The Red Book, page 65
35.The following section is reworked from Black Book 5 in a manner that is hard to separate the layers.
36.In 1929, Jung wrote: “The Gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room” (“Commentary on ‘The Secret of the Golden Flower,’ ” CW 13, §54).
37.Black Book 5 continues: “The God has the power, not the self. Powerlessness should thus not be deplored, but it is the condition that should abide. / The God acts from within himself. This should be left to him. What we do to the self, we do to the God. / If we twist the self, we also twist the God. It is divine service to serve oneself. We thus relieve humanity of ourselves. May one man carry another’s burden, has become an immorality. May each carry his own load; that is the least that one can demand anyone to do. We can at best show another how to carry his own load. / To give all one’s goods to the poor means to educate them to become idle. / Pity should not carry another’s load, but it should be a strict educator instead. Solitude with ourselves has no end. It has only just begun” (pp. 92–93).
38.The next four paragraphs do not occur in the Black Books.
39.In Jung’s copy of Eckhart’s Schriften und Predigten, the phrase “that the soul would also have to lose God!” is underlined, and there is a slip of paper on which is written: “Soul must lose God” (Meister Eckhart, Schriften und Predigten. Aus dem Mittelhochdeutschen übersetzt und herausgegeben von Herman Büttner, 2 vols [Eugen Diederichs, 1912], p. 222).
40.In Black Book 5, the voice is not identified as Philemon’s.
41.The next two paragraphs do not occur in Black Book 5.
42.The handwritten manuscript of Scrutinies continues:” and spoken through me” (p. 37).
43.December 2, 1915.
44.Instead of this paragraph, Black Book 5 has: “A phallus?” (p. 95). There is no mention of HAP in Black Book 5. The following references may be connected to this. In The Egyptian Heaven and Hell, Wallis Budge notes that “The Phallus of his Pepi is Hap” (vol. 1, p. 110). He notes that Hap is a son of Horus (p. 491—Jung placed a mark in the margin by this in his copy). He also noted that “In the Book of the Dead these four children of Horus play very prominent parts, and the deceased endeavoured to gain their help and protection at all costs, both by offerings and prayers. . . the four children of Horus shared the protection of the deceased among them, and as far back as the Vth dynasty we find that they presided over his life in the underworld” (Ibid.; underlined as in Jung’s copy) [London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner, 1905]).
45.Black Book 5 has: “of this divine pole” (p. 95).
46.This paragraph is not in Black Book 5.
47.December 5, 1915.
48.This paragraph is not in Black Book 5.
49.Black Book 5 has: “The Phallus” (p. 100). Cf. Jung’s childhood dream of the ritual phallus in the underground temple, p. 4 above.
50.See note 223, p. 367.
51.In 1912, Jung discussed the Hecate mysteries that flourished in Rome at the end of the fourth century. Hecate, the Goddess of magic and spells, guarded the underworld, and was seen as the sender of madness. She was identified with Brimo, a Goddess of death (Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, CW B, §586ff).
52.In Transformations and Symbols of the Libido (1912), Jung referred to Nut, the Egyptian Sky Goddess, who arched over the earth, daily giving birth to the Sun God (CW B, §364).
53.This paragraph is reworked from Black Book 5.
54.December 7, 1915.
55.December 9, 1915.
56.Jung was critical of Christian missionaries. See “The problems of the soul of modern men” (1931), CW 10, §185.
57.Black Book 5 continues: [The dead one:] “after the devil has preceded you. Now is not the time for love, but for deeds.” [I:] “Why do you mention deeds? Which deeds?” [The dead one]: “Your work.” [I:] “What do you mean, my work? My science, my book?” [The dead one:] “That is not your book, that is the book. Science is what you do. Do it, without hesitation. There is no way back, only forward. Your love belongs there. Ridiculous—your love! You must allow death to occur.” [I:] “Leave dead ones around me at least.” [The dead one:] “Enough dead, you are surrounded.” [I:] “I do not notice anything.” [The dead one:] “You ought to notice them.” [I]: “How? How can I?” [The dead one:] “Proceed. Everything will come toward you. Not today, but tomorrow” (pp. 116–17).
