4um: The Aryan Christ: the Secret Life of Carl Jung (introductory chapter)

Title: The Aryan Christ: the Secret Life of Carl Jung (introductory chapter)
Source: Genesis of Eden
URL Source: http://www.dhushara.com/book/jung/archr.htm
Published: Dec 22, 2008
Author: Richard Noll
Post Date: 2009-06-07 15:41:14 by Deasy
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Keywords: Odin, Doc Martens, Aryan, Solstice
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The book you hold before you is not a biography of Carl Gustav Jung. I sincerely doubt an authentic, comprehensive biography of Jung's entire life will be written any time soon. To do so would require that the heirs of Jung's estate open up everything to a scholar - Jung's private diaries, all the letters he wrote and received, his famous "Red Book" of paintings of his visions and discussions with the Dead, and of course all the personal papers and letters of his wife and collaborator, Emma Jung, who many forget had an interesting and full life independent of her husband's. What we know about Emma Jung would barely fill two or three pages of text, and this will remain the case unless her personal papers are made available to scholars. The Jung family would also have to allow access to any diaries or papers from Jung's collaborator and lover, Antonia Wolff, that may be in the archives, along with documents belonging to Jung's early associate, J. J. Honegger, to which Jung's heirs have no discernible legal claim. As we shall learn, the Honegger papers are of paramount importance for making judgments about Jung's character and intellectual honesty. Regrettably, the surviving members of the Jung family and the administrators of the Jung estate have shown little interest in contributing to the historical record. We do have, however, the posthumously published "autobiography" known as Memories, Dreams, Reflections (hereafter MDR), which purports to be an honest statement from Jung himself about his own life. This is only partly true. As the scholar Alan Elms was the first to document, this book is less an autobiography than a patchwork of material brilliantly integrated by Aniela Jaffe, Jung's assistant in his last years, with copious editorial assistance from the American editors at Pantheon, who brought out the English edition before a German one appeared. Although Jung wrote the initial draft of the first three chapters and a later one entitled "Late Thoughts," in which he speculated on life after death, these were not intended to be the first chapters of an autobiography, despite what the published volume would lead one to think. Furthermore, against Jung's own wishes, his words in these chapters were altered or deleted to conform to the image preferred by his family and disciples. Jaffe took Jung's own contributions, transcripts of his old lectures, and her own notes of discussions with him, put them into the first person, and allowed this to be passed off on an unsuspecting public as an autobiography. Unflattering material was, of course, left out, and even the usual sort of factual material that one expects in a biography or an autobiography is missing, leaving the strange story of an extraordinary individual who somehow lived outside of time and escaped history. The Jung portrayed in MDR is a clairvoyant sage, a miracle worker, a god-man who earns his apotheosis through his encounter with the Dead and with God. His is a morality tale of mystical evolution, as his life becomes the exemplum of his theories, the heroic saga of an "individuated" man who survived a terrifying encounter with extramundane beings (the archetypes) from a transcendent reality (the collective unconscious). Unfortunately, MDR has served as the basis for all subsequent "biographies" of Jung since its first publication in 1962. Until recently, the truthfulness of this preferred version of Jung's "myth" has gone unquestioned. There is great resistance to altering the myth, which would mean tangling Jung in time and space and restoring him to his German cultural milieu, a humiliating descent from mythopoesis into history. MDR, rightly or wrongly, has become one of the primary spiritual documents of the twentieth century. As the story of Jung's spiritual rebirth, it has inspired awe and hope in its readers, reenchanting their worlds. It is a powerful book, and I recall my bewildered reaction to it at age seventeen after the first of what was to become many readings. As I have subsequently learned from years of critical readings of Jung and historical research into his life, MDR and its imitators have actually obscured the story of a Jung who is much more interesting-and at times terrifyingly flawed-because of his humanity, not his semidivinity.

