Aniela Jaffe, An Archetypal Approach to Death Dreams and Ghosts
Foreword by Carl Jung
The author of this book has already made a name for herself by her valuable contributions to the literature of analytical psychology.
Here she tells of strange tales which incur the odium of superstition and are therefore exchanged only in secret.
They were lured into the light of day by a questionnaire sent out by Schweizerischer Beobachter, which can thereby claim to have rendered no small service to the public.
The mass of material that came in arrived first at my address.
Since my age and my ever-growing preoccupation with other matters did not allow me to burden myself with further work, the task of sorting out such a collection and submitting it to psychological evaluation could not have been placed in worthier hands than those of the author.
She had displayed so much psychological tact, understanding and insight in her approach to a related theme – an interpretation of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story “The Golden Pot”[1] – that I never hesitated in my choice.
Curiously enough, the problem of wonder tales as they are currently told – enlightenment or no enlightenment – has never been approached from the psychological side.
I naturally don’t count mythology, although people are generally of the opinion that mythology is essentially history and no longer happens nowadays.
As a psychic phenomenon of the present, it is considered merely a hunting-ground for economics.
Nevertheless, ghost stories, warning visions, and other strange happenings are constantly being reported, and the number of people to whom something once “happened” is surprisingly large.
Moreover, despite the disapproving silence of the “enlightened,” it has not remained hidden from the wider public that for some time now there
has been a serious science which goes by the name of “parapsychology.” This fact may have helped to encourage the popular response to the questionnaire.
One of the most notable things that came to light is the fact that among the Swiss, who are commonly regarded as stolid, unimaginative, rationalistic and materialistic, there are just as many ghost stories and suchlike as, say, in England or Ireland.
Indeed, as I know from my own experience and that of other investigators, magic as practiced in the Middle Ages and harking back to much remoter times has by no means died out, but still flourishes today as rampantly as it did centuries ago.
One doesn’t speak of these things, however.
They simply happen, and the
intellectuals know nothing of them – for intellectuals know neither themselves nor people as they really are.
In the world of the latter, without their being conscious of it, the life of the centuries lives on, and things are continually happening that have accompanied human life from time immemorial: premonitions, foreknowledge, second sight, hauntings, ghosts, return of the dead, bewitchings, sorcery, magic spells, etc.
Naturally enough our scientific age wants to know whether such things are “true,” without taking into account what the nature of any such proof would have to be and how it could be furnished.
For this purpose the events in question must be looked at squarely and soberly, and it generally turns out that the most exciting stories vanish into thin air and what is left over is “not worth talking about.”
Nobody thinks of asking the fundamental question: what is the real reason why the same old stories are experienced and repeated over and over again, without losing any of their prestige?
On the contrary, they return with their youthful vitality constantly renewed, fresh
as on the first day.
The author has made it her task to take these tales for what they are, that is, as psychic facts, and not to pooh-pooh them because they do not fit into our scheme of things.
She has therefore logically left aside the question of truth, as has long since been done in mythology, and instead has tried to inquire into the psychological questions:
Exactly who is it that sees a ghost? Under what psychic conditions does he see it? What does a ghost signify when examined for its content, i.e., as a symbol?
She understands the art of leaving the story just as it is, with all the trimmings that are so offensive to the rationalist.
In this way the twilight atmosphere that is so essential to the story is preserved. An integral component of any nocturnal, numinous experience is the dimming of
consciousness, the feeling that one is in the grip of something greater than oneself, the impossibility of exercising criticism, and the paralysis of the will.
Under the impact of the experience reason evaporates and another power spontaneously takes control – a most singular feeling which one willy-nilly hoards up as a secret treasure no matter how much one’s reason may protest.
That, indeed, is the uncomprehended purpose of the experience – to make us feel
the overpowering presence of a mystery.
The author has succeeded in preserving the total character of such experiences, despite the refractory nature of the reports, and is making it an object of investigation.
Anyone who expects an answer to the question of parapsychological truth will be disappointed.
The psychologist is little concerned here with what kind of facts can be established in the conventional sense; all that matters to him is whether a person will vouch for the authenticity of his experience regardless of all interpretations.
The reports leave no doubt about this; moreover, in most cases their authenticity is confirmed by independent parallel stories.
It cannot be doubted that such reports are found at all times and places.
Hence there is no sufficient reason for doubting the veracity of individual reports.
Doubt is justified only when it is a question of a deliberate lie.
The number of such cases is increasingly small, for the authors of such falsifications are too ignorant to be able to lie properly.
The psychology of the unconscious has thrown so many beams of light into other dark corners that we would expect it to elucidate also the obscure world of wonder tales eternally young.
From the copious material assembled in this book those conversant with depth psychology will surely gain new and significant insights which merit the greatest attention.
I can recommend it to all those who know how to value things that break through the monotony of daily life with salutary effects, (sometimes!) shaking our certitudes and lending wings to the imagination. ~Aniela Jaffe, An Archetypal Approach to Death Dreamsand Ghosts, Page 5-6
Eleanor Bertine: Close Relationships : Family, Friendship, Marriage Studies
Introduction
The analytic method of C.G. Jung is really an education in depth quite as much as it is a form of psychotherapy.
Therefore those whom it attracts are often by no means abnormal but are seeking a fuller, more meaningful life through psychological enlightenment.
Some problem of human relationship is the immediate cause which brings many people to consult an analyst.
In the privacy of the consulting room a multitude of such difficulties are revealed.
Whether the relation is one of friend, lover, business associate or enemy, it has the power to bring joy, sorrow, anxiety and despair.
The stories are quite familiar. A daughter can’t get along with her mother, a marriage is on the rocks, a man smarts under the overbearing domination of his boss, and, as a consequence, life is filed with bitterness and resentment.
These are not good companions to live with and anyone possessed by them needs to be released.
But, it may be said, all this is a matter of psychological development.
If you are mature, you can handle the problem.
If not, no attempt to learn how from the top of the head would be of the least use.
So let the analyst concentrate on getting on with the analysis, and let the patient handle outside problems in the meantime.
Of course, I agree one hundred per cent with the first half of this proposition, that is, that the quality of a relationship reflects the stage of development of the participants.
But just as an improved capacity to relate is one outcome of psychological development, so also development itself may be accelerated by sincere work on relationships and the unconscious factors that influence them.
Actually, getting on with the analysis may require getting on with the
relationship. For, to a young or unconscious person, the view of, and consequently the reaction to, the outer world, and especially to other people, is distorted by projections of his or her own psychological contents, which then seem to belong to the other person.
This condition renders mutual understanding impossible and makes for so much trouble that one may be driven to realize and assimilate projections, thus greatly extending the area of consciousness.
