In Aion (published 1951), Carl Jung sets out to translate ancient symbols in terms of modern understanding of consciousness, because “this may remedy our modern psychological ills by shedding light on the psychic background and secret chambers of the soul.” Though Aion is an exploration of ancient religious symbology, Jung is careful to always tie it back to practical applications to human consciousness and psychic health: “I will write as a physician, not as a proselyte or as a scholar.” He wants to heal modern man by reanimating the truth behind religious symbols — and I find this a worthwhile exercise in our own day and age.
He makes this effort somewhat reluctantly, admitting how symbols are open to a wide array of interpretation, and symbology is an inherently fuzzy science. But, the patterns which emerged between symbology and clinical psychology were too clear for Jung to disregard. He did not believe in coincidences that large, and felt compelled to write Aion…
Jung begins with four chapters introducing the reader to the key tenets of his model of the human psyche, and learnings from his clinical practice:
Psyche is Greek for “Soul”. So Psychology is really the study of the soul — i.e. the phenomena of conscious experience and emotional reaction to it. It is a science of spirituality in that way.
The Self / Psyche is the Whole. Ego and Unconscious are two parts of the whole.
Ego is the Conscious subject of the self.
The Unconscious is comprised of a Personal Unconscious (experiences from our own lives), and a Collective-Impersonal Unconscious, which Jung calls the Shadow, which itself is made of Anima and Animus, Female and Male archetypes. These are essentially blood memories.
The Unconscious (Inner Being) has such autonomy and power over our Self that it can reasonably be conceived of as a God. It works whether we’re conscious of it or not, but the more conscious of it and its processes we are, the less power it has over us. It is one of the most important tasks of psychological hygiene to pay attention to unconscious contents and processes. Increase in self knowledge, from integration of parts of collective unconscious, results in considerable positive influence on the ego-personality.
Integrating the Shadow marks the first stage of the journey of Self knowledge, wisdom, enlightenment. Psychologically, this may be experienced as the “will of god”, the natural force that appear to us as Instinct.
“Only under ideal conditions, when life is simple and unconscious enough to follow instinct without hesitation, the integration works with success. The more civilized, the more conscious and complicated a man is, the less he is able to follow his instincts. His complicated living conditions and the influence of his environment are so strong that they drown the quiet voice of nature. Opinions, beliefs, theories, and collective tendencies appear in nature’s stead and back up all the aberrations of the conscious mind. Deliberate attention should then be given to the unconscious so that the compensation can work. Hence it is especially important to picture the archetypes of the unconscious not as a rushing series of images but as constant, autonomous factors (which, indeed, they are).”
He then spends ten chapters on the real point of this book: showing in extensive (sometimes exhausting) detail the patterns between Christian, Astrological, and Alchemical symbols and text; then connecting those symbols to archetypes he uncovered as a clinical Psychologist. While explaining the symbols, he continually reminds us: that by understanding and incorporating these symbols into our consciousness, we can improve our own inner psychic life. I will include here many excerpts, and do my best to provide context, but the full exploration and support of this symbology is better left to Jung himself.
Christ is a symbol of the Whole Self; the symbols and metaphors used in early Christian writing perfectly exemplify the union of opposites, again and again.
Jung explains how he will go on to show how so many symbols and writings associated with Christ overlap with his model of the Self.
Why focus on Christ, and not other eastern symbols? “Because he is the still-living myth of our culture. He is our cultural hero who, regardless of his historical existence, embodies the myth of the divine Primordial Man, the mystic Adam. He is in us, and we in him.” “He represents a glorified man, a son of God. The image of God in man, made manifest.”
Adam falling, or Christ descending into hell, is the equivalent of psychological integration of collective unconscious.
“The divine child is the symbol of that which is born from the unity of opposites. Unity and totality stand at the highest point on the scale of objective values.”
Christ and the Fishes are a particularly potent pair of astrological symbols.
Jung spends (perhaps too many) pages exploring all the ancient symbols of Pisces, the dueling fish.
He notes 0 AD marked the advent of the Age of Pisces within the Zodiac, a 2-thousand-year aeon within a 24-thousand-year cycle. Pisces is always presented as two fish, both swimming in opposite directions, an inherently dualist symbol. Christ may be interpreted as as the union of those opposites.
