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AnalyJ ical
JUNG, DANTE, AND THE

MAKING OF THE RED BOOK:
OF FIRE AND FORM
Tommaso Priviero
Jung, Dante, and the Making of
the Red Book: Of Fire and Form
This book explores the genesis of the Red Book (or Liber Novus), through the
lens of Jung’s lifelong confrontation with Dante and, in doing so, provides the
first-ever thorough comparative analysis of the intertextual and symbolical
correspondences between Liber Novus and the Commedia.
Starting from Jung’s multifaceted fascination with Dante and his pivotal
role in the former’s visionary material at historical, hermeneutical, and
psychological levels, the book challengingly envisions Liber Novus as
Jung’s Divine Comedy. This work finds a new way of approaching Jung’s
understanding of concepts such as “visionary works” and “visionary mind”
and considers how this approach can enhance our vision of depth psychology.
Through various thematics such as the metanoia and the symbolism of
animals, as well as the transformative role of the feminine and the erotic
and spiritual imagery of the soul, this work revolves around the Jung–Dante
correlation.
Offering an original perspective within the field of Jungian and Dante
scholarship, this book will be of great interest to academics and postgraduate
students studying in the areas of Jung, Dante, analytical psychology, depth
psychology, hermeneutics, and Western esoteric currents and practices. The
book will also appeal to Jungian analysts and psychoanalysts more broadly.
Tommaso Priviero is an analytical psychologist in London, and holds a PhD

in History of Psychology, University College London, UK.
Research in Analytical Psychology and Jungian Studies Series
Series Advisor: Andrew Samuels
Professor of Analytical Psychology, Essex University, UK.
The Research in Analytical Psychology and Jungian Studies series features

research-focused volumes involving qualitative and quantitative research,
historical/archival research, theoretical developments, heuristic research,
grounded theory, narrative approaches, collaborative research, practitioner-
led research, and self-study. The series also includes focused works by clinical
practitioners, and provides new research informed explorations of the work
of C. G Jung that will appeal to researchers, academics, and scholars alike.
Books in this series:
The Cartesian Split

A Hidden Myth
Brandon Short
Psychogeotherapy
Revisioning Therapeutic Space
Martyna Chrześcijańska
Alchemy, Jung, and Remedios Varo

Cultural Complexes and the Redemptive Power
of the Abjected Feminine
Dennis Pottenger
Jung’s Reception of Picasso and Abstract Art

Lucie Hill
The Paradoxical Meeting of Depth Psychology and Physics

Reflections on the Unification of Psyche and Matter
Robert Matthews
Jung, Dante, and the Making of the Red Book: Of Fire and Form
Tommaso Priviero
For more information about this series please visit: www.routledge.com/

Research-in-Analytical-Psychology-and-Jungian-Studies/book-series/JUNGIANSTUDIES.
Jung, Dante, and the Making
of the Red Book: Of Fire
and Form
Tommaso Priviero
First published 2024
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2024 Tommaso Priviero
The right of Tommaso Priviero to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
ISBN: 978-1-032-10451-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-10452-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-21539-4 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215394
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Preface viii
List of Figures x
Introduction 1
Content of the Work 2
Methodology 4
Jung and Dante 8
Notes 21
References 23
1 Books of Visions 25
Jung, Dante, and Liber Novus 25
Hypnagogia 25
A “Meditation Book” 30
Jung’s Dante 33
“From Things Heard and Seen” 37
“Visionary Works”: Genealogy of a Concept 45
The Esoteric Dante 52
Dante at the Turn of the Twentieth Century 52
A Short History of the Symbolist Reading of Dante 55
Jung and the Symbolist Reading of Dante 58
Notes 66
References 74
2 Into Hell 81
Noontide 81
The Sacrifice of the Hero 81
“Creative Passion” 86
vi Contents
Katabasis 93
The Midpoint of Life 93
Forest, Desert, and Fearsome Beasts 101
Good Friday 110
Sinister 118
Lucifer 121
The Devil Motif in Liber Novus 121
The Wild Flight 128
Notes 133
References 141
3 Rebirth 146
Daybreak 146
The Dark Mountain 146
Jung’s Purgatorial Labor 148
Anabasis 151
Christmas 1913, “Mysterium” 151
The Symbol of the Reversed Cones 157
“Forethinking” and “Pleasure” 161
The Guide and the Soul 163
Dante’s Virgil and Jung’s Philemon 163
From Guidance to Freedom 173
The Lady of the Mind: Dante’s Beatrice and Jung’s
Soul 183
On Love 191
Notes 196
References 202
Epilogue 206
Notes 210
References 210
Appendix (Chronology) 211

Index 213
Acknowledgements
Sonu Shamdasani, whose mentorship accompanied this work, to an extent

that I am unable to quantify.
Florian Mussgnug, for his unfailingly kind presence over the years of
my PhD.
Ernst Falzeder, dear friend, hiking companion, and one-of-a-kind scholar.
Martin Liebscher.
Marco Innamorati.
Vittorio Montemaggi, Catherine Keen, Daniela Boccassini.
Bettina Kaufmann, Thomas Fischer, and the Stiftung der Werke von C. G.
Jung. A special thanks to Andreas Jung for his kind assistance at the C. G.
Jung Haus in Küsnacht.
The Health Humanities Centre at UCL and the LAHP, which sponsored
this project.
My parents Lia and Massimo, and Laura.
Helen and David Walker, who patiently read this manuscript.
The amazing friendship and inspiration offered by Josh Torabi, Matei
Iagher, Dangwei Zhou, Gaia Domenici, Alex Woodcock, Arthur Eaton, Ollie
Knox, Francisca Stutzin-Donoso, Anna Dadaian, Jelena Martinovic, Florent
Serina, and the Health Humanities students at UCL.
George B., with gratitude.
Emily, with love.
Lama Paljin Tulku Rinpoce, in a way that simply cannot be put into words.
Preface
How many ways are there to read a visionary text? In his Convivio, Dante
expounded four ways of reading: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical,
setting out a prescriptive hermeneutics of how to read the Commedia.
In the case of Liber Novus, Jung was not content to leave the reading
open for the reader, even accompanied by prescriptions; rather, in its first two
books, Liber Primus and Liber Secundus, he embedded a secondary layer
of commentary and lyrical elaboration within the work itself, reading the
imaginal psychomachia as the dynamic and generative interplay of general
principles of human and cosmic functioning, portraying the way of what is
to come. In the calligraphic volume, he added a tertiary layer of imagistic
elaboration or figural commentary. Finally, in his exoteric scholarly works,
he attempted the task of translating the whole ensemble of text and “com-
mentaries” into the emergent conceptuality of complex psychology, as well
as implicitly embedding it within a cross-cultural and transhistorical compar-
ative study of human and divine becoming, or individuation, as he termed it.
Jung, Dante, and the Making of the Red Book: Of Fire and Form can itself
be principally read in two ways.
On the historiographical level, it presents the first detailed (and long over-
due) study of the relationship between Jung and Dante. It makes an impor-
tant contribution to locating the significance of Dante as a critical marker for
Jung in three registers: at an existential and literary level in the experiment
charted in his Black Books and which resulted in Liber Novus; in Jung’s
connections to the tradition of esoteric reading of Dante, represented here
by Luigi Valli; and in Jung’s construction of a visionary tradition in his schol-
arly works, spanning from the Commedia, via Blake, Goethe’s Faust, and
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to (implicitly) his own Liber Novus. Moving across
literature, poetry, theology, and psychology, this level opens up a wider his-
toriographical frame of the comparative study of visionary, imaginal works,
which calls out for further work.
On the symbolical level, it stages an encounter between the images
and figures of the Commedia and Liber Novus, tracing their intertextual
Preface ix
correspondences and divergences, drawing from Henry Corbin’s analysis of

the visionary recitals of Islamic mysticism: reading both works as “récits”,
and journeys into the “mundus imaginalis”. While the first level traced and
reconstructed a tradition of esoteric reading, the second level performatively
enacts it, through locating intersections of symbolic forms and utilising these
as keys to the existential states linked to them. Commentary here no longer
stands apart, outside the texts under consideration, but becomes a form of
reconfiguration, attempting a new distillation from the same imaginal matrix
in its own experimental literary hermeneutics, giving rise to a literary work
in its own right.
The oscillation and tension between these two modes generate the form
and fire of this book.
Sonu Shamdasani
List of Figures
0.1 Dante at the moment of entering the fire 12

0.2 Inferno13
0.3 Purgatorio14
0.4 Paradiso15
0.5 Jung’s Liber Novus (The Red Book)16
0.6 Liber Novus: The Way of What Is to Come17
0.7 Liber Novus: Snake Image III [Image 54]18
0.8 Liber Novus: Çatapatha-brahmanam 2,2,4 [Image 64]19
0.9 Liber Novus: Untitled [Image 70]20
0.10 C. G. Jung, Black Book 4 (Toni Wolff’s handwriting) 21
Introduction
God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger, and
it alters just as fire, when mixed with spices, is named according to the aroma of
each of them.
Heraclitus
At the time of Dante, as T. S. Eliot once wrote, “seeing visions” was a “psy-
chological habit, the trick of which we have forgotten”, and although we
may now resort to narcotics, the medieval man was educated to “a more
significant, interesting, and disciplined kind of dreaming”: the practice of
visions.1 The “medieval imagination”, as Jacques Le Goff pointed out, was
in fact always at the crossroad between body and soul, religion and science,
by mediating between “external and internal sensibility” in a manner which
was not dominated by later essentially Cartesian body–mind dualisms.2 In
modern times, the concept of “creative imagination” (imagination créatrice)
reclaims a similar perspective, around the central idea that imagination con-
veys the awakening of a deeply transformative core of being. This faculty of
the mind, according to an important distinction introduced by Henry Cor-
bin, belongs to the “imaginal” and not to the simple “imaginary”.3 That is,
to the topography of an intermediary state between waking and sleeping, in
which the appearance of images heralds a pivotal mediating function between
visible and hidden realities. The “imaginal”, Corbin writes, “ranks higher
than the world of the senses, and lower than the purely intelligible world;
it is more immaterial than the former and less immaterial than the latter”.4
Imagination thus becomes the cognitive function of an in-between world,
against its confinement, in present-day language, to the pejorative meaning of
“fantasies” or “abstractions”. It is, in Corbin’s words, “imaginative power in
its purest form”, close to what Paracelsus referred to in terms of Imaginatio
vera (“true imagination”).5 The conception of imagination this work engages
with comes close to this specific non-dualistic appreciation of the imaginative
faculty, which approaches imagination mainly in terms of Einbildungskraft
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215394-1
2 Introduction
(“imaginative power”): an active evocation of inner images corresponding to

a process of self-transformation. Gaston Bachelard, whose attempt to pioneer
the reconciliation of poetry and science in contemporary psychology signifi-
cantly informs the comparative method of the present research, calls the vis
imaginativa the very force of psychic production, a “power of poetisation”
of life, which “can well be designated as a psychological poetics”.6 Similarly
aiming at bridging the gap between imagination and modern psychology,
James Hillman, in his groundbreaking Re-Visioning Psychology, points out:
Man is primarily an image-maker and our psychic substance consists

of images; our being is imaginal being, an existence in imagination. We
are indeed such stuff as dreams are made on. Since we can know only
fantasy-images directly and immediately, and from these images create our
worlds and call them realities, we live in a world that is neither “inner”
nor “outer”. Rather the psychic world is an imaginal world, just as image
is psyche. . . . Because our psychic stuff is images, image-making is a via
regia, a royal road to soul-making.7
Content of the Work

