Homo Mysticus

The anti-conventional, anti-collective and anti-dogmatic nature of mysticism

Douglas Lockhart
To what degree is the mystical a universal phenomenon, and to what degree is man homo mysticus? Is there a
natural level to mysticism which theology has obscured, or is mysticism fundamentally a religious concern
which only theology can properly understand and explain. In his ground-breaking book The History of
Consciousness (1973), the analytical psychologist Erich Neumann asks these questions and answers them
decisively. Neumanns approach is to observe that the psychologist's experience not only encompasses the
human, but that it opens out into an area so vast that we cannot actually detect its limits. This suggests that the
theological approach to mysticism, although useful in the sense of supplying a series of symbolic markers,
may in the end be forced to give way to an approach unhindered by theologically-driven concerns - that is, to
a mystical anthropology rather than a mystical theology.
Surrounded by a plethora of religious configurations (heavens, hells, prophets, angels, saviours, redeemers
and devils), the religious individual struggles to make sense of their experience of self and world. While
capable of viewing anothers religious beliefs objectively, they experience their own religious beliefs as
beyond objective assessment. Neumann concurs. . . . it is much easier for us to fathom as projections those
contents with which we are not unconsciously and affectively involved.
The New Testament scholar Burton Mack aligns himself with Neumann: Christians never feel comfortable
with the notion of myth or willing to see their own myths as the product of human imagination and intellectual
labour. But Mack does notice a fundamental difference between the Christian myth and religious myths in
general. The Christian myth, he tells us, is fused with history and demands a statement of faith allied to a
canon of beliefs. At first only for the purpose of clarification, this statement of faith hardens into a fixed credo
demanding unquestioning acceptance. This highlights the exact nature of the problem that arose: the problem
of the Christian Church forcing its adherents to affirm a particular version of the Christian myth as true. In that
moment belief in the idea that belief was the central focus of Christianity disrupted the myths experiential
core, so allowing group politics of the most basic kind to dominate the myths future shape and expression.
But only externally. Internally the creative unconscious continued to push out a flood of insights.
Challenging the restrictive myth now in place, early Christian radicals attempted to breach the wall of fixed
belief and liberate themselves from the growing menace of a Church turned maniacally certain. They failed.
Overpowered by a self-validating system, they were driven underground and all but exterminated. The
experience of God as a sacred adventure was under threat, the ability of the Christian ego to attend to and be
moved by its creative centre all but outlawed. Inwardness, in the sense of a contemplative approach to
spiritual reality, would be replaced by intellectual endeavour. And so the dividing line between conscious
ego and creative unconscious was drawn, those who stepped over that line declared heretical and deemed
unfit to associate with.
In his study of mysticism, W R Inge talks of human weakness and insecurity in relation to a God who
remains silent. Faced with an unintelligible universe, we warm to the idea of an ultimate religious authority.
Relieved of the responsibility to think for ourselves, we may even submit voluntarily to that authoritys
dictates. As with Neumann, however, Inge is aware of an alternative to this external authority, namely, the
creative unconscious. And so he contrasts "religions of authority" with "religions of the Spirit", and speaks of
a creative centre. But he does so with qualification. He notes that this internal authority can be made external
and given a spurious infallibility, and by way of example quotes an old Quaker lady who said "Jerusalem? It
has not yet been revealed to me that there is such a place."
In contrast to Neumann's suggestion that mystical theology may have to be replaced by a mystical
anthropology, Inge roundly condemned the psychology of his day for its quasi-scientific rationalisms and
demanded recognition of mysticism as a possible intuition of objective reality. Arguing for a comprehensive
philosophy of mysticism on the basis that our present world view had all but removed traditional religious
supports, he asked that the data supplied by genuine mystics no longer be neglected or ignored. Having
developed the concept of mystical man to a quite extraordinary degree by 1949, Neumann clearly described
the creative process we are each involved in at the unconscious level, and but for the two year gap between

