Exploring Jung's Red Book, Part 3

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This week we move from Liber Primus to Liber Secundus, from the First Book to the Second Book.  The second book differs in many respects:  it includes many more archetypal figures and it includes larger and more complex illustrations.

The chapter opens with a dialog between Jung and a figure called the Red One, who eventually reveals himself to be the Devil.  Their conversation has a couple of main themes.  First, that Christianity has led Jung, like most Christians, to a feeling of alienation from the world and a sullenness.  Instead, people should dance through life.  In fact, the Devil reveals that his other name is “joy,” and at that he turns from red to tender flesh color, his clothes bursting into green leaf.

The scene shifts.  Now Jung finds himself in a castle, where he encounters a slender young woman, whom he comes to recognize as his anima.  This leads to a fascinating conversation about the balance of masculine and feminine in the personality.  He comes to the conclusion that discovering one’s soul requires transcending whatever rules we have learned about gender. There is no generalizable path on how this is to be done; it is unique to each individual.  One must rise to the demands of each situation.  To a rationalist like Jung, this opens once again the fear, and the necessity, to abide the chaotic and horrifying forces of the unconscious.

Next, Jung encounters a lowly person, a tramp, who is dying of several illnesses. As he lay dying, he describes his fears and longings to Jung, to know simple pleasures of going to the cinema, having a job, having the love of a woman.  Jung puts him up in lodging, and stays with him as he dies, gurgling in his own blood.

This episode leads to Jung’s expositing on the experience of one’s depths. He sees his own fate in that of this lowly man.  Indeed, he will not experience personal transformation until he has sunk this low.  Fear of death brings us, ultimately, into an awareness of our singleness, apart from our collective identity.  We must ultimately face this fear boldly, and we can only achieve our own redemption by living our life fully and uniquely.

In the next experience, Jung encounters an anchoriate, a monk who has taken up the solitary life in the desert.  This anchorite teaches Jung how to read scripture, that is, not to seek any unambiguous meaning, but to read the text anew in light of one’s changing experiences and circumstances. It is not about mere words – the anchorite cautions that “words should not become gods.”  But this is the trend of the modern world.

Two other themes emerge in this part of the Red Book:  solitude and the values of “unlearning.” The anchorite has been able to turn from the cares and duties of everyday life and to “turn his whole life into the sprouting garden.”  In solitude, one is more able to examine one’s ideas, to set aside what one has learned in the past that might impede having new insights or ideas.

Jung has yet another vision, of the Greek god Helios riding across the heavens in his chariot of the sun, drawn by white, winged horses.  The anchorite urges Jung to pray, and although Jung objects at first, he finds himself praying to the sub, to a scarab, and to a stone. The anchorite does not condemn Jung for this, announcing that he himself came to prayer through pagan practices before his conversion to Christianity, and that “all religions are the same in their innermost essence.”

Jung pushes the anchorite farther, and ultimately gets the anchorite to reveal some of his own continuing pagan beliefs. The anchorite reacts angrily, calling Jung satan for re-inserting these pagan ideas into his mind. Jung responds, “He who comprehends the darkness in himself , to him the light is near.”  He has no regrets at appearing to the anchorite as the devil, for where the anchorite has been sucked dry by the desert, Jung says he has “ate the earth, drunk the sun, and become a greening tree that stands along and grows.”  Jung goes on to explain that one must not, like the anchorite, attempt to finds oneself by contemplating the meaning of scripture.  Rather, one must find meaning in oneself. The world itself is shaped by psychical events, so at best it leads one to look within at possible meanings.

In the next episode of the Red Book, Jung enounters the archetype of death, wearing a wrinkled black coat.  He has a vivid experience of all living things headed for their dissolution in a sea of blood, from which rises a new sun. If you wish to have clarity of vision, you must taste the coldness of death. M0dern man has overemphasized life, and must turn to death for true understanding to emerge.

