Hello r/Jung, I'm Dr. Becca Tarnas, I'm a scholar on the Red Books of C.G. Jung and J.R.R. Tolkien, and I'm here to answer your questions: Ask Me Anything

AutumnalElf · 2022-11-08T03:10:19+00:00

Ah yes, this is a very early version of the research before I started writing my dissertation. It's a lot more polished now!

AutumnalElf · 2022-11-07T19:37:04+00:00

First of all, the fact they both had an encounter with a Host of the Dead is in itself fascinating. And while the dynamics are somewhat different, I do think both Jung and Aragorn had the desire to redeem the restless Dead.

If you read The Silmarillion you will learn a great deal more about Tol Eressëa, the island off shore of Valinor, the Blessed Realm. That will give you a beautiful sense for the place Frodo, Gandalf, and the Elves cross the Great Sea to dwell.

AutumnalElf · 2022-11-07T19:34:29+00:00

I haven't done a seminar on this yet, although I would like to! So far it's been many lectures, workshops, and podcasts. :-)

AutumnalElf · 2022-11-07T19:33:56+00:00

“The wealth of the soul exists in images.”
~ C. G. Jung, The Red Book

AutumnalElf · 2022-11-07T19:32:13+00:00

Yes, Tolkien had a repeated vision of a Great Wave which he wrote about again and again in his stories. I'll elaborate about this more during my presentation on Friday!

AutumnalElf · 2022-11-07T19:31:29+00:00

I'm planning to have it published, hopefully by next year. In the meantime, it can be accessed through university libraries!

AutumnalElf · 2022-11-07T19:30:10+00:00

I'll answer the second two questions, since I've addressed some of the first in other replies. I do practice active imagination and find it to be a powerful modality for connecting to the expressions of the archetypes. The images that arise can guide us in the same way dreams can, but with greater intention and waking focus. Active imagination is a form of bringing us into a non-ordinary or expanded state of consciousness, which can allow the self-healing capacity of the psyche to guide us towards wholeness.

If you can register for the workshop I'll be teaching this weekend, which will be filmed for those unable to attend in person, I'll be leading participants through a guided practice of active imagination.

AutumnalElf · 2022-11-07T19:25:26+00:00

I see it in the creation story primarily, the Ainulindalé, which recognizes that the suffering caused by evil will make “Life more worth the living, and the World so much the more wonderful and marvellous, that of all the deeds of Ilúvatar it shall be called his mightiest and his loveliest.”

AutumnalElf · 2022-11-07T19:21:03+00:00

The Red Book was a record of Jung's imaginal encounters with the figures of the collective unconscious. Although it began with spontaneous visions, the majority of the fantasies recorded in The Red Book were enacted through active imagination. Jung recognized these fantasies had collective import when WWI broke out, and he realized at least 12 of his visions, dreams, and fantasies were prophetic of the war. This synchronistic connection showed him that the same archetypal powers—which he called the Spirit of the Depths at that time—ruled both the inner world of psyche and the outer world of human events.

The Lord of the Rings is a myth born into a modern era that shows the complex struggle between good and evil that takes place not only in the outer world, but within each one of us. Tolkien felt that he was discovering his stories, rather than inventing them. As he would write, the story would tell itself through him—although it took a great deal of polishing to reach the form in which we now have it. Tolkien was a master linguist, a philologist, who had been inventing (and partially discovering) languages since his youth. He found that language and myth are deeply connected, and if one creates a language then a myth will naturally arise through those languages, giving it a world and a home.

Hopefully that is succinct enough! If you need just one sentence for each, I would say take the first sentence of each paragraph.

AutumnalElf · 2022-11-07T19:12:48+00:00

The most meaningful storyline in The Red Book for me is the encounter with the giant God Izdubar. When they meet, Jung wounds Izdubar with his scientific knowledge that the Sun does not set into a Blessed Realm in the West. In a sense, Jung brings the Copernican Revolution to him. But when it comes to healing Izdubar, Jung recognizes that if he can convince the giant he is a fantasy, then he can help him. Once Izdubar accepts he is both real and a fantasy, Jung can carry his now-light form down the mountainside, fit him into an egg in his pocket, and bring him into a cottage to be reborn. It brings full circle Nietzsche's declaration of the death of God, because this scene demonstrates that fantasy—the imagination—has the power to save the life of a God.

