… a mighty dream vision rose from the depths
Jung’s transmutation: Siegried to Parsifal
A first version of this chapter was presented at the 2019 IAAP International Congress held in Vienna, the setting being an important reason for including a fair amount of material on Freud.
The chapter is based largely on Jung’s Red Book in its assertion that Jung’s quest for his soul, as he expresses it in that work, is actually the Quest for the Grail. In the process of writing a chapter for Murray Stein and Thomas Arzt’s Jung’s Red Book for Our Time: Searching for Soul under Postmodern Conditions, I reread the entirety of Jung’s Red Book and, in so doing, came across the myth of Parsifal embedded in the text.
In The Red Book there are several allusions to that myth, which is the one associated with Jung’s natal sign of Leo. “I took it upon myself to get to know ‘my’ myth” (Shamdasani, 2009, p. 15) is what he sets out knowingly to find though he appears to have come upon it unwittingly as, although there are frequent references to the Parsifal myth, I could find no acknowledgement that this was his myth.
As the present chapter is, to a large extent, based on the contents of The Red Book, I shall begin with my personal experience of the latter leading up to its publication in 2009.
Prior to that date, I was already familiar with some of its contents from Aniela Jaffé’s 1979 C. G. Jung: Word and Image, which includes some text and images from it. I first recall hearing from my friend, Sonu Shamdasani, of his work on The Red Book in the early 2000s, though throughout that time he was bound by confidentiality agreements not to disclose any of its contents.
Finally, in August 2009, Sonu and Maggie Barron hosted a private seminar lasting a few days for a small group of individuals at Cliveden, an elegant mid-nineteenth-
century house in the English county of Berkshire.
This private seminar preceded the formal launch of The Red Book: Liber Novus on 7th August 2009 at the Rubin Museum in New York, where the exhibition also included Jung’s Black Books, the precursors of The Red Book.
Before setting out for the New York launch in 2009, I managed to get hold of
two copies of the first edition in order to write a review for The Economist that would coincide with the date of its publication.
My editor on the paper was astonished by the high quality of Jung’s artwork and queried whether he had done it all himself.
These paintings show the influence of the indigenous civilisations of Ancient Egypt, India, Mexico, and Tibet, as well as the symbolist artist, Odilon Redon, and the Byzantine frescoes and mosaics in Ravenna.
That unforgettable time with Sonu and members of the Jung family as well as other luminaries such as James Hillman, George Makari, Frank McMillan, and Beverley Zabriskie, spent together in New York for the book’s launch, consisted of eleven days of frenzied activity, particularly for Sonu, so much so that many of us were concerned for his well-being.
This special event was followed in 2010 by an exhibit of the Red and Black Books at the Library of Congress in Washington, which was attended by the eminent Librarian of Congress, James Billington.
Once again, some of the same people who came to the New York launch attended these proceedings in Washington, where the Swiss embassy put on a reception for all of us at the ambassador’s residence in the US capital.
Immediately following the launch in New York, I conducted an interview with Sonu for The Journal of Analytical Psychology, in the course of which he discussed some of the main features of The Red Book, that Jung had worked on from 1914 to 1930.
A key point about the work is that it is not a scientific study but a private cosmology forming the bedrock of Jung’s public work in which he is exploring various questions.
These consist of the impossibility of reconciling Western science with what science has forsaken; how psychology can differentiate religious jung’s transmutation 173
experiences from psychosis; and what to do with irrational experiences that are so far from rationality.
“What is prophetic in Jung’s text is the rebirth of the God image and the image of God” (Casement, 2010, p. 36).
As Shamdasani goes on to say in the interview, there is a crisis of language in The Red Book that emerges from the tension between directed and non-directed thinking, with the text oscillating between the two poles.
The literary content of the book was composed in such a way that it should be comparable to Dante’s Divine Comedy and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and the key figure of Philemon links to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Goethe’s Faust.
I have given the above personal account as a prelude to homing in on the specific theme of this chapter, namely, Jung’s claim that The Red Book depicts his own transmuting process, which may be seen in his shift from identifying with the Germanic hero, Siegfried, to the unwitting discovery of Parsifal as “his” own myth.
This matches with Jung’s theoretical construct of the first and second halves of life—according to which, the former is normally extraverted as it deals with ego development in the form of finding a partner, settling down to home and family, and developing a career, usually accomplished in Jung’s time when an individual
had reached their mid to late thirties.
The second half of life, says Jung, is introverted whence the focus is on the inner life as a preparation for death, which brings to mind Heidegger’s being-unto-death.
The latter assertion is my own because Jung appears unread in Heidegger,
testified to by the fact there are no references to the latter in the General Index, Volume 20 of the Collected Works, only one to a J. H. Heidegger, a Swiss theologian.
The following is a distillation of how I understand Heidegger’s being-unto-death, his version of preparedness for death, which is expressed in the first person singular.
When I take on board the possibility of my own not being, my own not being-able-to-Be is brought into proper view.
Hence my awareness of my own death as an omnipresent possibility discloses the authentic self—a self that is mine opposed to a theyself.
The possibility of my not existing encompasses the whole of my existence and my awareness of that possibility illuminates me, qua Dasein, in my totality.
To return to The Red Book, there are so many literary and esoteric allusions running through the text and the footnotes in it, which entailed several forays into the work before I was made aware of the theme of Parsifal running through much of the book.
These are preceded earlier in the work by Jung’s significant dream about Siegfried, which he refers to in the following way: “… a mighty dream vision rose from the depths” (Shamdasani, 2009, p. 160).
This dream has been much analysed over the years by psychoanalysts, including yours truly.
I was with a youth in high mountains.
It was before day-break, the Eastern sky was already light.
Then Siegfried’s horn resounded over the mountains with a jubilant sound.
We knew that our mortal enemy was coming.
We were armed and lurked beside a narrow rocky path to murder him.
Then we saw him coming high across the mountains on a chariot made of the bones of the dead.
He drove boldly and magnificently over the steep rocks and arrived at the narrow path where we waited in hiding.
As he came around the turn ahead of us, we fired at the same time and he fell slain.
Thereupon I turned to flee, and a terrible rain swept down.
But after this I went through a torment unto death and I felt certain that I must kill myself, if I could not solve the riddle of the murder of the hero. (1963, p. 173) ~Ann Casement, Jung’s Transformation: Siegfried to Parsifal, Page 171-174