This book develops along two main tracks: (1) to demonstrate the impor-
tance exerted by Dante, and particularly the Commedia, on Jung’s visions
in the Black Books and primarily in Liber Novus and indeed on the devel-
opment of his psychological ideas, thus offering a novel perspective to Jung
studies and an original contribution to Dante scholarship; (2) to illustrate
the way in which the Jung–Dante encounter provides an excellent oppor-
tunity to scrutinise the hermeneutical tenets which accompany Jung’s
hypothesis of a Western “visionary” genre. In response to these questions,
this book offers the first detailed study of the relation between Jung and
Dante, and more specifically, the intertextual relation of Dante’s Com-
media and Jung’s Liber Novus. The focus of the project is mainly placed
on the literal and symbolic correlations between these works, while hav-
ing to postpone an accurate analysis of the images and illustrations of
Jung’s experiment for a separate study. Overall, the making itself of Liber
Novus can be challengingly envisioned in terms of “Jung’s Commedia”, by
highlighting Dante’s role in Liber Novus at historical, hermeneutical, and
psychological levels.
Chapter 1 (“Books of Visions”) begins by illustrating the background
of Jung’s visions, mapping out Dante’s presence in the development of
his experiment (“Jung, Dante, and Liber Novus”). This section intro-
duces the central role of the Middle Ages in Liber Novus, by drawing
on parallel writings such as Psychological Types, published in 1921, and
the Polzeath seminar, 1923. This chapter also illustrates the genealogy
of Jung’s notion of “visionary art”, highlighting the direct correlation
Introduction 3
between his own “visionary work” (Liber Novus) and the psychologi-
cal characteristics of this category of creative expression, as well as the
distinctive place of the symbolism of the Commedia within this tradition.
The second section of the first chapter (“The Esoteric Dante”) contextual-
ises Jung’s understanding of Dante during Liber Novus with the contem-
porary historical development of Dante studies in Europe. This section
traces a hitherto unexplored connection between the “symbolist” tradi-
tion of reading Dante and Jung. Original historical research allows this
study to prove the direct fascination of the Swiss psychiatrist for this line
of interpretation, particularly with regard to one of its most notable and
disputed works: Luigi Valli’s The Secret Language of Dante and the Fedeli
d’Amore, appearing in 1928. This fact also enables this work to convinc-
ingly situate and make sense of Jung’s later references to Dante scattered
throughout his scientific works.
Where Chapter 1 served for understanding the multiform hermeneu-
tical connections between Jung and Dante, Chapter 2 (“Into Hell”) and
Chapter 3 (“Rebirth”) lead instead into a close reading of Liber Novus,
through the lens of a comparative analysis with the Commedia. Themati-
cally, Chapter 2 looks at the “descent” or “way down” of Jung’s journey
(“Noontide”, “Katabasis”, and “Lucifer”), whereas Chapter 3 takes into
account the motifs and symbols related to the “ascent” or “way up” (“Day-
break”, “Anabasis”, “The Guide and the Soul”). Accordingly, Chapter 2
proceeds with an analysis of Jung’s and Dante’s visions of Hell, including
subjects varying from the motif of “radical mental change” to the symbol-
ism of animality and instinctual forces, the conical abyss of the underworld,
the Christian framework of the descent, the encounter with the spectres of
the dead, the “left” as the side of the “unholy and inauspicious”, and the
threatening yet paramount function of Lucifer or the Antichrist. The dis-
cussion of Jung’s journey into Hell is underpinned by his evolving reflection
on the Western conception of evil, which in his view had been dramatically
transformed, in psychological terms, precisely during the Middle Ages.
Finally, in the third and last chapter of the work, the reader is taken out of
Hell and led to consider in which ways Liber Novus represented for Jung a
crucial space of self-regeneration, which originated with the work itself but
took shape in a wider and more complex process. In the first place, a new
analogy is pointed out between Dante’s Purgatory (in particular, the image
of the “sacred mountain”) and the purgatorial, transformative aspects of
Jung’s journey. This correspondence is directly evoked by a series of entries
from Purgatorio which Jung copies in the Black Books. As illustrated in
this section, Dante evokes in these verses the “fire” of love and the “form”
of visionary writing. Jung’s variegated understanding of this enigmatic ref-
erence represents the common thread of this chapter, which in essence deals
with the mystery and transformative power of Eros. On this basis, the chap-
ter tackles two central points of confrontation between these authors: the
4 Introduction
function of inner guidance and the symbolism of the soul, which elsewhere
in his writing Jung relates to the archetypes of “meaning” and “life”. As for
the motif of inner guidance, this section highlights the relevant similarities
existing between Jung’s Philemon (the “magician” or “wise old man” who
instructs the “I” on the meaning of his visions) and Virgil, Dante’s “dolce
padre” (“sweet father”). Having completed an analysis of these symme-
tries, the chapter proceeds to discuss the motif of the “soul”, by elucidating
the way in which this crucial aspect of Jung’s psychology closely intertwines
with his reading of Dante. In 1921, Jung considered Dante “the spiritual
knight of his lady”, who by venturing for her sake into the realms of Hell,
Purgatory, and Heaven, provided the most beautiful representation of the
modern man’s search for the “soul”. Analogously, he essentially comes to
see his own experiences in terms of a Dantesque journey “on the service
of the soul”, to the extent of claiming to have returned to the “soul” like
“a tired wanderer who had sought nothing in the world apart from her”.8
The conclusive part of the last chapter is thus dedicated to a study of the
roots of Jung’s understanding of the “anima” or “soul” in relation to
Dante’s representation of Beatrice, a perspective which, however impor-
tant, has not been investigated before.
Methodology
The methodology of this book is based on a close reading of Liber Novus,
as such technique of reading was applied for the ancient exegesis of vision-
ary texts.9 This method comes close to Wolfgang Iser’s phenomenological
view of the reading process, as historically developed in the context of the
Constance School, in which the active interplay between text and reader is
given a central place, following Roman Ingarden’s idea that an interpreta-
tion of a text is always an act of present “concretisation”.10 Iser conceives
the interaction between text and reader not regulated by given codes, a
priori theories or fixed goals of interpretation, but rather as a process
set in motion between the poles of structure and recipient, through the
active participation of the reader’s imagination with the adventures the
text offers them. It is a coming together of text and imagination, in which
one pole cannot do without the other. “Literature stimulates life”, as Iser
points out, “not in order to portray it, but in order to allow the reader
to share in it”.11 This idea is particularly agreeable when it comes to dis-
cussing texts such as the Commedia and Liber Novus, which, due to their
strongly imaginal nature, require to take into account in equal measures
both a meditative proximity to the texts and the instant exceptional crea-
tive resonance that these texts stimulate in the reader. The present work is
also significantly informed by Jung’s signature notion of “amplification”,
which he commonly intended as the application of mythological, cultural,
Introduction 5
and spiritual analogies to psychic material, and which he once described

by translating in psychological terms the image of the philologist who
seeks parallels in order to establish the overarching meaning of a text.12
However, in the present case, the legacy of Jung’s amplification is trans-
ferred from the purposes of psychotherapy to another form of practice:
the imminent creative experience of close textual analysis. By conveying
a language that strongly transcends the author’s individuality, in fact,
visionary texts align particularly well with a close comparative approach,
which ensures the living power of the work of art, whilst not constraining
the experience of the text within one-sided theorisations. Coming to the
threshold of works such as the Commedia or Liber Novus implies directly
facing the problematic accordance of any fixed methodological delibera-
tion with the imminent experience of being pushed in front of something
for which theories only work to a certain extent. These are works which,
by conducting the reader into the strange and unfamiliar terrains of
visionary images, require a necessary combination of intellectual penetra-
tion and creative participation. One can interpret in this manner the way
in which Dante, before the breathtaking appearance of Beatrice, reminds
the reader that “who has not felt this cannot understand”.13 The close
reader is familiar with the kukeón, the ancient psychoactive substance
which Demeter prepares to find Persephone and Circe gives Odysseus to
bewitch him. Some readings, Giorgio Colli has pointed out,14 are imbued
of kukeón, such as Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zarathustra or the Commedia
and Liber Novus. Whether the drug is cooked by Demeter or Circe, that
is, melted in an experience of regeneration or witchcraft, it depends on the
reader’s eye. Either way, the reader is transformed, injected with some-
thing they cannot grasp entirely and caught in their own creative quest,
as such experience is offered by the polymorphous nature of Dante’s and
Jung’s visionary narrations. Of the kukeón, Heraclitus says that “it sepa-
rates unless it is stirred”,15 since an act of creation, in this case a process
of interpretation, depends on an undergoing process of continual regen-
eration and binding of opposites, as beautifully captured by the quote
from the pre-Socratic philosopher at the beginning of this introduction.
Before works such as Zarathustra, William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven
and Hell, the Commedia, and Liber Novus, the notion of hermeneutic cir-
cle that has been illustrated from Friedrich Schleiermacher to Hans-Georg
Gadamer uncoils in a serpent-like form. Yet, before going any further,
it is mandatory for the critic-historian to listen first to what the authors
have to say about their own works, instead of searching elsewhere. In this
way, it is possible to observe that both Jung and Dante not only share the
great urge of recording some extraordinary mental experiences but they
also have in common the intent to provide some sort of guidance to the
readers. Dante is exceptionally clear in clarifying the primary objective
6 Introduction
behind writing the Commedia: “It can be briefly stated that the aim of
the whole and of the part is to remove those living in this life from a state
of misery and to guide them to a state of happiness”.16 As observed by
Ananda Coomaraswamy, these words encapsulate the “science” of Dante,
that the whole of his work was undertaken, as the poet claims, for a prag-
matic and not a speculative end.17 Christian Moevs, in The Metaphysics of
Dante’s Comedy, explains these pragmatical aims essentially in terms of
a “change of life, experience, and vision” deriving from the “dissolution
of the ego”:
The point of the Comedy is that understanding is practical. It must not be

confused with anything that can be thought or taught, with any ‘doctrine’
or ‘belief’. Understanding-happiness-salvation, for Dante, is not a set of
ideas; it is to have experienced the true nature and foundation of reality,
to know it as oneself, and thus to live it. . . . The Comedy tells us that
there is no path to understanding, happiness or immortality that does not
go through self-sacrifice, through the death to blind self-interest that is
an awakening to love, to freedom, to the infinite in and as the finite: to
Christ.18
To achieve this goal, Dante compels to acknowledge from the start that
at least two different identities come into play throughout the Commedia.
They are Dante the viator, or “traveller”, and Dante the auctor, or “writer”,
corresponding to two different levels of mental and poetic experience. While
the former embraces a visionary journey into the realms of Hell, Purgatory,
and Paradise, the latter comes back to tell the world about the multiple senses
of that stunning event. As Irma Brandeis has written, the primary subject
of Dante’s Commedia is a first person’s inner regeneration subjected to an
experience of visions.19 In Liber Novus, a similar combination of views takes
place, through the encounter between Jung the viator, taken in by the sud-
den burst of visionary material forming Liber Novus, and Jung the auctor,
who in a second moment of the experiment attempts to elaborate a science of
visions based on his then-evolving psychological ideas. An intriguing parallel
is offered by Corbin’s interpretation of Persian “visionary recitals”, a mode
of reading texts describing states of possession or ecstatic visions occurring
in a state of dream or waking.20 Reading “recitals”, like reading Liber Novus
or the Commedia, is, in Corbin’s sense, a journey, at once symbolic and exis-
tential, into a subtle “order of reality, which corresponds to a precise mode
of perception”,21 which becomes shared by the author and the reader. The
organ of perception through which this experience of communication occurs
is a refined degree of imagination, intended similarly to a meditational prac-
tice, in which images and visions become incubated thanks to techniques of
introversion and visualisation. About the directionality of this event, Corbin
notices:
Introduction 7
Undoubtedly what is involved is not a movement from one locality to

another, a bodily transfer from one place to another, as would occur in the
case of places in the same homogenous space. . . . Essentially the relation-
ship involved is that of the outer, the visible, the exoteric (in Greek ta exo,
in Arabic zahir) to the inner, the invisible, the esoteric (in Greek ta eso,
in Arabic batin), or the relationship of the natural to the spiritual world.
Leaving the where, the ubi category, is equivalent to leaving the outer
or natural appearances that cloak the hidden inner realities, just as the
almond is concealed in its shell.22
In Liber Novus, the opening of the “esoteric” or “inner” level corresponds

