>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
^M00:00:05
[ Silence ]
^M00:00:13
>> Good morning. I am Jim Billington, the Librarian of Congress, and it's my pleasure to
welcome you to this Library of Congress symposium on Carl Jung and the Red Book. I am
glad that the symposium has generated so much interest as the crowd here assembled clearly
indicates. It's possible that Jung would have been uncomfortable with the location of this
symposium. In one of his visions in the Red Book he describes a bad experience he had on
the library.
[ Laughter ]
While there, Jung was beset by a squadron of ghosts who persecuted 16th century Anabaptist.
The squadron is on its way to Jerusalem to pray at the holy sites when Jung struck up a
conversation. The Anabaptist leader and the chief librarian of unidentified library to be sure,
called the police and had him committed to the local insane asylum.
[ Laughter ]
On the other hand, I suspect that Jung might have found this library not entirely uncongenial
since the exhibit that is upstairs, and you will have a chance to see in the course of the day, is
right next to Jefferson's reconstituted library. Jefferson organized knowledge as you may be
aware on three categories, memory, reason and imagination. Contrast that with the multiple
subdivisions of knowledge that you'll find in bureaucratized academia today. And, but it
certainly bears in Jefferson's life as well as his library the kind of active imagination that was
one of the trademarks of Freud's thinking. So as Librarian of Congress, I think this library
being a multi-medial resource of all kinds with unparalleled collections of music, of prints and
photographs, of cinema, of all kinds of expressions of creative imagination, I think it's
appropriate and also in my sometime capacity as historian of Russian culture, and this is not
in the exhibit but it's something that struck me as I was reading some of this material and
going through the exhibit. In the 10 years that Russia lived without censorship, there are only
10 years in their history up until the fall of the Soviet System. There was an explosion of
creativity which if not directly influenced by Jung but certainly has many points of parallel
movement on voyage of Russian culture as it literally exploded for long periods between, the
decade between 1907 and 1917. There were the late Rimsky-Korsakov in the early
Kandinsky, both believed that there--since both sound and light were thought to be solely
transmitted by waves that they must both be expressions of some deeper formation and some
deeper elements in what they didn't call but I think implicitly acknowledged was a kind of
unconscious or subconscious level out of which culture came. And so, you can see in their
works of that period and even more in the works of Scriabin and a whole bunch of other
people, Scriabin who wanted to introduce the other senses, sight and not just sight and sound
1
but touch and smell as part of the aroma of messages, so to speak, that the multimedia of
culture had. The climax of the enormous fertility of what Russians of today rediscovering in
what's--from what they always called the Silver Age or the Russian Renaissance was a great
project that lasted on to the '20s until its leader Pavel Florensky was executed in the gulag,
one of the earliest of gulags, was a universal dictionary of symbols called symbolarium. That,
in post Soviet Russia that is a major project of their--one of their great minds and founder of
the Russian school of semiotics, a man named Ivanov, who we've been fortunate to have on
our advisory council up here at the Kluge Center within the library. So, if not directly
influenced by Jung, it's interesting that there is a kind of parallel, parallel track of deep
investigation with this project that's had very obvious resemblances to the work and the
aspirations of Jung. So, I think there's much more probably to be discovered in terms of
parallelisms and perhaps of direct influences yet to be unveiled from the still imperfectly
inventory world records, the stave sets of rhetoric, many of which are event in another small
repository in New York looked very much like the man of literacy [phonetic] in the Red
Book. The Red Book, you know, as you know was published in digital facsimile in 2009
after being accessible to the public since its creation several decades earlier. It was the
product of an extraordinary entirely unanticipated period in Jung's life from 1913 to 1917.
During which he endured what he called a prolonged confrontation with his unconscious,
which produced a stream of fantasies, visions, dreams which were so strange and frightening
that he later said they were, they "threatened to break me". Both he and the ghostly figure and
the librarian in Jung's account, that I just alluded, thought that he might be going mad. Jung,
however, summoned the moral and intellectual stamina to distance himself from these assaults
from the unconscious even as they intruded on him. In an effort to understand his
experiences, Jung recorded them in words and artwork in the Red Book, the original of which
is on display two floors above you in our Jung exhibit. Everything, Jung later said, derived
from confrontations with the unconscious. The experiences he described in the Red Book
furnished him with raw material to construct his system of analytical psychology, excuse me,
one of the major efforts of the 20th century to unlock the mysteries of the human mind.
Today, we will hear a distinguished group of Jungian experts from the United States and
Europe and we thank them all for coming often from long distances to explain and assess the
experiences that Jung described in the Red Book. Then they will also tell us what impact they
think the Red Book will have outside the Jungian community on psychology and related field.
So I look forward to intellectual thesis, I'm sure we all do. Many individuals and
organizations have assisted us in making it financially possible to mount our exhibit and to
present today's symposium. And I'm happy to recognize them, the James Madison Council of
the Library of Congress, the Oswald Family Foundation, the Honorable J. Richard Fredericks
- one of our former ambassadors to Switzerland, the Embassy of Switzerland, the Jung
Society of Washington, the Philemon Society, the Archives for Research for Archetypal
Symbolism, the International Association for Analytic Psychology. And in addition,
contributions from the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, W.W. Norton and Company, the
Honorable Joseph B. Gildenhorn - the more recent Ambassador to Switzerland, and the
Jungian Analysts of Washington Association. Finally, let me conclude on a more personal
note that the staging of this event, I think, owes a good deal to an old friend of mine who I've
2
had a chance to have some deep conversations with in 2003 Phil Zabriskie, known to many of
you, a Jungian analyst, and his widow Beverley Zabriskie, another luminary among the
Jungian scholars and practitioners who will chair the first session. And ladies and gentlemen,
it's my privilege to now get out of the way and turn it over to the experts beginning with the
highly esteemed and great friend, Beverley Zabriskie.
^M00:08:44
[ Applause ]
^M00:08:56
>> Good morning and welcome. And as a Jungian analyst I like the back stories and the
hidden stories. So I would just like to tell you a few of those. First of all, I want to thank
James Billington, a gentleman and a scholar and we are lucky to have him serving the library
and serving the country.
^M00:09:18
[ Applause ]
^M00:09:25
Sixty years ago this month, James Billington graduated from Princeton as the valedictorian of
the class. And Philip Zabriskie was the salutatorian. And the two of them went off to Oxford
and fast forward to 2003 and there's the 100th anniversary of the road scholars at Oxford and
in London. And at a dinner together, Jim mentioned the idea of a Jung exhibit at the Library
of Congress and he Philip began to discuss this and he said, but what was needed was a
centerpiece, a Jungian centerpiece, around which an exhibit could be formed. We were in
London, we called up Sonu Shamdasani. Sonu came over, had dinner together and that was
the night that the idea for this exhibit really began to take form. And Sonu already was
working on the possibility of the Red Book. He'd been working on it since, I believe, 1997.
I'll tell you more about that in a minute. But it was in conversation and it was in friendship
among scholars and gentlemen that this idea really emerged. And then when the Red Book
was published, it was thanks to Sonu's work with the members of the Jung family, three of
whom are here and I would like you to know them, Andreas Jung who is Jung's grandson and
the occupant of Jung's house in Kusnacht and his wife Franie [phonetic] and that home thanks
to their efforts is going to become a public foundation. So would you stand and Eric Bauman
[phonetic], a great grandson.
^M00:11:15
[ Applause ]
^M00:11:28
It's just in terms of Jungian history, the Red Book has become a means through which so
many different arenas of the Jungian world have come together, the family and the scholars
3
and the analysts. And so, it's had that synthesizing effect. And to come as an analyst and see
that poster in front of the Library of Congress facing Capitol Hill with Jung's Red Book on it.
[ Laughter ]
If a patient came in and told me that was a dream I would be seriously in doubt of their
grandiosity and inflation.
[ Laughter ]
But I hope and trust that the energy of the Red Book which was about Jung befriending those
who might be considered enemies in his psyche that some of that spirit gets across the avenue
and I have heard that there is now a tunnel between Capitol Hill and the Library of Congress.
>> A passageway.
>> A passageway, so let's hope that above ground and underground, we begin to affect the
American psyche.
^M00:12:43
[ Applause ]
^M00:12:48
None of this would have been without the extraordinary devotion and dedication of Jung to
his own unconscious and to his psyche, and as I say rather than experiencing what emerged as
frightening and to be skewed and confronted as enemy, he did it in the spirit of befriending
that which was within him. And the devotion that he showed really is a path, a passageway
for all of us to deal with the enemies within so we don't project them without. And Jung was
very lucky to have caught the attention of a man of similar devotion and dedication, Sonu
Shamdasani. Sonu was born in India and when Sonu was 18 years old, he went to India to
find his guru. And while there, he picked up a copy of Jung's Secret of the Golden Flower
and then the next year started reading Memories, Dreams, Reflections and read that one finds
once guru within. And that began a very long, and as I said, dedicated career. With Steve
Martin, Jung--Sonu founded the Philemon Association and Foundation and the President
Nancy Furlotti is here with us today and they have taken on the enormous task of publishing
the 30,000--no, 38,000 unpublished letters of Jung's. And another 30 volumes worth of
unpublished material and I heard many asking Sonu what was he going to do now that the
Red Book was completed.
[ Laughter ]
I thought I would save him having to answer and you having to ask by telling you that he has
embarked on putting together a reconstruction of the formation of modern psychological
disciplines and therapeutics and also a reconstruction of the formation of work of Jung based
on primary archival materials. Sonu has read every Jung document at the [inaudible] in
Zurich. He has since 1988 been prowling the stacks of the Library of Congress. And he
4
probably knows more about Jung than anyone else who has ever lived besides Jung. And as
the cofounder and executive editor of the Philemon Foundation he is continuing this work
with their support. And Sonu also has another life as a scholar. He is the Philemon Professor
of Jung at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at the University College
London. So, it is my enormous privilege and pleasure to introduce the man without whom the
Red Book would not be here and we would not be gathered in this room today, Sonu.
