the faint light in the darkness >> by john fraim >> *spark-online issue ten

Duality has been a leading element of Western culture while unity has been a leading element of Eastern culture. In Western culture it has been the paradoxical duality between consciousness and unconsciousness, masculine and feminine, future and past, life and death. In Eastern culture there have not existed these divisions. It has always been the dominance of the feminine, unconsciousness of that old past death of childhood.

Eastern culture, the mother of Western culture, has never been able to recognize or understand this duality. Like all mothers, duality has always been a foreign, masculine concept to her.

In its attempt to grow and move away from its "mother" Western culture has always been saddled with that grand paradox of life--the desire to return to the initial unity of the East and the new freedom and separation represented by Westward expansion.

Freud suggested a basis for this original cultural duality in the basic drives of Libido and Thanatos--life and death. But it was most eloquently expressed by Freud's pupil Otto Rank in Will Therapy where the two symbols are seen as fears in perpetual battle throughout the life of an individual.

"The fear in birth, which we have designated as fear of life, seems to me actually the fear of having to live as an isolated individual, and not the reverse, the fear of loss of individuality (death fear). That would mean, however, that primary fear corresponds to a fear of separation from the whole, therefore a fear of individuation, on account of which I would like to call it fear of life, although it may appear later as fear of the loss of this dearly bought individuality as fear of death, of being dissolved again into the whole. Between these two fear possibilities, these poles of fear, the individual is thrown back and forth all his life...."

The paradox of Western cultures is expressed in this unresolved battle. The failure to resolve this has created a cyclic movement back and forth between the two. It has been that overriding Zeitgeist of Western culture, hovering over entire eras and explaining entire periods of history as the dominance of the fear of life or the fear of death.

While the two concepts battled in Western consciousness, the overall direction of Western culture has been one of separation from the Eastern mother. In effect, Western culture is the symbol for the growth of consciousness out of the original unconsciousness inside the mother.

In this sense, Western progress has traditionally been linked to movement away from past birth in the East and towards the symbolic future of the West. It was a historical voyage based on discovery and the presence of an undiscovered world.

The symbolic solution was for Western culture to replace expansion into place (and its historic westward movement) with expansion into space. It is more than coincidental that psychology, that great inward exploration, arose at the same time western expansion into place came to a halt at the Pacific Ocean in California.

Yet the real destiny of America was established many years before--in the two founding (paradoxical) principles of America in freedom and equality. For the task given to American destiny was the confrontation of the Eastern idea of unity, and equality, with the Western idea of separation, and freedom. The ideas came to be embodied in the freedom of the Republican idea and the equality of the Democratic idea. It has also seen the symbolism of this paradox in the opposition between the mass culture (of the first part of the twentieth century) and the segmented culture (during the last third of the twentieth century).

It is these two great dualities which have played themselves out in the America of the twentieth century. This symbolism has played itself out in cycles of American culture. The dominance of one or the other is expressed by leading genres in such areas as films, literature, brands, theory paradigms and institutions as well as the two-party political system of Democrats and Republicans.

At the beginning of the new millennium they continue to battle each other in the feminine "context" of the non-linear Internet electronic technology of space which stands in opposition to a masculine "content" of the linear "messages" within this feminine context.

Much of the current confusion of our information age might be resolved with America's acceptance of this grand duality and the determination to explore the challenge of this grand historical paradox.

It is a paradox represented on the earth by America but also in the heavens with the astrological change from the sign of Pices to that of Aquarius--from the sign of the fish, contained in the water context of the mother, to that of the "water carrier" of Aquarius who finally understands water context enough to finally get outside of it and become a carrier.

This great astrological change was noted in one of Carl Jung's final works, Aion. In many ways, Aion may come to symbolize Jung's real contribution to mankind.

It is one of the strangest books Jung ever wrote and one of his last projects, published when he was seventy-six. Like Mysterium Coniunctionis and all of Jung's late works, Aion was written after his grave illness of 1944 from which he never believed he would recover. When he did survive he felt these years were like a gift, given to accomplish some final purpose in his life. A type of rebirth.

