Chapter 7: The Story of Deification
Awe surrounds the mysteries, particularly the mystery of deification. This was one of the most important of the mysteries. It gave the immortal value to the individual -- it gave certainty of immortality. One gets a peculiar feeling from being put through such an initiation.
-- C. G. Jung, June 8, 1925
There is a significant, deliberate omission from Jung's alleged autobiography. [1] The information Aniela Jaffe left out of Memories, Dreams, Reflections is crucial to understanding Jung, the metaphors he chose for his method of psychotherapy, and the early development of analytical psychology. Indeed, it forms the core of his "personal myth," elements of which he kept secret but that can now be revealed with a contextual analysis of this important material.
Aniela Jaffe based the chapter in MDR known as "Confrontation with the Unconscious" on "a number of passages from a seminar delivered from March to July 1925 in which Jung spoke for the first time of his inner development." [2] (By then Jung delivered his lectures entirely in English.) Extensive notes were kept and typed by Cary F. de Angulo, checked for accuracy by Jung, and then, in November 1925, copied and distributed to the seminar participants. But until a published edition of the complete seminar notes appeared in 1989, those wishing to read this remarkable document needed at least one hundred hours of "approved" analysis and the permission of one's analyst.
What could have been so important in Cary de Angulo's notes that Jaffe chose to keep it out of MDR and that it was kept from many of Jung' s own disciples for more than sixty years? Why were the secrets about Jung that it contained considered forbidden fruit for so long?
What is missing is an entire episode from Jung's life, and arguably the most important one.
In December 1913, Jung deliberately and repeatedly induced trance states using methods he had learned from his experience with spiritualism. This technique, which he would later call "active imagination," sparked a series of intense visionary experiences that Jung interpreted as his direct mystical initiation into one of the most ancient of the pagan mystery cults of the Hellenistic world.
Jung became an initiate into this brotherhood during an extraordinary epiphany.
His head changed into that of a lion and he became a god. He became the Deus Leontocephalus, the lion-headed god whose image is found in the sanctuaries of the mystery cult of Mithras (first to fourth centuries C.E.). Jung became a god known to us as Aion.
Near the end of his life Jung published a book in 1951 on "the phenomenology of the self" named after this god, with a striking frontispiece photograph of Deus Leontocephalus. We can only conclude that throughout his life Jung must have been haunted by the mystery of his initiation. To him it was the revelation of his secret self, of the god within, of the great and unspeakable mystery of the imago dei.
After Jung underwent the mystery of deification in December 1913, his personal and professional life changed markedly. Within a few months he resigned from the presidency of the psychoanalytic movement and withdrew from his lecturer position at the university. He maintained his private practice in Kusnacht, and his sexual relationship with Toni Wolff intensified. He continued his visionary explorations and researches into mythology and the history of religion. He gathered his core disciples around him and gave them special lectures on "complex psychology," psychological types, and mythology. By 1916, he began to teach his disciples that analysis was an initiation into the mysteries of the impersonal, the transpersonal, or the collective unconscious. By 1917, he transformed the imaginal entities he met in his visions into elements of his new poetic brand of analytical psychoanalysis.
He developed a model for his movement that set him apart from all other forms of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, or any other secular form of healing. Jung based the social and psychotherapeutic practices of the "Zurich school" on the ancient mystery cults of the Hellenistic world. From Jung, his disciples learned to participate in the most ancient of mysteries, whose roots reached back into the mythopoetic age.
The defining moment in the secret story of Jung's life and movement happened the day that he was deified. We need to understand why this is so and understand the deeper significance of Jung's own interpretation of the ancient mysteries. Stripping away the false mask of idealization constructed by his disciples reveals the dark face of the god he had truly become.
"Why do you worship me?"
