MARK KYBURZ, JOHN PECK, AND SONU SHAMDASANI
At the outset of Liber Novus, Jung experiences a crisis of language. The spirit of the depths, who immediately challenges Jung's use of language along with the spirit of the time, informs Jung that on the terrain of his soul his achieved language will no longer serve. His own powers of knowing and speaking can no longer account for why he utters what he says or under what compulsion he speaks. All such attempts become arbitrary in the depth realm, even murderous. He is made to understand that what he might say on these occasions is both "madness" and, instructively, what is. [1] Indeed, in a broader perspective, the language that he will find for his inner experience would compose a vast Commedia: "Do you believe, man of this time, that laughter is lower than worship? Where is your measure, false measurer? The sum of life decides in laughter and in worship, not your judgment." [2]
In translating this accumulated record of Jung's imaginal encounters with his inner figures, from a sixteen-year period beginning just before the First World War, we have let Jung remain a man who was pulled loose from his moorings but also caught up in the maelstrom that has gone by the name of literary modernism. We have tried neither to further modernize nor to render more archaic the language and forms in which he couched his personal record.
The language in Liber Novus pursues three main stylistic registers, and each poses distinct difficulties for a translator. One of them faithfully reports the fantasies and inner dialogues of Jung's imaginal encounters, while a second remains firmly and discerningly conceptual. Still a third writes in a mantic and prophetic, or Romantic and dithyrambic, mode. The relation between these reportorial, reflective, and Romantic aspects of Jung's language remains comedic in a manner that Dante or Goethe would have recognized. That is, within each chapter the descriptive, conceptual, and mantic registers consistently rub against each other, while at the same time no single register is affected by its partners. All three stylistic registers serve psychic promptings, and each chapter shares a polyphonic mode with the others. In the Scrutinies section from 1917 this polyphony matures, its voices commingling in various ratios.
A reader will quickly infer that this design was not premeditated, but rather grew from the experiment to which Jung arduously submitted. The "Editorial Note" diagrams the textual evolution of this composition. Here we need only observe that Jung each time sets down an initial protocol layer of narrative encounter, usually with dialogue, and then, in the "second layer," a lyrical elaboration of and commentary on that encounter. The first layer avoids an elevated tone, whereas the second welcomes elevation and modulates into sermonic, mantic-prophetic reflections on the episode's meaning, which in turn unpack events discursively. This mode of composition -- which is unique in Jung's works -- was no temperamental arrangement. Instead, as the episodes accumulated and their stakes mounted, it grew into an experiment that was as much literary as it was psychological and spiritual. In Jung's extensive published and unpublished corpus, there is no other text that was subjected to such careful and continual linguistic revision as Liber Novus.
These three linguistic registers already present themselves as virtual models for a possible translation. Our practice has been to let them cohabit within the exploratory frameworks alive in Jung's own day. The task before him was to find a language rather than use one ready at hand. The mantic and conceptual registers can themselves be considered as translations of the descriptive register. That is, these registers move from a literal level to symbolic ones that amplify it, in a modern analogue to Dante's "modi diversi" in his letter to Can Grande della Scala. [3] In a very real sense, Liber Novus was composed through intertextual translation. The book's rhetoric, its manner of address, emerges from this interanimating structure of internal translation or transvaluation. A critical task for any translation of the work, therefore, is conveying this compositional texture intact.
The fact that painted images of an accomplished and hybrid kind illuminate the medieval format of a folio in scribal hand compounds any reflections on the linguistic task. The novel language required a renewed ancient script. A polyphonic style couches itself multimedia fashion within a symbolic throwback-yet-forward movement, medieval and anticipatory, into retrievals of psychic reality. Verbal and visual images press in on Jung from the root past and present while aiming toward the beyond: a layered medium emerges, whose polyphonic style mirrors within its language that same composite layering.
Faced with the task of translating a text composed nearly a hundred years ago, translators usually have the benefit of prior models to consult, as well as decades of scholarly commentary and criticism. Without such exemplars at hand, we were left to imagine how the work might have been translated in previous decades. Consequently, our translation sidesteps several unpublished or hypothetical models for rendering Liber Novus into English. There is Peter Baynes' strikingly archaizing Septem Sermones of 1925, which draws largely upon a Victorian idiom. Or the conceptually rationalizing version that R.F.C. Hull might have attempted had he been allowed to translate it alongside his other volumes in the Bollingen Series of Jung's Collected Works; [4] or the elegant literary rendering from the hand of someone like R. J. Hollingdale. Our version therefore occupies an actual position in a largely virtual sequence. Consideration of these virtual models highlighted questions of how to pitch the language within historical shifts in English prose, how to convey the myriad convergences and divergences between the language of Liber Novus and Jung's Collected Works, and how to render in English a work simultaneously echoing Luther's German and Nietzsche's parody of the same in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Because our version takes this position, accordingly when we have cited Jung's Collected Works we have freshly rendered or discreetly modified the published translations.
