The White Goddess is a strange and charismatic book, as you say. If you’re interested in the (mostly modern) tradition that inspired it, you could look at Ronald Hutton’s Pagan Religions of the British Isles.
I was thinking about Answer to Job when I read BDM’s reflections on McCarthy and sin last week, particularly how Jung’s argument there seems to hinge in part around the idea that morality is human and something that humanity has to teach or offer to the divine, not the other way around, and how that does and does not fit in with what she was saying about sin making humans less of themselves.
Answer to Job is totally having a moment in occult circles on the right and left these days, it seems, and I’ve been wondering about that in relationship to chaos magic’s crumbling further and further into identity politics and conspiracy bickering.
Thank you! I loved this! Reflections on Blake amazing too
Thank you! It's a fascinating book, that's interesting. I know Jung in general is having something of a revival these days in ways that seem deeply unfortunate, although I enjoy his work.
Excellent! I'd like hear more about your thoughts on the unfortunate influence of Jung, if you'd like to share them. I enjoy your engagement with religious and mythopoetic texts: I've been thinking that we need something along the lines of a Bloom-style religious criticism to make sense of the metaphysical battles of the moment. My problem with the Goddess hypothesis (if it is taken seriously as mythology rather than simply poetic inspiration) is that it fares no better than a belief in God the Father against Freud's critique of religion as springing from the helpless child's desire for the protective parent. I find it funny that psychology has largely replaced theology as the theoretical framework most educated Westerners use to make sense of human behaviour and yet we are still reluctant to accept Freud's pessimism (which is perhaps why Jung is a more amenable choice for many).
The non-dualism of Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell has always appealed to me, noting the inherent ambivalence of the bit you quote being in the Voice of the Devil...
I almost want to write a full fledged response laying out some of my thoughts but for now the gist is that I worry that about the use of archetypes to hypostasize an essentially suburban industrial 20th century model of the human as the timeless ideal in the collective unconscious,+some of his kookier ideas play well with racial essentialism and dodgy mysticism of that sort. Does that make sense? I'm never entirely sure.
I for one would be interested in a fuller analysis! I’ve seen Jung’s influence mainly on various New Age movements – an internalised quest for meaning as a consolation prize for civilisation’s discontents. Racial animus seems to be overdetermined, so I'm curious as to how you view Jung's influence in particular.
I’d also really love to read your full analysis. I’ve been interested in a long time in a way ppl struggle with a full picture of Jung. Jungians/post-jungians wanting to divorce him from his religiosity/belief in himself as having experienced deification while New Agers and those in practicing in various magical traditions want to leave behind his delimited scientific context and all of its sociocultural pitfalls and prop him up as a prophet. Then there’s Jordan Petersen lol.
I just read the new history of children's literature by Sam Leith and he names Blake as an important forerunner to a lot of 19th century children's writing and may even make the same connection to Milne, so you're definitely on the money there. Songs of Innocence and Experience is still my favorite, when I finally saw a copy IRL (just hanging in a random hallway at the Met where I had stopped to catch my breath!) I had no idea how tiny the prints were, only as big as a baseball card. Something about the subject matter and the scale and the simplicity of the poetry and art when you have to put your face six inches from them to be able to read them moved me intensely, I've never forgotten it.
That sounds like an interesting book! So often when I was reading early Blake I was reminded of Now we are Six or something like that, it's fascinating. It's annoying that the prints aren't included with most collections of his poetry, even if one can understand why!
Yeah I really need to read Fearful Symmetry but I remember starting it and reading in the first few pages that it wouldn't be dealing with the art at all, and that put me off a bit -- I don't know how you could possibly separate them.
I think you're right about moralists—though even then I think the damage only goes so far. Tolstoy and Rousseau aren't going away no matter pathetic their actual lives make them.…
I bought The White Goddess like ten years ago because I ran into a teacher of mine in a bookshop and asked him to recommend me something. The first book he recommended had been out of print for like fifty years but the second was TWG. I dragged it around for years, but never actually opened it. I wonder what happened to that copy.…
Yeah once you're in the canon there's not much that can dislodge you. I aspire to one day be the sort of person who recommends fifty years-out of print books...