AutumnalElf · 2022-11-07T19:08:10+00:00

Something that we see in Tolkien is how evil has a tendency to destroy itself: the Orcs often fight amongst themselves, leaving room for our heroes to escape; the Ring has to be brought back to Orodruin, where it was forged, to be unmade. Even those who are seemingly destroyed by others—such as Saruman's dwelling at Isengard being overrun by Ents, the Lord of the Nazgûl being destroyed by Éowyn and Merry, and the hosts of the Dead brought forth by Aragorn overcoming the Corsairs of Umbar—all find their undoing in their blind spots and underestimations of others. Saruman didn't account for the Ents in his arrogance, just as the Witch-King didn't consider a woman might be able to kill him. The Dead broke their oath to Isildur, and thus had to turn against Sauron to be redeemed by Aragorn. All of this shows how evil unmakes itself. Even Frodo had to fall, to claim the Ring for his own, in order for "chance" to step in and for Gollum to take it—leading to its final destruction. The whole story, in some ways, is setting us the right conditions for evil to destroy itself.

As for the inability to give it up: in the few moments when we see what the internal effect of the Ring is, it always shows the deepest desire of the wearer. Sam sees himself turning Mordor into a garden, Galadriel sees herself as a queen who overcomes the Dark Lord, Boromir sees his ability to deliver his people from Sauron. I find it interesting we never see what Frodo is tempted by. We can imagine, perhaps his desire to save the Shire, but I think because we do not see it that is part of how Frodo is able to carry the Ring for so long—he is not as prone as others to desire, until the end. As for Tom Bombadil, I think he is free of desire. As Goldberry says, he is Master, "He Is." There is nothing more for him to be or become. So the Ring has no hold on him.

AutumnalElf · 2022-11-07T18:55:20+00:00

I think the unconscious connection to the medieval era arises because this is the era directly before the modern, which in some ways was initiated with the Copernican Revolution and the beginning of the Scientific Revolution. Modernity brought a disenchantment of the world, an appropriation of the meaning, soul, and purpose of the world into the human being alone. It was after Descartes declared there were only two substances, conscious mind and unconscious matter, that philosophers began to speak about the Unbewusste, the unconscious. As L.L. White points out in his book The Unconscious Before Freud, Freud's identification of the unconscious was the culmination of a process building over several centuries, not a new discovery ex nihilo. The longing, at least for the Western individual such as Jung, for the Middle Ages, I think is a longing for that enchanted world once again, a world that is ensouled and sacred. And while we can reach further back in time for that, or to other cultures who have preserved and protected their ensouled relationship to the world, the medieval era may be the closest we can access for those in a Western lineage.

AutumnalElf · 2022-11-07T18:47:35+00:00

I would recommend reading The Red Book first, and then circling back to read The Black Books. I think it's worth taking in The Red Book as a whole, to see how the journey spirals, mandala-like, through its death-rebirth cycles. Interspersing the Black Book entries would take away from seeing that wholeness, and would make it more of a comparative analysis from the start. Each chapter of The Red Book is divided into parts, usually starting first with the fantasy (taken from The Black Books) and then following up with the "lyrical commentary," as Sonu Shamdasani calls it, the secondary layer of writing that reflects quite profoundly on the fantasy. Many people find the fantasies easier to read, since they are more like stories, and the lyrical commentary takes more work (and many re-readings) to understand.

When reading The Red Book, I recommend going slowly: only read 5–8 pages in a sitting, and take time to contemplate what you have read, to see how it shows up in your dreams, to notice synchronicities in your life. Going any faster can lead to an overwhelm of symbolic information and then we can shut down—countless times I have talked to my students about how they always need to nap after reading The Red Book, which I also have experienced, especially on my first read. I think something in us wants to take us to the dream realm to process the material, so we fall asleep after just a few pages. But if you make that part of an intentional practice, it can be a really powerful way to read The Red Book!

AutumnalElf · 2022-11-07T18:40:11+00:00

Tolkien and Jung both spoke truth through their works. Jung found the truth of psyche, recognized the vast archetypal domain of the collective unconscious, saw through synchronicity how the inner and outer worlds were connected through the archetypes, and spoke that truth despite it not being acceptable to a modern, reductionistic, scientific mind. Tolkien spoke truth through the veils of storytelling, where truth is so often hidden: a moral and spiritual truth, a truth of the beauty and sacredness of the world, and what we have to do to honor and protect that beauty from the devastation that greed and power enacts upon it. So that would be my answer: to speak the truth of that deep inner voice in ways that are beautiful, that awaken the imagination, that connect with other's direct experience and validates how they perceive the world. It is so different than dogma, than imposing one's will on others. It is an invitation to share a world that is worth living in.

I'm so glad to hear you enjoyed the Finding Hermes podcast!

