NOLL AND VOID:

JUNG AND THE "NON-ANYTHING" PSYCHOLOGIST

1997 Richard Roberts

PREFACE
The following article is a condensation of an article that not only takes to task
Richard Noll's contentions about Jung in The Aryan Christ, but also sets forth how I
was able to update and utilize the Hermetic divinatory arts of Tarot and astrology
through the influence of Jungian archetypes, evidence for which Noll dismisses as
"hearsay." Furthermore, the Jungian techniques of active fantasy and
the hierosgamos, the "sacred marriage" of the conscious and unconscious minds,
resulted in my writing two books which could not have been written without these
techniques, one of which books was evidently beyond the boundaries of the
conscious mind, because no writer in the long history of literature had heretofore
written his characters into the work of another writer. This union with the
unconscious mind yielded an expansion of consciousness in both the author(myself)
and in the protagonists of my book, The Wind & the Wizard, of which Dr. James
Daley of the Psychology Department at Diablo Valley College has written, "The more
than twenty years that Joseph Campbell was his mentor well-prepared him for the
writing of a book.. which is at once an exploration of cosmic mythology, a highlyconscious Jungian tale of the individuation path, an alchemical parable in which the
son/self is transformed into the King/Self, thereby redeeming the father, and a
fantasy/science fiction adventure of great fun involving the most exotic time-travels
one could imagine." Even the book's structure comes from the "sacred marriage," two
interpenetrating triangles with a different element representing each of the six points
of the trines and each book, ranging from The Wind in the Willows to The Marvelous
Land of Oz; hence, the title. Because pages of the original authors' words are used,
the books had to be in the public domain; and to make my characters' presence as
seamless as possible, I wrote each of the six books in the style of the original authors.
The second book, which came from the archetypes dreaming themselves, is Tales for
Jung Folk.
My very first book, Tarot and You(1970), was the result of divination, accessing the
Jungian Self, the "god within" in order to attain a wisdom beyond the ego's ken.
These taped readings yielded highly accurate interpretations for the people being
"read," and I wondered for a time how the Tarot cards could possibly "work." The
secret, however, was in my method. Rather than relying on medieval-like dream
book interpretations, I dragged Tarot kicking and screaming into the 20th century by
allowing the readee to free associate his own interpretation for each card, and then
presenting an overview organized into what I called "The Jungian Spread," which
contained cards for the unconscious archetypes, which tend to drive the individual
into archetypal relations or situations. My point here is that my own life has been so
creatively enriched by Jung's influence that without it I would be impoverished.
Many others may feel as I do that the Hermetic world view is a valid alternative to

the mechanistic view of nihilism because of their own transformative experiences, of

which I should like to hear from those reading this. Therefore, those who would like
the original article in its entirety need only to email their request to me, and I shall
email it back to them from rroberts@hooked.net.
Last but not least, Noll's charges against Jung, anti-Semitism and a closet fascism,
and creation of an alternative "religion" for purely greedy, materialistic motives, were
by no coincidence the same accusations made against Joseph Campbell in 1990 by
Brendan Gill. I responded with a rebuttal, "The Shaman and the Stalinists," published
in Matrix: Explorations in Spirituality. Readers who would also like this article may
request it from me by email. It may be beneficial to read that articlebefore the one
here below, because Noll's attack then becomes truly transparent, part of a larger
nihilist agenda that seeks to discredit not only traditional religion but also those like
Jung and Campbell who posit a spiritual world view. The greater implications for the
future of our Republic are sinister indeed, for as Alan Bloom said, the nihilism and
the moral relativism that happened in the German universities, that paved the way for
Hitler, has happened in our universities and is happening everywhere. Although these
are times when the "worst of men are full of passionate intensity," the best of men
must stand on the strength of their spiritual convictions.
When I first heard by word-of-mouth of the guilt by association with Naziism tactic
in The Aryan Christ, I was given the e-mail address of Noll, whereupon I requested a
volume and page number that would substantiate his charge from the great number of
volumes in the collected works of Jung. I received from Noll an article, "A Christ
Named Carl Jung," which encapsulates the ideas in his book, but nary a line
supporting Jung's supposed fondness for the Third Reich. The reader should not be
surprised by this. I anticipated as much, for I had written a defense of Joseph
Campbell in 1990 when he was branded a fascist and an anti-Semite by Brendan Gill
in an article in The New York Review of Books. Gill's charges cited no textual
references to support his thesis, but depended upon hearsay and false assumptions
based upon a misunderstanding of Campbell's work, particularly the phrase, "Follow
your bliss."
Jung, it may be recalled, broke with Freud, thereby jeopardizing his professional
future, over Freud's demand that Jung make of Freud's sexual theory "a bulwark
against the black tide of mud of occultism." Campbell, too, risked being marginalized
when he abandoned his Ph. D. program when he wanted to change his dissertation to
his newfound interest in mythology. Denied, he abandoned his pursuit of the golden
key to academia, the Ph. D. Subsequently, while teaching at Sarah Lawrence,
Campbell earned the ire of his fellow teachers by refusing to join the teacher's union.
Can we logically believe, therefore, that these two men, who were so outspoken in
the strength of their convictions, would be unwilling to commend to paper one line to
support the charges made by their detractors Gill and Noll?
What then do Gill and Noll ask us to accept in devaluing the work and reputation of
two of the 20th century's greatest men? In respect to Campbell, according to

