Miguel Serrano: I went to Montagnola to see Hermann Hesse, and upon my return I decided that I should try to see Dr. Jung again.

May 5, 1959: Second Interview On the following day, I went to Montagnola to see Hermann Hesse, and upon my return I decided that I should try to see Dr. Jung again.

I rang him up at his house in Küsnacht which is near Zürich, because I knew that by that time he had returned from his holidays.

There was a certain risk in that telephone call, because I knew that Dr. Jung was receiving no visitors; but if I had not made it, my relationship with Jung would undoubtedly have ceased.

His secretary, Aniela Jaffé, with whom I had corresponded from India, answered the phone.

She was very doubtful about my request and insisted that Professor Jung was receiving no one and that he was not in good health.

I then told her that I had been with him in Locarno and pleaded with her to ask whether I might come.

Mrs. Jaffé put down the phone, and a few moments later returned to tell me that Jung would receive me at four o’clock that very afternoon. I left immediately and arrived in time at his house in Küsnacht.

Over the doorway of his house was written an inscription in Latin: Vocatus adque non vocatus, Deus aderit. [Called or not called, God is present.]

The inside of the house seemed dark and shadowy.

I was greeted by the same woman I had seen with Jung in Locarno, and she introduced herself as Miss Bailey.

She asked me to go up, and as I climbed the stairs, I noticed that the walls were covered with ancient drawings of medieval and Renaissance scenes.

I then waited in a little room upstairs.

In due course, Dr. Jung appeared and greeted me cordially, asking me to go into his study, which had a window overlooking the lake.

In the center of the room was a desk covered with papers, and round about were many bookcases.

I noticed some bronze Buddhas and over his work table a large scroll showing Siva on top of Mount Kailas.

That painting forcibly reminded me of the many pilgrimages which I myself had taken into the Himalayas.

We sat down beside the window, and Dr. Jung made himself comfortable in a large armchair opposite me.

‘Your story about the Queen of Sheba is more like a poem than an ordinary tale,’ he said.

‘The affair of the King and the Queen of Sheba seems to contain everything; it has a truly noumenal quality.’

I listened quietly, and he continued: ‘But if you should ever meet the Queen of Sheba in the flesh, beware of marrying her. The Queen of Sheba is only for a magic kind of love, never for matrimony.

If you were to marry her, you would both be destroyed and your soul would disintegrate.’

‘I know,’ I answered.

‘In my long psychiatric experience I never came across a marriage that was entirely self-sufficient. Once I thought I had, because a German professor assured me that his was. I believed him until once, when I was visiting in Berlin, I discovered that his wife kept a secret apartment.

That seems to be the role.

Moreover, a marriage which is devoted entirely to mutual understanding is bad for the development of individual personality; it is a descent to the lowest common denominator, which is something like the collective stupidity of the masses.

Inevitably, one or the other will begin to penetrate the mysteries. Look, it’s like this.…’

Jung then picked up a box of matches and opened it. He separated the two halves and placed them on a table so that at a distance they looked the same.

He then brought them together until the drawer of the box entered the shell. ‘That’s how it is,’ he said; ‘the two halves appear equal, but in fact they are not.

Nor should they be, since one should always be able to include the other or, if you like, remain outside of the other. Ideally, the man should contain the woman and remain outside of her.

But it’s a question of degree, and the homosexual is fifty-five per cent feminine.

Basically speaking, however, man is polygamous.

The people of the Mussulman Empire knew that very well. Nevertheless, marrying several women at the same time is a primitive solution, and would be rather expensive today.’

Jung then laughed before continuing: ‘I think that the French have found the solution in the Number Three. Frequently this number occurs in magic marriages such as your encounter with the Queen of Sheba.

It is something quite different from Freud’s sexual interpretations or from D. H. Lawrence’s ideas.

Freud was wrong, for example, in his interpretation of incest which, in Egypt, was primarily religious and had to do with the process of individuation.

In reality, the King was the individual, and the people were merely an amorphous mass.

Thus the King had to marry his mother or his sister in order to protect and preserve individuality in the country.

Lawrence exaggerated the importance of sex because he was excessively influenced by his mother; he overemphasized women because he was still a child and was unable to integrate himself in the world.

People like him frequently suffer from respiratory illnesses which are primarily adolescent.

Another curious case is that of Saint-Exupéry: from his wife I learned many important details about him.

Flight, you see, is really an act of evasion, an attempt to escape from the earth. But the earth must be accepted and admitted, perhaps even sublimated.

That is frequently illustrated in myth and religion.

The dogma of the Ascension of Mary is in fact an acceptance of matter; indeed it is a sanctification of matter.

If you were to analyze dreams, you would understand this better.

But you can see it also in alchemy.

It’s a pity we have no alchemical texts written by women, for then we would know something essential about the visions of women, which are undoubtedly different from those of men.’

I then asked Dr. Jung whether he thought it was wise to analyze one’s own dreams and to pay attention to them.

I told him that I had begun to analyze my own again and that I’d found my vitality increasing, as though I were making use of some hidden sources of energy which otherwise would have been lost.

