Carl Jung's mystical freakout
this morning i've done a little bit of digging into the strange events that C.G. Jung experienced in 1913-1916, during a period of self-imposed isolation just after his well-known falling out with Freud. thorough Googling variously describes this period in his life as an "encounter with the unconscious", "skirmish with insanity", "communication with the spirit world", "descent into the underworld" and even "deification". the man himself referred to it as his "creative illness". i, of course, prefer the term "mystical freakout". the specific content of his experience involved dream encounters with mythical characters, prophetic dreams about the world drenched in blood, and other experiences. there is some debate as to whether all of the information regarding this time has come out. most notably, this guy Noll seems to think full documentation of the incident has been supressed, in order that it wont be revealed that Jung was in fact a Nietzschean neo-pagan revivalist or even an Aryan Christ.

after the events he penned his Seven Sermons to the Dead, which according to scholar of Gnosticism Stephan Hoeller expresses all of Jung's later theories in concise mythological form. Jung himself in later life said, "It all began then; the later details are only supplements and clarifications of the material that burst forth from the unconscious and at first swamped me. It was the prima materia for a lifetime's work" about the incident. in fact, he emerged from his personal encounter with new theories about the existence of archetypes, the collective unconscious, the structures of the human psyche, the different types of human personality, and the individuation process. he combined these theories with an interest in comparative mythology and dream interpretation to construct an approach to therapy that he called analytical psychology. he also emerged with the idea that many of his patients suffered from a "lack of religion" - his system resumed many of the features of Western alternative spirituality, notably with similarities to gnosticism and alchemy.

so what did his freakout mean? was it his initiation? and is his system really a new religion in disguise, as Noll would have it? who knows. but to this modern-day spiritual libertine, he seems a figure worth serious contemplation and meditation. i choose to see him as an early modern representative of the sacred perennial tradition. in the west, Jungianism picks up where shamanism, paganism, gnosticism, alchemy, and the Romantics left off. he went into his "dark night of the soul" and brought back a treasure that is hard to find: contemporary connection to ancient mysteries. guys like Noll may decry Jung and Jungians for attempting to bring back European paganism under the guise of psychology. fine. to me, his experiences and theories are eminently useful for any modern trying to find his soul or Self in a culture that endorses only the spiritual tyranny of orthodoxy and the spiritual bankruptcy of dogmatic materialism.