Jung, The Red Book

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Re: Jung, The Red Book

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Insanus wrote: Mon Feb 08, 2021 1:38 am Have you experienced the uncanny greed and eyes litting as if from inner heat, heard the dead--
I only read your summary, so correct me if I seemed to understand something off. I'm reminded of many transgressive acts of coming in touch with the animal side, that could be indeed seen as living for the dead. One of the earliest being just at that age when you start to be more selfconscious as a child and many things become embarrassing, but still puberty is years away. There was kids disco events during the summer where kids from neighbouring villages gathered to eat candy and socialize. It was terrifying to be there, with so much unknown and thus unpredictable social circles, and only girls danced. But I too had this strong need to go on the dance floor and just do it despite the black cloud hanging over that boys are not to do so, or either... Well fortunately me and my cousin were really open minded and having lived under one roof for some weeks, we had had these deep discussions at night that helped us detach from the rule of oppression and the girls were making it easier for us, so we went and had so much fun that the backlashes we were consequently subjected to didn't weight too much on us. Thus we were sort of dancing for the dead and that liberation was more important than being crushed under the same old rule or minding the reaction it summoned from others.
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Re: Jung, The Red Book

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Smaragd wrote: Mon Feb 08, 2021 5:39 pm
Insanus wrote: Mon Feb 08, 2021 1:38 am Have you experienced the uncanny greed and eyes litting as if from inner heat, heard the dead--
I only read your summary, so correct me if I seemed to understand something off. I'm reminded of many transgressive acts of coming in touch with the animal side, that could be indeed seen as living for the dead. One of the earliest being just at that age when you start to be more selfconscious as a child and many things become embarrassing, but still puberty is years away. There was kids disco events during the summer where kids from neighbouring villages gathered to eat candy and socialize. It was terrifying to be there, with so much unknown and thus unpredictable social circles, and only girls danced. But I too had this strong need to go on the dance floor and just do it despite the black cloud hanging over that boys are not to do so, or either... Well fortunately me and my cousin were really open minded and having lived under one roof for some weeks, we had had these deep discussions at night that helped us detach from the rule of oppression and the girls were making it easier for us, so we went and had so much fun that the backlashes we were consequently subjected to didn't weight too much on us. Thus we were sort of dancing for the dead and that liberation was more important than being crushed under the same old rule or minding the reaction it summoned from others.
Hey, that's a really nice example.
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Re: Jung, The Red Book

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NOX TERTIA

Sorry for the delay, this wasn't easy. Unlike the reasonably clear Nox Secunda, Nox Tertia is a complete mess. It feels like this chapter refers to many of the earlier chapters and to other texts and to itself and also follows a very subjective logic that is likely only clear in similar state that Jung was in at the time of writing this. Very interesting, very tough to pick what's important and what's not so much. Well, I tried something.

--

The chapter starts with Jung's soul whispering to him about all foundations being completely mired in madness and encouraging him to let the light of madness shine.
"You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too."
"Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules."
"I: That all sounds very desolate, but nevertheless it prompts me to disagree. S: You have nothing to disagree with - you are in the madhouse."


Clearly soul wants to help Jung attain a holistic union with life by breaking his limiting barriers. But then it's revealed that it maybe wasn't Jung's soul speaking after all, but the professor from the madhouse. Also maybe we're not in the madhouse: "everything inside me is in utter disarray. Matters are becoming serious and chaos is approaching. Is this the ultimate bottom? Is chaos also a foundation? If only there weren't these terrible waves. Everything breaks asunder like black billows. Yes, I see and understand: it is the ocean, the almighty nocturnal tide - a ship moves there - a large steamer - I'm just about to enter the smoking parlor - many people - beautiful clothes - they all look at me astonished - someone comes up to me and says "What's the matter? You look just like a ghost! What happened?"