He decided he was going to write the way he wanted to and that his readers would have to make the major effort toward understanding. The book Aion was one of the fruits of this late "rebirth" in Jung's life and for him gave expression to a type of "secret knowledge" he felt he possessed. In a private conversation to Margaret Ostrowski-Sachs, published in Conversations with C.G.Jung, Jung told her:

"Before my illness I had often asked myself if I were permitted to publish or even speak of my secret knowledge. I later set it all down in Aion. I realized it was my duty to communicate these thoughts, yet I doubted whether I was allowed to give expression to them. During my illness I received confirmation and I now knew that everything had meaning and that everything was perfect."

More than Jung writing Aion, the book seemed to write him. Jung remarks in a letter to his good friend Victor White in December of 1947 that he needed to express something but was not sure what it was:

"I simply had to write a new essay I did not know about what...In spite of everything, I felt forced to write on blindly, not seeing at all what I was driving at. Only after I had written about 25 pages in folio, it began to dawn on me that Christ--not the man but the divine being--was my secret goal."

Rather than something planned out like a number of his other works, Jungnotes to White that Aion "came to me as a shock" and he felt "utterly unequal to such a task."

If Jung's overall work might be compared to a great cathedral, the "priest" of the cathedral was less concerned with preaching the gospel to others as much as clarifying things in his own mind. After his illness it was therefore a time of deep reflection for Jung. His real life cathedral was his castle on the lake at Bollingen and he left it less and less.

But even for those who chose to make the journey to the Jungian Cathedral, it was still difficult to find the book Aion when they arrived. Rather than command a prominent place near the altar, it wasmore or less hidden from view. The "bookstore" of the cathedral--thatpublicity vehicle that parceled out pieces of Jungian thought to thegeneral community--gave prominence to Jung's more accessible books suchas Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Psychological Types and Modern Man in Search of a Soul. It left works such as Mysterious Coniunctionis, Answer to Job and Aionfor the truly adventuresome to discover on their own terms as they left the main parts of the Jungian cathedral and ventured down into the basement to sift through old brittle, yellowed pages inside dusty boxes.

The book was originally published in German in 1951. The central theme of the work he set felt forced to write, the book he notes that "he set it all down in" and was able to speak his "secret language" contained the broadest scope of anything he had ever written. Its time line was the entire Christian aeon of two thousand years from the birth of Christ to the year 2,000 and the second millennium.

In the Foreword to Aion, Jung tells us that the theme of the book is the change of the psychic situation in the Christian aeon which coincides with the astrological conception of the Platonic month of the fishes or Pisces. Those familiar with astrology may recognize that the notion of the Platonic month is based on the astronomical procession of the equinoxes. The movement of the sun through each zodiacal sign is called the Platonic month. In the spring equinox of around 1 A.D., the beginning of the Christian aeon, the equinox left the sign of Aries and started into the sign of Pisces. Now, 2,000 years later, it is about to leave the sign of Pisces and enter that of Aquarius.

Aion is about this grand two thousand year cycle and the sequences contained within the cycle. Perhaps the best place to start when approaching Aion is with The Aion Lectures by Edward Edinger. These lectures were given at the Jung Institute of Los Angeles between 1988 and 1989 and, like Edinger's Mysterium lectures, also provide a short type of "Cliff Notes" to help one navigate the complex waters of the work.

As Edinger notes in the Forward to his book, "Jung's Aion laid the foundation for a whole new department of human knowledge, a scholarly discipline one might call archetypal psychohistory." It is a discipline based on the insights of depth psychology to the data of cultural history. "The historical process," writes Edinger, "can now be seen as the self-manifestation of the archetypes of the collective unconscious as they emerge and develop in time and space through the actions and fantasies of humanity."

While it is impossible to do justice to this work in the space we have here, we can briefly touch on the broad symbolism Jung approaches in Aion. Pisces is symbolized by the fish and Aquarius by the water carrier. The contextual symbolism is one between the dualities of inside and outside. The fish (Pisces) is contained within water while a water carrier (Aquarius) cannot be contained within water if he is to be a carrier of water. He (Aquarius) must be outside of the water. The aeon cycle therefore represents a change from being controlled by the container to being outside the container.

