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THE RED BOOK: LIBER NOVUS |
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Liber Primus [fo1. i(r)] [1] Isaias dixit: quis credidit auditui nostro et brachium Domini cui revelatum est? et ascendet sicut virgultum coram eo et sicut radix de terra sitienti non est species ei neque decor et vidimus eum et non erat aspectus et desideravimus eum: despectum et novissimum virorum Virum dolor [os] um et scientem infirmitatem et quasi absconditus vultus eius et despectus unde nec reputavimus eum. vere languores nostros ipse tulit et dolores nostros ipse portavit et nos putavimus eum quasi leprosum et percussum a Deo et humiliatum. Cap. liii/i-iv. parvulus enim natus est nobis filius datus est nobis et factus est principatus super umerum eius et vocabitur nomen eius Admirabilis consiliarius Deus fortis Pater futuri saeculi princeps pacis. caput ix/vi. [Isaiah said: Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. (Isaiah 53: 1-4)] [2] [For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. (Isaiah 9:6)] [3] Ioannes dixit: et verbum caro factum est et habitavit in nobis et vidimus gloriam eius gloriam quasi unigeniti a Patre plenum gratiae et veritatis. Ioann. Cap. i/xiiii. [John said: And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth. (John 1:14).] Isaias dixit: laetabitur deserta et invia et exultabit solitudo et fforebit quasi lilium. germinans germinabit et exultabit laetabunda et laudans. tunc aperientur oculi caecorum et aures sordorum patebunt. tunc saliet sicut cervus claudus aperta erit lingua mutorum: quia scissae sunt in deserto aquae et torrentes in solitudine et quae erat arida erit in stagnum et sitiens in fontes aquarum. in cubilibus in quibus prius dracones habitabant orietur viror calami et iunci. et erit ibi semita et via sancta vocabitur. non transibit per eam pollutus et haec erit vobis directa via ita ut stulti non errent per eam. Cap. xxxv. [Isaiah said: The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing ... Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert. And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water: in the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes. And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called The way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it; but it shall be for those: the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein. (Isaiah 35:1-8).] [4] manu propria scriptum a C. G. Jung anno Domini mcmxv in domu sua Kusnach Turicense [Written by C. G. Jung with his own hand in his house in Kusnacht/Zurich in the year 1915.] / [fol. i(r) / i(v)] [HI i(v)] [2] If I speak in the spirit of this time, [5] I must say: no one and nothing can justify what I must proclaim to you. Justification is superfluous to me, since I have no choice, but I must. I have learned that in addition to the spirit of this time there is still another spirit at work, namely that which rules the depths of everything contemporary. [6] The spirit of this time would like to hear of use and value. I also thought this way, and my humanity still thinks this way. But that other spirit forces me nevertheless to speak, beyond justification, use, and meaning. Filled with human pride and blinded by the presumptuous spirit of the times, I long sought to hold that other spirit away from me. But I did not consider that the spirit of the depths from time immemorial and for all the future possesses a greater power than the spirit of this time, who changes with the generations. The spirit of the depths has subjugated all pride and arrogance to the power of judgment. He took away my belief in science, he robbed me of the joy of explaining and ordering things, and he let devotion to the ideals of this time die out in me. He forced me down to the last and simplest things. The spirit of the depths took my understanding and all my knowledge and placed them at the service of the inexplicable and the paradoxical. He robbed me of speech and writing for everything that was not in his service, namely the melting together of sense and nonsense, which produces the supreme meaning. But the supreme meaning is the path, the way and the bridge to what is to come. That is the God yet to come. It is not the coming God himself, but his image which appears in the supreme meaning. [7] God is an image, and those who worship him must worship him in the images of the supreme meaning. The supreme meaning is not a meaning and not an absurdity, it is image and force in one, magnificence and force together. The supreme meaning is the beginning and the end. It is the bridge of going across and fulfillment. [8] The other Gods died of their temporality, yet the supreme meaning never dies, it turns into meaning and then into absurdity, and out of the fire and blood of their collision the supreme meaning rises up rejuvenated anew. The image of God has a shadow. The supreme meaning is real and casts a shadow. For what can be actual and corporeal and have no shadow? The shadow is nonsense. It lacks force and has no continued existence through itself. But nonsense is the inseparable and undying brother of the supreme meaning. Like plants, so men also grow, some in the light, others in the shadows. There are many who need the shadows and not the light. The image of God throws a shadow that is just as great as itself. The supreme meaning is great and small, it is as wide as the space of the starry Heaven and as narrow as the cell of the living body. The spirit
of this time in me wanted to recognize the greatness The spirit of this time tempted me with the thought that all this belongs to the shadowiness of the God-image. This would be pernicious deception, since the shadow is nonsense. But the small, narrow, and banal is not nonsense, but one of both of the essences of the Godhead. I resisted recognizing that the everyday belongs to the image of the Godhead. I fled this thought, I hid myself behind the highest and coldest stars. But the spirit of the depths caught up with me, and forced the bitter drink between my lips. [10] The spirit of this time whispered to me: "This supreme meaning, this image of God, this melting together of the hot and the cold, that is you and only you." But the spirit of the depths spoke to me: "[11] You are an image of the unending world, all the last mysteries of becoming and passing away live in you. If you did not possess all this, how could you know?" For the sake of my human weakness, the spirit of the depths gave me this word. Yet this word is also superfluous, since I do not speak it freely, but because I must. I speak because the spirit robs me of joy and life if I do not speak. [12] I am the serf who brings it and does not know what he carries in his hand. It would burn his hands if he did not place it where his master orders him to lay it. The spirit of our time spoke to me and said: "What dire urgency could be forcing you to speak all this?" This was an awful temptation. I wanted to ponder what inner or outer bind could force me into this, and because I found nothing that I could grasp, I was near to making one up. But with this the spirit of our time had almost brought it about that instead of speaking, I was thinking again about reasons and explanations. But the spirit of the depths spoke to me and said: "To understand a thing is a bridge and possibility of returning to the path. But to explain a matter is arbitrary and sometimes even murder. Have you counted the murderers among the scholars?" But the spirit of this time stepped up to me and laid before me huge volumes which contained all my knowledge. Their pages were made of ore, and a steel stylus had engraved inexorable words in them, and he pointed to these inexorable words and spoke to me, and said: "What you speak, that is madness." It is true, it is true, what I speak is the greatness and intoxication and ugliness of madness. But the spirit of the depths stepped up to me and said: "What you speak is. The greatness is, the intoxication is, the undignified, sick, paltry dailiness is. It runs in all the streets, lives in all the houses, and rules the day of all humanity. Even the eternal stars are commonplace. It is the great mistress and the one essence of God. One laughs about it, and laughter, too, is. Do you believe, man of this time, that laughter is lower than worship? Where is your measure, false measurer? [13] The sum of life decides in laughter and in worship, not your judgment." I must also speak the ridiculous. You coming men! You will recognize the supreme meaning by the fact that he is laughter and worship, a bloody laughter and a bloody worship. A sacrificial blood binds the poles. Those who know this laugh and worship in the same breath. After this, however, my humanity approached me and said: "What solitude, what coldness of desolation you lay upon me when you speak such! Reflect on the destruction of being and the streams of blood from the terrible sacrifice that the depths demand." [14] But the spirit of the depths said: "No one can or should halt sacrifice. Sacrifice is not destruction, sacrifice is the foundation stone of what is to come. Have you not had monasteries? Have not countless thousands gone into the desert? You should carry the monastery in yourself. The desert is within you. The desert calls you and draws you back, and if you were fettered to the world of this time with iron, the call of the desert would break all chains. Truly, I prepare you for solitude." After this, my humanity remained silent. Something happened to my spirit, however, which I must call mercy. My speech is imperfect. Not because I want to shine with words, but out of the impossibility of finding those words, I speak in images. With nothing else can I express the words from the depths. The mercy which happened to me gave me belief, hope, and sufficient daring, not to resist further the spirit of the depths, but to utter his word. But before I could pull myself together to really do it, I needed a visible sign that would show me that the spirit of the depths in me was at the same time the ruler of the depths of world affairs. [15] It happened in October of the year 1913 as I was leaving alone for a journey, that during the day I was suddenly overcome in broad daylight by a vision: I saw a terrible flood that covered all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. It reached from England up to Russia, and from the coast of the North Sea right up to the Alps. I saw yellow waves, swimming rubble, and the death of countless thousands. This vision lasted for two hours, it confused me and made me ill. I was not able to interpret it. Two weeks passed then the vision returned, still more violent than before, and an inner voice spoke: "Look at it, it is completely real, and it will come to pass. You cannot doubt this." I wrestled again for two hours with this vision, but it held me fast. It left me exhausted and confused. And I thought my mind had gone crazy. [16] From then on the anxiety toward the terrible event that stood directly before us kept coming back. Once I also saw a sea of blood over the northern lands. In the year 1914 in the month of June, at the beginning and end of the month, and at the beginning of July, I had the same dream three times: I was in a foreign land, and suddenly, overnight and right in the middle of summer, a terrible cold descended from space. All seas and rivers were locked in ice, every green living thing had frozen. The second dream was thoroughly similar to this. But the third dream at the beginning of July went as follows: I was in a remote English land. [17] It was necessary that I return to my homeland with a fast ship as speedily as possible. [18] I reached home quickly. [19] In my homeland I found that in the middle of summer a terrible cold had fallen from space, which had turned every living thing into ice. There stood a leaf-bearing but fruitless tree, whose leaves had turned into sweet grapes full of healing juice through the working of the frost. [20] I picked some grapes and gave them to a great waiting throng. [21] In reality, now, it was so: At the time when the great war broke out between the peoples of Europe, I found myself in Scotland, [22] compelled by the war to choose the fastest ship and the shortest route home. I encountered the colossal cold that froze everything, I met up with the flood, the sea of blood, and found my barren tree whose leaves the frost had transformed into a remedy. And I plucked the ripe fruit and gave it to you and I do not know what I poured out for you, what bitter-sweet intoxicating drink which left on your tongues an aftertaste of blood. Believe me: [23] It is no teaching and no instruction that I give you. On what basis should I presume to teach you? I give you news of the way of this man, but not of your own way. My path is not your path, therefore I / [fol. i(v) / ii(r)] cannot teach you. [24] The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws. Within us is the way, the truth, and the life. Woe betide those who live by way of examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself? So live yourselves. [25] The signposts have fallen, unblazed trails lie before us. [26] Do not be greedy to gobble up the fruits of foreign fields. Do you not know that you yourselves are the fertile acre which bears everything that avails you? Yet who today knows this? Who knows the way to the eternally fruitful climes of the soul? You seek the way through mere appearances, you study books and give ear to all kinds of opinion. What good is all that? There is only one way and that is your way. [27] You seek the path? I warn you away from my own. It can also be the wrong way for you. May each go his own way. I will be no savior, no lawgiver, no master teacher unto you. You are no longer little children. [28] Giving laws, wanting improvements, making things easier, has all become wrong and evil. May each one seek out his own way. The way leads to mutual love in community. Men will come to see and feel the similarity and commonality of their ways. Laws and teachings held in common compel people to solitude, so that they may escape the pressure of undesirable contact, but solitude makes people hostile and venomous. Therefore give people dignity and let each of them stand apart, so that each may find his own fellowship and love it. Power stands against power, contempt against contempt, love against love. Give humanity dignity, and trust that life will find the better way. The one eye of the Godhead is blind, the one ear of the Godhead is deaf, the order of its being is crossed by chaos. So be patient with the crippledness of the world and do not overvalue its consummate beauty. [29] [HI ii(r)] [30] [2] When I had the vision of the flood in October of the year 1913, it happened at a time that was significant for me as a man. At that time, in the fortieth year of my life, I had achieved everything that I had wished for myself. I had achieved honor, power, wealth, knowledge, and every human happiness. Then my desire for the increase of these trappings ceased, the desire ebbed from me and horror came over me. [32] The vision of the flood seized me and I felt the spirit of the depths, but I did not understand him. [33] Yet he drove me on with unbearable inner longing and I said: [1] [34] "My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you -- are you there? I have returned, I am here again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you, I am with you. After long years of long wandering, I have come to you again. Should I tell you everything I have seen, experienced, and drunk in? Or do you not want to hear about all the noise of life and the world? But one thing you must know: the one thing I have learned is that one must live this life. This life is the way, the long sought-after way to the unfathomable, which we call divine. [35] There is no other way, all other ways are false paths. I found the right way, it led me to you, to my soul. I return, tempered and purified. Do you still know me? How long the separation lasted! Everything has become so different. And how did I find you? How strange my journey was! What words should I use to tell you on what twisted paths a good star has guided me to you? Give me your hand, my almost forgotten soul. How warm the joy at seeing you again, you long disavowed soul. Life has led me back to you. Let us thank the life I have lived for all the happy and all the sad hours, for every joy, for every sadness. My soul, my journey should continue with you. I will wander with you and ascend to my solitude." [36] [2] The spirit of the depths forced me to say this and at the same time to undergo it against myself, since I had not expected it then. I still labored misguidedly under the spirit of this time, and thought differently about the human soul. I thought and spoke much of the soul. I knew many learned words for her, I had judged her and turned her into a scientific object. [37] I did not consider that my soul cannot be the object of my judgment and knowledge; much more are my judgment and knowledge the objects of my soul. [38] Therefore the spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being. I had to become aware that I had lost my soul. From this we learn how the spirit of the depths considers the soul: he sees her as a living and self-existing being, and with this he contradicts the spirit of this time for whom the soul is a thing dependent on man, which lets herself be judged and arranged, and whose circumference we can grasp. I had to accept that what I had previously called my soul was not at all my soul, but a dead system. [39] Hence I had to speak to my soul as to something far off and unknown, which did not exist through me, but through whom I existed. He whose desire turns away from outer things, reaches the place of the soul. [40] If he does not find the soul, the horror of emptiness will overcome him, and fear will drive him with a whip lashing time and again in a desperate endeavor and a blind desire for the hollow things of the world. He becomes a fool through his endless desire, and forgets the way of his soul, never to find her again. He will run after all things, and will seize hold of them, but he will not find his soul, since he would find her only in himself. Truly his soul lies in things and men, but the blind one seizes things and men, yet not his soul in things and men. He has no knowledge of his soul. How could he tell her apart from things and men? He could find his soul in desire itself, but not in the objects of desire. If he possessed his desire, and his desire did not possess him, he would lay a hand on his soul, since his desire is the image and expression of his soul. [41] If we possess the image of a thing, we possess half the thing. The image of the world is half the world. He who possesses the world but not its image possesses only half the world, since his soul is poor and has nothing. The wealth of the soul exists in images. [42] He who possesses the image of the world, possesses half the world, even if his humanity is poor and owns nothing. [43] But hunger makes the soul into a beast that devours the unbearable and is poisoned by it. My friends, it is wise to nourish the soul, otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart. [44] [HI ii(r)2] [45] On the second night I called out to my soul: [46] "I am weary, my soul, my wandering has lasted too long, my search for myself outside of myself. Now I have gone through events and find you behind all of them. For I made discoveries on my erring through events, humanity, and the world. I found men. And you, my soul, I found again, first in images within men and then you yourself. I found you where I least expected you. You climbed out of a dark shaft. You announced yourself to me in advance in dreams. [47] They burned in my heart and drove me to all the boldest acts of daring, and forced me to rise above myself. You let me see truths of which I had no previous inkling. You let me undertake journeys, whose endless length would have scared me, if the knowledge of them had not been secure in you. I wandered for many years, so long that I forgot that I possessed a soul. [48] Where were you all this time? Which Beyond sheltered you and gave you sanctuary? Oh, that you must speak through me, that my speech and I are your symbol and expression! How should I decipher you? Who are you, child? My dreams have represented you as a child and as a maiden. [49] I am ignorant of your mystery. [50] Forgive me if I speak as in a dream, like a drunkard -- are you God? Is God a child, a maiden? [51] Forgive me if I babble. No one else hears me. I speak to you quietly, and you know that I am neither a drunkard nor someone deranged, and that my heart twists in pain from the wound, whose darkness delivers speeches full of mockery: "You are lying to yourself! You spoke so as to deceive others and make them believe in you. You want to be a prophet and chase after your ambition." The wound still bleeds, and I am far from being able to pretend that I do not hear the mockery. How strange it sounds to me to call you a child, you who still hold the all-without-end in your hand. [52] I went on the way of the day, and you went invisibly with me, putting the pieces together meaningfully, and letting me see the whole in each part. You took away where I thought to take hold, and you gave me where I did not expect anything and time and again you brought about fate from new and unexpected quarters. Where I sowed, you robbed me of the harvest, and where I did not sow, you give me fruit a hundredfold. And time and again I lost the path and found it again where I would never have foreseen it. You upheld my belief, when I was alone and near despair. At every decisive moment you let me believe in myself." *** [2] Like a tired wanderer who had sought nothing in the world apart from her, shall I come closer to my soul. I shall learn that my soul finally lies behind everything, and if I cross the world, I am ultimately doing this to find my soul. Even the dearest are themselves not the goal and end of the love that goes on seeking, they are symbols of their own souls. My friends, do you guess to what solitude we ascend? I must learn that the dregs of my thought, my dreams, are the speech of my soul. I must carry them in my heart, and go back and forth over them in my mind, like the words of the person dearest to me. Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. Why should I henceforth not love my dreams and not make their riddling images into objects of my daily consideration? You think that the dream is foolish and ungainly. What is beautiful? What is ungainly? What is clever? What is foolish? The spirit of this time is your measure, but the spirit of the depths surpasses it at both ends. Only the spirit of this time knows the difference between large and small. But this difference is invalid, like the spirit which recognizes it. / [fol. ii(r) / ii(v)] *** The spirit of the depths even taught me to consider my action and my decision as dependent on dreams. Dreams pave the way for life, and they determine you without you understanding their language. [53] One would like to learn this language, but who can teach and learn it? Scholarliness alone is not enough; there is a knowledge of the heart that gives deeper insight. [54] The knowledge of the heart is in no book and is not to be found in the mouth of any teacher, but grows out of you like the green seed from the dark earth. Scholarliness belongs to the spirit of this time, but this spirit in no way grasps the dream, since the soul is everywhere that scholarly knowledge is not. But how can I attain the knowledge of the heart? You can attain this knowledge only by living your life to the full. You live your life fully if you also live what you have never yet lived, but have left for others to live or to think. [55] You will say: "But I cannot live or think everything that others live or think." But you should say: "The life that I could still live, I should live, and the thoughts that I could still think, I should think." It appears as though you want to flee from yourself so as not to have to live what remains unlived until now. [56] But you cannot flee from yourself. It is with you all the time and demands fulfillment. If you pretend to be blind and dumb to this demand, you feign being blind and deaf to yourself. This way you will never reach the knowledge of the heart. The knowledge of your heart is how your heart is. From a cunning heart you will know cunning. From a good heart you will know goodness. So that your understanding becomes perfect, consider that your heart is both good and evil. You ask, "What? Should I also live evil?" The spirit of the depths demands: "The life that you could still live, you should live. Well-being decides, not your well-being, not the well-being of the others, but only well-being." Well-being is between me and others, in society. I, too, lived
-- which I had to recognize that I am only the expression and symbol of the soul. In the sense of the spirit of the depths, I am as I am in this visible world a symbol of my soul, and I am thoroughly a serf, completely subjugated, utterly obedient. The spirit of the depths taught me to say: "I am the servant of a child." Through this dictum I learn above all the most extreme humility, as what I most need. The spirit of this time of course allowed me to believe in my reason. He let me see myself in the image of a leader with ripe thoughts. But the spirit of the depths teaches me that I am a servant, in fact the servant of a child. This dictum was repugnant to me and I hated it. But I had to recognize and accept that my soul is a child and that my God in my soul is a child. [57]
My God is a child, so wonder not that the spirit of this time in me is incensed to mockery and scorn. There will be no one who will laugh at me as I laughed at myself. Your God should not be a man of mockery, rather you yourself will be the man of mockery. You should mock yourself and rise above this. If you have still not learned this from the old holy books, then go there, drink the blood and eat the flesh of him who was mocked [61] and tormented for the sake of our sins, so that you totally become his nature, deny his being-apart-from-you; you should be he himself, not Christians but Christ, otherwise you will be of no use to the coming God. Is there any one among you who believes he can be spared the way? Can he swindle his way past the pain of Christ? I say: "Such a one deceives himself to his own detriment. He beds down on thorns and fire. No one can be spared the way of Christ, since this way leads to what is to come. You should all become Christs. [62] You do not overcome the old teaching through doing less, but through doing more. Every step closer to my soul excites the scornful laughter of my devils, those cowardly ear-whisperers and poison-mixers. It was easy for them to laugh, since I had to do strange things. [HI ii(v)] [63] On the following night I had to write down all the dreams that I could recollect, true to their wording. [64] The meaning of this act was dark to me. Why all this? Forgive the fuss that rises in me. Yet you want me to do this. What strange things are happening to me? I know too much not to see on what swaying bridges I go. Where are you leading me? Forgive my excessive apprehension, brimful of knowledge. My foot hesitates to follow you. Into what mist and darkness does your path lead? Must I also learn to do without meaning? If this is what you demand, then so be it. This hour belongs to you. What is there, where there is no meaning? Only nonsense, or madness, it seems to me. Is there also a supreme meaning? Is that your meaning, my soul? I limp after you on crutches of understanding. I am a man and you stride like a God. What torture! I must return to myself, to my smallest things. I saw the things of my soul as small, pitiably small. You force me to see them as large, to make them large. Is that your aim? I follow, but it terrifies me. Hear my doubts, otherwise I cannot follow, since your meaning is a supreme meaning, and your steps are the steps of a God. I understand, I must not think either; should thought, too, no longer be? I should give myself completely into your hands -- but who are you? I do not trust you. Not once to trust, is that my love for you, my joy in you? Do I not trust every valiant man, and not you, my soul? Your hand lies heavy on me, but I will, I will. Have I not sought to love men and trust them, and should I not do this with you? Forget my doubts, I know it is ignoble to doubt you. You know how difficult it is for me to set aside the beggar's pride I take in my own thought. I forgot that you are also one of my friends, and have the first right to my trust. Should what I give them not belong to you? I recognize my injustice. It seems to me that I despised you. My joy at finding you again was not genuine. I also recognize that the scornful laughter in me was right. I must learn to love you. [65] Should I also set aside self-judgment? I am afraid. Then the soul spoke to me and said: "This fear testifies against me!" It is true, it testifies against you. It kills the holy trust between you and me. [2] How hard is fate! If you take a step toward your soul, you will at first miss the meaning. You will believe that you have sunk into meaninglessness, into eternal disorder. You will be right! Nothing will deliver you from disorder and meaninglessness, since this is the other half of the world. Your God is a child, so long as you are not childlike. Is the child order, meaning? Or disorder, caprice? Disorder and meaninglessness are the mother of order and meaning. Order and meaning are things that have become and are no longer becoming. 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. You are afraid to open the door? I too was afraid, since we had forgotten that God is terrible. Christ taught: God is love. [66] But you should know that love is also terrible. I spoke to a loving soul and as I drew nearer to her, I was overcome by horror, and I heaped up a wall of doubt, and did not anticipate that I thus wanted to protect myself from my fearful soul. You dread the depths; it should horrify you, since the way of what is to come leads through it. You must endure the temptation of fear and doubt, and at the same time acknowledge to the bone that your fear is justified and your doubt is reasonable. How otherwise / [fol. ii(v) / iii(r)] could it be a true temptation and a true overcoming? Christ totally overcomes the temptation of the devil, but not the temptation of God to good and reason. [67] Christ thus succumbs to cursing. [68] You still have to learn this, to succumb to no temptation, but to do everything of your own will; then you will be free and beyond Christianity. I have had to recognize that I must submit to what I fear; yes, even more, that I must even love what horrifies me. We must learn such from that saint who was disgusted by the plague infections; she drank the pus of plague boils and became aware that it smelled like roses. The acts of the saint were not in vain. [69] In everything regarding your salvation and the attainment of mercy, you are dependent on your soul. Thus no sacrifice can be too great for you. If your virtues hinder you from salvation, discard them, since they have become evil to you. The slave to virtue finds the way as little as the slave to vices. [70] If you believe that you are the master of your soul, then become her servant. If you were her servant, make yourself her master, since she needs to be ruled. These should be your first steps. *** During six further nights, the spirit of the depths was silent in me, since 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." [71] But I stood helpless and did not know what I could do. I looked into myself, and the only thing I found within was the memory of earlier dreams, all of which I wrote down without knowing what good this would do. I wanted to throw everything away and return to the light of day. But the spirit stopped me and forced me back into myself. The Desert
