Carl Jung on Elijah, Salome and The Serpent

I told you last time about the dream concerning the killing of the hero and then the fantasy about Elijah and Salome. Now the killing of the hero is not an indifferent fact, but one that involves typical consequences.

Dissolving an image means that you become that image.

Doing away with the concept of God means that you become that God.

This is so because if you dissolve an image it is always consciously, and then the libido invested in the image goes into the unconscious.

The stronger the image the more you are caught by it in the unconscious, so if you give up the hero in the conscious you are forced into the hero role by the unconscious. Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 95.

Besides Elijah and Salome, there was a third factor in the fantasy I began to describe, and that is the huge black snake between them.6 The snake indicates the counterpart of the hero.

Mythology is full of this relationship between the hero and the snake.

A northern myth says the hero has eyes of a snake, and many myths show the hero being worshipped as a snake, having been transformed into it after death.

This is perhaps from the primitive idea that the first animal that creeps out of the grave is the soul of the man who was buried.

The presence of the snake then says it will be again a hero myth.

As to the meaning of the two figures, Salome is an anima figure, blind because, though connecting the con- scious and the unconscious, she does not see the operation of the unconscious.

Elijah is the personification of the cognitional element, Salome of the erotic. Elijah is the figure of the old prophet filled with wisdom.
One could speak of these two figures as personifications of Logos and Eros very specifically shaped.

This is practical for intellectual play, but as Logos and Eros are purely speculative terms, not scientific in any sense, but irrational, it is very much better to leave the figures as they are, namely as events, experiences.

As to the snake, what is its further significance? Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Pages 96-97.

Carl Jung: Fore thinking also comes before thought.

[Note: Dr. Jung was lecturing on The Red Book as early as 1925. Evidence that The Red Book was not the "Secret" and "Hidden" book that is often erroneously asserted]

In layer two of Liber Novus, Jung interpreted the figures of Elijah and Salome respectively in terms of fore thinking and pleasure:

“The powers of my depths are predetermination and pleasure. Predetermination or fore thinking is Prometheus, who, without determined thoughts, brings the chaotic to form and definition, who digs the channels and holds the object before pleasure.

Fore thinking also comes before thought.

But pleasure is the force that desires and destroys forms without form and definition.

It loves the form in itself that it takes hold of, and destroys the forms that it does not take.

The fore-thinker is a seer, but pleasure is blind. It does not foresee, but desires what it touches. Forethinking is not powerful in itself and therefore does not move.

But pleasure is power, and therefore it moves” (p. 247).

In later commentaries written probably sometime in the 1920s, Jung commented on this episode and noted: “This configuration is an image that forever recurs in the human spirit.

The old man represents a spiritual principle that could be designated as Logos, and the maiden represents an unspiritual principle of feeling that could be called Eros” (p. 362). Footnote 8, 1925 Seminar, Page 97

Carl Jung's Systema Munditotius

Systema Munditotius.

In 1955, Jung’s Systema Munditotius was published anonymously in a special issue of Du dedicated to the Eranos conferences. In a letter of February II, 1955, to Walter Corti, Jung explicitly stated that he did not want his name to appear with it.

He added the following comments to it:

"It portrays the antinomies of the microcosm within the macrocosmic world and its antinomies.

At the very top, the figure of the young boy in the winged egg, called Erikapaios or Phanes and thus reminiscent as a spiritual figure of the Orphic Gods. His dark antithesis in the depths is here designated as Abraxas.

He represents the dominus mundi, the lord of the physical world, and is a world-creator of an ambivalent nature.

Sprouting from him we see the tree of life, labeled vita (’life’) while its upper counterpart is a light-tree in the form of a seven-branched candelabra labeled ignis (’fire’) and Eros (,love’).

Its light points to the spiritual world of the divine child.

Art and science also belong to this spiritual realm, the first represented as a winged serpent and the second as a winged mouse (as hole-digging activity!).

The candelabra is based on the principle of the spiritual number three (twice-three flames with one large flame in the middle), while the lower world of Abraxas is characterized by five, the number of natural man (the twice-five rays of his star).

The accompanying animals of the natural world are a devilish monster and a larva.

This signifies death and rebirth. A further division of the mandala is horizontal. To the left we see a circle indicating the body or the blood, and from it rears the serpent, which winds itself around the phallus, as the generative principle.

The serpent is dark and light, signifying the dark realm of the earth, the moon, and the void (therefore called Satanas).

The light realm of rich fullness lies to the right, where from the bright circle [cold, or the love of God] the dove of the Holy Ghost takes wing, and wisdom (Sophia) pours from a double beaker to left and right.

This feminine sphere is that of heaven. The large sphere characterized by zigzag lines or rays represents an in- ner sun; within this sphere the macrocosm is repeated, but with the upper and lower regions reversed as in a mirror.

These repetitions should be conceived of as endless in number, growing even smaller until the innermost core, the actual microcosm, is reached" Copyright © The Foundation of the works of C. G. Jung reproduced with the permission of the Foundation and Robert Hinshaw

Carl Jung: We were armed and lurked beside a narrow rocky path to murder him.

“I was with a youth in high mountains.

It was before daybreak, the Eastern sky was already light.

Then Siegfried’s horn resounded over the mountains with a jubilant sound. We knew that our mortal enemy was coming.

We were armed and lurked beside a narrow rocky path to murder him.

Then we saw him coming high across the mountains on a chariot made of the bones of the dead.

He drove boldly and magnificently over the steep rocks and arrived at the narrow path where we waited in hiding.

As he came around the turn ahead of us, we fired at the same time and he fell slain. Thereupon I turned to flee, and a terrible rain swept down.

But after this I went through a torment unto death and I felt certain that I must kill myself, if I could not solve the riddle of the murder of the hero” Carl Jung, Liber Primus, chapter 7, “Murder of the Hero,” Pages 241–242.


In Liber Novus, Jung wrote that Siegfried “had everything in himself that I treasured as the greater and more beautiful; he was my power, my boldness, my pride” Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 242.

“The rain is the great stream of tears that will come over the peoples, the tearful flood of released tension af- ter the constriction of death had encumbered the peoples with horrific force.

It is the mourning of the dead in me, which precedes burial and rebirth.

The rain is the fructifying of the earth, it begets the new wheat, the young, germinating God” Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 242.

I had killed my intellect, helped on to the deed by a personification of the collective unconscious, the little brown man with me. Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 62.

Carl Jung: Then you need the message of the old tamer of chaos.

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.

Perhaps you think that a man who consecrates his life to research leads a spiritual life and that his soul lives in / 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 recogni􀢢on that he fails to give her. Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 264.

The Book that took Dr. Jung away from "The Red Book" aka "Liber Novus

[I worked on this book [The Red Book] for 16 years. My acquaintance with alchemy in 1930 took me away from it. The beginning of the end came in 1928, when Wilhelm sent me the text of the "Golden Flower," an alchemical treatise. There the contents of this book,found their way into actuality and I could no longer continue working on it.]

The Hui Ming Ching [The Book of Consciousness and Life]

(Translation and Commentary by Richard Wilhelm)

1. Cessation of Outflowing ~

If thou wouldst complete the diamond body with no outflowing,
Diligently heat he roots of consciousness and life.
Kindle light in the blessed country ever close at hand,
And there hidden, let thy true self always dwell.

[ The illustration found here in the Chinese text shows the body of a man. In the middle of the lower half of the body is drawn a germ cell by which the gateway of life is separated from the gateway of consciousness. In between, leading to the outside world, is the canal through which the vital fluids flow out. ]

The subtlest secret of the Tao is human nature and life (hsing-ming). There is no better way of cultivating human nature and life than to bring both back to unity. The holy men o ancient times, and the great sages, set forth their thoughts about the unification of human nature and life by means of images from the external world.; they were reluctant to speak of it openly without allegories. Therefore the secret of how to cultivate both simultaneously was lost one earth. What I show through a series of images is not a frivolous giving away pf secrets. On the contrary, because I combined the notes of the Leng-yen-ching on the cessation of outflowing and the secret thoughts of Hua-yen-ching with occasional references to the other sutras, in order to summarize them in this true picture, it can be understood that consciousness and life are not anything external to the germinal vesicle. I have drawn this picture so that companions pursuing the divine workings of the dual cultivation may know that in this way the true seed matures, that in this way the cessation of outflowing is brought about, that in this way the sheli [Satira, the firm, the immortal body] is melted out, that in this way the great Tao is completed.

But the germinal vesicle is an invisible cavern; it has neither form nor image. When the vital breath stirs, the seed of this vesicle comes into being; when it cease it disappears again. It is the pace which harbors truth, the altar upon which consciousness and life are made. It is called the dragon castle at the bottom of the sea, the boundary region of the snow mountains, the primordial pass, the kingdom of greatest joy, the boundless country. All these different names mean this germinal vesicle. If a dying man does not know this germinal vesicle, he will not find the unity of consciousness and life in a thousand births, nor in ten thousand aeons.

