The Red Book (Jung)...He realizes that he has to let Izdubar out of the egg..Through his inner fusion with the archetypal powers,"channel" information by transmitting important understandings.

Liber Primus
The first part of the Red Book, Liber Primus, has a prologue, "The Way of the Future. See note 16, which begins with biblical quotations emphasizing the incarnation and the terrible trial it constitutes (Isaiah 53:1-4; John 1:14). The last part of the Red Book, Tests. See note 16, ends with "The Seven Sermons to the Dead", and its main object, once again, is the embodiment in space-time life of a broader spiritual reality, now called "the pleroma". Thus, the theme of incarnation as reported in The Red Book was clearly Jung's alpha and omega. The intermediate journey was sometimes ecstatic, but it was also extremely painful. The beginning of the text contrasts the "spirit of this time", the rational-scientific attitude of the collective consciousness, with the "spirit of the depths", the mysterious wisdom in its mythopoietic form long lost to consciousness. Jung begins with these words: "If I speak in the spirit of this time, I must say: nothing and no one can justify what I must proclaim to you. Any justification is superfluous for me, because I have no choice, but I need it. The Red Book (later: RB), p. 229[In this article,..... "These are the words of someone who mobilizes, and who is mobilized by, a numinous power. Jung's freedom, and that would be the freedom of anyone in this situation, was to know not what he wanted to do, but what he had to do, in this case: follow the spirit of the deep. The "spirit of this time" maintains that what is said by the other spirit, that of the depths, is madness. Jung answers: "It's true, it's true, what I'm saying is the greatness, the drunkenness and the ugliness of madness[. RB, p. 230... "Within this danger, he needs a "visible sign" RB, p. 231. "that would show him that the spirit of the depths is at the same time the one who governs the depths of the world's affairs. His need for a visible sign is important to understand the depth and nature of his experience. This need could demonstrate that his visions were of a different type than those described by mystics as unio mystica. When a person reaches this transcendent level, that is, when his soul leaves him to join the "Infinite Light" or whatever metaphor is chosen for this ineffable experience, there is no need for an external sign. The person simply knows. Jung's visions were different. They were founded in the psyche and the world of archetypes.Terribly disturbing visions set the process in motion, like the lightning bolt that marked the beginning of the alchemical opus. In October 1913, Jung had a vision that lasted two hours and came back, even more violently, two weeks later: "During the day, I was suddenly attacked by a vision in broad daylight: I saw a terrifying tide that covered all the northern and lowland countries between the North Sea and the Alps. It extended from England to Russia, and from the North Sea coast to the Alps. I saw yellow waves, floating rubble, and the death of countless thousands of human beings. RB, p. 231... "An inner voice says, "Look carefully, it's very real and it will happen that way. You can't doubt that... [The vision] left me exhausted and confused. And I thought that madness had seized my mind. RB, p. 231... » Finally, Jung obtained his "sign" linking the source of his vision and world affairs - the First World War broke out (officially, on January 8, 1914). Jung then sought what in his latest works would be called an experience of synchronicity, a meaningful relationship between inner and outer events. He seeks an archetypal, impersonal understanding of the chaos that engulfed him. It may well be that his visions were prophetic. But his answer shows him identified with the archetypal source, the condition of narcissism: "I encountered the colossal cold that froze everything; I encountered the tide, the sea of blood, and found my barren tree whose leaves had been transformed into a remedy by freezing. And I picked the ripe fruit and gave it to you, and I do not know what I offered you, what an intoxicating bitter-sweet drink, which left on your tongue an aftertaste of blood.