[72] Sixth night. My soul leads me into the desert, into the desert of my own self. I did not think that my soul is a desert, a barren, hot desert, dusty and without drink. The journey leads through hot sand, slowly wading without a visible goal to hope for? How eerie is this wasteland. It seems to me that the way leads so far away from mankind. I take my way step by step, and do not know how long my journey will last. Why is my self a desert? Have I lived too much outside of myself in men and events? Why did I avoid my self? Was I not dear to myself? But I have avoided the place of my soul. I was my thoughts, after I was no longer events and other men. But I was not my self, confronted with my thoughts. I should also rise up above my thoughts to my own self. My journey goes there, and that is why it leads away from men and events into solitude. Is it solitude, to be with oneself? Solitude is true only when the self is a desert. [73] Should I also make a garden out of the desert? Should I people a desolate land? Should I open the airy magic garden of the wilderness? What leads me into the desert, and what am I to do there? Is it a deception that I can no longer trust my thoughts? Only life is true, and only life leads me into the desert, truly not my thinking, that would like to return to thoughts, to men and events, since it feels uncanny in the desert. My soul, what am I to do here? But my soul spoke to me and said, "Wait." I heard the cruel word. Torment belongs to the desert. [74] Through giving my soul all I could give, I came to the place of the soul and found that this place was a hot desert, desolate and unfruitful. No culture of the mind is enough to make a garden out of your soul. I had cultivated my spirit, the spirit of this time in me, but not that spirit of the depths that turns to the things of the soul, the world of the soul. The soul has its own peculiar world. Only the self enters in there, or the man who has completely become his self, he who is neither in events, nor in men, nor in his thoughts. Through the turning of my desire from things and men, I turned my self away from things and men, but that is precisely how I became the secure prey of my thoughts, yes, I wholly became my thoughts. *** [2] I also had to detach myself from my thoughts through turning my desire away from them. And at once, I noticed that my self became a desert, where only the sun of unquiet desire burned. I was overwhelmed by the endless infertility of this desert. Even if something could have thrived there, the creative power of desire was still absent. Wherever the creative power of desire is, there springs the soil's own seed. But do not forget to wait. Did you not see that when your creative force turned to the world, how the dead things moved under it and through it, how they grew and prospered, and how your thoughts flowed in rich rivers? If your creative force now turns to the place of the soul, you will see how your soul becomes green and how its field bears wonderful fruit. Nobody can spare themselves the waiting and most will be unable to bear this torment, but will throw themselves with greed back at men, things, and thoughts, whose slaves they will become from then on. Since then it will have been clearly proved that this man is incapable of enduring beyond things, men, and thoughts, and they will hence become his master and he will become their fool, since he cannot be without them, not until even his soul has become a fruitful field. Also he whose soul is a garden, needs things, men, and thoughts, but he is their friend and not their slave and fool. Everything to come was already in images: to find their soul, the ancients went into the desert. [75] This is an image. The ancients lived their symbols, since the world had not yet become real for them. Thus they went into the solitude of the desert to teach us that the place of the soul is a lonely desert. There they found the abundance of visions, the fruits of the desert, the wondrous flowers of the soul. Think diligently about the images that the ancients have left behind. They show the way of what is to come. Look back at the collapse of empires, of growth and death, of the desert and monasteries, they are the images of what is to come. Everything has been foretold. But who knows how to interpret it? When you say that the place of the soul is not, then it is not. But if you say that it is, then it is. Notice what the ancients said in images: the word is a creative act. The ancients said: in the beginning was the Word. [76] Consider this and think upon it. The words that oscillate between nonsense and supreme meaning are the oldest and truest. Experiences in the Desert
[77] After a hard struggle I have come a piece of the way nearer to you. How hard this struggle was! I had fallen into an undergrowth of doubt, confusion, and scorn. I recognize that I must be alone with my soul. I come with empty hands to you, my soul. What do you want to hear? But my soul spoke to me and said, "If you come to a friend, do you come to take?" I knew that this should not be so, but it seems to me that I am poor and empty. I would like to sit down near you and at least feel the breath of your animating presence. My way is hot sand. All day long, sandy, dusty paths. My patience is sometimes weak and once I despaired of myself, as you know. My soul answered and said, "You speak to me as if you were a child complaining to its mother. I am not your mother." I do not want to complain, but let me say to you that mine is a long and dusty road. You are to me like a shady tree in the wilderness. I would like to enjoy your shade. But my soul answered, "You are pleasure-seeking. Where is your patience? Your time has not yet run its course. Have you forgotten why you went into the desert?" My faith is weak my face is blind from all that shimmering blaze of the desert sun. The heat lies on me like lead. Thirst torments me, I dare not think how unendingly long my way is, and above all, I see nothing in front of me. But the soul answered, "You speak as if you have still learned nothing. Can you not wait? Should everything fall into your lap ripe and finished? You are full, yes, you teem with intentions and desirousness! -- Do you still not know that the way to truth stands open only to those without intentions?" I know that everything you say, Oh my soul, is also my thought. But I hardly live according to it. The soul said, "How, tell me, do you then believe that your thoughts should help you?" I would always like to refer to the fact that I am a human being, just a human being who is weak and sometimes does not do his best. But the soul said, "Is this what you think it means to be human?" You are hard, my soul, but you are right. How little we still commit ourselves to living. 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. We believe that we can illuminate the darkness with an intention, and in that way aim past the light. [78] How can we presume to want to know in advance, from where the light will come to us? Let me bring only one complaint before you: I suffer from scorn, my own scorn. But my soul said to me, "Do you think little of yourself?" I do not believe so. My soul answered, "Then listen, do you think little of me? Do you still not know that you are not writing a book to feed your vanity, but that you are speaking with me? How can you suffer from scorn if you address me with those words that I give you? Do you know, then, who I am? Have you grasped me, defined me, and made me into a dead formula? Have you measured the depths of my chasms, and explored all the ways down which I am yet going to lead you? Scorn cannot challenge you if you are not vain to the marrow of your bones." Your truth is hard. I want to lay down my vanity before you, since it blinds me. See, that is why I also believed my hands were empty when I came to you today. I did not consider that it is you who fills empty hands if only they want to stretch out, yet they do not want to. I did not know that I am your vessel, empty without you but brimming over with you. [2] This was my twenty-fifth night in the desert. This is how long it took my soul to awaken from a shadowy being to her own life, until she could approach me as a free-standing being separate from me. And I received hard but salutary words from her. I needed that taking in hand, since I could not overcome the scorn within me. The spirit of this time considers itself extremely clever, like every such spirit of the time. But wisdom is simpleminded, not just simple. Because of this, the clever person mocks wisdom, since mockery is his weapon. He uses the pointed, poisonous weapon, because he is struck by naive wisdom. If he were not struck, he would not need the weapon. Only in the desert do we become aware of our terrible simplemindedness, but we are afraid of admitting it. "That is why we are scornful. But mockery / [fol. iii(r) / iii(v)] does not attain simplemindedness. The mockery falls on the mocker, and in the desert where no one hears and answers, he suffocates from his own scorn. The cleverer you are, the more foolish your simplemindedness. The totally clever are total fools in their simplemindedness. We cannot save ourselves from the cleverness of the spirit of this time through increasing our cleverness, but through accepting what our cleverness hates most, namely simplemindedness. Yet we also do not want to be artificial fools because we have fallen into simplemindedness, rather we will be clever fools. That leads to the supreme meaning. Cleverness couples itself with intention. Simplemindedness knows no intention. Cleverness conquers the world, but simplemindedness, the soul. So take on the vow of poverty of spirit in order to partake of the soul. [79] Against this the scorn of my cleverness rose up. [80] Many will laugh at my foolishness. But no one will laugh more than I laughed at myself. So I overcame scorn. But when I had overcome it, I was near to my soul, and she could speak to me, and I was soon to see the desert becoming green.
Descent into Hell in the Future
[81] In the following night, the air was filled with many voices. A loud voice called, "I am falling." Others cried out confused and excited during this: "Where to? What do you want?" Should I entrust myself to this confusion? I shuddered. It is a dreadful deep. Do you want me to leave myself to chance, to the madness of my own darkness? Wither? Wither? You fall, and I want to fall with you, whoever you are. The spirit of the depths opened my eyes and I caught a glimpse of the inner things, the world of my soul, the many-formed and changing. [Image iii (v) I] *** I see a gray rock face along which I sink into great depths. [82] I stand in black dirt up to my ankles in a dark cave. Shadows sweep over me. I am seized by fear, but I know I must go in. I crawl through a narrow crack in the rock and reach an inner cave whose bottom is covered with black water. But beyond this I catch a glimpse of a luminous red stone which I must reach. I wade through the muddy water. The cave is full of the frightful noise of shrieking voices. [83] I take the stone, it covers a dark opening in the rock. I hold the stone in my hand, peering around inquiringly. I do not want to listen to the voices, they keep me away. [84] But I want to know. Here something wants to be uttered. I place my ear to the opening. I hear the flow of underground waters. I see the bloody head of a man on the dark stream. Someone wounded, someone slain floats there. I take in this image for a long time, shuddering. I see a large black scarab floating past on the dark stream. In the deepest reach of the stream shines a red sun, radiating through the dark water. There I see -- and a terror seizes me -- small serpents on the dark rock walls, striving toward the depths, where the sun shines. A thousand serpents crowd around, veiling the sun. Deep night falls. A red stream of blood, thick red blood springs up, surging for a long time, then ebbing. I am seized by fear. What did I see? [85] [Image iii(v) 2] Heal the wounds that doubt inflicts on me, my soul. That too is to be overcome, so that I can recognize your supreme meaning. How far away everything is, and how I have turned back! My spirit is a spirit of torment, it tears asunder my contemplation, it would dismantle everything and rip it apart. I am still a victim of my thinking. When can I order my thinking to be quiet, so that my thoughts, those unruly hounds, will crawl to my feet? How can I ever hope to hear your voice louder, to see your face clearer, when all my thoughts howl? I am stunned, but I want to be stunned, since I have sworn to you, my soul, to trust you even if you lead me through madness. How shall I ever walk under your sun if I do not drink the bitter draught of slumber to the lees? Help me so that I do not choke on my own knowledge. The fullness of my knowledge threatens to fall in on me. My knowledge has a thousand voices, an army roaring like lions; the air trembles when they speak, and I am their defenseless sacrifice. Keep it far from me, science that clever knower, [86] that bad prison master who binds the soul and imprisons it in a lightless cell. But above all protect me from the serpent of judgment, which only appears to be a healing serpent, yet in your depths is infernal poison and agonizing death. I want to go down cleansed into your depths with white garments and not rush in like some thief, seizing whatever I can and fleeing breathlessly. Let me persist in divine [87] astonishment, so that I am ready to behold your wonders. Let me lay my head on a stone before your door, so that I am prepared to receive your light. *** [2] When the desert begins to bloom, it brings forth strange plants. You will consider yourself mad, and in a certain sense you will in fact be mad. [88] To the extent that the Christianity of this time lacks madness, it lacks divine life. Take note of what the ancients taught us in images: madness is divine. [89] But because the ancients lived this image concretely in events, it became a deception for us, since we became masters of the reality of the world. It is unquestionable: if you enter into the world of the soul, you are like a madman, and a doctor would consider you to be sick. What I say here can be seen as sickness, but no one can see it as sickness more than I do. This is how I overcame madness. If you do not know what divine madness is, suspend judgment and wait for the fruits. [90] But know that there is a divine madness which is nothing other than the overpowering of the spirit of this time through the spirit of the depths. Speak then of sick delusion when the spirit of the depths can no longer stay down and forces a man to speak in tongues instead of in human speech, and makes him believe that he himself is the spirit of the depths. But also speak of sick delusion when the spirit of this time does not leave a man and forces him to see only the surface, to deny the spirit of the depths and to take himself for the spirit of the times. The spirit of this time is ungodly, the spirit of the depths is ungodly; balance is godly. Because I was caught up in the spirit of this time, precisely what happened to me on this night had to happen to me, namely that the spirit of the depths erupted with force, and swept away the spirit of this time with a powerful wave. But the spirit of the depths had gained this power, because I had spoken to my soul during 25 nights in the desert and I had given her all my love and submission. But during the 25 days, I gave all my love and submission to things, to men, and to the thoughts of this time. I went into the desert only at night. Thus can you differentiate sick and divine delusion. Whoever does the one and does without the other you may call sick since he is out of balance. But who can withstand fear when the divine intoxication and madness comes to him? Love, soul, and God are beautiful and terrible. The ancients brought over some of the beauty of God into this world, and this world became so beautiful that it appeared to the spirit of the time to be fulfillment, and better than the bosom of the Godhead. The frightfulness and cruelty of the world lay under wraps and in the depths of our hearts. If the spirit of the depths seizes you, you will feel the cruelty and cry out in torment. The spirit of the depths is pregnant with iron, fire, and death. You are right to fear the spirit of the depths, as he is full of horror. You see in these days what the spirit of the depths bore. You did not believe it, but you would have known it if you had taken counsel with your fear. [91] Blood shone at me from the red light of the crystal, and when I picked it up to discover its mystery, there lay the horror uncovered before me: in the depths of what is to come lay murder. The blond hero lay slain. The black beetle is the death that is necessary for renewal; and so thereafter, a new sun glowed, the sun of the depths, full of riddles, a sun of the night. And as the rising sun of spring quickens the dead earth, so the sun of the depths quickened the dead, and thus began the terrible struggle between light and darkness. Out of that burst the powerful and ever unvanquished source of blood. This was what was to come, which you now experience in your life, and it is even more than that. (I had this vision on the night of 12 December 1913.) Depths and surface should mix so that new life can develop. Yet the new life does not develop outside of us, but within us. What happens outside us in these days is the image that the peoples live in events, to bequeath this image immemorially to far-off times so that they might learn from it for their own way, just as we learned from the images that the ancients had lived before us in events. Life does not come from events, but from us. Everything that happens outside has already been. Therefore whoever considers the event from outside always sees only that it already was, and that it is always the same. But whoever looks from inside, knows that everything is new. The events that happen are always the same. But the creative depths if man are not always the same. Events signify nothing, they signify only in us. We create the meaning of events. The meaning is and always was artificial. We make it. Because of this we seek in ourselves the meaning if events, so that the way of / [fol. iii(v) / iv(r)] what is to come becomes apparent and our life can flow again. That which you need comes from yourself, namely the meaning of the event. The meaning of events is not their particular meaning. This meaning exists in learned books. Events have no meaning. The meaning of events is the way of salvation that you create. The meaning of events comes from the possibility of life in this world that you create. It is the mastery if this world and the assertion of your soul in this world. This meaning of events is the supreme meaning, that is not in events, and not in the soul, but is the God standing between events and the soul, the mediator of life, the way, the bridge and the going across. [92] I would not have been able to see what was to come if I could not have seen it in myself. Therefore I take part in that murder; the sun of the depths also shines in me after the murder has been accomplished; the thousand serpents that want to devour the sun are also in me. I myself am a murderer and murdered, sacrificer and sacrificed. [93] The upwelling blood streams out of me. You all have a share in the murder. [94] In you the reborn one will come to be, and the sun of the depths will rise, and a thousand serpents will develop from your dead matter and fall on the sun to choke it. Your blood will stream forth. The peoples demonstrate this at the present time in unforgettable acts, that will be written with blood in unforgettable books for eternal memory. [95] But I ask you, when do men fall on their brothers with mighty weapons and bloody acts? They do such if they do not know that their brother is themselves. They themselves are sacrificers, but they mutually do the service of sacrifice. They must all sacrifice each other, since the time has not yet come when man puts the bloody knife into himself, in order to sacrifice the one he kills in his brother. But whom do people kill? They kill the noble, the brave, the heroes. They take aim at these and do not know that with these they mean themselves. They should sacrifice the hero in themselves, and because they do not know this, they kill their courageous brother. The time is still not ripe. But through this blood sacrifice, it should ripen. So long as it is possible to murder the brother instead of oneself, the time is not ripe. Frightful things must happen until men grow ripe. But anything else will not ripen humanity. Hence all this that takes place in these days must also be, so that the renewal can come. Since the source of blood that follows the shrouding of the sun is also the source of the new life. [96] As the fate of the peoples is represented to you in events, so will it happen in your heart. If the hero in you is slain, then the sun of the depths rises in you, glowing from afar, and from a dreadful place. But all the same, everything that up till now seemed to be dead in you will come to life, and will change into poisonous serpents that will cover the sun, and you will fall into night and confusion. Your blood also will stream from many wounds in this frightful struggle. Your shock and doubt will be great, but from such torment the new life will be born. Birth is blood and torment. Your darkness, which you did not suspect since it was dead, will come to life and you will feel the crush of total evil and the conflicts of life that still now lie buried in the matter of your body. But the serpents are dreadful evil thoughts and feelings. You thought you knew that abyss? Oh you clever people! It is another thing to experience it. Everything will happen to you. Think of all the frightful and devilish things that men have inflicted on their brothers. That should happen to you in your heart. Suffer it yourself through your own hand, and know that it is your own heinous and devilish hand that inflicts the suffering on you, but not your brother, who wrestles with his own devils. [97] I would like you to see what the murdered hero means. Those nameless men who in our day have murdered a prince are blind prophets who demonstrate in events what then is valid only for the soul. [98] Through the murder of princes we will learn that the prince in us, the hero, is threatened. [99] Whether this should be seen as a good or a bad sign need not concern us. What is awful today is good in a hundred years, and in two hundred years is bad again. But we must recognize what is happening: there are nameless ones in you who threaten your prince, the hereditary ruler. But our ruler is the spirit of this time, which rules and leads in us all. It is the general spirit in which we think and act today. He is of frightful power, since he has brought immeasurable good to this world and fascinated men with unbelievable pleasure. He is bejewelled with the most beautiful heroic virtue, and wants to drive men up to the brightest solar heights, in everlasting ascent. [100] The hero wants to open up everything he can. But the nameless spirit of the depths evokes everything that man cannot. Incapacity prevents further ascent. Greater height requires greater virtue. We do not possess it. We must first create it by learning to live with our incapacity. We must give it life. For how else shall it develop into ability? We cannot slay our incapacity and rise above it. But that is precisely what we wanted. Incapacity will overcome us and demand its share of life. Our ability will desert us, and we will believe, in the sense of the spirit of this time, that it is a loss. Yet it is no loss but a gain, not for outer trappings, however, but for inner capability. The one who learns to live with his incapacity has learned a great deal. This will lead us to the valuation of the smallest things, and to wise limitation, which the greater height demands. If all heroism is erased, we fall back into the misery of humanity and into even worse. Our foundations will be caught up in excitement since our highest tension, which concerns what lies outside us, will stir them up. We will fall into the cesspool of our underworld, among the rubble of all the centuries in us. [101] The heroic in you is the fact that you are ruled by the thought that this or that is good, that this or that performance is indispensable, this or that cause is objectionable, this or that goal must be attained in headlong striving work, this or that pleasure should be ruthlessly repressed at all costs. Consequently you sin against incapacity. But incapacity exists. No one should deny it, find fault with it, or shout it down. [102] Splitting of the Spirit But on the fourth night I cried, "To journey to Hell means to become Hell oneself. [103] It is all frightfully muddled and interwoven. On this desert path there is not just glowing sand, but also horrible tangled invisible beings who live in the desert. I didn't know this. The way is only apparently clear, the desert is only apparently empty. It seems inhabited by magical beings who murderously attach themselves to me and daimonically change my form. I have evidently taken on a completely monstrous form in which I can no longer recognize myself. It seems to me that I have become a monstrous animal form for which I have exchanged my humanity. This way is surrounded by hellish magic, invisible nooses have been thrown over me and ensnare me." But the spirit of the depths approached me and said, "Climb down into your depths, sink!" But I was indignant at him and said, "How can I sink? I am unable to do this myself." Then the spirit spoke words to me that appeared ridiculous, and he said, "Sit yourself down, be calm." But I cried out indignantly: "How frightful, it sounds like nonsense, do you also demand this of me? You overthrew the mighty Gods who mean the most to us. My soul, where are you? Have I entrusted myself to a stupid animal, do I stagger like a drunkard to the grave, do I stammer stupidities like a lunatic? Is this your way, my soul? The blood boils in me and I would strangle you if I could seize you. You weave the thickest darknesses and I am like a madman caught in your net. But I yearn, teach me." But my soul spoke to me saying, "My path is light." Yet I indignantly answered, "Do you call light what we men call the worst darkness? Do you call day night?" To this my soul spoke a word that roused my anger: "My light is not of this world." I cried, "I know of no other world." The soul answered, "Should it not exist because you know nothing of it?" I: "But our knowledge? Does our knowledge also not hold good for you? What is it going to be, if not knowledge? Where is security? Where is solid ground? Where is light? Your darkness is not only darker than night, but bottomless as well. If it's not going to be knowledge, then perhaps it will do without speech and words too?" My soul: "No words." I: "Forgive me, perhaps I'm hard of hearing, perhaps I misinterpret you, perhaps I ensnare myself in self-deceit and monkey business, and I am a rascal grinning at myself in a mirror, a fool in my own madhouse. Perhaps you stumble over my folly?" My soul: "You delude yourself, you do not deceive me. Your words are lies to you, not me." I: "But could I wallow in raging nonsense, and hatch absurdity and perverse monotony?" My soul: "Who gives you thoughts and words? Do you make them? Are you not my serf, a recipient who lies at my door and picks up my alms? And you dare think that what you devise and speak could be nonsense? Don't you know yet that it comes from me and belongs to me?" So I cried full of anger, "But then my indignation must also come from you, and in me you are indignant against yourself." My soul then spoke the ambiguous words: "That is civil war." [104] I was afflicted with pain and rage, and I answered back, "How painful, my soul, to hear you use hollow words; I feel sick. Comedy and drivel -- but I yearn. I can also crawl through mud and the most despised banality. I can also eat dust; that is part of Hell. I do not yield, I am defiant. You can go on devising torments, spider-legged monsters, ridiculous, hideous, frightful theatrical spectacles. Come close, I am ready. Ready, my soul, you who are a devil, to wrestle with you too. You donned the mask of a God, and I worshiped you. Now you wear the mask of a devil, a frightful one, the mask of the banal, of eternal mediocrity! Only one favor! Give me a moment to step back and consider! Is the struggle with this mask worthwhile? Was the mask of God worth worshiping? I cannot do it, the lust for battle burns in my limbs. No, I cannot leave the battlefield defeated. I want to seize you, crush you, monkey, buffoon. Woe if the struggle is unequal, my hands grab at air. But your blows are also air, and I perceive trickery." *** I find myself again on the desert path. It was a desert vision, a vision of the solitary who has wandered down long roads. There lurk invisible robbers and assassins and shooters of poison darts. Suppose the murderous arrow is sticking in my heart? *** [2] As the first vision had predicted to me, the assassin appeared from the depths, and came to me just as in the fate of the peoples of this time a nameless one appeared and leveled the murder weapon at the prince. [105] I felt myself transformed into a rapacious beast. My heart glowered in rage against the high and beloved, against my prince and hero, just as the nameless one of the people, driven by greed for murder, lunged at his dear prince. Because I carried the murder in me, I foresaw it. [106] Because I carried the war in me, I foresaw it. I felt betrayed and lied to by my king. Why did I feel this way? He was not as I had wished him to be. He was other than I expected. He should be the king in my sense, not in his sense. He should be what I called ideal. My soul appeared to me hollow, tasteless and meaningless. But in reality what I thought of her was valid for my ideal. It was a / [fol iv(r) / iv(v)] vision of the desert, I struggled with mirror images of myself. It was civil war in me. I myself was the murderer and the murdered. The deadly arrow was stuck in my heart, and I did not know what it meant. My thoughts were murder and the fear of death, which spread like poison everywhere in my body. And thus was the fate of the people: The murder of one was the poisonous arrow that flew into the hearts of men, and kindled the fiercest war. This murder is the indignation of incapacity against will, a Judas betrayal that one would like someone else to have committed. [107] We are still seeking the goat that should bear our sin. [108] Everything that becomes too old becomes evil, the same is true of your highest. Learn from the suffering of the crucified God that one can also betray and crucify a God, namely the God of the old year. If a God ceases being the way of life, he must fall secretly. [109] The God becomes sick if he oversteps the height of the zenith. That is why the spirit of the depths took me when the spirit of this time had led me to the summit. [110] Murder of the Hero
On the following night, however, I had a vision: [112] I was with a youth in high mountains. It was before daybreak, the Eastern sky was already light. Then Siegfried's horn resounded over the mountains with a jubilant sound. [113] We knew that our mortal enemy was coming. We were armed and lurked beside a narrow rocky path to murder him. Then we saw him coming high across the mountains on a chariot made of the bones of the dead. He drove boldly and magnificently over the steep rocks and arrived at the narrow path where we waited in hiding. As he came around the turn ahead of us, we fired at the same time and he fell slain. Thereupon I turned to flee, and a terrible rain swept down. But after this [114] I went through a torment unto death and I felt certain that I must kill myself, if I could not solve the riddle of the murder of the hero. [115] Then the spirit of the depths came to me and spoke these words: "The highest truth is one and the same with the absurd." This statement saved me, and like rain after a long hot spell, it swept away everything in me which was too highly tensed.