I further believe that despite his multiple professional personas of physician, psychotherapist and social critic, he consciously devoted his life to promoting the growth of a religious community centred on his personality and his teachings. This was his calling and many in his earliest circle of disciples ... followed him because he was 'the new light'. ... Jung openly told more than one person that he and those who follow his methods were chosen to be the redeemers of God. ... "He regarded his life as a mission to serve the function of making God conscious. He had to help God to make himself conscious, and not for our own sake, but for the sake of God." I believe this is at the core of what Jung was about. Most persons who consider themselves Jungians would not disagree with this, and many openly acknowledge their participation in such a mystery. Some, worried about how this reflects on the public perception of their secular professional identity, which they have bound totemically with Jung's name, have grave reservations.

I will risk controversy with an additional observation. Through years of reflection on Jung's considerable impact on the culture and spiritual landscape of the twentieth century, I have come to the conclusion that, as an individual, he ranks with the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate (fourth century C.E.) as one who significantly undermined orthodox Christianity and restored the polytheism of the Hellenistic world in Westem civilization. I realize this is quite an incautious statement, reflecting the hubris of the historian who succumbs to the fantasy of being a demiurge. Nevertheless, I believe that, for a variety of historical and technological factors-modern mass media being the most important-Jung has succeeded where Julian failed. For the first sixty years of his life-the period of his "secret life" largely lost to history-Jung was openly hostile to Judeo-Christian orthodoxies, particularly Judaism and Roman Catholicism. Contemporaneously, the patriarchal monotheism of the orthodox Judeo-Christian faiths has all but collapsed. Filling that void, however, we increasingly find Protestants, Catholics, and Jews adopting alternative, syncretic belief systems that often belie a basis in Jungian "psychological" theories. I place the term "psychological" in quotation marks because I believe-and argue in this book-that this twentieth-century mask was constructed deliberately, and somewhat deceptively, by Jung to make his own magical, polytheist, pagan worldview more palatable to a secularized world conditioned to respect only those ideas that seem to have a scientific air to them.

At Reimer's, Jung found himself in one of the central incubators of German Romanticism and nationalism. He came into contact with a steady flow of ideas from determined men-some of them political fugitiveswho were convinced of the idea of a Volksgeist, the unique characteristics or genius of the German people as a single nation, determined by language, climate, soil or landscape, certain economic factors, and, of course, race. These ideas found form in the essays of J. G. Herder, Amdt, Jahn, and the sermons of Schleiermacher. Here Jung met the Schlegel brothers Friedrich and August Wilhelm-and Ludwig Tieck, all noted writers and founders of the Romantic movement. Jung underwent a transformation not only of political consciousness, as evidenced by his contributions to the Teutsche Liederbuch anthology of German nationalist poem-songs (Lieder), but of religious consciousness as well. As confirmed in the baptismal certificate signed by Schleiermacher-another proud possession of the grandson - Karl Gustav Jung renounced the Roman Catholic faith and became an Evangelical Protestant in the Romantic and nationalist mode. The aftershocks of the grandfather's renunciation of his ancestral faith can still be felt by those touched by the life and work of the grandson. The sudden conversion of the grandfather, his act of apostasy, his angry rejection of Rome, would arguably prove to be one of the most powerful determinants of the destiny of C. G. Jung. The importance of this familial mark of Cain cannot be overstated. Religion mated with German nationalism in the eighteenth century and produced a fever in the people called Pietism.

Pietists' mystical enthusiam is reflected in some of their favourite incendiary metaphors for their ecstatic experiences. It was the fire of the Holy Spirit that must burn within , indeed it was often said that "the heart must burn" . They emphasized the burning experience of "Christ within us" instead of the inanimate, automatic belief in a dogma of a "Christ for us". Such subtle distinctions had profound implications for German nationalism, for the belief arose in a feeling of a group identity bound by common inner experience, a mystical blood-union of necessity, rather than as something external existing for an individual (9)