^M00:16:11
[ Applause ]
^M00:16:17
>> Jung's sleeping over as he descends into hell, Jung's hell and possibly our own. My theme
this morning is hell. And coming here this morning I think it may have been easier to get into
than this symposium.
[ Laughter ]
The sign on the gates of hell in Dante's Commedia "abandon all hope all who enter here"
might not be out of keeping or come to mind when individuals first begin to grapple Liber
Novus, the spirit of the depths and the dark denizens that lurk within. But all is not lost. As a
denizen of this domain nailed and chained to this book for what seemed fast approaching an
eternity and closer times to turning into a shade myself. I'd like this morning to provide some
short dispatches from hell to help you on your descent. As the Christian designation for the
dwelling of the dead, depictions of hell from the outset was superimposed on classical
descriptions of the underworld or Hades. First major Christian description of hell occurs in
the apocryphal apocalypse of Peter. In this, Christ shows Peter hell in graphic detail, people
hanging by their tongues, a lake of flaming mire and other full of pus, clouds of worms,
people gnawing their tongues and having flaming fire in their tongues and metal detectors
everywhere.
[ Laughter ]
The key trait of these in similar depictions is a notion that in hell punishments enact the nature
of sins. In his 1893 work on this text, Nekyia, Albrecht Dieterich argued that the apocalypse
of Peter drew heavily on Orphic-Pythagorean traditions. Now at the outset of Liber Novus'
two descents have an exemplary role, Odysseus' descent into the underworld in the Odyssey
and Christ's descent into hell. Descents into the underworld feature in different traditions.
And as the underworld has been a main theme in [inaudible] by James Hillman, I pass all
questions on the underworld to him. First to Odysseus, Book 11 of the Odyssey depicts
Odysseus' descent into the underworld to consult Tiresias. To enter the land of the dead
libations mixed with honey, milk then sweet wine and white barley were made. They then cut
the throats of sheep, probably organic in that time.
[ Laughter ]
5
Tiresias then gives warning and advice concerning what lies in store. We will return to this
motif but just like to put this as one of the backdrops to the terrain we'll be entering. The
second major theme is that of Christ's descent into hell, the harrowing of hell.
^M00:19:59
[ Pause ]
^M00:20:06
The Apostles Creed states that he descended into hell, the third day he rose again from the
dead. It's very brief but what indeed took place there? Accounts are found in the apocryphal
gospels. It was descent into hell to preach to the dead, to redeem the dead and to redeem
Adam. This formed one of, you could say, the major themes in Christian theology until a
reaction sets in in the Protestant Reformation. Swingley, for example, took the account of
Christ's descent simply to indicate that he had really died. Calvin dismissed it merely as a
fable. The fusion of classical descriptions of the underworld and the Christian hell which is
[inaudible] in the most famous depictions we have of hell that is Dante's Commedia, it's
Boticelli's hell. In presenting his vision of hell and one's journey through it, Dante also
presented a hermeneutics of how the text should be read. In his famous letter to Cangrande
Della Scala he differentiated two modes in which the Commedia could be read. The first
sense is that which comes from the letter. The second is that which is signified by the letter.
The first is called the literal, the second allegorical or moral or anagogical. And he
differentiated them in this text in the following manner. The subject of the whole work taken
only from the literal standpoint is simply the status of the soul after death, taken simply. If
the work is taken allegorically, however, the subject is man either gaining or losing merits
through his freedom of the will subject to the justice of being rewarded or punished. Two
modes of reading them and in the second hell featured in an allegorical sense. As the
historian D.P. Walker notes hell began to lose its hold in the 17th century. And there were
many reasons for this, the weakness of scriptural arguments for hell, the decline of the notion
of retributive justice, the rise of rationalist modes of thought and problems concerning the
precise location of hell interestingly conceived of as in the bowels of the Library of Congress,
no, in the earth. For example, in his art school [phonetic] and Diderot and d'Alembert's
Encyclopedie, Sweden argued that the number of the damned argued against the location of
hell in its traditional place inside the earth. It was simply overcrowded. I mean, there was no
place to fit them all. The only place big enough was the sun and this had the added virtues it
provided enough heat for the eternal flames. So even then there weren't problems of global
warming, ecology. You know, where are we going to find enough heat to burn everyone?
Alongside this notion of the problem concerning the literal hell and its location was a
metaphorical use of the word hell. The Oxford English Dictionary characterizes this as a
place, state or situation of wickedness, suffering or misery; a place, state or situation of
wickedness, suffering or misery. And it notes instances of the first usage going back in the
English language to Chaucer. In Milton's Paradise Lost Satan, who was a reliable figure,
states the mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
Satan knew a thing or two about hell. An instance of this metaphorical use is found in a
6
statement by Meister Eckhart cited on several occasion by Jung and you'll see why.
Therefore, do I turn back once more to myself, where do I find the deepest places deeper than
hell itself? For even from there does my wretchedness drive me, nowhere can I escape
myself. Here I'll set me down and here I will remain, the self as deeper than hell. Within the
context of the decline of the belief in a literal hell, two figures stand out. Emanuel
Swedenborg, in terms of central precision and graphic detail it's only perhaps Swedenborg's
hell which comes close to matching Dante's. Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist and Christian
mystic underwent a religious crisis in the 1740s depicted in his Journal of Dreams. In 1745,
he was sitting in a tavern in London. He heard a stranger say, don't eat so much. He went
back home and that night the stranger appeared in a dream and revealed himself as Christ and
told him that he would travel through heaven and hell and talk with demons and angels and
dead and show people the true faith. He was told to note what he'd seen and heard and
demonstrate the symbolic meaning of the Bible, which he duly did. In Swedenborg's work,
Heaven and Hell, heaven and hell were presented as strictly dichotomous. All things in
accord with the divine order corresponded to heaven and all contrary things to hell. In hell,
the spirits of the dead continue their lives much as they did on earth. The main thesis of
Swedenborg's work is encapsulated in this statement, "heaven and hell are from the human
race." Within each of us there were two gates. One which is open to evil and to hell, the
other to good and to heaven. What characterize those who are currently in hell was that when
they were living in the world they love the flesh, the self and the world as opposed to the soul,
the love of the Lord and the love of the neighbor. Now how did one get to hell? Swedenborg
presents its geography. Hells were to be found under mountains, hills and rocks and their
opening appeared like holes and clefts. Some of the hells appeared to the view like the dens
and caves of wild beasts in the forests. Some were like the hollow cabins and passages that
are seen in mines. Some hells present an appearance like the ruins of houses and cities after
conflagrations. In some hells, there were nothing but brothels. There are also deserts where
all is barren and sandy. Hence, there was a multiplicity of hells. One didn't see them by
walking by them because a light only flashed when the soul was cast into hell. They wouldn't
have some smoke coming up. So against the common belief that there was one hell which
was the same for everyone, Swedenborg noted that there was an infinite variety and diversity.
In a similar manner to Dante, Swedenborg not only presents a vision of hell but also a
hermeneutics, a spiritual hermeneutics. The Bible had two levels of meaning, a physical
literal level and an inner spiritual one. These were linked by the doctrine of correspondences.
So I'll come back later to this notion of divisionary tradition of a linkage between a vision
encapsulating its own hermeneutics. The most acute reader of Swedenborg was William
Blake. From his youth, this is a self-portrait. From his youth, Blake had visions of angels and
historical figures whom he conversed with. And for a time indeed he joined the
Swedenborgian church in London where it was established. Blake became critical of the
institutionalization of Swedenborgianism and began taking a more critical view of
Swedenborg. Around 1890, he published the work the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In the
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake articulated his critique of Swedenborg. Indeed the very
title, Marriage of Heaven and Hell encapsulated his sense that these were not two radically
dichotomous and distinct locations. Swedenborg's problem, he noted, was that he'd conversed
7
only with angels and not with the devils who hated religion. He'd had the wrong informants.
If you want to know what hell is like, you got to talk to a devil. I mean it's perfectly obvious.
What Swedenborg failed to see, Blake noted in his annotations to Swedenborg, was that
heaven and hell are born together.
^M00:30:21
He articulated a notion of dynamic of oppositions. What is basic is a series of contraries:
attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, and these oppositions were
necessary for life. What religion has called good and evil were secondary terms, derivatives
which sprang from these basic series of contraries. They were not primary. At the same time,
Blake then launched a critique of organized religion. And of Swedenborg, he noted, he'd
done much good and will do much good. He's corrected many errors of popery and also of
Luther and Calvin but there was little that was genuinely new in his work and it ultimately
served orthodox belief despite its protestations to the contrary. It was Dante, the great--Blake
considered the greater figure. And his last years he produced a series of engravings to the
Commedia, watercolors. That's Lucifer in case you didn't recognize him. This by way a
backdrop. We turn now to Jung. You have noticed that I have not mentioned Freud. As
Eugene Taylor and I have been arguing for decades Freud-centric legend of the genesis of
Jung's psychology, namely that its origins lay first in Jung's discipleship and then divergence
from Freud has led to the complete mislocation Jung in the intellectual history of the 20th
century, that's the [inaudible]. It's only since October the 7th that the full extent of this has
finally emerged into the public domain with the publication of Liber Novus. I would contend
that to continue to argue that psychoanalysis is the key determining context for the emergence
of Jung's psychology can hence forth only be regarded as acts of willful obscurantism. And
no way does Liber Novus emerge as a sequela of Yung's divergent from Freud as it fits
enough to diverge from Freud and enter this vast visionary domain. Rather, it should be
located and situated within the context of divisionary tradition. What Liber Novus presents us
with is a way back to hell. Hell that was increasingly lost to the western imagination. As
noted between the autumn of 1913 and the summer of 1914, Jung engaged in lengthy period
of self-experimentation inducing fantasies and awaking state. Uncertain of his activities 'til
the outbreak of war convinced him that his fantasies were precognitive. He then wrote a
handwritten manuscript of a thousand pages adding a second layer of lyrical elaboration,
interpretation and commentary. He then had this typed and retranscribed it into the volume
we have upstairs. This was self styled as a prophetic work. [Foreign language], the way of
what is to come. Like Dante's vision of hell, like Swedenborg's vision, Jung's vision contains
its hermeneutic within it and its layer 2 attempt to elaborate the significance of his fantasies.
