From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. C. G. Jung and the Red Book Opening Presentation in association with the Exhibit – 19 June 2010 Introduction by Jim Billington, Librarian of Congress: Good morning. I am Jim Billington, the Librarian of Congress … …Today, we will hear a distinguished group of Jungian experts from the United States and Europe and we thank them all for coming often from long distances to explain and assess the experiences that Jung described in the Red Book. Then they will also tell us what impact they think the Red Book will have outside the Jungian community on psychology and related field. So I look forward to intellectual thesis, 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 Oswald Family Foundation, the Honorable J. Richard Fredericks -‐ one of our former ambassadors to Switzerland, the Embassy of Switzerland, the Jung Society of Washington, the Philemon Society, the Archives for Research for Archetypal Symbolism, the International Association for Analytic Psychology. And in addition, contributions from the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, W.W. Norton and Company, the Honorable Joseph B. Gildenhorn -‐ the more recent Ambassador to Switzerland, and the Jungian Analysts of Washington Association. Finally, let me conclude on a more personal note that the staging of this event, I think, owes a good deal to an old friend of mine who I've had a chance to have some deep conversations with in 2003 Phil Zabriskie, known to many of you, a Jungian analyst, and his widow Beverley Zabriskie, another luminary among the Jungian 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, Beverley Zabriskie. Beverley Zabriskie: Good morning and welcome. And as a Jungian analyst I like the back stories 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. [ Applause ] Sixty years ago this month, James Billington graduated from Princeton as the valedictorian of the class. And Philip Zabriskie was the salutatorian. And the two of
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them went off to Oxford and fast forward to 2003 and there's the 100th anniversary of the Rhodes scholars at Oxford and in London. And at a dinner together, Jim mentioned the idea of a Jung exhibit at the Library of Congress and he Philip began to discuss this and he said, but what was needed was a centerpiece, a Jungian centerpiece, around which an exhibit could be formed. We were in London, we called up Sonu Shamdasani. 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 Sonu's work with the members of the Jung family, three of whom are here and I would like you to know them, Andreas Jung who is Jung's grandson and the occupant of Jung's house in Kusnacht and his wife Franie [phonetic] and that home thanks to their efforts is going to become a public foundation. So would you stand and Eric Bauman [phonetic], a great grandson. [ Applause ] It's just in terms of Jungian history, the Red Book has become a means through which so many different arenas of the Jungian world have come together, the family and the scholars and the analysts. And so, it's had that synthesizing effect. And to come as an analyst and see that poster in front of the Library of Congress facing Capitol Hill with Jung's Red Book on it. [ Laughter ] If a patient came in and told me that was a dream I would be seriously in doubt of their grandiosity and inflation. [ Laughter ] But I hope and trust that the energy of the Red Book which was about Jung 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. A passageway, so let's hope that above ground and underground, we begin to affect the American psyche. [ Applause ]
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None of this would have been without the extraordinary devotion and dedication of Jung to his own unconscious and to his psyche, and as I say rather than experiencing what emerged as frightening and to be skewed and confronted as enemy, he did it in the spirit of befriending that which 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 Jung was very lucky to have caught the attention of a man of similar devotion and dedication, Sonu Shamdasani. 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 Jung's Secret of the Golden Flower and then the next year started reading Memories, Dreams, Reflections and read that one finds once guru within. And that began a very long, and as I said, dedicated career. With Steve Martin, Jung-‐-‐Sonu founded the Philemon Association and Foundation and the President Nancy Furlotti is here with us today and they have taken on the enormous task of publishing the 30,000-‐-‐no, 38,000 unpublished letters of Jung'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. [ Laughter ] I thought I would save him having to answer and you having to ask by telling you that he has 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 Jung based on primary archival materials. Sonu has read every Jung document at the ETH in Zurich. He has since 1988 been prowling the stacks of the Library of Congress. And he probably knows more about Jung than anyone else who has ever lived besides Jung. And as the cofounder and executive editor of the Philemon Foundation he is continuing this work with their support. And Sonu also has another life as a scholar. He is the Philemon Professor of Jung at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at the 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, Sonu. {Minute 00:16:11} [ Applause ] _______