The family fable-discounted by everyone with an amused smile, including by Carl Jung himself sometimes-lives in the tradition of all myths of erotic union between mortal women and the gods. Many within the Jung family and without would occasionally tell the story furtively, relishing the role of an insider privy to celebrity gossip, that the mother of Professor Doctor Karl Jung had a "spring to the side" as they say in German, an extramarital tryst with Goethe that resulted in Karl, so the story goes. True or not, Carl Jung enjoyed telling this anecdote throughout his life. Its origins are not known, but there is good reason to suspect it was alive even during Karl Jung's lifetime. Jung said he first heard this story from strangers when he was a schoolboy, which must have only reinforced the possibility that it might be more than a frivolous family story. Carl Jung marveled at the similarities between his grandfather and Goethe. Both were vital, energetic, productive men who dominated, intellectually and temperamentally, most people. Both were scientists as well as poets, influenced by Pietism in their youth and disaffected from it in their maturity. Both were Germans and Freemasons-Illuminati, in fact and above all, true Romantics until the end. They both seemed larger than life, daemonic, godlike, more like forces of nature than men. Carl Jung knew that he shared many of the temperamental qualities of his grandfather (and therefore, by extension, of Goethe). By his own admission, it was the legend of his grandfather, not the living example of his father, against which Jung constantly measured himself as a young man. In a seminar he gave in Zurich in 1925, Carl Jung expressed his belief in the idea of "ancestor possession"-that is, that certain hereditary units would become activated under certain circumstances in one's life, allowing the spirit of one's ancestor to then "take over" one's actions (18).

Jung felt a special kinship with Goethe by age fifteen, after his first of many readings of Faust. "It poured into my soul like a miraculous balm," he recalled. Faust, the learned scholar who has many doctorates but is "no wiser than before," is the seeker of truth who sacrifices the realm of the intellect to tum to the magical invocation of spins for occult wisdom. Jung regarded Goethe's Faust as a new dispensation, a product of revelation, a contribution to the world of religious experience as a new sacred text. In 1932 he wrote in a letter, "Faust is the most recent pillar in that bridge of the spirit which spans the morass of world history, beginning with the Gilgamesh epic, the I Ching, the Upanishads, the Tao-te-Ching, the fragments of Heraclitus, and continuing in the Gospel of St. John, the letters of St. Paul, in Meister Eckhardt and in Dante." In his eyes, Goethe became "a prophet," especially for confirming the autonomous reality of "evil" and "the mysterious role it played in delivering man from darkness and suffering." The public expression of Jung's position on reincarnation, to be found in the chapter "On Life After Death" in MDR, is that he keeps "a free and open mind" and is not "in a position to assert a definite opinion," while at the same time several cryptic pages are devoted to "hints" of his past lives. In fact, Jung says at one point, "Recently, however, I observed in myself a series of dreams which would seem to describe the process of reincarnation in a deceased person of my acquaintance." After remarking that he has never come across any such dreams in other persons," he has no basis for comparison and therefore chooses "not to go into it any further." He does admit, however, that "after this experience I view the problem of reincarnation with somewhat different eyes." But we know from archival sources that his private opinion was that these dreams confirmed to him that he had been Goethe in a previous incarnation. "I know no answer to the question of whether the karma which I live is the outcome of my past lives, or whether it is not rather the achievement of my ancestors, whose heritage comes together in me," Jung confessed in MDR. "Am I a combination of the lives of these ancestors and do I embody these lives again? Have I lived before in the past as a specific personality, and did I progress so far in that life that I am now able to seek a solution? I do not know."

Yet reincarnation implies many existences, and Jung did not end his metaphysical antecedents with Goethe. In replies to questions about his possible past lives, Jung sometimes claimed he was Meister Eckhardt.

Jung's maternal grandfather, the Reverend Samuel Preiswerk, was a man of many talents. He was chief of the Protestant clergy of Basel, a professor of Old Testament exegesis and oriental languages at the Evangelical Institution in Geneva, an acclaimed Hebrew scholar, a poet, a composer of religious hymns, and a man who regularly spoke to spirits. The spirits of the Dead were everywhere among the living and could be addressed, but only if one knew their language. He believed that Hebrew was the language of heaven (he was not alone in this regard!), and he fully expected to speak to the Old Testament prophets and his savior in their divine tongue. In order to fulfill biblical prophecy, Samuel Preiswerk actively sought the return of the Jews to a homeland of their own in Palestine, and Theodor Herzl acknowledged him as an early Zionist. According to the family legends, he would talk to the spirit of his deceased first wife in weekly seances while locked in his study, much to the dismay of his second wife and the fascination of his children, including his favorite, Emilie. He taught her and his other children to stand behind him and chase away the spirits when he gave his sermons, for he and the family earnestly believed that the air around them was crowded with the chattering masses of the Dead. Emilie believed herself to have second sight, and throughout her life had precognitive dreams and other paranormal experiences that she attributed to messages from the Dead. She kept a diary, now in the possession of the Jung family, of these clairvoyant episodes. Carl Jung never made any secret of the fact that, in addition to being a hysteric, his mother was also a psychic, and a good one at that (24).