Liber Novus was coeval with the literary ferment that Mikhail Bakhtin called the dialogical prose imagination. [5] The Anglo-Welsh writer and artist David Jones, author of In Parenthesis and The Anathemata, referred to the rupture of the First World War, and its effects on the historical sense of writers, artists, and thinkers, simply as "The Break." [6] In concert with other experimental writing from these decades, Liber Novus excavates archaeological layers of literary adventure, with hard-won consciousness as both shovel and precious shard. While Jung actively considered publishing Liber Novus for many years, he chose not to make a name for himself in this literary manner -- as much for style as for content -- by releasing it. By 1921 with Psychological Types he already found that his sanctum could furnish him his main themes, through translation into a scholarly idiom.
Jung enunciates the tension among his three stylistic registers, already addressing a future readership -- which shifts from an inner circle of friends to a wider public between different layers of the text. This is graphically apparent in the frequent pronomial shifts between the versions, which show the manner in which he was constantly reimagining the potential readers of the text. Jung coherently adopted this dialogical stance -- polyphonic in Bakhtin's later terms -- once again mindful of a hypothetical future audience yet also aloof from the question of audience altogether, not from pride but simply in view of the aims to be served. Paintings and fantasies from this private treasury entered anonymously as crypted intertexts into Jung's later work, nestling as hermetic clues to the undisclosed whole of his effort.
Indeed, we can imagine Jung laughing when he wrote of "3. Case Z" in the last section of his essay on "The Psychological Aspects of the Kore" (1941). [7] There he summarizes twelve episodes from encounters with his own soul in Liber Novus, calling them "a dream-series." The comments he appends to these propel the adventurer he had been, and the subject he became in that adventure, into the discourse of a would-be science. The comedy is both spacious and exquisite: this respectful host to the anima also wields the diagnostic pointer in all seriousness. His language flexibly straddled both contexts, but also kept certain veils in place while doing so. This linguistic strategy mirrored Jung's larger aims in remaining fruitfully dual and contextual. Declaring his mysteries to be particular, not to be aped in any way, he nonetheless also offered them as a template of formative spiritual process, and, in so doing, attempted to develop an idiom that could be taken up by others to articulate their experiences.
This is one way of paraphrasing the considerable anomaly of the language that Jung had to find through sleepless nights from 1913 onward. That language shifted its shape, altered its scale, and weighed both megrims and tons. Therefore it comes as no surprise that in his more elevated passages Jung relied on the resonance of the Luther Bible, itself a translation that had achieved rocklike stability within German culture. Ein feste Burg, "a mighty fortress:" thus our own reliance here on the King James Version of the Bible (KJV) for comparable tonalities in English. Yet a paradox rises immediately: what Jung counted on in that resonance had transplanted an alien spirit into the Germanic Heimat or home, as one may likewise say of the KJV's deep embedding of the same implant in Anglo-Saxon culture. Franz Rosenzweig, translating parts of the Old Testament with Martin Buber in the mid-1920s, identified Luther's Bible as the great space-maker within Germanic spirit, precisely through Luther's close-in moves toward his source: "For the comfort of our souls, we must retain such words, must put up with them, and so give the Hebrew some room where it does better than German can." [8] Thus our own practice of not smoothing out Jung's several modes, or making them run more fluently than need be, or even regularizing his punctuation. Think of Dante's "shaggy " diction, or of still another maxim from Luther in Rosenzweig's notes: "The mud will cling to the wheel." [9]
Furthermore, if they are pious Jews and not the whoring people, as the prophets call them, how does it happen that their piety is so concealed that God himself is not aware of it, and they are not aware of it either? For they have, as we said, prayed, cried, and suffered almost fifteen hundred years already, and yet God refuses to listen to them. We know from Scripture that God will hear the prayers or sighing of the righteous, as the Psalter says [Ps. 145:19]: "He fulfills the desire of all who fear him, he also hears their cry." And Psalm 34:17: "When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears." As he promised in Psalm 50:15: "Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you." The same is found in many more verses of the Scripture. If it were not for these, who would or could pray? In brief, he says in the first commandment that he will be their God. Then, how do you explain that he will not listen to these Jews? They must assuredly be the base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth. If there were a single pious Jew among them who observed these, he would have to be heard; for God cannot let his saints pray in vain, as Scripture demonstrates by many examples. This is conclusive evidence that they cannot be pious Jews, but must be the multitude of the whoring and murderous people.
