Few ideas of Jung’s Red Book

The Red Book by Carl Jung is one of this author’s essential readings. It provides the first outlines of the main components of his mature psychology. On it, Jung writes about “the structure of the unconscious,” differentiating two layers of the unconscious. The first one, the personal unconscious, consisted of elements acquired during one’s own lifetime, together with elements that could be conscious. The second layer was the impersonal unconscious or collective psyche, which Jung claims it is inherited. He states that when one assimilates the personal and the collective psyche, regarding both of them as personal attributes, can experience extreme states of superiority and inferiority, a state of godlikeness (Goethe, Alfred Adler wrote about this), arousing from fusing both psyches, and this was one of the dangers of analysis.

It is difficult differentiating the personal from the collective psyche for various reasons. One of them is the personal one’s mask or role. The segment from the collective psyche that one regarded as individual. When one analyses this, the personality dissolves into the collective psyche, which results in the release of a stream of fantasies. Jung says about this that “all the treasures of mythological thinking and feeling are unlocked”. He also explains that the difference of this state and insanity is that this one is intentional. Under these circumstances, there are three possibilities: to attempt to regressively restore persona and return to the prior state, but it is impossible to get rid of the unconscious. To accept the condition of godlikeness, or the hermeneutic treatment of creative fantasies. This last one resulted in a synthesis of the individual with the collective psyche, which revealed the individual lifeline. This was the process of individuation, and the one Jung claimed went through. The vivid description of the vicissitudes of the state of godlikeness mirrors some of Jung’s affective states during his confrontation with the unconscious.

The notion of the differentiation of the persona and its analysis corresponds to the opening section of Liber Novus, where Jung sets himself apart from his role and achievements and attempts to reconnect with his soul. The release of mythological fantasies is precisely what ensued in this case, and the hermeneutic treatment of creative fantasies was what he presented in layer two of Liber Novus. The differentiation of the personal and impersonal unconscious provided a theoretical understanding of Jung’s mythological fantasies: it suggests that he did not view them as stemming from his personal unconscious but from the inherited collective psyche. If so, his fantasies stemmed from a layer of the psyche that was a collective human inheritance, and were not simply idiosyncratic or arbitrary.

Jung talks in this book about adaptation. He claims that some individuals are able to adapt to the inner (unconscious), leading to the demand of individuation, which is contrary to the adaptation and to the adaptation to others. This is a break in conformity leading to a tragic guilt requiring expiation and calls for a new collective function, because the individual had to produce values that could serve as a substitute for his absence from society. The individual had not only to create new values, but also socially recognisable ones, as society had a right to expect realisable values. Would that really be possible? This commitment to the demands of society separated Jung from the anarchism of the Dadaists.

On a second talk, Jung explains that individuality and collectivity are a pair of opposites related by guilt. Society demands imitation. Through the process of imitation, one can gain access to values that are one’s own. Through imitation the patient learns individuation, because it reactivates his own values. Unconscious materials are needed to supplement the conscious attitude, and to correct this one-sidedness. These unconscious materials are dreams (inferior expressions of consciousness contents) and spontaneous fantasies (creating first a vacuum in consciousness). Fantasy is seen as a free play without departing from the initial affect in a free associative process. This led to a concrete or symbolic expression of the mood, which had the result of bringing the affect nearer to consciousness, hence making it more understandable. Once these fantasies have been produced, two approaches are possible: creative formulation and understanding. Each need the other, and both are necessary to produce the transcendent function, which arises out of the union of conscious and unconscious contents.

Jung proclaimed that the psychological processes that accompanied the war had brought the problem of the chaotic unconscious to the forefront of attention. For the writer, the conjunction between his precognitive visions and the outbreak of war had made apparent the deep subliminal connections between individual fantasies and world events, and hence between the psychology of the individual and that of the nation. The psychologist believed there was a separation from oneself and the unconscious. On one side we had the I and then we had the non I (including the collective psyche or the absolute unconscious). In this absolute unconscious we find typical myths of primordial images. The ruling powers, the gods, that is, images of dominating laws and principles, average regularities in the sequence of images, that the brain has received from the sequence of secular processes. Jung speaks about the detachment of the mythological or collective psychological contents from the objects of consciousness, and their consolidation as psychological realities outside the individual psyche.

On another line, currents such as rationalism or scepticism, negated religion and irrationalism, which ended in the great war. The writer believed there was a need for accepting irrationalism. The union of the rational (conscious) and the irrational (unconscious) is on the symbol. Jung attempts to understand the psychological nature of symbolism, viewing his fantasies symbolically. He concluded that what was unconscious at any given epoch was only relative and changing. What was required was the remoulding of our views in accordance with the active forces of the unconscious. The production of the transcendent function, helped to take the unconscious in harmony. It’s rebalancing gave access to the productive and beneficent aspects of the unconscious. The unconscious contained the wisdom and experience of untold ages and this formed an unparalleled guide. He talks about two situations in which the collective unconscious became active: the first one is through a crisis in individual life and the collapse of hopes and expectations. The second one is at times of great social, political and religious upheaval.

The author speaks of the unconscious, about the factors suppressed by the prevailing attitudes, accumulating in the collective unconscious. There arisen different situations related to the flourishing of this unconscious. In the first one, the collective unconscious might replace reality. This Jung saw it as pathological. In the second one, the individual might feel disorientated (not pathological). Jung felt he was on point two before the great war, when he had these fantasies about rivers of blood and death.

The psychologist speaks about the I, or the conscious, and about the self, or your totality, the union of the conscious, and both unconscious levels. In conscious fantasy the self often appears as the super-ordinated or ideal personality, as Faust in relation to Goethe and Zarathustra in relation to Nietzsche. The self relates to the Hindu notion of Brahma or Atman. Within the self we had the soul, which possessed qualities complementary to the persona, containing those qualities that the conscious attitude lacked. Another important concept to mention is the concept of anima, which is how the subject is seen by the collective unconscious. There is complementarity and has a sexual character. Man is seen as feminine soul (anima) and women as masculine soul (animus).

Jung afterwards set up on the task to depict the translation and transposition of the numinous experience of individuals into symbols, eventually into the dogmas and creeds of organised religions, and finally, to study the psychological function of such symbols. Jung believed that whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpower. He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever soon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night.

The artist who produced this work educated the spirit of the age and compensated the one-sidedness of the present. In one dream, Jung understood that the centre is the goal and everything is directed towards the centre. Through that dream he understood that the self is the principle and archetype of orientation and meaning. The realisation was that the self is the goal of individuation and that the process of individuation was not liner, but consisted in a circumambulation of the self.

He argued that the first half of life was characterised as the natural phase, in which the prime aim was establishing oneself in the world, gaining an income and raising a family. The second phase or half of life was characterised as the cultural phase, which involved a reevaluation of earlier values. The goal in this period was one of the conserving previous values together with the recognition of their opposites. This meant that individuals had to develop the undeveloped and neglected aspects of their personality. The individuation process was now conceived as the general pattern of human development. He argued there was a lack of guidance for this transition in contemporary society. Liber Novus depicts Jung’s reappraisal of his previous values, and his attempt to develop the neglected aspects of his personality.

On another paper of his, Jung expanded upon the interior drama of the transformation process, adding a section dealing in details with the process of individuation. He noted that after one had dealt with the fantasies from the personal sphere, one met the fantasies from the impersonal sphere. These were not simply arbitrary, but converged upon a goal. Hence these later fantasies could be described as processes of initiation, which provided their nearest analogy.

After the assimilation of the personal unconscious, the differentiation of the persona, and the overcoming of the state of godlikeness, the next stage that followed was the integration of the anima for men and of animus for women. Jung argued that just as it was essential for a man to distinguish between what he was and how he appeared to others, it was equally essential to become conscious of “his invisible relations to the unconscious” and hence to differentiate himself from the anima. He noted that when the anima was unconscious, it was projected. One needed to objectify the anima and to pose questions to her, by the method of inner dialogue or active imaginations (a type of dramatised thinking). Experience the fantasies was also required. To treat fantasies literally when one was engaged in them, and symbolically when one interpreted them. The task was to integrate them in the conscious. Then the anima became a function of the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious, as opposed to an autonomous complex. The effects from this are various. Firstly, the range of consciousness is increased by the inclusion of a great number and variety of unconscious contents. The second one is a diminution of the dominative influence of the unconscious. The third is an alteration in the personality.

After this, one was confronted with the mana personality, which was a being of superior will and wisdom. However, this figure was a dominant of the collective unconscious, the recognised archetype of the powerful man in the form of the hero, magician, medicine man and saint, the lord of men and spirits, the friend of gods, for women the image of the great mother. One had to differentiate from this. If one gave up the claim to victory over the anima, possession by the figure of the magician ceased, and one realised that the mana truly belonged to the mid-point of the personality, namely, the self. The assimilation of the contents of the mana personality led to the self. The self is represented by the encounter with Philemon, who represents the god in us.

The self could be characterised as a kind of compensation for the conflict between the inner and the outer. The self is also the goal of life, because it is the most complete expression of that fateful combination we call individuality. With the experiencing of the self as something irrational, as an indefinable being to which the I is neither opposed nor subjected, but in a relation of dependence, and around which it revolves, very much as the earth revolves about the sun. Then the goal of individuation has been reached. Liber Novus could be considered to contain, among other things, an account of stages of Jung’s process of individuation.

In the book, one of the questions Jung pursued was whether something akin to the individuation process was to be found in all cultures and if so what were the differential factors. He convinced himself that mandalas have been produced in all places and times, and that the development of his patients and especially their mandala images were not simply due to suggestion. The mandala was seen as an example of the universality of an archetype. Jung articulated his understanding of the historical transformations of Christianity and the historicity of symbolic formations. He believed that there existed a principle of a causal orderedness that underlay such meaningful coincidences, such as his prophetic visions of the First World War, which he called synchronicity. He claimed that under certain circumstances, the constellation of an archetype led to a relativisation of time and space, which explained how such events could happen.

The psychologist also elaborated on two concepts of his, the spirit of the depths and the spirit of this time. The spirit of this time is fundamentally the gentleman’s own mind, in which the times are reflected. Apart of this spirit, Jung believed it existed the spirit of the depths, your inner and lowermost, which seemed unchaste and insolent. The spirit of this time is your measure, but the spirit of the depths surpasses it at both ends. The spirit of this time changes with the generations, while the spirit of the depts does not, it has subjugated all pride and arrogance to the power of judgement. The spirit of the depths took away Jung’s belief in science, robbed him of the joy of explaining and ordering things, and let devotion to the ideals of this time die out in him. It forced Jung down to the last and simplest things. It took Jung’s understanding and all his knowledge and placed them at the service of the inexplicable and the paradoxical. It robbed him of speech and writing, for everything that was not in the spirit’s service, namely the melting together of sense and nonsense which produces the supreme meaning, was unnecessary to have.

