Jung, The Red Book

Discussion on literature other than by the Star of Azazel.
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Insanus
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Re: Jung, The Red Book

Post by Insanus »

Dies II

This chapter seems to have three themes: the chariot, the sun, and the desert.
The desert is the social isolation and seemingly lifeless, soulless wasteland (Jung thinks: not so different from our cities), home of the anchorite who has chosen a solitary life of self-reflection and meditating upon the holy text.
The Sun is both life and death here, animating the dead stones, revealing their secret life that stands alone, absolute.
The Chariot, umm, at least in Tarot, the card is connected to the path uniting geburah and binah. I recall there was a conversation years ago about this card in the forums somewhere. How the chariot is ascending when the initiate gives up his blood in self-sacrifice, and how this blood is also the water that brings life to the desert depending on perspective. Here it seems to function as outside force acting upon Jung, inspiring, revealing deep meaning of the Sun that illuminates. I'd even think the chariot brought Jung the Cup that allowed him to drink the Sun.

The anchorite could be seen as someone striving to ascend to the state that Jung is inspired by. But Jung criticises: the anchorite is sucked dry by the desert and does not drink the sun. The chariot does not inspire the anchorite because he is so in love with the desert-life of solitude. He is father of the desert, like the scarab Jung also calls father, his soul is in deep symbiotic relationship with this myth, whereas Jung internalizes and overcomes these spirits of the desert.

Their conversation about Jesus, Osiris and Horus also probably has some symbolical meaning, but I can't figure it out.
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obnoxion
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Re: Jung, The Red Book

Post by obnoxion »

I'm having difficulties managing my responsibilities, and I will need one or two weeks more to do my chapter.

If it is ok with all, we could even skip january, and I will take february. So if no one objects this, I will do us a new schedule next weel, where evetry one will be shifted one month forward...?

I am very sorry about this delay.
One day of Brahma has 14 Indras; his life has 54 000 Indras. One day of Vishnu is the lifetime of Brahma. The lifetime of Vishnu is one day of Shiva.
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Nefastos
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Re: Jung, The Red Book

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obnoxion wrote: Fri Jan 31, 2020 6:40 pmIf it is ok with all, we could even skip january, and I will take february. So if no one objects this, I will do us a new schedule next weel, where evetry one will be shifted one month forward...?


I'd find this change excellent, since I will have my Jung's Psychology & Alchemy reading group turn in February, so to change my Red Book turn to March would make it easier not to suffocate in Jung.
Faust: "Lo contempla. / Ei muove in tortuosa spire / e s'avvicina lento alla nostra volta. / Oh! se non erro, / orme di foco imprime al suol!"
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Re: Jung, The Red Book

Post by Angolmois »

Just found this website after listening to Maailmanpuu podcast: http://gnosis.org/redbook/index.html
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Re: Jung, The Red Book

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DEATH

The date of this entry is January 2, 1914. The original title in the handwritten draft was "Fifth Adventure: Death". Frater Insanus pointed out in his previous post how in the Kabbalistic Tarot symbolism, The Chariot unites the sephitoth Gevurah and Binah. I do not know how the Tree of Life relates to the larger whole of the Red Book, but we now seem to be approaching, indeed, towards the oceanic Binah. The air is moist and misty. Rivers are gathering slowly towards the sea, and we are in the presence of mostly treeless marshes and standing waters. The horizon seems endless, and the skies are cloudy. There is a mention of colour: there are yellow hills by a dead lake. The feeling of haste ceases, and yet there is the sense of progress: "I follow my brother, the sea. It flows softly and almost imperceptibly, and yet we continually approach the supreme embrace, entering the womb of source, the boundless expansion and immeasurable depths.

On the theme of darkness and returning to the womb, there is a related paragraph in (perhaps the best book on Tantra I know) Mark S. G. Dyczkowski's "A Journey in the World of the Tantras" (Indica, 2004; page 190):

"But even though she, like Kali, consumes the worlds into the Void of her Yoni, the Triangle of the energies of will, knowledge and action, Kubjika is largely a benign androgyne despite her femininity. This is because the tension between the opposites is released within her through the blissful flux of emission. Her mad passion to consume everything into herself - the cosmic womb - has been satisfied. She is blissful with the Linga pouring out its energizing seed within her. Filling her, that is, with that same energy of bliss that is her own dynamic nature. As Alan Watts remarks, the Tantric androgyne symbolizes a state 'in which the erotic no longer has to be sought or pursued, because it is always present in its totality'."

So there is, I think, in the first paragraph of Jung's entry, a profound image that mirrors deeply the essences of sex and death.

Here Jung meets a gaunt and serious man in a black wrinkled coat, gazing silently into the distance "at the last corner of the world". Jung asks to stand beside him, and the dark one agrees, though he questions why someone living would want to stand in the cold with someone whose heart has never beaten. Jung says he has happily followed "the way of the living stream" here, and that he knows the dark one as the "ice and the end; you are the cold silence of the stones; and you are the highest snow on the mountains and the most extreme frost of the outer space. I must feel this and that's why I stand near you"

The dark one relates that from here on the path leads "into the undifferentiable, where none is equal or unequal, but all are one with one another". Jung is asked to view like a mass of clouds on a wave approaching, where images of all forms of life are seen stiff and cold. The wave breaks in red glow, and foams like a sea of blood at their feet, and Jung considers this vision awful. Then there rises from the waters a red ball of mixed blood and fire, like a red sun, that "rolls gleamingly toward the uttermost depths - it disappears at my feet". Here Jung losts the sense of direction, wondering which one is the sky and which the sea, feeling like he was suspended by his feet. (This brings to mind the other Tarot trump on the left pillar of the Tree of life, The Hanged Man. Together with The Chariot card, their associated Hebrew letters cheth and mem spell out the word Chem, which is the name of one of the sons of Noah and means "black").

Now, as we can see from the date of the entry, the outbreak of the First World War is only six months in the future. It seems this vision is not so much generally cosmic but particularily prophetic. On the general symbolism of the red sun, it might be considered libidal, as Jung has argued in his "Transformations and Symbols of the Libido" (2012) that the libido "was not only a Schopenhauerian life urge, but contained the contrary striving toward death within itself" (quoten in the 74th footnote).

In this entry Jung writes about the importance of accepting death. In the atmosphere of his sensing the approaching of violent cataclysm, these contemplations are acute with the awareness of the violence of dying. On the approaching sense of threat Jung writes: "You locked Satan in the abyss for a millenium, and when the millenium had passed, you laughed at him, since he had become a children's fairy tale. But if the dreadful great one rises his head, the world winces. The most extreme coldness draws near.".

Jung elaborates on the red sun of his vision, of sun whose rising is "awful and a reversal of that which we call day", and connects it to the violence of death. Jung speaks eloquantly of the method of entering death as "a frosty night in a vineyard full of sweet grapes". But entering thus death, Jung is confused and repulsed by the rising of the red sun :

"When I see lamentation and nonsense of the earth and consequently enter death with covered head, then everything I see will turn to ice. But in the shadow world the other rises, the red sun. It rises secretly and unexpectedly, and my world revolves like a satanic apparition. I suspect blood and murder. Blood and murder alone are still exalted, and have their own peculiar beauty; one can assume the beauty of bloody acts of violence"

The rising of the red sun seems to be re-surfacing of the most rejected aspects of the being - the things (personally and collectively, I asume) that are "repulsive, invisbly and cruelly repulsive, something that takes my breath away, that drains the power from my muscles, that confuses my senses, stings me poisonously from behind in the heel, and always strikes just where I did not suspect I possessed a vulnerable spot"

Dispite the magnicifent awefulness of the vision of the red sun, it doesn't confont one in the ideal way of manly heroics, but sneaks from behind. Jung describes his undoing: "I perish in a dung heap, while peaceful chickens cackle around me, amazedly and mindlessly laying their eggs. A dog passes, lifts his leg over me, then trots off calmly".

