The awakening of dark gods: Modern horror writing and Carl Jung’s notion of divine evil
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This latest article comes courtesy of guest writer, William Boyle. Carl Jung’s religious writings propose a highly unconventional revision to our understanding of God. Religion, Jung asserts, must take into account humanity’s potential for evil. His psychological approach attributes evil to the compensatory function of the shadow, expressing urges repressed by the ego. In this sense, the repressive function of religious morality is directly responsible for evil. Writing in the first half of the 20th Century, Jung perceived evil manifested through the unbridled violence of two World Wars. Faced with such devastation, Jung believed that religion must abandon its repressive function and incorporate an understanding of God that responds to the darkness in humanity. In his autobiography and the essay, “Answer to Job” Jung suggests that the Judeo-Christian tradition once incorporated an understanding of God’s darkness, but that understanding has since been severed. In spiritual terms, therefore, the incorporation of divine darkness represents the reawakening of the primal aspects of God. Jung’s claims would suggest that visions of this primal god should resonate throughout what he calls the collective unconscious. Indeed, W.B. Yeats’ The Second Coming , Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu could all be interpreted as visions of the reawakening of some dark and primal god.
Jung’s understanding of individual evil is not a supernatural one; rather, he defines evil as something people are capable of. Individuals are not, themselves, evil. The personal nature of evil, he claims, simply consists of characteristics and urges rejected by the ego, or consciousness. Such inclinations are repressed by the ego, as it cannot countenance that within itself which it regards as evil. These characteristics then constitute the shadow, therefore “to become conscious of [the shadow] involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality” (1951: 145), that which the ego calls evil.
In “The Role of the Unconscious” Jung describes the compensatory function of the unconscious. Instincts “which we have repressed and suppressed… gradually accumulate and, in time… begin to influence consciousness” (1918: 18, 25). The shadow therefore retains those aspects defined by the ego as ‘evil’, and their constant repression causes them to build in intensity until they burst forth with far greater passion than if their manifestation had been allowed. When it is a potentially dangerous urge that is called evil and thus repressed, aggression for instance, the bursting forth of that aggression is unbridled and can become highly destructive. Evil thus occurs, not in the acknowledgement of dark urges, but in their violent expulsion as a result of repression.
Jung sees the same tendency in nations, “for nations are made up of individuals” (1918: 27, 45). He attributes to Christianity and rationalism the repression of what he calls ‘primitive’ urges, particularly in Germans. The accretion and release of these urges, he claims, brought about the First World War, in which he sees a modern global manifestation of “the primitive’s distrust of the neighbouring tribe” (1918: 27, 44). It is clear that Jung sees this war as an expulsion on an international level of the darkness within the unconscious of nations. It is in the act of genocide, though, that evil on a national scale makes its most blatant manifestation. Rafael López Pedraza understands one example of genocide, the Holocaust, as “a shadow conflict” (1990: 73) in which Nazi Germany attempted to annihilate the Jews, onto whom they had projected their collective shadow. He also identifies the archetype of purity operating within Germany as a powerful repressive function, “[constellating] intolerance” (1990: 73) and drawing the Jews into its “dark shadow” (1990, 73) It is therefore possible to see two of the most serious conflicts of the early 20th Century as expressions of repressed urges functioning within the shadow.
For this reason, more than any other, Jung claims that it is imperative that Europeans come to understand their shadows. It is in the recognition and acceptance of internal evil that he proposes more devastating, external evil can be prevented. Given that he considers modern Christianity and rationalism responsible for much of the repression that led to such expressions of national evil, his approach to this reconciliation is not only psychological, but also religious. It is in the unconscious that the potential for evil develops, and the language of the unconscious is that of myths. To address the evil that forms in the shadow, therefore, it is necessary to address the myths and archetypes that govern people’s lives. He proposes, therefore, a new understanding of God that takes into account the dark, visceral and destructive aspects of the Christian God, and attends to the needs of the collective unconscious, in which the potential for evil has accumulated through constant repression.
