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Kabbalistic Visions

In 1944 C. G. Jung experienced a series of visions which he later described as

“the most tremendous things I have ever experienced.” Central to these
visions was the “mystic marriage as it appears in the Kabbalistic tradition,”
and Jung’s experience of himself as “Rabbi Simon ben Jochai,” the presumed
author of the sacred Kabbalistic text, the Zohar. Kabbalistic Visions explores
Jung’s 1944 Kabbalistic visions, the impact of Jewish mysticism on Jungian
psychology, Jung’s archetypal interpretation of Kabbalistic symbolism, and his
claim late in life that a Hasidic rabbi, the Maggid of Mezhirech, anticipated his
entire psychology. This book places Jung’s encounter with the Kabbalah in the
context of the earlier visions and meditations of his Red Book, his abiding
interests in Gnosticism and alchemy, and what many regard to be his Anti-
Semitism and flirtation with National Socialism. In this second revised edition
the author also provides a comprehensive discussion of Eric Neumann’s
recently published work on the relationship between Hasidism and
Jungian/archetypal psychology. Kabbalistic Visions is the first full-length
study of Jung and Jewish mysticism in any language and the first book
to present a comprehensive Jungian/archetypal interpretation of Kabbalistic
symbolism.

Sanford L. Drob, PhD, teaches at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Bar-

bara, CA, and the C.G. Jung Institute in New York. His most recent book is
Archetype of the Absolute: The Unity of Opposites in Mysticism, Philosophy
and Psychology. He is a visual artist whose paintings on archetypal themes can
be viewed at www.sanforddrobart.com.
“Sanford Drob’s book is a scholarly and provocative analysis of Jung’s “lin-
gering shadows,” the extent to which Jung’s dark and unresolved personal
complexes about Judaism affected his psychology. Drob’s analysis of Jung’s
late-life Kabbalistic visions finds Jung to be in the midst of a reparative and
transformative process that surprisingly links him to a long line of Jewish
mystical thinkers. In this important, far-reaching, and well-researched work,
Drob re-visions our understanding of Jung and his psychology, including an
analysis of the intimate interplay of the archetypal images shared by alchemy
and the Kabbalah. I am certain that its publication will ignite continuing
dialogue and debate.”
Stanton Marlan, PhD, Jungian Analyst

“At last! An in-depth, thoughtful, book bridging the worlds of Kabbalah

and Depth Psychology. Sanford Drob has provided us with a clearly
defined understanding of the archetypal patterns linking Kabbalah and the
psychology of C.G. Jung (and Freud) – from the world of Alchemy to the
amplification of Symbols. Dr. Drob shows he is equally at ease in both
worlds- not an easy task- and has provided us with an indispensable new
source for appreciating the connection between the world of the Kabbalah
and that of Analytical Psychology.”
Aryeh Maidenbaum, PhD, Director, NY Center for Jungian Studies
Kabbalistic Visions

C. G. Jung and Jewish Mysticism

Second edition

Sanford L. Drob
Cover image: “The Tree of Light and Dark” (Frontispiece from V. Weigel’s
Stadium Universale.)
Second edition published 2010
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Sanford L. Drob
The right of Sanford L. Drob to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
X BR325.C8. Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers
University Libraries.
Second edition published 2023 by Routledge
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Drob, Sanford L., author.
Title: Kabbalistic visions : C. G. Jung and Jewish mysticism / Sanford L Drob.
Description: [Second edition]. | Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York,
NY : Routledge, 2023. | “First published 2010 by Spring Journal Books”--
Title page verso. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2022015158
Subjects: LCSH: Jung, C. G. (Carl Gustav), 1875-1961. | Cabala. |
Mysticism--Judaism.
Classification: LCC BF109.J8 D69 2022 | DDC 296.1/6--dc23/eng/20220407
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022015158

ISBN: 978-0-36746-123-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-36746-124-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-00302-704-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003027041

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Taylor & Francis Books
Contents

List of illustrations vi
Preface vii

Introduction 1
1 Kabbalah and Depth Psychology 8
2 Kabbalah and Alchemy 32
3 The Wedding and Eros Symbolism 46
4 The Coincidence of Opposites in the Kabbalah and Jungian
Psychology 59
5 The “Shadow” and the “Other Side” 70
6 Adam Kadmon and the Sefirot 76
7 Fragmentation and Restoration 83
8 The Raising of the Sparks 94
9 Kabbalah and the Development of the Psyche 105
10 Carl Jung, Anti-Semitism, and National Socialism 137
11 Jung’s Kabbalistic Visions 176
12 Philosophical and Theological Issues 194

Appendix: Erich Neumann’s “Roots” 206

Notes 232
Index 282
Illustrations

Tables
1.1 The Basic Metaphor in Luria and Freud 18
9.1 The Lurianic System and its Archetypal Interpretation 108
11.1 Key Features of the Zoharic Theory of Dreams and their
Psychological Equivalents 185

Box
1.1 The Lurianic System 14
Preface

This has been a difficult book to research and write, one that involved a great
deal of personal anguish and soul-searching, not only in relation to what
would be said, but how and whether it should be said at all. On the one hand,
I am of the belief that Jungian psychology provides us with a very significant
piece of the puzzle regarding the human psyche. Moreover, I am convinced
that Jung’s perspective upon myth, mysticism, and religion is critical for any
contemporary interpretation of the Kabbalah. On the other hand, in the
course of researching this book, I have become acutely aware, more aware
than I would have perhaps preferred, of Jung’s problematic attitudes
towards both Jews and Judaism, and the ethical and social dangers that
certain aspects of Jung’s thought pose with regard to both anti-Semitism
and other forms of irrational prejudice. The questions that I have been
forced to ask are further complicated by my discovery and belief that Jung
is highly Kabbalistic in some of his doctrines, and that some of the ideas
he shares with certain strands within Jewish mysticism are the very ideas
that caused him to lose his bearings with respect to the threat of National
Socialism prior to World War II.
My initial intention in writing this work was simply to expand upon the
cross-fertilization between the Kabbalah and Jungian psychology that I had
described in several prior publications;1 to provide further evidence for my
thesis that Jung, by extracting the spiritual core of alchemy, was in many
ways rediscovering and reinterpreting the Kabbalah;2 and to show that
Jungian psychology is thus eminently suited to a contemporary under-
standing of Kabbalistic myths, symbols, and ideas. However, as I proceeded
with my work, it became increasingly clear that a simple rapprochement
between Jung and the Kabbalah was impossible, and that neither could
emerge unchanged from an encounter with the other. A second purpose
eventually emerged, one that involved a critique, reinterpretation, and in
some cases reformulation of certain key Jungian and Kabbalistic notions
that have the potential for dire consequences. In writing this book, I have
become far more appreciative of the age-old rabbinic dictum that among
those who enter the “garden” (of mysticism) very few emerge spiritually,
viii Preface

morally, and psychologically whole. In this work, I ponder the question of

whether Carl Jung (and by extension, Jungian psychology) can be a valuable
guide in our own spiritual/psychological quest. While in the end, and with
certain provisos, I answer this question in the affirmative, I have come to
recognize that the journey into the garden, as both Jung and the Kabbalists
well understood, must inevitably take us through the shadow world of the
“Other Side,” and I found that it is to this shadowy realm of Jung’s attitudes
towards Judaism, race, Hitler, and the Nazi party that any full examination
of Jung and the Kabbalah must eventually arrive.
Thus, while this book focuses upon an examination of Jungian psychology
and Jewish mysticism, it also includes an assessment of Jung’s relationship to
Jews and Judaism. It considers both Jung’s very harsh and very kind words and
deeds with regard to the Jewish people and religion and continues with an
extended meditation on the question of whether and how Jung compensated
for some of his earlier prejudices. Although this is not a biographical study per
se, I have felt compelled to discuss some of the personal, psychological, social,
and theoretical factors that led Jung into certain prejudicial statements and
sentiments while he was, at the same time, developing a psychology that in his
own later estimation was wholly anticipated by the Jewish mystics.
I realize that by openly discussing the purportedly “anti-Semitic” material I
run a grave risk of losing many readers, both Jewish and non- Jewish, who,
unfamiliar with the full compass of Jung’s writings and ideas, will see him in
the most negative of terms and close their minds to the ideas I present and the
arguments I make regarding the significance of Jung’s thought for our under-
standing of the Kabbalah. I also realize that many other readers will regard
my consideration of Jung’s personal attitudes largely or even wholly irrelevant
to the question of Jung’s theories and their applicability to a wide range of
religious symbols and experience.3 I can only say that I have labored long and
hard with respect to whether and where the “biographical” material should be
examined and included in a work of this kind. I ultimately concluded: (1) that
if Jungian psychology is to be made relevant to the study of Kabbalah, then
that psychology must be strong enough to pass the test of its weakest link; (2)
that one cannot understand Jung’s Kabbalistic visions and his entire relation-
ship to both the Kabbalah and alchemy without considering his attitudes
towards Freud, Judaism, and the rise of National Socialism; and (3) that the
dangerous path that Jung flirted with may well be intrinsic to the very world-
view that Jungian psychology shares with the traditional Kabbalah, and that
thus any consideration of Jung’s relationship to the Kabbalah without an
examination of Jung’s shadow or “other side” would be woefully incomplete. I
hope that the reader will bear with me and stay the course through the moral
and spiritual uncertainties of this examination in the hope of experiencing
a bit of psychological and perhaps spiritual understanding. As the Zohar,
profoundly if dangerously, says: “There is no light except that which issues
from darkness…and no true good except it proceed from evil.”4
 Preface ix

I would like to thank Stanton Marlan, Michael Sokal, and Aryeh Mai-
denbaum for encouraging the completion of various chapters in this book,
several of which have appeared in somewhat altered form in the journals or
books for which each of them has served as editor, and Nancy Cater for her
encouragement and assistance with the first edition of this work. I would also
like to thank Alexis O’Brien, Susannah Frearson, Driss Fatih, and Reanna
Young at Routledge for their assistance in bringing this second edition of
Kabbalistic Visions to fruition.
I have, in this second edition of Kabbalistic Visions, added an appendix
which considers the significance of the 2019 publication of Erich Neumann’s
long concealed The Roots of Jewish Consciousness. Neumann’s work sheds
important light on the parallels between Jungian and Hasidic thought and
provides considerable insight into Jung’s late life claim that the Hasidic Maggid
of Meseritiz anticipated his entire psychology in the 18th century.
Introduction

The proposition that one of the twentieth century’s giants in psychology,

C. G. Jung, can be understood as a Jewish mystical thinker, whose theories
not only reflect Kabbalistic sources but can actually breathe new life into
them, is an idea that is likely to be looked upon skeptically by scholars of
both Jung and the Kabbalah alike. While it is hard to avoid the obvious
fact that Jung, especially in his later years, quoted fairly extensively from
Jewish, especially Kabbalistic, sources, his references to Judaism are rather
few in comparison to those he made to Christianity, Gnosticism, and
alchemy. Further, Jung’s interest in the Kabbalah is generally understood
as merely one example of his more general interest in world religions
(including Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism), each of which he regarded
as the “data” for his hypothesis of the archetypes of the collective uncon-
scious. Given Jung’s predilection for Christian theology, and his early
ambivalent and at times derogatory view of Judaism, it would seem to be a
difficult task to argue, as I will in this book, that Jung’s relationship to Jewish
mysticism played an important role in the development of analytic psychol-
ogy, a role that he himself initially may have sought to minimize, but which
he ultimately embraced. It will be my task in this work to overcome each of
these potential prejudices.
To understand Jung’s intimate relationship with Jewish mysticism, one
need look no further than Jung’s own autobiographical account of a series of
visions that he had after his heart attack in 1944, and which he described, in
his Memories, Dreams, Reflections, as “the most tremendous things I have
ever experienced.”1 These visions, which occurred at a point when, according
to Jung’s own report, he “hung on the edge of death,”2 involve decidedly
Jewish, moreover Kabbalistic, themes:

Everything around me seemed enchanted. At this hour of the night

the nurse brought me some food she had warmed. For a time it
seemed to me that she was an old Jewish woman, much older than she
actually was, and that she was preparing ritual kosher dishes for me.
When I looked at her, she seemed to have a blue halo around her
DOI: 10.4324/9781003027041-1
2 Kabbalistic Visions

head. I myself was, so it seemed, in the Pardes Rimmonim,3 the

garden of pomegranates, and the wedding of Tifereth with Malchuth
was taking place. Or else I was Rabbi Simon ben Jochai,4 whose
wedding in the afterlife was being celebrated. It was the mystic marriage
as it appears in the Cabbalistic tradition. I cannot tell you how wonderful
it was. I could only think continually, “Now this is the garden of pome-
granates! Now this is the marriage of Malchuth with Tifereth!” I do not
know exactly what part I played in it. At bottom it was I myself: I was
the marriage. And my beatitude was that of a blissful wedding.5

The vision continues with what Jung describes as “the Marriage of the Lamb”
in Jerusalem, complete with angels and light. “I myself,” he tells us, “was the
Marriage of the Lamb.” The vision concludes with Jung in a classical
amphitheater situated in a verdant chain of hills: “Men and women dancers
came on-stage, and upon a flower-decked couch All- father Zeus and Hera
consummated the mystic marriage, as it is described in the Iliad.”6
Jung relates that as a result of these experiences he developed the impression
that this life is but a “segment of existence,” and that time as it is ordinarily
experienced is an illusion, since during the visions past, present, and future
fused into one. There can be little doubt that Jung took these impressions ser-
iously, as according to him, “the visions and experiences were utterly real; there
was nothing subjective about them.”7
This book is, in many ways, a sustained meditation on Jung’s Kabba-
listic vision. Interpreting this vision requires that we not only venture into
the details of Kabbalistic theosophy and Jungian psychology, but also into
the question of Jung’s personal relationship to Judaism and what he
termed “Jewish psychology.”

Jung and Jungism

Although I originally believed that the controversy regarding Jung’s per-
sonal and professional stance with regard to the Jews and the Nazis was
beyond the scope of this book, I am now convinced that a full exploration
of Jung’s attitudes on these issues is a necessity for progress in Jungian
studies of Jewish mysticism.8 This is not only because Jung’s purported
early anti-Semitism has been an obstacle to such studies, but for the more
basic and urgent reason that the very celebration of the nonrational and
emotional aspects of the psyche and the openness to its dark side, which
Jung shares with certain trends within the Kabbalah, may actually have
contributed to Jung’s negative attitudes towards normative Judaism and
his early optimism regarding the spiritual potential of the Nazi party.
Jung’s relationship to Judaism will therefore be a major concern, especially
in the second half of this book, where I will consider the literary and his-
torical record, and argue that this record supports the view that Jung
 Introduction 3

achieved a compensation and transformation in his views towards Jews

and Judaism in the years during and after the Second World War.
After decades of avoiding the problem the Jungian community has,
more recently, to its credit, taken careful stock of Jung’s record on the
“Jewish question” before, during, and after the Nazi era. The “Lingering
Shadows” conference,9 which was held in New York in the spring of 1989,
has greatly broadened the dialog and “soul-searching” on these important
questions. While there has now been much written on the subject of Jung’s
personal relationship to the Jews, what has been missing has been a deep
and sustained reflection on Jung’s theories and Judaism, in particular the
relationship between Jungian psychology and Jewish mysticism. This
work, which grows out of an appreciation for both Jewish mysticism and
Jungian psychology, is meant to continue and expand upon the reflections
on this theme that I began in my earlier articles and books.10