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the publication of their separate works, Inge would have had at his disposal the comprehensive philosophy of
mysticism he so much desired.
Erich Neumann's plea for a mystical anthropology to replace mystical theology was not an attempt to claim
an area of experience belonging to religion and change it into an appendage of psychology; it was an attempt
to wrest what he believed to be an expression of the psyche's higher systems of functioning away from
religion's constrictive grasp. Theology, he was saying, hamstrings mysticism; it is a process utterly at odds
with the often challenging nature of mystical experience. Bound to dogma and doctrine at the conscious level,
theology does not have the existential plasticity to accommodate the taboo-breaking nature of mystical
experience. And so, Christianity has had a problem when confronted by the statements of its own mystics, and
its mystics have had a problem staying within the fold of the Church. Neumann's summation is exact: "all
mystical trends strive to dissolve the traditional forms of religion and worship, although they often disguise
this endeavour as a renewal of the old religious form. As this exactly describes the ministry of Jesus, it
allows us to conjecture that his so distinctive platform of spiritual renewal was the result of contemplative
experience.
The Catholic scholar harold O J Brown is of much the same opinion, but he approaches the problem from
the Churchs point of view.
Mysticism tends to do away with the need for intermediaries between the believer and God. The church
cannot exist at all without a measure of mysticism, but as soon as mysticism begins to gain ground, it
begins to do away with the need for the churchs ministers and their services. In the extreme case, the
mystic may dispense with the Scriptures and even with the incarnate Christ himself, and seek to relate
directly with the uncreated, absolute godhead. Mysticism appears to make the church and institutional
religion unnecessary, and thus is a threat to the established church when it operates within a totally
orthodox theology.
The Territory of the Anthropos
The mystic's fundamental experience of his/her creative centre is, by almost all accounts, anti-conventional,
anti-collective and anti-dogmatic. So it is pretty certain that a mysticism exhibiting dogmatic characteristics is
either theology disguised as mysticism, mysticism of a low-order, authentic mysticism usurped and re-shaped
to sustain the religious status quo, or mysticism intentionally disguised by the experiencer for fear of reprisal.
Neumann is particularly clear on these differentiations. He nominates as low-level, for instance, the mysticism
of an individual affectively overpowered by some theologically defined element of the fixed canon. Authentic
to the extent that it is undoubtedly an "experience", it is also inauthentic in that the experience is brought about
through conscious fixation with some theologically constructed idea or image. The individuals creative
centre is not at work, merely the conscious mind revolving around an idea or image to the point of delirium
and/or dissociation.
Of particular interest, however, is that form of mysticism defined by Neumann as "disguised", for it opens
up to us a world of restriction and fear where profound religious experiences are made subservient to canons
of fixed belief. Unwilling to confront the religious system to which they belong, some mystics will
unconsciously re-dogmatise their authentic mystical experiences to fit in with their belief system, whereas
others will consciously disguise what they have experienced in the hope of remaining undetected by the
hierarchy. Marghanita Laski adds a further dimension to this when she suggests that the religious vocabulary
used to describe mystical experience is often a terminology intrusion, that is, the language used does not
necessarily belong to the experiencer, but to the religious system backing the experiencer.
So we are faced with a conundrum, for the very area of human activity most likely to produce mystical
experience is the area where censorship of such experiences is at its greatest. And there is the further
complication of naive acceptance of the fixed canon triggering, at the contemplative level, a breakthrough into
the very levels where the surface belief system's contents are symbolically questioned. This is a catch-22
situation. It reveals both the affective efficiency of theologically-driven forms of worship, while
simultaneously suggesting that such forms can inadvertently lead to breakthroughs capable of rearranging or
even annulling such forms.
Along with W R Inge and Erich Neumann, William James was of the opinion that mystical states overthrow
"the pretensions of non-mystical states to be the sole dictators of what we believe." That is a strong statement,
and Inge acknowledges it. But he is not satisfied with such a declaration; he feels impelled to remind us that
psychology is an abstract study of human consciousness held within self-imposed limits. It is the "states" that
psychology studies, not the relation of those states to objective reality. Neumann seems to agree, he speaks of

