Ephemera: Liber Novus OR The Red Book
Carl Jung's descent into his own unconscious, and the cryptic and fecund results
Saito: “You remind me of someone... a man I met in a half-remembered dream. He was possessed of some radical notions.” - Inception (2010)
I’ve recently become re-interested in esoteric and hermetic and gnostic philosophy (if philosophy is truly the right word for such a mystical and confusing and occult system of thought and practice). I’m working on a ‘grand synthesis’ of the narratives of creation: a speculative re-reading of the stories of Genesis, the pleroma, Sophia, the Demiurge, the narrative sweep of Christianity, and Islam… plus what we seem to know about history and cosmology. This sounds a lot bigger and more impressive than it is. It’s more or less a thought experiment in which I try to find similarities and recurrences among and between the biggest Western epistemological traditions. As I’ve aged I’ve tended to believe that there is something behind most of the enduring cultural epics which have structured knowledge for morality. I’m still essentially a rational materialist but the recent UAP phenomena and my re-readings of Christian gospels and Mesopotamian creation myths and heroic epics have tended to make me believe that ghosts, demons, prophecy, creation… all have at least hints of truth. To dismiss them entirely seems hasty. We cannot reliably measure or replicate these things and so they are not amenable to pedestrian science. Neither, though, can we measure consciousness, nor even formulate the barest hints of an explanatory model. Neither can we simulate or (currently) understand the phenomenon of Near Death Experiences (NDE’s), one type of phenomena which is fascinating and fairly eerie. Neither can we measure or replicate the UAP phenomena, and every possible explanation (that I’ve been able to construct) only leads to deeper mysteries.
The world is a confusing and layered and mysterious place and we are only in it for a short while. I think the newly-found enthusiasm for psychedelic experiences and the recent state acknowledgement of the UAP phenomena and the recent experiments on NDE’s predict a more open and flexible scientific stance toward the mysterious and the fringe and I think that will be an interesting and healthy development. Science is, at the end of the day, a process for learning and not a focus of study or a subject matter classification.
Here are some tangential pieces I have written about UAP’s, psychedelia, and Gnosticism. You can expect more to come:
The UFO Transition
The Return of the Spiritual
I’m always wary of categorizers and cycle-finders: those thinkers who try to discern regular groupings and relationships and patterns in human activity. They always seem to focus on certain events and factors, ignoring those that don’t fit their grand outlines. These outlines seem to be good guides to the near future… until they’re not. I could create a cyclic “model of history” right now:
Social Justice as a Gnostic Cult (?)
Exploring social justice ideology as a modern permutation of a very ancient and secretive religious tradition I've recently gone head-first down a rabbit hole of philosophy, reading Marx and Rubin and some of the early critical theorists and listening to James Lindsay's New Discourses series, in which he lays out a well developed and fascinating hypothesis: Hegel's dialectic, Marxism, Critical Theory, and the modern offshoots of social justice are all associated worldviews which follow the tradition of a very old religious impulse. They are modern incarnations of Gnosticism.
Midnight in the Temple of Demeter
We have so much that is novel and useful in the modern world: air conditioning and air travel and antibiotics and search engines. Yet, we lack a great deal as well… and these are things which no human society has ever gone without (in their totality): a ritual of manhood (naming ceremony); a firm belief in our culture and our cosmology; a clear idea of sex and gender roles, with the corresponding norms of mating and child-rearing;
To continue this path into ephemeral and strange subjects, I introduce to you today Liber Novus, ‘The Red Book’, worked on for decades by Carl Jung and secretively kept by his estate until some five decades after his death. It was written in German calligraphy and colorfully and ornately illustrated using paint and ink by Jung himself, in the manner of a medieval tome. It is truly a beautiful work. Were I to become a billionaire I would prize acquisition of the Red Book above most anything else. It is a profound and profoundly strange document.
Because of the intense secrecy surrounding it (Jung didn’t publicly reference it during his lifetime and only showed it to a few trusted confidants) it’s impossible to say exactly what the Red Book is. According to Jung it was an exercise in ‘active imagination’ during a challenging and emotionally constipated time in his life. He would retire to his study at night and let images come to him and passively allow them to develop of their own accord, following paths and interacting with mysterious figures without interference from his ego or his fears or desires. He spoke to crowds of the dead, devoured organs, died, and was born again This went on for years and the experiences were transcribed into his book… (faithfully? I cannot say).
I tend to think that Jung was experimenting with psychedelic drugs, or was in a highly psychologically abnormal state, or had perhaps perfected some kind of self-hypnotism. Another possibility that occurs to me (based on my own experiences) is the liminal state, between dreaming sleep and wakefulness. Try sitting in a chair and beginning to doze, while maintaining attention. (If you’re like me) you will feel your thoughts become strange and extra-referential and themes and characters will begin to appear… but Jung was adamant that he was fully awake for these sessions and the long journeys and deep conversations he had do not accord with the early stages of daytime REM sleep. In any case, try following Jung’s (spotty) instructions to achieve active imagination and if you have any success please let me know. As Jung himself well knew, there is a massive and rarely penetrable wall between the conscious and the unconscious mind and it’s there for a reason-many of us would be reduced to lunatics or infants if we had to confront our unconscious directly, even at times and places of our choosing.
Jung had many interesting and mystical ideas: the collective unconscious, archetypes, the shadow, the animus… I encourage you to research the Red Book and Jungian psychology on your own time. I have deliberately left this account bare of details or of real-world context. I think that’s appropriate. We simply don’t know what the Red Book was, or is, and now we never will. This is a strange fact: a man who considered himself a scientist and who was determined to erect a new structure of psychological knowledge and treatment hid what is probably his most interesting, years-long experiment from the world. I can’t explain the Red Book, or introduce any details which will illuminate its character… so I will leave you with some translated excerpts and I hope you will begin to explore the work yourself.
There is one feature of Jungian thought which is fairly undeniable: we all contain many disparate elements and urges and shadowy thoughts and understanding and reconciling them is necessary to self actualize (or, as he called it, individuate) and to find success and real happiness in this life.
Good luck.
From The Red Book:
We should grow like a tree that likewise does not know its law. We tie ourselves up with intentions, not mindful of the fact that intention is the limitation, yes, the exclusion of life.
I swayed between fear, defiance, and nausea, and was wholly the prey of my passion. I could not and did not want to listen to the depths. But on the seventh night, the spirit of the depths spoke to me: “Look into your depths, pray to your depths, waken the dead.”
Solitude with ourselves has no end. It has only just begun.
Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you…
…Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.
You open the gates of the soul to let the dark flood of chaos flow into your order and meaning. If you marry the ordered to the chaos you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness.
Every step closer to my soul excites the scornful laughter of my devils, those cowardly ear-whisperers and poison-mixers.
That belongs to the earth. I recall my solar nature and would like to rush to my rising. But ruins stand in my way…
…The quarreling powers that for so long stood between me and myself lie behind me.
Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers...he transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night.
Silence and peace come over you if you begin to comprehend the darkness.
Further Reading:
Thanks for reading! Please like, comment, subscribe, and SHARE.
