Jung on Wodan and Nietzsche

‘Wodan (also known as Woden or Wotan …) is one of important gods in the ancient Germanic mythology’ (http://www.timelessmyths.com/norse/teutonic.html#Wodan). It is also argued that this god had two totally opposite sides of representations; ‘as the chief sky god and war god’, and the god of ‘death and hanging’ (ibid), which allegedly incited blood sacrifice.

Following is a quote from an argument on Carl Gustav Jung, the famous Swiss psychologist in the twentieth century, which gives a basic explanation about ‘archetype’, one of Jung’s keywords, as following:

‘… every archetype has sides, positive (light) and negative (dark). Actually, these are neutral attributes, like the constructive and destructive sides of nature, their intent is neither good nor evil. Rather, it is the human experience of them that is either positive or negative. In The Practice of Psychotherapy, Jung notes that the positive side of an archetype is experienced as superhuman, spiritual and divine; the dark side as bestial, semihuman and demonic. The former represents our higher nature, the latter our lower or primitive nature’ (https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:g8ULRi0j2ukJ:www.michaelgellert.com/pdf/michael_gellert-eruption_of_the_shadow_in_nazi_germany.pdf+jung+warned+wotan+1936&hl=en&gl=uk&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESiy7aBtQDUTfB6srVW2vE9QBtFxlWYpl1RPtNoQMj2zdneo2akwIPGvG7lKR8Rk2Vq_N1XEQwPjxQzv-9aIwGMBQJUJNJrxwGFVgDBYDGMS8yH7nDbH-SqNaVKwlGGHBKxV7gFQ&sig=AHIEtbRS9B55MgOEt2lv6Q904rJ0IkHHbw&pli=1).

Friedrich Nietzsche

Obviously, such double-sided archetype could be easily connected with Wodan/Wotan, the god of sky and death. The quote above further argues that ‘the spirit of the depersonalized or demythologized god Wotan (has been) manifesting in the collective psyche of the German people’ (ibid). In addition, it gives an example of Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher of the late nineteenth century, by quoting from Jung, who analysed the philosopher as ‘unfamiliar with German literature’ and he ‘misconstrued the identity of Wotan, on different occasions calling him Zarathustra, Dionysus, the “mistral wind,” and simply the “Unknown God”’ (ibid).

For reading the text in full: http://wrex2009.wordpress.com/2011/08/13/jung-on-nietzsche-and-the-archetype-of-wotan/