Vivianne Crowley (no relation to Aleister Crowley) is a Jungian psychotherapist, as well as an initiate of both Gardnerian and Alexandrian Witchcraft. Her influence on the British Neo-Paganism has been significant. Wouter Hanegraaf has written that Crowley’s Jungian perspective “is so strong that readers might be forgiven for concluding that Wicca is little more than a religious and ritual translation of Jungian psychology.”
In her essay, “Wicca as a Modern-Day Mystery Religion,” Crowley explained that Wicca is a mystery religion that has the same goal as the ancient Mysteries:
“to know thyself and to attain some form of permanent psycho-spiritual transformation involving a moving of the center of the personality from the ego (what I think of as myself), to the Self (what I truly am when the contents of the unconscious are revealed and reconciled). Interestingly, these aims are similar to those of many of the more spiritually-oriented psychotherapy movements, of which Carl Jung’s is the best-known.”
According to Crowley, Wicca accomplishes this psycho-spiritual transformation through ritual, which is an “externalization” of an inner psychological journey.
In Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Age (1989), Crowley explains, “Our Gods are the archetypal forces that inhabit the Collective Unconscious.” She then asks the question, “If the Divine is within us, is it merely psychological, an imaginary construct? Are the outer forms of the Gods real?” In response, Crowley quotes Jung as saying that archetypal images are not mere allegories or symbols. Rather, “they are images of contents that for the most part transcend consciousness. We have still to discover that such contents are real, that they are agents.” Crowley goes on to say that there is a Divine reality beyond the images, but it is beyond our human comprehension.
Updated 2019
Neo-Paganism 