Theos-Talk Archives (December 2002 Message tt00658)

I read the below article at:

http://www.equip.org/free/DP215.htm

It is from a Christian site so some of you out there
may consider this a little bias. Here is what another
review briefly said:

"In this provocative assessment of Jung's thought,
Noll boldly argues that such ideas as the "collective
unconscious" and the theory of the archetypes come as
much from late 19th-century occultism, neo-paganism,
and social Darwinian teachings as they do from natural
science. Written for the general reader, this book
will also be an important source for historians of
science and psychiatry."

Even if Jung's thought did come from such sources does
this mean that his thought has any less validity?
Perhaps not to those who reside here on this list. But
in our impressionist society many people would believe
that Jung does indeed have less validity (and vice
versa). If you're a scientist who had never heard of
Jung and I was explaining Jung's theories and how he
came to erect those theories I am sure that you would
be quite sceptical. On the other hand, if you're a New
Ager and you believed everything that was written in
the New Age section of the book store, then a supposed
scientist of Jung's credibility would, to you,
reinforce the notion that every New Age concept thrown
around is completely correct. Like everything in life
it is probably best to follow the middle path. Was
Jung a quack? Yes. Was Jung a genius? Yes. But go out,
read his stuff, and decide for yourself.




The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement

Richard Noll

(Princeton University Press, 1994) 



In the early years of this century, Swiss psychiatrist
Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) became the
second-in-command in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic
movement. In 1913 Jung broke with Freud and
established his own movement, called analytic
psychology. 

Although Freud’s importance in the history of
psychology has been much greater than Jung’s, in
recent decades the former’s influence has declined
while the latter’s has grown. Jung’s increasing
influence is most noticeable in the broader culture.
Best-selling authors who promote Jungian ideas include
the late Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth), Thomas
Moore (The Care of the Soul), and Clarissa Pinkola
Estés (Women Who Run with the Wolves). 

In my judgment, no single individual has done more to
shape the contemporary New Age movement than Jung. And
Jung has also won acceptance from many professing
orthodox Christians, some of whom are popularizers of
his ideas (e.g., J. Gordon Melton, Morton Kelsey, and
John Sanford). His profound influence on the inner
healing movement is documented in Don Matzat’s Inner
Healing: Deliverance or Deception? (Harvest House,
1987). 

Because of Jung’s extreme importance today, the
publication of Richard Noll’s The Jung Cult was a
major literary event. It won a prize as the best book
of 1994 on psychology from the Association of American
Publishers. Noll, 36, is a clinical psychologist who
recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the
history of science at Harvard University. The book’s
central thesis is that the movement that Jung
initiated is much closer in nature to a neopagan
(Aryan) cult than the scientific psychiatric
discipline that it has always claimed to be. It is not
just religious but a religion. 

Noll affirms that Jung increasingly guided his
movement away from the trappings of a scientific
discipline, shap­ing it instead into a “charismatic
movement” or cult of personality built around himself.
Jung’s true esoteric message was made available
mystery-cult style only to initiates who had undergone
one hundred hours of analysis and had obtained Jung’s
personal permission. Since Jung’s death it has been
passed down to the present generation of initiates by
a “body of priest-analysts.” 

The “Fin de Siecle”: In Search of the Historical Jung.
Convinced that the Jung portrayed in Jungian
literature is not historically reliable but rather the
well-crafted image of a cultic leader preserved by his
cult, Noll set out to uncover the historical Jung. To
do so, it was necessary for him to comprehensively
analyze the vast intellectual milieu that gave rise to
Jungian psychology. He has done an amazing job. 



Noll asserts that none of the extant biographies of
Jung place him within the historical context of the
fin de siecle (“end of the [nineteenth] century”), a
period in European history that Jung himself claimed
“‘contains the origin of all my ideas’” (p. 26). It
was a time of “cultural ferment and generational
collision in which opposing forces of rationality and
irrationality, of social progress and hereditary
degeneration, of positivism and occultism, scraped
together like great tectonic plates and set off
earthquakes and aftershocks that culminated in the
Great War and its subsequent revolutions and putsches
. . . .” (27). No one better represented the fin de
siecle period than philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche,
the prophet of modernity and irrationalism. And, Noll
affirms, no one exerted a greater influence over Jung
than Nietzsche. 

