Answer to Jung

Making Sense of 'The Red Book'

Lynn Brunet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138312371
• eBook ISBN: 9780429857201
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Santé mentale en psychologie

The Red Book is C.G. Jung's record of a period of deep penetration into his unconscious mind in a process that he called 'active imagination', undertaken during his mid-life period. Answer to Jung: Making Sense of 'The Red Book' provides a close reading of this magnificent yet perplexing text and its fascinating images, and demonstrates that the fantasies in The Red Book are not entirely original, but that their plots, characters and symbolism are remarkably similar to some of the higher degree rituals of Continental Freemasonry. It argues that the fantasies may be memories of a series of terrifying initiatory ordeals, possibly undergone in childhood, using altered or spurious versions of these Masonic rites. It then compares these initiatory scenarios with accounts of ritual trauma that have been reported since the 1980s. This is the first full-length study of The Red Book to focus on the fantasies themselves and provide such an external explanation for them.

Sonu Shamdasani describes The Red Book as an incomplete task that Jung left to posterity as a 'message in a bottle' that would someday come ashore. Answer to Jung brings its message to shore, providing a coherent, but disturbing, interpretation of each of the fantasies and their accompanying images.

Chapters: Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

1

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780429458262-1

When C.G. Jung embarked on his ‘most difficult experiment’ (Jung 2009a, p. 198; Jung 2009b, p. 15), a confrontation with his own unconscious during his mid-life period, he was faced with a collection of intense and frightening narratives and their accompanying imagery that plunged him, at times, into the feeling that he was going mad. He knew what madness looked like, as his years as a psychiatrist at the Burghölzli Mental Hospital involved daily contact with the full stratum of mental illness. As a result, he dedicated much of his early career in attempts to understand these mental states, in particular the psychology of dementia praecox, known today as schizophrenia (Jung 1963, pp. 125–130). So for Jung to question his own sanity to such an extent was no trifling matter; but his sharp scientific mind and scrupulously honest recording of these narratives, along with meticulous research, was to ultimately protect him from succumbing to their power.

As he began to discover, these narratives and their accompanying terrors belonged to a tradition, and this was the tradition of the Mysteries, found in many cultures such as ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt, that were comprised of a set of secret initiatory practices that accompanied the various religious beliefs of the ancient world. One of these sets of beliefs was Mithraism, a cult of the Roman soldiers that was taken to the far corners of the Roman empire. In a seminar in 1925, Jung was to reveal what he believed was the source of his visions, saying: ‘All this is Mithraic symbolism from beginning to end’ (Jung 2009a, p. 252, note 211; 2009b, p. 197). The argument presented here will focus on this aspect of the Mysteries in The Red Book and demonstrate that Jung’s attempt to make sense of his fantasies by examining the myths and practices related to the ancient Mysteries was only part of the story; there is another layer which we will discuss here that can make far more sense of these confusing narratives.

The Red Book or Liber Novus is a stunning work and a summation of an experimental process of ‘active imagination’ that Carl Jung conducted on himself intensely from late 1913 to 1917, though he continued with this process until as late as 1930 (Jung 2009a, p. viii; 2009b, p. xi). It contains an extremely complex series of fantasies that he first recorded in a set of personal journals he called the Black Books. The text is divided into three books: Liber Primus, Liber Secundus and Scrutinies. The first two of these books is further divided into a series of entries, each one containing a description of one of these fantasies along with a commentary. Sonu Shamdasani, the scholar who has undertaken the impressive task of editing Liber Novus, describes these two aspects of the entries as two layers, with the commentaries pursuing a wide range of questions, such as the structure of the human personality, the relationship between the individual and Western society, the role of Christianity, science, war, divine madness and so on (Jung 2009a, p. 207; 2009b, p. 48). In his lifetime, Jung considered publishing Liber Novus but for various reasons never achieved this, although in 1916 he privately published the concluding section of it as Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (Jung 2009a, p. viii; 2009b, p. xi). The original manuscript is bound in red leather with the text handwritten by Jung, some of it in beautiful calligraphy, along with his own exquisite paintings. The pages are embellished in the manner of a medieval manuscript and, as many have observed, it has the aura of a holy book. The content, however, is quite disturbing, with many questions concerning soul loss or soul damage and a strange confusion over its inexplicable scenarios. As Sanford Drob observes, ‘even Jungians find The Red Book jarring’ (Drob 2012, p. 260). Nevertheless, Jung felt that the visionary experiences outlined in Liber Novus were central to his entire life’s work as a psychoanalyst and theorist of the unconscious (Jung 1963, pp. 190–191).

In order to understand the complex nature of the human psyche, the riddles of his visionary experiences and the role of the Mysteries, Jung embarked on a lifelong study of myth, ancient religions, Gnosticism and alchemy that were to furnish him with his theories of the unconscious. These subjects were all products of the ancient or medieval world. However, one thing Jung failed to do, at least as recorded in The Red Book, was to question where these same subjects and their association with the Mysteries might be found in the practices of his own time and possibly much closer to home.

Jung’s paternal grandfather and namesake, Carl Gustav Jung (1794–1864) was also a doctor, held a chair in medicine at the University of Basel and created a psychiatric clinic (Jung 1979b, p. 10). This Carl Jung was an ardent Freemason and Grand Master of the Swiss Lodge and, as a signifier of his dedication to this organisation, he changed the family’s coat-of-arms, altering its design to include Masonic symbols (Jung 1963, p. 220).¹ Interestingly, Jung says very little about this action on behalf of his paternal grandfather, interpreting it as a form of resistance to his own father, although he does proceed to talk about the historical and philosophical role of Rosicrucianism. What is significant about Jung’s discussion of this matter is that he believes he has inherited a karmic responsibility to deal with a set of unanswered questions that were posed to his forefathers in some way (Jung 1963, p. 221). In the context of the discussion here, this reworking of the family’s crest is significant: the senior C.G. Jung was not only claiming his Masonic allegiance for himself but also for the Jung family as a whole.

