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| Odin, from Arthur Rackham illustrations for Richard Wagner's The Ring |
Note: see here for the essay Jung wrote at the end of the first world war, and here for the essay he wrote at the end of the second world war.
"I know that I hung on a windy tree
nine long nights,
wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin,
myself to myself,
on that tree [the world Ash, Yggdrasil] of which no man knows
from where its roots run.
No bread did they give me, nor a drink [of mead] from a horn,
Downwards I peered;
I took up the runes [ᚱᚢᚾᛟ], screaming I took them,
then I fell back from there."
Hávamál, Poetic Edda
When we look back to
the time before 1914, we find ourselves living in a world of events which
would have been inconceivable before the war. We were even beginning to
regard war between civilized nations as a fable, thinking that such an
absurdity would become less and less possible in our rational,
internationally organized world. And what came after the war was a veritable
witches’ Sabbath.
...we shall have to wait some time before anyone is able to assess
the kind of age that we are living in.
...what is more than curious – indeed, piquant to a degree – is that an ancient God of storm and frenzy, the long quiescent Wotan, should awake, like an extinct volcano, to new activity, in a civilized country that had long been supposed to have outgrown the Middle Ages. We have seen him come to life in the German Youth Movement... . Armed with rucksack and lute, blond youths, and sometimes girls as well, were to be seen as restless wanderers on every road from North Cape to Sicily, faithful votaries of the roving god. Later, towards the end of the Weimar Republic, the wandering role was taken over by thousands of unemployed, who were to be met with everywhere on their aimless journeys. By 1933 they wandered no longer, but marched in their hundreds of thousands. The Hitler movement literally brought the whole of Germany to its feet, from five-year-olds to veterans, and produced a spectacle of a nation migrating from one place to another. Wotan the wanderer was on the move.
Wotan is a restless
wanderer who creates unrest and stirs up strife, now here, now there, and
works magic. He was soon changed by Christianity into the devil, and only
lived on in fading local traditions as a ghostly hunter who was seen with his
retinue, flickering like a will o’ the wisp through the stormy night. In the
Middle Ages the role of the restless wanderer was taken over by Ahasuerus,
the Wandering Jew, which is not a Jewish but a Christian legend. The motif of
the wanderer who has not accepted Christ was projected on the Jews, in the
same way as we always rediscover our unconscious psychic contents in other
people. At any rate the coincidence of anti-Semitism with the reawakening of
Wotan is a psychological subtlety that may perhaps be worth mentioning.
The German youths who
celebrated the solstice with sheep-sacrifices were not the first to hear the
rustling in the primeval forest of unconsciousness. They were anticipated by
Nietzsche... . ...every interpretation of intoxication and
exuberance is apt to be taken back to classical models, to Dionysus, to the
peur aeternus and the cosmogonic Eros. No doubt it sounds better to academic
ears to interpret these things as Dionysus, but Wotan might be a more correct
interpretation. He is the god of the storm and frenzy, the unleasher of
passions and the lust of battle; moreover he is superlative magician and
artist in illusion who is versed in all secrets of an occult nature.
In 1863 or 1864, in his
poem To the Unknown God, Nietzsche had written:
I shall and will
know thee, Unknown One,
Who searchest
out the depths of my soul,
And blowest
through my life like a storm,
Ungraspable, and
yet my kinsman!
I shall and will
know thee, and serve thee.
In the dithyramb known
as Ariadne’s Lament, Nietzsche is completely the victim of the hunter-god:
...
Thou mocking eye
that stares at me from the dark!
Thus I lie.
Writhing,
twisted, tormented
With all eternal
tortures.
Smitten
By thee, cruel
huntsman,
Thou unknown –
God!
As he was wandering in a gloomy wood at night, he was
terrified by a “blood-curdling shriek from a neighbouring lunatic asylum,”
and soon afterwards he came face to face with a huntsman whose “features were
wild and uncanny.” Setting his whistle to his lips “in a valley surrounded by
wild scrub,” the huntsman “blew such as a shrill blast” that Nietzsche lost
consciousness – but woke up again in Pforta. It was a nightmare. [...] No one with ears can
misunderstand the shrill whistling of the storm-god in the nocturnal wood.
Wotan disappeared when his oaks fell and appeared again when the
Christian God proved too weak to save Christendom from fratricidal slaughter.
