Jung’s Red Book is here. Well, actually it has existed since Jung began his “creative imagination” exercises in 1914 or so, then sat in his study for fifty years after he died in 1961. But an exhibition of the cataclysmic text just ended at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, which included the original manuscript in a glass case and three facsimile editions placed around the room for people to examine, marking the first time The Red Book has been available to the public. Also on display were several series of images taken from the text—paintings done by Jung himself—in an attempt to offer some insight into the realm of transcendence created, or better yet, documented, in The Red Book.
The museum articulated the complexity of The Red Book’s purpose well:
“He wished to understand himself and integrate and develop various components of his personality; he wanted to understand the relationship between the individual and present day society as well as in the community of the dead; and he wanted to understand the psychological and historical effects of Christianity and the future religious development of the West… the manuscript serves as record of how Jung rediscovered his soul and overcame the malaise of spiritual alienation. He accomplished this by creating a new image of God and establishing a new psychological and theological cosmology.”
Cosmology means literally the study of the universe, and by extension, human placement in the universe. There have been many varying cosmologies throughout history, geography, and religion. In the Rubin’s complimentary exhibit, Visions of the Cosmos, Hindu, Buddhist, Jainist, Christian, Alchemical, Astrological, and scientific cosmologies are explored side by side, allowing witness of the striking visual similarities across time and culture, while also highlighting the differences of ideology. This context makes Jung’s Red Book images and ideas all the more relevant, all the more powerful.
The book itself is a kind of Medieval illuminated manuscript, with calligraphic German text and brightly painted images that illustrate or elaborate on what is written. The facsimile edition contains English translation in the back, which I sat reading and transcribing bits of into my journal, revealing Jung’s reality in poignant poetry:
“But the way is my own self, my own life founded upon myself. The God wants my life. He wants to go with me, sit at the table with me, work with me. Above all he wants to be ever-present. But I’m ashamed of my God. I don’t want to be divine but reasonable. The divine appears to me as irrational craziness. I hate it as an absurd disturbance of my meaningful human activity. It seems an unbecoming sickness which has stolen into the regular course of my life. Yes, I even find the divine superfluous.”
The honesty and borderline desperation of this excerpt strike me familiarly. I know that place of tension between the rational business of society and the bliss-fire cadence of my own relationship with the Divine. Many of us feel this frustration which sometimes becomes anger; resentment that things cannot just be simple, the way they “should” be, the way money and economy and manners dictate them. Because in the world of self-realization—of soul recovery—things get messy, black becomes white in an instant, art becomes science, love becomes a bird flying through an amber sky. Jung did experience what seems like waves of peace in relation to the God/Universe he explores throughout the remarkable Red Book:
Vocatus atque non vocatus dues aderit. Called or not, the God will be present.
I love, "Wind Tracks", the Kalachakra cosmic model, from Rubin Museum's Vision of the Cosmos exhibit, 2010..will have to check it out soon
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