Jung empathised on this because he believed the supreme meaning to be the way of the god to come. Supreme meaning is seen as the image force in one, representing magnificence and force together. The supreme meaning is the beginning and the end. It is the bridge of going across and fulfilment. The other gods died of their temporality, yet the supreme meaning guide into absurdity, and out of the fire and blood of their collision the supreme meaning rises up rejuvenated anew. The supreme meaning is real and casts a shadow. For what can be actual and corporeal and have no shadow. The shadow symbolises nonsense and the latter is the inseparable and undying brother of the supreme meaning.

In Liber Novus, Jung explains that the spirit of this time wanted to recognise the greatness and extent of the supreme meaning in him, but not its littleness. The spirit of the depts, however, conquered this arrogance, and Jung had to swallow the small as a means of healing the immortal in himself. It completely burnt up his inwards, since it was inglorious and unheroic. It was even ridiculous and revolting. But the pliers of the spirit of the depths helped him, and Jung had to drink the bitterest of all draughts. The spirit of this time tempted Jung with the thought that all this belongs to the shadowiness of the god-image. This would be pernicious deception, since the shadow is nonsense. But the small, narrow and banal is nonsense, but one of both of the essences of the godhead. In one part of the book, the spirit of this time tells Jung: this supreme meaning, this image of god, this melting together of the hot and cold, that is you and only you. But the spirit of the depths told him: you are an image of the unending world, all the last mysteries of becoming and passing away live on you. If you did not possess all this, how could you know?

The spirit of our time spoke to him again and said: what dire urgency could be forcing you to speak all this? Jung responded that this was an awful temptation. Jung wanted to ponder what inner or outer bind could force him into this, and because he found nothing that Jung could grasp, he was near to making one up. But with this the spirit of our time had almost brought it about that instead of speaking, Jung was thinking again about reasons and explanations, but the spirit of the depths spoke to him and said: to understand a thing is a bridge and possibility of returning to the path, but to explain a matter is arbitrary and sometimes even murder. Have you, Jung, counted the murderers amongst the scholars?

These huge volumes of words the spirit of this time believed on, the spirit of the depths believed to be madness. This madness that might be greatness, intoxication and ugliness is. It runs in all the streets, lives and rules the day of all humanity. Besides what has just been mentioned, Jung believed laughing to be necessary, as mocking of oneself believes and doings. He claimed laugh to be not lower than worship. He said that sacrificial blood binds the poles. Those who know this laugh and worship in the save breath. The humanity said: what solitude, what coldness of desolation you lay upon me when you speak such! The spirit of the depth said: sacrifice is not destruction, is the foundation stone of what is to come.

According to Jung’s writings, images are better than words to express the depths, the symbology expressed on the deep unconscious mind. The mercy which happened to him gave Jung belief, hope and sufficient daring to utter the word of the spirit of the depth. He needed though a vision to get confirmation that the spirit of the depths was the spirit of the ruler of the depths of the world affairs. The vision he experienced happened right before the start of the great war, when a dream about a flood in north part of Europe, brought lots of death. Then he had a dream about a terrible cold descending from the space, turning each living thing into ice. All those dreams were premonitions of the First World War. Those dreams made him feel that truth was on us. He believed could not teach as truth, we had to find it ourselves inside us. He was convinced the way to find truth led to mutual love in community. Give humanity dignity and trust that life will find the better way.

He said: whoever wants to be a doctor of the soul sees people as being sick. He offends human dignity. It is presumptuous to say that man is sick. Whoever wants to be the soul’s shepherd treats human dignity. It is insolent to say that people are like sheep.The one eye of the godhead is blind, the one ear of the godhead is deaf, the order of its being is crossed by chaos. So be patient with the crippleness of the world and do not over value its consummate beauty.

On his fortieth birthday, Jung enjoyed everything in life, honour, power, wealth, knowledge and happiness. He then dreamt about the spirit of the depth before the war. The he started talking to his soul. He talked to his soul that one must live his life. The path he followed through those dreams turned him into searching, a search for transformation. He said: this life is the way, the long sought after way, to the unfathomable, which we call divine. Jung describes the path for his personal transformation at the beginning of his second life, which frequently marked a return to the soul, after the goals and ambitions of the first half of his life.

According to him, the spirit of the depths misguided him, as he tried turning his soul into a scientific object. He did not consider that his soul could not be the object of his knowledge and judgement; much more are his judgement and knowledge the objects of his soul. The spirit of the depths forced Jung to speak to his soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being. Unlike the spirit of this time, the spirit of the depths believed the soul to be a living and self-existing being, not dependent on man. The soul cannot be grasped and arranged. Jung had to speak to his soul as something that did not exist through him, but through whom he existed.

He believed that those whose desires turn away from outer things, reach the place of the soul. They become fouls through their endless desires, and forget the way of his soul, never to find her again. They will run after all things, and will seize hold of them, but they will not find their soul, since they would find her only in themselves. Jung was convinced that If he possessed his desire, and his desire did not possess him, he would lay a hand on his soul, since his desire is the image and expression of his soul.

In one of the Red Book’s chapters, he says: he who possesses the image of the world , possesses half of the world, even if his humanity is poor and wins nothing. But hunger makes the soul into a beast that devours the unbearable and is poisoned by it. My friends, it is wise to nourish the soul, otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart.

Jung connections with his soul might have started through a woman, so he speaks to his soul as if it was a child or a woman. Besides, he was still ignorant at the time of her mystery, so he used the image of a child that lives in every man’s soul. He asks whether his soul is a child, because initially he thinks that is lost, when his soul is not lost. Indeed it upheld his belief when he was alone and near despair. At every decisive moment he let him believe in himself. But how can we reach our soul? The dregs of his thought, his dreams, are the speech of his soul. Dreams are the guiding words of his soul. Our actions and decisions are dependent on dreams. Dreams pave the way for life and they determine us without us understanding their language.

Scholarliness belongs to the spirit of this time, but this spirit in no way grasps the dream, since the soul is everywhere and scholarly knowledge is not. To become a knower of the soul, of the human soul, one had to hang up exact science and put away the scholar’s knowledge, to start wandering with human heart through the world, through the horror of prisons, mad houses and hospitals, through drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling dens, through the salons of elegant society… To experience love, hate and passion in every form in one’s body. The spirit of this time allowed Jung to believe in his reason. The spirit of the depths taught Jung that he is a servant, the servant of a child. Again, Jung’s soul is represented as a child. His god in his soul is represented as a child. The soul is symbolised as a child, so it has a future.

Dr Jung, who did not accept as a path to follow Christianism, believed we should aim at becoming God, not Christians but Christ, otherwise we will be of no use to the coming god. We should aim at serve our soul, so to find the God that is on us. We shouldn’t be concerned of people laughing at us, because we laugh at ourselves. Every step closer to our soul excites the scornful laughter of our devils, those cowardly ear-whisperers and poison-mixers. But this is the path to go through. To approach to the supreme meaning means giving ourselves to nonsense, to madness, to have to trust and love, feeling like going to disorder and meaningless.

Our god is a child, so long as we are not childlike. Is the child order, meaning? Or disorder, caprice? Disorder and meaninglessness are the mother of order and meaning. Order and meaning are things that have become and are no longer becoming. Open the gates of the soul to let the dark flood of chaos flow into our order and meaning. We got to go through horror, we must overcome fears and doubts. We must submit to what we fear, to love what horrifies us. God overcomes the temptation of evil but not of god to good and reason, Christ thus succumbs to cursing. We still have to learn this, to succumb to no temptation, but to do everything of our own will; then we will be free and beyond Christianity.

If we believe to be masters of our soul, then we become their servants. If we are their servants, we must make ourselves their masters, since she needs to be ruled. For our salvation and for the attainment on our soul, we must sacrifice. Thus no sacrifice can be too great for us. If our virtues hinder us from salvation, discard them, since they have become evil to us. The slave to virtue finds the way as little as the slave to vices.

In the passage on the desert, Jung finds himself on a dream of his own self, led by his soul, into solitude, and away from mankind. The desert is symbolised as a place in which Jung encounters with himself. The desert is representing a place which is burning and infertile, where the creative power of desire is absent. The spirit of the times cultivates events, men and thoughts, but now the spirit of the depths turns to the things of the soul. Only the soul enters in there, or the men that has become the self. Jung detached from his thoughts through turning his desire away from them. His self then became a desert.

Jung makes a speech in which walking on the desert shows his desires and intentions. His soul says to him that truth stands open only to those without intentions. Intention is a limitation, the exclusion of life, the cardinal lesson was that of allowing psychic events to happen of their own accord, letting things happen. Jung speaks of the action through no action. On the twenty-fifth night in the desert, Jung’s soul approached to him as a free standing being, separated from him. Jung’s soul talks to him about learning to accept the truth, even though is hard. In this chapter, Jung’s belief is to have overcome scorn, so he was nearer to his soul, and the desert became greener.

The spirit of this time considers itself extremely clever, like every such spirit. But wisdom is simpleminded. A clever person mocks wisdom, since mockery is his wisdom. In the desert we become aware of our simplemindedness. Cleverness couples itself with intention. Simplemindedness knows no intention. Increasing our cleverness will not save us from the spirit of this time, but by accepting what cleverness hates most, namely simplemindedness. This leads to the supreme being. Cleverness conquers the world, simplemindedness the soul.

In the chapter descent into hell in the future, Jung talks about the need to sacrifice a superior function in order to get at the libido necessary to activate the inferior functions. He dreams of going through a rock crack and deep into underground water. The writer talks about divine madness. According to him, we have become masters of the reality of the world, of our conscious. However, if we enter the world of the soul, we fire like a madman, and a doctor would consider us mad.

Jung talks about sick delusions. The first one is that one in which the spirit of the depths can no longer stay down and forces a man to speak in tongues instead of in human speech, and makes him believe that he is himself the spirit of the depths. The second delusion is that one in which the spirit of this time dies, not leaving man and surface to deny the spirit of the depths. What Jung means is that the spirit of the depths is ungodly, same for the spirit of this time, and that only the balance is godly.

Who can withstand fear when the divine intoxication and madness comes to him? Love, soul and god are beautiful and terrible. The ancients brought over some of the beauty of god into this world, and this world became so beautiful that it appeared to the spirit of this time to be fulfilment, and better that the bosom of the godhead. The frightfulness and cruelty of the world lay under wraps and in the depths of our hearts. With the spirit of the depths we witness horror, the hero slain, the beetle of darkness and resurrection, death for renewal. The sun of the night rises, and the struggle of night and light commences. But it is from those depths and surface that a new life emerges within us.

In another point of his, Jung expresses that the events looked from outside are always the same, but looked from inside, they are always new. We create the meaning of events, so what is to come becomes apparent and our life can flow again. The meaning of events which means the meaning you give, is the way to salvation, and it comes from the possibility of life in this world that you create. So on one side we have the meaning of events and in the other the supreme meaning. The god is standing between events and the soul. The god is the mediator of life, the way, the bridge and the ongoing across.

