La Belle Epoque

 One of the problems when writing a history that spans across more than a hundred years is to find the right description for the periods involved. Sometimes centuries and decades do nicely, but sometimes they can be clumsy. Victoria died in 1901, bringing to an end the Victorian Age, and replacing it with the Edwardian period, yet there was so much cultural, social, economic and political continuity that the division is almost meaningless.

Then came 1914 and the world changed. Six empires went to war. Only two survived. The cultural, social, economic and political continuity was shattered right across Europe. 

When we look back on the time before 1914, we seem to be living in a different age. Things are happening today of which we hardly dreamed before the war. We were even beginning to regard war between civilised nations as a fable, for surely such an absurdity would become less and less possible in our rational, internationally organised world.  Carl Jung: Essays on Contemporary Events

Terms like 'the long century', referring to 1800 to 1914, try to do service, but they lack the focus I was looking for. My problem of writing about Irene Pickard's archive is that its roots lay in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and on until the massive fault line of 1914. I needed a term to spanned that period. There is no such convenient term in British history, however, there is in French history – la belle epoque – so I borrowed it. 

It fits so nicely a very special period when the fruits of the industrial revolution finally radically affected peoples' lives. Jules Verne's novel Around the World in Eighty Days summed it up in that what Phileas Fogg boasts that he can do – circumnavigate the globe in less than a quarter of a year. Steam ships, Steam trains, and the electric telegraph had welded the world together as one place. It seemed an age of the triumph of science, progress and reason. The shock of 1914 destroyed that illusion.

It is difficult for generations that have come to maturity since 1914 to realise fully the impact of horror and betrayal which the war made on people's minds. A few here and there, it is true, had seen it coming, had realized that, as Rufus Jones wrote "Beneath all overt acts and decisions the immense subconscious forces, charged with emotion, had been slowly pushing towards this event".     Elizabeth Grey Vining:  Friend for Life, a biography of Rufus M Jones

But that cataclysmic event set the scene for an age that would have to come to terms with those 'immense subconscious forces', and in Carl Jung, the cartographer par excellence of those forces, Irene Pickard found a guide, not just to understanding the dark potentials within that could be so destructively and collectively unleashed, but in understanding how all the forces within us might be brought into less destructive balance, or even constructively used.  

Jung: psychobabble or mapping the mind?

For Jung, the meaning of life could be found in the realisation of the self, which for each individual holds a different meaning and a different destiny. The driving force behind the individuation process is the archetype of the self. In this sense, the individuation process does not culminate in a life lived only for its own sake as has been determined by the ego, or even in a realisation of the “divinity of life,” but in an experience of the “divine” within oneself. And here is the heart of the matter: in the individuation process the ego — experienced for the most of one’s life as the centre of personality— comes to the realisation that it is not as absolute as it has seemed to be, and it is superseded by an experience of the archetype as a balancing or cantering force in one’s life, moving one beyond the constraints of ordinary ego consciousness. One outcome of this is the capacity for self-reflective consciousness, which functions to direct our attention away from the ego as the centre of awareness, values, and meaning, thus creating a new transcendent perspective of consciousness. Another possible outcome is that the experience of the self restores a balance to the experience of ordinary consciousness, overcoming the ego’s tendency to one-sidedness.   Loren E Pedersen: Dark Hearts. The unconscious forces that shape men’s lives: Shambala, London 1991, p.206

In order to make head or tail of Irene Pickard's archive, I had to get to grips with Jung and his theories. There were possibly helpful but complex texts like the one above, however, there were other writings about Jung which presented a very different and somewhat antagonistic picture. This is because Jung is so very annoying! He can be obscure and opaque with long and convoluted explanations which make considerable use of his own idiosyncratic nomenclature. To unpackage it you have to get to grips with what on earth he was saying. 'Individuation', 'archetype', 'realisation of the self', 'ego', 'ordinary ego consciousness', 'transcendent perspective of consciousness', as in the above, being only a few of his menagerie of terms.

As a result there are those who claim that he is deliberately obscure because he is in fact saying nothing: a tangle of words in which he trapped – netted – his admirers. That he created a cult with himself as the shaman at the centre. Foremost amongst such critics is Richard Noll (The Jung Cult: The origins of a charismatic movement). Noll points to the way in which Jung restricted dissemination of his ideas to an inner circle of acolytes who needed to have undergone his style of analysis to be fully initiated. A structure not unlike that of apostolic succession, with his inner circle acting as the equivalents of bishops. Indeed, may of the women of that circle became almost guardians of his teaching, as is described by Maggy Anthony in her The Valkyries: the women around Jung.

It is possible to view Jung as pre-eminent psychobabble: a web of words to be thrown over people's actions and intentions trapping them into a world of dark hidden forces emanating from within their own minds, from which they can only escape through years of analysis with a trained and expensive therapist. A world in which analysts are the high priests initiating the vulnerable and gullible by degrees into the inner sanctums of the self-enlightened. The ultimate prize to be won is that of liberation from the dark forces within that frustrate and distort our lives – not entirely unlike the medieval practice of exorcism with its aim of driving out 'demons'. The cure, a twentieth century application of the Delphic maxim "Know yourself", or Socrates's claim that "the unexamined life is not worth living" taken to the extreme.

