Greg Mogenson - Northern Ghosis
Greg Mogenson - Northern Ghosis
Greg Mogenson - Northern Ghosis
Series Editor
Greg Mogenson
Greg Mogenson
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Contents
Acknowledgments.......................................................................................... ix
Introduction................................................................................................... xi
Index................................................................................................................ 133
Acknowledgments
—Odinn
he story is told that Odinn gouged out one of his own eyes as
3 Cf. James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld (New York: Harper & Row,
1979), p. 22. See also James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper &
Row, 1975), p. 20.
INTRODUCTION xiii
mythology. Heir to the myths that preceded it, psychology has yet to work
through its own version of this archetypal pattern. I refer, of course, to
the battle of the god-terms in the annals of psychoanalysis. Beginning
with the parting of the ways between Freud and Jung, and continued
between the various schools of analysis, this battle may have its root in
the failure of depth psychology to recognize that the theories of its
founders are just so many new heads sprung from the age-old hydra of
myth. With the hindsight of a century, however, it now seems an irony
that Freud, while loathing the “black tide of mud ... of occultism”4 which
he feared Jung’s research into mythology might release, found all our
beginnings in Oedipus and created a pantheon of concepts with names
such as Ego and Id, Eros and Thanatos (as his followers later called his
death-instinct) even as his estranged colleague went on to conceive of
the psyche as a series of encounters with such dramatis personae as the
shadow and the anima. While both men made their respective
contributions to the new mythologem of psychology by means of a shift
from the imaginal language of the ancient myths to more or less abstract
conceptualizations of that language, each was at the same time inspired
by what he sensed the other had left out in the process.5 That each theorist
continued in his own way to allow the imaginal to inform his thinking
bears witness to the fecundity of the unknowable object which they both
designated with the god-terms “psyche” and “the unconscious.”
At the forefront of the image-oriented thought which has followed
in the wake of Jung’s characterization of psychology as a modern
mythologem is the work of James Hillman. Inspired by Jung’s idea that
both psychology and mythology are underpinned by common
archetypes, Hillman’s “post-jungian” school of archetypal psychology has
attempted nothing less that a full-scale “re-visioning of psychology” from
the perspective of Greek polytheism.6 By returning to the stories of the
various divinities of the classical period for background to its imaginings,
archetypal psychology has sought to reconnect the notion of the
archetype with the concrete images and specific details of the myths
themselves. The innovation here is the notion that images have depth
came into being before you, which neither die nor are made, how much
will you then endure!”16
Reading the works of Freud and Jung alongside the images from
Norse mythology “which came into being before them” is both a rich
affective experience and a visionary feast. For instance, in connection to
the image of Odinn hung on the windy tree,17 one finds that the “little
vesicle” of emergent life, described by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle as being suspended amidst the perturbing stimuli of the world,
immediately flashes to mind.18 Sacrificed to himself in a shamanic rite,
the shrieking god is said to have picked up the runes of his wisdom, even
as the little vesicle of Freud’s speculations, traumatized by the exigencies
of nature, develops a protective surface boundary which functions, at the
same time, as a consciousness-creating and knowledge-constituting
perceptual threshold. Briinnhilde, the battle maiden, lying in the circle
of flames bedecked in manly armour, evokes herself, in a like fashion, in
those details of Freud’s account having to do with how the external
stimulation causes the protective surface boundary, or crust of dead
matter, to be formed around the vesicle’s deeper, living layers.19 And then
there are the resonances from Jung’s writings. While underlining those
lines of the Hdvamdl which refer to Odinn’s torment upon the tree, Jung’s
essay, “Mind and Earth,” comes forcefully into one’s thoughts. For in
16 Cited in Stephen Hoeller, Jung and the Lost Gospels: Insights into the Dead Sea
Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library (Wheaton, IL: The Theosophical Publishing
House, 1989), p. 198.
17 Cf. the Hdvamdl of the Elder Edda, stanzas 137, 138.
I know that I hung
On that wind-swept tree,
Through nine long nights,
Pierced by the spear,
to Odinn sacrificed,
myself to myself,
on that great tree
whose roots
no one knows.
Neither food nor drink
Did they give me.
I looked downwards—
Took up the runes,
Took them up shrieking,
Then I fell down.
18 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, tr. J. Strachey (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1961), pp. 20-21.
19 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, pp. 20-21.
INTRODUCTION xvii
this essay, Jung, too, speculates on the relationship between the psyche
and the inorganic world from which it can be conceived to have emerged
during the course of evolution. Imagining a descent through historical
layers of civilization, Jung would have us reach “the naked bed-rock, and
with it that prehistoric time when reindeer hunters fought for a bare and
wretched existence against the elemental forces of wild nature.”20 It is
within these “dark confines of the earth” that we come upon “the factors
that affected us most closely [and which, therefore,] became archetypes”
for Jung,21 even as they became runes for Odinn.
Although depth psychology from Freud to Hillman has tended to
turn to Greek mythology for its ultimate figures, it is useful, in light of
this nexus of associations in which the gnosis of the North reveals itself,
to explore the extent to which its mode of thought is governed by the
frost-demons, boulder-giants, Valkyries, and Rhine-maidens of its own
Central and North European landscape.22 This is not to say that our
psychological tradition could not be insighted from other mythological
perspectives. In the same way that a dream may take us to a distant land
in search of perspectives compensatory to our local psychology, so the
wisdom: the oracular runes. Exposed to the elements of the ancient north,
“the High one” as Odinn was called, drew what came to be known as
the runes from the inwardness and depth of his situation.25 Closer to
our own time, Jung, with a similar dynamic in mind, wrote of the “fantasy
combinations” that are latent in the unconscious and which come to light
as the press of one’s times and conditions bring about their inner
constellation.26 Used in divination, the runes were little pieces of stone,
clay, or bark with an alphabet of primitive symbols etched into them.
As destiny and fate play at Scrabble through our lives, so the runic fantasy
combinations of the imaginal psyche are cast within us by the sympathy
and adversity of things, if only in the form of our underlinings, marginal
comments, and moments of reverie. Turning now to the texts of Freud
and Jung, the task before us is to read them as our forebears read the
runes, letting particular passages spring to mind, along with the tales of
the North which they continue, from within the press of life and the
demands of daily practice.
Thor’s Hammer:
The Reality and Objectivity of the
Psyche in the Thought of
Freud and Jung
Thor in his thunder chariot preparing to hurl his
throwing hammer, Mjollnir
The psyche for me is something objective that sends up
effects into my consciousness. The unconscious (the objective
psyche) doesn’t belong to me; rightly or wrongly I belong to
it. By making it conscious I separate myself from it, and by
so objectivating it I can integrate it consciously. Thus my
personality is made complete and is prepared for the decisive
experience, but no more than that. What can, but need not,
happen then is the spontaneous action from the unconscious,
an action which is symbolized by the alchemists, Paracelsus,
Boehme and the modern unconscious as lightning.
... [T]he ego is that part of the id which has been modified
by the direct influence of the external world ...; in a sense it
is an extension of the surface-differentiation. Moreover, the
ego seeks to bring the influence of the external world to bear
upon the id and its tendencies, and endeavours to substitute
the reality principle for the pleasure principle which reigns
unrestrictedly in the id. For the ego, perception plays the part
which in the id falls to instinct. The ego represents what may
be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id,
which contains the passions.
God ofLightning
e have already met Thor in the introduction to this volume. As
W thunder god and lord of the lightning bolt, the fiery, hammer
wielding Thor can be imagined to be the sender of that “bolt from the
blue” which compels the psychologically-minded reader to underline those
passages in the works of Freud, Jung, and the Norse myths that resonate
most thunderously within the associative heart and mind. Though not
himself a god of inspiration or revelation, as a son of Odinn—the AEsir
4 NORTHERN GNOSIS
deity to whom these qualities are attached—Thor presents the power and
force of their impact. Just as our Northern forebears compared the rock
smashing, tree-shattering impact of lightning to the spark born of the
bronzesmith’s hammer, so inspiration strikes us a reverberating blow. We
hit upon an insight while reading the Norse myths alongside the writings
of Freud and Jung, the mind galvanized by the experience. Ideas come
together with a thundering crash. Images hammer us with the imaginal
power inherent in them. Even when the mythological image of Thor is
the farthest thing from our mind, being altogether unknown to us, it
nevertheless remains a possibility of any fantasy, “the archetype,” as
Hillman has said, being “wholly immanent in its image.”*1
AsThor hurls his throwing hammer, Mjollnir (the crusher or striker),
at the giants and monsters who are the adversaries of the AEsir and their
realm, so, with a similar might, the objective psyche throws up images. This
is not to say that the objective psyche is any more real than Thor or that
the lightning-like force of the one is any more primary than the lightning-
like force of the other. Psychology’s phrase—“the objective psyche throws
up images”—is as mythical a statement as the Norse account ofThor and
his throwing hammer. Indeed, we can just as readily see the term “objective
psyche” as a shaft of lightning hurled by Thor as we can conceive ofThor’s
hammer as a mythic image thrown up by the objective psyche.
This is not only true for the mind, but true to experience as well.
When one encounters a conceptual term such as “objective psyche” in a
text by Jung or a term such as “psychical reality” in an essay of Freud’s,
one may be struck by an afflux of emotion no less than when one reads
about Thor and his hammer. Strangely, despite their abstractness, these
concepts have a highly evocative power. While we think of them as ideas,
they resound with something deeper, for they are at the same time
feelings. The archetype, evidently, is just as immanent to concepts as it
is to images. Like a lightning shower, this phenomenon continues to
repeat itself in the very words one might draw upon to explain it. In words
such as “numinous” and in phrases such as “a priori emotional value,”2
that “spontaneous action from the unconscious ... which is symbolized
B God ofMud
esides the hammer-like quality of his lightning, another aspect of
Thor is evident in these pages: Thor is a warrior god, the defender
of the AEsir and their realm from the Jotunns (giants) and other
adversaries, such as the monstrous Midgard Serpent. Most of the tales
in which he figures celebrate his enormous strength, and the strength
of the various opponents over whom he sometime handily, sometimes
narrowly prevails. As might be expected, however, his brains do not
come up to the same level as his brawn. This is particularly evident
when it comes to word-duels. In debates, the obtuse Thor is easily
sundered. In contrast to the other gods, who ride over the Rainbow
Bridge, Bivrost, to the World Tree, Yggdrasill, where they hold council,
Thor takes a less glorious route, plodding on foot through the deep
rivers which stream from its base. When the council meeting begins,
his performance is consistent with the wretchedness of his entrance.
As one commentator describes it,
When Jung was writing his book, Psychological Types, he too became
simultaneously bogged down in the enormity of his undertaking and
inspired by an image that was thrown up by the unconscious (or by the
3 Jung, CW 9, i § 271.
4 Harald Hveberg, Of Gods and Giants: Horse Mythology, tr. P. S. Iversen (Oslo:
Johan Grundt Tanum Forlag, 1969), pp 19-20.
6 NORTHERN GNOSIS
5 Marie-Louise von Franz, The Shadow and Evil in Fairytales (Zurich: Spring
Publications, 1974), p. 209-210.
6 Thor’s association with seafaring derives from the story of his fishing for the
Midgard Serpent. For an account of this adventure see Hveberg, Of Gods and Giants,
pp. 52-54.
THOR’S HAMMER 7
P vision of the mud through which Thor of the laboured speech plods
to Yggdrasill and the council of the gods. In Freud’s writings, these
images from Norse mythology find their conceptual equivalents in
notions such as infantile sexuality, fixation, and sublimation. Enacting
itself in these terms, the mythical mud in which Thor gets stuck
corresponds to infantile sexuality’s regressive hold, his powerful throwing
hammer Mjollnir, to sexuality itself. The Rainbow Bridge and the
council chambers in the branches of the World Ash, Yggdrasill,
correspond, by contrast, to the cultural uses to which libido can be
applied, providing that infantile forms of gratification can be renounced
and their regressive longings sublimated. And herein lies the difficulty,
at least in the psychoanalytic version of the story. Pulled in two
directions at once, the ambivalent Thor must struggle to free
himself from the instinctual vicissitudes in which he is stuck on
his way to Yggdrasill, even as the Moses of Michelangelo, in
Freud’s view,9 was torn between a regressive desire to join the dance
around the golden calf and the commandments of his ego-ideal to seek
gratification in higher cultural forms. Wrenching a foot free from that
viscous muck and then setting it down again while he struggles to free
the other, Thor, or rather, the particular instinct or part-drive which is
fixated in the muddy embrace of its respective erogenous zone, undergoes
what Freud, with the so-called “vicissitudes of the instincts” in mind,
has called a “reversal into its opposite.”10 The active stance changes into
a passive one, even as in the Norse myth the mighty Thor slumps for a
moment in the place where he is stuck. To regain the balance, there is
“a reversal of content,”11 the valence of erotic life shifting from love to
hate: heated with frustration, the god gives vent to thunderous rages.
