| This paper comprises a study of Jungian influence on the global green
movement, especially in relation to the United Nations' Earth Charter.
In it I examine the anti-Jungian sentiment among Christian fundamentalist
groups, and their association of Jungian thought with the environmental
movement. And I draw conclusions as to whether this association and criticism
are justified. I end with a discussion of the ways in which Jungian theory
does and does not support the philosophies underlying today's deep ecology
and evolutionary consciousness movements.
Carl Jung is denounced by fundamentalist Christians as an anti-Christ,
the instigator of a new age of nature worship, of a dangerous and un-godly
psycho-eco-paganism. Jung’s ideas are named as the demonic force behind
the United Nations Earth Charter. His unholy high priests are the leaders
of the U. N., and his followers number not only analytical psychologists,
but environmentalists, zoologists, humanitarians, leaders of world religions,
botanists, conservationists, mystics, feminists and gays, and millions
of others who have been duped by his occultist, New-Age teachings.
The New American, April 27, 1998 issue, featured an article by
William Norman Grigg, entitled, “Apostle of Perversion.” The twisted apostle
referred to is Carl Gustav Jung, whose influence on technical-psychological
and popular language, and views on personality and behavior, Grigg sadly
notes, and writes, “Even more importantly, Jungian concepts guide many
efforts to divest Christianity of its ‘patriarchal’ character and to synthesize
a globalist new world religion.”1 ‘Sounds
like praise to me—Where is the perversion? Angry biographer Richard Noll,
in his book, The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung, reveals
that “’Jung believed himself to be a religious prophet with extraordinary
powers’.”2 Noll and Grigg associate
Jung with the subversive views of his grandfather, Karl Jung 3,
with the “notorious occultic movements” of “the Bavarian Illuminati [believed
to be currently incarnate in Yale’s Skull & Bones Society], and the
Theosophical Society,” and with Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism.4
“Psychoanalysis as Jung conceived it,” Noll and Grigg claim, “’was a separate
spiritual path that one could take only after rejecting the faith of one’s
birth’. . . . To entice others to follow him on that path, Jung created
a movement—a ‘holy order or secret society engaged in the redemptive work
of the spirit’.”5 “Memories,
Dreams, Reflections,” Noll observes, “has become one of the primary
spiritual documents of the twentieth century. . . . [Jung] consciously
devoted his life to promoting the growth of a religious community centered
on his personality and his teachings.”6
“Jung’s new religion,” writes Grigg, “drew upon a centuries-old occult
tradition to replace biblical institutions with an ethic of radical libertinism,
especially sexual emancipation.” “The modern apostles of sexual libertinism—from
Margaret Sanger to the contemporary ‘gay rights’ movement—“ we are told,
“are in Jung’s debt and following his lead.”7
In Noll’s words, Jung’s Tower “became a sexual space, a pagan sin altar
where, removed from his wife and family in Küsnacht and his disciples
in Zurich, he could enjoy his intimate companion, Toni Wolff, with orgiastic
abandon.”8 Noll concludes,
I believe . . . that this twentieth-century mask [that of psychologist]
was constructed deliberately, and somewhat deceptively, by Jung
to make
his own magical, polytheistic, pagan worldview more palatable to a
secularized world conditioned to respect only those ideas that seem
to
have a scientific air to them. 9 |
Jung’s theories, according to Noll, are “unmitigated gibberish”; yet
he and Grigg declare them to be, nonetheless, “dangerous and destructive.”
10
The September 23, 2002 edition of The New American is devoted to exposés
of Jung’s new religion. The website hawks the issue by asking,
| Will your children and grandchildren soon be taught in school to pledge
allegiance to ‘One World under Gaia’ (the goddess of Nature)? Will they
be taught that the Christian world view is not in harmony with Nature because
it promotes exploitation of, and harm of Mother Earth? Will they reverently
recite the Earth Charter, read the ‘sacred’ pagan Témenos Books,
and raise their arms in worshipful praise of the blasphemous Ark of Hope?
They will if the organized one-world forces promoting these latest United
Nations outrages are not stopped. 11 |
The web site describes the Earth Charter as the United Nations’ “’new Ten
Commandments’,” and “the basis for a neo-pagan, earth-centered ‘spirituality’.”
