Assumption Of Mary

The Assumption of Mary — the dogmatic declaration by Pope Pius XII in November 1950 that the Blessed Virgin was taken up body and soul into heaven — occupies a position of singular importance in the depth-psychological corpus, precisely because Jung pronounced it ‘the most important religious event since the Reformation.’ The corpus converges on a psychosymbolic reading: the dogma is understood not as a theological curiosity but as a spontaneous eruption of the collective unconscious, driven by a long-maturing archetypal need rather than by doctrinal logic. The dominant interpretive axis — articulated by Jung and systematically elaborated by Edinger — reads the Assumption as the symbolic completion of the Christian God-image, effecting the transformation of the masculine Trinity into a quaternary structure by incorporating the feminine, the corporeal, and by extension the dark or earthly pole of existence. This move is understood as the symbolic precondition for a second hieros gamos in the pleroma and a further incarnation — psychologically equivalent to the individuation process. A striking synchronicity is repeatedly noted: the dogma’s promulgation fell precisely within the decade Jung was formulating the coniunctio archetype. Secondary voices — von Franz, Woodman, Bulgakov, Harvey and Campbell — treat the Assumption as evidence of the repressed feminine’s irruption into patriarchal theology, though they differ in their assessment of how fully that irruption succeeds.

In the library 18 passages

The dogma of the Assumption [of the Virgin Mary]… I consider to be the most important religious event since the Reformation. [par. 752] The dogmatization of the Assumptio Mariae points to the hieros gamos in the pleroma

Edinger quotes Jung’s climactic judgment that the Assumption dogma signals a hieros gamos in the pleroma and heralds the individuation of many, identifying it as the culminating symbol of the transformed God-image.

Edinger, Edward F., Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job, 1992thesis

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The promulgation of the new dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary could, in itself, have been sufficient reason for examining the psychological background… the most powerful motive: namely, the popular movement and the psychological need behind it.

Jung argues that the dogma’s true driver was an unconscious collective need expressed through popular Marian visions, not scholarly theology, anchoring the Assumption squarely in depth-psychological causation.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis

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The dogma of the Assumption synchronistically co-incides with the discovery of the coniunctio. This announcement of the Assumption of Mary bodily into heaven is the latest event in the process of the transformation of the God-image.

Edinger identifies the Assumption as synchronistically co-incident with Jung’s formulation of the coniunctio archetype, reading the dogma as the definitive transformation of the Trinity into a quaternary God-image encompassing matter, flesh, and the feminine.

Edinger, Edward F., Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job, 1992thesis

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the Assumption of Mary can be considered as the comprehensive, summarizing image that expresses the fruit of the incarnation cycle taken as a whole, namely, the coniunctio… the Pope announced the dogmatization of the Assumption of Mary (1950)—which event Jung considers to be ‘the most important religious event since the Reformation.’

Edinger reads the Assumption as the archetypal coniunctio image that crowns the entire Christian incarnation cycle, and identifies the historical synchronicity between the dogma’s promulgation and Jung’s empirical discovery of the coniunctio archetype.

Edinger, Edward F., The Christian Archetype: A Jungian Commentary on the Life of Christ, 1987thesis

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The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, i. e., the taking up of Mary’s soul into heaven with… Medieval iconology, embroidering on the old speculations about the Theotokos, evolved a quaternity symbol in its representations of the coronation of the Virgin and surreptitiously put it in place of the Trinity.

Jung traces the Assumption’s symbolic genealogy to medieval Coronation iconography, showing how the quaternity motif was quietly substituted for the Trinity, encoding the feminine principle into the God-image long before the 1950 dogma.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis

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Jung considered the dogma of the Assumption of Mary to be ‘the most important religious event since the Reformation.’ It’s an astonishing remark.

Edinger foregrounds Jung’s extraordinary evaluative claim and contextualizes it by quoting directly from the papal bull Munificentissimus Deus, providing the doctrinal content against which Jung’s psychological interpretation operates.

Edinger, Edward F., Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job, 1992thesis

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The recent promulgation of the dogma of the Assumption emphasizes the taking up not only of the soul but of the body of Mary into the Trinity, thus making a dogmatic reality of those medieval representations of the quaternity.

Edinger relays Jung’s argument from Mysterium Coniunctionis that the Assumption’s inclusion of the body, not only the soul, completes a quaternity structure previously anticipated only in medieval visual iconography.

Edinger, Edward F., The Mysterium Lectures: A Journey Through C.G. Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1995thesis

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the God-image undergoes another massive transformation which is indicated by the image of the Assumption of Mary into heaven. Now the Trinitarian god has become a quaternity, and fleshly humanity, with all of its darkness and ambiguity, has become part of the totality.

