The Search for the Collective Unconscious Pt. 2
From The Waste Land to The Trance Epic; From Finnegans Wake to Star Wars
The Void of World War I
Christiana Morgan had long dreamed of living a more expansive, exciting life. She had been born in 1897 to a prominent ‘Boston Brahmin’ family. As a child, she had been bedridden for a combined period of several years from measles, convulsions, pneumonia, and scarlet fever—all serious, lingering ailments in the days before vaccines and antibiotics. As a wealthy debutante, she had been forced into an endless array of dances, parties and teas. She had her corset pulled tight uncountable times, and was taught the seemingly perpetual minutiae of becoming the perfect decoration for the eventual Harvard-educated husband. Christiana referred to the world she was brought up in as “half convention and half lie.”
One day when strolling through Harvard yard, Christiana encountered a group of wounded French soldiers. Their mystique made her feel ashamed at not taking part in the war effort “heart and soul.” That same evening, Christiana met a spirited and boyish Harvard student named William “Bill” Morgan. He didn’t strike her as very memorable at first, but she was intrigued when she heard that he had enlisted to go to war. She found him endearing and funny, but her diary entries leave a sort of mixed review, suggesting that he is not someone she would have sought out under normal circumstances. As she wrote:
He has never been around with girls at all and so doesn't seem very polished, but he isn't at all awkward. He is very much of a man's man and has perfectly splendid ideals and is really thoroughly fine through and through. He appreciates books a lot & gets a lot out of them, altho he isn't at all brilliant. He has a delightful sense of humor and can be awfully funny. He is funny-looking and you can't help being awfully fond of him, although physically he doesn't appeal to me very thrillingly…Somehow I don't think of him as a masterful man, but a perfectly dear boy.
The excitement and air of romance caused by the outbreak of World War I is difficult to conceptualize today. In fact, it was very hard to conceptualize with only a few years of hindsight. Europe and America had just gone through a half-century of relative peace, and all that was remembered of war was its romantic and heroic aspects. Large paintings of soldiers with brass buttons and glistening sabers, codes of honor and medals for bravery, the chance to truly test one’s mettle were the points of reference. Being an army officer for a stint was still seen as an aristocratic activity, hence the high enlistment rate of Harvard boys, even before the United States formally entered the war.
The writer Stefan Zweig gives a memorable portrait of how the beginning of the war was received in his native Austria: “The first shock at the news of war—the war that no one, people or government, had wanted—the war which had slipped, much against their will, out of the clumsy hands of the diplomats who had been bluffing and toying with it, had suddenly been transformed into enthusiasm…As never before, thousands and hundreds of thousands felt what they should have felt in peace time, that they belonged together…in that hour felt that they were participating in world history, in a moment which would never recur, and that each one was called upon to cast his infinitesimal self into the glowing mass, there to be purified of all selfishness.” Famously, when soldiers poured into train cars to be sent to the front, they assured their families that they’d be home before Christmas.
Through their romance, Christiana and Bill could play a picturesque role in the global story that was unfolding. Bill wrote Christiana ecstatic letters describing his basic training at Ford Sheridan, in Highland Park. Each seemed to realize the central role the war was playing in the spark of their relationship. In one letter, Bill disclosed, “I remember your saying that it would be wonderful to feel you were giving to the war some man who meant everything to you— and it is wonderful for a man to feel he can sacrifice himself for a girl." When Bill received the news that he would be deployed to France, he could hardly believe his good fortune:
Imagine Chris, what it means….to train the troops as they get ready for fighting. I can express myself—Chris—to think that this should come to me after all my dreams of going over there—I feel like smashing things (windows, furniture, or something) and then at the same time time I have that peculiar tightening of my throat which you get when you are so wildly happy that you can't say a word. ...It seems as if a great door had suddenly opened—revealing beyond another world— the one I have thought of so often—the one in which men come to their own and at last really are valued as men should be valued, for what is at the bottom of them; a world where men have seen things with new visions and feel things in a way which only future generations will realize.
On leave before deployment, Bill visited Christiana at her family’s summer house in Maine. There, dressed in uniform, Bill asked Christiana to marry him. She was nineteen years old, and he was twenty-two. Despite knowing him for less than five months, Christiana accepted. Christiana’s family was shocked and upset by the suddenness and apparent suddenness and thoughtlessness of the engagement. Christiana’s biographer Claire Douglas describes a photo of the pair taken after their engagement: “The couple are seated in a woodland corner of the York gardens; Christiana's beauty seems muted, pensive, as she shrinks into herself and away from Bill, who, handsome and eager in his officer's uniform, leans toward both her and the camera. He looks more like a younger brother than a future husband.” Bill’s immaturity is readily apparent from his early letters: “I sometimes feel so impatient to be where I can really see these Huns and possibly take a shot at them…[I’m] looking forward to the trenches.” Still, there is nothing Bill wanted more than to go to war to become the man deserving of his mysterious fiancé.
At first, Bill was exhilarated by his grand adventure in Europe. During a furlough, he rode a horse up to the front lines, and reported in a letter to Christiana, “We are all crazy to get to the trenches & to go 'over the top,'“ But Bill’s naïveté and idealism could only act as a shield for so long. This was a different type of war than Bill had heard about growing up. When Bill was a kid, nobody had ever flown a plane before. Now, planes could drop bombs and shoot machine guns at them. Poison gas would roll across the fields in a green cloud and suffocate anyone in its path. In previous wars, the most noble and courageous troops would ride in on horses—ignorance and even nostalgia led this to be tried several times in WWI, but the cavalry got immediately mowed down by machine gun fire. Bill’s idealism and innocent excitement was no match for stench of the trenches, the constant roar of artillery, and the slaughter of anyone who “went over the top.”
After a few months, Christiana was dissatisfied with supporting the war effort only through her relationship with Bill. She escaped from Boston society and made a move which was essentially unheard of for someone of her class position—she volunteered as an army nurse. Her doctor had warned her that her childhood case of scarlet fever had weakened her heart too much for the job, but she disobeyed his orders. Once Christiana had finished her training, she was needed closer to home than she expected. The Spanish Flu, which had torn through the trenches and much of Europe, had now deposited a particularly deadly strain in Boston. Still, Christiana wrote Bill frequently on the idealistic heroism of their efforts and how, for the first time, she felt incredibly alive and filled with purpose. The Spanish Flu would end up killing far more Americans than WWI, WWII, the Korean War, and Vietnam combined. It killed 675,000 Americans, primarily those in Christiana and Bill’s generation, who were between 20 and 40 years old.
Meanwhile, Bill’s nerves were firing like roman candles. The twenty-two year old was caked in mud, eating bread filled with maggots, and exhausted after leading his troops in defending against a 72-hour onslaught. His consciousness was drifting into a surrealistic dreamlike state. In his letters to Christiana, we see a psyche cracking, and decreasing lucidity. In some, he alternates between violent rants and extended meditations about the natural beauty of the battlefields:
This is such a beautiful little green wood, all checkered with dancing sun-light. I wonder why I should have felt this way this afternoon. I think it's the contrast, to hear the birds singing and to see the spring all around, and then to know that for hundreds [of] miles on either side of you men are killing each other, throwing gas, sneaking up on each other with little trench knives. At times I wish I were in the infantry. They claim that it is better to fight man to man and hack and slash than to sit cold-bloodily by a gun and wipe out a battalion by pumping 250 shots a minute into men with the pressure of one finger. We kill them more cleanly, our bullets are such nice smooth clean-cut affairs.
Christiana and Bill’s letters grew increasingly discordant. While Christiana continued to rhapsodize about the glories of war and exulting at the great story they were taking part in, Bill’s letters were growing increasingly solemn, schismatic, and incoherent. Christiana frankly could not understand what Bill was trying to tell her when he spoke of his ‘decayed nerves’ and ‘shock.’ She had never heard of such things.
40,000 men died in the first day of the battle of Somme, located in Northern France. By the time Bill’s troops got there, there were so many rotting corpses in the earth that it seemed like every time an artillery shell would land, it would dig up buried limbs. The largest bombardment in the history of mankind was playing out. The smell was putrid. Over 300,000 would die in this one battle. Bill survived the battle, but found himself unable to sleep or concentrate enough to read. Later, at the Battle of Soissons, a combat wagon slipped in the mud and crushed his foot. He continued on with his men for as long as he could, but eventually had to make his way back through the torn, hollow-eyed waste land. This almost certainly saved his life, as his whole squadron was mowed down by machine gun fire. He wrote to Christiana what we witnessed on his retreat:
Never shall I forget that walk. It isn't in me to see what I saw...They were gassing us, and a man came up and said he had been gassed. (The mustard doesn't affect you seriously right away.) I told him to walk back with me. We got into a shell hole for a while to see if the artillery would let up, but it didn't so we decided to shuffle on. We had gotten a few steps when all I remember is a blinding flash and crash, and then a few seconds later a horrible cry behind me. The man had landed just at my heels, with his leg torn off just below the knee. I can't seem to forget his expression. I bandaged him as best I could, and put on a tourniquet, and cut away his clothes…It took me over an hour to get back. . .That field. I never shall forget it. From a selfish point of view it would be so much easier to die than to see all that suffering…I am way down here, at last in the land where there are lights at night, and no guns. I thought this rest in the hospital would be great but I can't seem to get over the strain. It gets so on my mind that it drives me almost mad at times.
Bill returned to the United States a different man than when he had left. As opposed to returning as a strong, tanned soldier in uniform, he was pale and cadaverous, with sunken eyes and a far-off stare.
Christiana had also seen death and despair while working as an influenza nurse, but she seemed to have persisted through it largely unscathed. When the war ended, Christiana felt a despondent sense of disappointment that she would now need to return home to be an upperclass house wife. She wasn’t getting along with Bill, and had the terrible vague sense that he wasn’t meant to have returned. Now that the couple had time to live together, the match didn’t feel as natural as it at first seemed. Christiana was intellectual and adventurous—still yearning to find something more in life—and Bill spent much of his time sulking and drinking. Additionally, in the late 1910’s and early 1920’s, social conventions made it difficult for the woman to be the much stronger partner in the relationship.
Christiana expected Bill to fulfill his social role as a Harvard man and stake out an eminent career as a doctor or lawyer. She encouraged him to write a book about his war time experiences, or turn his newfound bitterness for war into a political or diplomatic vocation. But Bill had no interest in high idealism any longer. With his family’s money, he was able to dote around and try many different careers, none of which he had any motivation for.
With the old world and its customs roundly discredited, new ideas and literary movements were taking root in Europe and the United States. Christiana, attempting to understand what had happened to Bill, and trying to wrap her mind about what the war had represented, turned to depth psychology. She found herself transfixed by C.G. Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious (later retitled Symbols of Transformation). She read and reread the book, writing heavily in its margins, and gathering up every Jung book she could find in English translation. She felt that Jung’s decoding of mythology, literature, folklore, and superstition was speaking to something which was always within her, but covered up. Little did she know that soon she would befriend Jung himself, and that she would become one of his most fruitful subjects of analysis. Little did she know that she would become a sort of “chosen one” that Jung and his acolytes would rest their hopes on.
The Mythical Method
James Joyce was one of the many artists who flocked to neutral Switzerland to avoid the First World War. He brought along his wife Nora and his two kids, Giorgio and Lucia, to Zurich, and spent his time drafting Ulysses and drinking. He was chronically short on funds and wore cheap breaking-down shoes, non-matching clothes, a large ring, and a strange goatee. He also wore thick dark glasses, a large hat, and a cain, to help him get around despite his failing eyesight. He is also reported to have carried the cain to defend him against his two pathological fears—dogs and thunderstorms.
Joyce had a wonderful stroke of luck in that his writings had been come to the attention of Edith Rockefeller McCormick—daughter of John D. Rockefeller, one of the richest people of all time—who was in Zurich to be treated by Carl Jung. McCormick, a frequent patron of struggling artists, offered Joyce a monthly stipend which kept his family afloat. Joyce knew about Jung because the few people who knew him were urgently telling him to seek mental help in the city. As Joyce wrote in a letter: “A batch of people in Zurich persuaded themselves that I was gradually going mad and actually endeavoured to induce me to enter a sanatorium where a certain Doctor Jung (the Swiss Tweedledum who is not to be confused with the Viennese Tweedledee, Dr. Freud) amuses himself at the expense (in every sense of the word) of ladies and gentlemen who are troubled with bees in their bonnets.”
McCormick was reportedly a member of this batch who pleaded with Joyce to visit Jung. Then, when McCormick heard rumors that Joyce was “extremely lazy” and spent his time carousing, she abruptly cut off his funds. Joyce held Jung responsible for his misfortune. If pressed, Joyce would admit that Jung was responsible at least “in an indirect way.” [In 1953, Jung admitted in an interview with Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann that he indeed may have been responsible for the revocation of Joyce’s allowance. He stated unsurely that he may have encouraged McCormick to cease her patronage of Joyce because it would inspire Joyce to clean up his life]. Now out of money in an expensive city, Joyce was forced to relocate, with the help of Ezra Pound, to Paris.
In 1909, Pound became an extremely successful poet. He used his success to mentor and publicize up-and-coming talents, and to push them towards a uniquely ‘modernist’ style. In 1914, Pound had arranged for Joyce’s now classic A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to be published. It had taken Joyce eight and a half years to get his previous work, Dubliners (now regarded as one of the greatest short story collections in history) to be published, so he was elated at Pound’s unexpected assistance. Joyce henceforth referred to Pound as a “miracle worker.” T.S. Eliot had been introduced to Ezra Pound by his close friend and fellow poet Conrad Aiken, who insisted that Pound look at Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Pound was stunned that such a young poet could create such a momentous work, and arranged to have it published. While the public had not yet caught on, Pound had recognized the greatness of Joyce and Eliot. After WWI, Pound was hoping he could alchemize the talents of his young protégées to create a literary style which would define the new era.
Now that Eliot and Joyce were both in Paris, Pound arranged for them to meet at the Hotel de l'Elysee, on August 15th, 1920. Eliot came bearing a package for Joyce from Pound, which was revealed to be a pair of brown dress shoes to replace Joyce’s disintegrating tennis shoes. Although the two writers didn’t like each other personally, Joyce agreed to send Eliot drafts of his in-progress novel, Ulysses. Although he wrote the Dublin-set novel as an ex-pat, it was of such complexity, detail, and vividness, that he stated if Dublin were to be destroyed, Ulysses would allow it to be reconstructed brick-by-brick.
When Eliot saw Joyce’s bizarre stream-of-consciousness telling of the story of Odysseus through one day in the life of a cuckolded Jewish-Irish advertising canvasser in 1904, he knew he was seeing the future. And that future was the rejuvenation of Europe through the repurposing of ancient myths.
In his essay, Ulysses, Order, and Myth, Eliot writes with rapturous excitement:
I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape…It is here that Mr Joyce's parallel use of the Odyssey has a great importance. It has the importance of a scientific discovery. No one else has built a novel upon such a foundation before: it has never before been necessary. I am not begging the question in calling Ulysses a ''novel''; and if you call it an epic. it will not matter. If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve; it is because the novel, instead of being a form, was simply the expression of an age which had not sufficiently lost all form to feel the need of something stricter. In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art.
After corresponding with Joyce about his drafted novel, T.S. Eliot set about creating a poem which would employ the new ‘mythical method’ to capture the disillusionment and fragmentation of post-WWI Europe. Eliot sent a draft of his poem “He do the Police in Different Voices” to Ezra Pound, who crossed out about half of the words, and added many annotations. Eliot significantly altered the poem, renaming it “The Waste Land.”
Both The Waste Land and Ulysses were ready for publication in 1922. In January of that year, marking its epochal nature, Ezra Pound dated a letter to T. S. Eliot ‘An 1,’ meaning year 1. While the public had not yet noticed it—1922, (which also saw the publication of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room— was the year that the modernist literary revolution took root.
To this day, Ulysses—first reviewed as the creation of “a perverted lunatic who has made a speciality of the literature of the latrine” and only published because of Shakespeare and Company’s Sylvia Beach, who seems to be the only one other than Pound who had tremendous faith in Joyce—is broadly considered the best novel of the 20th century. Similarly, The Waste Land—first found to be utterly confounding and deliberately obscure—is often considered the 20th century’s greatest poem. Both works have a similar message: progress had gone awry and it was necessary to reincorporate ancient ways of thinking and myth into our everyday experience. This message is conveyed through many of Ulysses’ most famous lines, such as “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” and “God, Kinch, if you and I could only work together we might do something for the island. Hellenise it.”
The Waste Land famously begins:
I. Burial of the Dead
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
The poem shows the despair of a world where progress has ended in global cataclysm, where a young generation has been traumatized by war and disease, where the old social mores and religious beliefs cease to inspire, where the supposed improvements of modern life have only left a sense of meaninglessness and exhaustion. It speaks in a fragmented style, with snatches of overlapping dialogue, with layered epiphanies, cries of anguish, popular songs and ghastly images echoing in the back of the mind—the poem is not the ordered paeans to nature and bucolic life which marked 19th century poetry. According to the writer Kathleen Raine, The Waste Land conveyed that technology, war, and industrial society, had robbed a generation of their souls.
We had somewhere in all this lost our souls. Were we really in search of something science had convinced us was superfluous? The lesson was driven home by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, a poem in which my generation for the first time recognized the world into which we had come.
The Waste Land depicts Europe as a muddy no man’s land, covered in a brown fog like mustard gas: “Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many. / Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, / And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.” Under this despair, however, there is a yearning to connect with some sort of ancient mystery, a primordial, mythical source of power.
Responding to charges of the poem’s impenetrability, Eliot appended it with a series of footnotes. The very first footnote gives a substantial clue to the poem’s meaning: “Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston's book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble.” Eliot later recanted on the importance of the footnotes, but this is likely because scholars were going far too deep into all the arcana of the poem and missing its overall message and emotion. Also lending some credence to their value is the fact that he kept the footnotes in for all later additions, and the references to the Grail legend are too numerous to be ignored.
Weston’s From Ritual to Romance endeavors to trace back the roots of the Arthurian legends to ancient pagan fertility rites. The book focuses mainly on the part of the Grail legend which concerns the Fisher King, a ruler who is spiritually connected to his lands, and who guards the Holy Grail. The Fisher King has been wounded and thus his lands have turned to waste. In most versions, the Fisher King is injured in the groin, or is wounded with a lance of "barbaric properties," which may be a polite displacement of the phallic nature of the injury. A hero on horseback—typically Perceval or Galahad, but versions vary—comes across two men fishing, and inquires about finding nearby shelter. The fishermen direct him to castle, where he meets with the Fisher King. On the earlier advice of his uncle, Perceval refrains from asking questions about the King and the land’s misfortune, and decides to investigate in the morning. However, the next morning, Perceval finds that the castle has disappeared. The hero has failed to ask the proper “healing question” to restore the King and his lands, and thus needs to find the castle once again.
