Paul Likoudis reviews Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of C.G. Jung, a book written by Richard Noll. Original Review entitled, New Book Shows Scary Side of Jung

The Wanderer Printing Company

In the past 30 years, a “quiet revolution” has taken place in the Catholic Church as the psychoanalytical teachings of Carl Jung), replaced those of Jesus Christ, St. Paul, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas in the “mainstream” of Catholic teaching in Western Europe and the United States-a revolution which most Catholics have not yet noticed.

How odd that the Swiss psychoanalyst, who considered himself the founder of a new religion to replace traditional Christianity, who wrote of his own “deification” as a lion-headed god from an ancient Aryan mystery cult, should achieve such pre-eminent status.

Odder yet, in our post-Holocaust world, that Jung, a virulent anti-Semite whom the British Foreign Office wanted tried at the Nuremberg war crimes trials as a Nazi pseudoscientist, should be embraced as a spiritual guide by millions of Catholics seeking psychological healing.

Even odder is the fact that Jung, an “apostle for adultery,” who believed in (and practiced) polygamy, who devoted his life to overthrowing patriarchal society and reviving the ancient pagan gods of the libido, should have his “insights” into masculinity and femininity and sexuality upheld by a woman Dolores Leckey-who has headed the U.S. bishops’ Marriage and Family Life Office in their national conference for 20 years!

These bizarre developments in the Catholic Church have not yet had the hearing they deserve, but a new book by Richard Noll., a clinical psychologist and lecturer in the history of science at Harvard University, should generate. some long-overdue discussion.

Two years after publishing The Jung Cult(Princeton University Press), which demonstrated that Jung deliberately founded a new religious movement, Noll is back with The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of C. G. Jung (Random House), which presents even more explosive revelations detailing Jung’s obsession with overthrowing orthodox Christianity.

Noll shows how Jung was, in many ways, the product of his environment. He was the grandson of an apostate Catholic and physician, Karl Gustav Jung, who rose high in Masonic and Illuminati circles. The elder Karl might have been-Carl Jung believed he was-the result of an adulterous affair between K. G.’s mother and Goethe; at any rate, adultery and Masonic mysticism and occultism would continue racing through the Jung genes.

Noll introduces the reader to Carl Jung in 1895, when the 20-year-old medical student is among a circle of his female kin engaged in a seance, contacting the spirits of their dead relatives. These seances, described by Jung himself and narrated by Noll in spine-chilling detail, “marked the opening of a door that never completely closed, an invitation to countless discarnate voices and prescient entities that Jung would consult-and teach others to consult-for the rest of his life. Spiritualists techniques of visionary-trance induction not only introduced Jung to his deceased ancestors but also the spirits and gods of the Land of the Dead, who, under various pseudonyms of psychological jargon remained his traveling companions along the trails of life.”

From the years 1900 to 1909, Jung was engaged in clinical research at the renowned Burgholzli, where he specialized in dementia praecox (schizophrenia). By the time he left, he had made his reputation as a leading psychologist in Europe, and had pioneered many of the treatments and coined many of the phrases which are now standard tools of the trade.

During his time at the Burgholzli, Jung wrote a letter to the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, concerning a patient, Sabina Spielrein (with whom Jung later had an adulterous affair-one of many), thus beginning a short-lived but affectionate relationship during which Freud anointed the younger Jung his heir apparent-a device which he hoped would liberate psychoanalysis from the charge that it was a “Jewish affair.”

By 1910, Jung had come to see in psychoanalysis a replacement for traditional Christianity, which he made clear in a Feb. 10th, 1910 letter, replying to Freud’s query on whether it would be wise to join the International Order for Ethics and Culture:

I imagine a far finer and more comprehensive task for [psychoanalysis] than alliance with an ethical fraternity. I think we must give it time to infiltrate into people from many centers, to revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth, ever so gently to transform Christ back into a soothsaying god of the vine, which he was, and in this way absorb those ecstatic instinctual forces of Christianity for the one purpose of making the cult and the sacred myth what they once were a drunken feast of joy where man regained the ethos and holiness of an animal. That was the beauty and purpose of classical religion.

Noll comments:

This explosive effusion of Christian and Dionysian imagery and visions of psychoanalysis as an “irresistible mass movement” and as a living replacement for orthodox Christianity could only have reminded Freud of certain Nietzschean, Wagnerian, Volkish neopagan cultural themes that would appeal primarily to Germanic Christians-Aryans.

Freud’s response was a reprimand. Jung’s zealotry was clearly off-putting. “But you mustn’t regard me as the founder of a religion,” Freud said. “My intentions are not so far-reaching. . . . I am not thinking of a substitute for religion. This need must be sublimated”.

