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.