By Michael O'Callaghan

CHAPTER 1: THE INNER APOCALYPSE

"When conscious life is characterised by one-sidedness and by a false attitude,

primordial healing images are activated – one might say instinctively – and
come to light in the dreams of individuals and the visions of artists."

– Carl Jung

"All we have learned of psychotherapy suggests that it is at the precise time

when the individual feels as if his whole life is crashing down around him, that
he is most likely to achieve an inner reorganisation constituting a quantum leap
in his growth toward maturity. Our hope, our belief, is that it is precisely when
society's future seems so beleaguered – when its problems seem almost
staggering in complexity, when so many individuals seem alienated, and so
many values seem to have deteriorated – that it is most likely to achieve a
metamorphosis in society's growth toward maturity, toward more truly
enhancing and fulfilling the human spirit than ever before. Thus we envision
the possibility of an evolutionary leap to a trans-industrial society that not only
has know-how, but also a deep inner knowledge of what is worth doing."

– Willis Harman

"True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego,
that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality... and through
this death a rebirth and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-
functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its
betrayer."
 – R.D.Laing

One morning as you look out the window, the city

seems more ragged than usual. A nearby building
appears to be on fire. There's a sulphurous stench
in the air. Broken glass and rubble litter the streets.
People lie on the pavement and in doorways,
seemingly dead. Your terror turns to panic when
you notice a rat gnawing on a corpse. Screaming,
you rush to the bathroom to throw up. From your
skeletal reflection in the mirror, you realise you
too have died: empty eye sockets stare back at you
from a hollow skull.

The end of the world? Not exactly. Hallucination?

Yes. The vision of death described above is typical
of the onset of the psychological condition known
as the Acute Schizophrenic Break Syndrome.
According to official statistics, it affected from
sixty-six million to one hundred and thirty two
million people in 1994, depending on the method
The Scream
by Edvard Munch, 1893
of clinical definition. Broadly speaking, this
©1999 The Munch Museum represents from one to two percent of the general
population – one in five hospital beds – who have
been brought to a mental hospital, diagnosed, and
chronically medicated. Most will forfeit their job,
their friends and their family. Many lose their
home. They constitute thirty-three percent of the
homeless in America today. Whether in the
hospital, at home, or discharged onto the street,
these are ordinary people whose normal lives were
suddenly interrupted by the unexpected,
spontaneous, and powerful onset of a dramatic
non-ordinary state of consciousness. The vision
typically begins with Apocalyptic scenes of death
and world destruction.

Let's go back to that scene for a moment. As you are hysterically rushed through the traffic,
away from family and friends in a screaming ambulance, how could you possibly know that it
is not yourself who has come to an end, only your precious personality that has died? When
you arrive at the hospital, the admitting psychiatrist informs you that you've had a Nervous
Breakdown, and that you are in urgent need of immediate medication. From the dead look in
his eyes, you get the feeling you may be here forever. While you gulp the goblet of Lethe he
proffers, you wonder whether you will ever return to the land of the living. Soon, the Lithium
or Thorazine takes over like a dose of deadly nightshade. Then you collapse into a dreamless
sleep. When you wake up much later on, the vision is gone. But there is a great emptiness, a
hollow feeling, as if the lights went out. For years afterwards, perhaps till the end of your
days, your life is reduced to a kind of limbo in which you eke out a meaningless existence,
popping pills to keep the vision from coming back to haunt you, a pathetic shadow of your
former self.

There is, however, more to this than meets the outer eye. Over
half a century ago in Küsnacht, Switzerland, the psychiatrist
Carl Gustav Jung came to feel that psychological health is a
dynamic, on-going process of personal development into
greater maturity and spiritual awareness. This process – which
he called individuation – is, he said, nourished by a
continuous flow of symbolic insights transmitted from the
unconscious Self to the conscious Ego, in a variety of ways
including dreams, insight, and flashes of intuition. Should this
inner communication flow get blocked for any reason, one
may find oneself increasingly frustrated, for the simple reason
that one has lost touch with the built-in guiding system of
one's deeper Self.
    
In Jung's view, if such a blockage persists in time, one
Carl Jung
becomes alienated – in the sense that one may no longer be
able to use the considerable resources of one's innate common
sense to adapt effectively to one's social environment.
Alienation, of course, also happens on a collective level
within the family, society, and civilisation, in which case the
context one may have trouble adapting to includes not only
the social, but the ecological environment as well. Whether
individual or collective, a chronic blockage of the psyche's
inner communications process may lead beyond a mere sense
of ennui, and eventually jeopardise the ability to be
responsible for one's health and survival.

