Last month, the NYT Magazine cover-featured an article about Carl Jung‘s infamous Red Book, or, as the Times called it, The Holy Grail of the Unconscious:
This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say ‘Liber Novus,’ which is Latin for ‘New Book.’ Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn?｢どｨび｢t know the book?｢どｨび｢s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.
And yet between the book?｢どｨび｢s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure—taking place entirely in his head—he finds it again.
Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book—what it is, what it means—is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.
Well, on December 17th, Jung’s “confrontation with the unconscious” will finally be made available to everyone. Its written contents served as a Rosetta stone of sorts for much of Jung’s later theories, but the book’s visual components (sample above) might prove to be equally revelatory.
As The Guardian reports, “The book is a remarkable blend of calligraphy and art; an illuminated manuscript that bears comparison with The Book of Kells and William Blake.” Jung himself chats about death, and what might happen beyond that endpoint, in the clip below:
In The Guardian: An Early Look At Jung’s Red Book