We are always convinced
that the modern world is a reasonable world, basing our opinion on economic,
political, and psychological factors. [...] In fact, I venture the heretical
suggestion that the unfathomable depths of Wotan’s character explain more of
National Socialism than all three reasonable factors put together. There is
no doubt that each of these factors explains an important aspect of what is
going on in Germany, but Wotan explains yet more. He is particularly
enlightening in regard to a general phenomenon, which is so strange to
anybody not a German that it remains incomprehensible, even after the deepest
reflection.
Perhaps we may sum up
this general phenomenon as Ergriffenheit – a state of being seized or possessed.
The term postulates not only an Ergriffener (one who is seized) but, also, an
Ergreifer (one who seizes). Wotan is an Ergreifer of men, and, unless one
wishes to deify Hitler – which has indeed actually happened – he is really
the only explanation. It is true that Wotan shares this quality with his
cousin Dionysus, but Dionysus seems to have exercised his influence mainly on
women.
A mind that is still
childish thinks of the gods as metaphysical entities existing in their own
right, or else regards them as playful or superstitious inventions. From
either point of view the parallel between Wotan redivivus and the social,
political, and psychic storm that is shaking Germany might have at least the
value of parable. But since the gods are without doubt personifications of
psychic forces, to assert their metaphysical existence is as much an
intellectual presumption as the opinion that they could ever be invented. Not
that “psychic forces” have anything to do with the conscious mind, fond as we
are of playing with the idea that consciousness and psyche are identical.
This is only another piece of intellectual presumption. “Psychic forces” have
far more to do with the realm of the unconscious. Our mania for rational
explanations obviously has its roots in our fear of metaphysics, for the two
were always hostile brothers. Hence, anything unexpected that approaches us
from the dark realm is regarded either as coming from outside and, therefore,
as real, or else as a hallucination and, therefore, not true. The idea that
anything could be real or true which does not come from outside has hardly
begun to dawn on contemporary man.
The emphasis on the German race – commonly called
“Aryan” – the Germanic heritage, blood and soil, the Wagalaweia songs, the
ride of the Valkyries, Jesus as a blond and blue-eyed hero, the Greek mother
of St. Paul, the devil as an international Alberich in Jewish or Masonic
guise, the Nordic aurora borealis as the light of civilization, the inferior
Mediterranean races – all this is the indispensable scenery for the drama
that is taking place and at the bottom they all mean the same thing: a god
has taken possession of the Germans and their house is filled with a “mighty
rushing wind.”
It is above all the
Germans who have an opportunity, perhaps unique in history, to look into
their own hearts and to learn what those perils of the soul were from which
Christianity tried to rescue mankind. [...] It is an elemental Dionysus
breaking into the Apollonian order. The rouser of this Tempest is named
Wotan... . [...] Because
the behavior of a race takes on its specific character from its underlying
images, we can speak of an archetype “Wotan.” As an autonomous psychic
factor, Wotan produces effects in the collective life of a people and thereby
reveals his own nature. For Wotan has a peculiar biology of his own, quite
apart from the nature of man. It is only from time to time that individuals
fall under the irresistible influence of this unconscious factor. When it is
quiescent, one is no more aware of the archetype Wotan than of a latent
epilepsy.
...Wotan is not only a god of rage and frenzy who embodies the
instinctual and emotional aspect of the unconscious. Its intuitive and
inspiring side, also, manifests itself in him, for he understands the runes
and can interpret fate.
It was not in Wotan’s
nature to linger on and show signs of old age. He simply disappeared when the
times turned against him, and remained invisible for more than a thousand
years, working anonymously and indirectly. Archetypes are like riverbeds
which dry up when the water deserts them, but which it can find again at
anytime. An archetype is like an old watercourse along which the water of
life has flowed for centuries, digging a deep channel for itself. The longer
it has flowed in this channel the more likely it is that sooner or later the
water will return to its old bed. [...] Political events move from one impasse to the next, like a torrent caught in
gullies, creeks and marshes. All human control comes to an end when the
individual is caught in a mass movement. Then, the archetypes begin to
function, as happens, also, in the lives of individuals when they are
confronted with situations that cannot be dealt with in any of the familiar
ways.
Wotan’s reawakening is
a stepping back into the past; the stream was dammed up and has broken into its old
channel.