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 2:03 am

Chapter 10: Instruction

[HI vi(r)]
Cap. x.

On the following night, [185] I was led to a second image: I am standing in the rocky depth that seems to me like a crater. Before me I see the house with columns. I see Salome walking along the length of the wall toward the left, touching the wall like a blind person. The serpent follows her. The old man stands at the door and waves to me. Hesitantly I draw closer. He calls Salome back. She is like someone suffering. I cannot detect any sacrilege in her nature. Her hands are white and her face has a gentle expression. The serpent lies before them. I stand before them clumsily like a stupid boy, overwhelmed by uncertainty and ambiguity The old man eyes me searchingly and says: "What do you want here?"

I: "Forgive me, it is not obtrusiveness or arrogance that leads me here. I am here perchance, not knowing what I want. A longing that stayed behind in your house yesterday has brought me here. You see, prophet, I am tired, my head is as heavy as lead. I am lost in my ignorance. I have toyed with myself enough. I played hypocritical games with myself and they all would have disgusted me, were it not clever to perform what others expect from us in the world of men. It seems to me as if I were more real here. And yet I do not like being here."

Wordlessly Elijah and Salome step inside the house. I follow them reluctantly. A feeling of guilt torments me. Is it bad conscience? I would like to turn back, but I cannot. I stand before the play of fire in the shining crystal. I see in splendor the mother of God with the child. Peter stands in front of her in admiration -- then Peter alone with the key -- the Pope with a triple crown -- a Buddha sitting rigidly in a circle of fire -- a many-armed bloody Goddess [186] -- it is Salome desperately wringing her hands [187] -- it takes hold of me, she is my own soul, and now I see Elijah in the image of the stone.

Elijah and Salome stand smiling before me.

I: "These visions are full of torment, and the meaning of these images is dark to me, Elijah; please shed some light."

Elijah turns away silently, and leads the way toward the left. Salome enters a colonnade to the right. Elijah leads me into an even darker room. A burning red lamp hangs from the ceiling. I sit down exhausted. Elijah stands before me leaning on a marble lion in the middle of the room.

E: ''Are you anxious? Your ignorance is to blame for your bad conscience. Not-knowing is guilt, but you believe that it is the urge toward forbidden knowledge that causes your feeling of guilt. Why do you think you are here?"

I: "I don't know. I sank into this place when unknowingly I tried resisting the not-known. So here I am, astonished and confused, an ignorant fool. I experience strange things in your house, things that frighten me and whose meaning is dark to me."

E: "If it were not your law to be here, how would you be here?"

I: "I'm afflicted by fatal weakness, my father."

E: "You are evasive. You cannot extricate yourself from your law.

I: "How can I extricate myself from what is unknown to me, which I cannot reach with either feeling or presentiment?"

E: "You are lying. Do you not know that you yourself recognized what it means if Salome loves you?"

I: "You are right. A doubtful and uncertain thought arose in me. But I have forgotten it again."

E: "You have not forgotten it. It burned deep inside you. Are you cowardly? Or can you not differentiate this thought from your own self, enough so that you wished to claim it for yourself?"

I: "The thought went too far for me, and I shun far-fetched ideas. They are dangerous, since I am a man, and you know how much men are accustomed to seeing thoughts as their very own, so that they eventually confuse them with themselves."

E: "Will you therefore confuse yourself with a tree or animal, because you look at them and because you exist with them in one and the same world? Must you be your thoughts, because you are in the world of your thoughts? But your thoughts are just as much outside your self as trees and animals are outside your body." [188]

I: "I understand. My thought world was for me more word than world. I thought of my thought world: it is I."

E: "Do you say to your human world and every being outside of you: you are I?"

I: "I stepped into your house, my father, with the fear of a schoolboy. But you taught me salutary wisdom [189]: I can also consider my thoughts as being outside my self. That helps me to return to that terrible conclusion that my tongue is reluctant to express. I thought that Salome loves me because I resemble John or you. This thought seemed unbelievable to me. That's why I rejected it and thought that she loves me because I am really quite opposite to you, that she loves her badness in my badness. This thought was devastating."

Elijah is silent. Heaviness lies on me. Then Salome steps in, comes over to me and lays her arm around my shoulder. She takes me for her father in whose chair I sat. I dare neither move nor speak.

S: "I know that you are not my father. You are his son, and I am your sister."

I: "You, Salome, my sister? Was this the terrible attraction that emanated from you, that unnamable horror of you, of your touch? Who was our mother?"

S: "Mary."

I: "Is it a hellish dream? Mary; our mother? What madness lurks in your words? The mother of our Savior, our mother? When I crossed your threshold today, I foresaw calamity. Alas! It has come. Are you out of your senses, Salome? Elijah, protector of the divine law, speak: is this a devilish spell cast by the rejected? How can she say such a thing? Or are both of you out of your senses? You are symbols and Mary is a symbol. I am simply too confused to see through you now."

E: "You may call us symbols for the same reason that you can also call your fellow men symbols, if you wish to. But we are just as real as your fellow men. You invalidate nothing and solve nothing by calling us symbols."

I: "You plunge me into a terrible confusion. Do you wish to be real?"

E: "We are certainly what you call real. Here we are, and you have to accept us. The choice is yours."

I am silent. Salome has removed herself. Uncertainly I look around. Behind me a high golden red flame burns on a round altar. The serpent has encircled the flame. Its eyes glitter with golden reflections. Swaying I turn to the exit. As I step out into the hall, I see a powerful lion going before me. Outside, it is a wide cold starry night.

[2] [190] It is no small matter to acknowledge one's yearning. For this many need to make a particular effort at honesty. All too many do not want to know where their yearning is, because it would seem to them impossible or too distressing. And yet yearning is the way of life. If you do not acknowledge your yearning, then you do not follow yourself, but go on foreign ways that others have indicated to you. So you do not live your life but an alien one. But who should live your life if you do not live it? It is not only stupid to exchange your own life for an alien one, but also a hypocritical game, because you can never rally live the life of others, you can only pretend to do it, deceiving the other and yourself, since you can only live your own life.

If you give up your self, you live it in others; thereby you become selfish to others, and thus you deceive others. Everyone thus believes that such a life is possible. It is, however, only apish imitation. Through giving in to your apish appetite, you infect others, because the ape stimulates the apish. So you turn yourself and others into apes. Through reciprocal imitation you live according to the average expectation. The image of the hero was set up for all in every age through the appetite for imitation. Therefore the hero was murdered, since we have all been aping him. Do you know why you cannot abandon apishness? For fear of loneliness and defeat.

To live oneself means: to be one's own task. Never say that it is a pleasure to live oneself. It will be no joy but a long suffering, since you must become your own creator. If you want to create yourself, then you do not begin with the best and the highest, but with the worst and the deepest. Therefore say that you are reluctant to live yourself. The flowing together of the stream of life is not joy but pain, since it is power against power, guilt, and shatters the sanctified.

The image of the mother of God with the child that I foresee, indicates to me the mystery of the transformation. [191] If forethinking and pleasure unite in me, a third arises from them, the divine son, who is the supreme meaning, the symbol, the passing over into a new creation. I do not myself become the supreme meaning [192] or the symbol, but the symbol becomes in me such that it has its substance, and I mine. Thus I stand like Peter in worship before the miracle of the transformation and the becoming real of the God in me.

Although I am not the son of the God myself, I represent him nevertheless as one who was a mother to the God, and one therefore to whom in the name of the God the freedom of the binding and loosing has been given. The binding and loosing take place in me. [193] But insofar as it takes place in me, and I am a part of the world, it also takes place through me in the world, and no one can hinder it. It doesn't take place according to the way of my will but in the way of unavoidable effect. I am not master over you, but the being of the God in me. I lock the past with one key, with the other I open the future. This takes place through my transformation. The miracle of transformation commands. I am its servant, just as the Pope is.

You see how incredible it was to believe such of oneself. [194] It applies not to me, but to the symbol. The symbol becomes my lord and unfailing commander. It will fortify its reign and change itself into a starry and riddling image, whose meaning turns completely inward, and whose pleasure radiates outward like blazing fire, [195] a Buddha in the flames. [196] Because I sink into my symbol to such an extent, the symbol changes me from my one into my other, and that cruel Goddess of my interior, my womanly pleasure, my own other, the tormented tormentor, that which is to be tormented. I have interpreted these images, as best I can, with poor words.

***

[197] In the moment of your bewilderment, follow your forethinking and not your blind desire, since forethinking leads you to the difficulties that should always come first. They come nevertheless. If you look for a light, you fall first into an even deeper darkness. In this darkness you find a light with a weak reddish flame that gives only a low brightness, but it is enough for you to see your neighbor. It is exhausting to reach this goal that seems to be no goal. And so it is good: I am paralyzed and therefore ready to accept. My forethinking rests on the lion, my power. [198]

I held to the sanctified form, and didn't want to allow the chaos to break through its dams. I believed in the order of the world and hated everything disorganized and unformed. Therefore above all I had to realize that my own law had brought me to this place. As the God developed in me, I thought he was a part of my self. I thought that my "I" included him and therefore I took him for my thought. But I also considered that my thoughts were parts of my "I." Thus I entered into my thoughts, and into the thinking about the God, in that I took him / [fol. vi(r) / vi(v)] for a part of my self.

On account of my thoughts, I had left myself; therefore my self became hungry and made God into a selfish thought. If I leave myself, my hunger will drive me to find my self in my object, that is, in my thought. Therefore you love reasonable and orderly thoughts, since you could not endure it if your self was in disordered, that is, unsuitable thoughts. Through your selfish wish, you pushed out of your thoughts everything that you do not consider ordered, that is, unfitting. You create order according to what you know, you do not know the thoughts of chaos, and yet they exist. My thoughts are not my self, and my I does not embrace the thought. Your thought has this meaning and that, not just one, but many meanings. No one knows how many.

My thoughts are not my self, but exactly like the things of the world, alive and dead. [199] Just as I am not damaged through living in a partly chaotic world, so too I am not damaged if I live in my partly chaotic thought world. Thoughts are natural events that you do not possess, and whose meaning you only imperfectly recognize. [200] Thoughts grow in me like a forest, populated by many different animals. But man is domineering in his thinking, and therefore he kills the pleasure of the forest and that of the wild animals. Man is violent in his desire, and he himself becomes a forest and a forest animal. Just as I have freedom in the world, I also have freedom in my thoughts. Freedom is conditional.

To certain things of the world I must say: you should not be thus, but you should be different. Yet first I look carefully at their nature, otherwise I cannot change it. I proceed in the same way with certain thoughts. You change those things of the world that, not being useful in themselves, endanger your welfare. Proceed likewise with your thoughts. Nothing is complete, and much is in dispute. The way of life is transformation, not exclusion. Well-being is a better judge than the law.

But as I became aware of the freedom in my thought world, Salome embraced me and I thus became a prophet, since I had found pleasure in the primordial beginning, in the forest, and in the wild animals. It stands too close to reason for me to set myself on a par with my visions, and for me to take pleasure in seeing. I am in danger of believing that I myself am significant since I see the significant. This will always drive us crazy, and we transform the vision into foolishness and monkey business, since we cannot desist from imitation. [201]

Just as my thinking is the son of forethinking, so is my pleasure the daughter of love, of the innocent and conceiving mother of God. Aside from Christ. Mary gave birth to Salome. Therefore Christ in the gospel of the Egyptians says to Salome: "Eat every herb, but do not eat the bitter." And when Salome wanted to know, Christ spoke to her: "If you crush the covering of shame, and when the two become one, and the male with the female, neither male nor female.'' [202]

Forethinking is the procreative, love is the receptive. [203] Both are beyond this world. Here are understanding and pleasure, we only suspect the other. It would be madness to claim that they are in this world. So much that is riddling and cunning coils around this light. I won the power back again from the depths, and it went before me like a lion. [204]
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Re: The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung

Postby admin » Sun Dec 01, 2013 2:10 am

PART 1 OF 3

Chapter 11: Resolution

[HI vi (v)] [205]
Cap. xi.

[206] On the third night, deep longing to continue experiencing the mysteries seized me. The struggle between doubt and desire was great in me. But suddenly I saw that I stood before a steep ridge in a wasteland. It is a dazzling bright day. I catch sight of the prophet high above me. His hand makes an averting movement, and I abandon my decision to climb up. I wait below, gazing upward. I look: to the right it is dark night; to the left it is bright day. The rock separates day and night. On the dark side lies a big black serpent, on the bright side a white serpent. They thrust their heads toward each other, eager for battle. Elijah stands on the heights above them. The serpents pounce on one another and the white serpent draws back. Great billows of dust rise from the place of struggle. But then I see: the black serpent pulls itself back again. The front part of its body has become white. Both serpents curl about themselves, one in light, the other in darkness. [207]

Elijah: "What did you see?"

I: "I saw the fight of two formidable serpents. It seemed to me as if the black would overcome the white serpent; but behold, the black one withdrew and its head and the top part of its body had turned white."

E: "Do you understand that?"

I: "I have thought it over, but I cannot understand it. Should it mean that the power of the good light will become so great that even the darkness that resists it will be illumined by it?"

Elijah climbs before me into the heights, to a very high summit; I follow. On the peak we come to some masonry made of huge blocks. It is a round embankment on the summit. [208] Inside lies a large courtyard, and there is a mighty boulder in the middle, like an altar. The prophet stands on this stone and says: "This is the temple of the sun. This place is a vessel, that collects the light of the sun."

Elijah climbs down from the stone, his form becomes smaller in descending, and finally becomes dwarflike, unlike himself.

I ask: "Who are you?"

"I am Mime, [209] and I will show you the wellsprings. The collected light becomes water and flows in many springs from the summit into the valleys of the earth." He then dives down into a crevice. I follow him down into a dark cave. I hear the rippling of a spring. I hear the voice of the dwarf from below: "Here are my wells, whoever drinks from them becomes wise."

But I cannot reach down. I lose courage. I leave the cave and, doubting, pace back and forth in the square of the yard. Everything appears to me strange and incomprehensible. It is solitary and deathly silent here. The air is clear and cool as on the remotest heights, a wonderful flood of sunlight all around, the great wall surrounds me. A serpent crawls over the stone. It is the serpent of the prophet. How did it come out of the underworld into the world above? I follow it and see how it crawls into the wall. I feel weird all over: a little house stands there with a portico, minuscule, snuggling against the rock. The serpents become infinitely small. I feel as if I too am shrinking. The walls enlarge into a huge mountain and I see that I am below on the foundation of the crater in the underworld, and I stand before the house of the prophet. [210] He steps out of the door of his house.

I: "I notice, Elijah, that you have shown me and let me experience all sorts of strange things and allowed me to come before you today. But I confess that it is all dark to me. Your world appears to me today in a new light. Just now it was as if I were separated by a starry distance from your place, which I still wanted to reach today. But behold: it seems to be one and the same place."

E: "You wanted to come here far too much. I did not deceive you, you deceived yourself. He sees badly who wants to see; you have overreached yourself."

I: ''It is true, I eagerly longed to reach you, to hear more. Salome startled me and led me into bewilderment. I felt dizzy, because what she said seemed to me to be monstrous and like madness. Where is Salome?"

E: "How impetuous you are! What is up with you? Step over to the crystal and prepare yourself in its light."

***

A wreath of fire shines around the stone. I am seized with fear at what I see: The coarse peasant's boot? The foot of a giant that crushes an entire city? I see the cross, the removal of the cross, the mourning. How agonizing this sight is! No longer do I yearn -- I see the divine child, with the white serpent in his right hand, and the black serpent in his left hand. I see the green mountain, the cross of Christ on it, and a stream of blood flowing from the summit of the mountain -- I can look no longer, it is unbearable -- I see the cross and Christ on it in his last hour and torment -- at the foot of the cross the black serpent coils itself -- it has wound itself around my feet -- I am held fast and I spread my arms wide. Salome draws near. The serpent has wound itself around my whole body, and my countenance is that of a lion.

Salome says, "Mary was the mother of Christ, do you understand?"

I: "I see that a terrible and incomprehensible power forces me to imitate the lord in his final torment. But how can I presume to call Mary my mother?"

S: "You are Christ."

I stand with outstretched arms like someone crucified, my body taut and horribly entwined by the serpent: "You, Salome, say that I am Christ?" [211]

It is as if I stood alone on a high mountain with stiff outstretched arms. The serpent squeezes my body in its terrible coils and the blood streams from my body, spilling down the mountainside. Salome bends down to my feet and wraps her black hair round them. She lies thus for a long time. Then she cries, "I see light!" Truly, she sees, her eyes are open. The serpent falls from my body and lies languidly on the ground. I stride over it and kneel at the feet of the prophet, whose form shines like a flame.

E: "Your work is fulfilled here. Other things come. Seek untiringly, and above all write exactly what you see."

Salome looks in rapture at the light that streams from the prophet. Elijah transforms into a huge flame of white light. The serpent wraps itself around her foot, as if paralyzed. Salome kneels before the light in wonderstruck devotion. Tears fall from my eyes, and I hurry out into the night, like one who has no part in the glory of the mystery. My feet do not touch the ground of this earth, and it is as if I were melting into air. [212]

[2] [213] My longing [214] led me up to the overbright day, whose light is the opposite to the dark space of forethinking. [215] The opposite principle is, as I think I understand it, heavenly love, the mother. The darkness that surrounds forethinking [216] appears to be due to the fact that it is invisible in the interior and takes place in the depths. [217] But the brightness of love seems to come from the fact that love is visible life and action. My pleasure was with forethinking and had its merry garden there, surrounded by darkness and night. I climbed down to my pleasure, but ascended to my love. I see Elijah high above me: this indicates that forethinking stands nearer to love than I, a man, do. Before I ascend to love, a condition must be fulfilled, which represents itself as the fight between two serpents. Left is day, right is night. The realm of love is light, the realm of forethinking is dark. Both principles have separated themselves strictly, and are even hostile to one another and have taken on the form of serpents. This form indicates the daimonic nature of both principles. I recognize in this struggle a repetition of that vision where I saw the struggle between the sun and the black serpent. [218]

At that time, the loving light was annihilated, and blood began to pour out. This was the great war. But the spirit of the depths [219] wants this struggle to be understood as a conflict in every man's own nature. [220] Since after the death of the hero our urge to live could no longer imitate anything, it therefore went into the depths of every man and excited the terrible conflict between the powers of the depths. [221] Forethinking is singleness, love is togetherness. Both need one another, and yet they kill one another. Since men do not know that the conflict occurs inside themselves, they go mad, / [fol. vi(v) / vii(r)] and one lays the blame on the other. If one-half of mankind is at fault, then every man is half at fault. But he does not see the conflict in his own soul, which is however the source of the outer disaster. If you are aggravated against your brother, think that you are aggravated against the brother in you, that is, against what in you is similar to your brother.

As a man you are part of mankind, and therefore you have a share in the whole of mankind, as if you were the whole of mankind. If you overpower and kill your fellow man who is contrary to you, then you also kill that person in yourself and have murdered a part of your life. The spirit of this dead man follows you and does not let your life become joyful. You need your wholeness to live onward.

If I myself endorse the pure principle, I step to one side and become onesided. Therefore my forethinking in the principle [222] of the heavenly mother becomes an ugly dwarf who lives in a dark cave like an unborn in the womb. You do not follow him, even if he says to you that you could drink wisdom from his source. But forethinking [223] appears to you there as dwarfish cleverness, false and of the night, just as the heavenly mother appears to me down there as Salome. That which is lacking in the pure principle appears as the serpent. The hero strives after the utmost in the pure principle, and therefore he finally falls for the serpent. If you go to thinking, [224] take your heart with you. If you go to love, take your head with you. Love is empty without thinking, thinking hollow without love. The serpent lurks behind the pure principle. Therefore I lost courage, until I found the serpent that at once led me across to the other principle. In climbing down I become smaller.

Great is he who is in love, since love is the present act of the great creator, the present moment of the becoming and lapsing of the world. Mighty is he who loves. But whoever distances himself from love, feels himself powerful.

In your forethinking you recognize the nullity of your current being as a smallest point between the infinity of what has passed and of what is to come. The thinker is small, he feels great if he distances himself from thinking. But if we speak about appearances, it is the other way around. To whoever is in love, form is a trifling. But his field of vision ends with the form given to him. To whoever is in thinking, form is unsurpassable and the height of Heaven. But at night he sees the diversity of the innumerable worlds and their never-ending cycles. Whoever is in love is a full and overflowing vessel, and awaits the giving. Whoever is in forethinking is deep and hollow and awaits fulfillment.

Love and forethinking are in one and the same place. Love cannot be without forethinking, and forethinking cannot be without love. Man is always too much in one or the other. This comes with human nature. Animals and plants seem to have enough in every way, only man staggers between too much and too little. He wavers, he is uncertain how much he must give here and how much there. His knowledge and ability is insufficient, and yet he must still do it himself. Man doesn't only grow from within himself, for he is also creative [225] from within himself. The God becomes revealed in him. [226] Human nature is little skilled in divinity, and therefore man fluctuates between too much and too little. [227]

The spirit of this time has condemned us to haste. You have no more futurity and no more past if you serve the spirit of this time. We need the life of eternity. We bear the future and the past in the depths. The future is old and the past is young. You serve the spirit of this time, and believe that you are able to escape the spirit of the depths. But the depths do not hesitate any longer and will force you into the mysteries of Christ. [228] It belongs to this mystery that man is not redeemed through the hero, but becomes a Christ himself. The antecedent example of the saints symbolically teaches us this.

Whoever wants to see will see badly. It was my will that deceived me. It was my will that provoked the huge uproar among the daimons. Should I therefore not want anything? I have, and I have fulfilled my will as well as I could, and thus I fed everything in me that strived. In the end I found that I wanted myself in everything, but without looking for myself. Therefore I no longer wanted to seek myself outside of myself, but within. Then I wanted to grasp myself, and then I wanted to go on again, without knowing what I wanted, and thus I fell into the mystery.

Should I therefore not want anything anymore? You wanted this war. That is good. If you had not, then the evil of this war would be small. [229] But with your wanting you make the evil great. If you do not succeed in producing the greatest evil out of this war, you will never learn the violent deed and learn to overcome fighting what lies outside you. [230] Therefore it is good if you want this greatest evil with your whole heart. [231] You are Christians and run after heroes, and wait for redeemers who should take the agony on themselves for you, and totally spare you Golgotha. With that you [232] pile up a mountain of Calvary over all Europe. If you succeed in making a terrible evil out of this war and throw innumerable victims into this abyss, this is good, since it makes each of you ready to sacrifice himself. For as I, you draw close to the accomplishment of Christ's mystery.

You already feel the fist of the iron one on your back. This is the beginning of the way. If blood, fire, and the cry of distress fill this world, then you will recognize yourself in your acts: Drink your fill of the bloody atrocities of the war, feast upon the killing and destruction, then your eyes will open, you will see that you yourselves are the bearers of such fruit. [233] You are on the way if you will all this. Willing creates blindness, and blindness leads to the way. Should we will error? You should not, but you do will that error which you take for the best truth, as men have always done.

The symbol of the crystal signifies the unalterable law of events that comes of itself. In this seed you grasp what is to come. I saw something terrible and incomprehensible. (It was on the night of Christmas day of the year 1913.) I saw the peasant's boot, the sign of the horrors of the peasant war, [234] of murdering incendiaries and of bloody cruelty. I knew to interpret this sign for myself as nothing but the fact that something bloody and dreadful lay before us. I saw the foot of a giant that crushed a whole city. How could I interpret this sign otherwise? I saw that the way to self-sacrifice began here. They will all become terribly enraptured by these tremendous experiences, and in their blindness will want to understand them as outer events. It is an inner happening; that is the way to the perfection of the mystery of Christ, [235] so that the peoples learn self-sacrifice.

May the frightfulness become so great that it can turn men's eyes inward, so that their will no longer seeks the self in others but in themselves. [236] I saw it, I know that this is the way. I saw the death of Christ and I saw his lament; I felt the agony of his dying, of the great dying. I saw a new God, a child, who subdued daimons in his hand. [237] The God holds the separate principles in his power, he unites them. The God develops through the union of the principles in me. He is their union.

If you will one of these principles, so you are in one, but far from your being other. If you will both principles, one and the other, then you excite the conflict between the principles, since you cannot want both at the same time. From this arises the need, the God appears in it, he takes your conflicting will in his hand, in the hand of a child whose will is simple and beyond conflict. You cannot learn this, it can only develop in you. You cannot will this, it takes the will from your hand and wills itself. Will yourself, that leads to the way [238].

But fundamentally you are terrified of yourself, and therefore you prefer to run to all others rather than to yourself. I saw the mountain of the sacrifice, and the blood poured in streams from its sides. When I saw how pride and power satisfied men, how beauty beamed from the eyes of women when the great war broke out, I knew that mankind was on the way to self-sacrifice.

The spirit of the depths [239] has seized mankind and forces self-sacrifice upon it. Do not seek the guilt here or there. The spirit of the depths clutched the fate of man unto itself, as it clutched mine. He leads mankind through the river of blood to the mystery. In the mystery man himself becomes the two principles, the lion and the serpent.

Because I also want my being other, I must become a Christ. I am made into Christ, I must suffer it. Thus the redeeming blood flows. Through the self-sacrifice my pleasure is changed and goes above into its higher principle. Love is sighted, but pleasure is blind. Both principles are one in the symbol of the flame. The principles strip themselves of human form. [240]

***

The mystery showed me in images what I should afterward live. I did not possess any of those boons that the mystery showed me, for I still had to earn all of them. [241]

finis. part. prim. (End of part one)
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Re: The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung

Postby admin » Sun Dec 01, 2013 2:10 am

PART 2 OF 3 (CH. 11 CONT'D.)
_______________

Notes:

1. Medieval manuscripts were numbered by folios instead of pages. The front side of the folio is the recto (the right-hand page of an open book), and the back is the verso (the left-hand of an open book). In Liber Primus, Jung followed this practice. He reverted to contemporary pagination in Liber Secundus.

