Gospel of the Self: Jungian Themes in the Aramaic New Testament, Part 1

Introduction: Finding New Meanings in Ancient Words 

Jung wrote extensively about Christianity, about the purpose that it has filled for western culture, and the ways in which it contributed to the development of a Judeo-Christian shadow.  In particular, by leaving us with an image of God that is wholly good and wholly masculine, Judeo Christianity has made it difficult for us to fully experience, appreciate, and integrate the darker and feminine dimensions of human life.

But can we really say that Christianity was some sort of “mistaken path” that humanity undertook some 2,000 years ago? Or should we just label Christianity as an instrument of social, and particularly patriarchal, oppression? Clearly, regardless of how we view Christianity, we can’t deny that has appealed to billions of people and grown to one of the most popular and enduring faiths.  As Jungians, we have to acknowledge that it has deep archetypal roots and must be an expression of the human yearning for individuation.

For me, an even more interesting question is how a tiny gathering of Judeans became so inspired by a new way of thinking that it revolutionized the world. This question is independent of whether a person named Jesus ever actually lived, or whether he was literally the son of God, or the thousands of other theological questions that cannot ultimately be answered.  What we know are the effects.  Something did change in the Middle East some 2,000 years ago and we are still riding that wave of change up until today.

The only clues we have about what inspired those Judeans is contained in the official New Testament and the fragments of the unofficial texts that were, at some point, revered as a true representation of the words and teachings of Jesus.  In the first 200 years of the common era, there were hundreds of groups that called themselves Christian, each of which had it own system of belief, even hundreds of “gospels” that were shared in an oral tradition.  Then came efforts to put the words and acts of Jesus into writing, and at that moment the diversity began to diminish.  Certain selections were made about what should be written down, and the thoughts, opinions, and recollections of the literate people made it into the written works, leaving out thousands of alternative version or stories told by those who could not read or write.  A decision would have to be made about the language to be used.  History says that Jesus himself spoke the language known as Aramaic, but by the time the writing of the gospels took place, the intended audiences were not Middle Eastern, they were European, for whom the language of scholarship and faith was Greek. So there were some texts written in Aramaic and Hebrew, but many more written in Greek.

A critical turning point occurred in the year 325 of the Common Era.  In that year, the Emperor Constantine decided that a more unified, stable official religion would lead to a more stable, unified empire, and he decided to give Christianity a chance to be that religion.  First, though, the hundreds of competing Christian texts would need to be winnowed down to the “true” texts, editing out and eliminating the rest.  And these texts would need to be written in Greek.  He convened the Nicean Council, which resulted in the compilation of the official New Testament, along with a delineation of the official faith and many of the practices that are now recognized as mainstream Christianity.  The rest was labeled as heretical and systematically, even brutally, repressed and eliminated.  On that foundation was built the Christian church.

To what degree did that leave anything resembling an meaningful and complete portrayal of what inspired that small group of Judeans at the dawn of the Common Era?  No one will ever really know, of course.  Jung and the post-Jungians have found, in the official Christian texts as well as the remains of the others, an expression of the deeper process.  We humans struggle to find a way to relate to the immensity of wholeness, the totality of what has been and could possibly be true for human beings, to relate to the great assemblage of our ancestors and that unknowable Other, the Higher Power.  And billions have found Christianity at least a partial path to that end, at least in its most basic form.  Christ is a symbol of individuation.  He represents a divine spark becoming pinned in time and space, taking up the unique and often excruciating task to know oneself, and to offer that uniqueness back to our eternal source as the only truly worthy gift.

Modern scholarship has opened a new window into this question.  Although most of today’s translations start with Greek texts, there is one text that has survived in something close to the original Aramaic spoke in first century Judea.  It is called the Peshitta, which roughly translates as “simple gospel.”   This version of the New Testament was kept intact by the Syrian Church of the East, which lay outside the control of Constantine and the Roman Empire.  Unlike the official New Testament, which for most of its history remained out of the hands of common believers and not even translated into popular vernacular, copies of the Peshitta were widely available in individual homes and read in its original Aramaic language.

Why is this so significant?  Because the Peshitta gives a special window into the actual words that so inspired those original Judeans.  Aramaic is a very different language from Greek.  For example, in Aramaic, there is no word to distinguish between inner and outer, within versus among.  Therefore, Aramaic speakers would be baffled with the idea of an interior world cut off from exterior others; it is all one and continuous.  In Greek, there is a distinction between mind, body, emotion, and spirit – no such distinction is made in Aramaic.  In Aramaic, every word has subtle layers of alternative meanings, and Aramaic speakers often made use of this to convey depths of alternative meanings.  The intention was not to have one specific meaning, but for all of the possible meanings to be simultaneously true.  For example, the Aramaic word “shem” simultaneously meant light, sound, name, and atmosphere.  So, when Jesus was quoted as saying, “Pray in my shem,” it was translated into Greek as “pray in my name,” but that excludes the other, equally important meanings about the atmosphere that surrounds prayer or the sound of the prayer.

For the next few weeks, we will be exploring some of the most familiar New Testament passages – particularly the Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes – and trying to experience them as Aramaic speakers might have experienced them.  We will make use of the work of some modern Aramaic scholars, most notably Neil Douglas-Klotz.  In the process, we will unearth some very interesting parallels between these ancient texts and Jungian concepts of psyche, individuation, and Self.

To begin this week, let’s explore the Aramaic word that is translated as “God” in the English versions of the NT.  The word is “alaha.”  The layers of meaning are:  sacred unity, oneness, the All, the ultimate power or potential, and the One with no opposite. Imagine how this one difference in translation could radically change our understanding of NT statements attributed to Jesus.  Any time Jesus spoke about holiness or sacredness, the Aramaic understanding would have been “that which participates in or resonates with the Unity or Oncness.”

There is an underlying premise in this work that is very controversial.  Before Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, there was a more ancient Middle Eastern belief system. In this pre-existing system, there was little or no distinction between inner and outer, human and nonhuman, individual and community.  It was all one underlying pattern, one massive vibrational field, into which anyone could tune. By the time of Jesus, this pre-existing belief system had been severely challenged, even eradicated, by invading Roman and Greek forces.  But the old way of being and of thinking was at least partially preserved in the ancient languages of Aramaic and Hebrew, and despite mistranslation and editing, some of it survived into scriptural text.  The Peshitta, remaining in its original Aramaic, contains more of this pre-existing belief system intact.

