The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung

That's French for "the ancient system," as in the ancient system of feudal privileges and the exercise of autocratic power over the peasants. The ancien regime never goes away, like vampires and dinosaur bones they are always hidden in the earth, exercising a mysterious influence. It is not paranoia to believe that the elites scheme against the common man. Inform yourself about their schemes here.

Re: The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung

Postby admin » Sun Dec 01, 2013 1:50 am

Translators' Note

MARK KYBURZ, JOHN PECK, AND SONU SHAMDASANI

At the outset of Liber Novus, Jung experiences a crisis of language. The spirit of the depths, who immediately challenges Jung's use of language along with the spirit of the time, informs Jung that on the terrain of his soul his achieved language will no longer serve. His own powers of knowing and speaking can no longer account for why he utters what he says or under what compulsion he speaks. All such attempts become arbitrary in the depth realm, even murderous. He is made to understand that what he might say on these occasions is both "madness" and, instructively, what is. [1] Indeed, in a broader perspective, the language that he will find for his inner experience would compose a vast Commedia: "Do you believe, man of this time, that laughter is lower than worship? Where is your measure, false measurer? The sum of life decides in laughter and in worship, not your judgment." [2]

In translating this accumulated record of Jung's imaginal encounters with his inner figures, from a sixteen-year period beginning just before the First World War, we have let Jung remain a man who was pulled loose from his moorings but also caught up in the maelstrom that has gone by the name of literary modernism. We have tried neither to further modernize nor to render more archaic the language and forms in which he couched his personal record.

The language in Liber Novus pursues three main stylistic registers, and each poses distinct difficulties for a translator. One of them faithfully reports the fantasies and inner dialogues of Jung's imaginal encounters, while a second remains firmly and discerningly conceptual. Still a third writes in a mantic and prophetic, or Romantic and dithyrambic, mode. The relation between these reportorial, reflective, and Romantic aspects of Jung's language remains comedic in a manner that Dante or Goethe would have recognized. That is, within each chapter the descriptive, conceptual, and mantic registers consistently rub against each other, while at the same time no single register is affected by its partners. All three stylistic registers serve psychic promptings, and each chapter shares a polyphonic mode with the others. In the Scrutinies section from 1917 this polyphony matures, its voices commingling in various ratios.

A reader will quickly infer that this design was not premeditated, but rather grew from the experiment to which Jung arduously submitted. The "Editorial Note" diagrams the textual evolution of this composition. Here we need only observe that Jung each time sets down an initial protocol layer of narrative encounter, usually with dialogue, and then, in the "second layer," a lyrical elaboration of and commentary on that encounter. The first layer avoids an elevated tone, whereas the second welcomes elevation and modulates into sermonic, mantic-prophetic reflections on the episode's meaning, which in turn unpack events discursively. This mode of composition -- which is unique in Jung's works -- was no temperamental arrangement. Instead, as the episodes accumulated and their stakes mounted, it grew into an experiment that was as much literary as it was psychological and spiritual. In Jung's extensive published and unpublished corpus, there is no other text that was subjected to such careful and continual linguistic revision as Liber Novus.

These three linguistic registers already present themselves as virtual models for a possible translation. Our practice has been to let them cohabit within the exploratory frameworks alive in Jung's own day. The task before him was to find a language rather than use one ready at hand. The mantic and conceptual registers can themselves be considered as translations of the descriptive register. That is, these registers move from a literal level to symbolic ones that amplify it, in a modern analogue to Dante's "modi diversi" in his letter to Can Grande della Scala. [3] In a very real sense, Liber Novus was composed through intertextual translation. The book's rhetoric, its manner of address, emerges from this interanimating structure of internal translation or transvaluation. A critical task for any translation of the work, therefore, is conveying this compositional texture intact.

The fact that painted images of an accomplished and hybrid kind illuminate the medieval format of a folio in scribal hand compounds any reflections on the linguistic task. The novel language required a renewed ancient script. A polyphonic style couches itself multimedia fashion within a symbolic throwback-yet-forward movement, medieval and anticipatory, into retrievals of psychic reality. Verbal and visual images press in on Jung from the root past and present while aiming toward the beyond: a layered medium emerges, whose polyphonic style mirrors within its language that same composite layering.

Faced with the task of translating a text composed nearly a hundred years ago, translators usually have the benefit of prior models to consult, as well as decades of scholarly commentary and criticism. Without such exemplars at hand, we were left to imagine how the work might have been translated in previous decades. Consequently, our translation sidesteps several unpublished or hypothetical models for rendering Liber Novus into English. There is Peter Baynes' strikingly archaizing Septem Sermones of 1925, which draws largely upon a Victorian idiom. Or the conceptually rationalizing version that R.F.C. Hull might have attempted had he been allowed to translate it alongside his other volumes in the Bollingen Series of Jung's Collected Works; [4] or the elegant literary rendering from the hand of someone like R. J. Hollingdale. Our version therefore occupies an actual position in a largely virtual sequence. Consideration of these virtual models highlighted questions of how to pitch the language within historical shifts in English prose, how to convey the myriad convergences and divergences between the language of Liber Novus and Jung's Collected Works, and how to render in English a work simultaneously echoing Luther's German and Nietzsche's parody of the same in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Because our version takes this position, accordingly when we have cited Jung's Collected Works we have freshly rendered or discreetly modified the published translations.

Liber Novus was coeval with the literary ferment that Mikhail Bakhtin called the dialogical prose imagination. [5] The Anglo-Welsh writer and artist David Jones, author of In Parenthesis and The Anathemata, referred to the rupture of the First World War, and its effects on the historical sense of writers, artists, and thinkers, simply as "The Break." [6] In concert with other experimental writing from these decades, Liber Novus excavates archaeological layers of literary adventure, with hard-won consciousness as both shovel and precious shard. While Jung actively considered publishing Liber Novus for many years, he chose not to make a name for himself in this literary manner -- as much for style as for content -- by releasing it. By 1921 with Psychological Types he already found that his sanctum could furnish him his main themes, through translation into a scholarly idiom.

Jung enunciates the tension among his three stylistic registers, already addressing a future readership -- which shifts from an inner circle of friends to a wider public between different layers of the text. This is graphically apparent in the frequent pronomial shifts between the versions, which show the manner in which he was constantly reimagining the potential readers of the text. Jung coherently adopted this dialogical stance -- polyphonic in Bakhtin's later terms -- once again mindful of a hypothetical future audience yet also aloof from the question of audience altogether, not from pride but simply in view of the aims to be served. Paintings and fantasies from this private treasury entered anonymously as crypted intertexts into Jung's later work, nestling as hermetic clues to the undisclosed whole of his effort.

Indeed, we can imagine Jung laughing when he wrote of "3. Case Z" in the last section of his essay on "The Psychological Aspects of the Kore" (1941). [7] There he summarizes twelve episodes from encounters with his own soul in Liber Novus, calling them "a dream-series." The comments he appends to these propel the adventurer he had been, and the subject he became in that adventure, into the discourse of a would-be science. The comedy is both spacious and exquisite: this respectful host to the anima also wields the diagnostic pointer in all seriousness. His language flexibly straddled both contexts, but also kept certain veils in place while doing so. This linguistic strategy mirrored Jung's larger aims in remaining fruitfully dual and contextual. Declaring his mysteries to be particular, not to be aped in any way, he nonetheless also offered them as a template of formative spiritual process, and, in so doing, attempted to develop an idiom that could be taken up by others to articulate their experiences.

This is one way of paraphrasing the considerable anomaly of the language that Jung had to find through sleepless nights from 1913 onward. That language shifted its shape, altered its scale, and weighed both megrims and tons. Therefore it comes as no surprise that in his more elevated passages Jung relied on the resonance of the Luther Bible, itself a translation that had achieved rocklike stability within German culture. Ein feste Burg, "a mighty fortress:" thus our own reliance here on the King James Version of the Bible (KJV) for comparable tonalities in English. Yet a paradox rises immediately: what Jung counted on in that resonance had transplanted an alien spirit into the Germanic Heimat or home, as one may likewise say of the KJV's deep embedding of the same implant in Anglo-Saxon culture. Franz Rosenzweig, translating parts of the Old Testament with Martin Buber in the mid-1920s, identified Luther's Bible as the great space-maker within Germanic spirit, precisely through Luther's close-in moves toward his source: "For the comfort of our souls, we must retain such words, must put up with them, and so give the Hebrew some room where it does better than German can." [8] Thus our own practice of not smoothing out Jung's several modes, or making them run more fluently than need be, or even regularizing his punctuation. Think of Dante's "shaggy " diction, or of still another maxim from Luther in Rosenzweig's notes: "The mud will cling to the wheel." [9]

Furthermore, if they are pious Jews and not the whoring people, as the prophets call them, how does it happen that their piety is so concealed that God himself is not aware of it, and they are not aware of it either? For they have, as we said, prayed, cried, and suffered almost fifteen hundred years already, and yet God refuses to listen to them. We know from Scripture that God will hear the prayers or sighing of the righteous, as the Psalter says [Ps. 145:19]: "He fulfills the desire of all who fear him, he also hears their cry." And Psalm 34:17: "When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears." As he promised in Psalm 50:15: "Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you." The same is found in many more verses of the Scripture. If it were not for these, who would or could pray? In brief, he says in the first commandment that he will be their God. Then, how do you explain that he will not listen to these Jews? They must assuredly be the base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth. If there were a single pious Jew among them who observed these, he would have to be heard; for God cannot let his saints pray in vain, as Scripture demonstrates by many examples. This is conclusive evidence that they cannot be pious Jews, but must be the multitude of the whoring and murderous people.

-- On the Jews and Their Lies, by Martin Luther


Yet even these profound allowances for archaic and original speech across abysses of meaning fail to approximate the destabilizing experience, in and through language, to which Jung testifies. His later comments in the published memoir, on his reservations about high-flown style, [10] in effect cover his tracks in Liber Novus. The original experience sent speech into a spin that animates the book's initiatic dimension. Language too undergoes a descent into hell and the realm of the dead, which divests one of speech even as it renews the capacity for utterance.

The following instances give some idea of this factor's range, mapping the stresses in any sincere ventriloquism such as Jung risked by undertaking a controlled seance with himself and his ground, with pen in hand. Holderlin's hair-breadth space warps and Isaiah's tongue-borne burning coal both move in this league, along with Plato on "right frenzy " or divine madness: (1)"My soul spoke to me in a whisper, urgently and alarmingly: 'Words, words, do not make too many words. Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness, and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are all completely mired in madness?'" [11] (2) Jung's soul: "There are hellish webs of words, only words ... Be tentative with words, value them ... for you are the first who gets snared in them. For words have meanings. With words you pull up the underworld. Word, the paltriest and the mightiest. In words the emptiness and the fullness flow together. Hence the word is an image of the God." [12] (3) "But if the word is a symbol, it means everything. When the way enters death and we are surrounded by rot and horror, the way rises in the darkness and leaves the mouth as the saving symbol, the word." [13] (4) The dead woman: "Let me have the word -- oh, that you cannot hear! How difficult -- give me the word!" [14] It then materializes in Jung's hand as HAP, the phallus. (5) Jung's soul: "You possess the word that should not be allowed to remain concealed." [15] (6) Jung: "What is my word? It is the stammering of a minor ... " Soul: "They do not see the fire, they do not believe your words, but they see your mark and unknowingly suspect you to be the messenger of the burning agony ... You stutter, you stammer." [16] In the protocols for his memoir, Jung recalls bringing to the original experiences in Liber Novus only a "highly clumsy speech." [17] Yet one instance (7) strongly belies that later emphasis: "I knew that Philemon had intoxicated me and given me a language that was foreign to me and of a different sensitivity. All of this faded when the God arose and only Philemon kept that language." [18]

This last instance indicates that Jung later attributed the mantic, dithyrambic speech of layer two in everything before the Scrutinies section to Philemon. The literal intoxication described here is linguistic, a dramatized, ventriloquial version of Platonic divine madness. It therefore underscores our attempt to faithfully render the stylistic registers of Liber Novus so as to present a vital aspect of Jung's literary experiment, as he grapples with attempting to find the most fitting idiom in which to cast the transformations of inner experience. Jung's search for the soul, then, stands at one with the search for appropriately dialogical and differentiated language.

