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Jung claimed that the ancients lacked a capacity for directed thinking, which was a modern acquisition. ~Sonu Shamdasani, Red Book, Page 197
The fact that painted images of an accomplished and hybrid kind illuminate the medieval format of a folio in scribal hand compounds any reflections on the linguistic task The novel language required a renewed ancient script. ~Sonu Shamdasani, The Red Book, Page 222
Everything to come was already in images: to find their soul, the ancients went into the desert. This is an image. The ancients lived their symbols, since the world had not yet become real for them. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 236
Think diligently about the images that the ancients have left behind. They show the way of what is to come. Look back at the collapse of empires, of growth and death, of the desert and monasteries, they are the images of what is to come. Everything has been foretold. But who knows how to interpret it? ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 236
Notice what the ancients said in images: the word is a creative act. The ancients said: in the beginning was the Word. Consider this and think upon it. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 236
“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, The Red Book, Page 236, fn 74
This, too, is an image of the ancients, that they lived in things symbolically: they renounced wealth in order to have a share of the voluntary poverty of their souls. Therefore I had to grant my soul my most extreme poverty and need. And the scorn of my cleverness rose up against this. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 236 fn 80
To the extent that the Christianity of this time lacks madness, it lacks divine life. Take note of what the ancients taught us in images: madness is divine. But because the ancients lived this image concretely in events, it became a deception for us, since we became masters of the reality of the world. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 238
The ancients brought over some of the beauty of God into this world, and this world became so beautiful that it appeared to the spirit of the time to be fulfillment, and better than the bosom of the Godhead. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 238
The ancients did not speak in vain of a divine and holy madness.” Schelling related this to the “inner self-laceration of nature.” He held that “nothing great can be accomplished without a constant solicitation of madness, which should always be overcome, but should never be entirely lacking.” ~Editor, The Red Book, Page 238, fn 89
What happens outside us in these days is the image that the peoples live in events, to bequeath this image immemorially to far-off times so that they might learn from it for their own way, just as we learned from the images that the ancients had lived before us in events. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 239, fn 89
Those who wander in the desert experience everything that belongs to the desert. The ancients have described this to us. From them we can learn. Open the ancient books and learn what will come to you in solitude. Everything will be given to you and you will be spared nothing, the mercy and the torment.” ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 241, fn 110
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, The Red Book, Page 242
It was folly and monkey business, an atrocious Hell’s masquerade of the holiest mysteries. How else could Christ have saved his Antichrist? 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, The Red Book, Page 243
The one arose from the melting together of the two. He was born as a child from my own human soul, which had conceived him with resistance like a virgin. Thus it corresponds to the image that the ancients have given to us. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 244
And thus the image of the ancients is fulfilled: I pursued my soul to kill the child in it. For I am also the worst enemy of my God. But I also recognized that my enmity is decided upon in the God. He is mockery and hate and anger, since this is also a way of life. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 244
Look at the images of the Gods that the ancients and the men of old left behind: their nature is ambiguous and equivocal. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 244, fn 143
But if you break down the walls that confine your view, and if the immensity and its endless uncertainty inspire you with fear, then the ancient sleeper awakens in you, whose messenger is the white bird. Then you need the message of the old tamer of chaos. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 264
Anchorite: There are several others whom you can see further down in this valley Some have huts like me, others live in the graves that the ancients have hollowed out in these rocks. I live uppermost in the valley; because it is most solitary and quiet here, and because here I am closest to the peace of the desert. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 268
Dull from the sun and drunk from fermenting wines, you lie down in ancient graves, whose walls resound with many voices and many colors of a thousand solar years. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 269
He who breaks the wall of words overthrows Gods and defiles temples. The solitary is a murderer. He murders the people, because he thus thinks and thereby breaks down ancient sacred walls. He calls up the daimons of the boundless. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 270
And you prepare to sleep through the millennia like everyone else, and you sleep down into the womb of the millennia, and your walls resound with ancient temple chants. Since the simple is what always was. Peace and blue night spread over you while you dream in the grave of the millennia. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 270
0 mother stone, I love you, I lie snuggled up against your warm body, your late child. Blessed be you, ancient mother. Yours is my heart and all glory and power-Amen. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 271
I prepare to experience the hour of my second birth. The ancients said: “We are born between faeces and urine,”. For three nights I was assaulted by the horrors of birth. On the third night, junglelike laughter pealed forth, for which nothing is too simple. Then life began to stir again. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 275, fn 79
The ancients called the saving word the Logos, an expression of divine reason. So much unreason / was in man that he needed reason to be saved. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 280
The ancients said: it is terrible to fall into the hands of the living God. They spoke thus because they knew, since they were still close to the ancient forest, and they turned green like the trees in a childlike manner and ascended far away toward the East. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 281
One used to believe that one could murder a God. But the God was saved, he forged a new axe in the fire, and plunged again into the flood of light of the East to resume his ancient cycle. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 283
The ancients have also indicated this to us, in that they taught us to drink the blood and eat the flesh of the savior. The ancients believed that this brought healing to the soul. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 291
The same thing happened as in ancient times, but now under the law of love. So if you have no reverence for what has become, you will destroy the law of love. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 297
Therefore the ancients said that after Adam had eaten the apple, the tree of paradise withered. Your life needs the dark.
