 Reading Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy continues to feel less like studying a book and more like receiving a long-forgotten gospel. In pages 12 through 20, he opens up something so familiar it almost hurts—this deep ache in the modern psyche, this sense that we’ve lost something essential. That ache, Jung shows us, is the cry of the soul. This isn’t just philosophical musing. Jung puts his finger right on the wound. The modern ego, he says, has become hollowed out. We’ve severed ourselves from the source of instinct, from the sacred imagination, from the symbolic life that used to orient our inner world. He names it plainly: “the hollowness of Christian civilization” (Jung, 1980, p. 17). Now, he’s not rejecting Christianity here. He’s lamenting what it’s become—disconnected from mystery, from symbol, from soul. I feel this in my bones. So many of us walk into churches and don’t find the Living God anymore—we find systems, ideas, maybe moral encouragement, but not the burning bush. Not the fire. The Anima, the Child, and the Way Back Jung dives into a series of dreams that begin with a simple image: green pastures full of sheep. He connects this to the 23rd Psalm, that hauntingly tender line: “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures” (p. 13). For Jung, this image points to the soul’s longing for spiritual rest, for orientation, for a return to what he calls the “children’s land”—a time when our consciousness hadn’t yet split from the ancient psyche, the collective unconscious. That hit me. The children’s land. The place before the split. Before we got too grown-up, too rational, too responsible to listen to our dreams. And then she appears. The dreamer sees a woman who points the way. Jung calls her the anima, the soul-image, the inner guide. She shows the way forward by leading us backward—into memory, symbol, image, longing. She is the one who invites us to remember the soul. “The anima… now appears as the psychopomp, the one who shows the way. The way begins in the children’s land” (p. 13). In my own life, I know what it feels like to lose that inner compass. To lead as a pastor while wondering if I’ve lost the thread myself. But the soul sends messengers—dreams, synchronicities, whispers in the dark. And they’re always pointing us home. When Instinct Dies, Soul Follows Jung doesn’t romanticize this journey. He’s clear: we’ve lost our instincts. And when we lose our instincts, we get disoriented. We don’t know what we want, who we are, or why we’re suffering. He writes, “The separation is indeed inevitable, but it leads to such an alienation from that dim psyche of the dawn of mankind that a loss of instinct ensues… This brings about a still greater alienation from the fountainhead, thus increasing the lack of instinct until it becomes lack of soul” (p. 13). That’s it. That’s what I see every week in therapy, in ministry, in my own shadow work. We don’t just feel lost. We’ve forgotten how to feel our way back. Our culture teaches us to solve, fix, optimize, achieve—but not to listen. And without the symbolic life—without dreams, imagination, the presence of the sacred—we dry out. We go numb. We become soul-weary. But the Soul Still Speaks And yet, the anima still appears. The dreams still come. The unconscious still pushes forward images that carry real vitality. That’s the grace of it all. Jung sees in these dream fragments a kind of unconscious gospel. The ego may forget, but the Self remembers. This section of the book reminds me why I’m so drawn to Jung in the first place. He’s not just analyzing dreams or reviving alchemy as a historical curiosity. He’s laying out a sacred psychology. One that honors the religious instinct, the inner Christ, the mystery of the Self trying to incarnate again in each of us. We are not meant to be surface creatures. We are meant to descend, to suffer, to be transformed. That’s what alchemy always pointed to. That’s what Christianity meant before we institutionalized it beyond recognition. And that’s what the soul is still trying to show us—one dream at a time.
0 Comments
A Review of Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy, pp. 1–12: On the Condition of the Soul in the West4/12/2025  In the opening pages of Psychology and Alchemy (Collected Works Vol. 12), C.G. Jung begins what will become a comprehensive exploration of alchemy as a psychological system. But before turning to esoteric symbolism, Jung grounds the work in clinical observation and cultural critique. He introduces not a curiosity about symbols, but a crisis of meaning. What emerges clearly from these early pages is his concern with the condition of the Western soul, its disorientation, its estrangement from mystery, and its forgotten capacity for transformation.