At the very heart of MDR is the chapter "Confrontation with the Unconscious." [3] For many of his modern readers who regard MDR as a gospel or a new spiritual dispensation, this chapter is the holiest of holies. The stories of Jung's visionary journeys of December 1913 and his additional prophetic visions and dreams subtly model the process of transformation that Jung considered necessary before one could truly become an individual. The chapter offers the promise of such magical experiences to others. He insists that such an ordeal is dangerous and that not everyone can survive it. But the official version of Jung's 1913 visions leaves out the most important ingredient in the recipe for individuation, the experience that all of his therapeutic techniques were designed to bring about: a new experience of god through one's own self-deification.
Let us now compare Jaffe's version in MDR with Jung's own confession in a 1925 seminar. Jaffe's version is taken largely from the brief remarks Jung made at the end of the lectures on May 11 and June 1, 1925. Jung induced a dissociative altered state of conscious and made a visionary "descent" into the unconscious, which he refers to as the Land of the Dead. Once in this other realm, he met an old man with a white beard and a young girl who was blind. The old man introduced himself as Elijah. Jung was "shocked" to learn that the girl was named Salome. Elijah assured him that this couple "had been together since eternity." With them was a large black snake, which had an affinity for Jung. "I stuck close to Elijah because he seemed to be the most reasonable of the three, and to have a clear intelligence. Of Salome I was distinctly suspicious." [4]
In the fall seminar notes, Jung amplified these figures with references to motifs in mythology and symbolism. He explained that the snake is associated with hero myths. Salome is "an anima figure." Elijah represents "the wise old prophet," and "a factor of intelligence and knowledge." But, Jung added, "it is very much better to leave these experiences as they are, namely as events, experiences." [5]
One point on which these two versions diverge is the important figure of Philemon, Jung's imaginal guru. In MDR, he reveals that this figure, a "pagan" having "an Egypto-Hellenistic atmosphere with a gnostic coloration," developed out of the Elijah figure in subsequent fantasies. [6] Besides covering almost an entire wall in Jung's hermetic Tower at Bollin gen, images of the wise old Philemon grace the illuminated manuscript pages of Jung's secret transformation diary, the "Red Book." Philemon is not mentioned in the 1925 seminar.
Jung's initial voyage into the underworld was followed by a second: the long suppressed story of Jung's deification.
Jung told his audience that "a few evenings later, I felt that I should continue. So again I tried to follow the same procedure, but it would not descend. I remained on the surface." [7] He felt it was an "inner conflict" that prevented him from going down. After resolving this, he felt he could go on.
Jung looked about him. He saw Elijah on a rocky ridge, a ring of boulders, which he thought was a "Druidic sacred place." Inside, the old man climbed up on a mounded Druidic altar, and then both Elijah and the altar began to shrink while the walls grew larger. Jung noticed a tiny woman, "like a doll," who turned out to be Salome. He also saw a miniature snake and a house.
The walls around Jung kept growing. Suddenly he realized that he had been descending. "I was in the underworld," he said.
When they all reached bottom Elijah smiled at him and said, "Why, it is just the same, above or below."
Then it happened.
"Salome became very interested in me, and she assumed I could cure her blindness. She began to worship me. I said, 'Why do you worship me?' She replied, 'You are Christ.'"
Jung objected. But Salome persisted. She insisted that he was Christ.
Jung told her, "'This is madness,'" and he said that he "became filled with skeptical resistance." But events would soon prove she was right.
Then I saw the snake approach me. She came close and began to encircle me and press me in her coils. These coils reached up to my heart. 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 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 tiger. [8]
Jung then offered to his stunned audience some rather formulaic interpretations of his experiences in terms of his type theory. But in a meaningful shift of focus that must have taken only a few minutes during the spoken lecture, Jung then compared his experience with those of the ancient mysteries. "You cannot get conscious of these unconscious facts without giving yourself to them .... These images have so much reality that they recommend themselves, and such extraordinary meaning that one is caught. They form part of the ancient mysteries; in fact, it is such figures that made the mysteries."