Liber Secundus
In this second part of the Red Book, Jung meets a figure he calls Izdubar, which is an older name of the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh. It seems to me that this meeting plays a crucial role in Jung's experience. For reasons of space, I did not refer in this article to Jung's drawings. But the one accompanying this passage must be mentioned. On the drawing - a character praying and a huge jet of fire in full propulsion - Jung noted a passage of the Upanishads where the god Prajapati makes tapas, and in doing so creates Agni, the Devourer, who attacks him. To avoid being killed by his own creation, Prajapati creates the world from his own members, that is, he enters space-time. This link between the creation of a new order and the simultaneous creation of chaos or disorder is the main dynamic of the transformation in The Red Book. In The Red Book, the giant Izdubar "was gigantic, like a hero of colossal power RB, p. 280... "He comes from the Light; and yet, this creature so superior to Jung by size is completely defeated by Jung's scientific explanations, which Izdubar feels as a powerful and victorious poison. This is the power of reason, which suppresses and reduces numinosum. Jung talks about his love for Izdubar, and says he doesn't want to see him die, but he's too old to be transported. He acknowledges that he can use his thinking to solve his dilemma: "I am fundamentally convinced that Izdubar is not real in the ordinary sense of the word, but that it is an RB fantasy, p. 280. "Izdubar is in agony but cannot help but accept. Izdubar becomes light, like a fantasy, and can be easily transported; Jung eventually reduces it to the size of an egg and puts it in his pocket[RB, p. 283... He needs to reduce it to keep some control.He realizes that he must let Izdubar out of the egg, because he realizes that "I still haven't accepted what embraces my heart. This frightening thing is the confinement of God in the bud... I defeated the Great One, I mourned him, I did not want to abandon him because I loved him, because no mortal could compete with him RB, p. 286-287... "But Izdubar's liberation has an unexpected result: "But when he gets up, I go down... All light abandons me.... Woe to the mother who gives birth to a God! A birth is difficult, but a thousand times more difficult is the infernal great-peace. All the dragons and monstrous snakes of eternal emptiness succeed the divine son. RB, p. 287 Order and disorder begin to be linked as integral parts of a process. "If God approaches, your being begins to bubble and the black mud from the depths rises swirling. "A thousand times more difficult is the great peace. RB, p. 287... "He reflects on the power of the created disorder that he also identifies with evil or chaos: forms (such as) "an oppressive association with the object. RB, p. 287, "can only be dissolved by evil. So, despite the wisdom he has acquired, he returns to realization: "I still don't know what it means to give birth to a God. RB, p. 290," that is, to the self within. In a later passage, probably because he was seeking refuge from chaos, he imagined entering a library, relying on his thoughts. But thought can no longer be his refuge. He was soon confused and heard "a strange rustle and purr - and suddenly, a roaring sound filled the room like a horde of huge birds - with a frenetic flapping of wings.... RB, p. 294: "Jung's flight to spirit and order has created a powerful form of disorder, and he finds himself in a madhouse. He reflects on his old "protective and repeatedly polished crust, covering the mystery of chaos. If you break through this wall, it could not be more ordinary, the flow overflowing with chaos will penetrate it. Chaos is not simple, it is an infinite multiplicity..... It is full of figures which, because of their fullness, have the effect of disturbing us and submerging us.... These figures are the dead, not just your dead, that is, all the images of the forms you have taken in the past and that the course of your life has left behind, but also the swarming crowd of the dead of human history, the ghostly procession of the past, which is an ocean compared to the drops that constitute the whole extent of your own life.... (The dead) have lived on the heights and accomplished the lowest things. They forgot one thing: they did not experience their animal.... And that too is the failure of Christ. RB, pp. 295-296... If we are in our bodies, close to the energies of the animal in us, we are not crazy. And that is why Jung realizes that Christianity - with its rejection of the flesh - cannot save him from his fall into madness. For Jung, the dead are those aspects of his soul that represent his escape from the body, and aspects of this same escape in the (Christian) generations preceding him, in his parents, grandparents etc.

The Red Book is a red leather‐bound folio manuscript crafted by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung between 1915 and about 1930. It recounts and comments upon the author's imaginative experiences between 1913 and 1916, and is based on manuscripts first drafted by Jung in 1914–15 and 1917. Despite being nominated as the central work in Jung’s oeuvre, it was not published or made otherwise accessible for study until 2009.
In October 2009, with the cooperation of Jung's estate, The Red Book: Liber Novus was published by W. W. Norton in a facsimile edition, complete with an English translation, three appendices, and over 1500 editorial notes. Editions and translations in several other languages soon followed. In December 2012, Norton additionally released a "Reader's Edition" of the work; this smaller format edition includes the complete translated text of The Red Book: Liber Novus along with the introduction and notes prepared by Shamdasani, but it omits the facsimile reproduction of Jung's original calligraphic manuscript.