So the soul was the professor and now instead of the madhouse we are sailing in a steamer. The sea may or may not be the chaos from Nox Secunda. Someone who looks like Ezechiel from Nox Secunda (a man with a black beard, a tousled head of hair and dark shining eyes) says he has been on the ship for five years, but Jung also recognices him to be his neighbor who is now sitting on his bed. On top of that this Ezechiel-neighbour claims to be both Nietzsche and Christ AND is referred to as "The fool" in the text. The Ezechiel-neighbor-Nietzsche-Christ-fool also informs that they actually are in Hell and that the soul-professor is actually the devil. Also, the fool was supposed to marry the mother of God long ago, but the devil has her in his power. I just don't know what to make out of this. Maybe Jung entered some kind of subconscious-astral realm by agreeing to accept the madness completely and the interlapping of characters is his mind's best attempt to interpret some meaning to radically different sensory experience? I admit I'm quite lost already.

Later Jung sees a tree arise from the sea. "It's crown reaches to Heaven and it's roots reach down into Hell." Then he feels like life had flown from him and passed into imcomprehensible and fearful. "Salvation", he whispers and a strange voice answers: "There is no salvation here." footnote associates this with Dante's Commedia where the famous "abandon every hope you who enter" is inscribed over the gates of Hell. Jung agrees and thinks there is no need to find a way, because his life is the truth above all. "We create the truth by living it."

For added confusion Jung writes:

"This is the night in which all the dams broke, where what was previously solid moved, where the stones turned into seroents and everything living froze. Is this a web of words? If it is, it is a hellish web for those caught in it"
and
"With words you pull up the underworld. Word, the paltriest and the mightiest. In words the emotiness and fullness flow together. Hence the word is an image of God."
and
"So if I fall prey to the web of words, I fall prey to the greatest and the smallest. I am at the mercy of he sea, of the inchoate waves that are forever changing place. Their essence is movement and movement is their order. He who strives against waves is exposed to the arbitrary. The work of men is steady but it swims upon chaos. The striving of men seems like lunacy to him who comes from the sea. But men consider him mad. He who comes from the sea is sick."

So now it seems clear that the sea really is the chaos of subconscious, analogous to the chaos realm of the dead or maybe even identical with it. Chaos is without limitation, excess of life etc.so when one has seen it, there's no more going back to being "normal" in a sense. What confuses me is how it seems that this part is spoken by Jung the author and not Jung the seasick madhouse patient, which gives extra layers to the text. If the sea the author is imagining is the chaotic subconscious, has Jung just come back from the metaphorical sea or is he still there or both? Is the hellish web of words his own writing that tries to give structure to the chaos his projected self experiences in self-induced psychosis? Like in Nox Secunda, I'm not sure who is talking to whom anymore. Perhaps this is also an effect of the chaos, or an attempt to communicate it?
That could be it, but after some fairly black stuff follows later:
"If you accept the lowest in you, suffering is unavoidable since you do the base thing and build up what lay in ruin. There are many graves and corpses in us, an evil stench of decomposition. Just as Christ through the torment of sanctification subjugated the flesh, so the God of this time through the torment of sanctification will subjugate the spirit. Just as Christ tormented the flesh through the spirit, the God of this time will torment the spirit through the flesh. For our spirit has become an impertinent whore, a slave to words created by men and no longer the divine word itself."
Things get messier again. The hellish web of words, the word as an image of god and now these words created by men may or may not be the same thing. It seems there is holy inspired word in "good" madness, words of men in the ordinary neurotic subject and some hellwords in some submission to chaos/"bad madness".

Later we learn that the lowest in man is the source of mercy and we have to take sickness in ourselves so that God can be healed and purged of the decomposition of death and the mud of the underworld.
Then something about rage and taking my misdeed upon myself so that the God would be healed and also quite satanic stuff about Christ turning against himself and hating that which he loved in himself.

"We thus fear our lowest since that which one does not possess is forever united with thhe chaos and takes part in its mysterious ebb and flow. Insofar as I accept the lowest in me - precisely that red glowing sun of the depths - and thus fall victim to the confusion of chaos, the upper shining sun also rises- Therefore he who strives for the highest finds the deepest."