These instances in all their oscillations affect a reading of Jung's Collected Works, and counsel caution with applying its conceptual tools to the task of reading and understanding Liber Novus. To take but one example, one begins to see that it is too neat to equate the opposed yet related depths of Logos and Eros with the conceptual and lyrical-mantic registers found in Liber Novus. Jung's "Commentary" on the Elijah-Salome relationship included here shows that relationship to be developmental, a mystery play of "the formative process" that kindles love for the lowest in us. [19] The modal span for language in Liber Novus thus animates that mystery play but does not correspond directly to opposed psychological functions.

This complex respect for language instructs translators of Liber Novus in navigating the underworld/redemptive tensions spanned by its rhetoric. The great force behind the mantic tension in that rhetoric occupied Jung in the brief Epilogue he inscribed in the calligraphic volume in 1959, two years before his death. Once again plying the seas of those illuminated pages, he seems to have found any further summing-up to be unnecessary. Breaking off in midsentence, he left the book to stand on its own, as one strand of discourse within his whole effort. That counterpoint required no comment, any more than did the three registers of language within the book itself. Ordeal was Commedia after all, calling for no retrospective theoretical justification. Liber Novus would survive the gropings and peltings of reception. Jung had remarked in 1957 to Aniela Jaffe that so much rubbish had been said about him, that any more didn't disturb him. [20] That lifted pen therefore confidently consigned the book to its depth trajectory; steeply expanding into the quarry it had become, with both his Collected Works and the lakeside tower at Bollingen as its final extractions.

In this note we have attempted to convey only the general principles that have guided this translation. A full discussion of the choices that confronted us and a justification of the decisions taken would fill a volume as ample as this one.

_______________

Notes:

1. See below, p. 230.

2. See below, p. 230.

3. See the translation and discussion of this letter in Lucia Boldrini, Joyce, Dante, and the Poetics of Literary Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2001). pp. 30-35.

4. On the issue of Hull's translations of Jung, see Shamdasani, Jung Stripped Bare by His Biographers, Even, pp. 47-51.

5. See The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist. tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press. 1981).

6. David Jones, Dai Greatcoat: A Self-Portrait of David Jones in his Letters, ed. Rene Hague (London: Faber & Faber. 1980, pp. 41ff)

7. CW 9, 1.

8. Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Scripture and Translation, tr. Lawrence Rosenwald with Everett Fox (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994). p. 49, citing Luther's Preface to his German Psalter.

9. Ibid., p. 69.

10. See above, p. 214.

11. See below, p. 298.

12. See below, p. 299.

13. See below, p. 310.

14. See below, p. 339.

15. See below, p. 346.

16. See below, p. 346.

17. See below, MP, p. 148.

18. See below, p. 339.

19. See Appendix B.

20. MP, p. 183.

Editorial Note
SONU SHAMDASANI

Liber Novus is an unfinished manuscript corpus, and it is not completely clear how Jung intended to complete it, or how he would have published it, had he decided to do so. We have a series of manuscripts, of which no single version can be taken as final. Consequently, the text could be presented in a variety of ways. This note indicates the editorial rationale behind the present edition.

The following is the sequence of extant manuscripts for Liber Primus and Liber Secundus:

Black Books 2-5 (November 1913-April 1914)
Handwritten Draft (Summer 1914-1915)
Typed Draft (circa 1915)
Corrected Draft (with one layer of changes circa 1915; one layer of changes circa mid-1920s)
Calligraphic Volume (1915-1930, resumed in 1959, left incomplete)
Cary Baynes's transcription (1924-1925)
Yale Manuscript. Liber Primus, minus the prologue (identical with Typed Draft)
Copy-Edited Draft of Liber Primus minus the prologue, with corrections in unknown hands (circa late 1950s; edited version of the Typed Draft)


For Scrutinies, we have:

Black Books 5-6, (April 1914-June 1916)
Calligraphic Septem Sermones (1916)
Printed Septem Sermones (1916)
Handwritten Draft (circa 1917)
Typed Draft (circa 1918)
Cary Baynes's transcription (1925) (27 pages, incomplete)


The arrangement presented here starts with a revision of Cary Baynes's transcription and a fresh transcription of the remaining material in the calligraphic volume together with the Typed Draft of Scrutinies, with line-by-line comparisons with all extant versions. The last thirty pages are completed from the Draft. The main variations between the different manuscripts concern the "second layer" of the text. These changes represent Jung's continued work of comprehending the psychological significance of the fantasies. As Jung considered Liber Novus to be an "attempt at an elaboration in terms of the revelation," the changes between the different versions present this "attempt at an elaboration," and therefore are an important part of the work itself. Thus the notes indicate significant changes between the different versions, and they present material that clarifies the meaning or context of a particular section. Each manuscript layer is important and interesting, and a publication of all of them -- which would run to several thousand pages -- would be a task for the future. [1]

The criterion for including passages from the earlier manuscripts has been simply the question: does this inclusion help the reader comprehend what is taking place? Aside from the intrinsic importance of these changes, noting them in the footnotes serves a second purpose -- it shows how carefully Jung worked at continually revising the text.

The Corrected Draft has two layers of corrections by Jung. The first set of corrections appears to have been done after the Draft was typed and before the transcription into the calligraphic volume, as it appears that it was this manuscript that Jung transcribed. [2] A further set of corrections on approximately 200 pages of the typescript appears to have been made after the calligraphic volume, and I would estimate that these were done sometime in the mid-1920s. These corrections modernize the language, and bring the terminology into relation with Jung's terminology from the period of Psychological Types. Additional clarifications are also added. Jung even corrected material in the Draft that was deleted in the calligraphic volume. I have presented some of the significant changes in the footnotes. From them, it is possible for a reader to see how Jung would have revised the whole text, had he completed this layer of corrections.

Subdivisions have been added in Liber Secundus, chapter 21, "The Magician," and in Scrutinies for ease of reference. These are indicated by numbers in scrolled brackets: { }. Where possible, the date of each fantasy has been given from the Black Books. The second layer added in the draft is indicated by [2], and the manuscript reverts to the sequence of the fantasies in the Black Books at the beginning of the following chapter. In the passages where subdivisions have been added, the reversion to the sequence of the Black Books is indicated by [1].

The various manuscripts have different systems of paragraphing. In the Draft, paragraphs often consist of one or two sentences, and the text is presented like a prose poem. At the other extreme, in the calligraphic volume, there are lengthy passages of text with no paragraph breaks. The most logical paragraphing appears in Cary Baynes's transcription. She frequently took her cue for paragraph breaks from the presence of colored initials. Because it is unlikely that she would have reparagraphed the text without Jung's approval, her layout has formed the point of departure for this edition. In some instances, the paragraphing has been brought closer into line with the Draft and the calligraphic volume. In the second half of her transcription, Cary Baynes transcribed the Draft, because the calligraphic volume had not been completed. Here, I have paragraphed the text in the same manner as established before. I believe that this presents the text in the clearest and easiest-to-follow form.

In the calligraphic volume, Jung illustrated certain initials and wrote some in red and blue, and sometimes increased the font of the text. The layout here attempts to follow these conventions. Because the initials in question aren't always the same in English and German, the choice of which initial to set in red in the English has been governed by its corresponding location in the text. The bolding and increase of font size has been rendered by italics. The remainder of the text beyond that which Jung transcribed in the calligraphic volume has been set following the same conventions, to maintain consistency. In the case of the Septem Sermones, the font coloring has followed Jung's printed version of 1916.

The decision to include Scrutinies in sequence with and as part of Liber Novus is based on the following editorial rationale: The material in the Black Books commences in November 1913. Liber Secundus closes with material from April 19, 1914, and Scrutinies commences with material from the same day. The Black Books run consecutively until July 21, 1914, and recommence on June 3, 1915. In the hiatus, Jung wrote the Handwritten Draft. When Cary Baynes transcribed Liber Novus between 1924 and 1925, the first half of her transcription followed Liber Novus itself to the point reached by Jung in his own transcription into the calligraphic volume. It continues by following the draft, and then proceeds 27 pages into Scrutinies, ending midsentence.

At the end of Liber Secundus, Jung's soul has ascended to Heaven following the reborn God. Jung now thinks that Philemon is a charlatan, and comes to his "I," whom he must live with and educate. Scrutinies continues directly from this point with a confrontation with his "I." The ascent of the reborn God is referred to, and his soul returns and explains why she had disappeared. Philemon reappears, and instructs Jung on how to establish the right relation to his soul, the dead, the Gods, and the daimons. In Scrutinies Philemon fully emerges and takes on the significance that Jung attached to him both in the 1925 seminar and in Memories. Only in Scrutinies do certain episodes in Liber Primus and Liber Secundus become clear. By the same token, the narrative in Scrutinies makes no sense if one has not read Liber Primus and Liber Secundus.

At two places in Scrutinies, Liber Primus and Liber Secundus are mentioned in a way that strongly suggests that they are all part of the same work:

And then the War broke out. This opened my eyes about what I had experienced before and it also gave me the courage to say all that I have written in the earlier part of this book. [3]

Since the God has ascended to the upper realms, Image has also become different. He first appeared to me as a magician who lived in a distant land, but then I felt his nearness and, since the God has ascended, I knew that Image had intoxicated me and given me a language that was foreign to me and of a different sensitivity. All of this faded when the God arose and only Image kept that language. But I felt that he went on other ways than I did. Probably the greater part of what I have written in the earlier part of this book was given to me by [img]http://rapeutation.com/redbookjungsymbol.1a_small.gif/img]. [4]


These references to the "earlier part of this book" suggest that all of this indeed constitutes one book, and that Scrutinies was considered by Jung to be part of Liber Novus.

This view is supported by the number of internal connections between the texts. One example is the fact that the mandalas in Liber Novus are closely connected to the experience of the self and the realization of its centrality depicted only in Scrutinies. Another example occurs in Liber Secundus, chapter 15; when Ezechiel and his fellow Anabaptists arrive, they tell Jung that they are going to Jerusalem's holy places because they are not at peace, not having fully finished with life. In Scrutinies, the dead reappear, telling Jung that they have been to Jerusalem, but did not find what they sought there. At that point, Philemon appears and the Septem Sermones begin. Perhaps Jung intended to transcribe Scrutinies into the calligraphic volume and illustrate it; there are ample blank pages.

On January 8, 1958, Cary Baynes asked Jung: "Do you remember that you had me copy quite a bit of the Red Book itself while you were in Africa? I got as far as the beginning of the Prufungen [Scrutinies]. This goes beyond what Frau Jaffe put at K. W's [Kurt Wolff] disposal and he would like to read it. Is that OK?" [5] Jung replied on January 24, "I have no objections against your lending your notes of the 'Red Book' to Mr. Wolff." [6] Here Cary Baynes, too, seems to have regarded Scrutinies as part of Liber Novus.

In citations in the notes, ellipses have been indicated by three periods. No emphases have been added.
_______________

Notes:

1. Interested readers may compare this edition with the sections from the Draft in the Kurt Wolff papers at Yale University and with Cary Baynes's transcription at the Contemporary Medical Archives at the Wellcome Collection, London. It is quite possible that other manuscripts may yet come to light.

