JUNG ON THE RELATIVITY OF the Gods

Lead me from dreaming to waking.
Lead me from opacity to clarity.
Lead me from the complicated to the simple.
Lead me from the obscure to the obvious.
Lead me from intention to attention.
Lead me from what I'm told I am to what I see I am.
Lead me from confrontation to wide openness.
Lead me to the place I never left,
Where there is peace, and peace
- The Upanishads

*note* interesting comments about Jung perspective of GOD(from John P. Dourley)
-added by danny-
....................................
Jung's theoretical understanding of religion makes of the analytic process a religious event. It recalls the Gods to their psychic origin and encourages unmediated conversation with them within the containment of the psyche. The analytic process thus understood is currently to be valued for a number of reasons. The internalization of divinity curtails enmity between religious communities bonded by external Gods. More than this Jung's total myth contends that divinity can become conscious only in humanity. The education and redemption of God in history is an ongoing project. Currently it takes the form of an emerging myth of an extended compassion whose embrace supplants still reigning myths of lesser compass. The analytic process though confined, in the first instance, to individuals is a significant contributor to the now emerging societal myth

JUNG AND THE RECALL OF THE GODS.
By John Dourley
Jung on Religion: Theory and Therapy.
The intimacy Jungian psychology establishes between theory and therapy is particularly prominent in matters religious. Jung's greatly extended sense of religion rests on the unmediated experience of the numinous working ever more intense patterns of personal integration and universal relatedness. The experience of the numinous also lies at the heart of Jungian therapeutic practice. Without it no transformation takes place. Writes Jung on this point, "But the fact is that the approach to the numinous
1 This is an expanded version of a paper read at the 2nd International Academic
Conference of Analytical Psychology and Jungian Studies, Texas A and M University,
College Station, Texas, July 7-10, 2005.
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is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology" (Jung, 1973, p. 377). When the experience of the numinous becomes the basis of both religion and "...real therapy...", the distinction between Jung's theory of religious experience and the practice of his therapy collapses. The doing of classical Jungian therapy becomes itself a religious event. The religious nature of this event stands in constant need of clarification so that, at least, the analyst is made fully aware of what is at stake in the analytic process. The analytic process is one in which the analyst and analysand foster the birth of the self in the analysand's consciousness through the dream dialogue with the self. In effect the analysis becomes a personal revelation of the individual's unique myth originating, in Jung's view, from the same source that gives rise to all religions, namely, the archetypal dimension of the psyche.
The discovering of one's personal revelation enables the individual to distinguish one's personal myth and so oneself from the myths into which one is inevitably born. These are the layers of collective mythology such as ethnicity, religion, nationality, social status, etc., which can serve, in varying degrees, as impediments or resources in the emergence of the self. But it is only the emergence of the self in the consciousness of the individual that frees the individual to relate one's inherited mythologies to one's own deepest personal truth. As this truth emerges into consciousness the individual is progressively released from a compulsive and unconscious adhesion to received mythologies toward a more discerning response to them out of the power of the inimitable and sustaining truth of the personal self. This response can range from outright rejection to a heightened appreciation of the symbolic, ritual and more meaningful dimensions of the mythologies one inherits at birth. The point is that wherever the response lies
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along the scale from rejection to integration of inherited truths, it is a response in living touch with the power of the individual's personal myth. In the end such power is, for Jung, the only power that enables the individual to respond to the collective as an individual. "Resistance to the mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself (Jung, 1958, p. 278). (Italics Jung's).
The individual's growing into one's personal myth in the analytic process is never a solipsistic event. Such growth is a significant social resource because it provides society with individuals endowed with the critical perspective that only living out of their personal myth affords. This side of the religious role of the analytic process is peculiarly pressing in a time of epochal change. Jung thought his time and ours was a time of such epochal change. He refers to "...the end of the Christian aeon...", to "...the invalidation of Christ...", and describes himself as a modern Joachim di Fiore ushering in a new age of the Spirit (Jung, 1953b, p. 138). In this context the analytic endeavour can be revisioned not only on a personal level as an occasion for the surfacing of individual mythologies. The analytic endeavour becomes, through the individuals it touches, a major contributor to the emergence of a more encompassing collective myth or now dawning revelation which Jung anticipated but understandably could not describe in more than general terms.
