Archetype of the Apocalypse Lecture Two

Judgment:  Confrontation with the Shadow

By Bob Bongiovanni, MA

 

To recap our lecture series so far, we have discussed that the widespread, cross-cultural, and long standing belief in an impending end to the world is based on an archetype, which we are calling the Archetype of the Apocalypse.  Like all archetypes, this one has both an individual and a collective expression, and these two expressions mirror one another. 

 

On the individual level, we live our daily lives, operating out of a fairly limited ego consciousness.  We have our likes and dislikes, our views of right and wrong, our perceptions or reality, all shaped primarily by our personal history.  More specifically, most of who we think we are is rooted in how we’ve been rewarded and wounded in the past.  Those rewards and wounds have resulted in complexes, feeling laden patterns that drive reactions, paradigms, and behaviors for most of humanity.  So we go merrily along, thinking that is the only way to be.  Then comes a revelation.  The transpersonal Self floods consciousness with images and symbols from the collective unconscious.  This can be a humbling, even shattering, experience for the ego, which thought it was the prince of its own domain.  What are these images?  Where are they coming from?  I don’t think I am making them up – but that means that I am not alone in the psyche.  There is another force, perhaps a greater force, than my ego.

 

A healthy ego takes an attitude of curiosity and experimentation when confronted with revelations.  A rigid ego resists, denies, and attempts to repress, thus denying this great opportunity for growth, and perhaps suffering a breakdown in the process. 

 

An analogous process occurs on the collective level.  Our culture, our society, goes merrily along assuming its norms, values, and beliefs are grounded in absolute truth.  We live in a time of scarcity, right? – we have to fight, to compete, to keep the hungry masses from taking what’s ours.  The greatest powers on the planet are governments and corporations, right? – the true mark of success is to rise to the top of one of these collectives and be rewarded accordingly.  God is a distant observer, or perhaps just a myth, right? – Even if he does exist, he can be manipulated by sanctioned prayers in a traditional house of worship.  A collective revelation is on its way that will reveal the falsity of all these collective ideas.  Even the most skeptical will have to admit that they have been wrong.  The formerly downtrodden will assume their rightful places.

 

As if that’s not enough, revelation is actually just the first of the four parts of the archetype of the apocalypse.  Next comes judgment, followed by destruction, and ending with the appearing of a new world.  Last week, we covered revelation.  This week, we’ll cover judgment, relying again on Edward Edinger’s book Archetype of the Apocalypse and on the New Testament for source material.

 

The New Testament Book of Revelation contains several scenes where individuals and groups are judged.  In chapter 20, for instance, we find the following:

Then I saw a great white throne and the One who was sitting on it. In his presence, earth and sky vanished, leaving no trace. I saw the dead, great and small alike, standing in front of his throne while the books lay open. And another book was opened, which is the book of life, and the dead were judged from what was written in the books, as their deeds deserved. (20:11—12)

 

There’s actually a more lengthy passage from the Gospel of Matthew that brings even greater insight into the process of judgment:

 

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, escorted by all the angels, then he will take his seat on his throne of glory. All nations will be assembled before him and he will separate people one from another as the shepherd separates sheep from goats. He will place the sheep on his right hand and the goats on his left. Then the King will say to those on his right hand, "Come, you whom my Father has blessed, take as your heritage the kingdom prepared for you since the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you made me welcome, lack­ing clothes and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to see me." Then the upright will say to him in reply, "Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and make you welcome, lack­ing clothes and clothe you? When did we find you sick or in prison and go to see you?" And the King will answer, "In truth I tell you, in so far as you did this to one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me." Then he will say to those on his left hand, "Go away from me, with your curse upon you, to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you never gave me food, I was thirsty and you never gave me anything to drink, I was a stranger and you never made me welcome, lacking clothes and you never clothed me, sick and in prison and you never visited me." Then it will be their turn to ask, "Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty, a stranger or lacking clothes, sick or in prison, and did not come to your help?" Then he will answer, "in truth I tell you, in so far as you neglected to do this to one of the least of these, you neglected to do it to me." And they will go away to eternal punishment, and the upright to eternal life. (25:31—46)

 

Mainstream, literal-minded Christianity has a straightforward interpretation of all this, of course.  When the time of judgment comes, God will sit with a big book that shows every time you committed a sin, broke some rule, and you will pay the price.  Also, you’d better be nice to hungry, thirsty, lonely, naked, imprisoned, and sick people – if you don’t, that’s also written in that big book, and you’ll be sorry.  We, of course, are not going to leave it at that.  There is a deeper meaning being expressed here, not just meant to provoke fear and guilt, but regarding the psychological and spiritual growth that Jung called individuation.

 

The fundamental process at work during the judgment phase of the apocalypse is the ego coming to grips with itself, seeing itself in the harsh light of truth.  Egos have a myriad of ways to avoid that harsh light – techniques such as rationalization, denial, projection, and so on.  When the ego faces the full-on gaze of the Self, when it is laid bare before the archetype of the archetypes, these techniques will no longer work.  Of course, since we are talking about individuation here, the most painful truth that an ego can face is that it has lived a trivial, meaningless life and has betrayed its true destiny, usually by succumbing to the lure and fear posed by complexes.  That’s the psychological meaning of sin – having lived out of alignment with the Self and thereby wasted the opportunity for individuation.