Here is a quote from Douglas-Klotz on this point:

Our usual Western concepts of God and the sacred are only a partial view of Sacred Unity in the Middle Eastern sense. It is difficult to over-emphasize this point. Most of us have been raised from childhood think of God as a being infinitely distant from humanity or nature, d of the sacred as something separate from the profane. We have been taught that religion operates by different rules than politics, science, psychology, art, or culture. Yeshua's teaching and reported dealings with his lowers show that he did riot live from this type of separation thinking.  Indeed, it should have been difficult for anyone at his time to entirely divorce Alaha from the way that one related to one's community, to nature, or to the political forces of the time.

In the Gospel of Thomas, various sayings of Yeshua point to Alaha as Sacred Unity:'

Look for the Living One while you are alive, so that you will not die and then seek to see him and be unable to see. (Saying 59)

On the day when you were One, you became two; but when you have become two, what will you do? (Saying 11 :4)

The Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas also repeatedly uses phrases like "and they shall stand as a single one"-sometimes translated as "solitary one." Certainly these expressions point to a wandering, preaching lifestyle, exemplified by Jesus himself. I believe they also point to the Middle Eastern concept of the divine as Unity, Without opposites. This concept also appears in the following saying:

When you make the two One, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner, and the above as the below ... then you will enter the kingdom. (Saying 22:4,7)

Lets relate this back to Jungian concepts.  Here are some statements about the transcendent Self, one of Jung’s major teachings.  Note the similarities with Alaha:

 The Self is an archetypal IMAGE of man's fullest potential and the unity of the personality as a whole. The self as a unifying principle within the human psyche occupies the central position of authority in relation to psychological life and, therefore, the destiny of the individual. At times Jung speaks of the self as initiatory of psychic life; at other times he refers to its realisation as the goal. He stressed this as an empirical concept and not a philosophical or theological formulation but the similarity of his views and a religious hypothesis have needed clarification. One cannot consider the concept of the Self apart from its similarity to a GOD-IMAGE and, consequently, analytical PSYCHOLOGY has been confronted both by those who welcome acceptance of it as an acknowledgment of man's religious core and others, whether doctors, scientists or religious dogmatists, find such a psychological formulation unacceptable.

'The self is not only the centre', Jung writes, 'but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and UNCONSCIOUS; it is the centre of this totality, just as the EGO is the centre of the conscious mind' (CW 12, para. 144). In life, the self demands to be recognised, integrated, realised; but there is no hope of incorporating more than a fragment of such a vast totality within the limited range human CONSCIOUSNESS. Therefore, the relationship of ego to self is a never-ending process.

Following Jung conceptually, the self can be defined as an archetypal urge to coordinate, relativise and mediate the tension of OPPOSITES. By way of the self, one is confronted with the polarity of good and EVIL; human and divine. Interaction requires the exercise of the maximum human freedom in face of life's see inconsistent demands; the sole and final arbiter being the discovery of MEANING. A person's ability to integrate such an image without priestly mediation has been questioned by the clergy, and theologians have been critical of the inclusion of both positive and negative elements in the God-image. But Jung staunchly defended his position pointing out that Christian emphasis upon 'the good' alone had left Western man estranged and divided within himself.

Symbols of the self often possess a numinosity and convey a sense of necessity which gives them transcendent priority in psychic life. They carry the authority of a God-image and felt there was no doubt that alchemists' statements about the considered psychologically, describe the archetype of the self. Although he claimed to have observed intent and purpose in psychic manifestations of the self, he nevertheless eschewed making any statement in regard to the ultimate source of that purpose.

Andrew Samuels, Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis

Possibly, then, Jung was tapping into a level of relation to Higher Power that is strikingly mirrored in the original meaning of words attributed to Jesus some 2,000 years ago.

To conclude today, let’s explore a passage in the New Testament that has been translated from the Greek and then contrast it to the more subtle, nuanced Aramaic version.  The passage is Luke 11:34-35

The light of the body is the eye: therefore when thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light; but when thine eye is evil, thy body also is full of darkness.

Take heed therefore that the light which is in thee be not darkness.

This is one of the more baffling passages of the NT, which leads you to believe that there is a translation issue here.  Now let’s hear from Douglas-Klontz:

The Aramaic word used here for "eye" is a complex one. It can mean look, view, opinion. appearance. face. or the surface of something that expresses an inner essence. The word for "single" can also mean upright, stretched out, innocent. sincere, or straightforward. The word used here for "body" can also mean corpse or flesh-the purely phvsical stuff of a human being, without the living breath.

So we could translate this section of the verse as follows:

The degree of your illumination --

your understanding of all that is --

shines through your eyes, your face, and all you do.

When your expression is straight and expansive, without holding back,

like light through a clear lens, then everything you embody

shows the same flash of intelligence that helped create the world.

In other words, without being illuminated by nuhra, the light of intelligence , the body is just flesh, a corpse. More specifically, Jesus' listeners showed by the light in their eyes the degree to which they consciously understood his teaching.

The word for "evil" in Aramaic means unripe or not at the right time. The word for "darkness"(heshuka) is the Aramaic equivalent of the word for darkness used in Genesis (hoshech). So an expanded reading of this sentence could be:

But when your expression is veiled

)

the eye cloudy and darting,

the action at the wrong time and place,

what you embody of light and understanding will be chaotic, swirling, obscure.

Your non-understanding then

participates in the primal darkness of the cosmos.

An obscured gaze shows that a lesson or teaching – light -- is understood consciously. If something is received subconsciously, it may not be reflected in one's expression or action. The rules of the subconscious, like the primal darkness of hoshech, are obscure, indirect and circular. For a teaching to reach this level of understanding-for light to reach the darkness-indirect methods, like parables and stories are traditionally used in the Middle East.

