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The publication of The Red Book has electrified the Jungian community. One of the interesting aspects of the emerging dialogue surrounding it’s release has been how the publication places Jung and his opus into a new vulnerability. The concern, that critics will claim Jung somehow lost his way into mere daydreaming and fantasy, that the strangeness of what unfolds in the pages will give detractors ammunition. At the heart of this concern is the clear reality that nearly a century after the experiences charted in The Red Book occurred, Western culture has if anything become more locked into extroverted attitudes.
There are two ways to view Jung’s decision to have the text placed in a bank vault for nearly fifty years. The first: that he was afraid it would be misunderstood. This seems unlikely for a man whose every move and formulation throughout his life was misunderstood. The second: Jung’s intuitive insights recognized that the book’s efficacy to bring about the transformation he devoted his life to shepherding would only occur at a time ripe for impact. If the second premise is accurate, this is that time.
So what readers of The Red Book might find useful from the stand point of context for the contents they engage within its pages are some pointers from fellow Eranos contributor Henry Corbin.
“As for the function of the mundus imaginalis and the Imaginal Forms, it is defined by their median and mediating situation between the intellectual and sensible worlds. On the one hand it immaterialises the Sensible Forms, on the other it “imaginalises” the Intellectual Forms to which it gives shape and dimension. The imaginal world creates symbols on the one hand from the Sensible Forms, on the other from the Intellectual Forms. It is this median situation which imposes on the imaginative faculty a discipline which would be unthinkable where it had been degraded into “fantasy,” secreting only the imaginary, the unreal, and capable of every kind of extravagance. Here there is the same total difference already recognised and clearly remarked by Paracelsus between the imaginatio vera (Imagination in the true sense) and “Phantasy.” Henry Corbin, Towards a Chart of the Imaginal, (prelude to the 5th addition of Spiritual Body & Celestial Earth From Mazdean Iran to Shi’ite Iran) pg. 2.
Thanks to Tom Cheetham for making Corbin’s interesting essay accessible. An embedded copy of the entire essay is provided below if you’d like to dig further. Of noted relevance are the references to the alchemical posture which Jung was clearly conscious of practicing.
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