colleague Professor Finch, Campbell ran afoul of a clique of Stalinists at Sarah

Lawrence, who were only too willing to attack him after his death, whereas during
his lifetime not one of them was willing to engage him in print debate. This is truly a
cowardly tactic and tips the hand of those who utilize it.
Here in my own county in California, the local paper touts Noll's contention that
"Jung became an early supporter of the Third Reich in the 1930's." And the writer,
"an assistant Lifestyle editor," doesn't miss the chance to cast aspersions on
Campbell: "If you watched Joseph Campbell expound about religion on Bill Moyers'
PBS series, you may not realize that much of what Campbell talked about was
borrowed from Jung." And so this Lifestyles editor laments that although "Noll
makes his case about Jung, [it] probably won't dissuade many of his followers." She
concludes by giving the last word to the New York Times' critic Walter Kendrick, who
sums up Jungian psychology as "an obviously wacko creed."
"Dissuading" Jungian followers, and destroying the reputation of Campbell and Jung
is part of the larger agenda of nihilism which I shall reveal before the end of this
article.
Richard Noll, author of The Aryan Christ, has called for a debate on the scientific
validity of Jungian psychology, particularly the theory of the collective unconscious
and the archetypes within. The Jungians whom I have sounded out on this say,
"What's the point? Noll rejects out-of-hand Jungians' personal experience of the
archetypes and the collective unconscious." Indeed, in the Jung Index interview with
Matthew Clapp, Noll states that in an earlier seminar there was a dispute over what
constituted scientific evidence for the collective unconscious and the archetypes, and
that "many analysts argued for the validity of what they themselves saw in their
sessions with patients." Noll's response was that such experiential evidence was
grounds for an hypothesis, but had to be verified by, as he puts it, "non-believers,"
because "non-believers can't seem to find the collective unconscious anywhere."
Whenever Noll's conclusions about Jung are questioned, he adopts an Olympian
posture from which he gazes down on the questioner from the rarefied heights of
logic and objectivity, thereby implying that his conclusions can not be called into
question because all the scientific evidence is on his side. Fair enough, but if we
apply the same logical standard to his criticism that clinical, testimonial evidence is
"nothing more than hearsay. corrupted by the belief systems of the analyst and of
the patient," then we arrive at the logical conclusion that "non-believers" will not find
evidence of the collective unconscious, because their belief system says that it does
not exist.
Therefore, by Noll's methods of validating evidence we are at loggerheads, but he
notes that in one seminar an analyst suggested trying to create a "nonrational" method
for validation if traditional science could not. Noll responds by saying that "this lack
of effort to think critically is a dangerous thing." Remember that in Gill's attack on
Campbell, he called him "a dangerous mischief-maker."
Noll then goes on in the interview with Clapp to imply that Jungian analysis is
harmful. He states that one third of all forms of therapy are harmful, and that Jungian

therapy should be reclassified as a religion, "then there is no problem," although

