not every mutual fits neatly into an archetypal medievalism but there are some mutuals that im like yeah addressing you as “my liege” would come strangely naturally
Continuing my commentary on The Red Book by Carl Jung. See Liber Primus, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
Buckle up, because you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. We’ve got a lot to get through. This book is going to steadily get weirder and more mystical, and as it does, we get more and more amazing artwork. Liber Primus was pretty light on the artwork. I’m eager to introduce you to Jung’s art, because it’s truly spectacular.
The Images of the Erring
Liber Secundus begins with Bible quotes from Jeremiah 23:
“Hearken not unto the words of the prophets that prophesy unto you: they make you vain: they speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the Lord.
[…]I have heard what the prophets said, that prophesy lies in my name, saying, I have dreamed, I have dreamed. How long shall this be in the heart of the prophets that prophesy lies? Yea, they are prophets of the deceit of their own heart; Which think to cause my people to forget my name by their dreams which they tell every man to his neighbour, as their fathers have forgotten my name for Baal. The prophet that hath a dream, let him tell a dream; and he that hath my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat? saith the Lord.”
I’m still not sure I understand this. I understand the quote itself: “Don’t listen to the people who claim their UPG is the authentic Word of God,” but why did Jung choose to make this the epigraph for Liber Secundus? Is Jung calling himself a false prophet, because he’s reporting his dreams? I suppose he isn’t preaching to anybody—this is a private journal—so is he reminding himself to trust more in his own revelations than those of others? I found an article here that discusses the quote in Jung’s context, and suggests that Jung is trying to distinguish between the conflicting voices of the Spirit of the Times and the Sprit of the Depths, but neither are mentioned in Liber Secundus. So, I’m still a bit lost. One thing I’ll note is that a major theme of the first half of Liber Secundus is the tension between Christianity and paganism within Jung’s own mind, something that he finds difficult to reconcile.
The illuminated multiline initial is a letter “D” painted against a background that looks like layers of bedrock beneath water. The rock has deep fissures running through it. The footnotes specify that Jung himself described “fragmentation” as a running theme in paintings done by schizophrenics, who depict the splintering of their own minds through fracture lines. I have no idea if that’s true or not, but the fact that Jung associates fragmentation in his own art with schizophrenia is what matters here. (Most of Jung’s art is not disturbing, but it is weird and clearly mystical in nature. We’ll get there. You literally see him improve as an artist as this book goes along.) Inside the “D” are twining red and blue tendrils that look like a vein and artery, or maybe even a DNA strand. (The twining red and blue represented Elijah and Salome before, but neither of them appears in this book, either.) On the other side, flowers bloom. In the middle is a striking red eye. The Eye of Providence?
The Red One
After the last vision, Jung has been shut out of the Mysterium. He is a guardsman standing on a castle turret, dressed in green. This is what’s depicted in the multiline initial:
Jung again appears as a darker-skinned man with shoulder-length black hair. I’m not sure why he chooses to depict himself this way in his art, but then again, I don’t appear the way I actually look in my mindscape, either.
A horseman dressed all in red comes to the castle. Jung’s immediate thought is that the man in red is the Devil, and the man in red calls him out on it. Jung thinks there’s something pagan about him. His mannerisms are too “worldly,” “impudent,” and “exuberant” for him to be a Christian. The man in red tells him that he hit the nail on the head. Jung determines that the man is too contemporary, too “of the times” to be a true pre-Christian person: “You’re no real pagan, but the kind of pagan who runs alongside our Christian religion.” Ouch, that hit me kinda hard. He’s not wrong, though. Neopagans who are raised within Christianity grow up with Christian mindsets, not with the set of cultural assumptions that they would have if they were raised in a pagan context. Jung, too, is operating from a primarily Christian viewpoint, despite the amount of very pagan imagery he experiences and depicts.
The man in red congratulates Jung for figuring out more than the average person, but also criticizes him for taking scripture too literally. What follows is a dialogue in which Jung asserts that every person should experience Christian mysteries, and the man in red retorts that Jung is too solemn and sullen for his own good. “Why so serious?” He is somewhat amused by Jung’s insistence on literal-minded solemnity. As he talks, his clothes get redder: “…his garments shine like glowing iron.”
Jung insists that he has been banished to “this place and time” (the medieval-style castle? the contemporary twentieth century? idk) by a magic spell, that he is not actually what he appears to be. I’m not really sure how to interpret that. Does that only apply to this vision of Jung as a guardsman, or to this fantasy-universe in general? Is this why Jung looks different in his art? If not, then what is he really? My intuition is telling me that it’s only applicable to this particular context.
What follows is a philosophical dialogue in which Jung and The Red One debate the merits of Christianity, and each accuse the other of being stuck in his own little world and unable to accept any other viewpoints. Jung (or at least, his dream-self) argues with the fervor of a born-again evangelical that receiving the Christian sacrament and accepting Christ into your heart is necessary for spiritual development: “…it’s hardly a coincidence that the whole world has become Christian.” From my perspective, it doesn’t feel like Jung’s authentic views. It feels more like Jung is arguing with himself about whether Christianity is the only possible path towards enlightenment. I think that maybe he’s starting to realize that it’s not—that it is, in fact, limiting (as he said in his commentary on madness in Liber Primus). But he has to get past his conditioning first, and that means arguing with the Devil. Sort of.
The Red One isn’t exactly the Devil. He tells Jung, “Life doesn’t require any seriousness. On the contrary, it’s better to dance through life.” That sounds like something that Dionysus would tell me.
Jung says that he already knows how to dance, and interprets dance either as a mating call or as an act of worship, dancing for God. The Red One is taken aback by this, because now Jung is meeting him on his own turf instead of commenting on something that he can easily mock. The red of his clothes becomes “tender reddish flesh-color,” and Jung’s own green clothes suddenly burst into leaves. He tells Jung that dance can represent a secret third thing.
The Red One finally reveals his identity: “Don’t you recognize me, brother, I am joy!”
Joy. The Red One is joy? Honestly, I find that fascinating in and of itself. I associate Dionysus with joy, partly because that’s one of his domains and also because that is the specific thing he arrived in my life to teach me. Joy is hard, especially when you’ve been raised in an environment that prioritizes seriousness and/or suffering. Joy — and dance, which is an expression of joy — requires slackening the rules that you use to constrain your behavior, and that can be scary and vulnerable. From the perspective of Christianity, or some strains of it at any rate, joy appears devilish. So of course, Jung assumes that The Red One is the Devil. Or rather, he is not the Devil, but Jung’s own devil.
Surely, this red one was the devil, but my devil. […] that strange joy of the world that comes unsuspected like a warm southerly wind with swelling fragrant blossoms and the ease of living. You know it from your poets, this seriousness, when they expectantly look towards what happens in the depths, sought out first of all by the devil because of their springlike joy. It picks up men like a wave and drives them forth. Whoever tastes this joy forgets himself. And there is nothing sweeter than forgetting oneself.
There’s a lot I could say about the association between the Devil and hedonism, but I’ll save that for my separate project on the Devil (which is still in the works). For now, I’ll just say that this idea of living in the world and enjoying it for what it is, i.e. being “worldly,” isn’t anathema to mysticism. You don’t have to be an isolated monk in a desert. You can be the artist, driven by an unstoppable emotional tide, sent into dreams by figurative opiates.
I earnestly confronted my devil and behaved with him as with a real person. This I learned in the Mysterium: to take seriously every unknown wanderer who personally inhabits the inner world, since they are real because they are effectual.
Yeah, that’s basically how this works. That’s how I interact with all of my internal people, be they spirits or gods or characters or somewhere in between. Take them all seriously. It doesn’t matter whether they’re “real” or not.
Jung explains that one should take the Devil seriously. I interpreted this in terms of Shadow work, of course, but this isn’t Shadow work (we’ll get there). Nothing Shadow-related has been triggered here. Right now, Jung is primarily concerned with religious reconciliation.
What I said about dancing struck him because I spoke about something that belonged in his own domain. He fails to take seriously only what concerns others because that is the peculiarity of all devils. In such a manner, I arrive at his seriousness, and with this we reach common ground where understanding is possible. The devil is convinced that dancing is neither lust nor madness, but an expression of joy, which is something proper to neither one nor the other. In this I agree with the devil. Therefore he humanizes himself before my eyes. But I turn green like a tree in spring.
If the The Red One is playing “devil’s advocate,” then in hearing him out and finding one point on which they agree, Jung is able to reconcile the argument. Or rather, he just turned it back on The Red One — now Jung is the interrogator, insisting that dance can exist for the sake of something (sex or religion) and not for its own sake (joy). When that happens, he becomes covered in leaves. I immediately thought of the Green Man, even though the Green Man is an architectural motif and not a god. I saw the leaves as a sign that Jung just became more pagan. He gets some of the Devil’s joy, and the Devil gets some of his seriousness.
Jung addresses the ramifications of the Devil being joy, since he still insists on interpreting The Red One as the Devil. He writes that it took him a week to determine what it might mean if the Devil is joy, and decided that because joy is “the most supreme flowering and greening of life,” because it is destabilizing and full of fiery passion, it must therefore be devilish. And that because joy is fleeting, you cannot make a pact with joy, or with the Devil. If you feel too much joy, “then you arrive at pleasure and from pleasure go straight to Hell, your own particular Hell, which turns out differently for everyone.” Well, I would say that’s straight-up wrong.
It’s ultimately Jung’s interpretation that matters here, because this is all his UPG; it feels presumptuous to say “your interpretation of your own private visions and your personal symbols is wrong,” but nonetheless, I still feel like he’s missing the point here. The Red One all but says that he is not the Devil: “What sort of superstitious fellow are you, that immediately you think of the Devil?” He shouldn’t be trying to bend over backwards to associate joy with evil, he should be realizing that joy is not associated with evil. All I can say is that this whole first section feels… well… spiritually immature in comparison to what comes later. It’s not pleasure that ultimately sends Jung to Hell. Nothing so droll as that.
The Castle in the Forest
The next night, Jung finds himself wandering in a dark forest. and comes to a small castle in the middle of a swamp. (I’m instantly reminded of Sir Gawain finding Lord Bertilak’s castle in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.) The multiline initial shows a picture of the castle:
He knocks and asks for lodging, and is brought up into a white hall that is lined with black chests and wardrobes. From there, he’s led into a study, in which an old man in a black robe is sitting at a desk. The professor tells Jung to wait to be shown to a room, but is so absentminded that he forgets why Jung is waiting, and briefly scolds him for lingering. He apologizes, and calls a servant who brings Jung to a room. The bed is uncomfortable.
Jung admires the old man’s solitude with only his books for company, but concludes that he must have a beautiful daughter who is also living somewhere in the castle. He lambasts himself for the clicheness of this idea:
…a vulgar idea for a novel – an insipid, worn-out theme—but the romantic can be felt in every limb—a real novelistic idea—a castle in a forest—solitary night—an old man petrified in his books, protecting a costly treasure and enviously hiding it from all the world—what ridiculous thoughts come to me! Is it Hell or purgatory that I must also contrive such childish dreams on my wanderings? But I feel impotent to elevate my thoughts to something a bit stronger or more beautiful. I suppose I must allow these thoughts to come. What good would it do to push them away—they will come again—better to swallow this stale drink than keep it in my mouth. So what does this boring heroine look like? Surely blonde, pale—blue eyes—hoping longingly that every lost wanderer is her savior from the paternal prison—Oh, I know this hackneyed nonsense—I’d rather sleep—why the devil must I plague myself with such empty fantasies?
I totally relate to this feeling. I shut down so many ideas that I could potentially use because they feel too cliché. I expect brilliant originality to spring fully-formed from my brain, and that’s just not a thing that typically happens. I feel validated that Jung goes through this same thought process. His sarcasm is also hilarious: “Oh, what do you bet she’s got blond hair and blue eyes and sings ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’? Figures.” That’s exactly how I think! Nice to know that Jung is also Genre Savvy—that always helps in these kinds of Otherworld-journeys. However, clichés are usually cliché for a reason, one I suspect has something to do with archetypes.