-- On the Jews and Their Lies, by Martin Luther
Yet even these profound allowances for archaic and original speech across abysses of meaning fail to approximate the destabilizing experience, in and through language, to which Jung testifies. His later comments in the published memoir, on his reservations about high-flown style, [10] in effect cover his tracks in Liber Novus. The original experience sent speech into a spin that animates the book's initiatic dimension. Language too undergoes a descent into hell and the realm of the dead, which divests one of speech even as it renews the capacity for utterance.
The following instances give some idea of this factor's range, mapping the stresses in any sincere ventriloquism such as Jung risked by undertaking a controlled seance with himself and his ground, with pen in hand. Holderlin's hair-breadth space warps and Isaiah's tongue-borne burning coal both move in this league, along with Plato on "right frenzy " or divine madness: (1)"My soul spoke to me in a whisper, urgently and alarmingly: 'Words, words, do not make too many words. Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness, and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are all completely mired in madness?'" [11] (2) Jung's soul: "There are hellish webs of words, only words ... Be tentative with words, value them ... for you are the first who gets snared in them. For words have meanings. With words you pull up the underworld. Word, the paltriest and the mightiest. In words the emptiness and the fullness flow together. Hence the word is an image of the God." [12] (3) "But if the word is a symbol, it means everything. When the way enters death and we are surrounded by rot and horror, the way rises in the darkness and leaves the mouth as the saving symbol, the word." [13] (4) The dead woman: "Let me have the word -- oh, that you cannot hear! How difficult -- give me the word!" [14] It then materializes in Jung's hand as HAP, the phallus. (5) Jung's soul: "You possess the word that should not be allowed to remain concealed." [15] (6) Jung: "What is my word? It is the stammering of a minor ... " Soul: "They do not see the fire, they do not believe your words, but they see your mark and unknowingly suspect you to be the messenger of the burning agony ... You stutter, you stammer." [16] In the protocols for his memoir, Jung recalls bringing to the original experiences in Liber Novus only a "highly clumsy speech." [17] Yet one instance (7) strongly belies that later emphasis: "I knew that Philemon had intoxicated me and given me a language that was foreign to me and of a different sensitivity. All of this faded when the God arose and only Philemon kept that language." [18]
This last instance indicates that Jung later attributed the mantic, dithyrambic speech of layer two in everything before the Scrutinies section to Philemon. The literal intoxication described here is linguistic, a dramatized, ventriloquial version of Platonic divine madness. It therefore underscores our attempt to faithfully render the stylistic registers of Liber Novus so as to present a vital aspect of Jung's literary experiment, as he grapples with attempting to find the most fitting idiom in which to cast the transformations of inner experience. Jung's search for the soul, then, stands at one with the search for appropriately dialogical and differentiated language.
These instances in all their oscillations affect a reading of Jung's Collected Works, and counsel caution with applying its conceptual tools to the task of reading and understanding Liber Novus. To take but one example, one begins to see that it is too neat to equate the opposed yet related depths of Logos and Eros with the conceptual and lyrical-mantic registers found in Liber Novus. Jung's "Commentary" on the Elijah-Salome relationship included here shows that relationship to be developmental, a mystery play of "the formative process" that kindles love for the lowest in us. [19] The modal span for language in Liber Novus thus animates that mystery play but does not correspond directly to opposed psychological functions.
This complex respect for language instructs translators of Liber Novus in navigating the underworld/redemptive tensions spanned by its rhetoric. The great force behind the mantic tension in that rhetoric occupied Jung in the brief Epilogue he inscribed in the calligraphic volume in 1959, two years before his death. Once again plying the seas of those illuminated pages, he seems to have found any further summing-up to be unnecessary. Breaking off in midsentence, he left the book to stand on its own, as one strand of discourse within his whole effort. That counterpoint required no comment, any more than did the three registers of language within the book itself. Ordeal was Commedia after all, calling for no retrospective theoretical justification. Liber Novus would survive the gropings and peltings of reception. Jung had remarked in 1957 to Aniela Jaffe that so much rubbish had been said about him, that any more didn't disturb him. [20] That lifted pen therefore confidently consigned the book to its depth trajectory; steeply expanding into the quarry it had become, with both his Collected Works and the lakeside tower at Bollingen as its final extractions.
In this note we have attempted to convey only the general principles that have guided this translation. A full discussion of the choices that confronted us and a justification of the decisions taken would fill a volume as ample as this one.
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Notes:
1. See below, p. 230.
2. See below, p. 230.
3. See the translation and discussion of this letter in Lucia Boldrini, Joyce, Dante, and the Poetics of Literary Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2001). pp. 30-35.
4. On the issue of Hull's translations of Jung, see Shamdasani, Jung Stripped Bare by His Biographers, Even, pp. 47-51.
5. See The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist. tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press. 1981).
