archetype.guide
archetype.guide

Classical (Jung) · an archetype

Mana-personality

The power you think you have won, and the mask it puts on you.

Jung’s 1928 name for the archetype of the man of extraordinary power (hero, chief, magician, medicine man, saint) and for the inflation that follows when the ego, having come to terms with the anima, identifies with that figure.

The mana-personality, in Jung’s usage, names two things at once: a figure and a danger. The figure is the archetype of the person of extraordinary power, the hero, chief, magician, medicine man or saint, who seems to possess a force that ordinary people lack. The danger is what happens when the ego claims that force for itself. Jung placed it at a specific point in analysis: once a man has stopped projecting the anima and has turned her into a function of relation to the unconscious, he tends to believe he has won her power; in fact his ego has simply fused with a new collective figure, the magician or sage, and inflated. Jung gave a woman a corresponding figure, the all-understanding great mother.

Go deeper

At the threshold

O, what a world of profit and delight,Of power, of honour, of omnipotence,Is promis'd to the studious artizan!All things that move between the quiet polesShall be at my command: emperors and kingsAre but obeyed in their several provinces,Nor can they raise the wind, or rend the clouds;But his dominion that exceeds in this,Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man;A sound magician is a mighty god:Here, Faustus, tire thy brains to gain a deity.

Public domain · Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1604)

The scholar’s first sight of the magician’s power, and the step from wanting it to wanting to be a god, which is the inflation the figure names.

Constellation

The figures who carry it

Hover a star. Jung’s own examples are marked; the rest are readings applied later, and the entry below says by whom.

All 6 figures as a list
  1. Jung’s example

    Ayesha, She-who-must-be-obeyed

    Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, ch. IV, p. 252, 1887

    Haggard’s immortal queen, Jung’s picture of the power the anima holds before it is withdrawn.

  2. Jung’s example

    The magician

    Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, ch. IV, pp. 253–254, 1928

    The collective figure that takes the anima’s power and possesses the ego that thinks it has won.

  3. Jung’s example

    Napoleon and Laozi

    Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, ch. IV, p. 259, 1928

    Jung’s two ideal images of the state: the superman’s will and the complete sage’s wisdom.

  4. Jung’s example

    Faust and Zarathustra

    Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, ch. IV, p. 264, 1928

    Goethe’s magician and Nietzsche’s master-man, two attempts to solve the problem by mastery.

  5. a later reading

    The Great Individual

    Erich Neumann, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 1949

    The leader who becomes the group’s mana-personality, and in the 1930s its redeemer.

  6. a later reading

    The guru

    Connie Zweig, Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path, 2023

    A later reading: any teacher, of any sex, can be made to carry the figure.

The wider sky

Where the Mana-personality has been seen

25 exemplars across 10 fields, from myth to this year. Each is marked as Jung’s own example, a scholar’s reading, a widely published reading, or ours.

Hover a field in the sky, or choose one above, to read its exemplars.

Interlude

Though no ear should choose to hear me,Yet the shrinking heart must fear me:Though transformed to mortal eyes,Grimmest power I exercise.

Public domain · Goethe, Faust, Part II, Act V, Midnight (Care), trans. Bayard Taylor (1871) · a work Jung discussed

The power the ego thought it had taken returns in another shape, which is the counter-attack Jung describes when the ego claims mastery.

He no longer believes the woman in his dreams holds the secret. Now he believes he does.

The room goes quiet when he speaks, and he has started to wait for the quiet.

Someone offers him a crown. The work is to hand it back without breaking it.

The deep layer · what was written

Mana-personality: the entry

Definition

The mana-personality, in Jung’s usage, names two things at once: a figure and a danger. The figure is the archetype of the person of extraordinary power, the hero, chief, magician, medicine man or saint, who seems to possess a force that ordinary people lack. The danger is what happens when the ego claims that force for itself. Jung placed it at a specific point in analysis: once a man has stopped projecting the anima and has turned her into a function of relation to the unconscious, he tends to believe he has won her power; in fact his ego has simply fused with a new collective figure, the magician or sage, and inflated. Jung gave a woman a corresponding figure, the all-understanding great mother.

The entry therefore describes a stage as much as a character. The mana-personality is met when someone takes on the role of the one who knows, and equally when someone hands that role to a teacher, leader or analyst. Jung’s remedy was to make the contents of the figure conscious, which he said leads back to the self, and his firmest advice was that no god should be made of it. The word mana itself is borrowed from Melanesian and Polynesian languages through European anthropology, and the borrowing has its own critics.

History

The word reached Jung from anthropology and the comparative study of religion, where R. H. Codrington’s The Melanesians (1891) is the usual starting point. Jung used it in the first of his Two Essays for the “primitive energetics” of dynamistic religions, citing Söderblom (1916) in a footnote (1928 translation, p. 70). In the mana chapter he takes his definition from Friedrich Lehmann’s monograph Mana (1922): mana as “extraordinary effectiveness” (p. 259).

