Within the depth-psychology corpus, 'New Jerusalem' functions as a charged eschatological symbol that is simultaneously theological, psychological, and cosmological. The tradition moves along two primary axes. The first, represented most fully by Jung and his close exegetes Edward Edinger and Marie-Louise von Franz, reads the heavenly city of Revelation 21 as a psychic image of wholeness: a mandala-structured totality in which the estranged opposites — heaven and earth, masculine and feminine, ego and Self — are at last rejoined. For Edinger, the descending city enacts the coniunctio, the sacred marriage of the Lamb with his bride, and its jewelled, quaternal architecture figures the completed individuation process. For von Franz, the New Jerusalem represents a qualitatively transformed creation — identified with a 'glorified body' that is neither identical to nor wholly continuous with ordinary matter. The second axis, represented by Abrams and Blake scholarship, secularises the image: the New Jerusalem becomes Blake's visionary state of liberated human consciousness, the 'free state of the mind' that is Jerusalem-as-Liberty. Jung's own commentary in 'Answer to Job' and 'Psychology and Religion' treats the Apocalypse's finale as the culminating enantiodromia of the Christian aeon, the eruption of a feminine divine through the symbol of the city-as-bride. Across these readings, the term marks the telos of a long symbolic drama: the healing of the primordial split between God and creation.
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The new (that is, purified) Jerusalem is the bride of God (the Lamb). Heaven and earth, which were separated at the beginning of creation, are to be rejoined, healing the split in the psyche and reconnecting ego and Self
Edinger reads the New Jerusalem as the premier coniunctio image of the Christian scriptures, its mandala form embodying the reunification of heaven and earth as a healing of the fundamental psychic split between ego and Self.
Edinger, Edward F., Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985thesis
At the end of the Book of Revelation we are presented with the grand image of the heavenly Jerusalem descending from heaven... And her light was like... a jasper stone, clear as crystal. The wall had twelve gates.
Edinger presents the descent of the heavenly Jerusalem as the culminating image of Revelation, its geometric perfection and luminosity signifying the fully realised God-image at the close of the apocalyptic drama.
Edinger, Edward F., Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung's Answer to Job, 1992thesis
the new creation is identified with the heavenly Jerusalem, the heavenly city, which, as we know from other passages of the Revelation, is definitely thought of as a mandala... it is likened to a woman 'adorned for her husband'
Von Franz identifies the New Jerusalem as a mandala image of the new creation, simultaneously a feminine figure adorned as bride and a symbol of a qualitatively more spiritual reality than the present material world.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Creation Myths, 1995thesis
the liberation of that freely expansive, or 'multiple,' vision which delivers to human consciousness a new 'world which is the free state of the mind that Blake calls the New Jerusalem'
Abrams documents Blake's internalization of the New Jerusalem as a psychological state — the reintegrated, liberated human vision that results from the harmonious ordering of all mental faculties.
M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis
it is evident from this passage that the City, the heavenly bride who is here promised to the Son, is the mother or mother-imago... The other attributes that are heaped on the heavenly Jerusalem put its mother significance beyond doubt
Jung interprets the heavenly Jerusalem as a mother-imago, the purified celestial counterpart to the harlot Babylon, whose union with the Son completes the archetypal drama of separation from and return to the primordial feminine.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis
Since there will be no sin in the new Jerusalem, however, there will be no need for a temple to symbolize the distance that sin placed between God and his people... God and the Lamb are present with their people in the holy city
Thielman argues that the New Jerusalem abolishes the temple as mediating structure because the removal of sin eliminates the very distance between God and humanity that the temple had symbolised.
Frank S. Thielman, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
Jerusalem was the holy, sacred city, and Babylon was the despicable, secular city, because it was the city of captivity... in Revelation that same symbolism was applied to Rome
Edinger establishes the Jerusalem–Babylon polarity as the symbolic axis structuring Revelation's eschatology, with the New Jerusalem representing the ultimate triumph of the sacred principle over the forces of captivity and corruption.
Edinger, Edward F., Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung's Answer to Job, 1992supporting
And I will write the name of my God upon him, and the name of the city of my God, that new Jerusalem which is coming down out of heaven from my God... these texts refer to a transfer or translation from the temporal, personal life of the ego to the eternal, archetypal realm
Edinger reads the promise of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 3:12 as a psychological text describing the sublimatio of individual ego-consciousness into the collective archetypal treasury — an eschatological individuation.
Edinger, Edward F., The Creation of Consciousness Jung's Myth for Modern Man, 1984supporting
A celestial Jerusalem was created by God before the city was built by the hand of man... The Sibylline Oracles preserve the memory of the New Jerusalem in the center of which there shines 'a temple . . . with a giant tower touching the very clouds'
Eliade situates the New Jerusalem within his archetype-of-the-Center paradigm, showing that the heavenly prototype of the city preceded its earthly instantiation and constitutes the sacred cosmological model to which all holy cities refer.
Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954supporting
the retrospective and prospective paradises in Christian writings — the same term being commonly applied to the primal earthly residence of Adam and Eve, to the new Kingdom on earth to be estab
Abrams traces the typological equation between Eden and New Jerusalem in Christian writing, showing how the eschatological city is consistently figured as a recovered and elevated form of the original paradise.
M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
the Palestinian holy site denotes orthodoxy, the law, the awesome majesty of the lordly and jealous patriarch of Semitic religiosity. In Jerusalem the Lord broods in his secret temple chambers
Hoeller contrasts Jerusalem as a symbol of patriarchal orthodoxy with Alexandria as a symbol of spiritual pluralism, contextualising the sacred city within a Jungian typology of conscious versus unconscious religious orientations.
Hoeller, Stephan A., The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982aside
I shall restrict 'apocalypse' to the sense used in Biblical commentary, where it signifies a vision in which the old world is replaced by a new and better world
Abrams defines 'apocalypse' as the replacement of the old world by a new one, providing the conceptual framework within which the New Jerusalem functions as the telos of the entire eschatological vision.
M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971aside