THE RED BOOK

LIBER SECUNDUS

Part Two

Divine Folly

Jung is in a hall, standing in front of a green curtain between two columns. Behind the curtain is a small room with a small, blue glass window and two doors, one on the right and one on the left. Jung chooses right. He is in a library. He comments that the vibes of the library are bad. Rather than a cozy place to read books, it is a place of “scholarly ambitions, scholarly conceit, wounded scholarly vanity.” The librarian, a “small, thin man of pale complexion,” asks Jung what he wants. Jung requests a book, The Imitation of Christ by Thomas á Kempis. The librarian is nonplussed. He doesn’t seem to think that Jung of all people would be interested in this particular book, and even Jung is a bit surprised by his request. Jung says that he wants to read it for prayer, and not out of philosophical or scholarly interest. He says,

“You know that I value science extraordinarily highly. But there are actually moments in life where science also leaves us empty and sick. In such moments a book like Thomas’s means very much to me since it is written from the soul.”

Jung is still caught up in the tension between Christianity and unchristian-ness (that being both secular science and paganism). There is a hole that science cannot fill, but religion can. Jung insists to the librarian that just because Christianity has been put aside in this secular age (i.e. Jung himself is starting to move away from it internally), doesn’t mean it should be abandoned entirely. The librarian is dismissive: “It’s just a religion.” Jung begins to argue in its favor against the librarian, just as he argued in its favor against The Red One back at the beginning of Liber Secundus. Nietzsche is mentioned – Jung thinks that Nietzsche is a bit too “agitated and provocative,” and Jung wants a philosophy that will make him “smaller and more inward.” Instead of lashing out with big “God is Dead” proclamations, Jung wants something introspective. He wants “inferiority,” or maybe “resignation,” which the librarian thinks is counterintuitive. Jung says,

Nietzsche is too oppositional. Like everything healthy and long-lasting, truth unfortunately adheres more to the middle way, which we unjustly abhor.

I definitely agree with this. Nietzsche, and edgy atheists in general, care more about fighting against religious dogma than in asking what religion actually does for people and working to replace it with something. A running theme with Jung in general is that the middle way is the way to go – the God reconciles dualities, and the healthiest approach is always the one that accounts for nuance.

The divine wants to live in me. My resistance is in vain. I asked my thinking, and it said, “Take as your model one that shows you how to live the divine.” Our natural model is Christ.

I love this! Jung has no choice but to accept the Divine within him, but God doesn’t really care what form it takes. It tells Jung to pick whatever framework makes the most sense to him personally, and he picks Christianity because that’s what he’s most familiar with and most comfortable with. He proceeds to justify his choice by saying that Christ’s model is “natural” and inescapable. He says,

You can certainly leave Christianity but it does not leave you. Your liberation from it is a delusion. Christ is the way. You can certainly run away, but then you are no longer on the way.

Lol. I’m sorry, Jung, but I’m gonna invalidate your UPG a bit. God literally just said to you that your model should be whatever you think shows you how to live the divine, and the reason why you think Christianity is the “natural” choice is because that’s the culture you were raised with. Your dreams have taken on a distinctly pagan flavor, but you hold fast to Christianity because, in a way, you’re right – you can leave it, but it doesn’t leave you so easily. Latent Christianity is powerful and difficult to truly extricate oneself from. “You can check out any time, / but you can never leave.” Latent Christianity would have you believe that Christianity is the only right and proper path. It wants you to think that you can never leave it, that it’ll always be the one true way calling you back. But it’s not, and it won’t.

I think Jung’s very pagan experiences in the preceding chapters might have shaken him a bit. He clings onto Christianity because it’s familiar and safe in comparison. But hey, whatever works! And he still recognizes that the next step is still Shadow work:

…the true way does not lead upward, but down towards the depths, since only my other [i.e. my Shadow] leads me beyond myself. But acceptance of the other [the Shadow] means a descent into the opposite, from serious into the laughable, from suffering into the cheerful, from the beautiful into the ugly, from the pure into the impure.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Nox Secunda

Jung leaves the library with his book, goes back into the previous room, and enters the left door. He is now in a kitchen, where a fat woman is cooking. He sits down in front of the fire and begins to read. The cook asks if he is a clergyman, because her mother once left her a similar-looking book. It turns out to be the exact same one, The Imitation of Christ. Jung remarks that her mother was smart to give it to her, because he likes the “intuitive method” it recommends. He goes back to reading.

Suddenly, a bunch of shadowy figures rush past like a flock of birds taking flight, all babbling, “Let us pray in the temple!” Jung asks where they’re going, and a bearded shadow with “dark shining eyes” stops to tell him that they are going to pray in Jerusalem. Jung begs for them to take him with them. The shadowy man, Ezechiel, says that Jung cannot go, because he is alive and has a body. The other people are all the shades of the dead. Like Marley and the ghosts in A Christmas Carol, Ezechiel and the shades cannot rest, and are on an endless pilgrimage to all the holy places. They “forgot something important that should also have been lived.” Jung asks what that was, but Ezechiel does not know, and reaches out desperately. Jung recoils, and says, “you did not live your animal,” which will be explained later.

