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“It seemed to me I [Jung] was living in an insane asylum of my own making,” he recalled in 1925.
“I went about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analyzing them.” ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 13
Salome was his daughter and that they had been companions since eternity. Salome told Jung’s “I” that she loved him.
Elijah told him that Salome loved a prophet and announced the new God to the world. Jung’s ‘I’ was shocked at all this. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, 24
In an active imagination on January II, 1926, Wolff’s “I” had a dialogue with Thot, the Egyptian God of writing.
Thoth instructed her how to invoke someone’s “Ka”:
“So call loudly thrice, You Ka, you Ka, you Ka of so and so, come here and move into my heart. Space has been made for you.
Your Ba expects you and you should move in.” She followed his instructions: “You Ka, you Ka, you Ka of C., come here, move into my heart.
Space has been made for you. Your Ba expects you and you should move in. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, 32
Jung divided the material up into a series of books comprised of short chapters.
But whereas Zarathustra proclaimes the death of God, Liber Novus depicts the rebirth of God in the Soul. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, 40
But whereas Zarathustra proclaimes the death of God, Liber Novus depicts the rebirth of God in the soul. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, 40
He touched on madness, divine madness, and psychiatry, how the Imitation of Christ is to be understood today; the death of God; the historical significance of Nietzsche; and the relation of magic and reason. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, 31
The overall theme of Liber Novus is how Jung regains his soul and overcomes the contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation.
This is ultimately achieved through enabling the rebirth of a new image of God in his soul and developing a new worldview in the form of a psychological and theogenic cosmology. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, 42
In this way salvation is given to us in the un-openable and un-sayable symbol, for it protects us by preventing the devil from swallowing the seed of life . . ..We must understand the divine within us, but not the other, insofar as he is able to go and stand on his own … . We should be confidants of our own mysteries, but chastely veil our eyes before the mysteries of the other, insofar as he does not need “understanding” because of his own incapability. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, 45-46
In a critical entry of January 16, 1916, his soul presented an elaborate thiogenic cosmogony.’ She described her own nature, the nature of the daimons,
the heavenly mother, and the Gods.
Of particular significance was Abraxas, the powerful and fearful self-renewing God of the cosmos.
She characterized the nature of man as striving for absolute individuality, through which he concentrated and countered the dissolution of the Pleroma, or the “all.” for fishes with hook and line in the middle of the picture.
On the left was the
Devil saying something to the man, and your son wrote down what he said.
It was that he had come for the :fisherman because he was catching his fishes, but on the right was an angel who said, “No you can’t take this man, he is taking only bad fishes and none of the good ones.”
Then after your son had made that picture he was quite content.
The same night, two of your daughters thought that they had seen spooks in their rooms.
The next day you wrote out the “Sermons to the Dead,” and you knew after that nothing more would disturb your family, and nothing did. Of course I knew you were the :fisherman in your son’s picture, and you told me so, but the boy didn’t know it. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 48-49
Everyone immediately looked to see who was there, but there was no one in sight. I was sitting near the door bell, and not only heard it but saw it moving.
We all simply stared at one another.
The atmosphere was thick, believe me! Then I knew something had to happen.
The whole house was as if there was a crowd present, crammed full of spirits.
They were packed deep right up to the door and the air was so thick it was scarcely possible to breathe.
As for myself, I was all a-quiver with the question: “For God’s sake, what in the world is this!”
Then they cried out in chorus, “We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 49
The Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (Seven Sermons to the Dead) can be regarded as a culmination of the fantasies of this period.
It is a psychological cosmogony cast in the form of a Gnostic creation myth.
In Jung’s fantasies, a new God had been born in his soul, the God who is the son of the frogs, Abraxas.
Jung understood this symbolically. He saw this :figure as representing the uniting of the Christian God With Satan, and hence as depicting a transformation of the Western God-image.
It was in 1952, in Answer to Job, that Jung elaborated on this theme. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 50
The Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (Seven Sermons to the Dead) can be regarded as a culmination of the fantasies of this period.
It is a psychological cosmogony cast in the form of a Gnostic creation myth.
