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: 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: 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 on "The Supreme Meaning of Death"

he supreme vision comes not at the end of the Bardo, but right at the beginning, at the moment of death; what happens afterward is an ever deepening descent into illusion and obscuration, down to the ultimate degradation of new physical birth.

The spiritual climax is reached at the moment when life ends. Human life, therefore, is the vehicle of the highest perfection it is possible to attain; it alone generates the karma that makes it possible for the dead man to abide in the perpetual light of the Voidness without clinging to any object, and thus to rest on the hub of the wheel of rebirth, freed from all illusion of genesis and decay.

Life in the Bardo brings no eternal rewards or punishments, but merely a descent into a new life which shall bear the individual nearer to his final goal.

But this eschatological goal is what he himself brings to birth as the last and highest fruit of the labors and aspirations of earth ~Carl Jung; Commentary on the Tibetan Book of the Dead; Psychology and Religion, Pages 524-525.

It is highly sensible of the Bardo Thodol to make clear to the dead man the primacy of the psyche, for that is the one thing which life does not make clear to us. We are so hemmed in by things which jostle and oppress that we never get a chance, inthe midst of all these “given” things, to wonder by whom they are “given.”

It is from this world of “given” things that the dead man liberates himself; and the purpose of the instruction is to help him towards this liberation. We, if we put ourselves in his place, shall derive no lesser reward from it, since we learn from the very first paragraphs that the “giver” of all “given” things dwells within us.

This is a truth which in the face of all evidence, in the greatest things as in the smallest, is never known, although it is often so very necessary, indeed vital, for us to know it.

Such knowledge, to be sure, is suitable only for contemplatives who are minded to understand the purpose of existence, for those who are Gnostics by temperament and therefore believe in a savior who, like the savior of the Mandaeans, is called “knowledge of life” (Manda d’Hayye).

Perhaps it is not granted to many of us to see the world as something “given.” A great reversal of standpoint, calling for much sacrifice, is needed before we can see the world as “given” by the very nature of the psyche.

It is so much more straightforward, more dramatic, impressive, and therefore more convincing, to see all the things that happen to me than to observe how I make them happen. Indeed, the animal nature of man makes him resist seeing himself as the maker of his circumstances.

That is why attempts of this kind were always the object of secret initiations, culminating as a rule in a figurative death which symbolized the total character of this reversal.

And, in point of fact, the instruction given in the Bardo Thodol serves to recall to the dead man the experiences of his initiation and the teachings of his guru, for the instruction is, at bottom, nothing less than an initiation of the dead into the Bardo life, just as the initiation of the living was a preparation for the Beyond. Such was the case, at least, with all the mystery cults in ancient civilizations from the time of the Egyptian and Eleusinian mysteries.

In the initiation of the living, however, this “Beyond” is not a world beyond death, but a reversal of the mind’s intentions and outlook, a psychological “Beyond” or, in Christian terms, a “redemption” from the trammels of the world and of sin.

Redemption is a separation and deliverance from an earlier condition of darkness and unconsciousness, and leads to a condition of illumination and releasedness, to victory and transcendence over everything “given.” ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Pages 513 – 514.

Carl Jung The Red Book Quotations [Posted July 4, 2017 #4]

If the word is a sign, it means nothing. But if the word is a symbol, it means everything. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 310.

One creates inner freedom only through the symbol. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 311.

Not one title of Christian law is abrogated, but instead we are adding a new one: accepting the lament of the dead. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 298, Footnote 187.

But if you know what the dead demand, temptation will become the wellspring of your best work, indeed of the work of salvation. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 278, Footnote 188.

When Christ ascended after completing his work, he led those up with him who had died prematurely and incomplete under the law of hardship and alienation and raw violence. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 278, Footnote 188.

The lamentations of the dead filled the air at the time, and their misery became so loud that even the living were saddened, and became tired and sick of life and yearned to die to this world already in their living bodies. And thus you too lead the dead to their completion with your work of salvation. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 278, Footnote 188.