Jung comes back to his senses. The cook didn’t see the spirits, so she thinks he might be insane. Then the librarian bursts in with a bunch of other people, and Jung is dragged away and shoved into a police van. He still has his book, and opens it to a random page, which says that all people suffer from temptation. Jung concludes that Ezechiel is a restless ghost because he didn’t understand this. The police take Jung (a psychiatrist) to an asylum. A doctor asks him what he experiences, and Jung tells him about the ghosts like a child talking about their imaginary friends. Jung claims that he summoned the ghosts. The doctor concludes that he’s clearly insane, but lets him keep the book.

The problem of madness is profound. Divine madness – a higher form of the irrationality of the life streaming through us – at any rate a madness hat cannot be integrated into present-day society – but how? What if the form of society were integrated into madness?

This is right in line with my Dionysian philosophies, and it highlights the fact that society really doesn’t know what to do with “religious madness,” i.e. mystical experience. Jung goes mad within one of his own dreams, and is put into a psyche ward by his own dream-figures. His experience is dismissed by the doctors, and he’s not taken seriously, which we know is triggering for him. That shows that the secular world has an even worse grasp on mystical experience and what to do with it than Christianity does. What if society were integrated into madness? Now that’s a question, but one I don’t really have an answer for. I’ll ask Dionysus.

There are patients on Jung’s right and left. Jung interprets them as “thinking and feeling,” that old dichotomy that he based on Elijah and Salome. Jung marvels at how all these dichotomies can exist simultaneously, like buds growing in opposite directions on the same stem – right and left rooms, the hot-cold path, the secular world of seriousness and rationality and the sacred world that requires going crazy. The only way Jung can find Christ again is by going to “that funny-frightful realm” of pure insanity. Jung’s reason doesn’t work here, and all he can really do is trust God that it will all work out somehow. That’s the “intuitive method” he was reading about in the book.

I can no longer say that this or that goal should be reached, or that this or that reason should apply because it is good; instead I grope through mist and night. No line emerges, no law appears; instead everything is thoroughly and convincingly accidental, as a matter of fact even terribly accidental. But one thing becomes dreadfully clear, namely that contrary to my earlier way with all its insights and intentions, henceforth all is error. It becomes ever more apparent that nothing leads, as my hope sought to persuade me, but that everything misleads.

And suddenly to your shivering horror it becomes clear to you that you have fallen into the boundless, the abyss, the inanity of eternal chaos. It rushes toward you as if carried by the roaring wings of a storm, the hurtling waves of the sea.

Jung has managed to keep some semblance of sanity up to this point, even through his many weird dreams, but now he has well and truly gone insane “in-universe.” He’s been subsumed by the absurdity and meaninglessness that he associates with his Shadow, and which he’s tried to avoid this whole time. He has to get over his fear of not being taken seriously by ripping the band-aid off and going to the asylum, where he has no chance of being taken seriously. For all the dissing of Nietzsche before, it seems as though Jung has seen the Abyss staring back at him.

I feel like Jung and Lovecraft would have a lot to talk about (and not just because Jung would be really interested in psychoanalyzing Lovecraft). They both learned to navigate the Dreamlands and had some pretty profound mystical experiences. They also both have an interesting relationship with insanity and with the idea of the absurd, i.e. the inherent meaninglessness of everything.

Every man has a quiet place in his soul, where everything is self-evident and easily explainable, a place to which he likes to retire from the confusing possibilities of life, because there everything is simple and clear, with a manifest and limited purpose. About nothing else in the world can a man say with the same conviction as he does of this place: “You are nothing but…” And indeed he has said it.

Interesting concept. I think too many people try to live their whole lives in such a place. This goes back to what I was saying before about nuance. We like for things to be simple and make sense, but they’re not and they don’t, and only by acknowledging that can we really make any progress. But the complexity of life is also a beautiful thing.

And even this place is a smooth surface, an everyday wall, nothing more than a snugly sheltered and frequently polished crust over the mystery of chaos. If you break through this most everyday of walls, the overwhelming stream of chaos will flood in. Chaos is not single, but an unending multiplicity. It is not formless, otherwise it would be single, but it is filled with figures that have a confusing and overwhelming effect due to their fullness.

The true absurdity of life is lurking just beneath the surface, and it is not simple, it is extremely complicated. It’s brain-breakingly complicated. It is fundamentally eldritch in nature. It’s uncomfortable for any human to look at for too long, and if you’re not careful, you will go insane when you see it. It’s cosmic horror in a nutshell. But that’s the way the world is, and if you learn to work with it instead of pretending it isn’t there, you can gain some mastery over it. (Please someone tell Jordan Peterson to read this book.)

In my experience, being able to contain and process that multiplicity is godlike thinking. Humans don’t like it when things are complicated, beyond the scope of that little “room,” but gods can see all of those limitless contradictions and allow them to exist simultaneously, like the buds on the stem. To a god, nothing is mutually exclusive. Being able to grasp that multiplicity as a human gives you more power and more insight.

These figures are the dead, not just your dead, that is, all the images of the shapes you took in the past, which your ongoing life has left behind, but also the thronging dead of human history, the ghostly procession of the past, which is an ocean compared to the drops of your own life span. I see behind you, behind the mirror of your eyes, the crush of dangerous shadows, the dead, who look greedily through the empty sockets of your eyes, who moan and hope to gather up through you all the loose ends of the ages, which sigh in them. Your cluelessness does not prove anything. Put your ear to that wall and you will hear the rustling of their procession.

