Mats, I agree with much of what you say, although I am inclined to (no doubt arbitrarily) use different terms and foci in places.
Jung's Philemon was an image of the Self in a Jungian sense and is conventionally held by Jungians to be a Self figure. Although there is enough overlap in my own construction of the Self with the Jungian concept to share the name (and derive an initial inspiration to stay with that name), in my definition Philemon would not be a Self figure. I would consider him an amalgam of the heroic ego and the Demon . . . in other words a "poisoned" hero.
In my thinking, Philemon cannot be a Self figure because he is not a true Other to Jung's ego but an idealized version of it. Philemon is Jung's fantasy ego pumped up to full potential and utterly sans shadow. This kind of poisoning/inflation of the heroic ego can occur once the heroic ego has triumphed over the more basic, supergoic form of the Demon introject. That is, once the "son" overthrows the "father" and starts to value a new organization of the psyche over the old, socially conditioned one. That attitude was very prominent in Jung when he was writing the Black and Red Books, taking very particular shape thanks to his relationship with Freud. Jung also exercises (more than explores) this dynamic in his work that helped cleave his bond to Freud, Symbols of Transformation (written just before the visionary experiment that became the Red Book began), although much of Jung's focus there is on Son/Mother conflict.
Perhaps the principle theme (and problem!) of the Red Book is the conflict between son and father figures and the struggle of the son to become the "New Father". That myth was always very important to Jung (who was profoundly dissatisfied with and developed himself in reaction to his father, Paul Jung). Although the Red Book introduces the anima/Soul in a supporting role (and she turns out to "steal the show," at least for the audience), it is really a drama about Jung and his father figures. The attitude he takes to these father figures is very interesting. He begins with a very worshipful approach, appearing like an eager disciple. But he quickly grinds through them, exposing their limitations. He wants more . . . and he is clever enough to get it most of the time (though his expansive imagination).
I sense a distinct sense of rage in Jung directed at father figures and "powerful patriarchs" but masked with passive aggressive pseudo-humility. It is no wonder Freud was afraid that Jung harbored murderous wishes toward him. Freud and Jung were perfect pathological partners for one another. They had complimentary complexes. I still think Freud was overbearing and contributed greatly to luring out Jung's complex in a catastrophic way, but Jung deserve much of the blame for their split.
The Red Book culminates in the image of the ego ideal, Philemon, because that was Jung's best solution to how to be a "superior man" to his father and father figures and to the "inheritance" of their model of manliness. Although Jung makes Philemon a wizard steeped in chthonic darkness and perhaps (it is at least implied) something "demonic", Philemon is really a shadowless figure . . . a being without real weakness (from Jung's perspective at the time). Philemon is capable of fully mastering and manipulating the unconscious that Jung felt was undermining him (via the anima most of all) and waylaying his attempts to be strong, perfect, and secure in his knowledge, selfhood, and social position.
To Jung's credit, he remained skeptical about this identification with Philemon (even as he succumbed to it). He recognizes it as a "mana-personality" or archetypal inflation with "the wizard". Jung never falls entirely or permanently under the spell of this inflation . . . but his solution is far from perfect. He chooses to differentiate himself from the mana-personality by forcibly disidentifying from it. He allows it to exist as it appears, but makes a Herculean effort to chisel off a piece of himself apart from it that he will call the ego. But making this differentiation for Jung is like splitting an atom. One must be a Titan to keep the explosive energy of this splitting at bay. That is, one must always be a kind of Atlas pinned beneath an impossible burden. That is Jung's "holding the tension of the opposites."
I don't think it works. For one thing, one is still identified with a mighty figure . . . one capable of such Titanic strength and supposed self-discipline. For another, the figure of the mana-personality is never functionally resolved or transformed. It remains fully formed in the psychic pantheon. That might be how things work in a culture's mythology, but in the individual psyche, greater dynamism is required. Archetypes are not mere stars fixed in the sky, they are complex, interwoven relational patterns that have narrative, dynamic properties. Although archetypal personages might not be entirely soluble, they are quite transformable . . . and I suspect that that transformation is often the mark of a healthier psychic organization. It is such transformation that we see as a staple of folktales (as opposed to classic Western myths). No Demon or mana-personality figure in folktale ever survives intact. They either are led to destroy themselves or they are redeemed or have their "blackness" removed.
