Psychologická astrologie, Astropsychologie

Ethos anthropoidaimon
“A man’s character is his fate.”
(The psychological nature of a human being is the determining factor of his/her life story.)
Heraclitus

Everyone knows nowadays that people “have complexes.” What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.
(Complexes are relatively independent elements of the structure of the human psyche, determining decisively his/her life story.)
C. G. Jung (CW 8, par. 200)

       In its controversy with the Roman Catholicism, Protestantism struggled to reach a greater authenticity by elevating belief into the position of the decisive aspect of the Christian life (sola fide). Beyond any doubt, this effort was very desirable and, as such, it did not have to lead to any negative consequences. But it was accompanied by the dismantling of the imagination and the devaluation of the sacraments, rituals and art forms so typical of the Roman Catholicism. Protestantism rejected the traditions of the Church ( sola scriptura) and sought to excise all the “magical” aspects from Christianity, above all the mystery of the trans-substantiation of the bread and wine; it restricted the cult of the Saints, disclaimed miracles, reduced the sacraments radically, repudiated episcopal robes, as well as certain ceremonies (the Easter fire renewal, the consecration, fumigation, etc.). What used to be only outer in the Roman Catholicism was now supposed to become something real, i.e. inner, simple and civilian.
       It seems that the aim of this endeavor was to put an emphasis on the personal, individual aspect of the relationship between human and God. But this emphasis was so radical that it disturbed the relationship itself. The Great Arcane started to diminish gradually. As prominent witnesses of the process, we could name Nietzsche, Jung, and Ingmar Bergman. The fathers of all the three men were Lutheran pastors. Nietzsche announced the death of the God, Jung described the salvatory activity of Jesus of Nazareth as a total failure, and Bergman‘s Alexander, before putting his head into the lap of his grandmother at the end of the film Fanny a Alexander, stated: “If I ever meet the God, I will kick his ass.”
       The influence of Protestantism and the Enlightenment, together with the triumph of modern science during recent centuries has led to a progressively deepening gap between thinking and the imagination, which has resulted in the attenuation of the right hemisphere functions (imagination, valuation, empathy, etc.). Humans have become autistic (“I alone!”), in accord with the archetype represented by the Homerian Cyclops and the Golem, the legendary artificial figure made of soil and brought to life by the Rabbi Loew, a historical character who lived in late-renaissance Prague.
       The imagination forms the basis for any symbolism practiced, and such symbolism leans on analogical thinking.The inner is concurrently outer (Goethe),and this relationship, serving as a connecting link (ligamentum) is the source of mysticism, i.e. of that what transcends the earthly world, and thus also human reason.Mysticism is the leaven of the Gospel that causes the proving of the dough. This not very noble metaphor aptly depicts the Mystery that surrounds mysticism. In its absence, the dough fails to rise and becomes unleavened bread. Which is, as the Bible informs us, the food that is good only for times of indigence.
       The nature of a mystery lies in the fact that it remains hidden while causing an effect. Mystery can be accepted by our reason if we see it as a natural and permanent aspect of reality. Without Mystery, reality is dead, even though it is possible to revive it in various ways, e.g. by maximizing performance, colourfulness, drug use, increased loudness, speed, or other like means.
       We can rightfully ask a question whether Protestantism, in its attempt to demythologize belief, didn’t actually destroy mysticism, which was the poetry of religion and a necessary condition for the ensoulment of everyday Christian life. The soul itself slipped away from the sterilized space. Out of the resulting wasteland grew European psychology (Malebranche), destined to compensate for the current deficiency and find the lost soul.
       To understand Jungian psychology properly, we need to recognize that it arose within the lineage of the Protestant tradition and that his own “search for the lost soul” stemmed from these roots.There were six reformed pastors in the family of his mother, while two brothers of his father served in the same role, as well as his father himself. When preparing for Jung’s first communion, his father personally gave him instruction for confirmation. As Jung remembered in his biography Memories, Dreams, Reflections , the catechism bored him to death. When they came across the paragraph on the Trinity, Jung hoped that they would finally get to the core of the matter. But, to his profound disappointment, his father said that he was going to skip that topic, for he really did not understand anything of it himself.
       The father used to tell Jung: “You always want to think. One ought not to think but believe." But when his son replied: “Give me this belief”; the father would only shrug.

       “In spite of the boredom, I made every effort to believe without understanding - an attitude which seemed to correspond with my father's - and prepared myself for Communion, …”

       „Only gradually, in the course of the following days, did it dawn on me that nothing had happened… I knew that God could do stupendous things to me, things of fire and unearthly light; but this ceremony contained no trace of God. Not for me, at any rate. To be sure, there had been talk about Him, but it had all amounted to no more than words.” (C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, New York, Vintage Books, 1989, p. 52-55)
       First communion had no effect on Jung, who decided not to participate in such ceremonies any longer, because it did not have anything to do with his experience of the living God that he had had since the age of twelve.

