The Passion of Perpetua and The Pagan Christ: Tom Harpur (2004)

Newsletter, January, 2005

The Passion of Perpetua:

A Psychological Interpretation of Her Visions

Marie-Louise von Franz, edited by Daryl Sharp,

Toronto, Inner City Books, 2004

The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light

Tom Harpur

Toronto, Thomas Allen Publishers, 2004

I am excited by the fact that two books published in Toronto this year, while quite different from one another, both make the same important point.

One is a radical challenge to conventional Christian doctrine by a leading Canadian religion journalist and author. The other is a re-issue of a monograph on the visions a young Christian convert experienced shortly before her grisly death for her faith in Carthage in 203, written by Jung’s associate Marie-Louise von Franz and first published in 1949.

The Pagan Christ helps us to understand why The Passion of Perpetua, modest volume though it is, is really quite an exciting book. The Passion of Perpetua reinforces the message of The Pagan Christ with additional data and with a certain gravitas that The Pagan Christ lacks.

Both books offer the reader a mythical or psychological, rather than literal and dogmatic, approach to Christian material and demonstrate that much of what we regard as Christian existed long before Christianity.

Harpur, a religion columnist for the Toronto Star, Anglican priest and former seminary professor, goes so far as to argue that it is doubtful that a historical Jesus ever existed in the way imagined by most Christians, conservative or liberal. He acknowledges that some scholars have long known about the material he presents, which shows that the ancient sources, in ancient Egypt and elsewhere, of much of what we now call Christianity, including even the notion of a suffering “Christos,” go back many centuries before Christ is said to have lived.

Harpur pleads for a “cosmic Christianity” that would retain the symbols we associate with that faith today—the Cross, the Eucharist and so on—but treat them as the symbols of spiritual truth that he contends they have been for millennia.

[W]hat we need today is not a further rationalizing and de-mythologizing of the Bible accounts, but rather a re-mythologizing of them in order to see their eternal significance as we have never seen it before. The need is not to peel away the myth, as I used to think, but to use it to penetrate into the spiritual heart of what it has always been trying to tell us.

In a passage that contains one of the few references to Jung in the book, Harpur writes that what he has learned of the sources of Christian symbols in pre-Christian times “has made clear to me that the concepts at the heart of Christianity really flow from the deep well of the unconscious, having been planted there by God.” He goes on:

For example, the idea of the Christ within—the fully realized, spiritual human being—is now to me an unmistakable Jungian-style archetype in our human psyche. The same is true of … other religious symbols ... Implanted deeply by the Creator, they belong to us uniquely as human beings, however they are named, and they are full of promise and hope for a meaningful, twenty-first-century faith.

This is a more theological and less psychological formulation than Jung or von Franz would have been likely to offer, but, like them, Harpur directs our attention to some key questions in the area where these disciplines meet.

Perpetua, a young Christian convert, was martyred in the arena in Carthage in 203, first attacked by a mad cow and then killed with a sword. Von Franz is inclined to credit Perpetua’s visions as authentic products of her unconscious, and therefore a valuable glimpse into what was going on in the psyche of a person of her era.

(There is at least one place in the world where Perpetua’s name continues to be associated with human-animal struggle in an arena. Sainte-Perpétue, a community of about 2,225 souls on Highway 259 about 20 kilometres north of Drummondville, is best known today as the home of an annual Festival du Cochon in early August, the highlight of which is the Course Nationale du Cochon Graissé, or National Greased-Pig Race.)

Perpetua’s and Von Franz’s interpretations of Perpetua’s visions are quite different. For example, Perpetua dreamed that she stepped on the head of a dragon while starting to climb a ladder to heaven. For Perpetua the dragon was the devil, but for von Franz the dragon is a more complex figure, standing for the danger of Perpetua’s “slipping back into the old pagan spiritual attitude, out of which the ladder shows the way to higher consciousness,” and also for “Perpetua’s own instinctive soul, her will to live and her feminine reality, which she tramples underfoot and disregards as she steps beyond.”

Like Harpur, von Franz sees early Christianity, paganism and gnosticism as far less distinct than is commonly supposed and drawing on a common stock of symbols. While Perpetua exemplifies how Christianity represented a break from the past, von Franz writes that Perpetua’s visions “contain not a single purely Christian motif; rather, they contain only archetypal images common to the pagan, Gnostic and Christian.”

Perhaps von Franz goes a little farther than Harpur in acknowledging new and creative elements in what welled up from the collective unconscious a couple of millennia ago, even if the results were by no means all positive. She sees Perpetua and other martyrs as “tragic, unconscious victims of the transformation which was being fulfilled deep down in the collective stratum of the human soul. This was the transformation of the image of God, whose new form was to rule over the aeons to come.”

In her quiet way, von Franz seems to suggest, as Harpur does forthrightly, that the time may have come for a further transformation.

—Harvey Shepherd