presumably Noll would not want the medical community to license them to practice.
Jungians without the archetypes and the collective unconscious might be acceptable
to the scientific community, but that would be unacceptable to Jungians, Noll states,
because "that would remove too much of the magic and the mystery from it. They
want the metaphysics."
Presumably Noll does not want the metaphysics, which leads us back to my defense
of Joseph Campbell in which I stated that there are two opposing views on the nature
of the universe, one materialistic, in which reality must be weighed and measured,
and the other transcendental, which postulates a metaphysical reality. In Jungian
seminars, and the seminars of Joseph Campbell in which I participated, I noted a
strong religious impulse in the seminarians, many of whom were disaffiliated nuns,
priests, and rabbis. Furthermore, many of the seminarians had begun life as
materialists with a strictly scientific outlook until some sort of conversion experience
had convinced them that that model of the universe was incorrect.
When one ceases to accept the Bible as history, a kind of metaphorical
excommunication takes place, for one is no longer welcome in the bosom of the
religion. Initially, at the beginning of this century, there was nowhere for such persons
to go, except into the despair of existentialism or atheism. Jung, Campbell and others
of the New Age provided a spiritual home for such people, with revelations about
Hermeticism, in which God is within, and with the mythologies of other peoples.
But neither the scientific materialists or the religious fundamentalists are pleased by
this appeal to the people who have rejected their views of reality, their models of the
universe. That is the bottom line of the agendas of Gill and Noll in attacking
Campbell. They want us to accept their nihilistic world view in which there is no
informing spiritual principle. Just as vehement in their denunciations of Jung,
Campbell, and the New Age are the religious fundamentalists, referring to them as
"spiritual counterfeits." So we, I include myself, poor Jungians and Campbellians
take our lumps from both sides, whereas the two opposite camps demonize only one
another.
Now whereas Noll has proposed debate, and Jungians don't see the point of doing it, I
in fact do, for it serves to make us aware of what we stand for, and why we have
rejected nihilism. Ultimately a question of morality is involved in taking a stand for
what one believes. Gill and Noll call into question the characters of two great men.
Gill's charges I have laid to rest, and Noll's I shall deal with forthwith. At his website
(www.uga.edu/~conseling/jung/noll/christ_noll.html), Noll encapsulates his quarrel
with Jungians that led to his writing The Aryan Christ.
Not only are Jungians depicted as unprofessional, but also dishonest, exploitive of
"spiritually desperate patients," cult-like followers unable to think for themselves,
"fascinated with polytheism and paganism who made a religion of Jung's archetypes,"
seeking to change Jungian psychology into "a modern mystery cult," because they
"thirst for mystery, not history, myth, not fact." Worse of all perhaps is that they have
"private occult practices." To the uncritical mind, the latter statement invokes images

of Satanic rites, enough to dissuade most from considering Jungian therapy as a

viable option. But that is indeed the bottom line of the nihilist agenda everywhere, to
defuse the spiritual influence of those who present the transcendental overview, and
to depict them as "wackos." Noll lets the nihilist cat out of the bag when he speaks of
Jungian analysis as holding out the promise of "the cosmic Big Bang experience of
this transcendent reality of gods and goddess."
In all truth, therapy needs to fit the individual needs of the patient. I have known
persons in Freudian analysis for more than fifty years, during which they dwell
primarily on the family circle. A great man has said, "At the level of the problem,
there is no solution." We must therefore transcend and transform ourselves, for which
Jungian analysis at least holds out the possibility. Fundamentalists, however, need not
apply, for they see the Devil everywhere and would be in constant debate with the
analyst. That is why Jung rejected practicing Jews, according to Noll, but accepted
secular Jews, for integration of the shadow is one of the most important stages in
Jungian individuation. Nevertheless, Noll goes a bit far when he says in the Clapp
interview that "Jung despised observant Jews" and was "most vocally anti-Semitic in
the 1930s."
The Aryan Christ contains a heading that reads "For a short time he believed in the
possibilities of Naziism." Noll is quoting Wilhelm Bitter, founder of the Stuttgart
Institute for Psychotherapy, who was in analysis with Jung in the 1930s. This is the
line that is touted everywhere in the reviews of Noll's book to condemn Jung as antiSemitic, but if one takes the trouble to read the book, and it is of course troubling,
one reads that Bitter disavows Noll's implications as follows: "This statement is
wrong. He spoke of Jewish psychology, but not in an anti-Semitic sense. His best
pupils are Jewish." Subsequently we learn that Jung equated Naziism with chaos, or
the massa confusa of alchemy, certainly not a complimentary attribution.
Noll's "evidence" of Jung's support for the Third Reich is based upon "the beliefs
widely held by the classicists Jung respected, regarding the place of Indo-European
pagans, and Hellenistic Gnostics within the evolution of the Aryan race." Noll allows
that this "Aryan mysticism" predated Hitler. Indeed, it is quite true that Adolph Hitler
expropriated some of the symbology and mythology for his National Socialism,
specifically the swastika on a red sun background, but the attempt to tie this to Jung
stretches credulity when Noll says that "Jung even adopted the Aryan symbol of god
the mandala as sun as his own symbol for wholeness." This is truly guilt by
symbolic association, and unconscionable except in the nihilist philosophy that the
end justifies the means, that is, with the purpose in mind of devaluing the reputation
of a proponent of a metaphysical overview.
Had Noll truly wanted to mine the field of influence of ancient Indo-European pagans
and Hellenism on National Socialism, he could have found all he wanted to know in
two books with which I am familiar, Nigel Pennick's Hitler's Secret Sciences: His
Quest for the Hidden Knowledge of the Ancients; and Nicholas Goodrick
Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism: The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany
1890-1939. Knowledge has been used for good or evil since the beginning of man.

The same occult knowledge that Hitler used to inflame the emotions of the masses,
thereby making them slaves of his demagoguery, Jung used to free people from
centuries of dogma and superstition, making them active in their own spiritual
salvation through gnosis, although Noll faults him for this by saying that he
"significantly undermined orthodox Catholicism and restored the polytheism of the
Hellenistic world in Western civilization." So has Joseph Campbell, we might add.
But Noll cares not whether orthodox Catholicism is "undermined," it is just a further
example of his unfair attack on Jung.
A similar example of guilt by symbolic association came to my attention during the
Bush presidency. A local gossip columnist said that while at Yale, Bush had belonged
to the Skull and Bones society, which utilized in its secret rites the swastika symbol.
By means of this demagoguery, the nave reader was left to jump to his own
conclusion that Bush was a closet Nazi. Of course anyone with a smattering of
knowledge of the history of symbols knows that the swastika was used by the
American Indians as a symbol of the earth's four quarters, or four directions,
basically, a symbol of wholeness.
And Jung, as Noll tells us, adopted the mandala as sun as his own symbol of
wholeness, the Self. Remember, in Hermeticism man as God's creation is not separate
and despised by his creator. God is within. Therefore, the Gnostic and alchemical
symbol for sun, a point within a circle, lent itself to Jung's concept of the Self at the
center of psyche. Further, because of its golden color, "gold of the sun" was the long
sought end of the alchemical process, the language of which Jung utilized for his
individuation process.
My point is that whereas Hitler used the Aryan sun sign for evil purposes, the
background for the swastika on the Nazi flag, to ancient alchemists, to Jung and to
myself, the sun symbol represented the end process of a wholly spiritual evolution.
History and mythology are replete with tales of warlords who invite a rival chieftain
and his men to their stronghold on one pretense or another. But when the chieftain
arrives, he is told that in the spirit of amnesty his men must leave their weapons at the
door. A great feast ensues, during which the rival and his men are slaughtered. To me
this tale serves as a metaphor of the kind of debate Noll is seeking from the Jungians.
They must not reference their unscientific experience of the archetypes or collective
unconscious, or also we may infer, numinous Big Dreams, and active fantasies.
Further, they must not rely on Hermetic "evidence" obtained through the occult arts
of astrology, tarot, numerology, alchemy, and the Eastern I Ching. So disarmed and
stripped of these weapons they would be slaughtered, as Noll knows full well.
However, I will fight the good fight, but not on Noll's terms. I propose to storm the
castle of Materialism, carrying with me all the Hermetic arts, for if "the last 300 years
of science and medicine were superfluous to Jungian analysts," as Noll charged,
several thousand years of Hermetic arts seem lost to him. Which brings us to a
critical question. Is psychoanalysis a science or an art? If it were a science, we could
compare an encephalgraph of the patient's brain waves with that of several thousand
worldwide analysts until we found the best match for his cure. We must admit that

therapy, and particularly Jungian therapy, is a fine art.Given that, it is quite proper for
analyst and analysand to utilize Hermetic arts, in order to find the god within, the
Self, goal of the individuation process.
I am a case in point. Although I have never undergone Jungian analysis, I consider
my viewpoint to be Jungian, thanks largely to Joseph Campbell, who over a period of
years sent me most of Jung's collected works as gifts in thanks for my sharing my
home with him on his Western lecture tours from 1967 to 1979. But I always had a
predilection for the paranormal, spending much time reading the "Journal of the
Society for Psychical Research." At an early age, I set out to scientificallydisprove
astrology, the twelve character generalizations of which seemed to be utter nonsense.
To do so, I had from various astrologers readings that had more truth than falsity in
each; however, it was several years later that a Uranian chart (that postulates ten extra
planets) finally nailed precisely my character and inner life, plus a precise correlation
of dates and illnesses and accidents. The astrologer was Charles Emerson, who was
both an artist and a scientist, but he failed in his goal of getting medical science to
seriously examine the value of Uranian astrology as a predictor of health issues,
despite having written numerous articles of medical correlation. Undoubtedly Noll
could tell us why medical science ignored him. "Its astrology; it's wacko! No need to
waste time investigating it." However, I hasten to mention that I have never met
anyone who has investigated astrology in depth (going beyond the nonsense of the
sun sign generalizations in the newspapers), who has concluded that it does not
"work" as a way of defining character. Like myself, most astrologers began as "nonbelievers."
At the same time my interest in Tarot was developing, Joseph Campbell also had his
scholarly interest piqued. We visited and viewed the "marvelous" card collection of
Albert G. Field, and bought many different decks, for it was said that if the 22 cards
of the Major Arcana were arranged in the proper order, their esoteric inner meaning
would then be transparent. Eventually each of us found the arrangement that best
suited the particular deck with which we empathized, and we published this in a book
entitled Tarot Revelations (1979).
Joseph Campbell selected and edited Jung's work for The Viking Portable Jung, the
most diverse and stimulating of all Jungian editions. "Jungian" is a fair label to apply
to Campbell, I think. According to Noll, contact with the occult compromises
Jungians and the field of psychology in general; however, Campbell states, writing
about my contribution to our collaboration, "Richard Roberts, accordingly, has
pointed, in his analysis of the symbolism of the Waite-Smith deck, not only to its
background in esoteric astrological, gnostic, and alchemical traditions, but also, by
anticipation, forward to the archetypology of Jung who, in developing his insights,
was significantly influenced (as he everywhere lets us know) by the same gnostic and
alchemical texts from which the members of the Order of the Golden Dawn drew
inspiration. The crucial difference, I would say, between their understanding and
Jung's, rests in his interpretation of the archetypes as psychological, whereas Yeats
and the rest believed literally in the objectivity, not only of the mythic
personifications, but also of incarnate 'secret masters,' much in the way of

