Back from Jerusalem

Who asks for blood

The first ghost in Western literature does not ask to be remembered. He asks to be buried.

In the eleventh book of the Odyssey Ulysses digs the trench, pours the libations, cuts the throats of a ewe and a ram, and the blood draws the souls in their thousands. The first to come forward is Elpenor, the companion who on Aeaea had fallen asleep drunk on the roof of Circe’s house and at dawn, as he got up, had fallen and broken his neck; in the haste of departure no one had buried him. Elpenor asks for no news of home, asks nothing of the future, utters no prophecy. He asks for a burial and the mourning owed to him. Ulysses promises, and on his return to Aeaea he keeps his word.

In the twenty-third book of the Iliad Patroclus appears to Achilles in a dream and demands the same thing: the funeral rites, without which he cannot cross the threshold; and further, that the bones of the two of them should rest together when the time comes. Achilles sends his men to cut the wood, builds the pyre, and prays to the winds to make it catch.

They are two creditors. They present a bill, the bill is collectable, and it is paid. Ritual is the currency of this bookkeeping, and the currency has a precise metal: in the Odyssey the dead drink before they speak, and Ulysses must hold them off with his sword so that Tiresias may drink first — even his mother Anticleia waits her turn. Blood is what gives voice back to those who no longer have one. It is the price of the conversation.

This structure has a property that escapes notice because it is too obvious: it can be settled. The ancient dead can be satisfied. Their demand is finite, formulable, dischargeable by a living person who has wood, animals and time. No one in the epic asks the living to understand something. They ask them to do something.

What follows is an archetypal reading, and I declare it as such: an interpretation of texts, not a finding about the nature of the dead nor a diagnosis of the man who met them. But the text it rests on has a precision I have not found elsewhere, because it is the text in which that structure is explicitly refused.

The shadows at the door

The third part of Carl Gustav Jung’s Liber novus is entitled Scrutinies. Jung never transcribed it into the calligraphic volume bound in red leather, and for that reason it remained unknown until 2009, when the heirs allowed the work to be published in the edition prepared by Sonu Shamdasani — in Italian Il Libro rosso. Liber novus, edizione studio, Bollati Boringhieri, translated by Giovanni Sorge, Maria Anna Massimello and Giulio Schiavoni; the passages quoted here are rendered from that Italian text, not from Jung’s German. It is in these pages, and almost only in these, that the dead appear as speaking interlocutors.

At a certain point Jung addresses them thus: «silent shadows standing at my door and asking for my blood». The reflex is erudite and instantaneous. A man raised on Greek, who had just spent years on Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, sees shadows at his own door and spontaneously offers the Homeric contract: the trench, the libation, the price of the conversation. No other gesture occurs to him, because no other gesture is codified.

A few dozen pages later, the dead come back — and correct him.

«We are coming back from Jerusalem, where we did not find what we were seeking», they cry in chorus. «We beg you to let us in. You have what we desire. Not your blood, but your light. Exactly that!»

That «exactly that» has the tone of someone correcting a misunderstanding. It is not a theological refinement: it is the refusal of a payment offered in the wrong currency. Between Homer and 1916 something in the contract has broken, and the text stages the rupture as an error of the living man, not as a novelty on the part of the dead.

There is more, and it comes earlier. In the same Scrutinies, in a long dialogue preceding the Jerusalem scene, a dead woman tells Jung that great is the need of the dead, and in the same breath that God requires no sacrificial offerings. Ritual is declared ineffective by the dead themselves, and it is so declared before the pilgrimage to Jerusalem is ever recounted. Anyone who knows what follows understands that this is an announcement.

The refusal

For the dead to come back from Jerusalem, they must have gone there. The departure is in Liber secundus, chapter fifteen, «Nox secunda», on folio one hundred and one of the calligraphic volume. Shamdasani dates it to a fantasy of 17 January 1914: two years earlier.

The scene begins with a roar and a whirring of wings, like a flock of large birds pouring into the room. Many human figures rush past, and out of the murmur Jung makes out the request to be allowed to pray in the Temple. He asks where they are running. A bearded man, with tousled hair and eyes giving off a dark gleam, stops and turns: «We are bound for Jerusalem, to pray at the Holy Sepulchre».

