“Nature herself demands a death and a rebirth.”
-C.G. Jung, CW 9i par 234

The death/rebirth archetype is crucial to the understanding of the dialogue and syntheses of Jung and shamanism. It is activated in the shamanic journeying process, in holotropic and sacred breath practices, in rites of passage and initiations. It is at work in transformative ritual structure and processes of all kinds, and in the individuation processes. Death/rebirth is a major theme of sacred breathwork and sacred dance, and many other forms of shamanic and mystical experience.

Next to the archetypal Self, I consider the archetype of death/rebirth to be the most foundational archetype of the transformative processes occurring everywhere in Nature on some scale. The archetypal Self is the eternal core and force within the psyche that expresses itself and lures forth our realization of it through an ongoing sequence of birthing, dying, and rebirthing.

The archetypal Self has a teleological, prospective, and self-directing component that guides us towards our flowering and wholeness, dynamically embracing a union of opposites. Stanislav Grof, influenced by Jung’s concept of the teleology of the psyche, replaced this term with the “holotropic principle,” which means a force that is moving us towards wholeness, a term that nicely linked Grof’s model to Bohmian physics.

In this discussion I wish to tie the archetypes of this process to their ontological and spiritual ground. The intent is to illuminate the sacred/divine foundations of Jung and shamanism, in theory, and as support for the practices I teach, including the shamanic journey, the sacred breathwork ™, and the heart practices, the Four Acts of Power, ™ and so on.

By way of preview, the grounding assumptions of the following discussion are as follows:

1) The Self = the sacred/divine within the psyche.

2) Within the Self is the activity of the sacred/divine aims at promoting harmony and intensity of feeling in the world, for oneself and others, now and in the future. In my book “Psychotherapy and the Sacred,” I follow A. N. Whitehead and call the divine aims in the world the “Lure of Becoming,” Teilhard de Chardin called the divine aim an “omega point.” Jung simply called it the “spiritus rector” function within the Self. This is what Stan Grof, as just mentioned, has called the holotropic force, or principle.

3) Archetypes are ontological manifestations of the creative Ground of Being-itself (Tillich), essentially divine thought forms. Whitehead called them “complex eternal objects.”

4) Death/Rebirth is the privileged archetype through which the sacred/divine aims in the world are promoted.

5) Many of the practices associated with the aims of Jungian psychology and shamanism presuppose alignment with or surrender to the sacred/divine at the foundations of the soul/psyche.

Now let’s briefly sketch out the ontological status of archetypes, and of the highly privileged place of death/rebirth archetype.

Recurrence in Experience
Death and Birth are facts recurrent in experience, and can occur on many scales with self-similar form: something old is being shed or is falling away, or is put to death, let go of, and so on…. Something new is being birthed, processively growing from its core, expanding, self-liberating, coming into its own, moving beyond past forms and limitations. The process of shifting the directing source of one’s living from the mind (head) to living from the heart, with the mind as servant, reflects an instance of the archetypal death/rebirth process.

The shift needed now, for example, to effectively deal with our planetary crisis, is one of moving from a predominantly ego-dominating way of living, to a heart-open and earth-honoring way of living. Such a transformation of the human must occur, according to many experts, within the next few decades, if we are to prevent massive loss of the diversity and quality of life on the planet. This topic is an instance of a much needed archetypal death/rebirth process that must happen in each of us now, if we are to reach a “critical mass” large enough to make the needed shift on a large enough scale publically. We must each become the change we are seeking for the planet. This is to say that the initiatory death and rebirth must go on inside us intentionally, if we are to be able to successfully influence and sustain an outward and public transformation to a more heart-centered and earth-honoring way of life. The impetus for this transformation is not mere opinion, for it has an ontological (or spiritual) source, which I am trying to clarify here, if all too briefly.

Self-similarity of Death/Rebirth Instances
Birth and death has recurrent effects on our living, healing and transforming processes. It is central to the shamanic and Jungian enterprise aiming at soul recovery and individuation. It is involved in such techniques as shamanic voyaging, sacred breathwork, Toltec recapitulation, questing for a vision, and a wide variety of ecstatic ceremonies.