The White Goddess is a strange and charismatic book, as you say. If you’re interested in the (mostly modern) tradition that inspired it, you could look at Ronald Hutton’s Pagan Religions of the British Isles.
Thank you!
I was thinking about Answer to Job when I read BDM’s reflections on McCarthy and sin last week, particularly how Jung’s argument there seems to hinge in part around the idea that morality is human and something that humanity has to teach or offer to the divine, not the other way around, and how that does and does not fit in with what she was saying about sin making humans less of themselves.
Answer to Job is totally having a moment in occult circles on the right and left these days, it seems, and I’ve been wondering about that in relationship to chaos magic’s crumbling further and further into identity politics and conspiracy bickering.
Thank you! I loved this! Reflections on Blake amazing too
Thank you! It's a fascinating book, that's interesting. I know Jung in general is having something of a revival these days in ways that seem deeply unfortunate, although I enjoy his work.
Excellent! I'd like hear more about your thoughts on the unfortunate influence of Jung, if you'd like to share them. I enjoy your engagement with religious and mythopoetic texts: I've been thinking that we need something along the lines of a Bloom-style religious criticism to make sense of the metaphysical battles of the moment. My problem with the Goddess hypothesis (if it is taken seriously as mythology rather than simply poetic inspiration) is that it fares no better than a belief in God the Father against Freud's critique of religion as springing from the helpless child's desire for the protective parent. I find it funny that psychology has largely replaced theology as the theoretical framework most educated Westerners use to make sense of human behaviour and yet we are still reluctant to accept Freud's pessimism (which is perhaps why Jung is a more amenable choice for many).
The non-dualism of Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell has always appealed to me, noting the inherent ambivalence of the bit you quote being in the Voice of the Devil...
I almost want to write a full fledged response laying out some of my thoughts but for now the gist is that I worry that about the use of archetypes to hypostasize an essentially suburban industrial 20th century model of the human as the timeless ideal in the collective unconscious,+some of his kookier ideas play well with racial essentialism and dodgy mysticism of that sort. Does that make sense? I'm never entirely sure.
I for one would be interested in a fuller analysis! I’ve seen Jung’s influence mainly on various New Age movements – an internalised quest for meaning as a consolation prize for civilisation’s discontents. Racial animus seems to be overdetermined, so I'm curious as to how you view Jung's influence in particular.
I’d also really love to read your full analysis. I’ve been interested in a long time in a way ppl struggle with a full picture of Jung. Jungians/post-jungians wanting to divorce him from his religiosity/belief in himself as having experienced deification while New Agers and those in practicing in various magical traditions want to leave behind his delimited scientific context and all of its sociocultural pitfalls and prop him up as a prophet. Then there’s Jordan Petersen lol.
I just read the new history of children's literature by Sam Leith and he names Blake as an important forerunner to a lot of 19th century children's writing and may even make the same connection to Milne, so you're definitely on the money there. Songs of Innocence and Experience is still my favorite, when I finally saw a copy IRL (just hanging in a random hallway at the Met where I had stopped to catch my breath!) I had no idea how tiny the prints were, only as big as a baseball card. Something about the subject matter and the scale and the simplicity of the poetry and art when you have to put your face six inches from them to be able to read them moved me intensely, I've never forgotten it.
That sounds like an interesting book! So often when I was reading early Blake I was reminded of Now we are Six or something like that, it's fascinating. It's annoying that the prints aren't included with most collections of his poetry, even if one can understand why!
Yeah I really need to read Fearful Symmetry but I remember starting it and reading in the first few pages that it wouldn't be dealing with the art at all, and that put me off a bit -- I don't know how you could possibly separate them.
I think you're right about moralists—though even then I think the damage only goes so far. Tolstoy and Rousseau aren't going away no matter pathetic their actual lives make them.…
I bought The White Goddess like ten years ago because I ran into a teacher of mine in a bookshop and asked him to recommend me something. The first book he recommended had been out of print for like fifty years but the second was TWG. I dragged it around for years, but never actually opened it. I wonder what happened to that copy.…
Yeah once you're in the canon there's not much that can dislodge you. I aspire to one day be the sort of person who recommends fifty years-out of print books...