Carl Jung on “Hell,” “Lucifer,” “Satan,” and the “Devil” – Anthology

Carl Jung on “Hell,” “Lucifer,” “Satan,” and the “Devil” – Anthology

Great is the power of the way. In it Heaven and Hell grow together, and in it the power of the Below and the power of the Above unite. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 308.

My I, you are a barbarian. I want to live with you; therefore I will carry you through an utterly medieval Hell, until you are capable of making living with you bearable. You should be the vessel and womb of life, therefore I shall purify you. The touchstone is being alone with oneself. This is the way. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 330.

No one knows what happened during the three days Christ was in Hell. I have experienced it. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 243.

But on the fourth night I cried, “To journey to Hell means to become Hell oneself. It is all frightfully muddled and interwoven. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 240.

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. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 242.

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 under worldly brother. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.

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. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.

He who journeys to Hell also becomes Hell; therefore do not forget from whence you come. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.

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. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.

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. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.

The way to your beyond leads through Hell and in fact through your own wholly particular Hell, whose bottom consists of knee-deep rubble, whose air is the spent breath of millions, whose -fires are dwarflike passions, and whose devils are chimerical sign-boards. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 262.

When you step into your own Hell, never think that you come like one suffering in beauty; or as a proud pariah, but you come like a stupid and curious fool and gaze in wonder at the scraps that have fallen from your table. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 262.

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 ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Footnote 74, Page 236.

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. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.

I wait, secretly anxious. I see a tree arise from the sea. Its crown reaches to Heaven and its roots reach down into Hell. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 300.

There are hellish webs of words, only words, but what are words? Be tentative with words, value them well, take safe words, words without catches, do not spin them with one another so that no webs arise, for you are the first who is ensnared in them. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 300.

Just as Christ was crucified between the two thieves, our lowest lies on either side of our way. And just as one thief went to Hell and the other rose up to Heaven, the lowest in us will be sundered in two halves on the day of our judgment. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 300.

This is really Good Friday; upon which the Lord died and descended into Hell and completed the mysteries. This is the Good Friday when we complete the Christ in us and we descend to Hell ourselves. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 300.

Who among the living is Christ and journeys to Hell in living flesh? ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 300.

I have been baptized with impure water for rebirth. A flame from the fire of Hell awaited me above the baptismal basin. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 304.

I hold together what Christ has kept apart in himself and through his example in others, since the more the one half of my being strives toward the good, the more the other half journeys to Hell. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 315.

Christ himself compared himself to a serpent, and his hellish brother, the Antichrist, is the old dragon himself. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 318.

No one saves us from the evil of becoming, unless we choose to go through Hell. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 318.

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. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Footnote 135, Page 243.

If you have become a sacrifice to the ideal, then the ideal cracks open, plays carnival with you, and goes to Hell on Ash Wednesday. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 276.

I hold together what Christ has kept apart in himself and through his example in others, since the more the one half of my being strives toward the good, the more the other half journeys to Hell. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 315.

Birth is difficult, but a thousand times more difficult is the hellish afterbirth. All the dragons and monstrous serpents of eternal emptiness follow behind the divine son. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 287.

If my God were not overpowering, neither would be my evil. But I want my God to be powerful and beyond all measure happy and lustrous. Only in this way do I love my God. And the luster of his beauty will also have me taste the very bottom of Hell. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 289.

My God rose in the Eastern sky; brighter than the heavenly host, and brought about a new day for all the peoples. This is why I want to go to Hell. Would a mother not want to give up her life for her child? How much easier would it be to give up my life if only my God could overcome the torment of the last hour of the night and victoriously break through the red mist of the morning? ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 289.

If you want to go to heaven, your feet will grow into hell. ~Carl Jung, Cornwall Seminar, Page 12.

