Jung and Aion

Jung and Aion: Time, Vision,
and a Wayfaring Man

Lance S. Owens
C. G. Jung stated in 1957 that the visionary experiences recorded in The
Red Book: Liber Novus were the foundation of his life work: My entire
life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious
and ooded me like an enigmatic stream . . . the numinous beginning,
which contained everything, was then. Liber Novus is now historically
placed in a hermeneutic relationship with Jungs subsequent writings.
Jung composed the rst page of Liber Novus in 1915. On this in-
troductory folio leaf he graphically intertwined a prophecy of the future
and the coming of a new aeon: an epochal turning-point in human con-
sciousness. Though this revelation was foundational to his subsequent
work, Jung did not initially feel free to publicly disclose its keynote.
After several extraordinary near-death visions in 1944, Jung real-
ized it was his duty to nally and openly communicate the central revela-
tion recorded in Liber Novus. The rst manuscript page of Liber Novus
penned by Jung in 1915deeply considered, dense with verbal and
pictorial imagery formed in response to the Spirit of the Depthsand
the complexly crafted commentary in Aion, composed three decades
later, are fundamentally wed. They both declare the dawning of a new
aeon. While each work might be studied as an independent text, one
can only comprehend Jung and his struggle with Liber Novus in their
conjunction.
ho hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of

the Lord revealed? For he shall grow up before him as
a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground. . . .
253

254
Der Weg des kommenden (The Way of What Is to Come). The rst parchment
sheet of Liber Novus, composed in 1915, with Jungs symbolic declaration of
a coming new aeon. (Some paint chipping on the original parchment has been
digitally restored.) Liber Novus, Liber Primus, folio i recto.

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TIME, VISION, AND A WAYFARING MAN 255
Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the
deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as a
hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in the wilderness
shall waters break out, and streams in the desert. And the
parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land
springs of water: in the habitation of dragons, where each
lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes. And a highway
shall be there, and it shall be called the way of holiness. The
unclean shall not pass over it, but it shall be for those, the
wayfaring men; and fools shall not err therein.
Incipit Liber Novus, 1915
1
Not the opinion of any individual contemporary will decide
the truth and error of what has been discovered, but rather
future generations and destiny. There are things that are not
yet true to-day, perhaps we are not yet permitted to recognize
them as true, although they may be true tomorrow. There-
fore every pioneer must take his own path, alone but hopeful,
with the open eyes of one who is conscious of its solitude and
of the perils of its dim precipices. Our age is seeking a new
spring of life. I found one and drank of it and the water tasted
good. That is all that I can or want to say. My intention and
my duty to society is fullled when I have described, as well
as I can, the way that led me to the spring; the reproaches of
those who do not follow this way have never troubled me, nor
ever will.
C. G. Jung, 1917
2
In 1915 )ung began crafting the rst parchment leaf of Liber Novus, what
would become the rst page of his Red Book. Over the two preceding
years he had wandered as a wayfarer on an ancient and forgotten imagi-
native highway, eyes open, conscious of its solitude and of the perils of its
dim precipices.
3
He had languished in a parched desert, discovered the via
sancta, seen visions, confronted the dexterous and sinister arm of God, and
met his guide and master Philemon. The journey had led to a new spring of
life.
4
Carl Gustav Jung knew he had received a revelation.
5
He had gone
searching for his own myth and encountered an epochal human story: a c-
tion that was also a fact, a tale that he found true. Now he made the journeys

256

record. He began by compiling a 1,200-page draft manuscript detailing the
initial ood of visions, recorded in his Black Book journals between Novem-
ber 1913 and April 1914, adding further reections on their meaning.
6
With
this protean draft at hand, he next turned to creating a perdurable testament
to the tale.
The formal recordin initial conceptionwould be an illuminated
book. Into it he would transcribe his account, interweaving images and
historiated text, all worked upon folio sheets of parchment in a seemingly
medieval style.
7
And on the beginning page, this rst preface page, Jung
would offer a succinct reection upon the whole. Certainly no page of Liber
Novus was more carefully considered than its beginning. Though this is the
rst leaf artistically rendered, it is in composition a conclusion, a summary
statement made about all that follows. As Jung explained in the text on the
verso of the sheet, I speak in images. With nothing else can I express the
words from the depths.
8
His prologue offers supreme evidence of what that
statement meant.
The words carefully chosen for the beginning are not, however, his
own, nor are they found in his draft manuscript.
9
For a preface to his rev-
elation, Jung reached back across two millennia, to the echoes and preface
of an antecedent but parallel moment in the story. Scribed in old Latin, he
offered prophetic writ from the threshold of the Christian aeonfour au-
guries of a new age from the prophet Isaiah, and the signal proclamation of
that ages birth recorded in the Gospel of John: And the Word was made
Flesh.
Worked around this proem to the prior and passing aeon, Jung added
in image his own declaration of the new. The key gure is a depiction of the
suns precession through the zodiacal circle. Astrological observations linked
the vast human story with the gradually shifting vernal equinoctial position
of the sun relative to the xed stars, a transposition within the zodiac marked
every 2,200 years or so. At the dawn of Christianity, the sun had entered the
astrological house of the two sh, the constellation of Pisces. Now the solar
spring point is on the cusp of transitioning into the zodiacal constellation of
Aquarius, inaugurating a new age.
Within the rst four words of Liber NovusDer Weg des kom-
menden, The Way of the ComingJung intertwined a graphic tale of the
past and a prophesy of the future. I speak in images. With nothing else can
I express the words from the depths. The preface declaration of the New
Book offers, in complex image, the mythopoetic proclamation of a coming
new aeon: an epochal turning-point in the human story. This is Jungs sum-
mary perspective on Liber Novus as it was formed in 1915. The story and its
revelation remained a cornerstone to all his coming work.

LANCE S. OWENS

THE WAY OF WHAT IS TO COME
In 1957, near the end of his long life, Jung spoke these now familiar words to
Aniela Jaff e about the experiences from which Liber Novus emerged:
The years . . . when I pursued the inner images were the most
important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from
this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter any-
more. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth
from the unconscious and ooded me like an enigmatic stream
and threatened to break me. . . . Everything later was merely
the outer classication, the scientic elaboration, and the inte-
gration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained
everything, was then.
10
Although critics once held this broad statement suspect, its truth can
no longer be questioned. Nearly half a century after Jungs death, publication
of The Red Book: Liber Novus provides the long-awaited primary evidence
to the fact of his words. Sonu Shamdasani declares, based on over a decade
of comprehensive study and editorial research preparing the text for publica-
tion, that Liber Novus is nothing less than the central book in his oeuvre.
11
It is the bedrock and foundation upon which any understanding of the life
and work of C. G. Jung must be built. This relationship will, however, be fully
appreciated only after a complete reconsideration of Jungs work in light of
the numinous beginning, which contained everything. And that complex
reorientation will require the efforts of more than a single generation.
Jung did not record Liber
Novus as a private, aesthetic
pretension. He addressed it
to readers in a future time,
though, from the beginning,
he was never quite sure when
that time might come.
Even adept students
of Jung nd Liber Novus
a difcult and perplexing
work. Jung understood their
problemhe had lived
through it. Liber Novus is
Jungs record of a journey
into mythopoetic imagina-
tion, and it was a difcult
passage. What confounds
the reader now is the same
issue that confronted Jung
then: Though imaginative,
mythic, apparently ctive,
and ultimately subjective, what Jung met in his wanderings spoke with the
258
voice of an objective fact. It was independent, ineffably ancient, and yet