‘On the other hand,’ I said, ‘I have talked with Krishnamurti, in India, and he told me that dreams have no real importance, and that the only important thing is to look, to be conscious and totally aware of the moment.

He told me that he never dreams.

He said that because he looks with both his conscious and unconscious mind, he has nothing left over for dreams, and that when he sleeps he gains complete rest.’

‘Yes, that is possible for a time,’ said Jung. ‘Some scientists have told me that when they were concentrating with all their attention on a particular problem, they no longer dreamed.

And then, for some unexplained reason, they began to dream again.

But to return to your question about the importance of analyzing your own dreams, it seems to me that the only important thing is to follow Nature.

A tiger should be a good tiger; a tree, a good tree.

So man should be man.

But to know what man is, one must follow Nature and go on alone, admitting the importance of the unexpected.

Still, nothing is possible without love, not even the processes of alchemy, for love puts one in a mood to risk everything and not to withhold important elements.’

Jung then rose and took a volume from the bookcase.

It was his own Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, and he opened it to a chapter called ‘Study of a Process of Individuation.’

He showed me the extraordinary colored plates that are reproduced there, some of Tibetan tankas.

‘These were made,’ he said, ‘by a woman with whom we planned a process of individuation for almost ten years. She was an American and had a Scandinavian mother.’

He pointed to one picture done in bright colors.

In the center was a flower, rather like a four-leaf clover, and above it were drawn a king and queen who were taking part in a mystic wedding, holding fire in their hands.

There were towers in the background.

‘The process of the mystic wedding involves various stages,’ Jung explained, ‘and is open to innumerable risks, like the Opus Alquimia. For this union is in reality a process of mutual individuation which occurs, in cases like this, in both the doctor and the patient.’

As he spoke of this magic love and alchemic wedding, I thought of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Christ and his Church, and of Siva and Parvati on the summit of Mount Kailas –all symbols of man and his soul and of the creation of the Androgynous.

Jung went on as though he were talking to himself: ‘Somewhere there was once a Flower, a Stone, a Crystal, a Queen, a King, a Palace, a Lover and his Beloved, and this was long ago, on an Island somewhere in the ocean five thousand years ago.… Such is Love, the Mystic Flower of the Soul. This is the center, the Self.…’ Jung spoke as though he were in a trance. ‘Nobody understands what I mean,’ he said. ‘Only a poet could begin to understand.…’

‘You are a poet,’ I said, moved by what I had heard. ‘And that woman, is she still alive?’ I asked. ‘She died eight years ago.… I am very old.…’ I then realized that the interview should end.

I had brought Hermann Hesse’s book, Piktor’s Metamorphosis. I showed him the drawings and gave him greetings from Steppenwolf.

‘I met Hesse through a mutual friend who was interested in myths and symbols,’ said Jung. ‘His friend worked with me for a while, but he was unable to follow through to the end. The path is very difficult.…’

It was late when I left Jung’s house, and as I walked down towards the lake, I thought of our conversation and tried to put my feelings in order.
~Carl Jung, Jung and Hesse: A Diary of Two Friendships, Page 75

Carl Jung and Hermann Hesse

C.G. Jung and Hermann Hesse by Miguel Serrano

Foreword

I reread the pages of this book with an overpowering feeling of nostalgia.

How many years have there been, and how many editions? – twenty in the United States alone, as well as translations into most of the European languages, even Dutch and Greek, not to mention Persian and Japanese. How many years have passed since I experienced this great adventure of the soul! Truly, I have been blessed with a magical existence, since I was lucky enough to live for ten years in Montagnola, in the ancient Casa Camuzzi, which had once provided a home for Hermann Hesse. It was a nobleman’s house, built in the Saint Petersburg Baroque style by one of the architects of the Golden Hill, its balconies and terraces facing the peaks of the Alps and the Lago di Lugano – but also opening onto the Garden of Klingsor.

Youthful pilgrims from East and West beat a path to its door, carrying in their knapsacks The Hermetic Circle, often in its German translation but more often in the English version. They retraced, step by step, the journey I had made so many years earlier (more than twenty years earlier, in fact) and, quite unexpectedly, they found themselves fact to face with the author of those pages, who acted as their guide, sat them down at his table to drink wine and offered them hospitality, just as all those years ago Hesse had done with me – then merely another youthful pilgrim, who had arrived from the Polar South with no more credentials than a recently-published first work entitled: Neither by Sea nor by Land.

Many things had changed since those far-off days. The streets of Montagnola were no longer of earth but of asphalt, and the pilgrims who trod them were different, too. Almost all of them had gotten to know Hermann Hesse via the biased propaganda of an adulterated form of Hinduism or of the drug culture. I tried to make them see that Hermann Hesse was not at all like that, and that he was being used, distorted. Of course, I realized that I would only achieve limited success among a small number of those I spoke to, whom I might just be able to save before an entire generation plunged into the abyss. I was encouraged in my endeavor by the memory of Ninon Hesse, the author’s wife, who had confessed to me, in the last interview we ever had, her own discouragement in her struggle to ensure that Hesse was not distorted. She told me that she had had a visit from a Canadian television company, which wanted her to write a script from Steppenwolf. She had refused, because Hesse had expressly stated in his Will that his works were not to be filmed. Ninon was having problems with the author’s children, too. While she was alive, Hesse’s instructions were obeyed faithfully, but this was to change after her death.

