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First published 2018
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Bishop, Paul, 1967- editor. | Gardner, Leslie, 1949- editor.
Title: The ecstatic and the archaic : an analytical psychological
inquiry / [edited by] Paul Bishop and Leslie Gardner.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017050157 (print) | LCCN 2017054737
(ebook) | ISBN 9780203733332 (Master e-book) | ISBN
9781138300538 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138300545
(pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Psychoanalysis and religion. | Ecstasy. | Jungian
psychology.
Classification: LCC BF175.4.R44 (ebook) | LCC BF175.4.R44
E37 2018 (print) | DDC 150.19/54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017050157

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CONTENTS

Contributors vii
Preface ix
Leslie Gardner

Introduction 1
Paul Bishop

PART I
Ecstasy and the psychological 17

1 The stream of desire and Jung’s concept of psychic energy 19

Raya A. Jones

2 The characters speak because they want to speak:

Jung, Dionysus, theatre, and therapy 28
Mark Saban

3 Ancient psychotherapy? Fifth-century bce Athenian

intellectuals and the cure of disturbed minds 43
Yulia Ustinova

4 Antiquity and anxiety: Freud, Jung, and the impossibility

of the archaic 56
Alan Cardew
vi Contents

PART II
Ecstatic-archaic history 77

5 I must get out (of myself) more often? Jung, Klages,

and the ecstatic-archaic 79
Paul Bishop

6 Ecstatic atoms: The question of Oresteian individuation 97

Ben Pestell

7 Monetised psyche and Dionysiac ecstasy 117

Richard Seaford

PART III
Ancient ecstatic in other worlds 127

8 History, philosophy, and myth in Luo Guanzhong’s

Three Kingdoms 129
Terence Dawson

9 Enki at Eridu: God of directed thinking 147

Catriona Miller

Index 161
CONTRIBUTORS

Paul Bishop is William Jacks Chair of Modern Languages in the School of Modern
Languages and Cultures at the University of Glasgow. He edited The Archaic: The
Past in the Present (2012) for Routledge, and his most recent publications include
On the Blissful Islands with Nietzsche & Jung (Routledge, 2016) and Ludwig Klages
and the Philosophy of Life: A Vitalist Toolkit (Routledge, 2017).
Alan Cardew is a Senior Fellow at the University of Essex, a Member of the
Athens Institute for Education and Research, and a Member of the Foro di Studi
Avanzati in Rome. At Essex he was Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary
Studies in the Humanities and Director of the Enlightenment. He has written on
Heidegger, Jung, Cassirer, and Nietzsche, and his recent publications have been on
the idea of the protrepticus and the sublimity of origins.
Terence Dawson spent the larger part of his academic career in Singapore. Now
retired, he continues to pursue his interest in the relation of Jungian theory to
literature and the other arts. He is an Associate Editor of the International Journal
of Jungian Studies, the co-editor with Polly Young-Eisendrath of The Cambridge
Companion to Jung (2nd edn, Cambridge University Press, 2008), and the author
of The Effective Protagonist in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (Ashgate, 2004), as
well as of wide-ranging articles on English and European literature.
Leslie Gardner is a Fellow in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic
Studies, University of Essex, where she obtained her Ph.D. She published Rhetorical
Investigations: G.B. Vico and C.G. Jung (Routledge, 2010); and has published chap-
ters in several volumes, most recently in Jung and the Question of Science, edited by
Raya A. Jones (Routledge, 2014) and in a forthcoming film handbook edited by
Luke Hockley. She co-edited (with Luke Hockley) House: The Wounded Healer on
Television (Routledge, 2013) and (with Fran Gray) Feminist Views from Somewhere
viii Contributors