Noll, however, does not mention that when Jung penned that letter in 1910, Freud had reason to worry: Anti-Semitism was rife in Central Europe. Government sanctioned, underwritten by wealthy industrialists, nurtured in the universities, public schools, and cafes, anti-Semitism was the key ingredient in the rising wave of Volkish and neopagan ideologies extraordinarily popular in Germany.

The Case Of Otto Gross

Before their eventual split, however, Freud passed on to Jung for treatment at the Burgholzli a client, one Otto Gross, described by Noll as “one of the most dangerous men of his generation a threat to the bourgeois-Christian universe of German Europe. . . .

“Gross was the great breaker of bonds, the loosener, the beloved of an army of women he had driven mad…. He coaxed one lover/patient to suicide, and then another patient died under similar circumstances. . . .

“He was a Nietzschean physician, a Freudian psychoanalyst, an anarchist, the high priest of sexual liberation, a master of orgies, the enemy of patriarchy, and a dissolute cocaine and morphine addict. He was loved and hated with equal passion, an infectious agent to some, a healing touch to others. He was a strawberry-blond Dionysus.

Gross, the son of the founder of modern scientific criminology, would become-Freud not excepted-the greatest single influence on Jung, the man who persuaded him of the therapeutic value of adultery as a cure for every kind of neurosis.

Of the many fascinating characters Noll describes entering and exiting Jung’s world, Gross is by far the most intriguing and one of the most important: “Through Otto Gross, psychoanalysis first leapt from the bourgeoisie to the bohemian counterculture, beginning a literary and artistic fascination with Freudian theory that continues to this day,” observes Noll.

Gross was the prophet of a “sexual communism,” and among those he inspired were D. H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, and a host of other writers and artists. During Jung’s and Gross’ long periods of psychoanalysis, Gross “captivated Jung with his theories of sexual liberation, his Nietzscheanism, and his utopian dreams of transforming the world through psychoanalysis.”

The analysand became the teacher. Writes Noll:

During the course of their time together, Gross offered Jung forbidden fruit. After a period of tormented consideration, Jung finally bit. Jung’s conception of what constituted a ‘sin’ changed: ‘Doing evil’ could have a beneficial effect on the personality by freeing one from ‘one-sidedness’ and putting one back in touch with an Edenic instinctual being. Jung came to believe that not giving in to a strong sexual impulse could result in illness or even death. These are all ideas that everyone who knew Jung for any length of time would hear him urge on others.

Once Jung submitted to the temptations Gross offered, profound alterations in his concepts on the place of sexuality and religion in life took place. Because they denigrated the body and sexual activity-especially outside of holy matrimony-the repressive orthodoxies of Christianity now seemed to him to be the true enemies of life. Sexuality had to be brought back into spirituality.

By 1912, Jung found another model-the spirituality of pagan antiquity-that he held sacred. Although Gross die not share Jung’s fascination with spiritualism or the occult, his “religion” was finding ways to rejuvenate and indeed redeem humankind through the sacrament of uninhibited sex. Jung soon learned of the spiritual sacredness of sex through personal experience and implored others to consider the call of the flesh.

Jung is also indebted to Otto Gross for the concepts of extraversion and introversion . . . the fundamental ideas of Jung’s theory of “psychological types”.

Gross died in a sanitorium in 1920.

The Religion Of Sex

Many of Jung’s patients became his devoted “apostles.” Noll brilliantly introduces us to them, and we watch as they physically and mentally (to say nothing of spiritually) deteriorate.

There is Medill McCormick, part-owner ofThe Chicago Tribune, who suffered from both alcoholism and depression. In a 1909 letter to his wife, Ruth Hanna McCormick, he disclosed that Jung had prescribed mistresses as a cure for his ills.

He rather recommended a little flirting, and told me to bear in mind that it might be advisable for me to have mistresses-that I was a very dangerous and savage man, that I must not forget my heredity and infantile influences and lose my soul-if women would save it.

Jung similarly recommended adultery to Henry A. Murray, the psychologist and personality theorist at Harvard University, when Murray was contemplating divorcing his wife-and, of course, Jung was taking his own advice. While his wife was bearing children, Jung brought his mistress, Toni Wolff, to live with him.

By the time Murray met [Jung and Wolff] in 1925, [they] had been lovers for more than a decade. And they, too, were convinced that they had founded a new religion. They believed in a new faith in which former sins and evils became necessary for spiritual rebirth. God-no longer One would emerge from individual visionary experiences and automatic writing as a multitude of natural forces or entities that were both good and evil, writes Noll.

