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ABSTRACT
We live in a world so obsessed with individuality and self-affirmation that all ties with the world of the dead have been severed. Gone are the dead from our horizon and, with them, all that they silently stand for: our past, our roots, our shared human and cosmic identity. Yet the living call we have been so intent on heeding is proving more and more deadly by the day, not only to ourselves but also to the planet we call home. Through their work and life experience, both Jung in the twentieth century and Dante in the fourteenth century, deliberately chose to respond to the needs of the living by following an altogether different path. They pursued their own individuation by traveling the ancient, lonely road of the dead. This article retraces some of the salient moments of Jung’s and Dante’s encounters with the dead. It highlights the role the dead played in both Jung’s and Dante’s hard-won inner realization of the importance of becoming aware of the dead’s call and heeding their teachings. It also considers why both Jung and Dante followed to its end that forlorn path of self-realization and what we would gain, individually and collectively, were we willing to accept the gifts of liberating insight that, thanks to Jung’s and Dante’s mediation, the dead may share with our world: a dying world, whose only hope of survival paradoxically rests with the undying input that the dead have to offer us.
NOTE
References to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number, and paragraph number. The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and Princeton University Press (USA).
Notes
1. This article is based on a talk given at the Jung Society of Vancouver on November 25, 2015. I am borrowing the title from Novalis, Hymns to the Night VI, line 60: “in des Vaters Schoß.”
2. This and other dreams of Jung’s, some of which are recorded and expanded in The Red Book, are referenced in “The Psychological Aspects of the Kore” (CW 9i, 1941/1969, ¶¶358–383); for this dream in particular, see ¶359 and ¶371.
3. At the end of the 1950 Preface Jung states, “This book was written in 1911, in my thirty-sixth year. This time is a critical one, for it marks the beginning of the second half of life, when a metanoia, a mental transformation, not infrequently occurs. I was acutely conscious, then, of the loss of friendly relations with Freud and of the lost comradeship of our work together.” Dante dates his journey into the beyond to the year 1300, his thirty-fifth, marking “the middle of our life’s walk” (see below “On the Edge of Being: Dante and Cacciaguida”).
4. See the foreword to the 1925 edition of Wandlungen und symbole der Libido: “The sum of these [mythological] images constitutes the collective unconscious, a heritage which is potentially present in every individual.” The use of the term primitive on Jung’s part, with all its nuances, would call for a study of its own; see Deloria’s C. G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions (2009).
5. Jerome Bernstein (Citation2005) has taken his readers into a far-reaching exploration of the borderland through deep listening; his concerns and mine here are not that far apart.
6. “Like the traveler who returns from foreign lands laden with precious jewels and priceless treasures, the seeker does not return to ordinary consciousness unchanged or empty-handed, but emanating the exotic perfume of his or her spiritual realization. The experience of this deathless state beyond life is, like the legendary philosopher’s stone, the mystical magic that infuses ordinary existence with ‘the life of life’—a meaningfulness beyond meaning emanating from beyond the framework of space and time” (Inayat Khan 1999, 33). This may be understood as the journey of the hero in Joseph Campbell’s widely acknowledged frame of reference, but the deep-seated affinities are with the shaman’s journey, a perspective that demands further study and acknowledgment now that our understanding of shamanism has grown out of earlier narrower preconceptions.
7. Corbin’s “Mundus imaginalis ou l’imaginaire et l’imaginal” (1964) is available in English translation in Spring (1972), now at https://www.amiscorbin.com/bibliographie/mundus-imaginalis-or-the-imaginary-and-the-imaginal/.
8. The disappearance of imaginatio vera, “a cognitive power of its own,” in the Western world has triggered “a catastrophe of the Spirit, where we have by no means yet taken the full measure of all the consequences” (Corbin Citation1989, viii). It is worth noticing that at the time when Corbin plunged into the study of the imaginal through the works of Sufi and Shi’ite masters, Henri de Lubac had highlighted the importance of the intermediate realm in his presentation of the three Buddhist kayas, with references to the early Christian tradition and to the Acts of Peter in particular, which are foundational to Corbin’s worldview (Lubac Citation1951/2012, Chapter 3).
9. And Jung to comment: “the feeling was similar to the one I had later toward the ‘illustrious ancestors’ in the black rock temple of my 1944 vision” (Jung Citation1963, 307).
10. Readers who have seen Ikiru by Akira Kurosawa may want to use the image of the protagonist and the atmosphere of his workplace as possible prop for their imagination.
