Carl Jung’s Red Book, Liber Novus

A Brief Exploration of the Spiritual Psychologist’s Formative Inner Journey

In the year 1897, at the tender age of twelve, the future psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung was visiting the picturesque cathedral located in his childhood home of Basel, Switzerland, when he was struck by a waking dream that would come to fundamentally frame the way he viewed spirituality. The cathedral roof had recently undergone restoration, and this young visionary son of a pastor saw the way in which God on high showed his favor to the beautiful building mankind built to house Him: the Almighty appeared on a golden throne above the cathedral and delivered upon it a bowel movement of divine size and force, omnipotent feces which splintered the roof and reduced the church to rubble. Here, for the first time, Jung felt a personal connection to a living God, outside of and bigger than his father’s dead buildings and books. This conception of God as a visceral, alive, and most importantly totally personal — yet still all-encompassing — being is the underlying notion found throughout his first and most closely guarded synthesis of philosophical psychology, The Red Book.

The Red Book was born as an expression of the tension that surrounded Jung around the time of its inception, both culturally as the tense presence of war’s preceding spectre loomed menacingly over Europe prior to the outbreak of the first world war, and personally as his now infamous friendship with Sigmund Freud bent and then broke under the strain of an ever widening gap between their conceptions of the unconscious aspects of the human mind. It began in a particularly haunting dream in the fall of the year 1913, in which Jung saw Europe consumed by a tsunami of blood , in hindsight seeming to forecast the gruesome conflict yet to come. Unable to shake the feeling of premonition and impending destruction, Jung felt compelled to engage with, explore, and analyze the meaning of this and other recurring messages his psyche seemed to foist upon him with impetus, in much the same way he had analyzed the dreams of patients alongside Dr. Freud. This inward journey of self-analysis would take the form of repeated, intentional lucid-dreaming over the course of sixteen years; direct conversation with the fantastic manifestations of the deepest parts of his own mind, unadulterated confrontation with and interpretation of the symbolic scenes, images, and ideas these inner daimon presented to him within the spiritual realm of the psyche, to Jung an equally real and parallel world. These experiences laid the bedrock upon which Jung rest his understanding of the human mind and theories thereof from then on, later saying of such dreams: “That was the primal stuff that compelled me to work on [psychology], and my work is a more or less successful attempt to incorporate this incandescent matter into the worldview of my time. The first imaginings and dreams were like fiery, molten basalt, from which the stone crystallized, upon which I could work.”

It’s fitting, then, that the two conceptual essences which Jung — at first broadly — describes being confronted by are those of the worldly, rational “spirit of this time,” and the transcendent, primordial “spirit of the depths,” The spirit of this time extols to Jung the virtues of humanity’s current perceptions and wisdom, insisting on the orderly dogmas of both science and Christianity, recognizing “the greatness and extent of the supreme meaning, but not its littleness.” The spirit of the time divides supreme meaning into two halves: one, a God-image of accepted moral right and order, the other, a rejected devilish shadow of evil and chaos. To Jung’s confusion and horror, the spirit of the depths insists that the true Godhead is not this God-image, but instead is the gestalt sum of both the image and its shadow; that a true God is not only made up of the exceptional, the great, and the good, but also encompasses the banal, the miniscule, and grotesque aspects of life and existence, saying “The supreme meaning is great and small, it is as wide as the space of the starry Heaven and as narrow as the cell of the living body.” This God-image — shadow dichotomy as described in the voice of the spirit of the time, forms the basis of understanding for much of the dreams and images it precedes, which often take the form of a comparison between a scientific thinker or traditionally Christian person — to whom Jung at first relates, but later comes to see the folly of — and a hedonistic or pagan figure –who at first repulses Jung, before he realizes they are to be understood, related to, and accepted. Through the recognition and integration of such duality, Jung comes to understand the transcendent, all encompassing nature of the “spirit of the depths.”

Jung is presented with and guided along this inward path by his soul, at first just felt as a shadowy presence chased through a spiritual desert and always ever so slightly out of reach, eventually fully manifested as the Anima, the incarnation of the fundamental feminine aspect of Jung’s inner self, a separate being which exists in all the spaces and embodies all possibilities Jung himself does not evince in life, most obviously evident in her femininity (a woman, according to Jung, would have a masculine Animus). To most easily understand Jung’s conception of the soul, one need only consider the nearly ubiquitous outward projection of the lack of connection to it: the romantic notion of a “soulmate,” the conceptualized ideal of a partner who completes us, who fits in all the gaps of our heart, with whom one and one make not two but simply an even greater one. Jung’s Anima is not the pure, angelic figure one might imagine of such a soul however; she is often mocking, scornful, cruel, and deceitful, pitilessly drawing Jung through the very pits of Hell itself for the sake of conceiving a living God inside himself.

