An Order Outside Time: A Jungian View of the Higher Self from Egypt to Christ

By Robert B. Clarke

The line of Western Spirituality began in Egypt and continued through the time of Christ. Has it become stalled in the years since?Robert Clarke says yes, it has. In The Four Gold Keys, Clarke, going by his own spiritualization in the psychic depths, argued that the way out of Western civilization's essential atheism lies in the psychological teachings of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung.In An Order Outside Time, Clarke reinterprets Western Spirituality, using Jungian symbolism, to show that the great stories of ancient Egypt and of the Old and New Testament are processes of what Jung called individuation. This is the individual's journey from lowest to highest Self; from Osiris to Horus, from Moses to Joshua, from David to Solomon, from John the Baptist to Jesus Christ. These pairings also reflect what Joseph Campbell calls the Hero's Journey, which may ultimately spiritualize the whole culture.Clarke traces the connections between Egyptian, Jewish, and Christian mythology, andconcluding that the West's spiritual lineage has become stalledmaintains that we can attain wholeness only by making sense of the clues provided by our mythology. This is the royal line of Higher Self incarnations through the collective unconscious.The ultimate example of individuation, Clarke says, is the Christ, who must now be further understood and developed. And, taking Christ as our symbol of the Self, direct experience of the sacred, by each of us, can enable us to achieve our greatest spiritual potential, both as individuals and as a whole culture. An Order Outside Time shows how that spiritual journey began and how it must be continued.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 15, 2005
• ISBN: 9781612832364

Book preview

Introduction

The Foundations of Life in the Spirit

What follows in this book mostly concerns direct experience of the sacred. I must ask the reader to remember this, so that when we become immersed in the ancient myths or biblical texts, it is realized these are not merely accounts of invented tales or constructed beliefs. On the contrary, what is involved is sacred reality actually coming through to Man's direct experience. (I use the old, traditional term Man throughout this work because I am old and traditional myself. All my old, treasured works on the spirit, on wisdom and truth, refer to Man and these I will follow.) Although the largest part of this is through the unconscious, rather than seen as outer visions, this in no way reduces the validity of the experiences as sacred occurrences. When I speak of the divine Son, Horus, therefore, or of Christ, or of an appearance of the terrible dragon, these phenomena are real as symbolic representations of that other reality of spirit and soul experienced through the unconscious; this is true even of the dragon, which is a representative of the dark instinctual underside.

Before delving into the answer to the mysteries of ancient Egypt, the Bible, and so forth, it is necessary to say something of the standpoint from which I speak: the view of processes of the unconscious. This is not to be understood in terms of normal psychology, which, though of much interest to some, is off-putting to others. So I must stress that it is not normal psychology that is concerned here, but rather that other reality of spirit and soul through the collective unconscious that lies behind conscious reality and which works in interaction with it.

Saint Paul said there were three types of students to whom he taught Christianity. The first type took everything literally and were the simple students. The second type knew that deeper, hidden mysteries were involved, but nevertheless went no further, staying at the simple level. The third type not only knew that deeper mysteries lay below the surface level, they became involved in them, and were thereby themselves initiates into the same spiritualizing processes that Jesus the man had undergone. In this book, I am mostly concerned with that third type of initiate and the hidden level that lies beneath the surface of the teachings.

Many books have been published in the past few decades claiming a royal bloodline of European monarchs descending from Jesus the man and Mary Magdalene. As Jesus is of the seed of King David in the scriptures, the royal bloodline is said to stretch back at least that far, or even to ancient Egypt, and the Holy Grail is usually brought in later as the continuance of it. The books are very entertaining and are certainly well researched as far as they go; the problem is, their basic claims are wrong.

It is not so much the purpose of this present work to disprove those claims, but rather to explain the real meaning of our Western spiritual heritage, and in so doing the true state of the royal bloodline will, I hope, become clear. This is far more astonishing than the claims made in the previous works on the subject. For the almost unbelievable truth is that not only is the traditional belief that Christ truly was the Son of God perfectly valid—that is, as archetypal fact—but the Bible contains examples of several other divine incarnations that form the real royal bloodline.

In fact, the phenomenon has been known to many cultures reaching back to earliest times, and the myths and religions of the world are genuine records of those monumental events. I say this not as a matter of my own personal conscious conjecture, or of anyone else's, but based on my many years of experience with the unconscious undergoing its processes, for it is there that the archetype of the immortal we today call the Higher Self can be known. It is this experience that enables us to recognize similar material when we see it in the world's myths, which all have the same basic themes and motifs, all having foundations in the same timeless unconscious/spirit reality.

Despite the fact that the Bible displays much evidence of divine incarnations, the Jews nevertheless still await the coming of a Messiah, though he actually came throughout their ancient history. Each of these figures continues, as we will see, the spiritual royal line that reaches back to the beginnings of Egypt. This is the inner line of true blue blood, divinely inspired by direct action of the Holy Spirit in certain initiates who were experiencing the soul depths through the human psyche. This was not so much the personal depths, but the other reality of spirit and soul that psychologist C. G. Jung called the collective unconscious. This royal line forms an order outside time, an eternal priesthood, to use Jung's phraseology, for its reality is of sacred time coming through to Earth time. It is this line I investigate in this book.

Jung discovered these facts of paramount importance almost a century ago and his first important work, Symbols of Transformation (published in 1912 as Psychology of the Unconscious), contains much relevant information proving that the nonpersonal, collective unconscious really does exist beyond the individual's personal unconscious. Indeed, his book is amazing in its insights for that time. Jung realized that the Higher Self, a term he borrowed from Eastern philosophy, is the higher and wider truth of us all, the immortal figure, the Great Man, Anthropos, Christ within, to which we are all attached, and which ultimately connects us with God.