The turbulence surrounding the birth of a new societal myth is presently vividly evident at the collective level. The educated and spiritually sensitive turn away in great numbers from ecclesial institutions that continue to take their founding poets, the writers of their Holy Scriptures, literally and then rely on legalism and authority to enforce belief in the unbelievable. Theology thus remains where it was in Jung's day. "It proclaims doctrines
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which nobody understands, and demands a faith which nobody can manufacture" (Jung, 1948, p. 192). With the departure of those with a native religious sensitivity and/or developed mind, collective religion is largely abandoned to various forms and degrees of fundamentalism in both West and East. The numerical surge of institutional fundamentalism bears stark witness to the baser lusts of humanity collective religion so often serves, namely, the need for instant certitude collectively reinforced in the face of the anxiety and fear of living with doubt. In my own tradition the spirit of renewal promised by Vatican II in the sixties has been broken through more than a quarter century reign of an imperial papacy with roots in the thirteenth century. The head of the Inquisition during much of this period has now succeeded his predecessor. Nor has Romanism been the only religious tradition to have circled the wagons in an instinctive defense against the emergence of a secularity of higher moral instinct informed by a still fragile but growing religious sense of a broader compassion and more inclusive embrace.
For many contemporaries caught in this current situation the religious import of the analytic process could serve as the "tertium", the third, not given or not entertained as a possibility by those whose dismay with traditional religion holds out but two bleak options. Many feel they can either grind their teeth and stay in their tradition or simply walk away, often to the sterility of a life without the depth that functional religion can provide. Jung's third possibility would hold out the option of accessing the source of all religions as the basis of one's own through accessing the depths of the personal psyche. This accessing could restore the vitalities of religious experience to those who would explore it, its arduous demands, and its quiet rewards, with an immediacy devoid of institutional need or intervention.
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Such access might bring to some a transformed and heightened appreciation of their former traditions, symbols and rites now freed of their literal misinterpretation and authoritarian imposition. As an example, such experience would be of help to a now sociologically discernible group known as "recovering Catholics". Whether or not such recovery was to take place within or beyond ecclesial confines, it would restore a vitality that only the experience of the native religious depths of the human can provide. Or, on the other hand, and in a more gnostic vein, many may have to go it alone and simply "...stand before the Nothing out of which All may grow (Jung, 1933, p. 75). In this passage Jung suggests that this alternative may indeed be the face of future religion for the truly modern though few might currently be able to bear its demands. Deeper than either of these options and the many variations that lie between them is Jung's contention that the abiding in one's personal revelation is the greatest contribution one can make to the surpassing myth, the new revelation, now struggling for birth, at least, in the contemporary West. This alone makes the exploration of the religious implications of the analytic process, the melding of the theory and practice of religion in a Jungian sense, worthwhile.
Capping the Volcano.
Jung's understanding of the psyche rests on a conception of containment which tolerates no invasion of the psyche by agencies beyond the psyche. Such containment eliminates all commerce between an allegedly self-sufficient supernatural world of divine beings and the natural world of psyche. Theologically such containment means that the psyche creates all the divinities as well as all personal and collective faiths in them. For Jung this now dawning consciousness marks the culmination of a millennial
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evolution of religious maturation (Jung, 1954, p. 402), one which carries with it a moral imperative. This imperative demands that responsible religion recall the Gods to their psychic origin where dialogue with them would continue on an individual basis (Jung, 1940, p. 85). This dialogue would be at once socially safer and personally more harrowing. It would be socially safer because it would undermine the conflict between religious communities who claim a universal truth for one or other of their competing, still transcendent Gods. The dialogue would be more harrowing because it would face the individual with an inner critique more personal, rigorous and defiant of evasion than any religion can muster. Internalizing the conversation with deity would also, in Jung's words, terminate "...the systematic blindness... that God is outside man" (Jung, 1940, p. 58). (Italics Jung's). It would force humanity to confront its Gods and its faiths in them within the confines of the psyche from which they first are born.