Now there's even talk of the dead of the Above and Below. So perhaps there are two different kinds of dead too and they are united in the growth of the tree in the sea of chaos? The text tells me that the noble and the wicked drew many after them to higher and lower madness, thereby sowing confusion and preparing the way of what is to come. Two madnesses (two Coopers!) perhaps implying transrational, spiritual inspiration on one hand and the collective demonic bloodlust &c. of the dead who did not die properly on the other? This would go together with the idea of three words and the Hell-Heaven-Inbetween theme.
Both should be accepted completely and who accepts, sees the tree of life whose roots reach into hell and whose top touches heaven and he no longer knows differences except the difference between below and above. Life needs the dark, but if weknow it's evil you we no longer accept it and you suffer anguish and we do not know why.
"Nor can you accept it as evil, else your good will reject you. Nor can you deny it since you know good and evil."
Makes sense that you shouldn't accept evil except through some kind of insight of unity. Returning to primal chaos solves the issue and we forget the distinction as long as our tree grows from below to above.
"But as soon as growth stops, what was united in growth falls apart and once more you recognize good and evil".
The growth is the key, and probably related to the law of movement earlier.
"The strong have doubt but doubt has the weak"
"My speech is neither light nor dark since it is the speech of someone who is growing."


---

A simplistic summary could be that Jung allows his rational mind to collapse to the call of his soul and this allows him to enter a state of different seeing, interpreting the primal chaos. This interpretation cannot be put to words because there are two different kinds of madness and they are one to someone who is growing. This growth happens via returning to the chaos, that can be understood as the sea. Some obvious associations are at least Binah as the Great Sea of Understanding & the oceanic feeling Freud talked about. I'm still fascinated about the role of the dead in this.
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Re: Jung, The Red Book

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Today's binge-reading of Liber Novus in order to catch up our discussion offered, once again, an explosion of synchronicities. I have come to except this from Jung readings in the past year or so.

I will comment briefly the recent chapters in different posts, to make the comments more readable.

Wyrmfang wrote: Tue Oct 27, 2020 8:00 pmChapter xiii: The Sacrificial Murder

The "madness" looming (and blossoming in the later chapters, as Insanus related) presents itself as a "marionette with a broken head", the violent death of the integrity of the man's constitution, seen to his usual self as the healthy integration of kâma manas. The psychonaut cleaves in two, the sides of the masculine (identified with) and the feminine (his "soul", seen outside, but communicated with).

There's a very Azazelian line given by the murdered girl's spirit, who is later revealed to be Jung's own soul:

S: Do you understand this [scene of a violent murder]?
I: I refuse to understand such things. I can't speak about them without becoming enraged.
S: Why become enraged? You might as well rage every day of your life, for those and similar things occur every day.

This precisely is the "rage" of a Satanist on the path of ascension.

From the coming apart of the dreamer's soul, the murder of the girl, comes also the loathing of the nature of Mars, the masculine.
S: You are a man, and a man has committed this deed.
I: Yes, I am a man – I curse whoever did this for being a man, and I curse myself for being a man.

This brings to mind the misandrist discussion with Cancer here some years ago.

In the end are given many pictures that seem like chakras. In some of them, a special hieroglyphic writing is given. In extensive footnotes 155 to 157 this hieroglyphic writing is discussed. Since we quite recently discussed about the possible special challenges concerning runic magic (here), it is interesting to note that the one who is giving the psychonaut Jung the quite detailed metaphysical explanations on the runes is "a black magician". This is understandable: the thing is similar than to what I discussed in the Demons' Cube text, which draws hieroglyphic pictures to form goetic evocations from the Metatron's Cube of Platonic solids. This is the point where the physical & spiritual merge, and so it is not only magical but also necessarily "black". The Magician's name (Ha-Ha-Ha) is very kabbalistic as well as Tarotian (arc 0/1). Footnote 156 gives a similar hieroglyphic idea that I gave about A/Aleph in Argarizim.
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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Astraya wrote: Mon Nov 30, 2020 12:10 pmDivine Folly

In this chapter Jung once again comes back to both of his permanent favourites: Nietzsche's Zarathustra and Goethe's Faust.

