Category: Ideas

It is said that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Well, in the modern world, the better formulation might be that when the student is ready, somebody will comment on their blog to point the way to the teacher. That’s happened twice here in recent times. On both occasions, I was writing in an exploratory fashion by following a hunch and trying to figure it out as I went.

Back in my Age of the Orphan series, I was the following a hunch about how the dominant archetype of modern society is The Orphan. As part of that, I was struggling to tie together the individual spiritual journey with the social and then a commenter (Austin) referred me to Rene Guenon who had already explained this with his exoteric/esoteric distinction. That gave me the answer I was looking for.

In this series of posts, I’ve been following the Jungian hints about what I’ve been calling the eternal feminine and how it seems to relate to a major transformation going on right now in the world. I’ve been wondering whether this is happening because the feminine is being re-integrated after a couple of millennia of patriarchy or whether we are being called to deal with the unconscious itself. This was what Jung implied in Answer to Job. Just as Yahweh learned about his unconscious through the mistreatment of Job, we are all now having to learn about our collective and personal unconscious through the machinations of modern society where the unconscious seems to be given free reign including to do previously unthinkable things like lockdown society.

Before we get into Gebser in more detail, allow me to indulge in a little autobiographical story which I think will help to set the context, at least for why I think Gebser is so important.

I did my university degree in linguistics and worked briefly as a linguist after graduating. Linguistics had a burst of popularity in the post war years under the work of Noam Chomsky and his generative grammar. A big chunk of my uni degree involved learning Chomskyan analysis. I’m going to skip over all the details and give you my conclusion: Chomskyan linguistics was a failure. It was a failure by trying to use the methods of the “hard sciences” where they don’t belong. What’s more, all kinds of hand waving argumentation gets used in modern linguistics to make it seem like linguistics is a hard science. Articles and books are written making claims that cannot be empirically tested. It seemed very clear to me that Chomskyan linguistics and similar approaches were the attempt to shoe horn a field of study into a type of thinking which simply didn’t work. That was how I felt at the time and it was partly this that led me to leave the field.

As I was reading Weinberg I had a eureka moment because in that book he explained with great clarity the reasons why Chomskyan linguistics can’t work. Again, I’m going to skip all the details here. But the issue was bigger than just modern linguistics. Systems thinking was a critique of the whole of modern science. It explained why science had worked so well in certain domains (physics and chemistry) but not in other domains (biology, psychology and linguistics). That gave me the theoretical basis to my criticism of modern linguistics.

But there was a problem. I was learning systems thinking within the context of a job that was firmly based in science and technology. We were learning these ideas because people believed that incorporating the lessons of systems thinking would let people do better science and technology. They believed systems thinking could fix the problems of science. That’s still true to this day. What gets called Systems Thinking now is nothing more than a way to do science better. In fact, the goal of the original thinkers like Weinberg was to set limits of what science can do. They didn’t say “here’s a better way to do science”. They said “beyond this point you can’t do science as we know it”.

During corona, I’ve watched as people I know who are evangelicals about “systems thinking” fell for the nonsense. I realised that they too had drank the kool-aid. They believed in science and they believed that systems thinking was a way to do better science. They had missed the fundamental point.

When I started reading Jung, it occurred to me that the “language faculty” that modern linguistics is predicated on could best be thought of as an archetype in the Jungian sense. Early in his career, Jung also fell into the trap of trying to explain why the archetypes must have a material basis (in genetics) using the same hand waving argumentation as in modern linguistics. However, he changed his position as he got older and started to abandon the old paradigm. I believe this is a big part of the reason why Freud became far better known than Jung. Freud’s work fits better within the materialist presuppositions of the modern world. Jung’s work does not. It raises uncomfortable questions. Much like systems thinking, Jung’s work became a challenge to the paradigm. But nobody wanted to think about that. They wanted to continue with business as usual.

Although I had not connected the dots, it was always clear to me that ideology was overriding what seemed like genuinely interesting new ideas in the seemingly unrelated disciplines of linguistics, IT, science (systems thinking) and psychology (Jung). With the corona debacle, somehow these things got tied together. We had the great Chomsky seriously suggesting the unvaccinated be allowed to starve to death. The IT industry has been used to censor the internet, freeze bank accounts of political protestors, track the movements of citizens etc. We’ve seen “science” completely fail while being told to trust it without question. And, we’ve seen the psychology of the unconscious manifest before our very eyes in a mass hysteria. It’s because all this has continued to roll along and shows no signs of going away that I have started to wonder whether something more fundamental is happening and that’s been the hunch I have been following in this series of posts.

I’ve been speed reading through Gebser’s The Ever Present Origin over the past couple of days. I’ve only read through the highlights but, in some ways, I don’t need to read the details because the concept is almost exactly the same as I formulated at the start of this series. I have been trying to find the starting line, but Gebser had already run the race. It was a marathon, too. His book is almost 700 pages long.

I found myself furiously nodding along to almost every sentence I read, especially the parts on Jung. It’s only because of my biographical background that I’ve just described that I feel confident summarising Gebser’s work without having read the whole book. Gebser was a linguist too and I don’t believe this is an accident. There is something to the practical methods of modern linguistics (not the Chosmkyan ideology) that seems relevant to the issues at hand. But that’s for a future post. For now, we can understand the key to Gebser’s analysis in this diagram taken from his book.

Each of the rows in the table is what Gebser calls a “mutation” of consciousness. We could think of them as layers on an onion. Note that the first row refers to what Guenon and others call the realm of “timeless non-duality”. The cyclic view of the world comes to view in the Mythic Consciousness and thus the idea from Hindu cosmology of the Kali Yuga and other enormous cycles of history belongs in that category. The relentless, ongoing thrust exemplified most clearly in Faustian culture with its myth of eternal “progress” belongs to the fourth category while the magical practices that are a universal of human societies (even in the West before the Church stamped them out) are in the second row. Gebser provides detailed descriptions of each of these in his book but we need only the high level view for now.

The fifth row is the one we are most concerned with because this is the new consciousness that Gebser believes is trying to become manifest in the modern world. Note that the integration of masculine and feminine is part of this new consciousness, although Gebser is mostly concerned with its social manifestation as the integration of patriarchy and matriarchy. Gebser sees Jungian psychology, in particular the archetypes (including the Unconscious) as paradigmatic of the new consciousness. This is highly fitting. Jungian individuation is about integrating disparate parts into wholes. This is also what systems thinking was primarily concerned with: how to deal with the interaction of parts and wholes. Thus, the name that Gebser gives to this new consciousness is also fitting: the Integral.

There is a crucial point to bear in mind when trying to understand the different types of consciousness. This was one of the main lessons of the original systems thinkers like Weinberg and it is one of the primary errors that we see time and again in modern society. It is the error of the Instrumental Consciousness which is still the dominant in our society (Gebser calls it “Mental” in the above chart but he uses Instrumental in the book and I prefer that. Science and Technology are the paradigmatic activities of Instrumental Consciousness).

Within the Instrumental Consciousness, everything is a logical, either/or relationship. That’s why we are obsessed with the binary logic of modern computers and machines. Within Instrumental Consciousness, if one thing is “correct”, everything else must be “incorrect”. Herein lies the logic of the myth of progress. The future is good. Therefore, the past must be bad. My political party is right. Therefore your political party must be wrong. This applies at the meta level too. Instrumental Consciousness (science) is right. Therefore, religion, magic, myth and art must be capital ‘W’ – Wrong.

Integrative Consciousness says otherwise. In Integrative Consciousness nothing is inherently right and wrong. Rather, the truths of each type of consciousness are valid within their own context. It’s no longer enough to know “the truth”. You have to know the context in which that truth can be valid. If this starts to sound like postmodernism, Gebser was well aware of the dangers that lie with this idea. Rather than explain this theoretically, let’s tie it down with a concrete, everyday example.

You decide to take a short cut down a dark alley one night and a 6-foot-something man made out of 100kg of muscle and wielding a large knife steps out of the shadows with the clear intent to do you harm. You can try turning the other cheek, you can try casting a magic spell, you can try telling him a story or appealing to his moral sensibility. Ultimately, if none of these work, you are going to have to acknowledge that in this specific context, this time and place, Might is Right. When you do so, you will realise that the best course of action is to turn and run. What you will have done is analysed the context and found the corresponding “truth”. (Fortunately for most people, their instincts will do this “thinking” for them and kick them into Fight or Flight mode. But Fight or Flight mode is just Might is Right mode. They even rhyme!).

