Greg Mogenson - Northern Ghosis

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The book examines the theories of Freud and Jung through the lens of Norse mythology, interpreting their ideas as mythical figures and relating their personal relationships to Norse sagas.

The main topics discussed in the book include psychic reality, the ego ideal, participation mystique, and kinship libido which are analyzed through figures like Thor, Baldr and the Volsungs.

Freud's concepts of a death instinct, repetition compulsion, mourning and the ego-ideal are interpreted as variants of the tale of Baldr's death, while Jung's theory of archetypes is related to Thor's encounters with giants.

NORTHERN GNOSIS

Spring Journal Books


Studies in Archetypal Psychology Series

Series Editor
Greg Mogenson

Other titles in the Series

Dialectics & Analytical Psychology:


The El Capitan Canyon Seminar
Wolfgang Giegerich, David L. Miller, Greg Mogenson

Raids on the Unthinkable:


Freudian & Jungian Psychoanalyses
Paul Kugler

The Neurosis of Psychology:


Primary Papers towards a Critical Psychology
(forthcoming, October 2005)
Wolfgang Giegerich
NORTHERN
GNOSIS
Thon Baldr, and the Volsungs
in the Thought ofFreud
andJung

Greg Mogenson

Spring Journal Books


New Orleans, Louisiana
© 2005 by Greg Mogenson.
All rights reserved.

Published by
Spring Journal, Inc.;
627 Ursulines Street #7
New Orleans, Louisiana 70116
Tel.: (504) 524-5117
Fax: (504) 558-0088
Website: www.springjournalandbooks.com

Printed in Canada.
Text printed on acidfree paper.

Cover image
adapted from a woodcut
(see facing page)
by
Hans Gerhard Sorensen

Cover design by
Northern Cartographic
4050 Williston Road
South Burlington, Vermont 05403

Library in Congress Cataloging in Publication Data


Pending
Woodcut by Hans Gerhard Sorensen
For

Michael Mendis
Contents

Acknowledgments.......................................................................................... ix

Introduction................................................................................................... xi

CHAPTER ONE: Thor’s Hammer: The Reality


and Objectivity of the Psyche.................................................. 1

God of Lightning God of Mud Thor’s Hammer in the


Thought of Freud and Jung Thor, Jung, and Freud in
Utgarda-Loki’s Castle Thor’s Hammer Stolen and
Reclaimed Thor, Jung, and the Jotunn Runge

CHAPTER TWO: Barnstock and the Volsungs: The


Sword of Incest and the Tree of Life....................................... 39
Runic Preamble Barnstock in the Thought of Freud and
Jung Signy’s Wedding The Tale Re-Told The Sword of
Incest in Freud, Jung, and Spielrein Odinn’s Sword in
Freud’s Hands Freud’s Sword in Jung’s Hands Jung
Draws the Sword Spielrein’s Fetch

CHAPTER THREE: Baldr’s Death: Individuation


and the Ancestral Soul............................................................... 77

Runic Preamble The Northern Myth

Part One: Baldr’s Freud.............................................................. 83

Baldr’s Death in Freud’s Thought The Principle of


Constancy and the Pleasure Principle Of Mistletoe,
Repetition, and the Reality Principle The Compulsion to
Repeat Progressing Deathward to no Death Freud
Consults the Volva Negentropic Mourning The Ego-
Ideal Regaining Lost Worlds on New Levels
CONTENTS

Part Two: Baldr’s Jung................................................................ 107


Baldr in Jung’s Thought Jung Consults the Volva The
Struggle with the Dead Consciousness and the Child
Archetype Projection and Re-Collection Heroic Incest
Voluntary Sacrifice Inflation, Differentiation, and
Actualization The Moment of the Ancestor between
Fate and Destiny

Index................................................................................................................ 133
Acknowledgments

I want to thank my colleagues Ron Schenk, John Desteian, and


Anita Chapman for their stimulating and generative support while I was
writing this book. Nancy Cater, the publisher of Spring Journal Books,
has been a wonderful collaborator on this and other projects, for which
I thank her warmly. Thanks are also due to Michael Mendis for his help
with the manuscript production, Ragnhild Talman for assistance with
the illustrations, and to my wife, Rita Mendis-Mogenson, for her love
and support.
Chapter two of this book, in a slightly different version, was
previously published as a two-part article, “Barnstock’s Progeny: The
Sword of Incest and the Tree of Life in Freud, Jung, and Spielrein,” which
appeared in Quadrant: Journal ofthe C. G. Jung Foundation for Analytical
Psychology (Vol. XX, no. 2, 2000, pp. 20-41 & Vol. XXI, no. 1, 2001,
pp. 31-47). The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission
to reprint this article.
The woodcut print illustration, “Odin’s Sacrifice,” on p. xvii is by
Pete White of Murrieta, California.
All other illustrations are woodcuts by Hans Gerhard Sorensen.
The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission of
Pete White and Brit Anne Sorensen to reprint these works.
Introduction

One word led me


to other words.
One work led me
to other works.1

—Odinn

he story is told that Odinn gouged out one of his own eyes as

T a sacrifice for the gift of wisdom. Haemorrhaging visions, the


gory orb gazed out from Mirmir’s well, the spring that feeds
the World Tree, Yggdrasill, which houses the nine worlds. To sacrifice
an eye in the manner of this Northern All-Father of the Gods is to
dedicate the mind to a particular way of comprehending things. It is
to take up an idea in a committed way and to see it through. The
Odinn’s eye of an idea that we shall be taking up in these pages comes
from Jung. Reflecting upon psychology in the light of his concept of
the archetype (an idea for which he, too, had given an eye), the great
psychologist writes,

Psychology, as one of the many expressions of psychic life,


operates with ideas which in their turn are derived from
archetypal structures and thus generate a somewhat more
abstract kind of myth. Psychology therefore translates the
archaic speech of myth into a modern mythologem—not
yet, of course, recognized as such—which constitutes one
element of the myth “science.” This seemingly hopeless
undertaking is a living and lived myth, satisfying to persons
of a corresponding temperament, indeed, beneficial in so far
as they have been cut off from their psychic origins by
neurotic dissociation.2

1 From the Havamal of the Elder Edda, stanza 140.


2 C. G. Jung, CollectedWorks, tr. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1953), vol. 9, i, para. 302 (all subsequent references to Jung’s Collected Works,
vols. 1-20, will be by volume—CW-—and paragraph number—§).
xii INTRODUCTION

Our endeavour in the chapters that follow will be to demonstrate


that the archaic speech of myth has, indeed, been translated into a
modern mythologem—that “living and lived myth,” as Jung calls it,
psychology. A comparative study, our approach shall be one of insighting
the theories of Freud and Jung through the lens of Norse myth. In
keeping with this focus, our interest will be less in providing a
psychological reading of Norse mythology than in discovering how the
Norse divinities enact themselves in the concepts and theories of our
depth psychological forebears.
The myths of our Northern ancestors were a vital expression of their
struggle to exist in the world in which they found themselves. Psychology,
like the cycle of ancient stories which preceded it, is equally this for us.
It, too, is a myth, even as the myths of the ancient North were the
psychology of a past era.3 Of course, there are differences. History has
moved on; times have changed. We are divided from the meaning that
myth had in the past by an enormous gulf. And, yet, the comparisons
that can be drawn have a vitalizing effect upon the practice of psychology
and analysis. Simply by calling psychology a myth (and recognizing in
this way its symbolic dimension) we establish a living connection to its
theories, using them in a different way than we would if we valued them
only for their explanatory power. Cum grano salis, it is now up to
psychology to be for our time what I-Ching hexagrams, Norse runes, and
just-so stories were for another.
From its earliest beginnings, the tradition of depth psychology has been
fascinated with mythology. This fascination, however, has for the most part
taken the form of interpreting the myths. Listening to the ancient stories
as if they had been spoken from the mouth of a patient, psychology treated
them to its talking cure. Mostly, this consisted of simple translation work.
Myth’s images and motifs were explained in terms of whatever theoretical
terms were current in psychology. Ironically, however, these terms were
often much more than simply concepts with which to think. Reified and
hallowed, they functioned, for all their abstractness, as gods themselves.
A connection may here be drawn to how in mythology an older order
of divinities is frequently supplanted by a subsequent one—the Vanir
by the AEsir in Norse mythology, the Titans by the Olympians in Greek

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

4 C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. A. Jaffe (New York: Random


House), p. 150.
5 Cf Freud’s charge that Jung had “failed to hear the mighty and primordial melody
of the instincts.” The Standard Edition ofthe Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund
Freud, tr. J. Strachey, vol. XIV (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), p. 62.
6 James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology.
xiv INTRODUCTION

and meaning in and of themselves.7 Jung, approaching images through


his technique of amplification, moved away from the specificity of
particular images. For him, the likeness between various mythic images
pointed to the existence of otherwise irrepresentable archetypes.8 It was
largely by elucidating these structures that Jung translated the archaic
speech of myth into the conceptual language of analytical psychology.
In contrast to this approach, archetypal psychology’s return to myth has
been a return to the image. By adhering more strictly to Jung’s dictum—
“image is psyche”9—than Jung himself tended to, archetypal psychology
has shown that images need not be related to more abstractly conceived
symbols to be meaningful.10
My own approach in these pages owes much to Hillman and to
archetypal psychology. Mimetic to the work of this school, I, too, shall
be turning to myths for perspective and re-visioning psychology from
the perspective of specific mythic images. A difference, however, is that
my return to myth is simultaneously a return to the concepts and theories
of Freud and Jung. My interest, in contrast to Hillman’s, is in the re­
discovery of the writings of these theorists as myths, and of their concepts
as images.11 In a sense, my intent is to play both ends of the so-called
classical-archetypal continuum of analytical psychology against the
middle. While on the one hand, in line with Hillman’s approach, I
attempt to stay with specific images and imagine in terms of the
perspectives that they offer, on the other hand I retain something of the
conceptual vocabulary of Freud and Jung, terms such as “objective
psyche,” “the unconscious,” and “psychic reality.” While Hillman has
moved away from these terms, preferring to speak of image and
imagination instead, my own proclivity is to retain them. From my
perspective, concepts are as valuable as images, even are images. They,
too, resound with archetypal depth. Just as one image implies another,
thereby activating the living fantasies that animate our psychic life, so
concepts can open into one another.

7 James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account (Dallas: Spring


Publications, 1983), pp. 11-15.
8 Jung, CW 11 § 222.
9Jung, CW 13 § 75.
10 Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, pp. 6-15.
11 Hillman laid the ground work for this approach in a work in which he compares
Freud’s account of the unconscious with the underworld of Greek mythology. See his
The Dream and the Underworld (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 7-22.
INTRODUCTION xv

There is another important contrast between my approach and that


of Hillman, and this concerns what Hillman calls “cultural locus.”12
Archetypal psychology, according to Hillman, “starts in the South,” which
is to say, in the same imaginal Mediterranean soil from which Greek and
Renaissance civilization sprang.13 In this study, by contrast, we shall return
to the North. This shift of cultural locus, like Hillman’s contrary one, is
consistent with the intent of our venture. Just as archetypal psychology,
hoping to free itself from the conceptual terms in which depth psychology
has come to be literalized, turned to the South in order to situate itself
in a “pre-psychological geography” in which what the North formulated
as “psychology” was implicit to the culture of imagination and very mode
of life,14 we, hoping to return to the concepts and theories of Freud and
Jung as to the living and lived myth of our time, return to the landscapes
of Northern Europe. The North we return to, however, is not only that
of twentieth-century Zurich and Vienna—the North which Hillman left
behind. Our North is also the ancient, pagan North of Thor, Baldr, and
the Volsungs.
Psychology, according to Jung, is necessarily a subjective confession
of its author, a product or function of his inner experience. This is true,
not only for the author, but for the reader as well. The resonance
between the myths of the North and the writings of Freud and Jung is
first and foremost a felt experience. Just as the wonders of the natural
world evoke reactions in us which are commensurate with their
grandeur, so one may experience the numinosum in one’s armchair with
one’s books. Affects get constellated, and one underlines a sentence. Or,
seeing a connection with another text, one excitedly scribbles a note in
the margin. As if by a bolt from the blue, one has been struck by what
Jung, in a particularly apt definition of what he meant by the term
“numinous,” called “a priori emotional value.”15 Running along the
nerve fibres through the arm and out the pen, a line which may in its
own way be as inspired as the sentences it underscores, appears upon
the page. From a sentence I once underlined in the gnostic Gospel of
Thomas I have learned to call this illuminating power gnosis: “When
you see your image, you are glad. But when you see your images which

12 Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, p. 30.


13 Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, p. 30.
14 Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, p. 30.
15 C. G. Jung, CW 6 § 791.
xvi INTRODUCTION

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

Odinn sacrificing himself on the World Tree, Yggdrasill, and the


emergence of the runes
INTRODUCTION

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

20 Jung, CW10 § 55.


21 Jung, CW 10 § 55.
22 Cf. Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins ofa Charismatic Movement (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 92-193. As Noll has shown, the nineteenth
century concept of Bodenbeschaffenheit-—“the formative forces of the soil”—was still
current in Jung’s day, Jung’s friend Count Keyserling, at whose behest Jung wrote his
essay “Mind and Earth,” being among its most vocal proponents. Supported by the
theories of the evolutionary biology of his day, Jung took the formative influence of
the landscape more literally, perhaps, than I do in returning to this notion here. For
me, outer landscapes reverberate with our interior depths as well as having soul
themselves, as Hillman has helped us to better appreciate with his work on anima
mundi. Thus, it is not necessary to derive materialistically the psyche from the soil,
the mind from the earth, but only to note that the experience which the landscape
evokes in us cannot be divided into its geology, biology, evolutionary history, etc.,
without remainder. This remainder, though itself irrepresentable, can, nevertheless,
be symbolized by the outer forms which amplify it. Like the synonyms of the
philosopher’s stone in alchemy, the objective psyche—Jung’s term for what I have here
referred to as the remainder—reverberates the depths of its subtle nature in the outward
forms of actual nature—mountains, lakes, planets and stars. Keyserling recognized this
when he wrote that “for the man who believes in myths there are no facts in our sense;
he knows nothing of the sun of the physicist [but] prays before what he feels as the
immediate source of life” (cited in Noll, The Jung Cult, p. 94, italics mine). For Jung,
too, the archetypal world is not a copy of the external world which science progressively
reveals to us. On the contrary, it is a record of the psyche’s unconscious reactions to
the objects of external reality. See C. G. Jung, Analytical Psychology: Notes ofthe Seminar
given in 1925, ed. William McGuire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989),
pp. 135-136.
INTRODUCTION XIX

various schools of analysis may find compensation through the medium


of the so-called “multicultural imagination.”23 In this connection, it is
helpful to recall the modesty with which Jung tempered the application
of his otherwise bold concept of the collective unconscious. In his
“Psychological Commentary to the Secret ofthe Golden Flower," a treatise
on Chinese alchemy of some antiquity, Jung writes that our “growing
acquaintance with the spiritual East should be no more to us than the
symbolical expression of the fact that we are entering into connection
with the elements in ourselves which are strange to us.”24 Applied to the
Northern perspective which we shall be entertaining in this study, perhaps
the most that can be said is that Norse mythology resonates with elements
in ourselves which are somewhat more familiar.
In each of the chapters that follow, we shall explore Jung’s
characterization of psychology as a modern mythologem from the vantage
point of a different image from Norse myth. In the first chapter, Thor’s
thunderbolt, the throwing hammer Mjollnir, will govern our selection
and guide our reading of the texts of Freud and Jung. By means of this
image, we shall discuss how the concreteness of the imaginal and the impact
of psyche’s expressions have been conceptually figured by Freud and Jung
in the mythos of their theories. Besides being concrete and impactful,
images—and concepts, too, when entertained as images—are life-giving.
In the second chapter, this life-giving quality will be explored through
the perspective of the sword that Odinn plunged into the trunk of the
Northern oak, Barnstock, at the wedding of Volsung’s daughter, Signy.
As we shall see, there are many resonances between this Northern saga
and the saga that was enacted by Freud, Jung, and Sabina Spielrein in
the early days of psychoanalysis. Finally, in the last chapter, the
relationship of the imaginal psyche to death and the ancestral dead will
be explored alongside such psychological notions as the principle of
constancy, the ego-ideal, archetypes and the mana-personality. In this
case, our lens is provided by the myth of Baldr.
We began with the image of Odinn’s sacrifice of his eye for the gift
of wisdom. A moment ago we mentioned another source of that god’s

23 Michael V. Adams, The Multicultural Imagination: “Race, ” Color, and the


Unconscious (London: Routledge, 1996).
24 C. G. Jung, “Commentary” to Richard Wilhelm, tr., The Secret of the Golden
Flower: A Chinese Books ofLife (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 128. See
also C. G. Jung, CW13 § 72.
XX INTRODUCTION

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.

25 See note 17 above.


26 Jung, CW 8 § 132.
CHAPTER ONE

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.

—C. G. Jung, Letters, vol. II, p. 57.

... [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.

—Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, p. 1'5.

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

1 James Hillman, “On the Necessity of Abnormal Psychology: Ananke and


Athene,” in J. Hillman, ed. Facing the Gods (Irving, TX.: Spring Publications, 1980),
p. 10.
2 C. G. Jung, CollectedWorks, tr. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1953), vol. 6, para. 791. All subsequent references to the Collected Works (CW),
vols. 1-20, will be by volume and paragraph number (designated by §).
THOR’S HAMMER 5

by the ... modern unconscious as lightning brings the hammer of Thor


to bear once again. In this connection, the following reflection of Jung’s
seems particularly apt:

Not for a moment dare we succumb to the illusion that an


archetype can be finally explained and disposed of. Even the
best attempts at explanation are only more or less successful
translations into another metaphorical language. (Indeed,
language itself is only an image.) The most we can do is to
dream the myth onwards and give it a modern dress.3

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,

He plunges in blindly, but is not wise enough, he blunders


and gets completely stuck. He can be so angry that it seems
as though fire is flashing from his eyes. He is always busy,
and has little time.4

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

lightning bolt ofThor) in response to this situation. As von Franz recounts


this story,

[Dr. Jung had] wanted to write in a clear, logically accurate


form, having in mind something like Le Discours de la Methode
by Descartes, but he couldn’t do it because that was too refined
a mental instrument to grasp this enormous wealth ofmaterial.
When he arrived at this difficulty he dreamt that there was an
enormous boat out in the harbour laden with marvellous
goods for mankind and that it should be pulled into the
harbour and the goods distributed to the people. Attached to
this enormous boat was a very elegant, white Arab horse, a
beautiful and delicate, highstrung animal which was supposed
to pull the ship into harbour. But the horse was absolutely
incapable of this. At that moment an enormous red-headed,
red-bearded giant came through the mass of people, pushed
everybody aside, took an axe, killed the white horse and then
took the rope and pulled the whole ship into harbour in one
elan. So Jung saw that he had to write in the emotional fire
he felt about the whole thing and not go on with this elegant
white horse. He was then driven by a tremendous working
impulse, or emotion, and he wrote the whole book in
practically one stretch, getting up every morning at three a.m.5

Though Jung identified this red-bearded, axe-wielding figure who is able


to free the ship of his writing from the mud in which it had run aground
to be a giant, it might be more accurate, in light of our discussion so far,
to see this dream as an epiphany ofThor. Like Thor, who is said to appear
whenever there is a giant to be faced, this figure, along with the features
we have just mentioned, also has the association with elocution discussed
above and was a god of seafarers.6 Jung’s account of his dream and the
Norse account ofThor evidently tell similar stories of the way things
happen. Just as Thor trudges through the muddy river to the council
chambers of the gods to make his speeches, so Jung dreamt of a stuck
ship and an axe-toting giant or god when he was struggling to articulate
himself in his book on types.

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

In this connection, we may recall Jung’s use of the image of a riverbed


in his characterization of the archetype as well as a reference in which
he relates the “impact” that archetypes have to the act of speech. In the
first of these references, Jung describes the archetype as “a deeply graven
river-bed in the psyche, in which the waters of life, instead of flowing
along as before in a broad but shallow stream, suddenly swell into a
mighty river.”7 If in this passage Thor enacts his journey to the council
chambers of the AEsir, in the second passage he takes to the podium to
deliver his speech:

The impact of an archetype, whether it takes the form of


immediate experience or is expressed through the spoken
word, stirs us because it summons up a voice that is stronger
than our own. Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks
with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers, while
at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express
out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of
the ever-enduring.8

Thor’s Hammer in the Thought ofFreud andJung


sychoanalysis and analytical psychology each present a very different

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

7 Jung, CW15 § 127.


8 Jung, CW 15 § 129.
8 NORTHERN GNOSIS

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

From a Jungian perspective, the muddy riverbeds beneath the


Rainbow Bridge and the lofty council chamber in the branches of
Yggdrasill are not the clear-cut developmental and moral opposites that
the Freudian view would suggest. On the contrary, it is as the ends of
a continuum, which may be encountered in any image, from the most
mundane to the most sublime, that this motif enacts itself in analytical
psychology’s theories of an objective psyche. Unlike Freud, who
championed the light of the rational intellect (that inner representation
of the reality principle) over the darkly infantile fantasies which the
pleasure principle perversely spawns, Jung, like Paracelsus before him,
conceives the muddy images in which our lives are mired to be suffused
from the outset with the a priori consciousness of an archetypal light.15
Like the treasure troves and gold mines of the Northern dwarves and
elves which lie hidden under boulders and beneath the roots of trees,
the lumen naturae, or natural light, is trapped, as is the celestial nous
of gnostic speculation, in the heaviness of matter itself.
It is not only that the archetype is wholly immanent in its
image, as we have already heard from Hillman. Nor is it that matter
and spirit, like the mud and lightning in our Northern myth,
coalesce in what has been called an intermediary world of images.16
To these axioms, a third one, adapted from an adage of Edward
Casey’s,17 must be added if we are to fully declare the mud in the
eye of a fully imaginal perspective: an image is not what we see, but
how we see and are seen from the transpersonal perspective of the
objective psyche.18

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

Though the intellect, given to abstraction, may conceive of the


archetypal psyche as a realm of isolated and cleanly differentiated
monads, the archetypes, writes Jung, exist “in a state of contamination
of the most complete mutual interpenetration and interfusion.”19 Mixed
up with one another in this undifferentiated state, the various archetypal
faces of the collective unconscious become clear to us only when we are
as mired in one or another of the sink holes of life as they are in each
other. As Jung puts it, “When a situation occurs which corresponds to
a given archetype, that archetype become activated and a compulsiveness
appears, which, like an instinctual drive, gains its way against all reason
and will, or else produces a conflict of pathological dimensions, that is
to say, a neurosis.”20
Freud, of course, could not credit such a view. Though he, too, was
immensely interested in the psyche’s primordial reaches, the tendency to
attribute wisdom to them was anathema to him.21 Myth and religion,
in his view, were a primeval slime redolent of mankind’s most infantile
urges—early man standing in the same relationship to his contemporary
counterpart, neurotic man, as the perverse nursling stands in relation to
the mature adult. The best that could be said of them was that their motifs
and creeds bore witness to the transformation, via renunciation and
sublimation, of the blind impulsiveness of the id into the imperatives of
the ego-ideal:

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:

28 C. G. Jung, Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Seminar given in 1925, ed. W.


McGuire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 27-28.
29 Cited in John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method: The Story ofJung, Freud, and
Sabina Spielrein (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 482.
30 C. G. Jung, Letters, vol. I: 1906-1950 & vol. II: 1951-1961, ed. G. Adler & A. Jaffe,
tr. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973 & 1975), vol. I, p. 60.
31 Cf. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 151: “Freud, who had always made
much of his irreligiosity, had ... in the place of a jealous God whom he [as a self­
proclaimed “godless Jew”] had lost, ... substituted another compelling image, that of
sexuality. It was no less insistent, exacting, domineering, threatening, and morally
ambivalent than the original one. Just as the psychically stronger agency is given ‘divine’
or ‘daemonic’ attributes, so the ‘sexual libido’ took over the role of a deus absconditus,
a hidden or concealed god.”
32 Jung, CW 8 § 680.
THOR’S HAMMER 13

The regressing libido apparently desexualizes itself by


retreating back step by step to the presexual stage of earliest
infancy. Even there it does not make a halt, but in a manner
of speaking continues right back to the intra-uterine, pre­
natal condition and, leaving the sphere of personal
psychology altogether, irrupts into the collective psyche ....
The libido thus reaches a kind of inchoate condition in
which, like Theseus and Peirithous on their journey to the
underworld, it may easily stick fast. But it can also tear itself
loose from the maternal embrace and return to the surface
with new possibilities of life.33

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.