In Jung’s fantasies, a new God had been born in his soul, the God who is the son of the frogs, Abraxas. Jung understood this symbolically.
He saw this :figure as representing the uniting of the Christian God With Satan, and hence as depicting a transformation of the Western God-image.
It was in 1952, in Answer to Job, that Jung elaborated on this theme. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 50
He noted that when individuals annexed the contents of the collective psyche and regarded them as personal attributes, they experienced extreme states of superiority and inferiority.
He borrowed the term “godlikeness” from Goethe and Adler to characterize this.
This state arose from fusing the personal and the collective psyche, and represented one of the dangers of analysis. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 52
Two possibilities presented themselves: one could attempt to regressively restore persona, and return to the prior state.
However, it was impossible to get rid of the unconscious. Alternatively, one could accept the condition of godlikeness. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 52
The vivid description of the vicissitudes of the state of “godlikeness” can be taken as representing some of Jung’s affective states during his self-experimentation. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 53
In Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, Jung had called the contents of this unconscious typical myths or primordial images.
He also called them “dominants”: “the ruling powers, the Gods, that is, images of dominating laws and principles, average regularities in the sequence of images, that the brain has received from the sequence of secular processes.” ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 57
The seventh sermon had culminated in an evocation of a star God: At immeasurable distance a lonely star stands in the zenith.
This is the one God of this one man, this is his world, his Pleroma, his divinity.
In this world man is Abraxas, the creator and destroyer of his own world.
This star is the God and the goal of man, this is his one guiding God, in him man goes to his rest, toward him goes the long journey of the soul after
death, in him everything that man withdraws from the greater world shines resplendently.
To this one God man shall pray. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 59
in the last sermon you find the beginning of individuation, out of which, the divine child arises. Please don’t speak of these things to other people.
It could do harm to the child. The child is fate and amor fati & guidance and necessity-and peace and fulfillment (Isaiah] 9.6).
But don’t allow yourself to be dispersed into people and opinions and discussions. The child is a new God, actually born in many individuals, but they don’t know it.
He is a “spiritual” God. A spirit in many people, yet one and the same everywhere. Keep to your time and you will experience His qualities. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 59-60
From the beginning of August to the end of September, he drew a series of mandalas in pencil in his army notebook, which he preserved.
The first is titled “Phanes” and bears the legend “transformation of matter in the individual.”
This image may be seen as an attempt to depict the “newly arising God” and his relation to the individual ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 61
The realization of the significance of the self is portrayed in Scrutinies.
On September 18, 1915, Jung wrote, “Through uniting with the self we reach the God.” In the autumn of 1917, he added, “I must say this not with reference to the opinions of the ancients or that authority, but because I have experienced it.”
This unshakable experience was nothing less than the experience of God:
“The self is not God, although we reach the God through the self.”
He realized that he had to serve the self, and that this service was also service of God and of mankind.
At the same time, he had to free his self from God, since “the God I experienced is more than love; he is also hate, he is more than beauty, he is also the abomination, he is more than wisdom, he is also meaninglessness, he is more than power, he is also powerlessness, he is more than omnipresence,
he is also my creature.”
This description of Jung’s experience of God corresponds to the vision of Abraxas in the Sermones. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 68
In the Black Books, the main :figure Jung’s “I” has dialogues with is his soul; in some sections of Liber Novus, it is the serpent or the bird.
In one conversation in January 1916, his soul explained to him that when the above and below are not united, she falls into three parts-a serpent, the human soul, and the bird or heavenly soul, which visits the Gods.
Thus Jung’s revisions, in which he now differentiated the soul into serpent, human soul, and bird, here can be seen to reflect his understanding of the tripartite nature of his soul. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 69
A major theme that Jung was preoccupied with here was finding the right relation to the higher powers, the Gods, and understanding the role of mankind in relation to them.
He came to see that it was critical that one did not give oneself over to the Gods but maintained one’s human perspective.
On March l , 1918, his soul informed him that what was necessary was maintaining simultaneously a respect and disdain for the Gods, and that this began with respect and disdain for oneself.
