THE RED BOOK
LIBER SECUNDUS
Part One
I’m picking up right where I left off, so please go read my analysis of Liber Primus first:
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Then buckle up, because you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. We’ve got a lot to get through. This book is going to steadily get weirder and more mystical, and as it does, we get more and more amazing artwork. Liber Primus was pretty light on the artwork. I’m eager to introduce you to Jung’s art, because it’s truly spectacular.
The Images of the Erring
Liber Secundus begins with Bible quotes from Jeremiah 23:
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“Hearken not unto the words of the prophets that prophesy unto you: they make you vain: they speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the Lord.
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I have heard what the prophets said, that prophesy lies in my name, saying, I have dreamed, I have dreamed. How long shall this be in the heart of the prophets that prophesy lies? Yea, they are prophets of the deceit of their own heart; Which think to cause my people to forget my name by their dreams which they tell every man to his neighbour, as their fathers have forgotten my name for Baal. The prophet that hath a dream, let him tell a dream; and he that hath my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat? saith the Lord.”​
I’m still not sure I understand this. I understand the quote itself: “Don’t listen to the people who claim their UPG is the authentic Word of God,” but why did Jung choose to make this the epigraph for Liber Secundus? Is Jung calling himself a false prophet, because he’s reporting his dreams? I suppose he isn’t preaching to anybody—this is a private journal—so is he reminding himself to trust more in his own revelations than those of others? I found an article here that discusses the quote in Jung’s context, and suggests that Jung is trying to distinguish between the conflicting voices of the Spirit of the Times and the Sprit of the Depths, but neither are mentioned in Liber Secundus. So, I’m still a bit lost. One thing I’ll note is that a major theme of the first half of Liber Secundus is the tension between Christianity and paganism within Jung’s own mind, something that he finds difficult to reconcile.
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The illuminated multiline initial (I know what that’s called now!) is a letter “D” painted against a background that looks like layers of bedrock beneath water. The rock has deep fissures running through it. The footnotes specify that Jung himself described “fragmentation” as a running theme in paintings done by schizophrenics, who depict the splintering of their own minds through fracture lines. I have no idea if that’s true or not, but the fact that Jung associates fragmentation in his own art with schizophrenia is what matters here. (Most of Jung’s art is not disturbing, but it is weird and clearly mystical in nature. We’ll get there. You literally see him improve as an artist as this book goes along.) Inside the “D” are twining red and blue tendrils that look like a vein and artery, or maybe even a DNA strand. (The twining red and blue represented Elijah and Salome before, but neither of them appears in this book, either.) On the other side, flowers bloom. In the middle is a striking red eye. The Eye of Providence?
The Red One
After the last vision, Jung has been shut out of the Mysterium. He is a guardsman standing on a castle turret, dressed in green. This is what’s depicted in the multiline initial:
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Jung again appears as a darker-skinned man with shoulder-length black hair. I’m not sure why he chooses to depict himself this way in his art, but then again, I don’t appear the way I actually look in my mindscape, either.
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A horseman dressed all in red comes to the castle. Jung’s immediate thought is that the man in red is the Devil, and the man in red calls him out on it. Jung thinks there’s something pagan about him. His mannerisms are too “worldly,” “impudent,” and “exuberant” for him to be a Christian. The man in red tells him that he hit the nail on the head. Jung determines that the man is too contemporary, too “of the times” to be a true pre-Christian person: “You’re no real pagan, but the kind of pagan who runs alongside our Christian religion.” Ouch, that hit me kinda hard. He’s not wrong, though. Neopagans who are raised within Christianity grow up with Christian mindsets, not with the set of cultural assumptions that they would have if they were raised in a pagan context. Jung, too, is operating from a primarily Christian viewpoint, despite the amount of very pagan imagery he experiences and depicts.
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The man in red congratulates Jung for figuring out more than the average person, but also criticizes him for taking scripture too literally. What follows is a dialogue in which Jung asserts that every person should experience Christian mysteries, and the man in red retorts that Jung is too solemn and sullen for his own good. “Why so serious?” He is somewhat amused by Jung’s insistence on literal-minded solemnity. As he talks, his clothes get redder: “…his garments shine like glowing iron.”
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Jung insists that he has been banished to “this place and time” (the medieval-style castle? the contemporary twentieth century? idk) by a magic spell, that he is not actually what he appears to be. I’m not really sure how to interpret that. Does that only apply to this vision of Jung as a guardsman, or to this fantasy-universe in general? Is this why Jung looks different in his art? If not, then what is he really? My intuition is telling me that it’s only applicable to this particular context.
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What follows is a philosophical dialogue in which Jung and The Red One debate the merits of Christianity, and each accuse the other of being stuck in his own little world and unable to accept any other viewpoints. Jung (or at least, his dream-self) argues with the fervor of a born-again evangelical that receiving the Christian sacrament and accepting Christ into your heart is necessary for spiritual development: “…it’s hardly a coincidence that the whole world has become Christian.” From my perspective, it doesn’t feel like Jung’s authentic views. It feels more like Jung is arguing with himself about whether Christianity is the only possible path towards enlightenment. I think that maybe he’s starting to realize that it’s not—that it is, in fact, limiting (as he said in his commentary on madness in Liber Primus). But he has to get past his conditioning first, and that means arguing with the Devil. Sort of.
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The Red One isn’t exactly the Devil. He tells Jung, “Life doesn’t require any seriousness. On the contrary, it’s better to dance through life.” That sounds like something that Dionysus would tell me.
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Jung says that he already knows how to dance, and interprets dance either as a mating call or as an act of worship, dancing for God. The Red One is taken aback by this, because now Jung is meeting him on his own turf instead of commenting on something that he can easily mock. The red of his clothes becomes “tender reddish flesh-color,” and Jung’s own green clothes suddenly burst into leaves. He tells Jung that dance can represent a secret third thing.
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The Red One finally reveals his identity: “Don’t you recognize me, brother, I am joy!”
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Joy. The Red One is joy? Honestly, I find that fascinating in and of itself. I associate Dionysus with joy, partly because that’s one of his domains and also because that is the specific thing he arrived in my life to teach me. Joy is hard, especially when you’ve been raised in an environment that prioritizes seriousness and/or suffering. Joy — and dance, which is an expression of joy — requires slackening the rules that you use to constrain your behavior, and that can be scary and vulnerable. From the perspective of Christianity, or some strains of it at any rate, joy appears devilish. So of course, Jung assumes that The Red One is the Devil. Or rather, he is not the Devil, but Jung’s own devil.
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Surely, this red one was the devil, but my devil. […] that strange joy of the world that comes unsuspected like a warm southerly wind with swelling fragrant blossoms and the ease of living. You know it from your poets, this seriousness, when they expectantly look towards what happens in the depths, sought out first of all by the devil because of their springlike joy. It picks up men like a wave and drives them forth. Whoever tastes this joy forgets himself. And there is nothing sweeter than forgetting oneself.
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There’s a lot I could say about the association between the Devil and hedonism, but I’ll save that for my separate project on the Devil (which is still in the works). For now, I’ll just say that this idea of living in the world and enjoying it for what it is, i.e. being “worldly,” isn’t anathema to mysticism. You don’t have to be an isolated monk in a desert. You can be the artist, driven by an unstoppable emotional tide, sent into dreams by figurative opiates.
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I earnestly confronted my devil and behaved with him as with a real person. This I learned in the Mysterium: to take seriously every unknown wanderer who personally inhabits the inner world, since they are real because they are effectual.
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Yeah, that’s basically how this works. That’s how I interact with all of my internal people, be they spirits or gods or characters or somewhere in between. Take them all seriously. It doesn’t matter whether they’re “real” or not.
Jung explains that one should take the Devil seriously. I interpreted this in terms of Shadow work, of course, but this isn’t Shadow work (we’ll get there). Nothing Shadow-related has been triggered here. Right now, Jung is primarily concerned with religious reconciliation.
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What I said about dancing struck him because I spoke about something that belonged in his own domain. He fails to take seriously only what concerns others because that is the peculiarity of all devils. In such a manner, I arrive at his seriousness, and with this we reach common ground where understanding is possible. The devil is convinced that dancing is neither lust nor madness, but an expression of joy, which is something proper to neither one nor the other. In this I agree with the devil. Therefore he humanizes himself before my eyes. But I turn green like a tree in spring.
If the The Red One is playing “devil’s advocate,” then in hearing him out and finding one point on which they agree, Jung is able to reconcile the argument. Or rather, he just turned it back on The Red One — now Jung is the interrogator, insisting that dance can exist for the sake of something (sex or religion) and not for its own sake (joy). When that happens, he becomes covered in leaves. I immediately thought of the Green Man, even though the Green Man is an architectural motif and not a god. I saw the leaves as a sign that Jung just became more pagan. He gets some of the Devil’s joy, and the Devil gets some of his seriousness.
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Jung addresses the ramifications of the Devil being joy, since he still insists on interpreting The Red One as the Devil. He writes that it took him a week to determine what it might mean if the Devil is joy, and decided that because joy is “the most supreme flowering and greening of life,” because it is destabilizing and full of fiery passion, it must therefore be devilish. And that because joy is fleeting, you cannot make a pact with joy, or with the Devil. If you feel too much joy, “then you arrive at pleasure and from pleasure go straight to Hell, your own particular Hell, which turns out differently for everyone.” Well, I would say that’s straight-up wrong.
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It’s ultimately Jung’s interpretation that matters here, because this is all his UPG; it feels presumptuous to say “your interpretation of your own private visions and your personal symbols is wrong,” but nonetheless, I still feel like he’s missing the point here. The Red One all but says that he is not the Devil: “What sort of superstitious fellow are you, that immediately you think of the Devil?” He shouldn’t be trying to bend over backwards to associate joy with evil, he should be realizing that joy is not associated with evil. All I can say is that this whole first section feels… well… spiritually immature in comparison to what comes later. It’s not pleasure that ultimately sends Jung to Hell. Nothing so droll as that.
The Castle in the Forest
The next night, Jung finds himself wandering in a dark forest. and comes to a small castle in the middle of a swamp. (I’m instantly reminded of Sir Gawain finding Lord Bertilak’s castle in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.) The multiline initial shows a picture of the castle:
He knocks and asks for lodging, and is brought up into a white hall that is lined with black chests and wardrobes. From there, he’s led into a study, in which an old man in a black robe is sitting at a desk. The professor tells Jung to wait to be shown to a room, but is so absentminded that he forgets why Jung is waiting, and briefly scolds him for lingering. He apologizes, and calls a servant who brings Jung to a room. The bed is uncomfortable.
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Jung admires the old man’s solitude with only his books for company, but concludes that he must have a beautiful daughter who is also living somewhere in the castle. He lambasts himself for the clicheness of this idea:
…a vulgar idea for a novel – an insipid, worn-out theme—but the romantic can be felt in every limb—a real novelistic idea—a castle in a forest—solitary night—an old man petrified in his books, protecting a costly treasure and enviously hiding it from all the world—what ridiculous thoughts come to me! Is it Hell or purgatory that I must also contrive such childish dreams on my wanderings? But I feel impotent to elevate my thoughts to something a bit stronger or more beautiful. I suppose I must allow these thoughts to come. What good would it do to push them away—they will come again—better to swallow this stale drink than keep it in my mouth. So what does this boring heroine look like? Surely blonde, pale—blue eyes—hoping longingly that every lost wanderer is her savior from the paternal prison—Oh, I know this hackneyed nonsense—I’d rather sleep—why the devil must I plague myself with such empty fantasies?
I totally relate to this feeling. I shut down so many ideas that I could potentially use because they feel too cliché. I expect brilliant originality to spring fully-formed from my brain, and that’s just not a thing that typically happens. I feel validated that Jung goes through this same thought process. His sarcasm is also hilarious: “Oh, what do you bet she’s got blond hair and blue eyes and sings ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’? Figures.” That’s exactly how I think! Nice to know that Jung is Genre Savvy—that always helps in these kinds of Otherworld-journeys. However, clichés are usually cliché for a reason, one I suspect has something to do with archetypes.
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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.
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Sure enough, she’s beautiful, otherworldly, and pure. She’s a person who hasn’t ever had to deal with the grittiness and cumbersome materiality of reality. Jung is still put-off by how fairy-tale like she is, and she says this:
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“Be reasonable, dear friend, and do not stumble now over the fabulous, since the fairy tale is the great mother of the novel, and has even more universal validity than the most-avidly read novel of your time. And you know that what has been on everyone’s lips for millennia, though repeated endlessly, still comes nearest the ultimate human truth. So do not let the fabulous come between us.”
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And thus, a million Jungian analyses of fairy tales were born!
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Clichés are cliché for a reason. There’s a lot of tropes that show up over and over again in fiction because they’re inherently resonant for audiences. The more often a particular trope shows up in stories from across cultures, the more “universal validity” it has. Certain folkloric motifs are seemingly ingrained in the human psyche: Most cultures have a variant of the Cinderella story, for example. The trope of a special (usually male) child persecuted by a powerful authority figure seems extremely common, too. And damsels in distress, kept in towers by strict parents to protect their virtue? Well, that one’s probably not Older Than Dirt, but it’s certainly popular. There has to be something inherently significant about these stories, right? Somewhere behind all the stories and symbols is the truth.
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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.”
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Now, at this point I’ve had enough bad experiences with psychoanalysis of storytelling to know that attempting to determine why these tropes are universal is… wishy-washy. I sat through The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim, which attempted to explain every fairy tale in terms of the Oedipal Complex. (Because that’s a universal experience!) I really want to believe Jung that certain kinds of stories or tropes are inherent to humanity, but I also remember what happened the last time I tried to prove that. We run up against the same problem: The same symbols can mean different things to different people, and the same exact story or structure can be interpreted in drastically different ways. Any “psychological” explanation we might come up with for what a story “means” is not going to be as universally applicable as the story itself. Luckily, though, we don’t need to do that right now. All that matters in this instance is what this story means to Jung personally. Jung’s own mind is telling him to seek divine wisdom in old stories that have been constantly told and retold.
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Jung decides that he loves the girl, because she has given him so much to ponder philosophically, and therefore she must be uncommon. She can’t be a cliché damsel in distress if she’s spouting philosophical postulates about the nature of divinity and storytelling, right? Then she hits him with a gut-punch: “I bring you greetings from Salome.” Ooooh! Then she promptly disappears, leaving red roses in her wake.
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Just as Jung couldn’t accept that Salome and Elijah were the same being, Jung also can’t accept that this girl is significant and potentially divine because she is a common trope. He has to resolve that cognitive dissonance by insisting that her philosophical nature makes her unique, and therefore worth his time. Then the kicker: “BTW, Salome says hi.” It feels like she lifted her mask for a moment there. This situation isn’t actually any different, it just has a different aesthetic. Salome, and all of the feelings of confusion and terror that she evoked in Jung, is still figuratively lurking in the background. If we’re keeping to pulp fiction tropes, then it feels like one of those moments when a strange woman that the hero is kinda into suddenly gives him a snide quip that reminds him that the villain is watching.
Jung begins his commentary on this dream with an eloquent explanation of why this work is necessary:
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The part that you take over from the devil — joy, that is — leads you into adventure. In this way you will find your lower as well as your upper limits. It is necessary for you to know your limits. If you do not know them, you run into the artificial barriers of your imagination and the expectations of your fellow men. But your life will not take kindly to being hemmed in by artificial barriers. Life wants to jump over such barriers and you will fall out with yourself. These barriers are not your real limits, but arbitrary limitations that do unnecessary violence to you. Therefore try to find your real limits. One never knows them in advance, but one sees and understands them only when one reaches them. And this happens to you only if you have balance. Without balance you transgress your limits without noticing what has happened to you. You achieve balance, however, only if you nurture your opposite. But that is hateful to you in your innermost core, because it is not heroic.
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I like this association of joy with adventure. Maybe that’s why I love fantasy stories so much. And I completely agree with his point about knowing your limits. So much of this work — Shadow work especially, but really all of it — is about knowing your limits. Fantasy allows you to explore the edges of them without fear of consequence, and that tells you a lot about yourself. If you won’t push past a certain point, why not? Is it a matter of principle? Is it a trigger? Is it a limit you really should be able to transcend, but for a psychological block caused by some external influence? I’m reminded of hard and soft limits in BDSM. Hard limits are limits that you won’t break, for any reason, while soft limits can be pushed. Knowing what those boundaries are gives you a place to play without fear of hurting yourself (or your partner). BDSM is actually a great metaphor here, because it brings you into contact with your absolute darkest desires and impulses in a way that is 1. safe, 2. fun, and 3. potentially fulfilling. But to do that, you have to get past all of that shame and other crap that stands in the way, the “artificial barriers,” and that is not easy.
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Shame does “unnecessary violence to you.” Oh, hell yes, it does. I can’t even tell you how many unnecessary barriers I have that are a result of my own preconceived notions of how the world works, or how I fear other people will react to me. I think we all have those. Find your real limits, not the ones society says you should have! How do you do that? You “nurture your opposite.” One of the things I learned about Shadows through my own experience is that “we are all our own inverses”— your Shadow is you, but with all of your values flipped, and therefore expresses the opposite of whoever you try to be in public. There’s a reason why most villains think that they’re doing the right thing — they think they’re heroes, and transgress their limits without noticing. They say you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain, but how many young heroes ask themselves what they would look like as villains? I thought myself the hero with impenetrable moral principles (still do, actually), so my Shadow appears as a stereotypical Dark Lord. Of course he does.
