Professor Jung: You should define what you mean by mysticism. Let us assume that you mean people who have mystical experience:
Mystics are people who have a particularly vivid experience of the processes of the collective unconscious. Mystical experience is experience of archetypes
CW18 ¶ 218Question: Is there any difference between archetypal forms and mystical forms?
CW18 ¶ 219PHENOMENOLOGY OF
MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE
Professor Jung: I make no distinction between them. If you study the phenomenology of mystical experience you will come across some very interesting things. For instance, you all know that our Christian heaven is a masculine heaven and that the feminine element is only tolerated. The Mother of God is not divine, she is only the arch-saint. She intercedes for us at the throne of God but she is not part of the Deity. She does not belong to the Trinity
CW18 ¶ 220CHRISTIAN MYSTICS
Now some Christian mystics have a different experience. For instance we have a Swiss mystic, Niklaus von der Flüe. He experienced a God and a Goddess. Then there was a mystic of the thirteenth century, Guillaume de Digulleville, who wrote the Pèlerinage de l'âme de Jésus Christ. Like Dante, he had a vision of the highest paradise as “le ciel d'or,” and there upon a throne one thousand times more bright than the sun sat le Roi, who is God himself, and beside him on a crystal throne of brownish hue, la Reine, presumably the Earth. This is a vision outside the Trinity idea, a mystical experience of an archetypal nature which includes the feminine principle. The Trinity is a dogmatic image based on an archetype of an exclusively masculine nature. In the Early Church the Gnostic interpretation of the Holy Ghost as feminine was declared a heresy
CW18 ¶ 221TRINITY AS A DOGMATIC IMAGE
Dogmatic images, such as the Trinity, are archetypes which have become abstract ideas. But there are a number of mystical experiences inside the Church whose archetypal character is still visible. Therefore they sometimes contain a heretical or pagan element. Remember, for instance, St. Francis of Assisi. Only through the great diplomatic ability of Pope Boniface VIII could St. Francis be assimilated into the Church. You have only to think of his relation to animals to understand the difficulty. Animals, like the whole of Nature, were taboo to the Church. Yet there are sacred animals like the Lamb, the Dove, and, in the Early Church, the Fish, which are worshipped
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