The essay that contains the chapter grew out of an earlier paper, published in English under another title in Constance Long’s Collected Papers (2nd ed., 1920). The translators’ preface to the 1928 English edition says that so much new material had been added that both essays “start afresh, so to speak”. The chapter “The Mana Personality” is present in that 1928 translation as the fourth and last chapter of part II, so it belongs to the text as first published in book form and is not a later addition (CW 7 ¶374–406 in the revised text, as given in Stein 2016). Jung’s definition there reads:

But the mana personality is a dominant of the collective unconscious, the recognized archetype of the powerful man in the form of hero, chief, magician, medicine man, and saint, the lord of men and spirits, the friend of gods. — C. G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1928; H. G. and C. F. Baynes, Trans.), p. 253; CW 7 ¶377

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

The ego that has “mastered” the anima concludes it has gained her mana, but the importance does not show itself to anyone else, which is the test (CW 7 ¶380, as given in Sharp 1991). What has happened is a new fusion, “this time with a figure of the same sex corresponding to the father-imago” (p. 254). Jung names two ideal images of the state, Napoleon as the superman and Laozi as the complete sage (p. 259), and says the mana-personality has developed historically into the hero and the divine man, whose earthly form is the priest; he adds that analysts could say how far the physician is identified with mana (p. 259; ¶389, as given in Sharp 1991). He had never seen an advanced analysis without at least a passing identification with it. The danger runs both ways, since one may become a father-mask or fall under the power of the mask worn by someone else: “Master and pupil are in this sense the same” (p. 260). The way out is to make conscious the contents of the figure, which for a man is the “second and real liberation from the father” and for a woman freedom from the mother, a step he compares to initiation and rebirth (p. 262). Then comes his warning:

On psychological grounds, therefore, I would recommend that no god be constructed out of the mana personality archetype. — C. G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1928; Baynes, Trans.), p. 263

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

The chapter closes on the term it has been moving towards: the dissolved mana-personality leaves a “middle-point” between conscious and unconscious, and “I have called this middle-point the self” (p. 265; ¶399, as given in Sharp 1991). Part I of the same essay prepares the ground with the prophet and the disciple of the prophet, both described as primordial images that inflate whoever identifies with them (pp. 181–182).

Jung returned to the idea briefly. “Archaic Man” (1931) speaks of mana personalities as people impressive in their own right (Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 1933, pp. 149–151). The dream series in The Integration of the Personality (1939) lists “the old wise man or ‘mana personality’” among the figures the conscious mind must come to terms with (p. 127; CW 12 ¶121). That bracket is why the two are often run together; the 1928 chapter, though, describes a broader figure than the sage, and a condition rather than a helper.

The debate

Jung’s text supports two readings. One treats the mana-personality as an archetypal image in its own right. Mario Jacoby (1990) takes a numinous dream figure of Jung’s as an example and says the Wise Old Man and the Magna Mater are equivalent to the mana-personality, personifications of the knowledge the unconscious holds. The other treats it mainly as a pathology of inflation. Esther Harding (1963) describes the man who meets life as its master because he has identified with some great figure, Napoleon, Beethoven or Christ, and calls this image the archetype of the mana personality; if the identification is deep, she says, it turns into the compensating figure of the misunderstood martyr. Edward Edinger (1972) generalises inflation into a recurring stage of development, the ego’s identification with the Self, without using Jung’s term. Murray Stein (2016) calls the mana-personality a state of grandiosity and a “titanic inflation” that feels itself beyond all moral codes.

Erich Neumann (1949) moved the figure into collective psychology: in early groups the “Great Individual” represents the mana-personality and acts as the group’s creative centre, and in National Socialism the leader was identified with the redeemer figure, “the mana-personality of the collective unconscious”, displacing individual conscience. Jacoby (1990) also sets Jung’s inflation beside Heinz Kohut’s grandiose self, which places the mana-personality close to what psychoanalysis calls narcissistic grandiosity.

The teacher–disciple pair has become the commonest application. Connie Zweig (2023) applies the term to gurus and spiritual directors of any sex, notes that Jung did not imagine women in the role and gave them only a matriarchal counterpart, and observes that Jung himself became a mana-personality for some Jungians. James Hillman, asked in 1983 whether he carried the role for archetypal psychology, declined it. Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette (1993) use it for the inflation that follows first contact with their Magician.

The borrowed word is the most exposed point. Roger Keesing (1984) argued that in Oceanic languages mana is used mainly as a stative verb, meaning to be effective or successful, and that the idea of an invisible force a person can hold more or less of owes much to European interpreters. Jung’s 1928 chapter depends on exactly that reading, and on period language about “primitives”. The emergent school, for which archetypes carry no inherited content, has no separate account of the mana-personality.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested the mana-personality as a psychological construct, and no instrument measures it. The nearest mainstream work is on narcissism and on power-related personality change; David Owen and Jonathan Davidson (2009) proposed a “hubris syndrome” acquired by heads of government in office, from biographical evidence. It describes a change in people who hold power, not an inherited figure.