Then I had a second vision: [116] I saw a merry garden, in which forms walked clad in white silk, all covered in colored light, some reddish, the others blueish and greenish. [117] [Image iv(v)] *** I know, I have stridden across the depths. Through guilt I have become a newborn. [118] *** [2] We also live in our dreams, we do not live only by day. Sometimes we accomplish our greatest deeds in dreams. [119] In that night my life was threatened since I had to kill my lord and God, not in single combat, since who among mortals could kill a God in a duel? You can reach your God only as an assassin, [120] if you want to overcome him. But this is the bitterest for mortal men: our Gods want to be overcome, since they require renewal. If men kill their princes, they do so because they cannot kill their Gods, and because they do not know that they should kill their Gods in themselves. If the God grows old, he becomes shadow, nonsense, and he goes down. The greatest truth becomes the greatest lie, the brightest day becomes darkest night. As day requires night and night requires day, so meaning requires absurdity and absurdity requires meaning. Day does not exist through itself, night does not exist through itself. The reality that exists through itself is day and night. So the reality is meaning and absurdity. Noon is a moment, midnight is a moment, morning comes from night, So meaning is a moment and a transition from absurdity to absurdity, and absurdity only a moment and a transition from meaning to meaning. [121] Oh that Siegfried, blond and blue-eyed, the German hero, had to fall by my hand, the most loyal and courageous! He had everything in himself that I treasured as the greater and more beautiful; he was my power, my boldness, my pride. I would have gone under in the same battle, and so only assassination was left to me. If I wanted to go on living, it could only be through trickery and cunning. Judge not! Think of the blond savage of the German forests, who had to betray the hammer-brandishing thunder to the pale Near-Eastern God who was nailed to the wood like a chicken marten. The courageous were overcome by a certain contempt for themselves. But their life force bade them to go on living, and they betrayed their beautiful wild Gods, their holy trees and their awe of the German forests. [122] What does Siegfried mean for the Germans! What does it tell us that the Germans suffer Siegfried's death! That is why I almost preferred to kill myself in order to spare him. But I wanted to go on living with a new God. [123] After death on the cross Christ went into the underworld and became Hell. So he took on the form of the Antichrist, the dragon. The image of the Antichrist, which has come down to us from the ancients, announces the new God, whose coming the ancients had foreseen. Gods are unavoidable. The more you flee from the God, the more surely you fall into his hand. The rain is the great stream of tears that will come over the peoples, the tearful flood of released tension after the constriction of death had encumbered the peoples with horrific force. It is the mourning of the dead in me, which precedes burial and rebirth. The rain is the fructifying of the earth, it begets the new wheat, the young, germinating God. [124] The Conception of the God On the second night thereafter, I spoke to my soul and said, "This new world appears weak and artificial to me. Artificial is a bad word, but the mustard seed that grew into a tree, the word that was conceived in the womb of a virgin, became a God to whom the earth was subject." [125] As I spoke thus, the spirit of the depths suddenly erupted. He filled me with intoxication and mist and spoke these words with a powerful voice: [OB iv (v)] "I have received your sprout, you who are to come! I have received it in deepest need and lowliness. I covered it in shabby patchwork and bedded down on poor words. And mockery worshiped it, your child, your wondrous child, the child of one who is to come, who should announce the father, a fruit that is older than the tree on which it grew. In pain will you conceive and joyful is your birth. Fear is your herald, doubt stands to your right, disappointment to your left. We passed by in our ridiculousness and senselessness when we caught sight of you. Our eyes were blinded and our knowledge fell silent when we received your radiance. You new spark of an eternal fire, into which night were you born? You will wring truthful prayers from your believers, and they must speak of your glory in tongues that are atrocious to them. You will come over them in the hour of their disgrace, and will become known to them in what they hate, fear, and abhor. [126] Your voice, the rarest pleasing sound, will be heard amid the stammerings of wretches, rejects, and those condemned as worthless. Your realm will be touched by the hands of those who also worshiped before the most profound lowliness, and whose longing drove them through the mud tide of evil. You will give your gifts to those who pray to you in terror and doubt, and your light will shine upon those whose knees must bend before you unwillingly and who are filled with resentment. Your life is with he who has overcome himself / [fol. iv(v) / v(r)] [OB v (r)] and who has disowned his self-overcoming. [127] I also know that the salvation of mercy is given only to those who believe in the highest and faithlessly betray themselves for thirty pieces of silver. [128] Those who will dirty their pure hands and cheat on their best knowledge against error and take their virtues from a murderer's grave are invited to your great banquet. The constellation of your birth is an ill and changing star. These, oh child of what is to come, are the wonders that will bear testimony that you are a veritable God." [2] When my prince had fallen, the spirit of the depths opened my vision and let me become aware of the birth of the new God. The divine child approached me out of the terrible ambiguity, the hateful-beautiful, the evil-good, the laughable-serious, the sick-healthy, the inhuman-human and the ungodly-godly. [129] I understood that the God [130] whom we seek in the absolute was not to be found in absolute beauty, goodness, seriousness, elevation, humanity or even in godliness. Once the God was there. I understood that the new God would be in the relative. If the God is absolute beauty and goodness, how should he encompass the fullness of life, which is beautiful and hateful, good and evil, laughable and serious, human and inhuman? How can man live in the womb of the God if the Godhead himself attends only to one-half of him? [131] If we have risen near the heights of good and evil, then our badness and hatefulness lie in the most extreme torment. Man's torment is so great and the air of the heights so weak that he can hardly live anymore. The good and the beautiful freeze to the ice of the absolute idea, [132] and the bad and hateful become mud puddles full of crazy life. Therefore after his death Christ had to journey to Hell, otherwise the ascent to Heaven would have become impossible for him. Christ first had to become his Antichrist, his underworldly brother. No one knows what happened during the three days Christ was in Hell. I have experienced it. [133] The men of yore said that he had preached there to the deceased. [134] 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. [135] Our conviction of the value of the good and beautiful has become strong and unshakable, that is why life can extend beyond this and still fulfil everything that lay bound and yearning. But the bound and yearning is also the hateful and bad. Are you again indignant about the hateful and the bad? Through this you can recognize how great are their force and value for life. Do you think that it is dead in you? But this dead can also change into serpents. [136] These serpents will extinguish the prince of your days. Do you see what beauty and joy came over men when the depths unleashed this greatest war? And yet it was a frightful beginning. [137] If we do not have the depths, how do we have the heights? Yet you fear the depths, and do not want to confess that you are afraid of them. It is good, though, that you fear yourselves; say it out loud that you are afraid of yourselves. It is wisdom to fear oneself. Only the heroes say that they are fearless. But you know what happens to the hero. With fear and trembling, looking around yourselves with mistrust, go thus into the depths, but do not do this alone; two or more is greater security since the depths are full of murder. Also secure yourselves the way of retreat. Go cautiously as if you were cowards, so that you pre-empt the soul murderers. [138] The depths would like to devour you whole and choke you in mud. He who journeys to Hell also becomes Hell; therefore do not forget from whence you come. The depths are stronger than us; so do not be heroes, be clever and drop the heroics, since nothing is more dangerous than to play the hero. The depths want to keep you; they have not returned very many up to now, and therefore men fled from the depths and attacked them. What if the depths, due to the assault, now change themselves into death? But the depths indeed have changed themselves into death; therefore when they awoke they inflicted a thousand-fold death. [139] We cannot slay death, as we have already taken all life from it. If we still want to overcome death, then we must enliven it. Therefore on your journey be sure to take golden cups full of the sweet drink of life, red wine, and give it to dead matter, so that it can win life back. The dead matter will change into black serpents. Do not be frightened, the serpents will immediately put out the sun of your days, and a night with wonderful will-o'-the-wisps will come over you. [140] Take pains to waken the dead. Dig deep mines and throw in sacrificial gifts, so that they reach the dead. Reflect in good heart upon evil, this is the way to the ascent. But before the ascent, everything is night and Hell. 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 have planned with yourself is also laughable, that everything fine is also brutal, that everything good is also bad, that everything high is also low, and that everything pleasant is also shameful. But the deepest 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. That is the ambiguity of the God: he is born from a dark ambiguity and rises to a bright ambiguity. Unequivocalness is simplicity and leads to death. [141] But ambiguity is the way of life. [142] If the left foot does not move, then the right one does, and you move. The God wills this. [143] You say: the Christian God is unequivocal, he is love. [144] What is more ambiguous than love? Love is the way of life, but your love is only on the way of life if you have a left and a right. Nothing is easier than to play at ambiguity and nothing is more difficult than living ambiguity. He who plays is a child; his God is old and dies. He who lives is awakened; his God is young and goes on. He who plays hides from the inner death. He who lives feels the going onward and immortality. So leave the play to the players. Let fall what wants to fall; if you stop it, it will sweep you away. There is a true love that does not concern itself with neighbors. [145] When the hero was slain and the meaning recognized in the absurdity, when all tension came rushing down from gravid clouds, when everything had become cowardly and looked to its own rescue, I became aware of the birth of the God. [146] Opposing me, the God sank into my heart when I was confused by mockery and worship, by grief and laughter, by yes and no. The one arose from the melting together of the two. He was born as a child from my own human soul, which had conceived him with resistance like a virgin. Thus it corresponds to the image that the ancients have given to us. [147] But when the mother, my soul, was pregnant with the God, I did not know it. It even seemed to me as if my soul herself was the God, although he lived only in her body. [148] And thus the image of the ancients is fulfilled: I pursued my soul to kill the child in it. For I am also the worst enemy of my God. [149] But I also recognized that my enmity is decided upon in the God. He is mockery and hate and anger, since this is also a way of life. I must say that the God could not come into being before the hero had been slain. The hero as we understand him has become an enemy of the God, since the hero is perfection. The Gods envy the perfection of man, because perfection has no need of the Gods. But since no one is perfect, we need the Gods. The Gods love perfection because it is the total way of life. But the Gods are not with him who wishes to be perfect, because he is an imitation of perfection. [150] Imitation was a way of life when men still needed the heroic prototype. [151] The monkey's manner is a way of life for monkeys, and for man as long as he is like a monkey. Human apishness has lasted a terribly long time, but the time will come when a piece of that apishness will fall away from men. That will be a time of salvation and the dove, and the eternal fire, and redemption will descend. Then there will no longer be a hero, and no one who can imitate him. Because from that time henceforth all imitation is cursed. The new God laughs at imitation and discipleship. He needs no imitators and no pupils. He forces men through himself. The God is his own follower in man. He imitates himself. We think that there is singleness within us, and communality outside us. Outside of us is the communal in relation to the external, while singleness refers to us. We are single if we are in ourselves, but communal in relation to what is outside us. But if we are outside of ourselves, then we are single and selfish in the communal. Our self suffers privation if we are outside ourselves, and thus it satisfies its needs with communality. Consequently, communality is distorted into singleness. If we are in ourselves, we fulfil the need of the self, we prosper, and through this we become aware of the needs of the communal and can fulfil them. [152] If we set a God outside of ourselves, he tears us loose from the self, since the God is more powerful than we are. Our self falls into privation. But if the God moves into the self, he snatches us from what is outside us. [153] We arrive at singleness in ourselves. So the God becomes communal in reference to what is outside us, but single in relation to us. No one has my God, but my God has everyone, including myself. The Gods of all individual men always have all other men, including myself. So it is always only the one God despite his multiplicity. You arrive at him in yourself and only through your self seizing you. It seizes you in the advancement of your life. The hero must fall for the sake of our redemption, since he is the model and demands imitation. But the measure of imitation is fulfilled. [154] We should become reconciled to solitude in ourselves and to the God outside of us. If we enter into this solitude then the life of the God begins. If we are in ourselves, then the space around us is free, but filled by the God. Our relations to men go through this empty space and also through the God. But earlier it went through selfishness since we were outside ourselves. Therefore the spirit foretold to me that the cold of outer space will spread across the earth. [155] With this he showed me in an image that the God will step between men and drive every individual with the whip of icy cold to the warmth of his own monastic hearth. Because people were beside themselves, going into raptures like madmen. Selfish desire ultimately desires itself. You find yourself in your desire, so do not say that desire is vain. If you desire yourself, you produce the divine son in your embrace with yourself. Your desire is the father of the God, your self is the mother of the God, but the son is the new God, your master. If you embrace your self, then it will appear to you as if the world has become cold and empty. The coming God moves into this emptiness. If you are in your solitude, and all the space around you has become cold and unending, then you have moved far from men, and at the same time you have come near to them as never before. Selfish desire only apparently led you to men, but in reality it led you away from them and in the end to yourself, which to you and to others was the most remote. But now, if you are in solitude, your God leads you to the God of others, and through that to the true neighbor, to the neighbor of the self in others. If you are in yourself, you become aware of your incapacity. You will see how little capable you are of imitating the heroes and of being a hero yourself. So you will also no longer force others to become heroes. Like you, they suffer from incapacity. Incapacity, too, wants to live, but it will overthrow your Gods. [BP v (r)] / [fol. v(r) / v(v)] Mysterium. Encounter On the night when I considered the essence of the God, I became aware of an image: I lay in a dark depth. An old man stood before me. He looked like one of the old prophets. [156] A black serpent lay at his feet. Some distance away I saw a house with columns. A beautiful maiden steps out of the door. She walks uncertainly and I see that she is blind. The old man waves to me and I follow him to the house at the foot of the sheer wall of rock. The serpent creeps behind us. Darkness reigns inside the house. We are in a high hall with glittering walls. A bright stone the color of water lies in the background. As I look into its reflection, the images of Eve, the tree, and the serpent appear to me. After this I catch sight of Odysseus and his journey on the high seas. Suddenly a door opens on the right, onto a garden full of bright sunshine. We step outside and the old man says to me, "Do you know where you are?" I: "I am a stranger here and everything seems strange to me, anxious as in a dream. Who are you?" E: "I am Elijah [157] and this is my daughter Salome." [158]
I: "The daughter of Herod, the bloodthirsty woman?" E: "Why do you judge so? You see that she is blind. She is my daughter, the daughter of the prophet." I: "What miracle has united you?" E: "It is no miracle, it was so from the beginning. My wisdom and my daughter are one." I am shocked, I am incapable of grasping it. E: "Consider this: her blindness and my sight have made us companions through eternity." I: "Forgive my astonishment, am I truly in the underworld?" S: "Do you love me?" I: "How can I love you? How do you come to this question? I see only one thing, you are Salome, a tiger, your hands are stained with the blood of the holy one. How should I love you?" S: "You will love me." I: "I? Love you? Who gives you the right to such thoughts?" S: "I love you." I: "Leave me be, I dread you, you beast." S: "You do me wrong. Elijah is my father, and he knows the deepest mysteries. The walls of his house are made of precious stones. His wells hold healing water and his eyes see the things of the future. And what wouldn't you give for a single look into the infinite unfolding of what is to come? Are these not worth a sin for you?" I: "Your temptation is devilish. I long to be back in the upper world. It is dreadful here. How oppressive and heavy is the air!" E: "What do you want? The choice is yours." I: "But I do not belong to the dead. I live in the light of day. Why should I torment myself here with Salome? Do I not have enough of my own life to deal with?" E: "You heard what Salome said." I: "I cannot believe that you, the prophet, can recognize her as a daughter and a companion. Is she not engendered from heinous seed? Was she not vain greed and criminal lust?" E: "But she loved a holy man." I: "And shamefully shed his precious blood." E: "She loved the prophet who announced the new God to the world. She loved him, do you understand that? For she is my daughter." I: "Do you think that because she is your daughter, she loved the prophet in John, the father?" E: "By her love shall you know her." I: "But how did she love him? Do you call that love?" E: "What else was it?" I: "I am horrified. Who wouldn't be horrified if Salome loved him?" E: ''Are you cowardly? Consider this, I and my daughter have been one since eternity" I: "You pose dreadful riddles. How could it be that this unholy woman and you, the prophet of your God, could be one?" E: "Why are you amazed? But you see it, we are together." I: "What my eyes see is exactly what I cannot grasp. You, Elijah, who are a prophet, the mouth of God, and she, a bloodthirsty horror. You are the symbol of the most extreme contradiction." E: "We are real and not symbols." I see how the black serpent writhes up the tree, and hides in the branches. Everything becomes gloomy and doubtful. Elijah rises, I follow and we go silently back through the hall. [159] Doubt tears me apart. It is all so unreal and yet a part of my longing remains behind. Will I come again? Salome loves me, do I love her? I hear wild music, a tambourine, a sultry moonlit night, the bloody-staring head of the holy one [160] -- fear seizes me. I rush out. I am surrounded by the dark night. It is pitch black all around me. Who murdered the hero? Is this why Salome loves me? Do I love her, and did I therefore murder the hero? She is one with the prophet, one with John, but also one with me? Woe, was she the hand of the God? I do not love her, I fear her. Then the spirit of the depths spoke to me and said: "Therein you acknowledge her divine power." Must I love Salome? [161] *** [2] [162] This play that I witnessed is my play, not your play. It is my secret, not yours. You cannot imitate me. My secret remains virginal and my mysteries are inviolable, they belong to me and cannot belong to you. You have your own. [163] He who enters into his own must grope through what lies at hand, he must sense his way from stone to stone. He must embrace the worthless and the worthy with the same love. A mountain is nothing, and a grain of sand holds kingdoms, or also nothing. Judgment must fall from you, even taste, but above all pride, even when it is based on merit. Utterly poor, miserable, unknowingly humiliated, go on through the gate. Turn your anger against yourself, since only you stop yourself from looking and from living. The mystery play is soft like air and thin smoke, and you are raw matter that is disturbingly heavy. But let your hope, which is your highest good and highest ability, lead the way and serve you as a guide in the world of darkness, since it is of like substance with the forms of that world. [164] [Image v (v)] [165] The scene of the mystery play is a deep place like the crater of a volcano. My deep interior is a volcano, that pushes out the fiery-molten mass of the unformed and the undifferentiated. Thus my interior gives birth to the children of chaos, of the primordial mother. He who enters the crater also becomes chaotic matter, he melts. The formed in him dissolves and binds itself anew with the children of chaos, the powers of darkness, the ruling and the seducing, the compelling and the alluring, the divine and the devilish. These powers stretch beyond my certainties and limits on all sides, and connect me with all forms and with all distant beings and things, through which inner tidings of their being and their character develop in me. Because I have fallen into the source of chaos, into the primordial beginning, I myself become smelted anew in the connection with the primordial beginning, which at the same time is what has been and what is becoming. At first I come to the primordial beginning in myself. But because I am a part of the matter and formation of the world, I also come into the primordial beginning of the world in the first place. I have certainly participated in life as someone formed and determined, but only through my formed and determined consciousness and through this in a formed and determined piece of the whole world, but not in the unformed and undetermined aspects of the world that likewise are given to me. Yet it is given only to my depths, not to my surface, which is a formed and determined consciousness. The powers of my depths are predetermination and pleasure. [166] Predetermination or forethinking [167] is Prometheus, [168] who, without determined thoughts, brings the chaotic to form [169] and definition, who digs the channels and holds the object before pleasure. Forethinking also comes before thought. But pleasure is the force that desires and destroys forms without form and definition. It loves the form in itself that it takes hold of, and destroys the forms that it does not take. The forethinker is a seer, but pleasure is blind. It does not foresee, but desires what it touches. Forethinking is not powerful in itself and therefore does not move. But pleasure is power, and therefore it moves. Forethinking needs pleasure to be able to come to form. Pleasure needs forethinking to come to form, which it requires. [170] If pleasure lacked forming, pleasure would dissolve in manifoldness and become splintered and powerless through unending division, lost to the unending. If a form does not contain and compress pleasure within itself, it cannot reach the higher, since it always flows like water from above to below. All pleasure, when left alone, flows into the deep sea and ends in the deathly stillness of dispersal into unending space. Pleasure is not older than forethinking, and forethinking is not older than pleasure. Both are equally old and in nature intimately one. Only in man does the separate existence of both principles become apparent. Apart from Elijah and Salome I found the serpent as a third principle. [171] It is a stranger to both principles although it is associated with both. The serpent taught me the unconditional difference in essence between the two principles in me. If I look across from forethinking to pleasure, I first see the deterrent poisonous serpent. If I feel from pleasure across to forethinking, likewise I feel first the cold cruel serpent. [172] The serpent is the earthly essence of man of which he is not conscious. Its character changes according to peoples and lands, since it is the mystery that flows to him from the nourishing earth-mother. [173] The earthly (numen loci) separates forethinking and pleasure in man, but not in itself. The serpent has the weight of the earth in itself, but also its changeability and germination from which everything that becomes emerges. It is always the serpent that causes man to become enslaved now to one, now to the other principle, so that it becomes error. One cannot live with forethinking alone, or with pleasure alone. You need both. But you cannot be in forethinking and in pleasure at the same time, you must take turns being in forethinking and pleasure, obeying the prevailing law, unfaithful to the other so to speak. But men prefer one or the other. Some love thinking and establish the art of life on it. They practice their thinking and their circumspection, so they lose their pleasure. Therefore they are old and have a sharp face. The others love pleasure, they practice their feeling and living. Thus they forget thinking. Therefore they are young and blind. Those who think base the world on thought, those who feel, on feeling. You find truth and error in both. The way of life writhes like the serpent from right to left and from left to right, from thinking to pleasure and from pleasure to thinking. Thus the serpent is an adversary and a symbol of enmity, but also a wise bridge that connects right and left through longing, much needed by our life. [174] The place where Elijah and Salome live together is a dark space and a bright one. The dark space is the space of forethinking. It is dark, so he who lives there requires vision. [175] This space is limited, so forethinking does not lead into the extended distance, but into the depth of the past and the future. The crystal is the formed thought that reflects what is to come in what has gone before.
