Another Book Launch!

By George Elder, 7/5/25

I have just published a second edition of The Snake and the Rope: A Jungian View of Hinduism (BookLocker, 2025). The text is unrevised from the 2012 edition except for the correction of errors. The Index is still a “study index,” i.e., a major topic with its page references is followed by its relevant subcategories. That helps someone studying an archetypal motif to see its ramifications or a student writing a paper to organize a theme. In large format as a paperback, The Snake and the Rope is 370 pages with fifty images, mostly in color.

There are, however, two major changes. The cover is new in order to match my recently published two volumes of The Self and the Lotus: A Jungian View of Indian Buddhism (BookLocker, 2025). That means these three volumes are a set—covering the two major religions of ancient India from a scholarly and psychological point of view. The other major change is the availability of an ebook version.

THE CONTENTS

Following an introduction to Jungian psychology, Part I opens with the foundation of all Indian religions—that of the Indus Valley culture, dating from around 3000 BCE. It had a distinctly “matriarchal” character as I explain through its artifacts that are usually quite small. As this culture was dying out, India was synchronistically “invaded” around 1500 BCE by Indo-Europeans or Aryans. By contrast, these people were distinctly “patriarchal.”

Much of the subsequent history of India, therefore, can be understood as the marriage of two cultural styles—each making its claim but having to come to terms with the other to give birth to a great civilization.

The matriarchal and patriarchal are, also, ever-present psychological styles. That means these materials are relevant to us personally—as we try to unite the opposites within our own culture and within ourselves.

I explore the early history of what would be called Hinduism through Vedic texts that include the Puruṣa Hymn and the Creation Hymn that were important to C. G. Jung. Since he wrote when Vedic and Sanskrit studies were still young, I bring his observations up to date technically. I discuss the transition texts of the Brāhmaṇas and the Āryaṇakas where we find seeds of a cyclic cosmos, the beginning of karma doctrine, and peculiar forms of asceticism.

That leads to two chapters on the Upaniṣads that some consider the highest achievement of religion in India, perhaps all religion. At any rate, it is from them that Jung borrowed the term, “Self,” a translation of Ātman, to refer to the sacred core of the human psyche. The reader will find an exploration of what Jung meant and to what extent the Upaniṣadic sages meant the same thing.   

Part II presents classical Hinduism from around the first century BCE to a few centuries prior to the thirteenth CE. It is then that the Delhi Sultanate “invaded” India with its religion of Islam that had no roots there and, as we know from history, did not quite “take.”

In this second half of the book, we meet the great high gods Viṣṇu, Śiva, and the Goddess or Devī—and their many manifestations, sometimes called "avatars." Viṣṇu appears as Rāma and as Kṛṣṇa who—in turn—appears as Child, Lover, and Teacher. Śiva is the divine Phallus, Androgyne, and Dancer. The Goddess is not only Durgā but also the helpful yet difficult Kālī.

A friend told me recently that he’d love to read about Hinduism but there were too many gods. I sort them. I also try to show their presence in our lives. Although modern persons can no longer believe in these gods as metaphysical beings, we can discover how they operate in the everyday, for good and for ill. And it is always better to know with what forces one is dealing to live right, especially if they are “gods”—powerful archetypal forces within the psyche.

The Snake and the Rope: A Jungian View of Hinduism closes with this quotation from Jung: “It is not, however, the actual East we are dealing with but the collective unconscious which is omnipresent.”

Enjoy reading!