Subsequent steps bring about still other instinctual vicissitudes such as
“turning around upon the subject,” “repression” and “sublimation.”12
Simultaneously sequestered in the primary process which is the corollary,
at the mental level, of the part-drives, speech and thought become a
muddled affair as well. Though the patient is obliged to say whatever
comes into his mind, his associations, as psychoanalysis has long
recognized, are anything but free. For just as defences against the
instincts oppose the straightforward pursuit of instinctual aims,13 so
resistances oppose compliance with the fundamental rule.14 Words fail,
topics are abruptly changed, and the discourse becomes inexplicably
bogged down and blocked. When the patient does seem to be speaking
freely, as often as not, it is with the muddy foot ofThor in his mouth—
language being redolent of the mechanisms of infantile sexual life that
we have just listed. But with an ear for dirt, which is to say, with a
knowledge of such muddy mechanisms as displacement, condensation,
and symbolization, the analyst listens for the latent meaning of the
patient’s utterances, formulating them into cogent interpretations which
bring the light of reason and reality to bear.
9 Sigmund Freud, “The Moses of Michelangelo,” Collected Papers, vol. III: 293-
383, tr. J. Riviere (London: The Hogarth Press & The Institute of Psycho-Analysis,
1950). (All subsequent references to the Collected Papers—hereafter CP—will be by
volume and page number.)
10 Freud, СР IV, 69.
11 Freud, СР IV, 69.
12 Freud, СР IV, 69.
13 Freud, СР IV, 69.
14 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, tr. James Strachey (New York:
Norton, 1961), pp. 12-14.
THOR’S HAMMER 9
15 Jung, CW 8 § 387-396.
16 Cf. my “The Between-ness of Things: Psyche as the Intermediary between
Matter and Spirit,” Harvest: International Journal for Jungian Studies 50:1 (2004).
17 “An image is not what we see, but how we see.” Adage adapted from his
statement: “The image is not what is present to awareness—this is the content proper—
but how this content is presented.” Edward S. Casey, “Toward a Phenomenology of
Imagination,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 5 (1974): 10.
18 To Caseys adage, cited in the previous note, I have added the notion of being
known by an unknown knower. Of this Edinger writes: “The experience of knowing
with can be understood to mean the ability to participate in a knowing process
simultaneously as subject and object, the knower and the known. This is only possible
within a relationship to an object that can also be a subject. Practically, this means
either a relationship with an outer other (a person) or an inner other (the Self).” Edward
Edinger, The Creation of Consciousness: Jung’s Myth for Modern Man (Toronto: Inner
City Books, 1984), p. 53. We shall return to this theme in the final chapter, discussing
it there in terms of our relationship to the ancestral soul.
10 NORTHERN GNOSIS
The ego ideal is ... the heir of the Oedipus complex, and
thus it is also the expression of the most powerful impulses
and most important libidinal vicissitudes of the id. By setting
up this ego ideal, the ego has mastered the Oedipus complex
and at the same time placed itself in subjection to the id.
Whereas the ego is essentially the representative of the
external world, of reality, the super-ego stands in contrast
to it as the representative of the internal world, of the id.
19 C. G. Jung, The Integration of the Personality, tr. S. Dell (London: Kegan &
Paul, 1940), p. 91. See also Jung, CW9, i § 302— “It is a well-nigh hopeless undertaking
to tear a single archetype out of the living tissue of the psyche; but despite their
interwovenness they do form units of meaning that can be apprehended intuitively.”
20 Jung, CW9, i § 99.
21 For a remarkable reading of Freud’s super-ego theory that shows that it is
compatible with the idea of a wise unconscious see Dan Merkur, Unconscious Wisdom:
A Superego Function in Dreams, Conscience, and Inspiration (Albany: State University
of New York, 2001).
THOR’S HAMMER 11
Conflicts between the ego and the ideal will, as we are now
prepared to find, ultimately reflect the contrast between what
is real and what is psychical, between the external world and
the internal world.22
While with this theory, Freud certainly does meet the reproach of those
critics who had complained that psychoanalysis ignores “the higher,
moral, supra-personal side of human nature,”23 the tale it tells is a most
pessimistic one given that the super-ego, which has developed as the result
of this same process, is regarded as casting such long shadows of
discontent upon the future.24
Against Freuds anxious admonishment that he cleave dogmatically
to the sexual theories of psychoanalysis and make an “unshakable
bulwark” of them “against the black tide of mud ... of occultism”25 that
his own emerging theories threatened to release Jung held fast. For to
him Freud’s position, taken to its ultimate conclusion, would “lead to
an annihilating judgement upon culture,” culture appearing on this
account to be “a mere farce, the morbid consequence of repressed
sexuality.”26 Having immersed himself to the knees, and higher, in his
mythological researches, Jung came to believe that the mind’s mythical
substrate was not the mere quagmire of repressed material that Freud
believed it to be at that time,27 but a reservoir of vitality, resilience, and
proto-adaptive tendencies. As with Thor, however, it was at first painfully
difficult for him to articulate his ideas to Freud, derived as they were
from the very fantasy thinking that he, like Freud, had until that point
22 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, ed, J. Strachey, tr. J. Riviere (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1962), p. 26.
23 Freud, The Ego and the Id, p. 25.
24 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, in The Freud Pelican Library,
vol. 12: 251-340 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985).
25 C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, tr. R. & C. Winston (New York:
Random House, 1965), p. 150.
26 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 150.
27 Though Jung tended to characterize Freud’s view of the unconscious as limited
to the repressed, and though I have here limited my amplification of the mud in which
Thor mucks to Freud’s notions of repression, fixation and infantile sexuality, Freud
clearly recognized that the unconscious comprised much more than repressed contents.
In The Ego and the Id, Freud speaks of a structure in the ego which, while providing
for consciousness, has itself never been conscious. Conceptualizing this region of the
mind as the “third unconscious,” Freud maps something of the same territory Jung
mapped with his notion of a psychoid unconscious. Discussion of these ideas, however,
I will leave to the final chapter, for they do not have the muddy quality which concerns
us here, being rather more rigid, inorganic, and stone-like.
12 NORTHERN GNOSIS
regarded with suspicion.28 It was a very troubled Jung who would write
to his patient and confidant, Sabina Spielrein, “I have been blasphemed
enough, mocked enough, and criticized thoroughly; therefore I will keep
my runes and all my pale and thin little ideas, some of which I shared
in my ‘Libido’ work,” even though, as he bitterly added, “[they are only]
‘unscientific,’ symbolic lies built on repressed anal eroticism.”29 Evidently,
at this point in his career, Jung only dimly perceived what he would
later, with the help of his alchemical research, see more clearly: lightning
and mud constellate together even as the gold (as the adage puts it) is
in the shit.
Jung’s later conviction “that creative imagination is the only
primordial phenomenon accessible to us, the real Ground of the psyche”30
began to take hold in him with the recognition that it was the mythical
power of Freud’s sexual theory,31 not sexuality itself, that exerted the
fascinating, not to say fixating, effect which Freud attributed to libido.
As the only immediate reality accessible to us, images, in Jung’s view,32
are more indicative of our psychic nature than is sexuality. They, not
sexuality, are the mud in which we plod, even as they, not sexuality, are
the source of the lightning which enlivens our being.
Where the unconsciously mythical language of Freud’s psychoanalysis
would assimilate the image of the muddy Thor to its psycho-sexual theory
of regression and fixation, the more consciously mythical language of
Jung’s analytical psychology would speak of a potentially positive
introversion of psychic interest into the depths of its own symbolical
imagery. As Jung put it in the later, revised edition of the chapter of his
Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, which, in its original version,
signalled the end of his collegial relations with Freud:
This view of the mud, which was as much the product of Jung's
Thor-like return to his childhood pursuit of making rivulets for his
fantasies in the shoreline of Lake Zurich as it was the result of his
scholarly research into the nature of myth,3435is indeed a radical
departure from the views of Freud. From this perspective, both the mud
of myth and the stuff of theory are essential expressions of the psyches
symbolic process.
“bridge [s] the irreconcilable claims of subject and object”36 such that life
can carry on. God (or that imago of the psyche which so transcends the
boundaries of the ego that we experience it as if it were a deity) really
does hear the sparrow fall, in one situation becoming Thor to do so, in
other situations taking on the form of still other gods—hence Jung’s
hypothesis of a collective unconscious.37
—C. G. Jung
36 Jung, CW 6 § 78.
37 In using the term “collective unconscious” interchangeably with the term “God”
I follow Jung’s precedent: “For the collective unconscious we could use the word God.
... [But] I prefer not to use big words, I am quite satisfied with humble scientific
language because it has the great advantage of bringing the whole experience into our
immediate vicinity.” C. G. Jung, The Visions Seminars (Zurich: Spring Publications,
1976), p. 391.
38 Jung, CW 8 § 328.
39 The “Poetic” or “Elder Edda” is a compilation of mythic tales and poems. Dating
from 1250 C.E., it is also referred to as Saemund’s Edda after a famous Icelander. The
“Younger Edda,” also called the “Prose Edda,” is a later compilation written by Snorri
Sturluson around 1220 C.E.
40 Freud, The Ego and Id, p. 7.
16 NORTHERN GNOSIS
as appearing whenever called upon for aid against the Jotunns and the
Vanir, Freud conceptualizes a psychic agency of similar characteristics,
the “I” or “ego,” which is called into being through the clash between
the instinctual impulses of the id and the forces at large in the
surrounding environment.
The “younger edda” of Jung’s analytical psychology tells much the
same story. Indeed, like Freud, Jung also conceives of an ego which, as
he puts it, “seems to arise in the first place from the collision between
the somatic factor and the environment, and once established as a subject,
... goes on developing from further collisions with the outer world and
the inner.”41
The tale ofThor’s encounters with the Jotunn, Skryme, and Utgarda-
Loki, the King of the Jotunns,42 comes immediately to mind in
connection with Freud’s and Jung’s accounts of the clash or collision of
the somatic factor, or id, with the external world.
41 Jung, CW 9ii § 6.
42 My telling of this tale follows the account of Hveberg, Of Gods and Giants,
pp. 41-51.
43 Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms ofDefense, tr. C. Baines (New York:
International Universities Press, 1966), p. 109-121.
THOR'S HAMMER 17
sleeping giant on the head. Though we may be sure that the blow was a
mighty one, the groggy Skryme merely awakens wondering ifit was a leaf
that has fallen on his head. Twice more Thor brings his hammer down
upon Skryme, the Jotunn thinking that perhaps an acorn or a twig has
fallen on him.
44 I refer here to the illuminating comparison of one thing to another, i.e., to the
capacity to know what things are like, as this comes across in metaphor and simile,
image, symbol and myth.
18 NORTHERN GNOSIS
45 Freud, The Ego and the Id,p.7: “We have formed the idea that in each individual
there is a coherent organization of mental processes; and we call this his ego. It is to
this ego that consciousness is attached; the ego controls the approaches to motility—
that is, to the discharge of excitations into the external world; it is the mental agency
which supervises all its own constituent processes, and which goes to sleep at night,
though even then it exercises the censorship on dreams. From this ego proceed the
repressions ....”
46 Freud, CP III: 149-289.
47 Jung, CW 8 § 499-500. Cf. Harry Wilmer, “Combat Nightmares: Toward a
Therapy of Violence,” Spring 1986: An Annual ofArchetypal Psychology and Jungian
Thought (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1986), pp. 120-139.
48 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, III.i, 11. 63-64.
THOR’S HAMMER 19
49 Freud, The Ego and Id, p. 7. See epigraph at top of this chapter.
50 Musical passages from Stravinsky’s Le Sucre du Printemps come to mind at this
juncture as if to remind me that the metapsychological Freud was a visionary Freud
and that the technical terms he created denote much more than the mental apparatus
of the human subject. Indeed, the simplest life forms at the dawn of creation are subject
to the same descriptive categories. As Freud puts it, “The differentiation between ego
and id must be attributed not only to primitive man but even to much simpler
organisms, for its is the inevitable expression of the influence of the external world”
(The Ego and the Id, p. 28).
20 NORTHERN GNOSIS
In the first contest, Thor’s companion Loki is pitted against the Jotunn
Loge in an eating contest. Although Loki eats the great trough of meat laid
before him with great speed and gusto, Loge consumes not only the meat,
but the bones and trough as well, in the same briefperiod.
first encounter, Utgarda-Loki, then in the form of the Jotunn Skryme, has
used magic and cunning to protect himselfand his fellow Jotunns from the
strength of Thor, which he only pretended to hold in small account. As he
explains to his incredulous guests, the sack ofprovisions which he, as Skryme,
had given to Thor could not be opened because it was tied with magic yarn.