The Higher Self, at a personal level, is like a guardian angel, teacher, and friend (in positive form), the immortal entity to which each of us is connected. But in cosmic form, the Higher Self is the divine Son of God, equated with the Logos, which in the Mysteries is said to disperse parts of himself into mortal beings. Yet this also has two aspects, the Higher Self as Son of God, and what I term the Lower Self as Son of the Earth Spirit/World Soul.

Though Jung's works are increasingly popular today, this deepest and most essential discovery has still not been realized generally, and not fully appreciated even by some Jungians. Jung called the individual's quest for these inner treasures the individuation process, in which personal consciousness becomes broadened and fulfilled by archetypal material flowing through from nonpersonal layers of the collective unconscious.

None of this is theory. It is the actual situation, and my previous book, The Four Gold Keys (Hampton Roads, 2002), is the record of my own inner journey in dreams through this other reality. In that book, I demonstrate that this other reality—the ancient Egyptians called it the Other World—though nonmaterial in nature, does exist, and that it is experience of this that has always formed the foundations of religion.

In other words, as certain archetypal symbolism appeared in my dreams with certain meanings, I was able to identify similar material in the world's myths, though this present work is chiefly concerned with our Western religious traditions. Just as a number of chairs form a row, so a number of dreams form the individuation process, in which the interplay between consciousness and the collective unconscious assembles and develops the different sides of the Higher Self, like a game of tennis with the ball passing from one side to the other. If the inner process turns out successfully, then a transformation occurs within the personality of the initiate, meaning a broadening and extension of consciousness that may even bring forth the immortal Self in the unconscious, of which the individual human psyche is a mere, though very important, part.

I happen to be one of those people who has visions in dreams occasionally, and it took me some years to finally understand all that was taking place. Nevertheless, I am an empiricist who accepts nothing on unsound evidence; I must have logic and reason and intelligence, especially when it comes to the things of the spirit. I do not, however, believe that full reality can ever be confined to the reductive limitations of a cramped rationalism, as though unfathomable infinity and eternity could be parceled up and contained in the transient, faulty, and fallible human brain. But I have much evidence of the Higher Self phenomenon in my own dream processes stretching over a period of many years, so that it is a matter of fact to me now.

For the past two thousand years, the Higher Self in ultimate form has been symbolized in the West by Christ, whose mortal side is represented by the man Jesus, the initiate into the inner hidden mysteries. As Jung says, Jesus as a man represents ego-consciousness, and as a god the Higher Self. This is why Jung continually warned of the great danger to Western civilization caused by the virtual loss of Christ, for Christ is no longer the foundation and mainstay of culture. Nevertheless, Christ still remains the symbol of the Higher Self and, indeed, of the divine Son, as far as spirit reality through the unconscious is concerned. His loss to culture as mediator means dissociation from the Self, to which we are psychically attached.

We simply have no other figure on which to project the Self, even if only unconsciously. (This in no way lessens the original Christ as a genuine Son of God, though as a process much more subtle than a physical birth.) I have experienced certain dream-visions of a Christ reactivated in the collective unconscious, however, and these dream-visions, plus the recent upsurge of interest in Christ in the United States, may well be indicating a turning of the tide.

The bringing forth of the Higher Self has historically been a worldwide phenomenon, though it almost always occurs along traditional lines of cultural development. Obviously, it would be pointless, and even disorienting, for a Buddhist to have experiences of the spirit in Muslim or Christian form, or for a South Seas islander to be inundated with archetypal material from the Jewish religious mysteries. So we experience spirit and soul through the unconscious mostly according to our spiritual heritage, though this encompasses a wide range of phenomena at all levels.

It is also true that even when experienced within the framework of one's own spiritual heritage, the archetypal material is often very strange and disorienting, so that we often feel decidedly and even dangerously at odds with both ourselves and normal reality. Nevertheless, it is incalculably wiser and safer to undergo the processes within the protective framework of a traditional religion, as the latter has a solid foundation in the same collective unconscious that has proved substantiating through worldly time. This forms a royal line that stretches back through time. If the quest is undergone without those protective walls, then it is perilously close to dealing with magic rather than religion. The sixteenth-century alchemist Paracelsus had the highest motives and even considered himself a good Christian, but the form his opus took was closer to sorcery than to saintly matters, and Jung criticized him for it. The alchemists said, Not a few have perished in our work, for it is dealing with things greater than Man, with both the light and the darkness.

Although the inner processes occur mostly within the framework of the religious traditions of the culture of the initiate, they are expressive of symbolic truths rather than literal ones. This is why myths and religions of the world have basically the same symbolism, though appearing in different outer forms. Thus Horns has four brothers (that later become his sons), Christ has four brothers, Quetzalcoatl has four brothers or agents, and so forth, all symbolizing the fourfold nature of the Higher Self. Jung called this the qua-temity structure.

From another aspect, the Higher Self is sevenfold, having seven constituent parts, and we again find this expressed across the world. Horus has seven rowers in his boat, called the Seven Spirits of Annu; Manu is in a boat with seven companions in India, as is Noah in the Bible; Moses constructs a seven-branched candelabra (in Numbers); Christ is in the midst of seven candlesticks (Revelation)—all have the meaning of the Higher Self with the Seven Powers.

The seven are sometimes symbolized as Seven Stars and, again, we find this several times across the world, simply because most peoples can see the starry constellations and naturally project the seven experienced in the unconscious during the inner quest onto them. (The unconscious uses the Seven Stars as symbolism; I have seen them several times in dreams.) This is the answer to why we so often find seven, or 1 + 7 formations, in mythology: it is symbolism of spirit/soul reality through the unconscious. Thus the Seven Spirits of the Wind of the Huron Indians of North America match the Seven Spirits of God in the Bible.