Jung's interpretation here is clear: his visions were an initiatory experience into the mysteries of pagan antiquity. These mystery cults provided all the symbols of transformation necessary for a personal renewal or rebirth. Further, they were at the deepest level of the unconscious mind, available to one and all who wished to descend to the ancestral unconscious or to go on a heroic "night sea journey" through its murky depths. The gods awaited one there.
The climax of the initiation into the mysteries, however, was the "mystery of deification," which gave "certainty of immortality." Jung's statement of his own deification is remarkable:
One gets a peculiar feeling from being put through such an initiation. The important part that led up to the deification was the snake's encoiling of me. Salome's performance was deification. The animal face which I felt mine transformed into was the famous [Deus] Leontocephalus of the Mithraic Mysteries. It is the figure which is represented with a snake coiled around the man, the snake's head resting on the man's head, and the face of the man that of the lion. This statue has only been found in mystery grottoes (the underchurches, the last remnants of the catacombs). The catacombs were not originally places of concealment, but were chosen as symbolical of a descent into the underworld. [9]
After presenting a few historical details concerning Mithraism, Jung told his audience: "It is almost certain that the symbolical rite of deification played a part in these mysteries." He then identified the Leontocephalus as "Aion, or the eternal being," which, he said, was derived from an Iranian deity whose name means "the infinitely long duration."
He described a museum piece he had once seen, a Mithraic amphora that bore the image of a flame with a lion on one side and a snake on the other. To him, these were to be interpreted psychologically as "opposites of the world trying to come together with the reconciling symbol between them." Significantly, "The lion is the young, hot, dry July sun in the culmination of light, the summer. The serpent is humidity, darkness, the earth, winter."
Jung closed this remarkable lecture with a return to the initiatory climax of deification in the ancient mysteries: "In this deification mystery you make yourself into the vessel, and are a vessel of creation in which the opposites reconcile."
An unidentified person in the audience then asked Jung the date of this "dream," and Jung replied, "December 1913. All this is Mithraic symbolism from beginning to end." [10]
***
Before we can understand the true meaning of Jung's initiation, some questions must be answered: What did Jung have in mind when he spoke of the ancient mysteries? How did he come to the notion that, at the absolute climax of the initiatory rites of these ancient mystery cults, the humble human initiate becomes a god? What were the Mithraic mysteries and why would Jung entertain the fantasy of becoming an initiate into them? What was the most likely source of these remarkable visions? Why were the mysteries of Mithras such an important model for his own circle of disciples in Zurich? And what did it mean when Jung mixed Christian and pagan elements in his own deified self?
To find these answers, we must leave our narrative and enter a lost world of fin-de-siecle classical scholarship, which reflected a mentality quite different from our own.
Jung's sources on the ancient mysteries
Perhaps it is best to explore first the most probable source of the contents of Jung's initiation. In the spring of 1925, after Jung finally revealed the story of his 1913 visionary descent to the Land of the Dead and his meetings with otherworldly entities, he said to his audience: "I had read much mythology before this fantasy came to me, and all of this reading entered into the condensation of these figures." [11]
Is Jung inadvertently admitting here that cryptomnesia played a role in generating the content of his visionary experiences and dreams? Is it possible that these experiences were more personal than transpersonal, more mundane than mystical?
Jung's years of maturation were characterized by an unusually potent convergence of familial and cultural preoccupations with the spirituality of Aryan antiquity, with heredity, evolution, memory, the superiority of direct experience or intuition over reason, and the direct contact with ancestors or the Dead. Like many in Jung's generation, becoming a "modern" meant questioning the very foundations of one's bourgeois-Christian identity and even rejecting it.
Jung, of course, knew the general aspects of the ancient Hellenistic mystery cults before he became obsessed with archeology and mythology following his trip to America in September 1909. But much of his imaginings about the rituals of these cults came from the work of six scholars, four of whom were his contemporaries. All of the metaphors Jung later used to describe his theories and methods of treatment and the otherworldly terrain of the collective unconscious and its archetypes had their basis in this literature.
