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To: alt.magick.tyagi,alt.magick,alt.mythology,sci.skeptic,alt.psychology.jung
From: catherine yronwode 
Subject: Re: Evidence Supporting Collective Unconscious/Archetypes? Anybody? (was Demonstrating)
Date: Sat, 10 Aug 2002 20:38:27 GMT

*Philip* wrote:
> 
> catherine yronwode wrote:
> > As far as i know, the existence of the collective unconsious is an
> > unproven paranormal theory developed by Carl G. Jung.
> 
> That is really wrong!
> 
> The Collective Unconscious is that part of our individual psyche 

The psyche is an unproven paranormal structure that is linked to the
mind or body. It is not congruent with "mind" or "mentality" but the wod
"spirit" is sometimes used interchangeably with it. 

> which is the same for all people.  

A portion of an unseeable paranormal structure which is the same for all
people remains unprevable and unseeable. 

> Have you ever heard of, for example, "instincts"?

Yes. Instincts are patterns *behaviours* that are heritable. 

The collective unconscious is not a *behaviour.* 
 
> Archetypes are defined by Jung as "patterns of instinctive behavior".

Really? If he defined archetypes as "patterns of behaviour" then i
suspect he was mish-mashing thoughts and actions rather
indiscriminately. 

Please understand that i have nothing against a belief in or personal
application of the theory of the collective unconscious. I myself have
opted out of it. 

Being Jewish by birth, it was easy for me to forego the Jungian
belief-set, since Jung said in 1925 that Jews were not part of his
theoretcal construct anyway.

But truth to tell, it was not Jung's racial exclusionism that drove me
from his school of theought -- it was my wide reading as a child. I kept
finding historical mythology that flatly contradicted his theory of
"universal" archetypes. 

For instance, Jung based the whole edicface of the "collective
unconscious" on the "Solar Man" data (which Noll has demonstrated was a
deliberate hoax on Jung's part, but, of course, i did not know that
then). Taking the Solar Man paradigm at face value, i was led by the
nose from one Solar-Male and Lunar-Female deity to another as Jungian
promoters like Erich Neumann and Joseph Campbell presented image after
image of Solar gods and Lunar goddesses to "prove" their "cvollective
unconscious: hypothesis. 

But the Jews see the Sun as a FEMALE and the moon as a MALE, and i KNEW
that. 

(That may explain why Jung felt that Jews were not part of the
"collective unconscious" when he lectured in 1925 that Jews did not
partake of "Aryan blood and soil." -- but sure, sure, we all know Jung
dropped this outright anti-Jewish angle after World War Two -- so let's
get back to the main point -- the Jews see the Sun as a FEMALE and the
moon as a MALE.)

So, as a kid, here i was reading this Jung stuff and wondering what was
up with the Jews, how come they didn;t match the theory ... and then i
ran across a nice little book of Japanese mythology in my parents' book
store -- and i learned that the Japenese also see the Sun as a FEMALE
and the moon as a MALE. But they were on the same side of Warld War Two
as the "Aryan" (so-called) Germans, so that made no sense to me at all
-- because how could they be "Aryans" if they saw the Sun as FEMALE,
just like the Jews????? 

Well, a few years later i ran across the works of Samuel Noah Kramer,
who had embarked on a translation of every Sumerian text in the world --
and watcha know? The Sumerians saw the Sun as a FEMALE and the moon as a
MALE. In fact, in their mythology, the Moon was the father of both the
Sun and of Venus.

So now i understood that the Jews were not merely rank outsiders to
"Aryan" and European mythology -- they were part of a long-standing
Middle Eastern tradition in which the Moon was the father and the Sun
was his son and his daughter Venus was The Queen of Heaven.

I didn't have to hypothesize that the Japanese were part of some
bizarre  Sumerian-Jewish lineage to explain their female Solar deity and
male lunar deity. I just had to apply Occam's Razor: 

There are two sexual genders and two major lights in the sky. In order
to create a mythology, emergent human cultures basically assigned a
gender to each of the major lights by a process almost as random as
flipping a coin. The only "universal" constant was that they assigned
one gender to the sun and the other gender to the moon. 

In time, some of those cultures dominated others and some were dispersed
as minority populations. At any given point in time, one can draw a map
of areas where the sun is male and where the sun is female and that's
all one will have -- a MAP. It will not be a statement about the nature
of the "psyche" or the "collective unconsious" -- it will be a MAP of
cukltural movement. Period. 

And where was Jung's archetypal Solar Man -- his proof of the "collecive
unconscious" -- in all of this? Well, as far as i was concerned, it
looked like map, too -- a map of the distribution of the Iranian (Aryan)
people, who long ago flipped their coin and came up worshipping a male
Sun ... and eventually dominated a rather large territory. 

Controlling a lot of squares on the game board does not mean your
mythology is "universal." And as long as the Japanese and Jews exist, no
one will be able to demonstrate the "universality" of "archetypes" that
"instinctively" spring from the "collective unconscious." 

cat yronwode