Whenever there is a very intense reaction to someone or somepage_thing there will be found a projection at the bottom of it, a projection not only from the personal life, such as the qualities or characteristics of one’s mother, but also from the archetypes of the deep or collective unconscious.
For instance, if a youth sees a pair of pretty ankles, the biological instinct of sex may be stimulated. But at the same time a number of psychological reactions are likely to take place which may reflect not only his personal relations with girls, but also the collective reactions men have had to women down through the ages.
The stirring of such images is responsible for the glamour of romance or the fear of the woman and her power to captivate and exploit.
Thus, his feelings in the particular situation may have very little to do with the real girl who confronts him.
Symbols of these archetypes might be Aphrodite or Helen of Troy, on the one hand, expressing the lure, or the lorelei or la belle dame sans merci on the other, expressing the threat.
The massive libido4 charge of an instinctual or archetypal experience is most important in the process of becoming conscious, for libido is energy and psychological development takes enormous energy.
Sometimes this is generated within analysis in the form of intense inner happenings or projections onto the person of the analyst in the experience of transference.
But at other times this has been constellated outside the analytic situation: a youth is called to war, a loved one dies, serious illness strikes, or the patient has fallen in love.
Here is emotion, the raw dynamic of life, which is essential for progress.
One cannot steer a boat that has no means of propulsion.
There is little transformation in a cold retort.
So wherever this precious stuff of life is produced, it may be used for the objective of psychological transformation.
Human relationship, even if the experience is one of frustration, is probably the greatest generator of intense libido.
This has a nonpersonal element, which is archetypal, in spite of having arisen at the very core of the most personal experience.
Charles Morgan wrote a book some years ago called Sparkenbroke, in which the hero, a poet, in searching to discover what the sources of this experience in depth are, came to the conclusion that it is brought about by three things:
love, the impact of death and the creative act, especially in poetry, for that was his field, but also more generally in any creative art.
In any problem that arouses the emotional depths, good advice is quite useless, for the way to proceed should be the expression of the individual’s uniqueness, not of an opinion borrowed from somebody else.
To find the individual way requires contact with the unconscious.
However, it sometimes happens that a person seems to have no capacity at all for even glimpsing the reality and importance of the unconscious, especially, though not necessarily, if young and extraverted. His or her interest flows exclusively outward, and one almost despairs of being able to touch anything at a deeper level.
Then a dream about relationship, whose emotional content cannot be evaded, may make such an impression that it brings the analysis vividly to life and affects the dreamer’s entire future.
An excellent example of this occurs to me. It was the case of a young woman in her early twenties, an artist, gifted in her work, pretty, attractive, gay and happy-go-lucky.
She had lots of suitors, but much preferred to keep them in that capacity rather than settle down with any one of them.
But then she met a man who was her polar opposite, introverted, intense, demanding and altogether difficult. And he wanted to marry her.
She tried to put him off, so he sent her to me!
She was smart enough to realize quickly that she had to choose between playing around with the many and losing the one, whom she liked, incidentally, much the best, or marrying the one and giving up the many.
She chose according to her heart, with the proviso, however, that she should continue her painting as before.
But, as usual, l’homme propose et Dieu dispose.
She immediately became pregnant, against her firmest intentions.
This time she came back to see me under her own steam.
She felt caught, trapped, forced to become a responsible woman when she wanted so badly a few more years of carefree Bo-hemian existence.
Her impulse was all in favor of getting rid of the problem by an induced abortion.
Not having any connection with the unconscious, she had no idea how such an act often sets a woman
against her instinctive nature, and how terribly nature can strike back.
I talked with her about the seriousness of that
decision without producing much of an impression, so I suggested she earnestly ask her unconscious to give her some
guidance in a dream.
She hadn’t much hope of that, for dreams meant nothing to her, but agreed to try.
Sure enough, next time she came to her hour of analysis with what she called a silly little fragment.
This was it: She
dreamed she saw an enormous elephant, much larger than a real one.
It was walking westward with a slow deliberate
pace right across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
When it arrived at the rim of the sea, the sun was just
about to drop beneath the horizon.
She saw the great creature outlined against the red ball of the sun, at the edge of the vast western ocean.
Though she tried to laugh off the dream, it had obviously impressed her.
And no wonder, for it was the intrusion of contents from the archetypal depths into her too personal and childish existence.
I asked for associations.
She spoke of seeing elephants in the zoo, of their massive size and earthiness, as though they were hunks of the earth itself walking about.
Westward was in the direction of the sun’s journey. “Going west” was a current phrase for dying.
The sun was the giver of light.
The edge of the ocean was the border of the unknown, where one couldn’t go any farther, and the setting sun was also the death of the day.
So this archetypal elephant is incarnated reality, life in the flesh, and it goes inexorably along the path of the sun.
Thus, the ordained paths of the body and the spirit parallel each other.
To deviate by rejecting her pregnancy would be to break the law of this correspondence, to bring disorder into the picture.
Her feeling, rather than her thinking, repudiated such a thing.
She felt that she simply could not interfere with the sunwise movement of life just to suit her personal convenience or pleasure.
Thus the dream, which on the extraverted side related to her hus
band and prospective baby, on the other side, the introverted, gave a highly philosophical representation of the lines of force of the psyche and the laws that rule the inner being.
It was more than she could take in at the stage of development she had up to that time attained, but it stayed with her and has been a sort of talisman through her subsequent life.
The anticipated baby is now grown, and the marriage, which had promised right along to be difficult, has amply justified this expectation. But she has stood by loyally through thick and thin, and has finally brought her family and herself to some measure of the contentment that is always the result of worked-out problems.
Naturally she has had a good deal of analysis in the course of the years.
But it was this relatedness problem that opened the way to the inner life, made her analysis “take,” and led to the maturing of an exceedingly fine woman.
Individuation cannot take place in a vacuum.
As Jung once said, “The hermit either will be flooded by the unconscious or
he will become a very dull fellow.”
Life must be lived to the full if it is to change anyone for the better.
It is possible to develop a certain amount of consciousness in relation to things and inanimate nature, and even more in relation to animals, where feeling may be strongly touched.
But only another human being can constellate so many sides of ourselves, can react so pointedly, and can bring to consciousness so much of which we had been unaware.
And because of the real values involved and the consequently keen desires, the heat of emotion is raised high enough to produce the transformation more readily and more often in relationship than in almost any other experience of life.
Sometimes it is even possible to follow in a single relationship the transformation of the libido from one stage of development to the next, as symbolized in the chakra system of Kundalini, or tantric yoga.
Here the nonpersonal libido is conceived of as the feminine counterpart of the god Shiva, who lies coiled up, asleep in the pelvic basin, in the form of
the serpent Kundalini.
This lasts for as long as the state of purely personal consciousness, which the Hindu calls unconsciousness, persists.