Jung still can’t sleep, and sure enough, the girl comes to him. Jung’s response to the tropiness of the story he’s in is to conclude that he’s in Hell: “I am truly in Hell—the worst awakening after death, to be resurrected in a lending library!” The girl is offended that he thinks she’s cliché, or “common.” Jung can’t bear it because it seems banal and ridiculous, and we know from Liber Primus that these are his triggers. He wants to be “high-minded,” and melodramatic pulp fiction is not high-minded. Jung asks if the girl is real or if she’s just a hallucination brought on by insomnia, because nothing this dumb could ever be actually real, and the girl starts crying. At this, Jung starts to pity her and puts his Genre Savvy quips aside. He asks her who she is, and she gives him the tropey answer beat-for-beat: Her father keeps her locked in the castle because he loves her and doesn’t want anything to happen to her, because she looks like her mother and her mother died young. Jung feels like figuratively banging his head into a wall. He asks the Gods (plural!) why they’ve stuck him in the middle of such a trite story. But ultimately, his pity wins out, and he comforts the girl. She comments that his reaction is finally a humane one.
Sure enough, she’s beautiful, otherworldly, and pure. She’s a person who hasn’t ever had to deal with the grittiness and cumbersome materiality of reality. Jung is still put-off by how fairy-tale like she is, and she says this:
“Be reasonable, dear friend, and do not stumble now over the fabulous, since the fairy tale is the great mother of the novel, and has even more universal validity than the most-avidly read novel of your time. And you know that what has been on everyone’s lips for millennia, though repeated endlessly, still comes nearest the ultimate human truth. So do not let the fabulous come between us.”
And thus, a million Jungian analyses of fairy tales were born!
Clichés are cliché for a reason. There’s a lot of tropes that show up over and over again in fiction because they’re inherently resonant for audiences. The more often a particular trope shows up in stories from across cultures, the more “universal validity” it has. Certain folkloric motifs are seemingly ingrained in the human psyche: Most cultures have a variant of the Cinderella story, for example. The trope of a special (usually male) child persecuted by a powerful authority figure seems extremely common, too. And damsels in distress, kept in towers by strict parents to protect their virtue? Well, that one’s probably not Older Than Dirt, but it’s certainly popular. There has to be something inherently significant about these stories, right? Somewhere behind all the stories and symbols is the truth.
Jung asks the girl how to seek divinity. He thinks that divinity cannot be banal, that it must be by nature uncommon and only found in the minds of great philosophers. She explains that the more uncommon the truths are, the less they resonate and the less meaningful they are. The more universal an idea is, the more people it resonates for, the more likely it is that it comes from the divine. She tells him, “Only what is human and what you call banal and hackneyed contains the wisdom that you seek.”
Now, at this point I’ve had enough bad experiences with psychoanalysis of storytelling to know that attempting to determine why these tropes are universal is… wishy-washy. I sat through The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim, which attempted to explain every fairy tale in terms of the Oedipal Complex. (Because that’s a universal experience!) I really want to believe Jung that certain kinds of stories or tropes are inherent to humanity, but I also remember what happened the last time I tried to prove that. We run up against the same problem: The same symbols can mean different things to different people, and the same exact story or structure can be interpreted in drastically different ways. Any “psychological” explanation we might come up with for what a story “means” is not going to be as universally applicable as the story itself. Luckily, though, we don’t need to do that right now. All that matters in this instance is what this story means to Jung personally. Jung’s own mind is telling him to seek divine wisdom in old stories that have been constantly told and retold.
Jung decides that he loves the girl, because she has given him so much to ponder philosophically, and therefore she must be uncommon. She can’t be a cliché damsel in distress if she’s spouting philosophical postulates about the nature of divinity and storytelling, right? Then she hits him with a gut-punch: “I bring you greetings from Salome.” Ooooh! Then she promptly disappears, leaving red roses in her wake.
Just as Jung couldn’t accept that Salome and Elijah were the same being, Jung also can’t accept that this girl is significant and potentially divine because she is a common trope. He has to resolve that cognitive dissonance by insisting that her philosophical nature makes her unique, and therefore worth his time. Then the kicker: “BTW, Salome says hi.” It feels like she lifted her mask for a moment there. This situation isn’t actually any different, it just has a different aesthetic. Salome, and all of the feelings of confusion and terror that she evoked in Jung, is still figuratively lurking in the background. If we’re keeping to pulp fiction tropes, then it feels like one of those moments when a strange woman that the hero is kinda into suddenly gives him a snide quip that reminds him that the villain is watching.
