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nyxshadowhawk · 2 months

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The Red Book, Liber Primus Part Three

Previous section: https://nyxshadowhawk.tumblr.com/post/740006966416588801/the-red-book-liber-primus-part-two

Picking right up where I left off...

The Splitting of the Spirit

So, now it’s time for Jung’s own Shadow work.

To journey into Hell is to become Hell itself.

Damn. You know, I’d never considered that before, but seeing it written out like this really helps it to sink in. Journey into Hell, and you take on its essence — you become monstrous.

[The desert] seems inhabited by magical beings who murderously attach themselves to me and daimonically change my form. I have evidently taken on a completely monstrous form in which I can no longer recognize myself. It seems to me that I have become a monstrous animal form for which I have exchanged my humanity.

I’m reminded of the concept of Beasthood in Bloodborne, in which drinking the blood of gods turns one into a beast that constantly craves more blood. It’s outright stated at multiple points in the game that the beast is part of man’s inherent nature, a “horrific and unwelcome instinct deep within the hearts of men.” I know exactly what it feels like to transform into this beast-possessed self in meditation, to temporarily suspend one’s humanity and become a savage thing. So, I understand what Jung is going through here.

What follows is a dialogue between Jung and his soul, in which he is indignant at the darkness and animality and stupidity of it all. It seems very backwards to Jung that he should be getting this instead of knowledge, truth, and light. The soul answers obtusely, frustrating him further. It insists that its way is still that of knowledge and light (because Shadow work is necessary for enlightenment), but Jung doesn’t understand this yet. Jung cries out that he has worshipped the soul like a god, but now it wears the face of a devil, of “eternal mediocrity” (showing that Jung associations devilishness/shadow with banality and mundaneness). Everything feels insane and pointless, and he doesn’t like it. It’s counterintuitive that this should be the path towards knowledge and enlightenment. He engages in civil war with himself.

It’s so wild to witness someone else’s Shadow work, and straight from the horse’s mouth. I’m watching him go through almost the exact same thing that I went through, but the things that trigger Jung are not the same things that trigger me. I have much less of an issue with the idea of banality or meaninglessness, and Jung doesn’t seem to have any of my issues around power or sex. Everyone’s Shadow looks different, but the process is always the same.

It’s also interesting to me that Jung’s soul basically becomes his Shadow in this scene — it “wears the mask of a devil, a frightful one” — but he still calls it the soul and not the Shadow. So, does that mean that the Shadow is an aspect of the soul? My own Shadow appears to me as a man, so does that mean that he’s actually my soul, but wearing a Shadowy face? He only wears that face some of the time, not all the time. He’s both my beast and my prince. That’s partly because my Shadow aspects all have to do with power, but it also hearkens back to the duality of sacrificer and sacrificed.

I felt myself transformed into a rapacious beast. My heart glowered in rage against the high and beloved, against my prince and hero, just as the nameless one of the people, driven by greed for murder, lunged at his dear prince. Because I carried the murder in me, I foresaw it. Because I carried the war in me, I foresaw it. I felt betrayed and lied to by my king. Why did I feel this way? He was not as I had wished him to be. He was other than I expected. He should be the king in my sense, not in his sense. He should be what I called ideal. My soul appeared to me hollow, tasteless and meaningless. But in reality what I thought of her was valid for my ideal.

People project onto their leaders. It can be hard for you to accept that your leaders are still people, that they are still flawed, and that they have Shadows of their own. Instead, you want the leader to fulfill your agendas and make the world in your image; to be king according to your idea of what a king is and what a king should do, instead of the king’s own. When the king inevitably demonstrates that he is, in fact, a unique person who has his own personality and agenda, the people feel betrayed and turn on him. Think of all the complaints about politicians not being who you thought they were when they get into office! During campaigns, they pander to the projections, and then their real self inevitably shows because they’re people and not ideas.

Because of all these projections, leaders tend to reflect the unconscious of the people they rule to some extent, especially if the leader is elected by those people. However, sometimes the leader ends up being the pure, concentrated Shadow of the society they rule. Whenever the Shadow goes unaddressed, it takes over, often in spectacular fashion. There’s an obvious example of one such leader in Jung’s time and place. There’s also an example of one such leader in my time and place. If a writer of dystopian fiction created a character that mixed together every bad stereotype of Americans into one person, then named that character after McDonalds and a word that means both “to overcome” and “fart,” I would tell them that they were being way too ham-fisted and writing a strawman instead of a person. Who the hell writes this shit?!

The Murder of the Hero

In a dream, Jung (helped by a colonial “savage” stereotype of a dark-skinned indigenous person) slays the hero Siegfried, who rides on a chariot of bone. Siegfried is blond and blue-eyed, representing all that is good and noble in Jung’s mind. (The footnotes say that Jung didn’t actually feel attached to Siegfried, but this was the image his mind latched on to.) Jung is so disturbed by this dream that he feels like he must take his own life if he does not figure out what it means. He feels better after the spirit of the depths says, “The highest truth is one and the same with the absurd.” I completely agree with that — often the most profound truths delivered by the divine are weird and nonsensical when understood using human logic. This is one of those things.

There is an illustration of this dream:

Jung sort of goes back and forth on what this dream means throughout The Red Book, but his eventual interpretation seems to be that the heroic ideal needs to die in order for one to confront the reality of the Shadow. Here’s his interpretation from Memories, Dreams, Reflections:

…suddenly the meaning of the dream dawned on me. "Why, that is the problem that is being played out in the world." Siegfried, I thought, represents what the Germans want to achieve, heroically to impose their will, have their own way. "Where there is a will there is a way!" I had wanted to do the same. But now that was no longer possible. The dream showed that the attitude embodied by Siegfried, the hero, no longer suited me. Therefore it had to be killed. After the deed I felt an overpowering compassion, as though I myself had been shot: a sign of my secret identity with Siegfried, as well as of the grief a man feels when he is forced to sacrifice his ideal and his conscious attitudes. This identity and my heroic idealism had to be abandoned, for there are higher things than the ego's will, and to these one must bow.

This isn’t what my interpretation of the hero’s death would be. My immediate thought was that heroes or kings always have to die as part of the alchemical process, because that represents ego death, and resurrection always follows. But it is significant that Jung himself is not the one who dies, he’s the one who shoots, accompanied by his Shadow. The idea of indigenous people as “savages” is full-on colonial racism, but it’s also a textbook example of Shadow-projection: Europeans assume that indigenous people are animalistic, barbaric, and violent, and then proceed to commit centuries’ worth of heinous atrocities against them. The Europeans attack the very thing they fear in themselves, and thus become it. So in a way, it’s… uh… progressive?… that Jung recognizes the “savage” symbol as an aspect of himself, identifying with it instead of projecting onto it.

Meanwhile, Siegfried represents everything that Jung perceives is good about himself:

Oh that Siegfried, blond and blue-eyed, the German hero, had to fall by my hand, the most loyal and courageous! He had everything in himself that I treasured as the greater and more beautiful; he was my power, my boldness, my pride. […] If I wanted to go on living, it could only be through trickery and cunning.

You can’t identify with the Shadow until you abandon the notion that you are purely good, beautiful, and noble. Now that Jung has destroyed the noble aspects of himself, he has to live ignobly, through trickery and cunning, i.e. as his Shadow.

The reason why it’s Siegfried in particular is because he represents idealized German-ness. Siegfried or Sigurd is a mythological hero from Germanic and Norse mythology, who slays the dragon Fafnir (and he is actually murdered in mythology, though not like this). Therefore, he’s someone to be admired and emulated. Plus, he’s blond. But, as Jung says in the next chapter, imitating the hero is not a good thing. In fact, it’s explicitly a bad thing, because imitating someone else prevents you from being yourself: “The hero must fall for the sake of our redemption, since he is the model and demands imitation. But the measure of imitation is fulfilled.” Beyond that, I think we can see something prophetic in the murder of Siegfried, the German ideal. If Jung interprets Siegfried as the Germans’ desire to “impose their will,” that is definitely not a heroic thing, and should be shot dead before it gets too far. Alternatively, one could say that the positive and flattering reputation of Germany is killed — I might have to brush up on my history, but if I remember correctly, Germany was on top of its game at the beginning of the twentieth century. Then Siegfried, the blond and blue-eyed German hero, is murdered. The ideal is dead. The world will see Germany’s Shadow. Boy will it ever.

Most of that interpretation is presented in the next chapter, though. In this chapter, Jung’s interpretation of Siegfried is as a projection of the divine:

…I had to kill my lord and God, not in single combat, since who among mortals could kill a God in a duel? You can reach your God only as an assassin, if you want to overcome him. But this is the bitterest for mortal men: our Gods want to be overcome, since they require renewal. If men kill their princes, they do so because they cannot kill their Gods, and because they do not know that they should kill their Gods in themselves.