When my soul fell into the hands of evil, it was defenseless except for the weak fishing rod which it could use, again with its power, to pull the fish from the sea of emptiness. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 289.

Stupidity is one of man's strange hobbyhorses. There is something divine about it, and yet something of the megalomania of the world. ~Liber Novus, Page 316, Footnote 277.

Somewhat deaf somewhat blind, it [Stupidity] brings about necessary fate and keeps from us the virtuousness coupled with rationality. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 316, Footnote 277.

It [Stupidity] is what separates and isolates the mixed seeds of life, affording us thus with a clear view of good and evil, and of what is reasonable and what not. ~Liber Novus, Page 316, Footnote 277.

But on the fourth night I cried, "To journey to Hell means to become Hell oneself. It is all frightfully muddled and interwoven. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 240.

After death on the cross Christ went into the underworld and became Hell. So he took on the form of the Antichrist, the dragon. The image of the Antichrist, which has come down to us from the ancients, announces the new God, whose coming the ancients had foreseen. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 242.

Christ totally overcomes the temptation of the devil, but not the temptation of God to good and reason. Christ thus succumbs to cursing. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 235.

Therefore after his death Christ had to journey to Hell, otherwise the ascent to Heaven would have become impossible for him. Christ first had to become his Antichrist, his under worldly brother. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.

Read the unknown books of the ancients, and you will learn much from them. Notice that Christ did not remain in Hell, but rose to the heights in the beyond. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.

He who journeys to Hell also becomes Hell; therefore do not forget from whence you come. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.

Take pains to waken the dead. Dig deep mines and throw in sacrificial gifts, so that they reach the dead. Reflect in good heart upon evil, this is the way to the ascent. But before the ascent, everything is night and Hell. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.

What do you think of the essence of Hell? Hell is when the depths come to you with all that you no longer are or are not yet capable of. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.

The way to your beyond leads through Hell and in fact through your own wholly particular Hell, whose bottom consists of knee-deep rubble, whose air is the spent breath of millions, whose -fires are dwarflike passions, and whose devils are chimerical sign-boards. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 262.

When you step into your own Hell, never think that you come like one suffering in beauty; or as a proud pariah, but you come like a stupid and curious fool and gaze in wonder at the scraps that have fallen from your table. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 262.

I think of Christianity in the desert. Physically, those ancients went into the desert. Did they also enter into the desert of their own self? Or was their self not as barren and desolate as mine? There they wrestled with the devil. I wrestle with waiting. It seems to me not less since it is truly a hot hell ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Footnote 74, Page 236.

But the deepest Hell is when you realize that Hell is also no Hell, but a cheerful Heaven, not a Heaven in itself, but in this respect a Heaven, and in that respect a Hell. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.
I wait, secretly anxious. I see a tree arise from the sea. Its crown reaches to Heaven and its roots reach down into Hell. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 300.

There are hellish webs of words, only words, but what are words? Be tentative with words, value them well, take safe words, words without catches, do not spin them with one another so that no webs arise, for you are the first who is ensnared in them. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 300.

Just as Christ was crucified between the two thieves, our lowest lies on either side of our way. And just as one thief went to Hell and the other rose up to Heaven, the lowest in us will be sundered in two halves on the day of our judgment. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 300.

This is really Good Friday; upon which the Lord died and descended into Hell and completed the mysteries. This is the Good Friday when we complete the Christ in us and we descend to Hell ourselves. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 300.

Who among the living is Christ and journeys to Hell in living flesh? ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 300.

Carl Jung Quotations The Red Book [Posted July 4, 2017 #3]

The old prophet expresses persistence, but the young maiden denotes movement. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 365.

Nothing makes this effect clearer than the serpent. It signifies everything dangerous and everything bad, everything nocturnal and uncanny, which adheres to Logos as well as to Eros, so long as they can work as the dark and unrecognized principles of the unconscious spirit. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 365.

This suggests that Eros does not tend toward the right, the side of consciousness, conscious will and conscious choice, but toward the side of the heart, which is less subject to our conscious will. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 366.