Everyone takes part in murdering; the sun of the depths shines in the after murder and the thousand serpents want to devour the sun. The source of blood that follows the shrouding of the sun is also the source of the new life. The sacrificers sacrifice their brothers, when in reality they are sacrificing themselves. People kill the brave, the hero, they take aim at there and do not know that with this they mean themselves. They don’t know, they sacrifice the hero in themselves, and because they don’t know, they sacrifice their courageous brother. As long as you prefer to kill your brother than to look at your inner self, the time is not ripe. Frightful things must happen until men grow ripe. If the hero in you is slay, then the sun of the depths rises in you, glowing from afar, and from a dreadful place.

What the murdered hero means? Those nameless men who in your day have murdered a prince are blind prophets who demonstrate in events what then is valid only for the soul. Through the murder of princes we will learn that the prince in us, the hero, is threatened.

Our ruler is the spirit of these times, which rules and leads in us all. It is the general spirit in which we think and act today. He is of frightful power, since he has brought immeasurable good to this world and fascinated men with unbelievable pleasure. But the nameless spirit of the depths evokes everything that man cannot. Incapacity prevents further ascent. Greater height requires greater virtue. We do not possess it. We must first create it by learning to live with our incapacity. We must give it life. We must gain our inner capacity. The heroic on you is that you are ruled by the thought that this or that is good, that this or that performance is indispensable, this or that cause is objectionable… Therefore, you sin against incapacity. But incapacity exists. As day requires night and night requires day, so meaning requires absurdity and absurdity requires meaning. Meaning is a moment and a transition from absurdity to absurdity, and absurdity only a moment and a transition from meaning to meaning.

In the passage the splitting of the spirit, Jung states that he must become hell in the desert. He feels that has become a monster, a monstrous animal who has exchanged his humanity. Jung’s soul explains to him that the path through the spirit of the depths is light, even though it goes through darkness. This light is not of this world. He believed that a struggle happened on you where you became murdered and the murderer, a civil war inside you. Your thoughts became murder and the fear of death, which spread like poison. That is what happened with people: the murder of one is the poisonous arrow that flew into hearts of men and kindled fiercest war.

Through history, we have always been seeking the goat that should bear our sin, hence why Jung speaks of the murder of the hero. Instead, Jung felt that had to kill himself if he could solve the riddle. He said he went through a torment unto death and he felt certain that he must kill himself, if he could not solve the riddle of the murder of the hero. If men kill their princes, they do so because they cannot kill their gods, and because they do not know that they should kill the gods in themselves.

The image of the antichrist, which has come down to us from the ancients, announces the new god, whose coming the ancients had foreseen. This antichrist is pictured as the negative aspects hidden in your unconscious, this unconscious part of yourself which is so hard to experience and to accept. Jung states that rain is the great stream of tears that will come over the peoples, the tearful flood of released tension after the constriction of death and 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.

In the passage the conception of the god, Jung explains about the God he believes all of us have in ourselves. He states that when the prince had fallen, the spirit of the depths opened his vision and let him become aware of the birth of this new god. This god in himself which is represented as the divine child, approached him out of the terrible ambiguity, the hateful-beautiful, the evil-good, the laughable-serious, the sick-healthy, the inhuman-human and the ungodly godly. It is a divine god that comprehend all attributes and qualities, because infinite has no qualities and englobe them all. Jung understood that the god whom we seek is in the absolute beauty, goodness, seriousness, elevation, humanity or even in godliness. But this divine god is much more. He understood that the new god is in the relative. This new god had experienced also hell, so all possible opposites were included in it. Even Christ have to walk to hell to become the antichrist before becoming god. An example of this mixture of good and evil found all together is experienced by soldiers right before the Great war. Jung experienced this beauty and joy coming over men when the depths unleashed the Great War. The beginning started with love and brotherly feelings amongst soldiers in each side.

Jung though reminds us that hell and heaven are attractive and can become our cage. He states that he who journeys to hell also becomes hell; therefore do not forget from whence you come. The depths are stronger than us; so do not be heroes, be clever and drop the heroics, since nothing is more dangerous that to play the hero. Be sure on your journey to take golden cups full of the sweet drink of life, red wine, and give it to the dead matter, so that it can win life back. The dead matter will change into black serpents. Do not be frightened, the serpents will immediately put on the sun of your days, and a night with wonderful will-of-the-wisps will come over you. Jung also states that hell is when from a positive you see the opposite, but the deepest hell is when it is no hell, but a cheerful heaven. He mentions about the ambiguity of the god: he is born from a dark ambiguity and rises to a bright ambiguity. Ambiguity is therefore the way to life. The Christian god is love, but not ambiguity. The divine child Jung believes we have all on our inner world is ambiguous. Love is the way of life, but your love is only on the way of life if you have a left and a right. The one arose from the melting together of the two. He was born as a child from my own human soul, which had conceived him with resistance like a virgin.

On another note of his, Jung states that the hero, which is perfection, is the enemy of the god. The gods envy the perfection of man, because perfection has no need of the gods, but since no one is perfect, therefore we need the gods. The gods love perfection because it is the total way of life. But the gods are not with him who wishes to be perfect, because he is an imitation of perfection. On the same line, if we set a god outside ourselves, he tears us loose from the self, since the god is more powerful than we are. Our self falls into privation. But if the god moves into the self, he snatches us from what is outside us. We arrive at singleness in ourselves. So the god becomes communal in reference to what is outside us, but single in relation to us no one has our god, but our god has everyone, including myself.

Jung continues saying that selfish desire ultimately desires itself. You find yourself in your desire, so do not say that desire is vain. If you desire yourself, you produce the divine son in your embrace with yourself. Your desire is the father of the god, your self is the mother of the god, but the son is the new god, your master. Jung states the importance of focussing on yourself, to find the god in yourself. If you are in yourself, you become aware of your incapacity. You will see how little capable you are of imitating the heroes and of being a hero yourself. So you will also no longer force others to become heroes like you, as they also suffer from incapacity. Incapacity, too, wants to live, but it will overthrow your gods.

In the passage named the Mysterium – Encounter, comes the appearance of Elijah, a living archetype who represented the collective unconscious and the self. In this passage also appears Elijah’s daughter Salome, an archetype of love, of Eros. Elijah is the archetype of logos, of events and experiences, of consciousness. Salome is the archetype of Eros. Elijah (a prophet) and Salome (a murderer) are described also as one since eternity. The presence of the snake is an indication of a hero-myth of Salome, the anima figure, blind because, though connecting the conscious 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.

Jung sees his deep interior as a volcano, that pusher out the fiery-molten mass of the unformed and the undifferentiated. Thus his interior gives birth to the children of chaos, of the primordial mother. Because he has fallen into the source of chaos, into the primordial beginning, he himself becomes smelted anew in the connection with the primordial beginning, which at the time is what has been and what is becoming.He comes to the primordial beginning of himself. As part of matter and the formation of the world, he also comes into the primordial beginning of the world in the first place.

What are the powers of his depths? The first one is predetermination, fore-thinking. Prometheus, who without determined thoughts brings the chaotic to form and definition, is the archetype symbolised by Elijah. The second power is pleasure, a force that desires and destroys forms without form and definition, which is the archetypal figure of Salome. The serpent connects the above and the below, it leads into the shadows but it has the functioning of the anima, it leads you into the depths. One cannot live with fore-thinking alone, neither with pleasure, it needs both. Those who think, base the world on thought, those who feel, on feeling. You find truth and error in both. The way of life writhes from right to left and vice-versa like the serpents. The serpent is an adversary and a symbol of enmity, but also a wise bridge. Jung believes the introverts are led by the power of thinking and the extroverts by the power of feeling.

In the passage titled instruction, Jung says that desire without fore-thinking gains much but keeps nothing. If pleasure is united with fore-thinking, the serpent lies before them. To succeed in something, you first need to deal with the resistance and difficulty, otherwise joy leaves behind pain and disappointment. Fore-thinking is the procreative, love is the receptive. Both are beyond this world. Here are understanding and pleasure, we only suspect the other. If fore-thinking and pleasure unite in oneself, a third arises form them, the divine son, who is the supreme meaning, the symbol, the passing over into a new creation. You do not yourself become the supreme meaning of the symbol, but the symbol becomes in yourself such that it has its substance, and you yours. Thus you stand like Peter in worship before the miracle of the transformation and the becoming real of the god in you.

The image of the hero was set up for all in every ape through the appetite for imitation. Therefore the hero was murdered, since we all have been aping him. Do you know why you cannot abandon apishness? For fear of loneliness and defeat. To live oneself means to be one’s own task. It will be no joy but a long suffering, since you must become your own creator. Just as you are not damaged through living in a partly chaotic world, so too you are not damaged if you live in your partly chaotic thought world. Thoughts are natural events that you do not possess and whose meaning you only imperfectly recognise. Likewise, you change those things of the world that, not being useful in themselves, endanger your welfare. Proceed likewise with your thoughts. Nothing is complete, and much is in dispute. The way of life is transformation, not exclusion. Well-being is a better judge that the law.

In the passage called resolution, Jung’s struggle between doubt and desire shows as great. The spirit of the depths wants the struggle of the Great War to be understood as a conflict in every man’s own nature. Since after the death of the hero our urge to live can no longer imitate anything, it therefore goes into the depths of every man and excites the terrible conflict between powers of the depths. Fore-thinking is singleness, love is togetherness. Both need one another, and yet they kill one another, they go mad, and one lays the blame on the other. If one-half of mankind is at fault, then every man is half at fault. But he does not see the conflict in his own soul, which is however the source of the outer disaster. If you are aggravated against your brother, think that you are aggravated against the brother in you, that is, against what is in you that is similar to your brother.

Love and fore-thinking are in one and the same place. Love cannot be without fore-thinking and vice versa. Man is always too much in one or the other. This comes with human nature. This is a conflict between opposing functions. From the union of fore-thinking and pleasure the divine in us can be released. Love, which is released from our innermost, is not pleasure, which can be separated from love releasing it by self-sacrifice.

May the frightfulness become so great that it can turn men’s eyes inward, so that their will no longer seeks the self in others but in themselves. We serve the spirit of this time, and believe that we are able to escape the spirit of the depths. But the depths do not hesitate any longer and will force us into the mysteries of Christ. It belongs to this mystery that man is not redeemed through the hero, but becomes a Christ himself. It is the way of the perfection of the mystery of Christ, so that people learn self-sacrifice. The new god embraces the principles, unites them, the death of Christ, a new god who subdued daimones in his hand. Fundamentally, we are terrified of ourselves and therefore we prefer to run to all others rather than to ourselves.