The Purpose of the Book

My goal in this book is threefold. First, through a careful analysis of both
Jung’s texts and his sources, I will explore the impact that Kabbalistic
ideas had upon the development of Jungian psychology. I will show, for
example, how, in extracting the psychological and spiritual “gold” that lay
buried in the alchemists’ texts and practices, Jung was, in many respects,
reconstituting the Kabbalah, which had to a large extent been alchemy’s
spiritual foundations, and in the process provided himself with a frame-
work through which he could make sense of the profound and transform-
ing experiences he had years earlier, and which eventuated in his Red Book
and related writings.11 Second, through an archetypal analysis of the
Kabbalistic symbols, I will explore the profound psychological insights
afforded by a Jungian approach to Jewish mysticism. As such, it is my
hope that this work will be a contribution both to Jungian and Kabbalistic
studies. Finally, I will critically examine a view on the non-rational nature
of the psyche, aspects of which are shared by Jung and the Kabbalists, and
which may have attracted Jung to the Kabbalah in the first place. In doing so,
I will raise certain questions regarding the values inherent in the Kabbalah as
it is often understood and take some tentative steps towards a “New Kabba-
lah,”12 one that is perhaps more balanced in its approach to the rational and
nonrational aspects of both theology and the human psyche.
Jung brought the same interpretive posture to the Kabbalah as he had
brought to Gnosticism and alchemy, the two spiritual disciplines that had
received his most sustained attention. Throughout most of his career, Jung
regarded Gnostic and alchemical symbols and practices to be projections of
mostly unconscious psychological processes. Where the Gnostic saw the infi-
nite divine “Pleroma,” Jung saw the infinite expanse of the individual and
collective unconscious. Where the alchemist saw a procedure for combining
4 Kabbalistic Visions

base metals into gold, Jung saw the symbolic formation of a unified “self.”
Jung’s approach to the Kabbalah was similar, but less systematic, and his
views on Jewish mysticism must occasionally be pieced together from his
discussions of parallel Gnostic and alchemical themes. Further, as will
become evident in the late chapters of this work, Jung’s ideas concerning the
significance of mystical symbols and experience changed later in his life, a
change that was arguably in large measure precipitated by his Kabbalistic
visions of 1944.13
In this book I will survey a number of Kabbalistic symbols and ideas
that were of significance to Jung, and several others that are significant
from a Jungian perspective. Among these symbols and notions are Ein-Sof
(the Infinite God), Tzimtzum (the Divine Contraction), Adam Kadmon
(Primordial Human), the Sefirot (divine archetypes), Shevirat ha-Kelim
(the Breaking of the Vessels), Kellipot (Shells or Husks), the separation/
unification of the King and Queen, Tikkun ha-Olam (the Restoration of
the World), and Partzufim (Divine “Faces” or “Visages”). While I will
endeavor herein to elucidate the significance of each of these Kabbalistic
symbols, both from traditional and Jungian perspectives, those interested
in a more detailed treatment are referred to my earlier books, Symbols of
the Kabbalah and Kabbalistic Metaphors.14
In his later writings and letters, Jung acknowledged a great affinity with the
Jewish mystical tradition. Yet as great as was Jung’s acknowledged affinity to
the Kabbalah, his unacknowledged relationship was even greater. For every
reference to the Kabbalah in Jung’s writings there are several to Gnosticism,
and perhaps dozens to alchemy—yet, as I will detail in this book, the inter-
pretations that Jung places on Gnosticism and the very texts that Jung refers
to on alchemy were profoundly Kabbalistic, so much so that one could call
the Jung of the Mysterium Coniunctionis and other later works a Kabbalist in
contemporary guise. Jung has frequently been called a “Gnostic,”15 but for
reasons that I will provide, Jung is far more Kabbalistic than he is Gnostic,
and he is “alchemical” largely to the extent that the alchemists borrowed
from and relied upon Kabbalistic ideas.
In this study, I will argue that Jung read Gnosticism in such a manner as to
transform a radical anti-cosmic, anti-individualistic doctrine into a world-
affirming basis for an individual psychology, one that is remarkably close to
the psychology of Kabbalah and, especially, Chasidism. Indeed, near the end
of his life, Jung himself came to the conclusion that “the Hasidic Rabbi Baer
from Mesiritz…anticipated [his] entire psychology in the eighteenth cen-
tury.”16 Further, I will show that Jung interpreted alchemy so as to extract its
Kabbalistic spiritual and psychological core. Had Jung been sufficiently
familiar with the Kabbalists (and Chasidim), his task could have been far
easier, for their writings provide a richer and more psychologically oriented
imagery and symbolism than either the “otherworldly” theories of the
Gnostics or the radically material practice of the alchemists. Indeed, in some
 Introduction 5

instances, the Gnostics, the alchemists, and the Kabbalists share the same
symbols and images (e.g., the “sparks,” “Primordial Human”), but in each
case the Kabbalistic approach to these symbols is the closest to Jung’s own.
In short, by providing a “this-worldly” interpretation of Gnosticism and a
spiritual-psychological interpretation of alchemy, Jung arrived at a view
that was essentially Kabbalistic in spirit. To use an alchemical metaphor,
Jung, in his interpretation of alchemy, succeeded remarkably in extracting
the Kabbalistic gold that lay buried in the alchemists’ texts and methods.

The Plan of This Book

Chapter 1 provides a brief survey of Kabbalistic symbols and ideas, with
specific attention to the Kabbalistic theosophy of Isaac Luria, which is of
particular relevance to Jungian psychology. The relationship between the
Lurianic Kabbalah and (Freudian) psychoanalysis is briefly considered.
Jung’s interpretation of Gnosticism is revealed as a model through which he
was to later comprehend both alchemy and the Kabbalah. The relationship
between Gnosticism and the Kabbalah is explored, and Jung’s familiarity
with Kabbalistic sources is surveyed.
Chapter 2 examines the relationship between the Kabbalah and
alchemy. The impact of the Kabbalah on alchemy is explored in some
detail as background for the assertion that Jung, in extracting the spiritual
and psychological core of alchemy, was, in effect, reconstituting a Kabbalistic
perspective on humanity.
Chapters 3 through 8 explore a variety of Kabbalistic symbols and ideas
that had a significant impact on Jung’s thinking. The Kabbalists’ “wed-
ding” and erotic symbolism (Chapter 3) and their conception of the com-
plementarity of opposites (Chapter 4) are seen as an important foundation
for Jung’s understanding of the human psyche as a coincidentia opposi-
torum of masculine and feminine, good and evil, etc. Chapter 5 is a com-
parative study of the Kabbalistic symbol of the “Other Side” and the
Jungian “Shadow.” Chapter 6 discusses the Kabbalistic symbols of Adam
Kadmon and the Sefirot, which Jung understood as important symbols of
the self. Chapter 7 focuses upon the Lurianic symbols of the Breaking of
the Vessels (Shevirat ha-Kelim) and their restoration (Tikkun). These sym-
bols embody the dialectic of fragmentation and restoration, chaos and
order, which, for Jung, is an essential dynamic of the human psyche.
Chapter 8 considers the “scintillae” or “sparks,” an image utilized by both
the Kabbalists and Gnostics, and which Jung interprets to be symbols of
the collective unconscious.
Chapter 9 requires a bit more explanation. Jung can in some ways be
understood as a contemporary Kabbalist, yet one who provides the basis
for a radical psychological interpretation of the Kabbalists’ symbols and
ideas. Such a psychological interpretation was not altogether foreign to the
6 Kabbalistic Visions

Kabbalists themselves, who, on the principle of the microcosm mirroring

the macrocosm, held that their own descriptions of cosmic events were
also, and equally profoundly, descriptions of the dynamics within men’s
souls.17 Indeed, such an interpretation of the Kabbalah provided the major
impetus for the doctrines of the Chasidim. Still, Jung took this psychologiza-
tion process further than either the Kabbalists or Chasidim, living in a pre-
psychoanalytic age, could ever have hoped to do them- selves. In Chapter 9 I
follow Jung’s example and method in providing a psychological interpretation
of certain Kabbalistic symbols and texts that Jung himself did not consider.
Indeed, my goal in this chapter (and throughout this book) is to apply Jung’s
method to the basic metaphors of the Lurianic Kabbalah, a task that Jung did
not even attempt to complete himself.
Chapter 10 considers in detail the vexing issue of Jung’s relationship to
Judaism and his controversial stance with regard to National Socialism.
My intent in this chapter is not to provide an apology for Jung, but rather
to review the historical record in order to provide the reader with an
opportunity to evaluate Jung and Jung’s personal relationship to Judaism
and the Kabbalah. This chapter raises the question of whether Jung sup-
pressed the Jewish mystical sources of his psychology and considers the
possible motives he might have had for doing so. The chapter also con-
siders several possible explanations for Jung’s apparently contradictory
words regarding Judaism, Hitler, and the Nazi party. While throughout
this book I will present a perspective from which a Jungian approach to
Jewish mysticism can be welcomed by those (such as myself) who continue to
be deeply troubled by Jung’s behavior before, and also to a more limited
extent after, World War II, I acknowledge that others may come to different
conclusions on this matter.
Regardless of what we conclude regarding Jung’s personal behavior, it is
clear that Jungian psychology is in many ways compatible with and in
some instances indebted to Jewish mystical ideas and symbols. Even if one
were to remain firmly (and I believe wrongly) convinced that Jung was
anti-Semitic, one would ignore his psychology at the peril of ignoring insights
that are compatible with, based upon, and, perhaps most significantly,
illuminative of the Jewish mystical tradition.
Chapter 11 provides a detailed examination of Jung’s 1944 “Kabbalistic
vision.” Jung’s vision is explored from Jungian and Kabbalistic dream
perspectives, providing both a comparison between Jung and the Kabba-
lah on the subject of dreams and a basis for the idea that Jung’s dreams/
visions served a compensatory and redemptive function in connection with
his activities and writings prior to World War II.
Chapter 12 considers the question, raised by any characterization of
Jung as “Gnostic” or “Kabbalistic,” regarding the extent to which Jung
shared in the metaphysical as well as the psychological assumptions of
these spiritual movements. Throughout most of his career, Jung himself
 Introduction 7

denied any metaphysical aspirations, asserting that his discussions of

“God” or “Primordial Human,” to take two examples, were merely meant
to illuminate aspects of the empirical psychology of the self, and that any
inquiry into the external “truth” of these archetypal images was beyond
the scope of his own investigation.18 In spite of these disavowals, Jung has
been adopted (and criticized) by the theologians, and his work can be
taken to have important theological, axiological, and metaphysical impli-
cations. Further, toward the end of his life, Jung seemed to open the door
to theology, stating, amongst other things, that for him the existence of
God was a matter of knowledge as opposed to belief, an assertion that,
with the publication of The Red Book, we now see had been made by Jung
much earlier in his life.19
Philosophically, Jung can be understood as part of a tradition that can be
traced back to the Kabbalah and early Christian mystics (and which achieved
supreme rational expression in Hegel), which sees the Absolute and man as
progressing through a series of contradictions or oppositions in a quest for
unity and, as Jung put it, “individuation.” One of the goals of Chapter 12 is to
situate Jung within this tradition, comparing his views with those of the
Kabbalists as well as with the views of such thinkers as Kant, Hegel, and
Derrida, all in the hope of illuminating not only Jung’s work, but the con-
temporary situation of the Kabbalah as well. Such issues as the metaphysical
status of psychological and philosophical antinomies and oppositions, the role
of reason and myth in resolving such antinomies, and the nature of mythical
symbols (each of which are raised by Jung’s work) must be addressed if the
age-old tradition of the Kabbalah is to gain new life in our own time, rather
than remain the province of historians and philologists.
Chapter 1

Kabbalah and Depth Psychology

Late in his life, when Carl Jung was asked to comment on “the significance of
Freud’s Jewish descent for the origin, content and acceptance of psycho-
analysis,” Jung responded that in order to adequately answer this question
“one would have to take a deep plunge into the history of the Jewish mind…
into the subterranean workings of Hasidism…and then into the intricacies of
the Kabbalah, which still remains unexplored psychologically.”1 Freud himself
is said to have exclaimed, “This is gold!” after having read a German transla-
tion of the Kabbalistic work Sefer Etz Chayyim,2 and Jung, in an interview on
his eightieth birthday in 1955, declared, “the Hasidic Rabbi Baer from Mesiritz
anticipated my entire psychology in the eighteenth century.”3
It would seem, at least according to Jung’s evaluation, that the Jewish
mystical tradition, as expressed in Kabbalah and Chasidism, is of more
than passing significance for the origins of depth psychology. This chapter
examines this proposition in some detail, beginning with an overview of the
relevant Kabbalistic symbols and ideas, and then exploring the significance
of these ideas for both Freudian and Jungian thought.

The Kabbalah
The Kabbalah, the major tradition of Jewish mystical theosophy, theology, and
practice, is a vast spiritual and intellectual arena that in our time has come to
both ignite the public’s imagination and command its own field of university
study. Rooted in early Jewish mysticism and, according to many, a Jewish form
of Gnosticism,4 the Kabbalah achieved its own unique expression toward the
end of the twelfth century in the anonymous Sefer ha-Bahir, generally regarded
to be the earliest extant text in this mystical genre.5 It is in Sefer ha-Bahir that
the theory of the ten Sefirot, the value archetypes (e.g., Will, Wisdom, Under-
standing, Kindness, Judgment, Beauty, etc.), which the Kabbalists held to be
the elements of creation, first takes distinctive form. The locus classicus, how-
ever, for our understanding of the Sefirot and other Kabbalistic symbols is
Sefer haZohar (The Book of Splendor), which, according to Jewish tradition,
was authored by the second-century rabbinic sage Simon ben Yochai.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003027041-2
 Kabbalah and Depth Psychology 9

Contemporary scholars, however, believe that the Zohar originated in Spain

sometime in the thirteenth century, and was for the most part written by Rabbi
Moses de Leon (c. 1250–1305), who claimed to have “rediscovered” this
“ancient” text, and who first brought it to the attention of the world.6 The
Zohar, much of which is written as a loose and far-reaching commentary on
the Torah (the Five Books of Moses), is the source of much of the “wedding
symbolism” (unifications of the various Sefirot) that preoccupied the alche-
mists studied by Jung. The Zohar’s homilies on the nature of the unknowable
infinite, the soul, the masculine and the feminine, the Sefirot (archetypes of
God, mind, and world), the relationship between good and evil, dreams, death,
and many other subjects provide much of interest to analytic and archetypal
psychologists. As we shall see, Jung himself quoted a number of Zoharic pas-
sages, and appears to have been acquainted not only with a Latin, but also a
German and an English translation of portions of this book.
It is, however, the radical reformulation of the Kabbalah, initiated by Isaac
Luria (1534–72) and his disciples, notably Chayyim Vital (1542–1620), in the
final decades of the sixteenth century, that will be the focus of much of our
interest in this work.7 Vital, who outlived Luria by fifty years, had acted as
Luria’s “Boswell” during the latter’s most produc tive period in Safed, taking
down his words as if they were the words of a prophet. It was through Vital and
Luria’s other disciples that the Lurianic Kabbalah was transmitted from Pales-
tine to Europe and later became the foundation for the Sabbatean heresy8 in the
seventeenth century and the Chasidism in the eighteenth century. Luria’s ideas
were little known outside orthodox Jewish circles, however, until Gershom
Scholem brought them to the attention of the intellectual world in the 1930s.9
Even today, only a fraction of the Lurianic corpus has been translated into
English. Luria himself wrote comparatively little, and the main source for our
knowledge of Luria’s theosophy, Chayyim Vital’s Sefer Etz Chayyim, is an
extremely complex and baroque work. While it is rich in archetypal material, its
study requires familiarity with the specialized Kabbalistic terminology used by
its author.10 A more lucid volume by Moses Luzatto has been translated as
General Principles of the Kabbalah. Written one hundred years after Vital’s
death, it summarizes many of the basic symbols and principles of the Lurianic
system.11
One can also find many ancient Gnostic themes reappearing suddenly in
the Lurianists, and the study of both Christian and Jewish Gnostic sources is
invaluable as a background for comprehending the ideas of the Kabbalah.12
Lurianic ideas are prominent in the seventeenth-century messianic movement
surrounding Sabbatai Sevi in Poland.13 They are also to be found among the
Chasidim, whose psychological interpretation of the Kabbalah is invaluable
for our own understanding of this tradition.14
There is also a Christian Kabbalah, which translated into Latin and at
times creatively expanded upon some of the Jewish sources. For example,
Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata, a Latin compendium of Zoharic
and other Kabbalistic texts, was relied upon by Jung in his interpretation of
10 Kabbalistic Visions

alchemy.15 We should also note that the Kabbalah has important affinities to
many of the themes in Plato and Neoplatonism, Christian mysticism,
German Idealism (Schelling and Hegel), and, interestingly, both Hindu and
Buddhist thought.16 A comprehensive contemporary interpretation of the
Kabbalah would indeed take into consideration these and many other mys-
tical, theological, and philosophical movements, a number of which I have
examined in my previous works, Symbols of the Kabbalah, Kabbalistic
Metaphors, and Kabbalah and Postmodernism.

The Lurianic Kabbalah

With this background in mind, I will now briefly summarize the main
Lurianic symbols and ideas. As the Lurianic Kabbalah incorporated much
of the previous Kabbalah, this summary will provide the necessary back-
ground to comprehend not only Jung’s use of the Kabbalistic symbols, but
also a contemporary psychological reading of the Kabbalah as a whole.
The Lurianic Kabbalah is of interest in part because of its systematic treat-
ment of many of the symbols and conceptions of the earlier Kabbalah.
Indeed, many of the ideas in the Lurianic Kabbalah are dynamic develop-
ments of concepts and symbols that appear in the Zohar. Luria adopted the
earlier Kabbalistic term Ein-sof to designate the primal, allencompassing
“Infinite All.” This “All,” according to the Kabbalists, is both the totality of
being and the abyss of complete “nothingness.”17 As such, it is the union of all
things and their opposites.18 For the Kabbalists, Ein-sof is completely ineffable
and unknowable prior to its manifestation in creation. Regarding Ein-sof, the
Zohar declares, “High above all heights and hidden beyond all concealments,
no thought can grasp you at all…You have no known Name for You fill all
Names and You are the perfection of them all.”19 Vital holds that the term
Ein-sof “indicates that there is absolutely no way to comprehend Him, either
by thought or by contemplation, because He is completely inconceivable and
far removed from any kind of thought.”20 Nearly all Kabbalists agree that
Ein-sof is at least one step removed from the personal, biblical God.
Luria departed from the majority of the earlier Kabbalists, who had put forth
a Neoplatonic, “emanationist” view of creation. According to Luria, Ein-sof
created the world through a negative act of divine concealment, contraction,
and withdrawal. This act, known in the Lurianic corpus as the Tzimtzum, was
necessary to “make room” in the divine plenum for the emanation of the
worlds. In the act of Tzimtzum, the Infinite God withdraws himself from
himself, leaving a void. According to Vital:

When it arose in His simple will to create the world and emanate the
emanations, and to bring to light the perfection of His acts and names,
then He contracted Himself into the central point that was in the middle
of His light. He contracted Himself into this point and then retreated to
the sides encircling this point. Then there remained an empty space or
ether, an empty hollow (or void).21
 Kabbalah and Depth Psychology 11