 

I have used this analogy for individuation before, and it has particular relevance in this context.  Imagine that the essence of the lives of all the humans who have ever lived are part of a huge book – the “book of life” referenced in the passage from Revelation of John.  The Self longs for this tale to go on, and it particular relishes the passages that are unique.  Not much is added to the book of life when someone lives an extremely conventional life.  But when a person innovates, lives a truly experimental life – individuates, in other words – sentences, paragraphs, even whole pages are added to the book, and the Self rejoices.  The Book and the Self are transformed by such lives.  This is how the Self grows in wholeness and completeness.  This is how mortals achieve a form of immortality; their stories live on in the book of life.  Other humans, who just retraced the well-worn ruts of their ancestors, have stories that are soon forgotten, on heaven as well as earth.  They go into darkness, as if they had never lived at all.

 

The second passage, from Matthew, tells us something else about judgment – it also involves the shadow.  Quoting from Edinger:

 

The Matthew text is particularly important psychologically because it establishes the fact that the "Greater" personality (the Self) is found in the "least" of psychological manifestations. In other words, those aspects of the psyche that the ego despises and which are most likely to be neglected are precisely where the Self resides: "In truth I tell you, in so far as you neglected to do this to one of the least of these, you neglected to do it to me." This is, of course, a kind of paradox, that. the personality in its transpersonal greater form should be manifest in the least. But it makes very good sense psy­chologically, because the process of coming into awareness of one's wholeness involves the acceptance and assimilation of all those shadow aspects that one has previously considered the most despi­cable. The way to the Self is through the "least" aspects of ourselves. . . (page 151)

 

So, the ego must encounter and grapple with painful truths about what has been excluded from the personality.  The listing from the Matthew text is not accidental.  What is it that the ego most fears and tries to deny?  The ego would like to pretend that it can avoid thee frightening fates:  hunger, thirst, loneliness, nakedness, imprisonment, and sickness.  Some of these have to do with disconnection between the body and ego, meeting bodily needs, handling the vulnerabilities of being embodied.  Some of these have to do with being subject to public ridicule and rejection.  Part of the judgment process is coming to grips with these realities and accepting them as part of the human condition, perhaps even necessary for individuation to occur.

This relates back to the idea of the “eye of God,” which we briefly discussed last week.  This theme comes up over and over again in the Book of Revelation.  For instance, the figure of the lamb that opens the seals of the scroll, unleashing the four horses of the apocalypse and other trials for human, was described as having seven eyes.  This has to do with judgment, in that these are the divine eyes that see people as they truly are, behind their masks of persona.  Edinger offers the following commentary:

 

The coming of the Self into visibility is accompanied by the ego's experience of being looked at, being stripped of all disguises and seen for exactly what one is. That is no easy experience to endure. It has the nature of the so-called "Final Judgment," which is no fabrication of priests imposed on human beings from the outside; it is, in fact, an archetypal psychic reality projected from the unconscious into mythological material. Practically all the religions of the world have the notion of a Final Judgment—not necessarily coming in some future time, as in the Book of Revelation, but coming just after death. This objective judg­ment (so often projected into the afterlife) is nevertheless an expe­rience one does not need to die to have. (page 49)

 

There’s another passage in the Book of Revelation that has to do with judgment, from chapter 7:

 

I saw four angels, standing at the four corners of the earth, hold back the four winds of the world to keep them from blowing over land or the sea or any tree. Then I saw another angel rising where the sun rises, carrying the seal of the living God; he called in a powerful to the four angels whose duty was to devastate land and sea. "Wait before you do any damage on land or at sea or to the trees, until we have put the seal on the foreheads of the servants of our God." And I heard how many had been sealed: a hundred and forty-four thousand, out of tribes of Israel. (7:1—4)

 

A catastrophic reshaping of reality is imminent.  Who will have the spiritual and psychological resources to survive the experience?  Edinger believes that the 144,000 refers to the relatively few human beings that are willing to undertake the arduous tasks of individuation.

 

Mainstream, particularly fundamentalist, Christianity proposes that these 144,000 will be spared the painful tribulation that will befall the rest of humanity – that these elect few will be taken up to heaven in a rapture, where they will witness the remainder of the apocalypse but not participate in it.  Edinger says that people who ascribe to this belief are suffering from a dehumanizing inflation, wanting to escape the inevitable human fate.  Once again, there is a psychological process involved here, which Edinger describes as follows:

 

Those of us who are more psychologically alert cannot take this imagery literally, but must admit that it is part of the "living myth" and deserves to be understood. I think the "rapture" refers to the capacity to bear or endure great hardship and distress: provided one understands the circumstances to be meaningful, provided one sees the events one is suffering to be part of a larger purposeful pattern with a goal. That gives the sufferer a certain viewpoint "above" the difficult circumstances, so to speak, and outside the immediate concrete events. It does not put one in heavenly bliss, to be sure, but it does make the events bearable. Psychological experience bears out that way of thinking; it is, at any rate, a way to understand the "rapture" as a symbol.  (page 40)