2. There are also some paint marks on this manuscript.

3. See below, p. 336.

4. See below, p. 339.

5. JA.

6. JA.

Liber Primus

[fo1. i(r)] [1]

Prologue: The Way of What is to Come

Isaias dixit: quis credidit auditui nostro et brachium Domini cui revelatum est? et ascendet sicut virgultum coram eo et sicut radix de terra sitienti non est species ei neque decor et vidimus eum et non erat aspectus et desideravimus eum: despectum et novissimum virorum Virum dolor [os] um et scientem infirmitatem et quasi absconditus vultus eius et despectus unde nec reputavimus eum. vere languores nostros ipse tulit et dolores nostros ipse portavit et nos putavimus eum quasi leprosum et percussum a Deo et humiliatum. Cap. liii/i-iv.

parvulus enim natus est nobis filius datus est nobis et factus est principatus super umerum eius et vocabitur nomen eius Admirabilis consiliarius Deus fortis Pater futuri saeculi princeps pacis. caput ix/vi.

[Isaiah said: Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. (Isaiah 53: 1-4)] [2]

[For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. (Isaiah 9:6)] [3]

Ioannes dixit: et verbum caro factum est et habitavit in nobis et vidimus gloriam eius gloriam quasi unigeniti a Patre plenum gratiae et veritatis. Ioann. Cap. i/xiiii.

[John said: And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth. (John 1:14).]

Isaias dixit: laetabitur deserta et invia et exultabit solitudo et fforebit quasi lilium. germinans germinabit et exultabit laetabunda et laudans. tunc aperientur oculi caecorum et aures sordorum patebunt. tunc saliet sicut cervus claudus aperta erit lingua mutorum: quia scissae sunt in deserto aquae et torrentes in solitudine et quae erat arida erit in stagnum et sitiens in fontes aquarum. in cubilibus in quibus prius dracones habitabant orietur viror calami et iunci. et erit ibi semita et via sancta vocabitur. non transibit per eam pollutus et haec erit vobis directa via ita ut stulti non errent per eam. Cap. xxxv.

[Isaiah said: The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing ... Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert. And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water: in the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes. And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called The way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it; but it shall be for those: the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein. (Isaiah 35:1-8).] [4]

manu propria scriptum a C. G. Jung anno Domini mcmxv in domu sua Kusnach Turicense

[Written by C. G. Jung with his own hand in his house in Kusnacht/Zurich in the year 1915.]

/ [fol. i(r) / i(v)] [HI i(v)] [2] If I speak in the spirit of this time, [5] I must say: no one and nothing can justify what I must proclaim to you. Justification is superfluous to me, since I have no choice, but I must. I have learned that in addition to the spirit of this time there is still another spirit at work, namely that which rules the depths of everything contemporary. [6] The spirit of this time would like to hear of use and value. I also thought this way, and my humanity still thinks this way. But that other spirit forces me nevertheless to speak, beyond justification, use, and meaning. Filled with human pride and blinded by the presumptuous spirit of the times, I long sought to hold that other spirit away from me. But I did not consider that the spirit of the depths from time immemorial and for all the future possesses a greater power than the spirit of this time, who changes with the generations. The spirit of the depths has subjugated all pride and arrogance to the power of judgment. He took away my belief in science, he robbed me of the joy of explaining and ordering things, and he let devotion to the ideals of this time die out in me. He forced me down to the last and simplest things.

The spirit of the depths took my understanding and all my knowledge and placed them at the service of the inexplicable and the paradoxical. He robbed me of speech and writing for everything that was not in his service, namely the melting together of sense and nonsense, which produces the supreme meaning.

But the supreme meaning is the path, the way and the bridge to what is to come. That is the God yet to come. It is not the coming God himself, but his image which appears in the supreme meaning. [7] God is an image, and those who worship him must worship him in the images of the supreme meaning.

The supreme meaning is not a meaning and not an absurdity, it is image and force in one, magnificence and force together.

The supreme meaning is the beginning and the end. It is the bridge of going across and fulfillment. [8]

The other Gods died of their temporality, yet the supreme meaning never dies, it turns into meaning and then into absurdity, and out of the fire and blood of their collision the supreme meaning rises up rejuvenated anew.

The image of God has a shadow. The supreme meaning is real and casts a shadow. For what can be actual and corporeal and have no shadow?

The shadow is nonsense. It lacks force and has no continued existence through itself. But nonsense is the inseparable and undying brother of the supreme meaning.

Like plants, so men also grow, some in the light, others in the shadows. There are many who need the shadows and not the light.

The image of God throws a shadow that is just as great as itself.

The supreme meaning is great and small, it is as wide as the space of the starry Heaven and as narrow as the cell of the living body.

The spirit of this time in me wanted to recognize the greatness and extent of the supreme meaning, but not its littleness. The spirit of the depths, however, conquered this arrogance, and I had to swallow the small as a means of healing the immortal in me. It completely burnt up my innards since it was inglorious and unheroic. It was even ridiculous and revolting. But the pliers of the spirit of the depths held me, and I had to drink the bitterest of all draughts. [9]

The spirit of this time tempted me with the thought that all this belongs to the shadowiness of the God-image. This would be pernicious deception, since the shadow is nonsense. But the small, narrow, and banal is not nonsense, but one of both of the essences of the Godhead.

I resisted recognizing that the everyday belongs to the image of the Godhead. I fled this thought, I hid myself behind the highest and coldest stars.

But the spirit of the depths caught up with me, and forced the bitter drink between my lips. [10]

The spirit of this time whispered to me: "This supreme meaning, this image of God, this melting together of the hot and the cold, that is you and only you." But the spirit of the depths spoke to me: "[11] You are an image of the unending world, all the last mysteries of becoming and passing away live in you. If you did not possess all this, how could you know?"

For the sake of my human weakness, the spirit of the depths gave me this word. Yet this word is also superfluous, since I do not speak it freely, but because I must. I speak because the spirit robs me of joy and life if I do not speak. [12] I am the serf who brings it and does not know what he carries in his hand. It would burn his hands if he did not place it where his master orders him to lay it.

The spirit of our time spoke to me and said: "What dire urgency could be forcing you to speak all this?" This was an awful temptation. I wanted to ponder what inner or outer bind could force me into this, and because I found nothing that I could grasp, I was near to making one up. But with this the spirit of our time had almost brought it about that instead of speaking, I was thinking again about reasons and explanations. But the spirit of the depths spoke to me and said: "To understand a thing is a bridge and possibility of returning to the path. But to explain a matter is arbitrary and sometimes even murder. Have you counted the murderers among the scholars?"

But the spirit of this time stepped up to me and laid before me huge volumes which contained all my knowledge. Their pages were made of ore, and a steel stylus had engraved inexorable words in them, and he pointed to these inexorable words and spoke to me, and said: "What you speak, that is madness."

It is true, it is true, what I speak is the greatness and intoxication and ugliness of madness.

But the spirit of the depths stepped up to me and said: "What you speak is. The greatness is, the intoxication is, the undignified, sick, paltry dailiness is. It runs in all the streets, lives in all the houses, and rules the day of all humanity. Even the eternal stars are commonplace. It is the great mistress and the one essence of God. One laughs about it, and laughter, too, is. Do you believe, man of this time, that laughter is lower than worship? Where is your measure, false measurer? [13] The sum of life decides in laughter and in worship, not your judgment."

I must also speak the ridiculous. You coming men! You will recognize the supreme meaning by the fact that he is laughter and worship, a bloody laughter and a bloody worship. A sacrificial blood binds the poles. Those who know this laugh and worship in the same breath.

After this, however, my humanity approached me and said: "What solitude, what coldness of desolation you lay upon me when you speak such! Reflect on the destruction of being and the streams of blood from the terrible sacrifice that the depths demand." [14]

But the spirit of the depths said: "No one can or should halt sacrifice. Sacrifice is not destruction, sacrifice is the foundation stone of what is to come. Have you not had monasteries? Have not countless thousands gone into the desert? You should carry the monastery in yourself. The desert is within you. The desert calls you and draws you back, and if you were fettered to the world of this time with iron, the call of the desert would break all chains. Truly, I prepare you for solitude."

After this, my humanity remained silent. Something happened to my spirit, however, which I must call mercy.

My speech is imperfect. Not because I want to shine with words, but out of the impossibility of finding those words, I speak in images. With nothing else can I express the words from the depths.

The mercy which happened to me gave me belief, hope, and sufficient daring, not to resist further the spirit of the depths, but to utter his word. But before I could pull myself together to really do it, I needed a visible sign that would show me that the spirit of the depths in me was at the same time the ruler of the depths of world affairs.

[15] It happened in October of the year 1913 as I was leaving alone for a journey, that during the day I was suddenly overcome in broad daylight by a vision: I saw a terrible flood that covered all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. It reached from England up to Russia, and from the coast of the North Sea right up to the Alps. I saw yellow waves, swimming rubble, and the death of countless thousands.

This vision lasted for two hours, it confused me and made me ill. I was not able to interpret it. Two weeks passed then the vision returned, still more violent than before, and an inner voice spoke: "Look at it, it is completely real, and it will come to pass. You cannot doubt this." I wrestled again for two hours with this vision, but it held me fast. It left me exhausted and confused. And I thought my mind had gone crazy. [16]

From then on the anxiety toward the terrible event that stood directly before us kept coming back. Once I also saw a sea of blood over the northern lands.

In the year 1914 in the month of June, at the beginning and end of the month, and at the beginning of July, I had the same dream three times: I was in a foreign land, and suddenly, overnight and right in the middle of summer, a terrible cold descended from space. All seas and rivers were locked in ice, every green living thing had frozen.

The second dream was thoroughly similar to this. But the third dream at the beginning of July went as follows:

I was in a remote English land. [17] It was necessary that I return to my homeland with a fast ship as speedily as possible. [18] I reached home quickly. [19] In my homeland I found that in the middle of summer a terrible cold had fallen from space, which had turned every living thing into ice. There stood a leaf-bearing but fruitless tree, whose leaves had turned into sweet grapes full of healing juice through the working of the frost. [20] I picked some grapes and gave them to a great waiting throng. [21]

In reality, now, it was so: At the time when the great war broke out between the peoples of Europe, I found myself in Scotland, [22] compelled by the war to choose the fastest ship and the shortest route home. I encountered the colossal cold that froze everything, I met up with the flood, the sea of blood, and found my barren tree whose leaves the frost had transformed into a remedy. And I plucked the ripe fruit and gave it to you and I do not know what I poured out for you, what bitter-sweet intoxicating drink which left on your tongues an aftertaste of blood.

Mussolini's transformation away from Marxism into what eventually became fascism began prior to World War I, as Mussolini had grown increasingly pessimistic about Marxism and egalitarianism while becoming increasingly supportive of figures who opposed egalitarianism, such as Friedrich Nietzsche. By 1902, Mussolini was studying Georges Sorel, Nietzsche, and Vilfredo Pareto. Sorel's emphasis on the need for overthrowing decadent liberal democracy and capitalism by the use of violence, direct action, general strikes and neo-Machiavellian appeals to emotion impressed Mussolini deeply. His use of Nietzsche made him a highly unorthodox socialist, due to Nietzsche's promotion of elitism and anti-egalitarian views. Prior to World War I, Mussolini's writings over time indicated that he had abandoned the Marxism and egalitarianism that he had previously supported, in favour of Nietzsche's übermensch concept and anti-egalitarianism. In 1908, Mussolini wrote a short essay called "Philosophy of Strength" based on his Nietzschean influence, in which Mussolini openly spoke fondly of the ramifications of an impending war in Europe in challenging both religion and nihilism: "a new kind of free spirit will come, strengthened by the war, ... a spirit equipped with a kind of sublime perversity, ... a new free spirit will triumph over God and over Nothing."

-- Fascism, by Wikipedia


"Have you heard about it?"

I had heard nothing. Demian squeezed my arm and turned his face toward me, with a strangely somber yet sympathetic look in his eyes.

"Yes, it's starting. You've heard about the difficulties with Russia."