to the eventful emergence of Jung’s experiment, pouring into the Black Books:
an initiation into vision before a new psychological formulation. Later, in
what has been identified as the second layer of Jung’s journey, one finds a
critical reflection oriented by a specifically non-reductive interpretation of
symbols. When this combined mode of reading, viator and auctor, vision and
interpretation, is considered in relation to Jung’s confrontation with Dante,
it is possible to realise that this perspective finds support both in Dante’s
own hermeneutics (as indicated not only in the disputed letter to Cangrande
della Scala23 but also in the Convivio24 and in the Commedia itself) and in
the development of Jung’s analytical approach throughout the years of Liber
Novus.
Nevertheless, there are also important points of difference to bear in
mind from the outset. The major one is that the Commedia is the story of
a luminous ascension to Heaven from the darkest corner of Hell, framed in
a marvellous literary narrative in which each Canto reflects a cosmologi-
cal structure crafted by the author with the most accurate precision. Hardly
could one say the same about the dense nature of Jung’s journey (at least on
its textual level), a tangled purgatorial path not without frequent relapses into
Hell. Between the circular rhythm of Dante’s heavenly progression and the
laboured task of Jung’s unfinished project, there is often a contrasting tone.
The symbol of the Commedia is a spiritual ladder, that of Liber Novus a spi-
ral. Thus, it is important to distinguish between two elements of Jung’s explo-
rations: the process and the work. The former is the underlying experiment
which began with Liber Novus but did not end with it, for Jung conceived
what he developed after Liber Novus as the unwritten Cantos of his note-
books: the next phase of a comprehensive experience of self-transformation.
By contrast, the work is what one actually finds in the textual material of
Liber Novus. Overall, following this comparison, one may say that the pro-
cess of Jung’s experiment has a stronger Dantesque feature than the work
itself. The second major difference regards the fact that although Jung essen-
tially considered the content of the Commedia as the result of a direct vision-
ary experience, and this is the line of interpretation to which the present
study generally adheres, there is no exact biographical information about the
8 Introduction
states and visions which acted as the original source for the composition of
the text. With Liber Novus, on the contrary, the raw material of the author’s
visions is present and conveys a substantial component of a hybrid experi-
ment. The result is that with Liber Novus process and work are openly inter-
twined elements, whereas with the Commedia, what one can say about the
process can only be intuitively inferred on the basis of the work, even when
one follows Jung’s standpoint that the Commedia was essentially a “vision-
ary work”. The third major point of difference between the Commedia and
Liber Novus resides in the fact that Dante entrusted poetry and theology
with the fundamental transformative power which Jung ultimately ascribed
to the practice of analytical psychology. In this sense, the process which
inspired the Commedia comes to coincide and culminate with the actual
production of the work, whereas in Jung, the aesthetic quality of a vision-
ary work, whatever form it takes, serves for the deeper task of the process
of psychic transformation. The fourth and last major difference stems from
the fact that Jung, who was never a critical reader of Dante, significantly
undermines or readapts Dante’s theological and philosophical constructions
in order to suit his own motifs and his own personal reading of the Com-
media. There is no mention of Aristotle, Averroes, Boethius, Richard of Saint
Victor, or Thomas Aquinas in Jung’s reception of Dante, however central
these figures have been for the Italian poet. On the contrary, there is a con-
ception of Dante’s view of good and evil which notably reminds more of
Blake and Yeats than the original Dantesque picture. One should thus never
forget that Dante and Jung’s Dante (on which this book focuses) are often
very different subjects. Dante may have been a visionary above all, as Jung
believed, but he was also a poet, a philosopher, a theologian, a metaphysi-
cian, a scientist, a political man, and much more, which are all elements
which the Swiss tends to set aside in order to emphasise the experiential and
visionary trait d’union between the Commedia and Liber Novus. These dif-
ferences altogether, however, do not affect the paramount evidence that Liber
Novus and the Commedia not only share a great deal of similar symbolism
but also a fundamental common orientation. They both convey the story of
a radical process of self-transformation which is essentially based, although
in divergent ways, on the renewal of the inner self through the vision of love:
the life-changing task of becoming divine which Dante awakens to in his
Christic journey and the author of Liber Novus ascribes to the motif of the
rebirth of God in the soul.
Jung and Dante

However fascinating, the topic of Jung’s encounter with Dante was left
scholarly unexplored until two contributions: Sonu Shamdasani’s “Descen-
sus ad Infernos: Jung’s ‘Season in Hell’ ” (2016, 2021) and my “On the Ser-
vice of the Soul: C. G. Jung’s Liber Novus and Dante’s Commedia” (2018),
Introduction 9
followed by “A Historical Study of C. G. Jung’s Psychological Understand-

ing of Dante” (2020).25 In the past and in a very different manner from the
methodology of the present work, a few authors have attempted to place
Dante’s Commedia under the lens of Jung’s psychology.26 Helen Luke, for
example, a Jungian analyst trained in Zürich, interprets the whole narrative
line of Dante’s journey (“from dark wood to white rose”) by analogies with
Jungian psychological tenets. Dante’s advancement through Hell, Purgatory,
and Heaven is taken as a paradigmatic example of Jung’s conception of the
“individuation process”. The motif and characters that accompany the Com-
media become instances of inner psychic development, from the obscurity
of a psychological crisis to an increasingly wider enlargement of conscious-
ness. M. P. Sexton develops her work along similar lines, by comparing the
circular spiral-like structure of the Commedia to Jung’s interpretation of
mandala symbolism and then examining the primary elements of Dante’s
visions through a markedly Jungian outlook. More comprehensive than the
first two is Adriana Mazzarella’s work, a study of the symbolic dimension
of Dante’s poetry, which boasts the direct confrontation with Marie-Louise
von Franz among its primary sources of inspiration. Though this work too
essentially tackles the visions of the Italian poet from the viewpoint of a Jun-
gian language, the volume provides some original inspiration, for example,
by juxtaposing the structure of Dante’s other world to the different chakras
of Kundalini Yoga (a parallel which is not ignored by Jung either) or by tak-
ing into account elements of the symbolist interpretation of Dante, eliciting
in this way a point of confrontation between the latter and Jung’s psychol-
ogy. Engaging as these works may be, however, they all ignore the historical
and hermeneutical aspects of Jung’s relation to Dante, opting rather for a
Jungian reading of the Commedia. Furthermore, they appear before the fun-
damental publication of Liber Novus and they do not include Jung’s unpub-
lished works in their analysis, a crucial component of any study on the topic.
After the appearance of Liber Novus, in fact, the connection between Jung
and Dante has become more evident, yet not followed by a thorough exami-
nation. Without starting from sound historical grounds, any study of this
topic in a way or another misses the factual, experiential dimension of Jung’s
explorations, which gives to following speculations the artificial tone of a
theoretical facade. At any rate, the question of Jung and Dante increasingly
engages scholars and has in recent times made a breach even into the walls of
academic Dante scholarship.27 Overall, therefore, the Italian poet continues
to exert a special fascination within a Jungian framework. After all, even
Henri Ellenberger, in the Jung chapter appearing in his monumental The Dis-
covery of the Unconscious, chose a vivid Dantesque metaphor to portray a
key point of Jung’s psychological model:
One characteristic feature of any journey through the unconscious is the

occurrence of what Jung called enantiodromia. This term, originating with
10 Introduction
Heraclitus, means the “return to the opposite”. Certain mental processes

are turned at a given point into their opposites as if through a kind of self-
regulation. This notion has also been symbolically illustrated by poets. In
the Divine Comedy we see Dante and Virgil reaching the deepest point
of hell and then taking their first step upward in a reverse course toward
purgatory and heaven. This mysterious phenomenon of the spontaneous
reversal of regression was experienced by all those who passed success-
fully through a creative illness and has become a characteristic feature of
Jungian synthetic-hermeneutic therapy.28
Though Ellenberger was most likely unaware of the fact that Jung
actively read Dante during his years of self-explorations, his observa-
tions provide an optimal angle to highlight a primary aspect of Jung’s
encounter with the Commedia. Namely, Dante furnishes him with a syn-
thetic model that is able not only to pave a way into Hell but especially
to deliver “a first step upward” over the legs of Lucifer, “a ritornar nel
chiaro mondo;/e sanza cura aver d’alcun riposo” – “to return to the
bright world;/And not worrying about taking any rest”.29 In contrast
with the above-mentioned literature, therefore, this work is based on
an entirely different approach, which finds in Liber Novus its departure
point and the main object of interest. Far from being a commentary of
Dante’s Commedia in a Jungian vein or a retrospective analysis of Liber
Novus using Jung’s later psychological jargon, the main inspiration of
this book stems from the effort to delineate the way in which (Jung’s)
Dante has informed the elaboration of Liber Novus at historical and
hermeneutical levels. It cannot be stressed enough that the Black Books
and Liber Novus do not contain any of the characteristic terms that
would later become the hallmark of analytical psychology, words such
as “shadow”, “animus” and “anima”, “archetypes”, and the infamous
“unconscious”, which appears only once in Jung’s notebooks before
being disposed with altogether. Thus, projecting ex post the theories of
the Swiss psychologist onto Liber Novus not only is historically inap-
propriate but it can also be misleading at a critical level, for it conveys
the temptation to seek validation for his experiment into a more or less
explicit Jungian ontology. In fact, though it is safe to say that Jung’s
work is crucial to the understanding of his mature psychology, “to con-
clude that it therefore proves the truth of that psychology is an evident
non sequitur”, as Wouter Hanegraaff points out: “Jung’s well-known
theories provide us simply with one possible vantage point for interpret-
ing his text, and not necessarily the most convincing one”.30 In fact,
adopting a Dantesque hermeneutics to approach Liber Novus seems to
give more fruitful insights than the other way around. Accordingly, this
Introduction 11
work adheres as much as possible to the eventful language of Jung’s

visions, while on the other hand, privileging the scientific texts of Jung
that are contemporary and more complementary to the development
of Liber Novus, by drawing equally on published material, such as the
1925 seminar on Analytical Psychology, and forthcoming unpublished
works, such as the 1923 Polzeath seminar.
About six centuries run between the masterpiece of Italian medieval
poetry and the start of Jung’s work. The challenging investigation of this
connection is something that requires the right balance between the “scien-
tist’s patience” and “the artist’s passion”, as Vladimir Nabokov envisioned
the act of penetrating reading. Therefore, besides a legendary prophecy
predicting that Dante’s Commedia would be finally understood only after
nearly seven centuries, Shamdasani offers a more reliable place to start: “It
is clear from this that Jung found an existential as well as a literary proto-
type for his activity in the Commedia”.31 Our inquiry proves and develops
further this conviction, by understanding Jung’s approach to Dante as a
springboard, from which to examine his personal and psychological con-
cern about the nature and meaning of visionary experiences. Ten years after
Dante’s appearance in the Black Books, Jung held a seminar in Polzeath,
Cornwall, in the summer of 1923. There he claims, for the first time in
public, that Christianity had lost its validation to speak for a universal
religious experience, which it only had in the Middle Ages, going as far
as to claim that the only “real Christianity was medieval”.32 The greatest
psychological loss of the Christian, he argues, comes from having forgotten
the “fire” of spiritual experiences, as caused by the four great exclusions of
the Western mind: sex and nature, animality, the inferior man, and creative
imagination.
It is only our damnable pride in having the best thing that makes us call
our ultimate truth Christianity. What is exclusively traditional Christi-
anity? It is difficult to say just what has been repressed by Christianity.
In your own life you cannot say what categories of things have been
repressed in you by historical Christianity, but the Church appears to
have made four great exclusions psychologically: 1. The world of nature
and of flesh. 2. The animal. 3. The inferior man. 4. Creative fantasy and
freedom.33
In response to this critical situation, which occupies a central place in

Jung’s reflections, a reference like Dante’s Commedia places itself exactly at
the opposite end of such an impasse: a work deeply inspired by an erotic epi-
sode, based on the transgressive spiritual freedom of his author, and shaped
into the tradition of a medieval “meditation book”.
12 Introduction
Figure 0.1 Dante at the moment of entering the fire. Dante’s Commedia (Venezia:
Per Francesco Marcolini ad instantia di Alessandro Vellutello)
Introduction 13
Figure 0.2 Inferno

14 Introduction
Figure 0.3 Purgatorio

Introduction 15
Figure 0.4 Paradiso

16 Introduction
Figure 0.5 Jung’s Liber Novus (The Red Book)

[From THE RED BOOK by C. G. Jung, edited by Sonu Shamdasani, translated by Mark
Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani. Copyright © 2009 by the Foundation of the
Works of C. G. Jung Translation copyright (c) 2009 by Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu
Shamdasani. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.]
Introduction 17
Figure 0.6 Liber Novus

18 Introduction

Introduction 19

20 Introduction

Introduction 21
Figure 0.10 C. G. Jung, Black Book 4 (Toni Wolff ’s handwriting)