As the passage continues, it becomes more puzzling in its translations (here, KJV): Take heed therefore that the light which is in thee be not darkness. (Luke 11 :35)

Here the Aramaic version gives a more subtle reading. The word usually translated as “therefore” can also mean perhaps, unless, or “it may be.”  It points out a special circumstance that amends what been said before. The word "not" does not appear in either the Aramaic or Greek text of Luke. So two other hearings of this phrase can be:

Take care in this circumstance:

when the light in you actually becomes darkness. then it is no longer light:

When your understanding loses its clarity

or becomes lost in complexity,

it cannot claim to be teaching or Illumination.

Pay attention that you use clear understanding for what is straightforward, able to be taught. Use veiling and darkness for what

is circular, indirect, only able to be suggested.

This calls to mind another saying of Jesus (KJV): "Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves" (Matthew 10:16). The word for "wise" is related to the methods of Hokhmah, Holy Wisdom, which operate in the darkness. We will explore this more in chapter seven. The word [or "harmless" can also mean straightforward, sincere, or complete.

In the last segment of this passage in Luke, Jesus suggests that the guidance one experiences as illumination can entirely fill one's being.,if the darkness is ready to receive it.   In the King James version:

If thy whole body therefore be full of light, having no part dart; the whole shall be full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle doth give thee light. (Luke 11 :36)

Using the expanded meanings of words we have already seen, we can hear the following nuances of the Aramaic version:

If light comes fully into darkness, if illumination reaches the depths of your flesh and soul,

then vibrating, swirling obscurity marries radiant, straightforward clarity.

"Let there be light" becomes your experience. For a candle to give illumination,

every part of it must participate:

the dark of the wick

the light of the flame,

the aura of the heat.

SOURCE:  Douglas-Klotz, Neil. The Hidden Gospels.  

Exploring Jung's Red Book, part 6

This week, we cover the last portion of the Red Book.  This is the portion that was published in its entirety long before the full Red Book, the portion known as “The Seven Sermons to the Dead.”  This text was published as an appendix to Jung’s autobiography, Memories Dreams Reflections, and has been widely read and quoted.  With the publication of the Red Book, we now see the full context of the work.

The text begins with a crowd of the dead pressing in on Jung, crying out, “We have come back from Jerusalem where we did not find what we sought.”  What is it that they seek?  Previously in the Red Book, the dead have sought Jung’s blood, his life source.  This time, they are seeking his consciousness, his light, which is delivered through a series of seven lectures, prompted by questions from the dead.  Interestingly, Jung claims that the source of these lectures is not he himself – his ego – but Philemon, the archetypal wise old man who has been Jung’s instructor during his active imaginations.

The first lecture begins:  “Now hear:  I begin with nothingness.  Nothingness is the same as fullness.  In infinity, full is as good as empty.”  With just these few words, we know that this is going to be a mystical journey, grounded in pre-Christian Gnosticism.  A Gnostic concept is introduced, the concept of Pleroma, which roughly translates as “the infinite fullness” or alternatively as “the sum of divine powers.” If one is dealing with the infinite, there are no individual distinctions and determinations, and thus it may be called “nothing ness.” Out of the Pleroma emerges creation, limited in time and space.  All of creation, including human beings, have the spark of Pleroma within, but is alienated from that infinite fullness.  Humans must bring this spark to consciousness so as to ascend to Pleroma.  In one of the most basic paradoxes, we are the microcosm that mirrors or is contained in the macrocosm. We suffer alienation from Pleroma, but it is also our true essence.

Philemon asks Jung why he speaks of Pleroma, and Jung replies that he speaks of it in order to begin somewhere, and to acknowledge that there is actually nothing fixed or certain.  Philemon makes clarification:  differentiation is the essence of creation, and since we humans are part of creation, we can’t help but make distinctions.  If we were to stop doing so, we would fall into the Pleroma and cease to exist. What sort of differentiations and distinctions are we talking about?  Full and empty, living and dead, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, one and many.  These opposites cancel each other out in the Pleroma, but they are effective in us and give us life.  And, at the same time, they victimize us, causing a rent in the fullness of the Pleroma.  The best way to proceed is to recognize these pairs of opposites, see how they drive so much of our thinking, and also recognize that we can distance ourselves from the oppositions and at least intuitive a fullness beyond the distinctions.  Psychic wholeness can only occur when you integrate the poles of the opposition, not accepting one pole over the other, and that there is something else, a transcendent third.

The dead grumble and fade away, and the first sermon is finished.  Jung asks Philemon why the dead must receive this instruction on such ancient ideas, and Philemon explains that they dead have lived incomplete lives and now they need to be fulfilled before they can enter fully into death.  These are our ancestors, who left us with their cultural wisdom and teaching, yet also bequeathed to us their unfinished work and unanswered questions.  In that sense, these Seven Sermons are not just addressed to the dead, but to all of us who are continuing to strive to answer all of those questions.

The dead reappear for the second sermon. This time they ask, “Where is God?  Is God dead?” Philemon responds that God is not dead, because God is creation. Here is another paradox.  God is distinct from Pleroma, because God is a manifestation, where Pleroma is fullness and unity.  But God does also have an identity with the Pleroma, like all of creation does.  Philemon explains that another name for God is “effective fullness;” another name for the devil is “effective emptiness.”  Both of them stand very close to the Pleroma.  What is meant by “effective?” Whereas the Pleroma is totally remote from human life, God and the devil produce effects in mundane life.

There is another being, called Abraxas, that stands above God and the devil.  This is the forgotten god and is identified with effect in general.  When the dead hear this, they are very agitated; it seems that they were Christians while they were alive, and this is far beyond their understanding and acceptance.   Philemon is not distressed by this reaction from the dead; they may have been nominal Christians, but they lived during a time when knowledge was place far above belief.  Now they cannot grasp a God who both creates and destroys.  A god like Abraxas represents force, duration and change – the sum of all effects experiences by humankind – and is therefore more akin with the blind forces of nature that comprise the universe.  Abraxas is the world, its becoming, and its passing.

