Soul and Symbol by Nico de Haas

ON PSYCHOLOGY AS AN AUXILIARY SCIENCE IN THE INTERPRETATION OF SYMBOLS

In recent times, various more or less serious attempts have been made here and there to bring the ancient Germanic symbols closer to the contemporary Germanic people. Generally, even the best-intentioned publications in this area cannot be considered particularly convincing. The easiest way is to let these symbols speak for themselves with many illustrations and as little text as possible. However, this presupposes a "receiver," an audience that is still attuned to the inner radiance of these symbols. It assumes resonance in the soul of the viewer. However, practice shows that this resonance usually does not exist, and when it does occur, it is often completely false.

Symbols on the Flyhof rocks (West-Gotland, Sweden). 

No wonder: the contemporary person — and especially the city dweller — is completely estranged from the old symbols. And not just now, but generally has been for generations, even centuries.

The danger that lies in this type of "bringing closer" is that the folk forms are misused due to this misunderstanding for completely irresponsible imitation and senseless combination of the inherited motifs and signs. The "kitsch" that is emerging everywhere proves that this danger is anything but imaginary.

More important, therefore, are the serious, thoroughly researched books on the study of symbols, which, in addition to illustrations, also provide explanatory text, but they generally fail to be very convincing. While they often offer a far-reaching systematization and compete in giving precise content definitions of all kinds of symbolic representations, an impression of arbitrariness and chaotic mingling of various significant factors cannot be avoided.

WHAT SEPARATES US FROM THE SYMBOL

When interpreting symbols from the Germanic ancient times and the "timeless" peasant art, it must never be forgotten that these symbols, although they emerged from our racial soul, do not necessarily correspond with the spirit of this time and therefore cannot simply be "understood" by the contemporary person. On the contrary: the fact that we feel so attracted to ancient Germanic and peasant life today is more due to the feeling that we can perceive in it the spontaneous expression of a truly nature-connected way of life, which has been lost to us since the Christianization and for which we passionately long to return. But our thinking is no longer wholly nature-connected, no longer unbiased and all-encompassing. Consciousness has sharpened, concentrated — certainly, but also narrowed to a new schooled logic, to a systematization that has particularized itself in the sense of superficial civilization and turned away from nature. Therefore, with reason, we cannot encompass the symbolic primal values; they were originally deeper, more general, and more comprehensive than we can reasonably perceive today.

If we do not find a way to revise or supplement our "modern" mindset with the values that have been pushed out of our current consciousness, we have the certainty that we will inextricably mix contemporary thoughts with the heritage of our ancestors. Such unconscious falsifications are currently rampant in the study of symbols.

PURIFICATION OF THE METHOD

P. E. Schramm, in his introduction to the study by Berent Schweinekoper, "Der Handschuh im Recht, Amterwesen, Brauch und Volksglauben" (1938), has set some conditions for first achieving a reliable method of symbol research.

It is not only sufficient to distinguish between symbolic objects (symbols in a narrower sense) and symbolic actions — a distinction that is usually recognized — but also the origin of a symbol (folkdom, space), the century in which it is found, the developmental course of its content and representation, and the possible changes or reversals it underwent over time are of utmost importance.

Furthermore, a clear distinction must be made between true symbols and externally (almost) similar representations or signs of a different nature.

It makes no sense at all to consider a motif or sign on its own without examining its binding and origin in relation to people, time, and culture.

To begin with, we must therefore not only distinguish between different types of symbols but also investigate from which space a symbol originates, what role it played in that space and specifically with that people or tribe, what changes this symbol underwent over the centuries, and how its content developed or changed. If we do the same for all the symbols from a specific ethnographically defined area, we get an overview of the symbolism in its binding to people and land, i.e., an insight into the specific local significance of generally used symbolic representations and signs in the Germanic world.

The best approach for this research starts from entire series of studies on individual symbols in their spatial and temporal binding. In the field of legal symbolism, excellent work has already been done in this manner (e.g., by Von Schwerin on the sword symbol).

Bronze Age European Swords

However, more significant than the research into the particular meaning of a Germanic symbol tied to place, time, and people is currently the research into the general, original meaning of ancient Germanic symbols, that is, the content that we may consider the primordial value of a symbol. Namely, that initial and undivided meaning that the symbol had before the described diversity arose.