[From THE BLACK BOOKS, 1913–1932: NOTEBOOKS OF TRANSFORMATION, VOL
UMES 1 THROUGH 7 by C. G. Jung, edited by Sonu Shamdasani, translated by Martin
Liebscher, et al. Copyright © 2020 by the Foundation of the Works of C. G. Jung Copyright
(c) 2020 by Sonu Shamdasani. Translation copyright (c) 2020 by Martin Liebscher, John Peck,
and Sonu Shamdasani. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.]
Notes
1 Thomas Stearns Eliot, 1965 (1929), Dante (London: Faber and Faber), p. 15.
2 Jacques Le Goff, 1992 (1985), The Medieval Imagination (L’imaginaire médiéval)
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 1–17.
3 Henry Corbin, 1972 (1964), “Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imag
inal”, in Cahiers internationaux de symbolisme, 6.
4 Ibid., p. 6.
5 Ibid.
6 Gaston Bachelard, 1971 (1960), The Poetics of Reverie (Boston: Beacon Press),
p. 16.
7 James Hillman, 1992 (1975), Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: HarperCol
lins), p. 23.
8 C. G. Jung, 2009 (1913–1959), The Red Book: Liber Novus, ed. and introduced
Sonu Shamdasani, tr. Mark Kyburz/John Peck/Sonu Shamdasani (New York/Lon
don: Norton & Company), p. 233. Italics added.
9 Northrop Frye, 2000 (1957), Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton Univer
sity Press), p. 3.
22 Introduction
n Communication in Prose
Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press),
pp. 274–294.
11 Wolfang Iser, 1993 (1989), Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary
Anthropology (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press), p. 29.
12 Carl Gustav Jung, 1935, “The Tavistock Lectures: On the Theory and Practice
of Analytical Psychology”, in Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol. 18 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press), §173.
13 “Che ’ntender no la può chi no la prova”. (English tr. M. Musa). Dante Alighieri,
1977 (c. 1292–1294), Vita nuova. Introduced E. Sanguineti, notes A. Berardinelli
(Milano: Garzanti), p. 52.
14 Giorgio Colli, 2005, “Nota Introduttiva”, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Così Parlò
Zarathustra) (Milano: Adelphi), p. xiii.
15 Heraclitus, 1979, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, ed. C. H. Kahn (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press), LLXVII, LXXVII (D. 1259), p. 194.
16 Dante, Epistola XIII, 15, in Dante Alighieri, 2014, Opere 2, Convivio, Monar-
chia, Epistole, Egloge (Milano: Mondadori), p. 1506; “Dicendum est breviter
quod finis totius et partis est removere viventes in hac vita de statu miserie et
perducere ad statum felicitatis”. (tr. C. S. Latham, 1891).
17 Ananda Coomaraswamy, 2004, The Essential Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
(Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom Inc.), pp. 100, 177.
18 Christian Moevs, 2005, The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy (Oxford: Oxford
University Press), p. 171.
19 Irma Brandeis, 1962 (1960), The Ladder of Vision (New York: Anchor Books).
20 See Henry Corbin, 2016 (1960), Avicenna and the Visionary Recital (Princeton:
Princeton University Press).
21 Corbin, 1972 (1964), p. 1.
22 Ibid., p. 4.
23 Dante, Epistola XIII, 7; 2014, p. 1501. See Umberto Eco, 1985, “L’Epistola XIII,
l’allegorismo medievale, il simbolismo moderno”, in On Mirrors and Other
Essays (Sugli specchi e altri saggi) (Milano: Bompiani), pp. 215–241.
24 Convivio, I, 1 18; II, 1 1–14; Alighieri, 2014, pp. 211–220.
25 See C. G. Jung, 2020 (1913–1932), “Toward a Visionary Science”, in The Black
Books 1913–1932: Notebooks of Transformation, vol. 7, ed. Sonu Shamdasani
(New York/London: W. W. Norton & Company), footnote 121.
26 Helen Luke, 1975, From Dark Wood to White Rose. Journey and Transforma-
tion in Dante’s Divine Comedy (Pecos, New Mexico: Dove Publications); Mary
Patricia Sexton, 1975, The Dante-Jung Correspondence (Los Angeles, CA: Joyce
Motion Picture Co.); Adriana Mazzarella, 1991, In Search of Beatrice (Alla
Ricerca di Beatrice) (Milano: IN/OUT).
27 Daniela Boccassini, 2018, “Earthly Paradise: Dante’s Initiatory Rite of Passage”,
in Temenos Academy Review, 21, 61–92; Id., 2019, “Down to the Father’s Womb:
Jung’s and Dante’s Encounters with the Dead”, in Jung Journal: Culture & Psy-
che, 13 (2), 46–81.
28 Henri Ellenberger, 1994 (1970), The Discovery of the Unconscious (London:
Fontana Press).
29 Dante, Inferno, XXXIV, 134–135, 1987, p. 340.
30 Wouter Hanegraaff, 2017, “The Great War of the Soul: Divine and Human Mad-
ness in Carl Gustav Jung’s Liber Novus”, in S. Schüler (ed.), Krise und religiöser
Wahn-Sinn (Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag), p. 106.
31 Sonu Shamdasani, 2016, “Descensus ad Inferos: C. G. Jung’s Season in Hell”
(“Descensus ad Infernos: la saison en enfer de C. G. Jung”), in Danger et necessité
Introduction 23
de l’individuation: 9e Colloque de Bruxelles (Brussels: Esperluète Eds), p. 46; see

also Id., 2021, “Descensus ad Infernos: Jung’s ‘Season in Hell’ ”, in Phanês, 4.
32 Carl Gustav Jung, 1923, Polzeath Seminar (unpublished), p. 74.
33 Ibid., pp. 74–75.
References
Bachelard, Gaston, 1971 (1960), The Poetics of Reverie (Boston: Beacon Press).
Boccassini, Daniela, 2018, “Earthly Paradise: Dante’s Initiatory Rite of Passage”, in
Temenos Academy Review, 21.
, 2019, “Down to the Father’s Womb: Jung’s and Dante’s Encounters with the
Dead”, in Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, 13 (2).
Brandeis, Irma, 1962 (1960), The Ladder of Vision (New York: Anchor Books).
Colli, Giorgio, 2005,“ Nota Introduttiva”, in Così Parlò Zarathustra, ed. Friedrich
Nietzsche (Milano: Adelphi).
Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 2004, The Essential Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (Bloom-
ington, IN: World Wisdom Inc.).
Corbin, Henry, 1972 (1964), “Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imagi-
nal”, in Cahiers internationaux de symbolisme (Brussels: Imp. Dieu-Brichart).
, 2016 (1960), Avicenna and the Visionary Recital (Avicenne et le récit vision-
naire) (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
Dante, 1977 (c. 1292–1294), Vita nuova, introduced Edoardo Sanguineti, notes
Alfonso Berardinelli (Milano: Garzanti) = VN.
, 1987 (1308–1321), Commedia, Curated by Emilio Pasquini and Antonio Qua-
glio (Milano: Garzanti) = Commedia.
, 2014, Opere 2, Convivio, Monarchia, Epistole, Egloge (Milano: Mondadori).
Eco, Umberto, 1985, “L’Epistola XIII, l’allegorismo medievale, il simbolismo mod-
erno”, in Sugli specchi e altri saggi (Milano: Bompiani).
Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 1965 (1929), Dante (London: Faber and Faber).
Ellenberger, Henri, 1994 (1970), The Discovery of the Unconscious (London: Fon-
tana Press).
Frye, Northrop, 2000 (1957), Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University
Press).
Hanegraaff, Wouter, 2017, “The Great War of the Soul: Divine and Human Mad-
ness in Carl Gustav Jung’s Liber Novus”, in Krise und religiöser Wahn-Sinn, ed. S.
Schüler (Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag).
Heraclitus, 1979, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, ed. C. H. Kahn (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
Hillman, James, 1992 (1975), Re-visioning Psychology (New York: HarperCollins).
Iser, Wolfgang, 1974, The Implied Reader: Patterns in Communication in Prose Fic-
tion from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press).
, 1993 (1989), Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology
(Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press).
Jung, Carl Gustav, 1923, Polzeath Seminar (unpublished).
, 1935, “The Tavistock Lectures: On the Theory and Practice of Analytical Psy-
chology”, in Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol. 18 (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press).
24 Introduction
, 1995, Gesammelte Werke 1–20 (Ostfildern: Patmos Verlag), 1953–1983, The
Collected Works of C. G. Jung, ed. Sir H. Read/M. Fordham/G. Adler, tr. R. F. C.
Hull (Princeton: Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press) = GW/CW.
, 2009 (1913–1959), The Red Book: Liber novus, ed. and introduced Sonu
Shamdasani, tr. Mark Kyburz/John Peck/Sonu Shamdasani (New York/London:
Norton & Company) = LN.
Le Goff, Jacques, 1992 (1985), The Medieval Imagination (L’imaginaire médiéval)
(Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press).
Luke, Helen, 1975, From Dark Wood to White Rose. Journey and Transformation in
Dante’s Divine Comedy (New Mexico: Dove Publications).
Mazzarella, Adriana, 1991, In Search of Beatrice (Alla Ricerca di Beatrice) (Milano:
IN/OUT).
Moevs, Christian, 2005, The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press).
Sexton, Mary Patricia, 1975, The Dante-Jung Correspondence (Northridge, CA:
Joyce Motion Picture Co.).
Shamdasani, Sonu, 2016, “Descensus ad Infernos: la saison en enfer de C. G. Jung”,
in Danger et necessité de l’individuation: 9e Colloque de Bruxelles (Brussels: Esper-
luète Eds).
, 2020, “Toward a Visionary Science: Jung’s Notebooks of Transformation”,
in Black Books, vol. 7, ed. C. G. Jung (New York/London: Norton & Company).
, 2021, “Descensus ad Infernos: Jung’s ‘Season in Hell’ ”, in Phanês, 4.
Chapter 1
Books of Visions
Jung, Dante, and Liber Novus
Hypnagogia
With the publication of Liber Novus (The “New Book”, 2009) and the Black
Books (2020), it emerged that in a period stretching from 1913 to the late
1920s, the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology C. G.
Jung embarked on a visionary experiment which remained unavailable to the
public for about a century. Be the reader familiar or not with Jung’s ideas,
Liber Novus is a work of a serpentine nature which escapes the use of ordi-
nary criteria of analysis.1 It can hardly be categorised as a scientific, literary,
artistic, or spiritual text, counterposing to any optional artificial characteri-
sation, the polyphony of a work whose title, the “New Book”, evokes above
all an experience of rebirth. Although it cannot be proved that the title Liber
Novus has been directly informed by Dante’s Vita Nova, a certain similar-
ity of content is there. As Dante’s Vita Nova entails the beginning of a new
life (“vita nova”) in the poet’s heart through the vision of love, Liber Novus
heralds the complete transformation of his author’s life and thought, also
through an experience of love. As the Vita Nova unravels a new vision out of
the suffering of a symbolical death, Liber Novus claims the sacrifice of past
values into a higher and different order of perceptions. As the former, along
the tradition of Apuleius and the ancient mysteries, announces the conver-
sion of a neophyte (lit. “newborn”, “born to a new life”) into a spiritual
journey (the Commedia), the latter proclaims the unfolding of unborn things
that are “yet to come”. Liber Novus immediately leads the reader off the
beaten path, casting doubt over the safer habitual lens which one would be
tempted to use according to one’s favourite viewpoint. It questions, in one
word, “imitation”, which the author of Liber Novus describes as a surpassed
monkey-like way of life that belonged to the heroic prototype.2 No matter the
eye that looks, Liber Novus calls to look deeper, by challenging the reader to
experience first-hand what they see, with the “new eyes” of a neophyte. For
all that one cannot know and say about it, in fact, there is something of the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215394-2
26 Books of Visions
nature of this experiment that can be affirmed with confidence. Liber Novus
is Jung’s own account of a visionary experience of regeneration, the result of
a practice that challenged at the bottom conventional boundaries between
psychology, science, and art.
It is therefore mandatory to first look again at what this practice exactly
consisted of. Liber Novus essentially develops on the basis of a technique
of meditation or creative visualisation, which in a later phase will be called
“active imagination”, sometimes also referred to as “visioning” or “tranc-
ing”. The term recurs when, following the years of his self-explorations,
Jung takes the notion of active imagination from ancient spiritual and artistic
traditions (of both Western and Eastern origins) and makes it one of the
most representative therapeutic tools of analytical psychology or “complex
psychology” (“komplexe Psychologie”), as he preferred to call his psycho-
logical approach. However, prior to being applied to a therapeutic context,
the implications of active imagination are an event in his life, the power of
which seizes him as a “stream of lava”, pouring into Liber Novus.3 As the
name implies, active imagination emphasises an active or creative capacity
of imagination to convey transformative properties over the mind. In this
context, imagination is constrained neither to an aesthetic sense, as an artis-
tic play of fantasy, nor to an intellectual one, as an organ of understanding
and conceptualisation. Differently, in this formulation, the function of active
imagination transcends both formal and rational aspects of the fantasies
produced, dealing with another fundamental concern: the direct activation
of an interaction with hidden psychic material which through the work of
imagination becomes “visible” to the mind and suitable for psychic trans-
formation. The adjective “active” highlights that through active imagination
nature itself comes into play, via the creative force of subconscious images to
compensate and restore what the ego has made sick. This technique should
thus be understood first of all in relation to Jung’s vision of subconscious
phenomena as essentially compensatory to the conscious attitude of the indi-
vidual. Active imagination develops without effort what the efforts of the
conscious mind cannot reach. Gadamer has similarly written of the “art of
healing”: “Medical practice is not concerned with actually producing equi-
librium, that is, with building up a new state of equilibrium from nothing,
but rather is always concerned with arresting and assisting the fluctuating
equilibrium of health”.4 Paraphrasing Gadamer’s words, one can see active
imagination, in Jung’s view, as a systematic training at mentally “assisting”
the natural equilibrium of the mind, however opposite this may look to the
contingent wishes of the ego.
The scientific text in which Jung first elaborates on the psychological
application of active imagination is The Transcendent Function, originally
written in 1916, but only published in 1957–58. In a later prefatory note
to the text, written in 1958–59, he notably claims that the technique of
active imagination is “the most important auxiliary for the production of
Books of Visions 27
those contents of the unconscious which lie, as it were, immediately below