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That’s my example. Here’s Jung’s own example:
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My spirit reflected on everything rare and uncommon, it pried its way into unfound possibilities, toward paths that lead into the hidden, towards lights that shine in the night. And as my spirit did this, everything ordinary in me suffered harm without my noticing it, and it began to hanker after life, since I did not live it. Hence this adventure I was smitten by the romantic. The romantic is a step backward. To reach the way, one must also take a few steps backward.
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Because Jung is attached to the idea of seeming unique and high-minded, and desperately doesn’t want to be called banal or romantic, he neglects the part of him that already is ordinary or a hopeless romantic. So it suffers, and begins to take over. Shadow is whatever part of yourself you don’t want to be associated with.
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Actually, maybe it’s not Shadow that we’re dealing with here. (Shadow usually requires katabasis, and we haven’t cycled back to that yet.) Back in Part One, I went on a tangent to describe the anima/animus archetype, and how I thought it didn’t age as well as the Shadow. I said that the anima/animus was progressive for its time, but seems gender-essentialist and heteronormative by modern standards. I should have just waited to comment on it, because everything I said there is properly addressed here:
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What about masculinity? Do you know how much femininity man lacks for completeness? Do you know how much masculinity woman lacks for completeness? You seek the feminine in women and the masculine in men. And thus there are always only men and women. But where are people? You, man, should not seek the feminine in women, but seek and recognize it in yourself, as you possess it from the beginning. It pleases you, however, to play at manliness, because it travels on a well-worn track. You, woman, should not seek the masculine in men, but assume the masculine in yourself, since you possess it from the beginning. But it amuses you and is easy to play at femininity, consequently man despises you because he despises his femininity. But humankind is masculine and feminine, not just man or woman. You can hardly say of your soul what sex it is. But if you pay close attention, you will see that the masculine man has a feminine soul, and the feminine woman has a masculine soul. The more manly you are, the more remote from you is what woman really is, since the feminine in yourself is alien and contemptuous.
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You will not behave towards women per se as a man, but as a human being, that is to say, as if you were of the same sex as her. You will recall your femininity. It may seem to you then as if you were unmanly, stupid, and feminine so to speak. But you must accept the ridiculous, otherwise you will suffer distress, and there will come a time, when you are least observant, when it will suddenly round on you and make you ridiculous. It is bitter for the most masculine man to accept his femininity, since it appears ridiculous to him, powerless and tawdry.
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I KNEW IT! The anima/animus only appears to reinforce the gender binary because it was filtered through the Zeitgeist of the early twentieth century — what it really does is smash the gender binary to bits. This whole paragraph absolutely eviscerates toxic masculinity. And toxic femininity, too! It criticizes men and women both for essentially trying to turn themselves into archetypes of masculinity and femininity, and seeking those archetypes in their romantic partners, instead of just being people. People aren’t Masculine or Feminine, they’re just people, and everyone is some degree of both. If you repress that “opposite-sex” side of yourself though, and end up projecting it onto your romantic partner, then you’ll fall in love with that idealized archetype of Manhood or Womanhood instead of with the actual person. (Lookin’ at you, Robert Graves…) I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you what a disaster that is. This is the kind of crap that results in men and women’s tendency to treat each other like separate species.
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Also, it’s nice to get some confirmation on the assumption I made in my Liber Primus analysis — Astor isn’t just my Shadow, he’s actually my soul. Jung, a man, has a female soul, so I, a woman, have a male soul. (Or maybe we’re both just nonbinary, idk.) Astor is relatively effeminate, but the more stereotypically “masculine” aspects of him are the ones that disturb me the most — namely, his (my) desire for dominance and control, his (my) violent conqueror-king impulses, his (my) aggressive and predatory sexuality, and the sexist way that he relates to female characters. Astor at his most masculine is also Astor at his most terrifying. Therefore, I still have some issues around masculinity to work through. Maybe Jung feels similarly about Salome.
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Yes, it [accepting your inner femininity/masculinity] seems to you like enslavement. You are a slave of what you need in your soul. The most masculine man needs women, and he is consequently their slave. Become a woman yourself, and you will be saved from slavery to woman. You are abandoned without mercy to woman so long as you cannot fend off mockery with all your masculinity. It is good for you once to put on women’s clothes: people will laugh at you, but through becoming a woman you attain freedom from women their tyranny. This acceptance of femininity leads to completion. The same is valid for a woman who accepts her masculinity.
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Jung the Psychotherapist’s official recommendation is that men do drag to get over their fear of femininity and of appearing ridiculous. I love Jung! He was so ahead of his time!
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I must be nonbinary, because apparently I have both an animus and an anima to work through. The idea of being “enslaved” to women is a major trigger for me, so I relate to what Jung says here. To beat my “nightmare woman,” I need to become a woman myself. But I already am a woman. So, maybe defeating her means working on my external self, instead of on Astor.
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Therefore, because I rise above gendered masculinity and yet do not exceed the human, the feminine that is contemptible to me transforms itself into a meaningful being. This is the most difficult thing – to be beyond the gendered and yet remain within the human.
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You may go past the gendered for human reasons, and never for the sake of a general rule that remains the same in the most diverse situations, and therefore never has a perfect validity for each single situation.
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“To be beyond the gendered and yet remain within the human” is a great line, and sort of encompasses the point of the entire discussion around gender politics. You heard it here first, folks: Carl Jung says that gender is fake!
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I almost feel a little bit misled by everything Jung wrote about the anima/animus in Aion, and what Marie Louise von Franz wrote about it in Man and His Symbols. The way it’s made to sound, the anima and animus archetypes are like these ultimate, borderline-divine gender stereotypes. The anima is characterized by femininity as it was understood in the twentieth century, and always appears as a sexy temptress in the man’s mind, while the animus is characterized by masculinity as it was understood in the twentieth century, and appears as the woman’s father or a priest ordering her to be chaste. Ew. Men are logical and women are emotional, so the anima is the emotional part of the man and the animus is the logical part of the woman, etc. But it’s not actually like that! The anima/animus is supposed to be a way of transcending the gender binary and just being human! And the archetypes are malleable, never exactly the same for each individual person, so they aren’t this divine standard of gender stereotypes.
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There’s a little more commentary in here about the setting of the dream, and the relationship of the dreamer to the internal and external world. Everyone lives in two worlds, and neglecting either one is a bad idea. The old scholar whose castle it is believes that he can shut out the external world, but “has thrown himself away in the books and thoughts of others.” Scholars aren’t actually all that great, Jung reasons, because they beg for validation, and end up looking stupid. “They are offended if their name is not mentioned, cast down if another one says the same thing in a better way, irreconcilable if someone alters their views in the least. […] The soul demands your folly, not your wisdom.” If you believe that you have to always be right all the time, then no one is going to take you seriously.
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There’s also some commentary on the nature of Hell, and how your own personal Hell is always made up of the things you dissociate from yourself:
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Everything odious and disgusting is your own particular Hell. How can it be otherwise? Every other Hell was at least worth seeing or full of fun. But that is never Hell. Your Hell is made up of all the things that you always ejected from your sanctuary with a curse and a kick of the foot. When you step into your own Hell, never think that you come like one suffering in beauty, or as a proud pariah, but you come like a stupid and curious fool and gaze in wonder at the scraps that have fallen from your table.
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You really want to rage, but you see at the same time how well rage suits you. Your hellish absurdity stretches for miles. Good for you if you can swear! You will find that profanity is lifesaving. Thus if you go through Hell, you should not forget to give due attention to whatever crosses your path. Quietly look into everything that excites your contempt or rage; thereby you accomplish the miracle that I experienced with the pale maiden. You give soul to the soulless, and thereby it can come to something out of horrible nothingness. Thus you will redeem your other into life. Your values want to draw you away from what you presently are, to get you ahead of and beyond yourself. Your being, however, pulls you to the bottom like lead. You cannot at the same time live both, since both exclude each other. But on the way you can life both. Therefore the way redeems you. You cannot at the same time be on the mountain and in the valley, but your way leads you from mountain to valley and from valley to mountain. Much begins amusingly and leads into the dark. Hell has levels.
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If Hell seems like it’s fun to you — an eternity’s worth of sex, drugs, and rock & roll — then it’s not Hell. Hell is whatever you personally consider to be the worst thing ever, no matter how it may appear to anyone else. Hell might appear as Fluffy Cloud Heaven with a bunch of rosy-cheeked angels playing harps and singing hymns of praise to God and otherwise populated by crazy fundamentalists. You’re in the Bad Place!
The way to notice your Shadow, to notice the things you don’t want to be associated with, is to pay attention to whatever makes you angry or defensive for seemingly no reason. Whoever it is you really are at your core is never going to align perfectly with your values and your lofty ideals, because those are too high a standard for you to reach anyway. So you might as well accept all the parts of yourself that fail to meet that standard, and make peace with them.
Jeez, I’ve already written all that, and we’re still just getting started…
Nox Tertia
The multiline initial is a bright mosaic pattern.
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Next night, Jung is wandering through the snow, accompanied by a one-eyed tramp with scars on his face. Jung thinks that his companion does not look trustworthy. The man says he’s looking for work, but complains about all of Jung’s suggestions. He likes movie theaters, because movies show you everything that happens in the world and are cheap. Jung doesn’t seem to like movies: “I have to think of Hell, where there are also cinemas for those who despised this institution on earth and did not go there because everyone else found it to their taste.” Movie magic is equated to the miracles of saints: In a movie, you can hold your head under your arm, perform a dangerous stunt and not die, stand in a fire and not get burned. Jung concludes, “Oh, today’s miracles are simply somewhat less mythical than technical.”
The men arrive at a tavern, where Jung is received as a wealthy customer. He buys the poor man a proper meal, and asks how he lost his eye. The man says that he lost it in a brawl and that he spent time in prison for it, which wasn’t so bad. Jung wonders if there are prisons in Hell for those who have never been incarcerated in life, and if it’s somewhat hopeful to hit rock bottom. “Incidentally – mustn’t it be a peculiarly beautiful feeling to hit bottom in reality at least once, where there is no going down any further, but only upward beckons at best? Where for once one stands before the whole height of reality?” If you hit rock bottom, there’s nowhere to go but up.
The man has high hopes for the future, but has a coughing fit, and then dies overnight of some kind of lung condition. The man coughs up blood, and Jung’s hands become covered in it. He thinks it looks like he has murdered the man, and the moon throws his shadow onto the wall. Jung contemplates death, and considers that the man’s life was generally meaningless and left no impact, but that this is true of most people. “This is a final truth and no riddle. What delusion could make us believe in riddles?”
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Traveling with this destitute person gives Jung a bit of perspective, so he can see the depths against the heights. This chapter is notable in that it doesn’t really relate directly to anything else that happens in Liber Secundus. It’s a bit isolated from the “plot,” so to speak. But it’s interesting, because of this commentary on class and privilege:
If I am always on the heights, I wear them out and the best becomes atrocious to me.
But because I do not want to have it, my best becomes a horror to me. Because of that I myself become a horror, a horror to myself and to others, and a bad spirit of torment [i.e. a tyrant]. Be respectful and know that your best has become a horror, and with that you save yourself and others from useless torment. A man who can no longer climb down from his heights is sick, and he brings himself and others to torment. If you have reached your depths, then you see your height light up brightly over you, worthy of desire and far-off, as if unreachable, since secretly you would prefer not to reach it since it seems unattainable to you.
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[…]
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At your low point you are no longer distinct from your fellow beings. You are not ashamed and do not regret it, since insofar as you live the life of your fellow beings and descend to their lowliness, you also climb into the holy stream of common life, where you are no longer an individual on a high mountain, but a fish among fish, a frog among frogs.
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Your heights are your own mountain, which belongs to you and you alone. There you are individual and live your very own life. If you live your own life, you do not live in the common life, which is always continuing and never-ending, the life of history and the inalienable and ever-present burdens and products of the human race. There you life the endlessness of being, but not the becoming. Becoming belongs to the heights and is full of torment. How can you become if you never are? Therefore you need your bottommost, since there you are. But therefore you also need your heights, since there you become.
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[…] we do not love the condition of our being brought low, although or rather precisely because only there do we attain clear knowledge of ourselves.
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If you’re a privileged person, then you don’t have a realistic perspective of “the heights” vs. “the depths.” The entire idea of “first world problems” is based on that — when you’ve never been in the depths, you won’t recognize the best as the best, and you’ll start to project those unrealized depths outward, tyrannically oppressing everyone else around you. If you’re in the depths, then you have a realistic understanding of where you stand in relation to other people. Being on the heights is great because then you can pursue life as an individual and not as a member of the collective, but you can’t really “become” anything because you are not challenged and don’t have any room for growth. On the other hand, if you’re at rock bottom, you can’t really sustain any delusions about yourself. You can’t project that you are the greatest or smartest or most worthy person in the world, because the stark reality of your existence is before you. There is nothing but you and yourself. And you have something to strive for; the striving will change you into a better person. The heights are best as a place to end up rather than as a place to start from.
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Maybe the world will be a lot better if everyone had this kind of perspective.
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What follows is an extended metaphor for what was just described, but it’s so beautiful, I have to share it:
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To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth. In the depths, being is not an unconditional persistence but an endlessly slow growth. You think you are standing still like swamp water, but slowly you flow into the sea that covers the earth’s greatest deeps, and is so vast that firm land seems only an island imbedded in the womb of the immeasurable sea.
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As a drop in the ocean you take part in the current, ebb and flow. You swell slowly on the land and slowly sink back again in interminably slow breaths. You wander vast distances in blurred currents and wash up on strange shores, not knowing how you got there. You mount the billows of huge storms and are swept back again into the depths. And you do not know how this happens to you. You had thought that your movement came from you and that it needed your decisions and efforts, so that you could get going and make progress. But with every conceivable effort you would never have achieved that movement and reached those areas to which the sea and the great wind of the world brought you.
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From endless blue plains you sink into black depths; luminous fish draw you, marvelous branches twine around you from above. You slip through columns and twisting, wavering, dark-leaved plants, and the sea takes you up again in bright green water to white, sandy coasts, and a wave foams you ashore and swallows you back again to new regions, to twisting plants, to slowly creeping slimy polyps, and to green water and white sand and breaking surf.
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But from far off your heights shine to you above the sea in a golden light, like the moon emerging from the tide, and you become aware of yourself from afar. And longing seizes you and the will for your own movement. You want to cross over from being to becoming, since you have recognized the breath of the sea, and its flowing, that leads you here and there without your ever adhering; you have also recognized its surge that bears you to alien shores and carries you back, and gargles you up and down.
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You saw that it was the life of the whole and the death of each individual. You felt yourself entwined in the collective death, from death to the earth’s deepest place, form death in your own strangely breathing depths. Oh – you long to be beyond; despair and mortal fear seize you in this death that breaths slowly and streams back and forth eternally. All this light and dark, warm, tepid, and cold water, all these wavy, swaying, twisting plantlike animals and bestial plants, all these nightly wonders become a horror to you, and you long for the sun, for light dry air, for firm stones, for a fixed place and straight lines, for the motionless and firmly held, for rules and preconceived purpose, for singleness and your own intent.
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[…]
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One who becomes grows aware of life, whereas one who simply exists never will, since he is in the midst of life. He needs the heights and singleness to become aware of life. But in life he becomes aware of death. And it is good that you become aware of collective death, since then you know why your singleness and your heights are good. Your heights are like the moon that luminously wanders alone and through the night looks eternally clear. […]
From there [the moon] you look out, cold, motionless, and radiating. With otherworldly silvery light and green twilights, you pour out into the distant horror. You see it but your gaze is clear and cold. Your hands are red from living blood, but the moonlight of your gaze is motionless. It is the life blood of your brother, yes, it is your own blood, but your gaze remains luminous and embraces the entire horror and the earth’s round. Your gaze rests on silvery seas, on snowy peaks, on blue valleys, and you do not hear the groaning and howling of the human animal.
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The sea is really meant to be the collective ebb and flow of all the lives of common people, their individual lives moving together like water droplets, as opposed to the cold and detached perspective of the heights. That detached perspective gives you the distance needed to see life in its totality, in all its beauty and horror; to see the forest instead of the trees (or the ocean instead of the water, rather). I think that the sea also represents prima materia (primordial matter), and the unconscious mind. It is a symbol of ego death, and the knowledge that all beings are as inseparable from each other as individual drops of water. Coming onto land represents incarnation, becoming an individual and becoming aware of your ego. But of course, being aware of life means you have to contend with death.
The Anchorite
The multiline initial is surrounded by patterns that look like carvings found on a desert temple. I can’t really explain why they’re evocative of that, but that’s what I think of, and it’s probably intentional.
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Jung is back in the desert. He follows footprints to a small hut made of reeds and mud, where an emaciated old man is meditating with a parchment book on his lap. Jung interprets him as an anchorite in the Libyan desert, and the book as “a Greek gospel.”
