Where to begin?

Fitting an archive into its historical context poses a question of where to begin. The obvious answer is 'begin at the beginning'; but where is the beginning? Well, that depends on the audience!

An audience of professional historians might need little in the way of context, especially if they were cultural or intellectual historians (no, not historians who are intellectuals, but historian who study the history of ideas!), or those with an interest in the history of religious movements, or specialists in the history of psychology, or engaged in the history of Peace Studies. 

But then much of the archive was Jungian, so perhaps not historians, but Jungians, or others with an interest in the human mind. 

Then again, Irene Pickard, whose archive it was, was a Quaker – so Quakers? 

How about students of Peace Studies? So much of the why that group of Quakers in Geneva were so deeply interested in what Jung had to say was because of its implications for the peace work they were engaged with.

There were so many overlapping potential circles of interest in the story of the archive and its creators; a case of intersectionality if there ever was.

Even a Quaker audience posed a problem. Many Quakers may not need a lot of context – one might hope so! Although a repeated complaint is how little Quakers know of Quaker history: after all, it is not essential to being a Friend. What matters is what Friends do and how that enriches their lives and the lives of others. The shared space of stillness and silence which engenders so much is why people come, allied with the commitment to living out the truth of what is encountered. That living out often encapsulated as the testimonies of Simplicity, Truth, Equality, Peace and Sustainability. Easily said, but much more complex in the unpacking.

For instance, 'simplicity' means de-ritualising, stripping down to the bear essentials: you, in stillness and silence, sitting with a few others, preferably in a quiet and plain space set aside for the purpose, unburdened by the weight of theology or orchestration by a cleric; but it means so much more too – taking that straightforwardness into daily life. But to do all this – to live it – does not need much, if any, knowledge of Quaker history. Even Quakers might need far more context than might be supposed if they are to appreciate what is in the archive and how that has contributed to shaping modern Quakerism.

To return to the question: who are the likely readers? Clearly the less specialist, the more context would be needed. 

In deciding how to use the fruits of my research I was greatly helped by those wonderfully chance conversations that happen. Friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues – in fact anyone who got chatting to me asking what I was doing these days – got a very, very brief synopsis of what I was researching into. Once they heard, they often said "Oh! I'd like to read about that. Let me know when you have produced something. Sound like it would make a good book."

So, the likely audience seemed to be far wider than professional historian, Jungians, Quakers or other odd assorted individuals; and that helped determine the answer of where to begin: start at the very beginning. Assume anyone reading is simply interested but has no specific background. The sort of person who might mooch through non-fiction titles in a book-store.  

That set the the question of who on earth are the Quakers and how did they come about, as the starting point for the narrative of how and why Irene Pickard's archive came to be created and preserved – but in no more than 1500 words. That meant a lot of simplifying and compacting! And going back to 1652.

No. I tell a lie! To 1612 and the burning at the stake of Bartholomew Legate.

No! That not it. To the Lollards in the mid 14th century.

Actually, to a streak of perversity among the English, Welsh, Scots and Irish, that waves a finger at any would be authority.

Am I fullfilling Godwin's law?

 Jung, the Quakers and Hitler – why the Hitler? He certainly was not there when I started. 

It began with my being invited to look at an archive left to an elderly Friend (yes, the capital is intended, she was a Quaker, born and bred, and an active Member – yes that capital too – of the Society of Friends – yep, and those) who was deeply concerned that her mother's archive might be lost or destroyed when she died. That was exactly what had happened to her mother's friend's archive when she died: it was mistakenly sold along with the household furniture. She had been the first Jungian analyst in Washington D.C., a founder of the Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology, and for many years the editor of Inward Light. Among her papers would have been many fascinating letters exchanged between her, the Jungs (yes, both Carl and Emma) and her own analyst for many years – Tina Keller-Jenny. Posterity lost out there: they're gone – the letters and all – no doubt consigned to some rubbish dump or incinerator.

Needless to say, Irene Pickard's surviving daughter was concerned that the same fate should not happen to her mothers archive. She had inherited them from her sister – herself a psychiatrist – who had inherited them from their mother. They had both understood that the archive was worth preserving, that its contents were certainly unique and irreplaceable, and might well be of value to future researchers. Some of it had already been used as a resource for one post-graduate submission for a higher degree, and another academic had written a paper about their father – Bertram Pickard. His papers, and some of his wife's, had been preserved. They had been gifted to the Swarthmore College Peace Collection. 

And that was where Hitler got in.

