The Occult World of Carl Gustav Jung

Carl Gustav Jung, the renowned psychologist and founder of analytical psychology, underwent a series of extraordinary experiences throughout his life that significantly influenced his thinking and work. After a serious accident in 1944, while hospitalized, he experienced visions that led him to reflect on the mystery of existence and spirituality. As his life progressed, Jung opened up to topics related to the occult, astrology, and parapsychology, which brought him into conflict with scientific approaches. His family history, which included elements of the paranormal, also influenced his interests and subsequent research.

On February 11, 1944, 68-year-old Carl Gustav Jung, the world's most renowned living psychologist at the time, slipped on ice and fractured his fibula. Ten days later, in the hospital, he suffered a heart attack caused by an embolism that had formed in his broken leg. Treated with oxygen and camphor, he lost consciousness and experienced something resembling a near-death experience or an out-of-body experience—or, depending on your perspective, delirium. He felt as if he were floating 1,000 miles above Earth. Seas and continents were bathed in a blue glow, and Jung glimpsed the Arabian desert and the snow-capped Himalayas. He seemed about to leave orbit, but then a large black monolith became visible to the south. It was some kind of temple, at the gate of which Jung saw a Hindu sitting in the lotus position. Inside, countless candles glowed, and he felt as if "the whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence" was fading away. It wasn't pleasant at all, but what remained was "Jung's essence"—the root of his experiences.

Jung knew that within the temple he could find the answer to the mystery of his existence, his life's purpose. Having seen it, he was about to cross its threshold when he suddenly saw, floating over Europe, the image of his doctor in the archetypal form of the King of Kos, the island where the temple of Aesculapius, the Greek god of medicine, was located. He told Jung that his departure was premature; many people demanded his return, and he, the King, was to take him back. Upon hearing these words, Jung felt disappointed, and the vision ended almost immediately. He experienced the reluctance to live that many "taken back" feel, but what most perplexed him was the sight of his doctor in this archetypal form. He knew this meant that the physicist had devoted his entire life to saving Jung. On April 4th—a date that many numerologists revel in—Jung sat on his bed for the first time since his heart attack. That same day, his doctor came in with sepsis and lay down on the bed. He never got up again and died a few days later.

Jung was certain that this was not a hallucination, but that he had experienced a vision of reality. He had transcended time, and his experience had a profound impact on him. On the one hand, the depression and pessimism that had come with World War II had vanished. But there was also something more. For most of his long career, he had proven to his colleagues, friends, and readers that—above all—he was a scientist. He repeated like a mantra that he was not a mystic, an occultist, or a visionary—all the things his critics had used against him, dismissing his pretensions to science. Now, having returned from the brink of death, he seemed ready to allow the scientist within him to recede into the background for the remaining 17 years of his life.

Although Jung always believed in the existence of an "other" world, he tried to keep it to himself. However, after experiencing his visions, he seemed less secretive. He seems to have undergone a conversion experience of sorts, and the previously hidden interests of the world-renowned psychologist have since become known. Flying saucers, astrology, parapsychology, alchemy, and even predictions of the coming "Age of Aquarius": evidence of all these questionable phenomena—questionable, at least from the perspective of modern science—flowed from his pen. While throughout his career he leveled accusations against mysticism and occultism—initially sparked by his conflict with Freud in 1912—by the late 1940s, he seemed to give up the fight. The Jung we know from the last decade of his life emerged—"The Sage of Küsnacht" and "The Witcher of Zürich."