What really took Jung's colleagues by surprise, however, was his declaration that the so-called
acute schizophrenic break phenomenon is actually no disease, but rather a natural (and
temporary!) healing process – which automatically activates itself in response to the
underlying blockage which I have just described. Jung maintained that the spontaneous onset
of the visionary state of consciousness is nature's self-organising way for the alienated psyche
to become whole again. In his view, when the Ego has become cut off from the rest of the
psyche to a point of real distress, the Self "comes to the rescue" through a temporary, but
complete overpowering of the conscious personality by means of a vivid upwelling of
hallucinatory voices and visions from the deeper levels of the unconscious. The conscious
Ego, that is, falls apart and comes back together again, renewed. If one understands the
essentially life-affirming nature of the visions which occurs during this metamorphosis,
appreciates their symbolic relevance to the problems at hand, and integrates their deeper
meaning, the result is a healing of the alienated condition which prevailed before the onset of
the so-called illness itself – and a rebirth of the personality as a more integrated, invigorated
whole.

Back in Vienna however, Sigmund Freud did not approve of his former pupil's new discovery.
Nor, apparently, do most psychiatrists, psychologists and psychoanalysts today, who – unable
to incorporate the new data into the outdated mechanistic world views of mainstream
psychiatry and allopathic medicine – stubbornly persist in clinging to Freud's simplistic
doctrine that "schizophrenia" is all pathological hodge-podge and meaningless delusion. Since
Jung first proposed his symbolic and transformative view of the matter however, his
transpersonal approach has been further explored by some of the best scientists and thinkers of
the twentieth century. Prominent among these have been comparative mythologist Joseph
Campbell (4) through his global survey of cosmologies; biological philosopher Gregory
Bateson (5) through his research in the cybernetics of self-organising systems; medical
anthropologist Joan Halifax (6) through her trans-cultural study of shamanism; anthropologist
Terrence McKenna (7) through his ethno-botanical explorations; and psychiatrists R.D.Laing
(8), John Weir Perry (9), and Stanislav Grof (10), whose brilliant research and assistance to
people in visionary states of consciousness have helped to bring about a fundamental
paradigm-shift in our scientific understanding of the human psyche.

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, however, orthodox psychiatrists and the
general public still make the category mistake of viewing the phenomenon as a disease in need
of medical intervention and control. They are like the Pope Urban VIII, who, when invited by
Galileo in 1611 to look through his telescope – and see with his own eyes evidence of
Copernicus's 1547 discovery that the Earth is not the centre of our solar system – was
unwilling to deal with the cosmological implications of this new realisation. Rather than admit
the limitations of his own belief system, he simply refused to look through the telescope – and
had the man sent into exile (11). The consequences of such arrogance are devastating.

First off, at the individual level, there's the insult, humiliation and suffering that are inflicted
on the person who has the visionary experience. At the onset of the hallucinations, he or she is
inevitably surprised, frightened, rejected, and delivered into the hands of the psychiatric
establishment. With all the code words and ritual paraphernalia of a spiritual priesthood, these
doctors of medicine will issue an authoritative diagnosis declaring that one's perception of
reality is completely wrong, that one has contracted an incurable disease, that one has become
an acute schizophrenic, that the problem is caused either by a biochemical imbalance (12)
requiring chemical medication, or by a genetic defect (13), and that one had better submit to
whatever treatment these doctors may prescribe (whether one likes it or not, since it is for
one's own good). By this stage those societies who are thus prejudiced have already robbed the
so-called schizophrenic person of his or her ontological dignity as a human being. In the USA,
10% of those diagnosed end up committing suicide.
Then comes the treatment. Allopathic medicine, which has shown so much enthusiasm for
attacking the symptoms of disease, has perfected a complete technological arsenal with which
to bring the unfolding of one's visionary voyage to a total standstill. The methods used include
lobotomy (14), electroshock, forced sterilisation (15), behaviour modification, insulin coma
therapy, and heavy medication with a veritable smorgasbord of "anti-psychotic" drugs
guaranteed to reduce even the most dazzling visionary states to total darkness. Jung remarked
"with what passion people today believe that psychological complications can be made to
magically disappear, by means of hormones, narcotics, insulin shocks and convulsion
therapy." The direct result of such treatment, apart from having one's nervous tissues
physically destroyed, permanently short-circuited, or saturated with a mind-bending cocktail
of consciousness-reducing chemicals, is the prognosis of chronic or lifelong illness, and the
concurrent prescription of continuous and costly medication. This conveniently provides a
guaranteed market – and considerable profits – for the pharmaceutical drug companies whose
financial largesse also endows many a chair of medicine in our universities, perpetuating the
vicious circle of misinformation to a new generations of doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists
and nurses. As for any actual healing of the alienated condition which precipitated the break in
the first place, you might as well forget it.

