THE PYRAMID TEXTS AS PSYCHOANALYTICAL PRIMERS

The Pyramid Texts, whose importance and significance can hardly be exaggerated, enshrine collective memories of the people who gave them life. These memories are the products of the earliest aspirations of the Egyptians as a group, when they were first experiencing that sense of election which led to nationhood. Some of the texts are in the form of dialogues, demonstrating how ancient is the form of antiphonal exchange, sometimes between spirits, sometimes focusing on the king as the principal actor in the drama, sometimes in the form of exchanges between priests officiating in a complex ritual.

The Pyramid Texts are known from a series of ‘editions’ carved on the walls of royal tombs of the late Fifth Dynasty and the Sixth Dynasty. This was the high point of the Old Kingdom community’s coherence and assurance; society then was in balance with nature and it must have seemed to be unthreatened, unchanging, and eternal. The texts do not display notable tensions such as, for example, those which the near-contemporary late Sumerian or Akkadian texts often reveal; the Egyptians’ characteristic state of tranquil complacency seems unimpaired until it is finally blown away with all the rest of the mooring posts of the Old Kingdom world.

The Texts are still little understood. The obscurity of their language and the strange images which they evoke are difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend. There is no evidence that Jung was conscious of their significance in any detail, though he knew of their existence. During his lifetime a version of the texts was translated by the great German Egyptologist Kurt Sethe who, though some of his interpretations have been questioned by more recent authorities, was the first to make them generally accessible to a modern audience. The most celebrated version of the Texts is that carved in exquisite hieroglyphs on the subterranean walls of Wenis’ pyramid at Saqqara and originally infilled with a brilliant blue paste.33 The Wenis texts, like the others which succeeded them, are a compendium of the most profound expressions of the ancient Egyptian spirit.

C. G. JUNG AND ANCIENT EGYPT

Jung’s response to Egypt seems largely to have been stimulated by random factors of sudden insight rather than systematic study. However, in his attitude to his journey down the Nile in 1925 he seems to have come very close to penetrating the essential nature of Egypt’s aboriginal and essentially African culture. It is the more surprising that he seems not to have written more extensively about his journey, though he always acknowledged the deep level of significance that he felt towards Africa. It was Egypt’s African roots to which Jung most readily responded. It was precisely in those roots that the ‘soul’ of Egypt will be found and which provide the most productive sources of analysis. Africans seem always to have recognized the essential duality of man’s nature.

Predictably, Jung was much taken with what he recognized as the complex Egyptian concepts of the psychic elements in man. The Egyptians recognized several distinct entities as different aspects of man’s spiritual essence, or perhaps even as different essences. The ba corresponded to the idea of the enduring, incorporeal spirit possessed by everyone which would, in the later Osirian cults at least, be judged according to the individual’s behaviour in life. The ka was the essential self created at the time of the individual’s conception and coexisting in a non-material order of existence; Jung’s perception of the king, in his role as the ‘self of the people’, as the community’s ka, is very apt. The akh was the transfigured spirit, living in the realms of light, or in terms of a later eschatology, among the blest; the akh was a force which could be invoked to assist the deceased in the journey to the Afterlife. The king, as described earlier, seems in addition to have had a double, a twin, who existed independently of the king’s earthly life and who was identified with the royal placenta. The double kept, as it were, the king’s place in the region beyond the Imperishable Stars, to which the king would be translated after death.

Jung thought long and deeply about that aspect of the psyche which reveals itself in dreams or in circumstances of profound trauma, and which seems to exist independently of space and time. In doing so he came close to that analysis, or probing of the self, which the Egyptian division of the psyche into the several parts or distinct ‘selves’ implies. His equation of the king with Egypt’s ‘self’ was itself a profound insight; he clearly recognized that both the person of the king and the office of the kingship were fundamental to the understanding of the origins of the Egyptian state and the ethos which underlay it.

Though Jung has been portrayed, as much by his admirers as by his critics, as a mystic, almost a magus (a persona which he clearly was not at all averse to assuming, for the occasion) he considered himself, first and foremost, to be a healer. In this, though he may not have been immediately aware of it himself, he comes very close indeed to one of the most singular aspects of the history of the earliest kings of Egypt.

Most peoples, whether ancient or of more modern times, have tended always to celebrate their heroes as great warriors, preferably as conquerors. The Egyptians too, were not wholly without such pretensions, but they were outweighed by another, perhaps more ennobling trait. They admired amongst their earliest heroic figures especially kings who were healers or who achieved their reputation by the reconciling of opposite or conflicting elements in the society over which they reigned so majestically.

Jung was aware of the power of the opposites in the structure of the Egyptian state, particularly in its formative phases. As a doctor and as a pioneer psychologist he, too, was a healer and a reconciler of opposites, expressed in the conflicting elements of his patients’ personalities. He would, it is surely not too fanciful to suggest, have found much in common with the great if mysterious figures who occupied the throne of Egypt in the first brilliant centuries of its existence.

It must be said that Jung himself never devoted as much attention to the application of his theories to the emergence of complex societies as has been argued here. That he was interested in the psychological dynamics of past societies is clear, especially from his correspondence and he was firm in his belief of the universal application of such concepts as the collective unconscious and the influence of the archetypes.

