the work for which he has struggled for so long has deserted him, and it is Gurnemanz and Kundry, both very much changed, who freed him from his madness and show him the way to the Gralsburg."

Jung found the Gralsburg when he became the Aryan Christ. He was brought to that point by Elijah and Salome, but ultimately reached it on his own initiative, much as, at the climax of Wagner's opera, the Aryan Parsifal assumes the magical healing powers of Christ.

Only a chosen few disciples in the audience that day knew that Jung was referring to his own deification process with this example from Parsifal. Others, who would be uncomfortable with a rejection of their Protestant heritage (there were almost no Catholics in these early years of the club, few French, and no Jews), could only look upon him in admiration as he again resorted to Christian themes. This time he even drew the analogy between the members of the club and the apostles of Christ. ''The Collective soul may be brought to constellation in a different way in every individual, but in principle all these manifestations are the same," said Jung. "When the Holy Ghost revealed Himself to the Apostles on Whitsuntide, the Apostles spoke in tongues, which means that each spoke in his own way, each had his own way of praising his own God, and yet all praised the same God." Hence, within the collectivity of the club, each could still be an individual working toward the same spiritual goals. All could be true apostles of the same master and yet each follow the master's path in her or his own way.

Jung's views of the utopian nature of such an analytical collectivity soon became clear: "Only after the overcoming of self-deification, only after the human being has been revealed to himself, and man recognizes the human being in mankind, can we speak of a real analytical collectivity -- a collectivity which reaches out (extends) beyond type and sex." Only after the god within has been fully experienced through its manifestation in an individual can the limitations of personality type and gender be overcome. A community of such god-men would then manifest this transcendent functioning in a collective. Jung's followers would be the first to try this, something never before done in the history of humankind, and to then redeem it from the misunderstandings and even violence caused by the limitations of psychological type and sex. But Jung cautioned his flock that there was still much work to be done in their analytical collectivity before they could alter human destiny.

"But we have not yet come so far, we are on the way to the Menschwerdung. The recognition and the acceptance of the personal life's task leads to the Menschwerdung. The recognition that each has to fulfill his especial task, and to his own especial way, leads to the respect for the individual and his especial path," said Jung. "Only those who have been forced through their own individual laws to go their own ways, and thereby have come in conflict with the prevailing traditions, come to Analysis." By "prevailing traditions" Jung meant religious ones. Hence, analysis as Jung conceived it was a separate spiritual path that one could take only after rejecting the faith of one's birth.

Near the end of his introductory remarks on his theory of spiritual transformation -- he never uses the words "psychology" or "psychological" or "psychotherapy" but always the language of the spirit or of his mysteries -- Jung listed his ideas for the principles of the new club. He said that the analytical collectivity should always have "respect for the individual and his individual purpose." The "original groups" of such a community of analyzed persons will pass through their own development, and there should be "perfect freedom to build an endless number of small groups." Difficulties, if they arise, "must be solved according to analytical principles." If difficulties persist, Jung said, "they must be brought before an analytical tribunal." One can only wonder if Jung was aware of how much this last remark recalled the institutions and inquisitions of the Roman Catholic Church.

Jung's closing remarks to his disciples were the most telling. Here, in undisguised language, was Jung's "guiding fiction" or group fantasy that would sustain them. [8] Here we do not find mention of the group's cultural activities or of its intellectual or psychological or medical aims. Instead we find the guiding fantasy of the holy order or secret society engaged in the redemptive work of the spirit. Here we find Jung reaching back to his grandfather, hence completing the spiritual arc between them, invoking the words of Goethe and the occult symbols of the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians. Here again are references to Wagner and to the Tree of Life -- and we find a reference to the sun. Jung said:

Nothing is new under the sun. That which I see ahead of us as an ideal analytical collectivity Goethe saw and speaks of in his "Geheimnisse. " If it were not so long, I should be glad to read it to you now -- it may not be familiar to you all.

The poem was written in 1816 and no doubt was far ahead of its time. It describes a collectivity founded on the principle of the religious acceptance of the individual path, and the Menschwerdung. As a symbol this Cloister has a Cross wound with roses, symbol of the resurrected life -- the Tannhauser motif of the budding staff, the Chider, or the Tree of Life.

The ancients say of the Tree of Life, "A Noble Tree planted with rare skill grows in the garden. Its roots reach down to the bottom of Hell -- its crown touches the Throne of God, its wide spreading branches surround the Earth. The Tree stands in fullest beauty and is glorious in its foliage."

This Tree is the expression of a collective function, created by Analysis and life.

The applause Jung received after this last line was well earned. In this very brief address he not only spelled out the path of individuation -- a road that led to self-deification -- but he also inspired his audience with the guiding fiction that they were fellow members of a mystical order on a quest for the creation of a new type of spiritually superior human being and for a new utopian society that would transcend type and sex.

The world-redeeming process had now officially begun. Patients became apostles. Analysis became initiation. Cures became secondary to conversions. Their formerly mundane and spiritually bankrupt lives took on cosmic dimensions. They were on the path.

Decknamen

These were precarious times for C. G. Jung. He was in danger of losing everything he had so carefully built up over the years. His adoption of polygamy threatened his marriage and family life. His decision to cut himself off from almost all external professional activities -- his hospital job, his university lectureship, and his presidency of the psychoanalytic association -- left him, by late 1914, with only his private practice and the most devoted of his followers. Would he still have them in five years? Ten? There was no guarantee that his decision to found his own movement of spiritual revitalization would lead to success.

But his heart told him he must assume the mantle that had been offered to him by fate. He had been initiated into the most ancient of mysteries and had become a god. The gods had shown him the mysteries of life and human history, visions of the future and of a New Man. He saw the absolute lies of Christian dogma and its belief in a single, unreachable god. He could redeem those biologically capable of rebirth -- Aryans -- by returning them to their natural pagan roots, to the archaic man still within. He could save the world. Having been blessed with the direct knowledge of the divine, who better than he to be the prophet of a new age?

But despite his disengagement from most professional activities, Jung knew he had to maintain at least a modicum of respectability. He was, after all, a physician, a world-renowned scientist, and a man who was increasingly identified as one who was offering a spiritual alternative to the atheistic Jewish science of Sigmund Freud. He continued to give occasional talks in such places as England, Scotland, and America to professional societies of physicians. Occasionally, he wrote papers that were printed in respected scientific journals. And, of course, he made sure to keep writing and publishing dense works of scholarship.

To make his spiritual movement a success, Jung had to adopt at least three false faces or masks. In his professional talks, his professional publications, and in his books (at least until the 1930s), he equivocated. He could not talk about the living mystery of the gods and of the ancestors in a public forum if he wanted to be taken seriously. To get around this problem, he constructed a confusing but somewhat poetic pseudoscientific vocabulary to cover up the true meaning of his experiences. Terms that he used in print and in lectures in 1916 such as "personal unconscious," "collective unconscious," and "persona" were in reality Decknamen, or cover names, that hid the true nature of the phenomena from outsiders. Jung here emulated alchemists, who developed an elaborate vocabulary of symbols and metaphors to hide actual chemical names and processes from competitors. Only those adepts initiated into the special code by the author of such works could then understand them. [9] To some degree, Jung reversed the function of cover names: he invented "scientific" terms to obfuscate the direct experiences of living mystery that he offered his initiates through analysis. This is the Jung of the Collected Works and of his many apologists who continue to insist that there is something legitimately scientific about Jung's ideas.

For those members of the initial core group surrounding him in 1916, there were two publications that provided them with the terms they could use in their conversations with outsiders. The first of these was a French translation of a talk given to the club in 1916 on "The Conception of the Unconscious" in which the terms "collective unconscious" and "personal unconscious" were used for the first time in print. [10] In this publication, the German transcript of which must have been available to the club members, Jung talks repeatedly and openly about the deification process and about the wonderfully mystical experience he could promise those who underwent his brand of treatment. Jung tempted the spiritually hungry with statements such as "The wealth of the possibilities of the collective psyche is both confusing and dazzling. The dissolution of the persona results in the release of phantasy, which apparently is nothing else but the functioning of the collective psyche. This release bring materials into consciousness of whose existence we had no suspicion before. A rich mine of mythological thought and feeling is revealed." [11] Who wouldn't be curious about such things?

In early 1917, his little volume entitled Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prozesse (The psychology of unconscious processes) became a textbook of sorts for those in Jung's circle. [12] It is the first published statement of the theory and methods of treatment that we still recognize as Jungian. Appropriately, the cover design for the original edition shows a chalice -- the Holy Grail -- with a large blazing sun positioned just above it.

In these publications and lectures Jung was careful to always speak and write in code. The Land of the Dead, the eternal realm of the gods, indeed the whole divine realm of the Hellenistic world, became the collective unconscious. The mortal shell that hides the god within us is the persona, or mask of false individuality. The gods themselves, including otherworldy entities such as Elijah, Salome, and Philemon, were given the name "dominants" of the collective or suprapersonal unconscious. When introducing this term for the first time, Jung even wrote that "These dominants are the Ruling Powers, the Gods." [13] Jung said the dominants (in 1919, the "archetypes") are a fact of "psychological reality," which itself is a Deckname -- still very much used by Jungians today -- for direct mystical experience of the spirit world or of the divine. All of this makes up Jung's first mask.

In a more familiar setting, such as his lecture to the Psychological Club, Jung was not afraid to make pointed allusions to metaphors of the spiritual. Particularly after 1930 or so, he was less afraid to speak publicly in the language of the spirit, but he was not very self-disclosing, and he stuck close to Christian metaphors to hide the pagan undertow of his stream of thought. This was his second mask.

In intimate settings -- such as an analytic session -- he could, on occasion, be quite explicit about the mysteria that awaited his patients if they continued along the path of initiation that would bring them a new experience of the gods. Still, even in these intimate moments of self-disclosure, Jung was still very much in his role as a religious prophet and leader of a charismatic cult of individuals looking up to him for guidance. This was his third mask.

These three levels of persona, these three faces of Jung, hid further mystical experiences from everyone except, perhaps, one person: Toni Wolff. How far Jung had gone down the path of the pagan only she knew. Jung still needed to use familiar Christian metaphors to wean away from Christianity those who earnestly sought rebirth. At times he turned to the confusing heretical Christians that we call the Gnostics. And he even taught Gnostic heresies to the Dead.

The year 1916 not only brought a return of the pagan gods to the dreams and relationships, to the sexuality and spirituality of the pilgrims who flocked to his consulting room, it brought dead Christian knights to Jung's doorstep. And they were angry.

"We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought"

The story Aniela Jaffe relates in Jung's voice in MDR is one of the most unforgettable in the book. [14] On a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1916, Jung's doorbell began ringing "frantically." Everyone in the house looked out the window but no one was seen. Jung himself was sitting near the doorbell, "and not only heard it but saw it moving." The place was haunted!

"The atmosphere was thick, believe me!" he said. "Then I knew something had to happen. The whole house was filled as if there was a crowd present, crammed full of spirits. They were packed up right to the door, and the air was so thick it was impossible to breathe. As for myself, I was all a-quiver with the question: 'For God's sake, what in the world is this?' Then they cried out in chorus, 'We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought.'"

For the next three nights, "compelled from within to formulate and express what might have been said by Philemon," Jung wrote his famous "Seven Sermons to the Dead."

"Seven Sermons" is written in an oracular style, under the pseudonym of a famous Hellenistic Gnostic by the name of Basilides of Alexandria, a second-century Christian who was eventually branded a heretic. Although none of the original writings of the Basilidean Christians have survived, images of Abraxas, one of their most important deities, can be found on magical medallions and stones. Abraxas was a powerful rooster-headed god with snakes for legs and who brandished a whip. Sometimes, however, Abraxas is seen with the head of a lion. Abraxas was thought to be the master of the hundreds of other gods who are his slaves and was therefore the supreme god of this planet -- the demiurge -- in which all contradictory forces and oppositional deities were contained.

The Dead came to Jung' s house for help because they "found not what they sought" in Jerusalem, the promised land of salvation. These spirits are Christian Crusaders who realized only after death that no redemption awaited them in the Holy Land. They felt cheated out of their immortality. They had been deceived by a false religion.

Jung preached to them in the form of seven sermons. By the end of the seventh, he had converted these disaffected Christians to his own pagan philosophy and to Abraxas, a god both good and evil. Abraxas is a terrible, hidden god that humans cannot directly perceive. Abraxas is behind the sun and the night. Abraxas is the creator and destroyer of world, truth and evil, light and darkness. Abraxas is "the hermaphrodite of the earliest beginning." Abraxas is the operation of all the gods and devils, and is "the world, its becoming and passing." There is no deity more powerful.

In the seventh sermon, Jung tells the knights that they were mistaken to seek salvation outside of themselves by journeying to Jerusalem. Instead, the real secret of rebirth can only be found in the "innermost infinity." If they would only look inward they would see at a distance on the inner horizon a "single Star in the zenith." The inner star is the "one guiding god" and the "goal of man." Invoking familiar pagan beliefs, Jung tells the howling Christians that after death the soul does not go to the Christian promised land but toward God as the sun or the star within. With this revelation of the pagan path of redemption, the Dead become silent and vanish up into the night sky to find their eternal rest.

The idea that the god within is experienced as the sun or a star on the inner horizon is one of the most central ideas of Jung's teachings during these early years. Indeed, in 1916, Jung himself drew and painted an image that he later interpreted as a representation of his personality. [15] It is a series of concentric circles within a larger one. Weird gods and daemons crawl about its various levels. What is most significant, however, is that at its core -- like the magma at the center of the earth -- is a fiery sun.

From 1918 on, he called these images "mandalas." The Sanskrit word mandala means "circle" and is thought to refer to the sun. For the rest of his life, Jung continually pointed to the Indian (Aryan) mandala as the best symbolic representation of wholeness or completeness in an individual or as the supreme God in which all opposites are contained.

In the seventh sermon are Jung's final words to the Dead, in which he instructs them about mankind. The seventh sermon is an interpretation of the mandala that Jung painted in 1916. With it, we see the inner pantheon of gods and daemons that Jung experienced within himself. We see that the sun or a star is at the very core of his being, the supreme god hidden behind all the others.

At the very bottom of the sun circle of Jung's soul, on the outermost circle, we see the demiurge, the dominus mundi or lord of the physical world. He is Abraxas, and the rays of the sun shine forth as a halo around his head. He is Abraxas the Leontocephalus, the lion-headed variant of the Gnostic god.

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PART 1 OF 2

PART THREE: Acts of the Apostles

There were many whose hearts told them that they should begin to tell the secret runes, the Word of God, the famous feats that the powerful Christ accomplished in words and in deed among human beings.

There were many of the wise who wanted to praise the teachings of Christ, the holy Word of God, and wanted to write a bright-shining book with their own hands, telling how the sons of men should carry out His commands.

-- The Heliand, song 1, circa 830 C.E.

Fidus, frontispiece to Otto Borngraber, Konig Friedwahn: Germanisches Trauerspiel, 1905. Here is the Aryan Christ worshiped by a female disciple.

Chapter 9: Fanny Bowditch Katz -- "Analysis Is Religion"

In the beginning, just like the celebrants in the ancient cults of Dionysus, it was mostly women who came to Jung from afar to celebrate in his mysteries. Beset by spiritual longing, shut out of any positions of authority or power in the Judeo-Christian faiths, enraptured by decades of spiritualist seances and Theosophical texts, many foreign women left their homes and set up residence in Switzerland so that they could be near Carl Gustav Jung. Jung was their "new light," their spiritual adviser and prophet, the Swiss physician and scientist who nonetheless also was a master of occult wisdom and magical practice. They came to Jung to heal themselves and learn to heal others through visionary contact with a transcendent realm of gods and goddesses. Two of them -- both Americans from wealthy families -- lived near Jung for many years before returning home to confront terrible problems in their respective marriages. These were marital problems exacerbated by Jung himself. A third -- an unmarried English physician who was a self-made success story -- remained in her native land and eventually escaped Jung's gravitational pull only when she found a new exotic wise man to follow.

All three women -- Fanny Bowditch Katz, Edith Rockefeller McCormick, and Constance Long -- found themselves in the first group of apostles around Jung at the same time. This was a very critical time in the establishment of Jung's analytical psychology and his cult, and therefore these three women exerted a long-lasting influence on his subsequent international movement and his place in history.

Let us begin with the story of the woman who has left us the most complete record -- indeed the earliest surviving record -- of what psychotherapy was like in the hands of Jung in the years immediately following his break with Freud.

The troubled soul of Fanny Bowditch

In the chill Boston winter of 1911, after a catastrophic bout with Parkinson's disease, Henry Pickering Bowditch died in his seventy-first year. He had enjoyed a long and distinguished career at Harvard Medical School as an experimental physiologist. His good friend William James, the philosopher and psychologist, had died the year before. Working in Bowditch's state-of-the-art laboratory inspired James to set up the very first experimental psychology laboratory in America at Harvard in the mid-1870s. Even after James had grown bored with experimental work and returned to philosophy, the two men remained close friends and shared many unconventional interests.

One of these was spiritualism and the whole range of parapsychological phenomena associated with it. Over several decades they studied "extraordinary mental states," as James termed them, and associated phenomena such as automatic writing and drawing, trance-induced multiple personalities, and waking hallucinations of the living and of the dead.

Mostly they studied mediums during spiritualist seances. James and Bowditch attended many spiritualist seances together over the course of the twenty-five years that followed their formation of the American Society for Psychical Research. In gaslit homes in Cambridge and on Beacon Hill these two old friends often spent evenings in the presence of women who seemed to go into deep trances and who spoke with the low, sometimes eerie, more often comical, voices of the Dead. They remained skeptical, yet their common bond was a fascination with transcendental issues, with matters of the spirit.

Harvard professors of philosophy and medicine, psychical researchers and their spooky mediums, conversations late into the night about the Big Issues in life and life after death informed the environment in which Fanny Pickering Bowditch, Henry's daughter, began her unusual life.

Fanny had always been intensely shy. She always appeared hesitant, afraid of life, unsure of herself. She felt vulnerable, sensitive to the looks and words of others, and was not very interested in intellectual matters in any focused way. Depressive episodes were not uncommon with her. At times, however, she could be quite a willful, even spiteful child. As the daughter of a famous professor and scientist much was demanded of her, and the life of social events and ritualized afternoon teas with the elite pained her. She tried to hide in the background as much as possible, but her cloak of invisibility did not work. She was not beautiful, and she knew it. She attracted few suitors, no husband. Life was routine, empty, and only to be endured, not enjoyed. By 1905 it was clear that Parkinson's disease was weakening Dr. Bowditch's heart. There was no treatment, and, still living at home, Fanny nursed her father through the last few painful years of his life. When he died, Fanny went into a depression so severe that suicide was her only comforting thought. Although grief-stricken herself, her mother, Selma, perceived the danger to her daughter's life and turned to a distant cousin of Fanny's for help.

"Cousin Jim," as Fanny called him, was none other than James Jackson Putnam of Harvard Medical School, a man still regarded as the American father of neurology, who by 1909 was one of the strongest promoters in America of psychoanalysis. [1] Putnam's prestige in the scientific and medical worlds helped to make Freud credible to American physicians. In the autumn of 1909, both Freud and Jung spent considerable time with Putnam. (After Freud and Jung parted company in 1913, Putnam remained closer to the circle around Freud until his own death in 1918.)

After talking with Fanny and realizing the depth of her disturbance, Putnam recommended that she go to Switzerland for extensive psychoanalytic treatment with Jung. Fanny's mother approved wholeheartedly. The prospect terrified Fanny, but she realized at some level that it was time to try out a new life: almost thirty-eight, unmarried, obsessively suicidal, there was nowhere else to go but oblivion. Switzerland was clearly the better alternative. At some point in early 1912, Fanny Bowditch arrived in Zurich and almost immediately began treatment with Dr. Jung.

"Your daughter ... has to go through a ripening process of her character"

In Zurich, Fanny found friends and felt alive again. After a difficult period of adjustment she eventually settled into a new identity as a member of a community united by a shared belief system and a sense that the work they did together would one day bring the spiritual salvation of the world.

In February of that year, Jung and Franz Riklin set up a new organization made up of analysts and patients called the Society for Psychoanalytic Endeavors. Going further than the Viennese circle around Freud, this new organization sponsored lectures and classes on the application of psychoanalysis to culture as a interpretive worldview. Everyone who participated was united by their shared experience in psychoanalytic treatment, which had taught them a new language for describing their lives -- a secret vocabulary that was sexual, clinical, liberating.

When Fanny began her sessions she was struggling with German. To facilitate her treatment, Jung did what he usually did with his patients from America and Great Britain: after an initial diagnosis, he referred her to his assistant and colleague, Maria Moltzer, for concurrent treatment. Moltzer was a Dutch nurse who entered Jung's circle in Zurich as early as 1910. She was the primary translator of Jung's Fordham lectures, and for many years was the only fluent English-speaking analyst in his circle. Moltzer was the daughter of the owner of the famous Bois distillery in the Netherlands, and she became a nurse to protest the abuse of alcohol. Jung's first mention of her is in a letter to Freud dated September 8, 1910, in which he claims that she and another of his female disciples, Martha Boddinghaus, are in "a loving jealousy over me." [2] She attended the Weimar conference in September 1911, but in the famous picture of the participants she sits in the front row to the left of most of the rest of the Zurich School. Her image is slightly blurred, but she looks intense, perhaps severe, with her dark hair pulled back.

In his initial diagnosis of Fanny, Jung revealed his view of psychotherapy as a ripening or maturational process in which the individual personality organically "grows" during the course of therapy, like plants or crystals in the natural world. And it is clear that Jung saw Fanny suffering from a stunted development of her personality. Jung wrote Fanny's mother, Selma, that Fanny must "go through a ripening process of her character until her personality has achieved complete independence." [3] Otherwise, he warned, she would never regain her health. Although this process may have seemed mysterious, he assured Selma that he could help her daughter.

But by later in 1912, something had gone seriously wrong in Fanny's analysis. Paradoxical feelings arose, making her feel anxious, ambivalent, confused, raw, exposed. Feelings of desperately needing approval from Jung and Moltzer were mixed in with a panic-driven impulse to flee from them and their perceived assaults on her -- especially from Jung. Fanny had never felt more vulnerable then she did with these strange but fascinating people who were eroding her old sense of self. In need of advice, she wrote to her cousin Jim and poured out her heart to him.

Jung was in New York City in September to deliver the Fordham lectures and to see colleagues and patients in other American cities, and he then reassured Putnam that Fanny's treatment was proceeding well, uninfluenced by the splits forming in the psychoanalytic movement. In his response of October 12, Putnam told Fanny: "I suspect that Dr. Jung's very masterful ways may affect some of his patients more strongly than he realizes himself, and you must not get dependent on him or hesitate to form critical judgments of him in your mind. I went out to New York to meet him a few days ago ... and also had a few words with him about you which made me feel sure that you are on the right track."

Putnam had enough experience with psychoanalytic treatment to recognize the psychological dynamics of the situation. Fanny was reacting to the early stages of therapy in a very characteristic way. The transference was beginning to set in and she was resisting. He knew that Fanny had been too cloistered all her life and that this was the first time she had ever really challenged herself. She had wanted to leave after a similar crisis in June, but Putnam convinced her then, too, that she should stay. It was too soon to quit. The alternative was too grim to contemplate, and they both knew it. On December 1, Putnam sent Fanny the following advice:

I think perhaps you take the analysis with Dr. Jung and Schwester M. all too seriously, and feel yourself far too much of a fly on sticking paper. After all, they are only humans with limitations and failings, like you and me, and you are not obliged to see any more to the analysis than just what you do see. I wish I could talk with you about it and see what is in your mind.

Perhaps you find your need of the kind of aid that Zurich has to offer too strongly and really need, now, more striking out intellectually and socially, for yourself. It is a fault in Dr. Jung (entre nous) that he is too self-assertive and I suspect that he is lacking in some needful kinds of imagination, that he is, indeed, a strong but vain person, who might and does do much good but might also tend to crush a patient. He is to be learned from but not followed too implicitly.

Putnam puts his finger on an aspect of Jung's personality that Jung himself became aware of in later years. Jung told more than one of his disciples that he had an unusual effect on people, that they were either "inflated by my presence or entirely crushed." [4] How revealing it is that Putnam uses the same verb to describe the harmful effects of Jung's personality on others.

At the end of his letter to her, Putnam offered Fanny some personal philosophy of his own: "Life is or should be an affair of each person, each one of us, getting in touch with the elemental forces of the universe (which is, throughout, a personal universe) [ ] more dignity and power at their full measure, cultivating sympathy and insight but refusing to be played tricks on by an infantile love of protection. [i] I'm not sure what you know enough of yourself -- but [you] need to feel your own oats more (excuse the colloquial expression), not in an aggressive sense but in a big sense."

In accordance with the wishes of her cousin, she remained in treatment. Under the guidance of Jung and Moltzer, she still had much to learn as she struggled with analysis in 1912 and 1913.