Eve / [fol. v(v) / vi(r)] and the serpent show me that my next step leads to pleasure and from there again on lengthy wanderings like Odysseus. He went astray when he played his trick at Troy. [176] The bright garden is the space of pleasure. He who lives there needs no vision; [177] he feels the unending. [178] A thinker who descends into his forethinking finds his next step leading into the garden of Salome. Therefore the thinker fears his forethought, although he lives on the foundation of forethinking. The visible surface is safer than the underground. Thinking protects against the way of error, and therefore it leads to petrification. A thinker should fear Salome, since she wants his head, especially if he is a holy man. A thinker cannot be a holy person, otherwise he loses his head. It does not help to hide oneself in thought. There the solidification overtakes you. You must turn back to motherly forethought to obtain renewal. But forethought leads to Salome. [179] Because I was a thinker and caught sight of the hostile principle of pleasure from forethinking, it appeared to me as Salome. If I had been one who felt, and had groped my way toward forethinking, then it would have appeared to me as a serpent-encoiled daimon, if I had actually seen it. But I would have been blind. Therefore I would have felt only slippery, dead, dangerous, allegedly overcome, insipid, and mawkish things, and I would have pulled back with the same shudder I felt in turning from Salome. The thinker's passions are bad, therefore he has no pleasure. The thoughts of one who feels [180] are bad, therefore he has no thoughts. He who prefers to think than to feel, [181] leaves his feeling [182] to rot in darkness. It does not grow ripe, but in moldiness produces sick tendrils that do not reach the light. He who prefers to feel than to think leaves his thinking in darkness, where it spins its nets in gloomy places, desolate webs in which mosquitos and gnats become enmeshed. The thinker feels the disgust of feeling, since the feeling in him is mainly disgusting. The one who feels thinks the disgust of thinking, since the thinking in him is mainly disgusting. So the serpent lies between the thinker and the one who feels. They are each other's poison and healing. In the garden it had to become apparent to me that I loved Salome. This recognition struck me, since I had not thought it. What a thinker does not think he believes does not exist, and what one who feels does not feel he believes does not exist. You begin to have a presentiment of the whole when you embrace your opposite principle, since the whole belongs to both principles, which grow from one root. [183] Elijah said: "You should recognize her through her love!" Not only do you venerate the object, but the object also sanctifies you. Salome loved the prophet, and this sanctified her. The prophet loved God, and this sanctified him. But Salome did not love God, and this profaned her. But the prophet did not love Salome, and this profaned him. And thus they were each other's poison and death. May the thinking person accept his pleasure, and the feeling person accept his own thought. Such leads one along the way. [184] Instruction On the following night, [185] I was led to a second image: I am standing in the rocky depth that seems to me like a crater. Before me I see the house with columns. I see Salome walking along the length of the wall toward the left, touching the wall like a blind person. The serpent follows her. The old man stands at the door and waves to me. Hesitantly I draw closer. He calls Salome back. She is like someone suffering. I cannot detect any sacrilege in her nature. Her hands are white and her face has a gentle expression. The serpent lies before them. I stand before them clumsily like a stupid boy, overwhelmed by uncertainty and ambiguity The old man eyes me searchingly and says: "What do you want here?" I: "Forgive me, it is not obtrusiveness or arrogance that leads me here. I am here perchance, not knowing what I want. A longing that stayed behind in your house yesterday has brought me here. You see, prophet, I am tired, my head is as heavy as lead. I am lost in my ignorance. I have toyed with myself enough. I played hypocritical games with myself and they all would have disgusted me, were it not clever to perform what others expect from us in the world of men. It seems to me as if I were more real here. And yet I do not like being here." Wordlessly Elijah and Salome step inside the house. I follow them reluctantly. A feeling of guilt torments me. Is it bad conscience? I would like to turn back, but I cannot. I stand before the play of fire in the shining crystal. I see in splendor the mother of God with the child. Peter stands in front of her in admiration -- then Peter alone with the key -- the Pope with a triple crown -- a Buddha sitting rigidly in a circle of fire -- a many-armed bloody Goddess [186] -- it is Salome desperately wringing her hands [187] -- it takes hold of me, she is my own soul, and now I see Elijah in the image of the stone. Elijah and Salome stand smiling before me. I: "These visions are full of torment, and the meaning of these images is dark to me, Elijah; please shed some light." Elijah turns away silently, and leads the way toward the left. Salome enters a colonnade to the right. Elijah leads me into an even darker room. A burning red lamp hangs from the ceiling. I sit down exhausted. Elijah stands before me leaning on a marble lion in the middle of the room. E: ''Are you anxious? Your ignorance is to blame for your bad conscience. Not-knowing is guilt, but you believe that it is the urge toward forbidden knowledge that causes your feeling of guilt. Why do you think you are here?" I: "I don't know. I sank into this place when unknowingly I tried resisting the not-known. So here I am, astonished and confused, an ignorant fool. I experience strange things in your house, things that frighten me and whose meaning is dark to me." E: "If it were not your law to be here, how would you be here?" I: "I'm afflicted by fatal weakness, my father." E: "You are evasive. You cannot extricate yourself from your law. I: "How can I extricate myself from what is unknown to me, which I cannot reach with either feeling or presentiment?" E: "You are lying. Do you not know that you yourself recognized what it means if Salome loves you?" I: "You are right. A doubtful and uncertain thought arose in me. But I have forgotten it again." E: "You have not forgotten it. It burned deep inside you. Are you cowardly? Or can you not differentiate this thought from your own self, enough so that you wished to claim it for yourself?" I: "The thought went too far for me, and I shun far-fetched ideas. They are dangerous, since I am a man, and you know how much men are accustomed to seeing thoughts as their very own, so that they eventually confuse them with themselves." E: "Will you therefore confuse yourself with a tree or animal, because you look at them and because you exist with them in one and the same world? Must you be your thoughts, because you are in the world of your thoughts? But your thoughts are just as much outside your self as trees and animals are outside your body." [188] I: "I understand. My thought world was for me more word than world. I thought of my thought world: it is I." E: "Do you say to your human world and every being outside of you: you are I?" I: "I stepped into your house, my father, with the fear of a schoolboy. But you taught me salutary wisdom [189]: I can also consider my thoughts as being outside my self. That helps me to return to that terrible conclusion that my tongue is reluctant to express. I thought that Salome loves me because I resemble John or you. This thought seemed unbelievable to me. That's why I rejected it and thought that she loves me because I am really quite opposite to you, that she loves her badness in my badness. This thought was devastating." Elijah is silent. Heaviness lies on me. Then Salome steps in, comes over to me and lays her arm around my shoulder. She takes me for her father in whose chair I sat. I dare neither move nor speak. S: "I know that you are not my father. You are his son, and I am your sister." I: "You, Salome, my sister? Was this the terrible attraction that emanated from you, that unnamable horror of you, of your touch? Who was our mother?" S: "Mary." I: "Is it a hellish dream? Mary; our mother? What madness lurks in your words? The mother of our Savior, our mother? When I crossed your threshold today, I foresaw calamity. Alas! It has come. Are you out of your senses, Salome? Elijah, protector of the divine law, speak: is this a devilish spell cast by the rejected? How can she say such a thing? Or are both of you out of your senses? You are symbols and Mary is a symbol. I am simply too confused to see through you now." E: "You may call us symbols for the same reason that you can also call your fellow men symbols, if you wish to. But we are just as real as your fellow men. You invalidate nothing and solve nothing by calling us symbols." I: "You plunge me into a terrible confusion. Do you wish to be real?" E: "We are certainly what you call real. Here we are, and you have to accept us. The choice is yours." I am silent. Salome has removed herself. Uncertainly I look around. Behind me a high golden red flame burns on a round altar. The serpent has encircled the flame. Its eyes glitter with golden reflections. Swaying I turn to the exit. As I step out into the hall, I see a powerful lion going before me. Outside, it is a wide cold starry night. [2] [190] It is no small matter to acknowledge one's yearning. For this many need to make a particular effort at honesty. All too many do not want to know where their yearning is, because it would seem to them impossible or too distressing. And yet yearning is the way of life. If you do not acknowledge your yearning, then you do not follow yourself, but go on foreign ways that others have indicated to you. So you do not live your life but an alien one. But who should live your life if you do not live it? It is not only stupid to exchange your own life for an alien one, but also a hypocritical game, because you can never really live the life of others, you can only pretend to do it, deceiving the other and yourself, since you can only live your own life. If you give up your self, you live it in others; thereby you become selfish to others, and thus you deceive others. Everyone thus believes that such a life is possible. It is, however, only apish imitation. Through giving in to your apish appetite, you infect others, because the ape stimulates the apish. So you turn yourself and others into apes. Through reciprocal imitation you live according to the average expectation. The image of the hero was set up for all in every age through the appetite for imitation. Therefore the hero was murdered, since we have all been aping him. Do you know why you cannot abandon apishness? For fear of loneliness and defeat. To live oneself means: to be one's own task. Never say that it is a pleasure to live oneself. It will be no joy but a long suffering, since you must become your own creator. If you want to create yourself, then you do not begin with the best and the highest, but with the worst and the deepest. Therefore say that you are reluctant to live yourself. The flowing together of the stream of life is not joy but pain, since it is power against power, guilt, and shatters the sanctified. The image of the mother of God with the child that I foresee, indicates to me the mystery of the transformation. [191] If forethinking and pleasure unite in me, a third arises from them, the divine son, who is the supreme meaning, the symbol, the passing over into a new creation. I do not myself become the supreme meaning [192] or the symbol, but the symbol becomes in me such that it has its substance, and I mine. Thus I stand like Peter in worship before the miracle of the transformation and the becoming real of the God in me. Although I am not the son of the God myself, I represent him nevertheless as one who was a mother to the God, and one therefore to whom in the name of the God the freedom of the binding and loosing has been given. The binding and loosing take place in me. [193] But insofar as it takes place in me, and I am a part of the world, it also takes place through me in the world, and no one can hinder it. It doesn't take place according to the way of my will but in the way of unavoidable effect. I am not master over you, but the being of the God in me. I lock the past with one key, with the other I open the future. This takes place through my transformation. The miracle of transformation commands. I am its servant, just as the Pope is. You see how incredible it was to believe such of oneself. [194] It applies not to me, but to the symbol. The symbol becomes my lord and unfailing commander. It will fortify its reign and change itself into a starry and riddling image, whose meaning turns completely inward, and whose pleasure radiates outward like blazing fire, [195] a Buddha in the flames. [196] Because I sink into my symbol to such an extent, the symbol changes me from my one into my other, and that cruel Goddess of my interior, my womanly pleasure, my own other, the tormented tormentor, that which is to be tormented. I have interpreted these images, as best I can, with poor words. *** [197] In the moment of your bewilderment, follow
your forethinking I held to the sanctified form, and didn't want to allow the chaos to break through its dams. I believed in the order of the world and hated everything disorganized and unformed. Therefore above all I had to realize that my own law had brought me to this place. As the God developed in me, I thought he was a part of my self. I thought that my "I" included him and therefore I took him for my thought. But I also considered that my thoughts were parts of my "I." Thus I entered into my thoughts, and into the thinking about the God, in that I took him / [fol. vi(r) / vi(v)] for a part of my self. On account of my thoughts, I had left myself; therefore my self became hungry and made God into a selfish thought. If I leave myself, my hunger will drive me to find my self in my object, that is, in my thought. Therefore you love reasonable and orderly thoughts, since you could not endure it if your self was in disordered, that is, unsuitable thoughts. Through your selfish wish, you pushed out of your thoughts everything that you do not consider ordered, that is, unfitting. You create order according to what you know, you do not know the thoughts of chaos, and yet they exist. My thoughts are not my self, and my I does not embrace the thought. Your thought has this meaning and that, not just one, but many meanings. No one knows how many. My thoughts are not my self, but exactly like the things of the world, alive and dead. [199] Just as I am not damaged through living in a partly chaotic world, so too I am not damaged if I live in my partly chaotic thought world. Thoughts are natural events that you do not possess, and whose meaning you only imperfectly recognize. [200] Thoughts grow in me like a forest, populated by many different animals. But man is domineering in his thinking, and therefore he kills the pleasure of the forest and that of the wild animals. Man is violent in his desire, and he himself becomes a forest and a forest animal. Just as I have freedom in the world, I also have freedom in my thoughts. Freedom is conditional. To certain things of the world I must say: you should not be thus, but you should be different. Yet first I look carefully at their nature, otherwise I cannot change it. I proceed in the same way with certain thoughts. You change those things of the world that, not being useful in themselves, endanger your welfare. Proceed likewise with your thoughts. Nothing is complete, and much is in dispute. The way of life is transformation, not exclusion. Well-being is a better judge than the law. But as I became aware of the freedom in my thought world, Salome embraced me and I thus became a prophet, since I had found pleasure in the primordial beginning, in the forest, and in the wild animals. It stands too close to reason for me to set myself on a par with my visions, and for me to take pleasure in seeing. I am in danger of believing that I myself am significant since I see the significant. This will always drive us crazy, and we transform the vision into foolishness and monkey business, since we cannot desist from imitation. [201] Just as my thinking is the son of forethinking, so is my pleasure the daughter of love, of the innocent and conceiving mother of God. Aside from Christ. Mary gave birth to Salome. Therefore Christ in the gospel of the Egyptians says to Salome: "Eat every herb, but do not eat the bitter." And when Salome wanted to know, Christ spoke to her: "If you crush the covering of shame, and when the two become one, and the male with the female, neither male nor female.'' [202] Forethinking is the procreative, love is the receptive. [203] Both are beyond this world. Here are understanding and pleasure, we only suspect the other. It would be madness to claim that they are in this world. So much that is riddling and cunning coils around this light. I won the power back again from the depths, and it went before me like a lion. [204] Resolution [206] On the third night, deep longing to continue experiencing the mysteries seized me. The struggle between doubt and desire was great in me. But suddenly I saw that I stood before a steep ridge in a wasteland. It is a dazzling bright day. I catch sight of the prophet high above me. His hand makes an averting movement, and I abandon my decision to climb up. I wait below, gazing upward. I look: to the right it is dark night; to the left it is bright day. The rock separates day and night. On the dark side lies a big black serpent, on the bright side a white serpent. They thrust their heads toward each other, eager for battle. Elijah stands on the heights above them. The serpents pounce on one another and the white serpent draws back. Great billows of dust rise from the place of struggle. But then I see: the black serpent pulls itself back again. The front part of its body has become white. Both serpents curl about themselves, one in light, the other in darkness. [207] Elijah: "What did you see?" I: "I saw the fight of two formidable serpents. It seemed to me as if the black would overcome the white serpent; but behold, the black one withdrew and its head and the top part of its body had turned white." E: "Do you understand that?" I: "I have thought it over, but I cannot understand it. Should it mean that the power of the good light will become so great that even the darkness that resists it will be illumined by it?" Elijah climbs before me into the heights, to a very high summit; I follow. On the peak we come to some masonry made of huge blocks. It is a round embankment on the summit. [208] Inside lies a large courtyard, and there is a mighty boulder in the middle, like an altar. The prophet stands on this stone and says: "This is the temple of the sun. This place is a vessel, that collects the light of the sun." Elijah climbs down from the stone, his form becomes smaller in descending, and finally becomes dwarflike, unlike himself. I ask: "Who are you?" "I am Mime, [209] and I will show you the wellsprings. The collected light becomes water and flows in many springs from the summit into the valleys of the earth." He then dives down into a crevice. I follow him down into a dark cave. I hear the rippling of a spring. I hear the voice of the dwarf from below: "Here are my wells, whoever drinks from them becomes wise." But I cannot reach down. I lose courage. I leave the cave and, doubting, pace back and forth in the square of the yard. Everything appears to me strange and incomprehensible. It is solitary and deathly silent here. The air is clear and cool as on the remotest heights, a wonderful flood of sunlight all around, the great wall surrounds me. A serpent crawls over the stone. It is the serpent of the prophet. How did it come out of the underworld into the world above? I follow it and see how it crawls into the wall. I feel weird all over: a little house stands there with a portico, minuscule, snuggling against the rock. The serpents become infinitely small. I feel as if I too am shrinking. The walls enlarge into a huge mountain and I see that I am below on the foundation of the crater in the underworld, and I stand before the house of the prophet. [210] He steps out of the door of his house. I: "I notice, Elijah, that you have shown me and let me experience all sorts of strange things and allowed me to come before you today. But I confess that it is all dark to me. Your world appears to me today in a new light. Just now it was as if I were separated by a starry distance from your place, which I still wanted to reach today. But behold: it seems to be one and the same place." E: "You wanted to come here far too much. I did not deceive you, you deceived yourself. He sees badly who wants to see; you have overreached yourself." I: ''It is true, I eagerly longed to reach you, to hear more. Salome startled me and led me into bewilderment. I felt dizzy, because what she said seemed to me to be monstrous and like madness. Where is Salome?" E: "How impetuous you are! What is up with you? Step over to the crystal and prepare yourself in its light." *** A wreath of fire shines around the stone. I am seized with fear at what I see: The coarse peasant's boot? The foot of a giant that crushes an entire city? I see the cross, the removal of the cross, the mourning. How agonizing this sight is! No longer do I yearn -- I see the divine child, with the white serpent in his right hand, and the black serpent in his left hand. I see the green mountain, the cross of Christ on it, and a stream of blood flowing from the summit of the mountain -- I can look no longer, it is unbearable -- I see the cross and Christ on it in his last hour and torment -- at the foot of the cross the black serpent coils itself -- it has wound itself around my feet -- I am held fast and I spread my arms wide. Salome draws near. The serpent has wound itself around my whole body, and my countenance is that of a lion. Salome says, "Mary was the mother of Christ, do you understand?" I: "I see that a terrible and incomprehensible power forces me to imitate the lord in his final torment. But how can I presume to call Mary my mother?" S: "You are Christ." I stand with outstretched arms like someone crucified, my body taut and horribly entwined by the serpent: "You, Salome, say that I am Christ?" [211] It is as if I stood alone on a high mountain with stiff outstretched arms. The serpent squeezes my body in its terrible coils and the blood streams from my body, spilling down the mountainside. Salome bends down to my feet and wraps her black hair round them. She lies thus for a long time. Then she cries, "I see light!" Truly, she sees, her eyes are open. The serpent falls from my body and lies languidly on the ground. I stride over it and kneel at the feet of the prophet, whose form shines like a flame. E: "Your work is fulfilled here. Other things come. Seek untiringly, and above all write exactly what you see." Salome looks in rapture at the light that streams from the prophet. Elijah transforms into a huge flame of white light. The serpent wraps itself around her foot, as if paralyzed. Salome kneels before the light in wonderstruck devotion. Tears fall from my eyes, and I hurry out into the night, like one who has no part in the glory of the mystery. My feet do not touch the ground of this earth, and it is as if I were melting into air. [212] [2] [213] My longing [214] led me up to the overbright day, whose light is the opposite to the dark space of forethinking. [215] The opposite principle is, as I think I understand it, heavenly love, the mother. The darkness that surrounds forethinking [216] appears to be due to the fact that it is invisible in the interior and takes place in the depths. [217] But the brightness of love seems to come from the fact that love is visible life and action. My pleasure was with forethinking and had its merry garden there, surrounded by darkness and night. I climbed down to my pleasure, but ascended to my love. I see Elijah high above me: this indicates that forethinking stands nearer to love than I, a man, do. Before I ascend to love, a condition must be fulfilled, which represents itself as the fight between two serpents. Left is day, right is night. The realm of love is light, the realm of forethinking is dark. Both principles have separated themselves strictly, and are even hostile to one another and have taken on the form of serpents. This form indicates the daimonic nature of both principles. I recognize in this struggle a repetition of that vision where I saw the struggle between the sun and the black serpent. [218] At that time, the loving light was annihilated, and blood began to pour out. This was the great war. But the spirit of the depths [219] wants this struggle to be understood as a conflict in every man's own nature. [220] Since after the death of the hero our urge to live could no longer imitate anything, it therefore went into the depths of every man and excited the terrible conflict between the powers of the depths. [221] Forethinking is singleness, love is togetherness. Both need one another, and yet they kill one another. Since men do not know that the conflict occurs inside themselves, they go mad, / [fol. vi(v) / vii(r)] and one lays the blame on the other. If one-half of mankind is at fault, then every man is half at fault. But he does not see the conflict in his own soul, which is however the source of the outer disaster. If you are aggravated against your brother, think that you are aggravated against the brother in you, that is, against what in you is similar to your brother. As a man you are part of mankind, and therefore you have a share in the whole of mankind, as if you were the whole of mankind. If you overpower and kill your fellow man who is contrary to you, then you also kill that person in yourself and have murdered a part of your life. The spirit of this dead man follows you and does not let your life become joyful. You need your wholeness to live onward. If I myself endorse the pure principle, I step to one side and become onesided. Therefore my forethinking in the principle [222] of the heavenly mother becomes an ugly dwarf who lives in a dark cave like an unborn in the womb. You do not follow him, even if he says to you that you could drink wisdom from his source. But forethinking [223] appears to you there as dwarfish cleverness, false and of the night, just as the heavenly mother appears to me down there as Salome. That which is lacking in the pure principle appears as the serpent. The hero strives after the utmost in the pure principle, and therefore he finally falls for the serpent. If you go to thinking, [224] take your heart with you. If you go to love, take your head with you. Love is empty without thinking, thinking hollow without love. The serpent lurks behind the pure principle. Therefore I lost courage, until I found the serpent that at once led me across to the other principle. In climbing down I become