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Dr. Sonu Shamdasani: Jung's Liber Novus is a descent into hell, Jung'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...) [ Laughter ] The sign on the gates of hell in Dante's Commedia "abandon all hope all who enter here" might not be out of keeping or come to mind when individuals first begin to grapple Liber Novus, the spirit of the depths and the dark denizens that lurk within. But all is not lost. As a denizen of this domain, nailed and chained to this book for what seemed fast approaching an 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 the Christian designation for the dwelling of the dead, depictions of hell from the outset was superimposed on classical descriptions of the underworld or Hades. First major Christian description of hell occurs in the apocryphal apocalypse of Peter. In this, Christ shows Peter hell, in graphic detail – people hanging by their tongues, a lake of flaming mire and other full of pus, clouds of worms, people gnawing their tongues and having flaming fire in their tongues, and metal detectors everywhere. [ Laughter ] The key trait of these, and in similar depictions, is a notion that in hell punishments enact the nature of sins. In his 1893 work on this text, Nekyia, Albrecht Dieterich argued that the apocalypse of Peter drew heavily on Orphic-‐Pythagorean traditions. Now at the outset of Liber Novus' two descents have an exemplary role: Odysseus' descent into the underworld in the Odyssey and Christ's descent into hell. Descents into the underworld feature in different traditions, and as the underworld has been a main theme in the work by James Hillman, I pass all questions on the underworld to him. First to Odysseus, Book 11 of the Odyssey depicts Odysseus' descent into the underworld to consult Tiresias. To enter the land of the dead, libations mixed with honey, milk then sweet wine and white barley were made. They then cut the throats of sheep (probably organic in that time). [ Laughter ]
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Tiresias then gives warning and advice concerning what lies in store. We will return to this motif, but I’d just like to just put this as one of the backdrops to the terrain we'll be entering. [Image displayed] The second major theme is that of Christ's descent into hell, the harrowing of hell. [Image displayed] [ Pause ] 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 of His descent into hell, to preach to the dead, to redeem the dead and to redeem Adam. This formed one of, you could say, the major themes in Christian theology until a reaction sets in in the Protestant Reformation. Zwingli, 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 Commedia. [Image displayed: “This is Boticelli'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 Cangrande Della Scala he differentiated two modes in which the Commedia 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 merits, 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 D. P. Walker notes, hell began to lose its hold in the 17th century. And there were 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, which could be conceived of as in the bowels of the Library of Congress – no, in, ahhh, in the earth. For example, in his article in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopedie, Sweden argued that the number of the damned argued against the location of hell in its traditional
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place inside the earth. It was simply overcrowded. I mean, there was no place to fit them all. The only place big enough was the sun. And this had the added virtues, it provided enough heat for the eternal flames. So even then there were problems of global warming, ecology. You know, where are we going to find enough heat to burn everyone? Alongside this notion of the 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;” a place, state or situation of wickedness, suffering or misery. And it notes instances of the first usage going back in the English language to Chaucer. In Milton's Paradise Lost Satan – who was a reliable figure – states, “the mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” Satan knew a thing or two about hell. An instance of this metaphorical use is found in a statement by Meister Eckhart cited on several occasion by Jung, and you'll see why: “Therefore, do I turn back once more to myself, where 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, in terms of central precision and graphic detail it's only perhaps Swedenborg's hell which comes close to matching Dante's. Swedenborg, a 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 him that 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 demonstrate the symbolic meaning of the Bible, which he duly did. In Swedenborg's 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 is open to evil and to hell, the other to good and to heaven. What characterize those who 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 its geography. Hells were to be found under mountains, hills and rocks and their opening appeared like holes and
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clefts. Some of the hells appeared to the view like the dens and caves of wild beasts in the forests. Some were like the hollow cabins and passages that are seen in mines. Some hells present an appearance like the ruins of houses and cities after conflagrations. In some hells, there were nothing but brothels. 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 a light only flashed when the soul was cast into hell. They would have some smoke coming up. So against the common belief that there was one hell which was the same for everyone, Swedenborg noted that there was an infinite variety and diversity. In a similar 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 visionary tradition of a linkage between a vision encapsulating its own hermeneutics. The most acute reader of Swedenborg was William Blake. [Image of Blake displayed: “This is a self-‐portrait”.] From his youth, Blake had visions of angels and historical figures whom he conversed with. And for a time indeed he joined the Swedenborgian church in London where it was established. Blake became critical of the institutionalization of Swedenborgianism and began taking a more critical view of Swedenborg. Around 1890, he published the 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 [Blake] noted, was that he'd conversed only with angels and not with the devils who hated religion. He'd had the wrong informants. If you want to know what hell is like, you got to talk to a devil. I mean, it's perfectly obvious. What Swedenborg failed to see, Blake noted in his annotations to Swedenborg, was that heaven and hell are born together. He articulated a notion of dynamic of oppositions. What is basic is a series of contraries: 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 contraries. 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 errors of popery and 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 contrary.” It was Dante, the great-‐-‐Blake considered the greater figure. And his last years he produced a series of engravings to the
