CGJung
From: Deborah Friday, May 09, 2003 9:54 PM
Subject: Re: ultima strauss
I was asked about Jung and the occult. Joseph Campbell wrote:
"During early youth, Jung thought of archaeology as a career. Theology, too, interested him, though not in his father's sense: for the concept of Christ's life as the sole decisive feature in the drama of God and man he regarded as belying Christ's own teaching that the Holy Ghost would take his place among men after his death. He regarded Jesus as a man; hence, either fallible or a mere mouthpiece for the Holy Ghost, who, in turn, was 'a manifestation of the inconceivable God.' "
I suppose that could be considered occult by modern Fundamentalists—who I dare say—with their feet planted firmly in a positivist, material / literal ground floor of scriptural truth, are limited in perspective re the psyche. Occult seems by nature a relative term.
Esoteric? Jung wrote:
"Nature is not only aristocratic, she is also esoteric. Yet no man of understanding will thereby be induced to make a secret of what he knows, for he realizes only too well that the secret of psychic development can never be betrayed, simply because that development is a question of individual capacity." CW17
So much for an occult conspiracy. And what of an implied exclusiveness, "the chosen" so necessary for such conspiracy? He states:
"if all the world's traditions were cut off at a single blow, the whole mythology and the whole history of religion would start all over again with the next generation."
In sum, what Jung demonstrated was true negative capability:
"I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions - not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation of something I do not know. In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidity underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being."
So much for Jung BELIEVING in the laundry list attributed to him over on Heaven's Register. Scroll down on their page to the link on transference and consider the attitude towards the unconscious demonstrated there. The attitude towards the unconscious seems key, the bedrock and linchpin of a psyche, to me.)
So then what do we have from Jung? A generosity willing to look at the full psyche, a psyche that flows from the great tap root, a psyche as real as any matter in time space, and each individual as much a part of it as the current year's fruit or blossom. Jung in a nutshell. Add to that, as Culiano put it more recently, "although we still mistake the space of the mind ... for the space outside, we are learning the former is no less powerful than the latter. Identity, power, and historical truth have their roots in these imaginative realms. Every individual thinks part of a tradition and therefore is thought by it..."
It seems some simply mix Jung up with some of his followers, those men in the white uniforms that hang out at the chateau of Montsegur at the Winter's solstice. The model of the chakra can be applied very well to all this: simply, there are fundamentalists in all religions, faiths and non-faiths, just as there are positivist scientists. And so, fundi jungians... remember his comment that he was glad he wasn't one. Jung resisted the school of jung, its very creation, knowing that he would become dogma. But here's the important part: people take things in at the point they are "at"... literal at first, blossoming to grasp the nature of paradox as they go along. We have to trust each other, and above all, he knew that. So if a segment of people read him and fancy themselves adepts and grand Pooh-Bahs, so what? It will just be back on the wheel with all of us... sooner or later to get beyond the need to be king of the mountain. We all move on at some point (or should say, are all moved around the same point). That's the business of that teaching that the Holy Ghost would take her place among humans. It's a metaphor—like the New Age.
Jung's approach to magic was that of working the horizon of the unconscious, ala Couliano's statement, reestablishing "a peaceful coexistence between the conscious and unconscious when coexistence is under attack." Building walls with stone and brick play along the same horizon, as Jung and Churchill and a world of children have experienced. I think a great understanding of magic is in Jung's Transformation Symbolism and the Mass. As a certain Mike Dickman said, "the Mass is not a parody of the Magnum Opus. The Mass is an exact manifestation of the Magnum Opus."
The perspective is that the deity is named by man and so becomes created in the psyche. What then is named, was named, but the forces of the cosmos as they unfold in us. But the incarnation is man's in this roundabout way:
"It is not man as such who has to be regenerated or born again as a renewed whole, but, according to the statements of mythology, it is the hero or god who rejuvenates himself. These figures are generally expressed or characterized by libido-symbols (light, fire, sun, etc.), so that it looks as if they represented psychic energy. They are, in fact, personifications of the libido.
"Now it is a fact amply confirmed by psychiatric experience that all parts of the psyche, inasmuch as they possess a certain autonomy, exhibit a personal character, like the split-off products of hysteria and schizophrenia, mediumistic 'spirits'; figures seen in dreams, etc. Every split-off portion of libido, every complex, has or is a (fragmentary) personality. At any rate, that is how it looks from the purely observational standpoint.