United Nations leaders are the new “High Druids of the UN’s global green
religion.”12 The web site derides the
UN’s “Ark of Hope” as “a blasphemous mimicry of the sacred Ark of the Covenant”
13 (this despite the fact that the original
Yahwist Ark was itself a usurpation of an older, Canaanite shrine 14
), and derides its contents, including aboriginal Earth Masks and visual
prayers for “global healing, peace, and gratitude,’ created by 3,000 artists,
teachers, students, and mystics,” 15
and the Témenos Books, described as “meditations and art
rooted in the occultist psycho-babblings of C. G. Jung.” Among the pseudo-Ark’s
profane “worshippers” are Jane Goodall, Mikhail Gorbachev, Steven Rockefeller,
and Pete Seeger.16
The feature article of this issue, by William F. Jasper, entitled, “The
New World Religion,” opens, “Presented to the world as a mystical revelation,
the UN Earth Charter is actually a diabolical blueprint for global government.”
17 The Earth Charter’s “benign-sounding verbiage
and symbolic nature,” Jasper writes, “camouflage its dangerous purpose.
The Charter is intended to become a universally adopted creed that will
psychologically prepare the world’s children to accept the necessity of
world government to save the environment. It is also an outrageous attempt
to indoctrinate your children in the UN’s New Age paganism.”18
Proof of this perverse mission is offered in the form of the Earth Charter’s
Preamble, which states,
| . . . we are one human family and one Earth community with a common
destiny. We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society
founded on respect for nature. . . . Towards this end, it is imperative,
that we, the peoples of Earth, declare our responsibility to one another,
to the greater community of life, and to future generations. 19 |
Jasper continues with a point-by-point commentary, illuminating for his
readers the evil truth behind each of the document’s seemingly benign statements.
The article ends with Jasper’s exhortation to Americans to inform “themselves
and their friends and neighbors about this blatantly diabolical and blasphemous
deception.” 20
Another anti-Jung site 21 is Terry
Melanson’s Illuminati Conspiracy Archive, which details the global totalitarian
pantheist agenda and Gaia cult of the U. N., exposing additional co-conspirators
such as Paul Winter, David Spangler, the Dalai Lama, Pope John Paul II,
and Sri Chinmoy. The subversive evils of Deep Ecology, Permaculture, Bioregionalism,
and Creation Spirituality, all elements of the Jungian-inspired United
Nations plot, are exposed as well. 22
Is Jung guilty of inspiring this fearsome neo-pagan takeover of
the world? In his Symbols of Transformation Jung discusses the etymological
and theological relationship between the idea of Earth as Mother and the
ancient practice of dedication to Gaia of ??????i—sacred precincts for
acts of worship and sacrifice.23 Jolande
Jacobi quotes from Jung’s Introduction to Richard Willhelm’s 1931 German
translation of the Secret of the Golden Flower (T’ai I Chin Hua Tsung Chih)
his view of the mandala as a symbolic expression of the temenos, or “sacred
precincts” of the “innermost personality.24
Erich Neumann, in his discussion of the “Central Symbolism of the Feminine”
in The Great Mother, elaborates upon Jung’s association of the temenos
with the Earth as Mother. 25 We see that Jung
did, certainly, inspire awareness of the connections between modern psychology
and ancient spiritual practices.