I like this interpretation better, because it fits in with my general idea that spiritual death is required for rebirth and renewal. The idea that “our Gods want to be overcome” reminds me of Aly Seleem’s Bloodborne theory that the Great Ones want the player to kill them so they can ascend to a higher plane of existence. I’m still not sure if I completely agree with that theory, but this idea of killing God in oneself does make “Hunt the Great Ones. Hunt the Great Ones.” make more sense. Also interesting that God must be assassinated (boy, if only Bloodborne were that easy…) because there’s no other way to win against it — that reminds me of the Titans setting upon baby Zagreus while he’s distracted with toys.

The next section addresses alchemical inversion:

If the God grows old, he becomes shadow, nonsense, and he goes down. The greatest truth becomes the greatest lie, the brightest day becomes darkest night. As day requires night and night requires day, so meaning requires absurdity and absurdity requires meaning. Day does not exist through itself, night does not exist through itself. The reality that exists through itself is day and night. So the reality is meaning and absurdity. Noon is a moment, midnight is a moment, morning comes from night, evening turns into night, but everything comes from the day and morning turns into day.

Night and day are not separate things that exist by themselves. The reality is that both day and night exist and regularly turn into each other, so, they are one thing and not two things. The same is true of all other pairs of opposites. Each pair of opposites represents one thing, not two things.

Interestingly, Jung then makes a connection with Norse pagans:

Judge not! Think of the blond savage of the German forests, who had to betray the hammer-brandishing thunder to the pale Near-Eastern God who was nailed to the wood like a chicken marten. […] But their life force bade them to go on living, and they betrayed their beautiful and wild Gods, their holy trees and their awe of the German forests.

You know, I’ve always wondered, why did pagans abandon their gods for the sake of Christianity? I can understand the appeal of Christianity itself, especially early Christianity, but the mandate that only one god be worshipped seems intolerable to me now. I couldn’t imagine abandoning my gods for its sake. So why did they? It wasn’t all under duress. Sometimes the old gods were kept on as saints, and sometimes churches were built on the same holy sites, but it is not the same. As Jung said before, it lacks its madness. I appreciate that Jung can see that the old gods are beautiful and wild. They are. They still are.

After death on the cross, Christ went into the underworld and became Hell, so he took on the form of the Antichrist, the dragon.

Now this is interesting. This goes back to what Jung was saying before, “To journey into Hell is to become Hell itself.” If Christ journeyed into Hell, then he had to have become his hellish counterpart, the Antichrist. The idea of Christ and the Antichrist being one and the same being is utterly blasphemous by Christian standards, but it also seems really obvious. Of course Jesus would have a Shadow, and of course the thing literally called “Antichrist” would be it. I wonder why I’ve never considered that before.

Gods are unavoidable. The more you flee from the God, the more surely you fall into his hand.

Lol, this is certainly true in my experience.

I can understand Jung’s feelings of confusion and terror after having this murder dream. I actually had a dream like this, once. It’s the only dream I’ve ever had that possessed me with so much terror that it made me literally sit up in bed like in the movies, and like Jung, I had to process it before falling to sleep again (though thankfully it didn’t make me feel suicidal). In the dream, I was apprenticed to a wizard. There was another wizard whom my mother idolized as a spiritual teacher. My wizard told me to kill that other wizard, and while I usually trust my mother’s judgement, I obeyed my wizard and killed him (I don’t remember actually doing it, the dream cut to it having been done). My mother mourned his death. My wizard told me that we were not done, because the wizard’s hat and book still had evil magical power, and that I needed to destroy them. I felt a mounting sense of terror as I tried to acquire the hat and book, and it didn’t subside when I succeeded. My wizard told me to burn the hat and book, and to make the dead wizard’s familiars watch. That last bit was so sadistic that I bolted up in bed. Even after I woke, the terror still didn’t subside. Then I realized the truth: I had killed the wrong guy. My wizard was evil, the magic of the hat and book wasn’t dangerous, and my mother was right all along. Suddenly I felt completely at peace, and promptly went back to sleep. This remains the only truly Jungian dream I’ve ever had, and I still have no idea how to interpret it.

The Conception of the God

The ideas of this chapter are elaborated upon in Jung’s book Aion, in which he argues that the Age of Aquarius will bring the end of Christianity’s two-thousand-year-long spiritual supremacy in the Western world. That period of two millennia happens to coincide with the astrological age of Pisces, the sign of the fish, which is one of the earliest symbols of Christianity. In the coming astrological age, Jung argues, Christianity will begin (and arguably, has already begun) to lose its hold over the cultural consciousness, and the Shadows that it has repressed for so long will start to be addressed.

This chapter of The Red Book is about the conception of the new God of the coming astrological age. Jung says that this new God will be characterized by its synthesis of all dualities:

The divine child approached me out of the terrible ambiguity, the hateful-beautiful, the evil-good, the laughable-serious, the sick-healthy, the inhuman-human and the ungodly-godly. I understood that the God whom we seek in the absolute was not to be found in absolute beauty, goodness, seriousness, elevation, humanity or even in godliness. Once the God was there. I understood that the new god would be in the relative. If the God is absolute beauty and goodness, how should he encompass the fullness of life, which is beautiful and hateful, good and evil, laughable and serious, human and inhuman? How can man live in the womb of the God if the Godhead himself attends only to one-half of him?

This checks. It checks with everything I know about alchemy, in which the opposite principles of sulfur and mercury unite in the Chemical Wedding to produce a secret third thing, the Philosopher’s Stone, which is a perfect mix of both polarities. Jesus, as he is, is only one half of the equation. The new God is going to encompass both the light and the Shadow, the totality of existence and of the human soul. Haven’t I said this? I’m almost certain that I have said something to this effect in my answers before: Life is nuanced, so God is nuanced. The reason why I like my gods’ dark and terrifying sides is because they encompass the whole of life, with all of its aspects, and that this is more spiritually useful than focusing only on the good or light aspects of things. Dionysus in particular is a god that expresses and reconciles multiple dualities, like good/evil, above/below, male/female, life/death, divine/human. The Absolute must be all things, or it’s not the Absolute. To fixate only on the things that are light, good, and comfortable is insufficient.

Therefore after his death Christ had to journey to Hell, otherwise the ascent to Heaven would have become impossible for him. Christ first had to become his Antichrist, his underworldly brother. No one knows what happened during the three days Christ was in Hell. I have experienced it. The men of yore said that he had preached there to the deceased. What they say is true, but do you know how this happened? It was folly and monkey business, an atrocious Hell’s masquerade of the holiest mysteries.

I have to say, it’s pretty ballsy of Jung to say straight-up that he had the same harrowing experience as Jesus Christ and came out of it unscathed, but that’s also exactly what happened. He underwent the first part of the Great Work and descended into the Underworld, confronting and becoming his own Shadow, and finally rising to the surface again. This is a great and old Mystery, and one of the ones that I feel I’m familiar with. I’ve experienced it too.

Jung provides the reader with instructions for katabasis, which I’m once again going to transcribe in full:

If we do not have the depths, how do we have the heights? Yet you fear the depths, and do not want to confess that you are afraid of them. It is good, though, that you fear yourselves: say it out loud that you are afraid of yourselves. It is wisdom to fear oneself. Only the heroes say that they are fearless. But you know what happens to heroes. With fear and trembling, looking around yourselves with mistrust, go thus into the depths, but do not do this alone: two or more is greater security since the depths are full of murder. Also secure yourselves the way of retreat. Go cautiously as if you were cowards, so that you preempt the soul murderers. The depths would like to devour you whole and choke you in mud. 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 than to play the hero. The depths want to keep you; they have not returned very many up to now, and therefore men fled from the depths and attacked them. What if the depths, due to the assault, now change themselves into death? But the depths indeed have changed themselves into death; therefore when they awoke they inflicted a thousandfold death. We cannot slay death, as we have already taken all life from it. If we still want to overcome death, then we must enliven it. Therefore on your journey be sure to take golden cups full of the sweet drink of life, red wine, and give it to 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 out the sun of your days, and a night with wonderful will-o-the-wisps will come over you. Take pains to waken the dead. Dig deep mines and throw in sacrificial gifts, so that they reach the dead. Reflect in good heart upon evil, this is the way to the ascent. But before the ascent, everything is night and Hell. What do you think of the essence of Hell? Hell is when the depths come to you with all that you no longer are or are not yet capable of. Hell is when you can no longer attain what you could attain. Hell is when you must think and feel and do everything that you know you do not want. Hell is when you know that your having to is also a wanting to, and that you yourself are responsible for it. Hell is when you know that everything serious that you have planned with yourself is also laughable, that everything fine is also brutal, that everything good is also bad, that everything high is also low, and that everything pleasant is also shameful. But the deepest Hell is when you realize that Hell is also no Hell, but a cheerful Heaven, not a Heaven in itself, but in this respect a Heaven, and in that respect a Hell.

