The following two pieces were written in October and September of 2002 (respectively). They were written in response to someone on a forum I used to partake in and s/he was inquiring into Carl Jung's Septem Sermones ad Mortuos. I dredged these up because someone else recently quoted the second paragraph of Sermo I on G+ and I thought: ah, Jung, I like that--where's it from (i.e., I did not recognize it as the second paragraph of Sermo I)? So I Googled it and found I had already encountered it before. Y'know how it is with memory, or, at least, I know how it is with my memory, heh. Anyway, simply thought I'd reacquaint myself with both Jung's text and my own and figured I might as well collect it here on Drifting Labyrinths.
The first piece is an attempt at answering the forum member's question:
What
are your thoughts on the text?
And the second piece is an attempt at answering a different question this person had asked:
What do people think of Jung's concept that alchemy and gnosticism
formed a kind of unconscious to the institutional relgions that labelled
such beliefs and preactises as heretical?
Here is the text for Septem Sermones ad Mortuos in case you'd like to read it for yourself.
*******
First Piece
Attempting answers (complement: questions; combination: analysis) at ancient analogies.
First thoughts roll with sevens. Seven days in a week, seven classical planets (recall the celestial bodies which circled round a stationary earth), lucky seven, The Chariot, seven major stages in the alchemical process: calcination, putrefaction, solution, distillation, conjunction, sublimation, and philosophic congelation. And of course, our seven sermons.
The Chariot is driven by the light and the dark engines—it is the two forces which power the single vehicle. If we can extract anything from Sermo I, it is a discussion of opposites, but on several layers. We are told that “[t]he pairs of opposites are qualities of the plemora which are not, because each balance each.” Above this statement we are shown eleven pairs of opposites as examples of the binary pairings which negate one another in the plemora. We will now list these as eleven unordered pairs: {effective, ineffective}, {fullness, emptiness}, {living, dead}, {difference, sameness}, {light, dark}, {hot, cold}, {force, matter}, {time, space}, {good, evil}, {beautiful, ugly}, {one, many}. It is these and other pairings that exist as one and the same thing in the plemora; that is to say, they don’t exist in the plemora because it of itself has no qualities. So we get a further pairing of {existence, non-existence} (which may seem similar, but perhaps not readily identical to {living, dead}), as a non/quality (and here we note the ‘/’ is used to indicate, in this case, both the absence and presence of a quality) of the plemora. We might want to recognize that some of Jung’s work focuses on the pairing {internal, external} with respect to individual; in different words, Jung looks at connections between a person’s psyche and the manifest world.
E.E. Rehmus informs us that the plemora itself is the Gnostic divine being, it is the Universal Soul. He goes on to note that all aeons emanate from it. In a Jungian sense, we might consider this to be the archetype of the Self, and from the Self, we derive selves—personal aeons or the aeon of an individual—in the small. In Sermo I, we are told that the plemora is nothingness and fullness, and I recall from a lecture on Jung that he felt the Self was also empty, yet contained every other archetype and, in this sense, is full. We are also told, in the Sermo, many other contrary things about the plemora. In particular, we are informed that we are not part of the plemora, that “we are from the plemora infinitely removed,” because to be a distinct creature is to be distinct form the other, and in specific, distinct form this Universal Soul, and in this Soul there is no distinction; however, we are also told that “because we are parts of the plemora, the plemora is also in us.” So we see here a further pairing of {plemora, individual} or, perhaps more in a Jungian flavour {other, self}. What we can begin to see is that the plemora and the individual, or the self and the other, share an identity in so far as each pairing, in their non/existence in the plemora, become one thing—we’ve denoted this one object by borrowing from set theoretic notation: the unordered binary pairing {x, y}—which is nothing (but of course, everything = nothing). We can note a numeric example of this pair as framed in computational language: {1, 0}.
More important to notice is that “the plemora is both the beginning and end of the created beings,” and that “the plemora prevadeth altogether, yet hath created being no share thereof.” So here we have further pairings of contraries giving rise to our existence, and yet, canceling out that existence. We are told that the plemora has not created being, but yet, it is the end and beginning of existence, and that it is ubiquitous throughout existence. In the pattern of thought being followed, the plemora has {nothing, everything} to do with non/existence. Or in different, but unsurprising words, the plemora is all and it is nothing, that we are both the plemora itself and entirely distinct from it. It is in our being—our existence—that we continue and create distinction: “[w]hen we distinguish qualities of the plemora, we are speaking from the ground of our own distinctiveness and concerning our own distinctiveness.” Thus, since the plemora is empty and possesses no qualities, which is to say that it is full and posses all qualities, it is we who ‘pull out’ (‘push in’?) the pairings, and we who further divide the elements of the pairings—one here, and one over there. Put differently, it is we who create things, it is we who are the blind demiurges that shape the world, it is we who are the plemora. But if we weren’t blind and could see this in its entirety (its eternity), then this “would mean self-dissolution,” and “[t]herein both thinking and being cease.” Perhaps this would be the end (beginning?) of the Jungian goal: full integration of the shadow into the personality.