This germinal point is soemthig great. Before this our body is born of our parents, at the time of conception, this seed is first created and human nature and life dwell therein. The two are intermingled and form a unity, inseparably mixed like the sparks in the refining furnace, a combination of primordial harmony and divine law. Therefore it is said: "In the state before the appearance there is an inexhaustible breath". Furthermore it is said: "Before the parents have begotten the child, the breath of life is complete and the embryo perfect". But when the embryo moves and the embryo vesicle is torn, it is as if a man lost his footing on a high mountain: with a cry the man plunges down to earth, and from then on human nature and life are divided. From this moment human nature can no longer see life nor life human nature. And now date takes its course: youth passes over into maturity, maturity into old age, and old age into woe.

Therefore the Julia (Buddha Tathagata), in his great compassion, let the secret making and melting be known. He teaches one to re-enter the womb and create anew the human nature and life of the ego; he shows how spirit and soul (vital breath) enter the germinal vesicle, how they must combine to become a unity in order to complete the true fruit, just as the sperm and soul of father and mother entered into this germinal vesicle and united as one being in order to complete the embryo. The principle is the same.

Within the germinal vesicle is the fire of the ruler; at the entrance of the germinal vesicle is the fire of the minister; in the whole body, the fire of the people. When the fire of the ruler expresses itself, it is received by the fire of the minister. When the fire of the minister moves, the fire of the people follows him. When the three fires express themselves in this order a man develops. But when the three fires return in reverse order the Tao develops.

This is the reason that all the sages began their work at the germinal vesicle in which outflowing had ceased. If one does not establish this path, but sets up other things, it is of no avail. Therefore all the schools and sects which do not know that the ruling principle of consciousness and life is in this germinal vesicle, and which therefore seek it in the outer world, can accomplish nothing despite all their efforts to find it outside.

2. The Six Periods of Circulation in Conformity with the Law ~

If one discerns the beginning of the Buddha’s path,
There will be the blessed city of the West.
After the circulation in conformity with the law,
There is a turn upward towards heaven when the breath is drawn in.
When the breath flows out energy is directed towards the earth.
One time-period consists of six intervals (hou).
In two intervals one gathers Moni (Sakyamuni).
The great Tao comes forth from the center.
Do not seek the primordial seed outside!

The most marvelous effect of the Tao is the circulation in conformity with the law. What makes the movement inexhaustible is the path. What best regulates the speed are the rhythms (kuei). What best determines the number of the exercises is the method of the intervals (hou).

This presentation contains the whole law, and the true features of the Buddha from the West are contained in it. The secrets contained in it show how one gets control o the process by exhaling and inhaling, how the alternation between decrease and increase expresses itself in closing and opening, how one needs true thoughts in order not to deviate from the way, how the firm delimitation of the regions makes it possible to begin and to stop at the right time.

I sacrifice myself and serve man, because I have presented fully this picture which reveals the heavenly seed completely, so that every layman and man of the world can reach it and so bring it to completion. He who lacks the right virtue may well find something in it, but heaven will not grant him his Tao. Why not? The right virtue belongs to the Tao as does one wing of a bird to the other: if one is lacking, the other is of no use. Therefore there is needed loyalty and reverence, humaneness and justice and strict adherence to the five commandments [of Buddhism: Do not kill, steal, commit adultery, lie, nor drink alcohol nor eat meat]; then only does one have the prospect of attaining something.

But all the subtleties and secrets are offered in this Book of Consciousness and Life to be pondered and weighted, so that one can attain everything in its truth.

[ *** The drawing is intended to show the circulation of the streams of energy during the movement of breathing. Inhalation is accompanied by the sinking of the abdomen and exhalation by the lifting of it, but in these exercises the point is that we have a backward-flowing movement as follows: when inhaling, one opens the lower energy-gate and allows the energy to rise upward along the rear line of energy (in the spinal cord), and this upward flow corresponds to the time-intervals indicated in the drawing. In exhaling, the upper gate is closed and the stream of energy is allowed to flow downward along the front line, likewise in the order of the time-intervals indicated. Furthermore, it is to be noted that the stations for "washing" and "bathing" do not lie exactly in the middle of the lines, but that "washing" is somewhat above and "bathing" somewhat below the middle, as the drawing shows. ]

3. The Two Energy-Paths of Function and Control ~

There appears the way of the in-breathing and out-breathing of the primordial pass.
Do not forget the white path below the circulation in conformity wit the law!
Always let the cave of eternal life be nourished through the fire!
Ah! Test the immortal place of the gleaming pearl!

[ *** In the text there is another picture here which is very similar to the first. It shows again the paths of energy: the one in front leads down and is called the function-path (jen), and the one at the back leading upwards is the control-path (tu). ]

This picture is really the same as the one that precedes it. The reason that I show it again is so that the person striving for cultivation of the Tao may know that there is in his own body a circulation with the law. I have furnished this picture in order to enlighten companions in search of the goal. When these two paths (the functioning and the controlling) can be brought into unbroken connection, then all energy-paths are joined. The deer sleeps with his nose on his tail in order to close his controlling energy-path. The crane and the tortoise close their functioning-paths. Hence these three animals become at least a thousand years old. How much further can a man go! A man who carries on the cultivation of the Tao, who sets in motion the circulation in conformity with the law, in order to let consciousness and life circulate, need not fear that he is not lengthening his life and is not completing his path.

4. The Embryo of the Tao ~

According to the law, but without exertion, one must diligently fill oneself with light.
Forgetting appearance, look within and help the true spiritual power!
Ten months them embryo is under fire.
After a year the washing and baths become warm.

This picture will be found in the original edition of the Leng-yen-ching. But the ignorant monks who did not recognize the hidden meaning and knew nothing about the embryo of the Tao have for this reason made the mistake of leaving this picture out. I only found out through the explanations of adepts that the Julai (Tathagata) knows real work on the embryo of the Tao. This embryo is nothing corporeally visible which might be completed by other beings, but is in reality the spiritual breath-energy of the ego. First the spirit must penetrate the breath-energy (the soul), then the breath-energy envelops the spirit. When spirit and breath-energy are firmly united and the thoughts quiet and immobile, this is described as the embryo. The breath-energy must crystallize; only then will the spirit become effective. Therefore it is said in the Leng-yen-ching: "Take maternal care of the awakening and the answering". The two energies nourish and strengthen one another. Therefore it is said: "Daily growth takes place". When the energy is strong enough and the embryo is round and complete it comes out on the top of the head. This is what is called: the completed appearance which comes forth as embryo and begets itself as the son of the Buddha.

5. The Birth of the Fruit ~

Outside the body there is a body called the Buddha image.
The thought which is powerful, the absence of thoughts, is Bodhi.
The thousand-petal lotus flower opens, transformed through breath-energy.
Because of the crystallization of the spirit, a hundred-fold splendor shines forth.

In the Leng-yen-chou [Suramgama mantra] it is said: "At that time the ruler of the world caused a hundredfold precious light to beam from his hair knots. In the midst of the light shone the thousand-petal, precious lotus flower. And there within the flower sat a transformed Julai. And from the top of his head went ten rays of white, precious light, which were visible everywhere. The crowd looked up to the outstreaming light and the Julai announced: 'The divine, magic mantra is the appearance of the light-spirit, therefore his name is Son of Buddha'".

If a man does not receive the teaching about consciousness and life, how could there develop out of his own body the Julai, who sits and shines forth in the lotus flower and appears in his own spirit-body! Many say that the light-spirit is a minor teaching; but how can that which a man receives from the ruler of the world be a minor teaching? Herewith I have betrayed the deepest secret of the Leng-yen in order to teach disciples. He who receives this way rises at once to the dark secret and no longer becomes submerged in the dust of everyday life.

6. Concerning the Retention of the Transformed Body ~

Every separate thought takes shape and becomes visible in color and form.
The total spiritual power unfolds its traces and transforms itself into emptiness.
Going out into being and going into non-being, one completes the miraculous Tao.
All separate shapes appear as bodies, united with a true source.

7. The Face Turned to the Wall ~

The shapes formed by the spirit-fire are only empty colors and forms.
The light of human nature [hsing] shines back on the primordial, the true.
The imprint of the heart floats in space; untarnished, the moonlight shines.
The boat of life has reached the shore; bright shines the sunlight.

