Introduction
For most of the twentieth century the most talked-about unpublished book in psychology stayed in the Jung family’s keeping, for its last quarter-century in a Swiss bank vault. It was a large volume bound in red leather, written in a medieval hand and painted with visions, and almost nobody had read it. Carl Jung had called the years that produced it “the most important time of my life,” and added: “Everything else is to be derived from this.”
In 2009 the family relented and W. W. Norton published it in full. The book is Liber Novus, the New Book, known as the Red Book. Behind it sit the Black Books, the notebooks where Jung first wrote down what he saw, published in 2020. Together they show a psychiatrist in his late thirties losing his footing, going looking for his soul on purpose, and coming back with the ideas he would spend the rest of his life working out. One of those ideas became the eight functions behind the sixteen types.
The break
Jung was a pastor’s son. His father served in the Swiss Reformed Church, and eight of his uncles were parsons too. As a boy he could never bring himself to feel what he was supposed to feel about the creed, and he spent his career looking for the religious experience that the creed had not given him.
By 1912 he was the best-known man in Freud’s circle and its heir apparent. Then he wrote Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, which read the unconscious as more than repressed sexuality. He knew the risk and went ahead, “and it did indeed cost me Freud’s friendship,” he wrote in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. “After the break with Freud, all my friends and acquaintances dropped away.” He was dismissed as “a mystic, and that settled the matter.”
In October 1913, alone on a journey, he had a waking vision. “I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps.” He saw “the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood.” Two weeks later it came again, and an inner voice told him: “Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so.” He feared he was going mad. Ten months later the First World War broke out, and he came to read the visions as foresight.
The experiment
That winter Jung did something few psychiatrists would risk. He let his fantasies run on purpose and wrote down whatever came, sitting with the images and talking to the figures in them as if they were real. He later called the method active imagination. He called the whole period, from 1912 to 1918, his “confrontation with the unconscious.”
The record went into a run of notebooks with black covers, the Black Books. The Philemon Foundation, which published them, is careful about what they are: “not personal diaries, but rather the records of a self-experimentation.” Jung noted very little of his outward life in them. The dialogues, its editors write, “can be regarded as a form of thinking in a dramatic form.”
CaseThe killing of Siegfried
On 18 December 1913 Jung dreamed he was in the mountains before dawn with a brown-skinned stranger. “I heard Siegfried’s horn sounding over the mountains and I knew that we had to kill him.” The hero came down the slope in a chariot made of the bones of the dead, and they shot him.
In the dream he fled, “filled with disgust and remorse for having destroyed something so great and beautiful.” The meaning came to him slowly. Siegfried, he decided, stood for “what the Germans want to achieve, heroically to impose their will, have their own way,” and Jung had wanted the same for himself. “The dream showed that the attitude embodied by Siegfried, the hero, no longer suited me. Therefore it had to be killed.” Less than eight months later Germany marched.
The book
When the war came, Jung began turning the notebooks into a book. He copied out the main fantasies, added a layer of commentary, and over the following years copied the whole thing again in an ornate Gothic script into a large folio bound in red leather. He gave it historiated initials, ornamental borders and full-page paintings, on the model of a medieval illuminated manuscript. He worked on it for sixteen years.
The book has two parts, Liber Primus and Liber Secundus, followed by the Scrutinies. Its theme, in the words of the edition, is how Jung regains his soul and overcomes the spiritual sickness of his age, “through enabling the rebirth of a new image of God in his soul.” It opens with two voices. The spirit of this time is the spirit of use and value, which had run Jung’s life up to then. The spirit of the depths leads to the things of the soul. Where the first tells him that the image of God he has glimpsed “is you and only you,” the second answers: “You are an image of the unending world.”
NoteThe facsimile in numbers
Norton released the facsimile on 7 October 2009, edited by Sonu Shamdasani and translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck and Shamdasani. It reproduces 205 pages of the original: 53 are full-page images, 71 mix text and images, and 81 are calligraphy alone. The printed volume measures about 15.4 by 11.6 inches and listed at $250. By December 2009 it had reached No. 18 on the New York Times extended list for hardcover nonfiction, and by the following summer it had been reprinted six times. A text-only Reader’s Edition followed in 2012.