Jung begins his commentary on this dream with an eloquent explanation of why this work is necessary:
The part that you take over from the devil — joy, that is — leads you into adventure. In this way you will find your lower as well as your upper limits. It is necessary for you to know your limits. If you do not know them, you run into the artificial barriers of your imagination and the expectations of your fellow men. But your life will not take kindly to being hemmed in by artificial barriers. Life wants to jump over such barriers and you will fall out with yourself. These barriers are not your real limits, but arbitrary limitations that do unnecessary violence to you. Therefore try to find your real limits. One never knows them in advance, but one sees and understands them only when one reaches them. And this happens to you only if you have balance. Without balance you transgress your limits without noticing what has happened to you. You achieve balance, however, only if you nurture your opposite. But that is hateful to you in your innermost core, because it is not heroic.
I like this association of joy with adventure. Maybe that’s why I love fantasy stories so much. And I completely agree with his point about knowing your limits. So much of this work — Shadow work especially, but really all of it — is about knowing your limits. Fantasy allows you to explore the edges of them without fear of consequence, and that tells you a lot about yourself. If you won’t push past a certain point, why not? Is it a matter of principle? Is it a trigger? Is it a limit you really should be able to transcend, but for a psychological block caused by some external influence? I’m reminded of hard and soft limits in BDSM. Hard limits are limits that you won’t break, for any reason, while soft limits can be pushed. Knowing what those boundaries are gives you a place to play without fear of hurting yourself (or your partner). BDSM is actually a great metaphor here, because it brings you into contact with your absolute darkest desires and impulses in a way that is 1. safe, 2. fun, and 3. potentially fulfilling. But to do that, you have to get past all of that shame and other crap that stands in the way, the “artificial barriers,” and that is not easy.
Shame does “unnecessary violence to you.” Oh, hell yes, it does. I can’t even tell you how many unnecessary barriers I have that are a result of my own preconceived notions of how the world works, or how I fear other people will react to me. I think we all have those. Find your real limits, not the ones society says you should have! How do you do that? You “nurture your opposite.” One of the things I learned about Shadows through my own experience is that “we are all our own inverses”— your Shadow is you, but with all of your values flipped, and therefore expresses the opposite of whoever you try to be in public. There’s a reason why most villains think that they’re doing the right thing — they think they’re heroes, and transgress their limits without noticing. They say you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain, but how many young heroes ask themselves what they would look like as villains? I thought myself the hero with impenetrable moral principles (still do, actually), so my Shadow appears as a stereotypical Dark Lord. Of course he does.
That’s my example. Here’s Jung’s own example:
My spirit reflected on everything rare and uncommon, it pried its way into unfound possibilities, toward paths that lead into the hidden, towards lights that shine in the night. And as my spirit did this, everything ordinary in me suffered harm without my noticing it, and it began to hanker after life, since I did not live it. Hence this adventure I was smitten by the romantic. The romantic is a step backward. To reach the way, one must also take a few steps backward.
Because Jung is attached to the idea of seeming unique and high-minded, and desperately doesn’t want to be called banal or romantic, he neglects the part of him that already is ordinary or a hopeless romantic. So it suffers, and begins to take over. Shadow is whatever part of yourself you don’t want to be associated with.