This proposed revisionism is not merely a utilitarian suggestion to prevent repeated upsurges of evil; it is in fact consistent with Jung’s own religious convictions. In his autobiography, Jung recounts two events of momentous religious significance to him. The first is a dream in which he feels he was presented with the vision of a chthonic deity which took the form of an enormous enthroned phallus. Jung asserts that “the phallus of this dream seems to be a subterranean god “not to be named” (1961: 13). If it is indeed God then it is one that responds to the visceral needs of the collective unconscious. The connection between the visceral and this image of a phallus is clear enough, its placement in the earth also ties it to desire and aggression, what Christian morality regards as base and earthy. Jung’s first vision of God is one divorced from the moral deity of Christian dogma; it embraces the desires held in the shadow.
The vision, nonetheless, is tied to Christianity, as it takes place within the cemetery outside Jung’s father’s church. Furthermore, while the burial of this object renders it dead, the phallus is a symbol of life. This thing that is ‘dead’ cannot truly be considered dead, but regenerates eternally. It is possible that Jung sees this as an aspect of the Christian God that is dead and yet regenerating. The second event involves the vision of God on his throne defecating on the cathedral in Basel, destroying it utterly. The act of defecation of course identifies this vision of God with the visceral, while the destruction of the church represents God’s vengeance against the structures of morality and prudishness that Christianity has imposed. Together, these visions of God express not only Jung’s understanding of the baseness of God, but also demonstrate the vengeance of such a god against the bonds of Christian dogma.
Heretical as it may seem, this vision of God as a dark and visceral entity is not inconsistent with the Judeo-Christian tradition. While contemporary Christianity may espouse a God of love, it is at odds to explain the actions of Yahweh in the Torah. This is a god whose wrath annihilates Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19:23), who hardens Pharaoh’s heart against the Israelites and then sends plagues when he does not comply with Moses’ demands (Exodus 11:9) and who slaughters the firstborn son of every Egyptian household (Exodus12:30). Yahweh may love the Israelites but the experiences of the Egyptians and others are of God as evil, and this is to say nothing of the untrammeled violence that awaits us at the End of Days. Further, there is something particularly primal about the pleasure Yahweh derives from the smoke of animal sacrifices (Genesis 8:21). In “Answer to Job” Jung discusses the precedent set in the Old Testament for a God not subject to later Christian morality. He identifies in Job’s experience a raging, immoral God, attributing this to the fact that God is “not human” (1952: 547).
If, as Jung seems to suggest, the collective unconscious is experiencing the need to incorporate a darker conception of God that addresses the potential for evil within humanity, suggestions of that conception can be seen in the work of several writers from the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. William Butler Yeats, in The Second Coming presents an image of Europe in the aftermath of the First World War:
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” (1921)
The first eight lines describe the brutality that humanity has gone through due to the loosing of evil on the world. Yeats hopes for “some revelation… the Second Coming” (1921: 9-10) and the vision with which he is greeted is certainly apocalyptic, but where he perhaps hopes for the saviour, he sees a beast with more resemblance to the sphinx. Its “lion body” (1921: 14) ties it to Christ, who is often depicted as the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, but its “gaze blank and pitiless as the sun” (1921: 15) renders it unconscious, closer to some bestial and primordial deity. What Yeats seems to be witnessing is the birth of a Messiah whose primal nature corresponds to the potential for evil within humanity.
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness also explores a desire for the so-called civilised man to connect with something more primal. Like Jung, he attributes to ‘the primitive’ a stronger connection to instinct, in Jung’s terms, the unconscious. The character of Kurtz is compelling as he represents an individual who has re-formed the connection with his shadow through “the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts” (1899: 82). The words he speaks have “behind them… the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams” (1899: 83). Like Yeats, Conrad couches this encounter in the context of the evils perpetrated by humanity, in this case, during the colonisation of Africa. There is also a suggestion of some god awakening, like Jung’s, from death. Marlow is surrounded by death on his journey, from the “sepulchral city” (1899: 88), along the Congo River, reminiscent of the crossing of the Styx, to Kurtz, the “atrocious phantom” (1899: 74) and “animated image of death” (1899: 74). Marlow may be in the jungle, but the imagery is of the underworld.