intimately and synchronously involved with human history. He perceived it
as real, and the story it told had the tenor of a revelation.
Jung did not record Liber Novus as a private, aesthetic pretension.
He addressed it to readers in a future time, though, from the beginning, he
was never quite sure when that time might come.
12
Nonetheless, Jung an-
ticipated that potential readers of Liber Novus would need preparation; the
book demanded from him a hermeneutics and an exegesis appropriate to
its voice. So he gave one, or at least struggled mightily with the effort. For
decades readers have perused the resultessentially, everything Jung wrote
after 1916unaware of what it really is, and often frustrated by this chasm in
their comprehension. The intertext to the enterprise, the critical foundation
to comprehension, remained occulted.
Now we must begin again, reading and considering Jung in circular
fashion: Liber Novus and Jungs developed hermeneutic to his visionsthe
once occulted primary text and its extended exegesisboth require each
other. They are integrally interwoven in Jungs life and in his writings. Any
presumption of understanding Jung, absent an appreciations of Liber Novus
and the revelatory mythopoetic experience that engender his new book, is
vain.
An examination of the rst page of Liber Novus reveals the path
awaiting exploration. Of course, the intention of this initial parchment folio
might seem a matter open to diffuse conjecture. And so it would be, if Jung
had not given its image a book-length commentary late in his life with the
publication of Aion in 1951.
13
The rst stunning manuscript page of Liber
Novus, penned by Jung in 1915, deeply considered, dense with verbal and
pictorial imagery formed in response to the Spirit of the Depths, and the
complexly crafted commentary in Aion composed thirty-ve years later, are
fundamentally wed. Although each might be studied as an independent text,
one can only comprehend Jung and his struggle with Liber Novus in their
conjunction.
In the following comments, I focus on Liber Novus and Aion. This is
just a brief introduction, perhaps a paradigm for the work awaiting. In like
manner, all of the four major works Jung published after his illness and near-
death visions of 1944the late writings that I call his summary quartet,
composed of Psychology of the Transference, Aion, Answer to Job, and
Mysterium Coniunctionis
14
demand a new consideration. Formed near
the end of his life and completed after a second extraordinary visionary ex-
perience, each provides a uniquely focused elaboration and nal testament
to the numinous beginning recorded in Liber Novus: Everything else is to
be derived from this.

LANCE S. OWENS

HEAVEN ABOVE, HEAVEN BELOW
In February of 1944, Jung slipped in the snow and broke his ankle. This mod-
est injury and associated immobilization led to development twelve days later
of a life-threatening pulmonary embolism and heart attack. For three weeks
Jung hung between life and death. And in that twilight, he was immersed in
a prolonged series of visions. They seemed the end of his journey, the con-
clusion to the story he had lived. It is impossible to convey the beauty and
intensity of emotion during those visions. They were the most tremendous
things I have ever experienced.
15
I would never have imagined that any such experience was pos-
sible. It was not a product of imagination. The visions and experi-
ences were utterly real; there was nothing subjective about them;
they all had a quality of absolute objectivity.
We shy away from the word eternal, but I can describe
the experience only as the ecstasy of a non-temporal state in
which present, past, and future are one. Everything that hap-
pens in time had been brought together into a concrete whole.
Nothing was distributed over time, nothing could be measured
by temporal concepts.
16
This illness, these visions, and a year of convalescencesoon followed by a
second serious cardiac event in November of 1946deeply affected Jungs
perspective upon his life, his story, and the task remaining to him. They
marked the summation of an experience foreshadowed by Liber Novus and
gave origin to his book Aion. After his second heart attack, Jung wrote in a
letter to Victor White:
Yesterday I had a marvellous dream: One bluish diamondlike
star high in heaven, reected in a round, quiet poolheaven
above, heaven below. The imago Dei in the darkness of the
Earth, this is myself. . . . It seems to me as if I were ready to die,
althoughas it looks to mesome powerful thoughts are still
ickering like lightnings in a summer night. Yet they are not mine,
they belong to God, as everything else which bears mentioning.
17
At the beginning of the illness, Jung later noted, I had the feeling
that there was something wrong with my attitude.
18
Events reoriented it.
Barbara Hannah, an astute observer close to Jung during this period, char-
acterized the illness and visions as being something like a second rite of
initiationthe rst great initiation having been his visionary passage thirty
years earlier, recorded in Liber Novus. Using the image of a shamanistic
260