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

In one of his reflections, Jung has this dream about a castle guard and the red one coming by horse. The red one arrives to the castle, enters it and starts a conversation with the former, in which the castle guard seems to know that the red one is a pagan type from their time, perhaps member of alchemy. He judges him on a superstitious way, using the scriptures to judge by appearance. The conversation between the red one and the I, which represents Jung, goes around the inability to avoid Christianism in the world, and the belief amongst western man in Christ and in suffering, death and resurrection.

Surely the Red one was the devil, Jung’s devil. That is, he was his joy, the joy of the serious person, who keeps watch alone on the high tower: his red-coloured, red-scented, warm bright red joy. Not the secret joy in his thoughts and his looking, but that strange joy of the world that comes unsuspected like a warm southerly wind with swelling fragrant blossoms and the phase of living. A kind of joy of springlike type, which picks up men like a wave and drives them forth. Whoever tastes this joy forgets himself.

Jung confronts his evil and behaves with him as with a real person. This he learned in the mysterious: to take seriously every unknown wanderer whose personally inhabits the inner world, since they are as real because they are effectual. Jung had a devil on him with who he spoke. He believed that we all must have a conversation with the devil on us. A religious conversation is inevitable with the devil, since he demands it, if one does not want to surrender to him unconditionally. One of the lessons from this encounter is that it is important having an understanding of the devil, which is the other you. What Jung does to reach the devil in him is to find agreement on dancing, which is seen as joy, therefore humanising the devil in him.

In another of his dreams, Jung finds himself in a story about finding a scholar in a castle in the middle of a lake, where Jung stays for a night. He meets the scholar’s daughter, who is hidden in the castle out of love. She is connected to Salome, the scholar to Elijah. The old scholar and his pale daughter are a distorted likeness of the mysterious.

The writer explains that man should seek the masculine in women and vice-versa. Women should assume the masculine in themselves. If we pay close attention, we will see that the most masculine man has a feminine soul, and the most feminine woman has a masculine soul. It is required the integration of the anima for the man and of the animus for the woman for the development of the personality. The most difficult thing is to remain beyond the gendered and yet remain within the human. The psychologist also states: if no outer adventure happens to you, then no inner adventure happens to you either. The part that you have taken over from the devil-joy, this is, leads you into adventure. Jung says that in this way you will find your lower as well as your upper limits. It is necessary for you to know your limits. Learn your limits by reaching them. One never knows them in advance, but one sees and understands them only when one reaches them, and this happens to us only if we have balance. Without balance we transgress our limits without noticing what has happened to us. We achieve balance, however, only if we nurture our opposite. But that is hateful to us in our innermost core, because it is not heroic.

Jung tells us also that if we take a piece of joy from the devil and set off on adventures with it, we accept our pleasure. But pleasure immediately attracts everything we desire, and then we must decide whether our pleasure spoils or enhances us. If we remain with ourselves, as a man who is himself and not of the devil, then we will remember our humanity. We will not behave towards women per se as a man, but as a human being, that is to say, as if we were of the same sex as her.

On another passage named one of the lowly, Jung states that at our low point we are no longer distinct from our fellow beings. We are not ashamed and do not regret it. Since in so far as we live the life of our fellow beings and descend to their lowliness. We also climb into the holy stream of common life, where we are no longer an individual on a high mountain, but a fish among fish, a frog among frogs. As a drop in the water, we take in the current, ebb and flow.

Our heights are our own mountain, which belongs to us and us alone. If we live our own life, we do not live the common life, which is always continuing and never-ending, the life of history and the inalienable and ever present burdens and products of the human race. There we live the endlessness of being, but not the becoming. Becoming belongs to the heights and is full of torment. How can we become if we never are? Therefore we need our bottommost, since there we are. But therefore we need our heights, since there we become. To be that which we are is the bath of rebirth. In the depths, being is not in unconditional persistence but an endlessly slow growth.

Jung says in this just mentioned passage that the knowledge of death came to him that night from the dying that engulfs the world. He saw how we live towards death, how the swaying golden wheat sinks together under the scythe of the reaper, like a smooth wave on the sea beach. Thus, the fear of death drove him towards singleness. He did not live there, but he became aware of life and was happy, since in singleness he was one who becomes, and has overcome death. He overcame death through overcoming common life. He did not live his individual being, since he was not what he was, but what he became.

One who becomes, becomes aware of life, whereas one who simply exists never will, since he is in the midst of life. He needs the heights and singleness to become aware of life. But in life he becomes aware of death. And it is good that we become aware of death. And it is good that we become aware of collective death, since then we know why our singleness and our heights are good. Our heights are like the moon that luminously wanders alone and through the night looks eternally clear. Sometimes it covers itself and then we are totally in the darkness of the earth, but time and again it fills itself out with light. The death of the earth is foreign to it. Motionless and clear, it sees the life of the earth from afar, without enveloping haze and streaming oceans.

At some point in the book Jung claims that the moon is dead. His soul went to the moon, to the preserver of the souls. Thus the soul moved towards death. He went into the inner death and saw that outer dying is better than inner death and he decided to die outside and to live within. For that reason he turned away and sought the place of the inner life.

In another of Jung’s dreams, he goes to the desert where he finds him with a book of the gospel and nothing more. Jung starts asking what he does, and an anchorite states that is just there and that time passes so quickly. Jung can’t believe how time can pass so quickly and the anchorite, because of this, thinks that Jung is a pagan. They both start a conversation around gods and words, the anchorite saying that Philo’s interpretation in which he stated that words were gods was incorrect. The anchorite is in the process of unlearning the logos which he believes was given to man.

By reading this part of the book, it seems clear that restraint becomes imperative for Jung, since it protects him from the countless possibilities of interpretation. The word is protective magic against the daimones of the unending, which tear at our soul and want to scatter us to the winds. We are saved if we can say at last: that is that and only that. We speak the magic word, and the limitless is finally banished. Because of that men seek unmake words.

He who breaks the wall of words overthrows gods and defiles temples. The solitary is a murderer. He murders people because he thus thinks and thereby breaks down ancient sacred walls. He calls up the daimones of the boundless and he sits, leans back, and does not hear the groans of mankind, whom the fearful fiery smoke has seized. And yet you cannot find the new words if you do not shatter the old words. But no one should shatter the old words, unless he finds the new word that is a firm rampart against the limitless and grasps more life in it than in the old word. A new word is a new god for old men.

The darkness does not comprehend the word, but rather man; indeed, it seizes him, since he himself is a piece of the darkness. Not from the word up to man: that is what the darkness comprehends is your mother; she behooves reverence, since the mother is dangerous. She has power over you, since she gave birth to you. Honour the darkness as the light, and you will illuminate your darkness. Learning and going through the darkness, make of you simplicity and this is how all started.

In the passage named Dies II, Jung has a dream about encountering the four horses with gold wings carrying Helios and 1000 black serpents crawling swiftly into their holes, the holes of the gorge where Jung’s stood. Jung finds himself in the desert and not knowing what prayers to recite. In the morning, he starts worshipping the beetle, animal that symbolises eternity in ancient Egypt. Then he starts worshipping desert stones. It seems as if everything is animated. Then he asks to find the anchorite, who is in his deep reflection. They discuss with the anchorite about gods such as Seth, Osiris or Horus, from Ancient religion, and then the anchorite explains that all religions are antecedents of other religions, that all religions do not differ in their innermost essence.

He who comprehends the darkness in himself, to him the light is near. He who climbs down into his darkness reaches the staircase of the working light, fire-maned Helios. So Jung feels deep in the darkness gorge but at the same time feels the animation of all life. If we watch closely, we will see what we have never seen before, namely that things live our life and that they live off us: the rivers bear our life to the valley, one stone falls upon another with our force, plants and animals also grow through us and they are the cause of our death. A leaf dancing in the wind dances with us: the irrational animal guesses our thought and represents us. The whole earth sucks its life from us and everything reflects us again. We can suck the immensity of the small and the great into ourselves, and we will become emptier and emptier, since immense fullness and immense emptiness are one and the same.

What happened to every desirous solitary also happened to Jung: the devil came to him with smooth tongue and clear reasoning and knew the right word at the right moment. He lured him to his desire. Jung had to appear to him as the devil, since he had accepted his darkness. He ate the earth and drank the sun, and became a greening tree that stands alone and grows.

In the passage titled Death, the author dreams of the northern lands, where swamps, water all around, an unending horizon, draped by gray clouds leads to the womb, where the sky and the sea are fused into infinity. In the last corner of the world stands the black one, a heartless cold individual, he is the cold-stone, the snow high mountains and the most extreme frost of the outer space. The Black one asks: what leads you here to me, you living matter? The living are never guests here. Well, they all flow past here sadly in dense crowds, all those above in the land of the clear day who have taken their departure, never to return again. But the living never come here. What do you seek here? Jung was basically led by the path to the unconscious to where there are no individuals, but all are the same. Jung sees multitudes of humans, animals, forests, etc, going into violent streams and waves that take them into the mist. He goes to that blackness and in 1914 sees a sea of mortal blood. When he comprehended his darkness, a truly magnificent night came over him and his dream plunged him into the depths of the millennia and from it his phoenix ascended.

One needs death to be able to harvest the fruit. Evil is relative, partly avoidable, partly fate; the same goes for virtue and one often does not know which is worst. Virtues and vices are brothers, but we are in this struggle between them, alone without our gods. With the power of daimones, we seize the evil, and our virtues cross over to him. Life and death must strike a balance in our existence. We men need a large slice of death, since too much incorrectness lives in us, and too much correctness died in us. What stays in balance is correct, what disturbs balance is incorrect. But if balance is attained, then that which preserves it is incorrect and that which disturbs it is correct.

In the passage the remains of earlier temples, Jung has a dream on flowery meadows where the author encounters the tall Red one, who became old, and the Ammonius. Conversation starts in which both, the Red one and Ammonius complained at Jung’s trickery to him.

When Jung had seen death and all the terrible solemnity that is gathered around it, and had become ice and night himself, an angry life and impulse rose up in him. His thirst for the rushing water of the wisdom began to clink with wine glasses; from afar he heard drunken laughter, laughing women and street noise. Dance music, stamping and cheering poured forth from all over; and instead of the rose-scented south wind, the reek of the human animal streamed over him. Luscious-lewd whores giggled and rustled along the walls, wine fumes and kitchen steam and the foolish cackling of the human crowd drew near in a cloud. Hot sticky tender hand reached out of him, and he was swaddled in the covers of a sickbed. Jung says: I was born into life from below, and I grew up as heroes do, in hours rather than years. And after I had grown up, I found myself in the middle land, and saw that it was spring.

He basically became a new individual who had absorbed from Ammonius and from the Red one, he had absorbed both lives; a green tree grew from the ruins of the temple.

Jung explains that he who believes is really living his ideals, or believes he can live them, suffers from delusions of grandeur and behaves like a lunatic in that he stages himself as an ideal: but the hero has fallen. Ideals are mortal, so one should prepare oneself for their end.