"But when we go into the matter more deeply, we find that they are really archetypal formations. There are no conclusive arguments against the hypothesis that these archetypal figures are endowed with personality at the outset and are not just secondary personalizations. In so far as the archetypes do not represent mere functional relationships, they manifest themselves as daimones, as personal agencies. In this form they are felt as actual experiences and are not "figments of the imagination," as rationalism would have us believe. Consequently, man derives his human personality only secondarily from what the myths call his descent from the gods and heroes; or, to put it in psychological terms, his consciousness of himself as a personality derives primarily from the influence of quasi-personal archetypes.
"Numerous mythological proofs could be advanced in support of this view. .... It is, then, in the first place the god who transforms himself, and only through him does man take part in the transformation.". CW5
Personifications of the libido, the life-force itself. (Eros exactly manifests this. Follow his evolution, his paradoxical transformations.) The later Collected Works are Jung's empirical explorations of alchemical and Gnostic texts. His great work is there. He wrote:
I lay particular stress on the phenomena of assimilation in alchemy because they are, in a sense, a prelude to the modern approximation between empirical psychology and Christian dogma—and approximation which Nietzsche clearly foresaw. Psychology, as a science, observes religious ideas from the standpoint of their psychic phenomenology without intruding on their theological content. It puts the dogmatic images into the category of psychic contents, because this constitutes its field of research. It is compelled to do so by the nature of the psyche itself: it does not, like alchemy, try to explain psychic processes in theological terms, but rather to illuminate the darkness of religious images by relating them to similar images in the psyche.... A rapprochement between empirical science and religious experience would in my opinion be fruitful for both. Harm can result only if one side or the other remains unconscious of the limitations of its claim to validity. CW vol 14, 457
Jung's "Basilides" text — the Red Book— is sometimes interpreted as proof of an occult obsession. But it seems an exploration to me, in imitation of the earliest alchemists, a long-standing tradition. Peter Kingsley notes:
"The introductory section in the Turba certainly contains doxographic material, yet it is not just a doxographic text—any more than the section on the Presocratics in Olympiodorus is just a doxographic text. On the contrary, the Olympiodorus piece plainly testifies to a self-conscious principle of composition: a principle that involved taking items of doctrine attributed to individual Presocratics in the doxographic literature, using those items of doctrine as starting points for brief meditations on alchemical themes, and attributing these meditations to the Presocratics himself. As for the alchemists' motive in adopting such a procedure, it is clear that their purpose was to trace an affiliation between the Presocratic ideas and their own alchemical tradition."
Racking my brain here. Astrology? Jung saw it as a mapping of the projection of the psyche and studied it and suggested further study for what it reflected in that regard. Long standing tradition, after all, there for all to see for centuries in mosaic on the Vatican walls... Hermes Trismegistus in tile on the floor...
What did Jung warn about but the repressed religious fx manifesting as dogma, fundamentalism, a material compensation for spiritual things... as we see so plainly now on C St. and FOX TV and John Ashcroft etc.
Re the Platonic, I look to sources like Peter Kingsley, Stanley Rosen, Robert Lloyd Mitchell. That Athens was the beginning of all things, only savages before it, and all leading up brick upon brick to our royal highness and grand evolved-ness... We know that's all a big Lie. As for them Greeks— James Davidson says (in Courtesans and Fishcakes) :
"There are two main dangers in approaching the Greeks. The first is to think of them as our cousins and to interpret everything in our own terms. We are entering a very different world, very strange and very foreign, a world inconceivably long ago, centuries before Christ or Christianity, a century before the first Chinese emperor's model army, a world indeed without our centuries, or weeks or minutes or markings of time. And yet these Greeks will sometimes seem very familiar, very lively, warm and affable. Occasionally we might even get their jokes. We must be careful, however, that we are not being deceived by false friends. Often what seems most familiar, most obvious, most easy to understand is in fact the most peculiar thing of all. On the other hand, we must resist the temptation to push the Greeks further into outer space than is necessary. They are not our cousins, but neither are they our opposites. They are just different, just trying to be themselves."
(And I think you can extrapolate this to all the ancients.) As for what the Greeks actually said, it's important to have new translations as old ones continue to turn up biased: there are whole careers and schools to defend that were and are based on missed second guesses and agendas. Kingsley says:
"Hesitant interpretations evolve into dogmatic ones, which are then assumed to be correct just because they were stated with such certainty: this predictable chain of human events represents as great a danger for the historian of ideas as it does for the historian of facts."