Jung asks to be taken along, and is told that he cannot: he has a body, and they are dead. There follows a short and extraordinarily orderly interrogation, in which the living man asks the questions and the dead man answers. His name is Ezekiel, he is an Anabaptist, and those he wanders with are his brothers in the faith. Why do they wander? They can never stop: they must make pilgrimage to every holy place. What drives them to it? He does not know. But they cannot find peace, although they died in the true faith.

Here the dialogue opens out, and it is worth the whole essay. Why do you find no peace, Jung asks, if you died in the true faith? And the dead man: «I always have the impression that we did not manage to live our lives well». It is as if they had forgotten something important, which ought also to have been lived.

Jung, intrigued, asks what. «And that would be...?»

And the dead man answers: «Do you know?»

This is the reversal. Until that moment the scene had obeyed the convention: the living man investigates, the dead man testifies. In three words the relation inverts, and the ghost stops being a source and becomes a claimant. He asks for no wood and no animals. He asks for a content. And, according to the text, he seizes Jung with a greedy and disquieting manner, his eyes lit with an inward ardour.

Jung’s answer is not an answer: «Leave me, demon, you have not lived the animal that is in you!» He turns back on the dead man the accusation the dead man had made against himself, translates it into a specific deficiency, and with the word «demon» closes the question by way of exorcism. Then the scene collapses. The cook holds him by the arms and asks whether he feels ill; strangers rush into the room; among them the librarian, who produces a sly smile and calls the police. Jung is bundled into a carriage, and notes coldly that the journey evidently leads to the asylum.

There the short, plump professor asks him what book he is holding. It is the Imitation of Christ. Diagnosis: religious paranoia — and that book, the professor adds, leads straight to the madhouse. Does he hear voices? Indeed: that day a troop of Anabaptists was making a racket in the kitchen.

And here the text does something that ruins any indulgent reading. In the carriage, between the two policemen, Jung opens the book he is clutching and his eye falls on the thirteenth chapter, where it is written that without temptations we could not exist. He thanks wise Thomas, who always knows how to find the fitting answer, and adds that the mad Anabaptist perhaps did not know this: otherwise he might have ended his days in peace. Then he presses the point, in Latin, with Cicero: satiety of all things produces satiety of life, and satiety of life brings the ripe time of death.

That is: he had the answer. It is exactly the answer the dead man was asking for — you have not had your fill, and that is why you cannot die — and Jung formulates it a few minutes after refusing it, inside a book, in a dead language, addressing it to a man who is no longer there. It was not ignorance. It was refusal.

It must be said precisely what we are reading: a literary self-portrait, not a clinical fact. Jung writes a fantasy in which a character diagnoses the narrator, and he writes it with the ear of someone who worked at the Burghölzli and knows how a report is drawn up. The apparatus, however, records a detail no reader could have known before 2009: in an earlier draft Jung had written, of himself, «paranoid form of dementia praecox», and in revision he softened it. He filled out for himself the file he would have signed as a physician, and then toned down his own signature.

Hold on to the sequence, because it is the key: in the scene in which he refuses to answer the dead, the man ends up committed.

Saturday, Sunday

Two years pass, and the theme is no longer private. In the middle of the European carnage the return of the dead is collective matter: Shamdasani recalls Abel Gance’s J’accuse, and the fact that the slaughter rekindled interest in spiritualism throughout the West. The séances, the tables, the mediums. What happens in the house at Küsnacht happens inside a mass phenomenon, and this must be said before recounting it, so as not to take it for an isolated marvel.

The notes to the critical edition date the voices day by day. A dark host knocks at Jung’s door on 29 January 1916. Philemon appears on the 30th. The second instruction bears the date of the 31st.

Forty-five years later, in the memoir compiled by Aniela Jaffé — Ricordi, sogni, riflessioni, Rizzoli, translated by Guido Russo from the English edition and then revised against the German text of Rascher of Zurich — Jung recounts the same week. His nine-year-old son, who normally never drew, asks his mother for coloured pencils and draws his own nightmare — he calls it «The Fisherman’s Picture» — and does so, Jung writes, «on a Saturday morning». The next day, «on the Sunday, towards five in the afternoon», the front-door bell began to ring wildly.