Actually, maybe it’s not Shadow that we’re dealing with here. (Shadow usually requires katabasis, and we haven’t cycled back to that yet.) Back in Part One, I went on a tangent to describe the anima/animus archetype, and how I thought it didn’t age as well as the Shadow. I said that the anima/animus was progressive for its time, but seems gender-essentialist and heteronormative by modern standards. I should have just waited to comment on it, because everything I said there is properly addressed here:
What about masculinity? Do you know how much femininity man lacks for completeness? Do you know how much masculinity woman lacks for completeness? You seek the feminine in women and the masculine in men. And thus there are always only men and women. But where are people? You, man, should not seek the feminine in women, but seek and recognize it in yourself, as you possess it from the beginning. It pleases you, however, to play at manliness, because it travels on a well-worn track. You, woman, should not seek the masculine in men, but assume the masculine in yourself, since you possess it from the beginning. But it amuses you and is easy to play at femininity, consequently man despises you because he despises his femininity. But humankind is masculine and feminine, not just man or woman. You can hardly say of your soul what sex it is. But if you pay close attention, you will see that the masculine man has a feminine soul, and the feminine woman has a masculine soul. The more manly you are, the more remote from you is what woman really is, since the feminine in yourself is alien and contemptuous.
[…]
You will not behave towards women per se as a man, but as a human being, that is to say, as if you were of the same sex as her. You will recall your femininity. It may seem to you then as if you were unmanly, stupid, and feminine so to speak. But you must accept the ridiculous, otherwise you will suffer distress, and there will come a time, when you are least observant, when it will suddenly round on you and make you ridiculous. It is bitter for the most masculine man to accept his femininity, since it appears ridiculous to him, powerless and tawdry.
I KNEW IT! The anima/animus only appears to reinforce the gender binary because it was filtered through the Zeitgeist of the early twentieth century — what it really does is smash the gender binary to bits. This whole paragraph absolutely eviscerates toxic masculinity. And toxic femininity, too! It criticizes men and women both for essentially trying to turn themselves into archetypes of masculinity and femininity, and seeking those archetypes in their romantic partners, instead of just being people. People aren’t Masculine or Feminine, they’re just people, and everyone is some degree of both. If you repress that “opposite-sex” side of yourself though, and end up projecting it onto your romantic partner, then you’ll fall in love with that idealized archetype of Manhood or Womanhood instead of with the actual person. (Lookin’ at you, Robert Graves…) I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you what a disaster that is. This is the kind of crap that results in men and women’s tendency to treat each other like separate species.
Also, it’s nice to get some confirmation on the assumption I made in my Liber Primus analysis — my own internal male figure, Astor, is not just my Shadow, he’s actually my soul. Jung, a man, has a female soul, so I, a woman, have a male soul. (Or maybe we’re both just nonbinary, idk.) My Astor is relatively effeminate, but the more stereotypically “masculine” aspects of him are the ones that disturb me the most — desire for dominance and control, violent conqueror-king impulses, aggressive and predatory sexuality. Astor at his most masculine is also Astor at his most terrifying. Therefore, I still have some issues around masculinity to work through. Maybe Jung feels similarly about Salome.
Yes, it [accepting your inner femininity/masculinity] seems to you like enslavement. You are a slave of what you need in your soul. The most masculine man needs women, and he is consequently their slave. Become a woman yourself, and you will be saved from slavery to woman. You are abandoned without mercy to woman so long as you cannot fend off mockery with all your masculinity. It is good for you once to put on women’s clothes: people will laugh at you, but through becoming a woman you attain freedom from women their tyranny. This acceptance of femininity leads to completion. The same is valid for a woman who accepts her masculinity.
Jung the Psychotherapist’s official recommendation is that men do drag to get over their fear of femininity and of appearing ridiculous. I love Jung! He was so ahead of his time!
I must be nonbinary, because apparently I have both an animus and an anima to work through. The idea of being “enslaved” to women is a major trigger for me, so I relate to what Jung says here. To beat my “nightmare woman,” I need to become a woman myself. But I already am a woman. So, maybe defeating her means working on my external self, instead of on Astor.
Therefore, because I rise above gendered masculinity and yet do not exceed the human, the feminine that is contemptible to me transforms itself into a meaningful being. This is the most difficult thing – to be beyond the gendered and yet remain within the human.
[…]
You may go past the gendered for human reasons, and never for the sake of a general rule that remains the same in the most diverse situations, and therefore never has a perfect validity for each single situation.
“To be beyond the gendered and yet remain within the human” is a great line, and sort of encompasses the point of the entire discussion around gender politics. You heard it here first, folks: Carl Jung says that gender is fake!