       “I was seized with the most vehement pity for my father. All at once I understood the tragedy of his profession and his life. ... An abyss had opened between him and me, and I saw no possibility of ever bridging it, for it was infinite in extent.”

       Jung wasn’t able to help his father then, but the experience became a permanent record in his memory and a decisive motive of his effort to find “belief with understanding“ or “knowing belief”. Everything that Jung was about to do later in life in this direction can be understood as an attempt to explain at least the most important riddles of Christian belief and its world view to his father.
       First of all, it was necessary to find the soul that had previously disappeared from religious life, which was possible only with the help of psychology. Following the Protestant tradition of looking for the lost soul, Jung continued with his journey into the human interior, which he later described in his Red Book.He tried even harder due to the fact that Catholicism too had fallen into crisis in the meantime, which happened for the opposite reasons, especially because of an overemphasis on the outer sacraments and ceremonies. In Jung’s conviction, the interior of the supposed Christians remained inhabited by the pagan gods who became the causes of two devastating wars.
       The determining motive of Jung’s quest was “Deus redivivus” – the God that is seated in the human interior in a particular way, and is accordingly present in all the outer religious rites.It is impossible not to see the outlines of Luther’s “image of God” in the background, his main features – especially his frightfulness and dreadfulness – being so eloquently described by Rudolf Otto in his book The Idea of the Holy .
       Jung‘s “thorn in the flesh” (exemplified by Paul the Apostle) was related to the ambivalent, contradictory nature of God’s agency and to the question how could such opposites possibly be unified.

       The Astrological Commentary

       (with regard to the Chiron-Jupiter opposition and Sun-Neptune square in Jung’s birth chart)

       Astrology holds the view that through analysis of a birth chart, it is possible to identify the constellations, i.e. the complexes, that determine the qualities, intentions and behavior of the person, and the leitmotiv of his life story.
       When reading a chart, it is possible to use a formal approach and analyze gradually all the constellations, e.g. the positions of the planets, their aspects, and other astrological symbols.
       The interpretation of the chart focuses on capturing of the overall image, one that is based on the conception of analogical and reflective relationships between archetypesand individual phenomena, focusing on the dominant factors of the chart that are woven into the whole life story of the individual like a red thread. The art of interpretation (hermeneutics) lies in the ability to spot these dominant factors. They can be connected with a conglomeration of planets in a certain sign or house, or with some of the major planetary aspects, but sometimes also with the seemingly less important planets labeled as unaspected, or a tight aspect of the significant point of the Black Moon (Lilith) with personal planets.In many cases, we find the dominant factor in an alignment between the Sun or Moon and the collective planets - Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.
       Recently, I have dedicated my attention to the astrological archetype of Chiron (it doesn’t matter whether we call it a “minor planet” or otherwise; the same principle applies to Pluto, removed from the list of the “major” planets by astronomers in 2006).
       As an important factor of astrological symbolism, Chiron was discovered thanks to the combination of intuition and empiricism. It happened in the second half of the twentieth century (1977), at a time when it was more than obvious that the traditional Christian image of the Savior had fully withdrawn into the background, being replaced by the representatives of totalitarian power. The traditional discipline of astrology does not accept such “deconstruction”, because it holds the longing for salvation as an inseparable part of human nature, one that does not disappear, but only changes its forms and ways of expression. We are witnesses of the process in which the traditional cultural forms are degrading to a lower developmental stage as a consequence of secularization, and it is in in the context of such dynamics that the archaic gods (Wotan, Dionysus, Lilith) reappear on the stage.
       The Christian conception of the salvation is connected with the events that took place during the time of Jesus‘ activity, especially on the Gethsemane Rock, Golgotha, and in the garden where Mary Magdalene met the Resurrected One and took him for a gardener at first: “Rabbuni!”
       In the New-Pagan (Promethean) age, the meaning of the longing for salvation has changed. A human of today is longing for salvation in the sense of healing: he desires to heal by his own power with the help of the tools provided by medical science or natural medicine. The expectations connected with this self-healing encompass not only physical and psychological health, but even liberation from all existential problems.
       Of all the archaic gods, it is the Greek Chiron who comes into mind as a surrogate for the Savior, for he is himself wounded, and therefore capable of healing human wounds and illnesses as well, and especially chronic ones. This is the source of the symbolic meaning of Chiron in astrology. Already the shape of its orbit is symbolic, for it crosses the orbit of Saturn and heads outwards Uranus. Chiron’s glyph corresponds with this: it is the key that opens the gate from the restrictive realm of Saturn into the Uranian sphere of liberty and freedom. Uranus, being the dominant planetary archetype of the Aquarian Age, thus foreshadows also the way modern man images salvation. (See Starý, Rudolf. Cheirón, asklépiovskámedicína a jungovskápsychologie / Chiron, Asclepian Medicine and Jungian Psychology, 2000).

