The Red Book: Liber Novus

Introduction

• As Jung saw it, part of us lives in the present and the other part is connected to the centuries.
• "I am no longer alone with myself, and I can only artificially recall the scary and beautiful feeling of solitude. This is the shadow side of the fortune of love."
• "If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us."
• In Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, Jung differentiated two kinds of thinking. Taking his cue from William James, among others, Jung contrasted directed thinking and fantasy thinking. The former was verbal and logical, while the latter was passive, associative, and imagistic. The former was exemplified by science and the latter by mythology. Jung claimed that the ancients lacked a capacity for directed thinking, which was a modern acquisition. Fantasy thinking took place when directed thinking ceased.
• One particular myth was given a central role: that of the hero. For Jung, this represented the life of the individual, attempting to become independent and to free himself from the mother.
• One without a myth "is like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society."
• "...a conviction that the unconscious did not consist of inert material only, but that there was something living down there."
• He argued that there were two basic movements of the libido: extraversion, in which the subject's interest was oriented toward the outer world, and introversion, in which the subject's interest was directed inward. Following from this he posited two types of people, characterized by a predominance of one of these tendencies.
• His scientific question was to see what took place when he switched off consciousness.
• The constructive standpoint asked, "how, out of this present psyche, a bridge can be built into its own future."
• Whereas Zarathrustra proclaimed the death of God, Liber Novus depicts the rebirth of God in the soul. There are also indications that Jung read Dante's Commedia at this time, which also informs the structure of the work. Liber Novus depicts Jung's descent into Hell. But whereas Dante could utilize an established cosmology, Liber Novus is an attempt to shape an individual cosmology. The role of Philemon in Jung's work has analogies to that of Zarathrustra in Nietzsche's work and Virgil in Dante's.
• "It is the devil who says: Disdain all reason and science, mankind's highest powers. That is never appropriate even though we are forced to acknowledge [the existence of] the irrational."
• The overall theme of the book is how Jung regains his soul and overcomes the contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation.
• He realized that until then, he had served the spirit of the time, characterized by use and value. In addition to this, there existed a spirit of the depths, which led to the things of the soul. The spirit of the times corresponds to personality 1 and the spirit of the depths corresponds to personality 2. Thus, this period could be seen as a return to the values of personality 2.
• The task of individuation lay in establishing a dialogue with the fantasy figures - or contents of the collective unconsciousness - and integrating them into consciousness, hence recovering the value of the mythopoeic imagination which had been lost to the modern age, and thereby reconciling the spirit of the time with the spirit of the depth.
• Adaptation to the "inner" led to the demand for individuation, which was contrary to adaptation to others.
• The individual had to produce values that could serve as a substitute for his absence from society. These new values enabled one to make reparation to the collective. Individuation was for the few. Those who were insufficiently creative should rather reestablish collective conformity with a society. The individual had not only to create new values, but also socially recognizable ones, as society had a "right to expect realizable values."
• Society demanded imitation.
• "The training consists first of all in systematic exercises for eliminating critical attention, thus producing a vacuum in consciousness." One commenced by concentrating on a particular mood, and attempting to become as conscious as possible of all fantasies and associations that came up in connection with it. The aim was to allow fantasy free play, without departing from the initial affect in a free associative process. This led to a concrete or symbolic expression of the mood, which had the result of bringing the affect nearer to consciousness, hence making it more understandable.
• The outbreak of war had made apparent the deep subliminal connections between individual fantasies and world events - and hence between the psychology of the individual and that of the nation.
• Jung argued that the era of reason and skepticism inaugurated by the French Revolution had repressed religion and irrationalism. This in turn had serious consequences, leading to the outbreak of irrationalism represented by the world war. It was thus a historical necessity to acknowledge the irrational as a psychological factor. The acceptance of the irrational forms one of the central themes of Liber Novus.
• "Our age is seeking a new spring of life. I found one and drank of it and the water tasted good."
• All of us stand between two worlds: that world of external perception and the world of the perception of the unconscious.
• Symbols, Jung maintained, stemmed from the unconscious, and the creation of symbols was the most important function of the unconscious.
• The soul gave rise to images that were assumed to be worthless from the rational perspective. There were four ways of using them:
  • Artistic
  • Philosophical speculation
  • Quasi-religious
  • Licentiousness
  • [and a fifth] Psychology, if Jung can clearly distinguish it from the other uses (particularly art)

Liber Primus

Prologue: The Way of What is to Come

• Woe betide those who live by way of example! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, but who should live your own life if not yourself? So live yourselves.

I: Refinding the Soul

• I did not consider that my soul cannot be the object of my judgment and knowledge; much more are my judgment and knowledge the objects of my soul.
• The wealth of the soul exists in images.

II: Soul and God

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III: On the Service of the Soul

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IV: The Desert / Experiences in the Desert

• The soul has its own peculiar world. Only the self enters in there, or the man who has completely become his self, he who is neither in events, nor in men, nor in his thoughts.

V: Descent into Hell in the Future

• Speak then of sick delusion when the spirit of the depths can no longer stay down and forces a man to speak in tongues instead of in human speech, and makes him believe that he himself is the spirit of the depths. But also speak of sick delusion when the spirit of this time does not leave a man and forces him to see only the surface, to deny the spirit of the depths and to take himself for the spirit of the times. The spirit of this time is ungodly, the spirit of the depths is ungodly, balance is godly.
• Therefore whoever considers the event from outside always sees only that it already was, and that it is always the same. But whoever looks from inside, knows that everything is new. The events that happen are always the same. But the creative depths of man are not always the same. Events signify nothing, they signify only in us. We create the meaning of events. The meaning is and always was artificial. We make it.
• The heroic in you is the fact that you are ruled by the thought that this or that is good, that this or that performance is indispensable, this or that cause is objectionable, this or that goal must be attained in headlong striving work, this or that pleasure should be ruthlessly repressed at all costs. Consequently you sin against incapacity. But incapacity exists. No one should deny it, find fault with it, or shout it down.

VI: Splitting of the Spirit

• My soul: "Who gives you thoughts and words? Do you make them? Are you not my serf, a recipient who lies at my door and picks up my alms? And you dare think that what you devise and speak could be nonsense? Don't you know yet that it comes from me and belongs to me?
• Everything that becomes too old becomes evil, the same is true of your highest. Learn from the suffering of the crucified God that one can also betray and crucify a God, namely the God of the old year. If a God ceases being the way of life, he must fall secretly.
• The God becomes sick if he oversteps the height of the zenith. That is why the spirit of the depths took me when the spirit of this time had led me to the summit.

VII: Murder of the Hero

• We also live in our dreams, we do not live only by day. Sometimes we accomplish our greatest deeds in dreams.
• In that night my life was threatened since I had to kill my lord and God, not in single combat, since who among mortals could kill a God in a duel? You can reach your God only as an assassin, if you want to overcome him.
• But this is the bitterest for mortal men: our Gods want to be overcome, since they require renewal. If men kill their princes, they do so because they cannot kill their Gods, and because they do not know that they should kill the Gods in themselves.
• If the God grows old, he becomes shadow, nonsense, and he goes down. The greatest truth becomes the greatest lie, the brightest day becomes the darkest night.
• As day requires night and night requires day, so meaning requires absurdity and absurdity requires meaning.

VIII: The Conception of the God

• The divine child approached me out of the terrible ambiguity, the hateful-beautiful, the evil-good, the laughable-serious, the sick-healthy, the inhuman-human and the ungodly-godly.
• 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 have planned with yourself is also laughable, that everything fine is also brutal, that everything good is also bad, that everything high is also low, and that everything pleasant is also shameful.
• But the deepest Hell is when you realize that Hell is also no Hell, but a cheerful Heaven, not a Heaven in itself, but in this respect a Heaven, and in that respect a Hell.
• That is the ambiguity of the God: he is born from a dark ambiguity and rises to a bright ambiguity. Unequivocalness is simplicity and leads to death. But ambiguity is the way of life. If the left foot does not move, then the right one does, and you move. The God wills this.
• [note] In 1916, Jung wrote: "Man has one ability which, though it is of the greatest utility for collective purposes, is the most pernicious for individuation, and that is imitation. Collective psychology can hardly dispense with imitation."
• Then there will no longer be a hero, and no one who can imitate him. Because from that time henceforth all imitation is cursed. The new God laughs at imitation and discipleship. He needs no imitators and no pupils. He forces men through himself. The God is his own follower in man. He imitates himself.
• If you are in yourself, you become aware of your incapacity. You will see how little capable you are of imitating the heroes and of being a hero yourself. So you will also no longer force others to become heroes. Like you, they suffer from incapacity. Incapacity, too, wants to live, but it will overthrow the Gods.

IX: Mysterium. Encounter

• [note] In a 1925 seminar, Jung recounted: "Whenever you take journeys like this you find a young girl with an old man... Salome is an anima figure, blind because, though connecting the conscious and the unconscious, she does not see the operation of the unconscious. Elijah is the personification of the cognitional element, Salome of the erotic. Elijah is the figure of the old prophet filled with wisdom. One could speak of these two figures as personifications of Logos and Eros very specifically shaped.
• The scene of the mystery play is a deep place like the crater of a volcano. My deep interior is a volcano, that pushes out the fiery-molten mass of the unformed and the undifferentiated. Thus my interior gives birth to the children of chaos, of the primordial mother. He who enters the crater also becomes chaotic matter, he melts. The formed in him dissolves and binds itself anew with the children of chaos, the powers of darkness, the ruling and the seducing, the compelling and the alluring, the divine and the devilish. These powers stretch beyond my certainties and limits on all sides, and connect me with all forms and with all distant beings and things, through which inner tidings of their being and their character develop in me.
• The powers of my depths are predetermination and pleasure. Predetermination of forethinking is Prometheus, who, without determined thoughts, brings the chaotic to form and definition, who digs the channels and holds the object before pleasure. Forethinking also comes before thought. But pleasure is the force that desires and destroys forms without form and definition. It loves the form in itself that it takes hold of, and destroys the forms that it does not take. The forethinker is a seer, but pleasure is blind. it does not foresee, but desires what it touches. Forethinking is not powerful in itself and therefore does not move. But pleasure is power, and therefore it moves.
• If pleasure lacked forming, pleasure would dissolve in manifoldness and become splintered and powerless through unending division, lost to the unending. If a form does not contain and compress pleasure within itself, it cannot reach the higher, since it always flows like water from above to below. All pleasure, when left alone, flows into the deep sea and ends in the deathly stillness of dispersal into unending space. Pleasure is not older than forethinking, and forethinking is not older than pleasure. Both are equally old and in nature intimately one. Only in man does the separate existence of both principles become apparent.
• The serpent is the earthly essence of man of which he is not conscious.
• One cannot live with forethinking alone, or with pleasure alone. You need both. But you cannot be in forethinking and in pleasure at the same time, you must take turns being in forethinking and pleasure, obeying the prevailing law, unfaithful to the other, so to speak. But men prefer one or the other. Some love thinking and establish the art of life on it. They practice their thinking and their circumspection, so they lose their pleasure. Therefore they are old and have a sharp face. The others love pleasure, they practice their feeling and living. Thus they forget thinking. Therefore they are young and blind. Those who think base the world on thought, those who feel, on feeling. You find truth and error in both.
• The way of life writhes like the serpent from right to left and from left to right, from thinking to pleasure and from pleasure to thinking. Thus the serpent is an adversary and a symbol of enmity, but also a wise bridge that connects right and left through longing, much needed by our life.
• The place where Elijah and Salome live together is a dark space and a bright one. The dark space is the space of forethinking. It is dark, so he who lives there requires vision. this space is limited, so forethinking does not lead into the extended distance, but into the depth of the past and the future. The crystal is the formed thought that reflects what is to come in what has gone before.
• A thinker should fear Salome, since she wants his head, especially if he is a holy man. A thinker cannot be a holy person, otherwise he loses his head. It does not help to hide oneself in thought. There the solidification overtakes you. You must turn back to motherly forethought to obtain renewal. But forethought leads to Salome.
• The thinker's passions are bad, therefore he has no pleasure. The thoughts of one who feels are bad, therefore he has no thoughts.
• The thinker feels the disgust of feeling, since the feeling in him is mainly disgusting. So the serpent lies between the thinker and the one who feels. They are each other's poison and healing.
• What a thinker does not think he believes does not exist, and what one who feels does not feel he believes does not exist. You begin to have a presentiment of the whole when you embrace your opposite principle, since the whole belongs to both principles, which grow from one root.
• May the thinking person accept his pleasure, and the feeling person accept his thought. Such leads one along the way.

X: Instruction

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XI: Resolution

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Liber Secundus

The Images of the Erring

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I: The Red One

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II: The Castle in the Forest

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III: One of the Lowly

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IV: The Anchorite. Dies I

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V: Dies II

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VI: Death

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VII: The Remains of Earlier Temples

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VIII: First Day

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IX: Second Day

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X: The Incantations

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XI: The Opening of the Egg

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XII: Hell

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XIII: The Sacrificial Murder

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XIV: Divine Folly

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XV: Nox Secunda

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XVI: Nox Tertia

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XVII: Nox Quarta

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XVIII: The Three Prophecies

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XIX: The Gift of Magic

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XX: The Way of the Cross

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XXI: The Magician

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