The symbolic process is an experience in images and of


images. Its development usually shows an enantiodromian
structure ... a rhythm of negative and positive, loss and gain,
dark and light. Its beginning is almost invariably characterized
by one’s getting stuck in a blind alley or in some impossible
situation; and its goal is, broadly speaking, illumination or
higher consciousness, by means of which the initial situation is
overcome on a higher level.35

Just as eternity can be glimpsed in a grain of sand, and Thor in a


debate over theory, the objective psyche, that mythological mud of
interpenetrating archetypes, is illuminatingly present in the images and
ideas to which we are subject wherever we are stuck. It does not matter
whether we have come to a halt in one of the great transitional periods
of our lives or are simply bogged down in a creative project (as Jung was
when he was writing his Psychological Types), sooner or later the lightning­
hurling, rune-casting psyche will react with an image or fantasy which

33 Jung, CW5 § 654.


34 Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 2003, p.
245.) See also Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 173-175.
35 Jung, CW 9, I § 82. Italics mine.
14 NORTHERN GNOSIS

Thor in Utgarda-Loki’s castle


THOR’S HAMMER 15

“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

Thor, Jung, and Freud in Utgarda-Loki’s Castle


What we can safely say about mythical images is that the
physical process imprinted itself on the psyche in this
fantastic, distorted form and was preserved there, so that the
unconscious still reproduces similar images today. Naturally
the question now arises: why does the psyche not register
the actual process, instead of mere fantasies about the
physical process?38

—C. G. Jung

ur reference above to the lightning-hurling, rune-casting psyche

O raises important questions. How, we must now ask, is it that the


psyche is so constituted? And what account do the stories ofThor,
reiterated in the theories of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology,
give of how the so-called objective inner world of the psyche has come
into being?
In the “elder edda”39 of psychoanalysis, legends like those in the
Norse cycle depicting Thor as the matchless adversary of the Jotunns
are told. Where the Norse myths speak of frost-giants and boulder­
demons, however, Freud’s myth speaks of the id-modifying “influence
of the external world.”40 And where the Norse account describes Thor

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.

Awakened in the night by a ground-trembling earthquake, Thor and


his companions discover an enormous giant sleeping nearby. So enormous
is this giant that it is by his snoring that the earth has been made to quake.
Upon awakening the giant introduces himselfto Thor. His name is Skryme.
As mighty as Thor is, he is clearly minuscule compared to this Jotunn. As
Skryme rises to dress, Thor realizes that what he had thought to be a house
and had taken shelter in for the night was in fact merely the thumb of the
giant’s glove! Doubtless, the sheer immensity of Skryme accounts for Thor’s
accepting his invitation that they travel together. The friendly relations that
seem to have been established between these sworn enemies, however, is more
apparent than real. While Thor allows himself to be carried along by the
great strides of his new companion (and we humans do as well when we
are overwhelmed by a new stimulus), his “identification with the aggressor”43
is short-lived. At nightfall, afterfinding that he is unable to muster sufficient
strength to open the sack ofprovisions that Skryme had hospitably offered
to him before retiring for the night, Thor undertakes to add the sleeping
giant to his long list of slain Jotunns. Taking up his hammer, Mjollnir,
the thunder god approaches Skryme of the thunderous snores, striking the

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.

Bearing in mind that the mythical events I have just described


and the depth psychological concepts which appear to resemble them
cannot be explained through reduction to each other’s terms, let us
briefly re-tell the tale of Thor and Skryme in terms of resembling
motifs from the thought of Freud. As the juxtaposition of these motifs
renders what is familiar about the one mythology strange and what
is strange about the other mythology familiar, something objective in
the background of both is thrown vividly into relief, or as Jung would
say, amplified.
The Norse account of Thor’s having been awakened by the earth-
shaking snores of the Jotunn Skyrme is reminiscent of Freud’s account
of the ego’s origins in the clash between the external world and the
id, a concept that we have already discussed. Likewise, the story of
how Thor subsequently brought his hammer to bear upon the brow
of his sleeping foe, only to have his foe mistake that blow for the tickle
of a falling leaf, is reminiscent of the repressive tendency that Freud
attributed to the ego. In the materialistic view of Freud, the dialectic
from which the inner world of psychical reality is built up is the
consequence of the id actively turning upon itself, in the form of the
ego, a modified version of the collisions with the external world which
formed the ego out of the id in the first place. Born of this process,
psychic images are neither true copies of external objects, nor wholly
transparent to the id and its impulses, but a muddy fusion of the two.
Having derived their form and force from the collision between the
id and the external world, which they simultaneously seek to repress,
these images create, through subsequent collisions of their own with
one another,44 an illusory space or psychical reality of increasingly
immense proportions.

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

Clearly, Freud’s vision of the ego, as simultaneously protecting


and propitiating the id by offering it hallucinatory forms of
satisfaction, resonate with the hammer blows that Thor dealt to
Skryme.45 For, like that sleeping Jotunn in the Norse myth, the
mental apparatus of Freudian theory is constituted in such a way that
when it dreams, impinging impressions reaching it from the instincts
and the external world are also mistaken for the tickling of a leaf,
or whatever other image may emerge to protect our sleep. Similar
processes underpin the production of neurotic symptoms as well. Like
Skyrme awakened by Thor’s hammer-blows and thinking that a leaf,
an acorn, and then a twig has fallen upon his head, neurotics,
according to Freudian theory, defend themselves from the ultimate
sources of their suffering by representing their thoughts, fantasies and
symptoms in such a way that they may remain unconscious of their
true origin and meaning. Little Hans, to take but one example,
protected himself from his dread Oedipal fears by developing a horse
phobia.46 In the case of the traumatic neuroses, on the other hand,
the blows of fate cannot be reduced to such trifles as a falling leaf,
an acorn, or a twig, although after many thousands of repetitions,
the onslaughts of almost unmediated affect-images which characterize
these disturbances may also begin to vary their imagery, thereby
becoming subject to soul-making.47
But for Freud, the mental apparatus does not only distort reality
as a means of defence; it also develops the capacity to face it without
illusions. While nature may be the first to bring its mighty hammer to
bear upon the creatures that dwell in its midst, once subjected to the
“thousand natural shocks that mortal flesh is heir to,”48 that part of the
id that has been traumatized to the point where it now bears the image

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

and likeness of the forces afflicting it comes to wield a hammer of its


own. As both the inner representative of the external world and the mental
agency which controls the discharge of libidinal excitations into the
surrounding environment, the Thor-like “ego seeks to bring the influence
of the external world to bear upon the id and its tendencies, and ... to
substitute the reality principle for the pleasure principle which reigns
unrestrictedly in the id.”49 The sparks of light and flashes of lightning
that are born of this hammer-like clash of opposing forces correspond,
in Freuds account, to the “reason and common sense” that the ego has
gleaned (phylogenetically and ontogenetically) from its travail in the
school of hard knocks which the world provides.50
Before examining the ideas of Jung’s that come to mind in
connection with this discussion, let us return to our Northern tale.

Awakening thefollowing morning, quite untrammelled by the hammer­


blows he received during the night, Skryme invites Thor and his companions
to travel with him to the castle of Utgard, a Jotunn stronghold. There, he
wryly informs them, they will meet even bigger fellows than himself Thor
accepts the veiled challenge and agrees to go along. Though hisfailed attempt
to kill Skryme the previous night does not augur wellfor such a journey, the
nature ofhis divinity is predicated on such against-all-odds encounters. Who,
after all, would Thor be without such Jotunn foils?
After a day’s travel, Thor and company find themselves at the castle of
Utgard. As castles go, this one is ofan extraordinarily immense size. To see
the height ofit, Thor must bend over backwards. To enter its keep, he must
step, mouse-like, through the bars of the door.
Once inside the castle, the visitorsfind themselves in the loomingpresence
of its resident Jotunns. Utgarda-Loki, the Jotunn King, introduces himself
to them. Insulting his guests on account of their relatively small size, he
immediately challenges them to compete against his Jotunns in a series of
contests and trials of strength.

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.

The eating contest

In subsequent contests, Thor’s contingent fares no better. After the swift


Tjalve loses afoot race against a Jotunn boy named Huge, Thor himselfenters
the competition. Renowned for his capacity to drink great draughts ofale,
the barrel-chested AEsir might have expected to be able to drain the ale-horn
which Utgarda-Loki offers him with a few fast gulps. After three attempts,
however, Thorfinds to his chagrin that the horn is stillfarfrom empty. Inviting
his bewildered guest to other contests, Utgarda-Loki mockingly suggests that
the mighty Thor now see ifhe can lift the castle cat up offthefloor. In this, as
well, Thor is defeated. Though he raises the cat very high, the arch ofits back
is so great that he is only able to raise one ofits pawsfrom thefloor. And then,
addingfurther insult to Thor’s injured pride, Utgarda-Loki suggests a final
contest. Would the great Thor test his strength in a wrestling match against
the king’s elderlyfoster-mother?! Thor by this time is enraged enough to wrestle
anythingplaced in his path. But here again his efforts prove to be to no avail.
Even this old hag puts him to shame with quick dispatch.
With thisfinal and most humiliating defeat, Utgarda-Loki calls offany
further contests and invites Thor and his companions to table. Extending to
his guests the best ofhospitality, Utgarda-Loki then treats them to an enormous
feast. Bitterly, Thor and his party eat their meal as ifit were a sorry dish of
humble pie. After a secondfeed the following morning, they prepare to leave.
It is at this point, just as Thor and his contingent are about to step
through the door and out of the castle, that Utgarda-Loki reveals to his
humiliated and shamefaced guests how things really are. From their very
THOR’S HAMMER 21

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.

If psychology, as Jung has suggested, is the “[translation] of the


archaic speech of myth into a modern mythologem,”51 what mythologem,
we might ask, does Jung’s analytical psychology use to re-tell this
Northern tale? Or, said another way, in what conceptual terms do Thor,
Skryme and Utgarda-Loki enact themselves in Jung’s thought?
We have already examined the theories in Freud’s thought in which
Thor enacts his initial encounter with the enormous Skryme. Turning
now to a consideration of Jung’s theories, we find that in so doing we
follow the plot of our Northern myth. For just as Thor accepted Skryme’s
invitation to accompany him to the castle of Utgard, where he would meet
Jotunns that were even larger than Skryme himself, so Jung’s theories
invite us to conceive of the psyche as an immensity in which we are
contained, an immensity, moreover, which is replete with giants of its
own. These giants, which Jung calls archetypes, are the inner equivalents
of the elemental giants of the external environment from which Freud
would mechanistically derive the mental apparatus. Though occasionally
described by Jung in definitional statements as having evolved in relation
to external forces along something of the same lines as Freud describes,52

51 Jung, CW9i § 302.


52 Jung, CW 10 § 49-56.
THOR’S HAMMER 23

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

Let us now examine another passage from Jung’s writings in which


Utgarda-Loki’s revelation of his true nature to Thor can be overheard:

“All that is outside, also is inside,” we could say with Goethe.


But this “inside,” which modern rationalism is so eager to
derive from “outside,” has an a priori structure of its own
that antedates all conscious experience. It is quite impossible
to conceive how “experience” in the widest sense, or, for that
matter, anything psychic, could originate exclusively in the
outside world. The psyche is part of the inmost mystery of
life, and it has its own peculiar structure and form like every
other organism. Whether this psychic structure and its
elements, the archetypes, ever “originated” at all is a
metaphysical question and therefore unanswerable. The
structure is something given, the precondition that is found
to be present in every case. And this is the mother, the
matrix—the form into which all experience is poured.56

If Thor’s hammer in the hand of Freud would aim its blows at


Skryme, here in the hand ofJung, as in the previous quotation, it is aimed
at that mercurial trickster, Utgarda-Loki. For just as Utgarda-Loki, in
the course of exposing his deceptions to Thor, reveals that he had been
Thor’s companion from the outset, appearing to him earlier than Thor
had previously realized in the form of Skryme, so Jung speaks of the
psyche as having an “a priori structure of its own which antedates all
conscious experience.” Inasmuch as this structure is always already the
precondition of the theoretical fantasies that we would bring to bear upon
it, it truly is a metaphysical question whether it ever originated at all.
Even theories as brilliant and visionary as those of Freud, far from dealing
a devastatingly explicative blow to the psychic problem, fall upon it as a
leaf, an acorn, or a twig out of the psyche’s own a priori nature.
Jung’s point about consciousness being antedated by a shaping
structure is a crucial one. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to
characterize it as the very cornerstone of his thought. Stated negatively,
the a priori structure that Jung attributes to the psyche is the empirical
corollary of the epistemological conundrum peculiar to psychology,
namely, its lack of an Archimedean perspective.57 Because it is quite
without an extrapsychic vantage point, and can therefore never completely

56 Jung, CW9i § 187.


57 Jung, CW11 § 87.
THOR’S HAMMER 25

separate itself as formulating subject from the object its seeks to


investigate, psychology finds itself unable to defeat the giants with which
it jostles. Its theories are also fantasies, mythologems in modern dress,
rooted in archetypes which precede their present formulation even as the
myths of our Northern forebears antedate the discoveries of
psychoanalysis and analytical psychology. As with Thor, so with
psychology: no sooner do we believe that we have struck a mortal blow
to Skryme than we find ourselves to have been deceived by Utgarda-Loki.
While psychoanalysis as inaugurated by Freud, like modern
rationalism generally, bashes away at Skryme with its mechanistic
prejudice that the inner world of the psyche can be derived exclusively
from the external world, Jung, in rejecting this view, takes a swipe at the
fleeting visage of Utgarda-Loki. Of course, the hammer ofJung’s theories,
no less than Freud’s, whizzes passed its target as he does so. This, however,
is less important than Jung’s recognition that it always returns, like Thor’s
Mjollnir, with consciousness-advancing insights into the psychic
structures enveloping it.
The important point here is not simply that the projections contained
in our theories, like projections generally, are “always an indirect process
of becoming conscious.”58 Given psychology’s predicament with respect
to its lack of an Archimedean perspective, the process is more circular
than that. No sooner have we formulated the consciousness we have
gleaned from one projection into the terms of a more embracing theory
than we find that we are humbled once again, as were Thor and his party
in their contests with the Jotunns, by another projection.59 When this
process is grasped, however, for the symbolical process that it actually is,
it can be affirmed as a method of knowing that names the unknown by
the name of the more unknown60—in Jung’s text by such names as
collective unconscious, archetype and Mercurius, in these pages by such
names as Thor and Utgarda-Loki.

58 Jung, CW14 § 486.


59 Cf. Marie-Louise von Franz, Projection and Re-Collection in Jungian Psychology:
Reflections ofthe Soul (La Salle & London: Open Court, 1980), p. 38: “This seems to
correspond to a general psychological law: The statement of the new truth reveals the
previous conceptions as ‘projections’ and tries to draw them into the psychic inner world,
and at the same time it announces a new myth, which now passes for the finally discovered
‘absolute’ truth. ”
60 “If [man] possesses a grain of wisdom, he will lay down his arms and name the
unknown by the more unknown, ignotum per ignotius—that is, by the name of God.”
Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 354.
26 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:

It is not storms, not thunder and lightning ... that remain


as images in the psyche, but the fantasies caused by the
affects they arouse. I once experienced a violent earthquake,
and my first, immediate feeling was that I no longer stood
on the solid and familiar earth, but on the skin of a gigantic
animal that was heaving under my feet. [Note here the lack
of an Archimedean point on which to stand!—G. MJ. It
was this image that impressed itself on me, not the physical
fact. Maris curses against devastating thunderstorms, his
terror of the unchained elements—these affects
anthropomorphize the passion of nature, and the purely
physical element becomes an angry god.
Like the physical condition of his environment, the
physiological conditions, glandular secretions, etc., also can
arouse fantasies charged with affect. Sexuality appears as a
god of fertility ... or as a terrifying serpent that squeezes its
victims to death.61

Though Jung acknowledged that “myth[s] undoubtedly [contain] a


reflection of the physical process [and that, therefore,] many investigators
assume that the primitives invent[ed them] merely to explain the physical
process,”62 he also saw them as being structured a priori by a psychic factor
that is discontinuous with the physical process, though perhaps in
synchronistic relationship with it. The earthquake as we have come to
know it through seismological instrumentation is not registered as such
by the experiencing psyche, but as a gigantic animal heaving underfoot—
or a gigantic snoring Jotunn. Our experience of the glandular secretions
occurring in our own bodies, likewise, is mediated to us by a world of
fantasy images—hence Jung’s adage that the “body is as metaphysical as
spirit.”63 Even without compelling external stimuli, such as the
earthquake and hormones mentioned by Jung, the psyches images may
constellate to huge effect. Molehills become mountains; tempests rage
in teapots. Taking particular note of such phenomena, Jung advised that

61 Jung, CW 8 § 331-332.
62 Jung, CW8 § 327.
63 Jung, Letters, vol. I, p. 200.
THOR’S HAMMER 27

whenever a “psychic reaction ... is out of proportion to its precipitating


cause [it] should be investigated as to whether it may be conditioned at
the same time by an archetype.”64

Thor’s Hammer Stolen and Reclaimed


Innumerable facts prove that the psyche translates physical
processes into sequences of images which have hardly any
recognizable connection with the objective process. The
materialistic hypothesis is much too bold and flies in the face
of experience with almost metaphysical presumption. ...
There is ... no ground at all for regarding the psyche as
something secondary or as an epiphenomenon; on the
contrary, there is every reason to regard it, at least
hypothetically, as a factor sui generis, and to go on doing so
until it has been sufficiently proved that the psychic
processes can be fabricated in a retort.65

he argument which Jung advances here, and in many other places

T in his writings, against the materialistic hypothesis and its tendency


to conceive of the psyche as being something secondary, a mere
epiphenomenon, is reminiscent of another tale of Thor from the Norse
cycle. By reminding ourselves of this tale we can amplify something of
the a priori psychic structure that shaped Jung’s recognition of the reality
of this factor. Where previously we have dreamed the archaic myth along
by translating it into the modern mythologem of psychological theory,
now we dream the modern mythologem of analytical psychology onward
by recasting it in archaic dress—ignotum per ignotius.
The tale I am thinking of concerns Thor s regaining of his lost hammer,
Mjollnir. Like the tale ofThor’s encounter with Skryme and Utgarda-Loki,
this tale also deals with deceptive trickery. This time, however, it is Thor,
with the aid of his cunning companion Loki, who plays the trickster.

Awakeningone morning, Thorfinds that his hammer is missing and turns


to Loki for help. Suspecting that a Jotunn has stolen it, Loki borrows the
marvellous plumage of Freya and flies to Jotunheim to find out what has
happened. Once in Jotunheim he soon discovers that Trym, the king of thefrost­
giants, has taken the hammer and hidden it twenty-four leagues underground.

64 Jung, CW10 § 57.


65 Jung, CW 9, i § 117.
28 NORTHERN GNOSIS

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.

Enacting itself in Jung’s thought, the lost hammer of Thor


corresponds to Jung’s account of our contemporary unconsciousness with
respect to the reality of the psyche, the giants who stole his hammer to
the rationalism and materialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
While in previous centuries Thor had had a relatively firm grip on his
hammer insofar as there then existed “a religious formula for everything
psychic,”66 the consciousness to which we were awakened with the
Enlightenment rendered us more or less unconscious of the psychic factor
and its power. Like Thor’s Mjollnir, buried twenty-four leagues beneath
the earth in Jotunheim, the spiritual force or psychic factor was projected
into the mysteries of matter and the forces of the natural world with the
result that the sense of its agency and autonomy was quickly lost to the

66 Jung, CW9i § 11.


THOR’S HAMMER 29

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

67 In describing the psyche’s response as “asymmetrical” I wish to capture in a single


word Jung’s view that images are not mere copies of the external world, but are also a
function of the psyche’s own objective character. Jung describes the asymmetrical quality
of the psyche in a 1934 letter. While reading from this letter we may let his use of the
image of an empty sack remind us of the image from our Northern myth in which
Thor struggles in vain to open the sack of provisions which Utgarda-Loki has tied shut
with the magic yarn of illusion. In this way we will appreciate once again how Thor
enacts himself in Jung’s thought: “The unconscious is on no account an empty sack in
which the refuse of consciousness is collected, as it appears to be in Freud’s view; it is
the whole other half of the living psyche. More than that, it is a psychic reflection of
the whole world. If you go into these problems you will soon see that our ego is situated
between two antithetical worlds—the so-called outer world open to the senses, and
the unconscious psychic substrate which alone enables us to grasp the world at all. This
psychic substrate must necessarily be different from [i.e., asymmetrical—G. M.] the
so-called outer world, otherwise there would be no possibility of grasping it, for like
cannot cognize like” (Jung, Letters, vol. I, p. 143).
68 It might be asked how Jung’s claim to be a scientist can be squared with his
having posited an unknown psychic factor which he frequently equates with spirit.
Helpful in this regard is an article by the Canadian philosopher, logician and
mathematician William Hatcher, “A Scientific Proof of the Existence of God” (Journal
ofBaha'i Studies, December 1993 - March 1994, pp. 1-16). In this article Hatcher argues
that just as we are obliged to infer the existence of gravity from the fact that a falling
object always moves downward towards the earth against the probability of randomness,
so we are also obliged to infer the existence of a force to account for the fact that
evolution has fostered increasingly complex systems against the probability of disorder
and hazard. This force which produces evolution and which Hatcher further argues
may be rationally called God, I believe, may be likened to, or even identified with,
that a priori psychic factor which in Jung’s view produces both archetypal phenomena
and that further expression of evolution, individuation.
30 NORTHERN GNOSIS

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

69 In Freud’s view, those psychic structures which Jung takes to be transparent to


a psychic factor sui generis can in fact be accounted for in a manner consistent with
his program of rigorous materialism. What Jung sees as archetypal structures with
constructive-synthetic possibilities, Freud identified as the super-ego, particularly in
its aspect as ego-ideal. The id, unwilling to relinquish a satisfaction, attempts to regain
what it has in fact lost in the course of its clash with the external world, on the level of
the ego-ideal. “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. 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” (The Ego and the Id, p. 26). Reading
this psycho-physics phylogenetically, as was Freud’s tendency, we get a dialectical
materialist account of what Jung, with reference to spirit, called archetypes: “Through
the forming of the ideal, 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. Owning to the way in which the ego ideal is formed,
it has the most abundant links with the phylogenetic acquisitions of each individual—
his archaic heritage” (p. 26). Without abandoning his materialistic standpoint, Freud,
too, has a story of how Thor’s hammer is retrieved. We shall return to these ideas in
the third chapter, insighting them there through the myth of Baldr’s death.
THOR’S HAMMER 31

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

70 Jung, Analytical Psychology, pp. 27-28.


71 Jung, Analytical Psychology: Notes ofthe Seminar given in 1925, pp. 27-28.
72 Jung, CW4 § 400.
32 NORTHERN GNOSIS

The context of this quotation is a critique of the trauma theory in the


aetiology of hysteria. Though Jung, doubtless, is drawing heavily on Freud’s
view that “there is no ‘indication of reality’ in the unconscious, so that one
cannot distinguish between truth and fiction that has been cathected with
affect,”73 the concept of “innate sensitiveness,”74 which Jung introduces a
paragraph earlier in his text, is an early conceptualization of the innate
psychic factor, which he will later describe, toward the latter part of his
career, as the objective psyche and the philosopher’s stone. From our
vantage point, however, this factor is Mjollnir, the hammer of Thor,
flashing in the distance like the lightning of that god.
Another quotation, from a passage published just two years later, is far
bolder in its claim, for here the context is a discussion of the “tendencies
or determinants which produce culture in man with the same logic as in
the bird they produce the artfully woven nest, and antlers in the stag”:

The purely causal, not to say materialistic views of the last


few decades seek to explain all organic formation as the
reaction of living matter, and though this is undoubtedly a
heuristically valuable line of inquiry, as far as any real
explanation goes it amounts only to a more or less ingenious
postponement and apparent minimizing of the problem. ...
External causes can account for at most half the reaction,
the other half is due to the peculiar attributes of living matter
itself, without which the specific reaction formation could
never come about at all. We have to apply this principle also
in psychology. The psyche does not merely react, it gives its
own specific answer to the influences at work upon it, and
at least half the resulting formation is entirely due to the
psyche and the determinants inherent within it.75

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

73 Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts


and Notes: 1892-1899, tr. E. Mosbacher & J. Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1954),
L: September 21, 1897, p. 264.
74 Jung, CW 4 § 399.
75 Jung, CW 4 § 665.
THOR’S HAMMER 33

such as we find in collective myths or images such as those we find in


our own dreams and fantasies, are as the lightning hurled by Thor. While
we are daily pelted from without by a barrage of stimuli, some of which
may be of a traumatic intensity, there is a psychic factor which at the
same time strikes outward from within. In this connection, a few lines
of a patient’s poem come to mind:

I write in the hope that the world will disappear,


Continually frustrated by its refusal to do so.
Occasionally I succeed.
The world retreats a little,
Just enough to allow a poem.76

Earlier in this chapter we asked how it is that the psyche is so


constituted that when we are stuck or bogged down it generates images
of such vitality, sagacity, and compelling power that we are enabled to
change direction or move ahead again. Continuing our exploration, let
us now examine two quotations from Jung’s writings in which he not
only regains Thor’s hammer, but brings it resoundingly to bear upon this
question. In the first quotation, Jung merely reiterates his views regarding
the compensatory tendency of the unconscious, accounting for these
through the archetypes. In the second quotation, he gives a more
explanatory account. This is the first:

Every invasion of the unconscious is an answer to a definite


conscious situation, and this answer follows from the totality
of possible ideas present, i.e., from the total disposition
which ... is a simultaneous picture in potentia of psychic
existence. The splitting up into single units, its one-sided
and fragmentary character, is of the essence of consciousness.
The reaction coming from the disposition always has a total
character, as it reflects a nature which has not been divided
up by any discriminating consciousness. Hence its
overpowering effect. It is the unexpected, all-embracing,
completely illuminating answer, which works all the more
as illumination and revelation since the conscious mind has
got itself wedged into a hopeless blind alley.77

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

The more explanatory account comes from Jung’s 1925 seminar.