I almost feel a little bit misled by everything Jung wrote about the anima/animus in Aion, and what Marie Louise von Franz wrote about it in Man and His Symbols. The way it’s made to sound, the anima and animus archetypes are like these ultimate, borderline-divine gender stereotypes. They're the "Divine Masculine" and the "Divine Feminine." The anima is characterized by femininity as it was understood in the twentieth century, and always appears as a sexy temptress in the man’s mind, while the animus is characterized by masculinity as it was understood in the twentieth century, and appears as the woman’s father or a priest ordering her to be chaste. Ew. Men are logical and women are emotional, so the anima is the emotional part of the man and the animus is the logical part of the woman, etc. But it’s not actually like that! The anima/animus is supposed to be a way of transcending the gender binary and just being human! And the archetypes are malleable, never exactly the same for each individual person, so they aren’t this divine standard of gender stereotypes.
There’s a little more commentary in here about the setting of the dream, and the relationship of the dreamer to the internal and external world. Everyone lives in two worlds, and neglecting either one is a bad idea. The old scholar whose castle it is believes that he can shut out the external world, but “has thrown himself away in the books and thoughts of others.” Scholars aren’t actually all that great, Jung reasons, because they beg for validation, and end up looking stupid. “They are offended if their name is not mentioned, cast down if another one says the same thing in a better way, irreconcilable if someone alters their views in the least. […] The soul demands your folly, not your wisdom.” If you believe that you have to always be right all the time, then no one is going to take you seriously.
There’s also some commentary on the nature of Hell, and how your own personal Hell is always made up of the things you dissociate from yourself:
Everything odious and disgusting is your own particular Hell. How can it be otherwise? Every other Hell was at least worth seeing or full of fun. But that is never Hell. Your Hell is made up of all the things that you always ejected from your sanctuary with a curse and a kick of the foot. When you step into your own Hell, never think that you come like one suffering in beauty, or as a proud pariah, but you come like a stupid and curious fool and gaze in wonder at the scraps that have fallen from your table.
You really want to rage, but you see at the same time how well rage suits you. Your hellish absurdity stretches for miles. Good for you if you can swear! You will find that profanity is lifesaving. Thus if you go through Hell, you should not forget to give due attention to whatever crosses your path. Quietly look into everything that excites your contempt or rage; thereby you accomplish the miracle that I experienced with the pale maiden. You give soul to the soulless, and thereby it can come to something out of horrible nothingness. Thus you will redeem your other into life. Your values want to draw you away from what you presently are, to get you ahead of and beyond yourself. Your being, however, pulls you to the bottom like lead. You cannot at the same time live both, since both exclude each other. But on the way you can life both. Therefore the way redeems you. You cannot at the same time be on the mountain and in the valley, but your way leads you from mountain to valley and from valley to mountain. Much begins amusingly and leads into the dark. Hell has levels.
If Hell seems like it’s fun to you — an eternity’s worth of sex, drugs, and rock & roll — then it’s not Hell. Hell is whatever you personally consider to be the worst thing ever, no matter how it may appear to anyone else. Hell might appear as Fluffy Cloud Heaven with a bunch of rosy-cheeked angels playing harps and singing hymns of praise to God and otherwise populated by crazy fundamentalists. You’re in the Bad Place!
The way to notice your Shadow, to notice the things you don’t want to be associated with, is to pay attention to whatever makes you angry or defensive for seemingly no reason. Whoever it is you really are at your core is never going to align perfectly with your values and your lofty ideals, because those are too high a standard for you to reach anyway. So you might as well accept all the parts of yourself that fail to meet that standard, and make peace with them.
Jeez, I’ve already written all that, and we’re still just getting started…
Something nobody prepares you for is that the better you get at writing the harder it becomes. beginners write freely because they don't know enough to know what's wrong. then you learn. and suddenly you can see every single flaw in real time as you're making it and you have to write anyway while your own brain is in the corner going "that's a weak verb. that transition is lazy. you've used that word three times." getting good at this is mostly just getting better at ignoring yourself.
I think it’s hilarious how Count Dracula is romanticised by mainstream media, especially considering that the entire team, EXCLUDING DRACULA, is a massive polycule. That man was the group pervert AT BEST.
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