6. David Jones, Dai Greatcoat: A Self-Portrait of David Jones in his Letters, ed. Rene Hague (London: Faber & Faber. 1980, pp. 41ff)
7. CW 9, 1.
8. Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Scripture and Translation, tr. Lawrence Rosenwald with Everett Fox (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994). p. 49, citing Luther's Preface to his German Psalter.
9. Ibid., p. 69.
10. See above, p. 214.
11. See below, p. 298.
12. See below, p. 299.
13. See below, p. 310.
14. See below, p. 339.
15. See below, p. 346.
16. See below, p. 346.
17. See below, MP, p. 148.
18. See below, p. 339.
19. See Appendix B.
20. MP, p. 183.
Editorial Note
SONU SHAMDASANI
Liber Novus is an unfinished manuscript corpus, and it is not completely clear how Jung intended to complete it, or how he would have published it, had he decided to do so. We have a series of manuscripts, of which no single version can be taken as final. Consequently, the text could be presented in a variety of ways. This note indicates the editorial rationale behind the present edition.
The following is the sequence of extant manuscripts for Liber Primus and Liber Secundus:
Black Books 2-5 (November 1913-April 1914)
Handwritten Draft (Summer 1914-1915)
Typed Draft (circa 1915)
Corrected Draft (with one layer of changes circa 1915; one layer of changes circa mid-1920s)
Calligraphic Volume (1915-1930, resumed in 1959, left incomplete)
Cary Baynes's transcription (1924-1925)
Yale Manuscript. Liber Primus, minus the prologue (identical with Typed Draft)
Copy-Edited Draft of Liber Primus minus the prologue, with corrections in unknown hands (circa late 1950s; edited version of the Typed Draft)
For Scrutinies, we have:
Black Books 5-6, (April 1914-June 1916)
Calligraphic Septem Sermones (1916)
Printed Septem Sermones (1916)
Handwritten Draft (circa 1917)
Typed Draft (circa 1918)
Cary Baynes's transcription (1925) (27 pages, incomplete)
The arrangement presented here starts with a revision of Cary Baynes's transcription and a fresh transcription of the remaining material in the calligraphic volume together with the Typed Draft of Scrutinies, with line-by-line comparisons with all extant versions. The last thirty pages are completed from the Draft. The main variations between the different manuscripts concern the "second layer" of the text. These changes represent Jung's continued work of comprehending the psychological significance of the fantasies. As Jung considered Liber Novus to be an "attempt at an elaboration in terms of the revelation," the changes between the different versions present this "attempt at an elaboration," and therefore are an important part of the work itself. Thus the notes indicate significant changes between the different versions, and they present material that clarifies the meaning or context of a particular section. Each manuscript layer is important and interesting, and a publication of all of them -- which would run to several thousand pages -- would be a task for the future. [1]
The criterion for including passages from the earlier manuscripts has been simply the question: does this inclusion help the reader comprehend what is taking place? Aside from the intrinsic importance of these changes, noting them in the footnotes serves a second purpose -- it shows how carefully Jung worked at continually revising the text.
The Corrected Draft has two layers of corrections by Jung. The first set of corrections appears to have been done after the Draft was typed and before the transcription into the calligraphic volume, as it appears that it was this manuscript that Jung transcribed. [2] A further set of corrections on approximately 200 pages of the typescript appears to have been made after the calligraphic volume, and I would estimate that these were done sometime in the mid-1920s. These corrections modernize the language, and bring the terminology into relation with Jung's terminology from the period of Psychological Types. Additional clarifications are also added. Jung even corrected material in the Draft that was deleted in the calligraphic volume. I have presented some of the significant changes in the footnotes. From them, it is possible for a reader to see how Jung would have revised the whole text, had he completed this layer of corrections.
Subdivisions have been added in Liber Secundus, chapter 21, "The Magician," and in Scrutinies for ease of reference. These are indicated by numbers in scrolled brackets: { }. Where possible, the date of each fantasy has been given from the Black Books. The second layer added in the draft is indicated by [2], and the manuscript reverts to the sequence of the fantasies in the Black Books at the beginning of the following chapter. In the passages where subdivisions have been added, the reversion to the sequence of the Black Books is indicated by [1].
The various manuscripts have different systems of paragraphing. In the Draft, paragraphs often consist of one or two sentences, and the text is presented like a prose poem. At the other extreme, in the calligraphic volume, there are lengthy passages of text with no paragraph breaks. The most logical paragraphing appears in Cary Baynes's transcription. She frequently took her cue for paragraph breaks from the presence of colored initials. Because it is unlikely that she would have reparagraphed the text without Jung's approval, her layout has formed the point of departure for this edition. In some instances, the paragraphing has been brought closer into line with the Draft and the calligraphic volume. In the second half of her transcription, Cary Baynes transcribed the Draft, because the calligraphic volume had not been completed. Here, I have paragraphed the text in the same manner as established before. I believe that this presents the text in the clearest and easiest-to-follow form.
