Jung, Red Book period

• Dates: 1913 to about 1930.
• Figure: Carl Gustav Jung (1875 to 1961), Swiss psychiatrist.
• Family: Psychology, with a contested line back to Theosophy.
• Edge shown as: claimed or contested. This page explains why.

What it is

Between late 1913 and the late 1920s, Jung conducted a deliberate experiment on himself. After breaking with Freud, he began inducing waking visions, writing them down, arguing with the figures who appeared, and painting what he saw. The results filled a set of black notebooks and were then copied, in calligraphy and full-page illustration, into a large red leather volume he called Liber Novus, the New Book. It stayed private for eighty years and was published as The Red Book in 2009.

Nearly everything Jung is known for came out of that decade: the collective unconscious, the archetypes, active imagination, individuation, the anima, and the use of the mandala. He spent the rest of his life translating the experience into scientific language. This map shows the period rather than the man, because it is the period that connects to the esoteric family tree.

The Theosophy connection: what can be said and what cannot

The arrow from Theosophy to Jung is dashed on this map, and it needs to be read carefully. Jung was not a Theosophist. He never joined the Society, and he was publicly rude about it, describing Theosophy and Anthroposophy as Gnosticism dressed in Indian clothes and treating their popularity as a symptom rather than a solution. So the influence is not one of allegiance. It is an influence of environment, of sources, and of vocabulary. Three channels are well documented.

1. The Theosophical translators, above all G. R. S. Mead. Mead had been Blavatsky's private secretary and later led the Theosophical Society's Gnostic and Hermetic publishing. His Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1900), Thrice-Greatest Hermes (1906), and his edition of the Pistis Sophia were, for an educated reader in 1913, the main way into the Gnostic and Hermetic texts. Jung read them closely. When the Red Book turns Gnostic, most sharply in the Seven Sermons to the Dead of 1916, which Jung attributed to the Alexandrian teacher Basilides, the Gnosticism he is drawing on is the Gnosticism Mead had made available. Jung and Mead later corresponded and met. This is the strongest single strand in the arrow: not Blavatsky's doctrine, but the reading list her movement produced.

2. The Theosophical popularisation of Eastern ideas. Reincarnation, karma, the chakras, the idea of a hidden wisdom shared by all religions, the mandala as a diagram of the whole self: by 1913 these were in the air of every European city, and they were in the air because Theosophy had put them there. Jung took some of these forms seriously. His mandala painting in the Red Book, and later his seminars on Kundalini yoga and his commentary on a Chinese alchemical text, sit inside a European conversation that Blavatsky had started forty years earlier. Jung then set about reinterpreting the material psychologically, which is precisely the move Theosophy did not make.

3. The occult culture of Jung's youth. Before Freud, Jung's doctoral work was on a teenage medium in his own family, and his early reading included the spiritualist and psychical literature that Theosophy grew alongside. The Swiss psychologist Théodore Flournoy, whom Jung admired, had written a famous study of a medium whose trance material was steeped in Theosophical ideas. Jung learned from Flournoy to treat such productions as creative work of the subliminal mind rather than as messages from elsewhere. That method is exactly what he later applied to his own visions.

Where the influence stops

Jung took the sources and refused the metaphysics. Theosophy said the Masters are real, the planes are real, and the hidden doctrine is literally true. Jung said the figures are real as psychological facts, the layers are layers of the psyche, and the "hidden doctrine" is the recurring shape of the human mind, which is why it shows up in every tradition. Where Blavatsky offered a cosmology, Jung offered a map of the interior. That is the difference between a religion and a psychology, and Jung insisted on it for the rest of his life.

Whether that refusal succeeds is still argued. Critics from both directions say Jung smuggled a religion in through the back door by calling it science. Admirers say he rescued the material from the occultists. This map does not decide. It records that the Red Book period drew on Theosophical sources and vocabulary, and that Jung defined himself against Theosophical belief. That is what a dashed arrow means.

Why it matters on this map

Jung is the reason a great deal of modern spiritual language, "shadow," "archetype," "integration," "the inner journey," sounds psychological rather than religious. When a Tarot teacher today says the cards are archetypes, they are speaking Jung. When they say the Tower is your shadow, they are speaking Jung. Much of the current spiritual marketplace runs on Jung's vocabulary while quietly restoring the Theosophical metaphysics he had removed. Knowing where the vocabulary came from, and what its author actually meant by it, is the first step to noticing when that has happened.

Read next on this map

• Theosophy (Blavatsky, 1875): the environment
• Adyar Theosophy (Besant and Leadbeater): the machinery of Masters and planes Jung rejected
• Spiritualism (1848): the mediumistic culture of Jung's early work
• New Age vocabulary: where Jung's terms and Theosophy's metaphysics were recombined

Sources

• C. G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus, edited and introduced by Sonu Shamdasani (2009). The introduction covers Jung's reading and sources during the period.
• G. R. S. Mead, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1900); Thrice-Greatest Hermes (1906).
• C. G. Jung, Psychological Types (1921), for his early published assessment of Theosophy.
• Théodore Flournoy, From India to the Planet Mars (1900).
• Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture (1996), on Jung's place between esotericism and psychology.