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Commedia, watercolors. (Speaking of visual image displayed: That's Lucifer in case you didn't recognize him. This by way a backdrop.) We turn now to Jung. You have noticed that I have not mentioned Freud. As Eugene Taylor and I have been arguing for decades Freud-‐centric legend of the genesis of Jung's psychology – namely that its origins lay first in Jung's discipleship and then divergence from Freud – has led to the complete mislocation Jung 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 Liber Novus. I would contend that to continue to argue that psychoanalysis is the key determining context for the emergence of Jung's psychology can hence forth only be regarded as acts of willful obscurantism. In no way does Liber Novus emerge as a sequelae of Jung's divergent from Freud – as if its enough to diverge from Freud and enter this vast visionary domain. Rather, it should be located and situated within the context of visionary tradition. What Liber Novus 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, Jung engaged in lengthy period of self-‐experimentation inducing fantasies and awaking state. Uncertain of his activities 'til the outbreak of war convinced him that his fantasies were precognitive. He 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 re-‐transcribed it into the volume we have upstairs. This was self-‐styled as a prophetic work: Der Weg des Kommenden, “The way of what is to come.” Like Dante's vision of hell, like Swedenborg's vision, Jung's vision contains its hermeneutic within it, in its “layer two” attempt to elaborate the significance of his fantasies. Thus, like Dante, Swedenborg and Blake, Jung's endeavor was not simply to elaborate a work born of visionary experience, to give it form, but to elaborate a hermeneutics of how it should be read. In a critical sense then interpretative commentary is superfluous. What is required is a wider contextualization. (Speaking of the rapid display of images from Jung’s Red Book on the screen: This is the whole work approaching you.) [ Laughter ] It's a new form of Jungian optician's text. [ Laughter ] Now in terms of the western cultural tradition, not little has been written on Jung's relation to figures in his Pantheon such as Goethe and in particular Nietzsche. But
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other figures have received scant attention – such as Dante, Swedenborg and Blake. I wish to speak a little bit of this now. In Jung’s copy of the Commedia 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 find myself astray in the dark wood where the straight road had been lost sight of.” This was a situation where Jung found himself. [ Pause ] In a lecture, at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1935, Jung noted, “a point existed about 35th 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 Zarathustra will know that Nietzsche 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.” [ Pause ] It's clear from this that Jung found an existential, as well as a literary, prototype for his activity in the Commedia. And there are indications that Jung was reading the Commedia during this period. On 26th December 1913 he transcribed the following lines from the Purgatorio into his black book, "And I to him. I am one who when love breathes on me, notices and in 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 Jung's undertaking to 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, Jung read the Commedia as a visionary experience disguised on historical and mythical events. Its significance for Jung as a historical document is found in his commentary in Psychological Types in 1921. He argued that the birth of modern individualism began when the worship of women, with the worship of women, "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 in Paradiso, Saint Bernard's prayer to the Virgin Mother.
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We turn now to Swedenborg. First to highlight the significance of Swedenborg for Jung 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. They are not directly cited, but Swedenborg features critically in the backdrop to Liber Novus. At the very beginning of the text, Jung'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 constructed by figures in the spiritual world, and Jung's endeavor in Liber Novus. The critical difference is simply one of ontology. Jung replaces Swedenborg's spiritual realism with psychic realism, his notion of esse and anima, articulated indeed in Liber Novus, and then Psychological Types. It's simply a shift of ontology, a different manner of reading Swedenborg. Swedenborg's spiritual hermeneutics, reading the symbolic sense of the Bible, also appears to inform the hermeneutics of layer two of Liber Novus. Jung's relation to the works of Blake appears to be more ambivalent and oscillates. And this appears to be connected to Jung's ambivalence concerning the notion of art. In 1921, Jung cited Blake's the Marriage of Heaven and Hell in Psychological Types, which indicates that he read it during this period when he was working on Liber Novus. 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 5, Type Problem in Poetry, and the reading of Psychological Types will be in a way completely transformed after reading Liber Novus; and the significance of this chapter will be apparent, in the sense that it's transposing or attempting to cast in the conceptual language some of the insights of Liber Novus. At the end of this, at the end of what I consider the most important chapter of the work, Jung notes – cites Blake's statement from Heaven and Hell – that there were “two classes of men, the prolific and devouring. And that religion was an attempt to reconcile the two.” Jung then noted that this summarized the whole of his previous discussion, that this says it all, quite striking. In 1913 in a discussion of visionary works of art, Jung noted that poets turn to mythological figures to give suitable expression to their experience. This did not mean that they were working with second-‐hand material, but it was the only way to give form to imageless primordial experience.