Thus, like Dante, Swedenborg and Blake, Jung's endeavor was not simply to elaborate a work
born of visionary experience to give it form but to elaborate hermeneutics of how it should be
read. In a critical sense then interpretative commentary is superfluous. What is required is a
wider contextualization. This is the whole work approaching you.
[ Laughter ]
It's a new form of Jungian optician's text.
8
[ Laughter ]
Now in terms of the western cultural tradition, not little has been written on Jung's relation to
figures in his Pantheon such as Goethe and in particular Nietzsche. But other figures have
received scant attention such as Dante, Swedenborg and Blake. I wish to speak a little bit of
this now. The English copy of the Commedia there is a touching slip of paper inserted by the
opening cantos in the line, "in the middle of the journey of our life I find myself astray in the
dark wood where the straight road had been lost sight of. This was a situation where Jung
found himself.
^M00:35:44
[ Pause ]
^M00:35:53
In a lecture, at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1935, Jung noted, a point existed
about 35th year when things begin to change. It's the first moment of the shadow side of life
and of the going down to death. It's clear that Dante found this point and those who've read
Zarathustra will know that Nietzsche also discovered it. When this turning point comes,
people meet it in several ways, some turn away from it, others plunge into it and something
important happens yet--to yet others from the outside. We do not see a thing, fate does it to
us.
^M00:36:33
[ Pause ]
^M00:36:40
It's clear from this that Jung found an existential as well as a literary prototype for his activity
in the Commedia. And there are indications that Jung was reading the Commedia during this
period. On 26th December 1913 he transcribed the following lines from the Purgatorio into
his black book, "And I to him. I am one who when love breathes on me notices and in the
manner that he dictates within I utter words." Second quote, "And then in the same manner as
a flame which follows the fire whatever shape it takes, the new form follows the spirit
exactly." Since with these citations give voice to Jung's undertaking to give expression to
what he was endeavoring to do and the manner that he dictates within by utter words. He was
transcribing what he was hearing in a faithful manner. And second, the new form follows the
spirit exactly. This is his fidelity to the event. This is what he was attempting to bear witness
to. In his published scholarly writings, Jung read the Commedia as a visionary experience
disguised on historical and mythical events. Its significance for Jung as a historical document
is found in his commentary in Psychological Types in 1921. He argued that the birth of
modern individualism began when the worship of women, with the worship of women,
"which strengthened man's soul very considerably as a psychological factor since the worship
of women meant worship of the soul." This is nowhere more beautifully and perfectly
expressed than in Dante's Divine Comedy. So he situates it right at the birth of modern
9
individualism, the worship of the soul. Jung then goes on to comment on several cantos in
Paradiso, Saint Bernard's prayer to the Virgin Mother. We turn now to Swedenborg. First to
highlight the significance of Swedenborg for Jung was Eugene Taylor who's lurking
somewhere there. So address all questions on Swedenborg to him. In his youth, Jung read
through many volumes of Swedenborg. There not directly cited Swedenborg's features
critically in the backdrop to Liber Novus. At the very beginning of the text Jung's turning
away from the things ofthe world to the soul can be seen as parallel to Swedenborg's
conception of heaven and hell, the turning inward, the turning away.
^M00:40:03
That what he previously lived had been a hell, in a sense, a negation of the soul. There are
also many similarities in the manner in which Swedenborg engaged dialogue in attempt
constructed by figures in the spiritual world and Jung's endeavor in Liber Novus. The critical
difference is simply one of ontology. Jung replaces Swedenborg's spiritual realism with
psychic realism, his notion of essay and anima articulated indeed in Liber Novus and then
psychological types. It's simply a shift of ontology, a different manner of reading
Swedenborg. Swedenborg's spiritual hermeneutics reading the symbolic sense of the Bible
also impairs to inform the hermeneutics of layer two of Liber Novus. Jung's relation to the
works of Blake appears to be more ambivalent and oscillates. And this appears to be
connected to Jung's ambivalence concerning the notion of arch. In 1921, Jung cited Blake's
the Marriage of Heaven and Hell in Psychological Types which indicates that he read it
during this period when he was working on Liber Novus. Now a curious thing about
Psychological Types is the most read chapter has been the definition of types at the end. But
it's to me quite apparent that the most important chapter of the text is Chapter 5, Type
Problem in Poetry, and the reading of Psychological Types will be in a way completely
transformed after reading Liber Novus and the significance of this chapter will be apparent in
the sense that it's transposing or attempting to cause in the conceptual language some of the
insights of Liber Novus. At the end of this, at the end of what I consider the most important
chapter of the work, Jung notes--cites Blake's statement from Heaven and Hell that there were
two classes of men, the prolific and devouring. And that religion was an attempt to reconcile
the two. Jung then noted that this summarized the whole of his previous discussion, that this
says it all, quite striking. In 1913 in a discussion of visionary works of art, Jung noted that
poets turn to mythological figures to give suitable expression to their experience. This did not
mean that they were working with secondhand material but it was the only way to give form
to imageless primordial experience. So, one starts with imageless primordial experience,
authentic visionary experience, which then poets use mythological and historical figures to
give form to. They've derived the figures from somewhere but that does not mean that the
visions themselves are derived from elsewhere. An important point to note in discussions of
Liber Novus. Jung then noted Dante [inaudible] experience in all the imagery of heaven, and
purgatory and hell. Blake presses into a service the phantasmagoric world of India, the Old
Testament and the Apocalypse. So in his view here, Blake's work contained visions from the
collective unconscious clothed in mythological language. In 1939, in Jung's introduction to
Suzuki's work on Zen Buddhism Jung noted the glimmerings of a breakthrough of total
10
experience in the west where to be found in Goethe's Faust and Nietzsche's Zarathustra, again
the usual suspects from Jung's Pantheon. Although tucked away in a footnote we find "in this
connection, I must also mention the English mystic William Blake." In this connection, he
cannot raise him to the levels of Goethe and Nietzsche. In 1944, in psychology and alchemy,
Jung featured two images by Blake and one of his illustrations to Dante. The legend in
Psychology and Alchemy describes this as the soul as a guide showing the way. It's actually a
revealing slip. It's actually Dante and Virgil ascending the mountain of purgatory. In a 1948
letter, he noted, I find Blake a tantalizing study since he has compiled about half of
undigested knowledge in his fantasies. According to my idea, they are an artistic production
brought in authentic representation of unconscious processes. Here again, you find instances
of this oscillation. It seems to me as though he's indicating this oscillation concerns Jung's
own ambivalence concerning his own work, was Liber Novus a work of art? The notion of
the dynamic interplay of contraries central to Blake's Heaven and Hell is a key theme in
Jung's Liber Novus though there's no evidence to suggest that he derived this idea from Blake.
Rather, it's indicative of what Jung may have found tantalizing in the reading and study of
Blake. Around 1910 Jung went to an Australian trip with his friends Albert Ure [phonetic]
and Andreas Visher [phonetic] during which Ure wrote out chap--read out chapters from the
Odyssey dealing with Circe and the Nekyia. Jung noted that shortly afterwards he like
Odysseus was presented by faith with a Nekyia that descends into the dark Hades. It is then
Jung's figuration of the self-experimentation, the descents into the underworld. Let's now
trace, briefly trace this motif. On the 21st December of 1913 in his fantasy at the outset of his
journey in which he first encountered the biblical figures of Salome and Elijah, Jung gazes
into a stone and catch sight of Odysseus and his journey on the high seas, one of the first
figures that he encounters. After his interchange with Salome and Elijah, he looks again into
this stone thinking again of Odysseus and how he passed the rocky islands of the Sirens and
wonders if he should do so or not. He is there imagining himself in the same situation. In his
commentary in the layer two hermeneutics on this passage you can note that the image
indicated the lengthy wanderings lay ahead of him. Odysseus had gone astray when he
played his trick at Troy. Then Jung notes Odysseus would not have become what he was
without his odyssey. So it's the question of the necessity of the wondering, of the erring in
terms of his becoming. In handwritten drafts t the second book of Liber Novus, Liber
Secundus, Jung subtitled Liber Secundus the Adventures of the Odyssey. In the corrected
draft this is retitled the Great Odyssey. And finally, Jung suggested the line from the Odyssey
happily escaped from the jaws of death be used as a motto of [inaudible] biography of him
Memories, Dreams, Reflections misleadingly referred to as his autobiography. We come now
to the descent into hell. It was a few weeks earlier on December 12th that he engaged in his
first visual fantasy. In 1925, in a seminar he recalled, I devised such a boring method by
fantasizing that I was digging a hole. The fantasy then begins. I see a gray rock along which
I sink into great depths. Only this is a sensible procedure for anyone versed in Swedenborg, is
digging a hole in the rocks that is where hell is to be found. Fantasy that ensues Jung saw a
killed figure float by on the stream and serpents who veiled the sun from which stream of
blood flowed. In 1914, as noted, Jung felt these visions, these fantasies were precognitive and
then he titles this chapter Descent into Hell in the Future. In this fantasy he had descended
11
into hell and the bloodshed that he'd saw depicted what was happening in Europe. "As the
darkness seized the world, a terrible war rose and the darkness destroyed the light of the world
since it was incomprehensible to the darkness and good for nothing anymore. And so we had
to taste hell. Hell was now indeed let loose. It was the earth, the bloodshed and the slaughter
of the Great War. The world had gone literally to hell. But critically, in Jung's account in
Liber Novus this was not senseless but meaningful for the further development of mankind. I
like to indicate further depictions of Jung's imagination of hell in Liber Novus. On 12th
January he found himself in a gloomy volt with a tangle of human bodies. He realized then
that he'd reached the underworld or hell. On 18th January 1914 after he had been interred to
in the insane asylum that James Billington mentioned, he found himself in a steamer, his
neighbor in the ward, a fool who declared himself to be Nietzsche and Christ told him simply
that they were in hell. On 2nd February 1914 his serpent soul tells him that they had arrived
in hell. He saw a hanged man who'd poisoned his parents and his wife. The man tells him
that he'd done this to honor God so that they could escape the wretchedness of life for state of
eternal blessedness. In the fantasy of 28th December 1913 he found himself in a castle in the
forest where he met an old scholar. He is led to a room to sleep and imagines that the scholar
has locked up his daughter were seen to be a hackneyed theme for a romantic novel. She then
literally appeared before him. And Jung notes, "I am truly in hell, the worst awakening after
death, to be resurrected in a lending library." I note that the Library of Congress is not a
lending library, I think, but perhaps for some members of Congress. Have I held the men of
my time in its haste in such contempt that I must live in hell and write out the novels that I
have already spat on long ago? Does the lower of half of average human taste also claim
holiness and invulnerability so we might not say any bad word about it without having to
atone for the sin in hell? So the canonical notion of the fitting punishment in hell is
articulated here. He despised such novels. He finds himself condemned to literally be in one,
forced to live them out. The contemporary equivalent would no doubt be finding his work
featured in a New York Times article or a TV Cop show. Reflecting on this episode, Jung
noted, your hell is made up of all the things that you always ejected from your sanctuary with
the curse and a kick of the foot. What was required then was to give due attention to what led
one to contempt and rage. And through accepting this, through accepting what one had
rejected, one redeemed one's own other into life. Hence, the notion of going to hell is seen as
essential in affirming fullness of one's existence and indeed of life itself. Life affirmation
required an affirmation, and an acceptance of hell. Hell epitomizes a state that Jung found
himself in. A moment of collapse of all that he cherished, all that he had striven for, all that
he'd aspired to and hold dear. Transvaluation of all his values and he comments as follows.