This void, known as the tehiru or chalal, is a metaphysically empty circle

or sphere (or on some accounts a square), which Ein-sof surrounds equally
on all sides. Once established, this void becomes the metaphysical “space”
in which an infinite number of worlds will take form through a positive,
emanative phase in the creative process. But even without a positive ema-
nation the stage has already been set for a finite world; like a photographic
slide, which selectively conceals various portions and aspects of a projec-
tor’s homogenous light, the Tzimtzum creates a differentiated matrix of
finite things by selectively concealing aspects of the full divine presence.
According to Luria, with the advent of the Tzimtzum, a thin line (kav) of
divine light (the Or Ein-sof) penetrates the void but does not completely trans-
verse it. From this line, as well as from a residue (reshimu) of the divine light that
had remained in the metaphysical void after the divine contraction, the first
created being, Primordial Human (Adam Kadmon), is formed. (The Or Ein-Sof,
the divine light, is subsequently revealed to be a sexual or erotic energy which
informs the conjugal relations between the masculine and feminine aspects of
God and the world.)
Vital holds that it is the Primordial Human who is responsible for ema-
nating the archetypal structures of the created world, the Sefirot. Lights
flashing from the ears, nose, mouth, and eyes of this Primordial Human
create the Sefirot, which are understood by the Kabbalists to be the ten
essential elements or value-dimensions of creation. Each light from the
Primordial Human beams down into the void and then returns, leaving a
residue of divine energy from which the “vessel” for each Sefirah is formed.
A second light is projected from the eyes of Adam Kadmon and then
returns, leaving behind a second residue, which fills the vessels, thereby
completing the formation of each of the ten Sefirot. The ten Sefirot, in
order of their emanation (and with their alternate appellations), are as fol-
lows: Keter (Crown) or Ratzon (Will), Chochmah (Wisdom), Binah
(Understanding), Chesed (Loving-kindness) or Gedullah (Greatness),
Gevurah (Strength) or Din (Judgment), Tiferet (Beauty) or Rachamim
(Compassion), Netzach (Glory), Hod (Splendor), Yesod (Foundation), and
Malchut (Kingship) or Shekhinah (the feminine aspect of God).
The Sefirot are themselves organized into the “body” of Primordial
Human, with Keter, Chochmah, and Binah forming the “crown” and
“brains”; Chesed and Gevurah, the arms; Tiferet, the torso; Netzach and
Hod, the legs; and Malchut, the mouth, or in some accounts the feminine
counterpart to Adam Kadmon. The Sefirot are also organized into a series of
five worlds (the worlds of Primordial Human, “Nearness,” “Creation,”
“Formation,” and “Making”—the lowest of which, Assiyah [Making], pro-
vides the substance of our earth). The cosmos, as it was originally emanated
via ten discrete Sefirot, is known as the “World of Points.”
In addition to the emanation of the Sefirot, Adam Kadmon is said to
emanate the Otiyot Yesod, the twenty-two “Foundational Letters” that form
the linguistic-conceptual structure of the world. According to the Kabbalists,
12 Kabbalistic Visions

the worlds and everything within them are comprised of both Sefirot and
letters. Together the ten Sefirot and twenty-two Otiyot (letters) comprise the
“thirty-two paths of wisdom” through which the world was created.
Luria is completely original in his description of the fate of the Sefirot, letters,
and worlds after their original emanation from Adam Kadmon. The Sefirot
“closest” to Adam Kadmon, the so-called “psychical” Sefirot, are comprised of
the most powerful vessels, and they alone can withstand the impact of the
second series of lights emanating from the eyes of the Primordial Human. As
we have seen, these lights were intended to fill the sefirotic vessels with divine life
and energy. According to Vital:

The light that shines into the vessels of the ten Sefirot and keeps them
alive, is enclothed within the vessel in the same way that the soul
enters into the body, enclothed within human limbs, giving them life
and illuminating them from the inside. This is called the inner light.22

However, the vessels were unable to effectively contain their lights. The first
three vessels were merely displaced by the lights’ impact, but the next six,
from Chesed to Yesod, shattered, causing displacement, exile, and discord to
hold sway throughout the cosmos. This event is known in the Lurianic Kab-
balah as the “Breaking of the Vessels” (Shevirat ha-Kelim). The shattering of
the Sefirot is paralleled by an equivalent catastrophe in the linguistic realm:

All the stages of extended Light are also represented by combinations

of letters. These are the functioning lights from which everything
comes into being. Since they were unable to endure the abundance of
Light, the combination of letters became disarranged and were sev-
ered from each other. They were thus rendered powerless to act and to
govern. This is what is meant by their “shattering.”23

As a result of the cosmic catastrophe, shards from the broken vessels tumble
down through the void, entrapping sparks of divine light in “evil husks” (the
Kellipot) that form the lower worlds and, ultimately, the “other side,” a realm
of evil, darkness, and death that is alienated from the source of divine light in
God. Chaos reaches the upper worlds as well, where the masculine and fem-
inine aspects of the deity, the celestial “Mother” and “Father,” represented by
the Sefirot Chochmah and Binah, are prompted to turn their backs on one
another, thus disrupting the flow of divine erotic energy to all the worlds.
The broken vessels must be reassembled and restored. This is possible
because not all of the divine light that fell out of the broken vessels is entrapped
in the Kellipot. Some of this light returns spontaneously to its source, com-
mencing a repair and reconstruction of the cosmos. This process, spoken of as
Tikkun ha-Olam, the restoration of the world, involves the reorganization of the
broken vessels into a series of Partzufim, “visages” or personality-structures of
God, each of which is dominated by one or more of the original Sefirot.
 Kabbalah and Depth Psychology 13

However, the Partzufim organize within themselves all of the Sefirot and are
hence stronger than any of the original Sefirot were in and of themselves.
According to Scholem, these visages represent the development of the Pri-
mordial Human (Adam Kadmon) as it evolves towards a restored and redeemed
world.24 The Lurianists held that the stages of Tikkun are actually brought
about by means of lights streaming from the forehead of Adam Kadmon.
The Kabbalists understood the Partzufim to be aspects or partial personal-
ities of the deity. The five major divine personas are constellated as follows:

Attika Kaddisha (The Holy Ancient One) or Arikh Anpin

(The Long-suffering One),
Abba (The Father),
Imma (The Mother),
Zeir Anpin (The Impatient One) or Ben (The Son),
Nukvah (The Female) or Bot (The Daughter).

The Partzufim engage in certain regular relationships or unifications. Abba

and Imma are unified in an enduring relationship of mutual friendship and
support, and Zeir Anpin and Nukvah are unified in a passionate romance,
which brings them alternately together and apart. The lower Partzufim
(and Sefirot) are “born” in the womb of Imma, the Mother.
According to Luria the erotic relations (and ruptures) of the various Part-
zufim determine the fate of God, man, and the world. It is mankind’s spiri-
tual task to help raise the sparks of divine light entrapped in the evil husks of
the other side. Man must, in effect, have dealings with the evil realm in order
to realize the world’s and his own redemption. As put by the Zohar:

There is no true worship except it issue forth from darkness, and no

true good except it proceed from evil.25

Schneur Zalman, the first Lubavitcher rebbe, tells us:

The ultimate purpose [of creation] is this lowest world, for such was
His blessed will that He shall have satisfaction when the Sitra Achra is
subdued and the darkness is turned to light, so that the divine light of
the blessed Ein-sof shall shine forth in the place of the darkness and
Sitra Achra throughout the world, all the more strongly and intensely
with the excellence of light emerging from darkness than its effulgence
in the higher worlds.26

According to the Chasidic rebbe Dov Baer of Mesiritz, the “Maggid,” who,
as we have seen, Jung later praised for having anticipated his “entire
psychology”:27
It was…necessary that there should be a shevirah (Breaking of the Ves-
sels), for by this means forgetfulness occurs in the Root, and each one can
14 Kabbalistic Visions

lift up his hand to perform an act…and they thereby elevate the sparks of
the World of Action.28
According to the Lurianists, the “raising of the sparks” liberates divine
energy for the service of erotic unions among the various Partzufim, not only
between the “Mother” and “Father,” but also between the Son and the
Daughter and even between the “Old Holy Man” (Attika Kaddisha) and his
consort. In raising these sparks, mankind is said to provide the “feminine
waters” for the renewed divine activity. The result of these erotic recouplings,
and the overall effect of the “World of Tikkun,” is that cosmic alienation and
exile is overcome and the flow of divine erotic energy is restored. The restored
cosmos is far superior to the original “World of Points,” which was comprised
of the Sefirot as they were emanated prior to the Breaking of the Vessels. By
assisting in the process of Tikkun ha-Olam, humanity, as Jung himself later
declared, truly becomes a partner in the creation of the world. The Kabbalists
themselves went so far as to hold that humanity’s Tikkun (Restoration)
is actually the completion, if not the creation, of Ein-sof, the Infinite God.
As put by the Zohar:

He who “keeps” the precepts of the Law and “walks” in God’s ways,
if one may say so, “makes” Him who is above.29

With the “raising of the sparks” the process of divine manifestation is complete.
In Jungian terms, it might be said that Ein-sof and the world have become fully
individuated, i.e., have achieved their respective identities. However, for the
Kabbalists, the deity is not an external, transcendent being who creates a sepa-
rate and distinct world. Rather, the world is itself an integral part of Ein-sof’s
identity. Divinity, for the Kabbalists, is the entire theosophical process. This
process is summarized in Box 1.1, which can be understood as a “verbal
picture” which begins with, develops, and ends with Ein-sof, the infinite God:

Box 1.1 The Lurianic System

Ein-sof (The infinite godhead),
of which nothing can be said…
is the union of being and nothingness, of “everything and its opposite.”
Ein-sof performs a Tzimtzum (Divine Concealment, Contraction,
Withdrawal) which leads to a…
Metaphysical Void (tehiru), a circle surrounded by Ein-sof on all sides…
containing a residue (reshimu) of divine light, and into which
is emanated…
the light of the infinite (Or Ein-sof), a thin line (kav) through which…
Adam Kadmon (Primordial Human) spontaneously emerges.
Lights flashing and recoiling from Adam Kadmon’s eyes, nose, mouth,
and ears form Vessels (Kelim) for containing further lights,
 Kabbalah and Depth Psychology 15

thus forming the “World of Points” comprised of…

the Sefirot (Archetypes of Value and Being,
which are the constituents of the body of Adam Kadmon):
Keter (Crown, Will, Delight, the highest Sefirah)
Chochmah (Intellect, Wisdom, Paternal) Binah (Understanding, Maternal)
Chesed (Loving-kindness) Tiferet/Rachamim (Beauty, Compassion)
Din/Gevurah (Judgment, Strength)
Netzach (Glory) Hod (Splendor)
Yesod (Foundation)
Malchut /Shekhinah (Kingship / Feminine principle)
The ten Sefirot are complemented by the twenty-two Otiyot Yesod
(Foundational Letters), together forming the “thirty paths of wisdom”
which are organized into…
Worlds (ha-Olamot)
Adam Kadmon (A’K, identified with Ein-sof and Keter)
Atziluth (Nearness)
Beriah (Creation)
Yetzirah (Formation), and
Assiyah (Making, the lowest world, which includes our material earth).
The weakness and disunity of the Sefirot leads to their
shattering and displacement, known as…
The Breaking of the Vessels (Shevirat ha-Kelim), which
produces… a disruption in values and language and a
rupture in the conjugal flow
between Masculine and Feminine aspects of God.
Netzotzim (Sparks) from the shattered vessels fall and
become entrapped in…
Kellipot (Husks), which comprise the…
Sitra Achra (the Other Side, a realm of darkness and evil).
Lights from the forehead of Adam Kadmon reconstitute the
vessels as:
Partzufim (Faces or Personalities of God):
Attika Kaddisha (The Holy Ancient One) /
Keter Abba (The Father) / Chochmah
Imma (The Mother) / Binah
Zeir Anpin (The Impatient One) Chesed - Yesod
Nukvah (The Female) Malchut/Shekhinah. … This
begins…
Tikkun ha-Olam (The Impatient One), completed by
man, via the “raising of the sparks” which brings about the
reunification of the Partzufim, the masculine and
feminine principles of God,
and an end to division, alienation, and exile within the cosmos,
and the realization of Ein-sof, the infinite Godhead.
16 Kabbalistic Visions

In subsequent chapters we will see that Jung himself makes reference to

several of these symbols and that, moreover, the entire system is readily
comprehensible in Jungian terms.

The Lurianic Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis

Before we explore the details of the relationship between Jung and the
Kabbalah it will be worthwhile to orient ourselves by considering the basic
connection between Lurianic and (Freudian) psychoanalytic thought.
There have, of course, been numerous works that treat of the presumed
Jewish pedigree to psychoanalysis.30 However, with the exception of David
Bakan’s Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, none of them
deal specifically with Jewish mysticism and most understand Freud’s
Judaism as only a kind of general impetus to his work in psychoanalysis.
Bakan argued that Freud was greatly influenced by Kabbalistic ideas and
was in fact a “crypto-Sabbatean,” a follower of the seventeenth-century
false messiah, Sabbatai Sevi.31 Unfortunately, Bakan provided insufficient
data to substantiate these claims, and his book also suffered from a failure
to consider any of the symbols and ideas specific to the Lurianic Kabba-
lah; this despite the fact that in the book’s second edition Bakan records a
story, related to him by the late Lithuanian Rabbi Chayyim Bloch, that
Freud had taken a keen interest in a German translation of a manuscript
by Chayyim Vital, Luria’s most prominent disciple.32 In his book, first
published in the 1950s, Bakan had argued that Freud had either con-
sciously or unconsciously made use of Jewish mystical ideas in formulating
psychoanalysis. After the book’s publication, Bakan received a letter from
a Rabbi Chayyim Bloch, who reported that he had been an acquaintance
of Freud some years back. Bloch had read Bakan’s book and informed
Bakan that he had some information that might be of interest to him.
According to Chayyim Bloch, many years earlier he had been asked by
his own mentor, the eminent Rabbi Joseph Bloch, to do a German trans-
lation of a work by Chayyim Vital, the most important student of Isaac
Luria, the great master of the theosophical Kabbalah. Chayyim Bloch told
Bakan that he’d begun work on the translation, but soon lost interest and
ceased work altogether when Joseph Bloch died in 1923. Some time later,
however, Chayyim Bloch had a dream in which Joseph Bloch came to him
and asked him why he had not finished the project.
Chayyim Bloch then completed the translation, but felt he needed
someone to write a foreword to the book and to help assume responsibility
for its publication. Apparently Bloch had some understanding of the psy-
chological significance of Chayyim Vital’s work, because he decided to
approach his acquaintance, Sigmund Freud. Freud agreed to read the
manuscript, and upon doing so exclaimed to Bloch, “This is gold!” and
wondered aloud why Chayyim Vital’s work had never previously been
 Kabbalah and Depth Psychology 17

brought to his attention. Freud agreed to write the foreword to the book
and also agreed to assist in securing its publication.
At this point, Freud informed Bloch that he too had written a book that
was relevant to Judaism, and hurriedly presented Bloch with the manu-
script of what was to become Moses and Monotheism. Freud and Bloch
were meeting in Freud’s library, and Bloch quickly perused Freud’s
manuscript. The work, however, incensed Bloch, who saw that Freud had
not only denied that Moses was Jewish but had placed responsibility for
Moses’ death on the Jewish people. Bloch exclaimed that the Christian
world had always blamed the Jews for the death of their Christ, and now
Freud would blame the Jews for the death of their own liberator, Moses.
Freud was himself deeply angered by Bloch’s reaction to Moses and
Monotheism and left the room, leaving Bloch alone in Freud’s library for a
period of time. During that time Bloch reports he had nothing to do but
to browse through the books on Freud’s shelf, among which was a French
translation of the classic Kabbalistic text, the Zohar, as well as several
German-language books on Jewish mysticism.
What, we might ask, was the “gold” that Freud had seen in the pages of
Bloch’s translation of Chayyim Vital’s work? Interestingly, and somewhat
surprisingly, David Bakan, in his own book on Freud and Jewish mysti-
cism, barely even mentions Vital or Luria. This is the case even though it
is plain that the Lurianic Kabbalah is a system of thought that cries out
for interpretation in psychoanalytic terms.
As we have seen, Jung himself held that Jewish mysticism as expressed in
the Kabbalah and Chasidism was an important key to understanding the
origins of psychoanalysis.33 Let us, then, examine the relationship between
Freudian psychoanalysis and Kabbalistic, specifically Lurianic, theosophy, a
relationship that is summarized in Table 1.1 below.
According to Freudian theory, the development of the individual involves
the channelling and vicissitudes of libidinal energy, much as, for the Lur-
ianists, the development of the cosmos involves the channeling and vicissi-
tudes of the sexual/procreative energy of the Infinite God. Like the energy of
the Kabbalists’ Ein-sof, which is concealed and contracted to form a world,
the libidinal energy spoken of by Freud is concealed and contracted (via
repression), and modified into structures, the ego and superego, that form
components of a psychic self. The function of these structures is to channel
and modulate further “emanations” of the individual’s libido, much as,
according to the Kabbalists, the Sefirot were designed as vessels for channel-
ling God’s light, energy, and will. For psychoanalysis, the structures of the
ego and superego are essential for the formation of human character in much
the same way as, in the Kabbalah, the Sefirot are essential for the formation
of Adam Kadmon, the Primordial Human.
For reasons that are inherent in the nature of the conflict between
instinct and culture, the Freudian structures (ego and superego) are not
18 Kabbalistic Visions

Table 1.1 The Basic Metaphor in Luria and Freud

Metaphor Luria Freud
Primary procreative and Or Ein-sof (Light of the The Libido
sexual energy Infinite God)
Negation or concealment Tzimtzum (Contraction/ Primary repression
of energy concealment of the infi-
nite light)
Formation of value The Sefirot (Value Value structures of ego
structures Archetypes) and superego
Creation of personality Adam Kadmon Individual character
or man (Primordial Human)
Deconstruction Shevirah (Breaking of the Shattering and splitting
Vessels) of ego structures
“Sparks” entrapped in Libido repressed in
Alienation in the Sitra Achra (the Unconscious
“underworld” “Other Side”)
Disruption in the erotic Division of masculine Sexual dysfunction and
and feminine principles pathology
in Godhead
Restoration Tikkun ha-Olam: Psychoanalysis: libido
Restored flow of divine restored
sexual energy

consistently able to maintain and modulate the libidinous energy in ways

that are most adaptive to the individual. As with the Kabbalists’ Sefirot,
there is a partial shattering of each of these structures, resulting in a
splitting off or alienation of ideas and emotions from the main fabric of
the individual’s personality. In the Lurianic system, this is analogous to
the way in which divine sparks are separated or exiled from their main
source in God. For Freud, the psychological splitting off occurs, for
example, when the individual becomes aware of an impulse, thought, or
desire that his conscious self finds unacceptable. The impulse or idea, and
its associated affect, is repressed and subsequently exists in a nether psy-
chological realm known as the unconscious, which is quite analogous to
Luria’s Sitra Achra or “Other Side.” Once in the unconscious, these com-
plexes of thought and affect, which are akin to the Kabbalist’s kellipot
(“husks”), are inaccessible to the individual. They are, in effect, exiled
psychosexual energy, which becomes the source of an imbalance that the
individual experiences as depression or other neurotic symptoms, in much
the same way as the kellipot entrap and exile divine sexuality, thereby
becoming the source of cosmic negativity and evil. Further, in Freudian
theory, the splitting of the ego resulting from repression creates a disrup-
tion in the individual’s erotic life, just as for Luria the Breaking of the
 Kabbalah and Depth Psychology 19

Vessels causes a blockage in the flow of divine sexual energy and a rupture
in the coniunctio between the masculine and feminine aspects of God.
The task of psychoanalysis, at least as it was originally conceived, is to
make the unconscious thoughts and emotions conscious and, more
importantly, to free the libidinal energy attached to them so that it can
again be made available to the individual for his erotic and life goals; just
as in Kabbalah the energy trapped in the Sitra Achra must be freed and
made available for divine service and a renewed relationship between the
masculine and feminine aspects of God. From a Kabbalistic perspective,
psychoanalytic therapy is itself a form of tikkun or restoration, which
brings an end to a galut or exile of aspects of the individual’s personality
and ushers in a geulah or psychological redemption.
The relationship between Freudian psychoanalysis and the Kabbalah is
certainly a fascinating topic in its own right, one that is made even more
interesting by Freud’s father’s background and other circumstances in
Freud’s life.34 We will see, however, that as strong as is the link between
the Lurianic Kabbalah and Freudian psychoanalysis, it is the non-Jewish
disciple of Freud, Carl Jung, who creates a psychology that is most pro-
foundly Kabbalistic in nature. As we have seen, it is Jung who has Kabbalistic
visions, which he describes as the “most tremendous things I have ever
experienced,” and it is Jung who (via Gnosticism, alchemy, and the Kabba-
lah itself) turns to the symbols of Jewish mysticism in constructing his theory
of the human psyche and, in effect, extracts the psychological “gold” buried
in the Jewish mystical tradition.

