End of Evangelion: Jung's Aion, Alchemy, and an Anime Apocalypse
- pontos fathom podcast Ep14
Welcome to our fourteenth episode of the pontos fathom podcast - End of Evangelion: Jungian Psychology, Jung's Aion, Alchemy, and an Anime Apocalypse. pontos fathom podcast EP14. In this episode we continue our month long analysis into the Evangelion anime from the point of view of psychoanalysis. In this podcast, we discuss Jung, the epic End of Evangelion, following topics of Aion, Psychoanalysis, Jungian Archetypes, Aion, and Gnositic Alchemy in relation to Apocalyptic Anime. Interesting insights into characters, human instrumentality, and the Eva units. Thanks for watching and let me know your thoughts in the comments below!
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welcome back everyone to pontus fathom press this is pontos fathom podcast episode 14
discussing end of evangelion carl jung's ion and apocalyptic anime yes continuing our neon genesis evangelion uh series of podcasts this month and i'm sort of structuring these at least off the bat is things about freud uh in the last topic uh just really focusing on the original neon genesis evangelion uh if you want to check out that podcast we really get into the concept of how just like anno minds minds christianity for world building and for his storytelling and and for some of the resonances that we get out of you know why why there's a greatness in neon genesis evangelion he also seems to be mining uh consciously or unconscious the psychoanalytical process right so in in a way uh evangelion is is has a therapeutic kind of uh storyline right so the so the hero's the classical hero's journey has been uh one of you know giant robot big monster robot kills monster everyone's happy this one's more like giant robots beat up by monster people's lives are shattered apocalypse something like this right this is so i think that that kind of subversion and um uh what what gets discovered as the story un unfolds throughout neon genesis evangelion was sort of the topic of the first one but those themes really apply across all of evangelion and so today we're going to talk a bit about end of evangelion and and that's sort of the you know anno's return to the probably the last two chapters of neon genesis evangelion which were very internal uh uh psychoanalytical psychological episodes they're really about the um kind of what's going on in shinji's mind what's going on with um these these impacts right with this human um uh genji's project right and
human instrumentality so today i want to focus by focusing on end of evangelion and here we've got a picture of the classic mass production angels that asaka that's a great scene with the mass production angels and very apocalyptic also right this is a classic scene from end of evangelion so let's kind of do a little bit of background on jung let's do a little bit of background on why there was an end of evangelion and what it sort of signifies end of evangelion for sure is a is a fan favorite it's one of my favorites and i think it really captures some very interesting points and we're going to reach into carl jung's ion here phenomenology of the self because a lot of what's going on in evangelion is about the self it's not only about shinji's self but the weird architecture of the self in the sense that you've got an ava you've got a a pilot inside the lcl you've got atf fields avas fight angels and then you know this question kind of comes out in the in the you know second third impacts you know especially as we get into it's a rebuild later
why do we have evangelions like you know angels are evangelions there's all this kind of confusion around the self so phenomenology of the self jung's work in the ion
is a little bit like jung's end of evangelion right this is the book that terrified jordan peterson it's got a lot of uh culmination of uh jung's phenomenology of the um sorry about the collective unconscious and also some inklings into his alchemical and gnostic sort of researches so we'll go into this a bit i'll also be talking about alchemy mysterium conjunction is some of these mysteries that come up and we'll talk a little bit about the break between freud and young so we'll kind of use that as just like anno has a break with the fans and the fans have a break between like the mecca fans versus the the emo fans of evangelion we'll sort of say it that way so let's kind of go into next we'll talk about end of evangelion kind of comes out of in a way the success of neon genesis evangelion right there was a huge success of people really identified with the evangelion