What do you think of the essence of hell? Hell is when the depths come to you with all that
you are no longer--which you--I'll start again. 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 you're 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've planned with yourself is also laughable. That everything
fine is also brutal. That everything good is also bad. That everything high is also low. That
12
everything pleasant is also shameful. A complete moment of reversal, the Eckhartian sense of
the return to one's self as deeper than hell itself or indeed the deepest hell. And Jung notes 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. This is indeed what
Blake would have called the marriage of heaven and hell. What then does one do when one
finds one's self in hell in life? Jung found a prototype in Christ's descent into hell, the
harrowing of hell. One of the key themes in Liber Novus is that of the invitation of Christ.
How was this to be understood, how was this to be lived. In reflecting upon this Jung
understood it not on a literal level but in this deeper sense of living one's life as fully as Christ
lived his. In attempting to do this he has experienced something akin to Christ's descent into
hell. "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. How else could Christ have saved his
Antichrist? Read the unknown books of the ancients, and you will learn much from them.
Notice that Christ did not remain in hell, but rose to the heights in the beyond. In Jung's
understanding, Christ's journey to hell was necessary. Without this he would not have been
able to ascend to heaven. In Jung's account to Liber Novus, Christ had to become his
antichrist, his underworldly brother. He had to become hell himself. Christ's task of the
redemption, the salvation of the dead is then taken up in what I call Jung's theology of the
dead in Liber Novus. To site one of the statements from the draft, "Not one title of Christian
law is abrogated but instead we are adding a new one accepting the laments of the dead." In
Jung's theology of the dead, redemption does not take the form of you should be saving the
souls of the dead but of taking on their legacy answering their unanswered questions. After
his work Liber Novus, in his published scholarly writings, Jung attempted to translate some of
the insights of Liber Novus to a language acceptable to medical scientific audience. One
aspect of this undertaking was a psychological formulation and interpretation of Christ's
descent into hell. In 1937, in his Terry Lectures at Yale Jung noted, "three days descent into
hell during death describes the sinking of a vanished value into the unconscious whereby
conquering the power of darkness establishes a new order and rises up to heaven again that
has attained supreme clarity of consciousness." I'll read this again, you hear the change in
language. The three days descent into hell during death describes the sinking of the vanished
value into the unconscious whereby conquering the power of darkness it establishes a new
order then rises up to heaven again. That is, pertains supreme clarity of consciousness. In
1952, in Aion he noted, "The scope of the integration is suggested by the descensus ad
infernos, the descent of Christ's soul to heaven--to hell.
^M01:00:05
Its work of redemption also encompasses the dead. The psychological equivalent of this
forms the integration of the collective unconscious which represents an essential part of the
individuation process." Again, I repeat. The scope of the integration is suggested by the
descensus ad infernos, the descent of Christ's soul to hell. Its work of redemption also
encompasses the dead. The psychological equivalent of this forms the integration of the
13
collective unconscious which represents an essential part of the individuation process. Here
we find Christ's descent to hell interpreted as the individualization process and the inspiration
of the collective unconscious, the central theme in Jung's later work but we must pause here,
which language, which articulation is primary? First person voice in articulation in Liber
Novus or its subsequent reformulation decades later and the psychological concepts of the
collected works. Relevant here are some comments that Jung made from the discussion of
none other than Swedenborg, see this talk does tie in some loose manner, at a discussion
psychological club in the 1950s. I quote. There are also visions whose pathological character
can be recognized not from their form but from their effects. Or also that they subsequently
require continual working. For instance, the Nicholas van Defleur [phonetic]. He had a
terrible vision and how to protect himself from it, reinterpretation of the vision in the image of
the Holy Trinity. Same with Swedenborg, he went up into this [inaudible] to protect himself
against the vision. Since this was dangerous for him he hitched himself to the concepts. One
must also give the patient something with which he can hold on to himself which he can grasp
equals concepts. The visions of Swedenborg are something terribly important. Also with him
a danger is shown to he plunged into the abyss. Because of that he had to hold on to concepts.
These formed a true salvation for many men. A very nuance statement, Jung was saying that
Swedenborg to protect himself formed concepts. But Jung is not merely being critical and
indicating for many men concepts was all they have to hold onto to be able to withstand the
experiences in question. Now this raises the question whether Jung's later conceptual system
which in some of his followers has not lacked for octrine [inaudible] forms such a safety net
or guard rail vital for some, no doubt, for protection which may block access to very
experiences in question. Taking this further, does Jung's significance lie in his conceptual
formulations, the individualization, the collective unconscious, the integration of collective
unconscious, archetypes and so forth or rather does it, does it in the terms of his own
visionary experience lie in the recovery of hell as made accessible through individual fantasy,
through individual vision and enabling a new route to hell and back. If as Jung claimed Dante
and Blake clothed visionary experience in mythological forms, could we not pose the question
that Jung in turn attempted to clothe visionary experience in conceptual psychological forms?
If so, the power and significance of his work does not reside in his concepts which are
familiar to us but in the visionary experience which was at the back of them. Publication of
Liber Novus then finally enables one to reconsider Jung's significance in wholly new yet
quintessentially ancient manner as recovering the road to hell. Thank you.
^M01:04:45
[ Applause ]
[ Noise ]
^M01:04:51
>> Sonu, thank you. For 13 years, Sonu carried his knowledge of the Red Book in his head
keeping it confidential in all that time. And he had the good fortune to meet Jim Maris at the
library. No, there are so many Jim's, at W.W. Norton who was the editor, unfortunately he's
14
not here today. And Norton originally planned a publication of 5,000 volumes. They thought
they might sell between 1,500 and 2,000. And now the book has gone through its sixth
printing with 45,000 volumes sold in English, 10,000 in German, a Portuguese edition coming
out in the fall and many more languages will be added to the versions of the Red Book. So
that book is going to be on the shelves of many lending library, sorry Jung. But it's again
another example of how an idea and an imagination can bring forth such a phenomenon so,
thank you so much. I know from Sonu that one of his intentions was to make this material
available to those who had toiled in the tradition of Jung for many years and his feeling that
people who have devoted their lives to this enterprise really deserve to have access to this
material and no one deserved it more than James Hillman who is our next speaker. James is
probably the most eminent of all Jungian analyst scholars and the founder of archetypal
psychology. He was born in this country and attended Sorbonne in Paris and graduated from
Trinity College, Dublin. He received his PhD from the University of Zurich and he has also
received his analyst diplomat from the Jung Institute there. He was the director of studies at
that institute until 1969. And that was the year that we arrived in Zurich and met James
Hillman. He then founded Spring House and Spring Publications. And have certainly more
than 15 volumes in his name, Re-Visioning Psychology, The Soul's Code, In Search of
Character and Calling and many other volumes. And right now a 10-volume uniform edition
of archetypal psychology is being produced. And it's collecting many of his works and the
sixth one which is alchemical psychology is now in press. And I believe it will be out in the
fall. Others, [inaudible] I believe have already been published. So the uniform edition of
archetypal psychology will be available. And meanwhile here is the man in whose head it all
exists, James Hillman.
