The Materialization of Psychic Phenomena as Magic

Old essay from 2018

The Materialization of Psychic Phenomena as Magic

By Chris Gabriel  

In Jung's "Alchemical Studies" he analyses the German fairy tale "The Spirit in the Bottle". He describes it as a repression of the pagan archetypes, though he also sets a guideline for the phenomenology of  supernatural interpretation. He sets five essential views, the first being a primitive identification of supernatural with the natural as one and the same, (a voice coming from a tree is literally the tree). 

The second being the Pagan view, where the voice is from an inhabiting spirit that resides in the tree, he third is the subject of the fairy tale, and nearly identical to the second, though it's a Christian interpretation. (The Dogmatic repression of the voice, as it is bottled up and buried under the tree). 

The fourth, and dominant view is a secular view which states the phenomena was entirely hallucinatory. And entirely reductive and nearly insulting view, it demolishes all context from the situation and safely places it in a glass cabinet where Rational Actors can laugh at the foolishness of the past. 

The fifth is the most context based and understanding means of understanding, as it allocates the creation of the phenomena to the Unconscious mind, while the Conscious mind creates the phenomena itself.  

Dreamer, Dreams, Dream

This raises a deeply puzzling question. How does the Unconscious mind create phenomena?

What strikes me as a key to this is a line from the Vedas:

“We are like the spider,” said the king. “We weave our life, and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream.

“This is true for the entire universe. That is why it is said, ‘Having created the creation, the Creator entered into it’.

“This is true for us. We create our world, and then enter into that world. We live in the world that we have created. When our hearts are pure, then we create the beautiful, enlightened life we have wished for.

The Unconscious at it's most visible plays the role of "Dream Weaver" much like Maya, the dancer who spins a web of Illusion. This role does not end with waking, the dreaming function of the Unconscious allows for extremely empowered complexes to make their way into our conscious lives, Jung saw this in the UFO filled skies of the 1950's. The archetypal "God Disk" had been released.

Complex Magic 

The manipulation of collective complexes is the role all leaders play, but how can we rend the veil of induced dreams?

Žižek or Lacan may critique the simplistic Gnostic view which is one that assumes there is something "real" beyond the veils. The response to be made is one found in modern Occult thought, specifically in that of William S. Burroughs, a denial of all belief, and in turn control over the beliefs of others. As we are tossed about in an Ocean of Will, rather than trying to use a bucket to empty the ocean and see the Desert of the Real, we must learn to control the currents, a task which is undoubtedly doable. It can be seen in individuals like Freud or Marx who have altered the very fabric of social and political reality, or Aleister Crowley who forever altered the meaning of Occult. 

Beyond the individual manipulation of beliefs, one government has been the most infamous for it's effective propaganda, Nazi Germany. To think the Occultist Elite that dominated the SS were ignorant of their utilization of collective archetypes is naive. The Volkish movements of the 1800's were well aware of the "Blond Beast" that lay in waiting, repressed for centuries by Christ, Wotan in a Bottle. When Germany uncorked the bottle, Wotan ran wild, but the reigns were held by the political elite, but as Jung points out, totalitarian government fails so soon as the leaders begin to identify with their propagandized persona. They had dreamed the nightmare of Nazi Germany, and then became a part of it (rather than atop it).Freud believed magic was the psychic connection between a conscious Wish and the unconscious Will, the topic of this work, and hopefully more to come is to understand what exactly the Unconscious Will is, and how it creates phenomena.