The Unconscious as Carrier of Spiritual Content Jung’s starting point is his clinical work. Over many years of analysis, he discovered that “European and American men and women” were producing in their dreams “symbols similar to, and often identical with, the symbols found in the mystery religions of antiquity, in mythology, folklore, fairytales, and the apparently meaningless formulations of such esoteric cults as alchemy” (Psychology and Alchemy, p. 8). This observation becomes the foundation of his theory of the collective unconscious. More than a mere repetition of old forms, these symbols brought with them psychic vitality. Jung writes that they “brought with them new energy and new life to the people to whom they came” (p. 8). The symbols were not abstract decorations; they had the effect of restoring orientation and direction, what one might call, in older terms, a spiritual reawakening. Psychic Reality as Spiritual Reality One of the most striking features of these early reflections is Jung’s assumption that psychic reality is itself real, and not only real, but spiritual. He speaks of the unconscious as “a source of energy and insight in the depth of the human psyche” and asserts that it has operated “in and through man from the earliest periods of which we have records” (p. 8). This language situates the unconscious not merely as a storage house of memory or trauma, but as the very field through which meaning and transformation unfold! This view directly challenges the modern scientific reductionism that would treat psychic life as epiphenomenal (secondary, derived or less essential). For Jung, the unconscious is not beneath reason but beneath ego, and it contains within it the potential for renewal. That is, it carries the kind of symbolic, imaginative, and often religious content which modernity has discarded and which, as he implies, Western individuals desperately need. Alchemy as a System of Soul In describing alchemy, Jung is clear that his interest lies in it as “a particular example of symbol-formation, extending in all over some seventeen centuries” (p. 9). Alchemy, then, is not to be judged on its material claims, but as a cultural expression of the same symbolic processes found in the unconscious. The alchemical texts, obscure, disorganized, and imagistic—bear a resemblance to dreams. Jung’s approach is comparative: he places the symbolic language of alchemy alongside the dream material of modern individuals, and in doing so, demonstrates their affinity. Both contain images of transformation, death, renewal, and union of opposites. The alchemists, he suggests, were projecting their psychic life into matter, unconsciously working through their own individuation. He notes that his case material involves a patient who “had no knowledge of what the symbols appearing in the dreams might mean” (p. 9), which lends empirical weight to his hypothesis: the symbols arise spontaneously. They are not culturally acquired in the usual sense, but seem to emerge from what Jung terms the collective unconscious—a deeper layer of the psyche common to all humanity. The Condition of the Western Soul This leads to Jung’s implicit critique of the West. The fact that people’s dreams unconsciously generate alchemical symbols suggests that modern consciousness is no longer in contact with the symbolic layer of reality. It has lost access to the very images that facilitate psychic development. He writes: “People forget that even their passions are only partially theirs; they belong also to their ancestors and have existed in the race for ages” (p. 10). This is not merely a genetic or cultural statement—it is existential. To forget the deeper, inherited layers of the psyche is to forget the soul itself. Jung does not use the term “soullessness” directly in these pages, but it is implied in his concern: that the Western ego has cut itself off from the wellspring of life. It operates in isolation, unaware that its suffering might be the result of symbolic starvation. A Christian Context (Implicit) Though not emphasized explicitly in these early pages, Jung’s broader project is deeply informed by Christian symbolic material. Even here, he lays the groundwork for later comparisons between alchemical imagery and Christian motifs. The “spiritual development of the individual human being” (p. 9) that he describes echoes traditional theological language about sanctification or the transformation of the inner person. His emphasis on symbolic processes that “reach far beyond the horizon of the conscious mind” (p. 11) gestures toward mystery, transcendence, and what the early Church Fathers might have called the imago Dei—the image of God in the soul, which must be recovered. What Christianity once described through myth, liturgy, and sacrament, Jung is now recovering through depth psychology. In a later passage (not yet reached, but consistent with this opening), Jung will write that: “The goal of the psychic process is the Self, the God-image within us.” (Aion, §40) The implication is clear: the soul’s journey toward wholeness—whether called individuation or sanctification—remains fundamentally spiritual. Conclusion In these opening