But still, there is nothing that “standeth [as] something fixed, or in some way established from the beginning.” So we speak of “qualities of the plemora which are not.” In other words, even our groupings of these pairs into units, and then into non/existence stemming from, into, through, an empty and full plemora is still creating distinction, it is still our thoughts about the plemora, and thus, “we have said nothing concerning the plemora.” “What is changeable” is the shifting thoughts and experiences by which, even in recognizing an x and its contrary y as an {x, y}, and then negating this in the plemora—which is ourselves, we generate the individual as “fixed and certain…or even as a quality itself.” “The plemora is rent in us”: there appears to be a necessity of something as it exists in the tension between everything and nothing, where {nothing, everything} is {infinite, eternal}, and yet, not that at all. In other words, we are thinking of a way, or a being told ways in which we can think of the unthinkable, by which we can ascertain something outside of our experience. Put differently still, the Sermo is both conditioning, reconditioning, and unconditioning our ways of thinking with respect to ultimate reality: it offers us tools that work on our neurosemantic interpretations of reality, and in effect, tells us at one and the same time that ultimate reality—here framed as the plemora—is both thinkable and unthinkable, knowable and unknowable, that from which our experience derives, but also that which has nothing to do with our experience. In short, it seems a jarring interplay between contraries which may serve to free the reader (or hearer) from his or her own private (or not so private) dogmas and fundamentalisms: nothing is true, everything is possible (?).
I would like to note that there is further binary pairings which can be built from basic units of pairs (this again borrows from set theory). We can see that what is asserted about the plemora can be modeled in the following way: {{plemora, {x, y}}, {not plemora, {x, y}}}. This pairing might shed some light on the “deep structure” of the first Sermo: the plemora is full of all possible binary pairings where these pairings are self-negating (balance each other out—cancel or annul one and other), and the plemora has nothing to do with any possible binary pairings. In a yet larger scope we might construct the following binary pairing: {{{plemora, individual}, {x, y}}, {{not plemora, individual}, {x, y}}}, or perhaps some mixture thereof.
To turn briefly to the closing remarks of the opening Sermo, which concern “the striving after your own being.” Which appears to concern the resolution or dissolution of apparent opposites into complementary unities with respect to the identification of self with other, or with the plemora and the individual. It is suggested that the only real striving is that after our self, which I think Jung would agree with: we are, through our being in the world, seeking after that which we are, which, I think, might be seen as a manifestation of Self. What appears to be asserted is that it is our very thoughts and thought processes which move us a step away from being in what might be seen as purely experiential; that is, it is thought which serves to divide the pairings of complements into pairings of opposites, and this division is what separates self from other (leading, in heightened or more “crystalized” form to acute alienation), which in turn places us a step removed from the “isness” of unanalyzed experience. In different words, our interpretations are simply partial representations which further increase distinction, and the uninterpreted is the undifferentiated reality. In coming to “the right goal by virtue of [our] own being,” we might come to the identification of self with other or come to know the unknowable not through analysis or thought, but by the absence of these. In closing, I’d suggest that Sermo I is linked to the first step of alchemy, calcination, where we burn (or transform) the black into the white.
Variables Vibrate Vicariously.
First thoughts roll with sevens. Seven days in a week, seven classical planets (recall the celestial bodies which circled round a stationary earth), lucky seven, The Chariot, seven major stages in the alchemical process: calcination, putrefaction, solution, distillation, conjunction, sublimation, and philosophic congelation. And of course, our seven sermons.
The Chariot is driven by the light and the dark engines—it is the two forces which power the single vehicle. If we can extract anything from Sermo I, it is a discussion of opposites, but on several layers. We are told that “[t]he pairs of opposites are qualities of the plemora which are not, because each balance each.” Above this statement we are shown eleven pairs of opposites as examples of the binary pairings which negate one another in the plemora. We will now list these as eleven unordered pairs: {effective, ineffective}, {fullness, emptiness}, {living, dead}, {difference, sameness}, {light, dark}, {hot, cold}, {force, matter}, {time, space}, {good, evil}, {beautiful, ugly}, {one, many}. It is these and other pairings that exist as one and the same thing in the plemora; that is to say, they don’t exist in the plemora because it of itself has no qualities. So we get a further pairing of {existence, non-existence} (which may seem similar, but perhaps not readily identical to {living, dead}), as a non/quality (and here we note the ‘/’ is used to indicate, in this case, both the absence and presence of a quality) of the plemora. We might want to recognize that some of Jung’s work focuses on the pairing {internal, external} with respect to individual; in different words, Jung looks at connections between a person’s psyche and the manifest world.