concepts the mecca the story and then they were left with the final two episodes which were very apocalyptic right i think there's certain fans who who like like it you know but the fans are always going to be torn right so anno comes back definitely is something that you could get commercial success from at the same time he he's on oh right and he has his own ways of looking at it so what you have with the individual van is sort of a retelling of the end of neon genesis and evangelion and it's it's done in a two-chapter format but it's it's more of an external look right so you have an internal look and an external look and i think that it's a in some ways we talk about i was talking about anno's break with the fans but you do see uh this sort of break that happens and i and i want to kind of call highlight out some differences between jung and freud right so there's the freudian school of of analysis and you know freud is in a lot of ways the founder or the the grandfather of psychoanalysis right and at the same time yoon was a student but then jung went off in a very different direction and i think that this this break where freud kept things grounded in uh the topics of uh neuroses and analysis jung started to move more into mythology and philosophy like a philosophy of psychology right and he wanted to look at well beyond you know our the way we are traumatized perhaps or the way our family structure worked or you know uh freud was very much grounded in the psychoanalytic practice and even though he has theoretical works and even though he has um interesting exploration founding exploration right right just amazing and we'll go we'll go into freud the re the rebuild of freud in our next podcast talking about alakan because lokhan will go back and look at freud and sort of say hey we'll look at how freud was doing this but now we see this perspective right and i think anno does that with rebuild of evangelion so we'll kind of go into that in that phase but sticking with the the jung break with freud jung started exploring different things you started exploring how he saw in the in his patients dream work alchemical and religious themes that resolved in the same way that the mythology was resolved so this is where jung got really into like terence mckenna says the books that the jungians don't read right so you've got mysterium conjunctions which is his union of opposites right and the alchemical work where jung really starts to explore these things so if we if we take a look at um how end of evangelion comes up it's really shinji is bringing a pop shinji is basically bringing the apocalypse forward right in a lot of ways and maybe gendo has engineered it with human instrumentality but you can see all of these psychological forces in a way around shinji whether it's his mother in the ava his mother is the clone ray rey is symbolic children of adam and lilith and uh not just ray but the evangelion program in their relation to adam and lilith right so maybe we'll jump in there i think that's a good place to jump in so
first of all let's talk about the self so jung kind of talks a lot about his phenomenology of the self uh with some terms so in in jungian in the jungian view and i think this will i'll bring this up because i think this kind of relates to how our eva pilots are fragmented somewhat when they're in their ava so there's always this kind of weird uh
mitigating circumstances or drama about and and even later on in rebuild when mari talks about the smell of the lcl or uh this confusion about which pilot can operate which evangelion because you know the evangelion is based on a human and in shinji's case it's his mother so it's such a natural connection it's her child returned to the womb something like this but psychologically jung sort of explored this idea of the self is a much more complex egg you know so the self has things like the conscious self and the which is your ego right but you're there's also in the conscious side of the self there's the idea of the persona so you have an ego but you also have this public facing persona so we can see like asuka has the i'm the strong girl i'm the fierce fighter but then she kind of goes off and she has her odd doll conversations right which is sort of goes now it starts to go into the unconscious space so so we have the self which is bigger than the self is sort of bigger than the sum of all your parts right and the conscious parts are the ones you sort of know about consciously like your ego and your persona is the ones that you publicly show but then below the line we have the unconscious right and then freud kind of breaks the unconscious ass so say we go back to ossica again her doll talks really are deep dives into her complexes her enema and animus and her shadow right so she's got some trauma around her mother's uh mother traumatizing her mother's death she also has some strange relations to men that she she wrestles with right and i think that some of these things uh you know jung kind of calls out in the idea of uh you know in the unconscious that he found structures there there's the relating function which he kind of called the anima which is the um it's a feminine function in the idea that you know we're all children of a father and a mother right and then from there we get relations to what um our relating function is and what our animus function is you know from from the people that raise us or how we're raised or from our social interactions right we see how uh different people relate and how different people act strongly so on the animal side and so we see kind of this animus possession in osaka we see this enema possession in shinji we see this um similar uh uh disaffected sort of distancing from experience in the clone ray or the real ray or is she real she cloned right she's a clone right and then uh but she she's actually one that's raising like learning among her friends right so so this rey also becomes symbolic of many things because she is more than what she um she seems right gendo has got plans for her and then we'll see that in the liverton atom story so one of the things that come out of this is this syzygy so let's go into what jung says about the syzygy here he says uh the suzuji is the anamine enemas so what is the connections he says the spinning woman maya creates illusions by her dancing
