In Answer to Job Jung gives an example of the luminosity of visionary experience by way of an extraordinary interpretation of the apocalyptic predictions of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament, attributed to St John. I want to look briefly at the central aspects of the Jungian psychotherapeutic approach to such psychic contents by choosing examples from this rich material that illustrate the method of analytical psychology.
Jung points out that it would happen to someone like St John, who held a very one-sided and perfect view of God as perfect light and perfect love in
whom there is no darkness at all, to become dissociated and then overwhelmed with conflicting material from the unconscious. Jungians believe the shadow of perfectionist attitudes often brings, as compensation, vengeful revelations to balance the conscious position. For St John, his fearless belief concerning Christ’s perfect advocacy with God turns upon him in his first vision, where a changed Christ appears; the Son of Man is merged with an average man out of whose mouth a two-edged sword appears. St John reports that he fell as though dead in fear when he saw this form of Christ and was commanded by Him to write seven epistles to the Asian churches, five of which were admonished with devastatingly bad reports and the other two firmly chastened. This visionary ‘double-image Christ’ is power- conscious and bad-tempered, resembling the shadow of the perfect Christ St John had tried to imitate in life. This Christ is reminiscent of Yahweh.
Then a vision of inorganic stone, glass and crystal surrounds the deity, who became like jasper and cornelian. Here Jung is reminded of seventeen centuries of the alchemists’ work with inorganic matter looking for ‘the Man’ or homo altus who was ‘the stone that is no stone’.
Next comes the great vision of the Lamb, a horrendous theriomorphic seven-eyed and seven-horned ram-like thing who stands as if slain. He then comes and opens the Seven Seals of the Book. The first four seals reveal the frightening apocalyptic horsemen. The fifth seal unleashes the wailing of the martyrs crying for vengeance upon their earthly slaughters. The sixth seal brings the wrath of this horn-ram, and there is a cosmic catastrophe.
Jung suggests that years of preaching Christianity by St John had repressed negative insights in him until they burst forth in a brutal picture of hatred, wrath, fury and destructiveness. Blood and fire abound in these visions, bringing terror everywhere.
But is this material, this outburst from St John, psychotic? Is Jung saying that this much compensation for a conscious position of brotherly love has made St John sick? No, Jung maintains persuasively that the apocalyptic visions are so clear, consistent and unconfused as to rule out a severe psychosis. But St John is at the borderline. Jung points out, ‘the really religious person, in whom the capacity for an unusual extension of consciousness is inborn, must be prepared for such dangers’ (1952:145).
The visions culminate in the opening of the seventh seal. The seventh angel trumpets in the vision of the sun-woman with the moon under her feet who is giving birth to a male child threatened by a red dragon. Jerusalem has been destroyed and the temple has been opened in Heaven. A heavenly hieros gamos between an ‘unknown father’ and an ‘ordinary’ woman clothed with the sun has occurred. She is an anima of the primordial Anthropos, the cosmic man.
The son of such a union is a uniting symbol, a totality, a complexio oppositorum. This duplication of characteristic events similar to Christ’s birth led to beliefs that a second Messiah is to come at the end of the world.
Here Jung points out that we are getting from St John’s unconscious everything rejected by consciousness, so the rather heathenish birth is envisioned. But St John is swept away himself by the archetype of the divine child, so for him God is born again in his own partly pagan unconscious. This tremendum of the divine child’s birth when it happens in psyche is indistinguishable from the manifestation of the Self of St John just as it is in Jungian psychotherapeutic process, when the Self symbolically constellates as a birth of a child in dream material. The relationship of the Self to the ego of men and women reminds one of the symbolic relationship, for Christians, of Christ to man. As ego by definition represents only consciousness, so the totality of Self or atman in Indian philosophy consists of everything conscious and unconscious in human personality.
This representation of an inner rebirth in St John’s psyche reveals the parallel between visionary experience and dream experience, for, as Jung remarks, ‘If the vision were a modern dream one would not hesitate to interpret the birth of the divine child as the coming to consciousness of the self.’