In the calligraphic volume, Jung illustrated certain initials and wrote some in red and blue, and sometimes increased the font of the text. The layout here attempts to follow these conventions. Because the initials in question aren't always the same in English and German, the choice of which initial to set in red in the English has been governed by its corresponding location in the text. The bolding and increase of font size has been rendered by italics. The remainder of the text beyond that which Jung transcribed in the calligraphic volume has been set following the same conventions, to maintain consistency. In the case of the Septem Sermones, the font coloring has followed Jung's printed version of 1916.
The decision to include Scrutinies in sequence with and as part of Liber Novus is based on the following editorial rationale: The material in the Black Books commences in November 1913. Liber Secundus closes with material from April 19, 1914, and Scrutinies commences with material from the same day. The Black Books run consecutively until July 21, 1914, and recommence on June 3, 1915. In the hiatus, Jung wrote the Handwritten Draft. When Cary Baynes transcribed Liber Novus between 1924 and 1925, the first half of her transcription followed Liber Novus itself to the point reached by Jung in his own transcription into the calligraphic volume. It continues by following the draft, and then proceeds 27 pages into Scrutinies, ending midsentence.
At the end of Liber Secundus, Jung's soul has ascended to Heaven following the reborn God. Jung now thinks that Philemon is a charlatan, and comes to his "I," whom he must live with and educate. Scrutinies continues directly from this point with a confrontation with his "I." The ascent of the reborn God is referred to, and his soul returns and explains why she had disappeared. Philemon reappears, and instructs Jung on how to establish the right relation to his soul, the dead, the Gods, and the daimons. In Scrutinies Philemon fully emerges and takes on the significance that Jung attached to him both in the 1925 seminar and in Memories. Only in Scrutinies do certain episodes in Liber Primus and Liber Secundus become clear. By the same token, the narrative in Scrutinies makes no sense if one has not read Liber Primus and Liber Secundus.
At two places in Scrutinies, Liber Primus and Liber Secundus are mentioned in a way that strongly suggests that they are all part of the same work:
And then the War broke out. This opened my eyes about what I had experienced before and it also gave me the courage to say all that I have written in the earlier part of this book. [3]
Since the God has ascended to the upper realms, has also become different. He first appeared to me as a magician who lived in a distant land, but then I felt his nearness and, since the God has ascended, I knew that had intoxicated me and given me a language that was foreign to me and of a different sensitivity. All of this faded when the God arose and only kept that language. But I felt that he went on other ways than I did. Probably the greater part of what I have written in the earlier part of this book was given to me by [img]http://rapeutation.com/redbookjungsymbol.1a_small.gif/img]. [4]
These references to the "earlier part of this book" suggest that all of this indeed constitutes one book, and that Scrutinies was considered by Jung to be part of Liber Novus.
This view is supported by the number of internal connections between the texts. One example is the fact that the mandalas in Liber Novus are closely connected to the experience of the self and the realization of its centrality depicted only in Scrutinies. Another example occurs in Liber Secundus, chapter 15; when Ezechiel and his fellow Anabaptists arrive, they tell Jung that they are going to Jerusalem's holy places because they are not at peace, not having fully finished with life. In Scrutinies, the dead reappear, telling Jung that they have been to Jerusalem, but did not find what they sought there. At that point, Philemon appears and the Septem Sermones begin. Perhaps Jung intended to transcribe Scrutinies into the calligraphic volume and illustrate it; there are ample blank pages.
On January 8, 1958, Cary Baynes asked Jung: "Do you remember that you had me copy quite a bit of the Red Book itself while you were in Africa? I got as far as the beginning of the Prufungen [Scrutinies]. This goes beyond what Frau Jaffe put at K. W's [Kurt Wolff] disposal and he would like to read it. Is that OK?" [5] Jung replied on January 24, "I have no objections against your lending your notes of the 'Red Book' to Mr. Wolff." [6] Here Cary Baynes, too, seems to have regarded Scrutinies as part of Liber Novus.
In citations in the notes, ellipses have been indicated by three periods. No emphases have been added.
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Notes:
1. Interested readers may compare this edition with the sections from the Draft in the Kurt Wolff papers at Yale University and with Cary Baynes's transcription at the Contemporary Medical Archives at the Wellcome Collection, London. It is quite possible that other manuscripts may yet come to light.