Jung’s Familiarity with the Kabbalah

Jung makes very few references to the Jewish mystical tradition in his pre-
alchemy writings and does not appear, even in his later writings, to have
had in-depth knowledge of original Kabbalistic texts. While Mysterium
Coniunctionis includes citations to the Sperling and Simon English trans-
lation of the Zohar (first published in 1931–34) as well as to a German
translation of the Zohar by Ernst Mueller (1932),35 nearly all of Jung’s
specific citations to Kabbalistic symbols and ideas are to the writings of
Knorr von Rosenroth, whose Kabbalah Denudata (1684) is a Latin trans-
lation of passages from the Zohar, other Kabbalistic writings, and essays
on the meaning of the Kabbalah.36 Knorr von Rosenroth’s work, however,
was a formidable one, and Jung’s close disciple James Kirsch asserts that
Jung had read all three thousand pages in its entirety.37 While Jung’s
“visions” were inspired by the symbolism of the Kabbalist Moses Cordo-
vero’s Pardes Rimmonim (Garden of Pomegranates), and this work is cited
in the bibliography of Mysterium Coniunctionis, the only specific reference
is in a single footnote, and this is cited through Knorr von Rosenroth.38
While Jung was undoubtedly aware of the writings of Gershom Scholem
20 Kabbalistic Visions

(whose Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism first appeared in the mid-1930s),

if we take him at his word, he appears unlikely to have read them closely
prior to 1954. Otherwise he would have undoubtedly been familiar with
certain doctrines of the Lurianic Kabbalah such as the Breaking of the
Vessels and Tikkun prior to the date he acknowledges in his letter to
Reverend Erastus Evans in February of that year.39 Jung carried on a
correspondence with a number of students who had first-hand knowl-
edge of Kabbalistic texts, and even acknowledges to R. J. Zwi Wer-
blowsky that he received a copy of the Kabbalist R. Gikatila’s text on
dreams.40 In addition, with the publication of Erich Neumann’s The
Roots of Jewish Consciousness in 2019 (see Appendix) it is tempting to
speculate that the rich psychological understanding of Hasidism present
in that work was imparted to Jung by one of his closest disciples, but
at this point the evidence is that Jung derived his working knowledge
of the Kabbalah from Knorr von Rosenroth, references to the Kabba-
lah in the writings of such alchemists as Dorn, and an occasional per-
usal of the European literature on the Kabbalah (French, German,
English) that was extant before the field was thoroughly transformed by
Scholem.
I will argue in Chapter 10 that, for reasons to be adduced there, Jung
may have originally suppressed his more direct dependence upon Kabbalistic
sources. Regardless, in his later work Jung commented quite profoundly on
certain Kabbalistic symbols and ideas. The major Kabbalistic symbols and
ideas that concerned Jung were those that had clear parallels in Gnosticism
and alchemy: the notion of a spark of divine light contained within man, the
concept of Primordial Human who contains within himself in coincidentia
oppositorum the various conflicting tendencies within the human spirit, the
theory of the Sefirot and their unifications, particularly the unifications of
good and evil and masculine and feminine, etc. Despite an occasional refer-
ence to Luria, absent from any detailed consideration in Jung’s major works
are the symbols of tzimtzum (divine contraction), shevirah (the “breaking of
the vessels”), tikkun ha-olam (the “restoration of the world”), etc., which are
unique to the Lurianic Kabbalah. It is true, however, that just as these con-
cepts were implicit in the Kabbalah that preceded Luria (e.g., the Zohar),
they are, as we will see, also implicit in the alchemical writings that borrowed
so heavily from the earlier Kabbalah. Had Jung been aware of these symbols
prior to 1954, they would have been of invaluable service to him, not only in
his attempt to grasp the spiritual and psychological nature of alchemy, but
also in the expression of his own psychology of the self.41

Jung and Gnosticism: The Seven Sermons to the Dead

Jung’s interpretation of Gnosticism is critical to his understanding of the
Kabbalah. This is because many major Kabbalistic themes are anticipated
 Kabbalah and Depth Psychology 21

in the Gnostic sources with which Jung was familiar.42 Jung’s comments
on Gnosticism are scattered throughout his writings;43 his major statement
on the subject coming in his essay “Gnostic Symbols of the self.”44 How-
ever, long before he had systematically considered Gnosticism from the
point of view of his own analytical psychology, Jung had been familiar
with Gnostic theology and even constructed, in 1916, his own “Gnostic
myth,” which he had circulated privately among friends but which, at his
own request, was excluded from his collected works. This myth, as we now
know, was originally embedded within a much larger set of writings, which
eventuated in The Red Book, and was reported by Jung to have been
communicated to him by Philemon, one of the psychic figures that
emerged during his early visions and experimentations with active imagi-
nation. In the “Septem Sermones ad Mortuos” (Seven Sermons to the
Dead), as well as in other passages in The Red Book, Jung registers a
number of “Gnostic” themes to which he was to return to many times in
his later writings.
Among these themes, perhaps the most significant and pervasive is a
concern with the coincidence of opposites and the unification of anti-
nomies. “Harken,” Jung writes, “I begin with nothingness. Nothingness is
the same as fullness. In infinity full is no better than empty. Nothingness is
both empty and full.”45 The “Pleroma” (or fullness of being, which for the
Gnostics is the equivalent of the Kabbalists’ Ein-sof, the Infinite) is char-
acterized, Jung tells us, by “pairs of opposites,” such as “living and dead,”
“good and evil,” “beauty and ugliness,” “the one and the many.” These
opposites are equal and hence void in the Pleroma but are “distinct and
separate” in man. “Thus,” Jung writes, “we are victims of the pairs of oppo-
sites. The Pleroma is rent in us.”46 “Abraxas,” the “forgotten god,” who
stands above the God who is worshipped and who would be the first mani-
festation of the Pleroma if the Pleroma indeed had “being,” speaks “that
hallowed and accursed word which is life and death…truth and lying, good
and evil, light and darkness, in the same word and in the same act.”47 In The
Red Book, we learn “the melting together of sense and nonsense… produces
the supreme meaning,”48 “immense fullness and immense emptiness are
one and the same,”49 and “madness and reason want to be married….
The opposites embrace each other, see eye to eye, and intermingle.”50 The
doctrine of coincidentia oppositorum, also played a prominent role in
Psychological Types, which Jung wrote and published during the period of
his Gnostic visions.
A variety of other typically Gnostic themes make their appearance in “The
Seven Sermons.” Among these is the doctrine that “because we are parts of
the Pleroma, the Pleroma is also in us.” We are also, according to Jung, “the
whole Pleroma”51 on the principle that each smallest point in the microcosm
is a perfect mirror of the cosmos.52 Man, as a finite creature, is characterized
by “distinctiveness,” and the natural striving of man is towards
22 Kabbalistic Visions

distinctiveness and individuation. However, this battle against sameness and

consequent death is ultimately futile, because as we are immersed in the
Pleroma our pursuit of various distinctions inevitably leads us to seize each of
their opposites. In pursuing good and beauty we necessarily lay hold of evil
and ugliness as well. Hence, man should not strive after that which is illusory,
but rather after his own being, which leads him to an existential (rather than
an epistemological) awareness of the pleromatic “star” that is his ultimate
essence and goal.53
Jung’s prescription for man in “The Seven Sermons” is significant
because it appears to be so typically Gnostic. This world of distinctiveness
and individuation offers man nothing. Man must turn his back on the
world of “creatura” and follow his inner star beyond this cosmos, for,
according to Jung:

Weakness and nothingness here, there eternally creative power. Here

nothing but darkness and chilling moisture. There wholly sun.54

Years later, when Jung comes to take a second look at Gnosticism through
the eyes of a more fully developed archetypal psychology, he interprets it
in a manner that is far more Kabbalistic than Gnostic, that is, far more
friendly to the world and the individual’s struggle within it. Interestingly,
there are passages in The Red Book that anticipate this “world-embracing”
turn. For example, in Liber Primus, Jung writes, “this life is the way, the
long sought after way to the unfathomable, which we call divine. There is
no other way. All other ways are false paths.”55
Several other ideas that were to become significant for Jung’s later psy-
chology make their appearance in The Red Book and the “Seven Sermons.”
These include the themes of accepting the evil or shadow side of God and
human nature, welcoming “chaos” as a path to the discovery of one’s soul,
valuing the unknown, and giving “(re)birth” to both God and self. We will
later see how each of these themes is developed by Jung in conjunction with
alchemical, and particularly, Kabbalistic, symbols and ideas.
One more point regarding “The Seven Sermons” bears mention: its view
of sexuality. Jung adopts the Gnostic theme of sexuality pervading the
cosmos. For Jung, as for the Gnostics, sexuality is a numinous phenomenon
and not simply a natural function of mankind:

The world of the gods is made manifest in spirituality and in sexuality.

Spirituality and sexuality are not your qualities, not things which you
possess and contain but they possess and contain you; for they are
powerful demons, manifestations of the gods, and are therefore things
which reach beyond you, existing in themselves. No man hath a
spirituality unto himself, or a sexuality unto himself. But he standeth
under the law of spirituality and of sexuality.56
 Kabbalah and Depth Psychology 23

This passage is of particular interest with respect to Jung’s own polemic

against Freud. Years later, Jung would relate how Freud appeared to take
an almost religious, worshipful view of the sexual instincts in man, but
was not able to acknowledge the true spirituality of Eros.57 Jung, of
course, would later locate spirituality and sexuality among the archetypes
of the collective unconscious, and in this sense they would remain for him
a law that exists beyond any human individual. Here in this Gnostic flight
of fancy he sees them, however, as manifestations of the gods, “Platonic
forms” that have an existence independent of the human mind. We will see
how the Kabbalists came to epitomize the divine nature of sexuality in
their theosophical writings.
The themes expressed in “The Seven Sermons,” and many of the themes
in The Red Book in general, are well represented in the Gnostic sources58
and, as we shall see, in the Kabbalah. We will now turn to Jung’s unique
contribution in this area, the psychologistic interpretation of Gnosticism
that crystallized in his essay “Gnostic Symbols of the self.”

Jung’s Interpretative Method

Jung’s interpretation of Gnosticism, indeed his interpretation of religious
phenomena in general, rests upon his theory of the history of the psyche in
man,59 a theory that builds upon Freud’s understanding of the origins of the
mythological and religious worldview. In The Psychopathology of Everyday
Life (1904), Freud had written:

I believe that a large part of the mythological view of the world, which
extends a long way into most modern religions, is nothing but psy-
chology projected into the external world. The obscure recognition…
of psychical factors and relations in the unconscious is mirrored…in
the construction of a supernatural reality, which is destined to be
changed back once more by science into the psychology of the uncon-
scious. One could venture to explain in this way the myths of paradise
and the fall of man, of God, of good and evil, of immortality, and so
on, and to transform metaphysics into metapsychology.60

However, according to Jung, modern man has moved from a state in

which he projects the contents of his unconscious onto the world and
heavens to one in which, as a result of his total identification with the
rational powers of the ego, he has withdrawn his projections from the
world. In this state, he fails completely to recognize the formerly projected
contents (what Jung terms the “archetypes”) of his unconscious mind. The
world’s great religions, Christianity and Gnosticism among them, developed
at a time when men projected their collective unconscious onto the world and
then worshipped these contents as gods. In essence, the ancients understood
24 Kabbalistic Visions

these unconscious contents as events independent of their own psyches.

According to Jung, as a result of the development of a fully independent
rational and conscious ego, modern man has withdrawn his unconscious
projections from the world and heavens. This has resulted in a loss of faith in
the gods and a loss of interest in mythological language and symbols. Today,
Jung writes, “we lack all knowledge of the unconscious psyche and pursue
the cult of consciousness to the exclusion of all else.”61 The unconscious,
however, cannot be ignored or eliminated, and it forces itself on modern man
in the form of ennui, superstitious fears and beliefs (e.g., “flying saucers,”62
or, in our time, “new age ideas”), and, most significantly, in neurosis
and aggression. According to Jung:

The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather
the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s con-
sulting room, or disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who
unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world.63

Jung’s prescription for contemporary man is a new non-projective aware-

ness and experience of the collective unconscious to replace the dead pro-
jective metaphors of religion. Psychology, specifically Jungian psychology,
is in a position to provide man with a direct awareness of the archetypes
within his own psyche. This, Jung believes, can be accomplished through
an interpretation of the spontaneous symbolic projections of the uncon-
scious in fantasy, art, and dreams, guided by a new psychological under-
standing of the basic archetypal images, which have presented themselves
in the history of myth and religion. Jung turns to this history for a cata-
logue or map of the contents of the collective unconscious, and he
interprets his patients’ (archetypal) dreams and images accordingly. His
interest in the “dead” religion of Gnosticism, as well as in the forgotten
science of alchemy, lies in the fact that their symbolisms presumably
contain a more or less pristine crystallization of the collective uncon-
scious, undisturbed by the ego-oriented reinterpretations of reason and
dogma. Indeed, the long incognizance of the Kabbalah in official Juda-
ism suggests that it too preserves elements of the collective unconscious
in a relatively pure form.

Jung’s Interpretation of Gnosticism

Jung interpreted the Gnostic myths—including the origin of the cosmos in the
Pleroma, the emergence of an ignorant God or demiurge, the creation of a
Primordial Human, and the placing of a spark of divinity within individual
humans—in psychological terms.64 The Gnostic myths do not, according to
Jung, refer to cosmic or even external human events, but rather reflect the basic
archetypal developments of the human psyche. The Pleroma, within which is
 Kabbalah and Depth Psychology 25

contained the undifferentiated unity of all opposites and contradictions, is,

according to Jung, nothing but the primal unconscious from which the human
personality will emerge.65 The “demiurge,” which the Gnostics disparaged as
being ignorant of its pleromatic origins, represents the conscious, rational ego,
which in its arrogance believes that it is both the creator and master of the
human personality. The spark, or scintilla, which is placed in the soul of man,
represents the possibility of the psyche’s reunification with the unconscious,
and the primal anthropos (Adam Kadmon or Christ), which is related to this
spark, is symbolic of the “self,” the achieved unification of a conscious,
individuated personality with the full range of oppositions and archetypes in
the unconscious mind. “Our aim,” Jung tells us, “is to create a wider per-
sonality whose centre of gravity does not necessarily coincide with the ego,”66
but rather “in the hypothetical point between conscious and unconscious.”67
Jung sees in the Gnostic (and Kabbalistic) image of Primordial Human a
symbol of the goal of his own analytical psychology.