(Routledge, 2017), and she has convened conferences on ‘(Dis)enchantment’ and

‘Ecstatic archaic thought and analytical psychology’ in London. She co-founded
the International Journal of Jungian Studies with Renos Papadopoulos.
Raya A. Jones is a Reader in the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University.
She was a member of the Executive Committee of the International Association
for Jungian Studies (2003–2009) and chaired the IAJS Second International
Conference in 2009. She is the author of Personhood and Social Robotics (Routledge,
2016), Jung, Psychology, Postmodernity (Routledge, 2007) and The Child–School
Interface (Cassell, 1995), editor of Jung and the Question of Science (Routledge,
2014), Body, Mind and Healing after Jung (Routledge, 2010), and co-editor of
Jungian and Dialogical Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Cultures and Identities
in Transitions (Routledge 2010) and Education and Imagination (Routledge,
2008). She has published numerous journal articles on Jungian and postmodern
approaches to the self.
Catriona Miller is a Senior Lecturer at Glasgow Caledonian University where
she teaches television script writers and media students. She publishes in the field
of film and television studies, with a particular interest in Horror, Cult TV and
Science Fiction genres from a Jungian perspective. She is currently working on
a joint book The Heroine’s Journey: Female Individuation on Screen for Routledge.
Ben Pestell holds a Ph.D. from the University of Essex on divine contact and myth-
ical thought in the Oresteia of Aeschylus. He serves on the executive committee of
the Centre for Myth Studies at Essex. He is co-editor of Translating Myth (Legenda,
2016), and has published on Aeschylus and contemporary classical reception.
Mark Saban is a senior analyst with the Independent Group of Analytical Psychologists.
He recently co-edited (with Andrew Samuels and Emilia Kiehl) Analysis and Activism:
Social and Political Contributions of Jungian Psychology (Routledge, 2016). Recent papers
include ‘Jung, Winnicott and the divided psyche’, Journal of Analytical Psychology (61(3),
June 2016; and ‘Two in one or one in two? Pushing off from Jung with Wolfgang
Giegerich’, in Journal of Analytical Psychology (60(5), November 2015).
Richard Seaford is Emeritus Professor of Ancient Greek at the Unversity of Exeter.
He is the author of numerous papers and books on Greek drama, Greek religion,
Greek philosophy, Greek society, and on the interrelation between them, most
notably Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy (Cambridge
University Press, 2004).
Yulia Ustinova is Associate Professor at the Department of General History,
Ben-Gurion University of Negev, Israel. Her current research is entitled ‘Mania:
Alteration of consciousness and insanity in Greek culture’, and her publications
on Greek religion and culture include The Supreme Gods of the Bosporan Kingdom:
Celestial Aphrodite and the Most High God (Brill, 1999) and Caves and the Ancient
Greek Mind: Descending Underground in the Search for Ultimate Truth (Oxford
University Press, 2009).
PREFACE
Leslie Gardner

In this volume, we look both to contemporary times, and back to the ancients, to
trace the insistent presence of the ecstatic, as it presents itself in – what is deemed
to be – an archaic frame of mind. This self-aware state of being transports the mind
and emotion out of their ordinary and sensible states. Psychologists, classicists,
philosophers, and literary theorists have focused on such ancient thought and its
bearing on contemporary analytical psychology to explore in this volume its tena-
cious and compelling hold.
Walter Benjamin associated intoxication with that ‘ecstatic component [which]
lives in every revolutionary act’, adding that this component ‘is identical with
the anarchic’.1 As Michael Löwy points out in his discussion of Benjamin’s essay
‘Surrealism’ (included in One-Way Street and Other Writings), intoxication is ‘an
expression of the magical relationship between the ancients and the cosmos’.2
Löwy proposes that Benjamin implies that ‘the experience (Erfahrung) and the
Rausch that once characterized that ritual relationship with the world disappear in
modern society.’ The notorious concept of ‘profane illumination’ is Benjamin’s
alternate phrase for the ubiquitous experience of transcendence in a mystical world
without God.3
Exploring the ecstatic state in the same geographical frame as Benjamin’s were
such psychoanalysts as C.G. Jung, who looked to ancient constructs to try and
evoke that supra-rational and distinctly human mode. They found the ecstatic-
archaic mind still in evidence in the modern world, despite wondering at its
diminished power. And as Richard Seaford has also reminded us, there is a vital
connection between how the ecstatic state played out in ancient classical times and
in psychological contemporary applications.
The papers given at the original colloquium in London at the Freud Museum
have been expanded and substantially revised for publication. While building
on an earlier volume edited by Paul Bishop (The Archaic: The Past in the Present,
x Leslie Gardner

