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Becca Tarnas
Re-Enchanting the Academy
September 26, 2015
The Synchronicity of the Two ‘Red Books’:
Jung, Tolkien, and the Imaginal Realm
“To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation. . . . The task is to
give birth to the old in a new time.”
– C.G. Jung, The Red Book1
“Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode,
because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a
Maker.”
– J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories”2
I’ve chosen to begin today with these two quotes from Jung and Tolkien because
they serve as bookends to my presentation. This conference is dedicated to exploring the
depths of imagination and the power of enchantment, reviving them as ways of knowing
in an academic paradigm that, for the most part, assumes the universe is devoid of
meaning and purpose. Both Jung and Tolkien have significant roles to play in this venture
in their own right. Yet today I’d like to share with you a synchronistic parallel between
the works of these two luminaries, one that perhaps has profound implications for how
we understand the role of imagination in our world.
Let me first introduce you to Jung’s Red Book (Slide 3). In his late thirties, the
depth psychologist Carl Jung began to have profound visionary experiences, powerful
Fantasies, expressions of what he called “active imagination.” He inscribed these visions
in a large book written in black and red letters, accompanied by rich illustrations, bound
1
C.G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus, ed. Sonu Shamdasani, trans. Mark Kyburz, et al. (New York, NY: W.W.
Norton & Company, 2009), 311.
2
J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories” in The Monsters and the Critics, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London, England:
HarperCollins Publishers, 2006), 145.
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by two covers of red leather. This book has been called the Liber Novus, or simply The
Red Book.
On the other hand we have J.R.R. Tolkien’s Red Book of Westmarch. Tolkien set
out to write a mythology—in his words “a body of more or less connected legend,”3
cosmogonic myths and romantic tales whose “cycles,” Tolkien said, “should be linked to
a majestic whole.”4 This mythology eventually took the form of The Hobbit, The Lord of
the Rings, and The Silmarillion. But within the world of the mythology itself these tales
have been written out in a book that’s been passed on from generation to generation: a
large book inscribed in black and red letters, accompanied by rich illustrations, bound by
two covers of red leather. Tolkien presents himself simply as the translator of this work.
The book is referred to as The Red Book of Westmarch.
At first glance the parallel names of Jung’s and Tolkien’s respective Red Books
just seem an odd coincidence. The books couldn’t actually share anything in common.
(Slide 4) On the one hand we have Jung, one of the founders of depth psychology, an
explorer of the unconscious, of the archetypal realm, the phenomenon of synchronicity, a
Swiss man born in 1875. On the other hand we have Tolkien, firmly English, a
philologist, eventually the famous author of The Lord of the Rings, one of the founders of
the fantasy literature genre, a younger man born in 1892. At first glance there seems to be
little common ground between the two men, let alone between their work.
I came to Jung’s Red Book already with a strong background in Tolkien studies,
having been an avid explorer of Middle-Earth since age nine. When I first encountered
3
J.R.R. Tolkien, qtd. in Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 2000), 97.
4
Tolkien, qtd. in Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, 98.
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Jung’s Red Book I felt like I was looking through a book from Tolkien’s world. The style
of calligraphy, the ornamented letters, even the illustrations felt similar. A certain
resonance seemed to be between the two bodies of work, a convergence of images—a
synchronicity, in Jung’s terminology—a synchronicity of imagination.
The first parallel that stood out was one of timing. Jung began his “Red Book
period”—the time of his psychological descent when the fantasy images came to him in
waking life—in 1913. At the same time Tolkien began making an unusual series of
illustrations in a sketchbook he called The Book of Ishness. Virtually simultaneously,
both men took an unusual turn in their lives. They turned away from the outer images, the
world of common day, and focused instead upon the inner images of the imagination.