pages of Psychology and Alchemy, Jung is not just setting up a historical study. He is diagnosing a cultural and psychological rupture. Western man, he suggests, has forgotten how to listen to the soul. In its place, he has installed rationalism, moralism, and surface-level adjustment. But the unconscious continues to generate symbols of healing, drawn from the same deep source that once inspired religion and myth. For Jung, alchemy becomes a historical parallel to the work of psychotherapy: a symbolic system for understanding the psyche’s natural drive toward integration. But more importantly, it becomes a witness to something modernity has lost—the symbolic life of the soul. In recovering alchemy, Jung is not escaping modernity; he is trying to re-enchant it. And perhaps that is what makes this book enduringly relevant—not only to clinicians or historians, but to anyone concerned with the spiritual emptiness of our time. The Parable of the Weeds Among the Wheat4/10/2025  In the story of Oedipus and the Sphinx, Oedipus is told a riddle, you may remember it from your days in English class. “What walks on four feet in the morning, two in the afternoon and three at night?” And Oedipus answers “Man: as an infant, he crawls on all fours; as an adult, he walks on two legs and; in old age, he uses a walking stick.”The Sphinx could have easily said, “man has three phases of life,” but the power of that truth is felt only when one reflects on what that riddle is really speaking to, seeing that our whole lives exist within those stages. In the ancient world this style of teaching was common, the use of parables, riddles, and metaphors to which Jesus employs with his students, was a way of teaching that got students to think and engage with what the teacher was teaching. Today Jesus tells us another parable, a kind of riddle that when reflected upon, will give us some wisdom about the kingdom of Heaven. King Solomon writes what the word of God is for in Proverbs chapter 1, it’s “for learning about wisdom and instruction, for understanding words of insight, for gaining instruction in wise dealing, righteousness, justice, and equity; to teach shrewdness to the simple, knowledge and prudence to the young — let the wise also hear and gain in learning, and the discerning acquire skill, to understand a proverb and a parable, the words of the wise and their riddles.” So when you come to church and read the Bible throughout the week, this is what you are here to acquire, knowledge and wisdom, so that when you live your life, you aren’t living it out in the dark, guessing your way through it, no, God has prepared this book like a giant stone to be mined for its treasure with the pickaxe of our intellects. How have we gotten all the cool things we have in the world today? Through that very practice of mining resources and using those resources for our good. The Bible is our resource when it comes to spiritual knowledge and wisdom, so let us dig into this passage of scripture this morning and see what Jesus would like us to know about the kingdom of Heaven. Anyone interested in going there? Good.
Jesus tells his disciples, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field.” So if someone says to you, “what’s the kingdom of heaven like?” You can say, “it’s like someone who sowed good seed in his field.” There’s this great YouTube channel where they ask physicists and mathematicians to explain big ideas to a senior, a person in their 40’s, a person in their 20’s, a person in their teens, and then a kid in grammar school. Do you think that genius of a person explains quantum physics or complicated math theories all in the same way to each person? No, a good teacher speaks and uses language and examples that make sense to the persons stage of life, speaking to where they’re at. Each version of what that person teaches will sound different but at the same time, they’ll be saying the same thing. Jesus, as a teacher, represents Gods wisdom here on earth, that’s why they called him “the Word made flesh” and His wisdom and knowledge was infinite but even still, Jesus had to craft messages that would make sense to those who didn’t have infinite wisdom and knowledge. Parents have to do this all the time with their kids. Like those math and science teachers who adapted their teachings for their audiences, so Jesus crafts a message with tremendous wisdom in a simple story about weeds and wheat. But don’t be fooled, there are no simple teachings of Jesus, they’re rich and deep, and Jesus crafted these parables in a way that, if explored correctly, would reveal heavenly knowledge to us. So, what is the kingdom of heaven like? (Follow along in your bulletin) “It can be compared to someone who sowed good seed in their field; (semi-colon, which means the sentence isn’t done yet),” it says, "BUT while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away.” Well, that sounds like something my brother would do or something Abram would do. I bought him Lincoln Logs, Molly and I built this nice little city with them, and guess what Abram did? Godzilla child, he destroyed and messed it all up. You see, I just said the same thing as the parable but used