Philemon

Who is Philemon?

Philemon is a figure who appears in two literary works:

Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”, and Goethe’s “Faust”.

In “Metamorphoses”, Ovid narrates how Jupiter and Mercury wandered around, disguised as mortals in the hill country of Phyrgia.

Searching for a place to rest, they were turned away from a thousand homes until they were met by an elderly couple- Philemon and Baucis, who graciously invited these strangers into their humble cottage.

Philemon and Baucis had married in their youth in their cottage and have grown old together in it, accepting their poverty. To honor their guests they offered to kill their only goose. The goose took refuge with the gods who decreed that it should not be killed, and revealed themselves to the couple, saying that those around them would be punished but they would be spared.

With the Gods, they climbed into safety atop a mountain, and upon reaching the top, they saw that the entire country was flooded. Only their cottage remained, now transformed into a temple made of columns of marble and a roof of gold.

To repay their kindness, the gods granted the old couple any wish, to which Philemon and Baucis’ reply was in keeping with their deep humility and reverence.

They wished to become priests and serve in this new shrine to the gods and to die at the same time as a testimony of their enduring love. And so it happened, and when they died, the gods honored them further by tranforming them into trees so that they could continue to live side by side in this way as they had in their mortal lives.

Much later, Goethe uses the old couple as a literary allusion in his book, “Faust”.

In Faust, Goethe has Faust build a city on land reclaimed from the sea. In order to do this, Faust tells Mephistopheles (The Devil) that he wants the old couple, Philemon and Baucis, who live there, to move.

To Faust’s ultimate horror, Mephistopheles burns the old couple’s cottage, with the two still alive inside.

In 1913, during a period of psychosis, Carl Jung recounts a dream in his book, “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” in which a figure named Philemon appears to him.

Jung saw a sea-blue sky covered by brown clods of earth that appeared to be breaking apart. Out of the blue, he saw an old man with kingfisher wings and the horns of a bull flying across the sky, carrying a bunch of keys.

After the dream, Jung painted the image, because he did not understand it. During this intense period, Jung was struck by the synchronicity of finding a dead kingfisher, a bird rarely seen around Zürich, in his garden by the lakeshore.

Thereafter, Philemon played an important role in Jung’s fantasies. To Jung, he represented superior insight and functioned like a guru to him.

Philemon explained how Jung treated thoughts as though they were generated by himself, while for Philemon “thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air.”

Jung concluded that Philemon taught him “psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche.”

This helped Jung to understand that there is something in us which can say things that we do not know and do not intend.

Goethe’s Faust also made a tremendous impression on Jung and held a life-long significance for him.

He felt personally implicated by the destruction of these humble and reverent figures and felt that it was his responsibility to atone for this crime and to prevent its repetition in the 20th century.

Healing this “Faustian split”- the breaking off of man’s spiritual, intuitive, and psychological understanding for the western world’s rapid emphasis on industrialization and hyper-rationality would become a central theme in Jung’s life work.

At his tower in Bollingen, Jung commemorated Philemon. Over the gate, he carved the inscription,

“Philemonis Sacrum – Fausti Poenitentia”

[Philemon’s Shrine – Faust’s Repentance].

In one of the rooms at Bollingen, he painted a huge mural of the winged Philemon, essentially reproducing the painting from the Red Book.

In a letter to Paul Schmitt in 1942, Jung wrote:

“I have taken over Faust as my heritage, and moreover as the advocate and avenger of Philemon and Baucis, who, unlike Faust the superman, are the hosts of the gods in a ruthless and godforsaken age.”

What does this all mean, and why is Philemon important?

To quote W.H. Auden:

“We are lived by powers we do not understand.”

Often, rather than us having ideas, it is ideas that instead have us.

The “Faustian split” which Jung warns us about, and vigilantly fought against his whole life is the tendency for mankind’s rationality to fall in love with itself and it’s own creations.

When we end up prioritizing specific ideologies or systems of understanding over the dignity of the individual, we risk being inauthentic, and inevitably neglect or even deny what cannot be justified by our own ideologies.

This is analogous to what happens in any tyrannical society, any dogmatic religious system, or oppresive political party/point of view.

If you need any examples of this. You need only to look around, or turn to history and you will see it everywhere you go.

You will see it in racism, sexual orientation/class prejudice, gender inequality, the holocaust, and the gulag.

If we are not careful, there is an unconscious part within each and every person that is capable of commiting horrifying actions under the justification and rationalization of any ideology.

In this sense, Philemon acts as a counter-symbol: a spiritual totem that represents the individual’s consciousness/psychological awareness behind rationality.

The symbol of Philemon suggests that there are things that cannot always be grasped by rationality and logic but can be peripherally known through other means using our own individual intuition and discernment.