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So, one 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 Liber Novus. Jung then noted Dante decks-‐out experience in all the imagery of heaven, and purgatory and hell. Blake presses into a service the phantasmagoric world of India, 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 Jung's introduction to Suzuki's work on Zen Buddhism, Jung noted the glimmerings of a breakthrough of total experience in the West where to be found in Goethe's Faust and Nietzsche's Zarathustra – again the usual suspects from Jung's Pantheon. However, tucked away in a footnote we find, "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 Goethe and Nietzsche. 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 about half of 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 his oscillation. It seems to me, as I was indicating, that this oscillation concerns Jung's own ambivalence concerning his own work, was Liber Novus a work of art? The notion of the dynamic interplay of contraries central to Blake's Heaven and Hell is a key theme in Jung's Liber Novus, though there's no evidence to suggest that he derived this idea from Blake. Rather, it's indicative of what Jung may have found tantalizing in the reading and study of Blake. Around 1910 Jung went on a sailing trip with his friends Albert Uri [phonetic] and Andreas Visher [phonetic] during which Uri read out chapters from the Odyssey dealing with Circe and the Nekyia. Jung noted that shortly afterwards he, like Odysseus, was presented by fate with a Nekyia that descends into the dark Hades. It is then Jung's figuration of the self-‐experimentation, a descents into the underworld. I’d like now to trace, to briefly trace, this motif. On the 21st December of 1913 in his fantasy – at the outset of his journey in which he first encountered the biblical figures of Salome and Elijah – Jung gazes into a stone and catches sight of Odysseus and his journey on the high seas, one of the first figures that he encounters. After his
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interchange with Salome and Elijah, he looks again into this stone, thinking again of Odysseus 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 two hermeneutics on this passage, Jung noted that lengthy wanderings lay ahead of him. Odysseus had gone astray when he played his trick at Troy. Then Jung notes, Odysseus would not have become what he was without his odyssey. [LN 248 n176] So it's the question of the necessity of the wandering – of the erring – in terms of his becoming. In handwritten drafts to the second book of Liber Novus, Liber Secundus, Jung subtitled Liber Secundus “the Adventures of the Odyssey.” In the corrected draft this is retitled “the Great Odyssey.” And finally, Jung suggested the line from the Odyssey, “Happily escaped from the jaws of death,” be used as a motto for Aniela Jaffe’s biography of him, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (still misleadingly referred to as his autobiography). We 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 devised 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.” This is a sensible procedure for anyone versed in Swedenborg, digging a hole in the rocks – that is where hell is to be found. In the fantasy that ensues Jung saw a killed figure float by on the stream and serpents who veiled the sun, from which stream of blood flowed. In 1914, as noted, Jung felt that these visions, these fantasies were precognitive and then he titles this chapter “Descent into Hell in the Future.” In this fantasy he had descended into hell and the bloodshed that he'd saw depicted what was happening in Europe. "As the darkness seized the world, a 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 Jung's account in Liber Novus this was not senseless, but meaningful for the further development of mankind. I would like to indicate further depictions of Jung's imagination of hell in Liber Novus. On 12th January he found himself in a gloomy volt with a tangle of human bodies. He realized then that he'd reached the underworld or hell. On 18th January 1914, after he had 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 Nietzsche and Christ, told him simply that they were in hell. On 2nd February 1914 his serpent soul tells him that they had arrived in hell. He saw a hanged man who'd poisoned his parents and his wife. The man tells him that he'd done this to
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honor God so that they could escape the wretchedness of life for state of eternal blessedness. In the fantasy of 28th December 1913, he found himself in a castle in the forest where he met an old scholar. He is led to a room to sleep, and imagines that the scholar has locked up his daughter, which seemed to be a hackneyed theme for a romantic novel. She then literally appeared before him. And Jung notes, "I am truly in Hell, the worst awakening after death, to be resurrected in a lending library." [ Laughter ] (I note that the Library of Congress is not a lending library, except perhaps for some members of Congress.) “Have I held the men of my time and their taste in such contempt that I must live in Hell and write out the novels that I have already spat on long ago? Does the lower half of average human taste also claim holiness and invulnerability, so that 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, and 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. [ Laughter ] Reflecting on this episode, Jung noted, “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.” 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 epitomizes a state that Jung found himself in. A moment of collapse of all that he cherished, all that he had striven for, all that he'd aspired to and held dear – Transvaluation of all his values. 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 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 Eckhartian sense of the return to one's self as deeper than hell itself, or indeed the deepest hell. And Jung notes, “but the deepest