With Thor’s hammer in mind, let us take note of Jung’s use of the word
“repercussions.” Though he uses it but once in the section quoted here,
it actually appears three times in the paragraph from which this is
excerpted. In a similar vein, that is to say, with the image of Mjollnir
buried twenty-four leagues beneath the earth in Jotunheim in mind, let
us also take note of Jung’s reference to the archetype being “dug up”
through analytical work from the external world in which it is buried by
unconscious projections.

... [T]he images of the collective unconscious ... [while]


refer[ring] to the influences of absolutely existing external
objects ... are the psychic reactions to them, the only
difference between the image of external reality and the
archetype being that the former is conscious and the latter
unconscious. The archetype nonetheless appears also in the
so-called external world if it is not “dug up” in ourselves by
an analytical procedure. But you can apply the same
analytical processes to the image of external reality also, and
see how subjective they are. ... archetypes are records of
reactions to subjective sense-images. In our conscious
memory we record things as they are subjectively, as
memories of real facts, but in the unconscious we record the
subjective reactions to the facts as we perceive them in the
conscious. I should suppose that there are layers even of such
repercussions, reactions of reactions, and that they would
form the stratification of the mind.78

In the next paragraph, Jung gives an example of this process, and in


the paragraph after that he makes the decisive swerve which our myth
describes as the regaining of Mjollnir by Thor. We now quote an excerpt
from the former paragraph together with the whole of the later one.

... [T]he most regular recurrence in the world is the rising


and the setting of the sun. Our consciousness remembers
the real facts of this phenomenon, but our unconscious has
recorded the untold millions of sunrises and sunsets in the
form of a hero myth, and the hero myth is the expression of
the way in which our unconscious has reacted to the
conscious image of sunrise and sunset. As reaction a is

78 Jung, Analytical Psychology, p. 135.


THOR’S HAMMER 35

forming the image of the external world, so reaction b is


forming the collective unconscious—what one could call a
sort of mirage world or reflex world.
But it would be somewhat of a depreciation to make the
dignity of the collective unconscious one of secondhand
origin only. ... [A consideration of another kind] allows us
to envisage the collective unconscious as a firsthand
phenomenon, something sui generis.... As we assume that
behind our image of the external world there is an absolute
entity, so necessarily we must assume that behind the
perceiving subject there is an entity; and when we start our
consideration from that end, we must say the collective
unconscious is reaction a, or the first reaction, or first
image of the world, while the conscious would be second
hand only.79

Jung’s reference to the collective unconscious as “a sort of mirage


world or reflex world,” along with the possibility he raises of its being a
“firsthand phenomenon,” are redolent of our Northern myths. We have
only to think of the reflexive feats performed by Thor in the mirage world
of Utgarda-Loki’s castle, or, again, ofThor’s having disguised himself up
as Freya in order to retrieve his hammer from Jotunheim, to glimpse the
Northern lights emanating from these passages.

Thor, Jung, and the Jotunn Rungne


o complete our encounter with the aspect of the psyche which we

T have been amplifying throughout this chapter by comparing the


stories ofThor with the resembling theories of psychoanalysis and
analytical psychology, let us examine one last juxtaposition of images and
theories, if only to gain another glimpse of the Northern light that has
inspired these pages.
In his essay, “A Study in the Process of Individuation,” Jung presents
the case study of an American woman of Scandinavian descent who,
immediately prior to her sessions with Jung, had visited Denmark, her
mother’s country.80 The series of mandala paintings that she produced
in the course of her analysis began with a dark, brooding, Northern
landscape of craggy rocks and sea. The second picture of the series, which

79 Jung, Analytical Psychology, p. 136.


80 Jung, CW 9i § 525.
36 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

Thor clothed as Freya speeding to Jotunheim to retrieve his hammer, his


chariot wheels rimmed with lightning
THOR’S HAMMER 37

a number of complicated mandalas. This development, Jung argues,


compensates the turmoil of his patient’s outer life insofar as it reflects
an inner process of self-realization or individuation. Surprisingly, Jung,
in his extensive amplification of this picture, neglects to mention Thor,
whose chariot wheels rimmed with lightning are continuous with the
mandala symbolism he explores. As I now, through this mere mention,
bring that boulder-smashing Northern god of the lightning flash into
relation with this patient’s painting, I am reminded not to neglect
another of his stories. Told in its archaic, Northern version, it is the
tale of Thor’s fight with the Jotunn Rungne. As enacted in Jung’s
thought, it is the tale of the interpenetrating oneness of matter and
spirit which is one aspect of alchemy’s philosopher’s stone.
I will not recount the Norse tale in its entirety, but only the part
that bears on our theme.

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.

Jung, in the context of his alchemical studies, tells a similar tale of a


“stone” embedded in us from which our lives become. Let us conclude
this chapter with his version:

Something of the projection-carrier always clings to the


projection, and even if we succeed to some degree in
38 NORTHERN GNOSIS

integrating into our consciousness the part we recognize as


psychic, we shall integrate along with it something of the
cosmos and its materiality; or rather, since the cosmos is
infinitely greater than we are, we shall have been assimilated
by the inorganic. “Transform yourselves into living
philosophical stones!” cries an alchemist, but he did
not know how infinitely slowly the stone “becomes.” ... In these
projections we encounter the phenomenology of an
“objective” spirit, a true matrix of psychic experience, the
most appropriate symbol for which is matter. Nowhere and
never has man controlled matter without closely observing
its behaviour and paying heed to its laws, and only to the
extent that he did so could he control it. The same is true
of that objective spirit which today we call the unconscious:
it is refractory like matter, mysterious and elusive, and obeys
laws which are so non-human or suprahuman that they seem
to us like a crimen laesae majestatis humanae. If a man puts
his hand to the opus, he repeats, as the alchemists say, God’s
work of creation. The struggle with the unformed, with the
chaos ofTiamat, is in truth a primordial experience.81

81 Jung, CW 13 § 286.
CHAPTER TWO

Barnstock and the Volsungs:


The Sword of Incest and the Tree
of Life in Freud, Jung,
and Spielrein
Yggdrasill, the Rainbow Bridge, and the AEsir
Every time two families become connected by a marriage,
each of them thinks itself superior to or of better birth than
the other. Of two neighbouring towns each is the other’s
most jealous rival .... Closely related races keep one another
at arm’s length; the South German cannot endure the North
German, the Englishman casts every kind of aspersion upon
the Scot .... [G]reater differences ... lead to an almost
insuperable repugnance, such as the Gallic people feel for
the German, the Aryan for the Semite ....

—Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the


Analysis of the Ego, pp. 130-131

... [T]he tree symbolizes life. It is alive like a human being,


with head, feet, etc., and it lives longer than man, so it is
impressive, there is mana in a tree. ... Formerly a tree was
planted when a child was born, and as long as the tree lived
the child lived. ... Trees through their fruits are nourishing,
so they acquire a mother quality. There is a Germanic legend
that the ash and the alder were the first two human beings.
... Then there is the world-tree, Yggdrasill, with its roots
in the earth and its branches in Heaven; the first life came
from that tree, and at the end of the world the last couple
will be buried in Yggdrasill; human life begins and ends in
the tree.

—C. G. Jung, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar


Given in 1929-1930, pp. 360-361

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

1 C. G. Jung, CollectedWorks, tr. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University


Press, 1953), vol. 13, para. 252. All subsequent references to Jung’s Collected Works (CW),
vols. 1-20, will be by volume and paragraph number (designated by §), except in the
case of text from prefaces and tables which will be by volume and page number.
2 James Hillman, “On the Necessity of Abnormal Psychology: Ananke and
Athene,” in J. Hillman, ed. Facing the Gods (Irving, TX.: Spring Publications, 1980),
p. 10.
3 Jung, CW 9i § 555; CW11 § 707; CW 13 § 381n.9; CW 14 § 626, 643.
BARNSTOCK AND THE VOLSUNGS 43

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

Barnstock in the Thought ofFreud andJung


It has justly been said that the Oedipus complex is the
nuclear complex of the neuroses .... It represents the peak
of infantile sexuality, which, through its after-effects,
exercises a decisive influence on the sexuality of adults. ...
With the progress of psychoanalytic studies the importance
of the Oedipus complex has become more and more evident;
its recognition has become the shibboleth that distinguishes
the adherents of psychoanalysis from its opponents.5

—Sigmund Freud

Participation mystique obtains between parents and children.


... So long as participation mystique with the parents persists,
a relatively infantile style of life can be maintained. Through
the participation mystique life is pumped into us from outside
in the form of unconscious motivations, for which, since
they are unconscious, no responsibility is felt. Because of this
infantile unconsciousness the burden of life is lightened. ...
One is not alone, but exists unconsciously in twos or threes.
In imagination the son is in his mothers lap, protected by
the father. The father is reborn in the son—at least as a link
in the chain of eternal life.6

—C. G. Jung

istening to the sagas of his patient’s lives, Freud was well aware of

L the passions and treacheries, incestuous impulses and murderous


fantasies that are rife beneath the surface of family life. Borrowing a name
from Greek mythology, he placed these family imbroglios under the rubric
of the Oedipus complex even as our Northern saga places them beneath
the branches of Barnstock. Had Freud spoken of a Barnstock complex
rather than an Oedipus complex, however, he might have understood
better the saga that was brewing in the branches of his own psychoanalytic
tree. For, while Freud was refining his theories about the role of the
Oedipal drama in hysteria and obsessional neurosis, his Teutonic heir
apparent, Jung, was listening to his first analytic patient, the young

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

Russian woman Sabina Spielrein, as she discussed her fantasies of


Siegfried, the incestuous love-child that had been conceived in her
psyche through her transference to Jung.
Conceived like Sinfjotli, the son by incest of Signy and Sigmund, the
Siegfried fantasy of Spielrein and Jung was latent with a very different
conception of psychoanalysis from the one Freud had in mind when he
installed Jung as the president of the International Psychoanalytic
Association. Indeed, like Sinfjotli of the Volsunga Saga, Jung’s vision of
the psyche, grounded as it was in a very different understanding of the
interpretation of myth, was destined to destroy an alliance—in this case
the one Freud had sought to establish between Vienna and the scientifically
prestigious Zurich School. For though Jung, highly esteeming Freud,
characterized his relation to the older man as that of a son to a respected
father,7 and though Freud, following suit, compared their relationship to
that between Moses and Joshua,8 Jung was no more Freud’s son than was
Sinfjotli of the doubly-Hun blood the son of the Goth Siggeur.
Reputed to be the great-grandson of Goethe,9 Jung was acutely aware
of the Germanic blood flowing in his veins. Linked to this illustrious
forebear through his experience of that older soul in himself which he
had, early in life, learned to call “personality No. 2,”10 Jung could never
restrict his vision of the psyche to the family romance to which
“personality No. 1,” the ordinary child and adolescent, was subject.
Straining against what he experienced as the swaddling bands of Freud’s
personalistic psycho-sexual theories,11 Jung immersed himself in
mythological research, a sphere of enquiry more congruent with his
experience of personality No. 2. Of course, as Freud was only too aware,
the mythical Oedipus had made a similar move: he, too, had tried to

7 William McGuire, ed. The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence between


Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, tr. R. Manheim & R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 122.
8 McGuire, ed. The Freud/JungLetters, pp. 196-197. Freud wrote to Jung, “... [I]f
I am Moses, then you are Joshua and will take possession of the promised land of
psychiatry, which I shall only be able to glimpse from afar.”
9 C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. A. Jaffe (New York: Random
House, 1965), p. 35.
10 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 45-48, 66, 74, 75, 80.
11 Jung would express this attitude much later in his Tavistock Lectures: “...I often
scratch my head at a meeting and say, ‘Are they all midwifes and nurses?’ Does not the
world consist chiefly of parents and grandparents? The adults have the problems. Leave
the poor children alone. I get the mother by the ears and not the child. The parents
make the neuroses of children.” Jung, CW18 § 296.
46 NORTHERN GNOSIS

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

The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back many


millions of years. Individual consciousness is only the flower
and the fruit of a season, sprung from the perennial rhizome
beneath rhe earth; and it would find itself in better accord
with the truth if it took the existence of the rhizome into its
calculations. For the root matter is the mother of all things.14

What Jung so confidently affirms about the psyche’s ancestral roots


in this late preface was rife with conflict for him at the beginning of his
psychoanalytic career, Freud’s influence having constellated in him a
countering or compensatory introversion of libido. Indeed, as Jung goes
on to say in this preface with respect to himself at that time: “... I simply
had to know what unconscious or preconscious myth was forming me,
from what rhizome I sprang.”15 In this regard, Jung, despite the sonship
he at that time still felt toward Freud, was not unlike the mythical hero
he described in Wandlungen who becomes his own father and gives birth
to himself.16
In adopting Jung as his son and heir, Freud, like the Siggeur of our
Northern saga, failed to recognize the archetypal fantasies latent in the
disparate bloodlines he hoped to intermingle in order to prevent
psychoanalysis from becoming a ghettoized affair, of concern only to
Jews.17 Blood being thicker than water, however, the mix he sought to
bring about could not be made, at least not at that time and with that
end in mind. Motivated less by an antipathy such as Freud’s for the
Jewishness of psychoanalysis than by a need to find support for his own
ideas from within that sphere of the unconscious that his experience of
personality No. 2 had intimated to him was the source of the authority
that one bestows upon a father,18 Jung, after the pattern of Sinfjotli,
responded to being adopted as Freud’s heir by acquainting himself with
the ancestral rhizome from which his individual consciousness and
personality No. 1—the flower and fruit of a season—ultimately sprang.
Receiving the blood of his ancestors through this root or rhizome, Jung
fortified himself against what he increasingly experienced as the watering
down effects of Freud’s theories of infantile sexuality. For his part, Freud

14 Jung, CW5, p. xxiv.


15 Jung, CW 5, p. xxv.
16 Jung, CW5 § 332, 335, 497, 516.
17 John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method: The Story ofJung, Freud, and Sabina
Spielrein (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 287.
18 Jung, CW 4 § 727.
48 NORTHERN GNOSIS

found Jung’s dilution of psychoanalytic doctrine even less palatable. As


with the Huns and the Goths, the alliance between Vienna and Zurich,
Freud and Jung, collapsed into a bitter, if not bloody, conflict.

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

—Sabina Spielrein, Diary entry for October 19, 1910

nacting itself in Freud’s thought as the theory of the Oedipus complex

E and in Jung’s thought in the form of the rival concept ofparticipation


mystique, Barnstock, as we have already mentioned, is the mythical home
of the Volsungs. An enormous oak tree, Barnstock’s trunk rises up in the
midst of a large hall in which Volsung resides with his daughter, Signy,
and his ten sons, while its billowing branches stretch out through the
roof. The roots of this tree are the family’s ancestral lineage, the deepest
root of which stretches back to the great AEsir deity and all-father, Odinn.
This divine progenitor invests the line of Volsung the Hun four times.
In the first place, Odinn is the father of Volsung’s great-grandfather Sigi.
In the second place, it is he who sends Rerir, the childless son of Sigi,
the fertility apple through which his potency is restored and a son,
Volsung, is born to him. In the third place, Odinn’s spirit again enters
the lineage of this family through Volsung’s marriage to Hljod, the wish­
maiden who, at Odinn’s bidding, had brought Volsung’s father Rerir the

19 Cited in Aldo Carotenuto, A Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein Between Jung


and Freud (New York: Pantheon, 1982), p. 30.
BARNSTOCK AND THE VOLSUNGS 49

aforementioned vitalizing apple which had enabled him to sire Volsung.


The incestuous link to Odinn then recurs a fourth time in the subsequent
generation through the union between Volsung’s eldest son, Sigmund,
and his only daughter, Signy. Keeping in mind our earlier discussion of
the different ways in which Barnstock enacts itself in the life and thought
of Freud and Jung, let us now look more deeply at the dynamics of the
incestuous impulse presented in the saga.

The Tale Retold


Signy, we are told, did not welcome marriage to the Goth king, Siggeur.
Herfather, Volsung, however, insisted on the union, for it was through unions
such as these that Northern families forged the alliances that allowed their
societies to survive in an age when there existed only a rudimentary collective
judiciary and no effective centralgovernment.20 Though the reasonfor Signy’s
antipathy to the marriage is not stated in the saga, evidently it is figurative
ofthe apprehension which wasfelt in thefamilies ofthe ancient North about
whether the alliances forged through marriage would provide the hoped-for
defense against the larger social world, or whether, on the contrary, treachery
would befall thefamily at the hands ofits in-laws. Such treachery had already
befallen Sigi, the son ofOdinn andgrandfather ofVolsung. His wife’s brothers,
whom he had taken into his trust, intrigued against him, killing him and
his men in battle. His son, Rerir, lived to avenge his father, before siring,
with the help of the apple sent by Оdinn, Signy’s father, Volsung. It is little
wonder, given this compensatory or dialecticalpattern oftreachery and incest,
exogamy and endogamy, that Signy and her brother Sigmund, as well as their
subsequentprogeny, Sinfjotli and Sigurd, bear the root element oftheir great-
great-(great) grandfather Sigi’s name. This element, sig, in fact, goes back
one more generation, to Odinn himself, who was also known by the name,
Sigtyr, the Victory God. The fact that the name ofSigny’s husband, Siggeur,
also partakes ofthis name suggests that the same identity-preserving, incestuous
pattern courses through his bloodline as well. It was actually a convention of
many Scandinavian, Anglo-Saxon, and other Germanic royalfamilies to trace
their ancestral roots back to (Hinn. But as with the Goths and the Huns in
the Volsunga Saga, these noble bloodlines did not mix any more easily on that
account. Indeed, the contrary was often the case. For though literal blood is

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

21 Byock, The Saga of the Volsungs, p. 38.


22 Byock, The Saga of the Volsungs, p. 39.
23 Byock, The Saga of the Volsungs, p. 39.
BARNSTOCK AND THE VOLSUNGS 51

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.

The Sword ofIncest in Freud, Jung, and Spielrein


All the changes that Jung has proposed to make in
psychoanalysis flow from his intention to eliminate what is
objectionable in the family-complexes, so as not to find it

24 "Kynfylgja literally means family fetch. A fetch was a guardian spirit or


supernatural attendant, usually female, associated with an individual or a family. The
term is used here with the more abstract meaning of inherited characteristic or (bad)
luck.” Byock, The Saga ofthe Volsungs, p. 114.
52 NORTHERN GNOSIS

again in religion and ethics. ... The Oedipus complex has a


merely “symbolic” meaning: the mother in it means the
unattainable, which must be renounced in the interests of
civilization; the father who is killed in the Oedipus myth is
the “inner” father, from whom one must set oneself free in
order to become independent. ... In this way a new religio-
ethical system has been created ... which was bound to re­
interpret, distort or jettison the factual findings of analysis.25

—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

25 Sigmund Freud, On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Standard


Edition, vol. 14, 62.
26 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 167.
27 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 167.
28 Jung, CW 5 § 654-655.
BARNSTOCK AND THE VOLSUNGS 53

maintained, the neurotic, Jung came to believe, only appears to be


sequestered in the infantile history to which he had returned under the
duress of an obstacle in his current life situation. It is on account of
his reluctance to relinquish his former mode of adaptation that the
neurotic finds himself unadapted in his present circumstances.29
Prospectively considered, however, the regressive process was, for Jung,
a necessary part of future adaptation inasmuch as it immersed the
individual in the depths of his own being, rendering his subsequent
adaptation more authentic and meaningful.30
The Signy of this psychoanalytic saga was Sabina Spielrein, the
young Russian Jewess whom Jung undertook to treat as his first analytic
patient, his “test case,”31 as it were. Spielrein, who has the distinction
within the psychoanalytic tradition of being the earliest patient to
become a psychoanalyst, originally presented at the Burgholzli with
symptoms of psychotic hysteria. As Jung makes clear in his account of
her case in his essay, “The Freudian Theory of Hysteria,” her psyche
was particularly rife with the kind of fantasy material that Freud had
used as the basis for his theories.32 Jung’s analysis of Spielrein, however,
was not simply an opportunity for him to experiment with Freud’s
method and begin to differentiate something of his own viewpoint. As
virtually the first case in the history of psychoanalysis to involve the
concept of countertransference, Spielrein’s analysis with Jung was as
illustrative of Jung’s unconscious resistances to the methods and
interpretations he was applying to Spielrein under Freud’s tutelage as
it was of Spielrein’s complexes and fantasies. Indeed, just as Signy
complained to her father of her distaste for her intended husband

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

Siggeur, so Spielrein complained about a loathing for her father. In the


perverse defecation fantasies through which she symptomatically
expressed her loathing,33 Jung saw a symbol of his own distaste for
Freud’s vision of the psyche. In effect, what Jung, writing about the
incestuous regression which attaches the patient temporarily to the
analyst, later said about the prospective function of transference held
true for him as well in his countertransference to Spielrein. Just as “the
transference to the analyst builds a bridge across which the patient can
get away from his family into reality,” so the countertransference, in
this case, provided Jung with a bridge that carried him beyond his
sonship to Freud.34 With Spielrein’s cure, Jung’s own cure—the cure of
his anima from what he later described as the tyranny of Freud’s
influence—began.35
In the throes of the now much discussed transference­
countertransference enactment with Sabina Spielrein that led him to
transgress the boundaries of ethical conduct, Jung turned to Freud, in
whom he found a benign counsellor. As he had done with Fliess in the
case of Emma Eckstein, Freud took an indulgent view ofJung’s behaviour
toward his patient. So long as Jung was applying Freudian principles,
the whole episode could be framed as the inevitable “laboratory
explosion” that befalls any dedicated scientist.36 When Spielrein turned
to Freud about the whole affair, even as Signy in the Volsunga Saga
turned to Volsung regarding Siggeur, Freud handled her petition adroitly,
averting a scandal for Jung. It was not until he himself felt betrayed by
Jung’s re-interpretations of psychoanalytic doctrine that he found
anything incestuous about Jung’s claim to his psychoanalytic domain.
In this regard, Freud’s writing of Totem and Taboo may be seen as an
enactment of Odinn’s plunging of the sword into Barnstock. Writing in
counterpoint to the divergent views on mythology, incest, and the status
of the infantile that Jung, his adopted son and Crown Prince, was
simultaneously developing in Wandlungen, Freud sought to set out his
own views on these matters.