medicine man (expounded by the mythologist Mircea Eliade), she explains:
Although as a rule there is only one initiation, yet sometimes in an emer-
gency, for example, when a great disaster threatens the tribe, the medicine
man also goes through a second.
19
Hannahs comments expose a great deal both about Jungs experience
and about how disciples close to Jung during these years historically wit-
nessed the story he was telling with his life. She described the visions as the
greatest milestone in Jungs attainment of wholenesss.
20
Hannah continues:
It most certainly changed and developed Jung to an incalculable
extent. . . . Before his illness one often felt he was on the moun-
tain; one could say that the absolute knowledge in the uncon-
scious was accessible to him, as it might be to an immortal; but
he was also often completely in the valley. After his illness he
seemed to be much more completely on the mountain, but at all
times he could descend into the valley and speak and act in its
terms.
21
Beginning in 1913, at the age of thirty-eight, C. G. Jung consciously
engaged an inner mythic reality. The activity continued for several years.
This was his rst initiation, to use Hannahs expression. For thirty years,
he had followed the implications of the experience. At the very beginning
of his journey, Jung most closely associated his experience with Gnosticism,
an experiential and visionary fact present in early Christianity. But he also
sensed relationships with Egyptian hermeticism and the late classical mys-
tery traditions, Mithraism and Orphism.
22
He identied his master, Philemon,
whom he met in a vision, as an Alexandrian Gnostic. Philemon subsequently
disclosed himself as Simon Magus, whose bride Helena was the incarnation
of Sophianic wisdom.
23
Jung long pondered that story.
It is vitally necessary to
understand the ramications
of Jungs late-life encounter
with Jewish Kabbalah, and
the intimate relationship
between Kabbalah, alchemy,
and the hermetic culture of
the Renaissance.
The path led him
on, wandering through the
visionary traditions of the
West, searching experiential
evidence for a story he knew
was not his alone. Jung even-
tually determined that he had
identied its thread reaching
across centuries, to her-
meticism, alchemy, medieval
heretical traditions, and Jew-
ish Kabbalah. He recognized
the unifying fact of a central
and dening experience
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hidden somewhere within all of these traditions: It was the imaginative,
mythopoetic initiation he had, in measure, shared.
Jungs explorations led inexorably toward a summation experience he
perceived as having been witnessed by the visionary tradition, the mys-
terium coniunctionis. Historically it has been symbolized in the holy wed-
ding of two natures named with many names: divine and human, male and
female, eros and logos, king and queen, salt and sulfur, inner and outer, sense
and nonsense, above and below. During the years immediately prior to his
1944 visions, Jung was grappling with alchemical and Kabbalistic texts, ci-
phering cryptic textual evidence about this sacred experience which he per-
ceived central to the traditions. It was the focus of a work that he conceived
might be his opus magnum: Mysterium Coniunctionis.
Now during his illness, it happened to him. He lived it: The vi-
sions and experiences were utterly real; there was nothing subjective about
them.
I myself was, so it seemed, in the Pardes Rimmonim, the
garden of pomegranates, and the wedding of Tifereth with
Malchuth
24
was taking place. Or else I was Rabbi Simon ben
Jochai, whose wedding in the afterlife was being celebrated. It
was the mystic marriage as it appears in the Cabbalistic tradi-
tion. I cannot tell you how wonderful it was. I could only think
continually, Now this is the garden of pomegranates! Now this
is the marriage of Malchuth with Tifereth! I do not know exactly
what part I played in it. At bottom it was I myself: I was the mar-
riage. And my beatitude was that of a blissful wedding. . . .
There followed the Marriage of the Lamb, in a Jerusalem
festively bedecked. I cannot describe what it was like in detail.
These were ineffable states of joy. Angels were present, and light.
I myself was the Marriage of the Lamb.
That, too, vanished, and there came a new image, the last
vision. I walked up a wide valley to the end, where a gentle chain
of hills began. The valley ended in a classical amphitheater. It was
magnicently situated in the green landscape. And there, in this
theater, the hierosgamos was being celebrated.
25
The journey had started in Liber Novus with Jungs petition to his soul,
whom he found again only through the soul of the woman.
26
She had sub-
sequently offered herself, in the form of Salome, as a bride. He had followed
the trail of that illusive mystical wedding across the ages. Now his story had
reached its experiential conclusion. Jung had entered the bridal chamber, he
had met the bride: I was the marriage.
262

In an insightful recent study, Stanford Drob called these visions Kab-
balistic Visions.
27
It is vitally necessary to understand the ramications of
Jungs late-life encounter with Jewish Kabbalah, and the intimate relation-
ship between Kabbalah, alchemy, and the hermetic culture of the Renais-
sance. But it is also important to remember Kabbalahs experiential links
to earlier Merkabah mysticism, roots reaching back at least to the period
of Christian origins and related to the visionary milieu out of which Gnos-
ticism had emerged. Jung described his experience in three settings, each
with distinct symbolic imagery. In sequence, they were Kabbalistic, mysti-
cally Christian, and Hellenisticthe last vision was a mystery rite of pagan
antiquity. It seems more correct to broadly suggest that these are Gnostic
visionsunderstanding Kabbalah in Gershom Scholems denition as Jew-
ish Gnosticism
28
and dening the Gnosis by its visionary hermeneutics, not
by any temporal delimitation of dogma.
Regardless of how one struggles to categorize the ineffable, this second
and nal visionary initiation was transformative. It refocused Jung on the
core experience of his life, Liber Novus, and on how important it is to afrm
ones own destiny.
29
Woven in the fabric of that destiny were Liber Novus
and its declaration of a new aeon. Jung gave this summary of his own sense
about what had changed:
A good many of my principal works were written only then. The
insight I had had, or the vision of the end of all things, gave me the
courage to undertake new formulations. I no longer attempted to
put across my own opinion, but surrendered myself to the cur-
rent of my thoughts. Thus one problem after the other revealed
itself to me and took shape.
30
In the Fall of 1945, only shortly after emerging from the prolonged con-
valescence following his rst heart attack, Jung began an extraordinary cor-
respondence, and eventual friendship, with Fr. Victor White, O.P., an English
Dominican priest and Catholic theologian. Their letters are among Jungs
most important, and personally most valued, epistolary legacies.
31
They pro-
vide a rare window into Jungs reformulating focus after his second vision-
ary initiation and offer an intimate view on his struggles with the end of the
Christian aeon.
The rst new work that crystallized entirely during this period after his
near-death visions was Aion. In a historically crucial letter to Victor White,
written 19 December 1947, Jung recounts how he was forced to begin writing
Aion:
Not very long after I have written to you [letter of 22 Sept. 1947],
I simply had to write a new essay I did not know about what. It

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occurred to me I could discuss some of the ner points about An-
ima, Animus, Shadow and last but not least the Self. I was against
it, because I wanted to rest my head. . . . In spite of all I felt forced
to write on blindly, not seeing at all, what I was driving at. Only
after I had written about 25 pages in folio, it began to dawn on
me, that Christnot the man but the divine beingwas my se-
cret goal. It came to me as a shock, as I felt utterly unequal to
such a task.
32
It was, however, a task he had directly confronted before, though the
event and its conclusions remained sequestered in his hidden new book,
Liber Novus. The current of Jungs thoughts was now forcing him back to
the unnished task of Liber Novus. In three decades of writing, Jung knew
he had not yet directly and publicly confronted the revelation summarized
there on its rst page: the Christian aeons end and the way of what is to
come. Now he must. Several years later Jung commented in private conver-
sation:
Before my illness I had often asked myself if I were permitted to
publish or even speak of my secret knowledge. I later set it all
down in Aion. I realized it was my duty to communicate these
thoughts, yet I doubted whether I was allowed to give expres-
sion to them. During my illness I received conrmation and I now
knew that everything had meaning and that everything was per-
fect.
33
This was his task of tasks. We will return later to the rest of this letter from
Jung to Victor White about the writing of Aion. But rst we need to circle
back with Jung to the beginnings of his story. Without understanding that
beginning, we cannot grasp the meanings at its end.
THE TASK OF TASKS
Jungs writings during these nal and focused years following his illness in
1944 have confused many readers; their intertwined coherence can be dif-
cult to apprehend. Only with Liber Novus open is it possible to see what Jung
was doing, how he was struggling to turn the circle of his journey homeward
and nish his tale, speak my secret knowledge. Liber Novus is the key to
these late works, and they in turn are Jungs nal interpretive working of the
visions recorded in it.
264

