PETER KINGSLEY'S CATAFALQUE: The Noll/Woodcock Reviews

PETER KINGSLEY’S CATAFALQUE: The Noll/Woodcock Reviews This essay is born from a rich exchange of comments between Richard Noll and me, based on our respective reviews of Catafalque. The tone of this exchange is cordial and mutually respectful, although we sharply differ in our respective interpretations of the texts of both Jung and Kingsley. I mention this quality because tone and collegial respect is an issue in Catafalque that is steering many readers away from the essential message that Kingsley is delivering: Jung was first and foremost a prophet, sacrifice, redeemer, saviour and servant. The horrendous difficulty in understanding what any of these historically loaded terms even mean in our modern context, in Kingsley’s book, and indeed in Jung’s opus quickly leads to the familiar charges or inflation, splits, complexes, madness, or in Richard’s understanding, cults (See his The Jung Cult)1! None of these interpretations can really be contested. There is enough evidence to convince most open-minded researchers of their “rightness”. In my first response to Catafalque, posted on Academia, I attempted to address the fact that Catafalque raises almost insurmountable issues for readers—issues that led to Jung’s sense of being quite isolated near the end of this life feeling that no one really understood him.2 The central and determining source of misunderstanding lies with Jung’s attempts to be scientific about a Reality that can only be approached by the mind of poet, artist, mystic, prophet, or world reconfigurer (Heidegger). The worst possible formulation of this mystery is that of a hypostasized Collective Unconscious.3 To put it another way, as I did in my book The Peril of Thinking, the fundamental problem facing us all in the West is one of language: how can a world that is at once both archetypal and ordinary yet distinct be articulated—this world being the healing medicine or Holy Grail for a culture which has been linguistically split for centuries? 4 I have worked for decades on this issue and am now seeing signs, from within the contemporary art world (of course), hints of just such articulations of this new world.5 Richard’s evaluation of both Jung’s and Kingsley’s work rests entirely on his interpretations of archetypal events as expressed in prosaic or pragmatic language in the Jungian literature, which is then interpreted in the secondary literature—an interpretive disaster in terms of conveying prophecy, revelation, or archetypal truths such as world Saviour, Redeemer, Sacrifice, or indeed, End of Humanity. Most commentators simply cannot grasp the fact that such archetypal truths have something to do with the public, real world today. There is no language at present that can persuade anyone on that score. Yes, Jung went to the Cross, as written in The Red Book, a very real experience but his experience could have nothing to do with real events 1 Richard Noll (1994): The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement. https://www.amazon.com/Jung-Cult-Origins-CharismaticMovement/dp/0691037248/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=richard+noll+the+jung+cult&qid=1550024122&s=gat eway&sr=8-1-fkmrnull 2 Response to Peter Kingsley’s Catafalque in Seven Parts. https://www.academia.edu/37914875/Response_to_Peter_Kingsleys_Catafalque_in_seven_parts 3 This unfortunate term and its references is the focus of Wolfgang Giegerich’s criticisms of Jung’s theoretical interpretations of his mystical experiences. 4 Linguistic splits such as inner/outer; spirit/matter, etc. These linguistic splits point to a split linguistic world, as Jung understood. 5 For example, see Arthur Danto’s The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). 2 of 14 in the world today—a purely private affair! This understandable conclusion is guaranteed for those auditors of The Red Book whose consciousness is still determined by the inner/outer split—the very split that Jung the Initiate overcame. His eyes were thus opened to totally different appearances which fact justifies the Heideggarian epithet of “World Reconfigurer”, or World Saviour, Healer etc. Having found the Holy Grail, the healing potion (i.e. consciously embodying the unity and difference of the split in actual experience), the rest became a matter of developing appropriate cultural practices to maintain and articulate the new world and its appearances. I believe the Jung “cult” and the Jung Club for example, followed by institutes all over the world is simply the first attempt to develop these cultural practices—a disastrous one to be sure.6 But as I said the world of art is rising up, as Heidegger suggests, to refute the absoluteness of our technological civilization, and to show a way that could honour Jung’s pioneering work as a Reconfigurer of Worlds. So as you read on now with Richard’s and my reviews and exchanges, keep in mind that what is at stake is not so much who has got the goods on Kingsley and Jung, but rather how can we work together on this staggeringly difficult problem of articulating a world in which archetypal reality and ordinary reality can be perceived in a new configuration. It requires nothing less that reconfiguring our self-definition. This is where contemporary art is leading us today. The reviews and comments below are ordered in temporal sequence.7 MY REVIEW OF CATAFALQUE C. G. Jung: Mystic before anything else “His whole science, [Jung] explains, derived entirely from his visions and dreams.” (p79) I have read and re-read many of Peter Kingsley’s books over the years, and his audio CD’s as well, so