The Hero’s Journey is probably one of the most instantly-recognizable things to come out of Jungian psychology, but Jung kind of eviscerates the idea of the hero in The Red Book. If you try to be a hero — that is, if you try to match a particular ideal… well, you’ve seen what happens, haven’t you? The only way forward is to admit that you are not ideal, that you are dark and scary. You have no choice but to descend into your own Underworld and confront your own monsters. Bring a guide with you, and ensure you know the way out again, because the depths are hungry and they want to keep you — it’s not natural for souls to return from the Land of the Dead, so the Underworld will do everything it can to prevent you from leaving. The best thing is to be cautious and humble. Death itself cannot die (because it’s already dead, by definition), so the only way to overcome Death is to confront it with its opposite, which is life. When you get to the Underworld, the first thing you must do is reawaken dead matter with red wine (liquid life-force). The dead matter will turn into serpents that will blot out the sun. Sacrifice to the chthonic powers. Meditate upon evil.

That last bit in particular is counterintuitive, but it is the only way back up. That means allowing yourself to think, feel, do, and be everything that you normally want to disassociate from yourself. If you don’t want to be seen as evil, then you’ll be evil. If you don’t want to be seen as weak, then you’ll be weak. If you don’t want to be seen as foolish, then you’ll be foolish. And so on. You have to admit that you are responsible for every dark desire and evil impulse that you have had, that at least part of you actually does want to do evil things. Even if you feel compelled, even if you feel inclined to say “I did what I had to do” or some other half-assed justification, part of you does want to be evil. And that’s not some external force like demons or the Devil working on you, that is all you.

“Hell is when you know that everything serious that you have planned with yourself is also laughable, that everything fine is also brutal, that everything good is also bad, that everything high is also low, and that everything pleasant is also shameful.” This line once again addresses the general theme of inversion. In the Underworld, everything becomes its opposite, including everything about you — but all opposites are also the same thing. As above, so below. This line reminds me a lot of a similar, thematically-significant line from Macbeth: “Fair is foul and foul is fair.” The last inversion is that of Hell and Heaven itself, which brings to mind another very famous Early Modern English line, this time from Paradise Lost: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / can make a heav’n of Hell, a hell of Heav’n.”

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. Thus it corresponds to the image that the ancients have given to us.

Once again, a very alchemical image. Reminds me of this line from The Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine (I started doing an analysis of that ages ago, and I promise that I will get back to it): “But our Stone, as it has been bequeathed to me by the Ancients, is derived from two things, and one thing, in which is concealed a third thing.” The secred third thing is the Philosopher’s Stone, the Divine Child that unites all opposites and therefore becomes its own separate thing — neither red, nor blue, but purple.

Jung says how he worshipped his soul, believing her to be God, but he was actually worshipping the unborn God within the womb of the soul.

This section addresses the interpretation of the hero’s death as the death of an ideal:

The hero as we understand him has become an enemy of God, since the hero is perfection. The Gods envy the perfection of man, because perfection has no need of the Gods. But since no one is perfect, 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.

Again, really interesting that perfection is defined as a sort of opposite to divinity, instead of as divinity itself. Often, gods are defined as perfect beings, but here Jung places a sharp distinction between perfection and divinity. Here, perfection is defined as lacking any darkness, flaws, “incapacity,” or other Shadow traits. Gods are therefore not perfect, because gods are an even mix of conscious and Shadow traits. Perfection involves ignoring half of God. (This is probably why the Neoplatonic idea of gods as perfect beatific beings never really resonated for me.) Perfection is not only unattainable, it’s actually dangerous to try to achieve perfection. (A certain Dwarf in the Flask comes to mind.) The only thing one can really do is imitate it, and imitation amounts to nothing, because it makes you into a hollow facsimile of whatever you’re imitating, instead of self-actualized.

The new God laughs at imitation and discipleship. He needs no imitations and no pupils. He forces men through himself.

This God is no guru. He doesn’t instruct or preach. His worship is more experiential than theoretical. Worshipping him means being forced through oneself, forced to confront the internal world and the unconscious. You aren’t supposed to follow him, you’re supposed to follow yourself, and that’s a whole lot harder. About damn time.

The God must be within, not projected outside the self:

If we set a God outside of 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 it 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 my God, but my God has everyone, including myself. The Gods of all individual men always have all other men, including myself. So it is always only the one God despite his multiplicity. You arrive at him yourself and only through your self seizing you. The hero must fall for the sake of our redemption, since he is the model and demands imitation. But the measure of imitation is fulfilled. We should become reconciled to solitude in ourselves and to the God outside of us. If we enter into this solitude then the life of the God begins. If we are in ourselves, then the space around us is free, but filled by the God.

I’m not sure I fully understand this, but here’s my take: If your fixation is on the external world, God will tear you away from yourself and you’ll fail at self-actualization. If God is within you, then you’ll be pulled inward, and you’ll have to do all the difficult work that Jung has been doing. As said before, God fills the empty space, so God is essentially a powerful vacuum that sucks you towards itself. The external God is communal, but the internal God is personal: Each individual person has their own conception of God within themselves, so God appears different to all of the different people. Your idea of God is completely unique to you. But from God’s perspective, all of these different unique Gods are still versions of itself. Therefore God is both one and many. (I would argue that God can be subdivided into many individual divinities within a person, but the point is that all people’s interpretations are different while also all amounting to the same thing.)

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. If you embrace your self, then it will appear to you as if the world has become cold and empty. The coming God moves into this emptiness. If you are in your solitude, and all the space around you has become cold and unending, then you have moved far from men, and at the same time you have come near to them as never before. Selfish desire only apparently led you to men, but in reality it led you away from them and in the end to yourself, which to you and to others was the most remote. But now you are in solitude, your God leads you to the God of others, and through hat to the true neighbor, to the neighbor of yourself in others. 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.

Spiritual work of this type is inherently isolating, which is why so many who attempt it are monks or suchlike that already isolate themselves for spiritual purposes. Speaking from experience, it is very difficult to engage with the external world when so much of me is floating around up in the astral realm. (The Internet is such a blessing in that sense, because it is a midway between the physical and non-physical worlds — it is wholly in the airy intellectual realm, but almost everyone on it is a real person who exists somewhere, so I’m still engaged with actual human beings.) The external world could also seem “cold” in comparison because the external goals you may have been chasing may seem like they no longer matter, like you’re living in the Matrix. Being drawn into yourself involves becoming acutely self-aware, but the advantage of self-awareness is that it will prevent you from projecting (either heroes or Shadows) onto other people, which will help you to see them as they really are. And that promotes empathy, which brings you closer to other people, and so on.

I’m really interested in what Jung would have thought of the Hero’s Journey concept…

Mysterium Encounter

So, Jung has successfully completed his journey to the Underworld. Now what? The next three sections concern a series of visions in which Jung meets an old man, Elijah, and a young woman, Salome, in a dark house with pillars and a bright garden. There’s also a black snake. Jung recounts his dialogues with these spirits in the form of a mystery play.

Elijah says that Salome is his daughter, and the source of his wisdom, and that is why she is blind. Jung is utterly disturbed by this. He cannot reconcile that Salome, the woman who requested that John the Baptist’s head be delivered to her on a platter, could be the daughter of a holy prophet. She asks him if he loves her, and Jung says, “I dread you, you beast.” In response, she asks him, “And what wouldn’t you give for a single look into the infinite unfolding of what is to come? Are these not worth a sin for you?” This is interesting to me, because it seems to suggest that sin is preferable, or even necessary, as part of the experience of acquiring divine knowledge. Honestly, that makes sense — mysticism and occultism tend to be transgressive in many ways, especially when they push against established religious doctrine. Jung’s reaction to Salome sort of reminds me of my reaction to the nightmare woman, except that Salome is not at all threatening to Jung. At least, not from my perspective. He seems to think she’s a wicked temptress. The Spirit of the Depths insists that Salome is divine, and Salome insists that Jung must love her.

Elijah and Salome’s partnership force Jung to question just about everything he knows about spirituality. The idea of the “bloodthirsty horror” being the daughter of the prophet, that they are in fact one being, is too much for Jung to bear. And yet, that falls right in line with the recurring theme of the union of opposites. Here are two extreme opposites, that Jung is being told are the same being. How’s he going to accept that? Hearing all this, he assumes he’s still in the Underworld. But he’s not.

After the dialogue is an interjection that insists to the reader that this is Jung’s own mystery, and that it does not apply to anyone else: “This play that I witnessed is my play, not your play. It is my secret, not yours. You cannot imitate me. My secret remains virginal and my mysteries are inviolable, they belong to me and cannot belong to you. You have your own.” Again, I feel validated and almost relieved to see this here, because it means that Jung isn’t trying to apply his personal experience on a universal scale. He recognizes that it applies only to himself. Go get your own mysteries!

He who enters into his own must grope through what lies at hand, he must sense his way from stone to stone. He must embrace the worthless and the worthy with the same love. A mountain is nothing, and a grain of sand holds kingdoms, or also nothing. Judgement must fall from you, even taste, but above all pride, even when it is based on merit. Utterly poor, miserable, unknowingly humiliated, go on through the gate. Turn your anger against yourself, since only you stop yourself from looking and from living. The mystery play is soft like air and thin smoke, and you are raw matter that is disturbingly heavy. But let your hope, which is your highest good and highest ability, lead the way and serve you as a guide in the world of darkness, since it is of like substance with the forms of that world.