had we not long known the symbolism of dreams the son's relation to the mother is real to her imago and to the woman who has become a mother for him his eros has passed like a child he hopes to be caught sucked in enveloped and devoured right he seeks the protecting nourishing charmed circle of the mother the condition of the infant released from care so here you see our young 14 year old ava pilots inside their evangelions kind of safe signing you know in the womb of of lcl fluid right where does the guilt lie with the mother or with the sun presumably with both and here young kind of talks about the the way the syzygy forms a a mysterium conjunction it's a opposite but it's a union right the pilot becomes the ava in a lot of ways right the lcl breaks down the walls and that's where we start seeing some of that um amazing uh visuals that anna produces for us where the the the pilots start to lose it a bit so then lastly just on the self uh we'll talk about the idea of the assimilation of the self it must be reckoned a psych a psychic catastrophe when the ego is assimilated by the self the image of wholeness then remains in the unconscious so that on the one hand it shares the archaic nature of the unconscious and the other hand finds itself in this psycho psychically relative space-time continuum that is a characteristic of the unconscious as such both these qualities are numinous and hence have an unlimited determining effect on ego consciousness it is a vital necessity that it should be so if the ego fails at any length of time under the control of the unconscious factor its adaptation is disturbed and the way is open for all sorts of possible accidents now this almost reads like an evangelion battle right the idea is you know your ego can be shattered just like the battery runs out in the evangelion and then all this other chaos happens or the um the pilot of the evangelion has some misalignment with the synchronization with ava you know and we have the avas that have gone haywire like in end of evangelion uh but then you have the total opposite of all this you know there's that apocalyptic side of end of evangelion but then you still have shinji failing he's rolled up in the ball again right he doesn't want to play he wants to revert from all activity and and it comes to um you know asaka meets her sort of meets her end in the in this space against the the against the mass production angels
lastly here would just say
accentuation of the ego personality and the world of consciousness may easily assume such proportions that the figures of the unconscious are psychologized and the self consequently becomes assimilated into the ego now this is some weird things right the self being assimilated into the ego it's like you think you are
your ego as opposed to your wholeness right so although this is the exact opposite of the process we have just described it follows by the same result inflation right asaka's ego inflation she thinks she can do it all the world of consciousness now must be leveled down in favor of the reality of the unconscious in the first case reality has to be protected against the archaic external and ubiquitous dream state so yeah so here we kind of go into this like when we lose that balance uh it's very very risky for instance a person who is not conscientious enough to make up a moral effort in order to come up to the mark right like shinji while for one who is sufficiently rooted in the world through his own efforts and no moral achievement to inflict defeat on the virtues by losing the ties to the world and reducing his adaptive performance this is like asaka losing heart right and we have finally in the end rey who comes to the rescue all the time rey's really self-sacrificing she comes to the rescue okay so that that's a little bit about the self about the animus and the syzygy i also want to talk a bit about the shadow right so jung talks about the shadow but uh just quick mention of that is the idea that there are parts of ourselves that we don't want to see right we don't want to see certain parts of ourself and i think that this is um this is the shadow work we talk about the shadow work is making that unconscious force that's a negative side of us conscious and we can kind of see anno doing this maybe by re rebuild but i think with end of evangelion he's sort of really lashing out a bit at the same time he's trying to express some of the things visually he is an artist still so he does he is able to do both right so what do you guys think leave a message in the chat just while we were talking about that i just want to shout out quickly we're working on some new books the impedance and admittance in desiring machines and psychoanalysis of artificial intelligence these are in proof uh we'll be getting these out shortly but speaking of the apocalypse you can check out bentzemagos is flowing the tears of a flesh android the curiously short presidency of obiden in which the continuity of government team in a low orbital satellite is flowing the tears of the candidate making sure the salinity test is up to muster administered by uh commandant of injectable life extending