11. Significantly, Jung adds, “The stories of the Grail had been of the greatest importance to me ever since I read them, at the age of fifteen, for the first time. I had an inkling that a great secret still lay hidden behind those stories. Therefore it seemed quite natural to me that the dream should conjure up the world of the Knights of the Grail and their quest” (1963, 165; emphasis added). While in India, Jung had another major dream related to the Holy Grail (281–283).
12. This is not the appropriate place to further analyze this Gnostic divine principle, which plays so prominent a role in Jung’s Seven Sermons to the Dead and The Red Book. But in relation to the journey of the soul toward this higher God, of crucial importance for Dante as well, it is essential to dispel ambiguities and misunderstandings. See, for example, Hoeller’s comments to the Sermons: “The Gnostic soul rises from sphere to sphere, from aion to aion, in its quest for communion and union with the supreme source. After all tasks are accomplished, all purifications undergone, all spells changed and all holy deeds done, at the end of the great journey, there beckons the First Mystery, the Source of all gods, worlds, and men. This is the unknown, all-transcending and all-pervading one whose name—according to Basilides and his modern amanuensis C. G. Jung—is Abraxas” (1982, 88–89). All is well here, up until the last sentence, which regrettably turns out to be just plain wrong. As remarked by Owens (2013, 26) and clearly spelled out by Jung’s anima in the Black Book entry of January 16, 2016, Abraxas is the name of the fearful demiurge, the “ruler of this world,” not of “the one God, the wonderfully beautiful and kind, the solitary, starlike, unmoving” to be sought and worshiped (see full text in Jung Citation1963, 370). Corbin, on the other hand, had unfailingly recognized the centrality of the unnamed Gnostic starlike God for Jung (I have addressed this in my introduction to Corbin Citation2017).
13. See also Jung’s “The Visions of Zosimos” (1954/1968, CW 13, ¶97): “The Hermetic vessel too is a uterus of spiritual renewal or rebirth” (emphasis added).
14. See also Symbols of Transformation (CW 5, ¶¶42, 423, 555–556, 565–569, 598–600, 602–611).
15. The paragraph continues: “If men kill their princes, they do so because they cannot kill their Gods, and because they do not know that they should kill their Gods in themselves.” References to The Red Book will be cited in the text as book, chapter, folio, with page numbers for both The Red Book: Liber Novus designated as LN and The Red Book: Liber Novus, A Reader’s Edition as RB.
16. See Jung’s conversation with the elderly Indian whose guru was Shankaracharya: “Most people have living gurus. But there are always some who have a spirit for teacher” (1963, 184).
17. I have expanded on these aspects of Philemon in “On the Wings of the Night” (Boccassini Citation2014) and “Beyond Narcissism: Mirroring, Mandalas, and Feminine Self-Remembering” (2018, 46).
18. Summoned or not summoned the dead are present.
19. See the second part of Jung’s “Late Thoughts” in Memories, Dreams, Reflections on the importance of “a secret which the individual is pledged to guard” (1963, 342). In taking stock of his “experiment” Jung comes to realize that “the unconscious undergoes or produces change,” leading to “the central concept of my psychology: the process of individuation” (209). On the need to “embody this secret in ourselves,” see Psychology and Alchemy (1968, CW 12, ¶564).
20. There are two illustrations accompanying ¶564 at the very end of Psychology and Alchemy: the image from the Mutus liber that illustrates the alchemist’s motto “Ora, lege, lege, lege, relege, labora et invenies,” and an image of “the phoenix as symbol of resurrection.” Jung gives no indication as to the source of the exhortation “Rumpite libros ne corda vestra rumpantur,” so central to his concluding remarks. Numerous treatises well known to Jung do, indeed, reference it in connection with dealbatio, the process of whitening or washing of the stone (see, for example, Morienus [1559, f. 25v] and Rosarium philosophorum [f. K iv], but Michael Maier showcases it in his 1617 Atalanta fugiens. The expression “Rumpite libros” is part of the title of Emblem XI: De secretis naturae. Dealbate Latonam et rumpite libros, visually included in the illustration and fully referenced as a wisdom saying among alchemists in the commentary: “Verum ne quis nimio studio . . . se maceret . . . Philosophi emblematico hoc utuntur sermone, quod Latona dealbanda sit, . . . libri rumpendi, ne corda eorum rumpantur” (But lest a man should vex himself with overmuch study . . . the Philosophers use this Emblematical speech, that Latona must be whitened and their books must be torn lest their Hearts be broken [Maier Citation1617, 55]). I am quoting from the English translation of the British Library MS. Sloane 3645 (See The Alchemy Web Site, http://www.levity.com/alchemy/atalanta.html). This page of Maier’s book was certainly read by Jung, as he highlighted and underlined the sentence a few lines below this one, where Maier evokes the Egyptian origins of the goddess Latona, mother of Apollo and Diana, turned to stone by Zeus (https://www.e-rara.ch/cgj/content/pageview/1906034). Maier’s commentary is an apt illustration of Jung’s own experience with the theoretical and empirical aspects of alchemy (see also CW 16, ¶488–489). Jung came to own a copy of the Atalanta fugiens only late in life: as attested by the dedication, he received it as a gift from his close friend and collaborator Siegmund Hurwitz for his eightieth birthday (I wish to thank Thomas Fischer for helping me identify Hurwitz’s signature). However, he had long been familiar with the re-edition of the Atalanta fugiens, which had been printed stripped of its musical component under the title Secretioris naturae secretorum scrutinium chymicum in 1687, long after Maier’s death.