8. Empty Infinity ~

Without beginning, without end,
Without past, without future.
A halo of light surrounds the world of the law.
We forget one another, quiet and pure, altogether powerful and empty.
The emptiness is irradiated by the light of the heart and of heaven.
The water of the sea is smooth and mirrors the on in its surface.
The clouds disappear in blue space; the mountains shine clear.
Consciousness reverts to contemplation; the moon disk rests alone.

Carl Jung: While I was there I sketched every morning in a notebook a small circular drawing, a mandala

I had painted the first mandala in 1916 after writing the Septem Sermones; naturally I had not, then, understood it.

In 1918-19 I was in CMteau d'Oex as Commandant de la Region Anglaise des Internes de Guerre.

While I was there I sketched every morning in a notebook a small circular drawing, a mandala, which seemed to correspond to my inner situation at the time.

With the help of these drawings I could observe my psychic transformations from day to day.

One day, for example, I received a letter from that esthetic lady in which she again stubbornly maintained that the fantasies arising from my unconscious had artistic value and should be considered art. The letter got on my nerves.

It was far from stupid, and therefore dangerously persuasive.

The modern artist, after all, seeks to create art out of the unconscious.

The utilitarianism and self-importance concealed behind this thesis touched a doubt in myself, namely, my uncertainty as to whether the fantasies I was producing were really spontaneous and natural, and not ultimately my own arbitrary inventions.

I was by no means free from the bigotry and hubris of consciousness which wants to believe that any halfway decent inspiration is due to one's own merit, whereas inferior reactions come merely by chance, or even derive from alien sources.

Out of this irritation and disharmony within myself there proceeded, the following day, a
changed mandala: part of the periphery had burst open and the symmetry was destroyed.

Only gradually did I discover what the mandala really is:"Formation, Transformation, Eternal Mind's eternal recreation.'

And that is the self, the wholeness of the personality, which if all goes well is harmonious, but which cannot tolerate self-deceptions.~Carl Jung, MDR, Pages 195-196

Carl Jung: When Elijah told me he was always with Salome, I thought it was almost blasphemous for him to say this.

In those days I saw a compensatory principle that seemed to show a balance between the conscious and unconscious.

But I saw later that the unconscious was balanced in itself.

It is the yea and the nay.

The unconscious is not at all exactly the opposite of the conscious.

It may be irrationally different.

You cannot deduce the unconscious from the conscious.

The unconscious is balanced in itself, as is the conscious.

When we meet an extravagant figure like Salome, we have a compensating figure in the unconscious.

If there were only such an evil figure as Salome, the conscious would have to build up a fence to keep this back,
an exaggerated, fanatical, moral attitude.

But I had not this exaggerated moral attitude, so I suppose that Salome was compensated by Elijah.

When Elijah told me he was always with Salome, I thought it was almost blasphemous for him to say this.

I had the feeling of diving into an atmosphere that was cruel and full of blood.

This atmosphere was around Salome, and to hear Elijah declare that he was always in that company shocked me profoundly.

Elijah and Salome are together because they are pairs of opposites. Elijah is an important figure in man’s unconscious,
not in woman’s.

He is the man with prestige, the man with a low threshold of consciousness or with remarkable intuition.

In higher society he would be the wise man; compare Lao-tse.

He has the ability to get into touch with archetypes.

He will be surrounded with mana, and will arouse other men because he touches the archetypes in others.

He is fascinating and has a thrill about him.

He is the wise man, the medicine man, the mana man.

Later on in evolution, this wise man becomes a spiritual image, a god, “the old one from the mountains” (compare Moses coming
down from the mountain as lawgiver), the sorcerer of the tribe.

He is the legislator.

Even Christ was in company with Moses and Elijah in his transfiguration.

All great lawgivers and masters of the past, such as for example the Mahatmas of theosophical teaching,
are thought of by theosophists as spiritual factors still in existence.

Thus the Dalai Lama is supposed by theosophists to be such a figure.

In the history of Gnosis, this figure plays a great role, and every sect claims to have been founded by such a one.

Christ is not quite suitable; he is too young to be the Mahatma.

The great man has to be given another role. John the Baptist was the great wise man, teacher, and initiator, but he has been depotentiated.

The same archetype reappears in Goethe as Faust and as Zarathustra in Nietzsche, where Zarathustra came as a visitation.

Nietzsche has been gripped by the sudden animation of the great wise man.

This plays an important role in man’s psychology, as I have said, but unfortunately a less important part than that
played by the anima. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Pages 100-101


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Carl Jung: Man is a gateway, through which you pass from the outer world of Gods

"Man is a gateway, through which you pass from the outer world of Gods, daimons, and souls into the inner world, out of the greater. into the smaller world. Small and inane is man, already he is behind you, and once again you find yourselves in endless space, in the smaller or inner infinity.

"At immeasurable distance a lonely star stands in the zenith.

"This is the one God of this one man, this is his world, his Pleroma, his divinity.

"In this world, man is Abraxas, the creator and destroyer of his own world.

"This star is the God and the goal of man.

This is his lone guiding God, in him man goes to his rest, toward him goes the long journey of the soul after death, in him everything that man withdraws from the greater world shines resplendently.

"To this one God man shall pray. Prayer increases the light of the star; it throws a bridge across death, it prepares life for the smaller world, and assuages the hopeless desires of the greater.

"When the greater world turns cold, the star shines.

"Nothing stands between man and his one God, so long as man can turn away his eyes from the flaming spectacle of Abraxas.

"Man here, God there.

"Weakness and nothingness here, eternally creative power there.

"Here nothing but darkness and clammy cold there total sun." ~Carl Jung, Red Book, Page 354.

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Carl Jung: Hence we must strive to free the self from the God, so that we can live.

In terms of the self selfless love is a veritable sin.

We must presumably often go to ourselves to re-establish the connection with the sel£ since it is torn apart all too often, not
only by our vices but also by our virtues.

For vices as well as virtues always want to live outside.

But through constant outer life we forget the self and through this we also become secretly selfish in our best endeavors.

What we neglect in ourselves blends itself secretly into our actions toward others.

Through uniting with the self we reach the God.

I must say this, not with reference to the opinions of the ancients or this or that authority; but because I have experienced
it.

It has happened thus in me.

And it certainly happened in a way that I neither expected nor wished for.

The experience of the God in this form was unexpected and unwanted.

I wish I could say it was a deception and only too willingly would I disown this experience. But I cannot deny that it has seized me beyond all
measure and steadily goes on working in me.

So if it is a deception, then deception is my God.

Moreover, the God is in the deception.

And if this were already the greatest bitterness that could happen to me, I would have to confess to this experience and recognize
the God in it.

No insight or objection is so strong that it could surpass the strength of this experience.

And even if the God had revealed himself in a meaningless abomination, I could only avow that I have experienced the God in it.

I even know that it is not too difficult to cite a theory that would sufficiently explain my experience and join it to the already known.

I could furnish this theory myself and be satisfied in intellectual terms, and yet this theory would be unable to remove even the smallest part of the
knowledge that I have experienced the God.

I recognize the God by the unshakeableness of the experience.

I cannot help but recognize him by the experience.

I do not want to believe it, I do not need to believe it, nor could I believe it.

How can one believe such?

My mind would need to be totally confused to believe such things.

Given their nature, they are most improbable.

Not only improbable but also impossible for our understanding.

Only a sick brain could produce such deceptions.

I am like those sick persons who have been overcome by delusion and sensory deception.

But I must say that the God makes us sick.

I experience the God in sickness.

A living God afflicts our reason like a sickness.

He fills the soul with intoxication.

He fills us with reeling chaos.

How many will the God break?

The God appears to us in a certain state of the soul.

Therefore we reach the God through the self.

Not the self is God, although we reach the God through the self.

The God is behind the self, above the self. the self itself. when he appears.

But he appears as our sickness, from which we must heal ourselves.

We must heal ourselves from the God, since he is also our heaviest wound.

For in the first instance the God's power resides entirely in the self since the self is completely in the God, because we were
not with the self.

We must draw the self to our side.

Therefore we must wrestle with the God for the self Since the God is an unfathomable powerful movement that sweeps away the self into
the boundless, into dissolution.

Hence when the God appears to us we are at first powerless, captivated, divided, sick, poisoned with the strongest poison, but
drunk with the highest health.

Yet we cannot remain in this state, since all the powers of our body are consumed like fat in the flames.

Hence we must strive to free the self from the God, so that we can live.

It is certainly possible and even quite easy for our reason to deny the God and to speak only of sickness.

Thus we accept the sick part and can also heal it.

But it will be a healing with loss.

We lose a part of life.

We go on living, but as ones lamed by the God.

Where the fire blazed dead ashes lie.

I believe that we have the choice: I preferred the living wonders of the God.

I daily weigh up my whole life and I continue to regard the fiery brilliance of the God as a higher and fuller life than the
ashes of rationality.