We see further evidence of the Higher Self in the Old Testament when various figures experience an angel just before God speaks. The angel is mediator, connecting Man and God, the mediator being the Higher Self. The mortal human is part of the Self, while the Self is part of God, and, when developed through inner spiritualizing processes, the Self becomes the stepping-stone, or mediator, to God. Moses sees an angel in the burning bush before God speaks; Christ says, No man cometh unto the Father, but by me (John 14:6). We will investigate all of this as the book proceeds.

But what is individuation? Imagine an island rising out of the sea, which is like the human individual growing out of the collective unconscious, where all of nature merges as the World Soul. Ego-consciousness then grows further by assimilating material from the outer world surrounding it, but remaining mostly unaware of the unconscious—personal and collective—out of which it has grown. True individuation, however, entails the assimilation of contents from the collective unconscious, largely of the Self, of which the human personality is a part; the personality is the agent of the Self in material reality. All of the parts are assimilated to the center, which is the Self in the individuation process, including ego-consciousness, like the numbers of a clock around the center. The human personality connected with the Self is seen in ultimate form in Jesus the man and the higher Christ, and in the Greek Mysteries in the mortal eidolon and the immortal Daemon.

The individuation process is a journey through the unconscious in dreams, assembling the many often-conflicting parts of the Self that need to be assimilated to consciousness. This obviously necessitates an individuation process that is known to consciousness. But this often occurs unconsciously, unbeknown to consciousness. People have mentioned to me odd dreams they have had, and though they knew nothing at all about the subject, the dreams were clearly parts of a fuller process, of which the dreamers were unaware—aside from the odd dreams. Jung claims that the processes may not reach consciousness at all, even in the odd dream, but then are wasted, and may even lead to tragedy, the conscious personality being led or driven into things by forces of which it is entirely unaware. Fortunately, this extreme seems to be a rare occurrence.

Religious material appears in dreams (counter-matched by much other material from the lower soul depths), even though ego-consciousness may consider itself atheistic. In fact, a religious conversion may even be forced upon consciousness and, if resisted and refused, may make the person quite ill. Such seems to have been the basis of Sigmund Freud's own neurosis, the direct result of setting up bulwarks to keep out archetypal/religious material that was trying to come through from unconscious/spirit reality. Saint Paul is the prototypal example of how archetypal forces of the unconscious can burst through and force themselves overwhelmingly onto a split-off, dissociated consciousness.

Paul, originally called Saul, was by nature a religious visionary of a highly evolved kind, hence his great work in the spread of Christianity. (The Church later significantly toned down his visionary experiences.) Yet in his earlier life, Paul was unconscious of this and was a rabid persecutor of Christians, being directly responsible for the deaths of worshippers, both men and women, which he freely admitted several times: I persecuted the Church of God violently and tried to destroy it (Gal. 1:13). But spiritualizing processes and visionary material of a Christian nature would have been long trailing in and rising up from his unconscious depths. The more he was affected by inner disturbances, the more violently he persecuted the Christians. Then one day as he journeyed to Damascus, Paul was struck down by a vision of Christ, asking, Paul, Paul, why persecutest thou me? (Acts 9:4).

For the three days following, Paul was blind, but on recovery was transformed, experiencing visions that he said must make him seem quite mad. His virulent persecution of Christians was really his fight against the welling up of inner forces of the spirit, in the same way that Freud set up bulwarks against what were ultimately the same forces, thereby causing his neurosis.

I suffered neuroses for some years and it was not until the health-bringing archetypes welled up into my experience that a positive transformation took place. I was sinking into that void between the extremes of simple traditional religion and cold atheistic rationalism that offers no help to the modern inquiring mind. (I have become a lot more sympathetic to traditional religious forms since I realized their validity as archetypal truths.) Anyone who wishes to investigate how the phenomenon of the Higher Self is experienced and developed in dream processes may refer to The Four Gold Keys. So for many years I was lost and unwell, searching for deeper meaning that I was unable to find. Only my eventual discovery of Jung and the unconscious finally brought lasting healing.

Colin Wilson once compared my first encounter with Jung to Saint Paul struck down by his vision of Christ on the way to Damascus. I had a dream in which I received four gold keys on a gold key ring from a dying Jung (hence the tide of my previous book), meaning I was to carry on Jung's work, for the keys formed an important, ancient symbol of wholeness. In fact, it was such keys that were said to unlock the doors to the ancient religious Mysteries and to medieval alchemy. Jung himself had received the keys in a dream from a wise old man figure he called Philemon (the figure called itself Elijah in an initial dream he had), the personification of spirit, as Jung put it, which led to his life's work.

For myself, the universe was no longer frightening and cold, but alive with spirit, soul, and, ultimately, God. For the first time since childhood I felt at home and settled in worldly reality, for now it had meaning that extended into eternity. I had been going the wrong way for a long while, but now found that I had definitely found the right way.

I studied the myths and religions of the world, realizing that their foundations lie in these same unconscious processes that I was experiencing. The dismemberment and reconstitution of the Egyptian god Osiris, for example, clearly equaled in human aspect my own breakup and reconstitution in the unconscious processes, with the immortal Self that I was to experience equaling the god aspect of Osiris, who is likewise reconstituted. Osiris has both mortal and immortal aspects, but is mostly the god or spirit in matter that develops into the lower form of the Higher Self, which I call the Lower Self.

The royal line of Western religious experience began in early Egypt, then continued through the Jewish prophets and up to Christ. In adopting Christ, we of the West became heirs to this line, though as it was all taken as an outer, physical phenomenon, deeper understanding was thereby rendered impossible, prohibiting further development. Modern Man has now advanced so that he can no longer believe blindly; he now needs direct experience, above all, to be able to understand. The East has known for thousands of years that it is possible for the Higher Self to descend through the unconscious and merge with its mortal aspect, Man, while the West never understood that the higher Christ had so descended into the mortal Jesus as God's incarnation.