Routledge, 2012), this new collection takes the concept of the archaic in an entirely
new direction, and offers a distinctive contextualisation of the dimension of the
archaic in relation to the ecstatic experience. We want to thank our excellent edi-
tor at Routledge, Susannah Frearson, and her attentive colleagues for all their help.

Notes
1 W. Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, in One-Way Street and Other Writings, tr. E. Jephcott and
K. Shorter, London:Verso, 1985, pp. 225–239 (p. 236).
2 M. Löwy, ‘The Young Benjamin’. Available online from: https://www.jacobinmag.com/
2016/01/walter-benjamin-anarchism-surrealism-marxism-theses/. Accessed 4 May 2017.
3 Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, in One-Way Street and Other Writings, p. 227. Cf. M. Cohen, Profane
Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of the Surrealist Revolution, Berkeley and Los
Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press, 1993.
INTRODUCTION
Paul Bishop

This volume has its origin in a conference held on 15–16 July 2016 at the Freud
Museum, London, in a room right above Freud’s study with its ancient statues
and sculptures. In some ways, the very title of this conference—‘Ecstatic Ancient/
Archaic Thought and Analytical Psychology: An Inquiry’—was an act of defiance,
because its subject is exactly counterposed to the dominant discourse in the arts and
humanities. According to this discourse, which describes itself as postmodern but
might equally well be described as ‘sophistical’, what we are talking about does not
exist. On this account, there is no origin, no Ursprung, no archē; instead, as good
Foucauldians reading our Nietzsche, we have to talk about ‘provenance’ (Herkunft)
and ‘point of emergence’ (Entstehung). And equally there is no ‘ecstasy’ or ekstasis,
for there is nothing outside the self, indeed there is nothing outside the text (il n’y
a pas de hors-texte); indeed, there isn’t even a text, there is only a structure, a tissu, a
web, a network. (And there certainly isn’t a canon; although, in a way, there is, for
the new canonicity resides precisely in the denial of canonicity, and in the destruc-
tion, ridicule, or avoidance of the canon.)
Nor is there any ecstatic in the more circumscribed sense of its sexual or
erotic dimension, because in the study of sexualities, in gender studies, in LGBT
studies—all of which have, rightly, established themselves over recent years as valid
areas of scholarship and contributed vital insights—everything is collapsed into ‘dis-
course’. So we should forget the Kama Sutra, forget the troubadours, forget Petrarch;
forget the Marquis de Sade, forget Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, forget Foucault
(who knew a thing or two about sexuality, thanks to his experiences in the bath-
houses of San Francisco . . .); and above all forget cherchez la femme, because (according
to Jacques Lacan) la femme n’existe pas.
And yet the thesis informing the conference and subsequently this volume—which
does not claim to be definitive, but deliberately describes itself as an inquiry—is that,
however much we might want to or try to, we cannot escape the archaic dimension of
2 Paul Bishop

