propaganda

Just ran across this book today -- Pagan Resurrection: A Force for Evil or the Future of Western Spirituality? -- so I thought I'd drop it in here. Random House has a thing that (apparently) allows you to read the whole book online, which is pretty amazing (more how-to info here). To see it in action, first click here, then look for the size controls in the bottom right corner (I found that zooming to 250% was comfortable; deduct 50% for each 10 years younger than me you are). Following are several grafs from the sole (at present) Amazon review. Note especially the last line about Jung and Serrano, since we've been discussing them here of late. Though I am calling out this one bit, it's worth reading the entire review, which is much longer. Rudgley portrays C.G. Jung as the figure of central importance in the modern pagan revival. For Rudgley, Jung was essentially a prophet of Wotan/Odin. Jung saw Hitler as a manifestation of the stormy, restless side of Odin. But there is another side - Wotan's "ecstatic and mantic qualities", which will also be revealed in time. Jung himself said, "things must be concealed in the back ground which we cannot imagine at present..." But Rudgley fails to note that, for mortals, moments of divine ecstasy are not without their price...and the price often involves those same stormy, restless moments he greatly fears. Rudgley describes Jungian archetypes as "blueprints for certain workings of the human psyche." Some of these, he acknowledges, are "specific to certain cultures." (e.g. Odin is the most important archetype of the Germanic mind). Hyperborea, the land of Indo-European origins, is not a physical plane... it is to be found "not on the map of the earth but the map of the soul." As a symbol it has many layers of meaning, one of the primary ones being a vertical ascent, or attainment of enlightenment. But are the gods, then, merely 'blueprints', and not objectively real? Rudgley seems to think so, and states that "we do not have to believe in Odin's actual existence as a god to track his return to the forefront of the Western psyche." In the same way, Stephen Flowers, noting Jung's influence, claims that "divinities in Asatru/Odinism are not seen as independent/transcendental beings, but rather as exemplary models of consciousness, or archetypes, which serve as patterns for human development." But this doesn't take into account Jung's own later view expressed in his Foreword to Miguel Serrano's book The Visits of the Queen of Sheba, where he stated openly for the first time that his mission was religious rather than scientific - implying that the 'archetypes' are, in fact, independently real.

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