The figures
The book is a series of meetings. Some of the figures came from scripture, some from myth, and one from nowhere Jung could name.
FigureElijah and Salome
Early on, Jung descends in imagination and finds an old man with a white beard and a young girl. “The old man explained that he was Elijah, and that gave me a shock. But the girl staggered me even more, for she called herself Salome! She was blind.” A black serpent lived with them. The prophet of the one God beside the girl who asked for John the Baptist’s head was a pairing Jung could not explain away, and Elijah assured him the two had belonged together from all eternity.
FigurePhilemon
Out of the Elijah figure came another, who became Jung’s teacher. “Philemon was a pagan and brought with him an Egypto-Hellenistic atmosphere with a Gnostic coloration.” Jung painted him as an old man with the wings of a kingfisher. Philemon taught him that thoughts are like animals in a forest, with lives of their own, and that the psyche holds things a person does not make. The foundation that publishes Jung’s unpublished work is named after him.
FigureIzdubar
In Liber Secundus Jung meets Izdubar, the old reading of the name Gilgamesh, a giant from the dawn of the world on his way west to the land where the sun goes down to be reborn. Jung tells him there is no such land. He comes from a country “where there is proven science,” and its scholars have measured how far away the sun is. Izdubar collapses. “Your magical poison is stronger than the army of Tiamat,” he says, and Jung has to admit that what the giant calls poison is science. To save him Jung makes him small enough to carry, and in the chapters called “The Incantations” and “The Opening of the Egg” the god comes back to life. Science had wounded the old god and only the imagination could heal him.
FigureThe two spirits
Shamdasani has pointed out that the two spirits match a split Jung described in his own childhood, between the boy at school and an older, timeless figure inside him that he called “personality No. 2.” The spirit of this time is the first. The spirit of the depths is the second, and the whole book is the second getting its say.
The gods and the one God
The strangest text from these years is not in the Red Book proper. In 1916 Jung wrote the Seven Sermons to the Dead, Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, and had them privately printed under the name of a second-century Gnostic teacher, “Basilides in Alexandria, the City where the East toucheth the West.” In the Red Book manuscript the speaker is Philemon. Aniela Jaffé, who edited Jung’s memoirs, called the attribution “a deliberate game of mystification.”
The Sermons are a Gnostic creation myth, and much of them is frankly polytheist. Above the god of light and the devil stands a third, “a god above god,” whose name is Abraxas. “It is more indefinite still than god and devil.” The Fourth Sermon is blunter: “the gods are many, whilst men are few,” and “Numberless gods await the human state.” Shamdasani reads Abraxas as the God newly born in Jung’s soul, a union of the Christian God with Satan, a change in the Western image of God that Jung would only argue in public in Answer to Job in 1952. (The English is H. G. Baynes’s translation of 1925.)
But the Sermons do not end with the many. The Seventh Sermon turns inward and finds, at an immeasurable distance, “one single Star in the zenith. This is the one god of this one man.” It is a god to pray to: “To this one god man shall pray.” And the last word sets him against the old gods: “Between man and his one god there standeth nothing, so long as man can turn away his eyes from the flaming spectacle of Abraxas.”
That is the drift of the whole book. It starts in a crowd of gods, demons, prophets and heroes, and it ends, as the edition puts it, with “the rebirth of a new image of God” in a single soul. Jung’s one God is not the God of Elijah. It is found inside, it is half unknown, and it keeps company with Abraxas. Still, the pastor’s son who could not believe what he was told came out of the Red Book with something he could not do without. When the BBC’s John Freeman asked him in 1959 whether he believed in God, he paused for a long time. “I don’t need to believe. I know.”
What came out of it
Nearly everything Jung is known for starts here. The Philemon Foundation lists the theories he developed through this confrontation as the archetypes, the collective unconscious and the process of individuation, and he reworked psychotherapy from treating the sick into a way of developing the whole person. Shamdasani put it in one line: the Red Book “is the nuclear reactor for all his works.”