Following Sir James Frazer’s examples of how medieval adventure tales were often built around the refashioning of pagan myths into a Christian idiom, Weston identifies many myths which tie the health of the ruler to their lands. Gradually, (and through making some speculative leaps) she follows the many tellings of the story back in time, to where the Christian elements drop out, and the pagan elements resurface, and lands on more primordial variations: “Typically, a great goddess who represents or personifies the earth can only maintain her 'fertility' through a mystico-magical sexual act, performed annually with the year-god, a male consort less powerful than the goddess herself. After the consummation, the year-god dies, or is killed, and is buried in the ground. His 'resurrection' in the spring, with the growing crops, allows the cycle to play itself out yet another time.” Frazer identifies Osiris of Egyptian mythology, Tammuz of the Sumerians, Adonis of the Greeks, and Attis of the Phygians, as mythical heroes associated with fertility and vegetation, who engage in a mystico-magical sexual act with a powerful female consorts, are sent to the underworld, and are resurrected with the spring. The stories of Osiris, Attis, and Adonis also all feature specific injuries to the groin. Weston positions the Fisher King as one of these heroes, who has the land itself as a consort (Christian versions of Pagan myths often extricated goddesses or the clearly feminine element). Eliot plays with these motifs in the line “‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / ‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? / ‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?”
In a move that is rather dubious and speculative—but is important to Eliot’s poem—Weston then attempts to follow the Grail legends back as far as the written/oral record can go, to the ancient Sanskrit Rig Veda epic. The Rig Veda contains a story about Rishyaçriñga, who is raised far off in the woods, where the only people he knows exist are his parents. Perceval in the Grail legends has the same woodland upbringing. Then, in the Rishyaçriñga story, the rains stop, and the land turns to waste. Rishyaçriñga must venture off to find the King’s daughter. Once Rishyaçriñga and the King’s daughter’s marriage is consummated, the rains will begin again and the land is restored. Next, Weston points out many examples in the Rig Vedas where a King’s health is directly tied to the health of the lands, who must be restored for the rain to begin. She concludes: “I would submit that there is no longer any shadow of a doubt that in the Grail King we have a romantic literary version of that strange mysterious figure whose presence hovers in the shadowy background of the history of our Aryan race; the figure of a divine or semi-divine ruler, at once god and king, upon whose life, and unimpaired vitality, the existence of his land and people directly depends.” Note the line about “our Aryan race.” This stems from a theory which took off in the early 1900’s that European civilization originated in North India and Iran and that this racial group (tall, blonde, blue eyes) migrated into Europe. Now, it is true that Latin, Sanskrit, Greek, and old Celtic have a common origin in the Proto-Indo European (“PIE”) language, which like began in the Caspian steps. It is also true that myths and cultural practices likely spread along with the PIE language. But it is not true that PIE is tied to any specific racial group. And the earliest speakers of PIE certainly were not blonde and blue eyed. Questionably, Weston appears to be searching for the roots of the Grail legend in a sort of Ur-tradition which is inherent to the ‘Aryan Race.’
The last section of Eliot’s The Waste Land is called “What the Thunder Said.” It starts in a desolate land, cracked and dry as bone: “Here is no water but only rock / Rock and no water and the sandy road / The road winding above among the mountains / Which are mountains of rock without water / If there were water we should stop and drink.” We are shown the Fisher King pondering the fate of his lands: “ I sat upon the shore / Fishing, with the arid plain behind me / Shall I at least set my lands in order?” Then, out in the Himalayas, where Weston traces back the origins of European culture, the thunder begins to crackle and moil: “Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves / Waited for rain, while the black clouds / Gathered far distant, over Himavant. / The jungle crouched, humped in silence. /Then spoke the thunder.” Echoing Vico, this thunder begins to “speak”—Vico thought that the thunder boomed “PA!” which became the first word for Jove, or the sky god. Eliot has the thunder saying the Sanskrit root “DA!” He then includes in the poem’s last section three words which use this Sanskrit root: “Datta” (“Give”), “Dayadhvam” (“Sympathize”), and “Damyata” (“Control”). The poem then ends, after dragging us through all the horrors the modern world is capable of producing, with a thrice-repeated Sanskrit word, “Shantih shantih shantih” which means peace, tranquility, and restoration. Clearly Eliot is asking us to go back to the beginning of Vico’s cycle, to get in touch with the primordial poetic speech of the thunder, to go back to where Weston places the ancient sacred Ur-culture of fertility rites, to stimulate our “dull roots” with “spring rain.”
The Dyad
From 1921 to 1923, Bill Morgan was briefly a law student, then a journalist, then a banker, and then a trader—all with minimal success. Unable to recover from his wartime experiences, feeling intense survivor’s guilt from abandoning his squadron (although he had no choice due to injury), and failing to connect with Christiana, he was frustrated, unable to concentrate, and slipping into despair. To make matters worse, his mother was slowly dying of breast cancer. Bill left New York for several months-long trips to Highland Park, Illinois, to care for her. Christiana came with on the first trip, but was miserable and did not get along with her mother-in-law. Christiana at this time still could not grasp the seriousness of Bill’s psychic wounds. Bill was happy to spend time away as it gave him a break from their acrimonious marriage.
Christiana spent this time reading Jung, taking art lessons, and attending events around New York City. Out of curiosity, she attended a fundraising dinner for the World Zionist Organization. Chaim Weizmann, a Zionist leader who would one day become the first president of Israel was in town, giving speeches about the violence and peril his people faced in the broader Middle East, and rising antisemitism in Europe. Christiana was introduced to him, and was impressed by his passion. As she wrote in her diary: “What zeal, what eloquence! The wholeheartedness of his commitment, his certainty of purpose, the fervor of his language… Here, without a doubt, was an inspired man…” The two bonded over their mutual love of Nietzsche, and their idealism. Christiana and Weizmann began a brief affair, and she—for a moment—considered running away to British Palestine with him. Weizmann shortly thereafter moved on and continued his travels, but the two kept up an intermittent correspondence. Christiana felt bad about the affair, but she was not content to just sit at home. She wrote in her diary: “Why do I feel it is such a curse for a woman to have my psychology? It seems to be against all her right development.”
Not long after Bill’s mom passed away, and he returned to New York, the Morgans attended a performance of Wagner’s Parsifal—a retelling of the grail legend—at the Metropolitan Opera. Bill spotted a friend of his brother’s, Henry A. Murray (Often called “Harry.” Here I will either call him ‘Harry’ or ‘Henry Murray’), in the lobby, and brought him up to their red velvet-lined opera box, and introduced him to Christiana. As a teenager, Christiana had admired Harry’s wife, Josephine, who was one of the most popular and sought-after debutantes. Harry was struck my Christiana’s dark, intellectual eyes, and mysterious demeanor. She was excited to hear that Harry was a medical student, and asked him whether he preferred Freud or Jung. Harry, a gregarious Harvard man who had captained two varsity teams and was rarely at a loss for words, was embarrassed by the return of his old stutter, and stammered that he wasn’t sure. His mind reeling, he went out after the opera and bought a copy of Jung’s Symbols of Transformation.
Soon after, the two couples—Bill, Christiana, Harry, and Josephine—started going to dinner together and began a book club. Harry was completely absorbed in the works of Herman Melville, who had died penniless some thirty years ago and was completely forgotten. Harry was struck by Melville’s prophecy, “Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter.” He decided his personal mission would be to get Melville the posthumous recognition he deserved.
During this time, Harry described Christiana as “a profoundly depressed woman. She appeared to [have] everything a woman could desire, and yet, despite it all, she was basically, tragically, and incommunicably unfulfilled and un-self-realized. She was resistant to all that Western culture had to offer her, to the type of life which tradition prescribed, dissatisfied with Christianity, dissatisfied with the accepted role of woman as wife and mother. She felt there must be something better than all this.”
Reading Jung and Melville became Christiana’s outlet. Although Bill was present at the meetings, it was clear a romance was developing between Harry and Christiana. Christiana described her warm, but complex feelings for Harry in her diary: "He [Harry] reminds me at present of the young Goethe - seeking to solve the struggle between the reasoning, thinking man and the emotional artistic idealistic man. Thinking of course is his dominant function and he will solve his problem undoubtedly on that basis, but at present all the emotional, colorful and sensuous aspects have a strong appeal. He is absorbed in spiritual growing pains which seem to have come to him quite late...However I love him at this period. This tension between the two selves is so beautiful and so youthful, with all the touching appeal of youth. For me he is more beautiful now than I think he ever will be in the future. I feel unsure of him in the future." Harry was certainly experiencing ‘spiritual growing pains’ and finding himself more and more out-of-step with Josephine.
The two couples, along with Harry’s brother and his wife, decided to temporarily move to England so the men could pursue doctorates in biochemistry at Cambridge. In their free time, they continued the book club to read Melville’s Pierre. Pierre, a deeply strange book, written right after Melville completed Moby-Dick (and during the depression which resulted when his masterpiece barely any copies) follows a love triangle involving the titular character, his loving fiancé, and his mysterious and alluring half-sister. The parallels between Harry and Pierre’s lives were too glaring not to see: each had grown up in Boston high society, attended the finest schools, each cared about their conventional, attractive wives, but felt drawn to a forbidden other. By this point, Bill had sunken deeper into himself, and Harry and Christiana were having a difficult time hiding what was happening between them.
Harry’s life was in crisis—he was considering leaving his wife for the wife of his friend, and he was growing tired of biochemistry and was considering switching to psychology or psychoanalysis—so he opted to seek Carl Jung out for advice. This is not the first time Henry Murray had reached out to the top brass for personal help. When WWI broke out, he sought out Theodore Roosevelt, who predictably told the young man that he should “go fight or regret it for the rest of your life.” Harry decided it was better to regret something for the rest of his life than to be dead, and didn’t enlist.
At about the time Harry set off for Zurich, Christiana attended T.S. Eliot’s Clark Lectures at Cambridge on “The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry.” Before the first lecture began, a full house of eager intellectuals bubbled with excitement to hear the great poet explain his obscurely beautiful works. When Eliot began, all the audience received was a litany of overly-learned meanderings. Attendance dwindled. Christiana wrote “The Clark lectures by T.S. Eliot were about what you would expect them to be. Metaphysical poets of the 18th century. They are so weighted with cool scholarship and erudition that life is almost eclipsed….Eliot is a fine example of what happens to anyone from America who seeks spiritual values here believing them to be non-existent at home.” Which is ironic, considering that Christiana had essentially just done the same thing. But Christiana was likely disappointed that this poet who once represented the new—the breaking of tradition for the creation of new forms—had, after several mental breakdowns, now embraced Christianity and the English monarchy. Christiana wasn’t looking for someone seeking to re-establish a Christian Society and culture, and likely found Eliot’s antisemitism distasteful—she was looking for something new and personally transformative.
Meanwhile, Henry Murray couldn’t believe the world he inadvertently stepped into. The now fifty-year-old Jung had set up his private practice at his lofty mansion on the shores of Lake Zurich. Curious artists and spiritual seekers trekked over the mountains into the Swiss enclave to have this strange man with gold-rimmed glasses pry open the secrets of their mind. They went to see what connection to the collective unconscious they could foster. Many stayed at the nearby Hotel Sonne to join in on the growing community.
Future Nobel Prize winner Herman Hesse was one such artist. Hesse had been institutionalized as a child for "disturbances of the soul" and later placed in group homes for the ‘weak-minded’ so he wouldn’t commit suicide. In 1907 he stumbled upon the alternative community living on Mount Truth in Ascona, Switzerland. Hesse completed a two-week fast and was entranced by the strange European Neo-holy men and women he found there. In 1916 he began psychoanalytic treatment and was so impressed with its results he got in contact with Jung. Jung personally analyzed him, and inspired his book Demian. Hesse then became one of the only people Jung ever showed his Red Book writings to. In 1922—the same year as Ulysses and The Waste Land—Hesse published his masterpiece Siddhartha, which re-envisioned the days of the Buddha through the lens of German romanticism.
Hesse stayed among the intellectual circles in Switzerland during the World Wars, which no doubt inspired his final novel, The Glass Bead Game. This novel takes place in a fictional "pedagogical" province of central Europe called Castalia, which has been created as a sort of lifeboat to protect the highest achievements of human thought and art. Monk-like artists, philosophers, and scholars are to weather out the collapse of culture and society in Castalia until the broader world is ready for them again. Also important to Castalia is the creation of the glass bead game itself, which allows for an abstract synthesis of all human knowledge, so that fields as diverse as gothic architecture, classical music, and the study of Chinese divinatory texts can be given a common denominator, making them subject to comparison, addition, and multiplication. The book shrouds the glass bead game in mystery, but describes it as making it possible for multiple players to harmonize disparate ideas in the same way four different instruments can play in a quartet.
Toni Wolfe was also present in Jung’s home. Wolfe had started as Jung’s patient, then became his assistant, then became his closest confidant, and then his lover. This affair was carried out in the open with the full knowledge of Jung’s wife Emma. Toni was something Emma was forced to live with if she was to say with her husband; she described Toni as “always there” and the Jung children abhorred and played practical jokes on her. Sometimes Jung would go so far as to walk into meetings with other psychoanalysts with Emma on one arm, and Toni on the other. Toni was quiet and witch-like with black messy hair and piercing black eyes. She is described by Deirdre Bair as “twitchy and skinny” and known to be continuously embedded a haze of cigarette smoke. She is described as resembling Christiana with her “olive skin” and introspective mysteriousness. Jung insisted that Toni’s inspiration and guidance was necessary for the progression of his work and crucial to his self-analysis.
When Henry Murray met Jung he was eager to ask about the development of psychoanalysis, but perhaps even more eager to ask what he should do about his growing interest in Christiana. He had no desire to divorce Josephine, but found Christiana irresistible. Jung responded immediately that pursuing a romantic relationship with Christiana was necessary for Murray’s psychic development. The eminent psychoanalyst confided that there would be great risks in pursuing the relationship, notably hurting those around him and ending his relationships, but that if done honestly and with care, it could greatly enhance his creativity.
Jung then took the younger man sailing down the long crystal-blue snake-like passage of Lake Zurich, nestled between the snow-capped mountains. They passed through a bed of reeds and came ashore in front of a small castle with four towers. The central, largest tower still appeared to be under construction. It looked like something out of the Grail Legend. Jung explained that he had been building “The Tower” himself as a ‘physical instantiation of his psyche’ since 1923. Jung may of conveyed to Murray the story of how when he began building, he brought his daughter to the site, who exclaimed: “What, you're building here? There are corpses about!” Jung thought this was ridiculous, until when digging the foundation he indeed found the skeleton of a French soldier. Jung gave the skeleton a proper burial, which included the firing of three rifle shots into the air. Inside the Tower, Jung introduced Murray to both of his romantic partners. Inside his psychic abode, Murray got a glimpse of Jung’s full charisma. Jung then explained the nature of the unconscious while his golden ring, emblazoned with the word ‘Abraxa’ (the Gnostic God which contains both good and evil), gleamed in the fading sunlight.
Josephine reported that when Murray returned to Cambridge he was “absolutely hypnotized by Jung and impenetrable.” He was animated in a way she had not seen in years, but she was unable to grasp his ‘Zurich ravings.’ When Harry extolled Jung’s unique arrangement with Emma and Toni, Josephine could likely see where this was going. When he mentioned the ‘dyad’—the spiritual, creative, inspirational relationship between Jung and Toni, it often sounded like he was talking about himself and Christiana. And, indeed, Harry did exuberantly tell Christiana about Jung’s relationship with Toni and Emma. He propositioned that they attempt something similar. A part of Christiana was intrigued by the opportunity to challenge convention. Murray then confided that Jung had instructed them to commence a relationship. Christiana was deeply torn up. She even consulted Bill, who wearily replied, “you must do what you think is right.” At first she refused Murray, but then she relented. When Bill wandered into town, Harry climbed up the heavy vines to her window, and slipped into the room.
Soon after, Christina and Bill set out to see the strange man in Küsnacht for herself. They stayed at the Hotel Sonne, which was full of Jung’s acolytes and fresh cold air off from Lake Zurich. While the walls were lined with abstract paintings, the fireplaces and railings had elaborate Greek-inspired marble carvings, giving the hotel a strange mixture of the classical and the avant guard. There was both a shady barroom filled with cigarette smoke and tattered-clothed artistic types and an ornate dining room where rich heiresses in elaborate dresses dined. There was a half-mile path from the hotel to Jung’s home. First one would walk along a cobblestone path, then cross the bridge over a river which fed into the lake, then go past the old church tower near the cemetery, until one arrived at the long, straight driveway lined with hedges, which led up to the large yellow mansion with a red spire, and a thick stone awning above the heavy door. Bill was directed to see Toni Wolffe in a small room at the back of the house, while Christiana was led up to Jung’s study.
Jung was remarkably tall and large, with a pipe always in his mouth. His hair was receding, making his forehead look particularly large and impressive. During sessions, he would lean forward and stare intently at his patients. He had certainly calmed down from his vision quests of a decade prior, although there was a knowing look in his eye. There was perhaps a tinge of the sinister about him. At her first appointment, Christiana appeared to Jung as “a woman of about thirty years of age [she was 28] . . . highly educated, very intelligent, a typical intellectual, with an almost mathematical mind. She is . . . exceedingly rational . . . has a great deal of intuition, which really ought to function but is repressed.” Christiana explained to Jung that although she recognized her own intelligence and was well read, she was not satisfied with marriage and believed she lacked the language to express her ideas or describe her emotions. She also conveyed that she had little knowledge of what possibilities may be open to her outside of being a housewife.
Judging by what Christiana wrote afterwards about the meeting, it seems that Jung identified her as someone who could help him with his mission. She confirmed to him that she would continue to pursue the affair with Harry. Christiana seems to have experienced Jung as a revelation. She knew immediately that she had stumbled upon something massive and important, something which could change the course of history. What Jung appeared to be offering was not just a cure for the sick, but a cure for the age. Christiana arranged to do a longterm analysis with Jung the following summer, then quickly dashed off a letter to Harry, her hand trembling with excitement:
There is no question about the fact that he [Jung] is the prophet. And the new way means the reconciliation of the thought of the present day with the spirit. He has achieved the attitude in himself. The full philosophy remains to be worked out. Let's do it, Harry! To go on with what Jung has begun would be the biggest thing that could be done at the present time. Is there a bigger whale or a whiter whale than the chains of the outworn attitudes which fetter and hinder the spirit? He says, ‘No footstep has been there ahead of yours. You are beginning the way of a new order. If you are weak vou will side with society and say 'Yes, I too believe as you believe'. If you are strong you will seek the new way. No one knows what the solution is. No one knows the way. You may succeed, You may fail, but you will have dealt with life. You will have struggled for the new reality.’ Don't think, dear, that I have lost my critical sense entirely. But Jung is a big person and I see the significance of him and his work. It goes so infinitely far beyond the therapeutic aspect. The germs of what we seek are in it. I feel in my blood that the whale boats are getting manned. Goodbye, dear one. It is late and this letter grows long. Hold me close to you. There are big things in the air. I need you.