E.E. Rehmus informs us that the plemora itself is the Gnostic divine being, it is the Universal Soul. He goes on to note that all aeons emanate from it. In a Jungian sense, we might consider this to be the archetype of the Self, and from the Self, we derive selves—personal aeons or the aeon of an individual—in the small. In Sermo I, we are told that the plemora is nothingness and fullness, and I recall from a lecture on Jung that he felt the Self was also empty, yet contained every other archetype and, in this sense, is full. We are also told, in the Sermo, many other contrary things about the plemora. In particular, we are informed that we are not part of the plemora, that “we are from the plemora infinitely removed,” because to be a distinct creature is to be distinct form the other, and in specific, distinct form this Universal Soul, and in this Soul there is no distinction; however, we are also told that “because we are parts of the plemora, the plemora is also in us.” So we see here a further pairing of {plemora, individual} or, perhaps more in a Jungian flavour {other, self}. What we can begin to see is that the plemora and the individual, or the self and the other, share an identity in so far as each pairing, in their non/existence in the plemora, become one thing—we’ve denoted this one object by borrowing from set theoretic notation: the unordered binary pairing {x, y}—which is nothing (but of course, everything = nothing). We can note a numeric example of this pair as framed in computational language: {1, 0}.
More important to notice is that “the plemora is both the beginning and end of the created beings,” and that “the plemora prevadeth altogether, yet hath created being no share thereof.” So here we have further pairings of contraries giving rise to our existence, and yet, canceling out that existence. We are told that the plemora has not created being, but yet, it is the end and beginning of existence, and that it is ubiquitous throughout existence. In the pattern of thought being followed, the plemora has {nothing, everything} to do with non/existence. Or in different, but unsurprising words, the plemora is all and it is nothing, that we are both the plemora itself and entirely distinct from it. It is in our being—our existence—that we continue and create distinction: “[w]hen we distinguish qualities of the plemora, we are speaking from the ground of our own distinctiveness and concerning our own distinctiveness.” Thus, since the plemora is empty and possesses no qualities, which is to say that it is full and posses all qualities, it is we who ‘pull out’ (‘push in’?) the pairings, and we who further divide the elements of the pairings—one here, and one over there. Put differently, it is we who create things, it is we who are the blind demiurges that shape the world, it is we who are the plemora. But if we weren’t blind and could see this in its entirety (its eternity), then this “would mean self-dissolution,” and “[t]herein both thinking and being cease.” Perhaps this would be the end (beginning?) of the Jungian goal: full integration of the shadow into the personality.
But still, there is nothing that “standeth [as] something fixed, or in some way established from the beginning.” So we speak of “qualities of the plemora which are not.” In other words, even our groupings of these pairs into units, and then into non/existence stemming from, into, through, an empty and full plemora is still creating distinction, it is still our thoughts about the plemora, and thus, “we have said nothing concerning the plemora.” “What is changeable” is the shifting thoughts and experiences by which, even in recognizing an x and its contrary y as an {x, y}, and then negating this in the plemora—which is ourselves, we generate the individual as “fixed and certain…or even as a quality itself.” “The plemora is rent in us”: there appears to be a necessity of something as it exists in the tension between everything and nothing, where {nothing, everything} is {infinite, eternal}, and yet, not that at all. In other words, we are thinking of a way, or a being told ways in which we can think of the unthinkable, by which we can ascertain something outside of our experience. Put differently still, the Sermo is both conditioning, reconditioning, and unconditioning our ways of thinking with respect to ultimate reality: it offers us tools that work on our neurosemantic interpretations of reality, and in effect, tells us at one and the same time that ultimate reality—here framed as the plemora—is both thinkable and unthinkable, knowable and unknowable, that from which our experience derives, but also that which has nothing to do with our experience. In short, it seems a jarring interplay between contraries which may serve to free the reader (or hearer) from his or her own private (or not so private) dogmas and fundamentalisms: nothing is true, everything is possible (?).
