June 10, 2023

I’ve long wondered about the mysterious image in Jung’s Red Book of a veiled woman standing before a crowd. At the end of the last course on Jung’s Red Book & Black Books, I suddenly found myself captivated by her and unable to teach what I’d had planned. We spent a great deal of time exploring her instead.

Many of Jung’s images in The Red Book are entirely unrelated to the surrounding text. In fact, as Jung spent many years transferring his initial visions from 1913-1914 into the red leather-bound manuscript, the paintings were largely undertaken years later. Most relate to entries from years later found only in The Black Books. Because of this, when reading and teaching the material, I’ve found myself glossing over many of the images, not knowing their origin and wary of projecting my own conclusions onto the symbols and landscapes without anything tangible as proof. That’s perhaps never been more true with the engaging image on page 155 (above).

The text in which this painting is embedded offers no real conclusions, yet it sits adjacent to a similarly large-scale painting of Philemon—the alchemist-magician and image of Jung’s Self—as if she is his feminine counterpart, two sides of a whole. In fact, she is the only clear feminine form depicted visually in the entire book, save some tiny images of Salome in the first few pages. Yet while we know a great deal about Philemon, the gray-bearded man with kingfisher wings, there is no certain parallel for this seemingly Middle Eastern woman. She is almost entirely covered in a light blue robe and holding the attention of a modern, perhaps rambunctious crowd. Golden light descends above her and a crescent moon hangs to her left, evoking various icons of the Virgin Mary, as angels hang above her on either side. Classic images of Our Lady of Perpetual Help and of the Immaculate Conception both strongly evoke this divine woman in blue.

But it would be too simple to say that she’s the Virgin Mary. Something else is going on.

I have referred in the past to her simply as Salome, given her proximity to Philemon, an outgrowth of Elijah in The Red Book and Salome’s initial counterpart. This woman’s veiled appearance may also be a nod to Salome, as Oscar Wilde depicted her performing an interpretation of a Middle Eastern dance which he called “the dance of the seven veils” in his 1891 play Salomé. But Jung leaves no explicit indication that it is Salome whom he has depicted in this image.

This image, like that of Philemon, is situated within “The Magician” chapter, near the end of the book, just as Jung begins playing the flute to an iridescent serpent in order to, he says, “make her believe that she was my soul.” Yet that passage, while suggestive of a feminine soul, really doesn’t provide insight into the image. Moreover, this is a passage whose tone around the feminine changed a great deal from the original entry in The Black Books (a common and grating change).

The original entry from January 29, 1914, comes directly after a conversation that Jung had with Philemon about magic. The beginning dialogue doesn’t include anything about enchanting a serpent and instead goes like this:

J: My soul, what can I say? What do you say?

S: I let grass grow over everything that you do.

J: That sounds comforting and seems not to say much.

S: Would you like me to say much? I can also be banal, as you know, and let myself be satisfied that way.

J: That seems hard to me. I believe that you stand in close connection with everything beyond, with what is greatest and most uncommon. Therefore I thought that banality would be foreign to you.

The mention of banality is in direct reference to what a Salome-esq feminine character teaches him about his greatest fears in the chapter “The Castle in the Forest” (perhaps my favorite chapter).

Meanwhile, the footnote to this image is, on the whole, remarkably confusing. It’s so jumbled that it encourages further glossing over amidst so much material to get through. But the editors do provide helpful clues and translations if we have the patience to explore. They indicate, for instance, that Jung referenced this image anonymously in his 1951 essay, “The Psychological Aspects of the Kore.” There, he expressed the following about a series of anima dreams (his own) which he shared as an anonymous case study.

Dream x: The unknown woman leaves the house as a petite bourgeoise with a female relation, and in her place there is suddenly an over-life-size goddess clad in blue, looking like Athene.

Dream xi: Then she appears in a church, taking the place of the altar, still over-life-size but with veiled face.

It is in his later commentary on these dreams that we get a bit deeper into the meaning of Image 155 for Jung:

Dream x shows the paradoxical double nature of the anima: banal mediocrity and Olympian divinity.

Dream xi restores the anima to the Christian church, not as an icon but as the altar itself. The altar is the place of sacrifice and also the receptacle for consecrated relics.

Though the editors reference Dream xi in their footnote, I’ve included Dream x because I think it too—and his commentary, in particular—sheds enormous light on Jung’s thinking around this painting of the mysterious woman. In fact, I’d argue that Image 155 is a combination of those two dreams.

We learn a bit more from the footnote as we understand the Latin inscriptions found throughout the painting.

The border inscription reads: “The wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory… for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.” These are portions of a longer quotation from I Corinthians 2:7-10.

Is Jung suggesting here that this woman is Sophia, the wisdom behind the male godhead? But the word Sophia doesn’t arise anywhere in this text. Certainly, Sophia was of interest to Jung before and during his confrontation with the unconscious around the time of WWI. But he doesn’t speak of her here.

On either side of the arch (entirely invisible unless you’ve got the facsimile version of The Red Book in front of you) is this inscription: “the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.” This text is from Revelation 22:17.

Above the arch, it reads “ave virgo virginum” which translates to “Hail, virgin of virgins” a phrase that, the editors tell us, is the title of a medieval hymn. (Though it may actually be the original work of one Jeremiah W. Cummings from the mid-1800s.)

And then there is one final, curious, very important clue on the left-hand side of the image, an Arabic word: “Daughters.” Plural.

This one word and its surprising plurality brings me back to Jung’s commentary on Dream x, which “shows the paradoxical double nature of the anima: banal mediocrity and Olympian divinity” and its connection to Jung’s Black Books entry from July 10, 1918, which caught my attention just as we were wrapping up class last May.

In this remarkable entry, Jung is in dialogue with his Soul and she is trying to explain to him that she has two properties. She expresses her frustration to him as well. They are, in the background, continuing to make sense of his love for Toni Wolff and his struggle to end his attachment to her. In this dialogue she, Toni, and Salome are intimately linked.

“S: …Why did you give me the two kinds of properties? Why did you not separate the opposites? Why did you leave me mixed? This creates the trouble of the standstill. The opposites cancelled each other out. My other half, which is on the side of the earth, is another soul than I. She is between things and you. I am between the eternal images and you. I am mind, she is feeling. I am light, she is dark. The black one [Toni Wolff] is her symbol. You have still not released Salome from her. She is the spirit of the earth that dances poisonous dances, that bewitched and intoxicates, that drinks blood and causes magical sickness. If she were released from the symbol, she would give form, substance, and actual life to the eternal images. But she intoxicates herself in the blood of the holy one [John the Baptist]. Why? She has not been released from the human symbol. Why do you love the black one? Because she is the dancer.”

Soul continues to speak and what she says is incredibly striking, an entry that sounds a great deal like the feminine-voiced Gnostic text of Thunder Perfect Mind. This Black Books section is, I believe, of direct relevance to Image 155, and it goes like this:

“S: … I carry up into eternity, she drags down into the mystery of matter, into the beauty of the earth, into the death of everything earthly. I am the daughter of the eternal mother, she is the daughter of the eternal father.”

Two daughters within one Soul. The only reference I’ve ever seen to why Jung included the Arabic word for Daughters beside this incredible image of a single woman.

Jung spoke frequently about the two sides of the anima, and here she is depicted.

So we can speak of this blue-veiled woman as an anima image, as Soul, and as Salome; all of that would be true. But it must be understood ultimately as a single image depicting two sides in one, and as a commentary, ultimately, on the ascension of Mother Mary within the Catholic Church as well. Which is, given the length of this exploration already, a conversation for another time.

Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies