Carl Gustav Jung & The Red Book (part 1)

from the Library of Congress in Washington D.C from the Library of Congress in Washington DC good morning I am uh Jim the librarian of Congress and it's my pleasure to welcome you to this Library of Congress Symposium on Carl Yung and the red book I am glad that the Symposium has generated so much interest as as the crowd here assembled clearly indicates um it's possible that Yung would have been uncomfortable with the location of this Symposium in one of his Visions in the red book he describes a bad experience he had in a library while

there uh young was beset by a squadron of ghosts of persecuted 16th century anabaptist the Squadron was on its way to Jerusalem to pray at Holy sights when Yung struck up a conversation uh the anabaptist leader and the chief librarian of an unidentified library to be sure U called the police and had him committed to the local inan aan on the other hand I suspect that Yung might have found this Library not entirely uncongenial uh since the exhibit that uh is is upstairs and you will have a chance to see in the course of the

day is right next to Jefferson's reconstituted Library Jefferson organized knowledge as you may be aware on three categories memory reason and Imagination contrast that with the multiple subdivisions of knowledge that you'll find in bureaucratized Academia today uh but it certainly bears in Jefferson's life as well as his Library uh the kind of active imagination that was one of the trade marks of Freud's thinking um so as librarian of Congress um I think this this Library being a multimedial resource of all kinds with un unparalleled collections of music of of uh prints and photographs of uh

Cinema uh of all kinds of expressions of the creative imagination um I think it's appropriate uh and also uh in my sometime capacity as a historian of Russian culture and this is not in the exhibit but it's something that struck me as I was reading some of this material and going through the exhibit um the um in the 10 years that Russia lived without censorship there were only 10 years in their history up until the fall of the Soviet system um the there was an explosion of creativity which if not directly influenced by Yung was

certainly uh has many points of parallel movement on The Voyage of Russian culture as it literally exploded after a long period between in the decade between 1907 and 1917 um there were the the late rimsky corov and the early Kandinsky both believed that there since both sound and light was were thought to be solely transmitted by waves that they must both be expressions of some deeper uh uh formation some deeper elements in the in what he didn't they didn't call but I think implicitly acknowledged was a kind of um unconscious or subconscious uh uh level

out of which culture came and so you can see in the in in their works of that period uh and even more in the works of scriabin and a whole bunch of other people scriabin who want wanted to introduce the other senses of sight and uh not just Sight and Sound but touch and smell uh as part of the uh Aroma of messages so to speak that uh multimedial culture had uh the climax of The Enormous fertility of what Russians are today rediscovering and what's from what they call the Silver age or the Russian Renaissance

was a great project that lasted on to the 20s until its leader Pavo florensky was executed in the gulag one of the earliest of gulags was a universal Sy uh Universal dictionary of symbols called symbol Aria that in post Soviet Russia that is a major project of their one of their great minds and the founder of the Russian School of semiotics a man named Ivan of who we've been fortunate to have on our advisory Council here at the kugi center within the library so if not directly influenced by Yung it's interesting that there is a

kind of parallel uh parallel track of deep investigation um with this project as bearing obvious resemblances to the work and the aspirations of of VI so I think there's much more probably to be discovered in terms of parallelisms and perhaps of direct influences yet to be unveiled from the still imperfectly inventoried uh world record the stage sets of Ric many of which are uh in another small uh repository in New York um look very much like the manal that you see in the red book The Red Book you know as you know was published in

digital fact simly in 2009 after being accessible to the public since its creation several decades earlier uh it was the product of an extraordinary entirely unanticipated period in Jung's life from 1913 to 1917 during which he endured what he called a prolonged confrontation with his unconscious which produced a stream of fantasies vision Visions dreams which were so strange and frightening that he later said they were they quote threatened to break me end of quote both he and the Ghostly figur in the librarian in yung's account I just alluded to thought that he might be going

mad Yung however summoned the moral and intellectual stamina to distance himself from these assaults from the unconscious even as they intruded on him in an effort to understand his experiences y recorded them words and artwork in the red book The Original of which is on display two floors above you in our Yung exhibit Everything Young later said derived from confrontations with the unconscious the experiences he described in the red book furnished him with the raw material to construct his system of analytical analytical psychology excuse me one of the major efforts of the 20th century to

unlock the mysteries of the human mind today we will hear a distinguished group of Yi and experts from the United States and Europe we thank them all for coming often from long distances to explain and assess the experiences that Yung described in the red book they may also tell us what impact they think the red book will have outside the jungian community on psychology and related fields so I look forward to an intellectual Feast as I'm sure we all do many individuals and organizations have assisted Us in making it financially possible to mount our exhibit

and to present today's Symposium and I'm happy to recognize them the James Madison Council of the Library of Congress the osor Family Foundation The Honorable J Richard Fredericks former one of our former ambassadors to Switzerland the embassy of Switzerland the Yung Society of Washington the filimon society the archives for research for archetypal symbolism the International Association for analytic psychology um and in addition of contributions from the CJ Yung Institute of San Francisco ww Norton and Company The Honorable Joseph B gildenhorn A more recent ambassador to Switzerland and the union analysts of Washington Association um finally

let me conclude on a more personal note that the uh staging of this event I think owes a good deal to an old friend of mine who I had a chance to have some deep conversations with in in 2003 Phil zisy known to many of you uh Union analyst and um his widow Beverly zabriski another luminary among uh the union Scholars and practitioners who will chair the first session and ladies and gentlemen it's my privilege to now get out of the way and turn it over to the experts beginning with the highly esteemed and great

friend Beverly zki [Applause] good morning and welcome and as a yian analyst I like the backstories and the hidden stories so I would just like to tell you a few of those first of all I want to thank James Billington a gentleman and a scholar and we are lucky to have him serving the library and serving the country 60 years ago this month James Billington graduated from Princeton as the valedictorian of the class and Philip zisy was the salutatorian and the two of them went off to Oxford and fast forward to 2003 and there's the

100th anniversary of the road Scholars at Oxford and in London and at a dinner together Jim mentioned the idea of a young exhibit at the Library of Congress and he and Philip began to discuss this and he said but what was needed was a centerpiece a yian centerpiece around which an exhibit could be formed we were in London we called up Sonu sham Dasani Sonu came over had dinner together and that was the night that the idea for this exhibit really began to take form and Sonu already was working on the possibility of the red

book he'd been working on it since I believe 1997 I'll tell you more about that in a minute but it was in conversation and it was in Friendship among Scholars and gentlemen that this idea really emerged and then when the red book was published it was thanks to son's work with the members of the Yung family three of whom are here and I would like you to know them Andreas Yung who is yung's grandson and the occupant of yung's house in kusno and he is and his wife rainy and that home thanks to their efforts

is going to become a public foundation so would you stand and Eric Balman a great grandson [Applause] it's just in terms of yian History the red book has become a means through which so many different Arenas of the yion world have come together the family and the scholars and the analysts and so it's it's had that synthesizing effect and to come as an analyst and see that post poster in front of the Library of Congress facing Capitol Hill with yung's red book on it if if a patient came in and told me that was a

dream I would be seriously in doubt of their grandiosity and inflation but I hope and trust that the energy of the red book which was about Yung befriending those who might be considered enemies in his psyche that some of that Spirit gets across the Avenue and I have heard that there is now a tunnel between Capitol Hill and the Library of Congress a passageway so let's hope that above ground and underground we begin to affect the American psyche none of this would have been without the extraordinary devotion and dedication of Yung to his own unconscious

and to his psyche and as I say rather than experiencing what emerged as frightening and uh to be as skewed and confronted as enemy he did it in the spirit of befriending that what was within him and the devotion that he showed really is a path a passageway for all of us to deal with the enemies within so we don't project them without and Yung was very lucky to have caught the attention of a man of similar devotion and dedication Sonu sham Dasani Sonu was born in India and when Sonu was 18 years old he

went to India to find his Guru and while there he picked up a copy of yung's Secret of the Golden Flower and then the next year started reading memories dreams Reflections and read that one finds one's Guru within and that began a very long and as I said dedicated career with Steve Martin Yong uh Sonu founded the filimon association and foundation and the president Nancy fot is here with us today and they have taken on the enormous task of publishing the 30,000 no 38,000 unpublished letters of yung's and another 30 volumes worth of unpublished material

and I heard many asking Sonu what was he going to do now that the red book was completed I thought I would save him having to answer and you having to ask by telling you that he is embarked on putting together a reconstruction of the formation of modern psychological disciplines and Therapeutics and also a reconstruction of the formation of work of Yung based on primary archival materials Sonu has read every young document at the aan in Zurich he has since 1988 been prowling the stacks of the Library of Congress and he probably knows more about

Yung than anyone else who has ever lived besides Yung and as the um co-founder and um executive editor of the filimon foundation he is continuing this work with their support and Sonu also has another life as a scholar he is the filon professor of Yong at the welcome TR center for the history of medicine at un University College London so it is my enormous privilege and pleasure to introduce The Man Without whom the red book would not be here and we would not be gathered in this room today [Applause] Sonu Jung Le bovis is is

a descent into hell yung's hell and possibly our own my theme this morning is hell and coming here this morning I think it may have been easier to get into than this Symposium the sign on the gates of hell and Dante's Comedia abandon all hope all who enter here might not be out of keeping come to mind when individuals first begin to Grapple will Le benov the spirit of the depths and the dark denisons that look within but all is not lost as a Denison of this domain nailed and chained to this book for what

seemed fast approaching in eternity and closer times to turning into a shade myself I'd like this morning to provide some short dispatches from hell to help you on your descent as a Christian designation for the dwelling of the dead depictions of Hell from the outset were superimposed upon classical descriptions of the underworld or Hades the first major christian description of Hell occurs in the apocryphal Apocalypse of Peter in this Christ shows Peter hell in graphic deta detail people hanging by their tongues a lake of flaming mire another full of pus clouds of worms people knowing

their tongues and having flaming fire in their tongues and metal detectors everywhere the key trait of these and similar depictions is the notion that in Hell punishments enact the nature of sins in his 1893 work on this text Nea Al Di argued that The Apocalypse of Peter Drew heavily on or Pythagorean Traditions now at the outset of liben noas two descents have an exemplary role adicus descent into the underworld in The Odyssey and Christ descent into hell the centor to the underworld feature in different traditions and as the underworld has been a main theme in

the speaker that follows me James hullman I pass all questions on the underworld to him first to odyss book 11 of the Odyssey depicts adicus descent into the underworld to consult tasas to enter the Land of the Dead liban mixed with honey milk then sweet wine and white barley were made they then cut the throats of sheep probably organic in that time tasas then gives warning and advice concerning what lies in store we will return to this Motif but just like to put this as one of the backdrops to to the terrain will be entering

the second major theme is out of Christ's descent into hell the harrowing of Hell the Apostles Creed states that he descended into hell the third day he rose again from the dead it's very brief but what indeed took place there accounts are found in the apocryphal Gospels it was descent into hell to preach to the dead to redeem the dead and to redeem Adam this formed one of could say the the major themes in Christian theology until a reaction set in in the Protestant Reformation zingle for example took the account of Christ's descent simply to

indicate that he had really died Calvin dismissed it merely as a fable the fusion of classical descriptions of the underworld and the Christian hell which is apotheosis in the most famous depictions we have of hell that is Dante's Comedia it's belli's hell in presenting his vision of hell and one's Journey Through It Dante also presented a hermeneutics of how the text should be read in his famous letter to K Grande de Scala he differentiated two modes in which the Comedia could be read the first sense is that which comes from the letter the second is

that which is signified by the letter the first is called the literal the second allegorical or moral or anagogical and he differentiated them in this text in the following manner the subject of the whole work taken only from the literal standpoint is simply the status of the Soul after death taken simply if the work is taken allegorically however the subject is man either gaining or losing Merit through his freedom of the will subject to the justice of being rewarded or punished two modes of reading then and in the second hell features in an allegorical sense

as the historian DP Walker notes hell began to lose its hold in the 17th century and there are many reasons for this the weakness of scriptural Arguments for hell the decline of the notion of retributive Justice the rise of rationalist modes of thought and problems concerning the precise location of hell just conceived of as in the bowels of the Library of Congress no in uh in the Earth for example in his article in dero and dalinar's encyclop Sweden argued that the number of the Damned argued against the location of Hell in its traditional place inside

the earth it was simply overcrowded I mean it was no no place to fit them all the only place big enough was the Sun and this had the added virtu it provided enough heat for the Eternal Flames so even then there were in problems of global warming ecology where are we going to find enough heat to burn everyone alongside this notion of problem concerning the literal hell and its location was a metaphorical use of the word hell the Oxford English Dictionary characterizes this as a place state or situation of wickedness suffering or misery Place state

or situation A wickedness suffering or misery and it notes instances of first usage going back in the English language to Cha in Milton's Paradise Lost Satan was a reliable figure States the mind is its own place and it itself can make a heaven of Hell a hell of Heaven Satan knew thing or two about hell an instance of this metaphorical use is found in a statement by Meister eart cited on several occasions by Yung and you'll see why therefore do I turn back once more to myself there do I find the deepest places deeper than

hell itself for even from there does my wretchedness drive me nowhere can I escape myself here I'll set me down and here I will remain the self as deeper than hell within the context of the decline of the belief in a literal hell two figures stand out Emanuel swedenborg terms of central precision and graphic detail it's only perhaps swedenborg's hell which comes close to matching dant's swedenborg Swedish scientist and Christian Mystic underwent a religious crisis in the 1740s depicted in his journal of Dreams in 1745 he was sitting in a Tavern in London he heard

a stranger say Don't eat so much he went back home and that night The Stranger appeared in a dream and revealed himself as Christ and told them he would travel through Heaven and Hell and talk with demons and angels and dead and show people the true Faith he was told to note what he'd seen and heard and de demonstrate the symbolic meaning of the Bible which he duely did in Sweden work heaven and hell heaven and hell were presented as strictly dichotomous all things in accord with the divine order corresponded to heaven and all contrary

things to Hell In Hell the spirits of the Dead continue their lives much as they did on Earth the main thesis of swedenborg's work is encapsulated in this statement heaven and hell are from the human race within each of us there were two gates one which was open to evil and to Hell the other to good and to Heaven what characterized those who are are currently in hell was that when they were living in the world they loved the flesh the self and the world as opposed to the soul the love of the Lord and

the love of the neighbor now how did one get to hell swedenborg presents um its geography Hells were to be found under mountains Hills and rocks and their opening appeared like holes and clifts some of the hells appear to the view like the dens and caves of wild beasts in the forest some were like the hollow caverns and passages that are seen in mines some HS present an appearance like the ruins of houses and cities after confl ations in some Hells there were nothing but brothel there were also deserts where all is Barren and Sandy

hence there was a multiplicity of Hells one didn't see them by walking by them because they a light only flashed when a soul was cast into hell and when had some smoke coming up so against the common belief that there was one H which was the same for everyone swedenborg noted that there was an infinite variety and and diversity in a similar man manner to Dante swedenborg not only presents a vision of hell but also a hermeneutics a spiritual hermeneutics the Bible had two levels of meaning a physical literal level and an inner spiritual one

these were linked by the doctrine of correspondences so I'll come back later to this notion of in the visual tradition of a linkage between a vision encapsulating its own hermeneutics the most acute reader of swedenborg was William Blake from his youth this is a self-portrait from his youth Blake had visions of angels and historical figures whom he Cons conversed with and for a time indeed he joined the swedenborgian church in London where it was established Blake became uh critical of the institutionalization of swedenborgianism and began began taking a more critical view of swedenborg around 1890

he published a work the marriage of Heaven and Hell In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake articulated his critique of swedenborg indeed the very title marriage of Heaven and Hell encapsulated his sense that these were not two radically dichotomous and distinct locations swedenborg's problem he noted was that he conversed only with angels and not with the Devils who hated religion he'd had the wrong informants you want to know what hell it's like you got to talk to a devil I mean it's it's perfectly obvious what swedenborg had failed to see Blake noted his annotations

to swedenborg was that heaven and hell are born together he he articulated a notion of dynamic oppositions what is basic is a series of contes Attraction and repulsion reason and energy love and hate and these oppositions were necessary for Life what religions called Good and Evil were secondary terms derivatives which sprang from these basic series of contries they were not primary at the same time Blake then launched a critique of organized religion and of swedenborg he noted he'd done much good and will do much good he's corrected many erors of poi in also of Luther

and Calvin but there was little that was genuinely new in his work and It ultimately served Orthodox belief despite its protestations to the country it was Dante that great Blake considered the greater figure and his last years he produced a series of Engravings to the Comedia of watercolors that's uh Lucifer in case you didn't recognize him this by way of [Music] backdrop we turn now to Yung you have noticed that I've not mentioned Freud as Eugene Taylor and I have been arguing for decades froc Centric legend of the Genesis of Yung psychology namely that its

Origins lay first in yung's discipleship and then Divergence from Freud has led to the complete mislocation of Yung in the intellectual history of the 20th century that's the postcard version it's only since October the 7th that the full extent of this has finally emerged into the public domain with the publication of leben noas I would contend that to continue to argue that psychoanalysis is the key determining context for the emergence of Y psychology can henceforth only be regarded as acts of willful obscurantism in no way does Lian nois emerges the SEI of Jung's Divergence from

Freud as if it's enough to diverge from Freud and and enter this vast Visionary uh domain rather it should be located and situated with within the context of the Visionary tradition for what Lian noas presents us with is a way back to hell hell that was increasingly lost to the Western imagination as noted between the Autumn of 1913 and the summer of 1914 Yung engaged in a lengthy period of self-experimentation inducing fantasies in awaking St uncertain of his activities till the outbreak of War convinced him that his fantasies were precognitive then wrote a handwritten manuscript

of a thousand Pages adding a second layer of lyrical elaboration interpretation and commentary he then had this typed and retranscribed it into the volume we have upstairs this was self-styled as a prophetic work they V this common the way of what is to come like Dante's vision of hell like swedenborg's Vision yung's Vision contains its hermeneutic within it in this layer to an attempt to elaborate the significance of his fantasies thus like Dante swedenborg and Blake yung's Endeavor was not simply to elaborate a work born a Visionary experience to give it form but to elaborate

hermeneutics of how it should be read in a critical sense then interpretive commentary is Superfluous what is required as a wider contextualization this is the whole work approaching you it's a it's a new form of a Yan uh Opticians test now in terms of the western cultural tradition not a little has been written on yung's relation to figures in his Pantheon such as Gera and in particular Nicha but other figures have received scant attention such as Dante swedenborg and Blake and I wish to speak a little bit of this now in your copy of the

Comedia there is a touching slip of paper inserted by the opening cantos in the line in the middle of the Journey of our life I found myself astray in a dark wood where the straight road had been lost sight of this was a situation where Yung found himself in a lecture at the SS Federal Institute of Technology in 1935 Yung noted a point exists at about 30 the 5th Year when things begin to change it's the first moment of the Shadow side of life and of the going down to death it's clear that Dante found

this point and those who've read zaratustra will know that NRA also discovered it when this Turning Point comes people meet it in several ways some turn away from it others plunge into it and something important happens yet to yet others from the outside we do not see a thing fate does it to us it's clear from this that Yung found an existential as well as a literary prototype for his activity in the Comedia and there are indications that Yung was reading the Comedia during this period on 26th December 1913 he transcribed the following lines from

the patoro into his Black Book quote and I to him I am one who When Love breathes on me notices and in the the manner that he dictates within I utter words second quote and then in the same manner as a flame which follows the fire whatever shape it takes the new form follows the spirit exactly seems to me these citations give voice to yung's undertaking they give expression to what he was endeavoring to do in the manner that he dictates within I utter words he was transcribing what he was hearing in a faithful Manner

and second the new form follows the spirit exactly this is his Fidelity to the event this is what he was attempting to Bear witness to in his published scholarly writings Young the Comedia as a Visionary experience disguised under historical and mythical events it significance for Yung as a historical document is found in his commentary and psychological types in 1921 he argued the birth of modern individualism began when the worship of women with the worship of Women quote which strengthened man's Soul very considerably as a psychological Factor since the worship of women meant worship of the

Soul this is nowhere more beautifully and perfectly expressed than in Dante's Divine Comedy so he situates it right at the birth of modern individualism the worship of the Soul Jung then goes on to comment on several cantos from Paradiso St Bernard's prayer to the virgin mother I turn now to swedenborg first to highight like the significance of swedenborg for Yung was Eugene Taylor Who's lurking somewhere there so address all questions on swedenborg to him in his youth Jung read through many volumes of swedenborg though not directly cited swedenborg's features critically in the backdrop to Lea

noas the very beginning begin of the text yung's turning away from the things of the world to the soul can be seen as parallel to swedenborg's conception of Heaven and Hell the Turning inward the Turning Away that what he previously lived had been a hell in the sense a negation of the Soul there are also many similarities in the manner in which swedenborg engaged dialogued and attempted to be instructed by figures in the spiritual world and yung's Endeavor in Liber noas the critical difference is simply one of ontology Yung replaces swedenborg spiritual realism with psychic

realism his notion of essay and anima articulated indeed in in Liber noas and then in psychological types it's a simply a shift of ontology a different manner of reading swedenborg swedenborg spiritual hermeneutics re reading the symbolic sense of the Bible also appears to inform the hermeneutics of Layer Two of Lea noas Jung's relation to the works of Blake appears to be more ambivalent and oscillates and this appears to be connected to yung's ambivalence concerning the notion of Art in 1921 Yung cited Blakes the marriage of Heaven and Hell in psychological types which indicates that he

read it during this period when he was working on liba noas now a curious thing about psychological types is the most read chapter has been the definition of types at the end but it's to me quite apparent that the most important chapter of the text is chapter five type problem in poetry and the reading of psychological types is will be in in a way completely transformed after leading lean noas the significance of this chapter will uh be apparent in the sense that he's transposing or attempting to cast in a conceptual language some of the insights

of Lian noas at the end of this I say at the end of what I consider the most important chapter of the work Yung notes cites Blake statement from heaven and hell that there were two classes of men the prolific and the devouring and that religion was an attempt to reconcile the two Jung then noted that this summarized the whole of his previous discussion so that just says it all quite striking in 1930 in a discussion of visionary works of art Yung noted that poets turn to mythological figures to give suitable expression to their experience

this did not mean that they were working with secondhand material but it was the only way to give form to imageless primordial experience so it starts with imageless primordial experience authentic Visionary experience which then poets use mythological and historical figures to give form to they've derived the figures from somewhere but that does not mean that the Visions themselves are derived from elsewhere an important point to note in discussions of leben noas Yung then noted Dante dexs out his experience in all the imagery of Heaven in purgatory and Hell Blake presses into a service fantasmagoria the

Old Testament and the apocalypse so in his view here Blake's work contained Visions from the collective unconscious clothed in mythological language in 1939 in yung's introduction to Suzuki's work on Zen Buddhism Yung noted that the glimmerings of a breakthrough of total experience in the west were to be found in Gus fa and N zarathustra Again The Usual Suspects from yung's Pantheon however tucked away in a footnote we find quote in this connection I must also mention the English Mystic William Blake in this connection he can't not raise him to the levels of Gerta and N

in 1944 in Psychology and Alchemy Jung featured two images by Blake and one of his illustrations to Dante the legend in Psychology and Alchemy describes this as the soul as a guide showing the way it's actually a revealing slip it's actually Dante and Virgil ascending the mountain of purgatory in a 1948 letter he noted I find Blake a tantalizing study since he has compiled a lot of half or undigested knowledge in his fantasies according to my idea they are an artistic production rather than an authentic representation of unconscious processes here again you find instances of

this oscillation it seems to me as I was indicating this oscillation concerns yung's own ambivalence concerning his own work was leonovus a work of art the notion of the dynamic interplay of countries Central to bles heaven and hell is a key theme in yung's liben noas though there's no evidence to suggest that he derived this idea from Blake rather it's indicative of what Yung May found tantalizing in the reading and study of Blake around 1910 Yung went on a sailing trip with his friends Albert URI and Andreas visher during which erri wrote out chap read

out chapters from The Odyssey dealing with Cersei and the Nikia Yung noted that shortly afterwards he like aysus was presented by Fate with a Nakia that Ascent into the dark Hades this is then yung's figuration of his self-experiment exp mentation a descent into the underworld like that to trace briefly trace this Motif on the 21st December of 1913 in his fantasy at the outset of his journey in which he first encounted the biblical figures of salom and Elijah Yung gazes into a stone and catch sights sight of adicus and his journey on the high seas

one of the first figures that he encounters after his interchange with salom and Elijah he looks again into this Stone thinking again of adicus and how he passed the rocky islands of the sirens and wonders if he should do so or not he is there imagining himself in the same situation in his commentary in the layer to hermeneutics on this passage you note that the image indicated that lengthy wanderings lay ahead of him uus had gone astray when he played his trick at Troy then Yung notes uus would not have become what he was without

his Odyssey so it's the question of the the necessity of the wandering of the earing in terms of his becoming in the handwritten draft to the second book of leonovus liba secundus Yung subtitled liba secundus The Adventures of the Odyssey in the corrected draft this is retitled the great Odyssey and finally Yung suggested the line from The Odyssey happily escaped from the drawers of death be used as a motto for anela's biography of him memories dreams Reflections still misleadingly referred to as his autobiography I come now to the descent into hell it was a few

weeks earlier on December 12th that he engaged in his first visual fantasy in 1925 in a seminar he recalled I divided such a boring method by fantasizing that I was digging a hole the fantasy then begins I see a gray rock along which I sink into great depths one this is a sensible procedure for anyone versed in swedenborg he's digging a hole in in the rocks that is where hell is to be found fantasy that ensues Jung saw a killed figure Flo by on a stream and serpents who Veil the Sun from which a stream

of blood flowed in 1914 as noted Yung felt that these Visions these fantasies were precognitive and he then titles this chapter descent into hell in the future in his fantasy he had descended into hell and the Bloodshed that he saw depicted what was happening in Europe quote as the darkness sees the world the terrible War Rose and the Darkness destroyed the light of the world since it was incomprehensible to the darkness and good for nothing anymore and so we had to taste hell hell was now indeed let loose it was the Earth the Bloodshed and

the slaughter of the Great War the world had gone literally to hell but critically in yung's account in Lian noas this was not senseless but meaningful for the further development of mankind like to indicate further depictions of you's imagination of Hell in the benov on 12th January he found himself in a gloomy Vault with a tangle of human bodies he realized then that he had reached the underworld or hell on 18th January 1914 after he'd been interred to in the insane asylum that James Billington mentioned he found himself in a steamer his neighbor in the

ward a fool who declared himself to be NE in Christ told him simply that there were in Hell on 2nd February 1914 his serpent Saul tells him that they had arrived in hell he saw a hanged man who' poisoned his parents and his wife man tells him that he'd done this to honor God so to escape the wretchedness of life for a state of Eternal blessedness in a fantasy of 28th December 193 13 he found himself in a castle in the forest where he met an old scholar he's led to a room to sleep and

imagines that the scholar has locked up his daughter which seems to be hacked theme for a romantic novel she then literally appeared before him and Yung notes I'm truly in Hell the worst and Awakening after death to be resurrected in a lending library I note that uh the Library of Congress is is not a lending library I think but perhaps for some members of Congress have I held the men of my time in their taste and such contempt that I must live in hell and write out the novels that I've already spat on long ago

does the lower half of average human taste also claim Holiness and invulnerability so we might not say any bad word about it without having to atone for the sin in hell so the canonical notion of the fitting punishment in hell is articulated here he despised such novels he finds himself condemned to literally be in one forced to live them out the Contemporary equivalent would no doubt be finding his work featured in a New York Times article or a TV cop show reflecting on this episode you noted your hell is made up of all the things

that you always ejected from your Sanctuary with a curse and a c kick of the foot what was required then was to give due attention to what led one to contempt and rage and through accepting this through accepting what one had rejected one redeemed one's own other into life hence the notion of going to hell is seen as essential in affirming the fullness of one's existence and indeed of life itself life affirmation required an affirmation and an acceptance of hell hell epitomized the state that Yung found himself in moment of collapse of all that he

cherished all that he'd striven for all that he aspired to and held dear transvaluation of all its value new and he comments as follows what do you think of the essence of hell hell is when the depths come to you with all that you are no longer which you I'll start again what do you think of the essence of hell hell is when the depths come to you with all that you no longer are or are not yet capable of hell is when you can no longer attain what you could Attain hell is when you

must think and feel and do everything that you know you do not want hell is when you know that your having to is also a wanting to and that you yourself are responsible for it hell is when you know that everything serious that you've planned with yourself is also laughable that everything fine is also brutal that everything good is also bad that everything high is also low that everything Pleasant is also shameful a complete moment of reversal the etian acarian sense of the return to oneself as deeper than hell itself or indeed the deepest hell

and you notes but the deepest hell is when you realize that hell is also no hell but a cheerful Heaven not a heaven in its self but in this respect a heaven and in that respect a hell this is indeed what Blake would have called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell what then does one do when one finds oneself in hell in life Yung found a prototype in Christ descent into hell the harrowing of hell one of the key themes in lean nois is that of the invitation of Christ how is this to be understood

how is this to be lived in reflecting upon this Yung understood it not on a literal level but on in this steeper sense of living one's life as fully as Christ lived his in attempting to do this he' experienced something akin to Christ's descent into hell quote no one knows what happened during the three days Christ was in hell I have experienced it the men of Y said that he preached there to the deceased what they say is true but you know how this happened it was Folly and Monkey Business atrocious hell's masquerade the holiest

Mysteries how else could Christ have saved his Antichrist read the unnown books of the Ancients and you will learn much from them notice that Christ did not remain in hell but Rose to the Heights in the Beyond in yung's understanding Christ's journey to hell was necessary after without this he would not have been able to ascend to heaven and yung's account in liba noas Christ had to become his Antichrist his underworld brother he had to become hell himself Christ's task of the Redemption the salvation of the Dead is then taken up in what I call

yung's Theology of the Dead in leben noas to cite one of the statements from the draft quote not one title of Christian law is abrogated but instead we are adding a new one accepting the lament of the Dead in yung's Theology of the Dead Redemption does not take the form of literally saving the souls of the dead but of taking on their legacy answering their unanswered questions after his work on leben noas in his published scholarly writings Jung attempted to translate some of the insights of bovis to a language acceptable to a medical scientific audience

one aspect of this undertaking was a psychological formulation and interpretation of Christ's descent into hell in 1937 in his Terry lectures at Yale Yung noted three days descent into hell during death describes the sinking of the vanished value into the unconscious where by Conquering the power of Darkness establishes a new order then Rises up to heaven again that is attains supreme Clarity of Consciousness I read this again you hear the the change in in language the three days descend into hell during death describes the sinking of the vanished value into the unconscious whereby Conquering the

power of Darkness it establishes a new order then Rises up to heaven again that is attains supreme exem Clarity of Consciousness in 1952 in ion he noted the scope of the integration is suggested by the dissensus ad infernos The Descent of Christ's soul to Heaven to Hell whose work of redemption also encompasses the Dead the psychological equivalent of this forms the integration of the collective unconscious which represents an essential part of the individ dation process again I repeat the scope of the integration is suggested by the dissensus at infernos The Descent of Christ's Soul To

Hell work of redemption also encompasses the dead psychological equivalent of this forms the integration of the collective unconscious represent an essential part of the individuation process here we find Christ descent into hell interpreted as the individuation process and the integration of the collective unconscious the central theme in yung's late to work but we must pause here which language which articulation is primary first person voice in articulation in Liber noas or its subsequent reformulation decades later in the Cy olical concepts of the collected works relevant here are some comments that Yung uh made following a discussion

of none other than swedenborg see this talk does tie in some loose manner at a discussion psychological Club in the 1950s I quote there are also Visions whose pathological character can be recognized not from their form but from their effects or also that they subsequently require continual working for instance Nicholas vlu he had a terrible vision and had to protect himself from it reinterpretation of the vision in the image of the Holy Trinity same with swedenborg he went up into his this doctrinal to protect himself against the vision since this was dangerous for him he

hitched himself to the concepts one must also give the patient something with which he can hold on to himself which he can grasp equals Concepts the visions of swedenborg are something terribly important also with him a danger is shown that he plunged into the abyss because of that he had to hold on to Concepts these form a true salvation for many men a very nuanced statement Yung is saying that swedenborg to protect himself from Concepts but Yung is not merely being critical and indicating for many men Concepts was all all they would have to hold

on to to be able to withstand the experiences in question now this raises the question whether Jung's later conceptual system which in some of his followers has not lacked for doctrin neness forms such a safety net or guard rail vital for some no doubt but a protection which may block access to the very experiences in question taking this further does Yung significance lie in his conceptual formulations the individuation process the collective unconscious the integration of the collective unconscious archetypes and so forth or rather that it does it in the terms of his own Visionary experience

lie in the recovery of hell as made accessible through individual fantasy through individual vision and enabling a new route to hell and back if as Jung claimed Dante and Blake clothed Visionary experience in mythological forms could we not pose the question that Jung in turn attempted to clothe Visionary experience in conceptual psychological forms if so the power and significance of his work does not reside in his Concepts which are familiar to us but in the Visionary experience which was at the back of them publication of liben nois then finally enables one to reconsider yung's significance

and holy new yet quintessentially ancient manner as recovering The Road to Hell thank you [Applause] [Music] Sonu thank you for 13 years Sonu carried his knowledge of the red book in his head keeping it confidential in all that time and he had the Good Fortune to meet Jim Mars at the library of there's so many gyms at ww Norton who was the editor unfortunately he's not here today and Norton originally planned a publication of 5,000 volumes um they thought they might sell between 1500 and 2000 and now the book has gone through its sixth printing

with 45,000 volumes sold in English 10,000 in German a Portuguese edition coming out in the fall and many more languages will will be added to the versions of the red book so that book is going to be on the shelves of many lending library sorry y but it's again another example of how an idea and an imagination can bring forth such a phenomenon so thank you so much I know from Sonu that one of his um intentions was to make this material available to those who had toiled in the tradition of Yung for many years

and his feeling that people who had devoted their lives to this Enterprise really deserve to have access to this material and no one deserved it more than James Hilman who is our next speaker James is probably the most eminent of all of yungi and analyst Scholars and um the founder of archetypal psychology he was born in this country and attended Sor buun in Paris and graduated from Trinity College Dublin he received his PhD from University of Zurich and he was also uh received his analyst Diplomat from the Yung Institute there he was the director of

studies at that Institute until 1969 and that was was the year that we arrived in Zurich and met James Hilman he then founded Springhouse and spring Publications and has certainly more than 15 volumes um in his name revisioning psychology the Soul's code in search of character and calling and many other volumes and right now a 10 volume uniform edition of archetypal psychology is being produced and it's collecting many of his works and the sixth one which is um alchemical psychology is now impr press and I believe it will be out in the fall others City

and soul senx and puer I believe have already been published so the uniform edition of archetypal psychology will be a ailable and meanwhile here is the man in whose head it all exists James Hillman thank you very thank you very much Beverly and thank you Sonu um the the title that I gave my thoughts this morning is Yung and the profoundly personal and so uh it seemed probably a good move in old age to uh make it profoundly personal not only about Jung's profoundly personal but maybe something from my own past but first I want

to quote something from Odon Wiston Odon the poet we are lived by powers we pretend to understand and that's the whole thing and the work that Sonu has been doing the work that Yung did what that book is and what Yung spent his life trying to write and make clear is the pretending to understand trying to understand the powers and we are always up against the enormous limitations of the mind and of language in attempting to understand the powers that are living us and once we once we enter the realization that we are being lived

we are not the sole agents the ego is a myth a figure I've never met one anywhere except the word somewhere or another that all of that is attempts to understand the powers and this changes the way uh the way one imagines what's going on in life and what happens in relationships what happens in therapy what happens everywhere else we are being lived by powers we pretend to understand of course I never understood this for still don't fully but feel it um and this is June 19 2010 in June 1961 I was then 35 and

I was uh allowed to go out to yung's house and pay homage to yung's body he was in a separate room and some of us went out to kushak from zri I remember uh carrying a lily one of those huge lies with white you know those Exquisite things that you see imaged in Psychology and Alchemy and being a received beautifully by fra Lily Yung fra hernie uh fra gret Balman and we we sat on the sofa sometimes different people coming and going and I looked at photographs from the old days and we were beautifully received

in this time of morning so it was probably the second or third day I don't know exactly and so I had my moment in the room with the body and paid homage had my Lily and the the the message the meaning that I was given was get out or get on or gets over something like that and do my work now after that uh interesting that Lily because I remember Yolanda yakobe a member of that group at that time brought red roses I brought the anima image of the Lily you know I was the young

man of 35 who um who was animar possessed possessed by the idea of the soul the softness the agulation the all of those virtues that the Lily was but but the message was get out get on get over and do my work and that's that was the the cruth so then for for years and years and years and years it seems to me I was doing the work and at the same time I was undoing the work and I was living the tension that Sono shamdasani spoke of last night the tension between the public and

the private now I have breached that or or resolved that tension for a moment by telling that story by telling a story that is public or telling a story in public that is intimately private and yung's the red book is a book of deep deep intimate privateness so of course there's this tension what part is public what part is private how far do you go with this or with that of course in late life it's resolved that the whole business becomes what's public and what's private anyway but and what difference does it really make we

are all scandals [Laughter] [Applause] but each differently of course uh so that that tension of doing and undoing the tension between undoing the language that Sono has been speaking about these words that obsess our attempt to understand ego un conscious uh this kind of type and that kind of type uh these rational words that are left over from psychology of other periods psychology of other dimensions psychologies of other psychologists Jung's own language was not that that's what the red book when it came out was like an enormous turn for me a revelation that my undoing

all these years of trying to work through and re resist this language of opposites you use the word contraries contraries are not opposites they're necessary to each other they're co-relative coexistent don't have one without the other black and white aren't opposites they are only opposites if your mind has to think in an Aristotelian way and and put them into the category of opposites otherwise you can have all sorts of whiteness without thinking about black and you can have all sorts of Blackness without any kind of necessary opposition there are no white berries there's no white

coal there's no you I mean these are necessary uh these are mistakes in thinking and it was that struggle all along that has occupied me but now with the red book there is the Revelation the Revelation that the language the language of psychology is imagistic it's poetic it is uh pre- dialectic prelogical Yung writes those those sentences that seem sometimes to be forgotten in the psychological types which you mentioned as being so crucial and as the book that I think that's the first book that came out after the beginnings of the experience with li Liber

noas am I right about that 1921 I think yeah he says image is not a psychic reflection of an external object it's not because you saw something and then you have an image of it but a concept derived from poetic usage poetic usage is the beginning of the right language for psychology if we're talking about the powers that have us a fantasy image and they appear in space and as voice but are not pathological as such he writes and I'll give you even the paragraph numbers paragraph 7:22 in psychological types imagination is the reproductive or

creative activity of the mind in general what does the Mind do it doesn't invent words like ego it invents imaginative forms figures melodies poetic phrases moments of insight intuitions formula imagination is the reproductive or creative activity of the mind in general fantasy as imaginative activity is the direct expression of psychic life what does the psyche do naturally as a chicken naturally lays an egg the human psyche fantasizes that's its primary activity our dreams are prior to our thinking see this is a way of looking at the world that seems to me to have been realized

in yung's life in the red book that is the the the concession of the mind that goes back to Aristotle but gets reinforced particularly from decart onward the rational mind the mind that was dominating that 18th century in which Blake and swedenborg were contraries that that mind doesn't do the job and the psychology that arises from that mind can't do the job so of course everyone's in therapy because they're using the wrong mind to deal with the psyche and the therapists are using the wrong mind in dealing with the psyches who are using the wrong

mind the mind is creating images fantasies and that these are living realities that can speak to us they come figured at times not only as I say also a Melody is a psychic image fantasy as imaginative activity is the direct expression of psychic life and they are identical with again yung's quote with the flow of psychic energy so our energy our emotional Vitality whichever way it goes goes down or up inward or outward the psychic energy is actually only one aspect the other aspect are the fantasy figures and forms so if you want to get

hold of your emotions or know what emotion or feel yourself emot trapped by an emotion you try to find the image of that emotion which tells you much more about the emotion than simply suffering the emotion itself it isn't to get out of the emotion it is to find its form to find its fantasy to to elaborate it further identical with the flow of psychic energy even more he says in psychological types paragraph uh 78 this one psyche creates reality every day the only exp uh expression I can use for this activity is fantasy wow

psyche creates reality every day we think there's psychic inner world and then there's reality watch out don't do [Music] that psychic reality and then reality hard reality which is always hard tough real cold and so on well that reality is a fantasy also it's only not recognized as a fantasy and so we call it reality whatever we call reality is a fantasy that has got stubborn and blocked and become obscured to the fact of its of the flow of psychic energy in it this opens the whole business this opens the soul to uh living to

living so that as a line from San one of his plays two people meet and one says to the other what's the fantasy now Kitty Duval that's the the relationship what's the fantasy now not what happened to you when you were four that's a fantasy too what happened to you when you were four now this what I'm trying to elaborate is also that it is profoundly personal we think the profoundly personal is what happened to us when we were four the wounds we've suffered the hopes that were dashed the relationships that we have or had

the intimacies the memories that this is the profoundly personal but these are the things that happen to everybody everyone has been jilted everyone has been disappointed everyone has has filled with enthusiasm these are the profoundly Collective experiences the profoundly personal is the engagement with one's own demons or the visit to hell and to and the the encounter with the figures that Yung had this is the most intimate deep profound unexpected completely surprising individualized part of life in other words the encounter with one's own soul and the red book begins with that Jung felt he had

lost his soul and was it was now his job to find it or to find out where it was or what had happened this is the profoundly personal that this changes a lot because the entire realm of psychotherapy for a hundred years has been going down the Avenue of the profoundly personal is my personal life my personal memories my personal childhood my personal experiences my personal uh the subjectivism of my uh what Freud called the tagus resta or the personal unconscious uh or the repressed but there is something else that is not collective in that

way and not Collective let's say that is not common to us all but is has some deep individual uh faithful aspect and this is what Jung was engaged with as I read the red book he was engaged with uncovering what are in the depths of the soul that was given to him and the Fate that was given to him now that changes what's important in your life that changes that these things you're trying to work out in regard to your personal life are really being lived by Powers we're trying to understand and it takes a

kind of courageous uh theat Mii let it be done to me uh to drop into that again in the profoundly personal in my own case when I got to Zurich in 1953 um the Terrors of what lurked that I didn't understand or was afraid of seemed to me to be down below now I hadn't read about yung's descent through a the hole of he dug but I had that feeling that there were things that were going to come up and get me and I took to making little paintings of what might be down there because

this was encouraged by my analyst that seemed to be the way you did things um and I recall well the The Descent for in Mya in my moment was into water I went down deep into the bottom of the sea and there were a lot of creatures there that were going to grab me and hold me and do things and so on and I had the experience that I could breathe underwater and that was a revelation whatever a revelation is that seemed a revelation that I could actually stay in this realm and do things talk

uh ask questions move around uh explore and breathe underwater it was that literal and that concrete and that Vivid the being underwater and yet at the same time the imagination the Fantasy Made it possible to breathe now this is just one example of hundreds of examples of this kind of work that Jung invented invented because I say he invented it for modern psychology people have been doing exploratory Journeys forever that's not and they're recorded in all kinds of ways in epics in in Dante's work in Blake's work and all the way back all sorts of

people have done hild deard V bingan and so on and so forth that's not the point the point is that Yung did something different with it he devised this partly as a way as a method as something that can be recorded carefully and observed with a uh phenomenological mind and I say a phenomenological mind rather than an empirical mind because he was not doing experiment only in the C of let's try this and see what happens he was allowing the phenomena to speak and there's a difference between empiricism and phenomenology here because the empiricist is

also doing something with what is and the phenomenologist is first of all allowing the phenomenon to have it say and all um all thoughts about it what it should be how it should work uh all the historical information is bracketed out and you're left with simply the way the phenomenon appears and Yung let the phenomena speak now we need to know here how difficult it is to let them speak in our culture we must remember that uh let me just because I do have a note actually um I think it's Mark the biblical Mark and

you'll be able to tell me uh Jesus doesn't let the yeah Mark 1:34 Jesus suffered not the Devils to speak now Do You Realize by letting the demons speak by letting the voices speak Yung was making a move of demonology as Carl Jaspers has said and he was opening he was immediately being heretical as his Pastor said at his funeral that he was a heretic well it's very important because the Heretics belong within the church they're not simply Heretics they have a very important role and and so he let the demons speak Mark 1:34 says

Jesus suffered not the Devils to speak get thee behind me Satan Harrow hell death wears thy sting that opening produced a a a radical move in the relation of Jung to Christianity and the voice says at times in the read book The Christianity that he has in is not Sona will be able to tell me those passages where the Christianity in the that Jung thought he was a Christian is not the Christianity that he is discovering in the book is that more or less yeah um so that he says and you can see why because

he is allowing other voices the multitude of voices to speak and to be figured to be personified to have re as reality as other figures in the basic fundamental Christian way of looking at it there is only one voice that can speak to you and that it must be Jesus's voice so all the others are out of the game so the images are also voices and they bring some sort of message from the dead and that was one of the things I'd love to talk more with you Sono about is who are the Dead who

are the dead in yung's book are they his personal ancestors are they the the dead of Jerusalem from the seven sermons who who are the dead what is the message of the dead and what is it in America what is it in our culture that has has so much trouble with the dead so difficulty our president can't even go to the coffins of the Dead a former president that we have this this this tremendous wall between living and death so that at any cost we must keep the living alive because what's on the other side

no sense no sense of the permeability of life and death of the flow of the others of the voices of the figures of the powers into our life every day of our relation to those on the other side who in the old days used to say welcome to be welcomed by the ancestors when you die received instead there's something this great unknown and you die alone and all these Horrors are imagined because there's no sense of the ancestors and of course our ancestors are the American Indians who lived in this soil so perhaps our dead

we are cut from the dead by what by what we have buried and to go to the dead would bring bring up all sorts of things we don't want to bring up but it's a a question that seems to me the dead are the daily encounter with everything that has been left out buried burned drowned forgotten on purpose and continues to um send wafts of little messages through all sorts of small intuitions hunches hints warnings Omens the little feelings in the stomach that say no I don't think I'll do that I'm not going to pick

up the phone on that one I'm let that one go those little cautions and warning who who sends those who's protecting us every day about not doing this or doing that remember Socrates said that it he was never told by his dimeon what to do he was only cautioned what not to do where does that the what not to do the moment of holding off holding back not the moment of not are those the dead keeping us safe watching out for us today this book is so enormously how many thousand could I have those figures

again what were they 46,000 in English 46,000 in English 10,000 and more languages coming and more languages coming imagine another printing and another printing we're in the sixth imagine on the best seller list imagine imagine it was uh last week on Law and Order Criminal Intent if you happen to see was that it what it's called Criminal Intent if you happen to have seen it the red book was displayed itself and it was part of a cult it was it was uh INSP inspiring some inspiring some I don't know whether they were vampires or they

were now of course it's been reviewed you know we've had meetings like this in New York and Los Angeles and the New York Times and so on so forth what is its importance in our culture at this moment is what I have been saying about the dead about the voices about letting the demons speak about the Deep polytheistic background that has been forgotten about the depth of the the profundity of one's personal life and its importance and the individual search for not for meaning but for image for images meanings don't carry you through but the

images are your companions you can have all the slogans in the world and explanations and understandings but what carries you through are the voices and figures you live with and can talk with is that what's missing is that what they call it's so radically different from anything else in Psychology so radically different from today's cultural mure of Technology economic uh reason information you know when the book for I don't know if I'm going on too long okay um when the book uh when it was being written in around 1915 let's say just that period at

that time current in the mind was blatsky surrealism parapsychology in worked on by Leading intellects like William James and many others in England dadaism German expressionism Joy there were comp compatible and comparable experiments in other areas in our time this book is absolutely freakish because we have lived we live in such a narrow technical rational explanatory causal way of thinking we have shrunk our our mindset tremendously since the beginning of the century when this book was not as strange in my mind would not have been as strange after all Yung wrote his doctoral dissertation in

the year two uh 1900 on occult phenomena for a medical degree think of that in today's medicine today's medicine is packed with oul phenomenon but so it's the book has is sort of a necessity the book is a necessity in our time and it is recognized on a deep level of the collective psyche thank you very much thank you so much James uh there is another James that I would like to thank and he's just left the room but I'm going to thank him anyway at this point one of the groups of the Dead that

Yung met as James Billington described to us were the anabaptists in the red book and James Hudson who has been The Marvelous scholar and gentleman and um head of the manuscripts division of the Library of Congress is a historian and one of his Specialties has been the anabaptists in terms of the history of the church and working with him has been such a pleasure in the formation of this program and told me that he found out that the Swiss anabaptists were tied in Sachs by zwingley in 1525 and swingley and his friends drowned them in

the lake of Zurich not far from kned so that when Yung met the ghosts of the anabaptists they were a group of dead that were emerging out of the waters so another wonderful [Laughter] backstory and now it's my great pleasure to introduce my friend and colleague from New York an belred ulanoff an has been a strong womanly vo and yian studies for many decades she holds the Christine Brooks Johnson Memorial chair established in memory of her student at New York's Union Theological Seminary where she's a professor of psychiatr Psychiatry and religion and she's also a

yian analyst in private practice in Manhattan um an has many many books to her credit certainly nine that I know of and she is always at work she's published many books of her own and she published several with her husband The Late Bar ulof her two recent titles are Spirit spirit and Yung the unshuttered harsh opening to aliveness and deadness in the self so I'm so grateful that an is here with us today [Applause] yes thank you thank you in the red book Yung encounters Elijah and saloman who say to him we are real and

not symbols and they express the tone of the whole volume what the guide filimon conveys psychic reality exists it's there it's objective and addresses yung in a series of images figures tasks and though later Yung reflects that these figures are p ifications of unconscious thoughts when he actually meets them they are real experiences and evoke in him dread loathing confusion he described salame as bloodthirsty horror exclaiming I fear her he understood Salam to personify his feeling which he had scorned as grossly inferior to his thinking personified by Elijah and even later when salame is redeemed

into loving and offers her love to Yung he says to her you are like the serpent who coiled around me and pressed out my blood and yet at the end of his encounters he learns from filimon that only through voluntary Devotion to love do I arrive at my truest and innermost self from this one of countless examples we get a sense of what it is to read the red book we Plunge in down where encounters with the unconscious call us out forcing us to tasks that if we avoid we miss the boat in painting 55

we see what Yung saw that we all have a boat riding on the unconscious psyche under which the serpent the Dragonfish the monster of Fus swims threatening to swallow the Son Of Consciousness Yung was called to these encounters forced by his own complexes that when faced ye yielded his vocation he said in my 40th year of life I had achieved everything that I had wished for myself but he had lost his soul and had to go find it with fright he asks his soul into what mist and darkness does your path lead I limp after

you on crutches of understanding I follow but it terrifies me and yet Yung recognizes quote this life is the way the long sought after way to the unfathomable Divine thus pairing psyche with soul to whom he says your meaning is a supreme meaning and your steps are the steps of a god Yung felt carried into fearsome territory beyond what Christ taught the soul tells him if you marry the ordered to the chaos you produce the Divine Child the Supreme meaning Beyond meaning and meaninglessness Christ taught God is love but you should know that love is

also terrible Christ overcomes the Temptation Of The Devil but not the Temptation Of God to good and reason identification then with what we call the good is not going to work anymore for the soul tells him nothing will deliver you from disorder and meaninglessness since this is the other half of the world in response Yung says I swayed between fear Defiance and nausea Yung sees that as Christ knew that he was the way the truth and the life I know that chaos must come over men for him who has seen the chaos he knows that

the bottom sways for he has seen the order and disorder of the Endless in short the soul tells him life has no rules that is its mystery we enter Then a world of encounters which Jung insistently claims as his own saying don't ape me you have your own Mysteries go there find them Yung is encountered by many figures his meetings lead him to take leave of quote science that clever knower that imprisons the soul in a lightless cell to find another kind of knowing pertaining to the child God he comes to serve and to paradoxical

over intellectual intelligence the child God who is quote Beyond being split between opposites whose simple will we cannot learn for it can only become in you brings an attitude without preconceptions of inexhaustible freshness and from this uniting of opposites rise arises a third quote the Supreme meaning the symbol passing over into a new creation here the symbol takes on incarnate life it's not hanging in the air but acts as a solid Bridge into daily life for as Yung writes the Divine wants to live with me further this new meaning changes our grasp of how we

understand quote the spirit of the depths took my understanding and all my knowledge and placed them at the service of the paradoxical the melting together of sense and nonsense which produces the Supreme meaning the god Yet to Come Yung for example encounters the uniting of below and above the Monstrous and devoted the collective and individual the Divine and the human and Paradox also changes our relation to what we know he no longer identif ifies with it but says I do not myself become the Supreme meaning but the symbol becomes in me that it has its

substance and I have mine and even further Yung distinguishes God and the image of God saying it is not the coming God himself but the image which appears in the Supreme meaning chaos thus unites with order and the god image we perceive and form on which we depend can always be destroyed how does Yung get here to these thoughts only by Going Through Hell which he says means to become hell oneself and he describes it as full of frightful noise shrieking voices where he discovers the Thousand serpents that want to Devour the son are also

in me I myself am the murdered and the murderer the sacrificer and the sacrificed the upwelling of blood streams out of me from refusals of such Consciousness flow Collective depredations manifest then in World War I manifest now across our globe in the countless cruelties we do to each other Yung says men fall on their brothers with Mighty weapons and bloody axe when they do not know that their brother is themselves one way or another the sacrifice will be made unconsciously in barbarism against each other and against the Earth as filon asks do men atone for

the ox with the Velvet eyes or do Penance for the shiny ore your bloodthirsty tiger growls softly while you conscious only of your goodness offer your human hand to me in greeting and suddenly I felt a cruel Hammer blow struck a nail into my temple what then is the sacrifice to sever our identification with what he calls our formations such as the image of God or what we hold Supreme for Yung at that time science or what we experience as our ruling principle for Yung his thinking the expansion of our subjectivity accompanies our opening to

reality that lies beyond our images of its Center the ruling principle in each of us is the hero who must be slain he writes the heroic in you is the fact that you are ruled by the thought that this or that is good the goal consequently you sin against incapacity but incapacity exists no one should deny it or shout it down when we succeed quote in making a God our whole Force has entered into this design we desire to rise with the Divine sun and become part of its magnificence but then we are no more

than Hollow forms he continues for our formation causes many good persons to bleed to death when we lose our Force to our formation we try with unconscious cunning and power demandingly to force others into following the god by clinging to our formation we push away anything opposite and left unvalued this incapacity this inferior part does not develop but degrades into monstrous form but Yung finds that quote salvation comes to you from the discarded your son will arise from the swamps and even more shocking but the lowest in you is also the eye of evil that

stares at you coldly and sucks your light down into the dark abyss we need the help of evil to dissolve our formations for we become bad in our goodness and do not know it hence we must recognize quote our comp our complicity in the act of evil for evil has to be accepted and must have a share in our life this jarring encounter with his lowest what he later calls his shadow issues in Yung hanging against quote his inordinate ambition you don't work for Humanity you work for self-interest he accuses you consume yourself in Rage

and speak in cold daggers what is concealed in you I will drag into light you should be a vessel of life so kill your Idols yet Yung also Harang his soul who has brought him to these realizations accusing her of stealing quote the gold the sparkling light of the jewel and absconding with it to Heaven Yung insists that she tell him what is this treasure and give him what belongs to me and beg for what you need from it the soul finally confesses it is love warm human love warm red blood the holy Source of

Life the unification of everything separated and longed for Yung protests you get drunk on the blood of man and let him starve love belongs to me I want to love not you through me he insists she learned to honor mankind because you force us to labor for your salvation and now she must work for quote the Earthly Fortune of humankind this means taking back into the human interior not just his own lowest his inferior part but also his force that creates the Gods Not Just his shadow but also his now redeemed feeling The Treasure of

warm human love and not just his personal matter but what his encounters show him about what matters the fundamental elements of reality for example Yung must Embrace quote The Serpent of God that wants human blood for this serpent life is part of the power that is different from the power of science the serpent is the Earthly essence of man which is not conscious it is the mystery that flows cl to us from the nourishing Earth mother from which everything that becomes emerges it both causes Yung to become enslaved to his ruling principle and hence is

an adversary but also gives him wisdom hardness a wise bridge that connects the right and the left and leads to concretization on Earth the point here is not Theory but making a difference in life in ethical action Yung does Unite with the serpent he says I took my part of the humiliation and subjugation upon myself and he continues the devil who is the sum of Darkness of human nature now has no power over him for Satan is the quintessent of evil pure negation without Force taking on the serpent Yung Fetters the devil and builds quote

a firm structure that can withstand the fluctuations of the personal and therefore the immortal in me is saved the Dead come back to Yung because their unlived life drove them to find the animal part they had failed to live Yung says he takes over something of the dead into my day and death that can never be cancelled out gives me durability and stability when I recognize the demands of the Dead in me and satisfied them I sacrificed personal striving in the world which then took me for dead but the serpent says to him Life Is

Yet To Begin which Jung himself perceives in saying the every day belongs to the image of the godhead echoing the words of salame and Elijah that they are real the everyday living serves the image we have of the ultimate what we call God and for this task of living the Divine in every day day Yung has the help of the kabiri who grow from the flowers of the corpse of the slain Dragon who devoured the Son Of Consciousness Yung calls them possessors of ridiculous wisdom first formations of the unformed gold they have their origin in

the lowest and and he asks them are you the Earthly feet of the godhead they say we are the juices sucked out of inertia affixed to what is growing we carry up what is dead yet enters into the living we placed Stone on Stone and now you stand on Solid Ground and they give him a sword to slay them for that will free Yung from his entanglement with his formations his ruling principle his scientific thinking so from this encounter we learn what Yung learned destructiveness Finds Its ongoing place in life he writes the creating of

the new prepares the destruction of precisely this day in the hope of leading over into a new creation as a result of these encounters Yung experiences a change in his subjectivity he says I am smelted a new in the connection with the primordial beginning of myself and the world the formed in him dissolves binds itself a new with the children of chaos the powers of Darkness the ruling and seducing the Divine and the devilish he writes by accepting the lowest in myself I lower a seed into the ground of Hell the seed is invisibly small

but the tree of life grows from it and conjoins the below and the above beginning down where nothingness widens itself into unrestricted Freedom so in effect the nowhere in US becomes the sight of transcendence for God is not now to be found in the absolute but in the terrible ambiguity quote the hateful beautiful the sick healthy the new God will be found in the relative born as a child for my own soul soul and from the human soul from the secret mystery of the individual the arrival of the new comes not then as a Descent

of spirit from above but from the below of matter which for the psyche is the unconscious that includes our personal narrative but also the human narrative the objective elements that must conj join we must do the work Yung says when God enters my life I bear the burden of poverty and everything reprehensible in me with this I prepare the way for God's coming this is not hubris this is service and a bold way Yung describes his service is this the depths will force you you into the mysteries of Christ one is not redeemed through the

hero but becoming a Christ himself we undergo the mysteries of conjoining the Opposites and suffer what this conjunction brings for Yung it was conjoining thinking with feeling science with magic intellect with Paradox Devil with God and his way makes us ask well what is our way and Yung writes you make yourself into the vessel of Creation in which the Opposites reconcile and thus you also serve others if we are ourselves he writes we fulfill the need of the self and through this become aware of the needs of the communal and can fulfill them then the

life of God begins May each one seek his own way the way leads to mutual love and Community the change in his subjectivity accompanies the change in God images the child Christ and abraxis all turn up in fillon's Garden filon tells Yung the dead re rejected the god of love and the community of love so I am teaching The God Who blasts everything human who powerfully creates and mightily destroys and filimon advises Yung to enter ever deeper into God and Yung encounters the lord of the frogs quote of bodily juices the spirit of sperm and

entros of the genitals of the joints of the nerves and the Brain the spirit of sputum and excretions abraxis the name given to this God behind the godhead is quote the Creative Drive form and formation sheer Effectiveness that unites the fullness and vital force God god with the sucking Gorge of emptiness the devil a brais who produces truth and lying good and evil life and death in the same word and in the same Act is terrible out of the ploma which is fullness and nothing the beginning and end of creation quote our nature natur our

very nature is differentiation if we are true to our Essence we differentiate and quote the prim primordial creator of the world the blind creative libido becomes transformed in man through individuation and out of this process arises a divine child a reborn God no more dis firsted but one an individual in all individuals the same everywhere a thread winds back to Christ that we should be ourselves as truly as Christ was filimon says to Christ what one individual can do for men you have done the time has come when each of us must do his own

own work of redemption and Yung responds I decided to do what was required of me I accepted all the joy and every torment of my nature and remained true to my love to suffer what comes to everyone in their own way so behind the work of individuation lurks the terrific power of abraxis the sheer force of being and as man becomes differentiated at a great distance writes yung in the Zenith stands a star this is the one God of this one man this is his world his ploma his divinity the God and goal of man

to this one God man shall pray prayer throws a bre Bridge across death and Yung responds to his encounters by saying our task is to live oneself to fulfill what comes to you for our life is the truth we seek we create the truth by living it speaking to the spirit of the depths Yung exclaims let me persist in Divine as astonishment so that I am ready to behold your wonders this knowledge of the heart is in no book but grows out of you like the Green Seed from the dark Earth and you attain this

knowledge only by living your own life to the full and only if you also live what you never have lived yung's Devotion to what he encountered made him recognize quote that I am as I am in this visible world and only the expression and symbol of the soul I am thoroughly a servant of a child and filimon tells Yung quote you will be a river that pours forth over the lands and streams toward toward the depths you will hold the invisible realm in Trembling Hands it lowers its root into gray darknesses and Mysteries of the

earth and sends up branches covered in leaves into the golden air it will stay green for a long time thank you [Music] thank you very much an an is our last formal speaker and I'm going to now we are going to go until 12 1210 because we started late and I'm first going to ask the speakers if they would like to address any questions to each other and then invite the audience also to ask questions and I'm going to take the prerogative of making the first two quick remarks one thing that astonishes me is the

incredible breadth of Jung's lived life that while he was working on the red book and writing his 60 volumes worth of material he was keeping a full practice traveling around the world present to the raising of his five children and loving food and wine and art and the wind and the Waters of Zurich and so the whole celebration of the lived life was also happening simultaneously here and last night um one of yung's the youngest of yung's grandsons Hans hernie said that what he most remembered as a 10-year-old of his grandfather was the totality of

his laughter and I just wanted to share that with you because I thought that was such a beautiful phrase that somehow he managed to go through all this and live Liv the full life with a totality of laughter and the other thought that came to me as I was listening is the definition Yung gave of God when he was asked as an older man how he would define God and he said God is that which crosses my willful path which is I think one of the the great um statements of always being open to the

unexp expected and the surprise in life and so now I'd like to ask the speakers if they would like to address anything to each other I I have one there's a sentence I discard page 307 in the red book I discard everything that was Laden with meaning then fra yaf writes a book called yung's The Myth of meaning can you distinguish what Yung means what f yaf means I mean that evidently there two senses of meaning here or it's because I I love this thing I discard everything that was Laden with meaning I think they're

Splendid but I take it in my own way it's an important juncture I think there's a critical issue of chronology there what he describes there is entering a state of frameless a state of frameless shamelessness setting aside acude meanings to be able to confront his own experience in doing that meanings are recomposed and one finds that in the second layer of the text hermeneutics develops so in that sense I see that the first statement as a moment almost in a healan sense on the way to an ultimate recovery of meaning uhuh to the eventual recovery

of meaning which then heelan would have to be discarded again wouldn't it and then the whole shebang starts again and again I I would say Jim that it's um it's meaning and meaninglessness that he's after so that perhaps the word emphasize should be missed rather than meaning that you create meanings and you know that the bottom sways underneath them and none of them are ultimate and they will be dissolved and if you can't take that as an inner task to live with that it might happen to you from the outside as I think you said

um where events happen that just are terrible they just rip up everything you thought you knew um death is like that often and um but we need we as you were saying we have images of meaning the psyche speaks in images that strike us and we want them and yet the bottoms ways okay I I'll I'll let that ride yes that's uh it comes as the fox askas is somehow if one can live the meaningless life that's what I'm thinking of that would be a formation that would dissolv [Applause] I think one has no option

that's that's where we find ourselves yes yeah MH except we we are lived by the powers so it it would be the sense the sense of Life can still be filling without having the meaning well the ultimate meaning eludes one if there is one yeah if yeah exactly or I think the um emphasis shifts from having the meaning or not having the meaning to be in sort of a constant thrumming conversation with the powers it's like a a dance or a fox appearing and splat I go on the ground so perhaps the point there is

that to have the we got to have a point the perhaps the point then in that definition of God is that which crosses my willful path is that the fantasy of carving one's path is a willful fantasy in that sense you you would carry the image of it that that's that's what's happening or there's another phrase here which I didn't include at the time but he says I know these experiences are of God because of their unshaken so there's a kind of to it it also strikes me that solom is the first figure appears the

first female figure and she's a beheader oh details details and so what he's discriminate behavor she chooses whom she wishes to behead yes but to talk to her means you open yourself up to the experience of beheading that everything you thought and structured your life around is challenged yeah but but she doesn't behead him he he heals thinks he will behe seduces her well she seduces him [Laughter] well you never know who exactly exactly there is the a dream he he says um when followed that quotation I gave that she coils around him like a

serpent then the next line is whenever I think of you I never forget this dream I had I was this is Yung I was lying on iron spikes and a bronze wheel rolled over me and crushed me this is what he Associates to deduction of sell he knew what he was talking about it's no evidence biographically that Yung was into SNM in any way course re note in this sentence U that God is what crosses my willful path does not necessarily imply that God uh is good and that you turn your cheek to everything that

crosses your willful path it really would be more Jacobian that is you struggle with whatever crosses your willful path which is but is that the heroic mistake or do you turn the other cheek and and uh love whatever crosses your willful path or what conversation with all of the above what's that conversation with all of the above who is it who is it Crossing and well it it it seems um in the attitude that Yung has that he has talked about in memories dreams Reflections he has these Big Dreams and then he says oh no

that means I have to work on all this material it's always dismay you know that he's he's had these huge archetypal dreams in a way this will give me a task so to me that that is engaging engaging well also it's not about return to the question of meaning it's about a question of discrimination and differentiation of the voices yeah of discriminating who is there and what is there and noting it being alive to its to to what confronts one I mean there's no answer he doesn't propose an answer there but a kind of fidelity

of recording what comes his way so any burning questions it's hard to see knowing there are no answers there's one up in the back yes yes in the back there wow am I think uh could these meanings these symbols that come could they be relative truths that only exist in the moment and are meant to be grasped in the moment but not clung to I didn't hear it the the there was an explication in the text of temporality that that the highest truth as n put it devalue themselves and that require regeneration um there's a

chapter entitled The ruin of former temples where he talks about his former ideals and how these things necessarily re degenerate so he's faced with the collapse of everything that he held dear to his To His Highest truths so that is part of the predicament is to is to literally allow his truths or to to witness his truths turned into falsehoods and that lands him into this hell he has to find his way to accept the um accept the becoming of temporality and that is as an was explicating the figure of rraa that is an acceptance

of change destruction coming into being and destruction at the same time and an affirmation that nothing is fixed and the catches you do need something to live by we're finite those that repetition of the image of a solid Bridge into everyday life the Divine wants to live in the everyday life so the the catch is how to live with something that you're depending on that that is guiding you and simultaneously know it is not ultimate in that sense it is relative but you're living as if it's ultimate and yet it's relative it's that kind of

I'm there and there's a gap as well so we have another program this afternoon there'll be a chance for more questions and um I wanted to thank the speakers this morning and I also want to again thank James Hudson who now is in the room this has been a presentation of the Library of Congress visit us at loc.gov this has been a presentation of the Library of Congress visit us at loc.gov