^M01:08:22
[ Applause ]
^M01:08:27
>> Thank you very much Beverly and thank you, Sonu. The title that I gave my thoughts this
morning is Jung and the Profoundly Personal. And so, it seemed probably a good move in old
age to make it profoundly personal. Not only about Jung's profoundly personal but maybe
something from my own past. But first I want to quote something from Auden, Wystan
Auden, the poet. We are lived by powers we pretend to understand. And that's the whole
thing. And the work that Sonu has been doing, the work that Jung did, what that book is and
what Jung spent his life trying to write and make clear is the pretending to understand, trying
to understand the powers. And we are always up against the enormous limitations of the mind
and of language in attempting to understand the powers that are leaving us and once we enter
the realization that we are being lived. We are not the soul agents. The ego is a myth, a
figure I've never met one anywhere, except the words somewhere on all there. That all of that
is attempts to understand the powers. And this changes the way, the way one imagines what's
going on in life and what happens in relationships, what happens in therapy, what happens
everywhere else. We are being lived by powers we pretend to understand.
15
^M01:10:49
Of course, I never understood this, still don't fully but feel it. And this is June 19, 2010. In
June 1961 I was then 35 and I was allowed to go out to Jung's house and pay homage to
Jung's body. He was in a separate room and some of us went out to Kusnacht from Zurich. I
remember carrying a lily. One of those huge lilies with white, you know those exquisite
things that you see imaged in psychology and alchemy. And being received beautifully by
Frau Lily Jung, Frau Annie [phonetic], Frau Gret Bauman [phonetic] and we were sat on the
sofa sometimes, different people coming and going and I looked at photographs from the old
days and we were beautifully received at this time of mourning. So it was probably the
second or third day, I don't know exactly. And so I had my moment in the room with the
body and paid homage, had my lily, and the message, the meaning that I was given was get
out or get on or gets over, something like that and do my work. Now after that, interesting
that lily because I remember Yolande Jacobi, a member of that group at that time brought red
roses. I brought the anima image of the lily. You know, I was the young man of 35 who was
anima possessed, possessed by the idea of the soul, the softness, the adulation, all of those
virtues that the lily was. But the message was get out, get on, get over and do my work. And
that's--that was like [inaudible]. So then for years and years and years and years, it seems to
me, I was doing the work. And at the same time I was undoing the work. And I was living
the tension that Sonu Shamdasani spoke of last night, the tension between the public and the
private. Now I have reached that or resolved that tension for a moment by telling that story.
By telling a story that is public or telling a story in public that is intimately private. And
Jung's the Red Book is a book of deep, deep intimate privateness. So of course there's this
tension, what part is public, what part is private, how far do you go with this or with that? Of
course, in late life it's resolved that the whole business becomes what's public and what's
private anyway but, and what difference does it really make.
[ Laughter ]
We are all scandals.
^M01:14:43
[ Laughter ]
[ Applause ]
^M01:14:53
But each differently, of course.
[ Laughter ]
So that tension of doing and undoing, the tension between undoing the language that Sonu has
been speaking about, these words that obsess our attempt to understand ego, unconscious, this
kind of type and that kind of type. These rational words that are left over from psychology of
other periods, psychology of other dimensions, psychologies of other psychologists. Jung's
16
own language was not that. That's what the Red Book when it came out was like an
enormous turn for me. A revelation that my undoing all these years of trying to work through
and resist this language of opposites. You use the word contraries. Contraries are not
opposites, they're necessary to each other. They're correlative, coexistent. Don't have one
without the other. Black and white aren't opposites. They are only opposites if your mind has
to think in an Aristotelian way and put them into the category of opposites, otherwise, you can
have all sorts of whiteness without thinking about black and you can have all sorts of
blackness without any kind of necessary opposition. There are no white berries. There is no
white coal. There's no, I mean, these are necessary, these are mistakes in thinking. And it
was that struggle all along that has occupied me but now with the Red Book, there is the
revelation. The revelation that the language, their language of psychology is imagistic, is
poetic. It is pre-dialectic, prelogical. Jung writes of those sentences that seemed sometimes
to be forgotten in the psychological types which you mentioned as being so crucial and it's the
book that I think, that's the first book that came out after the beginnings of the experienced
with Liber Novus. Am I right about that, 1921, I think, yeah. He says, "Image is not a
psychic reflection of an external object. It's not because you saw something and then you
have an image of it, but a concept of derived from poetic usage." Poetic usage is the
beginning of the right language for psychology if we're talking about the powers that have us,
a fantasy image and they appear in space and as voice but are not pathological as such. He
writes--and I'll give you even the paragraph numbers. Paragraph 722 in Psychological Types,
"Imagination is the reproductive or creative activity of the mind in general." What does the
mind do? It doesn't invent words like ego. It invents imaginative forms, figures, melodies,
poetic phrases, moments of insight, intuitions, formula. Imagination is the reproductive or
creative activity of the mind in general. Fantasy as imaginative activity is the direct
expression of psychic life. What does the psyche do naturally as a chicken naturally lays an
egg, the human psyche fantasizes. That's its primary activity. Our dreams are prior to our
thinking. See, this is a way of looking at the world that seems to me to have been realized in
Jung's life in the Red Book that is the--the concession of the mind that goes back to Aristotle
but gets reinforced particular from Descartes onward, the rational mind, the mind that was
dominating that 18th century in which Blake and Swedenborg were contraries.
^M01:20:07
That that mind doesn't do the job and that psychology that arises from that mind can't do the
job. So of course everyone's in therapy because they're using the wrong mind to deal with the
psyche. And the therapists are using the wrong mind in dealing with the psyches who are
using the wrong mind. The mind is creating images, fantasies and that these are living
realities that can speak to us. They come figured at times, not only as I say also a melody is a
psychic image. Fantasy as imaginative activity is the direct expression of psychic life, and
they are identical with again Jung's quote with the flow of psychic energy. So our energy, our
emotional vitality, whichever way it goes, down or up, inward or outward, the psychic energy
is actually only one aspect, the other aspect of the fantasy figures and forms. So if you want
to get hold of your emotions or know what emotion or feel yourself emote, are trapped by an
emotion, you try to find the image of that emotion which tells you much more about the
17
emotion than simply suffering the emotion itself. It isn't to get out of the emotion, it is to find
its form, to find its fantasy to elaborate it further, identical with the flow of psychic energy.
Even more he says in Psychological Types, paragraph 78 this one, "Psyche creates reality
everyday. The only expression I can use for this activity is fantasy." Wow. Psyche creates
reality everyday. We think there is psychic inner world and then there is reality. Watch out,
don't do that.
[ Laughter ]
Psychic reality and then reality, hard reality which is always hard, tough, real, cold and so on.
Well, that reality is a fantasy also. And some may not recognize this a fantasy and so we call
it reality. Whatever we call reality is a fantasy that has got stubborn and blocked and become
obscured to the fact of its--of the flow of psychic energy in it. This opens the whole business.
This opens the soul to living, to living so that as a line from Saroyan, one of his plays, two
people meet and one says to the other, what's the fantasy now, Kitty Duval? That's the
relationship. What's the fantasy now? Not what happened to you when you were 4. That's a
fantasy too, what happened to you when you were 4.
[ Laughter ]
^M01:23:49
[ Pause ]
^M01:23:55
Now this, what I'm trying to elaborate is also that it is profoundly personal. We think the
profoundly personal is what happened to us when we were 4. The wounds we've suffered, the
hopes that were dashed, the relationships that we have or had, the intimacies, the memories,
that this is the profoundly personal. But these are the things that happened to everybody.
Everyone has been jilted. Everyone has been disappointed. Everyone has filled with
enthusiasm. These are the profoundly collective experiences. The profoundly personal is the
engagement with one's own demons or the visit to hell. And the encounter with the figures
that Jung had, this is the most intimate, deep, profound, unexpected, completely surprising
individualized part of life. In other words, the encounter with one's own soul and the Red
Book begins with that. Jung felt he had lost his soul. It was now his job to find it or to find
out where it was or what had happened. This is the profoundly personal. Now this changes a
lot because the entire realm of psychotherapy for a hundred years has been going down the
avenue of the profoundly personal is my personal life, my personal memories, my personal
childhood, my personal experiences, my personal--the subjectivism of my, what Freud called
the [inaudible] or the personal unconscious or the repressed. But there is something else that
is not collective in that way and not collected let's say that is not common to us all but is--has
some deep individual of faithful aspect. And this is what Jung most engaged with as I read
the Red Book, he was engaged with uncovering what are in the depths of the soul that was
given to him and the faith that was given to him. Well, that changes what's important in your
life. That changes that these things you're trying to work out in regard to your personal life
18
are really being lived by power as we're trying to understand. And it takes a kind of
courageous fiat mihi, let it done to me, to drop into that. Again, in profoundly personal in my
own case, when I got to Zurich in 1953, the terrors of what lurked that I didn't understand or
was afraid of seem to me to be down below. Now I hadn't read about Jung's descent through
the hole of [inaudible], but I had that feeling that there were things that were going to come up
and get me. And I took to making little paintings of what might be down there, because this
was encouraged by my analyst that seemed to be the way you did things. And I recall the
descent for in my--in my moment, was into water. I went down deep into the bottom of the
sea and there were a lot of creatures there that were going to grab me and hold me and do
things and so on. And I had the experience that I could breathe underwater, and that was a
revelation. Whatever a revelation is, that seemed a revelation that I could actually stay in this
realm and do things, talk, ask questions, move around, explore, and breathe underwater. It
was that literal and that concrete and that vivid, the being underwater, and yet at the same
time, the imagination, the fantasy made it possible to breathe. Now this is just one example of
hundreds of examples of this kind of work that Jung invented. Invented because I say he
invented it for modern psychology. People have been doing exploratory journeys forever.
That's not--and they record it in all kinds of ways, in epics, in Dante's work, in Blake's work
and all the way back, all sorts of people have done Hildegard von Bingen and so on and so
forth. That's not the point. The point is that Jung did something different with it. He devised
this partly as a way, as a method, as something that can be recorded carefully and observed
with a phenomenological mind.
^M01:30:07
And I say a phenomenological mind rather than an empirical mind because he was not doing
experiment only in the sense of let's try this and see what happens. He was allowing the
phenomena to speak. And there's a difference between empiricism and phenomenology here.
