June 6

Carl Jung and the Occult of Modern Psychology

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The good doctor kept a secret in a Swiss vault for nearly fifty years.

Carl Gustav Jung—born July 26, 1875, who died on this date in 1961 at the age of eighty-five—was the most influential psychologist of the twentieth century … and whose work the psychiatric community never quite knew what to do with. The founder of analytical psychology, the theorist of archetypes and the collective unconscious, the inventor of synchronicity and the concept of the shadow—Jung was, depending on who you ask, either the greatest depth psychologist since Freud or a credulous mystic who confused subjective vision with objective fact. His colleagues accused him of occultism, specifically because he was exploring exactly the same territory as the occultists—and doing so with a scientific vocabulary that simultaneously legitimized and concealed what he was actually doing…

The Mannequin in the Attic

Jung’s secret within the vault was a red leather-bound manuscript the size of a medieval folio, hand-calligraphed in Gothic script and filled with paintings of extraordinary boldness and strangeness. He called it Liber Novus—the New Book—but the world would come to refer to it as “the Red Book.” It was, in actuality, the record of his descent into his own unconscious between the years 1913 and 1930, and it was, by his own account, the source from which everything else he wrote derived. Knowing the esoteric nature of such a long-term self-study, he opted to keep it in a Swiss bank vault. Not until 2009 was it finally published—forty-eight years after his death—and three years of negotiations with his estate were required to finally secure its public release.

That a man who changed the world kept what could arguably be considered his most important work hidden for most of a century tells you something significant about the relationship between depth psychology and the esoteric tradition it was drawing on. It also speaks volumes about how much it cost, in Jung’s era, to be caught doing magic in a professional, psychological setting. But the occult impulse in Jung didn’t begin with the break from Freud; Jung’s mother, Emilie, was a woman of two personalities—conventional housewife by day, profound eccentric by night—when she claimed spirits visited her bedroom. His maternal grandfather, Samuel Preiswerk, was a distinguished Hebraist and theologian who was also deeply interested in the occult, while eight of Jung’s uncles were clergymen. In effect, Jung grew up in a household where the boundary between the religious, the psychological, and the supernatural was genuinely symbiotic.

At around ten years old, Jung carved a tiny mannequin from the end of a wooden ruler, placed it with a painted stone in a pencil case, and hid the case in the attic. He would visit periodically, bringing it tiny slips of paper inscribed in his own secret language. Later, Jung described this act as bringing him “a feeling of profound peace and security”—a feeling he didn’t fully understand until decades later, when he encountered the concept of the tjurunga in Indigenous Australian practice, the soul-stones of Arlesheim, and the totemic figures of cultures he’d never known as a child. Only then did he realize the ritual that he’d inadvertently performed as a boy of ten, and its precise parallels in traditions from across the world. To him, this was the first empirical evidence—personal, inexplicable, undeniable—that there was a layer of the psyche beneath the individual, operating according to patterns common to all humanity.

And so, the collective unconscious had its origin in a hidden mannequin in an attic.

The Break with Freud

Jung’s relationship with Sigmund Freud was one of the most consequential intellectual partnerships—and ruptures—in the history of psychology. Initially, Freud viewed Jung to be his chosen heir: younger, Christian, academically respectable, and the ideal figure to carry psychoanalysis beyond the Jewish Viennese milieu in which it had been born, and which he feared would permanently limit its reach. Admittedly, Jung was electrified by Freud’s system, and served as the first president of the International Psychoanalytical Association.

Their professional and personal rupture over the nature of human libido and the meaning of myth occurred in 1912. Freud’s system was fundamentally materialist and reductive—everything traced back to sexuality and infantile experience; religion and mythology were mass neurosis; the unconscious was a repository of repressed personal material. But, by then, Jung’s vision was moving in a different direction entirely. Unlike his mentor and friends, he saw mythology not as the distorted expression of repressed sexuality, but a direct expression of something he was coming to call “the collective unconscious”—a layer of the psyche beneath the personal, shared by all humanity, and structured around universal patterns he called archetypes. When his Symbols of Transformation was published in 1912—containing his emerging theory—the break was sealed.

The aftermath was devastating and, presumedly, the two men never spoke again. Jung described the period following the friendship’s rupture as a “creative illness,” Professionally and personally destabilized, he made the most consequential decision of his life: instead of defending against what was arising, he would go toward it deliberately, and would descend into his own unconscious and record what he found there. Thus, the project of the “Red Book” officially began.