2. In 1921, Jung cited the first three verses of this passage (from Luther's Bible), noting: "The birth of the Savior, the development of the redeeming symbol, takes place where one does not expect it, and from precisely where a solution is most improbable" (Psychological Types, CW 6, §439).

3. In 1921, Jung cited this passage, noting: "The nature of the redeeming symbol is that of a child, that is the childlikeness or presuppositionlessness of the attitude belongs to the symbol and its function. This 'childlike' attitude necessarily brings with it another guiding principle in place of self-will and rational intentions, whose 'godlikeness' is synonymous with 'superiority.' Since it is of an irrational nature, the guiding principle appears in a miraculous form. Isaiah expresses his connection very well (9:5) ... These honorific titles reproduce the essential qualities of the redeeming symbol. The criterion of 'godlike' effect is the irresistible power of the unconscious impulses" (Psychological Types, CW 6. §442-43).

4. In 1955/56, Jung noted that the union of the opposites of the destructive and constructive powers of the unconscious paralleled the Messianic state of fulfillment depicted in this passage (Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, §258).

5. In Goethe's Faust, Faust says to Wagner: "What you call the spirit of the times / is fundamentally the gentleman's own mind, / in which the times are reflected" (Faust I, lines 577-79).

6. The Draft continues: "And then one whom I did not know, but who evidently had such knowledge, said to me: 'What a strange task you have! You must disclose your innermost and lowermost. / This I resisted since I hated nothing more than that which seemed to me unchaste and insolent" (p. 1).

7. In Transformations and of the Libido (1912), Jung interpreted God as a symbol of the libido (CW B. §111). In his subsequent work, Jung laid great emphasis on the distinction between the God image and the metaphysical existence of God (cf. passages added to the revised retitled 1952 edition, Symbols of Transformation, CW 5, §95).

8. The terms hinubergehen (going across), Ubergang (going-across), Untergang (down-going), and Brucke (bridge) feature in Nietzsche's Zarathustra in relation to the passage from man to the Ubermensch (superman). For example, "What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what can be loved in man is that he is a going-across and a down-going. / I love those who do not know how to live except their lives be a down-going, for they are those who are going over" (tr. R. Hollingdale [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984], p. 44, tr. mod; words are as underlined in Jung's copy).

9. Jung seems to be referring to episodes that occur later in the text: the healing of Izdubar (Liber Secundus, ch. 9), and the drinking of the bitter drink prepared by the solitary (Liber Secundus, ch. 20).

10. The Draft continues: "Who drinks this drink will never again thirst for this world nor for the afterlife since he drank crossing and completion. He drank the hot melting river of life which congeals to hard ore in his soul and awaits new melting and mixture" (p. 4).

11. The calligraphic volume has: "This supreme meaning."

12. The Draft continues: "He who knows understands me and sees that I am not lying. May each one inquire of his own depth whether he needs what I say" (p. 4).

13. Lit. Vermessener. This also carries the connotation of the adjective vermessen, that is, a lack or loss of measure, and thus implies overconfidence, presumptuousness.

14. A reference to the vision that follows.

15. The Corrected Draft has: "I Beginning" (p. 7).

16. Jung discussed this vision on several occasions, stressing different details: in his 1925 seminar Analytical Psychology (p. 42f ), to Mircea Eliade (see above, p. 201), and in Memories (pp. Jung was on the way to Schaffhausen, where his mother-in-law lived; her fifty-seventh birthday was on October 17. The journey by train takes about one hour.

17. The Draft continues: "with a friend (whose lack of farsightedness and whose improvidence I had in reality often noted)" (p. 8).

18. The Draft continues: "my friend, however, wanted to return on a small and slower ship, which I considered stupid and imprudent" (p. 8).

19. The Draft continues: "and there I found, strangely enough, my friend, who had evidently taken the same faster ship without my noticing" (pp. 8-9).

20. Ice wine is made by leaving grapes on the vine until they are frozen by frost. They are then pressed, and the ice is removed, leading to a highly concentrated delectable sweet wine.

21. The Draft continues: "This was my dream. All my efforts to understand it were in vain. I labored for days. Its impression, however, was powerful" (p. 9). Jung also recounted this dream in Memories (p. 200).

22. See introduction, p. 201.

23. In the Draft, this is addressed to "my friends" (p. 9).

24. Cf. the contrast to John 14:6: "Jesus said unto him, I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me."

25. The Draft continues: "This is not a law, but notice of the fact that the time of example and law, and of the straight line drawn in advance has become overripe" (p. 10).

26. The Draft continues: "My tongue shall wither if I serve up laws, if I prattle to you about teachings. Those who seek such will leave my table hungry" (p. 10).

27. The Draft continues: "only one law exists, and that is your law. Only one truth exists, and that is your truth" (p. 10).

28. The Draft continues: "One should not turn people into sheep, but sheep into people. The spirit of the depth demands this, who is beyond present and past. Speak and write for those who want to listen and read. But do not run after men, so that you do not soil the dignity of humanity -- it is a rare good. A sad demise in dignity is better than an undignified healing. Whoever wants to be a doctor of the soul sees people as being sick. He offends human dignity. It is presumptuous to say that man is sick. Whoever wants to be the soul's shepherd treats people like sheep. He violates human dignity. It is insolent to say that people are like sheep. Who gives you the right to say that man is sick and a sheep? Give him human dignity so he may find his ascendancy or downfall, his way" (p. 22) .

29. The Draft continues: "This is all, my dear friends, that I can tell you about the grounds and aims of my message, which I am burdened with like the patient donkey with a heavy load. He is glad to put it down" (p. 12).

30. In the text, Jung identifies the white bird as his soul. For Jung's discussion of the dove in alchemy, see Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955/56) (CW 14, §81).

31. The Corrected Draft has: "First Nights" (p. 13).

32. The Handwritten Draft has: "Dear Friends!" (p. 1). The Draft has "Dear Friends!" (p. 1). In his lecture at the ETH on June 14, 1935, Jung noted: "A point exists at about the thirty-fifth year when things begin to change, it is the first moment of the shadow side of life, of the going down to death. It is clear that Dante found this point and those who have read Zarathustra will know that Nietzsche also discovered it. When this turning point comes people meet it in several ways: some turn away from it; others plunge into it; and something important happens to yet others from the outside. If we do not see a thing Fate does it to us" (Barbara Hannah, ed., Modern Psychology, Vol. 1 and 2: Notes on Lectures given at the Eidgenossiche Technische Hochschule, Zurich, by Prof Dr. C. G. Jung, October 1933-July 1935, 2nd ed. [Zurich: privately printed, 1959], p. 223).

33. On October 27, 1913, Jung wrote to Freud breaking off relations with him and resigning as editor of the Jahrbuch fur Psychoanalytische und Psychopathologische Forschungen (William McGuire, ed., The Freud/Jung Letters, tr. Mannheim and R.F.C. Hull [Princeton: Princeton University Press/Bollingen Series, 1974], p. 550).

34. November 12, 1913. After "longing," the Draft has "at the beginning of the following month, I seized my pen and began writing this" (p. 13).

35. This affirmation occurs a number of times in Jung's later writings -- see for example, Jane Pratt, "Notes on a talk given by C. G. Jung: 'Is analytical psychology a religion?'" Spring Journal of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1972), p. 148.

36. Jung later described his personal transformation at this time as an example of the beginning of the second half of life, which frequently marked a return to the soul, after the goals and ambitions of the first half of life had been achieved (Symbols of Transformation [1952], CW 5, p. xxvi); see also "The turning point of life" (1930, CW 8).

37. Jung is referring here to his earlier work. For example, he had written in 1905, "Through the associations experiment we are at least given the means to pave the way for the experimental research of the mysteries of the sick soul." ("The psychopathological meaning of the associations experiment," CW 2, §897).

38. In Psychological Types (1921) Jung noted that in psychology conceptions are "a product of the subjective psychological constellation of the researcher" (CW 6, §9). This reflexivity formed an important theme in his later work (see my Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science, §1).

39. The Draft continues: "a dead system that I had contrived, assembled from so-called experiences and judgments" (p. 16).

40. In 1913, Jung called this process the introversion of the libido ("On the question of Psychological Types," CW 6).

41. In 1912, Jung had written, "It is a common error to judge longing in terms of the quality of the object ... Nature is only beautiful on account of the longing and love accorded to it by man. The aesthetic attributes emanating therefrom apply first and foremost to the libido, which alone accounts for the beauty of nature" (Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, CW B, §147).

42. In Psychological Types, Jung articulated this primacy of the image through his notion of esse in anima (CW 6, §66ff §711ff ). In her diary notes, Cary Baynes commented on this passage: "What struck me especially was what you said about the "Bild" [image] being half the world. That is the thing that makes humanity so dull. They have missed understanding that thing. The world, that is the thing that holds them rapt. 'Das Bild', they have never seriously considered unless they have been poets" (February 8, 1924, CFB).

43. The Draft continues: "He who strives only for things will sink into poverty as outer wealth increases, and his soul will be afflicted by protracted illness" (p. 17).

44. The Draft continues: "This parable about refinding the soul, my friends, is meant to show you that you have only seen me as half a man, since my soul had lost me. I am certain that you did not notice this; because how many are with their souls today? Yet without the soul, there is no path that leads beyond these times" (p. 17). In her diary notes Cary Baynes commented on this passage: "February 8th [1924]. I came to your conversation with your soul. All that you say is said in the right way and is sincere. It is no cry of the young man awakening into life but that of the mature man who has lived fully and richly in ways of the world and yet knows almost abruptly one might, say, that he has missed the essence. The vision came at the height of your power, when you could have gone on just as you were with perfect worldly success. I do not know how you were strong enough to give it heed. I am really for everything you say and understand it. Everyone who has lost the connection with his soul or has known how to give it life ought to have a chance to see this book. Every word so far lives for me and strengthens me just where I feel weak, but as you say the world is very far away from it in mood today. That does not matter too much, a book can swing even a whole world if it is written in fire and blood." (CFB).

45. In 1945, Jung commented on the symbolism of the bird and serpent in connection with the tree, "The philosophical tree" (ch. 12, CW 13).

46. November 14, 1913.

47. The Draft continues: "which were dark to me, and which I sought to grasp in my own inadequate way" (p. 18).

48. The Draft continues: "I belonged to men and things. I did not belong to myself." In Black Book 2, Jung states that he wandered for eleven years (p. 19). He had stopped writing in this book in 1902, taking it up again in the autumn of 1913.

49. Black Book 2 continues: "And I found you again only through the soul of the woman" (p. 8).

50. Black Book 2 continues: "Look, I bear a wound that is as yet not healed: my ambition to make an impression" (p. 8).

51. Black Book 2 continues: "I must tell myself most clearly: does He use the image of a child that lives in every man's soul? Were Horus, Tages, and Christ not children? Dionysus and Heracles were also divine children. Did Christ, the God of man, not call himself the son of man? What was his innermost thought in doing so? Should the daughter of man be God's name?" (p. 9).

52. The Draft continues: "How thick the earlier darkness was! How impetuous and how egotistic my passion was, subjugated by all the daimons of ambition, the desire for glory, greed, uncharitableness, and zeal! How ignorant I was at the time! Life tore me away, and I deliberately moved away from you and I have done so for all these years. I recognize how good all of this was. But I thought that you were lost, even though I sometimes thought that I was lost. But you were not lost. I went on the way of the day. You went invisibly with me and guided me step by step, putting the pieces together meaningfully" (pp. 20-21).

53. In 1912, Jung endorsed Maeder's notion of the prospective function of the dream (''An attempt at an account of psychoanalytic theory," CW 4, §452). In a discussion in the Zurich Psychoanalytical Society on January 31, 1913, Jung said: "The dream is not only the fulfillment of infantile desires, but also symbolizes the future ... The dream provides the answer through the symbol, which one must understand" (MZS, p. 5). On the development of Jung's dream theory, see my Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science, §2.

54. This echoes Blaise Pascal's famous statement, "The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing" (Pensees, 423 [London: Penguin, 1660/1995]. p. 127). Jung's copy of Pascal's work contains a number of marginal marks.

55. In 1912, Jung argued that scholarliness was insufficient if one wanted to become a "knower of the human soul." To do this, one had to "hang up exact science and put away the scholar's gown, to say farewell to his study and wander with human heart through the world, through the horror of prisons, mad houses and hospitals, through drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling dens, through the salons of elegant society, the stock exchanges, the socialist meetings, the churches, the revivals and ecstasies of the sects, to experience love, hate and passion in every form in one's body" ("New paths of psychology," CW 7, §409).

56. In 1931, Jung commented on the pathogenic consequences of the unlived life of parents upon their children: "What usually has the strongest psychic effect on the child is the life which the parents ... have not lived. This statement would be rather too perfunctory and superficial if we did not add by way of qualification: that part of their lives which might have been lived had not certain somewhat threadbare excuses prevented the parents from doing so" ("Introduction to Frances Wickes, 'Analyse der Kinderseele,'" CW 17, §87).

57. In the 1925 seminar, Jung explained his thoughts at this time: "These ideas about the anima and animus led me ever further afield into metaphysical problems, and more things crept up for reexamination. At that time I was on the Kantian basis that there were things that could never be solved and that therefore should not be speculated about, but it seemed to me that if I could find such definite ideas about the anima, it was quite worthwhile to try to formulate a conception of God. But I could arrive at nothing satisfactory and thought for a time that perhaps the anima figure was the deity. I said to myself that perhaps men had had a female God originally, but growing tired of being governed by women, they had then overthrown this God. I practically threw the whole metaphysical problem into the anima and conceived of it as the dominating spirit of psyche. In this way I got into a psychological argument with myself about the problem of God" (Analytical Psychology, p. 46).

58. In 1940, Jung presented a study of the motif of the divine child, in a collaborative volume with the Hungarian classicist Karl Kerenyi (see "On the psychology of the child archetype," CW 9, 1). Jung wrote that the child motif occurs frequently in the individuation process. It does not represent one's literal childhood, as is emphasized by its mythological nature. It compensates the one-sidedness of consciousness and paves the way for the future development of the personality. In certain conditions of conflict, the unconscious psyche produces a symbol that unites the opposites. The child is such a symbol. It anticipates the self, which is produced through the synthesis of the conscious and unconscious elements of the personality. The typical fates that befall the child indicate the kind of psychic events accompanying the genesis of the self. The wonderful birth of the child indicates that this happens psychically as opposed to physically.

59. In 1940, Jung wrote: "an essential aspect of the child motif is its futural character. The child is potential future" ("On the psychology of the child archetype," CW 9, I, §278).

60. The Draft continues: "My friends, as you can see, mercy is granted to the developed, not the childish. I thank my God for this message. Do not let the teachings of Christianity deceive you! Its teachings are good for the most mature minds of bygone time. Today, it serves immature minds. Christianity no longer promises us grace, and yet we still need mercy. That which I tell you is the way of what is to come, my way to mercy" (p. 27).

61. I.e., Christ. Cf. Jung, "Transformation symbolism in the mass" (1942, CW II) .

62. In Answer to Job Jung noted: "Through the indwelling of the third divine person in man, namely the Holy Ghost, a christification of the many arises" (1952, CW 11, §758)

63. November 15, 1913.

64. In Black Book 2, Jung wrote down here the two pivotal dreams he had when he was nineteen years old which led him to turn to natural science (p. 13f); they are described in Memories, p. 105f.

65. In Black Book 2, Jung noted here: "Here, someone stands beside me and whispers terrible things into my ear: 'You write to be printed and circulated among people. You want to cause a stir through the unusual. Nietzsche did this better than you. You are imitating Saint Augustine'" (p. 20). The reference is to Augustine's Confessions (400 CE), a devotional work written when he was forty-five years old, in which he narrates his conversion to Christianity in an autobiographical form (Confessions, tr. H. Chadwick [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991]). The Confessions are addressed to God, and recount the years of his wandering from God and the manner of his return. Echoing this in the opening sections of Liber Novus, Jung addresses his soul and recounts the years of his wandering away from her, and the manner of his return. In his published works, Jung frequently cited Augustine, and referred to his Confessions several times in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido.

66. The first letter of John: "God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him" (1 John 4:16).

67. Christ was tempted by the devil for forty days in the desert (Luke 4:1-13).

68. Matthew 21:18-20: "Now in the morning as he returned into the city, he hungered. And when he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward for ever. And presently the fig tree withered away. And when the disciples saw it, they marveled, saying, How soon is the fig tree withered away!" In 1944 Jung wrote: "The Christian -- my Christian -- knows no curse formulas; indeed he does not even sanction the cursing of the innocent fig-tree by the rabbi Jesus" ("Why I have not adopted the 'Catholic truth'?" CW 18, §1468).

69. The Draft continues: "They may serve for your redemption" (p. 34).

70. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote: "And even when one has all the virtues, there is still one thing to remember: to send even these virtues to sleep at the proper time" ("Of the chairs of virtue," p. 56). In 1939 Jung commented on the Eastern notion of liberation from virtues and vices ("Commentary to the 'Tibetan Book of Great Liberation," CW II, §826).

71. November 22, 1913. In Black Book 2, this sentence reads "says a voice" (p. 22). On November 21 Jung had given a presentation to the Zurich Psychoanalytical Society on "Formulations on the psychology of the unconscious."

72. November 28, 1913.

73. Black Book 2 continues: "I hear the words: 'An anchorite in his own desert.' The monks in the Syrian desert occur to me" (p. 33).

74. Black Book 2 continues: "I think of Christianity in the desert. Physically; those ancients went into the desert. Did they also enter into the desert of their own self? Or was their self not as barren and desolate as mine? There they wrestled with the devil. I wrestle with waiting. It seems to me not less since it is truly a hot hell" (p. 35).

75. Around 285, St. Anthony went to live as a hermit in the Egyptian desert, and other hermits followed, whom he and Pachomius organized into a community. This formed the basis of Christian monasticism, which spread to the Palestinian and Syrian deserts. In the fourth century there were thousands of monks in the Egyptian desert.

76. John 1:1: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

77. December 11, 1913.

78. In "Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower' "(1929), Jung criticized the Western tendency to turn everything into methods and intentions. The cardinal lesson, as presented by the Chinese texts and by Meister Eckhart, was that of allowing psychic events to happen of their own accord: "letting things happen, the action through non-action, the 'letting go of oneself' of Meister Eckhart, became the key for me that succeeded in opening the door to the way: One must be able to psychically ley things happen" (CW 13, §20).

79. Christ preached: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5:3). In a number of Christian communities, members take a vow of poverty. In 1934, Jung wrote: "Just as in Christianity the vow of worldly poverty turned the mind away from the riches of this earth, so spiritual poverty seeks to renounce the false riches of the spirit in order to withdraw not only from the sorry remnants -- which today call themselves the protestant 'churches' -- of a great past, but also from all the allurements of exotic aromas; in order, finally, to turn back to itself, where, in the cold light of consciousness, the blank barrenness of the world reaches to the very stars" ("On the archetypes of the collective unconscious." CW 9, I, §29).

80. The Draft continues: "This, too, is an image of the ancients, that they lived in things symbolically: they renounced wealth in order to have a share of the voluntary poverty of their souls. Therefore I had to grant my soul my most extreme poverty and need. And the scorn of my cleverness rose up against this" (p. 47).

81. December 12, 1911 The Corrected Draft has: "IV The Mystery Play. First Night." (p. 34). Black Book 2 continues: "The battle of late was the battle with scorn. A vision that caused me three sleepless nights and three days of torment has likened me to G. Keller's druggist of Chamounix (from start to finish). I know and acknowledge this style. I have learned that one must give one's heart to men, but one's intellect to the spirit of humanity, God. Then His work can be beyond vanity; since there is no more hypocritical whore than the intellect when it replaces the heart" (p. 41). Gottfried Keller (1819-1890) was a Swiss writer. See "Der Apotheker von Chamounix: Ein Buch Romanzen," in Gottfried Keller. Gesammelte Gedichte: Erzahlungen Nachlass (Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1984), pp. 351-417.

82. The Draft continues: "A dwarf clad entirely in leather stood before it, minding the entrance" (p. 48).

83. The Corrected Draft continues: "The stone must be conquered, it is the stone of the torment, of the red light" (p. 35). The Corrected Draft has: "It is a six-sided crystal that gives off a cold, reddish light" (p. 35). Albrecht Dieterich refers to the representation of the underworld in Aristophanes' The Frogs (which he understood to be of Orphic origin) as having a large lake and a place with serpents (Nekyia: Beitrage zur Erklarung der neuentdeckten Petrusapokalypse [Leipzig: Teubner, 1893], p. 71). Jung underlined these motifs in his copy. Dieterich referred to his description again on page 83, which Jung marked by the margin, and underlined "Darkness and Mud." Dieterich also referred to an Orphic representation of a stream of mud in the underworld (p. 81). In his list of references in the back of his copy, Jung noted. "81 Mud."

84. Black Book 2 continues: "This dark hole -- I want to know where it leads and what it says? An oracle? Is it the place of Pythia?" (p. 43).

85. Jung narrated this episode in his 1925 seminar, stressing different details. He commented: "When I came out of the fantasy; I realized that my mechanism had worked wonderfully well, but I was in great confusion as to the meaning of all those things I had seen. The light in the cave from the crystal was, I thought, like the stone of wisdom. The secret murder of the hero I could not understand at all. The beetle of course I knew to be an ancient sun symbol, and the setting sun, the luminous red disk, was archetypal. The serpents I thought might have been connected with Egyptian material. I could not then realize that it was all so archetypal, I need not seek connections. I was able to link the picture up with the sea of blood I had previously fantasized about. / Though I could not then grasp the significance of the hero killed, soon after I had a dream in which Siegfried was killed by myself. It was a case of destroying the hero ideal of my efficiency. This has to be sacrificed in order that a new adaptation can be made; in short, it is connected with the sacrifice of the superior function in order to get at the libido necessary to activate the inferior functions" (Analytical Psychology, p. 48). (The killing of Siegfried occurs below in ch. 7) Jung also anonymously cited and discussed this fantasy in his ETH lecture on June 14, 1935 (Modern Psychology, vols. I. and 2, p. 223).

86. In the Corrected Draft, "Science" is deleted (p. 37).

87. In the Corrected Draft, "more blessed" is substituted (p. 38).

88. In the Corrected Draft, this sentence is substituted by: "Madness grows" (p. 38).

89. The theme of divine madness has a long history. Its locus classicus was Socrates's discussion of it in the Phaedrus: madness, "provided it comes as a gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings" (Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, tr. W Hamilton [London: Penguin, 1986), p. 46, line 244). Socrates distinguished four types of divine madness: (1) inspired divination, such as by the prophetess at Delphi; (2) instances in which individuals, when ancient sins have given rise to troubles, have prophesied and incited to prayer and worship; (3) possession by the Muses, since the technically skilled untouched by the madness of the Muses will never be a good poet; and (4) the lover. In the Renaissance, the theme of divine madness was taken up by the Neoplatonists such as Ficino and by humanists such as Erasmus. Erasmus's discussion is particularly important, as it fuses the classical Platonic conception with Christianity. For Erasmus, Christianity was the highest type of inspired madness. Like Plato, Erasmus differentiated between two types of madness: "Thus as long as the soul uses its bodily organs aright, a man is called sane; but truly, when it bursts its chains and tries to be free, practising running away from its prison, then one calls it insanity. If this happens through disease or a defect of the organs, then by common consent it is, plainly, insanity. And yet men of this kind, too, we find foretelling things to come, knowing tongues and writings which they had never studied beforehand -- altogether showing forth something divine" (In Praise of Folly, tr. M. A. Screech [London: Penguin, 1988), pp. 128-29). He adds that if insanity "happens through divine fervor, it may not be the same kind of insanity, but it is so like it that most people make no distinction." For lay people, the two forms of insanity appeared the same. The happiness that Christians sought was "nothing other than a certain kind of madness." Those who experience this "experience something which is very like madness. They speak incoherently and unnaturally, utter sound without sense, and their faces suddenly change expression ... in fact they are truly beside themselves" (ibid., pp. 129-33). In 1815, the philosopher F.W.J. Schelling discussed divine madness in a manner that has a certain proximity to Jung's discussion, noting that "The ancients did not speak in vain of a divine and holy madness." Schelling related this to the "inner self-laceration of nature." He held that "nothing great can be accomplished without a constant solicitation of madness, which should always be overcome, but should never be entirely lacking." On the one hand, there were sober spirits in whom there was no trace of madness, together with men of understanding who produced cold intellectual works. On the other, "there is one kind of person that governs madness and precisely in this overwhelmingly shows the highest force of the intellect. The other kind of person is governed by madness and is someone who is really mad" (The Ages of the World, tr.), Wirth [Albany: SUNY Press, 2000], pp. 102-4).

90. An application of William James's notion of the pragmatic rule. Jung read James's Pragmatism in 1912, and it had a strong impact on his thinking. In his foreword to his Fordham University lectures, Jung stated that he had taken James's pragmatic rule as his guiding principle (CW 4, p. 86). See my Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science, pp. 57-61.

91. The Draft continues: "The spirit of the depths was so alien to me that it took me twenty-five nights to comprehend him. And even then he was still so alien that I could neither see nor ask. He had to come to me as a stranger from far away and from an unheard-of side. He had to call me. I could not address him, knowing him and his nature. He announced himself with a loud voice, as in a warlike turmoil with the manifold clamoring of the voices of this time. The spirit of this time arose in me against this stranger, and uttered a battle cry together with his many serfs. I heard the noise of this battle in the air. Then the spirit of the depths burst forth and led me to the site of the innermost. But he had reduced the spirit of this time to a dwarf who was clever and bustling, yet was a dwarf. And the vision showed me the spirit of this time as made of leather, that is, pressed together, sere and lifeless. He could not prevent me from entering the dark underworld of the spirit of the depths. To my astonishment I realized that my feet sank into the black muddy water of the river of death. [The Corrected Draft adds: "for that is where death is". p. 41] The mystery of the shining red crystal was my next destination" (pp. 54-55).