existence, nor can we remain oblivious to its ecstatic manifestation. On the one hand,
the ecstatic-archaic manifests itself through something that can be called Grenzerlebnisse,
Grenzsituationen, oder Grenzerfahrungen, and which derives from the experience of what
Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) called a Grenzsituation.1 ‘Limit situations’ is a term is used
by Jaspers to describe situations in which the human individual comes up against the
limitations of his or her being—ultimately, his or her mortality. On the other hand,
the ecstatic-archaic is something one can encounter in a more everyday experiential
way as well, as the introductory blurb to Joseph Campbell’s Myths To Live By suggests:
‘The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and The Beast,
stands this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the
traffic light to change.’2
The ecstatic dimension of the archaic is clearly brought out in the experience
explored by the cultural critic Jonathan Meades towards the end of the first epi-
sode of the three-part documentary series Magnetic North, first broadcast on BBC
Four in 2008, when he visits the famous chalk cliffs on the island of Rügen—
famous not least because of their depiction in a famous painting by the German
Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), his Chalk Cliffs on Rügen
(1818–1820). Its three figures gazing out to sea are, Meades suggests, not so much
looking out towards a bright new dawn as turning away from the immensity of the
forest behind them: ‘What Friedrich’s painting does not reveal is the forest behind
him, behind the figures staring transfixedly at the sea and at a limitless world.’ As
Meades goes on to explain: ‘For Friedrich, as for the Brothers Grimm, forests were
places of real and metaphorical darkness which mankind had ceased to dwell in and
worship in; which mankind had escaped from, but which still exerted a morbid
attraction.’ For Meades, the forest was a location of the primitive, the primordial,
or the archaic—and it is still is today. ‘The fear that overtook me’, he says,

was primal; it went beyond that German conditioning, even though I was
in Germany. Brain and body were united in foreboding; it was sufficient
to persuade me that another memory might exist—an atavistic memory. I
was the distant legatee of some distant, woad-smeared forebear’s fear of the
forest.

At this point, Meades turns directly to the camera and tells us:

In places like this, reason does not sleep: it is concussed by a heavy blow. So
I wouldn’t have been surprised to see berserker warriors, in bloody furs and
skin, or knots in wood mutating into witches’ faces, or fabulous stags with
shining bez tines, or enchanting wood sprites whose kiss is fatal. This place
seemed to contain [he emphasises] an inventory of horrible possibilities.3

While the postmodernists deny the very idea of the archaic and show disdain for
its ecstatic manifestations, there is nevertheless a strong tradition of scholarship
that investigates the archaic and the ecstatic, the latter used here in the sense of
 Introduction 3

‘rapture, beauty, adoration, wonder, awe, mystery, sense of the unknown, desire
for the unknown’.4 In 2012, a collection of papers was published under the title
The Archaic: The Past in Present, building on work undertaken on Jung by contribu-
tors to The Journal of Analytical Psychology, on Schelling (1775–1854), on Martin
Heidegger (1889–1976), and on Ernesto Grassi (1902–1991), in order to try and
revive interest in the archaic as a valid category in the field of scholarly inquiry.5
Yet an exploration of the ecstatic dimension of the archaic remained, as Leslie
Gardner, the organiser of the London conference had realized, a desideratum in
the field of ‘Archaic Studies’.
Now the philosophical investigation of the ecstatic goes back as least as far
as Plotinus in his celebrated Ennead (VI.9) on ‘The Good or the One’, which
famously concludes with its description of the contemplative life as ‘the flight
of the lone to the Alone’.6 In the final section of this text, Plotinus describes the
moment of union with the divine in the following ecstatic terms:

[The seer] was as if carried away or possessed by a god, in a quiet solitude

and a state of calm, not turning away anywhere in his being and not busy
about himself, altogether at rest and having become a kind of rest. He had
no thought of beauties, but had already run up beyond beauty and gone
beyond the choir of virtues, like a man who enters into the sanctuary and
leaves behind the statues in the outer shrine; these become again the first
things he looks at when he comes out of the sanctuary, after his contempla-
tion within and intercourse there, not with a statue or image but with the
Divine itself; they are secondary objects of contemplation. But that other,
perhaps, was not a contemplation but another kind of seeing, a being out of
oneself [ekstasis] and simplifying and giving oneself over and pressing towards
contact and rest and a sustained thought leading to adaptation, if one is going
to contemplate what is in the sanctuary.7