The attempt of this yoga is to awaken Kundalini and to force her to rise through the narrow passage of the
spinal canal, Shushumna, thus passing through the various chakras (which are really mandalas symbolizing the successive levels of consciousness) until she reaches Sahasrara, at the very crown of the head, where she unites with her lord Shiva.
The following example, which occurred in the course of a relationship, is a parallel to this yogic development.
It concerns a woman who, in connection with her work, met a man to whom she was much attracted.
She was a stranger in the city and lonely, and the man’s companionship seemed to be the answer to “a maiden’s prayer.”
He would take her out, dance with her, occupy her evenings and many weekends.
All this was a matter of her merely personal libido, manageable, pleasant, but quite cold-blooded.
However, it was in the direction of the life process and she thrived on it.
The gods, here the archetypes and instincts, were back of it.
This stage of consciousness would correspond to the lowest chakra, Muladhara.
The attraction soon increased and became definitely erotic.
She found herself jealous of the other women he was seeing, wanting more and more time and attention from him.
She realized she was getting deeply involved.
She had fallen into Svadisthana, the water region, where live the images of the forces of the unconscious, and was in danger of being devoured by the Macara, the great serpent dragon, which is its characterizing symbol. This would mean a complete domination by the night aspect of the unconscious.
She would become prey to the desirousness not only of instinct, but
also of all the powerful archetypes of satisfaction that cluster around the opposite sex, such as functioning socially and otherwise as one of a couple marriage, home and family.
This overwhelming, cold-blooded desirousness quickly lit the fire of passion.
Hot emotion came up to accompany, and partly replace, desire.
The libido had now reached Manipura, the fire region, presided over by the violent sun ram.
Yet it is called the place of jewels, A mandala is a symbolic diagram, usually in the form of a circle or square, or a combination of the two.
It may be a prescribed ritualistic pattern or be made by the individual.
In either case, it is an attempt to find a pictured reconciliation of divergent elements within an ordered whole.
It is used in the Orient as a basis for meditation, and frequently occurs in drawings of those in analysis.
See “Commentary on `The Secret of the Golden Flower,'” Alchemical Studies, CW 13.
for the intensity resulting from the strong constellation of opposites is the heaping up of life, with all its potentiality for good and ill.
The conflict was especially severe because the young man, though most friendly and agreeable, seemed to have no thought of anything more than the existing platonic situation.
So she had to be her own battlefield, contain her own tumult.
Then he went away on business for several months.
On his return he announced his engagement to another woman.
That was a stunning blow.
On the surface she took it very well, but, in the silence of the night, she had it out with herself.
The storm raged in her for weeks.
Finally she wrote me: Oh this unbearable pain! But no, not unbearable now.
I managed to pull myself together last night and have been able to work well today.
It was all pain on one level, a crucifixion of the personal life.
But at the same moment, I had also the actual experience of the bringing together, the sharp focusing of the Self in a great suffering, tantamount to a great joy.
I can feel how, at that depth, it really makes no difference whether the exprience that brings Self-realization is one of grief or joy.
There flames up an intensity, an ecstasy, which is far beyond the personal.
But the all-too-human woman still remains in me too, and she still cries out in her pain, “I feel as though I had conceived and my baby is an abortion.
dies without having lived.
Life passes me by and leaves me out, set apart, not up to the business of living, and so accurst.”
Then the other voice comes back, “This experience has given you a glimpse of something greater than anything the outer world can give, even at its most radiant best.
It can be yours to make it a living reality.”
This is a typical experience of the next chakra, Anahata, in which Ishvara, a symbol of the Self,8 is first glimpsed as a shy antelope at the edge of the forest.
Sometimes it will come near, and then with a bound it will be gone.
It is evident from this bit of her letter how far this woman went in her inner development, led, or perhaps I should say forced, by the psychological process set in motion by a love affair that was almost entirely one-sided.
The character of the inner movement from level to level is archetypal, as well as are the images on the way.
Yet to the eye of the ordinary person, the whole thing would have appeared as a rather humiliating comedy.
The expression in meaningful form of these archetypes underlying human life is the great function of the artist.
But to relate rightly to them in reality is the meaning of the human enterprise.
And this will be fought out to a very large extent in the arena of human
relationships the battle of the gods and the demons may take place in the course of an apparently personal conversation between John and Mary.
It is in the hope of clarifying the way these archetypes enter into daily life that I have chosen to write about interpersonal relationships.
They are the most subtle, the most complicated, and, for the majority of people, probably the most frequent and moving setting in which the awe-inspiring archetypes of the unconscious are experienced.
And finally, they stimulate the process of growth, which, while it aims at a deeper, more satisfying connection with another human being, actually
leads into the path of individuation, which is the finding of the Self. ~Eleanor Bertine, Close Relationships : Family, Friendship, Marriage, Introduction, Page 9-16
A first version of this chapter was presented at the 2019 IAAP International Congress held in Vienna, the setting being an important reason for including a fair amount of material on Freud. The chapter is based largely on Jung’s Red Book in its assertion that Jung’s quest for his soul, as he expresses it in that work, is actually the Quest for the Grail.
In the process of writing a chapter for Murray Stein and Thomas Arzt’s Jung’s Red Book for Our Time: Searching for Soul under Postmodern Conditions, I reread the entirety of Jung’s Red Book and, in so doing, came across the myth of Parsifal embedded in the text.
In The Red Book there are several allusions to that myth, which is the
one associated with Jung’s natal sign of Leo.
“I took it upon myself to get to know ‘my’ myth” (Shamdasani, 2009, p. 15) is what he sets out knowingly to find though he appears to have come upon it unwittingly as, although there are frequent references to the Parsifal myth, I could find no acknowledgement that this was his myth.
As the present chapter is, to a large extent, based on the contents of The Red Book, I shall begin with my personal experience of the latter leading up to its publication in 2009. Prior to that date, I was already familiar with some of its contents from Aniela Jaffé’s 1979 C. G. Jung: Word and Image, which includes some text and images from it.
I first recall hearing from my friend, Sonu Shamdasani, of his work on The Red Book in the early 2000s, though throughout that time he was bound by confidentiality agreements not to disclose any of its contents.
Finally, in August 2009, Sonu and Maggie Barron hosted a private seminar lasting a few days for a small group of individuals at Cliveden, an elegant mid-nineteenth-century house in the English county of Berkshire.
This private seminar preceded the formal launch of The Red Book: Liber Novus on 7th August 2009 at the Rubin Museum in New York, where the exhibition also included Jung’s Black Books, the precursors of The Red Book.
Before setting out for the New York launch in 2009, I managed to get hold of two copies of the first edition in order to write a review for The Economist that would coincide with the date of its publication.