Note: Jung never explicitly says so, yet the implied source of the title of the book is the God named Aion, a Hellenistic deity associated with time, the orb or circle encompassing the universe, and the zodiac (a name related with aeons). It is fitting, however, that Jung spends less time on the Pisces aeon and the Zodiac in general, and more time on his concept of God as the union of inner opposites, experienced in man when he acts as a conduit of his Instinct / Inner Being — an aspect of my own concept of God.
“I have dwelt at some length on the dualistic aspects of the Christ-figure because, through the fish symbolism, Christ was assimilated into a world of ideas that seems far removed from the gospels, a world of pagan origin, saturated with astrological beliefs to an extent that we can scarcely imagine today. Christ was born at the beginning of the aeon of the Fishes. It is by no means ruled out that there were educated Christians who knew of the coniunctio maxima of Jupiter and Saturn (Light-bringer, and Dark-star) in Pisces in the year 7 B.C., just as, according to the gospel reports, there were Chaldeans who actually found Christ's birthplace. The Fishes, however, are a double sign.”
The symbol of Leviathan as the evil beast from the deep is the image of discord and disunion of self within our unconscious, the antichrist, the opposite of psychological wholeness. “The Leviathan shall rise from the sea with the advent of the Messiah”
Jung literally draws comparisons between Modernity and Leviathan — a coincidence too large for this neoreactionary reader of Samuel Francis to disregard.
“What is it then that one adept whispers into the ear of another, fearfully looking around lest any betray them, or even guess their secret? Nothing less than this: that through this teaching the One and All, the Greatest in the guise of the Smallest, the Whole which is found within the Part, God himself in his everlasting fires may be caught like a fish in the deep sea (unconscious). Further, that he may be ‘drawn from the deep’ by a Eucharistic act of integration (called God-eating by the Aztecs) and incorporated in the human body.”
In dreams, the ocean always represents the unconscious, and fish, jellyfish, or other sea-creatures represent contents of the unconscious “swimming up” to present themselves to the conscious observer.
Jung spends multiple chapters exploring the connection between the Fish symbols and Alchemical symbols.
Alchemy arose in the 16th century as a Gnostic and Kabballistic system, but eventually gave rise to modern science.
“The part of a whole has the image of the whole in itself – this interior microcosm was the object of alchemical research. Today we call it the collective unconscious, and it is identical in all individuals, and therefore ONE. Out of this universal ONE there is produced in every individual a SUBJECTIVE consciousness i.e. the ego.”
The ‘drawing from the deep’ is associated with the transmutation of the substance into the philosopher’s stone. “Divine white substance is attracted to the animating stone through magnetism” — divine inner being is brought up to the conscious.
“The procedure for making the philosopher’s stone cannot be performed with hands. It is a disposition. This accomplishes the ‘changing of the natures’, the transformation brought about by the great conjunction. The process of transmutation could easily be understood as the realization of unconscious content. Man’s greatest treasure is to be found within man, and not outside him”
“The old master saw the alchemical work as an apocatastasis, a restoring of an initial state in an eschatological one. The alchemists wrote: ‘The end looks to the beginning, and contrariwise.’ Jesus said: ‘Except ye become as little children.’ The Zen koan says: ‘Show me your original face.’ It is a psychological process of development in which the original propensity to wholeness becomes a conscious happening.”
In alchemy, the magnetic north pole is the nous, the ego, the intellect. The hidden transcendent center is the God-image, the unconscious — it is the matter which is drawn up. The magnetism between the two is the unifying force, the union is the one, the Christ.
Jung explores Gnostic symbolism, with the lesson that “The God-image is not something invented, it is an experience that comes upon man spontaneously”
The monad (a circle with a dot in the middle) is the pre-eminent Gnostic symbol of God. The dot represents the true self, the inner self, the Great Inner Being, the Unconscious. “Divinity consists of being attached to this center. Anyone who withdraws [to the circumference] is an ununified man, a brute.”
It is simple to see the Monad and its explanation as similar to the alchemical conclusion stated above — drawing the Inner Being up into Consciousness, the divine substance up to the Philosopher’s Stone.