Nietzsche
As a medical student in the 1890s, Jung absorbed the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, who was a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel before turning to philosophy. From him Jung first became intoxicated with the mysteries of blood and sexuality and underground initiation in the ancient cults of Dionysus. Nietzsche was also the source of Jung' s first fascination with Zoroastrianism and ancient Iranian spirituality via his depiction of the prophet Zarathustra in Also Sprach Zarathustra, which Jung later claimed was a record of "one of the first attempts in modern times to come back to the immediate, individual initiation." [12]
Creuzer
If there can be said to be one central, non-mystical source of Jung's concepts of the phylogenetic and collective unconscious it is the writings of Friedrich Creuzer, who was a professor of ancient literature at Heidelberg University in the nineteenth century. [13] On November 8, 1909, Jung wrote to Freud, "Now I am reading the four volumes of old Creuzer, where there is a huge mass of material." [14]
Creuzer's four-volume Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Volker besonders der Griechen, originally published between 1810 and 1812, was the first truly comprehensive scholarly source in German for information concerning the spirituality of antiquity, especially about the Greco-Roman mystery cults. As a result, it contained information that was widely disseminated throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Central to Creuzer's work was a hypothesis on which much German scholarship in the nineteenth century was based; namely, that Greek mythology was the best paradigm through which to study all pagan religions', regardless of which part of the world they were from. And Creuzer, like so many others, believed that Greek mythology was a corruption of a prehistoric spiritual worldview, the Urreligion of all human beings that had existed for thousands of years before languages and cultures diverged. Creuzer (as Bachofen and Blavatsky and so many others) was convinced that a careful study of the surviving artifacts of pagan antiquity could reveal key elements of the hidden "secret doctrine" of the prehistoric ancestors of us all. Jung shared their views and made Creuzer's work required reading for his assistants. Thus, Creuzer's personal biases framed the type of mythological data collected from the delusions, hallucinations, and dreams of institutionalized patients with psychotic disorders. They also framed the type of material that would be ignored as well, because as dutiful assistants Honegger, Spielrein, and Nelken would disregard anything that wasn't "mythological" in the sense that Creuzer (and Jung) maintained.
Albrecht Dieterich
Beginning in the 1890s, there was a renaissance in classical archeology. No doubt reflecting the intellectual climate of the fin de siecle, classicists became interested in the ancient mystery cults and their special brand of personal religion. In part, this new scholarship reflected a cultural interest in the irrational and the experiential, but it also reflected the tremendous interest in ancient mysteries that was stimulated after 1875 by Madame Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society. Blavatsky claimed to have been an initiate into the mysteries of the goddess Isis, and the social structure of the Theosophical movement was set up, like the Freemasons, as a step-by-step process of initiation into ancient occult wisdom. This new scholarship on the ancient mysteries was a method of scientifically investigating the reality of these cults.
Jung borrowed extensively from Albrecht Dieterich. Dieterich's books on the ancient Gnostic god known as Abraxas, on the heroic "night sea journey," on the cult of Mother Earth, and on a fragment from the Greek Magical Papyri known as the Mithraic Liturgy all provided Jung with numerous metaphors that are familiar to Jungians today, [15] It is probably from Dieterich's book on the Mithraic Liturgy that Jung derived his conviction that an initiation into the mysteries of Mithras involved a selfdeification process. Dieterich identifies as central liturgical images of the Mithraic mysteries the mystical union of "man in god and god in man" and the unio mystica (erotic union) of humans with a god.
No one reads Albrecht Dieterich today, but he clearly must be remembered when we attempt to reconstruct the hidden history of C. G, Jung and find the original sources of so many of his ideas.