In this text, as Richard Harder remarks, Plotinus ‘approaches the suprarational

kernel of the experience of union above all by the means of a spiritual eroticism
derived from Plato, but given new weight’, for ‘here the passion aroused is repeat-
edly assuaged by references to how the ecstasy is “calm”, “still”’.8
In more recent times, the archaic and its ecstatic inflection have been investi-
gated by numerous writers and thinkers, almost all of whom fall outside—or have
been pushed outside—the mainstream of academic enquiry. In one way or another,
all these thinkers tried to follow an injunction found in Nietzsche’s unpublished
fragments from 1881:

Stop feeling oneself to be such a fantasized ego! Learn step by step to throw away
one’s supposed individuality! Discover the errors of the ego! Gain insight into
egoism as an error! Understand that its opposite is not altruism! That would
mean showing love towards other apparent individuals! No! Go beyond
“you” and “me”! Experience cosmically!9
4 Paul Bishop

For instance, this sense of the cosmic or the archaic was explored at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century by the Canadian psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke
(1837–1902) in his account of various case studies (including Bucke’s own), entitled
Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (1905).10 Bucke’s
study introduced the notion of ‘cosmic consciousness’, a term derived from Edward
Carpenter (in turn, one of the case studies in this book), but it also drew on Bucke’s
own, all-too-brief ‘mystical’ experience in London in 1872. (Perhaps there is some-
thing about London hotels that invites mystical experiences; after all, Swedenborg
had his own mystical experience, referred to as his ‘vision of vocation, in London in
April 1745.)11 In Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure (1889; 1920), Carpenter had argued in
an almost proto-Klagesian manner that civilisation is a kind of disease through which
human societies pass but, in Cosmic Consciousness, Bucke distinguished between the
perceptual mind (sense impressions), the receptual mind (simple consciousness), the
conceptual mind (self consciousness), and the intuitional mind (a mind in which ‘sen-
sation, simple consciousness and self consciousness are supplemented and crowned
with cosmic consciousness’)12. The historical figures considered in his study included
Gautama Buddha, Jesus Christ, St Paul of Tarsus, Plotinus, the prophet Mohammed,
Dante, Bartolomé de Las Casas, St John of the Cross, Francis Bacon, Jakob Böhme,
William Blake, Honoré de Balzac, and Walt Whitman.
Very often those thinkers who are interested in theorizing the archaic pay close
attention to the world of myth.13 But what is myth? In his ‘Prolegomena’ to Essays
on the Science of Mythology (1941), co-authored with Carl Jung, the Hungarian clas-
sicist Karl Kerényi (1897–1973) draws on the work of the anthropologist Bronisław
Malinowski (1884–1942) to argue that myth is not ‘an explanation put forward to
satisfy curiosity’, but rather ‘the rearising of a primordial [i.e., archetypal] reality
in narrative form’.14 Drawing attention, as many other thinkers have done, to the
importance of the German gründen, i.e., to ‘found’, to ‘ground’, or to ‘establish’,
Kerényi claims that ‘mythology gives a ground, lays a foundation’, inasmuch as ‘it
does not answer the question “why?” but “whence?”’. Kerényi specifically draws
on the Greek notion of the arkhai to explicate this notion of a ground:

They form the ground or foundation of the world, since everything rests
on them. They are the arkhai to which everything individual and particular
goes back and out of which it is made, while they remain ageless, inexhaust-
ible, invincible in timeless primordiality, in a past that proves imperishable
because of its eternally repeated rebirths.15

Granted that these arkhai exist, then ‘this return to the origins and to primordiality
is a basic feature of every mythology’, Kerényi argues, and mythology is ‘the direct
unquestioning return to the arkhai, a spontaneous regression to the “ground”’. Or
put in terms of ancient Greek thought: ‘behind the “Why?” stands the “Whence?”,
behind the aiton the arkhē’.16
Kerényi goes on to distinguish two dimensions to this origin, which are never-
theless linked—one metaphysical, one political:
 Introduction 5