The Symbols of the Perennialists
Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (“AKC”) was born in 1877 to an eminent family in Sri Lanka (then known as British Ceylon). His father, Muthu Coomaraswamy, had been the first Asian lawyer permitted to join the British bar. Muthu had befriended Prime Minister Disraeli and had been made a Knight Bachelor, the highest honor the British sovereign could bestow upon a colonial subject. AKC’s mother was an Englishwoman who came from the rich and powerful Kent Family. After his father’s early death, AKC spent much of his childhood in England, where he attended renowned preparatory schools.
Early in his life, AKC’s main interests were geology and botany. In 1903, he returned to British Ceylon, where he became Director of Mineralogical Surveys. During the surveys, he discovered the radioactive mineral Thorianite (Thorium). This sparked a correspondence with Marie Curie, who offered to name the mineral “Coomaranite” in his honor, but AKC refused. During his travels across the island, he also saw the catastrophic impact Western industrialism and cultural imperialism was inflicting on his homeland. He began to study and collect indigenous arts and crafts, which were withering under the spread of Western education and economic competition.
AKC was able to delve deeply into indigenous arts and culture because of his astonishing gift for mastering languages. By the end of his life, he considered himself fluent in thirty-six languages. AKC only considered himself fluent in languages in which he could both hold long, technical conversations in and had read the great poems and literatures which represented that particular language’s true potential. Many of his friends commented that he could not only speak and read in many languages, but could “actually think in both Eastern and Christian [cultural] terms, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Pali and to some extent Persian and even Chinese.” As an art theorist and historian he would become incredibly prolific—publishing 95 books and more than 900 articles. He was gifted with an extraordinary, but now nearly entirely forgotten, intellect that he used to parse the world’s artistic traditions.
In 1914, AKC returned to England, where he began writing fervently on Indian art. He began amassing a large collection of artifacts. Then, the British attempted to draft him for WWI. AKC refused to join the British army until India was granted home rule. Rather than be sent to prison, AKC opted to escape to America, where he became the “Keeper of Indian and Mohammedan Art” at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. There he began a correspondence with the noted German Indologist and linguist, Heinrich Zimmer, who specialized in the study of Hindu and Buddhist myths and symbols. Zimmer introduced AKC to the works of a strange and shadowy figure named René Guénon, who would profoundly influence AKC’s life and work.
By design, very little is known about René Guénon and his most ardent followers. The school of thought Guénon founded, known as the ‘perennialitsts’ or ‘traditionalists’ shunned Western individualism, avoided writing anything about themselves, and considered it a point of pride if nothing in their work was considered ‘original.’ We do know that as a young man living in Paris, Guénon joined several secret initiatory orders and published articles on ancient rites under the pseudonym “the Sphinx.” But the outbreak of WWI caused him to reassess all his beliefs and associations—he began questioning whether modern Western civilization represented any sort of progress or improvement on what had come before. He then converted to Islam, was initiated into Sufism, learned Arabic, moved to Egypt, changed his name to Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahid Yahya, and spent the rest of his life in quiet, voluntary poverty. Guénon, tall and slender, could often be seen wandering Cairo arguing with local Egyptians about the superiority of the East, who frequently envied the West and dismissed him.
Like Vico, Bastian, and Jung, René Guénon identified in expansive detail the widespread commonalities between myths, faiths, and legends from around the world. He found the cross, the swastika, and the grail particularly potent and omnipresent. He found similarities in ritual and the steps of initiation. He believed that these commonalities must be the leftover fragments of a primordial Ur-tradition, which emerged through humanity’s initially close interconnection with the spiritual. From this initial golden age, humanity, particularly in the West, had severed itself from this tradition, which led to a sense of ennui and purposelessness. He argued that humanity had descended into the Kali Yuga of Hinduism—the Dark Age of unleashed materialistic appetites—which, like in Vico’s scheme, represents the last and fourth stage of a historical cycle. Coomaraswamy believed that he had recognized this descent in the destruction of traditional Sri Lankan culture he had witnessed, and believed that he too had found the remnants of a sort of universal Ur-tradition in his cultural studies. In the same that Jung thought people ignored dreams and thought of them as nonsense because they weren't able to translate them, AKC believed that the West was running roughshod over the arts and crafts of the East because they didn’t know how to translate them.
“No living writer in modern Europe is more significant than René Guénon, whose task it has been to expound the universal metaphysical tradition that has been the essential foundation of every past culture, and which represents the indispensable basis for any civilization deserving to be so-called.” —AKC
As previously mentioned, Coomaraswamy was a master of languages. However, Guénon convinced Coomaraswamy that there was a vast store of accessible information which lay behind language. This information was encoded visually in art and symbols, which were created not for aesthetic purposes, but to serve as reference points for thought, and to propose theses. Thus, AKC believes that ancient art served a radically different function than what we use art for today. As AKC writes, “The original intention of intelligible forms was not to entertain us, but literally to ‘re-mind’ us. The chant is not for the approval of the ear, nor the picture for that of the eye (although these senses can be taught to approve the splendor of truth, and can be trusted when they have been trained), but to effect such a transformation of our being as is the purpose of all ritual acts.”
In human history, written language is certainly a novel and rare form of encoding information. Written language began around 6,000 B.C., and therefore has only been present for 2% of humanity’s time on Earth. Of the tens of thousands of languages which have existed, only 106 languages have had anything like a written literature. Today, there are around 3,000 spoken languages but only 78 of them have a literature. AKC argues that ancient cultures recorded their philosophy and myths not only in oral tradition, but in a super-dense symbolic system. When written language emerged, these ideas could then be encoded in a discursive manner, and visual arts took on a different purpose. AKC explains: “We are peculiar people. I say this with reference to the fact that whereas almost all other peoples have called their theory of art or expression a ‘rhetoric’ and have thought of art as a kind of knowledge, we have invented an ‘aesthetic’ and think of art as a kind of feeling.” AKC invokes the potentially more familiar example of medieval European art, which was “not like ours ‘free’ to ignore truth,” its purpose was to make apparent the divine truths shown in the Bible—every detail was a philosophical or theological statement. Today, it can be shocking to walk into an art gallery anywhere in Europe to see that painting for hundreds of years was completely obsessed with, and completely dominated by, representing instances from the Bible, particularly the crucification. The purpose of art for the Medievals was certainly not to express their own individuality. In fact it was the opposite—the complete suppression of individual contingencies and particularities was necessary to access universal truth.
AKC gives a powerful example of how, for a true believer, the depiction of a symbol is not judged on merely aesthetic principles:
“The collector who owns a crucifix of the finest period and workmanship, and merely enjoys its ‘beauty,’ is in a very different position from that of the equally sensitive worshiper, who also feels its power, and is actually moved to take up his own cross; only the latter can be said to have understood the work in its entirety, only the former can be called a fetishist.”
AKC argues that the art of ancient tribal and pre-literate cultures is far less similar to the art of the modern West than that of medieval Europe. Ancient art, truly traditional art, is full of “cosmic analogies,” it was the imitation of heavenly forms, it was the depiction of metaphysical truths in the same manner that mathematical equations are depictions of scientific truths. These fruits of these arts were not seen as derived from individual whim, but were supposed to be models or incarnations of the always-existing celestial archetypes. This is why traditional art was rarely, if ever, signed. It was thought not to have emerged from the individual. AKC is evangelical for this form of art: “It is under such conditions that a really living art, unlike what Plato calls the arts of flattery, flourishes; and where the artist exploits his own personality and becomes an exhibitionist that art declines.” Here, we find something which exists before Vico’s ‘age of men,’ we are still in the era of poetic wisdom, of deities and archetypes.
AKC followed Guénon in his opposition to psychoanalysis. For the traditionalists, there was a common spiritual basis which united the genesis of the world’s traditions. The paths of the ancient traditions were so many paths up the same sacred mountain. Psychoanalysis, in the traditionalist view, denies that the ascent is spiritual, and positions it as only mental or psychological. For AKC and Guénon, the great symbolic and artistic works of the world’s traditions are representative spiritual and divine truths, they belong to the ‘superconscious’ not the ‘subconscious,’ which Guénon refers to as a sort of ‘psychic garbage heap.’ Psychoanalysis is what happens when those who are unexperienced and uninitiated into a spiritual tradition trying to think in a materialistic way about spiritual concepts. Guénon blames this materialistic outlook partially on Freud’s Jewish ancestry, which through displacement, has been separated from its ancient tradition. As will be shown, Judaism became a thorny question for the traditionalists.
“The case of Freud himself, founder of 'psychoanalysis, is quite typical in this respect, for he never ceased to declare himself a materialist. One further remark: why is it that the principal representatives of the new tendencies, like Einstein in physics, Bergson in philosophy, Freud in psychology, and many others of less importance, are almost all of Jewish origin, unless it be because there is something involved that is closely bound up with the 'malefic' and dissolving aspect of nomadism when it is deviated, and because that aspect must inevitably predominate in Jews detached from their tradition?”
Coomaraswamy used the works of Guénon to challenge the colonial west’s claims of progress, and intellectual and spiritual dominance over the colonized. He wanted to show that the old traditions and creations of the illiterate peasant had a spiritual foothold which the modern liberal state lacked. But traditionalism had more complex political ramifications. At the same time Coomaraswamy was delving deeper into Guénon’s works, another philosopher and writer was eagerly seeking out the mysterious-frenchman-turned-Sufi mystic. This young Italian philosopher was named Julius Evola. After fighting in WWI, he briefly joined the newly-formed Dada movement in Zurich, until a spiritual crisis caused him to give up painting and nearly commit suicide. Needing to “transcend the emptiness" of modern life, he experimented with hallucinogens, magic, and radical politics. Then, he discovered Guénon's The Crisis of the Modern World. Evola began a correspondence with Guénon, whom he called his “master,” and even asked the older man for a photo of himself. Guénon declined, stating that he did not have any photos of himself, as he had rejected everything of a “merely individualistic character.” In Guénon, Evola believed that he had found the “soul” of the young, but rapidly expanding, Italian fascist movement. Evola mixed the works of Guénon and Otto Weininger to outline a ‘virile spirituality’ rooted in ancient principles, which would reconnect with Aryan mythology, and fight the influences of materialism, individualism, and Judaism. Evola sought to show that the liberal, hyper-literate, cosmopolitan, capitalist West had embraced a rootless Judaism over the steadfast, hierarchical, disciplined, and sublime primordial traditions. Later, Evola would influence Mussolini and Hitler’s interests in the occult, and promote the Nazi search for the Holy Grail.
Today, both Steve Bannon, Aleksandr Dugin (who has been called “Putin’s Brain”), and Olavo de Carvalho (a close advisor to Jair Bolsonaro) claim the traditionalists—mainly Guénon and Evola—as their main philosophical influences. In 2018, Bannon and Dugin even met in Rome to discuss Guénon.
Christiana’s Visions
By the time Christiana went back to Küsnacht, Bill and Josephine had long known about the affair between her affair with Murray. The times and their social class did not allow divorce, and Josephine did not want to jeopardize Harry’s career. Bill was physically unwell, sunken into his psyche, and did not want the added shame of losing Christiana. It is difficult to imagine what Bill was feeling—he had been a hero in a war he no longer believed in, and had his wife stolen away by a man who was all talk, but had never seen action. Christiana brought Bill again to Jung to see if the psychoanalyst could be of help, but he didn’t understand his methods or why he had the authority to give his wife permission to see another man. Who was this charlatan who had taken spiritual and mental possession over his wife and friend? But he still loved Christiana, although she was rapidly changing before his eyes. Despite it all, the ‘dyad’ was something that Bill and Josephine had to learn to accept.
Christiana spent much of her time that summer hiking in the quiet green hills above Küsnacht. She “chewed the cud” of Jung’s ideas through the winding paths and rows of miniature waterfalls which overlooked the Zurich suburb. She realized that she had diverged from the standard path which was set out for her life, and had betrayed the wishes of her upper-crust ancestors. He observed having “the curious feeling of having ages of New England ancestry quietly and noiselessly taking fight…I didn't even waste my breath to hurl an epithet after them.” She thought about how the rationalistic, scientific mindset of the West had caused people to refuse their mystic and emotional nature. She believed that the time was ripe for the pendulum to swing back towards the instinctive and primordial.
At the Hotel Sonne, she befriended Robert Edmond Jones, a stage designer whose star was rising for his rebellion against highly-realistic set designs, in favor of more sparse but impressionistic designs. He sought to use dramatic lighting, empty space, and symbolic artifacts, to convey the central emotions and ideas of the production. His book The Dramatic Imagination, would later became an industry standard and would change both Hollywood and Broadway. Robert would sit in the lobby and teach anyone who asked how to trance. Now, on the street corners of the once-sleepy, upperclass Küsnacht, one could hear passersby ask each other, “are you still stuck in that cavern?” or “what is your magician up to today?” Under Robert’s guidance, Christiana’s dreams became increasingly vivid, encompassing, and emotionally salient. Robert could tell she was responding very quickly to his training, and conveyed to Jung her potential. In a rare gesture, Jung reached out to Christiana to ask for more frequent appointments. He was determined to crack open her mind.
Many of Christiana’s dreams showed the lingering effects of the war:
I found myself in a graveyard in the devastated area in France. The graves were made of red sandstone. I saw people walking over a large grave where many soldiers were buried. Someone said, "Look at this gravestone." It was a large tombstone and upon it was carved the figure of a saint and beside it the figure of a bull, and in spite of the fact that both figures were carved in stone, they were alive, half dead and half alive. I saw that the bull was gnawing the fingers of the saint. I felt nauseated with horror and walked away, shaking my own hand as though to free it from the bull.
Jung was intrigued by the dream because of the bull’s central importance to religious worship before Christianity. The bull was the central image of Mithraism, a rival religion to Christianity from the 1st to the 4th century AD. Mithraism is sometimes considered the religion which would have spread through Europe if it was not outcompeted by Christianity. The bull relates to another early rival of Christianity, Judaism, in that aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, means bull, and is supposed to look like a bull’s head. As Jung commented, “one finds bull worship, or the worship of similar animals, in all the most remote corners of the earth at the most different times. That is because it is an archetype; the archetype is eternal, outside of time.”
One evening, after a long session with Jung in which he went into depth about his idea of the animus (the inner, unconscious masculine dimension of the female personality), in an exhausted state, she went back to the Hotel Sonne and fell into a hypnagogic state. In her inner eye, she saw “a beautiful peacock was perched on the back of a man, and the beak of the peacock was pointed at the man's neck. Then this picture disappeared and another one came up where she was just seeing herself, she was looking down at a large hole in her shoe, and she thought that it was so worn that she could not wear it any longer.” Jung interpreted the peacock with the beak to mean that she was now under the command of something beautiful which was unfolding. He believed that it was perched on the man’s back because it was connected to the unconscious or the ‘shadow side’ of Christiana. The worn shoe represented her old way of living, which it was time to cast off. Jung congratulated her that this was great progress, and instructed her to “put it all down as beautifully and as carefully as you can-in some beautifully bound book…when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church-your cathedral- the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them-then you will lose your soul-for in that book is your soul.” Soon, another set of hypnogogic visions came other. She saw a set of simple symbols which looked like hieroglyphs: an upraised hand, a the outline of a head with a halo behind it, and a fiery globe pierced by a black rod. Then, she saw a flame which hovered in front of her face, and then flew into her mouth.
Then, again in the steep rolling hills above Küsnacht, Christiana would have her first of a year-long series of visions. She conveyed to Jung: “I beheld the head of a ram. Swiftly and with fearful strength the ram charged and was met full on the forehead by the spear of an Indian.” Jung was very pleased, particularly by the vision’s ‘photographic quality’ and Christiana’s ability to vision while staying mentally stable. However, having the visions frequently exhausted her. Jung cautioned his patient not to force the visions, to drink plenty of water and take care of herself, and to not be upset when the visions stopped appearing. The visions kept coming, but there was less mood in them, they appeared like videos or paintings where the emotional content was completely wrapped up in the forms, and not brought on by Christiana’s state of the mind. The visions took on a fairytale or mythological quality where all feelings, moods, inner conflicts are translated into image and action. Here is one of the more fully-formed visions:
The bull picked up an infant from the ground and carried it to an antique statue of a woman and laid the child at her feet. A naked young girl, her hair crowned with flowers, came riding on the back of a white bull; she seized the child, tossing it up in the air and catching it again. The white bull carried them to a Creek temple. Here the girl laid the child on the floor. Through a hole in the roof streamed a ray of sunlight. This ray of light struck the child on the forehead, imprinting a star there. She then changed into a youth, standing in a sacred grove. A satyr appeared and said, "Why are you here?" The youth answered, "I have no place to go."
The visions continued to increase in detail and length. They took on the properties of a continuous epic, and appeared almost daily. As Christiana’s biographer Claire Douglas wrote:
Once Morgan started to "vision," Jung found she possessed something he had only met before in himself: the equivalent of perfect pitch, a gift enabling her to enter the realm of the collective unconscious with accurate immediacy, to open herself to its images, and afterwards to translate them coherently, in words as well as by drawing and painting.
Usually, if she wanted to stop, Christiana could peek her head above the waves and quiet the vision until she was back to normal. In most of her letters from this period, she sounds of pretty solid mind. However, in a letter to Henry Murray, she described the feeling of entering a particularly strong trance state, in a manner which is not easy to follow:
The enormous energy put into these shapes is interesting. A tremendous process was started up - excitement followed by great exhaustion. Once started the process wet quickly with a sort of frenzy. The shapes constantly moving and changing, suddenly lighting up and then dying away, and a new arrangement falling into place. I saw them changing in the ground at my feet.
The whole process literally possessed me. This was the only time during the whole process of trancing when I had no volition either in beginning it or ending it. I felt that a frenzy vas upon me and that I was mad. With it there went a feeling of elation, a feeling that I could never be destroyed or lost or disrupted. I felt that now at last I was secure in some deep principle of my own being.
When consciously the ego accepts these tendencies as equal in power and in effect there arises man's great instinct to form, to order the world in which he lives, and the first step in this seems to be the substitution of geometric forms for the new dynamic conceptions. Geometric forms have their own dynamic relations, their own balance, order and proportion which is probably why they come up rather than flowing lines. Then the use of the star, suns, moon, etc. are the greatest images known to man to represent the most unconditioned feelings, the widest limitation.