Recent Jungian reflection on the internalization of the relation to the divine has illuminated the Jungian options to the inevitable question Jung's work poses, "Is there a God beyond the psyche?" Lionel Corbett points out in strict continuity with Jung that the experience of the numinous is the basis in humanity for the experience of God. This leads to only two options in relating the numinous to the possibility of a God beyond the psyche. Corbett puts it this way, "To reiterate: numinous experience arises from an autonomous level of the psyche that is either the source of, or the medium for, the transmission of religious experience: empirically we cannot say which (Corbett, p. 8). If the unconscious is the source of the numinous experience there would be no need to posit a God beyond the psyche. If the unconscious is the medium of the numinous experience then one could posit the reality of God beyond the unconscious who would address the human
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through the unconscious. This would lead to the question of why such a God in his creative role would use such an ambivalent medium as the unconscious to make his presence and project known to humanity. This option, when closely examined, envisages a God or divine power along theistic lines who would create the unconscious as a mediator between himself and the human ego. Occam's razor would surely slice away such a superfluous entity as the unconscious as mediator in favour of the more abstemious option that the unconscious is, in fact, the source of the numinous and requires no reality beyond it for the generation of the numinous as the basis of humanity's experience of the divine. The option for the unconscious as the source of the numinous would lead to the sparse yet organic conception of a wholly intrapsychic transcendence, one that would affirm that the unconscious infinitely transcends ego consciousness but that nothing transcends the total psyche. Jung's own waffling on this issue might well be traced to the progressive development of his thought and to his being less than candid in his dialogue with theologians. He was, however, quite frank in his debates with Victor White and Martin Buber that the real or implied supernaturalism of both thinkers was incompatible with his understanding of the psyche in its religious function (Dourley, 1991).
Corbett is also accurate in his perception that Jung's psychology rests on an eastern Vedantic notion of a point of residual identity between the divine and the human within the human. He goes on to comment that though this position is consistent with certain Western mystics like Eckhart it is in serious conflict with orthodox Jewish and Christian insistence on an objective transcendent God. He notes, "So far Jungian depth psychologists have largely been dualistic in this regard, presumably reflecting the unconscious bias of their Judaeo-Christian heritage" (Corbett, p. 42). This is
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a rather strong indictment of Jungian analysts who cling to a theistic and supernatural conception of the divinity as an objective entity beyond the psyche and usually as its creator. Corbett's critique that such dualism is hostile to Jung's understanding of the psyche has much to validate it. It is difficult to reconcile such a divinity with Jung's statement, "The naive assumption that the creator of the world is a conscious being must be regarded as a disastrous prejudice which later gave rise to the most incredible dislocations of logic (Jung, 1954, p. 383, fn 13). Rather Jung would have the ego in a much more immediate relation with a divinity as beastly as it was good looking for the reconciliation of its opposites in human consciousness.
Such psychic containment rests, in Jung's word's, on a point of "identity" between the divine and human native to all of nature including human nature (Jung, 1940, p. 58, 60, 61). Such a sweeping sacramental sense enables Jung to extend to every human the prerogative of the homoousia, the unity of two natures, divine and human, in one person (Jung, 1940, p. 61). He does not do this in the fixed essentialist categories of the Trinitarian and Christological councils with their limitation of this status to one outstanding "historical" individual. Rather Jung affirms that everyone is gifted with a conscious and an unconscious nature and that bringing them together in one person is both the work of a lifetime and the only serious meaning of redemption available to empirical humanity. In this integrative view human maturation and deification coincide.
The unification of each individual's two natures into a total person is also the only meaning that Jung gives to incarnation (Jung, 195, p. 406). Incarnation describes the process of the unconscious becoming embodied in the consciousness of " a more compendious" or "supraordinate" personality
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(Jung, 1954b, p. 258, 259). The Spirit or the self works this emerging personality through the conscious unification of the individual's divine and human natures. In doing so the Spirit brings itself to conscious birth in those who respond to its approach (Jung, 1954b, p. 263). In this sense incarnation does not refer to a past event but becomes the ever present and ongoing process of God becoming conscious in the individual to the extent the individual allows the urgencies of the unconscious to become conscious in the unique form that incarnation seeks in every life. In this precise sense the analyst has every right to view participation in the analytic process as cooperation with the Spirit in working its incarnation in the consciousness of the analysand. By mediating the analysand's latent divinity to consciousness every analyst plays the role of the priest.