I would like to note that there is further binary pairings which can be built from basic units of pairs (this again borrows from set theory). We can see that what is asserted about the plemora can be modeled in the following way: {{plemora, {x, y}}, {not plemora, {x, y}}}. This pairing might shed some light on the “deep structure” of the first Sermo: the plemora is full of all possible binary pairings where these pairings are self-negating (balance each other out—cancel or annul one and other), and the plemora has nothing to do with any possible binary pairings. In a yet larger scope we might construct the following binary pairing: {{{plemora, individual}, {x, y}}, {{not plemora, individual}, {x, y}}}, or perhaps some mixture thereof.
To turn briefly to the closing remarks of the opening Sermo, which concern “the striving after your own being.” Which appears to concern the resolution or dissolution of apparent opposites into complementary unities with respect to the identification of self with other, or with the plemora and the individual. It is suggested that the only real striving is that after our self, which I think Jung would agree with: we are, through our being in the world, seeking after that which we are, which, I think, might be seen as a manifestation of Self. What appears to be asserted is that it is our very thoughts and thought processes which move us a step away from being in what might be seen as purely experiential; that is, it is thought which serves to divide the pairings of complements into pairings of opposites, and this division is what separates self from other (leading, in heightened or more “crystalized” form to acute alienation), which in turn places us a step removed from the “isness” of unanalyzed experience. In different words, our interpretations are simply partial representations which further increase distinction, and the uninterpreted is the undifferentiated reality. In coming to “the right goal by virtue of [our] own being,” we might come to the identification of self with other or come to know the unknowable not through analysis or thought, but by the absence of these. In closing, I’d suggest that Sermo I is linked to the first step of alchemy, calcination, where we burn (or transform) the black into the white.
Variables Vibrate Vicariously.
*******
Second Piece
One of the things I have appreciated about Jung’s thought regarding
institutionalized religion is how it can often become a barrier to
promoting a personal religious experience. If I recall correctly, Jung
felt that what often occurred in the case of an organized religion was
that someone at some point in time, in some context, had some sort of
revelatory, mystical, or otherwise transcendent contact with the
‘divine’. If the person who had this experience was moved to attempt to
describe it to others, and if others were significantly affected by this
person’s relation of the experience, then the budding of a new
religious movement could now begin.
What occurs at this point is the codification of the details of the experience. Moreover, the personal religious experience of a single individual now becomes the paradigmatic focal point and touch stone for people who might want to recreate such an experience for themselves. However, as the codification becomes dogma and doctrine, and as the experience of one person becomes structured into a organization, we immediately get issues of power and authority. Who is it that understands what that original experience was really about? We get the rise of those who will now become the interpreters and mediators between the source of some other individual’s experience, and the everyday lives of ordinary people. That is, we get, in an organized religion, those who are, by their position in the power structure, allowed to read scripture (or such) in such a way that they are the ones who will interpret this record of the events of a single individual for other people. They become the ones who will lead the flock (so to speak).
Now, it seems to me that alchemy is the personal pursuit of an encounter with the divine. It is the seeking after Hermes’ Bird, the Philosopher’s Stone (and many other names), but this is nothing other than the understanding that the individual is right there with God in creating the world. As Joderowsky frames it in The Holy Mountain, it is turning your excrement into gold. In existentialist terms, it is deciding the meaning and direction of your life without fear or angst in the face of the idea that there is no meaning or direction. In a sense, the alchemical pursuit is the unification of self and other, especially in terms of the mundane with the divine, or the particular with the universal. This entire pursuit is one that must be carried out by the individual alone, and not something that can be given or learned from someone else. I think that in traditional alchemy it was the alchemist alone who would mix the ingredients in the alembic, and it would be the alchemist alone that would supervise, observe, and participate in the growing of Hermes’ Tree. It seems to me that the idea here, in more Jungian terms, is that it is the individual who must turn his or her shadows into light, or integrate the shadows of his or her being into a whole individual. While people might be able to give guidance and what not, the life of any person is entirely in that person’s hands (whether he or she can admit this or not).
While I am not particularly well versed in Gnosticism, if I recall, one of the driving ideas is that the world was created by an evil demiurge, and that the real God was so far removed from this world that he or she had no contact with us, nor we with him or her. So let us put this into the context of what I’ve been spinning out so far. Alchemy is the individual quest for unification with the divine, for participation in the creation and transformation of the world. Gnosticism seems at least partially correct so far as contact with the divine is not an everyday part of most people’s lives, and that contact with the divine appears very difficult or might be impossible. So, if we have organized religion arising out of an individual’s encounter with the divine, then the individualized encounter was something unique, difficult, and not likely to be duplicated. Thus, we see how there might be elements of alchemy and Gnosticism providing the origins of an organized religion in so far as the origins are founded in an individual’s experience. As the experience itself becomes lost in the religion’s codification and increasing rigidness of formalization, the original experience which shares these elements of the alchemical pursuit and certain ideas pertaining to Gnosticism does become like the unconscious underpinnings of the institutional tradition.