This stream-of-consciousness mystical advice reads like instructions to initiates who dare to go through a similar experience to find their own mystery plays. I experience a lot of mystery dialogues in my free time, while I’m meditating by pacing back and forth, in this astral space where everything is volatile (in the alchemical sense) and I all but lose track of my heavy matter. Once again, one must accept what comes without judgement, especially if it involves seemingly-irreconcilable opposites. The line about hope reminds me of The Sandman, in which Hope is the form that Dream uses to win The Oldest Game. It wins because even Hope has power in Hell, and can’t be snuffed out.

There’s an illustration of Elijah and Salome, in front of their pillared house. Elijah wears blue and Salome wears red. The black snake is at their feet. The figure representing Jung is once again a dark-skinned man in white, with shoulder-length black hair. Decorating the border is blue light on the left side, and red tendrils on the right side that coil around the beams of light. I think it’s safe to assume that the light represents Elijah and the tentacles represent Salome.

The scene of the mystery play is a deep place like the crater of a volcano. My deep interior is a volcano, that pushes out the fiery-molten mass of the unformed and the undifferentiated. Thus my interior gives birth to the children of chaos, of the primordial mother. He who enters the crater also becomes chaotic matter, he melts. The formed in him dissolves and binds itself anew with the children of chaos, the powers of darkness, the ruling and the seducing, the compelling and the alluring, the divine and the devilish. These powers stretch beyond my certainties and limits on all sides, and connect me with all forms and with all distant beings and things, through which inner tidings of their being and their character develop in me. Because I have fallen into the source of chaos, into the primordial beginning, I myself become smelted anew in the connection with the primordial beginning, which at the same time is what has been and what is becoming. At first I come to the primordial beginning in myself. But because I am a part of the matter and formation of the world, I also come into the primordial beginning of the world in the first place. I have certainly participated in life as someone formed and determined, but only through my formed and determined consciousness and through this in a formed and determined piece of the whole world, but not in the unformed and undetermined aspects of the world that likewise are given to me. Yet it is given only to my depths, not to my surface, which is formed and determined consciousness.

This is a powerful image. Because mystical visions are predicated on madness to some extent, they are a raw outpouring of pure chthonic material, primordial Khaos at its finest. Engaging with it requires alchemical dissolution or ego death. Everything that is “formed” (i.e. fixed) in you dissolves or “melts” into the prima materia, and is reformed, having been infused with underworldly divine power. This is more or less participation in the primordial process of creation itself. Consciousness interacts only with the “formed and determined,” i.e. fixed, aspects of existence. So, you need your depths to engage with the unformed and undetermined, i.e. volatile, aspects of existence.

Most of the rest of this chapter is an analysis of what Elijah and Salome represent, even though Elijah explicitly stated that they do not represent anything. Jung interprets them as representing the dual faculties of “precognition and pleasure,” or thinking and feeling. Yup, this is where the thinking/feeling axis on the MBTI test comes from! It comes from Jung trying to make sense of this particular vision. Jung says that “Both are equally old and in nature intimately one,” and interprets the serpent as representing a mediator between the two. Some people are more inclined towards thinking, and others towards feeling, but you need some degree of both to avoid falling out of balance. Jung assumes that because he’s a thinking person, he fears Salome. My bet is, that’s not why. I think he fears Salome because he struggles to see divinity in a stereotypically “evil” figure. He’s struggling against his conditioning that pleasure is evil.

I’m not going to go through Jung’s analysis of the specific symbols in his vision, because to be honest, very little of it resonates for me. Jung does not interpret these visions the way I would, and I think that much of his interpretation misses the obvious because he’s trying so hard to force a disturbing truth into a comfortable framework. But, it’s not my vision or my mystery, so I’m not going to tell him he’s wrong.

Instruction

Jung goes back to Elijah’s house the next night. He says to Elijah,

I have toyed with myself enough. I played hypocritical games with myself and they all would have disgusted me, were it not clever to perform what others expect of me. It seems to me as if I were more real here [in the dream world]. And yet I do not like being here.

I completely relate to the sensation of feeling more real in my dream world than I do in the physical world. I definitely feel like that. But I don’t feel as unsettled in my dream world as Jung does at Elijah and Salome’s house. Jung recognizes that most of his life in the external world involves “hypocritical games,” doing things that don’t really resonate and aren’t really meaningful for the sake of propriety and fitting within the societal expectations that have been set for him. Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t seem comfortable in either world.

I forgot to mention that there is a scrying crystal inside the house. Previously, Jung saw the Garden of Eden and Odysseus with the sirens in the crystal. This time, he sees Mary with baby Jesus, St. Peter, the Pope, then Buddha, then Kali.

Elijah provides Jung with some good advice about thoughts that I could use. Jung says that thoughts are dangerous because men confuse them with themselves, and Elijah says:

Will you therefore confuse yourself with a tree or animal because you look at them and because you exist with them in the same world? Must you be your thoughts, because you are in the world of your thoughts? But your thoughts are just as much outside your self as trees and animals are outside your body.

Because I live in my thoughts, my thoughts cause me a lot of trouble. Thoughts that cause me shame are particularly awful, because I feel like just having the thought reflects badly on me, when really only an action would reflect badly on me. The idea of thought as something separate from myself, something that exists around me as nature physically exists around me, is genuinely good therapeutic advice. (Therapeutic advice from the work of a psychotherapist? You don’t say!) I shouldn’t take my thoughts seriously, or interpret them as expressions of my identity.

Salome calls herself Jung’s sister. He asks who their mother is, and she says that it is Mary. It’s getting worse! Jung is absolutely sent reeling by this revelation:

Is it a hellish dream? Mary, our mother? What madness lurks in your words? The mother of our Savior, our mother? When I crossed your threshold today, I foresaw calamity. Alas! It has come. Are you out of your senses, Salome?

I sort of relate, in that it can be extremely difficult to think that you actually are that special. It seems the height of hubris to claim to be the child of a powerful goddess (yes, I’m calling Mary a goddess, because she functions like one), even when your spirits explicitly tell you that this is the case.

Jung tries to rationally make sense of it by continuing to insist that Elijah and Salome and Mary are symbols that he hasn’t interpreted yet. This is Elijah’s response:

You may call us symbols for the same reason that you can also call your fellow men symbols. But we are just as real as your fellow men. You invalidate nothing and solve nothing calling us symbols. […] We are certainly what you would call real. Here we are, and you have to accept us. The choice is yours.

Daaamn. Of course, Jung insists on interpreting Elijah and Salome as symbols of the “thinking” and “feeling” principles anyway. The idea of the actual entities Elijah and Salome being the same being freaks him out too much. This is one of the big reasons why I think that his interpretations throughout these three chapters are wrong. He can only process all of this by interpreting it as symbolic language as opposed to taking it at face value, because he can’t make sense of it any other way.

If you do not acknowledge your yearning, then you do not follow yourself, but you go on foreign ways that others have indicated to you. So you do not live your life but an alien one. But who should live your life if you do not live it? It is not only stupid to exchange your own life for an alien one, but also a hypocritical game, because you can never really live the life of others, you can only pretend to do it, deceiving the other and yourself, since you can only live your own life. […] To live oneself means: To be one’s own task. Never say that it is a pleasure to live oneself. It will be no joy but a long suffering, since you must become your own creator. If you want to create yourself, then you do not begin with the best and the highest, but with the worst and the deepest. The flowing together of the stream of life is not joy but pain, since it is power against power, guilt and shatters the sanctified.

Good advice in general. Pay attention to what you really want out of life, not what society says you should want. If you only do what everyone around you says you should and acquire what they say you should want, then you’re living someone else’s life instead of your own. No one else is going to live your life for you, and you can’t live anyone else’s life either. So embrace your own desires, and live your own life. That’s not an easy thing, because you have to do the work to reinvent yourself in your own image instead of following someone else’s self-help guidebook (literal or figurative). And you have to begin by doing Shadow work, which is extremely difficult. Everything that you hold sacred will likely ring hollow throughout that process, because you won’t see it in the same way until you can find divinity for yourself.

As the God developed in me, I thought he was a part of my self. I thought that my “I” included him and therefore I took him for my thought. But I also considered that my thoughts were parts of my “I.” Thus I entered into my thoughts, and into the thinking about the God, in that I took him for a part of my self. […] Therefore you love reasonable and orderly thoughts, since you could not endure it if your self was in disordered, that is, unsuitable thoughts. Through your selfish wish, you pushed out of your thoughts everything that you do not consider ordered, that is, unfitting. You create order according to what you know, you do not know the thoughts of chaos, and yet they exist.

Jung confused the developing God for an aspect of himself, just as he worshipped the soul believing it was God. Because he hates thoughts that he considers disorganized or unreasonable, he roots out all the thoughts that don’t fit his projection of what God should be. Where does all the “disordered” thought end up? The Shadow.

