““The Aquarian age would “constellate the problem of the union of opposites.” The “real existence” of evil would have to be acknowledged; it could no longer be understood as the mere absence of good, as was the official Christian stance. This would come about not through politics or any collective effort but through the “individual human being, via his experience of the living spirit,” that is, the unconscious.7 As an example of how the archetypes work on the collective consciousness, Jung notes the then recent papal decree making the Assumption of Mary, Christ’s mother, part of Christian dogma. This was of enormous importance for Jung; it showed that Christianity recognized the need to include the feminine in the Godhead, something it had lacked and which had weakened its appeal. The idea that Mary didn’t die but was taken, body and soul, to heaven, had been accepted for nearly a century, but it wasn’t made part of divine revelation until Pope Pius XII’s decree on November 1, 1950. The masses demanded it and their insistence was, Jung writes, “the urge of the archetype to realize itself.”8””
