Herr Franz Jung went to the bookshelves

Herr Franz Jung went to the bookshelves

About Franz: Remembering C. G. Jung-A Son’s Story

We returned to the subject of music.

Herr [Franz] Jung did not play an instrument but was particularly fond of baroque music.

He said that when attending concerts, his friends liked to sit where they could see the musicians, but he preferred closing his eyes to enjoy the emotional experience of the music.

He was often moved to tears, he said.

Herr [Franz] Jung went to the bookshelves and brought back two books to show us.

The first was Carl Jung’s personal hand-illustrated copy of Septem Sermones Ad Mortuous (Seven Sermons to the Dead) lettered in beautiful Gothic script and handed it to me.

The first letters of each paragraph were ornately painted in reds and blues with touches of gold tempera, and the script in black.

The paper was a heavy weight and light brownish in color.

I held the book, my hands trembling, feeling suddenly overwhelmed with what I was holding, and recalled what I knew of his father’s life history.

Only a few copies of this book had been printed and not generally circulated.

As I leafed through, I saw the book also contained Carl Jung’s account of some of his dreams from 1917.

At the top of several of the dream pages, he had made intricate paintings of coins.

Some dreams had one coin, some two, one three, a few no coins at all.

Each coin was painted yellow with what looked like tempera paint and allowed to dry, then etched with what appeared to be brown detail added in his careful, painstaking manner.

I asked Franz if he knew what the coins represented.

He took the manuscript from my hands, studied it carefully, and shook his head.

“No, I do not know what they represent, only that my father was very fond of painting in this manner.” ~Mary Dian Molton, About Franz: Remembering C. G. Jung-A Son’s Story, Page 26

But that first afternoon, our discussion of the Septem Sermones Ad Mortuous manuscript continued as we recalled together that Jung, later on, had not wanted this manuscript included in the collected works and only agreed to its inclusion in an appendix of Memories, Dreams, Reflections as an historical footnote.

Franz thought this might have been because his father had presented the work as written by Basilides in Alexandria, a legendary second-century Gnostic folk figure, and his father might have thought he could be “accused of plagiarism!”

This said with a laugh and the matter was dropped as we moved on to other topics. ~Mary Dion Molton, About Franz: Remembering C. G. Jung-A Son’s Story, Page 27

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