International Journal of Jungian Studies Vol. 2, No. 2, September 2010, 160Á176

BOOK REVIEWS

The red book: Liber novus, by C. G. Jung, edited by , preface by Ulrich Hoerni, trans. Mark Kyburz, John Peck and Sonu Shamdasani, London and New York, Norton, 2009, xii371 pp., US$195.00/£120.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0- 393-06567-7

What was Christmas like for the members of the Jung family in 1913? Earlier in the summer, in the autumn, and since the beginning of Advent, their father had been experiencing a remarkable sequence of visions, including fantasies of devastation of apocalyptic proportions, which he transcribed in a series of small, black notebooks. Then he began to transfer them Á in ‘aestheticised’ form Á into a large, red book. In 1914 the war broke out, but even when it was over, and for many years afterwards, his work on , as it came to be known, continued. The fact of this book’s existence has tantalised disciples, scholars, and critics of C. G. Jung alike for decades, not least because the huge, heavy tome itself has been hidden away in a bank vault, withheld from public view. Now, at last, the Red Book has been published; one feels like saying it has burst upon the world. After all these years, has it been worth the wait? What does it tell us that is new about Jung? And what is the Red Book all about? For starters, it is undoubtedly red and, as a facsimile edition which reproduces the original’s size, The red book: Liber novus is very large (and correspondingly expensive). At one point in it Jung writes that he had felt the need to ‘catch up with a piece of the Middle Ages Á within [him]self’ (p. 330), and the splendour of its appearance and the pseudo-medieval style of its composition are among the first things that strike the reader; it looks as if it could be a book of the Gospels from centuries past. True, some of the material it contains has, as at least one analyst has been keen to emphasise, been previously published: in Jung’s 1925 seminar on , in Memories, dreams, reflections (1961), and in Aniela Jaffe´’s C. G. Jung: Word and image (1979). Yet the sheer physical presence of The red book makes it feel like something from another world (which, in a sense, it is), or at least another age. The amazing luxuriousness of its production reminds one of the massive Jugendstil edition of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, typeset and richly ornamented by Henry van de Velde. (Just as that work was issued in a limited edition of 100 leather- bound and 430 parchment-bound volumes, so The red book was published in a special deluxe edition of 199 red-leather-bound and clamshell-encased copies retailing at $2500, which rapidly sold out.) Nor is this the only thing that The red book has in common with Zarathustra, as we shall see. The long and obviously difficult story of how Jung’s heirs changed their collective mind and allowed The red book to be published is recounted by Sonu Shamdasani towards the end of his extensive, and helpful, introduction. So one must congratulate Shamdasani not simply for his editorial work in this volume, but also for having been

ISSN 1940-9052 print/ISSN 1940-9060 online DOI: 10.1080/19409052.2010.507998 http://www.informaworld.com International Journal of Jungian Studies 161 a major player in ‘landing the great whale’ (as Jung once remarked of having written ). Inevitably, it has been claimed that the book will change our understanding of Jung Á or even that, without it, we cannot understand Jung at all (see ‘Introduction’, pp. 219 and 221). Yet as Shamdasani also concedes, The red book cannot easily be understood, except in Jungian terms, so that it and the Collected works are a mutual explication of each other (p. 219). In this sense, then, it is no more foundational than the works that have already been published, but it undoubtedly reveals new aspects to Jung, bolstering, not damaging, his reputation as a significant intellectual figure, at the same time as it resituates it. In the press release, the Philemon Foundation compared The red book to The book of Kells and the illuminated works of William Blake, and it is both of these and more: it is Jung’s attempt to produce his equivalent of Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, the Gospels (canonical and apocryphal), Dante’s Divine comedy, Goethe’s Faust, Wagner’s Ring, and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra Á all in one go and in a single volume. At the risk of confirming Shamdasani’s fears that ‘commentators are likely to find their preconceptions confirmed therein’, it seems to me that The red book, whatever else it may represent, considerably strengthens the case for reading Jung within the context of his European and Germanic cultural inheritance. Above all, The red book represents Jung’s quest for beauty Á for ‘the beauty in me and with myself’ (p. 323). Before discussing this aspect further, however, perhaps an outline survey of its contents would be useful. As its text is currently presented (see below), The red book consists of three sections: ‘Liber primus’, ‘Liber secundus’, and a third section, somewhat mislead- ingly translated as ‘Scrutinies’ (which detracts from the connotations in the original German, Pru¨ fungen, of ‘examinations’ and ‘trials’). The first book, or ‘The way of what is to come’, presents a sequence of visions experienced by Jung in the run-up to the First World War, including a period when he was visiting Scotland, beginning in October 1913 and continuing up to 25 December of that year. Fittingly for the Advent season, the text opens with quotations from the Book of Isaiah, which Jung later alluded to in (1921). Rather than to the ‘spirit of the age’, Jung learns to listen to the ‘spirit of the depths’ (p. 229), and he reflects, at the psychologically significant age of 40, on his visions of a mighty flood (p. 231). Entering into dialogue with his soul, Jung travels to the desert of his self, and undertakes a ‘descent into hell in the future’ (p. 237). Here we find the vision of the murdered youth, the black scarab, and the rising sun, followed by the fantasy of the slaying of Siegfried, familiar from Memories, dreams, reflections and his 1925 seminar on analytical psychology. Subsequently, he meets the quasi-biblical figures of Elijah and Salome, an encounter which teaches Jung that ‘to live oneself means: to be one’s own task’; that one should ‘never say that it is a pleasure to live oneself’; and that ‘it will be no joy but a long suffering, since you must become your own creator’ (p. 249). Following his transformation into the ‘deus leontocephalus’, an episode recounted in the 1925 seminar and the centrepiece of Richard Noll’s scathing critique in The Jung cult (1994), Jung learns that ‘Man doesn’t only grow from within himself, he is also creative from within himself’, and so ‘the god becomes revealed in him’ (p. 253). In a vision on Christmas day of 1925, Jung sees how ‘in the mystery Man himself becomes the two principles, the lion and the serpent’, and realises that he himself ‘must become a Christ’ and be ‘made into Christ’ (p. 255). In ‘Liber secundus’, containing ‘The images of the erring’ (otherwise known as ‘The adventures of the wandering’), we find Jung’s visions from 26 December 1913 to