For Jung the unconscious would always be a source of higher knowledge beyond the confines of time and three-dimensional space, and one could establish a personal relationship with the voices and images of one's unconscious, one's inner Land of the Dead. But long before the First World War, when Jung again led others into the Land of the Dead, he endured several years of scientific doubt and relative skepticism about the reality of spirits. During these first years of Jung's psychiatric career, a career cruelly built on the sacrifice of Helly's social reputation, the spirits were transformed. Jung renamed them. The spirits became "complexes," and the spirit world became "the unconscious." Until when, in Zurich in 1916, once again the unconscious became the home of the ancestors, the inner fatherland, the realm of the gods (41).

"Is everything the Dawn? Is everything the Sun?" Muller asked in a famous passage. "This question I had asked many times before it was addressed to me by others ... but I am bound to say that my own researches lead me again and again to the dawn and the sun as the chief burden of myths of the Aryan race." To Muller, the sun god of the ancient Aryans was in the languages of their descendants. To Jung, God was in the blood, and this was his rationale for seeking and finding solar myths in the symptoms of psychotic patients at the Burgholzli and in Miss Frank Miller, whom he regarded on the verge of psychosis even though he had never met her. In highly disturbed patients a biologically based disease process eroded the normal covering of repressive defense mechanisms, some of which he thought were biologically inherited in a quasi-Lamarckian fashion from centuries of civilization and Christianity. The erosion of the thick mask of defense mechanisms released archaic material from the deepest strata of the unconscious mind. Given that Jung and most of his patients were of Aryan stock-a group, unlike the older and more "civilized" Semites, who had practiced their natural religion of the sun and the sky until Christianized only one thousand years ago-it is no surprise that symbols of the sun arise again and again. This fact was consistent with the science of philology as he knew it from the books of Renan and Muller. It was also consistent with biology and race (112).

Emest Jones complained to Freud in December 1912 that "Jung is going to save the world, another Christ (with certainly anti-Semitism combined)." Freud concurred. "I thank you for your very just remarks about Jung. In fact, he behaves like a perfect fool, he seems to be Christ himself, and in the particular things he says and does there is always something of the [rascall]."

After the formal break in personal relations between the two men in January 1913, Zurich and Vienna never seemed so far apart. On June 8, Freud wrote to Ferenczi, "You are right. Our dear Swiss have gone crazy." Then, confirming that the source of tension in the movement emanated from a complex fusion of religion and racialism, he observed:

On the matter of Semitism: there are certainly great differences from the Aryan spirit. We can become convinced of that every day. Hence, there will surely be different world-views and art here and there. But there should not be a particular Aryan or Jewish science. The results must be identical, and only their presentations may vary. Certainly my remark about the Interpretation of Dreams should be taken in this way. If these differences occur in conceptualizing the objective relations in science, then something is wrong. It was our desire not to interfere with their more distant worldview and religion, but we considered ours to be quite favorable for conducting science. You had heard that Jung had declared in America that [psychoanalysis] was not a science but a religion. That would certainly illuminate the whole difference. But there the Jewish spirit regretted not being able to join in.

By the end of 1913, however, Jung did not share Freud's enlightened opinion that there should not be a specifically Aryan or Jewish science. Psychoanalysis had to raise the consciousness of humanity to a higher level through a religious outlook. The only problem was that such a conception of psychoanalysis could no longer have a place for Jews.