Incarnation thus understood becomes an alternate description of what Jung means by "the relativity of God" (Jung, 1921, p. 242-244; 1954, p. 381). Put succinctly, Jung is contending that only in human consciousness can God become self-conscious and so relativized, at least, in relation to a God conceived as an absolute and transcendent self-sufficient divinity "wholly other" than the human (Jung, 1953, p. 11, fn. 6). The "relativity of God", thus understood, also provides the deepest meaning of human suffering. Relativization implies that divinity must divest itself of its transcendent remove and suffer in historical humanity the resolution of its unresolved eternally conflicted life. It is no wonder that Jung would write that "...God wants to become man but not quite" (Jung, 1954, p. 456). Even for deity things were less painful in eternal but unconscious bliss. With the realization that the pain of becoming conscious is the same pain in the human and the divine, humanity has to face the fact that its deepest historical meaning and suffering is the redemption of God at the insistence of a God
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who creates human consciousness as the only locus in which the divine self-contradiction can be perceived and resolved. The redemption of God in and through the suffering involved in the conscious integration of divinity's living antinomy in historical humanity is also the basis of Jung's eschatology and of his philosophy of history (Jung, 1954, p. 408, 455, 459, 461). Christ's dying in despair between divinely grounded opposites as a prelude to their union in resurrected life becomes for Jung the substance of the answer to Job. This moment is "...as divine as it is human, as 'eschatological' as it is 'psychological'" (Jung, 1954, p. 408). Psychologically humanity's suffering toward the redemption of God in itself coincides with the movement of history and strikes the deepest cord in the psyche as the meaning and movement of the entire human enterprise (Jung, 1948, p. 179).
Humanity's current participation in the ongoing divine/human drama calls up the image of the volcano that now needs to be capped in the wake of Jung's recall of the Gods to their psychic origin. Jung confronts contemporary humanity with the question of whether it is up to suffering divinely based conflict in the immediate precinct of human interiority, the matrix of all the Gods, without breaking containment and destroying itself in destroying the evil other. Failure to meet Jung's challenge would only continue the sad current situation of externalizing the conflict and blowing up, in the name of the demonic, whatever contradicts one's own truncated personal or collective compact or testament with the divine. Thus the recall of the Gods and the internal resolution of their mutual enmity as the precedent of external peace is currently at the heart of the hope of the species that it can survive its God and religion creating proclivity (Dourley, 2003). It is the fire of this wider hope the analytic process fans through addressing whatever conflict it faces in the individual circumstances of the
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analysand. Each individual gain in consciousness contributes to the contemporary emergence of a myth informed by a more universal sensitivity and wider inclusion now sponsored by the unconscious in its role as the maker of history.
Humanity and Divinity as Functions of Each Other.
The intimacy which Jung establishes between divine and human life, suffering and consciousness is most evident in his appropriation of Meister Eckhart's mystical experience. Here Jung reads Eckhart to mean that God and humanity are "functions" of each other caught up in a single cosmic and organic process of mutual completion (Jung, 1921, p. 243). In these passages Jung is obviously equating the relationship of the ego to the unconscious with the relationship of the human to the divine and containing both within the psyche. Elaborating on this intrapsychic dialectic Jung makes the telling point that those who do not understand that, "...God's action springs from one's own inner being..." do not understand the nature of religious experience and so do not understand religion itself (Jung, 1921, p. 243).
Jung goes on to describe the dynamic of humanity and divinity as functions of each other in some detail. Basically this dynamic takes on the form of a never to be completed psychic cycle. In the first moment the soul regresses to an immersion in and identity with the energies of the divine. In the second moment the soul then mediates these energies to consciousness (Jung, 1921, p. 255, 256). When the cycle is taken in its totality Jung is found to be saying that the moment of the soul's identity with God is the necessary prelude to the birthing of the divine in human consciousness. His Answer to Job describes the same process in terms of a baptism, the baptism
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of consciousness into and from the pleroma, the creative and formless source of all form and consciousness (Jung, 1954, p. 425). In every analysis reliant on dreams this process is at work as the dreams take the soul into the depths of the psyche and then speak directly to consciousness through the soul from her immersion in these depths. This process makes of the analyst both the observer and catalyst in the baptism of the individual into the life of the individual's evolving myth as that individual's greatest contribution to the emerging societal myth.