Liber Novus: The New Book

Every evening between the years 1913 and 1916, Jung sat in a chair, relaxed his ordinary consciousness, and allowed what he called “active imagination”—a technique he was developing in real time wherein a deliberate engagement with the unconscious through a process of sustained imaginative attention was undertaken—in order to produce a stream of visions. He recorded these visions in a series of notebooks he called “the Black Books.” He then edited, elaborated, and illuminated this material in the red folio that became Liber Novus, working on it periodically until around 1930.

Strikingly, Jung didn’t just have visions; he saw figures and entities, and engaged with them, and these figures, in turn, became the theoretical foundations of his entire system. Philemon—an elderly winged figure with the horns of a bull who appeared repeatedly and with whom Jung held extended dialogues—was the origin of the concept of autonomous psychic contents: the recognition that not everything in the psyche belongs to the ego, that there are genuinely other presences operating within the mind. (Jung scholars and ceremonial magicians alike have noted independently that Philemon’s function in the Red Book—the wise, autonomous inner teacher who provides knowledge the ego cannot access alone—is structurally identical to the Holy Guardian Angel of the Western magical tradition—the inner guide whose Knowledge and Conversation is the central aim of ceremonial magic. Jung encountered him through active imagination; Crowley encountered him through the Abramelin operation; and yet, the destination was the same.)

Salome, the anima figure in the visions, generated the theory of the anima—the feminine soul-image in the male psyche; the “Red One,” a figure of dangerous vitality and transgression, explored the shadow. The Septem Sermones ad Mortuos—“the Seven Sermons to the Dead,” which emerged from the Red Book and were the only portion published in Jung’s lifetime (only privately, and for close friends)—read like a Gnostic treatise: a meditation on the nature of the Pleroma, the divine fullness, and the Abraxas—the god beyond good and evil, beyond all pairs of opposites, who resolves the tension of duality into unity. Jung described these as being "dictated" to him by the dead. It is the most explicitly esoteric text in his entire body of work.

The concepts that emerged from the Red Book period reshaped the Western esoteric tradition as profoundly as they reshaped psychology—and nowhere more so than in the three that most directly engage the occult terrain:

The Shadow—the sum of everything the conscious personality refuses to acknowledge about itself, everything rejected as unacceptable or inferior and relegated to the unconscious—was Jung’s map of exactly the territory that the Western magical tradition had been calling “the Dweller on the Threshold,” or the Qliphoth, the dark side of the Tree of Life. “Shadow work”—the deliberate engagement with and integration of the material the conscious mind has expelled—is now one of the most widely practiced forms of psychological self-development in the contemporary world, deployed in therapy, in spiritual practice, and in the chaos magic tradition that we’ve been writing about throughout this issue. (Austin Osman Spare’s atavistic resurgence, Peter J. Carroll’s work with repressed psychic contents—these are shadow work under different names.)

Jung’s lifelong engagement with alchemy—he collected alchemical texts obsessively, wrote extensively on their psychological significance in Psychology and Alchemy (1944) and Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955)—was not the work of a man who had found a historical curiosity. It was the work of a man who recognized, in the alchemical texts, a precise and sophisticated mapping of the interior territory he himself had been exploring. The coniunctio oppositorum—“the conjunction of opposites,” the union of Sol and Luna, the marriage of king and queen, the resolution of all pairs of contradictions into a third thing that transcends them—was, for Jung, both the goal of the alchemical opus and the goal of individuation: the process of becoming whole by integrating everything that had been split off and denied.

And synchronicity—Jung’s concept of "meaningful coincidence," the principle by which events that are not causally connected nevertheless appear to be meaningfully related—was his scientific vocabulary for what the occult tradition calls the web of correspondences. The Hermetic “As above, so below” is a statement about synchronicity. The astrological claim that celestial configurations are meaningfully related to terrestrial events is a statement about synchronicity. Jung didn’t validate astrology; yet he did provide a framework within which the relationship between inner states and outer events could be discussed without appealing to supernatural causation.

Every practitioner of divination—every Tarot reader, astrologer, I Ching consultant—is working within a synchronistic framework whether they use Jung’s vocabulary or not.

Or maybe its just unconscious...

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

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