I was delighted to find him again speaking with Murray Stein on a video discussing C. G. Jung’s Red Book and Kingsley’s latest book Catafalque. I felt an immediate kinship with the subtitle. After all, my dissertation was about the phenomenon of the end of the world, for which my dreams were the primary “data”. But I did not know what a catafalque is so I looked it up to find that it is the “decorated wooden framework supporting the coffin of a distinguished person during a funeral or while lying in state.” Is C. G. Jung that distinguished person, I wondered, or humanity? Maybe C. G. Jung is a modern mouthpiece of humanity. I certainly believe so. I rushed to order the book and now have it—two volumes in which Kingsley wisely separates his literary voice, which as a mouthpiece of the goddess, carries Her wisdom and withering scorn for fools (i.e. all of us), from the scholarly references and endnotes that must come in the voice of the Academy, or tradition. Catafalque focuses on Jung’s Red Book and he shows how it unequivocally stamps C. G. Jung as a mystic, seer, prophet, and augur, before anything else. 6 Disastrous, that is, if the purpose of these practices was to initiate individuals into Archetypal Reality. Programmatic approaches can never work! 7 If you want to read my Response to Catafalque, posted at Academia before these reviews go to: https://www.academia.edu/37914875/Response_to_Peter_Kingsleys_Catafalque_in_seven_parts 3 of 14 This book is also an all-out attack on the institution of reason and, as well, the stubborn insistence within the Jungian community that Jung was first and foremost a modern scientist whose results can be empirically verified by the scientific community. Kingsley shows that, on the contrary, Jung’s opus is based firmly on his dreams and visions as demonstrated in the Red Book and elsewhere during Jung’s life. The degree to which the Jungian community has sought to diminish or even cover up Jung’s mysticism as the source of everything he has given us is truly astonishing. But Kingsley spells it all out. Kingsley’s literary style in all his books is an incantatory method of excoriation (stripping, flaying…) combined with rhythmic droning repetition. This magical methodology can steer us, if we dare to go, towards the mystical foundations of our Western civilisation. Catafalque is methodologically no different in this regard. With this rhetorical style and profound scholarship, Kingsley drives home how our privileging reason/rationality historically has in effect murdered those foundations. I am reminded of another crazy modern mystic Phillip K. Dick who affirms Kingsley's assertions through his literary "other", Fat: The single most striking realization that Fat had come to was his concept of the universe as irrational and governed by an irrational mind, the creator deity. If the universe were taken to be rational, not irrational, then something breaking into it might seem irrational, since it would not belong. But Fat, having reversed everything, saw the rational breaking into the irrational. The immortal plasmate had invaded our world and the plasmate was totally rational, whereas our world is not. RICHARD’S REVIEW OF CATAFALQUE Peter Kingsley (hereafter “Peter,” since his publications are so personal, including his “howl” recently published as Catafalque) is a classicist who specializes in ancient Greek culture and philology. He is rightly renowned for a series of brilliant scholarly articles between 1990 and 2002 and a book, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic (1995) which offered a reinterpretation of Presocratic philosophers such as Empedocles and Parmenides as healer/seers, magicians and possible practitioners of trance incubation in caves and ecstatic journeys to the underworld rather than as the originators of the rational Greek philosophical tradition that came later. No novel creative contributions from Peter of this caliber have appeared in almost twenty years, and as a result he recycles the insights of his youth throughout his later mystical books. The respect of academics for his early career work on the Presocratics has mostly protected Peter from withering criticism of his later works: In the Dark Places of Wisdom (1999), Reality (2004), A Story Waiting to Pierce You (2010) and now Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity (2018) These latter works are very personal books, written in a sideways style that Peter believes best suits a prophet, and each has two distinct (indeed, arguably unrelated) components: 4 of 14 (1) a primary text filled with flat, emotionless prose which is consciously aimed at the general reader as a parable-like confession of Peter’s very personal mystical interpretation of the divinely “seeded” origin of ancient Greek culture (and therefore Western culture – the two are identical in Peter’s mind, for the only true culture is ancient Greek culture to him – nothing else afterwards matters, and non-Western cultures are almost completely absent from his concerns because Western culture is THE superior culture, a spiritually elite culture that has lost its way); and (2) his extensive, impressive sections of footnotes, which scholars love and which are the true contributions of all his works, including Catafalque. Peter is a master bibliographer and footnote wizard, but not an effective communicator of his own deeply personal mystical revelations. Without his footnotes, which he brandishes like a man pulling open his shirt to reveal a suicide vest of explosives as a warning to others that he should be taken seriously – VERY seriously, his idiosyncratic mystical