Notes on Jung 03: The Call to Adventure

By Sadhika on

 Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious

“Our intellect has achieved the most tremendous things, but in the meantime our spiritual dwelling has fallen into disrepair. We are absolutely convinced that even with the aid of the latest and largest reflecting telescope, now being built in America, men will discover behind the farthest nebulae no fiery empyrean; and we know that our eyes will wander despairingly through the dead emptiness of interstellar space.”

Jung voices his fear that not only will man’s intellectual richness prove insufficient to quell the poverty of his soul, but the greater man’s strides are in the realm of science and rationality, the further away from his roots he might wander. Perhaps the emptiness of the symbols and the subsequent death of the gods is a sign that the objective faculty of man’s psyche has become so self-loving, that it has managed to free(?) man from the grips of any truth that it fails to comprehend by means its very restrained, very skeptical logic. In doing so, it declares itself capable of surviving on its own, with no need of the transcendent. The unconscious may be forced to withdraw deeper and deeper into the crevices of the soul. It may even be forced to tiptoe as if with uncertainty around the newly crowned conscious. But that which helped man survive Nature’s paroxysms will not be slain by the forgetful, cynical and simple-minded seed of Adam. Too long has the unconscious endured to be subdued by a few smug children. No, it would descend of its own accord into the depths. And it would wait.

“Like greedy children we stretch out our hands and think that, if only we could grasp it, we would possess it too. But what we possess is no longer valid, and our hands grow weary from the grasping, for riches lie everywhere, as far as the eye can reach. All these possessions turn to water, and more than one sorcerer’s apprentice has been drowned in the waters called up by himself—if he did not first succumb to the saving delusion that this wisdom was good and that was bad. ”

With the instruments of our newfound wisdom, whole new worlds become visible to us. We gape at them in awe, mesmerised that it was we who discovered these wonderful sights. For a while they will content us, like a child that has found a shiny new toy. For a while at least, we might forget the void from which we recoil in horror. But respite shall not be given us for long. Our eyes were not built to see these shapes alone.

“When our natural inheritance has been dissipated, then the spirit too, as Heraclitus says, has descended from its fiery heights. But when spirit becomes heavy it turns to water, and with Luciferian presumption the intellect usurps the seat where once the spirit was enthroned. Therefore the way of the soul in search of its lost father—like Sophia seeking Bythos—leads to the water, to the dark mirror that reposes at its bottom. In the chambers of the heart dwell the wicked blood-spirits, swift anger and sensual weakness. This is how the unconscious looks when seen from the conscious side...Hence it is generally believed that anyone who descends into the unconscious gets into a suffocating atmosphere of egocentric subjectivity, and in this blind alley is exposed to the attack of all the ferocious beasts which the caverns of the psychic underworld are supposed to harbour.”

At this juncture, in the traditional hero myth, the hero would receive a call beckoning him to adventure. This call is from the maternal unconscious that waits for precisely this moment to win back its estranged son. At first, the conscious part of his psyche, which holds the reins of the hero’s existence, would repel this call as dangerous and unnecessary. But should the hero choose to silence the murmurings of his conscious and respond to the call, he will make the voluntary descent into the depths where the unconscious holds the wisdom that he must liberate. In myth and tale, this is represented as the hero’s father (order, wisdom, culture) that has been imprisoned by the Terrible mother (underworld, unconscious, chaos), and can only be freed when the the hero himself descends into the chaos and danger to wrestle with the demon that guards his captive father. This journey into the underworld is rife with demons of all shapes, for only a true hero should be able to access the treasure which many others may have tried to reach, but perished in the attempt. There will be multiple tests of the hero’s courage and integrity, and each of these will aid in his transformation, so much so that at the end of this arduous journey, the hero will be reborn as a victor, all from his decision to confront potential itself.

“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”
- Mathew 4:4.

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