“What Was All that Rustling in the Woods?”:
Meredith Sabini has compiled major quotations from Jung in which he explicitly mentions or touches on the main principles of shamanism as they relate to his own work. The title is particularly apt. If, as rational minds would have it, there is no truth in all this talk of spirits and shamans, then, as the boy in the tale asks his father, “What was all that rustling in the woods?”
Jung spoke passionately and poetically about the loss of sacred tradition:
Through scientific understanding, our world has become dehumanized. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos. He is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional participation in natural events, which hitherto had a symbolic meaning for him.
Thunder is no longer the voice of a god, nor is lightning his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree means a man’s life, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom, and no mountain still harbors a great demon. Neither do things speak to him nor can he speak to things, like stones, springs, plants, and animals. He no longer has a bush soul identifying him with a wild animal. His immediate communication with nature is gone forever, and the emotional energy it generated sunk into the unconscious. (Jung 1976, para. 585)
He discovered, however, that this tradition never completely dies out but lives on in the deep psyche:
Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche. Just as the human body connects us with the mammals and displays numerous relics of earlier evolutionary stages going back to the reptilian age, so the human psyche is likewise a product of evolution, which, when followed to its origins, shows countless archaic traits. (Jung 1933, 126)
Dreams and creative fantasy provide bridges to the lost tradition:
The symbol-producing function of our dreams is an attempt to bring our original mind back to consciousness, where it has never been before, and where it has never undergone critical self-reflection. We have been that mind, but we have never known it. We got rid of it before understanding it. (Jung 1976, para. 591)
For Jung, this imaginal world became a separate, objective reality:
Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought.
For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest. … It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche …. Philemon represented superior insight …. …. To me he was what the Indians call a guru. (Jung 1961, 183)
Through introspection, we may be able to perceive basic archetypal or phylogenetic patterns:
As animals have no need to be taught their instinctive activities, so man also possesses primordial psychic patterns, and repeats them spontaneously, independently of any teaching. Inasmuch as man is conscious and capable of introspection, it is quite possible that he can perceive his instinctual patterns in the form of archetypal representations. As a matter of fact, these possess the expected degrees of universality (cf., the remarkable identity of shamanistic structures). (Jung in Adler 1975, 152)
Shamanism and alchemy are examples of the natural process of spiritual development:
This confirms the psychological inference that may be drawn from shamanistic symbolism, namely that it is a projection of the individuation process. This inference, as we have seen, is true also of alchemy, and in modern fantasies of the tree as it is evident that the authors of such pictures were trying to portray an inner process of development independent of their consciousness and will. The process usually consists in the union of two pairs of opposites, a lower (water, blackness, animal, snake) with an upper (bird, light, head, etc.) and a left (feminine) with a right (masculine). (Jung 1967a, para. 462)
Suffering is an integral part of this process, not as punishment but for transformation:
Since all mythical figures correspond to inner psychic experience and originally sprang from them, it is not surprising to find certain phenomena in the field of parapsychology which remind us of the trickster …. His universality is co-extensive, so to speak, with that of shamanism, to which the whole phenomenology of spiritualism belongs. There is something of the trickster in the character of the shaman and medicine-man, for he, too, often plays malicious jokes on people, only to fall victim in his turn to the vengeance of those whom he has injured. For this reason, his profession sometimes puts him in peril for his life.
Besides that, the shamanistic techniques in themselves often cause the medicine-man a good deal of discomfort, if not actual pain. At all events, the “making of a medicine-man” involves, in many parts of the world, so much agony of body and soul that permanent psychic injuries may result. His “approximation to the savior” is an obvious consequence of this, in confirmation of the mythological truth that the wounded is the agent of healing, and that the sufferer takes away suffering. (Jung 1969c, para. 457)
The numinous experience of the individuation process is, on the archaic level, the prerogative of shamans and medicine men; later, of the physician, prophet, and priest; and finally, at the civilized stage, of philosophy and religion …. The shaman’s experience of sickness, torture, death, and regeneration implies, at a higher level, the idea of being made whole through sacrifice, of being changed by transubstantiation and exalted into a pneumatic man—in a word, of apotheosis. (Jung 1958, para. 448)
Jung summarizes the stages in the evolution of consciousness, and concludes with a description of our modern dilemma:
Since, at the present level of consciousness, we cannot suppose that tree demons exist, we are forced to assert that the primitive suffers from hallucinations, that he hears his own unconscious, which has projected itself into the tree.