Jung’s Red Book period is considered to have spanned the years 1913-1930,5 but the
primary content of his visions came to him from late 1913 through around 1917.6
Most of the sketches in Tolkien’s Book of Ishness were done over a shorter period
of time: from December 1911 through the summer of 1913 he made his “Earliest
Ishnesses,”7 but he continued to add illustrations to The Book of Ishness up until 1928—
almost the exact same years as Jung’s Red Book period.8 Alongside the visionary
drawings another form of creativity was emerging through Tolkien as well: the arts of
language. Tolkien was trying his hand at writing poetry and prose not only in English, but
in languages of his own invention. Tolkien recorded the first mythic stories set in Middle-
5
6
7
Ulrich Hoerni, “Preface,” in Jung, The Red Book, VIII.
Jung, The Red Book, 200.
Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist & Illustrator (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 2000), 40.
8
Hammond and Scull, J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist & Illustrator, 50.
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Earth in September 1914.9 Although the primary creative periods for both Jung and
Tolkien were during these potent years of the 1910s, they each spent the next forty years
of their lives developing the material they encountered during that time.10
One of the earliest visions that came to both Jung and Tolkien was of major
significance to each of them: an overpowering Flood, or as Tolkien sometimes called it,
the Great Wave. The first of Jung’s Flood visions came to him while awake, in October
1913. To quote Jung’s words:
In October, while I was alone on a journey, I was suddenly seized by an
overpowering vision: I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern
and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. . . . I saw the
mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned
bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood.11
Two weeks later Jung had the vision again, this time accompanied by a voice saying,
“Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so. You cannot doubt it.”12
An uncannily similar vision came repeatedly to Tolkien, in dreams and while
awake.13 He called the vision his “Atlantis-haunting.” In Tolkien’s words:
This legend or myth or dim memory of some ancient history has always
troubled me. In sleep I had the dreadful dream of the ineluctable Wave,
either coming out of the quiet sea, or coming in towering over the green
inlands. It still occurs occasionally, though now exorcized by writing
about it. It always ends by surrender, and I wake gasping out of deep
water.14
9
Hammond and Scull, J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist & Illustrator, 19.
10
Lance Owens, “Tolkien, Jung, and the Imagination,” interview with Miguel Conner, AeonBytes Gnostic Radio, April
2011, http://gnosis.org/audio/Tolkien-Interview-with-Owens.mp3.
11
C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York, NY:
Vintage Books, 1989), 175.
12
Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 175.
13
14
Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, 31.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter, with Christopher Tolkien (New York, NY:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000), 347.
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When World War I broke out in August 1914, Jung recognized that his vision of the
destructive Flood was prophetic of the war; his interior images were reflective of the
external political and cultural situation in Europe. The outbreak of war indicated to Jung
that he wasn’t, as he’d been afraid, going mad, but was rather inwardly mirroring the
madness unfolding in the external world. Tolkien fought in that same war. Needless to
say, the war had a tremendous effect upon Tolkien, particularly the Battle of the Somme
in which two of his closest friends were killed.15
The next vision that came to Jung, and the first he inscribed in The Red Book,
marked the beginning of what he called his “confrontation with the unconscious.”16 I’m
going to quote at length so you can experience Jung’s vision through his own words:
I was sitting at my desk once more, thinking over my fears. Then I let
myself drop. Suddenly it was as though the ground literally gave way
beneath my feet, and I plunged down into dark depths. . . . After a while
my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, which was rather like a deep
twilight. Before me was the entrance to a dark cave, in which stood a
dwarf with a leathery skin, as if he were mummified. I squeezed past him
through the narrow entrance and waded knee deep through icy water to the
other end of the cave where, on a projecting rock, I saw a glowing red
crystal. I grasped the stone, lifted it, and discovered a hollow underneath.
At first I could make out nothing, but then I saw that there was running
water. . . a gigantic black scarab and then . . . a red, newborn sun, rising
up out of the depths of the water.17
This vision contains many symbolic images. But for this particular study, I want to draw
our attention to the numerous parallel images in Tolkien’s works of the many
underworld, underground journeys that take place in Middle-Earth: the dark journey
through the lost Dwarf realm Moria where Gandalf is lost in a battle with Shadow and
15
Lance Owens, “Lecture I: The Discovery of Faërie,” in J.R.R. Tolkien: An Imaginative Life, (Salt Lake City, UT:
Westminster College, 2009), http://gnosis.org/tolkien/lecture1/index.html.