92. The Draft continues: "My soul is my supreme meaning, my image of God, neither God himself nor the supreme meaning. God becomes apparent in the supreme meaning of the human community" (p. 58).

93. In "Transformation symbolism in the mass," (1942) Jung commented on the motif of the identity of the sacrificer and the sacrificed, with particular reference to the visions of Zosimos of Panapolis, a natural philosopher and alchemist of the third century Jung noted: "What I sacrifice is my egotistical claim, and by doing this I give up myself. Every sacrifice is therefore, to a greater or lesser degree, a self-sacrifice" (CW II, §397). Cf. also the Katha Upanishad. ch. 2. verse 19. Jung cited the next two verses of the Katha Upanishad on the nature of the self in 1921 (CW 6, §329). There is a line in the margin of Jung's copy by these verses in the Sacred Books of the East, vol. XV, pt. 2. p. 11. In "Dreams," Jung noted in connection with a dream "My intensive unconscious relation to India in the Red Book" (p. 9).

94. Jung elaborated the theme of collective guilt in ''After the catastrophe" (1945. CW 10).

95. The reference is to the events of World War I. The autumn of 1914 (when Jung wrote this section of "layer two") saw the battle of the Marne and the first battle of Ypres.

96. In his lecture at the ETH on June 14, 1935, Jung commented (partially in reference to this fantasy, which he referred to anonymously): "The sun motif appears in many places and times and the meaning is always the same -- that a new consciousness has been born. It is the light of illumination which is projected into space. This is a psychological event; the medical term "hallucination" makes no sense in psychology. / The Katabasis plays a very important role in the Middle Ages and the old masters conceived of the rising sun in this Katabasis as of a new light, the lux moderna, the jewel, the lapis" (Modern Psychology, p. 231).

97. The Draft continues: "My friends, I know that I speak in riddles. But the spirit of the depths has granted me a view of many things in order to help my weak comprehension. I want to tell you more about my visions so that you better understand which things the spirit of the depths would like you to see. May those be well who can see these things! Those who cannot must live them as blind fate, in images" (p. 61).

98. In The Relations between the I and the Unconscious (1927), Jung refers to the destructive and anarchic aspects that are constellated in societies being enacted by prophetically inclined individuals through spectacular crimes such as regicide (CW 7, §240).

99. Political assassinations were frequent at the beginning of the twentieth century. The particular event referred to here is the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Martin Gilbert describes this event, which played a critical role in the events that led to the outbreak of the First World War, as "a turning point in the history of the twentieth century" (A History of the Twentieth Century: Volume One: 1900-1933 [London: William Morrow, 1977], p. 308).

100. The Draft continues: "When I was aspiring to my highest worldly power, the spirit of the depths sent me nameless thoughts and visions, that wiped out the heroic aspiration in me as our time understands it" (p. 62).

101. The Draft continues: "Everything that we have forgotten will be revived, each human and divine passion, the black serpents and the reddish sun of the depths" (p. 64).

102. On June 9, 1917, there was a discussion on the psychology of the world war in the Association for Analytical Psychology following a presentation by Jules Vodoz on the Song of Roland. Jung argued that "Hypothetically, the World War can be raised to the subjective level. In detail, the authoritarian principle (taking action on the basis of principles) clashes with the emotional principle. The collective unconscious enters into allegiance with the emotional." Concerning the hero, he said: "The hero -- the beloved figure of the people, should fall. All heroes bring themselves down by carrying the heroic attitude beyond a certain limit, and hence lose their footing" (MAP, vol. 2, p. 10). The psychological interpretation of the First World War on the subjective level describes what is developed in this chapter. The connection between individual and collective psychology which he articulates here forms one of the leitmotifs of his later work Present and Future [1957], CW 10).

103. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche wrote: ''Anyone who fights with monsters should take care that he not in the process become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into you" (tr. Marion Faber [Oxford: Oxford University Press], 1998, §146, p. 68).

104. Black Book 2 continues: "Are you neurotic? Are we neurotic?" (p. 53).

105. See note 99, p. 240.

106. The Draft continues: "My friends, if you knew what depths of the future you carry inside you! Those who look into their own depths, look at what is to come" (p. 70).

107. The Draft continues: "But just as Judas is a necessary link in the chain of the work of redemption, so is our Judas betrayal of the hero also a necessary passageway to redemption" (p. 71). In Transformations and Symbols of the Libido (1912), Jung discussed the view of the Abbe Oegger, in Anatole France's story Le jardin d'Epicure, who maintained that God had chosen Judas as an instrument to complete Christ's work of redemption (CW B,

108. Cf. Leviticus 16:7-10: "And he shall take the two goats, and present them before the Lord at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation. And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for the scapegoat. And Aaron shall bring the goat upon which the Lord's lot fell, and offer him for a sin offering. But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness."

109. The Draft continues: "this is what the ancients taught us" (p. 72).

110. The Draft continues: "Those who wander in the desert experience everything that belongs to the desert. The ancients have described this to us. From them we can learn. Open the ancient books and learn what will come to you in solitude. Everything will be given to you and you will be spared nothing, the mercy and the torment" (p. 72).

111. This refers to the mourning for the death of the hero.

112. December 18, 1913. Black Book 2 has: "The following night was terrible. I soon awoke from a frightful dream" (p. 56). The Draft has: "a mighty dream vision rose from the depths" (p. 73).

113. Siegfried was a heroic prince who appears in old German and Norse epics. In the twelfth-century Niebelunglied, he is described as follows: "And in what magnificent style Siegfried rode! He bore a great spear, stout of shaft and broad of head; his handsome sword reached down to his spurs; and the fine horn which this lord carried was of the reddest gold" (tr. A. Hatto [London: Penguin, 2004], p. 129). His wife, Brunhild, is tricked into revealing the only place where he could be wounded and killed. Wagner reworked these epics in The Ring of the Niebelung. In 1912, in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, Jung presented a psychological interpretation of Siegfried as a symbol of the libido, principally citing Wagner's libretto of Siegfried (CW B. §568f).

114. The Draft continues: "After this dream vision" (p. 73).

115. In Black Book 2, Jung noted: "I strode light-footedly up an incredibly steep path and later helped my wife, who followed me at a slower pace, to ascend. Some people mocked us, but I didn't mind, since this showed that they didn't know that I had murdered the hero" (p. 57). Jung recounted this dream in the 1925 seminar, stressing different details. He preceded it with the following remarks: "Siegfried was not an especially sympathetic figure to me, and I don't know why my unconscious got engrossed in him. Wagner's Siegfried, especially, is exaggeratedly extraverted and at times actually ridiculous. I never liked him. Nevertheless the dream showed him to be my hero. I could not understand the strong emotion I had with the dream." After narrating the dream, Jung concluded: "I felt an enormous pity for him [Siegfried], as though I myself had been shot. I must then have had a hero I did not appreciate, and it was my ideal of force and efficiency I had killed. I had killed my intellect, helped on to the deed by a personification of the collective unconscious, the little brown man with me. In other words, I deposed my superior function ... The rain that fell is a symbol of the release of tension; that is, the forces of the unconscious are loosed. When this happens, the feeling of relief is engendered. The crime is expiated because, as soon as the main function is deposed, there is a chance for other sides of the personality to be born into life" (Analytical Psychology, pp. 56-57). In Black Book 2, and in his later remarks about this dream in Memories (p. 204), Jung said that he felt that he would have to kill himself if he could not solve this riddle.

116. The Draft continues: "and I fell asleep again. A second dream vision rose in me" (pp. 73-74).

117. The Draft continues: "These lights pervaded my mind and senses. And once again I fell asleep like a convalescent" (p. 74). Jung recounted this dream to Aniela Jaffe, and commented that after he had been confronted with the shadow, as in the Siegfried dream, this dream expressed the idea that he was one thing and something else at the same time. The unconscious reached beyond one, like a saint's halo. The shadow was like the light-colored sphere that surrounded the people. He thought this was a vision of the beyond, where men are complete. (MP, p. 170).

118. The Draft continues: "The world in-between is a world of the simplest things. It is not a world of intention and imperatives, but a perchance-world with indefinite possibilities. Here the next ways are all small, no broad, straight highroads, no Heaven above them, no Hell beneath" (p. 74). In October of 1916, Jung gave some talks to the Psychological Club, "Adaptation, individuation, and collectivity," in which he commented on the importance of guilt: "the first step in individuation is tragic guilt. The accumulation of guilt demands expiation" (CW 18, §ro94).

119. The Draft has here, in addition: "Are you smiling? The spirit of this time would want to make you believe that the depths are no world and no reality" (p. 74).

120. The Draft continues: "a Judas" (p. 75).

121. The Draft continues: "My dream vision showed me that I was not alone when I committed the deed. I was helped by a youth, that is, one who was younger than me; a rejuvenated version of myself" (p. 76).

122 The Draft continues: "Siegfried had to die, just like Wotan" (p. 76). In 1918, Jung wrote of the effects of the introduction of Christianity into Germany: "Christianity split the Germanic barbarian into his upper and lower halves and enabled him, by repressing the dark side, to domesticate the brighter half and fit it for culture. But the lower, darker half still awaits redemption and a second domestication. Until then, it will remain associated with vestiges of prehistory, with the collective unconscious, which must indicate a peculiar and increasing activation of the collective unconscious. ("On the unconscious," CW 10, §17). He expanded on this situation in "Wotan" (1936, CW 10).

123. In the Draft, this sentence reads: "We want to continue living with a new God, a hero beyond Christ" (p. 76). To Aniela Jaffe, he recounted that he had thought of himself as an overcoming hero, but the dream indicated that the hero had to be killed. This exaggeration of the will was represented by the Germans at that time, such as by the Siegfried line. A voice within him said, "If you do not understand the dream, you must shoot yourself!" (MP, p. 98, Memories, p. 204). The original Siegfried line was a defensive line established by the Germans in northern France in 1917 (this was actually a subsection of the Hindenburg Line).

124. The theme of the dying and resurrecting God features prominently in James Frazer's The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1911-15), which Jung drew upon in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido (1912).

125. A reference to Christ's parable of the mustard seed. Matthew 13:31-32: "The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree" (Cf. Luke 13:18-20, Mark 4:30-32).

126. In Mark 16:17, Christ stated that those who believe shall speak with new tongues. The issue of speaking in tongues is discussed in 1 Corinthians 14, and is central in the Pentecostal movement.

127. The theme of self-overcoming is an important one in the work of Nietzsche. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes: "I teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All creatures hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and do you want to be the ebb of this great tide, and return to the animals rather than overcome man? ("Zarathustra's prologue 3," p. 41; underlined as in Jung's copy). For Jung's discussion of this theme in Nietzsche, see Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-9, vol. 2, ed. James Jarrett (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988, pp. 1502-08).

128. Judas betrayed Christ for thirty pieces of silver (Matthew 26:14-16).

129. See note 58, p. 234.

130. This conception of the encompassing nature of the new God is fully developed further ahead in Scrutinies (Sermon 2, p. 349f ).

131. The theme of the integration of evil into the Godhead played an important role in Jung's works; see Aion (1951, CW 9, 2, ch. 5), and Answer to Job (1952, CW 11).

132. The conception of the absolute idea was developed by Hegel. He understood it as the culmination and the self-differentiating unity of the dialectical sequence that gives rise to the cosmos. Cf. Hegel's Logic (tr. W. Wallace [London: Thames and Hudson, 1975]). Jung refers to this in 1921 in Psychological Types (CW 6, §735).

133. This sentence is cut in the Corrected Draft and replaced with "but this can be guessed:" (p. 68).

134. 1 Peter 4:6 states: "For this reason the gospel was preached also to those who are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit."

135. The theme of Christ's descent into Hell features in several apocryphal gospels. In the "Apostles Creed," it is stated that "He descended into Hell. The third day He arose again from the dead." Jung commented on the appearance of this motif in medieval alchemy (Psychology and Alchemy, 1944, CW 12, §61n, 440, 451; Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1955/56, CW 14, 475). One of the sources which Jung referred to (CW 12, §61n) was Albrecht Dieterich's Nekyia: Beitrage zur Erklarung der neuentdeckten Petrusapokalypse, which commented on an apocalyptic fragment from the Gospel of St. Peter, in which Christ gives a detailed description of Hell. Jung's copy of this work has numerous markings in the margins, and in the rear are two additional pieces of paper with a list of page references and remarks. In 1951 he gave the following psychological interpretation of the motif of Christ's descent into Hell: "The scope of the integration is by the 'descensus ad infernos,' the descent of Christ's soul to Hell, whose work of redemption also encompasses the dead. The psychological equivalent of this forms the integration of the collective unconscious which represents an essential part of the individuation process" (Aion, CW 9, 2, §72). In 1938 he noted: "The three days descent into Hell during death describes the sinking of the vanished value into the unconscious, where, by conquering the power of darkness, it establishes a new order, and then rises up to heaven again, that is, attains supreme clarity of consciousness" ("Psychology and religion," CW II, §149). The "unknown books of the ancients" refer to the apocryphal gospels.

136. The Draft continues: "But the serpent is also life. In the image furnished by the ancients, the serpent put an end to the childlike magnificence of paradise; they even said that Christ himself had been a serpent" (p. 83). Jung commented on this motif in 1950 in Aion, CW 9, 2, §291.

137. The Corrected Draft has: "a beginning of Hell" (p. 70). In 1933 Jung recalled: "At the outbreak of war I was in Inverness, and I returned through Holland and Germany. I came right through the armies going west, and I had the feeling that it was what one would call in German a Hochzeitsstimmung, a feast of love all over the country: Everything was decorated with flowers, it was an outburst of love, they all loved each other and everything was beautiful. Yes, the war was important, a big affair, but the main thing was the brotherly love all over the country, everybody was everybody else's brother, one could have everything anyone possessed, it did not matter. The peasants threw open their cellars and handed out what they had. That happened even in the restaurant and buffet at the railroad station. I was very hungry. I had had nothing to eat for about twenty-four hours, and they had some sandwiches left, and when I asked what they cost, they said, "Oh nothing, just take them!" And when I first crossed the border into Germany, we were led into an enormous tent full of beer and sausages and bread and cheese, and we paid nothing, it was one great feast of love. I was absolutely bewildered" (Visions Seminars 2, ed. Claire Douglas [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997], pp. 974-75).

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?"...

I am coming to the end of my story. Everything went very rapidly from then on. Soon there was war, and Demian, strangely unfamiliar in his uniform, left us. I accompanied his mother home. It was not long before I, too, took my leave of her. She kissed me on the mouth and clasped me for a moment to her breast. Her great eyes burned close and firmly into mine.

All men seemed to have become brothers -- overnight. They talked of "the fatherland" and of "honor," but what lay behind it was their own fate whose unveiled face they had now all beheld for one brief moment. Young men left their barracks, were packed into trains, and on many faces I saw a sign -- not ours -- but a beautiful, dignified sign nonetheless that meant love and death. I, too, was embraced by people whom I had never seen before and I understood this gesture and responded to it. Intoxication made them do it, not a hankering after their destiny. But this intoxication was sacred, for it was the result of their all having thrown that brief and terribly disquieting glance into the eyes of their fate.

It was nearly winter when I was sent to the front. Despite the excitement of being under fire for the first time, in the beginning everything disappointed me. At one time I had given much thought to why men were so very rarely capable of living for an ideal. Now I saw that many, no, all men were capable of dying for one. Yet it could not be a personal, a freely chosen ideal; it had to be one mutually accepted.

As time went on though I realized I had underestimated these men. However much mutual service and danger made a uniform mass of them, I still saw many approach the will of fate with great dignity. Many, very many, not only during the attack but at every moment of the day, wore in their eyes the remote, resolute, somewhat possessed look which knows nothing of aims and signified complete surrender to the incredible. Whatever they might think or believe, they were ready, they could be used, they were the clay of which the future could be shaped. The more single-mindedly the world concentrated on war and heroism, on honor and other old ideals, the more remote and improbable any whisper of genuine humanity sounded -- that was all just surface, in the same way that the question of the war's external and political objectives remained superficial. Deep down, underneath, something was taking shape. Something akin to a new humanity. For I could see many men -- and many died beside me -- who had begun to feel acutely that hatred and rage, slaughter and annihilation, were not bound up with these objectives. No, these objectives and aims were completely fortuitous. The most primitive, even the wildest feelings were not directed at the enemy; their bloody task was merely an irradiation of the soul, of the soul divided within itself, which filled them with the lust to rage and kill, annihilate and die so that they might be born anew.

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


138. The phrase "Soul murderer" had been used by Luther and Zwingli, and more recently by Daniel Paul Schreber in his 1903 Memoirs of my Nervous Illness, eds. and tr. Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter (Folkestone: William Dawson, 1955). Jung discussed this work in 1907 in "On the psychology of dementia praecox" (CW 3), and drew Freud's attention to it. In discussions concerning Schreber in the Association for Analytical Psychology on July 9 and 16 of 1915 following presentations by Schneiter, Jung drew attention to Gnostic parallels to Schreber's imagery (MAP, vol. 1., p. 88f ).

139. The reference is to the carnage of World War I.

140. This refers back to the vision in chapter 5, "Descent into Hell in the Future." In 1940 Jung wrote: "the threat to one's inmost self from dragons and serpents points to the danger of the newly acquired consciousness being swallowed up again by the instinctive soul, the unconscious" ("On the psychology of the child archetype," CW 9,1, §282).

141. The Corrected Draft has instead "to an end" (p. 73).

142. In 1952, Jung wrote to Zwi Werblowsky concerning the intentional ambiguity of his writings: "The language I speak must be equivocal, that is, ambiguous, to do justice to psychic nature with its double aspect. I strive consciously and deliberately for ambiguous expressions, because it is superior to unequivocalness and corresponds to the nature of being" (Letters 2, pp. 70-71).

143. The Draft continues: "Look at the images of the Gods that the ancients and the men of old left behind: their nature is ambiguous and equivocal" (p. 87).

144. I John 4:16: "God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him."

145. The Draft continues: "Whoever reverses this word and others that I speak, is a player, since he doesn't respect the spoken word. Know that you attain yourself from what you read in a book. You read as much into a book as out of it" (p. 88).

146. The Corrected Draft has "birth of the new [conception of a] God" (p. 74).

147. The reference is to the Virgin Mary.

148. See note 57, p. 237.

149. This seems to refer to the wounding of Izdubar in Liber Secundus, ch. 8, "First Day." See below, p. 278f.

150. The importance of wholeness above perfection is an important theme in Jung's later work. Cf. Aion, 1951, CW 9, 2, §123; Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1955/56, CW 14, §616.

151. In 1916, Jung wrote: "Man has one ability which, though it is of the greatest utility for collective purposes, is the most pernicious for individuation, and that is imitation. Collective psychology can hardly dispense with imitation" ("The structure of the unconscious: CW 7, §463). In "On the psychology of the child archetype" (1940) Jung wrote about the danger of identifying with the hero: "This identity is often very extremely stubborn and dangerous for the equilibrium of the soul. If the identity can be dissolved, the figure of the hero, through the reduction of consciousness to a human level, can gradually be differentiated into a symbol of the self " (CW 9, I, §303).

152. Jung dealt with the issue of the conflict between individuation and collectivity in 1916 in "Individuation and collectivity" (CW 18).

153. Cf. Jung's comments in "Individuation and collectivity" that "The individual must now consolidate himself by cutting himself off from God and becoming wholly himself. Thereby and at the same time he also separates himself from society. Outwardly he plunges into solitude, but inwardly into Hell, distance from God" (CW 18, §1103).

154. This is an interpretation of the murder of Siegfried in Liber Primus, ch. 7, "Murder of the Hero."

155. This refers to the dream mentioned in the prologue, p. 231.
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Re: The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung

Postby admin » Sun Dec 01, 2013 2:11 am

PART 3 OF 3 (CH. 11 CONT'D.)

156. In Black Book 2 Jung noted: "with a gray beard and wearing an Oriental robe" (p. 231).

157. Elijah was one of the prophets of the Old Testament. He first appears in I Kings 17, bearing a message from God to Ahab, the king of Israel. In 1953, the Carmelite Pere Bruno wrote to Jung asking how one established the existence of an archetype. Jung replied by taking Elijah as an example, describing him as a highly mythical personage, which did not prevent him from probably being a historical figure. Drawing together descriptions of him throughout history, Jung described him as a "living archetype" who represented the collective unconscious and the self. He noted that such a constellated archetype gave rise to new forms of assimilation, and represented a compensation on the part of the unconscious (CW 18, §§1518-31).

For even the great prophetic movement, which, well considered, is the only manifestation of the Hebrew intellect which possesses enduring worth, originated in the north. Elijah, in many respects the most remarkable and most imaginative personality in the whole Israelite history, exercised his influence there only. The accounts of Elijah are so scanty that many look upon him as a mythological personage, but I agree with Wellhausen in thinking that this is historically impossible, for Elijah is the man who sets the stone rolling, the inventor in a way of the true religion of Jehovah, the great mind which has a vague feeling, though not a clear idea, of the monotheistic essence of that worship. Here a great personality is at work, and to work it must have lived. Of special interest is the one exact piece of information which we possess regarding him; according to it he was not an Israelite, but a "settler with half rights" from the other side of the Jordan, from the farthest boundaries of the land -- a man, therefore, in whose veins in all probability almost pure Arabian blood must have flowed. This is interesting, for it shows the genuine Semitic element at work, trying to save its religious ideal, which in the south by the eclecticism of such half-Amorites as David and Amorite-Hittites as Solomon, and in the north by the secular tolerance of the predominantly Canaanite population, had been seriously threatened. In the north alone, which was favoured by its situation, and the inhabitants of which probably were distinguished by greater industry and talent for commerce, there was already prosperity, and with it luxury and the taste for art had developed; one of the sins with which Amos reproaches the Israelites is that "they make songs like David." Against this the anti-civilising spirit of the more genuine Semite rebelled. The noble-minded man felt instinctively and powerfully the incompatibility between the alien culture and the mental qualities of his people; he saw before his feet the pit open, into which in truth all mongrel Semitic kingdoms had quickly sunk and left no trace behind, and, fearless as the Bedouin, he prepared for the struggle. From Elijah onwards this prophetic movement is like a healthy, dry desert wind, which, coming from afar, withers up the blossoms of idleness -- but at the same time the buds of beauty and of art.

-- The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, by Houston Stewart Chamberlain


158. Salome was the daughter of Herodias and the step-daughter of King Herod. In Matthew 14 and Mark 6, John the Baptist had told King Herod that it was unlawful for him to be married to his brother's wife, and Herod put him in prison. Salome (who is not named, but simply called the daughter of Herodias) danced before Herod on his birthday, and he promised to give her anything she wished for. She requested the head of John the Baptist, who was then beheaded. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the figure of Salome fascinated painters and writers, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Gustave Flaubert, Stephane Mallarme, Gustave Moreau, Oscar Wilde, and Franz von Stuck, featuring in many works. See Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 379-98.

159. Black Book 2 continues: "The crystal shines dimly. I think again of the image of Odysseus, how he passed the rocky island of the Sirens on his lengthy odyssey. Should I, should I not?" (p. 74).

160. I.e., the head of John the Baptist.

161. In the 1925 Seminar, Jung recounted: "I used the same technique of the descent, but this time I went much deeper. The first time I should say I reached a depth of about one thousand feet, but this time it was a cosmic depth. It was like going to the moon, or like the feeling of a descent into empty space. First the picture was of a crater, or a ring-chain of mountains, and my feeling association was that of one dead, as if oneself were a victim. It was the mood of the land of the hereafter. I could see two people, an old man with a white beard and a young girl who was very beautiful. I assumed them to be real and listened to what they were saying. The old man said he was Elijah and I was quite shocked, but she was even more upsetting because she was Salome. I said to myself that there was a queer mixture: Salome and Elijah, but Elijah assured me that he and Salome had been together since eternity. This also upset me. With them was a black serpent who had an affinity for me. I stuck to Elijah as being the most reasonable of the lot, for he seemed to have a mind. I was exceedingly doubtful about Salome. We had a long conversation but I did not understand it. Of course I thought of the fact of my father being a clergyman as being the explanation of my having figures like this. How about this old man then? Salome was not to be touched upon. It was only much later that I found her association with Elijah quite natural. Whenever you take journeys like this you find a young girl with an old man" (Analytical Psychology, pp. 63-64). Jung then refers to examples of this pattern in the work of Melville, Meyrink, Rider Haggard, and the Gnostic legend of Simon Magus (see note 154, p. 359), Kundry and Klingsor from Wagner's Parsifal (see below, p. 303), and Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia. In Memories, he noted: "In myths the snake is a frequent counterpart of the hero. There are numerous accounts of their affinity ... Therefore the presence of the snake was an indication of a hero-myth" (p. 206). Of Salome, he said: "Salome is an anima figure. She is blind because she does not see the meaning of things. Elijah is the figure of the wise old prophet and represents the factor of intelligence and knowledge; Salome, the erotic element. One might say that the two figures are personifications of Logos and Eros. But such a definition would be excessively intellectual. It is more meaningful to let the figures be what they were for me at that time -- namely. events and experiences" (pp. 206-7). In 1955/56, Jung wrote: "For purely psychological reasons I have elsewhere attempted to equate the masculine consciousness with the concept of Logos and the feminine with that of Eros. By Logos I meant discrimination, judgment, insight, and by Eros I meant the placing into relation" (Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, §224). On Jung's reading of Elijah and Salome in terms of Logos and Eros respectively, see Appendix B, "Commentaries."