This “truth” (Might is Right) does not invalidate other truths even though they might logically contradict each other. Logic is just one view of the world; specifically, the Instrumental Consciousness. We live in a world where Might is Right and Turn-the-other-cheek are both true. Acknowledging that fact is extremely difficult for those who are stuck in Instrumental Consciousness. They demand either/or answers. They want the “experts” tell them the one true answer and, even when that answer continually fails to yield a result (or yields negative results), they will march on like robots unable to change tack. That’s one of the main drawbacks of the Instrumental Consciousness. It has a bad habit of turning people into mindless robots. It quite literally did so in the factories of the Industrial Revolution and in modern bureaucracies.

Note that this way of looking at it also explains the curious fact I raised in the last post which is the way thinkers like Guenon and Marx promoted both a fatalistic and a purposive approach to the world. Thus, the Marxists will say that the Proletarian Revolution is the inevitable result of historical forces (a mythic/cyclic view of the world) and also that the point of philosophy is to change the world (an instrumental/science approach). Without realising it, they are invoking two different kinds of consciousness that are logically contradictory. Within the Integral approach, contradictions are not a problem and, in fact, one should be very careful not to make contradictions go away by prematurely ruling out possibilities. This is something Jung talked about a lot. He argued that we should sit in the contradiction and trust that the answer will come “from the unconscious”.

The Integral Consciousness is not a way to “fix” the problems with Instrumental Consciousness nor is it a regression to pre-rational ways of thinking. It is something new; an integration of multiple modes of understanding even when those modes seem to contradict each other. There is no fixed process to follow and no reliable timeframe for a result. In fact, if you’re doing Integral Consciousness well, a perfectly valid result is to abandon the idea. Let me give a concrete example of this which is of world historical significance.

The physicist, Richard Feynman, worked on the Manhattan Project. After the war, he went into a deep depression thinking that humans would destroy themselves with the bomb that he was partly responsible for creating.

The initial justification for developing the bomb was to beat the Germans to it. That was a completely valid reason at the time. But then the context changed. The Germans surrendered before the bomb was finished. Feynman recounts how nobody on the team stopped to ask the question: why are we still working on the bomb when the Germans have surrendered? Everybody continued to show up to work like nothing had changed.

This is paradigm example of Instrumental Consciousness. It sets a goal and works until the goal is achieved irrespective of what happens along the way. In reality, all goals are formulated in a context and the context is just as important as the goal. When the context changes, you should consider changing the goal or even abandoning it. When the Germans surrender, you don’t need the bomb anymore. That’s what Integral Consciousness would understand. But Instrumental Consciousness just marches on. Integral Consciousness is about paying attention to the context, not just the goal. It requires a different way of thinking, one that seems wishy-washy and vague to the Instrumental mind.

Gebser’s schema also allows us to make sense of recent history. The patriarchal embrace of Instrumental Consciousness destroyed itself on the battle fields of the world wars. But it has lived on in the post war era through the mindless materialism and egocentrism of the baby boomer era. All of our institutions are still running on the Instrumental consciousness of which the bureaucracy is the ultimate organisational model. The incredible stupidity we see on a day to day basis now is the logical outcome of that fact. The world is changing too fast for bureaucracies to deal with. This was the logical result of globalisation. The context has changed but we are still stuck in the old paradigm. Only Integral Consciousness can deal with a globalised world.

What we are seeing with the corona debacle is the complete failure of Instrumental Consciousness and the institutions that run on it. This was predictable if you know your systems thinking (I wrote about this in my book The Plague Story) but the people who run our institutions are using the old Instrumental Consciousness. Hence the absurd, Kafkaesque nightmare is still ongoing because these people are stuck in a trap of their own making and they’re bringing us along for the ride. For future “pandemics”, the exact same thing will happen again unless we embrace Integrative Consciousness.

I could go on and on here but these are all topics for future posts.

What about the theme of this series of posts which is the integration of what I have called the eternal feminine? This fits within Gebser’s overall model. He notes the end of the patriarchal period but rather than regress to the previous matriarchy, the new period should be an integration of patriarchy and matriarchy that would be as big of a change for men as for women because, contrary to what modern feminism says, the patriarchal period was just as damaging for men as for women (the battlefields of the world wars are all the proof needed on that front). Jung’s archetypal theory, in particular the anima/animus integration, is an excellent way to understand this process.

Thus, Gebser would agree with both of my hypotheses about what is going on at the moment. Yes, the feminine is re-emerging after a long period of patriarchy and this will affect social and interpersonal relations. But the Jungian theory is also central to the Integral Consciousness. Coming to terms with the Unconscious is going to be one of the tasks ahead of us. This leads to a certain chicken and egg problem. Are we seeing the archetypes now because the Integral Consciousness is emerging and allowing us to see for the first time? Or are the archetypes driving the emergence of the new consciousness? Ironically, this is exactly the kind of logic problem that systems thinkers dealt with. The answer is: it’s the wrong question. One of the things we will need to get comfortable with is not being able to explain everything as just cause and effect but to see that every cause is a more or less arbitrarily defined starting point on a larger “circuit”. The point of Integral Consciousness is to be aware of the circuit.

This way of looking at things backs up my hunch from the last post and my analysis in the Age of the Orphan series. The reason we have no elders in the modern world is because there can be no elders to bring in a new consciousness. That doesn’t mean that we throw away the wisdom of the past. On the contrary, what is needed is a Nietzschean re-evaluation of values which involves breaking out of the single-mindedness of the Instrumental Consciousness and incorporating the older forms of consciousness into the new Integrative Consciousness. This is also why the artists will be so important and Gebser spends significant pages in his book analysing all forms of art. Creativity, he says, is “the most direct, although rarest, process of integration.”

Recall the passage from the Book of Revelations cited in the first post in this series:

“And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered…. and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.”

I now have a new reading of this based on Gebser’s book.

The child being born is Integral Consciousness. It is that which needs to be integrated into our psychic and spiritual being. The dragon is the old Instrumental Consciousness (science, technology, capitalism, patriarchy).

So, I’d say it’s time to revisit Gebser’s ideas as a guide for the way foster the emergence of the new consciousness. But that will be a subject for a future series of posts.

All posts in this series:

Patrick White’s “Voss”
The Eternal Feminine, The Devouring Mother and the Fourth Face of God: Part 1
The Eternal Feminine, The Devouring Mother and the Fourth Face of God: Part 2
The Eternal Feminine, The Devouring Mother and the Fourth Face of God: Part 3
The Eternal Feminine, The Devouring Mother and the Fourth Face of God: Part 4
The Eternal Feminine, The Devouring Mother and the Fourth Face of God: Final

Guenon is an astute critic of the modern West and he wrote several books that express his criticism in great detail. One of the best of these is Reign of Quantity. Guenon introduces the book by noting that what’s going on in the modern world is all part of a grand cycle known in Hindu cosmology as the Kali Yuga. The name of a cycle is a Manvantara, which could be translated into English as “aeon” or “age”. In that way, the analysis is somewhat similar to what Jung was doing in Aion, although the timeframes in the Hindu tradition are seriously long. The Kali Yuga started in 3102 BCE and will last all the way til 428,899 CE.

As I’ve said, I am in furious agreement with most of the details of Guenon’s critique of the modern West one of which is that we focus almost exclusively on the material world that can be quantified. It is clear we are obsessed with matter as evidenced by the fact that right now in a huge bunker in Switzerland scientists are smashing matter together in a giant particle collider (yes, that’s stretching the definition of “matter”, but still). I don’t have a problem with the content of Guenon’s analysis. I do have a problem with the idea that this is all foretold in some great cycle of history. The problem revolves around the age old questions of fate, free will and consciousness.

Let’s accept that it’s true that some great sage in ancient India, while meditating under a tree, stole the password and hacked into the central computer at Cosmic Headquarters and mentally downloaded the plans of the cosmos for the next trillion years. According to those plans, everything that is happening right now has already been foretold and the decadence of the modern West is just part of the cycle. If that is true, what can be the point in criticising the modern West for its decadence? If the modern West is just part of the inevitable cycle, a simple act of fate, surely there is no point in arguing about it. Yet, that’s what Guenon does. In fact, he spends several books outlining with wonderful clarity a principled critique of the West based on what he calls the traditionalist approach. But, again, what is the point of this traditionalist approach given everything is inevitable anyway?

Let’s put this in the form of a thought experiment.