stimulants rona crown uh right hand man to the flesh android in chief and you know various hijinks he runs into going haywire as the tentacles dis attached from his spinal column so that'll be an interesting book to check out if you're interested in the apocalypse and we really support the channel so we appreciate your your help so let's get into let's talk a little bit about adam let's talk a little bit about adam and lilith which are kind of part of this mythology of end of evangelion and i wanted to go into the con concepts that we see both of adam and lilith i be because i think that these are quite strange uh occurrences in in the ava series right they're very mysteriously done they're not well described and i think the first one here is this is very interesting that i found this in mysterium conjunctions by jung says the reference to sulfur as an arcane and transformative substance must suffice so it starts going off about sulfur
the christ lapis the colors the grove of venus as we saw he fell asleep after having a long and instructive conversation with the voice of saturn in his dream he beholds the figures of two men by the fountain in the grove of saturn there's an incurable wound and blood pours and we have red blood right blood pours and just think of the imagery of evangelion when i say this the blood pours from it in the form of whitest milk and as the adept sinks deeper into dreams it changes to a river so now we're in a river of milk and i think about this white and red colors that are in end of evangelion we see it in the angels right we see it i'm sorry we see it in the mash mass production evangelions right the red lips and the white but then we see it later as rey reincarnates um white right and then we see the blood of not only of the uh destroyed angels but also of the of the third impact second impact the third impacts the various impacts right uh and we also see that sort of like this idea as it says bodies appear floating their souls above the water and they go back into bodies so polluted and glad to be quit of them the world would remain afloat until the fogs and clouds have disappeared it's a sulfuric dream that's going on and it says here this is where it's interesting we learned further that sulfur is not only the medecina but also the medicus the wounded physician sulfur suffers the same fate as the body that is pierced by the lance of mercurius in roushner's pandora the body is symbolized as christ the second atom pierced by the lance of a mermaid or a lilith or an adam right so here you have wow you have everything here you've got a lance you've got a crucified christ the second adam christ is the second adam so we have that adam lilith connection we have the crucifixion imagery and we also have the lance of the mermaid which although we call the spirit of longinus or the spear of cactus we have a mention to lilith so here we have this kind of return that uh that that anno does with end of evangelion and with the series in general let's kind of go into adam a bit so we talk we found a reference to lilith and adam let's kind of keep going down in this so into this you know and of course anno says oh yeah the mythology is nonsense and we know that it's not really christianity here and we're not really talking that eva evangelion is some kind of prophetic thing but more from a point of view of world building more from a point of view of uh if we look at jungian archetypes right the idea of young gain archetypes is very interesting because jung sees that are unconscious and this could be the unconscious of the viewers of individual of the creators of it or even of the artists our unconscious sort of in jung's view was a pipeline to the influences of human cultural and activity you have hero myths you have gods of the mountain you have the fish myth you have a number of interesting things that come up
and i think that um uh this is where this is where we're sort of planting that idea and uh we'll keep going into this atom and lilith connection so it says according to the rabbinic view adam even had a tail his condition at first was altogether most inauspicious as he lay still inanimate on the ground he was of a greenish hue thousands of impure spirits fluttering around but god shooed them away until only one remained lilith the mistress of spirits who succeeded in so attaching herself to adam's body that she became with child by him only when eve appeared did she fly away again the eve only when the ava appeared right so this is such a weird stuff that anno has tapped into right because here we have these old old texts not even biblical these are sort of mythological texts even right um the rabbinical works of jeremiah ben elizar right and adam has many faces just like the many eyes the many eyes of uh uh anno's vision in end of evangelion right but god shooed them away until only one remain lilith the mistress of spirits who succeeded so uh became with child and then only when eve