162. The Corrected Draft has: "Guiding Reflection" (p. 86). The Draft and Corrected Draft have "This, my friend, is a mystery play in which the spirit of the depths cast me. I had recognized the birth of the new God [the conception], and therefore the spirit of the depths allowed me to participate in the underworld ceremonies, which were supposed to instruct me about the God's intentions and works. Through these rituals I was supposed to be initiated into the mysteries of redemption" (Corrected Draft, p. 86).

163. The Draft continues: "In the renewed world you can have no outer possessions, unless you create them out of yourselves. You can enter only into your own mysteries. The spirit of the depths has other things to teach you than me. I only have to bring you tidings of the new God and of the ceremonies and mysteries of his service. But this is the way: It is the gate to darkness" (p. 100).

164. The Draft continues: "The mystery play took place at the deepest bottom of my interior, which is that other world. You have to bear this in mind, it is also a world and its reality is large and frightening. You cry and laugh and tremble and sometimes you break out in a cold sweat for fear of death. The mystery play represents my self and through me the world to which I belong is represented. Thus, my friends, you learn much about the world, and through it about yourself, by what I say to you here. But you have not learned anything about your mysteries in this way: indeed, your way is darker than before, since my example will stand obstructively in your path. You may follow me, not on my way, but on yours" (p. 102).

165. This depicts the scene in the fantasy.

166. This is a subjective interpretation of the figures of Elijah and Salome.

167. In the Corrected Draft, "Predetermination or forethought" is replaced by "The Idea." This substitution occurs throughout the rest of this section (p. 89).

Forethought: I noun advance planning, aim, anticipation, calculation, circumspection, consideration, consideration in advance, contemplation, deliberate intention, deliberation, design, direction, distinct purpose, fixed purpose, intent, intention, plan, planned course of action, planning ahead, plot, preconsideration, predeliberation, predetermination, premeditation, previous consideration, previous design, previous reflection, prior planning, prior thought, providentia, provision, purpose, resolution, resolve, scheme, shrewdness, strategy, thought beforehand, thoughtfulness, volition, will, willfulness associated concepts: malice, caution (vigilance), consideration (contemplation), contemplation, deliberation, design (intent), plan, precaution, precognition, predetermination, premeditation, preparation, prudence, strategy
-- Burton's Legal Thesaurus. William C. Burton. 2006

Predetermination: I noun aim, bias, closed-mindedness, conclusion beforehand, conclusion in advance, decision beforehand, decision in advance, destined lot, destiny, fate, fixed future, force of circumstances, foredoom, foregone conclusion, forejudgment, foreordainment, forethought, fortune, goal, inevitability, inevitableness, inexorable fate, intention, jaundice, kismet, lot, object, objective, one-sidedness, partiality, preapprehension, preconception, precondusion, predecision, predeliberation, predestination, predetermined course of events, prejudgment, prejudice, premeditation, prenotion, prepossession, preresolution, presumption, presupposal, presupposition, presurmise, purpose, resolve, undetachment, will, animus, bias, design (intent), foregone conclusion, forethought, goal, intent, preconception, predisposition, prejudice (preconception), premeditation

-- Burton's Legal Thesaurus. William C. Burton. 2006

Predeliberate: To deliberate beforehand, to premeditate. Occasions of committing either mortal, or any voluntary and predeliberated, venial sin.

-- Useful English dictionary

Plan: I noun agenda, alternative, ambition, arrangement, cabal, campaign, complot, conspiracy, course of action, curriculum, design, draft, expedient, forethought, hope, intendment, intent, intention, itinerary, plot, predeliberation, preparation, program, projection, proposal, proposed action, proposition, prospectus, readiness, resolve, schedule scheme, strategem, strategy, suggestion, syllabus, tactic, undertaking associated concepts: ecological plan, feasibility plan, plan for reorganization, planning board, aim, arrange, block out, cabal, calculate, collude, complot, concoct, connive, conspire, contrive, counterplot, design, determine upon, devise, engineer, establish guidelines for, expect, figure, frame, harbor a design, have a policy, intend, intrigue, lay out, lay the foundation, look ahead, machinate, make arrangements, make preparations, make ready, map out, mark out a course, organize, outline, plot, prearrange, preconcert, precontrive, predesign, predetermine, premeditate, prepare, project, propose, provide for, purpose, resolve, schedule, scheme, set up, shape a course, take measures, think ahead, work out, agenda, blueprint, building (business of assembling), calculate, campaign, conceive (invent), conspiracy, conspire, contemplation, content (structure), contour (outline), contrivance, contrive, course, delineation, design (construction plan), design (intent), device (contrivance), devise (invent), direction (course), enterprise (undertaking), expedient, forethought, form (arrangement), frame (construct), frame (formulate), frame (prearrange), goal, idea, intend, intent, intention, maneuver, method, model, motif, motive, order (arrangement), organization (structure), originate, pattern, platform, ploy, policy (plan of action), prearrange, predetermine, preparation, procedure, process (course), program (noun), program (verb), project, proposal (report), proposal (suggestion), propose, proposition, prospect (outlook), prospectus, provide (arrange for), purpose, purview, resolution (formal statement), resolve (decide), schedule, scheme (noun), scheme (verb), set down, stratagem, strategy, structure (composition), subterfuge, system, target, undertaking (attempt), undertaking (enterprise), way (channel)

-- Burton's Legal Thesaurus. William C. Burton. 2006


168. In Greek mythology, Prometheus created mankind out of clay. He could foretell the future, and his name signifies "forethought." In 1921, Jung wrote an extended analysis of Carl Spitteler's epic poem Prometheus und Epimetheus (1881) together with Goethe's Prometheus Fragment (1773); see Psychological Types, CW 6, ch.5.

169. The Corrected Draft has: "Boundary" (p. 89).

170. The Draft continues: "Therefore the forethinker approached me as Elijah, the prophet, and pleasure as Salome" (p. 103).

171. The Draft continues: "The animal of deadly horror, which lay between Adam and Eve" (p. 105).

172. The Corrected Draft continues: "The serpent is not only a separating but also a unifying principle" (p. 91).

173. When commenting on this in the 1925 seminar, Jung noted that there were many accounts in mythology of the relation between a hero and a serpent, so the presence of the serpent indicated that "it will again be a hero myth" (p. 89). He showed a diagram of a cross with Rational/Thinking (Elijah) at the top, Feeling (Salome) at the bottom, Irrational/Intuition (Superior) at the left, and Sensation/Inferior (Serpent) at the right (p. 90). He interpreted the black serpent as the introverting libido: "The serpent leads the psychological movement apparently astray into the kingdom of shadows, dead and wrong images, but also into earth, into concretization ... Inasmuch as the serpent leads into the shadows, it has the function of the anima; it leads you into the depths, it connects the Above and Below ... the serpent is also the symbol of wisdom" (Analytical Psychology, pp. 94-95).

174. The Draft continues: "By following Elijah and Salome, I follow the two principles inside me and through me in the world, of which I am part" (p. 106).

175. The Corrected Draft continues: "that is, of thinking. And without thinking one cannot grasp an idea" (p. 92).

176 The Draft continues: "What would Odysseus have been without his wandering?" (p. 107). The Corrected Draft adds: "There would have been no odyssey" (p. 92).

177. The Corrected Draft continues: "Than much rather the pleasure to enjoy the garden" (p. 92).

178. The Corrected Draft continues: "It is strange that Salome's garden lies so close to the dignified and mysterious hall of ideas. Does a thinker therefore experience awe or perhaps even fear of the idea, because of its proximity to paradise?" (p. 92).

179. The Draft continues: "I was a forethinker. What could astonish me more than the intimate community of forethinking and pleasure, these inimical principles?" (p. 108).

180. The Corrected Draft has instead: "One who has pleasure" (p. 94).

181. The Corrected Draft has instead: "Pleasure" (p. 94).

182. The Corrected Draft has instead: "Pleasure" (p. 94).

183. The Draft continues: "as one of your poets has said: 'the shaft bears two irons'" (p. 110).

184. In 1913, Jung presented his paper, "On the question of psychological types," in which he noted that the libido or psychic energy in an individual was characteristically directed toward the object (extraversion) or toward the subject (introversion); CW 6. Commencing in the summer of 1915 he had extensive correspondence with Hans Schmid on this question, in which he now characterized the introverts as being dominated by the function of thinking, and the extraverts as being dominated by the function of feeling. He also characterized the extraverts as being dominated by the pleasure-pain mechanism, seeking out the love of the object, and unconsciously seeking tyrannical power. Introverts unconsciously sought inferior pleasure, and had to see that the object was also a symbol of their pleasure. On August 7, 1915, he wrote to Schmid: "The opposites should be evened out in the individual himself" (The Jung-Schmid Correspondence, eds. John Beebe and Ernst Falzeder, tr. Ernst Falzeder with Tony Woolfson [Philemon Series, forthcoming]). This linkage between thinking and introversion and feeling and extraversion was maintained in his discussion of this subject in 1917 in The Psychology of the Unconscious Processes. In Psychological Types (1921), this model had expanded to encompass two main attitude types of introverts and extraverts further subdivided by the predominance of one of the four psychological functions of thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition.

185. December 22, 1913. On December 19, 1913, Jung gave a talk "On the psychology of the unconscious" to the Zurich Psychoanalytical Society.

186. The Draft continues: "Kali" (p. 113).

187. Black Book 2 continues: "now that white shape of a girl with black hair -- my own soul -- and now that white shape of a man, which also appeared to me at the time -- it resembles Michelangelo's sitting Moses -- it is Elijah" (p. 84). Michelangelo's Moses is in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome. It was the subject of a study by Freud that was published in 1914 (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, tr. J. Strachey; 24 vols. [London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1953-1974]. vol. 13). The third-person pronoun "it" identifies Salome with Kali, whose many hands wring each other; cf. note 196, p. 000.

188. Jung mentioned this conversation in the 1925 seminar and commented: "Only then I learned psychological objectivity. Only then could I say to a patient, 'Be quiet, something is happening.' There are such things as mice in a house. You cannot say you are wrong when you have a thought. For the understanding of the unconscious we must see our thoughts as events, as phenomena" (Analytical Psychology, p. 95).

189. The Corrected Draft has instead: "Truth" (p. 100).

190. The Corrected Draft has: "Guiding Reflection" (p. I03). In the Draft and Corrected Draft, a lengthy passage occurs. What follows here is a paraphrase: I wonder whether this is real, an underworld, or the other reality, and whether it was the other reality that had forced me here. I see here that Salome, my pleasure, moves to the left, the side of the impure and bad. This movement follows the serpent, which represents the resistance and the enmity against this movement. Pleasure goes away from the door. Forethinking [Corrected Draft: "the Idea," throughout this passage] stands at the door, knowing the entrance to the mysteries. Therefore desire melts into the many, if forethinking does not direct it and force it toward its goal. If one meets a man who only desires, then one will find resistance against his desire behind it. Desire without forethinking gains much but keeps nothing, therefore his desire is the source of constant disappointment. Thus Elijah calls Salome back. If pleasure is united with forethinking, the serpent lies before them. To succeed in something, you first need to deal with the resistance and difficulty; otherwise joy leaves behind pain and disappointment. Therefore I drew nearer. I had first to overcome the difficulty and the resistance to gain what I desired. When desire overcomes the difficulty; it becomes seeing and follows forethinking. Therefore I see that Salome's hands are pure, with no trace of crime. My desire is pure if I first overcome the difficulty and resistance. If I weigh up pleasure and forethinking, I am like a fool, blindly following his longing. If I follow my thinking, I forsake my pleasure. The ancients said in images that the fool finds the right way. Forethinking has the first word, therefore Elijah asked me what I wanted. You should always ask yourself what you desire, since all too many do not know what they want. I did not know what I wanted. You should confess your longing and what you long for to yourself. Thus you satisfy your pleasure and nourish your forethinking at the same time" (Corrected Draft, pp. 103-4).

191. The Corrected Draft has: "in his outer appearance, in the misery of earthly reality" (p. 107).

192. The Corrected Draft has instead: "the son of God" (p. 107).

193. Cf. Matthew 18:18. Christ: "Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."

194. The Draft and Corrected Draft continue: "The Pope in Rome has become an image and symbol for us of how God becomes human and how he [God] becomes the visible lord of men. Thus the coming God will become the lord of the world. This happens first [here] in me. The supreme meaning becomes my lord and infallible commander, though not only in me, but perhaps in many others whom I don't know" (Corrected Draft, pp. 108-9).

195. The Corrected Draft has: "thus I become, like the Buddha sitting in the flames" (p. 109).

196. The Corrected Draft continues: "Where the idea is, pleasure always is too. If the idea is inside, pleasure is outside. Therefore an air of evil pleasure envelops me. A lecherous and bloodthirsty Godhead gives me this false air. This happens because I must altogether suffer the becoming of the God and can therefore not separate it from myself at first. But as long as it is not separated from me, I am so seized by the idea that I am it, and therefore I am also the woman associated with the idea from the beginning. In that I receive the idea and represent it in the manner of Buddha, my pleasure is like the Indian Kali, since she is Buddha's other side. Kali, however, is Salome and Salome is my soul" (p. 109).

197. In the Draft, a lengthy passage occurs here, a paraphrase of which follows: The numbness is like a death. I needed total transformation. Through this my meaning, like that of the Buddha, went completely inside. Then the transformation happened. I then went over to pleasure, as I was a thinker. As a thinker, I rejected my feeling, but I had rejected part of life. Then my feeling became a poisonous plant, and when it awakened, it was sensuality instead of pleasure, the lowest and commonest form of pleasure. This is represented by Kali. Salome is the image of his pleasure, that suffers pain, since it was shut out for too long. It then became apparent that Salome, i.e., my pleasure, was my soul. When I recognized this, my thinking changed and ascended to the idea, and then the image of Elijah appeared. This prepared me for the mystery play, and showed me in advance the way of transformation that I had to undergo in the Mysterium. The flowing together of the forethinking with pleasure produces the God. I recognized that the God in me wanted to become a man, and I considered this and honored this, and I became the servant of the God, but for no one other than myself [Corrected Draft: it would be madness and presumption to assume that I also did this for others, p. 110). I sank into the contemplation of the wonder of transformation, and first turned into the lower level of my pleasure, and then through this I recognized my soul. The smiles of Elijah and Salome indicate that they were happy at my appearance, but I was in deep darkness. When the way is dark, so is the idea that gives light. When the idea in the moment of confusion allows the words and not the blind longing, then the words lead you to difficulty. Whereas it leads you to the right. That is why Elijah turns left, to the side of the unholy and evil, and Salome turns right to the side of the correct and good. She doesn't go to the garden, the place of pleasure, but remains in the house of the father" (pp. 125-27).

198. In the Draft, a passage occurs, a paraphrase of which follows: If I am strong, so also are my intentions and presuppositions. My own thought weakens and goes over into the idea. The idea becomes strong; it is supported by its own strength. I recognize this in the fact that Elijah is supported by the lions. The lion is of stone. My pleasure is dead and turned to stone, because I did not love Salome. This gave my thought the coldness of stone, and from this the idea took its solidity, which it needed to subjugate my thought. It needed to be subjugated as it strove against Salome, since she appeared bad to it (p. 128).

199. In 1921 Jung wrote: "The peculiar reality of unconscious contents, therefore, gives us the same right to describe them as objects as outer things" (Psychological Types, CW 6, §280).

200. The Draft and Corrected have: "I would have to consider myself mad, [:It would be more than inconsistent,] if I thought that I had produced the thoughts of the Mysterium" (Corrected p. 115).

201. The Draft continues: "I recognized the father because I was a thinker, and thus I did not know the mother, but saw love in the guise of pleasure and called it pleasure, and therefore this was Salome to me. Now I learn that Mary is the mother, the innocent and love-receiving, and not pleasure, who bears the seed of evil in her heated and seductive nature. / If Salome, evil pleasure, is my sister, then I must be a thinking saint, and my intellect has met with a sad fate. I must sacrifice my intellect and confess to you that what I told you about pleasure, namely that it is the principle opposed to forethought, is incomplete and prejudiced. I observed as a thinker from the vantage point of my thinking, otherwise I could have recognized that Salome, as Elijah's daughter, is an offspring of thought and not the principle itself, which Mary, the innocent Virgin Mother, now appears as" (p. 133).

202. The gospel of the Egyptians is one of the apocryphal gospels that features a dialogue between Christ and Salome. Christ states that he has come to undo the work of the female, namely, lust, birth, and decay. To Salome's question of how long shall death prevail, Christ answered, as long as women bear children. Here, Jung is referring to the following passage: "she said, 'Then I have done well in not giving birth,' imagining that it is not permitted to bear children; the Lord answered, 'Eat of every herb, but the bitter one eat not.'" The dialogue continues: "When Salome asked when it shall be made known the Lord said, 'When you tread under foot the covering of shame and when out of two is made one, and the male with the female, neither male nor female'" (The Apocryphal New Testament, ed. J. K. Elliot [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999], p. 18). Jung cites this logion, available to him from Clement in the Stromateis, as an example of the union of opposites in Visions (1932, vol. I., p. 524), and as an example of the coniunctio of male and female in "On the psychology of the child archetype" (1940, CW 9, I, §295) and Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955-56, CW 14, §528).

203. The Draft and Corrected Draft have: "but when the mystery play showed me this, I didn't understand, but I thought I had produced an incredible thought. I am mad to believe this, And I believed it. Therefore I was seized by fear, and I wanted to explain my arbitrary thoughts to Elijah and Salome, and thus invalidate them" (Corrected Draft, p. 118).

204. The Draft continues: "The image of the cool starry night and of the vast sky opens up my eye to the infinity of the inner world, which I as a desirous man feel is still too cold. I cannot pull the stars down to myself, but only watch them. Therefore my impetuous desire feels that that world is nightly and cold" (p. 135).

205. This depicts a scene in the fantasy that follows.

206. December 25, 1911.

207. In the 1925 seminar, Jung said: "A few evenings later, I felt that things should continue, so again I tried to follow the same procedure, but it would not descend. I remained on the surface. Then I realized that I had a conflict in myself about going down, but I could not make out what it was. I only felt that two dark principles were fighting each other, two serpents" (Analytical Psychology, p. 95). He then recounted the fantasy that ensued.

208. In the 1925 seminar, Jung added: "I thought, 'Ha, this is a Druidic sacred place'" (Analytical Psychology, p. 96).

209. In Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung, the Nibelung dwarf Mime is the brother of Alberich and a master craftsman. Alberich stole the Rhinegold from the Rhinemaidens; through renouncing love, he was able to forge a ring out of it that conferred limitless power. In Siegfried, Mime, who lives in a cave, brings up Siegfried so that he will kill Fafner the giant, who has transformed into a dragon and now has the ring. Siegfried slays Fafner with the invincible sword that Mime has fashioned, and kills Mime, who had intended to kill him after he had recovered the gold.

210. In the 1925 seminar, Jung interpreted this episode as follows: "the fight of the two snakes: the white means a movement into the day, the black into the kingdom of darkness, with moral aspects too. There was a real conflict in me, a resistance to going down. My stronger tendency was to go up. Because I had been so impressed the day before with the cruelty of the place I had seen, I really had a tendency to find a way to the conscious by going up, as I did on the mountain ... Elijah said that it was just the same below or above. Compare Dante's Inferno. The Gnostics express this same idea in the symbol of the reversed cones. Thus the mountain and the crater are similar. There was nothing of conscious structure in these fantasies, they were just events that happened. So I assume that Dante got his ideas from the same archetypes" (Analytical Psychology, pp. 96-97). McGuire suggests that Jung is referring to Dante's conception "of the conical form of the cavity of Hell, with its circles, mirroring in reverse the form of Heaven, with its spheres" (Ibid.). In Aion, Jung also noted that serpents were a typical pair of opposites, and that the conflict between serpents was a motif found in medieval alchemy (1951, CW 9, 2, §181).

211. In the 1925 seminar, Jung recounted that after Salome's declaration that he was Christ: "In spite of my objections she maintained this. I said, 'this is madness,' became filled with skeptical resistance" (Analytical Psychology, p. 96). He interpreted this event as follows: "Salome's approach and her worshiping of me is obviously that side of the inferior function which is surrounded by an aura of evil. One is assailed by the fear that perhaps this is madness. This is how madness begins, this is madness ... You cannot get conscious of these unconscious facts without giving yourself to them. If you can overcome your fear of the unconscious and can let yourself go down, then these facts take on a life of their own. You can be gripped by these ideas so much that you really go mad, or nearly so. These images have so much reality that they recommend themselves, and such extraordinary meaning that one is caught. They form part of the ancient mysteries; in fact it is such fantasies that made the mysteries. Compare the mysteries of Isis as told in Apuleius, with the initiation and deification of the initiate ... One gets a peculiar feeling from being put through such an initiation. The important part that led up to the deification was the snake's encoiling of me. Salome's performance was deification. The animal face which I felt mine transformed into was the famous [Deus] Leontocephalus of the Mithraic mysteries, the figure which is represented with a snake coiled around the man, the snake's head resting on the man's head, and the face of the man that of a lion ... In this deification mystery you make yourself into the vessel, and are a vessel of creation in which the opposites reconcile." He added: "All this is Mithraic symbolism from beginning to end" (ibid., pp. 98-99). In The Golden Ass, Lucian undergoes an initiation into the mysteries of Isis. The significance of this episode is that it is the only direct description of such an initiation that has survived. Of the event itself, Lucian states: "I approached the very gates of death and set foot on Prosperine's threshold, yet was permitted to return, rapt through all the elements. At midnight I saw the sun shining as if it were noon; I entered the presence of the gods of the under-world and the gods of the upper-world, stood near and worshiped them." After this, he was presented on a pulpit in the temple in front of a crowd. He wore garments which included designs of serpents and winged lions, held a torch, and wore "a palm tree chaplet with its leaves sticking all out like rays of light" (The Golden Ass, tr. R. Graves [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984], p. 241). Jung's copy of a German translation of this work has a line in the margin by this passage.

[F]rom the depth however there came up slowly the sound of a clock-bell. Zarathustra listened thereto, like the higher men; then, however, laid he his finger on his mouth the second time, and said again: "COME! COME! IT IS GETTING ON TO MIDNIGHT!" -- and his voice had changed. But still he had not moved from the spot. Then it became yet stiller and more mysterious, and everything hearkened, even the ass, and Zarathustra's noble animals, the eagle and the serpent, likewise the cave of Zarathustra and the big cool moon, and the night itself. Zarathustra, however, laid his hand upon his mouth for the third time, and said:

COME! COME! COME! LET US NOW WANDER! IT IS THE HOUR: LET US WANDER INTO THE NIGHT!

Ye higher men, it is getting on to midnight: then will I say something into your ears, as that old clock-bell saith it into mine ear, --

As mysteriously, as frightfully, and as cordially as that midnight clock-bell speaketh it to me, which hath experienced more than one man:

Which hath already counted the smarting throbbings of your fathers' hearts -- ah! ah! how it sigheth! how it laugheth in its dream! the old, deep, deep midnight!

Hush! Hush! Then is there many a thing heard which may not be heard by day; now however, in the cool air, when even all the tumult of your hearts hath become still, --

Now doth it speak, now is it heard, now doth it steal into overwakeful, nocturnal souls: ah! ah! how the midnight sigheth! how it laugheth in its dream!

Hearest thou not how it mysteriously, frightfully, and cordially speaketh unto THEE, the old deep, deep midnight?

O MAN, TAKE HEED!

Woe to me! Whither hath time gone? Have I not sunk into deep wells? The world sleepeth --

Ah! Ah! The dog howleth, the moon shineth. Rather will I die, rather will I die, than say unto you what my midnight-heart now thinketh.

Already have I died. It is all over. Spider, why spinnest thou around me? Wilt thou have blood? Ah! Ah! The dew falleth, the hour cometh --

The hour in which I frost and freeze, which asketh and asketh and asketh: "Who hath sufficient courage for it?

Who is to be master of the world? Who is going to say: THUS shall ye flow, ye great and small streams!"

The hour approacheth: O man, thou higher man, take heed! this talk is for fine ears, for thine ears -- WHAT SAITH DEEP MIDNIGHT'S VOICE INDEED?

It carrieth me away, my soul danceth. Day's-work! Day's-work! Who is to be master of the world?

The moon is cool, the wind is still. Ah! Ah! Have ye already flown high enough? Ye have danced: a leg, nevertheless, is not a wing.

Ye good dancers, now is all delight over: wine hath become lees, every cup hath become brittle, the sepulchres mutter.

Ye have not flown high enough: now do the sepulchres mutter: "Free the dead! Why is it so long night? Doth not the moon make us drunken?"

Ye higher men, free the sepulchres, awaken the corpses! Ah, why doth the worm still burrow? There approacheth, there approacheth, the hour, --

There boometh the clock-bell, there thrilleth still the heart, there burroweth still the wood-worm, the heart-worm. Ah! Ah! THE WORLD IS DEEP!

Sweet lyre! Sweet lyre! I love thy tone, thy drunken, ranunculine tone! -- how long, how far hath come unto me thy tone, from the distance, from the ponds of love!

Thou old clock-bell, thou sweet lyre! Every pain hath torn thy heart, father-pain, fathers'-pain, forefathers'-pain; thy speech hath become ripe, --

Ripe like the golden autumn and the afternoon, like mine anchorite heart -- now sayest thou: The world itself hath become ripe, the grape turneth brown,

Now doth it wish to die, to die of happiness. Ye higher men, do ye not feel it? There welleth up mysteriously an odour,

A perfume and odour of eternity, a rosy-blessed, brown, gold-wine-odour of old happiness,

Of drunken midnight-death happiness, which singeth: the world is deep, AND DEEPER THAN THE DAY COULD READ!

