https://www.newdawnmagazine.com/arti...of-carl-g-jung
Jung’s family upbringing in the occult
https://virtueonline.org/carl-jung-a...nder-oppositesJung’s involvement with the occult was with him from the start – literally, it was in his DNA. His maternal grandfather, Rev. Samuel Preiswerk, who learned Hebrew because he believed it was spoken in heaven, accepted the reality of spirits, and kept a chair in his study for the ghost of his deceased first wife, who often came to visit him. Jung’s mother Emilie was employed by Samuel to shoo away the dead who distracted him while he was working on his sermons. She herself developed mediumistic powers in her late teens. At the age of 20, she fell into a coma for 36 hours; when her forehead was touched with a red-hot poker she awoke, speaking in tongues and prophesying. Emilie continued to enter trance states throughout her life, in which she would communicate with the dead. She also seems to have been a ‘split personality’. Jung occasionally heard her speaking to herself in a voice he soon recognised was not her own, making profound remarks expressed with an uncharacteristic authority. This ‘other’ voice had inklings of a world far stranger than the one the young Carl knew.
Jung's family had occult linkage on both sides, from his paternal grandfather's Freemasonry[29] involvement as Grandmaster of the Swiss Lodge[30], and his maternal family's long-term involvement with séances and ghosts. Jung was heavily involved for many years with his mother and two female cousins in hypnotically induced séances.[31] They 'used a primitive, homemade Ouija board and a glass that moved over the letters to spell out answers to questions."[32] Jung eventually wrote up the séances as his 1902 medical dissertation entitled "On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena".[33] His Preiswerk relatives were outraged that they were 'shamefully' included, and blamed Carl Jung for the inability of several of his cousins to find husbands.[34]
James A Herrick notes that Jung's mother 'introduced him as a child to Hindu gods, for which he maintained a life-long fascination.'[35] After the death of three babies in a row before Carl Jung's birth, his mother "Emilie withdrew, taking refuge in the private interior visions of the spirits."[36] Emilie often had to be hospitalized, leaving Carl Jung with the feeling of the feminine as 'natural unreliability, one can never rely on it' and the term 'father' as 'reliability and powerlessness.'[37]
Religious upbringingJung's maternal Grandfather Samuel Preiswerk, a Basel pastor, had weekly séances attempting to contact his deceased first wife in the presence of his second wife, (Jung's grandmother) and his daughter (Jung's mother)
Jung's "family was steeped in religion - he had eight uncles in the clergy as well as his maternal grandfather and his earliest playgrounds were churches and graveyards."[44] The famous Ulysses author James Joyce disparagingly referred to Carl Jung as the Reverend Dr. Jung[45], hinting that Jungianism was really a religion. Carl Jung's pastor-father loved theological school reflections, but deeply disliked rural congregational life and was losing his faith.[46] The famous Liberal German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher had converted and baptized Carl Jung's grandfather. Carl Jung was deeply aware of and damaged by his father's spiritual emptiness, saying "What he said sounded stale and hollow, like a tale told by someone who knows it only by hearsay and cannot quite believe it himself."[47]
Carl Jung's first and only time of taking Holy Communion was a devastating experience for him: "Slowly I came to understand that this communion had been a fatal experience for me. It had proved hollow; more than that, it had proved to be a total loss. I knew that I would never again be able to participate in this ceremony. 'Why, that is not religion at all,' I thought. 'It is the absence of God; the church is a place I should not go to. It is not life which is there, but death.'"[48]Jung believed that the "dark side" of human nature needed to be "integrated" into a single, overarching "wholeness" in order to form a less strict and difficult definition of goodness.[59] Jung significantly said: "I would rather be whole than good."[60] Wholeness for Jung is really the gnostic reconciliation of opposites. "If Christ means anything to me," said Jung, "it is only as a symbol...I do not find the historical Jesus edifying at all, merely interesting because controversial."[61]
Jung believed that "the Christ-symbol lacks wholeness in the modern psychological sense, since it does not include the dark side of things..."[62] For Jung, it was regrettable that Christ in his goodness lacked a shadow side, and God the Father, who is the Light, lacked darkness.[63] Jung sought a solution to this dilemma in the Holy Spirit who allegedly united the split in the moral opposites symbolized by Christ and Satan.[64] "Looked at from a quaternary standpoint", writes Jung, "the Holy Ghost is a reconciliation of opposites and hence the answer to the suffering in the Godhead which Christ personifies."[65]
Jung believed that Satan and Jesus, as spiritual opposites, were gnostically reconciled through the Holy Spirit. "It is possible", said Jung, "for a man to attain totality, to become whole, only with the co-operation of the spirit of darkness..."[66]
After experiencing Goethe's Faust, Jung came to believe in the 'universal power' of evil and "its mysterious role it played in delivering man from darkness and suffering."[67] "Most of all", said Jung, "(Faust) awakened in me the problem of opposites, of good and evil, of mind and matter, of light and darkness."[68]
In post-modern culture, the Judeo-Christian worldview is often dismissed as too narrow-minded and dogmatic. Jung saw the reconciliation of opposites as a sign of great cultural sophistication: "(Chinese philosophy) never failed to acknowledge the polarity and paradoxity (sic) of all life. The opposites always balanced one another - a sign of high culture. One-sidedness, though it lends momentum, is a sign of barbarism."[69] It would not be too far off to describe Jung as a gnostic Taoist. "The book on types (PT)", says Jung, "yielded the view that every judgment made by an individual is conditioned by his personality type and that every point of view is necessarily relative. This raised the question of the unity which must compensate this diversity, and it led me directly to the Chinese concept of Tao."[70] Being influenced by the Yin-Yang of Taoism, Jung believed that "Everything requires for its existence its opposite, or it fades into nothingness."[71]
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