smaller. Great is he who is in love, since love is the present act of the great creator, the present moment of the becoming and lapsing of the world. Mighty is he who loves. But whoever distances himself from love, feels himself powerful. In your forethinking you recognize the nullity of your current being as a smallest point between the infinity of what has passed and of what is to come. The thinker is small, he feels great if he distances himself from thinking. But if we speak about appearances, it is the other way around. To whoever is in love, form is a trifling. But his field of vision ends with the form given to him. To whoever is in thinking, form is unsurpassable and the height of Heaven. But at night he sees the diversity of the innumerable worlds and their never-ending cycles. Whoever is in love is a full and overflowing vessel, and awaits the giving. Whoever is in forethinking is deep and hollow and awaits fulfillment. Love and forethinking are in one and the same place. Love cannot be without forethinking, and forethinking cannot be without love. Man is always too much in one or the other. This comes with human nature. Animals and plants seem to have enough in every way, only man staggers between too much and too little. He wavers, he is uncertain how much he must give here and how much there. His knowledge and ability is insufficient, and yet he must still do it himself. Man doesn't only grow from within himself, for he is also creative [225] from within himself. The God becomes revealed in him. [226] Human nature is little skilled in divinity, and therefore man fluctuates between too much and too little. [227] The spirit of this time has condemned us to haste. You have no more futurity and no more past if you serve the spirit of this time. We need the life of eternity. We bear the future and the past in the depths. The future is old and the past is young. You serve the spirit of this time, and believe that you are able to escape the spirit of the depths. But the depths do not hesitate any longer and will force you into the mysteries of Christ. [228] It belongs to this mystery that man is not redeemed through the hero, but becomes a Christ himself. The antecedent example of the saints symbolically teaches us this. Whoever wants to see will see badly. It was my will that deceived me. It was my will that provoked the huge uproar among the daimons. Should I therefore not want anything? I have, and I have fulfilled my will as well as I could, and thus I fed everything in me that strived. In the end I found that I wanted myself in everything, but without looking for myself. Therefore I no longer wanted to seek myself outside of myself, but within. Then I wanted to grasp myself, and then I wanted to go on again, without knowing what I wanted, and thus I fell into the mystery. Should I therefore not want anything anymore? You wanted this war. That is good. If you had not, then the evil of this war would be small. [229] But with your wanting you make the evil great. If you do not succeed in producing the greatest evil out of this war, you will never learn the violent deed and learn to overcome fighting what lies outside you. [230] Therefore it is good if you want this greatest evil with your whole heart. [231] You are Christians and run after heroes, and wait for redeemers who should take the agony on themselves for you, and totally spare you Golgotha. With that you [232] pile up a mountain of Calvary over all Europe. If you succeed in making a terrible evil out of this war and throw innumerable victims into this abyss, this is good, since it makes each of you ready to sacrifice himself. For as I, you draw close to the accomplishment of Christ's mystery. You already feel the fist of the iron one on your back. This is the beginning of the way. If blood, fire, and the cry of distress fill this world, then you will recognize yourself in your acts: Drink your fill of the bloody atrocities of the war, feast upon the killing and destruction, then your eyes will open, you will see that you yourselves are the bearers of such fruit. [233] You are on the way if you will all this. Willing creates blindness, and blindness leads to the way. Should we will error? You should not, but you do will that error which you take for the best truth, as men have always done. The symbol of the crystal signifies the unalterable law of events that comes of itself. In this seed you grasp what is to come. I saw something terrible and incomprehensible. (It was on the night of Christmas day of the year 1913.) I saw the peasant's boot, the sign of the horrors of the peasant war, [234] of murdering incendiaries and of bloody cruelty. I knew to interpret this sign for myself as nothing but the fact that something bloody and dreadful lay before us. I saw the foot of a giant that crushed a whole city. How could I interpret this sign otherwise? I saw that the way to self-sacrifice began here. They will all become terribly enraptured by these tremendous experiences, and in their blindness will want to understand them as outer events. It is an inner happening; that is the way to the perfection of the mystery of Christ, [235] so that the peoples learn self-sacrifice. May the frightfulness become so great that it can turn men's eyes inward, so that their will no longer seeks the self in others but in themselves. [236] I saw it, I know that this is the way. I saw the death of Christ and I saw his lament; I felt the agony of his dying, of the great dying. I saw a new God, a child, who subdued daimons in his hand. [237] The God holds the separate principles in his power, he unites them. The God develops through the union of the principles in me. He is their union. If you will one of these principles, so you are in one, but far from your being other. If you will both principles, one and the other, then you excite the conflict between the principles, since you cannot want both at the same time. From this arises the need, the God appears in it, he takes your conflicting will in his hand, in the hand of a child whose will is simple and beyond conflict. You cannot learn this, it can only develop in you. You cannot will this, it takes the will from your hand and wills itself. Will yourself, that leads to the way [238]. But fundamentally you are terrified of yourself, and therefore you prefer to run to all others rather than to yourself. I saw the mountain of the sacrifice, and the blood poured in streams from its sides. When I saw how pride and power satisfied men, how beauty beamed from the eyes of women when the great war broke out, I knew that mankind was on the way to self-sacrifice. The spirit of the depths [239] has seized mankind and forces self-sacrifice upon it. Do not seek the guilt here or there. The spirit of the depths clutched the fate of man unto itself, as it clutched mine. He leads mankind through the river of blood to the mystery. In the mystery man himself becomes the two principles, the lion and the serpent. Because I also want my being other, I must become a Christ. I am made into Christ, I must suffer it. Thus the redeeming blood flows. Through the self-sacrifice my pleasure is changed and goes above into its higher principle. Love is sighted, but pleasure is blind. Both principles are one in the symbol of the flame. The principles strip themselves of human form. [240] *** The mystery showed me in images what I should afterward live. I did not possess any of those boons that the mystery showed me, for I still had to earn all of them. [241] finis. part. prim. (End of part one) _______________ Notes: 1. Medieval manuscripts were numbered by folios instead of pages. The front side of the folio is the recto (the right-hand page of an open book), and the back is the verso (the left-hand of an open book). In Liber Primus, Jung followed this practice. He reverted to contemporary pagination in Liber Secundus. 2. In 1921, Jung cited the first three verses of this passage (from Luther's Bible), noting: "The birth of the Savior, the development of the redeeming symbol, takes place where one does not expect it, and from precisely where a solution is most improbable" (Psychological Types, CW 6, §439). 3. In 1921, Jung cited this passage, noting: "The nature of the redeeming symbol is that of a child, that is the childlikeness or presuppositionlessness of the attitude belongs to the symbol and its function. This 'childlike' attitude necessarily brings with it another guiding principle in place of self-will and rational intentions, whose 'godlikeness' is synonymous with 'superiority.' Since it is of an irrational nature, the guiding principle appears in a miraculous form. Isaiah expresses his connection very well (9:5) ... These honorific titles reproduce the essential qualities of the redeeming symbol. The criterion of 'godlike' effect is the irresistible power of the unconscious impulses" (Psychological Types, CW 6. §442-43). 4. In 1955/56, Jung noted that the union of the opposites of the destructive and constructive powers of the unconscious paralleled the Messianic state of fulfillment depicted in this passage (Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, §258). 5. In Goethe's Faust, Faust says to Wagner: "What you call the spirit of the times / is fundamentally the gentleman's own mind, / in which the times are reflected" (Faust I, lines 577-79). 6. The Draft continues: "And then one whom I did not know, but who evidently had such knowledge, said to me: 'What a strange task you have! You must disclose your innermost and lowermost. / This I resisted since I hated nothing more than that which seemed to me unchaste and insolent" (p. 1). 7. In Transformations and of the Libido (1912), Jung interpreted God as a symbol of the libido (CW B. §111). In his subsequent work, Jung laid great emphasis on the distinction between the God image and the metaphysical existence of God (cf. passages added to the revised retitled 1952 edition, Symbols of Transformation, CW 5, §95). 8. The terms hinubergehen (going across), Ubergang (going-across), Untergang (down-going), and Brucke (bridge) feature in Nietzsche's Zarathustra in relation to the passage from man to the Ubermensch (superman). For example, "What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what can be loved in man is that he is a going-across and a down-going. / I love those who do not know how to live except their lives be a down-going, for they are those who are going over" (tr. R. Hollingdale [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984], p. 44, tr. mod; words are as underlined in Jung's copy). 9. Jung seems to be referring to episodes that occur later in the text: the healing of Izdubar (Liber Secundus, ch. 9), and the drinking of the bitter drink prepared by the solitary (Liber Secundus, ch. 20). 10. The Draft continues: "Who drinks this drink will never again thirst for this world nor for the afterlife since he drank crossing and completion. He drank the hot melting river of life which congeals to hard ore in his soul and awaits new melting and mixture" (p. 4). 11. The calligraphic volume
has: " 12. The Draft continues: "He who knows understands me and sees that I am not lying. May each one inquire of his own depth whether he needs what I say" (p. 4). 13. Lit. Vermessener. This also carries the connotation of the adjective vermessen, that is, a lack or loss of measure, and thus implies overconfidence, presumptuousness. 14. A reference to the vision that follows. 15. The Corrected Draft has: "I Beginning" (p. 7). 16. Jung discussed this vision on several occasions, stressing different details: in his 1925 seminar Analytical Psychology (p. 42f ), to Mircea Eliade (see above, p. 201), and in Memories (pp. Jung was on the way to Schaffhausen, where his mother-in-law lived; her fifty-seventh birthday was on October 17. The journey by train takes about one hour. 17. The Draft continues: "with a friend (whose lack of farsightedness and whose improvidence I had in reality often noted)" (p. 8). 18. The Draft continues: "my friend, however, wanted to return on a small and slower ship, which I considered stupid and imprudent" (p. 8). 19. The Draft continues: "and there I found, strangely enough, my friend, who had evidently taken the same faster ship without my noticing" (pp. 8-9). 20. Ice wine is made by leaving grapes on the vine until they are frozen by frost. They are then pressed, and the ice is removed, leading to a highly concentrated delectable sweet wine. 21. The Draft continues: "This was my dream. All my efforts to understand it were in vain. I labored for days. Its impression, however, was powerful" (p. 9). Jung also recounted this dream in Memories (p. 200). 22. See introduction, p. 201. 23. In the Draft, this is addressed to "my friends" (p. 9). 24. Cf. the contrast to John 14:6: "Jesus said unto him, I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." 25. The Draft continues: "This is not a law, but notice of the fact that the time of example and law, and of the straight line drawn in advance has become overripe" (p. 10). 26. The Draft continues: "My tongue shall wither if I serve up laws, if I prattle to you about teachings. Those who seek such will leave my table hungry" (p. 10). 27. The Draft continues: "only one law exists, and that is your law. Only one truth exists, and that is your truth" (p. 10). 28. The Draft continues: "One should not turn people into sheep, but sheep into people. The spirit of the depth demands this, who is beyond present and past. Speak and write for those who want to listen and read. But do not run after men, so that you do not soil the dignity of humanity -- it is a rare good. A sad demise in dignity is better than an undignified healing. Whoever wants to be a doctor of the soul sees people as being sick. He offends human dignity. It is presumptuous to say that man is sick. Whoever wants to be the soul's shepherd treats people like sheep. He violates human dignity. It is insolent to say that people are like sheep. Who gives you the right to say that man is sick and a sheep? Give him human dignity so he may find his ascendancy or downfall, his way" (p. 22) . 29. The Draft continues: "This is all, my dear friends, that I can tell you about the grounds and aims of my message, which I am burdened with like the patient donkey with a heavy load. He is glad to put it down" (p. 12). 30. In the text, Jung identifies the white bird as his soul. For Jung's discussion of the dove in alchemy, see Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955/56) (CW 14, §81). 31. The Corrected Draft has: "First Nights" (p. 13). 32. The Handwritten Draft has: "Dear Friends!" (p. 1). The Draft has "Dear Friends!" (p. 1). In his lecture at the ETH on June 14, 1935, Jung noted: "A point exists at about the thirty-fifth year when things begin to change, it is the first moment of the shadow side of life, of the going down to death. It is clear that Dante found this point and those who have 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 to yet others from the outside. If we do not see a thing Fate does it to us" (Barbara Hannah, ed., Modern Psychology, Vol. 1 and 2: Notes on Lectures given at the Eidgenossiche Technische Hochschule, Zurich, by Prof Dr. C. G. Jung, October 1933-July 1935, 2nd ed. [Zurich: privately printed, 1959], p. 223). 33. On October 27, 1913, Jung wrote to Freud breaking off relations with him and resigning as editor of the Jahrbuch fur Psychoanalytische und Psychopathologische Forschungen (William McGuire, ed., The Freud/Jung Letters, tr. Mannheim and R.F.C. Hull [Princeton: Princeton University Press/Bollingen Series, 1974], p. 550). 34. November 12, 1913. After "longing," the Draft has "at the beginning of the following month, I seized my pen and began writing this" (p. 13). 35. This affirmation occurs a number of times in Jung's later writings -- see for example, Jane Pratt, "Notes on a talk given by C. G. Jung: 'Is analytical psychology a religion?'" Spring Journal of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1972), p. 148. 36. Jung later described his personal transformation at this time as an example of the beginning of the second half of life, which frequently marked a return to the soul, after the goals and ambitions of the first half of life had been achieved (Symbols of Transformation [1952], CW 5, p. xxvi); see also "The turning point of life" (1930, CW 8). 37. Jung is referring here to his earlier work. For example, he had written in 1905, "Through the associations experiment we are at least given the means to pave the way for the experimental research of the mysteries of the sick soul." ("The psychopathological meaning of the associations experiment," CW 2, §897). 38. In Psychological Types (1921) Jung noted that in psychology conceptions are "a product of the subjective psychological constellation of the researcher" (CW 6, §9). This reflexivity formed an important theme in his later work (see my Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science, §1). 39. The Draft continues: "a dead system that I had contrived, assembled from so-called experiences and judgments" (p. 16). 40. In 1913, Jung called this process the introversion of the libido ("On the question of Psychological Types," CW 6). 41. In 1912, Jung had written, "It is a common error to judge longing in terms of the quality of the object ... Nature is only beautiful on account of the longing and love accorded to it by man. The aesthetic attributes emanating therefrom apply first and foremost to the libido, which alone accounts for the beauty of nature" (Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, CW B, §147). 42. In Psychological Types, Jung articulated this primacy of the image through his notion of esse in anima (CW 6, §66ff §711ff ). In her diary notes, Cary Baynes commented on this passage: "What struck me especially was what you said about the "Bild" [image] being half the world. That is the thing that makes humanity so dull. They have missed understanding that thing. The world, that is the thing that holds them rapt. 'Das Bild', they have never seriously considered unless they have been poets" (February 8, 1924, CFB). 43. The Draft continues: "He who strives only for things will sink into poverty as outer wealth increases, and his soul will be afflicted by protracted illness" (p. 17). 44. The Draft continues: "This parable about refinding the soul, my friends, is meant to show you that you have only seen me as half a man, since my soul had lost me. I am certain that you did not notice this; because how many are with their souls today? Yet without the soul, there is no path that leads beyond these times" (p. 17). In her diary notes Cary Baynes commented on this passage: "February 8th [1924]. I came to your conversation with your soul. All that you say is said in the right way and is sincere. It is no cry of the young man awakening into life but that of the mature man who has lived fully and richly in ways of the world and yet knows almost abruptly one might, say, that he has missed the essence. The vision came at the height of your power, when you could have gone on just as you were with perfect worldly success. I do not know how you were strong enough to give it heed. I am really for everything you say and understand it. Everyone who has lost the connection with his soul or has known how to give it life ought to have a chance to see this book. Every word so far lives for me and strengthens me just where I feel weak, but as you say the world is very far away from it in mood today. That does not matter too much, a book can swing even a whole world if it is written in fire and blood." (CFB). 45. In 1945, Jung commented on the symbolism of the bird and serpent in connection with the tree, "The philosophical tree" (ch. 12, CW 13). 46. November 14, 1913. 47. The Draft continues: "which were dark to me, and which I sought to grasp in my own inadequate way" (p. 18). 48. The Draft continues: "I belonged to men and things. I did not belong to myself." In Black Book 2, Jung states that he wandered for eleven years (p. 19). He had stopped writing in this book in 1902, taking it up again in the autumn of 1913. 49. Black Book 2 continues: "And I found you again only through the soul of the woman" (p. 8). 50. Black Book 2 continues: "Look, I bear a wound that is as yet not healed: my ambition to make an impression" (p. 8). 51. Black Book 2 continues: "I must tell myself most clearly: does He use the image of a child that lives in every man's soul? Were Horus, Tages, and Christ not children? Dionysus and Heracles were also divine children. Did Christ, the God of man, not call himself the son of man? What was his innermost thought in doing so? Should the daughter of man be God's name?" (p. 9). 52. The Draft continues: "How thick the earlier darkness was! How impetuous and how egotistic my passion was, subjugated by all the daimons of ambition, the desire for glory, greed, uncharitableness, and zeal! How ignorant I was at the time! Life tore me away, and I deliberately moved away from you and I have done so for all these years. I recognize how good all of this was. But I thought that you were lost, even though I sometimes thought that I was lost. But you were not lost. I went on the way of the day. You went invisibly with me and guided me step by step, putting the pieces together meaningfully" (pp. 20-21). 53. In 1912, Jung endorsed Maeder's notion of the prospective function of the dream (''An attempt at an account of psychoanalytic theory," CW 4, §452). In a discussion in the Zurich Psychoanalytical Society on January 31, 1913, Jung said: "The dream is not only the fulfillment of infantile desires, but also symbolizes the future ... The dream provides the answer through the symbol, which one must understand" (MZS, p. 5). On the development of Jung's dream theory, see my Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science, §2. 54. This echoes Blaise Pascal's famous statement, "The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing" (Pensees, 423 [London: Penguin, 1660/1995]. p. 127). Jung's copy of Pascal's work contains a number of marginal marks. 55. In 1912, Jung argued that scholarliness was insufficient if one wanted to become a "knower of the human soul." To do this, one had to "hang up exact science and put away the scholar's gown, to say farewell to his study and wander with human heart through the world, through the horror of prisons, mad houses and hospitals, through drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling dens, through the salons of elegant society, the stock exchanges, the socialist meetings, the churches, the revivals and ecstasies of the sects, to experience love, hate and passion in every form in one's body" ("New paths of psychology," CW 7, §409). 56. In 1931, Jung commented on the pathogenic consequences of the unlived life of parents upon their children: "What usually has the strongest psychic effect on the child is the life which the parents ... have not lived. This statement would be rather too perfunctory and superficial if we did not add by way of qualification: that part of their lives which might have been lived had not certain somewhat threadbare excuses prevented the parents from doing so" ("Introduction to Frances Wickes, 'Analyse der Kinderseele,'" CW 17, §87). 57. In the 1925 seminar, Jung explained his thoughts at this time: "These ideas about the anima and animus led me ever further afield into metaphysical problems, and more things crept up for reexamination. At that time I was on the Kantian basis that there were things that could never be solved and that therefore should not be speculated about, but it seemed to me that if I could find such definite ideas about the anima, it was quite worthwhile to try to formulate a conception of God. But I could arrive at nothing satisfactory and thought for a time that perhaps the anima figure was the deity. I said to myself that perhaps men had had a female God originally, but growing tired of being governed by women, they had then overthrown this God. I practically threw the whole metaphysical problem into the anima and conceived of it as the dominating spirit of psyche. In this way I got into a psychological argument with myself about the problem of God" (Analytical Psychology, p. 46). 58. In 1940, Jung presented a study of the motif of the divine child, in a collaborative volume with the Hungarian classicist Karl Kerenyi (see "On the psychology of the child archetype," CW 9, 1). Jung wrote that the child motif occurs frequently in the individuation process. It does not represent one's literal childhood, as is emphasized by its mythological nature. It compensates the one-sidedness of consciousness and paves the way for the future development of the personality. In certain conditions of conflict, the unconscious psyche produces a symbol that unites the opposites. The child is such a symbol. It anticipates the self, which is produced through the synthesis of the conscious and unconscious elements of the personality. The typical fates that befall the child indicate the kind of psychic events accompanying the genesis of the self. The wonderful birth of the child indicates that this happens psychically as opposed to physically. 59. In 1940, Jung wrote: "an essential aspect of the child motif is its futural character. The child is potential future" ("On the psychology of the child archetype," CW 9, I, §278). 60. The Draft continues: "My friends, as you can see, mercy is granted to the developed, not the childish. I thank my God for this message. Do not let the teachings of Christianity deceive you! Its teachings are good for the most mature minds of bygone time. Today, it serves immature minds. Christianity no longer promises us grace, and yet we still need mercy. That which I tell you is the way of what is to come, my way to mercy" (p. 27). 61. I.e., Christ. Cf. Jung, "Transformation symbolism in the mass" (1942, CW II) . 62. In Answer to Job Jung noted: "Through the indwelling of the third divine person in man, namely the Holy Ghost, a christification of the many arises" (1952, CW 11, §758) 63. November 15, 1913. 64. In Black Book 2, Jung wrote down here the two pivotal dreams he had when he was nineteen years old which led him to turn to natural science (p. 13f); they are described in Memories, p. 105f. 65. In Black Book 2, Jung noted here: "Here, someone stands beside me and whispers terrible things into my ear: 'You write to be printed and circulated among people. You want to cause a stir through the unusual. Nietzsche did this better than you. You are imitating Saint Augustine'" (p. 20). The reference is to Augustine's Confessions (400 CE), a devotional work written when he was forty-five years old, in which he narrates his conversion to Christianity in an autobiographical form (Confessions, tr. H. Chadwick [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991]). The Confessions are addressed to God, and recount the years of his wandering from God and the manner of his return. Echoing this in the opening sections of Liber Novus, Jung addresses his soul and recounts the years of his wandering away from her, and the manner of his return. In his published works, Jung frequently cited Augustine, and referred to his Confessions several times in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido. 66. The first letter of John: "God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him" (1 John 4:16). 67. Christ was tempted by the devil for forty days in the desert (Luke 4:1-13). 68. Matthew 21:18-20: "Now in the morning as he returned into the city, he hungered. And when he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward for ever. And presently the fig tree withered away. And when the disciples saw it, they marveled, saying, How soon is the fig tree withered away!" In 1944 Jung wrote: "The Christian -- my Christian -- knows no curse formulas; indeed he does not even sanction the cursing of the innocent fig-tree by the rabbi Jesus" ("Why I have not adopted the 'Catholic truth'?" CW 18, §1468). 69. The Draft continues: "They may serve for your redemption" (p. 34). 70. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote: "And even when one has all the virtues, there is still one thing to remember: to send even these virtues to sleep at the proper time" ("Of the chairs of virtue," p. 56). In 1939 Jung commented on the Eastern notion of liberation from virtues and vices ("Commentary to the 'Tibetan Book of Great Liberation," CW II, §826). 71. November 22, 1913. In Black Book 2, this sentence reads "says a voice" (p. 22). On November 21 Jung had given a presentation to the Zurich Psychoanalytical Society on "Formulations on the psychology of the unconscious." 72. November 28, 1913. 73. Black Book 2 continues: "I hear the words: 'An anchorite in his own desert.' The monks in the Syrian desert occur to me" (p. 33). 74. Black Book 2 continues: "I think of Christianity in the desert. Physically; those ancients went into the desert. Did they also enter into the desert of their own self? Or was their self not as barren and desolate as mine? There they wrestled with the devil. I wrestle with waiting. It seems to me not less since it is truly a hot hell" (p. 35). 75. Around 285, St. Anthony went to live as a hermit in the Egyptian desert, and other hermits followed, whom he and Pachomius organized into a community. This formed the basis of Christian monasticism, which spread to the Palestinian and Syrian deserts. In the fourth century there were thousands of monks in the Egyptian desert. 76. John 1:1: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." 77. December 11, 1913. 78. In "Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower' "(1929), Jung criticized the Western tendency to turn everything into methods and intentions. The cardinal lesson, as presented by the Chinese texts and by Meister Eckhart, was that of allowing psychic events to happen of their own accord: "letting things happen, the action through non-action, the 'letting go of oneself' of Meister Eckhart, became the key for me that succeeded in opening the door to the way: One must be able to psychically ley things happen" (CW 13, §20). 79. Christ preached: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5:3). In a number of Christian communities, members take a vow of poverty. In 1934, Jung wrote: "Just as in Christianity the vow of worldly poverty turned the mind away from the riches of this earth, so spiritual poverty seeks to renounce the false riches of the spirit in order to withdraw not only from the sorry remnants -- which today call themselves the protestant 'churches' -- of a great past, but also from all the allurements of exotic aromas; in order, finally, to turn back to itself, where, in the cold light of consciousness, the blank barrenness of the world reaches to the very stars" ("On the archetypes of the collective unconscious." CW 9, I, §29). 80. The Draft continues: "This, too, is an image of the ancients, that they lived in things symbolically: they renounced wealth in order to have a share of the voluntary poverty of their souls. Therefore I had to grant my soul my most extreme poverty and need. And the scorn of my cleverness rose up against this" (p. 47). 81. December 12, 1911 The