The psychic rhythm Jung describes in his treatment of Eckhart and Job establishes a mutual dependence of the soul on God and God on the soul working the endless redemption of divinity in a humanity itself redeemed in its function as the sole birthplace of divine consciousness (Jung, 1921, 251). The divine/human mutuality Jung here describes strongly suggests that the depth of one's penetration into the unconscious is the ultimate determinant of the breadth of one's compassion in the conscious world. It further implies that there is no where humanity, individual or collective, can hide from its role in the redemption of the divine since nothing exists beyond the psyche which could absolve humanity from the suffering involved in the divine insistence of becoming progressively conscious in the creature. To the extent any analysis births the self in consciousness it also births God in humanity and in the process redeems both. The effect of such redemption always has wider societal import.
Toward A Surpassing Myth and a More Encompassing Spirit.
The above considerations make it obvious that Jung's psychology is itself a myth which appreciates even as it corrodes so many reigning religious myths and especially the monotheisms. In Jung's view the
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monotheisms had already been seen through by the religious consciousness evident in the Book of Job (Jung, 1954, 385). Once Job's consciousness had surfaced little could be done to save the monotheistic myth in any of its variants. Jung's myth continues in this critical stance but adds significant substance to the myth the unconscious currently sponsors in the West, a myth appreciatively surpassing the monotheisms.
A foundational element of Jung's myth is humanity's unmediated experience of its divinity and the dynamic this experience presently unleashes. If humanity and divinity naturally share a common point or ground, the thrust of this ground is to manifest its total potential in ever greater approximations of human totality. As it drives toward the fullest manifestation of itself in the human, the divine and psychic ground of humanity exercises both an expansive and balancing influence on the humanity in whom it seeks to become conscious. In effect this side of Jung's mythology is addressing the compensatory nature of revelation. Put simply Jung equates revelation with the compensation the unconscious offers to the culture in which the revelation occurs. In effect we get the Gods, saviours, and religions we deserve and need.
Bringing these positions to bear on the contemporary situation, Jung introduces a complex historical argument concluding that the transcendent Gods of the monotheisms provided a then much needed religious compensation to their constituencies (Jung, 1956, p. 66-71). This compensation currently cries out for its own compensation, that is, for a new revelation at whose service Jung places his psychology. This is particularly the case with Christianity, and by extension the other monotheisms, whose initial compensatory imbalance toward the spiritual would inevitably fall prey to the laws of the psyche and evoke their own
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compensation in the course of time (Jung, 1959, p. 43). On the precise dates and mode of the revelation compensating Christianity, Jung waffles from the Book of Revelation (Jung, 1959, p. 43; 1954, p. 439, 458), itself within the Christian canon, to the gnostic/alchemical tradition, to the mediaeval Spirit movements, mystics, and devotees of the grail, to Renaissance neo-Platonism, and finally to the Enlightenment (Jung, 1959, p. 43, 44) and its enthronement of reason as the anti-Christ (Dourley, 1999, p. 58-65). Take your pick. Such imprecision is hardly the stuff that a more rigorous historical methodology would to-day tolerate.