Halfway through her summer of 100 trances, Christiana visited Harry in Munich. She guided him through her book of images and mental journeys, and he was ecstatic. He believed she was sounding the same depths which Melville had attempted to survey. They were young, they were in love, and they believed they were on the way to discovering something of great importance. Harry’s work at the Harvard psychology clinic was becoming well known, as the field itself began to gain traction. The names of Freud and Jung were slipping out of esoteric and academic circles and entering the public consciousness. They had done, at great risk, and against all social convention, what Jung had asked of them—given each other their minds and bodies—and something monumental appeared to be occurring. Jung even appeared to be becoming jealous of Christiana’s mental journey, and the depth of Harry’s connection to her.
After Christiana returned to Küsnacht, Harry wrote to her:
And so it follows that your trances represent, express, order our love. Thus they are central. We cannot go ahead without them. They are our language…
Our purpose is the creation of a trance epic. I know that whatever I can give that is good, will make your trances good. When I am wrong the trances will be wrong. They will be nothing but a lonely, solitary and hence meaningless song without me. But if you know that through your trances as a core I cannot express myself, how can you have a humble attitude about them? I shall enrich them for you and they shall include all time and space and all life struggling within the confines of time and space.
I may terribly analyze and criticize your trances. We may fight. But this may all be necessary. The great vice would be fear, false modesty, shallowness. Are we brave enough for this? The whole spiritual course of man will pivot on you.
It is stunning that after Christiana had the visions on her own, Harry has the gall to make them largely about himself: “They will be nothing but a lonely, solitary and hence meaningless song without me.” The race would now be on for Jung and Murray to use Christiana’s visions for their own purposes and fame.
Jung and the Joyces
When Carl Jung delved into Ulysses, the modernist masterwork penned by his acquaintance James Joyce, he got angry—Jung simply could not understand the book at all. The complete misunderstanding between Joyce and Jung—two of the most consequential, revered, creative, and intelligent explorers of the human psyche, mythology, and dream worlds of the 20th century, perhaps of any century—must be one of the greatest missed connections in history. In 1932, ten years after the book’s publication, Jung wrote a scathing review of Ulysses which escalates from confused grumblings to calling the book ‘a work of the anti-christ.’ Jung even hypothesized that Joyce was a schizophrenic, which was not merely an idle speculation, as Jung had written Psychology of Dementia Praecox, the time’s most applauded analysis of schizophrenia’s etiology. In the end, Jung compared Joyce to a worm gifted with literary powers, which writes with its sympathetic nervous system rather than a brain.
“I had an uncle whose thinking was always to the point. One day he stopped me on the street and asked, “Do you know how the devil tortures the souls in hell?” When I said no, he declared, “He keeps them waiting.” And with that he walked away. This remark occurred to me when I was ploughing through Ulysses for the first time. Every sentence raises an expectation which is not fulfilled; finally, out of sheer resignation, you come to expect nothing any longer.” —from Jung’s 1932 review of Ulysses
In time, Jung’s frustration and headaches with Ulysses dissipated, and his attitude on the work softened. He wrote Joyce a letter which contrasts with his review in that it shows some appreciation for the work: “I also don’t know whether you will enjoy what I have written about Ulysses because I couldn’t help telling the world how much I was bored, how I grumbled, how I cursed and how I admired. The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches. I suppose the devil’s grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman, I didn’t.” Joyce read this letter aloud to his wife, Nora, who rolled her eyes and said, “Jim knows nothing at all about women.” Joyce shook his head at the letter and review: “He seems to have read Ulysses from first to last without one smile. The only thing to do in such a case is to change one’s drink.”
For his part, Joyce was little impressed with the work of the eminent psychoanalyst. When friends would drone on about the genius of Jung and Freud, Joyce would interrupt: “Why all this fuss and bother about the mystery of the unconscious? What about the mystery of the conscious? What do they know about that?” When readers assumed that Joyce had developed his stream-of-consciousness technique and psychological insights from reading Freud, he would bitterly insist that he had gleaned everything from Dujardin and Vico.
Joyce was not interested in the scientific and materialistic explanations of consciousness which Jung aspired for. Joyce instead wanted to render the richness of conscious experience, and delve into its spiritual etiologies. Here, Vico would be his guide. When Ulysses was complete, Joyce would embark on a 17-year struggle to complete his final work, Finnegans Wake, which relies on Vico’s The New Science as a template in much the same manner as Ulysses relied on Homer’s Odyssey. The work was a struggle because of Joyce’s poverty, which caused him to constantly switch addresses and flee creditors, and because of his failing eyesight, which forced him to write the book in crayon on large sheets of cardboard. Joyce wrote the work lying prone on his bed, carrying a large magnifying glass, and wearing thick glasses, as well as a broad white jacket which he used to reflect light onto the paper. He needed every teaspoon of light possible to project his final work into his much-operated upon failing eyes, which were scarred by glaucoma, synecchia, iritis, conjunctivitis, episclerotis, retinal atrophy, as well as primary, secondary, and tertiary cataracts.
After shunning and belittling Jung’s works, it was with some embarrassment that Joyce was left with no other option but to bring his mentally ill daughter Lucia for a consultation at Jung’s house in Küsnacht. Lucia had had a difficult time growing up—she was born cross-eyed with a literary-mad-scientist father who as constantly moving the family to different addresses, frequently in different countries, spending his days working and nights getting black-out drunk.
But still, James Joyce loved his family. He set Ulysses on the day in which he had his first date with his future wife Nora, who ended the date by giving him a handjob under a bridge. From that moment, Joyce knew he had found his match. At the time, Nora was working as a chambermaid at Finn’s Hotel, which may have been an inspiration for Finnegans Wake. Additionally, Finnegan’s Wake concerns the doings of a family which resembles his own. James Joyce cared little when famous artists like T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway came to visit him, and preferred to center his world around Nora, Lucia, and his son Georgio. He thereby found it difficult to accept Lucia’s illness even when she was cutting their apartment’s phone lines, lighting things on fire, sending telegrams to dead people, and throwing furniture at her mother. Joyce insisted that Lucia was “slightly confused but on the whole a typical young woman.” She was examined at the Burgholzli sanatorium and declared definitively a schizophrenic. Joyce retorted that she was “not a raving lunatic, just a poor child who tried to do too much, to understand too much.” After consultations with nineteen different doctors, Joyce finally agreed to bring Lucia to Jung.
Jung talked with the father and daughter, and concluded that they were both suffering from schizophrenia, but that the elder Joyce was nevertheless functional because he was “a genius.” James and Lucia Joyce spent many hours with Jung in his smoke-filled, book-lined study. Jung found that the father and daughter were both ‘going to the bottom of the same river, one diving and the other drowning.’ He believed that Lucia represented to James a femme inspiratrix and inner part of his own psyche, which made it impossible for him to admit that she was seriously ill. At first Lucia responded well to Jung’s psychoanalysis, but then she turned bitter and angry. At one point, she raged at her father for bringing her to Jung, yelling “To think that such a big fat materialistic Swiss man should try to get hold of my soul!” After holding sessions with Lucia for many months, Jung concluded that there was little that could be done for her because she was “so bound up with her father's psychic system.” He attempted once again to show Joyce that Lucia was seriously ill. But Joyce insisted that his daughter “was an innovator not yet understood.” Joyce proclaimed that if the psychoanalyst was unable to understand Ulysses, he stood no chance of understanding his much more complex Lucia.
But Jung was correct that James and Lucia were deeply bound up together. Indeed, the father and daughter often worked together—with Joyce writing and Lucia practicing modernist dance in the same room. Lucia’s biographer, Carol Shloss, has explained that Lucia’s improvisational dance was an important inspiration for Finnegans Wake:
“There are two artists in this room, and both of them are working. Joyce is watching and learning. The two communicate with a secret, unarticulated voice. The writing of the pen, the writing of the body become a dialogue of artists, performing and counterperforming, the pen, the limbs writing away. The father notices the dance’s autonomous eloquence. He understands the body to be the hieroglyphic of a mysterious writing, the dancer’s steps to be an alphabet of the inexpressible. . . . The place where she meets her father is not in consciousness but in some more primitive place before consciousness. They understand each other, for they speak the same language, a language not yet arrived into words and concepts but a language nevertheless, founded on the communicative body. In the room are flows, intensities.”
Finnegans Wake
The river in which Joyce was diving, and Lucia drowning, is the main subject of Finnegans Wake. The book begins mid-sentence with the transcendent line which never ceases unwinding itself: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” Here we are both following the Irish landscape alongside the River Liffey (Howth Castle is a real place, which is downriver from Adam and Eve’s Church) and the full course of humanity, which runs from Adam and Eve through Vico’s (‘commodious vicus’ invokes both Vico and the Latin word for street) recirculating stages of history.
The title of Finnegans Wake is also heavily Viconian. In Irish folk song The Ballad of Finnegan’s Wake, Tim Finnegan, born "with a love for the liquor," falls from a ladder, breaks his skull, and is thought to be dead. This instance echoes Vico’s fateful fall from a ladder in which he broke his skull as child. Then, at his wake, a bucket of whisky falls on Finnegan’s head, reviving and waking him up. Thus, in the book’s title the word "wake" represents both the recognition of a passing (into death) and a rising (from sleep), as well as a track or path of water left “in the wake” of something. This echoes Vico’s insistence that civilization passes through recurring cycles of death and rebirth.
“Then Mickey Maloney raised his head
When a bucket of whiskey flew at him
It missed and falling on the bed
The liquor scattered over Tim
Tim revives, see how he rises
Timothy rising from the bed
Said "Whirl your whiskey around like blazes
Thundering Jesus, do you think I'm dead?”—The Ballad of Finnegan’s Wake
It is frequently commented on that while Ulysses is a novel which takes place in the day, Finnegan’s Wake is a night novel, dreamlike novel, where characters and ideas are continuously in flux, where all boundaries are permeable, where illusions and puns and perturbations pile up endlessly upon each other. It is a novel in which the dreamworld links up everyday characters into a kaleidoscope of hallucinatory archetypes, where all of history and myth bleeds across the page. A New Yorker review suggested the book might have been written by a “god, talking in his sleep.”
Many scholars have hypothesized that Finnegans Wake is the contents of the dream which Stephen Deadalus, a major character in Ulysses, has when going to sleep after the novel’s events. Thus, while Deadalus proclaims in Ulysses, “history is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake,” Finnegans Wake is all of world history rendered as his nightmare. This reading is suggested by the first word, riverrun,’s resemblance to rêverons, a French word meaning “we will dream.”
Others scholars have suggested the entire book takes place in the split-second in which Deadalus hits his head on Ulysses page 23. Another theory, proposed by Corey Dansereau, a current PhD student at Stanford, holds that Finnegans Wake “begins at the climax of Ulysses, where Stephen Daedalus, whom the theosophist, medic Buck Mulligan, has dosed with an ancient Greek sacrament, collapses at the peak of a philosophical frenzy. His stream of consciousness drops out for 50 pages. I think the wake brings us into that concealed liminal state, a state of suspensive exanimation, a revelatory near-death experience.” In support of this theory, Dansereau points to several moments in the wake where characters are slipped drinks. In one instance, a potion is described as “…medicine. The Good Doctor mulled it. Mix it twice before…” He also points to the fact that “to take a Mulligan” means to be-reborn, or to try something again. It can also be added that the bar/tavern owned by the main characters of Finnegans Wake is called the Mullignar.
In case I forgot to mention this, or in case you haven’t been able to surmise it so far, Finnegans Wake is, unquestionably, unreadable. In 2023, a book club in California finished reading the book after 28 years of sessions, and turned back to the first page to try to eke out more of its untapped substance. Another book group in Boston has recently reached the halfway point of the book, after 12 years. A third group at the Trinity College, Dublin, is scheduled to read the book in a comparatively hurried 15 years. Many have tried to unravel the book’s vast mysteries. The online resource FWEET (the Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury) is a search engine with 99,788 explanatory annotations of the book. Nobody can claim to truly understand it in its entirety.
If Ulysses is Joyce’s attempt to capture every brick, stone, and dirty thought of Dublin in one book, Finnegans Wake is his attempt to capture the entire course of human history. It includes 60-70 modern and ancient languages, frequently through obscure slang terms. Joyce even includes potshots at his previous works: “making believe to read his usylessly unreadible Blue Book of Eccles” (the main character of Ulysses lives on Eccles street). Reading the book feels like treading water in a bubbling, deep pit of nonsense. Most of the words are not words at all, but the deep rumblings of experience which happens below thought. They are quasi-words or proto-words; words weaved into other words. The result is monstrosities like “chaosmos,” “bisexcycle,” “celescalating,” “I’ll be your aural eyeness,” and “Rowlin’s tun he gadder no must.” Here is how Joyce defended his technique:
And perhaps it is madness to grind up words in order to extract their substance, or to graft them one onto another, to create crossbreeds and unknown variants, to open up unsuspected possibilities for these words, to marry sounds which were not usually joined together before, although they were meant for one another, to allow water to speak like water, birds to chirp in the words of birds, to liberate all sounds of rustling, breaking, arguing, shouting, cracking, whistling, creaking, gurgling - from their servile, contemptible role and to attach them to the feelers of expressions which grope for definitions of the undefined. I took literally Gautier's dictum, 'The inexpressible does not exist.' With this hash of sounds I am building the great myth of everyday life.'
Here Joyce is trying to sever the distance between language and thought, word and sensation. This follows Vico’s view that humanity’s early words were closely bound up with the sensations that evoked their annunciation, highly onomatopoetic, that song preceded speech, and the ‘feeling’ of a word was more important than its conventionally-fixed meaning. Joyce sometimes even breaks through the boundary of alphabetical language and returns to the use of symbols to find the form of expression he is looking for. Characters are represented by symbols such as Δ, ⊢, and ∃. Here, Joyce is using symbols in the same manner which the traditionalists like Guenon and Coomaraswamy theorized that ancient people did, to pack a great compendium of meaning and thought into a small surface area. In a concise, (but, of course) confusing manner Joyce summarizes the traditionalists view of symbols: “the proteiform graph is a polyhedron of scripture.” Translation: the protean hieroglyphic is sacred scripture rendered in geometric form. At an early stage of writing Finnegans Wake, Joyce wrote a key for some of the symbols:
Along with its ties to ancient, primordial symbols, the contents of Finnegans Wake are somewhat like the free associations of Jung’s patients, or the mental patterns which arose when ancient peoples went down to perform rites in sensation-depriving caverns. As Stanford PhD student Corey Dansereau put it:
Finnegans Wake is about what goes on in the mind's absence, and the prose demonstrates this, this raw data moshing without stable concepts, an underworld where order is provided not by transcendental intellect, but by imminent feelings of terror and fascination….And this folds together with Vico's philosophical quest, as I described earlier, a descent out of these civilized natures of ours, back into the arcana of psychohistory, the heroic and divine ages, in search of a restorative power for a senile and depressed nation, a kind of controlled recorso whereby a resurrection or refleshment will hopefully occur.
In Dansereau’s depiction, Finnegans Wake runs parallel to The Waste Land, the symbolic quests of the Traditionalists, and the peregrinations of Carl Jung: it is a descent into psychic history in order to recover a spiritual wellspring which has been lost. Joyce even asks in the Wake, “where in the waste is the wisdom?” And, by not only describing Vico’s stages of man, but by reanimating their modes of language, Joyce seeks to immerse us in their symbols, archetypical manifestations, and poetic wisdom.
The connection to The Waste Land is further made apparent through the perhaps eponymous centrality and copious references to the Irish mythological hero Finn Mac Cool. Finn Mac Cool defended Ireland from invaders for a hundred years, until he was slain in 283 A.D, and his massive corpse became part of the landscape next to the river Liffey. According to mythology, Finn still waits for his re-awakening. Joyce describes the hero’s imprint on the landscape thus: “Yet may we not see still the brontoichthyan form outlined aslumbered, even in our own nighttime by the sedge of the troutling stream that Bronto loved and Brunto has a lean on.” He refers to the giant, submerged outline of Finn as “brontoichthyan” because it is a fix of the massive dinosaurs Brontosaurus and Ichthyosaurus. Notably, Finn’s totem animal is the salmon, a fish which returns to exactly where it spawned in order to lay its eggs and begin the lifecycle over again. In his lifetime, Finn attained incredible powers by eating the “salmon of wisdom.” Therefore, Finn is a Fisherking of sorts who awaits rejuvenation, who awaits the beginning of a new cycle, to Finn-Again. According to the FWEET, Finnegans Wake includes at least 111 references to salmon—frequently calling them smolts (when they migrate to the sea for the first time), Salmo Salar (the latinate scientific name of salmon), or other names—mostly referring to their stages of development and eventual return. Joyce alludes to Finn’s slumber by describing him as a tinned salmon:
Finiche! Only a fadograph of a yestern scene. Almost rubicund Salmosalar, ancient fromout the ages of the Agapemonides, he is smoltenin our mist, woebecanned and packt away. So that meal’s dead off for summan, schlook, schlice and goodridhirring.
Also notable is Joyce’s intention of publishing the completed Finnegans Wake in 1939, 1,656 years after the death of Finn Mac Cool. This mirrors the Biblical account of how the deluge which flooded the whole Earth rained down 1,656 years after Creation. Just as the floodwaters of the deluge wiped out the old, degraded civilization and allowed a new cycle to begin; and just as the Fisherking awaits the rains which will rejuvenate his land; Joyce waits for the awakening of the old mythology which will fulfill the prophecy of Finn’s reawakening, and bring us back to the divine stage of Vico’s cycle.
In fact, the novel is split up into four sections which mirror Vico’s stages of human history. The first part of the book, the age of the God's follows the exploits and relationship of the father HCE (known variously as “Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker”; “Howth Castle and Environs;” “Hoc Est Corpus [this is the body]” and “Here Comes Everybody”) with his wife, ALP (“Anna Livia Plurabelle,” who represents the River Liffey which runs through Dublin, and the eternal feminine). HCE is a god, a stutterer, and the landscape around Dublin. The second stage, which mirrors Vico’s “heroic age” follows HCE and ALP’s children, Shem, Shaun, and Issy. The relationship between Shem and Shaun follows the archetype of competing twins such as Set and Horus of the Osiris story; the biblical pairs Jacob and Esau, Cain and Abel; the mythological Romulus and Remus; and the modern battle between artist and industrialist. Shem is the writer of letters (the penman) while Shaun is the deliverer of letters (the post). The third section depicts Vico’s “age of man” and discusses the politicians and rowdy democratic populace who put HCE on trial. The fourth section is Vico’s ricourso, the return, in which the dream begins to fade, and ALP guides us back to the beginning of the book.