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The anchorite (called Ammonius in subsequent chapters – this is either an intentional or a synchronistic reference to the Neoplatonic leanings of some of Jung’s ideas; in particular, the idea the one must turn inward, or “go into the desert” in Jung’s language, to spiritually advance) says that he has lived in the desert for ten years, and that time passes quickly. Jung asks how time can possibly pass quickly for someone whose life is so monotonous. Ammonius calls him childish for asking, and mistakes Jung for a pagan. He explains that even if you read the same book over and over again, you will notice new things each time, and it will remain interesting. Jung says he has a hard time grasping this, and Ammonius says, “How do you read this holy book? Do you really only see one and the same meaning in it? Where do you come from? You are truly a pagan.” So, we’re once again confronted with the tension between Christianity and paganism. I think it’s really interesting that that’s such a running theme here — a lot of Jung’s thinking is pagan, but he doesn’t seem to fully realize it.
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Jung asks how to read the book properly, and Ammonius says that “it’s easier to explain colors to a blind person.” However, he tries his best at explaining:
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“You must know one thing above all: a succession of words does not have only one meaning. But men strive to assign only a single meaning to the sequence of words, in order to have an unambiguous language. This striving is worldly and constricted, and belongs to the deepest layers of the divine creative plan. On the higher levels of insight into divine thoughts, you recognize that the sequence of words has more than one valid meaning. Increasingly we try to grasp a few more meanings.”
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I can’t help but wonder if Jung is intentionally referencing Neoplatonism here, or if his dreams are just this saturated with Neoplatonism. Everything Ammonius says here is summed up in one sentence from Origen, an early Neoplatonist Christian philosopher: “The Scriptures were written by the Spirit of God, and have meanings, not as they appear at the first sight, but also others, which escape the notice of most.” I bet that's how I'll be reading this book in the future.
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This explanation is also right in line with my insight that gods think with more nuance than humans typically do, and see multiple possible meanings and interpretations of all things, even contradictory ones. It seems to me as though most Christians today read “like pagans,” since they argue incessantly over what the correct interpretation of the Bible is, to their detriment and to everyone else’s detriment. Meanwhile, pagans are typically in the opposite boat of allowing there to be more than one correct interpretation of any given myth or text (though certainly not all think like this.) I’m wondering now what new things I’ll get out of The Red Book whenever I reread it.
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Regarding Neoplatonism, Ammonius explains how he was once a pagan, and a teacher at the Academy of Alexandria (further emphasizing that tension between Christianity and paganism). He’s probably supposed to be Ammonius Saccus, who was one of Origen’s tutors. He tells Jung that he tutored people from all over the Roman empire, Gaul, and Britain in matters related to Greek philosophy, but that he placed too much emphasis on words. He idolized words too much, as if words were gods in and of themselves.
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Most of the rest of the dialogue contemplates the meaning and context of the Platonic concept of Logos, within a Christian framework. Jung identifies another alchemical inversion:
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Until now it always seemed to me as if it were exactly that which was meaningful in John, namely that the son of man is LOGOS, in that he thus elevates the lower to the higher spirit, to the world of the LOGOS. But you lead me to see the matter conversely, namely that John brings the meaning of LOGOS down to earth.
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Yes! The elevating of the lower to the higher spirit is transmutation, but a big part of that is also bringing the divine back down to earth. That’s my opinion, anyway. So many mystical systems and philosophies, especially Neoplatonism, place a lot of emphasis on ascending from the prison of the flesh (think Allegory of the Cave) and rejoining with God, but an equally important part of that process is bringing God back down to earth. We’re all still alive and incarnated, after all.
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Ammonius says,
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“I’ve spent many years alone with the process of unlearning. Have you ever unlearned anything? — Well, then you should know how long it takes. And I was a successful teacher. As you know, for such people to unlearn is difficult or even impossible.”
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Unlearning things is just as important a skill as learning things. When I first started studying occultism, I absorbed a lot of information about ancient paganism and magic that was incorrect, and have had to spent years unlearning it. It was a difficult process, not just to admit that you’re wrong but also to be able to identify and correct the misinformation. Unlearning humbles you. It can provoke resentment, though, if you feel like you’ve been misled. Being a teacher makes it harder because you’re supposed to be a person who Knows Stuff, so admitting that you don’t in fact know what you’re talking about (seemingly) undermines your credentials and skills, if not your very identity.
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Ammonius stays in the desert because it is a simple, yet beautiful, environment where he can see everything that is distant. Simple surroundings make it easier to think, and if you can see all around you, it’s easier to comprehend the totality of things:
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In the desert the solitary is relieved of care and therefore turns his whole life to the sprouting garden of his soul, which can flourish only under a hot sun. In his garden the delicious red fruit grows that bears swelling sweetness under a tight skin.
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You think that the solitary is poor. You do not see that he strolls under laden fruit trees and that his hand touches grain a hundredfold. Under dark leaves the overfull reddish blossoms swell toward him from abundant buds, and the fruit almost bursts with thronging juices. Fragrant resins drip from his trees and under his feet thrusting seed breaks open.
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If the sun sinks onto the plane of the sea like an exhausted bird, the solitary envelops himself and holds his breath. He does not move and is pure expectancy until the miracle of the renewal of light rises in the East.
This contrasts what Jung was saying about his own desert back in Liber Primus — his inner world was a desert because he did not focus on it. If your outer world is a desert, then you can cultivate the garden of your inner world. The anchorite’s wealth and abundance are all in his inner world, and in his appreciation for the very simple things that are around him. The sunrise is something that happens every day, but if it is the most beautiful thing you see, it seems like a miracle.
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He gives you a small insignificant fruit, which has just fallen at his feet. It appears worthless to you, but if you consider it, you will see that this fruit tastes like a sun which you could not have dreamt of. It gives off a perfume which confuses your senses and makes you dream of rose gardens and sweet wine and whispering palm trees. And you hold this one fruit in your hands dreaming, and you would like the tree in which it grows, the garden in which the tree stands, and the sun which brought forth this garden.
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And you yourself want to be that solitary who strolls with the sun in his garden, his gaze resting on pendant flowers and his hand brushing a hundred-fold of grain and his breath drinking the perfume of a thousand roses.
Dull from the sun and drunk from fermenting wines, you lie down in ancient graves, whose walls resound with many voices and many colors of a thousand solar years.
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When you grow, then you see everything living again as it was. And when you sleep, you rest, like everything that was, and your dreams echo softly again from distant temple chants.
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You sleep down through the thousand solar years, and you wake up through the thousand solar years, and your dreams full of ancient lore adorn the walls of your bedchamber.
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You also see yourself in the totality.
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This is just beautiful writing. It’s so vivid that I can practically taste and smell it. How wonderful it is, to feel apart of everything! This idea that the Garden of Eden is internal, rather than external, and that it is a state of awareness and gratitude is such a lovely one. I also love the image of hibernating for centuries, surrounded by secret magical lore generated by your own dreams. “You see yourself in the totality” implies “As above, so below,” or maybe Ed’s “One is All and All is One” speech from Fullmetal Alchemist. You see yourself reflected in the universe, and the universe exists within you.
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Jung expresses how frustrating it is to perceive the totality but not quite be apart of it:
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You sit and lean against the wall, and look at the beautiful, riddlesome totality. The Summa lies before you like a book, and an unspeakable greed seizes you to devour it. Consequently you lean back and stiffen and sit for a long time. You are completely incapable of grasping it. Here and there a light flickers, here and there a fruit falls from high trees which you can grasp, here and there your foot strikes gold. But what is it, if you compare it with the totality, which lies spread out tangibly close to you? You stretch out your hand, but it remains hanging in invisible webs. You want to see it exactly as it is but something cloudy and opaque pushes itself exactly in between. You would like to tear a piece out of it; it is smooth and impenetrable like polished steel. So you sink back against the wall, and when you have crawled through all the glowing hot crucibles of the Hell of doubt, you sit once more and lean back, and look at the wonder of the Summa that lies spread out before you. Here and there a light flickers, here and there a fruit falls. For you it is all too little. But you begin to be satisfied with yourself, and you pay no attention to the years passing away. What are years? What is hurrying time to him that sits under a tree? Your time passes like a breath of air and you wait for the next light, the next fruit.
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This is putting us in the shoes of the anchorite, or perhaps Jung has become the anchorite. The anchorite can sit alone in the desert because he experiences the totality of beauty and of life, and can be satisfied with simply perceiving it. Seeing the Summa, one feels such an indescribable sense of yearning that it breaks you. You want desperately to claim it for yourself or dissolve into it, but you can’t, so you learn to be satisfied with the little pieces of it that break off naturally. You are both within and without it.
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I remember that yearning. I felt it mainly as a child, when I was still getting used to being incarnated in a body and was very, very frustrated that I couldn’t reach back through the veil and find the Otherworld again. It’s often said that children are more perceptive than adults and are more able to perceive magic and the supernatural. Maybe that was still true of me, but from my perspective, I felt this overwhelming sense of lack, of loss. There was magic, but it’s gone. What happened to it? Where did it go? Why can’t I access it anymore? Why can’t I fly anymore? Why can’t I find my way back? As young as six, I was terrified that I would lose my capacity to believe in magic as I grew up, because adults didn’t believe, and are barred from Narnia and Neverland. I really thought that I had to stumble into the Otherworld before I grew up, or I would lose my chance forever. Now look at me! The yearning is still there, but I’ve adapted to living on this side of the veil and bringing whatever’s up there down to here. I also know a lot more about magic. I can access the Otherworld more-or-less at will, but I still remember how it felt to be able to see it there, but to be unable to reach it.
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Neoplatonism teaches that the flesh is a prison, and that it’s our goal to transcend it and reunite with Nous, with the Great Divine. Pretty sure Hinduism and Buddhism teach versions of that, too. It’s a common mystical idea. Well, I don’t believe my flesh is a prison, even if I’m physically uncomfortable in it. I’m definitely supposed to be here, and I’m happy to be here. My task is to engage with the world, to bring it all back down, which is why I worship a god of pleasure instead of being an anchorite. But man, it is not easy.
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…life flows not only down a finite path but also an infinite one. But the unbounded makes you anxious since the unbounded is fearful and your humanity rebels against it. Consequently you seek limits and restraints so that you do not lose yourself, tumbling into infinity. Restraint becomes imperative for you. You cry out for the word which has one meaning and no other, so that you can escape boundless ambiguity. The word becomes your God, since it protects you from the countless possibilities of interpretation. The word is your protective magic against the daimons of the unending, which tear at your soul and want to scatter you to the winds.
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And this is why people create frameworks. The unstructured, the infinite, the ambiguous is too much for the human mind to bear. To comprehend it properly requires some amount of insanity, because the conscious mind will inevitably try to put up these barriers to make it easier to understand and explain. Then the framework ends up becoming God, becoming more important that the infinite that it is intended to represent. You end up worshipping a symbol, instead of what the symbol means. It’s an apotropaic charm against the absurd.
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He who breaks the wall of words overthrows God and defiles temples. The solitary is a murderer. He murders the people, because he thus thinks and thereby breaks down ancient sacred walls. He calls up the daimons of the boundless. […] Man remains the same, even if you create a new model of God for him. He remains an imitator. What was word, shall become man. The word created the world and came before the world. It lit up like a light in the darkness and the darkness did not comprehend it. And thus the word should become what the darkness can comprehend, since what is the light if the darkness does not comprehend it? But your darkness should grasp the light.
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This goes back to the Murder of the Hero and the conception of the new God from Liber Primus. It’s another way of talking about that same thing. The new God, the new framework, must express more of the Infinite. To do that, it must make room for the darkness. Whoever ends up paving the way for the new framework must destroy the old framework, which amounts to “murder” and blasphemy from the perspective of the people who worship the framework. Dissolution is a difficult, painful process, and sometimes a violent one. And if you’ve been taught not to worship the darkness, then any intrusion of the darkness would seem like an act of evil, even thought it’s actually necessary.
The God of words is cold and dead and shines from afar like the moon, mysteriously and inaccessibly. Let the word return to its creator, to man, and thus the word will be heightened in man. Man should be light, limits, measure. The darkness does not comprehend the word, but rather man; indeed, it seizes him, since he himself is a piece of darkness. Not from the word down to man, but from the word up to man: that is what the darkness comprehends. The darkness is your mother; she behooves reverence, since the mother is dangerous. She has power over you, since she gave birth to you. Honor the darkness as the light, and you will illume your darkness.
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It’s ballsy of Jung to say straight-up that the Word (Logos) comes from man and not God, that it is man’s attempt to define and not God’s attempt at creation. That’s an outright rejection of Neoplatonism. Light is limitation because it defines what is visible; darkness is the Infinite, and the Infinite includes everything.
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If you comprehend the darkness, it seizes you. It comes over you like the night with black shadows and countless shimmering stars. Silence and peace come over you if you begin to comprehend the darkness. Only he who does not comprehend the darkness fears the night. Through comprehending the dark, the nocturnal, the abyssal in you, you become utterly simple. And you prepare to sleep through the millennia like everyone else, and you sleep down into the womb of the millennia, and your walls resound with ancient temple chants. Since the simple is what always was. Peace and blue night spread over you while you dream the grave of the millennia.
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Oh Astor, how I love thee…
Dies II
The illuminated initial for this chapter is a beautiful “I” shaped like a tree, entwined with leaves. On either side are scarab beetles. On the left, a big blue scarab beetle faces a golden, winged sun with its wings raised. There is another blue scarab beetle in the center of the sun. Between the beetle and the rising sun is a cross entwined with a serpent. On the other side, the beetle is smaller and faces down at a setting sun. The golden winged sun above it has its wings down, and an equal-armed cross instead of a beetle. The cross in between is upside-down, with the serpent facing down. The background appears to be a desert landscape with a sunburst on top, decorated with stylized glyphs that look a little like cave paintings. The ones on the bottom depict men, swords, and beasts.
Obviously, we’ve got the rising and setting sun, being pushed by the Egyptian god Khepri, the blue scarab beetle. Between them is the Axis Mundi, the world tree. The design in the desert sand resembles cave paintings, or maybe a Navajo sand painting. (I’m not sure to what degree Jung was familiar with Navajo sand paintings, but I’ve heard Joseph Campbell talk about them in The Power of Myth. A lot of Jung’s “mandala” designs seem similar to them.) The snake on the cross is an alchemical symbol (the same one on Ed’s jacket in Fullmetal Alchemist), associated with Nicholas Flamel, which represents the fixation of the volatile (the “coagula” part of solve et coagula). There’s something very primordial about this image.
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Jung describes a dream of four white horses with golden wings, who pull the chariot of Helios. One of the horses addresses him, “Hail him who is in darkness since the day is over him.” Jung considers whether he should pray to the sun. Despite the insights of the last chapter, Jung doesn’t understand how Ammonius can tolerate living in the desert. He sees a scarab pushing a ball. He prays to the scarab: “Dear scarab, my father, I honor you, blessed be your work — in eternity —amen.” I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how very pagan this is. Then he contemplates the beauty and antiquity of the desert, and the ancient aquatic animals that used to live where the desert is now, and he prays to the desert: “O mother stone, I love you. I lie snuggled up against your warm body, your late child. Blessed be you, ancient mother. / Yours is my heart and all glory and power — Amen.” Jung admonishes himself for his animism, and blames the desert.
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Jung speaks to Ammonius, who tells him not to admonish himself for praying to the sun, the beetle, and the earth. “If you do find a word, your soul has nevertheless found inexpressible words to greet the break of day.” Ammonius relates how he was converted to Christianity by an old friend. The friend described Jesus, and Ammonius thought that he was talking about Osiris, Horus, or Set. But the idea of a man who was also God brought him around to Christianity. He considers Egyptian religion an “inadequate” form of Christianity, but also accepts that Christianity itself is an “inadequate” form of what is to come. Ammonius relates another story of a slave with no formal education who still understood all the base spiritual concepts that underly both paganism and Christianity, because all religions ultimately amount to the same thing: “It’s erroneous to believe that religions differ in their innermost essence. Strictly speaking, it’s always one and the same religion. Every subsequent form of religion is the meaning of the antecedent.” Very interesting. I mostly agree, except that I don’t think religions progress quite so linearly, or that there’s a singular ultimate destination. We’re all just evolving our own frameworks.
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Ammonius considers that he’d maybe have better luck with his quest to discover the future meaning of Christianity if he was around other people, but dismisses this as a temptation of Satan. He insists that he loves the desert:
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Here you can see the countenance of the sun every day, you are alone, you can see glorious Helios—no, that is pagan—what’s wrong with me? I’m confused—you are Satan—I recognize you—give way, adversary!
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This is so interesting to me. The calm and quiet anchorite, the wise spiritual leader, falls apart over the unresolved tension between Christianity and paganism. He commits a Freudian slip (Jungian slip?) that reveals that he hasn’t quite given up paganism. Then he accuses Jung himself of being Satan, and tries to attack him. Definitely not a straightforward spiritual guru!