My thoughts are not my self, but exactly like the things of the world, alive and dead. Just as I am not damaged through living in a partly chaotic world, so too I am not damaged if I live in my partly chaotic thought world. Thoughts are natural events that you do not possess, and whose meaning you only imperfectly recognize. Thoughts grow in me like a forest, populated by many different animals. But man is domineering in his thinking, and therefore he kills the pleasure of the forest and that of the wild animals. Man is violent in his desire, and he himself becomes a forest and a forest animal. Just as I have freedom in the world, I also have freedom in my thoughts.

This is good advice for me personally. My thoughts can be scary and chaotic, but they do not damage me. I love the image of thoughts being like a forest. I should just enjoy my time amongst the wild things, and the absolute freedom that my thoughts give me, without any shame.

Resolution

Jung dreams that he is standing on a ridge in a wasteland, with day on one side and night on the other. A black snake is on the night side, and a white snake is on the day side. They fight each other, with Elijah watching from above. The black snake’s head turned white, and they both curled around themselves.

Jugn and Elijah climb to a stone circle that is the Temple of the Sun. Elijah turns into Mime (a dwarf from Wagner’s The Ring). Mime brings Jung to springs in a cave, that confer wisdom on those who drink from them. Jung doesn’t trust Mime, and leaves the cave without drinking, feeling discombobulated, and follows a snake to Elijah’s house. He sees a series of visions in the crystal, ending with Christ on the cross with the black serpent coiled about the base. The serpent coils around Jung’s own feet, and up his body — he turns into Aion/Arimanius, the Mithraic lion-headed god. Salome says, “You are Christ.”

This is an amazingly profound experience. Jung experiences the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection directly, and experiences it in the form of a pagan deity, the primordial creator god Aion or Phanes. In a way, it is the ultimate Mystery. It goes back to what Jung said before about how Christians should not deny that Jesus is a part of them, that you yourself are Christ. That is why Mary is named as Jung’s mother, because he is not separate from Christ.

If you are aggravated against your brother, think that you are aggravated against the brother in you, that is, against what in you is similar to your brother. As a man, you are part of mankind, and therefore you have a share in the whole of mankind, as if you were the whole of mankind. If you overpower and kill your fellow man who is contrary to you, then you also kill that person in yourself and have murdered a part of your life. The spirit of this dead man follows you and does not let your life become joyful. You need your wholeness to live onward.

This is just a lesson on projection again, but I like the phrasing. We’re all one being, all incarnations of the Divine, so any harm we do against each other is harm against the corresponding parts of ourselves. You can’t experience any authentic joy, or really live at all, with that sort of burden. That’s what makes Shadow work worth it.

If you go to thinking, take your heart with you. If you go to love, take your head with you.

I’m still not sure how I feel about the whole thinking/feeling dichotomy, but I like this phrase.

I saw a new God, a child, who subdued daimons in his hand. The God holds the separate principles in his power, he unites them. The God develops through the union of the principles in me. He is their union.

Not much to say about this that I haven’t already said, except that I’m once again reminded of Dionysus, who unites all opposites and commands all daimons. I feel like I can get myself there. Maybe I already am. It feels good to unite opposites in oneself; it’s hard to do, but once you’ve done it, it feels comfortable and fulfilling.

Jung interprets WWI as people learning self-sacrifice, Christ’s mystery, which will teach them to look inward. “The spirit of the depths has seized mankind and forces self-sacrifice upon it.”

That's the end of Liber Primus! I'll start posting the sections of my commentary on Liber Secundus soon. There's more very cool art to come!

#the red book #the red book jung #carl jung #jungian psychology #symbols #archetypes #shadow work #mysticism #occult #occultism #jungian archetypes #long post #analysis #commentary #liber novus #illuminated manuscript #mystical experiences #mystical art #tw murder

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nyxshadowhawk · 3 months

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The Red Book, Liber Primus: Part Two

I'm picking up right where I left off, so please go read Part One: https://nyxshadowhawk.tumblr.com/post/728084509673799680/the-red-book-liber-primus-part-one#notes

Soul and God

Jung says to his soul:

Who are you, child? My dreams have represented you as a child and as a maiden. I am ignorant of your mystery. Forgive me if I speak as in a dream, like a drunkard — are you God? Is God a child, a maiden?

Throughout this chapter, Jung has to grapple with unorthodox ideas of what God looks like. God as a child, let alone a maiden, is so dissonant with typical ideas of divinity in Christianity that I can’t really blame him for reeling over it. I see this as validation that God is inherently polymorphic, and can appear to different people in different ways depending on what they need to see. Jung sees God as a child or a maiden, and I see God as… well… a femboy.

Scholarliness belongs to the spirit of the time [i.e. the conscious mind], but this spirit in no way grasps the dream, since the soul is everywhere that scholarly knowledge is not.

“The soul is everywhere that scholarly knowledge is not” is a great way of putting it. I’ve had to constantly grapple with the balance between my analytical mind and my mystical mind, and since Jung was both a scientist and a mystic, I imagine he needed to do the same. The analytic mind needs everything to be backed up with primary sources and/or proven with empirical evidence, and it needs all of its arguments to be airtight. The mystical mind needs to make wild connections between unrelated things and to take symbols at face value, going more than a bit crazy in the process. The mystical and analytical parts of the mind can work in tandem, but they shouldn’t be confused with each other. If you let the mystical mind handle the analytic stuff, that’s how you get conspiracy theories. If you let the analytic mind handle the mystical stuff, it will shut them down and try to force them into a framework. Scholarship can’t reach everywhere, because some things just don’t make sense, and scholarship is also limited by the zeitgeist (i.e. what we know and how we know it, who’s in power and what their narrative is, needing things to make sense through the cultural lens).

But how can I attain the knowledge of the heart? You can attain this knowledge only by living your life to the full. You live your life fully if you also live what you have never yet lived, but have left for others to live and to think. But you should say, “The life that I could still live, I should live, and the thoughts that I could still think, I should think.” It appears as though you want to flee from yourself so as not to have to live what remains unlived until now. But you cannot flee from yourself. It is with you all the time and demands fulfillment. If you pretend to be blind and dumb to this demand, you feign being blind and deaf to yourself.

This reminds me a lot of the line spoken by Lord Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray, “To realize one’s nature fully — that is what each of us is here for.” I’d say that this was a Jungian reference, except that Oscar Wilde was writing before Jung wrote any of this. I completely agree that before you attain any real spiritual knowledge, you must have as complete an understanding of yourself as possible. If you avoid developing this understanding of your internal world, then you won’t be really living, and you’ll feel that emptiness and lack of fulfillment that characterizes midlife crisis. And you won’t learn anything.

I had to recognize that I am only the expression and symbol of the soul. In the sense of the spirit of the depths, I am as I am in the visible world a symbol of my soul…

Again, really interesting concept — existing as a symbol of one’s soul, you existing through it instead of it through you. It’s the real thing, you’re the impression it leaves on the material world.

The spirit of the depths taught me to say, “I am the servant of a child.” Through this dictum I learn above all the most extreme humility, as what I most need.

The spirit of this time of course allowed me to believe in my reason. He let me see myself in the image of a leader with ripe thoughts. But the spirit of the depths teaches me that I am a servant, in fact the servant of a child. This dictum was repugnant to me and I hated it. But I had to recognize and accept that my soul is a child and that my God in my soul is a child.

Once again, Jung has a hard time seeing the divine in things that are small, trivial, or mundane. It’s so ridiculous to him that God should appear like a little kid, and that he should be in service to this little kid, that to admit this requires “extreme humility.”

If you are boys, your God is a woman. If you are women, your God is a boy. If you are men, your God is a maiden. The God is where you are not.

“The God is where you are not.” I love this. This suggests that there is something inherently divine about the Shadow, the inverse of whatever your conscious mind considers itself to be. Wherever you don’t build your conscious mind, God fills the empty space. It’s pretty natural for us humans to project ourselves onto God and interpret God as looking like us, hence why God is assumed to be a powerful old man in this patriarchal society. It’s quite another thing to be able to see God in something that isn’t like us, that doesn’t reflect the ideal. That’s another recurring theme.

I don’t know whether it’s always true that a man’s god is a maiden and a woman’s god is a boy, but I know that my god appears as a femboy.

The same inversion occurs with age. If you’re an old person, you have a young god, and vice-versa.

What is better, that man has life ahead of him, or that God does? I know no answer. Life; the unavoidable decides.

This is one of those utterly weird, out-of-the-box mystical ideas that are just so much fun to wonder about. The idea that god ages, that a young god belong to an old person may have more life ahead of it than the living human does, and the question of whether it is better for you to have more life or for your God to have more life. I don’t have an answer to that, either.

My God is a child, so wonder not that the spirit of this time in me is incensed to mockery and scorn. There will be no one who will laugh at me as I have laughed at myself.

