The Journey into the Unconscious — Jung and Shamanism, Part 3
This is the next in a long series discussing Carl Jung’s ‘confrontation with the unconscious’. (For what has preceded please see this list.) In the introduction to this section I suggested that there is a link between Jung and shamanism going back through his own depth psychology, mediaeval alchemy, Gnosticism, Greek pre-Socratic philosophers like Parmenides, and perhaps more.
I’m currently exploring the links between Jung and shamanism in more detail. This is important because it shows that his inner journey and the Depth Psychology which emerged from it is a genuine tradition going back many thousands of years, and that this ancient tradition of shamanism still has great healing potential in modern times.
My primary source is Shamanism and the Psychology of C. G. Jung: The Great Circle by Robert E. Ryan¹. In the introduction I quoted the jacket notes. In the following article I discussed his first chapter. In the most recent article I provided the evidence that shamanism was and remains a unified global phenomenon, not just in general terms, but often in precise detail. Now I’ll turn to chapters 2 and 3 where Ryan compares Jung’s cosmos with that of the ancient shamans. (Chapter 2 outlines Jung’s worldview in general, including a discussion of various concepts, for example the collective unconscious, archetypes, synchronicity, the nature of symbolism. I assume readers will have some understanding of these, so here I’ll focus just on the ideas directly relevant to shamanism.)
Shamanism is still relevant today because Jung believes that modern humanity has lost touch with its primordial depths rooted in myth; a revival of shamanic ideas therefore could re-establish the connection. As Ryan says: “It is only myth which can overcome that paralyzing image of the alienated and tortured human mind… and unite us with the immortal part of the mortal mind. And it is Carl Jung who best can explain to the modern mind in terms it can still understand this now difficult and nearly lost but deeply human inner truth”.
He begins chapter 2 by elaborating Jung’s ideas: “Modern man, Jung observed, is paralyzed by self-division. Our well-developed rational intellect, on the basis of which we have made such tremendous progress in the modern world, has come to dominate the psychic landscape and ‘usurps the seat where once the spirit was enthroned’. As such ‘consciousness deviates again and again from its instinctual foundation and finds itself in opposition to it’. So divided the conscious mind starves for the creative insight provided by the unconscious, while the unconscious is denied the light of consciousness. The universal and primordial images which, according to Jung and as will become apparent from their employment in shamanic cultures, are alone capable of working to synthesize these sundered psychic positions, have been largely misunderstood and abandoned by modern culture. According to Mircea Eliade… the loss of our mythic sensibility constitutes for humankind a second fall from grace and effectively divides us from an experienced truth. Or, as Jung expressed the same realization, ‘Our myth has become mute, and gives no answers’ ”.
“Today, we must ask ourselves why the images which captivated and motivated so many proud and intelligent cultures of the past now mean next to nothing to us. For cultures throughout history, myth and symbol provided both existential meaning and direction and connected man with what Jung termed the objective psyche, those depths of the human mind from which our religious and creative insights and intuitions have always mysteriously been born. ‘They are created out of the primal stuff of revelation’, Jung observes, ‘and reflect the ever-unique experience of divinity’. Such insights and intuitions provide us with a premonition of our proximity to the divine and to that slumbering image of unity and totality which, as we shall see, Jung felt lay deep within the psyche and moved it toward integration with its own depths, the world of nature from which it sprang, and a sacred cosmos”.
This cul-de-sac into which the so-called Enlightenment has led the West, as noted by Jung, is a prominent theme of my writings. Ryan identifies the beginning of this process as taking place in ancient Greece, which he contrasts with Nepal: “Nepal stands out over the centuries for a resolute religious temperament which has kept alive ancient traditions, myths and ritual practices. Greece, on the other hand, stands halfway between the mythic world and the evolving rational consciousness which would eventually give us our current empiricism and technology. It represents the evolutionary impetus which impelled us to modernity, and here we find myth in its final, twilight hours”.