While the work has in past years been descriptively called simply "The Red Book", Jung did emboss a formal title on the spine of his leather-bound folio: he titled the work Liber Novus (in Latin, the "New Book"). His manuscript is now increasingly cited as Liber Novus, and under this title implicitly includes draft material intended for but never finally transcribed into the red leather folio proper.The existence of C.G. Jung's Red Book was revealed by the publication of his autobiography My Life - Memories, Dreams and Thoughts. C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, A. Jaffe (Ed.), R..... The autobiography contained in the appendix a treatise of Gnostic appearance, "The Seven Sermons to the Dead", the last part of the Red Book as we now possess it.However, the "Sermons" alone tell us little about the Red Book, and the latter has remained surrounded by an aura of secrecy, as it was for me when I studied in Zurich from 1966 to 1970.2 Secrets create a void that attracts projections, and the Red Book certainly had that effect.Why had it not been published?In Zurich, fantasies were swirling: it was said that the Jung family kept him because Jung said he was the Messiah, or because Jung appeared as a psychotic, etc.We are finally in a position to evaluate these fantasies.But the publication, in a magnificent facsimile edition - a work in which the love and devotion of its publisher, Sonu Shamdasani, transpired and which has spanned a decade - also opens up a completely new field of research.For if, as Jung says in his autobiography, the Red Book was his prima materia for the rest of his life[3][3]Ibid. at 199 (translation fr. cit. at 231-232), it can be assumed that there is a strong link between these experiences and the Collected Works.3 This is only partially the case.Although the sources of the main themes of the Collected Works can certainly be found in The Red Book, there are also significant differences.In particular, chaos or disorder plays a much greater and more important role in The Red Book than in Collected Works where order plays the main role, through the order-producing function of archetypes, for example.This has far-reaching implications for Jungian psychology as a form of psychotherapy, more than as a doctrine of wisdom or as a modern form of sustainable philosophy[4].[4]M.-L. von Franz, among others, made the suggestion, during a..., but also for our evaluation of C.G. Jung's work.4C.G. Jung's Red Book is a series of dialogues, caused by striking and confusing dreams he had in 1912, with various figures of his imagination, then with repetitive fantasies that he could not understand, such as: "there was something dead, but that was still alive[5][5]C.G. Jung, 1973, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, op. cit.,..."; then, in the fall of 1913, with an outbreak of global catastrophe hallucinations. Its immersion in the unconscious then began and continued in the spring of 1914, maintaining all its intensity for about five months, but it will continue in 1916.There were periods of disorientation for several more years, but they eventually decreased with the understanding of his mandala drawings (which are contained in The Red Book) as an expression of the self: these drawings as well as his rational and scientific mind allowed him to contain his chaos. "I (first) tried an aesthetic elaboration of my.....5 Jung tells us that he had to control his fantasies in one way or another, but also that an intense fear and "violent resistance" kept him from "letting himself fall into them. Ibid, p. 178 (translated from english, p. 207). ». He recorded the fantasies he experienced in a series of "Black Papers" that covered most of the most intense period and ended in 1916 with the "Seven Sermons to the Dead. "Later, and over a period of several years, he transcribed in The Red Book his imaginative encounters into a process that he would later call "active imagination". The dialogues are interspersed with passages in the form of wisdom teachings enunciated by an amalgam (which eventually transforms) of Jung and his inner images. Later, he realized that many of these images had been precursors of the central figure of the Red Book, Philemon.
But unlike a schizophrenic, Jung was able to consider his fantasies and relate to them consciously. He was able to bring them back into space and time, so to speak, and what completely distinguishes him from a madman is that he made the choice to connect his inner world to the common reality. In addition, Jung has never decompensated during these years, as is usually the case during a psychotic episode. On the contrary, he continued his psychotherapy practice full-time and did not lose contact with his family life. It is surely wrong to think that Jung was crazy, or that he was a schizophrenic who would have treated himself creatively. But to recognize that Jung, like everyone else, to one degree or another, had crazy parts within an otherwise healthy