Let’s say everybody in the modern West reads Reign of Quantity and completely agrees with Guenon that the traditionalist approach is best. Realising the error of our ways, we stop doing everything we are doing and re-arrange society according to Guenon’s principles. If we were to do that, we would have circumvented the Kali Yuga. The West would no longer be decadent materialists obsessed with quantity. The cycle would have been short circuited because we followed Guenon’s advice.

Alternatively, we could take a more Dostoevskyan perspective. We read Guenon and understand that everything is fate. It doesn’t matter what we do, the Kali Yuga will manifest anyway, society will spiral downwards in decadence until the new cycle starts its inevitable progression. One of the ways we might respond to this knowledge is to say “screw you, cosmos! We’re not playing your stupid cycle game” and proceed to commit mass suicide. In doing so, we would also circumvent the Kali Yuga because it is a cycle of humanity and if there’s no humans around you can’t have any more cycles of humanity. In both of these cases, the overarching pattern would have been broken.

It seems to me that Guenon can’t have it both ways. Either the cycle is inevitable or the act of analysing the problems of modern society can make a difference. (There is an obvious compromise position where fate determines most things while human will has the ability to initiate change but Guenon seems quite specifically to reject this).

The issue here, and this is where Jung becomes relevant, relates to consciousness. By reading Guenon, we become conscious of problems we were previously unaware of. Either we can use this consciousness to change direction or we can’t. If we can’t, then the consciousness is useless. Worse than useless, in fact, because we know what is going to happen but can’t do anything about it. We might prefer to be ignorant in that case. As the saying goes: Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do learn from history are doomed to watch while others repeat it. Well, are those who read Guenon doomed to watch while the inevitable cycle unfolds or can they do something about it? Does the act of changing even one person’s mind make a difference?

We could translate the Book of Job into modern terms by imagining an elderly beggar on the street who is clearly suffering physical illness. The beggar tells the story of how he got into such a state and asks whether it is just. Four others, including a well-dressed young man name named, Elihu, approach. The young man, Elihu, clearly thinks very highly of himself. “One in perfect knowledge is before you,” he tells the beggar. He then proceeds to explain to the beggar why all this is for the best and the beggar must have done something wrong to deserve God’s wrath. And, even if he didn’t, God is all powerful and may do as he pleases.

With very little modification we could translate the dialogue in the Book of Job into what we have seen ever since the corona vaccines have been rolled out. Countless people took the vaccine and then got sick. From their point of view, the vaccine was the cause. They did the right thing and now suffer. But nobody seems to care. On the contrary, television media personalities and groups of people on social media pop up to say that the vaccine could not have been the cause because it’s safe and effective. “Shut up and believe in God,” says Elihu. “Shut up and trust the experts,” say the modern mob.

If this was all there was to the Book of Job, it would still have perfectly captured a universal of human psychology. But, the stakes are raised substantially by the fact that we, the reader, know that the whole thing is a set up. Satan has convinced God to allow Job to be tested in a way that causes Job immense suffering. There’s much that can and has been said about that, but we’ll focus on the argument made by Jung in Answer to Job, which is as follows.

The treatment of Job was unnecessary because God is omniscient.

Now, omniscience is one of those concepts that seems simple and yet when you think about it quickly becomes problematic. What sort of knowledge is it that God has? Does his omniscience include all kinds of knowledge or just a subset? Does God know everything that happens for all of time or did God just create the rules of the universe and then press the Play button?

To short circuit a long philosophical diversion, let’s assume omniscience means something like Laplace’s Demon. That is, because God created the universe, he knows the starting variables of everything and because God has an infinite amount of calculating power, he could deduce intellectually any path of events. If he wanted to know whether Job was faithful, he need only calculate the sequence of events in his mind to get the answer in the same way a computer simulation works (only this computer is perfect).

But God does not do that in the Book of Job. What God does, prompted by Satan, is to carry out what we could call in modern language an empirical investigation; a test. Because it’s an empirical test, Job is directly affected by it. God allows Satan to first destroy all of Job’s possessions and, when that doesn’t work to break his faith, to inflict physical suffering. God says to Satan, have fun, just don’t kill him. It is the immorality of this that forms the core of the story, although presumably we draw a different moral lesson in the modern world to the one that would have been drawn at the time. In modern scientific studies, researchers are not allowed to inflict suffering on their subjects without prior consent so modern ethics recognises this problem (although, the history of science is littered with stories like Job’s).

Why would God put Job through such torture unnecessarily? Why do an empirical test instead of use his omniscience? That is the question we, the reader, must deal with and we cannot help but take Job’s side. This seems like an open and shut case where God is in the wrong. That is Job’s argument in the story. The arguments of his opponents cannot convince us because we know the bigger picture.

To skip over Jung’s argumentation and go to his conclusion, he believed the story of Job was so important because, even though Job ultimately yielded to God (and was rewarded for doing so), it was pretty clear he was not converted to the idea that might is right. There was now one man in the world who believed God had done wrong and because God can see into men’s hearts, God himself learned this. Therefore, God learned something about himself. It follows that God also has an unconscious mind (Satan can be seen to stand symbolically for God’s unconscious in the story). It is Job’s unwillingness to yield to an obvious injustice that allows God to see all this. Job, a mere mortal, not omniscient or omnipotent, has taught an omniscient and omnipotent God something.

In the story of Job, we have a God who is not an aloof mathematician. He is not a God of pure intellect who set up the rules, started the machine running and then went off to play computer games or otherwise amuse himself while the universe bubbled along. This God is actively involved. He cares (although as Jung points out, he cares mostly about himself). We know that he cares because at the start of the story he goes out of his way to tell Satan what a virtuous man Job is. He then personally meets Job at the end of the story to extract a pledge from him. It is because God cares and gets personally involved that he can learn. Now we have a God that can change. But that learning and that change comes from the “ground up”. The material world that God could wipe out with flick of his finger turns out to be worth something after all.

The story of Job implies a view that is in contradiction to Guenon’s. Guenon’s universe is one of timeless non-duality. Time and space are illusory. There is no change. It is all very similar to Plato. The material world is mere appearance. This is partly why the Christian theology is so radical because God himself manifested in the material world. But that amounts to God manifesting in illusion. Why would a god willingly do that? In the Jungian argument, it’s because God, following the Job incident, wanted to learn more about himself and he realised he could do so by becoming a man. Suddenly, matter and the material world are redeemed.

What if the idea that the material world is just an “illusion” is actually nothing more than an intellectual value judgement made a priori; the same kind of value judgement made by Job’s interlocutors or by people who say the vaccine is safe and effective. Psychologically, that value judgement relegates material existence to the unconscious. It is not valuable, therefore we don’t pay attention to it. But in the Jungian paradigm, one does not simply relegate things to the unconscious. Out of sight is not out of mind because the unconscious is also part of the mind.

Philosophers have a habit of doing this kind of thing. In Guenon, I hear much the same tone you can hear in Plato. Notice how in the Socratic dialogues, Socrates is never surprised. He never asks a question of his interlocutors except to lead them into a dialectical trap of his own making. He never learns anything. He never says “that’s a good point, Thrasymachus. I hadn’t thought of that before. Let me go away and think about it.” For Guenon and Plato, there is nothing to learn. They have ruled out the value of such learning (from the material world) from the start. The universe is a one-way street starting in the realm of timeless non-duality and flowing down into material reality but never back up again. Jung’s reading of the Book of Job and the Bible in general suggests that the Christian God came to a different conclusion and wanted to redeem the material world. In the person of Job, the material world rose up out of God’s unconscious and forced an individuation process to occur.

What’s all this got to do with the eternal feminine?

Well, firstly, it’s the thesis of this series of posts that we are seeing a similar individuation process occur right now and that process could be as significant as the process that led (in Jung’s belief) to the God of the Book of Job manifesting as a human in Christ; in other words, an epochal change. That would mean that something critical that has been relegated to the unconscious is trying to come to consciousness. That something seems to be related to the eternal feminine. But the eternal feminine is a nebulous concept and could mean many things.

One of them could be a concept mentioned in the last post: Sophia (wisdom). The word philosopher means lover of wisdom; philo + Sophia. To the extent that Sophia is the eternal feminine, it follows that wisdom could be relevant and I think that’s true. That why I believe Guenon’s wisdom is relevant. He is right, western society is completely lacking in wisdom right now. We need wisdom like a man who has just spent two days walking in the desert needs a glass of water. That’s why I agree with most of what Guenon says even though I disagree with his underlying philosophy. There may very well be a sphere of timeless non duality. But in relation to it, I’m inclined to use Wittgenstein’s catchy phrase and say “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent”. Down here in time and space, the dualities still seem to hold even though the point is to resolve them into a trinity (or perhaps even a quarternity as in the Fourth Face of God).