If this theory is correct—and I do not know how we could formulate it otherwise today—then the second level of consciousness has effected a differentiation between the object “tree” and the unconscous content projected onto it, thereby achieving an act of enlightenment. This third level rises still higher and attributes “evil” to the psychic content which has been separated from the object.
Finally, a fourth level, the level reached by our consciousness today, carries the enlightenment a stage further by denying the objective existence of the “spirit” and declaring that the primitive has heard nothing at all, but merely had an auditory hallucination. Consequently the whole phenomena vanishes into thin air—with the great advantage that the evil spirit becomes obviously nonexistent and sinks into ridiculous insignificance. A fifth level, however, which is bound to take a quintessential view of the matter, wonders about this conjuring trick that turns what began as a miracle into a senseless self-deception—only to come full circle.
Like the boy who told his father a made-up story about sixty stags in the forest, it asks, “But what, then, was all the rustling in the woods?” The fifth level is of the opinion that something did happen after all: even though the psychic content was not the tree, nor a spirit in the tree, nor indeed any spirit at all, it was nevertheless a phenomenon thrusting itself up from the unconscious, the existence of which cannot be denied if one is minded to grant the psyche any kind of reality. (Jung 1967b, para. 248)
This is how he thought analytical psychology could help restore our original wholeness:
People live as though they were walking in shoes too small for them. That quality of eternity which is so characteristic of the life of primitive man is entirely lacking. Hemmed round by rationalistic walls, we are cut off from the eternity of nature. Analytical psychology seeks to break through these walls by digging up again the fantasy-images of the unconscious which our rationalism has rejected.
These images lie beyond the walls; they are part of the nature in us, which lies buried in our past and against which we have barricaded ourselves behind walls of reason. Analytical psychology tries to resolve the resultant conflict not by going “back to nature” with Rousseau, but by holding on to the level of reason we have successfully reached, and by enriching consciousness with a knowledge of man’s psychic foundations. (Jung 1969a, para. 739)
The realm in which transformation takes place is ultimately a paradox:
The place or the medium of realization is neither mind nor matter, but that intermediate realm of subtle reality which can only be adequately expressed by the symbol. The symbol is neither abstract nor concrete, neither rational nor irrational, neither real nor unreal. It is always both. (Jung 1968, para. 400)
*Just as the archetypal is partly a spiritual factor, and partly like a hidden meaning immanent in the instinct, so the spirit, as I have shown, is two-faced and paradoxical: a great help and an equally great danger. It seems as if man were destined to play a decisive role in solving this uncertainty, and to solve it moreover by virtue of his consciousness, ~Meredith Sabini, The Sacred Heritage, Page 13-17
REFERENCES
Adler, G. (1975). C. G. Jung: Letters,1951-1961. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Jung, C. G 1933. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
—. 1958. Transformation Symbolism of the Mass. In Psychology and Religion:
West and East. Bollingen Series XX: The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 11 Princeton: Princeton University Press.
—. 1961. Memories, Dreams Reflections. New York: Random House.
—. 1967a. The Philosophical Tree. In Alchemical Studies. Bollingen Series XX:
The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 13. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
—. 1967b. The Spirit Mercurius. In Alchemical Studies. Bollingen Series XX: The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 13. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
—. 1968. Religious Ideas in Alchemy. In Psychology and Alchemy. Bollingen
Series XX: The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 12. Princeton: Princeton University Press.—. 1969a. Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung. In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. Bollingen Series XX: The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 8. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
—. 1969b.On the Nature of the Psyche. In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. Bollingen Series XX: The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 8. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
—. 1969c. On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure. In The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. Bollingen Series XX: The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 9, part 1. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
—. 1976. Healing the Split. In The Symbolic Life. Bollingen Series XX: The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 18. Princeton: Princeton University Press
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