Despite this, certain mystics and even alchemists of the Middle Ages came close to reviving the original experience as a new actuality. The Holy Grail, which still grabs and excites our imagination today, was a true and genuine way to the marriage of spirit and soul through the unconscious. Of certain alchemists, Jung said that unlike many modern apostles of enlightenment, they had a very positive attitude toward the Church. They came to understand the deep symbolism of the Christian cosmos, for its images were basically the same as the ones they were experiencing through their work. (Jung was speaking of the few enlightened alchemists.) Jung concluded that modern Man is completely dissociated from all this and has installed in its place substitutes as poisonous as they are worthless.

After a couple of centuries of materialistic brainwashing, today we are further removed than ever from understanding Christ as a symbol of the Higher Self, except by way of the new knowledge of depth psychology. Through the latter, we now understand that not only did the divine phenomenon occur with Christ, but that it must have happened any number of times throughout world history. Modern science, by which our assessment of reality is ultimately measured, is still overwhelmingly possessed by a rationalism and materialism that not only colors but severely discolors our picture of that full reality, and to an extreme degree. And the fault lies not merely with what we think, but with how we think.

I remember a book published a few years ago that claimed that science will soon be able to prove that God does not exist. I could not conceive of anything so horribly unwelcome, if it could be so proved, though, thankfully, I knew it was utter nonsense. In fact, the latest declarations of a number of scientists are that they have to admit the possibility of God, and one even claims to be able to demonstrate mathematically that Heaven exists. This is not a positive step, however, for a God that could be proven on such evidence would not be the eternal God of spirit, merely one reduced to the severe limitations of mathematics. In other words, the same reductionism is at work in both instances. God's existence or nonexistence could never depend on the cold and limited calculations of mathematics, or indeed, of scientific materialism generally.

Another scientist is prepared to concede that religion may have to be included as a part of science, which again demonstrates how absurd modern scientific thinking has become. How could an eternal God be a part of science? The fragment becomes the whole and the whole the fragment. So even those scientists who are prepared to admit the possibility of God can presumably only conceive of Him in a scientific/mathematical way. This does more harm than good, for were there to be a religious revival along those lines, it would be on the basis of materialism, and the wonder and otherness of the spirit and our necessary connection with it would still be denied. Those who then believed they had found the true nature of God would in reality be worshipping a mere materialistic concept of Him, possibly an even greater blunder than atheism.

As a voice from above told me in a dream, modern Man has become imprisoned in his own limited intellect, so that it has warped his concept of reality. Holiness can never be assessed by science, only some of its effects. Holiness, if it can be classified at all, which it cannot, would have to come under the heading of the irrational, its truth being ultimately unfathomable. It is the difference between the Star of Bethlehem being assessed, on the one hand, as a mass of matter and, on the other, as a magical sign that heralds the birth of the Son of God in Man. It is the difference between a lump of rock and a divine child, a rationalistic theory of faulty human intellect and divine holiness. To paraphrase Jung, when Man's intellect dares to take possession of the high position once held by the spirit, great harm is done to the soul.

It has been said that we finally rejected the Bible because we all grew up, but the truth is, we failed to grow up enough. The inability to accept the teachings of the Bible as literal facts was only the first stage of development into psychic/spiritual adulthood. The second stage is the realization that its truths are symbolic ones, involving other spiritual dimensions of reality to which we are connected psychically, that is, psychically in the original meaning of the word—by way of the soul. Experience of this other reality through dreams forms the individuation process, the means by which God is able to incarnate into the world of matter (though this occurs in the reality existing behind consciousness).

So while the first stage of growing up meant our rejection of the Bible and myths as literal facts, the second stage involves further understanding of them as symbolic and irrational facts. This will mean, as Jung pointed out, the evolution of the religious spirit in Western Man, to equal and even surpass the profound understanding of the Eastern religions. Only by means of psychology can we come to know the real meaning of religion (though outer visions are certainly possible) and to know the secret of the royal line that is our Western heritage.

The world has many other spiritual bloodlines—Buddhism, which developed out of Hinduism, is one—but the royal line of the West runs from ancient Egypt to Christ—and to a certain degree on to alchemy, the Holy Grail, and the mysticism of the Middle Ages. (It may be argued with much validity that religious experience in outer form, if it is genuine, has no need of psychology, but depth psychology in its wider sense includes this concept.)

Jung stressed that modern psychology can only sort out the religious problem of modern Man along historical lines, leading, it is to be hoped, to a new assimilation of the traditional myth. Our rabid inclination today, however, to reject all of our past and render it unconscious might well bring about a period of hundreds of years of barbarism, normal spiritual development having been severely curtailed (Jung 1959b).

I had a dream in which an old worn, tattered Bible that nobody wanted lay on the pavement. People were kicking it out of the way as they passed. But when I picked it up and opened it, I found that every page was made of the purest gold. That is how unconscious/spirit reality feels about the Bible. The Bible teems with the symbolism of Man's experience of God through the individuation process, and is the record of this in a certain part of the world over many centuries. This forms an order outside time, the royal line of the Higher Self.

Jung said that myth is not fiction, and, indeed, it speaks the truths of the timeless reality that has been called sacred time. The Mysteries have always taught that mundane time is an illusion, while scientists have long been saying that time is relative, and so the only real time is sacred time, which is, in fact, timeless and, therefore, for all time. Consequently, the religious truths of sacred time are timeless and for all time. This is the nature of myths and of mythic reality.

Mircea Eliade, the well-known writer on myths, once stated that Communism is a modern myth in that Communists see it as a fight between Good and Evil, in which whole peoples are involved. This is forgetting, however, that Communism totally denies spirit/soul reality, from whence mythic truths originate. In fact, we could say that the main fault of Communism is that it rejects mythic reality for the solely worldly (as does capitalism). But as Jung pointed out, Man does not indefinitely tolerate the nullification of his soul and its meaning, whether by politics or science, for the soul is mythic and religious by nature, if it is anything.