Certainly, much that Jung says, and he wrote a lot and gave many seminars and lectures, is seeped in his own psychoanalytic language – although he preferred the term 'analytical psychology' to describe his version, in order to differentiate it from Freud. Rather like the European 'discovers' of the New World, Jung named the features he found in order to place them on a map. Unlike those explorers, who were mapping real places, the existence of those features would seem almost entirely dependent on acceptance of his terms – his vision of the architecture of the mind. Psychoanalytic maps of the mind – be they Jungian, Freudian, or whatever – are a bit like phrenological maps. They depend on acceptance of the suppositions made about how the human psyche works. At worst, their resemblance with any map emerging from experimental psychology or neuroscience may be as little as an astrologer's map has to an astronomer's map.

Jung's work could be seen as an attempt, in part, to create a taxonomy of the mind, although, for the good doctor, that was subordinate to treating his patients. If his theories served to release them from their suffering, then, like any medicine, they had achieved the objective. Their proof was their clinical effectiveness, not their scientific validity. Effectiveness would suggest they has some validity but not confirm it. Validation would depend on a different approaches to clinical method, which is ultimately pragmatic and sometimes heuristic. It only establishes what works, not why it works. Jung always believed that his theories were provisional.

In order to understand his patient's minds, Jung developed a map of the human psyche and its mechanism. The healing process, he suggested, was achieved by shifting the centre of being from the 'ego' to the 'self' – a fulcrum point between our conscious world and the unconscious. That led to the incorporating of the unconscious forces at play into our conscious lives, diminishing the harm they could do, and finding a new equilibrium. Mental distress, he noted, was almost entirely due to a lack of equilibrium between the forces at play within us.

The notion that Jung had developed a map of the mind in order to understand its working, is very much the theme of Murray Stein's books, Jung's Map of the Soul and Minding the Self . Stein is a training analyst at the International School for Analytical Psychology in Zurich, Switzerland. I found Stein very helpful in demystifying Jung, and own a lot to his explanations.

My experience of psychology before starting on unpackaging Irene Pickard's archive, was mostly in applied social psychology, much of which used elements of behaviour modification. A far cry from anything remotely psychoanalytic! Getting to grips with Jung meant trying to understand a very different way of conceiving human psychology. My initial approach was through trying to comprehend his map of the mind. I found it helpful to take the notion of a map literally, and to try to produce a crude representation of how I thought such a map might look. You could call it "Jung's Zoological Garden".

Sinaitic Palimpsest again

I must thank Richard Pickvance (The Friend 29 October) once more for his correction. 

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

Mea culpa: I over simplified and repeated a 'factoid'* (as he termed it) in place of a much more complicated truth. However, Constantine did give the religion a degree of prominence and privilege in the Empire and was instrumental in encouraging the definition of an emerging Christian orthodoxy, even on occasions enforcing it; a version of Christianity that Rendel Harris referred to as containing 'an ecclesiastical Christ' who was very much a product of that later age.

The edifice of theology constructed by the emerging 'state' church of the Empire was what Rendel Harris felt had obscured the inspiring clarity of the original message: a clarity that spoke to one's inward condition as a guiding light. Prominent among those theological layerings obscuring the light was the concept of the incarnate divinity of Christ.

In Origin of the Doctrine of the Trinity he suggested that the divinity actually rested on the identification of Christ with the Divine Wisdom who was with God in the creation, not, as the Church taught, as a physical incarnation. That is why Rendel Harris was not perturbed by the discovery that the Sinaitic Palimpsest version of St Mark lacked both the resurrection and ascension. For Rendel Harris those omissions confirmed the gap that had grown between the 'ecclesiastical Christ' and the original.

*An item of unreliable information that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact. (Oxford Languages)

D.Lockyer

--------------

Irene Pickard, whose archive is the basis of Jung, The Quakers and Hitler, was Rendel Harris' personal secretary and would have typed the texts of all of his later works, including the Origins; an experience which readied her for engaging with Jung's ideas about the evolution of religions as projections of developments deep within the collective psyche.

The Pronoun Dance

It is so much the fashion now to not just give your name, but your preferred choice of pronoun. This is supposed to be more inclusive. What right do I have, if and when I speak about you, to categorise you as male or female? Unless I know you intimately, how should I know how I might be transgressing against your sense of identity? Perhaps male, perhaps female, perhaps something other? There is a rainbow of hues possible – so we are told. The pain of those who struggle with their identity testifies to the suffering caused by attempts to conform to the binary identities imposed by society – a simple 100% M or 100% F – branded onto you at birth. Why should I corral you into one or other sorting pen, conferring on you the appropriate privileges or strictures as a result? I do not wish to injure you.

Even if you are happy with your classification as F or M, it does not follow that you are happy with the cloud of expectations that accompany it: you may not want what is on offer in the pink aisle or in the blue aisle. There are as many ways of being male or female as there are men or women.

Mostly we signal identity externally: this is how I dress, so this is what I am. This is the body shape I have, so this is what I appear to be. Sometimes those are in harmony. Sometimes not. The use of 'he' or 'she' follows the appearance, almost as an ingrained reflex: the two tribes being discovered so early in childhood; each with their own way of being, reflected in speech, mannerism, dress and approved choices. A girl acting girlishly get adoring looks, a boy acting like that soon earns a reprimand. Exhibiting the behaviour of the opposite sex has always risked provoking repression. Societies police the sex boundary with varying degrees of severity.