When the fire has burnt all that should be burnt, the balanced people of common sense naturally settle down and control the fiery ones because they are a nuisance. Yet the fire remains alive in certain people, eg. Meister Eckhart whose teaching lay dormant for six hundred years. Around Eckhart grew up a group of Brethren of the Free Spirit who lived licentiously. The problem we face is: “Is analytical psychology in the same boat?” “Are the second generation like the Brethren of the Free Spirit?” If so, it is the open way to Hell, and analytical psychology has come too soon and it will have to wait for a century or two. ~Carl Jung, The Cornwall Seminar, Page 20.

The God-image in man was not destroyed by the Fall but was only damaged and corrupted (‘deformed’), and can be restored through God’s grace. The scope of the integration is suggested by the descent of Christ’s soul to hell, its work of redemption embracing even the dead. The psychological equivalent of this is the integration of the collective unconscious which forms an essential part of the individuation process. ~Carl Jung; Aion; Page 39; Para 72.

To be “normal” is the ideal aim for the unsuccessful, for all those who are still below the general level of adaptation. But for people of more than average ability, people who never found it difficult to gain successes and to accomplish their share of the world’s work-for them the moral compulsion to be nothing but normal signifies the bed of Procrustes-deadly and insupportable boredom, a hell of sterility and hopelessness. ~Carl Jung; CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy; P. 161.

No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Page 43.

Only for outsiders, who have never been inside, is penal servitude not a hellish cruelty. I know many cases from my psychiatric experience where death would have been a mercy in comparison with life in a prison. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 446-448.

Yet real compulsion is one of the most hellish, devilish tortures, far worse than any organic disease. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 59-63.

But this does not prevent us from being continually licked round by the flames of hell. All of us have to atone, inwardly and outwardly, for this guilt of unconsciousness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 341-342.

The eastern gods all have two aspects, Kwannon, the well-known goddess of kindness, is also the goddess of hell. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 13Jan1939, Page 57.

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” ~Carl Jung, CW 18, §1103.

The Bible says, “Whosoever shall say “Racha” to his brother is guilty of hellfire.” If we substitute “shadow” for “brother” and implicate the dark brother within, we open out this biblical word into new perspectives. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 25.

And who in Hell would have invented the Decalogue? That is not invented by Moses, but that is the eternal truth in man himself, because he checks himself. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 16.

Becoming conscious does not in itself lead to hell by any means. It leads to this unpleasant place only if you are conscious of certain things and not of others. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 30.

It is quite natural that if in your consciousness you are always running round in a circle you will finally end up in hell. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 30.

I live in my deepest hell, and from there I cannot fall any further. ~Carl Jung on how he could live with the knowledge he had recorded in the Book of Job, Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 174.

As I once dreamt, my will to live is a glowing daimon, who makes the consciousness of my mortality hellish difficult for me at times. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 119.

But if you are now in the dumps and up to your ears in the mire, you must tell yourself that you were obviously flying too high and that a dose of undiluted hellish blackness was indicated. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 298.

What I have heard from the theological side has readied me for a special compartment in hell. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 547-548

But at least he [Socrates] has shown us the one precious thing: “To hell with the Ego-world! Listen to the voice of your daimonion. It has a say now, not you.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 531-533

If you leave all your energy and will in the superior function you slowly go to hell—it sucks you dry. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 74

Love is a force of destiny whose power reaches from heaven to hell. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 198.

The fact is that if one tries beyond one’s capacity to be perfect, the shadow descends into hell and becomes the devil. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 569.

Heaven and hell are the fates meted out to the soul and not to civilized man, who in his nakedness and timidity would have no idea of what to do with himself in a heavenly Jerusalem. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 26-27

Man has come to be man’s worst enemy. It is a clash between man and God, in which man’s Luciferan genius has produced in the H-bomb the power to destroy more effectively than any ancient god could. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 248.

And now we are moving into Aquarius, of which the Sibylline Books say: Luciferi vires accendit Aquarius acres (Aquarius inflames the savage forces of Lucifer). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 229-230

It is a clash between man and God, in which man’s Luciferan genius has produced in the H-bomb the power to destroy more effectively than any ancient god could. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 244-251

Just as evening gives birth to morning, so from the darkness arises a new light, the stella matutina, which is at once the evening and the morning star— Lucifer, the light-bringer. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 299

Satan unlike Christ, was created, not begotten. When I create I am free and not dependent. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 48.