the threshold of consciousness and, when intensified, are the most likely to
irrupt spontaneously into the conscious mind”.5 At the time Jung writes The
Transcendent Function, the topic discussed in the paper reflects the direct
engagement of the Swiss thinker with the sudden burst of visions that will
occupy him for many years. By “transcendent function”, he intends “noth-
ing mysterious or metaphysical”, but a specific psychological technique
arising “from the union of conscious and unconscious contents”,6 aimed at
widening consciousness and bringing to light elements of emotional distur-
bance. The text outlines an important alternative trajectory of psychological
analysis developing around that time. Despite the fact that psychoanalytic
theory considered then dream analysis the “royal way” of dealing with psy-
chic phenomena, in fact, Jung and other figures like Silberer and Ludwig
Staudenmaier not only extensively used psychological methods to interpret
the symbolism of the dreaming state but equally sought a way to enter the
dream while awake. Although acknowledging the fundamental analytical
importance of dream interpretation, Jung argues in The Transcendent Func-
tion that other sources are necessary to animate more closely the energy
of the mind. He advocates a mental training in “exercises for eliminating
critical attention”,7 subjected to what Pierre Janet calls an “abaissement du
niveau mental”,8 a phenomenon which intensifies the counteraction of hid-
den sources of psychic energy over conscious control. When critical atten-
tion is properly eliminated, the introversion of libido that follows enlivens
an entire world of symbolic and imagistic forms of thinking. Besides the
experience of analysis itself, The Transcendent Function outlines a variety of
ways in which this mind training can occur, according to the different nature
of individuals:
Visual types should concentrate on the expectation that an inner image

will be produced. As a rule such a fantasy-picture will actually appear –
perhaps hypnagogically – and should be carefully observed and noted
down in writing. Audio-verbal types usually hear inner words, perhaps
mere fragments of apparently meaningless sentences to begin with, which
however should be carefully noted down too. . . . There are others, again,
who neither see nor hear anything inside themselves, but whose hands
have the knack of giving expressions to the contents of the unconscious.
Such people can profitably work with plastic materials. Those who are
able to express the unconscious by means of body movements are rather
rare. . . . Still rarer, but equally valuable, is automatic writing, direct of
with the planchette. This, too, yields useful results.9
What the development of the “transcendent function” shares with medi-

tation is the first-hand observation of the mind and a practical training in
methods of self-transformation. Before formulating this view theoretically,
28 Books of Visions
however, Jung elaborates his own practice first and foremost through the com-
pelling amount of visionary material that finds its place in Liber Novus. The
self-exploratory character of this work is not without parallels. From 1909,
Silberer begins conducting experiments on himself in hypnagogic states, that
is, a transitional state between sleep and waking, characterised by receptivity
and passive concentration.10 Swedenborg refers to this technique as a form of
“passive potency”. Edgar Allan Poe describes it as a special kind of mental
activity, occurring to him on the very brink of sleep, with the consciousness
of being so: “In these fancies . . . it is as if the five senses were supplanted
by five myriad of others alien to morality”.11 A similar term, “psychago-
gia” (soul-guiding), appears in Aristotle’s Poetics, to designate the cathartic
condition of the spectator whose mind is “entranced” before the dramatic
action of the tragedy.12 Silberer notices that in such a state of drowsiness,
counteracted by a certain effort to think (the two fundamental conditions to
activate a hypnagogic state), thoughts are replaced by a pictorial symbolic
representation of it. Thus, he starts to formulate the hypothesis of “auto-
symbolic” phenomena, namely automatic self-portrayals, in a symbolic form,
of the mind’s striving for expression. He conceives the hypnagogic state as
an optimal method for spontaneously letting images appear in a half-waking
state, achieving in this way a deeper degree of continuity between waking and
dreaming. At that time, Silberer sends his articles to Jung, bearing dedications.
In the same years, Staudenmaier embarks on similar self-experimentations,
made available through research published in 1912, Magic as an Experimen-
tal Natural Science.13 In this work, Staudenmaier explores automatic writing,
self-induced hallucinations, and dialogues with autonomous inner charac-
ters, digging out a scientific way to explore the roots of magical thinking.
Jung’s copy of this work is annotated on almost every page, with a particu-
lar emphasis on Staudenmaier’s method of personifications. Silberer, who
is acquainted too with Staudenmaier’s investigations, establishes parallels
between his experimental technique and Eastern practices of introversion,
such as Hatha Yoga and Kundalini Yoga. For the Viennese psychoanalyst, the
primary sense of Staudenmaier’s method is that “through the exercise he car-
ries on, and which produces an intense introversion, psychophysical energies
are set free that make him capable of greater efficiency”, deriving from this
view the more general assumption that “a treasure can be gained (by prac-
tices having a significant introversion character), a treasure which permits an
increased thinking and feeling activity”.14 In the particularly dynamic context
of the early twentieth century, a common interest for techniques of intro-
version is encouraged by numerous cross-fertilisations between experimental
psychology and esoteric research. As a number of abnormal psychologists
find in esoteric material a pragmatic view on spiritual matters, so writers
involved in the study of esoteric traditions find in non-reductive psychologi-
cal approaches a scientific counterpart to their arguments.
Books of Visions 29
Fascinatingly, in 1918, W. B. Yeats gave in Per Amica Silentia Lunae an

account of the techniques of trancing and visioning with which he widely
experimented, which comes strikingly close to Jung’s method in Liber Novus:
One must allow the images to form with all their associations before one
criticises. . . . If you suspend the critical faculty, I have discovered, either
as the result of training, or, if you have the gift, by passing into a slight
trance, images pass rapidly before you. If you can suspend also desire, and
let them form at their own will, your absorption becomes more complete
and they are more clear in colour, more precise in articulation, and you
and they begin to move in the midst of what seems a powerful light.15
Similarly, the visionary procedure elaborated in Liber Novus consists of a

technique, closely related to a hypnagogic mechanism that enables its author
to get to the bottom of his inner processes and bring to light the images stir-
ring beneath the threshold of waking consciousness, allowing in this way
psychic contents to appear as freely as possible. He then begins to interact
with the multifarious personifications that rise out of this process, by enact-
ing inner dialogues between the standpoint of the “I” and the autonomous
forces of the fantasies evoked. In 1925, he recalls that “in putting down all
this material for analysis, I was in effect writing letters to my anima, that is
to a part of myself with a different viewpoint from my own”.16 He refines
this praxis of visualisation by a method of concentration and mental digging
up, a process of “auto-fécondation” (Léon Daudet) or inner awakening of
energy which he compares to the Indian concept of tapas (fire within).17 He
depicts the difficulties of this state of introversion as facing a deep dark crater
or entering into a cathedral, a catacomb, or an antediluvian forest, whose
mysterious inhabitants have been suddenly awakened:
I devised such a boring method by fantasising that I was digging a hole,

and by accepting this fantasy as perfectly real. This is naturally somewhat
difficult to do – to believe so thoroughly in a fantasy that it leads you into
further fantasy, just as if you were digging a real hole and passing from
one discovery to another. But when I began on that hole I worked and
worked so hard that I knew something had to come of it – that fantasy had
to produce, and lure out, other fantasies.18
He recounts that the more he becomes acquainted with this method, the
deeper and clearer the vision appears to reach him.19 This phenomenon grad-
ually allows him to make voluntary use of visions and altered mental states,
by deliberately engaging, as in a dramatic performance, with the variety of
images which appear to his mind. In this way, he experiences that by lower-
ing the level of habitual perceptions, greater psychic sources are activated.
30 Books of Visions
The core aspect of this whole experience, he argues, consists of acquiring the
ability of letting psychic events happen of their own accord, as in Meister
Eckhart’s principle of “letting oneself go”.20 For Hillman, in his “descent
into the underworld”, Jung acquired a technique to give up his psychiatric
standpoint and experienced his journey “imaginally, thereby opening it to
insight”, which also led to a switch in his conception of man’s personality,
from a “single-centred” view to a “polycentric” one.21
A “Meditation Book”
The six notebooks in which Jung took record of the extraordinary vision-
ary experiment he embarked on from 1913 to 1932 are called Black Books.
Black Books 2–6 contain the raw material of these visions, also known as
“Layer One” of Liber Novus. The second part of Black Book 6 and Black
Book 7 encloses visions from mid-1916 to 1932. They draw the appellation
“Black Books” from the fact that, with the exception of the first notebook,
which has a brown cover, they all have black covers, thus forming a single
corpus. Altogether, they convey nothing less than the most important experi-
ment of Jung’s life, as well as the starting point for understanding the genesis
of analytical psychology. It is no exaggeration to state that, within the his-
tory of posthumous publications by major modern European thinkers, the
appearance of Jung’s Black Books is an unparalleled event. In his introduc-
tion to this work, Shamdasani meticulously takes the reader step by step
through the genealogy of Jung’s “science of visions”, laying the foundations
for re-visioning the birth and fate of analytical psychology in light of the
Black Books, and not vice versa. The paramount novelty of this change of
perspective finally allows the reader to grasp the connections between Jung’s
“esoteric visionary cycles” and the formulation of his “exoteric psychology”,
thus enabling the reader “to enter the private laboratory of analytical psy-
chology and follow the genesis of a visionary science: that is, how a psy-
chology was born of the visionary imagination, which in turn could form a
science of visions”.22 On the basis of the material of the Black Books, Jung
commences revising the content of his visions and elaborates reflections on
them by copying the material into a new work titled, indeed, Liber Novus. In
the Draft of Liber Novus, he transcribes a significant part of the visions from
the Black Books, about 50% of the original material.23 In the Black Books,
he literally notes the stream of the visions as they occur to his mind, without
any attempt to alter them through intellectual or aesthetic elaboration. Dif-
ferently, in the Draft of Liber Novus, he starts to add sections of commentary
in which he introduces a level of interpretation based on his then-evolving
psychological model. This distinction of layers echoes the attempt to theo-
rise an objective and a subjective level of the interpretation of dreams and
psychological phenomena, which he elaborates in 1913 and first discusses in
the Zürich Psychoanalytical Society on January 30, 1914.24 A little later, he
Books of Visions 31
completes a handwritten version of Liber Novus (Handwritten Draft), then

he edits it and types it (Typed Draft). Further on, he adds illustrations to
the text and begins to faithfully transcribe his material in a quasi-medieval
calligraphic manuscript. The final outcome is a large folio volume of more
than 600 pages, with gothic characters, miniatures, historiated initials, and
paintings, conferring to the work some significant resemblance to Blake’s
illuminated books. An excellent synthesis of this multilayered practice is in
Jung’s later indications to Christiana Morgan’s personal engagement with
visioning, which evidently paralleled the method adopted in his own journey:
I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully & as carefully as you
can – in some beautifully bound book. It will seem as if you were making
the visions banal – but then you need to do that – then you are freed from
the power of them. . . . Then when these things are in some precious book
you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your
church – your cathedral – the silent places of your spirit where you will
find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you lis-
ten to them – then you will lose your soul – for in that book is your soul.25
It is pivotal to observe that although Jung transcribed the Black Books