The ashes are suicide to me.

I could perhaps put out the fire but I cannot deny to myself the experience of the God.

Nor can I cut myself off from this experience.

I also do not want to, since I want to live.

My life wants itself whole.

Therefore I must serve my self I must win it in this way.

But I just win it so that my life will become whole.

For it seems to me to be sinful to deform life where there is yet the possibility to live it fully.

The service of the self is therefore divine service and the service of mankind.

If I carry myself I relieve mankind of myself and heal my self from the God.

I must free my self from the God, since the God I experienced is more than love; he is also hate, he is more than beauty, he is
also the abomination, he is more than wisdom, he is also meaninglessness, he is more than power, he is also powerlessness, he
is more than omnipresence, he is also my creature. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Pages 337-338


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Carl Jung: Hence we must strive to free the self from the God, so that we can live.

In terms of the self selfless love is a veritable sin.

We must presumably often go to ourselves to re-establish the connection with the sel£ since it is torn apart all too often, not
only by our vices but also by our virtues.

For vices as well as virtues always want to live outside.

But through constant outer life we forget the self and through this we also become secretly selfish in our best endeavors.

What we neglect in ourselves blends itself secretly into our actions toward others.

Through uniting with the self we reach the God.

I must say this, not with reference to the opinions of the ancients or this or that authority; but because I have experienced
it.

It has happened thus in me.

And it certainly happened in a way that I neither expected nor wished for.

The experience of the God in this form was unexpected and unwanted.

I wish I could say it was a deception and only too willingly would I disown this experience. But I cannot deny that it has seized me beyond all
measure and steadily goes on working in me.

So if it is a deception, then deception is my God.

Moreover, the God is in the deception.

And if this were already the greatest bitterness that could happen to me, I would have to confess to this experience and recognize
the God in it.

No insight or objection is so strong that it could surpass the strength of this experience.

And even if the God had revealed himself in a meaningless abomination, I could only avow that I have experienced the God in it.

I even know that it is not too difficult to cite a theory that would sufficiently explain my experience and join it to the already known.

I could furnish this theory myself and be satisfied in intellectual terms, and yet this theory would be unable to remove even the smallest part of the
knowledge that I have experienced the God.

I recognize the God by the unshakeableness of the experience.

I cannot help but recognize him by the experience.

I do not want to believe it, I do not need to believe it, nor could I believe it.

How can one believe such?

My mind would need to be totally confused to believe such things.

Given their nature, they are most improbable.

Not only improbable but also impossible for our understanding.

Only a sick brain could produce such deceptions.

I am like those sick persons who have been overcome by delusion and sensory deception.

But I must say that the God makes us sick.

I experience the God in sickness.

A living God afflicts our reason like a sickness.

He fills the soul with intoxication.

He fills us with reeling chaos.

How many will the God break?

The God appears to us in a certain state of the soul.

Therefore we reach the God through the self.

Not the self is God, although we reach the God through the self.

The God is behind the self, above the self. the self itself. when he appears.

But he appears as our sickness, from which we must heal ourselves.

We must heal ourselves from the God, since he is also our heaviest wound.

For in the first instance the God's power resides entirely in the self since the self is completely in the God, because we were
not with the self.

We must draw the self to our side.

Therefore we must wrestle with the God for the self Since the God is an unfathomable powerful movement that sweeps away the self into
the boundless, into dissolution.

Hence when the God appears to us we are at first powerless, captivated, divided, sick, poisoned with the strongest poison, but
drunk with the highest health.

Yet we cannot remain in this state, since all the powers of our body are consumed like fat in the flames.

Hence we must strive to free the self from the God, so that we can live.

It is certainly possible and even quite easy for our reason to deny the God and to speak only of sickness.

Thus we accept the sick part and can also heal it.

But it will be a healing with loss.

We lose a part of life.

We go on living, but as ones lamed by the God.

Where the fire blazed dead ashes lie.

I believe that we have the choice: I preferred the living wonders of the God.

I daily weigh up my whole life and I continue to regard the fiery brilliance of the God as a higher and fuller life than the
ashes of rationality.

The ashes are suicide to me.

I could perhaps put out the fire but I cannot deny to myself the experience of the God.

Nor can I cut myself off from this experience.

I also do not want to, since I want to live.

My life wants itself whole.

Therefore I must serve my self I must win it in this way.

But I just win it so that my life will become whole.

For it seems to me to be sinful to deform life where there is yet the possibility to live it fully.

The service of the self is therefore divine service and the service of mankind.

If I carry myself I relieve mankind of myself and heal my self from the God.

I must free my self from the God, since the God I experienced is more than love; he is also hate, he is more than beauty, he is
also the abomination, he is more than wisdom, he is also meaninglessness, he is more than power, he is also powerlessness, he
is more than omnipresence, he is also my creature. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Pages 337-338


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Carl Jung avoided a “Psychosis” – The Red Book

The following month, on a train journey to Schaffhausen, Jung experienced a waking vision of Europe being devastated by a catastrophic flood, which was repeated two weeks later, on the same journey.

Commenting on this experience in 1925, he remarked:

"I could be taken as Switzerland fenced in by mountains and the submergence of the world could be the debris of my
former relationships."

This led him to the following diagnosis of his condition:

"I thought to mysel£ 'If this means anything, it means that I am hopelessly off"'

After this experience, Jung feared that he would go mad.

He recalled that he first thought that the images of the vision indicated a revolution, but as he could not imagine this, he concluded that he was "menaced with a psychosis." ~Introduction, The Red Book, Page 198

On July 28, Jung gave a talk on "The importance of the unconscious in psychopathology" at a meeting of the British Medical Association in Aberdeen.

He argued that in cases of neurosis and psychosis, the unconscious attempted to compensate the one-sided conscious attitude.

The unbalanced individual defends himself against this, and the opposites become more polarized.

The corrective impulses that present themselves in the language of the unconscious should be the beginning of a healing process, but the form in which they break through makes them unacceptable to consciousness. ~Introduction, The Red Book, Page 201

A month earlier, on June 28, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, was assassinated, by Gavrilo Princip, a nineteen-year-old Serb student.

On August I, war broke out.

In 1925 Jung recalled, "I had the feeling that I was an over-compensated psychosis, and from this feeling I was not released till August 1st 1914." ~The Red Book Introduction, Pages 201-202

Years later, he said to Mircea Eliade:

As a psychiatrist I became worried, wondering if I was not on the way to "doing a schizophrenia," as we said in the language of those days ...

I was just preparing a lecture on schizophrenia to be delivered at a congress in Aberdeen, and I kept saying to myself:

"I'll be speaking of myself! Very likely I'll go mad after reading out this paper."

The congress was to take place in July 1914-exactly the same period when I saw myself in my three dreams voyaging on the Southern seas.

On July 31"r, immediately after my lecture, I learned from the newspapers that war had broken out.

Finally I understood.

And when I disembarked in Holland on the next day; nobody was happier than I.

Now I was sure that no schizophrenia was threatening me.

I understood that my dreams and my visions came to me from the subsoil of the collective unconscious.

What remained for me to do now was to deepen and validate this discovery.

And this is what I have been trying to do for forty years. ~Carl Jung, Combat interview , C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 233-34·

In 1955/56, while discussing active imagination, Jung commented that "the reason why the involvement looks very much like a psychosis is that the
patient is integrating the same fantasy-material to which the insane person falls victim because he cannot integrate it but is swallowed up by it. " ~Introduction, The Red Book, Page 202.

Liber Novus is of critical significance for grasping the emergence of Jung's new model of psychotherapy.

In 1912, in Transformation and Symbols of the Libido, he considered the presence of mythological fantasies-such as are present in Liber Novus-to be the signs of
a loosening of the phylogenetic layers of the unconscious, and indicative of schizophrenia.

Through his self-experimentation, he radically revised this position: what he now considered critical was not the presence of any particular content, but the attitude
of the individual toward it and, in particular, whether an individual could accommodate such material in their worldview.

This explains why he commented in his afterword to Liber Novus that to the superficial observer, the work would seem like madness, and could have become so, if he had failed to contain and comprehend the experiences.201

In Liber secundus, chapter 15, he presents a critique of contemporary psychiatry, highlighting its incapacity to differentiate religious experience or divine madness from
psychopathology.

If the content of visions or fantasies had no diagnostic value, he held that it was nevertheless critical to view them carefully. ~Introduction, The Red Book, Page 215.

The Red Book Publication Deliberations

Publication Deliberations

From 1922 onward, in addition to discussions with Emma Jung and Toni Wolff, Jung had extensive discussions with Cary Baynes and Wolfgang Stockmayer concerning what to do with Liber Novus, and around its potential publication.

