Carl Jung: Master of the Garden

Carl Jung: Master of the Garden

The Red Book

oh master of the garden! I see your dark tree from afar in the shimmering sun. My street leads to the valleys where men live. I am a wandering beggar. And I remain silent.

Killing off would-be prophets is a gain for the people. If they want murder, then may they kill their false prophets. If the mouth of the Gods remains silent, then each can listen to his own speech. He who loves the people remains silent. If only false
teachers teach, the people will kill the false teachers, and will fall into the truth even on the way of their sins. Only after the darkest night will it be day: So cover the lights and remain silent so that the night will become dark and noiseless. The sun rises without our help. Only he who knows the darkest error knows what light is.

oh master of the garden, your magical grove shone to me from afar. I venerate your deceptive mantle, you father of all will,o’,the,wisps.

281 Jung’s marginal note to the calligraphic volume: “The bhagavadgita says: whenever there is a decline of the law and ‘an increase in iniquity; then I put forth myself For the rescue of the pious and for the destruction of the evildoers, for the establishment of the law I am born in every age.” The citation is from chapter 4, verses 7-8 of the Bhagavad Gita. Krishna is instructing Arjuna concerning the nature of truth. ~Red Book; Footnote 281.

282 The text in the image reads: “Father of the Prophet, beloved Philemon.” Jung subsequently painted another version of this painting as a mural in one of the bedrooms in his tower at Bollingen.

He added an inscription in Latin from the Rosarium philosophorum, in which Hermes describes the stone as saying: “defend me and I will defend thee, give me my right that I may help thee, for Sol is mine and the beams thereof are my inward parts; but Luna is proper to me, and my light excelleth all light, and my goods are higher than all goods.

I give many riches and delights to men desiring them, and when I seek after anything they acknowledge it, I make them understand and I cause them to possess divine strength. I engender light, but my nature is darkness. Unless my metal should be dry, all bodies have need of me, because I moisten them. I blot out their rustiness and extract their substance. Therefore I and my son being joined together, there can be nothing made better nor more honorable in the whole world.” Jung cited some of these lines in Psychology and Alchemy (1944, CW 12, §§99, 140, 155).

The Rosarium, first published in 1550, was one of the most important texts of European alchemy, and concerns the means of producing the philosopher’s stone. It contained a series of woodcuts of symbolic figures, which was Jung’s exemplar in Psychology of the Transference. Explained through an Alchemical Series of Pictures. For Doctors and Practical Psychologists (1946, CW 16). ~Carl Jung; Red Book; Footnote 282.