musings would be ridiculed by the scholars he scorns. It is clear that he is conscious of this and he is very sensitive about it. The two sides of each of Peter’s latter books really do stand apart and bear little relation to one another. The main text of each of these books, including Catafalque, is written by Peter the Prophet and the notes are written by Peter the Pedant. Peter has publicly self-identified as a mystic for more than twenty years (see, for example, his Wikipedia entry and the numerous interviews with him over the years). He has also made it clear in his last four books that he is also a prophet (a “howler,” as he claims is the original meaning of the word). It is his mission to save us from ourselves. Indeed, like a true prophet, he repeatedly reminds us he is misunderstood by the world and is bitter about it (bitterness is the single most commented upon aspect of Peter’s prose by reviewers of his last four books). Peter’s divinely inspired work, which he claims is written in “the choiceless rhythm of the winds and the rain,” is beyond criticism by others: “And you can try your best to criticize it if you are an expert at judging how the weather should be assessed” (pp. 444-445). It is the prerogative of a mystic and prophet to grant himself a pardon and immunity from prosecution. These are not exaggerations. And they are not insults. This is how Peter perceives himself and how he wants others to perceive him. He has been very public about this. However, as the classicist M. David Litwa wrote in the most detailed, insightful and blunt public criticism of Peter’s work (in a post on cultural historian Wouter Hanegraaff’s blog Western Culture and Counter Culture of 6 April 2017), Peter is “the self-appointed prophet of the obivious.” His interpretations “are almost always strained, eccentric and dogmatic.” This makes them unintentionally “humorous” because they are offered by a scold who asserts he has received, in an almost epiphanic divine flash of insight, the “immediate,” “obvious,” and “simple” Truth that is lost on all scholars (and all scholars are pedants, according to Peter). Litwa confesses with honesty: “Regarding Kingsley’s popular work, it is hard to get into. I have no problem with Kingsley constructing his authorial persona as a mystagogue, but he is a very curmudgeonly mystagogue. That 5 of 14 amount of anti-intellectualist rhetoric in his book Reality (on Parmenides) exceeds analysis and exegesis of Parmenides poem itself!” As Litwa explained, his criticisms are not designed to “depreciate” Kingsley. In Hanegraaff’s blog post, entitled “Peter Kingsley,” his deep respect and appreciation of Peter’s wonderous gifts as a classicist and philologist (all true) are tempered by the observation about the book Reality that, “on many pages, Kingsley’s utter contempt for almost all his colleagues and their failure to see the Truth makes the reading embarrassing and painful.” Any honest reader of Catafalque will immediately see how apt these observations are for the current book under review as well. But in this new book Peter’s contempt is repeatedly extended to Jungians and Jungian analysts. Peter masterfully marketed Catafalque as an “event” through You Tube promotional videos (including one with a rather tense dialogue with Jungian analyst Murray Stein in which Peter points out how Jungian analysts “who should know better” just seem to keep getting Jung wrong), and with glowing publicity blurbs from prominent scholars. He and they claim the book is a shocking new interpretation of C.G. Jung from a man who claims to be the only one who had a fluency of Greek and Latin that surpassed even Jung’s (yes, Peter says this in various places). This is not a book most Jungians or Jungian analysts will enjoy. Indeed, Jungians are charged with killing the spirit of everything that was alive and vital in Jung’s work. In a departure from his previous books, Peter’s usual villains – those ignorant scholarpedants – receive comparatively milder condemnation, though it is still abundant, particularly in Peter’s Trumpian attempts to humiliate other Jung scholars in the footnotes in volume 2. Peter's footnotes read like Trump's tweets. The intensity of the bitterness is several orders of magnitude above the unkind personal attacks found in the footnotes of his previous books, and one can only feel sorry for Peter, for it diminishes him. And I mean that sincerely. My sorrow is genuine. It will be especially difficult for Jungians (and I am not one) to give Peter an honest hearing of his howl due to his incessant belittling of them as an ignorant and sleeping herd. This is a shame, since Peter is a clever man and has many interesting insights into Jung. But Peter is a Prophet of Strife, an Empedoclean prophet of division and exclusion, who argues for the rightness of a spiritual elite who are awake and more intelligent than anyone else and who must lead the rest of us to . . . what, exactly? The best I can gather is that, like his spiritual guru Empedocles, Peter wants all of us to follow him in an act of mass suicide by jumping into the krater of a volcanic lava pit. That is the kind of prophet Peter is. His vision is, in the end, a dark and hopeless one, as his readers will see if, given our obviously limited cognitive and spiritual abilities, they can stay awake long enough to read the final chapters of the book. So let’s begin our direct assessment of Catafalque as a extension of Peter’s deeply personal concerns in his previous three books. Then let’s proceed directly to his deeply personal, hyper-hagiographic (to the point of slavish comedic