At about this time, Jung's increasingly estranged colleagues in the psychoanalytic movement were speculating about the true nature of the relationship between Jung and Moltzer. Ernest Jones told Freud, on December 26, that Jung "broke loose furiously" in a letter to him, "proclaiming that he was not neurotic at all, having passed through a [psychoanalytic] treatment (with the Moltzer? I suppose, you may imagine what the treatment was)." [5] Three days earlier, on December 23, Freud had written to Ferenczi: "[Jung] is behaving like a florid fool and the brutal fellow that he is. The master who analyzed him could only have been Fraulein Moltzer, and he is so foolish as to be proud of this work of a woman with whom he is having an affair. She is probably the one who got him worked up immediately upon his return to Zurich." [6] Although Toni Wolff is most likely the woman who was exciting Jung in late 1912, the gossip about an affair with Moltzer even reached later generations of Jung's disciples. Jolande Jacobi said in an interview for the C. G. Jung Biographical Archives Project, "I heard from others, about the time before he [Jung] met Toni Wolff, that he had a love affair there in the Burgholzli with a girl -- what was her name -- Moltzer." [7] However, as this is gossip that was more than two decades old by the time Jacobi heard it, this "girl" was most likely Sabina Spielrein.

Was Jung having an affair with Maria Moltzer? Did he submit to a formal psychoanalysis conducted by her? Until historians have access to Jung's personal papers for this period in his life, or until Moltzer's personal papers surface, we cannot answer these questions. However, given Freud's assertion that it could only have been Moltzer who analyzed Jung, clearly he regarded her as the most capable analyst in Zurich to do so.

***

One of the most admirable aspects of Jung's therapeutic philosophy during this time was his emphasis on the intellectual education of his patients. This was especially valuable for the women who entered his orbit without any formal education in psychology, psychoanalysis, or the history of religion and comparative mythology. Jung regularly held seminars for the broader community of the Zurich School, and many patients attended, including Fanny. As Jung's life and interests changed, so did the material he presented in the classroom. By December 1912, he knew he was no longer a Christian and was actively seeking a new myth for himself and for humanity in the polytheism of pagan antiquity. The seminars that Fanny attended reflected this shift toward a more overt religious orientation. For example, the first seminar Fanny attended, in May 1912, was on "Psychoanalysis." Her notebook for this class reveals it to have been a fairly straightforward explanation of the basic tenets of psychoanalysis, illustrated with a great amount of material from his word-association studies and from case histories. Dream interpretation was also explained through clinical material. There were few overtly religious references in the flow of ideas. But by the summer of 1913, when Jung taught another introductory course on psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic concepts were blended with remarks on the history of religion and even alchemy. Presaging Jung's later interest in alchemy, Fanny jotted down the following condensation of Jung's remarks in her notebook: "Alchemie -- die Geheimnis des Wiedergeburt zu finden" ("Alchemy -- to find the secret of rebirth"). This is the earliest evidence of Jung's spiritual and redemptive interpretation of alchemy.

As the religious elements of analytical psychology became more pronounced during 1913, Fanny's fascination with her experience in Zurich increased proportionally. Everyone was trying to decipher their favorite mythological passages in Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido. Could these marvelous, though frightening, experiences of gods and goddesses and the scintillating power of the sun-libido-God one day be hers? Fanny, like others, longed for confirmation of a transcendent realm but also remained afraid of actually experiencing it. The vitality and brilliant intellect emanating from Jung seemed to give everyone hope that they, too, could be such interesting people one day. Maybe it was possible to survive such an ordeal. . . .

And yet, despite Jung' s continual references to God and to things spiritual, his views confused everyone, including Fanny. Modern life created a crisis of meaning, a religious crisis, that must be counteracted with religion. Jung, as a parson's son and healer, seemed to be the right person to deepen their Christian faith and to breathe life back into their hopes for an afterlife and salvation. For many years Jung did this, but as he adopted a form of polytheistic paganism as his own personal myth, he found it increasingly difficult to hide behind Christian metaphors to get his therapeutic points across to his colleagues and patients who had not -- yet -- strayed from their monotheism. Knowing the time was not right to reveal his new pagan worldview, he confused -- indeed deliberately misled -- his flock.

Prophetic dreams

In January 1913, Selma Bowditch wrote to Jung to ask when her daughter would be returning home. With visions in mind of the popular story of Svengali and his hypnotic slave, the virtuous maiden Trilby, some relatives of American patients began to wonder what spell kept their female kin in Zurich. Jung assured Selma that Fanny had made great progress, so much so that he could soon "discharge" her from treatment. However, Jung insisted that it was Fanny herself who did not yet want to leave Zurich.

Fanny may not have been entirely happy in Zurich, but she was decidedly ambivalent about returning home. It was in Boston, after all, that she had watched her father die and where she had wanted to kill herself. She followed Jung's advice and looked for portents of the future in her dreams. The unconscious was to function as a higher intelligence, the oracle who would see into the future and let her know when the time was propitious. Jung and Alphonse Maeder had been teaching their patients how to use this "prospective" function of dreams to make decisions about their daily lives. Jung went one step further and insisted that some dreams were prophetic. Just as the old prophets of the Bible interpreted their dreams as messages from the future or from God, so could we. Fanny had been keeping Putnam informed of developments in Zurich, and they had begun to alarm him. On September 2, 1913, in a letter to Ernest Jones, he mentioned his concern over Jung's "prophetic dreams" and the discrepancy between his professed scientific theory and actual mystical practice with his patients. Fanny's identity is disguised here as that of "a former patient":

They [Jung colleagues] would seem to say that Jung is devoting much more attention to "reality"; but I should like to know practically whether this is true. Jung's feelings about the prophetic dream seem to be positive with him. He has been treating a former patient of mine for the past year, and utilized her dreams as a means of deciding whether she ought to return to America for a visit. This seems queer, and the more so that during his absence just a little later, she analyzed her own dreams, and came to the conclusion that a different meaning was to be asserted in this respect!! [8]

Apparently, Jung had been urging Fanny not to return to America, but during a hiatus from her analysis with him she decided otherwise.

In the late autumn of 1913, after her seminars were over, Fanny finally went home to Boston. She had been away almost a year and a half and returned a much more mature woman. But she had been having a difficult time. Jung had been aggressive, confrontational in her analysis. She sought out her cousin Jim's protection, but Putnam was reluctant to take her side even though he was beginning to have serious doubts about Jung. Still believing that Fanny was going through the usual transference resistances, he avoided saying anything that would damage her therapeutic process. And sensing his unwillingness, Fanny didn't tell him the full story of her treatment.

What Fanny didn't reveal was that in her sessions Jung had repeatedly called her a liar and a coward to her face. No one had ever spoken to her like that before and she resented it. But she was nevertheless aware of Putnam's high regard for Jung and set sail once more from America in late September 1913 and arrived in Zurich in mid-October. She immediately saw Jung and repeated all the private conversations she had with Putnam. Jung must have been horrified when Fanny related all the negative impressions of him she had transmitted to Putnam. The world-renowned Harvard neurologist was an important colleague whom Jung could not afford to lose to Freud's camp at this uncertain time. Freud, Jones, and Ferenczi were all courting Putnam as well, and the letters that passed between the three of them in November and December 1913 were filled with references to Putnam, his attitudes toward Jung, and whether or not Putnam was in the Freudian camp. They even passed Putnam's letters to Jones between them without Putnam's knowledge. They needed him and they knew it.

In November 1913, Jung was still nominally president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, but he and his Swiss colleagues knew a formal schism was in the offing. (Freud and Jung had broken off correspondence in January of that year.) The allegiance of James Jackson Putnam would be critical in determining whether Freudian or Jungian psychoanalysis would dominate the world, particularly in all-important America. Jung had the advantage because he had Putnam's relative in his pocket -- or so he thought. Fanny Bowditch now became a critically important pawn in a larger political game for the future of psychoanalysis and Jung's own career. Jung realized that he could not let Fanny stray from him with the damaging attitudes that she now seemed to harbor. Therefore, he convinced Fanny that it was she who had been mistaken, it was she who had transgressed against him. This brought her back into the fold of the Zurich School. Then she sent a remarkable confession to Putnam on November 18,1913:

Since leaving America now six weeks ago, I've thought of you very many times and have wanted to write, but the time has not seemed propitious as things have not been going as well as I hoped they might.

Very soon after sailing the reaction set in and all the old feelings of unreality, the depression and the haunting thoughts of suicide returned in full force so that I felt in no condition to write. I wanted to wait until I had seen Dr. Jung and had a chance to talk America and my problems there over with him.

Now I have been with him a month and I have told him a good deal about my conversations with you and my various experiences.

He has helped me to see things in their true light, to understand how although at the time unconsciously I misrepresented him to you and how faithless I have been to him, so now it is only fair toward you and toward him to write to you and show you my dishonesty.

Cousin Jim, I know that you will believe me when I tell you that I did not realize what I was doing -- but my not realizing was inexcusable after a year and a half of analysis.

I should have understood as I do now that in telling you of the crisis of last June, I was not, as I imagined telling you of it in order to show you my worst and what Dr. Jung has had to contend with in analyzing me, but in reality in order to win from you sympathy and understanding for my wounded feelings -- instead of honestly acknowledging my fault, taking the blame myself and facing the situation, I put all the blame on him, attributing it all to his having laughed at me; but I said nothing of the many hours of analysis, which through my dishonesty and unreasonableness I had made more than difficult for Dr. Jung -- this side of it did not occur to me.

He tells me now that he purposely allowed the crisis to come as he knew that only in some such way could he make any impression on me-also, that he did not drive me back into it as I told you, but that some such demonstration would have come with any analyst, as even with Sister Moltzer, who is so wonderfully tactful my behavior was often so childish and incomprehensible that analysis was almost impossible.

In resenting his laughing, in fact in telling you that it would take years for me to recover from the shocks and suffering of analysis, I only showed the pitiable smallness of my mind; that nursing my wounded feelings is more important to me than overcoming my faults and profiting by analysis.

You see, Cousin Jim, while I was in America I was conscious of the strongest resistance toward Dr. Jung and instead of analyzing them and understanding them simply as feelings of revenge, I was not honest enough for this, and allowed myself to be faithless to him.

I've realized during these last few days more than ever before how deep-rooted my dishonesty is -- Dr. Jung emphasized again lately that I am untrue, fake and dishonest and he has even used the word liar. He says I am particularly clever in erasing the truth, in misrepresenting things in order to shine at the expense of others, and it is with the deepest shame and humiliation that I must admit the absolute truth of all this. I am fearfully dishonest, Cousin Jim, I have lied in analysis both unconsciously and consciously; I have deceived Dr. Jung and sister and now you too -- O Cousin Jim I've been dishonest all my life because I am too much of a coward to do anything else.

Dr. Jung says he is willing to go on with me if I care to come to him, but he has no more interest in my case -- he says his only motive in taking me back is his duty to humanity.

You can see by this how desperate my situation is -- it is desperate -- but the feeling that at last you know me as I really am, that I've had the courage to tell you the fearful truth will be a help in going on, and I mean to go on at all costs -- finishing analysis means more to me than my life -- far more. And I'm ready to sacrifice anything and everything for it. You see, I've never yet known truth or perfect honesty. Dr. Jung says, and I know how true it is, that I must lose my life to find it -- during these last days I've been down to the depths as never before and surely soon the uplift must come; the wonderful feeling of "Wiedergeburt" ["rebirth"] which keen suffering and a struggle for a higher life bring.

I am, and always shall be, full of gratitude to Dr. Jung for handling me with such absolute sincerity and seriousness -- in my afterlife I may understand even more than I do now what it has done for me.

I can't write yet on the question you and I discussed so freely together as I haven't yet talked it over sufficiently with Dr. Jung, but here too I have given you wrong impressions and misrepresented him. I shall write and explain as soon as I can -- but Cousin Jim I am full of the bitterest regrets concerning my visit to America; I made many mistakes for which I can never forgive myself, and at present my mind is in chaos and often on the verge of despair.

I can't forgive myself for having made misunderstandings between you and Dr. Jung and I shall not rest until I've been able to straighten these out; and what an impression I must have made on you! When I think of my conversations now, they seem impossible and horrible -- you see how it was, Cousin Jim, don't you? My one idea was not to be a coward, because the word "Feigling" ["coward"] which I had heard so often in analysis has burned so deep into my soul, and my one idea was to harm myself and have courage -- I thought then that I knew myself -- but now I see how utterly mistaken I was.

It all makes me desperately unhappy. I shall read this to Dr. Jung before sending it to you to avoid all further misunderstandings.

With many thanks for all you did for me, all your interest and sympathy.

Fanny's remarkable letter tells us many things about the way Jung's brand of therapy took on a spiritualizing trend in 1913. Analysis leads one to a rebirth, the Wiedergeburt, just as the eighteenth-century Pietists and the ancient mystery cults promised. Fanny uses the metaphor of a descent or a katabasis when she says she has "been down to the depths as never before." Also akin to the ancient mystery cults, which promised initiates a better life after death, Fanny, too, sees her treatment with Dr. Jung as preparation for the afterlife. He agrees to continue treatment with her now not for her sake, but for the sake of "his duty to humanity."

A few days after Fanny showed the above letter to Jung, he instructed her to write again to Putnam to report the latest development in her analysis: her overpowering, almost oceanic, feelings of love for him. In just a month since returning from America, she swung from feeling crushed by Jung to feeling elevated, ecstatic, indeed inflated with divine love for her master. On November 23, Fanny wrote the following addendum and sent the two-part missive in the same envelope:

Dr. Jung has heard this letter and says he considers it all true but he wants me to add more to tell you of my latest experiences, so I'll have to tax your patience still further -- I'm so sorry.

You see this letter was written during the [ ] that I voluntarily stayed away from analysis as I needed to come to myself and understand. Only after days of struggle and conflict could I bring myself to realize how strongly dishonest I really am; I was continually making excuses for myself and trying to erase the painful truth.

Writing to you, to Sister, and going to Dr. Riklin who is analyzing my young friend Frl. Herzel and telling him of it, because I feared my influence might be bad on her, all helped me to reach a deeper insight, but in spite of it all I was harassed by the feeling that I couldn't love myself as I knew I must. I couldn't understand it and was in very great distress; all the time I had the strongest resistances and hatred for Dr. Jung with fantasies of shooting and stabbing him and there were moments when I thought seriously of stopping analysis with him and going to Dr. Riklin. It would have been fearful to me to have had to do this but I was in a desperate state of mind and it seemed the only possibility. Cousin Jim, it was ghastly, and it was only with the greatest effort that I can force myself to think of it and write to you. I had the blackest thoughts and suspicions of Dr. Jung and one day a sudden great fear of him which was quite new to me and I was continually being haunted by the thoughts of my experiences in America. I was sleeping badly and twice during that time I screamed so loudly in my sleep that I waked Miss [Sarah B.] Baker in the next room through closed doors.

Then came last Thursday evening and on Friday I was to see Dr. Jung again. I was trying desperately hard to make order out of chaos and I felt vaguely that beside acknowledging my dishonesty I must make still another sacrifice, a greater one than I had ever made before -- that only then could I love myself. But yet I couldn't find it and I had all sorts of extreme ideas, quite fanatical many of them.

Then, Cousin Jim, that evening as I was going to bed the truth suddenly came to me. I saw that it was my pride that I had to surrender, that in spite of my surrender to Dr. Jung in the beginning of analysis I had yet never really yielded my pride -- and this was to be my sacrifice. It all came over me then that instead of hating Dr. Jung I felt a deep and overpowering love for him; that my fear of him had been a distorted love, and that for the first time in my life I was capable of a disinterested love, because I could love him without either his friendship or his respect and my sacrifice was to be in telling him so.

I've never found anything harder than writing you of this, but Dr. Jung wants you to know of it, so I am trying to put my feelings aside.

Having the truth come to me so suddenly was a very wonderful experience -- overwhelming and indescribable and I wanted to pray -- this had come to me only very seldom in my life but I found I had reached that for which I had been longing and struggling all my life.

That night I called out again in my sleep but this time not in distress -- Miss Baker was woken by hearing me shouting out, "Oh, I am so glad, I really am," and then followed two great sighs of relief -- she heard this through closed doors but I knew nothing of it.

Dr. Jung has shown me both my pride has been keeping me from reaching that which I've needed all my life, and that being capable of a disinterested love is the first step toward an understanding of religion. Oh, and Cousin Jim, I see now how very much I have misunderstood Dr. Jung, how much bigger and finer he is than I in my smallness have been able to understand.

It's all very overwhelming and I can't say that just now I feel hopeful of ever being well, the confusion and distress are too great, but I have taken a step in being able to show my soul to Dr. Jung as it really is and I firmly believe that in time I can overcome my faults even though they are so fearfully serious. Oh, I hope you believe so too!

I've read all this to Dr. Jung and he says it is right. ... I am sending it gladly, Cousin Jim, and I am ready to take the consequences whatever they may be. Do write to me -- it's fearfully hard to have to wait too long.

I've had to copy it all over as the original was not fit to send.

When Putnam read these letters he was appalled at Jung's actions and concerned for Fanny's psychological independence and safety. In the course of a few weeks, Jung had led her to an eroticized religious conversion and made her less sure of herself than ever. Putnam recognized the cultlike nature of Fanny's new worship of Jung. He also saw the danger in Jung's control over her communications to him. Although he couldn't say this to Fanny in his response if Jung might read it, some of his psychoanalyst colleagues in America were claiming, in the wake of his split with Freud, that Jung was insane.

On December 10, Putnam composed a lengthy response to Fanny.

On the left margin of his emotional letter Putnam scrawled, "I cannot write without constraint unless I feel sure it is for you alone." Whether Fanny showed this letter to Jung or not is unknown, but Putnam's outrage and concern are apparent.

I have just read your letter and am naturally a good deal stirred up by it. ...

I should not want you to show this letter to Dr. Jung, or even tell him about it (simply for fear of concealing misunderstandings), so that if you feel that you ought positively to do that, please leave it unread. Do not be afraid, however, that anything you said to me gave any false impression of Dr. Jung. I understand it all.

The main thing that I want to say is that I believe your present reaction of abnegation and self-reproach to be excessive and therefore unwise and injurious. Let it be true, ten times over, that you were activated by a feeling of revenge towards Dr. Jung, and that underneath the revenge there was love.

Nevertheless, although -- if all this is true, as may well be -- you should see this, it should be seen and reacted to in calmness and with intelligent scrutiny, not in the way of self-abasement. The self-abasement reaction is "too easy" and becomes in its turn a sort of self-indulgence, like asceticism. You have, at your best, a fine mind and sound character, as was evident last summer, and you owe it to yourself to preserve a self-respect which should override and outlive even the discovery in yourself of more or less falseness.

Who is not false? Not one of us, not Dr. Jung either. Doubtless we can aid each other, but it is as the blind helping the blind, by giving a feeble but new bit of insight. I have no doubt that Dr. Jung is consciously trying to help you but I cannot understand his saying that he has lost interest in your case, just because you admitted that you had had a feeling of revenge and acted on it. He must know (and indeed I have heard him say as much), as everybody knows who is engaged in this work, that such feelings are extremely common. Doubtless they should be gotten rid of, but not at the cost of a loss of self-respect.

We should live by our best, and when we find that we are not doing so, we should look at ourselves critically but calmly, and quietly readjust our course.

I remember that Dr. Freud pointed out to me, in the very first of our few conferences at Zurich, that I was a murderer! Think of that. But did he mean, or did I suppose he meant, that I was to go and jump overboard, or give myself up to the hangman? Not a bit of it. I was to be healthier-minded from then-on, and happier, and better able to stop being a murderer. Of course you understand that your suicidal tendencies or thoughts are (at least in part, which is as far as we can go) a kind of self-indulgent, and again, excessive attempt to find a short cut to some sort of stability and content.

But there are no short cuts and no excessive reactions of these sorts -- most excepting your present reaction of humiliation, religious frenzy, or love which you call disinterested, -- that fill the bill of good sense and helpful change of heart. You cannot and should not change the dear Fanny Bowditch whom we all love, into any other sort of creature whatever, except through a process of slow, intelligent, and quiet growth and -- although I say this without wishing it to be taken too much to heart -- I cannot but suspect that you are suffering in part from the influence of Dr. J.'s personality and [a] tendency to be excessive in a too personal way of taking things. Perhaps I am wrong, but there will be no harm in realizing that he is also no god but a blind man trying to lead the blind, and that you are as much at liberty to criticize him as he is to criticize you ....

Putnam's reminder that Jung was no god is chillingly ironic when we consider that during this same week, Jung began to experience a series of religious visions that culminated in his initiation into the mysteries of Mithras and his own self-deification. By the time Fanny received this letter, her analyst had become the Aryan Christ.

How much did she learn of this in the months that followed? How did these mystical revelations to Jung change the style of her treatment in the months that followed this crisis?

***

One clue as to how Jung dealt with Fanny's powerful erotic transference and religious frenzy can be found in a letter from Ernest Jones to Sigmund Freud on July 27, 1914: "You may be interested to learn the latest method of dealing with the Ubertragung [transference]. The patient overcomes it by learning that she is not really in love with the analyst but that she is for the first time struggling to comprehend a Universal Idea (with capitals) in Plato's sense; after she had done this, then what seems to be Ubertragung may remain." [9] Ferenczi learned of this a few days later and said to Freud (July 31, 1914): "The Platonic idea as a transference substrate is precious. Jung seems also to have used the word imago in a quite incorporeal way." [10]

Tina Keller, who was in analysis with Jung in 1915, described how Jung dealt with her "love" for him in the manner described by Jones:

Dr. Jung never spoke of "transference" but obliged me to face the fact that I was "in love." It would have been easier to use a technical term. Or. Jung's theory was that I was "in love" with some quality (or archetype) which he represented, and had touched in my psyche. If and in the measure that I would be able to realize this quality or this unknown element in myself, then I would be free of him as a person. He was convinced of the meaning of such a manifestation, and he said that what I brought was such an openness that he owed me some spiritual value that would fertilize my psyche and my "individuation" would be a "spiritual child." [11]

Keller, who experienced difficulties with her husband, Adolph, because of her analysis, didn't buy this seductive promise of spiritual insemination. "This sounded good," she said. "He sincerely meant it, but it did not prove true." Jung's heterodox religious therapy could not win Tina away from Christianity or her husband. "All through this terrible period, when my husband was sad and angry, and I was unhappy, I still knew that I had married the 'right' man." [12] (The Kellers and Alphonse Maeder eventually broke with Jung and the Psychological Club and renewed their Christian faith through the Oxford Movement.)

What Fanny may have been struggling to comprehend was that she had been seized or possessed by a "god," to use Jung's private pagan metaphor, or had been overtaken by an Urbild (primordial image) from the phylogenetic unconscious. If all "projections" require a "hook," then Fanny's projections onto Jung did indeed have a basis in reality -- at least Jung's personal reality. Fanny was not really in love with C. G. Jung the man. She was in love with C. G. Jung the god. At least this is how the thinking would have gone. And since everyone had the potential to become one with the god within, techniques that allowed this internal divine essence to speak for itself moved to the forefront of Jung's method of psychotherapy.

Given the traumatic crisis in her relationship with Jung in November and December 1913, and given her cousin Jim's strong advice to look more critically at Jung, it is probable that in 1914 Maria Moltzer became Fanny's primary analyst. By February 1915 we find the first evidence that Jung and his circle were urging their patients to draw and paint their dreams and fantasies. Although Fanny left behind a small collection of drawings, few of them are dated and none seems to be from 1915. On February 15, 1915, Fanny typed up her own psychological interpretation of a series of drawings she presented to Moltzer. Though the drawings themselves have not survived, from her own brief analysis of them we can see that the spiritualizing trend in Jungian treatment had finally prevailed and that references to Wagner's Parsifal and to Mozart's Masonic mystery opera, Die Zauberflote, provide the anchors for interpretation.

"My drawings containing the very archaic and the very high," Fanny wrote as she free-associated from her artwork. "I must learn to understand them and how each of them can be lived. Certain archaic tendencies and certain spiritual aspirations too low or too high to be lived (as in the Zauberftote). To recognize the Kundry element in one. The possibility of developing from the very low to the very high. Of the value and importance of recognizing one's archaic tendencies, as part of oneself -- loving them as being a part of one's soul." Fanny mentions St. Francis of Assisi "speaking lovingly to a wolf" and talking to birds. "A new idea in the unconscious shows itself at first in the conscious as something quite commonplace, banal, -- then becomes spiritualized."