Because these discussions took place when he was still working on it, they are critically important.

Cary Fink was born in 1883.

She studied at Vassar College, where she was taught by Kristine Mann, who became one of Jung's earliest followers in the United States.

In 1910, she married Jaime de Angulo, and completed her medical training at Johns Hopkins in 19II. In 1921, she left him, and went to Zurich with Kristine Mann.

She entered analysis with Jung.

She never practiced analysis, and Jung highly respected her critical intelligence. In 1927, she married Peter Baynes.

They were subsequently divorced in 1931.

Jung asked her to make a fresh transcription of Liber Novus, because he had added a lot of material since the previous transcription.

She undertook this in 1924 and 1925, when Jung was in Africa.

Her typewriter was heavy, so she first copied it by hand and then typed it out.

These notes recount her discussions with Jung and are written in the form of letters to him, but were not sent.

OCTOBER 2,1922

In another book of Meyrink's the "White Dominican," you said he made use of exactly the same symbolism that had come to you in the first vision that revealed to your unconscious. Furthermore you said, he had spoken of a "Red Book" which contained certain mysteries and the book that you are writing about the unconscious, you have called the "Red Book". Then you said you were in doubt as to what to do about that book. Meyrink you said could throw his into novel form and it was all right, but you could only command the scientific and philosophical method and that stuff you couldn't cast into that mold. I said you could use the Zarathustra form and you said that was true, but you were sick of that. I am too. Then you said you had thought of making an autobiography out of it. That would seem to me by far the best, because then you would tend to write as you spoke which was in a very colorful way. But apart from any difficulty with the form, you said you dreaded making it public because it was like selling your house. But I jumped upon you with both feet there and said it wasn't a bit like that because you and the book stood for a constellation of the Universe, and that to take the book as being purely personal was to identify yourself with it which was something you would not think of permitting to your patients ... Then we laughed over my having caught you red-handed as it were. Goethe had been caught in the same difficulty in the 2nd part of Faust in which he had gotten into the unconscious and found it so difficult to get the right form that he had finally died leaving the Mss. as such in his drawer. So much of what you had experienced you said, would be counted as sheer lunacy that if it were published you would lose out altogether not only as a scientist, but as a human being, but not I said if you went at it from the Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and Truth] angle, then people could make their own selection as to which was which. You objected to presenting any of it as Dichtung when it was all Wahrheit, but it does not seem to me falseness to make use of that much of a mask in order to protect yourself from Philistia-and after all, as I said Philistia has its rights, confronted with the choice of you as a lunatic, and themselves as inexperienced fools they have to choose the former alternative, but if they can place you as a poet, their faces are saved. Much of your material you said has come to you as runes & the explanation of those runes sounds like the veriest nonsense, but that does not matter if the end product is sense. In your case I said, apparently you have become conscious of more of the steps of creation than ever anyone before. In most cases the mind evidently drops out of the irrelevant stuff automatically and delivers the end product, whereas you bring along the whole business, matrix process and product. Naturally it is frightfully more difficult to handle. Then my hour was up.

JANUARY 1923

What you told me some time ago set me thinking, and suddenly the other day while I was reading the "Vorspiel auf dem Theater" [prelude in the theater]'182 it came to me that you too ought to make use of that principle which Goethe has handled so beautifully all through Faust, namely; the placing in opposition of the creative and eternal with the negative and transient. You may not see right away what
this has to do with the Red Book but I will explain. As I understand it in this book you are going to challenge men to a new way of looking at their souls, at any rate there is going to be in it a good deal that will be out of the grasp of the ordinary man, just as at one period of your own life you would scarcely have understood it. In a way it is a "jewel" you are giving to the world is it not? My idea is that it needs a sort of protection in order not to be thrown into the gutter and finally made away with by a strangely clad Jew. The best protection you could devise, it seems to me, would be to put in incorporate the book itself an exposition of the forces that will attempt to destroy it. It is one of your great gifts strength of seeing the black as well as the white of every given situation, so you will know better
than most of the people who attack the book what it is that they want to destroy Could you not take the wind out of their sails by writing their criticism for them? Perhaps that is the very thing you have done in the introduction. Perhaps you would rather assume towards the public the attitude of "Talce or leave it, and be blessed or be damned whichever you prefer." That would be all right, whatever
there is of truth in it is going to survive in any case. But I would like to see you do the other thing if it did not call for too much effort.

JANUARY 26,1924

You had the night before had a dream in which I appeared in a disguise and was to do work on the Red Book and you had been thinking about it all that day and during Dr. Wharton's hour preceding mine especially (pleasant for her I must say) ... As you had said you had made up your mind to turn over to me all of your unconscious material represented by the Red Book etc. to see what I as a stranger and impartial observer would say about it. You thought I had a good critique and an impartial one. Toni you said was deeply interwoven with it and besides did not take any interest in the thing in itself nor in getting it into usable form. She is lost in "bird fluttering" you said. For yourself you said you had always known what to do with your ideas, but here you were baffled. When you approached them you became enmeshed as it were and could no longer be sure of anything. You were certain some of them had great importance, but you could not find the appropriate form-as they were now you
said they might come out of a madhouse. So then you said I was to copy down the contents of the Red Book-once before you had had it copied, but you had since then added a great deal of material, so you wanted it done again and you would explain things to me as I went along, for you understood nearly everything in it you said. In this way we could come to discuss many things which never came up
in my analysis and I could understand your ideas from the foundation. You told me then something more of your own attitude toward the "Red Book" You said some of it hurt your sense of the fitness of things terribly; and that you had shrunk from putting it down as it came to you, but that you had started on the principle of "voluntariness" that is of making no corrections and so you had stuck to that. Some of the pictures were absolutely infantile, but were intended so to be. There were various figures speaking, Elias, Father Philemon, etc. but all appeared to be phases of what you thought ought to be called "the master." You were sure that this latter was the same who inspired Buddha, Mani, Christ, Mahomet-all those who may be said to have communed with God.183 But the others had identified with him. You absolutely refused to. It could not be for you, you said, you had to remain the psychologist-the person who understood the process. I said then that the thing to be done was to enable the
world to understand the process also without their getting the notion that they had the Master caged as it were at their beck & call. They had to think of him as a pillar of fire perpetually moving on and forever out of human grasp. Yes, you said it was something like that. Perhaps it cannot yet be done. As you talked I grew more and more aware of the immeasurability of the ideas which are filling you. You said they had the shadow of eternity upon them and I could feel the truth of it.

On January 30, she noted that Jung said of a dream which she had told him:

That it was a preparation for the Red Book because the Red Book told of the battle between the world of reality and the world of the spirit. You said in that battle you had been very nearly torn asunder but that you had managed to keep your feet on the earth & make an effect on reality That you said for you was the test of any idea, and that you had no respect for any ideas however winged that had to exist off in space and were unable to make an impression on reality

There is an undated fragment of a letter draft to an unidentified person in which Cary Baynes expresses her view of the significance of Liber Novus, and the necessity of its publication:

I am absolutely thunderstruck for example, as I read the Red Book, and see all that is told there for the Right Way for us of today; to find how Toni has kept it out of her system. She wouldn't have an unconscious spot in her psyche had she digested even as much of the Red Book as I have read & that I should think was not a third or a fourth. And another difficult thing to understand is why she has no interest in seeing him publish it. There are people in my country who would read it from cover to cover without stopping to breathe scarcely; so does it re-envisage and clarify the things that are today; staggering everyone who is trying to find the clue to life ... he has put into it all the vigor and color of his speech, all the directness and simplicity that come when as at Cornwall the fire burns in him.186
Of course it may be that as he says, if he published it as it is, he would forever be hors du combat in the world of rational science, but then there must be some way around that, some way of protecting himself against stupidity; in order that the people who would want the book need not go without for the time it will take the majority to get ready for it. I always knew he must be able to write the
fire that he can speak-and here it is. His published books are doctored up for the world at large, or rather they are written out of his head & this out of his heart.

These discussions vividly portray the depth of Jung's deliberations concerning the publication of Liber Novus, his sense of its centrality in comprehending the genesis of .his work and his fear that the work would be misunderstood.

The impression that the style of the work would mal(e on an unsuspecting public strongly concerned Jung.

He . later recalled to Aniela Jaffe that the work still needed a suitable form in which it could be brought into the world because it sounded like prophecy, which was not to his taste.

There appears to have been some discussion concerning these issues in Jung's circle.

On May 29, 1924, Cary Baynes noted a discussion with Peter Baynes in which he argued that Liber Novus could be understood only by someone who had known Jung.

By contrast, she thought that the book:

was the record of the passage of the universe through the soul of a man, and just as a person stands by the sea and listens to that very strange and awful music and cannot explain why his heart aches, or why a cry of exaltation wants to leap from his throat, so I thought it would be with the Red Book, and that a man would be perforce lifted out of himself by the majesty of it, and swung to heights he had never been before.