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The fact that this is all coming out of Jung’s head suggests that he was also a pagan underneath it all, a pagan who adopted Christian teachings because that’s the context in which he was raised, and what else was he going to do? His own mind is reintroducing him to paganism, and the advantages of it, but he rejects them as the work of Satan because it causes the destruction of his former paradigm, and Christianity teaches that any challenge to it must be Devilish. The first time, Jung himself rejects the Devil as the guardsman in green, but this time, another character experiences the same cognitive dissonance and accuses Jung himself of being the Devil. This is one of those “the call is coming from inside the house” moments.
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I’m speculating, here. I don’t actually know what Jung’s relationship was to his own religious beliefs, and I’m not going to go through the effort of trying to create a kind of religious profile of him based on his history and this writing. Looking at it at face value, though, that’s what I see. (I’m also biased.)
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He who sleeps in the grave of the millennia dreams a wonderful dream. He dreams a primordially ancient dream. He dreams of the rising sun.
If you sleep this sleep and dream this dream in this time of the world, you will know that the sun will also rise at this time. For the moment we are still in the dark, but the day is upon us.
He who comprehends the darkness in himself, to him the light is near. He who climbs down into his darkness reaches the staircase of the working light, fire-maned Helios.
His chariot ascends with four white horses, his back bears no cross, and his side no wound, but he is safe and his head blazes in the fire.
Nor is he a man of mockery, but of splendor and unquestionable force.
I do not know what I speak, I speak in a dream. Support me for I stagger, drunk with fire. I drank fire in this night, since I climbed down through the centuries and plunged into the sun far at the bottom. And I rose up drunk from the sun, with a burning countenance and my head is ablaze.
Give me your hand, a human hand, so that you can hold me to the earth with it, for whirling veins of fire swoop me up, and exultant longing tears me towards the zenith.​
This whole section reminds me of the emphasis on the rising sun in Hogfather. In that story as well, the rising sun is presented as one of the most primordial of all human symbols. The protagonist, Susan, has to save Discworld’s equivalent of Santa Claus from nonexistence, or else the sun will not rise — the earth will turn to face a ball of flaming gas that produces light through thermonuclear fusion, but the Sun will not rise. So many myths do not treat the rising of the sun as an inevitability; one must survive the night, not just you, but also the gods. There’s always a chance that Apophis might destroy the solar barge and consume Ra. There’s always a chance that Huitzilopochtli will be killed by his many siblings, the moon and stars, unless he’s fed enough human sacrifices. There’s always a chance that Skoll or Hati will catch up to Sol and devour her. The rising of the sun is not guaranteed, so it is a miracle when it happens. Every time.
There’s also an implied condemnation of Christianity here — behold the glory of Helios, who is not wounded and bears no burden, but is bright and magnificent and everything a god should be.
​
What do you do once Shadow work is over? You have to ascend out of the Underworld, and you do that by literally becoming the rising Sun. Once you’ve become the Sun, you are fully bright and magnificent, the polar opposite of the monstrous thing that is the subject of scorn. This is something I haven’t quite figured out how to do yet, and I really appreciate Jung’s advice here. Apollo told me that I should carry the sun within me, that it would heal my damaged solar plexus and be a personal power core, a constant source of energy burning in my gut. I don’t know how to do that.
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Like Zeus, I should swallow Phanes, and thus become the Demiurge.
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Jung is still uncomfortable with the notion of praying to the sun.
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Why should I pray to it? I drink the sun within me, so why should I pray to it? But the desert, the desert in me demands prayers, since the desert wants to satisfy itself with what is alive. I want to beg God for it, the sun, or one of the other immortals.
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Jung also has discovered animism, and acknowledged that all things are secretly alive, with their own agendas. Magical living things are all around and within you, and you are part of them all:
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But if you watch closely, you will see what you have never seen before, namely that things live their life, and that they live off you: the rivers bear your life to the valley, one stone falls upon another with your force, plants and animals also grow through you and they are the cause of your death. A leaf dancing in the wind dances with you; the irrational animal guesses your thought and represents you. The whole earth sucks its life from you and everything reflects you again.
Once again, I’m reminded of Edward Elric’s “One is All and All is One” speech. Life lives off of other life, so everything is connected, not just through the food chain but through every aspect of existence. Everything somehow involves you, and you affect everything around you. Everything is one unified system, wrapped up in a “great unseen flow.”
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Jung praised the anchorite for his solitude and gratitude in the last chapter, but in this chapter, he realized that the anchorite ultimately fails in his task because he can’t fully connect to the sun. Having that internal fire, that self-sustaining power core of nuclear fusion in your belly, is the source of personal power.
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You would like to hear of him, the radiating savior, who as a son of the sun cut through the webs of earth, who sundered the magic threads and released those in bondage, who owned himself and was no one’s servant, who sucked no one dry, and whose treasure no one exhausted.
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You would like to hear of him who was not darkened by the shadow of earth, but illuminated it, who saw the thoughts of all, and whose thoughts no one guessed, who possessed in himself the meaning of all things, and whose meaning no thing could express.
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If you have that power core, then you don’t feel drained and you also don’t drain anyone else. You have all the knowledge and energy you need within you. You can vanquish every subtle thing and penetrate every solid thing. You have infinite awareness and understanding. That’s what a god has.
​
The anchorite becomes the desert, the stone, the cave, the earth, all barren and empty. “[he] remained a son of the earth who sucked a book dry and was sucked empty by the desert. He was desire and not splendor, completely earth and not sun.” The Son of God shines with his own light, fulfilling and sustaining himself instead of getting knowledge or power from any other source. You shouldn’t need a book or a priest to tell you what to do. The anchorite, for all his cleverness, isn’t actually any different or any more knowledgeable than any other human. He can’t think like a god. As usual, the answer is introspection: “If he would have drunk of himself, he would have drunk fire.” You only find the meaning of things if you find meaning in yourself first, and let those meanings evolve organically. If you search for meaning in the external world, whether it’s from scripture or from the desert or philosophy or religion or whatever else, you’ll only increase your feeling of emptiness.
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Why does the anchorite accuse Jung of being Satan? Because Jung has done Shadow work:
I had to appear to him as the devil, since I had accepted my darkness. I ate the earth and I drank the sun, and I became a greening tree that stands alone and grows.
Death
The multiline initial depicts an ugly black centipede with bulging, froglike eyes and sharp teeth, rising up from the red Sun of the Depths. Around the outside are various stylized figures: men, lizards, a man in the center of a winged sun, a caterpillar with a man in its belly, a man reclining on… maybe a solar barge? Men within men. A snakelike thing with a spiky head arranged like a double helix?
In the next dream, Jung is in the far north, and everything is misty and murky and dank. He follows the water flowing downward:
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I follow my brother, the sea. It flows softly and almost imperceptibly, and yet we continually approach the supreme embrace, entering the womb of the source.
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This reminds me of the gorgeous description of the sea from back in chapter 3. The sea is prima materia, or something like it. Calling it “my brother” gives the sea an animistic quality. It’s alive, perhaps a god. This sense of kinship with everything in the natural world further reinforces the “one is all and all is one” theme.
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Jung finds Death standing on the last dune, staring out at the infinite horizon. He wears a black coat, and appears gaunt. Jung identifies death as coldness — stones deep in the earth, snow on mountain peaks, the void of space. Death tells Jung that the living never come to stand with him at the edge of the world. He directs Jung’s gaze out at the horizon, where he sees that what appear to be gray clouds are actually a mass of people, animals, and plants, everything that has ever lived and died. They flow like a stream, whirling like dry leaves as the souls do in the Fields of Asphodel. The sea breaks against them, and they dissolve into the air. The sea glows red, making it look like blood, and the scarlet Sun of the Depths sinks into the sea. Jung is left alone in the dark and cold infinite.
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And thus I went out in that night (it was the second night of the year 1914), and anxious expectation filled me. I went out to embrace the future. The path was wide and what was to come was awful. It was the enormous dying, a sea of blood. From it the new sun arose, awful and a reversal of that which we call day. We have seized the darkness and its sun will shine above us, bloody and burning like a great downfall.
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When I comprehend my darkness, a truly magnificent night came over me and my dream plunged me into the depths of the millennia, and from it my phoenix ascended.
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I assume this is another premonition related to the World Wars, and the great unleashing of the Shadow that they entail. Comprehending one’s own darkness, through Shadow work, brings you into contact with the dark realities of death and eternity, and from that spiritual death you rise like a phoenix as a better version of yourself.
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Jung’s commentary offers a more direct interpretation of Shadow work in relation to WWI:
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I saw which vices the virtues of this time changed into, how your mildness became hard, your goodness became brutality, your love became hate, and your understanding became madness. Why did you want to comprehend the darkness! But you had to or else it would have seized you. Happy the man who anticipates this grasp.
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Did you ever think of the evil in you? Oh, you spoke of it, you mentioned it, and you confessed it smilingly, as a generally human vice, or a recurring misunderstanding. But did you know what evil is, and that it stands right behind your virtues, that it is also your virtues themselves, as their inevitable substances? You locked Satan in the abyss for a millennium, and when the millennium had passed, you laughed at him, since he had become a children’s fairy tale. But if the dreadful great one raises his head, the world winces. The most extreme coldness draws near.
[…]
You do not know which devils are greater, your vices, or your virtues. But of one thing you are certain, that virtues and vices are brothers.
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I’m not exactly sure when Jung is writing this. He had the dream itself in 1914, before the World Wars had happened, but maybe he wrote this sometime during or after. I don’t know. However, he clearly already hit upon the question that everyone would be asking themselves soon after: What separates a normal person from a Nazi? The answer is, not much. Everyone has the potential for acts of evil. Not just sin, but true atrocity.
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Identifying virtues as “devils” is interesting, and pointed. Virtue doesn’t extinguish vice, and pretending it does is actually dangerous. Virtue and vice exist in tandem with each other, and even inform each other, just as your body casts a shadow. Fail to acknowledge the vices, and your virtues will transmute into them; acknowledge them, and the opposite will happen.
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It occurs to me that perhaps Armageddon wouldn’t even happen if Satan was only let out to play in a safe enclosure every once in a while.
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We need the coldness of death to see clearly. […] What stays in balance is correct, what disturbs balance is incorrect. But if balance has been attained, then that which preserves it is incorrect and that which disturbs it is correct. Balance is at once life and death. For the completion of life a balance with death is fitting. If I accept death, then my tree greens, since dying increases life. If I plunge into death encompassing the world, then my buds break open. How much our life needs death!
Joy at the smallest things comes to you only when you have accepted death.
[…]
To be, and to enjoy your being, you need death, and limitation enables you to fulfill your being.
​
Not much to say here. It’s basically old news to me at this point. Death keeps everything in balance, it allows old life to decay and nourish new life, and knowing that your time is limited also motivates you to do something with the time you have. It puts things into perspective. This is why immortality is a state of stagnation, and why so many characters in fiction cannot have immortal lives – the inability to die destroys the will to live, and one cannot live fully without death (Except Hob Gadling, who lives forever not because he fears death but because he loves life, even when it’s at its worst.)
But in the shadow world the other rises, the red sun.
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Official mention of the Shadow Realm in The Red Book!
The Remains of Earlier Temples
Next to the multiline initial is a picture of a blue circle that looks kind of like a mosaic, with two smaller ovals on the inside that are both red. In one is a red man, and in the other is a green man, both with peaked hats. It looks almost like a cell, or a mutagen from The Witcher III. The two men represent the characters who will reappear in this chapter.
Now Jung is in a meadow, surrounded by flowers and hills, with a distant wood. Jung meets two people on the road, a monk and a tall man in red. The man in red is The Red One, much older now, but still with a “childish gait.” In the first dream in which he appeared, he said “I too live and don’t let my hair turn white over it,” but his hair is now white. The monk is Ammonius. Jung greets them, but both of them recoil and cross themselves. Jung realizes that he is covered in leaves, as he was in the first “Red One” dream. Ammonius again identifies Jung as Satan, and The Red One calls him “pagan riffraff.” They both accuse him of being devilish and of having only pretended to be Christian, but then they admonish each other and look embarrassed before him. Jung is dumbfounded and laughs.
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Both The Red One and Ammonius accuse Jung of having been an insincere Christian, having been pagan underneath all along, and both blame him for their respective downfalls. Ammonius describes how he became involved in “voluptuous” things like drinking wine and lusting after women and having an “insatiable greed” to see the world, all which distracted him from the scriptures, and he blames Jung for this. He met The Red One in Naples, which shocked him out of his hedonism and convinced him to return to the monastery. Ammonius says,
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“You seduced me with your accursed curiosity, desirously stretching my hand after the divine mysteries, since you made me conscious at that time that I really knew nothing about them. Your remark that I probably needed the closeness of men to arrive at the higher mysteries stunned me like infernal poison.”
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See, I would assume that seeking after divine mysteries is a good thing, not a sin. It is, in fact, what one is supposed to do. If you feel like embracing the mysteries is poison, then you’re doing it wrong. And here, we see Christianity’s weird relationship with mysticism… you’re supposed to receive insight from God, but only if it matches the established doctrine. And since when have mystical experiences ever been conventional?
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The Red One also experienced an inversion. After having spoken to Jung, he lost his joy. He became serious, and converted to Christianity. He introduced dancing to Christianity, making dance serious instead of carefree, and became an Abbot. (He originally mocked Jung for “an ethical air and a simplicity that smacks of stale bread and water,” but has now adopted exactly that.) Everyone started dancing before God, which was “terrible,” and The Red One fled to be in solitude. But he danced every day, against his will, until he collapsed from exhaustion. He now feels an aversion towards Christianity, but still accuses Jung of having ensnared him with “pagan arts.” It’s kind of sad to see the personification of joy be brought to this, especially since The Red One becomes irrelevant after this chapter. It feels like a waste. But this isn’t a story, it’s a set of mystical experiences.
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Ammonius and The Red One basically swapped places. The Red One becomes more “serious” and Ammonius becomes more “voluptuous,” each losing what made them who they were in the first place. Both believe that Jung is an evil devil who set them on their downward spiral. Jung tries to be friendly, but they both rebuke him. He asks why they’re traveling together. Ammonius says that the devil commands respect, and The Red One says that he depends on clergy for his clientele.
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In his first encounter with The Red One, Jung had to argue the merits of Christianity against him. Now that Jung has become more pagan, both The Red One and Ammonius feel threatened. There’s nothing more that Jung can gain from these two figures. They are “the remains of earlier temples,” the crumbling ruins of Jung’s previous faith. In having broken them down, Jung essentially examined the limits of Christianity as a mystical system. After a certain point, it breaks under the weight of its own doctrine, because it can’t accept any new revelations unless they agree with what has already been established. Introducing anything new to these two figures completely ruined them, and that shouldn’t happen. Again, I’m not sure where Jung ended up religiously in real life, but within the internal schema of his visions, this is when he moves past Christianity. He physically moves past its two inverted archetypes on the road, and continues on towards something… else. Something older.
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When I had seen death and all the terrible solemnity that is gathered around it, and had become ice and night myself, an angry life and impulse rose up in me. My thirst for the rushing water of the deepest knowledge began to clink with wine glasses; from afar I heard drunken laughter, laughing women and street noise. Dance music, stamping and cheering poured fourth from all over; and instead of the rose-scented south wind, the reek of the human animal streamed over me. Luscious-lewd whores giggled and rustled along the walls, wine fumes and kitchen steam and the foolish cackling of the human crowd drew near in a cloud. Hot sticky tender hands reached out for me, and I was swaddled in the covers of a sick-bed. I was born into life from below, and I grew up as heroes do, in hours rather than years. And after I had grown up, I found myself in the middle land, and saw that it was spring.
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Why not? If you don’t have those restrictions anymore — if you’ve already died and been reborn — then why hold yourself back from engaging with “worldly things”? You’re alive, so be alive. Don’t watch the human animal from the distance of the heights as if you do not exist within it while you have a body. There’s no shame in having a body.
Jung identifies himself with a Pan-like, Puck-like, Tom-Bombadil-like Green Man figure:
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But I was no longer the man I had been, for a strange being grew through me. This was a laughing being of the forest, a leaf green daimon, a forest goblin and prankster, who lived alone in the forest and was itself a greening tree being, who loved nothing but greening and growing, who was neither disposed nor indisposed toward men, full of mood and chance, obeying an invisible law and greening and wilting with the trees, neither beautiful nor ugly, neither good nor bad, merely living, primordially old and yet completely young, naked and yet naturally clothed, not man but nature, frightened, laughable, powerful, childish, weak, deceiving and deceived, utterly inconsistent and superficial, and yet reaching deep down, down to the kernel of the world.
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This is an excellent description of this archetype. I’d say that’s Pan in a nutshell. Very pagan. This is what The Red One really should have been, but Jung took that from him in their first encounter, and that was when the leaves sprouted.
Jung interprets the downfall of Ammonius and The Red One to be due to their inability to let themselves look ridiculous. Once The Red One had fallen prey to seriousness, he and Jung had basically switched places, with Jung becoming the laughing pagan spirit. Both Ammonius and The Red One couldn’t reconcile their ideals with the grimy and heady realities of living. “Because both of them believed in themselves and their own goodness, each in his own way, they ultimately became mired in the natural and conclusive burial ground of all outlived ideals.”
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After the cursing comes laughter, so that the soul is saved from the dead.