Jung’s Interpretation of Alchemy

Jung provides a similar, if more daring and far-reaching, interpretation of
alchemy. According to Jung, what the alchemist sees in matter and
understands in his formulas for the transmutation of metals and the deri-
vation of the prima materia “is chiefly the data of his own unconscious
which he is projecting into it.”68 For example, the alchemist’s efforts to
bring about a union of opposites in his laboratory and to perform what he
speaks of as a “chymical wedding” are understood by Jung as attempts to
forge a unity, e.g., between the masculine and feminine, or the good and
evil aspects of his own psyche.69 “The alchemical opus,” Jung tells us,
“deals in the main not just with chemical experiments as such, but with
something resembling psychic processes expressed in pseudochemical lan-
guage.”70 It is for this reason that the alchemists have occasion to equate
their chemical procedures with a vast array of symbolical processes and
figures, for example, equating the prima materia not only with the philo-
sopher’s stone (lapis philosophorum), but also with the Spirit Mercurius, a
“panacea,” and a divine hermaphroditic original man.71 Indeed, according
to Jung, alchemy is of special interest to the psychologist because the
alchemists, in projecting their unconscious onto their work, laid bare their
psyche without ever realizing that they were doing so.72 As such, alchemy
provides a pure crystallization of the collective unconscious, unaltered by
conscious censorship or obfuscation.
In his Mysterium Coniunctionis, Jung provides a catalog of alchemical
symbols, interpreted in the context of the alchemists’ principle of solve et
coagula (separation and bringing together). According to Jung, “the alche-
mist saw the essence of his art in separation and analysis on the one hand and
synthesis and coagulation on the other.”73 The process, ending in what the
26 Kabbalistic Visions

alchemists spoke of as the coniunctio, is personified as a “marriage” or union

between sun and moon, Rex and Regina (King and Queen), or Adam and
Eve. This union, according to Jung, reflects “the moral task of alchemy,”
which is “to bring the feminine, maternal background of the masculine
psyche, seething with passions, into harmony with the principle of the
spirit.”74 In Jungian terms, this amounts to the unification of animus and
anima or of the ego with the unconscious.
The solve et coagula (separation and unification) of the alchemist is,
according to Jung, perfectly paralleled in the contemporary process of psy-
chotherapy. Therapy, according to Jung, approaches a personality in conflict,
separates out—i.e., analyzes—the conflict, and ultimately aims at uniting the
dissociated or repressed elements with the ego. The alchemist, in striving for a
permanent, incorruptible, androgynous, divine “unification,” was himself
unconsciously striving after a process of individuation, the forging of a unified
self.75 As we shall see, the alchemists consciously borrowed such Kabbalistic
symbols as the “spiritual wedding,” “the raising of the sparks,” and Adam
Kadmon (Primordial Human) to further articulate this unification process.
It is interesting to note, if just in passing, that Jung, without much ela-
boration, interprets astrology in a similar, psychological manner. Indeed, he
applauds alchemy and astrology for their ceaseless preservation of man’s
bridge to nature (i.e., the unconscious) at a time when the church’s “increas-
ing differentiation of ritual and dogma alienated consciousness from its nat-
ural roots.”76 In regard to astrology, Jung writes:

As we all know, science began with the stars, and mankind discovered
in them the dominants of the unconscious, the “gods,” as well as the
curious psychological qualities of the zodiac: a complete projected
theory of human character.77

As we proceed to examine Jung’s relationship to Jewish mysticism, we will

do well to remember that such Kabbalists as Chayyim Vital were often
also practitioners of both alchemy and astrology.78

Kabbalah, Gnosis, and Jungian Psychology

Regardless of the direction of influence, it is clear that nearly all of the basic
symbols and ideas of Gnosticism are to be found in one form or another in
the Kabbalah, and vice versa. The notion of an unknowable Infinite God-
head that contains within itself a coincidence of metaphysical opposites, the
gradual manifestation of the Infinite through an emanation of logoi or
Sefirot, the notion of a cosmic accident giving birth to the manifest world, the
distinction between the God of the Bible and the true Infinite, the estrange-
ment of man from his true essence, and the entrapment of a divine spark
within man’s material nature are all themes that found their way into both
 Kabbalah and Depth Psychology 27

Gnosticism and the Kabbalah. The question of origins is complicated by the

fact that although, according to contemporary scholars, the Kabbalah
arrives on the scene centuries after the first manifestations of Gnosticism,
many of these same scholars hold that Gnosticism itself grew out of an
even earlier Jewish mystical tradition that (centuries later) also gave rise to
the Kabbalah.79 There is also speculation to the effect that apparent
Gnostic themes arose de novo among the Lurianic Kabbalists in the sixteenth
century in Safed.80
Yet for all the similarities between Gnostic and Kabbalistic doctrine, cer-
tain essential differences emerge that are of ultimate significance for Jungian
psychology. The major difference is that Gnosticism has no equivalent con-
cept or symbol for the Kabbalistic notion of Tikkun ha-Olam, the Restora-
tion of the World. For the Gnostics, the goal of religious life is not a
restoration, but an escape from what they regard to be this worthless, evil
world. The Gnostic identifies with the divine spark within himself in order
that he might transcend his physical self and the material world. The Kabb-
alist, on the other hand, holds, in the main, a radically different view.
Although there are also escapist or “gnostic” trends within the Kabbalah, the
majority of Kabbalists held that the realization of the divine spark both in
man and the material world brings about an elevation, restoration, and spir-
itualization of both humanity and its environment.81 In Gnosticism the world
is escaped; in the Kabbalah it is elevated and restored. The latter view is one
that is much more congenial to Jungian psychology, not only on the obvious
principle that for Jung life in this world, and the world itself, is worthwhile,
but also with respect to the (less obvious) psychological interpretation that
Jung places on the Gnostic myths. As Robert Segal has pointed out, the
Gnostic ethic, as interpreted by Jung, would strictly speaking lead to a com-
plete identification of the ego with the unconscious mind.82 This is because
the Gnostic attempts to escape from the world (which Jung equates with the
ego) into a complete identification with the infinite Pleroma—which, as we
have seen, Jung identifies with the unconscious.
By way of contrast, for the Kabbalists and Jung (and the alchemists as
interpreted by Jung) the Godhead creates the world in order to fully rea-
lize itself within it. By analogy, the unconscious mind manifests itself in a
reflective ego in order to complete and know itself as a conscious “self.”
“The difference,” Jung writes, “between the ‘natural’ individuation pro-
cess, which runs its course unconsciously, and the one which is consciously
realized, is tremendous. In the first case consciousness nowhere intervenes;
the end remains as dark as the beginning.”83
As Idel points out (and as will be detailed in the Appendix to this volume)
Jung’s early Jewish disciple, Erich Neumann, well understood the “this-wordly”
nature of Jewish mysticism, as well as its implications for a psychology of the
self. As Neumann put it, “Normally the ego, transformed by the experience of
the numinous, returns to the sphere of human life, and its transformation
28 Kabbalistic Visions

includes a broadening of consciousness….Whenever the ego returns to the

sphere of human life, transformed by the mystical experience, we may speak of
an immanent world-transforming mysticism.”84 Jung himself was well aware
of the worldly orientation of Judaism. For example, in his seminar on
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra he averred that “the Semitic temperament… believes
in the glorification of the world,” and “The Jew has the temperament of a
reformer who really wants to produce something in this world.”85
For Jung, as for the Kabbalists and alchemists, the world, and its psy-
chological equivalent, the self, far from being the superfluous, harmful,
and lamentable conditions envisioned by the Gnostics, are actually neces-
sary, beneficial, and laudable.86 For Jung the process of individuation, of
raising the spark within one’s psyche, reveals the archetypal richness of the
collective unconscious, and has the effect of bringing one into the world
(Judaism), rather than escaping from it (Gnosticism). According to Jung,
with the revelation of the collective unconscious:

there arises a consciousness which is no longer imprisoned in the

petty, oversensitive, personal world of the ego, but participates freely
in the wider world of objective interests. This widened consciousness is
no longer that touchy, egotistical bundle of personal wishes, fears,
hopes, and ambitions which always has to be compensated or cor-
rected by unconscious counter-tendencies; instead, it is a function of
relationship to the world of objects, bringing the individual into
absolute, binding, and indissoluble communion with the world at
large.87

For Jung, both God and man must pass through the world and redeem it in
order to realize their full essence. This is precisely the view of the Kabbalists,
as expressed in their symbol of Tikkun ha-Olam. As Segal has pointed out,
Gnosticism actually advocates the precise opposite of Jungian psychology.
Interestingly, the alchemists are far more compatible with Jung (and the
Kabbalah) on this crucial point than are the Gnostics. The raison d’être of
alchemy is the transformation of worldly matter,88 not the escape from it.
For Gnosticism, the dissolution of the world is an end in itself. For the
alchemists, it is a precondition for a new creation, just as in the Kabbalah
the Shevirat ha-Kelim, the breaking of the vessels and destruction of ear-
lier worlds, sets the stage for the world’s redemption in Tikkun ha-Olam. It
is thus understandable that Jung would write at the close of The Red Book
that it was only an encounter with alchemy beginning in 1930 that enabled
him to arrange the experiences that produced The Red Book into a
coherent whole. As we will see in Chapter 2, European alchemy was itself
indebted to the Kabbalah for its spiritual core.
Jung is more Kabbalistic than Gnostic on a number of other crucial points
as well. For example, according to the Gnostics, the demiurge or creator God
 Kabbalah and Depth Psychology 29

(the God archetype in Jung) is thoroughly evil, whereas for Jung (and the
Kabbalah) it represents both good and evil, persona and shadow, a coin-
cidence of opposites.89 Indeed, Gnosticism holds a radical dualism of good
immateriality and evil matter; while for Jung, as for the Kabbalah, good and
evil originate (and end) in the same source, are mutually dependent upon one
another, and are not simply to be identified with spirit and matter. This, again,
is a theme that permeates Jung’s thoughts and experiences in The Red Book, a
theme that is essentially Jewish in origin.90 Had Jung been more familiar with
the Kabbalah, particularly in its Lurianic form, he would have found a system
of mythical thought that was far more compatible with his own psychology
than Gnosticism. In 1954, shortly after his discovery of the Lurianic Kabbalah
and after essentially completing Mysterium Coniunctionis, Jung all but
acknowledged this point of view. In a letter to James Kirsch (16 February
1954), he writes:

The Jew has the advantage of having long since anticipated the develop-
ment of consciousness in his own spiritual history. By this I mean the
Lurianic stage of the Kabbalah, the breaking of the vessels and man’s help
in restoring them. Here the thought emerges for the first time that man
must help God to repair the damage wrought by creation. For the first
time man’s cosmic responsibility is acknowledged.91

For Jung, in contrast to the Gnostics, humanity is not enjoined to escape

the world, but is rather responsible for its repair and restoration. It is this
notion of “world-restoration,” what the Kabbalists referred to as Tikkun
ha-Olam, that most connects Jung to the Jewish mystical tradition.

Jung’s Gnosticism
Before turning to our next major theme, the relationship between the
Kabbalah and alchemy, I will comment briefly on a question that has been
a subject of controversy for many years, the question of Jung’s so-called
“Gnosticism.” The question takes on a certain moment in the present
context for the fact that Jung’s main “accuser” in this regard was the
Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, himself an expositor of Chasidism and
sometime interpreter of the Kabbalah. Buber castigates Jung for reducing
God to an aspect of the self, and for failing to recognize that the primary
experience of the deity is via a relationship to one who is wholly “other,”
as in the experience that Buber himself had articulated in I and Thou.92
Jung’s theology, according to Buber, is Gnostic in the disparaging sense
that Jung reduces God to humanity.
Jung bitterly rejected the Gnostic epithet, not because he rejected any
particular Gnostic symbol or theory, but because he viewed himself as an
empirical scientist who was, in his work, completely agnostic with respect
30 Kabbalistic Visions

to any metaphysical or theological claims.93 For Jung, God, the Pleroma,

the divine spark, etc., are real psychologically, but Jung insists that he can
make no judgment regarding their metaphysical status. As for Buber’s
criticisms, Jung held that a genuine encounter with the self was a necessary
prerequisite for a genuine and sustained “I-Thou” encounter with God.94
Still, others have not been willing to let Jung off the hook with such a
general disclaimer. Maurice Friedman, a disciple and expositor of Buber,
calls Jung a Gnostic because Jung offers the psychological equivalent of sal-
vation, a salvation of turning inward into one’s own psyche or soul.95
Thomas J. J. Altizer, a theologian who himself proclaimed the “death of
God” and the deity’s subsequent dispersal throughout humanity, writes:

Despite his frequently repeated and even compulsive scientific claims,

Jung has found his spiritual home in what he himself identifies as the
Gnostic tradition.96

One cannot readily demur to Altizer’s characterization, a characterization

that is particularly apt given Jung’s late-life confession that the fantasies and
dreams that culminated in his Gnostic “Seven Sermons” prefigured and
guided all of his later work. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he writes:

All my works, all my creative activity, has come from these initial
fantasies and dreams which began in 1912, almost 50 years ago.
Everything that I accomplished in later life was already contained in
them, although at first in the form of emotions and images.97

Indeed, in The Red Book Jung speaks forcefully about the discovery of God
within his self and, despite occasional references to the singular significance
of love,98 he holds that there are enormous difficulties in achieving relational
mutuality:

two things have yet to be discovered. The first is the infinite gulf that
separates us from one another. The second is the bridge that could
connect us.99

Yet even with this confession, and even if we discount Jung’s own pro-
fessed agnosticism, Jung, as we have seen, makes a radical break from the
Gnostics in his affirmation of both the individual human being and, more
importantly, the world. In addition, with his discovery of the psychological
significance of alchemy, Jung became deeply involved with its wedding/
coniunctio symbols, symbols that were in many cases imported from the
Kabbalah, and which, in their Kabbalistic form, became the central theme
in Jung’s 1944 visions. These coniunctio symbols, which would provide
Jung with a notation for unifying the masculine and feminine aspects of
 Kabbalah and Depth Psychology 31

the self, as well as representing the union of man and woman, and
humanity and God, are absent from The Red Book and Jung’s other early
writings. It is for these reasons that I have described Jung as more Kab-
balistic than Gnostic, and they are, in part, the reasons why Jung turned
from Gnosticism to the more “worldly” (and Kabbalistic) alchemy in his
historical exploration of the symbols of the unconscious.
Chapter 2

Kabbalah and Alchemy

In October 1935, over a year after Erich Neumann had emigrated from
Germany to Palestine, Neumann wrote Jung about his fear that his
absorption in Jungian psychology would place him in “danger of betrayal
to [his] own Jewish foundations.” Neumann further wrote of his realiza-
tion that analytical psychology “stands on its own ground… Switzerland,
Germany, the West, Christianity,” and that Jewish individuation must be
based “on our own archetypal collective foundations which are different
because we are Jews.”1 Jung, in his response, wrote that analytical psychology
“has its roots deep in Europe, in the Christian Middle Ages, and ultimately in
Greek philosophy,” adding, “the connecting-link I was missing for so long
has now been found, and it is alchemy.”2 Neither Neumann nor Jung would
allow that analytical psychology as it then stood was rooted in anything
Jewish, a fact that was troubling to Neumann, who had thought of Jung as
his spiritual teacher but who chided Jung for his “general ignorance of things
Jewish.”3
Although, later in his life, Jung was more than happy to acknowledge
Jewish, specifically Jewish mystical, precursors to his own work,4 during
the 1930s, at a time when he sought to distinguish analytical psychology
from the “Jewish” psychologies of Freud and Adler, Jung was unlikely to
acknowledge any Jewish sources of his own thinking. There is a certain
irony here, because what Jung failed to realize, or mention, at the time of
his letter to Neumann (though he would later openly acknowledge it) was
that alchemy, the “connecting link” to analytical psychology, was itself
imbued with Jewish mystical symbols and ideas.
In this chapter, I discuss the historical connection between alchemy and
the Kabbalah. I will provide evidence supportive of the hypothesis that the
spiritual/psychological aspects of alchemy were in no small measure
derived from the Kabbalah, thus providing grounds for regarding Jung as
further immersed in Kabbalistic ideas than his more limited quotation of
Kabbalistic texts might suggest. Indeed, I will argue here and in later chapters
that there is good reason to believe that in extracting the “psychological gold”
that lay buried in the alchemists’ texts and procedures Jung was, in effect,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003027041-3
 Kabbalah and Alchemy 33

reconstituting Kabbalistic ideas that had been absorbed by the alchemists

themselves.