On the next passage, named first day, Jung has a dream in which he goes through a mountain range and along a valley, steeping on red super hot and white icy cold surfaces, and finding Izdubar, a character with a horned Helmet, armour and a double ax, who surprisingly is trembling of fear. He is heading to the western lands, which are the lands of the death (in Ancient Egyptian). During this dream, he finds Izdubar, who is shocked by science, by the impossibility of reaching the sun, of becoming immortal. Jung talks about the innovation of nature and Izdubar talks about divine irrationality. Then Jung sets to the East, where the sun rises, as he finds difficult dealing with darkness. Jung wanders towards the South and finds the unbearable heat of solitude with himself. Afterwards, Jung wanders towards the North and finds the cold death from which all the world dies. He withdrew to his western land, where the men are rich in knowing and doing, and he began to suffer from the sun’s empty darkness. And he threw everything from him and wandered towards the East, where the light rises daily. He went to the East like a child. He did not ask, he simply waited. Jung aims at reaching the East but finds the one coming from the East, who now Jung possessed. The one seems to be Jung’s other half, and none of them fully function without the other.

The author speaks about the importance of oppositions. The outer opposition is an image of his inner opposition. Once he realises this, he remains silent and think of the chasm of antagonism in his soul. The opposites: old and new, lightness-darkness, dwarfish and enormous, etc, find one another on the border between morning and evening. On the same line, divinity and humanity should remain preserved, if man should remain before the god, and the god remain before man. The high-blazing flame is the middle way, whose luminous course runs between the human and the divine.

The ancients called the saving word the logos, an expression of divine reason. So much unreason was in man that he needed reason to be saved. If one waits long enough, one sees how the gods all change into serpents and underground dragons in the end. This is also the fate of the logos: in the end it poisons us all. In time, we were all poisoned, but unknowingly we kept the one, the powerful one, the eternal wanderer in us away from the poison. We spread poison and paralysis around us in that we want to educate all the world around us into reason.

Following from what has just been mentioned, in the passage titled Second Day, Jung has a dream in which Izdubar and himself find themselves trapped in between the West and the East and they cannot move westwards. Jung realises that Izdubar is only a fantasy and to save both of them , he approaches Izdubar and explains this to the hero. By becoming a fantasy, the hero, who is lamed, could be turned into a light load and be carried by Jung on his back. They started moving forward towards the East, then they found the Red one, who use to be powerful but now is represented as a shepherd.

What might be the interpretation of this? Jung’s god found salvation. He was saved precisely by what one would actually consider fatal, namely, by declaring him a figment of the imagination. This was obviously a serious mistake, since this was precisely what saved the god. He did not pass away, but became a living fantasy, whose working Jung could feel on his own body: his inherent heaviness faded and the hot and cold way of pain no longer burned and froze his soles. The weight no longer kept him pressed to the ground, but insisted the wind carried him lightly like a feather, while he carried the giant.

One used to believe that one could murder a god. But in this dream the god was saved, he forged a new axe in the fire, and plunged again into the flood of light of the East to resume his ancient cycle. But we clever men crept around lamed and poisoned, and did not even know that we lacked something. But Jung loved his god, and took him to the house of men, since he was convinced that he also really lived as a fantasy, and should therefore not be left behind, wounded and sick and hence he experienced the miracle of his body losing its heaviness when he burdened himself with the god.

Jung believes we should not bear Christ as he is unbearable, but we should be Christ, for then our yoke is swift and our burden easy. This tangible and apparent world is one reality, but fantasy is the other reality. So long as we leave the god outside us, apparent and tangible, he is unbearable and hopeless. But if we turn the god into fantasy, he is in us and is easy to bear. Take the god with you, then you know where he is. If you do not have him with you in the western lands, he will come running to you at night with clanking armour and a crushing battle axe.

Above all you must conquer death. He who conquers needs weapons, but what else you can conquer? You cannot conquer the sun, you cannot conquer the sea, nor the snow of the poles, nor the sands of the desert… Armour is enough to protect you from fools who still suffer from the need to conquer. God’s armour will make you invulnerable and invisible to the worst fools.

Consider that your fellow men are animals without knowing it. So long as they go to pasture, or lie in the sun, or suckle their young, or mate with each other, they are beautiful and harmless creatures of dark mother earth. But if the god appears, they begin to rave, since the nearness of god makes people rave. They tremble with fear and fury and suddenly attack one another in fratricidal struggles, since one senses the approaching god in the other. So conceal the god that you have taken with you. Let them rave and maul each other. Your voice is too weak for those raging to be able to hear. Thus do not speak and do not show the god, but sit in a solitary place and sing incantations in the ancient manner.

The author represents the god as an egg, a primordial being, which we have to incubate in ourselves. The egg is born from the Eastern sun, and Jung is the mother and father without knowing it. In the passage about incantations Jung speaks of preparing himself for the coming of the god within, a god bringing duality and contradictions, a fire coming from the darkness from which one needs to protect himself, and at the same time, be ready to accept and understand him.

Jung says: my god, I love you as another loves the unborn whom she carries in her heart. Grow in the egg of the East, nourish yourself from my love, drink the juice of my life so that you will become a radiant god. We need your light oh child. Since we go in darkness, light our paths. May your fire warm the coldness of our life. We do not need your power but life.

Jung asked for earth, heaven, the sea, the wind, the fire, with all people, kings, with all wisdom, with all hearts and heads, to find the primordial embryo. After all these incantations, he goes on to state that he hasn’t reached god yet, the enclosing of the god in the egg is not opened. Only he who loves the god can make him fall, and the god submits to his vanquisher and nestles in his hand and dies in the heart of him and promises him birth.

Following from this statement we reach the passage the opening of the egg, where Jung speaks of the incubation and reales of Izdubar god, from the egg and on a red carpet, wondering in the universe with stars up and down. The comparison with the sun is made as it rises and sets like a birth from an egg from writings of Led Frobenius. Comparison of the god born from the egg, with the sun, that cannot be grasped. Izdubar appears healed from his eggs. The renewed god signifies a renewed attitude, that is, a renewed possibility for intensive life, a recovery of life, because psychologically god always denotes the greatest valve, thus the greatest sum of the libido, the greatest intensity of life, the optimum of psychological life’s activity.

After the birth of the sun-god, hell is opened, the afterbirth, all the dragons and monstrous serpents of eternal emptiness follow behind the divine son. What remains of human nature when the god has become mature and has seized all power? Everything incompetent, everything powerless, everything eternally vulgar, everything adverse and unfavourable, everything reluctant, diminishing, exterminating, everything absurd, everything that the unfathomable night of matter encloses itself, that is the afterbirth of the god and his hellish and dreadfully deformed brother.

The god suffers when man does not accept his darkness. Consequently men must have a suffering god, so long as they suffer from evil. To suffer from evil means: you still love evil and yet love it no longer. So long as your god suffers, you have sympathy with him and with yourself. You thus spare your hell and prolong his suffering. If you want to make him well without engaging in secret sympathy with yourself, evil puts a spoke in your wheel, the evil whose form you generally recognise, but whose hellish strength in yourself you do not know.

What you do destroy is the image that you have formed in yourself. For it is this image that clings to your force. You will need evil to dissolve your formation, and to free yourself from the power of what this image fetters your strength. Evil is to be accepted, not hated or loved, recognising that it needs to have its share of life. Through haste and increased willing and action we want to escape from emptiness and also from evil. But the right way is that we accept emptiness, destroy the image of the form within us, negate the god, and descend into the abyss and awfulness of matter.

Man stands between emptiness and fullness. If his strength combines with fullness, it becomes fully formative. There is always something good about such formation. If his strength combines with emptiness, it has a dissolving and destructive effect, since emptiness can never be formed, but only strives to satisfy itself at the cost of fullness. Combined, this human force turns emptiness into evil. If your force shapes fullness, it does so because of its association with fullness. But to ensure that your formation continues to exist, it must remain tied to your strength.

When you notice that your strength is coming to an end and desire sets in, you must withdraw evil from what has been formed into your emptiness; through this association with the emptiness you will succeed in dissolving the formation in you. You will thus regain your freedom, in that you have saved your strength from oppressive association with the object. So long as you persist with the standpoint of the good, you cannot dissolve your formation, precisely because it is what is good. You cannot dissolve good with good. You can dissolve good only with evil. For good also leads ultimately to death through its progressive binding of your force. You are entirely unable to live without evil.

Your shaping first produces an image of your formation within you. This image remains in you and it is the first and unmediated expression of your shaping. It then produces precisely through this image an outer one, which can exist without you and outlive you. Your strength is not directly linked to your outer formation, but only through the image that remains in you. When you set about dissolving your formation with evil, you do not destroy the outer shape or else you would be destroying your own work. But what you do destroy is the image that you have formed in yourself. For it is this image that clings to your force. You will need evil to dissolve your formation, and to free yourself from the power of what has been, to the same extent which this image fetters your strength. Hence their formation causes many good persons to bleed to death, because they cannot attend to evil in the same measure. The better one is and the more attached one is to one’s formation, the more one will lose one’s force. But what happens when the good person has lost their force completely to their formation? Not only will they seek to force others into the service of their formation with unconscious cunning and power, but they will also become bad in their goodness without knowing it, since their longing for satisfaction and strengthening will make them more and more selfish. But because of this the good ones will ultimately destroy their own work , which will become their enemies, because they will have alienated them. But you will also secretly begin to hate who ever alienates you from yourself against your own wishes, even if this were in the best interest of things. Unfortunately, the good person who has bound his strength will all too easily find slaves for his service, since there are more than plenty who yearn for nothing more strongly than to be alienated from themselves under a good pretext.

On the passage titled the sacrificial murder Jung states that his sacrifice has been accomplished: the divine child, the image of the god’s formation, is slain, and he has eaten from the sacrificial flesh. The child, that is, the image of the god’s formation, not only bore his human craving, but also encloses all the primordial and elemental powers that the sons of the sun possess as an unalienable inheritance. But as the creation of a god is a creative act of highest love, the restoration of our human life signifies an act of the below. This is a dark and great mystery. Man cannot accomplish this act solely by himself, but is assisted by evil, which does it instead of man. But man must recognise its complicity in the act of evil. He must bear witness to this recognition by eating from the bloody sacrificial flesh. Through this act he testifies that he is a man, that he recognises good as well as evil, and that he destroys the image of the god’s formation through withdrawing his life force, with which he also dissociates himself from the god. This occurs for the salvation of the soul, which is the true mother of the divine child.

Jung says: but the way is my own self, my own life founded upon myself. The god wants my life. He wants to go with me, sit at the table with me, work with me. Above all he wants to be ever present, but I’m ashamed of my god. I don’t want to be divine but reasonable. The divine appears to me as irrational craziness. I hate it as absurd disturbance of my meaningful human activity. It seems as unbecoming sickness which has stolen into the regular course of my life. Yes, I even find the divine superfluous.

