My Life in a Death Cult

I tend to share Jung’s Kantian perspective about subjects like God and life after death. We simply cannot know the ontological truth about these directly. Yet to the psyche their existence seems quite real regardless of what the intellect has to say about the subject. I also possess what I would consider a healthy mistrust of mediums and mediumship, though to be fair, I don’t doubt their inner experiences. While I’m convinced at least some of them are outright charlatans, my doubt lies rather with the meaning they assign to these experiences.  

Before launching into what I have to say, it feels important to mention that much of my own experience outlined below occurred prior to my conscious knowledge of Jung’s inner life and ideas about these subjects. Though I have been aware of correlations for some years now it’s through my current reading of his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections that I’m coming to new insights and conclusions.

This continues to unfold rather synchronistically, as I will shortly relate, while the Centre of Applied Jungian Studies hosts it’s 2025 Jungian Mystery School, on the subject of death, titled Memento Mori. I should also apologize to the reader up-front for writing about these events as they are connected by meaning and span the inner landscape of both Jung’s and my own, rather than simply laying them out chronologically. My hope is that perhaps this will impart something of the sense of synchronicity and its relation to death and timelessness. 

This somewhat idiosyncratic structure acknowledged, let me at least start with some chronological ordering of these events:

About thirty years ago, at the beginning of my foray into mysticism, along with a little dabbling into Jung, I experienced what Jungians call a “big dream”. Without going into detail, I experienced my own death in the dream and was rather surprised to see my body lying on the ground while my “consciousness” seemed to persist outside of my body. 

Around 2014 under the mentorship of Stephen Anthony Farah, our Head of Learning at the Centre, I came to understand that one of the central symbols in the dream – a tree, under which my father and I had been sitting, was on the one hand a mythical reference to Eden and mankind’s subsequent fall into suffering and on the other hand also a reference to my ancestry or family tree. 

One of the difficulties with a precognitive dream like this is that it’s meaning generally only unfolds retrospectively and this meaning can be layered. It has more recently emerged that the tree is also the Iboga tree – a shrub from the jungles of Gabon whose psychoactive root bark is used to produce altered states of consciousness in the ceremonies of the Bwiti – a syncretistic shamanic religion that has its origins with the Babongo people of that area. And Bwiti, even the “Neo-Bwiti” variety into which I was initiated, is for all intents and purposes a death cult.

I’ve participated in a fair number of Neo-Bwiti ceremonies and despite the uniqueness of each experience the general archetypal arc of the process is more or less the same.

It seems that Jung held a similar view due to the events that preceded his writing of Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (The Seven Sermons to the dead). In MDR, Chapter IV, Confrontation with the Unconscious, he writes:

If, therefore, one has a fantasy of the soul vanishing, this means that it has withdrawn into the unconscious or into the land of the dead. There it produces a mysterious animation and gives visible form to the ancestral traces, the collective contents. Like a medium, it gives the dead a chance to manifest themselves. Therefore, soon after the disappearance of my soul the “dead” appeared to me, and the result was the Septem Sermones.

It’s not possible to relate all of my Bwiti experiences here but two of them stand out for me as being particularly relevant.

The first took place during 2019.

Within about two hours of ingesting “the medicine” (Iboga) I began to see images of my ancestors flashing before me, beginning at first with my father, then my grandfather and then his father and so on, until these images settled on a male ancestor several generations down my paternal line. He presented with a scar on the left side of his face, just like the one my father had from being launched through a car window in a drunken driving incident. The thought arose that much of what troubled me in life had as its origin the life of this particular ancestor. What then followed were hours of intensely painful mental suffering or resistance, in my experience quite distinct from somatic suffering, which I would describe as form of mental resistance. Finally, after about twelve to sixteen hours of this, from what I could ascertain, this gave way to complete surrender and psychic death. An experience of pure bliss.

In MDR, Chapter VIII – The Tower, Jung says this:

When I was working on the stone tablets, I became aware of the fateful links between me and my ancestors. I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors, it often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children.

While transporting the chairs to our home my wife had the uncanny sense of an “ancestral presence” and so it seems we now have two unseen guests who have come dine with us for nourishment!

Jumping back to 2020, I’m participating in yet another Bwiti ceremony: This time the nature of the “afterlife” unfolded more explicitly. I entered the bardos rather quickly and spent some time travelling through realm after realm, each connected by a tunnel of light, exactly the kind one hears about in reports of near-death experiences.

Finally, I came to one of these tunnels that seemed particularly important and something told me I really needed gain some momentum to propel myself through this tunnel. I began to “run” faster and faster until this psychic effort produced a “body” (perhaps enough libidinal charge?) sufficient to eject me out of the tunnel and into the realm on the other side. I can only describe this world at least visually as being an “infinite horizon”. 