However, I’m increasingly skeptical that wisdom is all we need partly because wisdom is necessarily about the past. It’s wisdom that said “might is right” when that was considered the truth. It’s also the case that the magnitude of what looks to be taking shape is enormous in which case it will be a long time before wisdom can re-establish itself.

So, maybe the eternal feminine that we really need would be the one that Dostoevsky wrote so much about and is best embodied by the Virgin Mary. That eternal feminine would indicate that what we need now is faith, forgiveness and, most of all, love.

On this score, the poets, writers and artists may be our better guide (an idea that Plato would have abhorred). Dostoevsky is one and so too, I believe, is Patrick White. We’ll explore that more in a future post.

All posts in this series:

Patrick White’s “Voss”
The Eternal Feminine, The Devouring Mother and the Fourth Face of God: Part 1
The Eternal Feminine, The Devouring Mother and the Fourth Face of God: Part 2
The Eternal Feminine, The Devouring Mother and the Fourth Face of God: Part 3
The Eternal Feminine, The Devouring Mother and the Fourth Face of God: Part 4
The Eternal Feminine, The Devouring Mother and the Fourth Face of God: Final

One of the many things I’ve learned over the last two and a half is how to identify a synchronicity. One of the problems with synchronicities is that they aren’t considered scientifically valid in our modern world. They are, we are told, “subjective”. Of course, over the last two and a half years of the corona debacle, The Science™ in all its objectivity has been wrong about everything. Ironically, I consider this fact to also be a synchronicity as I’ll explain later in the post.

Synchronicities are symbolically meaningful. Therefore, it should be possible to train people to learn to see synchronicities and the way to do that would be to give them training on how to work with symbols; interpreting them, creating them for yourself etc. It used to be the case that almost everybody would engage in symbolic behaviour at least once a week by going to Church. A Catholic mass is nothing but symbolism. The Church building itself is designed according to symbolism. There are symbols scattered around the building in the form of paintings, sculptures, intricate works on the walls and ceilings and cornices. Whether you were paying conscious attention or not, going to a Catholic mass brought you into direct contact with symbolic practice. Symbols were taken seriously and you were encouraged to take them seriously too.

Not many people go to Church anymore but there are other ways to develop symbolic competence. One that I have personal experience with is writing fiction. Again, this is all about symbols. Words are symbols. Sentences are symbols. Character and plot are symbols. Like a well built Church, a novel is a collection of symbols arranged symbolically to create meaning. The collection of the symbols into a story (or a blog post for that matter) produces in the best writers an array of symbolic resonances similar to the greatest holy buildings. These are kinds of works you can read and re-read and each time you notice some new meaning you had missed before. The new meaning you discover is actually a synchronicity but because we know a novel is a work of fiction we don’t perceive it as such. It’s not “real”. Nevertheless, the greatest writers transcend the worlds they create in their novels and create something “universal”. That is exactly what I discussed in last week’s post, my review of Patrick White’s Voss; a book that I believe transcends itself and says something very important to modern culture. I knew Voss was something special when I read it but then another synchronicity happened and now I think it’s really special, perhaps even epochal.

Most of my Devouring Mother analysis was based on reading synchronicities; symbolic meanings. Starting with the corona debacle, I quickly realised that the symbols pointed to a wider pattern, one that involved Brexit and Trump. Corona was not just a random bit of madness, a one-off mass formation psychosis. If it was, it should have ended by now. It should have ended two weeks after it started, or two months, or two years. It could have ended at any time, but it hasn’t. Instead, in just the last few weeks, the vaccine has been made available to children under 5 in some countries in what is arguably the ultimate example of the subset of Devouring Mother behaviours known as Munchausen by Proxy. Corona is not over we are told. It’s not over because the archetypal machinations are not over. In fact, they are only becoming more urgent. Like a giant fist banging on the door, something wants to come in and be recognised.

In Jungian thought, synchronicities are ascribed to the unconscious mind. To quote Jung:

“Something empirically demonstrable comes to our aid from the depths of our unconscious nature. It is the task of the consciousness to understand these hints.”

How can you tell when a hint is symbolically important versus just some random noise from your psyche? All religions solved this problem by giving certain gifted people training in symbolic understanding and then giving them the job of analysing what is a meaningful symbol and what is noise. The followers of the religion had to fall into line behind that analysis. To do otherwise was to commit heresy.

But modern society got rid of religion. And so we are all left to our own devices and our own judgement. These words on the screen are themselves just symbols and you, the reader, can treat them as meaning or as noise. Most people in the modern west would treat them as worse than noise. They would say they are “insane” (an epithet that gets thrown around willy nilly these days). Of course, those same people believe the The Science™ that has been one hundred percent wrong for the last two years. They believe it because science has become our religion. The “experts” are our priests. They are the ones who are officially recognised as interpreters of symbols. Well, it’s obvious those priests are reading the symbols wrong. Maybe it’s time for a new reading.

Those who read last week’s post, my book review of Patrick White’s Voss, know that I got a little excited. I called the book one of the greatest works of Faustian culture. I still believe that to be true but then two coincidences happened that made me re-evaluate its importance and shed new light not just on the book but on my Devouring Mother analysis.

Firstly, in my initial review, I had assumed that White had read Jung and that he had used the Jungian concept of integrating the anima/animus to inform the story of Voss. A commentator on the post (big thanks to Shane) pointed out that this was not true and that White had only read Jung later in his life. This is a crucial fact because it means White intuited exactly the same thing as Jung without direct contact between the two. This is quite a common occurrence in the history of ideas. Perhaps the most famous example is that Newton and Leibniz both came up with the calculus at the same time. Another is that Wallace and Darwin discovered the theory of evolution independently of each other.

It’s partly because I now knew that White hadn’t read Jung, that the second coincidence occurred.

I have been reading Jung extensively over the last year and just as I was finishing Voss, I began the next book on my Jung reading list, Answer to Job. As I was reading Answer to Job my synchronicity meter was going off the charts as I realised that White had also intuited the core issue from Answer to Job. But, much more importantly, it was that core issue that tied the whole thing back my Devouring Mother analysis. I saw a line going straight back from Voss, through Jung, through Faust and winding up way back at the Book of Job. But more than that, I saw The Devouring Mother in this context. It’s the natural consequence of Jung’s argument in Answer to Job. I now believe Jung had (implicitly) predicted the appearance of The Devouring Mother in that book.

Let me explain.

Answer to Job contains a long theological argument which I’ll discuss more in a future post. The main point for now is that it contains Jung’s analysis of the Assumption of Mary, a papal decree which Jung believed was the most important event in the history of Christianity since the Reformation. What is curious, (and, I think, crucial) about the decision of the Pope was that he gave no scriptural backing for the dogma. The only reference that was given was from a senior advisor who cited a passage from the Book of Revelations:

“And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.”

In the Catholic tradition, the sun-woman is Mary but she is also Sophia and, as Jung notes in one of his letters, Sophia is what Goethe was referring to in the last line of Faust by the phrase “the eternal feminine”. I had also, completely independently, analysed White’s character of Laura Trevelyan as Sophia in my review last week; hence the connecting of the dots in my mind.

There is an enormous amount of symbolic resonance around the concept of Sophia that would need a whole post (probably a whole book) to unpack. For now, we can simply note that Sophia represents the eternal feminine and has her shadow counterpart in the biblical Lilith, first wife of Adam who was banished from the Garden of Eden. In archetypal terms, Sophia is the mother and Lilith is the shadow form; the Devouring Mother.

To return to the quote from the Book of Revelations, the Sun-Woman (aka Mary/Sophia) is giving birth to a Child. But then we find out that there is a dragon in the picture.

“and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.”

Here is how I read the passage as an amateur Jungian. The Sun and Moon combined are the total psyche, The Self. The child is some new aspect of the self being born into consciousness. The dragon is the unconscious. The unconscious is trying to devour (hello Devouring Mother) the new self to prevent it from manifesting. Translated into theological terms, Mary is to give birth to something new which her shadow form, Lilith, wants to destroy. The battle appears to be between the mother and the devouring mother.

As Jung puts it in Answer to Job, there is something new wanting to come into existence. It is the integration of the eternal feminine into the Godhead. This is also known as the Fourth Face of God. That’s what the Pope was doing with the declaration of the Assumption of Mary. A similar movement had already happened in the late 19^th century in Russian Orthodox Mysticism where Sophia became the “fourth person of the trinity”, although this was ruled heretical in 1935 prior to the Pope’s decree in 1950.