Your soul is your own self in the spiritual world. Just as you create your children that separates from you and live their own lives, your create your soul, who separates from you. However, you must try uniting it with your conscious, to bring the divine child that is on you.

On the passage called Divine Folly, a dream about Jung choosing a path to a library is described. In there, the author found a librarian and out of discomfort Jung asks for a book “The Imitation of Christ” from Thomas Akempis, a book that advices to interiorise Christ and to live out an inner spiritual live. The librarian and the writer start a conversation around Christianity and Nietzsche, around inferior or superior feelings.

Jung says the way to the divine on you is through Christ. This is the model, as we have stood under his law since antiquity, first outwardly, then inwardly. Liberating from Christianity is delusion, Christ is the way. The way of Christ ends on the cross, hence we are crucified with him in ourselves. With him, we wait until we die for our resurrection. We are imitating Christ, but if I am truly to understand Christ, I must realise how Christ actually lived only his own life, and imitated no one. He did not emulate any model. Jung understood that the prophets of this time and the imitation of Christ followed different paths. The latter demanded bearing, the former demands discarding, Christ demands submission and the prophets the will.

In the passage named nox secunda, Jung continues with his book and finds an obese female cook who has read the same book. There, Jung starts dreaming awake and finds Ezequiel and Anabaptist on his day dream, who wander as death and in peace as they haven’t lived their animal side life. He wakes up and finds the cook and other people coming, pushing him into a van. There, Jung reads a passage from the book stating that while on life temptations are out there for everyone. Temptation is devil.

He who never lives his animal must treat his brother like an animal. Abase yourself and live your animal so that you will be able to treat your brother correctly. You will thus redeem all those roaming dead who strive to feed on the living and do not turn anything you do into a law, since that is the hubris of power.

If you break through this most everyday of walls, the overwhelming stream of chaos will flood in. Chaos is not single, but an unending multiplicity. It is not formless, otherwise it would be single, but it is filled with figures that have a confusing and overwhelming effect due to their fullness. These figures are the dead, not just your dead, that is, all the images of the shapes you took in the past, which your ongoing life has left behind, but also the thronging dead of human history, the ghostly procession of the past, which is an ocean compared to the drops of your own life span.

When the time has come and you open the door to the dead, your horrors will also afflict your brother, for your countenance proclaims the disaster. Hence withdraw and enter solitude, since no one can give you counsel if you wrestle with the dead. Do not cry for help if the dead surround you, otherwise the living will take flight, and they are your only bridge to the day. Live the life of the day and do not speak of mysteries, but dedicate the night to bringing about the salvation of the dead. We seek salvation and hence we need to revere what has become and to accept the dead, who have fluttered through the air and lived like bats under our roofs since time immemorial.

Break the Christ in yourself so that you may arrive at yourself and ultimately at your animal which is well behaved in its herd and unwilling to infringe its laws. May it suffice in terms of transgression that you do not imitate Christ, since thereby you take a step beyond it. Christ brought salvation through adeptness, and ineptitude will save you. Your poverty in what has become you will thus deliver into the wealth of the futures.

We are a blinded race. We live only on the surface, only in the present, and think only of tomorrow. We deal roughly with the past in that we do not accept the dead. We want to work only with visible success. Above all we want to be paid. We would consider it insane to do hidden work that does not visibly serve men. There is no doubt that the necessity of life forced us to prefer only those fruits one can taste. But who suffers more from the tempting and misleading influence of the dead than those who have gone wholly missing on the surface of the world? There is one necessary but hidden and strange work, a major work, which you must do in secret, for the sake of the dead. He who cannot attain his own visible field and vineyard is held fast by the dead, who demand the work of atonement from him. And until he has fulfilled this, he cannot get to his outer work, since the dead do not let him. He shall have to search his soul and act in stillness at their behest and complete the mystery, so that the dead will not let him. Do not look forward so much, but back and into yourself, so that you will not fail to heal the dead.

In the passage named nox tertia, a conversation of Jung with his soul happens in which the soul tells Jung to remain better silent than to use words and to accept his madness. Jung has a conversation on the importance of attaining chaos for the balance to bring to life the inner son god to become. Christ does not understand this, as he does not understand the madness in him. Jung says: accept chaos as it is the foundation. For him who has seen 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. If you accept the lowest in you, suffering is unavoidable, since you do the base thing build up what lay in ruin.

Just as the disciples of Christ recognised that god had become flesh and lived among them as a man, we now recognise that the anointed of this time is a god who does not appear in the flesh; hence he can be born only through the spirit of men as the conceiving womb of the god.

Our spirit has become an impertinent whore, a slave to words created by men and no longer the divine word itself. If I accept the lowest in me, I lower a seed into the ground of hell. The seed is invisibly small, but the tree of my life grows from it and conjoins the below with the above. At both ends there is fire and blazing embers. Between the unbearable fires grows your life. You hang between these two poles. He who could achieve the connection between the two poles sees the tree of life, whose roots reach into hell and whose top touches heaven. He also no longer knows differences. Who is right? What is genuine? What is good? What is correct? He knows only one difference: the difference between below and above. For he sees that the tree of life grows from below to above, and that it has its crown at the top, clearly differentiated from the roots. To him this is unquestionable. Hence he knows the way to salvation.

He who wants to accept himself must also really accept his other. One cannot be enough since the other is in us. And if we were content with one, the other would suffer great need and afflict us with its hunger, but we misunderstand this hunger and still believe that we are hungry for the one and strive for it even more adamantly.

If others mock me, it is nevertheless them doing this, and I can attribute guilt to them for this, and forget to mock myself. But he who cannot mock himself will be mocked by others. So accept your self-mockery so that everything divine and heroic falls from you and you become completely human. What is divine and heroic in you is a mockery to the other in you. For the sake of the other in you, set off your admired role which you previously performed for your own self and become who you are.

Jung believes he has been baptised with impure water for rebirth. A flame from the fire of hell awaited him above the baptismal basin. He has bathed himself with impurity and he has cleansed himself with dirt. He received him, accepted him, the divine brother, the son of the earth, the two-sexed and impure, and overnight he has become a man. His two incisors have broken through and light down covers his chin. He captured, overcame, embraced him. He demanded much from Jung and yet brought everything with him. For he is rich. The earth belongs to him. But his black horse has parted from him.

Now comes this point in the book in which Philemon is represented in Jung’s life. Jung’s description of him is as the joy of the earth: “the daimones become reconciled in the one who has found himself, who is the source of all four streams, of the source-bearing earth. From his summit waters flow in all four directions. He is the sea that bears the sun; he is the mountain that carries the sun; he is the father of all four great streams; he is the cross that binds the four daimones. He is the incorruptible seed of nothingness, which falls accidentally through space. This seed is the beginning, younger than all endings”. Later Philemon came to be a figure similar to an ancient Egyptian Ka (an embodied soul). The king’s Ka was his earthly form.

On the passage named the three prophecies, a conversation between Jung and his soul happens in which his soul invites Jung to accept darkness and that instead of grasping the whole history of civilisation, he should focus on his small garden. The misery of war, the darkness of magic and the gift of religion all belong together, mean the unceasing of chaos and its power, just as they also mean the binding of chaos.

Jung says that a free man knows only free gods and evils that are self-contained and take effect on account of their own force if they fail to have an effect , that is their own business, and you can remove this burden from yourself. But if they are effective, they need neither your protection nor your care, nor your belief. Thus you may wait quietly to see whether they work. But if they do, be clever, for the tiger is stronger than you. You should be able to cast everything from you, otherwise you are the slave of a god. Life is free and chooses its way. It is limited enough, so do not pile up more limitation, hence he cut away everything confining.

On the passage the gift of magic, a conversation between Jung and his soul happens in which his soul asks Jung to abandon his solace and to embrace magic instead. The soul states that solace is only a human condition, not found in nature. The black rod of magic is given to Jung on the condition he abandons solace.The rod is hard as iron and cold as ice. Jung wants to accept the magic and the most powerful magic lives in this rod. The inexplicable occurs. You would very much like to forsake yourself and defect possibility. You would very much like to risk every crime in order to steal for yourself the mystery of the changeful. But the road is without end.

On the passage titled the way of the cross, Jung speaks of the three fold nature of the soul, differentiating the serpent, the soul and the bird. This three fold occurs when the soul is not conjoined in the above and the below, the serpent and or on another living animal, living nature daimonically, arousing fear and longing, the human soul living forever within us, and the celestial soul, as such swelling with the gods, far from you and unknown, appearing in the form of a bird.

He who goes to himself, climbs down. No one rises above himself, who has not turned his most dangerous weapon against himself. One who wants to rise above himself shall climb down and hoist himself to the place of sacrifice. But what must happen to a man until he realises that outer visible success, that he can grasp with his hands, led him astray. What suffering must be brought upon humanity, until man gives up satisfying his longing for power over his fellow man and forever wanting others to be the same. How much blood must go on flowing until man opens his eyes and sees the way to his own path and himself as the enemy, and becomes aware of his real success. You can offer no more precious a sacrificial meal to your god than yourself.

The word is a symbol. Our freedom does not lie outside us, but within us. One can be bound outside, and yet one will still feel freedom through powerful actions, but one creates inner freedom only through the symbol. The symbol is the word that cries out of the mouth, that one does not simply speak, but that rises out of the depths of the self as a word of power and great need and places itself unexpectedly on the tongue. It is an astonishing and perhaps seemingly irrational word, but one recognises it as a symbol since it is alien to the conscious mind. If one accepts the symbol, it is as if a door opens leading into a new room whose existence one previously did not know. But if one does not accept the symbol, it is as if one carelessly went past this door; and since this was the only door leading to the inner chambers, one must pass outside into the streets again, exposed to everything external.

Our salvation is a way through lots of gates / symbols. The symbol becomes from the union of good and evil, a becoming that seems as the birth from the womb. Pregnancy comes about through voluntary copulation. It goes on through willing attention. But if the depths have conceived, then the symbol grows out of itself and is born from the minds befits a god.

Jung says: in the morning, when the new sun rises, the word steps out of my mouth, but it is murdered lovelessly, since I did not know that it was the saviour. The newborn child grows quickly, if I accept it and immediately it becomes my charioteer. The word is the guide, the middle way which easily oscillates like the needle on the scales. The word is the god that rises out of the waters each morning and proclaims the guiding law to the people. Outer laws and outer wisdom are eternally insufficient, since there is only one law and one wisdom, the god renews himself each night.