When he finally reaches Kurtz, Marlow is struck by the impression that “the wilderness had… taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins” (1899: 59). Conrad attributes intention to the wilderness, identifying in it some dark, reawakening god. Though the suggestion is that Kurtz is possessed by the god, it is through this possession that he has made the connection with the primordial within. Of course, possession is a horrific notion, but that horror carries an attendant fascination that draws Marlowe to Kurtz, and expresses his deep desire to experience the same primordial change.
Finally, H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu provides an example of a text that, while it is not considered a great work of modernism, can be seen to express the same inclination within the collective unconscious to see some dark and primordial god awoken. Ostensibly a horror story, it narrates the reawakening of the Great Old Ones, understood to be long-slumbering and evil gods. “Although They no longer lived, They would never really die” (1926: 155), just as in Jung’s dream, the phallic god lies dead and yet regenerating. Like Behemoth and Leviathan, described by Edinger, they sleep beneath the sea (1926: 168), connecting them to the primal. They communicate with “the sensitive among [humans] by moulding their dreams” (1926: 155).
Parallels can be seen here with Jung’s suggestion that the god will form in the collective unconscious. Jung’s assertion that ‘the primitive’ bears a closer connection to the shadow is echoed in the cults that worship these Great Old Ones, they are “men of a very low, mixed-blooded and mentally aberrant type…. negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese” (1926: 153). The racism for which Lovecraft is infamous shows as he constructs these people as ‘primitives’. Although The Call of Cthulhu is a horror story, the notion of such things awakening is at once compelling and discomfiting, similarly, Yeats’ vision of a bestial Messiah and the suggestion of whatever has touched Kurtz are at once fascinating and horrific.
Jung asserts that humans possess the potential for evil, and that evil occurs when the ego’s repression of the primal urges of the unconscious results in a violent expulsion of these urges. He sees this demonstrated in the destruction wrought by nations upon one another in the beginning of the 20th Century. He believes that Europeans must acknowledge their own potential for evil by looking into their own shadows. A part of this process involves gaining a new understanding of God. Like humans, Jung asserts, God has the potential for primal acts not bound by Christian morality. Jung’s visions of God and his theology demonstrate his own personal belief in such a god. Similarly, contemporaneous literature can be seen to demonstrate the inclination towards a god that addresses this tendency for evil. Through the apocalyptic visions of Yeats, Conrad and Lovecraft, perhaps the notion of such a god can be seen forming in the collective unconscious.
Works Cited
Conrad, J. 1899: Heart of Darkness, Penguin, London, 2007.
Edinger, E.F. 1984: The Creation of Consciousness, Toronto, Inner City Books, 1984.
Jung, C.G. 1918: “The Role of the Unconscious” in: Civilization in Transition, Ed. Read, H. Fordham, M. Adler, G. Trans. Hull, R.F.C. London : Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953-1979.
Jung, C.G.1951: “Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self” in: The Portable Jung, Ed. Campbell, J. Trans. Hull, R.F.C. London, Penguin Books, 1971.
Jung, C.G.1952: “Answer to Job” in: The Portable Jung, Ed. Campbell, J. Trans. Hull, R.F.C. London, Penguin Books, 1971.
Jung, C.G. 1961 Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Ed. Jaffé, A. Trans. Winston, R. & C. New York, Vintage Books, 1989.
Bible (New International Version).
Pedraza, R.L. 1990: “Cultural Anxiety” in: Carl Gustav Jung: Critical Assessments, Ed. Papadopolous, R.K. London, New York, Routledge, 1992.
Yeats, W.B. 1921: The Second Coming in: Jeffares, A.N. Profiles in Literature: W.B. Yeats, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971, p. 36.
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Particularly relevant at this point in American history.