Your God should not be a man of mockery, rather you yourself will be the man of mockery. You should mock yourself fand rise above this. If you have still not learned this from the old holy books, then go there, drink the blood and eat the flesh of him who was mocked and tormented for the sake of our sins, so that you totally become his nature, deny his being-apart-from-you; you should be he himself, not Christians but Christ, otherwise you will be of no use to the coming God.

You do not overcome the old teachings through doing less, but through doing more. Every step closer to my soul excites the scornful laughter of my devils, those cowardly ear-whisperers and poison-mixers. It was easy for them to laugh, since I had to do strange things.

The inner Zeitgeist, the voice of the society that Jung lives in, mocks him for his submission to a little kid. Jung feels like he is kind of immune to mockery at this point because no one can possibly mock him for this more than he mocks himself. He throws that mystical mockery into focus with this irreverent but also completely true characterization of Christianity. See, Jung gets it. He realizes that the Eucharist is, in fact, exactly what it looks like. You take God into you. You consume it. You become God. That’s the most mystical thing I’ve heard of this side of Orphism. You’re not a Christian, you are Christ himself, because you’ve partaken in Christ. Get with the program.

I don’t really blame Jung for distancing himself from mysticism throughout his career, because of the threat of mockery. Mysticism still has a stigma attached to it. Scientists don’t like it because it’s pure unadulterated crazy, and Christianity has a very weird relationship to it despite it arguably being the basis of the entire faith (see above). To be a mystic is to be isolated from and mocked by both camps. It’s easy to laugh at because, well, it’s very weird.

On the Service of the Soul

If you take a step towards your soul, you will think that you will at first miss the meaning. You will believe that you have sunk into meaninglessness, into eternal disorder. You will be right! Nothing will deliver you from disorder and meaninglessness, since this is the other half of the world.

Someone please tell Jordan Peterson that Jung says he needs to come to grips with chaos. Chaos matters because it’s half the world, so there is no “antidote” to it, no overcoming it. All you can really do is work with it.

If you marry the ordered to the chaos you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness.

This is the Chemical Wedding, the orderly (fixed) sulfur and the chaotic (volatile) mercury producing the Philosopher’s Stone, which is an even mix of both. That volatile “dark flood of chaos” transmutes into fixed matter if you just sit with it and let it sort itself out.

I too was afraid, since we had forgotten that God is terrible. Christ taught: God is love. But you should know that love is also terrible.

Everyone has forgotten that God is terrible, and I think that’s a problem. Every time the atheists point out how evil and mean God is in the Old Testament, and how starkly this clashes with the all-loving God that Christians profess they worship, they treat it like it’s an invalidation of the entirety of Christianity. And it is, only because Christians expect everything to be internally consistent. God is, in fact, both, and that is The Point™. There’s also the fact that mystical experiences can be utterly terrifying, awesome and awful and sublime. God is scary as hell, people!

You dread the depths. It should horrify you, since the way of what is to come leads through it. You must endure the temptation of fear and doubt, and at the same time acknowledge to the bone that your fear is justified and your doubt is reasonable.

The first step of spiritual advancement is through the darkness, the chaos, the Underworld. You have to do your Shadow work first. It’s completely reasonable to be afraid of that, because it’s scary by nature, but you’ve still got to do it.

You still have to learn this, to succumb to no temptation, but to do everything of your own will, then you will be be free and beyond Christianity.

So interesting that this book contains what is essentially a road map to transcending Christianity! That’s because “the way of what is to come” involves the dark as well as the light, down as well as up, both halves of the whole. Seeing everything as good and light and “holy” all the time is just as much a temptation as the Devil in the desert. Man that’s ahead of its time!

I have had to recognize that I must submit to what I fear; yes, even more, that I must love what horrifies me.

Shadow work in a nutshell!

The slave to virtue finds the way as little as the slave to vices.

A repetition of what I said above, that divinity doesn’t mean all-goodness-all-the-time. Focusing only on the good and bright and celestial things is only half the equation and is still shooting yourself in the foot.

If you thought you were the master of your soul, become her servant. If you were her servant, become her master.

Inversion again. Whatever you think your relationship to your soul is, flip it and see what happens.

The Desert

(I’ll give you a moment to go and play the Journey soundtrack while you read this. *Opens Spotify*)

Jung’s self appears as a barren desert, because he has neglected it. This is the first time he’s ever really paid attention to his internal world. The “creative power of desire” is absent from Jung’s desert. If you’re able to focus on your internal world, and not just on “things, men, and thoughts,” you can cultivate it into a garden. (My own mindscape is a Skyrim-esque landscape that looks like green hills and pine forests surrounded by high, craggy silver mountains. It’s slowly developed into Umbragard.) Even if your mindscape is a garden, you still need things, men, and thoughts, but at least you will be their friend instead of their slave.

I turned myself away from things and men, but that is precisely how I became the secure prey of my thoughts, yes, I wholly became my thoughts.

If this is the first time you’ve ever focused on the internal world, then your thoughts will overwhelm you pretty quickly. I’ve spent a lot of time in my internal world, and I still get easily overwhelmed.

When you say that the place of the soul is not, then it is not. When you say that it is, then it is. Notice what the ancients said in images: the word is a creative act. The ancients said: in the beginning was the Word. Consider this and think upon it.

Oh boy, how do I sum this up quickly? I already had notes about this concept from another part of my Book of Shadows that I wrote long before reading this, so I’ll just post that here:

Eliphas Levi writes in Doctrine and Ritual, “To speak is to create.” To think is to exist (“I think therefore I am”), so to speak is more powerful than thought, and writing more powerful than that. This is why many gods of magic are also associated with words, both spoken and written. Hermes is the god of magic, and also of speech and of writing, which are forms of discourse — they’re an exchange of ideas, the same way goods and services are exchanged, and the same way people physically move from place to place when they travel. Hermes’ base characterization as messenger god is based around this same concept, the exchange of information between people. Thoth is self-begotten — he literally willed himself into existence. He decided that he existed, and so he did. In addition to magic, he is also the god of writing, books, record-keeping, and wisdom. Odin discovered the Norse writing system by hanging himself on the World Tree, Yggdrasil, and observing the patterns of its fallen branches. Through this act of self-sacrifice, he received the knowledge of runes. The line between speech/writing and magic is slim. This is why God created the world through “the Word,” and why many occultists believe that if you can pronounce God’s unspeakable name correctly, you can command the entire universe.

So, magic is as simple as it is difficult — you just have to state that something is so, and then accept that it is. It’s really hard to convince your mind that it’s actually possible to do that, and not a form of self-delusion that you’ll be mocked for. My gods have advised me that the easiest spell I can do to end my anxiety is “If I say everything is okay, then it is.” Not easy to convince myself of that while I’m anxious. But it really is that simple. To state that something is so is to bring it into being.

The words that oscillate between nonsense and supreme meaning are the oldest and truest.

Ain’t that the truth. Mystical experiences are somehow both complete insanity and the most profound truth there is, at the same time. That’s how you know that their messages and symbols are older than dirt.

Experiences in the Desert

Jung confronts his soul in the desert. The soul says to Jung, “Don’t you know that the way to truth stands open only to those without intentions?” This rings true for me. If you intend to get something out of a particular experience, then you’ll ignore everything that doesn’t align with the intention. What you want to learn and what you try to do is going to interfere with what you’re actually being taught or given. Intention is for magic; mysticism really requires a state of passive reception, so that you don’t overanalyze things. I have a tendency to shut down meditative visions because I’ll try to plan them out or somehow control them, and that makes them fizzle. My gods recommend that I stop trying to accomplish something specific, and ask more questions.

We tie ourselves up with intentions.

Take it from me: If you try to accomplish something, you will end up getting stuck.

The soul says to Jung, “Do you know who I am? Have you grasped me, defined me, and made me into a dead formula? Have you measured the depths of my chasms, and explored all the ways down which I am yet going to lead you?”

I love this. It implies that the soul is something inherently immeasurable, incomprehensible, and utterly unscientific. You cannot define the soul. That’s the conscious mind attempting to impose a framework onto something that’s too amorphous to really fit into one. Of course, Jung will attempt to create this framework anyway, but that doesn’t change the fact that the best way to understand the soul is to not try to understand it.

The spirit of this time considers itself extremely clever, like every such spirit of the time. But wisdom is simpleminded, not just simple. […] Only in the desert do we become aware of our terrible simplemindedness, but we are afraid of admitting it. […] We cannot save ourselves through increasing our cleverness, but through accepting what our cleverness hates most, namely simplemindedness. Yet we also do not want to be artificial fools because we have fallen into simplemindedness, rather we will be clever fools. That leads to supreme meaning. Cleverness couples itself with intention. Simplemindedness knows no intention. Cleverness conquers the world, but simplemindedness the soul.