Theosophists. This trend infected their thinking, and equally their writing, with all
sorts of mystifications. But now and here, it seems to me, is a point of the
greatest interest there can be recognized in Dante's work and in the mystical lore
of his century direct influences from many of same alchemical, gnostic, and
astrological works that were drawn upon both by Jung and by the members of the
Golden Dawn."
Galileo was persecuted for presenting evidence that the earth was not the center of
the Christian universe. This should have been apparent to anyone who looked through
his telescope. Yet these believers who thought contrarily believed that the Devil had
tricked their eyes. So too the evidence of Jungians is rejected by Noll, and in so doing
he makes himself a strange bedfellow with the rigid fundamentalism of Church
dogma, even though he stands for the antithetical point of view. The belief in no gods,
no absolutes, no metaphysics is characteristic of the philosophy known as nihilism.
But nihilism has more insidious tenets which infect the world today. There being no
gods to hold us to account, self-interest takes precedence over morality; hence moral
relativism prevails. Nor is there an objective truth, say the nihilists; hence "truth" is to
be determined by force of argument by those with the greatest persuasion.
Noll should know that new scientific models of the universe have come about as a
result of "evidence" that shows that the old model is somewhat flawed, else the new
evidence could not be. Noll's unwillingness to examine any metaphysical evidence as
proof of the archetypes at best is an unscientific attitude, and at worst relegates him to
the heap of nihilists.
In the 1970s, at the same time that I was doing ten years of research and writing on
Tarot for my collaboration with Campbell, parts of which were cut and placed in a
subsequent book, From Eden to Eros :Origins of the Putdown of Women (1985),I was
investigating a possible correlation between Jung's archetypes and the planets, plus
sun and moon. That this could be scientifically taboo did not occur to me at the time.
Many local Jungians were also seeking this correspondence, for if the archetypes had
such a profound effect upon one's life, surely astrology would reflect this, provided
the right attributions were made. I myself was seeking "the missing (or 'lost') link
between mind and matter," as I said then. "Where mind terminates and 'out-there'
begins cannot be determined. Hence I postulate a model of the universe which is
holistically a psychic phenomenon."
After fifteen years of research, the correlation I discovered between planets and
animus/a, shadow, persona, and Self was published in The Journal of Geocosmic
Research, Fall, 1975. Entitled "Archetypal Astrology," the editor of that journal
noted, "One acquaintance of mine who appeared to be in a position to know stated
that Jung did not especially like the idea that astrology worked, but was compelled to
admit that it did, at least to some extent. Despite the fact that Jung was far ahead of
most of the Western scientific community in his understanding of the importance of
myth and symbolism, he was still a Western, rationalist scientist, and to anyone who
holds the assumptions of that tradition as valid, astrology is a kind of insult. But
Jung was willing to do experiments with astrology. His famous experiment

concerning the synastry of married couples is the major case in point."

I sent the article to one of Jung's daughter's, Frau Gret Bauman, whom I had learned
had herself become an astrologer. Subsequently we corresponded for a time. I had
previously sent this article to James Hillman, editor of the Jungian organSpring, but
he rejected its publication, replying that it read too much like a lecture. Ironically,
instead he published in the next issue an actual lecture by Von Franz, and eventually
became an astrologer himself, expropriating the name "Archetypal Astrology" to
signify his own brand of astrology.
One can see, therefore, that Jung's psychology has had an expansive effect upon my
own life, and I am only one of perhaps hundreds of thousands of people who have
been broadened by Jung in ways so diverse no one can say. His influence on the Arts
has been extremely enriching.
Should I and all the others have held back and not "followed our bliss" on the
grounds that it was not scientific, and that we would be held up to ridicule by the
nihilists? Had we done so, the Wasteland would have continued to prevail in the Arts,
and we would still be "waiting for Godot" amid the ash cans and midden heaps.
I make no apology to Mr. Noll or the reductionists for my affinity for Hermeticism.
Indeed, I would feel shame if I advocated the reductionist view of man as "nothing
but an animal." Our so-called progressive and enlightened century has produced the
greatest number of mass murders in history, sixty million for Stalin and eighty
million for Mao, all deriving from the philosophy that an individual man or woman
has no value except as an integer or cog in the wheel of the inevitable march towards
a classless, highly-controlled society that will dictate appropriate conduct and stamp
out individuals who will not conform. I stand with Victor Frankl who said that the gas
chambers were ultimately prepared not in some ministry of Berlin, but rather in the
lecture halls of nihilist scientists and philosophers.
When I was in college, we all thought that Orwell's 1984 was a warning about the
Right-wing of world politics. Of course he was writing about English socialism, and
the abuses of freedom he had also seen from the Left in the Spanish Civil War. But
we were mostly young, budding socialists and blind to any dangers to democracy
except fascism. One now would have thought that knowing about the 140 million
aforementioned dead, would be a wake-up call to the reductionist scientists, the
behaviorists, and the social engineers, that man cannot be treated as nothing but a
social animal, and that all equations, theories, and measures of man are bereft of the
single spiritual value needed to redeem them. Therefore, you ask us Jungians and
other proponents of New Age spirituality to hang our heads in shame for not
measuring up to your "scientific' standards. As you put it, Mr. Noll, "the last 300
years of science and medicine were superfluous to Jungian analysts."
. Individuation is the antithesis of the reductionist view of man. Jungians, of course,
are in the business of promoting individuation. And a very good business it is, for the
traditional view of religion with its hellish fires and transgressions for sinners (read
counter-revolutionists) has much in common with nihilists: man is 'nothing but" an
integer in the collective body of the Church. But Campbell is clear on the dangers