Because the empiricist is also doing something with what is. And the phenomenologist is first
of all allowing the phenomenon to have it say and all thoughts about it, what it should be, how
it should work, all the historical information is bracketed out, and you're left with simply the
way the phenomenon appears. And Jung let the phenomena speak. Now, we need to know
here how difficult it is to let them speak. In our culture, we must remember that--let me just-'cause I do have a note actually. I think it's Mark, the biblical Mark and you'll be able to tell
me. Jesus doesn't let the--yeah, Mark 1:34, "Jesus suffered not the devils to speak." Now, do
you realize by letting the demon speak, by letting the voices speak, Jung was making a move
of demonology, as Karl Jaspers have said, and he was opening, he was immediately being
heretical as his pastor said at his funeral, that he was a heretic.
[ Laughter ]
And a very important because the heretics belong within the church, they're not simply
heretics. They have as very important role and so he let the demon speak. Mark 1:34 says,
"Jesus suffered not the devils to speak. Get thee behind me, Satan. Harrow hell. Death
where is thy sting?" That opening produced a radical move in the relation of Jung to
Christianity and the voice says at times in the Red Book, the Christianity that he has and is
19
not--Sonu will be able to tell me those passages where the Christianity in the--that Jung
thought he was a Christian is not the Christianity that he is discovering in the book. Does that
more or less--so that he says, and you can see why because he is allowing other voices, the
multitude of voices to speak and to be figured, to be personified, to have as reality as other
figures. In the basic fundamental Christian way of looking at it, there is only one voice that
can speak to you and that must be Jesus' voice, so all the others are out of the game. So the
images are also voices and they bring some sort of message from the dead and that was one of
the things I'd love to talk more with you, Sonu, about is who are the dead? Who are the dead
in Jung's book? Are they his personal ancestors? Are they the dead of Jerusalem from the 7
sermons? Who are the dead? What is the message of the dead and what is it in America,
what is it in our culture that has so much trouble with the dead? So difficulty, our President
can't even go to the coffins of the dead, our former president. That we have this tremendous
wall between living and death so that at any cost we must keep the living alive because what's
on the other side. No sense, no sense of the permeability of life and death, of the flow of the
others, of the voices of the figures, of the powers into our life everyday, of our relation to
those on the other side who in the old days used to say, welcome, to be welcomed by the
ancestors when you die. Received instead is something this great unknown and you die alone
and all these horrors are imagined because there is no sense of the ancestors. And of course
our ancestors are the American-Indians who lived in this soil. So perhaps our dead, we are
cut from the dead by what we have buried. And to go to the dead would bring up all sorts of
things we don't want to bring up. But it's a question that seems to me the dead are the daily
encounter with everything that has been left out, buried, burned, drowned, forgotten on
purpose and continues to send wafts of little messages through all sorts of small intuitions,
hunches, hints, warnings, omens, the little feelings in the stomach that say, "No, I don't think
I'll do that. I'm not going to pick up the phone on that one. I'm--let that one go." Those little
cautions and warning, who sends those? Who's protecting us everyday about not doing this or
doing that? Remember Socrates said that it--he was never told by his daemon what to do. He
was only cautioned what not to do. Where does that fit, what not to do? The moment of
holding off, holding back, not, the moment of not, are those the dead keeping us safe,
watching out for us? Today, this book is so enormously--how many thousand could I have
those figures again? What were they?
>> 46,000 in English.
>> 46,000 in English, 10,000->> And more languages coming.
>> And more languages coming, imagine->> Another printing.
>> And another printing. We're in the 6th imagine, on the best seller list, imagine. Imagine.
It was last week on Law & Order: Criminal Intent [laughter] if you happen to see. Was that
it--what it's called, criminal intent? If you happen to have seen it, the Red Book was
displayed itself and it was part of a cult.
20
[ Laughter ]
It was inspiring some--inspiring some, I don't know whether they were vampires or they
were-[ Laughter ]
[ Inaudible Remark ]
Now, of course it's been review--you know, we've had meetings that like this in New York
and Los Angeles and the New York Times and so on and so forth. What is its importance in
our culture at this moment? Is what I have been saying about the dead, about the voices,
about letting the demon speak, about the deep polytheistic background that has been
forgotten, about the depths of the profundity of one's personal life and its importance, and the
individual search for not for meaning but for image--for images. Meanings don't carry you
through but the images are your companions. You can have all the slogans in the world and
explanations and understandings, but what carries you through are the voices and figures you
live with and can talk with. Is that what's missing? Is that what they called--it's so radically
different from anything else in psychology, so radically different from today's cultural
[inaudible] of technology, economics, reason, information. You know, when the book first--I
don't know if I'm going on too long. Am I-[ Inaudible Remark ]
^M01:39:52
Okay. When the book--when it was being written around 1915, let's say just that period. At
that time, current in the mind was Blavatsky [phonetic], serialism, parapsychology and
worked on by leading intellects like William James and many others in England, Dadaism,
German Expressionism, joys. They were compatible and comparable experiments in other
areas. In our time, this book is absolutely freakish because we have lived--we live in such a
narrow technical, rational, explanatory, causal way of thinking. We have shrunk our mindset
tremendously since the beginning of the century when this book was not as strange, in my
mind, would not have been a strange. After all, Jung wrote his doctoral dissertation in the
year--1900 on occult phenomena for a medical degree. Think of that in today's medicine.
[ Laughter ]
Today's medicine is packed with occult phenomenon.
[ Laughter ]
But--so it's--the book is sort of a necessity. The book is a necessity in our time and it is
recognized on a deep level of the collective psyche. Thank you very much.
^M01:41:31
[ Applause ]
21
^M01:41:48
>> Thank you so much, James. There is another James that I would like to thank and he's just
left the room but I'm going to thank him anyway at this point. One of the groups of the dead
that Jung met as James Billington described to us where the Anabaptists in the Red Book and
James Hudson who has been the marvelous scholar and gentleman and head of the
manuscripts division of the Library of Congress is a historian and one of his specialties has
been the Anabaptists in terms of the history of the church. And working with him has been
such a pleasure in the formation of this program. And he told me that he found out that the
Swiss Anabaptists were tied in sacks by Zwingli in 1525, and Zwingli and his friends drown
them in the lake of Zurich not far from [inaudible]. So that when Jung met the ghost of the
Anabaptist, they were a group of dead that were emerging out of the waters, so.
[ Laughter ]
Another wonderful back story. And now it's my great pleasure to introduce my friend and
colleague from New York, Ann Belford Ulanov and has been a strong womanly voice in
Jungian studies for many decades. She holds the Christiane Brooks Johnson Memorial Chair
established in memory of her student at New York's Union Theological Seminary, where she's
a professor of psychiatry and religion. And she's also a Jungian analyst in private practice in
Manhattan. And has many, many books to her credit, certainly 9 that I know of, and she is
always at work. She has published many books of her own and she published several with her
husband, the late Barry Ulanov. Her two recent titles are Spirit in Jung, The Unshuttered
Heart: Opening To Aliveness and Deadness in the Self. So I'm so grateful that Ann is here
with us today. Yes.
^M01:44:26
[ Applause ]
^M01:44:35
>> Thank you. Thank you. In the Red Book, Jung encounters Elijah and Salome who say to
him, "We are real and not symbols." And they expressed the tone of the whole volume. What
the guide Philemon conveys, psychic reality exists, it's there. It's subjective and addresses
Jung in a series of images, figures, tasks. And though later, Jung reflects that these figures are
personifications of unconscious thoughts. When he actually meets them, they are real
experiences and evoke in him dread, loathing, confusion. He describes Salome as blood
thirsty horror exclaiming, "I fear her." He understood Salome to personify his feeling which
he had scorned as grossly inferior to his thinking, personified by Elijah. And even later, when
Salome is redeemed into loving and offers her love to Jung, he says to her, "You are like the
serpent who coiled around me and pressed out my blood." And yet at the end of his
encounters, he learns from Philemon that only through voluntary devotion to love do I arrive
at my truest and innermost self. From this one of countless examples, we get a sense of what
it is to read the Red Book. We plunge in down where encounters with the unconscious call us
out, forcing us to tasks that if we avoid, we miss the boat. In painting 55, we see what Jung
22
saw that we all have a boat riding on the unconscious psyche under which the serpent, the
dragon-fish, the monster Apophis swims, threatening to swallow the sun of consciousness.
Jung was called to these encounters, forced by his own complexes that when faced yielded his
vocation. He said, "In my 40th year of life, I had achieved everything that I had wished for
myself." But he had lost his soul and had to go find it. With fright, he asks his soul. "Into
what mist and darkness does your path lead? I limp after you on crutches of understanding. I
follow but it terrifies me." And Jung recognizes, "This life is the way, the long sought-after
way to the unfathomable divine. Thus pairing psyche with soul to whom he says, 'your
meaning is a supreme meaning, and your steps are the steps of a God.'" Jung felt carried in
the fearsome territory beyond what Christ taught. The soul tells him, "If you marry that
ordered to the chaos, you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning, beyond meaning
and meaninglessness." Christ taught God is love, but you should know that love is also
terrible. Christ overcomes the temptation of the devil but not the temptation of God to good
and reason. Identification then with what we call the good is not going to work anymore. For
the soul tells him, nothing will deliver you from disorder and meaninglessness since this is the
other half of the world." In response Jung says, "I swayed between fear, defiance, and
nausea." Jung sees that as Christ knew that he was the way, the truth and the life, I know that
chaos must come over men. For him who has seen the chaos, he knows that bottom sways.
For he has seen the order and disorder of the endless, in short, the soul tells him, life has no
rules, that is its mystery. We enter then a world of encounters which Jung insistently claims
as his own, saying, "Don't ape me. You have your own mysteries. Go there, find them."