"What? Is it war?"

He spoke very softly although no one was anywhere near us. "It hasn't been declared yet. But there will be war. You can take my word for that. I didn't want to worry you but I have seen omens on three different occasions since that time. So it won't be the end of the world, no earthquake, no revolution, but war. You'll see what a sensation that will be! People will love it. Even now they can hardly wait for the killing to begin -- their lives are that dull! But you will see, Sinclair, that this is only the beginning. Perhaps it will be a very big war, a war on a gigantic scale. But that, too, will only be the beginning. The new world has begun and the new world will be terrible for those clinging to the old. What will you do?"

-- Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth, by Hermann Hesse


Believe me: [23] It is no teaching and no instruction that I give you. On what basis should I presume to teach you? I give you news of the way of this man, but not of your own way. My path is not your path, therefore I / [fol. i(v) / ii(r)] cannot teach you. [24] The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws. Within us is the way, the truth, and the life.

Woe betide those who live by way of examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself? So live yourselves. [25]

The signposts have fallen, unblazed trails lie before us. [26] Do not be greedy to gobble up the fruits of foreign fields. Do you not know that you yourselves are the fertile acre which bears everything that avails you?

Yet who today knows this? Who knows the way to the eternally fruitful climes of the soul? You seek the way through mere appearances, you study books and give ear to all kinds of opinion. What good is all that?

There is only one way and that is your way. [27]

You seek the path? I warn you away from my own. It can also be the wrong way for you.

May each go his own way.

I will be no savior, no lawgiver, no master teacher unto you. You are no longer little children. [28]

Giving laws, wanting improvements, making things easier, has all become wrong and evil. May each one seek out his own way. The way leads to mutual love in community. Men will come to see and feel the similarity and commonality of their ways.

Laws and teachings held in common compel people to solitude, so that they may escape the pressure of undesirable contact, but solitude makes people hostile and venomous.

Therefore give people dignity and let each of them stand apart, so that each may find his own fellowship and love it.

Power stands against power, contempt against contempt, love against love. Give humanity dignity, and trust that life will find the better way.

The one eye of the Godhead is blind, the one ear of the Godhead is deaf, the order of its being is crossed by chaos. So be patient with the crippledness of the world and do not overvalue its consummate beauty. [29]
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Re: The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung

Postby admin » Sun Dec 01, 2013 1:51 am

Chapter 1: Refinding the Soul

[HI ii(r)] [30]
Cap i. [31]

[2] When I had the vision of the flood in October of the year 1913, it happened at a time that was significant for me as a man. At that time, in the fortieth year of my life, I had achieved everything that I had wished for myself. I had achieved honor, power, wealth, knowledge, and every human happiness. Then my desire for the increase of these trappings ceased, the desire ebbed from me and horror came over me. [32] The vision of the flood seized me and I felt the spirit of the depths, but I did not understand him. [33] Yet he drove me on with unbearable inner longing and I said:

[1] [34] "My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you -- are you there? I have returned, I am here again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you, I am with you. After long years of long wandering, I have come to you again. Should I tell you everything I have seen, experienced, and drunk in? Or do you not want to hear about all the noise of life and the world? But one thing you must know: the one thing I have learned is that one must live this life.

This life is the way, the long sought-after way to the unfathomable, which we call divine. [35] There is no other way, all other ways are false paths. I found the right way, it led me to you, to my soul. I return, tempered and purified. Do you still know me? How long the separation lasted! Everything has become so different. And how did I find you? How strange my journey was! What words should I use to tell you on what twisted paths a good star has guided me to you? Give me your hand, my almost forgotten soul. How warm the joy at seeing you again, you long disavowed soul. Life has led me back to you. Let us thank the life I have lived for all the happy and all the sad hours, for every joy, for every sadness. My soul, my journey should continue with you. I will wander with you and ascend to my solitude." [36]

[2] The spirit of the depths forced me to say this and at the same time to undergo it against myself, since I had not expected it then. I still labored misguidedly under the spirit of this time, and thought differently about the human soul. I thought and spoke much of the soul. I knew many learned words for her, I had judged her and turned her into a scientific object. [37] I did not consider that my soul cannot be the object of my judgment and knowledge; much more are my judgment and knowledge the objects of my soul. [38] Therefore the spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being. I had to become aware that I had lost my soul.

From this we learn how the spirit of the depths considers the soul: he sees her as a living and self-existing being, and with this he contradicts the spirit of this time for whom the soul is a thing dependent on man, which lets herself be judged and arranged, and whose circumference we can grasp. I had to accept that what I had previously called my soul was not at all my soul, but a dead system. [39] Hence I had to speak to my soul as to something far off and unknown, which did not exist through me, but through whom I existed.

He whose desire turns away from outer things, reaches the place of the soul. [40] If he does not find the soul, the horror of emptiness will overcome him, and fear will drive him with a whip lashing time and again in a desperate endeavor and a blind desire for the hollow things of the world. He becomes a fool through his endless desire, and forgets the way of his soul, never to find her again. He will run after all things, and will seize hold of them, but he will not find his soul, since he would find her only in himself. Truly his soul lies in things and men, but the blind one seizes things and men, yet not his soul in things and men. He has no knowledge of his soul. How could he tell her apart from things and men? He could find his soul in desire itself, but not in the objects of desire. If he possessed his desire, and his desire did not possess him, he would lay a hand on his soul, since his desire is the image and expression of his soul. [41]

If we possess the image of a thing, we possess half the thing.

The image of the world is half the world. He who possesses the world but not its image possesses only half the world, since his soul is poor and has nothing. The wealth of the soul exists in images. [42] He who possesses the image of the world, possesses half the world, even if his humanity is poor and owns nothing. [43] But hunger makes the soul into a beast that devours the unbearable and is poisoned by it. My friends, it is wise to nourish the soul, otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart. [44]
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Re: The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung

Postby admin » Sun Dec 01, 2013 1:52 am

Chapter 2: Soul and God

[HI ii(r)2] [45]
Cap. ii.

On the second night I called out to my soul: [46]

"I am weary, my soul, my wandering has lasted too long, my search for myself outside of myself. Now I have gone through events and find you behind all of them. For I made discoveries on my erring through events, humanity, and the world. I found men. And you, my soul, I found again, first in images within men and then you yourself. I found you where I least expected you. You climbed out of a dark shaft. You announced yourself to me in advance in dreams. [47] They burned in my heart and drove me to all the boldest acts of daring, and forced me to rise above myself. You let me see truths of which I had no previous inkling. You let me undertake journeys, whose endless length would have scared me, if the knowledge of them had not been secure in you.

I wandered for many years, so long that I forgot that I possessed a soul. [48] Where were you all this time? Which Beyond sheltered you and gave you sanctuary? Oh, that you must speak through me, that my speech and I are your symbol and expression! How should I decipher you?

Who are you, child? My dreams have represented you as a child and as a maiden. [49] I am ignorant of your mystery. [50] Forgive me if I speak as in a dream, like a drunkard -- are you God? Is God a child, a maiden? [51] Forgive me if I babble. No one else hears me. I speak to you quietly, and you know that I am neither a drunkard nor someone deranged, and that my heart twists in pain from the wound, whose darkness delivers speeches full of mockery: "You are lying to yourself! You spoke so as to deceive others and make them believe in you. You want to be a prophet and chase after your ambition." The wound still bleeds, and I am far from being able to pretend that I do not hear the mockery.

How strange it sounds to me to call you a child, you who still hold the all-without-end in your hand. [52] I went on the way of the day, and you went invisibly with me, putting the pieces together meaningfully, and letting me see the whole in each part.

You took away where I thought to take hold, and you gave me where I did not expect anything and time and again you brought about fate from new and unexpected quarters. Where I sowed, you robbed me of the harvest, and where I did not sow, you give me fruit a hundredfold. And time and again I lost the path and found it again where I would never have foreseen it. You upheld my belief, when I was alone and near despair. At every decisive moment you let me believe in myself."

***

[2] Like a tired wanderer who had sought nothing in the world apart from her, shall I come closer to my soul. I shall learn that my soul finally lies behind everything, and if I cross the world, I am ultimately doing this to find my soul. Even the dearest are themselves not the goal and end of the love that goes on seeking, they are symbols of their own souls.

My friends, do you guess to what solitude we ascend?

I must learn that the dregs of my thought, my dreams, are the speech of my soul. I must carry them in my heart, and go back and forth over them in my mind, like the words of the person dearest to me. Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. Why should I henceforth not love my dreams and not make their riddling images into objects of my daily consideration? You think that the dream is foolish and ungainly. What is beautiful? What is ungainly? What is clever? What is foolish? The spirit of this time is your measure, but the spirit of the depths surpasses it at both ends. Only the spirit of this time knows the difference between large and small. But this difference is invalid, like the spirit which recognizes it. / [fol. ii(r) / ii(v)]

***

The spirit of the depths even taught me to consider my action and my decision as dependent on dreams. Dreams pave the way for life, and they determine you without you understanding their language. [53] One would like to learn this language, but who can teach and learn it? Scholarliness alone is not enough; there is a knowledge of the heart that gives deeper insight. [54] The knowledge of the heart is in no book and is not to be found in the mouth of any teacher, but grows out of you like the green seed from the dark earth. Scholarliness belongs to the spirit of this time, but this spirit in no way grasps the dream, since the soul is everywhere that scholarly knowledge is not.

But how can I attain the knowledge of the heart? You can attain this knowledge only by living your life to the full. You live your life fully if you also live what you have never yet lived, but have left for others to live or to think. [55] You will say: "But I cannot live or think everything that others live or think." But you should say: "The life that I could still live, I should live, and the thoughts that I could still think, I should think." It appears as though you want to flee from yourself so as not to have to live what remains unlived until now. [56] But you cannot flee from yourself. It is with you all the time and demands fulfillment. If you pretend to be blind and dumb to this demand, you feign being blind and deaf to yourself. This way you will never reach the knowledge of the heart.

The knowledge of your heart is how your heart is.

From a cunning heart you will know cunning.

From a good heart you will know goodness.

So that your understanding becomes perfect, consider that your heart is both good and evil. You ask, "What? Should I also live evil?"

The spirit of the depths demands: "The life that you could still live, you should live. Well-being decides, not your well-being, not the well-being of the others, but only well-being."

Well-being is between me and others, in society. I, too, lived -- which I had not done before, and which I could still do. I lived into the depths, and the depths began to speak. The depths taught me the other truth. It thus united sense and nonsense in me.

I had to recognize that I am only the expression and symbol of the soul. In the sense of the spirit of the depths, I am as I am in this visible world a symbol of my soul, and I am thoroughly a serf, completely subjugated, utterly obedient. The spirit of the depths taught me to say: "I am the servant of a child." Through this dictum I learn above all the most extreme humility, as what I most need.

The spirit of this time of course allowed me to believe in my reason. He let me see myself in the image of a leader with ripe thoughts. But the spirit of the depths teaches me that I am a servant, in fact the servant of a child. This dictum was repugnant to me and I hated it. But I had to recognize and accept that my soul is a child and that my God in my soul is a child. [57]

If you are boys, your God is a woman.
If you are women, your God is a boy.
If you are men, your God is a maiden.
The God is where you are not.
So: it is wise that one has a God; this serves for your perfection.
A maiden is the pregnant future.
A boy is the engendering future.
A woman is: having given birth.
A man is: having engendered.
So: if you are childlike beings now, your God will descend from the height of ripeness to age and death.
But if you are developed beings, having engendered or given birth, in body or in soul, so your God rises from the radiant cradle, to the incalculable height of the future, to the maturity and fullness of the coming time.
He who still has his life before him is a child.
He who lives life in the present is developed.
If you thus live all that you can live, you are developed.
He who is a child in this time, his God dies.
He who is developed in this time, his God continues to live.
The spirit of the depths teaches this mystery.
Prosperous and woeful are those whose God is developed!
Prosperous and woeful are those whose God is a child!
What is better, that man has life ahead of him, or that God does?
I know no answer. Live; the unavoidable decides.
The spirit of the depths taught me that my life is encompassed by the divine child. [58] From his hand everything unexpected came to me, everything living.
This child is what I feel as an eternally springing youth in me. [59]
In childish men you feel the hopeless transience. All that you saw passing is yet to come for him. His future is full of transience.
But the transience of the things coming toward you has never yet experienced a human meaning.
Your continuing to live is a living onward. You engender and give birth to what is to come, you are fecund, you live onward.
The childish is unfruitful, what is to come to him is what already has been engendered and already withered. It does not live onward. [60]


My God is a child, so wonder not that the spirit of this time in me is incensed to mockery and scorn. There will be no one who will laugh at me as I laughed at myself.