2. There are also some paint marks on this manuscript.
3. See below, p. 336.
4. See below, p. 339.
5. JA.
6. JA.
Liber Primus
[fo1. i(r)] [1]
Prologue: The Way of What is to Come
Isaias dixit: quis credidit auditui nostro et brachium Domini cui revelatum est? et ascendet sicut virgultum coram eo et sicut radix de terra sitienti non est species ei neque decor et vidimus eum et non erat aspectus et desideravimus eum: despectum et novissimum virorum Virum dolor [os] um et scientem infirmitatem et quasi absconditus vultus eius et despectus unde nec reputavimus eum. vere languores nostros ipse tulit et dolores nostros ipse portavit et nos putavimus eum quasi leprosum et percussum a Deo et humiliatum. Cap. liii/i-iv.
parvulus enim natus est nobis filius datus est nobis et factus est principatus super umerum eius et vocabitur nomen eius Admirabilis consiliarius Deus fortis Pater futuri saeculi princeps pacis. caput ix/vi.
[Isaiah said: Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. (Isaiah 53: 1-4)] [2]
[For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. (Isaiah 9:6)] [3]
Ioannes dixit: et verbum caro factum est et habitavit in nobis et vidimus gloriam eius gloriam quasi unigeniti a Patre plenum gratiae et veritatis. Ioann. Cap. i/xiiii.
[John said: And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth. (John 1:14).]
Isaias dixit: laetabitur deserta et invia et exultabit solitudo et fforebit quasi lilium. germinans germinabit et exultabit laetabunda et laudans. tunc aperientur oculi caecorum et aures sordorum patebunt. tunc saliet sicut cervus claudus aperta erit lingua mutorum: quia scissae sunt in deserto aquae et torrentes in solitudine et quae erat arida erit in stagnum et sitiens in fontes aquarum. in cubilibus in quibus prius dracones habitabant orietur viror calami et iunci. et erit ibi semita et via sancta vocabitur. non transibit per eam pollutus et haec erit vobis directa via ita ut stulti non errent per eam. Cap. xxxv.
[Isaiah said: The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing ... Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert. And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water: in the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes. And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called The way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it; but it shall be for those: the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein. (Isaiah 35:1-8).] [4]
manu propria scriptum a C. G. Jung anno Domini mcmxv in domu sua Kusnach Turicense
[Written by C. G. Jung with his own hand in his house in Kusnacht/Zurich in the year 1915.]
/ [fol. i(r) / i(v)] [HI i(v)] [2] If I speak in the spirit of this time, [5] I must say: no one and nothing can justify what I must proclaim to you. Justification is superfluous to me, since I have no choice, but I must. I have learned that in addition to the spirit of this time there is still another spirit at work, namely that which rules the depths of everything contemporary. [6] The spirit of this time would like to hear of use and value. I also thought this way, and my humanity still thinks this way. But that other spirit forces me nevertheless to speak, beyond justification, use, and meaning. Filled with human pride and blinded by the presumptuous spirit of the times, I long sought to hold that other spirit away from me. But I did not consider that the spirit of the depths from time immemorial and for all the future possesses a greater power than the spirit of this time, who changes with the generations. The spirit of the depths has subjugated all pride and arrogance to the power of judgment. He took away my belief in science, he robbed me of the joy of explaining and ordering things, and he let devotion to the ideals of this time die out in me. He forced me down to the last and simplest things.
The spirit of the depths took my understanding and all my knowledge and placed them at the service of the inexplicable and the paradoxical. He robbed me of speech and writing for everything that was not in his service, namely the melting together of sense and nonsense, which produces the supreme meaning.
But the supreme meaning is the path, the way and the bridge to what is to come. That is the God yet to come. It is not the coming God himself, but his image which appears in the supreme meaning. [7] God is an image, and those who worship him must worship him in the images of the supreme meaning.
The supreme meaning is not a meaning and not an absurdity, it is image and force in one, magnificence and force together.
The supreme meaning is the beginning and the end. It is the bridge of going across and fulfillment. [8]
The other Gods died of their temporality, yet the supreme meaning never dies, it turns into meaning and then into absurdity, and out of the fire and blood of their collision the supreme meaning rises up rejuvenated anew.
The image of God has a shadow. The supreme meaning is real and casts a shadow. For what can be actual and corporeal and have no shadow?
The shadow is nonsense. It lacks force and has no continued existence through itself. But nonsense is the inseparable and undying brother of the supreme meaning.
Like plants, so men also grow, some in the light, others in the shadows. There are many who need the shadows and not the light.
The image of God throws a shadow that is just as great as itself.
The supreme meaning is great and small, it is as wide as the space of the starry Heaven and as narrow as the cell of the living body.
The spirit of this time in me wanted to recognize the greatness and extent of the supreme meaning, but not its littleness. The spirit of the depths, however, conquered this arrogance, and I had to swallow the small as a means of healing the immortal in me. It completely burnt up my innards since it was inglorious and unheroic. It was even ridiculous and revolting. But the pliers of the spirit of the depths held me, and I had to drink the bitterest of all draughts. [9]
The spirit of this time tempted me with the thought that all this belongs to the shadowiness of the God-image. This would be pernicious deception, since the shadow is nonsense. But the small, narrow, and banal is not nonsense, but one of both of the essences of the Godhead.