/Birth Chart/
C.G. Jung
26. 7. 1875, 18.50 UT
Kesswill, CH
(47N36, 9E20)
Koch

       In the birth chart of Carl Jung, Chiron is situated in the sign of Aries in the 3rd house, opposing Jupiter at the cusp of the 9th house; Jupiter trines Saturn in the 1st house. This means that the chronic trauma of Jung‘s psyche, one that accompanied him throughout his whole life and that he – as we can see in his work – tried to heal, was related to the wound of Jupiter, in connection with Saturnian traditions.
       Jupiter in the 9th house, being the “ruler” of the house, represents a world view, religion, philosophy, missions, preaching, releasing books and journals, lecturing, teaching, spreading scientific knowledge and ideological opinions, theoretical conceptions of sense and the meaning of human life, travelling, journeying, a quest for the Holy Grail as a path of self-discovery, the process of development as such, growth and expansion. The Chironian wounding of Jupiter means a chronic crisis of religious belief and world view, a crisis of personal development, a sense of the insufficient possibility of personal growth and expansion, the inability to travel, an unsatisfied desire to spread knowledge and come up with redemptory ideas.

       Healing of a trauma comes through the planet that represents the cause of the wound. We can see it as a homeopathic principle, according to which it is possible to heal an illness through the factor that has caused it.
       A missionary spreads the Gospel of salvation, serving him as a means of his own attempt to find salvation.
       An ideologist spreads the ideas that are supposed to bring salvation to all people, including himself.
       A traveller heals his trauma through endless journeying around the whole world, for he cannot find redeeming rest anywhere.
       An oligarch quiets his pain through agglomeration of properties.
       A plutocrat sees the redemption of his soul in his unceasing effort to aggregate as much power over others as he can (for he had lost his power over himself).
       A thinker hopes to find salvation through as much knowledge as he is able to gain (the closest relative of Jung with his 17 volumes of Collected Works would be Clemens of Alexandria with his Stromateis).
       In this way, a leitmotiv symbolized by a certain planet may develop into a passion. Such a passion doesn’t necessarily have to act negatively, but it can play an important role in shaping of one’s life story and can become a source of enterpreneurial, mental and creative energy.It all depends on whether the person is able to resist its pressure and the danger of arriving at an extreme, where the passion becomes a devastating form of possession. That is how the Saviors and Healers of humanity are born. Self-knowledge and “disidentification” with the archetype is an indispensable antidote here.
       The real trauma lies in an addiction to experiences of such a kind. For we often seek out such experiences at all costs, sometimes even at the cost of self-destruction, which is exactly the opposite of what we long for – to break free from the circumjacent pressures and influences.But it should be remembered here that even if we succeed in reaching this aim, it is not true redemption; it is a healing that enables us – thanks to these traumatic experiences – to step across the boundaries of Saturnian restrictions in the direction of the Uranian realm of freedom.
       The true Redemption is connected with the Gethsemane Rock, Golgotha, and in the garden where Mary Magdalene met the Resurrected One and took him for a gardener at first: “Rabbuni!”

       Jung had to deal with moments of spiritual crisis since his school years, both within his family and in confrontation with his inner experiences. Among them a central place held his dream of a huge piece of excrement that fell from above, from the throne of God, onto the cathedral of St. Basel, which is thus completely destroyed. The destruction of the temple structure (Jupiter trine Saturn) questioned the sense of religious life as practiced (Jupiter) and caused a permanent trauma to the twelve-years old boy:

       “Church gradually became a place of torment to me. For there men dared to preach aloud I am tempted to say, shamelessly about God, about His intentions and actions.” (45-46)

       “… my father's sermons and those of other parsons became acutely embarrassing to me.” (46)

       “What he said sounded stale and hollow, like a tale told by someone who knows it only by hearsay and cannot quite believe it himself.” (43)