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"special limitations" in the sense of psychology's interpretation of such states being firmly anchored in the
human. But in contrast to Inge he does not see this as limiting psychology, for although centered on an
anthropology and not a theology, the territory of the anthropos is intuited to be so vast that it becomes hard
for Neumann to imagine any part of it being beyond psychology's grasp. But not just any old psychology; only
those psychologies which have developed a suitable language descriptive of the mystics relationship to
objective reality. If the language of transcendence is missing from a particular psychologys vocabulary, then
that psychology will be incapable of going beyond state-specific studies of consciousness.
Neumann points to this fact when he says: Any attempt to understand mystical man....must be grounded in a
psychology which takes into account the different phases of the ego and consciousness in their development
from the unconscious. A system of coordinates is required for the psychologist to understand what is going
on, and these co-ordinates have to translate out into a map of consciousness showing the stages of human
growth in relation to mystical experience. There are, this psychologist argues, phases in the development of
consciousness, and through an analysis of these phases the egos containment in, and eventual escape from, the
unconscious can be successfully described. These phases are birth, puberty, middle age, old age and death.
Our eventual escape from the unconscious will only be partial, for the ego-personality which evolves is a
divided system, a system of conscious and unconscious attributes, the tension between which constitutes its
creative and transformative dynamic. So it can be said that human beings are naturally mystical, for the
development and transformation of the ego-personality is stamped from beginning to end with interactions and
confrontations at the unconscious level. Whether conscious of this level or not, we may sense or even glimpse
something of this levels capacity to express itself if we momentarily dip towards it. Or we may simply be
overpowered by it if our style of life, or thought, causes us to ignore its promptings. Whatever the case, each
phase has its transition point, and this point is generally experienced as a crisis.
And what greater crisis can there be than the suspicion that our pet ideas about God and Jesus and much
else besides are at best inadequate, and on occasions gibberish? How can we handle the fact that the nearer
we get to what constitutes God the less he seems to fit into the Churchs theological straitjacket? Which
suggests that the stages of life with their built-in points of crisis are capable of delivering up a great deal more
than balance and maturity in the ordinary sense of these words, but also levels of being through which we can
begin to approach our creative centre. This is of course to mix psychology with religious aspiration, but it is
in fact necessary to do so, for when separated the language of religion and psychology taper off towards
absurdity, whereas when joined they open out into a perception of reality which resonates with fundamental
being. Why should this be? Because human beings seem to be naturally mystical, and as such their phases of
development are also spiritually transformative.
The Archetypal Encounter
In analytical psychology a persons life from birth to death, from unconsciousness to what Neumann terms the
integration of the final phase is marked by phases or archetypal zones. These zones, phases or sectors
punctuate the life stream at intervals, and are responsible for the egos growth towards an interaction with
what Paul Tillich terms the ground of being. In this sense it is individual existence which reveals God to us,
not theology. Neumann captures this interaction when he tells us that the divine void (the ground of being) . .
. fills the psychological inwardness of the anthropos." As creatures of form we are expressions of the
formless void, and as such are capable of experiencing what lies hidden at our creative centre. Our creative
centre is not the formless void; it is the location where we step beyond the boundary of form and encounter
formlessness.
But it is important to note that this experience at the creative centre of being is actually an encounter, an
encounter dependent on the kind of people we are. It is our encounter, and being our encounter it is an
experience touched by the quality of our thinking and the texture of our daily lives. Jesus can call his
encounter with the formlessness father; we may not find the experience quite so comforting. And who is to
say how many encounters Jesus had with his father before he became comfortable with formlessness. For
formlessness must by its very nature be ambiguous, and ambiguity is the sworn enemy of religious certainty. In
this context the development of the personality becomes important, for it is the personality that undergoes the
experience and is changed or transformed. Everything depends on the stage reached by the personality, the
zones traversed, the sectors gone through, the phases completed.
The Archetypal Zones
But problems can arise in relation to the mystical; not all mystical experiences are beneficial. The encounters
which follow can cause immense problems for the personality. The historian and ex-Carmelite nun Karen