At the cultural level a less obvious, but perhaps more serious result in this respect is the social
cost a society must pay, which refuses – a priori – to integrate the insights of those experiences
which may transmit a transformative vision both of the individual and of the body politic.

Most Western doctors and nurses, by the time they graduate, have been thoroughly
indoctrinated to believe that all non-ordinary states of consciousness are pathological, and
automatically proceed to plot the behavioural minutiae of their victims' symptomatology on a
kind of Cartesian thought-disorder grid, a diagnostic equivalent of a paint-by-numbers
formula, which is spelled out with implacable logic in the Kafkaesque bible of their trade, the
DSM V (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual V.) This encyclopaedia of psychiatric definitions
(now in its umpteenth reprinting, internationally-distributed, and translated into more than a
dozen languages) is used by psychiatrists, insurance companies, and courts. (16)

A brief historical summary of how this reactionary fear and suppression of visionary states has
come about will help to clarify the political and social significance of the emergent
transpersonal approach. This should also show why until we as a society learn to integrate
such visionary experiences into our private and social lives, we shall have little hope of
avoiding an Apocalypse of the external kind in the long run. Unlike the hundreds of thousands
of pre-urban societies – in which the existence and psycho-spiritual validity of non-ordinary
states of consciousness is or was socially recognised and ritually endorsed since Palaeolithic
times – our newfangled industrial civilisation is one in which the unconscious has, until very
recently, been to all intents and purposes taboo. The historical events which led to this taboo
are somewhat astounding.

In his book The Divided Self, R.D.Laing first set forth the interpersonal and social ecology of
schizophrenia, which until then had only been described as an intra-psychic phenomenon. The
first time we met, I asked him about this taboo against visionary states, and he pointed out that
it began in Europe in the fifteenth century, when the proto-scientific experiments of Medieval
alchemists produced the first philosophical seed-stones of scientific thought, which as we can
see in retrospect, have rather dramatically changed Humankind's relationship to the Universe.

Non-ordinary states of consciousness have been understood to serve a healing or

transformative function in every tribal society studied by anthropologists – but not the urban
civilisation in which we live. They are particularly evident in the last remaining hunter-
gatherer and nomadic indigenous peoples who still survive in the remoter parts of North and
South America, the Arctic, Asia, Africa, Oceania and Australia. In such cultures, visionary
states are always associated with the healing function of the shaman. In this context, as Joan
Halifax explains in her book Shamanic Voices, the vision of the shaman forms the
quintessential religious experience:

"The shaman, a mystical, priestly and political figure... can be described not
only as a specialist in the human soul, but also as a generalist whose sacred and
social functions can cover an extraordinarily wide range of activities. Shamans
are not only spiritual leaders but also judges and politicians, the repositories of
the knowledge of the culture's history, both sacred and popular... Above all
however, shamans are technicians of the sacred and masters of ecstasy...

The initiatory crisis of the shaman must...be designated as a religious

experience, one that has persisted since at least Palaeolithic times, and is
probably as old as human consciousness itself, when the first feelings of awe
and wonder were awakened in primates. From this perspective, the initiation of
the shaman is an ahistorical event, transcending the confines of culture and
bringing into focus ontological concerns that have existed within the human
mind for aeons...

The healing image that the shaman projects is of disease as a manifestation of

the transformative impulse in the human organism. The crisis of a powerful
illness can also be the central experience of the shaman's initiation. It involves
an encounter with forces that decay and destroy. The shaman not only survives
the ordeal of a debilitating sickness or an accident, but is healed in the process.
Illness then becomes the vehicle to a higher plane of consciousness. The
evolution from the state of psychic and physical disintegration to shamanising
is effected through the experience of self-cure. The shaman – and only the
shaman – is a healer who has healed himself." (17)

But most of the current information about shamanism available in the West necessarily comes
from anthropological sources in South America, Asia, and Africa, and as such it comes to us in
foreign clothing. When European settlers annihilated most of the Native American peoples,
they were not only ignorant of their own shamanic traditions, but they also rode roughshod
over a living shamanism from which they might have learnt a thing or two. For Europeans and
European Americans to better understand what this healing system is all about, we must also
turn to our own traditions. Has anyone ever heard of an European shamanic tradition, apart
from that of the Saami in remote Lapland? (18) Western culture is an urban one, and nouveaux
city folk all too eagerly forget the peasant wisdom of their village-dwelling ancestors. People
have lived in Europe for at least 250 thousand years, but the first European towns only
appeared upon the land in the second millennium BCE at Minos in Crete, spreading thence in
the first millennium BCE to Greece and its colonies, eventually leading to the foundation of
Rome in 753 BCE. Their serious implantation began from there in the first century BCE when
Julius Caesar expanded the frontiers of the Roman Empire beyond the natural boundaries of
his ancestral Italy. Until then, the bronze-age societies of Europe – including Ireland, England,
Scotland, Wales, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Austria,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Jugoslavia, Northern Italy, Greece and Spain – were
predominantly Celtic, a tribal people whose culture has all but disappeared with the advent of
civilisation.

