I could write a whole book telling why I love and am devoted to Carl Gustave Jung, and continue to dive into his writings for answers to my big questions and for guidance when I am lost .... which is so often.
It is not only his theories and ideas that I love, though for me they stand as some of the most profound, original and magnificent ever spoken or written, and I am deeply grateful to have them often at my fingertips and spoken from his own mouth in videos. May those thousands of scribes, editors, publishers, film-makers, interviewers and their teams who have made such wealth available to us be forever blessed.
But I love also the man himself, as he is seen on those precious videos and depicted by those who met him, knew him, also loved him: Jung the friend, the peasant, the deep thinker, the healer, the eloquent writer, the jokester, lover, sinner, the sculptor, the artist, the complete human being ... Like the esteemed Edward Edinger, I see dear CJ as an epochal human being, one of those who come every thousand years or so to bring transformative wisdom for those who will listen. Not a saint or an angel but more, I think, because he was also so totally, genuinely, heartfully, imperfectly human.
And like any devotee, I gather all I can of his wisdom, taking into my heart what little of it I can understand. I have dozens of books by or about Jung and his wisdom, and by his long-time devotee and colleague, Marie-Louise von Franz, who also loved him. I watch films of their interviews. I read writings and watch videos of others who knew them.
(Jung and the young ML von Franz. I cannot find the source of this image)
Recently, I began reading von Franz's book, Jung, His Myth in Our Time, and have been making my slow appreciative way through it, a richly detailed, earnest summary of Jung's work that just rounds it out for me even more.
I love her too, Marie-Louise von Franz, who once said that she knew on their first meeting when she was eighteen years old and he in his fifties that she would never meet another of his stature. How brave she was, that intellectual young woman, to surrender to the creative Eros that drew her into the circle of Jung. I suspect that Jupiter, lord of higher truth and meaning and wise Sophia who touches God through the body and the mud of earth were also in the mix.
Others have claimed to know Jung as he is not usually known. In his prodigious Catalfaque, Peter Kingsley, scholar of ancient philosophy, Mystery and Magic, on which he has written several books, writes that Jung has not been recognised for the shaman, the poet, mystic and prophet that he was. But though CJ shied away from such descriptions, he was recognised as such by Marie-Louise von Franz, Laurens van der Post, Henri Corbin, Karl Kerenyi and others who knew him. He was instantly recognised as such by readers in our times, not all, but by people like me who knew from the very first reading of his work that they were entering into a wider, deeper, more magical, mythopoeic world than was usually presented.
In Jung, his Myth in Our Time, p. 62, the erudite von Franz whose dominant thinking function chastened what was so clearly her immense admiration and love for this man, writes:
I fell in love with Jung from the first book I read, his Memories, Dreams and Reflections, which I read sometimes weeping with joy at having found someone who knew, understood and valued the reality I had sometimes inhabited, who hugely expanded it, enriched it, sacralised it, and even more, could explain it. Here I am over forty years later, still picking up gems, still finding treasures of deep insight, still caught up by the Eros energy, Sophia's cthonic, profoundly feminine divinity in Jung's vision of the human psyche and the world.
“Eros is a mighty daemon”
(C. G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology)
(Marie-Louise Von Franz, Barbara Hannah, C.G. Jung)
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