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Ideals are, according to their essence, desire and pondered; they exist to this extent, but only to this extent. Yet their effective being cannot be denied. He who believes he is really living his ideals, or believes he can live them, suffers from delusions of grandeur and behaves like a lunatic in that he stages himself as n ideal; but the hero has fallen. Ideals are mortal, so one should prepare oneself for their end: at the same time it probably costs you your neck.
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Man, this hits hard. I hold myself to pretty strict moral values, and nothing inhibits Shadow work more than that. I tried to stick to my ideals even within the universe of my own head, where I can’t affect anyone else, because I spend so much time in my fantasy world that my imaginary characters feel almost like real people. It’s impossible to hold myself to such a standard all the time! Astor finds it stifling, and tends to retaliate with even darker thoughts. At worst, this sort of thinking can lead to hypocrisy — you try to live your ideals, but inevitably fall short, because you’re human. Believing that you can really live your ideals makes you a lunatic. Believing you can live your ideals is a delusion of grandeur, because life is messy and complicated and never holds up to any particular ideal. That reality has to be acknowledged.
If you have become a sacrifice to the ideal, then the ideal cracks open, plays carnival with you, and goes to Hell on Ash Wednesday. The ideal is also a tool that one can put aside anytime, a torch on dark paths. But whoever runs around with a torch by day is a fool. How much my ideals have come down, and how freshly my tree greens!
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I went through this as well, because a lot of my Shadow work has involved me coming to the realization that I can’t be a perfectly good person all the time, especially not in my own head. Being philosophically or morally inconsistent doesn’t make me a hypocrite, because life is nuanced, and no idea is going to apply universally. That doesn’t mean that ideals are useless, though. It means I have to be able to pick them up and put them down like tools, each specialized to the particular thing it’s used for.
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The idea of ideals dying or needing to be superseded validates another thing I figured out on my own: that your Shadow is you but with all of your values flipped. Jung says as much in a comment in one of the footnotes: “From this comes the necessity to appreciate the value of the opposite of our former ideals, to recognize the error in former truth and to feel how much antagonism and even hatred lay in what had formerly passed for love for us.” Your Shadow has the same personality, but opposing beliefs. It wants what’s best for you, but has a very different idea of what that is.
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Jung realizes that, rather than forming some kind of unholy alliance or unlikely friendship, the devils and the clergy were always working together to reinforce the system. Jung becomes the Green Man because he realizes that he doesn’t need to pursue worldly things or spiritual things, but instead he can live only for his own sake and blossom from within himself. “And thus I learned to live without the world and spirit; and I was amazed how well I could live like this.”
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It seems nearly impossible to live as a man. As long as you are not conscious of yourself you can live; but if you become conscious of your self, you fall from one grave into another. All your rebirths could ultimately make you sick.
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Jung realizes that holding himself to a certain standard, instead of just living for his own sake, is pointless. He doesn’t want to be a “chameleon” and change according to what society, or religious institutions, or a particular incarnation expects of him, but rather to be a lion and have his power come from within rather than without. He wants to be the bright solar being that he knows he really is. i.e. Jung wants to break the cycle of incarnation and ascend to a pure divine state, a very common mystical goal. Or perhaps, to live in this incarnation as that powerful solar being.
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Neither good nor evil shall be my masters. I push them aside, the laughable survivors, and go on my way again, which leads me to the East. The quarreling powers that for so long stood between me and myself lie behind me.
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Henceforth I am completely alone. I can no longer say to you: “Listen!” or “you should,” or “you could,” but now I talk only with myself. Now no one else can do anything more for me, nothing whatsoever. I no longer have a duty toward you, and you no longer have duties toward me, since I vanish and you vanish from me. I no longer hear requests and no longer make requests of you. I no longer fight and reconcile myself with you, but place silence between you and me.
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Your call dies away in the distance, and you cannot find my footprints. Together with the west wind, which comes from the plains of the ocean, I journey across the green countryside. I roam through the forests, and bend the young grass. I talk with trees and the forest wildlife, and the stones show me the way. When I thirst and the source does not come to me, I go to the source. When I starve and the bread does not come to me, I seek my bread and take it where I find it. I provide no help and need no help. If at any time necessity confronts me, I do not look around to see whether there is a helper nearby, but I accept the necessity and bend and writhe and struggle. I laugh. I weep. I swear, but I do not look around me.
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On this way, no one walks behind me, and I cross no one’s path. I am alone, but I fill my solitariness with my life. I am man enough. I am noise, conversation, comfort, and help enough unto myself. And so I wander to the far East. Not that I know anything about what my distant goal might be. I see blue horizons before me: they suffice as a goal. I hurry towards the East and my rising — I will my rising.
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And with that, Jung leaves Christianity behind.
First Day
At the beginning of this chapter is a beautiful painting, the first full-page image. It’s labeled “Izdubar,” which is a mis-transliteration of the name of Gilgamesh. He wears red and blue armor covered with strange glyphs, appears to have black bovine horns, and he carries an axe. In the background are green snakes with four little legs and… maybe gold wings? On either side are a pile of alligators that get steadily bigger and at the bottom, a person in green (Jung) worshipping the gigantic figure of Gilgamesh. The art is going to get a lot cooler from here on out.
The multiline initial has the image of what looks like a gold serpent coiled around the sun:
Jung walks through a gorge in a desolate mountain range. Half the path is black (hot iron) and the other half is white (ice). As he reaches the top, there is a booming sound, as though the mountainside was hit with a missile. At the pass, Jung meets Gilgamesh. (Jung calls him Izdubar, but his proper name is Gilgamesh, so I’m going to call him Gilgamesh.) He has bull horns and Jung describes him as a “bull-man,” so maybe there’s some of Enkidu in him as well. Gilgamesh is apparently afraid of Jung. Jung immediately humbles himself before Gilgamesh, but Gilgamesh says that he has no intention of killing Jung and asks Jung where he comes from. Jung says he comes from the West, i.e. from the Land of the Dead.
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Gilgamesh is upset to hear that the world is round and that there is no land of immortality beyond the sea, and downright terrified to hear that it is scientifically impossible to reach the sun. He destroys his own axe, considering it pointless to try to conquer or defeat anything when “the eternal void” cannot be defeated. He hurls a piece of the axe at the sun and cries. The existential dread of knowing the truth about how the universe functions is like poison to Gilgamesh, and he laments that it is the only thing that has ever been able to defeat him.
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Jung explains how, counterintuitively, science and religion can both be true at the same time:
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Jung: I don’t doubt that your priests speak the truth. It is certainly a truth, only it runs contrary to our truth.
Gilgamesh: Are there then two sorts of truth?
Jung: It seems to me to be sow. Our truth is that which comes to us from the knowledge of outer things. The truth of your priests is that which comes to you from inner things.
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This is a great sum-up of my general thoughts on how science and religion can complement each other. Science is the study of the mundane world as it is, and religion is the study of the subtle world. At minimum, science provides humans with a way of understanding and utilizing the world on a physical level, while religion (ideally) helps humans understand the world on a mental-emotional level and a symbolic level. Let me tell you, religion did a lot for mental health before the science of psychology, and Jung is writing before that science even really got off the ground. (Freudian psychotherapy was, in brief, not great.) Scientific advancements do not negate spiritual insights because they address different things, i.e. “THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN […] A MERE BALL OF FLAMING GAS WOULD HAVE ILLUMINATED THE WORLD.” It messes with human logic to say that two seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same time, but that’s often how it works. Light is both a wave and a particle.
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Jung then makes a fire, as it has become dark and cold. Gilgamesh asks how he did it. Jung explains how matches work. Then he explains airplanes and watches, and other sufficiently-advanced-technology. Gilgamesh asks if he is immortal, and Jung says that he is not. Gilgamesh doesn’t understand how it’s possible for Jung to have so much powerful magic and still be mortal, especially when the magic is poisonous. Jung explains how we have to acclimate ourselves to scientific knowledge, bit by bit, or else it would strike us down in the same way — “If our life is dear to us, we prefer to sacrifice a piece of our life force rather than abandon ourselves to certain death.” Next, the subject turns to gods, and how science has taken from humans the capacity to see the gods’ workings in natural events. Gilgamesh asks how Jung and his people can possibly live without belief in gods. Jung answers, “with one foot in the cold and one foot in the hot,” referring back to the path.
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There’s a lot of dumb questions on Quora about whether you would be burned as a witch if you went back to the Middle Ages or the Ancient World and showed them an iPhone. The truth is, the people of those times wouldn’t even have the ability to mentally contextualize an iPhone. You could call it a “magic mirror” or something, putting it in terms they can understand, but you probably couldn’t tell them what an iPhone really is and make them understand. If you were to somehow bring an ancient person to the future, they would find modern technology utterly destabilizing. The only reason we don’t find it destabilizing is because we’re used to it, because we’ve been through the centuries worth of development that saw it come into existence. But, one could argue, every technological or scientific advancement erodes our humanity a little more. They distance us from the primeval archetypes that used to define our understanding of the world. We retell the same old myths, and never come up with any new ones, because we don’t need to. We know what the Sun is, so there’s no reason to call it a god, except as a novelty — “This is what people used to believe, back in the dark ages!” Or maybe the myths died when Christianity replaced them all with a single book that hasn’t really changed that much in two thousand years, immune to the organic drift of oral tradition. Then again, maybe not — I grew up on Greek myths, and I lived and breathed them for a time. Still do, actually. I couldn’t tell you whether or not I believed the gods really existed back then, but honestly, I don’t think the thought even crossed my mind. It didn’t matter.
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Jung isn’t really all that comfortable with this state of affairs — only used to it — so he has set out for the East, towards the rising sun, “to seek the light that we lack.” Gilgamesh appears to have that light, but just like science, it can be blinding and destabilizing if one is unprepared for it.
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Jung has had to defend Christianity against The Red One before, and here he defends science against a pagan figure. Once again, a powerful figure is afraid of Jung or otherwise shaken by him—first Ammonius was threatened by Jung attacking his beliefs, then The Red One similarly fell, and now Gilgamesh is “lamed” by Jung’s scientific knowledge. It’s interesting that Jung describes God, or the God, as this explicitly pagan being from here on. Not only is Gilgamesh pagan, he’s one of the oldest mythological figures that we have records for.
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The hot/cold path unites opposites, but it is extremely painful to walk on. Once again, Shadow work comes up, this time using the metaphor of a snake biting one’s heel:
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But the poison of the serpent, whose head you crush, enters you through the wound in your heel and thus the serpent becomes more dangerous than it was before. Since whatever I reject is nevertheless in my nature. I thought it was without, and so I believed that I could destroy it. But it resides in me and has only assumed a passing outer form and stepped toward me. I destroyed its form and believed that I was a conqueror. But I have not yet overcome myself.
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The outer opposition is an image of my inner opposition.
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This is basically how projection works. Anything you reject is part of yourself, and constitutes your Shadow. You project your Shadow onto some external enemy, and believe that by destroying that enemy, you will conquer your Shadow. But that’s not really how that works.
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As the Shadow and Conscience are opposites and counterbalance each other, Jung and Gilgamesh are opposites, each coming from the West and the East respectively; Jung is running towards the light of the East and Gilgamesh towards the darkness of the West.
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And so we hurried toward each other; he, from the light; I, from the darkness; he, strong; I, weak; he, God; I, serpent; he, ancient; I, utterly new; he, unknowing; I, knowing; he, fantastic; I, sober; he, brave, powerful; I, cowardly, cunning. But we were both more astonished to see one another on the border between morning and evening.
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There’s a lot of crossing of liminal spaces here, and the ever-present theme of unification of opposites. Jung appears small and weak because he’s coming up from his descent, while Gilgamesh is going down into it, so he appears large and powerful. His descent comes when Jung, the small worm or serpent, figuratively bites him on the heel and injects him with the knowledge of how the world really works. So, Jung has gone from being (or merely witnessing?) the Sun God a few chapters back to being the serpent who causes the God to fall.
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Alas, he [Gilgamesh] is my dearest, most beautiful friend, he who rushes across, pursing the sun and wanting to marry himself with the immeasurable mother as the sun does. How closely akin, indeed how completely one are the serpent and the God!
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One of the most common recurring motifs in mythology is a heroic figure, sometimes with explicit solar connotations, who vanquishes some serpent or dragon-like creature. Siegfried, the German hero whom Jung murdered in Liber Primus, is an example. In Greece, Apollo kills Python and takes over the holy site of Delphi at the center of the world. In Mesopotamia, Marduk kills Tiamat and builds the world out of her body. In Egypt, various catlike beings representing the sun god Ra have to defeat Apophis every night so he can pass safely through the Underworld. In medieval England, St. George kills a dragon to save a village from having to sacrifice humans to it. There are various similar-looking depictions of the Archangel Michael defeating Satan, who sometimes has dragonlike features. And in modern times, Harry Potter kills the basilisk in his own Underworld, with help from a fiery solar bird. In Neil Gaiman’s supplemental to American Gods, “The Monarch of the Glen,” this trope is presented as one of the oldest and most intrinsic myths, a symbolic representation of the entire concept of Good vs. Evil (and then it’s promptly deconstructed). Bitter experience has taught me to be wary of calling this motif truly universal, and I’m sure I would find stark differences between all of these stories if I looked, but for once, the point stands: the heroic God and the Serpent he fights, the concept of Good and the concept of Evil, are really two sides of the same thing. Perhaps this even applies to God and the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, even though that’s a different trope. The Serpent’s death must be accounted for, perhaps even mourned. The glorious Apollo successfully conquers Delphi by killing Python, but he still has to be punished for killing her, because she was sacred to Gaia; Apollo is humbled and forced to live on earth as a slave to a mortal.
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Jung and Gilgamesh both sit around the “primordial fire,” which unites them both, warms them, and protects them against the night:
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The primordial fire that conquers every necessity shall burn again, since the night of the world is wide and cold,a nd the need is great.
The well-protected fire brings together those from far away and those who are cold, those who do not see one another and cannot reach one another, and it conquers suffering and shatters need.
The words uttered at the fire are ambiguous and deep and show life the right way.
The blind shall be lamed, so that he will not run into the abyss, and the lamed shall be blind, so that he will not look at things beyond his reach with longing and contempt.
Both may be aware of their deep helplessness so that they will respect the holy fire again, as well as the shades sitting at the hearth, and the words that encircle the flames.​
The fire is “primordial” because our ability to use it to keep out the cold and dark, to make useful tools, and to cook food is what shaped our evolution — it is what makes us human. It is the source of all other technology. It’s also a gathering-place that forms the center of community, that other big thing that makes us human, and facilitates storytelling. Sitting around a campfire is probably one of the most intrinsically human things you can do.
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All gods change into serpents eventually, and so too does the Logos, which poisons you with scientific knowledge. Reason causes paralysis. The light of Logos and the primordial darkness of the Serpent will always coexist.
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You can subjugate yourself, shackle yourself in irons, whip yourself bloody every day. You have crushed yourself, but not overcome yourself. Precisely through this you have helped the Powerful One, strengthened your paralysis, and promoted his blindness. He would like to see it in others, and inflict it on them, and would like to force the Logos on you and others longingly and tyrannically with blind obstinacy and vacant stubbornness. Give him a taste of Logos. He is afraid, and he already trembles from afar since he suspects that he has become outdated, and that a tiny droplet of the poison of Logos will paralyze him. But because he is your beautiful, much loved brother, you will act slavishly toward him and you would like to spare him as you have spared none of your fellow men.
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Is Gilgamesh sort of an anti-Shadow? If you’ve done Shadow work and you become your Shadow, the Serpent, then you end up coming face-to-face with Conscience and all of its problems, like its desire to force its own way of thinking and being onto everyone else. That’s the downside of Logos, which corresponds pretty well to the Freudian concept of “superego.” Logos (Conscience) likes everything to make sense, and it can’t stand whenever anything is too weird or too illogical or too messy, so it tries to force everything to fit into a consistent framework. Believe me, I’ve seen it in action when arguing with Neoplatonists on r/Hellenism. I believe in the concept of emanation, but not in the Theory of Forms, and one of them asked me how I could justify belief in gods or in anything without belief in perfect Forms. I was pressed for a logical explanation, and could give none, because that’s not how I think.
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I’ve seen atheists fall into the same trap of forcing the Logos on everyone else, adapting science as the sense-making framework of the universe, which nothing can exist outside of. Never mind that science is constantly changing and adapting itself as new information is discovered, and that the new information has the potential to completely fuck up our understanding of reality as surely as any mystical experience. Just like with mysticism, the deeper you go into science, the weirder and more unintuitive it gets. It works according to its own rules, but it is under no obligation to make sense according to human logic. We learn science through lies-to-children, as nice and simple as any myth of good vs. evil, because the real truth would be too destabilizing and “poisonous” for our brains to grasp unless we’ve been slowly acclimated to it as scientists have.
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Gilgamesh is an evolution of the murdered Siegfried. He is bright and powerful and beloved, the Hero, who is brought low by Jung’s own self. (Jung did not make this connection between Gilgamesh and Siegfried. I did.) This time, however, he doesn’t die. He’s paralyzed by reason and brought down towards the darkness. However, this time Jung does not leave him to die. This time, Jung recognizes Gilgamesh as his brother, and loves him even as he poisons him. If the God is Conscience, then Jung plays the role of Shadow in this scnee. The serpentine Shadow, from the land of darkness in the West. The God does not die here because Jung still needs his support, assimilating his force and bringing it down to Earth.