Except, as it happens especially, in Ireland.

Unlike Brittany, Wales, and England, the
Romans never managed to conquer this
Western island, and although some towns do
exist, the oldest, Dublin, is only ten centuries
old. All of these were founded by foreigners –
Viking, Norman, or English invaders – whose
habit of huddling together in the centralised
urban way was considered alien, and whose
military garrison-towns never completely
   succeeded in entirely wiping out the far more
ancient and decentralised tribal culture of the
native Celts. Unlike Scotland, the Irish never
fully accepted English conquest. And due to its
geographical isolation on the Westernmost
fringe of the Old World, the contemporary Irish
language is (except for Basque and Sami) the
oldest, its mythology the most archaic, its
folklore and traditional music the most
voluminous in Europe.

And the Irish megalithic artworks – dating from the Pre-Celtic Neolithic era – are the earliest
known astronomical observatories on the planet. Not having had its tribal memory severed by
the Roman Empire, Irish mythology thus transmits a cultural continuum that reaches nine
thousand years through history, through the bronze and iron ages of prehistory, back to the
Neolithic stone age. Because of this great antiquity, Irish mythology provides a kind of
anthropological time-machine through which twentieth century Westerners can obtain a
revealing glimpse of their psycho-social past, before the birth of civilisation and the
proliferation of overpopulated cities which are devastating the planetary biosphere today. (19)

The Celts were Indo-European, patriarchal, aristocratic cattle herders. When they came to
Ireland, they had sacral Kings, and a highly-privileged caste of learned people called the Aés
Dána (literally: People of Art). The latter's primary responsibility was to transmit the senchas
or tradition through the generations. Like the Brahmin of Vedic India, they constituted a
distinct social class whose legal privileges were equal to – or greater than – those of the
aristocracy. (20) This intellectual élite included druíd (musician-shamans), fílid (poets,
literally: seers), fáith (prophets), seanchaí (geneaologist-historians), brithemain (jurists), and
the ollamh (psychopomp) whose legal status was higher than that of the King or Queen.
Ireland considered the arts as sacred, to such an extent that during the Dark Ages after the fall
of Rome, the Irish monasteries almost single-handedly kept the flame of Classical civilisation
alive in Europe, and the country became known as the Land of Saints and Scholars. Even
today, artists in Ireland must not pay income tax!

Regarding "schizophrenia", it seems that this modern concept did not exist as such then.
Certainly no term with such derogatory connotations exists in the Irish vocabulary. The
closest Gaelic idioms translate into English as being touched by God, or having been taken –
by which is meant that the person has been taken to the Other World. How shamanic can you
get? Under the Celtic Brehon law, "insane" persons were under the guardianship of an adult
male relative who was responsible for any offences which they might commit. Irish law was
concerned that the rights of the insane should not be exploited: one text lays down the general
principle that "the rights of the insane take precedence over any other rights.

   That visionary experiences were held in such high respect is

Fairies illustration by Arthur
Rackham
from Peter Pan in Kensington
Gardens, 1893
clear from the thousands of references to the Tuatha Dé
Danaan, i.e. the People of the Goddess Danu or Diana (21) –
otherwise known as the Good People or Faery folk – who
are said to live in this Other World. To find the origin of this
ancient European idea of "schizophrenia" as a different
place, we must go back to the Irish sagas and mythology
about these People of the Goddess, who inhabited the island
from the New Stone Age until the arrival of the Celts much
later on. By all accounts they were a peaceful, gentle
matriarchal race who developed the arts of music and
astronomy to great excellence. In fact they built thousands
of megaliths – i.e. stone astronomical observatories –
hundreds of which still adorn the landscape. The most
famous of these is Newgrange (described in chapter 4),
which dates to 3,200 BCE. Those in the West of Ireland are
even older, going as far back as 5,400 BCE, entire millennia
before Stonehenge or the pyramids at Giza.(22).

Numerous legends mention the Tuatha Dé Danaan as semi-

divine, immortal beings, of great physical beauty, with a
 kind and playful nature, and an extraordinary ability to
enchant human beings, animals and plants alike with a
sweetly intoxicating music. How these Good People then
came to live in the Other World is explained in a legend
whose basic metaphor is a veritable psychological peach.