That was what was going on in the religious spheres. Jung wholeheartedly agreed with the Pope’s decision from his secular psychological perspective. And, of course, in modern society we have seen the same clues popping up everywhere including the various “waves” of feminism which started around the same time at the end of the 19^th century. I now believe Patrick White’s Voss to be another exemplar; another “hint”. The papal decree was made in 1950. Jung wrote Answer to Job in 1952 and White wrote Voss in 1957. They are all about the same thing, the eternal feminine.

Here’s another symbolic resonance.

Patrick White was an Anglican but he broke with the Church in large part due to its intolerance of homosexuality (White was gay). In Answer to Job, Jung talks about the problem of Protestantism in relation to the integration of the eternal feminine. Because of the absence of an explicit scriptural basis, almost all Protestant denominations do not accept the Assumption of Mary. This pointed, Jung believed, to Protestantism being a “man’s religion”. It had no formal representation of women. The Assumption of Mary caused a split between Catholic and Orthodox faiths which now represent the eternal feminine and Protestant ones which do not. Jung believed this was a big mistake. What’s more, if the Book of Revelations is correct, then we are right now in an apocalypse (change of epoch) and Protestantism (including modern atheism) is in denial of that fact.

And here lies the key point that leads to corona and the Devouring Mother. The apocalypse – the integration of the eternal feminine – is in Jungian terms an individuation. Some new element of the psyche is coming up out of the collective unconscious and needs to be integrated into consciousness.

“…the symbols that rise up out of the unconscious….show…a confrontation of opposites, and the images of the goal represent their successful reconciliation. Something empirically demonstrable comes to our aid from the depths of our unconscious nature. It is the task of the consciousness to understand these hints. If this does not happen, the process of individuation will nevertheless continue.”

Answer to Job

The “hints” in this case are exactly what we have been talking about; the Assumption of Mary both in Catholic and Orthodox religion and the feminist movement in popular culture being just two. I include Patrick White’s Voss because it is an extended “reconciliation” of the confrontation of opposites in the form of a brilliant novel. It invokes all the primary symbols of Faustian culture including Faust himself, Christ, Mary and, most importantly, Sophia in the form of the character Laura Trevelyan. Importantly, Voss was written from a modern secularist viewpoint and so it complements and extends the religious viewpoint. White may have given up on exoteric religion, but it seems clear to me he was practising a kind of esotericism through his writing. That is why I now think his works are more than literature, they are revelations.

If all these are the “hints”, Jung notes that it is the task of consciousness to understand them. But that is precisely what has not happened. Why? Well for one thing, the Protestant denominations rejected the Assumption of Mary and here we have another big coincidence.

In the post-war years, Protestantism in most western countries (the US is an outlier in this respect) has suffered a collapse that has picked up pace in recent decades. Looking at the Australian statistics, which I assume are representative of most western countries, since 1950 Protestantism has seen a massive decrease in membership. Meanwhile, Catholic and Orthodox membership as a percentage of the population has remained steady. This is not what one would expect if there was an overall turn away from religion. In fact, the trend towards atheism in western culture is almost entirely from Protestantism to atheism. This is not that surprising as modern atheism has always been a sub-sect of Protestantism. It’s not a coincidence that the so-called Four Horseman atheists (Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennet and Richard Dawkins) are all from protestant backgrounds.

So, there seems to be a clear pattern to the chain of events. In 1950, Protestantism rejects the Assumption of Mary. In the decades that follow, people leave Protestantism in droves. Meanwhile, in secular society, the rise of modern feminism took place at exactly the same time. Just a coincidence? I doubt it. But here’s the problem, it’s clear that secular feminism is not “working”. It’s not fulfilling the underlying need which is psychological/spiritual. That’s why we are seeing The Devouring Mother manifesting the shadow form of the feminine and the increasingly huge ructions that now look to be threatening the very foundation of the West.

The Protestant west (including atheists) were not listening to the Pope in 1950 and they certainly aren’t listening now. Similarly, a brilliant work like Voss has not been understood in secular society because no secular person reads literature thinking they are doing metaphysics. In short, the average westerner is up the metaphorical creek without a symbolic paddle. The problem lies spiritually at the level of the Divine, in Jungian psychological terms in the collective unconscious and in philosophical/metaphysical terms, which would need to unpacked in more detail, but which we can summarise under the concept “wisdom”. No surprises then that modern society cannot deal with any of these. We deny the spiritual. Jungian psychology has been relegated to apostate status. And philosophy has turned into nothing more than academic masturbation. As we are missing the right tools to address the matter, we are invoking all the wrong tools instead: politics, “science”, ideology, propaganda.

Let me end with an idea I’m not quite prepared to defend intellectually yet but seems very relevant.

What we are witnessing now with the corona debacle is, I believe, the beginning of the end of modern science. The guardians of that science including the likes of Fauci (a lapsed Catholic, by coincidence) have been 100% wrong about everything in the last two and a half years. Not just a little bit wrong; exactly wrong. Are these people imbeciles? Are they completely corrupt? Maybe. But maybe there is something else going on.

It seems appropriate that all this should blow up over the concept of viruses which sit right on the border between matter (physics/chemistry) and biology and get talked about in the public discourse as if they were almost human. Modern science treats “matter” as dead, inert, without spirit. But secular people (including most modern scientists) would be very surprised to learn that this idea came about historically by the Church enforcing the old dogma of the Trinity.

The alchemists, who were the predecessors to modern chemistry, believed matter was feminine. It was imbued with spirit. Matter was also associated with the unconscious. Why? One idea is that the feminine had been relegated to the unconscious by being left out of the original Holy Trinity. When the alchemists started playing around with the idea that matter was “feminine” and was imbued with spirit, this was a heresy at the time and the Church stamped it out. Alchemy went underground and became an occult science. Official science (supported by the Church) held that matter was inert. The result was modern chemistry and materialist science as we know it.

What if the alchemists were right? That would mean the feminine spirit had been removed from modern science leading to a “masculine” dominant approach that has now spread around the world. Could that be why science has been at the forefront of the corona debacle? Could that be why The Devouring Mother is working her wrath through that institution directly and why basic scientific facts are now unable to be uttered in polite society? Is this another Jungian “hint” or is it just madness? We’ll explore the idea more in a future post.

Let’s summarise.

If this is all true, what we are seeing in the world is an apocalypse, a new epoch being born through the integration of the eternal feminine into the Godhead. In Jungian terms, it is an individuation process in the collective unconscious. As Jung noted, that process is going to happen whether we like it or not. Like the line in some cheesy movie: “There’s two ways we can do this.” Well, western society is currently choosing the hard way. That’s why we are seeing the Devouring Mother manifest in ever more fervent terms.

We have ignored the hints coming up from the unconscious for more than a century now and they are turning into outright demands. If we don’t take the hints, according to Jung, we will become the victims of the individuation process. We will be “…dragged along by fate towards that inescapable goal which we might have reached walking upright, if only we had taken the trouble and been patient enough to understand in time the meaning of the numina that cross our path.”

That’s what this series of posts will be about: the understanding of the numina that cross our path that are pointing to the integration of the eternal feminine. To adopt Jung’s metaphor, are we going to stand and walk towards the goal or are we going to get dragged through the mud by fate? That seems to be the choice before us.

All posts in this series:

Patrick White’s “Voss”
The Eternal Feminine, The Devouring Mother and the Fourth Face of God: Part 1
The Eternal Feminine, The Devouring Mother and the Fourth Face of God: Part 2
The Eternal Feminine, The Devouring Mother and the Fourth Face of God: Part 3
The Eternal Feminine, The Devouring Mother and the Fourth Face of God: Part 4
The Eternal Feminine, The Devouring Mother and the Fourth Face of God: Final

Spoiler Alert: I give away some details of the plot of Voss in this post. I don’t believe this will impact anybody’s enjoyment of the book as the literal aspects of the plot are not central to the meaning of the work, but people planning to read the book should be aware.

Now that I’ve read White, I can certainly see why he might get lumped in with the dreaded genre of modern literature. His prose is often overwrought. But I suspect that the writers he inspired were just mimicking him. They knew his writing was great but didn’t know why and, in the absence of that understanding, tried to achieve greatness themselves by copying the form but not the content. It’s the same error made by people who noticed that most of the great Irish writers were alcoholics and concluded that the thing to do to become a great writer was to drink a bottle of whisky for breakfast every day. As Jimi Hendrix once said, I’ve been plagiarised so much, I’ve even heard people copy my mistakes. What would be flaws in a lesser artist become charming quirks in an artist of greatness. Even technical errors look like they were done on purpose.