I watched a television program that revealed how psychologists in the 1950s were involved in the indoctrination of Americans to fear and hate Communism. This was done, it was claimed at the time, to protect democracy. Irrational forces of the unconscious were responsible for Nazism and its violence, as well as for Communism, the program claimed. American democracy, therefore, had to be protected against these forces of the unconscious that lie within and behind the human mind.

Most of the psychologists involved in the brainwashing were Freudians—Freud's daughter, Anna, was very much involved—and though the reasons behind it were genuine initially (the protection of democracy and the maintenance of stable culture), it became sinister. Not least because if people are brainwashed to be democratic, then democracy itself is thereby destroyed. Big business was also involved, fearful of the effects of Communism and even of liberalism.

The program related that in the 1950s, a democratically elected president of a South American banana republic was so smeared and blackened, false evidence being planted and so forth, that he was forced to resign office and was replaced by an amenable puppet. The former president was not actually a Communist, but had idealistic reforms planned, so he had to go. Certain psychologists were deeply involved in this, feeling their actions justified in the interests of democracy. But behind it all—apart from the interests of big business—was the great fear of the irrational forces of the unconscious, which could, it was feared, break out relentlessly at any time. The only hope of controlling them, it was believed, was by brainwashing the public.

But then Freudian psychology has never possessed any real understanding of the collective irrational forces of the unconscious or, indeed, of the meaning of the individual psyche. As I shall demonstrate in this book, the unconscious, while containing forces of darkness and violence, is also the source of the greatest light known to Man, the light of the spirit and of God. The unconscious is actually the greatest bringer of order—true order—possible, for the essence of the Higher Self, the main product of the unconscious, is harmony and order itself. All opposing sides come together under an immortal dominant, and this is why whenever the Higher Self appears as savior in history, it institutes a period of spiritual growth and cultural blossoming. The very source that the psychologists feared was actually the source of the answer to the great problem.

In fact, Christianity, the religion of the West for two thousand years now (though often shamefully misused), is based on love and is the highest product of the irrational unconscious so far (along with Buddhism) and a true advancement of conscious awareness, according to Jung. I write this book in defense of those irrational forces and of Christianity, which must be further understood and developed rather than abandoned, for if it is abandoned, then chaos will certainly reign as everything fragments. The real danger is the rejection, not the acceptance, of the irrational forces of the unconscious that the psychologists feared.

As I stated, most of the psychologists involved in the brainwashing of Americans were Freudians. Jung had worked with Freud in the early years of the twentieth century, but he realized from the start that Freud was setting up bulwarks against the religious/mythological contents from the nonpersonal depths; Jung's acceptance of these was the basis of his eventual break with Freud. I can attest to the validity of those contents as archetypal reality; they are meaningful beyond what we at first dare to hope, though dangerous to the same degree if denied or misused. Consciousness may well be overwhelmed by the extremely powerful contents in certain circumstances, as happens in cases of severe mental illness when frail human minds burst at the onslaught of the nonpersonal forces; and it is certainly true that whole nations may likewise be overwhelmed.

With utmost care, the effects on humans of contact with these contents need not be destructive and, indeed, may constitute the most positive and constructive influences possible. It all depends on consciousness itself, on its attitudes and values. A religious attitude is in tune with the unconscious, whereas an atheistic one is dissociated. In the early twentieth century, it was the faulty and inferior thinking of German consciousness that allowed the negative forces in the form of the ancient god Wotan to upsurge and possess the whole nation. A truly Christian attitude would have maintained the positive position, keeping out the destructive powers from the negative side of the unconscious. God, or the spirit, would rather be good, but the dark, evil side can come forth just as easily; it all depends on Man.

Freud exemplifies the extreme narrowness and, indeed, the dangerous error of the denial of the spirit and the existence of any otherworldly reality. For Freud, only material existence was real, and even Man's finest achievements in art and culture were due to processes of a brain that is entirely physical in nature. Thought patterns existed, of course, said Freud, and the human mind was extremely complicated, especially regarding complexes of the subconscious, as he termed it. Eventually, he was forced to concede there was the id, which merely means the it, a sort of super-consciousness that was nevertheless still limited to the world of matter. When all was said and done, everything that exists was the product of material reality to Freud. As for religion, that was due to a number of causes, some of them contradictory, but in all cases religious belief constituted a neurotic, dangerous way of thinking that must be cured at all cost.

Religion was due unquestionably to sexual repression, to hatred of the father, to the need for protection by the father as in childhood, and to guilt and the need for atonement for the mental slaying of the father, Freud said. When Mithras slays the bull in the myth, therefore, he is slaying the personal father, and so on. It was all due, according to Freud, to the black tide of occultism from the cesspool that is the subconscious, and so must be eradicated without question. Freud even tried to extract the promise from Jung that he would never abandon the Freudian position regarding this, a promise that Jung could not give, let alone keep. Indeed, Jung was forced by his discoveries to go way beyond the Freudian position; he came to inhabit a reality in which spirit and soul exist alongside the universe of matter and over which rules the eternal God.

The truth is, Jung never lost his belief in God, even as a young teenager witnessing his father, a pastor, suffer agonies of guilt when he was unable to sustain his faith. Finally, Jung senior leaped over to the opposite camp, to the side of atheistic psychology, but it brought him no comfort. He died not long afterward, a tortured, broken man who had lost his God and belief in the immortal soul. We can only conclude that he must have been a true lover of God for His loss to cause such tragedy; yet this is the same tragedy of modern Man. As Jung stresses, a profound disturbance in the Higher Self occurs when belief in the sacred and the holy is lost.

Even as a young man, Jung knew that humankind has a long history of supernatural experience, from ghosts and poltergeists to visions of divine holiness. It could not all be rationalistically explained away and, in any case, Jung was prone to certain experiences of irrational nature himself, which increased as he further explored the reality of the collective unconscious. The break with Freud was not only inevitable, it was an absolute necessity, for Jung was fated to do work on behalf of God and for the soul of Man that was of inestimable importance. When asked by John Freeman in the BBC television program Face to Face (1959) if he believed in God, Jung answered, I have no need to believe ... I know, I know. This was not arrogance on Jung's part, but direct knowledge gained through the unconscious, what the ancients called gnosis.