33 Jung, CW4 § 55-56.


34 Jung, CW4 § 428.
35 Expressed in the conceptual terms which Jung developed only much later,
Spielrein was an earlier carrier of the anima figure that compensated the persona with
which he, as President of the International Psychoanalytic Association, was identified.
Cf. Jung, CW 7 § 304.
36 McGuire, ed. The Freud/Jung Letters, p. 235.
BARNSTOCK AND THE VOLSUNGS 55

I Odinn's Sword in Freud’s Hands


t is not difficult to conceive of how Freud would have interpreted
Odinn’s sword-brandishing appearance at the wedding feast beneath
the branches of Barnstock. We have only to think of the similarity
between this scene from our saga and the vision of the primordial family
Freud provides in Totem and Taboo. Beneath the manifest content of the
saga’s story Freud would doubtless find a representation of what he,
drawing on Darwin, called the “primal horde.” Odinn, in Freud’s
speculative reconstruction of human prehistory, would correspond to that
jealous and dominating figure, the primal father, who held all the women,
including his own daughters, in a horde over which he enjoyed exclusive
sexual licence. The sword, the Volsung brothers, and their Goth brother-
in-law Siggeur would correspond, likewise, to the castration threat by
which the father drove the brothers out from the horde. At the same time,
Freud would also see in these figures an archaic vestige of the so-
called “primal crime,” wherein the brothers banded together and
slew their father.
Keeping in mind the scene from our saga in which the Volsung
brothers, along with Siggeur and his contingent, compete to see which
of them can draw the sword from Barnstock, let us quote the famous
passage in which this scene enacts itself in Freud’s thought:

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

Freud’s vision of the aftermath of this prehistoric act of parricide is


also resonant with our Northern saga, a variation of its theme:

Though the brothers had banded together in order to


overcome their father, they were all one another’s rivals in

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

regard to the women. Each of them would have wished, like


his father, to have all the women to himself. The new
organization would have collapsed in a struggle of all against
all, for none of them was of such over-mastering strength as to
be able to take on his father’s part with success. Thus
the brothers had no alternative, if they were to live together,
but—not, perhaps, until they had passed through many
dangerous crises—to institute the law against incest, by
which they all alike renounced the women whom they
desired and who had been their chief motive for despatching
their father [their mother and sisters—G. M.].38

Commentators on this reconstruction of the supposedly phylogenetic


event which Freud referred to as his “scientific myth’’ have established
clearly how allegorical it is of the psychoanalytic movement over which
Freud presided.39 Though we may challenge Freud’s conviction that the
primal crime is the Rosetta Stone by which mythology in general may
be explicated, there is no questioning the heuristic value of the story in
explicating the relationship of Freud to his followers. Like the primal
father of whom he wrote in Totem and Taboo, Freud was notoriously
authoritarian in his dealings with his colleagues. In this connection, one
thinks immediately of Adler, the first of a number of talented early analysts
to be driven out from the Psychoanalytic Association in retribution for
advancing theories that deviated too greatly from those that Freud held
to be sacrosanct. When Jung began to delve into mythology, an area
hitherto unexplored by Freud, Freud began to experience something of
the jealousy of the primal father and felt compelled to make his seminal
contribution to this area before Jung could. The tyranny inspiring this
pre-emptive strike that Freud had launched with his swifter pen did not
fail to rankle with Jung, who had, by then, come to regard Freud, as he
told him in a letter, as “a dangerous rival.”40
Like Odinn plunging his sword so deeply into Barnstock that none
save its intended heir could draw it free, Freud in Totem and Taboo took
in hand all that he had previously discovered about infantile sexuality
from his reconstruction of the ontogenetic development of contemporary
neurotics and thrust it deeply into the prehistory of mankind, showing

38 Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 144.


39 George Hogenson, Jung’s Struggle with Freud (Wilmette, IL: Chiron
Publications, 1994), pp. 142-145.
40 McGuire, ed. The Freud/Jung Letters, p. 490.
BARNSTOCK AND THE VOLSUNGS 57

how it may be found there as well. In pointed contrast to Jung, whose


foray into mythology was leading him away from strict adherence to
established sexual theory, Freud argued that our archaic forebears, too,
were subject to the triadic vicissitudes of the Oedipus complex even if
their myths and religious practices, like contemporary dreams, obscured
this fact. While he fully agreed with Jung in positing a collective mind
composed of phylogenetic schemas,41 he felt that these schemas did little
more than predispose the child to experience what it would experience
anyway, its sexuality and triadic family milieu being what they were. In
effect, Freud’s acknowledgement of a collective mind served merely to
reiterate his belief in the centrality of infantile sexuality in the life of the
psyche. Far from being a spiritual factor constituted of timeless themes
that might lead the individual beyond the family to later stages of
development, as Jung was coming to believe, the phylogenetic
unconscious was, for Freud, a template of familial patterns acquired by
children during their early relations with parents through countless
generations. Had Freud been willing to grant a greater measure of
importance to the subsequent stages of ontogenetic development, as Jung
did, he might have been able to tolerate Jung’s wider view of the
phylogenetic unconscious as well. This, however, he could not do.42

41 Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” Collected Papers


vol. III: 473-605. tr. A. & J. Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press & The Institute of
Psycho-Analysis, 1950), p. 578.
42 Cf. Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis.” A passage from this
text, written after the break with Jung, substantiates this assertion: “I am inclined to
take the view that [phylogenetically inherited schemas] are precipitates from the history
of human civilization. The Oedipus complex ... is the best known member of the class.
Wherever experiences fail to fit in with the hereditary schema, they become remodelled
in the imagination. ... We are often able to see the schema triumphing over the
experience of the individual; as when in our present case the boy’s father became the
castrator and the menace to his infantile sexuality ...” ( p. 603). Because both the
phylogenetic schema and the ontogenetic experience have the same content for Freud,
the process simultaneously works the other way as well: given all that he has said about
hereditary schemas, “the significance of the traumas of early childhood ... lie[s] in the
fact that to this [phylogenetic] unconscious they would contribute material which would
save it from being worn away by the subsequent course of development” (p. 604). Of
course, what Freud here vaguely refers to as “the subsequent course of development”
corresponds to what Jung calls the current adaptational challenge of adolescent and
post-adolescent development. That the unconscious might also have phylogenetic
schemata prospectively related to these conflicts and life-stages is a prospect which Freud
disregards. Freud’s failure to do justice to Jung’s position in this regard provides a vantage
point for a critique of the order of precedence he prescribes concerning phylogenetic
explanation. Railing against Jung for “obstinately disputing the importance of infantile
prehistory while at the same time freely acknowledging the importance of ancestral
prehistory,” Freud declared that he “regard[ed] it as a methodological error to seize upon
58 NORTHERN GNOSIS

Freud’s Sword in Jung’s Hands

My heroic attitude toward the world was never a secret to


me, from earliest childhood on; I would have known it even
without analysis. Without your instruction I would have
believed, like all laymen, that I was dreaming of Siegfried,
since I am always dwelling on heroic fantasies. ... I violently
resisted the interpretation of Siegfried as a real child, and
on the basis of my mystical tendencies I would have simply
thought that a great and heroic destiny awaited me, that I
had to sacrifice myself for the creation of something great.
How else could I interpret those dreams in which my father
or grandfather blessed me and said, “A great destiny awaits
you, my child”?43

—Sabina Spielrein, Letter to Jung, January 19, 1918

f it had been Siggeur’s prerogative to draw the sword from

I Barnstock, Jung might well have retained his original position in


the psychoanalytic movement—that of Freud’s adopted son and heir.
The archetypal dynamics of the situation being what they were,
however, Jung could no more wield the sword Freud wished to pass
on to him as his own than Siggeur could draw the sword from the
tree in our saga. This was not for lack of trying. In the early years of
his association with the psychoanalytic movement Jung was an ardent
champion of Freud’s views. The exogamous libido he invested in this
extroverted pursuit, however, was at the same time inwardly
compensated for by a more endogamous, or as he conceptualized it at
the time, “introverted” current of libido. That this was so was already
evident in Jung’s analysis of Spielrein. Though he began the analysis
in line with the theories of Freud’s he wished to test, he quickly found
that his patient’s condition worsened. Resisting her doctor’s
interpretations, Spielrein replaced her presenting neurosis with a
transference neurosis that had a strongly inductive effect upon him.

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

The other aspect of Jung’s regression implicated him more personally.


Though Jung writes in his autobiography that Spielrein was referred to
him by another doctor, who had “acquired a transference to her and finally
begged her not to come to him any more, for if she did, it would mean
the destruction of his marriage,”46 this doctor, as Kerr has shown, was
none other than Jung himself.47 Compelled to love in Spielrein what he
had, in his allegiance to Freud, denied of his own personal equation (that
is, his creative link to the ancestral soul), Jung became increasingly bound
to her, the more he attempted to apply Freuds principles to her treatment.
Expressed in the language of our saga, no sooner had Jung become a
Siggeur in relation to his own soul than his soul, projected into Spielrein’s,
appeared to him, as Signy had appeared to her brother Sigmund when
she sought him out in his forest hideout, there to conceive with him
incestuously a child of doubly Hun blood who would avenge the murder
of her father and brothers. If Jung as a Freudian was unable to eradicate
his patient’s incest fantasy, it was because in a deeper sense, this fantasy,
in which he partook on a very deep level, was pregnant with his own
post-Freudian self. Complementary to the hero of Jung’s Wandlungen,
who becomes his own father, Spielrein, as Kerr has argued, played for
Jung the role of dual-mother, that destructive but also creative incestuous
matrix to which the hero returns for rebirth.48 As Spielrein simply (and
yet not so simply) insisted, Siegfried was not only the child she would
have with Jung, but at the same time Jung himself. This was so, regardless
of whether or not she accepted Jung’s symbolic interpretation (which,
in fact, she basically did).

Jung Draws the Sword


Every sexual symbol in a dream, as in mythology, possesses
the significance of a life- and death-bringing god.49

—Sabina Spielrein

In ancient times the feeling of being “penetrated” by, or of


“receiving,” the god was allegorized by the sexual act. But it

46 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 138.


47 Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method, p. 311.
48 Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method, p. 333.
49 Sabina Spielrein, “Destruction as a Cause of Coming into Being” (1912), The
Journal ofAnalytical Psychology 39.2 (1994): 157.
BARNSTOCK AND THE VOLSUNGS 61

would be a gross misunderstanding to interpret a genuine


religious experience as a “repressed” sexual fantasy on account
of a mere metaphor. The “penetration” can also be
expressed by a sword, spear, or arrow.50

—C. G. Jung

ung’s writings abound with passages in which we may witness him

J drawing the sword from Barnstock. In his concepts of participation


mystique, the parental imago, and introversion we can already sense
the heft of the swords handle in his hand. Sigmunds sword Gram, in Jung’s
thought, is neither the Oedipal threat posed by one’s actual father nor
the castrating blade of the primal father. On the contrary, it is a
representation of the age-old psychic factor, the libido, or life-force, which
the dependent child, projecting outward all that it is unconscious of in
itself, first experiences in the form of the life-giving (death dealing) power
of the parents, and then later, in the heroic, consciousness-creating
adolescent phase of life, wrests free from the parents and makes its own.
Also illustrative of this decisive shift in Jung’s thought is a passage
from the preface to the third edition of his paper, “The Significance of
the Father in the Destiny of the Individual.”51 In this passage Jung,
employing images similar to those that are central to our saga, explains
the shift in perspective which necessitated the revisions that appear in this
final version of his paper. With the image of Gram in the trunk of
Barnstock in mind, let us observe how Jung, enacting the drama inherent
in these images, wrests the razor-edged sword of his own mature viewpoint
free from the theories of Freud in which it had previously been lodged:

Experience in later years has ... altered and deepened many


things. ... I have seen how the roots of the psyche and of
fate go deeper than the “family romance,” and that not only
the children but the parents, too, are merely branches of one
great tree. While I was working on the mother-complex in
my book Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, it became clear
to me what the deeper causes of this complex are; why not
only the father, but the mother as well, is such an important
factor in the child’s fate: not because they themselves have this
or that human failing or merit, but because they happen

50 Jung, СW 10 § 638.
51 Jung, CW 4, pages 301-322.
62 NORTHERN GNOSIS

to be—by accident, so to speak—the human beings who first


impress on the childish mind those mysterious and mighty
laws which govern not only families but entire nations,
indeed the whole of humanity. Not laws devised by wit of
man, but the laws and forces of nature, amongst which man
walks as on the edge of a razor.52

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

Our second passage is from Jung’s “Introduction to Wickes’s Analyse


der Kinderseele.” Here, what Jung referred to in the previous quotation
as “the thousand-year-old stem” that is more fateful for the child than
its parents reappears as what he calls “the infinity of the child’s
preconscious soul.” While reading this passage let us recall that in our
saga this factor is represented as the spirit of Odinn, which invests each
generation of Volsung children.

The infinity of the child’s preconscious soul ... [is] the


mysterious spiritus rector of our weightiest deeds and of our
individual destinies. ... For behind every individual father
there stands the primordial image of the Father, and behind

52 Jung, CW 4, page 301.


53 C. G. Jung, Letters, vol. I: 1906-1950 & vol. II: 1951-1961, ed. G. Adler & A.
Jaffe, tr. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973 & 1975), vol.
1, pp. 217-218.
BARNSTOCK AND THE VOLSUNGS 63

the fleeting personal mother the magical figure of the Magna


Mater. These archetypes of the collective psyche, whose
power is magnified in immortal works of art and in the fiery
tenets of religion, are the dominants that rule the
preconscious soul of the child and, when projected upon the
human parents, lend them a fascination which often assumes
monstrous proportions. From that there arises the false
aetiology of neurosis which, in Freud, ossified into a system:
the Oedipus complex. And that is also why, in the later life
of the neurotic, the images of the parents can be criticized,
corrected, and reduced to human dimensions, while yet
continuing to work like divine agencies. Did the human
father really possess this mysterious power, his sons would
soon liquidate him or, even better, would refrain from
becoming fathers themselves. ... Far better to leave this
sovereign power to the gods, with whom it had always rested
before man became “enlightened.”54

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

54 Jung, CW17 § 97.


55 McGuire, ed. The Freud/Jung Letters, p. 95.
56 From Jung’s post-Freudian point of view, Freud’s theoretical fantasy of a primal
crime of parricide was compensatory to his identification with the father archetype.
Unable to sacrifice his relationship to the infantile objects he studied, Freud clung to
them in his theories. In this way he foreclosed recognition of the significance of the
archetypal psyche and became, as he described himself, “a godless Jew.” Jung makes
his view of this clear in a letter to Spielrein, which was part of a late exchange between
the two in which they enacted something of the deep, identity-renewing incest of
64 NORTHERN GNOSIS

The fantasy of sacrifice means the giving up of infantile


wishes. ... The chief obstacle to new modes of psychological
adaptation is conservative adherence to the earlier attitude.
But man cannot leave his previous personality and his
previous objects of interest simply as they are, otherwise his
libido would stagnate in the past .... Here religion is a great
help because, by the bridge of the symbol, it leads his libido
away from the infantile objects (parents) towards the
symbolic representative of the past, i.e., the gods, thus
facilitating the transition from the infantile world to the adult
world. In this way the libido is set free for social purposes.57

What Freud interpreted as the primordial fathers incest-thwarting


castration threat, Jung, by contrast, interpreted as the son’s necessary
sacrifice of an attitude which, having passed beyond the zenith of its
adaptive potential, must be allowed to descend through the so-called
“incest barrier” to the depths of ancestral soul for renewal, even as the
sun descends beneath the sea so as to rise again the following day. As a
conceptual enactment of what our saga images as Sigmund’s drawing the
sword out of Barnstock, Jung’s prospective, post-Freudian reading of
castration as sacrifice and incest as rebirth is in keeping with the nature
of the god who thrust the sword into that tree in the first place. Like the
sword he brings, all-father Odinn was also impaled upon a tree as a
sacrifice. For nine days, it is said, he hung suspended by a spear on the
trunk of Yggdrasill, “a sacrifice of myself to myself.”58 Just as a gardener
stimulates a tree or shrub to flourish by pruning it, so the psyche seeks
to renew itself, incestuously from its deepest root, by sacrificing spindly
branches. Significantly, even one’s literal parents are spindly branches in
comparison with this great, ancestral root to which we all must sacrifice
if we are to grow from our true depths.
The incest taboo, which produces estrangement between family
members and leads ultimately to the diminishment of family ties, is a

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

function of a deeper, archetypal incest prerogative. It is because we are


more like the thousand-year-old stem than we are like our parents that
we feel compelled to leave our parents for partners outside the family.
Of course, few people differentiate themselves so completely from their
participation mystique with their parents that there remains no trace of
parental influence in their choice of love object. But as Jung says, “It is
normal that children should in a certain sense marry their parents. This
is just as important, psychologically, as the biological necessity to infuse
new blood if the ancestral tree is to produce a good breed. It guarantees
continuity, a reasonable prolongation of the past into the present. Only
too much or too little in this direction is harmful.”59 The sword of incest
cuts both ways: not only does it inhibit incest, it also requires it.
One of Jung’s most sword-brandishing statements regarding the
psychological significance of the incest fantasy appears in his paper, “The
Psychology of the Transference.” The excerpt that appears below was
written to elucidate a woodcut in the series from the Rosarium
Philosophorum, which Jung believed depicted the objective (that is,
archetypal) dimension of the transference. This particular woodcut bears
images analogous to those in our saga. Indeed, just as Odinn’s namesake
Signy marries Siggeur beneath the branches of Barnstock, only to commit
incest subsequently with her brother Sigmund, so in this picture from
the Rosarium, the divine siblings, Apollo and Diana, hold hands in
incestuous matrimony while extending branches toward each other with
their free hands. And just as in our saga the god Odinn appears with his
sword and plunges it into the trunk of Barnstock, so in this Rosarium
woodcut the Holy Ghost descends from a star in the form of a dove
bearing in its beak a branch which intersects with the branches held by
the couple.

... [T]he intervention of the Holy Ghost reveals the hidden


meaning of the incest, whether of brother and sister or of
mother and son, as a repulsive symbol for the unio mystica.
... Incest symbolizes union with one’s own being, it means
individuation or becoming a self, and, because this is so
vitally important, it exerts an unholy fascination—not,
perhaps, as a crude reality, but certainly as a psychic process
controlled by the unconscious .... It is for this reason, and
not because of occasional cases of human incest, that the

59 Jung, CW 10 §
73.
66 NORTHERN GNOSIS

first gods were believed to propagate their kind


incestuously. Incest is simply the union of like with like,
which is the next stage in the development of the primitive
idea of self-fertilization.60

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:

64 Jung, CW8 § 148.


65 Jung, Letters, vol. 1, pp. 142-143: “Behind all the rationalizations of Freud’s
theory there are still facts that need to be understood. It is futile to devalue them with
the famous ‘nothing but’ formula. If in exceptional cases the inner demand can be
reduced to silence, people have lost something and they pay for their apparent
calm with inner desiccation. The irrational factors that manifest themselves
indirectly as ‘incest complexes’ and ‘infantile fantasies,’ etc., are susceptible
of a quite different interpretation.”
66 Jung, CW 8 § 149.
68 NORTHERN GNOSIS

Patient has a pronounced father complex and a rich tissue of


sexual fantasies about her father, whom she lost early. She always
put herself in her mother’s place, although with strong
resistances towards her father. She has never been able to
accept a man like her father and has therefore chosen weakly,
neurotic men against her will. Also in the analysis violent
resistance towards the physician-father. The dream digs up
her wish for her father’s “weapon.” The rest is clear. In
theory, this would immediately point to a phallic fantasy.67

Side by side with this “analytical interpretation,” Jung places his


“constructive interpretation.” If the analytical reading is comparable to
the sword of Odinn lodged in the trunk of Barnstock, the constructive
reading is comparable to Sigmund’s drawing it forth:

It is as if the patient needed such a weapon. Her father had


the weapon. He was energetic, lived accordingly, and also
took upon himself the difficulties inherent in his
temperament. Therefore, though living a passionate, exciting
life he was not neurotic. This weapon is a very ancient
heritage of mankind, which lay buried in the patient and
was brought to light through excavation (analysis). The
weapon has to do with insight, with wisdom. It is a means
of attack and defence. Her father’s weapon was a passionate,
unbending will, with which he made his way through life.
Up till now the patient has been the opposite in every
respect. She is just on the point of realizing that a person
can also will something and need not merely be driven, as
she had always believed. The will based on a knowledge of
life and on insight is an ancient heritage of the human race,
which also is in her, but till now lay buried, for in this
respect, too, she is her father’s daughter. But she had not
appreciated this till now, because her character had been that
of a perpetually whining, pampered, spoilt child. She was
extremely passive and completely given to sexual fantasies.68

Constructive interpretation is rooted in the new interpretation of


incest that Jung arrived at in Wandlungen. Just as Goethe, Jung’s legendary
forefather, wrote, “What thou hast inherited from thy fathers, acquire it

67 Jung, CW 8, page 76.


68 Jung, CW 8, page 76.
BARNSTOCK AND THE VOLSUNGS 69

to make it thine,”69 so Jung’s constructive stance with respect to


interpretation invites the dreamer to recognize the potential of her
ancestral soul and make its possibilities actual in her own life.
Interpretation in this sense is itself an enactment of a higher incest.
Conceived as a constructive union with the deepest roots of one’s being,
the rhizome from which life springs, constructive interpretation
transcends the lower incest, which ties the neurotic to the analyst as if to
a parent—hence the associated notion of a transcendent function.
Expressed in the language of our saga, constructive interpretation effects
a union with the forefathers (in whose line Odinn repeatedly invests
himself) and thereby draws out the sword. Just as Odinn plunges his
sword into Barnstock and Sigmund, his great-great-grandson, draws it
free, so every act of interpretation that turns reflexively upon itself in the
recognition that it, too, is a fantasy production of the psyche incestuously
reinvests itself with its own hermeneutic spirit. Said another way, each
time a symbol is hallowed as the best approximation of something
unknown and named accordingly (i.e., by the name of the more
unknown, and finally by the name of God70), Odinn—that self-sacrificing
root of the objective psyche which turns upon itself in the form of a
sword—once again infuses life into our psychic growth process.

