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The projection of the Numinous is an essential component in cultic phenomena. Just as the projection of contrasexual psychic components is a major psychodynamic component of the complex layered phenomena known as sexual love, so the projection of unexpressed archetypal non-egoic psychic contents is of fundamental significance in religious and some political social groups. Commonalities are apparent: both sexual love and cultic membership are characterised by obsession with an individual to the point of fanaticism; perception of an individual as magical, magnetic, powerful and perfect or at least very special; submersion of normal egoic function and critical thought under affects and imperatives arising from the essentially sensory, almost physical perception of the magical and special quality of the self/love-object or Mana-personality; and potential or actual willingness to engage in activities on behalf of or commanded by the love/Mana-object detrimental to the individual's normal self-interest and possibly also in violation of the prevailing cultural canon.
There are of course differences between sexual love and cultic devotion: sexual love usually occurs between two or at most a small group of individuals, and most commonly occurs between the sexes. It can at least potentially be mutual and balanced, tho' someone, Jung I think, wrote that there is always a "container" and a "contained"; someone else put it that there is always a "seeker" and a "sought". In my experience this is unfortunately generally the case: balance is desirable, but perhaps the best that can be achieved is minimized and shared imbalance. I suspect that imbalance and instability may be structurally inherent in sexual love as it has so far been elaborated; further research is called for.
Cultic Mana-personality obsession is always a many-to-one relationship and is completely imbalanced by nature. Also, the Chosen One is usually male: this may be some combination of cultural artifact and the nature of the psychic contents projected.
This theory of cultic obsession smoothly accommodates the observation that highly intelligent, very rational urbanites are at risk of cultic absorption. Indeed, because of their extreme psychic deracination, they are quite probably at greater risk than the general population. The techno-urban intelligentsia is almost certainly as a class among the most deracinated. They are among the most intelligent of groups, and it is precisely because of this that they are deracinated, for their intelligence is of the purely rational kind. They are profoundly disconnected from the archaic mammalian roots of our species: ancient tribal and territorial imperatives such as blood, race, fatherland/mother country and so forth that the darkest of Mana-personalities such as Hitler exploited so skillfully can be expected to evoke in the mind of the liberal intellectual either fear and discomfort or, even more dangerously, nothing at all. Sex likewise either disappears altogether or takes on a neotenous, safe and sanitized, bloodless and bodiless quality, becoming a sort of prepubescent combination of friendship and tension-relieving, so divorced from the deep roots that the sex, age and other physical qualities of the partner or partners seem to become immaterial: passion is replaced by the "Internet romance". Genuine sexual passion is as alien to the disembodied, deracinated rationality of the urban intelligentsia as blood, race, tribe and territory are.
Yet the dark, pre-personal roots of the psyche don't go away simply because the rational mind declares itself above such things. That which cuts itself off from its roots weakens and dies; the roots may live on and burst forth anew. When this happens in the individual personality, the result can be madness or transformation. When it happens to a whole culture, the likely result is social disorder or war.
It is not only the dark, archaic, pre-civilised and pre-human roots of Blood and Fire that the disembodied cogito-ergo-sum rational consciousness cuts itself off from. It loses contact with the entirety of the Numinous, both those Numinosa which reach into the pre-human past and those which may reach beyond the human present. Modern rational consciousness rightly conceives of itself as the purest and most fully developed form of mental-egoic consciousness yet known. It then proceeds with characteristic arrogance and myopia to identify itself as Spirit, as the highest form of consciousness yet developed. It views its deracination as spiritual health and advancement and concludes that the future of consciousness lies in simple linear distancing ever farther from the physical and emotional into the abstract and intellectual.
Rational consciousness means well by this, and these mistakes are perhaps inevitable, but they are profoundly dangerous. 'Pure Reason' is disconnected from and represses the entirety of the Numinous, not just the most purely pre-egoic and physiologically-determined. One cannot pick and choose: some accommodation must be made with all non-egoic psychic contents if any of it is to be fully and stably integrated, and Jung seems correct in writing that the Shadow, the dark, inferior, primitive components of the psyche, are the first to be encountered. When 'Pure Reason' flees the Earth, it thinks it is rising to Heaven, but it is merely getting lost in empty space, and setting the stage for explosive decompression.
Conventional revealed religion, which Jung described so well as protecting ordinary people from a direct experience of God, is generally not effective for the modern rational urbanite as a suitable hook to carry the projected Numinous. It is too primitive, too old, too thoroughly critiqued, relativised and dismissed to have much power for a fully modern consciousness. Jung described faith as the ability to believe that which one knows to be untrue; I think that sort of faith is much less viable now than it was in his day, and I can't see it as much of a loss. But it did serve an essential psychological function in providing a way for the Numinous to be projected and experienced in a relatively safe and non-disruptive manner. The closure of this safety-valve leaves no recourse but a direct and personal experience of the Numinous, absent social sanction and established structure and support. The rational, atheistic individual in whom this pressure has built to the point or undermining the fundamental repressive structures of the mental-ego is at great risk for falling under the spell of the first Mana-personality they encounter, whether it be a run-of-the-mill ambulatory psychopath Messiah, a Fascist strong-man, or a bald castrato waiting for his spaceship to come in.