I saw the narrowness of modern psychology in action a few years ago. A relative of mine had a nervous breakdown and I went to visit him in the hospital a few times. On one occasion, I had to wait in a corridor and I sat outside a room, the door to which was slightly open. Inside the room were a girl, who I learned later was aged seventeen, and her father, and they were having an argument, the father raising his voice.

The girl was saying that Jesus came to visit her in dreams to comfort and help her, and it was wonderful. But her father was almost beating the table, ranting, There is no Jesus, there is no God. Get that nonsense out of your head or you'll never be well. So it went on. Later, I asked the person I was visiting about the girl, and was told that everybody liked her because she tried to help them and seemed very warmhearted.

At that time, I was well into my individuation process and it was by no means unusual for me to have an experience of spirit in the form of Jesus in my own dreams, so I realized that the girl must be undergoing the same sort of thing. The individuation process often occurs unconsciously and, from what I could discover about the girl, it seemed she was naturally one of those who have experiences of the spirit and, who knows, may even have had the soul of a saint. Her father was the sick one who needed treatment, and it is not hard to imagine what harm he was doing to the girl. The psychiatrists treating her would have been no better, almost certainly agreeing with the father, and they were probably filling her with drugs to try and take away her inner visions.

This is the world of the modern mind doctors, and we must seriously wonder—fear—what harm some of them must be doing to warp the natural workings of the spirit in Man through the unconscious. Thank heavens for Jung and depth psychology!

The Nature of the Unconscious and Its Processes

Thus, this book investigates the divine incarnations through the unconscious in the Western royal line. This exploration is in accordance with my own experience of the individuation process, which fits in with Jung's discoveries to a large degree. Naturally, it necessitates the return to the beginnings, to the beginnings of ancient Egyptian culture, where the royal line starts. This reveals how Egyptian religion, on which that culture was firmly based, had solid foundations in experience of the unconscious. We shall then trace other examples along the developing line through the Bible up to and including Christ.

Along the way, it will be necessary to make a few digressions here and there, but only when these are connected in some way to the royal line and have a bearing upon it, or when certain mythic symbolism of the world is the same as the Western, thus proving their independent origins in the same collective unconscious.

In a future work, I will investigate the royal line phenomenon through the alchemy, Holy Grail legends, and mysticism of the Middle Ages, up to Jung and modern times.

My task, based on what I have said thus far, is to demonstrate how the processes of the unconscious form the foundations of this order outside time. As I have noted, Jung called it the eternal priesthood; he said it has flowed through certain figures from Melchizedek to Christ, though he knew that it is much older, stemming from the beginnings of ancient Egypt. This is a very long line, of course, and so I can only dip into it at certain points, though I hope the most relevant ones. If viewed from the outside, some sections or incidents may seem unconnected as we travel down the byways, but if we take them to their roots in the unconscious, we find they have one and the same source. Many myths and stories display what are obviously similar archetypal occurrences, and this is because all humankind shares the same collective unconscious.

To fulfill my purpose adequately here, I must first try to explain, briefly, the structure of the unconscious and how its processes function. It should then be easier to imagine an ancient initiate, let us say Moses, on his quest through the archetypal depths, eventually leading up to his experience of the Higher Self and God on the Mount. Such experiences as the latter obviously occur at the highest levels of the processes, way beyond personal psychology, though involving it.

The thing to keep in mind is that the unconscious—the otherworldly reality—speaks to us in symbolic language, that is, in archetypal symbols. These symbols are representations of a mystery beyond Man, though involving him, and as symbols are less, perhaps very much less, than what they attempt to convey. They may be the best representations possible, but nevertheless may fall short of the archetypal happening itself. So when the biblical King David slays the giant Goliath, or King Saul sees three men ascending Heavenward carrying three loaves, a bottle of wine, and three goats, the actual mysteries involved are so much more than those representations suggest.

Depth psychology is the key, the way in, to the understanding of religion and the inner mysteries (and of reality itself). Only with this key may we come to grasp the tremendous phenomenon, which, over long periods of time, has formed the order outside time through the unconscious in Western Man. This order did not continue in the Middle Ages as it should have, however, but became stuck at the level of understanding—or misunderstanding—of the later Church. In fact, the very early Church, or some of its chief figures, possessed better understanding of the deeper meaning of the Christian mystery than has been known at any time since. Today, with the scientific rationalism developed over the last couple of centuries, we observe almost total denial of the original mystery, despite claims of belief in God; this is a catastrophic situation of psychic dissociation.

Dreams are the direct link between consciousness and the unconscious and, in them, we experience the life of the unconscious and our association with it. We may experience our own souls, but also the eternal forces, and if we take it all deadly seriously, it may develop into a heroic quest, instances of which have filled myths and religions the world over since time immemorial. The hero, the serpent-dragon, the captured maiden, the divine child, the savior or god-man and his evil counterpart, even God Himself, plus many animal forms, all may be experienced on the long, wondrous, but potentially dangerous journey through the unconscious and the realm of spirit and soul.

This other realm is a world of a completely different kind, speaking to us in archetypal dreams, trying to convey to us its own nature by using symbolism that we can, it is to be hoped, understand. Yet this other realm is connected directly to the physical world and is the animating force behind it.

In the language of dreams, dry land has always symbolized consciousness, with the ocean and its depths representing the great collective unconscious. In the latter, we can experience the animating forces that lie within matter, which we call the Earth Spirit on the masculine side, and the World Soul on the feminine side. These forces must permeate matter throughout the universe. But we also experience the opposite of matter and soul, what we term higher spirit, and this may appear in dreams in various forms: religious figures, angels, birds (which come down from the sky, just as the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus in the form of a dove), UFOs, aliens, and so on.