But fear not... As Jung knew, books will keep turning up in the desert. Every cuneiform bit of clay that evidences a more ancient root and source of a more recent Biblical wisdom will somehow turn up in desert or drainage ditch, no matter how many museums are sacked, or how many triumphant meetings held in Ur try to rewrite history. "The victor is never asked if he tells the truth." But he can't bury all the evidence.
"There is no excusing classical scholars today for ignoring the developments in scientific theory and practice throughout the twentieth century, and continuing to pursue their own specialized interests apparently unaware of the fact that many people at the forefront of contemporary science are no longer able to accept that distinguishing between mind and matter represents a genuine approach to reality—let alone an achievement—or that the basic Aristotelian dictum of the 'excluded middle' (that something is either x or is not x, but cannot be both simultaneously) necessarily holds good. For anyone accustomed to the world of the Presocratics and also the world of modern science and cosmology, it is difficult not to notice how the second of these realms appears to moving closer and closer to the first with its increasing appeal to bold paradox, to the simple but also the enigmatic and—dare we say—mythological...." Peter Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic
Jungian, yes? Kingsley also tells us that it was only Jung who was willing to look with a fresh, unbiased eye at some of the earliest alchemical texts. This is fundamental to seeing the link between West and East, and the duality/One/ paradox, which is the true Nature :
(re the Turba:) "This idea of 'a point in the sun' at the very center of the earth is at first sight both paradoxical and bizarre, so much so that modern scholarship has cheerfully followed Julius Riska in altering the text to give it a more acceptable meaning. But Ruska's 'emendation' is in itself far from plausible; and above all, unnecessary. The one person who, since Ruska's edition in 1931, has seen the need to retain the manuscript reading has been Carl Jung. Owing to his familiarity with alchemical literature he was quick to realize that the strange idea of the sun growing out of the middle of the earth was fundamental to alchemical doctrine. More specifically, he noted not only that even the earliest of Latin commentators on the Turba philsophorum found the reading 'point of the sun' in their texts—and interpreted it without any hesitation—but also that this same basic idea of a fiery, generative point at the heart of matter can be traced back to Gnostic writings of the very first centuries AD."
Does it not seem that much opposition to Jung is—as it ever was—political?
And since I mention politics—re the Founding fathers: the Deist mindset of 18th C Enlightenment (for this, great source is Margaret Jacobs ) is what is reflected in the liberal generosity of the Constitution. It's the Enlightenment beyond the present net of limitations cast on it. It wasn't 'rationalism' alone. Our Founding Fathers soundly debated the notion of a national religion and voted it down—and that's the truth of the matter no matter how much the Heritage Foundation wants to distort it.
In sum, Jung pulled the rug out from under the cherished western prejudices. He went back to the root and followed the vine... Those two pairs —the quaternity— that represented the original elements as Empedocles and those before him wrote so many years ago: All water, the tears of Persephone: The deflowering that is destructive, creative, and transforming: The necessary agony of the conditions of incarnation.
By my soul, Deborah
Jung on Freud (Yes, it is like antique philosophy. An education.)
——-
From: EMC Sent: Friday, May 09, 2003 9:14 PM
Subject: Re: ultima strauss
Them Straussian neo-cons — it makes perfect sense: the ancients, just like the neo-cons, had no concept of universal human rights. They're a very good match.
And, by the way, neither Plato nor Aristotle were supporters of democracy. Though it is completely debatable whether he thought it could be realized, Plato argued for a utopian oligarchy, and Aristotle's student, the author of the Ath. Pol., does not seem to have a decided taste for democracy (see his take on Theramenes, for example).
Likewise, as David Stockton argues, it's difficult to discern any strong bias towards any particular political system in many of the ancient sources, including Thucydides and Herodotus.
In fact, the more I study the radical democracy of the classical period, the more it seems that the ancients really did very little theorizing about democracy, but that democracy came into being as a new device in the aristocrats' political arsenal. Really—aristocratic dynamism. The democracy of the Greeks—literally in Aristotle: the right of the people to gather in the same place. The Greeks had no concept of rights theory; democracy for them was a way of settling civil disputes.
All of this is just evidence that the neo-cons want to stamp out the obvious debt of American democracy to the Enlightenment. And why should they want to do that?
love to all, e
Individuation, Harry, is what will defeat Voldermort.