^M01:50:10
Jung is encountered by many figures. His meetings lead him to take leave of "science that
clever knower" that imprisons the soul "in a lightless cell." To find another kind of knowing
pertaining to the child God, he comes to serve and to paradoxical over intellectual
intelligence. The child God who is "beyond being split between opposites, whose simple will
we cannot learn for it can only become in you, brings an attitude without preconceptions of
inexhaustible freshness." And from this uniting of opposites rise--arises a third, "the supreme
meaning, the symbol, passing over into a new creation." Here, the symbol takes on incarnate
life, it's not hanging in the air but acts as a solid bridge into daily life, for as Jung writes, "the
divine wants to live with me." Further, this new meaning changes our grasp of how we
understand. "The spirit of the depths took my understanding and all my knowledge and place
them at the service of the paradoxical, the melting together of sense and nonsense which
produces the supreme meaning, the God yet to come." Jung for example encounters the
uniting of below and above, the monstrous and devoted, the collective and individual, the
divine and the human. And paradox also changes our relation to what we know. He no
longer identifies with it but says, I do not myself become the supreme meaning, but the
symbol becomes in me that it has its substance and I have mine. And even further, Jung
distinguishes God and the image of God saying, "It is not the coming God himself but the
image which appears in the supreme meaning." Chaos does unites with order and the God
image we perceive and form on which we depend can always be destroyed. How does Jung
get her to these thoughts? Only by going through hell which he says means to become hell
23
one self. And he describes it as full of frightful noise, shrieking voices where he discovers the
thousand serpents that want to devour the son are also in me. I myself am the murdered and
the murderer, the sacrificer and the sacrificed, the upwelling of blood streams out of me.
From refusals of such consciousness flow collective depredations, manifest then in World
War I. Manifest now across our globe in the countless cruelties we do to each other. Jung
says, men fall on their brothers with mighty weapons and bloody acts, when they do not know
that their brother is themselves. One way or another, the sacrifice will be made.
Unconsciously, in barbarism against each other and against the earth as Philemon asks, do
men atone for the ox with the velvet eyes? Or do penance for the shiny ore? Your blood
thirsty tiger growls softly, while you, conscious only of your goodness, offer your human
hand to me in greeting. And suddenly I felt a cruel hammer blow, struck a nail into my
temple. What then is the sacrifice? To severe our identification with what he calls our
formations, such as the image of God or what we hold supreme for Jung at that time science,
or what we experience as our ruling principle for Jung, his thinking. The expansion of our
subjectivity accompanies our opening to reality that lies beyond our images of its center. The
ruling principle in each of us is the hero who must be slain. He writes, "The heroic in you is
the fact that you are ruled by the thought that this or that is good, the goal. Consequently, you
sin against incapacity but incapacity exists, no one should deny it or shout it down." When
we succeed, "in making a god," our whole force has entered into this design. We desire to
rise with the divine sun and become part of its magnificence. But then we are no more than
hollow forms. He continues, for our formation causes many good persons to bleed to death.
When we lose our force to our formation, we try with unconscious cunning and power,
demandingly to force others into following the God. By clinging to our formation, we push
away anything opposite and left unvalued this incapacity, this inferior part does not develop
but degrades into monstrous form. But Jung finds that "Salvation comes to you from the
discarded. Your sun will arise from the swamps. And even more shocking, but the lowest in
you is also the eye of evil that stares at you coldly and sucks your light down into the dark
abyss." We need the help of evil to dissolve our formations for we become bad in our
goodness and do not know it. Hence, we must recognize "our complicity in the act of evil, for
evil has to be accepted and must have a share in our life." This jarring encounter with his
lowest what he later calls the shadow, issues in Jung haranguing against, "his inordinate
ambition. You don't work for humanity, you work for self interest, he accuses. You consume
yourself in rage and speak in cold daggers. What is concealed in you I will drag into light.
You should be a vessel of life, so kill your idols. Yet, Jung also harangues his soul who has
brought him to these realizations, accusing her of stealing "the gold", the sparkling light of the
jewel and absconding with it to heaven. Jung insist the she tell him what is this treasure and
give him what belongs to me and beg for what you need from it. The soul finally confesses.
It is love, warm human love, warm red blood. The holy source of life, the unification of
everything separated and longed for. Jung protests. You get drunk on the blood of men and
let him starve. Love belongs to me. I want to love not you through me. He insists she learn
to honor mankind because you force us to labor for your salvation. And now she must work
for "the earthly fortune of humankind". This means taking back into the human interior not
24
just his own lowest, his inferior part but also his force that creates the gods. Not just his
shadow but also his now redeemed feeling, the treasure of warm human love.
^M02:00:07
And not just his personal matter but what his encounter show him about what matters, the
fundamental elements of reality. For example, Jung must embrace "the serpent of God that
wants human blood". For this serpent, life is part of the power that is different from the
power of science. The serpent is the earthly essence of men which is not conscious. It is the
mystery that flows to us from the nourishing earth mother from which everything that
becomes emerges. It both causes Jung to become enslaved to his ruling principle and hence is
an adversary. But also it gives him wisdom, hardness, a wise bridge that connects the right
and the left and leads to concretization on earth. The point here is not theory but making a
difference in life in ethical action. Jung does unite with the serpent. He says, "I took my part
of the humiliation and subjugation upon myself." And he continues the devil, who is the sum
of darkness of human nature now has no power over him. For Satan is the quintessence of
evil, pure negation without force. Taking on the serpent, Jung fetters the devil and builds "a
firm structure" that can withstand the fluctuations of the personal and therefore, the immortal
in me is saved. The dead come back to Jung because their unlived life drove them to find the
animal part they had failed to live. Jung says he takes over something of the dead into my day
and death that can never be canceled out gives me durability and stability, when I recognize
the demands of the dead in me and satisfied them. I sacrificed personal striving in the world
which then took me for dead. But the serpent says to him, life is yet to begin, which Jung
himself perceives in saying that everyday belongs to the image of the Godhead. Echoing the
words of Salome and Elijah that they are real, the everyday living serves the image we have
of the ultimate, what we call God. And for this task of living the divine in everyday, Jung has
the help of the Cabiri who grow from the flowers of the corps of the slain dragon who
devoured the sun of consciousness. Jung calls them possessors of ridiculous wisdom, first
formations of the unformed gold. They have their origin in the lowest and he asks them, "Are
you the earthly feet of the Godhead?" They say, "We are the juices sucked out of inertia,
affix to what is growing. We carry up what is dead yet enters into the living. We place stone
on stone and now you stand on solid ground." And they give him a sword to slay them. For
that will free Jung from his entanglement with his formations, his ruling principle, his
scientific thinking. So from this encounter we learn what Jung learned. Destructiveness finds
its ongoing place in life. He writes, the creating of the new prepares the destruction of
precisely this day in the hope of leading it over into a new creation. As a result of these
encounters, Jung experiences a change in his subjectivity. He says, I'm smelted anew in the
connection with the primordial beginning of my self and the world. The formed in him
dissolves, binds itself anew with the children of chaos, the powers of darkness, the ruling and
seducing, the divine and the devilish. He writes, by accepting the lowest in my self, I lower a
seed into the ground of hell. The seed is invisibly small but the tree of life grows from it and
conjoins the below and the above. Beginning down where nothingness widens itself into
unrestricted freedom. So in effect, the nowhere in us becomes the site of transcendence. For
God is not now to be found in the absolute, but in the terrible ambiguity "the hateful beautiful,
25
the sick, healthy," the new god will be found in the relative, born as a child for my own soul
and from the human soul, from the secret mystery of the individual. The arrival of the new
comes not then as a descent of spirit from above but from the below of matter which for the
psyche is the unconscious that includes our personal narrative but also the human narrative,
the objective elements that must conjoin. We must do the work. Jung says, "When God
enters my life, I bear the burden of poverty and everything reprehensible in me. With this, I
prepare the way for God's coming." This is not hubris, this is service. And a bold way Jung
describes his service is this. The depths will force you into the mysteries of Christ. One is
not redeemed through the hero but becoming a Christ himself. We undergo the mysteries of
conjoining the opposites and suffer what this conjunction brings. For Jung, it was conjoining
thinking with feeling, science with magic, intellect with paradox, devil with God and his way
makes us ask, well what is our way. And Jung writes, you make your self into the vessel of
creation in which the opposites reconcile and thus you also serve others. If we are ourselves,
he writes, we fulfill the need of the self and through this become aware of the needs of the
communal and can fulfill them, then the life of God begins. May each one seek his own way,
the way leads to mutual love and community. The change in his subjectivity accompanies the
change in God images. The child Christ and Abraxas all turn up in Philemon's garden.
Philemon tells Jung, the dead rejected the God of Love and the community of love. So I am
teaching the God who blasts everything human, who powerfully creates and mightily
destroys. And Philemon advices Jung to enter ever deeper into God and Jung encounters the
Lord of the Frogs, "of bodily juices, the spirit of sperm and entrails, of the genitals, of the
joints, of the nerves and the brain, the spirit of sputum and excretions." Abraxas, the name
given to this God behind the Godhead is "the creative drive form and formation, sheer
effectiveness that unites the fullness and vital force, God, with the sucking gorge of
emptiness, the devil." Abraxas who produces truth and lying, good and evil, life and death, in
the same word and in the same act is terrible.