Now you know why you lodged the simplest and most easily explained matters in just that spot, why you praised that peaceful seat as the most secure: so that no one, least of all yourself, would unearth the mystery there. For this is the place where day and night agonizingly merge. What you excluded from your life, what you renounced and damned, everything that was and could have gone wrong, awaits you behind that wall before which you sit quietly.

I’m no psychologist, but in my amateur opinion, I think that this explains a lot of human thinking and behavior. We just don’t want to deal with any of that mess. We’re raised from simple-minded children to complex-minded adults, but we never really learn to handle that complexity, and we actively avoid it. That last line there is a perfect sum-up of Shadow work. Behind the wall of simplicity that you hold yourself in is your Shadow, everything that you rejected, standing among Hecate’s throng of the restless dead.

The greatest among all the shades is Christ, because “It was too little for him to break the world, so he broke himself.” I don’t quite know how to interpret that line, but it sticks with me.

The shades, the Shadows that secretly prey on human lives while they remain unacknowledged, did not “live their animal.” What Jung means by this is that animals don’t try to control each other, or horde their resources, or live out-of-balance with the land. Animals just are. If you don’t “live your animal,” then you’ll end up treating your fellow humans like an animal, i.e. your repressed animal nature will manifest itself in a way that is violent and unhealthy.

When you face down the hordes of shades, you have to do so alone. If someone else sees or hears you wrestling with the dead, they’ll tear you away from them, trying to save you from them. However well-meaning, this will sabotage the whole operation. That’s why you keep it secret. “Live the life of the day and do not speak of mysteries, but dedicate the night to bringing about the salvation of the dead.”

It’s really interesting to think of Shadow work as redeeming the collective spirits of the dead, in imitation of Christ. I don’t quite know what to make of that, but it’s a sign that I was dead-on when choosing Hecate as my Queen of Shadows. She leads the host of the restless dead in Ancient Greece. Also, could this be a form of ancestor worship? Redeeming the dead, or at least hearing them out to give them some peace? Having some real reverence for them, instead of fearing them?

There is an image in the middle of this chapter, a beautiful mandala, mostly comprised of Jung’s characteristic swirling patterns. In circles at the four points of the mandala are four figures: On the top is an old man with a white beard, wearing a pale blue robe. It’s Elijah, from Liber Primus. On the left is Salome, in her red dress. Across from Salome, on the right, is what looks like the Virgin Mary. On the bottom is a figure that I don’t think we’ve seen before. He has dark skin and red hair that is shaped kind of like a flame, and he wears a black robe from the waist-down. He’s holding something that looks kind of like a Rubik’s cube. I expect he’s some kind of devilish or infernal figure, to contrast with Elijah, but I honestly don’t know. He doesn’t resemble any figure that’s been mentioned so far.

Recurring in this mandala are four colors representing the four directions – gold for Above, black for Below, red for Left, pale blue or white for Right. They appear as semicircles in these positions surrounding each of the four figures. (I’m vaguely reminded of the Four Tezcatlipocas from Aztec mythology, representing the four directions and each corresponding to a different color, but they don’t match exactly.) One circle of the mandala is decorated with little circles divided into quarters, with each quarter being one of these colors, with the colors rotating and changing position each time. These four colors showed up in the “Creation” mandalas, and the blue star from the “Creation” mandalas is in the middle. The pattern behind it looks marbled, like jaguar spots. Around this innermost circle is a small ring of leaf shapes, some of which repeat and others of which are unique. The rest of the mandala is dominated by the swirling patterns.

Jung is still really invested in defending Christianity, but he’s also not afraid to say the quiet part out loud:

Did not Christ himself restore bloody human sacrifice, which better customs had expelled from sacred practice since days of old? Did he not himself reinstate the sacred practice of the eating of human sacrifice? In your sacred practice that which earlier laws condemned will once again be included.

Oooh! This goes back to the last chapter in which Jung had to eat the liver of a dead girl, the body of his soul. I’ve heard it remarked that Christ abolished all need for sacrifice with this one great act of sacrifice, but… also… it is human sacrifice. It is symbolic cannibalism. The difference, Jung says, is that Jesus sacrificed himself instead of someone else, hence establishing his law of love. Honestly, that I can get behind. I really wish more Christians were actually willing to put themselves through physical and psychological difficulties for the sake of other people. That’s, like, the one thing Jesus was trying to teach them to do. And yet, how many of them can actually do it? How many would willingly give up any part of themselves for the sake of people they don’t like?

Case in point:

We are a blinded race. We live only on the surface, only in the present, and think only of tomorrow. We deal roughly with the past in that we do not accept the dead. We want to work only with visible success. Above all we want to be paid. We would consider it insane to do hidden work that does not visibly serve men.

[…]

There is one necessary but hidden and strange work – a major work – which you must do in secret, for the sake of the dead. He who cannot attain his own visible field and vineyard is held fast by the dead, who demand the work of atonement from him. And until he has fulfilled this, he cannot get to his outer work, since the dead do not let him. he shall have to search his soul and act in stillness at their behest and complete the mystery, so that the dead will not let him. Do not look forward so much, but back and into yourself, so that you will not fail to hear the dead.

Jung has already said a lot about the importance of turning inward and focusing on developing the internal world, back in Liber Primus. This applies it more directly to Shadow work: If you don’t do this work, then all of the subconscious crap that you’re not addressing will hold you back from it. No matter what you achieve in the external world, it’s never going to give you happiness or fulfillment if you don’t do the internal work first. Not doing the internal work may even prevent you from achieving any kind of success in the external world. Shadow work is the first step, the first great mystery. You have to get through this first before you can make any progress in the physical or the spiritual world.