A serious problem of Jungian thinking about the hero and individuation is that it ossifies the hero as a kind of Demon-posioned mana-personality. Jung never separates the hero from the Demon . . . and so the "true" hero is not known to him or to Jungianism in general. Equally, the Demon is not known to Jungianism, because the Demon is caught up in both the hero and in the so-called "archetypal shadow" and Jung's "real evil". Missing from Jung's constructions of individuation are the genuine mystical experience of the hero surrendering to the way of the Self. In fact, his passionate efforts to rebel against identification with aspects of the autonomous psyche become ways of refusing to surrender to the Self's principle of organization. The "unconscious" remains something to be resisted and to only embrace when specifically cultivated and colonized by the ego.
That makes for a very "theological" construction of the psyche . . . and I prefer a more "naturalistic" one. There is no Great Dark Unconscious trying to defeat and devour the ego. There is only an adaptive and instinctual principle of organization to the psyche that the ego is subject to, albeit with some autonomy and partial (often illusory) free will. The psyche's principle of organization does not always fit neatly into the process of living in the world and among other people. It does not address the kinds of problems ego consciousness does. Mostly, it seeks to grow and to move toward a kind of dynamic homeostasis, to perpetuate itself, even while embracing adaptation and mutation. I don't see the autonomous psyche as particularly anthropomorphic or "like consciousness writ large". I also don't see it as inherently opposed to the ego, although it is the nature of the modern world that we often end up in conflict with the autonomous psyche.
The story of Salome you recount form Jung is very telling. I'm not sure I would interpret it precisely the way you do, but I agree it is extremely significant to understanding Jung and Jung's thinking. I think we should keep in mind that this is taken from an active imagination experiment. I am disinclined to see Jung's Salome as a pure expression of the anima or the "unconscious". Her characterization is riddled with Jung's signature sexism. He tries to find "archetypal" meaning in her, but fails to recognize how she reflects his own prejudices and complexes. I think her blindness and worshipfulness of Jung are reflections more of Jung's own projected blindness and sense of self-importance than of any inherent traits of the anima archetype.
This Salome seems a lot like Sabina Spielrein (and some of Jung's "other women") thrown in. We should also contextualize the fantasy Jung describes with his relationship to Spielrein in which he may have wished he could act above her, as her doctor and mentor, but he could not control himself well enough not to also (it seems) act as her lover, as someone who desired specific things from her. The crucifixion/deification fantasy seems to depict Jung in a much more resistance position to the anima than he was able to muster in real life regarding Spielrein. It's wish-fulfillment . . . at least at first.
"Against his will" he succumbs to her and ends up ensnared in the transformative coils of the snake "curing" Salome's blindness with his profuse sweat. It sounds to me (among other things) like Jung imagining he can "cure" Spielrein's neurosis with the sweat (and other bodily fluids?) of sexual passion. Whatever the truth might be, the fantasy definitely demonstrates his inner conflict. He cannot resist the "temptation" of the anima, and this gives him an excuse for his behavior . . . i.e., it is she who is a "temptress". Throughout the Red Book, Jung is fighting with the anima figures, despising and insulting them, pushing them away. But they keep creeping back in various forms. He hangs all blame on them (like eating the child's liver in a later scene), but the only progress in the Red Book (if there is any) comes out of his interactions with the anima.
But he longs for the personal power (which he comes to call "magic") to dispel and overthrown the anima, which for Jung embodies the difficult and unwelcome otherness of the autonomous psyche. Only once he completes and seeks to become Philemon does he have the "might" to make the anima go away (or perhaps give up on him). And he very astutely (if incorrectly) recognizes that it is the mana-personality that "defeats" the anima and takes its mana for his own and in accordance with his mighty will.
I'm less inclined to read Christian ideas into Jung's symbols. Consciously, he was very Christian and exuded (especially in the Red Book) all of the conventional Protestant moralisms and prudishness as well as the dogmas. But Jung's spontaneous symbols seem much more "pagan". In fact, I suspect that they are made to seem especially "pagan" because they are seen through such a Christian lens and with conventional Protestant superiority (regarding the "pagan"). Like a "good Christian", Jung tends to turn a lot of the Otherness of the "unconscious" into the demonic. It's certainly true that Jung is deeply dissatisfied with Christianity and critical of it . . . but I think it is HIS OWN Christianity he is most dissatisfied with. It is the way he wears and feels oppressed by that Christianity that drives Jung out questing toward the pagan, the occult, and the East.
So, I wouldn't look at the serpent in a Christianized way (as "falseness", as you say) as much as in a pagan way, as a symbol of transformation, or devouring and rebirth. It is that symbolism that most fascinates Jung . . and TEMPTS him, because he is seduced by the possibility of becoming something new, something more than what he was, by transcending himself. Just as he is seduced by the romanticization of the pagan mind (even as he simultaneously maintains a very Protestant and very modern attitude toward his own romanticism).