It was a religion conceived through polygamy.

Then there are Harold McCormick (cousin of Medill), heir of International Harvester, and his wife, Edith Rockefeller, daughter of John D. Without Edith, Noll speculates, Jung might never have succeeded-for she poured her family’s fortune into publicizing him on this side of the Atlantic, even while her own life deteriorated via the standard course: psychoanalysis, adultery, divorce, alienation from her larger family, and, eventually, a lonely death in the Drake Hotel in Chicago.

It makes painful reading.

Then there is the case of Constance Long, a British physician who never married. After her professional experiences during World War I and her contact with Jung, Long began to develop her theories on bisexuality and hermaphroditism. Her theories posited that there are no exclusively masculine or feminine genders, but each person is a blend of both.

These notions, daring for the time, have now become part of the contemporary vocabulary through such authors as the U.S. bishops’ longtime marriage and family life director Dolores Leckey.

No one should be surprised that Noll’s book reads like a walk through a mental hospital: it is. It is full of sick people, generally the idle rich searching for a cure for their profound angst; or, in the case of Constance Long, someone seeking a spiritual support for her lesbianism.

In the chapter on “The Passion of Constance Long,” Noll discloses-for the first time, based on Long’s diary Jung’s view of himself as a “heresiarch of the first order. ”

In this letter of January, 1920, filled with spiritualized eroticism and more than just a touch of Gnostic philosophy, Jung told Long how to discover the little child, the god living within her:

This child in its infinite smallness is your individuality, wrote Jung,and with practice, it is a god-smaller than small yet greater than great. The primordial creator of the world, the blind creative libido, becomes transformed in man through individuation [i.e., doing whatever you want], and out of this process which is like pregnancy, arises the divine child, a reborn god. . . .

Please do not speak of these things to other people. It could do harm to the child. . .

Noll explains: If there was ever any doubt that Jung was quite self-consciously the charismatic leader of his own mystery cult, this private letter to his disciple should dispel it. Jung considered himself a heresiarch of the first order, a redeemer who offered redemption to others so that they, too, could be involved in the grand work of bringing to life the new god that was trapped within everyone, waiting to be released.

Fitting In

Many Catholic readers of Aryan Christ will find especially valuable Noll’s final chapter, “From Volkish Prophet to Wise Old Man.” This chapter situates Jung in his era, a time when Volkish ideologies of racism and anti-Semitism, occult spirituality, sun worship, neopaganism, and a farrago of pseudoscientific philosophies prevailed.

At the heart of these potent ideologies that prepared the Germans for the Third Reich was a bitter anti-Catholicism nurtured for over a century in the state schools, the universities, and popular literature.

Noll shows, via a letter Jung wrote to Oskar Schmitz in 1923, that Jung considered Christianity a foreign growth on Germany. Like Wotan’s oaks, Jung lamented, the gods were felled and a wholly incongruous Christianity, born of monotheism on a much higher cultural level, was grafted onto the stumps. The Germanic man is still suffering from this mutilation. . . . We must dig down to the primitive in us, for only out of the conflict between civilized man and the Germanic barbarian will there come what we need: a new experience of God.

Not surprisingly, as Richard Wolin wrote in his review of Noll’s book, published in the Oct. 27th issue of the New Republic, Jung adored Hitler.

In a January, 1939 interview with Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan, Jung described Hitler in glowing terms: There is no question but that Hitler belongs in the category of the truly mystic medicine man. As somebody commented about him at the last Nuremberg party congress, since the time of Mohammed nothing like it has been seen in this world. This markedly mystic characteristic of Hitler’s is what makes him do things which seem to us illogical, inexplicable, curious, and unreasonable. . . . So you see, Hitler is a medicine man, a form of spiritual vessel, a demi-deity, or, even better, a myth.

Richard Noll’s Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung powerfully documents Jung’s life’s mission to subvert and overthrow the Catholic Church and traditional Christianity, the human wreckage he left in the wake of carrying out his goal, and his unsavory associations, including individuals involved in supporting Hitler on his rise to power. Some of the more minute details will be surprising such as Noll’s revelation that an official with the International Harvester Company helped Hitler design his Nazi flag.

How odd, then, that Jungian spirituality is a staple in Catholic education, Catholic spirituality, and Catholic retreat centers across America. How could it happen? Those who read Noll’s book might not find the answer to that question, but they will find themselves reflecting time and time again on Pope Paul VI’s lament: The smoke of Satan has entered the Catholic Church.