Early in this period and while still nishing Aion, he was directed to
a reading and extensive revision of Wandlungen und Symbole der Li-
bido, the threshold study feverishly composed between 1910 and 1912. It
was a crucial episode in his journey; this was the work that signaled an end
to his misadventure with Freud. Jung penned an introduction for this revi-
sion (published in 1952 under the new title Symbols of Transformation: An
Analysis of the Prelude to a Case of Schizophrenia
34
) explaining in mature
reection how that book rst came to be:
The whole thing came upon me like a landslide that cannot be
stopped. The urgency that lay behind it became clear to me only
later: it was the explosion of all those psychic contents which
could nd no room, no breathing-space, in the constricting atmo-
sphere of Freudian psychology and its narrow outlook.
35
As the old age fragments and
factures, deep seams are rent
open. . . . In coming time,
humankind will rediscover
the manifold essence of an
inner world, light and dark.
Note that Jung is now
critically placing the begin-
ning events of his journey
into the context of his story.
He recounts that his intense
study of mythologies during
the prior three years forced
him to conclude that without
myth, a human is like one
uprooted, having no true link
either with the past, or with
the ancestral life which con-
tinues within him, or yet with contemporary human society.
36
He continues:
So I suspected that myth had a meaning which I was sure to miss
if I lived outside it in the haze of my own speculations. I was
driven to ask myself in all seriousness: What is the myth you are
living? I found no answer to this question, and had to admit that I
was not living with a myth, or even in a myth, but rather in an un-
certain cloud of theoretical possibilities which I was beginning to
regard with increasing distrust. . . . So, in the most natural way,
I took it upon myself to get to know my myth, and I regarded
this as the task of tasks. . . . I simply had to know what uncon-
scious or preconscious myth was forming me, from what rhizome
I sprang.
37
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So, over the next four years, he confronted the portentous task of
tasks. And he found his myth. As he explained to Victor White, I wanted
the proof of a living Spirit and I got it. Dont ask me at what price.
38
It had
led him to the new spring of life.
The myth that distilled in Jung appears, at least on a rst reading of
Liber Novus, somewhat chaotic. But it has a coherent and unifying motif,
which can be condensed something like this: The third age of human history,
played out vastly over two past millennia, is drawing to a close.
39
We now
stand at the threshold of a new aeon, an epochal turning of perspective. An
enantiodromia in human consciousness is coming. The demiurgic Spirit of
this Time with its dominant monistic rationalism has reached a cataclysmic
end-time. This is a period of darkness, dissolution, and inevitable psychic
disruption.
40
But there will be a new dawn. As the old age fragments and
factures, deep seams are rent open, and from forgotten depths, an ageless
treasure will emerge. In coming time, humankind will rediscover the mani-
fold essence of an inner world, light and dark. And with it will come a new
perception of man and woman and God and their intimate relationship.
Here are his words from Liber Novus:
Your soul is in great need, because drought weighs on its world. If
you look outside yourselves, you see the far-off forest and moun-
tains, and above them your vision climbs to the realms of the
stars. And if you look into yourselves, you will see on the other
hand the nearby as far-off and innite, since the world of the in-
ner is as innite as the world of the outer. Just as you become a
part of the manifold essence of the world through your bodies,
so you become a part of the manifold essence of the inner world
through your soul. This inner world is truly innite, in no way
poorer than the outer one. Man lives in two worlds.
41
. . . He who sleeps in the grave of the millennia dreams a
wonderful dream. He dreams a primordially ancient dream. He
dreams of the rising sun.
If you sleep this sleep and dream this dream in this time of
the world, you will know that the sun will also rise at this time.
For the moment we are still in the dark, but the day is upon us.
He who comprehends the darkness in himself to him the
light is near. He who climbs down into his darkness reaches the
staircase of the working light, re-maned Helios.
42
Jung went searching for his myth in 1913 and found a via sanctathe
way of holinessleading into an epochal vision. He dreamed the primordial
266

Detail of the historiated initial beginning, Liber Secundus (the second book), of Liber Novus.
A force like molten basalt is pushing through geologic ssures, extending up from the depths.
Beside this image, a human heart and circulatory system link the visible world with the unseen
depths. Liber Novus, Liber Secundus, folio 1.
dream, discovered the ageless story, the rhizome from which he sprang. At
least, so it seemed to him. It linked him with the past, with the ancestral life
that continued within him, and with contemporary time. It also bound him to
the future, to a new dawn and a destiny:
It seems as though a message had come to me with overwhelming
force. There were things in the images which concerned not only
myself but many others also. It was then that I ceased to belong
to myself alone, ceased to have the right to do so. From then on,
my life belonged to the generality.
43
And as he wrote to Victor White in 1947, Conforming to the divine will I
live for mankind, not only for myself, and whoever understands this message
contained in and conveyed by my writing will also live for me.
44
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Two thousand years earlier, so his story disclosed, other wayfarers had
passed upon this highway of vision, foreseen the dawning of a new aeon, and
given it a voice and a keynote. And the parched ground shall become a
pool, and the thirsty land springs of water. . . . Their testimony endured
as sacred writ to the passing age. Now, in turn, Jung met his destiny and his
time, and gave his voice to what he had seen. He explained in a letter from
1929, When the confusion is at its height a new revelation comes, i.e., at the
beginning of the fourth month of world history.
45
BEGINNING THE FOURTH MONTH
Jung had taken an active interest in the psychological signicance of astrolog-
ical symbols several years before the initial eruption of visions that assailed
him in late 1913 and subsequently produced Liber Novus. In 1911, while im-
mersed in his studies of mythology and its symbolism for Wandlungen und
Symbole der Libido, he wrote Freud: My evenings are taken up very largely
with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to nd a clue to the
core of psychological truth. . . . I dare say that we shall one day discover in
astrology a good deal of knowledge that has been intuitively projected into
the heavens.
46
And in another letter two months later in 1911, he shares
intuitions about omens indicating a great change:
I . . . have the feeling that this is a time full of marvels, and, if the
auguries do not deceive us, it may very well be that . . . we are
on the threshold of something really sensational, which I scarcely
know how to describe except with the Gnostic concept of o
[Sophia], an Alexandrian term particularly suited to the reincar-
nation of ancient wisdom in the shape of A.
47
Then two years later, in a note dated March 1913, he speaks of the
neurosis resulting from a failure to recognize the work awaiting of helping
to build up a new civilization. He continues:
We are all far too much at the standpoint of the nothing-but
psychology; we persist in thinking we can squeeze the new future
which is pressing in at the door into the framework of the old
and the known. And thus the view is only of the present, never of
the future. But it was of most profound psychological signicance
when Christianity rst discovered, in the orientation towards the
future, a redeeming principle for mankind. In the past nothing
can be altered, and in the present little, but the future is ours
and capable of raising lifes intensity to its highest pitch. . . . The
268