One day, in Montagnola, I received a visit from Hermann Hesse’s son, Heiner, accompanied by some North American filmmakers. Heiner Hesse had given them permission to make a film of Steppenwolf. They wanted to consult me. I questioned Heiner about the terms of his father’s Will and reminded him of what Ninon had told me. He confirmed that those were indeed the terms, but explained that there was an additional clause to the effect that ‘if any of his children were to find himself in an adverse economic situation, he could authorize a film of one of the books.’ I asked him if he was in such a situation, and he said ‘no,’ but that he was ‘… doing it to help present-day youth.’ They left me the script, saying that they would return in a week’s time for my opinion.

As I read the pages, I was surprised to discover statements by the protagonist of Steppenwolf that were lengthy diatribes against Nazism – something that had never appeared in the original book. I pointed this out at our subsequent meeting, and I can still remember – with a sense of something akin to shock – the reply: ‘We had to put these in because the North American public tends to see in Hermann Hesse’s cultural baggage the same tradition that gave rise to Nazism in Germany.’ This was appalling. It goes without saying that I told them that I was opposed both to this falsification and to the making of the film itself – but, of course, it went ahead after the payment of $ 70 000 to Heiner Hesse. The film was a complete failure.

The total lack of discretion and respect shown by the North Americans and the information media, as well as their lack of culture, led them to try to destroy a German – and so German! – author’s links with the very roots of his nationality so as to use him for their own aims, to use him in the great conspiracy of ‘universal revelation,’ so to speak, which had just begun and which was soon to spread with vertiginous speed across the whole planet. This phenomenon was doubtless encouraged by the vast lack of culture which was generalized and propagated by so many circles in the United States of America.

By this time, my book, The Hermetic Circle, had acquired a certain reputation and was being read by young people and by university circles and professional psychiatrists, in Jungian groups, to a point where the Australian Psychiatric Society sent me a letter of congratulations signed by the president and all its members. For several years, symposiums were held in Montagnola or its immediate vicinity, at the instigation of enlightened North Americans, in which writers and university professors from Europe and America took part. They invited me, too, with the result that I was afforded the opportunity to give two talks. One was about Nietzsche and the Eternal Return, which was subsequently published in book-form under the same title, after I had also given the talk at a university college in Madrid and at the Institute of Hispanic Culture in Madrid and Barcelona, as well as in various Chilean universities. My second lecture was on ‘The Transformation of Hermann Hesse in the United States of America.’

In this talk, I sustained the thesis that Hermann Hesse’s essential meaning had been adulterated, making him appear to be some kin of Bohemian, a hippy, an apostle of the drug culture, a pacifist vagrant (although he was indeed a pacifist) who preached liberty at the expense of discipline and method and who, by some subtle means, hinted at homosexuality – or, if one prefers, bisexuality. I affirmed most emphatically that Hermann Hesse could not really be understood if he was cut off from his roots in the literary tradition of German Romanticism, in the ongoing tradition of Novalis, Hölderlin, Kleist and of Nietzsche himself, whom he so admired.

Hesse had become the ultimate flower of German Romanticism and of the philosophical line of thought that, with Schopenhauer and Goethe himself (an admirer of Shakunthala), had initiated the great conceptual journey to the East. (Hermann Hesse wrote an extraordinary study of German Romanticism, which has long since disappeared and is completely unknown today.)

Under the influence of C.G. Jung, with whom he underwent psychoanalysis, Hesse entered fully into the Germanico-alchemical dream of the Androgyne – which is the opposite of homosexuality – whose aspiration is totality and the fusion of the opposites, the unity of Nietzsche’s ‘Self,’ the inner homo, of coelo, Demian, beloved and admired by Sinclair; that is to say, by Hesse.

His most intimate ego. Narcissus and Goldmund. In the original German version of Steppenwolf, the female protagonist is called Hermina, which is the feminine of Hermann. And this is the same alchemical-tantrio game as in Mozart’s Magic Flute: Pamino and Pamina. Hermann Hesse, like the great Germans of the grand tradition, was steeped in the music of Mozart and Bach.

An attempt has been made to turn Hesse into a product of the Consumer society and a propagator of its rites and orthodoxy. He has been firmly inserted in the sinister current of the Kali Yuga. But the young Chilean who, many ears ago, walked the dusty streets of Montagnola and who later returned as his country’s ambassador to India, went in search of the other Hesse, the real one; just as he went in search of the real India – that of the eternal ones, the beloved, the Immortals.

These, I can still encounter in the pages of this book.

Miguel Serrano
Valparaíso, Chile
June 1991