This brings us to the third sermon. The dead want to know about Abraxas.  Philemon explains that Abraxas is the ultimate good and ultimate evil, the mother of both good and evil, life and death, light and darkness. He is the coming together of the Christian God and Satan, as Shamdasani put it (RB Intro, p. 206)  He is terrible, a monster of the underworld, a frenzy. As said in the Red Book, “Before him is no question and no reply.”  He cannot be understood, because that would diminish him. We may wish to call lawfulness God, but the universe also contains chance, sin, and irregularity, and so God must be beyond mere lawfulness.

That brings us to the fourth sermon.  The dead call Philemon “the accursed one” and implore him to speak to them about “gods and devils.” Philemon says that there are innumerable gods.  Look into the night sky.  Each star is a god, and the space that each star fills is a devil.  But there are four principle gods, each of which is under Abraxas.  The first god is the Sun God.  The second god is Eros, the one who binds the others together.  The third god is the tree of life.  The fourth god is the devil.  These gods are all equal to one another in power.  Perhaps there are even as many gods as there are human beings.  But when it comes to Abraxas, worship and prayer mean nothing, because such things neither add to or take away from the highest of the gods.  At this, the dead interrupt with anger and mockery.  Jung gently admonishes Philemon for espousing polytheism, which had long ago been overcome by the Christian fathers.  Philemon explains that the dead took a practical approach to their world – made weighing and counting the most important things in life – but failed to acknowledge the sacred aspects of the material world.  They failed to atone for the slaughter and destruction of the material world.  Now, Philemon is giving voice to the powerful gods that demand vengeance.  At the end of this sermon, Philemon kisses the earth, saying “Mother may your son be strong.”  Then, gazing upward, Philemon states, “how dark is your new light.”  (RB, p. 239)

The fifth sermon comes on the following night. The dead implore Philemon to teach them about the church and holy communion. Philemon responds, “The world of the Gods is manifest in spirituality and in sexuality.  The celestial ones appear in spirituality, the earthly in sexuality.”  (RB, p 352).  Clearly, Jung has left behind the idea of sex as a purely biological drive;  sexuality and spirituality are seen as interdependent forces, with sexuality as a sacred act. Philemon explains that spirituality is a sort of embrace from the celestial mother, while sexuality may be equated with PHALLOS, an earthly masculine creative power. 

Next, Philemon explores the concept of community. Those who lack community succumb to sickness and suffering.  But those who are excessively drawn into community also suffer. A balance must be struck. Individuation, as Jung will later describe it, neither pushes the collective away, nor overly identifies with.  Instead, one assimilates aspects of the collective and utilizes them to live a life of uniqueness and integrity.

To quote from the Red Book:

In the community every man shall submit to others, so that the community be maintained. for you need it.

In singleness every man shall place himself above the other, so that every man may come to himself and avoid slavery.

Abstention shall hold good in community, extravagance in singleness.

Community is depth, singleness is height.

Right measure in community purities and preserves.

Right measure in singleness purifies and increases.

Community gives us warmth, singleness gives us light.  (RB, p. 353)

The theme of sexuality and spirituality continues into the sixth sermon. Philemon explains that sexuality comes to the soul as a serpent, spirituality comes to the soul as a white bird.  There is a daimon of sexuality who is mischievous, whorish, and even tormenting. There is a daimon of spirituality that is solitary, chase, and a messenger of the mother.  The dead implore Philemon to stop this kind of talk.  Is it his intention to turn back the wheel of the rational and succumb to ideas of gods, daimons, and souls?  Is he so superstitious?   Philemon proposes that perhaps his folly would be a good complement to their cleverness.  With these teachings, the earth may rise again.

That brings us to the seventh and final sermon.  This time, the dead wish to learn about man. Here is what Philemon told the dead:

Man is a gateway, through which you pass from the outer world of Gods, daimons, and souls into the inner world, out of he greater into the smaller world. Small and inane is man, already he is behind you, and once again you find yourselves in endless pace, in the smaller or inner infinity.

At immeasurable distance a lonely star stands in the zenith. "This is the one God of this one man, this is his world. his Pleroma, his divinity.

In this world, man is Abraxas, the creator and destroyer of his own world.

This star is the God and the goal of man.

This is his one guiding God.

in him man goes to his rest.

toward him goes the long journey of the soul after death,

in him everything that man withdraws from the greater world

shines resplendently

To this one God man shall pray. Prayer increases the light of the star. it throws a bridge across death.

it prepares life for the smaller world, and assuages the hopeless desires of the greater.

When the greater world turns cold, the star shines.

Nothing stands between man and his one God, so long as man can turn away his eyes from the flaming spectacle of Abraxas.

"Man here, God there.

"Weakness and nothingness here, eternally creative power there.

Here nothing but darkness and clammy cold

There total sun.

But when Philemon had finished, the dead remained silent. Heaviness fell from them, and they ascended like smoke above the shepherd’s fire, who watches over his flock by night.

There are a few more passages in the Red Book, but that is the end of the Seven Sermons to the Dead.  In those final passages, Philemon speaks of man’s inhumanity to man.  There is another encounter with Elijah and Salome, wherein Elijah complains of losing his power to Jung and is astonished that the old God is slipping away from this world, in favor of a multiplicity of smaller gods. Elijah bids Salome to depart with him, but as she leaves, she whispers to Jung that she actually prefers the multiplicity. Jung is implored by his soul to return to obedience to the Gods; he replies that this is impossible for him, even if this brings them suffering and invokes their rage.   In the final active imagination, Philemon is strolling in his garden, talking to one of the shades.  They discuss how man has grown beyond being slaves of God or swindlers, but rather they grant hospitality to God. In this garden is both Christ and the devil, and they have much in common. In the end, the shade says, “I bring you the beauty of suffering.” 

Exploring Jung's Red Book, Part 5

We have covered the first and second books that make up the beginning of the Red Book, what Jung called the Liber Primus and Liber Secundus. These materials were written in 1913 and 1914.  Now, we come to the part of the book that Jung called Scrutinies, based on visions that Jung had between 1913 and 1916, which he began writing in 1917.