Re: America is a religion ,
,
George Monbiot writes :
As Clifford Longley shows in his fascinating book Chosen People, published last year, the founding fathers of the USA, though they sometimes professed otherwise, sensed that they were guided by a divine purpose. Thomas Jefferson argued that the Great Seal of the United States should depict the Israelites, "led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night". George Washington claimed, in his inaugural address, that every step towards independence was "distinguished by some token of providential agency". Longley argues that the formation of the American identity was part of a process of "supersession". The Roman Catholic church claimed that it had supplanted the Jews as the elect, as the Jews had been repudiated by God. The English Protestants accused the Catholics of breaking faith, and claimed that they had become the beloved of God. The American revolutionaries believed that the English, in turn, had broken their covenant: the Americans had now become the chosen people, with a divine duty to deliver the world to God's dominion. Six weeks ago, as if to show that this belief persists, George Bush recalled a remark of Woodrow Wilson's. "America," he quoted, "has a spiritual energy in her which no other nation can contribute to the liberation of mankind."
The New Jerusalem... The excerpt above reflects Enlightenment Masonic reasoning--Masonry, which called itself "the science of symbols." What Monbiot fails to say is that it is that very reasoning --*the ability to think symbolically*-- that has been lost between the Georges Washington and Bush.
It is that ability that psychologists like Jung sought to restore, especially to the religious impulse, which, if left unchecked, plays out in a literal, material insistence that amounts to psychosis. It's what we see now in the Falwells, Tom Delays, Ashcrofts--all the more dangeous because they urge stealth.
Mars is bright tonight...
How to acknowledge Intuition yet lean towards the light? Some middle way, some centering... an unending process: individuation.
Ever in search...
x's
Deborah
From Deborah, Wednesday, June 18, 2003 4:49 PM
Subject: Re: ultima strauss
I know the Weekly Standard (colorfully called Rupert Murdoch's Neo-Con rag) isn't something that goes down well when swallowed—but this morsel does give some taste of the discomfort those as Eros-centered as — say, all of us, certainly Jung—have with what passes as philosophy, with those endless whole nine yards of hard-line analytical academia.
All this is missed by the Strassian-embracing Neo-Cons, even as they suck down the sublime waters, bending stiffly from the waist, kowtowing toward the same ultimate source as Rosen... Guess Rosen must have glanced up at the right moment—seen the human reflection?
"The Beautiful is difficult."
Minding your own vision, reading sources as directly as you can: Isn't that the message in the bottle that keeps bobbing up, washing onto our shore? Easy for hard heads keeping everything sorted, all the ducks in rows, deeming negative capability the height of slop, to look down long noses at the flare of the more passionate nostril. :) So what? May their mouths relax enough to receive some kiss, some great O of surprise, some ahhh of humble-awed knee-trembling mystery. Some great Frenching tongue... The elements, everstirred by Eros, only standing still when one wraps tightly in his wings: Life—life so much bigger, big enough to contain death and for death to contain it back again.
Was that a poem? Anyway—here's a better one as well as the article:
what time is it?
it is by every star a different time,
and each most falsely true;
or so subhuman superminds declare
—nor all their times encompass me and you:
when are we never, but forever now
(hosts of eternity; not guests of seem)
believe me, dear, clocks have enough to do
without confusing timelessness and times.
Time cannot children, poets, lovers tell—
measure imagine, mystery, a kiss
—not though mankind would rather know than feel;
mistrusting utterly that timelessness
whose absence would make your whole life and my
(and infinite our) merely to undie -e.e.cummings
Modern Ancients Stanley Rosen's achievement. by Thomas Hibbs 11/25/2002, Volume 008, Issue 11
summa felicitas,
deborah
note: Freud wrote to his future wife that
"it is neither pleasant nor edifying to watch the masses amusing themselves; we at least don't have much taste for it. . . . I remember something that occurred to me while watching a performance of Carmen: the mob gives vent to its appetites and we deprive ourselves. We deprive ourselves in order to maintain our integrity, we economize in our health, our capacity for enjoyment, our emotions; we save ourselves for something, not knowing for what. And this constant suppression of natural instincts gives us the quality of refinement. . . . Why don't we get drunk? . . . Why don't we fall in love with a different person every month? . . . Thus we strive more toward avoiding pain than seeking pleasure. And the extreme case are people like ourselves who chain themselves together for life and death, who deprive themselves and pine for years so as to remain faithful, and who probably wouldn't survive a catastrophe that robbed them of their beloved. . . . Our whole conduct of life presupposes that we are protected from the direst poverty and that the possibility exists of being able to free ourselves increasingly from social ills. The poor people, the masses, could not survive without their thick skins and their easygoing ways. Why should they take their relationships seriously when all the misfortune nature and society have in store threatens those they love? Why should they scorn the pleasures of the moment when no other awaits them? The poor are too helpless, too exposed, to behave like us. When I see the people indulging themselves, disregarding all sense of moderation, I invariably think that this is their compensation for being a helpless target for all the taxes, epidemics, sicknesses, and evils of social institutions."