heights) engagement with Jung. 6 of 14 As David Litwa pointed out in his commentary to Hanegraaff’s blog post, there is a metanarrative of decline in Peter’s books. Catafalque is indeed a howl, but the noise is one of lament, not joy or triumph. Peter argues in the final pages his book is a catafalque that he has built to support the remains of his beloved Western culture, which in his view is dead. There are many culprits, many murderers, and followers of Jung, who should know better, are prominent among them in this book. At the end of the book, as Peter stood all alone atop the catafalque he had built, I fully expected him to push the ignition button on his suicide vest and blow the whole damn carcass of Western culture into smithereens. As a prophet, Peter offers a diagnosis and a pharmakon, a treatment. The book is a personal statement, elegiac and poignant in its way, and at times nostalgic in a bittersweet way, because his own early career insights into the true divine origins of Western culture via the Presocratic healers/seers are the central Truth of his personal history and of our culture. Peter the Prophet’s fate and our fate are linked. Those golden Glory Days, his and ours, are in the distant past. We must bring the past into the present and return to The Truth if we are to be saved. Western culture lost The Truth until Peter rediscovered it in the 1980s through mystical revelations. We are all doomed because of this fatal forgetfulness. Western culture, indeed the whole world, is dying and is about to be placed in a coffin on the catafalque Peter has built. Peter laments that no one understands prophets like him, so all is lost. But what this really comes down to is that we are all doomed for not being Peter. Peter places himself and the truly brilliant insights of his early scholarly work at the center of this cosmic drama of Western cultural origins and redemption. Indeed he claims he extends and completes Jung’s work, connecting Jungian psychology with alchemy and Gnosticism and now Peter’s personal scholarly interpretation of the Presocratics. Peter claims the Presocratic founding fathers received direct divine gnosis in the underworld from “a goddess” or other spiritual beings. Western culture (which he never defines) was “seeded” by these divine entities and has been guided by a select few, a spiritual elite which includes Empedocles, Parmenides, Jung and Peter, who have established relations with these entities for more than two thousand years. Like a mystical nativist wearing a red cap that shouts “Make Western Culture Great Again!” Peter frantically waves his arms to warn us that the antidote to our sickness is to return to a society of the romantic past of shamans and Presocratic healer/prophets and live our dull, semi-conscious lives while hanging on every word of their revelations and following the lead of the elite. The lament is that Western culture is dying because only Peter has this insight, the only true pharmakon, and no one wants to hear his howl. My lament is that Peter only seems to care about Western culture in his mystical work (a colonialist mentality which he shares with Jung). If I were to follow a prophet I would personally prefer one who would show some awareness of the cultural diversity on our planet and maybe, just maybe, toss 7 of 14 a little of that salvation stuff towards those billions of folks living in non-Western cultures. After all, they’re the ones slaving in sweat shops making those red caps for us. And what about Jung? Catafalque is supposed to be about C.G. Jung, isn’t it? Not quite. And I mean this in several senses. First, and most obviously, Peter’s books are about Peter. The is true for all authors, but in Peter’s case this is explicitly so. He shares with us his dreams, fantasies, mystical flashes of insight, synchronicities, personal experiences with others (including a memory of being in a girl's living room and hoping to get laid when he was 14 -- but Jung happened to be on TV and cockblocked him) and, of course, his prophecies. To a lesser extent than in his other three mystical books, but still present in this one, Peter shares his insights gained from his mystical encounter with The Goddess herself and the living entities of Empedocles and Parmenidies who have been informing his writings. In this book, he is in dialogue with Jung as a spiritual guru of sorts. Jung is Peter’s Philemon. However, the Jung that Peter seems to be channeling in this book is not the biological or historical Jung the man. All that was ephemeral. Here it is: “In other words, there is no Jung. His life wasn’t the story of Jung realizing himself. It was a story of the unconscious realizing itself through the passing appearance of a conscious Jung” (p. 208). So Peter’s book is not about Carl Jung. It is Peter’s engagement with his imaginings of an eternal force that was only temporarily Carl Jung. Therefore, this book will be a great disappointment to anyone wanting a historical account or biography of Jung the man. But even Peter had to admit such a man did exist, at least briefly in his “Personality Number One” form. Peter channels Jung’s eternal “Personality Number Two” for us, indeed for our salvation (as least those of us in Western culture). Since the first volume of the book is a 445-page, meandering, sidewinding meditation that never catches fire, there is nothing to be said about its correctness or incorrectness. It is Peter’s movie of an intellectually, morally and spiritually flawless C.G. Jung. So here is how Jung #2 is portrayed in Peter’s movie: • Jung was a mystic (and knew it and lied about it) • Jung was a