Salome: Being and multiplicity appeal to me, even if it is not new and not eternally true.
In LN the dialogue continues in the following way:
“But Salome turned to Elijah and said, ‘Father, it seems to me that men have outstripped us.
He is right: the many is more pleasurable.
The one is too simple and always the same.’ / Elijah seemed saddened and said,
‘What about the one in this case?
Does the one still exist if it stands next to the many?’ /
I answered, ‘That is your old and ingrained mistake, that the one excludes the many.
But there are many individual things.
The multiplicity of individual things is the one multiple God from whose body many Gods arise, but the uniqueness of the one thing is the other God, whose body is a man but whose spirit is as large as the world.’ /
But Elijah shook his head and said, ‘That is new, my son. Is the new good? What was, is good; and what was, will
Is that not the truth? Has there ever been anything new? And was what you call new, ever good?
Everything remains the same if you give it a new name.
There is nothing new, there can be nothing new; how could I then look ahead?
I look at the past and therein I see the future , as in a mirror.
And I see that nothing new happens, everything is but mere recurrence of what has been since time immemorial.
What is your being?
An appearance, a darting light; tomorrow it is no longer true.
It is gone; it is as if it never was.
Come, Salome, let us go.
One is mistaken in the world of men.’ /
But Salome looked back and whispered to me while leaving, ‘Being and multiplicity appeal to me, even if it is not new and not eternally true.’ /
Thus they disappeared into the dark night and I returned to the burden signified by my existence.
And I sought to do everything correctly that seemed to me to be a task and to take every way that seemed to me to be necessary for myself.
But my dreams became difficult and laden with anxiety, and I did not know why” (p. 546).
This continuation may have been written on a separate piece of paper; or it may have been added in the autumn of 1917, when Jung composed the manuscript of Scrutinies (evidently the case with the last paragraph here).
In Memories, Jung stated:
“The figures of the unconscious are uninformed too, and need man, or contact with consciousness, in order to attain to ‘knowledge.’
When I began working with the unconscious, I found myself much involved with the figures of Salome and Elijah.
Then they receded, but after about two years they reappeared.
To my enormous astonishment, they were completely unchanged; they spoke and acted as if nothing had happened in the meanwhile.
In actuality the most incredible things had taken place in my life.
I had, as it were, to begin from the beginning again, to tell them all about what had been going on, and explain things to them.
At the time I had been greatly surprised by this situation.
Only later did I understand what had happened: in the interval the two had sunk back into unconscious and into themselves-
I might equally put, into timelessness.
They remained out of contact with the I and the I’s changing circumstances, and therefore were ignorant of what had happened in the world of consciousness” (p. 337).
This appears to refer to the conversation with these figures in this entry of Book 6. 239, fn 174