Scrutinies begins with perhaps the most basic question of all:  What is the “I”? In essence, Jung is stepping back from the sense of identity that normally acts in the background, and is confronting its nature and reality.  He confronts its value system – greediness, ambition, cowardliness, pomposity – and threatens to pull off its skin and pull out its tongue. Jung is ruthless in this process.  He is both personal and general.  He wrote these words on the very day that he resigned as president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, so in part it reflects what he went through to come to that decision. But it also reflects his attitude toward ego more generally, with which most people completely identify, but must actually be tamed and somewhat transcended for people to have real integrity with their deepest identity.

Having put the “I “ in its place, Jung can return to connection to soul.  The soul reveals to him that the “I” must be sacrificed – crucified, laid completely bare, and disgraced – if the soul is to become centered in the true core of human identity, which is the Self.  She asks, “Can you not remain on your way for once?”  Jung replies, “You know that I doubt, because of my love for men.”  She replies, “No, for the sake of your weakness, for the sake of your doubt and disbelief.  Stay on your way and do not run away from yourself. There is a divine and a human intention. They cross each other in stupid and godforsaken people, to whom you belong from time to time.” 

At his, Jung launches into a discussion about knowledge and belief.  To him, these must be balanced.  Belief is more childlike, harkening back to a day when we believed that belief could bring humankind to what is good and reasonable.  But that time has passed.  People today thirst for knowledge and won’t settle for belief, and thus much of the relationship with God has been sacrificed, since it is grounded in belief. Jung says:

Belief is not everything, but neither is knowledge. Belief does not give us the security and the wealth of knowing. Desiring knowledge sometimes takes away too much belief. Both must strike a balance.

But it is also dangerous to believe too much, because today h everyone has to find his own way and encounters in himself a n beyond full of strange and mighty things. He could easily take everything literally with too much belief and would be nothing but a lunatic. The childishness of belief breaks down in the face t. of our present necessities. We need differentiating knowledge h to clear up the confusion which the discovery of the soul has brought in. Therefore it is perhaps much better to await better knowledge before one accepts all thing too believingly.  (RB, 336)

Once again, Jung hears from his soul that he is destined for solitude, but that he should not fear madness. His greatness demands that this occur.  Unlike most others, he has touched the divine, and that means that he should not resist the inevitable solitude.

Jung then hears the voice of an old man reciting a poem that he says was at first “dreadfully meaningless”:

It is not yet the evening of days. The worst comes last.

The hand that strikes first, strikes best.

Nonsense streams from the deepest wells, amply like the Nile.

Morning is more beautiful than night.

Flowers smell until they fade.

Ripeness comes as late as possible in spring, or else it misses its purpose.

Although he did not understand the words, these words less him in deep sadness and pain that lasted a month. The spell was only broke when the voice of the soul added another line:  “The greatest comes to the smallest.”  And at that time World War I broke out.

Jung took an entire year off from the writing of the Red Book, until one day he saw an osprey seize a large fish from the lake and soar skyward.  He heard the voice of his soul, saying, “That is a sign that what is below is borne upward.”  And, with that, his inner journey resumed.

Soon thereafter, he heard once again from Philemon, the archetype of the wise old man.  Philemon tells Jung that he is being called into business with Philemon.  He will be treated like a gold coin, being passed from hand to hand and lacking any will of his own, expressing instead the “will of the whole.” Philemon still has some doubts about becoming Jung’s teacher, but Jung persist, and Philemon continues.

At first, Philemon leaves Jung to his own troubled thoughts.  Jung thinks about how Christianity supposedly promotes selflessness, but it also demands that others also sacrifice themselves, which results in a sort of mutual enslavement or enchantment. One should only submit to oneself, and not expect others to supply redemption.  Instead, redemption is self-work that requires self-love.  But redemption cannot be strived after; it comes of its own accord when one has abandoned the need to have it.

Now Jung enters into a discussion of Self and God. From his own experience, he states that he knows that “through uniting with the self we reach God.” He has no choice but to accept this, because it is based on his lived experience, not some rational argument that he can be talked out of. He has been afflicted by this experience, and now God appears as a sort of sickness from which he must heal himself.

As Sanford Drob points out, this passage contains the kernel of Jung’s notion of the archetype of God, the so-called God-image which manifests in the psyche and is identical with the Self.

To say that Jung is ambivalent about the effect of God in human life is a great understatement.  Here is a passage:

A living God afflicts our reason like a sickness. He fills the soul with intoxication. He fills us with reeling chaos. How many will the God break?

The God appears to us in a certain state of the soul. Therefore we reach the God through the self. Not the self is God, although we reach the God through the self. The God is behind the self, over the self, the self itself, when he appears. But he appears as our sickness, from which we must heal ourselves. We must heal ourselves from the God, since he is also our heaviest wound. 

For in the first instance the God's power resides entirely in the self, since the self is completely in the God, because we were not with the self.  We must draw the self to our side. Therefore we must wrestle with the God for the self. Since the God is an unfathomable powerful movement that sweeps away the self into boundless, into dissolution.

Hence when the God appears to us we are at first powerless, captivated, divided, sick, poisoned with the strongest poison, but drunk with the highest health. (RB, p. 338)

Jung expresses a wish to liberate himself from such a deity, but he knows it is impossible. Philemon urges him, instead, to immerse himself further into experience of God.  Jung senses that, on some level, he is beginning to merge with Philemon, becoming intoxicated with Philemon, although now he can see that they are also distinct from one another.

Three weeks pass, and Jung is visited by three shades, spirits of the dead with cold breath. One of them, a woman, had a demand of Jung:  Give us the symbol that we hunger for. Jung protests that he does not know how, but then the symbol is placed into his hand, to his own great astonishment. It is called HAP, and one of the shades tells Jung that it is “God’s other pole.” The God of this symbol is the God of the night, the “flesh spirit, extract of all bodily juices, of the sperm and entrails, of the genital, of the head, feet, hands, joints, bones, eyes, ears, nerves, brain, of sputum and excretion.”  Jung is horrified by this, asking if this is not actually the devil, not god.  But the dead insist:  enlightening thought comes from the body, and Jung must eat and drink of it.  It might be disgusting, but it is nourishing.  They also need this meal, as it will allow them to share in life.