The forms and figures of this Dantean journey are myriad, ranging from strange and intriguing caricatures of mythological people and places to the unspeakable and sickening, but a common thread of meaning seems to persist subtly throughout: Jung must recognize that the “truth” he currently lives by and understands is a half-truth, inexorably linked to and dependent for existence upon its inverse compliment. This is perhaps most clearly illustrated in a dream Jung would later call the “Mysterium Encounter,” in which he finds himself at the bottom of a dark primordial crater, confronted by the three inhabitants of the columned manor he finds there. The first of these figures, a robed, wizened old man with an air of sagacity, introduces himself as the prophet Elijah of the bible’s Old Testament; the second is an animal familiar, a black serpent who exists always between the other two, who can only be adequately explained after understanding it’s companions. The third is the prophet’s daughter, blind but also beautiful, and Jung is horrified and confused when the prophet identifies her as Salome, the licentious harlot of biblical fame, infamous for asking Herod for the head of John the Baptist after being spurned by the holy man. Jung’s dismay deepens when Salome declares her love for him, worsening still when the Elijah chastises him for not reciprocating her feelings.

Jung is left reeling until the spirit of the depths reveals to him the divine reality that underlies Elijah, Salome, and the serpent that stands between them. The prophet and the harlot represent twin aspects of his deep, primordial, pre-conscious self, the unconscious precursors from which conscious thought is born. Salome is a representation of feeling, the libidinal drive of a sensing being to seek that which is pleasurable. Elijah corresponds to forethinking, the ability of a being to perceive, to order and differentiate the chaotic sensual information into coherent associative concepts. Jung underlines the inexorable symbiosis of these two, pointing out that the blindness of Salome relates to the inability of feeling to conceive of the form of what it senses, therefore unable to see its way to pleasure. Likewise useless on its own, forethought unwed to feeling stands still, with no incitement to bring form out of formlessness. Feeling is awareness of the now, forethought is the memory of past states of feeling and the use of that memory in the anticipation of the future. These are ancient and universal forces which exist fundamentally at the core of all living beings.

The serpent which stands between forethinking and pleasure is the transcendent property, the necessary demarcation of the two for the sake of their existence, separate from but related to both. It is the essence which makes the thinking person shun their passion, and the feeling person reject their thought, as Jung says “If I look across from forethinking to pleasure, I first see the deterrent poisonous serpent. If I feel from pleasure across to forethinking, likewise I first feel the cold cruel serpent.” This serpent is kin and kind to the one found in Eden that imparts upon mankind the “knowledge of good and evil,” the fundamental aspect of differentiation between subjective and objective principle; this serpent is also further illustrated in a later dream in which a great and immortal god from the east — the land of the subjective — is poisoned by the objective knowledge of mortality Jung imparts upon him, as if bitten by the serpent in his Achilles heel, his unknown weakness. The transcendent essence that exists between such opposites is represented as reptilian and venomous because each is a perfect inversion, refutation, and death to the other, alien and unrelatable to its counterpart as the reptile seems to the mammal.

Later in the journey, Jung meets perhaps the most important figure of the Red Book, who embodies the acceptance and embrace of existence’s essential dichotomies. He is the shrewd but loving magician Philemon, who teaches Jung the secret to the art of magic: that magic can neither be learned, taught, nor understood, as Jung says: “the practice of magic consists of making what is not understood understandable in an incomprehensible manner.” It is further described as the ability to “unite the two conflicting powers of [the] soul and keep them together in a true marriage until the end of [one’s] life.” In many ways, Philemon represents a refutation of the predominant Christian theology, that identifies dualities like that of good and evil as universal, concrete absolutes the exist outside the self, imposed on the individual externally. Philemon’s teachings could be best related to those of Gnosticism, which emphasize a personal, inward focus to spiritual growth and understanding and a fundamental concept that truth is something that wells up from within, not that which is dispensed from without.

In the capstone of the Red Book, Philemon outlines the framework of this philosophy in seven sermons preached to the ghosts of the dead — but still unfulfilled — spiritual seekers, who continue to exist and yearn for truth within the collective unconscious of man. Throughout these sermons Philemon describes the nature of the Pleroma, the underlying and all-encompassing unknowable medium which represents both emptiness and fullness, both nothing and everything. It is indescribable and “fruitless to think about…for this would mean self-dissolution,” but is necessarily mentioned in order to recognize the relativity essential to every duality and understand that the serpentine essence of differentiation is the essential component of mankind. To conceive of existence implies nothingness as a matter of course, likewise the conception of a pure god engenders its opposite devil. The Pleroma is the prior state of undifferentiation and also the null that results from the collision of two opposite forces which perfectly cancel each other, the beginning and end of creation, the Alpha and Omega.

The resemblance of Jung’s inner journey and the truths found along the way within his unconscious to those found throughout much of Eastern philosophy is uncanny, especially in his conception of the Pleroma as compared to the Tao, or the Buddhist conception of Nirvana reached through self-dissolving enlightenment. It is no wonder then that Jung felt the journey complete when his friend and colleague Richard Wilhelm translated and then passed along an ancient Chinese text entitled The Secret of The Golden Flower, Jung saying of the text in the epilogue of the Red Book: “there the contents of this book found their way into actuality, and I could no longer continue working on it,” The Red Book was and still remains over a hundred years later a work far beyond the scope and understanding of the times, much like the primordial, unconscious, and eclectic spirit of the depths whose truth it contains.