The fish may symbolize the psyche and Jung seems to be suggesting that the two eons will have a different relationship to the psyche. Jung might be suggesting that the context we have been discussing will evolve into a content and that a new context for humanity will evolve. The contextual symbolism which now contains humanity may be coming to the end of its cycle. The emerging symbolic struggle is to move out of water. As Edinger suggests in The Aion Lectures, with the coming Age of Aquarius "we have the image of a vessel, an allusion to the symbolism of the alchemical vessel and to the capacity to contain the psyche, rather than be contained by it." Instead of being a fish contained in a psychic fish pond, the individual becomes a conscious dispenser of the psyche.

Edinger suggests that Christ may have foreshadowed the age of the water carrier. Both Mark and Luke recount that Christ directed two of his disciples to make preparations for the last supper saying to them, "Go into the city and you will meet a man carrying a pitcher of water. Follow him." (Mark 14:13 and Luke 22:10) The man leads the disciples to the house in which they are to go to the upper room for the Passover meal of the last supper. And Christ was also seen as a water-bearer and water dispenser. To the Samaritan woman at the well he said that if she had asked him for a drink, he would have dispensed eternal living water for her. (John 4:10)

But, as Edinger remarks, the water Christ dispensed did not generate more dispensers. Rather it generated fish contained in the water. The church, Edinger speculates, became the water carrier, the fish pond in which the faithful fish could swim. The great secret knowledge of Jung was the discovery of the containment, the water. "If my reading of the symbolism of Aion is correct," says Edinger, "the aeon of Aquarius will generate individual water carriers." This will mean that the psyche will no longer be carried by religious communities but instead it will be carried by conscious individuals. "This is the idea Jung puts forward in his notion of a continuing incarnation, the idea that individuals are to become the incarnating vessels of the Holy Spirit on an ongoing basis."

In Aion Jung provides the broadest contextual basis for symbolism he ever explored. The symbolic contextualism is the archetype of the God-image (the Self) and how this archetype has progressively revealed itself in the course of the Christian aeon. With the creation of this strange book Jung was finally able to gain a sense of peace in his final years. His secret knowledge was indeed "permitted" to be brought forth into the world. And with it, a foundation for a new science of a symbolism of culture.

* * * Today, Jung's thin little book has been relegated to dusty bookshelves in forgotten bookstores, to esoteric niche debates within the relatively small community of certain Jungians, and perhaps a few others.

Its message is particularly difficult for a contemporary America where the loud, screaming messages of masculine content dominate the silence of feminine context.

In this precarious situation, America has been given the historical task of creating a type of synthesis of the unconscious equality and reductionism of the Eastern mother with the progress towards consciousness, freedom, separation and growth of her Western child--growth into more and more pieces of information which has ushered in a great "smog" hanging over the land obscuring the Eastern "medium" with the Western "message."

But it is not just your normal dim, dead greyish yellow Los Angles smog that hovers over American culture today. Rather it is that brilliant, vibrant, radiating smog similar to that neon "smog light" which permeates the atmosphere just a little bit above Las Vegas.

If we can just reduce this neon entrancement the path toward this new synthesis may be opened before us. Yet the road ahead will still be a long and treacherous one.

"Instead of trying to bring a brilliant, intelligent, knowledgeable light to bear on obscene problems, I suggest we bring to bear a diminution of the light--a penetrating beam of darkness; a reciprocal of the searchlight ... The darkness would be so absolute that it would achieve a luminous, absolute vacuum. So that, if any object existed, however faint, it would show up very clearly. Thus, a very faint light would become visible in maximum conditions of darkness."

John Fraim is President of The GreatHouse Company in Santa Rosa, California. GreatHouse is a consulting, research and publishing firm with a focus in the area of the symbolism of popular culture. He has a JD from Loyola Law School and a BA from UCLA. His books Symbolism of Place and Symbolism of Popular Culture will soon be published. His book Spirit Catcher received the 1997 Small Press Award for Best Biography. His articles have appeared in a wide range of publications and Web sites such as Business 2.0, Journal of Marketing, Media & Culture Journal, Psychological Perspectives, the Jung Site and Industry Standard. For text of articles and further information on GreatHouse, visit the CyberBeacon Caf� .