Symbols are evocative, that is the point of them. They are not
passive. They are not signs. Signs simply stand for something or
point at something. They are passive – extremely useful – but
passive. In 2+2 the + does its job. The → points in the direction
to go and is therefore helpful. The ← turns us around and sends us
the other way. Logicians, mathematicians, graphic designers and sign
makers, amongst others, deal in signs all day long, and make and
invent new ones whenever they feel a need. Twenty-first century
people live in a sign rich world, especially since the arrival in our
lives of smart phones: the icon is king!
Symbols go deeper, at least in the Jungian sense. On the surface
they are signs, but they have the power to evoke deeper responses. In
fact, extremely deep responses. For Jung they reached beyond the
surface intelligence into the deep mind, into the parts we are not
distinctly conscious of: they engage us fully as human beings,
passing way beyond the surface shell of intellect.
Jung's work with his patients had led him to realise that much of
what drives and shapes us, much of what makes us what we are, is
rooted so deeply in us that we are not fully conscious of where it
comes from. It is like the wind that fills the sails that push boats
along: we feel its force and are driven forward by it, sometimes to
destruction on the rocks, sometimes into safe harbour; and, just like
the wind, it can be variable, sometimes little more than a breeze,
sometimes tearing at us with hurricane force. Think of people who
have lost their temper, who are in rage, think how they are hurled
along by their passion; and, just like the wind, those psychic forces
can veer about, driving us first one way, then another, or even drop
so that we wallow in the doldrums of listlessness: but where does the
wind start? For sailors it is always from beyond the horizon: just so
with the forces that drive us from within.
Symbols operate on the deep parts of the mind where those drives
originate. Their meaning is not formal, not reducible, not
containable within a matrix of definitions and words. They bypass the
purely intellectual. That is why they are encountered over and over
again in shapeshifting forms, capable of recurring in altered guises
at different times and in different cultures; like a woman who may
appear in different outfits each day, but still be recognisably
herself.
Jung gave a name to those patterns underlying the swirling changes
of outer appearance. He called them archetypes. He held that such
archetypal symbols invoke deep responses because the deep mind is
predisposed to respond to those patterns. The patterns of the
archetypes lie in the deep mind – the unconscious as he termed it –
like templates waiting to find configurations of the world that fit
their form – they slide naturally over them imbuing them with an
aura of meaningfulness.
Art abounds with archetypes because they speak to us. There are
galleries full of Virgin and Childs, Crucifixions, Empty Tombs,
Buddhas, or many-armed Hindu gods, for that matter. Venuses rise from
seas and angry deities belch forth smoke from their noses. Art and
religion have walked hand in hand through history. Even Islam has
evolved its own highly symbolic abstract and hypnotic pattern to
invoke deep responses in its holy spaces, wonderfully woven words
into poetry, and created soundscapes from the muezzin's calls to
prayer from high minarets, or in its devotional music and song.
For Jung, religions deal in archetypes. They operate on us
symbolically. They create a cloud of symbolic meaning that wraps
around us, invoking responses at the deepest level. They are the
mechanisms by which latent potentials of the archetypes within us
engage with our acts of living. They turn spaces from being simply
spaces into sacred spaces. They turn actions from being simply
actions into acts of worship, or blessing, or sanctification, or
contrition, or penance, or devotion – lifting actions out of the
mundane into the sacred. Consider the devotion showered on icons in
Eastern Orthodox worship. Consider the parading of statues of the
Virgin on Catholic feast days and the devotion shown towards them.
Consider the ever present statues of Buddha in meditation halls, or
the hanging of garlands around statues of Hindu gods.
Those clouds of meaning are shaped by religions into narratives
about how the world is. Religious narratives deal mythologically
with the world– narratives that do not deal with the mundane world
as such, but with the sanctification of the world through weaving
mythological meaning through it. They provide structures for making
the world comprehensible, manageable, and even tractable.
Importantly, they make it meaningful, emotionally, spiritually and
evocatively – they speak to the vitality of being, not to the inert
fact of being.
