Self as Historical Symbol

Aion’s methodological innovation is to treat the self not only as a present psychological reality in the individual but as a historical symbol whose phenomenology can be traced across an aeon. Jung states the program plainly: the work is a set of researches into the phenomenology of the Self, drawing on “Christian, Gnostic, and alchemical symbols of the self” to document “the change of psychic situation within the ‘Christian aeon’” (Jung 1951, intro). This is the move that takes analytical psychology out of the consulting room and into the history of Western symbolic life.

The method grants that the archetype as such is unconscious and unrepresentable; what is available to historical reading is the archetypal-image, the concrete symbolic form the Self has taken in a given period. In the Piscean aeon, the dominant imago has been Christ — a symbol “which even includes the animal side of man” (Jung 1951, §74) but which has been progressively stripped of its shadow until the shadow returned as Antichrist. The alchemical lapis-philosophorum is a second imago of the same Self, pursued underground by the alchemists while the Church held the surface. The Gnostic Anthropos is a third. Aion’s catalogue is a typology of how one archetype has appeared in three concurrent transmissions of the same aeon.

The consequence for the present is methodological: the individual undergoing individuation today is undergoing a stage of a historical process whose earlier stages are readable in the tradition’s symbolic record. The self is not a private achievement but participation in a collective phenomenology two thousand years long.

Relationships

Primary sources

jung-aion (Jung 1951, intro, §74, §122, §286)