For that diversity necessarily represents a further advancing particularization, delimitation, restriction, and derivation of the primordial value. An increasing concentration and consciousness, thereby a significant loss of scope and depth. It is a gain in clarity and rationality, but a loss in cosmic connectedness, in onconscious divinity. It is a path from the sacred to the profane.

MODERN AND FOREIGN HINDRANCES

We must therefore reach back to the primordial values that have been hidden behind these symbols, but which were once unmistakably conveyed by them.

We cannot rely on what "one" on the countryside today might say about a certain symbol. On the contrary, we can be sure that in many cases, a completely subjective interpretation is given, a series of coincidences or a local historical peculiarity that has very little to do with the ancient Germanic meaning. Furthermore, since the Christianization, many new meanings have been attributed to old and original things by various cultural currents, and surely some of this has also passed onto the symbols of the rural land.

Thus, the study of symbols is extraordinarily difficult.

In the first place, we are now obliged to consciously articulate and express in contemporary words feelings that once lived almost unconsciously in the folk soul and were understood without the almost always misleading use of words. After all, if a symbol truly lives, it speaks for itself and neither needs nor tolerates an "explanation," which can never be anything other than an arbitrary restriction and can never give more than the intellectual description of what lives a thousand times richer and deeper in the heart.

To dress the meaning of a symbol in words means inevitably to obscure the symbol, to violate it, to strangle it in misplaced concepts that are inseparably connected to our words as contemporary thought associations.

The symbol is primarily a matter of the soul, indeed, exclusively a matter of the soul, both of the individual soul and of the folk soul and racial soul. But it is precisely from this side, from the psychological science side, that the symbol has been the hardest to approach. For the science of the soul has, especially in the last few decades, in which prehistory, folklore, and racial studies have developed, completely lost its way to the soul of the Northern race.

The path to understanding the soul life of our own ancestors was blocked in 1927 by the sensational and noisy publication of the book "L'Âme primitive" by the researcher L. Levy-Bruhl. His alien thinking influenced an entire school of ethnologists, making it natural to deny the "primitive man" any rationality.

L'Ame primitive.

ETHNOLOGICAL ERRORS

This perspective — according to which Hottentots, Papuans, and the ancient Germans are "equal," namely uncivilized, irrational, and superstitious beings plagued by fears and trapped in black magic — was inherently blind to all cultural values that cannot be "understood" according to contemporary logic. These ethnologists completely overlooked the fact that it does not mean the same thing when two different groups do the same thing. They recognized only the savage, the barbarian, the heathen. What kind of heathens they were did not matter; red, black, yellow, or white played no role: these beings were alike in backwardness and thus "all" did the same things. They worshipped trees and springs, carved rough idol images, made sacrifices, kept sacred animals, and practiced solemn ancestor worship.

And since many black tribes still live in the Stone Age, one only needed to study their customs to know how our ancestors acted and thought during our Stone Age. And if stone axes, fire drills, and sacred stones from the South Seas could be shown, whose forms greatly resembled similar items from our cold North, then the essence of the "primitive soul" was clearly proven! At least, that was the assertion of the "Parisian" school of Levy-Bruhl.

It has been very difficult to overcome this line of thought, which was indeed seductive. But racial science has taught us that "race" does not only mean "body," but also "soul." Rosenberg succinctly put it: "Soul means race seen from within, race is the outside of the soul." Body and soul are both expressions of the same blueprint determined by race (i.e., hereditary traits). Therefore, Nachenius repeatedly emphasizes that race is "style," meaning attitude. And no "attitude" is conceivable without harmony and unity of both body and soul.

Thus, it follows that it is not so important what two people anywhere in the world do, but rather what ensouls them, what they feel, think, and intend when they do it. This entirely depends on their attitude towards life, i.e., on their worldview that is inseparably connected with their blood and inherited from generation to generation.

So, when examining what someone does, it is about their blood, their race, because the decisive factor is the manner in which and the purpose for which they do something.

We must therefore take the inspiration, the soul of a race, a people, a person as the starting point for our conclusions and not consider and compare an external action, an object, or an art form in isolation and compare it with other forms that may outwardly resemble it somewhat (or even very much)!