Your God should not be a man of mockery, rather you yourself will be the man of mockery. You should mock yourself and rise above this. If you have still not learned this from the old holy books, then go there, drink the blood and eat the flesh of him who was mocked [61] and tormented for the sake of our sins, so that you totally become his nature, deny his being-apart-from-you; you should be he himself, not Christians but Christ, otherwise you will be of no use to the coming God.

Is there any one among you who believes he can be spared the way? Can he swindle his way past the pain of Christ? I say: "Such a one deceives himself to his own detriment. He beds down on thorns and fire. No one can be spared the way of Christ, since this way leads to what is to come. You should all become Christs. [62]

You do not overcome the old teaching through doing less, but through doing more. Every step closer to my soul excites the scornful laughter of my devils, those cowardly ear-whisperers and poison-mixers. It was easy for them to laugh, since I had to do strange things.
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Re: The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung

Postby admin » Sun Dec 01, 2013 1:53 am

Chapter 3: On the Service of the Soul

[HI ii(v)]
Cap. iii.

[63] On the following night I had to write down all the dreams that I could recollect, true to their wording. [64] The meaning of this act was dark to me. Why all this? Forgive the fuss that rises in me. Yet you want me to do this. What strange things are happening to me? I know too much not to see on what swaying bridges I go. Where are you leading me? Forgive my excessive apprehension, brimful of knowledge. My foot hesitates to follow you. Into what mist and darkness does your path lead? Must I also learn to do without meaning? If this is what you demand, then so be it. This hour belongs to you. What is there, where there is no meaning? Only nonsense, or madness, it seems to me. Is there also a supreme meaning? Is that your meaning, my soul? I limp after you on crutches of understanding. I am a man and you stride like a God. What torture! I must return to myself, to my smallest things. I saw the things of my soul as small, pitiably small. You force me to see them as large, to make them large. Is that your aim? I follow, but it terrifies me. Hear my doubts, otherwise I cannot follow, since your meaning is a supreme meaning, and your steps are the steps of a God.

I understand, I must not think either; should thought, too, no longer be? I should give myself completely into your hands -- but who are you? I do not trust you. Not once to trust, is that my love for you, my joy in you? Do I not trust every valiant man, and not you, my soul? Your hand lies heavy on me, but I will, I will. Have I not sought to love men and trust them, and should I not do this with you? Forget my doubts, I know it is ignoble to doubt you. You know how difficult it is for me to set aside the beggar's pride I take in my own thought. I forgot that you are also one of my friends, and have the first right to my trust. Should what I give them not belong to you? I recognize my injustice. It seems to me that I despised you. My joy at finding you again was not genuine. I also recognize that the scornful laughter in me was right.

I must learn to love you. [65] Should I also set aside self-judgment? I am afraid. Then the soul spoke to me and said: "This fear testifies against me!" It is true, it testifies against you. It kills the holy trust between you and me.

[2] How hard is fate! If you take a step toward your soul, you will at first miss the meaning. You will believe that you have sunk into meaninglessness, into eternal disorder. You will be right! Nothing will deliver you from disorder and meaninglessness, since this is the other half of the world.

Your God is a child, so long as you are not childlike. Is the child order, meaning? Or disorder, caprice? Disorder and meaninglessness are the mother of order and meaning. Order and meaning are things that have become and are no longer becoming.

You open the gates of the soul to let the dark flood of chaos flow into your order and meaning. If you marry the ordered to the chaos you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness.

You are afraid to open the door? I too was afraid, since we had forgotten that God is terrible. Christ taught: God is love. [66] But you should know that love is also terrible.

I spoke to a loving soul and as I drew nearer to her, I was overcome by horror, and I heaped up a wall of doubt, and did not anticipate that I thus wanted to protect myself from my fearful soul.

You dread the depths; it should horrify you, since the way of what is to come leads through it. You must endure the temptation of fear and doubt, and at the same time acknowledge to the bone that your fear is justified and your doubt is reasonable. How otherwise / [fol. ii(v) / iii(r)] could it be a true temptation and a true overcoming?

Christ totally overcomes the temptation of the devil, but not the temptation of God to good and reason. [67] Christ thus succumbs to cursing. [68]

You still have to learn this, to succumb to no temptation, but to do everything of your own will; then you will be free and beyond Christianity.

I have had to recognize that I must submit to what I fear; yes, even more, that I must even love what horrifies me. We must learn such from that saint who was disgusted by the plague infections; she drank the pus of plague boils and became aware that it smelled like roses. The acts of the saint were not in vain. [69]

In everything regarding your salvation and the attainment of mercy, you are dependent on your soul. Thus no sacrifice can be too great for you. If your virtues hinder you from salvation, discard them, since they have become evil to you. The slave to virtue finds the way as little as the slave to vices. [70]

If you believe that you are the master of your soul, then become her servant. If you were her servant, make yourself her master, since she needs to be ruled. These should be your first steps.

***

During six further nights, the spirit of the depths was silent in me, since I swayed between fear, defiance, and nausea, and was wholly the prey of my passion. I could not and did not want to listen to the depths. But on the seventh night, the spirit of the depths spoke to me: "Look into your depths, pray to your depths, waken the dead." [71]

But I stood helpless and did not know what I could do. I looked into myself, and the only thing I found within was the memory of earlier dreams, all of which I wrote down without knowing what good this would do. I wanted to throw everything away and return to the light of day. But the spirit stopped me and forced me back into myself.
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Re: The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung

Postby admin » Sun Dec 01, 2013 1:54 am

Chapter 4: The Desert

[HI iii (r)]
Cap. iv.

[72] Sixth night. My soul leads me into the desert, into the desert of my own self. I did not think that my soul is a desert, a barren, hot desert, dusty and without drink. The journey leads through hot sand, slowly wading without a visible goal to hope for? How eerie is this wasteland. It seems to me that the way leads so far away from mankind. I take my way step by step, and do not know how long my journey will last.

Why is my self a desert? Have I lived too much outside of myself in men and events? Why did I avoid my self? Was I not dear to myself? But I have avoided the place of my soul. I was my thoughts, after I was no longer events and other men. But I was not my self, confronted with my thoughts. I should also rise up above my thoughts to my own self. My journey goes there, and that is why it leads away from men and events into solitude. Is it solitude, to be with oneself? Solitude is true only when the self is a desert. [73] Should I also make a garden out of the desert? Should I people a desolate land? Should I open the airy magic garden of the wilderness? What leads me into the desert, and what am I to do there? Is it a deception that I can no longer trust my thoughts? Only life is true, and only life leads me into the desert, truly not my thinking, that would like to return to thoughts, to men and events, since it feels uncanny in the desert. My soul, what am I to do here? But my soul spoke to me and said, "Wait." I heard the cruel word. Torment belongs to the desert. [74]

Through giving my soul all I could give, I came to the place of the soul and found that this place was a hot desert, desolate and unfruitful. No culture of the mind is enough to make a garden out of your soul. I had cultivated my spirit, the spirit of this time in me, but not that spirit of the depths that turns to the things of the soul, the world of the soul. The soul has its own peculiar world. Only the self enters in there, or the man who has completely become his self, he who is neither in events, nor in men, nor in his thoughts. Through the turning of my desire from things and men, I turned my self away from things and men, but that is precisely how I became the secure prey of my thoughts, yes, I wholly became my thoughts.

***

[2] I also had to detach myself from my thoughts through turning my desire away from them. And at once, I noticed that my self became a desert, where only the sun of unquiet desire burned. I was overwhelmed by the endless infertility of this desert. Even if something could have thrived there, the creative power of desire was still absent. Wherever the creative power of desire is, there springs the soil's own seed. But do not forget to wait. Did you not see that when your creative force turned to the world, how the dead things moved under it and through it, how they grew and prospered, and how your thoughts flowed in rich rivers? If your creative force now turns to the place of the soul, you will see how your soul becomes green and how its field bears wonderful fruit.

Nobody can spare themselves the waiting and most will be unable to bear this torment, but will throw themselves with greed back at men, things, and thoughts, whose slaves they will become from then on. Since then it will have been clearly proved that this man is incapable of enduring beyond things, men, and thoughts, and they will hence become his master and he will become their fool, since he cannot be without them, not until even his soul has become a fruitful field. Also he whose soul is a garden, needs things, men, and thoughts, but he is their friend and not their slave and fool.

Everything to come was already in images: to find their soul, the ancients went into the desert. [75] This is an image. The ancients lived their symbols, since the world had not yet become real for them. Thus they went into the solitude of the desert to teach us that the place of the soul is a lonely desert. There they found the abundance of visions, the fruits of the desert, the wondrous flowers of the soul. Think diligently about the images that the ancients have left behind. They show the way of what is to come. Look back at the collapse of empires, of growth and death, of the desert and monasteries, they are the images of what is to come. Everything has been foretold. But who knows how to interpret it?

When you say that the place of the soul is not, then it is not. But if you say that it is, then it is. Notice what the ancients said in images: the word is a creative act. The ancients said: in the beginning was the Word. [76] Consider this and think upon it.

The words that oscillate between nonsense and supreme meaning are the oldest and truest.
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Re: The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung

Postby admin » Sun Dec 01, 2013 1:54 am

Chapter 4A: Experiences in the Desert

[HI iii(r) 2]

[77] After a hard struggle I have come a piece of the way nearer to you. How hard this struggle was! I had fallen into an undergrowth of doubt, confusion, and scorn. I recognize that I must be alone with my soul. I come with empty hands to you, my soul. What do you want to hear? But my soul spoke to me and said, "If you come to a friend, do you come to take?" I knew that this should not be so, but it seems to me that I am poor and empty. I would like to sit down near you and at least feel the breath of your animating presence. My way is hot sand. All day long, sandy, dusty paths. My patience is sometimes weak and once I despaired of myself, as you know.

My soul answered and said, "You speak to me as if you were a child complaining to its mother. I am not your mother." I do not want to complain, but let me say to you that mine is a long and dusty road. You are to me like a shady tree in the wilderness. I would like to enjoy your shade. But my soul answered, "You are pleasure-seeking. Where is your patience? Your time has not yet run its course. Have you forgotten why you went into the desert?"

My faith is weak my face is blind from all that shimmering blaze of the desert sun. The heat lies on me like lead. Thirst torments me, I dare not think how unendingly long my way is, and above all, I see nothing in front of me. But the soul answered, "You speak as if you have still learned nothing. Can you not wait? Should everything fall into your lap ripe and finished? You are full, yes, you teem with intentions and desirousness! -- Do you still not know that the way to truth stands open only to those without intentions?"

I know that everything you say, Oh my soul, is also my thought. But I hardly live according to it. The soul said, "How, tell me, do you then believe that your thoughts should help you?" I would always like to refer to the fact that I am a human being, just a human being who is weak and sometimes does not do his best. But the soul said, "Is this what you think it means to be human?" You are hard, my soul, but you are right. How little we still commit ourselves to living. We should grow like a tree that likewise does not know its law. We tie ourselves up with intentions, not mindful of the fact that intention is the limitation, yes, the exclusion of life. We believe that we can illuminate the darkness with an intention, and in that way aim past the light. [78] How can we presume to want to know in advance, from where the light will come to us?