Jung’s Understanding of the Impact of Kabbalah on Alchemy

It is well known that Jung’s interest in alchemy consumed him for the last
thirty years of his life. Most of his writings in the 1940s and 1950s are
concerned, in one way or another, with alchemical themes, and it is fair to say
that the most mature developments in his thinking regarding such topics as the
self, the coincidence of opposites, and the archetypes of the collective uncon-
scious came about as a result of meditations upon alchemical texts and ideas.
Jung held that the pseudo-chemical language and goals of the alchemists
concealed and were symbolic of spiritual and, moreover, depth-psychological
principles and themes.5 In his investigations of alchemical texts, Jung sought
to uncover what he understood to be the psychological principles that the
alchemists projected into their chemical and metallurgical formulas.
By the time Jung wrote Mysterium Coniunctionis,6 he was well aware of the
strong relationship that had developed between the Kabbalah and later
alchemy, and he often spoke of specific Kabbalistic influences upon the
alchemists. “Directly or indirectly,” Jung writes, “the Cabala [Jung’s spelling]
was assimilated into alchemy. Relationships must have existed between them
at a very early date, though it is difficult to trace them in the sources.”7 Fur-
ther, in a discussion of the symbol of the “Primordial Human,” Jung tells us
that “traces of cabalistic tradition are frequently noticeable in the alchemical
treatises from the sixteenth century on.”8 Jung informs us that by that time
the alchemists began making direct quotations from the classic Kabbalistic
text, the Zohar. For example, Jung quotes the alchemist Blasius Vigenerus
(1523–96), who had borrowed the Zohar’s comparison of the feminine
Sefirah Malchut with the moon turning its face from the intelligible things of
heaven.9 Jung notes that the alchemists Vigenerus and Knorr von Rosenroth
had related the alchemical notion of the lapis or philosopher’s stone to cer-
tain passages in the Zohar that had interpreted verses in the books of Genesis
(28:22), Job (38:6), and Isaiah (28:16) as referring to a stone with essential,
divine, and transformative powers.10
Jung takes an interest in the Kabbalistic symbol of Adam Kadmon (Pri-
mordial Human), and references a number of alchemists, who made extensive
use of this symbol.11 Jung points out that in these texts “the alchemists…
equate Mercurius and the Philosopher’s Stone with the Primordial Man of the
Kabbalah.”12 It is significant that in exploring the Primal Anthropos, which he
calls “the essential core of the great religions,” Jung works his way through its
material representation in alchemy as the “stone,” to the quasi-physical spiri-
tual entity “Mercurius,” to its purely spiritual and, moreover, psychological
representation in the Kabbalah as Adam Kadmon. This is an example of what I
mean by Jung extracting the spiritual/Kabbalistic “gold” out of the material
34 Kabbalistic Visions

practice of alchemy. In this context, we should note that Jung references Isaac
Luria’s view that every psychic quality is attributable to Adam,13 quoting
Knorr von Rosenroth’s Latin translation of Luria’s text and stating that he is
indebted to Gershom Scholem for an “interpretive translation,” presumably
from the Hebrew.14
Jung notes that Paracelsus had introduced the sapphire as an “arcanum”
into alchemy from the Kabbalah.15 Jung took a lively interest in two alche-
mists, Knorr von Rosenroth and Heinrich Khunrath, who composed entire
treatises on the Kabbalah, as well as other alchemists, e.g., Dorn and Lully,
who were heavily influenced by Kabbalistic ideas.16 The symbol of the
“sparks” (or “scintillae”), which was to become a key element in the Lurianic
Kabbalah, is present in their work, where it is provided a this-worldly Kab-
balistic (as opposed to otherworldly or Gnostic) interpretation. Jung points
out, for example, that Dorn held that wisdom is an awareness of the “spark
of (God’s) light,” which is an “invisible sun,”17 the equivalent to the image of
God within man. Khunrath, who wrote at a time when the Lurianic Kabba-
lah was rapidly spreading across Europe, held that “there are…fiery sparks of
the World-Soul…dispersed or scattered at God’s command in and through
the fabric of the great world into all fruits of the elements everywhere,”18 a
quintessentially Kabbalistic idea that Jung interpreted as a “projection of the
multiple luminosity of the unconscious.”19

Kabbalah as the Spiritual Foundation of Alchemy

While Jung was clearly aware of the impact of Kabbalah upon alchemy,
more recent scholarship has provided further support for the idea that the
spiritual aspects of alchemy, those which interested Jung, were to a large
extent Jewish in origin.20
In this regard, Raphael Patai has provided an invaluable service in
collating and presenting many of the Jewish alchemical sources and
in tracing the influence of Kabbalah and Jewish alchemy on the Christian
alchemists.21
Interestingly, Jung’s own view that alchemy is essentially a spiritual/
psychological, rather than a purely material, discipline appears to have
originated in Jewish sources. The Egyptian Hellenistic Jewess, Maria the
Prophetess, who is regarded by Zosimos (third century) to be the founder
of alchemy (and by modern scholarship to be among its earliest practi-
tioners), viewed the alchemical work as fundamentally a process through
which the adept attains spiritual perfection.22 According to Maria, the
various metals in the alchemical work are symbols of aspects of humanity.
Her famous maxim “Join the male and the female and you will find what
is sought”23 anticipates Jung’s interpretation that alchemy provides the
feminine background of the masculine psyche. Later we will see that this
very “Jungian” view of the human psyche is deeply Kabbalistic.
 Kabbalah and Alchemy 35

Centuries later, Heinrich Khunrath (1560–1601), an alchemist who is

cited in many of Jung’s works, was influenced deeply by the Kabbalah in
his view that the alchemical opus reflects a mystical transformation within the
adept’s soul.24 Khunrath, whose highly influential compendium, Amphitea-
trum sapientiae (1602), is illustrated with Kabbalistic symbols, including an
elaborate depiction of the ten Sefirot, held that the alchemical “philosopher’s
stone” is equivalent to the spirit of God, haRuach Elohim, which hovered over
the waters at the time of creation.25 According to Patai, “Under the impact of
the Kabbalah and its gematria the medieval alchemical tradition underwent a
noticeable change, and became during the Renaissance a more mystically and
religiously oriented discipline.”26
We are only now becoming aware of the extensive influence of Jewish
mystical sources on the history and direction of alchemy. Indeed, alchemy
was already linked to the Kabbalah in the Middle Ages, and Jewish mystical
ideas are evident in an alchemical manuscript dating from the eleventh cen-
tury, Solomon’s Labyrinth.27 Patai marshals evidence that the alchemical
works attributed to the theologian and missionary Raymund Lully (ca. 1234–
1315), who is often quoted by Jung, were actually composed by a Marrano
Jew, Raymond De Tarregga, probably several decades after Lully’s death.28
Tarregga, like other Jewish alchemists, maintained a special interest in the
medical applications of his art, and applied alchemical principles to the cure
of melancholy and possession, taking a rather psychological view of these
afflictions. In his work on demonology, Tarregga held that demons come to
possess men because they are attracted to their ill humour, melancholy, and
their “horrible images in fantasy.” According to Tarregga, by treating the
possessed’s melancholy with the alchemical quinta essentia (the fifth essence)
and other medicines the patient will be freed from the demons because he no
longer provides a psychological environment hospitable to them.29 Interest-
ingly, Tarregga was accused by the ecclesiastical authorities of holding the
heretical belief that the sinner conforms to the will of God, on the grounds
that “good and evil please God equally.”30
By the close of the fifteenth century, a number of Christian scholars had
written works in Latin that made the doctrines of the Kabbalah readily
accessible to the Christian alchemists.31 Among these scholars were
Johann Reuchlin32 (1455–1522), Pietro Galatinus (1460–1540), and Pico
della Mirandola (1463–1522).33 Cardinal Egidio da Viterbo (ca. 1465–
1532) translated significant portions of the Zohar and other Kabbalistic
works into Latin and even composed his own work on the Sefirot. While
Jung had noted that Reuchlin and Mirandola had made the Kabbalah
accessible in Latin translation, Phillip Beitchman34 has documented the
wide impact and prevalence of the Kabbalah on thought during the
Renaissance and later and has collated numerous works in Latin and sev-
eral European languages through which the alchemists and others not
versed in Hebrew and Aramaic were able to absorb Kabbalistic ideas. The
36 Kabbalistic Visions

Kabbalistic writings of the sixteenth-century monk Giordano Bruno were

particularly noteworthy in this regard.35
Paracelsus (1493–1541), an alchemist whom Jung held in high regard,
and to whom he devoted an entire work (“Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phe-
nomenon”36), was of the opinion that expert knowledge of the Kabbalah
was a prerequisite for the study of alchemy.37 His teacher Solomon Tris-
mosin (six of whose alchemical illustrations adorn Jung’s Psychology and
Alchemy38) claimed that he drew his teachings from Kabbalistic sources
that had been translated into Arabic, which he acquired during his travels
to the south and east.39
In the sixteenth century, Johann Reuchlin (De Arte Cabbalistica), and
later Cornelius Agrippa, placed the Kabbalah at the center of theosophical
and occult studies, respectively, and from Agrippa’s equivalence of the
Kabbalah with “experimental magic” many alchemists concluded that
alchemy was itself a Kabbalistic discipline. According to Scholem, this
blending of alchemy and Kabbalah reached an apex in the work of Hein-
rich Khunrath of Leipzig, who under the influence of Johann Nidanus
Pistorius’s Artis Cabalisticae (Basel, 1587) brought together Kabbalistic
notions of divine creation and the alchemical opus.
By the end of the sixteenth century, European alchemists were, in effect,
claiming an identity between Kabbalah and alchemy. This was a view
advocated by Khunrath and his contemporary Pierre Arnaud de la Che-
vallerie, who held that advanced knowledge of traditional Kabbalah was
necessary for an understanding of alchemy. Similar ideas were echoed by
Paracelsus’s disciple Franz Kieser, and later by the Welsh philosopher and
alchemist Thomas Vaughan (1621–66), who held that the summa arcani
(the highest secrets) were only open to those who are versed in magic and
Kabbalah.40
Beginning around 1614, the Rosicrucians, in particular Johann Valentin
Andreae (1586–1654), took up the mystical conception of alchemy, and
the English theosophist Robert Fludd (1574–1637) popularized the
equivalence of Kabbalistic and alchemical symbols, arguing that the
alchemical production of gold was a material symbol for the transforma-
tion of humankind. Scholem points out that, under the influence of Reu-
chlin, Fludd adopted the thirteenth-century Kabbalistic notion (articulated
by the Spanish Kabbalist Jacob ha-Cohen) that there are two forms of the
Hebrew letter alef: the first, a material dark form, and the second, repre-
sented by white spaces (between the letters of the Torah), a light, “mys-
tical” form. Fludd adopted this Kabbalistic imagery in his account of the
transmutation of the dark prima materia into the bright philosopher’s
stone of wisdom. Authors like Fludd and Vaughan later found in Knorr
von Rosenroth’s Kabbalah Denudata a strong confirmation of their belief
in the equivalence of Kabbalah and alchemy.41 Scholem references two
German theosophists, Georg von Welling (1652–1727) and Friedrich
 Kabbalah and Alchemy 37

Christoph Oetinger (1702–82), who attempted a union of Kabbalistic

theosophy and alchemy. Welling makes clear that he is not interested in
“physical alchemy,” but rather the teaching of how God and nature can be
recognized in one another. Welling popularized the symbol of the Shield
of David as an alchemical representation of perfection. While Scholem
credits Welling with having made use of some authentic Jewish Kabbalistic
ideas, such as divine action through the vehicle of the Sefirot,42 Welling
actually rejected Jewish Kabbalah in favor of a Christian Kabbalistic dis-
cipline, and Scholem holds that on the whole Welling’s Kabbalah “relates
to the Jewish tradition in name only.”
Scholem is more generous to Oetinger, who he sees as having made an
“authentic connection” between Jewish Kabbalah and Christian alchem-
ical-mystical symbolism. Oetinger was influenced by the German mystic
and philosopher Jacob Boehme (1575–1624), who developed Kabbalistic
symbolism in his theosophical writings, and whose work was introduced to
Oetinger by Koppel Hecht (d. 1729), a Frankfurt Kabbalist.
For the alchemists, the Kabbalistic doctrine of the Sefirot provided a
theosophical justification for their belief in the infinite malleability and
underlying unity of all things. In the Kabbalah, the Sefirot, the ten divine
traits, which serve as the archetypes for creation, are in constant flux, break-
ing apart, being emended and restored, all for the purpose of reestablishing
divine unity. In the Kabbalistic doctrines of the Sefirot and gematria (the
view that words and thus things are transformable and equivalent by virtue
of the arithmetical properties of their letters) the alchemists saw a vehicle for
explaining and rationalizing such transformations.43
The notion that Hebrew letters and words concealed within themselves
an indefinite variety of secrets, meanings, and associations intrigued the
alchemists, who saw in this aspect of the Kabbalah an underlying rationale
for their own worldview. As a result, the Christian alchemists became
intrigued with the Hebrew alphabet and, according to Patai, “from about
the fifteenth century on, there was scarcely an alchemical book or treatise
written by Christian alchemists that did not display conspicuously some
Hebrew power-words on the title page or inside the text.”44 Patai points to
Heinrich Khunrath as a striking example of this tendency. Khunrath, in
his Amphitheatrum sapientiae, one of the most widely read alchemical
compendiums, not only equates the alchemical philosopher’s stone with
the Ruach Elohim but illustrates his volume with an impressive “world of
the spheres” that encompasses not only the ten Sefirot and twenty-two
Hebrew letters (which according to the Kabbalists are the primary ele-
ments of creation) but also a wide variety of other Hebrew inscriptions of
Jewish religious significance.45
We thus find that a “Kabbalistic alchemy” developed not mainly among
Jewish alchemists but among their non-Jewish counterparts.46 The Chris-
tian alchemist-Kabbalists endeavored to learn Hebrew, and they sought
38 Kabbalistic Visions

out Jewish spiritual mentors from whom they could learn the mysteries of
Kabbalah and gematria as a means of attaining the highest alchemical art
and knowledge.47
The Kabbalah provided the alchemists with a spiritual and metaphysical
foundation for their view that there was just one basic substance in the
universe, the so-called prima materia, which took on a multitude of mani-
festations and forms. The alchemists were intrigued by such Kabbalistic
doctrines as the notion that Ein-sof inheres and sustains all things and that
all the multifarious objects in the universe are comprised of the ten Sefirot,
which are themselves comprised of one another. By joining itself to the
Kabbalah, alchemy not only developed a rationale for its material enterprise
but also developed itself as a spiritual discipline.
A review of Jung’s works on alchemy reveals that many of the alche-
mists he discusses were Jews, Christians posing as Jews in order to give
their works “authenticity,” or Christians who openly acknowledged their
debt to Kabbalistic sources. For example, Gerhard Dorn, whom Jung
cites dozens of times throughout his later works, wrote an alchemical
commentary on the opening verses of the Book of Genesis,48 spoke of
Adam as the “invisibilus homo maximus”49—an allusion to the Kabba-
listic doctrine of Adam Kadmon—and held that the legendary patriarch
of alchemy, Hermes Trismegistus, though Egyptian, was taught by the
“Genesis of the Hebrews.”50
Like many of the alchemists, Jung was aware of the correspondence
between the alchemists’ chymical marriage—of sun and moon, gold and
silver, spirit and body, king and queen—and the conjugal unifications of the
various Sefirot and Partzufim that are central themes in the Kabbalah. Jung
himself had Kabbalistic visions51 that illustrated these themes, and which he
interpreted as exemplifying the coincidence of opposites, e.g., animus and
anima, and held to be requisite for the unification and individuation of the
self. Whether or not the alchemists actually derived their “wedding symbo-
lism” from the Kabbalists, it is clear that, in its encounter with the Kabbalah,
alchemy attained a new spiritual interpretation of these symbols. Alchemical
metaphors with only latent spiritual and psychological overtones became
rooted in an established spiritual/psychological discipline once alchemy had
incorporated the Kabbalah. According to Patai:

the Kabbalah supplied the alchemists with a quasi sanctification of

their views by opening up to them the doctrine of the cosmological
structure of the sefirot, which taught them that not only the hidden
essence of materia but even the divine unity itself was expressed in
multiple mystical manifestations.52

Patai points out that among Jewish alchemists alchemy occupied a middle
position between philosophy and medicine,53 and the Jewish search for the
 Kabbalah and Alchemy 39

philosopher’s stone was often more closely associated with healing the sick
than in obtaining earthly wealth.54 In this sense, the Jewish alchemists
approximated Jung’s therapeutic use of alchemical symbols and ideas.