PSYCHOLOGICAL ERRORS

The disastrous confusion in folk studies about the "primitive" soul was already preceded by an even greater deviation within psychology itself. The psychological science, barely fifty years old at the time, had been preoccupied with the "psychoanalysis" of Sigmund Freud since 1900.

Sigmund Freud

This is not the place to delve much deeper into it, but it should be noted that for Freud, all psychic energy that did not serve the drive for self-preservation always and everywhere had a sexual character. From cradle to grave, the soul is tormented by sexual inclinations and "repressed complexes." Faith, art, culture are expressions of sexual drive just like all human relationships, even those of the child to the parents. Repressed sexuality constantly threatens to overwhelm the soul by disturbing it from the unconscious and making the nerves sick. However, dreams allow the soul analyst to gauge these impending dangers. They are, as it were, messages expressed in symbols from the unconscious to the conscious about what is happening and living in the depths of the soul.

It all comes down to being able to "interpret" these dreams, i.e., to decipher the symbols rising from the depths of the soul in order to understand what is happening deep within us beyond the reach of consciousness and influencing our lives and actions unnoticed.

It hardly needs to be stated that this "interpretation" could not succeed in the embittered, sex-obsessed mind of Freud — and certainly not regarding the soul of the Nordic race. His entire theory was more a literary form of speculative thinking than a scientific method, a fact of which he himself was well aware, so much so that he ultimately showed little confidence in his own theory.

For the study of symbols, it is of the utmost importance that this Freudian way of thinking has been overcome and refuted, allowing us today to talk about the unconscious, about dream symbols and the life of the soul, without immediately triggering a flood of sexual insinuations!

Carl Gustav Jung

In this regard, the work of Prof. C. G. Jung, the founder of "depth psychology," is of groundbreaking significance. Not only did Jung break the fatal circle of eternal sexuality, but he also brought to light some highly important properties of the unconscious life of the soul for the study of symbols. His teachings have thus become significant both for the psychology of race and for prehistory and folk studies. Hans Burkhardt repeatedly refers to Jung in "Die seelischen Anlagen des Nordischen Menschen" (— Eine rassenpsychologische Untersuchung, 1941), as does Fr. Adama van Scheltema in his "Symbolik der germanischen Völker" (Handbuch der Symbolforschung II, 1941).

JUNG'S DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY

It is very encouraging that the somewhat stalled research into symbols has found new possibilities through the science of depth psychology, which were urgently needed. This need was by no means obscured by the increasingly fantastical and unmotivated elaborations on the few scientifically responsible certainties of the object-collecting and classifying symbol research. The psychologist Jung is a strong personality and a healthy mind. He took a stand against "the dark greats from the East" (Blavatsky, Besant, Krishnamurti, etc.) whose thoughts gripped the instincts of the masses and, "from below," besieged the universities, from which they were expelled three centuries ago.

He sees our inner life threatened and undermined by the perversity of Havelock Ellis and Freud and our reality made suspect by Einstein's theory of relativity. He saw through the "comedy" of Christian "moral mist" and established that superstition, in essence, is nothing but perversity. Therefore, he wants to make the European person know themselves by rejecting all dogmas and opening the soul to the "Primeval Experience," without letting them fall into the hands of Western charlatans with astrology, theosophy, and spiritualism.

In doing so, he wants to replace the sickly modernist interest in the dark and unhealthy expressions of contemporary inner life with a healthy interest in the deeply hidden precious heritage that has been preserved intact through thousands of years. The treasure of the soul instead of the sediment, as he himself puts it. This soul is primarily safe among the people, among "the quiet ones in the land, who are often laughed at, who, less corrupted by academic prejudices than the dazzling peaks of society, let themselves be carried along by the unconscious urge of the soul." Great renewals never come from above, but always from below, just as trees never grow down from the sky, but always up from the earth, although their seeds once fell from above to below." (Jung: "Problems of the Soul of Our Time").

REDEMPTION FROM MATERIALISM

The greatest merit of C. G. Jung is, however, that he was the first to oppose the metaphysics-of-matter produced by the 19th century with the reality of the soul. Materialism understood "soul" to be a product of "matter," a chemical reaction. Soul, mind, psyche were phenomena of the brain or hormones. Others preferred to speak of instincts or drives, but to attribute an independent existence to the soul was simply ridiculous nonsense for materialism.

