Jungs Frightening Revelation (Jim)
Jung’s Frightening Revelation 01/08/2006
When I spoke of my mystic experiences in the piece called ‘God’s Will’, last week, I described my vision of a 60' phallus on the alter, that arose as I tried to hold onto my sense of desire while in worship in church. I wondered which message was correct, that it arose in the first place because my desire was dangerously out of control as lust, or that it went away after confronting me, because God condoned my desire?
Jung struggled mightily over this very same vision in a dream, while a boy of just three or four years old. Of it he says, ‘I had the earliest dream I can remember - a dream which was to preoccupy me all my life.’ He drempt that in a big meadow, near a vicarage, there was a rectangular stone-lined hole in the ground, with a stairway leading down. At the bottom behind a heavy, sumptuous green curtain, he saw a rectangular chamber thirty feet long, with an arched ceiling of hewn stone. In the center, a red carpet ran from the entrance to a low platform, which had a wonderfully rich golden throne on it. Something was standing on it, perhaps a tree trunk 12 to 15 feet high and about one and half to two feet thick, except that it was made of skin and naked flesh, At the top it had a rounded head with no face and no hair, and on the very top was a single eye gazing upward. Above it was an aura of brightness. From outside he heard his mother’s voice call out then, “Yes, look at him. That is the man-eater.”
Only decades later did he understand that it was a ritual phallus. He interprets the dream thus.
Jung as a boy feared Jesuits, in their black robes and hats, with shadowed faces. His mothers words thus mean, to him, either that the phallus and not Jesus and Jesuits are the devourer of little boys, or that Jesus and Jesuits and the phallus are one and the same. The hole represents a grave. The grave itself is an underground temple, and the curtain is the meadow (the mystery of Earth with her covering vegetation). The carpet was blood red. He doesn’t know how he conjured an anatomically correct erect phallus. But the urethrae as an eye, with light above it, comes from the word phallus which means shining, bright. This phallus is a subterranean god, not to be named.
Lord Jesus, thus from that point on, became for him, never quite real, acceptable or loved, because of his underground counter-part. A frightening revelation! Lord Jesus became in some ways a god of death, of crucified and bloody corpses. Jesus’s love and kindness hence appeared doubtful. Jung could never overcome this secret mistrust from then on. Jesus and God, sat on a much more beautiful throne far, far away in the blue sky, with golden crowns and white robes, but from this same Jesus came the dark Jesuit robed in black women’s garb, associated with a very different throne, and something non-human and underworldly that fed on human flesh. Fifty years later he also realized that the motif of cannibalism underlies the symbolism of the Mass.
Finally Jung realized how unchild-like and sophisticated the dream and it’s message was for a three year old to have, and wondered “Who was it speaking to me?” “Who brought the Above and the Below together, and laid the foundation for everything that was to fill the second half of my life?” Jung sees this dream thus as an initiation into the realm of darkness, and as the unconscious beginning of his intellectual life.
Wasn’t it the same for Adam and Eve? Having eaten from the forbidden tree of Knowledge, their innocent naivete spoiled, revealing a secret mistrust of God.
When I spoke of my mystic experiences in the piece called ‘God’s Will’, last week, I described my vision of a 60' phallus on the alter, that arose as I tried to hold onto my sense of desire while in worship in church. I wondered which message was correct, that it arose in the first place because my desire was dangerously out of control as lust, or that it went away after confronting me, because God condoned my desire?
Jung struggled mightily over this very same vision in a dream, while a boy of just three or four years old. Of it he says, ‘I had the earliest dream I can remember - a dream which was to preoccupy me all my life.’ He drempt that in a big meadow, near a vicarage, there was a rectangular stone-lined hole in the ground, with a stairway leading down. At the bottom behind a heavy, sumptuous green curtain, he saw a rectangular chamber thirty feet long, with an arched ceiling of hewn stone. In the center, a red carpet ran from the entrance to a low platform, which had a wonderfully rich golden throne on it. Something was standing on it, perhaps a tree trunk 12 to 15 feet high and about one and half to two feet thick, except that it was made of skin and naked flesh, At the top it had a rounded head with no face and no hair, and on the very top was a single eye gazing upward. Above it was an aura of brightness. From outside he heard his mother’s voice call out then, “Yes, look at him. That is the man-eater.”
Only decades later did he understand that it was a ritual phallus. He interprets the dream thus.
Jung as a boy feared Jesuits, in their black robes and hats, with shadowed faces. His mothers words thus mean, to him, either that the phallus and not Jesus and Jesuits are the devourer of little boys, or that Jesus and Jesuits and the phallus are one and the same. The hole represents a grave. The grave itself is an underground temple, and the curtain is the meadow (the mystery of Earth with her covering vegetation). The carpet was blood red. He doesn’t know how he conjured an anatomically correct erect phallus. But the urethrae as an eye, with light above it, comes from the word phallus which means shining, bright. This phallus is a subterranean god, not to be named.
Lord Jesus, thus from that point on, became for him, never quite real, acceptable or loved, because of his underground counter-part. A frightening revelation! Lord Jesus became in some ways a god of death, of crucified and bloody corpses. Jesus’s love and kindness hence appeared doubtful. Jung could never overcome this secret mistrust from then on. Jesus and God, sat on a much more beautiful throne far, far away in the blue sky, with golden crowns and white robes, but from this same Jesus came the dark Jesuit robed in black women’s garb, associated with a very different throne, and something non-human and underworldly that fed on human flesh. Fifty years later he also realized that the motif of cannibalism underlies the symbolism of the Mass.
Finally Jung realized how unchild-like and sophisticated the dream and it’s message was for a three year old to have, and wondered “Who was it speaking to me?” “Who brought the Above and the Below together, and laid the foundation for everything that was to fill the second half of my life?” Jung sees this dream thus as an initiation into the realm of darkness, and as the unconscious beginning of his intellectual life.
Wasn’t it the same for Adam and Eve? Having eaten from the forbidden tree of Knowledge, their innocent naivete spoiled, revealing a secret mistrust of God.
posted by LifeWriter at 11:26 PM
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