He identifies the Demiurge myth as a metaphor for a psychological journey.
The myth states that a Demiurge was a fallen angel who created an imperfect material world, and that man has a “seed of divinity” / “spark of the soul” trapped within that he must find and free in order to achieve salvation.
The demiurge represents the Ego — arrogant, capable of creation, but ignorant of God (the total self).
The “spark of the soul” corresponds to the center of the monad, the Inner Being / Instinct, the spark in the depths of the unconscious. The goal is to find that seed, and, in doing so, man realizes the god within and makes himself whole, saves himself, and defeats the demiurge.
Jung explores 11th century Christian monasticists who interpreted astrology to identify their current age as the “era of the Holy Ghost.” They identified with God, deemed themselves Supermen, followed the promptings of the inner man / instinct, and understood the kingdom of heaven to be within.
Jung backs this up with canonical gospels: Luke 6:35 “You shall be sons of the highest.” … John 10:34 “Is it not written in your law: I said, you are gods?” … Luke 17:21 “The Kingdom of God is within you.”
He writes himself: “We need to find our way back to the original, living spirit which, because of its ambivalence, is also a mediator and uniter of opposites, an idea that preoccupied alchemists for many centuries”
“From various hints it is clear that the Gnostics were nothing more than psychologists” — scientists of the soul and consciousness. Clement of Alexandria says “the greatest discipline is to know one’s self, for when a man knows himself, he knows god.”
Gnostic experience of the divine inner being is therefore therapeutic, perhaps even spiritually redeeming: “The unconscious God-image can therefore alter the state of consciousness, just as consciousness can modify the God-image once it has become conscious of it.”
Jung presents himself as Gnostic in this book — not in the sense of believing the literal myths of angels and demiurges, or scorning moral laws to achieve freedom. But rather in the sense of realizing salvation of the soul by directly experiencing the divinity within us as Instinct. He says, “Gnosis is undoubtedly a psychological knowledge whose contents derive from the unconscious.”
Jung concludes:
Psychologically the Self is the union of conscious (masculine) and unconscious (feminine). But the Whole Self appears in all of these symbols, as the union of opposites, as God-images, and as Christ.
Dualist or Polytheist religions focus on the anima/animus. Monotheists focus on the whole self. This explains a lot of the dual images of Christ that the early church had to navigate: two fishes, Holy Father and Virgin Mother, Lightbringer Jupiter and Dark-sun Saturn, Christ and Antichrist, and more which I have not expounded upon in this summary.
The Gnostics made the best symbols of self, focused more on the human psyche / conscious experience of soul; and this symbology was carried forward by the Alchemists into the later stages of the Pisces aeon.
All throughout Aion, Jung comments on Modernity, which is notable considering the book was written in Europe during the aftermath of World War 2. He identifies an urgent, existential problem of the death of Western spirituality at the hand of Rationalism, Materialism, and Modernism. He believes Western peoples need to re-integrate Christian symbolism (or at least, symbols of wholeness) into their consciousness so that they may become psychologically healthy again, and avert a disastrous, spiritually dead future.
“The dechristianization of our world, the Luciferian development of science and technology, and the frightful material and moral destruction left behind from the great wars, have been compared with New Testament prophecies concerned with the coming of the Anti-Christ”
“Erstwhile symbols no longer express what is now welling up from the unconscious as the end-result of the development of Christian consciousness through the centuries. This end-result is a true spiritual image, not a false spirit of arrogance, hysteria, wooly-mindedness, criminal amorality, and doctrinaire fanaticism, a purveyor of shoddy spiritual goods, spurious art, philosophical stutterings, and Utopian humbug, fit only to be fed wholesale to the mass man of today. That is what the post-Christian spirit looks like.”
