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Liber XXX · Symbols · Chapter IV: Religious Symbols

Jung's Red Book (Liber Novus): History, Images and Meaning

C. G. Jung's Red Book (Liber Novus): his 1913–1930 visionary record, its figures and mandalas, its long seclusion and the 2009 facsimile, and what it means.

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The Red Book, or Liber Novus ("The New Book"), is the illuminated manuscript in which the Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung (1875–1961) recorded and elaborated the visions and inner dialogues he experienced from 1913 onward, during what he later called his "confrontation with the unconscious". Written in calligraphic script and illustrated with his own paintings, it was kept almost entirely private for nearly fifty years after his death until W. W. Norton published a full-colour facsimile with an English translation, edited by Sonu Shamdasani, in October 2009.

Origins: Jung's crisis after the break with Freud§

By 1912 Jung was the most prominent of Freud's followers, president of the International Psychoanalytic Association and the author of Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, a study of myth that strained their relationship. The two men broke decisively in 1913, and Jung resigned from the association and from his lectureship at Zurich soon afterwards. In October 1913, on a train journey, he experienced a waking vision of a monstrous flood covering Europe and turning to blood, which recurred, and which he later connected with the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914.

On 12 November 1913 he began to write down the fantasies that came to him in a series of small notebooks, now known as the Black Books. He deliberately allowed images and voices to arise and then engaged with them in conversation, a method he later called active imagination. Jung described the period in his late memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), assembled with Aniela Jaffé, as one of considerable inner danger, held in balance by his family life and his medical work. The notebooks themselves were published in a facsimile edition, again edited by Shamdasani, in 2020.

How the Red Book was made§

From the Black Books Jung composed a typed draft, adding commentary to each vision, and then, probably from 1915, began transcribing it into a large folio volume bound in red leather, which gave the book its familiar name. He titled it Liber Novus. Its pages imitate a medieval illuminated manuscript: the text is written in an ornate Gothic script, many chapters open with decorated initials, and full-page paintings alternate with pages of calligraphy. The paintings range from narrative scenes to abstract patterns and borrow freely from medieval, Islamic, Indian and early modern European art.

The work has three parts. Liber Primus and Liber Secundus were written into the folio; the third part, Scrutinies, remained in the draft and was printed from it in the 2009 edition. Jung continued to add images into the late 1920s and then stopped. A brief epilogue written in 1959 explains that he had abandoned the work when his encounter with alchemy, from around 1930, gave the material a new direction.

Figures and themes of Liber Novus§

The book opens by contrasting two powers: the "spirit of this time", which values usefulness and reason, and the "spirit of the depths", which leads Jung away from his scientific ambition and towards his neglected soul, whom he addresses directly. Much of the text consists of dramatic encounters in which Jung is confronted, mocked, instructed or tested.

Elijah, Salome and Philemon§

Among the earliest figures are the prophet Elijah and a blind Salome, an old man and a young woman whom Jung later interpreted as images of wise insight and of feeling or eros. Other episodes bring him into contact with a Red One who resembles the devil, an anchorite named Ammonius living in the desert, and Izdubar, a giant modelled on the Babylonian hero now called Gilgamesh, who is sickened by Jung's modern science. The most important guide is Philemon, a wise old man with the wings of a kingfisher, whom Jung painted several times and later described as a source of insights he could not have reached himself. In his later psychology such figures became examples of archetypes: the wise old man, the anima, the shadow.

The Seven Sermons to the Dead and Abraxas§

The Scrutinies include the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (Seven Sermons to the Dead), which Jung had privately printed in 1916 under the name of Basilides, the second-century Gnostic teacher of Alexandria. In them a voice instructs the restless dead about the pleroma, the fullness in which all opposites are contained, and about Abraxas, a god beyond good and evil whose name is taken from ancient gems and Gnostic sources. The sermons show how deeply Jung had been reading the Gnostic texts then available in German translation; for that background see What Is Gnosticism?.

