Jung on mind as energy (libido), magic, and being born with ancestral knowlage

On Psychic Energy

C. Canalization of Libido

It is culture that provides the machine whereby the natural gradient [of not doing anything, and letting Nature take its course] is exploited for the performance of work. That man should ever have invented this machine must be due to something rooted deep in his nature, indeed in the in the nature of the living organism as such. For living matter is itself a transformer of energy, and in some ways as yet unknown life participates in the transformation process. Life proceeds, as it were, by making use of natural physical and chemical conditions as a means to its existence. The living body is a machine for converting the energies it uses into other dynamic manifestations that are their equivalents. We cannot say that physical energy is transformed into life, only that its transformation is an expression of life.

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This dance [the Wachandi Spring Dance] has a special significance as an Earth-impregnation ceremony…It is a magical act for the purpose of transferring libido to the Earth, whereby the Earth acquires a special psych value and becomes an object of expectation. The mind then busies itself with the Earth, and in turn is affected by it, so that there is a possibility and even a probability that man will give it his attention, which is the psychological prerequisite for cultivation.

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D. Symbol formation   

The first achievement wrested by primitive man from instinctual energy, through analogy-building, is magic. A ceremony is magical so long as it does not result in effective work but preserves the state of expectancy. In that case the energy is canalized into a new object and produces a new dynamism, which in turn remains magical so long as it does not create effective work. The advantage accruing from a magical ceremony is that the newly invested object acquires a working potential in relation to the psyche. Because of its value it has a determining and stimulating effect on the imagination, so that for a long time the mind is fascinated and possessed by it. This gives rise to actions that are performed in a half-playful way on the magical object, most of them rhythmical in character.

The influence exerted on the mind by the magically effective object has other possible consequences. Through a sustained playful interest in the object, a man may make all sorts of discoveries about it which would otherwise have escaped him. As we know, many discoveries have actually been made in this way. Not for nothing is magic called the “mother of science”.

[Good quote to justify a practical approach to research]

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…only through the development of magic into science, that is, through the advance from the stage of mere expectation to real technical work on the object have we acquired that mastery over the forces of nature of which the magic age dreamed. Even the alchemists dream of the transmutation of the elements has been fulfilled, and magical action at a distance has been realized by the discovery of electricity.

Only where a symbol offers a steeper gradient than nature is it possible to canalize libido into other forms…

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The rites with which the sacred objects are surrounded often reveal very clearly their nature as transformers of energy. Thus the primitive rubs his churinga rhythmically and takes the magic power of the fetish into himself, at the same time giving it a fresh “charge” (Spencer and Gillan p.277).

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Mankind was freed from these fears [fear of spirits and evil magic] by a continual process of symbol-formation that leads to culture.

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In it [infantile germinal state of babies / young children] are hidden not merely the beginnings of adult life, but also the whole ancestral heritage, which is of unlimited extent. This heritage includes not only instincts from the animal stage, but all those differentiations that have left hereditary traces behind them. Thus every small child is born with an immense split in his make-up: on the one side he is more or less like an animal, on the other hand he is the final embodiment of an age-old and endlessly complicated sum of hereditary factors.

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…this conflict can be understood as an opposition between the profoundly primitive nature of the newborn infant and his highly differentiated inheritance.  

It is rather a case of inherited possibilities of ideas, “pathways” gradually traced out through the cumulative experience of our ancestors. To deny the inheritance of these pathways would be tantamount to denying the inheritance of the brain. To be consistent, such skeptics would have to assert that the child is born with the brain of an ape.  But since it is born with a human brain, this must sooner or later begin to function in a human way, and it will necessarily begin at the level of the most recent ancestor.

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The mind, as the active principle in the inheritance, consists of the sum of the ancestral minds, the “unseen fathers” (Söderblom, Das Werden des Gottesglaubens, pp.88ff. and 175ff) whose authority is born anew with the child.

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…an advance always begins with individuation, that is to say with the individual, conscious of his isolation, cutting a new path through hitherto untrodden territory. To do this he must first return to the fundamental facts of his own being, irrespective of all authority and tradition, and allow himself to become conscious of his distinctiveness. If he succeeds in giving collective validity to his widened consciousness, he creates a tension of opposite that provides the stimulation which culture needs for its further progress.

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There are large numbers of people for whom the development of individuality is the prime necessity, especially in a cultural epoch like ours, which is literally flattened out by collective norms, and where the newspaper [‘newspaper’ can now be replaced with ‘internet’] is the real monarch of the earth.

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