different imagery. The kingdom of heaven is like someone who set something up nicely and then someone came in and messed it up. Bible readers would immediately pick up on what he’s referencing. Somebody plants something and another somebody comes along and gets in what they planted and messes it up…sound familiar, sound like the way a certain book begins? In Genesis what does God plant? A garden? And if Jesus speaks in parables, how do you think God the Father speaks? In parables. So Genesis tells us that humanity began with a garden. And what happened in that garden called Eden, which means joy, that joyful garden? Many of us grew up with the Genesis story being a story about how the universe was made but science has disproven that and so people say, “look, the Bible cant be trusted.” Let me ask, “is the kingdom of heaven really like a man who sowed good seed? Like did a man literally go out and throw seed that became the kingdom of heaven?” No, it is a parable, so Genesis also is a parable that is speaking about how the world came to be through the eyes of God, with symbolic imagery, and we hear, “in the beginning,” the kingdom of heaven is like a field that someone decided to plant a garden in. But what happened in the garden, the garden of Eden? If you were to take a Sunday School 2.0 class we would learn that there’s more to the story of God in the garden of Eden, more to the story than talking snakes, bad human beings, and trees that decide our fate. Because in reality, God was never in the garden, did you know that? No, it was not god but an angel that was placed in the garden on behalf of God. Remember the tree of life, God put angels with fiery swords around that tree, well that wasn’t the only angel in the garden that day. There’s some famous angels that come out of the Biblical tradition, we have Gabriel who we will know from our next holiday here, Gabriel is known as the messenger angel, Gods voice in the world. Whenever a message needed to get out, God would delegate that to Gabriel. Then there’s Michael, who is known as the leader of Gods angel-armies. Whenever there was a big battle to be fought in the Bible, you can assume that God has sent Michael to do that on his behalf, and there are stories in the Bible that tell us that. In apocryphal texts you’ll find more angels, Raphael, an angel of healing and guidance, and Uriel, an archangel of wisdom. Like Jesus had his disciples as his servants for the church, God had his angels to serve his church in the spiritual realms. But there’s one angel I have not mentioned yet, anyone want to take a guess at his name? Lucifer. And guess what Lucifer’s job was? He was Gods guardian angel, charged with watching over humanity’s well being and his first station was…the Garden of Eden. Let me stop there and just ask again, “what is the kingdom of heaven like?” “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away.” What do I do with that when I am at home and need of some divine knowledge? I open up the Bible and it says something like that. What do I do with it? I will tell you now, do not take it literally. That way the story opens up, you are invited to engaged with it, wrestle it, and see if you can get something out of it. That’s what I did, I stepped back and said, “what is this story really trying to tell me?” That someone started something good and then it got messed up by someone else. You see, that is what the passage is really saying, that is the thought it is trying to provoke in me. Learn how to do that with the Bible and then you will learn how to do that with people, do that, and you will be called, “wonderful listener and counselor.” We gotta get to the essence of what Jesus was saying so more illumination follows. Someone started something good and then it got messed up by someone else and Jesus is telling us, “thats what the kingdom of heaven is like." So in Genesis God starts a garden and then places his servants, his angels to watch over it. I am a big Star Wars fan and so I love all the new Disney stuff that is coming out, it gives us more background into the characters that I grew up with. In the movie you only get a couple hours to see the story acted out but what has followed are more stories behind the characters, with all these new shows coming out, and in the same way, the Bible speaks to more of what happened in the Garden of Eden, but in other stories found in the Bible. Here is a passage about Lucifer, in case some of you may be thinking, “I have never heard that version of Genesis Shawn,” but it comes from Ezekiel chapter 28. It tells us exactly what went wrong in the Garden that God planted, here’s more on that angel Lucifer, it says, and God is speaking, “You were the signet of perfection Lucifer, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. You were in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was your covering, carnelian, chrysolite, and moonstone, beryl, onyx, and jasper, sapphire, turquoise, and emerald and worked in that gold, were your settings and your engravings. On the day that you were created they (humans) were prepared. You were a cherub; I placed you on the holy mountain of God; you walked among