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| M Winther... |
 Posted: Sun Sep 13, 2009 12:38 am |
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People are very materialistic today, very focused on material
welfare, rather than spiritual growth. This is the expression of a
resurgent mother complex. M-L von Franz says:
"This pronounced lack of a feminine personification of the unconscious
has therefore been compensated by the radical materialism which has
gradually taken hold of the Christian tradition. One could say that
practically no religion began with such a highly one-sided spiritual
accent and has landed - if you think of Communism as the end form of
Christian theology - in such an absolutely one-sided materialistic
aspect. The swing from one to the other is one of the most striking
phenomena we know of in the history of religion; it is due to the fact
that from the beginning there was an unawareness, an unbalanced
attitude towards the problem of the feminine goddess and therefore of
matter, because the feminine Godhead in all religions is always
projected into.and linked up with the concept of matter ['mater' =
mother (my remark)].
Only yesterday I had in my hand - this is in the nature of a digression,
but quite an interesting one - a book by Hans Marti entitled 'Urbild
und Verfassung', which could be translated as "Archetype and
Constitution." Marti shows that since man originally conceived of the
constitution of a democratic state - he is mainly concerned with the
Swiss Constitution - a secret switch has taken place from the
patriarchal concept of the State (the juridical State, the State being
a legal concept, a kind of father spirit) to what he calls the Welfare
State. Swiss democracy in its beginnings, let us say until the last
fifty years, was chiefly administered by a Club consisting of men -
you know women in Switzerland still cannot vote - and the basis of the
Constitution was a certain number of laws, the main object of which
was to guarantee the freedom of the individual, freedom of religion,
freedom of possession, and so on.
Into this slowly crept, as Marti very beautifully demonstrates,
another idea, namely that of the Welfare State, a mother archetype
where the State has to care for the health of the people, their
material welfare, old age pensions, etc. Marti points out very clearly
that this is a switch, that the State is no longer the father but has
become the mother, and as such interested in the physical welfare of
her children. He shows how, according to Swiss law, the State now has
the right to impose certain regulations on the possession of land, in
order to protect agricultural areas, for instance.
Some years ago the State assumed control over water rights - water is
a feminine symbol - in order to protect people since the water gets so
dirty and unwholesome, and slowly it has acquired the right to issue
laws to fight epidemics. If, for instance, there is some kind of
plague, or rabies, then the State can issue regulations which did not
previously exist. Formerly mankind was not so interested in the
people's physical and material welfare. If they died of the plague or
were bitten by mad dogs, that was just a part of life and not
important; the emphasis was on spiritual freedom while physical
welfare was rather neglected. Over the last fifty or sixty years
physical welfare has gradually become an important concern of the
State, and with that it has by degrees become more and more the
carrier of the projection of the mother, and less so of the father
image. We are slowly and without noticing it gliding into a
matriarchal situation.
Marti shows very clearly how certain emotional factors are
unconsciously at play, that the people conceive of the State in some
vague archetypal form and from that standpoint vote for certain laws.
But what seems to be self-evident, i.e., that the State should look
after its children, is really the projection of the mother image, and
that is *not* self-evident. He ends his book very intelligently by
saying that we should become conscious of what we are projecting onto
the State and begin with a real 'Auseinandersetzung', or
confrontation, and not change our laws by just projecting a mother
image.
This book describes a small aspect of a slow turn which on a large
scale has happened in the whole Christian civilization and which one
could call a secret unobtrusive return to matriarchy and material-ism.
This enantiodromia has to do with the fact that the Judaeo-Christian
religion did not face the archetype of the. mother consciously enough.
It had to a certain extent excluded the question. It is well known,
also, that when Pope Pius XII declared the 'assumptio Maria' his
conscious aim was to hit Communistic materialism by elevating, so to
speak, a symbol of matter in the Catholic Church, so as to take the
wind out of the Communists' sails. There is a much deeper implication,
but that was his conscious idea, namely that the only way to fight the
materialistic aspect would be by raising to a higher position the
symbol of the feminine Godhead, and with it matter. Since it is the
Virgin Mary's body which is raised to Heaven, emphasis is on the
physical material aspect." (Alchemy - An Introduction, p.212-15)
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Since the seventies, when von Franz made this interview, things have
gone worse. Today the Western Welfare Mother-states have taken upon
themselves the yoke of all the hapless people of the earth, who must
now have their provision for free. To my country - Sweden - they
arrive en masse, sit down and watch cable TV from their home country,
and wait for the next social allowance by post. This exaggerated
concern creates the danger of a blackhearted compensation from the
unconscious. Suddenly, like a lightning bolt, the 'Übermensch'
reappears, with a total unconcern for the well-being and lives of
people. Then the pendulum has swung to the other extreme, and the
Western states will coldheartedly let loose their war machinery, as
can be verified in near history. But should we begin to better accept
suffering, then we needn't experience those ruthless compensatory
reactions, which always take the expression of a feverish search after
new sacrificial victims.
See also my article "An Intrusion of Matriarchal Consciousness" :
http://home7.swipnet.se/~w-73784/matriarchal.htm
Mats Winther |
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