In spite of this historical ambiguity, when Jung gives content to what the new revelation demands and offers he does address social phenomena undeniably visible in contemporary society. For Jung's myth moves from a trinitarian paradigm of a self-sufficient divinity only contingently involved in the human historical drama to a quaternitarian paradigm (Jung, 1948, p. 175). In this paradigm divinity and humanity are co-dependents in processes of reciprocal fulfillment in time. Within this context Jung can be very precise on what is lacking in the Spirit of a trinitarian divinity and needs to be recovered and sacralized by the more inclusive Spirit of the quaternity. The Spirit of the new myth would confer divinity on the feminine as well as the masculine in the movement toward a richer androgynous consciousness. It is this Spirit that informs much of the feminist movement especially as it now matures beyond democratizing patriarchal values. In his work on Job Jung is prescient in his reference to "...the signs of the times which point to the equality of women." (Jung, 1954, p. 465)
The Spirit of the new myth was also operative at an unconscious level in restoring one side of the Goddess to her place at least in the Catholic pantheon through the declaration of the Assumption, for Jung, "...the most
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important religious event since the Reformation" (Jung, 1954, p. 464). But if Jung is read closely he is found to be saying that the son and virgin of Bethlehem are divine, and so "...not real human beings at all, but gods" (Jung, 1954, p. 399). As such they serve as a necessary but somewhat pallid prelude to a fuller incarnation of the divine in "...- an ordinary woman, not a goddess and not an eternal virgin immaculately conceived" (Jung, 1954, p. 439). Jung's full analysis of the meaning of the Catholic doctrine culminates in his claim that the conjunction of sun and moon in the woman and child of the Joannine Apocalypse already compensates the less or more than fully human Virgin and Son of the synoptic gospels (Jung, 1954, p. 439, 443, 448, 454). The former do not contain the totality of opposites that the sun woman and her child, who unite sun and moon, light and dark, do. What the author of the Book of Revelation took be a reprise of the first incarnation was actually its corrective. Already within the Christian canon a unity of opposites occurs which compensated the one sided and not fully human spirituality of a divine son born of an immaculate virgin. With this view Jung can then readily connect the full restoration of the feminine in the woman and child of the apocalypse with the divinization of matter and the body in a manner reminiscent of Blake's marriage of heaven and hell. This side of the Spirit of the quaternity is, no doubt, at work in the contemporary interest in the body, the healing arts, and in the resacralization of nature in environmental and ecological endeavours.
However, the symbol for the final inclusion of what the Spirit of the Trinity excludes from divinity and yet is so evident in humanity is much more elusive. Such a symbol would entail the Spirit worked synthesis of good and evil, lodging both good and evil in God and demanding that humanity work their resolution in history (Jung, 1948, p. 174, 175; 1954, p.
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434). On how this is to be done and what it might look like Jung remains vague. He will say that both good and evil are to be relativized in a perspective beyond good and evil but not at the cost of abandoning the traditional religious virtues which will be needed as this relativization takes place in empirical humanity (Jung, 1953b, p. 136). Jung would concede that at some point we all get stuck (Jung, 1953c, p. 297). It would appear he was stuck on providing greater detail on the emergence of a sense of the sacred in which good and evil, the light and dark sons of the same God, could embrace in history.
One might address this problem and go beyond Jung by identifying where the problem is most evident in the contemporary world. The problem of good and evil is blatantly evident in the mutual projection of evil onto each other by communities possessed by archetypally based suasion dignified by such noble names as "faith", or "patriotism", or "commitment". These euphemisms effectively disguise the loss of personal responsibility to archetypally induced collective unconsciousness. Going beyond good and evil in this context would mean the gracious moderation in individual and collectivity of claims to exhaustive possession of the absolute in any of its forms, religious or secular. The murderous grip of competing absolutes on their victims' minds can only be tempered through reflection on their common archetypal origin and on the narrowing influence they too often exert on the communities they bond. Humanizing by relativizing all claims to the unconditional possession of a saving truth would remain compatible with Jung's frank acknowledgement that the sense of the absolute, and so of religion, can never be fully removed from human consciousness (Jung, 1940, p. 6).
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Nevertheless, Jung's insight that the unconscious, as infinitely fecund, could never bring itself to exhaustive and so final expression in any finite form, religious or secular (Jung, 1954b, p. 258), would greatly undermine both individual and collective proclivities to project evil onto the other out of a sense of one's own identity with the absolute good or God. Spelling out the broader religious and political implications of Jung's thought in this manner is not to take them out of the analytic container or out of the specifics of a given analysis. Every analysis as it leads to greater conscious approximations of the self not only reveals the individual's myth but contributes to the sense of the individual's continuity with the totality and so breeds a universal sentiment hostile to premature and now dangerous communal or personal claims to an exhaustive possession of a saving truth. The experiential appropriation of one's individual myth corrodes the tyranny of mythologies claiming privileged access to a definitive salvation as all religious and many political mythologies do.