The saga tells of how the sons of Míl, a Celtic King from Galicia in Spain, sailed with their
retinue to the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry – on the South-Western tip of Ireland –
sometime in the second millennium BCE. Upon first landing, these seafarers informed the
People of the Goddess that they were coming to invade their country. A great battle was
arranged near the coast on the mountain called called Slieve Mish, it having been agreed
beforehand that if the invaders won, they could stay and the People of the Goddess would
have to leave, and vice versa. To make a long story short, the Celts were armed to the teeth,
and won the battle. And, true to their word, the People of the Goddess departed. But instead of
putting out to sea by ship, the legend says they "left their bodies" and disappeared off the face
of the Earth. Well, to be precise, not off the Earth, but into it – into the Other World which
lies hidden underground. Known in Irish as the Land of the Shídhe, it is conceived as a kind of
Buddha Realm, and thus exists not only in a different place, but also outside of time as we
know it. This Celtic Other World is analogous to the Australian aborigines' "Dreamtime" (23)
– a hidden dimension of eternity beyond time, where the People of the Goddess still exist, and
from which they occasionally return, appearing to mortal eyes in the form of the Faery People
or Good People. This lovely story symbolically illustrates the archaeology of the European
psyche as it changed its focus from participation mystique to patriarchal power. The myth
illustrates how the ecological consciousness of our matriarchal ancestors, being repressed by
patriarchal violence, went "underground" into the collective unconscious, where it is still alive
and well.

Once comfortably settled on the island, the Celts actually adopted much of the Tuatha Dé
Danann culture as their own; no doubt many of the People of the Goddess remained in the
flesh to intermarry with the invaders and pass on their Neolithic traditions to the new hybrid
culture; what is certain is that the Celtic Druids were widely believed to obtain their superior
wisdom and musical virtuosity from periodic trance-journeys to this Other World. Thousands
of myths, sagas, legends, fairytales, stories and anecdotes attest to the belief that although
usually invisible to mortal eyes, the Good People are still very much alive in their
subterranean Kingdom, and very much aware of us, though we may deny their existence.
Their frequent "appearance" in visionary states was usually considered a blessing and a clear
indication of the observer's sensitivity and compassion. As the great anthropologist and
Tibetologist W.Y.Evans-Wentz reports in his book The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, (24) –
written after a field trip to Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Brittany in 1908 and 1919 – this
shamanic belief in "travel between the worlds" was very much alive – Christianity
notwithstanding – right up until the twentieth century, when it virtually disappeared in the
eco-social aftermath of British conquest, industrial revolution, potato monoculture, crop
failure, famine, armed resistance, revolution and war. We shall return to this theme of a place
outside of time and its relation to Irish megalithic art in the last section of this book.
On the European continent, however, the extinction of shamanism was accomplished much
more rapidly and with intention. Soon after Julius Caesar appeared upon the scene, he sought
to control and expand the Roman Empire for his own perverted glory. Caesar perceived the
Druids – with their ancient tradition of appointing Kings and Queens from the aristocracy
through the method of election rather than birthright – as a primary threat to his plans. The
Emperor was the prototypical fascist, and such protodemocratic principles may have reminded
him of the Roman Senate (originally modelled on the democratic ideal of the Greek
Parliament) which he was also at such pains to dismantle. He was prevented from
accomplishing the latter only at the last minute on the Forum steps, as Shakespeare reminds
us, whence his nephew Brutus dispatched him to Hades. Although he may have failed to
smother democracy at home, Caesar did succeed in mounting a veritable scorched-earth
campaign against the Continental and British Druids, and all other indigenous traditions as
well. As Carl Jung put it, "In those times, the omnipresent, crushing power of Rome embodied
in the divine Caesar, had created a world where countless individuals, indeed whole peoples,
were robbed if their cultural independence and of their spiritual autonomy." (25) As Julius
Caesar himself reports in his Gallic Wars, he sent commandos of Roman legionnaires on
search-and-destroy missions as far away as Wales to cut down their sacred oak groves.
European schoolchildren remember his motto: "I came, I saw, I conquered." It was the first
battle in the European war on shamanism, and the beginning of the end of the archaic era
presided over by the Goddess.

In the four centuries after Jesus, the crumbling Empire converted to Christianity, with the
Church of Rome at its centre. The internal contradictions of this organised religion soon
distorted the original teachings of Jesus to suit its own strange blend of dogma, priestcraft,
colonialism, and corruption (26). The patriarchal creed of absolute monopoly on truth, along
with the priests' intolerance of any religious experience that is not mediated by them was a
thinly disguised grab for authoritarian control of the minds of the people. This was anathema
to the Shamanic way of having one's religious experience straight from the source. Having
received its first mortal wound from Caesar's macho legionnaires, shamanism thus suffered a
long, slow decline at the hands of the Catholic priests, and was banished to dark forests far
away from monasteries and the infallible authority of God's exclusive representatives on
Earth. By the late middle ages, when the Popes had assumed an imperial monopoly over
things spiritual, the Old Religion of the Goddess and the healing function of shamanism, after
centuries of repression, became increasingly associated with Devil-worship.