This indeed, in a nutshell, is how Jung revised personal memories and "infantile complexes": no inner experience, no memory or mental image, was simply personal ("banal"), but in reality collective or transcendent at its natural core. Fanny's jottings of her associations allow us to date them within the historical context of the development of Jung's thought. They are the earliest evidence that Jung took his former psychophysiological theory of the mind based on personal complexes -- which he had established experimentally with the word-association studies -- and elevated it to a transcendental plane. It was no longer those nettlesome complexes that made us forget things or say and do evil things we would not normally do; instead, our behavior was shaped by "primordial ideas" or "dominants" or "gods" or "archetypes." Once again, Jung found the universal in the particular, the sacred in the mundane.

In 1915, extraversion and introversion were the only two psychological types in his theory, and they roughly included the patterns that Jung would later call, respectively, the feeling type and the thinking type. These concepts referred to the direction of the flow of the libido in a person (extraverts project themselves outward, introverts toward the inner, subjective world). With the help of Toni Wolff, by 1916 he added the notion of intuition. Through a long and blunt discussion of the type problem in a se- ries of letters with Hans Schmid, Jung came to the conclusion that there were the two "functions," of which everyone had one to a greater or lesser degree, and four types in two bipolar pairs: thinking-feeling and sensation-intuition.

During these early years of analytical psychology, a major point of distinction between the Vienna School and the Zurich School was the latter's emphasis on personality types. Fanny Bowditch was almost a textbook case of an introverted type. Maria Moltzer was another. As Fanny and she would discover, their lives paralleled in many other respects as well.

Beginning in late 1914, Jung was called up regularly for several months of duty per year in the medical corps. Whatever had happened between them regarding the continuation of her analysis, Fanny now saw less of Jung. His analysis of Fanny came to a standstill for another reason. Possibly due to his mishandling of Fanny Bowditch's treatment, Jung lost Putnam's support, although Jung still admired him very much. By 1915, Putnam had allied himself firmly with Freud and his movement. Beginning in a February 22, 1915, note in which he sketched two hands clasped in friendship, Putnam now addressed Freud as "Dear Friend" in letters. Freud, delighted with the new intimacy, reciprocated with the same salutations. Hence, even though she was already at some remove in Moltzer's care, Jung no longer needed Fanny.

Fanny Bowditch continued her analysis with Moltzer and blossomed in ways that she had never dreamed possible. In 1915, a charming young psychiatrist from the Netherlands arrived and was in treatment with Jung and Alphonse Maeder. His name was Johann Rudolf Katz, and Fanny fell in love with him. Within a year or so they married. By late 1917 they settled in Amsterdam, where Katz practiced as a psychiatrist and an analyst.

Their courtship began in the spring of 1916. In May, Katz gave Fanny nine red roses bound with a golden ribbon. She had been around Jungians long enough to understand the sexual significance of the color of these flowers. They were a temptation, a challenge, and a confirmation that her life was about to change. As a forty-two-year-old virgin, Fanny's departure from maidenhood, from the protective container of a psychological world ruled by the mother-daughter dynamic, was long overdue. In the Jungian language of her circle, her individuation had been frozen by a transference to the principle of the Great Mother Goddess, and therefore as an adult she still remained a child. Here, now, was a man who offered the opportunity to bring her to full womanhood. But first there must be a sacrifice: the death of the maiden role in which she had been hiding.

Sacrificing her virginity to Wotan

On June 2, 1916, Fanny typed out a "fantasy" that she then acted out in real life. In it, she sounded very much like the cafe denizens of Schwabing described by Fanny zu Reventlow in her invocation of the great pagan cults of Mother Earth, the Great Mother Goddess, Volkish symbols of the sun, and the Tree of Life, the mighty oak. In a diary entry for August 29,1917, she referred to "reading my Club fantasy to the Club," and this document may have been the basis of her short presentation. Such presentations were testimonials of a sort, giving witness to the healing powers of Jungian analysis. She wrote:

The thought came to me that in breaking the transference which meant the tearing asunder of the bonds which had held me all my life, -- the bonds which had kept me bound to the great mother principle as a child is bound to the mother, I must use all the strength of my personality, give all I have, -- and above all, make it beautiful. Then came a fantasy which needed to be lived, -- and that afternoon I lived out in reality the expression of the great change now taking place within.

In the vase upon my table still stood three red roses, -- the last of nine that had meant a great deal to me having deep symbolic value not yet fully understood, -- their charm perhaps enhanced by the mystery of their meaning. The three faded red roses, now symbols of death, I bound together with the golden ribbon which had held them when they came to me fresh and beautiful. I took a trowel with me, and ... I went out into the woods. Never have those woods seemed more beautiful, or more responsive to my mood, -- one of nature's greatest gifts to man, the spirit of "Waldeinsamkeit" permeated my whole being and I felt consoled and uplifted ....

I was looking for an oak tree, the symbol of enduring strength, and although all others were plentiful, an oak tree seemed impossible to find. And so I wandered in my solitude, eagerly searching, -- never finding, -- but all the while feeling certain that somewhere in that fine forest must stand the tree which would mean to me more than all the rest, -- the one tree which from now on was to be the guardian of my roses and a symbol of new strength, of a new life, born out of sacrifice and death.

Eventually Fanny found her oak tree, or as she put it, "Fate willed it that I should find my oak." She placed her roses within a cavity in the trunk on some "cool earth." With her copy of the poems of Walt Whitman beside her, Fanny then waxed Romantic in her description of inner bliss as she kneeled in supplication to the mighty oak, that sacred symbol of Wotan, to which she had offered, in exchange for protection, the greatest of sacrifices: her immortal soul.

And as I knelt there filled with these solemn thoughts of death and life, -- of love and sacrifice, -- a sunbeam caught my eye .... All day the sky a dull dark grey had been, but now as if to give me all my heart desired, the sun shone forth, and in that moment came to me the meaning of the nine! All elements were here, -- below me Mother Earth, symbol of the great mother principle and giver of our life, -- beside me here the brook where flows loving water, -- symbol of eternal change and motion, -- of ever flowing thought, -- around me everywhere, and all pervading, the element of air, symbol of the spirit, of the mind, -- the part of us that calls on God, and striving ever upward realizes the Divine. And shining through the clouds, the great and living sun, symbol of the godly power and of might, life giver and destroyer of all life.

And here was I, -- one human being and alone in this great nature, -- one human being, small, and very much alone, -- yet conscious now of something vast within, something that vibrates with all nature, that strives, and falls, and strives again, -- that lives and must live, -- and living is a part of God.

Her memoir ends with the statement, "A sprig of oak leaves now stands in the vase upon my table."

Fanny Bowditch, like most Americans and many of the British who came for treatment by Jung, had very little education in mythology, and everything they learned about it came through the filter of Jung and his disciples. We can only speculate as to why she reenacted a Volkish fantasy about the ritual sacrifices to Wotan made by the ancient Germans. In her mind, she was offering the sacrifice of her virginity in return for protection from the Tree of Life for living out her sexuality and furthering her individuation. Sacrificial offerings to oak trees, which were sacred to Wotan, are thought to be the basis of our contemporary custom of placing ornaments on Christmas trees. Fanny would have been largely oblivious to the deeper Volkish nuances that made her sacrifice to the oak such a pregnant pagan act.

Jung, however, modeled the scripts or guiding fictions through which his disciples enacted their self-sacrificial encounters with God or the gods. Fanny's way of concretizing or acting out fantasies of making sacrifices must have had special meaning for Jung and those around him. It was a means of reaching back to old pagan cults for new religious possibilities. And although Fanny probably didn't understand the full Volkish twist of this philosophy, she did begin to understand that Christianity had its limitations. It had kept her sexually "repressed" and afraid of the natural world and of life itself. Analysis would redeem her from her old faith and offer her rebirth into a new existence.

Fanny -- like most of Jung's clueless American and British disciples -- may not have been aware of the culture-specific nature of the Volkish neopaganism that Jung was imparting, but James Putnam certainly saw its dangers and attempted to warn Fanny of them. In an undated note apparently written as an afterthought to a more critical exchange, Putnam said:

Do you not think that you have been too excessively and too intensely under the influence of a small group of self- assertive people with many fixed ideas (new to you and overwhelming) to be able to form a fair judgment as to their value? May it not be a case of exchanging old prejudices for new prejudices, an old glamour for a new glamour?

It seems to me that you may feel quite differently about the whole matter when you have exchanged again your German spectacles for your New England spectacles and German friends and traditions for your New England friends and traditions.

One should not be bullied into believing it is necessarily cowardice that determines one's course. It may be and it may not and usually both are partly true. The fear of cowardice is itself a cowardice -- or may be such.

Putnam criticized here one of the techniques by which social cohesiveness was enforced by Jung and his analysts: the insistence that the patients did not know themselves and were afraid to do so. What's more, the greatest sin of all was that they were "afraid of the Unconscious." To be a coward meant one was not receptive to the informed interpretations of the analysts. Given Jung's syncretism of German mysticism, Hellenistic paganism, and Gnosticism with his brand of treatment, it is no wonder that so many patients from foreign cultures and Christian backgrounds had strong resistance to adopting his worldview. The weaker ones, such as Fanny, eventually submitted to the constant attack on their old religious beliefs and values and allowed their old persona or conscious self-identity to be replaced with a new one as a member of a wonderful new spiritual movement led by the charismatic Jung.

By the time Fanny enacted her pagan sacrifice to Wotan after four years in Zurich she had, consciously or not, fallen under the spell of the analysts. Despite his blunt warning, even Putnam couldn't pull her out of it.

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PART 2 OF 2

Abraxas 1916: "Analysis is a therapy, and a religion"

In her diary from the summer of 1916, Fanny wrote, on Saturday, July 1, "Analysis is a therapy, and a religion -- [ ] a going back of Christianity." Fanny is now fully conscious of the fact that she is in a religious movement led by Dr. Jung, and that it is based on a return to pagan spirituality as a method of redemption or rebirth. The Aryanized Christianity of Parsifal appears again and again in her diaries, indicating that these Wagnerian and Volkish motifs were part of the "common Greek" (koine) spoken by initiates into the Jungian subculture and its mysteria.

Through Fanny's notes we can witness the birth of Jung's new religion. We find in them instruction in a new polytheistic cosmology and an appeal to make sacrifices to the old pagan gods once more. And we share Fanny's confusion as she is introduced to Abraxas.

Fanny's language in the early pages of her June 1916 diary echoes that of Hermann Hesse's analysis, which began at the very same time. She wrote the following disjointed (and often illegible) notes of her sessions with Moltzer:

[ ] it comes from "das innere Erlebnis" ["the inner experience"] that convey to one that this creed only, This is the way life is to be lived; [ ] insight into the deepest meaning of life -- seeing the Path before one [ ] or the Path one must go, or be guilty of the unpardonable sin -- sinning against one's higher self. This "innere Erlebnis" reached through religion -- analysis is religion. The Logos an abstract thought which cannot be expressed in a word -- logos -- and needs to be lived, not only thought -- thus being lived it becomes "das Fleisch gewordene Word" ["the Word made flesh"] -- [ ] -- Christ.

We are all Christ when we free our life through das innere Erlebnis -- live it -- but it carried with it an [ ] responsibility. We cannot live our life as he did -- but we can live in his spirit which means each living according to his own inner spirit, his highest [ ].

In speaking of god she [Moltzer] spoke of Dr. Jung's conception of "Abraxas" -- the Urlibido, which she also accepts [ ]. The Abraxas is the great cosmic force behind each God (the god seen by seeing the devil [in God?]) -- Abraxas -- a monotheistic conception -- the acceptance. Very difficult to understand and have remembered little. I think she said the dualistic conception in the [ ], light and darkness, day and night, good and bad, etc.

Thus, monotheism must have come with a much later development when the function of thought existed, also [ ] is an intellectual conception, and may here come from the recognition of the one power greater than oneself in the child to the father attitude.

To accept the idea of the many God --

Abraxas made brief appearances throughout the 1916 diary in many tangential comments by Fanny. She jotted down the phrase "Abraxas regression" and the equation "Abraxas-Iove-hate." In an entry most likely made in July, Fanny wrote, "Abraxas -- valuable to me -- this Parsifal episode."

We should remember that in the summer of 1916, Jung converted those deceased Christian crusaders to his neopagan cosmology and revealed the truth about Abraxas to them in his "Seven Sermons to the Dead." It seems that Jung could not help but share his knowledge of the terrible lionheaded god Abraxes with his disciples, who immediately injected this new revelation into their patients.

With the therapeutic and spiritual success she experienced with Moltzer, and with the very real possibility of a true loving relationship with Katz, by the autumn of 1916, Fanny no longer felt so erotically bound to Jung. In fact, he was beginning to seem quite human to her. And then, one evening at a meeting of the Psychological Club, something quite awful happened that forced many, including Fanny, to reassess their feelings about Jung.

Tina Keller remembers being repulsed by Jung in social situations "because Dr. Jung could be so sarcastic" and because "he made fun of people in an unfeeling way." [13] "From the beginning I had been shocked at the way Dr. Jung could speak about people, and I also heard the complaints of some who had been in contact with him, but had turned away disillusioned," Keller said. "There were conflicts in the Psychological Club and some very valuable members left. I clung to the aspect of Dr. Jung that I had experienced in my psychological sessions with him, but I avoided going to any of the social gatherings, where Dr. Jung could be vulgar and repel me." [14] Keller also could not tolerate the attitude of those Club members who hung on Jung's every word and seemed to overlook his darker side.

Perhaps it was the night of the first big banquet of the Club in the autumn of 1916. Alphonse Maeder gave a talk after dinner concerning his view of "the leading function of a medical doctor, contrary to psychoanalysis, where the unconscious is brought up by the doctor who also analyzes." Maeder later recalled that he "used the word 'leader' and 'leading function.' Jung made very sharp remarks about this" in front of the Club members. It resulted in a violent spectacle, one Fanny may have witnessed: "Once there was a terrible quarrel between us: He said something unbelievable to me! He said, 'Here, blood will flow!' It was really ... but first I have to tell why he said that. I had said to him that, 'You really have lied here!' I said that in front of the Club; it was really horrible; it was terrible! He was not always particular about everything. He was furious; he left the room. I followed him and then he said, 'Here, blood will flow!'" [15]

The sight of Jung threatening physical violence to one of his most trusted colleagues must have been quite an eye-opener. Whether it was this particular event or not, Fanny witnessed something one evening at the Club that shattered her godlike image of Jung. Immediately after the event, she wrote to Jung requesting to see him to work out her feelings analytically. Jung responded -- negatively. "I am glad to know how you felt about Saturday," Jung said in a note to Fanny dated October 16, 1916, but he urged her to analyze her resistances to him with Miss Moltzer. Jung did not want to deal personally with Fanny's issues.

Still troubled, she wrote to him the next day, making sure that her letter passed the approval of Moltzer:

I have received your letter, and I feel that I must write again to explain why I asked you to let me work this question out with you. A long time ago you said to me, that if a patient left Analysis with feelings of bitterness and resentment toward you, you knew there must be something wrong with his Analysis, -- that remark of yours has come often to my mind of late, and it has seemed to me important for me to get back again, if possible, that good rapport which I had with you in [the] past, but which should now be won on a much more mature basis.

At that time I was still so much in unreality, and in such confusion that the real conditions of life could mean but little to me, and the transference I gave you was based almost solely on sexual excitation, -- then finally came the evening at the Club, of which I spoke on Saturday, on which occasion my eyes were opened to the reality of things and I saw you in a new light, -- for the first time, in the grip of your own complexes, and I realized then, and subsequently, in talking the matter over, under what stress the Club had been formed, and what a lack of harmony existed even among the Zurich analysts.

These things must reflect on the psychology of the patients Dr. Jung, and make it all harder for them to find the harmony within themselves, -- for which reason it seems to be of utmost importance that such resistances as mine should be brought to headquarters, and worked out fully, even if very painful to both Analyst and patient. I cannot look at it as simply "a fact," but rather as a situation which ought to be worked out with all sincerity and honesty, recognizing the elements of right and wrong on both sides. And it is just because you and Frl. Moltzer represent symbolically the different values which I must bring into harmony within myself, that I feel so strongly the importance of working out this piece of my development, -- my Analysis could never be complete without it.

I have read this letter to Frl. Moltzer, and am sending it to you with her consent.

Jung's response of October 22 promised her the meeting that she requested, but only after he returned from military duty at the beginning of December. He once again placed the blame on her for not achieving an inner harmony and claimed that it might be good for her to "devalue" him so that she could withdraw her projections from him and work on her own individuality. Jung said that he knew-she needed to "see clearly." "But," he wrote, "your vision can only become clear if you look into your own heart." [16]

How did Fanny's encounter with Dr. Jung make out? There is a gap in our historical evidence. The rest is silence ....

"I had accepted the blasphemy"

The year 1917 brought Fanny into a deeper connection with her creative self through the painting and drawing of her fantasies. For the first time, tiny drawings of her fantasies and dialogues with her fantasy figures appear in her journal.

Her notebook for 1917 begins in February. Her references to Abraxas begin to recede. But for the first time she used language that is recognizably Jungian: "shadow," "persona," "individuation," "transcendent function," and the "collective psyche." We learn that Maria Moltzer began to confide to Fanny about her own troubled personal life and relationship with Jung. Moltzer shared not only her own drawings with her patient but her own "Bible," modeled on Jung's illuminated "Red Book."

On the very first page Fanny wrote: "My [ ] fantasies [ ] the state of being is a point [ ] the reaching of the beginning of things, i.e., -- the creation of the Personal God -- the alpha and the omega -- and all and everything -- my drawing is embryonic, as it should be, it is the embryo of this God-my own consciousness of religion -- bringing with it the four degrees." She was witnessing, through her own drawings and fantasies, the evolution of her inner self as the god within, and it was a product of the religious nature of Jungian analysis.

On May 4, Fanny sketched three panels in her diary that seem to be the three-step transformation of a vision she had of an unusual man. In the first panel he is sitting high up on a pedestal, legs crossed in a meditative posture, head and upper torso bent forward in prayer. In the second panel he is lying in a bed and something with large batlike wings hovers over him. In the third panel he is standing, dressed in robes, and a halo of flames outlines his entire body. Above him, something with wings seems to be clutching an object. Her notes for her analytic session suggest that Moltzer was teaching her to talk to this little figure, to bring him to life. Jung referred to such representation of the Masculine in female patients as the animus, which is the Latin word for "spirit." In men, the Feminine counterpart was the anima, or "soul." To engage in a dialogue with these entities, Jung believed, was to contact the innermost core of life itself. This technique of active imagination clearly resembled magical procedures for animating statuettes for divinatory purposes in the Hellenistic world. Fanny described her attempt to master such magic and receive instruction from her inner voice:

Still in my deep introversion and very tense. Was feeling as if [ ] I could only stay with her half an hour.

[three sketches]

She says I must keep very quiet, do only what is necessary in order to not lose my contact with life and wait -- try to make the man speak again.

He seems to represent my intellect [ ] intellect entirely expressed by my neurosis. The woman [ ] of feeling, of the soul.-Both are symbols of what 1have lost in life.

In a later entry in May, Fanny said she must continue her commitment "to life and to religion -- not only intellect, not science, but wherein initiation also plays a part." Below this statement she made a drawing of two crisscrossed wavy lines -- like old images of radio waves -- that intersect a large thick cross in the middle of the image. In the center of this cross is a circle, which an arrow indicates should be red. There are circles on other sides of the cross, and it is possible that the three circles symbolize the three psychological types that existed in Jung' s theory in 1917. It is not clear which circle represents which function. The letters "M.M." are in the lefthand corner, indicating this chart was inspired by Maria Moltzer. Below it Fanny wrote: "Science stands to Art as Art stands to Life. Here are the functions united in the Logos. The red circle in the center is the symbol of life, of blood, of fire -- it has [ ] fire, sacrifice, it is the very essence of life."

Here again we see the sun as a central symbol of divinity among Jung' s disciples, with life, blood, and sun fused together as core representations of the god within. Wagnerian elements will pop up in Fanny's associations to her imagery, and in the entry for May 26 she mentioned the Grail, Lohengrin, and so on. In other passages she mentioned gold rings and Alberich. But in this entry we find Fanny believing that she is participating in the creation of a new religion by working on her psyche and that she should use her own visions as the revelatory basis of a new bright-shining book, a new Bible. Fanny wrote: "I had accepted the blasphemy which means I had given up my old conception of religion and am creating a new. It is only blasphemous from the old point of view. This found in the beginning of my Bible!"

Accepting the blasphemy may have been an ideal for Fanny as an individual, but trying to form a cohesive bond with a mate who also felt compelled to follow the unique call of his own path only led to disappointment.

"I should do for R. what she is doing for Dr. J.!"

Fanny's relationship with Johann Rudolph Katz was showing signs of strain. They had married, but they were having serious problems. Fanny was afraid of him, afraid to totally give her heart to him and for some very good reasons: he could not -- would not -- give up his "polygamous tendencies."

On July 16, she spoke of her "transference" to "Dr. Katz" and devoted considerable space trying to analyze her attraction to him. After her analytic session with Moltzer, Fanny wrote: "Had a long talk with her about R. [Katz] which was difficult for her and for me. His complete lack of understanding of her, and not being honest with himself -- not accepting his transferences, etc. -- and realizing that he wanted to live his polygamous tendency, and projecting everything onto others. He has suffered too little and is not finding himself. All this is not the Dr. Katz, his main object is [ ] -- we need religious spirit."

Moltzer helped her put her personal relationship with Katz into a grander, more cosmic perspective. The personal problems of two individuals didn't amount to a hill of beans; it was their greater role in the evolving consciousness of humanity that counted. Moltzer reassured Fanny that the analytic work was refining her soul and making her one of the chosen who were going to bring about a change in consciousness for the whole human race:

[ ] developing thereby my subjective life and finding my soul -- that the relation means finding my adaptation to collectivity -- and this I do with R. -- it cannot be done alone -- finding my relation to him I find it to collectivity -- this is the overcoming of the hero, too.

She spoke very beautifully of this new attitude to life -- of some going further than others -- some reaching the goal -- others getting as far that they can see what will be done by the next generation -- whether we live to see it matters less than the spirit be kept alive.

But Fanny was realistic -- and somewhat prophetic -- about her future with Katz. "In Rudy's and my relationship I have a very hard piece of life ahead of us," she wrote, adding later, "His polygamous tendencies must be very strong to cause such a conflict." Moltzer, who, as we shall soon see, was dealing with a very similar situation, told Fanny "'there is another way,' that is the fulfilling of the progressive tendency in religion, and no longer polygamy." Although to the many women in Jung's circle replacing male polygamous instincts with religion may have seemed the ideal solution for everyone's problems, in practice things didn't work out quite that way. Not with Jung as Katz's analyst.

After this long talk with her analyst, Fanny was hopeful again. She was on the path. "I am at the beginning of my individuation," she confided to her diary, "gaining my inner life."

Fanny saw Moltzer on both Monday, July 30, and Tuesday, July 31. The entries for these sessions are among the most dramatic in her diaries. Before her first session with Moltzer, Fanny wrote to herself, "I must also force myself to talk with her of my deepest feelings." Fanny's confrontation with Katz over his polygamous instincts activated Ii complex in Moltzer (to use their language). Fanny's situation hit too close to home. The man whose polygamous tendencies were causing Maria Moltzer such grief was her master, C. G. Jung.

At first, Moltzer aggrandized Jung and her relationship to him, making it seem as if the two of them were a new Adam and Eve who were going to bring about the spiritual redemption of the world. It was heady stuff for Fanny to hear from a woman she idolized.

Of this hour it's hard to write -- I had perfect rapport and stayed 1-3/4 hours with her -- at the end of the time I felt lifted with another woman and almost as if I had been in a divine presence. She spoke wonderfully, as if inspired, and I saw more clearly than ever before what she is working for -- what her struggle with Dr. Jung means. How wonderfully she spoke of the work that she and Dr. Jung were to do together, for which they are only the instruments [ ] in the great universe, of our duty to life, of the subjection of self for the benefit of all -- all these feeling are coming to me now as if never before. She spoke of the great struggle going on in the world, the great agony, which is the collective expression of the individual struggle.

Fanny then quoted from a letter from her cousin James Putnam: " 'To be able to stand alone and give our best strength to the community -- that is the great aim and hard enough to reach.'"

Her next session with Moltzer was equally powerful, but for entirely different reasons. Here Moltzer disclosed their parallel difficulties with the polygamous men in their lives:

The next day we talked for almost an hour, an hour in the dining room ... Shall I soon forget it? She spoke of going to Chateau d'Or to see Dr. J. [at his Army post] of his injustice to her [ ] on one side he is fine and on the other almost a charlatan playing to the gallery.

His attitude toward their differences is the attitude of the intellectual man -- the historical man -- and she feels Rudy would be much the same -- and this shocked me -- as I felt that was a [ ] which Dr. J. lacks.

Then she said -- and oh how she said it -- with that wonderful far away look in her eyes, that she felt that forces here may run deep [and that] there could be an affinity between her and me -- that it is meant that I should do for R. what she is doing for Dr. J.! This explains to her the meaning of my giving her such a valuable thing as the little ivory figure. She [ ] feels that R. has great value which I can bring out -- and she spoke of overcoming the personal in order to do this -- she certainly has with Dr. Jung!