58.The handwritten manuscript of Scrutinies has “Soul” (p. 49), and the dialogue partner in this section is changed from the soul to the dead one.
59.December 20, 1915.
60.See note 8, p. 120.
61.January 8, 1916. This paragraph does not occur in Black Book 5.
62.In Gethsamane, Christ said: “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Matthew 26:39).
63.Cf. Job 25:6: “How much less man, that is a worm? and the son of man, which is a worm?”
64.January 10, 1916.
65.In the Poetic Edda, the giant Thrym stole the hammer of the God Thor.
66.January 11, 1916.
67.January 13, 1916. The preceding paragraph does not occur in Black Book 5.
68.In Greek mythology, ambrosia and nectar are the food and drink of the Gods.
69.This sentence does not occur in Black Book 5.
70.January 14, 1916. The preceding paragraph does not occur in Black Book 5.
71.In Exodus 3, God appears to Moses in the burning bush and promises to lead his people out of Egypt into a land flowing with milk and honey.
72.See Appendix C, January 16, 1916. This is a preliminary sketch of the cosmology of the Septem Sermones. Jung’s reference to forming his soul’s thoughts in matter seems to refer to composition of the Systema Munditotius (see Appendix A). For a study of this, see Barry Jeromson, “Systema Munditotius and Seven Sermons: symbolic collaborators in Jung’s confrontation with the dead,” Jung History 1, 2 (2005/6), pp. 6–10, and “The sources of Systema Munditotius: mandalas, myths and a misinterpretation,” Jung History 2, 2, 2007, pp. 20–22.
73.January 18, 1916.
74.The painting Systema munditotius has a legend at the bottom: “Abraxas dominus mundi” (Abraxas Master of the World).
75.Black Book 5 has: “Abraxas” (p. 181).
76.January 29, 1916.
77.January 30, 1916. The preceding sentence does not occur in Black Book 5.
78.On the significance of the Sermones that follow, Jung said to Aniela Jaffé that the discussions with the dead formed the prelude to what he would subsequently communicate to the world, and that their content anticipated his later books. “From that time on, the dead have become ever more distinct for me as the voices of the unanswered, unresolved and unredeemed.” The questions he was required to answer did not come from the world around him, but from the dead. One element that astonished him was the fact that the dead appeared to know no more than they did when they died. One would have assumed that they had attained greater knowledge since death. This explained the tendency of the dead to encroach upon life, and why in China important family events have to be reported to the ancestors. He felt that the dead were waiting for the answers of the living (MP, pp. 258–59; Memories, p. 217). See note 135 (p. 167), above, concerning Christ’s preaching to the dead in Hell.
79.See above, p. 335, where the dead Anabaptists led by Ezechiel were heading to Jerusalem to pray at the holy places.
80.This sentence does not occur in Black Book 5. Concerning the relation of Philemon to the Sermones, Jung told Aniela Jaffé that he grasped Philemon in the Sermones. It was here that Philemon lost his autonomy. (MP, p. 25).