It was in this period just before the Renaissance, when European cosmology was undergoing
its metamorphosis from the Alchemical to the Scientific world view, that the European taboo
against visionary experiences finally became explicit.

From the viewpoint of the Mediaeval psyche, the greatest philosophical challenge initially
posed by the emergence of Science was the implication that Man was now, for the second
time since Creation, sinking his teeth into that forbidden apple from the Tree of Knowledge. It
the first bite had indeed been responsible for the original expulsion from Eden, sensitive souls
must have wondered what divine retribution might be in store this time around. Could the
unconscious have known that the distillation of Science from the Alchemical bottle would
conjure up a technological Genie? Could people have had visions of this genie deforesting the
planet, terminating the existence of thousands of species, unleashing upon us two world wars,
and threatening our own demise – just four centuries later? Some technology is appropriate,
and some isn't. But the Mediaeval psyche which witnessed the start of Humankind's scientific
adventure must have intimated its Promethean aspect, a stepping-forth upon holy ground, a
going where angels fear to tread, and felt a terror, a sadness, and a loss.

In terms of the old European cosmology, this world view transformation entailed a final
splitting apart of what had been considered sacred and profane. No longer was the Earth itself
seen as the sacred embodiment of the immanent Goddess but as a great estate divinely created
by a transcendent (but nevertheless omnipresent) God, for human beings to rule (27). From
now on it was defined rather more matter-of-factly in the secular language of real estate, a
commodity which scientific man claimed the right to do with as he pleased, seizing for his
newly-created needs whatever land, plants, animals or other human beings he was capable of
conquering or extracting by force and ingenuity. This was the coup de grâce for the Old
Religion – whose ancient metaphor of the Great Mother (28) implicitly evoked respect for the
procreative power of nature. Instead there occurred a wholesale projection of ratioanalytic
manipulative male dominance, and its purposive attempt to obtain total technological control
over nature – which still holds us in its spell today. The violent, sexist, and patriarchal
psychological attitude associated with this enterprise was made quite explicit in by Francis
Bacon, the Attorney General of King James I of England, who taught fledgling scientists that
their duty was to "hound Nature in her wanderings", "bind her into service", and make her
their "slave". He exhorted them to "torture Nature's secrets from her", and "put her in
constraint" (29) – which, as we now see, they did.

     As Yin to Yang, a compensation of this

unbalanced attitude came about through an
outbreak of libido from the collective
unconscious, which made itself felt through a
flurry of visionary states – complete with
feelings of imminent world destruction – in the
mind-at-large of the general population. The
German artist Albrech Durer (1471 - 1528) was
fascinated by this theme, and produced a whole
series of very vivid images depicting the Biblical
Apocalypse with great imagination (see left).
But the Church's priests – having already thrown
out the spiritual baby along with the shamanistic
bathwater – had long since lost the necessary
insight to recognise the symbolic nature of this
psychic epidemic, and made the category
mistake of interpreting the visions literally. The
main metaphor had to do with loss of fertility.
Pope Innocent VIII, for example, declared his
 belief that:
The Apocalypse: Breaking of the Sixth Seal
by Albrecht Durer, 1496 / 98   Click on image for enlarged view
"Many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their
own salvation and straying from the Catholic
Faith, have abandoned themselves to devils,
incubi and succubi, and by their incantations,
spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms
and crafts, enormities and horrid offences, have
slain infants yet in the mother's womb, as also
the offspring of cattle, blasting the produce of
the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruits of
trees, nay, men and women, beasts of burden,
herd-beasts, as well as animals of other kinds,
with terrible and piteous pains and sore diseases,
both internal and external; they hinder men from
performing the sexual act and women from
conceiving, whence husbands cannot know their
wives nor wives receive their husbands."(30)

The visionary epidemic seems to have been centred in Germany, about whose Teutonic tribes,
by the way, Jung remarked that their conversion to Christianity was accomplished at the point
of the Roman spears (31). A well-documented example concerns the male population of this
area which became so paranoid about its virility that large numbers of men reportedly
hallucinated the disappearance of their penises! Documentary evidence of this extraordinary
group delusion may be found throughout the pages of the Maleus Maleficarum (32) – i.e. The
Hammer of Witchcraft – a book written by two professors of theology at the University of
Köln, Father Jacobus Sprenger, and Henricus Institores (also known as Prior Heinrich Kramer)
in 1484. According to the turgid ecclesiastical language of the text, the Devil had recently
begun to go about the area "causing some temporary or permanent impediment in the conjugal
act", "such freezing up of the generative forces that men are unable to perform the necessary
action for begetting offspring", while witches were causing an "obstruction of the procreant
function", in such a way as to "directly prevent the erection of the member which is
accommodated to fructification" and to "prevent the flow of vital essences to the members in
which resides the motive force, closing up the seminal ducts so that it does not reach the
generative vessels, or so that it cannot be ejaculated, or is fruitlessly spilled." Rhetorically, the
authors asked:

"And what, then, is to be thought of those witches who in this way sometimes
collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members
together, and put them in a bird's nest, or shut them up in a box, where they
move themselves like living members and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by
many and is a matter of common report?... For a certain man tells that, when he
had lost his member, he approached a known witch and to ask her to restore it to
him. She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take
that which he liked out of a nest in which there were several members. And
 when he tried to take the big one, the witch said: You must not take that one;
adding, because it belonged to a parish priest."
   
The Woman of Babylon (detail), by Albrecht Durer, 1496 / 98. The
woman-temptress is riding a seven-headed dragon, leaving a trail of
destruction behind her, including a riverside city bursting into
flames. Click here for whole picture (large 1.3MB file)
Not surprisingly, men blamed the widespread
"theft" of their penis on woman. Woman, whose
affair with the Serpent in the Garden had already
brought her the blame for the original expulsion
from Eden, (and the accumulated guilt for the
transmission of Original Sin ever since), was
now projected as Satan's prime agent in the
cosmic battle between God and the Devil.
Women were accused of participating in a huge
conspiracy against civilisation. Pleading at the
pulpit, preachers exhorted their flocks to save
their souls from eternal damnation by joining
ranks to fight the greatest plague of "witchcraft"
in the history of Christendom. In passing, it
should be noted that the English word
"witchcraft" means the art and craft of the wise,
from wit, to know.
To make matters worse, the Reverend Henricus
Institores then succeeded in obtaining a Papal
Bull, titled Summis Desiderantes Affectibus (33),
from the newly-elected Pope Innocent VIII in
Rome. Dated December 9th. 1484, this
document lent the enormous politico-religious
clout of the Vatican's imprimatur to an organised
attempt to suppress these visionary experiences
by giving the Holy Inquisition against so-called
"witches" an energising power and an authority
which it had never enjoyed before. People got
their metaphors mixed up and mistook the inner
for the outer and the outer for the inner. Not only
was it declared a mortal sin for witches to "fly"
through the sky with the Pagan Goddess Diana
(in the external sense of flying), it was also a
heresy – punishable by torture and death – not to
believe that witches really flew!
The dream had become real. People became
hysterical. The book received an Official Letter
of Approbation from the Faculty of Theology at
the University of Köln in 1487, and was
 immediately followed by a series of
excommunications, including that of the great
Florentine humanist Pico della Mirandola, the
first Christian philosopher to profess the
universality of all religions. The Vatican
appointed a notorious Spanish sadist, Tomás de
Torquemada, to the post of Grand Inquisitor.
The Malleus Maleficarum became the official
textbook of the campaign, and was a best-seller
for the next two hundred years. It was
republished in thirteen editions up to 1520,
followed by sixteen more between 1574 and
1669.

Read symbolically, this hallucinated loss of the male procreative member was, of course, a
perfectly apt metaphor for the apprehension which might be felt at the level of the collective
unconscious regarding the possible consequences of man's impending technological take-over
of natural creation. Lacking the very shamanic expertise which they were now seeking to
exterminate, all the hallucinating priests of the Church of Rome could do was gape in terror
between their legs, declare their feared castration to be the work of She-Devils, and set out on a
great crusade against these hallucinated Hordes of Satan. For this purpose, the Church
unleashed the Dominican Order (nick-named Domini Canis, i.e. the Hound of God) to
persecute the heresy, and trained its recruits with special techniques to track down and torture
its victims with an obscene array of devices designed to induce the most abominable agonies
imaginable (34).

Mystics, midwives, medicine-women, herbalists, healers, moon-worshipers, virgins, and

simple-minded girls – along with the occasional troublesome mistress and mother-in-law –
were rounded up by the thousands, and brought to the Inquisitor in chains. But it didn't stop
there. Children, too, were killed. At Würtzburg the child victims included boys of ten and
eleven, two twelve-year old choirboys, "a boy of twelve years old in one of the lower forms of
the school, the two young sons of the Prince's cook, the eldest fourteen, the younger twelve
years old, and several pages and seminarists." An unknown number of girls were also
condemned, including "a child of nine years old and her little sister." Our little best-seller
includes a list of titillating techniques with which to reveal the true allegiance of these women
and children by forced "confession" under torture, prior to being burned alive at the stake.

