We live in a time of turmoil…but is it really new?

My version of the Seeress of Prevorst, plagued by ghosts who sought her help, while she sought union with "higher" spirits. The words are what various scholars have said about her

​We live in a time of turmoil…but is it really new?
 
Some insights are emerging after my deep dive into writing about my ancestor
I have been deep into writing about my ancestor, the “Seeress of Prevorst,” or Frederike von Hauffe, over the past couple months, for a free on-line talk I will be giving later this month, “Seeress of Prevorst: Eccentric Early 19th Century Mystic and Healer.” One of the most notable aspects of the story of the “Seeress” is the way in which she was so emphatically a product of her time, the transition from the 18th to the 19th century. Her life mirrored the central preoccupations of Romanticism, Spiritualism and the very beginnings of modern psychology. 
 
The Seeress embodied the qualities sought by thinkers and creators of her time
With her physical vulnerability, paranormal abilities, which included the ability to see ghosts and spirits; she embodied that which the turn of the century Romantics and Spiritualists sought. These included darkness, death, dark emotions, nature (especially in its dark and mysterious manifestations) and the paranormal. Periods of upheaval seem to heighten interest in the unseen; in emotion, nature, death, and mystery.
 
A doctor/poet’s divided loyalties
The seeress’s doctor, Justinus Kerner, saw women as more connected to nature and even to death, according to scholar Wouter J, Hanegraaff. He quotes Kerner as saying: “Woman (to be woman is really illness) (weib zu sein ist eigentlich Krankheit) in a closer union with Nature than man, is therefore susceptible to more illnesses, and moves faster towards the complete union with Nature-death-; …(she) has a stronger talent for premonition (Ahnungsvermögen) than man.” The Romantic poet in Kerner, rather than the doctor side of him, valued this “feminine” vulnerability. However, this bias prevented him from being able to heal her from her illness. Instead of seeing Frederike for her humanness, he saw her for what he wanted from her, a channel into the paranormal world which fascinated him so greatly. 

​A hundred years later,,,what did Carl Jung have to say?
Almost a hundred years after Frederike Hauffe’s short life, Carl Jung, one of the founders of modern psychology spoke about her in a series of lectures. He was living at yet another time of turmoil, the transition from the 19th to the 20th century. He himself was a person of his time, and he channeled through his work much of the turmoil that surrounded him. His fascination with the seeress is understandable from this perspective. He mused about what he called her “extreme introversion,” seeming to focus on the negative aspect of this kind of isolation. 
 
And yet and the same time, he didn’t see her as unique. He saw in her paranormal abilities, developed from her “extreme introversion,” only an extreme expression of abilities that he believed all humans possess.  In a series of lectures about the seeress, he mentioned that he sees patients with her paranormal abilities at least once or twice a week. He spoke of what he knew, having probed his own unconscious, even to the point of putting himself at the brink of insanity, in order to bring back insights about the mysteries we all share within. In so doing, he became one of the founders of modern psychology and was possibly inspired by the seeress in the formation of some of his central ideas. 
 
Are we somewhere new now, or back to the same place?
And here, once again, we are in a time of turmoil, at the turn of the century from 20th to 21st. What do these insights gleaned from earlier transitions from one century to the next offer to us? Are we in a new age, or are we facing challenges that have been faced in time immemorial? How have we benefitted from the lives of these inner explorers of another time? We live today (in the words of one of my spiritual mentors) in a “spiritual wild west.”’ Anything goes. In the confusion that goes with this indiscriminateness, how do we even begin to find our way?

Carl Jung's earliest mandala, very closely resembling the seeress's "sun" and "life" circles. Both sought to order both the inner and outer worlds.

​What we have been taught to reject as fable, is in reality, ill understood truth
Catharine Crowe, the translator into English of the first book written about the seeress by her doctor, Justinus Kerner, (The Seeress of Prevorst; Being Revelations Concerning the Inner-Life of Man, and the Inter-Diffusion of a World of Spirits in the One we Inhabit,) had a particular interest in the milieu within which the seeress was born. She was very interested in the German penchant for folk tales, especially tales of ghosts and the paranormal. In a book that she wrote (The Night Side of Nature, 1848) Crowe wrote, “because in the 17th century, credulity outran reason and discretion, the 18th century, by a natural reaction, threw itself into an opposite extreme. Whoever closely observes the signs of the times, will be aware that another change is approaching. The contemptuous skepticism of the last age is yielding to a more humble spirit of inquiry, and there is a large class of persons among the most enlightened of the present, who are beginning to believe that what they had been taught to reject as fable, has been, in reality, ill understood truth.” She was alluding to the spiritualism and romanticism that pervaded the new century.
 
Does this sound familiar?
Does this shift back and forth sound familiar? Discoveries are made, in these cases discoveries that come from delving into an inner landscape and are celebrated in one century, only to be rejected in the next. We swing from extremes of reason to imagination, finding it difficult to establish a balance between the two. And until we do, we continue to swing back and forth, creating chaos and tumult, instead of peace and calmness. 
 
This essay isn’t about the tumult of our particular time-so much is being written about that right now. My only point is that (I think) we aren’t really facing anything new. We are only facing the inevitable consequence of the tendency to polarize extremes into one camp or another, refusing to consider that we always and forever need both. We need the inner and the outer, dark and light, masculine and feminine (however you choose to interpret these words,) truth and mystery, “reality” and the paranormal and everything in between. I hope that, by opening our ears and hearts to insights from those who have faced transitions such as ours during previous centuries, we may gain some wisdom that will help us to navigate these confusing times.