81.Jung’s calligraphic and printed versions of the Sermones bear the subheading: “The seven instructions of the dead. Written by Basilides in Alexandria, where the East touches the West. Translated from the original Greek text into the German language.” Basilides was a Christian philosopher in Alexandria in the first part of the second century. Little is known about his life, and only fragments of his teachings have survived (and none in his own hand), which present a cosmogonic myth. For the extant fragments and commentary, see Bentley Layton ed., The Gnostic Scriptures (New York: Doubleday, 1987, pp. 417–44). According to Charles King, Basilides was by birth an Egyptian. Before his conversion to Christianity, he “followed the doctrines of Oriental Gnosis, and endeavoured. . . to combine the tenets of the Christian religion with the Gnostic philosophy. . . For this purpose he chose expressions of his own invention, and ingenious symbols” (The Gnostics and their Remains [Bell and Daldy, 1864], pp. 33–34). According to Layton, the classical Gnostic myth has the following structure: “Act I. The expansion of a solitary first principle (god) into a full nonphysical (spiritual) universe. Act II. Creation of the material universe, including stars, planets, earth, and hell. Act III. Creation of Adam, Eve, and their children. Act IV. Subsequent history of the human race” (The Gnostic Scriptures, p. 13). Thus in its broadest outlines, Jung’s Sermones is presented in the form analogous to a Gnostic myth. Jung discusses Basilides in Aion (1951). He credits the Gnostics for having found suitable symbolic expressions of the self, and notes that Basilides and Valentinus “allowed themselves to be influenced in a large measure by natural inner experience. They therefore provide, like the alchemists, a veritable mine of information concerning all those symbols arising out of the repercussions of the Christian message. At the same time, their ideas compensate the aysmmetry of God postulated by the doctrine of the privato boni, exactly like those well-known modern tendencies of the unconscious to produce symbols of totality for bridging the gap between consciousness and the unconscious” (CW 9, 2, §428). In 1915, he wrote a letter to a friend from his student days, Rudolf Lichtenhan, who had written a book, Die Offenbarung im Gnosticismus (1901). From Lichtenhan’s reply dated November 11, it appears that Jung had asked for information concerning the conception of different human characters in Gnosticism, and their possible correlation with William James’s distinction between tough- and tender-minded characters (JA). In Memories, Jung said: “Between 1918 and 1926 I had seriously studied the Gnostics, for they too had been confronted with the primal world of the unconscious. They had dealt with its contents and images, which were obviously contaminated with the world of drives” (p. 226). Jung was already reading Gnostic literature in the course of the preparatory reading for Transformations and Symbols of the Libido. There has been an extensive body of commentaries concerning the Septem Sermones, which provides some valuable discussion. However, these should be treated cautiously, as they considered the Sermones without the benefit of Liber Novus and the Black Books, and, not least, Philemon’s commentaries, which together provide critical contextual clarification. Scholars have discussed Jung’s relation to Gnosticism and the historical Basilides, other possible sources and parallels for Sermones, and the relation of the Sermones to Jung’s later works. See especially Christine Maillard, Les Septem Sermones aux Morts de Carl Gustav Jung (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1993). See also Alfred Ribi, The Search for the Roots: C. G. Jung and the Tradition of Gnosis, Foreword by Lance Owens, tr. Don Reveau (Los Angeles: Gnosis Archive Books, 2013). Robert Segal, The Gnostic Jung (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Gilles Quispel, “C. G. Jung und die Gnosis,” Eranos-Jahrbuch 37 (1968, reprinted in Segal); E M. Brenner, “Gnosticism and Psychology: Jung’s Septem Sermones ad Mortuos,” Journal of Analytical Psychology 35 (1990); Judith Hubback, “VII Sermones ad mortuos,” Journal of Analytical Psychology 11 (1966); James Heisig, “The VII Sermones: Play and Theory,” Spring (1972); James Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower: The Perennial Philosophy, Yeats and Jung (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); and Stephen Hoeller, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead (Wheaton, IL: Quest, 1982).
82.The Pleroma, or fullness, is a term from Gnosticism. It played a central role in the Valentinian system. Hans Jonas states that “Pleroma is the standard term for the fully explicated manifold of divine characteristics, whose standard number is thirty, forming a hierarchy and together constituting the divine realm” (The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity [London: Routledge, 1992], p. 180). In 1929, Jung said: “The Gnostics. . . expressed it as Pleroma, a state of fullness where the pairs of opposites, yea and nay, day and night, are together, then when they ‘become,’ it is either day or night. In the state of ‘promise’ before they become, they are nonexistent, there is neither white nor black, good nor bad” (Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928–1930, ed. William McGuire [Bollingen Series, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984], p. 131). In his later writings, Jung used the term to designate a state of pre-existence and potentiality, identifying it with the Tibetan Bardo: “He must. . . accustom himself to the idea that ‘time’ is a relative concept and needs to be compensated by the concept of a ‘simultaneous’ Bardo—or pleromatic existence of all historical processes. What exists in the Pleroma as an eternal ‘process’ appears in time as aperiodic sequence, that is to say, it is repeated many times in an irregular pattern” (Answer to Job, 1952, CW 11, §629; see also §§620, 624, 675, 686, 727, 733, 748). The distinction that Jung draws between the Pleroma and the creation has some points of contact with Meister Eckhart’s differentiation between the Godhead and God. Jung commented on this in Psychological Types (1921, CW 6, §429f). The relation of Jung’s Pleroma to Eckhart is discussed by Maillard, op cit., pp. 118–20. In 1955/56, Jung equated the Pleroma with the alchemist Gerhardus Dorn’s notion of the ‘unus mundus’ (one world) (Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, §660). Jung adopted this expression to designate the transcendental postulate of the unity underlying the multiplicity of the empirical world (Ibid., §759f.).