There is therefore an urgent need for modern humanity to reconnect with its primordial and mythical depths, “the natural truth which dwells in the inner man”. Ryan quotes Mircea Eliade: “It is depth psychology (i.e. that beginning with Jung) that has revealed the most terrae ignotae, has caused the most dramatic confrontations. The discovery of the unconscious could be put on a level with the maritime discoveries of the Renaissance and the astronomical discoveries that followed the invention of the telescope. For each of these discoveries brought to light worlds whose existence was not even suspected… It is not impossible that our age may go down to posterity as the first to rediscover those ‘diffuse religious experiences’ which were destroyed by the triumph of Christianity”. He then adds: “Among these lost religious experiences, of course, he includes shamanism.
Ryan continues: “Our first task in attempting this ‘rediscovery’, therefore, will be to lay a basic foundation for understanding Jungian psychology and the natural truth which dwells in the inner man. We shall then show how this knowledge helps us understand the principles and practices of shamanism and illustrates the manner in which modern depth psychology is reclaiming an extremely meaningful aspect of our human heritage, tracing back thousands and even tens of thousands of years into our past through ever-recurrent symbolic forms”.
He begins his lesson on Jungian psychology thus:
- for Jung the psyche is “a cosmos equal and complementary to the physical world, a cosmos with its own form and structure, governed by its own laws and containing its own significance”.
- Jung “regarded the unconscious psyche as the source of human creativity and inspiration reaching back into and expressing principles of instinct, nature and finally creation itself. Moreover, he felt that it directly linked man not only with his own wellsprings but also with the wellsprings of the primordial past; that is, to the human evolutionary past and to its older modes of expression”.
- for him, the collective unconscious “contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind’s evolution, born anew in the brain structure of every individual”, is “a vast historical storehouse”, then “every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche… (which is) a product of evolution which, when followed to its origins, shows countless archaic traits”. Thus Jung was able to say: “Together the patient and I address ourselves to the 2,000,000-year-old man who is in all of us”.
- the cosmos “was the perpetual unfolding of a continuous pattern of order. And the archetype was capable of carrying forward aspects of this patterning into the human mind. Finally, in a very real sense for Jung as it had for archaic man, the logos of the soul deepened into the cosmic creation. Humankind, far from being orphaned in an absurd world, could experience itself as being the expression of a larger meaning and order”.
All this will provide what we so badly need in modern times, “an ever-expanding vision of human wholeness and relationship with the world which surrounds and supports us”.
Ryan concludes his second chapter by highlighting the parallels between Jung’s worldview with that of the shaman: “For the shaman, as it was for Jung, the psyche is a cosmos equal to and complementary to the physical world. Here again the world itself speaks in the symbol and the shaman employs the symbol’s power to penetrate the blocked subterranean passages of our psyche to reach the transpersonal realm of the unconscious, the deep realm of the wisdom of instinct, and the harmony with nature and cosmos hidden in the psyche’s depths. In a world transcending traditional distinctions between spirit and matter, mind and body, a world which opens directly to the causeless order of the pleroma, he also activates and harnesses powerful innate forces of psychodynamic transformation through his mastery of the terrain of the imaginal world”.
Chapter 3, entitled ‘The Shaman’s Cosmos’, opens with a section entitled “The Remarkable Similarity of the Human Psyche at All Times and in All Places”. Ryan opens by returning to the idea that modern humanity needs to return to a pre-Enlightenment worldview: “The cosmos which Jung offers to modernity is one that runs against the grain of the thought patterns that have increasingly emerged in the West since the Enlightenment. In fact, it is contrary to the ‘common sense’ vision we have of ourselves existing in the world. Yet many previous societies might have recognized it as truer and more significant than our construction of the world… Jung gauges reality against the structures of the mind which shape it, and in this anterior world he finds a realm with its own topography and laws, innate structural and functional qualities which are fascinating, illuminative, naturally therapeutic and ‘real because they work’. Here he unearths the unconscious unitary soul of mankind, for the human soul opens inward and the preconscious mind is revealed to be the germinal matrix of the form of our experience and all our creative endeavors”.