May I live up to her expectations!

"Everyone must write his Bible"

Fanny was entering the last stages of her analysis. She had learned to record her dreams and write down her associations to them. She had learned the power of painting and drawing the images that came to her when she was awake and asleep. She now felt comfortable talking to the images that she drew in her diary and reporting the dialogues she was having with her inner voice. Katz was learning to do the same. Fanny had learned that there was a personal god growing within her, a higher intelligence that she could communicate with through her drawings and automatic writing, and that the technical term for this communication was the "transcendent function."

She had learned to think in terms of types and compensation and had accepted Jung's dictum that the most unpardonable of all sins was to be too one-sided, to not live life to its fullest even if others consider your actions evil. She herself was too introverted, too feeling, and had needed to develop her intellect during her years in Zurich. Katz was her opposite in many ways: intellectual, a man of the world, more extraverted then she. She needed him in order to function well in the greater world outside the incestuous circle around Jung. Katz needed her, or so Moltzer told her, to be his "inspiratrice," to ripen him and bring him to full consciousness for the betterment of mankind. She also accepted that there were many gods in the one and that this one god was Abraxas, who was both good and evil.

With the help of Maria Moltzer, she had learned to construct and read her astrological horoscope. Astrology was an important aspect of Jungian therapy from its earliest days. Clues to understanding the logos, one's fate, could be discerned by reading horoscopic charts properly. By 1920, Jung introduced the I Ching to his disciples as the divinatory method of choice, saying the gods spoke to humans through such devices.

On August 17, 1917, Moltzer provided Fanny with a progress report of their work together:

She spoke of the great difference still between my conscious and my unconscious -- the latter being so rich while there is still so little in the conscious -- herein I have gone right against my horoscope which indicates much material in the conscious -- that is because I have developed my intellect. At times she has thought I had a man's intellect -- to develop my thoughts, I must go further and further with my drawings. Stick to it and finally light will come, and this will be far more valuable to me than my horoscope's been -- it is the direct [ ] out of [ ] unconscious.

Everyone must write his Bible and in working out [ ]. I shall find my adaptation to R. -- when on the Path one had a wonderful sense of peace.

If my horoscope had been written out with greater understanding of the trans.[cendent] function nothing would have been said of my becoming ill through my projections -- I need not become ill if I find the middle way.

Of her [Moltzer's] book, her Bible -- pictures and each with writing -- which I must also do.

For the analytic session of August 20, 1917, Fanny showed Moltzer some drawings she had made that contained images of the blazing sun. Moltzer's interpretation gives us a glimpse into the formulaic Jungian method of that period in which all such images were thought to be representations of the god within bursting out from the most archaic levels of the unconscious and into the patient's artwork. And as in the prevailing Aryan solar mysticism (such as in the illustrations of Fidus), the great principles of the Masculine and the Feminine are united within the sun as God: "The [ ] God of Life from which the Masculine and Feminine principles arise -- particularly from the collective libido, becoming individualized in the unconscious, thus rising as a flame, [ ] God of thought, spirit -- fire, the destroyer, as much as purifies. Agni -- the Fire God. The thoughts are brought forth through the agony of sacrifice."

Although her individuation was progressing smoothly on the spiritual front, on the physical plane her marriage was in trouble. "It appears that I have unconsciously [ ] in my marriage difficulties," Fanny recorded in her diary on August 29. She wondered if certain patterns she was living out with Katz were "an escape from my inner development." Moltzer attempted to reassure Fanny that day by sharing her views on why it takes women so long to individuate through analysis:

Some patients can be cured in a short time, in an hour, a few months, etc. Other women in whom a new function has to be created through which they are to give new values to [ ] must take years -- the function has to grow. She feels that it may take several years [ ] before I have found everything there is in me -- such a development can take 6-8, even 10 years. If! neglect this inner life I can never be satisfied. I will become bitter and others will do the work I should have done. I have been mistaking my regression tendency for life, and I lack faith and religion. My great danger is an escape into extraversion. Nothing could be plainer than the words of these I make, and it is quite clear where my path lies. There is absolute need of taking time to myself and developing my inner life. [Her emphasis.]

She [Moltzer] spoke of Art, real Art, being the experience of Religion.

September 1917 was the last time Fanny met with Moltzer for formal therapy sessions. They had known each other for more than five years. It was time for Fanny to go along her own path. But first she needed to truly begin her own Bible. "I must write a book, just for myself -- [ ] giving my life line and illustrated by my drawings," Fanny wrote on September 1. Moltzer "feels I am very near the end of my work with her, although it may take another several years before I understand everything."

As they approached the end of their association, Fanny experienced an intense vision -- a descent into the underworld -- that resembled those of both Jung and Hesse. Not all the details of the visionary descent into a grotto are in the diary, but Fanny's associations are. We can only guess whether Fanny experienced this katabasis on her own, or if she was led to the underworld through a guided-imagery exercise by her analyst. "I was right," Fanny excitedly wrote on September 11, "my experience in the grotto was the realization of the Logos, the ice was the symbol of death, and in the Temple of the Holy Grail Kundry dies -- What is Kundry to me?" To her, "Kundry is the undifferentiated libido -- example of 'Treib' in the collective sense -- belongs to the earth, the animal."

On September 14, Fanny Bowditch Katz made her last diary entry. Her visionary descent into a grotto brought her to the climax of her analysis: a realization of the sacred logos. The grotto became the Temple of the Holy Grail, and the Grail was the logos. Within the Temple of the Holy Grail was a hermaphrodite -- an important symbol in the analyses of others in Jung's circle. "In the grotto," Fanny wrote, "instead of realizing my visions and fantasies, I tried to understand the intellectual significance of the hermaphrodite.

"The Logos [ ]. The Logos is a religious experience."

And with that, the Ur- Bible of Fanny Bowditch Katz comes to a close.

"Everyone has his own mysteries"

Finished with their analyses, Rudy and Fanny Katz left Zurich in the autumn of 1917 and moved to Amsterdam. Rudy resumed his psychiatric practice and Fanny continued with her own program of educational development. Fanny remained a member of the Psychological Club and shows up on its roster for February 1918, as does Maria Moltzer. Moltzer remained in Zurich, analyzing many of the English-speaking patients that Jung himself did not want to see any longer. Her patients over the years included many whose names will become familiar to us: Edith Rockefeller McCormick, Harold F. McCormick, their daughter Muriel McCormick, Beatrice Hinkle, and Constance Long.

Fanny found the cessation of her analysis difficult to bear. She continued to make drawings and sent them to Moltzer for an analytic interpretation. She also may have sent Moltzer the German text (still surviving) of a "homunculus" vision in which she descended down to the "realm of the Mothers," as Faust did in Goethe's epic. In Fanny's vision, however, she regressed further and further back through evolutionary history until she became the "tiniest embryo, only a cell, round and small" and suddenly "came the memory of an experience under an anesthetic which I had never spoken about with Dr. Jung." [17]

In November 1917, Fanny had written a letter to Moltzer about some visions, wondering if she was experiencing the transcendental function. Moltzer wrote back, "Through your introversion you came again in contact with the Divine, and in connection with this you realised, the transcendental funktion as the funktion by which the divine is expressed in a human form. So the transcendental funktion is the 'Mittler' between God and Mankind." With this helpful definition of the transcendental function we now know that this was another cover name that Jung invented for the process of self-deification.

Not long after Fanny's arrival in Amsterdam she received word that her mother had died. Both Jung and Moltzer sent brief notes of condolence in the first weeks of March 1918. All of the old feelings of depression and suicide that she thought she had eliminated through five years of analysis came back. In addition, she felt terribly guilty for not having returned to America since 1913 to see her mother. She immediately wrote to Moltzer, pouring out all of her sorrows. She sent her latest drawings, which were all gray and black. Moltzer wrote back on April 14. In contrast with her original note expressing sorrow, this one is not exactly the most empathetic letter ever written. Her response demonstrates to what extent even normal grief reactions were depersonalized and then elevated to a cosmic plane by those following Jung's lead.

I am not astonished that it was after your Mother's death that your symptoms came on, although they have not exactly to do with it. Your Mother's death can probably mean but the death of the past, the death of your youth and your childhood .... In this moment the religious problem must come up again and now for the need of a continuity, for it is only with a religious attitude toward life that you can really conquer the difficulties of life. Although living together we are by the fact of our different personalities alone and it is only by acceptance of this loneliness and of our own qualities, that we are able to accept life. Although we have all a participation to the general subconsciousness, the picture of it is again so different and bound by individual values, that everyone has his own mysteries.

I think you have come to the moment where I scarcely can help you anymore. You only can understand what the last picture means and it is only from your own subconscious that you can get the explanation.

As for her guilt over not seeing her mother because of the fascination that the Jung cult held for her, Moltzer says, "I think too that you ought not to be so sorry of not having seen your Mother anymore, for she would never have understood you, be sure of it."

Fanny kept in touch with her spiritual adviser and sent drawings to her from time to time. In July of 1918, Fanny heard that Moltzer had resigned from the Psychological Club. Wanting to know more, she sent her a letter and a cheerful picture. Moltzer was joyous in her reply, referring to the picture as "radiant," and saying that "radiance is the first manifestation of the infinite that we can conceive." Furthermore, Moltzer said, referring to Abraxas, "I too think that God and the Devil are two manifestations of the same principle," and that "one necessitates the other." "We must learn to value the devil again. The Christian religion expelled him. He asks for his rights again."

Moltzer confirmed that she was "working hard" and that "Yes, I resigned from the club."

I could not live any longer in that atmosphere. I am glad I did. I think, that in time, when the Club really shall have become something, the club shall be thankful I did. My resignation has its silent effects. Silent, for it seems that it belongs to my path, that I openly don't get the recognition or the appreciation for what I do for the development of the whole analytic movement. I always work in the dark, and alone. This is fate and must be accepted. If the psychological steps I take work for the good of others, I must be contented and live in peace and so I am.

Rudy

Fanny's marriage to Rudy Katz proved difficult. Using Jung's relationship with Toni Wolff as his model, Rudy began a relationship with a woman much younger than his wife. Older than him, inexperienced in love and life, and still struggling with her own self-worth and confidence, Fanny let him. She did, however, make her resentment known in social situations. Maria Moltzer witnessed this when she saw them in January 1920 in Brussels and wrote Fanny immediately afterward. She advised Fanny to accept this new form of marriage for a new age. Abandoning her crusade to convince Jung and others that polygamous tendencies should be transmuted into religious fervor, Moltzer finally accepted the Schwabing-Ascona model of Quo Gross. Telling Fanny she was "looking at all the difficulties you have had with your husband from too narrow an angle," Moltzer placed the blame on Fanny and instructed her on the greater cosmic meaning in her personal situation. She wrote:

Your difficulties have been great; that is true but. ... You did not leave -- you have asked a younger woman to live with your husband. So you have brought difficulties to yourself by yourself. When that is so revenge in this moment [ ] but revenge would not be fair play ....

[With regard to Fanny's marriage she] had to go along the road of sacrifice -- a path -- is what the [ ] biological woman had to make sacrifice after sacrifice to acquire at last a new form of life and a new basis of marriage. A form we needed in our own times.

Moltzer then made reference to a book that Rudy had constructed of his drawings, paintings, and automatic writings that expressed the voice of his soul. He apparently showed this book, his Bible, to both Fanny and her analyst before their marriage proceeded with Moltzer's blessing.

I think -- you have to do what your husband had to do -- you have to write a book and receive a dream in which the path is shown by which the new form of marriage is to be required.

Now, you cannot write this book unless you have accepted marriage on a new basis. [ ] that you have not yet found the new form of marriage. [ ] 1thought: when your husband would accept his "sacrifice" and the text of his drawings -- here it is so clearly said.

Apparently, Rudy promised in his book to sacrifice his polygamous tendencies if the marriage with Fanny proceeded. Ultimately, as Jung found, it was not a sacrifice that allowed him to also follow the inner voice that urged him on to individuation. Perhaps Rudy simply followed Jung's counsel against the "unpardonable sin" of one-sidedness.

In the spring of 1925, Maria Moltzer sent Rudy three letters in which she tried to convince him to change his life. Moltzer told him he must choose between his work and his inclination to have extramarital affairs. She pulled no punches: Moltzer told Rudy that his infidelities put him in great danger and, furthermore, could lead him to insanity.

Other than one letter to Fanny in 1934 in which she said, "I want to see your drawings .... Your drawings are a part of your world," Maria Moltzer's trail ends here. Except for speculations about her possible affair with C. G. Jung, her name never appears in the history books. Most Jungians have never heard of her. She has been forgotten even by her own tribe.

Rudy died in 1938, ending a stormy marriage punctuated by many separations and renewals of vows to stay on the path.

Fanny spent her last years in Durham, New Hampshire, surrounded by her mandala paintings and other drawings. She went to Quaker meetings and saved newspaper clippings about Jung. Her friends called her "the Duchess of Durham." She died in 1967, at age ninety-three.

Only she would know if she remained on the path or not. But many people said that she often talked about those wild years in Zurich with Jung and his crew as the best she ever had.

_______________

Notes:

i. For this chapter and the three that follow, whenever a passage in a letter or diary is illegible I have indicated it with [ ]. All translations from the German are mine.

[admin]

PART 1 OF 2

Chapter 10: Edith Rockefeller McCormick -- The Rockefeller Psychoanalyst

Without her, he might never have succeeded. With her, he became known to the entire world. Yet despite her own celebrity, few know of the fateful collaboration of the Rockefeller psychoanalyst and C. G. Jung.

Edith Rockefeller McCormick is a mystery to her own family even today. She was the troubled daughter of John D. Rockefeller, whose personal fortune during the First World War was thought to comprise about 2 percent of the gross national product of the United States.

In 1913, Edith arrived in Zurich for treatment with Jung. The path that she undertook with Jung led her away from the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood and into a magical realm of gods and astrology and spiritualism. After 1913, Edith became a stranger to her father and siblings and even to her own husband and children. Indeed, Jung encouraged this separation from her old life and her compensatory integration into his community of disciples. Edith became an analyst in the Jungian mode, a magical healer who interpreted the dreams of her patients and pointed out the divine elements in their artistic productions.

Jung's magical world must have been tremendously attractive to Edith at that time. She had suffered the loss of two children and had withdrawn emotionally from her husband and from her surviving children, still quite young. She needed help and found it in Zurich. She came alive for the first time. Her former life, her former country, could not compare with the opportunity to participate in the salvation of the world and the birthing of a new god.

Edith Rockefeller McCormick remained in Zurich until 1921.

Misfortune among the fortunate

Of all the children of John D. Rockefeller, Edith always seemed the most unhappy. She was an intellectual by nature but as a woman and socialite at the turn of the century found few opportunities to satisfy her interests. She had few friends and rarely joined in the Rockefeller family activities unless her presence was required. She preferred being alone. She did not reveal her emotions, often seemed distant and taciturn, and carried herself with the superior attitude of someone critical and generally displeased. Rarely did she risk a smile or dispense compliments or make small talk, and her unwillingness or inability to extend herself often threw others off guard or left them cold. Perhaps all of this was a cover for her overpowering fears of external reality, fears that exploded into severe agoraphobia in her mid-thirties. These personality traits were most like her father's.

Naturally, she married a man who was her complete opposite. Harold Fowler McCormick was born with a first-class temperament and a second-rate intellect. He was a peacemaker, a placater, a surface skimmer. He thrived in a world of country clubs and racquetball tournaments, yachting competitions and philanthropic galas. He glided through Princeton University and received his A.B. there in 1895. He was being groomed to be the heir to his father's fortune and to command the empire that the International Harvester Company would become. This was a suitable track for Harold, for he was loyal, trustworthy, and eager to please. His polished social graces and buoyant superficiality made him the quintessential American business executive. Everyone liked Harold McCormick.

His father was Cyrus Hall McCormick (1809-84), the inventor of the McCormick reaper, which revolutionized harvesting. Cyrus was a brooding, unapproachable man. Born into near poverty, he developed a hard shell that aided his acquisition of fame and fortune. He died when Harold was twelve years old. Harold's mother, Nancy (Nettie) Fowler McCormick was deeply religious and an obsessively intrusive and overbearing mother. Of her five children, two were insane: her daughter Mary Virginia and her son Stanley. Harold and his sister Anita -- another strong personality -- spent much of their adulthoods preoccupied with the medical care of their younger siblings. Harold's older brother Cyrus generally removed himself from such concerns. Harold led the family negotiations and continually made peace among his relatives and between the warring teams of physicians called in to treat his sister and brother. Stanley McCormick, in fact, was treated by many of the most famous psychiatrists in the world, and the records of his treatment make him arguably the most fascinating case history of the twentieth century. [1]

The newspapers, savvy to the unspoken business deal about to take place, shouted with glee when Harold and Edith announced their engagement. They called Edith "the Princess of Standard Oil," and Harold "the Prince of International Harvester." Harold and Edith were both twenty-three when they were married on November 26, 1895. She was described as a "demure little blonde, with a high forehead, grey eyes, and a mass of ringlets under her hat." [2] It was a quiet affair, a private ceremony in a parlor of the Buckingham Hotel in Manhattan. Harold had graduated from Princeton that May and had already been provided a position in his father's company. By 1898 he was a vice president, and in 1918 he became the president of International Harvester. Educated by private tutors, Edith had freely followed her own interests. Her first actual job would be as a psychoanalyst during the First World War. Harold became close to Edith's father, and throughout the rest of his life -- even after he and Edith were divorced -- he wrote regularly to John D. Rockefeller and addressed him as "Father." Edith, for her part, had little in common with Harold's parents and avoided them whenever possible.

Edith had an analytical mind; Harold's tended toward synthesis and operated through the filter of feelings. Focused rational thought was foreign to him. He read newspapers, not books. Edith swam, skated, rode a horse and bicycle, but largely preferred to stay indoors, reading and studying. Harold could never play enough tennis and racquetball. No wonder he and Edith soon realized they had a difficult time communicating with one another. Edith's inwardness was reinforced by their inability to connect.

Their first child was nonetheless born in 1897. John D. Rockefeller McCormick was the apple of his grandfather's eye, but in 1901 he died from scarlet fever. Other children followed. Harold Fowler McCormick, Jr. -- called Fowler -- was born in 1898 and followed by three sisters: Muriel in 1902, Editha in 1903, and Mathilde in 1905. Editha's death a year after her birth propelled Edith into a depression from which she could not recover. She felt absolutely nothing most of the time, but seemed anxious -- "nervous," Harold called it -- and had difficulty sleeping. She was up at night and slept during the day. Maids and governesses filled the void as she struggled with her moods. She was afraid to venture far from their mansion on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, a massive gray stone house with a conical tower that Edith herself had nicknamed "the bastion." Harold's generally sunny disposition did much to counteract the harmful effects of Edith's slow decline on their children, but they always regarded her as somewhat of a stranger.

Edith had been quite active in Chicago's social life prior to her son's death, but became less so afterward. As the primary benefactor of the Chicago Opera, Edith would don her $2 million pearl necklace and host brief dinners for her select guests just before the opening of each new opera, each course timed perfectly by a jeweled clock beside her plate. But Edith could not maintain her position as Chicago's premier hostess. Between 1905 and 1907, she suffered from tuberculosis of the kidney, which eventually went into remission after numerous rest cures. In 1911, she planned a cotillion, but suddenly and inexplicably recalled all 120 invitations. Rumors spread quickly about her bizarre behavior. Many speculated that she was suffering a nervous breakdown. The gossip was very close to the truth.

Harold soon realized that she was in need of professional medical attention. His experience with managing the care of his insane siblings helped him search for physicians for Edith, but she was stubborn and often refused his suggestions for treatment. The few she did try -- mainly at resorts for wealthy neurasthenics -- did not make much of a difference.

One of the remedies that Harold insisted upon was a trip through Hungary (primarily Transylvania) in July and August of 1910. [3] The excursion would be part pleasure, part business, as Harold scouted sites for a new factory. Edith finally agreed, traveling by automobile across Europe. She found the traveling exhausting, and wanted to be back home in "the bastion." Upon her return to America, Edith passed straight through New York and directly on to Chicago, missing her own mother's birthday celebrations at the original Rockefeller mansion in Cleveland. As usual, Harold was left to smooth over any misunderstandings caused by Edith's asocial behavior. "Dear Father," Harold wrote to John D. Rockefeller on September 22, 1911, "It is a matter of deep regret that I was unable to be present at mother's celebration and more of a regret that Edith was not able to be present. Please be assured, and it is almost unnecessary for me to say so, that Edith was deeply sorry that she could not come on to Cleveland. She is now taking a rest at [their home at] 1000 Lake Shore Drive, isolating herself from everybody and spending from five to eight hours a day out in the air and I think this will do her more good than anything else at the present time if she will only keep it up long enough." [4]

Refusing to give up on Edith, Harold began making inquiries among his extended family. The most promising referral came from Medill, Harold's cousin from the branch of the McCormick family that owned and operated the Chicago Tribune. Medill spoke highly of a Swiss psychiatrist who had treated him for depression and alcoholism: C. G. Jung.

Medill had first approached Jung in Zurich in late 1908. [5] Impressed with the new treatment known as psychoanalysis, during the first week of July 1909 he attempted unsuccessfully to have a consultation with Freud. When Jung was in New York that September he spent many hours with Medill, at one point advising him, as we have seen, to become polygamous to save his sanity and his soul. The rich American was quite a catch for the fledgling psychoanalytic movement, and Jung and Freud were delighted with this trophy of their international success.

And Jung was soon reeling in an even bigger catch for psychoanalysis and for himself, a daughter of the man many considered to be the richest in the Western world: Edith.

***

As 1912 began, Edith had not emerged from seclusion after returning from the Hungarian trip two years earlier. But Harold was hopeful. "Edith is doing well in her determination to gut out a good many varied occupations, and she certainly is getting her life down to one of more natural easement." [6]

At some fateful point during the late spring of 1912, though, Edith learned of the legendary healing powers of C. G. Jung. The fantasy of going to Zurich to be treated by him began to take on an almost obsessive quality. She hoped Switzerland would be the promised land of her salvation. Without even meeting him, Edith began to think of Jung as her only savior.

But Harold wanted to try at least one more cure in America. He accompanied Edith to Ellenville, New York, for "a trial of treatment" at the clinic of a Dr. Foord. He reported on the situation to his mother. "Edith does not give herself up to the treatment as yet, but I think is gaining in her confidence, or indifference; that is she is doing a little more gracefully what she is asked to do." Edith was a difficult, noncompliant patient. "I shall stay here until such time as the doctor can form an opinion as to what he thinks he can do if Edith will cooperate." [7]

But Harold was well aware that Edith might never give her American physician a fighting chance. Her heart and soul already were in Zurich. And Harold was dead set against it.

For one who is ill or needs treatment, I think this place is fine. For one who is well, it is the slowest place in the world. I like Dr. Foord ever so much, and I think he can do wonders for Edith. But she finds it very hard indeed to submit to what is wanted. Just exactly as you put it in your letter. What she may have in mind is that after a trial here, it shall be pronounced a failure and that then we will all take a steamer, say 1st of August or thereabouts, and trot over to Switzerland. That in its entirety I do not stand for. If anybody goes over it shall be Edith and me alone. I don't think it right or fair to dislodge you all after you are comfortably settled.

I believe Edith now thinks that if she could toss this allover, that then she could get to Zurich. She disregards the fact that Jung would be absent for all the time until the last two or three weeks of our stay over there. If I had the courage to say or if it was right to say that the European trip is cancelled for this summer I believe it would be a great help in deciding Edith to stay here. [8]

While in Ellenville, Harold received a letter from Woodrow Wilson, then governor of New Jersey, who with the help of William Jennings Bryan had just become the Democratic nominee for president. "I feel sure he would make a safe and sane president," Harold wrote his father-in-law, and he passed along Wilson's personal missive requesting Harold's support. [9] (Medill was a friend of Wilson's opponents, President William H. Taft and Teddy Roosevelt.) Sailing to Europe to see Jung would remove Harold from the arena during a critical part of the campaign.

Edith finally submitted herself to Dr. Foord's treatment, and Harold felt confident enough to return to Chicago. Foord recognized the severity of Edith's phobias -- particularly her agoraphobia -- and recommended some commonsense measures to help her overcome their disabling effects. Edith then sent her mother-in-law the following telegram: "Can you send me your automobile and chauffeur without Harold's knowing it. The doctor wants me to begin to learn to get away from the house without fear. Edith." [10] Foord was soon discarded like so many of her previous physicians.

Three days after Edith sent that telegram, on September 7, 1912, C. G. Jung set sail for New York City. Edith's life was about to change forever.