into Liber Novus almost literally, adding chapter titles, a comparative per-
spective on the two works reveals a notable amount of significant omissions,
edits, and changes, which are traced by Shamdasani’s extensive footnotes
accompanying the recent publication of the Black Books. A thorough inves-
tigation of the relationship between the Black Books and Liber Novus is
a mandatory call for future scholarship in Jung studies. George Bright has
attempted to summarise the four main themes around which the distinctive-
ness of the material of the Black Books (post 1916) more powerfully emerges:
(1) the increasing autonomy of Jung’s “I” and “his destiny” in relation to the
Gods and daimons with whom he engages; (2) the emerging crucial thematic
of love, in relation to the symbolism of the soul, which interacts with Jung’s
“I” in many forms; (3) the “iterations” of Jung’s new God image, which is
centred on the individual’s creative engagement with the divine rather than
through imitation or submission to organised creeds; and (4) the transforma-
tion of the significance of human relations and the ethical implications of
a fundamental question: “how to relate in morally acceptable ways to one
another when the Christian moral code of striving for goodness (‘the imita-
tion of Christ’) has been subverted by the over-riding demand for whole-
ness”.26 Although the present work predominantly focuses on Liber Novus
and less on the peculiarities of the Black Books, what should be crucially
highlighted is that the Black Books differ from Liber Novus in at least one
fundamental sense: they do not contain any of the literary framing which
partly characterised the composition of Liber Novus. In this sense, they are
a less accessible and more demanding work. If Liber Novus transmitted the
32 Books of Visions
esoteric core of Jung’s psychology, the Black Books adds, if possible, a fur-
ther esoteric layer, acting as the innermost combustible element in the fire of
Jung’s experiment. Indeed, the Black Books can be ultimately considered an
esoteric work in multiple senses. First of all, in terms of Jung’s technique of
engagement with the inner world, which establishes itself in a crucial dialogue
within the history of Western esoteric traditions. Secondly, they are esoteric
for the analyst or trainee in analytical psychology, insofar as the language of
the Black Books appears strikingly at odds with the common jargon of Jun-
gians and post-Jungians, thus calling for a substantial revision of research in
depth psychology. Lastly, the Black Books are fundamentally esoteric for the
potential reader; they are an initiatory undertaking which, as such, remains
simply inaccessible to those who come to them out of pure intellectual curi-
osity. They demand instead a radical quality of engagement. As Shamdasani
pointed out, without a proper understanding of the significance of Liber
Novus for its author, one is “in no place to understand fully Jung’s intellectual
development” and any account of it “would be like writing the life of Dante
without the Commedia”.27 One might say, to follow up on that analogy, that
the Black Books stand to Liber Novus, as Dante’s Vita Nova stands to the
Commedia, even though the proportions are inverted. Just as the Vita Nova,
Dante’s astonishing journal of dreams and visions contains the embryonic
seed of the fundamental event, that is, Beatrice’s death and Dante’s resolution
to search for her in the underworld, which later forms the poetic universe of
the Commedia, so the Black Books convey the primal original experience of
the drive for self-transformation which pushed Jung to return to his soul like
a spiritual knight in search of his beloved. Karl Baier has valuably suggested
approaching Liber Novus essentially as a “meditation book”, for “the writ-
ing and reading practices that are associated with it, are part of an ancient
Western tradition of meditative interaction with the book and, at the same
time, are part of the history of European meditation”.28 Arguably, no better
description could be found. This “meditation book”, or even better, “medi-
tation practice”, is constituted of three parts, divided into multiple chapters
and sections. Liber Primus (The First Book), which Jung titles “The Way of
What is Yet to Come” (“Der Weg des Kommenden”), Liber Secundus (The
Second Book), or “The Images of the Erring” (“Die Bilder des Irrenden”),
and Liber Tertius (The Third Book), or more precisely, Scrutinies (Prüfun-
gen).29 Although the material is gathered under the title Liber Novus, the
work remains more popularly known as Jung’s Red Book. “Das Rote Buch”
(The “Red Book”) is in fact the term used by Jung with his closest acquaint-
ances to refer to his work, due to its huge red leather cover. Furthermore,
Cary Baynes records a conversation in 1922, in which the Swiss psychologist
refers to the freshly appeared novel by Gustav Meyrink, The White Domini-
can, a book in which he finds similar images to his experiences at the time. In
the novel, the protagonist becomes acquainted with the secret Cinnabar-red
book, a vehicle of spiritual illumination which the ancient Chinese tradition
Books of Visions 33
represented in red, the colour of the garments of those who walk along the
pathway of inner elevation.30 The choice to consistently refer in this study to
Liber Novus, instead of Red Book, adheres to Jung’s original deliberations
and aims to highlight the central meaning of the word novum, within the
long-standing tradition, this term evokes in apocalyptic literature. In his own
words, Jung vividly refers to the material taking shape in the Black Books as
“the most difficult experiment” of his life.31 In hindsight, he acknowledges
the years of his engagement with Liber Novus as the “beginning of every-
thing”: the epicentre of the entire development of his later work and scien-
tific elaboration.32 Seen as a whole, the records of this experiment reveal the
momentous transformation of a profound existential crisis, described as an
ineluctable visit to Hell, into the source of a life-changing process of creative
expansion. Altogether, the Black Books and Liber Novus represent the centre
of gravity of everything new one may want to say about Jung. In the Jungian
world, this is something that cannot be ignored any longer.
With these premises, the critical response to the publication of Liber
Novus in 2009 and the Black Books in 2020 has been far-reaching, in many
respects. At a popular level, it has triggered a new increasing interest in Jung,
who, unlike many other comparable figures of the twentieth century, tends
to be perceived as a contemporary author. At an academic level as well, it has
begun to notably change the study of the life and work of the Swiss thinker,
by setting forth an exceptional number of paths to explore within the his-
tory of Jung’s thought and analytical psychology. The extraordinary richness
of Liber Novus opens up an impressive number of contents, themes, inter-
linked threads, and comparative sources of study. Several central motifs have
now started to be examined from a different light, such as Jung’s distinctive
relationship with Nietzsche, German philosophy, Christianity, Gnosticism,
Swedenborg, visual art, and the history of psychiatry and psychotherapy.
However, other core elements of Liber Novus have not been considered yet
in depth, surprisingly, if not left completely unexplored. It is within this cat-
egory that the inspiration of this book finds its place.
Jung’s Dante
Among those novel elements of research concerning Liber Novus, one
notably stands out: Jung’s multifaceted encounter with Dante’s Commedia,
embedded within the in-depth fascination for the Middle Ages that charac-
terises Liber Novus throughout.33 In this regard, besides evoking the traits of
a “meditation book”, Baier has also approached Liber Novus as “a trans-
gressive book of Christian visions”, by juxtaposing it with the medieval tra-
dition of soliloquies and books of visions.34 The intuition is correct, yet it
fails to mention the proximity of Dante, arguably the Christian visionary
who transgressed the most, to the same tradition, which in itself provides
a historical trait d’union between some primary characteristics of Jung’s
34 Books of Visions
experiment and aspects of medieval texts of visions. Liber Novus presents

indeed a few intriguing analogies with the visionary corpus of the Middle
Ages from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, particularly in relation to
the dramatised inner dialogues and stages of self-transformation that inform
the soliloquies (visio, narratio, argumentatio). Liber Novus shares with the
medieval books of visions the strongly autobiographical dimension of the
genre (the visionary never speaks by imitation or artificial construction, but
by direct meditative experience upon self-induced or received visions) and
the equally strong pragmatical exigencies of the text (the visionary offers
a system of contemplative self-transformation which the attentive reader is
called to enact). Furthermore, it has in common with the works of medieval
visionaries that the transformative experience occurs by travelling into the
“other world”, while gathering a series of visions from this extraordinary
situation. This journey involves some important recurrent elements, such as
the threats of ghosts and demons, the appearance of travel companions, the
help of celestial guidance, the interaction with the deceased, the apocalyptic
framework, the phases of spiritual transformation, the sequences of invoca-
tions, the use of incantations, and the increasingly illuminated vision. How-
ever, beyond these connections, the most challenging point that Liber Novus
receives from the medieval visionary tradition and the spirit of the late Mid-
dle Ages is the permeation between religion and science, in a phase of the
development of European thought in which the separation between these
disciplines, as it is known to the modern mind, had not yet been formed. In
this regard, the function of creative imagination comes along a similar terrain
to that of the medieval Magia Naturalis: a conception of imagination as the
dedicated mediatory agency between invisible and visible dimensions of men-
tal operations. At the time, this characteristically synthetic approach finds in
Dante’s complexity of thought one of its most fruitful expressions. Scientific
and religious components appear not antagonistic but rather sympathetic
forces, forming an elaborate, organic whole, which stresses more than one
element of connection with the underlying spirit of Jung’s experiment. More-
over, Liber Novus, starting from its title, echoes aspects of what is known as
the ars nova of medieval vision books. Remarkably, these texts of spiritual
self-regeneration were often accompanied by pictures, indicating a general
amplification of the text into an imagistic form. One original example is
offered by John the Monk’s Liber visionum (Book of Visions), burned in
Paris in 1323 as a heretical and sorcerous document. Liber visionum is a late
medieval book of prayers and magical operations. It is closely connected to a
group of ritual magic texts mostly known as the “Ars Notoria” (the “Notary
Art”) of Solomon, the content of which, detailed in Lynn Thorndike’s His-
tory of Magic and Experimental Science,35 was condemned by Thomas Aqui-
nas and other theologians. The Liber visionum contains several significant
parallels with Dante’s Commedia.36 It draws from the “Notary Art” (also
referred to as sacratissima ars notoria) the characteristic inscription of notae
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welcomed by the colored as by the white members of the household.
Just before her arrival, a bottle of medicine with a strong odor of
Bourbon had been uncorked, and, afterward, set away. After the first
greetings were over, she exclaimed:
“I smell spirits. What have you been doing?”
Old Aunt Chloe, who had lingered in the room so as to be near
the beloved new-comer, turned with an air of triumph to her mistress,
who had often rebuked her belief in ghosts, and burst out with:
“Dar, Missus! Didn’t I allus tole yo dere was sperits in dis yere
house? Sometimes I see ’em, sometimes I hear ’em, an’ yo wood’n
b’lieve me; but now, Miss Lizzie’s done gone SMELL ’em!”
The first chapter of a Western novel is said to contain the

following striking passage:
All of a sudden the fair girl continued to sit on the sands, gazing
upon the briny deep, upon whose bosom the tall ships went merrily
by, freighted, ah! who can tell with how much joy and sorrow, and
pine lumber, and emigrants, and hopes and salt fish!
“The story,” said our host, with his inexhaustible humor and
irresistible brogue, “is of a man who died, and forthwith presented
himself at Heaven’s gate, requesting admittance.
‘Have ye bin to Purgatory, my mon?’ says St. Peter.
‘No, yer Riverence.’
‘Thin it’s no good. Ye’ll have to wait awhile.’
While the unlucky ‘Peri’ was slowly withdrawing, another
candidate approached, and the same question was asked him.
‘No, yer Riverence, but I’ve been married.’
‘Well, that’s all the same,’ says St. Peter; ‘Come in!’
At this, the first arrival taking heart of grace, advanced again, and
says he:
‘Plaze yer Riverence, I’ve been married twice!’
‘Away wid ye! Away wid ye!’ says St. Peter: ‘Heaven is no place
for fools!’”
When, some years since, a coalition was talked of between the

New York World, the Times, and the Herald, the Tribune remarked
that, after all, it would be nothing new; it was only the old story of
“the world, the flesh, and the devil.”
In 1871, when the French President was undecided and inactive,

in the face of all the frightful dangers that threatened the nation,
some wit quoted at him the well known verse from Tennyson:
“Thiers! Idle Thiers! We know not what you mean!”
In ’73 a print was widely circulated in Germany, representing

Bismarck pulling away at a rope which was fastened to the massive
pillars of a Cathedral. At his side stood His Satanic Majesty, who
thus questioned him:
“Well, my friend, what are you doing?”
“Trying to pull down the Church.”
“Trying to pull down the Church? And how long do you think it will
take you?”
“Oh, perhaps three or four years.”
“Very good, my friend, very good! I have been trying that for the
last eighteen hundred years; and, if you succeed in three or four, I’ll
resign in your favor!”
When a certain United States Senator disappointed his Ohio

constituents by voting on what they thought the wrong side of a
question, some one (who must have enjoyed his opportunity) hit him
with the following quotation: “He’s Ben Wade, and found wanting.”
“John P. Hale is an old goose!” exclaimed General Cass. Some

friend was kind enough to repeat this saying to the Senator; who
replied with a smile, (and, surely this was the “retort courteous,”) “Tell
General Cass that he’s a Michi-gander!”
At a public dinner in Boston, nearly twenty years ago, Judge

Story proposed as a toast: “The Orator of the Day: Fame follows
merit wherEVER IT goes!” To which Mr. Everett responded: “The
President of the Day: To whatever height the fabric of jurisprudence
may aspire in this country, it can never rise above one Story!”
A newspaper wit announces the discovery of a buried city in the

following pathetic terms: Another lost city has been found on the
coast of Siberia. Now let the man who lost it make his appearance,
pay for this advertisement, and take his old ruins away.
It has been said that the faculty of generalization belongs equally

to childhood and to genius. Was she a genius, clad in sable robes,
and bewailing the recent loss of her husband—she was certainly not
a child—who observed in conversation, with most impressive pathos:
“For we are all liable to become a widow!”
CHARACTERISTIC SAYINGS OF AMERICANS.