Did Jung recommend that we universally worship Mother Earth? I find
him most often, while obviating the universal archetypes underlying various
forms of worship, encouraging individuals to remain within their personal
and cultural belief-and-symbol-system when attempting to understand their
own spiritual experiences, especially with regard to those extreme experiences
that would be considered mystical. In his Introduction to the Chinese text
mentioned, for example, Jung expresses these views:
the spirit of the East has come out of the yellow earth, and
our spirit can,
and should, only come out of our own earth. . . . Let the convinced
Christian believe, for that is the duty he has taken upon himself,
but the
non-Christian has forfeited the grace of faith (perhaps he was cursed
from
birth in not being able to believe, but only to know). Therefore, he
has no
right to put his faith elsewhere. 26 |
And Jung’s own views on the feminine, while greatly valuing the work and
influences of particular women, placed the psychological feminine in an
inferior position with regard to the masculine. His psychological understanding
of the Great Mother archetype, in fact, remains within the parameters of
patriarchal interpretation, regarding both Mother and Earth as dark, fearsome
forces that need, not to be worshipped, but to be overcome. Individuation
requires the slaying of the Mother by the hero in order to free himself
from her devouring womb. 27
The fear-ridden separatist reactionaries are right about Jung’s influence
in this sense on the global evolutionary consciousness movement: Jung’s
theories, as far as they go, pave the way for an understanding of the interconnectedness
of human psychology, spirituality, and the natural world. Thomas Berry,
contemporary theologian, cultural and ecological historian, and enthusiastic
supporter of the Earth Charter (also damned by fundamentalist web sites),
in his book, The Dream of the Earth, reflects on “the entrancement, the
magic of the world about us, its mystery, its ineffable quality.” He writes,
| Experience of such a resplendent world activated the creative imagination
of Mozart in The Magic Flute, of Dante in his Divine Comedy, and gave to
Shakespeare that range of sensitivity, understanding, and emotion that
found expression in his plays. All of these derive from the visionary power
that is experienced most profoundly when we are immersed in the depths
of our own being and of the cosmic order itself in the dreamworld that
unfolds within us in our sleep, or in those visionary moments that seize
upon us in our waking hours. There we discover the Platonic forms, the
dreams of Brahman, the Hermetic mysteries, the divine ideas of Thomas Aquinas,
the infinite worlds of Giordano Bruno, the world soul of the Cambridge
Platonists, . . . the archetypal world of C. G. Jung.28 |
Jung obviously cannot be held solely responsible for the globalizing and
greening of consciousness. As Berry explains, Jung’s insights, like those
of the other geniuses he mentions, reveal but “some aspect of the universe
and of the planet Earth that is fascinating to the human mind.” Each of
these, he goes on, “can be understood as facets of a mystery too vast for
human comprehension, a mystery with such power that even a fragment of
its grandeur can evoke the great cultural enterprises that humans have
undertaken.” 29
Jung encouraged inventive approaches to life-phenomena, asserted their
ready relationship to the creative arts, and suggested their importance
for the psychological and historical health and development of the human
race. 30 The crucial problems of his
age have been compounded, and surpassed, by the global dimensions of the
problems we face in our own. Jungian theory as it is accounts for meaning
in nature as a projection of human psychic contents. Jung does not allow
for intelligence in nature itself, as do many ancient systems of belief
with which New Age spirituality, and innovative theories of global governance
and science are aligned. Jung himself does not go far enough; but Taoist
thought, to which he was so attracted, but which he only partially understood,
does. As he himself admitted: “We should do well to confess at once, that,
fundamentally speaking, we do not understand the utter unworldliness of
a text like [The Secret of the Golden Flower], indeed, that we do not want
to understand it.” 31 His allowance
for mysticism and mystery, however, reluctant in his psychotherapeutic
practice, though more enthusiastic in his abstract thought, may serve to
bridge his theories to what lies beyond a limited psychological approach
to life phenomena. To fit a more holistic notion of natural intelligence,
Jungian theory would have to be expanded to the degree that the collective
unconscious is shared by all life-forms, by all energy-forms. Taoist thought
sees a dynamic reality in the natural world independent of human perception
or projection, though interpenetrating the dynamic reality of human being.
Awareness of this non-hierarchical, non-oppositional interpenetration between
nature and humanity is a spiritual experience. Yoshiharu Nakagawa calls
this awareness and approach “radical naturalism.” To fulfill the promise
of Jungian thought, we need to see the light in the darkness that Jung
himself could not see.
Notes
1 William Norman Grigg, “Apostle of Perversion,” The New American,
April 27, 1998 (www.thenewamerican.com) 1.
2 Grigg, 2.
3 Writing of Karl Jung’s conversion from Catholicism to Evangelical
Protestantism, Noll declares the grandfather’s rejection of Rome an “act
of apostasy,” and a “familial mark of Cain” borne by the grandson (8).
4 Grigg, 2-3.
5 Grigg, 3.
6 Richard Noll, The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung
(NY: Random House, 1997) xiii, xiv.
7 Grigg, 4.
8 Noll, 3.
9 Ibid. Noll claims that Jung’s psychological terminology is
a cover-up: “The spirits became ‘complexes’, and the spirit world became
‘the unconscious’” (41).