Edith meets Dr. Jung

Edith had Jung on her mind, but so did Harold's mother and sister, though for an entirely different reason: Stanley. Nettie McCormick was staying at the Plaza Hotel in order to ask Jung to go to Santa Barbara, California, and assess the condition of her son. He suffered from the catatonic type of dementia praecox and was so unmanageable that he had been tied up with bed sheets since 1906. Jung wrote to Nettie on October 8, 1912, that he would be able to see Stanley McCormick in California "at the end of October." [11]

Upon receiving this information, Nettie returned to Chicago and contacted her daughter Anita McCormick Blaine in upstate New York. Would she agree to meet with Jung and discuss Stanley? "In the question of seeing Jung for S. my province would not be different from yours," Anita informed her mother. "What you should do is take the question to Dr. Favill [Stanley's primary physician]. I could not do otherwise." [12] But three days later, Harold begged Anita in a telegram to meet Jung. "Why don't you run down to New York and have a talk with Jung .... You would be able to form first impressions and he would give you his experiences and ideas. Believe your time would be well spent." [13] Stanley was not on his mind, but Edith. And Edith, still in Ellenville, emerged from her shell and for once took the initiative.

Edith invited Jung to the Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills for a visit and for some preliminary consultations. Unsubstantiated legend has it that Edith insisted that Jung move to America with his family and become her personal physician. She allegedly offered to buy a house for him and his family and pay him handsomely. Jung refused and instead insisted that Edith come to Zurich for long-term analysis with him. She agreed.

After Jung returned home in the first week of November, he sent Maria Moltzer to America to conduct a preliminary analysis of Edith. Moltzer probably left Zurich in December 1912 or January 1913. On February 2, 1913, Sigmund Freud wrote to Sandor Ferenczi, "Jung's letter [to Ferenczi] sounds somewhat elegiac; perhaps his Egeria has already left him. She should go to America to bring Rockefeller's daughter to Zurich." [14] Freud, suspecting that Jung was having an affair with his female assistant, refers to her as Egeria, a nymph in Roman mythology who was the lover of and adviser to the legendary king Numa Pompilius and who was the power behind the throne.

Perhaps this was a compromise that Jung negotiated with Edith. Moltzer was the only analyst completely loyal to him who spoke English fluently. In late 1912, Jung was still not clear about the loyalties of many in his circle, including the only American analyst who could have treated Edith-the New York psychoanalyst Beatrice Hinkle. Although she was really the only Jungian practicing in America at the time, Hinkle had eclectic tendencies. Furthermore, she was too independent. Moltzer was the better bait to keep Edith hooked until he could treat her himself.

Whether it was Dr. Foord's health spa, Dr. Jung's visit, or a trial of psychoanalysis with Maria Moltzer, Edith began to improve by the end of 1912 and gingerly reentered Chicago social life. She and Harold put their energies into a grand "coming-out" party for Edith to be held in Chicago at the end of January 1913.

1913

In the first week of February 1913 Edith left Chicago -- probably with Maria Moltzer -- and soon arrived in New York to spend the next several weeks preparing for her voyage to Switzerland. Moltzer was back in Zurich by the first week in March. Within just days of her arrival, Jung was on an ocean liner to New York. Moltzer's analysis had been a failure. Jung would bring Edith back to Zurich himself.

This new turn of events made Edith the subject of gossip between Sigmund Freud and his allies. "Jung has gone to America again for five weeks, to see a Rockefeller woman, so they say," Freud wrote to Ferenczi on March 7, 1913. [15] Ferenczi responded by flattering Freud and insulting Jung: "I would rather have granted you the summons to the Rockefellers," Ferenczi wrote on March 9. "Still -- the Americans don't deserve better." [16]

After almost three weeks of daily analytic sessions with Jung in New York, Edith enjoyed the same attention aboard their ocean liner. Edith, her two children, Fowler's tutor, and Muriel's governess all settled into a large suite of rooms in the luxurious Hotel Baur au Lac along Lake Zurich. Edith would live, study, teach, and psychoanalyze in these same rooms until the autumn of 1921.

Like Fanny Bowditch, Edith was most likely encouraged by Jung to sit in on his didactic seminars on psychoanalysis in the summer of 1913, as well as the seminar on the history of religion given by Professor Irene Hausheer. This was most likely the first time that Edith received any formal instruction in these subjects. Given her hunger for intellectual stimulation, she would have found these classes a welcome change from her life as a bored and agoraphobic socialite in Chicago.

In June and July, Fowler, his tutor, and his best friend were traveling in Italy. He returned to Zurich by the end of July and found that he did not care very much for the place. "Dear Grandfather," he wrote to John D. Rockefeller on August 10, 1913, "This is a very queer place. It has rained here this summer almost incessantly and some very peculiar weather phenomenons happen .... Zurich has many other peculiarities which are not worth mentioning." [17] It is clear from the many letters that survive that Fowler and Rockefeller had a very special bond, one not lost on Jung. He knew very well that this was the great Rockefeller's favorite grandchild. Jung always treated Fowler with special kindness that could only make his own son, Franz, quite jealous. His gradual adoption of Fowler was so successful that Fowler came to believe he was in the presence of a god.

In the years following the Second World War, Fowler became one of Jung's best friends. In an interview for the C. G. Jung Biographical Archives Project, Fowler confessed, "He was for me in my youth a 'father figure,' ... of an intensely strong nature. In a sense the word 'father figure' is too mild a term because one would call it more of a 'God figure.'" [18]

But in September 1913, not yet attached to Jung, Fowler set sail for America. He was not to see his mother or Jung again for two years.

In late October, Harold and Mathilde arrived in Zurich. Harold hoped that it would be a short stay and that Edith would return with him. Edith had then been in analysis with Jung for more than six months. Relatives on both sides of the family had been sending regular requests to Edith concerning her return. What could possibly be keeping Harold's family in Europe for so long?

The family was indeed settling in: Edith was working daily with Jung; Muriel was in "German school" and receiving private lessons; Mathilde, who suffered from frequent colds and struggled with maintaining her weight, would soon be in the Sanatorium Schweizerhof Davos-Platz for physical "upbuilding" and intellectual development. "It is very nice to be together," Edith wrote in a letter to Nettie, "and I am appreciating these days very much." [19]

As Christmas approached, Harold realized that Edith was not coming home any time soon. He had originally planned to bring Muriel back with him, but decided against it. She was an impulsive and headstrong child, quick to anger and seemingly in continual warfare with her parents, tutors, and governess. Harold decided it would be best to leave her in the structured environment of the German school and with her mother.

On December 9, 1913, Harold poured out his troubles to his mother:

Of course, I am greatly disappointed in one way, not to be back for Christmas. But, of course, it would not be the same if Edith were not there. Her pleasure still uncertain, but I have decided at her insistence to leave on the 20th by the Campania .... Edith wanted me to stay here longer, as her plans are uncertain, and she may not come over this winter .... So I was easily drawn to stay here. On the other hand she said the 20th and no longer. So the plan is really hers.

I will stop off a day to see Edith's family and report to them .... Edith is continuing to improve, and she is doing better and more each day. Today she went one and one-half hours out on the train and back, making a journey of three hours. Believe me, it does not come easily. [20]

Unknown to either Edith or Harold, Jung began the series of visionary descents into the Land of the Dead on December 12 -- just three days after Harold's letter to his mother -- that culminated in his self-deification as the Aryan Christ.



KUNSTHAUS ZURICH. ESTATE OF SUZANNE PERROTTET. COPYRIGHT © 1996 BY KUNSTHAUS ZURICH. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Neopagan Switzerland: "Totimo, Suzy Perrottet, Katja Wulff, Maja Lederer, Betty Baaron Samoa, Rudolf von Laban, Ascona, 1914," by Johann Adam Meisenbach. Not only did a number of these dancers frequent the Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in February and March of 1916 (at the same time that Edith Rockefeller McCormick helped Jung found the Psychological Club), but several later established relations with Jung or his disciples.



Third Psychoanalytic Congress in Weimar, September 21-22, 1911. Sitting: Lou- Andreas Salome, Beatrice Hinkle, Emma Jung, M. Von Stack, Toni Wolff, Martha Boddinghaus, Franz Riklin. Standing just to Riklin's right is Ernest Jones. Carl Jung is to the left, with his hands resting on the back of Emma's chair, and Sigmund Freud (bearded) stands to his right.



ERNST HAECKEL HAUS, JENA. GERMANY.

Ernst Haeckel, "Radiolaria," from his 1862 monograph of that name. Radiolaria are microorganisms that can be seen only with a microscope. In a dream the teenage Jung saw a radiolarian three feet in diameter. This led him to study medicine and the natural sciences rather than become a philologist or archeologist.



ERNST HAECKEL HAUS, JENA. GERMANY.

Ernst Haeckel, the Romantic scientist as artist, in Rapallo, Italy, on his seventieth birthday, 1904.



ERNST HAECKEL HAUS, JENA. GERMANY.

Ernst Haeckel and Isadora Duncan in front of the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, Germany, 1904. This photo -- never before published -- was taken at their first meeting. Just a few hours later, they sat in the Wagner family's private box and viewed a performance of Parsifal. The fusion of bohemians and scientists at the turn of the century was inspired by Haeckel pantheism.



KUNSTHAUS, ZURICH. COURTESY OF DR. HARALD SZEEMANN.

A rare photograph of Otto Gross (bearded, arms crossed). It is not known who the other men are, or where or when this photograph was taken. It was Gross who convinced Jung of the revitalizing powers of polygamy.



Fidus, "Sexualreligion," 1897. This illustration for Maximilian Ferdinand's volumes of Aryan mysticism shows an early representation of androgynous wholeness. The image of a Janus-faced male/female is what Jung would later call the "animus/anima," united in the symbol of the "self," the Aryan sun wheel, or mandala, as the supreme symbol of wholeness or God.



Fidus, cover illustration for a Theosophical journal, 1910. The Edenic imagery of the snake and the female would be echoed in a vision Jung had of his deification in December 1913.



BAUR AU LAC-ZURICH FAMILLE C. KRACHT TELEGR.: BAURLAC ZURICH INTERN, HOTEL TELEGR: CODE

Stationery from the Hotel Baur au Lac in Zurich, c. 1915. Although she came to Switzerland to have Jung cure her agoraphobia, Edith Rockefeller McCormick lived in a suite in this hotel from 1913 until 1921 and rarely ventured out. After she'd spent more than two million dollars (in today's currency) to found his Psychological Club, Jung allowed her to become an analyst. All her patients came to see her at the hotel, so she never had to leave her rooms.



MCCORMICK-INTERNATIONAL HARVESTER COLLECTION, STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WISCONSIN (MADISON).

Edith Rockefeller McCormick, February 1917.



MCCORMICK-INTERNATIONAL HARVESTER COLLECTION, STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WISCONSIN (MADISON).

Edith Rockefeller McCormick, flanked by her two daughters, Muriel (left). and Mathilde (right), in her suite at the Hotel Baur au Lac, February 1917.



MCCORMICK-INTERNATIONAL HARVESTER COLLECTION, STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WISCONSIN (MADISON).

The last portrait ever taken of the McCormick family. Seated: Muriel and Edith. Standing: Mathilde, Fowler, and Harold Fowler McCormick. Only little Mathilde was not in analysis with Jung or Maria Moltzer.



Maria Moltzer at the psychoanalytic conference in Weimar, September 1911.



COURTESY OF THE COUNTWAY LIBRARY OF MEDICINE, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL, BOSTON.

Fanny Bowditch Katz, photographed in Munich. c. 1925.



COURTESY OF THE COUNTWAY LIBRARY OF MEDICINE, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL, BOSTON.



COURTESY OF THE COUNTWAY LIBRARY OF MEDICINE, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL, BOSTON.



COURTESY OF THE COUNTWAY LIBRARY OF MEDICINE, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL, BOSTON.

Three pages from the analysis diary of Fanny Bowditch Katz.



A page from the diary of Constance Long, showing a drawing she made on August 31, 1920, in Sennen Cove, Cornwall, England, the site of a seminar and personal analysis by Jung.



BEATRICE HINKLE, THE RE-CREATING OF THE INDIVIDUAL 1923.

A symbol direct from Jung's "archaic unconscious"? Or from the "personal unconscious" of the patient who drew it? Beatrice Hinkle mistakenly thought the former. It is obviously the famous sun worshiper image of the "Lichtgebet," by the German artist Fidus.



COURTESY OF THE COUNTWAY LIBRARY OF MEDICINE, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL, BOSTON.



COURTESY OF THE COUNTWAY LIBRARY OF MEDICINE, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL, BOSTON.



COURTESY OF THE COUNTWAY LIBRARY OF MEDICINE, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL, BOSTON.



COURTESY OF THE COUNTWAY LIBRARY OF MEDICINE, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL, BOSTON.

As Jung's patients in Zurich in the 1920s, Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray and his mistress, Christiana Morgan, learned to induce visionary trance states and created their own neopagan cosmology. After finding and illustrating their own "Tower" in Massachusetts, Murray and Morgan practiced sexual magic and other rituil1s in honor of Jung. These four illuminated pages from a ritual "bible" created by Morgan are probably from the 1940s.



[i]COURTESY OF THE COUNTWAY LIBRARY OF MEDICINE, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL, BOSTON.

Jung at Harvard University, 1936. The man with the goatee is his disciple Ernest Harms.[/i]

On his return to the States, Harold dashed off a letter to John D. Rockefeller describing not only Jung's form of educational treatment for his community of patients, but also his own favorable impressions of the Swiss doctor. Indeed, Harold seems to have had quite a powerful therapeutic experience with Jung, and he viewed not only his wife but himself and his marriage in an entirely new light. For the first time in any of his correspondence Harold employed spiritual and mystical metaphors to describe Jung's methods. After assuring Rockefeller that Edith had "well-founded" reasons for remaining in Zurich and that she expressed a "relative unhappiness at feeling that her work demanded that she stay abroad," Harold had these remarkable things to say:

Suffice it for the moment, please, to say that she has made, is making and will make great progress, and that she does not rest content in any other thought than that of a completed treatment. That word, by the way, seems almost profane, in her case because it is more of a study much more than anything connected with medicine, or hygiene, and instead of being simply fed improvement, she very largely makes her own mental recipes .... In a word Edith is becoming very real and true to herself, and is seeking and I'm sure will succeed, to find her path. Those words would form the text. The analysis would be along many directions.

At any rate, she is in absolutely safe and trustworthy hands, for no finer man ever breathed than Dr. Jung. He has an intense admiration for Edith and yet recognizes that she is the toughest problem he ever had to deal with. At first he was doubtful of success and questioned what he would find. Now he sees a wonderful personality to engage his thoughts and his very best and most contentious efforts. He sees it is much worthwhile! ...

My time was most wonderfully well spent. It was not fun, it was very tiresome -- in the sense of fatiguing -- but mine was only a little of what Edith has to endure -- but she knows what the reward is and will be and she sees the light -- after passing through ever so much of deep and almost impenetrable darkness.

I know you will not prejudge what I say -- and perhaps I have ventured too far -- and yet there is no mystery -- only the situation is so unusual -- I almost have to pinch myself to know that it really does exist.

Edith has much of beautiful things to do in this world, she sees it, she knows it, and she is bound to realize their accomplishment. It was a Godsend that she met Dr. Jung, and that her family stood back of her in her resolve and that she felt this assurance. [21]

Edith, like Fanny Bowditch, Maria Moltzer, and many, many others before her, was now on the path. It was only a matter of time before Harold and Fowler would join her.

1914

For her father's birthday on May 2, twelve-year-old Muriel sent Harold a gardening tool as a present with a note: "For my dear Daddy, wishing him a very happy birthday, From his affectionate and loving daughter, Muriel." Harold wrote back thanking her for "the lovely little birthday present." "The trowel was simply fine," he wrote on May 9, "and I am keeping it on my desk. It was sweet of you to think of me, and I appreciate it as a peace offering from my lovely little daughter." [22]

Harold was here referring to the problems in their relationship caused by Muriel's mercurial -- indeed, volatile -- personality. Muriel told her father in a letter on July 13 that she and her governess, Mlle. Beley, had great "quarrels." As a remedy, Edith had insisted that her daughter undergo psychoanalysis as well. "My work with Miss Moltzer is getting along finely," Muriel told her father in the same letter. [23]

As we know from the case of Fanny Bowditch, Jung first began to incorporate his idea of a transcendent realm of primordial images (archetypes) into his practice in early 1914. His female patients fell in love with him not for who he was as a man but for his underlying godlikeness. Although spiritual metaphors and an interest in the occult had always attracted certain types of patients, in the early months of 1914 he became more explicit about his view of analysis as a spiritual path. The unconscious now became not only a place, but a "greater personality" or guardian spirit of sorts, an oracle that could be consulted to foretell the future if one learned the secret techniques of Jung's methods. Everyone now had a special spiritual fate or destiny to fulfill. No one believed this more than Edith.

She now took it upon herself to proselytize any and all who would listen. For far too many years she had lived in uncertainty and with the self-image of a weak and ill victim of circumstances. Now she began to take on the voice and advisory role of a prophetess. She began with her father, who was suffering through the prolonged, eventually fatal illness of his wife Laura.

"We all have our problems to face -- this is living," Edith told John D. on June 25, 1914, in one of her characteristically short letters. "And I feel that you will rise above the things that are difficult for us now, and realize that we must all fulfill our greater Destiny. The great Divine guardian Spirit cannot do things wrong." [24] From this point until the day she died, this was the new, mediumistic voice of Edith Rockefeller McCormick.

Missing his family, Harold finally made plans to return to Europe with Fowler. However, he chose August 1, 1914, as his tentative date of arrival. With the outbreak of war, Harold had to cancel his plans. Fowler returned to Groton for the fall term. And Edith, although making great progress in her studies and in her treatment with Jung, now feared leaving the neutral sanctuary of Switzerland.

Anticipating the worst, Harold sent over a courier to deliver gold to Edith and to report on the conditions in Zurich. He included a letter, begging her to contact him. The sudden outbreak of war in Europe redirected Harold's attention to company business as well. The general manager of International Harvester, Alexander Legge, issued a confidential memo to all its division managers and department heads on August 29, 1914, urging caution: "Obviously, the only position for us to take is one of absolute neutrality, with the hope that the struggle may be over soon. We must realize that the Company is International in fact as well as in name, that we have property interests in practically all of the countries involved in the difficulty, and among our employees and stockholders there are representatives of all the nations involved in the struggle." [25] The war threatened not only Harold's family, but his livelihood.

Despite his business and the dangers, he got to Genoa on September 18. When he arrived in Zurich, he found that Edith was no longer in analysis with Jung but instead had embarked on her own intensive educational program with a series of private tutors. "Edith is doing wonderfully well and you will be delighted when you see her and will feel the time well spent," Harold wrote to Rockefeller on October 3. "She occupies herself all day long .... She studies astronomy, biology and history, and music. She does not go to see Dr. Jung anymore. Physically, I think she is fine." [26] Muriel is "doing well although she finds it hard to control herself." To his mother, Harold reported, "The war is very sad. Yesterday I went with two Swiss acquaintances to the frontier and felt the breath of battle. All the Swiss soldiers are guarding their frontier." [27] Jung would soon be among them.

Switzerland seemed to all to be the calm eye of the storm, and the only visible sign that anything was amiss was the large number of refugees huddled near the main train station on the Bahnofsplatz. On October 20, Harold sent the following description of their life in Zurich in one of his weekly letters to his mother:

[Edith's] face is almost entirely clear and her step is springy and she walks with her arms free and swinging. She notices all the things of nature and dresses simply and in very artistic taste suitable to her makeup. In the morning we usually take a walk before lunch and in the afternoon also. Then in the evening we sit around the Hotel or go to some moving picture show .... Mathilde goes through a regular course of treatment each day and could be discharged by November. ... One day goes much like another here and the war news absorbs the attention directed towards the outer world. [28]

What Harold didn't tell his mother or his father-in-law was that now he, too, was in analysis with Jung. As the weeks passed, he decided to stay in Zurich and complete his own course of treatment and began to make preparations accordingly. On October 28, Harold broke what he knew would be unwelcome news to his mother: "I don't know when we will be corning back. I am proposing to remain here with Edith until she is ready -- and I do not propose to have the false alarms of last year." [29]

As his analysis progressed, Harold seemed to come under Jung's spell. Harold wrote his mother on November 28, "Dr. Jung grows on me all the time. You must know him sometime and I hope he will come to America sometime to make us a visit. He would interest you with the many and profound things he knows." [30]

On Christmas Eve, Harold, Edith, Muriel, and Mathilde exchanged gifts and sent their love through telegrams to Fowler, who was spending time with his grandfather at Pocantico Hills. They were pleased that Edith seemed to finally be happy -- or as happy as she ever became. Living in a foreign country still made everything seem somewhat unreal, somewhat tentative, since they all knew that at any moment Edith could change her mind and want to return to Chicago. Even the war seemed unreal to them.

Within a few months, the war would have the psychological effect of hermetically sealing many foreigners in Switzerland, and C. G. Jung would seem to many to be the only savior of a world gone mad.

1915

Edith was no longer in analysis with Jung, but she still very much believed in him. At first she did not like some of his orders -- such as washing the floors of her giant suite of rooms herself on her hands and knees, an activity that was supposed to help her learn humility. But she stuck with him and found new dimensions to their relationship that soon made her feel more like a colleague than a patient.

Although by now she read German quite well and spoke it passably, Edith saw how poor Harold struggled to understand Jung's writings. She wanted to share her transformative experience with her husband and with all those she left back home in America. To bring this about, Edith donated generous sums of money for the translation of his works into English. In 1916, Beatrice Hinkle's retitled translation of Wandlungen, Psychology of the Unconscious, appeared in New York and Jung's Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology was published in London. In 1918 the massive volume of Jung's word-association studies appeared in an English translation by M. D. Eder.

Rockefeller money introduced Jung to the English-speaking world and helped bring him the worldwide fame he has today. In the 1940s, Mary Mellon, with her husband, financier Paul Mellon, provided the funds for the translation of all the German works and retranslation of most of Jung's previous publications into English. [31] The Rockefellers, the McCormicks, and the Mellons were three of America's wealthiest families, and we can only wonder whether Jung would still be so popular today if he had not attracted and converted their women to his mysteria. Without their financial backing his works might still be in German and therefore inaccessible to much of the world.

***

The long-awaited wedding of Cyrus McCormick, Harold's older brother, had been scheduled for February 1915, and Nettie wanted the entire family, including Edith, Harold, and their children, present. In mid-January, however, Edith informed Harold that she would be unable to go. After some ambivalence, Harold decided to go alone. His visit would have been very short if Edith's mother, Laura Rockefeller, had not died while Harold was there. After seeing his son and visiting his grieving father-in-law in Pocantico Hills, Harold left New York on March 16 for Marseille.

The weather was cold and wet for almost the entire first two weeks of his return to Zurich. On April 14, 1915, he wrote his mother that Muriel was about to graduate from her German school and would then enter a boarding school outside Zurich. "This will get her out of the hotel, which is a bad place for her, and we can visit her on Sundays." Harold then tacked on an addition:

Dr. and Mrs. Jung come this evening to dinner. ... Edith has only seen Dr. Jung once while I was away and that was the morning before I arrived, when they went over some corrections Edith was making in the English proofs of some of Dr. Jung's writings. Edith is improving every day and now is almost independent of Dr. Jung's treatment. She is now once more almost entirely in contact with the world, from which she has so much withdrawn. She is working right along every day and learning "her path."

But in a scrawled note below his name, he admitted for the first time that something had been very wrong in Edith's understanding of herself as a mother. "She has improved greatly as to attitude towards the children, but still has some things to realize and carry out in this direction yet." [32] After years of abdicating the care of her own children to governesses and boarding schools, she no longer knew how to relate to them.

On that same day, Edith wrote a letter of encouragement to her father, fearing that the first letter she sent him after her mother's death did not reach him "on account of the war considerations." "I know that you are adapting yourself to this new life and fulfilling your own individual Destiny," Edith said. "We cannot mourn for the beautiful spirit which has gone beyond us, for we know that it is living on and developing. I am only sorry that my work is not yet finished here so that I could be nearer to you now." [33]

On May 7, 1915, 1,198 men, women, and children -- including 128 Americans -- lost their lives when the Germans torpedoed the British liner Lusitania. Harold knew someone on that doomed ship, a man by the name of Herbert Stone. "Everyone here speaks of the Lusitania with hushed voice," he wrote to his mother on May 31. "I cabled and wrote to Mary Stone. I am afraid Herbert was among those who could not swim and he surrendered any chance at the boats." [34]

Harold now realized the danger of crossing the ocean while the war still raged. The fear of leaving his family in the middle of a war zone helped him to overcome his remaining resistance to Jung. Rather than always having one foot in and one foot out of the magically unreal community of spiritual seekers around Jung, he now felt part of their mission. As others in analysis in Zurich found, the war seemed to heighten the social cohesiveness and group identity of the Jungians. Harold finally saw the need for the spiritual rebirth of the world and was certain that Jung was the man to bring it about. His conversion was complete.