And as for the hammer blows that Thor had aimed at the sleeping Skryme,
even the first ofthese would have killed him had not he, mercurial trickster
that he is, pulled a mountain between the hammer and himself. As evidence
ofthis deception, the guests are shown the flattened mountain and the three
square valleys that Thor’s hammer made in it. And what of the eating
contest? Recognizing that Thor’s Loki could eat most greedily, Utgarda-Loki
hadpitted him against a ragingfire that could consume the bones and trough
as fast as it could the meat. Continuing the litany ofdeceptions, Utgarda-
Loki reveals that the Jotunn, Huge, whom Tjalve had raced, was in fact
the memory and thought of their Jotunn host. Tjalve could hardly be
22 NORTHERN GNOSIS
expected to outrun these! Then there had been the ale-horn which Thor had
attempted to drain. In this event as well Thor’s performance had been most
impressive, for the other end of the horn lay in the sea. Though because of
this the horn could not be emptied, Thor had drunk so deeply from it that
his gulps created what is now known as the ebb-tide! And what trickery
was involved in the last two contests? What Utgarda-Loki had identified as
his cat and challenged Thor to lift off the floor was actually the dread
Midgard Serpent, whose length is that of the entire land! The mocking
Jotunns were really most astounded that Thor had lifted the arching monster
almost to heaven! They were also impressed by Thor’s performance in the
last contest, for while he was deceived into believing that the old hag with
whom he was wrestling was merely Utgarda-Loki’s foster-mother, it was
actually “Old Age” with whom he was fighting. No one, not even an AEsir
deity, can prevail over that spirit!
Upon hearing thefull account ofthese trials and deceptions, Thor quickly
took up his hammer, hoping to deal the long-overdue death-blow to his host,
butjust as quickly, Utgarda-Loki disappeared, his castle vanishing also.
archetypes for Jung also partake of “a causeless and creative principle” which
cannot be entirely derived from material processes.53
Quotations from Jung’s writings which dream the archaic myth of
Thor’s sojourn in Utgard onwards by translating it into modern dress
are many. Keeping the entire story of Thor’s encounter with Skryme and
Utgarda-Loki in mind, let us cite a few of these.
I can only gaze with wonder and awe at the depths and
heights of our psychic nature. Its non-spatial universe
conceals an untold abundance of images which have
accumulated over millions of years of living development
and become fixed in the organism. My consciousness is like
an eye that penetrates to the most distant spaces, yet it is
the psychic non-ego that fills them with non-spatial images.
And these images are not pale shadows, but tremendously
powerful psychic factors. The most we may be able to do is
misunderstand them, but we can never rob them of their
power by denying them. Beside this picture I would like to
place the spectacle of the starry heavens at night, for
the only equivalent of the universe within is the
universe without ...54
Like Thor, awestruck by the sheer immensity of the castle of Utgard and
humbled before the Jotunns who defeated him with the aid of Utgarda-
Loki’s deceptive magic, Jung speaks in this passage of his numinous
encounter with the depths and heights of a psychic nature constituted
of images which, far from being merely the pale shadows of the external
world, are powerful psychic factors in their own right. Though we, like
Thor, may misunderstand these images, or be deceived by them, we
cannot, writes Jung, rob them of their AEsiric and Jotunnic power by
denying their reality. The fact that they, being non-spatial, appear and
disappear of their own accord, as does Utgarda-Loki’s castle in our myth,
points, not to the insubstantiality of images (Freud’s theory of images as
mere wish-fulfillment), but to the independence and autonomy of the
psychic factor.55 For, as Jung writes elsewhere, when the effects that these
images produce are taken into account, their determining influence must
also be acknowledged.
53 Jung, CW 10 §49.
54 Jung, CW4 § 764.
55 Jung, CW9, i § 116-118.
24 NORTHERN GNOSIS
But let us now examine another passage from Jung’s writings, reading
it, too, as if it were the speech of Utgarda-Loki revealing his deceits to
Freud and Thor:
61 Jung, CW 8 § 331-332.
62 Jung, CW8 § 327.
63 Jung, Letters, vol. I, p. 200.
THOR’S HAMMER 27
Anxious that with their newly acquired might the Jotunns will storm Asgard,
theAEsir devise aplan to get the hammer back. The ransom that Trym has asked
for—Freya’s hand in marriage—is out ofthe question; people will say that the
goddess is man-crazy ifshe goes toJotunheim! But Trym’s requestgives Heimdall
an idea. They will trick the Jotunns by disguising Thor as Freya! That will
get him into Jotunheim and near enough to the hammer to turn the tables
on theJotunns.
Dressed as a bride, with Loki as his bridesmaid, Thor sets offto retrieve
Mjollnir. When the bridegroom Trymfirst sets eyes on his intended, he is taken
aback by the sight ofher. The goddess’s appetite astonishes him. Upon arriving
in Jotunheim the bride-to-be immediately consumes an ox, eight salmon, and
three barrels ofmead, not to mention other delicacies, which she also devours
in great quantity. Reassuring the incredulous Trym, Loki informs him that
Freya hadn’t eaten for eight days, such had been her desire to come to him.
Looking into Thor’s rage-filled eyes, taking them to be Freya’s, Trym is troubled
by theirfiery brightness. But again Loki reassures him that this is only because
Freya has not sleptfor eight nights, so great is her longing to be his bride. These
explanations are enough to assuage theJotunns doubts and the wedding service
begins. As it is the custom in those Northern climes to solemnize weddings by
placing Thor’s hammer in the lap of the bride, Thor has only to await his
moment. Everything goes off according to Heimdall’s plan. Trym produces
the hammer and places it on his bride’s lap. Quickly seizing the hammer by
its handle, the berserk Thor burstsfrom his disguise, slaying Trym and all his
stock with immediate dispatch.
materialism of the science that had in this way come to the fore. Doubtless,
this kind of projection, whatever forms it takes, has always been
ubiquitous. The forces of the outside world frequently are immense
enough to steal the psyche’s reaction even as they seem to be the source
of everything. The traumatized war veteran knows only too well what it
is like to be pummelled night after night by intolerable scenes of battle.
However, inasmuch as the myths (and eventually the recurring battle
nightmares as well) are not merely copies of external objects and outer
events, but, at the same time, impactful fantasies expressive of the psyche’s
own nature, the hammer is also retrieved. Knowing this we may imagine
the theft of Thor’s hammer and his subsequent reclaiming of it to be
archetypal dimensions of any myth or image. For, while the external world
does have an immense impact on the imagination, the fact that this impact
is registered asymmetrically by such fantastic figures as frost-giants and
boulder-demons points to the creative impact of a pre-existing inner
world.67 A priori this world, too, is a shaping spirit, as powerful in its own
way as external objects and external causes.68 And though Freud would
derive this inner world from the world of external objects through a
process called introjection, which he conceived to be as voluminous in
its capacity to swallow up and take in as were the ravenous Loki and the
barrel-chested Thor, Jung recognized that what would seem to have been
introjected from the external world is always already amalgamated with
fantasies which the psyche has extruded via the process of projection. Like
the four-year-old child who eats his broccoli only when his story-telling
mother tells him it is a wonderful green tree, what is taken into the psyche
through introjection is complicated from the start by the giants of
imagination with which it must compete. Again, it is impossible due to
the lack of an Archimedean position to say which strikes first, the inner
world or the outer, or which process is more primary, introjection or
projection. Our myth, however, does not trouble itself with this chicken-
or-egg dilemma regarding priority in the process. Rather, it dramatizes
the relationship of these powers and principalities through tales which are
indicative of the way things happen. Jung, arguing for the non-derivative
reality of the psychic factor, lives out these patterns again for our times
and for our discipline, as does Freud in arguing the contrary case.69
Passages from Jung’s writings in which we witness Jung reclaiming
for psychology the conceptual equivalent of the lost hammer of Thor
are many. Before examining a few of these, let us note that, as with Thor,
Jung also had to clothe himself in feminine attire before descending
into the Jotunheim of his own unconscious in search of the psyches objective
reality. And like Thor, Jung was initially loath to don such garb.
Commenting on this in his 1925 seminar on analytical psychology, Jung
reports that at the outset of his career autonomous fantasy thinking was
utterly repugnant to him. “Permitting fantasy in myself had the same
effect on me as would be produced on a man if he came into his
workshop and found all the tools flying about doing things
independently of his will. It shocked me ... to think of the possibility
of a fantasy life in my own mind; it was against the intellectual ideals I
had developed for myself.”7071 To defend himself from the shocking
recognition that the workshop tools of his mind frequently did get out
of his conscious grip (even as Thor’s hammer got out of his), Jung, as
he put it, projected his material onto Miss Miller, the subject whose
fantasies he explored in the pages of his Wandlungen.71 Only later, with
his recognition of the anima as an inner figure in himself, was he able
to embrace this autonomous fantasy thinking as springing from the
depths of his own nature. It was the otherness of this apparently
subjective factor that intimated to Jung the existence of an objective
psyche. He could no more have grasped the reality of this factor without
his encounter with the anima than could Thor have regained Mjollnir
without donning the wedding dress of Freya.
As early as 1912, in the series of lectures which he gave at
Fordham University in New York titled “The Theory of
Psychoanalysis,” we can already witness Jung reaching for, but not yet
quite retrieving, Thor’s hammer.
We must never forget that the world is, in the first place, a
subjective phenomenon. The impressions we receivefrom these
accidental happenings are also our own doing. It is not true
that the impressions are forced on us unconditionally; our
own predisposition conditions the impression. A man whose
libido is blocked will have, as a rule, quite different and very
much more vivid impressions than one whose libido is
organized in a wealth of activities. A person who is sensitive
in one way or another will receive a deep impression from
an event which would leave a less sensitive person cold.72
Though Jung had not yet hit upon the concept of the archetype,
and though only with the development of that concept did he take
Mjollnir fully in hand, there is already a Mjollnir-like quality to his
assertion that “[t]he psyche does not merely react, [but] it gives its own
answer to the influences at work upon it.” The images through which
the psyche responds to the influences at work upon it, be they images
76 In other stanzas of this poem (or in other sessions of its author’s therapy), we
may imagine the opposite movement: the poem receding a little, just enough to allow
the world.
77 Jung, CW 11 § 900.
34 NORTHERN GNOSIS
is the one that I want to single out here, is of lightning striking the rocky
shoreline and blasting out from the mass of stone a round, illuminated
boulder. This boulder becomes elaborated in subsequent paintings into
When summoned to the aid of the other AEsir deities who had gotten
themselves in a conflict with Rungne, the largest of the Jotunns, Thor
immediately faced him in battle. Arguing that it would be no victory for
Thor to defeat an unarmed Jotunn, Rungne persuaded Thor to allow him
to fetch his weapons—a shield and whetstone—-from Jotunheim. Fearing
that these weapons would not be sufficient, Rungne's Jotunn backers created
a battle-mate for him out of clay and a mare’s heart. As immense as this
creature was, however, it was gutless compared to Rungne himself whose
heart was a triangular stone. When they met in battle, Thor stormed Rungne
from all sides, like the lightning in Jung’s patient’s painting surrounding the
boulder which it blastsfrom the shoreline. When Rungne threw his whetstone
at Thor (again think of the boulder blasted free in the patient’s painting),
Thor hurled his hammer and smashed the stone in mid-air. Some of the
shards fell on the ground, becoming the source ofthe whetstones used by our
ancestors; others flew into Thor’s head. Though Thor ultimately prevailed
over his Jotunn foe, the whetstones that had lodged in his head embedded
themselves there so deeply that they could never be removed.
81 Jung, CW 13 § 286.
CHAPTER TWO
Runic Preamble
ung begins his essay, “The Philosophical Tree,” by quoting a brief
J
passage from Goethe’s Faust-. “All theory, my friend, is grey, /But
42 NORTHERN GNOSIS
green life’s golden tree.”1 In this chapter, we shall again be dealing with
theories—the theories of Freud and Jung. In keeping with the lines of
verse Jung quotes from Faust, we shall also be dealing with a tree. To
actual trees, such as those studied by Gustave Senn, the professor of
botany for whose Festschrift Jung wrote his seminal essay, the tree that
will concern us in these pages stands in something of the same relationship
as does Mjollnir, the hammer ofThor, to lightning, or the hero myth to
the endlessly repeating cycle of the rising and setting sun. While being
like these mythic images in that it too is related asymmetrically to the
natural phenomenon upon which it is partially modelled, this tree-as-
image (or better, image-as-tree) reflects the fact that the hammer-wielding,
lightning-hurling psyche has also the character of a natural growth
process. This is so, it is important to add, even with respect to images
that are not explicitly tree-like. Just as the archetype, according to
archetypal psychology, “is wholly immanent to its image,”2 so that aspect
of the psyche which mythologizes itself in terms of a tree is an archetypal
potential of any event, any image. In this connection, we may think of
the symbolic stone of the alchemists, which was at the same time not a
stone, but a thousand other things besides.3 In an equally philosophical
sense, the tree by means of which we shall be imagining in these pages is
not a tree only, but the house of a family and the sword of a hero as well.
At the centre of the North-European mythological cosmos stands
the World Ash, Yggdrasill, the most famous tree of Norse mythology.