For the remainder of the Red Book, Jung will struggle with the dead.  He feels a certain attraction to them, even love, but toward this female shade he also feels terror, that she is a sinister womb that wants to suck the life out of him.  The dead, Jung recognizes, want to return to life, and they wish to use Jung to accomplish this.  When he does finally offer her his blood, he soon becomes exhausted and must resist her.  Why should the living offer themselves to the dead? She points out that the living squander their precious lives.  They seek love, but are continually running away from themselves. The living hypocritically preach love but then justify war and murderous injustice. Might the dead not be better companions to Jung.  He need not actually die to serve them, only allow himself to be buried in their darkness.

Moreover, it is the will of the merciless God that he do this. Jung relents – how to begin, then?  First, she explains, a church will be needed.  Jung resists – he is no prophet, in need of a church – but she presses on, reciting an invocation to the dead in Jung’s name, explaining that Jung’s blood will result in the refreshment of the dead and the formation of a community where the living and dead unite, the past living on in the present.  Jung cries out, “Why did you see me as the one to drink the cess of humanity that poured out of Christiandom?”

As we have said before, this is a metaphor for what Jung would later call “the collective unconscious.”

Philemon reappears.  He warns Jung about how the soul and the dead are trying to exert power over him.  In particular, he must be wary of the soul.  She holds great wisdom and power, but she can also be cunning and disloyal, barely aware of Jung’s humanity.  Moreover, if he does not recognize her as within himself, he will be prone to project her outward, with disastrous consequences for Jung and his fellow men. She is only distantly related to humanity.  If he doesn’t persist in distinguishing himself from his soul, he might risk acting as a daemon or even playing God. Jung hesitates to accept this advice, and he asks her to comment on it.  His soul says that it is true that she desires everything, his love and his hate, that he might give to others, for she will need them when she takes her “great journey” after Jung’s death.  But she concurs that she should be imprisoned by Jung, where she can have a chance to reflect.

Jung is horrified and rageful about what the soul has told him.  They struggle with one another. His soul pleads for compassion.  Philemon, at times, intercedes on her behalf, but Jung persists in lecturing her on her immoderation, greed, hunger for power.  Eventually, Jung does ask her to devote herself, instead, to the salvation of humankind, and she agrees.  She tells him to construct some alchemical apparatus, a furnace incubator, which can be used to form and shape matter. Jung proceeds to form thoughts into matter, as his soul has bid him to do. Jung is then told that there is a great trial ahead for him, the earth plunged into flame, a sea of fire and smoke.  His soul vanished at this point, and Jung was left anxious and confused for many days.

Exploring Jung's Red Book, Part 4

This week we continue with Liber Secundus, the Second Book. 

In the next scene, Jung’s active imagination takes him to a library where he takes out a copy of the book Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis. His intention is to read this 14^th century text with a devotional, as opposed to a scholarly, attitude.  How do you reconcile Jung’s embracing of this book with the previous sentiments Jung expressed about religion and the outdated old God of Christianity?  The “imitation” that he talking about is to see Christ as symbolizing individuation, taking up one’s unique destiny while still connected to the spirit of the depths.

The scene shifts to a large kitchen, where he begins reading his book.  He has a dialog with a cook, who asks  if Jung is a clergyman.  They share a belief in the great merit of this book. Jung notes a passage that says that we should base our intentions on God’s mercy rather than on our own wisdom.  Jung interprets this to mean that we should rely more on intuitive thinking, as opposed to the more superficial rationality of the scientific approach. Christ represents this type of thinking, and this is what Jung says he would like to imitate.

Jung next encounters the prophet Ezechiel, who is accompanied by shadowy figures who are going to Jerusalem to pray.  Ezechiel tells Jung that he cannot accompany these figures, because he has a living body and these others are dead.    Jung senses that these dead ones neglected to live something important while they lived;  when Ezechiel presses Jung to explain what they might not have lived, Jung says that the did not “live their animal.”  To Jung, animals are true to their nature and are not deceitful, which in many ways makes them more civilized that the so-called civilized men.

The scene shifts again. He finds himself in a crowd, still clinging to his copy of Imitation of Christ, in which he reads that all people, including saints, are subject to temptation. Jung comments that temptation may, in fact, be necessary for life.  This is part of the idea of “living your animal.” Jung is then brought by policemen to a mental ward, where he is diagnosed with religious paranoia and told that imitation of Christ leads to the madhouse. The old professor who is diagnosing Jung dismisses all that he has to say about the intuitive method, and says that Jung has a poor prognosis so long as he resists his diagnosis. He is stripped and put into a ward with people who are profoundly mentally ill.  He returns to an earlier theme – that it is unavoidable, when turning truly within, to experience a sort of divine madness, which is “a higher form of the irrationality of the life streaming through us” but “cannot be integrated into present-day society.”

Jung now has a lengthy discussion with “chaos” and “the dead.”  What does Jung mean by “the dead”?  It is not just the ghosts of dead people; it is also all the discarded images of one’s past and  the “ghostly procession” of our human ancestors and our history.  Jung says that he has been “afflicted” by the dead, calling him into solitude and dedication to saving them.   He goes on to express that this involves the creative process, but the creative process is not altogether positive.  On the one hand, creativity hold the potential to reconcile the opposites and promote individuation; on the other hand, creative people strike out from the ways of the past, destroying it, and are often cast out from society as a result. Might it not be better for us mere mortals to “live our animal” rather than be like Christ, who epitomizes one who creatively transgresses the law, in the service of something higher?    Jung calls on us to seek atonement and to work work the redemption of the dead, which must involve accepting the chaos.

The scene shifts once more.  Jung is having an active imagination dialog with his soul, who is urging him to be open to madness in order to be open to everything. She depicts madness as a light that must be permitted to shine, and that Jung should “give it life.” Daily life is crazy and illogical, a profound mystery with no actual rules, which resists the imposition of something comprehensible.  The old professor from the madhouse appears again, condemning him for having lost his way and going crazy. Now Jung begins speaking to a fellow patient in the madhouse, who is referred to as “the fool.” This fool says many things that Jung cannot accept – that Jung is Christ, that the professor is the devil. Jung has a vision of a philosophical tree, rising from the sea, crowned in heaven, but rooted in hell.  Jung comments that this image has inspired an insight in him that there is there is no one formula or path to salvation; we must make our own roads, that “we create the truth by living it.” Some of us look to books like Imitation of Christ for comfort, while others of us face the abyss and embrace the hard idea that we must create our own meaning.