The point of origin is where the mind and the will stand still; it is a state of suspension that evokes our outrage, our defiance and eventually our greatest fear. For we can see nothing anymore and can no longer want anything. Or at least that is how it seems to Jung. The way is a highly peculiar standstill of everything that was previously movement, it is a blind listening and groping. One is convinced that one will burst. But the resolution is born from precisely this tension, and it almost always appears where one did not expect it. But what is the resolution? It is always something ancient and precisely because of this something long, since passed away, comes back again in a changed world, it is next. To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation. This is the creation of the new, and that redeems us. Salvation is the resolution of the task. The task is to give birth to the old in a new time. The soul of humanity is like the great wheel of the zodiac that rolls along the way. Everything that comes up in a constant movement from below to the heights was already there. There is no part of the wheel that does not come around again. Hence everything that has been streams upward there, and what has been will be again. For there are all things which are the inborn properties of human nature. It becomes to the essence of forward movement that what was returns. Only the ignorant can marvel at this. Yet the meaning does not lie in the eternal recurrence of the same, but in the manner of its recurring creation at any given time.

A wise man does not want to be a charioteer, for he knows that will and intention certainly attain goals but disturb the becoming of the future. Futurity grows out of us; we do not create it, and yet we do, though not deliberately and wilfully, but rather against will and intention. The ancients devised magic to compel fate. They needed it to determine outer fate. We need it to determine inner fate and to find the way that we are unable to conceive.

On the passage titled the magician, Jung finds Philemon with his wife. Philemon is one of those magicians who has not yet managed to banish old age, but who lives it with dignity, and his wife can only do the same. Why is Philemon a magician? The magician has preserved in himself a trace of primordial paganism, he possesses a nature that is still unaffected by the Christian splitting, which means he has access to the unconscious, which is still pagan, where the opposites still lie in their original native state, beyond all sinfulness, but, if assimilated into conscious life, produce evil and good with the same primordial and consequently daemonic force. Therefore he is a destroyer as well as a saviour. This figure is therefore preeminently suited to become the symbol carrier for an attempt at unification.

Jung has a conversation with Philemon, in which the former asks the latter to teach his magic. Philemon states that in the past he taught how to reach magic to few that were sick and disadvantaged. Philemon states that if he teaches his magic, Jung would laugh at him. He also says that even though he dies, it will be rediscovered. Magic is inborn in men. There are same magical customs in different places and times. Philemon asks: why are you so determined about learning more about magic, if you claim that you have left your reason at home? Or would you not consider consistency part of reason?

Magic does not follow ordinary understanding.
Magic is the negative of what one can know.
With magic, there is nothing to understand, eludes comprehension.

Magic is neither to be taught nor learned. Magicians tend to be of old age and this is because reasoning needs to be abandoned to acquire magic. Jung can’t understand that has to wait to old age to acquire magic, and Philemon responds that stupidity might be a step to reach magic. Magic accords with unreason, which one cannot understand. The world accords with reason and unreason. The magical is neither good nor evil, but both of them. Magic is dangerous since what accords with unreason confuses, allures and provokes; and we are always its first victim.

Where reason abides, one needs no magic. Hence our time no longer needs magic. Only those without reason needed it to replace their lack of reason. But it is thoroughly unreasonable to bring together what suits reason with magic since they have nothing to do with one another. But it is another thing for whoever has opened the chaos in himself. We need magic to be able to deceive or invoke the messenger and the communication of the incomprehensible.

The practice of magic consists in making what is not understood understandable in an incomprehensible manner. The magical way is not arbitrary, since that would be understandable, but it arises from incomprehensible grounds. Besides, to speak of grounds is incorrect, since grounds concur with reason. Nor can one speak of the groundless, since hardly anything further can be said about this. The magical way arises by itself. If one opens up chaos, magic also arises.

One can teach the way that leads to chaos, but one cannot teach magic. One can only remain silent about this, which seems to be the best apprenticeship. Jung says that one indeed needs reason for the magical translation of the not-understood into the understandable, since only by means of reason can the understandable be created. No one can say how to use reason, but it does arise if one tries to express only what an opening of chaos is. Reason takes up only a very small share of magic. Age and experience are needed to reach magic. The rash desirousness and fear of youth, as well as its necessary virtuousness, disturb the secret interplay of god and the devil. You are then all too easily torn to one side or the other, blinded or paralysed.

To reach magic, a certain solitude and isolation are inescapable conditions of life for the well being of oneself and of the other, otherwise one cannot sufficiently be oneself. A certain slowness of life which is like a standstill will be unavoidable. The uncertainty of such a life will most provably be its greatest burden, but still we must unite the two conflicting powers of our soul and keep them together in a true marriage until the end of our life, since the magician is called Philemon and his wife Baucis. We hold together what Christ kept apart in himself and through his example in others, since the more the one half of our being strives towards the good, the more the other half journeys to hell.

In a passage within the same chapter, Jung says: truly, oh Philemon, I did not see that your hut is a temple, and that you, Philemon and Baucis, serve in the sanctuary. This magical power allows itself to be neither taught not learned. Either one has it or does not have it. Now I know your final mystery: you are a lover. You have succeeded in uniting what has been sundered, that is, binding together the above and below. Have one not known this for a long time? Yes, we knew it, no, we did not know it. It has always been this way, and yet it has never been thus. Why did I have to wander such long roads before I came to Philemon, if he was going to teach me what has been common knowledge for ages? Philemon is the host of the souls, who loves his own soul. His wisdom is the wisdom of serpents, cold, with a grain of poison, yet healing in small doses. His magic paralyses and therefore makes strong people, who tear themselves away from themselves. But do they love him, are they thankful, lover of his own soul? Or do they curse him for his magical serpent poison? They keep distance, shaking their heads and whispering together.

Jung sought to grab hold of him and tear it out of him, since the Christians have learned to devour their god. And how long will it take for what happens to the god also to happen to man? Jung looked into the vast land and heard nothing but wailing and saw nothing but men consuming each other.

Jung states: Philemon, you are not Christian and no pagan, but a hospitable inhospitable one, a host of the gods, a survivor, an eternal one, the father of all eternal wisdom. Philemon, you are not Christian, since you nourish yourself from yourself and force men to do the same. You leave me in a solitary darkness, where there is nothing for me to either see or look for. You are no light that shines in the darkness, no saviour who establishes an eternal truth and thus extinguishes the nocturnal light of human understanding. Philemon, the wisdom of things to come; therefore you are old, oh so very ancient, and just as you tower above the present in futurity, and the length of your past is immeasurable. You are legendary and unreachable. You were and will be, returning periodically. Your wisdom is invisible, your truth is unknowable, entirely untrue in any given age and yet true in all eternity, but your pour out living water, from which the flowers of your garden bloom, a starry water, a dew of the night. I understand you, oh Philemon, you are a true lover, since you love your soul for the sake of men, because they need a king who lives from himself and owes no one gratitude for his life. They want to have you thus. You fulfil the wish of the people and you vanish.

The writer believes that if the projected conflict of the self is to be healed, it must return into the soul of the individual, where it had its beginnings in an unconscious manner. He who wants to be the master of this descent must celebrate a last supper with himself, and eat his own flood, which means that he must recognise and accept the other in himself.

Where is truth and faith? Where is warm trust? You and all this between men but not between men and serpents, even if they are serpents’ souls. But wherever there is love, the serpent-like abides also. Christ himself compared himself to a serpent, and his hellish brother, the antichrist, is the old dragon himself. What is beyond the human that appears in live has the nature of the serpent and the bird, and the serpent often enchants the bird, and more rarely the bird bears off the serpent. Man stands in between. What seems like a bird to you is a serpent to the other, and what seems like a serpent to you is a bird to the other. Therefore you will meet the other only in a human form. If you want to become, then a battle between bird and serpent must breakout. And if you only want to be, you will be a man to yourself and to others. He who is becoming belongs in the desert or in a prison, for he is beyond the human. If men want to become, they behave like animals. No one saves us from the evil of becoming, unless we choose to go through hell.

After this struggle, well explained by Jung, a dialogue between Jung and his soul happens, in which Jung says that the two opposites have been united, and nothing happened, surprising the writer. Jung’s soul sees himself still as the real master of life, and he states that the absolute was always adversed to the living. Then the psychologists states: arise then, son of darkness and stench! How firmly you cling to the rubble and waste of the eternal cesspit! I do not fear you, though I hate you, you brother of everything reprehensible in me. Today, you shall be forged with heavy hammers so that the gold of the gods will spray out of your body. Your time is over, your years are numbered, and today your day of judgement has gone to smithereens. May your casing burst asunder, with our hands we wish to take hold of your seed, the golden one, and free it from slithery mud. May you freeze, devil, since we will cold-forge you. Steel is harder than ice. You shall fit into our form, you thief of the divine marvel, you mother ape, you who stuff your body with egg of the gods and thereby make yourself weighty. Hence we curse you, though not because of you, but for the sake of the golden seed.

Jung seems to get closer to salvation, reaching the unconscious. Then, a character named the Cabiri asks him to kill his brain which is entangled by reason. The Cabiri seems to be a representation of the primordial being. The entanglement is human’s madness, the sword is to be used, which in alchemy is an instrument used for sacrifice, with divisive and separative functions. The Cabiri states that they need destruction since they themselves are the entanglement. He who wishes to conquer new land needs to bring down the bridges behind him.

Then Jung has a conversation with a man that was hanged because he killed his family. He is obviously dead, and hasn’t seen any devil in hell. With the introduction of this character, Jung takes the opportunity to describe the devil. He explains that the devil is the eternal adversary, because you can never reconcile personal life with absolute life. They are differences. Just as little as you make the day the opposite of the year or the bushel the opposite of the cubit. The devil is the sum of the darkness of human nature.

Jung believes is no longer threatened by the dead, since he accepted their demands through accepting the serpent. But through this he has also taken over something of the dead into his day. Yet it was necessary, since death is the most enduring of all things, that which can never be cancelled out. Death gives us durability and solidity. So long as he wants to satisfy only his own demands, he is personal and therefore living in the sense of the world. But when he recognises the demands of the dead in him, and satisfies them, he gives up his earlier personal striving and the world takes him for a dead man. When everything was completed in him, he unexpectedly returned to the mysteries, to that first sight of the spirit and desire. Just as he had achieved pleasure in himself and power over himself, Salome had lost pleasure in herself but learned love for the other, and Elijah had lost the power of his wisdom, but he had learned to recognise the spirit of the other. Salome thus lost the power of temptation and has become love.

This is the time when Jung has given birth to a son in his inner soul, which is evil and now regrets this, so starts repudiating Philemon for directing him into giving birth to this monster on him. Jung speaks of frogs, who will enjoy nocturnal nights’ songs with devil songs. The myth commences then, the one that need only be lived, not sung, the one that sings itself. He subject himself to the son, the one engendered by sorcery, the unnaturally born, the son of the frogs, who stands at the waterside and speaks with his fathers and listens to their nocturnal singing. Truly he is full of mysteries and superior in strength to all men. No man has produced him, and no woman has given birth to him.