The Jewish Alchemists: Abraham Eleazar and Esh M’saref

(The Refiner’s Fire)
Patai describes the work of the Jewish alchemist Abraham Eleazar, whose
Uraltes Chymisches Werck (Age-Old Chymical Work) is referred to several
times by Jung in Mysterium Coniunctionis,55 and which Jung regarded as
the work of a Christian posing as a Jew.56 However, according to Patai,
Eleazar’s is the most “Jewish” alchemical treatise in existence.57 The author is
unknown except for this work, which was first printed in 1735. According to
Patai, the content of the work likely goes back to an earlier Jewish thirteenth-
century alchemist. Patai describes Uraltes Chymisches Werck as “mysticism
clothed in alchemical garb.”58 It is a work that essentially concerns itself with
the healing and consolation of the Jewish people, and a fervent religious,
nationalistic, and “Zionistic” spirit pervades the work. Eleazar focuses at
length on the “supernal serpent,” which signifies the mundi universalem, the
universal world spirit, and which he describes as “the most lovely and also the
most terrible, who makes everything live, and who also kills everything, and
takes on all shapes of nature.” Eleazar continues: “In sum: he is everything,
and also nothing.”59 This last description, which is remarkably similar to
both Gnostic descriptions of the Pleroma and Kabbalistic descriptions of the
infinite Godhead, Ein-sof, is an exceptional example of the coincidentia
oppositorum, which, according to Jung, is the essential characteristic of the
human psyche. It is also an example of how Kabbalistic/mystical ideas came
to permeate alchemical treatises.
Jung drew extensively from Eleazar’s writings; twice in Mysterium Con-
iunctionis, quoting a lengthy passage from the Uraltes Chymisches that makes
reference to the Kabbalistic doctrines of the sparks60 and Adam Kadmon.61
Jung interprets Eleazar’s account of the Talmudic story in which God prevents
the mating of the Leviathan serpents (lest their union destroy the world) as
symbolic of a premature, unconscious, and hence dangerous integration of the
masculine and feminine aspects of the self,62 and he refers to Eleazar’s
description of the “King and Queen perishing in the same bath” as an example
of spirit and soul (anima) dissolving in the unity of the self.63
Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535) discussed the relationship between alchemy,
astrology, and the Kabbalah in a work entitled De Occulta Philosophia (printed
in 1533 but written ca. 1510). In this work, Agrippa drew a connection first
between the planets and the Kabbalistic Sefirot, and then between the planets
and the alchemists’ metals.64 Shortly thereafter there appeared a work by an
unknown Jewish alchemist that provided a direct one-to-one correspondence
between the metals and the Sefirot. This work, entitled Esh M’saref (The
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beauty, working from their admiration of beauty in woman and in
nature to beauty in things which they made with their own hands,
setting beauty above usefulness; even thinking it necessary, when
usefulness had been attained, to add adornment, as when they
added a Tower to the House of Life, yet did nothing with their Tower
and did not want it.
The Public Hall is built of red brick; it resembles a row of houses
each with a gable to the street. There is for each a broad plain door,
with a simple porch, below; and above, a broad plain window twenty
feet wide divided into four compartments or divisions, the whole set
in a framework of wood. The appearance of the Hall is, therefore,
remarkably plain. There are thirty-one of these gables, each forty
feet wide; so that the whole length of the Hall is twelve hundred and
forty feet, or nearly a quarter of a mile.
Within, the roof of each of these gables covers a Hall separated from
its neighbors by plain columns. They are all alike, except that the
middle Hall, set apart for the College, has a gallery originally
intended for an orchestra, now never used. In the central Hall one
table alone is placed; in all the others there are four, every Hall
accommodating eight hundred people and every table two hundred.
The length of each Hall is the same—namely, two hundred and fifty
feet. The Hall is lit by one large window at each end. There are no
carvings, sculptures, or other ornaments in the building. At the back
is an extensive range of buildings, all of brick, built in small
compartments, and fire-proof; they contain the kitchens, granaries,
abattoirs, larders, cellars, dairies, still-rooms, pantries, curing-
houses, ovens, breweries, and all the other offices and chambers
required for the daily provisioning of a city with twenty-four
thousand inhabitants.
On the East side of the Square there are two great groups of
buildings. That nearest to the Public Hall contains, in a series of
buildings which communicate with one another, the Library, the
Museum, the Armory, the Model-room, and the Picture Gallery. The
last is a building as old as the House. They were, when these events
began, open to the whole Community, though they were never
visited by any even out of idle curiosity. The inquisitive spirit is dead.
For myself, I am not anxious to see the people acquire, or revive,
the habit of reading and inquiring. It might be argued that the study
of history might make them contrast the present with the past, and
shudder at the lot of their forefathers. But I am going to show that
this study may produce quite the opposite effect. Or, there is the
study of science. How should this help the People? They have the
College always studying and investigating for their benefit the
secrets of medical science, which alone concerns their happiness.
They might learn how to make machines; but machinery requires
steam, explosives, electricity, and other uncontrolled and dangerous
forces. Many thousands of lives were formerly lost in the making and
management of these machines, and we do very well without them.
They might, it is true, read the books which tell of the people in
former times. But why read works which are filled with the Presence
of Death, the Shortness of Life, and the intensity of passions which
we have almost forgotten? You shall see what comes of these
studies which seem so innocent.
I say, therefore, that I never had any wish to see the people flocking
into the Library. For the same reason—that a study and
contemplation of things past might unsettle or disturb the tranquillity
of their minds—I have never wished to see them in the Museum, the
Armory, or any other part of our Collections. And since the events of
which I have to tell, we have enclosed these buildings and added
them to the College, so that the people can no longer enter them
even if they wished.
The Curator of the Museum was an aged man, one of the few old
men left—in the old days he had held a title of some kind. He was
placed there because he was old and much broken, and could do no
work. Therefore he was told to keep the glass-cases free from dust
and to sweep the floors every morning. At the time of the Great
Discovery he had been an Earl or Viscount—I know not what—and
by some accident he escaped the Great Slaughter, when it was
resolved to kill all the old men and women in order to reduce the
population to the number which the land would support. I believe
that he hid himself, and was secretly fed by some man who had
formerly been his groom, and still preserved some remains of what
he called attachment and duty, until such time as the executions
were over. Then he ventured forth again, and so great was the
horror of the recent massacre, with the recollection of the prayers
and shrieks of the victims, that he was allowed to continue alive.
The old man was troubled with an asthma which hardly permitted
him an hour of repose and was incurable. This would have made his
life intolerable, except that to live—only to live, in any pain and
misery—is always better than to die.
For the last few years the old man had a companion in the Museum.
This was a girl—the only girl in our Community—who called him—I
know not why (perhaps because the relationship really existed)—
Grandfather, and lived with him. She it was who dusted the cases
and swept the floors. She found some means of relieving the old
man's asthma, and all day long—would that I had discovered the
fact, or suspected whither it would lead the wretched girl!—she read
the books of the Library and studied the contents of the cases and
talked to the old man, making him tell her everything that belonged
to the past. All she cared for was the Past; all that she studied was
to understand more and more—how men lived then, and what they
thought, and what they talked.
She was about eighteen years of age; but, indeed, we thought her
still a child. I know not how many years had elapsed since any in the
City were children, because it is a vain thing to keep account of the
years; if anything happens to distinguish them, it must be something
disastrous, because we have now arrived almost at the last stage
possible to man. It only remains for us to discover, not only how to
prevent disease, but how to annihilate it. Since, then, there is only
one step left to take in advance, every other event which can
happen must be in the nature of a calamity, and therefore may be
forgotten.
I have said that Christine called the old man her grandfather. We
have long, long since agreed to forget old ties of blood. How can
father and son, mother and daughter, brother and sister continue for
hundreds of years, and when all remain fixed at the same age, to
keep up the old relationship? The maternal love dies out with us—it
is now but seldom called into existence—when the child can run
about. Why not? The animals, from whom we learn so much, desert
their offspring when they can feed themselves; our mothers cease to
care for their children when they are old enough to be the charge of
the Community. Therefore Christine's mother cheerfully suffered the
child to leave her as soon as she was old enough to sit in the Public
Hall. Her grandfather—if indeed he was her grandfather—obtained
permission to have the child with him. So she remained in the quiet
Museum. We never imagined or suspected, however, that the old
man, who was eighty at the time of the Great Discovery,
remembered everything that took place when he was young, and
talked with the girl all day long about the Past.
I do not know who was Christine's father. It matters not now; and,
indeed, he never claimed his daughter. One smiles to think of the
importance formerly attached to fathers. We no longer work for their
support. We are no longer dependent upon their assistance; the
father does nothing for the son, nor the son for the father. Five
hundred years ago, say—or a thousand years ago—the father carried
a baby in his arms. What then? My own father—I believe he is my
own father, but on this point I may be mistaken—I saw yesterday
taking his turn in the hay-field. He seemed distressed with the heat
and fatigue of it. Why not? It makes no difference to me. He is,
though not so young, still as strong and as able-bodied as myself.
Christine was called into existence by the sanction of the College
when one of the Community was struck dead by lightning. It was my
brother, I believe. The terrible event filled us all with consternation.
However, the population having thus been diminished by one, it was
resolved that the loss should be repaired. There was precedent. A
great many years previously, owing to a man being killed by the fall
of a hay-rick—all hay-ricks are now made low—another birth had
been allowed. That was a boy.
Let us now return to our Square. On the same side are the buildings
of the College. Here are the Anatomical collections, the storehouse
of Materia Medica, and the residences of the Arch Physician, the
Suffragan, the Fellows of the College or Associate Physicians, and
the Assistants or Experimenters. The buildings are plain and fire-
proof. The College has its own private gardens, which are large and
filled with trees. Here the Physicians walk and meditate, undisturbed
by the outer world. Here is also their Library.
On the North side of the Square stands the great and venerable
House of Life, the Glory of the City, the Pride of the whole Country.
It is very ancient. Formerly there were many such splendid
monuments standing in the country; now this alone remains. It was
built in the dim, distant ages, when men believed things now
forgotten. It was designed for the celebration of certain ceremonies
or functions; their nature and meaning may, I dare say, be
ascertained by any who cares to waste time in an inquiry so useless.
The edifice itself could not possibly be built in these times; first
because we have no artificers capable of rearing such a pile, and
next because we have not among us any one capable of conceiving
it, or drawing the design of it; nay, we have none who could execute
the carved stone-work.
I do not say this with humility, but with satisfaction; for, if we
contemplate the building, we must acknowledge that, though it is,
as I have said, the Glory of the City, and though it is vast in
proportions, imposing by its grandeur, and splendid in its work, yet
most of it is perfectly useless. What need of the tall columns to
support a roof which might very well have been one-fourth the
present height? Why build the Tower at all? What is the good of the
carved work? We of the New Era build in brick, which is fire-proof;
we put up structures which are no larger than are wanted; we waste
no labor, because we grudge the time which must be spent in
necessary work, over things unnecessary. Besides, we are no longer
tortured by the feverish anxiety to do something—anything—by
which we may be remembered when the short span of life is past.
Death to us is a thing which may happen by accident, but not from
old age or by disease. Why should men toil and trouble in order to
be remembered? All things are equal: why should one man try to do
something better than another—or what another cannot do—or what
is useless when it is done? Sculptures, pictures, Art of any kind, will
not add a single ear of corn to the general stock, or a single glass of
wine, or a yard of flannel. Therefore, we need not regret the decay
of Art.
As everybody knows, however, the House is the chief Laboratory of
the whole country. It is here that the Great Secret is preserved; it is
known to the Arch Physician and to his Suffragan alone. No other
man in the country knows by what process is compounded that
potent liquid which arrests decay and prolongs life, apparently
without any bound or limit. I say without any bound or limit. There
certainly are croakers, who maintain that at some future time—it
may be this very year, it may be a thousand years hence—the
compound will lose its power, and so we—all of us, even the College
—must then inevitably begin to decay, and after a few short years
perish and sink into the silent grave. The very thought causes a
horror too dreadful for words; the limbs tremble, the teeth chatter.
But others declare that there is no fear whatever of this result, and
that the only dread is lest the whole College should suddenly be
struck by lightning, and so the Secret be lost. For though none other
than the Arch Physician and his Suffragan know the Secret, the
whole Society—the Fellows or Assistant Physicians—know in what
strong place the Secret is kept in writing, just as it was
communicated by the Discoverer. The Fellows of the College all
assist in the production of this precious liquid, which is made only in
the House of Life. But none of them know whether they are working
for the great Arcanum itself, or on some of the many experiments
conducted for the Arch Physician. Even if one guessed, he would not
dare to communicate his suspicions even to a Brother-Fellow, being
forbidden, under the most awful of all penalties, that of Death itself,
to divulge the experiments and processes that he is ordered to carry
out.
It is needless to say that if we are proud of the House, we are
equally proud of the City. There was formerly an old Canterbury, of
which pictures exist in the Library. The streets of that town were
narrow and winding; the houses were irregular in height, size, and
style. There were close courts, not six feet broad, in which no air
could circulate, and where fevers and other disorders were bred.
Some houses, again, stood in stately gardens, while others had none
at all; and the owners of the gardens kept them closed. But we can
easily understand what might have happened when private property
was recognized, and laws protected the so-called rights of owners.
Now that there is no property, there are no laws. There are also no
crimes, because there is no incentive to jealousy, rapine, or double-
dealing. Where there is no crime, there is that condition of
Innocence which our ancestors so eagerly desired, and sought by
means which were perfectly certain to fail.
How different is the Canterbury of the present! First, like all modern
towns, it is limited in size; there are in it twenty-four thousand
inhabitants, neither more nor less. Round its great central Square or
Garden are the public buildings. The streets, which branch off at
right angles, are all of the same width, the same length, and the
same appearance. They are planted with trees. The houses are built
of red brick, each house containing four rooms on the ground-floor—
namely, two on either side the door—and four on the first floor, with
a bath-room. The rooms are vaulted with brick, so that there is no
fear of fire. Every room has its own occupant; and as all the rooms
are of the same size, and are all furnished in the same way, with the
same regard to comfort and warmth, there is really no ground for
complaint or jealousies. The occupants also, who have the same
meals in the same Hall every day, cannot complain of inequalities,
any more than they can accuse each other of gluttonous living. In
the matter of clothes, again, it was at first expected that the grave
difficulties with the women as to uniformity of fashion and of
material would continue to trouble us; but with the decay of those
emotions which formerly caused so much trouble—since the men
have ceased to court the women, and the women have ceased to
desire men's admiration—there has been no opposition. All of them
now are clad alike; gray is found the most convenient color, soft
beige the most convenient material.
The same beautiful equality rules the hours and methods of work.
Five hours a day are found ample, and everybody takes his time at
every kind of work, the men's work being kept separate from that
given to the women. I confess that the work is not performed with
as much zeal as one could wish; but think of the old times, when
one had to work eight, ten, and even eighteen hours a day in order
to earn a poor and miserable subsistence! What zeal could they have
put into their work? How different is this glorious equality in all
things from the ancient anomalies and injustices of class and rank,
wealth and poverty! Why, formerly, the chief pursuit of man was the
pursuit of money. And now there is no money at all, and our wealth
lies in our barns and garners.
I must be forgiven if I dwell upon these contrasts. The history which
has to be told—how an attempt was actually made to destroy this
Eden, and to substitute in its place the old condition of things—fills
me with such indignation that I am constrained to speak.
Consider, for one other thing, the former condition of the world. It
was filled with diseases. People were not in any way protected. They
were allowed to live as they pleased. Consequently, they all
committed excesses and all contracted disease. Some drank too
much, some ate too much, some took no exercise, some took too
little, some lay in bed too long, some went to bed too late, some
suffered themselves to fall into violent rages, into remorse, into
despair; some loved inordinately; thousands worked too hard. All ran
after Jack-o'-Lanterns continually; for, before one there was dangled
the hope of promotion, before another that of glory, before another
that of distinction, fame, or praise; before another that of wealth,
before another the chance of retiring to rest and meditate during the
brief remainder of his life—miserably short even in its whole length.
Then diseases fell upon them, and they died.
We have now prevented all new diseases, though we cannot wholly
cure those which have so long existed. Rheumatism, gout, fevers,
arise no more, though of gout and other maladies there are
hereditary cases. And since there are no longer any old men among
us, there are none of the maladies to which old age is liable. No
more pain, no more suffering, no more anxiety, no more Death
(except by accident) in the world. Yet some of them would return to
the old miseries; and for what?—for what? You shall hear.

When the Chimes began, the people turned their faces with one
consent towards the Public Hall, and a smile of satisfaction spread
over all their faces. They were going to Supper—the principal event
of the day. At the same moment a Procession issued from the iron
gates of the College. First marched our Warder, or Porter, John Lax,
bearing a halberd; next came an Assistant, carrying a cushion, on
which were the Keys of Gold, symbolical of the Gate of Life; then
came another, bearing our banner, with the Labarum or symbol of
Life: the Assistants followed, in ancient garb of cap and gown; then
came the twelve Fellows or Physicians of the College, in scarlet
gowns and flat fur-lined caps; after them, I myself—Samuel Grout,
M.D., Suffragan—followed. Last, there marched the first Person in
the Realm—none other than the Arch Physician Himself, Dr. Henry
Linister, in lawn sleeves, a black silk gown, and a scarlet hood. Four
Beadles closed the Procession; for, with us, the only deviation from
equality absolute is made in the case of the College. We are a Caste
apart; we keep mankind alive and free from pain. This is our work;
this occupies all our thoughts. We are, therefore, held in honor, and
excused the ordinary work which the others must daily perform. And
behold the difference between ancient and modern times! For,
formerly, those who were held in honor and had high office in this
always sacred House were aged and white-haired men who arrived at
this distinction but a year or two before they had to die. But we of
the Holy College are as stalwart, as strong, and as young as any
man in the Hall. And so have we been for hundreds of years, and so
we mean to continue.
In the Public Hall, we take our meals apart in our own Hall; yet the
food is the same for all. Life is the common possession; it is
maintained for all by the same process—here must be no difference.
Let all, therefore, eat and drink alike.
When I consider, I repeat, the universal happiness, I am carried
away, first, with a burning indignation that any should be so mad as
to mar this happiness. They have failed; but they cost us, as you
shall hear, much trouble, and caused the lamentable death of a most
zealous and able officer.
Among the last to enter the gates were the girl Christine and her
grandfather, who walked slowly, coughing all the way.
"Come, grandad," she said, as we passed her, "take my arm. You will
be better after your dinner. Lean on me."
There was in her face so remarkable a light that I wonder now that
no suspicion or distrust possessed us. I call it light, for I can
compare it to nothing else. The easy, comfortable life our people led,
and the absence of all exciting work, the decay of reading, and the
abandonment of art, had left their faces placid to look upon, but
dull. They were certainly dull. They moved heavily; if they lifted their
eyes, they wanted the light that flashed from Christine's. It was a
childish face still—full of softness. No one would ever believe that a
creature so slight in form, so gentle to look upon, whose eyes were
so soft, whose cheeks were like the untouched bloom of a ripe
peach, whose half-parted lips were so rosy, was already harboring
thoughts so abominable and already conceiving an enterprise so
wicked.
We do not suspect, in this our new World. As we have no property to
defend, no one is a thief; as everybody has as much of everything
as he wants, no one tries to get more; we fear not Death, and
therefore need no religion; we have no private ambitions to gratify,
and no private ends to attain; therefore we have long since ceased
to be suspicious. Least of all should we have been suspicious of
Christine. Why, but a year or two ago she was a little newly born
babe, whom the Holy College crowded to see as a new thing. And
yet, was it possible that one so young should be so corrupt?
"Suffragan," said the Arch Physician to me at supper, "I begin to
think that your Triumph of Science must be really complete."
"Why, Physician?"
"Because, day after day, that child leads the old man by the hand,
places him in his seat, and ministers, after the old, forgotten fashion,
to his slightest wants, and no one pays her the slightest heed."
"Why should they?"
"A child—a beautiful child! A feeble old man! One who ministers to
another. Suffragan, the Past is indeed far, far away; but I knew not
until now that it was so utterly lost. Childhood and Age and the
offices of Love! And these things are wholly unheeded. Grout, you
are indeed a great man!"
He spoke in the mocking tone which was usual with him, so that we
never knew exactly whether he was in earnest or not; but I think
that on this occasion he was in earnest. No one but a very great
man—none smaller than Samuel Grout—myself—could have
accomplished this miracle upon the minds of the People. They did
not minister one to the other. Why should they? Everybody could eat
his own ration without any help. Offices of Love? These to pass
unheeded? What did the Arch Physician mean?
 CHAPTER II.
GROUT, SUFFRAGAN.