My editor on the paper was astonished by the high quality of Jung’s artwork and queried whether he had done it all himself.
These paintings show the influence of the indigenous civilisations of Ancient Egypt, India, Mexico, and Tibet, as well as the symbolist artist, Odilon Redon, and the Byzantine frescoes and mosaics in Ravenna.
That unforgettable time with Sonu and members of the Jung family as well as other luminaries such as James Hillman, George Makari, Frank McMillan, and Beverley Zabriskie, spent together in New York for the book’s launch, consisted of eleven days of frenzied activity, particularly
for Sonu, so much so that many of us were concerned for his well-being.
This special event was followed in 2010 by an exhibit of the Red and Black Books at the Library of Congress in Washington, which was attended by the eminent Librarian of Congress, James Billington.
Once again, some of the same people who came to the New York launch
attended these proceedings in Washington, where the Swiss embassy put
on a reception for all of us at the ambassador’s residence in the US capital.
Immediately following the launch in New York, I conducted an interview
with Sonu for The Journal of Analytical Psychology, in the course of which he discussed some of the main features of The Red Book, that Jung had worked on from 1914 to 1930. A key point about the work is that it is not a scientific study but a private cosmology forming the bedrock of Jung’s public work in which he is exploring various questions.
These consist of the impossibility of reconciling Western science with
what science has forsaken; how psychology can differentiate religious
jung’s transmutation experiences from psychosis; and what to do with irrational experiences that are so far from rationality.
“What is prophetic in Jung’s text is the rebirth of the God image and the image of God” (Casement, 2010, p. 36).
As Shamdasani goes on to say in the interview, there is a crisis of language in The Red Book that emerges from the tension between directed and non-directed thinking, with the text oscillating between the two poles.
The literary content of the book was composed in such a way that it should be comparable to Dante’s Divine Comedy and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and the key figure of Philemon links to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Goethe’s Faust. Siegfried
I have given the above personal account as a prelude to homing in on the specific theme of this chapter, namely, Jung’s claim that The Red Book
depicts his own transmuting process, which may be seen in his shift from
identifying with the Germanic hero, Siegfried, to the unwitting discovery
of Parsifal as “his” own myth.
This matches with Jung’s theoretical construct of the first and second halves of life—according to which, the former is normally extraverted as it deals with ego development in the form of finding a partner, settling down to home and family, and developing a career, usually accomplished in Jung’s time when an individual had reached their mid to late thirties.
The second half of life, says Jung, is introverted whence the focus is on the inner life as a preparationfor death, which brings to mind Heidegger’s being-unto-death.
The latter assertion is my own because Jung appears unread in Heidegger,
testified to by the fact there are no references to the latter in the General
Index, Volume 20 of the Collected Works, only one to a J. H. Heidegger, a
Swiss theologian.
The following is a distillation of how I understand Heidegger’s
being-unto-death, his version of preparedness for death, which
is expressed in the first person singular.
When I take on board the possibility of my own not being, my own not being-able-to-Be is brought into proper view.
Hence my awareness of my own death as an omnipresent possibility discloses the authentic self—a self that is mine opposed to a theyself.
The possibility of my not existing encompasses the whole of y existence and my awareness of that possibility illuminates me, qua Dasein, in my totality.
To return to The Red Book, there are so many literary and esoteric allusions
running through the text and the footnotes in it, which entailed several forays into the work before I was made aware of the theme of Parsifal running through much of the book.
These are preceded earlier in the work by Jung’s significant dream about Siegfried, which he refers to in the following way: “… a mighty dream vision rose from the depths” (Shamdasani, 2009, p. 160).
This dream has been much analysed over the years by psychoanalysts, including yours truly.
I was with a youth in high mountains.
It was before day-break, the Eastern sky was already light. Then Siegfried’s horn resounded over the mountains with a jubilant sound.
We knew that our mortal enemy was coming.
We were armed and lurked beside a narrow rocky path to murder him.
Then we saw him coming high across the mountains on a chariot made of
the bones of the dead. He drove boldly and magnificently over the steep rocks and arrived at the narrow path where we waited in hiding.
As he came around the turn ahead of us, we fired at the same time and he fell slain.
Thereupon I turned to flee, and a terrible rain swept down.
But after this I went through a torment unto death and I felt certain that I must kill myself, if I could not solve the riddle of the murder of the hero. (1963, p. 173)
Following this dream/vision, Jung seemed to follow a natural process of filling the void left by the death of Siegfried, “the blond and blue-eyed
German hero” who “had everything in himself that I treasured as the
greater and more beautiful; he was my power, my boldness, my pride”
(Shamdasani, 2009, p. 163), and who is sometimes thought of as a storm
trooper.
Jung gives the following reason for this murder: “I wanted to go on living with a new God” (ibid.), and the rain is “… the mourning of the dead in me, which precedes burial and rebirth … it begets the new wheat, the young, germinating God” (ibid., p. 164).
Before proceeding further with The Red Book, it is necessary to retrace our steps and look at what the psychological astrologer and Jungian jung’s transmutation analyst, Liz Greene, says about the myth attached to Jung’s natal sign.
My own interest in astrology was piqued through making her acquaintance, and I was particularly drawn to the way she linked mythology to each sign of the Zodiac, which in Jung’s case lies in the sign of Leo, the sign that denotes the hero’s quest for his spiritual father.
The lion is a fiery animal and those born under this sign will have to battle strong instinctual urges in order to begin to individuate as Jung expresses it.
Liz Greene links the legend of Parsifal to the sign of Leo with its overarching theme of redemption, on the face of it a much-lauded quality but one that also has a shadow component that will be explored later in this chapter.
In the legend of Parsifal, it is the wounded father that needs redeeming,
a theme that erupted in and finally destroyed Jung’s relationship with
Freud.
At the start, Parsifal is fatherless, which underlines the lack of a father-principle “although there may be a physical father present” as there was in Jung’s life (Greene, 1984, p. 206).
In order to remind ourselves of the story of Parsifal, we will now turn to the version of the legend that Wagner chose to use for his last great oeuvre.
This is well set out in the late Bryan Magee’s Wagner and Philosophy, a book highly recommended to those who love both Wagner and philosophy as Magee had a profound grasp of both, a combination that is rare indeed. Wagner’s late musical dramas owe a huge debt (as he himself acknowledged) to Schopenhauer, with Wagner’s Parsifal representing the greatest influence of that philosopher, in particular the theme of redemption through compassion.
Wagner, of course, also composed and wrote the libretto of Siegfried, the third opera of his great opus The Ring. It is not entirely fanciful to think of the later works by this incomparable composer as Schopenhauer set to music.