This very satanic, very saturnian vision began very seriously on the edge of the world, where all life was seen as one. And it ends pitifully comic in the barnyard dirt, cosmic scale having changed to instectoid perspective. Though the Scarab is not mentioned, it seems central to the dung ball/the red sun theme. Also, the Scorpio as the heel-stinger with its astrological correspondence to anus seems a sort of culmination point to much of the violent and the exctemental symbolisms of this entry. Perhaps one could see this as vision as a plutonian (scorpionic) night in which terrible, repressed life becomes illumiated by the red sun rolled through it by the Scarab beetle. And on the othet side, this violently red sun becomes but a ball of dung.

Curiously the male scarab beetle was thought to be able to produce children without female partner, which makes it a sort of kumaric, virginal male. A complementary symbolism would be that of the vulture, which was thought to be able to produce without male, becoming virginally pregnant by the north wind. Vulture was symbolic of Ma'at, on whose scales the heart of the dead was measured against a feather. In the Corrected Draft of the Red Book (see footnote 73) Jung had replaced the sentence "We need the coldness of death to see clearly" with "Evil is one-half of the world, one of the two pans of the scale". In the scales of Ma'at evil would then be the heavy heart.
One day of Brahma has 14 Indras; his life has 54 000 Indras. One day of Vishnu is the lifetime of Brahma. The lifetime of Vishnu is one day of Shiva.
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Re: Jung, The Red Book

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Cap. vii. (Chapter Seven)
THE REMAINS OF EARLIER TEMPLES


Once again there's some synchronicity in the name of the chapter & the present brotherhood situation.

Wherein the last chapter we could find Arcanas 12 & (especially) 13 presented, I think we can meet the following, 14 & 15, in this one. Equally important is the jolly 0 (The Fool), who jumps here as the Green Man, whom the author has become. At the end of Dies II Jung the psychonaut became "a greening tree", and in The Remains of the Earlier Temples this metamorphosis is felt intensely.

In several chapters the triple colour code of Red-White-Black has been present in Jung's visions (take e.g. pages 236 or 242), but in this one White is replaced by verdant Green, the colour of its vivification. Also Black is hidden, it is present only symbolically in the form of the Anchorite hermit Ammonius. Red remains explicit, in the form of "the Red One", from the chapter with the same name.

In that earlier chapter's commentary I said that the Red One is Azazel, who is Jung himself. All along the way of the Red (!) Book, Jung seems to play the part of the antagonist himself. He is repeatedly called Satan, the Adversary, by the archetypical figures he meets. So it is in this chapter also; you may see Ammonius cry ' "Apage, Satanas" also in the picture inserted herein.

What happens in this chapter is that the intensely vivified Jung meets two aforementioned figures from his past, Ammonius the Anchorite from the desert, and the Red One from the castle gate. These two opposite types have been both drawn to a journey of their own because of what they spoke with Jung & heard from him, and have both become like still imperfect and agonished opposites of what they were in the first meeting. At the same time they have been woven together, yet they feel antagonism towards each other & Jung. Ammonius the Hermit has been drawn back to civilization, while the dance-loving Red One has in turn been trying life in a monastery.

For me personally it is wonderful to find that the opposites have met in Naples, Italy. That is also a place which is seen by many (also Goethe) as the most verdant and living place in Europe.

The leafed green man, a tree-man, who Jung's self-identified dreamer personality has become, is not a very common symbol in the modern occultism, but it is an important and old one. This idea of the leaf-clad green man, the very prototype of the most happy primitive state, a point of union between a man and living nature, is often connected with the devil. Here too, as I said, Jung is accused of being one, and he himself considers himself (quite happily) as a "hobgoblin". These are the creatures which also accompany Shiva; the near-human but just because of that (uncanny valley!) horrible and demonic beings, who are often both merry and mischievous. It also seems that this wild man is a "plant Christ" of sorts (see p.249, in the Anchorite chapter: "He gives you a small insignificant fruit... it seems worthless to you", &c. It is similar to "lapis-Christ" we'll go through in Jung's Psychology and Alchemy reading group, but in this, the Saviour is in vegetation rather than in mineral). Some similar figures may be seen in human mandragora and, later, in Tolkien's ents. The Green Man is about total rooting to the living Source; it is the opposite of death and closed state. Jung thinks that he is so alive because "he had absorbed the life of both of [his] friends; a green tree grew from the ruins of the temple". (p.273)