Nietzsche himself was strongly influenced by the
German higher criticism of the nineteenth century that
sought for the “historical Jesus’ and, in the process,
reduced Christian theology to the level of mythology.
Noll observes that “by the end of the century
widespread skepticism about the divinity of Jesus and
the truth of the stories in the Gospels of the New
Testament opened the way for social experimentation
with alternative religions, neopagan, occultist, or
atheistic life-styles” (34). To this he adds, “Jung’s
later repudiation of orthodox Christianity has its
roots in this Protestant critical theology that also
redirected Nietzsche to explore pagan paths of
regeneration” (37). 

This revision of the image of Christ allowed people in
the current of the fin-de-siecle to reevaluate pagan
religions, especially the ancient Hellenistic (Greek
or Greek influenced) mystery cults, which seemed to
have many surface similarities with certain aspects of
the early Christ cult of the Roman Empire. The ancient
mysteries and their pagan gods would no longer seem as
satanic and taboo to the average Christian — or at
least to the learned scholar... If Jesus of Nazareth
was no longer outside of time and was in fact a
historical person, as these German Protestant
theologians argued, how could any thinking Christian
turn to Christ or his contemporary representatives in
the various Christian churches for redemption or
salvation? Many late nineteenth-century individuals
came up with creative solutions to these problems and
paved new paths to individual fulfillment — in some
cases with more than a little help from some very
ancient pagan sources. (37) 

Haeckel and the “Biogenetic Law.” Of course,
evolutionary theory also strongly influenced the
thinking of young fin-de-siecle intellectuals such as
Jung. Evolution seemed to hammer another nail into the
coffin of orthodox Christianity. But in Germany the
dominant evolutionary theorist was not Charles Darwin
but biologist Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel’s published views
on human evolution predated those of Darwin, and it
was he who developed the famous “biogenetic law” that
“ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” (i.e., that the
evolutionary stages of a species are repeated in the
prenatal development of individual members of that
species). 

Haeckel was not an atheist but a pantheistic monist
who held to the unity of matter and spirit. Believing,
therefore, that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny in
the realm of the soul as well as the body, he called
on psychological researchers to demonstrate this
principle. Apparently Jung took this summons
seriously, for his theory of a collective unconscious
(race memory) was originally based on the biogenetic
law. 

Jung wrote in The Psychology of the Unconscious (as
quoted in Noll, 53) that the “phantastical” thinking
found in the “lower races” in children, and even in
modern educated adults when they allow their minds to
wander, corresponds to the “phantastical, mythological
thinking of antiquity.” Thus, “from all these signs it
may be concluded that the soul possesses in some
degree historical strata, the oldest stratum of which
would correspond to the unconscious.” 

Noll reveals the significance of all this to
analytical psychology: 

Haeckel thus becomes the key to understanding the
biological ideas underlying Jungs hypothesis of a
phylogenetic layer of the unconscious mind circa 1909.
In his first published theory to this effect, in 1911,
Jung introduces the idea that his phylogenetic layer
contains the mythological images and thinking of pagan
antiquity: therefore, when Jung’s use of language is
analyzed to reveal his intent, it is a decidedly
pre-Christian layer that has been covered up by
centuries of Judeo-Christian sediment. Although
initially viewed as, perhaps, “psychosis” or
“incipient psychosis” in 1909, by 1916 — after
repudiating the relevance of the Christian myth in his
own life in 1912 — Jung instead advocates deliberately
cutting through centuries of strangling
Judeo-Christian underbrush to reach the promised land
of the “impersonal psyche,” a pre-Christian, pagan
“land of the Dead,” and to thereby be revitalized.
(54; emphases in original.) 

Around 1916 Jung stopped referring to a phylogenetic
unconscious and began instead to speak of an
impersonal or collective unconscious. By so doing he
was shifting his emphasis from a biologically defined
unconscious composed of layers of evolutionary
experience to a more Platonic unconscious composed of
certain symbolic ideas and images (dominants or
archetypes). 