Let me bring only one complaint before you: I suffer from scorn, my own scorn. But my soul said to me, "Do you think little of yourself?" I do not believe so. My soul answered, "Then listen, do you think little of me? Do you still not know that you are not writing a book to feed your vanity, but that you are speaking with me? How can you suffer from scorn if you address me with those words that I give you? Do you know, then, who I am? Have you grasped me, defined me, and made me into a dead formula? Have you measured the depths of my chasms, and explored all the ways down which I am yet going to lead you? Scorn cannot challenge you if you are not vain to the marrow of your bones." Your truth is hard. I want to lay down my vanity before you, since it blinds me. See, that is why I also believed my hands were empty when I came to you today. I did not consider that it is you who fills empty hands if only they want to stretch out, yet they do not want to. I did not know that I am your vessel, empty without you but brimming over with you.

[2] This was my twenty-fifth night in the desert. This is how long it took my soul to awaken from a shadowy being to her own life, until she could approach me as a free-standing being separate from me. And I received hard but salutary words from her. I needed that taking in hand, since I could not overcome the scorn within me.

The spirit of this time considers itself extremely clever, like every such spirit of the time. But wisdom is simpleminded, not just simple. Because of this, the clever person mocks wisdom, since mockery is his weapon. He uses the pointed, poisonous weapon, because he is struck by naive wisdom. If he were not struck, he would not need the weapon. Only in the desert do we become aware of our terrible simplemindedness, but we are afraid of admitting it. "That is why we are scornful. But mockery / [fol. iii(r) / iii(v)] does not attain simplemindedness. The mockery falls on the mocker, and in the desert where no one hears and answers, he suffocates from his own scorn.

The cleverer you are, the more foolish your simplemindedness. The totally clever are total fools in their simplemindedness. We cannot save ourselves from the cleverness of the spirit of this time through increasing our cleverness, but through accepting what our cleverness hates most, namely simplemindedness. Yet we also do not want to be artificial fools because we have fallen into simplemindedness, rather we will be clever fools. That leads to the supreme meaning. Cleverness couples itself with intention. Simplemindedness knows no intention. Cleverness conquers the world, but simplemindedness, the soul. So take on the vow of poverty of spirit in order to partake of the soul. [79]

Against this the scorn of my cleverness rose up. [80] Many will laugh at my foolishness. But no one will laugh more than I laughed at myself.

So I overcame scorn. But when I had overcome it, I was near to my soul, and she could speak to me, and I was soon to see the desert becoming green.
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Re: The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung

Postby admin » Sun Dec 01, 2013 1:56 am

Chapter 5: Descent into Hell in the Future

[HI iii (v)]
Cap. v.

[81] In the following night, the air was filled with many voices. A loud voice called, "I am falling." Others cried out confused and excited during this: "Where to? What do you want?" Should I entrust myself to this confusion? I shuddered. It is a dreadful deep. Do you want me to leave myself to chance, to the madness of my own darkness? Wither? Wither? You fall, and I want to fall with you, whoever you are.

The spirit of the depths opened my eyes and I caught a glimpse of the inner things, the world of my soul, the many-formed and changing. [Image iii (v) I]

***

I see a gray rock face along which I sink into great depths. [82] I stand in black dirt up to my ankles in a dark cave. Shadows sweep over me. I am seized by fear, but I know I must go in. I crawl through a narrow crack in the rock and reach an inner cave whose bottom is covered with black water. But beyond this I catch a glimpse of a luminous red stone which I must reach. I wade through the muddy water. The cave is full of the frightful noise of shrieking voices. [83] I take the stone, it covers a dark opening in the rock. I hold the stone in my hand, peering around inquiringly. I do not want to listen to the voices, they keep me away. [84] But I want to know. Here something wants to be uttered. I place my ear to the opening. I hear the flow of underground waters. I see the bloody head of a man on the dark stream. Someone wounded, someone slain floats there. I take in this image for a long time, shuddering. I see a large black scarab floating past on the dark stream.

In the deepest reach of the stream shines a red sun, radiating through the dark water. There I see -- and a terror seizes me -- small serpents on the dark rock walls, striving toward the depths, where the sun shines. A thousand serpents crowd around, veiling the sun. Deep night falls. A red stream of blood, thick red blood springs up, surging for a long time, then ebbing. I am seized by fear. What did I see? [85] [Image iii(v) 2]

Heal the wounds that doubt inflicts on me, my soul. That too is to be overcome, so that I can recognize your supreme meaning. How far away everything is, and how I have turned back! My spirit is a spirit of torment, it tears asunder my contemplation, it would dismantle everything and rip it apart. I am still a victim of my thinking. When can I order my thinking to be quiet, so that my thoughts, those unruly hounds, will crawl to my feet? How can I ever hope to hear your voice louder, to see your face clearer, when all my thoughts howl?

I am stunned, but I want to be stunned, since I have sworn to you, my soul, to trust you even if you lead me through madness. How shall I ever walk under your sun if I do not drink the bitter draught of slumber to the lees? Help me so that I do not choke on my own knowledge. The fullness of my knowledge threatens to fall in on me. My knowledge has a thousand voices, an army roaring like lions; the air trembles when they speak, and I am their defenseless sacrifice. Keep it far from me, science that clever knower, [86] that bad prison master who binds the soul and imprisons it in a lightless cell. But above all protect me from the serpent of judgment, which only appears to be a healing serpent, yet in your depths is infernal poison and agonizing death. I want to go down cleansed into your depths with white garments and not rush in like some thief, seizing whatever I can and fleeing breathlessly. Let me persist in divine [87] astonishment, so that I am ready to behold your wonders. Let me lay my head on a stone before your door, so that I am prepared to receive your light.

***

[2] When the desert begins to bloom, it brings forth strange plants. You will consider yourself mad, and in a certain sense you will in fact be mad. [88] To the extent that the Christianity of this time lacks madness, it lacks divine life. Take note of what the ancients taught us in images: madness is divine. [89] But because the ancients lived this image concretely in events, it became a deception for us, since we became masters of the reality of the world. It is unquestionable: if you enter into the world of the soul, you are like a madman, and a doctor would consider you to be sick. What I say here can be seen as sickness, but no one can see it as sickness more than I do.

This is how I overcame madness. If you do not know what divine madness is, suspend judgment and wait for the fruits. [90] But know that there is a divine madness which is nothing other than the overpowering of the spirit of this time through the spirit of the depths. Speak then of sick delusion when the spirit of the depths can no longer stay down and forces a man to speak in tongues instead of in human speech, and makes him believe that he himself is the spirit of the depths. But also speak of sick delusion when the spirit of this time does not leave a man and forces him to see only the surface, to deny the spirit of the depths and to take himself for the spirit of the times. The spirit of this time is ungodly, the spirit of the depths is ungodly; balance is godly.

Because I was caught up in the spirit of this time, precisely what happened to me on this night had to happen to me, namely that the spirit of the depths erupted with force, and swept away the spirit of this time with a powerful wave. But the spirit of the depths had gained this power, because I had spoken to my soul during 25 nights in the desert and I had given her all my love and submission. But during the 25 days, I gave all my love and submission to things, to men, and to the thoughts of this time. I went into the desert only at night.

Thus can you differentiate sick and divine delusion. Whoever does the one and does without the other you may call sick since he is out of balance.

But who can withstand fear when the divine intoxication and madness comes to him? Love, soul, and God are beautiful and terrible. The ancients brought over some of the beauty of God into this world, and this world became so beautiful that it appeared to the spirit of the time to be fulfillment, and better than the bosom of the Godhead. The frightfulness and cruelty of the world lay under wraps and in the depths of our hearts. If the spirit of the depths seizes you, you will feel the cruelty and cry out in torment. The spirit of the depths is pregnant with iron, fire, and death. You are right to fear the spirit of the depths, as he is full of horror.

You see in these days what the spirit of the depths bore. You did not believe it, but you would have known it if you had taken counsel with your fear. [91]

Blood shone at me from the red light of the crystal, and when I picked it up to discover its mystery, there lay the horror uncovered before me: in the depths of what is to come lay murder. The blond hero lay slain. The black beetle is the death that is necessary for renewal; and so thereafter, a new sun glowed, the sun of the depths, full of riddles, a sun of the night. And as the rising sun of spring quickens the dead earth, so the sun of the depths quickened the dead, and thus began the terrible struggle between light and darkness. Out of that burst the powerful and ever unvanquished source of blood. This was what was to come, which you now experience in your life, and it is even more than that. (I had this vision on the night of 12 December 1913.)

Depths and surface should mix so that new life can develop. Yet the new life does not develop outside of us, but within us. What happens outside us in these days is the image that the peoples live in events, to bequeath this image immemorially to far-off times so that they might learn from it for their own way, just as we learned from the images that the ancients had lived before us in events.

Life does not come from events, but from us. Everything that happens outside has already been.

Therefore whoever considers the event from outside always sees only that it already was, and that it is always the same. But whoever looks from inside, knows that everything is new. The events that happen are always the same. But the creative depths if man are not always the same. Events signify nothing, they signify only in us. We create the meaning of events. The meaning is and always was artificial. We make it.

Because of this we seek in ourselves the meaning if events, so that the way of / [fol. iii(v) / iv(r)] what is to come becomes apparent and our life can flow again.

That which you need comes from yourself, namely the meaning of the event. The meaning of events is not their particular meaning. This meaning exists in learned books. Events have no meaning.

The meaning of events is the way of salvation that you create. The meaning of events comes from the possibility of life in this world that you create. It is the mastery if this world and the assertion of your soul in this world.

This meaning of events is the supreme meaning, that is not in events, and not in the soul, but is the God standing between events and the soul, the mediator of life, the way, the bridge and the going across. [92]

I would not have been able to see what was to come if I could not have seen it in myself.

Therefore I take part in that murder; the sun of the depths also shines in me after the murder has been accomplished; the thousand serpents that want to devour the sun are also in me. I myself am a murderer and murdered, sacrificer and sacrificed. [93] The upwelling blood streams out of me.

You all have a share in the murder. [94] In you the reborn one will come to be, and the sun of the depths will rise, and a thousand serpents will develop from your dead matter and fall on the sun to choke it. Your blood will stream forth. The peoples demonstrate this at the present time in unforgettable acts, that will be written with blood in unforgettable books for eternal memory. [95]

But I ask you, when do men fall on their brothers with mighty weapons and bloody acts? They do such if they do not know that their brother is themselves. They themselves are sacrificers, but they mutually do the service of sacrifice. They must all sacrifice each other, since the time has not yet come when man puts the bloody knife into himself, in order to sacrifice the one he kills in his brother. But whom do people kill? They kill the noble, the brave, the heroes. They take aim at these and do not know that with these they mean themselves. They should sacrifice the hero in themselves, and because they do not know this, they kill their courageous brother.

The time is still not ripe. But through this blood sacrifice, it should ripen. So long as it is possible to murder the brother instead of oneself, the time is not ripe. Frightful things must happen until men grow ripe. But anything else will not ripen humanity. Hence all this that takes place in these days must also be, so that the renewal can come. Since the source of blood that follows the shrouding of the sun is also the source of the new life. [96]

As the fate of the peoples is represented to you in events, so will it happen in your heart. If the hero in you is slain, then the sun of the depths rises in you, glowing from afar, and from a dreadful place. But all the same, everything that up till now seemed to be dead in you will come to life, and will change into poisonous serpents that will cover the sun, and you will fall into night and confusion. Your blood also will stream from many wounds in this frightful struggle. Your shock and doubt will be great, but from such torment the new life will be born. Birth is blood and torment. Your darkness, which you did not suspect since it was dead, will come to life and you will feel the crush of total evil and the conflicts of life that still now lie buried in the matter of your body. But the serpents are dreadful evil thoughts and feelings.