Jung cannot bring himself to actively identify with the Christ. He recognizes the hubris in this (even as he desires some degree of Christification, it seems). So he must find an earlier prefiguration of the Christ archetype, one that is available because it has been tarred by Christianity's brush and thus labeled "demonic" or false. Jung also clearly feels that the Protestant Christ is too etherial, too perfect, not fleshy enough, lacking the kind of genuine darkness that natural expressions of the autonomous psyche usually exhibit. I think he is dissatisfied with a kind of Christ that neither he nor any man could ever become. Maybe that is partly a product of his inflation and desire to transcend and become a "Great Man", but I also think there is something valid and perfectly functional to Jung's dissatisfaction (although he didn't quite figure this out).
Namely, the Christ figure is a potent, natural, archetypal expression of the autonomous psyche enmeshed in the modern era. But the Christ of the Church is a very distorted being (or perhaps emblem) that is wrenched away from its roots and displaced as a lofty hood ornament signifying the Church's right to determine truth and the nature and will of God. It is like waving an FBI badge in front of someone's eyes for a second as an indication that you must reveal to them exactly what they want out of fear and awe.
But the natural Christ figure is merely a tribal shaman and archetypal hero . . . not some kind of omniscient and all-powerful God. The death and rebirth of Christ are products of the shamanic initiation journey signifying the surrender of the individual to the principle of the Self, not the supremacy and "divine right" of the Church or those empowered by it. I think the Christ figure in its purest proto-Christian expressions (the proto-Gospel, whether "Q" or whatever it was, and some of the early Gnostic texts later purged) was not meant to be a superior being so much as a somewhat exalted ego figure one was meant to identify with and emulate. Such was the objective of the Gnostic "pneumatic". That Christ is the heroic ego, the embodiment of the attitude one must take in order to pass through the threshold of mystic initiation.
Only with the rise of the orthodox "Catholic" Church was this personalization of the Christ figure ripped away from the individual psyche where it belonged and made into an expression of patriarchal power and transcendence. Jung is too Christian to fully see or believe this, but intuitively and instinctively he leans this way. And this splitting makes for some degree of rupture in him. He is "possessed by the natural archetype of the Christ, but it drags along all its institutional Christian baggage and serves to ensure his brush with mysticism becomes a desperate grapple with inflation.
I think this inflation is built into Christianity (where it is only a problem for Christian mystics or Church authorities) and therefore built into Jungianism. The "Churchified" Christ figure is simply unhealthy for the initiate into the Mysteries . . . and intentionally so, because those Mysteries (in their various pagan and Gnostic expression) were the arch competitors of the early Church. Catholicism became the anti-Gnosticism. It was reactionary by design, rejecting and arguing against an older tradition rather than truly innovating.
Jung was always seeking to "treat" Christianity, although he was limited by being, himself, so Christian and by using such decidedly Christian tools while remaining tethered darkly and romantically to pre-Christian pagan drives and ideas. In a sense, he was like an early theologian or Church Father who sought to explain the universe, but only within the context of Christian assumptions about nature, humanity, and God. In "Answer to Job", for instance, Jung tries to work within these restraints, albeit with a more "heretical" and personalized project. But the psyche is not theologically bound. It is natural. A better tool to understand the psyche is science, because science allows things to be natural, to be objects. It does not (at its best) insist that they be seen relative to arbitrary human assumptions about the unknown/unobservable universe. There are no such assumptions in science, only what is evident. At least, any assumptions used are considered "experimental" and subject to falsification. But religion doesn't approach objects with the notion that its assumptions might be falsified by what it comes to observe.
Jung was caught between these kinds of perspectives (and probably among others, as well).
I do sympathize with Jung's dissatisfaction with becoming the kind of Christian contemplative you use in your example. I am personally more fond of the heretic's path. I can't identify with the assumption of belief. It simply isn't rigorous enough. To me, that kind of faith can easily become caught up in an identification between God and ego in which one speaks or acts as if by the "will of God", but since one has never functionally differentiated the ego from God, one is really acting out of egoic will subtly deified and refracted. To live a life of such profound and contemplative faith, one must assume they know God or the spirit and are abiding by its desires. But that is too big an assumption for someone like me, which is why I prefer science and its preference for objectivity.
