4.5 The relationship between the ego, the Anima, the Self and the anima mundi

 4.5.3 Natural science and modern depth psychology as split from the wholeness of the anima mundi of the Medieval Ages

Before we can go on, we must now define the term anima mundi or world soul (see picture on the right). As I have shown in Wolfgang Pauli und die Wiederkehr der Weltseele (in German), in the Medieval Ages one of the most important aspects of the world soul was the idea of the anima movens, the moving soul. It was this aspect, which produced the motion of the planets – and in fact any motion. The world soul was everywhere, in any part of the universe. However, it was also the soul of the whole. Thus, the part and the whole were identical; what happened in the microcosm had also happened in the macrocosm et vice versa. Like this, the world soul was the ligament between the part and the whole which were in fact one and the same thing[1].  

It is this idea, which is so difficult to understand for modern man. We are so used to thinking of ourselves as a part interacting with other parts completely distinct from us that we cannot feel anymore that we all together, all these single particles, could perhaps also be a unity, a wholeness, of one and the same living organism.  

For Medieval man this was completely different. Since he felt himself as the microcosm and the world or even the cosmos as the macrocosm, and for him the part was identical with the whole, the anima mundi was – in the terminology of today – also the connection between the inner and the outer world. However, we must always bear in mind that such a distinction between inside and outside was not even thinkable for Medieval man. Thus, also the individual and the collective soul were one and the same.  

Further, the world soul was also the ligament between spirit and matter. However, also such a terminology is in some way misleading, since spirit, matter and soul were also one and the same thing – the anima mundi.  

We can thus define the Medieval world soul in our modern terminology as a wholeness that comprises spirit, psyche and matter, the part and the whole, as well as the inner and the outer world. Its main principle was the idea of the connection of everything with everything, since on the one hand all parts are contained in the whole and the whole in all parts. The same is true for man’s inner world and the outer world, for the microcosm and the macrocosm. Further, the spirit was contained in the psyche, the psyche in matter, and matter in the spirit. We must however keep in mind that the Medieval man would not have described this fact in these terms, since the word “connection” – the interaction in modern physics – was not yet defined in the way we use it today, i.e., as an energetical principle qualitatively distinct from matter. What we call on the one hand “matter” and what we name on the other as “force” or “interaction”, was thus still one and the same thing; the “body of matter” and the “soul of matter” were just the same, the world soul. 

With the development of Kepler’s laws governing the motion of the planets at the beginning of the 17^th century mathematics entered natural philosophy. It allowed the description of the motion of a single part, e.g., of a specific planet. The idea of a ligament of love, the anima movens aspect of the mysterious divine world soul, was not necessary anymore for the explanation of the planets’ motions. Thus the connection between the celestial bodies was now not described by the principle of Eros anymore. Mathematics, i.e., the principle of Logos, explained now the motions of the bodies in the sky, and the divine ligament of the part and the whole, the anima movens, the background of all motion in the sky, became useless and worthless [see picture on the left (out of CW 12, p. 47; Carl Jung published the image at the beginning of his interpretation of Wolfgang Pauli's dreams...!)].  

Johannes Kepler’s discovery of the laws of planetary motion was thus an incredibly deep revolution with two extremely grave effects. First the unity of the planets and the universe, their vinculum amoris (band of love), and second the emotional ligament between man and the universe was destroyed. Up until this decisive moment the “inner movement” of the mystical experience of wholeness, the “e-motion” of the unity of the “part” with the deity, a principle belonging to the Eros, was the background of the relationship of the ego with the universe. Now however, after Johannes Kepler, it was the mathematical law that described outer motion[2]. The original unity of (inner) movement and (outer) motion was cut off, since the former continued to belong to the principle of Eros, the latter however became a content of the slowly dawning principle of Logos.  

Of course such a development encouraged also the split in Descartes (1596 – 1650). This philosopher lived two and a half decades after Kepler (1571 – 1630) and was raised in monasteries without any feminine and maternal background. He invented the sharp separation between the inner and the outer world and like this split the world soul. Further, with his concept of the distinction of the res cogitans – I call this principle the spirit-psyche – , from the res extensa, i.e., inanimate matter, he was in fact also the initiator of the repression of the second principle of the bipolar energy term, the matter-psyche.  Like this also the consciousness of the Medieval man, the res amans, the Eros ego, and his view of the energetical processes in matter, the res intensa, disappeared from the description of the natural world.  

As we have seen, the world soul was also the unity of what we call today spirit, psyche and matter. With the split into inner and outer world and the one-sided definition of the inner world as spirit-psyche (res cogitans) and the outer as “spirit-matter” (the inanimate matter or res extensa), a further one-sided concept conquered natural science: The qualitative difference between energy or force and matter. It was now easy to describe the active masculine part of the world as the principle of energy or force, the passive and feminine part as matter. The idea that this passive matter could also be or contain an original force or energy however vegetative and mathematically not describable – the matter-psyche – was repressed.  

Since with Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton it became possible to describe and even to manipulate (outer) motion with the help of causal mathematics, the belief arouse that the whole world is deterministic. This means that if we can determine the initial conditions of a motion, we can in every moment calculate all the further states. A logical effect of such a development was of course the repression of the postulate that the world soul could be able to create spontaneous, acausal events following the principle of the creatio continua[4]. Thus, the idea of the “cheerless clockwork” (Carl Jung), the causal materialistic world view valid for the description of the outer as well as for the inner world, was born.  

At the beginning of the 20^th century, the idea of the self-reliance of the soul came back – of course in stercore. Sigmund Freud re-discovered a specific aspect of the soul – in my terminology the inner spirit-psyche –  in what he called the subconscious. Its energetical principle, the libido (as he called the inner spirit-psyche), was in his view connected to the most repressed instinct, to sexuality. Carl Jung extended this background of the repressed individual soul, the individual spirit-psyche, first with the idea that the libido is not only an aspect of sexuality, but of all instincts, and especially also of our mind. Further, he extended the concept to the so-called collective unconscious with its center, the Self. In his view the human mind is based on the archetype of the spirit – in my terminology on the spirit-psyche – and, as we have seen, the connection of the conscious spirit-psyche, the mind, with the collective spirit-psyche, the Self, is established by dreams, visions and Active Imagination.  

Thus, one could assume that Carl Jung with the collective unconscious and its center, the Self, has re-discovered the world soul. However, as we have seen, his Self – I call it the Logos Self – contains only one aspect of the psyche, the (inner) spirit-psyche. Thus the matter-psyche, alchemically seen, the dew or the seeds in the earth, the other aspect of the bipolar world soul, is not included. The depth psychologist’s bright Logos Self outshines the matter-psyche, the latter becoming like this the shadow of Jung’s Self. Since this principle has a lot to do with “e-motion”, feeling and the connection principle in general, and since it is the looked-for “procreative nature of the Whole” (Carl Jung)[5] behind the human/animal sexual drive, I call the shadow of Jung’s Self, the Eros Self.  

We can now summarize the insights about the world soul. Up until the 17^th century natural philosophy and in fact the whole background of psychic life was determined by the anima mundi. The world soul was some sort of the divine energetical principle of the microcosm and of the macrocosm. Using my terms we can postulate that the world soul was a unity, containing the bipolarity of the inner and outer spirit-psyche as well as the bipolarity of the spirit-psyche and the matter-psyche[6] and last but not least the “trinity” of spirit, matter and psyche (soul).