This was critical not only for humanity; Jung now realized that “man would be the mediator in the transformation process of God.”
It was a cardinal insight, and it is the center of his later work Answer to Job.
Toward the end of his life, in a chapter of Memories entitled “late Thoughts,” he formulated it as follows:
“That is the meaning of divine service, of the service which man can render to God, that light may emerge from the darkness, that the Creator may become conscious of his creation, and man conscious of himself. / That is the goal, or one goal, which fits man meaningfully into the scheme of creation, and at the same time confers meaning upon it. It is an explanatory myth which has slowly taken shape within me in the course of the decades. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 70-71
In this dream, the Arab youth was the double of the proud Arab who had ridden past us without a greeting.
As an inhabitant of the Casbah he was a figuration of the self, or rather, a messenger or emissary of the self.
For the Casbah from which he came was a perfect mandala: a citadel surrounded by a square wall with four gates.
His attempt to kill me was an echo of the motif of Jacob’s struggle with the angel; he was to use the language of the Bible like an angel of the Lord, a messenger of God who wished to kill men because he did not know them.
Actually, the angel ought to have had his dwelling in me. But he knew only angelic truth and understood nothing about man.
Therefore he first came forward as my enemy; however, I held my own against him.
In the second part of the dream I was the master of the citadel; he sat at my feet and had to learn to understand my thoughts, or rather, learn to know man.
Obviously, my encounter with Arab culture had struck me with overwhelming force. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 77-78
The dream continued to echo for Jung, and two years after his return to Europe, he would encounter the figure again, in a fantasy of January 6, 1922.
His soul saw and described the figure and informed his “I” that the figure was a God and that he would hear from him again.
The God needed to hear from him, as otherwise they both couldn’t live.
His soul informed his “I” that he would reach the God again through solitude, coupled with reverence for the sun, moon, and earth, which stood for the masculine, the feminine, and the body, respectively. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 78
The dream continued to echo for Jung, and two years after his return to Europe, he would encounter the figure again, in a fantasy of January 6, 1922.
His soul saw and described the figure and informed his “I” that the figure was a God and that he would hear from him again.
The God needed to hear from him, as otherwise they both couldn’t live.
His soul informed his “I” that he would reach the God again through solitude, coupled with reverence for the sun, moon, and earth, which stood for the masculine, the feminine, and the body, respectively. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 78
Years later, recalling his encounter with this figure and describing it as a dream, Jung noted, “I suddenly knew: the Wild Huntsman had commanded it to carry away a human soul.”
A few days later he heard the news that his mother had died.
He realized that “It was Wotan, the god of my Alemannic forefathers, who had gathered my mother to her ancestors negatively to the ‘wild horde,’ but positively to the ‘salig hit,’ the blessed folk.” ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 79
Memories, p. 345. This was not Jung’s first encounter with Wotan, the storm God.
In a draft for her biography of Jung, Lucy Heyer narrated the event:
“This friendly and mildly temperate landscape was struck by a severe catastrophic storm, a rare natural event at this ferocity, just as the child was being taken for baptism in the church.
The home-borne young mother was anxious to see the young one safely brought through the ferocity and the eclipse.
In the family, this event fell into oblivion until fifteen years later the boy wrote a poem that described a storm catastrophe.
He dedicated it to his mother, and only at that moment she remembered again how threateningly the storm god had accompanied the baptism of her firstborn on that day of baptism in late summer 1875.
When Jung related this poem and his mother’s reaction, he noticed that he had often had such inspirations as this poem, contents foreign to consciousness that corresponded to an objective event, imposed themselves on him and sought expression.
That storm poem, which was a long time in the possession of the mother, was unfortunately later lost” (Lucy Heyer Grote papers, University of Basel Archives, “Biographie von Carl Gustav Jung,” “Kindheit,” p. 1).
On her biography, see my Jung Stripped Bare by His Biographers, Even (London: Karnac, 2005). ~Sonu Shamdasani, The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 79, fn 247
The reemergence of Wotan in the present was a phenomenon that he himself had directly experienced.