To prove his theory of a collective unconscious Jung
cited the recurring independent appearances of the
same archetypes in mythological traditions and in the
delusions of his psychiatric patients — particularly
one patient known as the “Solar Phallus Man,” whose
hallucination of a phallic sun paralleled a vision
described in the ancient Mithraic Liturgy. However,
Noll delivers a severe blow to these claims. First, he
points out that the patients in the hospital where
Jung conducted his research had ample opportunities to
learn about ancient mythology. Next, he documents that
the Solar Phallus Man could indeed have had access to
information about the Mithraic Liturgy, and that in
order to conceal this fact Jung deliberately
misrepresented several important details surrounding
the case. 

Influences on Jung, besides Nietzsche and Haeckel
(among many others detailed in the book), included
Theosophy, spiritualism, and the neopagan volkisch
revival that also gave rise to National Socialism. 

Theosophy. Through advances in publishing technology
around the l880s, “the great philosophies of the East
were distilled and marketed en masse to Western
civilization to a greater extent than had ever been
possible at any previous time in history. The enormous
Theosophical publishing machine thus set the stage for
the familiar countercultural fascination with these
topics, beginning in Ascona, Switzerland and Munich
circa 1900, and continuing through the beatniks,
hippies, Greens, and New Agers of more recent times”
(67-68). Noll cites considerable evidence to suggest
that Jung had read these works and gained much of his
initial knowledge of Eastern philosophy, Gnosticism,
ancient mythology, and astrology from them. 

Spiritualism. Noll also indicates that Jung’s
long-time interest in spiritualism gave him “ample
experience of how one may deliberately enter a
dissociative state, or trance, that allowed such
automatisms as automatic writing or even alternate
personalities to emerge. Jung had observed this at
séances, and indeed, his entire mother’s side of the
family . . . . seemed to have regularly engaged in
discourse with spirits” (202). 

After having repeated visions in 1913 of all Europe
being destroyed in a sea of blood, Jung heard a
disembodied voice speak to him about the visions.
Desiring to hear more from the voice and engage it in
conversation, Jung offered the entity the use of his
body so that it would have the necessary “speech
centers” to communicate with him. “This,” Jung wrote,
“is the origin of the technique I developed for
dealing directly with the unconscious contents.” Noll
makes the obvious but critical point: “Jung is
therefore admitting here that his psychotherapeutic
technique of active imagination is based on the
techniques of spiritualism” (203). 

Active imagination became the foundation for Jung’s
entire approach to psychotherapy, as Noll describes: 

It was in December 1913 that he begins the
deliberately induced visionary experiences that he
later named “active imagination.” From this time
forward, Jung engages in these visions with the
attitude that they are real in every sense of the
word. In these visions he descends and meets
autonomous mythological figures with whom he
interacts. Over the years (certainty by 1916) a wise
old man figure named Philemon emerges who becomes
Jung’s spiritual guru, much like the ascended
“masters” or “brothers” engaged by [Theosophy’s H. P.]
Blavatsky or the Teutonic Brotherhood of the Armanen
met by [Guido von] List. Philemon and other visionary
figures insist upon their reality and reveal to Jung
the foundation of his life and work. He refers on many
occasions to the place where these beings live as “the
land of the Dead.” These visionary experiences —
Jung’s mythic confrontation with the unconscious —
form the basis of the psychological theory and method
he would develop in 1916. (209-10) 

It would seem then that Jung’s approach is essentially
a fusion of spiritualism with psychology, the
“collective unconscious” being nothing other than a
psychoanalytic term for the same realm of experience
that occultists call the spirit world. 

>From here Noll proceeds to describe how “active
imagination” led Jung to an experience of deification
in which he identified himself with Christ. And Noll
leaves no room for doubt that such self-deification is
one and the same as “individuation” — the therapeutic
goal of analytical psychology. 

Jungian analysis, explains Noll, is essentially an
initiation into a pagan mystery — a means to
experience what Jung experienced. It is an occult
process in which the opposites of creation supposedly
reconcile in the oneness of the god within, and thus
the individual becomes psychologically and spiritually
whole. As Noll aptly observes: “Jung’s familiar
psychological theory and method, which are so widely
promoted in our culture today, rests [sic] on this
very early neopagan or volkisch formulation — a fact
entirely unknown to the countless thousands of devout
Christian or Jewish Jungians today who would, in all
likelihood, find this fact repugnant if they fully
understood the meaning behind the argument I make
here” (219). 

