Carl Jung’s Visions of the Battle of The Marne and the Battle of Ypres in World War I
The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition (Philemon)
[Carl Jung’s Visions of the Battle of The Marne and the Battle of Ypres in World War I.]
“I take part in that murder; the sun of the depths also shines in me after the murder has been accomplished; the thousand serpents that want to devour the sun are also in me. I myself am a murderer and murdered, sacrificer and sacrificed. [93]
The up-welling blood streams out of me.
You all have a share in the murder. [94]
In you the reborn one will come to be, and the sun of the depths will rise, and a thousand serpents will develop from your dead matter and the sun to choke it. Your blood will stream forth. The peoples demonstrate this at the present time in unforgettable acts, that will be written with blood in unforgettable books for eternal memory. [95]”
Footnote 93: In “Transformation symbolism in the mass,” (1942), Jung commented on the motif of the identity of the sacrificer and the sacrificed, with particular reference to the visions of Zosimos of Panapolis, a natural philosopher and alchemist of the third century.
Jung noted: “What I sacrifice is my egotistical claim, and by doing this I give
up myself Every sacrifice is therefore, to a greater or lesser degree, a self-sacrifice” (CW II, §397).
Cf also the Katha Upanishad, ch. 2, verse 19. Jung cited the next two
verses of the Katha Upanishad on the nature of the self in 1921 (CW 6, §329).
There is a line in the margin of Jung’s copy by these verses in the Sacred Books of the East, vol. Xv, pt. 2, p. II.
In “Dreams,” Jung noted in connection with a dream “My intensive unconscious relation to India in the Red Book” (p. 9).
Footnote 94: Jung elaborated the theme of collective guilt in “After the catastrophe” (1945, CW 10). ~The Red Book.
Footnote 95:The reference is to the events of World War 1. The autumn of 1914 (when Jung wrote this section of “layer two”) saw the battle of the Marne and the first battle of Ypres. ~The Red Book.