Richard Reitzenstein and Franz Cumont
In the introduction to his book Ancient Mystery Cults, Walter Burkert, a classical philologist and a leading contemporary authority on ancient Greek religion, credits Richard Reitzenstein and Franz Cumont for "setting the pace" of scholarship on the Hellenistic mysteries at the turn of the century. [16] Of the two, the Belgian scholar Cumont was far more of an influence on Jung. [17] Cumont was not only an authority on the Mithraic mysteries but also on the use of astrology in antiquity. However, he is most famous for his writings on the Mithraic cult, and they were a seminal influence on Jung. [18]
K.H.E. De Jong
Perhaps the most forgotten of the scholars whom Jung absorbed during his intense period of mythological studies was the Dutch classicist Karel Hendrik Eduard De Jong. De Jong, a lecturer at the University of Leiden, produced a book in 1909 that is one of the long-lost classics of the literature on Hellenistic mysteries, Das Antike Mysterienwesen in religionsgeschichtlicher, ethnologischer und psychologischer Beleuchtung (The ancient mysteries in light of the history of religion, ethnology, and psychology). [19] This book fascinated Jung, and with good reason: it was a detailed dissertation offering ethnological and psychological interpretations of the experiential phenomena reported by initiates into the ancient mysteries. While reading it, one cannot but be struck by how close De Jong is to the spirit of the works that Jung began producing with Wandlungen (in which he cites De Jong).
De Jong's book is a masterpiece of interdisciplinary scholarship, and when it appeared no other work on the ancient mysteries quite like it existed. After reviewing the major Hellenistic mystery cults (those of Eleusis, Isis, Mithras, and Dionysus), he addressed the classical literature on Egyptian and Greek magic. However, the bulk of the book is devoted to his explanation of the extraordinary initiatory experiences of the ancient mysteries in terms of modern phenomena. De Jong was fascinated with the literature on altered states of consciousness, and he reviewed the clinical literature on hypnosis and hysteria to find clues to the behavior of the ancients. He made use of the occultist literature of Theosophy and the literature on psychical research (especially the accounts of the spiritualistic trance performances of mediums). De Jong even cited Jung's 1902 doctoral dissertation concerning Helly Preiswerk. [20] He explored the phenomena of spiritual disciplines and occult sciences such as yoga and the Kabbalah and mined the ethnographic literature on primitive cultures in Africa, Asia, Australia, and North and South America for clues to their religious use of trances, especially by shamans.
In short, De Jong's book was a major stimulus for Jung's own syncretization of psychoanalysis, psychology, spiritualism, primitive religion, and Hellenistic mysteries in the theories he developed after 1913. Jung differed from De Jong in that he turned these insights into a claim about the nature of reality and developed techniques that enabled his patients and colleagues to directly experience the transformative power of the mysteries.
But what exactly were the mysteries?
Mysteria
Mysteria were the secrets of eternity imparted through initiation into a particular mystery cult of the Greco-Roman or Hellenistic world (fourth century B.C.E. to fourth century C.E.). Each mystery cult based the form of its rites of initiation on the narrative elements in its hieros logos, or "sacred myth," the central story of its divinity or divinities. This mystery-cult legend usually involved heroic wanderings by the cult divinity that were then ritually reenacted in public processions (such as the majestic state-sponsored procession from Athens to Eleusis) or in dancing (such as by the maenads in the Dionysian mysteries).
Whether the initiation was into the mysteries of Dionysus, Eleusis (the Greek site where Demeter and Persephone resided), the Great Mother, Isis, Mithras, Sabazios, or the Kabeiroi, the goal was essentially the same: the spiritual and psychological transformation, rebirth, or renewal of the initiate and the opportunity for a better life through direct contact with a transcendent realm of gods, sometimes through a ritual descent to the underworld. This underworld was the Land of the Dead, the realm of the ancestors, or, according to nineteenth-century German Volkish scholars, the "inner fatherland." As many twentieth-century classical scholars have suggested, the initiation into the ancient mysteries was a form of personal religion and served a special psychotherapeutic function in the pagan world. [21]
According to Walter Burkert, "Mysteries were initiation rituals of a voluntary, personal and secret character that aimed at a change of mind through an experience of the sacred .... [They] were a form of personal religion, depending on a private decision and aiming at some form of salvation through closeness to the divine." [22] Participation in the mysteries was not obligatory or unavoidable, unlike participation in organized religions as we know them. "Mysteries are to be seen as a special form of worship offered in the larger context of religious practice .... Mystery initiations were an optional activity within polytheistic religion, comparable to, say, a pilgrimage to Santiago di Compostela within the Christian system," explains Burkert. [23]
Mystery initiations were rites of passage during which the initiate became separated (symbolically and physically) from normal social interactions or norms of behavior. During the initiatory process, the candidate was regarded first as in a marginal, threshold state in which the boundaries between the sacred and the profane were blurred. Later, the initiate passed through an aggregation or "reincorporation" stage. [24] He or she then re gained community rights and obligations of a clearly defined type that were commensurate with the new identity. What changed for the initiate was his or her personal status vis-a-vis a particular deity, not necessarily his or her social position. In many instances the initiations could be repeated in a process of continual rebirth. This was true for the Eleusinian mysteries, for the many centers of the mysteries of Dionysus, and every twenty years or so for the mysteries of the Great Mother.