Mandalas and the image of the self§

The paintings of the Red Book are among the earliest examples of what Jung later called mandalas, circular images organised around a centre. In 1916 he painted a cosmological diagram, the Systema Munditotius, which arranges the gods and powers of the Sermons in concentric zones. In 1918–1919, while serving as commandant of a camp for interned British soldiers at Château-d'Oex, he sketched a small circular drawing almost every day and noticed that each seemed to reflect his inner state.

In 1928 he painted a mandala in the form of a golden, walled castle, which struck him as Chinese in feeling. Shortly afterwards the sinologist Richard Wilhelm sent him the Taoist text The Secret of the Golden Flower, which appeared to describe a comparable centring process; Jung later said that this coincidence marked the beginning of the end of his work on the Red Book. The meeting of these images with Chinese inner alchemy is described in Taoist internal alchemy, and the mandalas of his patients and of the physicist Wolfgang Pauli became central to Psychology and Alchemy. Jung's notion that circular, quaternary images express a striving toward psychic wholeness is one of the most influential modern theories of religious symbolism, discussed further in Religious Symbols.

From family archive to the 2009 facsimile§

Jung showed the Red Book to a few colleagues and patients and discussed publication, but never released it. After his death in 1961 it remained with his heirs, who were wary of how it might be received; from the early 1980s it was kept in a bank vault in Zurich. Rumours about a secret book circulated among Jungians for decades, and short passages and images appeared in Memories, Dreams, Reflections and in a few studies.

In 2000 the family agreed to an edition, and the historian of psychology Sonu Shamdasani spent several years preparing it under the auspices of the Philemon Foundation. The Red Book: Liber Novus appeared in 2009 as an oversized volume reproducing every page in colour, with an English translation by Mark Kyburz, John Peck and Shamdasani, a long historical introduction and extensive notes. Its launch coincided with an exhibition of the original at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, and it became an unexpected bestseller. A smaller text-only Reader's Edition followed in 2012.

Interpreting the Red Book: psychology, prophecy and esotericism§

Shamdasani argues that the Red Book is the central document for understanding Jung, since the concepts of his mature psychology, including individuation, the archetypes and the self, were first worked out in its narratives before being expressed in scientific language. Jung himself said, in his memoir, that the years of the confrontation with the unconscious contained everything essential and that his later work was only an elaboration of it.

Readers differ on what kind of text it is. Some Jungian analysts, notably James Hillman in dialogue with Shamdasani, treat it as a work of psychology addressed to the modern loss of soul. Others read it as a religious or prophetic book, comparing it with the visionary writings of William Blake or with the revelatory literature of the Gnostics, and historians of Western esotericism study it alongside other twentieth-century channelled and visionary texts. Critics such as Richard Noll had argued even before its publication that Jung saw himself as the founder of a new religious movement, and the Red Book has been cited both for and against that view. What is not in doubt is that it is one of the most remarkable illuminated books of the modern era, and that it shows a scientist of the psyche working in the idiom of medieval visionaries. Jung's later role at the Eranos conferences carried some of its themes into the mid-century study of myth and religion.

Frequently asked questions§

Why is it called the Red Book?§

The name comes from the red leather binding of the large folio into which Jung copied his visions. Jung himself gave it the Latin title Liber Novus, "The New Book".

When was Jung's Red Book published?§

It was first published in October 2009 by W. W. Norton as a full-colour facsimile with an English translation, edited by Sonu Shamdasani. A text-only Reader's Edition appeared in 2012, and the Black Books on which it is based were published in 2020.

Who is Philemon in the Red Book?§

Philemon is a winged old man who appears as Jung's chief inner guide. Jung painted him with kingfisher wings and later described him as a figure who taught him that the psyche contains things one does not produce oneself.

Is the Red Book a Gnostic text?§

Not in a historical sense, since it is a twentieth-century work. However, its Seven Sermons to the Dead are presented under the name of the Gnostic teacher Basilides and use Gnostic ideas such as the pleroma and Abraxas, which is why it is often discussed alongside Gnosticism.

Sources and further reading§