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

• Will you therefore confuse yourself with a tree or animal, because you look at them and because they exist with you in one and the same world? Must you be your thoughts, because you are in the world of your thoughts? But your thoughts are just as much outside your self as trees and animals are outside your body.
• [note] You cannot say you are wrong when you have a thought. For the understanding of the unconscious we must see our thoughts as events, as phenomena.
• Through reciprocal imitation you live according to the average expectation. The image of the hero was set up for all in every age through the appetite for imitation. Therefore the hero was murdered, since we have all been aping him. Do you know why you cannot abandon apishness? For fear of loneliness and defeat.
• To live oneself means: to be one's own task. Never say that it is a pleasure to live oneself. It will be no joy but a long suffering, since you must become your own creator. If you want to create yourself, then you do not begin with the best and the highest, but with the worst and the deepest. Therefore say that you are reluctant to live yourself. The flowing together of the stream of life is not joy but pain, since it is power against power, guilt, and shatters the sanctified.
• You create order according to what you know, you do not know the thoughts of chaos, and yet they exist. My thoughts are not my self, and my I does not embrace the thought. Your thought has this meaning and that, not just one, but many meanings. No one knows how many.
• My thoughts are not my self, but exactly like the things of the world, alive and dead. Just as I am not damaged through living in a partly chaotic world, so too I am not damaged if I live in my partly chaotic thought world. Thoughts are natural events that you do not possess, and whose meaning you only imperfectly recognize. Thoughts grow in me like a forest, populated by many different animals. But man is domineering in his thinking, and therefore he kills the pleasure of the forest and that of the wild animals. Man is violent in his desire, and he himself becomes a forest and a forest animal. Just as I have freedom in the world, I also have freedom in my thoughts. Freedom is conditional.
• You change those things of the world that, not being useful in themselves, endanger your welfare. Proceed likewise with your thoughts. Nothing is complete, and much is in dispute. The way of life is transformation, not exclusion. Well-being is a better judge than the law.

XI: Resolution

• Since, after the death of the hero our urge to live could no longer imitate anything, it therefore went into the depths of every man and excited the terrible conflict between the powers of the depths. Forethinking is singleness, love is togetherness. Both need one another, and yet they kill one another. Since men do not know that the conflict occurs inside themselves, they go mad, and one lays the blame on the other. If one-half of mankind is at fault, then everyman is half at fault. but he does not see the conflict in his own soul, which is however the source of the outer disaster. If you are aggravated against your brother, think that you are aggravated against the brother in you, that is, against what in you is similar to your brother.
• If you go to thinking, take your heart with you. If you go to love, take your head with you. Love is empty without thinking, thinking hollow without love.
• Whoever is in love is a full and overflowing vessel, and awaits the giving. Whoever is in forethinking is deep and hollow and awaits fulfillment.
• Love and forethinking are in one and the same place. Love cannot be without forethinking, and forethinking cannot be without love. Man is always too much in one or the other. This comes with human nature. Animals and plants seem to have enough in every way, only man staggers between too much and too little. He wavers, he is uncertain how much he must give here and how much there.
• [...] fundamentally, you are terrified of yourself, and therefore you prefer to run to all others rather than to yourself.

Liber Secundus

The Images of the Erring

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I: The Red One

• I feel that my will is paralyzed and that the spirit of the depths possesses me. I know nothing about a way. I can therefore neither want this nor that, since nothing indicates to me whether I want this or that. I wait, without knowing what I'm waiting for.
• I earnestly confronted my devil and behaved with him as with a real person. This I learned in the Mysterium: to take seriously every unknown wanderer who personally inhabits the inner world, since they are real because they are effectual.
• [note] the scientific credo of our time has developed a superstitious phobia about fantasy. But the real is what works. The fantasies of the unconscious work - there can be no doubt about that.
• The devil is convinced that dancing is neither lust nor madness, but an expression of joy, which is something proper to neither one nor the other.
• [...] he accepted some of my seriousness, and I accepted some of his joy. This gave me courage. but if the devil has gotten more earnest, one must brace oneself. It is always a risky thing to accept to joy, but it leads us to life and its disappointment, from which the wholeness of our life becomes.

II: The Castle in the Forest

• [...] does it want to grow into some silly ghost story? To what nonsense am I damned? Is it my soul that harbors such novelistic brilliance? Must this, too, happen to me? I am truly in Hell - the worst awakening after death, to be resurrected in a lending library.
• Only what is human and what you call banal and hackneyed contains the wisdom that you seek.
• If no outer adventure happens to you, then no inner adventure happens to you either. The part that you take over from the devil - joy -, that is - leads you into adventure. It is necessary for you to know your limits. If you do not know them, you run into the artificial barriers of your imagination and the expectations of your fellow men. But your life will not take kindly to being hemmed in by artificial barriers. Life wants to jump over such barriers and you will fall out with yourself.
• As a man you have no soul, since it is in the woman; as a woman you have no soul, since it is in the man. But if you become a human being, then your self comes to you.
• Man belongs not only to an ordered world, he also belongs in the wonder-world of his soul.
• Just as you become a part of the manifold essence of the world through your bodies, so you become a part of the manifold essence of the inner world through your soul. This inner world is truly infinite, in no way poorer than the outer one. Man lives in two worlds. A fool lives here or there, but never here and there.
• Your Hell is made up of all the things that you always ejected from your sanctuary with a curse and a kick of the foot.
• You cannot at the same time be on the mountain and in the valley, but your way leads you from mountain to valley and from valley to mountain. Much begins amusingly and leads into the dark. Hell has levels.

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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