29 January 1916 was a Saturday. The 30th was a Sunday. The weekly grid survives intact across forty-five years, in a man who is dictating his memories and does not have the diaries to hand.

The season, however, does not. «It was a bright summer day», Jung writes of the day of the doorbell. And this is not an inflection of the translator, an objection that would be legitimate given a version made from the English: that rendering was revised against the German text, and the summer survived the revision. A summer day does indeed appear in the Scrutinies, but at the fifteenth section, dated 1 June 1916: four months later. That memory contaminated January with June is a conjecture of mine and I leave it as such. The verifiable fact is more interesting than the conjecture: the memoir on which the whole episode rests gets the season of the night it recounts wrong, and does not get the days of the week wrong. It should be added, in fairness, that the alignment has a margin of play, because the apparitions seen by the daughters precede the Saturday of the drawing: the solid datum is the structure, not the individual night.

The drawing is documented twice, and the two versions do not entirely coincide. In the memoir: a river, a fisherman with a rod who has caught a fish, on the fisherman’s head a chimney out of which come flames and smoke, from the far bank the devil flying in and cursing because his fish has been stolen, and above the fisherman an angel who answers the devil that he can do nothing about it, because that fisherman takes only the bad fish. In the epistolary account which Cary de Angulo, later Baynes, addressed to Jung in 1923 on the basis of his own telling, the decisive particular appears: the fisherman was himself, as Jung confirmed to her, and the child did not know it.

Then the doorbell. Jung was sitting not far away, and not only heard it ring: he saw it move. Everyone ran to the door, and there was no one there. They looked at one another; the atmosphere was heavy. The house seemed to him crammed with spirits, crowding right up to the door, and the air was such that one could breathe only with difficulty. The question he found himself formulating — «For God’s sake, what in the world is this?» — is neither a prayer nor an invocation: it is the only question a man of science can still utter when the categories have given way. The answer came in chorus, and these are the opening lines of the Septem sermones.

As soon as he took up the pen, the crowd vanished. Three evenings only, and he had written everything. The invasion was over.

The mechanism is explained by him, and it is worth reporting because it is more sober than the legend would have it. Shortly before, he had noted a fantasy in which his own soul had flown away from him. The soul, he observes, is what establishes the relation with the unconscious; the unconscious corresponds to the mythic land of the dead, the land of the ancestors; a soul withdrawn there works like a medium and makes it possible for the dead to manifest themselves. It is not an ontology: it is a model. And on this point the diary of 1916 confirms the memoir of 1961, because in the Scrutinies, immediately before the host knocks at the door, the soul has ceased to make itself heard and seen. Whatever one may think of the substance, the internal consistency of the record is not in question.

And on the same page, in a single paragraph, there is the retraction — together with its opposite. The episode, he writes, was without doubt connected with the emotional state of that period, favourable to parapsychological phenomena: an unconscious constellation whose peculiar atmosphere he recognised as the numen of an archetype. Then, at once, the thrust: the intellect would naturally demand a scientific account of it, or would rather treat the whole business as a breach of the rules — but how sad the world would be if the rules were never broken. He holds both positions in three lines and does not resolve them. This is not indecision: it is the way a man protects an experience from his own discipline.

Seven questions

The Septem sermones ad mortuos are usually described as a Gnostic revelation: a prophet speaks, the dead listen. The text says something else. It is a dialogue in seven rounds, and each round is triggered by a different question.

The first is the request to enter, with the correction about the currency: not blood, light. Philemon answers by starting from nothingness, and nothingness and fullness are the same thing: the pleroma.

The second time the dead draw near, remain along the walls and shout: «We want to know about God. Where is God? Is God dead?». The Nietzschean formula is deliberate, and the apparatus refers to The Gay Science and to Zarathustra. It is worth recalling that Jung, twenty-two years later, in Psychology and Religion, would correct that pronouncement by turning it into a question: God has divested himself of the effigy we had conferred on him, and where shall we find him again? The question of the dead, in 1916, is already that one.