Just as in the Middle Ages it would have been madness to deny the substantial uniqueness of the soul, or to doubt that all matter essentially originated from a divine, matter-independent spirit. However, Jung reminds us that we do not ultimately know what matter or spirit truly are.

He also does not deny the close connection between spirit and matter, body and soul, and he does not deny that the content of our consciousness is largely governed by the perceptions of our senses. He admits that the soul first appears to us as a faithful reflection of everything we call material, tangible, and earthly. He is not blind to the power of drives and instincts — but he takes a strong stand against the modern materialistic belief that the physical is ultimately the only reality and cause of everything.

He found the courage for a new "psychology with soul," that is, with the soul as a reality closely connected to matter, but still autonomous and inherently unique.

THE SOUL AS REALITY

Jung refers to the Old Germanic origin of the word soul (Gothic: saiwala, Proto-Germanic: saiwald). The word means: moving force, life force. An original symbol for this was fire or flame, as a source of movable warmth. Warmth and breath (wind) are also signs of life.

The name of someone is also a symbol of the soul, namely the recognition of the awareness of the self. Originally, someone's name was indeed their essence. Hence, the Germanic custom of inheriting ancestral names.

This already shows how much in the old conceptions the soul was understood as a source of life, as an objective reality. For the "primitive" ancestor, i.e., for the spirit of our forefathers still entirely connected to nature and not constrained by "civilization," the soul was not something totally subjective and personal, as it is for us today, but something impersonal, living by itself, whom one could listen to and speak with.

This original conception is not at all narrow-minded, foolish, or backward, but is essentially confirmed by modern experience, even if we act as if we do not know this.

Just think about it: we cannot suppress most of our feelings, we cannot control our own moods, we cannot order or prevent dreams. Our thoughts can make the wildest leaps without us being able to prevent it. Ideas occur to us that we never sought or asked for.

Indeed: soul and consciousness are very different things. In reality, we are very much dependent on our unconscious soul life working healthily and not letting us down or obstructing us. For then our nerves would soon be in disarray. Where do all good or bad "inspirations" come from? Where do our inspiration, our enthusiasm, our ecstasy come from? They well up from the unconscious, which already lives in the smallest child long before it has even the slightest demonstrable self-awareness. (Hence the absence of memories of the first years of life.)

Therefore, the primitive (nature-connected) person feels in the depths of his soul the source of life, the divine breath of life. He is not as arrogantly foolish as we are and does not believe himself to be the lord and master of life, but feels his dependence on the unconscious-living-in-him. This feeling is his faith in the deeper and higher, which he believed he had to honor as an eternal value.

Dolmen near Rolde, Netherlands.
The entire landscape here acts as a symbol.

SUPRAPERSONAL WISDOM

And not without reason, for although the idea of the immortality of the soul may sound like medieval nonsense to modern, materialistic ears, it is essentially a primitive truth whose original meaning still applies today. So, what about this immortal soul?

Where does it reside? Even if it were more than a mere chemical reaction, this has never been explained, as we feel our thoughts in our head, our feelings in the heart area, and other emotions in the abdominal cavity.

In other cultures, these things are very different, as countless researchers have established. Does the soul occupy a mathematical point or an entire starry world? We do not know. We only know that all ancient cultures attributed higher knowledge to the soul than to our human understanding. The soul participated in eternity, as opposed to our self-consciousness, which remained trapped in the temporal, everyday, and material.

Thus, in all ancient cultures, certain dreams were perceived as symbolic messages from the unconscious soul to the conscious soul life, to the self. As divine tidings, laden with a wisdom drawn from the experiences of eternity.

A primitive foolishness? Psychology teaches otherwise. That the nature-connected person attached so much value to the unconscious soul life is not as fanciful as Western rationalism would like to believe. Because today, we know from an abundance of experimental material that the unconscious soul life holds information (contents) that—if it could be made conscious—would mean an immeasurable increase in our knowledge.

The human unconscious also contains the inherited forms of the life functions of the ancestors, so that even in the child there is an adaptive readiness for the functions of the soul long before any "consciousness" or conscious soul life is present. But even in adult, conscious life, that unconscious instinctual function of the soul is constantly present and active. One should not regard the teaching of the unconscious soul life as a modernistic deviation. The ancient cultures have been working practically with it for thousands of years, just as the East still does today.