Given this background, I approached White with caution. I decided to dip my toe in with one of his lesser (and shorter) works and began reading Fringe of Leaves, which is based on the true story of Eliza Fraser whose boat got shipwrecked in 1836 on the island that now bears her name, Fraser Island, near Brisbane in Queensland. Here I discovered the other of White’s main flaws as a writer which is his habit of telling instead of showing. Rather than have his characters reveal themselves to us through their words and actions, White frequently gives us his interpretation of them. That would be bad enough but he delivers his interpretation in a cryptic, quasi-psychological fashion that, much like his unnecessarily convoluted sentence structures, makes the reader do the work. And far too often the payoff is not worth the effort invested. The good news, I quickly realised, was that the reader can simply skim over these sections without missing anything of importance.

The real life Leichhardt was a man of science and won several awards for his work. But science, at least as we would think of it nowadays, plays no role in the story of Voss. What Voss is, is a work of Faustian culture, in my opinion one of the greatest works of modern Faustian culture incorporating the ideas of two of the greatest exponents of that culture in recent times: Nietzsche and Jung. Being set in Australia, Voss is also a critique of Australian culture from within the Faustian paradigm. The protagonist is a German who is going to “discover Australia”. He is supported in his task by the Anglo-materialist bourgeois culture of Sydney in the mid-19^th century with its Victorian era moral pretences and staid social rituals.

White himself was appalled by the modern version of that bourgeois society which still dominated 100 years later when he returned to Australia from continental Europe in the 1950s. Thus, Voss can be seen as White’s attempt to show Australians where the problem lies and also the solution; namely, to balance out the yin of Anglo materialism with the yang of what I would call the spiritual Faustian exemplified by the continental tradition. If Voss as a work is completely unconcerned with the everyday life of its characters, it is because White wants to counter a lack of spirituality in modern culture with an extra hard dose of it in literary form.

The result is that there is no drama in Voss. We never learn why the characters are doing what they are doing or even why they think they are doing what they doing. This is true even of the titular character. Why does Voss want to go on this journey? What does he hope to achieve? Why was he selected by whoever did the selecting? What do they want out it? None of this is ever dealt with. Even at the start of the book where we are introduced to the characters, there is little about the details. White gives us small glimpses into everyday life by having secondary characters give their impression of Voss and Laura, the two protagonists. But these are just to show that the other characters do not understand precisely because they are lacking the spiritual Faustian.   

This approach gives the book an inevitable pretentiousness. The two central characters, Voss and Laura Trevelyan are given some lines that could be straight out of Nietzsche. We hear, for example, about the will and fate and rising above baseness. It reminds me of the comedy sketch “Shit Nietzsche Says”, which admittedly is not that funny, but does capture the awkwardness of what happens when you speak philosophical ideas in an everyday setting where they do not belong. Voss and Laura are a bit like that in the book. This would be a problem if it wasn’t clear that White was doing it on purpose. Such ideas are not made to be comfortable. They are made to shake people out of the drowsiness caused by excessive comfort. In White, they become a direct challenge to Anglo Australia and its materialist mediocrity.

Because of the lack of drama in the story and because we know the plot in advance, the novel has an epic tone that is firmly within the romantic tradition. We know from the start that Voss is doomed. He is the loner, misunderstood by society, destined to die like we all are but willing to face that death honestly unlike the bourgeois society with its big houses, its garden parties and its fancy clothes all of which seem like an elaborate scheme to hide the truth away so it doesn’t spoil one’s appetite before dinner.

It’s that bourgeois world that we enter at the start of the book as Voss visits his main financial sponsor, Mr Bonner, at Bonner’s estate to take care of some business about his expedition to Western Australia. It’s Sunday morning and everybody is at church except Laura Trevelyan, Bonner’s niece (coincidentally, Voss is not at church either). White gives us the prototypical beginning to a love story which could be straight out of Jane Austen. An odd couple meeting in an aristocratic house. She the niece of good, morally upstanding citizens. He an outsider not well versed in the manners of polite society. Later, there is a scene at a small dinner party where Laura goes into the garden for some air. Is she going outside in the hope that Voss will follow her and they can be alone? Does he take the hint and join her in the garden? That would be what happens in a typical love story but, as already noted, in Voss everyday emotions and desires play no role especially for the two protagonists.

So lacking in the normal dynamic of a romantic love affair are these initial encounters that it comes as a shock when Voss, just before starting his journey from the Darling Downs, sends a letter to Laura telling her he plans to ask her uncle for her hand in marriage. She is just as surprised as we are because, not only has there been no hint of romantic love prior to that, there is no indication that Voss would or could settle down and become a proper husband assuming that he even makes it back from his treacherous journey. Laura writes back neither confirming nor denying her acceptance of Voss’s proposal. It’s the last communication between them in the book and it marks the beginning of act two of the story and the signal that we are entering the psychological and spiritual world that characterises the main body of the novel. Voss goes wandering in the desert in true biblical fashion. Laura is going to become the Virgin Mary. The love story was just a ruse. We are now in a symbolic realm whose correspondence with Jungian psychology is so precise that I cannot believe it is accidental.

Many people have heard of the anima and animus. These are the archetypes that represent the opposite sex in our minds. They initially belong to the unconscious part of the mind and a big part of our growth as individuals is the extent to which we can integrate them into our psyche and bring them to consciousness. The anima is the unconscious part of a man’s psyche that represents the feminine qualities and the animus is the unconscious part of a woman’s psyche that represents the masculine. The integration of the anima or animus determines, among other things, what we can perceive in members of the opposite sex. We’ve all heard the criticism that men objectify women and this is a true fact of male psychology which is only overcome by the man integrating his anima. Conversely, a woman who has not fully integrated her animus sees in men little more than a physical presence, hence the truism that women love a man in uniform (White represents this in the novel by the character of Belle Bonner, who marries a Lieutenant).

The integration of anima and animus begins in earnest with the development of sexuality at puberty and is therefore integral to sexual and romantic love. But it also drives the higher integration of  the psyche in those who are ready. This is why Jung referred to the integration of the shadow as the apprenticework while the integration of the anima/animus was the masterwork. It’s also why great religious symbolism contains both the masculine and the feminine; Christ and Mary, for example.

The relationship between Voss and Laura quite literally takes place outside the physical plane as they are not co-located for most of the book nor in contact. Rather, they exist in each other’s minds. What is being represented is nothing more or less than the Jungian individuation process in action. Laura is Voss’s anima. And Voss is Laura’s animus. The story does not show us any romantic love between Voss and Laura because they have already skipped what we might call the first stage of the Jungian journey. That’s how we find them at the start of the book. Voss is the of man action ready to undertake a great mission. Laura is insightful and intelligent but not virtuous. She tells us so herself. They both need each other to begin the process of ascending to the higher plane. They are each other’s instigator for the male and female individuation process.

This takes place in the second act of the story. Voss transcends the man of action to become a spiritual guide for both Laura and the men he is leading in the desert. He rides ahead of them on his horse, aloof and abstract. He barely interacts with them but he shows them the way. Meanwhile, Laura attains virtue. She transitions into the Virgin Mary symbolised by her adoption of an orphan girl who she names Mercy. By the end of the second act, Voss has ascended to the highest plane. He is a messenger of meaning sent from the Gods, a prophet, symbolised by White in the presence of a comet in the night sky. His death leads to Laura’s final transcendence. She becomes Sophia, wisdom, and can finally see Voss for what he really is whereas earlier she had wondered “are you just a myth?” Before he dies, Voss also see Laura for all that she is, no longer a mere object.

These Jungian themes are reinforced in the third act where Voss is equated with Christ: the fully integrated Self capable of good and evil and inevitably having manifested both as a result of being human. This is contrasted with the bourgeois society which cannot accept evil and must pretend that everything is for the best. Laura is still a part of that society but she has left the house of her aunt and uncle. The question of Voss is in the air but as little more than gossip. “What happened to that German?” Laura is the only one who really understands the meaning of his journey. In biblical terms, she is Mary Magdalene; the true witness to the death of Voss in the way the biblical character was to Christ.

