Remembering the Repressed with Carl Jung and Rudolf Steiner

Below is ChatGPT’s summary of the transcript:

Matt Segall opens by situating his talk at CIIS—an institution he frames as striving for a richly textured “planetary culture” that honors particular traditions rather than flattening them into a global consumer monoculture. Within that horizon he chooses Christianity, not to survey its whole archetypal breadth, but to probe one urgent facet: its treatment of evil. In a moment of social “descent,” he warns, we’re tempted to project evil onto others; Jung’s great service, he says, is to recall the shadow in each of us and to insist on individuation—an inner reconciliation work without which societies devour themselves.

He then locates himself autobiographically: raised within Judaism and evangelical Christianity, first repelled by the latter’s public face and drawn toward science and skepticism, he was later turned by Jung’s psychology of religion—and a formative psilocybin experience—toward the unavoidable psychic reality of the “Christ archetype.” That personal arc becomes his template for a collective task: those shaped by the West cannot simply repress Christianity; if we do, its energies will be co-opted by destructive and idolatrous forces.

From here he lays out Jung’s method: bracket metaphysics, take the psyche as real, and treat religious figures—God, Christ, Satan, angels—as experientially effective complexes. He quotes Jung to underscore individuated agency and the danger of a culture that believes only in “physical facts,” forgetting the psychic conditions under which technologies (and catastrophes) are born. Individuation, in this key, is the ego’s descent into relation with other archetypal powers, not a flight into solipsism.

Segall’s Jungian reading of Christianity hinges on Answer to Job and Aion. In Job, Jung sees the creator shamed into moral growth by the creature: Job’s fidelity reveals Yahweh’s shadow (with Satan as a “doubting thought” in the Godhead) and necessitates the incarnation—God must become human to attain moral balance. Yet, Segall stresses, in Aion Jung argues that the Christ event didn’t finish the work: the portrayal of Christ as pure and perfect light constellates a compensatory Antichrist. Jung collapses this shadow into “Lucifer,” and it is here that Segall introduces Rudolf Steiner to deepen the picture.

Steiner differentiates evil into two poles: the Luciferic (inflated spirituality, aesthetic rapture, prideful escape from matter) and the Ahrimanic (cold materialism, technocratic reduction, hard intellect without heart). For Steiner, evil is not a privation (as in Augustine or Aquinas) but has positive being and pedagogical purpose; the task is not avoidance but balance. Segall quotes Steiner to the effect that personality develops “through resistance,” in the rhythmic to-and-fro between these poles. He pairs this with Jung’s demolition of the “privation” theory of evil in Aion, arguing that the will to purify ourselves by projecting evil onto others is itself the evil we should fear.

To render the balance imaginally, Segall turns to Steiner’s monumental carving The Representative of Humanity. Christ stands mediating between the descending Lucifer and the chthonic Ahriman, receiving both “in love.” Lucifer cannot bear that love and tumbles wing-broken; Ahriman cannot bear it and is bound by the earth’s gold veins. Steiner doubles each figure—the supersensible Lucifer above Christ’s left and the subsensible Ahriman below Christ’s right, and their earthly images—suggesting, in Jung’s vocabulary, the distinction between archetypes themselves in their numinous reality, and our more manageable archetypal images of them. At the top left of the composition, Steiner places “cosmic humor,” which Segall links to Jung’s “missing fourth” (matter, the feminine, the shadow/evil) needed to complete the over-spiritual Trinity; humor keeps the drama from curdling into sentimental grandiosity and returns us to proportion.

Segall then widens the historical lens. Drawing on Jung’s zodiacal meditation in Aion, he reads Christianity’s entrance in the age of Pisces: the early, vertical “upward” fish (transcendence) gives way after the Renaissance to the horizontal fish (worldly attention)—Ficino’s Plato translations, nascent natural science, exploration, capitalism, and intensified inwardness. Steiner dates a similar shift into what he calls the age of the consciousness soul. What looks “anti-Christian” often manifests Christianity’s other face: a monotheistic obsession mutating from the Good to the One Truth of natural science. Jung remains agnostic about metaphysics; Steiner insists these beings are real and exist within a spiritual angelic hierarchy. Segall suggests we can fruitfully read each through the other.

The talk’s contemporary bite comes in his application to politics and technology. Rather than fetishizing a singular Antichrist, he sees today’s Ahrimanic signature in the deification of technology and AI, and in the easy capture of “spiritual but not religious” impulses by consumer capitalism—Lucifer and Ahriman colluding. The remedy is not purgation by scapegoat but conscious symbol-work and ethical practice: remembering what we’ve repressed in Christianity and redeeming it for planetary purposes.

He closes by returning to individuation’s dignity and burden. Following Steiner (and resonating with Teilhard), he suggests the human is not merely another animal species but a new kingdom of life, which means each person is, in effect, their own species. No universal prescription for reconciling spirit and matter will do: each of us must individuate in the unique way that only we can. If we refuse that inner work, the collective expresses our disowned conflicts as fate—fragmentation, mass-mindedness, and moral projection. Jung’s insights, Segall argues, are not only relevant; they are urgent.

In the Q&A, three threads deepen the thesis. First, an audience member urges Segall to make the Jung–Steiner conversation a book and celebrates “cosmic humor” as a multivalent “fourth” alongside matter, the feminine, and evil; comedy functions as a cultural immune system against tyrannical seriousness. Second, on Goethe as connective tissue, Segall shows how Jung maps the four psychological functions through Faust, and how Steiner’s Lucifer/Ahriman can be read as lopsided pairs (intuition–feeling vs sensing–thinking); he also links Böhme’s Ungrund and Plato’s chōra in the Timaeus as figures of the ever-missing fourth. Third, responding to whether we can “make up” new symbols, he underscores Jung’s active imagination as a disciplined poiesis-meets-discovery practice that lets adequate symbols emerge rather than be engineered. Finally, asked to name Christ’s sayings that cut against our splitting impulse, he highlights “Let the one without sin cast the first stone,” the Sermon on the Mount, and the refusal of judgment as the radical heart of the tradition: evil feeds on our attempt to annihilate it; meeting it with love allows it to consume itself.

The through-line is consistent: hold the tension of opposites without denial or nihilism; cultivate humor as the missing fourth; renew our moral and symbolic intelligence so that Christianity’s repressed depths serve a planetary culture rather than a fascist politics.

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