This item 246 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org

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Note: Regarding Jung’s Shadow side, it is very important that, to avoid disaster, we have a clear and critical understanding / approach to Jung’s dark side of pro-hitlerism, polygamy and immersion in occultic theory, wizardry and practices in Nietzschean proportions, as shown in Richard Noll’s studies. These are not well enough known.

THE WANDERER INTERVIEWS RICHARD NOLL by Paul Likoudis

Richard Noll … the author of is a clinical psychologist and a post-doctoral fellow in the history of science at Harvard University. Educated at the Brophy College Preparatory School in Phoenix, he studied political science at the University of Arizona and then received his Ph.D. in psychology from the New School for Social Research in New York. He told he considers himself a “lapsed Catholic,” who stopped going to church at age 14, when he could no longer believe what he was professing in church. His book, he explained, “just kind of materialized” while he was teaching psychology at the University of West Chester in Pennsylvania. “All the material just started falling into place.” I conducted a telephone interview with Dr. Noll from his home in Boston.

Q. I suspect [your work] has come as a very unwelcome intrusion to many Jungians, who have probably never considered his historical and cultural background. The Jung you present is a rather base product of his milieu, who acquired a smattering of bad science bad theology, bad philosophy, bad history, added a large share of occult mysticism, theosophy, and sexual libertinism, and came up with modern psychotherapy. Is this perception correct?

A. I would eliminate the word “bad” in your list. Jung’s background must be seen in his German cultural context- a context that frankly has been lost to history because of the gross obscenity of Adolf Hitler. It has taken so many generations for us to assimilate National Socialism that the world of pre-Hitler central Europe has largely been forgotten. Historians have focused so much on National Socialism and Hitler that they have neglected the period in the 1920s when he was amassing his movement. There was a lot going on besides Adolf Hitler.

Q. As a psychologist, do you make a judgment call on the intellectual “culture” of Germany in the early 20th century, preoccupied, as it was, with notions of racism, anti-Semitism, philosophical idealism, the occult, and anti-Catholicism?

A. It may seem crazy, but this was their world. It made sense to them. When you examine history and try to understand historical figures, the main task is to try to figure out which category the actors were acting in. It’s almost as if you have to figure out which category the actors were acting in. It’s almost as if you have to time travel and leave your values at home, and transmit yourself back to that world. There were all sorts of unusual and kooky things going on. Actually, the Nazis got their eugenics ideas from the United States. We were the ones sterilizing people under sterilization laws which made it mandatory for the insane, criminals, and other groups.

Q. You seem to make a great effort to distance Jung’s anti-Semitism from Hitler’s anti-Semitism, and to exculpate Jung from the charge that he was one of the intellectuals who prepared the way for Hitler. Why do you do this when it seems, at least to this reader, that the two matured under exactly the same intellectual and mystical influences-the only difference being that the one obtained real political and military power?

A. As I tried to point out in the book, the world was a racist world. It was accepted in bourgeois middle-class society. The society accepted the belief that there were great biological differences between Jews and non- Jews, that was what educated people thought. Frankly, Jung wasn’t big enough at all to influence Hitler’s rise. Back in the 1920s, everyone was talking about Count Hermann Keyserling, who did have a very strong anti-Semitic influence and connections to people who became some of the leading Nazis. Jung was not a big player in Zurich. He was attracting mostly people from England and the United States. I can’t lump him in with Hitler, despite his views on women, Jews, and other issues. Jung was never interested in a political movement. He wanted a spiritual renewal.

Q. Can you explain to a layman how it could be that so many of Jung’s insights were obtained from people suffering from mental disease, and these insights were then applied universally? Doesn’t it seem odd to project the problems of sick people on all people?

A. Jung, to his credit, really was able to see the positive aspects of suffering. He tried to find the meaning in it, in a way Freud did not. Jung realized there is no such thing as normal.

Q. Over and over again, you write that Jung’s mission in life was to form a new religion of psychotherapy with the specific intention of overthrowing Christian orthodoxy, which he judged responsible for all the neuroses in the world, due to its sexual teaching. Can you explain why Jung was so angry with orthodox Christianity?

A. First of all, Jung didn’t give up his identity as a Christian until he was 37. He was brought up in a very strict Protestant household. Jung grew up being absolutely terrified of the Catholic Church. He lived in very Protestant Switzerland, and was taught that Catholics were idol-worshipers, that the Pope was a mean, dictatorial character in Rome, that Catholic belief in transubstantiation was akin to cannibalism, and all this was drummed into Carl Jung’s head, so much so he couldn’t enter a Catholic church until his 30s. Despite many trips to Italy, he could never visit Rome.