The possible representations of spirit are potentially unlimited, simply because spirit has no physical form and so can appear as literally anything. But then, it is also true that the lower spirit/soul may appear in any form that is appropriate, though both spirit and soul do, of necessity, limit themselves to symbolic forms that will (it is to be hoped) be understood by consciousness. It is a fact that the required understanding frequently fails to occur, however, due to the lack of adequate knowledge in consciousness and, to a degree, to the natural age-old fear we have of the unconscious.

Imagine an iceberg floating on the sea, partly submerged in the water. That is like the human psyche, partly in the world of consciousness and partly in the realm of the unconscious. If we take the tip of the iceberg above the sea to be personal consciousness, then everything above it, the dry land and the air, represents the reality of the world and impersonal, collective consciousness. The iceberg below the water level, which is much larger than what shows above, represents the personal unconscious, which, like the iceberg, is much larger than the part of the psyche above that constitutes consciousness. But the submerged iceberg is, in turn, only an extremely small content in the great depths of the ocean; in the same way, the personal unconscious is merely a small drop in the waters of the collective unconscious. The latter might be better termed the eternal unconscious, for it spreads out to an eternal reality of spirit and soul.

Now, we would not believe for one moment that the whole of conscious reality is contained within a single, personal consciousness. Anyone who did would be considered quite mad, and would be so. Yet almost everyone, including many psychologists, believes that the world of the unconscious is strictly limited to the personal sphere. Freud, who is considered the father of modern psychology, certainly believed so, building the whole of his theory upon the misconception, and, in so doing, was led to the misinterpretation of the meaning of life itself. Jung's great discovery was that the personal unconscious is merely the first step, and that the collective unconscious is another reality surrounding the physical universe. For Freud, the unconscious was like a tail tapering off from consciousness that soon comes to an end, whereas in effect it is ego-consciousness that is the extension, the tail (perhaps I should say the head) growing out of unconscious reality.

Another way of looking at the full nature of the unconscious is this: Say you are outside your house on the street where you live. In the far distance, you can see a hill you want to get to, but there are so many obstacles between you and it that it is an impossible task. But if you go back into your house and then out the rear door, there is a path that will take you behind everything and directly through to the hill.

Our psyche is symbolized by the house we live in and, if we go through the rear door, the personal unconscious, we may eventually reach the realm of spirit and soul in the collective unconscious that we could not reach in conscious reality. This is the hill, and the treasure that is the Higher Self invariably lives on the hill. The ancients knew this very well and said that it was necessary to journey through the dangerous depths of the Underworld in order to reach Heaven on the Mount, and that is still the case, as is recognized in depth psychology today.

Scientists tell us that although matter may alter its forms drastically, nothing is ever entirely lost or destroyed. How much less, then, can we imagine spirit reality coming to an end? (That it exists I am absolutely as sure as I am that matter exists, having experienced both in my lifetime so far. I have lived in between them, so to speak, so if I were to doubt the existence of spirit, by the same token I would have to doubt the existence of matter.) As we know, everything that exists has its opposite—hot/cold, wet/dry, solid/liquid, good/evil, male/female—so even if we could not experience spirit, we would have to postulate it as the necessary counterpart to matter. Yet, as I noted earlier, spirit reality itself is divided into two opposite realms, that of higher spirit and the lower spirit that animates solid matter, which we call soul. This is why for the ancient Egyptians and later the alchemists, and, indeed, in the Mysteries generally, full reality consisted of body, soul, and spirit.

These opposite spirits break out into conflict when activated by the questing ego-consciousness, and so unification of these was always the aim of the religious Mysteries, because such is the aim of the eternal forces themselves. Life on Earth was developed to the point where an evolved creature could consciously activate, experience, and finally unite these eternal opposites in a sacred marriage. This is what happens in a successful individuation process that goes all the way. A heavy, mundane, animal reality is thereby transformed into a highly meaningful, holy one, or, at least, higher spirit reality is discovered to exist, under which humankind can live in light and truth.

Both higher and lower spirits produce a Son (two sides of the full Higher Self), and Man is connected to these through the unconscious. So in the processes, Man is found to be part of the Self, while the Self is part of God on the one side, and the World Soul on the other. Just as creatures of animal life, including humans, have part of themselves from the father and part from the mother, so does the Higher Self, though on a much larger scale.

Beginning the inner process, the personal unconscious is activated and we begin to experience what is nearest to consciousness. This is the Shadow, our very own Mr. Hyde, which we suppress and repress from consciousness to varying degrees; at least, most of us do. Criminals live out more of their darker side in consciousness, how much depending on how villainous they are. The future personality is more or less set at birth, so that the saint and villain are born and not made. A saint who lived as a villain, or even trivially, would be warping his or her personality, and we have to face the fact that this is so with the true or natural criminal. A true criminal can never be truly rehabilitated, for he would be going against and warping his basic nature, which is set out at birth, and even much before.

This is not to say that society must therefore tolerate his misdeeds, for it must protect itself. Only fear of punishment, or actually being locked up where he can do no harm, can be the answer for the natural criminal. Thankfully, only a small number of people of any given population are villains, though many other individuals may be influenced this way or that, depending on various circumstances. This lets the Shadow into culture to varying degrees. With the normal person, the suppressed Shadow is not far below the surface of consciousness, and is not altogether negative, having its more positive aspect, which is necessary for life.

To be aware of one's own evil is normally a heavy burden to carry, but the young of today, who are much more aware of the shadow within themselves, generally do not find it so. This is because they lack the moral standards that would enable them to separate themselves from the dark shadow, which means that they more easily fall victim to it.