In order to reach man, God has to show himself in his true form, or man would be everlastingly praising his goodness and justice and so deny him admission. This can be effected only by Satan, a fact which should not be taken as a justification for Satanic actions, otherwise God would not be recognized for what he really is. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 32-35.

Our society cannot afford the luxury of cutting itself loose from the imitatio Christi, even if it should know that the conflict with the shadow, i.e., Christ versus Satan, is only the first step on the way to the far-away goal of the unity of the self in God. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 133-138

He is the pneumatic state the creator attains to through the phase of incarnation. He is the experience of every individual that has undergone the complete abolition of his ego through the absolute opposition expressed by the symbol Christ versus Satan. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 133-138

But let man, mindful of his hybris, be content with the lesser evil and beware of the Satanic temptation of the grand gesture, which is only intended for show and self-intoxication. C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 11-12.

When Christ withstood Satan’s temptation, that was the fatal moment when the shadow was cut off. Yet it had to be cut off in order to enable man to become morally conscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 163-174

You locked Satan in the abyss for a millennium, and when the millennium had passed, you laughed at him, since he had become a children’s fairy tale. But if the dreadful great one raises his head, the world winces. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 274.

A religious conversation is inevitable with the devil, since he demands it, if one does not want to surrender to him unconditionally. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 261

If ever you have the rare opportunity to speak with the devil, then do not forget to confront him in all seriousness. He is your devil after all. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 261

The devil as the adversary is your own other standpoint; he tempts you and sets a stone in your path where you least want it. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 261

Although the devil very much abhors religion for its particular solemnity and candor, it has become apparent, however, that it is precisely through religion that the devil can be brought to an understanding. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 261

The fact is that if one tries beyond one’s capacity to be perfect, the shadow descends into hell and becomes the devil. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 569.

Therefore we say that if you give the little finger to the devil, he takes the whole arm, and finally the whole body. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 93-94

The devil is a preliminary stage of individuation, in the negative it has the same goal as the divine quaternity, namely, wholeness. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 409

Indians have no thoughts that would prevent consciousness from functioning, no devils that could devastate consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams, Page 409.

This disbelief in the devilishness of human nature goes hand in hand with the blank incomprehension of religion and its meaning. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 106

Only an infantile person can pretend that evil is not at work everywhere, and the more unconscious he is, the more the devil drives him. ~Carl Jung, CW ii, Para 255.

Nor should we omit to mention one final turn of the screw: like the devil who delights in disguising himself as an angel of light, the inferior function secretly and mischievously influences the superior function most of all, just as the latter represses the former most strongly. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 431.

It was from the spirit of alchemy that Goethe wrought the figure of the “superman” Faust, and this superman led Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to declare that God was dead and to proclaim the will to give birth to the superman, to “create a god for yourself out of your seven devils.” ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 163.

An ordinary man, not protected by an action from above, and isolated in society, cannot resist the power of evil, which is called very aptly the Devil. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 624-625.

But nobody has ever heard that the devil departed this life afterwards; on the contrary, the authentic New Testament view is that after the thousand year reign of Christ he shall be loosed again on earth in all his youthful freshness, in the form of Antichrist. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 253-254.

When you don’t acknowledge that you have such qualities [The Shadow], you are simply feeding the devils. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Page 53.

If you get rid of qualities[of the Shadow] you don’t like by denying them, you become more and more unaware of what you are, you declare yourself more and more non-existent, and your devils will grow fatter and fatter. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Page 53.

It is clear that the devil has been up to his tricks again. As soon as one notices that, one should say no more but withdraw into oneself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 250-252

Two things are united in this symbol, the spiritual attitude of Christ and the devilish desire for power. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 267-269

Thus the encounter of Christ with the devil is a classic example of the transcendent function. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 267-269

“Omnis festinatio a parte diaboli est”,’ he quoted in Latin – ‘all haste comes from the devil’. It is an old alchemical saying. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 297