In his letter to his mother, Harold discussed an article she had sent him about a young woman they both knew who had committed suicide. His high regard for the healing powers of Dr. Jung is evident, and he tells his mother he is postponing -- once again -- a return.

As to Miss Farwell, it is indescribably sad. At once on reading the article my thoughts formed just two words "Dr. Jung." There is not the slightest doubt he could have saved her -- saved a life and handed it back to the world in more beauty and usefulness than before. Spirits tired and worn and distracted are brightened and refreshed under his care and safe keeping .... I have decided as I cabled you to postpone my sailing which I had thought of as May 29th. I did this myself of my own account without regard to Edith. She was prepared that I should go but I wanted to stay here longer because there were some points with Dr. Jung I wanted to clear up. [35]

Despite Harold's reluctance to leave Switzerland, under Jung' s care he began to believe in the inevitability of fate and, paradoxically, worried less about the safety of his family. "This place is so tranquil, you would never know any war was going on," he said to his mother on June 3,1915. Oddly heedless of the Lusitania disaster, he assured her, "One can always leave without much difficulty." [36] Ocean liners still operated, although with great uncertainty, and Fowler set sail from New York on the St. Paul on June 19 with the hope "eventually ... to turn up in Zurich, there to join my long- lost family." [37] He arrived safely in Zurich on July 1.

Harold wrote to his mother on July 9, assuring her that Fowler made the trip without incident. He informed her that, "This morning Fowler went with me to Kiisnacht, both on bicycles, and then he left me at Dr. Jung's gate." [38] Harold's sessions with Dr. Jung assumed a greater importance in his life and he wanted everyone in his family to benefit from analysis. On July 15, he wrote, "Muriel goes to Miss Moltzer twice a week. It's doing great good." [39] Now it was Fowler's turn.

Fowler McCormick remembered it near the end of his life:

In 1915 ... my mother said to me, "Fowler, this question of analytical psychology is a very important one. There are many most interesting developments in it. I think it is something that you should know something about." Following that thought she arranged through Dr. Jung for me to spend two or three hours a week with Dr. Franz Riklin .... I was intensely interested in the subjects which Riklin spoke about and I read extensively in the works of Freud, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer. ... I was fascinated by the conception of the ability to find meaning in dreams and the marvelous work of Freud in exposing his theories and giving the cases as he did .... In Nietzsche I read in a beginning way, not as much as I did on my next trip to Zurich. [40]

With the entire family now in Zurich, John D. Rockefeller finally became incensed that Harold and Edith were "banqueting" their days away and placing the entire family -- including Fowler, his favorite -- in jeopardy in the middle of a war. On June 18, Harold wrote a very strong (for him) letter to his father-in-law and attempted to explain the allure of analytical psychology and Jung.

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PART 2 OF 2

This is not a tabernacle of joy, but a shrine to which seekers only address themselves, and it is in this spirit that I have again postponed my sailing and that Edith still finds herself held. With both of us, every day counts. This is not a place (the school of Zurich) which encourages remaining here beyond the right or the normal time, but the whole question is one of degree at best, for no one who is really interested in analytical psychology and finds it of help ever drops it, because if it is one thing, -- it is to be lived, and the more one studies the more one is prepared to live on its basis. So one must strike out again in life else it (analytical psychology) defeats its own purpose. The fundamental idea of it is to teach one, one's self -- and this is not always easy, and still worse difficult, owing to conscious resistances, to follow one's path when it has been laid out by one's own self .... I remained here purely on my own account, to finish up some work. [41]

In the last week of August 1915, Harold had an experience that convinced him more than ever of Jung's magical power.

Harold went on a "walking trip" with Jung through Switzerland and in the increased level of intimacy realized how "false" or "unreal" he was in comparison with Jung, whom he glowingly describes as a "real" or "natural" man. On August 31, he wrote a report of his experiences with Jung, Emma, and Toni Wolff that allows us to see not only how deeply involved Harold had become with Jung, but also the sorts of ideas about personality types and relationships Jung was then teaching his patients. It is a document of unparalleled insight.

Dr. Jung told me he was going on a ten days vacation and knowing this would throw me out of the sittings, meanwhile and having for a long while wanted to get off this way with him, I wondered if I might go. He said certainly in the latter part of his trip, but at first he wanted a few days for solitude and meditation. So later Mrs. Jung and a Miss Wolff (an analitiker) who has been analyzed by him joined him and later I did.... The companions charming, so real and true to themselves. [ ] and flexible, Dr. Jung is as nearly perfect to my mind as a man can be.

Naturally I was at first a little fearful how I would get on with such an analysed party. But it went beautifully, because the spirit, and my understanding were there. There were only two or three times when things went for a little while wrong -- "resistances" or "repressions" on my part but these were easily cleared up by talking out. It was a rare chance. Naturally Dr. Jung and I were each studying the other. I was making notes of his attitude and method to apply it to my own case. He was sizing me up to see how I was compared to those professional times when he usually saw me. I told him yesterday I was delighted to see the natural way he acted and he said "of course." Then I told him I was sure that Edith in her [ ] way was a little too inflexible still. And he said "yes" as for me he said I was much more balanced than formerly, so much so that he remarked to his wife that it was now hard to discern from my actions whether I was "extravert" or "introvert." But still my great need yet is to cultivate on my own part an intimate knowledge of myself -- to like to be with myself. Then other matters, when I learn to develop my "thinking" side, will take their natural and proper course, for my "feeling" side is plenty if not a little too much developed already. So on the whole the trip was profitable -- every minute of it. Once when I made some remark which pleased him, Dr. Jung said, "Mr. McCormick you're all right" -- which was a good deal for him to say and only had a general reference-here being plenty for me yet to do, -- but I know very well I am stronger in many ways, and yet I don't think the difference will be jarring, but rather the contrary. But this has yet to be seen. 1know I am deeply grateful for what I have achieved and aside from its wonderful help in connection with and relation to Edith, it is for me a great thing in itself. I have, I know, opened up for myself a field of opportunity, and now it is for me to take ahold of it. ...

I only wish Edith had been with us. But we had to do as he thinks best, and if Edith cannot or does not want to take such trips it is not for me always to stay back. There must be for the greatest peace and contentment a large amount of independence. This makes each more to the other not as long as there is an underlying value for each other, and this is something not to assume just because we are married, but to work for and strive for, and the more we are in a common work, the more we are together in thought and purpose. But there still is left room for individuality and separate interests and in following these we each bring to the other new thoughts and ideas and a freshness of things to talk about, and it gives us a zest which the reverse suppresses, leaving the desire still there but unsatisfied. This makes resistances and we project these on this basis into other things which in turn creates an entirely false situation and friction suppressed or unspoken issues -- it's bound to. [42]

As Harold's involvement with the Jungian subculture of Zurich deepened that autumn, his letters to his mother and to John D. became more explicit about his and his daughter Muriel's experiences with analysis. His mother had been quite concerned about Muriel's entry into puberty and recommended a prominent book for her son to read on adolescence. Harold responded, "Oh yes, I know Stanley Hall's book. I have read it some years ago." He then added: "[Muriel] just had her first menstruation about a month ago. You may believe we are watchful and we love her dearly, and Dr. Jung and Miss Moltzer are master minds on the subject and even now Muriel goes to Miss Moltzer and talks out all her 'repressions' or a good many of them at any rate." [43] Later, Harold said often that Muriel's problematic personality reminded him of his insane sister Virginia. On the same day, Harold also wrote to Rockefeller in response to some queries that he had put forth:

Of Dr. Jung, it seems a trite thing to say, but I do most sincerely say that I am surprised how little I have known myself heretofore or how little I have cared for the society and acquaintance and intimacy of myself. I am told there is a wealth of opportunity in this direction, without in any way increasing self-adulation. Some people know themselves instinctively, others never do. It never occurred to me to compare the society of myself with that of others. I sought the latter consciously while unconsciously wanting to be more with myself, and here was a battle. Now I am learning a little the new way, and I am trying to learn to think, for I have always had a superabundance of "feelings" -- With Edith it is just exactly the other way ....

For the past week I have had the rare chance of being with Dr. Jung and his wife and a Miss Wolff. He is surely a great man, and a most genuine one, and spiritual. [44]

Harold was clearly finding his work with Jung beneficial. He wrote his mother, "If I were not impressed with the benefit of it for all time I should not have invested one year in analysis." [45] Harold was now exercising his new intellectual muscles; in this letter he also included a definition from Immanuel Kant of what is "right" for an individual. In a later letter he told Nettie he was reading "the translation of the writings of an old Chinese philosopher (B.C. 625), Lao-dze," and provided extensive quotes. [46]

The walking trip with Jung seems to have made Harold more comfortable with the idea of leaving Edith behind. He planned to sail on October 15 "with or without her," as he told his mother. [47] (Fowler left Zurich on the seventh of September.) But although Harold seemed to be improving, Edith was having a slower time of it. While some persons found analysis useful, Harold told his mother that "in Edith's case it is life itself." Although Edith's dreams seemed to be telling her that she should return to Chicago, her agoraphobia was still quite disabling. For almost a year she had not left the grounds of the Hotel.

I wonder if I am betraying confidence in telling you just between us that Edith told me yesterday she had a dream in which she saw you coming into the parlor smiling, and she was much pleased. It was the first of its kind. She now is commencing to transfer her desire to Chicago which is a fine sign. It is an awakening as from a long dream. She now is commencing to travel. I started with her on her first try, the first in 11 months. We bought two tickers to Winterthur 35 minutes away first stop. Just before the train started she got out -- could not do it. She was so disappointed. I could have cried. We then took a local and went 20 minutes up the Lake [ ]. Then she went and slept at a small hotel in Kusnacht unknown to Dr. Jung (with Emmy). She has twice done this since at other small towns, and so she will feel her way. She is indomitable in tenacity. That has carried her through. Tonight she is off again. I plan to sail Oct. 15th. She is trying to get ready to go too. [48]

Harold reserved his most detailed descriptions of analysis and its effects for his father-in-law. Harold badly wanted him to understand and approve of his new analytic insights, and he went to great lengths to describe in layman's terms what he had learned from Jung. The most revealing letter -- of October 31 -- is also the longest: almost two thousand words. In it, Harold attempted to give concrete examples along with his definitions of Jung' s concepts of "projection," "transference," "introversion," "extraversion," "thinking type," "feeling type," and the necessity for the balance between the conscious and the unconscious minds.

Harold's letter was in response to one from Rockefeller in which he expressed his concern that analysis was a form of "propaganda" and that Harold and Edith were caught up in a religious cult of sorts. Rockefeller was a Baptist and was unsettled by the hints of a non-Christian religious frenzy that Harold as well as Edith now seemed to exhibit. He had looked to Harold as his eccentric daughter's caretaker, but he now joined Nettie McCormick in his concern that Harold's talk of adopting a new "religious attitude to life" did not bode well for the future.

Taken as a whole, Harold's letter to Rockefeller is a remarkable summary of Jung's philosophy in 1915 -- a virtually unknown period in Jung's development that preceded his later and more familiar theories of psychological types, the collective unconscious, and archetypes. It also shows the extent to which Jung was promoting a totalizing religious philosophy and himself as its prophet. Harold was, in a sense, "witnessing" to his father-in- law in this letter. Here are some significant excerpts:

I thank you for your reference to analysis and the work I am doing here. It is so strictly personal, it is hard to talk much about it, much less to write, and in a few experiences I have had I can see that this effort in either direction can be overdone and the object misunderstood. For a "visionary spirit" is the last in the world to have as to gaining converts or exercising any propaganda, but when one is interested to hear its principles of method can be outlined. But even to impart these is hard because so much of it has to be felt not in the way of "faith," but in the way of "need." And if one is studying it and feels its help the human tendency is to want everyone to have it and to know of it. ...

Well, anyway, "analytical psychology" is still in its infancy as a science, as a means for an end, as a method to obtain an attitude, and it is little known; and among those who know -- generally among those who know only somewhat of it where it is as such sometimes misunderstood -- it is not always believed in. Like anything new it has to "win its spurs," and that takes time, but the truth always prevails in the long run -- "truth, a property of certain of our ideas in agreement with reality" -- and I believe there is truth in "analytical psychology" and that in the course of time this will be recognized.

I have a simple little thought that "analysis" is good for everyone but necessary (in the sense of helpful) in proportion as one is not at one with himself. This last is mostly emphasized among those who are very neurotic. For a businessman it is good; for a poor tired soul, worn out by mental struggle with the world or himself, it is more needed.

To me it has two general aspects, one a scientific aspect: that is the knowledge and observance of certain laws of life, of human nature, etc.; and the other is metaphysical or spiritual. ... In the case of the tired soul the "religious attitude" -- entirely different in precept from "religion" but of the same character, would appeal the more strongly .... The whole work itself is the development of an attitude towards life and things, and this attitude when found directs one's daily life in almost everything .... I don't mean everyone is worthless without analysis, I only mean that there is much in analysis which would help everyone is my belief and from what I have seen and realized or experienced ....

I believe that without analysis few bring such situations before their minds for contemplation and action .... But there is to my mind a difference between doing this in a hap-hazard way or doing this systematically and intelligently and here is where analysis comes in as showing a "method" or a "process" towards the attainment of an "attitude" which directs, by uncovering and bringing to light the true inward situation from the unconscious into the "sunlight of consciousness" where the problems may be dealt with as real, known, propositions and factors rather than by indefinite hazy "ungetatable" longings or discontentments .... The knowledge of these problems, plus the knowledge of one's self, plus the action to harmonize and balance constitutes the state of mind called an "attitude," and the recognition of this attitude constitutes "being at one with one's self." ... Another way of putting this same thing is to say that when the conscious and unconscious are in balance "one is at one with one's self." ...

Dr. Jung believes there is an unconscious part of our mind as distinguished from the conscious, and that the unconscious mind is very powerful but usually is not fully recognized and is submerged by the conscious but not dominated by it, and it (the unconscious) goes on working .... The conscious represents the self in the more unreal way. The unconscious in the more real way. Dr. Jung believes that through the interpretation of dreams which in themselves are symbolic, we arrive at a knowledge of the speech of the unconscious; also through the "association word method" so much used now in criminology; also through "reveries" when the conscious mind is in repose ... and also through the "blocking" or "stumbling" process when a person says one thing while consciously meaning to say another. Now most Psychologists do not agree with Dr. Jung, or the truth or value of the interpretation of dreams, or in the unconscious being a separate proposition from the conscious. They believe it is all conscious simply of one degree or another of varying intensity, and that dreams are vagaries, and of no value to use.

Following a discussion of the importance of "self-esteem," Harold tried to explain Jung's notion of the two psychological types with reference to Edith and himself. Harold's remarks attest to the utility of these particular conceptual innovations, which are perhaps Jung's greatest practical contributions to psychology:

There are two types which stand out, for example, the one the "Introvert" (Edith's type), who "thinks" and the other is the "Extravert" (my type) who "feels. " The "Introvert" is of the old, so-called "Stoic type"; he lives much ·within himself; he is apt to deny the existence of all not possessed in the mind; he draws and absorbs from the world; there is a sharp line between himself and the world. The "Extravert" feels, does, acts, lives in and is a part of the world; he gives out constantly; he runs dry; there is no sharp line between himself and the world, his own personality is relatively lost; he is of the old "sympathetic" type. Now neither extreme is good; a balance is better, but how? Well, the Introvert should develop his feeling and the Extravert his thinking. The conscious manifestation of the Introvert being the "ability" to think, he should develop his unconscious which contains his latent feelings, and vice versa the Extravert, should develop his unconscious which is along the line of bringing out his thoughts .... So in analysis the idea on this point is that each shall understand the other on one hand, and each shall develop his particular weak side to a more even balance. So this work has naturally been of great help to Edith and me in each understanding the other, and in each helping to get to the other's standpoint.

Harold attempted to teach Rockefeller the unique language of analysis:

"[R]epressions" [meant that] we would not speak out and tell each other what we thought of one another but would keep silent and just remember, instead of bringing them out to the surface and having it out in talk and forgetting it. Too many "repressions" bring "resistances" and that means resentment or dislike, and that is bad. I had plenty of "resistance" piled up against Edith if, for example, she spoke to the cook about dinner out of my hearing I would become displeased and would start in to pick a quarrel with the cook, and the first I knew I would be angry at her. This is "projection." I would project on the cook (entirely harmless) my feelings really directed at Edith. Then "transference" is another general law where you get to be over dependent upon the other person (I have done a lot of this in my life).... I think all the above will give you a general idea of what we are driving at. Naturally Edith started in analysis as a salvation and it has wonderfully succeeded with her. I started because I was here, and for myself and for the benefit in understanding the language she was acquiring, and in this I have done well indeed. As I progressed I became deeply appreciative and engrossed. Of course you get hardly any idea from this letter of the depths and heights embraced within analysis.

Harold recommended that Rockefeller read an article on psychoanalysis by Max Eastman in the June/July 1915 issue of Everybody's Magazine, although he admitted it "only skims the surface."

There are few scientific writings as yet, and what papers there are mostly in German, but some are now being translated into English. Analysis holds that individual psychology exists, that each person is a problem to himself; that if a person does not find that he is at one with himself, that there is a way to learn; and finally that learning this if he follows the path indicated he will secure the result desired to a greater or lesser extent according to circumstances, of patience, of submission, degree of need felt, etc. It is wonderful how the days and time pass. You cannot imagine how this happens. [49]

United in their newly adopted psychological and metaphysical belief system, Harold and Edith attempted to convert John D. and other members of their family to Jung's ideas. In 1915, Jung assigned many of his disciples and patients readings in Nietzsche, particularly the posthumous compilation of notes and diary entries and other previously unpublished material that his sister put together in the book entitled The Will to Power. Harold and Edith were so taken with it that they sent a copy to John D. as a Christmas gift. Rockefeller and Nietzsche mixed like oil and water. "Dear Edith and Harold," Rockefeller wrote on January 26, "I am just in receipt of your Christmas greetings, and the book, entitled 'The Will to Power' volume one, for which I send many thanks. I am sure the book will prove very interesting reading, though it may be far beyond me. I keep to a simple philosophy and almost primitive ideas of living. These seem to be best for my physical and mental composition, and am keeping very busy, although I may not be keeping up with the bandwagon." [50]

Harold was quick to pick up on his father-in-law's discomfort at the implication that he needed any improvement, especially the sort they were engaging in. Harold tried to smooth over any misunderstandings by buttering him up. On February 16, 1916, Harold wrote:

We are glad you received the book "The Will to Power" vol. I -- It was not sent with any idea of being a guide, for you possess the title as few experience. It came to you more as iron to a magnet. It was thought a glance might be a pleasing collaboration. It cites the theory, you exemplify the practice. Others who are not so favored as you, or who have not developed the faculty, can I am sure get much good from it -- using discretion and discernment of course. Like many who have new paths, "Nietzsche" was radical. Edith and I both feel and think you are unusually "at one with yourself." ... Yours has been a life of pure intuitive psychology. For others this must be acquired and many may never get it. [51]

Once again, Christmas found the family united in Zurich, but without Fowler, who spent the day with his grandfather in Pocantico Hills. In an undated December 1915 letter to his grandmother, the lives of Harold and Edith are seen through the sad child they left behind in America.

I, too, am deeply disappointed that the entire family is not to-day on this side of the ocean, but I am confident that there is some good reason for this not being the case. And I can well understand Mother's feeling about coming back .... [She] is very happy in the surroundings and atmosphere of Zurich. She comes and goes and does what she wants, there is ample opportunity and time for study and she has few or no duties imposed upon her.

Father is divided by his desire to be over here with the business and his friends and family, and his desire to be with Mother. It certainly would simplify matters if Mother could come over. She imagines things worse over here and more difficult than they really are.

Don't worry about me! [52]

For Edith and Harold, the only solution was to introduce Fowler to the wisdom of Jung. If only he could see the light -- as they had with Jung's help -- he would understand the present situation and not feel abandoned. Harold began sending books and long letters explaining analytical psychology, which Fowler showed to his grandmother when he stayed with her in Chicago. Realizing that she might lose her grandson to the weird spell Jung seemed to hold over the rest of her family, Nettie accused Harold of trying to convert his son to this unhealthy foreign philosophy. From the perspective of those left behind in America, adopting Jung' s theories seemed the cause of the breakup of the family. On February 7, 1916, Harold sent her an equally sharp response. "I know how well-meaning your words are, but I am not trying to influence Fowler and I don't like others to." [53]

This would prove to be untrue.

1916

Harold and Edith were now zealots when it came to Jung and analytical psychology. And being Rockefellers and McCormicks, they knew they had the power to make Jung's influence felt in the world.

Both of them had attended the occasional lectures at the Psychological Club meetings that Jung had been holding in a private room of a local restaurant since 1913. The ambience, however, was not conducive to the free expression of ideas among intimates or the forging of stronger bonds between Club members. Given a lifetime spent in American country clubs, it was probably Harold who decided to buy a building to serve as a clubhouse for the analysts and patients. For Jung and analytical psychology to gain any respectability, it was clear to his American patrons that the Psychological Club needed a building for its lectures, seminars, and other social events and to lodge guests. Plans were made to buy or rent a building in Zurich and renovate it to resemble an American country club. It was up to Harold to find the right building and make all the arrangements. Bor rowing heavily from a local bank by using her Rockefeller name as collateral, Edith paid for it.

The building that Harold found was in one of the most expensive districts in the city. With Harold's help, Edith borrowed enough money to establish a large reserve of funds to ensure the continued existence of the Club. She did this without consulting her father first, but she knew that he would always take care of her. Plans to secure the building were already in place by January 31, 1916, when Edith wrote to him to ask for more stocks in Standard Oil, pointing out that her "allowance" from him had remained the same since 1910. "As a woman of forty-three," Edith said, "I should like to have more money to help with. There are causes in which I am interested which are uplifting and of such importance to my development which I cannot help as I should like to because I have not the money. I hope that you will see that as a woman of earnestness of purpose and singleness of spirit I am worthy." [54]

Without waiting for a response, Edith and Harold rented and renovated the new building.

Due perhaps to the intensity of the war, Edith did not receive a response from her father until July. Of course, Rockefeller gave his daughter the money, but this time he wanted to know exactly how she was spending it. He wanted a detailed accounting from her -- not her husband -- of what she had been doing for so long in Zurich. He knew she was going to use the extra money for Jung's purposes, and he began to suspect that Jung was a charlatan who was only after the Rockefeller fortune. In her uncharacteristically long response to her father on July 20, 1916, Edith tried to explain herself. She revealed some startling new developments in Zurich.

For the first time we learn that Jung has now allowed Edith to be a practicing analyst. As she was still quite agoraphobic, her patients came to her suite at the hotel. Perhaps Jung felt that her generous patronage bought Edith the right to be an analyst if that's what she wanted, despite the severity of her many problems.

Edith wrote:

I want to thank you for the letter you wrote to me ... in answer to my letter asking if you would not give me some more money. I too am sorry that my work has taken me for such a long time away from you ....

I'm getting healed myself and getting my nerves up. I am learning how I can help to heal other people who are struggling on with shattered nerves. It is a very difficult work, but it is a beautiful work. I have rented here a house and have founded a psychological club which gives the opportunity for those who are in analysis to come together. This is an important step forward in the collective development.

Except for small sums, my three large interests are the Memorial Institute for Infectious Diseases, the Chicago Opera Company, and Analysis. To the Institute I give $25,000.00 a year. To the Opera I give to the guarantee fund each year $12,000.00. To the Club I had to make the gift all at the same time, this was $120,000.00 Of this amount I had to borrow $80,000.00 at the Bank. But now I can begin paying this off next year. This work is unique in the history of mankind and its far reaching values are inestimable. For a cause such as this I would willingly make a bigger loan. The bankers are very nice with me and I expect no difficulties in paying off my debt in time. You would be interested to hear more of this work, and I shall be glad to tell you much about it when I come back. [55]

These sums would be generous in current dollars, let alone in 1916. Jung's movement was clearly the overwhelming recipient of Edith's largesse. In 1997 dollars, the money Edith donated to the Jungian cause would be close to $2 million. And this is in addition to paying for the translations of Jung's works into English.