Nine worlds are housed in the roots and branches of this great tree:
Asgard (the home of the AEsir), Jotunheim (the home of the giants),
Midgard (the middle earth of human habitation), Hel (the underworld
realm of the dead), Ljossalheim (the realm of light, elves and air-spirits),
Vanaheim (the realm of land and sea-deities), Svartalfheim (the realm
of black elves, stone spirits, and dwarves), Niflheim (the realm of ice
and cold) and Muspellheim (the realm of fire and heat). Lesser known
is Barnstock, the ancient oak that shelters the ancestral home of the
Volsungs, the line from which Sigmund and Sigurd (Siegfried) trace
their descent. Like Yggdrasill, this tree is as laden with fantasies as
the trees of nature are with branches and leaves. And just as the
botanist learns much about his science from actual leaves and
branches, so we learn much about the psyche from Barnstock’s
imaginal leaves and mythical branches. The corollary of this is also
true, as Jung’s quote from Goethe implies: our theories of the psyche,
though seemingly defoliate and grey, are themselves expressions of
“life’s green and golden tree.”4
An enormous oak, Barnstock (Barnstokkr = child-trunk) is the axis
familias around which the home of the Volsungs is built, even as
Yggdrasill, the cosmic tree which houses the nine worlds, is the axis
mundi. Beneath the sheltering canopy of its branches live Volsung, the
king of the Huns, his ten sons, and a daughter. Foremost among the
sons is the eldest, Sigmund, who, in his turn, becomes father of the
renowned dragon-slaying hero Sigurd. Signy, the twin sister of Sigmund,
who is given in marriage to the wicked Goth Siggeur as part of an ill-
fated attempt to forge a peace alliance between the two clans, becomes
mother, in her turn, of a son, Sinfjotli, through an incestuous union
with her brother. Born of incest, Sinfjotli is of pure Volsung blood.
Faithful to the vengeful ambitions that led his mother to conceive him,
and heeding the impulses of his doubly Volsung bloodline, Sinfjotli,
along with his father/uncle Sigmund, slays Siggeur and his kin in
retribution for Siggeur’s treacherous killing of Volsung and nine of the
ten Volsung sons shortly after his marriage to Signy.
4 Here we might ask what imaginal trees might have to tell us about actual trees.
Jung, after all, wrote his paper on the philosophical tree to honour a professor of botany.
We do well to address this point lest we give the mistaken impression that we regard
the tree that shall concern us in this chapter semiotically, as a metaphor of merely
hermeneutic significance, when in fact it is a veritable tree of life. In taking as its
empirical starting point what sciences such as contemporary botany discard as error
(the better to interrogate the projections psyche makes), analytical psychology embraces
and affirms an asymmetrical relationship to the other sciences. While those sciences,
as highly differentiated extensions of the perceptual organs, classify and describe the
features and properties of the extrapsychic phenomena that have long been the contents
of our conscious experience (for instance, actual trees such as the Northern ash and
oak), depth psychology, in Jung’s sense, clarifies and describes the psyche’s subjective
reaction to those same, less objectively perceived, phenomena (imaginal trees such as
Yggdrasill and Barnstock). In doing so, paradoxically enough, psychology isolates within
the retort of its own particular methodological process a spirit of life which the other
life sciences seek in vain in the physiological process that they take to be their object—
hence the relevance of Jung’s “Philosophical Tree” to a botanist’s Festschrift.
44 NORTHERN GNOSIS
—Sigmund Freud
—C. G. Jung
istening to the sagas of his patient’s lives, Freud was well aware of
5 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality, in The Freud Pelican Library, vol. 7, p.
149-150n.
6 Jung, CW 10 § 70.
BARNSTOCK AND THE VOLSUNGS 45
evade the fate of incest and parricide in one home only to run afoul of it
in another. Hoping that Jung would ultimately give up his incestuous
claims upon the psychoanalytic domain and transform his rivalrous
feelings into affectionate ones, Freud viewed Jung’s spirited innovations
and revisionist accounts at first with the tolerance of a father who knows
better and then with an increasingly jaundiced eye.
For a more coherent understanding of the heresy that flowed in Jung’s
veins,12 Freud might better have looked to our Northern saga for
perspective. Viewed from this vantage point, Jung was less like Oedipus
leaving the home of foster-parents whom he erroneously believed to be
his real parents, and more like Sinfjotli turning against his stepfather
Siggeur, loyal to the promptings of his doubly-Volsung blood. Simply
put, the issue was this: if the sonship bestowed upon him by Freud meant
being bound by Freud’s signature terms, infantile sexuality and Oedipus
complex, Jung would have to reject this sonship and rise up against the
Siggeur whom he met in Freud by endogamously conceiving, on the
model of Sigmund and Signy, versions of these notions that better suited
his age-old Volsung soul. And so it was, ironically enough—through such
Jungian terms as participation mystique, parental imago, introversion, the
racial unconscious, endogamous kinship libido, and symbolic (not literal)
incest—that the asymmetrical psychic factor, which mythologizes itself
in terms of pure blood lines, ethnic roots, and the “insuperable
repugnance” of one clan for another, came to enact itself again in the very
concepts in which it was being theorized about.
Far from trying to avoid his mythic fate in the manner of Oedipus,
Jung endeavoured to embrace it as his destiny, turning the passive
incestuous and parricidal wishes that are so characteristic of the neurotic
(according to Freud’s views) into the rejuvenating active incest and
emancipating act of sacrifice by which the ego, modelling itself on the
consciousness-creating redemptive hero, both renews itself in and frees
itself from its matrix in the unconscious.
In a late preface to Symbols ofTransformation, the extensively revised
and “much pruned” version of Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (the
book which “cost [him] Freud’s friendship”13), Jung writes:
12 Here I allude to the following statement from Jung’s March 3, 1912 letter to
Freud: “I would never have sided with you in the first place had not heresy run in my
blood.” McGuire, ed. The Freud/Jung Letters, p. 491.
13 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 167.
BARNSTOCK AND THE VOLSUNGS 47
Signy’s Wedding
At the time our poetry began, [Dr. Jung] had two girls, and
the potentiality of a boy within him, which my unconscious
ferreted out at the appropriate time in “prophetic dreams.”
He told me that he loved Jewish women, that he wanted to
love a dark Jewish girl. So in him, too, the urge to remain
faithful to his religion and culture, as well as the drive to
explore other possibilities through a new race, the drive to
liberate himself from the paternal edicts through an
unbelieving Jewess. His friend is Prof. Freud—a Jew, old
paterfamilias. I do not know whether it is reality or fantasy
that Prof. Freud has six children. Here, too, the Christian
is the “son” of the Jew. The latter is older and more
independent. But at the same time my friend is my little son,
so that volens-nolens we are married to Prof. Freud.19
20 Jesse Byock, The Saga ofthe Volsungs: The Norse Epic ofSigurd the Dragon Slayer
(Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), p. 10.
50 NORTHERN GNOSIS
thicker than water, metaphorical blood, is thicker than both. Life as we live
it is always a dilution of the archetypal imperative that compels and
animates it—-hence the strife to which marriage andfamily life are subject.
The wedding between Signy and Siggeur was held in the Hall of the
Volsungs, beneath the branches of Barnstock. In ironic contradistinction to
the phrase uttered by the priest or minister in contemporary Christian
marriages—“What God has joined together, let no man put asunder”—the
vows ofthe bride and groom ofthe saga were no sooner sworn before Odinn
than they were sundered by him. Appearing among the company ofassembled
families, Odinn, in his traditionalform ofthe one-eyed stranger, approached
Barnstock bearing a magnificent sword called Gram. Raising the sword over
his head, he then plunged it into the trunk of the tree to the hilt. “He who
draws this sword out of the trunk shall receive it from me as a gift, and he
himselfshall prove that he has never carried a better sword than this one. ”21
With this act, and these words, Odinn, as we shall see, invested the line of
the Volsungs yet another time.
One by one, the men from the two families, who had only moments ago
solemnized an alliance with each other through a marriage, took up Odinn’s
challenge and attempted to draw Gram from the trunk ofBarnstock. Each
time, however, the sword held fast. It was not until Sigmund took his turn
that the sword came free. Odinn had, evidently, fated him to be its bearer.
Enchanted by the fineness of Sigmund’s sword, Siggeur offered to
purchase it for triple its weight in gold. To this offer Sigmund replied, “You
could have taken this sword from where it stood, no less than I did, if it
were meantfor you to carry it; but now that it has comefirst into my hands,
you will never obtain it, even should you offer me all the gold you own. ”22
Though hefeigned indifference, Sigmund’s scornful tone angered the envious
Siggeur, who immediately turned to thoughts of treachery and revenge.
The next day, King Siggeur hastened to return to Gautland. Before
leaving with her husband, Signy approached her father and pleaded with
him not to send her away. “I do not wish to go away with Siggeur, nor do
my thoughts laugh with him, ” she said to Volsung. “I know through my
foresight and that special ability found in our family that if the marriage
contract is not quickly dissolved, this union will bring us much misery. ”23
The special ability found in the Volsungfamily to which Signy refers was
called in the pagan North a Kynfylgja or “familyfetch.A "24fetch is a guardian
spirit, the genius of an individual or family. Its existence, doubtless, was
inferredfrom familial patterns affecting individual destiny such as those we
have already discussed in connection with the ancestral roots ofBarnstock.
Contemporary psychological theory, ofcourse, knows thefetch by other names.
Being a man of honour, Volsung could not accede to his daughter’s
request. Reproaching Signy for making such a petition to him, he reminded
her of the shamefulness of breaking an agreement and of the ill-will that
would thereby be stirred up between the newly allied families. Signy, he
insisted, would go away with Siggeur as his wife.
It was only three months later that the calamity that Signy intuited would
befall the Volsungs on account of her marriage to Siggeur came to pass. It
had been planned that Volsung and his ten sons would visit the newly wedded
couple in Gautlandfor a feast. The invitation that Siggeur had extended to
his wife’s father and brothers, however, was part of a devious plan on his
part to punish Sigmund and wrestfrom him his sword. Assembling a large
army, Siggeur waited in ambush for the arrival ofhis in-laws. In the ensuing
battle, the Volsungs fought bravely, killing many ofKing Siggeur’s men. Being
altogether outnumbered, however, they could notfinally prevail. Volsung was
slain in the field and the ten brothers were taken prisoner. Signy, hoping to
save her brothers, begged Siggeur not to kill them. Agreeing in part, Siggeur
postponed their execution, leaving them manacled to afallen tree trunk. From
this predicament, Sigmund alone of the ten brothers survived. Years later,
hoping to conceive a strong Volsung son who would avenge the deaths ofher
father and brothers, Signy, disguising herselfas another woman, sought out
her brother Sigmund and lay with him. Sinfiotli, the child of this union,
after being initiated into the ways ofheroic manhood by Sigmund, fulfilled
this fated task alongside his father, slaying Siggeur and his entire clan.
—Sigmund Freud
arlier we drew an analogy between the alliance that Freud and Jung
E sought to create between Vienna and Zurich and the alliance that
Volsung and Siggeur sought to create between their two families, the
Huns and the Goths, through Siggeur’s marriage to Volsung’s daughter
Signy. As in the Volsunga Saga, this alliance between theoretical schools
of psychology was not a stable one. Indeed, no sooner had filial
relations been established between Freud and Jung than resistances
developed between the two men. On the level of theory, the issue over
which their legendary parting of the ways arose was the interpretation
of the psychological significance of incest fantasies. Like Gram, the
sword which Odinn had plunged into the trunk of Barnstock, the
incest question enacted its archetypal prerogative in the lives of Freud
and Jung by sundering the marriage they had sought to create between
their respective interests. Freud, as Jung put it in his memoirs, “clung
to the literal interpretation of [incest] and was unable to grasp the
spiritual significance of incest as a symbol.”26 For his part, Jung was
of the opinion that “incest signified a personal complication only in
the rarest cases.”27 In marked contrast to Freud, who maintained that
neurotics are disturbed by the actual incestuous desires and parricidal
wishes that they were first subject to as children and which are the
hallmarks of the Oedipus complex, Jung, after initially cleaving to this
view himself, gradually came to see in the same sort of material a
symbolic process of regression and transformation, rebirth and
renewal.28 Far from being fixated in infantile sexuality as Freud
29 Jung, CW 4 § 557-575.
30 Jung, CW 5 § 351 writes: “The development of consciousness inevitably leads
not only to separation from the mother, but to separation from the parents and the
whole family circle and thus to a relative degree of detachment from the unconscious
and the world of instinct. Yet the longing for this lost world continues and, when
difficult adaptations are demanded, is forever tempting one to make evasions and
retreats, to regress to the infantile past, which then starts throwing up the incestuous
symbolism. If only this temptation were perfectly clear, it would be possible, with a
great effort of will, to free oneself from it. But it is far from clear, because a new
adaptation or orientation of vital importance can only be achieved in accordance with
the instincts. Lacking this, nothing durable results, only a convulsively willed, artificial
product which proves in the long run to be incapable of life. No man can change himself
into anything from sheer reason; he can only change into what he potentially is.”
31 McGuire, ed. The Freud/Jung Letters, p. 228.
32 Jung, CW 4 § 52-63.
54 NORTHERN GNOSIS
One day the brothers who had been driven out came
together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end
of the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do
and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible
for them individually. ... The violent primal father had
doubtless been the feared and envied model of each one of
the company of brothers: and in the act of devouring him
they accomplished their identification with him, and each
one of them acquired a portion of his strength.37
37 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points ofAgreement between the Mental
Lives of Savages and Neurotics, tr. J. Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), pp.
