Page:Under a Starry Vault. Warburg, Jung and the Renaissance of Ancient Paganisms at the Beginning of the 20th Century.pdf/7

 of God, also rid itself of the active link to the unconscious, leaving it unguided and unhindered and at the mercy of its own frantic outbreak. To Jung, WWI was the proof.

Jung thought that the secularization of the Western world did not disempower only the religious symbolic, but the very mythical, unconscious imagination from which the former sprung forth. Nonetheless, although severed from and unrelated to the conscious, rational side of the psyche, the unconscious was still alive, and so was the psychological need to reintegrate it like a shadow, an uncanny anima within a representation of the self wider than the rational and conscious ego. Jung thought that the vitality of such a need was proved by the fascination for all sorts of psychic phenomena developed by modern man, who, no longer in the position to believe in God, began to look for a new experience of the «numinous», in which Jung recognized a pure Gnostic, pagan quality. The mere interest in the «numinous», though, remained only a symptom of the spiritual crisis in act. From a psychological point of view, it only showed the need for man to reach out to his unconscious, yet without being able to repair the divide. In the same way, the resurgence of paganism, along with the mythical universe it fed on, played a similar symptomatic role, yet did not, in itself, heal the split. The main task for modern man, was to bridge the gap between ego and unconscious. Jung's vision was optimistic. Neither the failure of religion nor the modern defiance of myth, in fact, were bound to have the last word. Besides the most archaic «unconscious way of transformation of the incest wish into religious practices», Jung suggested that there was a different way for man to reintegrate libido, precisely by means of a «conscious recognition and understanding» of the unconscious sides of the psyche. Such a recognition was meant to be an experience rather than an abstract knowledge. Jungian analysis aimed precisely at building the frame for this experience to happen within.

It has been said, rather correctly indeed, that such an experience had to be intended as one of «self-deification», the model of which was provided by the onereic