The absurd has entered the age old mother, and the son has grown in the deepest ground. He sprang up and was put to death. He rose again, was produced anew in the way of sorcery, and grew more swiftly than before. He gave him the crown that unites the separated and so he unites the separated for him. He gave him the power and thus he commands since he is superior in strength and cleverness to all others. He who did not grow like a man, and yet has the form of a man, is capable of binding the below and the above together.

Jung tells to himself: now I must love the beauty of the ugly, the spirit of the foolish, and the strength of the weak. I must advice the stupidity of the clever, must respect the weakness of the strong and the meanness of the generous, and honour the goodness of the bad. Where does that leave mockery, contempt and hatred? They went over to the son as a token of power. His mockery is bloody, and how contemptuously his eyes flash! His hatred is a singing fire! Enviable one you son of the gods, how can one fail to obey you? He broke me in two, he cut me up. He yokes the separated. Without him I would fall apart, but my life went on with him. My love remained with me.

In the passage named scrutinies, Jung produces a self-criticism as a confrontation with his shadow. He says: whoever looks into the mirror of the water will see first of all his own image. Whoever goes to himself risks a confrontation with himself. The mirror does not flatter, it faithfully shows whatever looks into it; namely the face we never show to the world because we cover it with the persona, the mask of the actor. But the mirror lies behind the mask and shows the true face. This confrontation is the first test of courage on the inner way, a test sufficient to frighten off most people, for the meeting with ourselves belongs to the more unpleasant things that can be avoided as long as one can project everything negative into the environment. But if we are able to see our own shadow and can bear knowing about it, then a small part of the problem has already been solved: we have at least brought up the personal unconscious.

Men who have understanding should not just believe, but should wrestle for knowledge to the best of their ability. Belief is not everything, but neither is knowledge. Belief does not give us the security of the wealth of knowledge. Desiring knowledge sometimes takes away too much belief. Both must strike a balance. But it is also dangerous to believe too much, because today everyone has to find his own way and encounters in himself a beyond full of strange and mighty things. He could easily take everything literally with too much belief and would be nothing but a lunatic. The childishness of belief breaks down in the face of our present necessities. We need differentiating knowledge to clear up the confusion which the discovery of the soul has brought in. Therefore it is perhaps much better to await better knowledge before one accepts things all too believingly.

The journey continues. Jung doubts of accepting solitude. His soul tells him not to disbelief on the madness of solitude. His soul speaks of abandonment, of leaving be, the size of the sacrifice does not matter. Jung’s soul advices him to go his way, the divine way, no matter what happens. To be in solitude is the way to the divine, madness is the way. Jung fear is his disbelief and doubts towards being in solitude. Jung’s souls speaks: it is true today as it was yesterday. Never forget you are a man and therefore you must bleed for the goal of humanity. Practice solitude assiduously without grumbling so that everything will in time become ready. You should become serious, and hence take your leave from science. There is too much childishness in it. Your way goes toward the depths. Science is too superficial, mere language, mere tools. But you must set to work.

Nor that it would be a beautiful or a pleasant thing to live with one’a self, but it serves the redemption of the self. Incidentally, can one give oneself up? With this, one becomes one’s own slave. That is the opposite of accepting oneself. If one becomes one’s own slave, and this happens to everyone who surrenders himself, one is lived by the self. One does not live one’s self; it lives itself. At the same time, the self-forgetting virtue is an unnatural alienation from one’s own essence, which is thus deprived of development. It is a sin to deliberately alienate the other from his self by means of one’s own virtuousness, for example, through saddling oneself with his burden. This sin rebounds on us.

For those that search for redemption, no beauty is to be found on it. We shouldn’t use the other for our own redemption. The other is not stepping stone for our feet. It is far better that we remain with ourselves. We must presumably often go to ourselves to re-establish the connection with the self, 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 endeavours, what we neglect secretly into our actions toward others.

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, 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. The I is our conscious and the self is our whole totality, conscious and unconscious. God’s power resides on the self. We must draw the self on our side, therefore we must wrestle with the god for the self, as god makes it dissolve into the boundless.

We can’t though remain in the state of the divine to reach the self, 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. Jung believes he must serve his self. He must win it in this way. But He must win it so that his life will become whole. For it seems to him 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 to mankind. If we carry ourselves, we relieve mankind of ourselves and heal ourselves from the god.

Jung says: do you believe that one who wounds himself unsparingly does the other a good deed with his love? No, of course you don’t believe it. You even know that he only teaches the other how one must wound oneself, so that he can compel others to express sympathy.

Therefore Jung believed he had to serve himself. He must will it in this way. But he must win it so that his life will become whole. For it seems to him 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 he carry himself he relieves mankind of himself and heal himself from the god. He must free himself from the god, since the god he experienced is more than love; he is also hate, he is also the abomination; he is more than wisdom, he is also meaninglessness; he is more than powerlessness…

Then the writer had this dream where dead women asked Jung to drink the blood and to be buried so he could resurrect in a new life, drinking the blood of HAP, the son of the divine and to be buried like if dead was a condition for a new life. In this book Jung criticises Christian religion, for which god only knows power and creation, he commands and you act. According to this religion, our anxieties are laughable. There is only one road, the military road of the godhead.

In the dream mentioned previously, Jung addresses his soul: touch the earth, press your hand into matter, shape it with care. The power of matter is great. Did HAP not come from matter? Is matter not the filling of emptiness? By forming matter, I shape your salvation. If you do not doubt the power of HAP, how can you doubt the power of its mother, matter? Matter is stronger than HAP, since HAP is the son of the earth. The hardest matter is the best; you should form the most durable matter. This strengthens thought.

At this statement, Philemon responded: I begin with nothingness. Nothingness is the same as the fullness. In infinity full is as good as empty. Nothingness is empty and full. You might just as well say anything else about nothingness, for instance, that it is a white, or black, or that it does not exist, or that it exists. That which is endless and eternal has no qualities. We call this nothingness or fullness the Pleroma. This is a term from Gnosticism, a state of fullness, where the pairs of opposites, are together, then when they become, it is either day or night. Therein both thinking and being cease, since the eternal and endless possess no qualities. No one is in it, for he would then be distinct from the Pleroma, and would possess qualities that would distinguish him as something distinct from the Pleroma.

The pairs of opposites are the qualities of the Pleroma that do not exist, because they cancel themselves out. As we are the Pleroma itself, we also have all these qualities in us. Since our nature is grounded in differentiation, which means firstly that these qualities are differentiated and separate in us; therefore they do not cancel each other out, but are effective. Thus we are the victims of the pairs of opposites. The Pleroma is rent within us. Secondly, these qualities belong to the Pleroma, and we must possess and live them only in the name and under the sign of differentiation. We must differentiate ourselves from these qualities. They cancel each other out in the Pleroma, but not in us. Distinction from them saves us. When we strive for the good or the beautiful, we forget our essence, which is differentiation, and we fall subject to the spell of the qualities of the Pleroma, which are the pairs of opposites. But if we remain true to our essence, which is differentiation, we differentiate ourselves from the good and the beautiful, and hence from the evil and ugly. And thus we do not fall under the spell of the Pleroma, namely into nothingness and dissolution. At bottom, therefore, there is only one striving, namely the striving for one’s own essence. If you had this striving, you would not need to know anything about the Pleroma and its qualities, and yet you would attain the right goal by virtue of your own essence.

Effective emptiness is the essence of the devil. God and devil are the first manifestations of nothingness, which we call the Pleroma. It makes no difference whether the Pleroma exists or not, since it cancels itself out completely. Not so creation, in so far as god and the devil are created beings, they do not cancel each other, but stand one against the other as effective opposites. We need no proof of their existence. It is enough that we have to keep speaking about them. Even if both were not, creation would forever distinguish them anew out of the Pleroma on account of their distinct essences. This inseparability is most intimate and, as you know from experience, as indissoluble in your life as the Pleroma itself, since both stand very close to the Pleroma in which all opposites are cancelled out and united.

Jung says that the process of individuation is in general the process of the formation and particularisation of human beings; especially the development of the psychological individual, as a being distinct from generality, from collective psychology. Individuation therefore is a process of differentiation having for its goal the development of the individual personality.

After these concepts Philemon appears again, this time speaking of the god Abraxas: how should I name it otherwise? If the overpowering essence of events in the universe and in the hearts of men were law, I would call it law. Yet it is also no law, but chance, irregularity, sin, error, stupidity, carelessness, folly, illegality.

Man shall differentiate himself both from spirituality and 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 superhuman daimones that reveal the world of the gods. They affect us more than the gods since they are closely akin to our essence. If you do not differentiate yourselves from sexuality and from spirituality, and do not regard them as an essence both above and beyond you, you are delivered over to them as qualities of the Pleroma. Man is weak, and community is therefore indispensable. If your community is not under the sign of the mother, it is under the sign of the phallos. Absence of community is suffering and sickness. Community in everything is dismemberment and dissolution. Differentiation leads to singleness. Singleness is opposed to community. But because of man’s weakness with regard to the gods and daimones and their invincible law, community is necessary, not for man’s sake, but because of the gods. The gods drive you to community. Insofar as the gods impose community upon you, it is necessary. In the community every man shall submit to others, so that the community be maintained, for you need it. In singleness every man shall place himself above the other, so that every man may come to himself to avoid slavery.

Jung gathered from Philemon’s words that he must remain true to love to cancel out the commingling that arises through unlived love. To cancel out the commingling is a bondage that takes the place of voluntary devotion. Scattering or dismembering arises, as Philemon had taught him, from voluntary devotion. It cancels out the commingling. Through voluntary devotion he removed binding ties. Therefore he had to remain true to love, and, devoted to it voluntarily, he suffer the dismembering and thus attain bonding with the great mother, that is, the stellar nature, liberation and bondage to men and things. If he is bound to men and things, he can neither go on with his life to its destination nor can arrive at his very own and deepest nature. Nor can death begin in him as a new life, since he can only fear death.

It is difficult to remain true to love since love stands above all sins. He who wants to remain true to love must also overcome sin. Nothing occurs more readily than failing to recognise that one is committing a sin. Overcoming sin for the sake of remaining true to love is difficult, so difficult that your feet hesitates to advance.

Jung says: why do men not see their stupidity? Stupidity is a daughter of the god. Therefore men cannot stop murdering, since thus they serve the serpent of the god without knowing it. It is worth giving one’s life for the sake of serving the serpent of the god. Hence be reconciled! But it would be far better to live despite the god. But the serpent of the god wants human blood. This feeds it and makes it shine. Not wanting to murder and die amounts to deceiving the god. Whoever lives has become one who deceives the god. Whoever lives intents his life for himself. But the serpent wants to be deceived, out of hope for blood. The greater the number of men who stole their lives from the gods, the greater the harvest feeding the serpent from the blood-sown field. The god grows strong through human murder. The serpent grows hot and fiery through human murder.

Based on the book The Red Book by Karl Gustav Jung

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