There are further signs that Jung circulated copies of Liber Novus to confidantes, and that the material was discussed together with the possibilities of its publication.

One· such colleague was Wolfgang Stockmayer.

Jung met Stockmayer in 1907- In his unpublished obituary; Jung nominated him as the first German to be interested in his work.

He recalled that Stockmayer was a true friend. They traveled together in Italy and Switzerland, and there was seldom a year in which they did not meet.

Jung commented:

He distinguished himself through his great interest and equally great understanding for pathological psychic processes. I also found with him a sympathetic reception for my broader viewpoint, which became of importance for my later comparative psychological works.


Stockmayer accompanied Jung in "the valuable penetration of our psychology" into classical Chinese philosophy; the mystical speculations of India and Tantric yoga.

On December 22,1924, Stockmayer wrote to Jung:

I often long for the Red Book, and I would like to have a transcript of what is available; I failed to do so when I had it, as things go. I recently fantasized about a kind of journal of "Documents" in a loose form for materials from the "forge of the unconscious," with words and colors.

It appears· that Jung sent some material to him.

On April 30, 1925, Stockmayer wrote to Jung:

In the meantime we have gone through "Scrutinies," and it is the same impression as with the great wandering. A selected collective milieu for such from the Red Book is certainly worth trying out, although your commentary would be quite desired. Since a certain adjacent center of yours lies here, ample access to sources is of great significance, consciously and unconsciously. And I obviously fantasize about "facsimiles," which you will understand: you need not fear extraversion magic from me. Painting also has great appeal.

Jung's tTIanuscript "Commentaries" (see Appendix B) was possibly connected with these discussions.

Thus figures in Jung's circle held differing views concerning the significance of Liber Novus and whether it should be published, which may have had bearings on Jung's eventual decisions.

Cary Baynes did not complete the transcription, getting as far as the first twenty-seven pages of Scrutinies.

For the next few years, her time was taken up with the translation of Jung's essays into English, followed by the translation of the I Ching.

At some stage, which I estimate to be in the mid-twenties, Jung went back to the Draft and edited it again, deleting and adding material on approximately 250 pages.

His revisions served to modernize the language and terminology.

He also revised some of the material that he had already transcribed into the calligraphic volume of Liber Novus, as well as some material that was left out.

It is hard to see why he undertook this unless he was seriously considering publishing it.

In 1925, Jung presented his seminars on analytical psychology to the Psychological Club.

Here, he discussed some of the important fantasies in Liber Novus.

He described how they unfolded and indicated how they formed the basis of the ideas in psychological Types and the key to understanding its genesis.

The seminar was transcribed and edited by Cary Baynes.

That same year, Peter Baynes prepared an English translation of the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, which was privately published.

Jung gave copies to some of his English-speaking students.

In a letter that is presumably a reply to one from Henry Murray thanking him for a copy, Jung wrote:

I am deeply convinced, that those ideas that came to me, are really quite wonderful things. I can easily say that (without blushing), because I know, how resistant and how foolishly obstinate I was, when they first visited me and what a trouble it was, until I could read this symbolic language, so much superior to my dull conscious mind.

It is possible that Jung may have considered the publication of the Sermones as a trial for the publication of Liber Novus.

Barbara Hannah claims that he regretted publishing it and that "he felt strongly that it should only have been written in the Red Book"

At some point, Jung wrote a manuscript entitled "Commentaries," which provided a commentary on chapters 9, 10, and II of Liber Primus (see Appendix B).

He had discussed some of these fantasies in his 1925 seminar, and he goes into more detail here.

From the style and conceptions, I would estimate that this text was written in the mid-twenties.

He may have written-or intended to write-further "commentaries" for other chapters, but these have not come to light.

This manuscript indicates the amount of work he put into understanding each and every detail of his fantasies.

Jung gave a number of people copies of Liber Novus: Cary Baynes, Peter Baynes, Aniela Jaffe, Wolfgang Stockmayer, and Toni Wolff. Copies may also have been given to others.

In 1937, a fire destroyed Peter Baynes's house, and damaged his copy of Liber Novus.

A few years later, he wrote to Jung asking if by chance he had another copy, and offered to translate it.

Jung replied: "I will try whether I can procure another copy of the Red Book. Please don't worry about translations. I am sure there are 2 or 3 translations already. But I don't know of what and by whom."

This supposition was presumably based on the number of copies of the work in circulation.

Jung let the following individuals read and/or look at Liber Novus: Richard Hull, Tina Keller, James Kirsch, Ximena Roelli de Angulo (as a child), and Kurt Wolff Aniela Jaffe read the Black Books, and Tina Keller was also allowed to read sections of the Black Books.

Jung most likely showed the book to other close associates, such as Emil Medtner, Franz Riklin Sr., Erika Schlegel, Hans Trub, and Marie-Louise von Franz.

It appears that he allowed those people to read Liber Novus whom he fully trusted and whom he felt had a full grasp of his ideas.

Quite a number of his students did not fit into this category. ~The Red Book, Introduction, Pages 212-215

Carl Jung: Septem Sermones ad Mortuos: THE SEVEN SERMONS TO THE DEAD

Septem Sermones ad Mortuos:
THE SEVEN SERMONS TO THE DEAD


Carl Gustav Jung

WRITTEN BY BASILIDES IN ALEXANDRIA,
THE CITY WHERE THE EAST TOUCHETH THE WEST
Transcribed by Carl Gustav Jung, 1916
(Translated by H. G. Baynes)
Included as Appendix V in the 1963 Viking Books edition
of C. G. Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

Sermo I

The Dead came back from Jerusalem, where they found not what they sought. They prayed me let them in and besought my word, and thus I began my teaching.

Harken: I begin with nothingness. Nothingness is the same as fullness. In infinity full is no better than empty. Nothingness is both empty and full. As well might ye say anything else of nothingness, as for instance, white is it, or black, or again, it is not, or it is. A thing that is infinite and eternal hath no qualities, since it hath all qualities.

This nothingness or fullness we name the PLEROMA. Therein both thinking and being cease, since the eternal and infinite possess no qualities. In it no being is, for he then would be distinct from the pleroma, and would possess qualities which would distinguish him as something distinct from the pleroma.

In the pleroma there is nothing and everything. It is quite fruitless to think about the pleroma, for this would mean self-dissolution.

CREATURA is not in the pleroma, but in itself. The pleroma is both beginning and end of the created beings. It pervadeth them, as the light of the sun everywhere pervadeth the air. Although the pleroma pervadeth altogether, yet hath created being no share thereof, just as a wholly transparent body becometh neither light nor dark through the light which pervadeth it. We are, however, the pleroma itself, for we are a part of the eternal and the infinite. But we have no share thereof, as we are from the pleroma infinitely removed; not spiritually or temporally, but essentially, since we are distinguished from the pleroma in our essence as creatura, which is confined within time and space.

Yet because we are parts of the pleroma, the pleroma is also in us. Even in the smallest point is the pleroma endless, eternal, and entire, since small and great are qualities which are contained in it. It is that nothingness which is everywhere whole and continuous. Only figuratively, therefore, do I speak of created being as part of the pleroma. Because, actually, the pleroma is nowhere divided, since it is nothingness. We are also the whole pleroma, because, figuratively, the pleroma is the smallest point (assumed only, not existing) in us and the boundless firmanent about us. But wherefore, then, do we speak of the pleroma at all, since it is thus everything and nothing?

I speak of it to make a beginning somewhere, and also to free you from the delusion that somewhere, either without or within, there standeth something fixed, or in some way established, from the beginning. Every so-called fixed and certain thing is only relative. That alone is fixed and certain which is subject to change.

What is changeable, however, is creatura. Therefore is it the one thing which is fixed and certain; because it hath qualities: it is even quality itself.

The question ariseth: How did creatura originate? Created beings came to pass, not creatura: since created being is the very quality of the pleroma, as much as non-creation which is the eternal death. In all times and places is creation, in all times and places is death. The pleroma hath all, distinctiveness and non-distinctiveness.

Distinctiveness is creatura. It is distinct. Distinctivness is its essence, and therefore it distinguisheth. Wherefore also he distinguished qualities of the pleroma which are not. He distinguisheth them out of his own nature. Therefore he must speak of qualities of the pleroma which are not.

What use, say ye, to speak of it? Saidst thou not thyself, there is no profit in thinking upon the pleroma?