In many ways, the character of Siegfried shares quite a bit in common with Parsifal, for example, both are bumbling youths when we first encounter them, although Parsifal eventually supersedes the fate of Siegfried.
How much of that might have been in Jung’s mind when he was composing his Red Book is unknown so let us now remind ourselves of the story of Parsifal as it appears in Magee’s book.
The knights of the holy grail are the guardians of the most numinous
objects on the face of the earth.
These are the grail itself, which is the chalice from which Christ drank at the Last Supper, and the spear that pierced his side as he hung on the cross.
This treasure is guarded by them in Montsalvat, their redoubt in the mountains of northern Spain, the paths to which can never be found by sinners.
Here their sublime ritual is a regular re-enactment of the Last Supper in which they themselves drink from the grail.
Their fitness for their office requires them to remain pure and chaste.
Theirs is an all-male community, except for a dowdy and bedraggled woman called Kundry, a solitary, humble servitor who lives hermit-like in their domain, though occasionally she disappears from the scene for long periods.
At some time in the past a knight called Klingsor has aspired to join the order but been prevented from doing so by his inability to master his
sexual desires.
In a drastic attempt to kill the lust in himself he castrated himself.
This horrendous act, far from giving him entrance to the order, made the order view him with revulsion, and turned him into a permanent outcast from it. His self-mutilation gave him access to magic powers, however, and he set out to use these to gain possession of the spear and the grail.
He built a castle in the same mountain range as Montsalvat, and—understanding as he did the disabling power of sexual desire, but being now immune to it himself—drew round him a subject community of gorgeous women with the task of seducing knights of the grail when they sallied forth from Montsalvat.
There were plenty of knights who succumbed; and from the moment they did so Klingsor had them in his power.
Faced with this mortal threat to the order, its king, Amfortas, set out one day armed with the holy spear itself to destroy Klingsor.
But on the way he encountered a fearsomely beautiful woman who seduced him from this aim—only in passing, as he thought.
Letting go of the spear to make love to her, he discovered too late that he had fallen into a trap set by Klingsor.
The hidden magician, watching the whole scene, rushed in, seized the spear, plunged it into Amfortas’s side, and made off with it.
So Klingsor had got the spear, and it remained only for him to get possession of the grail.
Amfortas, his life suspended by a thread, managed to get back to
Montsalvat, overwhelmed by mortification and guilt, and in physical
agony from his wound.
The wound never healed and never ceased to agonise, and yet the death for which Amfortas now longed as the only release from intolerable shame never came.
He found himself with a mortal wound that was permanent, and he lived on, hanging between life and jung’s transmutation death.
As king of the order he had no choice but to go on leading the regular enactments of the Last Supper—he, the only sinner in the order,
conducting the service.
He did this under the fiercest protest on account of his sense of unfitness, and had to be dragged to his place by the knights, physically crippled by his wound and emotionally crippled by guilt.
The remorse that ate into his soul might be appeased partially if the spear could be returned to Montsalvat, and at least he would be able to die in peace.
Year after year, knight after knight rode out to recover the spear and restore the situation; but each of them succumbed to one of Klingsor’s temptresses, and none of them ever returned.
The order went into a
decline which, if not halted, was bound to end in its demise.
A prophecy
emanating from the grail warned the order that it would be salvaged only
by a pure fool whose understanding of the situation was nothing to do
with cleverness but had been arrived at through compassion.
This is the background to the moment when a pure fool, killing birds
for fun, comes chasing along one of the paths into the knights’ domain.
As an innocent at large he unknowingly finds ways that are hidden from
sinners.
This is Parsifal, an abnormally simple and ignorant young man.
His father, a knight, was killed in battle before he was born, and his
mother, fearful of a similar fate for him, brought him up in ignorance
of his father, and of arms in general, and of the dangerous world.
But one day he saw a group of men in glittering array ride past on beautiful
creatures that he did not even know to be horses. Entranced, he ran after
them, but could not run as fast as the horses, and found himself in the
end lost and far from home.
From then on he wandered aimlessly, living from moment to moment, defending himself with a simple bow against robbers, wild beasts, and giants.
His mother, to whom he never returned, died of grief at his loss; but he did not know this, and gave no special thought to her.
When he blunders into Montsalvat he has no idea where he has come from; and he is unable to tell questioners what his name is, or who his father was.
The wisest of the knights, Gurnemanz, at once seizes on the hope that this person is the prophesied saviour, and introduces him as a spectator to the order’s ritual and lets him see Amfortas’s agony.
But Parsifal has no more understanding of any of this, and no more compassion for Amfortas, than he has shown towards his mother.
Seeing this, Gurnemanz gives up hope—Parsifal is just a fool, evidently,
nothing more. So Gurnemanz turns him out of Montsalvat altogether.
From there Parsifal blunders into Klingsor’s domain.
There his complete ignorance and innocence make him immune to the seductions of the women; and he routs Klingsor’s knights in the same way as he has routed robbers, wild beasts, and giants.
To bring him to heel, Klingsor confronts him with his supreme, hitherto irresistible temptress, the very same who had seduced Amfortas.
With her characteristic insight she arouses Parsifal’s sexuality for the first time in his life by evoking his relationship with his mother.
Partly because of this he experiences with her the onslaught of sexual desire in all its ferocity—and realises what had happened to Amfortas.
Ravaged by desire at its most terrible and imperious he does not flee from it, despite his terror, but lives it through without evasion, and finally succeeds in overcoming it.
The experience constitutes a breakthrough for him in understanding and insight.
Through it he achieves compassionate empathy not only with Amfortas
but with suffering humankind in general, eternally stretched out on its
rack of unsatisfiable willing.
He understands its need for redemption, and also what it means to be a redeemer who takes on himself the burden of suffering humanity—and therefore the significance of the re-enactment of the Last Supper which he had witnessed so uncomprehendingly at Montsalvat.
All becomes clear to him.
But, alas, although he is now able to destroy Klingsor’s castle and recover the spear, the temptress has left her curse on him nevertheless: after his experiences with her he is no longer the innocent he had been before, and when he leaves the ruins of Klingsor’s castle he can no longer find the path back to Montsalvat—at least not until after many years of wandering and searching, years during which the order of the grail declines almost to extinction.
But he does find it eventually. He also finds himself remembered, and recognised, though recognised for what he truly is.
He cures the wound of Amfortas by touching it with the point of the spear that caused it, and takes over from a now gratefully released Amfortas the leadership of the order, obviously to restore and surpass its former glories.
The arch temptress too achieves redemption in this final scene.
For it turns out that she and Kundry are one and the same person.
Through hundreds of years she has been living through a succession of lives in search of atonement for the ultimate sin, the ultimate lack of compassion: she had laughed and mocked at Christ as he was being flogged towards his own crucifixion.