141-142.
56 NORTHERN GNOSIS
phylogenetic explanation before ontogenetic possibilities have been exhausted” (p. 578).
From a Jungian point of view, it is only because Freud disputed the significance
of adolescent and post-adolescent development stressed by Jung that Jung appeared
to him to be guilty of this error of shortchanging ontogenetic possibilities in favour of
phylogenetic explanation.
43 Cited in Carotenuto, A Secret Symmetry, pp. 79-80.
BARNSTOCK AND THE VOLSUNGS 59
At this juncture, Jung did what the mythical hero he would soon write
about in his Wandlungen was purported to have done: having reached
an impasse in his own adaptation, even as his patient had in hers, he
regressed into his own depths, the depths of the mother, as these were
projected onto Spielrein (who had done much the same herself with
respect to Jung) for rebirth. At this point, Siggeur gave way to Sigmund
in the archetypal foreground of Jung’s life.
The regression Jung experienced during his work with Spielrein was
partly theoretical. Unable to stay the course with his application of
Freudian ideas (possibly because as a novice he had been applying them
too wildly), Jung returned to the ideas and perspectives that had
concerned him during the pre-Freudian period of his doctoral
dissertation—parapsychology, astrology, and the occult. In the course of
studying the partial personalities of his medium-cousin Helene Preiswerk
for his dissertation, Jung had come to the view that at least one of these
personalities was a latent form of the young woman’s future adult
adaptation.44 This was essentially the same interpretation he eventually
gave to Spielrein (or she to him).45 The son, “Siegfried,” whom she
believed it was her fate to conceive with Jung, far from being an actual
child (as Jung’s earlier Freudian interpretations had suggested), was
symbolic of her own heroic destiny.
44 Jung, CW 1 § 116. “The patient pours her own soul into the role of the
Clairvoyante, seeking to create out of it an ideal of virtue and perfection; she anticipates
her own future and embodies in [the partial personality or imaginal figure of] Ivenes
what she wishes to be in twenty years’ time—the assured, influential, wise, gracious,
pious lady.”
45 Cf. Carotenuto, A Secret Symmetry, pp. 105-106. Writing to Freud about Jung
on June 30, 1909, Spielrein states: “In conversation and also in a letter Dr. Jung identifies
me with his mother, and I him—with my brother and father .... In the course of an
analysis it turned out that so-and-so many years ago Dr. Jung had been fond of a dark
haired hysterical girl called S.W., who always described herself as Jewish (but in reality
was not.) ... Dr. Jung and I were very good at reading each other’s minds. But suddenly
he gets terribly worked up, gives me his diary, and says mockingly that I should open
it at random, since I am so wise and know how to find my fortune. I open it—and lo
and behold! it was the very passage where S.W. appeared to Dr. Jung one night in a
white garment. I believe it is the only place in the entire book where he mentions this
girl. ... This girl was deeply rooted in him, and she was my prototype. ... [R]ight at
the beginning of my therapy Dr. Jung let me read his dissertation, in which he described
this S.W. Later on he would sometimes turn reflective when I said something to him;
such and such a woman had spoken in just this way, etc. And it was always this girl!”
Spielrein goes on to discuss Jung’s attraction to Freud’s daughter and how this is another,
and to her more preferable, background to Jung’s transference to herself. Claiming the
existence of a “psychic kinship” between herself and Freud’s daughter, Spielrein thereby
links herself to Freud.
60 NORTHERN GNOSIS
—Sabina Spielrein
—C. G. Jung
50 Jung, СW 10 § 638.
51 Jung, CW 4, pages 301-322.
62 NORTHERN GNOSIS
Worth quoting here are several passages from Jung’s writings that
may be read both as amplifications of this passage and as further examples
of how Jung’s thought enacts the images of our Northern saga. The first
is taken from a letter to a correspondent who sought Jung’s advice
regarding her apparently tyrannical and possessive parents. Drawing on
the image of the tree, even as does our saga, Jung paradoxically upholds
the appropriateness of the child’s growing resistance to its parents, not
on the grounds that such relations are incestuous and therefore taboo,
but that they are not incestuous enough (in the higher sense of the term),
and are, therefore, an affront to a deeper cathexis of kinship libido.
Parents must realize that they are trees from which the fruit
falls in the autumn. Children don’t belong to their parents,
and they are only apparently produced by them. In reality
they come from a thousand-year-old stem, or rather from
many stems, and often they are about as characteristic of
their parents as an apple on a fir-tree.53
What Jung says concerning the individual father becoming the bearer
for his children of the power of the archetype applies as well to the Freud-
Jung relationship. During the period of his sonship to Freud, Jung, like
the children he discusses in this passage, projected this power onto Freud.
With his recognition that the power of the father is a function of the
archetype, however, Jung resolved what he called his ‘“religious’ crush”54 55
on the older man. Expressed in terms of the imagery of our saga, this
recognition was equivalent to Sigmund’s drawing the sword from the
trunk of Barnstock. Having identified with the paternal archetype, Freud
experienced the change in Jung’s outlook as being motivated by parricidal
wishes. For Jung, however, withdrawing this projection was essentially
an act of sacrifice. In differentiating between the father archetype and
its incidental human bearer, Jung sacrificed his childish dependence on
Freud and became heir to the “infinity of the child’s preconscious soul,”
that “thousand-year-old stem,” on a more conscious, adult level.56
Sigmund and Signy: “Do not forget that the Jews also had prophets. You do not yet live
one part of the Jewish soul because you look too much to the external. That is—
regrettably—the curse of the Jew: his innermost and deepest soul he calls ‘infantile
wish fulfillment.’ He murders his own prophet, murders even his Messiah.” Cited in
Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method, p. 486. For a different translation of the letter from
which this passage is taken see C. G. Jung, “The Letters of C. G. Jung to Sabina
Spielrein,” tr. B. Wharton, The Journal of Analytical Psychology 46.1 (2001): 192.
57 Jung, CW4 § 350.
58 From the Hdvamdl of the Elder Edda, stanza 138.
BARNSTOCK AND THE VOLSUNGS 65
59 Jung, CW 10 §
73.
66 NORTHERN GNOSIS
Though Jung wrote the essay from which this passage is taken
relatively late in his career (and dedicated it to his wife, Emma), the
interpretation of incest he sets out in it is consistent with the
interpretation he and Spielrein came to at the beginning of his career,
once he had appreciated the prospective meaning of her resistance to his
literalistic, Freudian approach to her fantasy of having his child. Spanning
these diametrically opposed relationships (wife and patient), the essay is
both a full theoretical account of the prospective meaning of transference
countertransference phenomena, such as those which led him into such
deep waters with Spielrein, as well as the “psychotherapeutic handbook
for gentlemen”61 that Emma Jung had suggested that she might have to
write during those erotically turbulent early years. In this connection,
and in connection to the previous quotation about the critical balance
between the need for continuity with the parents and the need for new
blood, let us recall that Jung told Spielrein, in the midst of their psyche
plumbing venture together, that he loved her on account of the
“remarkable parallelism of [their] thoughts ... and her magnificent proud
character ... [but] would never marry her because he harbour[ed] within
himself a great philistine who craves narrow limits and the typical Swiss
style.”62 For Jung, the incestuous union with oneself is a dialectical
product of endogamous and exogamous energic trends, a delicate and
oscillating balance of mother and anima, wife and mistress, polygamy
and the typical Swiss style. “Only too much or too little in this direction
[or that direction] is harmful.”
If we apply the principle of extensity to Jung’s thought,63 we should
expect to find a carryover of the incest theme into other ideas. We have
already seen the role incest played in his late statement about the
psychology of the transference. Another instance of carryover might be
W 16§419.
60 Jung, C
61 McGuire, ed. The Freud/Jung Letters, p. 72.
62 Cited in Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method, p. 312.
63 Jung, CW 8 § 38. Extensity refers to a characteristic of psychic energy
transformation wherein “libido does not leave a structure as pure intensity and pass
without trace into another, but ... takes the character of the old function over into
the new.”
BARNSTOCK AND THE VOLSUNGS 67
seen in an early paper, written at a time when Jung was just coming out
of the turmoil occasioned by the break with Freud and the renunciation
of Spielrein. Titled “The Transcendent Function,” this paper is less
concerned with describing the transference than with outlining a means
of facilitating its resolution. Whereas in his earlier writings, such as
Wandlungen, Jung had sought to re-interpret incest, in this paper he
incestuously reconceived the nature of psychoanalytic interpretation itself.
Just as he had learned through his work with Spielrein of the inefficacy
of interpreting imaginal figures such as Siegfried reductively, so in this
essay he argues that there is a stage in analysis at which “dissolution of
the symbol ... is a mistake.”64 Symbols, as Jung came to realize, cannot
be reduced to infantile sexuality without remainder. In fact, the symbolic
significance of the remainder is so immense that Jung recognized in it
the bridge to something more: the patient’s potential for adaptation to
his or her current adult life and future destiny.65
The interpretive stance born of this recognition Jung called
constructive-synthetic interpretation. To illustrate its use, Jung,
significantly enough, discusses the dream of an unmarried female patient,
“who dreamt that someone gave her a wonderful, richly ornamented, antique
sword dug up out ofa tumulus. ”66 The sword in the dream reminded the
dreamer of her father’s dagger, which he had once flashed in the sun,
and of her father’s impetuous temperament and adventurous love life.
As well, it recalled her Celtic ancestry, of which she was proud. For the
sake of contrast and comparison, Jung provides the Freudian (or, as he
calls it, “analytical”) interpretation, before tendering for discussion his
new “constructive” interpretation. Keeping in mind that Jung, as a
Freudian psychoanalyst and president of the International Psychoanalytic
Association, had himself made such interpretations in the early phase of
his analysis of Spielrein, let us quote Jung’s rendition of a Freudian reading
of the dream:
Spielreins Fetch
A tree sprouting from a seed resembles its species, but is not
identical with every other tree. Whether we perceive a
continuation or a disappearance of the former content
emphasized in the new product is a subjective matter.71
— Sabina Spielrein
— C. G. Jung
75 John Layard, “The Incest Taboo and the Virgin Archetype,” in his The Virgin
Archetype (New York: Spring Publications, 1972), pp. 284-288. See also Jung, CW16 §
438. For an important critique of the notion see James Hillman, Anima: An Anatomy
ofa Personified Notion (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1985), pp. 115-127.
76 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 185.
77 Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method, pp. 502-507.
78 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 185-188.
79 Spielrein, “Destruction as a Cause of Coming into Being,” pp. 155-186.
72 NORTHERN GNOSIS
in their bloodline that resists alliances such as the one that was to be
established through her marriage to Siggeur, so Spielrein, the feminine
link between Zurich and Vienna, combined the ideas of both Freud and
Jung to write a highly original contribution of her own on the destructive
aspect of sexuality. In so doing, she remained as loyal a daughter to Freud
as Signy was to Volsung, while at the same time conceiving with Jung,
in the manner of Signy with her bother Sigmund, the great Aryan-Semitic
hero of her dreams, Siegfried.
In summary, Spielrein’s theory accommodated both Freud’s
emphasis on sexuality and Jung’s interest in the phylogenetic or
mythological layer of the unconscious in order to explain the resistances
that the ego feels toward sexuality. Having experienced these fetch-like
resistances firsthand both in herself and in Jung, Spielrein recognized
them to be a ubiquitous phenomenon, something inherent to the ego’s
experience of sexuality.
Simply put, in Spielrein’s view, the life of the psyche is constituted
of the interplay of two instincts, the instinct of species-preservation
(sexuality) and the instinct of self-preservation. These instincts
correspond, in turn, to two psychic structures, the ego and the
unconscious. Vitalized by the instinct for self-preservation, the ego (or
“I”) of ordinary conscious identity exists in a relationship of conflict with
the unconscious, the unconscious being vitalized by the species-oriented
sexual instinct. Because sexuality cares nothing for the interests of the
individual, but only wants progeny in some form (e.g., children, or artistic
creations of value to the race), the ego experiences the desirous imperatives
of sexuality, the desirous imperatives of the unconscious, as destructive
and death-dealing, and consequently mobilizes an attitude of resistance
in response. One expression of this resistance to sexuality is incestuous
or incest-like attachments, for unions of this sort pose less of a threat to
the ego. On the other hand, if one can tolerate the dissolution of one’s
ego in sexuality—if, that is to say, one can temporarily sacrifice one’s
egoism—one can be vitalized by the “total energy of countless
generations,” even as Spielrein felt herself to be vitalized by the line of
Jewish religious leaders in her own ancestry.80 This vitalizing surge of
sexuality which “saturates [the ego’s personal] desires with blood” is
imaged in our saga as the bloody fate which befalls both the Huns and
the encounter with what Spielrein called sexuality (and Jung came to
call the collective unconscious) to the advantage of both the individual
and the species through the process of individuation.