       These gnawing experiences culminated during his first communion:
       “I ate the bread; it tasted flat, as I had expected. The wine, of which I took only the smallest sip, was thin and rather sour, plainly not of the best. Then came the final prayer, and the people went out, neither depressed nor illumined with joy, but with faces that said, "So that's that.” (54)
       When we find a motive in someone’s birth chart that can be traced throughout his whole life, such as Jung’s Chiron opposing Jupiter, i.e. Jupiter longing for salvation (in German “Heilsbedürftig”), it is possible to determine the importance of other constellations mostly according to the extent of their connection with the motive, the nature of this connection (whether they intensify or attenuate the motive), and the role they play in the context of the person’s effort to heal the trauma. In the case of Carl Jung, we need to consider especially his Sun-Neptune square (Neptune is situated in the feminine sign of Taurus, and as such can be seen as an equivalent of the “minus-Jupiter”, the traditional ruler of the feminine sign of Pisces; therefore, the shape of the constellation is: Sun square “minus-Jupiter”.
       When we read the Jung’s biography, we can immediately see the analogies of this constellation.It is connected with the personalities No. 1 and No. 2, as described in many places in Jung’s memoires; also with the relationship between Faust and Mephistopheles, experienced by Jung almost as a personal story;to a certain extent, it reflects Jung’s relationship to his father and mother (even though it was in the later confrontation with the paternal figure of Sigmund Freud where Jung had to win his identity associated with the Sun of his birth chart); in the context of Jung’s psychology, the constellation found its final shape in the contrast of conscious and unconscious. From the viewpoint of psychological astrology, we are talking about the relationship between the I (the Sun), representing consciousness, rationality, science and personal identity, and Neptune (the “minus-Jupiter”), representing imagination, visions, dreams, loosening, merging, ecstasy, religious belief and a sense of unity with the cosmos.
       Both in astrology and alchemy, a square designates an extremely antagonistic relation between two or more factors. “In the square the elements are still separate and hostile to one another and must therefore be united in the circle,” Jung explained in his work The Psychology of the Transference (CW 16, par. 402).The square is associated with the cross as a central symbol of Christianity with its Christ-paradigm. To have a planetary square in the birth chart means to be “crucified” in a way, and thus represents a serious problem for the person who has to somehow put up with it, or at least to learn how to endure it.
       Jung continues with the explanation that number four represents the state of disintegration of the structure of psyche, the “pluralistic state of the man who has not yet attained inner unity … an agonizing, unredeemed state which longs for union, reconciliation, redemption, healing, and wholeness.” (CW 16, par. 405)
       Alchemy solved this situation in the spirit of the axiom of Maria: in the beginning there are four elements (fire, water, air, earth), the process of transformation continues through the three Mercurial expressions (inorganic, organic and mental), then reaches the state of duality (Sun and Moon), out of which the Philosopher’s Stone is born during the Work, representing an inviolable Unity and, as such, being the cure for all human afflictions. In this way, Jung discovered in alchemy the model according to which he could solve the psychological problems connected with the contradictory tendencies acting in the human soul.
       According to Jung, the alchemical Opus represents “a process of individuation, a becoming of the Self”(CW 16, par. 531), where the Self (“das Selbst”) is“both ego and non-ego, subjective and objective, individual and collective(CW 16, par. 474) . With regard to the danger of hypostasis of this key notion of Jung, which could result in ego-inflation leading all the way up to the “Superman” of Nietzsche, it is possible to object that a complete and definite integration of the Self cannot be the goal of individuation, for that would mean to pronounce the “death” phase of the alchemical Work, the climax of the whole process.

       As Jung himself put it: “When the opposites unite, all energy ceases: there is no more flow.” (CW 16, par. 467)