prophet (and knew it and lied about it) • Jung was a Gnostic (and knew it and lied about it) • Jung was a magician and performed magical rituals • Jung was deified. Repeat: he became a god. • Individuation is a path to deification • Jung consciously and deliberately formed a religion (his psychology) • Jung became the savior of the world, the servator mundi • Jung is the Anthropos • Jung is the Cosmic Christ • Jung suffered for our salvation – why can’t his critics see this? • Jung and Peter are working together to save us all 8 of 14 Long ago I read much of the biographical literature on Jung, much of which could be termed hagiographic. I struggled to find a word for Catafalque. This is a slavish hyperhagiography of a perfect divine being. There is so much Christ-talk in this book, so many assertions that Jung is the cosmic Christ, that Catafalque may indeed be Peter’s final mortal statement before throwing himself into the abyss. [Note: I have made further comments, as have others, in the "Comments" section to this review. It can be accessed by clicking on the title link to this review about: "Making Western Culture Great Again!"] MY RESPONSE TO RICHARD’S REVIEW OF CATAFALQUE Richard Noll’s review of Catafalque surely gives welcome voice to the misgivings of many in the Jungian community, and beyond, who read Catafalque—particularly those scholars who suffer the scornful and withering attacks that Kingsley unleashes on them in Vol.2. I think Noll’s observations and evaluation of Kingsley’s work and tone need to be said. Many feel the same way, I am sure. Although I am small fry in the scheme of these scholarly to and fro’s, I did once personally suffer Kingsley’s scornful and dismissive assault. I was in effect “erased” (i.e. taken off his website email list). When I inquired, he told me I had in fact offended the goddess in my autobiography, when I mentioned him and his work. I was, as they say in Australia, “gobsmacked!” I could maybe understand in theory that I had offended the man Kingsley (although I read and re-read my autobiography in befuddlement) but how would he know that I had offended the goddess? Is he the only one with privileged access to her graces? Anyway, my little story adds a gram of weight to Noll’s searing and dismissive evaluation of Kingsley and his book. So yes, all this needs to be said, but (I am sure you can hear it coming) there is a BUT! Why would I bother to go back to Kingsley’s works after such dismissive and contemptuous treatment? Perhaps this quote from Noll will help here. He quotes Kingsley saying that Jung’s story is of “the unconscious realizing itself through the passing appearance of a conscious Jung.” Noll then adds that, therefore, “Peter’s book is not about Carl Jung.” This one passage reveals the problem in reading Kingsley and Jung. Is it possible that Jung’s personal life was an expression of the unconscious realizing itself through the “passing appearance” etc.; that the book therefore could, at the same time, be about Jung the “passing appearance”? Everything hangs on how you answer this question! In my view Kingsley’s book can only make sense if this is true! It has to do as Kingsley says, with how you define “ordinary” (see 143ff). Kingsley's entire book springs from his mystical perception that the ordinary and extraordinary are one! So the ordinary Jung's personality #1 is extraordinary while his personality #2 is ordinary. This perception IS the healing of our cultural split which divides the ordinary from the archetypal, giving rise to all those fears of inflation that worry Jungians so much. If this is not understood then there is no chance of getting near to understanding Kingsley's claims. 9 of 14 Noll however answers in the negative and so we read yet another example of the cultural split between the ordinary and extraordinary that Kingsley goes to so much effort to teach us about. And so Noll’s dismissive evaluation logically follows, helping us right along to "the end of humanity". Nowhere do I get a sense that Noll agrees with anything Kingsley says about Jung the mystic as being true. He mocks and ridicules Kingsley with such statements as, “Catafalque may indeed be Peter’s final mortal statement before throwing himself into the abyss.” There is not a hint here that throwing oneself into abyss may be literally true, in a mystical sense—true enough to mark one with a life task that makes one’s life utterly miserable and yet is in service to others, as Jung’s and Kingsley’s lives are. Even though he is not a Jungian, Noll’s review effectively pounds one more nail into the coffin of mysticism in the West as he skilfully enacts Kingsley’s observation that, “Indeed, Jungians are charged with killing the spirit of everything that was alive and vital in Jung’s work.” Noll’s lament that “Peter only seems to care about Western culture in his mystical work (a colonialist mentality which he shares with Jung)” successfully twists what Kingsley is asserting. Yes, he focuses exclusively on mysticism as the foundation underlying the West—not at the expense of other cultures but because the West has lost sight of its own mystical origins. He seeks to recover knowledge of these origins by examining C. G. Jung’s life as a modern mouthpiece of these origins. Nowhere does Noll seem to want to get close to this thought—and it is the central and dominant thought of this book, it seems to me. Lastly: So far, no reviewer has focussed on the essential point of the book (as stated in the title) i.e. the Red Book's prophecy of the end of humanity and Jung's initiation into the healing medicine! No one so far has asked what