![]() ![]() In his book review of Peter Kingsley’s Catafalque (Kingsley 2018), Gregory Shaw has reminded us of how, in On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians, Iamblichus complains to Porphyry about the impiety and rationalistic hubris of those whom he calls ‘the Greeks’:Īt the present time, I think the reason everything has fallen into a state of decay-both in our words and prayers-is because they are continually being changed by the endless innovations and lawlessness of the Greeks. Suffice it to say that, of all writers or thinkers, Jung was acutely aware of his debt to those who had preceded him in the past, and one ancient context for what Jung is trying to do in the Red Book might be found in the works of the Neoplatonist Iamblichus and in the practice of theurgy. Now whether the term ‘classic’, especially in an age which claims to have abolished the canon (Saul & Schmidt 2007), is useful or not, is not something we have to debate here. Somehow they must be harmonized, and harmonized by the introduction of a third element’ (ibid., p. 271). Indeed, Segal was categoric about denying the term ‘classic’ to the Red Book, on the ground that ‘the classics harbor original ideas-about human nature, society, God, and the cosmos’, whereas in his view the Red Book does not and instead ‘presents staid pairs of distinctions, which are incorrectly equated with pairs of oppositions, which are then incorrectly equated with pairs of contradictions’: ‘These pairs are assumed, without argument, to be artificial and outright false. While conceding that Jung’s Red Book ‘may be of alluring interest to Jungians’, Segal claimed that ‘the classics named are finished works of literature and not inchoate outpourings, however significant they are for tracing Jung’s subsequent publications’ (ibid., p. 271). Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Goethe’s Faust” ’ (Segal 2013, p. 271). In his review of Sanford Drob’s Reading the Red Book: An Interpretive Guide to C.G. Jung’s “Liber novus” (to which the analyst Stanton Marlan provided a foreword) (Drob 2012), for instance, Robert Segal began by noting that ‘we know we are on shaky ground when Stanton Marlan notes, without demurral, that Jung’s work “has been compared to many of the major classics of Western literature, including Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, St. In this article, I wish to discuss exactly what sort of work they might be, and to put forward some suggestions as to their significance.Īfter the initial reception of the Red Book which was largely positive, not to say adulatory, it was perhaps inevitable there would be a critical backlash. And for another, because the Black Books are a very different sort of work from the Red Book and arguably much less accessible. There are some obvious reasons for this: for one, because of the global coronavirus pandemic, which meant that, when the Black Books hit the market, many people were almost scared to death of dying (or, in the words of the Office for the Dead, timor mortis conturbat me). Yet on their publication in 2020 the reception of the Black Books-those six black-bound leather notebooks briefly mentioned in Memories, Dreams, Reflections as containing the transcription of his visionary ‘confrontation with the unconscious’ (Jung & Jaffé 1963, p. 212)-has thus far been rather more muted. When, after many years of mystery, Jung’s Red Book finally appeared in 2009, it was a major publishing event: prestigious seminars were held (for instance, at the Library of Congress, in San Francisco, and London). Keywords: Jung Black Books Red Book analytical psychology Wotan Plato ![]() Finally, the paper discusses Jung’s encounter with the Dionysos-like figure of Wotan, which is linked with Jung’s memory of an ‘unforgettable night in the desert’ when he ‘saw the Χ for the first time’ and ‘understood the Platonic myth’ ( BB7, p. 227), and it explores Jung’s longstanding interest in interpreting the myth of the creation in Plato’s Timaeus. It is argued that one of the key insights into the creative process behind the Black Books can be gained from examining their textual status (reflected, for example, in Jung’s handwriting), which gives a sense of the linguistic, stylistic, conceptual, and emotional struggle out of which they emerged. ![]() The paper examines the minor and more significant changes between the version of the text found in the Black Books and the Red Book, and it considers whether it is helpful to think of the Black Books in the categories of ‘science’, ‘nature’, or ‘art’. It considers the nature of the inspiration behind them, and it suggests that the Black Books reveal the textual nature of Jung’s experience of the process of ‘ordering’ in several different ways. This paper explores the genesis and significance of Jung’s recently-published Black Books. ![]()
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