The Self is a complexio oppositorum. If ego insists on perfectionism and morality, the Self will more strongly hold on to the shadow of darkness. St John’s ‘all-white’ Christ held up by ego in his imitatio Christi has turned in vision into a very ferocious avenger who is unrecognizable as a saviour. The premonitions involved in the visions come from St John’s collective unconscious. They point to an enantiodromia within the Christian aeon (the age of Pisces in astrology) so that after the first thousand years of Christ’s influence (when Satan is locked up in a bottomless pit) the Antichrist will reign until the age of Aquarius (from AD 2000). And so it seems to have been in the reality of history!
In St John’s vision, the devil, after roaming free again, is thrown into a lake of fire for ever. Then comes a sequence describing a mandala, so often the image that further manifests the self. The Lamb (ram) is to marry his Bride, the new Jerusalem. She is as radiant as jasper, as clear as crystal. The city is foursquare and built of clear, pure gold. The Lord God and the Lamb are in its temple enthroned. The four rivers of life and the tree of life are next to the throne. Here we have quarternity, in the city image and the four rivers of Paradise. The circle is the roundness of Heaven making a mandala shape.
Jerusalem is interpreted by Jung to relate to Sophia, who was with God before time began in the myth, and who at the end of time will be reunited with God through the sacred marriage. Yahweh is to be reunited with Sophia, with whom he had been in the original pleromatic state before the creation. They are originally one, the archetype of the hermaphroditic being.
In Jungian analysis we see again and again that when a patient is living through an insoluble conflict, no matter what empirical insights have been
gained in the therapeutic work, it is often necessary to see whether in a dream, in active imagination, in sandplay or painting an unexpected third thing will turn up as a solution. The motif of the divine child, the childhero and the mandala (squaring of the circle) signify very often a profound union of opposites which helps constellate the self, the essence of the individuation process.
God includes every ultimate idea and its opposite. In that realization one then is not surprised that a great Christian like St John came to compensatory visionary experience of great psychological significance for every man and woman.
The dominant elements of our lives involve the spirit of the holy, and, for Christians, the Holy Spirit is constantly working in and through selfhood. Man is divided with many opposing influences pressing his conscious mind from the unconscious. We know the unconscious frustrates, blocks and threatens the conscious mind. Prayer, as one practice of the spirit, tends to reinforce the unconscious in its potential and can have startling effects on consciousness. Meditation creates a psychic atmosphere in which clarifying conscious developments may occur. But it is the archetypal images of anima for man and animus for woman in which mankind reflects the need for a divine consort. Every man wants to unite with Sophia, the wisest woman. He may even wish to be born of Sophia and be the puer aeternus, the man- boy of changing consciousness, both black and white. The opposites lie close together in a child.
At the end of the Apocalypse the son marries the mother-bride. This symbolic hieros gamos is like individuation where a young man, the son of an adult man, unites with his anima (or images of bride and mother) as inspiration, union of soul and carrier of love.
This incarnation of every man and every woman is what Jungian analysis strives to enable, whenever possible. The holy often enters the psychological materials of an analysis, and its ideas can become the fulcrum of the Jungian way of spirit within psychotherapy. It is to Jung that we owe this transformation of depth psychology into a possible healing place for release and revelation of the holy within the psychological process.
This was previewed in Holy Scripture by St John’s revelations hundreds of years ago. Those revelations are often lived through in a unique way by those patients who take the courageous journey of a long and full Jungian analysis.
I would like to close with a quote from Jung:
[Religious] dogma expresses a renewed hope for the fulfilment of that yearning for peace which stirs deep down in the soul, and for a resolution of the threatening tension between the opposites. Everyone shares this tension and everyone experiences it in his individual form of unrest, the more so the less he sees any possibility of getting rid of it by rational
means. It is no wonder, therefore, that the hope, indeed the expectation of divine intervention arises in the collective unconscious and at the same time in the masses.
(1952:17c)