But if you know that it is evil, you can no longer accept it and you suffer anguish and you 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. Because of this the knowledge of good and evil was an insurmountable curse. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 301
S: “I find the treasures of all past cultures, magnificent images of Gods, spacious temples, paintings, papyrus rolls, sheets of parchment with the characters of bygone languages, books full of lost wisdom, hymns and chants of ancient priests, stories told down the ages through thousands of generations.” ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 305
From the flooding darkness the son of the earth had brought, my soul gave me ancient things that pointed to the future. She gave me three things: The misery of war, the darkness of magic, and the gift of religion. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 306
Therefore I took old magical apparatuses and prepared hot potions and mixed in secrets and ancient powers, things that even the cleverest would not guess at. I stewed the roots of all human thoughts and deeds. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 309
But what is the resolution? It is always something ancient and precisely because of this something new, for when something long since passed away comes back again in a changed world, it is new. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 311
To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation. This is the creation of the new, and that redeems me. Salvation is the resolution of the task. The task is to give birth to the old in a new time. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 311
The ancients devised magic to compel fate . They needed it to determine outer fate. We need it to determine inner fate and to find the way that we are unable to conceive. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 311
You know, Oh Philemon, the wisdom of things to come; therefore you are old, oh so very ancient, and just as you tower above me in years, so you tower above the present in futurity, and the length of your past is immeasurable. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 316
We stand in the vastness, wed to the serpent, and consider which stone could be the foundation stone of the building, / which we do not yet know. The most ancient> It is suitable as a symbol. We want something graspable. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 320
I must say this, not with reference to the opinions of the ancients or this or that authority; but because I have experienced it. It has happened thus in me. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 338
It is the custom of the ancients, the tradition of the ancestors, observed since days of old. It is to be adapted for new use. It is practice and incubation in a smelter, a taking-back into the interior, into the hot accumulation where rust and brokenness are taken away through the heat of the fire. It is a holy ceremony, help me so that my work may succeed. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page345
But I turned to Philemon and said, “My father, you utter strange teachings. Did not the ancients teach similar things? And was it not a reprehensible heresy, removed equally from love and the truth? ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 348, fn 88
The solar barge is a common motif in ancient Egypt. The barge was seen as the typical means of movement of the sun. In Egyptian mythology, the Sun God struggled against the monster Aphophis, who attempted to swallow the solar barge as it traveled across the heavens each day. In Transformations and Symbols of the Libido Jung discussed the Egyptian “living sun -disc” and the motif of the sea monster. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 285 fn 128
I was ancient and perpetually renewing myself falling from the heights to the depths, and whirled glowing from the depths to the heights hovering around myself amidst glowing clouds as raining embers beating down like the foam of the surf engulfing I myself in stiffing heat-Embracing and rejecting myself in a boundless game where was I was completely sun.” ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 286
What proves to be most difficult is to grasp the playfulness of life (the childish, so to speak). All the manifold sides of life, the great, the beautiful, the serious, the black, the devilish, the good, the ridiculous, the grotesque are fields of application which each tend to wholly absorb the beholder or describer. / Our time requires something capable of regulating the mind. Just as the concrete world has expanded from the limitedness of the ancient outlook to the immeasurable diversity of our modern outlook, the world of intellectual possibilities has developed to unfathomable diversity. Infinitely long paths, paved with thousands of thick volumes, lead from one specialization to another. Soon no one will be able to walk down these paths anymore. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 286, fn 135
“But we know that the ancients spoke to us in images. Hence my thinking advised me to emulate Christ, not to imitate him but because he is the way. If I follow a way, I do not imitate him. But if I imitate Christ, he is my goal and not my way. But if he is my way. I thus go toward his goal, as the mysteries had shown me previously. Thus my thinking spoke to me in a confused and ambiguous manner, but it advised me to imitate Christ” ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 293, fn 163