Sometimes people play with this, knowing and enjoying the confusion and discombobulation caused. Long live drag! The gender bending as performance has a long history. There is much that is tolerated on stage that is pillared in daily life, as boys in the UK who tried to attend school in skirts found out. Cross-dressing for fun is tolerated, even celebrated, but cross-dressing in daily life is problematic and even risky. The existence of male and females codes of dress only serve to emphasise how deeply embedded the binary is, how it shapes so much of our culture and expectations of what is to be accepted. It invites and even enforces conformity. There are always those prepared to police the boundary, and enjoy the licence and power they think is conferred on them.

Non-conformity is discordant. It jars. It challenges. It may provoke reaction, invited or not. Those of us who are to a greater or lesser extent androgynous know the dangers, and too often have tasted its bitter fruits. You learn how to duck and weave, to camouflage, to anticipate and dodge the blows. Societies self-appointed police savour the opportunities proffered by the non-conforming. Socially tolerated coercion is an opportunity for the sweet indulgence of much that is normally denied and repressed: the joy of bullying, the ecstasy of violence. It is a catharsis of liberation for socially manacled.

The more we stretch the boundaries of tolerance the more we invite explosive reactions. 

Jung was deeply aware of the dark potentials in people, lurking in the unconscious waiting for ecstatic release. It was witnessed only too clearly in the popular embrace of the cruelties and excesses of the regimes of his times. Most obviously in the Third Reich, but with a polite veneer and deniability in British and French empires, or the cold logic of the Soviet gulags; and since his times in the hysteria of the Cultural Revolution, the madness of Pol Pot's killing fields, the Rwandan genocide or the Srebrenica massacre.

And the pronoun dance? It invites yet another stretch of tolerance and acceptance; a blurring of the boundaries; a suspension of policing – conscious or unconscious – an effort to accommodate those who do not fit easily or comfortably into the binary of male or female; but it also poses a double problem. 

Firstly, many people are happy and comfortable with the binary, they embrace and live it for they are living out their maleness or femaleness as they feel it – it is authentic for them. That is why there is so much unease with the claim that 'gender is a social construct'. It would be more honest to say, for a huge number of people it is an organo-social construct – they are organically the construct they feel they are. Being male or female is their organically authentic selves. It is not a superficial, acquired construct like being a Manchester United supporter – a voluntarily acquired association. Those who try to pull sex and gender too far apart, making them not deeply interwoven but detachable, play a largely intellectual game to win a space for building a language more accommodating to diversity, but less aligned with lived experience.

Secondly, is there a right to require of other that they use words that do not arise naturally and spontaneously in response to what they encounter? Here is a conflict between what happens when someone externalises their inner difficulties with their identity and the perception of others. Should attachment to a self-ascribed pronoun preference take priority over the spontaneous and authentic responses of others? 

To know that how you see yourself is significantly different to how you are seen is essential to personal growth and maturation. Jung was acutely aware that people were largely blind to their shadows: not just to what lurked in the depths of their psyche, but to how they appeared to others. As Robert Burns wrote:

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

(Oh, would some Power give us the gift
To see ourselves as others see us!)

People's pronoun choice about us is their authentic response to how we appear to them, no matter how uncomfortable that makes us feel. 

Being 'out and proud' may challenge others to accept you as you see yourself, but that may not be what they are confronted with: they will see your shadow and that may be far from how you see yourself. That is what they will respond to. We all run the risk of wearing the Emperor's New Clothes!

Some of the recent furore over male to female transexuals 'invading' female spaces is because of the dichotomy between how the would be woman sees herself, and the shadow he still casts.

Even a superficial understanding of Buddhist psychology would warn that attachment to how others speak about you is a cause of suffering; liberation would be in indifference to the choice of pronoun used by others about you – in wholehearted acceptance of what is proffered. 

Quakers did away with the heirs and graces of title that implied hierarchy, understanding the attachment to rank was a delusion best dispensed with. Are we now substituting self ascribed pronoun titles in place of those of rank and not seeing them as being a modern equivalent? The same desire to bind others with how we wish to be addressed? We are plainly what others would see us as being, and that should determine their words, not our need for confirmation of the peculiarities of our chosen identity. The discordance between what we have chosen and how we appear may not allow the words to flow naturally.

As one who lives biologically on the boundary between maleness and femaleness –  androgynous as a birth-right – or birth infliction – I have no wish to control others choice of words about me. At best, a label stating my preferred pronoun would only achieve superficial compliance in my presence, and confusion and discomfort on part of others. 

Pronouns are usually used in the person's absence, so what compliance is likely anyway? Is it an aspiration that a not externally obvious identity might predominate even in your absence?

Liminal spaces or bathing in the Styx

The walls of hospitals have heard more prayers than the walls of temple, mosque, or church 

claimed a recent social media post, emblazoned across a photo of a hospital corridor, no doubt hoping to provoke comment. Was it intended to invite condemnation of institutionalised religion? Or comments on the human condition? Or on our relationship with religions – press the panic button/ pull the rip-cord/ set off the distress flare – otherwise don't bother me?

My thoughts were "Ah! the liminal spaces."

liminal |ˈlɪmɪn(ə)l|
adjective technical
1: relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process.
2: occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.

What greater transition is there than that from life into death? Or lesser ones from able bodied to disabled? From having life threatening injury to being healed? From diseased to well? It is no wonder that they let patients sound a bell when their cancer treatment course is complete.