I resisted recognizing that the everyday belongs to the image of the Godhead. I fled this thought, I hid myself behind the highest and coldest stars.
But the spirit of the depths caught up with me, and forced the bitter drink between my lips. [10]
The spirit of this time whispered to me: "This supreme meaning, this image of God, this melting together of the hot and the cold, that is you and only you." But the spirit of the depths spoke to me: "[11] You are an image of the unending world, all the last mysteries of becoming and passing away live in you. If you did not possess all this, how could you know?"
For the sake of my human weakness, the spirit of the depths gave me this word. Yet this word is also superfluous, since I do not speak it freely, but because I must. I speak because the spirit robs me of joy and life if I do not speak. [12] I am the serf who brings it and does not know what he carries in his hand. It would burn his hands if he did not place it where his master orders him to lay it.
The spirit of our time spoke to me and said: "What dire urgency could be forcing you to speak all this?" This was an awful temptation. I wanted to ponder what inner or outer bind could force me into this, and because I found nothing that I could grasp, I was near to making one up. But with this the spirit of our time had almost brought it about that instead of speaking, I was thinking again about reasons and explanations. But the spirit of the depths spoke to me and said: "To understand a thing is a bridge and possibility of returning to the path. But to explain a matter is arbitrary and sometimes even murder. Have you counted the murderers among the scholars?"
But the spirit of this time stepped up to me and laid before me huge volumes which contained all my knowledge. Their pages were made of ore, and a steel stylus had engraved inexorable words in them, and he pointed to these inexorable words and spoke to me, and said: "What you speak, that is madness."
It is true, it is true, what I speak is the greatness and intoxication and ugliness of madness.
But the spirit of the depths stepped up to me and said: "What you speak is. The greatness is, the intoxication is, the undignified, sick, paltry dailiness is. It runs in all the streets, lives in all the houses, and rules the day of all humanity. Even the eternal stars are commonplace. It is the great mistress and the one essence of God. One laughs about it, and laughter, too, is. Do you believe, man of this time, that laughter is lower than worship? Where is your measure, false measurer? [13] The sum of life decides in laughter and in worship, not your judgment."
I must also speak the ridiculous. You coming men! You will recognize the supreme meaning by the fact that he is laughter and worship, a bloody laughter and a bloody worship. A sacrificial blood binds the poles. Those who know this laugh and worship in the same breath.
After this, however, my humanity approached me and said: "What solitude, what coldness of desolation you lay upon me when you speak such! Reflect on the destruction of being and the streams of blood from the terrible sacrifice that the depths demand." [14]
But the spirit of the depths said: "No one can or should halt sacrifice. Sacrifice is not destruction, sacrifice is the foundation stone of what is to come. Have you not had monasteries? Have not countless thousands gone into the desert? You should carry the monastery in yourself. The desert is within you. The desert calls you and draws you back, and if you were fettered to the world of this time with iron, the call of the desert would break all chains. Truly, I prepare you for solitude."
After this, my humanity remained silent. Something happened to my spirit, however, which I must call mercy.
My speech is imperfect. Not because I want to shine with words, but out of the impossibility of finding those words, I speak in images. With nothing else can I express the words from the depths.
The mercy which happened to me gave me belief, hope, and sufficient daring, not to resist further the spirit of the depths, but to utter his word. But before I could pull myself together to really do it, I needed a visible sign that would show me that the spirit of the depths in me was at the same time the ruler of the depths of world affairs.
[15] It happened in October of the year 1913 as I was leaving alone for a journey, that during the day I was suddenly overcome in broad daylight by a vision: I saw a terrible flood that covered all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. It reached from England up to Russia, and from the coast of the North Sea right up to the Alps. I saw yellow waves, swimming rubble, and the death of countless thousands.
This vision lasted for two hours, it confused me and made me ill. I was not able to interpret it. Two weeks passed then the vision returned, still more violent than before, and an inner voice spoke: "Look at it, it is completely real, and it will come to pass. You cannot doubt this." I wrestled again for two hours with this vision, but it held me fast. It left me exhausted and confused. And I thought my mind had gone crazy. [16]
From then on the anxiety toward the terrible event that stood directly before us kept coming back. Once I also saw a sea of blood over the northern lands.
In the year 1914 in the month of June, at the beginning and end of the month, and at the beginning of July, I had the same dream three times: I was in a foreign land, and suddenly, overnight and right in the middle of summer, a terrible cold descended from space. All seas and rivers were locked in ice, every green living thing had frozen.