Significantly, Jung’s path to individuation “demanded
breaking bonds with one’s family, one’s society, even
one’s God, for ‘by cutting himself off from God’ the
individual becomes ‘wholly himself.’” Thus, “the first
step in individuation is a tragic guilt. The
accumulation of guilt demands expiation . . . . Every
further step in individuation creates new guilt and
necessitates new expiation. Hence: individuation is
continual rebirth through sinning (breaking
bourgeois-Christian norms) and redemption (translating
transcendental insights into social action).” 

Volkisch Groups, Sun Worship, and Anti-Semitism. Noll
is convinced that Jung cannot be properly understood
apart from this “volkisch formulation”:
“Nineteenth­century Europe witnessed a revival of what
has been termed volkisch (‘folkish’) movements,
nationalistic groups bonded together by a common
ethnic and cultural identity (the idea of Volk) and
seeking a political and cultural return to an
idealized past or golden age. A new utopian golden age
of the Volk could then be established” (75). Many
Germanic people who started out in Theosophy or other
occult teachings began to seek their own
pre-Christian, pagan (Teutonic) roots. Drawing on
scholarly and occultic (e.g., Theosophical)
speculations about evolution and the history of the
Aryan race (Indo-European Caucasians, as distinct from
Semitic Caucasians), they cultivated sentiments of
nationalism, racial superiority, and (in some cases)
overt anti-Semitism. National Socialism was one of
many movements that emerged from this revival. 

While not openly and blatantly espousing
anti-Semitism, Jung had collegial relations with open
anti-Semites, read and cited anti-Semite works, shared
their volkisch interest in the Aryan roots of the
Germanic peoples, made unflattering comments about the
Semitic peoples’ spiritual and psychological
development as compared to the Aryan peoples, and long
supported a secret quota that kept Jewish membership
limited to 10 percent in his Psychology Club in
Zurich. After the atrocities of Hitler’s regime came
to light, Jung shifted his metaphysical focus from
volkisch themes to the “rich symbolism of alchemy”
(284). 

Sun worship occupied a central place in this
turn-of-the-century neopagan spirituality. Believed to
be the practice of the ancient Teutons, it was viewed
as the best alternative to Semitic Christ worship and
in keeping with modern scientific knowledge of the
earth’s dependence on the sun. Noll extensively
documents that “Jung’s earliest psychological theories
and method can be interpreted as perhaps nothing more
than an anti-Christian return to solar mythology and
sun worship based on Romantic beliefs about the
natural religion of the ancient Aryan peoples. What
Jung eventually offered to volkisch believers in sun
worship circa 1916 was a practical method — active
imagination — through which one could contact
[Teutonic] ancestors and also have a direct experience
of God as a star or sun within” (136). Indeed, Noll
affirms that “sun worship is perhaps the key to fully
understanding Jung and the story I tell in this book”
(137). 

An Unintending Apologist. The Jung Cult is must
reading for the Christian who wants a serious,
objective, scholarly treatment of Jung and his
movement. Although Noll makes comments that indicate
he is not an orthodox Christian, throughout this book
he puts his finger on those aspects of Jung’s life and
thought that would most concern Christians. 

Noll’s book is serviceable to Christian apologetics
all the more because he is not a Christian apologist
(and thus cannot be accused of having an orthodox
Christian bias). He documents that Nazism — the
epitome of intolerance — did not arise out of a
Christian fundamentalism (as many today presume) but
rather out of a virulently anti-Christian sentiment,
occultism, and evolutionary scientism. A profusion of
mysticism, nature worship, and neopaganism comparable
to what we find in the West today did not prevent
militant nationalism, racism, and anti-Semitism but
actually fueled their development. Indeed, it was the
rejection of orthodox Christianity in eighteenth and
nineteenth-century Germany that opened the floodgates
that ultimately culminated in the rise of the Third
Reich. 

— Elliot Miller 








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Phone (949) 858-6100 and Fax (949) 858-6111



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