Despite his grandfather’s influence on the family and his leading role within the Swiss fraternal sector of his day, in Jung’s entire Collected Works there are only a few sentences in which he mentions Freemasonry. In a discussion of ancient initiation practices he refers to it alongside Gnosticism, Rosicrucianism and Theosophy, calling them all feeble substitutes for the ancient Mysteries (Jung 1979a, vol. 7, p. 385). Then, on two occasions when he discusses the threat of worldwide conflicts, he cites the Freemasons as one of the ‘projection-carriers’ of people’s collective fears (Jung 1979a, vol. 10, p. 610; vol. 12, p. 118). In today’s global climate Freemasonry continues to bear this role, and here it is necessary to defend the present argument, for to avoid the subject and its possible bearing on The Red Book out of a fear that it would be simply a case of projection would mean abandoning a fruitful area of investigation. So, it is by turning to the beliefs and practices of Freemasonry, a present-day repository of the Mysteries, albeit in a diluted form, and an institution that incorporates an eclectic range of myths from a wide range of cultures, that we may find many answers to the puzzling riddles of Jung’s nightly fantasies as recorded in The Red Book.

When Jung began drafting Liber Novus he based its style and structure on a close reading of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and was also influenced by Dante’s Commedia; however, the fantasies themselves have been regarded as being derived from his own imagination (Jung 2009a, p. 202; 2009b, pp. 30–31). This study will demonstrate that the fantasies in The Red Book are not entirely original but that their plots, characters and symbolism are derived from Masonic rites. Wolfgang Giegerich (2013, pp. 273–324) points out the number of times in The Red Book that Jung insists that his fantasies were factual, that is, that they actually happened, and notes the frequent expressions of painful suffering, cruelty and torment in the text, though he does not propose an explanation for this suffering and for Jung’s sense that these were real events. This study will confirm Jung’s sense that these experiences really happened. It will argue that at some point in his early life, Jung appears to have undergone a series of terrifying initiations based on distorted or spurious versions of Masonic rites and that his active imaginations are a recollection of these experiences. This conclusion will be made in the light of research into the ritual abuse of children, a phenomenon that only came to the attention of the psychology community and the broader public in the 1980s, after Jung had died.

Freemasonry and the Mysteries

The subject of Western esotericism has recently emerged as an area of academic study in its own right, and within this context there has been a development of scholarly interest in the tradition of Freemasonry, where it was once treated as unworthy of academic research.² Henrik Bogdan, a Swedish professor of religion at the University of Gothenburg, is one scholar who is re-examining this institution alongside the broader practices of Western esotericism and the role of initiation rites. Bogdan comments on the close historical relationship between Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, as well as the important role of alchemy in the development of the higher degrees on the Continent in the eighteenth century (Bogdan 2007, pp. 67–72, pp. 100–101). Interestingly, Bogdan also refers to Carl Jung’s theories as contributing to a more recent ‘psychologisation’ of the occult (p. 11), and it is aspects of the psychology of the initiation process as it appears in The Red Book that will also be addressed in this study. Bogdan’s work reflects some of the findings of a number of internal research bodies in the Masonic Order, such as the Quatuor Coronati Lodge, the Pietre-Stones Review of Freemasonry and the Scottish Rite Research Society.³ While the academic investigation of Freemasonry is a recent phenomenon there is, however, a wealth of material by Masonic authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that will be useful in this study. While the majority of these authors were amateur scholars, and their material was influenced by the available knowledge of the day, they nevertheless provide valuable insights into the beliefs, practices and history of Freemasonry relevant to the period under discussion, that is, from Jung’s childhood years to the time he recorded his active imaginations.

Amongst Freemasons in the latter part of the nineteenth century there was an ongoing debate as to whether the Order was a direct descendant of the ancient Mysteries or whether there was simply a resemblance between them (Mackey 1905, pp. 174–198). The ancient Mysteries were a body of secret ritual practices undergone by a select few that occurred alongside the public religions of the day amongst many different cultural groups in the ancient world. Each religious group had its own version of the Mysteries but they shared a common structure that involved a dramatic form of ritual theatre, a series of initiatory ordeals and a body of mystical knowledge conveyed through allegories, symbols and scenic representations. These initiations had a powerful effect on the imagination of the candidates and generated intense and conflicting emotions. All versions of the ancient Mysteries also contained a progressive order of degrees, as does Freemasonry. Masonic rituals consist of an ordeal, sometimes aimed at frightening the candidate, an oath and the communication of traditional secrets, not unlike the practices in the ancient Mysteries (Bogdan 2007, p. 75). A widely circulated definition of Freemasonry, that it is ‘a science of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols’, corresponds with the basic principles of the ancient Mysteries (Mackey 1882, p. 3).

Progress through the ancient Mysteries was comprised of three main steps. The first of these was Lustration, where the candidate underwent a preparatory cleansing, either as a physical washing or as some form of moral cleansing. The second step, known as Initiation, was where ‘the neophyte personated the supposed events of the life, the sufferings, and the death of the god or hero to whom the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of boxes
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Some notes on Jung’s childhood dreams
• 3. Discussing Liber Primus
• 4. Discussing Liber Secundus
• 5. Discussing Scrutinies
• 6. Other questions, other explanations
• 7. Conclusion
• Index