Appearances

Jung’s own examples are the core record. In the 1928 chapter: Rider Haggard’s Ayesha in She (1887), as the mana held by the anima before it is withdrawn; Napoleon and Laozi; Goethe’s Faust, who solves the problem through the figure of the magician, and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, through the master-man; Angelus Silesius, Christ and Paul as people gripped by the problem, and Meister Eckhart, with Goethe and Nietzsche, as writers who set it out again; and the popular belief that the “most Christian king” could heal epilepsy by touch. A chapter earlier, Jung uses Mr Preemby in H. G. Wells’s Christina Alberta’s Father (1925), who discovers he is Sargon, King of Kings, as a case of a small personality nearly engulfed by a primordial image (pp. 185, 193). Later readings add Neumann’s political leaders, Zweig’s gurus and Stein’s Joan of Arc. Outside Jung’s own text, “mana-personality” is in every case a reading applied by a later writer, not the subject’s or author’s own term.

Sources

  • Jung, C. G. (1928). Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (H. G. and C. F. Baynes, Trans.). Baillière, Tindall and Cox. Part II, chapter IV, “The Mana Personality”, pp. 252–269; p. 70 for mana; pp. 181–182 for prophet and disciple; pp. 185 and 193 for Wells. https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.24254
  • Jung, C. G. (1966). Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (2nd ed., R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). CW 7 ¶374–406. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-01782-2.
  • Jung, C. G. (1933). Archaic man (1931). In Modern Man in Search of a Soul (W. S. Dell and C. F. Baynes, Trans.), pp. 149–151. CW 10.
  • Jung, C. G. (1939). The Integration of the Personality (S. Dell, Trans.). Farrar & Rinehart. P. 127; revised as CW 12 ¶121.
  • Sharp, D. (1991). Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms and Concepts. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-48-9. Entries “Mana-personality” and “Self” (CW 7 ¶374, ¶377, ¶380, ¶389, ¶399). https://www.jungpage.org/learn/jung-lexicon
  • Stein, M. (2016). Soul: Treatment and Recovery. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-138-79122-0. Chapters on individuation and conscience (CW 7 ¶374–406).
  • Codrington, R. H. (1891). The Melanesians: Studies in Their Anthropology and Folk-Lore. Clarendon Press. https://archive.org/details/melanesiansstudi00codruoft
  • Lehmann, F. R. (1922). Mana: Der Begriff des “ausserordentlich Wirkungsvollen” bei Südseevölkern. Leipzig. https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_HQlgAAAAIAAJ
  • Keesing, R. M. (1984). Rethinking “mana”. Journal of Anthropological Research, 40(1), 137–156. https://doi.org/10.1086/jar.40.1.3629696
  • Harding, M. E. (1963). Psychic Energy: Its Source and Its Transformation (2nd ed.; first published 1947 as Psychic Energy: Its Source and Goal). Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-01790-7. Chapter “The Ego and the Power Problem”.
  • Neumann, E. (1949). Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (E. Rolfe, Trans., 1969). Shambhala edition 1990. ISBN 978-0-87773-571-7.
  • Edinger, E. F. (1972). Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche. Shambhala edition 1992. ISBN 978-0-87773-576-2. Chapter 1, “The Inflated Ego”.
  • Hillman, J. (1983). Inter Views: Conversations with Laura Pozzo. Spring Publications. ISBN 978-0-88214-348-4. Chapter “On Being Biographical”.
  • Jacoby, M. (1990). Individuation and Narcissism: The Psychology of Self in Jung and Kohut. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-00827-3.
  • Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1993). The Magician Within: Accessing the Shaman in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09594-9.
  • Zweig, C. (2023). Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path: The Dance of Darkness and Light. Inner Traditions. ISBN 978-1-64411-722-4.
  • Owen, D., & Davidson, J. (2009). Hubris syndrome: an acquired personality disorder? A study of US Presidents and UK Prime Ministers over the last 100 years. Brain, 132(5), 1396–1406. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awp008
  • Haggard, H. R. (1887). She. Project Gutenberg #3155.
  • Nietzsche, F. (1883–85). Thus Spake Zarathustra (T. Common, Trans.). Project Gutenberg #1998.

Leaving

And on the pedestal these words appear:‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal wreck, boundless and bareThe lone and level sands stretch far away.

Public domain · Shelley, Ozymandias (1818)

The mighty man’s claim outlasted by sand, a resonance with the dissolution Jung asks of the figure.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

Next in the journey☿ Wise Old ManThe archetype of meaning.Return to the void