The alchemists put emphasis on the principle, according to which no life can be created, unless the old one dies. The objective of the Work thus does not lie in a one-time unification of the Wholeness, or the Self, and its integration into the individual psyche; it is rather a cyclical transformation and birth of a new life, the achievement of another developmental stage in the sense of the maturation and gradual accomplishment of a human personality. This is (Aristotle’s) entelechy, understood as the realization of all the predispositions which a human is born into the world with - parallel to the Goethe’s “Bildungsroman” and the process of “gradation” (“Steigerung”), as he observed it in the world of plants.
       This is also the reason why it is important to discriminate strictly between the “complexiooppositorum” (the definition of God presented by Nicholas of Cusa), analogous to the Oneness of the Neoplatonism that lasts even after it has unfolded and diversified itself, and “ coniunctiooppositorum” as the term that the alchemists used for the unification phase.For confusing these two would mean a “deification” of man accomplished by the means of magic, not in the manner of Thomas a Kempis in the Imitation of Christ . A human would thus become a Golem (the Superman of Nietzsche). This would mean to tread the path of Newton, who undid the difference between the celestial and sublunar sphere during his setting of the fundaments of the modern science. It is impossible to make the relationship between the human and God “scientific”, for it is - instead of being a direct causal relationship – defined by the principles of analogy, alignment, following and resonance. It is possible, though, to ignore it (as one more unnecessary hypothesis). If the alchemists committed a heresy, then it consisted in their replacing of the “Take up your cross and follow me” of the Gospels by a one-time operation, during which the belligerent earthly elements become unified.
       If we use the metaphor of breathing, it describes the permanent drama of human destiny. Inhaling represents the intuitive belief that the things will happen in the way that we hope them to be. Exhaling expresses the realization - accompanied by the sense of disappointment – that things are different, because even we are different from the idea that we used to have about ourselves. A critical re-evaluation, correction and new attempt follow. The disconnection of the elements of the psyche is substituted by their re-unification. In the words of the alchemists: after “separatio”, the “coniunctio” follows. The course of this act possesses the nature of an upward spiral. It essence lies in being enriched by new life experiences, but these need to be processed and digested first, in a similar manner to that applied in the seemingly long outdated science of alchemy. It is to Jung’s immense credit that he discovered the correspondence between alchemy and the processes that secretly take place in the depths of the human psyche.
       When Jung described the nature of his personalities No. 1 and No. 2, both of which, by his report, accompanied him throughout his whole life, he didn’t believe that they had anything to do with a split or dissociation of the personality in the common medicine sense, such as is the cause of all neuroses. He believed that conflict betweenthe contradictory parts of the psyche takes place in every human. That is certainly true; the contradiction between the ego and non-ego, between the personal and impersonal powers that determine and control human existence as vis maior , is natural and indispensable for human development.Nevertheless, this may evolve into a split, if the person doesn’t learn to “breath” in this degree (systole and diastole in the sense outlined above) and establish a harmonious relationship between the opposite poles. In such a case, the “unification of the opposites” becomes an obsessive idea; and it is exactly such an idea that shapes the background of Jung’s psychology since the very beginning of his work (already his dissertation was dedicated to the problematics of schizophrenia or dementia praecox, as it was called at that time).The whole of Jung’s work represents an unceasing struggle with this neurosis, which can be identified as the neurosis of the modern, Faust-like, man and provides the tools for its diagnosis and treatment.
       Nevertheless, when assessing such a problem from the viewpoint of psychological astrology, we also need to take into account the harmonious or less dramatic aspects that can occur between the respective planets; in our case between the Sun and Neptune squaring each other.In such cases (trine, sextile), we can gather that there is the possibility of mutual blending, replenishment, or the actual unification of these psychological factors (supposing that there is an analogical relationship at work between the horoscopic structure and the structure of psyche. The opposition between the Sun and Neptune, as another major type of aspect, suggests a situation where the “polemics” between the two principles can lead to very potent encounters and mutual enrichment, while everything heads towards unification.In the cases of people in whose charts we cannot find any aspect between the Sun and Neptune, it is rather likely that they will have no psychological problem of this kind. But that doesn’t mean that the central problem of belief or non-belief doesn’t relate to all people without exception.The difference is only in how it is formulated - theologically, philosophically, psychologically, or astrologically. What do I really know and what can I really believe in is an eternal question and humans ask it themselves again and again. Goethe even holds the opinion that

      

       “the actual, sole, and deepest topic of the history of the world and humanity, one which everything else is subdued to, is the conflict between belief and non-belief.”

       Psychological astrology knows the constellations, e.g. a conjunction, where the unification of two or more factors marks only the starting point of their further development. Here the first step lies in their splitting into two, which can be a very painful process, quite like in a case of unification. In such cases, the scenario of individual development differs significantly from those that are about connection or unification. It is difficult to decide which of the two opposite cases is more demanding: whether the torment of dissociation, or the struggle with the restrictive powers that prevent the human from gaining personal independence (which we find, for example, in the cases of Sun-Neptune or Moon-Neptune conjunctions).There are countless variations of the stories of this kind contained in myths, fairy tales and art.

       Regarding Jung’s journeys to Africa and to the North-American Indians, the common assumption is that his main aim was to discover the still living myths and archetypes of the native tribes (a reminder of Goethe’s travels in Italy, where he wanted to discover the Urplant according to which he could then unfold plant metamorphoses ad infinitum).But it seems more likely that Jung was actually searching rather for examples of still living belief, the lack of which he felt so painfully.He found it in the Indians of the Pueblo tribe. The Pueblos believed that they were the sons of the Sun and that their task was to help their Father to cross the sky each day. Jung commented that:

       “I then realized on what the ‘dignity,’ the tranquil composure of the individual Indian, was founded. It springs from his being a son of the sun; his life is cosmologically meaningful…” (252)

       In these words, we can hear the echo of the words of Paul the Apostle explaining to the Ephesians that they are the children of God, and as such they are living a cosmologically meaningful life and are entitled to claim their inheritance, i.e. all the gifts that the Father bestows to them. Confronted with this belief, naïve in the eyes of current Europeans, Jung realized how poor and pitiable we are in comparison with them.

       “Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more from the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth.” (252)

       By the end of his life, being asked whether he believed in God, Jung stayed silent for a while and then replied: “I know, I don´t need to believe.” (C. G. Jung Speaking, p. 428)
       This answer makes plain that he preferred knowledge to belief. For this reason, we can label his reply as gnostic. It indicates that he was not able to resolve his life-long struggle in the interest of the “knowing belief.”
       He didn’t say (the Augustinian): I believe to be able to know, and I know to be able to believe.
       He didn’t say (the Paulian): I know what I came to believe in.
       He could have said: God’s existence is a banal truth, in the sense of vis maior or the most powerful force that determines our life.From this point of view, the existence of God wasn’t a problem for me; I had had religious experiences since my school years. I only needed to know what image of God I needed to develop and how should I understand it, especially in its contradictory nature. We are born into a culture that has a generally valid “God image.”The decisive thing is, whether I am able to fully rely on it and choose it as the basis of my life.And it was exactly this step that seemed to me the saltomortale which I never managed to perform. Even though it was me who wrote these remarkable words:

       “When a summit of life is reached, when the bud unfolds and from the lesser the greater emerges, then, as Nietzsche says, ‘One becomes Two,’ and the greater figure, which one always was but which remained invisible, appears to the lesser personality with the force of a revelation. He who is truly and hopelessly little will always drag the revelation of the greater down to the level of his littleness, and will never understand that the day of judgment for his littleness has dawned. But the man who is inwardly great will know that the long expected friend of his soul, the immortal one, has now really come, ‘to lead captivity captive’; that is, to seize hold of him by whom this immortal had always been confined and held prisoner…” (CW 9, par. 217)

       He could have said: From my point of view, I saw Jesus as a “half of the God-archetype.” The second half of the archetype was the Devil. I couldn’t imagine, how the two so contradictory parts could be unified.When I discovered alchemy, it seemed to me that exactly this discipline is capable of enabling man to overcome his disunity within the process of the alchemical Work. Unfortunately, I eventually came to believe that even the alchemists didn’t succeed. In the concluding part of my study on the psychology of transference, I was forced to state:

       “The task that defeated the alchemists presented itself anew: how is the profound cleavage in man and the world to be understood, how are we to respond to it and, if possible, abolish it?” (CW 16, par. 534)

       He could have said: The idea of the sacrifice of Christ as a cosmogonic event that brings the solution of the given problem remained strange to me. The traditional belief supposed that Jesus, through his death on the Cross, took all the evil of the world on himself, and that through His resurrection, the re-unification of the torn world had been gained, while Easter Mondayrepresents the repeated beginning of a new yearly cycle. And that humanity can participate in this macrocosmic unification within the frame of the Christ paradigm of individuation, even though, as a mortal, he is not able to reach it in full, for it would mean that he would become a Superman.

       We can object:
       Jung developed the thinking tools serving better than anything else to explicate the Gospels in the spirit of “new wine in new casks.”But he himself remained split even in this highest discipline.On one hand, he repeatedly emphasized the significance of Jesus Christ as the central symbol of Christianity, but on the other hand, when referring to him, especially in personal interviews, he makes almost mischievous, and sometimes utterly absurd statements (C.G. Jung Speaking).It seems that the aversion to his father’s sermons during the services, which he had to take part in (to his great displeasure), left in Jung traces much deeper than he was willing to admit to himself; traces which influenced his image of Jesus.

       In Jung‘s autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, we can read the following disrespectful sentences in the description of his visit to India:

“Christ is at once a historical man and God, and therefore much more difficult to comprehend. At bottom he was not comprehensible even to himself; he knew only that he had to sacrifice himself, that this course was imposed upon him from within. His sacrifice happened to him like an act of destiny. Buddha lived out his life and died at an advanced age, whereas Christ's activity as Christ probably lasted no more than a year.” (p. 279)

       During his New York seminars in 1937, he expressed an opinion that Jesus suffered because of his extramarital origin, and for that reason he felt the need to compensate for this feeling of inferiority. According to Jung, when Jesus said the famous sentence about being abandoned by the Father after crucifixion, he saw that “his whole life, devoted to the truth according to his best conviction, had been a terrible illusion.” He follows almost in the manner similar to that of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra:

“We all must do just what Christ did. We must make our experiment. We must make mistakes. We must live out our own vision of life. And there will be error. If you avoid
error you do not live; in a sense even it may be said that every life is a mistake, for no one has found the truth.” (C.G. Jung Speaking, p. 98)

       When speaking with Esther Harding (according to her notes from 1958; in: G.G. Jung Speaking, p. 367-368), Jung explains to her the significance of Palm Sunday, when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a borrowed ass (as according to Isaiah the prophet), to show the Jews that he was a different Saviour than they expected. Jung makes the direct claim that Jesus “stole the ass” and “brought on himself the mocking as a Caesar”. In Jung’s interpretation, Satan, whom Jesus had cast behind his back, returned to him on Palm Sunday.

       Jung many times said that for a person of a Christian world view, Jesus Christ represented the Archetype of humanity. But the idea of “imitation (following)” Him or “alignment” with Him was strange to Jung. His Aquarius rising and the broad conjunction of the Sun and Uranus in the seventh house in Leo suggest that it was against his nature, with which he was not able to struggle in the manner of the Biblical Jacob wrestling with the angel. Jung put across his identity and originality in a Promethean manner, and thus came very close to the Gnostic idea of self-redemption or self-healing through knowledge.