appeared did she fly away again and we sort of see like that that image of rey sort of rising up white and uh kind of floating over everyone right rey as the uh post impact view so let's keep on going it says this throws a bad light oh the demonic lilith sorry the daimonic liveth seems to be a certain aspect of adam for the legend says that she was created from him with the same earth it throws a bad light on adam's nature when we are told that countless demons and spooks arouse from his nocturnal emissions ex-nocturnal feminist fluids this happened during 130 years in which he had to spend apart from eve banished from the heavenly court well if that's not reminding us of the opening scene of end of evangelion i don't know what is but it's odd right and you can see how you when you get into this stuff of the unconscious how there are all these resonances and i think part of those resonances and exposing us to them are are what makes end of evangelion so um so interesting right uh so let's keep going here just a little bit further in gnosticism the original man adamus who was nothing but a paraphrase of adam was equated to the iphotic hermes with the koribas the seducer of dionysus as well as the calibri the pista sophia who met the sabawath adamus the ruler of the aeon and then it keeps going on adam was created by sataniel god's first son and the fallen angel so here they're saying that adam was cree in this myth according to the teaching of the belgamils adam was created by a fallen agent called sataniel satania was unable to bring him to life so god did it for him and you kind of see that weird adam is the homo maximus the anthropos right so you have this mandaean talk this idea of the anthropos humanity right human instrumentality projects the weird nature of um how uh chrono and rey seem to resonate a bit differently than the rest of the characters in that they are
sort of hybrid creatures or demi-god-like or clones or something like that there's a very strange nature to them okay so let's um let's keep going here i just wanted to call out a couple ideas if we look at the so let's go back to jung and we'll talk a little bit about his aeon so inside his aeon i just wanted to show some of these alchemical imagery so one thing that you was big on is
like i mentioned with dreams one can analyze the dreams and jung would find things like the hero's tale or or these stories that resonated with mythology and i think that this activity that jung would do with the collective unconscious was a tool of so to speak to understand how we are how the self can be found inside of uh how the self can be found inside of our um uh the self is bigger than the activity of just the consciousness of the unconsciousness and what we find in dreams through alchemy a sort of a way to know the self a way to surface the unconscious things like this so if we go into i'm just taking this is a book by edward edinger it's commentary on the ion book so we'll kind of just reach into this uh just to get some ideas that i wanted to share first of all there was this idea about the turning of the heavens right so the idea that this the wheel of the stars is turning but this reminds me of the opening of end of evangelion where you have that drop and it also reminds me of sort of like that uh feelings that we get in end of evangelion when you start having the uh third impact sort of feel right so you know scenes from inside of the the avas as the world starts to change and you can see that this these charts that jung shows us this is about the flow of pisces across the sky we also have this dream interpretations and they remind me of some of the imagery even from the imagery of the screens of
inside of nerve right so you know there's there's kind of like this weird techno jargon that goes out through all of end of end of evangelion and and neon genesis evangelion where these screens and heads up displays tell us about you know they give authority to the state of the eva and at the same time there's this mystical nature to things so what one thing that jung comes up with and this might kind of remind us of cele zella cele right the idea here is there's some kind of tribunal or there's some kind of structure in place and gendo's put himself against it and there's all kinds of fan theories we're not going to go into that but there's lots of if you're interested in that lots of different content out there to describe this what this is what this is really about here is these systematic ladder this lapis quarternio where we go from the rotundum to the lapis to the serpent to the man and they're always made up of these four characters for example you have in one you have the serpent and adam right in the garden of eden or you might have christ and satan in another kind of relation so it's like uh jung has put together these these relation matrixes and you can almost think of it as you can think of it as a a t fields uh you can think of it as um just the relation think of it this way shinji his mother rey and eva right and there's a complex quaternary that goes on there right shinji's relation to his mom she came from his mom she's his mother but then shinji's mom is the ava which shinji pilots shinji has a relation to the ava and then shinji's eva or