Edinger shows that the Assumption effectuates the symbolic integration of corporeal and chthonic existence into the divine totality, completing the archetypal range of opposites within the God-image.

Edinger, Edward F., Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job, 1992supporting

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The quaternity as Jungian of the Three seems to be aimed at by the Assumption of Mary. This dogma adds the feminine element to the masculine Trinity, the terrestrial element

Edinger explicates Jung’s letter in which the Assumption is understood as the quaternity-completing gesture that adds the feminine and terrestrial to the masculine-spiritual triad.

Edinger, Edward F., The New God-Image: A Study of Jung’s Key Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image, 1996supporting

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alchemy has picked up the image of the Assumption and applied it to the alchemical opus. There are a number of alchemical pictures which depict the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin Mary as a part of the alchemical procedure.

Edinger demonstrates that alchemical iconography appropriated the Assumption image for its own transformative opus, providing the psyche’s intermediate vehicle between religious symbol and modern psychological meaning.

Edinger, Edward F., Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job, 1992supporting

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From the psychological standpoint, however, and in terms of the history of symbols, this view is a consistent and logical restoration of the archetypal situation, in which the exalted status of Mary is revealed implicitly and must therefore become a ‘conclusio certa’ in the course of time.

Jung argues from within the history of symbols that the Assumption was a psychic inevitability — an archetypal situation that had to become explicit dogma — rather than an arbitrary ecclesiastical decision.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting

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‘There seems to be some strange rightness in the portrayal of this reunion in splendour of Son and Mother, Father and Daughter, Spirit and Matter.’ In this connection it is worth recalling the words of Pope Pius XII’s Apostolic Constitution, Munificentissimus Deus; ‘On this day the Virgin Mother was taken up to her heavenly bridal chamber’

Jung cites a Catholic theologian’s intuition of the Assumption’s symbolic ‘rightness’ as a reunion of opposites, and pairs it with the papal text’s own bridal-chamber language to reinforce the hieros gamos reading.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 1955supporting

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The universale, as you so neatly put it, is the interesting aspect of the dogma… Jung took the dream as referring to the dogma of the Assumption, a connection which is made clear in a later letter

Jung’s private correspondence reveals that he understood his own dreams at the time of the Assumption’s promulgation as psychically responding to the dogmatic event, underscoring his conviction that the collective unconscious was directly at work.

Jung, C.G., Letters Volume 1: 1906-1950, 1973supporting

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The universale, as you so neatly put it, is the interesting aspect of the dogma. The particulare, on the other hand, is the thing… Jung took the dream as referring to the dogma of the Assumption

This later letter reiterates Jung’s distinction between the universal (archetypal) significance of the Assumption and its particular doctrinal form, confirming the psychological-symbolic priority he assigns to the event.

Jung, C. G., Letters Volume 2, 1951-1961, 1975supporting

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in the Papal Bull of 1950, the Assumptio Maria Assumption of Mary was proclaimed as a dogma of the Church. In this way, through the back door rather than the front, the feminine came to assume in Catholic Christianity a significance almost equal to that of the masculine.

Woodman reads the Assumption as the covert re-entry of the feminine into a patriarchal theological system, characterizing the dogma as a compensatory elevation of the feminine principle that had been systematically marginalized.

supporting

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Assumption of Mary, 112; dogma of, 159, 165-76… Dogma of the Assumption, 172-74

The index of Answer to Job maps the Assumption’s structural position across the text, indicating the sustained attention Jung devotes to the dogma as a pivotal moment in his argument about the evolving God-image.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Answer to Job, 1952supporting

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This is, perhaps, Christianity’s greatest problem: how to include nature and everything pertaining to it in the realm of the Divine, how to recognize the immanence as well as the transcendence of the Divine.

Harvey and Baring contextualize the Assumption within the broader structural problem of Christianity’s exclusion of nature and instinct from divinity, suggesting that Marian elevation remains incomplete so long as Mary is positioned ‘below heaven and above nature.’

Harvey, Andrew; Baring, Anne, The Divine Feminine: Exploring the Feminine Face of God Throughout the World, 1996aside

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Mary’s own Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth of her son place her outside nature. She is below heaven and above nature.

Campbell identifies the structural limitation of the Marian elevation: by virtue of her Immaculate Conception, Mary remains severed from the instinctual ground, leaving the deeper rehabilitation of the natural feminine unaccomplished.

Campbell, Joseph, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, 2013aside

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