Half a year or so before I had that dream about the white bird I dreamed the following
Half a year or so before I had that dream about the white bird I dreamed the following:
I was in a southern town, on a rising street with narrow half-landings.
It was twelve o’clock midday-bright sunshine.
An old Austrian customs guard or someone similar passes by me, lost in thought. Someone says:
That is one who cannot die. He died already 30-40 years ago, but has not yet managed to decompose.
I was very surprised. Here a striking figure came, a knight of powerful build, clad in yellowish armor.
He looks solid and inscrutable and nothing impresses him.
On his back he carried a red Maltese cross.
He has continued to exist from the 12th century and daily between 12 and 1 o’clock midday he takes the same route.
No one marvels at these two apparitions, but I was extremely surprised.
I hold back my interpretive skills.
As regards the old Austrian, Freud occurred to me; as regards the knight, I myself. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. II, Page 160
In 1925 he gave the following interpretation of this dream:
“The meaning of the dream lies in the principle of the ancestral figure: not the Austrian officer- obviously he stood for the Freudian theory-but the other, the Crusader, is an archetypal figure, a Christian symbol living from the twelfth century, a symbol that does not really live today, but on the other hand is not wholly dead either.
It comes out of the times of Meister Eckhart, the time of the culture of the Knights, when many ideas blossomed, only to be killed again, but they are coming again to life now.
However, when I had this dream, I did not know this interpretation” (Introduction to Jungian Psychology, p. 42).
In Memories, Jung commented on this dream in the context of his relation to Freud (pp. 186ff.) .
He added:
“The stories of the Grail had been of the greatest importance to me ever since I read them, at the age of fifteen, for the first time. I had an inkling that a great secret lay hidden behind those stories.
Therefore it seemed quite natural to me that the dream should conjure up the world of the Knights of the Grail and their quest-for that was, in the deepest sense, my own world, which had scarcely anything to do with Freud’s.
My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life” (p. 189). ~The Black Books, Vol II, Page 160 fn 53
The Black Books: Toward a Visionary Science
Prelude
In 1935, Jung said: “A point exists at about the thirty-fifth year when things begin to change, it is the first moment of the shadow side of life, of the going down to death.
It is clear that Dante found this point and those who have read
Zarathustra will know that Nietzsche also discovered it.
When this turning point comes people meet it in several ways: some turn away from it; others plunge into it; and something important happens to yet others from the outside.
If we do not see a thing Fate does it to us.”
By 1913, he had established himself as one of the leading lights in European psychiatry and was president of the burgeoning International Psychoanalytical Association.
As he recounted in Liber Novus, “I had achieved everything that I had wished for myself.
I had achieved honor, power, wealth, knowledge, and every human happiness.
Then my desire for the increase of these trappings ceased, the desire ebbed from me and horror came over me.”
He had reached a turning point that was to transform his life and work: through this, Jung became Jung, and analytical psychology emerged as a general psychology and as a school of psychotherapy.
This transformation took place through the exploration of the visionary imagination, charted in the Black Books, from 1913 to 1932.
These are not personal diaries but the records of a unique self-experimentation that Jung called his “confrontation with his soul” and his “confrontation with the unconscious.”
He didn’t record day-to-day happenings or outer events in them but rather his active imaginations, depictions of his mental states, and reflections on these.
From the fantasies therein, between 1913 and 1916 he composed the Draft of Liber Novus, the Red Book, which he then transcribed in a calligraphic volume, illustrated with paintings.
The paintings from 1916 onward in the Red Book relate to Jung’s continued explorations in the later Black Books.
Liber Novus and the Black Books are thus closely intertwined. The Black Books cover the period before, during, and after Liber Novus.
Liber Novus was born from the Black Books.
It includes Jung’s meditation on his fantasies between 1913 and 1916, and his understanding of the significance of his experiences up to that point.
In Jung’s view, his undertaking pertained not just to himself but to others as well; he had come to view his fantasies as
stemming from a general mythopoeic layer of the psyche, which he named the collective unconscious.
From the notebooks of a self-experimentation, a psychological work in a literary and theogonic form was created.
Jung’s continued explorations of the visionary imagination in the Black Books from 1916 chart his evolving understanding and demonstrate how he sought to develop and extend the insights he had gained and embody them in life.
At the same time, they enable his paintings from 1916 onward to be understood in the context of the evolution of the iconography of his personal cosmology.
Given the intersection of the Black Books and Liber Novus, particularly between 1913 and 1916, this introduction of necessity reprises in a reworked and expanded form sections from the introduction to Liber Novus, now taken up from a different angle, as both works arise from one context and shared chronology.
The introduction at hand focuses more on the unfolding of Jung’s visionary self-experimentation, and provides a fuller contextualization of the later period, 1916 to 1932.
Similarly, a share of the notes from the 2009 Norton edition of Liber Novus have been carried over in the first part of this edition.
In the early twentieth century, it was not uncommon for a work to be expanded and recast through several editions.
A number of Jung’s pivotal publications, such as The Psychology of the Unconscious Processes, are prime examples of this.
This introduction is part of that genre. ~Sonu Shamdasani, The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 11-12
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