In this particular life-in-the-world, we experience death and birth at its origination, –at conception. There is a death, we could say, from the ontological dimension, into the field of flesh and time as a zygote. Then we are a fetus which must transform, as Joseph Campbell once put it, “from a water-breathing sea creature to an air breathing human,” and not before there is a surrender to the intelligence of the womb and its contractions. Then that form must yield to the child, which must, again yield to the emergent adolescent, which must yield to the young adult, then on to the midlife transition or crisis. If all goes well with this crisis, a more spiritual and generous human comes forth. Then onward into old age and biological death, if not early death by sickness or accident before old age. Then again there is a passing into the “other realms,” and ultimately back into the ontological source from which we originated.

The archetype of death/rebirth is expressed as a pattern of shedding past limiting forms and giving birth to the new forms. This pattern is a highly recurrent and self-similar in experience, even though the content and context vary.

The pattern of self-similarity suggests a fractal quality characteristic of the way archetypes function in human experience. Fractal forms and archetypes take us into the ontological dimension. According to Grof, originally, as one moves towards biological birth, one enters the pre-biographical birth perinatal matrices. An archetypal drama of death and birth is acted out in our incarnation prior to our birth (delivery). When we re-experience it repeatedly through experiential breathwork, this frequently leads to a death and RE-birthing that entails progressively removing obstacles or blockages (pathological complexes and COEX systems) so that our power of being-in-the-world increases.

Archetypes as Ontological Structures.
While Jung tended to avoid metaphysical or ontological statements, in favor of more conservative psychological or phenomenological statements, he often implied them. In a memorial address after Jung’s final passing in 1961, Paul Tillich praised the work of Jung, -especially for the formulating the concept of archetypes for us. Tillich noted that archetypes of the collective unconscious are ontological because they “permeate reality,” and “imprint themselves in the biological world”, and thus structure evolutionary processes. Here are a few interesting snippets from Tillich’s memorial address on the life and work of Jung:

“He [Jung] has actually reached the ontological dimensions [which is] ‘imprinted on the biological dimension.’”

If he calls the archetypes ‘primordial,’ this term oscillates between the early past and the eternal past, namely a transtemporal structure, belonging to being universally…”

The archetypal forms behind all myths belong to the mystery of the creative ground of everything that is.”

Tillich clearly saw the archetypes as ontological structures. What this means in his own philosophical system is that since Being (ontos) = the Divine, the archetypes are essences or thoughts forms in the Divine Life, to put it symbolically rather than in ontological language. Put alternatively, archetypes arise from within the creative Ground of Being-itself.

The death/rebirth archetype is a highly important expression of the creative work of the Ground of Being-itself. This creative Ground has imprinted itself into the temporal world process. It is an engine of creativity and transformation, and is at work in every being, human and non-human on some scale. Death/Rebirth is significantly at work in every becoming being.

If we read Jung’s “archetypal Self” as the “higher-Self,” or “Godself, “or as Jung sometimes called it, “the Atman,” perhaps we may see that the divine or sacred reality is the foundational core and thrust of the psyche, as it is analogously for the shaman’s conception of soul.

Since “the Self” expresses its work of promoting evolution, transformation, and healing through death and rebirth sequences, we might further say that the death/rebirth archetype is the numinous form through which the divine purposes in the world work towards evolution, development, transformation. Our shamanic methods of journeying, breathwork, soul recovery, ecstatic dancing, and ritually well-formed Ayahuasca ceremonies depend for their results upon centrality of divine, or numinous thrust towards death and rebirth. The impetus to individuation and wholeness (spiritus rector) described by Jung; the “guiding spirits” of the shaman, and the “holotropic force” described by Grof, are expressions of the ontological dimension, being significantly organized and promoted through the agency of the death/rebirth archetype.

References

“Carl Gustav Jung – 875-1961: A Memorial Meeting, New York, December 1, 1961 “[Tillich Address, pp 28-38]. The Analytical Psychology Club of New York, 1962.

C.G. Jung, “Concerning Rebirth.” Collectived Works, Princeton, vol 9i

Robert L. Moore. THE ARCHETYPE OF INITIATION: Sacred Space, Ritual Process, and Personal Transformation. Exlibris Corp. 2001

C. Michael Smith. PSYCHOTHERAPY AND THE SACRED. Chicago: Center for the Scientific Study of Religion Press, 1995

C. Michael Smith. JUNG AND SHAMANISM IN DIALOGUE. 2nd Edition. Trafford Press 2007.

Stanislav Grof. THE HOLOTROPIC MIND. Harper Collins 1990