16
Hoerni, “Preface,” in Jung, The Red Book, VIII.
17
Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 179.
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Flame; Frodo and Sam’s fearful passage through the midnight tunnel of the monstrous
spider Shelob, who resembles the giant scarab Jung describes; Aragorn and the Grey
Company’s journey through the Paths of the Dead, where they encounter a host of the
dead, a parallel to Jung’s engagement with the host of the Dead deeper into The Red
Book; Bilbo’s encounter with the dragon Smaug in the dark halls of Erebor, the Lonely
Mountain; and Bilbo’s fateful encounter with the twisted creature Gollum, whose lair is
deep within a mountain cavern, upon a little island rock set within the icy waters of a
subterranean lake. Upon that rock, like the red crystal of Jung’s vision, lay long-hid the
One Ring, the Ring of Power made by the Dark Lord Sauron. In both stories the heart of
the narrative begins here, upon this island rock, where a lost treasure of unknown power
is hid, waiting for a new hand to grasp it.
As Jung was having these early fantasies, Tolkien was creating the visionary
drawings in the Book of Ishness. Two particularly stand out in correlation to Jung’s
vision. The first is titled simply Before, which you can see here (Slide 5). Lance Owens
describes Before as “primitive, quick, a statement of the deep dream world.”18 Verlyn
Flieger also comments on the sketch, saying that “The title Before conveys the dual
notions of ‘standing in front of’ and ‘awaiting,’ or ‘anticipating.’”19
This second sketch seems intended to directly follow Before (Slide 6): you can
see a solitary figure walking out of a doorway of the same shape as in the previous
drawing. This drawing is titled Afterwards. The coloring greatly contrasts the stark red
and black of Before, but also conveys a sense of darkness and gloom. Yet it’s less
18
19
Owens, “Lecture I: The Discovery of Faërie.”
Verlyn Flieger, A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press,
1997), 260, n. 2.
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foreboding than the previous drawing. Both images appear to symbolize crossing a
threshold, entering an underworld imaginal realm.
Perhaps the most striking of all the Ishnesses is this one, titled End of the World
(Slide 7). You can see here a small figure stepping off a cliff by the sea. The Sun is
shining brightly down onto the scene, white stars shine within the water itself, a crescent
Moon bends across the horizon. Yes, the image of a man stepping off a cliff, and the title
End of the World, seem somber, even depressing. But they convey a dual meaning: this is
not only the “end of the world,” referring to its demise, or the death of this man, but it’s
the “end of the world,” the edge of the world. He’s reached the edge and wants to
continue his journey. One could see End of the World as a symbol of the threshold
Tolkien crossed at this time—the doorway to the imaginal, into what he called the realm
of Faërie.
Here are a few more images from Tolkien’s Book of Ishness to give you a fuller
sense of his visions: Wickedness, Eeriness, Thought, Undertenishness. (Slides 8, 9, 10,
11).
Let’s return to Jung’s Red Book. There are many significant parallels between the
style and content of the artwork created by Jung and Tolkien. They both painted multiple
dragons, symbols of the archetypal monster to be confronted in the heart of the
underworld (Slides 12, 13). Another recurring image is the archetypal Tree: the World
Tree or the Tree of Tales. Tolkien “regularly” drew what he called the Tree of Amalion,
which resembles this tree in Jung’s Red Book (Slides 14, 15, 16).20 Here are several other
examples of their tree illustrations.
20
Hammond and Scull, J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist & Illustrator, 64.
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There are other parallels I won’t take the time to unpack today: Philemon and
Gandalf, Númenor and the numinous, the Great Wave and the Great Flood, the Anima
and the Queen of Faery, the host of the Dead, numerous mandalas—symbol of the Self
archetype (Slides 17, 18, 19, 20).
A pair of images I found particularly striking were these (Slide 21): on the left is
one of Tolkien’s many illustrations of the evil Eye of Sauron, on the right is an
illuminated letter from one of the pages of Jung’s Red Book.