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

Sexual maturity brings with it the possibility of a new


personal participation mystique, and hence of replacing that
part of the personality which was lost in identification with
the parents. A new archetype is constellated: in a man it is
the archetype of woman, and in a woman the archetype of
man. These two figures were likewise hidden behind the

69 Cited in Sigmund Freud, An Outline ofPsychoanalysis, tr. J. Strachey (New York:


W. W. Norton, 1963), p. 123.
70 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 354.
71 Spielrein, “Destruction as a Cause of Coming into Being,” p. 163.
70 NORTHERN GNOSIS

mask of the parental imagos, but now they step forth


undisguised, even though strongly influenced by the parental
imagos, often overwhelmingly so. I have given the feminine
archetype in man the name “anima,” and the masculine
archetype in woman the name “animus,”....72

— C. G. Jung

n a passage of his memoirs, the octogenarian Jung records the earliest

I recollection of his life. As this recollection has to do with Jung’s infant


self, we may be put in mind by it of the prospective reading that he and
Spielrein eventually gave to Spielrein’s fantasy of giving him a little son
and of his actually being her son.73

I am lying in a pram, in the shadow of a tree. It is a fine,


warm summer day, the sky blue, and golden sunlight darting
through green leaves. The hood of the pram has been left
up. I have just awakened to the glorious beauty of the day,
and have a sense of indescribable well-being. I see the sun
glittering through the leaves and blossoms of the bushes.
Everything is wholly wonderful, colorful and splendid.74

Jung in his pram in the shadow of a tree is the incestuously conceived


son of the Northern child-trunk, Barnstock, even as Adonis was the
incestuous progeny of a Mediterranean tree. The golden sunlight darting
through the green leaves is emblematic, likewise, of the sword-like
consciousness to which Jung became heir through his incestuous union
with himself in his patient Spielrein. Wielding this sword, Jung, loyal to
the promptings of the heretical blood that coursed through his veins,
sacrificed his filial tie to Freud even as Spielrein sacrificed the infantile
tie to her parents.
Prospectively considered, this deepening of the transference­
countertransference neurosis corresponded to a shrinking of the parental
imagos and the establishment of “a new personal participation mystique’
between doctor and patient, one which replaced that part of each of
their personalities which had been lost through their former identification with

72 Jung, CW10 § 71.


73 Jung and Spielrein returned to a discussion of Spielrein’s Siegfried fantasy in an
exchange of letters years after their work together in analysis had ended. See C. G.
Jung, “The Letters of C. G. Jung to Sabina Spielrein,” tr. B. Wharton, The Journal of
Analytical Psychology 46.1 (2001): 173-199.
74 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 6.
BARNSTOCK AND THE VOLSUNGS 71

parents or parent-figures. Further differentiation of consciousness, however,


would require that this new participation mystique be sacrificed even as Jung
would sacrifice his sonship to Freud, and Spielrein her reliance on her
parents. The apparent betrayal of their love may, thus, be understood to
have had not only a conventional social and analytic necessity, but an
archetypal one: the “internalization through sacrifice” of the anima and
animus.75
The form that this individuation-promoting sacrifice took in Jung’s
life is well known. As Jung recounts in his autobiography, in the midst
of his work in self-analysis after the break with Freud, he entered into
conversation with a feminine voice in himself. This voice, which Jung
identifies as that of “a talented psychopath who had a strong transference
to him,”76 was an interior echo of the voice of Spielrein, as Kerr has
demonstrated.77 By responding to Spielrein’s voice in himself, Jung
entered into dialogue with that aspect of his psyche that she had
activated in him. Conversation with this asymmetrical psychic factor,
which he later called the anima, brought him into more intimate
relationship with himself.78
Spielrein’s equivalent ofJung’s process of actively imagining in himself
what she had previously carried for him outwardly came in the writing
of her seminal essay, “Destruction as a Cause of Coming into Being.”79
Drawing both on Norse mythology (via the Niebelungenlied) and tree
symbolism (as Jung did in Wandlungen), Spielrein formulated in this
article her own conceptual account of the process she had been through
with Jung. In this way Spielrein made more consciously her own an aspect
of her psychic heritage that had appeared to her first in projection as a
content of her transference to Jung.
Reading this essay in the context of our Northern saga, we may hear
it as a recurrence, in the language of psychoanalysis, of Signy’s speech
regarding the Volsung family fetch. For, just as Signy, the feminine link
between the Huns and the Goths, warned her father Volsung of the spirit

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

80 Carotenuto, A Secret Symmetry, p. 39.


BARNSTOCK AND THE VOLSUNGS 73

the Goths.81 It is through immersion in just such a blood bath of


destructive sexual imagery that the ego receives, and is valorized by, the
heroic vocation that transforms fate into destiny.82
Relinquishing the incestuous relationship to Jung in which had been
conceived the symbol that would allow her to sacrifice herself to this
species-preserving, vocation-conferring sexuality, Spielrein gave birth to
her child, Siegfried, in the form of her “Destruction” paper. When Jung,
in his capacity as editor of the Jahrbuch, read Spielrein’s paper—mailed
to him with a covering letter that identified it as the child of their love,
Siegfried83—he published it side by side with Part 2 of his
“Transformations and Symbols of the Libido,” in recognition both of
its collective value and its kinship with his own thought. Inwardly,
however, this animus-emancipating achievement of the outer woman,
Spielrein, may have served to deepen the conflict between Jung and his
inner woman, the anima. For, in light of Jung’s statement in his memoirs
that what his anima said to him in his dialogues with her seemed to be
“full of a deep cunning,”84 we may surmise that Jung had become subject
to resistances such as those Spielrein wrote of in her paper. Already long
familiar, through the uncanny voice of his mother as well as through
personality No. 2 in himself, with what Spielrein meant by sexuality, Jung
strove to hold onto the individual character of his psyche so that the split
in himself (in Spielrein’s view, the generic split between the ego-instinct
of self-preservation and sexuality) could be healed.
Jung’s life task, as he characterized it in one of his letters, was “to
climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the
little clod of earth that I am.”85 Ever leery of losing his individual identity
to a collective representation, the sword-brandishing Jung learned to
differentiate himself from such identifications by personifying them in
imaginal dialogues. Read from the point of view of Spielrein’s paper, the
various figures from which Jung derived his conceptual model of the
relations between the ego and the unconscious—persona, shadow, anima,
wise-old-man and the self—might be seen as resistances to sexuality. Read
from their own inherent point of view, however, they are attempts to turn

81 Carotenuto, A Secret Symmetry, p. 70.


82 The recent Hollywood film, Braveheart, tells much the same tale.
83 Carotenuto, A Secret Symmetry, p. 48: “Receive now the product of our love,
the project which is your little son Siegfried.”
84 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 187.
85 Jung, Letters, vol. 1, p. 19.
74 NORTHERN GNOSIS

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

86 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 179-180.


87 Jung wrote to Spielrein, September 1, 1919: “The love of S. for J. made the
latter aware of something he had previously only vaguely suspected, that is, of a power
in the unconscious that shapes one’s destiny, a power which later led him to things of
greatest importance. The relationship had to be ‘sublimated’ because otherwise it would
have led him to delusion and madness (the concretization of the unconscious).
Occasionally one must be unworthy, simply in order to be able to continue living.”
Cited in Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method, p. 491. 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, Journal ofAnalytical Psychology, 46:1 (2001), p. 194.
88 For a discussion of Jung’s affinity with Jewish spirituality at a depth level see
David Rosen, “If only Jung had a Rabbi,” TheJournal ofAnalytical Psychology 41.2 (1996):
245-256.
89 Jung, “The Letters of C. G. Jung to Sabina Spielrein,” The Journal ofAnalytical
Psychology 46.1 (2001): 192. See also note 56 above.
BARNSTOCK AND THE VOLSUNGS 75

the opposing endogamous and exogamous currents of the blood (that


is, libido) are united.
The conceptual equivalent of this vision of a common blood (which
not only underpins the family and racial levels of the unconscious, but
sends the individuation-promoting sword which turns kin against kin
as easily as it turns nation against nation), Jung later formulated as the
collective unconscious. What may appear, when viewed from the
perspective of social history, to have been a parting of the ways between
Jung and Freud, and the betrayal by Jung of Spielrein, reveals itself, when
viewed from the archetypal perspective of our saga, to be the outer
expression of an inner dialectical process of integration and self-realization
in all three. As Jung put it in his memoirs with respect to the inner figures
of Salome and Elijah (who may be taken as asymmetrical responses of
his psyche to Spielrein and Freud), “Only many years later, when I knew
a great deal more than I knew then, did the connection between the old
man and the young girl appear perfectly natural to me.”90
The archetypal processes depicted in the Volsunga Saga continue to
enact themselves upon the world stage in our own day. Perpetrating horror
on a colossal scale, the Wotanic spirit that raged through Europe to the
four corners of the globe during the First and Second World Wars has
again and again planted its sword of incest into the tree of life, most
recently in the former Yugoslavia. True to its characterization as “a most
dangerous method,”91 psychoanalysis (as I have been attempting to
demonstrate in these pages) has been subject to these same archetypal
powers from its very inception. That Jung, Freud, and Spielrein were able
to contain as well as they did what was exploding in the outer world in
bombs during their day is remarkable. Though the world remains rife
with ethnic conflict, their approach to these issues has advanced our saga’s
plot beyond the eschaton of its failed coniunctio. For while the couples
in the saga could never overcome the fetch of their familial and ethnic
loyalties, Freud, in his discovery of the transference, and Jung in his
prospective treatment of it, created an entirely new vessel of relationship:
the transference-countertransference neurosis of the talking cure. Analysis
by means of the consciousness created in this new form of relationship

90 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 182.


91 In a letter to Theodore Flournoy (28 September, 1909), William James writes
of psychoanalysis as “a most dangerous method” due to its emphasis on symbolism.
Cited in Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method, p. vi.
76 NORTHERN GNOSIS

has provided, however unwittingly, a container for the blood-complex from


which history pours forth as from a haemorrhage—a container, moreover,
that aims at transformation. On the way to becoming one, the two (analyst
and analysand) suffer the saga of the many. And this, too, Jung came to
see as only a transitional stage of diminished participation mystique between
archaic identity and individuation, for in the final analysis it is “the
individual ... [who] is the makeweight that tips the [worlds] scales ....”92
Jung considered it a characteristic of the collective unconscious that
what is truly accomplished somewhere once by someone is simultaneously
accomplished everywhere for all.93 With the dissolution of the personal
participation mystique through which Jung and Spielrein had been
unconsciously identified (i.e., the internalization through sacrifice of the
anima/animus94), the sword-struck family tree in which all our lives are
rooted became more consciously what it always already potentially was:
a tree of individuation—or the dark precursor of such a tree.
Because the Signy and Sigmund of Jung’s thought (the anima and
animus) are mediating figures that relate us to the collective unconscious
in a manner that provides for our individuation (when we do not identify
with them),95 the full significance of Jung’s and Spielrein’s prospective
interpretation of their relationship is evident only when viewed in cultural
perspective. Simply put, what Jung and Spielrein, as the progeny of
Barnstock, accomplished through the sacrifice of their outer relationship,
Nazi Germany failed to accomplish through its fantasy of racial
supremacy and world conquest. And if today we are still subject, through
that historic failure, to the mythic imperatives of Barnstock and Gram,
it is because we, the heirs of Freud, Jung, and Sabina Spielrein, have yet
to recognize the fetch that makes a saga of our lives for the urge to
individuation that it is.

92 Jung, CW10 § 586.


93 Jung, Letters, vol. 1, p. 58.
94 Jung, CW 7 § 387: “The immediate goal of the analysis of the unconscious,
therefore, is to reach a state where the unconscious contents no longer remain
unconscious and no longer express themselves indirectly as animus and anima
phenomena; that is to say, a state in which animus and anima become functions of
relationship to the unconscious.” In this passage we see Jung’s formula for working
through what, in another context, he called “...that unmistakable sexual obsession
which shows itself whenever a patient has reached the point where he needs to be forced
or tempted out of a wrong attitude or situation” (CW4 § 780).
95 Jung, CW 7 § 339, 521; CW § 9, ii § 20n1; СW 10 §714; CW11 § 107; CW13
§ 62; CW18 § 187.
CHAPTER THREE

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.

—Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, p. 280

When ... we make use of the concept of a God we are


simply formulating a definite psychological fact, namely the
independence and sovereignty of certain psychic contents
which express themselves by their power to thwart our will,
to obsess our consciousness, and to influence our moods
and actions.

—C. G. Jung, CW 7 § 400

Runic Preamble
ne story leads to another story and to another still. In this, our

O final chapter, we repeat for a third time the experiment which


Jung’s characterization of psychology as an archaic myth in modern dress
had inspired us to carry out in the previous two chapters. Shifting the
lens of our runic kaleidoscope to the purview of another Norse god, we
once again expect to find, among the newly positioned colours and
shapes, concepts and theories of our analytic tradition, the depth
psychological equivalent of yet another of those just-so stories which the
Norse myths tell about life. Baldr, the AEsir deity through whom we shall
be imagining the thought of Freud and Jung in the pages that follow is
a youthful god. The whitest and most beautiful of the AEsir, bright and
luminous with light, he is especially beloved by his fellow gods. Little
more than this, however, is known about him in our day. Indeed, as one
scholar of the ancient North has commented, there exist so few
descriptions of Baldr that “he would have little interest were it not for
80 NORTHERN GNOSIS

the story of his death, to which allusion is made frequently by Northern


writers.”1 In turning to the tale of Baldr’s dreams and death we shall be
making a similar claim with respect to the concepts of psychoanalysis
and analytical psychology. They, too, we hold to be of less interest in
and of themselves than the drama they enact together when viewed
through the lens of myth.

The Northern Myth


here are two vastly differing accounts of Baldr’s death in the Norse

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

1 E. O. G. Turville-Petre, Myth and Religion of the North: The Religion ofAncient


Scandinavia (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1975), p. 106.
2 For a discussion of Saxo’s version of the myth as it relates to our theme, see note
106 below.
BALDR’S DEATH 81

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

journey. Hermod the Fleet, Odinn’s son, took up the challenge.


Borrowing his father’s horse he rode to Hel, while the remaining AEsir
prepared for the funeral. Baldr was to be cremated aboard a burning
ship. When his wife, Nanna, saw the ship upon which his body lay in
state she died of grief and was placed alongside him. Meanwhile, Hermod
reached Hel and told its matron of the weeping and lamenting of the
gods. Baldr, he learned, would be allowed to return with him to live
once more among the AEsir on the condition that everything living and
dead in the world would join together in grief for him. The proviso to
this, however, was that if there was even one exception to this universal
grief, Baldr would have to remain in Hel.
Just as earlier a message had been sent throughout the world for
everything to swear itself harmless against Baldr, now a message was sent
out admonishing all things to grieve together in unison. Sharing in the
loss of Baldr, a loss that spelled their own doom, the things of the world—
the gods and mortals, animals and stones, rivers and trees, etc.—all joined
together in a great tumult of lamentation. But here again there was one
fateful exception. An old troll hag named Tokk refused to shed even a
single tear for Baldr. As a result, Baldr could not be brought back from
Hel. It was said by many that the troll hag, Tokk, was actually Loki in
disguise. The conflagration that had been prophesied then took place.
Loki, soon after being bound by the gods, broke loose from his bonds
and the final battle, which claimed the lives of the gods, was waged. The
destruction of the nine worlds, however, was followed shortly by a new
creation. The world in which we now dwell came into being, populated
by the progeny of a human couple who had been hidden away inside
the World Tree.3 Along with this new creation, the beautiful Baldr
returned as well—hence his claim to be a dying and resurgent god.4

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

Part One: Baldr’s Freud

Baldr’s Death in Freud’s Thought


ime in the soul is circular, a cycle of sacred moments, a ritual return

T to eternity, a compulsion to repeat. Torn from its living context in


the religious practices of the ancient North, the Baldr myth reads as a
narrative in time, a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Heard as an
ever-recurring moment in sacred time, however, it has the character of a
round. The Baldr who is killed by the gods despite their wish to spare
him is always already the product of ceaseless repetitions of the same story.
Similarly, the Baldr whom the gods cannot retrieve from Hel is perennially
resurrected simply through the re-telling of his tale.
It is in this spirit that we shall be reading Freud. Like the ancient
myths, Freuds theories also circle around a number of arcane themes in
an effort to plumb the mysteries of the soul. Concepts are related to each
other much as the gods are related to each other. Ideas concerning the
mechanisms that govern the psychic life of contemporary men and
women bear a filial resemblance to ideas concerning the emergence of
life in the dim prehistory of the planet. At many junctures these
theoretical ideas bear a strong resemblance to the events described in our
myth. In Freud’s writings, as we shall see, Baldr enacts himself with
especial vividness in the interplay of theories and concepts having to do
with the principles of constancy and pleasure, the origins of life, parricide,
mourning, narcissism, the ego-ideal and civilization. Though each of
these subjects differs from the others, they share a story together, a story,
moreover, that is like the tale our Northern forebears told of that dying
and resurgent god. To pull this story together, even as Snorri Sturluson
pulled together his account of the Baldr myth from the ancient poetical
sources available to him, we shall be examining the texts from Freud’s
writings which repeat the motifs of our Northern myth. As always, our
intent in doing so is not to reduce or explain the one in terms of the
other, but to throw into relief those aspects of the psyche which both
apostrophize, each in their own way and for their own time.
As we survey Freud’s books and papers in the light of the Baldr myth,
there are specific titles that stand out as likely candidates for comparison.
In his aspect as a god who stands apart from the other gods, Baldr brings
to mind writings by Freud having to with the individual and his relations
84 NORTHERN GNOSIS

to society—Group Psychology and the Analysis ofthe Ego and Civilization


and its Discontents. In his aspect as a god who dies and through his death
occasions an almost universal grief, Baldr is suggestive of Freud’s paper
“Mourning and Melancholia” and his book Totem and Taboo. And in
connection to his being a dying and the resurgent god who is so loved
that the other gods do not wish to relinquish him, we are led to associate
four further titles from Freud’s oeuvre, “On Narcissism,” The Ego and
the Id, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and the “Project for a Scientific
Psychology.” Though each of these works evokes itself in its entirety in
the drama of our Norse myth, even as our Norse myth may be imagined
to evoke itself in its entirety in them, we must here be content with brief
sketches of the theoretical formulations appearing in these works that
seem most redolent of the motifs of the Baldr myth.

The Principle of Constancy and the Pleasure Principle


Through the forming of the ideal, 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. Owing to the way in
which the ego ideal is formed, it has the most abundant links
with the phylogenetic acquisition of each individual—his
archaic heritage. What has belonged to the lowest part of
the mental life of each of us is changed, through the
formation of the ideal, into what is highest in the human
mind by our scale of values.5

ead as an epiphany of Baldr, Freud’s theories enact the story of that

R dying and resurgent god in the mechanistic account they provide


of the origins and development of the ancestral soul. Though Freud does
not use the term “ancestral soul” (preferring instead such terms as
phylogeny, archaic vestiges, and collective mind), our use of it here
underscores an important dimension of his psychological enterprise. An
archaeologist of the psyche, Freud made a speculative descent into its
depths, a descent that extended back past the generations of mankind to
the earliest moments when life in its most basic forms emerged upon the
earth. In addition to the Primal Father and his incest horde, which we

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

discussed in the previous chapter, Freud conceived of other, more distant


ancestors. Going farther back even than the primates, which Darwin held
to be the progenitors of human beings, Freud conceived of an amoeba­
like vesicle with a cortical layer that is susceptible to stimulation.6 The
clay out of which this earliest of Adams came into being Freud believed
to be the chemical substance of the inorganic world. True to his
mechanistic bent, however, Freud portrayed the Divine Artificer not as
god, but as the forces known to the physics of his day.
The cornerstone of Freud’s account of how the “phylogenetic
acquisitions” of the aeon-spanning ancestral soul come to be transformed
into our highest mental functions and cultural forms is the “principle
of constancy” or “tendency to stability.” In this idea, which Freud
borrowed from Gustav T. Fechner, Baldr evokes himself in the simplest
and most elemental of terms. As adapted by Freud to the purposes of
psychoanalytic investigation, this psycho-physical principle states that
“the mental apparatus endeavors to keep the quantity of excitation present
in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant.”7 In our myth we
find a similar motif. Though Baldr is the target of the projectiles hurled
at him by the gods, all of the projectiles, with the exception of the
mistletoe, have sworn themselves harmless against him. The image, here,
is one of stability; there is neither increase nor decrease. Suspended
between the prospect of death, as presaged in his dreams, and the prospect
of a continuance of life, as suggested by his apparent invulnerability to
harm, Baldr and his fellow gods ambivalently play both these ends of
existence against each other. This dynamic, as we shall see, recurs in many
of Freuds formulations.
Most immediately, we may be reminded by the mirth of the gods,
as they make sport with Baldr, of another facet of the constancy principle
Freud borrowed from Fechner. For Fechner, the psycho-physical tensions
that we experience as sensations of pain and pleasure are also a function
of this principle or tendency. Just as Baldr feels, not pain, but enjoyment
when struck with the objects which have promised Frigg they will not
harm him, so for Fechner “every psycho-physical motion rising above
the threshold of consciousness is attended by pleasure in proportion as,

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

beyond a certain limit, it approximates to complete stability, and is attended


by unpleasure in proportion as, beyond a certain limit, it deviates from
complete stability ....”8
Freud’s notion of the pleasure principle is essentially an abbreviation
of this formula of Fechner’s. Predicating the principle of constancy to
that of pleasure on the grounds that the constancy principle “was inferred
from facts which forced [psychoanalysis] to adopt the pleasure
principle,”9 Freud, in effect, established a similar covenant within the
economics of mental life as Frigg established in our myth. Like Frigg
requiring all things to swear that they will not harm her son, the pleasure
principle requires that all tensions discharge themselves as expeditiously
as possible.
The fateful sprig of mistletoe to which Baldr falls prey in our myth
enters this picture in Freud’s recognition that the pleasure principle is
not universally binding. Like Loki learning from Frigg about this plant
that grew far away by the walls of Valhalla and which had made no
promise to her, Freud recognized that there are mental processes which
operate “beyond the pleasure principle.”10 “It must be pointed out,” writes
Freud, in a passage in which we can overhear Frigg’s disclosure to Loki
of the existence and whereabouts of the mistletoe,

... that strictly speaking it is incorrect to talk [as we did


previously] of the dominance of the pleasure principle over
the course of mental processes. If such a dominance existed,
the immense majority of our mental processes would have
to be accompanied by pleasure or to lead to pleasure, whereas
universal experience completely contradicts any such
conclusion. The most that can be said, therefore, is that there
exists in the mind a strong tendency towards the pleasure
principle, but that that tendency is opposed by certain other
forces or circumstances, so that the final outcome cannot
always be in harmony with the tendency towards pleasure.
We may compare what Fechner ... remarks on a similar
point: “Since however a tendency towards an aim does not
imply that the aim is attained, and since in general the aim
is attainable only by approximations ....”11

8 Cited in Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 2.


9 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 3.
10 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 11.
11 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, pp. 3-4.
BALDR’S DEATH 87

OfMistletoe, Repetition, and the Reality Principle


mong the forces or circumstances which operate in opposition to

A the pleasure principle’s direct pursuit of its aims, two must be


singled out as especially important in Freud’s thought: the reality
principle and the compulsion to repeat. The first of these, the reality
principle, bears, at most, a superficial resemblance to the deadly stalk
of mistletoe that brought doom to Baldr. Indeed, compared with the
mistletoe that Freud hurled in his story of the dynamics of the psyche
when he first proposed his concept of the compulsion to repeat, the
reality principle is as benign as the projectiles that the gods fired at the
impervious Baldr. This, however, is reason enough to discuss it briefly
before turning our attention to that truly deadly force and most
primordial of ancestors, the compulsion to repeat, or, as Freud also called
it, the death-instinct.
While reality, with its characteristic harshness, continually challenges
the pleasure principle by bringing to bear upon our lives events and
circumstances incompatible with that principle’s hedonic aims, the reality
principle works in concert with the principle of pleasure by reckoning
these events and circumstances into the latter’s hedonic equation. Attuned
to the possibilities of life that might interfere with the attainment of
pleasure, the ego-instincts, serving the interests of self-preservation, carry
“into effect the postponement of satisfaction, the abandonment of a
number of possibilities of gaining satisfaction and the temporary
toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure.”12
It is through this interplay between the pleasure and reality principles
that the gods of Freud’s theory, the instincts,13 become as “aim-inhibited”
in their search for gratification as the AEsir were in theirs. Similarly, it is
through this interplay of psychical principles that the Baldr-like ego, that
“seat of anxiety,”14 comes to marshall defenses against unpleasure.
But what about the mistletoe? Clearly, the reality principle, as we
have just shown, bears a closer analogy to the AEsir and their sport of

12 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 4.


13 Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, in The Freud Pelican
Library, vol. 2 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 127: “...the theory of the
instincts is so to say our mythology. Instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their
indefiniteness. In our work we cannot for a moment disregard them, yet we are never
sure that we are seeing them clearly.”
14 Freud, The Ego and the Id, p. 47.
88 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

The Compulsion to Repeat


ike the principle of constancy, the compulsion to repeat is subject

L to a stabilizing tendency. This tendency to stability, however, is


more primitive than the one Fechner described in his analysis of
psycho-physical mechanisms or the one that Freud envisioned in his
related account of the pleasure principle. Heir to the inertia of lifeless
matter, the repetition compulsion is under the sway of the great,
great, infinitely great grandfather of these later principles and
processes. Driven by that most ancestral of all urges, the urge to
return to the stability of the inorganic world, the compulsion to
repeat runs roughshod over the equilibriums in which the sentient
organs that Fechner studied and the mental apparatus that Freud
described seek to operate, leaving pain, destruction, and death in its
wake. It is these fateful effects—pain, destruction, and death—that
this havoc-wreaking force, the compulsion to repeat, keeps constant
in our lives.
Among the clinical manifestations of the repetition compulsion,
Freud included the whole range of destructive behaviours that cannot
be accounted for exclusively within the economics of the pleasure and
reality principles. The Baldr-like trauma dream is one example;16 the
negative therapeutic reaction another.17 Also important are those recurrent
tragedies of life which afflict even our most blameless patients. Having
done nothing in any active way to arrange their own demise, these
patients seem to be obliged by the uncanny course of the events befalling

15 As Freud writes in the preamble to his discussion of the repetition compulsion:


“What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will
consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection.” Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, p. 18.
16 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 26.
17 Freud, The Ego and the Id, pp. 39-40.
BALDR’S DEATH 89

them to suffer in oddly tragic ways.18 Marching to the beat of a psychic


factor that is clearly beyond the pleasure principle (and beyond the reality
principle, too, for that matter), these patients appear to be the victims
of a daemonic power of fate.19 Seconding Heraclitus, who wrote that “a
man’s character is his fate,”20 Freud saw in these compulsively repetitive
enactments of the way things happen the workings of deeply unconscious
character resistances which are not personal, but instinctual, in origin.
With our Northern myth in mind, let us now examine several
passages from Freud’s writings in which he speculates about the origins
of this death-seeking compulsion which, like the mistletoe, was never
made to swear itself harmless against us. (As we do so it will be important
to bear in mind that what Freud conceives of as a death-instinct, more
archaic myths represent as an order of existence that is composed of the
dead, i.e., the underworld, or Hel, of the ancestors.)
In the first of these quotations, Freud identifies the compulsion to
repeat as a natural tendency acting through the instincts. Framing his
reflections with the question, “But how is the predicate of being
‘instinctual’ related to the compulsion to repeat?” he writes:

... [W]e cannot escape a suspicion that we may have come


upon the track of a universal attribute of instincts and
perhaps of organic life in general which has not hitherto been
clearly recognized. ... It seems, then, that an instinct is an urge
inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state ofthings which
the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the
pressure of external disturbing forces; that is, it is a kind of
organic elasticity, or, to put it another way, the expression
of the inertia inherent in organic life.21

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

Rider boundfor Hel conveys Freud’s notion of the death-instinct


BALDR’S DEATH 91

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

Progressing Deathward to No Death


cting against this drive to death, according to Freud, is “the pressure

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

22 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 32.