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Armstrong says "A journey to the depths of the mind involves great personal risk because we may not be able
to endure what we find there." There is a mysticism of childhood, a mysticism of maturity and a mysticism of
old age and death. This again raises the question of where the personality is in its development; it may not
develop quite as it ought. It can happen that the broadening effect of mystical experience on consciousness is
usurped by the desire to succumb to the formless void and close down consciousness. Mystical death in the
sense of ecstatic abandonment can result, and such episodes can lead to general sickness or even severe
neurosis. Civilization demands consciousness of the child, the adolescent and the adult, but clouds the fact that
archetypal encounters are taking place. These unrecognized encounters create crisis points that rearrange
elements of the personality and identity.
Mystical experience, if properly integrated, is creative and world-transforming. If poorly integrated it tends
towards nihilism. Neumann sums up the situation thus: The decisive factor in this orientation is the condition
of the ego after its mystical experience. So there are two kinds of mystic: those who return and shed a
positive influence on the world, and those who reject the world and cast a negative light on everything they
touch. (Consider the kind of reasoning that might be built on such a result.) Rejecting the creative principle
underlying human experience, negative mystics reveal themselves to be prophets of disintegration. And so
they advocate the unformed paradise of the unborn infant and reveal their infantile desire to achieve beatific
nonexistence in the divine womb of nothingness. As representatives of the prenatal stage of human
development, they project their own repressed natures onto the world and consign it to the devil. This state of
affairs is termed uroboros incest by Neumann; it is an attempt a return to prenatal bliss. In the attempt to
kill off their ego in mystic dissolution, they avoid the problem of integration and the ambiguities which
underpin the creative life. Left with their consciously constructed God, they sacrifice the chance to know and
experience the expansive God of the heart. Governed by what they fear most - the archetypal Mother (maternal
womb) of creation - they succumb to ecstatic seizure, inflation, depression and even psychosis. Attacked from
within by what they fear most, the feminine, they create a frightening world of shadows and infest this world
with male-dominated symbols.
And all because the sensed state of perfection underlying the conscious matrix in its early stages has run
out of control. Alpha has displaced omega. The infants state of perfection without will now lies at both ends
of the egos archetypal journey. Form coming out of formlessness has been swapped for a pointless process
where the ego suffers conscious differentiation for no other purpose than to regain its infantile paradise.
There is no point to the lived life except the moral refinement of the creature so that it can return to the arms of
its creator. The path is circular. The end is the beginning. The snake of creation devours its own tail. But this
need not be the case. A progressive strengthening of the ego seems to be the functional aim of a life, not a
weakening of the ego. The child does not remain a child, the adolescent does not remain adolescent, the
mature adult seeks greater maturity. This causes the ego to suffer at every stage, for inherent in suffering is the
energy of growth and transformation. Here, too, however, we stumble into the territory of the negative mystic,
for the positive mystics counterpart is an utterly rigid religious ego oblivious to the nudgings of the
unconscious.
Erich Neumann's grasp of what it means for a human being to encounter, and be encountered by, the
archetypal realm, is deeply challenging. Describing an archetypal encounter as a shattering of the ego's
ordered world, he speaks of the ego being "encompassed", and of undergoing a change in personality. This
change can be orderly in spite of its disruptive effects; but it can also be chaotic and apparently directionless,
religious, delusional, artistic, or simply the experience of falling in love. In this sense everything is
potentially archetypal, for everything carries a hidden charge capable of triggering a perception of the divine,
cosmic or human mystery. Reality, like a work of fiction, carries us towards an uncertain end. In principle
revolutionary and heretical, such experiences tend to dissolve traditional religious forms and draw the ego
into the solitude of consciousness.
The life-affirming mystic requires a strong ego to survive this journey into the vast solitude of the self,
whereas the negative mystics greatest wish is to lose his/her already weakened ego in an act of spiritual
abandonment. The nature of the encounter depends entirely on the shape and texture of the personality. The
personalitys stage of development governs the nature of the experience, not the experience the nature of the
personality. And so the measure of what is realized, understood or intuited is not fully a gift given, more a gift
received; that is, a gift which the receiver must know how to unpack. If successfully unpacked, the personality
will undergo positive change, for in being able to bear the creative tension between conscious and
unconscious levels, the gift received will enable the personality to endure an enhanced tension. If unable to
unpack the gift offered, the personality will suffer not a creative epiphany, but a further withdrawal from the
process of change and transformation. Held in a world of rigid ideas, hopes and expectations, such a
personality, if religious, will do the only thing it can do: attempt to escape such rigidity through mystical
abandonment or affective attachment to religious beliefs. If unreligious, other avenues of escape will be

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sought. Neumann sums up this tendency towards spiritual and intellectual suicide when he says, The mission
of man is not to plunge himself into the white primal light and lose his identity. This is not to advise against
an encounter with our own depths, it is to suggest that our capacity for inwardness should be exercised with
care.
In spite of its long and well-documented history, religious mysticism may only be one of many approaches
to the creative centre of being. This suggests that Tillich's conception of God as "ground of being" makes
every avenue of life sacred. The artist, teacher, engineer, dustman, flower arranger or pastry cook has then as
much chance of forming a deep and transformative relationship with what is ultimately real as any mystic. We
are, in our essential natures, already grounded in the infinite, and need only turn inward to make this discovery
for ourselves.

References
1) Neumann, Erich, The Origins of Consciousness , Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1973 pp. 375, 386, 388, 394, 397, 399,384, 410.
2) Mack, Burton, The Lost Gospel/The Book of Q, and Christian Origins , Harper
SanFrancisco, 1993 p. 207
3) Inge, W. R., Mysticism in Religion, Rider & Company, 1969 p. 17, 199.
4) Brown, Harold O J, Heresies, p 285-6.
5 Laski, Marghanita, Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experience. Jeremy P.
Tarcher, Inc., Los Angeles, 1961 p. 133.
6) Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, Mandarin, 1994 p. 246.
_____________________________________
Douglas Lockhart writes extensively on the dilemmas facing modern Christians. He is the author of
Jesus the Heretic (1997) and The Dark Side of God (1999), two books dealing with the historical origins
and development of Christianity. He is an Associate Member of the Westar Institiute (USA), and an
Honorary Research Associate with the University of Tasmanias School of Philosophy.