83.In Psychological Types (1921), Jung described “Tao” as “the creative being, begetting as the father and bringing forth as the mother. It is the beginning and end of all beings” (CW 6, §363.) The relation of Jung’s Pleroma to the Chinese Tao is discussed by Maillard, op cit., p. 75. See also John Peck, The Visio Dorothei: Desert Context, Imperial Setting, Later Alignments, pp. 179–80.
84.Lit. Unterschiedenheit. Cf. Psychological Types (1921), CW 6, §705, “Differentiation” [Differenzierung].
85.The principium individuationis is a notion from the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. He defined space and time as the principium individuationis, noting that he had borrowed the expression from Scholasticism. The principium individuationis was the possibility of multiplicity (The World as Will and Representation [1819], 2 vols., tr. E. J. Payne [New York: Dover], pp. 145–46). The term was used by Eduard von Hartmann, who saw its origin in the unconscious. It designated the “uniqueness” of each individual set against the “all-one unconscious” (Philosophie des Unbewussten: Versuch einer Weltanschauung [Berlin: C. Dunker], 1869, p. 519). In 1912, Jung wrote, “Diversity arises from individuation. This fact validates an essential part of Schopenhauer’s and Hartmann’s philosophy in profound psychological terms” (Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, CW B, §289). In a series of papers and presentations later in 1916, Jung developed his concept of individuation (“The structure of the unconscious,” CW 7, and “Individuation and collectivity,” CW 18). In 1921, Jung defined it as follows: “The concept of individuation plays no minor role in our psychology. Individuation is in general the process of the formation and particularization of individual beings; especially the development of the psychological individual, as a being distinct from generality, from collective psychology. Individuation, therefore, is a process of differentiation, having for its goal the development of the individual personality” (Psychological Types, CW 7, §758).
86.The notion of life and nature being constituted by opposites and polarities featured centrally in the Naturphilosophie of Schelling. The notion that psychic conflict took the form of a conflict of opposites and that healing represented their resolution featured prominently in Jung’s later work; see Psychological Types, 1921, CW 6, ch. 5, and Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1955/56, CW 14.
87.The following paragraphs to the end of this section do not occur in Black Book 6.
88.In the published version of the Sermones, these commentaries that follow each sermon do not appear, and nor does Philemon. The person delivering the sermons has been assumed to be Basilides. These commentaries were added in Scrutinies.
89.In his 1959 BBC TV interview, John Freeman asked Jung, “Do you now believe in God?” Jung replied: “Now? [Pause.] Difficult to answer. I know. I don’t need to believe. I know.” William McGuire and R.F.C. Hull, eds., C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters (p. 428). Philemon’s statement here seems to be the background for this much cited and debated statement. This emphasis on direct experience also accords with classical Gnosticism.
90.January 31, 1916. This sentence does not occur in Black Book 6.
91.For Nietzsche’s discussion of the death of God, see The Gay Science (1882, §§108 and 125), and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, section 4 (“Retired from service,” p. 271f). For Jung’s discussion of this, see “Psychology and religion,” 1938, CW 11 §142f. Jung commented: “When Nietzsche said: ‘God is dead,’ he expressed a truth which is valid for the greater part of Europe” (Ibid., §145). To Nietzsche’s statement, Jung noted, “However it would be more correct to say: ‘He has discarded our image, and where will we find him again?’ ” (Ibid.) He goes on to discuss the motif of the death and disappearance of God in connection with Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection.
