C. G. Jung’s Visionary Mysticism

Abstract

This paper sets out an argument for a radical thesis: that Jung was a post-religious or detraditionalised, western visionary mystic. After briefly reviewing Jung’s relationship to Western esotericism and religious studies scholarship identifying the significance of visionary mysticism for the history of religions and for the contemporary study of mystical experience, I introduce Jung’s post-religious or detraditionalised, visionary practice of active imagination, referring to analogies to other western esoteric spiritual practices. Then turning to the main argument of this paper, I locate Jung’s visionary spiritual practice within a disciplinary and hermeneutical framework independent of analytical psychology capable of enriching our understanding of Jung’s relationships to a variety of western and eastern mystical traditions: Andrew Rawlinson’s recent taxonomy of mystical traditions, perhaps the most sophisticated of all twentieth-century taxonomical studies. I demonstrate that Rawlinson’s quadrant model of Hot Structured, Cool Structured, Hot Unstructured and Cool Unstructured mystical traditions enables us to deepen our understanding of Jung’s reasons for his selective appreciation and appropriation, reinterpretation and criticism of western and eastern mystical materials, and more specifically, in the light of previous scholarship outlined in this paper, to identify Jung’s post-religious, visionary spirituality with other visionary mystical traditions located in Rawlinson’s quadrant of Hot Structured traditions