By seeing the mysteries or having them revealed, the passage is made from one state of being to another. In the words of an individual who had seen the mysteries of Eleusis, "I came out of the Mystery Hall feeling like a stranger to myself." But what these initiates actually saw is itself a mystery, for secrecy was the essential element of these cults, and history attests that the ancients were able to keep secrets to a remarkable degree.
Although the mysteries conveyed to the initiates a sense of a better life, particularly in the underworld, the ancient mysteries were not religions of salvation because they were not religions as we know them. Burkert notes insightfully that "the constant use of Christianity as a reference system when dealing with the so-called mystery religions leads to distortions as well as partial clarification, obscuring the often radical difference between the two." [25] Cumont and Reitzenstein were particularly guilty of this form of distortion. Cumont once referred to the "loss" of the "liturgical books of paganism" as the most regrettable one in the "great shipwreck" that lost so much of the literature of antiquity. Reitzenstein likewise believed that these "oriental religions" were bound together by shared, systematized articles of faith. Although each of the mystery cults was based on a central myth, perhaps even kept in a written form along with sacred ritual instruments in a cista mystica ("secret casket"), there is no evidence that such binding credos or pagan theological works ever existed. [26]
Yet the ancient pagan mysteries continued to occupy the imagination of humankind in an only nominal Christian Europe. Throughout the centuries their symbols and initiatory rites, their gods and goddesses, daemons and genii all found their way into the occult underground in the traditions of Gnosticism, Hermeticism, alchemy, astrology, the Kabbalah, the Tarot, ritual or ceremonial magic, Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, and especially in the occult revivals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They live on in the works of C. G. Jung and those who practice therapy in-his name.
The Hellenistic mysteries
Most of Jung's scholarship on the ancient mysteries began in earnest in October 1909, and the understanding of them that he carried throughout his life was based on the classical scholarship available around that time. Like most scholars, he read specific literatures in phases throughout his life as his interests changed. Based on his published correspondence, his bibliographic references, and the dates of publication of the books in his personal library, we know that Jung read very little new material on the Hellenistic mystery cults after 1912 or so. Instead, he read more widely in the literature on Gnosticism (primarily the works of the Theosophist G.R.S. Mead), [27] the patristic Christian literature, and ancient Germanic mythology and religion. By the late 1920s, Jung's dominant interest was alchemy, and in his later works alchemical metaphors replace those of Hellenistic mysteria that characterized his earlier thought. However, he integrated the core themes of the ancient mysteries into his alchemical studies, believing not only that the symbols were similar, but that both the mysteries and alchemy were, at their core, secret, underground, anti-orthodox Christian spiritual movements that promised individual redemption and rebirth.
Jung studied the ancient Hellenistic mysteries as precursors to the vitalistic movements of his day in which direct experience and the development of intuition were paramount over mere reason. Neither the details of public ritual processions, nor the political, social, and economic context of the Hellenistic mystery cults were of any major interest to him. This fact is indicative of Jung' s whole approach to the scholarship of others that he used in his own works. These external details were unnecessary historical facts that hid the true, living, eternal essence of the mysteries. Mystery, not history, was the bread of life.