For me, "faith" was a kind of tearing at the scenery of everything, always testing, trying to see things from alternative perspectives. It wasn't a matter of finding The One Holy Truth and then setting myself up as its prophet and devotee. I was always too impressed by the relativity of things, by arbitrariness. I am also largely pragmatic and tend to evaluate ideas by what good they can do when put into use. Does a belief lead to the dismissal, condemnation, or abuse of an other or others? If so, it's not so righteous in my book. Its exaltation depends on having a convenient scapegoat. I am unimpressed by "religious" ideas that can too easily be used to do some kind of harm to others.
I don't know if Jung had quite the same beef, though. My sense is that Jung was frustrated with Christianity because if prevented him from being "reborn" in the way he imagined. It hampered his romanticism. It was like a coat too small to fit his mind. But for better and/or for worse, he kept trying to put it on. I think that was largely an act of tribal solidarity. He wanted (as a heretic of the highest order) to demonstrate that he was one of the Christian tribe and deeply concerned with its wellbeing. It never really worked to the degree he desired. The very idea that Christianity is changeable, is treatable, is redeemable by a more modern mentality is itself a romanticism . . . and one that threatens to inflate those that might believe in it.
Curiously, that is an essential part of the Christian myth. Jesus was (by the story) a Jew who sought only to be a good Jew and to serve God and do right by Judaism . . . . where necessary, to treat Judaism where it had become crippled or diseased. But he never meant to make a new religion. The treatment of the tribal identity construct is a shamanic task. Jung desired something similar. He wanted to treat the Christian tribe, and that activities the shaman/scapegoat archetypal pattern.
One of the most distinct problems is that Christianity is no longer a tribe (despite superficial tribal pretensions), and Jung was never an official member or person of status in it. One of the great failings of many modernisms of the 20th century was the assumption that modern monotribes could be conducted like pre-modern monotribes. That they can be homogenized (like Nazi Germany sought) or shamanically transformed (as Jung fantasized). I don't know what if anything can be done, but these solutions do not work. At worst they do massive damage, engendering atrocities like genocide.
One of the great lessons of the modern (which Jung had pioneering insight into) was that the tribe no longer really exists in the outer world, can no longer really be understood as a group of people organized around specific survival purposes. The tribe lives in the psyche of the modern individual. We carry our tribes along with us wherever they go. They are like Jung's gods that became diseases, hidden in our personal darkness, away from our awareness, yet powerfully influencing our behavior and thought. This is something Jung well understood yet also deeply resisted . . . as in the case of Christianity, where he seems to seek and desire a treatment for an institutional or tribal body of Christianity. But the best he could do was work (sometimes "shamanically") within the context of an individual's own personal Christianity.
Within the individual's mind, a monotribe can have massive, modern scale . . . and it can be treated and transformed because the individual can be a kind of alchemical vessel containing such a transformation. But the mistake is thinking that these individual, inner transformations can affect some kind of outer institution in the world. The experience just doesn't seem to translate over to "the world". In effect, one can alchemize and live along side one's own Christ, but there is no room for Christs in the world. That is something I think the Gnostics grasped and may have approached more functionally than the Catholics. The Christ is an archetype residing in the individual psyche that can never be flesh.
Therefore, the story tells us that the flesh of the Christ must be torn away . . . and that it is God's will.
Although your interpretation of Jung's Salome (as "the other" Salome from the Bible) strikes me as a valid way of seeing it, I am less inclined to see her this way . . . or less inclined to see her in only this way. Jung very much saw the anima as John The Baptist's decapitating Salome . . . and himself (at times) as a kind of John. Her seductiveness threatens to hand Jung, the Great Man, prophet, and intellectual, his head. What is interesting (as you also note) is how, despite Jung's strong feelings about a decapitating anima, his Salome is both the blind follower and companion of Elijah (won Jung sees as a prefiguration of Philemon) and a ready worshipper of "Pagan Christs In Waiting". So, instead of decapitating like the whimsical but sadistic Lolita that was John's Salome, Jung's Salome "decapitates" by her worshipful Christmaking. It is (from Jung's perspective) as if she devours and even "rapes" Jung into unwanted identification with his desired but passionately resisted pagan Christ image.
Despite being imagined through Jung's sexism and complexes, I still feel this Salome has a glimmer of the real anima in her. It is the anima that loves the hero and wants the ego to "become" heroic (I mean this in the way I define the hero archetype/attitude, not in Jung's way). Jung is afraid of his own temptation to identify with the hero (not irrationally, since his vision of the hero is very inflated and patriarchal, a la Siegfried). He projects the temptation onto the anima figure which is the force of "inspiration" behind the transformation of his personality. And instead of dismantling and depotentiating his inflated identification with the hero, Jung decides to take out his frustrations on the anima as temptress. It is "all her fault", because Carl Jung would otherwise be an upstanding Swiss citizen and well-scholed son of a minister.