In the decades which have passed since Jung’s death in 1961 his work and his influence have both been the subjects of scrutiny, by those who are alienated by what they see as the streak of mysticism and what has come to be called ‘New Age’ pseudo-science, as by those who see him as one of the most original and important minds of the past century. Because Jung possessed one of those towering intellects which encompasses a vast range of interests, enthusiasms and areas of study and because he was a man who was never afraid of speculation, who wrote ceaselessly, lectured, corresponded and was subject to the excited pursuit of media and the channels of communication which became so readily accessible during his lifetime, his work provides a rich field for the proving of almost any theory, supportive or derogatory, which may be advanced by his protagonists or his detractors.

Like other great figures of the recent past he has been exposed to the mandatory process of revisionism, the reassessment of his theories and the significance of his life. The disparagement which has already been focused on some what appear to be his more arcane beliefs has been observed; to his admirers, these are sometimes mildly embarrassing but in the main they reflect simply the preoccupations of the society in which the commentator lives. So universal was Jung’s range of reference and interest that he could hardly have resisted commenting on the issues of his own day, even those which were relatively ephemeral. Many of these issues touched on the stuff of one of his own principal fields of interest, myth, of which indeed he was a connoisseur. Given the extent of Jung’s own exposure of his beliefs and praxis it is inevitable that some of his more quaint views should demand revision or, perhaps more charitably, setting them into the context of their time and of Jung’s own life experience.

Another phase of Jung’s involvement with the society of which he was a powerful, even an oracular voice, touches the application of his work in the political dimension and his own commitment, such as it was, to contemporary political postures. This aspect of the process of revision has focused particularly on Jung’s attitude to Nazi ideology and the issue as to whether he can be classed as manifesting symptoms of the condition customarily described as ‘anti-semitism’. He has also been accused, fancifully, as promoting himself as the focus of a new, non-Christian religion.34

Jung was a product of late nineteenth century Protestant German Switzerland; he was thus born as it were with an inbuilt programme of definite preconceptions, a situation little different from most people. He was intensely conservative in his social attitudes; he was not especially interested in politics, believing that the unconscious, his particular domain, was largely indifferent to, if not entirely unaware of political events. He exhibited a dislike of the modern world, thus evincing an attitude which many of his generation who lived through a period of marked social disintegration, shared with him.

His dislike of the present and his belief in the universality of the workings of the unconscious as common to all humans, inclined Jung to be suspicious of ‘the new’. He saw the unconscious as working at a succession of ever deeper levels, the family, the larger society, even ultimately the animal. Jung was a committed anti-communist and distrusted profoundly all populist movements. He believed in the nowadays deeply unfashionable idea of government by the elite. The presence of this highly equivocal attitude has obviously disturbed some of the commentators on his life.35

However, Jung could not entirely avoid contact with some of the currents which ran through the society of his time. His most notable — and in many ways his most extraordinary — encounter with the shadows of the political life came in the aftermath of the First World War, a time of extreme political upheaval in Central Europe, when he detected the stirrings of ‘the beautiful blond beast, beyond good and evil’, in his analyses of a number of his German patients.36 This was further reinforced by his recognition of the Wotan archetype, when he saw the return of the wild, irrational berserker god in the German unconscious.

These experiences led him to anticipate, with some apprehension, an upsurge in the psychic energy of the ‘volk’, which clearly was to find expression in the acceptance by the majority of the German people of the ideology of the National Socialist Party. He recognized the coming of the Nazi Party, supported by the appearance of the ‘blond beast’ and the return of Wotan, as evidence of the power of myth when it collided with the realities of politics.37

Jung’s attitude to the Jews has been questioned. Fundamental to this question is the extent and character of his relationship with Freud, profoundly emotional as it was, almost to a neurotic degree. Jung distrusted the idea, propounded by some of Freud’s disciples that there was a ‘Jewish psychology’. He regarded Jews as possessing distinct characteristics as a group,38 a view which would hardly be supported today and, like many others of the time, distrusted some aspects of what was seen to be their influence on the contemporary society. He was, however, never ‘anti-Jewish’; to accuse him of ‘anti-semitism’ reveals the poverty of language of those who use the term, since ‘semitic’ and its cognates can only be applied in a linguistic sense, for that is the only meaning which the word possesses. ‘Antisemitism’, if it means anything at all can only mean an antagonism to or antipathy for speakers of semitic languages: in the contemporary world the only native speakers of a semitic language are the Arabs.

Jung’s views of the politics of his time do not have any significant bearing on his primary insights into the workings of the human psyche. Like every other man who has expressed himself about fundamental questions and attempted to provide answers to them, he would no doubt have expressed himself differently if he had lived in an age when such matters are approached, on the one hand with scepticism and on the other with a set of entrenched political attitudes which, during his lifetime would have been anathema to him.

Jung’s attitudes to the society in which he lived were, to a remarkable degree, consistent with those views which he expressed about the Egyptian state. As was discussed above, his most pertinent insight here was his recognition of the personality and office of the king. The presence of ‘the Great Individual’ in so decisive a period as the formation of the Egyptian state, supported by a dedicated, highly talented elite impressed him deeply, as did the nature of the society which, in its early centuries at least, must have corresponded closely with his own projections of the ideal.