You thought you knew that abyss? Oh you clever people! It is another thing to experience it. Everything will happen to you. Think of all the frightful and devilish things that men have inflicted on their brothers. That should happen to you in your heart. Suffer it yourself through your own hand, and know that it is your own heinous and devilish hand that inflicts the suffering on you, but not your brother, who wrestles with his own devils. [97]

I would like you to see what the murdered hero means. Those nameless men who in our day have murdered a prince are blind prophets who demonstrate in events what then is valid only for the soul. [98] Through the murder of princes we will learn that the prince in us, the hero, is threatened. [99] Whether this should be seen as a good or a bad sign need not concern us. What is awful today is good in a hundred years, and in two hundred years is bad again. But we must recognize what is happening: there are nameless ones in you who threaten your prince, the hereditary ruler.

But our ruler is the spirit of this time, which rules and leads in us all. It is the general spirit in which we think and act today. He is of frightful power, since he has brought immeasurable good to this world and fascinated men with unbelievable pleasure. He is bejewelled with the most beautiful heroic virtue, and wants to drive men up to the brightest solar heights, in everlasting ascent. [100]

The hero wants to open up everything he can. But the nameless spirit of the depths evokes everything that man cannot. Incapacity prevents further ascent. Greater height requires greater virtue. We do not possess it. We must first create it by learning to live with our incapacity. We must give it life. For how else shall it develop into ability?

We cannot slay our incapacity and rise above it. But that is precisely what we wanted. Incapacity will overcome us and demand its share of life. Our ability will desert us, and we will believe, in the sense of the spirit of this time, that it is a loss. Yet it is no loss but a gain, not for outer trappings, however, but for inner capability.

The one who learns to live with his incapacity has learned a great deal. This will lead us to the valuation of the smallest things, and to wise limitation, which the greater height demands. If all heroism is erased, we fall back into the misery of humanity and into even worse. Our foundations will be caught up in excitement since our highest tension, which concerns what lies outside us, will stir them up. We will fall into the cesspool of our underworld, among the rubble of all the centuries in us. [101]

The heroic in you is the fact that you are ruled by the thought that this or that is good, that this or that performance is indispensable, this or that cause is objectionable, this or that goal must be attained in headlong striving work, this or that pleasure should be ruthlessly repressed at all costs. Consequently you sin against incapacity. But incapacity exists. No one should deny it, find fault with it, or shout it down. [102]
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Re: The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung

Postby admin » Sun Dec 01, 2013 1:57 am

Chapter 6: Splitting of the Spirit

[HI iv(r)]
Cap. vi.

But on the fourth night I cried, "To journey to Hell means to become Hell oneself. [103] It is all frightfully muddled and interwoven. On this desert path there is not just glowing sand, but also horrible tangled invisible beings who live in the desert. I didn't know this. The way is only apparently clear, the desert is only apparently empty. It seems inhabited by magical beings who murderously attach themselves to me and daimonically change my form. I have evidently taken on a completely monstrous form in which I can no longer recognize myself. It seems to me that I have become a monstrous animal form for which I have exchanged my humanity. This way is surrounded by hellish magic, invisible nooses have been thrown over me and ensnare me."

But the spirit of the depths approached me and said, "Climb down into your depths, sink!"

But I was indignant at him and said, "How can I sink? I am unable to do this myself."

Then the spirit spoke words to me that appeared ridiculous, and he said, "Sit yourself down, be calm."

But I cried out indignantly: "How frightful, it sounds like nonsense, do you also demand this of me? You overthrew the mighty Gods who mean the most to us. My soul, where are you? Have I entrusted myself to a stupid animal, do I stagger like a drunkard to the grave, do I stammer stupidities like a lunatic? Is this your way, my soul? The blood boils in me and I would strangle you if I could seize you. You weave the thickest darknesses and I am like a madman caught in your net. But I yearn, teach me."

But my soul spoke to me saying, "My path is light."

Yet I indignantly answered, "Do you call light what we men call the worst darkness? Do you call day night?"

To this my soul spoke a word that roused my anger: "My light is not of this world."

I cried, "I know of no other world."

The soul answered, "Should it not exist because you know nothing of it?"

I: "But our knowledge? Does our knowledge also not hold good for you? What is it going to be, if not knowledge? Where is security? Where is solid ground? Where is light? Your darkness is not only darker than night, but bottomless as well. If it's not going to be knowledge, then perhaps it will do without speech and words too?"

My soul: "No words."

I: "Forgive me, perhaps I'm hard of hearing, perhaps I misinterpret you, perhaps I ensnare myself in self-deceit and monkey business, and I am a rascal grinning at myself in a mirror, a fool in my own madhouse. Perhaps you stumble over my folly?"

My soul: "You delude yourself, you do not deceive me. Your words are lies to you, not me."

I: "But could I wallow in raging nonsense, and hatch absurdity and perverse monotony?"

My soul: "Who gives you thoughts and words? Do you make them? Are you not my serf, a recipient who lies at my door and picks up my alms? And you dare think that what you devise and speak could be nonsense? Don't you know yet that it comes from me and belongs to me?"

So I cried full of anger, "But then my indignation must also come from you, and in me you are indignant against yourself." My soul then spoke the ambiguous words: "That is civil war." [104]

I was afflicted with pain and rage, and I answered back, "How painful, my soul, to hear you use hollow words; I feel sick. Comedy and drivel -- but I yearn. I can also crawl through mud and the most despised banality. I can also eat dust; that is part of Hell. I do not yield, I am defiant. You can go on devising torments, spider-legged monsters, ridiculous, hideous, frightful theatrical spectacles. Come close, I am ready. Ready, my soul, you who are a devil, to wrestle with you too. You donned the mask of a God, and I worshiped you. Now you wear the mask of a devil, a frightful one, the mask of the banal, of eternal mediocrity! Only one favor! Give me a moment to step back and consider! Is the struggle with this mask worthwhile? Was the mask of God worth worshiping? I cannot do it, the lust for battle burns in my limbs. No, I cannot leave the battlefield defeated. I want to seize you, crush you, monkey, buffoon. Woe if the struggle is unequal, my hands grab at air. But your blows are also air, and I perceive trickery."

***

I find myself again on the desert path. It was a desert vision, a vision of the solitary who has wandered down long roads. There lurk invisible robbers and assassins and shooters of poison darts. Suppose the murderous arrow is sticking in my heart?

***

[2] As the first vision had predicted to me, the assassin appeared from the depths, and came to me just as in the fate of the peoples of this time a nameless one appeared and leveled the murder weapon at the prince. [105]

I felt myself transformed into a rapacious beast. My heart glowered in rage against the high and beloved, against my prince and hero, just as the nameless one of the people, driven by greed for murder, lunged at his dear prince. Because I carried the murder in me, I foresaw it. [106]

Because I carried the war in me, I foresaw it. I felt betrayed and lied to by my king. Why did I feel this way? He was not as I had wished him to be. He was other than I expected. He should be the king in my sense, not in his sense. He should be what I called ideal. My soul appeared to me hollow, tasteless and meaningless. But in reality what I thought of her was valid for my ideal.

It was a / [fol iv(r) / iv(v)] vision of the desert, I struggled with mirror images of myself. It was civil war in me. I myself was the murderer and the murdered. The deadly arrow was stuck in my heart, and I did not know what it meant. My thoughts were murder and the fear of death, which spread like poison everywhere in my body.

And thus was the fate of the people: The murder of one was the poisonous arrow that flew into the hearts of men, and kindled the fiercest war. This murder is the indignation of incapacity against will, a Judas betrayal that one would like someone else to have committed. [107] We are still seeking the goat that should bear our sin. [108]

Everything that becomes too old becomes evil, the same is true of your highest. Learn from the suffering of the crucified God that one can also betray and crucify a God, namely the God of the old year. If a God ceases being the way of life, he must fall secretly. [109]

The God becomes sick if he oversteps the height of the zenith. That is why the spirit of the depths took me when the spirit of this time had led me to the summit. [110]
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Re: The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung

Postby admin » Sun Dec 01, 2013 1:58 am

Chapter 7: Murder of the Hero

[HI iv(v)] [111]
Cap. vii.

On the following night, however, I had a vision: [112] I was with a youth in high mountains. It was before daybreak, the Eastern sky was already light. Then Siegfried's horn resounded over the mountains with a jubilant sound. [113] We knew that our mortal enemy was coming. We were armed and lurked beside a narrow rocky path to murder him. Then we saw him coming high across the mountains on a chariot made of the bones of the dead. He drove boldly and magnificently over the steep rocks and arrived at the narrow path where we waited in hiding. As he came around the turn ahead of us, we fired at the same time and he fell slain. Thereupon I turned to flee, and a terrible rain swept down. But after this [114] I went through a torment unto death and I felt certain that I must kill myself, if I could not solve the riddle of the murder of the hero. [115]

Then the spirit of the depths came to me and spoke these words:

"The highest truth is one and the same with the absurd." This statement saved me, and like rain after a long hot spell, it swept away everything in me which was too highly tensed.

Discordians don't have dogmas, which are absolute beliefs; we have catmas which are relative meta-beliefs. And the central discordian catma is, as I said before, any affirmation is true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense. And if you repeat this 666 times, you will achieve supreme enlightenment -- IN SOME SENSE!

-- Maybe Logic -- The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson, directed by Deepleaf Productions


Then I had a second vision: [116] I saw a merry garden, in which forms walked clad in white silk, all covered in colored light, some reddish, the others blueish and greenish. [117] [Image iv(v)]

***

I know, I have stridden across the depths. Through guilt I have become a newborn. [118]

***

[2] We also live in our dreams, we do not live only by day. Sometimes we accomplish our greatest deeds in dreams. [119]

In that night my life was threatened since I had to kill my lord and God, not in single combat, since who among mortals could kill a God in a duel? You can reach your God only as an assassin, [120] if you want to overcome him.

But this is the bitterest for mortal men: our Gods want to be overcome, since they require renewal. If men kill their princes, they do so because they cannot kill their Gods, and because they do not know that they should kill their Gods in themselves.

If the God grows old, he becomes shadow, nonsense, and he goes down. The greatest truth becomes the greatest lie, the brightest day becomes darkest night.

As day requires night and night requires day, so meaning requires absurdity and absurdity requires meaning.

Day does not exist through itself, night does not exist through itself.

The reality that exists through itself is day and night.

So the reality is meaning and absurdity.

Noon is a moment, midnight is a moment, morning comes from night, evening turns into night, but evening comes from the day and morning turns into day.

So meaning is a moment and a transition from absurdity to absurdity, and absurdity only a moment and a transition from meaning to meaning. [121]

Oh that Siegfried, blond and blue-eyed, the German hero, had to fall by my hand, the most loyal and courageous! He had everything in himself that I treasured as the greater and more beautiful; he was my power, my boldness, my pride. I would have gone under in the same battle, and so only assassination was left to me. If I wanted to go on living, it could only be through trickery and cunning.

Judge not! Think of the blond savage of the German forests, who had to betray the hammer-brandishing thunder to the pale Near-Eastern God who was nailed to the wood like a chicken marten. The courageous were overcome by a certain contempt for themselves. But their life force bade them to go on living, and they betrayed their beautiful wild Gods, their holy trees and their awe of the German forests. [122]

What does Siegfried mean for the Germans! What does it tell us that the Germans suffer Siegfried's death! That is why I almost preferred to kill myself in order to spare him. But I wanted to go on living with a new God. [123]

After death on the cross Christ went into the underworld and became Hell. So he took on the form of the Antichrist, the dragon. The image of the Antichrist, which has come down to us from the ancients, announces the new God, whose coming the ancients had foreseen.

