Painting- “The Fallen Angel” by Alexandre Cabanel, 1847.
“The Lucifer legend is in no sense an absurd fairytale; like the story of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, it is a “therapeutic” myth. We naturally boggle at the thought that good and evil are both contained in God, and we think God could not possibly want such a thing” (Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 291).
On this day in 1875, Carl Gustav Jung, founder of analytical psychology was born.
In 1913, at the age of thirty-eight, Jung experienced a “confrontation with the unconscious” in which he became concerned that he was experiencing psychosis or schizophrenia. Rather than turn from his turbulent inner world he recognised that his dreams and visions were valuable and began to induce what he called “active imagination” a process of recording his dreams, visions, insights, and encounters with the beings of his inner world.
Jung was prepared to pay the price for obtaining consciousness.
In mythology two archetypal figures that obtain consciousness (and are punished) are Lucifer the Light Bringer and Prometheus who stole fire from the gods to give to humans. Chiron is also connected with the myth of Prometheus, renouncing his immortality to set Prometheus free.
All three of these archetypes – Lucifer, Prometheus, and Chiron are involved with the processes of helping bring consciousness to humans, a transgressive act against the gods.
Jung created the term “Wounded Healer” which referred to the analyst who is aware of his or her own wounds in the psychotherapeutic process. Like Chiron, Jung became the master healer whose medicine derived from a deep dive into the wounds of his own soul. Jung a mortal man is -at least culturally speaking- immortalised in the publication of his works which have had a profound effect on the evolution of consciousness and the human psyche.
Jung is also a Promethean-like figure stealing fire, illumination, from the gods… particularly Pluto who rules Hades which from a psychological perspective is the unconscious.
Transgressive against the prevailing Christian doctrine of his time Jung questioned the eternal truth of Christianity, writing in 1946,
“Their [the Christian churches] truth may, with more right than we realize, call itself “eternal”, but its temporal garment must pay tribute to the evanescence of all earthly things, and should take account of psychic changes. Eternal truth needs a human language which alters with the spirit of the times. The primordial images [the archetypes themselves] undergo ceaseless transformation and yet remain ever the same, but only in new form can they be understood anew. Always they require a new interpretation if, as each formulation becomes obsolete, they are not to lose their spellbinding power” (Jung, 1946, “The Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity”, C.W. 16, para. 396).
For Jung individuation, the act of becoming an individual, is a spiritual path and the human is “no more than the stable in which the Lord is born”, meaning that the living Christ is within and that “Christification” may be realised through following the path of individuation.
In his astrology chart Jung has asteroid Lucifer at 9 °Aries conjunct his lunar north node at 11° Aries, and asteroid Prometheus at 29° Aries conjunct Chiron at 26° Aries. Though Chiron, the planetoid, was not discovered until 1977, Jung was an early recipient (pioneer) of Chiron’s influence paving the way for the explosion of mind-body-spirit healing and wisdom that birthed in the collective psyche some 15 years after his death.
Also in Jung’s chart is a Yod, involving a quincunx between Pluto and Jupiter, and Pluto and Mars, and a sextile between Jupiter and Mars. With the apex of the Yod pointing to Pluto at 23° Taurus in the third house we see that Jung was on a mission to transform the mercurial mind in terms of what it was capable of grasping and communicating through the unconscious.
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