[What if Satan represents elements of our personal lives? Extracts from The Red Book Below]
I: “It seems to me that it depends on what you call life. Your notion of life has to do with climbing up and tearing down, with assertion and doubt, with impatient dragging around, with hasty desire. You lack the absolute and its forbearing patience.”
Satan: “Quite right. My life bubbles and foams and stirs up turbulent waves, it consists of seizing and throwing away, ardent wishing and restlessness. That is life, isn’t it?”
I: “But the absolute also lives.”
Satan: “That is no life. It is a standstill or as good as a standstill, or rather: it lives interminably slowly and wastes thousands of years, just like the miserable condition that you have created.”
I: “You enlighten me. You are personal life, but the apparent standstill is the forbearing life of eternity, the life of divinity! This time you have counseled me well. I will let you go. Farewell.” ~Carl Jung Red Book
Satan crawls deftly like a mole back into his hole again. The symbol of the trinity and its entourage rise up in peace and equanimity to Heaven. I thank you, serpent, for hauling up the right one for me. Everyone understands his words, since they are personal. We can live again, a long life. We can
waste thousands of years. ~Carl Jung; Red Book
I: “What is it, then, with this damned personal quality? Satan recently made / a strong impression on me, as if he were the quintessence of the personal.”
Satan: “Of course he would, since he is the eternal adversary; and because you can never reconcile personal life with absolute life.”
I: “Can’t one unite these opposites?”
Satan: “They are not opposites, but simply differences. Just as little as you make the day the opposite of the year or the bushel the opposite of the cubit.” ~Carl Jung; Red Book
Thus I built a firm structure. Through this I myself gained stability and duration and could withstand the fluctuations of the personal. Therefore the immortal in me is saved. Through drawing the darkness from my beyond over into the day, I emptied my beyond. Therefore the demands of the dead disappeared, as they were satisfied. ~Carl Jung; Red Book
I am no longer threatened by the dead, since I accepted their demands though accepting the serpent. But through this I have also taken over something of the dead into my day. Yet it was necessary, since death is the most enduring of all things, that which can never be canceled out. Death gives me durability and solidity. So long as I wanted to satisfy only my own demands, I was personal and therefore living in the sense of the world. But when I recognized the demands of the dead in me and satisfied them, I gave up my earlier personal striving and the world had to take me for a dead man. For a great cold comes over whoever in the excess of his personal striving has recognized the demands of the dead and seeks to satisfy them.
While he feels as if a mysterious poison has paralyzed the living quality of his personal relations, the voices of the dead remain silent in his beyond; the threat, the fear, and the restlessness cease. For everything that previously lurked hungrily in him no longer lives with him in his day. His life is beautiful and rich, since he is himself. ~Carl Jung; Red Book