In Jung’s view, the ego, far from being as individually personal as
Spielrein’s theory assumes, is as collective as sexuality itself, until it is
differentiated out from a whole series of archetypal identifications. This
is why Jung, loyal to the sanguine promptings of his introverted
temperament, would dissolve his personal participation mystique with
Spielrein through active imagination, and kill in himself the Siegfried,
which Spielrein then had to carry to term in herself, without him, in
sublimated form. For though Spielrein might have interpreted Jung’s
nauseating dream of a blond-haired youth with a wound in his head
floating past him in a stream of blood as a representation of his ego’s
fear of their great love, Jung, after a subsequent dream in which he
killed the mythical figure Siegfried, interpreted these dreams as
heralding the sacrifice of his identification with the heroic ideals of the
German peoples, which no longer suited him.86 Having sacrificed these
ideals, Jung was no longer compelled by the compensatory imperatives
of his unconscious to love a dark Jewish girl. Having given back to
the unconscious the “love of S. for J.” that had shown him a truth
that would have driven him mad had he been unable to sublimate it,87
Jung released into his own Self-incarnating individuation process the
very Semitic blood from which he, like Signy in her marriage to
Siggeur, had recoiled from in Freud.88 Reminding Spielrein that the
Jews also had prophets,89 and railing against Freud for cutting off the
root of that thousand-year-old tree that links all peoples by reducing
it to “infantile sexuality,” Jung arrived at a vision of the psyche in which
Baldr's Death:
Individuation and the
Ancestral Soul
The AEsir making sport ofshooting Baldr
Long ago [man] formed an ideal conception of omnipotence
and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. To these
gods he attributed everything that seemed unattainable to
his wishes, or that was forbidden to him. One may say,
therefore, that these gods were cultural ideals.
Runic Preamble
ne story leads to another story and to another still. In this, our
T canon. The richer of these was written by Snorri Sturluson who based
his version on West Norse sources. The other account, based on East
Norse sources, is that of Saxo Grammaticus. In Snorri’s account, Baldr
is the passive, benign deity whose features we have already briefly
described. In Saxo’s account he is a forceful, demigod warrior, who
competes with a mortal man for the love of a woman.2
According to the version of the myth compiled by Snorri, Baldr, the
son of Odinn and Frigg, was troubled in the night by disturbing dreams
in which his life was threatened. Hearing of these dreams, the other gods
were troubled as well. Not only was Baldr the most beloved among them,
but the possibility that he might be subject to death, despite his being
a god, did not augur well for their immortality either. Were not such
dreams as Baldr’s a portent of the Ragnarok, the end of the gods?
Saddling his eight-legged mount Sleipnir, Odinn rode straight to
Nivlheim (the realm of ice and cold), and on from there to Hel, which
lay beyond that realm. Disguising his identity, he then consulted a seeress
or Volva, who lay in a burial mound, regarding Baldr’s fate. “For Baldr
the mead, that noble drink, is ready brewed,” the Volva told him. “And
the gods,” she added, “are now in great peril.” Wishing to know more,
Odinn pressed the Volva to answer another question. “Who will be the
bane of Baldr?” he asked. “Hod shall bring the noble hero here,” the
spectre replied. “And who will punish Hod for his crime?” “Rind, will
give birth to Vale. At only one night old, he shall kill Baldr’s slayer.” At
this juncture, the Volva recognized that it was Odinn who was her
interrogator and Odinn recognized that the Volva was the one known
as the Mother of Three Giants. With this Odinn took leave of Hel. As
he did so, the Volva predicted the destruction of the world that was soon
to come, the Ragnarok.
The next scene took place in the council chambers of the AEsir.
After describing what he had learned in Hel about Baldr’s dreams,
Odinn and the other gods formulated a plan to protect this beloved
fellow-god, and, by extension, themselves as well, from the fate that
had been prophesied. Their plan was a simple one. Frigg would require
everything in the world to swear an oath of mercy to Baldr so that no
evil would befall him. Fire and water, the stones and ores, trees and
sicknesses, animals and birds, snakes and serpents—all these, and the
vast multitude of other beings that make up a complete inventory of
the world besides, were enjoined to promise that no harm would come
to Baldr through them.
When this was accomplished, the gods were at ease once more and
their fancy turned to mirth. To amuse themselves they had Baldr stand
before them while they shot at him with arrows, struck him with swords,
and pelted him with any number of things. True to the vows they had
taken, none of the things that were hurled at the young god harmed him.
And so it was that the gods paid homage to Baldr.
Looking on, the ambivalent Loki did not like what he saw. Disguising
himself as an old woman he then asked Frigg if it was true that all things
had taken the oath not to harm Baldr. Frigg confirmed that all things
had sworn themselves harmless—all things, that is, except a tiny twig of
mistletoe that grows west of Valhalla, which she had deemed too young
to make an oath. Upon hearing of the mistletoe, the treacherous Loki
immediately set out to fetch it. When he returned, he placed it in the
hand of the blind Hod, and instructed him on how it should be thrown.
Not realizing that it was mistletoe in his hand, Hod threw it as Loki had
directed. Though Baldr had withstood the blows of everything else that
had been thrown at him, the mistletoe immediately passed through him,
killing him instantly.
The death of Baldr devastated the gods. They all lost the power of
speech, and all were at a loss as to how to express their grief. Revenge
would have been instantaneous had they not been standing on sanctified
ground and thus been forbidden for the moment from seeking
retribution. Frigg, hoping that Baldr could be ransomed from Hel,
promised her love and favour to whoever would undertake such a
82 NORTHERN GNOSIS
3 Where Norse myth imagines a human couple surviving the Ragnarok or end of
the gods, Jung theorizes about the anima and animus as mediators of the collective
unconscious (the realm of the archetypes or former “gods”): “The collective unconscious
as a whole presents itself to a man in feminine form. To a woman it appears in masculine
form, and then I call it the animus." Jung, CW 18 § 187. With arguably the same
phenomena in mind, Freud writes of the sexual figuration of the ego-ideal. For a
discussion of Freud’s notion of the sexual ideal in its relation to Jung’s notion of the
anima/animus, see my The Dove in the Consulting Room: Hysteria and the Anima in
Bellas and Jung (Hove: Brunner-Routledge, 2003), pp. 129-130.
4 Harald Hveberg, Of Gods and Giants: Norse Mythology, tr. P. S. Iversen (Oslo:
Johan Grundt Tanum Forlag, 1969), pp. 62-68. My re-telling of Snorri Sturluson’s
version of the Baldr myth follows Hveberg’s account. The dialogue is quoted from
Hveberg’s telling of this myth.
BALDR’S DEATH 83
5 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, ed., J. Strachey, tr. J. Riviere (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1962), p. 26.
BALDR’S DEATH 85
6 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, tr. J. Strachey (New York: Norton,
1961), pp. 20-21, 42-43. See also, Freud’s “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” in Thе
Freud Pelican Library, vol. 11 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 67-68.
7 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 3.
86 NORTHERN GNOSIS
pelting Baldr than to this deadly twig. How then does the mistletoe evoke
itself in Freud’s thought?
To find the mistletoe in Freud’s writings we must, like Loki on his
trek to Valhalla, look further afield, to the outer reaches of Freud’s
speculative thought, for as Freud himself admitted it was by speculating
wildly that he came upon his concept of the repetition compulsion and
the theory of its origins.15
18 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 16: “This ‘perpetual recurrence of the
same thing’ causes us no astonishment when it relates to active behaviour on the part
of the person concerned and when we can discern in him an essential character-trait
which always remains the same and which is compelled to find expression in a repetition
of the same experiences. We are much more impressed by cases where the subject appears
to have a passive experience, over which he has no influence, but in which he meets
with a repetition of the same fatality. There is the case, for instance, of the woman
who married three successive husbands each of whom fell ill soon afterwards and had
to be nursed by her on their death-beds.”
19 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 29: “The manifestations of a
compulsion to repeat ... exhibit to a high degree an instinctual character and, when
they act in opposition to the pleasure principle, give the appearance of some
‘daemonic’ force at work.”
20 Heraclitus, fragment 121.
21 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 30.
90 NORTHERN GNOSIS
Read alongside our Norse myth, as a variation of its vision of the way
things happen, it is precisely here, in his characterization of instinct as
“an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things” that
Freud lets the death-dealing mistletoe fly. Though seemingly innocuous,
like the little plant that Frigg deemed too trifling to be required to swear
itself harmless, our instincts, for Freud, are subject to a compulsion to
replicate or return to the stability of the inorganic world, the world out
of which all life must once have originated. The inorganic world, of course,
is an inanimate world and, so, to return to it is to return to death. As
Freud puts it, “we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim ofall life is death'
and, looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones.”'22
A of external disturbing forces,” which, like the projectiles that the AEsir
throw at Baldr, oblige the instincts and their organic substrate to abandon,
or better said, postpone their return to the inert stabilities of inanimate
matter. The picture here is that of a mechanistic dialectic. On the one
hand, there is something comparable to the principle of constancy operative
in the chemical processes which are at play in the inorganic world. On
the other hand, there are disturbing factors that interfere with these
processes in such a way that life negentropically gets a toehold.22 23
Expressed in the language of our myth, it is not just that Baldr’s death
is postponed because of the promise of the world’s objects not to harm
him. More deeply considered, his life and spirit are the product ofthis same
process. A dying and resurgent god, Baldr lives by means of dying. Subject
to the fatal mistletoe from the very beginning of life, even as all things
can be said to be born dying, he lives that deferral of death we have learned
to call life on account of the perturbing influence of the objects thrown
at him by the AEsir. These objects, operating within the precincts of the
pleasure and reality principles, create a dialectic which forestalls the
repetition compulsion, at least until Loki hands the mistletoe to the blind
Hod. Reading the myth as a round, it is easy to imagine that the objects
which now fall harmlessly upon Baldr were as fatal as the mistletoe during
previous incarnations at earlier levels of evolution and culture. As Freud
puts it in a key passage:
“the attributes of life [which] were at some time evoked,” “the young life,”
and the “living substance [which] was thus being constantly created afresh
and easily dying.” The projectile-hurling AEsir, likewise, evoke themselves
in the reference to “decisive external influences.” And the deadly mistletoe
can be imaginatively conceived to enact itself in Freud’s references to the
“instinct to return to the inanimate state” and “conservative instincts,”
even as in the previously quoted passage we recognized it in Freud’s
definition of instinct as “an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier
state ofthings.”
nightly feasts for a host of warriors who have been killed in battle. As part
of the eternal round, these feasting warriors take to the battlefield again
each day, there to die once more in a fresh battle. “For a long time,” writes
Freud with respect to the similar drama played out in the chemical
processes of matter, “... living substance was thus being constantly created
afresh and easily dying ...” (as quoted above).
Odinn’s horse, Sleipnir, also has associations with death. Most telling
in this regard is the resemblance of its eight legs to the eight legs of a
group of four pallbearers. From the asymmetrical viewpoint of the
mythologizing psyche, a coffin and the party carrying it manifest the
eight-legged horse of death, the steed of Odinn, Sleipnir. In the mythic
account of Baldr’s death this apperceptive link is evident. At precisely
the same time as the pallbearers cart the coffin of the dead Baldr away to
his death-ship for cremation, Hermod rides Sleipnir to Hel in the hope
of ransoming his beloved brother from death.
Negentropic Mourning
n “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud tells a story of loss and grief
I that is similar to our Northern myth. Like Odinn, Frigg, and the
other AEsir, the bereaved, according to Freud, are subject in their grief
to immense resistances when faced with the task of relinquishing their
deceased loved ones. These resistances, as we shall discuss in greater detail
below, are redolent of the negentropic process of development we have
been describing in our account of Freud’s mechanistic vision of the
origins of living matter, the instincts, and the mental apparatus. Though
familiar to us on the level of our own personal experience, they have
also an impersonal prehistory or archaic resonance—life’s first emergence
out of the inorganic world being a function of what has more recently
been characterized as a failure or inability to mourn. Just as the AEsir
in our myth (and we, too, in the throes of bereavement) are reluctant
to be parted from deceased loved ones, so that force which operates
beyond the pleasure principle to restore an earlier state of things can
be said to enact a rudimentary form of the same resistive process.
While simultaneously bearing in mind the events of our Northern
myth and our previous discussion of how these events recur in Freud’s
thought, let us now examine a passage in which Freud describes the
dynamics of mourning.
BALDR’S DEATH 95
26 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in Collected Papers, vol. IV: 152-
170, tr. J. Riviere (London: The Hogarth Press & The Institute of Psycho-Analysis,
1950), p. 154. (All subsequent references to the Collected Papers—hereafter CP—will
be by volume and page number.)
96 NORTHERN GNOSIS
27 Freud, The Ego and the Id, p. 28: “The differentiation between the ego and the
id must be attributed not only to primitive man but even to much simpler organisms,
for it is the inevitable expression of the influence of the external world.” Freud here
refers to the outer dermis of organisms, to the bark of trees, the rind of fruits and
vegetables, and the shells of mollusks, etc.