It should be emphasised that the extraordinary cruelty which the Church used in this crusade
against women must rank amongst the most bloodthirsty spectacles in all recorded history,
outstripping even the Nazi holocaust in its exhibition of brutality. At least the Nazis felt enough
shame that they concealed their atrocities from public scrutiny behind the barbed wire fences of
remote concentration camps. This Christian holocaust however, was carried out in public,
across the town squares of Europe, before the eyes and ears of the assembled citizens who were
exhorted to attend. Having first stripped, starved, beaten, tortured and no doubt sexually
molested their prey for days on end, our holy fathers then staged the sort of Kafkaesque trials in
which the guilt of the accused is a foregone conclusion. The recent ancestors of present-day
Americans and Europeans then burned alive an estimated six hundred thousand to two million
women between 1350 and 1750, like so much meat on a grill (35). In the very proper city of
Geneva, for example, the archives show that three hundred women were once roasted on a
single day. In 1514 three hundred people were burned alive at Como. More than six thousand
were burned in the Diocese of Strasburg between 1615 and 1635 (36). And according to
Bartholomew de Spina, a thousand people were put to death each year – for twenty five years –
in Lombardy (37). In Germany one woman was tortured not once but fifty-six times. The
Church, of course, did not restrict this practice to Europe, but inflicted its terror also upon the
Indigenous Peoples in the colonies, especially in the Americans and Africa.(38) One has to ask
who really was "possessed by the Devil?" The fact that this ethnic cleansing of the Old
Religion has all been conveniently forgotten only goes to show how much we are still suffering
from its psychological consequences. The Church has, as far as I know, has never really
admitted its mistake, apologised, or restituted the lands, buildings, and other properties that
were confiscated to the families of the victims.

From a psychological viewpoint, it is important to bear in mind that this mass brutality was
carried out by human beings so unaware of their own motives that they could hypocritically
justify this final solution as a pure and holy act, performed in the service of God, with the
complete sanction of a religion whose official mottoes were to "Love thy neighbour" and "Do
as you would be done by!" Such insane violence is a classical example of what can happen all
too easily when a culture which has lost touch with its psychological roots suddenly
experiences a flurry of visionary states. People take the visions literally, panic, and all Hell
breaks loose.

So along with our technological and scientific lust to dominate external nature, came a
corresponding attempt to achieve control over the mysterious motions of the Self within.
R.D.Laing, who had a particular interest in family history, pointed out that this Inquisition took
place a mere 18 generations back. Humankind goes back about 100,000 generations before that,
during which time the taboo against non-ordinary states of consciousness did not exist. So in
terms of family history (and therefore of the collective unconscious), it is a very recent
phenomenon indeed. As we know from psychological studies of Jewish survivors of the
Holocaust (39), the psychological reverberations of such social catastrophes linger deep in the
psyche, long after the events themselves and their protagonists have passed away. There can be
little doubt that the pathological terror of non-ordinary states of consciousness which exploded
during the Inquisition still echoes somewhere in the subterranean caverns of our collective
unconscious. After all, most western people are still easily upset by any perturbation which
they cannot control – and terrified if it should arise within their own head! Let us not forget that
it took an eccentric Viennese Jew like Sigmund Freud to reintroduce the mere concept of the
unconscious into Western culture, a rare Swiss visionary like Carl Jung to strip it of its negative
associations, and a gadfly Irish-American Harvard Professor like Timothy Leary (40) – armed
with seventeen million doses of the psychedelic drug LSD – to re-establish visionary
experience as a subject for dinner-party conversation four hundred years later.

Now that psychoanalysis and psychedelic research have partially eroded the taboo against the
unconscious, pioneering researchers in the fields of clinical psychology, biophysics,
neurophysiology, epistemology, cybernetics, comparative mythology, anthropology and the
humanistic and transpersonal approaches to psychology have accumulated a considerable body
of scientific data about the inner aspects of the visionary episode itself. As a consequence, our
understanding of non-ordinary states of consciousness has changed utterly – that is to say, what
passes for "madness" in a society which is rapidly destroying the very ecosystem on which its
own survival as a species depends. The magnitude of the paranoia which leads us to such
recklessness may be appreciated when one realises that in 1988 our annual global military
budget outstripped the total combined income of the poorer half of Humankind! If this is not
insanity, what is?

Faced with evidence of our collective alienation writ so large upon the wall, many people
search for technological fixes, political leaders, or religious messiahs to steer them away from
disaster. But the guidance we need will not be found in any single individual. As former United
Nations Assistant Secretary General Robert Müller once told me, "It is the five billion people
of this world who have the future in their hands". We're going to have to find the common
sense within ourselves. Buckminster Fuller expressed the same idea in slightly different terms:
"The human race is now about to enter its cosmic examination of integrity: on personal
integrity hangs humanity's fate." (41)

As you will see in the interview with Dr. John Weir Perry in the next section of this text, there
is an Aria