Carl Jung's "Red Book" a.k.a. Liber Novus
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My knowledge of Jung isn't that extensive.
Perhaps it's related, but I found a really interesting and telling mandala and description in the Red Book, however.
The illustration is on page 105 of the manuscript.
The commentary is on page 297 of the translation, footnote 186.
As soon as I saw it, it made me think of learning wholeness in terms of past and present Aeons. It just made me smile.
I'll describe it for those who don't have the book yet when I have more time.
peace.
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Well, I was about to copy the description, when I saw that it had previously been printed in another work. Here was the heart of the drawing.
It was basically an equal armed cross, with a white star on top of a blue star at the center representing the self. On the periphery at each arm were four archetypes.
At the top of the cross, a bearded wise father in blue.
At the right, a virgin in blue.
At the left, the harlot in red.
At the bottom, the fiery haired "cthonic" figure, representing the "Luciferian" element.I just looked at it and saw in a flash that the old aeon had embraced only two of the archtypes and had rejected and repressed the harlot and the beast, the very archetypes that had emerged in Crowley as necessary for the new aeon. It was just such a beautifully simple representation of something that for so long has been so difficult to for me to conceive or find so clearly represented in anyone else's thoughts that I thought I would throw it out for discussion.
Peace.
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I assume absolutely none of you had read 'Septem Sermones ad Mortuos' which is decidedly gnostic and has been out for years... Jung talked incessantly about the Self, the transcendence & union of opposites, and many other ideas that fit nicely with Thelema. That being said ,its said that so many new age folk and others essentially conflate & misunderstand his work (e.g. his notion of hte collective unconscious which has NOTHING to do with a shared consciousness in the sense described by 99% of new agers) to pander to their own prejudices.
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@Aum418 said
"I assume absolutely none of you had read 'Septem Sermones ad Mortuos'"
For those of you who are interested, Septem Sermones ad Mortuos is included as an appendix in Jung's autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
729
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I got my copy from the Missus yesterday (best present ever!)
I found this article (about the history of the book, not so much the contents) interesting:
www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html
"Already there are Jungians planning conferences and lectures devoted to the Red Book, something that Shamdasani [a professor, and longtime Jungian scholar] finds amusing. Recalling that it took him years to feel as if he understood anything about the book, he’s curious to know what people will be saying about it just months after it is published."
I have to confess that I'm mostly ignorant of Jung, and what little I do "know" is most likely distorted/misunderstood. I'm looking forward to perusing Liber Novus over the next few months, and am looking forward to being merely a consumer for a while.
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Avshalom Binyman, 93,
Have you read Memories, Dreams, Reflections? That would be a better place to start than The Red Book itself. Just don't take it as an 'autobiography,' as some uncritical thinkers have.
93 93/93,
Edward
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Edward,
I have not. Thanks for the tip!
Avy
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Edward,
I'm about 50 pages into Memories, Dreams, Reflections
It's clearly autobiographical so far, so I take you to mean that it is not just autobiographical, but also a guide of sorts? -
93,
It is autobiographical, but it isn't an autobiography. By design, it excludes much of what happened in Jung's outer life; and against his wishes, some of the most interesting parts were removed by the family. For example, his decades-long relationship with Antonia Wolff isn't even mentioned, yet on Emma Jung's own admission, Wolff kept Jung from going right off the deep end during the Confrontation with the Unconscious phase.
It was members of the family, of course, who kept The Red Book safely out of sight for many, many years. They are, or were, mostly rather conventional, middle-class Swiss people (read Jung's own paper, The Swiss Line in the European Spectrum, for some insight there), and telling about extramarital affairs and the shadow side of mystical adventures just wasn't their style.
We don't have a great biography of Jung yet. Sonu Shamdasani, who edited The Red Book for publication, has a book of his own, Jung Stripped Bare by his Biographers, Even (a pun on the title of a Marcel Duchamp painting) about how unfair the whole field has been. (Shamdasani is a Jung fan, of course, so he has his own biases). But while some biographies are spiteful, some books out there are weak because the family tends, or tended, to get nasty with critics of Grandpa. Richard Noll's second Jung book, The Aryan Christ is bad (he goes way, way over the top, starting with his title), but he no longer publishes through Princeton University because that university holds the North American rights to Jung's works. The Jung family laid down the law: no more Noll books on CGJ, or you lose the rights to the Collected Works. The money spoke in this case.
Whatever - MDR is a book I've read through at least a dozen times over the years, and even if a lot was cut out or stashed in the family vault, it's still a fascinating book. And yes, it is a spiritual guide in some senses.
93 93/93,
Edward