It is simply not possible to write about what was in Irene's archive without him. He had dominated their lives for far too many years because Bertram was actively involved in peace work for most of his life, spending a large part of it in the shadow of the rise of Hitler – an experience that almost cost all of his family their lives –and then in the aftermath of the Third Reich, helping to repair the damage. 

I was asked a simple question when I was invited to look at Irene's Jungian archive. Was the archive of value? As it contained heaps of Jungian related material, including correspondence with him, and was a record of how a group of Quakers struggled with and absorbed his ideas, coming in time to disseminate them on both sides of the Atlantic. There was no doubt in my mind it was of value. It contained a remarkable story waiting to be told, especially as it was interwoven with the story of the Pickard's peace work as a background.

I was allowed to have privileged access to the papers before a home was found for them among the Quaker archives at the University of Essex.  

Godwin's law? The longer the discussion, the more likely a Nazi comparison becomes, and with long enough discussions, it is a certainty. So in discussing my researches, it was utterly and completely unavoidable that I would fulfil the law. 

I understand that in some groups this would automatically signal the end of a discussion. Well, that's me stymied then, given what I am writing about.

Margaret Fell and Spinoza

One of the more unlikely surprises I had during my research was a connection between Margaret Fell (1614 – 1702) and Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677): Spinoza translated Margaret's Epistles to the Jews into Hebrew. 

Margaret Fell, who became George Fox's wife later in her life, is very much one of the co-founders of Quakerism, giving it the pastoral structures that enabled it to survive, especially through those early years of persecution and imprisonment. She herself suffered two lengthy spells in prison. Perhaps her most significant writing is Womens Speaking Justified (1666), in which she argued for spiritual equality between men and women, and equal weight being given to their ministry. It is in many ways the foundation of the Testimony of Equality that has stood ever since.

Spinoza I knew from my undergraduate studies in the early 1970s. Margaret Fell I only encountered after I came into Quaker circles some ten or so years ago. That Spinoza, one of the outstanding philosophers of his age, should have encountered Quakers at all seemed unlikely: Quakers were very few and thin on the ground, almost unknown outside England or Wales at that time, and he was a Dutch Jew, who never travelled outside of the Netherlands.

However, following his expulsion from the Amsterdam Jewish community (1656), Spinoza formed relationships with the Dutch Collegiants and via them with the Quakers, some of whom were travelling in Holland, having been drawn to the Collegiants, feeling that they were fellow spirits. He didn't join either, but he did spend time with both, moving to be nearer the headquarters of the Collegiants. It was during that period he offered to translate Margaret's epistle.

In many ways the Collegiants and the Quakers shared much in common, certainly in their attitude of distaste for the established and hierarchical churches, and for a shared attitude towards scriptures as inspired guidance rather than divine writ. They also shared a great tolerance of diverse views, seeing what spoke in people's hearts to be a better guide than the diktats of any church. 

Both had many among them those who embraced Spinoza's vision of God – a view very far removed from the dominant vision of the times. It has been called pantheism – the identity of reality and divinity – or, more crudely, God = Nature, but it is more sophisticated than that. However, it was a vision that placed human beings as the active agents and 'God' as a passive background, enabling and inspiring, but not controlling or interfering. This was humans as moral agents come of age.

It was exactly such attitudes that led George Keith (1638-1716) – an early Quaker and one of Fox's travelling companions both in the Netherlands and in America – to eventually abandon the Quakers, accusing them of being 'deists'. He would have know well what he meant by such a term, having graduated from Aberdeen in Theology before turning Quaker. Deists do not see God as playing an intercessional or active part in human affairs: very much Spinoza's view. He unequivocally denied a personal 'God' as mere superstition.

Jung, Rendel Harris & the Sinaitic Palimpsest

 Sinaitic Palimpsest

I must thank Richard Pickvance (1 October) for knowledgeable correction regarding the relationship of the Sinaitic Palimpsest to possible older lost Latin or Aramaic texts. I came across the story of its discovery, and J Rendel Harris’ part in it, while researching the relationship between Rendel Harris and Irene Pickard, his personal secretary, as part of my Eva Koch scholarship at Woodbrooke. Rendel Harris was profoundly affected by the realisation that the gospel had extra verses added, telling of the resurrection and ascension, between the time the Palimpsest was written and the reign of Constantine, when the gospel reached its current, canonical, form.   