shinji eva has a relation to rey you know they fight side by side they're protecting each other even the opening scene of neon genesis shinji has a moment of compassion where his cowardice is overcome by his his his care for the injured ray and he decides to go and fight in the evangelion and then they have this shinji ray relation you know ray wanted to bring uh gendo to dinner rey comes to save shinji ray doesn't want shinji to fight anymore something like this but then in the end shinji saves the mother shinji saves rey shinji will destroy the world to save the one right and you start having this very i mean this is the stuff of apocalypse right this is the apocalyptic uh component to it where the world is willing to come to end for certain of these uh prophecies to come true right and i think that that's very interesting and here you sort of see another chart that sort of maps out all of this propheticness you know here we say i mentioned the formula is quite similar to a vision of ezekiel you notice the formula of the four quaternaries each of its four corners represents itself in the other four quarters so like uh this is the daisy chain of oh well then there's another quaternary gendo human instrumentality yui and rey right so gendo's got this human instrumentality project yui was involved with it and then rey is the clone but then ray alter also intersects with the shinji coronary right so you start to use this quaternary and i'm just saying listen just like gendo uses religion it may just be we can just ground it as a world building technique or the reason why evangelion resonates with us so much right and there's that uroboros concept too i i believe if we look into one of the books maybe in the alchemy you can see the uroburros is uh the serpent that's consuming his own tail right so i think that that's another image you guys have seen it this is not the your burus but this sort of has that view of uh human instrumentality where the the line across the moon and uh and those alchemical uh ideas that come up okay so then let's let's go into the final stretch here so um i want to go back into jung's ion and talk a little bit about those alchemical i'm sorry those apocalyptic ideas right so we have um
we have this idea it says as to the 5 000 years the date we get is ad-1239 there was an epoch noted for the spiritual instability the vet revolutionary heresies uh and the new age of the spirit so there was joachim a flora in the fourth laternian council in 1215 he expected the opening of the seventh seal in the fairly near future the advent of the everlasting gospel right the evangelium we have in the evangelion here so we'll keep going on in the reign of the intellectus spiritualist in the age of the holy ghost this third aeon he said had already begun with saint benedict the founder of the benedictine order one of saint joachim's followers the franciscan friar gerard of borgo san dominio proclaimed in his introduction in evangelium eternal which is translates to his introduction to the eternal evangelium which appeared in 1254 in paris uh the year 1260 would replace the gospel of jesus and we are also known in joachims on monasteries as the true vehicle of the holy ghost so here i just wanted to kind of bring this up you know moving into the apocalyptic side of things that we start to see um you know lots listen there's lots of biblical imagery in this but jung had this kind of idea about the uh what the consequences of an apocalypse or a second coming was so let's let's just say there is a confusion with end of evangelion right we mash up a lot of things we've got this christian evangelion stuff happening we've got nerve being conquered everything's coming to an end and then there's a sort of redeeming moment maybe of shinji saving or rey is one of them but we also have the idea that something else is happening in this end of all things you know you sort of see that epic hey jude moment at the end of the the show where the songs playing and instrumental uh the the the second impact is unfolding that uh that i feel is very very very much in the spirit of japanese apocalyptic anime and i i think that we can kind of find some more insights here through young with this apocalyptic side so let's go back to adam again because while we have adam as the originator we have the idea of the second coming as well we know that jesus is thought of as a second adam right so when we see shinji as a crucified character or even rey as a crucified character actually all our characters and evangelion have to suffer and in the end of evangelion they all kind of are destroyed as as we see angels destroyed you know there's sort of a cross goes up for each of them in that that they're not going to survive this impact right so let's go into this is for the neces the universal ground is the original man adam um and knowledge of him is regarded as a begins of perfection as the bridge to the knowledge of god he is male female and comes from father and mother he has three parts the rational the psychic and the earthly these three parts came down into one to one person jesus and through the doctrine is related to the original man christ as the second adam the soul of three parts is a trinity therefore the original man is mentioned in