Erich Neumann Mystical Man
The subject of our present paper is not mysticism but mystical man.
We are here concerned not with mysticism in general or with any of the special forms in which it has manifested itself, but with the vehicle of mystical phenomena, man.
An understanding of the mystics, the extreme exponents of the mystical process, is, to be sure, one of our principal tasks, but, more than that, we wish here to determine the significance of the mystical for man in general.
We may then formulate our problem as follows:
To what degree is the mystical a universal human phenomenon, and to what degree is man homo mysticus?
These words of clarification are intended to spare you disappointment in case you have expected me to quote familiar or unfamiliar mystical texts or interpret such mystical texts.
And perhaps I shall also disappoint you in not attempting to add one more
definition of mysticism to all the others, yet it is my hope that at the end of our inquiry you will fully understand what the term “mystical” implies in our present context.
It is in keeping with a twofold limitation that we aim here not at a mystical theology but rather at a mystical anthropology.
First, a .li mitation of a general nature.
Modern man’s fundamental experience of the relativity of his position and his frames of reference forbids hirri in principle to make such absolute statements as
the na’ivete of former times permitted.
The second and special limitation consists in this: the psychologist’s experience encompasses the human, no less, but also no more, and he may not pass beyond these limits of his experience.
But what more than compensates for this twofold limitation is that the psychological area of the human, the area of the anthropos, has become so vast and
appears so prodigious to our inquiring consciousness that we must almost despair of finding its limits, even though we follow every road, so deep is its law.
At the risk of repeating material that is only too familiar, I must in this connection refer to the many things which man formerly experienced as outward world, but which modern man recognizes as inner world within himself.
It is not only the animism of primitive man with his manacharged places and animals, his spirits and demons, not only the gods of paganism that we have recognized to be projections of inner psychic experience.
The Judeo-Christian, as well as the extraEuropean, religious worlds-with their hierarchies of heaven and hell and all their inhabitants, gods and spirits, angels and devils, redeemers and seducers, with their religious myths of beginning and end, creation, downfall and redemption-have all become intelligible to us as projections of experience that occurs in the psychological inwardness of the anthropos.
This knowledge follows, of course, the general law that it is very much easier for us to fathom as projections those contents with which we are not unconsciously and affectively involved, but of which only our consciousness has knowledge, than those contents which originate in the depths of our unconsciousness, saturated as they are with affectivity.
This image of the anthropos surrounded by circles of heavens and hells which originate within him, resembles the mandala of ancient astrology.
But once the phenomenon of projection has been understood, this conception of man’s position in the cosmos becomes far more complicated, losing in plasticity what it gains in dynamism.
In our new conception of the anthropos system, there is a continuous movement between the central anthropos, the man in the middle, and the world as his periphery.
The world is the vehicle of the projections of the unconscious, and with the development ctl the human ego, which takes back and makes conscious these
projections into the world, our image both of cosmos and of man changes.
The progressive change in the relation between man and world is manifested in a corresponding change in our world picture and brings a new dynamic component into the old mandala of the anthropos; but this is not all, for inward as well the anthropos is involved in a continuous process of transformation.
This process is based on interrelations between ego, consciousness, and the unconscious, that is, on the fact that the personality is continuously changed from its own center outward, by the spontaneous action of the creative unconscious.
Thus the cause of the transformations within the anthropos system lies in the human psyche.
The initial cre:{ive movement which changes man and with him the world implies the inconstancy of world and man, which is experienced as the precariousness of his existence.
Not only is the source of the creative nothingness-which is the point of departure for the autonomous, spontaneous, and unconscious activity of the creative, vital psyche-situated within the psychological domain of the anthropos, it is its very center.
The problem of the creative unconscious, the central problem of this psychology, is at the same time the central problem of mysticism and of mystical man.
the creative process takes place outside of consciousness and must therefore be looked upon as an experience at the limits of the ego, any attempt to approach
this central and primal vortex is a hazardous undertaking.
