Notes on Jung 02: The Wealth of the Past

 Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious

“Dogma takes the place of the collective unconscious by formulating its contents on a grand scale...Almost the entire life of the collective unconscious has been channelled into the dogmatic archetypal ideas and flows along like a well-controlled stream in the symbolism of creed and ritual...Mankind has never lacked powerful images to lend magical aid against all the uncanny things that live in the depths of the psyche. Always the figures of the unconscious were expressed in protecting and healing images and in this way were expelled from the psyche into cosmic space.”

Strange images break free of the collective unconscious and escape into the conscious realm to be weaved into a drama before the wonderstruck eyes of Man. It is the wisdom of the ancient mother and is made accessible to Man when he descends voluntarily into the depths, or is flung there when all order collapses into chaos. It is the light at the end of the abyss. Man confronts the Terrible mother Nature and attempts to civilise her - to build walls around her gardens, to rebuild the Paradise he was expelled from, such that he might once again live in peace.

“The fact is that archetypal images are so packed with meaning in themselves that people never think of asking what they really do mean. That the gods die from time to time is due to man’s sudden discovery that they do not mean anything, that they are made by human hands, useless idols of wood and stone. In reality, however, he has merely discovered that up till then he has never thought about his images at all. And when he starts thinking about them, he does so with the help of what he calls “reason”—which in point of fact is nothing more than the sum-total of all his prejudices and myopic views.”

Like the sun that rises up on the horizon every morning, Man’s awakening consciousness conflicted with that which failed to fit into it. These strange symbols that had guided and healed humanity for millenia, suddenly seemed meaningless because they could not be explained by the faculty of reason. Just like the highest angel in God’s kingdom rebelled against the Almighty in an attempt to dethrone him, reason went to war with the transcendent. From time to time, the gods die, like the pillars of Man’s societies were drowned in the Flood, like all order that must be engulfed by chaos occasionally, in order to give birth to new forms. It was Man’s reason that gave him his poverty.

“The gods of Greece and Rome perished from the same disease as did our Christian symbols: people discovered then, as today, that they had no thoughts whatever on the subject. On the other hand, the gods of the strangers still had unexhausted mana. Their names were weird and incomprehensible and their deeds portentously dark—something altogether different from the hackneyed chronique scandaleuse of Olympus. At least one couldn’t understand the Asiatic symbols, and for this reason they were not banal like the conventional gods.”

When man’s intellect is exhausted, when he has used the fullest of that faculty, it is then that the dominion of instinct begins. We know this to be true in individual experience. When Man’s consciousness has fallen - when all that we can think to do has been done - then all that remains is what we have not, or cannot think to do by ourselves. That is when the archetypal images of the collective unconscious come to life and lend a helping hand to weak, helpless and inadequate Man. But what if, when we are at our strongest, the intellect should disrobe those fantastical spirits and drive them back into the depths? Now that we have successfully disproved our own deities, what alien gods will come to Man’s aid when he is undone by his refusal to fall? 

“Shall we be able to put on, like a new suit of clothes, ready-made symbols grown on foreign soil, saturated with foreign blood, spoken in a foreign tongue, nourished by a foreign culture, interwoven with foreign history, and so resemble a beggar who wraps himself in kingly raiment, a king who disguises himself as a beggar? No doubt this is possible. Or is there something in ourselves that commands us to go in for no mummeries, but perhaps even to sew our garment ourselves?”

Will these outlandish gods and ideals deliver men who are not their true beneficiaries? And what when Man dismembers these foreign symbols like he did his own? Will he confront the consequences of the terrible deed when his soul starves for nourishment? When all the blood of all the gods, native and foreign, old and new, flows through the depths of man’s soul and carves our whole gorges, would the lustre of his triumph fade then? What then, will he turn to?

“If we now try to cover our nakedness with the gorgeous trappings of the East, as the theosophists do, we would be playing our own history false...It seems to me that it would be far better stoutly to avow our spiritual poverty, our symbol-lessness, instead of feigning a legacy to which we are not the legitimate heirs at all. We are, surely, the rightful heirs of Christian symbolism, but somehow we have squandered this heritage. We have let the house our fathers built fall into decay, and now we try to break into Oriental palaces that our fathers never knew. Anyone who has lost the historical symbols and cannot be satisfied with substitutes is certainly in a very difficult position today: before him there yawns the void, and he turns away from it in horror. What is worse, the vacuum gets filled with absurd political and social ideas, which one and all are distinguished by their spiritual bleakness.”

In Jung’s view, it would not be the most prudent of decisions should man use the cultural fabric of foreign soils to cover his nakedness. The symbols of his own culture are nourished by his forefathers and by the societies that he has lived in. Now that Man, in his “enlightened” state, took the decision to hack away at the roots of his heritage, he does not get to sustain himself by means of stolen images of the far-flung lands. However, confronting the spiritual poverty of his soul is no easy task either, especially in a world where misshapen ideas rush to fill every void that ever was. Almost with violent fury is any form of ambivalence driven out in societies where ideologies of the tenacious sort take root. And these pernicious spirits make homes in the chasms left behind when the archetypal symbols were uprooted. The undecided become their marionettes. And the wisdom of the collective unconscious lies in wait, like a treasure trove, which alas, might never be found until someday, some noble wayfarer might stumble upon it by accident to make mankind rich once again!

“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. They then become capable of believing in anything.”
            - Émile Leon Cammaerts.