Franklin said many things that have passed into maxims, but
nothing that is better known and remembered than “He paid dear,
very dear, for his whistle.”
Washington made but very few epigrammatic speeches. Here is
one: “To be prepared for war is the most effectual means of
preserving peace.”
Did you ever hear of old John Dickinson? Well, he wrote of
Americans in 1768: “By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall.”
Patrick Henry, as every school-boy knows, gave us, “Give me
liberty, or give me death,” and “If this be treason, make the most of
it.”
Thomas Paine had many quotable epigrammatic sentences:
“Rose like a rocket; fell like a stick;” “Times that try men’s souls;”
“One step from the sublime to the ridiculous,” etc., etc.
Jefferson’s writings are so besprinkled that it is difficult to select.
In despair we jump at “Few die and none resign,” certainly as
applicable to office-holders now as in Jefferson’s time.
Henry Lee gave Washington his immortal title, “First in war, first in
peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney declared in favor of “Millions for
defence, but not one cent for tribute.”
“Peaceably if we can; forcibly if we must,” is from Josiah Quincy,
1841.
John Adams did not say, “Live or die, survive or perish, I am for
the constitution,” but Daniel Webster said it for him.
The revolutionary age alone would give us our article, had we
time to gather pearls. Coming down, we pass greater, but not more
famous men.
Davy Crockett was the illustrious author of “Be sure you are right,
and then go ahead.”
Andrew Jackson gave us “The Union—it must be preserved.”
Benton almost lost his original identity in “Old Bullion,” from his
“hard money” doctrines.
Governor Throop, of New York, was called “Small Light Troop” for
years, from a phrase in a thanksgiving proclamation.
Scott’s “hasty plate of soup” lasted his lifetime.
Taylor’s battle order, “A little more grape, Captain Bragg,” will be
quoted after he is forgotten by “all the world and the rest of
mankind.”
Seward is known for the “irrepressible conflict,” wherever the
English language is spoken.
To Washington Irving we owe “The Almighty Dollar.”
Rufas Choate gave us “glittering generalities.”
Tom Corwin’s “welcome with bloody hands to hospitable graves,”
gave him more unenviable criticism than any other saying in his life.
Calhoun gave us “state rights” as a most pernicious and absurd
equivalent for national supremacy under the constitution.
Douglas applied “squatter sovereignty,” though it is probable that
Cass invented it and Calhoun named it.
Stringfellow was the original “Border Ruffian.”
War times gave us no end of epigrammatic utterances. Those of
Lincoln alone would fill a volume—chief of these, is that noble
sentiment: “With charity to all, and malice toward none.”
McClellan’s “All quiet along the Potomac” was repeated so often
that its echo will “ring down through the ages.”
To Gen. Butler the country was indebted for the phrase
“Contraband of War,” as applied to fugitive negroes found within our
lines.
Grant gave us “Fight it out on this line,” “Unconditional surrender,”
“I propose to move immediately upon your works,” “Bottled up,” and
a hundred others. It seems to have escaped notice that Grant is
responsible for more of these characterizing, elementary
crystallizations of thought, than any other military leader of modern
times.
One odd example occurs, in his response to Gen. Sheridan’s
telegram: “If things are pushed, Lee will surrender.” “Push things!”
was the reply, and that has passed into a proverb.
DIALECTICAL.
The peculiarities of the Yankee dialect are most amusingly
exemplified by James Russell Lowell, in the Biglow Papers,
especially in the First Series, from which the following extract is
taken:
I ’spose you wonder where I be; I can’t tell fur the soul o’ me
Exactly where I be myself, meanin’ by thet, the hull o’ me.
When I left hum, I hed two legs, an’ they wa’n’t bad ones neither;
The scaliest trick they ever played, wuz bringin’ on me hither—
Now one on ’em’s I dunno where, they thought I was a-dyin’,
An’ cut it off, because they said ’twas kind of mortifyin’;
I’m willin to believe it wuz, and yet I can’t see, nuther,
Why one should take to feelin’ cheap a minute sooner ’n t’other,
Sence both wuz equilly to blame—but things is ez they be;
It took on so they took it off, an’ thet’s enough for me.
Where’s my left hand? Oh, darn it! now I recollect wut’s come on’t.
I haint no left hand but my right, and thet’s got jest a thumb on’t,
It aint so handy as it wuz to calkylate a sum on’t.
I’ve lost one eye, but then, I guess, by diligently usin’ it,
The other’ll see all I shall git by way of pay fer losin’ it.
I’ve hed some ribs broke, six I b’lieve, I haint kep’ no account of ’em;
When time to talk of pensions comes, we’ll settle the amount of ’em.
An’ talkin’ about broken ribs, it kinder brings to mind
One that I couldn’t never break—the one I left behind!
Ef you should see her, jest clean out the spout o’ your invention,
And pour the longest sweetnin’ in about a annooal pension;
And kinder hint, in case, you know, the critter should refuse to be
Consoled, I aint so expensive now to keep, as wut I used to be:—
There’s one eye less, ditto one arm, an’ then the leg that’s wooden,
Can be took off, an’ sot away, whenever there’s a pudden!
(Letter from Birdofreedom Sawin, a Mexican volunteer, to a friend
at home.)
The Dundreary “dialect” is admirably illustrated in
A LONDON EXQUISITE’S OPINION OF “UNCLE

TOM’S CABIN.”
Aw must wead “Uncle Tom,”—a wawk

Which aw’m afwaid’s extwemely slow:
People one meets begin to talk
Of Mrs. Hawiet Beechah Stowe.
’Tis not as if aw saw haw name

To walls and windahs still confined;
All that is meawly vulgah fame:
Aw don’t wespect the common mind.
But Staffa’d House has made haw quite

Anothah kind of pawson look;
A countess would pawsist last night,
In asking me about haw book.
She wished to know if aw admiawd

Eva, which quite confounded me;
And then haw ladyship inquiawed
Whethaw aw didn’t hate Legwee.
Bai Jove! Aw was completely flawed;

Aw wished myself, or haw, in Fwance;
And that’s the way a fellah’s bawed
By evewy gahl he asks to dance!
Aw felt myself a greataw fool

Than aw had evaw felt befaw;
Aw’ll study at some wagged school
The tale of that old blackamaw!
It must be this same kind of Englishman, of whom the following
story is told: He was traveling on some American railroad, when a
tremendous explosion took place; the cars, at the same time, coming
to a sudden halt. The passengers sprang up in terror, and rushed out
to acquaint themselves with the cause and extent of the mischief, all
but His Serene Highness, who continued reading his newspaper. In
a moment some one rushed back, and informed him that the boiler
had burst. “Awe!” grunted the Englishman.
“Yes, and sixteen people have been killed!”
“Awe!” he muttered again.
“And—and,” said his interlocutor, with an effort, “your own man—
your servant—has been blown into a hundred pieces!”
“Awe! Bring me the piece that has the key of my portmanteau!”
THE LEGAL “DIALECT.”
ODE TO SPRING.
WRITTEN IN A LAWYER’S OFFICE.
Whereas, on sundry boughs and sprays

Now divers birds are heard to sing,
And sundry flowers their heads upraise,
Hail to the coming on of spring!
The birds aforesaid, happy pairs!

Love ’midst the aforesaid boughs enshrines,
In household nests, themselves, their heirs,
Administrators and assigns.
The songs of the said birds arouse

The memory of our youthful hours,
As young and green as the said boughs,
As fresh and fair as the said flowers.
Oh, busiest term of Cupid’s court!
Where tender plaintiffs actions bring;
Seasons of frolic and of sport,
Hail, as aforesaid, coming spring!
“Broad Wiltshire” is sampled below, in a psalm given out by the

Clerk of Bradford Parish Church during an Episcopal visitation:
Let us zing to the praayze an’ glawry ’o God, dree verses of the
hundred an’ vourteenth zaam,—a version specially ’dapted to the
’casion, by myself:
Why hop ye zo, ye little hills,

And what var do’ee skip?
Is it acoz you’m proud to zee
His grace, the Lard Biship?
Why skip ye zo ye little hills,

And what var do’ee hop?
Is it acoz to preach to we,
Is comed the Lard Bishop?
Ees—he has comed to preach to we,—

Then let us aal strick up,
An’ zing a glawrious zong of praayze,
An’ bless the Lard Bishup!
Persons fond of economizing words, sometimes use figures (are

they figures of speech?) and letters, in their stead. Thus, the fate of
all earthly things is presented by the consonants DK—a view of the
case entirely consonant with our own observation.
The following is a printer’s short-hand method of expressing his
emotions:
2 KT J.
An SA now I mean 2 write
2 U, sweet KT J,
The girl without a ||,
The belle of UTK.
I 1der if U got the 1

I wrote 2 U, B4
I sailed in the RKDA,
And sent by LN Moore?
My MT head will scarce contain

A calm IDA bright,
But, 8T miles from U, I must
{
M this chance to write.
And first, should NE NV U,

B EZ, mind it not;
Should NE friendship show, B true;
They should not be forgot.
But friends and foes alike DK,

As U may plainly C,
In every funeral RA,
And every LEG.
From virtU never DV8;

Her influence B9
Alike induces 10dernS,
And 40tude divine.
This SA until U I C,
I pray U 2 to XQQ;
And not to burn in FIG
My young and 10der muse.
Now fare U well, DR KT J,

I trust that U R true;
When this U C, then U can say
An SA IOU.
AN AFFECTING STORY.
IIAR BB loved a maid,

He loved her to XS,
And XRSIId his NRGG
2 C her and confS.
Says he, “A meeting I’ll proQR,

B4 the day is past;
In spite of all my NMEE,
She shall B mine at last.”
Now UUULe, MLE

Was 10dR and B9,
FMN8 and gentL 2,
Some th0 she was Divine,
But poor IIAR made her X,

She said he was a calf—
SPCLE ODS;
0 spoke in his B½.
She said, “Should you go on UR nEE,

And melt awA in TRR,
Or WR at 10tions 4
The futR 50 years.
“U still would 0 B 2 me,

UR not 2 my mind,
So prA B YYR, sir, and go
Some betR maid 2 find.
“DR MLE, my love’s XS,

PrithE X10U8,
XQQ—4give—and love me, or
I’ll take an OP8.”
And so he did. Alas! poor man!

Kind readR shed a TR,
He took the OPM so strong,
It laid him on his BR!
GEORGE AND HIS POPPAR.
FEB. 22, A.D. 1738.
There livèd once a plan-ti-er

With his son, his only love,
To whom, upon his birth-day,
A brand new ax he guv.
This farmer had a gar-di-ing,

All filled with apple trees,
Which, for the city mar-ki-et,
He trièd for to reeze.
The son he takes the hatch-i-et,

Quite jolly and jocund,
And, going to the apple trees,
He chops them to the grund.
The farmer called his serv-i-ents,

And ranged them in a row;
“Now, who has chopped my apple trees,
And killed them, root and bo’?”
The servants stand ama-zi-ed,

All drawn up in a line;
Then comes a running up to him,
His young and hopeful sci’n.
“I cannot tell a lie, poppar,”

This truthful boy began;
“’Twas I who chopped your apple trees,
’Twas I, your little san.”
Now, who’d you s’pose this buffer was?