Typology came out of it too. Jaffé notes in the memoirs that the period “came to an end with the publication of Psychologische Typen in 1921,” the book in which Jung set out the two attitudes and four functions. He had been testing the ideas in letters with the Swiss doctor Hans Schmid-Guisan in 1915 and 1916, in the middle of the confrontation. The eight functions of The Compass of the Mind were worked out by a man who was, at the same time, talking to Elijah and carrying a wounded god in an egg.
Out of the vault
Jung stopped working on the Red Book around 1930 and left it unfinished. In 1959, two years before he died, he added a short epilogue that guessed how it would look to a stranger: “To the superficial observer, it will appear like madness.” After his death his family kept it, eventually in a bank vault, and refused requests to publish. A few people saw it, and one well-known reader who did, Sara Corbett reported in 2009, concluded it was the work of a psychotic.
The family’s mind changed around 2000, after Shamdasani showed them that copies of parts of the text were already circulating and argued that the book was central to Jung’s work. Nine years of editing and translation followed. The original then went on show: at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York from October 2009, at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Library of Congress in 2010, and in 2013 at the opening of the Venice Biennale’s main exhibition, the first time it had been shown beside contemporary art.
The Black Books came out on 13 October 2020, in seven volumes and 1,648 pages, edited by Shamdasani and translated by Martin Liebscher, John Peck and Shamdasani. They cover 1913 to 1932. About half the text of the Red Book comes straight from them, lightly edited, and what Jung left out is as revealing as what he kept.
The sceptics
The years behind the Red Book have been read every way possible. Corbett, in the New York Times Magazine, listed the main readings: “a creative illness, a descent into the underworld, a bout with insanity, a narcissistic self-deification, a transcendence, a midlife breakdown and an inner disturbance mirroring the upheaval of World War I.”
The phrase “creative illness” belongs to the historian Henri Ellenberger, who used it in The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970) for a crisis that leaves its sufferer with a new idea. The harder charge is that Jung was psychotic in these years. Against that stands how he lived through them: he kept seeing patients, kept his family, served in the army, and wrote everything down with the care of someone running an experiment and checking his results. The notebooks read as method more than collapse, and Jung himself expected the madness charge and answered it in advance.
The fiercest critic was the American psychologist Richard Noll, whose books The Jung Cult (1994) and The Aryan Christ (1997) cast Jung as a self-made prophet founding a sun-worshipping cult and accused him of borrowing or bending his evidence. Noll wrote before the Red Book and the Black Books could be read. Now that they can, the record shows a man who was frightened by what he found, tried hard to understand it, and kept most of it private for the rest of his life. That is an odd way to found a cult.
Works consulted
- Corbett, Sara. “The Holy Grail of the Unconscious.” New York Times Magazine, 16 September 2009.
- Ellenberger, Henri F. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books, 1970.
- Hammer Museum. “The Red Book of C. G. Jung: Creation of a New Cosmology.” 2010.
- Jung, C. G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé, translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Pantheon, 1963. Includes “Septem Sermones ad Mortuos,” translated by H. G. Baynes (1925).
- Jung, C. G. The Red Book: Liber Novus. Edited by Sonu Shamdasani, translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck and Sonu Shamdasani. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009. Reader’s Edition, 2012.
- Jung, C. G. The Black Books 1913 to 1932: Notebooks of Transformation. Edited by Sonu Shamdasani, translated by Martin Liebscher, John Peck and Sonu Shamdasani. 7 vols. New York: W. W. Norton, 2020.
- Jung, C. G. Interview with John Freeman. Face to Face, BBC, broadcast 22 October 1959.
- La Biennale di Venezia. “Il Palazzo Enciclopedico,” 55th International Art Exhibition, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, 1 June to 24 November 2013.
- Library of Congress. “The Red Book of Carl G. Jung: Its Origins and Influence,” exhibition, 2010, and Library of Congress Information Bulletin, July and August 2010.
- Noll, Richard. The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
- Noll, Richard. The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung. New York: Random House, 1997.
- Philemon Foundation. “Liber Novus” and “The Black Books 1913 to 1932,” consulted 6 October 2026.