personality. N. Schwartz-Salant, The Mystery of Human Relationship, New..., and that he suffered the horrors of this madness which was ultimately a source of both limitation and transformation, this is a very reasonable assumption. The Red Book expresses a narcissistic feature of Jung's personality before his "descent" into the unconscious, namely the amalgamation of his self with more unconscious, non-moic or archetypal energies, and his transformation. But before following the trace of this process in The Red Book, a quick reflection on the terms numinosum, narcissism, and self will be useful to understand Jung's journey. When Rudolph Otto wrote The Sacred and made the numinosum the nucleus of the religious experience, he said: "We invite the reader to focus his attention on a moment when he felt a deep and, as far as possible, exclusively religious emotion. If he is unable to do so or if he does not even know of such moments, we ask him to stop reading here. R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, London: Oxford University...... » If one does not know the numinosum as a religious consciousness of the totally "Other", attested by emotions such as fear, terror, fascination, fright and beauty, one can use concepts such as narcissism to illuminate certain aspects of Jung's personality and system, but in so doing, one may also misunderstand and pathologize others[. An example is given by Jeffrey Satinover's analysis,...... In this spirit, I use the term "narcissism" with caution. This conceptual tool helps us to understand the experiences that Jung reported in The Red Book and how they affected the Collected Works. But Jung's narcissism does not define the nature of what happened to him, and it should not be used to foolishly criticize. NB: Although the Red Book shows various narcissistic features of Jung's personality, it is another matter to talk about a narcissistic personality. This diagnosis can only be confirmed by the nature of the transfers involved. Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self, NY: International..., and we have only anecdotal evidence in this regard. In this study, I will therefore deal with those of Jung's narcissistic traits that appear clearly in The Red Book, in particular his fusion myself, and his remarkable struggle to dissolve this state of fusion, which leads to an authentic relationship me-self. The Jungian notion of self used in this article differs in its orientation from other psychoanalytical visions of self . N. Schwartz-Salant, Narcissism and Character Transformation,...... The key difference is that the self, which is a source of identity and our most intimate compass for living in a way that is felt to be authentic and true, is not the consequence of the internalization of object relationships, as with most psychoanalytical approaches. The self is an archetype. Metaphorically speaking, it's our psychic DNA. We were born with him. It is a complex energy system, which includes processes of order and disorder. Consciously realizing the existence of the self is often a long and arduous path, the path, in fact, that Jung called individuation. On the one hand, the self must be "seen" or "mirrored" by others in order to be gradually realized, which makes it possible to obtain a self-self relationship instead of a fusion. The state of fusion is a normal step, but if it stabilizes, what we call a grandiose exhibitionist self occurs. In this fusion, the self does not know that the self exists; it believes it is the self. On the other hand, inner experiences of the numinousness of the self can also lead to its actualisation. All his life, Jung doubted the need for external "mirror reflection" and the internalization of the object relationships that go hand in hand, because he saw in it a risk of altering the essential nature of the self. That's why he focused on internal objects. In general, The Red Book is Jung's encounter with the transformative power of numinosum, and it shows how Jung brought the fruits of this encounter back into spatial and temporal reality. In particular, The Red Book is a remarkable testimony to a fusion of myself and self transformed by the fire of chaos or madness, terms that Jung uses interchangeably. His effort to embody the wisdom he has acquired, both personally and in his Collected Works, is a remarkable journey. I am not aware of anything comparable in all the mystical or, more broadly, visionary literature. The Red Book is divided into three parts, Liber Primus, Liber Secundus and Events. The thread that connects these parts is analogous to a dream that begins with the initial position of the problem - the embodiment of a new spiritual attitude - and leads, through various episodes, to a lysis - the emergence of a relationship between myself and self. Jung's experience of such a profound psychological process was clearly a precursor to his notion of psychological reality and individuation, just as Philemon was the precursor to his idea of the self.