Leave me alone! Leave me alone! I am too pure for thee. Touch me not! Hath not my world just now become perfect?

My skin is too pure for thy hands. Leave me alone, thou dull, doltish, stupid day! Is not the midnight brighter?

The purest are to be masters of the world, the least known, the strongest, the midnight-souls, who are brighter and deeper than any day.

O day, thou gropest for me? Thou feelest for my happiness? For thee am I rich, lonesome, a treasure-pit, a gold chamber?

O world, thou wantest ME? Am I worldly for thee? Am I spiritual for thee? Am I divine for thee? But day and world, ye are too coarse, --

Have cleverer hands, grasp after deeper happiness, after deeper unhappiness, grasp after some God; grasp not after me:

Mine unhappiness, my happiness is deep, thou strange day, but yet am I no God, no God's-hell: DEEP IS ITS WOE.

God's woe is deeper, thou strange world! Grasp at God's woe, not at me! What am I! A drunken sweet lyre, --

A midnight-lyre, a bell-frog, which no one understandeth, but which MUST speak before deaf ones, ye higher men! For ye do not understand me!

Gone! Gone! O youth! O noontide! O afternoon! Now have come evening and night and midnight, -- the dog howleth, the wind:

Is the wind not a dog? It whineth, it barketh, it howleth. Ah! Ah! how she sigheth! how she laugheth, how she wheezeth and panteth, the midnight!

How she just now speaketh soberly, this drunken poetess! hath she perhaps overdrunk her drunkenness? hath she become overawake? doth she ruminate?

Her woe doth she ruminate over, in a dream, the old, deep midnight -- and still more her joy. For joy, although woe be deep, JOY IS DEEPER STILL THAN GRIEF CAN BE.

-- Thus Spake Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche


212. In "On the psychology of the Kore figure" (1951), Jung described these episodes as follows: "In an underground house, actually in the underworld, there lives an old magician and prophet with his 'daughter.' She is, however, not really his daughter; she is a dancer, a very loose person, but is blind and seeks healing" (CW 9, 1, §360). This description of Elijah draws him together with the later description of Philemon. Jung noted that this "shows the unknown woman as a mythological figure in the beyond (that means in the unconscious). She is soror or filia mystica of a hierophant or 'philosopher,' evidently a parallel to those mystic syzigies which are to be met with in the figures of Simon Magus and Helen, Zosimus and Theosebia, Comarius and Cleopatra, etc. Our dream-figure fits in best with Helen" (ibid., §372).

213. The Corrected Draft has: "Guiding Reflection" (p. 127). In Black Book 2, Jung copied the following citations from Dante's Commedia in German translation (p. 104): "And I to him: 'I am one who, when love / Breathes on me, notices, and in the manner / That he dictates within, I utter words'" (Purgatorio 24, 52-54); "And then, in the same manner as a flame! Which follows the fire whatever shape it takes, / The new form follows the spirit exactly" (Purgatorio 25, 97-99). Tr. C. H. Sisson (Manchester: Carcanet, 1980), pp. 259, 265.

214. The Draft has: "the news of the desire revived by the mother" (p. 143).

215. The Corrected Draft has: "of the primordial image" (p. 127).

216. The Corrected Draft has: "The idea or the primordial image" (p. 127).

217. The Corrected Draft has: "lives" (p. 127).

218. I.e., in ch. 5, "Descent into Hell in the Future."

219. The Corrected Draft has: "the spirit" (p. 127).

220. The Draft continues: "Therefore they all say that they are fighting for the good and for peace, but one cannot fight one another over the good. But since men don't know that the conflict lies within themselves, the Germans thus believe that the English and the Russians are wrong; but the English and the Russians say that the Germans are wrong. But no one can judge history in terms of right and wrong. Because one-half of mankind is wrong, every man is half wrong. Therefore a conflict resides in his own soul. But man is blind and always knows only his half. The German has in him the English and the Russian whom he fights outside of himself likewise, the English and the Russian has in him the German whom he fights. But man appears to see the outer quarrel, not the one within, which alone is the wellspring of the great war. But before man can ascend to light and love, the great battle is needed" (p. 145).

221. In December 1916, in his preface to The Psychology of the Unconscious Processes, Jung wrote: "The psychological processes, which accompany the present war, above all the incredible brutalization of public opinion, the mutual slanderings, the unprecedented fury of destruction, the monstrous flood of lies, and man's incapacity to call a halt to the bloody demon -- are suited like nothing else to powerfully push in front of the eyes of thinking men the problem of the restlessly slumbering chaotic unconscious under the ordered world of consciousness. This war has pitilessly revealed to civilized man that he is still a barbarian ... But the psychology of the individual corresponds to the psychology of the nation. What the nation does is done also by each individual, and so long as the individual does it, the nation also does it. Only the change in the attitude of the individual is the beginning of the change in the psychology of the nation" (CW 7, p. 4).

It may be opportune at this point to say a word about the attitude of a Christian Society towards Pacifism....I cannot but believe that the man who maintains that war is in all circumstances wrong, is in some way repudiating an obligation towards society; and in so far as the society is a Christian society the obligation is so much the more serious. Even if each particular war proves in turn to have been unjustified, yet the idea of a Christian society seems incompatible with the idea of absolute pacifism; for pacifism can only continue to flourish so long as the majority of persons forming a society are not pacifists....The notion of communal responsibility, of the responsibility of every individual for the sins of the society to which he belongs, is one that needs to be more firmly apprehended; and if I share the guilt of my society in time of 'peace', I do not see how I can absolve myself from it in time of war, by abstaining from the common action....

-- The Idea of a Christian Society, by T.S. Eliot


222. The Corrected Draft has: "the prophet, the personification of the idea" (p. 131).

223. The Corrected Draft has: "Idea" (p. 131).

224. The Corrected Draft has "Idea" substituted throughout this paragraph (p. 131).

225. The Corrected Draft adds "conscious" and deletes "From within himself" (p. 133).

226. The Draft and Corrected Draft have instead: "The divine creative power becomes [in him] a person [a personal consciousness] from the [unconscious] collective" (pp. 133-34).

227. The Draft and Corrected Draft have: "But why, you ask, does forethinking [the idea] appear to you in the guise of a Jewish prophet and your [the] pleasure in the guise of the heathen Salome? My friend, do not forget, that I too am one who thinks and wants in the spirit of this time, and is completely under the spell of the serpent. I am just now through my initiation into the mysteries of the spirit of the depths about to not entirely discard all the ancientness lacked by those thinking in the spirit of this time, but to readopt it into my being human, to make my life whole. For I have become poor and far removed from God. I must take in the divine and the mundane, since the spirit of this time had nothing else to give me; on the contrary he took the little that I possessed of real life. But in particular he made me hasty and greedy, since he is the present and he forced me to hunt down everything present to fill the moment" (pp. 134-35).

228. The Draft and Corrected have: "Just as the old prophets [ancients] stood before the Mysterium of Christ, I also stand as yet before the [this] Mysterium of Christ [insofar as I reassume the past] although I live two thousand years after him [later] and at one time believed I was a Christian. But I had never been a Christ" (p. 136).

229. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote: "To redeem the past and to transform every 'It was' into an 'I wanted it thus!' -- that alone do I call redemption!" ("Of redemption," p. 161).

230. On February 11, 1916, Jung said in a discussion at the Association for Analytical Psychology: "We abuse the will, natural growth is to the will ... War teaches us: The will is of no use -- we will see where this leads. We are completely subject to the absolute power of the becoming" (MAP, vol. 1, p. 106).

231. The Draft and Corrected Draft have: "Since you are [we are] inwardly still ancient Jews and heathens with unholy Gods" (p. 137).

232. The Corrected Draft has: "we ourselves" (p. 138).

233. The Corrected Draft has: "and we called ourselves Christians, imitators of Christ. To be Christ oneself is the true following of Christ" (p. 139).

234. This may refer to the German peasants' rebellion of 1525.

235. In 1918, in his preface to the second edition of The Psychology of the Unconscious Processes, Jung wrote: "The spectacle of this catastrophe threw man back on himself by making him feel his complete impotence; it turned him inward, and, with everything rocking, he seeks something that guarantees him a hold. Too many still seek outward ... But still too few seek inward, to their own selves, and still fewer ask themselves whether the ends of human society might not best be served if each man tries to abolish the old order in himself, and to practice in his own person and in his own inward state those precepts, those victories which he preaches at every streetcorner, instead of always expecting these things of his fellow men (CW 7, p.5).

236. The Draft has: "If this doesn't happen, Christ will not be overcome and the evil must become even greater. Therefore, my friend, I say this to you so that you can tell your friends, and that the word may spread among the people" (p. 157).

237. The Draft continues: "I saw that a new God had come to be out of Christ the Lord, a young Hercules" (p. 157).

238. A long passage occurs here in the Draft and Corrected Draft, a paraphrase of which follows: The God holds love in his right, fore thinking ["the idea," substituted throughout] in his left. Love is on our favorable side, forethinking on the unfavorable. This should recommend love to you, insofar as you are a part of this world, and especially if you are a thinker. The God possesses both. Their unity is God. The God develops through the uniting of both principles in you [me]. You [I] do not become God through this, or become divine, but God becomes human. He becomes apparent in you and through you, as a child. The divine will come to you as childlike or childish, insofar as you are a developed man. The childish man has an old God, the old God who we know and whose death we have seen. If you are grown up, you can only become more childlike. You have youth before you and all the mysteries of what is to come. The childish has death before him since he must first become grown up. You will become grown up insofar as you overcome the God of the ancients and of your childhood. You overcome him not through setting him aside, obeying the spirit of the time [Zeitgeist]. The spirit of this time sways between yes and no like a drunkard ["since he is the uncertainty of the present general consciousness"]. You ["One," throughout] can only overcome the old God through becoming him yourself and experiencing his suffering and dying yourself. You overcome him and become yourself, as one who seeks himself and no longer imitates heroes. You free yourself, when you free yourself from the old God and his model. When you have become the model then you no longer need his. In that the God held love and forethinking in the form of the serpent in his hands, it was shown to me that he had seized the human will. [God unifies the opposition between love and the idea, and holds it in his hands."] Love and forethinking existed from eternity, but they were not willed. Everyone always wills the spirit of this time, which thinks and desires. He who wills the spirit of the depths, wills love and forethinking. If you will both, you become God. If you do this, the God is born and seizes possession of the will of men and holds his will in his child's hand. The spirit of the depths appears in you as thoroughly childish. If you don't want the spirit of the depths, he is to you a torment. Willing leads to the way: Love and forethinking are in the world of the beyond, so long as you do not will them and your willing lies between them like the serpent ["keeps them separate"]. If you will both, the struggle breaks out in you between willing love and willing forethinking ["recognition"]. You will see that you can't will both at the same time. In this need the God will be born, as you have experienced in the Mysterium, and he will take the divided will in his hands, in the hands of a child, whose will is simple and beyond being split. What is this divine-childish willing? You can't learn it through description, it can only become in you. Nor can you will it. You cannot learn or empathize it from what I say. It is unbelievable how men can falsify themselves and lie to themselves. Let this be a warning. What I say is my mystery and not yours, my way and not yours, since my self belongs to me and not to you. You should not learn my way but your own. My way leads to me and not to you (pp. 142-45).

239. The Corrected Draft has "The great spirit" (p. 146).

240. A long passage appears here in the Corrected Draft, a paraphrase of which follows: As you saw how pride and power filled men and how beauty streamed out of the eyes of women when the war gripped the people, you knew that mankind was on the way. You knew that this war was not only adventure, criminal acts and killing, but the mystery of self-sacrifice. The ["great" changed throughout] spirit of the depths has seized humanity and forced him through the war to self-sacrifice. Do not seek the guilt here or there ["Guilt doesn't lie outside"] -- It is the spirit of the depths who leads the people into the Mysterium, just as he led me. He leads the people to the river of blood, just as he led me. I experienced in the Mysterium what the people were forced to do in actuality ["which happened outside on a large scale"]. I did not know it, but the Mysterium taught me how my willing laid itself at the feet of the crucified God. I experienced [wanted] Christ's self-sacrifice. The Mysterium of Christ completed itself in front of my eyes. My forethinking ['The idea standing above me'] forced me to this, but I resisted. My highest desire, my lions, my hottest and strongest passion. I wanted to rise up against the mysterious will to self-sacrifice. So I was like a lion encircled by the serpent, ["an image of fate eternally renewing itself "]. Salome came to me from the right, the favorable side. Pleasure awakened in me. I experienced that my pleasure comes to me when I accomplish the self-sacrifice. I hear that Maria, the symbol of love, is also the [my] mother of Christ since love has also borne Christ. Love brings the self-sacrificer and self-sacrifice. Love is also the mother of my self-sacrifice. In that I hear and accept this, I experience that I become Christ, since I recognize that love makes me into Christ. But I still doubt, since it is nearly impossible for the thinker to differentiate himself from his thought and accept that what happens in his thought is also something outside of himself. It is outside him in the inner world. I become Christ in the Mysterium, rather I see, how I was made into Christ and yet am completely myself, so that I could still doubt when my pleasure told me that I was Christ. [Salome,] My pleasure said to me, ["that I am Christ"] because love, which is higher than pleasure, which however is still in me hidden in pleasure, had led me to self-sacrifice and made me into Christ. Pleasure came near to me, encircled me in rings and forced me to experience the torment of Christ and to spill my blood for the world. My willing, which earlier served the spirit of this time ["Zeitgeist," substituted throughout] went under to the spirit of the depths, and just as it was previously determined by the spirit of the time, it is now determined by the spirit of the depths, by forethinking ["Idea," substituted throughout] and pleasure. It determined me through the willing of self-sacrifice, and to the spilling of blood, my life's essence. Mark that it is my bad pleasure which leads me to self-sacrifice. Its innermost is love, which will be freed from pleasure through sacrifice. Here the wonder happened that my previously blind pleasure became sighted. My pleasure was blind, and it was love. Since my strongest willing willed self-sacrifice, my pleasure changed, it went into a higher principle, which in God is one with forethinking. Love is sighted, but pleasure is blind. Pleasure always wants what is closest, and feels through the multiplicity, going from one to another, without a goal, just seeking and never fulfilled. Love wants what is furthest, the best and the fulfilling. And I saw something further, namely that the forethinking in me had the form of an old prophet, which showed that it was pre-Christian, and transformed itself into a principle that no longer appeared in a human form, but in the absolute form of a pure white light. So the human relative transformed itself into the divine absolute through the Mysterium of Christ. Forethinking and pleasure united in me in a new form and the willing in me, which appeared foreign and dangerous, the willing of the spirit of the depths, lay paralyzed at the feet of the shining flame. I became one with my will. This happened in me, I just saw it in the mystery play. Through this much was made known that I didn't previously know ["like in a play"]. But I found everything doubtful. I felt as if he was melting in the air, since the land of the Mysterium [that spirit] was still foreign to me. The Mysterium showed me the things which lay before me and had to be fulfilled. But I did not know how and when. But that image of the sighted Salome, who knelt in rapture before the white flame, was a strong feeling that came to the side of my will and led me through everything that came after. What happened was my wandering with myself through whose suffering I had to earn what served for the completion of the Mysterium I had seen ["I had first seen"] (pp. 146-50).

241. Gilles Quispel reports that Jung told the Dutch poet Roland Horst that he had written Psychological Types on the basis of thirty pages of The Red Book (cited in Stephan Hoeller, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead [Wheaton, IL: Quest, 1985], p. 6). It is likely that he had in mind these preceding three chapters of the "Mysterium." What is presented here develops the notions of the conflict between opposing functions, the identification with the leading function, and the development of the reconciling symbol as a resolution of the conflict of opposites, which are the central issues in chapter 5 of Psychological Types (CW 6), the "Type Problem in Poetry." In his 1925 seminar, Jung said: "I found that the unconscious is working out enormous collective fantasies. Just as, before, I was passionately interested in working out myths, now I became just as much interested in the material of the unconscious. This is in fact the only way of getting at myth formation. And so the first chapter of the Psychology of the Unconscious became most correctly true. I watched the creation of myths going on, and got an insight into the structure of the unconscious, forming thus the concept that plays such a role in the Types. I drew all my empirical material from my patients, but the solution of the problem I drew from the inside, from my observations of the unconscious processes. I have tried to fuse these two currents of outer and inner experience in the book of the Types, and have termed the process of the fusion of the two currents the transcendent function" (Analytical Psychology, p. 34).
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Re: The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung

Postby admin » Sun Dec 01, 2013 2:19 am

Liber Secundus

The Images of the Erring [1]


[HI I] [23] nolite audire verba prophetarum, qui prophetant vobis et decipiunt vos: visionem cordis sui loquuntur, non de ore Domini. audivi quae dixerunt prophetae prophetantes in nomine mea mendacium, atque dicentes: somniavi, somniavi. usquequo istud est in corde prophetarum vaticinantium mendacium et prophetantium seductionem cordis sui? qui volunt facere ut obliviscatur populus meus nominis mei propter somnia eorum, quae narrat unusquisque ad proximum suum: sicut obliti sunt patres eorum nominis mei propter Baal. propheta, qui habet somnium, narret somnium et qui habet sermonem meum, loquatur sermonem meum vere: quid paleis ad triticum? dicit dominus.

["Hearken not unto the words of the prophets that prophesy unto you: they make you vain: they speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the Lord." (Jeremiah 23:16)]

["I have heard what the prophets said, that prophesy lies in my name, saying, I have dreamed, I have dreamed. How long shall this be in the heart of the prophets that prophesy lies? Yea, they are prophets of the deceit of their own heart; Which think to cause my people to forget my name by their dreams which they tell every man to his neighbour, as their fathers have forgotten my name for Baal. The prophet that hath a dream, let him tell a dream; and he that hath my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat? saith the Lord" (Jeremiah 23: 25-28)]. / [1/2]

Let me put it to you in a simple way so you can grasp it. You thought the Savior would bring Gloria back -- right? He, she, didn't; now she's dead, too. Instead of --" I gave up.

"Then the true name for religion," Fat said, "is death."

"The secret name," I agreed. "You got it. Jesus died; Asklepios died -- they killed Mini worse than they killed Jesus, but nobody even cares; nobody even remembers. They killed the Catharists in southern France by the tens of thousands. In the Thirty Years War, hundreds of thousands of people died, Protestants and Catholics -- mutual slaughter. Death is the real name for it; not God, not the Savior, not love -- death. Kevin is right about his cat. It's all there in his dead cat. The Great Judge can't answer Kevin: 'Why did my cat die?' Answer: 'Damned if I know.' There is no answer; there is only a dead animal that just wanted to cross the street. We're all animals that want to cross the street only something mows us down half-way across that we never saw. Go ask Kevin. 'Your cat was stupid.' Who made the cat? Why did he make the cat stupid? Did the cat learn by being killed, and if so, what did he learn? Did Sherri learn anything from dying of cancer? Did Gloria learn anything --"

"Okay, enough," Fat said.

"Kevin is right," I said. "Go out and get laid."

"By who? They're all dead."

I said, "There're more. Still alive. Lay one of them before she dies or you die or somebody dies, some person or animal. You said it yourself: the universe is irrational because the mind behind it is irrational. You are irrational and you know it. I am. We all are and we know it, on some level. I'd write a book about it but no one would believe a group of human beings could be as irrational as we are, as we've acted."

"They would now," Fat said, "after Jim Jones and the nine hundred people at Jonestown."

"Go away, Fat," I said. "Go to South America. Go back up to Sonoma and apply for residence at the Lamptons' commune, unless they've given up, which I doubt. Madness has its own dynamism; it just goes on." Getting to my feet I walked over and stuck my hand against his chest. "The girl is dead, Gloria is dead; nothing will restore her."

"Sometimes I dream --"

"I'll put that on your gravestone."

-- Valis, by Philip K. Dick
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Re: The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung

Postby admin » Sun Dec 01, 2013 2:21 am

Chapter 1: The Red One [4]

Cap. i.

[HI 2] [5] The door of the Mysterium has closed behind me. I feel that my will is paralyzed and that the spirit of the depths possesses me. I know nothing about a way. I can therefore neither want this nor that, since nothing indicates to me whether I want this or that. I wait, without knowing what I'm waiting for. But already in the following night I felt that I had reached a solid point. [6]

[7] I find that I am standing on the highest tower of a castle. The air tells me so: I am far back in time. My gaze wanders widely over solitary countryside, a combination of fields and forests. I am wearing a green garment. A horn hangs from my shoulder. I am the tower guard. I look out into the distance. I see a red point out there. It comes nearer on a winding road, disappearing for a while in forests and reappearing again: it is a horseman in a red coat, the red horseman. He is coming to my castle: he is already riding through the gate. I hear steps on the stairway, the steps creak, he knocks: a strange fear comes over me: there stands the Red One, his long shape wholly shrouded in red, even his hair is red. I think: in the end he will turn out to be the devil.

***

The Red One: "I greet you, man on the high tower. I saw you from afar, looking and waiting. Your waiting has called me."

I: "Who are you?"

T. R.: "Who am I? You think I am the devil. Do not pass judgment. Perhaps you can also talk to me without knowing who I am. What sort of a superstitious fellow are you, that immediately you think of the devil?"

I: "If you have no supernatural ability, how could you feel that I stood waiting on my tower, looking out for the unknown and the new? My life in the castle is poor, since I always sit here and no one climbs up to me."

T. R.: "So what are you waiting for?"

I: "I await all kinds of things, and especially I'm waiting for some of the world's wealth, which we don't see here, to come to me."

T.R.: "So, I have come to absolutely the right place. I have wandered a long time through the world, seeking those like you who sit upon a high tower on the lookout for things unseen."

I: "You make me curious. You seem to be a rare breed. Your appearance is not ordinary, and then too -- forgive me -- it seems to me that you bring with you a strange air, something worldly, something impudent, or exuberant, or -- in fact -- something pagan."

T.R.: "You don't offend me, on the contrary, you hit your nail on the head. But I'm no old pagan as you seem to think."

I: "I don't want to insist on that. You are also not pompous and Latin enough. You have nothing classical about you. You seem to be a son of our time, but as I must remark, a rather unusual one. You're no real pagan, but the kind of pagan who runs alongside our Christian religion."

T.R.: "You're truly a good diviner of riddles. You're doing better than many others who have totally mistaken me."

I: "You sound cool and sneering. Have you never broken your heart over the holiest mysteries of our Christian religion?"

T.R.: "You're an unbelievably ponderous and serious person. Are you always so urgent?"

I: "I would before God always like to be as serious and true to myself as I try to be. However, that certainly becomes difficult in your presence. You bring a certain gallows air with you, and you're bound to be from the black school of Salerno, [8] where pernicious arts are taught by pagans and the descendants of pagans."

T.R.: "You're superstitious and too German. You take literally what the scriptures say, otherwise you could not judge me so hard."

/ [2/3] I: "A hard judgment is the last thing I would want. But my nose does not play tricks on me. You're evasive, and don't want to reveal yourself. What are you hiding?"

(The Red One seems to get redder, his garments shine like glowing iron.)

T. R.: "I hide nothing from you, you true-hearted soul. I simply amuse myself with your weighty seriousness and your comic veracity. This is so rare in our time, especially in men who have understanding at their disposal."

I: "I believe you cannot fully understand me. You apparently compare me with those whom you know. But I must say to you for the sake of truth that I neither really belong to this time nor to this place. A spell has banished me to this place and time for years. I am really not what you see before you."

T. R.: "You say astounding things. Who are you then?"

I: "That is irrelevant. I stand before you as that which I presently am. Why am I here and like this, I do not know. But I do know that I must be here to justify myself according to my best knowledge. I know just as little who you are, as you know who I am."

T.R.: "That sounds very strange. Are you something of a saint? Hardly a philosopher, since you have no aptitude for scholarly language. But a saint? Surely that. Your solemnity smells of fanaticism. You have an ethical air and a simplicity that smacks of stale bread and water."

I: "I can say neither yes nor no: you speak as one trapped in the spirit of this time. It seems to me that you lack the terms of comparison."

T.R.: "Perhaps you attended the school of the pagans? You answer like a sophist. [9] How can you then measure me with the yardstick of the Christian religion, if you are no saint?"

I: "It seems to me, though, that one can apply this yardstick even if one is no saint. I believe I have learned that no one is allowed to avoid the mysteries of the Christian religion unpunished. I repeat: he whose heart has not been broken over the Lord Jesus Christ drags a pagan around in himself who holds him back from the best."

T.R.: "Again this old tune? What for, if you are not a Christian saint? Are you not a damned sophist after all?"

I: "You are ensnared in your own world. But you certainly seem to think that one can assess the worth of Christianity correctly without being a downright saint."

T.R.: "Are you a doctor of theology, who examines Christianity from the outside and appreciates it historically, and therefore a sophist after all?"

I: "You're stubborn. What I mean is that it's hardly a coincidence that the whole world has become Christian. I also believe that it was the task of Western man to carry Christ in his heart and to grow with his suffering, death, and resurrection."

T.R.: "Well, there are also Jews who are good people and yet had no need for your solemn gospels."

I: "You are, it seems to me, no good reader of people: have you never noticed that the Jew himself lacks something -- one in his head, another in his heart, and he himself feels that he lacks something?"

T.R.: "Indeed I'm no Jew, but I must come to the Jew's defense: you seem to be a Jew hater."

I: "Well, now you speak like all those Jews who accuse anyone of Jew hating who does not have a completely favorable judgment, while they themselves make the bloodiest jokes about their own kind. Since the Jews only too clearly feel that particular lack and yet do not want to admit it, they are extremely sensitive to criticism. Do you believe that Christianity left no mark on the souls of men? And do you believe that one who has not experienced this most intimately can still partake of its fruit?" [10]

T. R.: "You argue your case well. But your solemnity?! You could make matters much easier for yourself. If you're no saint, I really don't see why you have to be so solemn. You wholly spoil the fun. What the devil is troubling you? Only Christianity with its mournful escape from the world can make people / [3/4] so ponderous and sullen."