That said I unto you, to free you from the delusion that we are able to think about the pleroma. When we distinguish qualities of the pleroma, we are speaking from the ground of our own distinctiveness and concerning our own distinctiveness. But we have said nothing concerning the pleroma. Concerning our own distinctiveness, however, it is needful to speak, whereby we may distinguish ourselves enough. Our very nature is distinctiveness. If we are not true to this nature we do not distinguish ourselves enough. Therefore must we make distinctions of qualities.

What is the harm, ye ask, in not distinguishing oneself? If we do not distinguish, we get beyond our own nature, away from creatura. We fall into indistinctiveness, which is the other quality of the pleroma. We fall into the pleroma itself and cease to be creatures. We are given over to dissolution in nothingness. This is the death of the creature. Therefore we die in such measure as we do not distinguish. Hence the natural striving of the creature goeth towards distinctiveness, fighteth against primeval, perilous sameness. This is called the PRINCIPIUM INDIVIDUATIONIS. This principle is the essence of the creature. From this you can see why indistictiveness and non-distinction are a great danger for the creature.

We must, therefore, distinguish the qualities of the pleroma. The qualities are PAIRS OF OPPOSITES, such as —

The Effective and the ineffective.

Fullness and Emptiness.

Living and Dead.

Difference and Sameness.

Light and Darkness.

The Hot and the Cold.

Force and Matter.

Time and Space.

Good and Evil.

Beauty and Ugliness.

The One and the Many.

The pairs of opposites are qualities of the pleroma which are not, because each balanceth each. As we are the pleroma itself, we also have all these qualities in us. Because the very ground of our nature is distinctiveness, which meaneth —

1. These qualities are distinct and separate in us one from the other; therefore they are not balanced and void, but are effective. Thus are we the victims of the pairs of opposites. The pleroma is rent in us.

2. The qualities belong to the pleroma, and only in the name and sign of distinctiveness can and must we possess and live them. We must distinguish ourselves from qualities. In the pleroma they are balanced and void; in us not. Being distinguished from them delivereth us.

When we strive after the good or the beautiful, we thereby forget our own nature, which is disinctiveness, and we are delivered over to the qualities of the pleroma, which are pairs of opposites. We labor to attain the good and the beautiful, yet at the same time we also lay hold of the evil and the ugly, since in the pleroma these are one with the good and the beautiful. When, however, we remain true to our own nature, which is distinctiveness, we distinguish ourselves from the good and the beautiful, therefore, at the same time, from the evil and ugly. And thus we fall not into the pleroma, namely, into nothingness and dissolution.

Thou sayest, ye object, that difference and sameness are also qualities of the pleroma. How would it be, then, if we strive after difference? Are we, in so doing, not true to our own nature? And must we none the less be given over to the sameness when we strive after difference?

Ye must not forget that the pleroma hath no qualities. We create them through thinking. If, therefore, ye strive after difference or sameness, or any qualities whatsoever, ye pursue thoughts which flow to you out of the pleroma: thoughts, namely, concerning non-existing qualities of the pleroma. Inasmuch as ye run after these thoughts, ye fall again into the pleroma, and reach difference and sameness at the same time. Not your thinking, but your being, is distinctiveness. Therefore not after difference, ye think it, must ye strive; but after YOUR OWN BEING. At bottom, therefore, there is only one striving, namely, the striving after your own being. If ye had this striving ye would not need to know anything about the pleroma and its qualities, and yet would ye come to your right goal by virtue of your own being. Since, however, thought estrangeth from being, that knowledge must I teach you wherewith ye may be able to hold your thought in leash.





Sermo II



In the night the dead stood along the wall and cried:

We would have knowledge of god. Where is god? Is god dead?

God is not dead. Now, as ever, he liveth. God is creatura, for he is something definite, and therefore distinct from the pleroma. God is quality of the pleroma, and everything I said of creatura also is true concerning him.

He is distinguished, however, from created beings through this, that he is more indefinite and indeterminable than they. He is less distinct than created beings, since the ground of his being is effective fullness. Only in so far as he is definite and distinct is he creatura, and in like measure is he the manifestation of the effective fullness of the pleroma.

Everthing which we do not distinguish falleth into the pleroma and is made void by its opposite. If, therefore, we do not distinguish god, effective fullness is for us extinguished.

Moreover god is the pleroma itself, as likewise each smallest point in the created and uncreated is pleroma itself.

Effective void is the nature of the devil. God and devil are the first manifestations of nothingness, which we call the pleroma. It is indifferent whether the pleroma is or is not, since in everything it is balanced and void. Not so creatura. In so far as god and devil are creatura they do not extinguish each other, but stand one against the other as effective opposites. We need no proof of their existence. It is enough that we must always be speaking of them. Even if both were not, creatura, of its own essential distinctiveness, would forever distinguish them anew out of the pleroma.

Everything that discrimination taketh out of the pleroma is a pair of opposites. To god, therefore, always belongeth the devil.

This inseparability is as close and, as your own life hath made you see, as indissoluble as the pleroma itself. Thus it is that both stand very close to the pleroma, in which all opposites are extinguished and joined.

God and devil are distinguished by the qualities of fullness and emptiness, generation and destruction. EFFECTIVENESS is common to both. Effectiveness joineth them. Effectiveness, therefore, standeth above both; is a god above god, since in its effect it uniteth fullness and emptiness.

This is a god whom ye knew not, for mankind forgot it. We name it by its name ABRAXAS. It is more indefinite still than god and devil.

That god may be distinguished from it, we name god HELIOS or sun. Abraxas is effect. Nothing standeth opposed to it but the ineffective; hence its effective nature freely unfoldeth itself. The ineffective is not, therefore resisteth not. Abraxas standeth above the sun and above the devil. It is improbable probability, unreal reality. Had the pleroma a being, Abraxas would be its manifestation. It is the effective itself, not any particular effect, but effect in general.

It is unreal reality, because it hath no definite effect.

It is also creatura, because it is distinct from the pleroma.

The sun hath a definite effect, and so hath the devil. Wherefore do they appear to us more effective than indefinite Abraxas.

It is force, duration, change.



The dead now raised a great tumult, for they were Christians.





Sermo III



Like mists arising from a marsh, the dead came near and cried: Speak further unto us concerning the supreme god.

Hard to know is the deity of Abraxas. Its power is the greatest, because man perceiveth it not. From the sun he draweth the summum bonum; from the devil the infinum malum: but from Abraxas LIFE, altogether indefinite, the mother of good and evil.

Smaller and weaker life seemeth to be than the summum bonum; wherefore is it also hard to conceive that Abraxas transcendeth even the sun in power, who is himself the radient source of all the force of life.

Abraxas is the sun, and at the same time the eternally sucking gorge of the void, the belittling and dismembering devil.

The power of Abraxas is twofold; but ye see it not, because for your eyes the warring opposites of this power are extinguished.

What the god-sun speaketh is life.

What the devil speaketh is death.

But Abraxas speaketh that hallowed and accursed word which is life and death at the same time.

Abraxas begetteth truth and lying, good and evil, light and darkness, in the same word and in the same act. Wherefore is Abraxas terrible.

It is splendid as the lion in the instant he striketh down his victim. It is beautiful as a day in spring. It is the great Pan himself and also the small one. It is Priapos.

It is the monster of the under-world, a thousand-armed polyp, coiled knot of winged serpents, frenzy.

It is the hermaphrodite of the earliest beginning.

It is the lord of the toads and frogs,, which live in the water and gets up on the land, whose chorus ascendeth at noon and at midnight.

It is abundance that seeketh union with emptiness.

It is holy begetting.

It is love and love’s murder.

It is the saint and his betrayer.

It is the brightest light of day and the darkest night of madness.

To look upon it, is blindness.

To know it, is sickness.

To worship it, is death.

To fear it, is wisdom.

To resist it not, is redemption.

God dwelleth behind the sun, the devil behind the night. What god bringeth forth out of the light the devil sucketh into the night. But Abraxas is the world, its becoming and its passing. Upon every gift that cometh from the god-sun the devil layeth his curse.

Everything that ye entreat from the god-sun begetteth a deed of the devil.

Everything that ye create with the god-sun giveth effective power to the devil.

That is terrible Abraxas.

It is the mightiest creature, and in it the creature is afraid of itself.

It is the manifest opposition to the pleroma and its nothingness.

It is the son’s horror of the mother.

It is the mother’s love for the son.

It is the delight of the earth and the cruelty of the heavens.

Before its countenance man becometh like stone.

Before it there is no question and no reply.

It is the life of creatura.

It is the operation of distinctiveness.

It is the love of man.

It is the speech of man.

It is the appearance and the shadow of man.

It is illusory reality.



Now the dead howled and raged, for they were unperfected.





Sermo IV



The dead filled the place murmuring and said:

Tell us of gods and devils, accursed one!