Jung's solution (as was the case in his personal, sexual life) was to have the "affair" with the anima, but only clandestinely and while paying public lip service to her condemnation. He is rather a hypocrite on this issue . . . but as regrettable as that might be, I suspect we are better off with a hypocritical Jung that at least had backdoor affairs with his anima than we would have been with an utterly anima-less Jung. Still, in Jungianism, the anima needs a great deal of redeeming (it is trapped at an early, "enchanted" stage of development as we see it in folktales before the hero fully embraces and redeems her). That redemption is part of a package that would require the differentiation of the Demonic/inflated hero from the genuine hero. Where the inflated hero can use and conquer the anima, turning her into a natural resource (we see this theme in some fairytales where the imprisoned princess is forced to perform some special task for the Demon figure, whose powers are in some way dependent on her imprisonment and usurpation.
Jung is surprisingly neglectful of the large tradition of anima folktales in which the male hero succeeds by redeeming the anima figure (who may be enchanted or cursed in some way that completely or partially imprisons her). His model of the hero comes from the myths and epics of great Western civilizations, which adopt (and misconstrue) only some basic elements of the folktale hero's model. Jung leans toward (or is drawn by) the motif of the conquering hero's battle with the Terrible Mother dragon, which is often a patriarchal cultural epic motif signifying the rise of the patriarchal ego over the darkness of Nature and instinct, which it transforms (temporarily, as the sun brings temporary light in daytime) into "fuel" for the development and progress of civilization. This is the myth of the modern male ego that is exalted through self-mastery and dissociation.
But the male folktale hero redeems the anima from its animalistic or demonic enchantment, often causing the imprisoning Demon figure to destroy itself by its own greed or hunger to control. And that hero ends up "happily ever after" with the anima as his queen. He never conquers or smites the Demon, but rather is focused on the rescue and redemption of his bride. And that redemption is often made through self-sacrifice, patience, and deep acceptance of her otherness or oddity. In other words, the folktale hero is not a creature of might but of valuation for what has become devalued, lost, or "enchanted".
There is no grasp of this in the Red Book and barely any awareness of it throughout Jung's work. Curiously, ironically, Jung is preserved in his insight into the autonomous psyche largely by the "power" of his rather persistent anima. She was not one to be easily defeated or dismissed. Jung maintains an awkward and indirect connection to her through his "susceptibility" to the unconscious, to his "weakness" for romanticisms, his capacity to keep second guessing himself, and his inability to fully embody the mana-personality. I.e., it is NOT his great success as a wizard and "balancer of the opposites" that gives Jung enough contact with the anima for it to imbue his work and worldview. It is rather that Jung can't help but "be seduced" consistently (if only temporarily) by the "magic" of the unconscious, which he is always indirectly in the process of valuating . . . even as he also issues condemnations of its "evil", darkness, and "feminine seductiveness". Jung is an anima's man despite himself.
It is not the anima or the "feminine" that is "weak" (as Jung often had it). It is that Jung's incurable and persistent ego "weakness" became for him the vehicle through which his anima relationship survived. I think that wherever Jung choose to detect his strength was where the anima vanished. When he was being overly "scientific" and "rational", rising above the chaotic and swampy unconscious, the anima snuck in through his closeted romanticism and susceptibility to the complex "otherworldliness" of the autonomous psyche. That is, he was just so damn fascinated by the "unconscious", that he was willing to sit at its feet patiently observing everything it put forth . . . even when in his writings he often made efforts to interpret and even reduce it.
And when he identified with his romanticism and sought to prophecy about the non-temporal, acausal, mystical, "psychoid" unconscious, his rationalism and capacity to psychologize or treat experience as objective, analyzable phenomena, helped bring these inflated wonderings back down to earth, grounding them somewhat in what could truly be observed. It was as if he was then rational in spite of himself. Either way, he was self-conflicted, and it was the nature of this complex self-conflict (a kind of primal and continually life-giving Wound, perhaps) that gave rise to his openness to and appreciation of the autonomous psyche. Jung famously sees himself (in MDR) as a creature of two conflicting personalities, but what he doesn't fully grasp is that Jung the object and observable self as well as the objective Jungian psychology is a synthesis of these forces even as Jung the man remains divided and turned against himself.
That synthesis, though (like Jung himself), has only ever been a potential. Jungians are left with something to heal or unite, which would seem to be a work much resisted. There is more inclination to gather the low-hanging fruit than to take care of the tree and its seeds.
-Matt