ABSTRACT
Jung describes mystical experience as unmediated experience of the archetypes. Tracing Jung's appropriation of his preferred mystics reveals a certain historical continuity from Mechthild of Magdeburg in the thirteenth century, to Eckhart in the fourteenth and on to Jacob Boehme in the sixteenth and seventeenth. In the next century Eckhart, familiar with the writing of the Beguines, described the same experience in what he termed "the breakthrough". The breakthrough depicts a total self-divestiture of the mind, the will and even personal being in a process of moving to an identity with the Godhead beyond the Trinity. Jung cites this experience as the most promising basis for a modern spirituality which cannot regress to commerce with one or other of the wholly transcendent and traditional Gods. Sustained examination of Jung's thought on religion, religious experience and its prototype in mysticism reveals that it rests on three major propositions.
