Catafalque and In The Dark Places of Wisdom

Excerpt from the book Catafalque by Peter Kingsley

"Dreams especially the big dreams, never depict life linearly. They dance around, then back on themselves in spirals. When Jung was reminded in his Kolkata dream of the need to find the healing vessel of the Holy Grail he was being reminded of what he already knew. Jung wrote and lectured on the symbolism of the Grail as it reaches back past the alchemists into the Gnostic and Hermetic traditions of antiquity. He traced it straight back to the symbol of the kratêr, an old Greek word for the mysterious mixing-bowl that initiates threw themselves into to be reborn, transformed. 10 years prior to the Kolkata dream he playfully if unsubtly hinted that this kratêr was the psychological work he did with his patients. Just as the only way for a knight to discover the Grail was by becoming it, and just as the only way to serve the servator mundi is inwardly to be the saviour and protector of the world, so the one and only way to make the kratêr work is by becoming the receptive kratêr oneself. Jung envisaged the entire “prehistory of his psychology” —meaning the history of Jungian Psychology before Carl Jung appeared on the scene—as embodied in one single symbol--the kratêr. Just the same way that he came to equate the mystery of the Grail with the secret of individuation and would see it as his central task to recover the abandoned Grail vessel, he had discovered in the Gnostic vessel of the kratêr the primordial symbol of his own psychology. He made sure to trace this quintessential symbol of the kratêr even further than the Gnostic and Hermetic circles of antiquity. From the very first time that he ever refers to the kratêr of rebirth, he specifically connects it with the name of one particular person: Empedocles. As a student, he was fascinated with the legend of Empedocles who died in Sicily by climbing the crater of Mount Etna—then throwing himself into the volcano so he could become immortal, be reborn as a god. The symbol was now the crater of a magnificent volcano seething with lava and water and fire-- one of the most terrifying examples on earth of mother nature's utterly inhuman power to destroy, transform, give birth."

“Here with these legends about Empedocles predating, alchemy and Gnosticism by centuries, he realized he had gone back as far as possible to the source and origin of all those traditions about a kratêr as well as a Grail: to the earliest prehistory of his own psychology. For C G Jung, history was the diametrical opposite of what we've come to think of as history. Actually to go back into the past wasn't a question of wandering off into the blank irrelevance of hundreds or thousands of years—but of returning to the primordial source of one's life, one's inspiration, one's existence. And from the time of his work on the Red Book right through to the end of his life he was perfectly clear about the nature, as well as the identity, of his own primordial source. The single point of origin for all his later work and understanding was the experiences he labored first to endure, then embody, then make sense of in his Red Book. But the source of those visionary experiences themselves was the overwhelming outflows of lava he had encountered in the symbol of the massive volcanic crater: the crater that gave him access to the underworld.”