But, perhaps more importantly, they are spaces where our daily praxis fails – that web of expectation, action and result with which we order our day to day – where we are masters of events. We know how the day/week/month/year goes – except suddenly it doesn't. 

That's when we fall into a liminal space. 

The rules no longer work. 

It is very disorientating.

But it is also a rich source of wisdom. A space for potential growth. 

Rinzai Zen makes great use of catapulting the student into a liminal space where the student is dumbfounded. The koans are designed to twist the mind into capitulation because it is there that one's 'true nature' is encountered. 

The contemplative traditions of Christianity – largely denied to the laity –  likewise take the initiate into that liminal space.

Like Soto Zen, with its endless hours of sitting facing a wall, pilgrimages are intended not as glorified tourist trips, but to grind you down by physical exhaustion until you are nothing more than the pilgrim: they are intentionally liminal. No one should go on a pilgrimage with an iPhone! 

The meaning webs in which we spend our lives screen us from encountering the wilderness of the liminal; but they also confines us to culturally created comfort zones. 

The rationalist uses unimpeachable logic to cling to the safety of their web of meaning. The sharp edge of 'science' used as a sword to plunge into heart of any threat. Only science is not like that: it provides updatable answers depending on the best set of evidence available – it is a process. Sometimes an exquisitely honed tool – the gold standard of five sigma – sometimes little better than our current heuristic. 

Limply, those who would set religion off against science– you might as well say setting off irrationality against rationality – want to anchor their certainties in one or other received teaching – hallowed by time and no doubt deeply emotionally appealing and comforting – especially if you are 'born again' or 'saved' – but far too often contrary to testable fact. Belief is a poor substitute for hard earned knowledge, no matter how fervent the belief. 

There are those who, in the name of this or that faith, are only too ready to harvest people who are in liminality, posing as real life Charons ready to ferry the stranded to a safe shore on the other side, from one web of certainty to another: the real gift would be bathing in the Styx. 

Belief is a mistaken road if it is presented as a higher case of knowing. One should not believe. One should be open to experiences of the liminal – to its taste and feel – to the not knowing – to simply being in its raw state, shorn of intention. 

When people say they believe in the existence of God, it has never impressed me in the least. Either I know a thing and then I don't need to believe it; or I believe it because I am not sure that I know it. I am well satisfied with the fact that I know experiences which I cannot avoid calling numinous or divine.     Jung's reply to H L Philip's question about whether all we are limited to is knowledge of the God-archetype: H L Philip "Jung and the Problem of Evil": Rockliff, London, 1958

The sound of doors being bolted shut

When you are researching an archive, the historical events that form its background can unexpectedly connect with your own family's history and with current events. It stops being remote and become so much more real. Last week the papers were full of this story:

Washington Post

By Amy Cheng

November 19, 2021 at 4:03 a.m. EST

Britain’s Conservative government could be allowed to strip people of citizenship without giving them notice to appeal if legislation being debated in Parliament becomes law.

The Nationality and Border Bill would permit the home secretary, Britain’s top domestic security official, to cancel citizenship without warning on national security grounds if it is not “reasonably practicable” to do.

The stripping of citizenship – well, that's familiar! History repeating itself, but in a minor key. It was a problem that the subjects of my researches had grappled with in the late 1930s. Bertram Pickard, in his role as a reporter for a number of newspapers, including the Washington Post, but also as an observer on behalf of the international Quaker community, attended the conference at Evian-les-Bains held between the 6th and 15th of July 1938; a conference called by President Roosevelt precisely because of the stripping of citizenship from so many people in central Europe was causing a refugee crisis. 

The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 had stripped German citizenship away from 'non-Aryans'. The Anschluss and the annexation of Czechoslovakia now extended that to the Jewish, Roma and other 'non-Aryans' of Austria and the freshly dismembered Czechoslovakia. 

Évian was the sound of the world bolting their door tight against any potential influx of refugees. Only previously allowed quotas would be accepted. In many cases, much as a result of the often hysterical reporting of the press, there was pressure to reduce even those. The Daily Mail ran headlines such as:

 German Jews Pouring into the Country

and wrote reports such as:

Never before has it been more difficult for an alien to land unlawfully and remain out of police hands for more than a few hours. The favourite method is to come ashore in a rowing boat with the appearance of having been out for a short sea-trip. Despite coastal watch it is possible for an alien to escape notice in this way, but his inevitable struggle for existence is almost certain to lead him before long into police hands.  Daily Mail, 2nd August, 1938

What! Aliens landing on British shores in small boats! 

Migrant crisis ‘out control’ as Channel crossings treble last year’s total

THE growing number of illegal migrants crossing the channel is now a "national emergency", a senior Tory MP has warned.

By Macer Hall

23:03, Mon, Nov 22, 2021 | UPDATED: 23:04, Mon, Nov 22, 2021

 

Sir Edward Leigh told Home Secretary Priti Patel that the Government had “lost control” in the crisis. Anger erupted at Westminster yesterday after figures showed more than 25,600 people have made the journey across the Channel this year. Small boat arrivals in 2021 now stand at more than triple the figure for the whole of last year, when 8,417 people crossed.     Daily Express, 22nd November, 2021

Clearly history is repeating itself, replete with press outrage and calls for the government to act, as Becky Taylor (Reader in Modern History, University of East Anglia) reminds us in her recent blog post on Refugee History.