Jung draws a parallel between himself suffering on the bed in the asylum between two other madmen, and Jesus crucified between the two criminals. Jesus is a leader of the restless dead, too, like Hecate and Dionysus. His people are the “despised and lost.” That’s another thing that not enough Christians understand. It was always the criminals and the whores that Jesus hung out with, not the people who go to church every Sunday and tick every box to show their devotion but then don’t do any of the difficult work. This Christian interpretation of Shadow work is actually reminding me of some of the things I liked about Christianity in the first place!

Jung is able to accept the chaos, and so his soul comes to him.

At the end of the chapter, there’s another mandala. It’s a gigantic four-spoked wheel, dominated by snaking patterns that twist and intertwine with each other like tangled thread, in all different colors. The spokes each have a design of two tangled colors: The upwards one has red and yellow, the left one has red and bright green, the downwards one has black and dark green, and the right one has blue and white. All these colors knot together in different patterns along the outside. Once again, there’s the blue star in the middle.

Nox Tertia

Jung’s soul asks him if he wants to accept his madness:

You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life.

I think this is pretty self-explanatory. Mystical experience, and to an extent all spiritual advancement, requires losing your mind at least temporarily. Why? Because the spiritual world is too weird and too counterintuitive for it to make sense otherwise. Dionysus has taught me about the virtues of madness. (Also, this is sounds a lot like Melinda’s experience, to the letter.)

Jung tells his soul that accepting madness is difficult. She says that he has to do it anyway, because it’s an important part of himself. Jung says that he did not know that. And the soul says this:

Jung still can’t sleep, and sure enough, the girl comes to him. Jung’s response to the tropiness of the story he’s in is to conclude that he’s in Hell: “I am truly in Hell—the worst awakening after death, to be resurrected in a lending library!" The girl is offended that he thinks she’s cliché, or “common.” Jung can’t bear it because it seems banal and ridiculous, and we know from Liber Primus that these are his triggers. He wants to be “high-minded,” and melodramatic pulp fiction is not high-minded. Jung asks if the girl is real or if she’s just a hallucination brought on by insomnia, because nothing this dumb could ever be actually real, and the girl starts crying. At this, Jung starts to pity her and puts his Genre Savvy quips aside. He asks her who she is, and she gives him the tropey answer beat-for-beat: Her father keeps her locked in the castle because he loves her and doesn’t want anything to happen to her, because she looks like her mother and her mother died young. Jung feels like figuratively banging his head into a wall. He asks the Gods (plural!) why they’ve stuck him in the middle of such a trite story. But ultimately, his pity wins out, and he comforts the girl. She comments that his reaction is finally a humane one.

Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at the bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something incomprehensible on life.

Gloriously stated! I couldn’t have said it better myself! This is what Dionysus has taught me, and it’s completely true. If you go mad on purpose, madness won’t completely destroy you. Nothing to add.

Jung doesn’t respond as well, though. He reacts with despair, and then says, “it prompts me to disagree.” His soul points out that there is nothing to disagree with. He’s in an asylum. That reminds me a lot of a certain famous dialogue:

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad, you’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

As soon as his soul reminds Jung that he’s in an asylum, she turns into the “fat little professor” from before, the doctor who is supposed to be tending to him. Jung realizes that he mistook the doctor for his own soul – he really is mad! The dialogue continues, but now it’s between Jung and the doctor instead of Jung and his soul. The doctor tells him that he is confused and incoherent.

Jung is experiencing ego death. He feels himself be subsumed into the boundless sea of Khaos. He sees the choppy waves of that sea approaching, and suddenly, he’s on a ship. He enters the parlor of the ship to see many people dressed up in beautiful clothes, who all look at him as if he were… well, a madman. One of the people tells Jung that he looks like he saw a ghost, and Jung starts raving. The fat little doctor is sitting at a table in the ship’s parlor, playing cards. He lightheartedly comments on Jung’s erratic behavior, offering him a drink. Jung insists that he was just the man’s patient in a madhouse, and the parlor erupts in laughter.

Jung gets a better look at the person who first came up to him. “He is a man with a black beard, a tousled head of hair, and dark shining eyes.” The man tells him “it’s five years now that I’ve been here.” Jung realizes that the man is actually the patient lying next to him in the madhouse. The man says, “I am Nietzsche, only rebaptized, I am also Christ, the Savior, and appointed to save the world, but they won’t let me.” Sounds like a madman’s speech, doesn’t it? But from a mystical standpoint, it almost makes a sort of sense.

Jung asks who is preventing the man from saving the world, and the man says that the doctor is the Devil, and that they are both in Hell. The man is apparently supposed to marry the Mother of God, but the Devil impregnates her every evening, and she gives birth to the child every morning. Then the child is dismembered by devils every nightfall, and the cycle continues.

Jung asks the girl how to seek divinity. He thinks that divinity cannot be banal, that it must be by nature uncommon and only found in the minds of great philosophers. She explains that the more uncommon the truths are, the less they resonate and the less meaningful they are. The more universal an idea is, the more people it resonates for, the more likely it is that it comes from the divine. She tells him, “Only what is human and what you call banal and hackneyed contains the wisdom that you seek.”

