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Anamnesis
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Philip K. Dick struggled in obscurity for most of his career as a pulp magazine science-fiction writer prior to his early death at age 53. Dick has since gained cult status following the 1982 release — just four months after his death — of Blade Runner, the classic sci-fi film based on his novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The often hallucinatory events of his drug-addled personal life have only added to his legend. Many of the bizarre episodes in his stories were, in fact, lifted directly from his own experience — or rather, his own experience as refracted through his tortured psyche. Mincing no words, one of his colleagues put it this way: “Phil developed paranoid schizophrenia into an art form.”
By Dick’s own account, one of the most formative of those hallucinatory events occurred after he had two impacted wisdom teeth removed in 1974. A delivery person arrived at his home with pain medication he had ordered from a local pharmacy. Dick asked her about the fish symbol on her necklace. The young woman explained that the symbol was an “ichthys,” a secret sign that early Christians used to identify themselves to one other during times of Roman persecution. Dick, who was already stoked on Darvon, lithium, and massive quantities of megavitamins, reported, “In that instant, as I stared at the gleaming fish sign and heard her words, I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis—a Greek word meaning, literally, ‘loss of forgetfulness.’ I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me. And not only could I remember it but I could see it. The girl was a secret Christian and so was I. We lived in fear of detection by the Romans.”
The sight of the ichthys had triggered a kind of genetic memory that instantly transported Dick back to Roman times, at least in his own fevered imaginings. The term he used, anamnesis, is more correctly translated as “to make present.” In Plato’s philosophy, anamnesis refers to the recollection of innate knowledge acquired before birth. Quoting Socrates, Plato argues that the soul is immortal, and certain knowledge is forgotten due to the trauma of birth and then recovered (anamnesis).
Dick’s anamnesis was the first of a series of such episodes over the next two months. He came to believe he had been contacted by extraterrestrials who told him he was living in first-century Rome and his life in modern-day California was a counterfeit reality. He became convinced that someone else was living inside his head, a first-century Christian named Thomas.
Fortunately perhaps, Dick was no more inclined to accept his visions at face value than everyday reality, although he did take them seriously. He was fully aware that his visions sounded pretty crazy — but was he? Dick certainly met the textbook definition of someone who posed a danger to himself and others, having tried to kill himself and at least two of his five wives. He also admittedly took a lot of drugs, especially amphetamines, which may have stoked some of his more paranoid delusions about plots against him by the FBI and the Soviet KGB. At least he was able to draw on his mental aberrations, such as they were, to assure that his stories’ plots were never dull.
There is a second meaning of anamnesis that is worth considering here. It is also a theological term, appearing in the story of the Last Supper, when Jesus tells his disciples that the bread and the wine of the Passover meal are his body and blood. Then, in offering his friends the bread and wine, he adds, “Do this in remembrance (anamnesis) of me.” We won’t get into whether the bread and wine are literally transformed into the body and blood of Christ during the sacrament of Eucharist. Christians have been fighting about that for two millennia and counting. But it might be worth exploring how anamnesis in the Platonic sense might apply here.
I will assume at the outset that in using a term like anamnesis,* Jesus did not mean to suggest we are reincarnated souls recovering memories from previous lifetimes. Reincarnation was not part of Jewish belief — nor, for that matter, was the concept of an eternal soul, a Greek idea later adopted into Christianity. But what if Jesus were “making present” not a recovered memory from a previous lifetime but what the depth psychologist Carl Jung referred to as an archetype?
Jungian archetypes are universal, recurring symbols or motifs found in myths, stories, and dreams across different cultures. They exist within what Jung called the collective unconscious of humanity. For example, “the shadow” embodies the darker, unconscious aspects of the psyche that are often repressed or hidden. In Robert Lewis Stevenson’s story, “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” the malevolent Hyde is Dr. Jekyll’s shadow, representing the dark side of his personality.
The Eucharist is a ritual that embodies a whole complex of archetypes. For starters, the Eucharist is a sacred meal, an archetype symbolizing nourishment, unity and transformation. The bread representing the body of Christ can be seen as an archetypal symbol of the divine or cosmic body. The Eucharist’s ritual reenactment or Christ’s sacrifice can be seen as an archetype of death and resurrection. The Eucharist as a transformative ritual recapitulates the alchemical process — another Jungian motif —in which base elements (bread and wine) are transmuted into the Philosopher’s Stone (Christ).
Admittedly, Jesus would have been no more familiar with Jungian archetypes than with reincarnation. But when Jesus offered his disciples the bread and the wine and told them to “do this in remembrance of me,” he was making present the Christ, which may be the ultimate archetype.
*Anamnesis is a Greek translation of whatever term Jesus used when he made this original statement in Aramaic.
Luke 22:19
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