Throughout the novel there are 10 “thunder words”—the first nine are 100 letters long, the last 101—which represent important moments in the development of human history. The thunder plays the same role in the book as it does in Vico’s philosophy: it is a moment where humanity, in a moment of shock, moves from a comparatively unreflective, autonomous state to one of higher self-consciousness. Conversely, some have theorized that each thunder word marks the beginning of a deeper sleep cycle, in which the narrator or central consciousness of the book is passing into. Other scholars have suggested that the thunder comes from outside the dream, and is the only sound from the “real world” which permeates the sleeper’s consciousness. In the book, these emanations are referred to as “The hundredlettered name again, last word of perfect language.” The first thunder word contains different words for ‘thunder’ from different languages smashed together along with other cryptic words. When read aloud it sounds like rolling thunder clanging across a moiling sky:
The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunnt-rovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!)1 of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the off wall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy.
Finnegans Wake is also an attempt to create a literature which could incorporate the impacts of new technology—what role should the novel have in a world which can transport information through electronic cables and radio waves? While Joyce was composing the book, lying nearly blind in the darkness, he thumbed through his new shortwave radio, which could pick up far-off stations in Ireland, Germany, and North Africa. The book resembles scratchy garbled transmissions of noise coming in from all of human history, where scores of languages, news of great events, and reports of prosaic happenings, all emerge from the ether. Finnegans Wake is a compendium of a globalized world, the true recording of the newly collectivized consciousness.
Joyce was also extremely interested in how film and television would transform storytelling, and society writ large. In 1909, Joyce had helped open The Volta Electric Theatre, the very first cinema in Ireland. Joyce owned many well-read technical journals explaining how televisions function, and the Wake contains references to cathode tubes, carrier waves, Philo Farnsworth (the inventor of the television), amplifiers, transmitters, and photoelectric cells: “'Television kills telephony in brothers' broil. Our eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen!'" He even includes a scene where characters watch a televised horserace in a pub—well before any pubs had televisions. In a climatic argument between Shem and Shaun, the electronic screen is depicted as a sort of hypnotic re-animator of the dream world, or a portal to the dreamworld accessible when awake. Playing off of Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, which chronicled a doomed calvary charge in the Crimean war, Joyce called the television a “light barricade.” Using this barricade, the “cinemen” seek to “roll away the reel world, the reel world, the reel world!" Joyce appears in many instances to be describing the dreamlike control which mass media, radio, the cinematic image, and video surveillance can have over us: “Affected Mob Follows in Religious Sullivence. Reinvention of vestiges by which they drugged the buddhy. Moviefigure on in scenic section.”
Importantly, the book’s tenth and final thunder appears as the crackle of static across a television screen. It is created by the brother Shaun the Post, in his avatar as an industrialist and technocrat. Thus, we see the power of the electronic image, with its creation of artificial thunder—a power formerly only accessible to the gods—to radically disrupt the consciousness of mankind. This thunder, “Ullhodturden-weirmudgaard- gringnirurdrmolnirfenrirlukkilokkibaugiman-dodrrerin-surtkrinmgern-rackinarockar!” is full of Norse gods and supernatural entities, and ends in “rackinarockar,” a play on “Ragnarokkr,” which means “the final battle” and “the twilight of the gods.” But something is lightly off about this thunder—perhaps underscoring its artificiality—as it contains 101 letters instead of 100. The brother Shem the Penmen ridicules Shaun for getting it wrong: “But you could come near it, we do suppose, strong Shaun.” Shaun retorts, “how’s that for Shemese?” indicating that it is now the post, the transmitter, who plays a more important communicative role than the penman, or artist, who is represented by Shem. At Joyce finished the Wake in Paris in 1939, he must have been thinking about what battle would occur with the impending world war, and the radio-accelerated rise of the Nazis—whether old gods would die and new ones would arise.
As previously noted, the last section of Finnegans Wake is the ricorso, the return to the beginning of Vico’s cycle. It represents the collapse of the dream, the collapse of the hallucination, the end of this cycle of civilization. Importantly, it is the reassertion of the feminine principle which takes humanity out of the chaos of the “age of men” and restarts the cycle at the beginning. Anna Livia Plurabelle, the representation of the eternal feminine, and the avatar of the river Liffey which runs through Dublin, speaks directly to the dreamer, who is gradually waking up. She speaks of the “greedy gushes” and “small souls” which plague the final days of civilization. We feel the dream losing its leaves like a tree in the fall, and hear gulls calling as we approach the river’s end in the ocean…the dream breaks and the cycle starts anew.
My great blue bedroom, the air so quiet, scarce a cloud. In peace and silence. I could have stayed up there for always only. It’s something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall. And let her rain now if she likes. Gently or strongly as she likes. Anyway let her rain for my time is come. I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights? All me life I have been lived among them but now they are becoming lothed to me. And I am lothing their little warm tricks. And lothing their mean cosy turns. And all the greedy gushes out through their small souls. And all the lazy leaks down over their brash bodies. How small it’s all! And me letting on to meself always. And lilting on all the time. I thought you were all glittering with the noblest of carriage. You’re only a bumpkin. I thought you the great in all things, in guilt and in glory. You’re but a puny. Home! My people were not their sort out beyond there so far as I can. For all the bold and bad and bleary they are blamed, the seahags. No! Nor for all our wild dances in all their wild din. I can seen meself among them, alla-niuvia pulchrabelled. How she was handsome, the wild Amazia, when she would seize to my other breast! And what is she weird, haughty Niluna, that she will snatch from my ownest hair! For ’tis they are the stormies. Ho hang! Hang ho! And the clash of our cries till we spring to be free. Auravoles, they says, never heed of your name! But I’m loothing them that’s here and all I lothe. Loonely in me loneness. For all their faults. I am passing out. O bitter ending! I’ll slip away before they’re up. They’ll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms. I see them rising! Save me from those therrble prongs! Two more. Onetwo moremens more. So. Avelaval. My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I’ll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff ! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair! If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like he’d come from Arkangels, I sink I’d die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup. Yes, tid. Th ere’s where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the…riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs…
With his voluminous references to mythology, archetypes, and dreams, one would expect Joyce to have come around to the value of the psychoanalysts. Not so. He casts frequent aspersions on Jung, his methods of scientific reductionism, and his mainly female acolytes, known as the “Jungfrauen” but which Joyce refers to as the “Jungfraud.” Joyce’s goal was not to systematize or interpret, but to evoke. But still, some writers such as Maria Popova, have found hints of solidarity:
The congruity of these two men’s lives [Jung and Joyce] did not end there. When Joyce wrote in Finnegans Wake, “We grisly old Sykos who have done our unsmiling bit on ’alices, when they were jung and easily freudened, in the penumbra of the procuring room . . .,” he seemed to be giving recognition to the similarity of Jung’s and his respective scientific and artistic aims. He was saying that he and Jung-“we grisly old Sykos”-were engaged in the same work. Both men-the writer narrating, the psychologist explaining- devoted their life-long creative energies to elbidating their common belief that the mind of a man is ineluctably bound to and governed by archetypal patterns which, like a myriad of undersea creatures, inhabit the timeless, boundless ocean that is the collective unconscious.
The Reawakening of Wotan
As far back as the first drafts of Symbols of Transformation, Carl Jung was interested in how symbols and archetypes could redirect libidinous impulses into higher, more numinous modes of living. He was convinced that in the same way that spirits and ghosts impacted the psyches of tribal people, and complexes could warp and compel human behavior, the symbols and beliefs encoded in religious thought were important channels of psychic energy. Indeed, Jung believed that religious symbols were the psychic equivalent of enzymes, capable of reinventing interiority and rapidly catalyzing behavior.
“The religious myth is one of man’s greatest and most significant achievements, giving him the security and inner strength not to be crushed by the monstrousness of the universe.Considered from the standpoint of realism, the symbol is not of course an external truth, but it is psychologically true, for it was and is the bridge to all that is best in humanity” — Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation
Throughout World War I and its immediate aftermath, Jung was deeply concerned that Christianity was no longer capable of domesticating the European unconscious. He found that Christianity’s once-potent nexus of symbols were becoming obsolete in an era of rationalism and industrialization: “What can a rationalist do with the dogma of the virgin birth, or with Christ’s sacrificial death, or the Trinity?” Jung explains that Christian symbols were crafted as the perfect instrument for transforming the militaristic, slave-saturated, power-and-glory obsessed libidinal impulses of the Romans, and channeling the psychic worlds of uneducated peasants into the numinous. They offered “a means of escape from the brutality and unconsciousness of the ancient world.” But now, without rejuvenation, Christianity has been weighed down by dogma and become nothing more than a slipping “moral mask.” Likewise, Jung finds it doubtful that modern science is enough to meet humankind’s spiritual and psychological needs.
Jung began a deep search into the meaning of Christian esotericism—including dubious fields like astrology, alchemy, and divination—not to evaluate their claims to literal truth, but to investigate their psychological truth. It was Jung’s conviction that some new doctrine would arise, sooner rather than later, to fill the psychic void. Something was churning in the deep mires of the collective unconsciousness. He wanted to understand it, and influence it if he could.
“The medical psychotherapist today must make clear to his more educated patients the foundations of religious experience, and set them on the road to where such an experience becomes possible. If, therefore, as a doctor and scientist, I analyze abstruse religious symbols and trace them back to their origins, my sole purpose is to conserve, through understanding, the values they represent, and to enable people to think symbolically once more, as the early thinkers of the Church were still able to do. This is far from implying an arid dogmatism. It is only when we, today, think dogmatically, that our thought becomes antiquated and no longer accessible to modern man. Hence a way has to be found which will again make it possible for him to participate spiritually in the substance of the Christian message.”
For these investigations, Jung needed a new assistant, as Toni Wolff was dismissive of Jung’s forays into the dubious never lands of alchemy and superstition. Soon, Jung found what he was looking for in the 18-year-old Marie-Louise von Franz. Von Franz was a socially awkward high school student known for humiliating her teachers by correcting their errors, and flaunting her intellectual dominance over them. Toni Wolff’s nephew was a teacher at the local school, and one day brought over the top 8 boys in the class, along with the top girl, Von Franz, to visit Jung. She was the only one who impressed Jung. Von Franz, who had never been cowed before thought to herself, “either this man is crazy or I am too stupid to understand what he’s talking about.” She realized after returning home that it would take her “ten years to digest what she experienced today.” Soon, Jung was sending Von Franz across Europe to follow vague leads in crumbling libraries and antiquarian bookstores to look for forgotten alchemical and religious texts.
On January 30th, 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of neighboring Germany. After the February 27th, 1933, burning of the Reichstag, the Nazis rescinded rights of assembly, and freedom of the press, and began solidifying control over civic institutions throughout Germany. The president of the Germany-based International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy (AÄGP), who had previously criticized Hitler, was thus forced to resign. Jung, the organization’s Vice President, was thus automatically promoted. This put Jung into a personal crisis—he could see what good he could do as the head of an organization which would in all likelihood be slowly converted into a Nazi propaganda outfit, or he could resign and lose stature in Germany just as it was beginning to take a belated notice of his work.
In 1933, Jung’s opinions on Jews and the Nazis are difficult to disentangle. On April 12th, he wrote a letter to Christiana Morgan which parroted some of the stereotypes Nazis were spreading about Jews. He invokes his old teacher and partner Freud, but makes no mention that Freud’s books were currently being burned in Germany, and seems to suggest that because Jews were without a homeland, they could only leech off of the culture of others. The letter isn’t explicitly hateful, but it shows little concern, and perhaps even pleased—but naive—anticipation, for Germany’s future:
Dear Christiana,
Thank you for your very nice letter…I was also interested to hear about your experiances with Freudian Analysis. Its great merit is that it is very Jewish. It is the prerogative of the Jew, that his psychology can be envisaged from an intellectual point of view. The peculiar jewish history has led to an equally peculiar detachment of the Jewish mind from its roots. The essentially nomadic nature of the Jew needs great detachment and versatility of the mind for the sake of its adaptation. Being always the same in its nomadic aspect, the jewish mind varies considerably according to its milieu.
Among Christians the Jew is almost a Christien, among Arabs almost arabic, among Hindus almost Indian, among Russians almost Russian etc. Thus the jewish mind can and must be even explained from the point of view outside of it. That is not so with the Aryan mind. It is autochtonous. Every outside point of view is inadequate because it is not an adapted but a naturally developed mind still living upon its own resources. We can live by ourselves, while the Jew only makes sense among Goyim.
In recent years I've been chiefly concerned with Germany which has apparently discovered me. I even became president of the Allgmeine serztliche Ges. f. Psychotherapie, and I had to deliver countless lectures in Germany. I'm actually collaborating with two German Indologists in Tübingen and Heidelberg [one of which was Heinrich Zimmer], concerning chiefly the psychology of the Tantra Yoga.
We are living in, a funny kind of atmosphere in our old Europe. It is a time of great change and great movement. I suppose you got something similar over there through your economic crisis. With us it looks as if with new times a new mind is about to develop.
At this perilous moment for the Jews, Jung made many other statements which are, at a minimum, questionable. He suggests that they lack an unconscious element because they have none of their “own earth underfoot.” He states that Freud and Adler’s simplification of the psyche to “primitive sexual wishes and power-drives” was befitting of their Jewish nature. Many in Jung’s orbit were exhilarated by the Nazi fascination in the occult, and the quasi-religious longings of fascism. Others in Jung’s orbit, which included many Jews, and people interested in developing, like Bastian, the ‘common psychic basis of humanity’ were horrified by how Europe was changing.
The divisions in Jung’s movement were apparent at the first convening of the Eranos Conference in 1933, in Ascona, Switzerland. The same currents of experimentation and spiritual yearning that brought Herman Hesse to Ascona years before had brought Olga Frobe-Kapteyn to the sparkling shores and high cliffs of Lake Maggiore. Having no idea how she would put it to use, Olga Frobe-Kapteyn built a large, rectangular structure beside her home, under the thickets of eucalyptus trees above the lake. She then conceived the idea of hosting a gathering place “between East and West” for the world’s scholar to discuss developments in religious studies and myth. Frobe-Kapteyn then built a large, round table to recall the Knights of the Round Table of the Grail Legend. In their early years, in addition to Jung, these conferences brought in notable thinkers such as D.T. Suzuki, Heinrich Zimmer, Gershom Scholem, Henri Corbin, and even the shadowy Jean Gebser. Other speakers at Eranos, such as Alfons Rosenberg and Gustav-Richard Heyer, were open advocates of the Nazi regime, and supporters of the spiritual Aryanism outlined by Julius Evola. Frobe-Kapteyn tried to keep the Conferences non-political, but that was difficult when both Martin Buber and members of the Nazi Party were invited. Frobe-Kapteyn kept a ‘neutral’ attitude on the schism until her special needs daughter was removed from her care facility by the Nazis, and murdered. Frobe-Kapteyn was not aware of her daughter’s death until she went to visit her and found her missing.
At the same time that Jung’s movement was becoming interested in Nazism, the Nazis were becoming very interested in Jung. Jung told a crowd that when he was traveling and giving lectures in Germany in 1933, “I was consulted by some leading Nazis who wanted to keep me there, one of them actually said he should arrest me so that I would be forced to remain.” Jung was confused, and responded, “But why? I am no politician, I am a psychologist, what have I to do with your enterprise?” The Nazis responded that he could help them understand their own movement. Jung was amazed that Nazism was so unconscious, that it could not understand their own movement. This didn’t seem to particularly bother Jung: “You see, they don't know. I marveled at that fellow, I think that is fine, it could almost convince one that there is something in it.”
Yet nonetheless, through his leadership of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy (AÄGP), he acted early to assist the Jews connected to the organization. In 1934, Matthias Göring, cousin of Nazi leader Hermann Goring, who had put in charge of eradicating the Jewish and Freudian elements from the German psychoanalytic movement, sent Jung a draft of new operating statutes for the AÄGP. Jung gave the draft statutes to his Jewish lawyer friend Rosenbaum, and instructed him to write in any possible loopholes which could be used for Jews in the organization’s benefit. Rosenbaum was baffled and somewhat amused, as he tried to explain to Jung that one could not hoodwink the Nazis with ambiguous statutes. Rosenbaum continued that Jung was putting himself at immense personal risk by entrusting a Jew to outsmart the Nazis. Jung responded “almost in a rage” that he knew the risks and the unlikelihood of success, but insisted “I must indeed try!” The Nazis did indeed accept the statutes, and the loopholes allowed funds to be send to Jews who had little other opportunities available to them for some years, and helped them acquire travel documents to international conferences, that aided them in their escape. When friends like Heinrich Zimmer (who had a wife of Jewish ancestry) left for England, America, or British Palestine, Jung contacted his benefactors to help them with their arrival.
By 1936, Jung had a more worked-out theory of the Nazi phenomenon, which he published in the essay Wotan. There, Jung postulated that Christianity had “split the Germanic barbarian into an upper and a lower half, and enabled him, by repressing the dark side, to domesticate the brighter half and fit it for civilization.” This lower side—the blond beast—was now ready to be actualized through the Norse-Germanic God of war, Wotan. Jung found it unusual that “an ancient god of storm and frenzy, the long quiescent Wotan, should awake, like an extinct volcano, to new activity, in a civilized country that had long been supposed to have outgrown the Middle Ages.” But, without a doubt, this powerful force, this symbol of transformation, had taken control of the whole of Germany. Here, Jung does not mean that the god Wotan possessed people in a literal sense, but that a long-known and written about psychic force, familiar at many points in history, had taken on a new instantiation. After observing a fascist parade, Jung remarked, “Out there, archetypes are already walking in the streets.”
“A mind that is still childish thinks of the gods as metaphysical entities existing in their own right, or else regards them as playful or superstitious inventions. From either point of view the parallel between Wotan redivivus and the social, political and psychic storm that is shaking Germany might have at least the value of a parable. But since the gods are without doubt personifications of psychic forces, to assert their metaphysical existence is as much an intellectual presumption as the opinion that they could ever be invented. Not that “psychic forces” have anything to do with the conscious mind, fond as we are of playing with the idea that consciousness and psyche are identical. This is only another piece of intellectual presumption. ‘Psychic forces’ have far more to do with the realm of the unconscious. Our mania for rational explanations obviously has its roots in our fear of metaphysics, for the two were always hostile brothers. Hence, anything unexpected that approaches us from the dark realm is regarded either as coming from outside and, therefore, as real, or else as an hallucination and, therefore, not true. The idea that anything could be real or true which does not come from outside has hardly begun to dawn on contemporary man.” —Carl Jung, Wotan
In Wotan, Jung took a far more anxious view of the Nazis than he had in previous writings. He called Hitler “possessed” and the infector of an entire nation, which had “started rolling on its course towards perdition.” He explains that the Germans have endorsed a new, yet somehow also ancient, form of “barbarism.” Still, he draws unsavory comparisons between the “Aryan” race and the Jews. He describes Jews as overly-conscious and stable, while Aryans as overly-unconscious, which puts them in a state of both dangerousness and creativity. He expands: “The still youthful Germanic peoples are fully capable of creating new cultural forms that still lie dormant in the darkness of the unconscious of every individual—seeds bursting with energy and capable of mighty expansion. The Jew, who is something of a nomad, has never yet created a cultural form of his own and as far as we can see never will, since all his instincts and talents require a more or less civilized nation to act as host for their development.” Jung’s close associate Erich Neumann, who left Zurich to join the Zionist effort, begged to differ. From British Palestine, Neumann wrote Jung an angry letter explaining how difficult it was “to maintain an inner relationship with a man who naturally feels, at most, a superficial connection to the events that injure all of us Jews.”