The last psychoanalytic congress that Jung attended-the fourth, in 1913 in Munich, at which he was re-elected president of the international movement-confirmed the disintegration of old personal relationships and the birth of new alliances. One personal relationship that ended was the torrid extramarital affair between Lou Andreas-Salome and the Swedish physician and psychoanalyst Poul Carl Bjeffe. They had met through a mutual friend during a visit to Sweden in 1911. Comparing him to her fanner lover, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Andreas-Salome noted in her private joumal, "Both blonde haired, with sensuous mouths, splendid brows, otherwise rather different." Freud met Bjeffe in January 1911 and reported to Jung that the Swede "is rather dry and laconic, but . . . a thorough and serious thinker." By 1916, in a book on the history of psychoanalysis and its techniques, Bjerre openly criticized Freud for exaggerating the importance of sexuality. Although Bjeffe helped to found the first Swedish psychoanalytic society, he nonetheless became persona non grata to Freud and the Viennese. Today his works have been forgotten everywhere but in Sweden. After Bjeffe confirmed that he was sympathetic to Jung's side in the war against Freud and the Viennese, their personal relationship heated up. On November 10, 1913, Jung wrote to Bjeffe, complaining that Freud had recently attempted to discredit him. Although we do not know exactly what Freud said to Maeder, Jung had sent a sharp letter of complaint to Freud about it on October 27. Jung continued to complain to Bjeffe about being accused of partisanship against the Viennese at the Munich congress and emphasized his wish to raise his efforts to a new level for the benefit of all. Yet the Viennese continue to be a sore point with him. Near the end of the letter, Jung made a statement that reveals his inner thoughts and sets the tone for much of the way he conducted his own movement in the years that followed, years in which his movement took on the nature of an Aryans-only cult of redemption and rebirth. This is the first piece of hard evidence to surface regarding his racialist outlook during this early period in his career.

To Poul Bjerre, Jung said simply: "Ich war zuvor kein Antisemit, jetzt werde ich es, glaube ich." "Until now I was no anti-Semite, [but] now I'll become one, I believe."

Jung's massive hymn to the sun could not have come at a more opportune time in German cultural history. All around him, in places such as Bavaria, Thuringia, and Ascona, German-speaking youths were on the march. They were hiking, singing German folk songs, reading Navalis, Goethe, Haeckel, Wilhelm Bblsche, Hesse, and Madame Blavatsky, wearing swastika pendants and runic rings, bathing nude in the sun, and dancing around bonfires on the days of the summer solstice-the ancient German festival of the "changing sun" (Sonnwendfest). They carried banners with the ancient Aryan "sun wheel" on them, a symbol of god that could be found in the ancient homelands of the Aryans-Iran and especially India-in the for-in of circular mandalas. And they sang hymns of praise to the sun. Because of decades of Volkish speculation about the consequences of the work of philologists such as Muller and Renan, there was an extraordinary revival of interest in not only the symbolism of sun worship but also its practice. The natural religion of the ancient Aryans-and indeed, of all humans if one were to speculate far enough-was revived by a multitude of groups all over Germany, Austria, and especially Switzerland, where cults and heretical sects had blossomed for centuries. Some actually performed group rituals in honor of the sun. But sun worship was just one element in a confused mass of cultural contradictions that beset Ger-inany in the three decades preceding the First World War. From the racialist right to the anarchist left a culture of "progressive reaction" against industrial capitalism was on the rise. All of the values that formed the foundation of the industrial order-repressive Judeo-Christian antihedonism, utilitarianism, and rational thought-were confronted with new philosophies of life or of pure experiences that exalted myth over history, impulsive action or deed over conscious reflection, and feeling or intuition over rational thought. This progressive reaction, as historian Jost Hermand has termed it, was manifest in a profound sense of loss, a sense that a spiritual connection with nature and the cosmos had been sacrificed with the rise of a more highly mechanized, industrialized, and urbanized civilization. Much of the sense of loss was expressed in metaphors of degeneration and decay. Civilization had ruined human beings by forcing them into unnatural, cramped, urban environments. Diseases physical and mental were hatched in some places, and the medical science of the day believed that such damage to an individual could be passed down to successive generations. Racial renewal, whether for the individual or society as a whole, was associated with new attitudes toward sexuality and eroticism. There was a cry to recover the Volk-that mystical union of a people with its blood and landscape-from the degenerate industrialized masses. The iron cage of "civilization"-Judeo-Christian beliefs and other political and value systems-had to be cast off in order to recover true culture, the primordial ground of the soul, the Volk. There was only one solution: recover the "archaic man" within, allowing a rejuvenating return to the chthonic powers of the Edenic, Aryan past. It is no coincidence that these same ideas are expressed time and again by C. G. Jung, especially in the first sixty years of his life. The multifaceted Volkish movement (Volkstumbewegung) had a broad plan for Germanic society: at the individual level, the taking of cures, abstinence from alcohol, nudism, vegetarianism, the eating of health foods, contact with the ancestors through spiritualist practices, and hiking through Nature were all remedies to erase the sense of profound loss that so many suffered. At the level of culture, a cleansing of the Aryan race through eugenics and deportations was proposed. Inspired by Herder, Schleiermacher, Ernst Mortiz Amdt, and Turnvater Jahn, throughout the nineteenth century the movement grew increasingly influential as the Germans sought their place in the sun. After German unification in 1871, Volkish energies fueled the establishment of a multitude of lodges, clubs, societies, and so on, all devoted to spiritual renewal. Some of these groups were motivated by blood mysticism and fantasies of reform through a return to the worship of the old Aryan gods. As early as 1814, Amdt had proposed a return to the celebration of the summer solstice as a way to return politically fragmented Germans to their cultural and religious roots. It was left to future leaders to bring his dream into reality. Eugen Diederichs, the famous Jena publisher of many of the new texts of this mystical, Volkish, neo-romantic movement, was one of them. He personally led sun-worshiping rituals with his youth-movement disciples beginning in 1904, expressing the beliefs of so many of them when he said, "My view of god is this, that I regard the sun as a source of all life." The youth organization of the Monistenbund-inspired and led by Haeckel-sponsored sun-worshiping festivals each summer solstice. Haeckel himself was not a practicing neopagan but loved the spirit of the movement. In 1910, the year Jung got lost in sun-hero myths while researching Wandlungen, a Monistenbund joumal reproduced this hymn to the sun:

We are all children of the sun. Out of its womb our planet was bom. An eter nal law of nature compels us to be within its sphere and influence. The im mensity of space is cold, still, lifeless-our luminous mother sun, warming and ripening our fruit, appears as the simple, true element of life. Our ances tors knew this in ancient times. Thus their justifiable joy when the sun made its slow victoriou@ spiral across the sky. They then remembered that all those trees, which concealed their greenness in the wintertime, were consecrated to the god, Wotan.45

Others wanted a Wagnerian twist to their Volkish neopaganism. They gathered in bearskins and made ritual sacrifices of animals to Wotan, Thor, Baldur, and other Teutonic deities. They studied the symbols of the ancient Norse runes and took visionary joumeys to meet with members of an ancient spiritual brotherhood. There were dozens of groups like these, large and small. They convinced themselves that they were chosen, like the grail knights in Wagner's Parsifal, to seek and protect the Holy Grail-in this case, the spiritual purity of Aryan blood. The most famous of these was the Tannenberg Foundation of General Erich Ludendorff, war hero and, later, a co-conspirator in Adolf Hider's failed putsch in 1923. The symbol of Ludendorff's organization was the hammer of Thor. Like many in German culture at the turn of the century, Ludendorff wanted to eradicate Christianity and replace it with an Aryan faith. As one commentator on the neopagan movement in Germany revealed, "In line with the Tannenberg program for the restoration of the ancient Germanic religion, General Ludendorff, accompanied by a few young men, would from time to time retire to the forests near Munich, where a bonfire was lighted and a horse sacrificed in honor of Thor, the god of thunder."

Jung's German spirituality was never more apparent: his references to the rootedness of one's spirituality, of the fact that one's spirituality must come from one's blood, and the appeal to stay within the boundaries of one's mystical landscape. In a 1918 essay, "Uber das Unbewusste" (translated as "The Role of the Unconscious"), Jung used "rootedness" to argue that the psychoanalysis of Freud and Alfred Adler could apply only to Jews. Jung argued that Germans would find Jewish psychoanalysis unsatisfying. Analytical psychology is therefore an Aryan science and form of spiritual psychotherapy that can truly assist only those of Aryan blood. Whereas Jung considered the English an extension of Germanic blood, his tolerance did not extend to Slavs such as Ouspensky. The English were Aryans, they could be redeemed with his methods. Slavs, although originally Aryan, had too much Asian blood mixed in; they would have a difficult time. Jews could not be redeemed.