the prophecy in The Red Book actually is and what the medicine is. It seems that many assume Kingsley means Climate Change, etc. But this is not the case! Kingsley is quite explicit about what for him and Jung the end of humanity means. It has already happened, whether or not "something else" goes forward into the future. This neglect of Kingsley's essential message, while gently criticising his tone, is quite in keeping with what happens to prophecies and prophets. They get ignored or "killed off". I have written on my blog about the essential message of the book, if you are interested. A PERSONAL EXCHANGE BETWEEN US John, I wanted to thank you personally for your comments on my review. Criticism about criticism is always welcome, especially when the discourse is civil. That's the way things should be. Many thanks Richard. You seem to have the capacity to weather severe batterings over time, by people who have vested interests in canonical thinking, ever since "The Jung Cult" and the radical perspective you offered there. I have always thought that your perspective needs to be heard, and maybe disputed. After all we are gazing at the same texts when we each interpret. Cheers, John 10 of 14 RICHARD’S FURTHER COMMENTS ON AMAZON Many of us have been hungry for a new scholarly vision of Jung by someone outside of The Jung Industry. We thought this book by Peter, considering his remarkable skills, was going to be the one. It wasn't. And those wanting a book on Jung are going to be very disappointed by this book. As for myself, after watching the Stein/Kingsley You Tube video, and then reading through both volumes of CATAFALQUE three times, I was struck by themes and issues that were first raised in my work on Jung in the 1990s. Beginning with my 1992 SPRING article, Jung the Leontocephalus, and continuing with my two books, I was the first to emphasize and amplify the significance of Jung's primary deification experience on Christmas Day 1913. As I later learned, Jung was deified more than once. At least according to his own interpretation of his experiences. I was only interested in how Jung interpreted his experiences to himself. Since none of us have direct access to the deeply personal, subjective experiences of others, all we have to go on are reports people make of their experiences. We can examine their ascriptions and causal attributions but not directly the experiences themselves. We can choose to believe the individual's own interpretation of their experience, or not. With the perspective of history, viewing a person as existing in a larger historical context -- something that historical subjects, indeed all of us, are mostly blind to, like goldfish in a bowl who are unaware of the constraints of the medium we exist in -- we can offer alternate interpretations. This is the difference between Peter's perspective and mine. For Peter, Jung IS the Cosmic Christ, the Anthropos, the Servator Mundi -- a very different take on things than mine. He shares his very personal mystical experiences with us, but without much evidence of any self-reflection, and angrily (for two large volumes!) asserts his Truth is THE Truth. For those wanting to join Peter the Prophet's New Faith, by all means do so. Peter also supported the arguments I made in my books that when Jung introduced his individuation concept he explicitly described individuation as a process of self-deification. Also, I made the argument that Jung viewed himself as a prophet (not that I thought he WAS a prophet), and that he consciously set out to form a religious movement with exoteric and esoteric components, based on his readings of the scholarship, new at the time, on the Hellenistic mystery cults. Analysis became a path of initiation (analysis) and rebirth (individuation as self-deification). Sun worship and solar mysticism, all key components of the experiences induced by following the magical recipes of the Mithraic Liturgy of the Greek Magical Papyri (see David Litwa's chapter on this in his book on deification in Western culture) and the Hellenistic theurgy of late antiquity (such as in the work of Iamblichus -- and I refer you to the works of classicist Gregory Shaw on this), were central to Jung's mystical/magical system. And yes, as I argued in my work, after 1912 Jung is more appropriately interpreted as a mystic with more similarities to Swedenborg and Blavatsky than to Freud or any other the medical and psychiatric figures or schools of thought of his era. Wouter Hanegraaff in 1996 described Jung as a German Romantic esotericist, and I think this gets things a bit closer to the historical truth. I did not have access to The Red Book in the early 1990s when I was researching Jung, but it was clear to me that there was a numinous glow arising from 11 of 14 his own intense, very personal, mystical experiences radiating up from and between the printed words of his texts in this time period. He certainly was having such experiences while writing WANDLUNGEN UND SYMBOLE DER LIBIDO in 1911 and particularly in 1912., Ernest Jones wrote a letter to Freud in December 1912 about an essay he was writing about Jung called The God Complex: The Belief That One Is God, and the Resulting Character Traits., published in 1913. Clearly others in Jung's extended professional and personal circles had picked up on something Jung was experiencing along these lines, a full year before Jung's Christmas 1913 deification experience. Let me offer a quote from THE JUNG CULT, published in September 1994: Jung was waging war against Christianity and its distant, absolute and unreachable God and was training his disciples