I: "I think there are still other things that bespeak seriousness."

T. R.: "Oh, I know, you mean life. I know this phrase. I too live and don't let my hair turn white over it. Life doesn't require any seriousness. On the contrary, it's better to dance through life." [11]

I: "I know how to dance. Yes, would we could do it by dancing! Dancing goes with the mating season. I know that there are those who are always in heat, and those who also want to dance for their Gods. Some are ridiculous and others enact Antiquity, instead of honestly admitting their utter incapacity for such expression."

T.R.: "Here, my dear fellow, I doff my mask. Now I grow somewhat more serious, since this concerns my own province. It's conceivable that there is some third thing for which dancing would be the symbol."

***

The red of the rider transforms itself into a tender reddish flesh color. And behold -- Oh miracle -- my green garments everywhere burst into leaf.

***

I: "Perhaps too there is a joy before God that one can call dancing. But I haven't yet found this joy. I look out for things that are yet to come. Things came, but joy was not among them."

T. R.: "Don't you recognize me, brother, I am joy!"

I: "Could you be joy? I see you as through a cloud. Your image fades. Let me take your hand, beloved, who are you, who are you?" Joy? Was he joy?

***

[2] Surely this red one was the devil, but my devil. That is, he was my joy, the joy of the serious person, who keeps watch alone on the high tower -- his red-colored, red-scented, warm bright red joy. [12] Not the secret joy in his thoughts and in his looking, but that strange joy of the world that comes unsuspected like a warm southerly wind with swelling fragrant blossoms and the ease of living. You know it from your poets, this seriousness, when they expectantly look toward what happens in the depths, sought out first of all by the devil because of their springlike joy. [13] It picks up men like a wave and drives them forth. Whoever tastes this joy forgets himself. [14] And there is nothing sweeter than forgetting oneself. And not a few have forgotten what they are. But even more have taken root so firmly that not even the rosy wave is able to uproot them. They are petrified and too heavy, while the others are too light.

I earnestly confronted my devil and behaved with him as with a real person. This I learned in the Mysterium: to take seriously every unknown wanderer who personally inhabits the inner world, since they are real because they are effectual. [15] It does not help that we say in the spirit of this time: there is no devil. There was one with me. This took place in me. I did with him what I could. I could speak with him. A religious conversation is inevitable with the devil, since he demands it, if one does not want to surrender to him unconditionally. Because religion is precisely what the devil and I cannot agree about. I must have it out with him, as I cannot expect that he as an independent personality would accept my standpoint without further ado.

THE DEVIL. What is the use of knowing?

DON JUAN. Why, to be able to choose the line of greatest advantage instead of yielding in the direction of the least resistance. Does a ship sail to its destination no better than a log drifts nowhither? The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer....

THE DEVIL. Well, well, go your way, Senor Don Juan. I prefer to be my own master and not the tool of any blundering universal force. I know that beauty is good to look at; that music is good to hear; that love is good to feel; and that they are all good to think about and talk about. I know that to be well exercised in these sensations, emotions, and studies is to be a refined and cultivated being. Whatever they may say of me in churches on earth, I know that it is universally admitted in good society that the prince of Darkness is a gentleman; and that is enough for me. As to your Life Force, which you think irresistible, it is the most resistible thing in the world for a person of any character. But if you are naturally vulgar and credulous, as all reformers are, it will thrust you first into religion, where you will sprinkle water on babies to save their souls from me; then it will drive you from religion into science, where you will snatch the babies from the water sprinkling and inoculate them with disease to save them from catching it accidentally; then you will take to politics, where you will become the catspaw of corrupt functionaries and the henchman of ambitious humbugs; and the end will be despair and decrepitude, broken nerve and shattered hopes, vain regrets for that worst and silliest of wastes and sacrifices, the waste and sacrifice of the power of enjoyment: in a word, the punishment of the fool who pursues the better before he has secured the good.

DON JUAN. But at least I shall not be bored. The service of the Life Force has that advantage, at all events. So fare you well, Senor Satan....

THE DEVIL. [gloomily] His going is a political defeat. I cannot keep these Life Worshippers: they all go....There is something unnatural about these fellows. Do not listen to their gospel, Senor Commander: it is dangerous. Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman: it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human. To a man, horses and dogs and cats are mere species, outside the moral world. Well, to the Superman, men and women are a mere species too, also outside the moral world. This Don Juan was kind to women and courteous to men as your daughter here was kind to her pet cats and dogs; but such kindness is a denial of the exclusively human character of the soul.

THE STATUE. And who the deuce is the Superman?

THE DEVIL. Oh, the latest fashion among the Life Force fanatics. Did you not meet in Heaven, among the new arrivals, that German Polish madman—what was his name? Nietzsche?

-- Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy, by Bernard Shaw


I would be fleeing if I did not try to come to an understanding with him. If ever you have the rare opportunity to speak with the devil, then do not forget to confront him in all seriousness. He is your devil after all. The devil as the adversary is your own other standpoint; he tempts you and sets a stone in your path where you least want it.

Taking the devil seriously does not mean going over to his side, or else one becomes the devil. Rather it means coming to an understanding. Thereby you accept your other standpoint. With that the devil fundamentally loses ground, and so do you. And that may be well and good.

Although the devil very much abhors religion for its particular solemnity and candor, it has become apparent, however, that it is precisely through religion that the devil can be brought to an understanding. What I said about dancing struck him because I spoke about something that belonged in his own domain. He fails to take seriously only what concerns others because that is the peculiarity of all devils. In such a manner, I arrive at his seriousness, and with this we reach common / [4/5] ground where understanding is possible. The devil is convinced that dancing is neither lust nor madness, but an expression of joy, which is something proper to neither one nor the other. In this I agree with the devil. Therefore he humanizes himself before my eyes. But I turn green like a tree in spring.

Yet that joy is the devil, or that the devil is joy, has got to worry you. I pondered this for over a week, and I fear that it has not been enough. You dispute the fact that your joy is your devil. But it seems as if there is always something devilish about joy. If your joy is no devil for you, then possibly it is for your neighbors, since joy is the most supreme flowering and greening of life. This knocks you down, and you must grope for a new path, since the light in that joyful fire has completely gone out for you. Or your joy tears your neighbor away and throws him off course, since life is like a great fire that torches everything in its vicinity. But fire is the element of the devil.

When I saw that the devil is joy, surely I would have wanted to make a pact with him. But you can make no pact with joy, because it immediately disappears. Therefore you cannot capture the devil either. Yes, it belongs to his essence that he cannot be captured. He is stupid if he lets himself be caught, and you gain nothing from having yet one more stupid devil. The devil always seeks to saw off the branch on which you sit. That is useful and protects you from falling asleep and from the vices that go along with it.

The devil is an evil element. But joy? If you run after it, you see that joy also has evil in it, since then you arrive at pleasure and from pleasure go straight to Hell, your own particular Hell, which turns out differently for everyone. [16]

Through my coming to terms with the devil, he accepted some of my seriousness, and I accepted some of his joy. This gave me courage. But if the devil has gotten more earnest, one must brace oneself. [17] It is always a risky thing to accept joy, but it leads us to life and its disappointment, from which the wholeness of our life becomes. [18]
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Re: The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung

Postby admin » Sun Dec 01, 2013 2:23 am

Chapter 2: The Castle in the Forest [19]

Cap. ii.

[HI 5] [20] In the second night thereafter, I am walking alone in a dark forest and I notice that I have lost my way. [21] I am on a dark cart track and stumble through the darkness. I finally come to quiet, dark swamp water, and a small old castle stands at its center. I think it would be good to ask here for the night's lodgings. I knock on the door, I wait a long time, it begins to rain. I have to knock again. Now I hear someone coming: the door opens. A man in an old fashioned garment, a servant, asks what I want. I ask about lodgings for the night, and he lets me enter a dark vestibule. Then he leads me up an old, worn-out stairway. At the top I come to a wider and higher hall-like space with white walls, lined with black chests and wardrobes.

I am led into a kind of reception room. It is a simple space with old upholstered furniture. The dim light of an antiquated lamp lights the room only very meagerly. The servant knocks on a side door and then quietly opens it. I scan it swiftly: it's a scholar's study, with bookshelves on all four walls and a large writing desk, at which an old man sits wearing a long black robe. He beckons me to draw closer. The air in the room is heavy and the old man seems careworn. He is not without dignity -- he seems to be one of those who have as much dignity as one can be granted. He has that modest-fearful look of scholarly men who have long since been squashed to nothing by the abundance of knowledge. I think that he is a real / [5/6] scholar who has learned great modesty before the immensity of knowledge and has given himself tirelessly to the material of science and research, anxiously and equably appraising, as if he personally had to represent the working out of scientific truth.

He greets me embarrassed, as if absent and defensive. I do not wonder about this since I look like an ordinary person. Only with difficulty can he turn his gaze away from his work. I repeat my request for lodgings for the night. After a longer pause the old man remarks, "So, you want to sleep, then please yourself." I notice that he is absentminded, and therefore ask him to instruct the servant to show me a chamber. To this he says, "You are demanding, wait, I cannot just drop everything!" He sinks again into his book. I wait patiently. After a while he looks up astonished: "What do you want here? Oh -- forgive me -- I totally forgot that you are waiting here. I'll call the servant straightaway." The servant comes and leads me to a small chamber on the same floor with bare white walls and a large bed. He wishes me good night and withdraws.

As I am tired, I undress immediately and go to bed, after I have snuffed out the candle. The sheet is uncommonly rough and the pillow hard. My errant way has led me to a strange place: a small old castle whose scholarly owner is apparently spending the evening of his life alone with his books. No one else seems to be living in the house apart from the servant who lives over there in the tower. An ideal though solitary existence, I think, this life of the old man with his books. And here my thoughts linger for a long time, until I finally notice that another thought doesn't let go of me, namely that the old man has hidden his beautiful daughter here -- a vulgar idea for a novel -- an insipid, worn-out theme -- but the romantic can be felt in every limb -- a real novelistic idea -- a castle in a forest -- solitary night -- an old man petrified in his books, protecting a costly treasure and enviously hiding it from all the world -- what ridiculous thoughts come to me! Is it Hell or purgatory that I must also contrive such childish dreams on my wanderings? But I feel impotent to elevate my thoughts to something a bit stronger or more beautiful. I suppose I must allow these thoughts to come. What good would it do to push them away -- they will come again -- better to swallow this stale drink than keep it in the mouth. So what does this boring heroine look like? Surely blonde, pale -- blue eyes -- hoping longingly that every lost wanderer is her savior from the paternal prison -- Oh, I know this hackneyed nonsense -- I'd rather sleep -- why the devil must I plague myself with such empty fantasies?

Sleep does not come. I toss and turn -- sleep still does not come -- must I finally harbor this unsaved soul in myself? And is it this that will not let me sleep? Have I such a novelistic soul? That's all I needed -- this would be agonizingly ridiculous. Does this bitterest of all drinks never end? It must already be midnight -- and still sleep does not come. What in the wide world, then, won't let me sleep? Is it something to do with this chamber? Is the bed bewitched? It's terrible, what sleeplessness can drive a man to -- even the most absurd and superstitious theories. It seems to be cool, I'm freezing -- perhaps that's what keeps me from sleeping -- it's really uncanny here -- Heaven knows what goes on here -- weren't those steps just now? No, that must have been outside -- I roll over, firmly closing my eyes, I simply must sleep. Wasn't that the door just now? My God, someone is standing there! Am I seeing straight? -- a slim girl, pale as death, standing at the door? For Heaven's sake, what is this? She's coming nearer!

"Have you come at last?" she asks quietly. Impossible -- this is a cruel mistake -- the novel wants to become real -- does it want to grow into some silly ghost story? To what nonsense am I damned? Is it my soul that harbors such novelistic brilliance? Must this, too, happen to me? I am truly in Hell -- the worst awakening after death, to be resurrected in a lending library! Have I held the men of my time and their taste in such contempt that I must live in Hell and write out the novels that I have already spat on long ago? Does the lower half of average human taste also claim holiness and invulnerability, so that we might not say any bad word / [6/7] about it without having to atone for the sin in Hell?

She says, "Oh, so you too think me common? Do you too let yourself be deluded by the wretched delusion that I belong in a novel? You as well, whom I hoped had thrown off appearances and striven after the essence of things?"

I: "Forgive me, but are you real? It's the sorriest likeness to those foolishly threadbare scenes in novels for me to assume that you are not simply some unfortunate product of my sleepless brain. Is my doubt then truly confirmed by a situation that conforms so thoroughly with a sentimental romance?"

She: "You wretch, how can you doubt that I am real?"

She falls to her knees at the foot of my bed, sobbing and holding her face in her hands. My God, in the end is she really real, and do I do her an injustice? My pity awakens.

I: "But for Heaven's sake, tell me one thing: in all earnestness must I assume that you are real?"

She weeps and does not answer.

I: "Who are you, then?"

She: "I am the old man's daughter. He holds me here in unbearable captivity, not out of envy or hate, but out of love, since I am his only child and the image of my mother, who died young."

I scratch my head: is this not some hellish banality? Word for word, pulp fiction from the lending library! Oh you Gods, where have you led me? It's enough to make one laugh, it's enough to make one weep -- to be a beautiful sufferer, a tragic shattered person is difficult, but to become an ape, you beautiful and great ones? To you the banal and eternally ridiculous, the unutterably hackneyed and emptied out, is never set like a gift of Heaven in uplifted praying hands.

But still she lies there, crying -- yet what if she were real? Then she would be worth feeling sorry for, every man would have compassion for her. If she is a decent girl, what must it have cost her to enter into the room of a strange man! And to overcome her shame in this way?

I: "My dear child, I believe you, despite everything, that you are real. What can I do for you?"

She: "Finally, finally a word from a human mouth!"

***

She gets up, her face beaming. She is beautiful. A deep purity rests in her look. She has a beautiful and unworldly soul, one that wants to come into the life of reality, to all reality worthy of pity, to the bath of filth and the well of health. Oh this beauty of the soul! To see it climb down into the underworld of reality -- what a spectacle!

She: "What can you do for me? You have already done much for me. You spoke the redeeming word when you no longer placed the banal between you and me. Know then: I was bewitched by the banal."

I: "Woe is me, you now become very fairy-tale-like."

She: "Be reasonable, dear friend, and do not stumble now over the fabulous, since the fairy tale is the great mother of the novel, and has even more universal validity than the most-avidly read novel of your time. And you know that what has been on everyone's lips for millennia, though repeated endlessly, still comes nearest the ultimate human truth. So do not let the fabulous come between us." [22]

I: "You are clever and do not seem to have inherited the wisdom of your father. But tell me, what do you think of the divinity, of the so-called ultimate truths? I found it very strange to seek them in banality. According to their nature, they must be quite uncommon. Think only of our great philosophers."

She: "The more uncommon these highest truths are, the more inhuman must they be and the less they speak to you as something valuable or meaningful concerning human essence and being. Only what is human and what you call banal and hackneyed / [7/8] contains the wisdom that you seek. The fabulous does not speak against me but for me, and proves how universally human I am and how much I too not only need redemption but also deserve it. For I can live in the world of reality as well or better than many others of my sex."

I: "Strange maiden, you are bewildering -- when I saw your father, I hoped he would invite me to a scholarly conversation. He did not, and I was aggrieved at him because of this, since his distracted slackness hurt my dignity. But with you I find it much better. You give me matters to ponder. You are uncommon."

She: "You are mistaken, I am very common."

I: "I can't believe that. How beautiful and worthy of adoration is the expression of your soul in your eyes. Happy and enviable is the man who will free you."

She: "Do you love me?"

I: "By God, I love you -- but -- unfortunately I am already married."

She: "So -- you see: even banal reality is a redeemer. I thank you, dear friend, and I bring you greetings from Salome."

With these words her shape dissolves into darkness. Dim moonlight penetrates the room. Where she stood something shadowy lies -- it is a profusion of red roses. [23]

***

[2] [24] If no outer adventure happens to you, then no inner adventure happens to you either. The part that you take over from the devil -- joy, that is -- leads you into adventure. In this way you will find your lower as well as your upper limits. It is necessary for you to know your limits. If you do not know them, you run into the artificial barriers of your imagination and the expectations of your fellow men. But your life will not take kindly to being hemmed in by artificial barriers. life wants to jump over such barriers and you will fall out with yourself. These barriers are not your real limits, but arbitrary limitations that do unnecessary violence to you. Therefore try to find your real limits. One never knows them in advance, but one sees and understands them only when one reaches them. And this happens to you only if you have balance. Without balance you transgress your limits without noticing what has happened to you. You achieve balance, however, only if you nurture your opposite. But that is hateful to you in your innermost core, because it is not heroic.

My spirit reflected on everything rare and uncommon, it pried its way into unfound possibilities, toward paths that lead into the hidden, toward lights that shine in the night. And as my spirit did this, everything ordinary in me suffered harm without my noticing it, and it began to hanker after life, since I did not live it. Hence this adventure. I was smitten by the romantic. The romantic is a step backward. To reach the way, one must sometimes also take a few steps backward. [25]

In the adventure I experienced what I had witnessed in the Mysterium. What I saw there as Salome and Elijah became in life the old scholar and his pale, locked-up daughter. What I live is a distorted likeness of the Mysterium. Following the romantic way I reached the awkwardness and ordinariness of life, where I run out of thoughts and almost forget myself. What I formerly loved I must now experience as feeble and wasted, and what I formerly derided I had to envy as towering and helplessly crave. I accepted the absurdity of this adventure. No sooner had this happened than I also saw how the maiden transformed herself and signified an autonomous meaning. One inquires into the desire of the ridiculous, and that is enough for it to change.

What about masculinity? Do you know how much femininity man lacks for completeness? Do you know how much masculinity woman lacks for completeness? You seek the feminine in women and the masculine in men. And thus there are always only men and women. But where are people? You, man, should not seek the feminine in women, but seek and recognize it in yourself, as you / [8/9] possess it from the beginning. It pleases you, however, to play at manliness, because it travels on a well-worn track. You, woman, should not seek the masculine in men, but assume the masculine in yourself, since you possess it from the beginning. But it amuses you and is easy to play at femininity, consequently man despises you because he despises his femininity. But humankind is masculine and feminine, not just man or woman. You can hardly say of your soul what sex it is. But if you pay close attention, you will see that the most masculine man has a feminine soul, and the most feminine woman has a masculine soul. The more manly you are, the more remote from you is what woman really is, since the feminine in yourself is alien and contemptuous. [26]

If you take a piece of joy from the devil and set off on adventures with it, you accept your pleasure. But pleasure immediately attracts everything you desire, and then you must decide whether your pleasure spoils or enhances you. If you are of the devil, you will grope in blind desire after the manifold, and it will lead you astray. But if you remain with yourself, as a man who is himself and not of the devil, then you will remember your humanity, women per se as a man, but as a human being, that is to say, as if you were of the same sex as her. You will recall your femininity. It may seem to you then as if you were unmanly, stupid, and feminine so to speak. But you must accept the ridiculous, otherwise you will suffer distress, and there will come a time, when you are least observant, when it will suddenly round on you and make you ridiculous. It is bitter for the most masculine man to accept his femininity, since it appears ridiculous to him, powerless and tawdry.

Yes, it seems as if you have lost all virtue, as if you have fallen into debasement. It seems the same way to the woman who accepts her masculinity. [27] Yes, it seems to you like enslavement. You are a slave of what you need in your soul. The most masculine man needs women, and he is consequently their slave. Become a woman yourself, [28] and you will be saved from slavery to woman. You are abandoned without mercy to woman so long as you cannot fend off mockery with all your masculinity. It is good for you once to put on women's clothes: people will laugh at you, but through becoming a woman you attain freedom from women and their tyranny. The acceptance of femininity leads to completion. The same is valid for the woman who accepts her masculinity.

Image
The exclusive Ak-Sar-Ben club, comprised of the leading figures in the Omaha business community, flaunts its bizarre rituals in its own publicity material. A 1967 book on Ak-Sar-Ben by Arvid E. Nelson, Jr., commissioned by the Ak-Sar-Ben Board of Governors, displayed this picture of a 1923 Ak-Sar-Ben festivity, showing male Ak-Sar-Ben members dressed as Egyptian dancing girls.

Two years after the raid on King's credit union, as the legislative Franklin committee's original term drew to a close, an old hand in Nebraska politics reflected on the events of the past 24 months. "The Omaha business community," he said, "the Ak- Sar-Ben crowd, has really closed ranks behind Alan Baer, Andersen and the rest of them. The word has gone out: layoff the Franklin investigation. Most of the Senators are terrified. These guys make and break political careers. They give a lot of campaign money, and many of the Senators get what are generously called 'consulting fees,' or sometimes positions -- no-show jobs, really -- with the big firms up there. That's the way it's done. It's not uncommon for a big company to have more than one Senator on a $50,000 retainer."

Who were "these guys," the Ak-Sar-Ben crowd?

Visit the Omaha Public Library to look up the boards of directors of big Omaha companies, and you will find names that are listed on board after board. Take a few of those -- say, Walter Scott, Jr., chairman and CEO of the construction giant, Peter Kiewit and Sons Corporation; Charles "Mike" Harper, chairman and CEO of the $20 billion per year food conglomerate ConAgra; Michael H. Walsh, CEO of Union Pacific Railroad, a major force in Nebraska for over a hundred years -- and ask the librarian to help find information on these men. The reply will likely be something like what one library staffer told a friend of mine in 1991: "These are businessmen all right, but they are intensely secretive. We have very little on them."

For over a century, the Omaha business community has been organized around the Knights of Ak-Sar-Ben, a quasi-freemasonic social organization, centered on a racetrack and fairgrounds in Omaha. Spell "Nebraska" backwards and you get its name. Founded in 1895, Ak-Sar-Ben functions as a sort of central committee of the corporate elite, and a self-perceived oligarchy for the city.

Every year Ak-Sar-Ben celebrates a ritual coronation of the "King of Ak-Sar-Ben," generally an older corporate executive, and his Queen, generally the younger wife or daughter of another man in the club. The king for 1990 was Mike Harper of ConAgra. Here, and at debutante balls and other affairs organized for the younger generation, the lords and ladies of Ak-Sar-Ben establish their social pecking order. The rituals and "den shows" mimic ceremonies from different lands, real and invented, and always pagan. Past Ak-Sar-Ben festivity themes included: "The Roman Hippodrome," "King Arthur's Wild Goats," "Trouble in the Tropics," and "Hi-Jinx in Hades." Sometimes the men and boys of Ak-Sar-Ben paraded in women's clothing, or dressed as Egyptian goddesses.

Ak-Sar-Ben's clout is so legendary, that Omaha Mayor P.J. Morgan, himself a member of the Ak-Sar-Ben social set, could make political hay by a demagogic attack on it. In 1990, during a squabble with Ak-Sar-Ben over where a new stadium would be constructed, Morgan blustered, "Frankly, I'm just sick and tired of a small handful of people who think that they can control this city and county without regard to feelings, sentiments and desires of the honest, hard-working people who are the real foundation of this city."

Sensitive to this widespread perception, ConAgra's Harper, speaking as chairman of Ak-Sar-Ben's Board of Governors, replied in a special World-Herald column on December 9, 1990, "Ak Knights Don't Control City." Just because the individuals and corporations on Ak-Sar-Ben's board had given over $50 million to various causes over the past 20 years, wrote Harper, ticking off a list of most of the public facilities in Omaha, that did not mean they had clout. I am at a loss to see how contributions to reputable charities can be associated with political power."

Harper's own company flaunted its political power over the city and the state, just a few years ago. According to "Omaha Held Hostage," a May 1989 article in Progressive magazine, ConAgra threatened in 1987, to pull out of Omaha, unless the city granted it a choice piece of free land, sewage, paving and a host of other benefits, which will ultimately total as much as $60 million, for a new corporate headquarters. The city acquiesced. Later the same year, when the Nebraska Legislature was on the verge of removing personal property tax exemptions on purchases of jet airplanes and mainframe computers, Harper put out the word to the legislature: Change the tax bill, or ConAgra leaves Nebraska. The bill was changed.

***

Ak-Sar-Ben has been ruled for decades by its Board of Governors, a roster of sixteen influentials (increased to twenty, in 1990, "to better represent the entire community," according to Mike Harper), most of whom are chief executives of major corporations. In the late 1980s, the board included:

Charles "Mike" Harper, President and CEO, ConAgra
William A. Fitzgerald, President and CEO, Commercial Federal Savings and Loan
Bruce Lauritzen, President, First National Bank of Omaha
David A. Rismiller, Chairman and CEO, FirsTier Financial, Inc.
Walter Scott, Jr., President and CEO, Peter Kiewit &Sons, Inc.
Thomas J. Skutt, Chairman and CEO, Mutual of Omaha
Michael H. Walsh, Chairman, Union Pacific Railroad
Michael Yanney, Chairman and CEO, America First Cos.

These corporations poured millions into the Franklin Credit Union, in the form of deposits and outright contributions. Their executives supported King, in arrangements both informal and formal.

Bill Fitzgerald, Knight of Ak-Sar-Ben and president of Commercial Federal Savings and Loan, helped his friend Larry King with advice. When the jig was up for Franklin and the Consumer Services Organization, King's close associate CSO director Barbara Moore could find employment with Walter Scott's wife, Sue.

Mutual of Omaha placed funds in the credit union, while Thomas Skutt, chief executive of this insurance giant, co-chaired a $1.3 million fundraising drive for Franklin, with Harold Andersen.