       “Christ is an exemplar who dwells in every Christian as his integral personality. But historical trends led to the imitatio Christi, whereby the individual does not pursue
his own destined road to wholeness, but attempts to imitate the way taken by Christ.” (p. 280)

       It may be rightly objected that individuation, presented by Jung himself as one of the key notions of his psychology, would make no sense without an archetypal Anthropos of the given culture. It would be as senseless as a phenomenon without the corresponding archetype and vice versa.

       The knowledge that every (Proclus’) sunflower is unique and full-bodied, only when it has developed itself according to the archetype of the Sunflower Queen, is perhaps the most valuable heritage of Neoplatonism, belonging to “perennial philosophy.” It is the Greek analogy of the Biblical creative principle expressed in the words: “According to the image and parable.” In the same way, every human is unique and full-bodied, only when he develops himself according to the archetype of the Anthropos of the given culture. Through that, he also takes part in shaping and re-shaping His Image, which is a privilege bestowed exclusively on humans. The seemingly fully independent human is the Superman of Nietzsche, a distant echo of the mythical rebellion of the Titans that was crushed by the joint forces of the Olympian gods.

       Here the resolute criticism of Gnosticism expressed by Eric Voegelin, who saw its meaning in “self-redemption through knowledge”, seems fully justified. Voegelin found the roots of this Promethean (astrologically: Uranian) rebellion in a pregnant form already in Karl Marx:

       “A being regards itself as independent only when it stands on its own feet; and it stands on its feet only when it owes its existence to itself alone. A man who lives by the grace of another considers himself a dependent being. But I live by the grace of another completely if I owe him not only the maintenance of my life but also its creation: if he is the source of my life; and my life necessarily has such a cause outside itself if it is not my own creation. (Marx, Karl, Nationalökonomie und Philosophie, quoted in: The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin , Volume 5, p. 268)

       Jung certainly wouldn’t be happy with this kinship in opinion. As he repeatedly stated, intellectuals were his least favorite kind of patients (he called them “highbrows”and used to say that had no clue what he was talking about). He wasn’t able to catch the sight of his own shadow in them.
       In his lectures, Voegelin claimed that the works of Max Weber represented the last big positivist system, but, in addition, he also pointed to the difference existing between Weber and the founder of positivism, Auguste Comte:

       “The evolution of mankind toward the rationality of positive science was for Comte a distinctive positive development; for Weber it was a process of disenchantment ( Entzauberung) and de-divinization(Entgöttlichung) of the world. By the overtones of his regret that divine enchantment had seeped out of the world, by his resignation to rationalism as a fate to be borne but not desired, by the occasional complaint that his soul was not attuned to the divine (religiösunmusikalisch) , he rather betrayed his brotherhood in the sufferings of Nietzsche – though, in spite of his confession, his soul was sufficiently attuned to the divine not to follow Nietzsche into his tragic revolt. He knew what he wanted but somehow could not break through to it. He saw the promised land but was not permitted to enter it.” (The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 5, p. 104-105)

       These thoughtful and unusually beautiful words of Voegelin can be fully related also to the evaluation of Jung’s attempt to resolve the same problems that tormented Nietzsche, Weber and other thinkers of the last century. The expression “religiously non-musical” depicts the current crisis in a perfect way, referring to the significance of spiritual music in resolving the relationship between belief and knowledge. Jung’s daughter said about her father that he was non-musical, while Jung himself wrote that he didn’t like polyphony, the musical form that perhaps most clearly depicts the true Godly Oneness (of the composition) in a Multiplicity (of voices), and thus the “ complexiooppositorum” that Jung desired so yearningly.
       Therefore, a question difficult to answer emerges: How was it possible that Jung, who, in his own words, put his effort into the renewal of reverence for the Numinous in modern man, came at the end of his life to such shocking denunciations of the Numinous, represented symbolically by Jesus of Nazareth?
       It almost seems as if the vision of Jung’s childhood, in which he saw a great excrement falling from the heavens and destroying the cathedral of Basel, should find its fulfillment in the end. But should that be the case, why put such enormous effort into its renewal? Could that, perhaps, be so, because Jung wanted to avoid the fate of Nietzsche, who couldn’t stop proclaiming that the cathedral had been destroyed and eventually ended up under its debris himself?

