Jung’s Answer to Job, or The Transformative Power of Anger with God
The Winchesters learn Chuck is God in 11x20 Don’t Call Me Shurley
In 15x03 The Rupture, the Winchesters solidify their shared anger at Chuck.
Dean: “I’m not freaked, I’m angry OK? I’m pissed.”
What does it mean to be angry with God?
The psychoanalyst Jung’s ideas about the psyche (as those of you who have been following my S14 Jungian meta series will know) have been drawn on by the SPN writers’ room, particularly in the Dabb era of Supernatural. Jung wrote a book called Answer to Job.
Job’s story is very relevant to Sam and Dean right now, because Job was a “righteous man” whom God tormented. In The Book of Job, Satan came to Yahweh, and suggested that Job was only righteous because his life was easy, as he had God’s protection. He bet God that Job would repudiate Yahweh if the going got tough. God took Satan’s bet, and withdrew his protection from Job, allowing Satan to visit all manner of torment on him.
Satan covered Job in boils, caused the deaths of his ten children and all his livestock of goats and cattle and camels, and generally f-ed him up.
Satan Smiting Job With Boils (1826) by William Blake
Note that God, at the end of S14, kills Team Free Will’s son, Jack, and now Sam is sick (thanks to the God-wound from the revenge/ equaliser Hammurabi gun) and Cas is losing his powers. So TFW are suffering in a similar manner to Job.
Job’s friends thought Job must have done something wrong, and suggested he was being justly punished by God for sins committed.
Job himself opened up a conversation with God in prayer, hoping his appeals would be answered, and lamenting the (unjust) suffering being inflicted on him:
“Does it please you [God] to oppress me,
to spurn the work of your hands,
while you smile on the schemes of the wicked?” Job 10:3
“Surely, O God, you have worn me out;
you have devastated my entire household.” Job 16:7
“He [God] throws me into the mud,
and I am reduced to dust and ashes.
I cry out to you, O God, but you do not answer;
I stand up, but you merely look at me.” Job 30:19-20
“Oh, that I had someone to hear me!
I sign now my defence – let the Almighty answer me;
let my accuser put his indictment in writing.” Job 31:35
“As surely as God lives, who has denied me justice,
the Almighty, who has made me taste bitterness of soul…” Job 27:1
Job expected and called on God to be just. But (in Jung’s interpretation) God wasn’t behaving justly. He’d made a bet with Satan, after all.
Eventually Yahweh does enter the chatroom. He appears to Job. gives a big, bombastic and terrifying speech about how mighty he is, and Job realises he had better bow before Yahweh and retract his criticism:
““I know that You can do all things and that no plan of Yours can be thwarted.... Therefore I retract my words, and I repent in dust and ashes...”
However, the criticism, Jung argues, stands. Jung says, of this encounter: “The victory of the vanquished and oppressed is obvious: Job stands morally higher than Yahweh. In this respect the creature has surpassed the creator.” (p351)
https://www.jungiananalysts.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/C.-G.-Jung-Collected-Works-Volume-11_-Psychology-and-Religion_-West-and-East.pdf
Jung argues that Yahweh is in an imperfect state because he is separated from the feminine God-principle, Sophia, and that Job’s reproach does hold up a mirror to Yahweh, eventually leading him to re-incarnate the lost feminine godhood in the form of Mary, mother of Jesus, and thus mutate from a wrathful God to a mercy-driven one.
Certainly, God tells off Job’s friends for suggesting Job had deserved his suffering, and even (in some interpretations) implies Job was right to call him, Yahweh, out:
“After the Lord had spoken these words to Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite: ‘My anger burns against you and against your two friends, for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.’ Job 42:7
Jung argues that God needs man in order that God may achieve higher consciousness - the createes teaching the creator. He suggests that Job sees the split in God, and that God is in need of the feminine God-principle, Sophia, in order to be truly just (aka merciful, not wrathful).
Jung believes God, and religions in general, are human allegorical stories about the human psyche. So the union of God with Sophia is about the union of the unconscious with the conscious mind.
This need for a conjoining of the light and the dark sides of God (for Jung, elements in the human psyche) tracks with SPN. Chuck has painted himself as The Light and Amara as The Darkness, but the God side of the equation, aka Chuck himself, is presently wrathful and the Sophia side of the equation, aka Amara, is presently wise. And Amara learned her wisdom (the power of love) from Dean-humanity-Winchester, just as, according to Jung, the wrathful Yahweh learned from Job.
Sharon Martin (a Jungian analyst) argues in “The Alchemy of Anger” that anger is transformational.
http://www.jungatlanta.com/articles/spring12-alchemy-of-anger.pdf
Sam and Dean’s anger with God is their anger with The FatherTM; the impact of their own father, John Winchester, on their psyches, and, on a meta level, the anger of characters striving to achieve free will against the constraints of their writers/ creators.
For now, the feminine and masculine God-principles may have broken up:
On the earthly plane, too, the feminine has been re-sacrificed, ouroboros style (circular narrative style). Because it was the sacrifice of the familial feminine (Mary Winchester and Jess) which initiated the SPN story in the first place. Now we have the re-sacrifice of Mary Winchester, and, most recently, to emphasise the point, Rowena’s sacrifice.
The sacrifice of the symbolic feminine (wisdom, Sophia) is also going on in Sam and Dean’s psyches. They have lost their mother all over again and Dean, we can see, has presently chosen anger over other emotions (grief, love). Some kind of splitting is also clearly going down with Sam, given that we saw a Lucifer-Sam mind-vision, when Cas tried to heal his God-wound in 15x02.
Insofar as Cas and Amara are paralleled (Amara leaves Chuck in 15x02, Cas leaves Dean in 15x03) Cas also stands in the place of the feminine in the narrative, at this point. And he too has been “sacrificed” and banished from the Winchester family (pushed away by Dean’s anger).
So, the WInchesters are presently mirroring Chuck’s own wrathfulness and splitting.
But, according to Jungian analysis, their anger/ eventual consciousness of splitting, is a necessary stage of the alchemical transformation of the psyche towards wholeness.
Eventually, the feminine principle will return: Chuck will reunite with Amara, Dean will reunite with Cas, and (I’m betting) Mary will reunite with her sons.
Jack who has been symbolised as a Hermes/ Mercury figure, and as the union of light and dark, given that he is the child of Satan and humanity - will also have a significant role to play.
Job got his happy ending. God eventually blessed him with ten more children, a long full life and a new bunch of goats, cattle and camels.
Hopefully Team Free Will will get theirs.