But what he actually ponders are the masculine (~forcing) and feminine (~submission) polarities in Christ. Jung claims that we have not understood Christ, and hence cannot have been done away with him.

We fought against Christ, we deposed him, and we seemed to be conquerors. But he remained in us and mastered us. It is better to be thrown into visible chains than into invisible ones. You can certainly leave Christianity but it does not leave you.

On the next page (332 in the Reader's Edition) Jung dreams a very Merezhkovskian dreams of uniting the Christ principle with its opposite, the modern prophets (and also the spirit of re-emerging paganism), but as was the case with Merezhkovski, he remains unable to do that in his own time.
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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Insanus wrote: Mon Feb 08, 2021 1:38 amNOX SECUNDA

In Nox Secunda, Jung comes to re-align the formerly separated male & female principles (cf. the same recurrent stages of separatio & coniunctio in alchemical work). This is accomplished using the idea of Imitatio christi, namely, actually trying to live a Christ-like life (ie. fully ethical one). This makes oneself, paradoxically, a very male power in female (apparent) submission, when such is adopted openly:

I believe one can also follow one's own nose. That would also be the intuitive method. But the beautiful way in which Christ does this must nevertheless be of special value.

Here the "nose" is an euphemistic expression for another Martian part, which has the similar symbolism. We are, of course, speaking about the libido, which is the very opposite of ennui.

From this, we come to the "vital" (once again vir-ility) that Insanus mentioned: "Let go, daimon, you did not live your animal". The psychonaut now has the key to meet the actual substance of the work, which is necromantic: the collective, more than personal pressure that comes from the substance that has, so to say (and also literally) died in frustration, without reaching the goals of its vital, animal needs.

This instantly puts us into the teachings on tantra, and the rest is indeed concerned with that teaching of sacred vivification. Jung puts it into beautiful words (on page 342):

He who never lives his animal must treat his brother like an animal. Abase yourself and live your animal so that you will be able to treat your brother correctly. You will thus redeem all those roaming dead [= karmic mortificated demands] who strive to feed on the living. And do not turn anything you do into a law, since that is the hubris is power.

Jung the tantric, indeed. "Liber Novus" is a very good name for this New Book for our time, one of the many, but better done than almost any other I've seen. Jung's own name ("the Young One") seems especially fitting in this context.

The idea about "sacred" animals is dealt more in the footnote 180 on the same page. "Only man is extravagant." This is a beautiful text, and reminds us why tantric Shiva is called Pashupati, the lord of beasts.

About the footnote 174 I have to say, that we must be more than vigilant about the usual Christ >< Christianity difference. Jung whips the latter about its "suppressed animal element", which is well and good, but the commentator should perhaps have mentioned the utmost important of the tantric Christ, which is anything but that figure of sad self-mortification.
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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Insanus wrote: Fri Feb 12, 2021 7:24 amNOX TERTIA

Like Insanus mentioned, this chapter is a bit disorganized, which is fitting to its theme of "the ship of fools". Humanity thinks that it has found a rock bottom of being, while actually our whole culture is a collection of shared insanities. This and the last chapter's funny and ironic presentation of becoming committed to mental care reminds be of Doctor Stravinsky's mental clinic in Master and Margarita. Jung's fantasy and the novel's develop in a similar, yet diametrically opposite ways: in both of these, a person is taken into custody & claimed to be a schizophrenic; then appears another personality, a true "fool" of the asylum, who mirrors the dreamer (whose projection he is) and thus condemns him sane (Jung) or insane (MM's Bezdomnyi). In other words, Jung who has come to doubt his own reason, compares himself to a man who is indeed insane, and comes to see where is the difference between them. (In the Red Book, the madman claims to be sane, and "Saviour"; in Master and Margarita, the madman claims to be insane, but actually bears reservedly the name of "Master".)

Insanus wrote: Fri Feb 12, 2021 7:24 amSo now it seems clear that the sea really is the chaos of subconscious, analogous to the chaos realm of the dead or maybe even identical with it. (...) Perhaps this is also an effect of the chaos, or an attempt to communicate it?