As further evidence for his hypothesis, he referred to Nietzsche’s elevation of Dionysus, claiming that biographical evidence suggested that the God he really had in mind was Dionysus’s cousin-namely, Wotan. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 80
He is the god of oracles, of secret knowledge, of sorcery, and he is also the equivalent of Hermes psychopompos.
And you remember he has, like Osiris, only one eye; the other eye is sacrificed to the underworld.
Therefore. he is an exceedingly apt symbol for our modern world in which the unconscious really comes to the foreground like a river, and forces us to turn one eye inward upon it, in order that we may be adapted to that side also; we feel now that the greatest enemy is threatening us, not from without but from within.
So on account of all his qualities, Wotan expresses the spirit of the time to an extent which is uncanny, and that wisdom or knowledge is really wild- it is nature’s wisdom.
Wotan is not the God of civilized beings but a condition of nature. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 80
Religious experiences led to new forms of personal relation.
Jung noted that “no individual can exist without individual relationships, and that is how the foundation of your church is laid.”
This, then, was the task that confronted analytical psychology: to form an invisible church, without succumbing to institutionalization.
Jung was also here drawing together the notion, from Liber Novus, that “the anointed of this time” was a God who would appear in the spirit, as opposed to the flesh-“through the spirit of men as the conceiving womb.” ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 83
See James Heisig, Imago Dei: A Study of Jung’s Psychology of Religion (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1979); Ann Lammers, In God’s Shadow: The Collaboration between Victor White and C.G.Jung (New York: Paulist Press, 1994); and Matei Iagher, “Theorizing Experience: Psychology and the Quest for a Science of Religion (1896-1936),” PhD thesis, University College London, 2016.
See also my” ‘ ls Analytical Psychology a Religion?’: In Statu Nascendi,” Journal of Analytical Psychology 44 (1999): 539 – 45 ~Sonu Shamdasani, The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 83, fn 259
The second was the role of the sun in Pueblo religion and cosmology:
“He said, pointing to the sun, ‘Is not he who moves there our father: How can anyone say differently: How can there be another god. Nothing can be without the sun.’ ” ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 87
Solar mythology plays a significant role in the Black Books.
It is likely that Jung would have been reminded of his dream of praying to the sun in his encounter with Ammonius, Izdubar’s longing for the sun and regeneration through becoming the sun, and the role of the sun God, Helios, in the Septem Sermones. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 87
After the assimilation of the personal unconscious, the differentiation of the persona, and the overcoming of the state of godlikeness, the next stage was the integration of the anima for men and of the animus for women. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 100
After one had achieved the integration of the anima, one was confronted with another figure-namely, the “mana personality.”
Jung argued that when the anima lost her “mana,” or power, the man who assimilated it must have acquired this and so become a “mana-personality,” a being of superior will and wisdom.
However, this figure was “a dominant of the collective unconscious, the recognized archetype of the powerful man in the form of hero, chief, magician, medicine man, and saint, the lord of men and spirits, the friend of gods.” ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 102
Of the self, he wrote:
“It might as well be called ‘god in us.’ The beginnings of our whole psychic life seem to be inextricably rooted to this point, and all our highest and deepest purposes seem to be striving toward it.” ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 102
His description of the self conveys the significance of his realization following his Liverpool dream:
The self could be characterized as a kind of compensation for the conflict between inner and outer . … the self is also the goal of life, because it is the most complete expression of that fateful combination we call individuality …. With the experiencing of the self as something irrational, as an indefinable being to which the I is neither opposed nor subjected, but in a relation of dependence, and around which it revolves, very much as the earth revolves about the sun then the goal of individuation has been reached. ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 102-103
At a historical level, the work had further significance, as the symbolic material was precisely what was excluded by ecclesiastical Christianity and thus had the function of a compensatory undercurrent.
For example, Jung’s vision of the God Abraxas bore striking parallels to the figure of Mercurius in alchemy.
He noted in retrospect that “my encounter with alchemy was decisive for me, as it provided me with the historical basis which I had hitherto lacked.” ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 108
1955, In Jung’s published anon SystemaMundiTotius.