^M02:10:02
Out of the pleroma which is fullness and nothing, the beginning and end of creation, "our
nature, our very nature is differentiation. If we are true to our essence, we differentiate." The
primordial creator of the world, the blind creative libido becomes transformed in men through
individuation and out of this process arises a divine child, a reborn God. No more dispersed
but one and individual in all individuals the same everywhere. A thread winds back to Christ
that we should be ourselves as truly as Christ was. Philemon says to Christ, what one
individual can do for men you have done. The time has come when each of us must do his
own work of redemption. And Jung responds, I decided to do what was required of me. I
accepted all the joy and every torment of my nature and remained true to my love, to suffer
what comes to everyone in their own way. So behind the work of individuation lurks the
terrific power of Abraxas, the sheer force of being. And as man becomes differentiated, at a
great distance, writes Jung, in the zenith stands a star. This is the one God of this one man,
this is his world, his pleroma, his divinity, the God and goal of man. To this one God, man
shall pray. Prayer throws a bridge across death. And Jung responds to his encounters by
saying our task is to live one self, to fulfill what comes to you, for our life is the truths we
26
seek, we create the truth by living it. Speaking to the spirit of the depths, Jung exclaims, let
me persist in divine astonishment so that I am ready to behold your wonders. This knowledge
of the heart is in no book but grows out of you like the green seed from the dark earth. And
you attain this knowledge only by living your own life to the full and only if you also live
what you never have lived. Jung's devotion to what he encountered made him recognize,
"That I am as I am in this visible world and only the expression and symbol of the soul. I am
thoroughly a servant of a child." And Philemon tells Jung, "You will be a river that pours
forth over the lands and streams toward the depths. You will hold the invisible realm in
trembling hands. It lowers its root into grey darknesses and mysteries of the earth and sends
up branches covered in leaves into the golden air. It will stay green for a long time." Thank
you.
^M02:14:05
[ Applause ]
^M02:14:32
>> Thank you very much, Ann. Ann is our last formal speaker and I'm going to now--we are
going to go until 12:10 because we've started late. And I'm first going to ask the speakers if
they would like to address any questions to each other and then invite the audience also to ask
questions. And I'm going to take the prerogative of making the first two quick remarks. One
thing that astonishes me is the incredible breadth of Jung's lived life. That while he was
working on the Red Book in writing his 60 volumes worth of material, he was keeping a full
practice traveling around the world, present to the raising of his 5 children and loving food
and wine and art and the wind and the waters of Zurich. And so, the whole celebration of the
lived life was also happening simultaneously here. And last night, one of Jung's--the
youngest of Jung's grandsons, Hans [phonetic] Hoerni said that what he most remembered as
a 10-year old of his grandfather was the totality of his laughter. And I just wanted to share
that with you because I thought that was such a beautiful phrase that somehow he managed to
go through all these and live the full life with the totality of laughter. And the other thought
that came to me as I was listening is the definition Jung gave of God when was asked as an
older man how he would define God and he said, God is that which crosses my willful path,
which is I think one of the great statements of always being open to the unexpected and the
surprise in life. And so now, I'd like to ask the speakers if they would like to address anything
to each other.
>> I have one little.
>> Yes.
>> There's a sentence, I discard--page 307 in the Red Book. I discard everything that was
laden with meaning. Then Jaffe writes a book called Jung's The Myth of Meaning. Can you
distinguish what Jung means, what Jaffe means? I mean that evidently there are two senses of
meaning here or--it's [inaudible]--'cause I love this thing, I discard everything that was laden
with meaning. I think they're splendid but I take it in my own way.
27
>> It's an important juncture. I think there's a critical issue of chorology there. What he
describes there is entering a state of framelessness, a state of framelessness.
>> Framelessness.
>> Setting aside [inaudible] meanings to be able to confront his own experience. In doing
that, meanings are recomposed and one finds that in the second layer of the text, [inaudible]
develops. So in that sense, I see that the first statement as a moment or [inaudible] gave in
sense on the way to an ultimate recovery of meaning.
>> Uh-huh.
[ Inaudible Remark ]
[ Laughter ]
>> To the eventual recovery of meaning.
>> Yup.
>> Which then [inaudible] would have to be discarded again, wouldn't it?
[ Laughter ]
>> And then the whole shebang starts again and again.
[ Laughter ]
>> I would say, Jim, that it's some--it's meaning and meaninglessness that he's after so that
perhaps the word emphasize should be missed rather than meaning, that you create meanings
and you know that the bottom sways underneath them and none of them are ultimate and they
will be dissolved and if you can't take that as an inner task to live with that, it might happen to
you from the outside as I think you've said where events happen that just are terrible. They
just rip up everything you thought you knew. Death is like that often and--but we need, we-as you were saying, we have images of meaning. The psyche speaks in images that strike us
and we want them and yet the bottom sways.
>> Okay. I'll let that ride, yes.
[ Laughter ]
That's->> It comes as thoughts.
>> They ask us somehow if one can live the meaningless life, that's what I'm thinking of.
[ Laughter ]
[ Applause ]
28
>> That would be a formation that would--dissolved.
^M02:20:08
[ Laughter ]
[ Applause ]
^M02:20:13
>> I think one has no option, that's-[ Laughter ]
>> That's insane.
>> That's where we find ourselves.
>> Yes, yeah. Except we lived by the powers, so it would be--the sense, the sense of life can
still be feeling without having the meaning.
>> Or the ultimate meaning eludes one, if there is one.
>> Yeah, if--yeah. Exactly.
>> Or I think the emphasis shifts from having the meaning or not having the meaning to be in
sort of a constant thrumming conversation with the powers.
[ Inaudible Remark ]
It's like a dance or a fox appearing and splat [phonetic], I go on the ground.
^M02:21:09
[ Laughter ]
[ Applause ]
[ Noise ]
^M02:21:24
So perhaps the point there is that to have this-^M02:21:29
[ Laughter ]
[ Inaudible Remarks ]
^M02:21:34
29
You got to have a point. Perhaps the point then in that definition of God is that which crosses
my willful path is that the fantasy of carving one's path is a willful fantasy in that sense. You
would carry the image of it. That's what's happening. Or as another phrase here which I
didn't include 'cause of the time but he says, I know these experiences are of God because of
their unshakableness. So, there's a kind of umm to it.
>> It also strikes me that Salome is the first figure, here is the first female figure and she's a
beheader.
>> Oh yeah.
[ Laughter ]
>> Details, details.
[ Laughter ]
And so what he's actually->> Discriminate behavior. She accuses whom she wishes to behead.
[ Laughter ]
>> Yes. But to talk to her means you open yourself up to the experience of beheading that
everything you thought and structured your life around is challenged, yeah.
>> But she doesn't behead him. He heals->> He thinks he will be. He seduces her.
>> Well she seduces not.
>> Well-^M02:22:54
[ Laughter ]
^M02:22:59
>> You never know who seduces her.
[ Laughter ]
>> Exactly.
>> Exactly.
>> Exactly.
[ Laughter ]
30
>> There is though a dream he says when--follow that quotation I gave that she coils around
him like the serpent, then the next line is whenever I think of you, I never forget this dream I
had. I was--this is you and I was lying on iron spikes and a bronze wheel rolled over me and
crushed me. This is what he associates to the seduction of Salome.
[ Inaudible Remark ]
[ Laughter ]
>> He knew what he was talking about.
[ Laughter ]
>> There is no evidence by it graphically that Jung was into [inaudible] anyway.
[ Laughter ]
Of course you mean that.
[ Laughter ]
>> In this sentence that God is what crosses my willful path, does not necessarily imply that
God is good and that you turn your cheek to everything that crosses your willful path. It
really would be more Jacobean, that is you struggle->> Exactly.
>> with whatever crosses your willful path.
>> Which is [inaudible]->> But is that the heroic mistake or do you turn the other cheek and love whatever crosses
your willful path or what?
[ Laughter ]
>> Conversation with all of the above.
>> What's that?
>> Conversation with all of the above. Who is it--who is it crossing and->> Well, it seems in the attitude that Jung has that he has talked about in Memories, Dreams,
Reflections, he has these big dreams and then he says, oh no, that means I have to work on all
these material.
>> Yeah.
>> It's always dismay, you know, that he's had this huge archetypal dreams in a way, this will
give me a task. So, to me that is engaging and--
31
>> Engaging.
[ Inaudible Remark ]
>> Well also, it's not about--it turns to the question meaning, it's a about a question of
discrimination and differentiation of the voices.
>> Yeah.
>> Of discriminating who is there and what is there and noting it, being alive to its--to what
confronts one. I mean there's no answer. It doesn't propose an answer there, but a kind of
fidelity of recording what comes his way.
>> So any burning questions? It's hard to see this. Knowing there are no answers.
[ Laughter ]
>> There's one up in the back.
>> Yes, yes. In the back there.
[ Inaudible Remark ]
>> [Inaudible] a mic. Could these meanings, these symbols that come, could they be relative
truths that only exist in the moment and are meant to be grasped in the moment but not clung
to?
>> I didn't hear it.
^M02:26:32
[ Pause ]
^M02:26:37
>> The--there is an explication in the text of temporality that the highest truths is [inaudible]
you put to devalue themselves and that require regeneration. There's that--a chapter entitled
the Ruin of Former Temples, which talks about his former ideals and how these things
necessarily degenerate. So he's faced with a collapse of everything that he held dear to his
highest truths. So that is part of the predicament is to allegedly allow his truths what is--to
witness his truths turned into falsehoods and that lands him into this hell. He is to find his
way to accept the--accept the becoming of temporality and that is--'cause that was explicating
the figure of Abraxas. That is an acceptance of change, destruction, coming into being and
destruction at the same time and an affirmation that nothing is fixed.
>> And the catch is you do need something to live by. We are finite--those that repetition of
the image of a solid bridge into everyday life. The divine wants to live in the everyday life.
So that the catch is how to live with something that you're depending on, that is guiding you
32
and simultaneously know it is not ultimate in that sense, it is relative. But you're living as if
it's ultimate and yet it's relative. It's that kind of I'm there and there's a gap as well.
>> So, we have another program this afternoon. There'll be a chance for more questions and I
wanted to thank the speakers this morning and I also want to again thank James Hudson who
now is in the room.
[ Laughter ]
^M02:28:58
[ Applause ]
^M02:29:06
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.
33