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You need to undertake only half of the way, he will undertake the other half. If you go beyond him, blindness will befall you. If he goes beyond you, paralysis will befall him. Therefore, and insofar as it is the manner of the Gods to go beyond mortals, they become paralyzed, and become as helpless as children. Divinity and humanity should remain preserved, if man should remain before the God, and the God remain before man. The high-blazing flame is the middle way, whose luminous course runs between the human and the divine.
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The divine primordial power is blind, since its face has become human. The human is the face of the Godhead. If the God comes near you, then plead for your life to be spared, since the God is loving horror. The ancients said: it is terrible to fall into the hands of the living God. They spoke thus because they knew, since they were still close to the ancient forest, and they turned green like the trees in a childlike manner and ascended far away towards the East.
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Consequently they fell into the hands of the living God. They learned to kneel and to lie with their faces down, to beg for pity, and they learned to live in servile fear and to be grateful. But he who saw him, the terrible beautiful one with his black velvet eyes and the long eyelashes, the eyes that do not see but merely gaze lovingly and fearfully, he has learned to cry out and whimper, so that he can at least reach the ear of the Godhead. Only your fearful cry can stop the God. And then you see that the God also trembles, since he stands confronting his face, his observing gaze in you, and he feels unknown power. The God is afraid of man.
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As you begin anabasis, ascending towards the East, the God begins katabasis, towards the West. It’s just as difficult for gods to encounter mortals as it is for mortals to encounter gods. Some of your mortality gets into them. Since the human and the god are reflections of each other, they sort of swap places, and both fear each other.
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Within this section is an another illuminated initial, bright red with what looks like the spiraling gold serpent and solar rays behind it. At the corners are flies, and on the sides are worms.
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Two images end the chapter. The first one is of… I think a sunset? A person with arms outstretched — Jung — is silhouetted against the light, and next to him is the gigantic form of the lamed God, outstretched. There are stars above, that form the shape of arches with a transparent pillar coming down the middle, supporting the sky. There are bricks on either side, probably representing the mountains on either side of the pass.
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The other is the first mandala. A person (with dark-ish skin and long, straight black hair, wearing green — figure representing Jung) supports the giant wheel. Behind him are more pillars and arches, the same temple-like backdrop. The wheel itself is something like a ladder, with five “rungs” supported by a central pillar, at the top of which is a black eight-pointed star. At dead center is an upside-down egg. A green serpent crawls up the central pillar towards the star. The egg and serpent motif sort of reminds me of the “Orphic egg” symbol of a serpent wound around an egg (though whether it’s really “Orphic” is debatable – I’ll have to check that). The wheel is decorated with many intricate designs, but they don’t appear to represent anything specific. Within the wheel, between the rungs, is a red fog that looks like a nebula. Surrounding it is night, the Eternal Void.
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My first thought is of the idea of the Axis Mundi or World-Soul. The snake is like the Kundalini, rising from the egg at the bottom to the crown at the top. Jung himself supports it — he has the whole world in his hands. I’m personally seeing a Platonic and/or Kabbalistic pattern of emanation, from the Godhead at the top (a dark godhead, because it’s black) all the way to the world (a temple, and a single man) at the bottom. The egg is about to become very, very significant, so we’ll get back to that.
Second Day
The multiline initial has what looks like two golden trees with curling branches intertwining over a golden egg.
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Gilgamesh sleeps until dawn, and Jung wonders what to do with him. He can’t just leave Gilgamesh there, because he’s lame. If he goes back West, he’ll find help, but that means traveling the hot-cold path again and he doesn’t want to do that (nor can he expect anyone else to want to do that). He can’t go East either, because the sun will blind him. He seems to be at an impasse.
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Another day passes. Jung wants to try going East, but he needs Gilgamesh’s help to do that. Gilgamesh has given up and resolved to die. Jung asks why he can’t travel at night, so the sun will not blind him. Gilgamesh says that the nocturnal snakes and dragons will eat him. Jung says that he is willing to risk his life, and Gilgamesh says that dying would be even more useless.
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Jung comes to a realization along the same lines as “there is no spoon” – Gilgamesh is not real. He’s a fantasy. That means that he can be helped in some kind of fantastical way. Gilgamesh is absolutely horrified and insulted to hear such a thing, but Jung is definitely onto something here. When my gods tell me to “think like a god,” this is what they mean. I can resolve my imaginary predicaments by finding solutions that would be illogical, inconsistent, or impossible in real life. The physical world is more fixed, so magic has to take more steps and overcome more obstacles to manipulate or manifest as matter. The reason why magic is easier in the Otherworld is because Otherworldly things can be more easily manipulated, and this is because they are more volatile — “volatile” is actually the word that Jung uses! I went and checked the German!
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Jung decides to utilize the incredibly ancient magic of naming to heal Gilgamesh.
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“You have become light, lighter than a feather. Now I can carry you.” I put my arms round him lift him up from the ground; he is lighter than air, and I struggle to keep my feet on the ground since my load lifts me up into the air.
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And that’s how to do magic, folks! Even Gilgamesh admits that it’s a “masterstroke.”
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I can’t even begin to emphasize how big a deal this is for me personally. I went into this book wondering if maybe I’d been misinterpreting Jung or projecting my own ideas onto him, since I haven’t read much of his Collected Works. But no, I was dead-on, and I didn’t even know it. Throughout this whole book, I’ve watched Jung come to all the same realizations that I’ve come to, independently, throughout the course of my own mystical journey. This is one of the big ones, and it’s one that I received relatively recently.
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I frequently impose arbitrary limits upon myself when exploring my imaginary worlds. I talked a little about that regarding clichés, but my fetters manifest in other forms, too. I don’t let myself break rules, because all my worldbuilding has to be airtight, or my readers will notice the discrepancies. To say this limits my creativity would be an understatement. I also work myself up with moral questions about putting characters through any kind of suffering, because I think of my characters as people. I have to be kind to my creations, or go the same way as Victor Frankenstein. The idea that writers should be sadistic kind of horrifies me. And yet, I’m also writing myself as this morally ambiguous character (Astor). I’ve asked my gods what to do about this, and their response was, “If you’re going to act like a god, you have to think like a god.” Writers are effectively God within their own worlds, so if I’m going to engage with my world as a character within it (Astor), then I have to react to it the way a god would. A simpler, easier solution can be simply willed into existence. And so, that is exactly what Jung does. He realizes that he doesn’t have to believe that Gilgamesh is too heavy to carry; he can believe that Gilgamesh is light as a feather, and just like that, he is. It’s that simple. And if you make a habit of believing in these impossible solutions, then you start to be able to do it in real life, too — By this means you shall have the glory of the whole world, and all obscurity shall fly from you.
Seeing Jung come to the same realization is just wild.
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Since he can now carry Gilgamesh, Jung brings him West. He doesn’t have to walk the hot-cold path again, because a gentle wind blows him down from the mountains. Ahead are Ammonius and The Red One. Gilgamesh describes them as “misshapen.” There’s a little town, but Jung avoids it because the enlightened live there, and they brew the strongest poisons and are all paralyzed as a result. Jung brings Gilgamesh to a secluded house in a dark garden. The door is too small for Gilgamesh to fit through, but the same logic applies — Gilgamesh isn’t real, so Jung makes him the size of an egg and puts him in his pocket.
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Thus my God found salvation. He was saved precisely by what one would actually consider fatal, namely by declaring him a figment of the imagination. How often has it been assumed that the Gods have been brought to their end in this way. This was obviously a serious mistake, since this was precisely what saved the God. He did not pass away, but became a living fantasy, whose workings I could feel on my own body: my inherent heaviness faded and the hot and cold way of pain no longer burned and froze my soles. The weight no longer kept me pressed to the ground, but instead the wind carried me lightly like a feather, while I carried the giant.
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One used to believe that one could murder a God. But the God was saved, he forged a new axe in the fire, and plunged again into the flood of light of the East to resume his ancient cycle. But we clever men crept around lamed and poisoned, and did not even know that we lacked something. But I loved my God, and took him into the house of men, since I was convinced that he also really lived as a fantasy, and should therefore not be left behind, wounded and sick. And hence I experienced the miracle of my body losing its heaviness when I burdened myself with the God.
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Such beautiful language! This is exactly what I mean when I say it doesn’t matter if God is real or not. If you spend your whole life asking yourself if God is real or not – or worse, trying to prove it – then you’ve missed the point and should go back to square one. God is fantasy, God exists Up There in its own world, and knowing that will endow you with its fantastical powers. Real or unreal, God is worth having in your life, precisely because of how fantastical it is.
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So long as we leave the God outside us apparent and tangible, he is unbearable and hopeless. But if we turn the God into fantasy, he is in us and easy to bear. The God outside us increases the weight of everything heavy, while the God within us lightens everything heavy.
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This is definitely something that I have to remember for my own life. I feel burdened by everything, and yet much of what I feel burdened by is imaginary. If I simply decided that it isn’t there, then — presto! — it wouldn’t be. An instant cure to all psychological problems, though by no means an easy one.
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Many have wanted to get help for their sick God and were then devoured by the serpents and dragons lurking on the way to the land of the sun. They perished in the overbright day and have become dark men, since their eyes have been blinded. Now they go around the like shadows and speak of the light but see little. But their God is in everything that they do not see: He is in the dark Western lands and he sharpens seeing eyes and he assists those cooking the poison and he guides serpents to the heels of the blind perpetrators. Therefore, if you are clever, take the God with you, then you will know where he is. If you do not have him with you in the Western lands, he will come running to you at night with clanking armor and a crushing battle axe. If you do not have him with you in the land of the dawn, then you will step unawares on the divine worm who awaits your unsuspecting heel.
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I think this may be a commentary on religious hypocrisy. If you try to reach the land of the sun, it will blind you, and then you won’t be able to see anything. The God that you worship becomes dark and exists in dark things. It creates poison and it will send the serpents to bite you. But because you want to continue to believe that your God is bright, and chase the light, you won’t notice that your God is now dark. If you don’t maintain awareness of where divinity manifests, even if it’s in ways that are unexpected or contradictory, then God will sneak up on you.
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The God destroyed his weapon because you don’t need to conquer anything, except death. All you need is armor to protect you from the conquerors.
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The huts of men are small and they cannot welcome the God despite their hospitality and willingness. Hence do not wait until rawly bungling hands of men hack your God to pieces, but embrace him again, lovingly, until he has taken on the form of his first beginning. Let no human eye see the much loved, terribly splendid one in the state of his illness and lack of power. Consider that your fellow men are animals without knowing it. So long as they go to pasture, or lie in the sun, or suckle their young, or mate with each other, they are beautiful and harmless creatures of dark Mother Earth. But if the God appears, they begin to rave, since the nearness of God makes people rave.
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I immediately thought of Dionysus — Dionysus who was hacked to pieces, Dionysus who causes men to rave, Dionysus who (as Phanes) was the World-Egg at the beginning of creation.
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Set the egg before you, the God in his beginning.
And behold it.
And incubate it with the magical warmth of your gaze.
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The God is in the egg. The God must be reborn. You must facilitate his gestation and birth.
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The Incantations
This is probably my favorite chapter so far. This is when the art starts to sing with the resonance of the truly divinely-inspired. If The Red Book were just a dream-log before, this is when it truly becomes a grimoire — an instruction manual for the reawakening of the God. What follows are twelve incantations, which constitute a formula that will help the egg to hatch. Each incantation is written inside the image that accompanies it, like a William Blake plate. The style of the images all look like mosaics, or stained-glass windows. I’m going to transcribe this section in full.
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Christmas has come. The God is in the egg.
I have prepared a rug for my God, an expensive red rug, from the land of morning.
He shall be surrounded by the shimmer of magnificence of his Eastern land.
I am the mother, the simple maiden, who gave birth and did not know how.
I am the careful father, who protected the maiden.
I am the shepherd, who received the message as he guarded his herd at night on the dark fields.
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The Christian references are obvious. Jung identifies himself as Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds. Interesting genderbending going on here – Jung is both mother and father to the God. I’m also reminded a little of the Orphic lamellae, “as a kid you rushed into milk”. (I’m not sure why I thought of that, since there’s no similar line in here. But since it came to mind when I first read this, it must be important to note) Did Jung know about the Greek Magical Papyri? I don’t have any reason to assume that he did, but these incantations all read like something out of them.
The image that goes with this first incantation is a pattern on a red background that looks like the “oriental rug” being described. At the top is a building shaped kind of like a mosque or the Taj Mahal, and on either side are what looks like towers of candles. At the bottom is the golden egg.
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This is just… spectacular.
I am the holy animal that stood astonished and cannot grasp the becoming of the God.
I am the wise man who came from the East, suspecting the miracle from afar.
And I am the egg that surrounds and nurtures the seed of the God in me.
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Mostly Biblical references here — the animals that surround the manger where Jesus is born, and are astonished but not comprehending. The Wise Men who come, knowing what they’ll find. The egg that contains the baby god, which Liber Primus specified should be within oneself. This completes the tableau, so that Jung identifies himself with everyone who is in attendance at the birth of the God.
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The image that goes with the second incantation depicts a similar “oriental” design on a red background. At the top is a king or a priest sitting on a mat between two trees alight with candles. On the right and left are gold spheres, the left one with a black serpent and the right one with a white bird. At the bottom is the gold egg amid what looks like a ritual fire on some kind of altar. Similar brazier-like devices are on either side, one with a cross and one with a six-pointed star.
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That design of the brazier, altar, or whatever it is — the support for the egg — is going to be a recurring one. It definitely reminds me of something, I want to say something Asian, though I know that’s vague. Flat with the sides curling in like that? Where have I seen that before?
The solemn hours lengthen.
And my humanity is wretched and suffers torment.
Since I am a giver of birth.
Whence do you delight me, O God?
He is the eternal emptiness and the eternal fullness.
Nothing resembles him and he resembles everything.
Eternal darkness and eternal brightness.
Eternal below and eternal above.
Double nature in one.
Simple in the manifold.
Meaning in absurdity.
Freedom in bondage.
Subjugated when victorious.
Old in youth.
Yes in no.
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Further emphasis on inversion, and the unification of opposites that this God is meant to represent. It’s one of the concepts I value most in my own religion, so of course it’s at the core of Jung’s relationship with God. It’s very alchemical, as well.
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The image that goes with the third incantation is a darker red than the previous two. Jung’s characteristic intricate designs compose most of it, and at the bottom is a huge, red sun rising. The Sun of the Depths?
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Oh
light of the middle way
enclosed in the egg,
embryonic,
full of order, oppressed.
Fully expectant,
dreamlike, awaiting lost memories.
As heavy as stone, hardened,
Molten, transparent
Streaming bright, coiled on itself.
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Unifying dualities means that this god is the “middle way” between them. To emphasize this, the image depicts what appear to be two green serpents straining in opposite directions. They form the “altar shape,” the support for the egg (which is the circle that contains the text). Behind them is a black and red branching pattern, like a forest, that turns blue when it intersects with the circle that contains the text. On top of the two serpents is what appears to be a gold support for the disk, like the headdresses of Khonsu and Thoth, the Egyptian lunar gods. Actually, taking another look at it, I think the twin snakes are something like a candelabra… the whole thing is a support for the lunar disk.
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Amen, you are the lord of the beginning.
Amen, you are the star of the East.
Amen, you are the flower that blooms over everything.
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Amen, you are the deer that breaks out of the forest.
Amen, you are the song that sounds far over the water.
Amen, you are the beginning and the end.
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This is so beautiful, I could cry.
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The image takes up the most space. It is a great green serpent, surrounded by magma, breathing a branching column of fire up into the sky. It is a powerful, ophidian volcano. The god straining to hatch from the egg? The serpent of the Underworld, Apophis, straining towards the heavens?
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One word that was never spoken.
One light that was never lit up.
An unparalleled confusion.
And a road without end.
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The image is of the Egyptian solar barge, sailing on deep blue water. A monstrous fish swims beneath it. If the previous page represents the Underworld and katabasis, then this would represent the Sun and anabasis — Apophis and Ra.
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I forgive myself these words, as you also forgive me for wanting your blazing light.
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The image is of temple arches, with the familiar mosaic pattern. Behind the temple is a forest of poplar trees, and between the pillars is a bright orange tree… or a flame, in a brazier. It might be the same as the support for the egg, the light of the god blazing upward.
See what I mean about the shape of the support looking familiar? What is that?
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Rise up, you gracious fire of old night.
I kiss the threshold of your beginning.
My hand prepares the rug and spreads abundant red flowers before you.
Rise up my friend, you who lay sick, break through the shell.
We have prepared a meal for you.
Gifts have been prepared for you.
Dancers await you.
We have built a house for you.
Your servants stand ready.
We drove herds together for you on green fields.
We filled your cup with red wine.
We set out fragrant fruit on golden dishes.
We knock at your prison and lay our ears against it.
The hours lengthen, tarry no longer.