Then my deceased ancestors, including aunts, uncles and cousins began slowly appearing to me one by one. Some of them spoke to me and others appeared to exhibit symbolic representations of what I concluded were psychic traumas they had endured during their lifetimes. When my father finally appeared, I was thrilled to see him and despite the rather alien symbolisation of this realm thought how wonderful it would be to have a cup of tea and talk about the grandchildren. 

Jung had similar sentiments when he had a precognitive dream about his mother’s untimely death in 1922 in which his father appeared asking for his advice about “marital psychology”. 

Just as it was for Jung, this was not to be, as the dead seem to have their own agenda. My father never spoke to me at all. Rather, he communicated to me by way of – and I can only cringe at the absurdity of it – emojis! I was utterly confused and annoyed and couldn’t make head or tail of the vast majority of what was being communicated. I had to later Google some of these emojis just to get a sense of their meaning. Incidentally there was one important emoji whose meaning eluded me at the time, however under current circumstances along with my current experiments, its meaning has become quite clear.  

In retrospect, the psyche’s use of emojis as a form of communicating affect seems completely rational since they seem to be the most suitable visual representation of the intense and often indescribable affects that were “purging” through my body during this experience. At the time I held of a sort of dual-awareness of my body in “meat space” on the one hand and the purgatorial realm on the other.

After several exhausting hours of this I opened my eyes in physical reality to see the ghostly apparition of my father lying next to me. He was at complete rest and I could sense an awareness in him. That awareness was aware that it was resting and I finally understood what is meant by the phrase “rest in peace”. 

I had thought at the time that such a purging would be the final nail in the proverbial coffin for my ancestral karmic work, at least as far as my father was concerned, but given the recent experience I mentioned of his appearance along with synchronicity of the two chairs, and the subsequent appearance of the meaning of the most significant emoji, this has been brought into question. Things obviously get a little more complicated when considered from the perspective of linear space-time. 

According to the Bwiti view the ancestors exist “beyond time” and since we ourselves are subjected to it, how and exactly when in space-time does this karmic work in relation to our ancestors in a purgatorial plane complete itself, if ever? Again, Jung seems to have similar notions around this difficulty with causality. In MDR, Chapter VIII, he writes:

When I began working with the unconscious, I found myself much involved with the figures of Salome and Elijah. Then they receded, but after about two years they reappeared. To my enormous astonishment, they were completely unchanged; they spoke and acted as if nothing had happened in the meanwhile. In actuality the most incredible things had taken place in my life. I had, as it were, to begin from the beginning again, to tell them all about what had been going on, and explain things to them. At the time I had been greatly surprised by this situation. Only later did I understand what had happened: in the interval the two had sunk back into the unconscious and into themselves I might equally well put it, into timelessness. They remained out of contact with the ego and the ego’s changing circumstances, and therefore were ignorant of what had happened in the world of consciousness.

The answer to this question and others around the links between ancestral karma and personal trauma are not entirely clear to me as yet. My current hypothesis – at least based on my own experience to date, is that personal trauma constellates an inter-generational complex, as a psychic defense against that trauma. At least as far as temporal causality in an individual life is concerned. This is not entirely dissimilar to Donald Kalsched’s concept of an archetypal Self-care system.

In addition, I have the notion that dissociation is a constellation of Thanatos (the archetype of death) and produces a traumatic complex that not unlike our deceased ancestors exists to some degree beyond the reaches of time. This is why trauma and neurosis can be so challenging to transmute.

Either way I suspect that answers lie at least in part in Jung’s own life work as a response to the call of his own ancestors, who in Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (The Seven Sermons to the Dead) had “come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought.”

In other words, Jung’s answer is the process of becoming a whole and undivided in oneself, or individuated. Then there is of course the question of whether any of this has an objective reality to it or whether these are merely the absurd fantasies of a disturbed mind. I can at least report that in addition to the synchronicities, of which there are many more I haven’t had the time to share, I have on occasion in these afterlife excursions gained direct objective knowledge of some of the minutest details of the lives of ancestors that were only later confirmed to me by living relatives.

What this implies ontologically with respect to the individual psyche’s persistence after death, as I said at the beginning, we can’t prove beyond a doubt other than to say there is some phenomenological (psychological) evidence for this. But there’s at least one point about which I am fairly certain, even if this too is “merely” psychological in nature: The purpose and meaning of our lives is inextricably interwoven with the lives of the dead.

Further Reading:

Jung, C.G., Aniela Jaffé, Winston, C. and Winston, R. (1989). Memories, dreams, reflections. New York: Vintage Books, A Division Of Random House, Inc.

Jung, C.G. and Basilides (1967). VII Sermones Ad Mortuos.

Kalsched, D. (1996). The inner world of trauma : archetypal defenses of the personal spirit. Hove: Routledge.