Abstract

Jung disliked being called a mystic, which was a term of opprobrium often leveled at him by his critics. Nevertheless, Jung was extremely interested in the subjective accounts of mystical experience provided by people such as Meister Eckhart, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Jacob Boehme. Jung’s basic position is that mystical experience such as they describe is the experience of the archetypal level of the psyche, which produces numinous experience. This material cannot be reductively dismissed. Jung’s approach to numinous experience has not only some similarities but also major differences from the Christian mystical tradition, but can be considered to be a mystical path in its own right.