At different times in her existence she is both of the jung’s transmutation
faces of the female archetype, on the one hand woman as nurturer and
carer, on the other hand woman as temptress and destroyer.
When she had been in Montsalvat she had been seeking expiation and redemption as an undemanding, self-sacrificing, barely noticed minister to the needs of others; but during her unaccountable absences she had been in search of self-fulfilment through sexual love, as the ultimately beautiful voluptuary and lover.
Having been repudiated in the second of these embodiments by Parsifal it is left to her only to serve him, and through doing so with no longer any possibility of self-gratification she finally reaches her redemption and attains release from the chain of being.
All the characters except Parsifal have been looking for fulfilment or redemption in the wrong place, and therefore would never have found it except through him.
Kundry has sought it not through loving but through being loved, or through being needed.
Klingsor has aspired to it through power. Amfortas has grasped for it in death.
The knights of the order have been hoping to achieve it by belonging to a society whose membership and vitality are in fact declining, and whose rituals, conducted by someone unworthy to do so, are a mockery.
Only Parsifal understands that redemption is not to be found through observances and not through any form of self-gratification either, but through its opposite, namely denial of the will in all its forms:
if through love, then utterly one-way love; if through power, then mastery over oneself, not mastery over others; if in death, then in death as a fulfilment of life, not as an escape from it; if in ritual, then in enactments dedicated wholly to something outside and beyond the participants, through self-effacement in the transcendental, and hence through self-transcendence in the most literal sense.
So the man who brings redemption to most of the other characters, and to the order of knights, himself finds redemption in the process. (Magee, 2000, pp. 265–269)
The Red Book
The themes spelt out in this account appear in The Red Book with the figure of Christ recurring throughout, including several references to the fifteenth-century religious thinker, Thomas à Kempis’s book The Imitation
of Christ: “There is no one so perfect and holy that he never meets temptation; we cannot escape it altogether” (Shamdasani, 2009, p. 336).
Among several others, there are further allusions to Christ (see pages 137, 331, 343, 356, 357).
The divine child symbolised by the pure, innocent fool, Parsifal, is another key motif that runs through The Red Book (pages 118, 204, 296).
The innocence and the potential of the child are both personified by Parsifal.
On pages 363–364, there is specific mention of Parsifal.
At first, Jung finds himself in a magnificent garden and it occurs to him this is Klingsor’s magical garden.
It seems he is in a theatre and that the characters of Amfortas and Kundry are part of the play.
Klingsor is also there and Jung says:
“How closely Klingsor resembles me! What a repulsive play! But look, Parsifal enters from the left. How strange, he also looks like me” (Shamdsani, 2009, pp. 363–364).
The scene changes: It appears that the audience, in this case me, joins in during the last act.
One must kneel down as the Good Friday service begins: Parsifal enters—slowly, his head covered with a black helmet.
The lionskin of Hercules adorns his shoulders and he holds the club in his hand, he is also wearing modern black trousers in honor of the church holiday.
I bristle and stretch out my hand avertingly, but the play goes on.
Parsifal takes off his helmet.
Yet there is no Gurnemanz to atone for and consecrate him.
Kundry stands in the distance, covering her head and laughing.
The audience is enraptured and recognises itself in Parsifal.
He is I. I take off my armor layered with history and my chimerical
decoration and go to the spring wearing a white penitent’s shirt … I walk out of the scene and approach myself—I who am still kneeling down in prayer as the audience. I rise and become one with myself. (Ibid.)
The dyad of Elijah/Salome in The Red Book may be linked to Klingsor/
Kundry; the male part, Elijah, Jung equates with his notion of the self, the
central archetype that is individual to the person unlike the other archetypes, that are universal.
The female part of the dyad, Kundry/Salome, was instrumental in Jung’s development of the notion of anima in its most ambiguous dual aspect as seducer/destroyer and loving/nurturing mother.
Jung’s fear of Salome’s designs on his head is of course taken from the biblical story wherein she is the cause of John the Baptist’s beheading, the latter figure being the herald of a new God just as Jungis seeking one in The Red Book. Furthermore, a severed head is another way of talking about castration which, in turn, links back to Klingsor’s castration.
The figure of the Magician has a long chapter devoted to it in The Red Book and is represented by Philemon, a figure first encountered in antiquity in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where he and his wife, Baucis, represent the poor ageing couple who welcome into their home the gods, Jupiter and Mercury (Zeus and Hermes in Greek mythology).
Philemon, who incorporates aspects of Gurnemanz and a wise magician, is the prototype for the mana personality that Jung developed in his exoteric writing in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology.
The attainment of this stage of consciousness comes about through the subjection of the mana (from the Oceanic term meaning magical knowledge and power) of the anima daemonic complex.
Through this process it is possible for ego to disengage from entanglements with the collective unconscious.
The figure of Philemon in The Red Book is a benign version of the evil magician Klingsor, and represents the archetypal Wise Old Man accompanying Jung as a guide on his quest (see pages 395, 397).
Jung writes of this figure in Psychological Types as follows:
The magician has preserved in himself a trace of primordial paganism, he possesses a nature that is still unaffected by the Christian splitting, which means he has access to the unconscious, which is still pagan, where the opposites still lie in their original naīve state, beyond all sinfulness, but, if assimilated into conscious life, produces evil and good with the same primordial and consequently daimonic force (Part of that power which would/ Ever work evil yet engenders good).… he is a destroyer as well as
savior.
The figure is therefore pre-eminently suited to become the symbol carrier for an attempt at unification. (1971, p. 188)
As may be deduced from this long quotation, for Jung it is the ultimate goal of unifying opposites that leads to redemption, a significant theme we shall return to at the end of this chapter.
In the meantime, let us press on with identifying other allusions to the Parsifal legend in The Red Book. A giant Jung encounters is called Izdubar, a character from the Sumerian Gilgamesh epic who has been wounded by the “poison” of science—an allusion Jung lifts from Nietzsche where in The Gay Science, Nietzsche argues that thinking arose from several impulses that had the effect of poison—to doubt being one.
Izdubar says: “No stronger being has ever cut me down, no monster has ever resisted my strength. But your poison … has lamed me to the marrow” (Shamdasani, 2009, p. 279).
Izdubar’s wound and Jung’s pity for him resonates with the feelings Parsifal has for Amfortas’s wound.
Good Friday appears in the play from The Red Book previously mentioned
and is a direct link to the Good Friday ritual in the Parsifal legend.
Jung goes on to say:
“This is the Good Friday when we complete the Christ in us and we descend to Hell ourselves … Good Friday on which we moan and cry to will the completion of Christ” (ibid., p. 370).
The Way of the Cross has its own section in The Red Book and begins with the words: “I saw the black serpent, as it wound itself upward around the
cross” (ibid., p. 189).