And who his filial kin?
It was the immortal Bushrod,
And the late G. Washingtin!
Feb. 22, 1875. MORAL.
Now, whoso takes a hatch-i-et,

And apple trees cuts down,
Will be, if he lives long enough,
A great and pious moun.
The preceding poem, while it places in a new light the immortal

history of the hatchet, also illustrates the wonderful adaptability of
the English language to the purposes of the poet. Thus, in the last
stanza, a rhyme is required for “down,” while the sense demands the
word “man” at the end of the corresponding line. Instantly the
ingenious author perceives the remedy, and changes “man” to
“moun,” which doesn’t mean anything to interfere with the sense,
and rhymes with “down” in the most satisfactory manner.
Other fine illustrations of this kind are found in that learned
translation of a part of the Eneid, published a few years since at
Winsted, Connecticut. Thus:
“The hair stood endwise on his powdered wig,

Like quills upon the fretful porcupig;
He wants to go, and then again he doesn’t;
The situation is indeed unpluzzent.”
The temptation is strong to quote just here several parallel

passages from Davidson’s very literal translation and from this
Winsted version. We will give one, for the sake of the contrast.
“Returning Aurora now illuminates the earth with the lamp of
Phœbus, and has chased away the dewy shades from the sky, when
Dido, half-frenzied, thus addressed her sympathizing sister:
Sister Anna, what dreams terrify and distract my mind! What think
you of this wondrous guest who has come to our abode? In mien
how graceful he appears! In manly fortitude and warlike deeds how
great! I am fully persuaded, (nor is my belief groundless,) that he is
the offspring of the gods. Had I not been fixed and steadfast in my
resolution never to join myself to any in the bonds of wedlock, since
my first love by death mocked and disappointed me, I might,
perhaps, give way. Anna, since the death of my unhappy spouse
Sichæus, since the household gods were stained with his blood,
shed by a brother, this stranger alone has warped my inclinations,
and interested my wavering mind. I recognize the symptoms of my
former flame. But he who first linked me to himself, hath borne away
my affection. May he possess it still, and retain it in the grave. (Liber
Quartus. Ibid.)
Next day the sun rose at the proper time,

And much improved the Carthaginian clime,
When thus her sister Anna she addressed:
“Sister, my nights are full of wild unrest:
This nice young man that’s now a-stopping here
To my affections is a-growing dear;
Celestial is his origin I know,—
Such fearless souls don’t emanate below.
My grief! what savage fights that man has fit,
And how genteel he can get up and git!
’F I hadn’t vowed not to unite again,
I’m not quite certain but I should cave in.
Since poor dear Sic was slew by brother Pyg,
For no live man I’ve ever cared a fig,
Till unto Carthage this brave hero came—
But now—I swan—I feel the ancient flame.
Yet, while Sichæus keeps his coffined state,
My heart lies with his ashes—that’s my gait.”
Prizes having been offered for rhymes corresponding to

“Ipecacuanha,” and “Timbuctoo,” it is to be hoped that the ingenious
authors of the following verses gained them:
As I was walking in the grove

With my Julianna,
Some oranges I gave my love,
Pine-apple and banana;
And then, her headache to remove,
Some ipecacuanha.
If I were a cassowary
On the plains of Timbuctoo,
I would eat a missionary,
Flesh and bones, and hymn-book, too.
“And the moral of that is,” as the Duchess observed:
That step can find no place

In rhyme, is not the case:
’Tis quite absurd:
To find a rhyme for “step,”
You only have to sep-
Arate a word.
Also: (“month” having been declared unrhymable;)
They seized a soldier in Broadway,

December was the month;
He saw his pistols thrown away,
He also saw his gun th-
rown away!
In W. G. Clarke’s youth he was requested by a young lady in the

millinery line to contribute a poem to her album. Her “Album” was an
account book diverted from its original purpose, and he responded
as follows:
To Miss Lucretia Sophonisba Matilda Jerusha Catling:
Thou canst not hope, O nymph divine
3 9
That I should ever court the
Or that, when passion’s glow is done,
1
My heart can ever love but
When, from Hope’s flowers exhales the dew,
2
Then Love’s false smiles desert us
Then Fancy’s radiance ’gins to flee,
3
And life is robbed of all the
And Sorrow sad her tears must pour 4
O’er cheeks where roses bloomed be
Yes! life’s a scene all dim as Styx;
6
Its joys are dear at
Its raptures fly so quickly hence
18d
They’re scarcely cheap at
Oh! for the dreams that then survive!
25
They’re high at pennies
The breast no more is filled with heaven
27
When years it numbers
And yields it up to Manhood’s fate
28
About the age of
Finds the world cold and dim and dirty
30
Ere the heart’s annual count is
Alas! for all the joys that follow
25
I would not give a quarter dollar.
1 97½
Thus, my dear maid, I send to you

The balance of my meter due;
Please scrutinize the above amount,
And set it down to my account.
“FRAGMENTS OF AN ORIGINAL LOVE STORY.”

BY
J. G. STAUNTON, AND A SOUTH CAROLINA LADY.
After a “lovers’
quarrel,” when the party of the first part
——Meekly approached and knelt down at her feet,
Praying loud as before he had ranted,
That she would forgive him, and try to be sweet,
And said “Can’t you?” the dear girl re-canted.
Then softly he whispered “How could you do so?

I certainly thought I was jilted;
But come now with me; to the parson we’ll go!
Say, wilt thou, my dear?” and she wilted.
Then gaily he took her to see his new home;

A cottage by no means enchanted;
“Ah! here we can live without longing to roam,”
He said, “Sha’n’t we, my love?” and they shantied,
And gently beamed o’er them love’s rose-colored ray;

(The bridegroom and bride of this ballad;)
He said “Let us walk at the close of the day,
My own lovely Sall,” and they sallied.
He plucked her the sweetest and loveliest flowers

That scented the path where they wandered;
And when she exclaimed “Let us turn from these bowers,
To roam near the pond!” then they pondered.
Old time softly paused o’er the home of this pair,

Nor grief nor perplexity haunted;
And when the meek husband asked “What shall I wear?”
“Plaid pants,” she replied, and he panted.
She, like a good wife, made his wardrobe her care;

(Neglecting it seemed to her wicked;)
So, when she brought linen, all shining and fair,
Saying “Wear this, dear Dick!” then he dickied.
And when a bright bud of divinity came,

To gladden the home where it tarried,
They put it to vote that the young stranger’s name
Sweet CARRIE should be, and ’twas carried.
But perhaps the most “pronounced” example of adaptability, as

referred to above, is found in a poem recently contributed to a
Rochester paper.
Spring, sprang, beautiful sprung!

The wild-winged warblers are wanging a wung,
And the soft southern breezes are brazing a broze,
That thaws up the ice with remarkable thoze.
O betterest time of all moments of tome,
I’ll rhyme thee a rhimelet in tenderest rhome,
And tell thee how oft in my longing, I’ve lung
To welcome thy coming, O beautiful sprung!
Symbolical season! exquisitest soze!

All nature uprising in gleefulest gloze,
Wide opens its larynx to sing and to shout,
Exuberant pleasure and gratefulest grout.
The blithe little rivulets run to the seas,—

The little buds start on the hemlocks and trees;
The wild geese are screaming their vigorest scream,
And the frogs that were dreaming no longer will dream.
Of course there is sadness in thinking the thought

That there’ll be no more skating for skaters who skaught;
But the Erie Canal, with its decrease in tolls,
Will cause us to smile a succession of smoles.
If “the exigencies of rhyme” need not be considered in

constructing English verse, neither need the exigencies of rhythm, as
shown by the following highly artistic couplets:
The wind blew down our well-sweep,

And father and I put it up again —— sheep.
Wasn’t Pharaoh a Rascal

Because he wouldn’t let the children of Israel go three days’ journey into the
wilderness, to celebrate the Paschal?
In ’73, a modest volume of poems was published by an Hon. and

Rev. gentleman of Central New York,[3] in which occur the following
rather surprising verses: (not consecutively, but here and there.)
O bright shining morn of the year,
I cannot foretell thy events;
Trusting in God, why should I fear,
Though having so many relents!
* * * * *
I looked on his form; ’twas like mine;
Transparent his body did seem;
His vigor could never repine;
With glory his features all gleam.
* * * * *
Oh, that the great ocean of love,
Where all the inhabitants bathe,
Ere they go to the bright realms above,
In His sight to whom they have clave.
* * * * *
We saw there as beacons of light
God’s temples of worship, so fair;
We saw there, enlisted in fight,
The wicked who cursed God with dare.
* * * * *
O then they all sang as before,
And the prophets they came rushing down;
And skipping, they came to that shore
Where saints shall forever be crowned!
To find the “concealed sense” (concealed nonsense!) of the

verses that follow, the first and third, second and fourth lines, are
read consecutively:
That man must lead a happy life,

Who’s free from matrimonial chains;
Who is directed by a wife,
Is sure to suffer for his pains.
Adam could find no solid peace,

When Eve was given for a mate;
Till he beheld a woman’s face,
Adam was in a happy state.
In all the female race appear
Hypocrisy, deceit, and pride,
The tokens of a heart sincere,
In woman never did reside.
What tongue is able to unfold

The failings that in woman dwell?
The merits in her we behold,
Are almost imperceptible.
Confusion take the man, I say,

Who makes a woman his delight!
Who will no court to women pay,
Keeps always reason in his sight.
This is nonsense, too; though, certainly, women are the faultiest

of human beings—except men.
Be that as it may, few women have ever been more severely, or,
perhaps, more justly, cauterized, than poor Job’s poor wife, in
Coleridge’s celebrated Epigram:
Sly Beelzebub took all occasions

To try Job’s constancy and patience.
He took his honor, took his health,
He took his children, took his wealth,
His servants, horses, oxen, cows—
But cunning Satan did not take his spouse.
But Heaven, that brings out good from evil,

And loves to disappoint the Devil,
Had predetermined to restore
Twofold all Job had lost before:
His servants, horses, oxen, cows.
Short-sighted Satan! NOT to take his spouse?
SECRET CORRESPONDENCE.

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Jung, Dante, and the Making of the Red

Book: Of Fire and Form Tommaso

JUNG, DANTE, AND THE

Tommaso Priviero is an analytical psychologist in London, and holds a PhD

The Research in Analytical Psychology and Jungian Studies series features

The Cartesian Split

Alchemy, Jung, and Remedios Varo

Jung’s Reception of Picasso and Abstract Art

The Paradoxical Meeting of Depth Psychology and Physics

For more information about this series please visit: www.routledge.com/

Appendix (Chronology) 211

Sonu Shamdasani, whose mentorship accompanied this work, to an extent

correspondences and divergences, drawing from Henry Corbin’s analysis of

0.1 Dante at the moment of entering the fire 12

(“imaginative power”): an active evocation of inner images corresponding to

Man is primarily an image-maker and our psychic substance consists

Content of the Work

and spiritual analogies to psychic material, and which he once described

The point of the Comedy is that understanding is practical. It must not be

Undoubtedly what is involved is not a movement from one locality to

In Liber Novus, the opening of the “esoteric” or “inner” level corresponds

Jung and Dante

followed by “A Historical Study of C. G. Jung’s Psychological Understand-

One characteristic feature of any journey through the unconscious is the

Heraclitus, means the “return to the opposite”. Certain mental processes

work adheres as much as possible to the eventful language of Jung’s

In response to this critical situation, which occupies a central place in

Figure 0.2 Inferno

Figure 0.3 Purgatorio

Figure 0.4 Paradiso

Figure 0.5 Jung’s Liber Novus (The Red Book)

Figure 0.6 Liber Novus

Figure 0.7 Liber Novus

Figure 0.8 Liber Novus

Figure 0.9 Liber Novus

Figure 0.10 C. G. Jung, Black Book 4 (Toni Wolff ’s handwriting)

de l’individuation: 9e Colloque de Bruxelles (Brussels: Esperluète Eds), p. 46; see

Jung, Dante, and Liber Novus

those contents of the unconscious which lie, as it were, immediately below

Visual types should concentrate on the expectation that an inner image

What the development of the “transcendent function” shares with medi-

Fascinatingly, in 1918, W. B. Yeats gave in Per Amica Silentia Lunae an

Similarly, the visionary procedure elaborated in Liber Novus consists of a

I devised such a boring method by fantasising that I was digging a hole,

completes a handwritten version of Liber Novus (Handwritten Draft), then

It is pivotal to observe that although Jung transcribed the Black Books

experiment and aspects of medieval texts of visions. Liber Novus presents

The first chapter of a Western novel is said to contain the

When, some years since, a coalition was talked of between the

In 1871, when the French President was undecided and inactive,

In ’73 a print was widely circulated in Germany, representing

When a certain United States Senator disappointed his Ohio

“John P. Hale is an old goose!” exclaimed General Cass. Some

At a public dinner in Boston, nearly twenty years ago, Judge

A newspaper wit announces the discovery of a buried city in the

It has been said that the faculty of generalization belongs equally

CHARACTERISTIC SAYINGS OF AMERICANS.

The Dundreary “dialect” is admirably illustrated in

Appendix (Chronology) 211

0.1 Dante at the moment of entering the fire 12