Although every foreigner who came into contact with Jung received a heavy dose of Volkish mysticism, few understood its uniquely German context.

The term rooted was constantly invoked by Volkish thinkers-and with good reason. Such rootedness conveyed the sense of man's correspondence with the landscape through his soul and thus with the Volk, which embodied the life spirit of the cosmos. It provided the essential link in the Volkish chain of being. Moreover, rural rootedness served as a contrast to urban dislocation, or what was termed "uprootedness." It also fumished a convenient criterion for excluding foreigners from the Volk and the virtues of rootedness. In addition, the concept of rootedness provided a standard for measuring man's completeness and his inner worth. Accordingly, having no roots stigmatized a person as being deprived of the life force and thus lacking a properly func tioning soul. Rootlessness condemned the whole man, whereas rootedness signified membership in the Volk which rendered man his humanity.

The Aryan Christ

More details

The Aryan Christ: the secret life of Carl Jung

By Richard Noll

Edition: illustrated

Published by Random House, 1997

Original from the University of Michigan

Digitized Sep 30, 2008

ISBN 0679449450, 9780679449454

334 pages

Psychiatrist of the Gods?

By WALTER KENDRICK

nytimes.com, 1997

Read the First Chapter of "Carl Gustav Jung" In December 1913, a funny thing happened in Kusnacht, Switzerland. According to Frank McLynn's ''Carl Gustav Jung,'' during that month Jung fought a ''skirmish with insanity,'' possibly brought on by a midlife crisis; he had a series of portentous dreams that culminated in the apparition of Philemon, ''a mythological creature recalling centaurs, mermaids and the Minotaur,'' who dropped in for chats in Jung's garden. But Richard Noll's ''Aryan Christ'' paints a more lurid picture: Jung's ''head changed into that of a lion and he became a god. He became the Deus Leontocephalus, the lion-headed god whose image is found in the sanctuaries of the mystery cult of Mithras (first to fourth centuries C.E.).'' There is a discrepancy here.

It is due in part to McLynn's and Noll's different sources. McLynn's account of Jung's ''descent into the underworld'' relies chiefly on the official version recorded by Aniela Jaffe in ''C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections'' (1963). Noll regards this source as tainted by ''a significant, deliberate omission'': ''the long-suppressed story of Jung's deification,'' which ''has been hidden for more than 80 years.'' So Noll goes back to the notes on a 1925 seminar, where Jung plainly said, ''The animal face which I felt mine transformed into was the famous Leontocephalus of the Mithraic Mysteries.'' Jung presented this flapdoodle as a dream, not a real event, but according to Noll Jung believed it to have been real: ''He had been initiated into the most ancient of mysteries and had become a god.'' The truth, of course, had to be kept dark, lest Jung lose his ''modicum of respectability.'' Only the great man's most intimate associates have been aware of it -- until now.

The differences between McLynn and Noll go deeper than their choices of documentation. McLynn's ''Carl Gustav Jung'' is a full-fledged biography by the author of five others, including lives of Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Henry Morgan Stanley, the African explorer. McLynn, a professional biographer and neither pro- nor anti-Jung, recognizes that ''Jung is in many ways a battlefield'' and has sought to avoid absorbing ''any of the conscious or unconscious parti pris the man and his doctrines provoke.'' The result is an evenhanded chronicle that follows Jung from cradle to grave and attempts to explicate the theories he constantly spun out.

McLynn's tone remains coolly reasonable, though he often finds Jung exasperating: ''It was typical of him to muddy the waters so that a good argument became dissolved in a bad one''; Jung's exposition of general ideas was ''typically turbid and confused''; in his last years, he displayed a ''maddening insistence, whenever he had lost something, that it had been spirited away by supernatural forces.'' McLynn's Jung emerges as an oversized Swiss version of an eccentric Englishman -- annoying to have around but dangerous only to those whose stupidity deserves what it gets.

