The worship of woman and worship of the soul are factors which had a profound effect on the psychic culture of manmore specifically:
The Christian principle which unites the opposites in the worship of God. In Buddhism, it is the worship of the Self (self-development), while in Spitteler and Goethe it is the worship of the soul symbolized by the worship of woman
CW6 ¶ 375Implicit in this categorization is the modern individualistic principle on the one hand, and on the other a primitive poly-daemonism which assigns to every race, every tribe, every family, every individual its specific religious principle
CW6 ¶ 375BIRTH OF MODERN
INDIVIDUALISM
The medieval background of Faust has quite special significance because there actually was a medieval element that presided over the birth of modern individualism. It began, it seems to me, with the worship of woman, which strengthened the man's soul very considerably as a psychological factor, since the worship of woman meant worship of the soul. This is nowhere more beautifully and perfectly expresses than in Dante's Divine Comedy
CW6 ¶ 376PERSONIFICATION OF
THE ANIMA
Dante is the spiritual knight of his lady; for her sake he embarks on the adventure of the lower and upper worlds. In this heroic endeavor her image is exalted into the heavenly, mystical figure of the Mother of Goda figure that has detached itself from the object and become the personification of a purely psychological factor, or rather, of those unconscious contents whose personification I have termed the anima. Canto XXXIII of the Paradiso expresses this culminating point of Dante's psychic development in the prayer of St. Bernard
TRANSFORMATION AND EXALTATION
OF ONE'S OWN BEING
The very fact that Dante speaks through the mouth of St. Bernard is an indication of the transformation and exaltation of his own being. The same transformation also happens to Faust, who ascends from Gretchen to Helen and from Helen to the Mother of God; his nature is altered by repeated figurative deaths (Boy Charioteer, homunculus, Euphorion), until finally he attains the highest goal as Doctor Marianus. In that form Faust utters his prayer to the Virgin Mother
CW6 ¶ 378SYMBOLIC ATTRIBUTES
OF THE VIRGIN
We might also mention in this connection the symbolic attributes of the Virgin in the Litany of Loreto:
CW6 ¶ 379Lovable Mother
Wonderful Mother
Mother of good counsel
Mirror of justice
Seat of wisdom
Cause of our gladness
Vessel of the spirit
Vessel of honor
Noble vessel of devotion
Mystical rose
Tower of David
Tower of ivory
House of gold
Ark of the covenant
Gate of heaven
Morning star
ANIMA AFFECTS
THE CONSCIOUS ATTITUDE
The above attributes reveal the functional significance of the Virgin Mother image: they show how the soul-image (anima) affects the conscious attitude. She appears as a vessel of devotion, a source of wisdom and renewal
CW6 ¶ 380THE SHEPHERD OF HERMAS
We find this characteristic transition from the worship of woman to the worship of the soul in an early Christian document, the The Shepherd of Hermas, which flourished about A.D. 140. This book, written in Greek, consists of a number of visions and revelations describing the consolidation of the new faith. The book, long regarded as canonical, was nevertheless rejected by the Muratori Canon
CW6 ¶ 381Hermas' mistress appears to him not as an erotic fantasy but in “divine” form, seeming to him like a goddess in heaven
CW6 ¶ 383The repressed erotic impression has activated the latent primordial image of goddess, i.e., the archetypal soul-image. The erotic impression has evidently become united in the collective unconscious with archaic residues which have preserved from time immemorial the imprint of vivid impressions of the nature of womanwoman as mother and woman as desirable maid
CW6 ¶ 383Such impressions have immense power, as they release forces, both in the child and in the adult man, which fully merit the attribute “divine,” i.e., something irresistible and absolutely compelling
CW6 ¶ 383In the end, Hermas' libido, i.e., his erotic desire is directed to his task of the Church. In this way, the transition of the worship of woman into the worship of the soul takes place
CW6 ¶ 383LITANY OF LORETO
Official Christianity, therefore, absorbed certain Gnostic elements that manifested themselves in the worship of woman and found a place for them in an intensified worship of Mary. I have selected the Litany of Loreto as an example of this process of assimilation from a wealth of equally interesting material. The assimilation of these elements to the Christian symbol nipped in the bud the psychic culture of the man; for his soul, previously reflected in the image of the chosen mistress, lost its individual form of expression through this absorption
CW6 ¶ 399DIFFERENTIATION OF THE SOUL
Consequently, any possibility of an individual differentiation of the soul was lost when it became repressed in the collective worship. Such losses generally have unfortunate consequences, and in this case they soon made themselves felt
CW6 ¶ 399Since the psychic relation to woman was expressed in the collective worship of Mary, the image of woman lost a value to which human beings had a natural right. This value could find its natural expression only through individual choice, and it sank into the unconscious when the individual form of expression was replaced by a collective one. In the unconscious the image of woman received an energy charge that activated the archaic and infantile dominants
CW6 ¶ 399DAEMONIC TRAITS
Since all unconscious contents, when activated by dissociated libido, are projected upon external objects, the devaluation of the real woman was compensated by daemonic traits. She no longer appeared as an object of love, but as a persecutor or witch. The consequence of increasing Mariolatry was the witch hunt, that indelible blot on the later Middle Ages
CW6 ¶ 399But this was not the only consequence. The splitting off and repression of a valuable progressive tendency resulted in a quite general activation of the unconscious. This activation could find no satisfying expression in collective Christian symbols, for an adequate expression always takes an individual form
CW6 ¶ 400Thus the way was paved for heresies and schisms, against which the only defense available to the Christian consciousness was fanaticism. The frenzied horror of the Inquisition was the product of over-compensated doubt, which came surging up from the unconscious and finally gave rise to one of the greatest schisms of the Churchthe Reformation
CW6 ¶ 400