It always pleases me, from my place at the College table, which is

raised two feet above the rest, to contemplate the multitude whom it
is our duty and our pleasure to keep in contentment and in health. It
is a daily joy to watch them flocking, as you have seen them flock,
to their meals. The heart glows to think of what we have done. I see
the faces of all light up with satisfaction at the prospect of the food;
it is the only thing that moves them. Yes, we have reduced life to its
simplest form. Here is true happiness. Nothing to hope, nothing to
fear—except accident; a little work for the common preservation; a
body of wise men always devising measures for the common good;
food plentiful and varied; gardens for repose and recreation, both
summer and winter; warmth, shelter, and the entire absence of all
emotions. Why, the very faces of the People are growing all alike—
one face for the men, and another for the women; perhaps in the
far-off future the face of the man will approach nearer and nearer to
that of the woman, and so all will be at last exactly alike, and the
individual will exist, indeed, no more. Then there will be, from first
to last, among the whole multitude neither distinction nor difference.
It is a face which fills one with contentment, though it will be many
centuries before it approaches completeness. It is a smooth face,
there are no lines in it; it is a grave face, the lips seldom smile, and
never laugh; the eyes are heavy, and move slowly; there has already
been achieved, though the change has been very gradual, the
complete banishment of that expression which has been preserved
in every one of the ancient portraits, which may be usefully studied
for purposes of contrast. Whatever the emotion attempted to be
portrayed, and even when the face was supposed to be at rest,
there was always behind, visible to the eye, an expression of anxiety
or eagerness. Some kind of pain always lies upon those old faces,
even upon the youngest. How could it be otherwise? On the morrow
they would be dead. They had to crowd into a few days whatever
they could grasp of life.
As I sit there and watch our People at dinner, I see with satisfaction
that the old pain has gone out of their faces. They have lived so long
that they have forgotten Death. They live so easily that they are
contented with life: we have reduced existence to the simplest. They
eat and drink—it is their only pleasure; they work—it is a necessity
for health and existence—but their work takes them no longer than
till noontide; they lie in the sun, they sit in the shade, they sleep. If
they had once any knowledge, it is now forgotten; their old
ambitions, their old desires, all are forgotten. They sleep and eat,
they work and rest. To rest and to eat are pleasures which they
never desire to end. To live forever, to eat and drink forever—this is
now their only hope. And this has been accomplished for them by
the Holy College. Science has justified herself—this is the outcome of
man's long search for generations into the secrets of Nature. We,
who have carried on this search, have at length succeeded in
stripping humanity of all those things which formerly made existence
intolerable to him. He lives, he eats, he sleeps. Perhaps—I know not,
but of this we sometimes talk in the College—I say, perhaps—we
may succeed in making some kind of artificial food, as we compound
the great Arcanum, with simple ingredients and without labor. We
may also extend the duration of sleep; we may thus still further
simplify existence. Man in the end—as I propose to make and mould
the People—will sleep until Nature calls upon him to awake and eat.
He will then eat, drink, and sleep again, while the years roll by. He
will lie heedless of all; he will be heedless of the seasons, heedless
of the centuries. Time will have no meaning for him—a breathing,
living, inarticulate mass will be all that is left of the active, eager,
chattering Man of the Past.
This may be done in the future, when yonder laboratory, which we
call the House of Life, shall yield the secrets of Nature deeper and
deeper still. At present we have arrived at this point—the chief
pleasure of life is to eat and to drink. We have taught the People so
much, of all the tastes which formerly gratified man this alone
remains. We provide them daily with a sufficiency and variety of
food; there are so many kinds of food, and the combinations are so
endless, that practically the choice of our cooks is unlimited. Good
food, varied food, well-cooked food, with drink also varied and pure,
and the best that can be made, make our public meals a daily joy.
We have learned to make all kinds of wine from the grapes in our
hot-houses. It is so abundant that every day, all the year round, the
People may call for a ration of what they please. We make also beer
of every kind, cider, perry, and mead. The gratification of the sense
of taste helps to remove the incentive to restlessness or discontent.
The minds of most are occupied by no other thought than that of
the last feast and the next; if they were to revolt, where would they
find their next meal? At the outset we had, I confess, grave
difficulties. There was not in existence any Holy College. We drifted
without object or purpose. For a long time the old ambitions
remained; the old passions were continued; the old ideas of private
property prevailed; the old inequalities were kept up. Presently there
arose from those who had no property the demand for a more equal
share. The cry was fiercely resisted; then there followed civil war for
a space, till both sides were horrified by the bloodshed that followed.
Time also was on the side of them who rebelled. I was one, because
at the time when the whole nation was admitted to a participation in
the great Arcanum, I was myself a young man of nineteen,
employed as a washer of bottles in Dr. Linister's laboratory, and
therefore, according to the ideas of the time, a very humble person.
Time helped us in an unexpected way. Property was in the hands of
single individuals. Formerly they died and were succeeded by their
sons; now the sons grew tired of waiting. How much longer were
their fathers, who grew no older, to keep all the wealth to
themselves? Therefore, the civil war having come to an end, with no
result except a barren peace, the revolutionary party was presently
joined by all but the holders of property, and the State took over to
itself the whole wealth—that is to say, the whole land; there is no
other wealth. Since that time there has been no private property; for
since it was clearly unjust to take away from the father in order to
give it to the son, with no limitation as to the time of enjoyment,
everything followed the land—great houses, which were allowed to
fall into ruin; pictures and works of art, libraries, jewels, which are in
Museums; and money, which, however, ceased to be of value as
soon as there was nothing which could be bought.
As for me, I was so fortunate as to perceive—Dr. Linister daily
impressed it upon me—that of all occupations, that of Physicist
would very quickly become the most important. I therefore remained
in my employment, worked, read, experimented, and learned all that
my master had to teach me. The other professions, indeed, fell into
decay more speedily than some of us expected. There could be no
more lawyers when there was no more property. Even libel, which
was formerly the cause of many actions, became harmless when a
man could not be injured; and, besides, it is impossible to libel any
man when there are no longer any rules of conduct except the one
duty of work, which is done in the eyes of all and cannot be shirked.
And how could Religion survive the removal of Death to some
possible remote future? They tried, it is true, to keep up the
pretence of it, and many, especially women, clung to the old forms
of faith for I know not how long. With the great mass, religion
ceased to have any influence as soon as life was assured. As for Art,
Learning, Science—other than that of Physics, Biology, and Medicine
—all gradually decayed and died away. And the old foolish pursuit of
Literature, which once occupied so many, and was even held in a
kind of honor—the writing of histories, poems, dramas, novels,
essays on human life—this also decayed and died, because men
ceased to be anxious about their past or their future, and were at
last contented to dwell in the present.
Another and a most important change which may be noted was the
gradual decline and disappearance of the passion called Love. This
was once a curious and inexplicable yearning—so much is certain—
of two young people towards each other, so that they were never
content unless they were together, and longed to live apart from the
rest of the world, each trying to make the other happier. At least,
this is as I read history. For my own part, as I was constantly
occupied with Science, I never felt this passion; or if I did, then I
have quite forgotten it. Now, at the outset people who were in love
rejoiced beyond measure that their happiness would last so long.
They began, so long as the words had any meaning, to call each
other Angels, Goddesses, Divinely Fair, possessed of every perfect
gift, with other extravagancies, at the mere recollection of which we
should now blush. Presently they grew tired of each other; they no
longer lived apart from the rest of the world. They separated; or, if
they continued to walk together, it was from force of habit. Some
still continue thus to sit side by side. No new connections were
formed. People ceased desiring to make others happy, because the
State began to provide for everybody's happiness. The whole
essence of the old society was a fight. Everybody fought for
existence. Everybody trampled on the weaker. If a man loved a
woman, he fought for her as well as for himself. Love? Why, when
the true principle of life is recognized—the right of every individual
to his or her share—and that an equal share in everything—and
when the continuance of life is assured—what room is there for
love? The very fact of the public life—the constant companionship,
the open mingling of women with men, and this for year after year—
the same women with the same men—has destroyed the mystery
which formerly hung about womanhood, and was in itself the
principal cause of love.
It is gone, therefore, and with it the most disturbing element of life.
Without love, without ambition, without suffering, without religion,
without quarrelling, without private rights, without rank or class, life
is calm, gentle, undisturbed. Therefore, they all sit down to dinner in
peace and contentment, every man's mind intent upon nothing but
the bill of fare.
This evening, directed by the observation of the Arch Physician, I
turned my eyes upon the girl Christine, who sat beside her
grandfather. I observed, first—but the fact inspired me with no
suspicion—that she was no longer a child, but a woman grown; and
I began to wonder when she would come with the rest for the
Arcanum. Most women, when births were common among us, used
to come at about five-and-twenty; that is to say, in the first year or
two of full womanhood, before their worst enemies—where there
were two women, in the old days, there were two enemies—could
say that they had begun to fall off. If you look round our table, you
will see very few women older than twenty-four, and very few men
older than thirty. There were many women at this table who might,
perhaps, have been called beautiful in the old times; though now the
men had ceased to think of beauty, and the women had ceased to
desire admiration. Yet, if regular features, large eyes, small mouths,
a great quantity of hair, and a rounded figure are beautiful, then
there were many at the table who might have been called beautiful.
But the girl Christine—I observed the fact with scientific interest—
was so different from the other women that she seemed another
kind of creature.
Her eyes were soft; there is no scientific term to express this
softness of youth—one observes it especially in the young of the
cervus kind. There was also a curious softness on her cheek, as if
something would be rubbed away if one touched it. And her voice
differed from that of her elder sisters; it was curiously gentle, and
full of that quality which may be remarked in the wood-dove when
she pairs in spring. They used to call it tenderness; but, since the
thing itself disappeared, the word has naturally fallen out of use.
Now, I might have observed with suspicion, whereas I only
remarked it as something strange, that the company among which
Christine and the old man sat were curiously stirred and uneasy.
They were disturbed out of their habitual tranquillity because the girl
was discoursing to them. She was telling them what she had learned
about the Past.
"Oh," I heard her say, "it was a beautiful time! Why did they ever
suffer it to perish? Do you mean that you actually remember nothing
of it?"
They looked at each other sheepishly.
"There were soldiers—men were soldiers; they went out to fight,
with bands of music and the shouts of the people. There were whole
armies of soldiers—thousands of them. They dressed in beautiful
glittering clothes. Do you forget that?"
One of the men murmured, hazily, that there were soldiers.
"And there were sailors, who went upon the sea in great ships. Jack
Carera"—she turned to one of them—"you are a sailor, too. You
ought to remember."
"I remember the sailors very well indeed," said this young man,
readily.
I always had my doubts about the wisdom of admitting our sailors
among the People. We have a few ships for the carriage of those
things which as yet we have not succeeded in growing for ourselves;
these are manned by a few hundred sailors who long ago
volunteered, and have gone on ever since. They are a brave race,
ready to face the most terrible dangers of tempest and shipwreck;
but they are also a dangerous, restless, talkative, questioning tribe.
They have, in fact, preserved almost as much independence as the
College itself. They are now confined to their own port of Sheerness.
Then the girl began to tell some pestilent story of love and
shipwreck and rescue; and at hearing it some of them looked
puzzled and some pained; but the sailor listened with all his ears.
"Where did you get that from, Christine?"
"Where I get everything—from the old Library. Come and read it in
the book, Jack."
"I am not much hand at reading. But some day, perhaps after next
voyage, Christine."
The girl poured out a glass of claret for the old man. Then she went
on telling them stories; but most of her neighbors seemed neither to
hear nor to comprehend. Only the sailor-man listened and nodded.
Then she laughed out loud.
At this sound, so strange, so unexpected, everybody within hearing
jumped. Her table was in the Hall next to our own, so that we heard
the laugh quite plainly.
The Arch Physician looked round approvingly.
"How many years since we heard a good, honest young laugh,
Suffragan? Give us more children, and soften our hearts for us. But,
no; the heart you want is the hard, crusted, selfish heart. See! No
one asks why she laughed. They are all eating again now, just as if
nothing had happened. Happy, enviable People!"
Presently he turned to me and remarked, in his lofty manner, as if he
was above all the world,
"You cannot explain, Suffragan, why, at an unexpected touch, a
sound, a voice, a trifle, the memory may be suddenly awakened to
things long, long past and forgotten. Do you know what that laugh
caused me to remember? I cannot explain why, nor can you. It
recalled the evening of the Great Discovery—not the Discovery itself,
but quite another thing. I went there more to meet a girl than to
hear what the German had to say. As to that I expected very little.
To meet that girl seemed of far more importance. I meant to make
love to her—love, Suffragan—a thing which you can never
understand—real, genuine love! I meant to marry her. Well, I did
meet her; and I arranged for a convenient place where we could
meet again after the Lecture. Then came the Discovery; and I was
carried away, body and soul, and forgot the girl and love and
everything in the stupefaction of this most wonderful Discovery, of
which we have made, between us, such admirable use."
You never knew whether the Arch Physician was in earnest or not.
Truly, we had made a most beautiful use of the Discovery; but it was
not in the way that Dr. Linister would have chosen.
"All this remembered just because a girl laughed! Suffragan, Science
cannot explain all."
I shall never pretend to deny that Dr. Linister's powers as a physicist
were of the first order, nor that his Discoveries warranted his election
to the Headship of the College. Yet, something was due, perhaps, to
his tall and commanding figure, and to the look of authority which
reigned naturally on his face, and to the way in which he always
stepped into the first rank. He was always the Chief, long before the
College of Physicians assumed the whole authority, in everything
that he joined. He opposed the extinction of property, and would
have had everybody win what he could, and keep it as long as he
would; he opposed the Massacre of the Old; he was opposed, in
short, to the majority of the College. Yet he was our Chief. His voice
was clear, and what he said always produced its effect, though it did
not upset my solid majority, or thwart the Grand Advance of the
Triumph of Science. As for me, my position has been won by sheer
work and merit. My figure is not commanding; I am short-sighted
and dark-visaged; my voice is rough; and as for manners, I have
nothing to do with them. But in Science there is but one second to
Linister—and that is Grout.
When the supper came to an end, we rose and marched back to the
College in the same state and order with which we had arrived. As
for the people, some of them went out into the Garden; some
remained in the Hall. It was then nine o'clock, and twilight. Some
went straight to their own rooms, where they would smoke tobacco
—an old habit allowed by the College on account of its soothing and
sedative influence—before going to bed. By ten o'clock everybody
would be in bed and asleep. What more beautiful proof of the
advance of Science than the fact that the whole of the twenty-four
thousand people who formed the population of Canterbury dropped
off to sleep the moment they laid their heads upon the pillow? This it
is to have learned the proper quantities and kinds of food; the
proper amount of bodily exercise and work; and the complete
subjugation of all the ancient forces of unrest and disquiet. To be
sure, we were all, with one or two exceptions, in the very prime and
flower of early manhood and womanhood. It would be hard, indeed,
if a young man of thirty should not sleep well.
I was presently joined in the garden of the College by the Arch
Physician.
"Grout," he said, "let us sit and talk. My mind is disturbed. It is
always disturbed when the memory of the Past is forced upon me."
"The Evil Past," I said.
"If you please—the Evil Past. The question is, whether it was not
infinitely more tolerable for mankind than the Evil Present?"
We argued out the point; but it was one on which we could never
agree, for he remained saturated with the old ideas of private
property and individualism. He maintained that there are no Rights
of Man at all, except his Right to what he can get and what he can
keep. He even went so far as to say that the true use of the Great
Discovery should have been to cause the incompetent, the idle, the
hereditarily corrupt, and the vicious to die painlessly.
"As to those who were left," he said, "I would have taught them the
selfishness of staying too long. When they had taken time for work
and play and society and love, they should have been exhorted to go
away of their own accord, and to make room for their children. Then
we should have had always the due succession of father and son,
mother and daughter; always age and manhood and childhood; and
always the world advancing by the efforts of those who would have
time to work for an appreciable period. Instead, we have"—he
waved his hand.
I was going to reply, when suddenly a voice light, clear, and sweet
broke upon our astonished ears. 'Twas the voice of a woman, and
she was singing. At first I hardly listened, because I knew that it
could be none other than the child Christine, whom, indeed, I had
often heard singing. It is natural, I believe, for children to sing. But
the Arch Physician listened, first with wonder, and then with every
sign of amazement. How could he be concerned by the voice of a
child singing silly verses? Then I heard the last lines of her song,
which she sang, I admit, with great vigor:
"Oh, Love is worth the whole broad earth;
Oh, Love is worth the whole broad earth;
Give that, you give us all!"
"Grout," cried the Arch Physician, in tones of the deepest agitation,
"I choke—I am stifled. Listen! They are words that I wrote—I myself
wrote—with my own hand—long, long ago in the Past. I wrote them
for a girl—the girl I told you of at dinner. I loved her. I thought never
again to feel as I felt then. Yet the memory of that feeling has come
back to me. Is it possible? Can some things never die? Can we
administer no drug that will destroy memory? For the earth reeled
beneath my feet again, and my senses reeled, and I would once
more—yes, I would once more have given all the world—yes, life—
even life—only to call that woman mine for a year—a month—a day
—an hour!"
The Arch Physician made this astonishing confession in a broken and
agitated voice. Then he rushed away, and left me alone in the
summer-house.
The singer could certainly have been none other than the girl
Christine. How should she get hold of Dr. Linister's love-song?
Strange! She had disturbed our peace at supper by laughing, and
she had agitated the Arch Physician himself to such a degree as I
should have believed impossible by singing a foolish old song. When
I went to bed there came into my mind some of the old idle talk
about witches, and I even dreamed that we were burning a witch
who was filling our minds with disturbing thoughts.
 CHAPTER III.
CHRISTINE AT HOME.

When the girl Christine walked through the loitering crowd outside
the Hall, some of the people looked after her with wondering eyes.
"Strange!" said a woman. "She laughed! She laughed!"
"Ay," said another, "we have forgotten how to laugh. But we used to
laugh before"—she broke off with a sigh.
"And she sings," said a third. "I have heard her sing like a lark in the
Museum."
"Once," said the first woman, "we used to sing as well as laugh. I
remember, we used to sing. She makes us remember the old days."
"The bad old days"—it was one of the Assistant Physicians who
admonished her—"the times when nothing was certain, not even life,
from day to day. It should bring you increased happiness to think
sometimes of those old times."
The first woman who had spoken was one whom men would have
called beautiful in those old times, when their heads were turned by
such a thing as a woman's face. She was pale of cheek and had
black eyes, which, in those days of passion and jealousy, might have
flashed like lightning. Now they were dull. She was shapely of limb
and figure too, with an ample cheek and a full mouth. Formerly, in
the days of love and rage, those limbs would have been lithe and
active; now they were heavy and slow. Heaviness of movement and
of eyes sensibly grows upon our people. I welcome every indication
of advance towards the Perfect Type of Humanity which will do
nothing but lie down, breathe, eat, and sleep.
"Yes," she replied with a deep sigh. "Nothing was certain. The bad
old times, when people died. But there was love, and we danced and
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