Context and composition
Jung was associated with Sigmund Freud for a period of approximately six years, beginning in 1907. Over those years, their relationship became increasingly acrimonious. When the final break of the relationship came in 1913, Jung retreated from many of his professional activities to intensely reconsider his personal and professional path. The creative activity that produced Liber Novus came in this period, from 1913 to about 1917.Biographers and critics have disagreed whether these years in Jung's life should be seen as "a creative illness", a period of introspection, a psychotic break, or simply madness." Anthony Storr, reflecting on Jung's own judgment that he was "menaced by a psychosis" during this time, concluded that the period represented a psychotic episode.[8] According to Sonu Shamdasani, Storr's opinion is untenable in light of currently available documentation. During the years Jung engaged with his "nocturnal work" on Liber Novus, he continued to function in his daytime activities without any evident impairment. He maintained a busy professional practice, seeing on average five patients a day. He lectured, wrote, and remained active in professional associations. Throughout this period he also served as an officer in the Swiss army and was on active duty over several extended periods between 1914 and 1918, the years of World War I in which Jung was composing Liber Novus. Jung was not "psychotic" by any accepted clinical criteria during the period he created Liber Novus. Nonetheless, what he was doing during these years defies facile categorization. Jung referred to his imaginative or visionary venture during these years as "my most difficult experiment."This experiment involved a voluntary confrontation with the unconscious through willful engagement of what Jung later termed "mythopoetic imagination". In his introduction to Liber Novus, Shamdasani explains: "From December 1913 onward, he carried on in the same procedure: deliberately evoking a fantasy in a waking state, and then entering into it as into a drama. These fantasies may be understood as a type of dramatized thinking in pictorial form.... In retrospect, he recalled that his scientific question was to see what took place when he switched off consciousness. The example of dreams indicated the existence of background activity, and he wanted to give this a possibility of emerging, just as one does when taking mescaline." Jung initially recorded his "visions", or "fantasies, or "imaginations" — all terms used by Jung to describe his activity — in a series of six journals now known collectively as the "Black Books". This journal record begins on 12 November 1913, and continues with intensity through the summer of 1914; subsequent entries were added up through at least the 1930s. Biographer Barbara Hannah, who was close to Jung throughout the last three decades of his life, compared Jung's imaginative experiences recounted in his journals to the encounter of Menelaus with Proteus in the Odyssey. Jung, she said, "made it a rule never to let a figure or figures that he encountered leave until they had told him why they had appeared to him." After the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Jung perceived that his visionary experience was not only of personal relevance, but entwined with a crucial cultural moment. In late-1914 and 1915 he compiled the visions from the journals, along with his additional commentary on each imaginative episode, into an initial manuscript. This manuscript was the beginning of Liber Novus. In 1915 Jung began artfully transcribing this draft text into the illuminated calligraphic volume that would subsequently become known as the Red Book. In 1917 he compiled a further supplementary manuscript of visionary material and commentary, which he titled "Scrutinies"; this also was apparently intended for transcription into his red folio volume, the "Red Book". Although Jung labored on the artful transcription of this corpus of manuscript material into the calligraphic folio of the Red Book for sixteen years, he never completed the task. Only approximately two-thirds of Jung's manuscript text was transcribed into the Red Book by 1930, when he abandoned further work on the calligraphic transcription of his draft material into the Red Book. The published edition of The Red Book: Liber Novus includes all of Jung's manuscript material prepared for Liber Novus, and not just the portion of the text transcribed by Jung into the calligraphic red book volume.In 1957, near the end of his life, Jung spoke to Aniela Jaffé about the Red Book and the process which yielded it; in that interview he stated: "The years… when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then." He wrote a short epilog in 1959 after leaving the book more or less untouched for about 30 years: “To the superficial observer, it will appear like madness.”
Creation and physical description
The Red Book resting on Jung's desk
Jung worked his text and images in the Red Book using calligraphic pen, multicolored ink, and gouache paint. The text is written in German but includes quotations from the Vulgate in Latin, a few inscriptions and names written in Latin and Greek, and a brief marginal quotation from the Bhagavad Gita given in English. The initial seven folios (or leaves) of the book — which contain what is now entitled Liber Primus (the "First Book") of Liber Novus — were composed on sheets of parchment in a highly illuminated medieval style. However, as Jung proceeded working with the parchment sheets, it became apparent that their surface was not holding his paint properly and that his ink was bleeding through. These first seven leaves (fourteen pages, recto and verso) now show heavy chipping of paint, as will be noted on close examination of the facsimile edition reproductions.

In 1915, Jung commissioned the folio-sized and red leatherbound volume now known as the Red Book. The bound volume contained approximately 600 blank pages of paper of a quality suitable for Jung's ink and paint. The folio-sized volume, 11.57 inches (29.4 cm) by 15.35 inches (39.0 cm), is bound in fine red leather with gilt accents. Though Jung and others usually referred to the book simply as the "Red Book", he had the top of the spine of the book stamped in gilt with the book's formal title, Liber Novus ("The New Book"). Jung subsequently interleaved the seven original parchment sheets at the beginning of the bound volume. After receiving the bound volume in 1915, he began transcribing his text and illustrations directly onto the bound pages. Over the next many years, Jung ultimately filled only 191 of the approximately 600 pages bound in the Red Book folio.[28] About a third of the manuscript material he had written was never entered into the illuminated Red Book. Inside the book now are 205 completed pages of text and illustrations (including the loose parchment sheets), all from Jung's hand: 53 full-page images, 71 pages with both text and artwork, and 81 pages entirely of calligraphic text. The Red Book is currently held, along with other valuable and private items from Jung's archive, in a bank vault in Zurich.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Book_(Jung)

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