the stones of fire. You were blameless in your ways from the day that you were created, until iniquity was found in you. In the abundance of your trade you were filled with violence, and you sinned, so I cast you as a profane thing from the mountain of God, and I drove you out, O guardian cherub, from among the stones of fire. Your heart was proud because of your beauty; you corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor. I cast you to the ground…” The kingdom of heaven is like what? Can it not be compared to someone who sowed good seed in a field?” But then what happened? The story of Genesis tells us that humans were deceived and led astray by the wisdom of another, a snake. A creature stripped of all limbs and bound to crawl on the dirt, an image we get from this passage about what God did to that angel for entering Gods garden while everyone was enjoying a Sabbath rest, and messing it up. How does Genesis start? “In the beginning…” How do 2 out of 4 of the Gospels start, “in the beginning.” The authors want to point out what’s happening. They want us to know that the arrival of Jesus is a new Genesis story, a new story of the garden of Eden. Because if the kingdom of heaven is like a man who planted seeds and then left, then the sower has returned to correct what went wrong. And in the beginning God intended to create a perfect world and asks his creations, his angels, his servants to help rule over it but what happened in the garden? While creation rested, His angels, his servants, messed it up and ruined it. How? A corrupted angel taught humans corrupted things…and they listened to them. God establishes the field but his creation ruined it. That is what the kingdom of heaven is like. Isn’t that just a principle of life? That if we are given something and we don’t take care of it and maintain it, it will fall to ruin? And it took 2000 years to correct it but eventually Jesus shows up to reestablish his kingdom on earth and he tells us how it got messed up in the first place, through a parable. Gods servants, those he charged to watch and take care of his garden, his angels, became corrupt and led humans down a self-serving materialistic path, ignorant of God and the spirit that dwells in them. This is why in Romans it says, “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels…can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.” But someone will say, why not destroy that creation and start over? The parable tells us, if you do that, “you would uproot the wheat and the weeds at the same time.” The wheat being a symbol for those who live and grow as God intended and the weeds as a symbol for those who live and die without ever knowing why they were here in the first place. Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is like a nice place someone planted and the servants charged with it ruined it. In this parable Jesus is taking us back in time and reminding us that heaven is already here on earth but it has become hard to notice because of how much influence darkness has in this world. That Guardian Cherub, Lucifer, a servant of God, threw weeds into God’s garden to choke out the light of Christ in each individual. If only God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit could find some other angels, some other servants, who would study his word, who would live by his ways, and do the work of God by managing and maintaining God’s field so that the kingdom of God may one day appear. That is a macro way of understanding this parable, as a way of seeing that the kingdom of heaven really is something in our hands, just as it was in the hands of angels. God sets up the environment but then leaves his servants to manage it. That’s how the kingdom of heaven works. He gave us his divine wisdom to use but if we don’t use it, if we don’t lean on his understanding than we will be left to lean on our own understanding, just as Lucifer did. But the micro way of understanding this parable is seeing that you are God’s field, you are his garden of Eden, but like Lucifer planted negative thinking, anxiety, violence, fear, guilt, and shame in Adam and Eve, those weeds now exist in us too. And that is our work. To weed out all the darkness within us, to become Gardens of Joy ourselves. Consider the parable as a new call, to be an angel of God who is like a guardian cherub over your mind and heart. Who daily walks the garden of their psyche’s weeding out all those things that hinder our growth and development as Christians. Servants who daily water their garden with the spirit of God and who feed it the nourishing words of Christ found in these parables. Today, capture the essence of this ancient teaching of Jesus and this week, become an angel, God’s servant, who brings heaven in their lives daily, and in doing so, is simultaneously, working to bring Gods kingdom, “on earth, as it is in heaven.” Amen. AuthorRev. Shawn is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and currently serves as senior minister of the United Church of Christ in Southbury, Ct. He is also a 4th year resident psychoanalyst at the Blanton-Peale Psychoanalytic Institute in Manhattan, NY. ArchivesCategories |
RSS Feed