‘Origin’ means two things in mythology. As the content of a story or

mythologem it is the ‘giving of grounds’ (Begründung); as the content of an
act it is the ‘founding’ (Gründung) of a city or the world.[17] In either case it
means man’s return to his own origins and consequently the emergence of
something original, so far as it is accessible to him, in the form of primordial
images, mythologems, ceremonies.18

And Kerényi’s point is that mythology, whichever form it comes in, is still alive
and relevant for us today:

The ideal primary mythology [hovers] as it were between the one origin and the
fixed monadic version of it. Living mythology, on the other hand, expands in
infinite and yet shapely multiplicity, rather like the plant-world in comparison
with Goethe’s ‘primal plant’. We must always keep our eyes on both: the his-
torical Many and the unitive principle that is nearest to the origin.19

A similar sense of the persistence of the archaic informs The Ever-Present Origin
(Ursprung und Gegenwart) (1949; 1953),20 a two-volume work by the Hispanist
linguist and philosopher, Jean Gebser (1905–1973).
In this study, Gebser undertook to trace the emergence of various structures
of consciousness in history, in a manner entirely separate from yet not dissimilar
to the more well-known account offered by the Neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst
Cassirer (1874–1945) in his famous study of ‘symbolic forms’.21 Whereas Cassirer
distinguished between language, mythical thought, and science as his major symbolic
categories, Gebser distinguishes between (1) the archaic, (2) the magic, (3) the myth-
ical, (4) the mental, and (5) the integral structures. As Ed Mahood notes in his online
introduction to the thought of Gebser, ‘the term “archaic” [. . .] is derived from the
Greek arche, meaning inception or origin’, he defines this ‘origin (or Ursprung, in the
original German)’ both as ‘the source from which all springs’ and as ‘that which is
behind and which underlies consciousness’.22 As Gebser portrays the archaic struc-
ture, in it consciousness is, in the words of Georg Feuerstein (1947–2012), no more
than ‘a dimly lit mist devoid of shadows’.23 In the archaic, ‘the human being was
totally immersed in the world unable to extricate himself or herself from that world’,
for he or she was fundamentally ‘identical with that world’.24
Yet Gebser’s argument is not purely an historical one but concerns the present
moment. As he noted at the end of the first volume, ‘this spiritual present [. . .]
elevates wholeness to transparency and frees us from our transient age, for this age
of ours is not the present but partiality and flight, indeed, almost a conclusion’, and
‘only someone who knows of origin has present—living and dying in the whole,
in integrity’.25
And as he sought to demonstrate at the beginning of the second volume, the
persistence of the archaic present can be tracked across a variety of different mani-
festations: in the natural sciences (in mathematics, physics, and biology), in the
sciences of the mind (psychology and philosophy), in the social sciences (law,
6 Paul Bishop

sociology, and economics), as well as in the so-called ‘dual sciences’ (including psy-
chosomatic medicine and parapsychology), the arts (music, architecture, painting,
literature)—and crucially in our daily lives.26 Gebser’s warnings about the mutation
in public consciousness, factory and office life as self-imposed falsifications of time,
and the achievements necessary to become an individual are as urgent as, if not
more so than, at the time of their writing in the 1950s:

Origin is present. Anyone who is able to perceive this spiritual state of affairs
has already overcome the confusion of our epoch and maintains the greater
and more decisive reality of the whole: that unique entirety and integrity
which is always both origin and present.27

