Gallery

Images by C.G Jung

Image 54 in the RED BOOK was given a title by Jung – Brahmanaspati, a Vedic deity presiding over prayer and the text of the Veda.  This mythical reference further supports the theme of deep meditation. (3) Brahmanaspati was also identified with Agni, the god of fire and with a deity of vegetation. The image is accompanied by the following incantation: “Amen, you are the lord of the beginning.
Amen, you are the star of the East. Amen, you are the flower that blooms over everything. Amen, you are the deer that breaks out of the forest. Amen, you are the song that sounds far over the water. Amen, you are the beginning and the end.”

----------------------------------------------------

This image is part of a sequence which symbolically depicts the regeneration of Izdubar. The entire sequence depicts the rebirth of God in Jung’s soul, and represents a renewal of life and vitality. In the Rig Veda, hiranyagarbha was the primal seed from which Brahma was born. In Jung’s copy of vol. 32 of the Sacred Books of the East (Vedic Hymns) the only section that is cut is the opening one, a hymn: “To the Unknown God.” This begins “In the beginning there arose the Golden Child (Hiranyagarbha): as soon as born, he alone was the lord of all that is. He established the earth and this heaven: – Who is the God to whom we shall offer sacrifice?” (p.1).

In Jung’s copy of the Upanishads in the Sacred Books of the East, there is a piece of paper inserted near page 311 of the Maitrâyana-Brâhmana-Upanishad, a passage describing the Self, which begins, “And the same Self is also called…Hiranyagarbha” (vol. 15, pt. 2)

INSCRIPTION TRANSLATION : “hiranyagarbha.”

TRANSLATION OF IMAGE TEXT :“Come to us, we who are willing from our own will. Come to us, we who understand you from our own spirit. Come to us, we who will warm you at our own fire. Come to use, we who will heal you with our own at. …” Come to us, we who will produce you out of our own body. Come, child, to father and mother.”

----------------------------------------------------

"And, furthermore, you know what people say about snakebite—that you’ll only talk about it with your fellow victims: only they will understand the pain and forgive you for all the things it made you do. Well, something much more painful than a snake has bitten me in my most sensitive part—I mean my heart, or my soul, or whatever you want to call it, which has been struck and bitten by philosophy, whose grip on young and eager souls is much more vicious than a viper’s and makes them do the most amazing things. Now, all you people here, Phaedrus, Agathon, Eryximachus, Pausanias, Aristodemus, Aristophanes—I need not mention Socrates himself—and all the rest, have all shared in the madness, the Bacchic frenzy of philosophy. And that’s why you will hear the rest of my story; you will understand and forgive both what I did then and what I say now."
- Plato, The Symposium

“The spirit of the depths took my understanding and all my knowledge and placed them at the service of the inexplicable and the paradoxical. He robbed me of speech and writing for everything that was not in his service, namely the melting together of sense and nonsense, which produces the supreme meaning.”
- C.G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus