Professional Documents
Culture Documents
PREFACE
The following article is a condensation of an article that not only takes to task
Richard Noll's contentions about Jung in The Aryan Christ, but also sets forth how I
was able to update and utilize the Hermetic divinatory arts of Tarot and astrology
through the influence of Jungian archetypes, evidence for which Noll dismisses as
"hearsay." Furthermore, the Jungian techniques of active fantasy and
the hierosgamos, the "sacred marriage" of the conscious and unconscious minds,
resulted in my writing two books which could not have been written without these
techniques, one of which books was evidently beyond the boundaries of the
conscious mind, because no writer in the long history of literature had heretofore
written his characters into the work of another writer. This union with the
unconscious mind yielded an expansion of consciousness in both the author(myself)
and in the protagonists of my book, The Wind & the Wizard, of which Dr. James
Daley of the Psychology Department at Diablo Valley College has written, "The more
than twenty years that Joseph Campbell was his mentor well-prepared him for the
writing of a book.. which is at once an exploration of cosmic mythology, a highlyconscious Jungian tale of the individuation path, an alchemical parable in which the
son/self is transformed into the King/Self, thereby redeeming the father, and a
fantasy/science fiction adventure of great fun involving the most exotic time-travels
one could imagine." Even the book's structure comes from the "sacred marriage," two
interpenetrating triangles with a different element representing each of the six points
of the trines and each book, ranging from The Wind in the Willows to The Marvelous
Land of Oz; hence, the title. Because pages of the original authors' words are used,
the books had to be in the public domain; and to make my characters' presence as
seamless as possible, I wrote each of the six books in the style of the original authors.
The second book, which came from the archetypes dreaming themselves, is Tales for
Jung Folk.
My very first book, Tarot and You(1970), was the result of divination, accessing the
Jungian Self, the "god within" in order to attain a wisdom beyond the ego's ken.
These taped readings yielded highly accurate interpretations for the people being
"read," and I wondered for a time how the Tarot cards could possibly "work." The
secret, however, was in my method. Rather than relying on medieval-like dream
book interpretations, I dragged Tarot kicking and screaming into the 20th century by
allowing the readee to free associate his own interpretation for each card, and then
presenting an overview organized into what I called "The Jungian Spread," which
contained cards for the unconscious archetypes, which tend to drive the individual
into archetypal relations or situations. My point here is that my own life has been so
creatively enriched by Jung's influence that without it I would be impoverished.
Many others may feel as I do that the Hermetic world view is a valid alternative to
The same occult knowledge that Hitler used to inflame the emotions of the masses,
thereby making them slaves of his demagoguery, Jung used to free people from
centuries of dogma and superstition, making them active in their own spiritual
salvation through gnosis, although Noll faults him for this by saying that he
"significantly undermined orthodox Catholicism and restored the polytheism of the
Hellenistic world in Western civilization." So has Joseph Campbell, we might add.
But Noll cares not whether orthodox Catholicism is "undermined," it is just a further
example of his unfair attack on Jung.
A similar example of guilt by symbolic association came to my attention during the
Bush presidency. A local gossip columnist said that while at Yale, Bush had belonged
to the Skull and Bones society, which utilized in its secret rites the swastika symbol.
By means of this demagoguery, the nave reader was left to jump to his own
conclusion that Bush was a closet Nazi. Of course anyone with a smattering of
knowledge of the history of symbols knows that the swastika was used by the
American Indians as a symbol of the earth's four quarters, or four directions,
basically, a symbol of wholeness.
And Jung, as Noll tells us, adopted the mandala as sun as his own symbol of
wholeness, the Self. Remember, in Hermeticism man as God's creation is not separate
and despised by his creator. God is within. Therefore, the Gnostic and alchemical
symbol for sun, a point within a circle, lent itself to Jung's concept of the Self at the
center of psyche. Further, because of its golden color, "gold of the sun" was the long
sought end of the alchemical process, the language of which Jung utilized for his
individuation process.
My point is that whereas Hitler used the Aryan sun sign for evil purposes, the
background for the swastika on the Nazi flag, to ancient alchemists, to Jung and to
myself, the sun symbol represented the end process of a wholly spiritual evolution.
History and mythology are replete with tales of warlords who invite a rival chieftain
and his men to their stronghold on one pretense or another. But when the chieftain
arrives, he is told that in the spirit of amnesty his men must leave their weapons at the
door. A great feast ensues, during which the rival and his men are slaughtered. To me
this tale serves as a metaphor of the kind of debate Noll is seeking from the Jungians.
They must not reference their unscientific experience of the archetypes or collective
unconscious, or also we may infer, numinous Big Dreams, and active fantasies.
Further, they must not rely on Hermetic "evidence" obtained through the occult arts
of astrology, tarot, numerology, alchemy, and the Eastern I Ching. So disarmed and
stripped of these weapons they would be slaughtered, as Noll knows full well.
However, I will fight the good fight, but not on Noll's terms. I propose to storm the
castle of Materialism, carrying with me all the Hermetic arts, for if "the last 300 years
of science and medicine were superfluous to Jungian analysts," as Noll charged,
several thousand years of Hermetic arts seem lost to him. Which brings us to a
critical question. Is psychoanalysis a science or an art? If it were a science, we could
compare an encephalgraph of the patient's brain waves with that of several thousand
worldwide analysts until we found the best match for his cure. We must admit that
therapy, and particularly Jungian therapy, is a fine art.Given that, it is quite proper for
analyst and analysand to utilize Hermetic arts, in order to find the god within, the
Self, goal of the individuation process.
I am a case in point. Although I have never undergone Jungian analysis, I consider
my viewpoint to be Jungian, thanks largely to Joseph Campbell, who over a period of
years sent me most of Jung's collected works as gifts in thanks for my sharing my
home with him on his Western lecture tours from 1967 to 1979. But I always had a
predilection for the paranormal, spending much time reading the "Journal of the
Society for Psychical Research." At an early age, I set out to scientificallydisprove
astrology, the twelve character generalizations of which seemed to be utter nonsense.
To do so, I had from various astrologers readings that had more truth than falsity in
each; however, it was several years later that a Uranian chart (that postulates ten extra
planets) finally nailed precisely my character and inner life, plus a precise correlation
of dates and illnesses and accidents. The astrologer was Charles Emerson, who was
both an artist and a scientist, but he failed in his goal of getting medical science to
seriously examine the value of Uranian astrology as a predictor of health issues,
despite having written numerous articles of medical correlation. Undoubtedly Noll
could tell us why medical science ignored him. "Its astrology; it's wacko! No need to
waste time investigating it." However, I hasten to mention that I have never met
anyone who has investigated astrology in depth (going beyond the nonsense of the
sun sign generalizations in the newspapers), who has concluded that it does not
"work" as a way of defining character. Like myself, most astrologers began as "nonbelievers."
At the same time my interest in Tarot was developing, Joseph Campbell also had his
scholarly interest piqued. We visited and viewed the "marvelous" card collection of
Albert G. Field, and bought many different decks, for it was said that if the 22 cards
of the Major Arcana were arranged in the proper order, their esoteric inner meaning
would then be transparent. Eventually each of us found the arrangement that best
suited the particular deck with which we empathized, and we published this in a book
entitled Tarot Revelations (1979).
Joseph Campbell selected and edited Jung's work for The Viking Portable Jung, the
most diverse and stimulating of all Jungian editions. "Jungian" is a fair label to apply
to Campbell, I think. According to Noll, contact with the occult compromises
Jungians and the field of psychology in general; however, Campbell states, writing
about my contribution to our collaboration, "Richard Roberts, accordingly, has
pointed, in his analysis of the symbolism of the Waite-Smith deck, not only to its
background in esoteric astrological, gnostic, and alchemical traditions, but also, by
anticipation, forward to the archetypology of Jung who, in developing his insights,
was significantly influenced (as he everywhere lets us know) by the same gnostic and
alchemical texts from which the members of the Order of the Golden Dawn drew
inspiration. The crucial difference, I would say, between their understanding and
Jung's, rests in his interpretation of the archetypes as psychological, whereas Yeats
and the rest believed literally in the objectivity, not only of the mythic
personifications, but also of incarnate 'secret masters,' much in the way of
Theosophists. This trend infected their thinking, and equally their writing, with all
sorts of mystifications. But now and here, it seems to me, is a point of the
greatest interest there can be recognized in Dante's work and in the mystical lore
of his century direct influences from many of same alchemical, gnostic, and
astrological works that were drawn upon both by Jung and by the members of the
Golden Dawn."
Galileo was persecuted for presenting evidence that the earth was not the center of
the Christian universe. This should have been apparent to anyone who looked through
his telescope. Yet these believers who thought contrarily believed that the Devil had
tricked their eyes. So too the evidence of Jungians is rejected by Noll, and in so doing
he makes himself a strange bedfellow with the rigid fundamentalism of Church
dogma, even though he stands for the antithetical point of view. The belief in no gods,
no absolutes, no metaphysics is characteristic of the philosophy known as nihilism.
But nihilism has more insidious tenets which infect the world today. There being no
gods to hold us to account, self-interest takes precedence over morality; hence moral
relativism prevails. Nor is there an objective truth, say the nihilists; hence "truth" is to
be determined by force of argument by those with the greatest persuasion.
Noll should know that new scientific models of the universe have come about as a
result of "evidence" that shows that the old model is somewhat flawed, else the new
evidence could not be. Noll's unwillingness to examine any metaphysical evidence as
proof of the archetypes at best is an unscientific attitude, and at worst relegates him to
the heap of nihilists.
In the 1970s, at the same time that I was doing ten years of research and writing on
Tarot for my collaboration with Campbell, parts of which were cut and placed in a
subsequent book, From Eden to Eros :Origins of the Putdown of Women (1985),I was
investigating a possible correlation between Jung's archetypes and the planets, plus
sun and moon. That this could be scientifically taboo did not occur to me at the time.
Many local Jungians were also seeking this correspondence, for if the archetypes had
such a profound effect upon one's life, surely astrology would reflect this, provided
the right attributions were made. I myself was seeking "the missing (or 'lost') link
between mind and matter," as I said then. "Where mind terminates and 'out-there'
begins cannot be determined. Hence I postulate a model of the universe which is
holistically a psychic phenomenon."
After fifteen years of research, the correlation I discovered between planets and
animus/a, shadow, persona, and Self was published in The Journal of Geocosmic
Research, Fall, 1975. Entitled "Archetypal Astrology," the editor of that journal
noted, "One acquaintance of mine who appeared to be in a position to know stated
that Jung did not especially like the idea that astrology worked, but was compelled to
admit that it did, at least to some extent. Despite the fact that Jung was far ahead of
most of the Western scientific community in his understanding of the importance of
myth and symbolism, he was still a Western, rationalist scientist, and to anyone who
holds the assumptions of that tradition as valid, astrology is a kind of insult. But
Jung was willing to do experiments with astrology. His famous experiment
implicit in this. In his The Masks of God whenever the knight Parzival yields to the
collective dictates of conduct instead of following his own inner awareness and
direction, he fails the tests in his quest for the Grail. Indeed, the Grail may be seen as
symbolic of psychic wholeness, the goal of Jung's "individuation process." In
retrospect, individuation was the unifying theme of the Third Model Seminars which
I gave with Campbell, except for "An Evening of Celtic Lore" given at the Edinburgh
Castle, a Scottish pub in San Francisco. A line from one of our flyers for the two-day
seminar "The Evolution of Consciousness" is instructive in regard to the
individuation process: "Man is a social animal; yet attaining Self-hood, with one's
own spiritual autonomy, involves a constant struggle, because collective society
typically opposes the individual's new birth of consciousness . Fortunately for
evolving man, there are other voices than those of the masses who would reduce man
to a cipher."
One seminar was devoted to individuation in literature with examples from the works
of Joyce, Hesse, Vonnegut, Alan Watts, and Colin Wilson. Another seminar dealt with
individuation in dreams, "What the psyche says." Here Campbell presented an
elaborate slide-show of Jungian archetypes drawn from the arts. We also had a
discussion of what Jungians call "Big Dreams," numinous dream experiences that
foreshadow or coincide with a change in consciousness.
This brings us full circle to the origins of Tales for Jung Folk in dreams and active
fantasies. While preparing for the above seminar I was reading some of the Von Franz
books on fairytales, useful in explaining the archetypes by bits and pieces from one
tale or another. In the 1970s Campbell made my home his headquarters for up to ten
days, four times a year, while he did seminars from Sonoma to Big Sur. So very often
the next morning I would recount to him the previous evening's dream. They were
unusual for their dramatization of a single archetype, and it was Campbell who
suggested that I write them down. Subsequently Harper & Row, which had seen the
first two stories, wanted the rest of the archetypal lot for publication; but I had to
explain that they came unbidden, so it was several years before the last revealed
itself, and they were then published.
The subtitle of Tales for Jung Folk is "Original fairytales dramatizing Jung's
archetypes of the collective unconscious." Like Man and His Symbols, the book is a
good introduction to Jung, with a primer about each archetype following each story.
As such, it has been used for many years in college psychology courses. I shall refer
to passages from it in rebutting Noll's contention that the collective unconscious
cannot be scientifically validated, and, therefore, is unworthy of consideration except
as an indication of how unprofessional and untrustworthy Jung was as a psychologist.
First of all there is a pronounced "catch 22," a Joker in a stacked deck from which
Noll deals. We are faced with the impossible task of materially validating
(scientifically proving) a psychic content. Like the dream, the archetypes cannot be
observed, measured, or weighed. In my rebuttal to Brendan Gill's attack on Campbell,
Gill is quoted as saying, "In rational discourse, let us leave references to the soul on
the doorstep."
Jung's concept of the collective unconscious is in for the same nihilistic treatment at
Noll's hands as the soul received from the beginning of the mechanistic model of the
universe right up to now. That said, I shall now present evidence, although not of the
materialistic kind, that has convinced a substantial number of intelligent people in the
20th century that the archetypes and the collective unconscious do exist. In the
absence of scientific, numerical data, metaphors best serve to define intangibles. Noll
may howl here about "how differently Freudian and Jungian analysts are educated,
"but he must grant that he has never weighed or measured an Oedipus complex, and
that the way he knows of its presence in the psyche is by the effect upon the
individual, which is my point about archetypes. For example, in viewing a distant star
through a telescope, if we notice a wobble in its orbit, we construe that it has behind
it an unseen twin which influences what should be a steady, predictable orbit. The
collective unconscious, and its archetypal contents, are equivalent to the unseen twin
we can't see them, but nothing can make our path through life wobble more than
these profound influences.
I like to think of myself as a family, and in situations that require important decisions,
evaluate what the shadow wants, the anima, and the self, rather than have the
conscious ego attempt to autocratically rule for the rest of the family.
My homage to Jung is really contained in Tales for Jung Folk (1983). I begin by
saying, "To his undying credit, Jung was the first psychologist to regard the
unconscious as more than a mine for clues to neurotic symptoms, as in
psychoanalysis generally, or as a source of unending nightly nonsense the lay
attitude toward dreams. Indeed, Jung restored to the unconscious and to the dream the
spiritual status that it had in such great traditions as Egypt at the time of the pyramids,
or Greece of the dream-diviners and soothsayers. These ancient priests and
priestesses were our first psychologists, for they interpreted dreams, and the entire
community's well being depended upon what they saw, whether for good or ill.
Throughout history, those cultures which have revered the dream have attained the
highest spiritual development, as in Egypt and Greece."
If we recall that in Hermeticism God is within, heresy to both science and religion,
then the Jungian concept of the Self is a further development of this idea. According
to the primer for "The Self," "The Self may be likened also to God in the definition of
Meister Eckhart. 'God is an intelligible sphere whose circumference is nowhere, and
whose center is everywhere.' For as well as being the center, the Self is also the
'circumference' of the psyche, encompassing the ego, even though the ego resists
recognizing anything greater than itself. Using an analogy from astronomy, I like to
think of the Self as an expanding universe. The center of this universe is a point of
infinitely powerful energy, but the outermost boundaries of this expanding universe
are part of the same universe; thus, the Self is the psyche's center and its totality."
Nowhere is the presence of the archetypes felt more vividly and dramatically than in
the animus and anima projections that condition the attractions of our sex lives.
Jung's psychology, which may have seemed mystical and impractical in regard to the
Self, becomes quite down-to-earth in regard to the give-and-take war between the
sexes. Indeed, I would say Dr. Jung's most important contributions to psychology are
in the area of sexual relations."
Thus, reduced to its essence, Noll's quarrel with Jung is nihilism's quarrel with the
metaphysical overview of Hermeticism. As I read Noll's arguments against Jung and
Jungians, a prevalent theme underlay each contention. Everything Jungian was so
unscientific, so dangerous, because Jungians dabbled in "astrology or mythology, the
I Ching, tarot, and even palmistry." Noll, who describes himself as a "non-anything"
psychologist, is the scientific messiah, the salvation for those who had mistakenly
followed Jung, the Aryan Christ. If we hand over to Noll the Non-anything, our
horoscopes, Tarot cards, and I Ching sticks, we will be welcomed back into the
scientific community And if we but swear an oath to believe in Nothing, all will be
forgiven. Noll was offering us Absolution from the true Church of Science.
But where had I heard this before? Ah, yes, Freud's words to Jung after Freud had
fainted, his mechanistic model of the universe having been so threatened by Jung's
shamanistic production of a loud report in the bookcase next to them. "Promise me
never to abandon the sexual theory . We must make a bulwark of it against the
black tide of mud of occultism."
To me, it is as if Freud has reincarnated in Noll, and now is continuing the old quarrel
with Jung. But the curious thing about it is that in the case of Freud's rant, Noll seems
not to be the impartially objective scientist, but like Freud, the hysteric.
I shall let Joseph Campbell have the last word from the Foreward to our
collaboration: "But in the end, always, we have come to revelations of a grandiose
poetic vision of Universal Man that has been for centuries the inspiration both of
saints and of sinners, sages and fools, in kaleidoscopic transformations. It is our hope
and expectation that our readers, too, may be carried through the picture play of these
two enigmatic card packs, through the magic of THE MAGICIAN's wand and
guidance of THE PROPHETESS, to insights such as may lead, in the end, to the joy
in wisdom of THE FOOL."
To the "scientific" reductionists, we Hermeticists and Jungians are fools; yet at the
dark core of nihilism lies the denial of the birth of the human spirit.