28 Freud, The Ego and the Id, p. 19.
BALDR'S DEATH 97
which have been allowed through it. By its death, the outer
layer has saved all the deeper ones from a similar fate—unless,
that is to say, stimuli reach it [as the mistletoe reached
Baldr—G. M.] which are so strong that they break through
the protective shield. Protection against stimuli is an almost
more important function for the living organism than
reception of stimuli. ... The main purpose of the reception of
stimuli is to discover the direction and nature of the external
stimuli; and for that it is enough to take small specimens of
the external world, to sample it in small quantities.33
The Ego-Ideal
arlier we quoted a text from Freud’s writings in which he said that
E “what biology and the vicissitudes of the human species have created
in the id and left behind in it is taken over by the ego and re-experienced
in relation to itself as an individual.”38 The referent in this quotation, it
will be recalled, was the ego-ideal, that highest of mental structures which,
nevertheless, “has the most abundant links with the phylogenetic
acquisitions of each individual—his archaic heritage.” At this juncture,
having discussed the manner in which the dying and resurgent Baldr
enacts himself in Freud’s neo-vitalist vision of the most primordial
moments and phases of the archaic heritage to which the ego and its ideal
are heir, we may now bring this entire negentropic, evolutionary process
to bear upon these higher forms of the mind and culture.
In the tale of Baldr’s death and attempted resurrection, the objects
hurled at the young god miraculously cause him no harm. Through the
use of the technical terms “ego” and “ego-ideal,” Freud also described a
state in which the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” strike lightly,
causing little damage. Prior to the differentiations which later bear upon
them, infants and small children cavort like the unscathed Baldr in a
world with which they are one. Protected by parental love, even as Baldr
was protected by Frigg, their narcissism enjoys a brief immunity from the
impingements that the environment hurls their way. As in our Northern
myth, however, this state of original, or, as Freud also calls it, primary
narcissism is not completely impervious to the impingements of fate.39
Just as Loki places the deadly sprig of mistletoe into the hand of the blind
Hod, so life has a way of dealing a fatal blow to the narcissistic perfection
of those early days when, as Freud put it, the child is his own ideal. Not
forever will the world obey the protective edicts of the family, swear itself
harmless, and adapt to the child as to a beautiful young god. Indeed, sooner
or later, even the parents themselves will hurl the mistletoe, if only in the
form of increasing expectations.40
It is precisely here, in the mortal blows which life deals to our
narcissism, that Freud locates the ontogenetic origins of the ego. Like
Baldr, impervious to the projectiles fired upon him by the gods, the ego,
for Freud, develops out of an undifferentiated state in which the
impulsions of instinct are at one with their satiating object even as the
child is at one with its mother. This feeling of inchoate oneness, or as
Freud calls it, primary narcissism, corresponds to the “oceanic feeling”
which the poet Romain Rolland, anticipating our present discussion of
the divine background of Freud’s theories, claimed to be the true referent
of religious sentiments. In Rolland’s view, as Freud recounts it in the first
41 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, in The Freud Pelican Library,
vol. 12: pp. 251-340 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 252.
42 The father of the Oedipal period is like the mistletoe of our myth, not because
he mediates the reality principle, but because the child’s inner representation of him
during this time is a function of phylogenetic schemata which are grounded in the
compulsion to repeat. For Freud, the child’s relationship to the father is heir to the
violence with which the primal father dominated his horde in prehistoric times. And
BALDR’S DEATH 103
But what happens to the narcissistic libido which the ego has had
to forfeit in order to develop into a distinct entity? Like the dying and
resurgent Baldr, the narcissistic cathexis of libido which has had to be
forfeited in order for the ego to differentiate itself no sooner passes away
this, in turn, is heir to a dialectic between the inertia of inanimate matter and the
play of external forces from which life emerged.
43 Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, pp. 254-255.
104 NORTHERN GNOSIS
... [W]e have been driven to the hypothesis that some such
agency develops in our ego which may cut itself off from the
rest of the ego and come into conflict with it. We have called
it the “ego-ideal,” and by way of functions we have ascribed
to it self-observation, the moral conscience, the censorship
of dreams, and the chief influence in repression. We have said
that it is heir to the original narcissism in which the childish
ego enjoyed self-sufficiency; it gradually gathers up from the
While the distance between the ego and the ego-ideal may vary from
individual to individual such that in some it goes no further than in
children, the gap between the individual and what Freud called the
cultural super-ego is immense. In Civilization and its Discontents Freud
presents a picture of just how immense, and persecutory of the individual
and his happiness, this gap in fact is. The instinctual renunciations which
mankind has had to make in order to live together as a group become a
“dynamic fount of conscience,” demanding, in their turn, still further
renunciation.47 Civilized life is a life lived in the midst of the ghostly
values through which we retain, in the form of binding expectations upon
ourselves and our future, all that we and our forefathers, right back to
the simple vesicle itself, have had to renounce or repress due to external
traumatic factors and the obsessive imperatives of earlier ideals.48 Little
wonder that the individual stands in something of the same relationship
to those with whom he shares common ideals as Freud’s Baldr-like vesicle
46 Sigmund Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” in The
Freud Pelican Library, vol. 12: pp. 93-178 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985),
pp. 139-140.
47 Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, p 321: “Every renunciation of instinct
now becomes a dynamic source of conscience and every fresh renunciation increases
the latter’s severity and intolerance.”
48 By “earlier ideals” I mean, more precisely, the regularities of order that
negentropically arise in the evolutionary/developmental process making the route to
death more and more circuitous. Freud seems to have just this picture in mind when
he writes that “Order is a kind of compulsion to repeat which, when a regulation has
been laid down once and for all, decides when, where and how a thing shall be done, so
that in every similar circumstance one is spared hesitation and indecision” (Civilization
and its Discontents, p. 282). This account of order maps something of the same territory
as does the notion of an archetypal pattern of behavior in Jung’s thought.
106 NORTHERN GNOSIS
stands with respect to the stimuli that the environment, like the
projectile-hurling disir, directs its way.
The more the individual sets himself apart from the group as an
individual, the more circuitous a detour he creates for the libido bequeathed
to him by his forebears, and the more discontent and guilt he must tolerate.
Having shed the protection provided by group affiliation, however, the
individual may easily fall prey to the unmediated impact of the cultural
values that bear in upon him. The rare epochal individual, such as Freud’s
Egyptian Moses,49 on the other hand, may himself be the mistletoe that
brings the Ragnarok of destruction and renewal upon the world of our
cultural values, insofar as the tension he holds and the ethic he manifests
surpass the moral level of the collective from which he has emerged.
Besides such epochal figures, there is another source of optimism and
hope. Mitigating the grimly deterministic character of his mechanistic
vision of the ancestral soul, Freud, almost in retrospect, introduced the
notion of “an internal impulse towards ‘progress’ and towards higher
development!”50 Like Baldr returning in the new creation after the
destruction of the gods, Eros, for Freud, is a positive instinctual force
which is conservative even to a greater degree than the death-instinct in
that it repeats again and again the beginning process of development
wherein the first animate tensions arose.51 By forming new unions along
sexual lines, Eros continually introduces “fresh tensions” into the
picture.52 With his recognition of Eros as a force that is not simply
reducible to his former concept of a pleasure-seeking, tension-reducing
and, hence, ultimately retrograde libido, Freud hurls the mistletoe a
second time. Like the dying and resurgent Baldr, life, as he conceives it,
is an interplay of Eros and Thanatos, love and death. Moving “with
vacillating rhythm ... one group of instincts rushes forward so as to reach
the final aim of life as swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in
the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain
point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey.”53
49 Sigmund Freud, Moses andMonotheism, tr. K. Jones (NewYork: Vintage Books, 1939).
50 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 34fn.
51 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, pp. 34-35.
52 Freud, The Ego and the Id, p. 37: “If it is true that Fechner’s principle of constancy
governs life, which thus consists of a continuous descent towards death, it is the claims
of Eros, of the sexual instincts, which, in the form of instinctual needs, hold up the
falling level and introduce fresh tensions.”
53 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, pp. 34-35.
BALDR’S DEATH 107
n Jung’s thought, no less than in Freud’s, the Baldr myth enacts itself
55 Jung, CW 9i § 302.
56 Jung, CW6 § 512.
57 Jung, CW 9i § 187.
58 Jung, CW 7 § 242.
59 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1961), p. 161.
BALDR’S DEATH 109
60 Cf. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, tr. R. & C. Winston (New York:
Random House, 1965), p. 325. Here Jung returns to the theme of acting in accordance
with one’s individual capacities when he writes that “the feeling for the infinite ... can
be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost,” i.e., in a realistic sense of our personal
limitations and life tasks.
61 To be fair to Nietzsche we should recall that he also spoke of the value of “short
lived habits.” Through these one may passionately live the imperatives of the
unconscious without finally being possessed by them. See his The Joyful Wisdom, tr. T.
Common (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1979), pp. 229-230.
62 Jung, CW10 § 831. In the course of critiquing Freud’s notion of the super-ego,
Jung comments that “the ‘archaic vestiges’ in the super-ego are a concession to the
archetypes theory and imply a fundamental doubt as to the absolute dependence of
unconscious contents on consciousness.”
63 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 319-320.
110 NORTHERN GNOSIS
64 Jung, CW 8 § 339.
65 William Blake, Selected Poetry and Prose ofBlake, ed. N. Frye (New York: The
Modern Library, 1953), pp. 123, 132.
BALDR'S DEATH 111
n the myth of Baldr there is a movement back and forth between the
I world of the living and the land of the dead. Concerned about Baldr’s dreams
and what they might portend for his fate and the fate of the gods in general,
Odinn visited Hel in search of answers. Later, after Baldr had been killed, Hel
was visited again, this time by Hermod the Fleet, as part of an effort to bring
him back to life. In the chapter “Life after Death” of his autobiography, Jung
covers something of this same ground when he characterizes his entire
psychological enterprise as “an attempt, ever renewed, to give an answer to
the question of the interplay between the ‘here’ and the ‘hereafter.’”67 Like
Odinn on his journey to Hel to consult with the Volva on Baldr’s behalf,
Jung conceived of his “confrontation with the unconscious,” both on a
personal and professional level, as a confrontation with the ancestral dead.68
Riding the eight-legged horse of his active imaginations, Jung followed
the introverting current of his libido into depths of an unconscious which
he held to be not personal only, but collective as well. Immersed in the
figures which he encountered there, even as the dying and resurgent Baldr
stood in the midst of his projectile-hurling company, Jung writes,
By sensing the presence of the dead standing directly behind him, Jung
narrowed the gap between what Freud called the ego and the ego-ideal.
To the extent that the “former ego-structures [,] which have left their
precipitates behind in the id”70 from time immemorial, could be
imaginatively perceived and consciously reckoned with, their determining
influence could be mitigated. In Jung’s view, what is inherited from our
ancestors need not entirely preclude what we, its heirs, would choose to
inaugurate through the opportunity afforded to us by individual
existence. Though the dead do pass on to us a legacy, this only
manifests itself as the mounting burden of guilt which Freud described
when we fail to heed it as a call to individuation.71
In two further passages, Jung underscores his sense of psychology
as a question concerning the interplay of ‘here’ and ‘hereafter,’ an
archaic myth in modern dress, a dialogue with the dead. In the first
of these he conceives of psychic existence on the model of mythic
accounts of the afterlife; in the second he once again, in characteristic
fashion, images himself to be immersed in a consciousness-advancing
tete-a-tete with interior figures.
The dead have become ever more distinct for me as the voices
of the Unanswered, Unresolved, and Unredeemed; for since
the questions and demands which my destiny required me
to answer did not come to me from outside, they must have
come from the inner world. These conversations with the
dead formed a kind of prelude to what I had to communicate
to the world about the unconscious: a kind of pattern of order
and interpretation of its general contents.73
80 Jung, CW 4 § 665.
81 Jung, CW 7 § 507. “The collective unconscious contains, or is, an historical
mirror-image of the world.”
82 Jung, CW 11 § 222n.
83 Jung, Letters, vol. I, p. 143.
84 See my “Mourning and Metapsychology: An Archetypal View,” Spring 58: A
Journal ofArchetype and Culture (Woodstock, CT: Spring Journal, 1995), pp. 51-68.
85 Jung, CW 5 § 332, 335, 497, 516.
86 Sonu Shamdasani, Cult Fictions: C. G. Jung and the Founding ofAnalytical
Psychology (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 56-75.
116 NORTHERN GNOSIS
In the next paragraph, Jung extends his reflections on the Baldr myth,
discussing it now in connection to the nascent stage of consciousness and
its relationship to the matrix from which it has emerged, the unconscious.
In answer to the question: “But why should the mistletoe kill Baldur,
since it is, in a sense, his sister or brother?” he writes:
90 Jung, CW 5§ 392.
91 Jung, CW5 § 393.
BALDR'S DEATH 119
Heroic Incest
or Jung, it is by identifying briefly with the archetype of the hero that
97 At a similar juncture, Jesus took pains to reassure the old gods. In the same
breath as he inaugurated, through the moral critique of his exemplary life, a new
dispensation (thereby bringing to an end the former state of archaic identity), he
declared that he had not come to destroy the law or the prophets but to fulfill them.