On this page where Jung discusses the ocean of chaos and the one emerging from it (352) we may claim that he is also talking about Oannes, the counterpart of Christ (a Cancer to Christ's Capricorn), who has not transcended but rather taken into him the demonic abyss:

The work of men is steady but it swims upon chaos. The striving of men seems like a lunacy to him who comes from the sea. But men consider him mad. He who comes from the sea is sick. He can hardly bear the gaze of men. (...) But for him who has seen the chaos, there is no more hiding.

On page 354 (& footnote 204), Jung comes to the Christian, kabbalistic, alchemical and Azazelian idea of "the rejected stone" & talks about "mercy" (Chesed). "The lowest in you is the source of mercy."

At the end of the chapter, in the extremely long footnote 211 (filling up the whole pages 358-359), Jung discusses the character of Phanes in a way I'll have to deal with separately a bit later; it is too interconnected with the ongoing Phanes-Salome -working in the international part of the brotherhood right now.
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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Cap. xvii (Chapter Seventeen)
NOX QUARTA


"The Fourth Night" once again drowns me into the ocean of synchronicities, so overwhelming that the intensity starts to make one physically ill of all the astral tumult & mental vertigo. But onwards we must go.

First, Jung discusses his feelings of integration once again in very Azazelian language (the speaker here is his soul, anima):

The door should be lifted off its hinges to provide a free passage between here and there, between yes and no, between above and below, between left and right. Airy passages should be built between all opposed things, light smooth streets should lead from one pole to the other. Scales should be set up, whose pointer sways lightly. (p.361)

Jung comes to conclusion he has been dreaming, and is in "the realm of mothers", once again a very tantric phrase, and once again also connected to Goethe's Faust (see footnote 217). This is the fertile chaotic state of Magna Mater, the phase where deeper astral is being stabilized into the vital astral in White (aether). Jung meets with the already familiar figures of the cook and the librarian. But these figures, especially the latter, are becoming banal, bland, and contemptuous, as repeatedly happens in Jung's visions: once he has exhausted a figure's energetical usefulness, it becomes a profane shade. To the meeting of the cook, an interesting painting is attached: it depicts an animal-faced brown human in a safe-seeming but confined narrow room with a checkboard floor tiles and a mystical portal in the far end. The feeling is the one of the reserved potential in the astral womb of confined mundane life, but the one with possibilities to going beautifully onwards. This is also what the person of the cook has depicted in this and the previous chapters.

Jung then opens "the green curtains" and enters "Klingsor's magical garden". In order to understand the background of the symbolic figures now emerging one must be familiar with Wagner's Parsifal. Dramatis personae here are:

Klingsor - the black magician - the Satanic side of the Ego
Kundry - i.e. Salome - the vital, magical part of the soul (anima)
Parsifal - the saviour knight - the âtma-buddhic part of the Ego (to Klingsor's manasic)

Jung reveals this in the following (emphasis mine):
How closely Klingsor resembles me! What a repulsive play! (...) The audience is enraptured and recognizes itself in Parsifal. He is I. (...) I rise and become one with myself.

Jung finally reaches his initiation, which is the integration of the purified manasic being (the black magician, one's simulacrum) with the actual Self (the Saviour, the simulacrum of God).

More Azazelian quotes are forthcoming:

He who wants to accept himself must also really accept his other. But in the yes not every no is true

That is, it is not enough to just present the antinomian truth, but one has to re-join the purified antinomian truth to its root, to create a soulful synthesis, and this is the (only) real living. Here we have a sketch of the whole alchemical process. Speaking of which, in the footnote 228 a reference is made to the exact spot our Psychology & Alchemy reading circle is at right now, Jung's idea of the Ezechiel's quadrated wheel... which also was the topos in my recent presentation in our Apocalypse convent of Lucifer.