caribbeaus and oanes the letter of a soul capable of suffering so that the figure of the great most beautiful and perfect man humbled to be a slave might suffer punishment he is the blessed nature hidden and revealed so we start out here in this apocalyptic moment where there was lots of suffering right a nerve has been destroyed in a physical level uh we see ossica totally devastated by the mass production angels shinji goes up against it then he gets sort of crucified into this higher form of an angel you see rey's transformation right and um it becomes kind of a gate right it becomes a gate a gateway in a lot of ways this is what's very interesting we go into this jung goes into this and says the blessed nature of the hidden is revealed and everything has come to be and will be and the kingdom of heaven is sought within humans and even in the children of seven years or in this case the children of 14 years on the face of it this looks like the beginnings of a sexual theory right concerning the underlying psychic structure reminiscent of certain modern attempts of the same vein this is for them a hidden in mystical logos they are osiris in the water they are the substance of the seed they are the hermes as the logos and you kind of see this uh you know in evangelion or end of evangelion there is a oh this is interesting though it says there's worshiped as the phallus they become like the male organ and has in every urge to lift upwards and we see that lifting upwards of ray right ray lifts upwards right so there is this and then you you can also see in some of the dialogue that's going on with shinji uh both in the neon genesis evangelion ending but as well as an end of evangelion that has this libidinal desire like what is your desire and you see the female characters all approaching shinji as sort of a vision of what's what's open to him so uh you know maybe uh this is a good place to jump into another quick observation i had where shinji's eva
is a unicorn and so maybe we can see it here so if you look at this picture you can see ava unit 1 has got the horn right you can see that horn in the top of ava unit 1. so i have another better clear picture of it
yeah well you see you can see rey's does not have that and here's an apocalyptic image of rey and ava unit zero and you have the spear of longinus this is not from the show but it's it's kind of it does have all those elements and it does have that apocalyptic imagery right you see this has got the red sky and the waters and and the ava behind holding the spear but i wanted to go into that uh concept of the of the unicorn right so here we see that unicorn horn and again we see
yeah we can see it very well here right so this one we can clearly see
unit one shinji's unit has got a unicorn horn again here with the whole cast right the unicorn horn is right here and here he's emulated by spears this is sort of a uh a crown of thorns sort of view right so um and here's a great picture of adam silly and corono and here's a picture of the end of evangelion so typical with with uh gendo but i wanted to kind of talk a bit about that unicorn so here we go to jung in yoongi and alchemy it's a whole section in psychology and alchemy on the unicorn and you hear see uh
the heavenly horn of the moon is closely connected with the unicorn it says uh
that's the ray of light now this is an interesting ray of light right rey is the rays right uh and the the ray of light you know you often see there's a statue of moses that has two horns well they're actually rays of light so sort of the ray of light the logos coming down into the unicorn and here we see like one of the great tapestries uh from the 15th century the hunt of the unicorn right the unicorn captured and cordoned off here right and this is sort of a bit like this kind of image might sum up end of evangelion in a real clear way like anno's relation to you know we talked earlier about the break between jung and freud but you had the break between anna and his fans where anno was getting death threats they didn't like the the ending of neon genesis evangelion and anno was sort of going through his own shadow work right anna was going through his own work to understand his problems that he was working through and find his voice and produce great art at the same time transforming into art and i think the redemptive side of it is he did produce the art right and so we see uh with this unicorn image these associated unicorn symbols aim at giving no more than a sample of the extremely intricate entangled connections between pagan and natural philosophy gnosticism alchemy ecclesiastical tradition which in turn had a deep and lasting influence on the world of alchemy i hope these examples have made clear for the reader just how far alchemy was a religious psychological or mystical movement right and i think that this is uh here's a poem it says we caught the beast called unicorn that knows and loves a maiden best and falls asleep upon her breast we took from underneath his horn the splendid male male carbuncle stone sparkling against the white skull bone and this is sort of like again the imagery of white the imagery of the the the lance the imagery of the of of rey uh past the moment so i think that's gonna give us a good tour of some concepts of jung throughout end of evangelion i did want to wrap it up sort of in the theme of apocalyptic anime and some conclusion i just wanted to read from young's ion