Jung now reflects on whether these visions he has been experiencing are merely a “web of words.”  Words, he says, have the potential to “pull up the underworld” and thus “the word is an image of God.”  There are times when words are empty, and in those times we often discover our sould and find our way to God.

Jung now returns to another central theme of the Red Book:  God longs to be incarnate in and completed by humankind. But this can only occur if humans accept the parts of ourselves that we see as meaningless, false, and evil.   “Under the law of love according to which nothing is cast out.” This is radical acceptance. God s healed when we dare to take upon ourselves, and be merciful toward, madness, chaos, sickness, and the contemptible within ourselves. One must also, paradoxically, come to hate what we overly love in ourselves.  One who strives for the highest finds the deepest. It is a sort of planting of a seed in hell, from which the tree of life will grow. Whatever or whomever we see as “other” is also in us.

Next, Jung finds himself in a performance of Wagner’s opera, Parsifal.  He is in the garden of the sorcerer Klingsor, and Jung notes that the actor playing this part looks a lot like him.  Two other of the main parts in the opera are played by previous characters from the Red Book.  Amfortas, the knight who protects the grail, is played by the librarian and Kundry, the seductress, is played by the cook.  By the final act of the opera, Jung has become Parsifal, the naïve hero of the story, and he’s adorned in armor, which is layered with history. He takes off the armor, and is now wearing the white shirt of a penitent, which he then exchanges for his normal clothes, walks out of the scene, and encounters himself kneeling down in prayer as the audience to this operatic scene.  He then merges with himself.

Jung shifts to a speculation on logic.  He speaks admiringly of Buddhist logic, which can recognize that some things can be both true and false at the same time,  b0oth real and unreal.  He writes, “I, who I am, am not it . . . I divided myself into two and in that I united myself with myself. I have bathed myself with impurity and I have cleansed myself with dirt.”  (RB, p. 304).  There is a “nameless one,” says Jung, which is both a new man and a new God, who can bring together the opposites, uniting even Christ and Hell.  He is nameless because he is yet to come.  He will be born through our efforts to accept the other.

Jung then has another encounter with his soul. She questions, once again, Jung’s capacity to accept all things, and she rattles off a litany of morbid historical events which she knows that Jung will struggle to accept, such as savagery and famine.  She also describes the heights of human accomplishment, such as temples and art, and Jung protests – how can he grasp all of this?  She chides him – does he really know his limits? He should cultivate his garden with modesty.

Jung’s soul gives him three prophesies:  the misery of war, the darkness of magic, and the gift of religion.  These, Jung is told, point to the future, but have been largely rejected by those with a liberal, scientific bent.  What do these have in common?  They have to do with the unleashing and binding of chaos.

Next, Jung speculate on magic, led by further discussion with his soul. Jung resists taking on magic in his life; he fears that it will replace his humanity with severity.  Jung’s soul says, “do not struggle.” He asks for her patience, for he has yet to abandon his scientific world view, and he cannot easily abandon it for magic. He knows, however, that this is his next challenge in accepting everything.  If he accepts magic, he sees that he will be introduced to a nameless, formless god, a fearsome god  who is yet to come.  It is magic that will create the future, the new god, and the new religion.

Jung next has a vision of a serpent creeping into the body of the crucified Christ, emerging from his mouth. Jung takes this to mean that one’s development is a grim task that must lead through one’s crucifixion. To individuate, we must overcome aversion and disgust, and we are more likely to retreat into escape and trickery, such as falling in love or committing crimes.

Next, there is a discourse on the meaning and nature of symbols. Symbols, Jung tells us, rise out of the depths of the self, giving us access to a new “room” in one’s psyche, going through a gate to salvation.  At his point in his work, Jung had yet to develop his concept of the archetypes, but there is some early thinking here in the Red Book, when he talks about the symbol giving rise to something “ancient” and that “to give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation.”  This process is not about will or intention; it is about letting go of intention and allowing deeper voice to emanate from the Self.

In the next scene, we are introduced to Philemon, a “magician” who will reappear several times in the remainder of the Red Book.  Jung believes that this character of a wise old man holds the secret of magic.  At first, Philemon denies this, but then explains that magic has to do with sympathy, meaning both compassion and imitation, and that it is inborn in humankind.  However, to know magic, Jung must step outside of knowledge, for it eludes comprehension. Jung asks, does this mean that magic involves deception? No, because that is still in the realm of reason, but magicians must exist beyond reason.

Reflecting on this, Jung says that magic cannot be learned, and enter the realm of imagination. Magic is not a power, it is an attitude that is receptive to the unconscious and the irrational.  The magic of Philemon has to do with the deeper mysteries, and it is the foundation of a true depth psychology.  Therefore, “if one opens up to chaos, magic also arises.”   “Where reason establishes order and clarity, magic causes disarray and a lack of clarity.”  Magic occurs when one opens oneself to the unconscious.

Jung next delivers a sort of praise of Philemon, referring to him as a lover who has survived a flood of chaos.  Jung pronounces that there are three kinds of lovers:  those who love men, those who love the souls of men, and those who love their own soul, with Philemon exemplifying this third type of lover.  Philemon is the spirit of the depths, a vessel of fables, and a teacher of the dead, as opposed to a teacher of the living.

After this encounter with Philemon, Jung becomes a magician. He encounters a serpent and a bird, both of which present themselves as Jung’s soul.  Dialoging with these figures, Jung returns to the theme of the coincidence of the opposites.  His soul tells him that a “last supper’ is being prepared for him, at which he will be both a guest and a dish.  He finds this both charming and horrifying.

Jung asks his soul, how can God and the devil become one?  The serpent intimates that the coincidence of opposites is the very knowledge forbidden to humankind, the apple in the garden of Eden.

Jung next has a vision involving the throne of God, the holy trinity, heaven, and satan.  Juing has a protracted discussion with Satan, who dismisses all the fuss about united God and Satan.  God is boring and vegetative, where satan claims to be ambitious, greedy for fame, lusty for action, the fizz of new thoughts. 