to listen to the voices of the dead and to become gods themselves (page 224) Compare this to what we now know was in The Red Book (published in 2009), or to many of the arguments Peter is making in CATAFALQUE, or even to some of the themes in Hillman and Shamdasani's LAMENT OF THE DEAD. The main difference is that in my work I employ a horizontal hermeneutics based on historical contextualization, embedding Jung and his experiences in the cognitive categories of the culture he lived in and their reflection in the scholarship he absorbed and which reappeared as the basis of his own experiences during his confrontation with the unconscious. Here is the contradistinction: Most readers of Jung take communion through imbibing writings that are styled in an anagogical hermeneutics, a prose that uplifts the spirit in a vertical direction. They want Jung the Wise Old Man and Jung the Prophet and Mystic and interpret any historicizing of Jung as an attack on him. They do not want to be exposed to anything that might threaten the idealizing transference to the imago of Jung as an icon of divinity. Aion and Phanes may be Jung's God, but Jung as The Cosmic Christ is Peter's God. Those caught in the force field of such an idealizing transference feel rage because they feel they have been personally attacked (which is not true at all), and therefore respond with ugly personal attacks on any author who does not write about Jung in a holy, reverential tone. This same reaction occurred to the first books that discussed Jesus as a historical figure in the 19th century by Strauss and Renan. If the books were not appropriately reverential in tone, if they did not focus on the magic and the mystery, readers were enraged. But Jung was a human being, living in a particular time and place in history. The experiences he had, recorded in The Black Books and then aesthetically elaborated in The Red Book are not sui generis. They are framed and flavored by Jung's historicallysituated personal experiences and all of the reading he was doing on mythology and Hellenistic mystery cults (starting in intensity circa 1909/1910), Theosophy (the works of G.R.S. Mead, around the same time), astrology, Gnosticism (starting with intensity circa 1915), and of course his deep reading in German Romanticism and the Bible. His reports of his experiences are framed and easily traceable to the materials he was reading prior to and during this period of personal transformation. Jung (and others today) interpret them as pure, sui generis, ejecta from the fiery magma of the collective unconscious. People who admire Jung want mystery, not history, when they read about Jung. That's fine. But there are other approaches. After all, there has been no one alive for many decades who 12 of 14 was in Jung's inner circle in Zurich in that period of his confrontation with the unconscious. Every interpretation, whether of mystery or history, is an imagining, a reconstruction, a story about the past told for the purposes of the present. A little humility -- and less one-sided-ness (the great sin in Jungian circles) - might help us all have a more complete understanding of this complex man who died in 1961. I want to thank everyone -- whomever you are -- who found my review of CATAFALQUE to be helpful. I have been a bit overwhelmed by the enormous positive response to it. I posted in on Amazon, Academia.edu and Researchgate.net in mid-December, almost exactly two months ago. In that time, on Academia and Researchgate there have been 1200 reads and 630 downloads of the review from people all over the world, from Malta to Santa Fe to Iran to Russia to Japan. More than 30 scholars in the fields of classics, Western esotericism, comparative religions, philosophy and psychology have messaged me via Academia.edu . Even the noted Jungian analyst Murray Stein, who appeared in a You Tube video with Peter, reached out and expressed his support of my review. Apparently the book took him by surprise, and not in a good way, when he finally received his copy in December. Many have shared stories of personal encounters with Peter over the past 30 years. Sadly, most were not flattering. I have also read the drafts of several forthcoming book reviews by noted scholars, some who are Jungian analysts, and I was surprised to see how similar they were to mine. Peter is a serious scholar, and anything Peter writes must be taken seriously. FINAL NOTE BY JOHN I am including my seventh and final response to Kingsley’s Catafalque here to highlight the enormous difficulties in language when seeking to say a new world into existence: Response to Kingsley’s Catafalque: Seventh Chapter: Finale. As the previous (6th) chapter says, many thoughtful commentators are pointing to the root cause of our impending end of humanity in terms of the devastating consequences of “the split”.8This split is thought in so many ways, depending on the discipline speaking (e.g. spirit/matter; inner/outer; mind/body; man/nature; the Cartesian split; mind/brain; culture/nature; fiction/reality, empirical/archetypal, and of course, the subject/object split, which gave rise to science.) Along with all these conceptions, there seems to be unanimity about the “cure”—to bring the split to an end! One of the latest efforts in this regard, for example, is called “quantum sentience”. We keep coming up with ever more sophisticated concepts to help us “bridge” the gap—except that none do! The split produced by western civilization has caused untold suffering across scale for over two thousand years, as Peter Kingsley’s book shows. The root cause of this incalculable suffering lies with the destruction of the mystical foundations of our culture—the very foundations that gave rise to our civilization in the first place, and the only possible source of renewal. We cannot possibly know how to heal the split, unless we, or at least some of us, individually descend into the wound and take on the suffering of an entire civilization. 