Schwäbisch Heidnisches Glaube

by Sean Jobst 17 August 2020 Representation of Wotan as "Dezember" in Festkalender, by the German painter Hans Thoma (1839-1924)    Another way that Jung has influenced me are his insights about German identity and the Wotan Archetype. Even before his mortal life, Jung inherited the memories and qualities of his ancestors, as with every individual even when not conscious of one's inheritance. One of his prized possessions was a robe from his paternal grandfather and namesake, Karl Gustav Jung (1794-1864), a Basel physician originally from Mannheim. The robe was in the black-red-gold colors of the nationalist revolution that tried to unify the German states, as Karl participated in Romantic ceremonies seeking to build a sense of cultural unity among descendants of the various German tribes.(1) The earliest record of the Jung family was in Mainz, beginning a trail from Rhineland to Schwaben and finally to Switzerland. On his maternal side, the Preiswerks, Carl Jung inherite...

by Sean Jobst 26 July 2020    Today is the birthday of a great thinker who has been one of my influences these past three years, primarily for giving me a framework to make sense of my inner journey. He provided concrete form and terms to the deepest aspects of the internal self, that which cannot always be named much less quantified. Carl Jung (1875-1961) is more than a psychologist, for he went beyond the rigid scientism of his peers into a way of thinking that was new only insofar as it challenged the dogmas that dominated his field. Despite the "youth" ( jung ) of his name, he tapped into the most ancient wisdom that remained latent all these centuries.      Not only a Swiss psychologist, Jung was a European mystic and a Germanic shaman, aware that the Siberian term described spiritual realities that had parallels under other names across the world, including among Germanic peoples. He thus became a 20th century mystic and shaman, speaking within the la...

by Sean Jobst 27 April 2020 It is a misty night whose magical qualities inspired many a poet and writer who dared allow themselves to step outside time and space. This night is when a disguised Mephistopheles sought to distract a Faust who had already bargained away his soul, from knowing the fate of his beloved Gretchen. The great poet who transmitted this story, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, on one winter's night in 1777 ascended the snowy heights of the Brocken to both recover from the sorrow of his sister's death and to step outside the mundane constraints of his Weimar society - but descended down newly inspired to create one of the best poetic masterpieces in the German language. This legendary night was immortalized by the great Irish novelist Bram Stoker as one "When the graves were opened and the dead came forth and walked. When all evil things of earth and air and water held revel." American science-fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft described this night's ...