When he actually set off for Egypt he came to the country from the south, travelling up from east Africa, observing that he wished:
To approach this cultural realm not from the West, from the direction of Europe and Greece but from the South, from the sources of the Nile. I was less interested in the complex Asiatic elements in Egyptian culture than in the Hamitic contribution.7
Jung’s remarkable perception of the essentially African character of Egypt is clearly demonstrated by this observation, but he does not appear to have written further about his actual experience of Egypt during his journey there.
THE ‘SELF AND INDIVIDUAL OF THE PEOPLE’
He continued to meditate on Egypt and on the particular nature of the Egyptian psyche. The most extended consideration is recorded in the Collected Letters, in which many of his references to Egypt are contained; in a letter to Frau Johanna Michaelis which deals with the special nature of Egyptian psychology in high antiquity he wrote:
Your questions are not easy to answer. Your conjecture that Ancient Egyptian psychology was somehow fundamentally different from ours is probably right. Those millennia had indeed different problems. On one side a torpid impersonal unconsciousness reigned, on the other a revealed consciousness, or a consciousness inspired from within and hence derived directly from the Gods, personified in Pharaoh. He was the self and individual of the people. The spirit came from above. The tension between above and below was undoubtedly extreme, hence the opposite could be held together by means of equally rigid forms. The duality of the ruler is based on the primitive belief that the placenta is the brother of the new born child which as such often accompanies him throughout life in ghostly fashion, since it dies early and is ceremonially buried. (C/f Levi Strauss, Primitives and the Supernatural). The Ka is probably a descendant of the placenta. White and red are sacred colours in India too, for instance the temple walls are painted with white and red stripes. What they mean is not clear to me. Your interpretation as light and blood is extremely probable but one should have historical proofs. The tension between above and below in ancient Egypt is in my opinion the real source of the Near Eastern saviour figures, whose patriarch is Osiris. He is also the source of the idea of an individual (immortal) soul. The purpose of nearly all rebirth rites is to unite the above with the below.8
This letter is central to Jung’s view of Egypt. The idea that the king represented ‘the self and individual of the (Egyptian) people’ is especially telling, and it is an idea to which Jung returns frequently. So too is Jung’s awareness of the balance of opposites which was always one of the most important marks of the Egyptian psyche manifested in social organization, religious belief and art. The suggestion that the placenta represents the king’s twin provides, as we have seen, the explanation for its place in the line of royal standards borne before the Early Dynastic kings in procession; indeed, it is the only convincing explanation for the appearance of the placenta in Early Dynastic rituals.
Jung overestimates here, as he does in other contexts, the role of Osiris; far from being the ‘patriarch’ of ‘Near Eastern saviour figures’, Osiris is a relative latecomer, for whose cult on any extensive or national scale there is little evidence until late in Old Kingdom times. Atum, Geb, or even Ptah and Re would be more convincing candidates in Egypt, whilst there are more formidable contenders still, if one is looking for early patriarchal figures, in Sumerian myth.
Jung was much impressed by the figure of Osiris as the dying god, reborn in his son; he saw him as the father god who brings into being his own son and successor. The king of Egypt was not identified with Osiris until after death and then only from late Old Kingdom times. Jung justified his belief in the influence of Osiris by attributing the origins of his cult to approximately 4000 BC. In this he was out by some two thousand years, the consequence of relying on the very high chronologies popular in his younger days. In another context he gives the same date for the beginning of writing.
World History
