Carl G. Jung : The Age of Science

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF C. G. JUNG

VOLUME 18

MARGINALIA ON CONTEMPORARY EVENTS

Until a few centuries ago those regions of the world which have since been illuminated by science were shrouded in deepest darkness. Nature was still in her original state, as she had been from time immemorial. Although she had long since been bereft of gods, she had not by any means been depsychized. Demonic spirits still haunted the earth and water, and lingered in the air and fire; witchcraft and prophecies cast their shadows over human relationships, and the mysteries of faith descended deep into the natural world. In certain flowers there could be found images of the martyrs’ instruments of torture, and of Christ’s blood; the clockwise spiral of the snail’s shell was a proof of the existence of God; in alchemy the Virgin birth was figured in the awakening of the infans mercurialis in the womb of the earth; Christ’s passion was represented by the separatio, solutio, and digestio of the arcane substance; his death and resurrection were reproduced in the processes of chemical transformation. These depicted the otherwise unimaginable transubstantiation. The secret of the baptismal water was rediscovered in the marvellous properties of the solvent par excellence, the aqua permanens. Christ’s crucifixion was like a prefiguration of the task of natural science, for the tree of the Cross corresponded to the arbor philosophica, which in turn stood for the opus alchymicum in general.

Today we can scarcely imagine this state of mind any more, and we can form no proper conception of what it meant to live in a world that was filled from above with the mysteries of God’s wonder, down to the very crucible of the smelter, and was corrupted from below by devilish deception, tainted by original sin, and secretly animated by an autochthonous demon or an anima mundi — or by those “sparks of the World Soul” which sprang up as the seeds of life when the Ruach Elohim brooded on the face of the waters.

One can scarcely imagine the unspeakable change that was wrought in man’s emotional life when he took farewell from that almost wholly antique world. Nevertheless, anyone whose childhood was filled with fantasy can feel his way back to it to a certain extent. Whether one laments or welcomes the inevitable disappearance of that primordial world is irrelevant. The important thing is the question that nobody ever asks: What happens to those figures and phantoms, those gods, demons, magicians, those messengers from heaven and monsters of the abyss, when we see that there is no mercurial serpent in the caverns of the earth, that there are no dryads in the forest and no undines in the water, and that the mysteries of faith have shrunk to articles in a creed ? Even when we have corrected an illusion, it by no means follows that the psychic agency which produces illusions, and actually needs them, has been abolished. It is very doubtful whether our way of rectifying such illusions can be regarded as valid. If, for example, one is content to prove that there is no whale that could or would like to swallow a Jonah, and that, even if it did, a man would rapidly suffocate under those conditions and could not possibly be spewed forth alive again — when we criticize in this way we are not doing justice to the myth. Indeed, such an argument is decidedly ridiculous because it takes the myth literally, and today this seems a little bit too naïve.

Already we are beginning to see that enlightened correction of this kind is painfully beside the point. For it is one of the typical qualities of a myth to fabulate, to assert the unusual, the extraordinary, and even the impossible. In the face of this tendency, it is quite inappropriate to trot out one’s elementary-school knowledge. This sort of criticism does nothing to abolish the mythologizing factor. Only an inauthentic conception of the myth has been corrected. But its real meaning is not touched, even remotely, and the mythologizing psychic factor not at all. One has merely created a new illusion, which consists in the belief that what the myth says is not true. Any elementary school child can see that. But no one has any idea of what the myth is really saying. It expresses psychic facts and situations, just as a normal dream does or the delusion of a schizophrenic. It describes, in figurative form, psychic facts whose existence can never be dispelled by mere explanation. We have lost our superstitious fear of evil spirits and things that go bump in the night, but, instead, are seized with terror of people who, possessed by demons, perpetrate the frightful deeds of darkness. That the doers of such deeds think of themselves not as possessed, but as “supermen,” does not alter the fact of their possession.