Later in 1936, Jung was invited to visit Harvard as an honored speaker for a symposium on the "Factors Determining Human Behavior." By then Henry Murray had become the head of the Harvard Psychology Clinic, with Christiana Morgan as his assistant. The two were developing the Thematic Apperception Test, which would become a highly influential way of understanding a subject’s motives, personality, and emotional stability. Bill Morgan had died two years prior, from the tuberculosis which lodged in his lungs when he was in the trenches of WWI. His obituary referred to him as a “weedy sort of fellow” and made much of his connection to the famous Henry Murray.
Jung’s invitation to Harvard was met with great controversy and an article in the Harvard Crimson was headlined: “PSYCHOLOGISTS BELIEVE JUNG UNDER NAZI THUMB.” The article points to the fact that the psychoanalytic organization Jung was currently President of had in its rules: “The Association takes it for granted that all its members that are active in writing or speaking have studied Adolph Hitler's fundamental book, ‘Mein Kampf’, with all scientific energy possible, and accepted it as a basis." Further, while Jung had never directly spoken in favor of the Nazi Party or Nazi policies, his Presidency of the AÄGP served as an implicit endorsement, and potent propaganda tool for the fascists. Henry Murray penned a response defending Jung, which was published in the Crimson later in the week.
Jung’s Harvard visit was a fiasco. Unable to hold himself back from the most controversial questions of the day, he spent much of his speech discussing the psychological differences between Germans and Jews. Jung also kept abandoning the schedule Harvard had planned for him in order to meet privately with Murray. At the luncheon honoring all the honorees, Jung repeatedly caused a scene by flirting openly with Christiana, who was there in her professional capacity as a researcher for Psychology Clinic. Christiana was already furious at Jung for not carefully preserving her anonymity when he conducted an extensive series of lectures about her visions in Zurich. This Harvard flirtation incident, along with a strange, fragmentary and flustered letter sent by Jung to Christiana some years before, are certainly enough to make one wonder about the true nature of their relationship:
My dear Christiana Morgan:
…In early December your face haunted me for a while. I should have written then but there was the question of time…
Thank you for everything.“Don’t blame me!”…
But my dear(!!) Christiana Morgan, you are just a bit of a marvel to me. Now don’t laugh, there is nothing to laugh about.
You were quite right in scolding me.
Yours affectionately,
C. G.
Jung’s behavior in this area remained confusing and contradictory over the subsequent years. In 1937, Rosenbaum—the lawyer who assisted Jung in adding loopholes to the Nazis statutes—was arrested for sending money to anti-fascist forces in Spain. He was released some months later, but was now penniless, disbarred, and under Nazi suspicion. The ragged Rosenbaum arrived at Jung’s property in Bollingen desperately looking for assistance, but Jung refused to open the gate. Jung told him to leave with the cold remark, “Even a mortally injured animal knows when to go off alone and die.”
Olga Frobe-Kapteyn, the founder of Eranos, and virulent anti-Nazi since the murder of her daughter, ended up supporting Rosenbaum until he was able to get back on his feet. At the succeeding Eranos Conferences, Frobe-Kapteyn made sure to always seat Rosenbaum within Jung’s line of sight. Rosenbaum later became an extremely successful art dealer.
Chronicler of the Monomyth
In 1927, Joseph Campbell was having a difficult time narrowing down his wide-ranging interests into a respectable, or workable, academic path. He was interested mainly in European literature, Native American cosmology, Medieval romance languages, and middle-distance running. He loved reading about the individualist, lawless pioneers, as well as the spiritually-guided Native Americans. He had just finished his masters at Columbia University, where he attended the anthropological lectures of Franz Boas; however, he preferred the universalizing work of Boas’s shadowy and untranslated predecessor, Adolf Bastian.
Campbell wrote his masters thesis on the Grail Legend. Following in the footsteps of the work of Jessie Weston, Campbell attempted to trace the story of the Grail Legend back to the Greek Adonis myth: “[both stories] tell how the consort of the earth goddess was emasculated. The natural result was that the earth failed in its fertility, and that life lapsed into languishment. The situation is euphemized by representing the god as wounded by a young knight in the thigh. This young knight is simply a vigorous embodiment of the cosmical vitality which is waning with the strength of the old god.” Campbell felt himself to be on some sort of spiritual quest for a ‘Holy Grail’ but had no idea where to get started. Still unsure what to do with his life, Campbell applied to Columbia for a grant to study Old French and Provencal languages in Paris.
Campbell spent much of his time in Paris wandering around and visiting the English-language bookstores. One day, a large blue book in the window of Shakespeare and Company caught his eye. Its display advertised it as a ‘scandalous book’ which had been banned, or even burned, throughout most of the English-speaking world. In America, customs censors had banned the book’s importation on the ground that it might cause readers to harbor "impure and lustful thoughts." Campbell was intrigued and bought the book, Ulysses, but found that he couldn’t make any sense of it. He brought the book back to Shakespeare and Company, and asked its fidgety, small, sharply serious, and boyish owner Sylvia Beach for help understanding it. As a friend of Joyce, and Ulysses’s publisher, Beach knew the book well, and tutored Campbell on its mythological and historical connections. The book slowly opened up to Campbell, and in it he saw a modern synthesis of the daily experience of the individual and the mythical and the timeless. “That changed my career,” he later said, “No one in the world knew more than what James Joyce knew of what I was trying to find out!” Campbell spent the next few years immersing himself in modernist literature.
When Finnegans Wake was published, Campbell was a literature professor at Sarah Lawrence College. While even Joyce’s longtime defenders and inner circle found the book to be completely impenetrable, Campbell and his friend Henry Morton Robinson immediately set to work decoding it. As Campbell’s young wife Jean Erdeman laughingly recalled, “I was on one arm and Finnegans Wake was on the other; he spent as much time with Finnegans Wake as with me.” After five years of work (a period some have called ‘perhaps overhasty’) Campbell and Robinson completed their Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, the first full-length summary and exegesis of the work. Campbell rejoiced, “I am sure we have the only Key that will ever be made to that seven-sealed cave of smoke…they are the densest chapters in the library of European fiction!” It was Joyce who would redirect Campbell from his study of literature and cultural studies into the realm of folklore and anthropology.
Campbell was particularly taken by (to use a term lifted from Finnegans Wake itself) Joyce’s “monomyth” the synthesis of all human experience into one “dreamlike saga of a guilt-stained, evolving humanity.” All the characters of Dublin, says Campbell and Robinson’s interpretation, live inside the felled giant, Finn Mac Cool’s dream. “You may think of [the characters]—as Joyce suggests—as maggots eating his dead body; or you may think of them as dream figures in the cavern of his soul.” Campbell draws parallels to other traditions where the felled or dreaming bodies of divine beings become the substrate of the Earth. These include Purusha of the Vedas, Pangu of Ancient Chinese mythology, Tiamat of Babylonian mythology, Ymir of Norse mythology, Karora of the Australian Aboriginals, and Cipactli of Aztec mythology. Inspired from this work, Campbell conclude that we are all living out a shared dream which bubbles up the unconscious.
Before going further, it is necessary to briefly mention one more of Campbell’s influences. Heinrich Zimmer, the same man who introduced Coomaraswamy to Guenon, had recently escaped Europe, as he had been hounded by the Nazi authorities on account of his wife having Jewish ancestry. After a stroke of luck in New York City, Zimmer was able to arrange for himself a lecture series at Columbia. At first, only three audience members showed up. One of these was Joseph Campbell. Zimmer had a speciality in comparing the moral teachings of myths from around the world, highlighting the hidden spiritual messages to be found in fairytales and folktales. Zimmer introduced Campbell to the works of Coomaraswamy and taught him the importance of symbols and visual art for understanding the philosophy and ideas of ancient peoples. When Zimmer unexpectedly died of pneumonia in 1943, Campbell would spend the next decade turning Zimmer’s notes and papers into several books.
By combining the insights of Bastian, Joyce, and Zimmer, Campbell would land on his most enduring idea—the hero’s journey.
Campbell starting point is the belief that mythology develops across cultures to guide human beings to the fulfillment of a full life. Its essence is the revelation of our own psychology, the fulfillment of our need to create a relationship with the great mysteries of life, and showing us the path to become fully grown individuals. “Mythology is psychology, misread as cosmology, history and biography,” Campbell contends, “Dante, Aquinas and Augustine, al’Ghazali and Mahomet, Zarathustra, Shankârachârya, Nâgârjuna, and T’ai Tsung, were not bad scientists making misstatements about the weather, or neurotics reading dreams into the stars, but masters of the human spirit teaching a wisdom of life and death.” Myth is what resonates with our inner selves to make the world “a holy picture” and teach us to navigate the human condition.
The seeds of these myths are deeply rooted in human psychology and physiology. The human nervous system, Campbell points out, has been developing for millions of years. For the first 600,000 years, anatomically modern humans were nomadic hunters and gatherers, and it is only in the last 8,000 years that humans began farming. Just as we contain vestigial traits from earlier eras such as wisdom teeth, the appendix (although recent research has shown that the appendix is not purely vestigial), pinky toes, and the tailbone, isn’t it possible that there are “images sleeping, whose releasers no longer appear in nature—but might occur in art?” But Campbell doesn’t think mythology is purely vestigial, he believes it to be a universal and ancient need to “to reconcile waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans [the awe-inspiring and fascinating mystery] of this universe as it is." Myths come up to our minds as guideposts on a pedagogic journey. These mental guideposts persisted and proliferated because of their usefulness. They don’t only guide humans from childhood through adolescence, but into old age as well.
“They are magnified dreams, and what dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other. And that's all myth is. Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, metaphorical images of the energies within us moved by the organs of the body in conflict with each other. This organ wants, this organ wants, this, the brain, is one of the organs.”
The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. The objective world remains what it was, but, because of a shift of emphasis within the subject, is beheld as though transformed.
Campbell’s main theory is that nearly all heroic myths share a structural core which instructs people on how to live their lives and get in touch with their unconscious self. These universal steps have an external component (such as seeking the unknown) and an internal component (transcending old fears) which brings the hero to full development. While different individual myths can focus on one, or a few aspects of the full cycle, they all belong and can be arranged into a “monomyth” or “heroes journey” with 17 steps.
Joseph Campbell’s book on the hero’s journey famously inspired George Lucas, who incorporated them directly into Star Wars. Therefore, to give the reader a visual of what I’m talking about for the first stage, I’ll include a brief description of how the Original Trilogy incorporated each step. The first five of these steps, which mark the “departure” stage are:
The Call to Adventure. The hero begins in a normal, everyday situation, when their life is disrupted, and information comes from afar to beckon them into the unknown. (Luke Skywalker lives a quiet life on Tatooine until he sees the holographic message “Help me Obi Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.”
Refusal of the Call. Out of a sense of inadequacy of fear, or duty to their previous obligations, the hero refuses the call. However, his normal life becomes either dreary or untenable. (Luke initially declines Obi-Wan's offer to accompany him to Alderaan and learn the ways of the Force. However, stormtroopers murder his aunt and uncle and destroy his home while searching for the droids. Thus, he is forced to leave.)
Supernatural Aid. Once the hero is ready for their quest, a magical helper provides them with knowledge or magical objects which will assist them on their quest. Often there is a reason given for why the helper cannot go on the quest themselves, typically because of old age or a flaw of their own. (This happens quite a few times in Star Wars. Most notably, Obi Wan Kenobi and Yoda teach Luke the force).
The Crossing of the First Threshold. The hero leaves their known, familiar, world and passes into the unknown. Typically, they will cross a demarcated line or meet “a threshold guardian” which marks or warns them against their passing out of their known world. It is here that the hero crosses from the normal world into the “magical” or the “subconscious world.” (This occurs when Obi Wan and Luke go to the canteena on Mos Eisley. Representing the edge of Luke’s known universe, it is full of all sorts of monstrous characters, smugglers, and criminal who travel to ‘uncharted waters.’ Luke is attacked when he gets into trouble with some of the ruffians, but Kenobi saves him. Han Solo becomes another guide willing to take Luke into dangerous territory.)
The Belly of the Whale. Either when the hero has decided to cross the threshold and follow their fate, or has tried to fully escape the call of adventure, they typically reach a setback which causes them to go through some form of metamorphosis or re-birth. They end up physically trapped, or put in a dangerous situation, which causes the hero to acquire bravery or transform himself. This stage often takes place in proximity to water—which represents the unconscious—and has some dangerous beast lurking in the water which represents the unknown or the hero’s fears. (In A New Hope, the belly of the whale is the trash compactor of the Death Star. A mysterious beast slithers through the water across their feet. Like Jonah’s whale, the beast pulls Luke deep under the water until it lets go of him and disappears.)
Next, in the initiatory stage, the hero must face an array of challenges and temptations. Campbell writes: “once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials.” Often, the hero fails many of these trials, and receives additional help from his magical helper. Typically when the hero is at a weak point, he will meet the “great goddess” which represents pure goodness, or the totality of what can be known. This figure often gives the hero solace and encouragement. The next step is atonement with the father. Following Freud’s lead, Campbell frames the confrontation of the hero and the villain as the resolution of an Oedipal complex: “as the original intruder into the paradise of the infant and mother, the father is the archetypical enemy; hence throughout life all enemies are symbolic (to the unconsciousness) of the father.” Taken more broadly, this can be seen as the attempt to surpass or come to terms with the central authority which has imposed on us a sense of inferiority. However, the hero initially fails this first attempt, and is stuck down. Here, the hero must die another sort of symbolic death in order to be reborn without fear or whatever was holding them back from their full potential—they must learn to let go, enter a certain state of flow, and allow their subconscious take control to achieve victory. Finally, the hero achieves the “ultimate boon” which is often what the hero truly needed, and not what they expected or set out to achieve. (If one knows Star Wars well they can certainly match up these steps with the trilogy as well, particular the “atonement with the father” stage and when Luke must let go of his hatred or use the force at climactic moments).
The cycle ends with the return stage, which can go down a few alternative paths. First, the hero can refuse to return from the ‘dreamworld’ to share their boon or knowledge with the everyday world which they set out from. Campbell writes: “numerous indeed are the heroes fabled to have taken up residence forever in the blessed isle of the unchanging Goddess of Immortal Being..there is danger that the abyss of this experience may eliminate all recollection of, or interest in, or hope for, the sorrows of the world.” Thus, the hero may seek to go further into, or get lost in their subconscious. Second, called “the magic of flight” the hero can wish to return to the normal world, but the villains or guardians of the dream world can attempt to stop them, causing a chase. Third is rescue from without, in which the hero must be brought back to the normal world by friends or helpers.
The underline of the hero’s journey is that it is not comfortable—a “death” of the old self is necessary for the resurrection of the new self—one may lose aspects of themself which they are attached to. They need to leave the comfort of childhood and the familiar; they must learn to embrace change, and they must be pushed past their limits. The hero will feel themselves inadequate, they will several time times fail, and they must face painful inner traumas and tensions in order to be reborn. Campbell first realized from Finnegans Wake the importance of death and resurrection to the transformation of the individual, which he later found in myths from around the world. The steps of the heroes journey may be literal or metaphorical—they may be the steps taken by Odysseus or the everyman Leopold Blood—but what underlies it all is a transformation of consciousness. To think that the Hero’s Journey, a model of such comparative elegance and simplicity could have emerged from an engagement with Finnegans Wake!
Further, the hero’s journey is about establishing the correct relationship with the unconscious. In Campbell’s words, “we must realize that consciousness is a secondary organ. It is the subconscious which is really in control.” The hero must learn how to access something deep inside him—perhaps the archetypical symbols and ancient sources of wisdom—and quiet that which is unhelpful about their conscious ego. It is about accessing that biological, or bodily reservoir which Campbell believes is our evolutionary inheritance. One could also argue that the development of human consciousness from an animal or lower form of semi- or sub-consciousness was an evolutionary mistake, and the hero’s journey is the path to reconciling these two aspects of ourselves. The myths themselves are messages coming up from the unconscious trying to teach us how to heal the wound. The wound between knowledge (the fall) and unknowing (bliss).
Beyond Star Wars, Joseph Campbell’s formulation of the monomyth has had a massive cultural influence. Stanley Kubrick used the book when working on 2001: A Space Odyssey. The screenwriters of the Disney films Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King used it as a model. The Grateful Dead attempted to incorporate it into their music. Even when it was not used as a model, once one when knows its general outline, the monomyth can be seen everywhere. Think Harry Potter, The Wizard of Oz, The Lord of the Rings, Fight Club, The Karate Kid, The Odyssey, Indiana Jones, Dante’s Inferno, the Hunger Games, the story of the Buddha, the story of Moses, Moby-Dick, or any Miyazaki movie.
The Tower & Agent 488
As the world was once again descending into war, Christiana retreated to the marshes along the Parker River in Massachusetts. When the last war began she had felt a compelling need to be part of the global story which was unfolding; now she only wished to explore her own interiority. Inspired by Jung’s Tower at Bollingen, Christina hired a local carpenter to help her build her own tower which would represent her psychological individuation process and her love for Henry Murray.
With the construction of the tower, she would insatiate her visions into elaborate wood carvings, icons, drawings, landscape design, and stained-glass windows. In 1939, when the tower was completed, her visions had returned, more powerful than ever, and she set about creating hundreds of trance-inspired paintings to line the inside of the tower with. Henry Murray would teach Harvard students psychology by day, and then conduct erotic and other rituals with Christiana in the tower by night. They were the Eve and Adam of this Howth Castle, from swerve of shore to bend of bay.
During this period, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy adopted Christiana as a sort of pupil. He helped her decode the symbols which came to her in visions, and connected them to the ancient tradition he believed was the shared inheritance of all peoples. Only a small collection of letters has survived from their relationship, but we know they often “hemmed and hawed” about the role of women in traditional culture. At various points it appears that Coomaraswamy is preparing for a swift decline in society, the sort of ‘end times’ suggested by Guenon: “Our study should be of the Myths, the penultimate form of Truth that must be grasped before we reach, now or hereafter, the time for iconoclasm and ‘the untaught way.’" At other times, Coomaraswamy appears to be coaching Christiana on how to enhance her spiritual powers.
