More generally, Jung seems to be speaking to the gradual evolution of human consciousness when writing about numinous experiences. As one of his protégés, Erich Neumann (1954), has noted, human consciousness (replicating the evolution of organic life) begins in an undifferentiated state (which Neumann calls the “uroborous”) and which I have identified as the condition of nothingness. This state is represented in many symbolic forms, ranging from many images of chaos (floods, wind, or ocean) to the more stylized image of a snake circling to begin devouring its own tail.
As I will soon consider in this essay, the condition of nothingness is often represented in symbols. Jungians suggest that the experience of the numinous is composed of both the primitive, undifferentiated elements (the “uroborous”) and the much more complex forms of high-art. The high art is recruited by the dynamic and compelling low art of primitive consciousness. As I will note in a later essay, the “seed” of beauty is to be found in this primitive consciousness—and specifically in the experience of nothingness.
Jung suggests that the numinous experience is frightening and often not welcomed. He proposes that we build societal norms and institutional structures to protect us from the numinous. Those aligned with the Jewish and Christian faiths approach the condition of nothingness by creating a myth of creation in the book of Genesis. Something comes from nothing through the divine work of Yahweh.
Jung nominates the Catholic Church as an institution that has provided protection from the numinous, through its rituals and priestly roles. However, Jung (1938, pp. 22-23) suggests in Psychology and Religion that the Protestant revolution shattered this protection and left those who adhere to a Protestant faith fully exposed to the powerful presence of the numinous: Protestantism, having pulled down many a wall which had been carefully erected by the [Catholic] church, began immediately to experience the disintegrating and schismatic effect of individual revelation.
As soon as the dogmatic fence was broken down and as soon as the ritual had lost the authority of its efficiency, man was confronted with an inner experience of nothingness—Tillich’s “non-being”– without the protection and the guidance of a dogma and a ritual. Specific, repetitive, and reinforced dogma and ritual are the unparalleled quintessence of Christian (as well as pagan) religious experience. Protestantism has, in the main, lost all the finer shades of Christian dogma and ritual: the Mass, the Confession, the greater part of the liturgy, and the sacrificial importance of priesthood.
Without this religious institutional protection, Protestants have looked elsewhere for a barrier that can be erected between self and numinous. In Psychology and Religion (based on the pre-World War II 1937 Terry Lectures), Jung (1938) suggests that the Nazi regime in Germany may powerfully and horribly exemplify the substitution of a secular institution for a religious institution in blocking the emergence of numinous, experiences that reside in the condition of nothingness. Whether or not Jung is correct in linking the Third Reich and ultimately the Holocaust to the threat of numinous experiences, we certainly can acknowledge and respect the power of these experiences.
