In order to answer that question, we need to state certain facts about Jungian texts.
What did Jung find in Alchemy and Gnosticism that helped him explain mystical experiences? In AION, Jung’s whole demonstration is based on the Moses quaternio of the Gnostics which is the cross-cousin marriage diagram that Jung used frequently in his books. This complexio oppositorum (combination of opposites) is, according to him, the fundamental structure of the Self because it contains all opposites.
Moses is the hero, the conscious ego, Miriam, the anima or the unconscious. Jethro is the father and the sage and finally, Zipporah is the child, the pupil. According to Jung, each character is an archetype and represents a family of symbols. Jung’s hypothesis is that a mystical experience is always a conjunction of one pair of those opposites. As a family of symbols, each one of these four characters may be declined with their correspondences. To Jung, mystical experiences were extremely numinous symbols of conjunction of opposites that enter consciousness forma brief moment. The first mystical experience always is a conjunction of the symbols of the horizontal axis. The relation between the child and the parent could be seen as the opposition particle-whole, me-universe or me-God. As such, the first transcendent experience has a symbol of the encounter or a merging between the opposites me-God, me-universe or me-sage considering that these symbols have multiple correspondences of equal value.
An example of that experience can be found in the writings of Thomas Merton (1915–1968) where he recounts several mystical experiences. His first experience took place in Rome when he was 18 years old. He was alone in his room at nightfall and, suddenly, he felt the presence of his father, who had died more than a year earlier. This presence was as vivid and real as if he had touched his arm or spoken to him. This sensation lasted only an instant, according to him. We recognize here the characteristics of the first mystical experience where the conjunction of opposites parent and child or sage and pupil forms a numinous symbol.
Genevieve W. Foster (1902–1992) was a member of the Analytical Psychology Club of New York. She wrote the following account of her mystical experience:
“That is, I saw nothing unusual with my outward eye, but I nevertheless knew that there was someone else in the room with me. A few feet in front of me and a little to the left stood a numinous [i.e., divine] figure, and between us was an interchange, a flood, flowing both ways, of love. There were no words, no sound. There was light everywhere … Indoors and out, the world was flooded with light, the supernal light that so many of the mystics describe and a few of the poets.”¹
Jung's findings in Gnosticism and alchemy support his basic hypothesis that mystical experiences are signposts of the individuation process because they are the irruption of the archetype of the Self in consciousness. The Self containing all opposites always manifests itself as a conjunction if opposites.
When one understand these premisses, one has the key to read Jung because he becomes surprisingly clear. When Jung uses alchemical or gnostic terminology, he is always writing about mystical experiences and the process to reach them.
That leads us to the question about Wolfgang Giegerich. His analysis of Jung’s relation to alchemy is fondamentally baseless and it shows how a superficial knowledge of alchemy and of Jungian thought always produce wrongful evaluations. He wrote:
“Instead of realizing that alchemy was an implicit and naïve, indeed to a large extent, helplessly groping form of thought, JUNG most of the time mistook it as an implicit psychology (in the personalistic sense of ‘people’s psychology,’ having to do with one’s self-development), thereby depriving himself of the possibility to realize that the object of psychology proper (the life of the soul) is logical life and that the redemption of the seemingly miscarried alchemical undertaking had taken place, more than a century prior to JUNG, in Hegel’s dialectical logic.”²
Now, who is naïve and mistaken here? Giegerich himself. He projects on Jung his own errors of judgment, his unconsciousness. When someone takes the chance to question Jung’s evaluation of alchemy, he first needs to do his homework and figure out what alchemy was really about. Giegerich shows no sign, in his writings, that he understands that alchemy was, in fact, an implicit psychology to explain and reach mystical experiences. He misread Jung and stayed at the inferior level of those who think that alchemy was a mishmash of absurdities. In contrast, Jung saw from the start that alchemy was a system to reach both wholeness and mystical experiences because he deciphered its symbols correctly. Giegerich failed to understand Jung properly in that domain and that cast a shadow on his entire work. By writing this, he tried to elevate himself over Jung but he just proved that he was not up to the job. That is what the intellectual inadequacy looks like nowadays.
Alchemical texts were written by the most brillant minds of their time. It is silly to think that their recipes were naïve techniques to produce gold. The most logical explanation of alchemy is that the grimoires contained a specific knowledge that needed to be hidden from the Church and the Inquisition. The gold or the philosophical stone are symbols of a transcendent experience. When we look at historical figures we tend to see them as inferior to us but this is not always the case. Those intellectual scholars, Newton, Paraclesus, Dorn, ... knew what they were talking about. Their goal was to explain the secret knowledge about mystical experiences and Jung was able to decipher their symbols.
Giegerich's defective evaluation represents the foremost problem in Analytical psychology today: the incapacity to arrive at simple conclusions about Jung's writings.
Fore more see
¹From IMERE, Institute for Mystical Experience Research and Education. Internet web site.
²Giegerich, Wolfgang. The Soul’s Logical Life. Peter Lang, 2020. P. 150