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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.” This is indeed what Blake would have called the marriage of heaven and hell. What then does one do when one finds one's self in hell in life? Jung found a prototype in Christ's descent into hell, the harrowing of hell. One of the key themes in Liber Novus is that of the invitation of Christ. How was this to be understood, how was this to be lived. In reflecting upon this Jung understood it not on a literal level, but in this deeper sense of living one's life as fully as Christ lived his. In attempting to do this, he has experienced something akin to Christ's descent into hell. "No one knows what happened during the three days Christ was in hell. I have experienced it. The men of yore said that he had preached there to the deceased. What they say is true, but do you know how this happened? It was folly and monkey business, an atrocious hell's masquerade of the holiest mysteries. How else could Christ have saved his Antichrist? Read the unknown 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 Jung's understanding, Christ's journey to hell was necessary. Without this he would not have been able to ascend to heaven. In Jung's account in Liber Novus, Christ had to become his antichrist, his underworldly 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 Jung's theology of the dead in Liber Novus. To cite one of the statements from the draft, "Not one title of Christian law is abrogated but instead we are adding a new one accepting the laments of the dead." In Jung's theology of the dead, redemption does not take the form of saving the souls of the dead, but of taking on their legacy answering their unanswered questions. After his work Liber Novus, in his published scholarly writings, Jung attempted to translate some of the insights of Liber Novus to a language acceptable to medico-‐ 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 Jung noted, "three days descent into hell during death describes the sinking of a vanished value into the unconscious whereby conquering the power of darkness establishes a new order and rises up to heaven again, that is attained supreme clarity of consciousness." I'll read this again, you hear the change in language. “The three days descent 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, pertains supreme clarity of consciousness.” In 1952, in Aion he noted, "The scope of the integration is suggested by the descensus ad infernos – the descent of Christ's soul to hell – its 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 individuation process." Again, I repeat. “The scope of the integration is suggested by the descensus ad infernos, the descent of Christ's soul to
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hell. Its 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 individuation process.” Here we find Christ's descent to hell interpreted as the individualization process and the inspiration of the collective unconscious, the central theme in Jung's later work. But we must pause here: Which language, which articulation is primary? First person voice in articulation in Liber Novus? Or, its subsequent reformulation decades later and the psychological concepts of the collected works? Relevant here are some comments that Jung made from the discussion of none other than Swedenborg (you 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, the Nicholas van de Flue [phonetic]. He had a terrible vision and how to protect himself from it, reinterpretation of the vision in the image of the Holy Trinity. Same with Swedenborg, he went up into this doctrinaire-‐ness 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.” (This 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 formed a true salvation for many men.” A very nuance statement: Jung was saying that Swedenborg to protect himself formed concepts. But Jung is not merely being critical, but indicating for many men concepts was all they would have to hold onto 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 doctrinaire-‐ness – forms such a safety net or guard rail: vital for some, no doubt, but protection which may block access to the very experiences in question. Taking this further, does Jung's significance lie in his conceptual formulations, the individuation, the collective unconscious, the integration of collective unconscious, archetypes and so forth? Or rather does 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: Did 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.
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Publication of Liber Novus then finally enables one to reconsider Jung's significance in wholly new yet quintessentially ancient manner, as recovering the road to hell. Thank you. [ Applause ] Text corrected 2/28/2012 from the full video presentation and transcript available at: http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/transcripts/2010/100619mns0900.txt