Summary:
On the basis of the ideas outlined in this article, it is possible to conclude that Jung could not resolve his problem of the psychological and mental split in the full sense of the “unification of the opposites”, which he strived so intensely for. Despite his extraordinary effort, the contradictory factors within him did not lead to unification, but remained permanently parallel, or skew. No analysis, however insightful – be it of Christ as fish, Christ as the Philosopher’s Stone, Christ as Anthropos – can bridge the abyss that divides the Christian Gnosis and belief (Aion). For Jung, Christ as God and Christ as man are the two phenomena that exist abreast, but their paths never cross.
       This outcome is bizarre in a way, because it contradicts the original intention of Jung’s psychology. It was oriented to the recognition that the personal ego must establish a relationship with the impersonal forces (Jung called them “collective unconscious”); the ego goes to meet them by shaping them according to the world view maintained, adopting a stance of reverence and ceremonial collaboration.
       Despite the fact that Jung was heading towards this goal from the very beginning, he turned his back to it by the end of his life journey and ended up in a similar kind of resignation to that which he pointed out in the case of Freud. Jung balanced this fact by his public identification with the figure of The Old Wise Man from Lake Zurich, no matter that it contradicted everything that he had discovered and proclaimed on his journey of understanding to the human soul.
       The unification of extreme polarities, represented symbolically by the planetary squares in an astrological chart, cannot be reached at the same level, for “tertium non datur”, as Jung says, and therefore a third something is needed in order to reach this goal. “The spirit is that which unifies”, remind us the alchemists (“Spiritus est qui unificat.”) But this spirit isn’t under the control of the alchemist. That is the reason why the alchemists, besides their laboratories, had also an oratory where they prayed for the success of their Work.
       Jung’s contribution lies in the fact that he took up this problem and enabled those who followed him on this journey to understand the nature and roots of the problem, as well as to imagine the possibilities of its resolution. Jung’s psychology is indispensable, especially for those who are forced to struggle with the same or similar problems (such as the author of these lines).
       If we can say that Jung suffered from a neurosis which he tried to heal throughout his lifelong psychotherapeutic practice, then – as we already said – it was the neurosis of the European man who is aware of his split between the personal and impersonal part of his soul in the conditions of the secular world. This kind of neurosis is perhaps unusually inspirational and fertile, as we can deduce already from Jung’s work as such. He states that in some cases, he even tried to “stir up” the neurosis in a patient, to wake him up from his lethargy. For according to Jung, a collision (polemics) between the personal and impersonal part of the soul is (within the Heraclitan lineage of thoughts) the moving force of human development and maturation. Otherwise we are under the threat of getting stuck and childish.

       Faust: “Two soulsalas! are dwelling in my breast; And each is fain to leave its brother.”
       Nowadays, we could inform Faust that the two souls already split away one from another, while the enlightened part denies the dark and unconscious. But the latter is older, larger, and wiser (Jung called it the “unconscious”) and it keeps coming back into life in the form of mass epidemics that threaten to destroy the human as an individual, person, and citizen.
       Jung’s attempt to heal the trauma of modernity was conditioned by his personal predispositions, i.e. his character, dominant complexes and the family background, mostly in the Protestant tradition, out of which the soul had faded away, for which reason it was necessary to undertake a journey to its rediscovery (see especially The Red Book). Jung’s attempt was individual, unique, and relative. Thanks to his personal engagement, insightfulness and insistence, Jung’s exemplar is highly inspirational for anyone on the journey of self-discovery.
       Jung says that since the very beginning, he was forced to see the opinions of Freud, Adler, but even his own, as relative, or rather as the expression of a certain psychological type.
       When thinking about this topic, Jung believed that

       “thinking, understanding, and reasoning cannot be regarded as independent processes subject only to the eternal laws of logic, but that they are psychic functions co-ordinated with the personality and subordinate to it.” (CW 9/1, par. 150)

       A modern Faust-like human suffers from Jungian neurosis, and Jung’s psychology is, therefore, of primal importance for him. On the one hand, he is forced to admit the significance of religious belief and its symbolism for the resolution of the relationship between the personal and impersonal factors conditioning his existence (according to Jung, religions are “great psychotherapeutic systems”), on the other hand he is no longer able to admit the superiority of the impersonal forces in their inherited traditional form (“Tu solus Altissimus!”) and surrender to their influence and leadership (Paul the Apostle: “It is no longer I, but the Christ in me.” ).

       Through his work, Jung provided the tools for the diagnosis of this critical psychological problem of contemporary Western man and suggested possibilities for its solution. But to Jung himself, the “journey to Rome” wasn’t granted. In 1949, when he finally wanted to carry out his visit to Rome, he was stricken with a faint while buying tickets, and had to give up the journey.

       Anyone who remains truthful to his legacy cannot become a “Jungian” in a professional sense (after all, it was Jung himself who claimed that there were no Jungians), but may – thanks to Jung’s invaluable and indispensable guidance – reach, on his own individuation journey, the crossroads where it is solely up to himself to face the task of making an attempt to solve his own psychological problems, including that of “knowing belief,” on the basis of his own dispositions and abilities, including that of “knowing belief”.

       *

Bibliography:
Jung, Carl Gustav. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
McGuire, William, Hull, R.F.C. C. G. Jung Speaking. Princeton University Press, 1993.
Starý, Rudolf. Cheirón, asklépiovskámedicína a jungovskápsychologie . Praha: Sagittarius, 2000.
Voegelin, Eric. The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 5: Modernity without Restraint . Colombia: University of Missouri Press, 2000.