I’m sure Jung will provide a detailed analysis of that at the end of the chapter, but for now, let me see if I can make some sense out of it: This madman is applying Christian figures to what are actually some pretty common pagan mythological motifs, the same ones that have recurred throughout The Red Book so far. The Devil, a god, impregnates the Mother of God, a goddess, with a baby god. The baby god probably represents the Sun, because he’s born at the start of the day and dies at the end of it, and that solar motif has been constant in Liber Secundus. He’s then reborn every single day. I didn’t even realize that the manner of the child’s death was only described as “gruesome,” without being specified, because I immediately interpreted it as dismemberment – the Titans dismember the baby Zagreus. Now, I have no reason to believe that Jung knew about the Zagreus myth, so he could have interpreted that “gruesome manner” as crucifixion or something else entirely different. But dismemberment has also shown up already, in the “Sacrificial Murder” chapter in which Jung finds the mutilated body of his soul. Regardless of the method, it’s clearly a bloody sacrifice, which has been a running theme ever since “The Murder of the Hero” back in Liber Primus.

Another, more subtle aspect of this is implied incest between the madman, who identifies himself as Christ, and the Mother of God, i.e. his own mother. He’s supposed to marry her. Why? Well, the mystical reason why incest is so common among gods is because they’re all conceptually interrelated. The relationships between the concepts they represent are symbolically represented by their familial relationships in mythology. Gods are incestuous because each generation of gods is an evolution of the same concept. So, the sky god and the earth goddess have sex and produce the next sky god, who also has sex with the earth goddess (often his mother, sometimes his sister), and on it goes. They loop back in on each other, because they’re actually just the same set of gods, begetting themselves over and over again.

Jung tells the other madman that what he speaks is “pure mythology,” and the madman calls him crazy. Yes, you read that right—the madman calls Jung crazy, and insists that he really does belong in an asylum, because he doesn’t understand. Jung fails to appreciate the mythical dream-logic of the Otherworld, so, he’s the crazy one.

This whole section is interrupted by an image, which comes right in the middle of the sentence describing the gruesome-but-unspecified death of the child. The image mostly consists of the swirling patterns, blue and gold like a sea of ripples in the background, and in the foreground, the red and black figure of a man. The man leans back with arms open, as a thin line of gold either shines out of his chest or pierces through it. One part of the background overlaps with the beam. A black and white serpent coils around his feet. It’s a striking image, but I’m not really sure how to interpret it. The man might represent Jung, or it might represent the madman that he’s talking to. The oceanlike background is probably the sea of primordial Khaos mentioned before. The man is immersed in it, but also standing on it, surrounded by its madness. The gold line I interpret as a beam of sunlight, perhaps a symbol of insight, and the man’s position suggests ecstasy.

Black and white snakes have been mentioned before, way back in Liber Primus. Jung interprets the snake that appears alongside Elijah and Salome as the bridge that connects thinking and feeling, as well as an adversary to them both. In that whole sequence, there is a black serpent representing Night and a white serpent representing Day, who fight each other. The black one appears to win, but part of its head becomes white. Here, the Serpent is equally black and white, a sign of integration. Snakes are also a general symbol of primordial Khaos.

Helpfully, the image has a caption (translated in the footnotes): “This man of matter rose up too far in the world of the spirits, but there the spirit of the heart bores through him with a golden ray. He falls with joy and disintegrates. The serpent, who is the evil one, could not remain in the world of spirits.” Well, that confirms that the golden beam is penetrating the heart, not emanating from it, and that the position is ecstatic. Other than that, it doesn’t provide much clarity. What I can say for sure is that it definitely represents “ego death” – being subsumed by the world of spirit (i.e. the unconscious) and disintegrating or dissolving into it. I still think that Jung is selling the serpent a little short.

The madman goes to sleep. Jung desperately holds on to his bed, still trying to protect himself from the ocean waves that he believes are there. He fixates on a line on the wall above a radiator, which morphs into a horizon line above a railing. The sun rises from the horizon, and Jung sees a crucified serpent within the sun. (The crucified serpent is an alchemical symbol that represents fixation, or the attainment of the Philosopher’s Stone. You may recognize it as the symbol on Ed’s red coat in Fullmetal Alchemist. It also appeared earlier in Liber Secundus, in the illuminated initial for “Deis II,” alongside the rising and setting sun.) The creature on the cross morphs, becoming a bull slit open as a sacrifice, then a donkey, then a ram, then Jung himself. Jung writes, “The sun of martyrdom has arisen and is pouring bloody rays over the sea.”

I’m reminded of a lot of different things, all at once. When the serpent changed into a bull, I was reminded of the Four Living Creatures (a bull, an eagle, a lion, and a man). I was also reminded of a bull with little hunting boots on its hooves being sacrificed in the place of Dionysus, and of Zagreus shapeshifting to avoid the Titans who want to kill him (he’s finally caught when he takes the shape of a goat). It’s interesting that the rising sun is repeatedly described as being red, like the Sun of the Depths.

Jung watches the sun rise until it reaches noon, at which the waves thunderously pound on the shore twelve times, striking the hour. And then there’s silence. A tree rises from the sea, the Axis Mundi, with branches that reach to Heaven and roots that reach to Hell. Upon seeing it in the distance, Jung feels weak and as if all his life-force has escaped into the void. He begs for salvation. A strange voice answers, “There is no salvation here,” and tells him to be quiet so as not to wake the other patients. The vision is gone, and the attendant is there, telling Jung to go to sleep. Jung says that he couldn’t find the way, and the attendant responds, “You don’t need to find a way here.”