An Ouroboric figure indeed, and this Ouroboros is the one with which Jung next struggles. He sees it carrying along the necrophilic needs of the deceased, particularly the ones connected with undeveloped sexual urge and pedophilia: "One wakens the dead with this pleasure" (p.368). On this same page Jung presents this pedophilic union in the form of prophet Elisha, who kabbalistically was Elias, who became John the Baptist, who was Philemon, Salome's counterpart. All these figures are the same in soul. But the heroic "Parsifal" self emerges to break this Ouroboric re-connection to ones beginning, which is most necrophilic & pedophilic at the same time (as we can see from the repetitive process of the Ouroboros, in case it does not receive its spiralic ascension: i.e. if it regresses to become "a being of the mask"). A spectacular picture of the Parsifal cutting the Ouroboric dragon called by Jung "Atmaviktu, the Breath of Life" (i.e. aeonic life, the life-giving "Devil") from inside its circle.

After these tremendous thoughts & pictures of earned initiation (to the new spiral, from the dregs of old) Jung gives yet other paintings, which connect to the prize that is Lapis (the philosopher's stone): a beautiful multi-faceted diamond, and a face of an earthly cthonic god or gnome, surrounded by fossils.

Reading the whole footnote 232 (going from page 372 to page 374) one can learn something about the two aspects of Satan, Saturnine "Ka" and Mercurial-Mephistophelian "Philemon" (mentioned above). In a way, I'd say that these two guiding & challenging spirits are also seen in Jung's permanent admiration of Nietzsche's Zarathustra (Ka, power) and Goethe's Faust (Philemon, guile).


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Re: Jung, The Red Book

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Cap. xviii (Chapter Eighteen)
THE THREE PROPHECIES


This chapter starts beyond the fourth wall, Jung speaking how he has had visions on 22 January 1914. After this brief intro, Jung speaks with his soul.

First, he is ready to "accept everything" that that soul would give to him, repeating his acceptance three times in a way that brings to mind the Catholic rite of absolutio. But no absolution is coming: instead, the author finds that he cannot after all accept everything the soul would give to him, and neither should he.

When Jung has started to hesitate to accept also "fratricide, cowardly mortal blows, torture, child sacrifice, the annihilation of whole peoples" and so on, he realizes (in the footsteps of Cato & Voltaire) that he is supposed to tend his own garden and not try to swallow everything whole. Positive humility is both in acceptance and renunciation of the absolute.

The psychonaut's soul then gives him three things, which are pretty much the same as Enochian Azazel gave to humanity: "The misery of war, the darkness of magic, and the gift of religion." In the language of our colours, these would be the symbols for Red, White, and Black, i.e. Pauline, Johannite and Petrine doctrines for claiming the future. "If you are clever, you will understand that these three things belong together." (p.376)

In the Draft version of the text, Jung ponders that these visions belong to the next eight hundred years to future (of which 1/8 has now passed, bringing quite a lot of war and some magic, but only a small portion of religion).

Next we see the second coming of "the green man" seen before in the past chapters. "Forests have grown around me, winding plants have climbed up me, and I am completely covered by endless proliferation. The depths are inexhaustible." And the text explains why this Green Man has often been seen as the devil: "Everything is as good as nothing." (p.377) This is, once again, the union of Venus with Saturn, the Black and the Green.

So Jung comes to the conclusion that there must be both Solve and Coagula, and to one's dharma belongs that he must choose. The red sun-swastika image given here is reminded by the commentator (footnote 237) to be similar [to the vision] which Jung mentions in his autobiography, where Germany is flooded & the inland cities have become ports.



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Also in the next chapters there are extremely beautiful pictures. Please let me know if you want me to include some samples of them here. This seems to be the peak of Jung's creative vision, and his paintings become a dazzling, new kind of reality. He was really an Artist, in the old meaning of this word.

In the following months we will go through the following chapters:

Nefastos wrote: Sat Sep 12, 2020 10:18 amWyrmfang (April): XIX The Gift of Magic
Astraya (May): XX The Way of the Cross
Insanus (June): XXI The Magician
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: Sat Sep 12, 2020 10:18 amWyrmfang (April): XIX The Gift of Magic
Astraya (May): XX The Way of the Cross
Insanus (June): XXI The Magician

Are you still with us in this, Wyrmfang?
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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