it says
it has been believed hitherto that the human shadow was the source of all evil now it can be ascertained on closer investigation that the unconscious human that is his shadow does not consist only of morally reprehensible tendencies but also displays a number of good qualities such as normal instincts appropriate relations realistic insights creative impulses etc on this understanding evil appears merely as a distortion a deformation a misinterpretation and misapplication of effective effects these falsifications and caricatures now appear as the special effects of anima and animus the latter as the real authors of evil but we cannot stop at even this realization for it turns out that all archetypes spontaneously develop favorable and unfavorable light and dark good and bad effects in the end we have to acknowledge that the self is a complexio oppositorium meaning a complex of oppositions precisely because there can be no reality without polarity right if we call everything that god does or allows good then evil too is good and good becomes meaningless right so the idea here is it must therefore be supposed that they spring from a need of human consciousness and for that reason they lose their vowel vitality and validity outside the human sphere that is to say a hypostasis of good and evil as metaphysical entities is inadmissible because it would deprive the terms as meaning so what is he talking about here talking about the chemical wedding okay and i think that some of the chemical wedding what i mean here is uh the union of the opposites there is good there is evil look at all of our fallen characters throughout end of uh throughout neon genesis evangelion everyone everyone goes with the uh second impact uh everyone goes and they um nobody's saved but yet shinji does reach for ray right shinji tries to save rey and i think that saving her is something that is the bridge for us into rebuilds because if we look at rebuild as an eternal recurrence it's sort of shinji wants to save rey he wants another chance he wants a redo right and even though we'll get into later how you can't we can't redo exactly we have to relive it i think that you'll see and rebuild uh something that's interesting because lacan also wanted to do this work uh to revisit freud and i think that'll be interesting in our next lecture or our next topics right uh last last on end of evangelion in the apocalyptic side uh and and in that closing notes from jung's ion what we do see here is in his conclusion that of the chemical wedding that there is some redemption that's possible right so with gendo he did have some good intentions the promise gendo hadn't worked out his own issues shinji has good intentions but he didn't work out his his issues and this is sort of like all of us right so what a what what apocalyptic um genre does often you show us that the time has run out but it shows us in a symbolic way right so with apocalyptic anime we get to see the world end and then see what our characters do in that extreme position but there's another way of looking at this um you know we there's another way to look at this which is you know that you know in christian apocalypse for example we had the idea that the christ returns right and the return of christ is the redemption of the christian apocalypse there's a second coming and now just like anno hack's religion i think that we could also hack it and just say actually every time one saves rey every time one puts the good of of human interests you know our fellow team you know shinji eventually does get back in the eva rey sacrifices herself we see that human story and i think this is the place where evangelion shows us that as we reboot into rebuild that some of that effort does pay off you know in the long hero's journey and i think you know with jung connection the hero's journey is a lot of what this is about right so hopefully this was interesting to you guys um like i mentioned in the lead out we'll do lacan next week i think i'm cheekily calling it uh the rebuild of rebuild of freud lacan's rebuild of freud and we will talk about rebuild of evangelion with the philosophy of lacan talk a little bit about his mirror stage we'll talk about his thoughts on desire on synthome synthome is very interesting which is like the symptom versus the cause of the the problem and we'll also talk a bit about um lacan's freud project how he revisits it and we'll see how anno has revisited the world of evangelion for us to sort of um do his own alchemy there is some jungian alchemy that we'll see in rebuild as well so looking forward to that one next week and thanks for watching please like and subscribe check out the flesh android in the links below and please leave your comments let me know what you think would like to turn this into a live broadcast at some point but bear with me as we grow the audience and we can get that out there so let let me know what you think below and share it if you think it's interesting and we'll talk to you next week thanks a lot bye-bye
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