Jung begins his analysis by saying that the attendant is right — there’s no inherent meaning, no direction that one must go, only the way that they are going. You build the road as you go. Jung writes, “We create the truth by living it.” That is a great line!

This is the night in which all the dams broke, where what was previously solid moved, where the stones turned into serpents, and everything living froze. Is this a web of words? If it is, it is a hellish web for those caught in it.

There’s a general theme of inversion here. What is unliving becomes living, and vice-versa. What is unmoving, moves, and vice-versa. The fixed becomes volatile, and the volatile, fixed – as is represented by the crucified serpent.

Jung advises you to be wary of the words that you use, and the connotations of them:

With words you pull up the underworld. Word, the paltriest and the mightiest. In words the emptiness and the fullness flow together. Hence the word is an image of God. The word is the greatest and the smallest that man created, just as what is created through man is the greatest and the smallest.

“With words you pull up the underworld.” Damn! That’s another line I’m going to have to remember.

The idea of the Word being the image of God is obviously present in the Abrahamic religions, but it’s also present in Platonic philosophy and Hermeticism. Actually, identifying the divine with thought or speech is extremely old—Thoth allegedly spoke himself into existence. To speak is to make an idea manifest as sound waves. The Platonic chain of emenation begins with God, then progresses through Nous (mind) and Logos (word) down to the material plane. In other words, there’s God, and God thinks of an idea, and then God speaks the idea, and then it becomes a tangible manifest thing in the material world. That’s how humans create things, too – you get an idea, and then you comprehend or communicate the idea, and then you manifest it in the real world. Every building that you’ve ever been in was once a thought in someone’s head that was designed on paper and then built. Every book you’ve ever read was once a thought in someone’s head that was written and then printed (or posted on the internet, that miraculous space that is neither manifest nor unmanifest). Magic works according to that same process, but makes it faster.

He who strives against waves is exposed to the arbitrary. The work of men is steady but it swims upon chaos. The striving of men seems like lunacy to him who comes from the sea. But men consider him mad.

If a person managed to escape the Platonic Cave and saw the sun and the objects casting the shadows, and then they went back inside the cave to tell the people still trapped inside about it, they wouldn’t be considered a brilliant philosopher. They’d be considered mad. They’d be told that three-dimensional objects do not exist, and they should just sit and watch the shadows. In the city of the blind, the one-eyed man is mad; the blind citizens are not going to be enthused about him describing how ugly their houses are, because what on earth does “ugly” mean?

Jung goes on to say that one who has “seen the chaos” (or The Good; really, it’s the same thing) can’t bear the presence of other men, because they all seem dense. Other people try to “save” him from his madness, but they’re missing the point, and they’re annoying! Besides, if he were to acquiesce, he’d become like one of those philosophers who’s never seen the chaos but speaks with authority about it anyway.

But for him who’s seen the chaos, there is no more hiding, because he knows that the bottom sways and knows what this swaying means. He has seen the order and the disorder of the endless, he knows the unlawful laws. He knows the sea and can never forget it. The chaos is terrible: days full of lead, nights full of horror.

Once you see chaos, there’s no going back, just as one who knows what the Matrix is can’t live a normal life inside it. How do you maintain your sanity? You don’t. How do you avoid being depressed and scared all the time, then?

Well, just as Christ came to give people salvation, there needs to be a new God, the new god that unites duality as described back in Liber Primus. The new God is not incarnated in the flesh like Jesus was, but is instead born in the spirit of men. The men are wedded to their feminine souls, who conceive the God. (All this was discussed in more detail during “The Conception of the God” in Liber Primus. )

What is done to this God you do to the lowest in yourself, under the law of love according to which nothing is cast out. For how else should your lowest be saved from your depravity? Who should accept the lowest in you, if you do not?

Shadow work! Again, not much else to say here. No wonder I recognized Dionysus as my God – he is so uncannily like my Shadow.

The lowest in you is the source of mercy. We take this sickness upon ourselves, the inability to find peace, the baseness, and the contemptibility so that the God can be healed and radiantly ascend, purged of the decomposition of death and the mud of the underworld. The despicable prisoner will ascend to his salvation shining and wholly healed.

This reflects back on the series of visions around Gilgamesh, who rose triumphantly into the sky as the Sun, while Jung sank into Hell. You have to take Hell upon yourself (i.e. do Shadow work) so that God can be expressed through you, instead of the Shadow.

Is there a suffering that would be so great to want to undergo for our God? You only see the one, and do not notice the other. But when there is one, so there is also another and that is the lowest in you. But the lowest in you is also the eye of evil that stares at you and looks at you coldly and sucks your light down into the dark abyss. Bless the hand that keeps you up there, the smallest humanity, the lowest living thing. Quite a few would prefer death. Since Christ imposed bloody sacrifice on humanity, the renewed God will not spare bloodshed.

You may think you don’t have a Shadow, but you do. Just because you don’t notice it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. For as long as you don’t notice it, it will be evil, lurking there in the abyss and being a drain on everything else in your life. If you want to make any progress, you have no choice but to confront it and deal with it.