As this consciousness would spread, the claim of any ultimate, and especially a religious ultimate, to complete expression of the unconscious would be viewed as psychologically immature and socially unethical. Exclusive monotheisms, political or religious, would be deemed immoral. Humanity could finally come to see the connection between claims to the final revelation and the final solution. The dawning consciousness that all absolutes, and especially the religious, are products of a common generative ground would lead devotees of each to recognize the common ground of all. Archetypally bonded communities could then appreciate each other as variant expression of a shared human profundity. In short the need to convert or kill would be undermined in principle.
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Conclusion: Recovering Our Health From Our Heresy.
Jung's psychology honors the priority of the Goddess or Great Mother in deference to the maternal nature of the deepest unconscious (Jung, 1956). If his psychology were to be given creedal or theological formulation it might read like this. In the beginning the Goddess created consciousness to become self-conscious in her child. Though from the outset she already dwelt in her child, she had to recall her child to a moment of immersion in herself to become more fully incarnate in the child then reborn from her womb. For the child reborn was now aware of the turbulent, conflicted life of the Goddess and, so, painfully conscious that her self-contradictions could only be perceived and redeemed in suffering toward their resolution in the life of humanity (Jung, 1954, p. 459). This process is redemptive both of the Goddess and of humanity who have from the outset been parts of each other. The Spirit of the Goddess thus always works toward the fullest manifestation of her infinite but conflicted energies in a humanity enriched by their syntheses. The incarnation of the Goddess and her redemption in humanity is the base meaning of individual and collective life and suffering as well as the direction in which all of history moves (Jung, 1948, p. 179). As such it grounds a new eschatology based on the resolution of divine conflict in humanity, a divinely grounded mandate humanity can neither evade nor hope to complete in time. The mandate cannot be evaded because it is felt immediately in every individual's experience of the self. It can never be completed because the fullness of the unconscious will always outstrip its historical concretions. There will be no situation in history in which God will be all in all just as there can be no human life wholly divested of the drive toward such a consciousness.
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The question that arises from the religious formulation of Jung's psychology is this. Can it be accepted by the religious mind currently prevailing in the West or has that mind, in the process of its self-making, excluded as heresy each of the abovementioned foundational elements of Jung's myth? Western theological reflection and attendant spirituality has become what Jung calls "...a universal religious nightmare...", (Jung, 1954, p. 453) a one-sided truncation of the human spirit now in desperate need to recover its heresy if it is to heal its pathology. It remains to be seen whether the great religions, at least in the West, can affirm humanity's natural inhesion in a divinity that asks of humanity its cooperation in enabling the divine to become increasingly conscious through the manifestation of its fullness in the only theatre available for that purpose, human consciousness (Jung, 1954, p. 461).
Beyond the religious sphere Jung's myth would seem to be enacted wherever a more extensive embrace of the totally human and the human totality is endorsed in the extension of a full humanity to those members of the species whose full divinity had been denied or qualified by the still reigning religious and societal collectives. Within the religious sphere the mystical impulse would seem to be the most vital carrier of Jung's myth because of the mystics' unmediated experience of the divine and the mutual need of divine and human this immediacy implies. This is especially true of Jung's favourite mystics, the mystics of the apophatic tradition, who for a moment lost themselves in the maternal nothingness from which all form is born (Dourley, 2004). One of them, Marguerite Porete, was to write of her soul, "...without such nothingness she cannot be the all" (Marguerite Porete, 1993, p.193). A Jungian translation might read, "My embrace of the world will never be more inclusive than the depth of my entrance into the mother
of the all." In a period when a terrorized humanity looks for salvation from its saviours to avoid its extinction, Jung's myth points to a moment of dissolution in the mother of the all as the ultimate resource to the lethal squabbles between her children fatally possessed by mere fragments of her always surpassing and redeeming wisdom. This is the wisdom which seeks to become conscious in every analysis moving through the individual into society.
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