It is in the very nature of such an undertaking that its object cannot be captured by the direct intervention of consciousness, but that one must seek to approach the center in question by a sort of ritual circling, an approach from many sides.
The situation of psychology is so paradoxical because in it the subject of knowledge, the ego as center of consciousness, and the object, the psyche which it strives to understand, are intermeshed, each system forming part of a personality.
The interdependence of these sxstems, their interpenetration, and their relative independence raise fundamental psychological problems.
Any attempt to encompass the phenomenon of mysticism encounters a similar difficulty.
Here again man as subject of mystical experience is inseparably and paradoxically bound up with his object, in whatever form it may confront him.
In speaking of a mystical anthropology, that is, a doctrine of mystical man as part of a general theory of man, we are taking a very broad and, one might justifiably say, vague view of mysticism.
We recognize mysticism not only in religion and assuredly not only in ecstatic, purely inward mysticism.
For us the mystical is rather a fundamental category of human experience which, psychologically speaking, manifests itself wherever consciousness is not yet, or is no longer, effectively centered around the ego.
We find the mystical element in the uroboros stage, the early psychological stage of original unity, in which there is as yet no systematized consciousness, the stage characterized by what LevyBruhl has called participation mystique.
In this situation, where man and world, man and group, ego and unconscious are intermingled, the mystical element is manifested in the fact that the ego has not yet detached itself from the nonego.
For the original cosmic sense, that which we call outside world and that which we call inner psyche are fused.
Stars and trees and animals are psychologically as close to the undelimited ego as
fellow clansman, child, and parent; and a mysterious bond unites what is nearest and wp.at is most distant, god, animal, and man.
This relation. is so fluent because the ego can still everywhere be confounded. with the non ego.
The incomplete separation of ego from nonego characterizes the original uroboros state, which lives in the psyche of mankind as the archetype of paradisiacal wholeness.
For the ego, lonely and nhappy in consequei:ice of its necessary development, this image of a lost stage of childhood is a symbol of irreparable loss.
This image, of course, is always projected back to a time preceding the irth of the ego, which by its very nature is a vehicle of suffering and imperfection.
Accordingly, the state of perfection is phylogenetically a paradise placed at the beginning of human history, while it is ontogenetically projected into the beginning of the individual life as the paradise of childhood.
But, just as we know that the original condition of mankind was no Rousseauan natural state and that primitive peoples did not inhabit any “happy isles,” so we know that childhood is not paradisiacal and happy, but full of problems and perils.
And yet there remains an eternal truth in this image of the perfection of the original situation, even when we understand the projection, even when our insight bids us look on the theological doctrine of the fall of man and the world as a fallacy based upon’ a false historical projection of this archetype.
The question remains open as to what should be done to. prevent the ideal of this state of perfection from poisoning mankind.
For again and again the arduous heroic path of the ego into consciousness and suffering is endangered by the magic of the temptation to seek, or not to depart from, the state of perfection represented by an egoless unconsciousness.
For modern man existence has split into world and self, the outward and inward which embrace the intervening ego.
This split, which is determinant for civilized man, became manifest only with the emergence of the ordering consciousness which posits contradictions, and this can be shown by a study of the development of consciousness.
The growth of humanity is fundamentally the development toward the ego, toward consciousness and individuality.
Every step of this road is arduous and fraught with suffering.
Only in the course of long historical processes has mankind, following in the wake of the creative precursor, the great individual, succeeded in developing a relatively independent ego as center of a system of consciousness, and, by arduous processes of differentiation, in developing agencies which define the human personality as unity and individuality.
B ut the development toward the ego, toward individuality and consciousness stands in inexorable conflict with the unconscious.
The formation of consciousness and the confirmation of the ego are possible only in battle with the engulfing powers of the unconscious, and this means in detachment from the uroboros stage, from the paradise of undivided unity and perff;ction.
Thus the heroic road of mankind-for heroic it is, in spite of imperfection-is the
road to clarity, differentiation, and responsible awareness of the go. ~Erich Neumann, The Mystical Man, Page 375-379
