The Shaping of a World Religion: Carl Jung and The Land of the Dead – Descending into the Underworld PART VI

By Cynthia Chung

“Now you have the key to mythology and you have the power to unlock all doors.”

– Carl Jung, Analytical Psychology (1917)

“Most persons who regard themselves as Jungians do not realize that Jung’s ideas changed markedly over a number of years. For example, in late 1909 Jung first began to hypothesize that the unconscious mind had a deeper ‘phylogenetic’ or racial layer beyond the memory store of personal experiences, and that it was from this essentially vitalistic biological residue that pre-Christian, pagan, mythological material emerged in dreams, fantasies, and especially psychotic states of mind. Jung’s final theories, those of a transpersonal collective unconscious (1916) and its archetypes (1919), marked a transition away from an already tenuous congruence with the biological sciences of the twentieth century and instead returned to ideas popular during his grandfather’s lifetime – the age of Goethe.”

– Richard Noll, The Jung Cult (1994)

This is the sixth instalment to the series “The Shaping of a World Religion: From Jesuits, Freemasons, & Anthropologists to MK Ultra and the Counter-Culture Movement.” For the previous instalments see Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV.

Part V is the first section to “The Shaping of a World Religion: Carl Jung and the Land of the Dead” to which this paper is part of this series.

It is here that we will resume our story…

In Bollingen, Switzerland lies the famous Bollingen Tower of Carl Jung (1875-1961). Jung had built the two-storey tower in 1923 and constructed additional towers throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Throughout Jung’s life starting in his late forties, he would spend several months each year living at the Bollingen Tower. It was a place where he felt free in his creativity and thoughts and where he could live in complete isolation, except for a few select people who were invited from time to time.

It was also where his muse-mistress Toni Wolff and himself could be left entirely to themselves for weeks if not months at a time. Wolff had become an essential companion to Jung’s travels into the depths of the human psyche. It is popularly said that it was Wolff who introduced Jung into the Eastern religions and mysticism, though this is likely not entirely true due to Jung’s involvement with Ascona[1], it is still very much relevant since it gives us an idea of the sort of “contribution” Wolff was making towards Jung’s “discoveries” on the psyche and his use of “active imagination”[2] on, no doubt, many a moonlit night at Bollingen…

Today, the Bollingen Tower, also known as Jung’s Turm (Tower) remains a site of pilgrimage where visitors are invited to regard its stone carved etchings, said to be done by Jung himself and his murals, painted onto the walls within the Tower.

However, only privileged visitors are invited by the members of the Jung family (who now own Jung’s Tower) to see the mural of Philemon, Jung’s guide to the Land of the Dead, within Bollingen.

Richard Noll in The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung writes[3]:

“It is from his discussions with Philemon, or so the story goes in MDR [Memories, Dreams, Reflections], that Jung received his most profound insights about the nature of the human psyche. Jung’s most famous ideas – the collective unconscious, which he first described in print in 1916, and the archetypes (its ‘gods’), which were added shortly thereafter – would not have been possible without guidance from Philemon.[4] It is from this Gnostic-Mithraic guru, who lives in a timeless space that Jung called the Land of the Dead, that Jung received instruction in ‘the Law,’ the esoteric key to the secrets of the ages. Jung inscribed these lessons in his ‘Red Book’.”

There is another painting that is even more secretive and is only revealed to “initiates.”

Noll writes[5]:

“Usually concealed, perhaps to protect the eyes of the uninitiated from witnessing the sacred mysteries it portrays, is the image of a thin crescent ship, like those that carry the dead in Egyptian iconography, with male and female figures facing each other. In the center of Jung’s vision is a large, reddish solar disk that brings to mind the frightful passage of souls to the underworld in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.”

Jung would himself write in his Memories, Dreams, Reflections in 1961[6]:

“After my wife’s death in 1955, I felt an inner obligation to become what I myself am. To put it in the language of the Bollingen house, I suddenly realized that the small central section which crouched so low, so hidden, was myself! I could no longer hide myself behind the ‘maternal’ and the ‘spiritual’ towers. So, in that same year, I added an upper story which represents myself or my ego-personality.

I had started the first tower in 1923, two months after the death of my mother. These two dates are meaningful because the Tower, as we shall see, is connected with the dead.