23 Negentropy is a concept introduced into evolutionary theory by the physicist
Erwin Schrodinger about twenty years after Freud wrote Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
As Arthur Koestler writes, ‘“Negative entropy’ (or ‘negentropy’) is ... a somewhat
perverse way of referring to the power of living organisms to ‘build up’ instead of
running down, to create complex structures out of simpler elements, integrated patterns
out of shapelessness, order out of disorder. The same irrepressible building-up tendency
is manifested in the progress of evolution, the emergence of new levels of complexity
in the organismic hierarchy and new methods of functional coordination, resulting in
greater independence from, and mastery of, the environment.” Arthur Koestler, Janus:
A Summing Up (London: Hutchinson, 1978), p. 223.
92 NORTHERN GNOSIS

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 were at some time evoked in inanimate


matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can form
no conception. It may perhaps have been a process similar
in type to that which later caused the development of
consciousness in a particular stratum of living matter. The
tension which then arose in what had hitherto been an
inanimate substance endeavoured to cancel itself out. In this
way the first instinct came into being: the instinct to return
to the inanimate state. It was still an easy matter at that time
for a living substance to die; the course of its life was
probably only a brief one, whose direction was determined
by the chemical structure of the young life. For a long time,
perhaps, living substance was thus being constantly created
afresh and easily dying, till decisive external influences altered
in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to
diverge ever more widely from its original course of life and
to make every more complicated detours before reaching its
aim of death. These circuitous paths to death, faithfully kept
to by the conservative instincts, would thus present us to­
day with the picture of the phenomena of life. If we firmly
maintain the exclusively conservative nature of instincts, we
cannot arrive at any other notions as to the origin and aim
of life.24

From an archetypal point of view, this passage of Freud’s can be


characterized as a creation myth. More particularly, it can be seen as a
recurrence in conceptual language of the familiar motif of the dying and
resurgent god, the so-called son-lover of the Great Mother. Comparison
with the myth of Baldr bears this out even in detail. The figures we have
been discussing from our myth are easily recognizable in this passage.
Baldr, as we have already seen, bears witness to himself in phrases such as

24 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, pp. 32-33.


BALDR’S DEATH 93

“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.”

Freud Consults the Volva


ther figures from our myth also reside in Freud’s text. Just as the

O resurgent Baldr, the projectile-hurling AEsir, the protective Frigg,


and the mistletoe-bearing Loki can be said to enact themselves in Freud’s
negentropic theory of the potentiating effect death has upon life, so Odinn
and Hermod can be said to enact their respective journeys to Hel on Baldr’s
behalf in Freud’s theory of the “complicated detours” and “circuitous paths”
followed by the living substance before reaching its final aim, the inanimate
condition of death and stasis.
Hearing tell of the portentous nature of Baldr’s dreams, Odinn, as
we recounted above, mounted his steed Sleipnir and rode to Hel to consult
the Volva concerning his son’s fate. Doubtless, the natural association
that exists between dreams and death may be regarded as an important
factor mobilizing Odinn to set out on that “circuitous path” to death
(Hel) which Freud discusses in more abstract terms in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle. Simply put, since dreams come from the realm of death, it is
to that realm that Odinn must go to discern their meaning.25
There are, however, still other factors at play in Odinn’s journey to
Hel, intrinsic ones which pertain to the character of that god. In the myth
and religion of the North, Odinn is a necromancer. As such he is able to
glean prophetic knowledge from the skulls of the dead. Like Thanatos
(both the Thanatos of the Greeks and the Thanatos referenced by Freud’s
followers when speaking of Freud’s theory of the death-instinct), Odinn
is also a Lord of the Dead. In Valhalla, the old stories inform us, he holds

25 For a thorough discussion on the relationship of dreams to death, that at the


same time elucidates the mythological background of Freud’s theory in relation to the
Greek mythologem of the underworld, see James Hillman, The Dream and the
Underworld (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 7-67.
94 NORTHERN GNOSIS

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

The testing of reality, having shown that the loved object no


longer exists, requires forthwith that all the libido shall be
withdrawn from its attachments to this object. Against this
demand a struggle of course arises—it may be universally
observed that man never willingly abandons a libido-position,
not even when a substitute is already beckoning to him. This
struggle can be so intense that a turning away from reality
ensues, the object being clung to through the medium of a
hallucinatory wish-psychosis. The normal outcome is that
deference for reality gains the day. Nevertheless its behest
cannot be at once obeyed. The task is now carried through
bit by bit, under great expense of time and cathectic energy,
while all the time the existence of the lost object is continued
in the mind. Each single one of the memories and hopes
which bound the libido to the object is brought up and
hyper-cathected, and the detachment of the libido from it
accomplished. Why this process of carrying out the behest
of reality bit by bit, which is in the nature of a compromise,
should be so extraordinarily painful is not at all easy to explain
in terms of mental economics. It is worth noting that this pain
seems natural to us. The fact is, however, that when the work
of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and
uninhibited again.26

The resonances between Freud’s account of the work of mourning


and the myth of Baldr are many. Echoes not only of Odinn and
Hermod’s journey to Hel, but also of the AEsir pelting the doomed
Baldr can be overheard in Freud’s reference to the tendency to turn
away from the reality of loss and cling to the dead through the
medium of “a hallucinatory wish-psychosis.” Just as the objects that
the AEsir throw at Baldr both swear themselves harmless against him
and promise to join together in grief for him, so Freud writes of the
“bit by bit” process by which “each single one of the memories and
hopes which bound the libido to the object is brought up and
hyper-cathected” in order that the “detachment of libido from
it may be accomplished.”

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

In the last sentence of this quotation, Freud speaks of the ego


becoming free and uninhibited again with the completion of the work
of mourning. While this statement accurately describes the fact that
people more or less do resolve their losses and, after a period of mourning,
form new attachments, it does not deal with the opposite case, in which
the object is not relinquished and the work of mourning is not completed
in this sense. For an account of this process, which, though clinically
troubling, is surprisingly rich in negentropic contributions when viewed
in phylogenetic perspective, we turn now to a passage from The Ego and
the Id. While keeping our myth in mind, it is also important for our
discussion to broaden the meaning of the term “ego” by noting that for
Freud the ego is not only an institution in the human mind, but an aspect
of simpler life forms as well, insofar as a dermis or surface-boundary is
produced in them as “the inevitable expression of the influence of the
external world.”27

When it happens that a person [or simpler life form, as just


noted—G. M] has to give up a sexual object, there quite
often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be
described as a setting up of the object inside the ego ...;
the exact nature of this substitution is as yet unknown to
us. It may be that by this introjection ... the ego makes it
easier for the object to be given up, or renders that process
possible. It may be that this identification is the sole
condition under which the id can give up its objects. At any
rate the process, especially in the early phases of
development, is a very frequent one, and it makes it possible
to suppose that the character of the ego is a precipitate of
abandoned object-cathexes and that it contains the history
of those object-choices.28

Enacting the AEsir’s reluctance to relinquish Baldr in his account of


man’s resistance to giving up a loved object, Freud provides a mythical
account of his own of the mechanism by which the ancestral soul is
generated. Like the AEsir in their attempt to forestall Baldr’s passing away

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

by such means as journeys to Hel and universal lamentation, lost objects,


for Freud, are set up inside the renunciative, hypercathected ego through
the twin processes of identification and introjection. In this way the urge
to restore an earlier state of things is satisfied at a negentropically higher
level of organization. The mourning process, evidently, is not only about
letting go of the dead—though of course they are relinquished in a
physical sense. Additionally, it is about retaining them on higher and
higher levels of complexity. Ironically, when seen in vast phylogenetic
perspective, it is the failures of the mourning process that provide
descendents of the dead with the negative capability (Keats) to carry out
the part of its work that can be completed during the course of their own
particular lives.
In the Norse account of the way these things happen, the troll hag
Tokk will not grieve for the dead Baldr, with the result that the campaign
to restore him to life fails. In Freud’s account, the life-creating, psyche­
constituting negentropic process to which we are heir is the result of our
forebears having identified themselves with lost loved ones that they, too,
could not fully relinquish or grieve. Though the ego, that “inevitable
expression of the influence of the external world,” has reached its most
advanced flowering in the values and ideals we now share together as
civilized human beings, these characterological acquisitions are, as Freud
writes in the quotation above, “a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexis
... that ... contains the history of those object-choices.”
Another passage from The Ego and the Id may be cited at this juncture
for the vivid picture it presents of how the processes we have been
discussing work together to constitute what I, with Jung’s notion of the
collective unconscious in mind, am calling the ancestral soul:

... [N]o external vicissitudes can be experienced or


undergone by the id, except byway of the ego .... The
experiences of the ego seem at first to be lost for
inheritance; but, when they have been repeated often
enough and with sufficient strength in many individuals
in successive generations, they transform themselves, so
to say, into experiences of the id, the impressions of
which are preserved by heredity. Thus in the id, which
is capable of being inherited, are harboured residues of
the existences of countless egos; and, when the ego forms
its super-ego [read ego-ideal—G. M.] out of the id, it
98 NORTHERN GNOSIS

may perhaps only be reviving shapes of former egos and


be bringing them to resurrection.29

In visualizing that imaginal process which Freud described as “a


setting up of the [lost or relinquished] object inside the ego,”30 it is
important to recognize that the ego to which Freud refers is not the
Jungian ego. In Jung’s definition, the ego is simply the centre of
consciousness. For Freud, on the other hand, the ego, as an expression
of the circuitous, negentropic process of dying into life, has an
unconscious aspect as well. This unconscious aspect, which Freud called
the “third unconscious,”31 is the dead zone in which the lost objects are
set up. The conscious part of the ego resides, as it were, behind these
identifications. They are not in it; on the contrary, it is in them. The
dead, that is to say, do not live on in the mind. The mind carries on in
the dead.32
Freud communicates his vision of the negentropic origins of the
conscious part of the ego by asking us to picture a “living vesicle with
[a] receptive cortical layer” suspended like Baldr “in the middle of an
external world charged with the most powerful energies.” “This little
fragment,” he continues,

... would be killed by the stimulation emanating from these


if it were not provided with a protective shield against
stimuli. It acquires the shield in this way: its outermost
surface ceases to have the structure proper to living matter,
becomes to some degree inorganic and thenceforward
functions as a special envelope or membrane resistant to
stimuli. In consequence, the energies of the external world
are able to pass into the next underlying layers, which have
remained living, with only a fragment of their original
intensity; and these layers can devote themselves, behind the
protective shield, to the reception of the amounts of stimulus

29 Freud, The Ego and the Id, p. 28.


30 Freud, The Ego and the Id, p. 19.
31 Freud, The Ego and the Id, pp. 7-8. With the notion of a “third Ucs.,” Freud
postulates the existence of an unconscious that is more like the Jungian unconscious
in that it does not correspond to the repressed but to a psychical substrate which has
never been conscious. In contrast to Jung, however, Freud locates this unconscious in
the ego. Known to us through character resistances, it is continuous with the “crust,”
“cortical layer,” or dead zone which has been created by the impact of the external world.
32 Cf. my “The After-Life of the Image: On Jung and Mourning,” Spring 71: A
Journal ofArchetype and Culture (New Orleans: Spring Journal, 2004), pp. 89-111.
BALDR’S DEATH 99

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

Reading this passage we are at once reminded of Freud’s speculative


account of the origins of life and of our earlier exploration of how Freuds
views on this subject enact the myth of Baldr’s death. Our discussion at
that juncture, it will be recalled, centred around a quotation from Beyond
the Pleasure Principle in which Freud states that while we can form no
conception of the force that first caused the attributes of life to appear
in inanimate matter, “it may have been a process similar in type to that
which later caused the development of consciousness in a particular
stratum of living matter.”34 In the passage to which our attention is now
directed, Freud picks up on this suggestion. Heir to the life-creating
tension that was prevented from cancelling itself out by the impingement
of external disturbing forces (even as Baldr lived by virtue of what the
AEsir hurled at him), the living fragment which is suspended amidst the
powerful energies of the world negentropically continues the battle of
Eros against Thanatos, life against death. Shielded from the overwhelming
intensities of stimuli reaching it from without by that part of itself which
has already been overwhelmed and killed, the living fragment brings the
Baldr-like process of dying into life to a higher level by developing sentient
awareness. On the one hand, we may imagine with Freud a physical
process: “... as a result of the ceaseless impact of external stimuli on the
surface of the vesicle, its substance to a certain depth may have been
permanently modified, so that excitatory processes run a different course
in it from what they run in the deeper layers. A crust would thus be
formed which would at last have been so thoroughly ‘baked through’ by
stimulation that it would present the most favourable possible conditions

33 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 21.


34 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, pp. 32-33.
100 NORTHERN GNOSIS

for the reception of stimuli and become incapable of further


modification.”35 On the other hand, we may imagine, again with Freud,
that this same process has a psychological aspect based in the tendency of
the negentropically evolving life-substance to identify with and introject
the objects of its environment and aspects of itself which it is resistant to
relinquishing. “ [Unwilling to] abandon a libido position, ... even when a
substitute is already beckoning,”36 the mental apparatus, following in the
ancestral footsteps of the processes that have transpired from time
immemorial in the natural history of the living substance, takes on the
character of the object to which it had been attached. “Thus,” writes Freud,
“the shadow of the [lost] object fell upon the ego, so that the latter could
henceforth be criticized by a special mental faculty like an object, like the
forsaken object.”37

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

35 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 20.


36 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” p. 154.
37 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” p. 159.
38 Freud, The Ego and the Id, p. 26.
BALDR’S DEATH 101

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

39 Sigmund Freud, An Outline ofPsychoanalysis, tr. J. Strachey (New York: W. W.


Norton, 1963), p. 23. Writing with reference to what he calls “absolute, primary
narcissism," Freud states that this condition “continues until the ego begins to cathect
the presentations [i.e., images] of objects with libido—to change narcissistic libido into
object libido.” These lines are transparent to the myth of Baldr, in particular to the
scene of the myth having to do with the god's being pelted with objects. Baldr’s
imperviousness to the objects, his indifference to them, reflects what Freud would call
the state prior to the cathecting of objects, i.e., the condition of primary narcissism.
By the same token, this scene from the myth could also be compared to Freud’s account
of the subsequent, cathecting stage, in which objects are invested with interest and
the narcissistic libido is changed into object libido. The mistletoe enters Freud’s text a
few lines later when he writes about the main quantity of libido coming to be directed
onto one particular object which then, as a love object, has the quality of an ego.
40 When the world is not a good-enough world, when, that is to say, the slings
and arrows of fate are more than Frigg can mediate, the gap between what Freud called
the ego and the ego-ideal becomes greater such that the latter becomes more
burdensome and persecutory. The deadly sprig of mistletoe, according to this account,
is anything that happens to the evolving life form at any stage of development which
is in excess of the equilibriums in which that life form optimally exists. Winnicott speaks
of failures of the facilitating environment and of impingements on the transitional space
which curtail the play or spontaneous gesture of the child. It is in these terms that
Baldr enacts himself in the thought of this more recent psychoanalytic theorist. See
Donald W. Winnicott, The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment (New
York: International Universities Press, 1965).
102 NORTHERN GNOSIS

pages of Civilization and its Discontents, there exists “a feeling of an


indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole.”41
In the terms of our myth, this oneness with the external world which
the mother mediates corresponds to Baldr’s invulnerability with respect
to the objects that are thrown at him by the AEsir. Just as the Norse myth
depicts Baldr as being at one with the world in which all things have
sworn themselves harmless at the behest of Frigg, so psychological theory
conceives of the child as experiencing a period of optimal rapport with
the mother until her attunement to him shifts.

Regaining Lost Worlds on New Levels


hile exploring the manner in which Baldr enacts himself in these

W notions of Freud’s, let us also bear in mind our earlier discussion


of how he enacts himself in Freud’s vision of primordial processes. It will
be recalled that Freud saw a parallel between the development of life out
of inorganic matter and the development of consciousness in a particular
stratum of living matter. In much the same way, the development of the
ego during the period in which the child luxuriates in the protective
embrace of its mother may be regarded as a repetition, at a much higher
level of development, of this same process. Indeed, just as in our earlier
account of how the disturbing external influences caused the
characteristics of life to develop out of what had hitherto been inorganic
matter, so the child’s ego develops by virtue of the challenge posed by
the painful sensations which impinge upon the blissful state of primary
narcissism which exists briefly between the child and its mother. Though
the child, so long as he enjoys the protection afforded him by maternal
love, lives, like Baldr protected by Frigg, in a world of objects which have
sworn themselves harmless against him, he gradually learns to
differentiate himself as a subject from the external world (i.e., the mother)
in response to various contingencies. Subject to the “slings and arrows
of outrageous fortune,” some of which are mediated by the father,42 the

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

pleasure ego, like Baldr, is eventually slain and a reality ego


resurrected in its stead. As Freud expresses this in a passage that is
especially rich with motifs of the Baldr myth,

... disengagement of the ego from the general mass of


sensations—that is, ... recognition of an ‘outside,’ and
external world—is provided by the frequent, manifold and
unavoidable sensations of pain and unpleasure the removal
and avoidance of which is enjoined by the pleasure principle,
in the exercise of its unrestricted domination. A tendency
arises to separate from the ego everything that can become
a source of such unpleasure, to throw it outside and to create
a pure pleasure-ego which is confronted by a strange and
threatening ‘outside.’ The boundaries of this primitive
pleasure-ego cannot escape rectification through experience.
Some of the things that one is unwilling to give up, because
they give pleasure, are nevertheless not ego but object; and
some sufferings that one seeks to expel turn out to be
inseparable from the ego in virtue of their internal origin.
One comes to learn a procedure by which, through a
deliberate direction of one’s sensory activities and through
suitable muscular action, one can differentiate between what
is internal—what belongs to the ego—and what is
external—what emanates from the outer world. In this way
one makes the first step towards the introduction of the
reality principle which is to dominate future development.
... In this way, ... the ego detaches itself from the external
world. Or, to put it more correctly, originally the ego includes
everything, later it separates off an external world from itself.
Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue
of a much more inclusive—indeed, an all-embracing—
feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond
between the ego and the world about it.43

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

than it resurrects itself in the form of an ideal through the aforementioned


processes of identification and introjection. Past tense becomes future
tense. Super-ego replaces Id. All that we have lost—both ontogenetically
and phylogenetically—we feel ourselves exhorted to have again in some
form. In the words of the poet, the child becomes the father of the man.44
This dynamic, whereby what is lost or renounced is not fully
relinquished, but on the contrary, retained in the form of a part of the
mental apparatus which has re-made itself in its image and likeness, is
characteristic of the nature of libido. Like Odinn, Frigg, and the other
AEsir in their reluctance to relinquish the dead Baldr, “Man,” as we have
already heard from Freud, is “incapable of giving up a gratification he
has once enjoyed.” It is as a response to this incapacity to give up, or
better said, this capacity to retain, that the ego-ideal comes into being.
Two quotes from Freud are particularly relevant here. The first of
these, from his paper “On Narcissism,” shows how the ego-ideal (heir to
the negentropic process we have been describing) develops out of the ego­
constituting renunciation of primary narcissism. The second quotation,
taken from Group Psychology and the Analysis ofthe Ego, summarizes the
diverse functions of the ego-ideal. As with all the texts we have cited, these
may also be read with our myth in mind. (I suggest reading “Hel” for
“repression,” “Baldr’s dreams” for “the censorship of dream,” “the
projectiles of the gods” for “influences of the environment,” and so on.)

The development of the ego consists in a departure from the


primary narcissism and results in a vigorous attempt to recover
it. This departure is brought about by means of the
displacement of libido to an ego-ideal imposed from without,
while gratification is derived from the attainment ofthis ideal.45

... [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

44 William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections


of Early Childhood,” Ist line of epigraph.
45 Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: an Introduction,” СР IV, p. 57.
BALDR’S DEATH 105

influences of the environment the demands which that


environment makes upon the ego and which the ego cannot
always rise to; so that a man, when he cannot be satisfied with
his ego itself, may nevertheless be able to find satisfaction in
the ego ideal which has been differentiated out of the ego.
In delusions of observation, as we have further shown, the
disintegration of this agency has become patent, and has thus
revealed its origin in the influence of superior powers, and
above all of parents. But we have not forgotten to add that
the amount of distance between this ego ideal and the real
ego is very variable from one individual to another, and that
with many people this differentiation within the ego does not
go further than with children.46

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

(Odinn rides Sleipnir to Hel to consult the Volva

Part Two: Baldr’s Jung

Baldr in Jung's Thought


We stand with our soul suspended between formidable
influences from within and from without, and somehow we
must be fair to both. This we can do only after the measure
of our individual capacities. Hence we must bethink
ourselves not so much of what we “ought” to do as of what
we can and must do.54

n Jung’s thought, no less than in Freud’s, the Baldr myth enacts itself

I in the form of theories that conceive of the psyche as an ancestral soul.


Like Freud’s account of archaic vestiges having come to oppress mankind
through the cultural super-ego, Jung’s account of the archetypes and the
collective unconscious conceives of the psyche as having been shaped by
the experience of our forefathers through countless generations. In
contrast to Freud, however, Jung was interested less in working out the
mechanics of the process by which the ancestral soul has evolved than in
developing what might be called a participant observer’s model of its
ongoing relationship with the individual psyche.
In choosing to pursue this emphasis, Jung was influenced by the same
epistemological considerations that led him to characterize psychology

54 C. G. Jung, Collected Works, tr. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton


University Press, 1953), vol. 7, para. 397. All subsequent references to Jung’s Collected
Works (CW), vols. 1-20, will be by volume and paragraph number, designated by §.
108 NORTHERN GNOSIS

to be a translation of the archaic speech of myth into a modern


mythologem.55 Though he, in line with Freud, spoke of the archetypes
as “a deposit of phylogenetic experiences and attempts at adaptation,”56
he was quick to add that ultimately the problem of origins is
unanswerable, since everything we might think or say regarding the origin
of these structures is already conditioned by them.57 In contrast to
explicative theories such as Freuds, which are doomed to fall prey to the
mistletoe of their own underlying psychic assumptions, descriptive
theories, such as Jung’s, seek to embrace psychology’s epistemological
conundrum from the outset with the aim of making the underlying
psychic structures in which their discourse is archetypally rooted
conscious. While this approach, of course, also falls prey to the mistletoe
of underlying assumptions, it is simultaneously released, as was the dying
and resurgent Baldr, from identification with the projections of the
various gods or psychic dominants.
Underlining passages in Jung’s writings with the same pen that only
moments ago had highlighted passages in the myth of Baldr and the
works of Freud, we find that the quotation at the top of this section,
from Jung’s essay “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious,”
well conveys the Northern motif that is continued in Jung’s
methodological position. Lacking an Archimedean perspective, our souls
are “suspended between formidable influences” emanating “from within
and from without,” even as Baldr was suspended in the midst of the
projectile-hurling AEsir. While eschewing identification with these
influences, it is salutary, according to Jung, to give them their due all
the same. By remaining mindful of our “individual capacities,” we may
minimize servile and imitative compliance with the received imperatives
of the inner and outer worlds.58 While it would be going too far to heed
the counsel of Nietzsche, who would appear to have fallen into just such
a state of compliance when he bid all higher men to transform every “It
was” into an “I wanted it thus,”59 Jung speaks more modestly of doing
not what we “ought” to do but “what we can and must do.” In Jung’s
view, it is by weighing the influences and imperatives of the soul’s life

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

against the feather of individual capacity that we liberate ourselves from


the soul-obliterating hubris of sustained identification,60 or, as this state
is also called by Jung, possession.61
Jung’s cautionary remark with respect to “what we ought’ to do” is
resonant with our previous discussion of Freud’s theory of the cultural
super-ego. Though Jung does not subscribe to Freud’s theory, criticizing
it a number of times,62 he would certainly have agreed that it presents a
vivid picture of just how formidable the ideals to which we are heir can
be. Man’s cultural values, pavilioned as they are upon archaic vestiges
and evolutionary relics, bear in upon our souls as a crushing weight. But
for Jung, as our quote suggests, this weight is a fatal burden only if we
lose sight of our individual capacities and allow ourselves to become
identified with these influences.
There are still other ways in which the variation of the Baldr myth
that Jung provides in his theory differs from Freud’s. Although he
explicitly describes the collective unconscious as an underworld or land
of the dead,63 even as our Norse myth speaks of a realm called Hel, he
does not imagine death as literally as Freud does with this theory of a
death-instinct bent upon returning to the inert stability of the inorganic
world. The archetypes, for Jung, though age-old, exert a vital and
vitalizing influence upon the life of the individual today. In this regard,
they bear more of a resemblance to Freud’s notion of Eros than to his
notion of the death-instinct, as the following text makes clear.