neurotic is ill not because he has lost his old faith, but because
he has not yet found a new form for his nest aspirations.
48
Jung was most certainly aware of late-nineteenth-century occultists
pronouncementsprominently including those of H. P. Blavatsky, the found-
ing luminary of the Theosophical Societylinking an impending new age
with the gradually approaching astrological transit of the sun into the zo-
diacal house of Aquarius.
49
This supposed portentous and symbolic event,
along with Jungs own intuition of a new future pressing in at the door,
a Gnostic Sophianic reincarnation of ancient wisdom, and the signicance
of a redeeming principle in orientation towards that future, all worked in
Jungs imagination as he approached his confrontation with the unconscious.
That passage began in full force on 12 November 1913, as related in opening
pages of Liber Novus.
The image of a new age augured in the stars requires some further
explanation; Jung only briey describes the astronomical background of the
event in his commentary within Aion. It remains an obscure topic, especially
in a time when most people no longer see the stars nightly nor visually recog-
nize the constellations of heaven circling slowly with the changing seasons.
The physical and astronomical facts behind the phenomenon are fairly simple
to explain, at least to people with an apt spatial imagination. Others, however,
nd the details rather befuddling or mysterious. And they really are.
In simple denition, an aeon denotes a vast period of time, an age of
world creation. The word derives in Latin from the Greek word (aion),
an ancient term with broad temporal implications, ranging from the span
of a human life to the moving image of eternity.
50
Tacitly linked to purely
temporal denitions, however, there is also a mythological implication: An
aeon is the personication of an age. In Platonic philosophy and subsequently
in Gnostic mythology the word signied a power existing from eternity, an
emanation or phase of the supreme deity taking part in the creation and
order of the universe. The historical shifting of time marked in heaven and
the mythological movement of a story on earth became intertwined in human
imagination.
To tease them apart, let me rst explain the observed astronomical
and temporal fact eventually linked to the concept of an aeon. The axis upon
which the earth turns night and daythe imaginary central skewer run-
ning through from the North to the South Poleis tilted a bit to one side.
The absolute direction of this tilt, relative to the distant stars, is not xed.
Instead, the earths polar axis very slowly rotates, changing over eons the
celestial direction in which it points. As it turns, the starry background of
the sky, as seen at different seasons, shifts slightly. Think of a toy top set
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quickly spinning on a table, tilting a little to one side. As it spins, the di-
rection in which it is tilted changes, rotating in a slow circle. The earth
does the same thing; the direction pointed by its polar axis relative to the
stars very slowly shifts, making one complete rotation about every 26,000
years.
Throughout our history, men and women have looked up at the heav-
ens and observed sun, moon, and planets apparently circling the earth. The
regular path (called the ecliptic) traveled by these wandering lights falls
upon a broad background belt of twelve imaginatively demarcated and named
constellations, each lling roughly one-twelfth (30 degrees) of the sky cir-
cle. These are the constellations or houses of the zodiac: Aquarius, Pisces,
Aries, Taurus, etc. From the beginnings of recorded history, this zodiacal
ring with its imagined twelve divisions was looked upon as xed and im-
mutable, an unchanging imperium against which the solar, lunar, and plane-
tary transitsand perhaps, the fates of men and womenwere all marked.
But around 140 B.C.E. the Greek astronomer Hipparchus discovered
that even the empyrean realm was in motion.
51
Based on careful comparison
between his own celestial observations and the notations of Greek stargazers
in earlier centuries, he determined that the constellations were very slowly
shifting position: The circle of the zodiac was gradually rotating backward
relative to the suns orbit.
Of course, Hipparchus did not grasp the geophysical reasons for this.
His observed fact was simply that the xed stars of the heavens were not
xed, but apparently very slowly moving. Using the position of the sun rel-
ative to the zodiacal stars at the moment of the spring equinox (called the
vernal point or spring point), it was eventually estimated that the heavens
rotated backwards about 30 degrees, the equivalent to one zodiacal house,
roughly every two millennia. In his own lifetime, on the rst day of spring
around 140 B.C.E., Hipparchus saw the sun passing the junction between the
constellations of Aries and Pisces. And in the coming two millennia, he could
now predict, it would transit across the house of Pisces, just as it had moved
fromTaurus into Aries a little over two thousand years before. This slowtran-
sit of the sun backward into and across the preceding zodiacal constellation
is known technically as the precession of the equinox.
It was a revolutionary discovery. And here begins the story. The xed
background of time became mutable. The heavenly constellations, forever
sensed by mortals to be intimately entwined with human fate, were them-
selves shifting over vast ages. The mythic and symbolic imagination of the
late classical period did not, however, immediately assimilate this new astro-
logical observation into its story. (Here I must note the possible exception
of the Mithraic cult, which formed in parallel with early Christianity; and the
Mithraic deity Aion does occupy both the title and the frontispiece to Jungs
270

book on the subject.
52
) While seers of the time saw a new age approaching,
history leaves little evidence that they explicitly linked their story to the pre-
cession of the equinox and the new age of Pisces. Nor was the zodiacal shift
associated in astrological lore with Platos more ancient concept of the aeon
until much later in history.
Jung explained that the
association of . . . the
perceived completion of a
vast age in the human story
and the astrological transit of
the sun through the zodiacal
ringwas entirely acausal
and synchronous.
It seems (and Jung
makes this point in Aion
53
)
that the recognition of a new
age, so integral to early Chris-
tianity, was only gradually as-
sociated with the astrological
fact of the precession of the
equinox and the new ruling
constellation of the sh. But
the image of the sh nonethe-
less symbolically constellated
in the Western imagination
and story, and it eventually
became fully associated with
the Christian age. By the late
nineteenth century, it had developed into a symbolic astrological story play-
ing on human history: Pisces marked the passing age; as the sun transited
into Aquarius, a new aeon of history approached. What that means is usually
obscure in its specics, but the story has carried into the popular culture of
the twenty-rst century.
In his late-life reections, Jung explained that the association of these
eventsthe perceived completion of a vast age in the human story and the
astrological transit of the sun through the zodiacal ringwas entirely acausal
and synchronous. The coming of a new age would not be caused by either
a geophysical fact or a determinative occult astrological force. The events
simply walk hand in hand, a sign to seers imagining meaning in the human
story we call history.
LIBER NOVUS AND THE AGE OF AQUARIUS
So we circle back to Liber Novus and the rst image of the preface page.
I earlier suggested imaginative implications for Jungs choice of the ancient
prophetic texts on this beginning sheet. But now look closely at the very
large and artfully worked initial to the opening proclamation, Der Weg, The
Way. And understand: These are not random doodles. They are intensely
considered words from the depths, as Jung interpreted them in 1915.
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Detail from the rst folio of Liber Novus, showing the zodiacal precession of the equinoxes. Liber
Novus, Liber Primus, folio i recto.
The central sketch suggests a spring day with a ship setting sail on a
voyage. Below, the painting reaches down through the waters of creation to
primordial earth and its ery central magma. And above, you see the far-off
forest and mountains, and above them your vision climbs to the realms of the
stars (LN, 264i).
In the heavens Jung outlines the zodiacal belt of constellations marked
with a ribbon of lighter blue, each noted by the traditional symbol. Travel-
ing upon this celestial highway is a gilded sun with four rays, one greatly
extended and pointing the way. However, there is something very unusual
about the six zodiacal symbols Jung has scribed here. They are not drawn in
usual sequence, as they appear in the sky and as they have been written in
manuscripts for thousands of years. The proper order goes like this: Aquarius
, Pisces , Aries , Taurus , Gemini , and Cancer . Here they are
reversed in order, shown in backward sequence.
This is no mistake, and Jungs symbolic meaning is certain. He is indi-
cating the precession of the equinoxes over prior ages. The path of the suns
precession through ve aeons is shown with a thin golden thread, leading for-
ward to the current solar position, at the end of the constellation of Pisces.
And note, the golden thread of past time and story ends here. But a ray of sun
reaches onward, stretching over Aquarius , the coming age, and heralding
his introductory words: The Way of What Is to Come.
Follow along this highway Jung marked for wayfarers. By 1915, Jung
had distilled from his visions and marked in his record this keynote of his
story: The two-millennia-long aeon of Pisces was ending, and a new age was
about to begin. But what distinguished the passing age from the coming way?
A primal characteristic marking an aeon is the god-image that dom-
inates its storythis reects the implications of the original Greek term,
aion. Throughout the visions recorded in Liber Novus, by directly engag-
ing the mythopoetic imagination Jung found himself wrestling with God. His
empirical man had entered a greater dimension, a divine realm, the realm
272