At this point, Jung re-encounters the Red One and the anchorite, who both express discontent that Jung has exerted a bad influence on them. It led the anchorite into debauchery, and the Red One into a monastery and conversion to Christianity. Jung chastises them for getting mired in “the burial ground of all outlived ideals.” For Jung himself, the anchorite and the Red One represent old ideals, “remains of earlier temples,” which he can now set aside and thereby achieve a sort of equanimity.

Commenting on this part of the Red Book, analyst Murray Stein points out that each of the episodes appears to involve confronting an attitude or archetype that needed to be assimilated in order for Jung to individuate. Encountering the Red One, Jung assimilated pleasure and joy.  Encountering the maiden, Jung assimilated the wisdom in the banal. Encountering the lowly man, Jung assimilated depths and despair. Confronting death, he recognized the need to appreciate transitoriness and limitation of time in the fulfilled life. Encountering the anchorite, Jung leaned that it is necessary to abandon old ideals.  Moreover, it is not just Jung that is changed by these encounters; these figures themselves are transformed.  As Drob puts it, “We might say that individuation, which is nothing if not a creative process, has the potential to impact the world as well as the Self, and to actually alter the manner in which the archetypes of the collective unconscious manifest themselves both in the individual and the collective.”  (Drob, p. 99)

As we now move to Chapter VIII in Liber Secundus, there is a dramatic shift in imagery.  Jung encounters a enormous god who goes by the name Izdubar. This god has a ruffled black bear, two horns like a bull, glittering armor, and a sparkling double ax in his hand.  But he is a fearful, trembling god which must be healed and re-created.  There is a clue to what ails Izdubar.  When Jung explains that the earth is a sphere, and that science has taught this to humankind, Izdubar’s symptoms intensify. Jung explains that Izdubar has been lamed by science, which has poisoned humankind’s capacity to believe in gods.  Science has revealed truths, derived from knowledge of outer things; there are others who reveal truths derived from knowledge of inner things, such as priests and astrologers.  Jung tells the god that he, like others of his time, has only words not gods.  Izdubar asks if these words are powerful, and marvels that science has not yet produced human immortality.

Jung has great compassion for this sick, blind, and dying god. He feels guilty that, as a scientist, he contributed to this deplorable condition, and vows to stand by him and to attempt to heal him.  This is a task he believes all humans must undertake: “We have understood that he is dead. We must think of his healing.” Why not permit him to die? In the words of Sanford Drog:  “Because without the spiritual, mythological, and libidinous forces they represent, the self and humanity as awhole would each be impoverished and sorely afflicted.”  (Drob, p. 108)

How will he bring about this healing of the sick god?  By risking everything in a long, hazardous trek to the east. Izdubar warns Jung that he is likely to be blinded or die if he undertakes such a journey; in the end, Jung turns inward in meditation. Jung tells Izdubar that there is only one hope: the god must accept that he is a fantasy, but that does not mean that he lack reality.  Like any product of the psyche, Izdubar is real, but he is real not in the outer world sense. Izdubar reluctantly agrees, and Jung proceeds with the god into a “welcoming house” where the healing occurs.  This means that human imagination has the power to heal the gods.

Through the power of imagination, Jung transforms Izdubar into an egg.  Jung then recites incantations for the incubation of the new god. As part of these incantations, Jung says he is the god’s mother and father, and that he is nurturing the seed of the god within himself. He implores the god to break through the shell, rescue us from our wretched condition.  He goes so far as to offer himself as a human sacrifice to bring this about.   The images that accompany this section are cross cultural, with several references to Vedic creation myths.  Another picture shows Jung kneeling down on a rug, as the egg opens.

Jung is ambivalent about all that occurs here. Is this new god even worth having – he is clearly not the ultimate reality that Christians hold up as their god. But, in the end, he declares love for this new god, akin to the love that a mother carries for her child.