At Bollingen I am in the midst of my true life, I am most deeply myself. Here I am, as it were, the ‘age-old son of the mother.’ That is how alchemy puts it, very wisely, for the ‘old man,’ the ‘ancient,’ whom I had already experienced as a child, is personality No. 2 who has always been and always will be. He exists outside time and is the son of the maternal unconscious. In my fantasies he took the form of Philemon, and he comes to life again at Bollingen.”

In order for us to have a better understanding of Jung’s fascination, or one could say, obsession with the Land of the Dead we need only start with the very case which would launch his career as a world-renowned psychiatrist.

Of Seances, Ghosts, and Apparitions of the Unconscious…

To be fair to Carl Jung (though this will come at the cost of what many have claimed is his very uniqueness, his “genius”) his thoughts on such matters as the Land of the Dead and his interest in such things as alchemy, and as we will see spirituality and the ancient mysteries, were thoughts that were very much common during his time, one could even say they were fashionable, à la mode.

This is especially the case for Switzerland, Germany and Austria in particular, who were influenced by the Germanic Volk which often overlapped with völkisch ideology.[7] Though the spiritualist movement had spread its influence prominently throughout Europe, as well as the United States and Russia, the Germanic Volk took a particularly strong attraction to this worldwide movement. For many in the west, such things were regarded as a curious and exhilarating novelty, however, to the Germans and the Swiss, many regarded this as a return to the old ways.

During the mid 1800s into the 1900s, people who communed with ghosts and spirits were seen by many as guides into the unknown, unrestrained from the overly rigid and mechanistic approach of modern-day “science,” which had arrogantly denied the “reality” of such things.

With the advent of the spiritualist and fin-de-siecle movements, it was thought by many that modern-day “science” was in fact largely to blame for the spiritual crisis that western society was suffering from. Darwinism had reportedly killed religion, that is, a belief in God, but the spiritualist movement had taken a very different approach and espoused to unite the two, though with a great deal of “reinterpretation” of both sects, of course.[8]

Jung was to be no different and in June of 1895 he would begin his first formal dialogues with the Land of the Dead, inviting four female relatives from his mother’s side, the Preiswerks, to participate in an experiment at his home outside of Basel. His mother, born as Emilie Preiswerk, was one of the participants. In fact Jung would learn the techniques for his own mediumship from the Preiswerks, who came from a line of supposed mediums and clairvoyants, mostly made up of women but his grandfather Reverend Samuel Preiswerk[9], chief of the Protestant clergy in Basel, also claimed to be a clairvoyant who spoke regularly with spirits.[10] As Noll makes the case, this practice of mediumship would be legitimized by Jung in his 1916 Zurich lectures by reframing the practice as “active imagination.”

Noll writes in The Aryan Christ:[11]

“According to the family legends, he [Samuel Preiswerk] would talk to the spirit of his deceased wife in weekly seances while locked in his study, much to the dismay of his second wife and the fascination of his children, including his favorite, Emilie [Jung’s mother]. He taught her and his other children to stand behind him and chase away the spirits when he gave his sermons, for he and the family earnestly believed that the air around them was crowded with the chattering masses of the Dead. Emilie believed herself to have second sight, and throughout her life had precognitive dreams and other paranormal experiences that she attributed to messages from the Dead. She kept a diary, now in the possession of the Jung family, of these clairvoyant episodes. Carl Jung never made any secret of the fact that, in addition to being a hysteric, his mother was also a psychic, and a good one at that.

Emilie was the youngest of the twelve children of Samuel Preiswerk’s second wife, Augusta Faber, a clairvoyant and spirit-seer in her own right, whose psychic abilities appeared at the age of twenty after a dissociative crisis in which she lay for thirty-six hours in a deathlike cataleptic trance. Consistent with treatment methods of that time, she awoke from her absent state when the tip of a red-hot iron poker was applied to the crown of her head. Upon waking, she was said to immediately begin babbling prophecies [much like the New Dawn prophets. See Part I and Part II of this series]. This pattern of falling into trance and then awakening to reveal information from the world beyond was repeated throughout her life. Carl Jung believed that his mother and his daughter Agathe had inherited their psychic abilities from his grandmother Augusta.”

Another member of this séance entourage of Preiswerk women around Jung was its youngest, Hélène Preiswerk, known as “Helly,” who was fourteen years old when these séances began with Carl Jung.

At the very first séance session with the Preiswerk women and Jung, Helly would discover herself to be a medium to the spirit world.

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