Edith's language in her letters suggests that from the very start she and everyone else involved with Jung saw their work as religious in nature and that their small group in Zurich would be the first of many other such groups to eventually spread across the planet. The Zurich School would be the vanguard of a new movement that would bring a spiritual rebirth to the world. If Jung's movement was indeed "unique in the history of mankind," then the founding of the headquarters of the Psychological Club would be remembered as the moment that Jung and his disciples entered the history books. Edith was proud to be able to bring this about. Describing it later that year in her annual letter to her mother-in-law, Edith said: "I am enclosing a photograph of the Psychological Club which I founded and endowed on the 26th of January of this year. This house I have rented for two and a half years. It makes a center for analyzed people where we can be in pension, or come in for meals, or come for the evenings for lectures, discussions and study, all of which teaches collectivity. Any new movement has a slow growth, but this assures a lasting quality." [56]

Sigmund Freud was quite jealous. "[The Rev. Oskar] Pfister writes that Rockefeller's daughter presented Jung with a gift of 360,000 francs for the construction of a casino, analytic institute, etc.," he complained to Sandor Ferenczi on April 29, 1916. "So Swiss ethics have finally made their sought-after contact with American money. I think ·not without bitterness about the pitiful situations of the members of our Associations, our difficulties with the Verlag [publishing house], etc. Now Jung is supposedly talking about me again with 'veneration.' I replied to Pfister that this turnaround finds no resonance with me." [57]

Within a few years, however, the coffers of the Club were almost bare. Edith continued to borrow money from Swiss banks, and by March 1920 she would be over $800,000 in debt, which her father finally paid off for her. Unable to afford the lease and upkeep of the expensive building Harold had chosen, Edith bought the Psychological Club its own building on Gemeindestrasse, where it continues to operate today. John D. Rockefeller's money paid for all of this.

In his way, Harold, too, was trying to be a force of change in the world. Feeling more confident about his ability to think, in March, Harold wrote a long proposal for ending the war that he intended to be passed along to the leaders of the combative parties. His proposal -- entitled "Cash Value of Ultimate Peace Terms" -- was essentially a cost-benefit analysis of the situation. Using his new reasoning abilities, he constructed an argument based on the idea that war simply is too expensive. Harold believed that if everyone could only see his point, the war would come to a halt. He sent copies of his manuscript to the American ambassador to Switzerland and to President Wilson and other top officials. Harold received many polite responses, but nothing that indicated that anyone took him seriously. He circulated another proposal -- "Via Pacis" -- the following year, after the United States entered the war. [58] This time Harold got himself into hot water when he tried to send a copy directly to high-ranking German officials. The State and War Departments in Washington immediately sent an avalanche of cables to Harold and to the American ambassador to Switzerland to demand that Harold stop meddling in international affairs.

In May 1916, Fowler was accepted at Princeton University, and with his parents' permission he took off the year before college. Like Ernest Hemingway, Walt Disney, Dashiell Hammett, e. e. cummings, John Dos Passos, and hundreds of young men -- mostly from elite New England prep schools and the Ivy League -- Fowler signed on to be a member of the "Gentlemen Volunteers" of the first ambulance corps in France. [59] His enlistment was for three months beginning in July. Stationed in Paris, he repaired and reattached Model T Ford frames for the bodies of the ambulances. He certainly saw wounded soldiers, but never made it to the front.

On the first of October, he arrived in Zurich. After not seeing Fowler for more than a year, in which time Harold himself had learned to think psychologically through analysis, Harold immediately noticed certain qualities in his son he had never seen before. "Fowler reminds me so much of [his insane brother] Stanley I find myself often almost calling him by that name," Harold told his mother on October 18. Almost immediately, Fowler began analysis with Jung.

Now four members of the family -- Edith, Harold, Muriel, and Fowler -- were deeply involved in analysis with Jung or Maria Moltzer. Only Mathilde seems to have escaped analysis, but she was once again in the sanitarium in Davos.

The Secret Church

Edith and Harold were in the audience when Jung gave his stirring inaugural talk to the Zurich Psychological Club. Edith explained to Harold the references Jung made in German about the Holy Grail and Parsifal and the Rosicrucians. Jung confirmed for them that they were members of a Holy Order like the Grail knights and that their new "religious attitude" and the work they did on themselves would ultimately redeem the entire world. At this point, Jung rarely mentioned in public that the religious attitude he was teaching them was a pagan one, antithetical to Judeo-Christian orthodoxies; he only remarked that this attitude was a "new" one.

But almost from the very beginning, there were serious problems in the Club. For the first time, the analysts and their patients all had frequent exposure to one another on a regular basis. Rather than promoting social cohesion, discord ruled. And no one was more disruptive to the harmony of the Club than Jung himself. A variety of factors may have been responsible for this. Jung's personal life was in turmoil as he tried to work out a polygamous menage with Emma and Toni Wolff. His visions continued, and in the summer of 1916 his house was haunted by the dead Crusaders who had not found what they sought in Jerusalem.

The introduction of money and the international social status of the Rockefellers and the McCormicks into Jung's circle with the opening of the Club no doubt tempted many of his male colleagues to jockey for position and rank. They were astute enough to see that the gravy train had just pulled in, and they wanted to be on board. Some -- such as Alphonse Maeder, Hans Triib, Adolph Keller, and Hans Schmid -- subtly attempted to dethrone Jung by challenging his authority. Jung was never one to tolerate criticism -- especially in public -- and his anger seeped out in sarcasm and insults.

Jung eventually won the power struggle by winning most of the female members of the Club to his side and by making it too unpleasant for too many male analysts to remain. The majority of analysts who allied themselves with Jung in these early days were female; they did not question his authority. Like Kundry, they existed only to serve their Parsifal. They wanted to continue to participate in the mystery of the Holy Grail that Jung promised them.

Harold and Edith certainly witnessed Jung's darker side, but they always seemed to give him the benefit of a doubt. To use their terms, their transference to Jung made them too dependent upon him to allow contradictory information to intrude on their idealizations.

Yet on a Saturday evening at the club -- probably the night of October 14 -- something happened that upset everyone. We know how upset Fanny Bowditch became when she saw Jung "in the grip of his complexes," and from a previously unpublished document that Harold McCormick was deeply troubled about the atmosphere of his beloved club as well.

Emma Jung, who was president of the executive committee of the club, saw how upset Harold was and asked him to submit a report that outlined the social problems of the club and proposed solutions. Harold worked for almost a month polishing two rough first drafts into a final version that he then formally submitted on November 13, 1916. As with his previous proposals for ending the war, writing this report allowed Harold to practice thinking. Without ever mentioning Jung or anyone else by name, Harold made the following observations about the disharmony and in so doing gives us insight into the "guiding fictions" of this unusual spiritual community and its insular, utopian mentality:

The School of Zurich stands for a set of principles and a set of expediencies -- a set of uncompromising attitudes and a set of flexible ones.

The School stands, in the unfolding of its truths or beliefs, virtually against the world. There are too few at present in the School, and too many outside it to warrant any difference among those who espouse its cause ....

The School of Zurich and the Psychology Club are in one way two separate propositions, but in another sense they are identical in interest at the present time, owing to the fact that the extent of the membership of the Club makes this collective body almost coincident with that of the School of Zurich itself,-the Club being an expression of the ideas of the School.

Therefore what affects the Club affects the School and vice versa ....

Differences of opinion and views, ... are bound to percolate, if not to become transferred with increased velocity and intensity to the other. ... Reference herein, it may be said, is made not to those differences of personal view wherein only the individual is affected, nor to those differences which apply to the individual versus the community in general, but only to those differences the adherence to which affects the solidarity of the movement surrounding the School of Zurich and the Club and their natural and normal advance and progress .... Towards the School and Club there is a more definite obligation, it is suggested, than towards society in general. ...

It might be said with a good deal of truth that the School of Zurich is on trial, insofar as its relation to the outcome of the Club enterprise is concerned, for if 60 people in analysis cannot get along together, what can be expected for the future among 600 or 6000.

To-day the Club stands as the Citadel of the School as a whole; it is the Visible Church; the Workshop of which the School is the Laboratory. Many of the principles of the School are or should be lived out at the Club, and the living out in the Club life of these principles is one test of their value ....

It is ventured that no Club could possibly start with more given difficult situations to meet and deal with than confront the Psychology Club at this time and considering the relatively short time of its life and the fact that it entered the field as a stranger to all precedents, it can be marvelled that it has done as well as has been the case. Review the conditions and the component parts: a club to be devoted to intellectual pursuits; to social pursuits; a pension; a town club; a place for collateral society meetings; and a habitat for persons in various stages of Analysis. In this club are to be members of different nationalities, of trained divergent temperamental and psychic makeups, joining in the spirit of collectivity. Here congregate people of different mental calibre, of different "Bildung," and in different stages of analysis. Here come together the "analytiker" [the analyst] and the "analysand" [the patient] in fellowship ....

In addition to finding ourselves individually it would seem that another logical step might be finding our Collectivity with people who are in analysis, and some would take the view that this step is more difficult than with people who are unanalyzed. If this is true it would surely be for the very reasons which cause the present difficulties of our club life, and if again in turn this would be so, does it not show the more importance of getting at once to the seat of the trouble in a united way to work out this problem to a harmonious result. What is more undignified than the spectacle of orthodox religious circles fighting among themselves over "claimed-for" important questions, which to on-lookers or those desired to be convinced, seem often times trivial and unimportant. ...

I believe that unconsciously there is too much of an atmosphere of rank observed in the Club, the mental rank, and the rank between "analytiker" and "analysand" on the one hand, and as between people in various stages of analysis on the other. If this difficulty does exist it surely does not emanate principally from those in the higher rank, but rather on account of "transference" and lack of assertiveness on the part of those less assured. Still granting this, the remedy may be sought by cooperation from both sides. A kind act tendered at a personal sacrifice is one development. Such a kind act tendered with a contented spirit might be a still further development, helpful to our Club-life welfare. The mantle of "caste" should be laid aside at the threshold of the Club and the Natural Simple Human Relation assumed in its real aspect. [60]

Harold's reference to the club as the "Visible Church" reveals that he had been reading the works of Arthur Edward Waite, particularly his 1909 book The Hidden Church of the Holy Grail. Waite proposes that there has been an underground mystical tradition, pre-Christian in origin, whose truths have emerged in a disguised form in Hellenistic mystery cults, Gnosticism, Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, alchemy, and particularly in the many legends of the Holy Grail. He refers to formal religious doctrines and institutions throughout history as the "Visible Church," which shows its face to the world. The visible church, however, is a mask for what Waite calls the "Hidden Church of Sacramental Mystery" or, more commonly, "The Secret Church." In his last chapter, Waite revealed the existence of this underground spiritual tradition throughout history. The Secret Church "is behind the Visible Church," and has always been kept alive by a chosen few. [61] Its existence has been hidden by rumors and "many literatures," which are "veils." [62] A mystical union with God and a spiritual regeneration or rebirth are experienced by those who are initiated into its mysteries. The Secret Church is therefore not an external or material construction that exists in space and time, for as Waite says, "If I may attempt one further definition, as the synthesis of all my statements -- echoing and reflecting all-I would describe the Secret Church as the integration of believers in the higher consciousness." [63]

In this final chapter we have all the elements of Jung's guiding fiction about the nature of his cult of followers in Zurich in 1916. [64] It was a fantasy that he would keep alive for them for the rest of his life. Together they were on a Grail quest and participated together in a mystery: the Secret Church. Jung used this metaphor quite often during these years, particularly in connection with the Mithraic mysteries, because Franz Cumont and other scholars thought that the secret underground mystery chambers in which the initiations took place were directly below actual visible churches where more formal rites were conducted.

Harold and Edith consciously believed that analysis with Jung was an initiation into this Secret Church, this Temple of the Holy Grail. Jung had told them it was.

This did not please John D. Rockefeller. He did not like the strange tone of Edith and Harold's letters. The "religious attitude" they both now espoused was unfamiliar to him. Despite all their talk of spirituality, it did not seem Christian to him, certainly not Baptist. In her annual letter to her father in 1916, Edith attempted to address tactfully these differences while letting him know that she and Harold had found their path together.

As it [the year] nears its close, we look onward with hope, confidence and trust. We know not what is ahead for us, but we do know that we have our home, we have found our path, so that while we know the road may be a hard one it will have its beauties.

You on your path have your philosophy and your religion which guide you. I on my path have my philosophy and my religion which guide me. That they differ makes no harm because we have love which makes the bond between us. [65]

Edith and Harold's new religion was analysis. Indeed, their acquaintance Fanny Bowditch was making such a statement to her diary in these same last months of 1916.

The final years in Zurich: 1917-1921

On January 18, 1917, Harold wrote, "Dear Mamma, Days roll by and some times I find myself wondering what, if anything, I am doing and accomplishing." As for Edith, "[she] is getting on her real feet every day -- had not been to Dr. Jung for a long while -- and is really independent more and more in spirit and in letter and gentle and tolerant of others and submissive and respective of the views of others, keeping her own individuality and strength at the same time." [66]

The war now occupied more and more of Harold and Edith's attention Together they sponsored charities to help prisoners of war, and Edith be came the secret patron of Irish writer and expatriate James Joyce. She pro vided him an anonymous monthly stipend that he picked up at a local Zurich bank. When he found out who his patron was, he came to the hotel to thank her. There is no record of their meeting, but Joyce later said she cut off her support when he refused to go into analysis with Jung or one of his disciples.

Harold felt that his marriage to Edith was blossoming as never before. "I must tell you in a word how lovely Edith is developing," he wrote to his mother on September 25. "You would not know her. All the lovely softness of her old attitude is returning with no loss of strength or firmness, but it is all so beautifully balanced. It is a charm to be with her. ... Her time is beautifully spent and profitable to herself and others." [67]

Edith spent her time teaching others about analysis and philosophy and seeing her own patients. "I am teaching six hours a day besides my own studies," she told her father in November. [68] A year later, she informed him, "I am so happy in my work, and go on generally from day to day, seeing very few people outside of those who come to me for their work." [69] Her new occupation as a psychoanalyst proved to fit in nicely with her agora phobia: She never had to worry about leaving the hotel except for walks or club functions.

"New patients are coming to me all the time," Edith told her father in March 1919, "and I have had some fifty cases now. I hear in a year twelve thousand dreams. This work is very concentrated and very different, -- but so intensely interesting. It is so beautiful to see life and joy come into the eyes of those who have come to me so hopeless and seemingly lost!" [70]

In May 1918, Harold McCormick finally returned to the United States. His business had been threatened by the war and by his prolonged absence. By the end of 1918 he became president of the International Harvester Company. His life was consumed with business. There was no more time to analyze his dreams or read books by Nietzsche or about the Holy Grail. The most immediate historical consequence of Harold's return to America is that the paper trail ends. Edith rarely wrote letters, and the few she did were never very informative. What she did with her patients for the last three years of her life in Zurich is still a mystery.

With his wife and most of his family in Switzerland, and with no "analyzed people" to talk to in America, Harold felt quite lonely. Used to talking out his problems in Zurich, he had no one to turn to in Chicago. In June 1919, Emma Jung sent Harold a short letter telling him that she had recently seen Edith, which was unusual. After Harold returned to America no one seemed to see Edith except her patients. On Sunday, June 29,1919, while with his mother at their Lake Forest estate, Harold wrote a rambling, nostalgic, depressed letter in which he poured out all his concerns and misgivings. It came to eighteen pages.?1 He never sent it, but it reveals that Harold was finding it difficult to cope without his usual support system.

Nettie McCormick was glad to have her son home, but she could not understand why Edith kept her grandchildren in Switzerland. Nettie cut out a newspaper article very critical of psychoanalysis entitled "Paralysis by Analysis" and sent it to Harold in August 1919. The author of the piece argued that this new technique of psychoanalysis made people worse, not better, because the incessant focusing of attention on one's inner thoughts and problems weakened their free will and rendered them incapable of making decisions for themselves. Harold was not pleased. "Radicals and zealots in all new movements go to extremes," he wrote back a few days later, "and in 'Analysis' we who believe in it are prone to go to extremes and make our paths difficult." Harold insisted that he, for one, was not paralyzed by analysis but indeed quite the opposite. "All the above means that I believe in action and decision, and if there is one thing that Dr. Jung does in his life, it is to decide things quickly, but for others this comes more painfully and more slowly until they have reached a certain point." The charges made in the article, Harold told her, are "not supported by the teachings of the school of psychoanalysis in Zurich." [72] Harold sent Nettie's letter and a copy of the article to Edith, Toni Wolff, Fowler, and Bea trice Hinkle. Hinkle told him not to expect too much from his mother, "You see," she wrote on September 26, "it is practically impossible for another person, no matter what their relation and how close the bond -- indeed the closer the bond usually the more difficult, to understand what analysis really means to those of us who have experienced and thereby gained our knowledge." [73]

In the last week of September, a young woman by the name of Ganna Walska called on Harold while he was in New York City. She was young, vivacious, Polish, and claimed to have sung opera with Caruso in Cuba. Harold contacted the Chicago Opera Company and asked them to give her an audition. A friendship ensued. Harold was captivated by her.

To sort out his feelings, Harold went to Washington, D.C., in the first week of March 1920 to visit his cousin Medill McCormick, now a United States senator. The two men traded books by Freud and Jung, and Medill reminded him of Zurich and the lessons about life -- and polygamy -- Jung had taught them. He reminded Harold of the dangers of being too one-sided and of not heeding the primal call of life. On Senate stationery, Medill urged him to pursue "Your rediscovery of the joie de vivre." [74]

Harold's sexual affair with Ganna Walska began.

Meanwhile, in Zurich, Edith had formed an intimate bond of some sort with one of her Swiss patients, a gold digger and former gardener named Edwin Krenn. Younger than Edith, he claimed to have promise as an architect. Edith believed him and took him under her wing, convinced she could liberate his genius.

Mathilde and Muriel wrote anxious letters to their father, begging him to come to Zurich immediately. Harold put off his trip until late September 1920 and then only stayed for a month. Ganna Walska had become the most important person in his life. Harold told his father-in-law that he wanted to divorce Edith. In September 1921, Edith arrived in New York accompanied by Edwin Krenn. She went immediately to Pocantico Hills to meet with her older brother, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. But the word was not good: The Rockefeller men sided with Harold. The divorce went through in record time.

Edith did not see her father on this trip, and had not seen him since 1912. She never would again. On December 28, 1921, the marriage between the princess of Standard Oil and the prince of International Harvester was officially over. In August 1922, Harold married Ganna Walska in Paris. They were divorced in 1931. Harold married once more in his life, a brief but happy union with Adah Wilson from 1938 until his death in 1941.

Both daughters were soon married as well, as was Fowler. In 1931 he wed Mrs. Anne Urquhart ("Fifi") Stillman, who was nineteen years his senior, with four children from her previous marriage. She was the mother of one of Fowler's classmates at Princeton. He and Fifi never had children of their own. Fowler maintained his friendship with Jung and became one of his favorite traveling companions in the last forty years of Jung's life. When Jung came to America in 1925 he took an automobile trip to see the Grand Canyon and visit the Taos Indians in New Mexico. On this trip Jung taught Fowler how to use the divinatory device known as the I Ching and revealed that Toni Wolff had been his mistress for at least a decade.

Fowler McCormick rose through the ranks of his father's company and became chairman of the board in 1946. However, he was "asked" to resign in 1951 by the board. During this palace coup, he consulted the I Ching and kept detailed records of the advice of the oracle. In 1960, during one of his many summertime visits to Jung, he had his astrology chart done by Gret Bauman, Jung's daughter. Fowler died at seventy-five in Palm Desert, California, in January 1974.

As for Edith, soon after her arrival in America she returned to her "bastion" at 1000 Lake Shore Drive and emerged only to go on strolls through the grove of trees on her property, which she called the "bosky." She lived with her servants and Edwin Krenn. She continued to contribute to philanthropic organizations in Chicago and somehow built up a small private practice. She also held occasional seances and interpreted her patients' astrology charts. Her belief in reincarnation grew. After reading of the discovery of the tomb of King Tut, Edith began to tell her intimates that she was the reincarnation of Tutankhamen's child bride, the Princess Anknesenpaaten.

After she left Zurich, Edith's Swiss chauffeur sold his story to the Schweizer Illustrierten, a popular magazine that often ran celebrity gossip. It depicted Edith in a very unflattering light. "Her chauffeur liked to tell scandals about her," remembered Herman Muller, Jung's own chauffeur and gardener. [75] The story was reprinted many times over the years, including shortly after Edith's death.

In 1930, Edith had a mastectomy after a cancerous growth was discovered on one of her breasts. Two years later the cancer had spread to her liver. By then, almost broke, Edith had moved to a suite of rooms in the Drake Hotel in Chicago and waited to die. Her children all came to be near her, and even Harold made repeated visits. She died on August 25, 1932.

Harold, Fowler, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Edwin Krenn were among the pallbearers at her funeral. Harold, ever the feeling type, was sensitive to Krenn's intimacy with Edith and made sure he was included, even over the protests of Edith's brother. There is good reason to suspect that Harold and his brother-in-law immediately burned all her diaries and personal papers relating to her analysis. There was no need for further scandal.

From Switzerland, telegrams and letters poured in from Adolph Keller, then the president of the Zurich Psychological Club, Hans Trub, and from other former acquaintances in the club. Harold received a touching four-page handwritten letter of sympathy from Emma Jung. "Hers seems a tragic fate ... I feel great pity for her," she wrote, acknowledging that the period the McCormicks spent in Zurich marked an important period in her life. [76] Emma invited Harold to Kusnacht and mentioned that she and Jung had been vacationing at the Tower, where Jung remained after she'd left. What Emma did not mention to Harold was that Jung was not in the Tower alone.

And from the Tower the following one-line telegram had arrived for Harold from Edith's ex-analyst: "Thanks and warm sympathy for old times sake. Toni Wolff Dr Jung." [77]

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PART 1 OF 2

Chapter 11: The Passion of Constance Long

Without a doubt, Constance Long was the most intellectually gifted of all the disciples who came to Jung after his break with Freud in January 1913. Her essays on dream interpretation, psychological types, the psychology of women, and child psychology all reveal a discriminating and independent mind that, unlike Jung's, tended toward analysis and not synthesis. [1] She always saw right to the heart of any theoretical matter. She was naturally attracted to highly detailed, hierarchical, and complex models of human experience, the more complex the better.

Unlike Fanny Bowditch Katz and Edith Rockefeller McCormick, she never spent more than two months in the rarefied atmosphere of the Jungian colony. As a result, she remained her own person and maintained an independent professional career, something those who remained in Switzerland found difficult to do. Still, Constance Long was one of Jung's first and most committed disciples in England.

At least until a new light captured her eye.

Like others who followed the Jungian path of analysis, Long recorded her struggles along the path in a book of colored paintings and drawings of images from her dreams and visions. She rarely encountered Jung in person, however, nor did her transformations take place in his domain. He was a burning star on her horizon for most of the years she devoted to him, maintaining the flame at a distance, sending spiritually inspiring letters to her. His words were magical, a healing balm, a ray of hope in a fallen world. He explicitly offered gnosis-true mystical knowledge-and promised to lead her to the home of the soul, which he insisted could only be reached through the call of one's blood and one's soil. And he promised spiritual insemination so that she could become pregnant with the spirit and give birth to the divine child-god who would save humanity.

But then something happened to change Constance Long's mind about Jung. Her diary reveals a story that has never been told and allows us to see, through her eyes, her painful transformation from believer to apostate.

Overcomings

Constance Ellen Long was born into a large family near Reading, England, in 1870. She was a petite woman, quick, birdlike, delicate. Throughout her childhood, she always seemed too thin and too prone to illness. But she was intellectually curious and alive and overcame her physical limitations to excel scholastically. After leaving school she worked as an art teacher in the School of Science and Art in South Kensington. Long was always a quietly religious person, inward, a compassionate woman whose one goal in life was, like Kundry's, "to serve." The British Empire had expanded deep into Africa during her youth and, like many young women and men, she dreamed of a career as a missionary to help those who could not help themselves. Around the age of twenty-three, she decided that the best way to do this would be as a medical missionary. And so, with her excellent academic record and obvious drive, she was immediately accepted into the London School of Medicine for Women.

In 1896, she earned both her L.S.A. (licensed surgical assistant) and medical degrees, but she was turned down for foreign missionary work because of her lack of physical vigor. In a career move typical for female physicians, Long became a resident medical officer in a maternity home. She later secured a post as resident medical officer at an orphanage in Hawkhurst, Kent. Here, Long finally found the confidence in herself as a novice physician that she had hoped for.

A sudden diphtheria outbreak in Hawkhurst threatened to kill dozens of people. Among the children she cared for there were forty cases within the first few days of the epidemic. Given the state of medical knowledge and the lack of antibiotics and vaccines, there was a good chance that all of the children would die within the week. As a recent medical-school graduate and a voracious reader of medical journals, Long knew of a new experimental "antitoxin" that was just coming into general use. She immediately ordered a large supply of the drug and began administering it as rapidly as she could. She did not lose a single child.

That the public perceived her as a hero helped her set up her own practice as a general practitioner. Long built up a highly successful practice in Crouch End, primarily among women and their children. She was a surgical clinical assistant at various hospitals and, for two years in a row, was president of the Association of Registered Medical Women. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Constance Long was one of the most prominent physicians in the British Empire. She became known as an effective instructor in courses on first aid, home nursing, and child care. But soon enough she developed an interest in psychotherapy that eventually turned into an obsession with psychoanalysis.

In 1913, she met C. G. Jung.