Q. Part of Jung’s mission was to tap into the power of the occult and to re-establish the Cult of Mithras, to revive goddess worship in order to replace “patriarchy,” and to deliberately work to erode the tradition of monogamous marriage. At the same time, he saw his friends involved in these practices mentally deteriorate, even to the point of committing suicide. Why didn’t he see that these were cults of self-destruction?

A. In his view, there was no guarantee that anyone who tried to individuate (to renew themselves that is, fully realize themselves) would come out okay. He expected casualties and he took no responsibility for them. He thought this was nature at work. He really looked at the natural world, where there was no morality, where there was only root, raw life, and it was not always pretty.

Q. Based on your research, has Jung unlocked the power of the occult for modern man? A. Let me put it this way. Second only to Julian the Apostate, Jung is probably the most successful pagan prophet in the last 2,000 years. Jung is a very similar figure; he was a polytheist. He was a pagan in the old sense of the word. He believed in the multitude of gods and spirits, and he believed that what made modern man diseased was essentially Judeo-Christianity-that you had to believe in one God and only one God and believe in dogma. In his way of viewing the world, that was the great trauma of world history – the imposition of monotheism on the people of Europe.

Q. As a professional psychologist, can you explain and describe the purpose and the effect of such Jungian practices as “discovering the god within,” “dream analysis, ” “psychodrama,” “journaling,” “journeying,” and other therapies? A. It’s a very complex issue. Number one, the first thing you have to realize is that to enter the Jungian world you have to pay a lot of money to someone who has the right intuition, the right perception of the transcendent world, to help you achieve the things you want. This puts people in a dependent situation. People who feel attracted to Jungian therapy feel out of touch with God, and they are assuming, because the analysts themselves market themselves as in touch with all the deeper, more spiritual things in life, that Jungian analysts have some special connection with a transpersonal world-the collective unconscious, a greater mystical place. People pay because they want that experience, too; they think the analysts are further along the path. This situation is just right for cultism. You have troubled people looking for help, and they are trusting these analysts. In most people who make this their life-and that’s not everybody,-because most just dabble- frankly, it’s just confusing them. It’s trying to make the next high. “Well, I’m going to go to a dream group this week, or a Tai Chi workshop, or hear a guru from India.” People get trapped on this phony path to spirituality, which I usually call the “way of the workshop. ” The Jungians are almost at the point where they are going to have to declare themselves an organized religion. People are seeking hidden knowledge, they want to see it directly. They don’t want to hear a religious message from a Pope or a Bible. They want to feel it. These programs are ways to tap into “hidden knowledge.” Instead of calling it the occult, they like to call it New Age or Jungian. They want to get in touch with the mother goddess. What we are really dealing with is paganism. There is a serious revival of paganism for the first time in 1,600 years. We are back to the way we were back then. What is so clear to me is that you cannot be a Catholic and Jungian, and yet there are so many Jungians who claim to be Catholic.

Q. As I read the book, I was constantly struck by Jung’s involvement with the occult and his determination to subvert and destroy the Catholic Church, and yet today, Catholic spirituality as it is taught in the majority of U.S. dioceses is almost entirely Jungian. Look at any “spirituality” or retreat program sponsored by a diocese or a religious house, and there is probably an 85% chance the leader will be a certified Jungian therapist or a priest or a nun who is teaching Jungian therapies. What is your reaction to this? Does it strike you as strange?

A. Yes, it strikes me as strange, and it exemplifies the level of ignorance of what Carl Jung was up to. And I repeat: Anyone who is a true Catholic, and I would include charismatics, cannot teach these things. Jungian teachings are antithetical to Christianity. You can’t have it both ways, at least from a Catholic perspective. From a pagan perspective you can. Probably what has happened is that, as the United States became paganized, people didn’t want to let go of the old religion. It looks like Catholicism is lost in this country, because you have people who think they are Catholic, and they practice Jungian teachings about contacting the great mother goddess, or some other mythical figure. Essentially, to me, it looks like the battle is over. The people who claim to be both Jungian and Catholic are pagan in the old sense of the word. That’s how it was in Julian’s world. You could get up in the morning and offer a sacrifice to one god, and burn incense to another in the afternoon, and still call yourself a Christian to your friends. Anyone who claims he accepts both Jung and the Catholic Church is a pagan.

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This article was taken from the December 29, 1994 issue of “The Wanderer,” 201 Ohio Street, St. Paul, MN 55107, 612-224-5733.

The works of Richard Noll on Jung

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/s/ref=is_s?k=richard+noll+jung

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