The fantastic, mythological world of the Middle Ages has, thanks to our so-called enlightenment, simply changed its place. It is no longer incubi, succubi, wood-nymphs, melusines, and the rest that terrify and tease mankind; man himself has taken over their role without knowing it and does the devilish work of destruction with far more effective tools than the spirits did. In the olden days men were brutal, now they are dehumanized and possessed to a degree that even the blackest Middle Ages did not know. Then a decent and intelligent person could still — within limits — escape the devil’s business, but today his very ideals drag him down into the bloody mire of his national existence.

The development of natural science as a consequence of the schism in the Church continued the work of the dedeification of Nature, drove away the demons and with them the last remnants of the mythological view of the world. The result of this process was the gradual dissolution of projections and the withdrawal of projected contents into the human psyche. Thus the rabble of spooks that were formerly outside have now transported themselves into the psyche of man, and when we admire the “pure,” i.e., depsychized, Nature we have created, we willy-nilly give shelter to her demons, so that with the end of the Middle Ages anno 1918 the age of total blood baths, total demonization, and total dehumanization could begin. Since the days of the Children’s Crusade, of the Anabaptists and the Pied Piper of Hamelin, no such psychic epidemics have been seen, especially not on a national scale. Even the torture chamber — that staggering achievement of modern times!— has been reintroduced into Europe. Everywhere Christianity has proved incapable2 of stopping the abomination, although many Christians have set their lives at stake. Finally, the invention of human slaughterhouses — compared with which the Roman circuses of 2,000 years ago were but a piffling prelude — is a scarcely surpassable achievement of the neo-German spirit.

These facts make one think. The demonism of Nature, which man had apparently triumphed over, he has unwittingly swallowed into himself and so become the devil’s marionette. This could happen only because he believed he had abolished the demons by declaring them to be superstition. He overlooked the fact that they were, at bottom, the products of certain factors in the human psyche. When these products were unreal and illusory, their sources were in no way blocked up or rendered inoperative. On the contrary, after it became impossible for the demons to inhabit the rocks, woods, mountains, and rivers, they used human beings as much more dangerous dwelling places. In natural objects much narrower limits were drawn to their effectiveness: only occasionally did a rock succeed in hitting a hut, only rarely was it possible for a river to overflow its banks, devastate the fields, and drown people. But a man does not notice it when he is governed by a demon; he puts all his skill and cunning at the service of his unconscious master, thereby heightening its power a thousandfold.

This way of looking at the matter will seem “original,” or peculiar, or absurd, only to a person who has never considered where those psychic powers have gone which were embodied in the demons. Much as the achievements of science deserve our admiration, the psychic consequences of this greatest of human triumphs are equally terrible. Unfortunately, there is in this world no good thing that does not have to be paid for by an evil at least equally great. People still do not know that the greatest step forward is balanced by an equally great step back. They still have no notion of what it means to live in a de-psychized world. They believe, on the contrary, that it is a tremendous advance, which can only be profitable, for man to have conquered Nature and seized the helm, in order to steer the ship according to his will. All the gods and demons, whose physical nothingness is so easily passed off as the “opium of the people,” return to their place of origin, Man, and become an intoxicating poison compared with which all previous dope is child’s play. What is National Socialism except a vast intoxication that has plunged Europe into indescribable catastrophe?

What science has once discovered can never be undone. The advance of truth cannot and should not be held up. But the same urge for truth that gave birth to science should realize what progress implies. Science must recognize the as yet incalculable catastrophe which its advances have brought with them. The still infantile man of today has had means of destruction put into his hands which require an immeasurably enhanced sense of responsibility, or an almost pathological anxiety, if the fatally easy abuse of their power is to be avoided. The most dangerous things in the world are immense accumulations of human beings who are manipulated by only a few heads. Already those huge continental blocs are taking shape which, from sheer love of peace and need of defence, are preparing future catastrophes. The greater the equalized masses, the more violent and calamitous their movement!

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