Noll's Jung is a different creature altogether. ''The Aryan Christ'' doesn't pretend to be a biography; it skims across Jung's early years to focus on that crucial month in 1913, and it largely ignores his life after about 1930. In part, Noll does for Jung what Frank Sulloway did for Sigmund Freud in ''Freud: Biologist of the Mind'' (1979): he places Jung's dreams and theories in the context not of biology but of contemporary mythological studies, showing how virtually all his supposed revelations can be found in books by once-popular authorities like Friedrich Creuzer and Franz Cumont. The Jungian panoply of archetypes, the collective unconscious and so on, may be simply a byproduct of ''cryptomnesia,'' or ''implicit memory,'' which is ''implicated in such contemporary issues as 'false memory syndrome' in cases of alleged child abuse,'' Noll says. ''If so,'' he concludes, ''the collective unconscious may still be said to exist, but only on the shelves of Jung's personal library.''

Debunking, however, ranks second on Noll's agenda. His first aim is to prove that Jungianism should be called neither psychotherapy nor philosophy but religion, ''an Aryans-only cult of redemption and rebirth.'' Jung and his followers, Noll maintains, knew this dire truth and concealed it from the world under a series of masks. The inconsistencies and contradictions in Jung's work make perfect sense to Noll because ''Jung was careful to always speak and write in code.'' Like other conspiracy theories, Noll's explains everything. The Jung conspiracy, furthermore, continues to this day, he insists, carried on by the jealous guardians of Jung's personal papers.

''The Aryan Christ'' is an excellent example of the kind of parti pris that McLynn avoids. Noll has suffered at the hands of ''The Jung Cult'' (the title of his previous book on the subject): those guardians refused to answer his letters, and the publication of an anthology he edited, which presumably would have supported his theory, was canceled ''due to objections by the Jung family.'' Noll seems weary of the whole business, but he's still licking his wounds. For all its ominous evocation of cults and conspiracies, ''The Aryan Christ'' fails to convince me that any serious damage has been done by a few people's adherence to an obviously wacko creed. I prefer McLynn's no-nonsense summation: ''Acres of print could have been saved if Jung had come clean and admitted that he was a prophet.''

McLynn's reasonableness never flags, even when he must handle such crazies as Jung's mother, Emilie, who bore him on July 26, 1875, and devoted herself thereafter to scaring the daylights out of him. Or his cousin Helene Preiswerk, a fake medium, whose antics formed the basis of Jung's dissertation at the University of Basel, where he qualified as a medical doctor in 1900. Or Jung himself, who throughout his youth (some might say his life) exhibited frequent signs of an ''unbalanced mental state.''

McLynn patiently follows Jung through his years at the Burgholzli hospital in Zurich; through his love affair with Freud, who called him his ''beloved son'' until their bitter split in 1913; and through all the gyrations of Jung's later life --his fascination with alchemy and ''ambivalent'' attraction to Nazism in the 1930's, his turn toward astrology and flying saucers in the 1950's, his ascension as ''the New Age guru'' in the years just before his death on June 6, 1961. McLynn never loses his straight face, calmly reporting for instance that Jung hated jet travel because ''the body went too fast for the soul, which had to catch it up; this was the true meaning of 'jet lag.' ''

Yet one gets the impression that McLynn, although he never says so, regards Jung as certifiable and his followers as worse. There's no accounting for the followers, but McLynn has a key to Jung's case: he was Swiss. As a nation, says McLynn, the Swiss are ''xenophobic, conservative, earthbound, introverted, money-minded''; so was Jung. He displayed ''the characteristic Swiss mixture of obstinacy, doggedness, stolidity and innate pride''; in some ways he was simply ''a home-loving Swiss bourgeois.'' Recent revelations of Swiss banking activities have given those traits a sinister cast. Still, it's a provocative thought: along with cheese, complicated pocket knives and cuckoo clocks, the world has Switzerland to thank for the infuriating genius of Carl Gustav Jung.

Walter Kendrick is a professor of English at Fordham University and the editor, with Perry Meisel, of ''Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, 1924-1925.''