It serves as a reminder that Christianity evolved out of Judaism in the period following the destruction of Jerusalem in 70CE, with competing branches and rival gospels. One particular branch emerging victorious following the First Council of Nicaea in 325CE, as a result of Constantine’s insistence that, as the official religion of the Empire, it should have only one agreed and enforcible doctrine – hence the Nicene Creed.*

Irene Pickard, whose archive I was studying, was much affected by those discoveries about the Sinaitic Palimpsest and by her contact with Carl Jung, whose works suggest that during that process of the evolution of Christianity, the legendary figure of Jesus was woven out of the sayings and doings of one or more itinerant Jewish teachers and given mythological status as the one and only incarnation of the previously tribal, now to be universal, god of the Jews.

 Letters, The Friend, 15th October 2021

 

The gospels

Sorry, David Lockyer (10 September), but the ‘Aramaic originals’ of the gospels remain lost. The Sinaitic Palimpsest is a fourth-century manuscript of a text that can be dated, on linguistic grounds, to around 200 AD. It is an early version, a translation, of the gospels, but the first Latin versions are generally thought to be slightly older. Be that as it may, the gospels were written at least a century earlier, which makes it difficult for this Aramaic text to be a source.

The story of the Palimpsest has been well told by Janet Soskice in Sisters of Sinai, though Friends may quibble with her description of Woodbrooke as ‘a house of training for Quaker lay-ministry’.

Aramaic or Hebrew origins can often be detected in the gospels (see my book First Burn Your Bible). The existence of an Aramaic source, in the form of a collection of the sayings of Jesus, which stands behind the synoptic gospels, has been postulated, and it has been given the name Q (from German Quelle – source). No such document has been found, but that has not stopped scholars trying to recreate it.

Richard Pickvance

Letters, The Friend, 1st October 2021

Aramaic gospels

I was interested in David Lockyer’s reply (10 September) to James Gordon about Aramaic gospels in which he stated that the originals of the gospels are not lost. 

I fear this may be misleading and would like to point out the following.

We do not possess any originals – ‘autographs’ – of the New testament, only copies of a few complete, and very many partial or fragmentary copies, a fragment of a few verses of John’s Gospel, dated early second century AD, and written in Greek.

The Sinaitic palimpsest manuscript containing the four gospels discovered at Saint Catherine’s monastery dates from the late fourth/early fifth century and is written in ‘Old Syriac’. It probably does represent the oldest translation of the gospels into Syriac reaching back to the late second century, and its discovery by two remarkable English Victorian twin sisters is fascinating to read!
The scholarly consensus is that all Syriac manuscripts we possess are translations from the Greek and cannot therefore be ‘originals’, especially since Syriac is a dialect of Eastern Aramaic, different from Western Aramaic containing the Jewish Palestinian Aramaic dialect that Jesus would have spoken. The Sinaitic palimpsest does however have traces of Palestinian dialect.

According to one eminent scholar: ‘The most we can say is that some Palestinian idioms in the Old Syriac gospels may possibly go back to a living tradition of the original gospel story and in particular to the words of Jesus’. (FF Bruce, The Books and the Parchment, fifth edition, Marshall Pickering 1991).

For an acknowledged, authoritative and detailed academic work see also Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament, third edition, Oxford University Press 1992.

Mike Pozner

Letters, The Friend, 8th October 2021

* In response to criticism I have re-writen the highlighted so that it does not read the same as the version published in the Friend. My attention was drawn to the fact that it was Theodosius I who made Christianity the official religion of Rome, Constantine, no matter how pivotal his roll, having only made it his preferred religion.  I had wrongly credited Constantine with making Christianity the official religion of the Empire.  

Sinaitic Palimpsest again

Oh dear. David Lockyer’s letter (15 October) contains an endlessly repeated factoid. Constantine I did not establish Christianity as the official religion of the Roman empire. He simply stopped the persecution of Christians.

Christianity progressed (not without some setbacks) and several more emperors came and went before Theodosius I made Nicene Christianity the state religion. It is the difference between the Edict of Milan in 313 and the Edict of Thessalonica in 380.

Richard Pickvance: Letters - 29 October 2021

One particular branch emerging victorious following the First Council of Nicaea in 325CE, as a result of Constantine’s insistence that, if it was to be his preferred religion for the Empire, it should have only one agreed and enforcible doctrine – hence the Nicene Creed. Christianity finally becoming the official religion of Rome in 380 under Emperor Theodosius I.*

Every human has a story

Jung came to the conclusion that every human being had a story, and the derangement came when that story was denied, or if the story was rejected; and it was only in the discovery of this story, enabling the patient to rediscover his personal story (within it), that the patient could be healed again.