10 Grigg, 5.
11 The New American, September 23, 2002 (www.thenewamerican.com)
1.
12 New American, Sept. 23, 2002, (www.thenewamerican.com) 1-3.
13 Ibid.
14 “The early cultic establishment of Yahweh and its appurtenances—the
Tabernacle, . . . its curtains embroidered with cherubim and its cherubim
throne, and its proportions according to the pattern of the cosmic shrine—all
reflect Canaanite models, and specifically the Tent of ‘El and his cherubim
throne” (Frank More Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic [Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1973] 72).
15 William F. Jasper, “The New World Religion,” The New American,
Sept. 23, 2002, (www.thenewamerican.com) 3.
16 New American, Sept. 23, 2002, (www.thenewamerican.com) 2-3.
17 Jasper, 1.
18 Jasper, 2.
19 Jasper, 3. Note: The complete text of the Earth Charter can
be viewed at www.earthcharter.org or www.earthchartersummit.org/TheEarthCharter.htm.
20 Jasper, 7.
21 Out of 611,000 Google entries for the Earth Charter, 4,250
overtly mention Jung. The majority of these sites are positive representations.
A few examples of these are: the site for eco-justice originating in Korea
(www.ecojustice.or.kr/); Pacifica Graduate Institute, California (www.onlinepacifica.edu);
the Boston Research Center, Massachusetts (www.brc21.org/home.html); and
the Native Voices Foundation out of Colorado (www.nativevoices.org/heroes.html).
But a significant number attack the U. N., the Earth Charter, and Jung
together. A few examples of these negative sites are: Contender Ministries
(www.contenderministries.org/articles/arkofhope.php); Perversions of Carl
Jung and Kinsey (www.balaams-ass.com/journal/prophecy/jung.htm); and the
CWiPP- Christian Witness to a Pagan Planet (www.spirit-wars.com/index.html).
It is rare to find a negative site, such as those listed, which provides
its originating location. The CWiPP advertises international seminars and
training sessions for anti-ecological education, but does not give its
originating location.
22 Terry Melanson, Illuminati Conspiracy Archive (http://conspiracyarchive.com/NWO/NewWorldOrder.htm)
4. Google search yielded 50,900 hits on the “Illuminati Conspiracy.”
23 C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation trans. R. F. C. Hull,
Bollingen Series xx (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967, rpt.
1976) 364-71.
24 Jolande Jacobi, The Psychology of C. G. Jung (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, orig. 1942, 1973) 139.
25 Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype,
trans. Ralph Manheim, Bollingen Series xlvii (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1955, rpt. 1991) 46.
26 Introduction, The Secret of the Golden Flower, trans. into
German, Richard Wilhelm, trans. into English, Cary F. Baynes (NY: Causeway
Books, 1931, rpt. 1975) 128-29. In his Introduction to the English version,
Charles San notes Jung’s failure to see from a non-westernized perspective:
“It is ironic that the cultural conditioning of both R. Wilhelm and C.
G. Jung prevents them from fully grasping the essential nature of the Eastern
teaching, although they have been the means of making that secret known
to Western students! . . . [Jung] makes a brave attempt to come to terms
with the Eastern approach, but even on the threshold of a brilliant understanding,
he turns aside and offers us the ‘psyche’ instead of experience . . . “
(ix-x).
27 “The hero who clings to the mother is the dragon, and when
he is reborn from the mother he becomes the conqueror of the dragon. .
. . The hero represents the positive, favourable action of the unconscious,
while the dragon is its negative and unfavorable action . . .” C. G. Jung,
Symbols of Transformation, 2nd ed., trans. R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series
20 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956, rpt. 1976) 374-75.
28 Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth (***) 197-98.
29 Berry, 198.
30 “Diving into the maelstrom,” he wrote, “the soul must create
the symbol that captures and expresses” the dynamic personal and collective,
mutually creative source of the God-Soul complex; “It is this process in
the collective psyche that is felt or intuited by poets and artists whose
main source of creativity is their perception of unconscious contents,
and whose intellectual horizon is wide enough to discern the crucial problems
of the age, or at least their outward aspects.” (Types, 258).
31 Jung’s Introduction, 80.
|