8 See also, for example, my essay “The Gap”: https://www.academia.edu/33528147/The_Gap_2017_ 13 of 14 This descent is in accord with Grail wisdom that states: “the wound is only healed by the lance that made it,” and constitutes an initiation of course—the kind of initiation that C. G. Jung endured, as recorded in The Red Book.9 Jung discovered the gift of the goddess, the same goddess who destroyed him, melted him down, placed him on the cross, dismembered him, and then finally, reconstituted him. The gift of the goddess is a new Being, and possibly a new culture that could flower from that Being. Kingsley describes the gift that is the initiate Jung, in great detail.10 To put it as simply as possible, Kingsley describes the gift this way: To live an archetypic life is no reason for inflation as it is the ordinary life of man … for [Jung] the totally extraordinary has become the utterly ordinary which, what’s more, was the normal state of humanity from the start. Kingsley goes on to add that “the apparent ordinariness of people [as they] go about their disconnectedly meaningless lives is the most extraordinary violation of what we humans are meant to be.” Human Beings were meant to be, in the first place, both ordinary and divine, in one: Whatever we think of as personal is in fact profoundly inhuman, while it’s only in the utter objectivity of the impersonal that we find our humanity. Now we are close to what “end of humanity” means. We are human when our humanness is grounded in archetypal reality, divinity, or “the profoundly inhuman”, and likewise, when the divine is ordinary. Returning to our source via initiation is to discover this truth, as Jung did. This truth is the gift of the goddess. The end of humanity, therefore, is the complete sundering of the divine from the ordinary. We lose our human-ness and that is the catastrophe before us today! In my essay, Jung and the Posthuman, I draw out the “intention” of archetypal reality, i.e. the background source from which we emerge—to bring ordinary reality and divine reality together, as one.11 The Holy Grail of our culture! I focus on language— achieved language and living language and the possibility of perceiving living language (archetypal reality) within prosaic language (ordinary reality). Jung’s descent into the Mothers, or the abyss, gave him the eyes to see this new reality and he spent his life teaching others to see it too, as best he could. Emma Jung complained that he was only interested in people if an archetype presented itself through their ordinariness: “you are not interested in anybody unless they exhibit archetypes”.12 The capacity to perceive the archetype in or as the divinity of any ordinary object is to end the split that is destroying our culture. Jung’s initiatory descent gave him that capacity. Recently I had this dream: 9 See my essay Transformation Through the Enraged Mother: https://www.academia.edu/37512893/Transformation_Through_the_Enraged_Mother_2018_ 10 Catafalque 143ff 11 Jung’s Red Book for Our Time: Searching for the Soul under Postmodern Conditions Edited by Murray Stein & Thomas Arzt Chiron Publications, 2017 12 Catafalque, 530 14 of 14 I am walking in public and learning for the first time that I have two heads, learning through the responses of others to me, as they looked at me. My ordinary consciousness was “located” more in one head but the ego-alien head was also seeing the world its peculiar way. This dream opened my eyes to the work of Dali, and I wrote an essay.13 In the essay I said: Dali is showing his version of an entirely new set of real appearances that correlate with a new style of consciousness—one that can simultaneously perceive ordinary, hardened, empirical reality and the reality of another dimension altogether, as this dimension unfolds into empirical reality. And several years before this, I had this impactful dream: I am wandering the streets, alone. I find myself in a hall where some ritual is going on, conducted by an older man. The participants are each undergoing a perfunctory ritual, i.e. they are just going through the motions. It has a Masonic-Christian feel to it. We are all sitting on our knees on carpet. When he sees me, he suddenly becomes interested, more alive, and asks me to go through the ritual, which now comes alive. There is a line on the floor. I am to touch my head on that line, i.e. submit. I do so as he intones the ritual of confessions. As I touch the floor with my head, he smiles and says warmly you are forgiven, everything. Then he comes over to me and crouches, whispering in my right ear for some time. As I listen I hear the voice of the “other”, a higher pitch, unearthly, i.e. the angel is speaking to me though him. I have trouble understanding most of it but the angel talks for some time. When finished I get up but have trouble speaking. My right hand begins to write autonomously. I scribble “interlocutor”.14 And so my capacity to “perceive”, within or as ordinary language, archetypal reality, or living language began to become conscious. 13 https://www.academia.edu/34714229/DALI_Deformation_of_Reality_2017_ This dream and my discussion appear in John Woodcock, “An Example of the New Art Form” in The Coming Guest and the New Art Form, (Bloomington: iUniverse, 2014), 48. 14