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365 18 modern Fraternities, ancient origins Charles S. Finch III Modern man does not understand how much his “rationalism” (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic “underworld.” He has freed himself from superstition (or so he believes) but in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree. His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and he is now paying the price for this break-up in world-wide disorientation and dissociation. —Carl Jung Psychocultural background There has always been a certain tendency in modern Western culture to disparage and dismiss the values and customs of the past; to view with condescension and scorn the lifeways, practices, and cultural perspectives of ancient and traditional peoples. This attitude of derision and contempt has fueled most of the systematic and relentless destruction of traditional cultures in every part of the globe. Although the conquest and mass destruction of indigenous peoples have produced devastating consequences, there are even more subtle effects that have exerted negative repercussions on the perpetrators of such conquest. Carl Jung realized this truth early in the twentieth century, when his investigations into the human psyche revealed the existence of a common archetypal bedrock in the “collective unconscious” of humanity out of which symbols emerged that drove not merely human behavior but also the process by which humans struggled to become psychically whole.1 Jung realized that these symbolic and mythical psychic substrates exerted a far greater impact on the evolution of human consciousness and “self-sense” than all the carefully constructed rational edifices of Western learning ever did. 366 Charles S. Finch III In the end, Jung came to a startling and, to him, alarming conclusion: Western science and philosophy, at least since the time of Descartes (seventeenth century), if not earlier, had systematically devalued and disempowered the symbolic essence of human existence. Myth, instead of being a consciously created symbolic expression of an otherwise inexpressible reality, was relegated to the realm of the fairy tale and puerile storytelling, artificially denuded of any and all truth it ever contained.2 Jung observed that myths were “depersonalized archetypes,” and archetypes were “personalized myths”; clearly, myths and unconscious archetypes were two ends of an unbreakable continuum of human psychic life. They were coactualizers and coenablers of human mental evolution. Looked at this way, there is no real way to discard or destroy myths or the symbols that constitute them, just as it is impossible to discard the human psyche. Western civilization, however, had embarked on a systematic campaign to exterminate myth and symbol; among scientists, scholars, and clergy, myth was deactivated and anathemized. In institutionalized Christianity, symbolism was pared down to a handful of canonical figures, signs, and icons, the cross being the most paramount. But Jung realized that this eradication campaign carried with it a terrible cost to the eradicators: the archetypes that represented interior symbols and myths no longer had any appropriate outlet or means of expression. Consequently, they did not disappear but merely remanifested in revised and aberrant forms. Jung expresses it as follows: “They [cultural symbols ] are important constituents of our mental make-up and vital forces in the building up of human society; and they cannot be eradicated without serious loss. Where they are re-pressed or neglected, their specific energy disappears into the un-conscious with unaccountable consequences. The psychic energy that appears to have been lost in this way in fact serves to revive and intensify whatever is uppermost in the unconscious. . . . Even tendencies that might in some circumstances be able to exert a beneficial influence are transformed into demons when they are repressed.”3 The archetypes were as active as they had ever been, but now, they were exteriorizing themselves in the most insidiously destructive ways imaginable. For example, the reworking of the sacred swastika of antiquity, a deep structural symbol in myriad lands around the world, became the defining emblem of the Nazis and their genocidal Aryan ideology, launching a war that would claim more than 50 million lives.4 The color red—ancient symbol of the blood of the mother presiding over the production and sustaining of new life—became the color of revolutionary Marxism, whose seminal idea of abolishing the state was soon awash in rivers of blood. Stalin killed 20 million of his countrymen, Mao 20 million, and Pol Pot 2 million (these numbers may [3.145.58.169] Project MUSE...

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