We are wretched without you and our song is worn out.
It’s possible to deserve things. If you’re a god, then you are entitled to worship, to a meal and luxurious gifts and a red carpet laid out for you, to entertainment and adoration. Ever wondered why you’re sick all the time? Break through. Break free.
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An abstract design, kind of like clouds, swirling around in bright red with spots of blue.
We are miserable without you and wear out our songs.
We spoke all the words that our heart gave us.
What else do you want?
What else shall we fulfill for you?
We open every door for you.
We bend our knees where you want us to.
We go to all points of the compass according to your wish.
We carry up what is below, and we turn what is above into what is below,
as you command.
We give and take according to your wish.
We wanted to turn right, but go left, obedient to your sign. We rise and we
fall, we sway and we remain still, we see and are blind, we hear and we
are deaf, we say yes and no, always hearing your word.
We do not comprehend and we live the incomprehensible.
We do not love and we live the unloved.
And we evolve around ourselves again and comprehend
and live the understandable.
We love and live the loved, true to your law.
More emphasis on the concept of inversion, including an explicit “as above, so below.” Had he studied alchemy at the time he wrote this? Or is this one of those mystical coincidences? There’s no footnote that points it out, so, I don’t know.
The image is more red clouds, and in the middle, a pale blue cloud with violent spots of red in it.
The footnote describes a nightmare Jung had of red avalanches. In that nightmare, he spoke with his soul, who had this to say:
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His soul tells him to help the Gods and to sacrifice to them. She tells him that the worm crawls up to Heaven, it begins to cover the stars and with a tongue of fire he eats the dome of the seven blue heavens. She tells him that he will also be eaten, and that he should crawl into the stone and wait in the narrow casing until the torrent of fire is over. Snow falls from the mountains because the fiery breath falls down from above the clouds. The God is coming. Jung should hide himself in stone, as the God is a terrible fire. He should remain quiet and look within, so that the God does not consume him in flames.
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There’s a lot there – the same death/dismemberment/conflagration theme that we’ve seen show up repeatedly, death and destruction combined with the birth of a new god, like the birth of a star. Jung has to “sacrifice” to the new God like a pagan would, and protect himself from the violent overflow of its fiery amniotic fluid. The storm is necessary for the God to be born. The first thing I thought of, honestly, was “Eye of Eden” from Sky: Children of the Light. It’s the difficult last level, in which you must whether a red storm to be reborn.
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Come to us, we who are willing from our own will.
Come to us, we who understand you from our own spirit.
Come to us, we who will warm you at our own fire.
Come to us, we who will heal you with our own art.
Come to us, we who will produce you out of our own body.
Come, child, to father and mother.​
Just as in the first incantation, Jung characterizes himself as both father and mother to the baby God, which continues the emphasis on synthesizing duality.
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The image is of a great orange sun rising into the blue sky, with what looks like a font of fire and the green support. A brazier? The twin snakes? It looks kind of like an Egyptian solar headdress. Beneath is the black altar/support with tis familiar though indiscernible shape. The caption reads “Hiranyagarbha,” which is the seed from which Brahma was born. It means “golden womb.”
We asked earth.
We asked Heaven.
We asked the sea.
We asked the fire.
We looked for you with all the peoples.
We looked for you with all the kings.
We looked at you with all the wise.
We looked for you in our own heads and hearts.
And we found you in the egg.​
This one describes seeking the God among the four classical elements (which translates to searching in each of the four cardinal directions, and states of matter), then seeking amongst people of all stations, and finally finding God in the universal core — the primordial egg.
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The image is of two blazing urns, the fire sending blue smoke upwards, and between them a stylized blue flower grows from the egg.
I have slain a precious human sacrifice for you,
A youth and old man.
I have cut my skin with a knife.
I have sprinkled your altar with my own blood.
I have banished my father and mother so that you can live with me.
I have turned my night into day and went about at midday
like a sleepwalker.
I have overthrown all the Gods, broken the laws, eaten the impure.
I have thrown down my sword and dressed in women’s clothing.
I shattered my firm candle and played like a child in the sand.
I saw warriors form into line of battle and I destroyed my suit of armor
with a hammer.
I planted my field and let the fruit decay.
I made small everything that was great and made everything great
that was small.
I exchanged my furthest goal for the nearest, and so I am ready.​
Oh, it’s getting real now! If there was any semblance of Christianity in this ritual, it’s gone now. Now we’ve got outright, explicit human sacrifice. The Shadow takes over and says its piece. The inversions get a little more taboo, with the subversion of gender roles, and outright rejection of men’s typical “warrior” role. It’s replaced with a monstrous, consuming persona. The harvest is neglected, one’s family is rejected, and one “sleepwalks” at midday, as a nocturnal creature might.
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The image is of a beast with many legs, like a giant green caterpillar, standing over the egg. The egg’s support is now red instead of green, stained with blood.
That was the last incantation? Brutal.
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Jung immediately backtracks on the last statement — he is not ready. In fact, he is afraid. Despite the enormous ancient precedent for gods in cosmic eggs, he feels as though he has humiliated the great entity by trapping it in the egg, and he’s unnerved that it was so easy to do so. “No one is greater than he with the bull’s horns, and yet I lamed, carried, and made him smaller with ease.” Well, man, I don’t know how to tell you this, but the Bull-Horned God was dismembered once; this is gentle compared to that.
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What is blasphemy compared to this? I would like to be able to blaspheme against the God: That way I would at least have a God whom I could insult, but it is not worth blaspheming against an egg that one carries in one’s pocket.
It’s really only Jung’s own Conscience that sees the egg as something small and unworthy, but he’s been fighting against his conditioning concerning the nature of greatness this whole time. He’s heard all the ancient wisdom that speaks of the God in the Egg, but can’t quite internalize it. It really bothers him that he’s made God something humble:
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I hated this pitifulness of the God. My own unworthiness is already enough. It cannot bear my encumbering it with the pitifulness of the God. Nothing stands firm: you touch yourself and you turn to dust. You touch the God and he hides terrified in the egg. You force the gates of Hell: the sound of cackling masks and the music of fools approaches you. You storm Heaven: stage scenery totters and the prompter in the box falls into a swoon. You notice: you are not true, it is not true above, it is not true below, left and right are deceptions. Wherever you grasp is air, air, air.
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This is a great example of how mystical experiences can be a bit traumatic at times. Having a mystical experience is a little like seeing through the Matrix: You realize that nothing is real, and the conscious mind’s immediate conclusion is that therefore, nothing matters. Hell is a pantomime, Heaven is a stage set, life is sound and fury. But nihilism is childish, and if you think you’re smarter than everyone else because you realized that nothing is real and/or read Nietzsche once, you’re not even halfway yet. Jung’s realization that nothing is real is also the answer – if nothing is real, then the giant can be carried, the God can be condensed into an egg without losing its greatness.
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Jung considers for a moment whether he shouldn’t just crush the egg, obliterating the race of Gods. If the Gods can so easily yield to Jung’s own power, then what even is a God? Why should Gods be honored at all? The reason why he bothered to encase the God in an egg is because he loves the God, and love motivated him to incubate it with the incantations. If man is a son of God, then God can also be a child of man. Gods can only be vanquished by those who love them.
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My God, I love you as a mother loves the unborn whom she carries in her heart. Grow in the egg of the East, nourish yourself from my love, drink the juice of my life so that you will become a radiant God. We need your light, O child. Since we go in darkness, light up our paths. May your light shine before us, may your fire warm the coldness of our life. We do not need your power but life.
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I came to understand a lot of things when I finally loved a god as fully and unconditionally as this. I understood worship as something other than forced submission. I understood what Christians are talking about (or aiming for, at least) when they say they love Jesus.
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It’s clear that Jung is experiencing some inner turmoil. Those incantations were so reverent, in the manner of true pagan hymns, so part of him clearly understands how gods work and why the egg is deserving of worship… but that clashes with his conscious mind, which can’t comprehend the egg as anything other than small and worthless. Throughout all of this, he realizes that it’s not power, might, or greatness that matters. It’s not ruling over others that matters. It’s warmth and light. “A sunless spirit becomes the parasite of the body. But the God feeds the spirit.”
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The next image is a tree, made of blue swirls. The first thing I was reminded of was the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, since it has spheres going up it on each of its branches. It has six spheres in its branches and another six at the top.
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It took me a moment to notice — the designs in the spheres are simplified versions of the incantation pictures! It begins on the bottom left with the egg on its support, surrounded by the Eastern-looking temple structure; then the sun rising from underneath; the twin snakes forming the support, with the solar sphere above them; the snake breathing fire upwards; the solar barge with the fish underneath; the column of fire between the pillars in front of the poplar trees; the abstract clouds; the Hiranyagarbha; the egg between the flaming urns; and the monstrous caterpillar surrounding the egg. It’s the entire process of the egg’s gestation, in one image, formed like a tree! At the very bottom, between the roots, is the egg itself.
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The next picture is one of the most striking and beautiful in The Red Book — the egg opens. It lies cracked open on a red and black tile floor, on which Jung (black-haired figure in green) kowtows in supplication. On the walls is the sea, a blue swirling pattern with an image of the solar barge. A column of fire bursts from the egg and rains down upon the small temple room, straining the edges of the image and filling it with smoke. The egg is open. The God is born.
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The Opening of the Egg
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The multiline initial doesn’t really have a specific pattern, but I like the design of it:
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On the third night, Jung opens the egg. The smoke rises from it, and suddenly Izdubar/Gilgamesh stands before him, enormous and whole. Gilgamesh comments on the small, dark space, asking if he is in a tomb. While he was in the egg, he was wheeling through flames, “falling from the heights to the depths, and whirled glowing from the depths to the heights.” (There’s the recurring theme of the depths and the heights again, as well as another “as above, so below.”) He was the sun.
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That’s really interesting, because it was the knowledge that the sun is a flaming ball of gas and not a god that lamed Gilgamesh in the first place, and the ensuing despair at knowing the sun was unreachable. When he’s in the egg, he becomes the Sun. Now that he’s out, his body glows so bright that Jung is temporarily blinded, and then he’s gone. The room is dark, and the empty eggshell is on the floor. Everything is as it was.
Where to start with this?
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Jung decides to start with the irony that, while he was holding the egg in his hands and considered crushing it, the god inside was literally the sun. He had been heading towards the East where the sun rises, but he met the Sun on the way there.
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But behold! I caught the sun without realizing it and carried it in my hand. He who wanted to go down with the sun found me through his downgoing. I became his nocturnal mother who incubated the egg of the beginning. And he rose up, renewed, reborn to greater splendor.
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However, incubating the God has depleted Jung of all his own inner light, so as the Sun rises, he has nowhere to go but down. Like a mother who has just given birth and lost a lot of blood, Jung is depleted of life-force. The God took his wings, his strength, his power. The Sun flew off as soon as it hatched and basically just left him there to die.
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Woe betide the mother who gives birth to a God! If she gives birth to a wounded and pain-stricken God, a sword will pierce her soul. But if she gives birth to an unblemished God, then Hell will open to her, from which monstrous serpents will rise convulsively to suffocate the mother with miasma. Birth is difficult, but a thousand times more difficult is the hellish afterbirth. All the dragons and monstrous serpents of eternal emptiness follow behind the divine son.
If everything bright leaves you with the God, then everything dark in you is exaggerated and distorted. Why is this the case? Well, it’s because the God suffers when you suffer from evil. The God suffers because you love evil — it’s secretly satisfying, and it offers you opportunities, but you can’t admit this to yourself. If you find that you love the God and don’t want him to suffer, then you have to do the one thing you would normally try not to do: confront your own darkness. If the God is absent, then Hell sleeps. If it’s present, though, you have no choice but to do Shadow work. When you do Shadow work, you won’t suffer from evil anymore.
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If you’re rich (not just in money, in anything), but you feel empty, it’s because you’re unfulfilled. Your emptiness consumes you from within, so you try to make up for the emptiness by filling it with all kinds of material possessions and successes in the external world. It doesn’t help, and your emptiness continues to eat away at you until it consumes all your strength. Then, you can’t do anything. You live through other people and make them serve you. You use other people as tools to shape things. “In this moment, you need evil.” You have to identify yourself with evil in order to dissolve it, because just insisting that you’re a good person isn’t going to change anything. You have to go into your emptiness, admit that it’s there, regain your freedom. You have to dissolve your internal image of yourself as a good person. You have to face the darkness within and identify yourself with it, instead of the image of greatness that you want everyone else to see. “You cannot dissolve good with good. You can dissolve good only with evil. […] You are entirely unable to live without evil.”
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Hence their formation causes many good persons to bleed to death, because they cannot attend to evil in the same measure. The better one is and the more attached one is to one’s formation (i.e. persona or ego), the more one will lose one’s force. But what happens when the good person has lost their force completely to their formation? Not only will they seek to force others into the service of their formation with unconscious cunning and power, but they will also become bad in their goodness without knowing it, since their longing for satisfaction and strengthening will make them more and more selfish. But because of this the good ones will ultimately destroy their own work, and all those whom they forced into the service of their own work will become their enemies, because they alienated them. But you will also secretly begin to hate whoever alienates you from yourself against your own wishes, even if this were in the best interest of things. Unfortunately, the good person who has bound his strength will all to easily find slaves for his service, since there are more than plenty who yearn for nothing more strongly than to be alienated from themselves under a good pretext.
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You suffer from evil because you love it secretly and are unaware of your love. You wish to escape your predicament, and you begin to hate evil. And once more you are bound to evil through your hate, since whether you love or hate it, it makes no difference: you are bound to evil. Evil is to be accepted. What we want remains in our hands. What we do not want, and yet is stronger than us, sweeps us away and we cannot stop it without damaging ourselves, for our force remains in evil. Thus we probably have to accept our evil without love and hate, recognizing that it exists and must have its share in life. In doing so, we can deprive it of the power it has to overwhelm us.
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TL;DR: The more you invest in protecting your ego and your sense of yourself as a good person, the more hypocritical you will appear to everyone else, and the more you and your God will suffer. If you don’t want your God to suffer, then you have to suffer by acknowledging your capacity for evil. Recognizing that it exists and learing to live with it, instead of trying to get rid of it, will make it eaiser to manage and therefore less of a threat.
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This is a much more exaggerated version of the Shadow/Conscious dynamic that I’m used to. I’m used to weighing the Shadow against the Zeitgeist, against social norms and propriety and so forth. I assumed that Shadow existed in contrast to the Zeitgeist, but how long has it been since the Zeitgeist was last mentioned? Here, the Shadow exists in contrast to God, the flaming-bright solar deity that is, in a way, a manifestation of pure Consciousness or “superego.” Now that it’s been set loose, the divine Shadow has to be contended with — as evil as the God is good, as dark as it is light, and equally powerful. When the volatile soul of the God separates from you and rises up, the dregs, the body, the base matter is what’s left. Since you’re attached to the matter, you have no choice but to go down with it. That’s what’s happening here. It’s time for Jung’s second katabasis.
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We are all bound for Hell, but Hell is also the way forward.
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Just as you engender or bear your physical children, and just as they grow up and separate themselves from you to live their own fate, you also produce or give birth to beings of thought which separate themselves from you and live their own lives. Just as we leave our children when we grow old and give our body back to the earth, I separate myself from my God, the sun, and sink into the emptiness of matter and obliterate the image of my child in me.
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I have given birth to “beings of thought” that exist independently from me — not just Astor, but all the other people of Umbragard. They very much have their own lives and personalities that I’m not in total control over. It’s always nice to know I’m not the only one. I mean, I knew that; any writer will tell you that characters have minds of their own, and begin to direct their own stories after a while, and that you should follow where they lead instead of trying to fanagle them into your existing vision. But still, it means something different to hear Jung say it.
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Alchemy always involves this kind of separation, especially when it reaches this death stage of the spiritual self leaving the physical self behind.
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Nature is playful and terrible. Some see the playful side and dally with it and let it sparkle. Others see the horror and cover their heads and are more dead than alive. The way does not lead between both, but embraces both. It is both cheerful play and cold horror.
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There’s our theme of duality again. Too true, as well! It’s important to accept the dark stuff, as we just explained, but if all you see is horror, it’s also important to step back and remind yourself that the world can be bright and beautiful. Embrace both.
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The four images that follow are a bit abstract and difficult to interpret. The first one looks very similar to the “Hiranyagarbha” painting, but the swirl pattern is black instead of red – Hell arising and the Shadow taking over?
The second image shows flames bursting up and breaking some sort of structure at the top – the flames are between two green tendrils that might be the broken edges of the egg’s support, or snakes’ tails, or both. If they’re snakes, they look like they’re diving into Hell. This is the very mouth of Hell.
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The next one depicts some kind of spiderweb-like frame with a snakelike cord interwoven through it. They look like three blue snakes twined around each other, but they don’t seem to have heads.
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I wish I had a more robust interpretation here, but I don’t really. It really baffles me. I guess I could interpret it as the different parts of oneself (Conscious, Shadow, Soul) straining around a framework used to support and contextualize them. The framework is as much a limitation as it is a support. The snakes don’t really fit comfortably on it. It reminds me of one of those dome things you find in playgrounds for kids to climb on. The little knot of snakes looks like it could be plucked off and shaken loose. Why don’t they have heads? Are heads unnecessary?