... [T]he [collective] unconscious, as the totality of all


archetypes, is the deposit of all human experience right
back to its remotest beginnings. Not, indeed, a dead
deposit, a sort of abandoned rubbish-heap, but a living

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

system of reactions and aptitudes that determine the


individual’s life in invisible ways .... It is not just a gigantic
historical prejudice, so to speak, an a priori historical
condition; it is also the source of the instincts, for the
archetypes are simply the forms which the instincts assume.
From the living fountain of instinct flows everything that
is creative; hence the unconscious is not merely conditioned
by history, but is the very source of the creative impulse.
It is like Nature herself—prodigiously conservative, and yet
transcending her own historical conditions in her acts of
creation. No wonder, then, that it has always been a
burning question for humanity how best to adapt to these
invisible determinants.64

As individuals, according to Jung, we are suspended between the


culturally mediated forms of our collective life and the equally collective
instinctual forms which reach us from the interior depths of the
unconscious via archetypal images and the so-called patterns of
behaviour. While being aeons-old, these “invisible determinants” are at
the same time ceaselessly contemporized through our conscious
grappling with them. The proviso here, of course (as we have already
heard from Jung), is that we do not allow ourselves to be assimilated to
these inner and outer collective factors as to an “ought,” but rather,
integrate them into the fabric of our lives by cleaving to a realistic sense
of our individual limitations.
The dialectical stance that Jung introduced into psychology with
these reflections is succinctly summed up in two adages from William
Blake: “Opposition is true Friendship” and “Without Contraries is no
progression.”65 By openly recognizing and at the same time carefully
distinguishing ourselves from the imperatives and spirits which approach
us outwardly from what Freud called the cultural super-ego as well as
inwardly from the collective unconscious, we may, according to Jung,
live an individual life that is at the same time a life in accordance with
the deeper trends of our psychic wholeness. As Jung expresses this in a
passage in which he once again depicts the Baldr-like predicament of the
individual soul,

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

... [S]ince the unconscious factors act as determinants no less


than the factors that regulate the life of society, and are no
less collective, I might just as well learn to distinguish between
what I want and what the unconscious thrusts upon me, as
to see what my office demands of me and what I myself
desire. At first the only thing that is at all clear is the
incompatibility of the demands coming from without and
from within, with the ego standing between them, as
between hammer and anvil. But over against this ego, tossed
like a shuttlecock between the outer and inner demands,
there stands some scarcely definable arbiter, which I would
on no account label with the deceptive name “conscience,”
although, taken in its best sense, the word fits that arbiter
very aptly indeed.......We should do far better to realize that
the tragic counterplay between inside and outside (depicted
in Job and Faust as the wager with God) represents, at
bottom, the energetics of the life process, the polar tension
that is necessary for self-regulation. However different, to
all intents and purposes, these opposing forces may be, their
fundamental meaning and desire is the life of the individual:
they always fluctuate round this centre of balance. Just
because they are inseparably related through opposition, they
also unite in a mediatory meaning, which, willingly or
unwillingly, is born out of the individual and is therefore
divined by him. He has a strong feeling of what should be
and what could be. To depart from this divination means
error, aberration, illness.66

Jung Consults the Volva

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

66 Jung, CW7 § 311.


67 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 299.
112 NORTHERN GNOSIS

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,

I frequently have a feeling that [the dead] are standing


directly behind us, waiting to hear what answer we will give
to them, and what answer to destiny.69

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.

Psychic existence, and above all the inner images ...,


supply the material for all mythic speculations about
a life in the hereafter, and I imagine that life as a
continuance in the world of images. Thus the psyche

68 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 191-192; CW 9i § 224.


69 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 308.
70 Freud, The Ego and the Id, p. 38.
71 Jung, CW 18 § 1084-1106.
BALDR’S DEATH 113

might be that existence in which the hereafter or the land


of the dead is located.72

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

In contrast to the materialistic dialectic through which Baldr enacts


himself in Freud’s explicative account of the origin and development of
the ancestral soul, Jung’s more descriptively conceived vision enacts that
god in its deeply introverted and experiential account of the phenomena
arising from the dialectic relationship between the ego and the
unconscious.74 Jung’s interest, as we have already noted, was not in the
causality of the cosmogonic process that produced our world and us in
it. His concern, as we shall presently discuss, was with what he called
the “second cosmogony.”75 With this term, Jung referred to that still
unfinished act of creation that was inaugurated with the intervention of
reflecting consciousness into the previously unapprehended order of
things. This second cosmogony (in which the first is brought to
fulfillment) continues to unfold as we, acting within the boundaries of
our individual capacities, consciously distinguish ourselves from the inner
and outer ordinances which continue to reach us from the dark world of
the first creation.

Natural history tells us of a haphazard and casual


transformation of species over hundreds of millions of years
of devouring and being devoured. The biological and
political history of man is an elaborate repetition of the same
thing [as our discussion of Freud would attest—G. M.]. But
the history of the mind offers a different picture. Here the

72 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 319-320.


73 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 191-192.
74 Jung, CW18 § 1738. “Modern psychology can no longer disguise the fact that
the object of its investigation is its own essence, so that in certain respects there can
be no ‘principles’ or valid judgements at all, but only phenomenology—in other words,
sheer experience.”
75 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 339.
114 NORTHERN GNOSIS

miracle of reflecting consciousness intervenes—the second


cosmogony. The importance of consciousness is so great that
one cannot help suspecting the element of meaning to be
concealed somewhere within all the monstrous, apparently
senseless biological turmoil, and that the road to its
manifestation was ultimately found on the level of warm­
blooded vertebrates possessed of a differentiated brain—
found as if by chance, unintended and unforeseen, and yet
somehow sensed, felt and groped for out of some dark urge.76

The Struggle with the Dead


ut what account can be given of Jung’s thought concerning the

B development of the ancestral soul? It is not enough to claim that


Jung distanced himself from this question when his theory concerning
the ongoing creative effect that the development of consciousness has
upon the collective unconsciousness suggests otherwise. In this
connection let us recall that Jung believed that what is really done once
by an individual somewhere becomes a permanent addition to the
collective soul, a new dispensation, whether for weal or woe, affecting
everyone everywhere.77
Critics of the phylogenetic theories of Freud and Jung suggest that
their theories are suspect because of a reliance on outmoded notions
of genetics. Freud’s account of the development of the ancestral soul,
however, as we have already seen, is really not a genetic theory at all,
but one that derives its logic from the Helmholzian physics of his day.
In Jung’s case too, despite various references to inheritance, genetics
is less the mechanism by which the ancestral soul or land of the dead
has come into being than is the psyche’s reaction to genetics.7879No
critique of Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious that fails to
reckon with the fact that he considers the psyche to be a reality in its
own right, a principle sui generis,74 can lay claim to having explored
this issue with any authority. Just as the psyche, for Jung, creates an
asymmetrical mirror world of images by responding out of its own

76 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 339.


77 C. G. Jung, Letters, vol. I: 1906-1950 & vol. II: 1951-1961, ed. G. Adler & A.
Jaffe, tr. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973 & 1975), vol.
I, p. 58; vol. II, p. 595.
78 Jung, СW 8 § 331-332.
79 Jung, CW 9, i § 117.
BALDR’S DEATH 115

mysterious nature to the influences at work upon it,80 so the ancestral


soul is the asymmetrical image which the psyche has created in
response to such realities as genetics, generational family history, shared
complexes, human phylogeny, and the history of civilization and
culture.81 As Jung expresses this, “empirically considered ... the
archetype did not ever come into existence as a phenomenon of organic
life, but entered the picture with life itself.”82 All this, of course,
precedes the appearance of consciousness. Predicated on the a priori
foundation provided by the asymmetrical mirror world of the
archetype, consciousness, for Jung, is a later development which enters
the picture in two ways. In the first place, it is the difference between
the objective outer world of nature and the equally objective interior
world of psychic images that creates the dialectical tension from which
consciousness is born.83 In the second place, consciousness, that “second
cosmogony,” continuously contemporizes the collective unconscious by
compelling it to react to the reflective awareness it brings into the order
of things. Again, the proviso here is that the individual, in his role
as bearer of consciousness, remain within the limits of his individual
capacities. As in the science fiction film, Back to the Future, the
ancestral soul seems to have developed in accordance with an inverse
form of ‘Lamarckian inheritance operating on an imaginal, rather than
genetic, level.84 What the individual makes conscious in his life is the
time machine through which the dead acquire the characteristics of
their descendants even as the hero, according to Jung, braves incest
to become his own father.85 Like Baldr’s dreams, Jung’s vision of
individuation as a soul-revolutionizing process on the brink of
apocalypse also disturbs the gods. As Jung (or more likely his associate
Maria Moltzer86) put it in an address to The Psychology Club of Zurich
in which these issues are discussed,

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

The separating of the personality from the collective soul


seems to disturb phylogenetically certain pictures or
formations in the unconscious—a process which we still
understand very little, but which needs the greatest care in
treatment. The struggle with the Dead is terrible, and I
understand the instinct of mankind which protests against
this great effort as long as it is possible to do so.87

Consciousness and the Child Archetype


Consciousness hedged about by psychic powers, sustained
or threatened or deluded by them, is the age-old experience
of mankind. This experience has projected itself into the
archetype of the child, which expresses man’s wholeness. The
“child” is all that is abandoned and exposed and at the same
time divinely powerful; the insignificant, dubious beginning,
and the triumphal end. The “eternal child” in man is an
indescribable experience, an incongruity, a handicap, and a
divine prerogative; an imponderable that determines the

I ultimate worth or worthlessness of a personality.88

n this quotation from Jung’s essay, “The Psychology of the Child


Archetype,” the myth of Baldr is enacted in the description that it
provides of an “age-old experience of mankind.” Like Baldr set up in the
midst of the projectile-hurling AEsir, consciousness is described as having
repeatedly experienced itself, during the course of its long history, as being
“hedged about by psychic powers, sustained, threatened or deluded by
them.” As our text indicates, a common image of this moment in the
soul’s life is that of an “abandoned ... exposed and at the same time
divinely powerful” child. This image, according to Jung, is figurative of
consciousness inasmuch as consciousness is the “child” of the
unconscious. Born of this mother and under her protection, consciousness
is at the same time menaced by the prospect of being incorporated back
into her again, as her womb becomes a tomb. Again, we may think of
Baldr. The youngest of the Norse divinities, Baldr belongs to the
mythological class of youthful consorts of the Great Mother, through his
relationship to the mother-goddess, Frigg. In contrast to the very different

87 Cited in Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement


(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 251-252.
88 Jung, CW9, i § 300.
BALDR’S DEATH 117

figure of the hero, which reflects consciousness at a stage in which it


is strong enough to break free from the sway of the unconscious, the
son-lover figure presents consciousness in a more nascent form.89
The Northern light that we have just brought to bear upon Jung’s
account of the vicissitudes of consciousness was shone by Jung as well.
In the chapter, “Symbols of the Mother and of Rebirth,” of his Symbols
of Transformation, Jung explicitly draws upon the myth of Baldr to
illustrate the dynamics of the relationship between consciousness in its
nascent stages of differentiation and the unconscious. Focusing upon the
mistletoe, Jung reminds us that the deadliness of this plant is a function
of its youth. As the myth puts it, Frigg did not require the mistletoe to
swear itself harmless against Baldr because it was too young. Jung then
goes on to explain that from a botanical point of view mistletoe is a
parasite that lives off of a larger host tree. Completing his brief
amplification he then includes several references to folklore associations
linking mistletoe and fertility. The implication of all this, for Jung, is
that mistletoe, as a fertile parasite living off a larger tree, tells the familiar
story, even in actual nature, of the son-consort of the Great Mother. The
mistletoe, for Jung, is, thus, identical with Baldr. Since both he and the
plant that kills him are images of the same parasitic dependence on the
mother, the scene which they enact together is representative of the fatality
inherent in this archetypal pattern.

... [T]he mistletoe which killed Baldur was “too young”;


hence this clinging parasite could be interpreted as the “child
of the tree.” But as the tree signifies the origin in the sense
of the mother, it represents the source of life, of that magical
life-force whose yearly renewal was celebrated in primitive
times by the homage paid to a divine son, a puer aeternus.
The graceful Baldur is such a figure. This type is granted
only a fleeting existence, because he is never anything but

89 Jung’s characterization of consciousness as the child of the unconscious has two


main facets. In the first place, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically consciousness
is regarded as being younger than the unconscious, an emanation of it as it were. In
the second place, consciousness, being unable to apprehend the greater field of the
unconscious, has projected its vulnerable nascent stages of development into the child
archetype. As Jung (CW 8 § 676) writes, “... [T]he unconscious is always there
beforehand as a system of inherited psychic functioning handed down from primeval
times. Consciousness is a late-born descendent of the unconscious psyche. It would
certainly show perversity if we tried to explain the lives of our ancestors in terms of
their late descendents, and it is just as wrong, in my opinion, to regard the unconscious
as just a derivative of consciousness.”
118 NORTHERN GNOSIS

an anticipation of something desired and hoped for. ... [H]e


only lives on and through the mother and can strike no roots
in the world, so that he finds himself in a state of permanent
incest. He is, as it were, only a dream of the mother, an ideal
which she soon takes back into herself .... The mistletoe,
like Baldur, represents the “child of the mother,” the longed-
for, revivified life-force that flows from her. But, separated
from its host, the mistletoe dies. ... This is the dream of the
mother in matriarchal times, when there was as yet no father
to stand by the side of the son.90

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:

The lovely apparition of the puer aeternus is, alas, a form of


illusion. In reality he is a parasite on the mother, a creature
of her imagination, who only lives when rooted in the
maternal body. In actual psychic experience the mother
corresponds to the collective unconscious, and the son to
consciousness, which fancies itself free but must ever again
succumb to the power of sleep and deadening
unconsciousness. The mistletoe, however, corresponds to the
shadow brother ... whom the psychotherapist regularly meets
as a personification of the personal unconscious. Just as, at
evening, the shadows lengthen and finally engulf everything,
so the mistletoe betokens Baldur’s end. Being an equivalent
of Baldur himself, it is fetched down from the tree like the
“treasure hard to attain”.... The shadow becomes fatal when
there is too little vitality or too little consciousness in the hero
for him to complete his heroic task.91

With these explicit references to Baldr, Jung illustrates the situation


in which consciousness, according to his conception, finds itself during
the nascent stages of its development. Consciousness, in his view, is the
child of the pre-existing (in contrast to repressed) unconscious. Like other
mythical son-consorts of the Mother Goddess, it is fatherless. By this Jung

90 Jung, CW 5§ 392.
91 Jung, CW5 § 393.
BALDR'S DEATH 119

seems to mean that it is lacking in effect. Without a father to stand by


it, youthful consciousness is little more than a dream of the mother upon
which it hangs like the parasitic mistletoe. For all its omnipotence in the
realm of fantasy, little may come of it at this stage. Like the barrage of
projectiles that left Baldr quite unscathed, one fantasy supplants another.
Eventually, however, the situation changes. Lack of adaptation to the
inner and outer worlds results in an accumulation of libido in the personal
unconscious, a turn of events which then takes on a menacing character.
Though protected by the mother, youthful consciousness comes more
and more into conflict with the shadow. Just as the mother’s boy who
doesn’t throw the snowball is the one that gets pelted by the other boys
and then punished for being the instigator of the whole commotion,
emergent consciousness eventually gets pummelled into a more
differentiated awareness of its own existence by happenings which are
anomalous to the mother-bound state in which subject and object are
still archaically identified.

Projection and Re-Collection


hese reflections bring us to the topic of projection. The reader,

T doubtless, has already been reminded by our frequent references


to the “projectile-hurling AEsir” of this psychological phenomenon.
Looking now in detail at the resemblance that exists between the Baldr
myth and Jung’s theory of projection, it is immediately evident that
this theory is another important instance of how Jung’s thought enacts
the myth of Baldr. Just as our Northern myth depicts a situation in
which Baldr is protected by Frigg from the objects which the AEsir throw
(until the sprig of mistletoe brings this situation to an end), so Jung
differentiates between what he calls “archaic identity between subject
and object”92 and projection proper. In the state of archaic identity, or
as he also calls it, participation mystique, the objects of the world have
sworn themselves harmless against the nascently conscious subject who
dwells among them in a state of non-differentiation similar to that which
we believe to exist in the early mother-child relationship. Though to a
more developed consciousness observing such an animistic scene it
would appear that it is rife with projections, Jung reserves this term
for when the emergent consciousness comes into conflict with itself and/

92 Jung, CW6§ 783.


120 NORTHERN GNOSIS

Ancestral bowmen convey the notion ofarchetypalprojection


BALDR’S DEATH 121

or its situation.93 Only then is it proper to pluck the mistletoe and


speak of projection.

Projection results from the archaic identity of subject and


object, but is properly so called only when the need to
dissolve the identity with the object has already arisen. This
need arises when the identity becomes a disturbing factor,
i.e., when the absence of the projected content is a hindrance
to adaptation and its withdrawal into the subject has become
desirable. From this moment the previous partial identity
acquires the character of projection. The term projection
therefore signifies a state of identity that has become
noticeable, an object of criticism, whether it be the self-
criticism of the subject or objective criticism of another.94

The reference in the last sentence of this quotation about criticism


having two possible objects, an inner one which gives rise to self-criticism
and an outer one which gives rise to what Jung calls “objective criticism
of another,” brings us back to our earlier discussion of the place of
consciousness between inner and outer forces from which it must
differentiate itself. Like Baldr in the midst of the objects hurled at him
by the AEsir, ego-consciousness, for Jung, as a “relatively constant
personification of the unconscious,”95 assimilates and is assimilated to
the inner and outer objects which the unconscious animates. To a nascent
consciousness the picture here is one of ceaseless incest or archaic identity.
For a more developed consciousness, one that has already by means of
critical judgements differentiated itself from the unconscious, the picture
is that of a one-sided development. Like the king in alchemy who becomes
so swollen with dropsy that he eventually is dissolved on that account,96
the ego may assimilate to itself more than it can finally contain. At this
point the difference between assimilation and integration becomes clear,
as does the associated difference between archaic identity and projection.
Far from being the integral centre of the world (as the scene of Baldr set
up as the happy target of the gods might suggest), the ego has merely
been assimilating contents one-sidedly, which is to say, on behalf of a

93 In analysis, the shift from participation mystique to critical awareness of


projection is often accompanied by dreams in which a weapon-bearing army appears,
or war has broken out.
94 Jung, CW6 § 783.
95 Jung, CW14 § 129.
96 Jung, CW14§ 358-361.
122 NORTHERN GNOSIS

dominant which it has failed to criticize and is therefore unconsciously


identical with. It is only when such an ego is burst asunder and must
actually face its root assumptions and change its foundations that it is
proper to speak of a projection’s having been grappled with and integrated.
Expressed more anciently, in the ‘psychoanalytic terms’ of our Northern
myth, Baldr’s dreams of his own demise frighten the gods because they
presage the apocalyptic Ragnarok, to which they too are doomed.97

Heroic Incest
or Jung, it is by identifying briefly with the archetype of the hero that

F consciousness begins to differentiate itself out from that more


primordial state of archaic identity which is reflected in mythology by such
son-consort figures as Baldr. Although identification with the hero brings
about an identification with a dominant of the collective unconscious that
will at some time need to be sacrificed, it may initially well serve the
emergence of ego-consciousness as it navigates a whole series of encounters
with the unconscious. As Jung puts it (and here let us keep in mind the
image of Baldr receiving the projectiles which the AEsir mirthfully hurl at
him): “The teleological significance of the hero as a symbolic figure who
attracts libido to himself in the form of wonder and adoration ... lead[s]
it over the symbolic bridge of myth to higher uses ....”98
Another passage from the same work may be read alongside this one
(once again with the scene from our Northern myth in mind) to give a
more complete picture of ego’s heroic capacity to critique, sacrifice, and
transform its incestuous dependency upon the unconscious.

The canalization of regressive libido into the god justifies


the mythological statement that it is the god or the hero
who commits incest. On the primitive level no further
symbolization is required. This only becomes necessary
when the mythological statement begins to bring the god
into discredit, which obviously only happens at a higher
level of morality.99

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

Read as a variant of the myth of Baldr, the phrase “canalization of


regressive libido into the god” is transparent to the mythical image of
Baldr as the recipient of the objects which have been obliged by Frigg
not to harm him. As a mythic representation of the way things happen,
this image prefigures, underpins, and exemplifies Jung’s later concept
of psychological incest, or as he also refers to this, participation mystique,
the archaic identity of subject and object.
The last line of the above quotation is reminiscent of the images of
our Northern myth having to do with Baldr’s ultimate vulnerability and
fatal wounding. Indeed, the scene in which the blind Hod, at Loki’s
biding, brings death to Baldr by hurling the fatal mistletoe at him is
enacted in Jung’s concept of a god being brought into discredit at a higher
level of morality.
The development of consciousness, for Jung, is a function of
continuous moral conflict. Poised between the inner and outer worlds,
pelted with the demands of both, the ego, as we discussed above, must
do justice to both and yet lose itself to neither. In one situation it must
sacrifice the imperatives of the outer world to values that approach it from
within. In another situation is must actualize itself through precisely the
opposite choice. Guiding the ego in its choices is the dim presentiment
of wholeness which it experiments at embodying in this way. Resistances,
of course, arise and complicate this picture. The ego gets overpowered
by inner figures; in its son-lover and heroic phases by the mother, at other
stages by other figures. Instead of coming into possession of the
consciousness that can be drawn from its brief archetypal identifications
(as these are subjected to criticism and sacrificed), it becomes possessed
by a single one. But the triumph it appears to have won soon shows itself
to be unsustainable. Gained at the cost of dissociation from the other
psychic dominants, it will eventually dwindle, like the rootless mistletoe,
for all life is ultimately rooted in the manifold depths of the unconscious.