The second dream was thoroughly similar to this. But the third dream at the beginning of July went as follows:
I was in a remote English land. [17] It was necessary that I return to my homeland with a fast ship as speedily as possible. [18] I reached home quickly. [19] In my homeland I found that in the middle of summer a terrible cold had fallen from space, which had turned every living thing into ice. There stood a leaf-bearing but fruitless tree, whose leaves had turned into sweet grapes full of healing juice through the working of the frost. [20] I picked some grapes and gave them to a great waiting throng. [21]
In reality, now, it was so: At the time when the great war broke out between the peoples of Europe, I found myself in Scotland, [22] compelled by the war to choose the fastest ship and the shortest route home. I encountered the colossal cold that froze everything, I met up with the flood, the sea of blood, and found my barren tree whose leaves the frost had transformed into a remedy. And I plucked the ripe fruit and gave it to you and I do not know what I poured out for you, what bitter-sweet intoxicating drink which left on your tongues an aftertaste of blood.
Mussolini's transformation away from Marxism into what eventually became fascism began prior to World War I, as Mussolini had grown increasingly pessimistic about Marxism and egalitarianism while becoming increasingly supportive of figures who opposed egalitarianism, such as Friedrich Nietzsche. By 1902, Mussolini was studying Georges Sorel, Nietzsche, and Vilfredo Pareto. Sorel's emphasis on the need for overthrowing decadent liberal democracy and capitalism by the use of violence, direct action, general strikes and neo-Machiavellian appeals to emotion impressed Mussolini deeply. His use of Nietzsche made him a highly unorthodox socialist, due to Nietzsche's promotion of elitism and anti-egalitarian views. Prior to World War I, Mussolini's writings over time indicated that he had abandoned the Marxism and egalitarianism that he had previously supported, in favour of Nietzsche's übermensch concept and anti-egalitarianism. In 1908, Mussolini wrote a short essay called "Philosophy of Strength" based on his Nietzschean influence, in which Mussolini openly spoke fondly of the ramifications of an impending war in Europe in challenging both religion and nihilism: "a new kind of free spirit will come, strengthened by the war, ... a spirit equipped with a kind of sublime perversity, ... a new free spirit will triumph over God and over Nothing."
-- Fascism, by Wikipedia
"Have you heard about it?"
I had heard nothing. Demian squeezed my arm and turned his face toward me, with a strangely somber yet sympathetic look in his eyes.
"Yes, it's starting. You've heard about the difficulties with Russia."
"What? Is it war?"
He spoke very softly although no one was anywhere near us. "It hasn't been declared yet. But there will be war. You can take my word for that. I didn't want to worry you but I have seen omens on three different occasions since that time. So it won't be the end of the world, no earthquake, no revolution, but war. You'll see what a sensation that will be! People will love it. Even now they can hardly wait for the killing to begin -- their lives are that dull! But you will see, Sinclair, that this is only the beginning. Perhaps it will be a very big war, a war on a gigantic scale. But that, too, will only be the beginning. The new world has begun and the new world will be terrible for those clinging to the old. What will you do?"
-- Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth, by Hermann Hesse
Believe me: [23] It is no teaching and no instruction that I give you. On what basis should I presume to teach you? I give you news of the way of this man, but not of your own way. My path is not your path, therefore I / [fol. i(v) / ii(r)] cannot teach you. [24] The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws. Within us is the way, the truth, and the life.
Woe betide those who live by way of examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself? So live yourselves. [25]
The signposts have fallen, unblazed trails lie before us. [26] Do not be greedy to gobble up the fruits of foreign fields. Do you not know that you yourselves are the fertile acre which bears everything that avails you?
Yet who today knows this? Who knows the way to the eternally fruitful climes of the soul? You seek the way through mere appearances, you study books and give ear to all kinds of opinion. What good is all that?
There is only one way and that is your way. [27]
You seek the path? I warn you away from my own. It can also be the wrong way for you.
May each go his own way.
I will be no savior, no lawgiver, no master teacher unto you. You are no longer little children. [28]
Giving laws, wanting improvements, making things easier, has all become wrong and evil. May each one seek out his own way. The way leads to mutual love in community. Men will come to see and feel the similarity and commonality of their ways.
Laws and teachings held in common compel people to solitude, so that they may escape the pressure of undesirable contact, but solitude makes people hostile and venomous.
Therefore give people dignity and let each of them stand apart, so that each may find his own fellowship and love it.
Power stands against power, contempt against contempt, love against love. Give humanity dignity, and trust that life will find the better way.
The one eye of the Godhead is blind, the one ear of the Godhead is deaf, the order of its being is crossed by chaos. So be patient with the crippledness of the world and do not overvalue its consummate beauty. [29]