Jung regarded mythologies as symbolic encodings of the deep forces
at play within the human unconscious, not as passive fantasies. They
allow us to symbolically project our inward struggles as we mature
through life. Engaging with them helps us to develop: they are
midwives of the soul.
Unlike the narratives of fiction, or those spun in film or
theatre, the adherents of religions are themselves woven into the
plots. They are part of the cosmic drama. They must play their part,
fulfil their role. They become part of a living myth. Living out
their part imbues their lives with meaning – with mythological
meaning. Jung liked quoting the Pueblo indians who felt it was their
job to help the sun rise each day – that was their spiritual
function – without which the world would die, because what would
rise would not be the real sun, and the world would be bathed in a
cruel light that made life wither instead of thriving.
Jung noted that many of his clients were floundering in a state of
anomie because intellectually they had detached from the mythological
meanings inherited from their culture. They had used their intellect
to detach from the evocative power of those symbols, but in doing so
had anaesthetised many of the archetypes within – hence their
malaise.
Jung thought that two of the archetypes, the anima and animus,
were not in danger of suffering this fate, because men and women
would still meet, and, like it or not, overwhelming attraction would
happen. The passion each feeling for the other coming from far deeper
than anything intellectual – flowing from those two archetypes.
That is why he thought they were entryways into discovering the
hidden world of the unconscious: they would be there driving emotions
and experiences, one way or another, for almost everyone, in their
dreams and fantasies, if not project out into the world over whoever
sparked their sexual interest.
However, what he termed the God-archetype, the Self, or
deep-centre – that archetype which turns the world sacred and
special, and which pours meaning over the 'believer' like a libation
– that archetype was all too often anaesthetised by modernity. The
title of his first book on the subject, Modern Man in
Search of a Soul, arose from
his observations of the floundering of so many of his clients who has
lost contact with their deep centre, with the God-archetype, with, as
Quakers would put it, that of God within.
He suggested that the mythology
of Christianity no longer acted symbolically on the deep minds
of many European people, which is why he suspected that we were
coming to the end of the Christian Era in the West. Its mythology and
symbols no longer spoke to people's condition; but this did not mean
that people could dispense with a religious framework in which to
live. Far from it. The archetype would lurk inside, waiting to be
invoked, to be triggered, that sense of need, insatiable and prowling
like a hungry wolf, disturbing dreams, disturbing behaviour,
expressing itself destructively. That was modern man's search for a
soul, as in the title. The zeal of the iconoclastic atheist often
being testimony to such pathology, along with a restless
experimentation with exotic religions – a searching for a cure –
on the part of others.
Sometimes, he noted, substitute mythologies were found – those
of nationalism, communism, or fascism – without their adherents
realising that those too were just as mythological as any traditional
religion. They served much the same function of imbuing with meaning
and justifying, or even compelling action. They invoked the
God-archetype, they engaged with the deep-centre of a person's being;
and, as he had seen all to clearly, they laid waste to the world in
consequence. Two World Wars made it only too clear that they brought
the dark side of the human potential to the fore.
Jung said that the greatest danger mankind faced was from within;
all too apparent in the age of assured mutual annihilation threatened
by the nuclear standoff of the Cold War, as it had been in the
devastating World Wars. He suggested that by recognising the
importance of integrating the God-archetype into our lives such fate
could be avoided. That integration should balance the constructive
with the destructive, recognising the dark-side of human potentials
by symbolically canalising them and directing their energies into
more creative expressions than war, human sacrifice or other
bloodshed. Likewise he felt that the feminine should be given equal
rein with the masculine at the symbolic level. He sensed that the
human psyche was seeking a more evolved and balanced expression which
would be embedded in whatever mythology came to replace the existing
forms of Christianity for Western Man.