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:

... [A]s soon as we feel ourselves slipping, we begin to


combat this tendency and erect barriers against the dark,
124 NORTHERN GNOSIS

rising flood of the unconscious and its enticements to regression,


which all too easily takes on the deceptive guise of sacrosanct
ideals, principles, beliefs, etc. If we wish to stay on the heights
we have reached, we must struggle all the time to consolidate
our consciousness and its attitude. But we soon discover that
this praiseworthy and apparently unavoidable battle with the
years leads to stagnation and desiccation of soul.... [E]ach of us
has a tendency to become an immovable pillar of the past.
Nevertheless, the daemon throws us down, makes us traitors to
our ideals and cherished convictions—traitors to the selves we
thought we were. That is an unmitigated catastrophe, because
it is an unwilling sacrifice. Things go very differently when the
sacrifice is a voluntary one. Then it is no longer an overthrow,
... the destruction of all that we held sacred, but transformation
and conservation.100

In this passage, Jung uses concepts such as sacrifice, regression, and


the unconscious to depict something of the same psychic scenario that
the mythic account of Baldr’s death depicts in terms of personified
figures. Like the situation imaged in our Northern myth, the message
is a simple one: consciousness must recognize that all the things that
it becomes identified with sooner or later become redundant and pass
away. As Jung expresses this in another place, this time with reference
to an image resembling the mistletoe of our myth, “Like a projectile
flying to its goal, life ends in death. Even its ascent and its zenith are
only steps and means to this goal.”101 Just as Loki brings the mistletoe
to bear upon a youthful god who has become attached to the objects
of the world that have been hurled at him by the joyful AEsir, so Jung
suggests that consciousness will fall prey to catastrophic compensations
if it fails to make timely enough sacrifices of its archaic identity with
the objects. “In the act of sacrifice,” writes Jung, consciousness gives
up its power and possessions in the interests of the unconscious. This
makes possible a union of opposites resulting in a release of energy.”102
Jung’s account of the necessity of sacrifice in the development of
consciousness maps the same psychological territory as Freud’s account
of the gap between the ego and the ego ideal, even as Baldr enacts himself

100 Jung, CW5 § 553.


101 Jung, CW 8 § 803.
102 Jung, CW 5 § 671.
BALDR’S DEATH 125

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-

103 Jung, CW 2 § 939-998.


104 Jung, CW2 § 895.
105 Jung, CW 16 § 470.
126 NORTHERN GNOSIS

personality.106 Also noteworthy in this connection are Jung’s views on


literal ancestor possession.107

W Inflation, Differentiation, and Actualization


e shall not undertake to discuss here the dynamics involved in the
encounters between the ego and the various figures which
approach it inwardly from the unconscious and outwardly through the
workings of society and fate. It is enough to say that Jung describes a
process in which the ego no sooner achieves differentiation from one
figure than it succumbs to inflation through identification with a
subsequent one.108 Once it has stripped the anima of her fascinating
power and obtained what would at first appear to be a greater handle on
the unconscious, the ego becomes inflated with her mana and,
aggrandized thereby, at risk of losing all that it has gained.109 If, however,
it can once again bring criticism to bear upon its inflated state,110 and

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:

The process of becoming human is represented in dreams and


inner images as the putting together of many scattered units,
and sometimes as the gradual emergence and clarification of
something that was always there.

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

... [T]he integration or humanization of the self is


initiated from the conscious side by our making ourselves aware
of our selfish aims; we examine our motives and try
to form as complete and objective a picture as possible. ...It
is an act of self-recollection, a gathering together of what is
scattered, ofall the things in us that have never been properly
related, and a coming to terms with oneself with a view to
achieving full consciousness. (Unconscious self-sacrifice is
merely an accident, not a moral act.) Self-recollection, however,
is about the hardest and most repellent thing there is for man,
who is predominantly unconscious. Human nature has an
invincible dread of becoming more conscious of itself [i.e., of
dying into a fuller and more conscious life through the
sacrifice of its identifications—G. M.]. What nevertheless
drives us to it is the self, which demands sacrifice by sacrificing
tself to us. Conscious realization or the bringing together of
scattered parts is in one sense an act of the ego’s will, but in
another sense it is a spontaneous manifestation ofthe self which
was always there. Individuation appears, on the one hand, as
the synthesis ofa new unity whichpreviously consisted ofscattered
particles, and on the other hand, as the revelation ofsomething
which existed before the ego and is in fact its father or creator
and also its totality.115

Menacing the entire individuation process for Jung is the danger of


the ego’s being assimilated to the self rather than being brought to
conscious realization. Recounting an experience of his own in which he
was brought perilously close to such a state of being, Jung told the
audience of a seminar given in 1925 of an experience he had had, while
engaged in the self-analytic practice of active imagination, of what he
calls self-deification. Immersed in his mythological studies, Jung was
pelted from without by the subject matter he was reading at that time
and from within by the affects that this material constellated within
him.116 Like Baldr, he became the focal point at which these archetypal
projections were being directed, his ego becoming the place of their re­
collection. Having brought a measure of criticism to bear upon a
seductive feminine figure he called Salome, he then put his trust in the

115 Jung, CW11 § 399-400.


116 Jung, Analytical Psychology, p. 92: As Jung explained to the audience of his 1925
seminar, “I had read much mythology before this fantasy came to me, and all of this
reading entered into the condensation of these figures.”
BALDR’S DEATH 129

evidently more trustworthy figure of Elijah who appeared in his vision


with her. And “then a most disagreeable thing happened—

... [Salome] began to worship me. I said, “Why do you


worship me?” She replied, “You are Christ.” In spite of my
objections she maintained this. I said, “This is madness,”
and became filled with sceptical resistance. Then I saw the
snake approaching me. She came close and began to encircle
me and press me in her coils. ... I realized as I struggled,
that I had assumed the attitude of the Crucifixion. In the
agony and the struggle, I sweated so profusely that the water
flowed down on all sides of me. Then [blind] Salome rose,
and she could see. While the snake was pressing me, I felt
that my face had taken on the face of an animal of prey, a
lion or a tiger.117

On the positive side, according to Jung, an experience of self-deification


such as this one can instill a sense of immortal value in the individual
who experiences it.118 It was for this reason that being likened to a hero
or deity was a basic feature of mystery initiations. On the negative side,
however, the ego may be torn asunder in madness if it is not able finally
to sacrifice such an identification. Jung’s subsequent writings, particularly
the section of his Two Essays in Analytical Psychology dealing with the
mana-personality, clearly indicate that he worked his experience of self­
deification through to a human conclusion.119 Recognizing with Jung
that the mana with which one has been ecstatically cathected is not one’s
personal possession, but an archetypal energy, one is returned to oneself
transformed. Just as Baldr, freighted with the projectiles of the gods, was
finally given over to the realm of the dead, so the afflux of archetypal
libido is given back to the unconscious. The upshot of this, according
to Jung, is that the ego, having by means of a dialectical attitude
individuated itself out from numerous inner and outer principalities and
powers, gives way as the central psychic value to a new psychic centre
about which it revolves as does the earth about the sun.120 This centre,
which Jung calls the self, is conceived as being equidistant between
conscious and unconscious and characterized as “a kind of compensation

117 Jung, Analytical Psychology, p. 96.


118 Jung, Analytical Psychology, p. 97.
119 Jung, CW7 § 374-406.
120 Jung, CW 7 §405.
130 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.

The Moment ofthe Ancestor between Fate and Destiny


In the end it boils down to this: is one prepared to break
with tradition, to be “unhistorical” in order to make history,
or not? No one can make history who is not willing to risk
everything for it, to carry the experiment with his own life
through to the bitter end, and to declare that his life is not
a continuation of the past, but a new beginning. Mere
continuation can be left to the animals, but inauguration is
the prerogative of man, the one thing he can boast of that

S lifts him above the beasts.122

elf-realization, according to Jung, is both the recognition of one’s


rootedness in the ancestral soul and an ahistorical break with tradition.
In the case of a personality which has lagged behind the level of
differentiation already achieved by the collective, the encounter with inner
and outer forces will be largely compensatory and collective institutions
such as the Church will mediate these compensations to the individual
in the form of moral precepts or liturgical symbols. Other personalities,
however, having, through the integration of projections, moved beyond
the state of archaic identity in which the collective soul slumbers in their
day, may exert, through their ahistorical acts of individuation-actualizing
choice, a compensatory influence upon the collective unconscious. Like
Baldr, their dreams will disturb the gods. And, again, like that dying and
resurgent Northern deity, their integration of archetypal projections will
bring about the Ragnarok or end of the gods.
It was to the needs of these latter individuals that Jung’s psychology
was particularly addressed. As Jung writes, “Among neurotics, there are
not a few who do not require any reminders of their social duties and

121 Jung, CW7 § 404.


122 Jung, CW10 § 268.
BALDR’S DEATH 131

The Ragnarok—the final conflagration, the end of the gods

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

123 Jung, CW 4 § 658.


132 NORTHERN GNOSIS

personal grievance against parents, the feelings of abandonment, of


neglect, may, in the same way, be collective problems, personal encounters
in which the individual confronts the myth we are all in.
When such is the case, one may dream dreams like Baldr’s—ancestor
dreams.124 Or, said another way, having come of age in this recognition,
one may relate to one’s dreams in a different way—finding in them not
only wise, compensatory commentaries on current dilemmas, but a legacy
of questions and quandaries which our forebears have passed down to
us. In this connection we may recall that it was the same Jung who was
consulted by “the dead [who] came back from Jerusalem, where they
found not what they sought”125 that wrote: “we find among our patients
individuals called to advance civilization.”126
The writings of our analytic forebears, Freud and Jung, may be read
in the same manner-—runically, as if they, too, were ancestral dreams.
By imagining the ways in which the divinities of the ancient North have
enacted themselves in their thought, we grapple, perhaps better than they
did, with the issues that drove them apart. Such, at any rate, has been
the aim of the present study. By reflecting the conceptualizations over
which the ways of Freud and Jung divided in the mythical images of
Thor’s hammer, Barnstock’s progeny, and Baldr’s death, we have
endeavoured to return the mana with which these giants conflictually
cathected each other to the Valhalla of that archetype which psychology,
as the “living and lived myth" of our time, continues by other means.

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

A 82 (n. 3), 107-110, 115-117,


132. See also child
active imagination 74, 112, 128 archetype; father archetype
Adler, Alfred 56 feminine 70. See also anima
AEsir xii, 3-5, 7, 20, 22-23, 28, 37, hero 122
40, 42, 48, 78, 79, 81-82, 87, masculine 70. See also animus
91-97, 99, 102, 104, 106, 108, Archimedean perspective 24—26,
116, 119, 121-123, 124, 126 (n. 30
106) Asgard 28, 42
affect-image 18 axis familias 43
alchemy xviii (n. 22), 121 axis mundi 43
Chinese xix
analytical interpretation 67—68. See В
also constructive-synthetic
Baldr iii, xv, xix, 78, 79, 80-86, 88,
interpretation
91-105, 107-113, 116-119,
analytical psychology. See psychol­
121-124, 126 (n. 106) 126-130
ogy: analytical
Barnstock xix, 42—44, 48-52, 54-
ancestor(s) xii, 37, 47, 85, 87, 89,
56, 58, 61, 63-65, 68-70, 76,
112, 117 (n. 89), 126, 130, 132
132
ancestral soul 9 (n. 18), 60, 64, 69,
betrayal 71, 75
84-85, 97, 106-107, 113-115,
Beyond the Pleasure Principle xvi,
125, 130
84, 91 (n. 23), 93, 99
anima xiii, 31, 54, 66, 70—71, 73,
Bivrost 5
76, 82 (n. 3), 125-126
Blake, William 110
anima mundi xviii (n. 22)
bloodline 43, 47, 49, 72
animus 70-71, 73, 76, 82 (n. 3),
Bodenbeschaffenheit xviii (n. 22)
125-126
Boehme, Jacob 3
archaic identity 76, 119, 121-124,
Briinnhilde xvi
130
archetypal psychology. See psychol­ c
ogy: archetypal
archetype xi, xiii, xiv, xviii, xix, 4— Casey, Edward 9
5, 7, 9-10, 13, 22-25, 27, 30 castrating father 57 (n. 42), 61
(n. 69), 32-34, 42, 63, 69-70, castration
134 INDEX

as sacrifice 64 dissociation xi, 123


threat 55, 64 dream(s) xviii, 33, 57, 127, 130, 132
child archetype 116, 117 (n. 89) (n. 124)
Civilization and its Discontents 84, ancestor 132
102, 105 and death 93 (n. 25)
collective mind 57, 84 Baldr’s 80, 80-81, 85, 88, 93, 104,
collective unconscious xix, 10, 15, 111, 115, 122, 132
25, 34-35, 74-76, 82 (n. 3), censorship of 18 (n. 45), 104-105
97, 107, 109-110, 114-115, Freudian vs. Jungian interpreta­
118, 122, 125-127, 130 tion of 67
compensation xix, 124, 129, 130 in Freudian theory 18
compulsion 126 (n. 110) Jung’s, of blond-haired youth 74
death-seeking 89 Jung’s, of boat in harbour 6
repetition 83, 87-89, 91-92, 102 Jung’s, of killing Siegfried 74
(n. 42), 105 (n. 48) projection in 121 (n. 93)
consciousness xvi, 3, 9, 11 (n. 27), prophetic 48
13, 18 (n. 45), 23-25, 28, 29, sexual symbols in 60
33-34, 38, 46-47, 61, 70-71, Spielrein’s 58, 72
75, 79, 85, 98, 109 (n. 62),
112-119, 121-128 E
development of 53 (n. 30), 92,
Eckstein, Emma 54
99, 102, 114, 123, 124
Edda. See Elder Edda; Younger
constancy principle xix, 83-86, 88,
Edda
91, 106 (n. 52)
ego xiii, 3, 10, 11 (n. 27), 15-19, 29
constructive-synthetic interpreta­
(n. 67), 30, 46, 72-74, 84, 87,
tion 67-69. See also analytical
95-98, 100-105, 111-113,
interpretation
121-129. See also ego­
cosmic tree 43. See also Yggdrasill
consciousness; ego-ideal; ego­
countertransference 53-54, 66, 70,
instinct; non-ego; pleasure
75. See also transference
ego; reality ego
cultural locus xv
Ego and the Id, The 11 (n. 27), 84,
D 96, 97
ego-consciousness 121-122
Darwin, Charles 55, 85 ego-ideal xix, 8, 10, 30 (n. 69), 82
death-instinct xiii, 87, 89, 90, 93, (n. 3) 83-84, 98, 100-101,
106, 109 104-105, 105, 112, 124, 125
depth psychology. See psychology: ego-instinct 73, 87
depth Elder Edda 15 (n. 38)
Descartes, Rene 6 Elijah 75, 129
“Destruction as a Cause of endogamous kinship 46
Coming into Being” 71, 73 Enlightenment 28
INDEX 135

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

32-35, 42, 61—62, 64-65, 72, L


85, 101 (n. 39), 104, 110, 112-
117, 122-124, 127, 132. See libido 7, 13, 31, 64, 66 (n. 63), 95-
also affect-image 96, 100-101, 103-104, 106,
imagery 12, 18, 63, 73 112, 119, 122
imaginal xiii, xv, xix, xx, 4, 9, 59 archetypal 129
(n. 44), 67, 73, 115 displacement of 104
imagination xiv, xv, 12, 29, 30, 44, endogamous kinship 46, 62
57 (n. 42), 118 exogamous 58
incest 43-46, 49, 51-56, 60, 62- introversion of 47, 58
69, 70, 72-73, 75, 84, 115, narcissistic 101 (n. 39), 103
118, 121-123 object 101 (n. 39)
as rebirth 64 regressive 122-123
higher 69 retrograde 106
lower 69 sexual 12 (n. 31)
psychological 123 lightning 3-6, 9, 12-13, 15, 19, 26,
taboo 62, 64 32-33, 36-37, 42
individuation 29 (n. 68), 37, 65, Little Hans 18
71, 74-76, 112, 115, 125, 128, Loki 20, 21, 27, 30, 81-83, 86, 92-
130, 131 93, 101, 123-124
instinct xiii (n. 5), 3, 8, 18, 53 (n. lumen naturae 9
30), 72, 87, 89, 91-94, 101,
105 (n. 47), 105-106, 110, 116.
M
See also death-instinct; ego­ madness 74 (n. 87), 129
instinct Magna Mater 63
sexual 106 (n. 52) mana 41, 126, 129, 132
integration 75, 121, 128, 130 mana-personality xix, 125-127, 126
introjection 30, 96-97, 104 (n. 106), 129
introversion 12, 46, 61 materialism 28—30, 32
mental apparatus 18, 19 (n. 50), 22,
J 85, 88, 94, 100, 104
Job 111 Mercurius 25
Jotunheim 27-28, 30, 34-37, 42 Midgard 42
Jotunns 5, 15-16, 19, 21, 22, 23, Midgard Serpent 5, 6 (n. 6), 22,
25, 28, 37 131
Jung, Emma 66 “Mind and Earth” xvi, xviii (n. 22)
Mirmir's well xi
К mistletoe 81, 85-89, 91-93, 99,
101-102, 106, 108, 117-119,
Keyserling, Count xviii (n. 22)
121, 123-124
Kynfylgja 51. See also Volsung:
family fetch
INDEX 137

Mjollnir xix, 2, 4, 7, 16, 25, 27-28, P


31-32, 34, 42
Moltzer, Maria 115 Paracelsus 3, 9
Moses 7, 45, 106 parental imago 46, 61, 70
Mother Goddess 116, 118. See also parricide 46, 55, 63 (n. 56), 83
Frigg part-drive 8
mother-complex 61 participation mystique 44, 46, 48,
mourning 83, 95-97 61, 65, 69, 70, 71, 74, 76, 119,
“Mourning and Melancholia” 84, 121 (n. 93), 123
94 persona 54 (n. 35), 73
mud xiii, 5-7, 9, 11-13 philosophers stone xviii (n. 22),
multicultural imagination xix 32, 37-38, 42
“Philosophical Tree, The” 41, 43
N (n. 4)
phylogeny 84, 115, 125
Nanna 82
pleasure principle 3, 9, 19, 83-84,
narcissism 83, 101, 104
86-89, 92, 94, 103
primary 101 (n. 39), 101-102,
pleasure-ego 103
104
Preiswerk, Helene 59
negentropy 91 (n. 23)
primal crime 55-56, 63 (n. 56)
neurosis 10, 18, 44, 45 (n. 11), 58,
primal father 55-56, 61, 84, 102
70, 75, 131
(n. 42)
aetiology of 63
primal horde 55
neurotic dissociation xi
principle of constancy. See con­
neurotic(s) 10, 18, 46, 52, 53, 56,
stancy principle
63, 68-69, 130
principle of pleasure. See pleasure
Niebelungenlied 71
principle
Nietzsche, Friedrich 108-109
“Project for a Scientific Psychol­
Nivlheim 80
ogy” 84
non-ego 23, 125
projection 25, 29-30, 34, 37—38,
О 43 (n. 4), 63, 71, 108, 119-
122, 126 (n. 106) 127-128,
objective psyche xiv, xviii (n. 22), 130
3-4, 9, 13, 31-32, 69 archetypal 120, 128, 130
Odinn xi, xvi-xx, 3, 48—50, 52, 54— psychic factor 23, 26, 28-30, 32-
56, 62, 64-65, 68-69, 80-82, 33, 46, 61, 71, 89
93-95, 104, 107, 111-112 psychic reality xiv
Oedipus xiii, 45-46, 52 psychoanalysis xiii, xix, 7-8, 11—
Oedipus complex 10, 44, 46, 48, 12, 15, 25, 31-32, 35, 44-45,
52, 57, 63 47, 51, 53, 71, 75, 80, 86-87
“On Narcissism” 84, 104 Psychological Types 5, 13
138 INDEX

psychology xi-xv, xviii-xix, 4, 22, origin of, according to Freud 18


24, 25, 30, 32, 43 (n. 4), 52, (n. 45)
66, 79, 107-108, 110, 112- Rerir 48—49
113, 130, 132 resistance(s)
analytical xiv, 7, 9, 12, 15, 16, and free association 8
22, 25, 27, 31, 35, 43 (n. 4), and mourning 94, 96-97
80. See psychology: analytical and repetition compulsion 89
archetypal xiii-xiv, xv, 42 and the development of con­
depth xii, xiii, xv, xviii, 43 (n. 4). sciousness 123
See psychology: depth character 98 (n. 31)
“Psychology of the Child Arche­ Jung’s, to Freud 52
type, The” 116 Jung’s, to Freud’s methods 53
“Psychology of the Transference, Jung’s, to Salome 129
The” 65 Jung’s, to sexuality 73
puer aeternus 117, 118 Spielrein’s, to Jung's Freudian
approach 66
R toward sexuality 72-74
Ragnarok 80-81, 82 (n. 3), 106, towards parents 62, 68
122, 130, 131 resurrection 98, 100
Rhine-maidens xviii
Rainbow Bridge 5, 7, 9, 40. See
Bivrost Rolland, Romain 101
rationalism 24-25, 28 Rosarium Philosophorum 65
reality ego 103 runes xii, xvi (n. 17), xvii, xviii, xx,
reality principle 3, 9, 19, 87-89, 12-13, 15
92, 102 (n. 42), 103 Rungne 35, 37
regression 52, 124
s
incestuous 54
Jung’s 59-60 sacrifice xi, xvi (n. 17), xix, 46, 58,
psycho-sexual theory of 12 63-64, 70-74, 76, 122-125,
“Relations between the Ego and 123, 127-129
the Unconscious” 108 Salome 75, 128-129
renunciation 10, 104, 105 (n. 47), second cosmogony 113,115
125 Secret of the Golden Flower xix
instinctual 105 self 9 (n. 18), 60, 65, 70, 73, 127-
Jung’s, of Spielrein 67 130
of incest 56 self-preservation 72—73, 87
of infantile forms of gratification self-realization 37, 75, 130
7 self-sacrifice 69, 128
of primary narcissism 104 sexual ideal 82 (n. 3)
of the unattainable 52 sexuality 7, 12 (n. 31), 26, 57
repression(s) 8, 11 (n. 27), 104 destructive aspect of 72
INDEX 139

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

psychoid 11 (n. 27) Volsunga Saga 45, 49, 52, 54, 75


third 11 (n. 27), 98 (n. 31) Volva 80-81, 93, 107, 111, 112
underworld xiv (n. 11), 13, 42, 89,
93 (n. 25), 109. See also Hel w
unio mystica 65 Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido
Utgarda-Loki 14, 16, 19—27, 29 (n.
12, 31, 46-47, 54, 59-61, 67-
67), 35, 131 68, 71
V Winnicott, Donald W. 101 (n. 40)
wisdom xi, xvi, xix, xx, 10, 25 (n.
Valhalla 81, 86, 88, 94, 132 60), 68
Valkyries xviii wish-psychosis 95
Volsung World Ash 7, 42. See also Yggdrasill
blood 43, 46 World Tree xi, xvii, 5, 82. See also
children 62 Yggdrasill
family 51
family fetch 51,71 Y
sons/brothers 43, 51, 55
Yggdrasill xi, xvii, 5, 7, 9, 40, 41—
soul 46
43, 64. See also World Tree;
Volsung the Hun xix, 43, 48-52,
World Ash
54, 71-72
Younger Edda 15 (n. 39), 16
Analytical Psychology/Psychoanalysis/Mythology

Can the theories of Freud and Jung be read through the stories of Norse Mythology?

Are Psychoanalysis and Analytical Psychology a Northern form ofgnosis?

C.G. Jung regarded psychology to be a modern form of myth.


Shaped by archetypal structures, psychological theories, he
maintained, do not simply explain our psychic life in the manner of
a science, they also give expression to the soul. Inspired by this
insight, the present book examines the writings of Freud and Jung in
the light of Norse mythology. Ideas such as psychic reality, ego­
ideal, participation mystique, and kinship libido are seen as
mythological figures, the figures of Thor, Baldr, and the Volsungs.
Illumined in this way, the founding texts of psychoanalysis and
analytical psychology are shown to be a veritable pantheon of God­
terms. Jung's theory of the archetype is read as a variant of the old
stories concerning Thor's encounters with the giants. Freud's
theories of a death instinct, repetition compulsion, mourning and
the ego-ideal are read as a variant of the tale of Baldr's death. And
the fractious relations of Freud, Jung and Sabina Spielrein are seen
as reflecting the saga of the Volsungs. Imaginative and scholarly,
Northern Gnosis will be valued by the psychoanalytic reader for its
fresh appreciation of Freud and Jung as makers of the myths that
continue to inform our minds.

About the Author


Greg Mogenson is the editor of the Studies in Archetypal Psychology Series of
Spring Journal Books and a Jungian psychoanalyst practicing in London, Ontario,
Canada. The author of many articles in the field of analytical psychology, his books
include God Is a Trauma: Vicarious Religion and Soul-Making, Greeting the Angels:
An Imaginal View of the Mourning Process, The Dove in the Consulting Room:
Hysteria and the Anima in Bellas and Jung, and (with Wolfgang Giegerich and David
L. Miller) Dialectics & Analytical Psychology: The El Capitan Canyon Seminar.

Spring Journal Books


Studies in Archetypal Psychology Series

Series Editor: Greg Mogenson

www.springjournalandbooks.com

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