The Franklin Credit Union had two boards. The small, governing board included Larry King, Jarrett Webb and James C. Hart, Jr., the secretary, who were named as child abusers by victim-witnesses before the Legislature's Franklin committee. The firms run by the Knights of Ak-Sar-Ben, along with other prestigious Omaha corporations and law firms, showed up on the larger, "Advisory Board."

On the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union Advisory Board were:

Chairman Harold Andersen, publisher, World-Herald
Rep. Hal Daub (R-2nd Congressional District)
N.P. Dodge II, President, N.P. Dodge Real Estate
Lamont Wallin, Kutak, Rock, & Huie law firm
L.B. Thomas, Vice President, ConAgra
Jerome Jamrog, Senior Vice President, Commercial Federal Savings and Loan
Arnold Nesbitt, Senior Assistant Manager, Union Pacific Railroad
David Hinton, Assistant Dean, College of Public Affairs, University of Nebraska, Omaha
Louis Lamberty, County Surveyor
Samuel Marvin, President, R-Lynn, Inc., Council Bluffs, Iowa
Leslie McAuley, Supervisor, Director of Quality Control, Northwest Bell
Donald Miller, Vice President, Omaha National Bank
Carolyn Rothery, Byrne & Randall, P.C., Omaha
Dale Wolforth, Vice President (ret.), Murray State Bank
John S. Zeilinger, attorney, Baird-Holz, Omaha
Michael Albert, President, Albert Food Brokerage
Angelo Amato, General Superintendent Customer Records Department, M.U.D.
David Ambrose, Professor, Department of Marketing, University of Nebraska, Omaha
Joseph Barker III, Massachusetts Mutual Insurance Company
Dana "Woody" Bradford, Bradford, Coenen, & Ashford
Leo Eisenstatt, Erickson, Sederstrom, Leigh, Eisenstatt, Johnson, Kinnamon
James Healy, Administrator of Urban Affairs, Northern Natural Gas

L.B. "Red" Thomas headed up finances for ConAgra, which put funds into Franklin certificates of deposit. Union Pacific, and its executives acting as individuals, poured in money, while Union Pacific officer Arnold Nesbitt sat on the board.

Ak-Sar-Ben interfaced with the Franklin credit union proper, but also with individuals in the orbit of Larry King. One of its biggest financial contributors in recent years was the department store heir and child abuser, Alan Baer. Catering for Ak-Sar-Ben was Gary West, bartender from the Max gay bar.

-- The Franklin Cover-Up -- Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska, by John W. DeCamp


The feminine in men is bound up with evil. I find it on the way of desire. The masculine in the woman is bound up with evil. Therefore people hate to accept their own other. But if you accept it, that which is connected with the perfection of men comes to pass: namely, that when you become the one who is mocked, the white bird of the soul comes flying. It was far away, but your humiliation attracted it. [29] The mystery draws near to you, and things happen around you like miracles. A gold luster shines, since the sun has risen from its grave. As a man you have no soul, since it is in the woman; as a woman you have no soul, since it is in the man. But if you become a human being, then your soul comes to you.

If you remain within arbitrary and artificially created boundaries, you will walk as between two high walls: you do not see the immensity of the world. But if you break down the walls that confine your view, and if the immensity and its endless uncertainty inspire you with fear, then the ancient sleeper awakens in you, whose messenger is the white bird. Then you need the message of the old tamer of chaos. There in the whirl of chaos dwells eternal wonder. Your world begins to become wonderful. Man belongs not only to an ordered world, he also belongs in the wonder-world of his soul. Consequently you must make your ordered world horrible, so that you are put off by being too much outside yourself.

Your soul is in great need, because drought weighs on its world. If you look outside yourselves, you see the far-off forest and mountains, and above them your vision climbs to the realms of the stars. And if you look into yourselves, you will see on the other hand the nearby as far-off and infinite, since the world of the inner is as infinite as the world of the outer. Just as you become a part of the manifold essence of the world through your bodies, so you become a part of the manifold essence of the inner world through your soul. This inner world is truly infinite, in no way poorer than the outer one. Man lives in two worlds. A fool lives here or there, but never here and there.

[30] Perhaps you think that a man who consecrates his life to research leads a spiritual life and that his soul lives in / [9/10] larger measure than anyone else's. But such a life is also external, just as external as the life of a man who lives for outer things. To be sure, such a scholar does not live for outer things but for outer thoughts -- not for himself, but for his object. If you say of a man that he has totally lost himself to the outer and wasted his years in excess, you must also say the same of this old man. He has thrown himself away in all the books and thoughts of others. Consequently his soul is in great need, it must humiliate itself and run into every stranger's room to beg for the recognition that he fails to give her.

Therefore you see those old scholars running after recognition in a ridiculous and undignified manner. They are offended if their name is not mentioned, cast down if another one says the same thing in a better way, irreconcilable if someone alters theirs views in the least. Go to the meetings of scholars and you will see them, these lamentable old men with their great merits and their starved souls famished for recognition and their thirst which can never be slaked. The soul demands your folly, not your wisdom.

Therefore, because I rise above gendered masculinity and yet do not exceed the human, the feminine that is contemptible to me transforms itself into a meaningful being. This is the most difficult thing -- to be beyond the gendered and yet remain within the human. If you rise above the gendered with the help of a general rule, you become the same as that rule and overreach the human. Therefore you become dry, hard, and inhuman.

You may go past the gendered for human reasons, and never for the sake of a general rule that remains the same in the most diverse situations, and therefore never has a perfect validity for each single situation. If you act from your humanity, you act from that particular situation without general principle, with only what corresponds to the situation. Thus you do justice to the situation, perhaps at the expense of a general rule. That should not be too painful for you, because you are not the rule. There is something else that is human, something all too human, and whoever has ended up there will do well to remember the blessing of the general rule. [31] For the general rule also has meaning and has not been set up for fun. It comprises much venerable work of the human spirit. Such persons are not capable of a general principle above the gendered, but only their imagination is capable of what they have lost. They have become their own imagination and arbitrariness, to their own detriment. They need to remember the gendered, so that they wake from their dreams to reality.

It is as agonizing as a sleepless night to fulfill the beyond from the here and now, namely the other and the opposing in myself. It sneaks up like a fever, like a poisonous fog. And when your senses are excited and stretched to the utmost, the daimonic comes as something so insipid and worn out, so mild and stale, that it makes you sick. Here you would gladly stop feeling across to your beyond. Startled and disgusted, you long for the return of the supernal beauties of your visible world. You spit out and curse everything that lies beyond your lovely world, since you know that it is the disgust, scum, refuse of the human animal who stuffs himself in dark places, creeps along sidewalks, sniffs out every blessed angle, and from the cradle to the grave enjoys only what has already been on everyone's lips.

But here you may not stop -- do not place your disgust between your here-and-now and your beyond. The way to your beyond leads through Hell and in fact through your own wholly particular Hell, whose bottom consists of knee-deep rubble, whose air is the spent breath of millions, whose fires are dwarflike passions, and whose devils are chimerical sign-boards.

Everything odious and disgusting is your own particular Hell. How can it be otherwise? Every other Hell was at least worth seeing or full of fun. But that is never Hell. Your Hell is made up of all the things that you always ejected from your sanctuary with a curse and a kick of the foot. When you step into your own Hell, never think that you come like one suffering in beauty, or as a proud pariah, but you come like a stupid and curious fool and gaze in wonder at the scraps that have fallen from your table. [32] / [10/11]

You really want to rage, but you see at the same time how well rage suits you. Your hellish absurdity stretches for miles. Good for you if you can swear! You will find that profanity is lifesaving. Thus if you go through Hell, you should not forget to give due attention to whatever crosses your path. Quietly look into everything that excites your contempt or rage; thereby you accomplish the miracle that I experienced with the pale maiden. You give soul to the soulless, and thereby it can come to something out of horrible nothingness. Thus you will redeem your other into life. Your values want to draw you away from what you presently are, to get you ahead of and beyond yourself. Your being, however, pulls you to the bottom like lead. You cannot at the same time live both, since both exclude each other. But on the way you can live both. Therefore the way redeems you. You cannot at the same time be on the mountain and in the valley, but your way leads you from mountain to valley and from valley to mountain. Much begins amusingly and leads into the dark. Hell has levels. [33]
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Re: The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung

Postby admin » Sun Dec 01, 2013 2:25 am

Chapter 3: One of the Lowly [34]

Cap. iii.

[HI II] In the following night, [35] I found myself wandering once more, in a homely, snow-covered country. A gray evening sky covers the sun. The air is moist and frosty. Someone who does not look trustworthy has joined me. Most notably, he has only one eye and a few scars on his face. He is poor and dirtily clothed, a tramp. He has a black stubble beard that has not seen a razor for a long time. I have a good walking stick for any eventuality. "It's damned cold," he remarks after a while. I agree. After a longer pause he asks: "Where are you going?"

I: ''I'm going to the next village, where I plan to stay overnight."

He: "I'd like to do that too, but will hardly manage to get a bed."

I: "Have you no money? Well, let us see. Are you out of work?"

He: "Yes, times are bad. Until a few days ago, I was working for a locksmith. But then he had no more work. Now I'm traveling and looking for work."

I: "Wouldn't you work for a farmer? There is always a shortage of farm labor."

He: "Working for a farmer doesn't suit me. That means getting up early in the morning -- the work is hard and wages are low."

I: "But it's always much more beautiful in the country than in a town."

He: "It's boring in the country, one meets nobody."

I: "Well, but there are also villagers."

He: "But there is no mental stimulation, the farmers are clods."

I look at him astonished. What, he still wants mental stimulation?

Better that he honestly earn his keep, and when he has done that he can think of stimulation. / [11/12]

I: "But tell me, what kind of mental stimulation is there in the city?"

He: "You can go to the cinema in the evenings. That's great and it's cheap. You get to see everything that happens in the world."

I have to think of Hell, where there are also cinemas for those who despised this institution on earth and did not go there because everyone else found it to their taste.

I: "What interested you most about the cinema?"

He: "One sees all sorts of stunning feats. There was one man who ran up houses. Another carried his head under his arm. Another even stood in the middle of a fire and wasn't burnt. Yes, it's really remarkable, the things that people can do."

And that's what this fellow calls mental stimulation! But wait -- that does seem remarkable: didn't the saints also carry their heads under their arms? [36] Didn't Saint Francis and Saint Ignatius levitate -- and what about the three men in the fiery furnace? [37] Isn't it a blasphemous idea to consider the Acta Sanctorum as historical cinema? [38] Oh, today's miracles are simply somewhat less mythical than technical. I regard my companion with feeling -- he lives the history of the world -- and I?

I: "Certainly, it's very well done. Did you see anything else like this?"

He: "Yes, I saw how the King of Spain was murdered."

I: "But he wasn't murdered at all."

He: "Well, that doesn't matter; in that case it was one of those damned capitalist kings. At least they got one of them. If all of them were taken out, the people would be free."

Not a word more dare I say: Wilhelm Tell, a work by Friedrich Schiller -- the man is standing right in the thick of it, in the stream of heroic story. One who announces the murder of the tyrant to a sleeping people. [39]

We have arrived at the inn, a country tavern -- a reasonably clean parlor -- a few men sit with beer in the corner. I am recognized as a "gentleman" and led into the better corner where a chequered cloth covers the end of a table. The other sits down at the far end of the table, and I decide to have him served a proper evening meal. He is already looking at me full of expectation and hunger -- with his one eye.

I: "Where did you lose your eye?"

He: "In a brawl. But I also got my knife into the other fellow pretty nicely. After that he got three months. They gave me six. But it was beautiful in prison. At the time the building was completely new. I worked in the locksmith's. There wasn't much to do and yet there was enough to eat. Prison really isn't all that bad."

I look around to make sure that no one is listening to me talking with a former convict. But no one seems to have noticed. I seem to have ended up in well-to-do company. Are there also prisons in Hell for those who never saw the inside of one while they were alive? Incidentally -- mustn't it be a peculiarly beautiful feeling to hit bottom in reality at least once, where there is no going down any further, but only upward beckons at best? Where for once one stands before the whole height of reality?

He: "So after that there I was, out on the street, since they banished me. Then I went to France. It was lovely there."

What demands beauty makes! Something can be learned from this man.

I: "Why did you have this brawl?"

He: "It was over a woman. She was carrying his bastard but I wanted to marry her. She was already due. After that she didn't want to anymore. I haven't heard from her."

I: "How old are you now?"

He: "I'll be thirty-five in spring. Once I find a proper job we can get married right off. I'll find myself one, I will. There's something wrong with my lungs, though. But that'll soon get better again."

/ [12/13] He has a coughing fit. I think that the prospects are not good and silently admire the poor devil's unswerving optimism.

After dinner I go to bed in a humble room. I hear how the other settles into his lodging for the night next door. He coughs several times. Then he falls still. Suddenly I awaken again at an uncanny moan and gurgle mixed with a half-stifled cough. I listen tensely -- no doubt, it's him. It sounds like something dangerous. I jump up and throw something on. I open the door of his room. Moonlight floods it. The man lies still dressed on a sack of straw. A dark stream of blood is flowing from his mouth and forming a puddle on the floor. He moans half choking and coughs out blood. He wants to get up but sinks back again -- I hurry to support him but I see that the hand of death lies on him. He is sullied with blood twice over. My hands are covered with it. A rattling sigh escapes from him. Then every stiffness loosens, a gentle shudder passes over his limbs. And then everything is deathly still.

Where am I? Are there also cases of death in Hell for those who have never thought about death? I look at my bloodstained hands -- as if I were a murderer ... Is it not the blood of my brother that sticks to my hands? The moon paints my shadow black on the white walls of the chamber. What am I doing here? Why this horrible drama? I look inquiringly at the moon as a witness. How does this concern the moon? Has it not already seen worse? Has it not shone a hundred thousand times into broken eyes? This is certainly of no avail to its eternal craters -- one more or less. Death? Does it not uncover the terrible deceit of life? Therefore it is probably all the same to the moon, whether and how one passes away Only we kick up a fuss about it -- with what right?

What did this one do? He worked, lazed about, laughed, drank, ate, slept, gave his eye for the woman, and for her sake forfeited his good name; furthermore, he lived the human myth after a fashion, he admired the wonder-workers, praised the death of the tyrant, and vaguely dreamed of the freedom of the people. And then -- then he miserably died -- like everyone else. That is generally valid. I sat down on the floor. What shadows over the earth! All lights gutter out in final despondency and loneliness. Death has entered -- and there is no one left to grieve. This is a final truth and no riddle. What delusion could make us believe in riddles?

***

[2] We stand on the spiky stones of misery and death.

A destitute joins me and wants admittance into my soul, and I am thus not destitute enough. Where was my destitution when I did not live it? I was a player at life, one who thought earnestly about life and lived it easily. The destitute was far away and forgotten. Life had become difficult and murkier. Winter kept on going, and the destitute stood in snow and froze. I join myself with him, since I need him. He makes living light and easy. He leads to the depths, to the ground where I can see the heights. Without the depths, I do not have the heights. I may be on the heights, but precisely because of that I do not become aware of the heights. I therefore need the bottommost for my renewal. If I am always on the heights, I wear them out and the best becomes atrocious to me.

But because I do not want to have it, my best becomes a horror to me. Because of that I myself become a horror, a horror to myself and to others, and a bad spirit of torment. Be respectful and know that your best has become a horror, with that you save yourself and others from useless torment. A man who can no longer climb down from his heights is sick and he brings himself and others to torment. If you have reached your depths, then you see your height light up brightly over you, worthy of desire and far-off, as if unreachable, since secretly you would prefer not to reach it since it seems unattainable to you. For you also love to praise your heights when you are low and to tell yourself that you would have only left them with pain, and that you did not live so long as you missed them. It is a good thing that you have almost become the other nature that makes you speak this way. But at bottom you know that it is not quite true.

At your low point you are no longer distinct from your fellow beings. You are not ashamed and do not regret it, since as you live the life of your fellow beings and descend to their lowliness / [13/14] you also climb into the holy stream of common life, where you are no longer an individual on a high mountain, but a fish among fish, a frog among frogs.

Your heights are your own mountain, which belongs to you and you alone. There you are individual and live your very own life. If you live your own life, you do not live the common life, which is always continuing and never-ending, the life of history and the inalienable and ever-present burdens and products of the human race. There you live the endlessness of being, but not the becoming. Becoming belongs to the heights and is full of torment. How can you become if you never are? Therefore you need your bottommost, since there you are. But therefore you also need your heights, since there you become.

If you live the common life at your lowest reaches, then you become aware of your self. If you are on your heights, then you are your best, and you become aware only of your best, but not that which you are in the general life as a being. What one is as one who becomes, no one knows. But on the heights, imagination is at its strongest. For we imagine that we know what we are as developing beings, and even more so, the less we want to know what we are as beings. Because of that we do not love the condition of our being brought low, although or rather precisely because only there do we attain clear knowledge of ourselves.

Everything is riddlesome to one who is becoming, but not to one who is. He who suffers from riddles should take thought of his lowest condition; we solve those riddles from which we suffer, but not those which please us.

To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth. In the depths, being is not an unconditional persistence but an endlessly slow growth. You think you are standing still like swamp water, but slowly you flow into the sea that covers the earth's greatest deeps, and is so vast that firm land seems only an island imbedded in the womb of the immeasurable sea.

As a drop in the ocean you take part in the current, ebb and flow. You swell slowly on the land and slowly sink back again in interminably slow breaths. You wander vast distances in blurred currents and wash up on strange shores, not knowing how you got there. You mount the billows of huge storms and are swept back again into the depths. And you do not know how this happens to you. You had thought that your movement came from you and that it needed your decisions and efforts, so that you could get going and make progress. But with every conceivable effort you would never have achieved that movement and reached those areas to which the sea and the great wind of the world brought you.

From endless blue plains you sink into black depths; luminous fish draw you, marvelous branches twine around you from above. You slip through columns and twisting, wavering, dark-leaved plants, and the sea takes you up again in bright green water to white, sandy coasts, and a wave foams you ashore and swallows you back again, and a wide smooth swell lifts you softly and leads you again to new regions, to twisting plants, to slowly creeping slimy polyps, and to green water and white sand and breaking surf.

But from far off your heights shine to you above the sea in a golden light, like the moon emerging from the tide, and you become aware of yourself from afar. And longing seizes you and the will for your own movement. You want to cross over from being to becoming, since you have recognized the breath of the sea, and its flowing, that leads you here and there without your ever adhering; you have also recognized its surge that bears you to alien shores and carries you back, and gargles you up and down.

You saw that it was the life of the whole and the death of each individual. You felt yourself entwined in the collective death, from death to the earth's deepest place, from death in your own strangely breathing depths. Oh -- you long to be beyond; despair and mortal fear seize you in this death that breathes slowly and streams back and forth eternally. All this light and dark, warm, tepid, and cold water, all these wavy, swaying, twisting plantlike animals and bestial plants, all these nightly wonders become a horror to you, and you long for the sun, for light dry air, for firm stones, for a fixed place and straight lines, for the motionless and firmly held, for rules and preconceived purpose, for singleness and your own intent.

The knowledge of death came to me that night, from the dying that engulfs the world. I saw how we live toward death, how the swaying golden wheat sinks together under the scythe of the reaper, / [14/15] like a smooth wave on the sea-beach. He who abides in common life becomes aware of death with fear. Thus the fear of death drives him toward singleness. He does not live there, but he becomes aware of life and is happy, since in singleness he is one who becomes, and has overcome death. He overcomes death through overcoming common life. He does not live his individual being, since he is not what he is, but what he becomes.

One who becomes grows aware of life, whereas one who simply exists never will, since he is in the midst of life. He needs the heights and singleness to become aware of life. But in life he becomes aware of death. And it is good that you become aware of collective death, since then you know why your singleness and your heights are good. Your heights are like the moon that luminously wanders alone and through the night looks eternally clear. Sometimes it covers itself and then you are totally in the darkness of the earth, but time and again it fills itself out with light. The death of the earth is foreign to it. Motionless and clear, it sees the life of the earth from afar, without enveloping haze and streaming oceans. Its unchanging form has been solid from eternity. It is the solitary clear light of the night, the individual being, and the near fragment of eternity.

From there you look out, cold, motionless, and radiating. With otherworldly silvery light and green twilights, you pour out into the distant horror. You see it but your gaze is clear and cold. Your hands are red from living blood, but the moonlight of your gaze is motionless. It is the life blood of your brother, yes, it is your own blood, but your gaze remains luminous and embraces the entire horror and the earth's round. Your gaze rests on silvery seas, on snowy peaks, on blue valleys, and you do not hear the groaning and howling of the human animal.

The moon is dead. Your soul went to the moon, to the preserver of souls. [40] Thus the soul moved toward death. [41] I went into the inner death and saw that outer dying is better than inner death. And I decided to die outside and to live within. For that reason I turned away [42] and sought the place of the inner life.
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Re: The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung

Postby admin » Sun Dec 01, 2013 2:27 am

Chapter 4: The Anchorite

Cap. iv. Dies 1. [43]

[HI 15] On the following night, [44] I found myself on new paths; hot dry air flowed around me, and I saw the desert, yellow sand all around, heaped up in waves, a terrible irascible sun, a sky as blue as tarnished steel, the air shimmering above the earth, on my right side a deeply cut valley with a dry river bed, some languid grass and dusty brambles. In the sand I see the tracks of naked feet that lead up from the rocky valley to the plateau. I follow them along a high dune. Where it falls off, the tracks move off to the other side. They appear to be fresh, and old half-worn-away footprints run alongside. I pursue them attentively: again they follow the slope of the dune, now they flow into another set of footprints -- but it is the same / [15/16] set that I have already followed, the one ascending from the valley.

Henceforth I follow the footprints downward in astonishment. I soon reach the hot red rocks corroded by the wind. On the stone the footprints are lost but I see where the rock falls off in layers and I climb down. The air glows and the rock burns my soles. Now I have reached the bottom; there are the tracks again. They lead along the winding of the valley, a short distance. Suddenly I stand before a small hut covered in reeds and made of mud bricks. A rickety wooden plank forms the door where a cross has been painted in red. I open it quietly. A haggard man covered in a white linen mantle is sitting on a mat with his back leaning against the wall. Across his knees lies a book in yellow parchment, with beautiful black handwriting -- a Greek gospel, without doubt. I am with an anchorite of the Libyan desert. [45]

I: ''Am I disturbing you, father?"

A: "You do not disturb me. But do not call me father. I am a man like you. What is your desire?"

I: "I come without desire, I have come to this place in the desert by chance, and found tracks in the sand up there that led me in a circle to you."

A: "You found the tracks of my daily walks at daybreak and sunset."

I: "Excuse me if I interrupt your devotion, it is a rare opportunity for me to be with you. I have never before seen an anchorite."

A: "There are several others whom you can see further down in this valley. Some have huts like me, others live in the graves that the ancients have hollowed out in these rocks. I live uppermost in the valley, because it is most solitary and quiet here, and because here I am closest to the peace of the desert."

I: "Have you already been here long?"

A: "I have lived here for perhaps ten years, but really, I can no longer remember exactly how long it is. It could also be a few more years. Time passes so quickly."

I: "Time passes quickly? How is that possible? Your life must be frightfully monotonous."

A: "Time certainly passes quickly for me. Much too quickly even. It seems you are a pagan?"

I: "Me? No -- not exactly. I was raised in the Christian faith."

A: "Well, then, how can you ask whether time drags on for me? You must know what preoccupies a man who is grieving. Only idlers grow bored."

I: "Again, forgive me, my curiosity is great, what then do you occupy yourself with?"

A: ''Are you a child? To begin with you see that I am reading, and that I keep regular hours."

I: "But I can see nothing at all with which you could occupy yourself here. You must have read this book from cover to cover often enough. And if it is the gospels, as I suppose, then I am sure you already know them by heart."

A: "How childishly you speak! Surely you know that one can read a book many times -- perhaps you almost know it by heart, and nevertheless it can be that, when you look again at the lines before you, certain things appear new or even new thoughts occur to you that you did not have before. Every word can work productively in your spirit. And finally if you have once left the book for a week and you take it up again after your spirit has experienced various different changes, then a number of things will dawn on you."

I: "I have difficulty grasping this. The book remains one and the same, certainly a wonderfully profound, yes, even divine matter, but surely not rich enough to fill countless years."

A: "You are astonishing. How, then, do you read this holy book? Do you really always see only one and the same meaning in it? Where do you come from? You are truly a pagan."

I: "I beg you, please don't hold it against me if I read like a pagan. Let me talk with you. I am here to learn from you. Consider me as an ignorant student, which I am in these matters."

A: "If I call you a pagan, don't take it as an insult. I used to be a pagan, too, exactly like you as I / [16/17] well remember. Therefore how can I blame you for your ignorance?"

I: "Thank you for your patience. But it matters very much to me to know how you read and what you take from this book."

A: "Your question is not easy to answer. It's easier to explain colors to a blind person. You must know one thing above all: a succession of words does not have only one meaning. But men strive to assign only a single meaning to the sequence of words, in order to have an unambiguous language. This striving is worldly and constricted, and belongs to the deepest layers of the divine creative plan. On the higher levels of insight into divine thoughts, you recognize that the sequence of words has more than one valid meaning. Only to the all-knowing is it given to know all the meanings of the sequence of words. Increasingly we try to grasp a few more meanings."

I: "If I understand you correctly, you think that the holy writings of the New Testament also have a doubleness, an exoteric and an esoteric meaning, as a few Jewish scholars contend concerning their holy books."

A: "This bad superstition is far from me. I observe that you are wholly inexperienced in divine matters."

I: "I must confess my deep ignorance about these things. But I am eager to experience and understand what you think about the multifaceted meaning of the sequence of words."

