Supernatural

Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘supernatural’ occupies a contested and multivalent position. It functions simultaneously as a phenomenological category, a psychological metaphor, and a theological datum. Jung deploys the term to describe the hero’s ‘semi-divine’ nature — a condition that synthesizes the ‘not yet humanized’ unconscious with human consciousness, pointing toward individuation and the genesis of the Self. Campbell extends this psychological valence into comparative mythology, treating the supernatural helper as the unconscious made available to the ego under the guise of divine assistance. Dodds reads Greek supernatural attribution — daemon-possession, divine ‘touch,’ mysterious mental intrusions — as projective mechanisms through which ancient culture managed experiences that modernity internalizes as psychological process. Bernard Williams, approaching from analytic philosophy, treats supernatural necessity as the conceptual condition under which fate acquires its particular irony and terror in Greek tragedy. The Philokalia tradition distinguishes natural from supernatural knowledge as epistemological categories, anchoring gnosis in divine illumination. Eliade’s shamanic materials complicate any simple opposition between supernatural and natural by showing the shaman as a technician of controlled transit between the two registers. The key tension across the corpus is whether ‘supernatural’ names a genuinely transcendent ontological order or is best understood as the psyche’s own numinous depth encountered from within.

In the library 11 passages

The god is by nature wholly supernatural; the hero’s nature is human but raised to the limit of the supernatural — he is ‘semi-divine.’ … the hero’s supernaturalness includes human nature and thus represents a synthesis of the (‘divine,’ i.e., not yet humanized) unconscious and human consciousness.

Jung distinguishes the fully supernatural god-figure from the hero’s ‘semi-divine’ supernaturalness, locating the latter as the psychic anticipation of individuation toward wholeness.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959thesis

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Protective and dangerous, motherly and fatherly at the same time, this supernatural principle of guardianship and direction unites in itself all the ambiguities of the unconscious — thus signifying the support of our conscious personality by that other, larger system.

Campbell identifies the supernatural helper as a mythological representation of the unconscious, whose ambiguous guidance supports yet imperils the ego’s rational purposes.

Campbell, Joseph, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2015thesis

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Knowledge here on earth is of two kinds: natural and supernatural. The second can be understood by reference to the first. Natural knowledge is that which the soul can acquire through the use of its natural faculties and powers when investigating creation.

The Philokalia establishes a formal epistemological distinction between natural and supernatural knowledge, with the latter available only through divine illumination to the baptized soul.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995thesis

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A supernatural thought, and with it the possibility of a fatalism … comes in only when we are told that a certain thing will happen whatever we do … Moreover, if efforts to avoid the outcome helped in fact to bring it about, this is a reliable sign, after the event, that the supernatural has been at work.

Williams defines the supernatural specifically as that order of necessity in which human agency is ironically inverted — efforts at avoidance becoming the very mechanism of fulfillment.

Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity, 1993thesis

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the energy of the Spirit performs those things that are supernatural and which it is not possible to comprehend unless by faith alone … God knoweth man’s infirmity … He performs His supernatural works through familiar objects.

John of Damascus frames the supernatural as the domain of divine energeia, accessible only through faith, yet providentially mediated through the ordinary and familiar.

John of Damascus, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting

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he or someone else will see in it, if we are to take the words literally, a psychic intervention by one of these anonymous supernatural beings … The recognition, the insight, the memory, the brilliant or perverse idea, have this in common.

Dodds identifies the Greek attribution of sudden cognition and unexpected memory to anonymous supernatural beings as a cultural convention for externalizing interior psychic events.

E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951supporting

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The relation of human beings to supernatural necessity inevitably invokes the image of being in someone’s power. The mere idea that things are shaped, one way or another, in relation to human purposes — in particular, against them — is enough.

Williams argues that supernatural necessity is experienced phenomenologically as subjection to an alien will, shaping events in systematic opposition to human intention.

Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity, 1993supporting

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origin in supernatural revelation, as by vision, hearing, or unaccountable impression; origin in direct possession by a higher spirit, expressing itself in prophecy and warning … these origins have been stock warrants for the truth of one opinion after another.

James catalogues supernatural revelation — vision, possession, unaccountable impression — as historically recurrent epistemological warrants in religious tradition, subject to the same empirical scrutiny as any other truth-claim.

James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting

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All the supernatural creatures lay on it like Geno, with their necks laid across one another. The feebler supernatural beings were stretched out from it in this, that, and every direction, asleep.

Radin’s trickster mythology depicts a cosmos populated by supernatural beings arranged in hierarchical torpor, providing ethnographic grounding for comparative psychology’s interest in autonomous psychic figures.

Radin, Paul, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting

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traces of the vaguer belief that mental disease is of supernatural origin … a phrase which in origin probably implied daemonic intervention … Here again a supernatural ‘touch’ is, I think, implied.

Dodds traces archaic Greek vocabulary for mental disorder to implicit beliefs in supernatural ‘touch,’ revealing a linguistic stratum in which psychic disturbance and divine intervention were not yet differentiated.

E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951supporting

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supernatural, 18-19, 103-4, 130-32, 135-51. See also Necessary chance

The index entry for ‘supernatural necessity’ in Williams maps its discussion to passages on fate, coercion, and the tragic ironies of Greek drama.

Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity, 1993aside

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Related terms