Corrected Draft has: " 82. The Draft continues: "A dwarf clad entirely in leather stood before it, minding the entrance" (p. 48). 83. The Corrected Draft
continues: "The stone must be conquered, it is the stone 84. Black Book 2 continues: "This dark hole -- I want to know where it leads and what it says? An oracle? Is it the place of Pythia?" (p. 43). 85. Jung narrated this episode in his 1925 seminar, stressing different details. He commented: "When I came out of the fantasy; I realized that my mechanism had worked wonderfully well, but I was in great confusion as to the meaning of all those things I had seen. The light in the cave from the crystal was, I thought, like the stone of wisdom. The secret murder of the hero I could not understand at all. The beetle of course I knew to be an ancient sun symbol, and the setting sun, the luminous red disk, was archetypal. The serpents I thought might have been connected with Egyptian material. I could not then realize that it was all so archetypal, I need not seek connections. I was able to link the picture up with the sea of blood I had previously fantasized about. / Though I could not then grasp the significance of the hero killed, soon after I had a dream in which Siegfried was killed by myself. It was a case of destroying the hero ideal of my efficiency. This has to be sacrificed in order that a new adaptation can be made; in short, it is connected with the sacrifice of the superior function in order to get at the libido necessary to activate the inferior functions" (Analytical Psychology, p. 48). (The killing of Siegfried occurs below in ch. 7) Jung also anonymously cited and discussed this fantasy in his ETH lecture on June 14, 1935 (Modern Psychology, vols. I. and 2, p. 223). 86. In the Corrected Draft, "Science" is deleted (p. 37). 87. In the Corrected Draft, "more blessed" is substituted (p. 38). 88. In the Corrected Draft, this sentence is substituted by: "Madness grows" (p. 38). 89. The theme of divine madness has a long history. Its locus classicus was Socrates's discussion of it in the Phaedrus: madness, "provided it comes as a gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings" (Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, tr. W Hamilton [London: Penguin, 1986), p. 46, line 244). Socrates distinguished four types of divine madness: (1) inspired divination, such as by the prophetess at Delphi; (2) instances in which individuals, when ancient sins have given rise to troubles, have prophesied and incited to prayer and worship; (3) possession by the Muses, since the technically skilled untouched by the madness of the Muses will never be a good poet; and (4) the lover. In the Renaissance, the theme of divine madness was taken up by the Neoplatonists such as Ficino and by humanists such as Erasmus. Erasmus's discussion is particularly important, as it fuses the classical Platonic conception with Christianity. For Erasmus, Christianity was the highest type of inspired madness. Like Plato, Erasmus differentiated between two types of madness: "Thus as long as the soul uses its bodily organs aright, a man is called sane; but truly, when it bursts its chains and tries to be free, practising running away from its prison, then one calls it insanity. If this happens through disease or a defect of the organs, then by common consent it is, plainly, insanity. And yet men of this kind, too, we find foretelling things to come, knowing tongues and writings which they had never studied beforehand -- altogether showing forth something divine" (In Praise of Folly, tr. M. A. Screech [London: Penguin, 1988), pp. 128-29). He adds that if insanity "happens through divine fervor, it may not be the same kind of insanity, but it is so like it that most people make no distinction." For lay people, the two forms of insanity appeared the same. The happiness that Christians sought was "nothing other than a certain kind of madness." Those who experience this "experience something which is very like madness. They speak incoherently and unnaturally, utter sound without sense, and their faces suddenly change expression ... in fact they are truly beside themselves" (ibid., pp. 129-33). In 1815, the philosopher F.W.J. Schelling discussed divine madness in a manner that has a certain proximity to Jung's discussion, noting that "The ancients did not speak in vain of a divine and holy madness." Schelling related this to the "inner self-laceration of nature." He held that "nothing great can be accomplished without a constant solicitation of madness, which should always be overcome, but should never be entirely lacking." On the one hand, there were sober spirits in whom there was no trace of madness, together with men of understanding who produced cold intellectual works. On the other, "there is one kind of person that governs madness and precisely in this overwhelmingly shows the highest force of the intellect. The other kind of person is governed by madness and is someone who is really mad" (The Ages of the World, tr.), Wirth [Albany: SUNY Press, 2000], pp. 102-4). 90. An application of William James's notion of the pragmatic rule. Jung read James's Pragmatism in 1912, and it had a strong impact on his thinking. In his foreword to his Fordham University lectures, Jung stated that he had taken James's pragmatic rule as his guiding principle (CW 4, p. 86). See my Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science, pp. 57-61. 91. The Draft continues: "The spirit of the depths was so alien to me that it took me twenty-five nights to comprehend him. And even then he was still so alien that I could neither see nor ask. He had to come to me as a stranger from far away and from an unheard-of side. He had to call me. I could not address him, knowing him and his nature. He announced himself with a loud voice, as in a warlike turmoil with the manifold clamoring of the voices of this time. The spirit of this time arose in me against this stranger, and uttered a battle cry together with his many serfs. I heard the noise of this battle in the air. Then the spirit of the depths burst forth and led me to the site of the innermost. But he had reduced the spirit of this time to a dwarf who was clever and bustling, yet was a dwarf. And the vision showed me the spirit of this time as made of leather, that is, pressed together, sere and lifeless. He could not prevent me from entering the dark underworld of the spirit of the depths. To my astonishment I realized that my feet sank into the black muddy water of the river of death. [The Corrected Draft adds: "for that is where death is". p. 41] The mystery of the shining red crystal was my next destination" (pp. 54-55). 92. The Draft continues: "My soul is my supreme meaning, my image of God, neither God himself nor the supreme meaning. God becomes apparent in the supreme meaning of the human community" (p. 58). 93. In "Transformation symbolism in the mass," (1942) Jung commented on the motif of the identity of the sacrificer and the sacrificed, with particular reference to the visions of Zosimos of Panapolis, a natural philosopher and alchemist of the third century Jung noted: "What I sacrifice is my egotistical claim, and by doing this I give up myself. Every sacrifice is therefore, to a greater or lesser degree, a self-sacrifice" (CW II, §397). Cf. also the Katha Upanishad. ch. 2. verse 19. Jung cited the next two verses of the Katha Upanishad on the nature of the self in 1921 (CW 6, §329). There is a line in the margin of Jung's copy by these verses in the Sacred Books of the East, vol. XV, pt. 2. p. 11. In "Dreams," Jung noted in connection with a dream "My intensive unconscious relation to India in the Red Book" (p. 9). 94. Jung elaborated the theme of collective guilt in ''After the catastrophe" (1945. CW 10). 95. The reference is to the events of World War I. The autumn of 1914 (when Jung wrote this section of "layer two") saw the battle of the Marne and the first battle of Ypres. 96. In his lecture at the ETH on June 14, 1935, Jung commented (partially in reference to this fantasy, which he referred to anonymously): "The sun motif appears in many places and times and the meaning is always the same -- that a new consciousness has been born. It is the light of illumination which is projected into space. This is a psychological event; the medical term "hallucination" makes no sense in psychology. / The Katabasis plays a very important role in the Middle Ages and the old masters conceived of the rising sun in this Katabasis as of a new light, the lux moderna, the jewel, the lapis" (Modern Psychology, p. 231). 97. The Draft continues: "My friends, I know that I speak in riddles. But the spirit of the depths has granted me a view of many things in order to help my weak comprehension. I want to tell you more about my visions so that you better understand which things the spirit of the depths would like you to see. May those be well who can see these things! Those who cannot must live them as blind fate, in images" (p. 61). 98. In The Relations between the I and the Unconscious (1927), Jung refers to the destructive and anarchic aspects that are constellated in societies being enacted by prophetically inclined individuals through spectacular crimes such as regicide (CW 7, §240). 99. Political assassinations were frequent at the beginning of the twentieth century. The particular event referred to here is the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Martin Gilbert describes this event, which played a critical role in the events that led to the outbreak of the First World War, as "a turning point in the history of the twentieth century" (A History of the Twentieth Century: Volume One: 1900-1933 [London: William Morrow, 1977], p. 308). 100. The Draft continues: "When I was aspiring to my highest worldly power, the spirit of the depths sent me nameless thoughts and visions, that wiped out the heroic aspiration in me as our time understands it" (p. 62). 101. The Draft continues: "Everything that we have forgotten will be revived, each human and divine passion, the black serpents and the reddish sun of the depths" (p. 64). 102. On June 9, 1917, there was a discussion on the psychology of the world war in the Association for Analytical Psychology following a presentation by Jules Vodoz on the Song of Roland. Jung argued that "Hypothetically, the World War can be raised to the subjective level. In detail, the authoritarian principle (taking action on the basis of principles) clashes with the emotional principle. The collective unconscious enters into allegiance with the emotional." Concerning the hero, he said: "The hero -- the beloved figure of the people, should fall. All heroes bring themselves down by carrying the heroic attitude beyond a certain limit, and hence lose their footing" (MAP, vol. 2, p. 10). The psychological interpretation of the First World War on the subjective level describes what is developed in this chapter. The connection between individual and collective psychology which he articulates here forms one of the leitmotifs of his later work Present and Future [1957], CW 10). 103. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche wrote: ''Anyone who fights with monsters should take care that he not in the process become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into you" (tr. Marion Faber [Oxford: Oxford University Press], 1998, §146, p. 68). 104. Black Book 2 continues: "Are you neurotic? Are we neurotic?" (p. 53). 105. See note 99, p. 240. 106. The Draft continues: "My friends, if you knew what depths of the future you carry inside you! Those who look into their own depths, look at what is to come" (p. 70). 107. The Draft continues: "But just as Judas is a necessary link in the chain of the work of redemption, so is our Judas betrayal of the hero also a necessary passageway to redemption" (p. 71). In Transformations and Symbols of the Libido (1912), Jung discussed the view of the Abbe Oegger, in Anatole France's story Le jardin d'Epicure, who maintained that God had chosen Judas as an instrument to complete Christ's work of redemption (CW B, 108. Cf. Leviticus 16:7-10:
"And he shall take the two goats, and present them before the Lord at
the door of the tabernacle of the congregation. And Aaron shall cast
lots upon the two goats; one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for the
scapegoat. And Aaron shall bring the goat upon which the Lord's lot
fell, and offer him for a sin offering. But the goat, on which the lot
fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the Lord, to
make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat 109. The Draft continues: "this is what the ancients taught us" (p. 72). 110. The Draft continues: "Those who wander in the desert experience everything that belongs to the desert. The ancients have described this to us. From them we can learn. Open the ancient books and learn what will come to you in solitude. Everything will be given to you and you will be spared nothing, the mercy and the torment" (p. 72). 111. This refers to the mourning for the death of the hero. 112. December 18, 1913. Black Book 2 has: "The following night was terrible. I soon awoke from a frightful dream" (p. 56). The Draft has: "a mighty dream vision rose from the depths" (p. 73). 113. Siegfried was a heroic prince who appears in old German and Norse epics. In the twelfth-century Niebelunglied, he is described as follows: "And in what magnificent style Siegfried rode! He bore a great spear, stout of shaft and broad of head; his handsome sword reached down to his spurs; and the fine horn which this lord carried was of the reddest gold" (tr. A. Hatto [London: Penguin, 2004], p. 129). His wife, Brunhild, is tricked into revealing the only place where he could be wounded and killed. Wagner reworked these epics in The Ring of the Niebelung. In 1912, in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, Jung presented a psychological interpretation of Siegfried as a symbol of the libido, principally citing Wagner's libretto of Siegfried (CW B. §568f). 114. The Draft continues: "After this dream vision" (p. 73). 115. In Black Book 2,
Jung noted: "I strode light-footedly up an incredibly steep path and
later helped my wife, who followed me at a slower pace, to ascend.
Some people mocked us, but I didn't mind, since this showed that they
didn't know that I had murdered the hero" (p. 57). Jung recounted
this dream in the 1925 seminar, stressing 116. The Draft continues: "and I fell asleep again. A second dream vision rose in me" (pp. 73-74). 117. The Draft continues: "These lights pervaded my mind and senses. And once again I fell asleep like a convalescent" (p. 74). Jung recounted this dream to Aniela Jaffe, and commented that after he had been confronted with the shadow, as in the Siegfried dream, this dream expressed the idea that he was one thing and something else at the same time. The unconscious reached beyond one, like a saint's halo. The shadow was like the light-colored sphere that surrounded the people. He thought this was a vision of the beyond, where men are complete. (MP, p. 170). 118. The Draft continues: "The world in-between is a world of the simplest things. It is not a world of intention and imperatives, but a perchance-world with indefinite possibilities. Here the next ways are all small, no broad, straight highroads, no Heaven above them, no Hell beneath" (p. 74). In October of 1916, Jung gave some talks to the Psychological Club, "Adaptation, individuation, and collectivity," in which he commented on the importance of guilt: "the first step in individuation is tragic guilt. The accumulation of guilt demands expiation" (CW 18, §ro94). 119. The Draft has here, in addition: "Are you smiling? The spirit of this time would want to make you believe that the depths are no world and no reality" (p. 74). 120. The Draft continues: "a Judas" (p. 75). 121. The Draft continues: "My dream vision showed me that I was not alone when I committed the deed. I was helped by a youth, that is, one who was younger than me; a rejuvenated version of myself" (p. 76). 122 The Draft continues: "Siegfried had to die, just like Wotan" (p. 76). In 1918, Jung wrote of the effects of the introduction of Christianity into Germany: "Christianity split the Germanic barbarian into his upper and lower halves and enabled him, by repressing the dark side, to domesticate the brighter half and fit it for culture. But the lower, darker half still awaits redemption and a second domestication. Until then, it will remain associated with vestiges of prehistory, with the collective unconscious, which must indicate a peculiar and increasing activation of the collective unconscious. ("On the unconscious," CW 10, §17). He expanded on this situation in "Wotan" (1936, CW 10). 123. In the Draft, this sentence reads: "We want to continue living with a new God, a hero beyond Christ" (p. 76). To Aniela Jaffe, he recounted that he had thought of himself as an overcoming hero, but the dream indicated that the hero had to be killed. This exaggeration of the will was represented by the Germans at that time, such as by the Siegfried line. A voice within him said, "If you do not understand the dream, you must shoot yourself!" (MP, p. 98, Memories, p. 204). The original Siegfried line was a defensive line established by the Germans in northern France in 1917 (this was actually a subsection of the Hindenburg Line). 124. The theme of the dying and resurrecting God features prominently in James Frazer's The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1911-15), which Jung drew upon in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido (1912). 125. A reference to Christ's parable of the mustard seed. Matthew 13:31-32: "The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree" (Cf. Luke 13:18-20, Mark 4:30-32). 126. In Mark 16:17, Christ stated that those who believe shall speak with new tongues. The issue of speaking in tongues is discussed in 1 Corinthians 14, and is central in the Pentecostal movement. 127. The theme of self-overcoming is an important one in the work of Nietzsche. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes: "I teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All creatures hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and do you want to be the ebb of this great tide, and return to the animals rather than overcome man? ("Zarathustra's prologue 3," p. 41; underlined as in Jung's copy). For Jung's discussion of this theme in Nietzsche, see Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-9, vol. 2, ed. James Jarrett (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988, pp. 1502-08). 128. Judas betrayed Christ for thirty pieces of silver (Matthew 26:14-16). 129. See note 58, p. 234. 130. This conception of the encompassing nature of the new God is fully developed further ahead in Scrutinies (Sermon 2, p. 349f ). 131. The theme of the integration of evil into the Godhead played an important role in Jung's works; see Aion (1951, CW 9, 2, ch. 5), and Answer to Job (1952, CW 11). 132. The conception of the absolute idea was developed by Hegel. He understood it as the culmination and the self-differentiating unity of the dialectical sequence that gives rise to the cosmos. Cf. Hegel's Logic (tr. W. Wallace [London: Thames and Hudson, 1975]). Jung refers to this in 1921 in Psychological Types (CW 6, §735). 133. This sentence is cut in the Corrected Draft and replaced with "but this can be guessed:" (p. 68). 134. 1 Peter 4:6 states: "For this reason the gospel was preached also to those who are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit." 135. The theme of Christ's descent into Hell features in several apocryphal gospels. In the "Apostles Creed," it is stated that "He descended into Hell. The third day He arose again from the dead." Jung commented on the appearance of this motif in medieval alchemy (Psychology and Alchemy, 1944, CW 12, §61n, 440, 451; Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1955/56, CW 14, 475). One of the sources which Jung referred to (CW 12, §61n) was Albrecht Dieterich's Nekyia: Beitrage zur Erklarung der neuentdeckten Petrusapokalypse, which commented on an apocalyptic fragment from the Gospel of St. Peter, in which Christ gives a detailed description of Hell. Jung's copy of this work has numerous markings in the margins, and in the rear are two additional pieces of paper with a list of page references and remarks. In 1951 he gave the following psychological interpretation of the motif of Christ's descent into Hell: "The scope of the integration is by the 'descensus ad infernos,' the descent of Christ's soul to Hell, whose 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" (Aion, CW 9, 2, §72). In 1938 he noted: "The three days descent into Hell during death describes the sinking of the vanished value into the unconscious, where, by conquering the power of darkness, it establishes a new order, and then rises up to heaven again, that is, attains supreme clarity of consciousness" ("Psychology and religion," CW II, §149). The "unknown books of the ancients" refer to the apocryphal gospels. 136. The Draft continues: "But the serpent is also life. In the image furnished by the ancients, the serpent put an end to the childlike magnificence of paradise; they even said that Christ himself had been a serpent" (p. 83). Jung commented on this motif in 1950 in Aion, CW 9, 2, §291.
137. The Corrected Draft has: "a beginning of Hell" (p. 70). In
1933 Jung recalled: "At the outbreak of war I was in Inverness, and I
returned through Holland and Germany. I came right through the armies
going west, and I had the feeling that it was what one would call in
German a Hochzeitsstimmung, a feast of love all over the country:
Everything was decorated with flowers, it was an outburst of love, they
all loved each other and everything was beautiful. Yes, the war was
important, a big affair, but the main thing was the brotherly love all
over the country, everybody was everybody else's brother, one could have
everything anyone possessed, it did not matter. The peasants threw
open their cellars and handed out what they had. That happened even in
the restaurant and buffet at the railroad station. I was very hungry. I
had had nothing to eat for about twenty-four hours, and they had some
sandwiches left, and when I asked what they cost, they said, "Oh
nothing, just take them!" And when I first crossed the border into
Germany, we were led into an enormous tent full of beer and sausages and
bread and cheese, and we paid nothing, it was one great feast of love. I
was absolutely bewildered" (Visions Seminars 2, ed. Claire
Douglas [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997], pp. 974-75).
"It hasn't been declared yet. But there will be war. You can
take my word for that. I didn't want to worry you but I have
seen omens on three different occasions since that time. So
it won't be the end of the world, no earthquake, no
revolution, but war. You'll see what a sensation that will
be! People will love it. Even now they can hardly wait for
the killing to begin -- their lives are that dull! But you
will see, Sinclair, that this is only the beginning. Perhaps
it will be a very big war, a war on a gigantic scale. But
that, too, will only be the beginning. The new world has
begun and the new world will be terrible for those clinging
to the old. What will you do?"...