A: "Unfortunately I am in no position to tell you everything I know about it. But at least I will try to make the elements clear to you. Because of your ignorance I will therefore begin elsewhere this time: What you need to know is that before I became acquainted with Christianity, I was a rhetorician and philosopher in the city of Alexandria. I had a great throng of students, including many Romans, a few barbarians, and also some Gauls and Britons. I taught them not only the history of Greek philosophy but also the new systems, among them the system of Philo, whom we call the Jew. [46] He was a clever head, but fantastically abstract, as the Jews are wont to be when they devise systems; moreover he was a slave of his own words. I added my own, and wove an atrocious web of words in which I ensnared not only my listeners, but also myself. We rioted terribly among words and names, our own miserable creatures, and accorded divine potency to them. Yes, we even believed in their reality, and believed that we possessed the divine and had committed it to words."

I: "But Philo Judeaus, if this is who you mean, was a serious philosopher and a great thinker. Even John the Evangelist included some of Philo's thoughts in the gospel."

A: "You are right. It is to Philo's credit that he furnished language like so many other philosophers. He belongs to the language artists. But words should not become Gods." [47]

I: "I fail to understand you here. Does it not say in the gospel according to John: God was the Word. It appears to make quite explicit the point which you have just now rejected."

A: "Guard against being a slave to words. Here is the gospel: read from that passage where it says: In him was the life. What does John say there?" [48]

I: "'And life was the light of men and the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not understood it. But it became a person sent from God, by the name of John, who came as a witness and to be a witness of the light. The genuine light, which illuminates each person, came into the world: He was in the world, and the world became through him, and the world did not recognize him.' -- That is what I read here. But what do you make of this?"

A: "I ask you, was this Image: [Logos] a concept, a word? It was a light, indeed a man, and lived among men. You see, Philo only lent John the word so that John would have at his disposal the word 'Image' alongside the word 'light' to describe the son of man. John gave to living men the meaning of the Image, but Philo gave Image as the dead concept that usurped life, even the divine life. Through this the dead does not gain life, and the living is killed. And this was also my atrocious error."

O: "I see what you mean. This thought is new to me and seems worth consideration. Until now it always seemed to me / [17/18] as if it were exactly that which was meaningful in John, namely that the son of man is the Image, in that he thus elevates the lower to the higher spirit, to the world of the Image. But you lead me to see the matter conversely, namely that John brings the meaning of the Image down to man."

A: "I learned to see that John has in fact even done the great service of having brought the meaning of the Image up to man."

I: "You have peculiar insights that stretch my curiosity to the utmost. How is that? Do you think that the human stands higher than theImage?"

A: "I want to answer this question within the scope of your understanding: if the human God had not become important above everything, he would not have appeared as the son in the flesh, but in the Image." [49]

I: "That makes sense to me, but I confess that this view is surprising to me. It is especially astonishing to me that you, a Christian anchorite, have come to such views. I would not have expected this of you."

A: "As I have already noticed, you have a completely false idea of me and my essence. Let me give you a small example of my preoccupation. I've spent many years alone with the process of unlearning. Have you ever unlearned anything? -- Well, then you should know how long it takes. And I was a successful teacher. As you know, for such people to unlearn is difficult or even impossible. But I see that the sun has gone down. Soon it will be completely dark. Night is the time of silence. I want to show you your place for the night. I need the morning for my work but after midday you can come to me again if you like. Then we will continue our conversation."

He leads me out of the hut, the valley is covered in blue shadows. The first stars are already glittering in the sky. He leads me around the corner of a rock: we are standing at the entrance of a [50] grave cut into the stone. We step in. Not far from the entrance lies a heap of reeds covered with mats. Next to it there is a pitcher of water, and on a white cloth there are dried dates and black bread.

A: "Here is your place and your supper. Sleep well, and do not forget your morning prayer, when the sun rises."

***

[2] The solitary lives in endless desert full of awesome beauty. He looks at the whole and at inner meaning. He loathes manifold diversity if it is near him. He looks at it from afar in its totality. Consequently silvery splendor and joy and beauty cloak diversity for him. What is near him must be simple and innocent, since close at hand the manifold and complicated tear and break through the silvery splendor. No cloudiness of the sky, no haze or mist is allowed to be around him, otherwise he cannot look at the distant manifold in the whole. Consequently the solitary loves the desert above all, where everything nearby is simple and nothing turbid or blurred lies between him and the far-away.

***

The life of the solitary would be cold were it not for the immense sun, which makes the air and rocks glow. The sun and its eternal splendor replace for the solitary his own life warmth.

His heart longs for the sun.

He wanders to the lands of the sun.

He dreams of the flickering splendor of the sun, of the hot red stones spread out at midday, of the golden hot rays of dry sand. / [18/19]

The solitary seeks the sun and no one else is so ready to open his heart as he is. Therefore he loves the desert above all, since he loves its deep stillness.

He needs little food since the sun and its glow nourish him. Consequently the solitary loves the desert above all since it is a mother to him, giving him food and invigorating warmth at regular hours.

In the desert the solitary is relieved of care and therefore turns his whole life to the sprouting garden of his soul, which can flourish only under a hot sun. In his garden the delicious red fruit grows that bears swelling sweetness under a tight skin.

You think that the solitary is poor. You do not see that he strolls under laden fruit trees and that his hand touches grain a hundredfold. Under dark leaves the overfull reddish blossoms swell toward him from abundant buds, and the fruit almost bursts with thronging juices. Fragrant resins drip from his trees and under his feet thrusting seed breaks open.

If the sun sinks onto the plane of the sea like an exhausted bird, the solitary envelops himself and holds his breath. He does not move and is pure expectancy until the miracle of the renewal of light rises in the East.

Brimful delicious expectation is in the solitary. [51]

The horror of the desert and of withered evaporation surround him, and you do not understand how the solitary can live. / [19/20]

But his eye rests on the garden, and his ears listen to the source, and his hand touches velvet leaves and fruit, and his breath draws in sweet perfumes from blossom-rich trees.

He cannot tell you, since the splendor of his garden is so abundant. He stammers when he speaks of it, and he appears to you to be poor in spirit and in life. But his hand does not know where it should reach, in all this indescribable fullness.

He gives you a small insignificant fruit, which has just fallen at his feet. It appears worthless to you, but if you consider it, you will see that this fruit tastes like a sun which you could not have dreamt of. It gives off a perfume which confuses your senses and makes you dream of rose gardens and sweet wine and whispering palm trees. And you hold this one fruit in your hands dreaming, and you would like the tree in which it grows, the garden in which this tree stands, and the sun which brought forth this garden.

And you yourself want to be that solitary who strolls with the sun in his garden, his gaze resting on pendant flowers and his hand brushing a hundredfold of grain and his breath drinking the perfume from a thousand roses.

Dull from the sun and drunk from fermenting wines, you lie down in ancient graves, whose walls resound with many voices and many colors of a thousand solar years.

When you grow, then you see everything living again as it was. And / [20/21] when you sleep, you rest, like everything that was, and your dreams echo softly again from distant temple chants.

You sleep down through the thousand solar years, and you wake up through the thousand solar years, and your dreams full of ancient lore adorn the walls of your bedchamber.

You also see yourself in the totality.

***

You sit and lean against the wall, and look at the beautiful, riddlesome totality. The Summa [52] lies before you like a book, and an unspeakable greed seizes you to devour it. Consequently you lean back and stiffen and sit for a long time. You are completely incapable of grasping it. Here and there a light flickers, here and there a fruit falls from high trees which you can grasp, here and there your foot strikes gold. But what is it, if you compare it with the totality; which lies spread out tangibly close to you? You stretch out your hand, but it remains hanging in invisible webs. You want to see it exactly as it is but something cloudy and opaque pushes itself exactly in between. You would like to tear a piece out of it; it is smooth and impenetrable like polished steel. So you sink back against the wall, and when you have crawled through all the glowing hot crucibles of the Hell of doubt, you sit once more and lean back, and look at the wonder of the Summa that lies spread out before you. Here and there a light flickers, here and there a fruit falls. For you it is all too little. But you begin to be satisfied with yourself, and you pay no attention to the years passing away. What are years? What is hurrying time to him that sits under a tree? Your time passes like a breath of air and you wait for the next light, the next fruit.

***

The writing lies before you and always says the same, if you believe in words. But if you believe in things in whose places only words stand, you never come to the end. And yet you must go an endless road, since life flows not only down a finite path but also an infinite one. But the unbounded makes you [53] anxious since the unbounded is fearful and your humanity rebels against it. Consequently you seek limits and restraints so that you do not lose yourself, tumbling into infinity. Restraint becomes imperative for you. You cry out for the word which has one meaning and no other, so that you escape boundless ambiguity. The word becomes your God, since it protects you from the countless possibilities of interpretation. The word is protective magic against the daimons of the unending, which tear at your soul and want to scatter you to the winds. You are saved if you can say at last: that is that and only that. You speak the magic word, and the limitless is finally banished. Because of that men seek and make words. [54]

He who breaks the wall of words overthrows Gods and defiles temples. The solitary is a murderer. He murders the people, because he thus thinks and thereby breaks down ancient sacred walls. He calls up the daimons of the boundless. And he sits, leans back, and does not hear the groans of mankind, whom the fearful fiery smoke has seized. And yet you cannot find the new words if you do not shatter the old words. But no one should shatter the old words, unless he finds the new word that is a firm rampart against the limitless and grasps more life in it than in the old word. A new word is a new God for old men. Man remains the same, even if you create a new model of God for him. He remains an imitator. What was word, shall become man. The word created the world and came before the world. It lit up like a light in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. [55] And thus the word should become what the darkness can comprehend, since what use is the light if the darkness does not comprehend it? But your darkness should grasp the light.

***

The God of words is cold and dead and shines from afar like the moon, mysteriously and inaccessibly. Let the word return to its / [22/23] creator, to man, and thus the word will be heightened in man. Man should be light, limits, measure. May he be your fruit, for which you longingly reach. The darkness does not comprehend the word, but rather man; indeed, it seizes him, since he himself is a piece of the darkness. Not from the word down to man, but from the word up to man: that is what the darkness comprehends. The darkness is your mother; she behooves reverence, since the mother is dangerous. She has power over you, since she gave birth to you. Honor the darkness as the light, and you will illumine your darkness.

***

If you comprehend the darkness, it seizes you. It comes over you like the night with black shadows and countless shimmering stars. Silence and peace come over you if you begin to comprehend the darkness. Only he who does not comprehend the darkness fears the night. Through comprehending the dark, the nocturnal, the abyssal in you, you become utterly simple. And you prepare to sleep through the millennia like everyone else, and you sleep down into the womb of the millennia, and your walls resound with ancient temple chants. Since the simple is what always was. Peace and blue night spread over you while you dream in the grave of the millennia.
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Re: The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung

Postby admin » Sun Dec 01, 2013 2:35 am

Chapter 5: Dies II. [56]

Cap. v.

[HI 22] [57] [58] I awaken, the day reddens the East. A night, a wonderful night in the distant depths of time lies behind me. In what far-away space was I? What did I dream? Of a white horse? It seems to me as if I had seen this white horse on the Eastern sky over the rising sun. The horse spoke to me: What did it say? It said: "Hail him who is in darkness since the day is over him." There were four white horses, each with golden wings. They led the carriage of the sun, on which Helios stood with flaring mane. [59] I stood down in the gorge, astonished and frightened. A thousand black serpents crawled swiftly into their holes. Helios ascended, rolling upward toward the wide paths of the sky. I knelt down, raised my hands suppliantly, and called: "Give us your light, you are flame-curled, entwined, crucified and revived; give us your light, your light!" This cry woke me. Didn't Ammonius say yesterday evening: "Do not forget to say your morning prayer when the sun rises." I thought that perhaps he secretly worships the sun. / [22/23]

Outside a fresh morning wind rises. Yellow sand trickles in fine veins down the rocks. The redness expands across the sky and I see the first rays shoot up to the firmament. Solemn calm and solitude on all sides. A large lizard lies on a stone and awaits the sun. I stand as if spellbound and laboriously remember everything from yesterday, especially what Ammonius said. But what did he say? That the sequences of words have many meanings, and that John brought the Image to man. But that does not sound properly Christian. Is he perhaps a Gnostic? [60] No, that seems impossible to me, since they were really the worst of all the idolators of words, as he would probably put it.

The sun -- what fills me with such inner exaltation? I should not forget my morning prayer -- but where has my morning prayer gone? Dear sun, I have no prayer, since I do not know how one must address you. Have I already prayed to the sun? But Ammonius really meant that I should pray to God at the break of day. He probably does not know -- we have no more prayers. How should he know about our nakedness and poverty? What has happened to our prayers? I miss them here. This must really be because of the desert. It seems as if there ought to be prayers here. Is this desert so very bad? I think it is no worse than our cities. But why then do we not pray there? I must look toward the sun, as if it had something to do with this. Alas -- one can never escape the age-old dreams of mankind.

What shall I do this whole long morning? I do not understand how Ammonius could have endured this life for even a year. I go back and forth on the dried-up river bed and finally sit down on a boulder. Before me there are a few yellow grasses. Over there a small dark beetle is crawling along, pushing a ball in front of it -- a scarab. [61] You dear little animal, are you still toiling away in order to live your beautiful myth? How seriously and undiscouraged it works! If only you had a notion that you are performing an old myth, you would probably renounce your fantasies as we men have also given up playing at mythology.

The unreality nauseates one. What I say sounds very odd in this place, and the good Ammonious would certainly not agree with it. What am I actually doing here? No, I don't want to condemn him in advance, since I still haven't really understood what he actually means. He has a right to be heard. By the way, I thought differently yesterday. I was even very thankful to him that he wanted to teach me. But I'm being critical once again, and superior, and may well learn nothing. His thoughts are not that bad at all; they are even good. I don't know why I always want to put the man down.

Dear beetle, where have you gone? I can no longer see you -- Oh, you're already over there with your mythical ball. These little animals stick to things, quite unlike us -- no doubt, no change of mind, no hesitation. Is this so because they live their myth?

***

Dear scarab, my father, I honor you, blessed be your work -- in eternity -- Amen.

What nonsense am I talking? I'm worshiping an animal -- that must be because of the desert. It seems absolutely to demand prayers.

How beautiful it is here! The reddish color of the stones is wonderful; they reflect the glow of a hundred thousand past suns -- these small grains of sand have rolled in fabulous primordial oceans, over them swam primordial monsters with forms never beheld before. Where were you, man, in those days? On this warm sand lay your childish primordial animal ancestors, like children snuggling up to their mother.

O mother stone, I love you. I lie snuggled up against your warm body, your late child. Blessed be you, ancient mother.

/ [23/24] Yours is my heart and all glory and power -- Amen.

What am I saying? That was the desert. How everything appears so animated to me! This place is truly terrible. These stones -- are they stones? They seem to have gathered here deliberately. They're lined up like a troop transport. They've arranged themselves by size, the large ones stand apart, the small ones close ranks and gather in groups that precede the large ones. Here the stones form states.

Am I dreaming or am I awake? It's hot -- the sun already stands high -- how the hours pass! Truly, the morning is nearly over -- and how astonishing it has been! Is it the sun or is it these living stones, or is it the desert that makes my head buzz?

I go up the valley and before long I reach the hut of the anchorite. He is sitting on his mat lost in deep reflection.

I: "My father, I am here."

A: "How have you spent your morning?"

I: "I was surprised when you said yesterday that time passes quickly for you. I don't question you anymore and this will no longer surprise me. I've learned a lot. But only enough to make you an even greater riddle than you were before. Why, all the things that you must experience in the desert, you wonderful man! Even the stones are bound to speak to you."

A: '' I'm happy that you have learned to understand something of the life of an anchorite. That will make our difficult task easier. I don't want to intrude on your mysteries, but I feel that you come from a strange world that has nothing to do with mine."

I: "You speak truthfully. I'm a stranger here, more foreign than any you've ever seen. Even a man from Britain's remotest coast is closer to you than I am. Therefore have patience, master -- and let me drink from the source of your wisdom. Although the thirsty desert surrounds us, an invisible stream of living water flows here."

A: "Have you said your prayer?"

I: "Master, forgive me: I've tried, but I found no prayer. Yet I dreamed that I prayed to the rising sun."

A: "Don't worry yourself because of that. If you do find a word, your soul has nevertheless found inexpressible words to greet the break of day."

I: "But it was a heathen prayer to Helios."

A: "Let that suffice for you."

I: "But Oh master. I've prayed not only to the sun in a dream, but in my absentmindedness also to the scarab and the earth."

A: "Be astonished at nothing, and in no case condemn or regret it. Let us go to work. Do you want to ask something about the conversation we had yesterday?"

I: "I interrupted you yesterday when you spoke of Philo. You wanted to explain your notion of the various meanings of particular sequences of words."

A: "Well, I'll continue my account of how I was freed from the awful predicament of spinning words. A man my father had set free once came to me; this man, whom I'd been attached to since my childhood, spoke to me and said:

"Oh Ammonius, are you well?" "Certainly," I said. "as you can see. I am learned and have great success."

He: "I mean, are you happy and are you fully alive?"

I laughed: "As you can see, all is well."

The old man replied: "I saw how you lectured. You seemed to be anxious at the judgment of your listeners. You wove witty jokes into the lecture to please your listeners. You heaped up learned expressions to impress them. You were restless and hasty, as if still compelled to snatch up all knowledge. You are not in yourself."

Although these words at first seemed laughable to me, they still made an impression on me, and reluctantly I had to / [24/25] credit the old man, since he was right.

Then he said: "Dear Ammonius, I have delightful tidings for you: God has become flesh in his son and has brought us all salvation." "What are you saying," I called, "you probably mean Osiris, [62] who shall appear in the mortal body?"

"No," he replied, "this man lived in Judea and was born from a virgin."

I laughed and answered: "I already know about this; a Jewish trader has brought tidings of our virgin queen to Judea, whose image appears on the walls of one of our temples, and reported it as a fairy tale."

"No," the old man insisted, "he was the Son of God."

"Then you mean Horus, [63] the son of Osiris, don't you?" I answered.

"No, he was not Horus, but a real man, and he was hung from a cross."

"Oh, but this must be Seth, surely, whose punishments our old ones have often described."

But the old man stood by his conviction and said: "He died and rose up on the third day."

"Well, then he must be Osiris," I replied impatiently.

"No," he cried, "he is called Jesus the anointed one."

"Ah, you really mean this Jewish God, whom the poor honor at the harbor, and whose unclean mysteries they celebrate in cellars."

"He was a man and yet the Son of God," said the old man staring at me intently.

"That's nonsense, dear old man," I said, and showed him to the door. But like an echo from distant rock faces the words returned to me: a man and yet the Son of God. It seemed significant to me, and this phrase was what brought me to Christianity.

I: "But don't you think that Christianity could ultimately be a transformation of your Egyptian teachings?"

A: "If you say that our old teachings were less adequate expressions of Christianity, then I'm more likely to agree with you."

I: "Yes, but do you then assume that the history of religions is aimed at a final goal?"

A: "My father once bought a black slave at the market from the region of the source of the Nile. He came from a country that had heard of neither Osiris nor the other Gods; he told me many things in a more simple language that said the same as we believed about Osiris and the other Gods. I learned to understand that those uneducated Negroes unknowingly already possessed most of what the religions of the cultured peoples had developed into complete doctrines. Those able to read that language correctly could thus recognize in it not only the pagan doctrines but also the doctrine of Jesus. And it's with this that I now occupy myself. I read the gospels and seek their meaning which is yet to come. We know their meaning as it lies before us, but not their hidden meaning which points to the future. It's erroneous to believe that religions differ in their innermost essence. Strictly speaking, it's always one and the same religion. Every subsequent form of religion is the meaning of the antecedent."

I: "Have you found out the meaning which is yet to come?"

A: "No, not yet; it's very difficult, but I hope I'll succeed. Sometimes it seems to me that I need the stimulation of others, but I realize that those are temptations of Satan."

I: "Don't you believe that you'd succeed if you were nearer men?"

A: "Perhaps you're right."

He looks at me suddenly as if doubtful and suspicious. "But," he continues, "I love the desert, do you understand? This yellow, sun-glowing desert. Here you can see the countenance of the sun every day, you are alone, you can see glorious Helios -- no, that is pagan -- what's wrong with me? I'm confused -- you are Satan -- I recognize you -- give way, adversary!"

/ [25/26] He jumps up incensed and wants to lunge at me. But I am far away in the twentieth century. [64]

***

[2] [HI 26] He who sleeps in the grave of the millennia dreams a wonderful dream. He dreams a primordially ancient dream. He dreams of the rising sun.

If you sleep this sleep and dream this dream in this time of the world, you will know that the sun will also rise at this time. For the moment we are still in the dark, but the day is upon us.

He who comprehends the darkness in himself, to him the light is near. He who climbs down into his darkness reaches the staircase of the working light, fire-maned Helios.

His chariot ascends with four white horses, his back bears no cross, and his side no wound, but he is safe and his head blazes in the fire.

Nor is he a man of mockery, but of splendor and unquestionable force.

I do not know what I speak, I speak in a dream. Support me for I stagger, drunk with fire. I drank fire [for] centuries and plunged into the sun far at the bottom. And I rose up drunk from the sun, with a burning countenance and my head is ablaze.

Give me your hand, a human hand, so that you / [26/27] can hold me to the earth with it, for whirling veins of fire swoop me up, and exultant longing tears me toward the zenith.

***

But day is about to break, actual day, the day of this world. And I remain concealed in the gorge of the earth, deep down and solitary, and in the darkening shadows of the valley. That is the shadow and heaviness of the earth.

How can I pray to the sun, that rises far in the East over the desert? Why should I pray to it? I drink the sun within me, so why should I pray to it? But the desert, the desert in me demands prayers, since the desert wants to satisfy itself with what is alive. I want to beg God for it, the sun, or one of the other immortals.

I beg because I am empty and am a beggar. In the day of this world, I forget that I drank the sun and am drunk from its active light and singeing power. But I stepped into the shadows of the earth, and saw that I am naked and have nothing to cover my poverty. No sooner do you touch the earth than your inner life is over; it flees from you into things.

And a wondrous life arises in things. What you thought was dead and inanimate betrays a secret life and silent, inexorable intent. You have got caught up in a hustle and bustle where everything goes its own way with strange gestures, beside you, above you, beneath you, and through you; even the stones speak to you, and magical threads spin from you to things and from things to you. Far and near work within you and you work in a dark manner upon the near and the far. And you are always helpless and a prey.

But if you watch closely, you will see what you have never seen before, namely that things live their life, and that they live off you: the rivers bear your life to the valley, one stone falls upon another with your force, plants and animals also grow through you and they are the cause of your death. A leaf dancing in the wind dances with you; the irrational animal [65] guesses your thought and represents you. The whole earth sucks its life from you and everything reflects you again.

Nothing happens in which you are not entangled in a secret manner; for everything has ordered itself around you and plays your innermost. Nothing in you is hidden to things, no matter how remote, how precious, how secret it is. It inheres in things. Your dog robs you of your father, who passed away long ago, and looks at you as he did. The cow in the meadow has intuited your mother, and charms you with total calm and security. The stars whisper your deepest mysteries to you, and the soft valleys of the earth rescue you in a motherly womb.

Like a stray child you stand pitifully among the mighty, who hold the threads of your life. You cry for help and attach yourself to the first person that comes your way. Perhaps he can advise you, perhaps he knows the thought that you do not have, and which all things have sucked out of you.

***

I know that you would like to hear the tidings of he whom things have not lived, but who lived and fulfilled himself. For you are a son of the earth, sucked dry by the suckling earth, that can suck nothing out of itself, but suckles only from the sun. Therefore you would like to have tidings of the son of the sun, which shines and does not suckle.

/ [27/28] You would like to hear of the son of God, who shone and gave, who begot, and to whom life was born again, as the earth bears the sun green and colorful children.

You would like to hear of him, the radiating savior, who as a son of the sun cut through the webs of the earth, who sundered the magic threads and released those in bondage, who owned himself and was no one's servant, who sucked no one dry, and whose treasure no one exhausted.

You would like to hear of him who was not darkened by the shadow of earth, but illuminated it, who saw the thoughts of all, and whose thoughts no one guessed, who possessed in himself the meaning of all things, and whose meaning no thing could express.

***


The solitary fled the world; he closed his eyes, plugged his ears and buried himself in a cave within himself but it was no use. The desert sucked him dry, the stones spoke his thoughts, the cave echoed his feelings, and so he himself became desert, stone, and cave. And it was all emptiness and desert, and helplessness and barrenness, since he did not shine and remained a son of the earth who sucked a book dry and was sucked empty by the desert. He was desire and not splendor, completely earth and not sun.

Consequently he was in the desert as a clever saint who very well knew that otherwise he was no different from the other sons of the earth. If he would have drunk of himself he would have drunk fire.

***

The solitary went into the desert to find himself. But he did not want to find himself but rather the manifold meaning of holy scripture. You can suck the immensity of the small and the great into yourself and you will become emptier and emptier, since immense fullness and immense emptiness are one and the same. [66]

He wanted to find what he needed in the outer. But you find manifold meaning only in yourself not in things, since the manifoldness of meaning is not something that is given at the same time, but is a succession of meanings. The meanings that follow one another do not lie in things, but lie in you, who are subject to many changes, insofar as you take part in life. Things also change, but you do not notice this if you do not change. But if you change, the countenance of the world alters. The manifold sense of things is your manifold sense. It is useless to fathom it in things. And this probably explains why the solitary went into the desert, and fathomed the thing but not himself.

And therefore what happened to every desirous solitary also happened to him: the devil came to him with smooth tongue and clear reasoning and knew the right word at the right moment. He lured him to his desire. I had to appear to him as the devil, since I had accepted my darkness. I ate the earth and I drank the sun, and I became a greening tree that stands alone and grows. [67] / [28/29]
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