Yet Gebser was by no means alone in emphasizing the existential dimension of an

appreciation of the archaic.
In Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (1957), Owen Barfield (1898–1997)
undertook, in less than 200 pages, an exploration of three millennia of human
history—or, more precisely, human consciousness. In it Barfield, a disciple of Rudolf
Steiner (1861–1925), propounded the case that not only do human consciousness
and language evolve simultaneously, but that this evolution of consciousness is
inseparable from the evolution of nature, arguing in effect for the interactivity of
matter and mind. Barfield deserves a place in the history of modern reflection on
the archaic, inasmuch as he proposes the notion of ‘original participation’—the
essence of which is that ‘there stands behind the phenomena, and the other side of them
from me, a represented which is of the same nature as me’—investigates language as
having its source in such participation—‘and, in doing so, indicates the direction
in which we must look for a true understanding of those mysterious “roots”’; he
argues that while it seems that Pan has ‘shut up shop’, he has, on fact, ‘not retired
from business’ but has ‘merely gone indoors’—‘he has not only gone indoors; he has
hardly shut the door, before we begin to hear him moving about inside’.28
Finally, at the very intersection—or, as critics would doubtless prefer, fringe—
of academic and popular discourse, one finds the figure of Terence McKenna
(1946–2000) and his study with a self-explicatory title called The Archaic
Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs,
Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History (1991).29
Although we might look askance at McKenna’s accounts of his experiences with,
say, tryptamine hallucinogens, his remarks can sometimes throw new light on
Heraclitus—‘the experience always reminds me of the twenty-fourth fragment of
Heraclitus: “The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls”’30—as well as Jung’s
experiences as they are recounted in his Red Book: ‘One not only becomes the
Aeon at play with colored balls but meets entities as well.’ McKenna explains, ‘I
describe them as self-transforming machine elves [. . .] dynamically contorting
topological nodules that are somehow distinct from the surrounding background,
which is itself undergoing a continuous transformation’, and he adds that these
‘tryptamine Munchkins’, these ‘hyper-dimensional machine-elf entities’ are like
 Introduction 7

‘fractal reflections of some previously hidden and suddenly autonomous part of

one’s own psyche’.31 On reading these sentences, it is hard not to think of the
mandalas and the Kabeiroi in the Red Book . . .
Yet all these accounts of the archaic in a cosmic sense nevertheless neglect, it
could be argued, to take full account of a particular dimension of the archaic, and
one that is easily misunderstood—its ecstatic quality. Precisely this dimension, how-
ever, is explored by a comparatively neglected thinker in the German intellectual
tradition, Ludwig Klages (1872–1956).32 Between 1900 and 1912, in fragmentary
texts written at this time which he subsequently edited himself and published in
1944 as his own literary Nachlass under the title Rhythms and Runes (Rhythmen und
Runen), Klages was already developing a theory of the ecstatic that would later
inform his mature philosophical system.33 In one fragmentary text from this period,
entitled ‘Life as a Retrospective’, Klages describes the relation of the individual liv-
ing being to the past in a way that builds up to a quotation from a work by one of
his favourite writers, the German Romantic poet Joseph Eichendorff (1788–1857):

What is alive in the individual being is related to the distance, which is to say:
to the past. Every glance into the distance is a glance into the past, even a
glance in a spatial sense; for what emerges as an image out of the distance will
already have passed: space itself is the phenomenal form of time. This is only
apparently contradicted by the exhilarated feelings of excitement, expecta-
tion, yearning, youthful intuitive anticipation of future vital plenitude, the
exhilaration of spring and the promise of happiness, which glows and smiles
at us from everything we love; in short, precisely that distant shudder which
Eichendorff caught in these luminous verses:
The distance speaks, intoxicated,
Of a future, of a great happiness.
[Es reden trunken die Ferne
Wie von künftigem, großem Glück.]34

Having reached an ecstatic high-point with this quotation from Eichendorff (a text
which has, memorably, been set to music by Schumann),35 and using these lines as
a starting-point, Klages analyses what he has just described as the main contours to
the ecstatic as he understands it:

For these are all ecstasies coming into being, syntheses that are being pre-
pared for a move from Now to Once, by means of which the past that flames
up in the Now consumes the intellectual ghost of the Future. In the power-
ful accord with the ‘Here-and-Now’ the Past which is emerging to existence
gleams and now entices as the ‘Future’. These are explosive moments in
which the ray of time, released from space, drowns, and it is the nuptial
celebration of the universe with the individual being which time had sur-
rounded as a glowing ring. In these verses by Eichendorff what we see aflame