All men seemed to have become brothers -- overnight. They
talked of "the fatherland" and of "honor," but what lay
behind it was their own fate whose unveiled face they had
now all beheld for one brief moment. Young men left their
barracks, were packed into trains, and on many faces I saw a
sign -- not ours -- but a beautiful, dignified sign
nonetheless that meant love and death. I, too, was embraced
by people whom I had never seen before and I understood this
gesture and responded to it. Intoxication made them do it,
not a hankering after their destiny. But this intoxication
was sacred, for it was the result of their all having thrown
that brief and terribly disquieting glance into the eyes of
their fate.
It was nearly winter when I was sent to the front. Despite
the excitement of being under fire for the first time, in
the beginning everything disappointed me. At one time I had
given much thought to why men were so very rarely capable of
living for an ideal. Now I saw that many, no, all men were
capable of dying for one. Yet it could not be a personal, a
freely chosen ideal; it had to be one mutually accepted.
As time went on though I realized I had underestimated these
men. However much mutual service and danger made a uniform
mass of them, I still saw many approach the will of fate
with great dignity. Many, very many, not only during the
attack but at every moment of the day, wore in their eyes
the remote, resolute, somewhat possessed look which knows
nothing of aims and signified complete surrender to the
incredible. Whatever they might think or believe, they were
ready, they could be used, they were the clay of which the
future could be shaped. The more single-mindedly the world
concentrated on war and heroism, on honor and other old
ideals, the more remote and improbable any whisper of
genuine humanity sounded -- that was all just surface, in
the same way that the question of the war's external and
political objectives remained superficial. Deep down,
underneath, something was taking shape. Something akin to a
new humanity. For I could see many men -- and many died
beside me -- who had begun to feel acutely that hatred and
rage, slaughter and annihilation, were not bound up with
these objectives. No, these objectives and aims were
completely fortuitous. The most primitive, even the wildest
feelings were not directed at the enemy; their bloody task
was merely an irradiation of the soul, of the soul divided
within itself, which filled them with the lust to rage and
kill, annihilate and die so that they might be born anew.
138. The phrase "Soul murderer" had been used by Luther and Zwingli, and
more recently by Daniel Paul Schreber in his 1903 Memoirs of my
Nervous Illness, eds. and tr. Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter (Folkestone:
William Dawson, 1955). Jung discussed this work in 1907 in "On the
psychology of dementia praecox" (CW 3), and drew Freud's
attention to it. In discussions concerning Schreber in the Association
for Analytical Psychology on July 9 and 16 of 1915 following
presentations by Schneiter, Jung drew attention to Gnostic parallels
to Schreber's imagery (MAP, vol. 1., p. 88f ).
139. The reference is to the carnage of World War I.
140. This refers back to the vision in chapter 5, "Descent into Hell in
the Future." In 1940 Jung wrote: "the threat to one's inmost self from
dragons and serpents points to the danger of the newly acquired
consciousness being swallowed up again by the instinctive soul, the
unconscious" ("On the psychology of the child archetype," CW 9,1,
§282).
141. The Corrected Draft has instead "to an end" (p. 73).
142. In 1952, Jung wrote to Zwi Werblowsky concerning the intentional
ambiguity of his writings: "The language I speak must be equivocal,
that is, ambiguous, to do justice to psychic nature with its
double aspect. I strive consciously and deliberately for ambiguous
expressions, because it is superior to unequivocalness and corresponds
to the nature of being" (Letters 2, pp. 70-71).
143. The Draft continues: "Look at the images of the Gods that
the ancients and the men of old left behind: their nature is ambiguous
and equivocal" (p. 87).
144. I John 4:16: "God is love; and he that
dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him."
145. The Draft continues: "Whoever reverses this word and others
that I speak, is a player, since he doesn't respect the spoken word.
Know that you attain yourself from what you read in a book. You read as
much into a book as out of it" (p. 88).
146. The Corrected Draft has "birth of the new [conception
of a] God" (p. 74).
147. The reference is to the Virgin Mary.
148. See note 57, p. 237.
149. This seems to refer to the wounding of Izdubar in Liber Secundus,
ch. 8, "First Day." See below, p. 278f.
150. The importance of wholeness above perfection is an important
theme in Jung's later work. Cf.
Aion, 1951, CW 9, 2, §123; Mysterium Coniunctionis,
1955/56, CW 14, §616.
151. In 1916, Jung wrote: "Man has one ability which, though it is of
the greatest utility for collective purposes, is the most pernicious for
individuation, and that is imitation. Collective psychology can
hardly dispense with imitation" ("The structure of the unconscious:
CW 7, §463). In "On the psychology of the child archetype" (1940)
Jung wrote about the danger of identifying with the hero: "This identity
is often very extremely stubborn and dangerous for the equilibrium of
the soul. If the identity can be dissolved, the figure of the hero,
through the reduction of consciousness to a human level, can gradually
be differentiated into a symbol of the self " (CW 9, I, §303).
152. Jung dealt with the issue of the conflict between individuation and
collectivity in 1916 in "Individuation and collectivity" (CW 18).
153. Cf. Jung's comments in "Individuation and collectivity" that "The
individual must now consolidate himself by cutting himself off from God
and becoming wholly himself. Thereby and at the same time he also
separates himself from society. Outwardly he plunges into solitude, but
inwardly into Hell, distance from God" (CW 18, §1103).
154. This is an interpretation of the murder of Siegfried in Liber
Primus, ch. 7, "Murder of the Hero."
155. This refers to the dream mentioned in the prologue, p. 231.
156. In Black Book 2 Jung noted: "with a gray beard and wearing
an Oriental robe" (p. 231).
157. Elijah was one of the prophets of the Old Testament. He first
appears in I Kings 17, bearing a message from God to Ahab, the king of
Israel. In 1953, the Carmelite Pere Bruno wrote to Jung asking how one
established the existence of an archetype. Jung replied by taking Elijah
as an example, describing him as a highly mythical personage, which did
not prevent him from probably being a historical figure. Drawing
together descriptions of him throughout history, Jung described him as a
"living archetype" who represented the collective unconscious and the
self. He noted that such a constellated archetype gave rise to new
forms of assimilation, and represented a compensation on the part of the
unconscious (CW 18, §§1518-31).
For even the great prophetic movement, which, well
considered, is the only manifestation of the Hebrew
intellect which possesses enduring worth, originated in the
north. Elijah, in many respects the most remarkable and most
imaginative personality in the whole Israelite history,
exercised his influence there only. The accounts of Elijah
are so scanty that many look upon him as a mythological
personage, but I agree with Wellhausen in thinking that this
is historically impossible, for Elijah is the man who sets
the stone rolling, the inventor in a way of the true
religion of Jehovah, the great mind which has a vague
feeling, though not a clear idea, of the monotheistic
essence of that worship. Here a great personality is at
work, and to work it must have lived. Of special interest is
the one exact piece of information which we possess
regarding him; according to it he was not an Israelite, but
a "settler with half rights" from the other side of the
Jordan, from the farthest boundaries of the land -- a man,
therefore, in whose veins in all probability almost pure
Arabian blood must have flowed. This is interesting, for it
shows the genuine Semitic element at work, trying to save
its religious ideal, which in the south by the eclecticism
of such half-Amorites as David and Amorite-Hittites as
Solomon, and in the north by the secular tolerance of the
predominantly Canaanite population, had been seriously
threatened. In the north alone, which was favoured by its
situation, and the inhabitants of which probably were
distinguished by greater industry and talent for commerce,
there was already prosperity, and with it luxury and the
taste for art had developed; one of the sins with which Amos
reproaches the Israelites is that "they make songs like
David." Against this the anti-civilising spirit of the more
genuine Semite rebelled. The noble-minded man felt
instinctively and powerfully the incompatibility between the
alien culture and the mental qualities of his people; he saw
before his feet the pit open, into which in truth all
mongrel Semitic kingdoms had quickly sunk and left no trace
behind, and, fearless as the Bedouin, he prepared for the
struggle. From Elijah onwards this prophetic movement is
like a healthy, dry desert wind, which, coming from afar,
withers up the blossoms of idleness -- but at the same time
the buds of beauty and of art.
158. Salome was the daughter of Herodias and the step-daughter of King
Herod. In Matthew 14 and Mark 6, John the Baptist had told King Herod
that it was unlawful for him to be married to his brother's wife, and
Herod put him in prison. Salome (who is not named, but simply called the
daughter of Herodias) danced before Herod on his birthday, and he
promised to give her anything she wished for. She requested the head of
John the Baptist, who was then beheaded. In the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, the figure of Salome fascinated painters and
writers, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Gustave Flaubert, Stephane
Mallarme, Gustave Moreau,
Oscar Wilde, and Franz von Stuck, featuring in many works. See Bram
Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle
Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 379-98. 159. Black Book 2
continues: "The crystal shines dimly. I think again of the image of
Odysseus, how he passed the rocky island of the Sirens on his lengthy
odyssey. Should I, should I not?" (p. 74). 160. I.e., the head of John the
Baptist. 161. In the 1925 Seminar, Jung
recounted: "I used the same technique of the descent, but this time I
went much deeper. The first time I should say I reached a depth of about
one thousand feet, but this time it was a cosmic depth. It was like
going to the moon, or like the feeling of a descent into empty space.
First the picture was of a crater, or a ring-chain of mountains, and my
feeling association was that of one dead, as if oneself were a victim.
It was the mood of the land of the hereafter. I could see two people, an
old man with a white beard and a young girl who was very beautiful. I
assumed them to be real and listened to what they were saying. The old
man said he was Elijah and I was quite shocked, but she was even more
upsetting because she was Salome. I said to myself that there was a
queer mixture: Salome and Elijah, but Elijah assured me that he and
Salome had been together since eternity. This also upset me. With them
was a black serpent who had an affinity for me. I stuck to Elijah as
being the most reasonable of the lot, for he seemed to have a mind. I
was exceedingly doubtful about Salome. We had a long conversation but I
did not understand it. Of course I thought of the fact of my father
being a clergyman as being the explanation of my having figures like
this. How about this old man then? Salome was not to be touched upon. It
was only much later that I found her association with Elijah quite
natural. Whenever you take journeys like this you find a young girl
with an old man" (Analytical Psychology, pp. 63-64). Jung
then refers to examples of this pattern in the work of
Melville, Meyrink, Rider Haggard, and the Gnostic legend of Simon
Magus (see note 154, p. 359), Kundry and Klingsor from Wagner's
Parsifal (see below, p. 303), and Francesco Colonna's
Hypnerotomachia. In Memories, he noted: "In myths the snake
is a frequent counterpart of the hero. There are numerous accounts of
their affinity ... Therefore the presence of the snake was an indication
of a hero-myth" (p. 206). Of Salome, he said: "Salome is an anima
figure. She is blind because she does not see the meaning of things.
Elijah is the figure of the wise old prophet and represents the factor
of intelligence and knowledge; Salome, the erotic element. One might say
that the two figures are personifications of Logos and Eros. But such a
definition would be excessively intellectual. It is more meaningful
to let the figures be what they were for me at that time -- namely.
events and experiences" (pp. 206-7). In 1955/56, Jung wrote: "For
purely psychological reasons I have elsewhere attempted to equate the
masculine consciousness with the concept of Logos and the feminine with
that of Eros. By Logos I meant discrimination, judgment, insight, and by
Eros I meant the placing into relation" (Mysterium Coniunctionis,
CW 14, §224). On Jung's reading of Elijah and Salome in terms of
Logos and Eros respectively, see Appendix B, "Commentaries." 162. The Corrected Draft
has: "Guiding Reflection" (p. 86). The Draft and
Corrected Draft have "This, my friend, is a mystery play in which
the spirit of the depths cast me. I had recognized 163. The Draft
continues: "In the renewed world you can have no outer possessions,
unless you create them out of yourselves. You can enter only into your
own mysteries. The spirit of the depths has other things to teach you
than me. I only have to bring you tidings of the new God and of the
ceremonies and mysteries of his service. But this is the way: It is
the gate to darkness" (p. 100).
164. The Draft continues: "The mystery play took place at the
deepest bottom of my interior, which is that other world. You have to
bear this in mind, it is also a world and its reality is large and
frightening. You cry and laugh and tremble and sometimes you break out
in a cold sweat for fear of death. The mystery play represents my self
and through me the world to which I belong is represented. Thus, my
friends, you learn much about the world, and through it about yourself,
by what I say to you here. But you have not learned anything about your
mysteries in this way: indeed, your way is darker than before, since my
example will stand obstructively in your path. You may follow me, not on
my way, but on yours" (p. 102).
165. This depicts the scene in the fantasy.
166. This is a subjective interpretation of the figures of Elijah and
Salome.
167. In the Corrected Draft, "Predetermination or forethought" is
replaced by "The Idea." This substitution occurs throughout the rest of
this section (p. 89).
Forethought: I noun advance planning, aim,
anticipation, calculation, circumspection, consideration,
consideration in advance, contemplation, deliberate
intention, deliberation, design, direction, distinct
purpose, fixed purpose, intent, intention, plan, planned
course of action, planning ahead, plot, preconsideration,
predeliberation, predetermination, premeditation, previous
consideration, previous design, previous reflection, prior
planning, prior thought, providentia, provision, purpose,
resolution, resolve, scheme, shrewdness, strategy, thought
beforehand, thoughtfulness, volition, will, willfulness
associated concepts: malice, caution (vigilance),
consideration (contemplation), contemplation, deliberation,
design (intent), plan, precaution, precognition,
predetermination, premeditation, preparation, prudence,
strategy
Plan: I noun agenda, alternative, ambition,
arrangement, cabal, campaign, complot, conspiracy, course of
action, curriculum, design, draft, expedient, forethought,
hope, intendment, intent, intention, itinerary, plot,
predeliberation, preparation, program, projection, proposal,
proposed action, proposition, prospectus, readiness,
resolve, schedule scheme, strategem, strategy, suggestion,
syllabus, tactic, undertaking associated concepts:
ecological plan, feasibility plan, plan for reorganization,
planning board, aim, arrange, block out, cabal, calculate,
collude, complot, concoct, connive, conspire, contrive,
counterplot, design, determine upon, devise, engineer,
establish guidelines for, expect, figure, frame, harbor a
design, have a policy, intend, intrigue, lay out, lay the
foundation, look ahead, machinate, make arrangements, make
preparations, make ready, map out, mark out a course,
organize, outline, plot, prearrange, preconcert, precontrive,
predesign, predetermine, premeditate, prepare, project,
propose, provide for, purpose, resolve, schedule, scheme,
set up, shape a course, take measures, think ahead, work
out, agenda, blueprint, building (business of assembling),
calculate, campaign, conceive (invent), conspiracy,
conspire, contemplation, content (structure), contour
(outline), contrivance, contrive, course, delineation,
design (construction plan), design (intent), device
(contrivance), devise (invent), direction (course),
enterprise (undertaking), expedient, forethought, form
(arrangement), frame (construct), frame (formulate), frame
(prearrange), goal, idea, intend, intent, intention,
maneuver, method, model, motif, motive, order (arrangement),
organization (structure), originate, pattern, platform,
ploy, policy (plan of action), prearrange, predetermine,
preparation, procedure, process (course), program (noun),
program (verb), project, proposal (report), proposal
(suggestion), propose, proposition, prospect (outlook),
prospectus, provide (arrange for), purpose, purview,
resolution (formal statement), resolve (decide), schedule,
scheme (noun), scheme (verb), set down, stratagem, strategy,
structure (composition), subterfuge, system, target,
undertaking (attempt), undertaking (enterprise), way
(channel)
168. In Greek mythology, Prometheus created mankind out of clay. He
could foretell the future, and his name signifies "forethought." In
1921, Jung wrote an extended analysis of Carl Spitteler's epic poem
Prometheus und Epimetheus (1881) together with Goethe's
Prometheus Fragment (1773); see
Psychological Types, CW 6, ch.5.
169. The Corrected Draft has: "Boundary" (p. 89).
170. The Draft continues: "Therefore the forethinker
approached me as Elijah, the prophet, and pleasure as Salome" (p.
103).
171. The Draft continues: "The animal of deadly horror, which lay
between Adam and Eve" (p. 105).
172. The Corrected Draft continues: "The serpent is not only a
separating but also a unifying principle" (p. 91).
173. When commenting on this in the 1925 seminar, Jung noted that
there were many accounts in mythology of the relation between a hero and
a serpent, so the presence of the serpent indicated that "it will again
be a hero myth" (p. 89). He showed a diagram of a cross with
Rational/Thinking (Elijah) at the top, Feeling (Salome) at the bottom,
Irrational/Intuition (Superior) at the left, and Sensation/Inferior
(Serpent) at the right (p. 90). He interpreted the black serpent as the
introverting libido: "The serpent leads the psychological movement
apparently astray into the kingdom of shadows, dead and wrong images,
but also into earth, into concretization ... Inasmuch as the serpent
leads into the shadows, it has the function of the anima; it leads you
into the depths, it connects the Above and Below ... the serpent is also
the symbol of wisdom" (Analytical Psychology, pp. 94-95).
174. The Draft continues: "By following Elijah and Salome, I
follow the two principles inside me and through me in the world, of
which I am part" (p. 106).
175. The Corrected Draft continues: "that is, of thinking. And
without thinking one cannot grasp an idea" (p. 92).
176 The Draft continues: "What would Odysseus have been without
his wandering?" (p. 107). The Corrected Draft adds: "There would
have been no odyssey" (p. 92). 177. The Corrected Draft
continues: "Than much rather the pleasure to enjoy the garden" (p. 92). 178. The Corrected Draft
continues: "It is strange that Salome's garden lies so close to the
dignified and mysterious hall of ideas. Does a thinker therefore
experience awe or perhaps even fear of the idea, because of its
proximity to paradise?" (p. 92). 179. The Draft
continues: "I was a forethinker. What could astonish me more than the
intimate community of forethinking and pleasure, these inimical
principles?" (p. 108). 180. The Corrected Draft
has instead: "One who has pleasure" (p. 94). 181. The Corrected Draft
has instead: "Pleasure" (p. 94). 182. The Corrected Draft
has instead: "Pleasure" (p. 94). 183. The Draft
continues: "as one of your poets has said: 'the shaft bears two irons'"
(p. 110). 184. In 1913, Jung presented
his paper, "On the question of psychological types," in which he noted
that the libido or psychic energy in an individual was
characteristically directed toward the object (extraversion) or toward
the subject (introversion); CW 6. Commencing in the summer of
1915 he had extensive correspondence with Hans Schmid on this question,
in which he now characterized the introverts as being dominated by
the function of thinking, and the extraverts as being dominated by the
function of feeling. He also characterized the extraverts as being
dominated by the pleasure-pain mechanism,
seeking out the love of the object, and unconsciously seeking tyrannical
power. Introverts unconsciously sought inferior pleasure, and
had to see that the object was also a symbol of their pleasure. On
August 7, 1915, he wrote to Schmid: "The opposites should be evened
out in the individual himself" (The Jung-Schmid Correspondence,
eds. John Beebe and Ernst Falzeder, tr. Ernst Falzeder with Tony
Woolfson [Philemon Series, forthcoming]). This linkage between thinking
and introversion and feeling and extraversion was maintained in his
discussion of this subject in 1917 in The Psychology of the
Unconscious Processes. In
Psychological Types (1921), this model had expanded to encompass
two main attitude types of introverts and extraverts further subdivided
by the predominance of one of the four psychological functions of
thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. 185. December 22, 1913. On
December 19, 1913, Jung gave a talk "On the psychology of the
unconscious" to the Zurich Psychoanalytical Society. 186. The Draft
continues: "Kali" (p. 113). 187.
Black Book 2 continues: "now that white shape of a
girl with black hair -- my own soul -- and now that white shape of a
man, which also appeared to me at the time -- it resembles
Michelangelo's sitting Moses -- it is Elijah" (p. 84). Michelangelo's
Moses is in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome. It was the
subject of a study by Freud that was published in 1914
(The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, ed. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud assisted
by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, tr. J. Strachey; 24 vols. [London: The
Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1953-1974]. vol.
13). The third-person pronoun "it" identifies Salome with Kali, whose
many hands wring each other; cf. note 196, p. 000. 188. Jung mentioned this
conversation in the 1925 seminar and commented: "Only then I learned
psychological objectivity. Only then could I say to a patient, 'Be
quiet, something is happening.' There are such things as mice in a
house. You cannot say you are wrong when you have a thought. For the
understanding of the unconscious we must see our thoughts as events, as
phenomena" (Analytical Psychology, p. 95). 189. The Corrected Draft
has instead: "Truth" (p. 100). 190. The Corrected Draft
has: "Guiding Reflection" (p. I03). In the Draft and Corrected
Draft, a lengthy passage occurs. What follows here is a paraphrase:
I wonder whether this is real, an underworld, or the other reality, and
whether it was the other reality that had forced me here. I see here
that Salome, my pleasure, moves to the left, the side of the impure and
bad. This movement follows the serpent, which represents the resistance
and the enmity against this movement. Pleasure goes away from the door.
Forethinking [Corrected Draft: "the Idea," throughout this
passage] stands at the door, knowing the entrance to the mysteries.
Therefore desire melts into the many, if forethinking does not direct it
and force it toward its goal. If one meets a man who only desires,
then one will find resistance against his desire behind it. Desire
without forethinking gains much but keeps nothing, therefore his desire
is the source of constant disappointment. Thus Elijah calls Salome back.
If pleasure is united with forethinking, the serpent lies before them.
To succeed in something, you first need to deal with the resistance and
difficulty; otherwise joy leaves behind pain and disappointment.
Therefore I drew nearer. I had first to overcome the difficulty and the
resistance to gain what I desired. When desire overcomes the difficulty;
it becomes seeing and follows forethinking. Therefore I see that
Salome's hands are pure, with no trace of crime. My desire is pure if I
first overcome the difficulty and resistance. If I weigh up pleasure
and forethinking, I am like a fool, blindly following his longing. If I
follow my thinking, I forsake my pleasure. The ancients said in images
that the fool finds the right way. Forethinking has the first word,
therefore Elijah asked me what I wanted. You should always ask yourself
what you desire, since all too many do not know what they want. I did
not know what I wanted. You should confess your longing and what you
long for to yourself. Thus you satisfy your pleasure and nourish your
forethinking at the same time" (Corrected Draft, pp. 103-4). 191. The Corrected Draft
has: "in his outer appearance, in the misery of earthly reality" (p.
107). 192. The Corrected Draft
has instead: "the son of God" (p. 107). 193. Cf. Matthew 18:18. Christ:
"Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and
whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."
194. The Draft and
Corrected Draft continue: "The Pope in Rome has become an image
and symbol for us of how God becomes human and how he [God] becomes the
visible lord of men. Thus the coming God will become the lord of the
world. This happens first [here] in me. The supreme meaning becomes my
lord and infallible commander, though not only in me, but perhaps in
many others whom I don't know" (Corrected Draft, pp. 108-9).