“Truths must always be restated in the forms of the current language; if this is not done, they become clichés (as all traditional "ornament" now has for us become, to such an extent that we find it hard to believe that these symbols were not always mere art forms, and to such an extent that we attribute to the primitives our own aesthetic motivations ( a notable example of the "pathetic fallacy")).” —Letter to Christiana, AKC
While Murray often spent time with Christiana in the tower, he did not take on the quiescent attitude he had shown after ignoring Theodore Roosevelt’s advice to fight in WWI. Murray, while conducting his psychological assessments at the Harvard Psychology Clinic on undergraduates was growing increasingly anxious that the students had no wish to contest rising Nazi aggression. “Our subjects,” Harry ruefully recorded, “had an almost compulsive need for voicing criticism…which seemed to arise out of a deep barely-articulate dissatisfaction with the ethos of American culture.” Harry had traveled to Germany in 1937, where he observed its military build up and visited the nationalistic Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. There, he scrutinized the face of Adolph Hitler, and concluded that he stood for the destruction of “everything that is mature and humane.” When Pearl Harbor broke the USA’s hesitancy for war, Murray was greatly relieved.
Joseph Campbell had a different reaction to Pearl Harbor. In a speech to his students the following day, he cautioned that “if a Mr. Hitler collides with a Mr. Churchill, we are not in conscience bound to believe that a devil has collided with a saint.” With a message of “judge not, that you may not be judged” he instructed his students to focus on their studies and the ‘permanent human values’ of art and creativity which are often lost sight of during war time: “If you devote yourselves exclusively, or even primarily; to peculiarities of the local scene and the present moment, you will wonder, fifteen years from now, what you did with your education.” Campbell’s sentiments here fit with other statements regarding the “heroic,” conscious-of-ancient-tradition cultures of Germany and Japan. In a dream journal he kept in the late ‘30s he described a dream as, “Another example of my Fascism-complex, and my feeling that the active powers (Germany—Japan) can outstrip the democracies. Our general carelessness . . . our [cultural] nakedness and our feeling of aloofness and superiority (represented even by our geographical position) . . . is related somehow to this configuration.” He also hated American and British colonialism for their erasure of traditional cultures around the world. Campbell, proud of his Irish heritage, distrusted England and distrusted global capitalism.
There are indications that Campbell’s antipathy for the Jews contributed to his equivocal reaction to Pearl Harbor. Campbell’s issues with the Judeo-Christian ethic are well known. He preferred traditions where mythology took place outside of time, in a sort of endless eternal return, where one could cultivate a sense of eternity, and thereby get in touch with the sacred. Judaism displaced sacred events from an internal realm, in which they were always ongoing, to a historical timeline where they had a certain position in time. “The myths were understood mythologically, not historically. In my Catholic training, I was being told that these were historical events. In reading the American Indian myths, I was told they were spiritual events. And the spiritual events were linked to the forest that I was living in at the summer holidays.” The historicity of the events in the Old and New Testaments made them feel remote and unlike. There is a story Campbell loved to repeat a story where a Japanese scholar reacted in confusion to the tenets of the Judeo-Christian religion: “He stood up with his hands on his side and he said, God against man, man against God, man against nature, nature against man, nature against God, God against nature. Very funny religion. Now in the other mythologies, one puts oneself in accord with the world.” For Campbell, a return to mythology and paganism was necessary to again achieve balance with nature. Finally, Campbell thought that the Jewish proclamation of ‘one true God’ severed the compatibilities and universality of traditions around the world: “But now, just consider: when your gods are nature gods, you can go from one place to another and say, ‘He whom you call Indra, we know as Zeus.’ For example in Caesar’s Gallic Wars, chapter six, one finds the author describing the deities of the Celts, but he gives them the related Roman names, Mercury, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, and Minerva, so that we hardly know of which Celtic gods he is treating. And such syncretism is characteristic of all peoples of the world, except the Semites. Imagine any Hebrew saying: ‘He whom we call Yahweh, you call Indra.’ No indeed!”
Now, a distaste with the Judeo-Christian ethic and the historical shift brought on by the philosophical ideas of Judaism is not at all the same as a dislike of Jews. But Campbell made many other statements which speak for themselves. In a departure from his usually clear style he wrote, “The Jews have taken the Franco-Anglo-American combination into their fold in their fight for “humanity,” and I have frequently found myself disproportionately moved by the “minding other people’s business theme, when the U.S.A. might be taking thought of its own race-persecutions on its Indian reservations and below the Mason-Dixon line.” One of Campbell’s students at Columbia reported hearing the professor say “Jews had ruined 20th century culture." A colleague recalled a particularly troubling exchange: “Campbell went into a description of how the New York Athletic Club had ingeniously managed for years to keep Jews out. He went on and on, telling his story in the most charming and amiable fashion, without any self-consciousness about the views he was expressing and, indeed, without any overt animus - for all that he obviously relished the notion of keeping Jews out of anywhere any time, forever.” While Campbell stayed away from the political during WWII, one wonders if he was rooting for the Axis to triumph over what he saw as “Western decadence.”
By contrast, Murray and Jung found themselves playing important roles in the Allied war effort. Roosevelt had appointed Murray to the National Moral Committee in 1940, which also included anthropologist Margaret Mead, George Gallup (founder of Gallup Polls), and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm; the Committee’s task was to discuss how to psychologically prepare the country for war. The Committee briefly considered creating a nationwide domestic propaganda agency, comparable to the ministry headed by Joseph Goebbels (but with different aims), but decided against it.
When the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the eclectic precursor of the CIA—was formed, Henry Murray was tapped to be its Chief Psychologist. The goal of the OSS was to trained skilled individuals who were not best used for traditional military roles (such as writers, anthropologists, and actors) for missions involving spying, sabotage, disseminating propaganda, and understanding the enemy. Murray played a leading role in recruitment, training, and screening spies and operatives before they were deployed. This may go some way to explain the strange, but remarkable people who found themselves in the OSS, such as Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Julia Child, Frank Fremont-Smith, and John Steinbeck.
Meanwhile, Allen Dulles, the head of the OSS’s offices in Switzerland (and future head of the CIA) was consulting with Jung. According to biographer Deirdre Bair, Jung became Dulles’ “sort of senior advisor on a weekly, if not almost daily, basis.” Dulles credited Jung, known as “Agent 488,” with helping him make powerful connections across Switzerland and helping him understand the minds of Nazi leaders. Jung had analyzed many important Germans, was in close contact with Herman Goring (Hitler’s second in command)’s cousin, and had spent years thinking about the German psyche. Dulles explained, “[He understood the characteristics of the sinister leaders of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. His judgment on these leaders and on their likely reactions to passing events was of real help to me in gauging the political situation. His deep antipathy to what Nazism and Fascism stood for was clearly evidenced in these conversations.”
Extremely sensitive information based both from Jung to Dulles and from Dulles to Jung. Jung found out that Hitler was already living underground in his East Prussian bunker. Dulles informed Jung ahead of time of the July 20th Plot, in which Nazi officers tried (unsuccessfully) to kill Hitler by detonating an explosive hidden in a briefcase. It was one of many attempts in which Nazis convinced that Hitler was leading Germany to complete destruction, and had already lost the war, attempted to kill Hitler. This made Jung one of the only people in the world to know of the plan.
After the war, Dulles remarked "Nobody will probably ever know how much Professor Jung contributed to the Allied cause during the war, by seeing people who were connected somehow with the other side.” When pressed for further detail on Jung’s involvement, Dulles insisted the matter remained “highly classified for the indefinite future,” and “Jung’s services would have to remain undocumented.”
But nobody will probably ever know the full extent of Jung’s involvement with the Nazis either. Years after the war, Jung’s friend Philip Wylie disclosed that Jung had confided to him “in strictest confidence that the Nazi minister of propaganda, Josef Goebbels, had summarily commanded him [Jung] to go to Berlin, there to attend public events and private ceremonies where Hitler, Hermann Goring, Heinrich Himmler, and Goebbels himself would be together. Goebbels wanted Jung to discern whether ‘all four of them, as Goebbels feared, evidently were mad…[Jung] sat through enough of their show to know they were madmen…[then] he secretly, swiftly, got out of Germany for fear his very life would be in danger.” This story remains unverified, and sounds dubious. However, many of the verified, true, events in Jung’s life also sound dubious. Rumors spread throughout both Zurich and American analytic circles that Jung had spent a great deal of time at Berchtersgaden, Hitler’s vacation fortress/estate in the Alps. Jung wrote the Murray to “get to the bottom of” the rumor.
Also locating Jung at close proximity to Nazi leaders was the fact that, Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s personal piano player, had conducted a long-distance affair with Jung’s personal secretary Mary Foote. Hitler had even sought refuge in Hanfstaengl's home after the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, where Hanfstaengl's wife, Helene, dissuaded Hitler from committing suicide. Hanfstaengl had since been kicked out of Hitler’s orbit, but this anecdote does suggest that Jung’s secretary—who handled and organized his papers—had Nazi sympathies. It is not much comfort either that Jung’s close friend Murray played a major role in the security screening of potential spies.
Murray was also put in charge of drafting the U.S. government’s official psychological assessment of Hitler, Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler: With Predictions of His Future Behavior and Suggestions for Dealing with Him Now and After Germany’s Surrender, which was finalized in October, 1943. Murray consulted with Jung on the writing of the report, which predicted that Hitler would commit suicide before surrendering, and advocated for the institution of an international court which would put surviving Nazi war criminals on trial. In a strange synchronicity, none other than Ernst Hanfstaengl, who had defected to the United States with the promise he would help bring down Hitler, also assisted Murray in creating the report. Perhaps part of Hanfstaengl’s contribution is the detailed analysis of Hitler’s veneration of Wagner, and the private information about Hitler’s ‘weeping fits.’
The drafters were extremely concerned with avoiding repeating the terms which followed the end of WWI—in which Germany was severely punished and humiliated, and the conditions were created for the rise of Nazism. The report recommended welcoming Germany back into the “brotherhood of nations,” creating supranational institutions which would seek to institute a fair, but safe, international order, while not demanding complete surrender and not compromising with Nazi leaders. Here, the language in the report treats Germany as a sick patient in need of psychoanalytic patient: “Very gradually, step by step, the patient is enlightened as to his own paranoid mechanisms…he should be made to understand that he has been victimized by unconscious forces which gained control over his proper self. During the course of these talks, the physician should freely confess his own weaknesses and errors, the patient being treated as an equal.” The Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler also contains the following recommendations:
Germany’s country-side; its music, historic culture and monuments of beauty should be appreciated and praised. The army of occupation should manifest intense interest in the culture of Old Germany, and show complete indifference to all recent developments. The [Allied] troops should be instructed and coached by lectures and guide-books covering the district they will occupy. They should be told that the war is not to be won until the heart of the German people has been won.
Germans of the old school should be hired to teach the German language; to guide the soldiers on tours of the country and of museums; to teach native arts and skills. Concerts should be arranged, omitting pieces that have been specially favored by the Nazis. Editions of books burned by the Nazis should be published and put on sale immediately.
When Murray’s report was written, the full extent of Nazi crimes were not yet known. Thus, while some of the reports recommendations were implemented, but the Allies put in place a more aggressive program of “collective guilt” and reeducation. Still, Murray was amazed by how quickly Germany and Japan could be transformed from death cults bent on either world domination or their own destruction, could be turned into valuable economic partners and allies. Whether the ideas that made this transition possible really began with Murray or not, Murray—along with his contacts in the newly formed CIA—were galvanized to see what other role psychological techniques could play on a global scale. Murray was becoming enraptured with the idea of the United States leading the way to create a world government, bound by a common mythology.
Before the end of the war, on February 11, 1944, Jung set off for an afternoon walk up to the same hills where Christiana had her first visions. Nearing the top of the snowy Küsnacht Almend, the sixty-nine year old slipped on a patch of black ice, and broke his leg. An ambulance brought him to Klinik Hirslanden, where the leg was set and immobilized. Jung faced serious complications when the immobilization caused blood clots in his leg veins, which in turn caused embolisms, which broke loose, and thereafter lodged in his lungs and heart. Rising and falling out of drugged sleep, Jung dreamt about different elements of the Grail Legend. In the dreams, he was alternatively tasked with recovering the Grail, or bringing it back to where it had once been hidden. Then, as he slipped into a full-on heart attack, Jung appears to have had a near depth experience:
I had reached the outermost limit, and do not know whether I was in a dream or an ecstasy. At any rate, extremely strange things began to happen to me. It seemed to me that I was high up in space. Far below I saw the globe of the earth, bathed in a gloriously blue light. I saw the deep blue sea and the continents. Far below my feet lay Ceylon, and in the distance ahead of me the subcontinent of India. My field of vision did not include the whole earth, but its global shape was plainly distinguishable and its outlines shone with a silvery gleam through that wonderful blue light…In many places the globe seemed colored, or spotted dark green like oxidized silver. Far away to the left lay a broad expanse – the reddish-yellow desert of Arabia; it was as though the silver of the Earth had there assumed a reddish-gold hue. Then came the Red Sea, and far, far back – as if in the upper left of a map – I could just make out a bit of the Mediterranean…I knew that I was on the point of departing from the earth…Everything else appeared indistinct. I could also see the snow-covered Himalayas, but in that direction it was foggy or cloudy.
It is interesting to note that it this point, no human or satellite had ever left the Earth, and there were only vague guesses of what Earth would look like from space. Jung kept drifting through space, until he was called back down to Earth again. He was reluctant to return: “Disappointed, I thought, ‘Now I must return to the ‘box system’ again.” From then on, Jung’s writings became much more cryptic and elliptical. Instead of writing with a potential reader in mind, Jung confided that for his final works, the reader would have to come all the way to him.
On Sept. 9, 1945, feeling the gravity of another view from a great height, Christiana Morgan cut out a clipping from the New York Times, and hung it on tower’s wall. The clipping described the nuclear destruction of Nagasaki from the plane which dropped the atomic bomb:
Observers in the tail of our ship saw a giant ball of fire rise as though from the bowels of the earth, belching forth enormous white smoke rings. Next they saw a giant pillar of purple fire, 10,000 feet high, shooting skyward with enormous speed.
At one stage of its evolution, covering millions of years in terms of seconds, the entity assumed the form of a giant square totem pole, with its base about three miles long, tapering off to about a mile at the top. Its bottom was brown, its center was amber, its top white. But it was a living totem pole, carved with many grotesque masks grimacing at the earth.
It kept struggling in an elemental fury, like a creature in the act of breaking the bonds that held it down. In a few seconds it had freed itself from its gigantic stem and floated upward with tremendous speed, its momentum carrying into the stratosphere to a height of about 60,000 feet.
But no sooner did this happen when another mushroom, smaller in size than the first one, began emerging out of the pillar. It was as though the decapitated monster was growing a new head. As the first mushroom floated off into the blue it changed 'its shape into a flowerlike form, its giant petal curving downward, creamy white outside, rose-colored inside.
Henry Murray was on an OSS mission in Kunming, China, testing officer candidates for the Chinese Nationalist Army, when the bombs were dropped. Murray heard Truman’s announcement of the bombings come through his army Jeep’s radio, which “set off a hectic procession of horrendous images of the world's fate.” Somewhere between intrusive thoughts and Christiana’s experiences, this was the closest Murray would ever come to a full-blown visionary experience. This cascade of thoughts and images sent him off a decades-long search for a sort of ‘Holy Grail’ which would end all wars.
The New Mythology
When World War II ended, a swift entry into World War III was more than a distinct possibility. The Soviets had begun World War II as enemies of the United States, and there was no guarantee that the two rising superpowers’ tolerance for each other would outlive the shared Nazi threat. By 1949, the Soviet Union had successfully detonated an atomic bomb, triggering an arms race. In 1952, the United States tested a hydrogen bomb, a weapon around 700 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. For the first time, it appeared that humanity had the power to completely destroy itself. At any given moment, there was the threat that peals of Viconian thunder would engulf the entire world.
Indeed, Harry Murray did believe that the world was on the precipice, and that decisive action needed to be taken. In the essay America’s Mission, he wrote, “Man's obligation to man is to abolish war, not merely to postpone it a few years while he exhausts his resources in manufacturing still more potent instruments of self-extermination. But since it is the best judgment of the probable effects of atomic and biotic warfare, dependable as a physician's judgment of the probable effects of a malignant tumor, it would be more scientific to apply the word ‘hysterical’ to those who can rid their eyes of the disquieting image, those, in short, who are capable of negative hallucinations, or hysterical blindness.” He continues on that the prior methods for avoiding war have not succeeded: “Many have been tried; none has proved effective. The Christian religion has not succeeded. The systems of morals derived from it have not succeeded. Pacifying attempts to avoid war through disarmament, appease-ment, isolationism, or irreproachable neutrality have not succeeded.” All aspects of Murray’s work—his love affair at Christiana’s tower, his work with the Harvard Psychology Clinic on 7 Divinity Avenue, his collaboration with the CIA, his gathering of the world’s great scholars of myth and religion—would now be in service of creating the new mythology. He wrote that the period between the first two World Wars was a “period of disintegration” and it was now America’s obligation to reintegrate the world.
Both Jung and Murray saw Christiana as a sort of goose which would lay the golden egg. Both thought that Christianity was missing a sense of the sacred feminine, that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost had tilted spirituality too far towards the masculine. They were convinced that a reemergence of ALP, to put it in Joycean terms, was necessary. Therefore, Jung was ecstatic when, in 1950, Pope Pius XII issued the papal dogma of the Assumption of Mary. Jung believed that this event was nothing less than the “most important religious event since the Reformation.” Jung had long been tracking the global occurrence of visions of Mary, which had radically increased in the previous decade, particularly among young children. Jung saw these visions as indicative of a shift in the collective unconscious. By studying the relevant symbols and trends, Jung believed, “one could have known for a long time that there was a deep longing in the masses for an intercessor and mediatrix who would at last take her place alongside the Holy Trinity and be received as the "Queen of Heaven and Bride at the heavenly court." With this reassertion of the feminine, humanity would be able to grasp a numinous feeling of completeness.