In the middle of this section, after the line “For how else should your lowest be saved from your depravity?” is the next image: The black and white snake, this time rising up through green swirl, with a bloom of red like a solar halo or like blood splatters around its head. The snake in front of the red sun? The Shadow rising up through you?

Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and they garments like him that treadeth in the winefat? I have trodden the winepress alone and no one is with me. I have trodden myself down in my anger, and trampled upon myself in my fury. Hence my blood has spattered my clothes, and I have stained my robe. […] As I trod myself down in my rage, and made myself drunk in my fury, and spilt my blood on the earth.

I figured that explicit Dionysian imagery would show up at some point! Let me just emphasize this: This is Carl Jung himself using the metaphor of a wine press to describe repressing one’s Shadow – trampling one’s Shadow (and therefore oneself) underfoot like one would trample grapes in a wine press. Gee, I wonder who my patron deity is!

That particular metaphor of the wine press ties into the general mystical theme, because Dionysian ecstatic dances were meant to resemble the stamping motions of crushing grapes. Crushing grapes is also an allegory for ego death, and the Dionysian theme of dismemberment is a related allegory. Jung crushes his own Shadow underfoot and beats it bloody, just as one might crush grapes in a wine press. There’s a blending between the “thou” and the “I,” because Jung there’s no meaningful difference between himself and his Shadow. The blood spatters Jung’s own clothes because it’s himself that he attacks. Interpreting repression of one’s Shadow as a kind of bloody ritual sacrifice is also very interesting.

Of course, Jung doesn’t relate it to Dionysus. He relates it to Christ, which is close enough. But c’mon… I know Jesus has a lot to do with wine, but a wine press? That is extremely specific!

If I accept the lowest in me, I lower a seed into the ground of Hell. The seed is invisibly small, but the tree of my life grows from it and conjoins the Below with the Above. At both ends there is fire and blazing embers. The Above is fiery and the Below is fiery. Between the unbearable fires grows your life. You hang between these two poles. In an immeasurably frightening movement the stretch hanging welters up and down.

Gorgeous description. The “as above so below” motif is made much more explicit here. There is hellfire beneath you and celestial fire above you, and you are suspended in between, at neither extreme.

We thus fear our lowest, since that which one does not possess is forever united with the chaos and takes part in its mysterious ebb and flow. Insofar as I accept the lowest in me—precisely that red glowing sun of the depths—and thus fall victim to the confusion of chaos, the upper shining sun also rises. Therefore he who strives for the highest finds the deepest.

As I always say, you can’t make any spiritual progress without doing your Shadow work first. The lower mysteries are just as important as the higher mysteries. The chaos is there whether you like it or not, and must be dealt with; the Night Sun beneath the earth is the same sun that rises, just at a different point.

Jung identifies Christ as a mediator, between the Above and the Below (which Jung identifies with the two thieves on either side of the cross), who led by example.

But he who goes into the one and not also at the same time into the other by accepting what comes toward him, will simply teach and live the one and turn it into a reality. For he will be its victim. When you go into the one and hence consider the other approaching you as your enemy, you will fight against the other. You will do so because you fail to recognize that the other is also in you. On the contrary, you think that the other comes somehow from without and you think that you also catch sight of it in the views and actions of your fellow men which clash with yours. You thus fight the other and are completely blinded.

But he who accepts what approaches him because it is also in him, quarrels and wrangles no more, but looks into himself and keeps silent.

Psychological projection in a nutshell. Whatever enemy you think you’re fighting is actually just you. You identify your own insecurities, your own repressed aspects, with your external enemies. You assume that by destroying your external enemy, you can also destroy the internal one. It doesn’t work like that, so you end up just chasing your own tail and causing a lot of destruction in the process. It’s possible that the external enemy isn’t even an enemy, that you just saw your Shadow in them and decided to attack them unprompted. It’s a vicious cycle and it doesn’t solve anything. The awful truth is that your real enemy is you, that whatever it is you hate comes from within.

That last line reminds me of an Ursula Le Guin quote, describing the same thing, from the end of A Wizard of Earthsea: “a man, who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life’s sake and never in service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.”

There’s another image after this section. It depicts a man who’s either very fat or wearing a puffy costume, with black and white splotches resembling the serpent’s skin, against a background of swirls that has lightened to pastel blue. The man has jaw-length black hair, which identifies him as Jung’s avatar within the visions. He stares directly at the viewer.

This image is kind of incomprehensible to me, but luckily, there’s a caption:

This is the image of the divine child. It means the completion of a long path. Just as the image was finished in April 1919, and work on the next image had already begun, the one who brought the Q came, as ΦΙΛΗΜΩΝ [Philemon] had predicted to me. I called him ΦΑΝΗΣ [Phanes], because he is the newly appearing god.