Gertrude Himmelfarb aside, what we see is that open sexuality in the 19th C -- and Jung was born in 1875 -- was associated with the lower classes. (They were like beasts of the field in the mind of the century's most open confessor, the writer of My Secret Life. Reading him astounds because of the contradictory and unconscious attitudes he so freely conveys .) But -- my point is that Jung, like most all his generation, carried the same baggage he was working out openly in his theories: Sexual repression was part of a 'respectable' class identity.
Jung wrote this about Freud, and I think it applies well to our current crop of conservatives:
The historical conditions which preceded Freud were such that they made a phenomenon like himself necessary, and it is precisely the fundamental tenet of his teaching-namely, the repression of sexuality-that is most clearly conditioned in this historical sense. Like his greater contemporary Nietzsche, Freud stands at the end of the Victorian era, which was never given such an appropriate name on the Continent despite the fact that it was just as characteristic of the Germanic and Protestant countries as of the Anglo-Saxon. The Victorian era was an age of repression, of a convulsive attempt to keep anaemic ideals artificially alive in a framework of bourgeois respectability by constant moralizings. These ideals were the last offshoots of the collective religious ideas of the Middle Ages, and shortly before had been severely shaken by the French Enlightenment and the ensuing revolution. Hand in hand with this, ancient truths in the political field had become hollow and threatened to collapse. It was still too soon for the final overthrow, and consequently all through the nineteenth century frantic efforts were made to prevent the Christian Middle Ages from disappearing altogether. Political revolutions were stamped out, experiments in moral freedom were thwarted by middle-class public opinion, and the critical philosophy of the late eighteenth century reached its end in a renewed, systematic attempt to capture the world in a unified network of thought on the medieval model. But in the course of the nineteenth century enlightenment slowly broke through, particularly in the form of scientific materialism and rationalism.
This is the matrix out of which Freud grew, and its mental characteristics have shaped him along foreordained lines. He has a passion for explaining everything rationally, exactly as in the eighteenth century; one of his favourite maxims is Voltaire's "Ecrasez l'infame." With a certain satisfaction he invariably points out the flaw in the crystal; all complex psychic phenomena like art, philosophy, and religion fall under his suspicion and appear as "nothing but" repressions of the sexual instinct. para 45, Sigmund Freud in his Historical Setting CGJUNG CW 15
Deborah
back pages
Dark City: Jung
and the search for light
Apr 26 1998
"When all visible light is extinguished, one finds the light of
the self"
Carl Jung's commentaries on the symbolism of alchemy are, of course, very Masonic. After all, Masonry drew greatly from Alchemy. Mackey's 19th C Encyclopedia of Freemasonry states
Freemasonry and alchemy have sought the same results (the lesson of Divine Truth and the doctrine of immortal life), and they have both sought it by the same method of symbolism. It is not, therefore, strange that in the eighteenth century, and perhaps before, we find an incorporation of much of the science of alchemy into that of Freemasonry.
In Alchemical Studies, he
refers to the Christian
philosopher, St. Augustine (who was not in any way a fan of the
old pagans): …..the lapis (*philosopher's stone, also the grail,
depending on the parable) is none other than the figure of light
veiled in matter. It is in this sense that St. Augustine quotes 1
Thessalonians 5:5, "Ye are all the children of light and the
children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness,"
and distinguishes two forms of knowledge, a cognitio vespertina
and a cognitio matutina, the first corresponding to the scientia
creaturae and the second to the scientea Creatoris.
Jung quotes Augustine’s City of God, XI, vii. :
"For the knowledge of the creature, in comparison the other
knowledge of the Creator, is but a twilight; and so it dawns and
breaks into morning when the creature is drawn to the love and
praise of the creator. Nor is it ever darkened save when the
creator is abandoned by the love of the creature."