of the greater self.
54
In the union of inner and outer, above and below, he
witnessed an epochal transformation occurring in the imago Dei. Of that
fact, he poignantly gives testimony in September of 1915, as transcribed in
Liber Novus:
Through uniting with the self we reach the God. . . . I have expe-
rienced it. It has happened thus in me. And it certainly happened
in a way that I neither expected nor wished for. The experience
of the God in this form was unexpected and unwanted. I wish I
could say it was a deception and only too willingly would I disown
this experience. But I cannot deny that it has seized me beyond
all measure and steadily goes on working in me. . . . No insight
or objection is so strong that it could surpass the strength of this
experience.
55
I have experienced it. It has happened thus in me. And he had thus been
given a task:
When something long since passed away comes back again in a
changed world, it is new. To give birth to the ancient in a new
time is creation. This is the creation of the new, and that redeems
me. Salvation is the resolution of the task. The task is to give birth
to the old in a new time.
56
An aeon was not simply a ledger book of years, begun and ended by
the phantom nger of an astronomical phenomenon. Jung beheld the aeons
as prodigious volumes in the human saga, an ongoing epic of the relationship
between two worlds. In mythopoetic imagination, story and history insepa-
rably entwined. Human consciousness became proscenium to the tale, and
time was only the ux in plot.
The third age of the story was now nearing its end. Human struggle
with the two worlds had distilled its dening themes, just as that dynamic
had demarcated the denouement of preceding ages. Jung gives the gist of the
plot:
When the month of the Twins
57
had ended, the men said to their
shadows: You are I, since they had previously had their spirit
around them as a second person. Thus the two became one, and
through this collision the formidable broke out, precisely that
spring of consciousness that one calls culture and which lasted
until the time of Christ. But the sh indicated the moment when
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what was united split, according to the eternal law of contrasts,
into an underworld and upperworld. If the power of growth be-
gins to cease, then the united falls into its opposites. . . . But
the separated cannot remain separated forever. It will be united
again and the month of the sh will soon be over.
58
Men of Jungs home and generation laughed at such assertions. They
saw only the exterior of reality. But he had wandered beyond their shire,
passed through the ancient encircling hedge, and met the ctive fact. Now
he proclaimed, This inner world is truly innite, in no way poorer than the
outer one. Man lives in two worlds.
Jung saw the story. He also sensed that throughout the ages, an occa-
sional wayfarer found this great Janus gate, the dual-visaged passage in the
wall between home and beyond, and there witnessed story and history gam-
boling together, spinning destiny. Call them prophets, poets, bards, seers,
wizards, or lunaticsor, perhaps simply wayfaring folk. Whatever be the cho-
sen nomination, Jung was one.
In quality and degree Jung comprehended that the directness of his vi-
sionary journey was, when placed in historical context, exceedingly rare. And
historians considering Jung must now in turn recognize that his hermeneutic
of the experience was entirely unprecedented: In fact and in act, his experi-
ence and hermeneutics might imaginatively mark a new aeons birth. Human
consciousness, in the vision of this one wayfarer, had reached a new perspec-
tive. He wrote the New Book. Many years later and with great affect he told
Jobs tale, how by seeing the backside of God, a solitary man forced that God
to incarnate with a newlevel of consciousness. Answer to Job, which erupted
from Jung immediately after he nished writing Aion, was his most personal
statement about the transformative force of human vision at the threshold of
an aeon.
59
This passing month was, of course, the Christian age for peoples of
the West, and two sh had circled in a sea of opposition. Now the develop-
ment of the Christian God image had passed its zenith. Jung judges the dog-
matic vestiges of Christianity at the terminus of its time with harsh words:
Its teachings are good for the most mature minds of bygone time.
Today, it serves immature minds. Christianity no longer promises
us grace, and yet we still need mercy. That which I tell you is the
way of what is to come, my way to mercy.
60
Everything that becomes too old becomes evil, the same
is true of your highest. Learn from the suffering of the crucied
God that one can also betray and crucify a God, namely the God
274

of the old year [aeon]. If a God ceases being the way of life, he
must fall secretly.
61
The judgment here is upon the cultural remnants of Christianity, and
not upon the gure of Christ, who remains in all Jungs writings a paradigm of
the way, the Self. Jung addressed the task of giving birth to the ancients in a
new time: Salvation is the resolution of the task. Renewing the old creates
the new. Jung apprehended that this also involved a revalorization of a for-
gotten value afrmed at the beginning of the Christian age by Gnosticism, an
experiential and mythopoetic tradition that held Jungs abiding sympathy
62
:
What has been will be again. For these are all things which are
the inborn properties of human nature. It belongs to the essence
of forward movement that what was returns. Only the ignorant
can marvel at this. Yet the meaning does not lie in the eternal re-
currence of the same, but in the manner of its recurring creation
at any given time.
63
In visions noted in Jungs Black Book journal during the spring of 1916,
Christ appears twice. On 12 April 1916, he comes vested in his robe of glory.
The vision is recorded in the last pages of Liber Novus: Philemon is given
the voice and addresses Christ, My master and my brother, praised be your
name . . . :
Liber Novus was the primary
documentary account of that
secret knowledge, the book
he never felt permitted to
publish.
But, my master
and my brother,
I believe you
have completed
your work, since
the one who has
given his life,
his entire truth,
all his love, his
entire soul, has
completed his work. What one individual can do for men, you
have done and accomplished and fullled. The time has come
when each must do his own work of redemption. Mankind has
grown older and a new month has begun.
64
These words well summarize Jungs myth of the passing and the coming
age: Christ has completed his work, now each must do his own; a new month,
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Detail, Liber Novus, Liber Secundus, folio 64.
the fourth month, has begun. Learn from the suffering of a crucied God.
The new aeon signaled emergence of a transforming divine image. Jung had
seen it.
AION
In his seventy-fth year Jung nished Aion.
65
While completing the
manuscript he wrote Fr. White and predicted, It will be, I am afraid, a shock-
ing and difcult book.
66
Shortly after the publication, Barbara Hannah com-
mented, From the reactions he had received, he thought Aion was the least
understood of his books.
67
Over ve subsequent decades, readers have con-
tinued to assess it as being somewhere between difcult and thoroughly be-
wildering. And it isat least until considered in perspective of its themes
rst declaration in Liber Novus.
To understand this intimate relationship of Aion and Liber Novus,
consider again Jungs remark: Before my illness I had often asked myself
if I were permitted to publish or even speak of my secret knowledge. Liber
Novus was the primary documentary account of that secret knowledge,
the book he never felt permitted to publish. Nonetheless Jung realized it
was my duty to communicate these thoughts. . . . He perceived that his rev-
elation needed rst to address readers in a different language and format
from its primary form, something less hieratic and prophetic in tone, yet still
sufcient to his duty. And so: I later set it all down in Aion.
Now, with his new book opened, we see that every motif elaborated
in Aion owed forward in a considered development from Liber Novus.
Placed in this context, Aion becomes a commentary to the New Book, a
276