But it is nothing new in the science of the West either. 

Leibnitz spoke two centuries ago of an "unbewusst Seelisches," a hundred years later, Kant dealt with "the immeasurable field of dark representations." Janet, Flournoy, Breuer, and Carus further developed the concept of the unconscious. Contemporary psychology builds upon their work.

THE UNCONSCIOUS

The difference between the conscious and the unconscious soul life is primarily that consciousness, although intensive and concentrated, is also superficial and focused on the present and the surrounding environment. Additionally, it only possesses personally acquired experiences, meaning at most a few decades of a human life. The rest is artificial and consists of our well-known "paper memory" with all its alarming errors and falsehoods.

The unconscious, on the other hand, is entirely different. Jung describes it approximately like this: The unconscious is not concentrated and intensive, but dim to dark. It is extremely extensive and can juxtapose the most disparate elements in the most paradoxical ways. Alongside an indefinite multitude of perceptions that remain below the threshold of consciousness, it holds a tremendous treasure trove of deposits from the life of the ancestors, which have contributed to the "diversity of species" merely by their presence.

If one were to imagine this unconscious as a person, it would be someone beyond gender or age, possessing the experience of one or two million years, thus practically the insight of an immortal.

He would have lived through the lives of individuals, kin, tribes, and peoples countless times, and the rhythm of becoming, flourishing, and perishing would be one of his most vivid feelings...

This personality, however, is not self-aware; it merely dreams within us. It is also not a "person," but something like an endless stream, a sea of images and life forms that occasionally come to our consciousness through our dreams.

To dismiss this unconscious as an illusion would be as grotesque as considering comparative anatomy or physiology nonsense, because our tangible body still shows various traces of ancient development.

It is only an illusion to try to explain this unconscious solely from the outside and only through consciousness, as Freud attempted.

THE ESSENCE OF THE DREAM

The personal consciousness floats like a ship on the endless, dark sea of the unconscious soul life. This ocean can, at times, be very threatening, even life-threatening. In the case of the mentally ill, the small ship of the ego, of consciousness, is tossed around aimlessly and sometimes completely engulfed. Occasionally, the waves of the unconscious crash high over the ship. In such cases, depending on the severity of the symptoms, one speaks of "losing oneself," "going mad," "being possessed," or "losing one's soul."

For this reason, it is beneficial to understand the messages that rise from the fathomless depths to the surface of the sea and thereby to the boundary of our consciousness.

Making these comprehensible is the task of the scientific interpretation of dreams. "Dreams are deceiving," preached rationalism. "Dreams are merely the fulfillments of unfulfilled and repressed desires," taught Freud's metaphysical materialism. These convenient excuses have long been outdated.

We now know that we actually know very little. What is the unconscious, really? We do not know — and precisely because of this, we call it by the grand name "The Unconscious." We know it just as little as the physicist knows what matter really is. We have only theories, concepts, word constructions. One day our theory collapses. Our words become meaningless — but matter and soul exist as always, they are no less real for it.

So it is with the value, with the symbolic content of our dreams. Dream interpretations and dream interpretation theories perish, but for centuries, indeed thousands of years, dreams have continually shown the same unchanging ancient motifs, leading forms, or symbols, derived from the inherited experience of thousands of generations before us.

"Dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious soul life, beyond the control of our consciousness. They are pure nature — and thus unadulterated truth. Therefore, they are particularly suited to giving us back our natural and original attitude towards life if our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundation," says Jung. "Engaging with one's dreams is a form of reflection on one's own essence."

DREAM AND SYMBOL

Unfortunately, there is not yet an absolutely reliable method to interpret all dreams, and the remark that one cannot rely on speculations and fantasies is quite justified.

However, there is at least a useful method that leads to practically usable and striking results, disregarding special cases.

A dream should be examined entirely without bias, without modern superstition, as an "unknown object." It should be turned over and over, discussed, and approached from all sides through emerging thought associations.

In ancient cultures, this was done with significant, so-called "great dreams" in a public assembly. Ancient accounts of this practice have been preserved.

From the insights gained in such gatherings, the meaning of the dream was usually more or less approximated. Psychology has elaborated and refined this method in very ingenious ways, building on the comparative study of an extensive amount of dream material from antiquity to the present and using the information provided by ethnology, folklore, mythology, and archaeology.