Laurens Van der Post: BBC - Time Life film on Jung,

Untangling what it was about Jung that so fascinated, engaged and enthused a group of Geneva Quakers that they would spend the rest of their lives expounding his virtues as someone who had given them the keys to unlocking their deeper selves and vitalised their spiritual lives was perhaps the biggest challenge of my research. Between them, they had created an extensive archive of materials, contributed articles to two journals, one either side of the Atlantic, addressed conferences, written books, acted as editors, and mentored and inspired many younger people as well as their contemporaries. They had been catalysts for change and modernisation, reinforcing trends that has already been at play in the communities they were part of.

The discovery of Jung, and their direct contact with him and his circle, made them more at ease with their spiritual life, more fully engaged with it and more willing to explore it. It helped them to realise its importance to their lives in spite the pull from their being 'modern', well educated and forward thinking people. They bucked the trends and fashions of their age: the affectation of a somewhat bohemian detachment from anything over serious, allied with a cynical disparagement of old fashioned things like religion which could not possibly stand the rigours of critical analysis. Religion was the opium of the people, and was utterly dreary. The stripped down religion of a set of left over tea-total puritans, with all their earnestness, social conscience and pacifism, was unspeakable. 

But somehow, that set of young, intelligent, and highly motivated people found something at the core of the Quaker tradition; in the shared, contemplative, ruminating silence, and in what arose from it; something that inspired and liberated them; and Jung gave them the intellectual justification for opening up to it.

For me, researching their left-overs – what little survives in the aftermath of life – it meant following their spiritual journeys, and tracking their footsteps in what material there was. Annoyingly, such material is always deficient. It is like a giant dot to dot drawing, stretching over three-quarters of a century, two continents and two world wars. Sometimes the dots are years apart. Sometimes they are scattered across diverse and disperse documents, articles and books. It was a six year journey on my part, and one which in some ways shadowed their own. To comprehend their journey meant undertaking one of my own, being forced to question many assumptions about my own life and attitudes. 

In many ways they confirmed Jung's contention: they found the big story which could contain the smaller stories of their lives. I think I have yet to achieve that.

Faint traces in time: Elined Kotschnig

Then there was Dr Esther M Harding, who died only recently in 1971 but made one of the greatest American contributions of all in volume of work and depth of character, although she was English. Her books on various aspects of psychology, literature and history, seen from a feminine point of view, have far-reaching consequences for the nature and wholeness of human awareness. Close beside her was Dr Eleanor Bertine — I speak only of those I knew personally — and many others like Elined Kotschnig and the gallant Martha Jaeger, both Quakers who laboured to carry Jung into the Society of Friends and make those indomitable “children and servants of the light” realise the the clearer the light the more precise the shadow.

Laurens van der Post:  Jung and the Story of Our Time.

One of the privileges of having the luxury of spend time researching an archive, and what you can of the lives of those who created it, is the joy of discovery, and the chance to place what traces are left of their lives into some sort of historical context. Elined Kotschnig was one such discovery. 

There were a few papers by her in Irene Pickard's archive of Jungian materials. They reveal that it was Elined who introduced that small circle of Quakers in Geneva to Jung in 1934, pointing out that he was a 'modern mystic' – modern in the sense that he underpinned his mysticism with his 'scientific' discoveries about the human mind – mystic in that he stressed the importance of deep, fully felt relationship with the the totality of being, not mere intellectual acknowledgement. Over rationalised relationships with life estranged and alienated people, creating the modern malaise he encountered so much in his practice as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Its antidote was discovering deeper, felt, connection. 

Elined was a born in Trefeca, Wales, and was a graduate of the University of Wales and a post graduate student at Cambridge. She married an Austrian, Walter Kotschnig, lived in Geneva, Switzerland, encountered Carl Jung, becoming in time a Jungian therapist, emigrated to the United States where she was one of the founders of the Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology (FCRP) and long time editor of its journal, Inward Light. 

Unfortunately, so much of the records of her life and contribution to psychoanalysis and Quakerism was lost after her death, when her papers were auctioned off by mistake with the furniture from her home. All of Elined's diaries, consultation notes, reflections, draft papers and letters were lost. What has survived are the few articles she wrote for Inward Light, one privately published book, Womanhood in Myth and Life, and the papers she wrote in Geneva which were preserved in Irene Pickard's archive.

There is so little reference to Elined outside Quaker circles that encountering her in van der Post's book was gratifying. She deserves to be much better know. Her synthases of Jungian and Quaker thought, extending them into a life affirming framework, was of great benefit to so many, and not just her patients, as was testified by the only person I met who met her. As a young woman my informant had attended some of the annual FCRP conferences where she had encountered Elined. She found her inspiring and liberating as well as deeply challenging: Elined excelled in confronting people with their shadow – those aspects of ourselves we would rather not see.