Izdubar then describes what he has experienced.  He declares that he rose and fell between the heights and the depths, until he became the sun. Jung acknowledges this, and he asks the god’s forgiveness for having carried him. He feels that, with the rebirth of the god, it drank the juice out of Jung’s life. What might this mean, in Jungian terms?  Sanford Drob comments:

In later Jungian terms, we might say that lung's individual libido has become completely invested in the God archetype; and once that archetype is projected outside of the ego, the ego is emptied of its life force. Confirmation of this is found in Jung's report that with the God's rebirth "the emptiness of the depths opened beneath [him]" (RB, p. 287a). Jung later relates that one who has created a God can become enamored of his creation and either attempt to follow this God into a higher world or end up preaching to others and even demanding to one's own and others' detriment that they follow this God as well (RB, p. 288a). We might understand the latter as a desperate effort on the part of an emptied ego to refill and reestablish itself.

With the externalization of a created God, human nature becomes fIlled with everything "incompetent ... powerless ... vulgar ... adverse and unfavorable ... exterminating ... absurd" (RB, p. 287a). When the powerful, productive, good, and reasonable aspects of the self have been projected into (a created) all-powerful and all-good God, one is left only with the opposites of these virtues. Perhaps this is why so many atrocities and absurdities are committed by the devoutly religious. Indeed, we might go so far as to say that lung's gestation and re-birth of Izdubar is itself an archetypal event that represents the psychological process through which the gods are created in general. Religion is then left with a paradox: if the God is consciously recognized as a projection of the Self, it can no longer function properly as a God, but if it is provided an independent life, human nature gravitates towards hell. Perhaps it is for this reason that Jung was later so adamant that we recognize the evil both in God and Self; if God is conceived as all-good, the Self runs the risk of being engulfed in its unprojected shadow elements. If, however, God is conceived of as balancing good and evil, the Self can retain such a balance as well.   (Drob p. 118)

In the Red Book, Jung goes on to say that “God suffers when man does not accept his darkness.” In other words, when we sympathize with a suffering God, we are in fact showing sympathy with one’s own depression.  But this is not the way to escape our own darkness; we must courageously face the desires and pleasures that we judge as repugnant.

Jung says that our spiritual creations eventually leave us and live their own fate, much as our children grow up and live independent lives.

The Red Book continues with another vivid internal vision.  IN this one, a young maiden is in the underworld, where she is defending herself against demons.  She has thrust a fishing rod into the eye of one of her tormentors, and Jung declares that the evil one cannot sacrifice his eye, and victory is with the one who can sacrifice. In this context, sacrifice means the path of individuation, which requires the ego to sacrifice its narrow aspirations and desires, judgements about goodness and necessity, and even our quest for complete fulfillment.

It seems that the process of giving birth to the new god has resulted in Jung’s soul falling prey to abysmal evil.  By extension, anyone who attempts to create a happy, powerful, and lustrous God – or self – will be followed by the nightmarish backlash of a god that is evil and empty. Meaning and value require a God that includes darkness and evil.

Jung then descends to an even deeper level of hell. Jung witnesses a horribly mutilated child; a shrouded woman asks Jung why he is enraged at this sight, since it happens every day.  Jung replies that most of the time we don’t see such things, but the woman does not accept this excuse. The woman then asks Jung to do something horrible:  to remove part of the child’s liver and eat it.  Jung says that such a horrible act would make him guilty of a horrible crime.  The woman replies that, as a man, he shares in the guilt of the act that sley this child.  Jung agrees and curses himself, and he does as the woman has bidden him, eating of the liver. The point is clear that we humans are capable of and are collectively responsible for the crimes of our fellow humans.  As Jung writes in the commentary to this section of the Red Book, “Nothing human is alien to me.”  Our human tendency is to distance ourselves, to draw a sharp line between evil and our image of ourselves and our god.

At this point, the woman reveals herself to be the soul of the slain child, and Jung’s own soul. This act, eating the sacrificial flesh of the divine child, completes the genesis of the new god.  He has descended to the depths, been complicit in an act of evil, and has thus restored himself to the primordial powers of the re-created god.

Jung expresses ambivalence about all of this.  The new god terrifies him with its irrationality, sickness, and disturbing qualities. This is a god with whom he much wrestle, and he will do so in the rest of the Red Book.