For the research of symbols, not all dreams are naturally useful. On the contrary.

Here, only those dreams are considered that the primitives regard as "great dreams," namely, those dreams that rise from great depths and thus originate from an ancient past. This is in contrast to the dreams that float more or less on the surface of the unconscious and mostly consist of pieces that have fallen down from consciousness, thus made up of fragments of personal experience. Just with the "great dreams," an intuitive "guessing" of the meaning is pointless.

Modern thought associations cannot help here. The specialist must work here, who completely masters the treasure of symbols and motifs, mythology, and comparative ethnology.

Therefore, says Jung, these dreams cannot be learned to interpret from books. Methods and rules are useful for those who cannot work without these aids. What matters is mastering the level of the dream completely as a personality with heart and mind; one must be literally "up to the mark" in those depths.

Only years of preparatory study and comprehensive practical work can create the conditions to achieve reliable results here.

Jung has been accused of undermining culture with his teachings and delivering our highest values to a primitive soul life. He has rightly responded that this fear stems from a fear of nature and primal reality.

Freud had turned the unconscious into a sexual monster, a destructive demon. But, says Jung, the unconscious is not a demonic beast, but a morally, aesthetically, and intellectually insensitive natural being, which only becomes dangerous if our consciousness's relationship with it is hopelessly wrong. On this basis alone, there can be no question of a demonic character of ancient symbols. They are always positive life and health signs.

But even to the most general, ancient, and thus relatively "fixed" symbols, Jung still attributes a somewhat indefinite character regarding their content. If the content were not indefinite, they would not be symbols but signs or symptoms, he writes in his "Reality of the Soul."

The "great dreams" and general symbols cannot be explained from the "personal unconscious," which contains everything forgotten or repressed in personal existence, as well as perceptions, thoughts, and feelings that remained below the threshold of consciousness.

Besides these "personal" elements, the unconscious contains the aforementioned inherited contents from the life of ancestors, including mythological representations and motifs and various unconscious connections that our logic no longer recognizes. But they arise within us everywhere and at all times, even without historical tradition or any other bridging aid.

MYTHOLOGICAL ARCHETYPES

These ancient mythological connections, these original representations and motifs, upon close examination, turned out to consist of a multitude of characteristic images or figures that continually reappear. Examples include: heroic figures, monsters, father, mother, the old wise man, etc.

Jung calls these figures "primitive images or archetypes." They are general forms stemming from timeless primordial depths and have become ideas.

Repeatedly, one encounters religious representations among these messengers that alert the consciousness. No wonder, says Jung: the strongest and most original activity of the spirit, namely the religious, has been more than any other spiritual experience, suppressed from conscious life and banished to the primordial depths of the soul in modern humans.

When these archetypes resurface, they thus contain fresh, unadulterated, and most universal primal values in symbolic form. This is especially true since the process of bringing these images to consciousness happens so quickly and automatically that practically no distortion occurs. Understanding them entirely depends on the scientific training, talent, and intuitive ability of the researcher.

For no person can derive more from a symbol than they are capable of imbuing it with themselves, and no person can sense what is not inherently present in their own soul as an inheritance from their ancestors.

Therefore, the study of symbols can never be undertaken by anyone other than trained, racially conscious Germanic researchers.

SYMBOLISM OF THE GERMANIC PEOPLES

Professor Jung has not entirely become aware of the necessity of the racial standpoint. Nevertheless, being predominantly of Nordic spirit, he has solved the problems he posed in accordance with that spirit, which naturally makes his teachings so valuable. However, he did not specifically feel drawn to the ancient Germanic symbols, which is undoubtedly very unfortunate.

On the other hand, the excellent researcher and renowned describer of ancient Nordic art, Adama van Scheltema, has indeed engaged very intensively with these symbols, using Professor Jung's insights in the process. In his latest work, "Symbolik der germanischen Völker" (1941), he supplemented his art and style-theoretical findings and his ethnological research with some results from Jung's depth psychology.

However, in my opinion, he did not sufficiently distinguish between ancient Germanic and pre-Germanic concepts, so a revision is needed here as well. I will elaborate on this further in a separate article.

Nico de Haas in Hamer (September 1942).