hermeneutic amplication to the visions. And, appropriately, its title echoes
the proclamation imaged on the rst folio of Liber Novus.
The visions Jung experienced in 1944 during his passage to the thresh-
old of death had completed his story, given him a nal conrmation of the
validity of the revelation, and granted him authority to speak. However, when
he began the writing that led him on the road to Aion and suddenly realized
the task he had begun, he confessed to Victor White, It came to me as a
shock, as I felt utterly unequal to such a task.
68
At this critical moment of doubt, a messenger arrived from the vision-
ary world of Liber Novus to aid him. His name is Izdubar. Jung tells the story
in the next lines of his 19 December 1947 letter. Only with Liber Novus in
hand can a reader possibly understand what happened, and what it meant to
Jung. When understood, one begins to fathom the deep imaginative relation-
ship of these two works.
Jung had rst met Izdubar, the giant God from the East, in a vision on 8
January 1914. The meeting had gone tragically wrongconfronted by Jungs
toxic modernity, Izdubar had been stricken and sickened unto death. Jung
sequestered the enfeebled God within an egg; before the egg Jung uttered
sacred incantations to his regeneration. Here, Liber Novus:
Christmas has come. The God is in the egg. I have prepared a
rug for my God, an expensive red rug from the land of morning.
He shall be surrounded by the shimmer of magnicence of his
Eastern land.
I am the mother, the simple maiden, who gave birth and did
not know how. I am the careful father, who protected the maiden.
I am the shepherd, who received the message as he guarded his
herd at night on the dark elds.
I am the holy animal that stood astonished and cannot
grasp the becoming of the God. I am the wise man who came
from the East, suspecting the miracle from afar. And I am the
egg that surrounds and nurtures the seed of the God in me.
The solemn hours lengthen. And my humanity is wretched
and suffers torment. Since I am a giver of birth. Whence do you
delight me, Oh God? He is the eternal emptiness and the eter-
nal fullness. Nothing resembles himand he resembles everything.
Eternal darkness and eternal brightness. Eternal below and eter-
nal above. Double nature in one. . . .
69
Thirty-four exquisite folio pages of Liber Novus, textually and artistically
among its most beautiful sections, are dedicated to this tale of Jungs sacred
labor to renew a dying God.
70
And in the illustrations, we see repeatedly
imaged a boat, the ancient barge carrying the Sun-god across a great sea.
LANCE S. OWENS

Detail, Liber Novus, Liber Secundus, folio 64.
With this vision from Liber Novus in mind, consider what Jung now
says. Here we continue reading the 19 December 1947 letter to Fr. White,
recounting the dream that led him into the writing of Aion:
Christnot the man but the divine beingwas my secret goal.
It came to me as a shock, as I felt utterly unequal to such a task.
A dream told me, that my small sherboat had been sunk and
that a giant (whom I know from a dream about 30 years ago) had
provided me with a new, beautiful seagoing craft about twice the
size of my former boat. Then I knewnothing doing! I had to go
on.
Of course, it was not in a dream thirty years previously that Jung had
met Izdubar, but in imaginative vision. Izdubar, the God whom Jung had re-
newed, was providing a vessel that would now help him cross a vast aeonal
sea. The illustration of the boat in Liber Novus is so vivid, one can almost
fall into Jungs dream.
278

After this nocturnal visitation from Izdubar, Jung knew, I had to go
on; he had to make his declaration about Christ, the aeon passing, and the
new God-imagethe secret revelation of Liber Novus about which he had
remained silent for thirty years. Aion would become a new formation of the
keynote message from Liber Novus.
He continues the letter, outlining what to him was now crystal clear,
but in words that must have left dear Fr. White completely benighted:
My further writing led me to the archetype of the Godman
and to the phenomenon of synchronicity which adheres to the
archetype. Thus I came to discuss the
71
and the then new
aeon of 30
(following 0
),
72
the prophecy of the Antichrist
and the development of the latter from 1000 A.D. in Mysticism
and Alchemy until the recent developments, which threaten to
overthrowthe Christian aeon altogether. I have found some beau-
tiful material.
Jung had found some beautiful materialhe had returned to Liber Novus.
Jung closes this singularly important letter with one more image from
the inner world, a dream that had occurred on the night before his writ-
ing the letter. Philemon had visited him again. One might conjecture that
the dream somehow motivated his revealing letter that next day, and cer-
tainly the dream has something to do with Jungs effort to aid his friend, the
Catholic theologian, to see a fact beyond the connes of dogma. He tells Fr.
White the dream, in abbreviated terms:
Last night I have dreamt of 3 catholic priests, who were quite
friendly and one of them had a remarkable library. I was the
whole time under a sort of military order and I had to sleep in the
barracks. There was a scarcity of beds, so that two men had to
share one bed. My partner had already gone to bed. The bed was
very clean, white and fresh and he was a most venerable looking,
very old man with white locks and a long owing white beard. He
offered me graciously one half of the bed and I woke up, when I
was just slipping into it.
Then a month later, in his next letter, Jung lls in a critical detail omitted in
his rst recension of the dream:
While I stood before the bed of the Old Man, I thought and felt:
Indignus sum Domine. I know Him very well: He was my guru
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The vessel bearing the God image (symbolized as the Sun-disk) crossing over the aeonian waters
of Pisces. Liber Novus, Liber Secundus, folio 55.
more than 30 years ago, a real ghostly gurubut that is a long
andI am afraidexceedingly strange story.
73
Standing before Philemon, confronted by the invitation of laying down his
burden beside the master, Jung thought and felt: Indignus sum Domine.
Perhaps no one except a priest like Fr. White could experientially understand
the conjoined affect and meaning of these words. The priest speaks them
at the most sacred moment of the Eucharistic ritual, as he addresses the
consecrated elements, the symbolic and real presence of Christs body and
blood: Lord, I am not worthy.
The visit from Philemon conrmed the task. Jung now had a book to
write; destiny had give him a duty. But he humbly understood that no one is
worthy of the mission mirrored by an Aion.
74
280