At least part of the reason that such beliefs and interests in things like alchemy and Gnostic ideas become viewed as heretical is because these ideas would or could serve to promote in the individual a unique and difficult encounter with the divine for that individual. Such an encounter will likely be counter to some or all of the codified ways of the institution, and so, would work to undermine or at least question the authority of those “higher up” in the power structure. If everyone could promote his or her own encounter with God, then what would be the need for a church (in the traditional sense)?
So, in a sense, I agree with Jung that the institutionalization of an individual’s religious experience often seems to prevent others from having their own encounter with the divine. Such an encounter must be based upon, and stem from, those things which become labeled as heretical under the authority of a power structure, and this structure, paradoxically, owes its existence to these same heretical experiences, which become the “unconscious” (in the sense of unrecognized or forgotten) of that institution.
What occurs at this point is the codification of the details of the experience. Moreover, the personal religious experience of a single individual now becomes the paradigmatic focal point and touch stone for people who might want to recreate such an experience for themselves. However, as the codification becomes dogma and doctrine, and as the experience of one person becomes structured into a organization, we immediately get issues of power and authority. Who is it that understands what that original experience was really about? We get the rise of those who will now become the interpreters and mediators between the source of some other individual’s experience, and the everyday lives of ordinary people. That is, we get, in an organized religion, those who are, by their position in the power structure, allowed to read scripture (or such) in such a way that they are the ones who will interpret this record of the events of a single individual for other people. They become the ones who will lead the flock (so to speak).
Now, it seems to me that alchemy is the personal pursuit of an encounter with the divine. It is the seeking after Hermes’ Bird, the Philosopher’s Stone (and many other names), but this is nothing other than the understanding that the individual is right there with God in creating the world. As Joderowsky frames it in The Holy Mountain, it is turning your excrement into gold. In existentialist terms, it is deciding the meaning and direction of your life without fear or angst in the face of the idea that there is no meaning or direction. In a sense, the alchemical pursuit is the unification of self and other, especially in terms of the mundane with the divine, or the particular with the universal. This entire pursuit is one that must be carried out by the individual alone, and not something that can be given or learned from someone else. I think that in traditional alchemy it was the alchemist alone who would mix the ingredients in the alembic, and it would be the alchemist alone that would supervise, observe, and participate in the growing of Hermes’ Tree. It seems to me that the idea here, in more Jungian terms, is that it is the individual who must turn his or her shadows into light, or integrate the shadows of his or her being into a whole individual. While people might be able to give guidance and what not, the life of any person is entirely in that person’s hands (whether he or she can admit this or not).
While I am not particularly well versed in Gnosticism, if I recall, one of the driving ideas is that the world was created by an evil demiurge, and that the real God was so far removed from this world that he or she had no contact with us, nor we with him or her. So let us put this into the context of what I’ve been spinning out so far. Alchemy is the individual quest for unification with the divine, for participation in the creation and transformation of the world. Gnosticism seems at least partially correct so far as contact with the divine is not an everyday part of most people’s lives, and that contact with the divine appears very difficult or might be impossible. So, if we have organized religion arising out of an individual’s encounter with the divine, then the individualized encounter was something unique, difficult, and not likely to be duplicated. Thus, we see how there might be elements of alchemy and Gnosticism providing the origins of an organized religion in so far as the origins are founded in an individual’s experience. As the experience itself becomes lost in the religion’s codification and increasing rigidness of formalization, the original experience which shares these elements of the alchemical pursuit and certain ideas pertaining to Gnosticism does become like the unconscious underpinnings of the institutional tradition.
At least part of the reason that such beliefs and interests in things like alchemy and Gnostic ideas become viewed as heretical is because these ideas would or could serve to promote in the individual a unique and difficult encounter with the divine for that individual. Such an encounter will likely be counter to some or all of the codified ways of the institution, and so, would work to undermine or at least question the authority of those “higher up” in the power structure. If everyone could promote his or her own encounter with God, then what would be the need for a church (in the traditional sense)?
So, in a sense, I agree with Jung that the institutionalization of an individual’s religious experience often seems to prevent others from having their own encounter with the divine. Such an encounter must be based upon, and stem from, those things which become labeled as heretical under the authority of a power structure, and this structure, paradoxically, owes its existence to these same heretical experiences, which become the “unconscious” (in the sense of unrecognized or forgotten) of that institution.