Just as now there are those who see refugees not as a threat but as people in distress who need help, so there were in the late 1930s. The subjects of my research were very much involved in such action, and were part of the Quaker effort to provide relief and assistance. Efforts that were co-ordinated from Friends House, London, the central offices of the Quakers in Britain:

Up to 1937 the staff and volunteers in the London office were never more than nine people. The work escalated after the invasion of Austria, so that by the end of 1938 the number of case workers employed had risen to 59. The stream of refugees needing help at Friends House swelled so much that the two great staircases became more or less permanently blocked by queues of people waiting to be attended to. Interviews had to be conducted in corridors when the offices were overflowing. A few months later, in February 1939, the work moved to Bloomsbury House. At this time a staff of 80 case workers moved out of Friends House along with 14,000 case records. The expansion of the work for Jewish refugees from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia led to the formation of a co-ordinating body known as the Inter-Church Council for German Refugees. Bertha Bracey was the Secretary of this body, whilst still employed by Friends Service Council as Secretary to the Friends Committee on Refugees and Aliens.    Lawrence Darton, Friends Committee on Refugees and Aliens, Appendix IV and pp. 58-9

My own family became involved when my mother received into her home a Jewish couple from Czechoslovakia, having paid the necessary surety money to the UK government to ensure that the couple would not become 'a charge upon the public purse' – the equivalent of about £5,000 in modern values. Technically the couple came as 'domestic servants' – due to the so called 'servant shortage' that was one of the very few categories of immigrant allowed into the UK – quite a claim for a couple who had owned a major store in Prague trading in fur coats – but a necessary fiction.

In the light of subsequent events, it seems the Quakers, and, in this case, my parents, were on the right side of history.

 

The I Ching, Cary Baynes and Irene Pickard

Archives always hold unexpected discoveries. One of them in Irene Pickard's archive was a letter between her and Cary Baynes, best know as the translator from German into English of the I Ching. It was one of those moments when you go "who? what? why?" It did not seem to make sense that two women from apparently utterly separate worlds should have connected with each other. 

Irene Pickard: wife, mother; one time personal secretary to the first director of studies at Woodbrooke College, Birmingham, UK; resident in Geneva because of her husbands post as secretary to the Quaker Centre in Geneva – itself not exactly the most prominent or prestigious post in the world – a woman whose largely domestic life would not necessarily have connected with many people outside her day to day circle, or the small world of Quakers visiting Geneva. She was at times warden of the small Quaker hostel in the city and was noted for her ability to cater for unexpected guests.

Cary Baynes: American, born in Mexico, educated at two prestigious American institutions – Vassar College and John Hopkins University – thrice married; a friend and collaborator of Carl Jung and occasional resident in Zürich; translator into English of one of the most published Chinese classics – the I Ching – and largely resident in California. 

The degree of separation seemed almost maximal. 

That there should be a letter, written in friendly and almost intimate terms between the two, seemed almost crazy; but there it was in the archive, dated August 1936. 

From the contents both women clearly knew of each other's personal lives and had formed a degree of friendship. 

What the letter revealed was that they had met when Emma Jung had travelled from Zürich to Geneva in order to deliver a series of seminars to a group of interested Quakers including Irene Pickard. Cary Baynes had accompanied Emma to help with interpretation. Clearly the friendship between Cary and Irene had developed then, perhaps because of Irene's famed flare for hospitality, but just as likely was their shared passionate interest in Jung's ideas. 

Cary Baynes had trained under Jung, but never practices as an analyst. What she did, however, was to translate from German into English three of Jung's works, two of them in collaboration with her then husband, H G Baynes. More importantly, she translated from their German versions, two Chinese classics which Jung has deemed of great psychological importance: The Secret of the Golden Flower and the I Ching. Jung wrote major introductions to both of these translations. 

There can be few homes of the hippy generation of the '60s without a copy of the I Ching. It is almost a requirement of anyone who dabbled in Far Eastern philosophies of life as an antidote to the suffocating narrowness of dogmatic Christianity, or the barrenness and sterility of scientific materialism. The choices on offer to the mid-twentieth century Western mind were bleak. Flirtation with the exotica of the East seemed to offer an escape route.

Irene Pickard's world in Geneva was centred very much on the small, but international, circle of Quakers in the city; among the member of which was Elined Kotschnig, a trainee Jungian analyst and wife of a member of the secretariat of the League of Nations. The analyst under whom Elined was training, Tina Keller-Jenny, was one of Jung's earliest protegees, and was the first Jungian analyst in Geneva. Tina was drawn to the Quaker circle, and spent a lot of time in their company, attending Quaker Meetings on occasions. It was Tina who was instrumental in bringing her friend and analyst Emma Jung to Geneva to give a series of seminars to the Quakers.

I am always impressed how the social networks we form are so fundamental in affecting our lives and transmitting attitudes. It is almost as if to understand who we are we need to understand what networks we are part of. 

The Jungian network and the Quaker network first intersected in Geneva. There have been many interconnections since.  