He then quotes Jung: “The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back many millions of years. Individual consciousness is only the flower and the fruit of a season, sprung from the perennial rhizome beneath the earth; and it would find itself in better accord with the truth if it took the existence of the rhizome into its calculations. For the root matter is the mother of all things”.
He then continues: “As we shall discover, the shaman likewise penetrates this root matter that is the mother of all things which lies beyond the plane of the conscious mind and tracks the soul into territories sharing many of the same features that we found in Jung’s cosmos. He unearths and unleashes psychodynamic processes which alter consciousness and reveal deeper dimensions of the psyche uniting man with the world of the past, instinct and ordered organic process and, finally, with a durative realm of essential form. In the process, he provides the structure and significance capable of guiding his community and a plenitude and vital power capable of repairing health, life and the creation itself… In so doing he employs techniques and a grammar of symbols, in the expanded sense in which Jung employs the term, which in structure as well as function form striking parallels with Jung’s discoveries with regard to his contemporary patients”.
Jung, in addition to everything else he did, was a psychotherapist all his adult life. It is fitting therefore that there follows a section entitled ‘The Science of the Soul’ which begins: “It was Jung’s challenge to retrieve and revitalize the sick souls of his contemporary patients and to reconnect them with their universal foundation, and in his efforts to do so he gradually unearthed the lineaments of an ancient wisdom reaching back far into history and, simultaneously, deep into the psychophysiological continuum from which consciousness evolves. According to him, neurosis was self-division and the severing of the psyche’s essential contact with its own deep structures”.
Jung says that “the loss of this great relationship is the prime evil of neurosis”, that psychotherapy’s proper task was to deal with “the perils of the soul and its salvation”, and frequently spoke of contemporary mental illness as a “loss of soul” which only the arduous process of psychic integration could repair”.
Many shamanic traditions throughout the world say something very similar, because “one of the most common, and frequently the most common, diagnosis of illness is a loss of the soul”. Surprisingly, this is understood quite literally. According to Mircea Eliade, “disease is (sometimes) attributed to the soul’s having strayed away or been stolen, and treatment is in principle reduced to finding it, capturing it and obliging it to resume its place in the patient’s body”. Ryan adds: “It is only the shaman who can find the alienated soul and restore it to its rightful place”. In modern times, we would probably not agree with that diagnosis when expressed in those terms, but consider it rather a metaphor.
The shaman, like Jung, is “the great specialist in the human soul”. He has obtained his power to heal following a journey into the spirit world, “an initiatory crisis of psychic disintegration, a return to origin, both within the psyche and the cosmos, and a renewal with enhanced power”. This could be a perfect description of Jung’s confrontation with the unconscious. This is confirmed as Ryan continues: “The shaman’s initiatory experience is a process of both psychic and cosmic integration which very clearly parallels the structural and functional stages of Jung’s individuation process. It involves the very same encounter with the collective unconscious, the realm of instinct and ordered organic process and, ultimately, with nature and cosmos”.
The shaman’s journey is extraordinary. “During his trance experiences his own soul is released from his body to find its way into the underworld or to ascend to the heavens. In so doing, it traverses an inwardly revealed but at the same time very real transpersonal realm with its own perils and laws which the shaman is able to master… It is the shaman’s gift… that he can chart this territory and bring back its riches to his community, integrating them with its conscious life as expressed in myth and traditional lore”.
Thus “the shaman both ‘guards’ the soul of the community and retrieves it when it becomes lost to man in this world… The shaman guards the soul and helps prevent its alienation by being the keeper of the myths, symbols, rituals and objects of art of his people which secure the soul by connecting it with its deeper sources”
This journey sounds very much like Jung’s experience. It is a recovery “of structures innate to the human psyche, connecting it with what Jung described as the unconscious unitary soul of mankind which silently structures the most significant levels of human reality and stamps our deepest personal experience with the forms of the transpersonal”.
Is it reasonable to conclude therefore that the shamanic tradition was desperate not to be lost to humanity, and chose Jung to be the one to revive it?
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Footnote:
1. Vega, 2002