From the perspective of Logos, following a movement blindly is a sin, because it is one-sided and violates the law that man must forever strive for the highest degree of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 366.

On the night when I considered the essence of the God, I became aware of an image: I lay in a dark depth. An old man stood before me. He looked like one of the old prophets. A black serpent lay at his feet. Some distance away I saw a house with columns. A beautiful maiden steps out of the door. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 245.

As I look into its reflection, the images of Eve, the tree, and the serpent appear to me. After this I catch sight of Odysseus and his journey on the high seas. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 245.

In the renewed world you can have no outer possessions, unless you create them out of yourselves. You can enter only into your own mysteries. The spirit of the depths has other things to teach you than me. I only have to bring you tidings of the new God and of the ceremonies and mysteries of his service. But this is the way. It is the gate to darkness. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, "Draft" Footnote 163, Page 246.

But for him who has seen the chaos, there.is no more hiding, because he knows that the bottom sways and knows what this swaying means. He has seen the order and the disorder of the endless, he knows the unlawful laws. He knows the sea and can never forget it. The chaos is terrible: days full of lead, nights full of horror. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 299.

My pleasure is dead and turned to stone, because I did not love Salome. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 250, Draft, Footnote 198.

Just as the old prophets [ancients] stood before the Mysterium of Christ, I also stand as yet before the [this] Mysterium of-Christ, [insofar as I reassume the past] although I live two thousand years after-him [later] and at one time believed I was a Christian. But I had never been a Christ. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 253, Footnote 228.

Now that white shape of a girl with black hair-my own soul-and now that white shape of a man, which also appeared to me at the time it resembles Michelangelo's sitting Moses-it is Elijah. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Pages 248-9, Footnote 187.

Only then I learned psychological objectivity. Only then could I say to a patient, 'Be quiet, something is happening.' There are such things as mice in a house. You cannot say you are wrong when you have a thought. For the understanding of the unconscious we must see our thoughts as events, as phenomena. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 249, Footnote 188.

Desire without forethinking gains much but keeps nothing; therefore his desire is the source of constant disappointment. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 249, Footnote 190.

If pleasure is united with forethinking, the serpent lies before them. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 249, Footnote 190.

You should always ask yourself what you desire, since all too many do not know what they want. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 249, Footnote 190.

Salome's approach and her worshiping of me is obviously that side of the inferior function which is surrounded by an aura of evil. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 253. Footnote 211.

This is how madness begins, this is madness ... You cannot get conscious of these unconscious facts without giving yourself to them. If you can overcome your fear of the unconscious and can let yourself go down, then these facts take on a life of their own. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 253. Footnote 211.

In this deification mystery you make yourself into the vessel, and are a vessel of creation in which the opposites reconcile. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 253. Footnote 211.

Evil is one-half of the world, one of the two pans of the scale. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 274, Footnote 72.

In this bloody battle death steps up to you, just like today where mass killing and dying: fill the world. The coldness of death penetrates you. When I froze to death in my solitude, I saw dearly and saw what was to come, as clearly as I could see the stars and the distant mountains on a frosty night. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 274, Footnote 73.

To live what is right and to let what is false die, that is the art of life. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 274, Footnote 75.

Life is an energetic process like any other. But every energetic process is in principle irreversible and therefore unequivocally directed toward a goal, and the goal is the state of rest ... ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 274, Footnote 75.

From the middle of life, only he who is willing to die with life remains living. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 274, Footnote 75.

Since what takes place in the secret hour of life's midday is the reversal of the parabola, the birth of death …Not wanting to live is identical with not wanting to die. Becoming and passing away is the same curve. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 274, Footnote 75.

The Buddha did not need quite so long to see that even rebirths are vain. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 298, Footnote 94.

His [Christ’s] own way led him to the cross for humanity's own way leads to the cross. My way also leads to the cross, but not to that of Christ, but to mine, which is the image of the sacrifice and of life. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 298, Footnote 164.

There are not too many truths, there are only a few. Their meaning is too deep to grasp other than in symbols. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 291.