Christiana had pulled back on her work for the Harvard Psychology Clinic, and was spending more and more of her time locked away in the tower. She filled journal after journal describing her trance states, and had designed a litany of sacred symbols. She and Harry had come up with the fundamentals of a new religion, which centered on mystical yearning and erotic ritual. They pulled methods from the Celtic fertility rites Jessie Weston wrote about in From Ritual to Romance. In their liturgies, they often included a benediction to Jung: “We give homage to the Old Man for his great conception - Animus-Anima - which started us in righteousness understanding along our path; for his teaching that the erotic problem in our civilization had never been faced, and that its solution was the highest quest for the spirit; for his knowledge that in the transforming power of the Trances lay the seeds of creative development; for his wisdom which warned us of, and thereby helped to protect us from, the many difficulties to be encountered along the path; for his view that for man to create woman, and woman to create man was a great, courageous, and most important adventure.”
Not all were happy with how Christiana was spending her time. Christiana’s close friend, Dona Luisa Coomaraswamy (widow of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, who died in 1947), considered her rituals a waste of her immense intellectual and creative abilities. She urged Christiana to return the Harvard, and get credit for the work which was increasingly appearing only under Harry’s name. Dona Luisa wrote to her: “You are capable of terrific work, and have enormous understanding but you will not do a stroke of it, you won't take the first step in chair-climbing until and unless you stop taking yourself seriously, and consider your Self, for what that is worth. . . . Most of the women I have known have had either hearts or minds: you have both but they are tangled up, get yourself untwisted, discard these objects like the chains on the hearth wall, these are not pleasant symbols…If you and I could have known how to put that 'passion' to a directed use, what could we not have made!” Dona Luisa was worried that her friend had sunk too deep into her and Harry’s private world, which they had only justified by the illusion that what they were doing had a global historical importance. Christiana was deeply upset by Dona Luisa’s pleadings, and wrote to her friend Lewis Mumford for reassurance that she was on the right path. To Christiana’s horror, Mumford concurred with Dona Luisa that Christiana’s work was slipping into incoherence. Mumford compared Christiana to the visionary mystic William Blake, who had invented his own private cosmology, which—while respected as great art—remains largely impenetrable to this day. Mumford cautions:
The question Mrs. Coomaraswamy raised about your carving is one that I first threshed out in relation to Blake's symbolism. Why is so much of Blake unintelligible? Why do his more formal poems, the very ones which one feels that his mature mind attempted to say most, actually convey so much less than he probably thought he had? The answer is that he was compelled to create a whole world by private fiat; and to understand these symbols one would have to be present at their genesis; for every verbal explanation would not suffice to recreate the experience out of which they grew.
The first purpose of art, I am sure, is to clarify something in oneself; and the only way to do this is to get it out of oneself. But the second purpose is to share it and test it with others; for this clarification is incomplete until others participate in it and thus assure one that the precious experience was not an hallucination or a form of self-indulgence.
If we were to compare Christiana Morgan’s life to the template of the hero’s journey, she was perhaps at the stage where the hero refuses to return from the ‘dreamworld’ to share their boon or knowledge with the everyday world which they set out from.
From the records which remain, reasonable people could disagree about where the power lay in the Harry Murray-Carl Jung-Christiana Morgan relationship. Both Murray and Morgan were infatuated by Jung’s shamanistic aura, which set them off on their alternative paths. Murray had attained fame, status, and historical importance for his role in WWII—all paths which remained closed to Christiana. Murray had even removed Christiana’s name from the Thematic Apperception Test, giving himself full credit on their largest co-written contribution to the emerging field of psychology. Jung and Murray had asserted the importance of the feminine to their new religion, but perhaps they were just imputing their conception of the feminine onto the mysterious Christiana. But Christiana was the keeper of the visions. Both men wanted what she had. A significant letter written from Christiana to Murray makes one wonder who actually held the power in their relationship:
I am not certain yet - you have not shown me - that your courage is worthy of my trances. If I should admit you now to the sanctuary of my heart, would you acknowledge me before the whole world? I am afraid not. I can almost hear you giving one of those nice, socially agreeable explanations of why you are not working at the Clinic. In the future many people will ask, "What are you doing ?" When is your next book coming out ?" What will you say? Will you deny me? I am not sure, Mansol [Christiana’s codename for Harry]; and before September I must, above all else be sure that you will never be a Judas to me. In the coming months I shall want to hear you tell a few of our nearest friends the manner and purpose of our love. I want them to know a little about the trances and how I have created step by step the thrilling composition of our life. I want to hear you adit, what your heart knows, that I am the creator.
At in times I may ask you to shock the people who are anemies to my way of life. And besides what I ask you to do, I expect you to push yourself out without my initiation to do things that are really morally difficult. You must overcome all the cautious cowardice of your ego, and let your pride become subservient to the higher vision I have given you. I admit that you are my superior in science and the world. But that is not my way path. I am wedded to the spirit, and here, as your superior, I am determined to develop you to the utmost. To be my instrument you must have courage; for I do not want to live my life in abject secrecy.
I want this tower to be your base - the place where you keep your things and do the main body or your work. For after this you will visit your family when I choose to let you go. I am the source of your well-being and of your fruition. You are mine, not Jo's. I have not decided yet what I shall do about your marriage, or when I shall have you leave the Clinic permanently - but I nave made up my mind that from now on I shall decide how much time you will devote to your family and how much to the Clinic.
This letter certainly puts their relationship in a different light. But there are many ambiguities around its creation. Was this finally Christiana fighting back after years of Murray’s dominance? Was the letter merely written as part of a sort of dominatrix-esque erotic foreplay? Is this a rare glimpse into the true nature of their relationship? Was Christiana pulling all the strings? Christiana, who nursed multitudes of those her own age dying of Spanish flu, who could go toe-to-toe in intellectual arguments with the greatest intellects of her day, such as Jung, Alfred North Whitehead, Coomaraswamy, and Chaim Weizmann, who had bucked all conventions for a woman of her time and social class, was not one to be bowed or restrained. But there are other signs that Christiana was unwell—her friends’ concern, her social isolation, her heavy drinking; and, of course, the fact that she was having visions. Christiana’s biographer Claire Douglas suggests that Harry wrote the letter, taking on the perspective of Christiana, but the writing style is way more suggestive of Christiana’s style. As is clear from all their notes and journals, Christiana was simply a far more lucid writer than Murray ever was.
In any case, Murray did not leave, or start spending less time at the Psychology Clinic. In fact, the Clinic was stronger than ever, and was likely receiving a great deal of money from Murray’s former OSS colleagues who had migrated to the CIA, which was now led by Murray and Jung’s friend Allen Dulles. In a heavily autobiographical work of fiction which remained unpublished, it is possible that Murray drew from his own experience when he wrote, “With dazzling research grants as bait, it [the clinic in the book which resembles the Harvard Psychology Clinic] has hooked and landed a great number of physical, biological, and social scientists, and directed their imaginations and talents toward the solution of problems relevant to the successful prosecution of a global war, a war, the expert tells us, in which all we cherish might be shattered, might crumble and dissolve like Shakespeare’s ‘insubstantial pageant faded, and leave not a wrack behind.’" This description seems a little too close to the CIA’s very real, ongoing experiments into novel drugs, mind control, and espionage techniques, which went under the heading “MKUltra,” to be coincidence.
When Dean of the Harvard Faculty Franklin Ford (who had also served in the OSS with Murray) was questioned on the extent of CIA involvement in campus research, he “reported that based on unclassified data alone, between 1960 and 1966 the CIA had contributed $456,000 [the equivalent of $4,525,657 in today’s dollars] to thirteen Harvard programs and individual professors in the departments of Psychology, Philosophy, and Social Relations.” Further, Harry’s close friend and former OSS partner Clyde Kluckhohn was the one who negotiated the relationship between Harvard and the CIA. Making the connection between Murray’s work and the spy agency even more likely is that Murrays clinic’s experiments had also begun to resemble some of the unsavory work he’d done at the OSS. At the OSS, Murray hadn’t hesitated to test whether sodium amytal and adrenaline injections improved interrogation outcomes. Now he was looking deeper into how minds could be rearranged, broken down and reconstructed. To keep up with the greater workload, and his many personal projects, Murray had begun giving himself with higher and higher doses of amphetamines.
Murray used the Clinic’s sudden and mysterious influx of funding to convene the era’s foremost theorists of myth. He awarded Alan Watts, whose popularization of Eastern wisdom for a Western audience would make him a countercultural legend, a two-year fellowship which gave the author “time to compile The Two Hands of God and to write Beyond Theology.” Murray conveyed a symposium on “Myth and Mythmaking” which brought together Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, Marshall McLuhan, and more. The participants in the symposium then collaborated on shared volume of the journal Daedalus where their works on mythology were compiled. At their annual gathering at the Eranos Conference in Ascona, Switzerland, one can imagine the great patriarchs of mythology, Campbell, Eliade, Jung, Erich Neumann, and Henry Corbin, sitting around the famous round table (consciously based on the round table of the Grail Legend), talking about what to do with their ambitious friend Murray, and his mysterious consort, Christiana.
Then, in 1959, Harvard University hired Timothy Leary, who had just begun his studies into psychedelic mushrooms. He was brought aboard at the behest of Murray’s colleagues Frank Barron and David McClelland. Murray supervised Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert’s early work on psychedelics, and took a keen interest in their work. In Learys memoir, Flashbacks, the countercultural guru described Murray as “the wizard of personality assessment who, as OSS chief psychologist, had monitored military experiments on brainwashing…Murray expressed great interest in our drug-research project and offered his support.” But Murray took a more active role than just offering his support. According to journalists Lee and Shlain, “[Murray] volunteered for a psilocybin session, becoming one of the first of many faculty and graduate students to sample the mushroom pill under Learys guidance.” Leary then introduced both Harry and Christiana to LSD. While Christiana found the drug unremarkable, Murray was thrilled by the opportunity to make visionary experiences accessible to the masses. The new world religion was drawing nearer. It is certainly strange that in an era known for its conformity, its nuclear families, its spreading suburbs with white picket fences, the era of Make America Great Again’s nostalgia, arguably the strangest, most avant guard experiments were happening within the military bureaucracy and the faded ivy walls of Harvard University.
When Leary and Alpert scandalized the university, and were thrown out to freely giving LSD to undergraduates, Murray was unfazed. According to Alan Watts, “Henry Murray, however, with a wise look on his face, reminisced about the days when psychoanalysis first struck Harvard, and what an uproar of indignation had come to pass when a psychoanalyzed faculty member had committed suicide.” Murray fully expected there to be ‘growing pains’ as the new mythology was taking form. One wonders exactly how far he was willing to go in search of his potentially world-regenerating discoveries. He had already severely strained his relationship with his wife Josephine, and betrayed his now-decreased friend Bill Morgan. Now, with the threat of nuclear annihilation always hanging in the background, quite a lot seemed justifiable.
In the early 1960’s, Murray conducted a litany of more than questionable experiments on Harvard undergraduates, which included subjecting them to psychological stress-tests. One of these experiments involved having undergraduates write out their most cherished beliefs. They, they were told, they would have ‘a friendly discussion with a classmate in which they would defend said beliefs.’ Unbeknownst to the student, however, the written out essay of their cherished beliefs was given to a team of Harvard law students to meticulously disassemble. Then, the ‘friendly discussion’ involved a law student masquerading as an undergrad, who would subject the unsuspecting student to "vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive" attacks aimed to disassemble their (Harvard-inflated) egos. While carrying out these experiments, Murray wrote that, “"the formidable task assigned to the social sciences" will be "that of designing a system of practices of child rearing, education, and self-development which, under favorable conditions, would produce generations of adult personalities who would prove progressively more fit, emotionally and intellectually, to live and (if called upon) to govern in a world capable of producing genocidal weapons.”
Theodore John Kaczynski, who would one day be known as the Unabomber, was one of the undergraduates subjected to Murray’s experiments. Kaczynski was a socially-insecure 17 year-old at the time, who would later harbor an immense hatred for the “brainwashing” faculties of modern technology and psychology. He would later mail or deliver 16 package bombs to scientists, universities, and representatives of modern technology, killing three people and injuring 23. It is a topic of immense speculation whether Murray’s experiments lit the fuse which would make the young, impressionable Kaczynski into a murderer.
The Ricorso
While the search for an ancient spiritual wellspring was largely the domain of the political right in the thirties, forties, and fifties, in the sixties that yearning shifted to the political left. In 1962, the Esalen Institute was founded with Eranos as its model. With the help of Gregory Bateson, Alan Watts, and Aldous Huxley, Esalen became the capital of the New Age movement. Some of its early docents were Joan Baez and Hunter S. Thompson. LSD left the CIA and found its way to San Fransisco. Joseph Campbell loosened up and befriended guitar-wielding hippies and artists. Jungian acolytes with fascist roots, like Mircea Eliade, did what they could to move on from, and cover up, their pasts. The Mount Truth commune which Herman Hesse stayed at in Ascona now had thousands of American imitations. There is an argument to be made that many flower children sprouted from the post-WWI waste land.
Carl Jung’s imprint impacted the culture in other ways too. Way back in 1926, Jung had told one of his alcoholic clients that only a religious conversion could make him sober. Jung then helped shepherd the client through a staged process of religious conversion which cured him. The client shared the technique with Ebby Thacker, who passed it along to Bill Wilson, who would go on to found Alcoholics Anonymous. Wilson wrote to Jung in 1961 in thanks for Jung’s role in the development of AA: “Your words really carried authority, because you seemed to be neither wholly a theologian nor a pure scientist. Therefore, you seemed to stand with us in that no-man’s land that lies between the two … You spoke a language of the heart that we could understand.” In the early years of the organization, Wilson also urged AA members to read Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul.
Carl Jung died at the age of 85 in June of 1961. Harry Murray’s wife Josephine died unexpectedly in January of 1962. Suddenly, Harry and Christiana were all that was left. They tried living together as man and wife, but the relationship didn’t work. They were still very much in love. But, while they once believed that they could solve "the erotic problem in our civilization," they now couldn’t even figure out how to live together. Christiana’s visions had dried up, and the power of the symbols they left behind was evaporating away. Now that Josephine had died, and the repressive 1950’s had given way to the free love of the 1960’s, their trysts didn’t seem as daring.
In the tower, the couple tried to rekindle their lust, sometimes with whips and chains. Christiana had always been Harry’s muse, his femme inspiratrice, his oft-neglected collaborator—and maybe even his master and spiritual leader—and now that her efficiency was waning, it seems they were trying to use brute force to re-stimulate the relationship. As Christiana’s biographer Claire Douglas writes, what “remains of the Red and Gold Diary often sounds, to a modern eavesdropper, not like courageous exploration but like the futile self-stimulation of two naughty children seeking to thrill and shock each other.” Christiana had also taken to alcohol to assuage her alienation from the world. Jung had warned her that when the visions went away she would need to be content with dreams; but the withdrawal of the spirit was proving incredibly difficult for her.
By the time of the 1963 Bay of Pigs, it was clear that the new mythology of Harry and Christiana was stillborn. Hopped up on amphetamines, and the more-than-occasional hallucinogen, Harry lurched back and forth between different projects, rarely bringing any to completion. His novel about world government was a mess. It centered around a character named Vico, who warns of the fall of Western society. Murray could not get the novel to work, and kept writing draft after draft after draft. Sometimes very little would change between each draft, but the book wasn’t getting much better. Harry was also working on a biography of Melville which was now well over 1,000 pages. He sent a draft to his friend and drinking companion Conrad Aiken—the same man who had gone through Harvard with T.S. Eliot and encouraged his writing of The Waste Land—and Aiken did not mince words. He told Murray the best use of his manuscript would be to throw it in the fireplace.
In 1967, Harry and Christiana decided that they needed a vacation. Some family members who saw them when they were traveling said that the couple looked happier than they had in ages. Perhaps it seemed like the old Harry and Christiana, the young, and vibrant, and naive Harry and Christiana, before meeting Jung, had returned. The couple stayed at their friend Cleome Wadsworth's Denis Bay Plantation on Saint John, in the Virgin Islands. The main house on the property was on the North Coast of the Island, and Henry and Christiana were given the cottage near the water. Above them, Wadsworth had erected a giant statue of Christ, which looked out over the bay. By some strange synchronicity, Harry and Christiana’s cabin was right next to the property in which Robert Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty went to in order to escape the shame he felt about his role in history. While Oppenheimer had sought the refuge of Denis Bay after his small circle had successfully and ineradicably reconfigured the state of the world, Christiana and Murray had ended up in the same place after feeling they had failed to do the same. Each sought the eternal, paradisal August of the tropics.
In the early morning of March 14, 1967, Christiana Morgan drowned in the ocean near the cottage under two feet of water. Her suspended body was visible under the gentle waves of the clear tropical waters, under the Christ statue’s watchful eye. Harry said that she had committed suicide, and left the following words of Conrad Aiken to be read over her grave: “O sweet clean earth, from whom the green blade cometh! When we are dead, my blest beloved and I, Embrace us well, that we may rest forever, Sending up grass and blossoms to the sky.” But Harry gave vastly different stories to different people. Sometimes he said that she’d fainted in the water and he tried to revive her, other times he said that he only discovered her hours after she was dead. All that is known is that this trance epic had collapsed, and that another ALP had dispersed into the sea.
Christiana’s granddaughter, Hilary Morgan,2 said this about the strange and suspicious circumstances surrounding the death:
“I think it’s one of the great mysteries. There are so many different canyons of inquiry and mystery that I’ve come across on this story which has just kept it infinitely fascinating. But I know that she did drown in water. You know, when I was a child, I saw her swim everyday in the river outside the tower. She was an expert swimmer. But she did have a lot of problems with alcohol. She was drinking heavily. And, according to Harry, she had left the ring that he gave her on a bag on the beach by the water before she entered it. She also left a passage to be read over her grave on her bedside table—and this is according to Harry, of course—but I know that according to my family members and some of his colleagues, that Harry, when he came back, gave everyone a different story of what happened down there with her death…it’s a mystery in many ways.”
Thus the word imitates the sound for thunder while having within it words that mean thunder. This echoes Vico’s theory that thunder inspired the first words.
“bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunnt-rovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!”
Bababadal: a reference to the tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9)
gharaghta: (Hindi) karak, gargarahat, (Arabic) ra'd: thunder.
kamminarronnkon: (Japanese) kaminari: thunder.
bron: (Greek) brontê: thunder
tonnerronn: (French) tonnerre: thunder.
tuonn: (Italian) tuonno: thunder.
thun: (English) thunder: thunder.
trovarr: (Portuguese) trovão: thunder.
hounawnskawn: (Swedish) åska, (Irish) scán: thunder
toohoohoordenen (with a bit of a stutter): (Danish) torden: thunder
thurnuk: (Irish) tórnach: thunder.
Hilary Morgan, is currently fundraising to refurbish her Grandmother’s tower. Christiana had hoped that the “Tower on the Marsh” would remain a sacred place, and become a residence for artists. If you would like to contribute, please follow this link: https://www.towerofdreamsdoc.com/support