The serpent represents the animal soul and appears frequently in the book; this section is also dedicated to the Crucifixion.
The Last Supper appears in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the Parsifal legend,
and The Red Book (ibid., p. 390).
Finally, the magical garden in The Red Book has links to Klingsor’s magical garden and also to the Garden of Eden and the Garden of Gethsemane (ibid., pp. 174, 363, 412, 552), thereby connecting the themes of humankind’s fall to that of its redemption.
The Red Book ends abruptly when Jung abandoned it to focus on his studies on alchemy—interest in alchemy and the quest for the Holy Grail both have their beginnings in the twelfth century.
Redemption of the father
As a final link to the legend of Parsifal, the goal that is being quested for in The Red Book is what Jung calls individuation, which he views as fulfilment and redemption.
In both cases, the theme of redemption was inspired by Schopenhauer, whose concatenation of Platonic and Kantian ideas with the Upanishads was a profound influence in this way and others on Wagner and Jung.
Self-renunciation as expressed by Schopenhauer as “… unselfinterested love toward others” is the key to redemption, a notion from Schopenhauer which in turn is adopted by jung’s transmutation 183
Wagner and Jung. According to Schopenhauer “All love is compassion”
(1819, pp. 434–435).
Jung shares with Parsifal the early experience of the lack of a father,
although in Jung’s case father was physically present but absent psychologically and intellectually, leaving Jung dissatisfied with their relationship and with a lack of the father principle in his life.
Jung came to feel his father was stuck in outworn tradition, taking God as prescribed by the Bible and from the teachings of his own forefathers.
When Jung was eighteen years old he had many discussions with his father, when he would try to explain his own feelings about an “immediate living
God … omnipotent and free, above his Bible and his Church” (Jung, 1959a, p. 15).
His father’s response was: “Oh, nonsense, you always want to think. One ought not to think, but believe” (ibid., p. 53).
As already stated in the lengthy chapter on Freud earlier in the book, the resulting father complex carried over into Jung’s interaction with the
creator of psychoanalysis in whom he thought he had found the ideal
father figure, as may be readily seen in the following extract from the
Freud/Jung correspondence: “… let me enjoy your friendship not as one
between equals but as that of father and son.
This distance appears to me fitting and natural” (McGuire, 1974, p. 122).
This is just one example of the idealised transference Jung had onto Freud in their early interaction and, like all such idealisations, it inevitably flipped over into its opposite when Jung berated Freud for patronising him and his other followers.
Before that final denouement, one sees evidence of Jung trying to redeem
Freud from what he views as the error of his ways over psychosexuality,
Freud’s innovative marriage of Psyche and Eros.
From Jung’s own words it is clear to see that he never worked through his bitter feelings towards Freud, exemplified by the following quotations from the late works Answer to Job and Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
With his touchiness and suspiciousness the mere possibility of doubt was enough to infuriate him and induce that peculiar doublefaced behaviour of which he had already given proof in the Garden of Eden, when he pointed out the tree to the First Parents and at the same time forbade them to eat of it.
In this way he precipitated the Fall, which he apparently never intended. (1958b, p. 375)
Freud himself had a neurosis … Apparently neither Freud nor his disciples could understand what it meant for the theory and practice of psychoanalysis if not even the master could deal with his own neurosis. (1963, p. 162)
The hubris of trying to redeem the father needs to be tempered by humility
and compassion, as seen in Parsifal.
Attempts to redeem the father are not the same as constructive criticism, for example, Wolfgang Giegerich’s elucidating critiques of Jung’s writings.
That is a completely different enterprise to delusional notions of redeeming the founding fathers of psychoanalysis from the error of their ways.
Behind that kind of enterprise one may speculate that there are unresolved father complexes—and who is ever free from those?
The most one can do is to have as much awareness of them as possible so they are not acted-out in futile attempts to redeem the external father.
Addendum
Michael Fordham, the eminent English psychoanalyst, has written an account of his last meeting with Jung shortly before the latter’s death in 1961. Jung had written to an English colleague saying he had failed in his mission and was misunderstood and misrepresented.
Fordham visited him in an effort to ease Jung’s distress and described the meeting as follows:
When I came to see him I did not touch on these matters but spoke superficially. If I had not done that I would have had to convey my thought that it was the delusion of being a world savior that made him feel a failure. (1993, p. 120)
THE general name “Gnostics” is used to designate several widely differing sects, which sprang up in the Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire almost simultaneously with the first planting of Christianity.
That is to say, these sects then for the first time assumed a definite form, and arranged themselves under different teachers, by whose names they became known
to the world, although in all probability their main doctrines had made their appearance previously in many of the cities of Asia Minor.
There, it is probably, these sectaries first came into definite existence under the title of “Mystae,” upon the establishment of a direct intercourse with India and her Buddhist philosopher, under the Seleucidae and the Ptolmies.
The term “Gnosticism” is dervied from the Greek, Gnosis, knowledge—a word specially employed from the first dawn of religious inquiry to designate the science of things divine.
Thus Pythagoras, according to Diogenes Laertius, called the transcendental portion of his philosophy, Gnîsij tîn Ôntwn, “the knowledge of things that are.”
And in later times Gnosis was the name given to what Porphyry calls the Antique or Oriental philosophy, to distinguish it from the Grecian systems.
But the term was first used (as Matter on good grounds conjectures) in its ultimate sense of supernal and celestial knowledge, by the Jewish philosophers belonging to the celebrated school of that nation, flourishing at Alexandria.
These teachers, following the example of a noted Rabbi, Aristobulus, surnamed the
Peripatician, endeavoured to make out that all the wisdom of the Greeks was derived immediately from the Hebrew Scripture; and by means of their well-known mode of allegorical interpretation, which enabled them to elicit any sense
desired out of any given passage of the Old Testament, they sought, and often succeed, in establishing their theory.
In this way they showed that Plato, during his sojourn in Egypt, had been their own scholar; and still further to support these pretensions, the indefatigable Aristobulus produced a string of poems in the names of Linus, Orpheus, Homer and Hesiod—all strongly impregnated with the spirit of Judaism.
But his Judaism was a very different thing from the simplicity of the Pentateuch.
A single, but very characteristic, production of this Jewish Gnosis has come down to our times.
This is the “Book of Enoch” (v. p. 18), of which the main object is to make known
the description of the heavenly bodies and the true names of the same, as revealed to the Patriarch by the angel Uriel.
This profession betrays, of itself, the Magian source whence its inspiration was derived.
Many Jews, nevertheless, accepted it as a divine revelation; even the Apostle Jude scruples not to quote it as of genuine Scriptural authority.