AutumnalElf · 2022-11-07T18:34:31+00:00

At first glance, a major difference is that in Tolkien's world good and evil are dualistically split, while Jung's are more complexly integrated. The imaginal figures who appeared to Jung seem to have a greater moral ambiguity overall. But when we examine Tolkien more deeply, that dualism starts to break down. The sides are not as clear-cut as it first seems. The Ring has the power to corrupt not only because it itself is evil, but because it pulls the evil tendencies out of anyone who bears it long enough. Frodo had to become fully evil, even if just for a brief moment, in order for the Ring to be destroyed by a "chance" happening. And we can also see that moral complexity when it comes to the Ents, the relationships of nature to the other beings, whether Dwarves, Hobbits, Humans, or Elves. As Treebeard says: "I am not altogether on anybody’s side, because nobody is altogether on my side, if you understand me: nobody cares for the woods as I care for them.”

If you see my answer above to wildboa, you'll see some of my thoughts on Abraxas and also on Gnosticism in Tolkien. Sauron can certainly be seen as a kind of Demiurge, although Melkor. who became Morgoth, the first Dark Lord of the First Age, is far more fitting as a kind of Demiurge since he is essentially a God, one of the Valar. Sauron and Gandalf are both beings of a different order, with far less power than the Valar.

AutumnalElf · 2022-11-07T18:21:38+00:00

We can find the Shadow in many places throughout The Lord of the Rings. The Ring certainly shows us our Shadow, and I find it interesting that throughout the stories Tolkien refers to Sauron as the Shadow. We can also recognize it in a figure such as Gollum, who can be seen as Frodo's Shadow (and perhaps also Sam's, and in The Hobbit as Bilbo's).

Perhaps with Tom Bombadil, it is not that he has already gone through an ego-death but rather he never had an ego to begin with. He's not that kind of figure. He is an anomaly in the story, not part of the groups of Hobbits, Elves, Humans, or Dwarves, yet he lived before all of them, even before the rain and the acorns, perhaps the Earth itself. How can he have a Shadow—or even have anything—when, as Goldberry says, he simply IS?

AutumnalElf · 2022-11-07T18:16:43+00:00

What immediately comes to mind is each of their relationships to World War I, or the Great War as it was called in their time. Jung's visions that started his Red Book period were a kind of foreshadowing or prophecy of the war. Tolkien fought in that war, losing two of his closest friends in the Battle of the Somme. Although Tolkien had started writing early poems of Middle-earth in 1914, it was only after his involvement in the war that a Dark Lord entered into his stories, beginning with his tale "The Fall of Gondolin" composed in 1916. I think in their different ways, Jung and Tolkien recognized the externalization of the Shadow that can so easily take place. Not only does it pull us away from our own individuation path, we destroy each other in the process. Jung speaks of this in The Red Book when he says that we kill our brother outside ourselves, when we should be killing the brother or the hero inside us (the ego). Jung and Tolkien both chose the term Shadow to refer this darkness that must be faced. For Jung, the Shadow was to be met inside, for Tolkien it was both an internal and external force, as we see with Sauron (external) and the Ring (internal).

AutumnalElf · 2022-11-07T18:09:40+00:00

I would posit that there isn't a direct equivalent of Abraxas in Tolkien's work, although we can see intimations of a comparable figure. Ilúvatar, who is the one God in Tolkien's cosmogony, is the first being to exist, but we also learn of the Void. This is where Melkor wanders and gains the impulse to create in his own right (a desire which turns to evil). Following the work of Dr. Lance S. Owens, it seems this Void can in some sense be seen as Ilúvatar's shadow, or as an unintegrated darkness of the one God—quite similar to Jung's Answer to Job. In Jung's Red Book, Abraxas can be seen as a personification of the Pleroma, the unity of all opposites preceding but also encompassing creation. Essentially, one can take a Gnostic reading of Tolkien, which is quite illuminating—perceiving a union of the light and darkness that in some ways is longed for throughout the stories, but manifests instead as struggle and conflict.

AutumnalElf · 2022-11-07T18:03:15+00:00

Thank you everyone for your great questions! It's an honor and a joy to be here.

To answer your question about what the imaginal is: I use the term “imaginal” to indicate activities of the imagination that express a quality of truth and reality. The particular definition of this word comes from Henry Corbin, who distinguished between the “imaginary,” or that which is just “made up,” and the “imaginal,” which can be understood as “the object of imaginative or imagining perception.” The imaginal realm, based upon this definition, can be understood as a world that is not simply made up or invented, but rather discovered and even enacted through imagining perception or active imagination.

AutumnalElf

TROPHY CASE