Myths and religious texts are full of conflicts between these light and dark opposites, at the human level at times, but chiefly concerning the dual aspects of the Self. Osiris and the dark Set exemplify these in ancient Egyptian myths, divided as the hostile twins or brothers of general mythology. Osiris and Set, though they have human aspects at one level, mostly express the lower, dual-natured Earth spirit of the Underworld, or the unconscious. The feminine aspect of the unconscious, termed the anima by Jung, though personal at one level, ultimately expresses the feminine World Soul. Isis fills this archetypal role, with Osiris and Set in conflict over her at the outset of the myths.

This reflects the situation in the unconscious where the anima, also dual-natured, may veer between the light and dark sides. When consciousness unifies with the personal anima, it is known as the syzygy, but when, at the ultimate level, God as his Son unites with the Great Mother, it is the sacred marriage, known as the hieros gamos.

The anima in my own inner processes chiefly appeared in dreams in the form of a certain real-life woman on whom I had projected the archetype, though the anima also appeared in many other female forms. This was the personal aspect, while at the collective level, I have seen the collective anima as goddess, queen, headmistress, female prime minister, and so on. The woman on whom the outer projection is made may bring great inner light to a man because she activates the anima within, who then appears as the woman in dreams. Jung calls such a woman a disturber of the peace, but adds that, as she activates the anima, she may then lead consciousness to experience the archetypal depths and heights.

As to the male side experienced in the unconscious, one form is the wise old man, whom Jung calls the personification of spirit. I often saw this figure in my own processes in the form of Jung—in fact, at times it seemed to be Jung himself. The wise old man represents a higher stage of special knowledge, and he may come to help at particularly tricky and dangerous times during the processes, or when a further stage has been reached successfully. As said earlier, Jung had a white-bearded, winged old man visit him in dreams, whom he called Philemon, while Jung was the figure who appeared in my dreams. The wise old man and girl (anima) together form a well-known archetype, such as Jethro and Zipporah, who appear in the Bible with Moses.

There are many other figures to be met in the unconscious, but if all goes well and the higher stages are reached in the processes, there will follow the birth of the divine child, which means the Higher Self. This may then develop through a long individuation process until the Self is realized, when it will be possible for consciousness to merge with the Self, though this is usually reserved until the afterlife. The Self, being immortal, is preexistent to ego-consciousness, so that the latter grows out of the former, but if the process is continued and developed through individuation, then both ego and Self are in a sense reunited in conscious awareness, in this present life.

In this way, the imaginary freedom of the ego is lost again to a degree, for the Self is the center and master of the totality. Nevertheless, it is essential that a distinct separation remains between mortal and immortal, for a man is not a god and must, in fact, shrink exceedingly small before such awesomeness as the Higher Self represents.

So, in one sense, the ego is the child, for it is born of and grows from the unconscious; but then the Self in the processes may be born as the divine child to consciousness. Both are thus parent and child at one and the same time. This is why we frequently find the archetype of the old man and boy together in myths, alchemy, and so on. Mercurius is both old man and child (and a good many other forms), and so too is Metatron, the Higher Self of the apocryphal prophet Enoch.

Many other symbols appear on the inner quest, such as the star, the Seven Stars, fish, dog, cat, stag, lion, snake, dragon, in fact, animal forms all the way down to insect level. And sometimes they appear as twins, and sometimes as bizarre conglomerations of some of these animal forms. We find this in ancient Egyptian depictions, now referred to by scholars as composite animals, but their source is quite obviously the unconscious, where various animals are sometimes symbolically merged into one. All these animal forms are parts of the lower spirit, which is why they are said to be representations of Osiris in the Underworld in Egyptian mythology and of Mercurius in medieval alchemy.

The nature of the Higher Self as a conglomeration of opposing parts is illustrated in the Acts of John, where Christ is depicted at the center of the twelve disciples who encircle him in a round dance. This is the Self at the center of the conflicting parts of the psyche, which, finding no harmony with one another, attain it by all of them concentrating on the center that is the Self. This is the basis of Buddhism, where the centerpoint of the wheel perfectly balances the unbalanced outer rim.

The number twelve denotes wholeness, and so does the number seven, and we will see these appearing frequently as this book progresses; sometimes the number four expresses this too as the quaternity of wholeness, as I noted earlier. As a matter of fact, there is much puzzlement among modern scholars as to why the Seven Powers, often as 1 + 7, occur so frequently in myths and religious texts worldwide from the earliest records. Many theories have been put forward, all of them off the mark, for the theories all pertain to physical reality, whereas the source is unconscious/spirit reality.

The Seven Powers, given many names, are really the seven constituent parts of the Higher Self—therefore, sometimes expressed as 1 + 7—in various aspects and fulfilling various functions, but usually as creators and builders, working on the evolution and advancement of Man through the spirit. These are called the Elohim in original biblical texts, and they appear in various forms elsewhere as spirit lights, called the Akhu in Egypt, Anunnaki in Sumeria, and Dhyan Chohans in India. We will investigate these in some depth as we proceed.

The royal line of incarnating God as the divine Son, often expressed as 1 + 7, began in Egypt in the Western tradition. This was carried on by certain biblical figures including Abraham, Joseph, Moses, David, the Son of Man figures of Daniel and Ezekiel, and so forth. Then Christ continued the order, so that Jesus the man was the initiate who underwent the individuation process, producing the Higher Self in ultimate form. As noted, this sometimes involves the Seven Powers, evidence of which is seen throughout the Egyptian and biblical texts. Christ the Self became mediator between Man and God, uniting both—the Self has both Man and God within its nature—which led eventually to a state of higher consciousness and culture for a large part of humankind.

As myths and religious texts across the world reveal, symbolic truths are marvelously alive and tremendously meaningful for humankind. Jung asked what has driven Man through the centuries to produce works of the greatest beauty, to attain the greatest heights of achievement, and to endure the most extreme acts of self-sacrifice with devotion. He answers that it is miracle. It is miracle because the