He goes on: "If we equate cognitio with consciousness, then
Augustine’s thought would suggest that the merely human and
natural consciousness gradually darkens, as at nightfall. But just
as evening gives birth to morning, so from the darkness arises a
new light, the Stella matutina, which is at once the evening and
the morning star – Lucifer, the light bringer.
Mercurius is by no means the Christian devil – the latter could be
said to be a ‘diabolization’ of Lucifer or of mercurious.
Mercurius is an adumbration of the primordial light-bringer who is
never himself the light, but a light bringer who brings the light
of nature, the light of the moon and the stars which fades before
the new morning light. Of this light St. Augustine says that it
will never turn to darkness unless the Creator is abandoned by the
love of his creatures."
Jung continues with some ideas of Geneses…
"… on the 6th day, knowledge of the land animals and of the ipsius
hominis, of man himself. The cognitio matutina is self-knowledge,
but the cognitio vespertina is knowledge of man. (*the Latin"
matutina and vespertina sorts of little mornings…) As St Augustine
describes it, the cognitio matutina gradually grows old and loses
itself in the ‘ten thousand things’ and finally comes to man,
although one would expect this to have happened already with the
onset of self-knowledge. But if this were true, Augustine’s
parable would have lost its meaning by contradicting itself. Such
an obvious lapse cannot be ascribed to so gifted a man. His real
meaning is that self-knowledge is the scientia Creatoris, a
morning light revealed after a night during which consciousness
slumbered, wrapped in the darkness of the unconscious. But the
knowledge arising with this first light finally and inevitably
becomes the scientio hominis, the knowledge of man, who asks
himself: "Who is it that knows everything? Why it is myself." That
marks the coming of darkness out of which arises the seventh day
of rest: "But the rest of God signifies the rest of those who rest
in God." The Sabbath is therefore the day on which man returns to
God and receives anew the light of the cognitio matutina. And this
day has no evening.
Augustine: (De vera religione LXXII, Migne, P.L., vol.34, col.
154) "Go not outside, return to yourself; truth dwells in the
inner man. And if you find that you are by nature changeable,
transcend yourself. But remember that when you transcend yourself,
you must transcend yourself as a reasoning soul."
Augustine is also the one who talks about Christ going to the
cross like a bridegroom to the bride, and all that is in the
Gnostic gospels…
Jung ends:
"It seems to me that Augustine apprehended a great truth, namely
that every spiritual truth gradually turns into something
material, becoming no more than a tool in the hand of man. (*Art?)
In consequence, man can hardly avoid seeing himself as a knower,
yes, even as a creator, with boundless possibilities at his
command. The alchemist was basically this sort of person, but much
less so than modern man. An alchemist could still pray:
"Purge the horrible darkness of our mind," but modern man is
already so darkened that nothing beyond the light of his own
intellect illuminates his world. ("Occasus Christi, passo
Christi." Enarrationes in Ps. CIII, Sermo III, 21 (Migne, P.L.,
vol. 37, col.1374))
That surely is why such strange things are happening to our
much-lauded civilization, more like a Gotterdammerung that any
normal twilight.
Mercurious, the two-faced god, comes as a lumen naturae, the
Servator and Salvator, only to those whose reason strives towards
the highest light ever
received by man, and who do not trust exclusively to the cognitio
vespertina. For those who are unmindful of this light, the lumen
naturae turns into a perilous ignis fatuus, and the psychopomp
into a diabolical seducer. Lucifer, who could have brought light,
becomes the father of lies whose voice is our time, supported by
press and radio, revels in orgies of propaganda and leads untold
millions to ruin."
I bring all this up because I
think it is beautiful, but also to point out to the hecklers,
antis, and fundamentalists that much of what they attack in
Masonry is symbolism drawn from the same source as their own
religion. Symbols are tools, just as parables are lessons, and Masons
understand that -- just as Jung did.
deborah
"What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every
government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing
and concentrating all cares and powers into one body, no matter
whether of the autocrats of Russia or France, or of the
aristocrats of a Venetian Senate."
~Thomas Jefferson to Joseph C. Cabell, 1816.
"Just as the President has a right to nominate without assigning
reasons, so has the Senate a right to dissent without giving
theirs." ~ George Washington, Conference with a Committee of the
United States Senate, August 8, 1789, in The Papers of George
Washington 401 (W.W. Abbot ed., U. Press of Va. 1989)