Nozizwe Charlotte Madlala-Routledge, who now occupies the role first created between the wars by Irene's husband Bertram Pickard, spoke of 'ubuntu' in her 2021 Salter Lecture – of a person being a person through others. "I see you" being an African greeting that acknowledges another person as a representative of their social and familial networks, not just as an isolated individual. More widely, ubuntu is:

A collection of values and practices that people of Africa or of African origin view as making people authentic human beings. While the nuances of these values and practices vary across different ethnic groups, they all point to one thing – an authentic individual human being is part of a larger and more significant relational, communal, societal, environmental and spiritual world.   ( Mugumbate, Jacob Rugare; Chereni, Admire (2020-04-23). "Editorial: Now, the theory of Ubuntu has its space in social work". African Journal of Social Work. 10 (1). ISSN 2409-5605.)

Radical re-centring

Part of the wonderful journey of discovery resulting from researching Irene Pickard's archive – it was like being a tourist for six years through other peoples minds and spiritual experiences – was encountering the radical re-centring that seems to lie at the root of Quakerism. 

The derailing of the spiritual authority of the Catholic Church by the Reformation and of its replacement, the Church of England, by the dethroning of Charles I, left a space for ordinary people to explore their spirituality without the fear of punishment. 

The publication of King James' authorised translation of the Bible into English (1611) and the spread of literacy due to the availability of books and other printed material, enabled many of the post 1611 generations to have direct access to 'the word of God' which had been denied to earlier generations. They had the tools to explore what had formally been the preserve of Latin reading priests, and some of them did just that:

At another time it was opened in me that God, who made the world, did not dwell in temples made with hands. This, at the first seemed a strange word because both priests and people use to call their temples or churches, dreadful places, and holy ground, and the temple of God. But the Lord showed me, so I did see clearly, that he did not dwell in these temples which men had commanded and set up, but in people's hearts; for both Stephen and the Apostle Paul bore testimony that he did not dwell in temples made with hands, not even in that which he had once commanded to be built, since he put an end to it; but that his people were his temple, and he dwelt in them.
The Journal of George Fox 1647

Fox was far from alone. The combination of direct access to the Bible and the freedom from fear of persecution led many to be radically adventurous, following where their deepest conscience led. And that was the point: they had not lost their lust for spiritual truth, if fact, set free of the fetters of church authority, it grew stronger. They sought for new centres of authority for their spirituality to replace the crumbling edifices of institutionalised religion. As Professor Alec Ryrie suggests in his Gresham College lecture The Spiritual Quest against Religion, they were bravely going where only heretics had dared to tread.

Their conclusions could be extremely radical. Here is Margaret Fell telling of George Fox's words which had so profoundly altered her life: 

'The Scriptures were the prophets’ words and Christ’s and the apostles’ words, and what as they spoke they enjoyed and possessed and had it from the Lord’. And said, ‘Then what had any to do with the Scriptures, but as they came to the Spirit that gave them forth. You will say, Christ saith this, and the apostles say this; but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of Light and hast walked in the Light, and what thou speakest is it inwardly from God?’   Margaret Fell, 1694

Conclusions that anyone could have direct access to the same source that had inspired Christ and the apostles – an inward 'light' that made truth shine in the heart; and when the light shone, the world changed:

Now I was come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter.   George Fox, 1648

It was the charismatic experience of communion with the holy spirit (that of God in everyone). A radical re-centring which validated the spiritual experience of each and every person. Experiences that led to 'great openings' as Fox called them. 

And I went back into Nottinghamshire, and there the Lord shewed me that the natures of those things which were hurtful without were within, in the hearts and minds of wicked men. The natures of dogs, swine, vipers, of Sodom and Egypt. Pharoah, Cain, Ishmael, Esau, etc. The natures of these I saw within, though people had been looking without. And I cried to the Lord, saying, 'Why should I be thus, seeing I was never addicted to commit those evils?' And the Lord answered that it was needful I should have a sense of all conditions, how else should I speak to all conditions; and in this I saw the infinite love of God. I also saw that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness. And in that also I saw the infinite love of God, and I had great openings.   George Fox, 1647

That radical, iconoclastic path was never going to be comfortable to follow, as the Woodbooke tutor Stuart Masters told in his 2020 Salter Seminar, Creating Heaven on Earth: The Radical Vision of Early Quakers: The World Turned Upside-Down.

Three hundred years after George Fox, Carl Jung was encouraging his patients to discover and connect with exactly that same centre, the inner well-spring of guidance and inspiration, no matter what they termed it: it would present itself to them in whatever form best suited their prejudices. 

The language available to Fox in a deeply Christian milieu was always going to shape the expression of his 'openings'; the language available to Jung's patients in a much more secular-scientific age would likewise shape theirs. What they shared in common was the force of that inner compass once it was discovered.

A republic of seekers not an empire of believers

From the very start Quakerism was a rebellion against institutionalised religion. Quakers felt that the churches – notably the Catholic, Anglican and Presbyterian – were of this world and of worldly power. They were empires that held their subjects in place by enforcing an adherence to belief. Enforcement that could extend well beyond fines and imprisonment to torture and burning at the stake. Quakers were averse to creating new institutions and hierarchies – especially the latter – so they strove to have only the barest minimum of organisational structures creating in effect a republic of seekers who engaged collectively in a search for truth. For many years they referred to themselves as 'The Friends of Truth', or simply as 'The Friends'.

From their heritage amongst the Seekers they gained a deep dislike and distrust for any who would set themselves up as authorities: they were deeply anti-clerical and anti-creedal. Although often well read in the bible, they did not regard it as an authority either: it might and did inspire, but it did not command. 