implicit in this. In his The Masks of God whenever the knight Parzival yields to the
collective dictates of conduct instead of following his own inner awareness and
direction, he fails the tests in his quest for the Grail. Indeed, the Grail may be seen as
symbolic of psychic wholeness, the goal of Jung's "individuation process." In
retrospect, individuation was the unifying theme of the Third Model Seminars which
I gave with Campbell, except for "An Evening of Celtic Lore" given at the Edinburgh
Castle, a Scottish pub in San Francisco. A line from one of our flyers for the two-day
seminar "The Evolution of Consciousness" is instructive in regard to the
individuation process: "Man is a social animal; yet attaining Self-hood, with one's
own spiritual autonomy, involves a constant struggle, because collective society
typically opposes the individual's new birth of consciousness . Fortunately for
evolving man, there are other voices than those of the masses who would reduce man
to a cipher."
One seminar was devoted to individuation in literature with examples from the works
of Joyce, Hesse, Vonnegut, Alan Watts, and Colin Wilson. Another seminar dealt with
individuation in dreams, "What the psyche says." Here Campbell presented an
elaborate slide-show of Jungian archetypes drawn from the arts. We also had a
discussion of what Jungians call "Big Dreams," numinous dream experiences that
foreshadow or coincide with a change in consciousness.
This brings us full circle to the origins of Tales for Jung Folk in dreams and active
fantasies. While preparing for the above seminar I was reading some of the Von Franz
books on fairytales, useful in explaining the archetypes by bits and pieces from one
tale or another. In the 1970s Campbell made my home his headquarters for up to ten
days, four times a year, while he did seminars from Sonoma to Big Sur. So very often
the next morning I would recount to him the previous evening's dream. They were
unusual for their dramatization of a single archetype, and it was Campbell who
suggested that I write them down. Subsequently Harper & Row, which had seen the
first two stories, wanted the rest of the archetypal lot for publication; but I had to
explain that they came unbidden, so it was several years before the last revealed
itself, and they were then published.
The subtitle of Tales for Jung Folk is "Original fairytales dramatizing Jung's
archetypes of the collective unconscious." Like Man and His Symbols, the book is a
good introduction to Jung, with a primer about each archetype following each story.
As such, it has been used for many years in college psychology courses. I shall refer
to passages from it in rebutting Noll's contention that the collective unconscious
cannot be scientifically validated, and, therefore, is unworthy of consideration except
as an indication of how unprofessional and untrustworthy Jung was as a psychologist.
First of all there is a pronounced "catch 22," a Joker in a stacked deck from which
Noll deals. We are faced with the impossible task of materially validating
(scientifically proving) a psychic content. Like the dream, the archetypes cannot be
observed, measured, or weighed. In my rebuttal to Brendan Gill's attack on Campbell,
Gill is quoted as saying, "In rational discourse, let us leave references to the soul on
the doorstep."