If the relationship between Laura and Voss is symbolic of Jungian integration at the personal level, White brilliantly extrapolates this further in a way that is consonant with both Jung and occult theory. As above, so below. If individuals can individuate, so can societies. The relationship between Voss and Laura becomes a synecdoche for Australian society and culture. Laura is the Anglo inheritance, brought to the country in trying circumstances to find a colony mired in materialism. Voss is a German representing what I earlier called the spiritual Faustian. Crucially, Laura is not the daughter of Anglo materialism (that role goes to Belle Bonner) but its dissatisfied niece. She represents the Australia that is looking for something more. That something more is the spiritual Faustian represented in the Germanic tradition – Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Jung – and embodied by Voss.

The question of Australia is raised at the start of the book where Voss mentions that, though a foreigner, he hopes to find the “real Australia”. It is to this question that White returns in the third act of the book. Voss is dead. He has played his symbolic role of bringing Faustian spirituality to Australia, but he is just the messenger of the gods. It is up to Laura, now in her psychological and symbolic role as Sophia (Wisdom) and representing Australian culture, to interpret and transmit the meaning of Voss. Fittingly, she is now a school teacher. She will teach the next generation, including her adopted native born daughter, the meaning of Voss; which is to say, the meaning of Faustian culture.

In the final scene, Laura morphs into an 18^th century French salonnières, holding court with her artists, thinkers and geniuses. An Englishman makes a wisecrack at the expense of Australian culture to which she responds. “We…will humbly attempt to rise in your opinion if you will stay long enough.” How long is enough, asks the man. For those strive for perfection, an eternity, answers Laura.

“The eternal feminine draws us on high,” wrote Goethe at the end of Faust. White finishes his book on the same note.

And that’s what Voss is, of course. It’s the Australian Faust. Note that the word “Voss” is phonetically almost identical to the word “Faust” (White pulls a similar trick in the book by giving the Judas character the name “Judd”). What Voss is, is a classically Faustian story updated to incorporate the ideas of Nietzsche and Jung and translated into the Australian landscape. It is neither more nor less than the attempt to uplift Australian culture from its mindless materialism. If this task sounds absurdly, even arrogantly, grand, White actually pulls it off. Voss is a masterpiece of Faustian literature, not just Australian literature.

I’ll finish with a few brief points.

Because Voss is set in Australia and was written at a time when Australian cultural identity was still trying to break free of the “cultural cringe”, it has inevitably been bound up with questions of Australian culture. It’s clear that White meant it as a clarion call to Australians. But the problem it addresses, the languishing in mindless materialism, has become pervasive across all Faustian culture (the West) in the aftermath of WW2. The Anglosphere “won” the wars and Anglo materialism has come to dominate everywhere. But the loss of the Germans was more than just a military one. The resources of the spiritual Faustian were put to work in service of the Nazis, most famously in their absurd invocation of Nietzsche who had himself predicted and warned about the looming threat of the bloodthirsty nationalism that was taking hold in Germany. Jung, Spengler and Heidegger also got dragged into the maelstrom. The Nazis ensured that the spiritual Faustian became tarnished by association with a great horror; an association it has retained to this day.

The obsession of the Anglosphere with the Nazis has many elements, but I suspect one of the main ones is this: the spiritual Faustian was the yin to the yang of Anglo materialism. Without the spiritual element, Faustian culture has been out of balance; malfunctioning. That was true in Australia in 1848 when Leichhardt started his voyage. It was true in 1957 when Voss was published. It’s even more true today.

We are missing our yin, our Faust, our Voss, not just in Australia but everywhere in the western world. White doesn’t seem to have appreciated that fact but perhaps he was blinded by the fact that Australia simply was more mindless than Europe at that time. Bertolt Brecht had a similar response when he moved to California. But rather than Australia and America rise to the spiritual Faustian, what has happened in the post war years is that the home of the Faustian, Europe, has descended to the material. That is what the “victory” of the Anglosphere has brought. Voss should have been a wake-up call to all Faustian culture in general, but by being written in Australia, it has become merely a work of Australian literature.

Of course, the book is not understood in Australia anyway. I’ve read numerous reviews of it now, including by people who are paid to be serious commentators of Australian literature. There is nothing, not a single review, not a single sentence of a single review, which indicates that anybody has any idea what White achieved with Voss. I’ve seen it referred to as a “romance” or, even worse, a “psychological thriller”. I guess this makes sense. You have to know the Bible, Goethe, Nietzsche and Jung as a bare minimum to understand the references in Voss. Maybe you have to have actually lived, like Patrick White did, in the Faustian heartland and absorbed its symbols. It’s precisely because the spiritual Faustian is lacking its basic elements that nobody could see what Voss really was.

Because of this, Voss takes on a meta meaning. It is autobiographical. Like its main character, the book is prophetic. But Voss needs his Laura Trevelyan to understand and interpret him and that is what is completely missing here in Australia. People know Voss is a work of greatness but they don’t know why. Spengler had already identified this problem. Australian culture is a Faustian pseudomorphosis. White intuited that. Voss is his attempt to create a true Faustian culture but nobody understood. And people wonder why White was notoriously grumpy!

And so one of the great works of Faustian culture was written in Sydney, Australia and nobody knew. To this day, I doubt anybody knows because Voss is treated like mere literature; even worse, Australian literature.

This is the final point I will make: you can’t understand Voss if you treat it as just literature.

This follows from an idea that emerged within Faustian culture, I think around the time of Nietzsche. If God is dead and religion moribund, who will interpret and propagate the symbols of the culture? The answer was: the artists. It was art which would fill the vacuum. Art would become the forum and the medium of interpreting and disseminating the symbols which constituted the culture. Art would be what would keep the symbols vibrant and alive and lift the culture out of mindless materialism.

It’s this role and this vision of art which White aims for and attains with Voss. To treat Voss as mere literature, let alone Australian literature, is to miss the point entirely, especially since literature itself has degraded to the point where it is now nothing more than a hobby of the upper middle class; exactly the thing that White was railing against.

It would be more accurate to treat Voss as a spiritual text. It is, to use another Nietzschean phrase, a re-evaluation of all values. It takes the symbols of Faustian culture and updates them for the modern world. It sets a challenge, not just for Australia, but all Faustian culture. It’s the kind of book that could make you believe in Faustian culture once more and yet, as I have already alluded to, it fell on deaf ears.

Maybe that’s the way it has to be. I’m sure White had read Nietzsche and Jung, but I’m guessing he hadn’t read Spengler. Voss looks set to become one of those late works of genius that comes during the civilisational phase, before the barbarians are at the gates, but when there is nobody left inside the gates who can understand.

That is what is at stake when talk about “culture”. Without Laura Trevelyan in her highest manifestation as understanding, Voss is reduced to a mere historical fact. He is Ludwig Leichhardt, the German explorer who went into the desert and never came back. It is only in the minds of a people and a culture that knows how to interpret symbols that he becomes all he can be. He becomes the son of God. He becomes Voss.

All posts in this series:

Patrick White’s “Voss”
The Eternal Feminine, The Devouring Mother and the Fourth Face of God: Part 1
The Eternal Feminine, The Devouring Mother and the Fourth Face of God: Part 2
The Eternal Feminine, The Devouring Mother and the Fourth Face of God: Part 3
The Eternal Feminine, The Devouring Mother and the Fourth Face of God: Part 4
The Eternal Feminine, The Devouring Mother and the Fourth Face of God: Final

I mentioned in my recent Devouring Mother update post that every now and again, amongst the cavalcade of nonsensical jabbering that constitutes western public discourse these days, it’s as if the fog clears and we are being spoken to directly by The Devouring Mother herself. This week saw one such occasion. This time it was the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, embodying the archetype to perfection. Here’s what Johnson said:

“If Putin was a woman, which he obviously isn’t, if he were, I really don’t think he would have embarked on a crazy, macho war of invasion and violence in the way that he has. If you want a perfect example of toxic masculinity, it’s what he is doing in Ukraine.”

I have studiously avoided the question of masculinity so far in my Devouring Mother analysis, preferring to focus on the archetype itself. But, of course, the dominance of a feminine archetype implies the subordination of the masculine and Johnson’s ridiculous statement has brought the matter to the fore.

So, it’s time to finally fill in some of the blanks in relation to the issue of masculinity in western societies, how that relates to the Devouring Mother, how Vladimir Putin had already come to represent the masculine in Western culture prior to the Ukraine War and why I believe the Ukraine War symbolises the re-establishment of the “masculine” at the geopolitical level. The bipolar world we are entering now could very well be the devouring feminine against the toxic masculine, although probably only in the fever dreams of the West. But before we get to all that, though, let’s do a little history lesson.