The projection of unexpressed numinous psychic content is not active solely in pernicious and pathological whacko cults and Fascist political organisations: these manifestations are exemplary either of projected pre-egoic content or a mixture of pre- and trans-egoic material. The projection of the Numinous is active in any spiritual phenomena which involves the perception of an entity which is felt to be higher, better, more advanced and so forth, be this entity personified or disembodied. I should note in passing that Krishnamurti makes a very trenchant critique of any sort of personalised worship, and firmly rejected the divine status offered him by the Theosophists; fortunately he did not refuse to speak and write.
That projection is involved in worship is almost tautologically self-evident: how could one have a perception of a being as more spiritually advanced without having preexisting internal perceptual categories corresponding to 'spiritual' and 'advanced'? One must already have an internal metric of spirituality to be able to perceive varying degrees of spirituality: one must have an internal model of anything to be able to recognise it in external objects. This does not need to be experienced or expressed in one's own life, and if it is, the projection in question has no reason to occur.
The dark, archaic roots of the human psyche provide preexisting cognitive-affective complexes that grow with the development of cognition from compulsive instincts directly linking sensory stimuli and behavioral response, to dynamically charged perceptual categories such as Race-Volk-Tribe, God-Flag-and-Country, The Enemy (AKA the competing Race-Volk-Tribe and their God-Flag-and-Country), Beautiful Woman, Powerful Man; these categories can be seen to operate thruout the animal kingdom, altho' Race-Volk-Tribe quickly shrinks to Hunter-Gatherer Group, Herd or Pack, and God-Flag-and-Country is replaced with Urine-Spray and Claw-Mark-On-Tree and so forth. But the idea is the same.
These are some of the pre-egoic psychic contents which can carry a great deal of the basic and fundamental psychic energy or life-force which Washburn calls the Dynamic Ground (which contains and subsumes 'libido', 'shakti', 'chi' and so forth): anything charged with Ground energy, or libidinally cathected (to use the Freudian language), can at least appear to be archetypal/Numinous in character. This is perhaps the basis of Freudian theory, but Freud stops here. Transpersonal theory, starting with Jung, continues on, postulating cognitive-affective complexes/categories which are like the pre-egoically-rooted powerfully attractive to the Dynamic Ground/life-force, yet unlike them are not elaborations of physical drives, territoriality and so forth.
One of the principles of complex systems appears to be that as complexity increases, properties emerge which are not reducible to or predictable from the properties present at lower levels of complexity. By way of example, the Net and the Web as both technological and sociological phenomena are not reducible to or determined by the technology and society of the 1950's, and if we assume continued technological progress and social change, we still cannot predict the technology and society of 2050. The properties of consciousness produced by the level of complexity of the human neocortex can not be reduced to or extrapolated from the moderately lower level of complexity of the chimpanzee neocortex. In addition to the conservation and reinterpretation of the preexisting properties of the psyche at each increment of complexity, new properties can be expected to emerge which are meta-properties of but not reducible to their antecedents.
Thus the archetype called "the Way" has no physiological or psychological reduction, tho' it may integrate or share components with structures related to birth trauma or perhaps the Superego or Animus or somesuch. The common spiritual themes of universal justice, peace and love are not reducible to "Tribe and Land" or any of the other archaic animal-kingdom archetypes, and while it also may have roots in in-utero/birth/neonatal experiences, it is not reducible to them. The Goddess is not reducible to "mother" or "pretty woman" or "witch"; the God is not reducible to "father" or "handsome man" or "wizard".
These trans-egoic spiritual archetypes can be expected to exist in some form, usually latent, in any psyche which is sufficiently complex for them to emerge. They will rarely be expressed for they are rather incompatible with both pre-egoic and mental-egoic psychic structures. Wanting to get laid and trying to make a buck does not (I hope) preclude a spiritual dimension to one's existence, but unless one is working in the sex trade, making money and getting laid are rather disparate activities, and they and any other normal self-directed pursuits are quite far indeed from transcendence. Eastern cultures seem to understand this and have social sanction and support for those concentrating on spiritual matters. Western culture offers a much lower degree of comprehension of or support for such activities, and appears to have either not evolved to the point of recognising spiritual values or properties or to have devolved from it. Cognition beyond the mental-egoic level appears to be rare in Eastern cultures and almost nonexistent in Western cultures, where the de facto state religion is free-market capitalist materialism, regardless of whatever mostly pro-forma participation there may be in institutional religiosity.
In cultures that have powerful, living spiritual traditions, there are social and psychological categories and support systems in place which are capable of carrying the projected Numinosum and of accommodating and helping those in whom spiritual archetypes have become activated. Spiritual archetypes are likely to be projected rather than directly experienced because of their incompatibility with normal social and psychic function; directly experiencing them generally requires the death of the social persona and the ego, or at least their radical restructuring, during the activation of the Numinous and possibly afterwards. Poverty, ridicule, madness and institutionalisation are strong possibilities, especially in free-for-all-market Pax America. Projection is a much safer bet.
The Gods act when and how they choose: spiritual emergencies will occur regardless of convenience. In the absence of a vital spiritual life in society, the vacuum is there for cults of all manner to fill, be they benign, or anthrax-brewing arms-stockpiling fundamentalist whatevers.