Have I found the bridge?

It was tiny, just a single sentence editorial introduction to an article in a monthly magazine produced in 1970 – the Quaker Monthly – but had it finally provided the bridge I had been looking for? Somehow, I felt that two of the people I have been writing about may have had some connection, but how or when was lost in the mists of time: it sometimes amazes me how little trace is left of many people's lives – just faint scatterings, motes of dust – that a historian has perhaps the fortune to find, if he is lucky. 

The rich, the famous and the powerful leave heaps of traces. They have big footprints in history. So, you wish to research into the life of a Churchill or a Orson Welles? No problem. You will have oceans of source material. Such lives are massively recorded. But try to research the lives of more obscure people, people who have not courted publicity, people whose lives are much more private and out of the limelight of media attention, you often have little more than scattered and vanishing vapour trails.

I suspected that Irene Pickard, whose archive had launched my researches, must have had some contact at some time with Pierre Lacout, the author of a much translated Quaker booklet, God is Silence. They had both been members of the small community of Quakers in Switzerland. They had both lived in Geneva, but not at the same time, as far as I could see; Irene had left Geneva in 1955, and Lacout can only be definitely connected with the Swiss community of Quakers sometime in the 1960s, becoming a member of the Lausanne Meeting after he settled near there. He had undertaken a course of psychotherapy in Geneva prior to that. They both shared a common attitude to the centrality of the practice of silence waiting as the wellspring of Quakerism, and the significance of psychoanalysis – especially that of Carl Jung – as an aid to spiritual development. They both had many Swiss Quakers they knew in common. It was a small pond in which they both swam with a reasonably high chance that they had either directly or indirectly connected.

Irene had maintained an active interest and connections with the community of European Quakers in the years following her and her husband's retirement to England. Significantly, they had been involved in the Friends World Committee on Consultation (FWCC) European conferences, both at the planning stage and during the events. We know for sure that they were highly involved in the 1959 conference on Depth Psychology as a help in the Religious Life, and maintained an interest in, and connections with, later European conferences.

The editorial introduction to Lacout's article in the March 1970 edition of Quaker Monthly notes that the article is:

Concluding our Swiss Friend’s address to last years European Conference, in which he told of his passage from Carmelite Monk to Quaker.

Sadly, what I don't know is if Irene was present at the 1969 conference, or had anything to do with it. Irene would have been 78, and was still involved in many Quaker things, especially the Seekers Association. She was also perfectly fluent in French – her years in Geneva having made her bilingual – but was she actually there? Did she ever meet Lacout? Did they correspond about the conference? We shall never know: there is no record. All we do know is that she had a copy of his booklet in her archive. If there was ever a bridge, it has been washed away.

What we do know is that Lacout and Irene were very much in sympathy with each other as to what was at the core of Quaker religious experience, as were so many of the members of the Seekers. Here I quote from a letter written to me in 2013 by Candia Barman, about the Seekers Movement:

The Seeker Movement aims to explore the discipline of waiting on the spirit at the still centre of our lives. We try to deepen our spiritual awareness in a devotional way based on mutual support and sharing with like-minded people. This leads to the search for expressing Quaker witness in the world.
Much of traditional language has become ineffective and diminished in meaning for people today, including ourselves. We seek through exploration and sharing to connect with the mystery at the heart of our world and our lives. We are active in opening ourselves to new light; this may come from modern scientific, theological or artistic endeavours as well as older traditions. We aim to promote a creative interplay amongst the diversity of understandings within the Religious Society of Friends.
This is done through residential and other gatherings, with a particular emphasis on working in small groups. Also correspondence groups on various topics and the movement’s journal.

It compares well with Lacout's description of what is at the heart of the Quaker experience in his 1969 address:

Silent worship, taking for us the place of dogma and creed, gives to us, by its unsullied transparency, infinite possibilities of dialogue. We think in a climate of absolute freedom with no fear, in principle, of condemnation by the Quaker community. Our faith, not being the prisoner of any form or words, can go without reservations towards the truth of every man, whether he be Christian or not, believer or not. We are as attentive to men as to God. Is not a human brother a part of the presence of God? If we dwell in the receptive state of mind which living worship develops in us, we shall not go towards the other man with the proud assurance of one who seeks to make a convert, but with humility of one who goes forward in gratitude for a revelation he is about to receive. To love the other man is to love his difference. Free from dogma we have more chance than others of building bridges between the fragments of our broken world. In this age of confrontation and hostility, let us learn to draw from silence, as from a well, the strength and art and skill of truthful reconciliation. No other religious family grants such liberty to its members.