SystemaMundiTotius was anonymously in a special issue of Du dedicated to the Eranos conferences.
In a 1955, letter of February to Walter Corti, Jung explicitly stated that he did II, (JA) not want his name to appear on it.
He added the following comments to the painting:
It portrays the antinomies of the microcosm within the macrocosmic world and its antinomies.
At the very top, the figure of the young boy in the winged egg, called Erikapaios or Phanes and thus reminiscent as a spiritual figure of the Orphic Gods. His dark antithesis in the depths is here designated as Abraxas.
He represents the dominus mundi, the lord of the physical world, and is a world-creator of an ambivalent nature.
Sprouting from him we see the tree of life, labeled vita (“life”) while its upper counterpart is a light-tree in the form of a seven-branched candelabra labeled ignis (“fire”) and Eros (“love”).
Its light points to the spiritual world of the divine child.
Art and science also belong to this spiritual realm, the first represented as a winged serpent and the second as a winged mouse (as hole-digging activity!).-The candelabra is based on the principle of the spiritual number three (twice-three flames with one large flame in the middle), while the lower world of Abraxas is characterized by five, the number of natural man (the twice-five rays of his star).
The accompanying animals of the natural world are a devilish monster and a larva. This signifies death and rebirth.
A further division of the mandala is horizontal.
To the left we see a circle indicating the body or the blood, and from it rears the serpent, which winds itself around the phallus, as the generative principle. The serpent is dark and light, signifying the dark realm of the earth, the moon, and the void (therefore called Satanas).
The light realm of rich fullness lies to the right, where from the bright circle fr(g-us sive amor dei [cold, or the love of God] the dove of the Holy Ghost takes wing, and wisdom (Sophia) pours from a double beaker to left and right.- This feminine sphere is that of heaven.-
The large sphere characterized by zigzag lines or rays represents an inner sun; within this sphere the macrocosm is repeated, but with the upper and lower regions reversed as in a mirror.
These repetitions should be conceived of as endless in number, growing even smaller until the innermost core, the actual microcosm, is reached (reproduced in Aniela Jaffe, ed., C.G.Jung, Word and Image [Princeton: Princeton University Press/ Bollingen Series, 1979 ], p. 75). ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 130
Image 113, LN. The legend reads:
“This is the image of the divine child. It means the completion of a long path. Just as the image was finished in April 1919, and work on the next image had already begun, the one who brought the 0 came, as [PHILEMON] had predicted to me. I called him [PHANES], because he is the newly appearing God.” ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 140
He added that at :first he did not recognize that the park in the dream was the same one he had depicted in the mandala, and commented:
“Now Liverpool is the center of life- liver is the center of life-and I am not the center, I am the fool who lives in a dark place somewhere, I am one of those little side lights.
In that way my Western prejudice that I was the center of the mandala was corrected- that I am everything, the whole show, the king, the god” (The Psychology ef Kundalini Yoga, ed. Sonu Shamdasani, p. 100 ).
In Memories, Jung added further details (pp. 223-24). ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 158-160
Painting of a medieval city with walls and moats, streets and churches, arranged quadratically. The inner city is again surrounded by walls and moats, like the Imperial City in Peking.
The buildings all open inward, toward the center, represented by a castle with a golden roof. It too is surrounded by a moat.
The ground round the castle is laid with black and white tiles, representing the united opposites.
This mandala was done by a middle-aged man …. A picture like this is unknown in Christian symbolism.
The Heavenly Jerusalem of Revelation is known to everybody. Coming to the Indian world of ideas, we find the city of Brahma on the world mountain, Meru.
We read in the Golden Flower:
“The Book of the Yellow Castle says: ‘In the square inch field of the square foot house, life can be regulated.’ The square foot house is the face. The square inch field in the face: what could that be other than the heavenly heart? In the middle of the square inch dwells the splendor. In the purple hall of the city of Jade dwells the God of Utmost Emptiness and life” (CW 9, pt. I, § 691). ~The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 160
