Dear Herr Kaegi, 7 November 1932

Thank you very much for kindly sending me your offprint.

I am glad you have drawn my attention to Walser.

As you are obviously well acquainted with Walser’s writings, I would like to ask you whether Walser has also taken an interest in the Ipnerotomachia of Francesco Colonna.

I find that it gives us a key to the backdoors of the Renaissance.

It is strange that the broad, shining surface of things always interests me much less than those dark, labyrinthine, subterranean passages they come out of.

Civilizations seem to me like those plants whose real and continuous life is found in the rhizome and not in the quickly fading flowers and withering leaves which appear on the surface and which we
regard as the essential manifestation of life.

Burckhardt mentions Colonna’s work but for understandable reasons he sees nothing in it.

Of the more recent writers, it seems to be chiefly Luigi Valli who has ventured into the background.

I almost believe that the real history of the human mind is a rhizome phenomenon.

With best thanks,

Yours sincerely,

C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 102