Perhaps one of the most profound areas in which Jung’s and Tolkien’s visions,
and respective world views, overlap is around the nature of evil. They both had a deep
understanding of the nature of evil. They could address its presence in the world, show
the importance of confronting it on behalf of personal and collective transformation.
Within The Lord of the Rings, the clearest view we are given of the Dark Lord is his great
Eye, in Tolkien’s words: “an image of malice and hatred made visible . . the Eye of
Sauron the Terrible [that] few could endure.”21 Amazingly, Jung also has a description in
The Red Book correlating to Tolkien’s Eye of Sauron:
Nothing is more valuable to the evil one than his eye, since only through
his eye can emptiness seize gleaming fullness. Because the emptiness
lacks fullness, it craves fullness and its shining power. And it drinks it in
by means of its eye, which is able to grasp the beauty and unsullied
radiance of fullness. . . . It sees the most beautiful and wants to devour it in
order to spoil it.22
The single eye that symbolizes evil is an eye that looks only outward; it doesn’t look
inward, or self-reflect. The eye as symbol of evil cautions against the refusal to look deep
into one’s innermost self, to face the Shadow within. Looking only outward one becomes
21
22
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001), 280-1.
Jung, The Red Book, 289.
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subsumed by that Shadow, blind to it from within. Indeed, both Jung and Tolkien even
used the term Shadow to refer to this darkness that must be faced and reflected upon.
What do the parallels of the Red Books intimate? Both men seem to have entered
a different realm, whether we call it Faërie, the creative collective unconscious, or
Imagination. They seem to have been walking parallel paths in that realm. I have come to
believe that Imagination is a place that is both inner and outer. Imagination is not merely
a human capacity, a function of the mind or the workings of the brain. It’s a place that
can be accessed through human capacity, through creativity, but Imagination extends far
beyond human capacity as well. It’s a world as infinite as the physical one in which we
daily dwell.
Jung advised each person to make their own Red Book from the Fantasies that
arise through the practice of active imagination. Return to your Red Book like you would
to a sanctuary or cathedral, for your soul is within its pages.23 Tolkien’s Red Book is The
Lord of the Rings. It’s a text treated by many as a sacred text, returned to year after year,
or read aloud with loved ones. Why is that? The Lord of the Rings, like Jung’s Red Book,
is an invitation to enter the realm of Imagination. It’s an invitation to find our own stories
and learn to tell them. Jung captures succinctly and elegantly what his and Tolkien’s Red
Books are inviting us each to do. He writes, “What was most essential was not
interpreting or understanding the fantasies, but experiencing them.”24
23
24
Jung, The Red Book, 216.
Ibid, 217.
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Bibliography
Carpenter, Humphrey. J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000.
Flieger, Verlyn. A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie. Kent, OH: The Kent State University
Press, 1997.
Hammond, Wayne G. and Christina Scull. J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist & Illustrator. New York, NY: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 2000.
Jung, C.G. “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious.” In Collected Works. Vol. 9, i. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1959.
–––––. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Edited by Aniela Jaffé. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston.
New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1989.
–––––. The Red Book: Liber Novus. Edited by Sonu Shamdasani. Translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck,
and Sonu Shamdasani. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009.
Owens, Lance. “Lecture I: The Discovery of Faërie.” In J.R.R. Tolkien: An Imaginative Life. Salt Lake
City, UT: Westminster College, 2009. http://gnosis.org/tolkien/lecture1/index.html.
–––––. “Tolkien, Jung, and the Imagination.” Interview with Miguel Conner. AeonBytes Gnostic Radio,
April 2011. http://gnosis.org/audio/Tolkien-Interview-with-Owens.mp3.
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New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000.
–––––. The Lord of the Rings. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994.
–––––. “On Fairy-Stories.” In The Monsters and the Critics. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London,
England: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006.
–––––. The Silmarillion. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001.
–––––. “Smith of Wootton Major.” In Tales from the Perilous Realm. London, England:
HarperCollinsPublishers, 2002.