195. The Corrected Draft
has: "thus I become, like the Buddha sitting in the flames" (p.
109). 196. The Corrected Draft
continues: "Where the idea is, pleasure always is too. If the idea is
inside, pleasure is outside. Therefore an air of evil pleasure envelops
me. A lecherous and bloodthirsty Godhead gives me this false air. This
happens because I must altogether suffer the becoming of the God and
can therefore not separate it from myself at first. But as long as it is
not separated from me, I am so seized by the idea that I am it, and
therefore I am also the woman associated with the idea from the
beginning. In that I receive the idea and represent it in the manner of
Buddha, my pleasure is like the Indian Kali, since she is Buddha's other
side. Kali, however, is Salome and Salome is my soul" (p. 109).
197. In the Draft, a
lengthy passage occurs here, a paraphrase of which follows: The numbness
is like a death. I needed total transformation. Through this my meaning,
like that of the Buddha, went completely inside. Then the transformation
happened. I then went over to pleasure, as I was a thinker. As a
thinker, I rejected my feeling, but I had rejected part of life. Then my
feeling became a poisonous plant, and when it awakened, it was
sensuality instead of pleasure, the lowest and commonest form of
pleasure. This is represented by Kali. Salome is the image of his
pleasure, that suffers pain, since it was shut out for too long. It then
became apparent that Salome, i.e., my pleasure, was my soul. When I
recognized this, my thinking changed and ascended to the idea, and then
the image of Elijah appeared. This prepared me for the mystery play, and
showed me in advance the way of transformation that I had to undergo in
the Mysterium. The flowing together of the forethinking with pleasure
produces the God. I recognized that the God in me wanted to become a
man, and I considered this and honored this, and I became the servant of
the God, but for no one other than myself [Corrected Draft: it
would be madness and presumption to assume that I also did this for
others, p. 110). I sank into the contemplation of the wonder of
transformation, and first turned into the lower level of my pleasure,
and then through this I recognized my soul. The smiles of Elijah and
Salome indicate that they were happy at my appearance, but I was in deep
darkness. When the way is dark, so is the idea that gives light. When
the idea in the moment of confusion allows the words and not the blind
longing, then the words lead you to difficulty. Whereas it leads you to
the right. That is why Elijah turns left, to the side of the unholy and
evil, and Salome turns right to the side of the correct and good. She
doesn't go to the garden, the place of pleasure, but remains in the
house of the father" (pp. 125-27). 198. In the Draft, a
passage occurs, a paraphrase of which follows: If I am strong, so also
are my intentions and presuppositions. My own thought weakens and goes
over into the idea. The idea becomes strong; it is supported by its own
strength. I recognize this in the fact that Elijah is supported by the
lions. The lion is of stone. My pleasure is dead and turned to stone,
because I did not love Salome. This gave my thought the coldness of
stone, and from this the idea took its solidity, which it needed to
subjugate my thought. It needed to be subjugated as it strove against
Salome, since she appeared bad to it (p. 128). 199. In 1921 Jung wrote:
"The peculiar reality of unconscious contents, therefore, gives us the
same right to describe them as objects as outer things" (Psychological
Types, CW 6, §280). 200. The Draft and
Corrected have: " 201. The Draft
continues: "I recognized the father because I was a thinker, and thus I
did not know the mother, but saw love in the guise of pleasure and
called it pleasure, and therefore this was Salome to me. Now I learn
that Mary is the mother, the innocent and love-receiving, and not
pleasure, who bears the seed of evil in her heated and seductive nature.
/ If Salome, evil pleasure, is my sister, then I must be a thinking
saint, and my intellect has met with a sad fate. I must sacrifice my
intellect and confess to you that what I told you about pleasure, namely
that it is the principle opposed to forethought, is incomplete and
prejudiced. I observed as a thinker from the vantage point of my
thinking, otherwise I could have recognized that Salome, as Elijah's
daughter, is an offspring of thought and not the principle itself, which
Mary, the innocent Virgin Mother, now appears as" (p. 133). 202. The gospel of the
Egyptians is one of the apocryphal gospels that features a dialogue
between Christ and Salome. Christ states that he has come to undo the
work of the female, namely, lust, birth, and decay. To Salome's question
of how long shall death prevail, Christ answered, as long as women bear
children. Here, Jung is referring to the following passage: "she said,
'Then I have done well in not giving birth,' imagining that it is not
permitted to bear children; the Lord answered, 'Eat of every herb, but
the bitter one eat not.'" The dialogue continues: "When Salome asked
when it shall be made known the Lord said, 'When you tread under foot
the covering of shame and when out of two is made one, and the male with
the female, neither male nor female'" (The Apocryphal New Testament,
ed. J. K. Elliot [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999], p. 18). Jung
cites this logion, available to him from Clement in the Stromateis,
as an example of the union of opposites in Visions (1932,
vol. I., p. 524), and as an example of the coniunctio of male and female
in "On the psychology of the child archetype" (1940, CW 9, I,
§295) and Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955-56, CW 14, §528).
203. The Draft and
Corrected Draft have: " 204. The Draft
continues: "The image of the cool starry night and of the vast sky opens
up my eye to the infinity of the inner world, which I as a desirous man
feel is still too cold. I cannot pull the stars down to myself, but only
watch them. Therefore my impetuous desire feels that that world is
nightly and cold" (p. 135). 205. This depicts a scene in
the fantasy that follows. 206. December 25, 1911.
207. In the 1925 seminar, Jung
said: "A few evenings later, I felt that things should continue, so
again I tried to follow the same procedure, but it would not descend. I
remained on the surface. Then I realized that I had a conflict in myself
about going down, but I could not make out what it was. I only felt that
two dark principles were fighting each other, two serpents" (Analytical
Psychology, p. 95). He then recounted the fantasy that ensued.
208. In the 1925 seminar,
Jung added: "I thought, 'Ha, this is a Druidic sacred place'" (Analytical
Psychology, p. 96). 209.
In Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung, the Nibelung
dwarf Mime is the brother of Alberich and a master craftsman. Alberich
stole the Rhinegold from the Rhinemaidens; through renouncing love, he
was able to forge a ring out of it that conferred limitless power. In
Siegfried, Mime, who lives in a cave, brings up Siegfried so that he
will kill Fafner the giant, who has transformed into a dragon and now
has the ring. Siegfried slays Fafner with the invincible sword that Mime
has fashioned, and kills Mime, who had intended to kill him after he had
recovered the gold.
210. In the 1925 seminar, Jung interpreted this episode as follows: "the
fight of the two snakes: the white means a movement into the day, the
black into the kingdom of darkness, with moral aspects too. There was a
real conflict in me, a resistance to going down. My stronger tendency
was to go up. Because I had been so impressed the day before with the
cruelty of the place I had seen, I really had a tendency to find a way
to the conscious by going up, as I did on the mountain ... Elijah
said that it was just the same below or above. Compare
Dante's Inferno. The Gnostics express this same idea in the
symbol of the reversed cones. Thus the mountain and the crater are
similar. There was nothing of conscious structure in these
fantasies, they were just events that happened. So I assume that Dante
got his ideas from the same archetypes" (Analytical Psychology,
pp. 96-97). McGuire suggests that Jung is referring to Dante's
conception "of the conical form of the cavity of Hell, with its circles,
mirroring in reverse the form of Heaven, with its spheres" (Ibid.).
In
Aion, Jung also noted that serpents were a typical pair of
opposites, and that the conflict between serpents was a motif found in
medieval alchemy (1951, CW 9, 2, §181).
211. In the 1925 seminar, Jung recounted that after Salome's declaration
that he was Christ: "In spite of my objections she maintained this. I
said, 'this is madness,' became filled with skeptical resistance" (Analytical
Psychology, p. 96). He interpreted this event as follows:
"Salome's approach and her worshiping of me is obviously that side of
the inferior function which is surrounded by an aura of evil. One is
assailed by the fear that perhaps this is madness. This is how madness
begins, this is madness ... You cannot get conscious of these
unconscious facts without giving yourself to them. If you can overcome
your fear of the unconscious and can let yourself go down, then these
facts take on a life of their own. You can be gripped by these ideas so
much that you really go mad, or nearly so. These images have so much
reality that they recommend themselves, and such extraordinary meaning
that one is caught. They form part of the ancient mysteries; in fact it
is such fantasies that made the mysteries.
Compare the mysteries of Isis as told in Apuleius, with the
initiation and deification of the initiate ... One gets a peculiar
feeling from being put through such an initiation. The important part
that led up to the deification was the snake's encoiling of me. Salome's
performance was deification. The animal face which I felt mine
transformed into was the famous [Deus] Leontocephalus of the
Mithraic mysteries, the figure which is represented with a snake
coiled around the man, the snake's head resting on the man's head, and
the face of the man that of a lion ... In this deification mystery you
make yourself into the vessel, and are a vessel of creation in which the
opposites reconcile." He added: "All this is Mithraic symbolism from
beginning to end" (ibid., pp. 98-99). In
The Golden Ass, Lucian undergoes an initiation into the mysteries of
Isis. The significance of this episode is that it is the only direct
description of such an initiation that has survived. Of the event
itself, Lucian states: "I approached the very gates of death and set
foot on Prosperine's threshold, yet was permitted to return, rapt
through all the elements. At midnight I saw the sun shining as if it
were noon; I entered the presence of the gods of the under-world and the
gods of the upper-world, stood near and worshiped them." After this,
he was presented on a pulpit in the temple in front of a crowd. He wore
garments which included designs of serpents and winged lions, held a
torch, and wore "a palm tree chaplet with its leaves sticking all out
like rays of light" (The Golden Ass, tr. R. Graves [Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1984], p. 241). Jung's copy of a German translation of this
work has a line in the margin by this passage.
[F]rom the depth however there came up slowly the sound of a
clock-bell. Zarathustra listened thereto, like the higher
men; then, however, laid he his finger on his mouth the
second time, and said again: "COME! COME! IT IS GETTING ON
TO MIDNIGHT!" -- and his voice had changed. But still he had
not moved from the spot. Then it became yet stiller and more
mysterious, and everything hearkened, even the ass, and
Zarathustra's noble animals, the eagle and the serpent,
likewise the cave of Zarathustra and the big cool moon, and
the night itself. Zarathustra, however, laid his hand upon
his mouth for the third time, and said:
COME! COME! COME! LET US NOW WANDER! IT IS THE HOUR: LET US
WANDER INTO THE NIGHT!
Ye higher men, it is getting on to midnight: then will I say
something into your ears, as that old clock-bell saith it
into mine ear, --
As mysteriously, as frightfully, and as cordially as that
midnight clock-bell speaketh it to me, which hath
experienced more than one man:
Which hath already counted the smarting throbbings of your
fathers' hearts -- ah! ah! how it sigheth! how it laugheth
in its dream! the old, deep, deep midnight!
Hush! Hush! Then is there many a thing heard which may not
be heard by day; now however, in the cool air, when even all
the tumult of your hearts hath become still, --
Now doth it speak, now is it heard, now doth it steal into
overwakeful, nocturnal souls: ah! ah! how the midnight
sigheth! how it laugheth in its dream!
Hearest thou not how it mysteriously, frightfully, and
cordially speaketh unto THEE, the old deep, deep midnight?
O MAN, TAKE HEED!
Woe to me! Whither hath time gone? Have I not sunk into deep
wells? The world sleepeth --
Ah! Ah! The dog howleth, the moon shineth. Rather will I
die, rather will I die, than say unto you what my
midnight-heart now thinketh.
Already have I died. It is all over. Spider, why spinnest
thou around me? Wilt thou have blood? Ah! Ah! The dew
falleth, the hour cometh --
The hour in which I frost and freeze, which asketh and
asketh and asketh: "Who hath sufficient courage for it?
Who is to be master of the world? Who is going to say: THUS
shall ye flow, ye great and small streams!"
The hour approacheth: O man, thou higher man, take heed!
this talk is for fine ears, for thine ears -- WHAT SAITH
DEEP MIDNIGHT'S VOICE INDEED?
It carrieth me away, my soul danceth. Day's-work!
Day's-work! Who is to be master of the world?
The moon is cool, the wind is still. Ah! Ah! Have ye already
flown high enough? Ye have danced: a leg, nevertheless, is
not a wing.
Ye good dancers, now is all delight over: wine hath become
lees, every cup hath become brittle, the sepulchres mutter.
Ye have not flown high enough: now do the sepulchres mutter:
"Free the dead! Why is it so long night? Doth not the moon
make us drunken?"
Ye higher men, free the sepulchres, awaken the corpses! Ah,
why doth the worm still burrow? There approacheth, there
approacheth, the hour, --
There boometh the clock-bell, there thrilleth still the
heart, there burroweth still the wood-worm, the heart-worm.
Ah! Ah! THE WORLD IS DEEP!
Sweet lyre! Sweet lyre! I love thy tone, thy drunken,
ranunculine tone! -- how long, how far hath come unto me thy
tone, from the distance, from the ponds of love!
Thou old clock-bell, thou sweet lyre! Every pain hath torn
thy heart, father-pain, fathers'-pain, forefathers'-pain;
thy speech hath become ripe, --
Ripe like the golden autumn and the afternoon, like mine
anchorite heart -- now sayest thou: The world itself hath
become ripe, the grape turneth brown,
Now doth it wish to die, to die of happiness. Ye higher men,
do ye not feel it? There welleth up mysteriously an odour,
A perfume and odour of eternity, a rosy-blessed, brown,
gold-wine-odour of old happiness,
Of drunken midnight-death happiness, which singeth: the
world is deep, AND DEEPER THAN THE DAY COULD READ!
Leave me alone! Leave me alone! I am too pure for thee.
Touch me not! Hath not my world just now become perfect?
My skin is too pure for thy hands. Leave me alone, thou
dull, doltish, stupid day! Is not the midnight brighter?
The purest are to be masters of the world, the least known,
the strongest, the midnight-souls, who are brighter and
deeper than any day.
O day, thou gropest for me? Thou feelest for my happiness?
For thee am I rich, lonesome, a treasure-pit, a gold
chamber?
O world, thou wantest ME? Am I worldly for thee? Am I
spiritual for thee? Am I divine for thee? But day and world,
ye are too coarse, --
Have cleverer hands, grasp after deeper happiness, after
deeper unhappiness, grasp after some God; grasp not after
me:
Mine unhappiness, my happiness is deep, thou strange day,
but yet am I no God, no God's-hell: DEEP IS ITS WOE.
God's woe is deeper, thou strange world! Grasp at God's woe,
not at me! What am I! A drunken sweet lyre, --
A midnight-lyre, a bell-frog, which no one understandeth,
but which MUST speak before deaf ones, ye higher men! For ye
do not understand me!
Gone! Gone! O youth! O noontide! O afternoon! Now have come
evening and night and midnight, -- the dog howleth, the
wind:
Is the wind not a dog? It whineth, it barketh, it howleth.
Ah! Ah! how she sigheth! how she laugheth, how she wheezeth
and panteth, the midnight!
How she just now speaketh soberly, this drunken poetess!
hath she perhaps overdrunk her drunkenness? hath she become
overawake? doth she ruminate?
Her woe doth she ruminate over, in a dream, the old, deep
midnight -- and still more her joy. For joy, although woe be
deep, JOY IS DEEPER STILL THAN GRIEF CAN BE.
212. In "On the psychology of the Kore figure" (1951), Jung described
these episodes as follows: "In an underground house, actually in the
underworld, there lives an old magician and prophet with his 'daughter.'
She is, however, not really his daughter; she is a dancer, a very loose
person, but is blind and seeks healing" (CW 9, 1, §360). This
description of Elijah draws him together with the later description of
Philemon. Jung noted that this "shows the unknown woman as a
mythological figure in the beyond (that means in the unconscious).
She is soror or filia mystica of a hierophant or
'philosopher,' evidently a parallel to those mystic syzigies which are
to be met with in the figures of Simon Magus and Helen, Zosimus and
Theosebia, Comarius and Cleopatra, etc. Our dream-figure fits in best
with Helen" (ibid., §372).
213. The Corrected Draft has: "Guiding Reflection" (p. 127). In
Black Book 2, Jung copied the following citations from Dante's
Commedia in German translation (p. 104): "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'" (Purgatorio 24, 52-54); "And then, in
the same manner as a flame! Which follows the fire whatever shape it
takes, / The new form follows the spirit exactly" (Purgatorio 25,
97-99). Tr. C. H. Sisson (Manchester: Carcanet, 1980), pp. 259, 265.
214. The Draft has: "the news of the desire revived by the
mother" (p. 143).
215. The Corrected Draft has: "of the primordial image" (p. 127).
216. The Corrected Draft has: "The idea or the primordial image"
(p. 127).
217. The Corrected Draft has: "lives" (p. 127).
218. I.e., in ch. 5, "Descent
into Hell in the Future."
219. The Corrected Draft
has: "the spirit" (p. 127).
220. The Draft continues: "Therefore they all say that they are
fighting for the good and for peace, but one cannot fight one another
over the good. But since men don't know that the conflict lies within
themselves, the Germans thus believe that the English and the Russians
are wrong; but the English and the Russians say that the Germans are
wrong. But no one can judge history in terms of right and wrong.
Because one-half of mankind is wrong, every man is half wrong.
Therefore a conflict resides in his own soul. But man is blind and
always knows only his half. The German has in him the English and the
Russian whom he fights outside of himself likewise, the English and the
Russian has in him the German whom he fights. But man appears to see
the outer quarrel, not the one within, which alone is the wellspring of
the great war. But before man can ascend to light and love, the
great battle is needed" (p. 145).
221. In December 1916, in his preface to The Psychology of the
Unconscious Processes, Jung wrote: "The psychological processes,
which accompany the present war, above all the incredible brutalization
of public opinion, the mutual slanderings, the unprecedented fury of
destruction, the monstrous flood of lies, and man's incapacity to call a
halt to the bloody demon -- are suited like nothing else to powerfully
push in front of the eyes of thinking men the problem of the restlessly
slumbering chaotic unconscious under the ordered world of consciousness.
This war has pitilessly revealed to civilized man that he is still a
barbarian ... But the psychology of the individual corresponds to the
psychology of the nation. What the nation does is done also by each
individual, and so long as the individual does it, the nation also does
it. Only the change in the attitude of the individual is the
beginning of the change in the psychology of the nation" (CW 7,
p. 4).
It may be opportune at this point to say a word about the
attitude of a Christian Society towards Pacifism....I cannot
but believe that the man who maintains that war is in all
circumstances wrong, is in some way repudiating an
obligation towards society; and in so far as the society is
a Christian society the obligation is so much the more
serious. Even if each particular war proves in turn to have
been unjustified, yet the idea of a Christian society seems
incompatible with the idea of absolute pacifism; for
pacifism can only continue to flourish so long as the
majority of persons forming a society are not
pacifists....The notion of communal responsibility, of the
responsibility of every individual for the sins of the
society to which he belongs, is one that needs to be more
firmly apprehended; and if I share the guilt of my society
in time of 'peace', I do not see how I can absolve myself
from it in time of war, by abstaining from the common
action....
222. The Corrected Draft has: "the prophet, the personification
of the idea" (p. 131).
223. The Corrected Draft has: "Idea" (p. 131).
224. The Corrected Draft has "Idea" substituted throughout this
paragraph (p. 131).
225. The Corrected Draft adds "conscious" and deletes "From
within himself" (p. 133).
226. The Draft and Corrected Draft have instead: "The
divine creative power becomes [in him]
227. The Draft and Corrected Draft have: "But why, you
ask, does
228. The Draft and Corrected have: "Just as the 229. In Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote: "To redeem the past and to transform
every 'It was' into an 'I wanted it thus!' -- that alone do I call
redemption!" ("Of redemption," p. 161). 230. On February 11, 1916, Jung
said in a discussion at the Association for Analytical Psychology:
"We abuse the will, natural growth is to the will ... War teaches us:
The will is of no use -- we will see where this leads. We are completely
subject to the absolute power of the becoming" (MAP, vol. 1, p.
106). 231. The Draft and
Corrected Draft have: "Since 232. The Corrected Draft
has: "we ourselves" (p. 138). 233. The Corrected Draft
has: "and we called ourselves Christians, imitators of Christ. To be
Christ oneself is the true following of Christ" (p. 139).
234. This may refer to the
German peasants' rebellion of 1525. 235. In 1918, in his preface to
the second edition of The Psychology of the Unconscious Processes,
Jung wrote: "The spectacle of this catastrophe threw man back on
himself by making him feel his complete impotence; it turned him inward,
and, with everything rocking, he seeks something that guarantees him a
hold. Too many still seek outward ... But still too few seek inward, to
their own selves, and still fewer ask themselves whether the ends of
human society might not best be served if each man tries to abolish the
old order in himself, and to practice in his own person and in his
own inward state those precepts, those victories which he preaches at
every streetcorner, instead of always expecting these things of his
fellow men (CW 7, p.5). 236. The Draft has:
"If this doesn't happen, Christ will not be overcome and the evil must
become even greater. Therefore, my friend, I say this to you so that
you can tell your friends, and that the word may spread among the
people" (p. 157). 237. The Draft
continues: "I saw that a new God had come to be out of Christ the Lord,
a young Hercules" (p. 157). 238. A long passage occurs here
in the Draft and Corrected Draft, a paraphrase of which
follows: The God holds love in his right, fore thinking ["the idea,"
substituted throughout] in his left. Love is on our favorable side,
forethinking on the unfavorable. This should recommend love to you,
insofar as you are a part of this world, and especially if you are a
thinker. become the model then you no
longer need his. 239. The Corrected Draft
has "The great spirit" (p. 146). 240. A long passage appears
here in the Corrected Draft, a paraphrase of which follows: As 241. Gilles Quispel reports
that Jung told the Dutch poet Roland Horst that he had written
Psychological Types on the basis of thirty pages of The Red
Book (cited in Stephan Hoeller, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven
Sermons to the Dead [Wheaton, IL: Quest, 1985], p. 6). It is likely
that he had in mind these preceding three chapters of the "Mysterium."
What is presented here develops the notions of the conflict between
opposing functions, the identification with the leading function, and
the development of the reconciling symbol as a resolution of the
conflict of opposites, which are the central issues in
chapter 5 of Psychological Types (CW 6), the "Type
Problem in Poetry." In his 1925 seminar, Jung said: "I found that the
unconscious is working out enormous collective fantasies. Just as,
before, I was passionately interested in working out myths, now I became
just as much interested in the material of the unconscious. This is in
fact the only way of getting at myth formation. And so the first
chapter of the Psychology of the Unconscious became most
correctly true. I watched the creation of myths going on, and got an
insight into the structure of the unconscious, forming thus the concept
that plays such a role in the Types. I drew all my empirical material
from my patients, but the solution of the problem I drew from the
inside, from my observations of the unconscious processes. I have tried
to fuse these two currents of outer and inner experience in the book of
the Types, and have termed the process of the fusion of the two currents
the transcendent function" (Analytical Psychology, p. 34). |
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