21. “I built it in a kind of dream. Only afterward did I see how all the parts fitted together and that a meaningful form had resulted: a symbol of psychic wholeness” (Jung Citation1963, 225).
22. Compare Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963, 227) and Psychology and Alchemy (1968, CW 12, ¶203) with fig. 77 therein: these “unseen, creative dwarf-gods, hooded and cloaked manikins,” Jung comments there, are “as kinsmen of the unconscious, they protect navigation, i.e. the venture into darkness and uncertainty” (and all that follows).
23. The winged youth, Jung states in Mysterium Coniunctionis, “personifies the ‘true Sulphur,’ the spirit of inner truth. . . . [He] stands for everything that is winged in the psyche or that would like to sprout wings” (1970, CW 14, ¶¶196–197). This same emblem was carved, I do not know when, at the entrance of Jung’s “retiring room” at Bollingen, with the date MCMXXIII (1923, the year of inception of the whole construction, not of this specific room).
24. Michael Maier is the author of the Atalanta fugiens (see endnote 20) and of numerous other alchemical texts liberally quoted by Jung in Psychology and Alchemy (CW 12), Alchemical Studies (CW 13), and Mysterium Coniunctionis (CW 14), along with Dorn’s works and those of other fire-philosophers. As for Paracelsus, Swiss physician and magus, there is no doubt Jung held him in high regard.
25. Anatole Broyard, “Doctor, Talk to Me,” The New York Times Magazine, August 26, 1990, as quoted in Hammerschlag (1994, 148).
26. I address this aspect of Dante’s work elsewhere; see Boccassini, “On the Wings of the Night: Jung’s and Dante’s Encounters with Soul” (2014).
27. All quotations from Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy are from Allen Mandelbaum’s translation (1980–1982), unless otherwise specified.
28. I have dealt with this theme elsewhere; see Boccassini, “‘Non impedir lo suo fatale andare.’ Volti e risvolti del viaggio nell’oltretomba, da Virgilio a Dante” (2013).
29. The “ancestral” and prophetic visionary figure and message of Joachim of Fiore (1135–1202) is yet another key connection between Dante and Jung that I plan to address elsewhere.
30. Dante’s utterly unconventional guides to the beyond is a subject requiring a separate in-depth analysis, especially in relation to Jung’s own rather unconventional guides, as attested by The Red Book. One of the main narrative threads pertaining to the wayfarer’s journey through the beyond has to do with his impending exile.
31. With this term I am purposely recalling the alchemical injunction that played such a great role for Jung: “. . . secundum naturam sit imaginatio, et vide secundum naturam de qua regenerantur corpora in visceribus terrae, et hoc imaginare sit’ per veram imaginationem et non phantasticam” (. . . imagination should be according to nature. Behold according to nature through whom bodies are reborn in the bowels of the earth, and such imagining be through true imagination rather than a fantasizing one [Rosarium Citation1550 f. Biij v; see CW 12, ¶167]).
32. For lack of space, I will leave the reader to reflect on Jung’s own deep connections to the figure of the crusader, or the Grail knight, as I described at the beginning of this article through the dreams recorded in Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
33. See the images on pages 107, 121, 125, 127, 129, 131, 135 of The Red Book.
34. See also Corbin Citation1957, Le temps d’Eranos.
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Daniela Boccassini
DANIELA BOCCASSINI is professor of Medieval and Renaissance Italian Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (Canada), and a board member of the C. G. Jung Society of Vancouver. Her latest work is an edited volume titled Oikosophia: dall‘intelligenza del cuore all‘ecofilosofia/From the Intelligence of the Heart to Ecophilosophy (Mimesis, 2018). She is currently working on a book-length project on Jung and Dante. For further information on her work see http://blogs.ubc.ca/boccassini.