Entheology in Jung

Entheology in Jung

By Brother Harmonius

Jung was a psychologist, and not an entheologist, if such a discipline even exists. However, Jung's writing overflows with the concept of "the spirit within." While making oblique reference to entheogens, without having actually used the rather modern term, we find passages such as this one:

As to the special nature of these substances, bread is undoubtedly a food. There is a popular saying that wine "fortifies," though not in the sense as a food "sustains." It stimulates and "makes glad the heart of man" by virtue of a certain volatile substance which has always been called "spirit." It is thus, unlike innocuous water, an "inspiriting" drink, for a spirit or god dwells within it and produces the ecstasy of intoxication.1

And again,

But, however sensible he was of the care and labour lavished upon them, man could hardly fail to observe that these cultivated plants gew and flourished according to an inner law of their own, and that there was a power at work in them which he compared to his own life breath or inner spirit. Frazer has called this principal, not unjustly, the "corn spirit."2

The closest Jung names this quality is the "vegetation numen."3

Jung wrote this in his essay Transformational Symbolism and the Mass, which, psychologically speaking, puts the worshipper in communion with the Holy Ghost.

Frazer had much to say about the “corn spirit,”4 much of it in relation to sacrifice in agrarian societies, but also totem animals which embody the corn spirit.5


1 Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1958) p253, par.384
2 Ibid p254, par.385
3 op. cit.
4 Sir James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1951) p.508 “THE CORN-SPIRIT SLAIN IN HIS HUMAN REPRESENTATIVE”
5 Ibid p.518 Ch. XLVIII: The Corn-Spirit As An Animal

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