The aspects of the ancient mysteries that did interest Jung were the initiates' reports of the direct experience of a transcendental realm of gods and the cryptic symbolism associated with such extraordinary experiences. He was particularly fond of a famous passage in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius in which he reported the climax of his initiation into the mysteries of Isis. The passage below reveals the passion for secrecy in the mysteries:
You would probably inquire quite eagerly, attentive reader, what was then said and done. I would tell you, if it were lawful; you would get to know all, were it lawful for you to hear. But both ear and tongue would incur equal guilt through such daring curiosity. Yet you are probably racked by religious longing, so I shall not torture you with prolonged anguish. Listen, then, but believe, for my account is true: I approached the boundary of death and treading on Proserpine's threshold, I was carried through all the elements, after which I returned. I saw the sun flashing brightly in the middle of the night [nocte media vidi solem]. I approached close to the gods above and the gods below and worshipped them face to face. Behold, I have related things about which you remain in ignorance, though you have heard them.
Therefore I shall recount only what can be communicated without guilt to the understanding of the uninitiated. [28]
Here we find a motif that greatly interested Jung: the image of a sun (or a star) in the depths as the central image of the god within.
Imagining Mithras
Jung's view of Mithraism was largely Cumont's Christianized one: Mithras was an ancient Iranian solar god (like Helios) and a god of correct behavior and order (like Apollo). He is referred to as Sol Invictus, the "invincible sun." Mithraism had survived from the old dualist Mazdean religion of ancient Persia but adapted itself to the Roman empire. Though only men could participate in these mysteries, Mithraism's wide geographical spread "from the banks of the Black Sea to the mountains of Scotland to the borders of the great Sahara Desert" could mean that it was the main rival to Christianity. [29] Cumont thought this was true because both rose in prominence at about the same time. Indeed, he argued, if historical events had gone a little differently, the Western world would be Mithraic and not Judeo-Christian today. There was perhaps even a voluminous Mithraic Liturgy akin to that of the Christian church, but it did not survive antiquity.
There were seven grades to the Mithraic mystery initiations, and they involved sacramental feasts at which bread and water were consecrated and at which blood was offered as a sacrifice in ceremonies involving priests in robes who offered prayers, sang hymns, and rang bells -- as in the Roman Catholic church -- at the holiest moment of the ritual: the unveiling of the ubiquitous image of Mithras killing a bull, the tauroctony. [30] Indeed, practically all of the elements of Mithraism that Jung refers to over his lifetime can be found in the chapter of Cumont's The Mysteries of Mithras entitled "The Mithraic Liturgy, Clergy, and Devotees."
Recent scholars have called into question almost all of Cumont's basic assumptions about the Iranian origins and "sacramental" ceremonies of Mithraism. Using the same archeological and textual evidence that Cumont compiled, while hunting down new evidence and deducing new theories, Mithraic scholars now offer very different interpretations of the mysteries. The main difficulty is simple: although there is a wealth of archeological material that is well preserved because the Mithraeums were built underground, there is not a single recorded account of the central myth of Mithraism, nor does Mithraic iconography provide us with the story. Any interpretation of the myth of Mithras, then, is an imagining, a reconstruction.
If Jung broke through to the eternal realm of the phylogenetic or collective unconscious, as he believed, and experienced an authentic Mithraic process of transformation, then non-Cumontian elements might appear in the structure of his December 1913 visions. They do not. All of the elements of Jung's initiation can be derived from Cumont and other scholars Jung read. This once again raises the issue of whether all of his experiences were based on cryptomnesia. If so, the collective unconscious may still be said to exist, but only on the shelves of Jung's personal library.
However, a review of the aspects of Mithraism that touch upon Jung's personal symbols of transformation sheds new light on secrets that Jung never openly acknowledged, secrets so personally profound that he only hinted at them in public. In part, they concern Sigmund Freud.