The “Pistis-Sophia,” attributed to the Alexandrian heresiarch Valentinus (so importance a guide in the following inquiry), perpetually refers to it as:
The highest source of knowledge, as being dictated by Christ Himself, “speaking out of the Tree of Life unto ΙΕΟΥ, the Primal Man.”
Another Jewish-Gnostic Scripture of even greater interest, (inasmuch as it is the “Bible” of the only professed Gnostic sect that has maintained its existence to the present day, the Mandaites of Bassora,) is their textbook, the “Book of Adam.”
Its doctrines and singular application of Zoroastrism to Jewish tenets, present frequent analogies to those of the Pistis-Sophia, in its continual reference to the ideas of the “Religion of Light,” of which full particulars will be given when the latter remarkable work comes to be considered (see p. 14.)
“Gnosticism,” therefore, cannot receive a better definition than in that dictum of the sect first and specially calling itself “Gnostics,” the Naaseni (translated by the Greeks into “Ophites”), viz., “the beginning of perfection is the knowledge of man, but absolute perfection is the knowledge of God.””
And to give a general view of the nature of the entire system, nothing that I can do will serve so well as to transcribe the exact words of a learned and very acute writer
upon the subject of Gnosticism (“Christian Remembrancer,” for 1866).
“Starting, then, from this point we ask what Gnosticism is, and what it professes to teach. What is the peculiar Gnosis that it claims to itself?
The answer is, the knowledge of God and of Man, of the Being and Providence of the former, and of the creation and destiny of the latter.
While the ignorant and superstitious were degrading the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made with hands, and were chancing ‘the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creatre rather than the Creator,’ the ancient gnostics held purer and truer ideas.
And when these corrupted and idolatrous forms of religion and worship became established, and were popularly regarded as true and real in themselves, the “Gnostics” held and secretly taught an esoteric theology of which the popular creed
of multitudes of deities, with its whole ritual of sacrifice and worship, was but the exoteric form.
Hence all the mysteries which, almost if not all, the heathen religions possessed.
Those initiated into these mysteries, whilst they carefully maintained and encouraged the gorgeous worship, sacrifices and processions of the national religions, and even openly taught polytheism, and the efficacy of the public rites, yet secretly held something very different—at the first, probably, a purer creed, but in
course of time, like the exoteric form, degenerating.
The progress of declination differed according to race or habit of thought: in the East it tended to superstition, in the West (as we learn from the writings of Cicero) to pure atheism, a denial of Providence.
This system was adopted likewise by the Jews, but with this great difference, that it was superinduced upon and applied to a pre-existent religion; whereas in the other
Oriental religions, the external was added to the esoteric, and developed out of it.
In the Oriental systems the external was the sensuous expression of a hidden meaning; in the Jewish, the hidden meaning was drawn out of pre-existing external
laws and ritual; in the former the esoteric alone was claimed as divine, in the latter it was the exoteric which was a matter of revelation.
To repeat this seeming defect, the Kabbalists, or teachers of the ‘Hidden Doctrine,’ invented the existence of a secret tradition, orally handed down from the time of Moses.
We may, of course, reject this assertion, and affirm that the Jews learnt the idea of a Hidden Wisdom, underlying the Mosaic Law, from their intercourse with the Eastern nations during the Babylonian captivity; and we may further be assured that the origin of this Secret Wisdom is Indian.
Perhaps we shall be more exact if we say that the Jews learnt from their intercourse
with Eastern nations to investigate the external Divine Law, for the purpose of discovering its hidden meaning.
The heathen Gnostics, in fact, collected a Gnosis from every quarter, accepted all religious systems as partly true, and extracted from each what harmonized with their ideas.
The Gospel, widely preached, accompanied by miracles, having new doctrines and enunciating new truths, very naturally attracted their attention.
The Kabbalists, or Jewish Gnostics, like Simon Magus, found a large portion of apostolic teaching in accordance with their own, and easily grafted upon it so much
as they liked.
Again the Divine power of working miracles possessed by the Apostles and their successors naturally attracted the interest of those whose chief mystery was the
practice of magic.
Simon the Magician was considered by the Samaritans to be ‘the great Power of God;’ he was attracted by the miracles wrought by the Apostles; and no doubt he
sincerely ‘believed,’ that is, after his own fashion.
His notion of Holy Baptism was probably an initiation into a new mystery with a higher Gnosis than he possessed before, and by which he hoped to be endued with higher powers; and so likewise many of those who were called Gnostic Heretics by the Christian Fathers, were not Christians at all, only they adopted so much of the Christian doctrine as accorded with their system.”
The considerations of the local and political circumstances of the grand foci of Gnosticism will serve to explain much that is puzzling in the origin and nature of the system itself.
Ephesus was, after Alexandria, the most important meeting-point of Grecian culture and Oriental speculation.
In regard to commerce and riches, although she yielded to the Egyptian capital, yet she rivalled Corinth in both, which city in truth she far surpassed in her treasures of religion and science.
Her richness in theosophic ideas and rites had from time immemorial been manifested in her possession of Diana, “whom all Asia and the world,” worshipped—that pantheistic figure so conformable to the genius of the furthest East; her college of “Essenes” dedicated to the service of that goddess; and her “Megabyzae,” whose name sufficiently declares their Magian institution.
Hence, also, was supplied the talisman of highest repute in the antique world, the far-famed “Ephesian spell,” those mystic words graven upon the zone and feet of the “image that fell down from Jupiter;” and how zealously magic was cultivated by her citizens is apparent from St. Luke’s incidental notice of the cost of the books belonging to those that used “curious arts” (t¦ per…erga, the regular names for
sorcercy and divination) destroyed by their owners in the first transports of conversion to a new faith.
Such converts, indeed, after their early zeal had cooled down, were not likely to resist the allurements of the endeavour to reconcile their ancient, far-famed wisdom, with the new revelation; in short, to follow the plan invented not long before by the Alexandrian Jew, in his reconciliation of Plato with Moses and the Prophets.
“In Ephesus,” says Matter, “the speculations of the Jewish-Egyptian school, and the Semi-Persian speculations of the Kabbala, had then recently come to swell the vast conflux of Grecian and Asiastic doctrines; so there is no wonder that teachers should have sprung up there, who strove to combined the religion newly preached by the Apostle with the ideas so long established in the place.
As early as the year A.D. 58, St. Paul, in his First Epistle to Timothy, enjoins him to warn certain persons to abstain from teaching ‘strange doctrines,’ those myths and interminable genealogies that only breed division. these same ‘myths and genealogies’ apply, without any doubt, to the theory of the Emanation of the Æons-Sephiroth, and to all the relations between the Good and Bad Angels that the Kabbalists had borrowed from the religion of Zoroaster.” ~C.W. King, THE GNOSTICS ND THEIR REMAINS, Page 5-9