Christianity might evolve by transformation of what was there into
new forms – a process of continued revelation – such as the
Quakers' tradition suggests – an openness to accepting new ways and
interpretations; but equally, Christianity might simply be replaced,
just as it had itself replaced Paganism in the Roman Empire, or as
Islam had replaced its predecessors. The attraction to Buddhism or
modern Paganism on the part of many people in the West would seem to
support Jung's contention: the archetype will attach itself to
whatever symbols invoke the deepest response. That is the nature of
spiritual conversion. It may come in a blinding flash – as with St
Paul on the Road to Damascus, or it may come by slow degrees of
opening to new 'truth', but in either case, the conversion is very
real: the old symbols become void and the new become charged because
they better fit the archetypes.
For many Quakers influenced by Jung's thinking the perpetual vexed
question of the divinity of Christ appeared to have a solution. Jesus
of Nazareth, the Jesus of the Testaments, was a symbol capable of
invoking a response from the deep archetype nearest the centre of
their being for some people. The fact of the life and teaching of
Jesus were fairly simple, even if the process of sifting and
retelling had turned the man into a legendary figure. The projection
of the archetype over the legendary figure deified him, and that was
then encapsulated in the man-god figure encountered in the Gospels,
especially in John. That evangelical narrative of the Saviour spoke
deeply to some. For those the image woven in the narrative would
trigger that strong response and would lodge in their hearts. This
was Christ as powerful symbol, the key that unlocked their soul, but
not for all.
For others the divinity lay not in the person but in the message.
The message was the symbol that triggered a response. That was the
key that unlocked the soul. It was the key to the 'Kingdom of Heaven'
on earth as a way of living. It was a kingdom not of the hereafter
but of the here and now; not of a paradise, but of a work in
progress, built step by step, life by life. It was a living
realisation of the word.
Quakers have always been ambivalent about the divinity of Jesus,
and about the trinitarian vision of the God-head. Their accusers have
placed them, along with the Unitarians, as being in denial of the
essential mystery – the core mythology of Christianity – the
belief in the dual nature of the central person of the drama, Jesus
of Nazareth, as both fully human, and, at the same time, being the
fully divine incarnation of the Christ.
There has been an uneasy tension in Quakerism ever since its
inception due to that ambivalence. This ambivalence arises because
belief is not the core of Quakerism, but the practice of silent
waiting is; that state of communion that bypasses belief, focusing on
experience instead: in George Fox's words – 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?
That tension in Quakerism, has been sometimes fruitful, but has
sometimes produced rifts, especially in North America: a tension
between the more evangelical, who take the fact of Jesus as Christ –
as God incarnate – as their cornerstone, who engage with the
biblical narrative as truth, including the certainty of an afterlife
in which they will be judged; and those who view Jesus as a teacher
and guide, as the one who opens the door to the divine, as a model
and instructor, who provides the code for living rightfully – those
who take the teachings as a guide to constructing the Kingdom of
Heaven on earth, with their sense of the divine message written in
each heart as lodestone.
George Keith (1638 – 1716), who worked and travelled with both
George Fox and William Penn for many years, was aware of that
tension, and of the ambivalence over the 'tenets' of the faith. He
eventually left the Quakers because he had come to see them as being
Deists, not Christians, who were certain of their sense of “that of
God-within” and of the Kingdom of Heaven they were to build in the
here and now, but indifferent to the message of salvation in the
death, resurrection and ascension of the transfigured being of Jesus
of Nazareth revealed as the Christ.
Jung's work on the inner mechanisms of spirituality, central to
which was his postulation of the archetype at the deep centre of
being – the Selbst (Self) – helped make sense of the ways in
which people responded to the symbols and mythology of Christianity
or other religions. It accounted for the evocative nature of such
symbols and mythologies, and also for how alienation from them can
occur. It also provided an account of how religions evolve and
mutate, or wither and die, depending on how well they engage the
inner complexes – how satisfying they are to the inner
psychological needs of people. Essentially, he saw religions as
external mythological projections of the sufferings of the soul, but
as also containing mechanisms for the relief of that suffering by
aiding lifelong maturation.