The new age

On October 30, 1913, under the stewardship of the Welshman Ernest Jones, the London Psycho-Analytic Society was formed with nine members; Constance Long was one of them. Jones had recently returned from several years of itinerant training in psychoanalysis at the hands of C. G. Jung, Otto Gross, Sandor Ferenczi, and Sigmund Freud. Freud was initially put off by Jones's fanatical attitude toward psychoanalysis and by the additional fact that he was not Jewish. "He is a Celt and consequently not quite acceptable to us," Freud wrote to Karl Abraham on May 3, 1908, but optimistically viewed this as a sign that "psychoanalysis escaped the danger of becoming a Jewish national affair." [2] But Jones won over the Viennese, perfecting his German and siding with them against Jung and his Swiss contingent. Convinced of Jones's loyalty after the breakdown of his personal relations with Jung, Freud anointed him to spread the gospel of psychoanalysis throughout the British Empire.

Jones didn't realize that his job was made easier by a feeling of cultural liberation in England; certain members of the cultural elite had already expressed an interest in psychoanalysis. With the death of Kind Edward VII in 1910, A. R. Orage, the creator and editor of The New Age, the premiere literary and cultural journal of the period, proclaimed that the new age had indeed arrived. "The last genuine link with the Victorian age has been broken with the death of King Edward VII," who was "spiritually the mere executor of Queen Victoria," Orage wrote in May 1910. [3]

The editions of The New Age that appeared between 1911 and 1914 reflect the changing interests of the London intelligentsia. Orage had been an ardent non-Marxist socialist and had written books on Nietzsche, but in the pages of The New Age Nietzsche was dethroned in favor of the vitalistic philosophy of Henri Bergson. Russian culture, particularly its music, ballet, and occultism, was of great interest. And, beginning in 1912 with what was probably the first discussion of the work of Sigmund Freud in a popular English journal, psychoanalysis became an increasingly important focus of discussion.

The first of Freud's books to be published in England, The Interpretation of Dreams, appeared in 1913. However, according to a publisher's note, circulation of A. A. Brill's translation was limited to "Members of the Medical, Scholastic, Legal and Clerical professions." As a physician, Constance Long may have been among the select few to have access to the book. (M. D. Eder's translation, On Dreams, was published for the general public the following year.) [4]

We do not know when Constance Long first became attracted to Jung and his ideas. He was in London in August 1913 to deliver papers on analytical psychology to the Psycho-Medical Society (of which Long was a member) and at the Seventeenth International Congress of Medicine. In his lecture to the Psycho-Medical Society on August 5, he spoke a great deal about the techniques of dream interpretation and the "metaphysical need" of human beings. He told his audience that psychological health depended on the adoption of a "religious or philosophical attitude," which is necessary if human beings are to "do creative work for the benefit of a future age" and, if necessary, to "sacrifice themselves for the welfare of the species." [5] Motivated by her religious longing to devote herself to humanitarian causes (as Maria Moltzer did with temperance work), Long could not help but be seduced by the hints Jung dropped of his vision of analytical psychology as a mission of world redemption.

"Constance Long, a virgin of 40"

In November 1913, Constance Long went to Zurich. Her friends David and Edith Eder had both had analytic sessions with Jung and spoke highly of his methods. These were the days when Jung began to flirt openly with the promise of spiritual rebirth that analysis could bring. In public, though, he stuck close to familiar Christian metaphors and avoided pagan ones. Outside of German-speaking Europe, he even avoided his usual allusions to Wagner and Parsifal. For those like Long who had been attracted to psychoanalysis as a method of healing sick souls, Jung seemed to be dispensing all the right metaphors of renewal and rebirth and in the right measure. He didn't scare anyone off with hints of neopaganism. Jung was struggling at that time with the difficult case of Fanny Bowditch and trying to prevent James Jackson Putnam from defecting to the Freudian camp. Like Fanny and Edith Rockefeller McCormick, Constance Long saw Jung as he approached his apotheosis.

On November 19, Ernest Jones wrote Freud about Long's trip. "It is a pity, this member of yours is going to Z[urich] for analysis," Freud lamented in his response. "He will be lost to you." [6] Jones wrote back, "Our member who goes to Jung is a woman, Constance Long, a virgin of 40, hence in any case not too hopeful." [7]

Whether Long was a virgin is unknown, but it is true that throughout her life she felt bottled up, incapable of really relaxing enough to feel the full flowering of love for another person except in the most abstract form. She never married. As she became more involved in the propagation of Jung's ideas, she met women with whom she could establish close friendships. During her visits to Switzerland she met Beatrice Hinkle, who became quite dear to Long in the last eight years of her life. [8] By 1915, Hinkle had lost one husband to death and one to divorce and had raised two children on her own. One of them, Consuela, was on the periphery of Jungian circles in Europe in the 1920s. Even though Long was a few years older, Hinkle was more experienced in matters of love and sex and related to her as an older sister and protector.

It is no wonder they became such good friends. In many ways their extraordinary, pioneering professional careers paralleled one another. Beatrice Moses was born in San Francisco and married that city's assistant district attorney, Walter Scot Hinkle, in 1892. Following in the footsteps of her father, Dr. B. Frederick Moses, she became the first female graduate of the Cooper (now Stanford) Medical School in 1899. Her husband died earlier that year, and she faced the prospect of supporting their two children. She was offered the position of San Francisco city physician and was the first female public-health doctor in the United States. Her interest in the psychology of suggestion and psychotherapy was awakened during the California bubonic-plague epidemic of 1899 to 1903, when she noticed the great variability of psychological responses to the same infection. In 1905, she moved to New York City, where, with Charles Dana, she established one of the first medical psychotherapy clinics in the United States, at the Cornell Medical College. She studied yoga, hypnotism, and books on psychoanalysis and went to Switzerland in 1911 for analysis with Jung. Her initial analysis still had strong Freudian elements, but she was attracted to his spiritual attitude toward life and the marked similarity between Henri Bergson's elan vital and Jung's new, broader, vitalistic concept of the libido. [9] She spent time with Jung intermittently until 1915, after which she went her own way intellectually and professionally.

Socialized into the Jungian worldview before the heady days of 1916, neither Hinkle nor Long developed the extreme one-sided mystical element in their professional work that Jung and his other apostles seemed to nurture. "The crippling kind of mysticism leads man away from earth to regions of the imagination," Long said in one essay, "whereupon common life loses its interest and intensity." For responsible physicians and thinking persons, the more reliable path seemed to be "enlightened mysticism" that "leads us to develop the precious faculties lying dormant in the unconscious, and to enrich our mundane existence by using those psychic powers of visions and perception which carry the profound conviction that the 'kingdom of heaven is within.'" [10] While appreciating Jung's recognition of the value of spirituality and a religious attitude in a mentally healthy life, neither of them believed they were forming a new pagan religion to replace Judeo-Christian orthodoxies quite as Maria Moltzer did, for example.

In January and early February 1914, Long returned to Switzerland for five weeks of analysis with Jung, which she told Ernest Jones she "greatly enjoyed." [11] Jung made England his most frequent foreign destination in the years following his break with Freud, and for a week in late July 1914 he stayed at Long's home in London. Jung was fighting a colonial war with Freud and he didn't want to lose the British empire. He also knew that England was his gateway to America. His books published in England would eventually make it to America and vice versa. He hoped analytical psychology would prevail over psychoanalysis in the English-speaking world.

Long saw as her mission the introduction of Jungian ideas into America and the British Empire. During Jung's 1914 visit, plans were finalized for Long to supervise the translation of a representative selection of Jung' s clinical papers and bring them out in book form. With David Eder's translation of Freud's On Dreams arousing public interest, Long and others wanted to do the same for Jung. At that time, Beatrice Hinkle was busily translating Jung's 1912 Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido into English. By the beginning of 1916 it appeared in America under the title Psychology of the Unconscious. [12] With the help of the Eders and Dora Hecht, Long completed Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology; and, backed by Edith Rockefeller McCormick's money, it was in print by February 1916. [13]

In August 1914, war had broken out. Other than a few of her talks that were published, we have no real knowledge of Long's activities during the war years, but we do know that the war convinced her more than ever that the world needed Jung and his ideas. For her, he offered hope for the salvation of humanity. When the war was finally over, she and Jung's disciples would lead others into a new, higher, more exalted state of consciousness. Only those chosen few whose insights had been given to them personally by Jung would be able to do this. She was one of them. And she wanted to do as much as she could to bring about this great spiritual awakening.

In the preface to Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology, she wrote:

Those who read this book with the attention it requires, will find they gain an impression of many new truths. It is issued ... at a time when much we had valued and held sacred is in the melting-pot. But we believe that out of the crucible, new forms will arise. The study of Psycho-Analysis produces something of the effect of a war in the psyche; indeed we need to make conscious this war in the inner things if we would be delivered in the future from the war in the external world, either in the form of individual or international neurosis. In the pain and the upheaval, one recognizes the birth-pangs of a newer, and let us hope, truer thought, and more natural adaptations. We need a new philosophy of life to take the place of that which has perished in the general cataclysm, and it is because I see in the analytical psychology which grows out of a scientific study of the Unconscious, the germs of a new construction, that I have gathered the following essays together. [14]

The diary

Jung did not return to England until July 1919, after he had been released from the yearly interruptions of military service. Despite the war, these had been his most intellectually fertile years. By 1919 he had developed the structure of his final theory of personality types with its two attitudes (extraversion and introversion) and its four functions (thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition). He had invented the terms "collective unconscious," "persona," "shadow," "anima," and "animus." Like Jung's type theory, the latter three concepts would be mentioned in print in later years only as "archetypes." The previous year, while on military duty, Jung drew a mandala every day and realized that it was a symbol of wholeness, completeness, of God as the sun. Later it was thought of as the archetype of archetypes, the image of the grand container of all the gods, the symbol of the microcosm (the whole, individuated personality) that mirrors the macrocosm (God). In 1928, he referred to this god within as the self (following theological form, many Jungians still capitalize "self" to indicate divinity).

Constance Long's diary documents that all these terms were already in use by Jung by the summer of 1919.15 Perplexingly, one month before Jung's arrival in London, Long made detailed references to his new, more complex theory of personality types and tried to grasp its internal structure with compasslike graphs and other illustrations. She had clearly received instruction in Jung's new theory before his arrival, but where and from whom? She does not say.

The initials MKB appear throughout the diary from the first pages until the last. Many references to MKB identify this person as female. For most of the diary, MKB shares Long's heart only with Jung. Who MKB may have been remains a mystery. There are many with the initials "MB" in Long's circle of friends (including Dr. Mary Bell, who analyzed along Jungian lines), but none whose middle initial begins with K. Connie Long seems to have been in love with MKB.

In June 1919, Long confessed, "MKB's anger with me because 'You cannot accept anything or any authority but J.'" Was she referring to Jung here? It is not clear.

One clue to MKB' s identity is that she wrote, or was writing, a book. Long had a dream of three books and attempted the following analysis of its elements:

AJ's paper: Jung's book
MKB book: My own
Jealousy

12.6.19 Dream [ ] Two books -- his -- MKB -- and a third book = mine.
My last paper. The conflict I have over writing ...

Health. Introverted feeling. Depreciation.

Introverted feeling was an element of Jung's new psychological typology. Two pages later, Long returned to the theme of MKB and her own difficulty in writing. "Perhaps," Long said, "some of my resistance to MKB's book lies in the fact that I want to write a book, but I am not sure that I have a single original idea."

Long seems to have kept a separate dream book in which she more fully elaborated her dreams, keeping her diary for association and personal references. Her entries suggest she was working analytically with someone in June 1919 who had training in Jung's new theories and was now imparting them to her. The evidence suggests it was not Jung himself, but it was clearly someone who was close to him and the goings-on in his circle in Switzerland.

On several pages Long made tiny mandala drawings over the crease at the top of two adjoining leaves. Who taught her this? Below the mandala and an odd sketch of two rectangular beams intersecting, she wrote, mysteriously, what seem to be abbreviated interpretations by someone else: "The soul the family demand the [ ] things the past. Doing something for the soul. You might work with tools. When you handle the tools, you might attract the family spirit." Whatever is going on here, there are certainly references that invoke images of ancestors and the idea that the ancestors form the collective soul, to put it in Jung' s terms during this period.

On the pages between the entries for June 12 and 16 are pencil sketches of a circle bisected vertically with a line. The left side of the diagram, beyond the circle, represents "external reality" and the corresponding left interior of the circle has a symbol for "female" and is labeled "persona." In Jungian terms, the persona is a mask -- literally -- that the conscious ego wears as its personal identity. As a woman, Long's ego identity is female. To the right of the circle is the abbreviation "Int. Obj. Unc." for the "internal objects" of the "unconscious mind." In accordance with Jungian theory, it is represented by the opposite sex, the "not-I," which for her is male. There is a corresponding symbol for male commonly used in medical shorthand. The right half of the circle -- the opposite of the persona -- is labeled "soul." Inside this right, unconscious half of Long's personality, are four strange symbols. The uppermost is labeled the "Upper Hermaphroditic God" and the lower the "Lower Hermaphroditic God." The elements of the picture are designated I for persona, 2 for soul, 3 for upper hermaphroditic god, and 4 for lower hermaphroditic god. Taken as a whole, this illustration is a representation of the individual human personality in its conscious and unconscious components.

Just what Jung and his disciples meant by the upper and lower hermaphroditic gods of the unconscious is anyone's guess. The last entries of Fanny Bowditch Katz's diaries were concerned with her descent into a "grotto" and a hermaphrodite who appears there. Here the hermaphrodite appears as a concern of Constance Long. It may have represented psychological wholeness or completeness as a counterpart to the fact that even humans have contrabiological elements. It is a symbol that Jung found again and again in alchemical texts when studying them in the late 1920s.

Long was clearly receiving instruction here. And the next lesson was on how to become a god.

On the page facing the graph of Jung's notion of the psyche, Long wrote: "When one is adapted to the unconscious by the pain of opposites -- and is god-like. Miss Moltzer is at 3 and 4. The hermaph above and the hermaphrodite below. It is only permitted to the god or gods to be hermaph. You need to be female."

It appears that Long may have viewed Moltzer as godlike, as a synthesis of the upper and lower hermaphroditic gods in her unconscious. Long, however, must remain simply female. The cross on which one may suffer the "pain of opposites" is also sketched on this same page:



No explanation of this compass chart of the soul appears in the diary.

Other references indicate that Long was struggling to learn the new theory and its practical application. Her entries for June 16 are a bit more legible and reveal, once again, the religious nature of Jung's practice of psychotherapy and a Volkish fascination with ancestral tendencies in the soul:

16.6.19 [ ] about the friend in the soul. If [ ] be the friend and the soul. The soul is to the unc. [unconscious] what the persona is to the consc. [conscious mind]. When you identify with the soul you project because it is uncon. We always project the unc. contents.

16.6 19 The dream of June 5. It is an attitude of devotion. She cuts herself off from the world to worship the god. [ ] The family tendencies have much to do with the soul. The only tool I want to handle is the pen -- this I use to write-[ ] etc. and don't keep enough libido to myself. My attempt at unc. last night was "dead wrong." It was far too conscious -- when it had to do with repression.

This entry is accompanied by one of her signature drawings of a tree that has human-like and animal-like faces emerging out of its bark. She named the drawing on this page "Tree spirit," and wrote beneath it, "The rain -- the rain -- the rain. [ ] The spirit falls. The spirit that part of the Col Unc [collective unconscious] that feels alive to con [consciousness] -- I should not be [ ] the spirit become 'word' logos."

A woman emerges from these fragments, a woman who is trying very, very hard to understand herself and her place in life, an introverted woman with health concerns who fears that she isn't good enough to write anything original. She is a woman who seeks love but does not receive it, turning her libido instead toward pursuing the promise of a better life that Jung offered to all his disciples.

The day the archetypes were born

In 1917, Constance Long brought out a second edition of Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology. For the first time, the anthology included the essay written by Jung in 1916 but published in German in 1917 in which he introduced the "dominants" as the "gods" of the unconscious. [16] By July 1919, when Jung was once again in England, these gods would become the archetypes.

Long was with Jung when the term "archetype" was introduced to the world. By this point she and the other Jungian-oriented analysts no longer participated in the London Psycho-Analytic Society with Ernest Jones and his cronies. (David Eder was the exception.) The Jungians were on their own, but without an official society. Jung favored Long's friend (and, possibly, occasional analyst) Maurice Nicoll as the leader of the British group. However, it was Helton Godwin ("Peter") Baynes who became Jung's first official assistant and heir apparent. [17] Baynes was a big, blustery extravert who was fond of sports and wives (he had at least four of the latter within the time he knew Jung). He had served as a medical officer during the First World War in the Balkans and in India. Jung liked him immensely and took him under his wing in Zurich. After a while, once Baynes learned enough German, he adopted Jung's physical gestures and mannerisms of speech.

Jung gave three lectures in London that July. He delivered "On the Problem of Psychogenesis" to the Royal Society of Medicine, "The Psychological Foundation of a Belief in Spirits" to the Society for Psychical Research, and, the most historic of the three, "Instinct and the Unconscious" for a symposium on instinct and the unconscious. [18] During the last of these lectures Jung introduced the term "archetype."

Constance Long was in the audience and made notes of Jung's remarks during the discussion that followed. Although it isn't clear from the published versions of Jung's lectures, his off-the-cuff remarks reveal that he thought of the archetypes as combining the prophetic or prospective function of the unconscious mind, its precognitive function, with "racial memories." Here is Long's summary of Jung's remarks: "12.7.19 The Symposium discussion: The colI.[ective] unc.[onscious] is a psychological state; it is that which is unconscious in everybody. On the one side there is the [ ] of racial memories, on the other side images preparing our psychological future. I am sure 'time' and 'space' depend on archetypes. All our concepts are mythological images. All our impulses are instincts."

"Experience -- fun -- vanity -- 'the opportunity'"

The experience of the First World War challenged women in ways that had been unthinkable before August 1914. Women were thrust into societal roles traditionally reserved for men. Conventional notions of masculine and feminine no longer held in many areas of life. After the war, in 1919, female physicians -- many of them in the forefront of the women's movement -- convened a six-week conference to share experiences and propose solutions to some of the pervasive problems created by the war.

From September 15 until October 24, 1919, the International Conference of Women Physicians was held at the headquarters of the YWCA in New York City. Every woman physician in the United States and Canada was invited, as well as about thirty women from foreign countries. Only three physicians were invited from England. Constance Long was one of them.

When Long was invited, she didn't know whether to go and decided to analyze her dreams and mental imagery to see what her unconscious mind told her about the future. She relied on the prophetic function of her dreams, just as Fanny Bowditch had in 1913 to decide whether she should visit America or not. In her diary for August 16, 1919, Long wrote:

I'm dubious about N. York --

Things against -- hot weather -- noise -- expensive -- exhaustion

For -- experience -- fun -- vanity -- "the opportunity"

The desired unc.[onscious] material was as follows:

Hypnagogic: Putting up a frieze rail in one of my small rooms (Gordon Square) it was too high. A little man sits on a narrow shelf opposite at same height as frieze rail and looks at it critically.

Dream: There was a beaten track into some ripe com (a small very prolific field) and something that paid for the corn -- and had to be carried to the other side.

The conference was a major event in the history of the women's movement in the early twentieth century. And, as we shall see, it also proved to be a defining moment for the future of the Jungian movement in the United States. The conference and its dozens of programs were divided into three general topic areas: "The Woman Physician and the Health of Women," "The Presentation of the Practical Program for Meeting the Needs of Girls in the Light of a Better Understanding of Their Emotional Life," and "The Present Social Conditions and Their Effect on Health and Personality." It was in this final section that one lecture by Constance Long and two by Beatrice Hinkle were given.

Both Hinkle and Long found Jung's theory of psychological types to be one of his most valuable contributions to the world. His insight that human beings had problems relating to one another because they saw the world differently depending on their types -- introverted or extraverted -- became a major point of departure for their work. Both women were also intrigued by the idea that men had a female component to their psychology -- the anima -- and women had a male component -- the animus. Both women proposed that psychological hermaphroditism or androgyny, the integration of one's contrabiological psychological components, was the true goal of psychotherapy. Not only would an inner wholeness or completeness result in the individual, but -- in the best of all possible worlds -- the relationship between the sexes would improve. As both Hinkle and Long were women who excelled in a man's world, they certainly recognized the so-called masculine components in their own psyches (intellect, ambition, drive, and so on) and wanted to help other women be aware of them as well.

Beatrice Hinkle gave lectures on "Personality and Will in Light of the New Psychology" and on "Arbitrary Use of the Terms Masculine and Feminine." Constance Long delivered a lecture on what we now know was a very relevant personal topic: "Sex as a Basis of Character." It was an eloquently argued and compassionately constructed explanation of the universal presence of autoerotism in its various forms and of the essential bisexual nature of all human beings. Above all, it is a plea for an empathetic understanding of the nature of homosexual love.

She began by making a case for the important and unrecognized role that the unconscious mind plays in everyday actions. Her next step in outlining the basis of human character was to address the "bi-sexuality or hermaphroditic character of the human being." "There is no excessively masculine man or exclusively feminine woman," Long explained. "Each bears traces of the other sex, not only physiologically, but psychologically. The importance of this well-known fact is not sufficiently realised." [19] "In mature life," each sex does under certain conditions display what are somewhat arbitrarily distinguished as qualities belonging to the opposite sex. Under war conditions this capacity is an asset of extraordinary value." [20] Libido is freed up from neurotic constraints, and there is more zest "for the performance of each other's relegated task."

Facing an audience of women who as physicians had confronted the destructive effects of war firsthand, Long then invoked the horrors all of them had seen, as well as the unforeseen positive effects of the war:

The European War has had the effect of separating men and women and massing together those of one sex. It has produced tremendous emotional problems of every sort. It has tom youthful civilians from home and normal conditions of life, and placed them under conditions where the ordinary moral notions are entirely reversed. Living through months of segregation as in camps, barracks, on ships, and on expeditions, is not a new thing, but it is accentuated by being experienced on such a huge scale. We have already a few obvious legacies from these cataclysmic times. There is a mass of venereal disease, a great outbreak of hysteria and other psychoneuroses among men, and not least there is a shortage of some ten million men in Europe. At such times homo-sexuality is bound to make its appearance as a problem for humanity.

Something else has been happening. Women have been obliged willy-nilly to do men's work in engine yards, in munitions factories, on the land -- in every field in fact of industrial and professional life. Something male in a woman's psychology has been called for, and we have seen there is a latent sex-element which enables her to respond ....

If homo-sexuality crops up at such a time, as my foregoing remarks show, its existence is not new. Perhaps the necessity to accept and consider it as one of the problems of our times is new. Franker discussion of all sex problems has made it possible to consider it here today ...

The homo-sexual tendency may become "fixed," because in the absence of personal effort and development, it is the easiest sexual expression life offers to a given individual. It arises as we have seen out of unnatural conditions such as the segregation of the sexes, -- or out of the economic difficulties in the way of marriage. Among women, whose numbers considerably surpass those of men, there is an arithmetical reason for it in the impossibility of marriage ....

My experience as a physician leads me to believe that the emotional problems of the married are no more or less severe than those of the unmarried, and that both men and women have much the same sexual problems, and are in a similar relation to them. Friendship, which we all like to think is untroubled by sex, is often wrecked upon it, and that most often where the sex element remains unconscious. [21]

At this conference Long met three women -- two American and one English -- who were to be the founding mothers of the Jungian movement in the United States. Although Beatrice Hinkle had been the first of Jung's analysands to practice in New York and did much to help found an Analytical Psychology Club there, she was no proselytizer for Jung, and she was so different from the others that she kept her distance from them. She taught at Cornell Medical College and operated her own private sanitarium in Connecticut. Her adaptation to the demands of external reality proved to be better than that of the others. For another, Hinkle was heterosexual.

The first of the Americans that Long met was Kristine Mann, who was brought up in a Swedenborgian household with a keen belief in spiritualism. Before becoming a physician, she had taught English at Vassar College. At Vassar she befriended one of her pupils, Eleanor Bertine, the second member of the group. Bertine became a physician and an activist for women's rights. After the 1919 conference, Bertine accompanied Long back to England to undergo analysis with her, but Long became gravely ill, and she urged Bertine to go on to Zurich. The third member was a native of Shropshire, England. Mary Esther Harding was an internist who turned to a career as a Jungian psychoanalyst. She went to Zurich in 1922.

At home again in London in late October, Long was immediately taken ill with intestinal pain. Nevertheless, she visited friends, including Joan Corrie, another disciple of Jung. [22] After a good start, she was suddenly doubled over with pain and had to be placed in a bed. "J C took me in an ambulance." Upon reaching the hospital she lay perfectly still, and this seemed to help keep the pain away. She was fearful and anxious. The problem turned out to be gallstones that had to be removed surgically. She was back in her home on November 8, answering her mail and regaining her strength.