Okay, so, Jung is definitely aware (or becomes aware) of the inherently Dionysian nature of the visions he’s seeing. He identifies the new God with Phanes, the divine progenitor and first Lord of the Universe in Orphism, whom Dionysus is explicitly identified with. “Phanes” means “to bring to light,” and Phanes is described as emitting light. Phanes is essentially the divine force that causes things to exist, and he is identified with Eros and Priapus, both gods of sexual desire and potency. In the footnotes is a hymn to Phanes that Jung channeled from Philemon (who hasn’t been introduced yet; we’ll get there). I immediately copied it into my notes! Reading it, I think Jung wasn’t as Christian as he purported to be:

Phanes is the God who rises agleam from the waters.
Phanes is the smile of dawn.
Phanes is the resplendent day.
He is the immortal present.
He is the gushing streams.
He is the soughing wind.
He is hunger and satiation.
He is love and lust.
He is mourning and consolation.
He is promise and fulfillment.
He is the light that illuminates every darkness.
He is the eternal day.
He is the silver light of the moon.
He is the flickering stars.
He is the shooting star that flashes and falls and lapses.
He is the stream of shooting stars that returns every year.
He is the returning sun and moon.
He is the trailing star that brings wars and noble wine.
He is the good and fullness of the year.
He fulfills the hours with life-filled enchantment.
He is love’s embrace and whisper.
He is the warmth of friendship.
He is the hope that enlivens the void.
He is the magnificence of all renewed suns.
He is the joy at every birth.
He is the blooming flowers.
He is the velvety butterfly’s wing.
He is the scent of blooming gardens that fills the nights.
He is the song of joy. He is the tree of light.
He is perfection, everything done better.
He is everything euphonious
He is the well-measured.
He is the sacred number.
He is the promise of life.
He is the contract and the sacred pledge.
He is the diversity of sounds and colors.
He is the sanctification of morning, noon, and evening.
He is the benevolent and gentle.
He is salvation…
In truth, Phanes is the happy day…
In truth, Phanes is work and accomplishment and its remuneration.
He is the troublesome task and the evening calm.
He is a step on the middle way, its beginning, its middle, and its end.
He is foresight.
He is the end of fear.
He is the sprouting seed, the opening bud.
He is the gate of reception, of acceptance and deposition.
He is the spring and the desert.
He is the safe haven and the stormy night.
He is the certainty in desperation
He is solid in dissolution.
He is the liberation of imprisonment.
He is counsel and strength in advancement.
He is the friend of man, the light emanating from man, the bright glow that man beholds on his path.
He is the greatness of man, his worth, and his force.

I have nothing to add. This is glorious.

Regarding the image, I presume that it’s intended to depict Phanes. It’s certainly the child god described in “The Conception of the God” chapter back in Liber Primus, and the fact that it looks like Jung’s internal version of himself is telling.

Okay, back to “Nox Tertia,” and the process of Shadow work:

He sees the tree of life, whose roots reach into Hell and whose top touches Heaven. He also no longer knows differences; who is right? What is holy? What is genuine? What is good? What is correct? He knows only difference: the difference between below and above. For he sees that the tree of life grows from below to above, and that it has its crown at the top, clearly differentiated from the roots. To him this is unquestionable. Hence he knows the way to salvation.

Because the Above and Below reflect and correspond to each other, they’re both on equal footing. Neither is “ranked” above the other in terms of importance or betterness. Integrating the Shadow means recognizing that there’s no fundamental difference between the Above and Below, Ego and Other, besides that they’re in opposite positions. The distinction between good and evil, genuine and farcical, right and wrong, does not matter because it was always arbitrary.

To unlearn all distinctions save that concerning direction is part of your salvation. Hence you free yourself from the old curse of the knowledge of good and evil. Because you separated good from evil according to your best appraisal and aspired only to the good and denied the evil that you committed nevertheless and failed to accept, your roots no longer suckled the dark nourishment of the depths and your tree became sick and withered.

Therefore the ancients said that after Adam had eaten the apple, the tree of paradise withered. Your life needs the dark. But if you know that it is evil, you can no longer accept it and you suffer anguish and you do not know why. Nor can you accept it as evil, else your good will reject you. Nor can you deny it since you know good and evil. Because of this the knowledge of good and evil was an insurmountable curse.

This is maybe the most interesting and resonant interpretation of Original Sin that I’ve ever seen. Acknowledging a difference between good and evil leads to aspiring towards good and denying evil, cutting off the entire “below” side of the equation and causing nearly all other problems. It results in a catch-22, which keeps you constantly aware of your own evil but unable to do anything with it. It just looms over you, so you ignore it and hope it’ll go away. The only way to actually do anything about it is to stop acknowledging good and evil as concepts.

But if you return to primal chaos and if you feel and recognize that which hangs stretched between the two unbearable poles of fire, you will notice that you can no longer separate good and evil conclusively, neither through feeling nor through knowledge, but that you can discern the direction of growth only from below to above. You thus forget the distinction between good and evil, and you no longer know it as long as your tree grows from below to above. But as soon as growth stops, what was united in growth falls apart and once more you can recognize good and evil.

Like all other polarities, good and evil are not different things. They’re the extreme ends of the same thing. A tree is a tree, whether you’re looking at the branches or the roots, and there’s an entire trunk in between.

Jung asserts that acknowledging “doubt” is a sign of strength. What I take that to mean is, it’s okay to have your sense of morality be constantly in flux. You can’t be a completely good person all the time, but you also don’t have to beat yourself up when you fail to meet an arbitrary standard. You can just… not be good or evil. You can exist in a perpetual gray ambiguity. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s possible, and ultimately healthier than the person who is certain that they are in the right no matter what they do. i.e. You’ll ironically be a better person if you doubt your goodness and just admit to being evil sometimes.

My speech is neither light nor dark, since it is the speech of someone who is growing.

I really like this line. If you are advancing spiritually, then that means you are in-between dualities.