"But what about men, what about mankind? There they stood, the two deserted bridges that should lead across to mankind: one leads from above to below, and men glide down on it, which pleases them. The other leads from below to above and mankind groans upward on it." (p.274) These two vertical roads can also be seen as a vertical plus horizontal, since the two archetypal figures of the Anchorite and the Red One have told how they have been hopelessly intertwined with each other. Thus is born the third one, Jung himself as the vivified creature. We see here what sod obnoxion has told us in his articles on Azazel: that the cross, the tree, and the green vegetation meet in the theophany of the higher self.

From this Sun of the higher self Jung starts to cool down to his more mundane being, and speaks of the chameleon, the "false lion", who is not the actual light-giving Sun but a creature of Moon and illusion. This brooding is necessary, since the Green Man phase is just the beginning, not the end; it is quite like an Aquarian child-angel, innocent & full of energy, but as said, quite unable to assume responsibility of the higher Sun/Self. It is funny to find a theosophical book mentioned in the footnote (94), where the draft version speakes about "the 777 rebirths". In the end Jung has practically once again become a figure similar to the earlier Ammonius, a hermit once again. The desert figures (the figures of Azazel) are persistent. Unlike the true Sun that rises from the East, the "little sun" Jung is left wandering to far East.





The Remains of Earlier Temples.jpg
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Faust: "Lo contempla. / Ei muove in tortuosa spire / e s'avvicina lento alla nostra volta. / Oh! se non erro, / orme di foco imprime al suol!"
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Re: Jung, The Red Book

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Red Book is going slowly, but it is still going onwards. Let's try to finish this project too.
Faust: "Lo contempla. / Ei muove in tortuosa spire / e s'avvicina lento alla nostra volta. / Oh! se non erro, / orme di foco imprime al suol!"
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Re: Jung, The Red Book

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Nefastos wrote: Tue May 05, 2020 11:27 am Red Book is going slowly, but it is still going onwards. Let's try to finish this project too.
That's right!

I wonder if the topic where we had our schedule is still somewhere to be found...?
One day of Brahma has 14 Indras; his life has 54 000 Indras. One day of Vishnu is the lifetime of Brahma. The lifetime of Vishnu is one day of Shiva.
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Re: Jung, The Red Book

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obnoxion wrote: Wed May 06, 2020 11:32 am
Nefastos wrote: Tue May 05, 2020 11:27 am Red Book is going slowly, but it is still going onwards. Let's try to finish this project too.
That's right!

I wonder if the topic where we had our schedule is still somewhere to be found...?
I'll PM the list to you. You can then post it here if you see it fit.
"Would to God that all the Lord's people were Prophets”, Numbers 11:29 as echoed by William Blake
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Re: Jung, The Red Book

Post by obnoxion »

Smaragd wrote: Wed May 06, 2020 12:36 pm I'll PM the list to you. You can then post it here if you see it fit.
Thank you very much!

THE updated LIST FOR 2020
(Twice a year each)

Nobody (January)
obnoxion (February)
Nefastos (March)
Wyrmfang (April)
Astraya (May)
Benemal (June)
Insanus (July)
obnoxion (August)
Nefastos (September)
Wyrmfang (October)
Astraya (November)
Benemal (Decemver)

YEAR 2021
lnsanus (January)
One day of Brahma has 14 Indras; his life has 54 000 Indras. One day of Vishnu is the lifetime of Brahma. The lifetime of Vishnu is one day of Shiva.
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