I’m betting that this is why the protagonist of so many fairy tales is a “simpleton.” They’re a person who doesn’t overthink things, doesn’t have an agenda, doesn’t operate from a place of self-interest or distrust. Their utter lack of cynicism is what allows them to accept help from ignoble-looking supernatural beings and friendly animals. They recieve all experiences with childlike wonder. They choose the plain-looking object instead of the shiny gold one, because they don’t feel the need to impress anybody. They aren’t stupid, per se — they’re more like 0 The Fool in a tarot deck, in that their naivete prevents them from being clever, and that works out well for them.

Jung’s conscious mind keeps saying “this is stupid!” but he has to stick with it. Overcoming his scorn at himself brings him nearer to his soul, and his desert starts to become green. “Many will laugh at my foolishness. But no one will laugh more than I laughed at myself.”

Descent into Hell in the Future

Time for katabasis! You knew it was coming. No Hero’s Journey is complete without a full-on descent into the Underworld.

Do you want me to leave myself to chance, to the madness of my own darkness? Wither? Wither? You fall, and I want to fall with you, whoever you are.

The spirit of the depths opened my eyes and I caught a glimpse of the inner things, the world of my soul, the many-formed and changing.

Most of the illustrations are big, beautiful paintings in in Liber Secundus, but there’s a few small ones nestled in Liber Primus. The first one is this one of a man in white walking in the Underworld, surrounded by shadowy monsters. The man in the image is too dark-skinned to be Jung, and he has shoulder-length black hair, but is clearly meant to represent Jung. I’m not sure why Jung decided to represent himself this way. But then again, the form that I take during my active imagination also looks nothing like me, so I get it.

Jung describes a cave of black water, across which is a “luminous red stone.” I immediately thought of the lake in the cave in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and the red stone is obviously a familiar image as well. Jung sees a severed head floating in the stream, a large black scarab, a red sun surrounded by snakes, represented in the next image:

There’s some interpretation of these images, but before we get there, Jung writes at length about one of my favorite subjects — divine madness!

These lines really struck me:

When can I order my thinking to be quiet, so that my thoughts, those unruly hounds, will crawl to my feet? How can I ever hope to hear your voice louder, to see you clearer, when all my thoughts howl? […] The fullness of my knowledge threatens to fall in on me. My knowledge was a thousand voices, an army roaring like lions; the air trembles when they speak, and I am their defenseless sacrifice. […] Let me persist in divine astonishment, so that I am ready to behold your wonders.

As a person who deals with anxiety and shame on a regular basis, I can say from experience that the voices of one’s thoughts can be overwhelming to the point of being intolerable. I’ve had fight-or-flight triggered by my thoughts alone, even when nothing bad is going on in real life (e.g. over something as non-threatening as sending emails). Likening those thoughts to an army of dangerous animals is a great metaphor. It’s also “knowledge” that Jung feels threatened by in this scene — knowledge can be helpful or powerful, but it also interferes with the ability to interpret dream-images at face value. Later in this paragraph, Jung cries for mercy from “science that clever knower” and the “serpent of judgement.” This goes back to what I was saying before about the balance between the analytic and the mystical mind. This is one context in which empirical thinking and analysis need not apply. Jung’s instincts to explain and categorize everything, to force them to make sense, and to pass judgement make the experience of katabasis even harder than it already is.

That’s where madness comes in. Madness suspends logic, judgement, and categorization. Madness forces you to allow things to not make sense. It is the state of being submerged in raw, unfiltered unconscious. Here’s what Jung has to say about it:

This is how I overcame madness. If you do not know what divine madness is, suspend judgement and wait for the fruits. But know that there is a divine madness which is nothing other than the overpowering of the spirit of this time through the spirit of the depths. Speak then of sick delusion when 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 himself is the spirit of the depths. But also speak of sick delusion when the spirit of this time does not leave a man and forces him to see only the surface, to deny the spirit of the depths and to take himself for the spirit of the times. The spirit of this time is ungodly, the spirit of the depths is ungodly, balance is godly.

[…]

Thus can you differentiate sick and divine delusion. Whoever does the one and does without the other you may call sick since he is out of balance.

That phrase “suspend judgement and wait for the fruits” means almost exactly the same thing as something Dionysus told me: “Take your sanity off like a mask, and take everything at face value as you would in a dream.” When you’re traversing the Otherworld, the way to maintain your sanity is to deliberately suspend your sanity. Attempting to overanalyze everything will drive you crazy, literally, because the Otherworld doesn’t conform to any kind of human logic. So, just accept it. If you remove your sanity, then it’ll still be there for you when you come back, instead of it getting damaged by all the nonsense that bombards you.

Jung defines madness as the Spirit of the Depths overtaking the Zeitgeist, i.e. the unconscious mind subsuming the conscious mind. He also distinguishes deliberate, mystical madness from psychiatric disorders — in the former case, one allows the Spirit of the Depths to take over, while in the latter case, the Spirit of the Depths forces itself on the person. I’ve made similar distinctions in some of my answers, like this one. Psychiatric disorders are debilitating, and prevent a person from living a normal life, while my mystical madness doesn’t last beyond my deliberate engagement with it and doesn’t interfere with my normal life. I think it’s interesting that Jung says that when a person is forcibly overtaken by the Spirit of the Depths, they think they are the Spirit of the Depths. That seems to describe all the people I’ve encountered on the internet who claim to be gods, unable to distinguish between their own fixed identities and the massive, inconsistent identities of the spirits. Sometimes it’s good to experience that (“ego death”), but you have to come back down again.

I also think it’s interesting that Jung defines possession by the Zeitgeist, denial of the unconscious mind and its contents, as a sort of mental illness. Such a person is probably the sort who allows atheism or reliance on scientific objectivity to essentially replace religion, blocking out any engagement with the irrational aspects of existence and denying that there is any healthy or productive way to engage with them. (One of the things I think Jung got right is that irrational, mystical, and weird things are an inherent and manifest part of life, and that science needs to find some way of addressing them.) The healthiest mental state is some balance between the two. There’s our running theme of reconciliation of duality.

Jung continues:

But 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 the time to be fulfillment, and better than the bosom of the Godhead. The frightfulness and cruelty of the world lay under wraps and in the depths of our hearts. If the spirit of the depths seizes you, you will feel the cruelty and cry out in torment. The spirit of the depths is pregnant with iron, fire, and death. You are right to fear the spirit of the depths, as he is full of horror.

Divine madness is useful and productive, but it’s still madness, and therefore scary as all hell. Looking God full in the face is going to cause insanity, the question is whether it’s the permanent kind or not. God is full of beauty and wonder, but don’t assume (as the Zeitgeist does) that its unfathomable beauty is fulfillment in and of itself, because you still have to confront the abject horror of it to get the full picture. If you don’t, the Spirit of the Depths will make sure you do on its terms instead of yours, and it won’t be pretty.

Jung also says this a couple of paragraphs earlier:

To the extent that the Christianity of this time lacks madness, it lacks divine life. Take note of what the ancients taught us in images: madness is divine.

I’m definitely going to be quoting this line in future posts, because this right here is one of the big reasons I prefer Dionysus to Christ. Madness is divine, but Christianity doesn’t often leave a lot of room for madness, or magic. It categorizes everything into very rigid theology and word-for-word interpretations of the Bible, despite mysticism being at its core and a constant lurking presence throughout its history. (Someday, I promise I will write a long answer on that.) It (sometimes violently) rejects everything that doesn’t conform to its framework as heresy. If Christianity lacks its madness and mysticism, and becomes more about the frameworks of orthodoxy and politics, its spiritual core is gone. One of the running themes throughout Jung’s mystical experiences, going all the way back to his childhood, is that he has to grapple with the fact that Christianity doesn’t serve his spiritual needs. He recognizes that it is incomplete, and that it focuses on only one-half of the equation, but because of the time and place he lives in, he can’t just hop on over to Dionysus like I could. We’ll get back to this, too.

Moving on. Jung provides some interpretation of the three images he saw in the Underworld: the severed head floating in the river, the black scarab, and the red sun:

Blood shone at me from the red light of the crystal, and when I picked it up to discover its mystery, there lay the horror uncovered before me: in the depths of what is to come lay murder. The blond hero lay slain. The black beetle is the death that is necessary for renewal; and so, thereafter, a new sun glowed, the sun of the depths, full of riddles, a sun of the night. And as the rising sun of spring quickens the dead earth, so the sun of the depths quickened the dead, and thus began the terrible struggle between light and darkness. Out of that burst the powerful and ever unvanquished source of blood.

We’ll get back to the dead hero, because that gets its own chapter. The black scarab I immediately associated with the Egyptian god Khepri, who pushes the sun. Another connection I made that I’m surprised Jung didn’t explicitly spell out has to do with his drawing of the red sun — it looks exactly like an egg cell, and it’s surrounded by snakes that look like sperm, one of which is touching it. Jung interprets the snakes as the reanimated dead matter that blots out the sun, but the drawing looks like a moment of conception. A significant portion of Liber Primus focuses on the conception of the god of the new age, which is explicitly a god that reconciles dualities. Here is the conception of the God, inside the womb of the Earth. And, I’m realizing right now as I write this… Zeus conceived Zagreus with Persephone, the lady of the Underworld, in the form of a serpent… Adding on to that, Macrobius identifies Dionysus with the chthonic or dark aspect of the sun: “They observe the holy mystery in the rites by calling the sun Apollo when it is in the upper (that is, daytime) hemisphere; when it is in the lower (that is, night-time) hemisphere, it is considered Dionysus, who is Liber.” Gee, I wonder who the god of the new age is! (Obviously, I’m biased, so take what you will from this.)