The phrase “toxic masculinity” has become part of western culture in recent times where it has come to stand for everything that is wrong with men. It is no small irony, then, that the phrase itself comes from within a movement known as the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement, a self-help group that ran in the United States in the 1980s and 90s that was aimed at addressing the problems of modern masculinity. Readers who followed my Age of the Orphan series might recognise the names of Stephen Jenkinson and Jungian psychologist, James Hillman. They were both involved in the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement and, in fact, Jenkinson tells the story in one of his books how he saw Hillman at one of the gatherings but didn’t know it was him as he didn’t know what Hillman looked like at the time.

As the name and the presence of people like James Hillman indicates, the movement had a strong Jungian bent. Typically masculine archetypes like the Warrior and the Ruler would have been discussed as would The Hero’s Journey as a guide to life. Real world problems like the break-up of families leading to the absence of a father role in the life of young men were highlighted. The capitalist economic paradigm which pits men against each other in the factory and the office was critiqued. Modern western masculinity had become split into either an excessive femininity (soy boys) or an over the top hyper-masculinity. What modern men needed was to reconnect with the deep masculine. This was not a conscious, rational process because an overemphasis on reason, logic and intellect is part of the problem. It was about reconnecting with the body (and, in one sense, the body is the subconscious).

Now, you might think that groups of men off in the bush listening to poetry and music and trying to help each other grow and develop as human beings wouldn’t be skin off anybody’s nose and might even be encouraged by society. But, we live in the world of The Devouring Mother. The Mythopoetic Men’s Movement became a target in the gender wars and that is how the phrase toxic masculinity got into the general discourse.

Within the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement, the phrase toxic masculinity was opposed to deep masculinity. Translated into the language I used in the Age of the Orphan series, it’s the difference between an uninitiated male and an initiated one. The whole point of the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement was to try and combat toxic masculinity by initiating modern men, helping them to reconnect with deep masculinity and turning them into fully integrated adult males. When it became a target in the gender wars, the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement was then accused of promoting the very thing it was trying to address!

Of course, all this fits The Devouring Mother archetype to a tee. The Devouring Mother does not want men to initiate and to connect with their masculinity. Thus, the slandering of the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement and the misuse of the phrase toxic masculinity is actually a very important part of the story of The Devouring Mother in the modern West. The Devouring Mother wants toxic masculinity. She wants immature men who can be controlled, not ones who are fully grown and in contact with the deep masculine. And, of course, the gender wars serve to divide the public and keep them from uniting against the elites. When western politicians invoke the phrase toxic masculinity, that is what is really going on.

Now that we have very briefly filled in the historical background, we can start to unpack Boris Johnson’s accusation that Putin represents the toxic masculine.

So, Johnson is just doing his job of character assassinating the enemy – Putin. But it’s the form of that character assassination that is revealing. Putin is not an animal, a barbarian, a Russki. He’s an exemplar of toxic masculinity. But we are told that toxic masculinity is endemic in the West too. So, this kind of propaganda is highly unusual. Wartime propaganda normally portrays the enemy as The Other while uniting the public in opposition. By using the phrase toxic masculinity, Johnson is putting Putin in the same group as many men in the West (from a propagandist and therefore, subconscious, point of view). You might say this was just a mistake on Johnson’s part and his rhetoric was accidental. But, actually, this reveals what is really going on at both the geopolitical level and the internal politics of the West.

Arnold Toynbee called this the internal and external proletariat. There are those on the outside who are excluded from the benefits of empire and also those on the inside. The internal proletariat found their identity with Trump and Brexit. They are the deplorables or, in archetypal terms, the rebellious children. With the Ukraine War, the external proletariat, aka the Global South, may be about to find its identity too. Johnson is, thus, correct to put them all in the same basket. But there’s the key: Putin is not one of the rebellious children. He is their leader. He is the missing father figure, the absent husband of The Devouring Mother. As we will see shortly, the West’s own propaganda had already revealed this.

Obviously, the Ukraine War is a geopolitical conflict. In realpolitk terms, it was surprising that Putin attacked not because he hadn’t been provoked but because it didn’t seem like a strong move. But as things are developing now, I think there’s something more important going on. Whether he intended it or not, Putin is leading the rise of the Eurasian bloc against the West. But, as I noted in a previous post, the West is The Devouring Mother in geopolitical terms. It exercises its power mostly through financial instruments which very much do devour their victims. The same financialisation that funnels wealth to the empire from the periphery has also created victims internally in the US. Just ask anybody who lost their shirt during the GFC. Thus, the rebellious children are both the internal and external proletariat; the ones who have been losing at the hands of the US empire. In this way, it makes symbolic sense to tar them both with the same brush of toxic masculinity as that has become a catchall phrase for everything that’s wrong with the world in western public discourse.

It also fits archetypally. Well before the Ukraine War, Putin had become something of a mythical manhood figure in western discourse.

Where things get more important, for both archetypal and geopolitical purposes, has been the fact that the Democrats in the US have been blaming Putin for everything that hasn’t gone their way ever since Trump got nominated as the Republican candidate way back in 2015. To take just the most prominent moments. Trump was accused by Hillary Clinton of being “Putin’s puppet” during one of the election debates. When Clinton lost, we were told it was because Putin had ordered the Russians to interfere in the election. We then had the whole Russiagate nonsense. Then we had “Putin’s inflation” and now we finally have Putin’s toxic masculinity. All of this is for the internal consumption of the acquiescent children. Boris Johnson’s comment this week was the latest but certainly won’t be the last.

But here is the paradox. Within this mythical, subconscious framing, Putin is given godlike powers. He must be all powerful. How else could he rig the US elections? How else can he have Trump wrapped around his finger? How else could he cause inflation and empty supermarket shelves? But if Putin is all powerful, it follows that we, the West, must be powerless. That is, of course, how The Devouring Mother wants us to feel. She has been drilling powerlessness into the acquiescent children for decades. Having Putin as the absent, evil father figure works to keep the archetypal parade going internally in the West but at the expense of making him seem incredibly strong.

There is a key fact to bear in mind about the subconscious: it believes whatever you tell it. That’s the reason why even the most absurd propaganda works. The subconscious takes it at face value. This is why it’s dangerous to consume propaganda even if your conscious mind knows full well that it is propaganda. The subconscious mind does not deal in logic. It cannot process negations. If you tell the subconscious mind that you are powerless while the enemy is all powerful, it will believe you. You can use this property of the subconscious to empower yourself (affirmations are a good example) or you can use it to disempower yourself. For example, it’s a very common habit for people to tell themselves they can’t do something and accidentally prime their subconscious to ensure they really can’t do it.

The West has been using its propaganda machine to spread the message that Putin is powerful. People in the West believe it. But so will people in the rest of the world. They will start to see Putin as all powerful too. This is all happening at the exact same time that Putin and the Eurasian bloc are explicitly setting up an alternative to Western hegemony. That alternative will only succeed if enough countries are persuaded to use it and right now the West is doing its level best to encourage that outcome not just by our own stupidity and greed but through the subconscious communication of our propaganda. That propaganda will work to keep the acquiescent children in line. But it could very well persuade the Global South to become the rebellious children. In fact, I think that’s exactly what it will do.

Bearing in mind that all models are wrong but some are useful, here is what the archetypal model says will happen next. Putin wins the war in Ukraine cementing the perception of his powerfulness. In geopolitical terms, the Global South are the rebellious children. They will take up the new deal being offered by Eurasia due in large part to the confidence in that system that Putin can generate (part of the confidence will be that the Russian military will be the stick to go along with whatever carrots the system might offer). I hope I’m wrong, but it looks like the West will continue the spiral of depression, loss of confidence and mental illness that’s been gradually getting worse in recent years. Having told ourselves that Putin was all powerful while we are powerless, we will watch on helplessly as he goes from victory to victory. Our elites will promote this in order to hold onto the reins of power as long as they can.

The irony, of course, is that Putin has all the hallmarks of a “real man”. He is the embodiment of the Ruler archetype. Meanwhile, Trump was an actual manifestation of what the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement meant when it used the phrase toxic masculinity. He is the hyper-masculine. “Grab ‘em by the pu**y” is perhaps the ultimate catchphrase for uninitiated, immature masculinity. Because our culture has actively suppressed an understanding of deep masculinity, we can no longer tell the difference between the two.

There is an open question whether out of all of this the West can reclaim masculinity. I believe the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement was correct that this must be done from the ground up. But as much as we might like to will it into existence, it will probably follow from material conditions. If things go as badly for the West as I expect in the decades ahead, the conditions will be right and we will need masculinity once again, not as a moral imperative but as a practical one.