Jung's concept of the collective unconscious is in for the same nihilistic treatment at
Noll's hands as the soul received from the beginning of the mechanistic model of the
universe right up to now. That said, I shall now present evidence, although not of the
materialistic kind, that has convinced a substantial number of intelligent people in the
20th century that the archetypes and the collective unconscious do exist. In the
absence of scientific, numerical data, metaphors best serve to define intangibles. Noll
may howl here about "how differently Freudian and Jungian analysts are educated,
"but he must grant that he has never weighed or measured an Oedipus complex, and
that the way he knows of its presence in the psyche is by the effect upon the
individual, which is my point about archetypes. For example, in viewing a distant star
through a telescope, if we notice a wobble in its orbit, we construe that it has behind
it an unseen twin which influences what should be a steady, predictable orbit. The
collective unconscious, and its archetypal contents, are equivalent to the unseen twin
we can't see them, but nothing can make our path through life wobble more than
these profound influences.
I like to think of myself as a family, and in situations that require important decisions,
evaluate what the shadow wants, the anima, and the self, rather than have the
conscious ego attempt to autocratically rule for the rest of the family.
My homage to Jung is really contained in Tales for Jung Folk (1983). I begin by
saying, "To his undying credit, Jung was the first psychologist to regard the
unconscious as more than a mine for clues to neurotic symptoms, as in
psychoanalysis generally, or as a source of unending nightly nonsense the lay
attitude toward dreams. Indeed, Jung restored to the unconscious and to the dream the
spiritual status that it had in such great traditions as Egypt at the time of the pyramids,
or Greece of the dream-diviners and soothsayers. These ancient priests and
priestesses were our first psychologists, for they interpreted dreams, and the entire
community's well being depended upon what they saw, whether for good or ill.
Throughout history, those cultures which have revered the dream have attained the
highest spiritual development, as in Egypt and Greece."
If we recall that in Hermeticism God is within, heresy to both science and religion,
then the Jungian concept of the Self is a further development of this idea. According
to the primer for "The Self," "The Self may be likened also to God in the definition of
Meister Eckhart. 'God is an intelligible sphere whose circumference is nowhere, and
whose center is everywhere.' For as well as being the center, the Self is also the
'circumference' of the psyche, encompassing the ego, even though the ego resists
recognizing anything greater than itself. Using an analogy from astronomy, I like to
think of the Self as an expanding universe. The center of this universe is a point of
infinitely powerful energy, but the outermost boundaries of this expanding universe
are part of the same universe; thus, the Self is the psyche's center and its totality."
Nowhere is the presence of the archetypes felt more vividly and dramatically than in
the animus and anima projections that condition the attractions of our sex lives.
Jung's psychology, which may have seemed mystical and impractical in regard to the
Self, becomes quite down-to-earth in regard to the give-and-take war between the

sexes. Indeed, I would say Dr. Jung's most important contributions to psychology are
in the area of sexual relations."
Thus, reduced to its essence, Noll's quarrel with Jung is nihilism's quarrel with the
metaphysical overview of Hermeticism. As I read Noll's arguments against Jung and
Jungians, a prevalent theme underlay each contention. Everything Jungian was so
unscientific, so dangerous, because Jungians dabbled in "astrology or mythology, the
I Ching, tarot, and even palmistry." Noll, who describes himself as a "non-anything"
psychologist, is the scientific messiah, the salvation for those who had mistakenly
followed Jung, the Aryan Christ. If we hand over to Noll the Non-anything, our
horoscopes, Tarot cards, and I Ching sticks, we will be welcomed back into the
scientific community And if we but swear an oath to believe in Nothing, all will be
forgiven. Noll was offering us Absolution from the true Church of Science.
But where had I heard this before? Ah, yes, Freud's words to Jung after Freud had
fainted, his mechanistic model of the universe having been so threatened by Jung's
shamanistic production of a loud report in the bookcase next to them. "Promise me
never to abandon the sexual theory . We must make a bulwark of it against the
black tide of mud of occultism."
To me, it is as if Freud has reincarnated in Noll, and now is continuing the old quarrel
with Jung. But the curious thing about it is that in the case of Freud's rant, Noll seems
not to be the impartially objective scientist, but like Freud, the hysteric.
I shall let Joseph Campbell have the last word from the Foreward to our
collaboration: "But in the end, always, we have come to revelations of a grandiose
poetic vision of Universal Man that has been for centuries the inspiration both of
saints and of sinners, sages and fools, in kaleidoscopic transformations. It is our hope
and expectation that our readers, too, may be carried through the picture play of these
two enigmatic card packs, through the magic of THE MAGICIAN's wand and
guidance of THE PROPHETESS, to insights such as may lead, in the end, to the joy
in wisdom of THE FOOL."
To the "scientific" reductionists, we Hermeticists and Jungians are fools; yet at the
dark core of nihilism lies the denial of the birth of the human spirit.