Barbelith Underground > Temple > Jung, Archetypes, and Our Meanings

GL, you're right in assuming that much of what passes for Jungian theory in the occult world is dumbed down.

Jung was a brilliant psychiatrist, and his work is dense and closely reasoned. Believe it or not, he also was a kick-ass (practical and theoretical) occultist.

I'd start by reading Jung's essay "On the Nature of the Psyche." If you want something detailed and thorough, check out "Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious." If you want an overview, I'd read "Man and His Symbols" or "A Guided Tour of the Collected Works."

And if you want to read the book Basilides of Alexandria supposedly dictated to Jung, check out Seven Sermons to the Dead, which has uncanny parallels to the Book of the Law.

Here's a sample from "On the Nature of the Psyche":

I must stress one aspect of the archetypes which will be obvious to anybody who has practical experience of these matters. That is, the archetypes have, when they appear, a distinctly numinous character which can only be described as "spiritual," if "magical" is too strong a word. Consequently this phenomenon is of the utmost significance for the psychology of religion. In its effects it is anything but unambiguous. It can be healing or destructive, but never indifferent, provided of course that it has attained a certain degree of clarity. This aspect deserves the epithet "spiritual" above all else. It not infrequently happens that the archetype appears in the form of a spirit in dreams or fantasy-products, or even comports itself like a ghost. There is a mystical aura about its numinosity, and it has a corresponding effect upon the emotions. It mobilizes philosophical and religion convictions in the very people who deemed themselves miles above any such fits of weakness. Often it drives with unexampled passion and remorseless logic towards its goal and draws the subject under its spell, from which despite the most desperate resistance he is unable, and finally no longer even willing, to break free, because the experience brings with it a depth and fulness of meaning that was unthinkable before. I fully appreciate the resistance that all rooted convictions are bound to put up against psychological discoveries of this kind. With more foreboding than real knowledge, most people feel afraid of the menacing power that lies fettered in each of us, only waiting for the magic word to release it from the spell.

Here's Jung talking about his own work with the spirit (or deity) Philemon:

Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. . . . Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight. He was a mysterious figure to me. At times he seemed to me quite real, as if he were a living personality.

And here's a quote from "Seven Sermons to the Dead":

Man is a gateway, through which from the outer world of gods, daemons, and souls ye pass into the inner world; out of the greater into the smaller world. Small and transitory is man. Already is he behind you, and once again ye find yourselves in endless space, in the smaller of innermost infinity. At immeasurable distance standeth one single Star in the zenith. This is the one god of this one man. This is his world, his pleroma, his divinity.