Jung now encounters the Cabiri, the early Greek gods who Jung regards as elemental, chthonic deities with “roots in the soil.” These Cabiri greet human and laud him as the master of the lower nature.  These gods describe themselves as responsible for the process by which dead matter becomes life. They give Jung a gift – a flashing sword which can cut through the knots that entangle him. What is this knot?  It is something entangled in the human brain, which is the root of madness. Jung is incensed at being called mad, but the Cabiri set this aside, saying that they are willing to die for him so that he can go beyond his brain and beyond his madness.

What might this encounter mean?  Sanford Drog speculates:

At least three possibilities come to mind, which are not mutually exclusive: humanly, transcending the brain suggests a rising above one's animal or material nature; philosophically, it suggests surpassing the naturalism or "soulless materialism," which holds the mind to be identical with and determined by the brain; and psychologically, it suggests -a going beyond mere thinking in favor of feeling and other psychic functions, The latter interpretation is supported by lung's statement that his tower has "not arisen from the patchwork of human thoughts" (RB, p. 321 b, p. 322a), but all three interpretations make sense in the context of both The Red Book and lung's later psychology. Jung comments: "Just as a tower surmounts the summit of a mountain on which it stands, so J stand above my brain, from which I grew ... 1 am master of my own self" (RB, p.  321b). This suggests a philosophical view in which the psyche is causally and naturally produced by the brain and nervous system, but attains its independence by virtue of the individual's capacity to take he brain and its products as an object to be judged, rejected, or in Jung's case, sliced through and disentangled (RB, p. 321a).  (Drob, p. 187)

Next comes a difficult monologue about the devil and the dead. The devil is described as the sum of darkness of human nature.  To escape the devil’s grasp, Jung unites himself with the serpent, thereby drawing the darkness from the beyond into the daylight. Jung thereby took something of death into himself, allowing him to give up personal striving and distancing himself from ambition and desire, setting aside egoism and moving toward becoming himself. This is a definition of individuation.

Jung encounters Elijah and Saome once again.  Salome protests that Jung has refused her love, particularly the love that goes beyond words.  Jung says that, for him, love has been something of a torture and an entanglement.  Salome offers help on this matter, but Jung says he must carry his own burden. Jung wants Salome’s love to come from fullness, not from longing.   Elijah informs Jung that he’s been gloomy ever since he lost his serpent. Jung says that, in fact, he has stolen Elijah’s serpent from the underworld, prompting a curse from the old prophet, but Jung says that his possession of the serpent protects him from such curses.

Further reflecting on love, Jung says that Salome has been accepted as pleasure, but he rejects her as love. He says this is a sacrifice, but the serpent appears and responds that this was hardly a sacrifice because Jung did it with thought, and he is such a thinking type.  At this, the serpent becomes a white bird that flies to the heavens and report down to Jung that she has found a gift for him in heaven, a golden royal crown.  At this, Jung finds himself hanging from a tree for the sake of Salome, who is weeping. Jung asks Salome’s help to escape, but she says he is hanging too high on the tree of life for her to reach him. He must devise his own escape. He expresses his torment as he continues to hang on the tree, and that this tree was the reason that his ancestors committed the original sin.

On the golden crown is the phrase, “love never ends,” and Jung recognizes that this means eternally hanging and suffering torment. A wise raven tell Jung that love might be eternal, but that it depends on what one means by love. The raven condemns Jung for being an ideologue, and the serpent reappears coiled around a branch, informing him that she is only half of herself.  Her magical half can be of use to him in life, but she is powerless to help him while he is hanging.

Satan appears with a scornful laugh. He tells Jung that, if he gives up his quest to reconcile the opposites, he can escape this hanging on the tree. But Jung refuses.

The white bird tells Jung that the crown and serpent are one, and that Jung and Salome are one, and that all he needs to do is grow wings an fly.  He does so, and glides down to earth.  The opposites are thereby reconciled, at least in part.  Love continues to be subordinated to individuation and to coincidence of opposites. To love is not to recognize that you and another are one – as with Jung and Salome.

Jung now has a discourse about life and love. “Life stands above love” writes Jung.  While “love is pregnant with life,” once life is born, love becomes and empty shell that expires. Love (as with a mother and a child) seeks to have and to hold, but life demands more than that.  Jung is trouble by this thought, that he has broken love and life in twain.

The serpent returns, and it tells a story to Jung:

A childless king who desIres to have a son is told by a wise woman that although he

has sinned, he should bury a pound of otter lard in the earth for nine months and wait to see what happens. Nine months later the king finds an infant boy sleeping in the pot that had contained the pound of lard. He and his wife raise the child as their son, and at twenty the son informs the father that he knows he was born not of a woman hut through sorcery and the king's repentance for his sins. The son, who is more powerful than any man, demands the throne, and the king, surprised and outraged by the son's demands, desires to have him killed. However, he fears his son and returns to the sorceress who tells him that although he is confessing a desire to commit yet another sin, he should again place a pot with a pound of otter's lard in the earth for nine months. The king again follows her instructions and over the next nine months his son grows progressively weaker and dies, and the king buries his son near the now-empty pot.

However, the king is filled with remorse over his son's death and he again returns to the sorceress, who tells him to once more go to his son's grave, fill it with otter lard, and return in nine months. For a second time an infant son is born of the earth, but this time he grows to maturity in 20 weeks and once again demands the king's crown. At this point, the king, knowing how things will most surely develop, embraces his son "with tears of joy" (RB, p. 328b) and crowns him king. The son is grateful and holds his father in high esteem for the remainder of the old king's days.  (retold by Sanford Drob, p. 197)

The serpent offers an interpretation of this story:  Jung is dissatisfied with his “Son,” meaning his work. Jung must accept both his inner mother and inner child. Jung himself is smaller and weaker than his work, and he must let it go.

Jung struggles with this.  How dare his “son” claim his crown! Jung must recognize, at this point, that he himself must remain among mere humans, while his son, his work born of magic, will become immortal.   He sees that he is on the verge of another opus, another great work, which will be born out of his solitude. Thus ends the Second Book of the Red Book.