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The last one is a geometric design showing teardrop-shapes on a black background, blue and green ones facing opposing directions (up and down) and a large orange and small red one facing towards each other. Separation of soul and body?
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I don’t have much to say about this one, either, except that it continues to reinforce the theme of duality and its application. I see this as the fixed and volatile parts of oneself straining in opposite directions, or perhaps the twin forces of sulfur and quicksilver, with the mediating Mercurius in between. It’s both solve and coagula.
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Hell
The multiline initial has a branching pattern behind it, like blood vessels.
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Jung is in a “gloomy vault.” In the center is a column on which ropes and axes hang, and at the foot of the column is an “awful serpentine tangle” of human bodies. (Reminds me a little of the serpentine tangle in the image before last.) Jung catches sight of a young maiden with “red-gold hair,” with three demons lying under and across her. All are motionless. The maiden had driven a silver fishing rod into the devil’s eye. Jung concludes that the devils were trying to torture the maiden, but that they failed, because she pierced the devil’s eye — he can’t move, or else his eye will be torn out. Jung is paralyzed with horror and anticipation, wondering what will happen. A voice tells him, “The evil one cannot make a sacrifice, he cannot sacrifice his eye, victory is with the one who can sacrifice.”
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Intuitively, Jung knows that he is in Hell. Jung reiterates that he has to be in Hell in order for his God to be happy. He has to endure this. “Would a mother not want to give up her life for her child? How much easier would it be to give up my life if only my God could overcome the torment of the last hour of the night and victoriously break through the red mist of the morning?”
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Why can’t the Devil sacrifice his eye? Because the Devil is empty, and his eye is what he uses to perceive fullness and beauty so that he can prey on it. The Devil will never give up his eye. “It wants you, the bright red light of your life.”
You smile innocently, my friend? Don’t you see that a gentle flickering of your eye betrays the frightfulness whose unsuspecting messenger you are? Your bloodthirsty tiger growls softly, your poisonous serpent hisses secretly, while you, conscious only of your goodness, offer your human hand to me in greeting. I know your shadow and mine, that follows and comes with us, and only waits for the hour of twilight when he will strangle you and me with all the daimons of the night.
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Jung muses on the fact that, though you may think you know someone well, an infinite gap separates you from them — they have an entire secret dark side that they don’t show you, and vice-versa. Rarely do you really know anyone well, which is why violence and horror can be perpetuated by people you think you know. But a bridge can cross that chasm that separates people.
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Jung determines that the maiden with the fishhook is his own soul, and that by wanting evil, he is able to strike the Devil’s one vulnerable place. If you don’t desire evil, you have no chance to save yourself from Hell. As long as you remain in the light, your Shadow will eventually take over, leaving the soul to languish in Hell. You have to want evil, to want to embrace rather than fight your Shadow, to defeat it. And you have to do that if you want to access any part of the internal world other than Hell. Passage through Hell always comes first! You’re going to remain hindered, and not be able to unlock any other doors, until your Shadow hands you the keys. (That’s my line, not a paraphrasing.)
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Don’t try to redeem the unredeemable. That makes you a prophet, like Ammonius, and we all saw what happened to him. Don’t go out trying to convert people. “Take in the seeker, but do not go out seeking those who err. What do you know about their error? Perhaps it is sacred. You should not disturb the sacred.” This is another profound inversion — the idea that to err is actually sacred flies in the face of the typical association of divinity and sanctity with perfection and figurative spotlessness. Jung says that you can feel compassion, but you should focus on living your own life and not on improving other people’s. That’s important for me to remember, because I waste a lot of energy on worrying about other people or about things that I don’t have control over. If you improve your own life, then that’s at least one drop in the bucket.
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Jung considers why his soul didn’t tear out the Devil’s eye. He says, “The evil one has many eyes, and losing one amounts to losing none.” That contradicts what he said earlier about the Devil’s eye being precious to him. Even if the Devil would technically lose nothing by losing his eye, he would still be unwilling to make any sacrifices, so the loss wouldn’t be the loss of the eye but rather the humiliation of losing the game. Emptiness can’t really sacrifice anything, because it lacks everything, so what does it have to give up? Don’t hurt his eye, because beautiful things wouldn’t exist if he wasn’t able to see it. That would be your loss. If evil didn’t crave for the beautiful things it sees, like Melkor lusting after the Silmarils, then how are you supposed to know that they’re beautiful?
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The evil one is holy.
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That’s a powerful statement, and a bit shocking, despite it being a no-brainer in the context of Shadow work. It is against the backdrop of evil that the holy, the beautiful, and the bright can exist. Maybe that’s what the abstract image with the bright teardrops on the black background is meant to represent. This is why good can’t exist without evil, and vice-versa — they’re only perceptible in the context of each other.
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Emptiness can’t really sacrifice anything because it’s empty, so it’s lacking by definition. But because you are full, or had been, you can sacrifice your will to evil. Doing so ironically destroys evil and gives you your power back. You get your power back through identifying yourself with evil, and not with the might and beauty of the God. The latter is an impossible standard to reach.
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Jung knows all of this now, but at the time, it pained him to have to destroy the image of the beautiful solar God. “Everything in me strives against this abysmal abomination. For I still did not know what it means to give birth to a God.” Yeah, Shadow work is counterintuitive like that.
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The next image shows two sets of concentric circles, a green and a blue one, meeting and producing a tangle of red tendrils. What are they? Snakes? Fire? Entrails? It’s not a particularly horrifying image, and nowhere near the scariest one in this book. It seems to be flowering into gold at the top. The circles are the same colors as the teardrops that were pulling away from each other in the last image.
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Chemical Wedding, maybe? But that doesn’t really make sense in context.
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The Sacrificial Murder
The background of the multiline initial once again has a tangle of red, like entrails.
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*Trigger Warning* The imagery in this chapter is significantly more graphic and disturbing than that in the corresponding “Murder of the Hero” chapter from Liber Primus.
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Jung is in an arid valley. It looks normal, but “smells of crime, of foul, cowardly deeds.” He feels nauseous. There are snakes everywhere. He walks very hesitantly over the rocks, under a weak gray sun and among dead bushes. He finds a marionette with a broken head. He finds a small apron. He finds the mutilated body of a small girl, with a crushed head and foot. The viivd description of her body reminds me of the final line from “The Woods” by San Fermin: “Yet I’m still buried in the mud / Skin and bones and brains and blood.”
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Next to the corpse is a shrouded woman, standing calmly. She asks Jung what he thinks of what he’s seeing. Jung doesn’t know how to respond to something so horrible. He doesn’t even want to try to understand this, because it makes him angry. The woman asks why he bothers to be angry, since such horrors happen every day. Why is Jung not enraged at the fact that they happen, and only enraged when confronted with them? She instructs Jung to take out the girl’s liver. Jung argues with her, until she says that she is the soul of the child, and wants him to do it. Jung takes a knife, cuts out the girl’s liver, and hands it to the ghost. The ghost tells him to perform the “healing act” — take a piece of the liver and eat it. Jung is even more horrified, calling it “desecration, necrophilia,” and refuses. (The word used in the translation is “necrophilia,” not necrophagia.) The ghost says that it is an act of atonement, and Jung asks why he should atone. She says that the murder is partly his own fault: “You are a man, and a man has committed this deed.” Jung curses the murderer and himself for both being men. The ghost again insists that he eat a piece of the liver, so he does, for her sake. It’s awful. But once he swallows with enormous effort, the ghost thanks him. She reveals herself to be the beautiful woman with red hair. It’s his soul.
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There’s no reaction in the dialogue. It cuts to Jung’s analysis. He interprets the dead girl as the Divine Child, female this time, whom he has slain in order to reclaim his power that was lost when the God was born. It took an act of atrocity to accomplish that, and the recognition that everyone is capable of and culpable for human atrocity. After you create the God using all your power, and he leaves you, you have to regenerate yourself, and that is “an act of the Below. This is a great and dark mystery.” A divine child is sacrificed, and you must consume it. This proves that you are human, that you recognize both good and evil, that you can dissociate yourself from the God-image and accept yourself as you are. That redeems your soul.
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When it bore and gave birth to the God, my soul was of human nature throughout; it possessed the primordial powers since time immemorial, but only in a dormant condition. They flowed into forming the God without my help. But through the sacrificial murder, I redeemed the primordial powers and added them to my soul. Since they became part of a living pattern, they are no longer dormant, but awake and active and irradiate my soul with their divine working. Through this it receives a divine attribute. Hence the eating of the sacrificial flesh aided its healing. The ancients believed that this brought healing to the soul.
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Consuming the body of a dead god is… well, I’m not sure exactly how widespread it is because two of my examples of it are fictional (Zmeya the Snake Star from In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente, and a certain nameless entity from Fallen London), but one is definitely real: The dismemberment and consumption of Zagreus. According to one source, the Titans’ consumption of Zagreus indirectly granted humans their divine essence. It’s debatable to what extent Dionysian worshippers actually engaged in omophagia (eating raw flesh) but the association was definitely there: Porphyry and Plutarch both recount examples of human sacrifice dedicated to Dionysus Omadios (flesh-eater). The God was eaten, so you must eat him too, if you want to become apart of him.
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I actually didn’t think of the much more obvious example — the Eucharist — until it was pointed out in the footnotes.
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Presenting it this way, as cannibalizing part of a literal mutilated corpse, really drives home the inherent horror of this Mystery. It’s exactly as disgusting as it sounds. And yet, the horror of it is part of what makes it what it is. The act of eating the child’s liver is explicitly healing for the soul; it’s an act of absolution, just like the Eucharist itself is supposed to be. And it’s interesting that it’s the liver, and not the heart or any other part of the body, because the liver’s job is to purify toxins within the body. Why is this act of purification so horrible, instead of washing in a stream or something like that?
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There are not many truths, there are only a few. Their meaning is too deep to grasp other than in symbols.
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That’s true. The reason why the Mysteries are so often expressed in this symbolic language is because we don’t have any other way of expressing them. It’s very possible that we are all examining the same Mysteries, the same divinities, the same stories from different angles, but using different symbols to express them. I still believe that, even despite all my bitter experience teaching me not to assume that all gods are the same or all stories are fundamentally the same. Of course, some of that belief comes from Jung himself, and from those he influenced (like Joseph Campbell), but seeing so much of my own UPG reflected in Jung’s UPG reinforces it. It’s almost like finding a prophecy about your life written in a book from a hundred years ago. So, if Jung and I could independently come to the same conclusions, despite living in different places and times, who’s to say that every other mystic isn’t having similar experiences and reaching similar conclusions?
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In the spirit of unifying opposites, I think that both can be true at the same time. On the one hand, cultural differences matter — they aren’t just quirky window-dressing, and every story or god needs to be considered within its native context instead of ripped out and shoved into a different one. But on the other hand, we are all reaching for a handful of fundamental truths. Because none of us can really grasp them with our small human minds, and they always have to be filtered through symbolic language, we have to be comfortable with the fact that each person or culture’s symbolic language is going to be different. The differences don’t mean that the truth is invalid, it means that none of us really have it, and that’s always going to be true. The key is to allow for that dissonance and not get caught up in the framework, which humans tend to struggle with.
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How would you be worthy of enjoying the wine and bread if you have not touched the black bottom of human nature?
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You wouldn’t, frankly. Good luck experiencing any kind of mystical union with God without having done Shadow work first. Sometimes it happens, but then the aftermath tends to be a complete mess, with the person believing that they’re God (identifying themself with the God-image) and so forth.
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Sometimes you no longer recognize yourself. You want to overcome it, but it overcomes you. You want to set limits, but it compels you to keep going. You want to elude it, but it comes with you. You want to employ it, but you are its tool: you want to think about it, but your thoughts obey it. Finally the fear of the inescapable seizes you, for it comes after you slowly and invincibly.
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There is no escape. So it is that you come to know what a real God is. Now you’ll think up clever truisms, preventive measures, secret escape routes, excuses, potions capable of inducing forgetfulness, but it’s all useless. The fire burns right through you. That which guides forces you onto the way.
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I think it’s impossible to really know God without having touched the depths, come face-to-face with both God and the Devil, faced horror as well as glory (because they’re really the same thing). People will definitely try to avoid having to confront that darker side of God with their truisms and excuses, but if you don’t, then you never advance. You never do anything. And you might end up compelled down that dark mystical path, anyway, kicking and screaming!
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Above all [God] wants to be ever-present. But I am ashamed of my God. I don’t want to be divine but reasonable. The divine appears to me as irrational craziness. I hate it as an absurd disturbance of meaningful human activity. It seems an unbecoming sickness which has stolen into the regular course of my life. Yes, I find even the divine superfluous.
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Yep! I was right! Gods don’t conform themselves to some Platonic ideal of logic and perfect forms. Gods are crazy, gods are irrational, gods are eldritch. Gods don’t think or operate in a way that makes sense to humans, unless we force them to! And if we put down those walls, and see the gods as they are, on their own turf… that becomes apparent very quickly. Gods are not human, and if you care about being reasonable, you’re never going to be able to perceive them as they are. You have to be willing to go completely mad and confront that absurdity. Jung could do it, in spite of himself, but not everyone can. And if you can’t, you’re going to end up caring more about your structure and your books than you do about God. It’s scary to look the Divine full in the face. It forces you to reassess everything, and most people will avoid doing that at all costs. That’s why they adhere so closely to religious structures, even after those structures stop being useful. It’s normal and human to think that God is crazy when you finally meet it, especially if you’ve been taught that God is a perfect source of Logos. Good luck reconciling that one.
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By the way, one of the footnotes says that Jung had carved above his door the phrase, “Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit,” attributed to the Pythia of Delphi. It means, “Called or not, the God will be present.”
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There’s a beautiful, mosaic-like image of four small circles (one bright red, one blue, one darker/pinkish red, and one green) encased in a larger circle. I’ve seen that sigil appear in one of my meditations before, inscribed on the door of a “witches’ cottage.” I’ve come to associate it with a shield, like that of the goddess Athena. I’m not sure what Jung intends it to mean. He associated mandalas with the Self, so this might be a diagram of the Self, with all its different components within it. We’ve also got a repetition of the same four colors that were in the teardrop image, and in the last image: orange and red opposite each other, green and blue opposite each other.
Interlude: A Creation Myth
The chapter ends there, but what follows is a very long series of eighteen mandalas with no accompanying text, which almost constitute a chapter in and of themselves. Jung interpreted mandalas (or really, any circular patterns) as symbolic of the search for the Self, and “wholeness.” This particular set look like variations on the same image, almost like they should be animated to form one continuous, changing image.
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Here they are, in order:
Here’s my first pass at an interpretation of them:
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Bull’s horns supporting the moon, or layers of emanation.
Expansion of sound waves. The matter gathered in the middle of the last image is pushed outwards.
Flower of Life; eight-spoked wheel.
The Flower of Life blooming above the abyssal water, prima materia.
The abyss rises. It isn’t water, it is a volcano, straining against the flower. A blue star, also eight-pointed, hangs above it.
The volcano continues to strain, pushing the flower upwards until it blooms into the sky. Above it is the fish icon that represents Christianity (Jung provides a lot of analysis of that in Aion.)
The volcano seems to “bloom” outward into the sea, still with the abyssal channel in the middle. The blue star descends, the setting sun.
The Flower of Life is in the water now, and the abyssal channel is still underneath it. The star hangs in the sky, rising this time. The flower has started to bloom again.
The new flower blooms, sending solar rays up out of the water, still beneath the star. Down in the Abyss, something rises, supported by an altar.
The red flower rises like magma and erupts into solar flares. On the other side, the matter that the Flower of Life has carried drops down towards the thing that arose from the abyss… a pedestal or tower with unreadable glyphs, charakteres. They look like really early pictorial writing.
The Flower of Life is connected at both ends — to the sky, and to the Underworld. Equilibrium.
The golden sun of fire descends. The red sun of the depths rises as the pedestal shrinks down. The blue star is in between, above the shrinking Flower of Life.
The blue star enters the Flower and bursts through it. The sun descends, the Sun of the Depths rises.
The world? A box containing the star, amidst water; the firmament above, with more charakteres just visible in the blue vault. Above, the Sun. Below, the Sun of the Depths.
The world closes itself into an eye shape. The blue star seems to be the pupil. More charakteres are written along the upper lid.
The eye is closed now. Branches spread above and roots spread below, within the lid—like optic nerves. Just above the eye is six charakteres arranged in a box. They look almost like Mayan writing to me. Above, a minimalist and colorless representation of the sun. Below, a minimalist and colorless representation of the Sun of the Depths, inside which is Jung’s symbol for an altar or ritual support (used throughout his paintings). (For some reason, this one speaks to me the most.)
The roots break out of the world… sideways. Light from the Sun and the Sun of the Depths both stream towards the center of the World, so that it is connected at all four corners.
It balloons into a dramatic cosmic egg shape, floating on the primordial sea, that looks like it has an atom at the center. The Sun and Sun of the Depths are both the same size now, and there are two other little spheres at the other two points, where the branches ended… the moon?
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I think we just witnessed the Creation of the World.
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