“The antichristian era is to blame that the spirit became non spiritual and that the vitalizing archetype gradually degenerated into rationalism, intellectualism, and doctrinairism, all of which leads straight to the tragedy of modern times now hanging over our heads like the sword of Damocles. The threat of the devil’s coming has already been foretold in the New Testament—for the less he is recognized the more dangerous he is. Who would suspect him under high sounding names such as public welfare, lifelong security, peace among nations? He hides under idealisms, under -isms in general, and of these the most pernicious is doctrinarianism. The present age must come to terms with the facts as they are,… that it is not only tearing the world apart politically, but has put a schism on the human heart. We need to find our way back to the original, living spirit which, because of its ambivalence, is also a mediator and uniter of opposites, an idea that preoccupied alchemists for many centuries”
“The Church has little power left, but she pastures her sheep on the ruins of Europe. Her message works, IF one knows how to combine her language, ideas, and customs with an understanding of the present. But the Church wraps her message in sacrosanct words hallowed by age.” The bridge from dogma to the inner experience of the individual has broken down. Instead, dogma is “believed”; it is made a supreme authority regardless of its contradictions.
“We can see how Christ was assimilated to symbols that also meant the Kingdom of God — the grain of mustard seed, the hidden treasure, the pearl of great price. He and his kingdom have the same meaning. It represents the assimilation and integration of Christ into the human psyche. The result is seen in the growth of human personality, and flowering of consciousness. These attainments are greatly threatened in our anti-Christian age, not only by delusional sociopolitical systems, but by the rationalistic hubris which tears our consciousness from its transcendent roots.”
“It may strike my reader as strange that a physician and psychologist should be so insistent about dogma. But I MUST emphasize it. If we wish to understand the impact of symbols on the unconscious, if we wish to gain a closer understanding of the dogma, we must consider first the myths that underlie Christianity and then the whole of mythology as the expression of a universal disposition in man. This disposition I have called the collective unconscious, the existence of which can be inferred only from individual phenomenology. The investigator comes back to the individual. The motive force that produces configurations of archetypes and thought-forms and unconscious organizers of ideas cannot be distinguished from the transconscious factor known as instinct. There is therefore no justification for visualizing the archetype as anything other than the image of instinct in man. When a living organism is cut off from its roots, it loses the connections with the foundations of its existence and must necessarily perish. The present tendency to destroy all tradition or render it unconscious could interrupt the normal process of development for several hundred years and substitute an interlude of barbarism.”
“A predominantly scientific and technological education can bring about a spiritual regression, and considerable increase in psychic dissociation. With hygiene and prosperity alone, a man is still far from health. Loss of roots and lack of tradition neuroticize the masses and prepare them for collective hysteria, which calls for collective therapy, which consists in abolition of liberty and terrorization. Where rationalistic materialism holds sway, states tend to develop less into prisons than into lunatic asylums.”
Agree or not with his conclusions, the man was a genius, one of the pre-eminent trailblazers of the inner frontier, and so the conclusions cannot be disregarded.
This reader, for one, is stunned to have discovered this book — I cannot believe it is not wider known, that I have not discovered it before. It reminds me of when I discovered Leviathan And Its Enemies by Samuel Francis: i.e. here is a book of such tremendous and lucid truths that it alters my worldview, or rather, it synthesizes my worldview into a new framework based on things I intuited to be true but could not piece together so masterfully as the author. Further, like with Leviathan, I had the same feeling of indignation that the book did not hold more cultural influence, because I felt that the power of its truth was world-altering.
The reasons that Aion did not “catch on” are likely the same as they were with Leviathan: it sometimes takes too scholarly a tone; it is often redundant and overly detailed; it offers no praxis for how to specifically apply its truths into the real world; and, perhaps most significantly, there is unfortunately only a small group of people (with limited cultural influence) within whom the message will resonate.
But by your very presence on this page, you are among those few, and I have cut through the scholarly tone, and summarized the details for you. And so, now, I hope, there is no excuse for this light to be stuck under a wicker basket any longer. I sincerely hope, if this message resonates within you, that you share it.
This is a really good effort. I think Jordan Peterson is leading people back to spirituality, led himself by Jung. There is so much obscurity and brain fog around us now, akin to darkness and unconsciousness. I have read Erdinger as an introduction and I'm grappling with the interpretation of the four quaternities as parallel to the four periods and two fishes of the piscean aion. I wonder whether Jesus is the fishing rod as well, and whether we all need to be water bearers as well as the water, rather than waiting for something to herald the new aion. I think it's already here since 1989 end of cold War and identity has been central to the West and its decline ever since. I wonder what Jung thought of China, and Russia: most likely not as an enemy of the West.