Carl Sagan: A Candle in the Dark
A Short Essay on the Death of Carl Sagan

by Matthew Clapp

This page mirrored from http://www.uga.edu/~counseling/jung/sagan.html

"Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication, and courage (without which) we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along." -Carl Sagan (1987).

One of my heros has fallen. Carl Sagan was one of those stars in the sky that complete the constellation of the father archetype. So great are my expectations of these great men that when one of those bright stars dissapears i am left feeling a bit empty.

After a two year battle with bone marrow cancer, Sagan died at age 62. Such was his influence on my generation. that as a kid i remember Cosmos coming on PBS for the first time. I stayed up late, and watched every episode. At night i dreamed of going to the places that his starship of the imagination went: off to distant places, light years away. Sagan was the first popularizer of science to reach the mainstream. He did not want to be an enegimatic laboratory professor, but to be understood.

In his latest book, The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan mentions Carl Jung and includes some of Jung's work on UFO's. Sagan's message for us is the same as it has always been. He asked us in Pale Blue Dot if we should be spending so much money on missions to the stars when we have homeless, disease, famine, political corruption here on Earth. "Or is this a reason for going?" he asked. He warned us of Nuclear Winter during the Cold War. He noted the decay of civilization through new philosophies such as deconstructionism. Just as Jung once warned that the psyche of man in hanging from a thin thread called consciousness, so Sagan called science a candle in the dark. Certainly the most exalting function of consciousness is science. Sagan warned against the prevailing wind, which is rarely rooted in tradition, but seeks only to blow out the candle.

Sagan called Jung a sensible pioneering psychoanalyst, in his most recent book. Also, Sagan explains how Jung saw the phenomenon of UFO's as a projection of the unconscious mind. There is also a reference to Jung's 1902 doctoral dissertation about the "young Swiss woman who was agitated to discover, sitting across from her on the train, a "star-dweller" from Mars."

Sagan's dream was to go to the stars. He believed it was humanities inescapable destiny to leave the Earth and travel light years away. Thus, leaving us with a new mythology, one that our culture so desperately needs. The image to fill this archetype was first glimpsed when the Apollo astronauts snaped the first picture of our planet from the surface of the moon. The Earth fills the mother archetype well.

However, even though our destiny may be to escape the gravity of our home world, Sagan warns that a much different, much darker destiny may await us, as well. This destiny is one of nuclear holocast: when we all give up and decide to blow the candle out. Again, this message echos the words of Jung.

We have lost a truely great scientist and a visionary. He was a dreamer and a hero. A rare combination for students like me, who are activley seeking great people to model my life after. Sagan may be gone, but his work, like Jung's, lives on for some young kid in first grade to accidentaly flip on a PBS program that may change his life: lead him from MTV to science, from sitcoms to psychology, from high school to college, from the Earth to the Stars...

Matthew Clapp