To Eckermann, Goethe recounted that “My Philemon and Baucis .. have nothing to do with that renowned ancient couple or the tradition connected with them. I gave this couple the names merely to elevate the characters. The persons and relations are similar, and hence the use of the names has a good effect” ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 312. fn 264
Jung narrated this episode in his 1925 seminar, stressing different details. He commented: “When I came out of the fantasy, I realized that my mechanism had worked wonderfully well, but I was in great confusion as to the meaning of all those things I had seen. The light in the cave from the crystal was, I thought, like the stone of wisdom. The secret murder of the hero I could not understand at all. The beetle of course I knew to be an ancient sun symbol, and the setting sun, the luminous red. disk, was archetypal. The serpents I thought might have been connected with Egyptian material. I could not then realize that it was all so archetypal, I need not seek connections. I was able to link the picture up with the sea of blood I had previously fantasized about. / Though I could not then grasp the significance of the hero killed, soon after I had a dream in which Siegfried was killed by myself It was a case of destroying the hero ideal of my efficiency. This has to be sacrificed in order that a new adaptation can be made; in short, it is connected with the sacrifice of the superior function in order to get at the libido necessary to activate the inferior functions” (Analytical Psychology, p. 48). (The killing of Siegfried occurs below in ch. 7.) Jung also anonymously cited and discussed this fantasy in his ETH lecture on June 14, 1935 (Modern Psychology, vols. I. and 2, p. 223). ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 236-237, fn 85
But why, you ask. does forethinking [the idea] appear to you in the guise of a Jewish prophet and your [the] pleasure in the guise of the heathen Salome? My friend, do not forget, that I too am one who thinks and wants in the spirit of this time, and is completely under the spell of the serpent. I am just now through my initiation into the mysteries of the spirit of the depths about to not entirely discard all the ancientness lacked by those thinking in the spirit of this time, but to readopt it into my being human, to make my life whole. For I have become poor and far removed from God. I must take in the divine and the mundane, since the spirit of this time had nothing else to give me; on the contrary he took the little that I possessed of real life. But in particular he made me hasty and greedy, since he is merely the present and he forced me to hunt down everything present to fill the moment” ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 253, fn 227
Socrates distinguished four types of divine madness: (1) inspired divination, such as by the prophetess at Delphi; (2) instances in which individuals, when ancient sins have given rise to troubles, have prophesied and incited to prayer and worship; (3) possession by the Muses, since the technically skilled untouched by the madness of the Muses will never be a good poet; and (4) the lover. In the Renaissance, the theme of divine madness was taken up by the Neoplatonists such as Ficino and by humanists such as Erasmus. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 238, fn 89
The ancients said in images that the fool finds the right way Forethinking has the first word, therefore Elijah asked me what I wanted. You should always ask yourself what you desire, since all too many do not know what they want. I did not know what I wanted. You should confess your longing and what you long for to yourself Thus you satisfy your pleasure and nourish your forethinking at the same time.” ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 249, fn 150
These images have so much reality that they recommend themselves, and such extraordinary meaning that one is caught. They form part of the ancient mysteries; in fact it is such fantasies that made the mysteries. Compare the mysteries of Isis as told in Apuleius, with the initiation and deification of the initiate … One gets a peculiar feeling from being put through such an initiation. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 252, fn 211
He who sleeps in the grave of the millennia dreams a wonderful dream. He dreams a primordially ancient dream. He dreams of the rising sun. If you sleep this sleep and dream this dream in this time of the world, you will know that the sun will also rise at this time. For the moment we are still in the dark, but the day is upon us. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 272
And so we hurried toward each other; he, from the light; I, from the darkness; he, strong; I, weak; he, God; I, serpent; he, ancient; I, utterly new; he, unknowing; I, knowing; he, fantastic; I, sober; he, brave, powerful; I, cowardly, cunning. But we were both astonished to see one another on the border between morning and evening. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 280