They gathered together and sat in silence – often long periods of silence – waiting for direct inspiration and guidance. A silence that might be cultured by what they had read or heard, but in which they tested the spiritual truth of those words and waited beyond that for an inner feeling of rightness that was not of their own volition. 

There was suspicion of 'creaturely activity' that was to be recognised by states of excitement or elation. They would not have been happy among modern evangelicals! God's voice was that 'still voice of calm': a feeling of being at one with what was revealed. This was a trend in Quakerism inherited from the Seekers that came more to the fore in the Eighteenth century, although the Seventeenth century generations were well practised in silent waiting – at the deepest level they were all shaped by it.

Eighteenth century Friends, in the Age of Reason, put their trust in that which was Beyond Reason and we neglect the quietist tradition at our peril. Its most compelling image was that of the Aeolian harp which, being nothing in itself, was in its very emptiness the instrument through which the winds of God could play. We err, and err gravely, if we think that quietism has anything to do with “being quiet”, with indolence, or with aloofness from the world. It protested against “creaturely activity” but taught that the soul, emptied of self-will and self-running, was being prepared to be the instrument of the holy spirit. Edward H Milligan: Nine for the Nine Bright Shiners: The Seeker, Autumn 1987

Around this kernel grew a set of practices; a way of living rather than believing. They set themselves apart in dress, in manner and by the 'right ordering' of life. Effectively they set up a counterculture, so much so that when the opportunity arose many fled Britain for the hardships of settling in Pennsylvania and breaking new land rather than giving up their 'distinctiveness' and conforming to the demands of King, Church and Country. A distinctiveness that had earned them many spells in prison and repeated fines or distraint of their goods and chattels.

They devised methods of collective governance that created a minimum of institution. No priest or ministers only Elders and, the unfortunately named, Overseers. In the light of slavery 'overseer' is not a word in favour now for describing what was a pastoral function concerned with the wellbeing of Friends: much needed when in the early years they spent so much time in prisons, or having their goods or chattels distrained. Neither appointment was ever permanent, but only held for a limited time – often no more than three years – to prevent the accumulation of power. Often there were also two servants of the Meeting: the Clerk and the Treasurer. Neither with any power to do anything beyond what was instructed by the Meeting. Likewise, they only served for a limited time. None were ever paid: it was a way of rendering service.

Those instructions came from the inspirations that arose in the silence of the 'gathered' meetings of Friends. That 'still quiet voice of God' was the authority sought. It spoke through the voice of one or other Friend during Meeting, guiding their words. It was recognised by the lack of resistance to its truth on the part of the listeners. It mattered not if it were man, woman or child that spoke: the truth spoke for itself. It created a harmonious accord between Friends when it arose. Quakers have never voted on any matter to this day – voting divides: seeking truth unites. 

Carl Jung admired this way of proceeding, feeling that the Quakers had discovered a method of shared access to what he termed 'the God-archypype' that was both an element within the deep mind of each and beyond in what he termed 'the collective unconscious'. In his letter to Irene Pickard he referred to them as being "the only true Christians" because of exactly that charismatic element. 

An element that concerned itself not with theological niceties of whether 'God' existed or not, or what he/she/it/they might be but with the vitality of the experience:

That is why whenever we speak of religious content we move in a world of images that point to something ineffable. We do not know how clear or unclear these images, metaphors, and concepts are in respect of their transcendental object. If, for instance, we say “God” we give an expression to an image or verbal concept which has undergone many changes in the course of time. We are, however, unable to say with any degree of certainty — unless it be by faith — whether these changes affect only the images and concepts, or the Unspeakable itself. After all we can imagine God as an eternally flowing current of vital energy that endlessly changes shape just as easily as we can imagine him as an eternally unmoved unchangeable essence. Our reason is sure of one thing: that it manipulates images and ideas which are dependent on human imagination and its temporal and local conditions, and which have therefore changed innumerable times in the course of their long history. C G Jung: Answer to Job

Complete, definitive & long, or selective & short?

What to do? What to do? Masses of material: many documents, papers, articles, speeches, letters, booklets, notes, drafts, etc. Add an associated library of 115 Jungian related titles. In all the product of near seventy years. A pile of stuff that Irene Pickard described as her 'compost heap' (Inward Light, No 59, Spring 1960). How best to process and present this trove? How to put over its significance? Was there indeed any coherence in the collection? Was there a narrative that would bring it together? How to relate its creation to its historical context? How to trace the lines of development within? Who were the main actors? What were the consequences of their very evident interest that brought these items together and preserved them? How does exploring and writing about it fit into public discourse? What discourse? Within which communities?

Opening an archive is rather like discovering a cave system. An unguessed at network of chambers and passageways is explored, and slowly the system is charted. Perhaps cave paintings, or remains are discovered, and natural wonders revealed. A catalogue of what is there might be created, and a guide to how to access it written and detailed maps drawn. Maybe a history of its discovery and exploration is recorded. What was unknown becomes shared and public. It becomes accessible and known, and may even be valued and added to tourist itineraries. It becomes part of the public landscape.

There clearly was a central event of importance: the direct contact in the 1930s between a group of Geneva Quakers and the psychologist Carl Jung and his circle, just at a time when Jung was developing his theories about the fundamental importance to psychological health and wellbeing of what might be termed the 'spiritual' aspect of life. 

