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Carl Jung on “Polytheism” – Anthology

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The Anima/Animus state is correlated with polytheism, the Self with monotheism. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 427

This is no polytheism that I [Philemon] have made up! But many Gods who powerfully raise their voices and tear humanity to bloody pieces. ~Carl Jung, Red Book, Page 352

But the fact is that polytheism, this unending richness in the form of the divine essence, is somehow a more exact expression of the Indian soul than that of the perfected Buddha.  ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 112

As you know, through this encounter with high Roman culture, Christianity spread throughout the Germanic territories and fundamentally modified a primitive polytheism that, not yet theistic but still in the stage of demonism, was obliterated by it except for a few traces. That never happened in India. ~Carl Jung, Psychology of Yoga and Meditation, Page 256

The essay by James Hillman, “Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic,” on this subject seems to me to be unsuccessful. Hillman’s conclusions are based on the erroneous assumption that monotheism equals Self equals old king, and polytheism equals animus and anima equals son, which historically is not justified. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 196

Amenophis IV achieved, by his reforms, a psychologically valuable work of interpretation. He united all the bull, ram, crocodile, and pile-dwelling gods into the sun-disc and made it clear that their various attributes were compatible with those of the sun. A similar fate overtook Hellenic and Roman polytheism as a result of the syncretistic strivings of later centuries. An excellent illustration of this is in the beautiful prayer of Lucius to the Queen of Heaven (the moon): Queen of heaven, whether thou be named Ceres, bountiful mother of earthly fruits, or heavenly Venus, or Phoebus’ sister, or Proserpina, who strikest terror with midnight ululations . . .. thou that with soft feminine brightness dost illume the walls of all cities . . .  ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 138

The transformation of libido through the symbol is a process that has been going on ever since the beginnings of humanity and continues still … This age-old function of the symbol is still present today, despite the fact that for many centuries the trend of mental development has been towards the suppression of individual symbol-formation … [A] step in this direction was … the extermination of polytheism … ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 92

I mention these facts in order to illustrate how thin is the wall that separates us from pagan times. Besides that, the Germanic peoples never developed organically out of primitive polydemonism to polytheism and its philosophical subtleties, but in many places accepted Christian monotheism and its doctrine of redemption only at the sword’s point of the Roman legions, as in Africa the machine-gun is the latent argument behind the Christian invasion ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 272.

This psychological fact spoils the abstract perfection of the triadic formula and makes it a logically incomprehensible construction, since, in some mysterious and unexpected way, an important mental process peculiar to man has been imported into it. If the Holy Ghost is, at one and the same time, the breath of life and a loving spirit and the Third Person in whom the whole trinitarian process culminates, then he is essentially a product of reflection, a hypostatized noumenon tacked on to the natural family-picture of father and son. It is significant that early Christian Gnosticism tried to get round this difficulty by interpreting the Holy Ghost as the Mother. But that would merely have kept him within the archaic family-picture, within the tritheism and polytheism of the patriarchal world. It is, after all, perfectly natural that the father should have a family and that the son should embody the father. This train of thought is quite consistent with the father-world ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 236

Only a little more than a thousand years ago we tumbled out of the crudest beginnings of polytheism into a highly developed Oriental religion which lifted the imaginative minds of half-savages to a height that in no way corresponded to their spiritual development … The repressed elements naturally did not develop, but went on vegetating in the unconscious, in their original barbarism. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 70



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Carl Jung on “Polytheism” – Anthology

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