Gods are unavoidable. The more you flee from the God, the more surely you fall into his hand.

The rain is the great stream of tears that will come over the peoples, the tearful flood of released tension after the constriction of death had encumbered the peoples with horrific force. It is the mourning of the dead in me, which precedes burial and rebirth. The rain is the fructifying of the earth, it begets the new wheat, the young, germinating God. [124]
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Re: The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung

Postby admin » Sun Dec 01, 2013 2:00 am

Chapter 8: The Conception of the God

[HI iv(v) 2]
Cap. viii.

On the second night thereafter, I spoke to my soul and said, "This new world appears weak and artificial to me. Artificial is a bad word, but the mustard seed that grew into a tree, the word that was conceived in the womb of a virgin, became a God to whom the earth was subject." [125]

As I spoke thus, the spirit of the depths suddenly erupted. He filled me with intoxication and mist and spoke these words with a powerful voice: [OB iv (v)] "I have received your sprout, you who are to come!

I have received it in deepest need and lowliness.

I covered it in shabby patchwork and bedded down on poor words. And mockery worshiped it, your child, your wondrous child, the child of one who is to come, who should announce the father, a fruit that is older than the tree on which it grew.

In pain will you conceive and joyful is your birth.

Fear is your herald, doubt stands to your right, disappointment to your left.

We passed by in our ridiculousness and senselessness when we caught sight of you.

Our eyes were blinded and our knowledge fell silent when we received your radiance.

You new spark of an eternal fire, into which night were you born?

You will wring truthful prayers from your believers, and they must speak of your glory in tongues that are atrocious to them.

You will come over them in the hour of their disgrace, and will become known to them in what they hate, fear, and abhor. [126]

Your voice, the rarest pleasing sound, will be heard amid the stammerings of wretches, rejects, and those condemned as worthless.

Your realm will be touched by the hands of those who also worshiped before the most profound lowliness, and whose longing drove them through the mud tide of evil.

You will give your gifts to those who pray to you in terror and doubt, and your light will shine upon those whose knees must bend before you unwillingly and who are filled with resentment.

Your life is with he who has overcome himself / [fol. iv(v) / v(r)] [OB v (r)] and who has disowned his self-overcoming. [127]

I also know that the salvation of mercy is given only to those who believe in the highest and faithlessly betray themselves for thirty pieces of silver. [128]

Those who will dirty their pure hands and cheat on their best knowledge against error and take their virtues from a murderer's grave are invited to your great banquet.

The constellation of your birth is an ill and changing star.

These, oh child of what is to come, are the wonders that will bear testimony that you are a veritable God."

[2] When my prince had fallen, the spirit of the depths opened my vision and let me become aware of the birth of the new God.

The divine child approached me out of the terrible ambiguity, the hateful-beautiful, the evil-good, the laughable-serious, the sick-healthy, the inhuman-human and the ungodly-godly. [129]

I understood that the God [130] whom we seek in the absolute was not to be found in absolute beauty, goodness, seriousness, elevation, humanity or even in godliness. Once the God was there.

I understood that the new God would be in the relative. If the God is absolute beauty and goodness, how should he encompass the fullness of life, which is beautiful and hateful, good and evil, laughable and serious, human and inhuman? How can man live in the womb of the God if the Godhead himself attends only to one-half of him? [131]

If we have risen near the heights of good and evil, then our badness and hatefulness lie in the most extreme torment. Man's torment is so great and the air of the heights so weak that he can hardly live anymore. The good and the beautiful freeze to the ice of the absolute idea, [132] and the bad and hateful become mud puddles full of crazy life.

Therefore after his death Christ had to journey to Hell, otherwise the ascent to Heaven would have become impossible for him. Christ first had to become his Antichrist, his underworldly brother.

No one knows what happened during the three days Christ was in Hell. I have experienced it. [133] The men of yore said that he had preached there to the deceased. [134] What they say is true, but do you know how this happened?

It was folly and monkey business, an atrocious Hell's masquerade of the holiest mysteries. How else could Christ have saved his Antichrist? Read the unknown books of the ancients, and you will learn much from them. Notice that Christ did not remain in Hell, but rose to the heights in the beyond. [135]

Our conviction of the value of the good and beautiful has become strong and unshakable, that is why life can extend beyond this and still fulfil everything that lay bound and yearning. But the bound and yearning is also the hateful and bad. Are you again indignant about the hateful and the bad?

Through this you can recognize how great are their force and value for life. Do you think that it is dead in you? But this dead can also change into serpents. [136] These serpents will extinguish the prince of your days.

Do you see what beauty and joy came over men when the depths unleashed this greatest war? And yet it was a frightful beginning. [137]

If we do not have the depths, how do we have the heights? Yet you fear the depths, and do not want to confess that you are afraid of them. It is good, though, that you fear yourselves; say it out loud that you are afraid of yourselves. It is wisdom to fear oneself. Only the heroes say that they are fearless. But you know what happens to the hero.

With fear and trembling, looking around yourselves with mistrust, go thus into the depths, but do not do this alone; two or more is greater security since the depths are full of murder. Also secure yourselves the way of retreat. Go cautiously as if you were cowards, so that you pre-empt the soul murderers. [138] The depths would like to devour you whole and choke you in mud.

He who journeys to Hell also becomes Hell; therefore do not forget from whence you come. The depths are stronger than us; so do not be heroes, be clever and drop the heroics, since nothing is more dangerous than to play the hero. The depths want to keep you; they have not returned very many up to now, and therefore men fled from the depths and attacked them.

What if the depths, due to the assault, now change themselves into death? But the depths indeed have changed themselves into death; therefore when they awoke they inflicted a thousand-fold death. [139] We cannot slay death, as we have already taken all life from it. If we still want to overcome death, then we must enliven it.

Therefore on your journey be sure to take golden cups full of the sweet drink of life, red wine, and give it to dead matter, so that it can win life back. The dead matter will change into black serpents. Do not be frightened, the serpents will immediately put out the sun of your days, and a night with wonderful will-o'-the-wisps will come over you. [140]

Take pains to waken the dead. Dig deep mines and throw in sacrificial gifts, so that they reach the dead. Reflect in good heart upon evil, this is the way to the ascent. But before the ascent, everything is night and Hell.

What do you think of the essence of Hell? Hell is when the depths come to you with all that you no longer are or are not yet capable of. Hell is when you can no longer attain what you could attain. Hell is when you must think and feel and do everything that you know you do not want. Hell is when you know that your having to is also a wanting to, and that you yourself are responsible for it. Hell is when you know that everything serious that you have planned with yourself is also laughable, that everything fine is also brutal, that everything good is also bad, that everything high is also low, and that everything pleasant is also shameful.

But the deepest Hell is when you realize that Hell is also no Hell, but a cheerful Heaven, not a Heaven in itself, but in this respect a Heaven, and in that respect a Hell.

That is the ambiguity of the God: he is born from a dark ambiguity and rises to a bright ambiguity. Unequivocalness is simplicity and leads to death. [141] But ambiguity is the way of life. [142] If the left foot does not move, then the right one does, and you move. The God wills this. [143]

You say: the Christian God is unequivocal, he is love. [144] What is more ambiguous than love? Love is the way of life, but your love is only on the way of life if you have a left and a right.

Nothing is easier than to play at ambiguity and nothing is more difficult than living ambiguity. He who plays is a child; his God is old and dies. He who lives is awakened; his God is young and goes on. He who plays hides from the inner death. He who lives feels the going onward and immortality. So leave the play to the players. Let fall what wants to fall; if you stop it, it will sweep you away. There is a true love that does not concern itself with neighbors. [145]

When the hero was slain and the meaning recognized in the absurdity, when all tension came rushing down from gravid clouds, when everything had become cowardly and looked to its own rescue, I became aware of the birth of the God. [146] Opposing me, the God sank into my heart when I was confused by mockery and worship, by grief and laughter, by yes and no.

The one arose from the melting together of the two. He was born as a child from my own human soul, which had conceived him with resistance like a virgin. Thus it corresponds to the image that the ancients have given to us. [147] But when the mother, my soul, was pregnant with the God, I did not know it. It even seemed to me as if my soul herself was the God, although he lived only in her body. [148]

And thus the image of the ancients is fulfilled: I pursued my soul to kill the child in it. For I am also the worst enemy of my God. [149] But I also recognized that my enmity is decided upon in the God. He is mockery and hate and anger, since this is also a way of life.

I must say that the God could not come into being before the hero had been slain. The hero as we understand him has become an enemy of the God, since the hero is perfection. The Gods envy the perfection of man, because perfection has no need of the Gods. But since no one is perfect, we need the Gods. The Gods love perfection because it is the total way of life. But the Gods are not with him who wishes to be perfect, because he is an imitation of perfection. [150]

Imitation was a way of life when men still needed the heroic prototype. [151] The monkey's manner is a way of life for monkeys, and for man as long as he is like a monkey. Human apishness has lasted a terribly long time, but the time will come when a piece of that apishness will fall away from men.

That will be a time of salvation and the dove, and the eternal fire, and redemption will descend.

Then there will no longer be a hero, and no one who can imitate him. Because from that time henceforth all imitation is cursed. The new God laughs at imitation and discipleship. He needs no imitators and no pupils. He forces men through himself. The God is his own follower in man. He imitates himself.

We think that there is singleness within us, and communality outside us. Outside of us is the communal in relation to the external, while singleness refers to us. We are single if we are in ourselves, but communal in relation to what is outside us. But if we are outside of ourselves, then we are single and selfish in the communal. Our self suffers privation if we are outside ourselves, and thus it satisfies its needs with communality. Consequently, communality is distorted into singleness. If we are in ourselves, we fulfil the need of the self, we prosper, and through this we become aware of the needs of the communal and can fulfil them. [152]

If we set a God outside of ourselves, he tears us loose from the self, since the God is more powerful than we are. Our self falls into privation. But if the God moves into the self, he snatches us from what is outside us. [153] We arrive at singleness in ourselves. So the God becomes communal in reference to what is outside us, but single in relation to us. No one has my God, but my God has everyone, including myself. The Gods of all individual men always have all other men, including myself. So it is always only the one God despite his multiplicity. You arrive at him in yourself and only through your self seizing you. It seizes you in the advancement of your life.

The hero must fall for the sake of our redemption, since he is the model and demands imitation. But the measure of imitation is fulfilled. [154] We should become reconciled to solitude in ourselves and to the God outside of us. If we enter into this solitude then the life of the God begins. If we are in ourselves, then the space around us is free, but filled by the God.

Our relations to men go through this empty space and also through the God. But earlier it went through selfishness since we were outside ourselves. Therefore the spirit foretold to me that the cold of outer space will spread across the earth. [155] With this he showed me in an image that the God will step between men and drive every individual with the whip of icy cold to the warmth of his own monastic hearth. Because people were beside themselves, going into raptures like madmen.

Selfish desire ultimately desires itself. You find yourself in your desire, so do not say that desire is vain. If you desire yourself, you produce the divine son in your embrace with yourself. Your desire is the father of the God, your self is the mother of the God, but the son is the new God, your master.

If you embrace your self, then it will appear to you as if the world has become cold and empty. The coming God moves into this emptiness.

If you are in your solitude, and all the space around you has become cold and unending, then you have moved far from men, and at the same time you have come near to them as never before. Selfish desire only apparently led you to men, but in reality it led you away from them and in the end to yourself, which to you and to others was the most remote. But now, if you are in solitude, your God leads you to the God of others, and through that to the true neighbor, to the neighbor of the self in others.

If you are in yourself, you become aware of your incapacity. You will see how little capable you are of imitating the heroes and of being a hero yourself. So you will also no longer force others to become heroes. Like you, they suffer from incapacity. Incapacity, too, wants to live, but it will overthrow your Gods. [BP v (r)] / [fol. v(r) / v(v)]
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