It struck me that Jung’s description of the Underworld is very pagan. It doesn’t sound like a Christian depiction of Hell at all. There’s no fire, no demons, no sinners being tortured, none of Dante’s creative punishments or Lucifer and his angels plotting revenge. Instead we get rivers, the sun, a scarab beetle, and loads and loads of snakes. Jung seems to agree, because in a 1925 lecture (cited in the footnotes) he says:

The light in the cave from the crystal was, I thought, like the stone of wisdom [the philosopher’s stone]. The secret murder of the hero I could not understand at all. The beetle of course I knew to be an ancient sun symbol, and the setting sun, the luminous red disk, was archetypal. The serpents I thought might have been connected with Egyptian material. I could not then realize that it was all so archetypal.

I don’t know the details of all Jung’s theories on why he saw these specific images, but here’s my theory: The “pagan-ness” of this Underworld is a sign that it can be escaped. Hell is a place of punishment, of permanent separation from God if not literal torture. The pagan Underworld is a place of death, but death is part of a cycle, and a lot of hero stories involve some sort of katabasis or symbolic death and rebirth. This is the nigredo stage of alchemy, a critical first step of the initiation process. The Christian concept of Hell does not represent that very well. That’s just my opinion.

The next section is a commentary on how events have no inherent meaning, but that humans assign meaning to events:

The events that happen are always the same. But the creative depths of man are not always the same. Events signify nothing, they signify only in us. We create the meaning of events. The meaning is and always was artificial. We make it.

Because of this we seek in ourselves the meaning of events, so that the way of what is to come becomes apparent and our life can flow again.

That which you need comes from yourself, namely the meaning of the event. The meaning of events is not their particular meaning. This meaning exists in learned books. Events have no meaning.

The meaning of events comes from the possibility of life in this world that you create. It is the mastery of this world and the assertion of your soul in this world.

The meaning of events is the supreme meaning, that is not in events, and not in the soul, but in God standing between events and the soul, the mediator of life, the bridge and the going-across.

I like this idea of God standing “between events and the soul.” Events have no meaning, stuff just happens. Looking for meaning in the external world is pointless, so it has to be found in the internal world. In order to put to use all of the information you find in the internal world, you need to bring it outward and impress your soul upon the external world. God is the mediator that allows you to do that. God translates the language of the internal world into that of the external world, and vice-versa. That’s basically the alchemical process and/or Hero’s Journey right there — journey into the internal world, receive spiritual insight, bring it down. I’ve been struggling with that last part, but I know it’s doable.

And now, we finally get to Shadow work! I’m just going to transcribe this entire section:

Therefore I take part in that murder; the sun of the depths also shines in me after the murder has been accomplished; the thousand serpents that want to devour the sun are also in me. I myself am a murderer and murdered, sacrificer and sacrificed. The upwelling blood streams out of me.

You all have a share in the murder. In you the reborn one will come to be, and the sun of the depths will rise, and a thousand serpents will develop from your dead matter and fall on the sun to choke it. Your blood will stream forth. The peoples demonstrate this at the present time in unforgettable acts, that will be written with blood in unforgettable books for eternal memory.

But I ask you, when do men fall on their brothers with mighty weapons and bloody acts? They do such if they do not know that their brother is themselves. They themselves are sacrificers, but they mutually do the service of sacrifice. They must all sacrifice each other, since the time has not yet come when man puts the bloody knife into himself, in order to sacrifice the one he kills in his brother. But whom do people kill? They kill the noble, the brave, the heroes. They take aim at these and do not know that with these they mean themselves. They should sacrifice the hero in themselves, and because they do not know this, they kill their courageous brother.

The time is still not ripe. But through this blood sacrifice, it should ripen. So long as it is possible to murder the brother instead of oneself, the time is not ripe. Frightful things must happen until men grow ripe. But anything else will not ripen humanity. Hence all this that takes place in these days must also be, so that the renewal can come. Since the source of blood that follows the shrouding of the sun is also the source of the new life.

As the fate of the peoples is represented to you in events, so it will happen in your heart. If the hero in you is slain, then the sun of the depths rises in you, glowing from afar, and from a dreadful place. But all the same, everything that up till now seemed to be dead in you will come to life, and will change into poisonous serpents that will cover the sun, and you will fall into night and confusion. Your blood also will stream from many wounds in this frightful struggle. Your shock and doubt will be great, but from such torment the new life will be born. Birth is blood and torment. Your darkness, which you did not suspect since it was dead, will come to life and you will feel the crush of total evil and the conflicts of life that still now lie buried in the matter of your body. But the serpents are dreadful evil thoughts and feelings.

You thought you knew that abyss? Oh you clever people! It is another thing to experience it. Everything will happen to you. Think of all the frightful and devilish things that men have inflicted on their brothers. That should happen to you in your heart. Suffer it yourself through your own hand, and know that it is your own heinous and devilish hand that inflicts the suffering on you, but not your brother, who wrestles with his own devils.

I would like you to see what the murdered hero means. Those nameless men who in our 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. Whether this should be seen as a good or a bad sign need not concern us. What is awful today is good in a hundred years, and in two hundred years is bad again. But we must recognize what is happening: there are nameless ones in you who threaten your prince, the hereditary ruler.

But our ruler is the spirit of this time, 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. He is bejeweled with the most beautiful heroic virtue, and wants to drive men up to the brightest solar heights, in everlasting ascent.

The hero wants to open up everything he can. 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. For how else shall it develop into ability?

We cannot slay our incapacity and rise above it. But that is precisely what we wanted. Incapacity will overcome us and demand its share of life. Our ability will desert us, and we will believe, in the sense of the spirit of this time, that it is a loss. Yet it is no loss but a gain, not for outer trappings, however, but for inner capability.

The one who learns to live with his incapacity has learned a great deal. This will lead us to the valuation of the smallest things, and to wise limitation, which the greater height demands. If all heroism is erased, we fall back into the misery of humanity and into even worse. Our foundations will fall into the cesspool of our underworld, among the rubble of all the centuries in us.

The heroic in you is the fact 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, this or that goal must be attained in headlong striving work, this or that pleasure should be ruthlessly repressed at all costs. Consequently you sin against incapacity. But incapacity exists. No one should deny it, find fault with it, or shout it down.

Jung is speaking in the context of the impending World Wars. That’s the blood sacrifice that he refers to, but everything he says here is also applicable to Shadow work more generally. The reason why people kill each other is because they project their own Shadows, their own Depths, onto each other. The heroes are the ones that die, because people become heroes by going to war and killing a bunch of people or by dying nobly in battle. In order to do Shadow work, you have to admit that you are complicit in this violence, and that you are both the killer and the victim. You’re the one holding the gun. When Jung says that he is both “murderer and murdered, sacrificer and sacrificed,” I’m reminded of Dionysus executing Pentheus by dismemberment, the same way he himself was murdered. I’m also reminded of how bulls and goats were named as representations of Dionysus himself before being sacrificed to him, sacrificing himself to himself. As far as I know, Dionysus is the only Ancient Greek god with that particular dynamic, that direct identification with the animals (and fictional people) sacrificed to him. All of the sacrifice and blood and death paves the way for resurrection and restoration, as it does in alchemy.

These lines are particularly striking: “You thought you knew that abyss? Oh you clever people! It is another thing to experience it. Everything will happen to you. […] Suffer it yourself through your own hand, and know that it is your own heinous and devilish hand that inflicts the suffering on you…” You thought you knew the dark? Oh, you don’t even know the dark, buddy. Not until you see the abyss staring back into you. The real truth is that you are heinous, you are devilish, you are the thing you fear the most and the thing you think you’re fighting against. “Oh you clever people!” is my new favorite insult. Cleverness won’t help you against your Shadow. Shadow is stark.

Facing the Shadow also requires the death of the hero, your “perfect” idealized image of yourself. The Zeitgeist wants you to rise to this ideal and become the most moral, the most pure, the most powerful, etc. But this is just unrealistic. You’re human, and you’re flawed. The way to transcend those flaws is to learn to live with them, maybe even turn them into advantages. But to do that, you have to admit that the flaws are there. No matter how much you may try to sort your actions and qualities into good and bad, useful and useless, meaningful and meaningless, or any other dichotomy, incapacity still exists. Whatever you’ve rejected will always exist, weighing you down, until you figure out how to turn your weaknesses into your greatest strengths. I love the idea of “sinning against incapacity” because it is so transgressive but also so true. You can sin against the dark, too, because the dark is also God.

More to come!

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