There are the antecedents to this event. Then there are the consequents. How much of each belongs in an account? Where to start and end the narrative? The choice of length and depth would very much dictate how much of each to include, as would considerations of who the likely audience might be and which discourses it might contribute to.

The question of purpose comes into all of this. What is my purpose in researching and reporting on the archive? The latter is easily answered: lacking a specific career goal, such as submitting a thesis, or building a reputation – I am post-career, retired, somewhat past such concerns – I have written about the archive and its creators because that is the only way I know of coming to understand what it contains. It has been my way of processing the contents and their relationship to the historical context. I have then felt compelled to share what I have discovered because, other than whatever contribution it might make to the historical record and the discourses around that, I think it will interest others who share my overlapping interests: philosophy, psychology, history, theology, peace-studies, ethics, Quakerism and the love of a good story. As I opened up the archive, that latter became obvious. 

The main protagonists had extraordinary lives. True, that was in part because they lived in what the apocryphal Chinese curse calls 'interesting times'; but most pertinently they proceeded through those times in countercultural ways. Their history is a history of exception not of conformity. Pacifists and peace-makers in a time of war and bellicose posturing; quietly and undogmatically religious in a time of avant-garde secularism and iconoclasm; deeply and self-critically questioning in a time of assertive certainties (patriotism, nationalism, imperialism, fascism, communism); open and receptive to new and emerging ideas and pluralities, whilst remaining connected and even embedded in their reluctantly evolving and somewhat traditionalist faith community. 

To top it all there were the elements of a good yarn: romance, thwarted love, danger, adventure, and the quest of a woman to find her place in a fast changing and disorientating world; and of an otherwise obscure man who became a founding member of the United Nations secretariat and who was instrumental in helping to shape the post Second World War order.

If I were chasing reputation or career, then a short, punchy account would do the job; but there would only be opportunity for one bite of this particular cherry. A definitive account would be unlikely ever to be written if a short, punchy account was chosen; however, a definitive account would take time and would be difficult to find a publisher for. What was in the archive deserved better than a hit and grab raid, as did the lives of the protagonists, so in the end its been the long haul: a definitive account.

What Is Spirituality? Spirituality is like an adventure park waiting to be explored

Firstly, you don't have to give up! You don't have to be like people who equate spirituality with a religion they decide is false, then abandon. It is possible to look at spirituality another way, as something free of institutional structures and hierarchies, not so much about dogma and beliefs as about attitudes, values and practices, about what motivates you (us) at the deepest level, influencing how you think and behave, helping you find a true and useful place in your community, culture and in the world.

Larry Culliford, M.B., B.Chir. (Cantab), M.R.C. Psych. (UK), is the author of The Psychology of Spirituality and a psychiatrist in Sussex, England. The quote comes from his blog. 

Silently waiting, sitting, hour on hour, week after week, slowly tempering the 'soul' – that inner spirit that drives life forward – like a patient hen sitting on her eggs. This is why they speak of Quakers being 'seasoned', like timbers; raw and green freshly felled wood is of limited use – it will warp and twist too much. The self, too full of ego, twists and warps. Tempered over time, seasoned by the long hours of silent waiting, the 'must have now, must do, must …' subsides as it cannot have the instant gratification it craves. Then the slow hatching of a deeper compassion and care for the living emerges. 

Before Jung 'religion' and 'spirituality' were equated. You were either an entirely secular – a non-believing, reductively rational materialist – or practised one or other religions: signed up and induced into the 'fold' and fed with a pre-packaged meal of belief, which you might be required to regurgitate on occasions. Increasingly that was a diet that was proving to be too indigestible for many.

What Jung found among his patients were increasing numbers who had become alienated from 'religion' as proffered, and who were suffering from varying degrees of ennui as a result. They were – as the title of one of his books suggested – examples of Modern Man in Search of a Soul. They were cast adrift from the anchoring points traditionally provided by religions, but had found no substitute, often believing they needed none: that is why they were floundering and came to him for help. 

His prescription was to look inwardly into the deep mind, often using dreams as a portal – although preferring what he called 'active imagination' – to try to find some anchor points. These often appeared symbolically represented in the pregnant imagery generated in the liminal spaces between full consciousness and the hypnagogic or hypnopompic stages of sleep.   

Such discoveries activated the spiritual aspect of his patients lives – put them in touch with their 'soul'. He was little concerned what symbols triggered such awakening, which religion they might come from – he suspected that they were older than any particular religion – just recurring in different guises as religions transformed and evolved. What mattered was their psychological function in helping his patients become more integrated – less distressed and broken.

That shift from outward induction into a received religion, to inward seeking for what resonates, marks the change from being religious to being spiritual. A phenomena even more marked in recent times than in Jung's lifetime. Books such as Spiritual but not Religious (Robert C Fuller), After Religion (Gordon Lynch), After God (Don Cupitt), or even the Dali Lama's own Beyond Religion being testament to that shift. 

What Jung admired about the Quakers was that they had already made that shift. Their centuries old practice of silent waiting opening them to being spiritually alert rather than being tied to outward forms of worship – the proscribed rituals of religion. Their rejection of creeds and dogmas readying them to respond to what arose rather than providing them with fixed formulas and ready answers.

It was a fascinating part of my research discovering the interactions between the Jungs (both Carl and Emma) and the Geneva Quakers on exactly such topics; and then tracing the consequences of that encounter for the Quaker world and beyond.

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.