The third time they draw near like mists risen from a swamp and beg that more be said about the supreme God. The answer is Abraxas, the god difficult to know, whose power is the greatest precisely because man does not see him: from the Sun man draws the highest good, from the Devil the utmost evil, and from Abraxas life, indeterminate in every respect.

The fourth time they arrive early, grumbling, and invade the place cursing the one who instructs them, to be told about the gods and the devils. The fifth they mass together and demand in a mocking tone lessons on the Church and on communion, opening with an «Instruct us, fool». Note the insult. The dead are not devout, not grateful and not docile: they are a crowd that demands, and at a certain point it derides the one who answers it.

The sixth time they say nothing. They stand in silence, motionless, and look at Philemon, waiting. And Philemon speaks precisely because they are silent: it is the only instruction that answers not a formulated question but an expectation. At the end the dead stare at him and vanish in silence. Philemon bows to the ground and says that the work has succeeded, but has not yet come to completion.

He is right. They come back a seventh time, with lamenting gestures, because there is one thing they had forgotten to discuss: «Instruct us about man».

This is the arc, and I do not believe it can be accidental: to enter, God, the supreme God, the gods and the devils, the Church, silence, man. Seven rounds to travel from heaven to the creature that is speaking with them. And the seventh instruction begins by saying that man is a door, through which one passes from the outer world of gods, demons and souls into the inner world, from the greater to the lesser. They had knocked at a door. They had begged to be let in. In the end they are told that the door is man.

One word, before leaving the sermons: they are not sermons. The German has Belehrung, which the Italian editors correctly gloss as «ammaestramento» or «insegnamento», and the autograph subtitle reads «The seven instructions of the dead». The Latin ad mortuos fixes the direction; the German genitive, of itself, does not. In any case «sermon», which has entered the translations and the title by which the work is known, installs a pulpit where the original has a classroom. And the Liber primus contains a chapter entitled, precisely, «Instruction».

Four names

There remains the question of who is speaking, and the answer is that Jung did everything possible for it not to be himself. In the diary, Black Book number six, the voice that instructs the dead is his. In the transcription into the red volume it becomes Philemon. In the pamphlet he had privately printed in 1916 it becomes Basilides of Alexandria, «the city where the East touches the West»: a Gnostic who really existed, active in the first half of the second century, of whom almost nothing survives except fragments preserved, in order to refute them, by his heresiologists.

And there is a fourth screen, the finest. Beneath the title of the printed edition Jung added: «Translated from the Greek original into the German language». A translation of an original that never existed, attributed to a translator who does not exist, of an author whose works are lost. Shamdasani reads in it the stylistic influence of late-nineteenth-century learned classicism, and he is right. But it is also the exact gesture of a man who needs the text not to be his.

To Alphonse Maeder he explained it without circumlocution: he could not presume to put his own name first, and chose that of one of those great spirits of the early Christian age whom Christianity has erased. The little book, he added, had fallen into his lap all at once like a ripe fruit, under the pressure of a difficult period, and in dark days had kindled for him a light of hope and comfort. It deserves to be noted: the dead had asked him for light, and he declares that he received some.

It was never put on sale. It circulated as a gift, among a few friends and pupils. And here the archive supplies the particular that brings everything back to earth, and that no hagiography reports willingly: Jung recalled having composed the sermons at the time of the founding of the Psychological Club, and regarded them as a tribute to Edith Rockefeller McCormick for her generous donation. The text that answers the dead is also a thank-you to a benefactress. There is no contradiction: there is the ordinary double-entry bookkeeping of anyone who works.

Interpretation, declared as such: in order to answer he needed not to sign. A signature would have made those pages an opinion, contestable and his. A pseudonym makes them a transmission. Whoever answers the dead cannot present himself as an author, because an author answers for what he says and the dead are not asking for an opinion: they are asking that something be said.