Cf. Matthew 5:17.
98 Jung, CW 5 § 477. Sense slightly altered.
99 Jung, CW 5 § 390.
BALDR’S DEATH 123
W Voluntary Sacrifice
hile continuing to bear in mind the scene of our myth in which
the AEsir resist relinquishing the dead Baldr, let us now examine a
passage from Jung’s writings in which he deals with the theme of sacrifice:
in the thought of both these theorists. And yet, their visions are so
different. Freud, conceiving of the psyche in an extroverted fashion,
located the genesis of the psyche in the subtle continuation of earlier
states of things which it is unable to detach itself from due to the
negentropic physics to which it is heir. Jung, by contrast, conceiving of
the psyche in an introverted fashion and confining himself to the
experiences of developing consciousness, finds in renunciation and
sacrifice the basis of the ego’s optimal relationship with the unconscious.
In Jung’s view, the so-called ego-ideals, which compel the ego to achieve
in some form what has been lost but not relinquished, must be carefully
differentiated from the ego and subjected to criticism. Or said another
way, the ego must bring criticism to bear upon itself in order to
differentiate itself from the dominant of the unconscious with which it
is identified. The picture here is not, as in Freud, of a long process of
psychic phylogeny culminating in a civilization oppressed with
discontents, but of a series of individual encounters with collective
representations which can actually have a redemptive effect upon the
dominants of the ancestral soul.
As in the association experiment, the individual may recognize the
alterity of his identifications and interior encounters in the form of
disturbances to his attention or to his ability to direct his awareness.103
Life, itself, in Jung’s view, may be compared to an association experiment,
inasmuch as it pelts us with events which trouble us even as the
experiment pelts us with words that make us react in peculiarly inhibited
ways.104 Again and again, we find ourselves in that typical situation,
“hedged about by psychic powers, sustained or threatened or deluded
by them.” As Jung, relating this situation to the process of individuation
puts it, “Nobody who finds himself on the road to wholeness can escape
that characteristic suspension which is the meaning of crucifixion. For
he will infallibly run into things that thwart and cross’ him: first, the
thing he has no wish to be (the shadow); second, the thing he is not
(the other,’ the individual reality of a ‘You’); and third, his psychic non
ego (the collective unconscious).”105 This list is not exhaustive. One
could expand the encounter with the collective unconscious into a
number of typical figures, such as the anima/animus and mana-
106 Scholars of Northern myth and religion have been struck by the great difference
between Snorri Sturluson’s account of the Baldr myth and the account of Saxo
Grammaticus. Unable to unify the different stories, they have tended to explain the
difference in terms of different sources. Though this may be so, there is, nevertheless,
a commonality between the two portraits of this god when viewed from the perspective
of the concepts in Jung’s thought in which Baldr enacts himself. In Saxo’s version of
the myth, Baldr is a warrior-god who battles a mortal who is his foe with respect to
the pursuit of a particular woman. After many battles, Baldr is finally killed by this
enemy. In Jung’s thought Saxo’s Baldr enacts himself in the theory of the ego’s
inflationary encounter with the anima (and animus). Like the AEsir who pelt Baldr in
Snorri’s version of the myth, the anima, for Jung, not only personifies the collective
unconscious (CW 7 § 521), but may be regarded as a representation the projection
making factor itself (CW9i § 20). It is by telling in different ways a story that Jung
once again tells differently in his theory of projection and the anima that there can be
said to be a rough equivalence between Snorri’s tale of Baldr pelted by the gods and
Saxo’s tale of Baldr enamoured of a woman and at war for her with another man. That
Baldr is a god and his foe a mortal maps something of the same territory as does Jung’s
discussion of the mana-personality which appears alongside the anima. Just as the mortal
foe of Baldr must grapple with this powerful God, so the ego, in its encounter with
the anima (or animus), must grapple simultaneously with the mana-personality to which
it may subsequently fall into identification (CW 7 § 374-406).
107 C. G. Jung, Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1925, ed. W.
McGuire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 37, 82, 130. See also
Jung, CW 9i: 224.
108 Jung, CW7 § 376-382.
109 Jung, CW 7 § 376-382.
110 Jung, Letters, vol. I, p. 227: “... [F]ree will only exists within the limits of
consciousness. Beyond those limits, there is mere compulsion.” Compulsion, here,
means, possession by inner and outer forces, archetypal powers, historical and cultural
processes, the ancestors. Only as we distinguish ourselves from these determinants is
the unconscious affected by our increased consciousness.
BALDR'S DEATH 127
then act within the boundaries of its individual human reality, more
of the collective unconscious will be integrated and the evolution of
consciousness furthered thereby.111 It is these developments, born of the
effect of consciousness upon the collective unconscious that Jung had in
mind when, expressing these ideas in a religious metaphor, he wrote that
“whoever knows God has an effect upon him”112 and that “the encounter
with the creature changes the creator.”113
In our Northern myth, Baldr is at one and the same time the focal
point at which the projectiles of the gods are directed, a disturbed dreamer,
a reluctant sacrifice, the end of the gods, and the presiding spirit of the
new creation in which we humans dwell. This constellation of images is
particularly resonant with a passage from Jung’s writings which we shall
now quote in order to draw together and summarize our previous
discussion of his thought. The passage is taken from his lecture,
“Transformation Symbolism of the Mass.” Immediately preceding it is
the lucid discussion of the meaning of sacrifice, from which we quoted
above. Concluding this earlier discussion, Jung writes that through
“sacrifice we gain ourselves—our ‘self’—for we have only what we give.
But what does the self gain? We see it entering into manifestation, freeing
itself from unconscious projection, and, as it grips us, entering into our
lives and so passing from unconsciousness into consciousness, from
potentiality into actuality. What it is in the diffuse unconscious state we
do not know; we only know that in becoming ourselves it has become
man.”114 Here is the passage, italicized to bring out the phrases in which
the Baldr myth enacts itself most vividly:
111 In the contrary case, where the ancestral mana-personality usurps the ego, the
reverse results. Unwilling or unable to sacrifice its identification with the god which it
has been compelled to ape, the ego-personality becomes instead its unwilling sacrificial
victim. As Jung expresses it, “An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and
conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past,
incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right
conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued
with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead” (CW 12 § 563).
112 Jung, CW 11 § 617.
115 Jung, CW 11 § 686.
114 Jung, CW 11 § 398.
128 NORTHERN GNOSIS
of the conflict between inside and outside.”121 And here again we find Jung’s
vision of the way things happen in the psyche prefigured in the vision of
our Northern myth. For it is precisely in 1 this freeing of the self through
the arduous process of taking back projections and then sacrificing the
power which has been falsely appropriated thereby that the resurgent Baldr
returns after the twilight of the gods to preside over a renewed humanity
on the conceptual level of Jung’s thought.
obligations, but are born and destined rather to be bearers of new cultural
ideals .. ..”123The burden of guilt which Freud saw as increasing alongside
the advance of civilization Jung saw as a call to individuation. Those who
do not lag behind the ethical level of their society, and yet suffer from a
neurosis, may be suffering a problem that is not exclusive to them
personally. At first, of course, they may not have the least awareness of this.
Like Thor in Utgarda-Loki’s castle, they may struggle to lift the cat off the
palace floor, not realizing that it is not a cat at all but the dread Midgard
Serpent, which encircles the world. The marital conflict, the apparently
124 For an example of such a dream and further discussion of what I have called
“the moment of the ancestor,” see my “Of Brothels, Gambling-Hells, and the Salons
of the Elegant: Collectivity, Individuality, and the Dream,” Quadrant: Journal of the
C. G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology, XXXIV: 1 Winter 2004, pp. 38-40.
125 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 378.
126 Jung, CW 4 § 667.
Index
Eros xiii, 99, 106, 109 Grammaticus, Saxo 80, 126 (n.
extensity 66 106)
Great Mother 92, 116-117. See
F also Magna Mater
Group Psychology and the Analysis of
family tree 76. See also Barnstock
the Ego 84, 104
fantasy 4, 13, 48, 53, 69, 119
guilt 106, 112, 131
combinations xx
Freud’s theoretical 63 (n. 56) H
images 26
incest 60, 65 hammer xix, 2, 3—5, 7, 16-19, 21—
Jung’s 128 (n. 116) 22, 24-25, 27-37, 42, 111, 132
life 31 Heimdall 28
of racial supremacy and world Hel 42, 80-83, 89, 90, 93-95, 97,
conquest 76 104, 107, 109, 111-112
of sacrifice 64 Heraclitus 89
phallic 68 Hermod the Fleet 82, 93-95, 111
repressed sexual 61 hero 42-43, 60, 72, 80, 115, 117,
Spielreins Siegfried 45, 66, 70 (n. 118, 122, 129
73) archetype 122
thinking 11,31 as symbolic figure 122
father archetype 63 (n. 56) identification with 122
Faust 41-42, 111 mythical 47, 59
Fechner, Gustav T. 85—86, 88, 106 redemptive 46
(n. 52) hero myth 34, 42
fertility 26, 117 Hillman, James xiii, xiv (n. 11), xv,
fertility apple 48-49 xviii (n. 22), 4, 9
fetch 51,69,71-72,75-76 Hljod 48
fixation 7, 11 (n. 27), 12 Hod 80-81, 92, 101, 123
Fliess, Wilhelm 54 hysteria 44, 53
“Freudian Theory of Hysteria, The” aetiology of 32
53
Freya 27-28, 31, 35-37 I
Frigg 80-81, 85-86, 91, 93-94, id xiii, 3, 10, 15-19, 30 (n. 69), 84,
101-102, 104, 116-117, 119, 96-98, 100, 104, 112
123. See also Mother Goddess identification(s) 16, 55, 63 (n. 56),
69, 70, 73-74, 96-98, 104,
G
108-109, 122, 125-129, 126
genetics 114-115 (n. 106)
Goethe 24, 41, 43, 45, 68 archetypal 74, 123
Gospel of Thomas xv image(s) xii-xvi, xix, 4—5, 7, 9, 12—
Gram 50, 52, 61, 76 13, 15, 17, 18, 23, 26-27, 29,
136 INDEX
infantile 7, 11 (n. 27), 44, 46-47, super-ego 10—11, 30 (n. 69), 98,
52, 56-57, 67, 74 104, 109 (n. 62)
of adults 44 cultural 105, 107, 109-110
repressed 11 sword xix, 42, 50-52, 54-56, 58,
resistence to 72-73 60-61, 63-65, 67-70, 73, 75-
Spielreins theory of 72—74 76, 81
shadow xiii, 73, 119, 125 Symbols of Transformation 117
Siggeur 43, 45-47, 49-52, 54-55,
58-60, 65, 72, 74 T
Sigmund 43, 45-46, 49-51, 59-60,
Thanatos xiii, 93, 99, 106
64 (n. 56), 65, 69, 72, 76
Thor iii, xv, 2, 3-8, 11-37, 42, 131
Signy xix, 43, 45—46, 48-54, 60, 64
Tokk 82, 97
(n. 56), 65, 71-72, 74, 76
Totem and Taboo 54-56, 84
Sigtyr 49
transcendent function 69
Sigurd 43, 49 “Transcendent Function, The” 67
Sinfjotli 43, 45-47, 49, 51
transference 45, 54, 58-60, 65-67,
Skryme 16-19, 21-25, 27
70-71, 75. See also counter
Sleipnir 80, 93-94, 107
transference
son
“Transformation Symbolism of the
as consciousness 118
Mass” 127
divine 117
“Transformations and Symbols of
Jung as Spielrein’s 48
the Libido” 73
necessary sacrifice on the part of
tree xvi (n. 17), 4, 9, 30, 41-44,
64
48, 50-51, 58, 61-62, 64-65,
of Barnstock, Jung as 70
69-71, 74, 76, 81-82, 96 (n.
Siegfried as Spielreins 59, 73 (n.
27), 117-118
83) tree of life 43 (n. 4), 75
Spielrein’s fantasy 70
trickster 21, 24, 27
son-consort 117, 118, 122
Trym 27
son-lover 92, 117, 123 Two Essays in Analytical Psychology
sonship
129
Jung’s, to Freud 45-48, 54, 58,
63, 71 u
Spielrein, Sabina xix, 12, 45, 48,
51, 53-54, 58-60, 63 (n. 56), unconscious xiii, xiv (n. 11), xviii
66-67, 69-76 (n. 22), xx, 3-5, 10-11, 15, 29
“Study in the Process of (n. 67), 30, 32-35, 38, 46-48,
Individuation, A” 35 53 (n. 30), 65, 72-76
Sturluson, Snorri 15 (n. 39), 80, 82 personal 119
(n. 4), 83, 126 (n. 106) phylogenetic 57
sublimation 7, 8, 10, 74 (n. 87) pre-existing 118
140 INDEX
Can the theories of Freud and Jung be read through the stories of Norse Mythology?
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