The god-sun is the highest good, the devil its opposite. Thus have ye two gods. But there are many high and good things and many great evils. Among these are two god-devils; the one is the BURNING ONE, the other the GROWING ONE.

The burning one is EROS, who hath the form of flame. Flame giveth light because it consumeth.

The growing one is the TREE OF LIFE. It buddeth, as in growing it heapeth up living stuff.

Eros flameth up and dieth. But the tree of life groweth with slow and constant increase through unmeasured time.

Good and evil are united in the flame.

Good and evil are united in the increase of the tree. In their divinity stand life and love opposed.

Innumerable as the host of the stars is the number of gods and devils.

Each star is a god, and each space that a star filleth is a devil. But the empty-fullness of the whole is the pleroma.

The operation of the whole is Abraxas, to whom only the ineffective standeth opposed.

Four is the number of the principal gods, as four is the number of the world’s measurements.

One is the beginning, the god-sun.

Two is Eros; for he bindeth twain together and outspreadeth himself in brightness.

Three is the Tree of Life, for it filleth space with bodily forms.

Four is the devil, for he openeth all that is closed. All that is formed of bodily nature doth he dissolve; he is the destroyer in whom everything is brought to nothing.

For me, to whom knowledge hath been given of the multiplicity and diversity of the gods, it is well. But woe unto you, who replace these incompatible many by a single god. For in so doing ye beget the torment which is bred from not understanding, and ye mutilate the creature whose nature and aim is distinctiveness. How can ye be true to your own nature when ye try to change the many into one? What ye do unto the gods is done likewise unto you. Ye all become equal and thus is your nature maimed.

Equalities shall prevail not for god, but only for the sake of man. For the gods are many, whilst men are few. The gods are mighty and can endure their manifoldness. For like the stars they abide in solitude, parted one from the other by immense distances. But men are weak and cannot endure their manifold nature. Therefore they dwell together and need communion, that they may bear their separateness. For redemtion’s sake I teach you the rejected truth, for the sake of which I was rejected.

The multiplicity of the gods correspondeth to the multiplicity of man.

Numberless gods await the human state. Numberless gods have been men. Man shareth in nature of the gods. He cometh from the gods and goeth unto god.

Thus, just as it serveth not to reflect upon the plerome, it availeth not to worship the multiplicity of the gods. Least of all availeth it to worship the first god, the effective abundance and the summum bonum. By our prayer we can add to it nothing, and from it nothing take; because the effective void swalloweth all.

The bright gods form the celestial world. It is manifold and infinitely spreading and increasing. The god-sun is the supreme lord of the world.

The dark gods form the earth-world. They are simple and infinitely diminishing and declining. The devil is the earth-world’s lowest lord, the moon-spirit, satellite of the earth, smaller, colder, and more dead than the earth.

There is no difference between the might of the celestial gods and those of the earth. The celestial gods magnify, the earth-gods diminish. Measurelesss is the movement of both.





Sermo V



The dead mocked and cried: Teach us, fool, of the church and holy communion.

The world of the gods is made manifest in spirituality and in sexuality. The celestial ones appear in spirituality, the earthly in sexuality.

Spirituality conceiveth and embraceth. It is womanlike and therefore we call it MATER COELESTIS, the celestial mother. Sexuality engendereth and createth. It is manlike, and therefore we call it PHALLOS, the earthly father.

The sexuality of man is more of the earth, the sexuality of woman is more of the spirit.

The spirituality of man is more of heaven, it goeth to the greater.

The spirituality of woman is more of the earth, it goeth to the smaller.

Lying and devilish is the spirituality of the man which goeth to the smaller.

Lying and devilish is the spirituality of the woman which goeth to the greater.

Each must go to its own place.

Man and woman become devils one to the other when they divide not their spiritual ways, for the nature of the creatura is distinctiveness.

The sexuality of man hath an earthward course, the sexuality of woman a spiritual. Man and woman become devils one to the other if they distinguish not their sexuality.

Man shall know of the smaller, woman the greater.

Man shall distinguish himself both from spirituality and from sexuality. He shall call spirituality Mother, and set her between heaven and earth. He shall call sexuality Phallos, and set him between himself and earth. For the Mother and the Phallos are super-human daemons which reveal the world of the gods. They are for us more effective than the gods, because they are closely akin to our own nature. Should ye not distinguish yourselves from sexuality and from spirituality, and not regard them as of a nature both above you and beyond, then are ye delivered over to them as qualities of the pleroma. Spirituality and sexuality are not your qualities, not things which ye possess and contain. But they possess and contain you; for they are powerful daemons, manifestations of the gods, and are, therefore, things which reach beyond you, existing in themselves. No man hath a spirituality unto himself, or a sexuality unto himself. But he standeth under the law of Spirituality and of sexuality.

No man, therefore, escapeth these daemons. Ye shall look upn them as daemons, and as a common task and danger, a common burden which life hath laid upon you. Thus is life for you also a common task and danger, as are the gods, and first of all terrible Abraxas.

Man is weak, therefore is communion indispensable. If your communion be not under the sign of the Mother, then is it under the sign of the Phallos. No communion is suffering and sickness. Communion in everything is dismemberment and dissolution.

Distinctiveness leadeth to singleness. Singleness is opposed to communion. But because of man’s weakness over against the gods and daemons and their invincible law is communion needful, not for man’s sake, but because of the gods. The gods force you to communion. As much as they force you, so much is the communion needed, more is evil.

In communion let every man submit to others, that communion be maintained; for ye need it.

In singleness the one man shall be superior to the others, that every man may come to himself and avoid slavery.

In communion there shall be continence.

In singleness there shall be prodigality.

Communion is depth.

Singleness is height.

Right measure in communion purifieth and preserveth.

Right measure in singleness purifieth and increaseth.

Communion giveth us warmth, singleness giveth us light.





Sermo VI



The daemon of sexuality approacheth our soul as a serpent. It is half human and appeareth as thought-desire.

The daemon of spirituality descendeth into our soul as the white bird. It is half human and appeareth as desire-thought.

The serpent is an earthly soul, half daemonic, a spirit, and akin to the spirits of the dead. Thus too, like these, she swarmeth around in the things of earth, making us either to fear them or pricking us with intemperate desires. The serpent hath a nature like unto woman. She seeketh company of the dead who are held by the spell of the earth, they who found not the way beyond that leadeth to singleness. The serpent is a whore. She wantoneth with the devil and with evil spirits; a mischievous tyrant and tormentor, ever seducing to evilest company. The White Bird is a half-celestial soul of man. He bideth with the Mother, from time to time descending. The bird hath a nature like unto man, and is effective thought. He is chaste and solitary, a messenger of the Mother. He flieth high above earth. He commandeth singleness. He bringeth knowledge from the distant ones who went before and are perfected. He beareth our word above to the Mother. She intercedeth, she warneth, but against the gods she hath no power. She is a vessel of the sun. The serpent goeth below and with her cunning she lameth the phallic daemon, or else goadeth him on. She yieldeth up the too crafty thoughts of the earthy one, those thoughts which creep through every hole and cleave to all things with desirousness. The serpent, doubtless, willeth it not, yet she must be of use to us. She fleeth our grasp, thus showing us the way, which with our human wits we could not find.

With disdainful glance the dead spake: Cease this talk of gods and daemons and souls. At bottom this hath long been known to us.





Sermo VII



Yet when night was come the dead again approached with lamentable mien and said: There is yet one matter we forgot to mention. Teach us about man.

Man is a gateway, through which from the outer world of gods, daemons, and souls ye pass into the inner world; out of the greater into the smaller world. Small and transitory is man. Already is he behind you, and once again ye find yourselves in endless space, in the smaller or innermost infinity. At immeasurable distance standeth one single Star in the zenith.

This is the one god of this one man. This is his world, his pleroma, his divinity.

In this world is man Abraxas, the creator and destroyer of his one world.

This Star is the god and the goal of man.

This is his one guiding god. In him goeth man to his rest. Toward him goeth the long journey of the soul after death. In him shineth forth as light all that man bringeth back from the greater world. To this one god man shall pray.

Prayer increaseth the light of the Star. It casteth a bridge over death. It prepareth life for the smaller world and assuageth the hopleless desires of the greater.

When the greater world waxeth cold, burneth the Star.

Between man and his one god there standeth nothing, so long as man can turn away his eyes from the flaming spectacle of Abraxas.

Man here, god there.

Weakness and nothingness here, there eternally creative power.

Here nothing but darkness and chilling moisture.

There wholly sun.



Whereupon the dead were silent and ascended like the smoke above the herdman’s fire, who through the night kept watch over his flock.



ANAGRAMMA:

NAHTRIHECCUNDE

GAHINNEVERAHTUNIN

ZEHGESSURKLACH

ZUNNUS.