It should be said, however, that this reading has a rival, and one that comes from closer at hand. Aniela Jaffé, introducing the sermons in the German edition of the memoir — a paragraph that does not exist in the Italian edition, since the two appendices were printed in German only — calls the identification with Basilides a playful and deliberate mystification. Hers too is an interpretation and not a transcript; but it comes from someone who was listening to him. The two readings do not exclude each other, and I suspect they should be held together: a man can play with a name and at the same moment need it. Play is the way certain serious things manage to get said.

The voices of the Unredeemed

The sentence for which this episode is known is the last: from then on the dead became for him, ever more clearly, the voices of the Inexplicable, the Unresolved, the Unredeemed.

The argument that precedes it, however, is more interesting than the sentence, and it is almost always reported the wrong way round. The apparatus of the Italian edition paraphrases it as an attribution: the questions came to him not from the surrounding world but from the dead. Jung writes something else. Since the questions his destiny required him to answer did not reach him from outside, they had to come to him from the inner world. It is an argument by elimination, not by attribution. He does not claim to have heard the dead: he observes that no living person was putting those questions to him, and draws the consequence. The whole difference lies there, and it is the difference between a seer and a man reasoning in an empty room.

And it is not the only shift. In the German edition — Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken, Rascher, Zurich 1962, p. 195 — the sentence runs thus: the dead became for him ever more clearly the voices «des Unbeantworteten, des Nicht-Gelösten und Nicht-Erlösten». And unbeantwortet does not mean inexplicable: it means unanswered. The first of the three names Jung gives the dead is, literally, that to which no one replied; the Italian rendering puts a quality of mystery in its place, and by shifting the defect from the living man who kept silent to the object that will not let itself be understood it strips the sentence of its addressee. The English apparatus of the Red Book translates unanswered, and agrees with the German. It is not a nuance. It is the difference between an enigma and a debt.

What astonished him, according to the same source, was that the dead did not seem to know more than they had known when dying. No wisdom acquired in the passage, no cognitive advantage. Hence their tendency to meddle in the affairs of the living; hence — and the notation is ethnographic, not metaphysical — the Chinese custom of communicating important family events to the spirits of the ancestors. The dead, according to a very live sensation of his, were waiting for the answers of the living.

The price is documented, and it is high. After Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, for three years he could not read a single scientific book: the material brought to light from the unconscious had, he says, left him without words. He resigned from the university, where he had taught since 1905 as a Privatdozent, choosing what he calls the «higher reason» over a career that lay easily open before him, because before completing the experiment he could not appear in public. Answering the dead cost him his teaching post.

And in the fantasy of 1914, the one in which he refuses to answer, the price had been paid in advance and in caricature: the policemen seated to right and left, the front door, the entrance hall, the report. The institution destroys him in imagination two years before he abandons it in fact. He who does not answer ends up committed; he who answers loses his post. No third outcome is provided for.

The arc closes by itself, and needs no help. In 1914 Ezekiel says it was as if they had forgotten something important, which ought also to have been lived. In 1961, at the end of the chapter, Jung writes that to fail to understand the images of the unconscious, or to evade moral responsibility towards them, means depriving existence of its wholeness and being condemned to a painfully fragmentary life.

It is the same proposition forty-seven years apart. The complaint of a dead man has become doctrine. Either Jung built his ethics on a sentence heard in a fantasy, or that sentence was already the ethics, arriving before its owner knew how to formulate it; and I see no way of deciding between the two hypotheses that does not consist in preferring one of them.

The question that remains, in any case, does not concern him. Our culture possesses a highly refined technique for the dead, and it is called commemoration: anniversaries, minutes of silence, plaques, centenaries, the flower laid down on the right day. It is the Homeric technique, and it is effective — with Elpenor. It does not work with those who come back from Jerusalem without having found, because they are not asking for a rite. On this premise James Hillman and Sonu Shamdasani built an entire book of dialogues, Lament of the Dead, published in 2013.

Whether they are the voices of the Unredeemed, or the unlived portion of a life, or the sum of the accounts that those who came before us did not settle, the archetypal reading offers a formula and cannot answer in our stead. It can only record that the question has been asked, and that it was not addressed to the dead.