WANDERING IN TIME
I cannot here outline specic themes echoing forth from Liber Novus into
Aionthat task will be met in time, and it will engage our imagination and
intuition, as well as a deepened understanding of Jung. It will require us to
consider how a story might cross history.
Each text offers something
new to the other; each has a
point of view. The key
prophetic themes in
Aion . . . draw broadly
from various sections [in
Liber Novus].
When comparing the
two works, one must under-
stand that there is no sim-
ple chapter-by-chapter cor-
respondence, though anyone
who knows Liber Novus
should open Aion to the Ta-
ble of Contents and peruse
its outlined form. After doing
that, read again the rst ve
chapters of Aion, from Chap-
ter One, The Ego, through
Chapter Five, Christ, a Sym-
bol of the Self. Then recon-
sider Jungs journey recounted in Liber Primus, the rst book of Liber
Novus. In context of the commentary in these ve chapters of Aion, re-
ect upon his story in Liber Novus: his personal situation in 1913; the
murder of Siegfried; the encounter with Salome and Elijah; and the com-
plex drama at the end of this rst book of Liber Novus, titled Mys-
terium, in which Jung is Christed. Each text offers something new to the
other; each has a point of view. The key prophetic themes in Aionthe
end of the Christian age, the Christ and Antichrist, Gnostic symbols of
the Self, and the structure of the Selfdraw broadly from various sections.
Once you have an ear for the story, you will hear it.
There is, however, one chapter in Aion on which I must specically
comment. It always seemed the very strangest: Chapter Seven, The Prophe-
cies of Nostradamus. Before plunging into his astrological discussion of the
aeon of Pisces, the Christian age, Jung takes a long detour to tell about a
man of the sixteenth centurya prophet and astrologerwho accurately
read human destiny in the stars. Now, in a ash, it becomes quite clear why
Jung adds this bizarre episode. He is placing himself in historical context.
After all, he too was a man reading the story of human destiny in the stars.
75
But, then, who would understand?
Edward F. Edinger presented an extraordinary seminar on Jungs Aion
at the C. G. Jung Institute in Los Angeles during 1988 and 1989. The lec-
tures have subsequently been published in book form and provide one of the
LANCE S. OWENS

most probingly insightful discussions of Jungs late thought anywhere avail-
able.
76
Anyone seeking a detailed exegesis of Aion will be well served by
these lecturesI doubt it is possible to do better without fully integrating
Liber Novus.
Based on evidence from Jungs published comments in 1925 about his
visions,
77
Edinger intuited that Aion was closely linked with Jungs experi-
ence recorded in the then still hidden Red Book. His rst evidence was the
image of the lion-headed Mithraic deity Aion that appears as frontispiece to
the book. In the great Mysterium recorded in Liber Novus,
78
and told in the
1925 seminar, Jung himself took on this visage. Edinger comments:
Now what does this vision mean? I think that one of the things it
means is that Jung is the rst representative of the new aeon . . .
he is the harbinger of the new aeonwhat I call and what I think
will in the future be called the Jungian aeon. . . . Just as Christ
was the rst person to enter the aeon of Pisces, so Jung is the
rst to inaugurate the aeon of Aquarius.
79
This is an extreme, and perhaps to some people, even offensive statement.
But Dr. Edinger knew Jung better than most men of his generation. And he
made similar assertions about Jung on several occasions, despite the wincing
response of some Jungian theorists. Only centuries of time will determine
whether such comments had merit. Personally, speaking from the present,
on this single issue I disagree with Edinger: Jungs own response to the germ
of that thought was, Lord, I am not worthy.
But there is another reason behind my hesitance to accept Edingers
term: a dream rst told to me in February of 1993 by a middle-aged woman
with a remarkable interior relationship to Jung. We both long ago forgot
the dream, but recently while reading her journals she rediscovered it, and
brought it back for a second consideration. The dream goes like this: She
[the dreamer] is in a store buying a cup of coffee. Instead of accepting her
$20 bill in payment, the female clerk insists on giving to her a $5 bill, say-
ing, You may return it next time. She leaves, thinking, It makes no sense.
Something similar happens again in a vaguely remembered scene involving
her automobile. Then the image radically changes. I transcribe verbatim from
her dream journal as recorded in the morning, 7 February 1993:
Jung is speaking, though unseen. It is Him speaking from another
realm, the spirit. He is speaking about the termination or culmi-
nation of this present age, with an emphasis on the feminine who
is called Sophia.
282

A book is placed before me after Jung concludes speaking. It is a
New Book, a new beginning. And the reading the book is opened
to is entitled Emmanuel. This clearly is the new feminine name,
i.e., it has replaced Sophia. The book is Jungs work. I proceed
reading aloud.
There seems rst to be the introductory lines and a marked em-
phasis on the lifting of the weight of oppression this age had with
it, bringing a quality of joy, and the people shall experience light-
ness of heart.
80
The dream memory ended there, with this nal note added: Emmanuel =
With us is God.
81
I confess to pondering the synchronous reappearance of that dream
while writing this article. Jung asked himself, How can I fathom what will
happen during the next eight hundred years, up to the time when the One
begins his rule? I am speaking only of what is to come.
82
Only a millennial
dream, a primordially ancient dream, dares augur such a measureless tale.
As I now read Jungs story and ponder its plot, it seems to me his vi-
sion of a new God-image certainly involves an integration of the feminine.
83
It
also centers attention on the Mysterium Coniunctionis, a mystery of union
in the bridal chamber where two divided natures conjoin. Jung intuited that
symbolic names and images will be vitally renewed or reformed in this fourth
month of the journey, just as they were 2,000 years ago at the beginning of
the aeon of Pisces. And perhaps on the wandering path of the way to come,
humankind will imaginatively discover its symbolic compass in a new femi-
nine name, like this dreamed name of Sophia becoming Emmanuel: With us
is God.
Time will tell.
AION IS A CHILD
In 1950, Jung worked the last page of his Liber Novus and the story of Aion
upon a great square stone resting beside his Bollingen Tower on the shores
of Lake Zurich. This is his nal compendium to a long journey completed, the
homecoming oblation of a wayfaring man.
84
When he began work on the front surface, the stone showed him a
circle: It looked out at him like an eye. With chisel, he cut deep the orb, and
then the central pupil. In the pupil of the eyeat the doorway between inner
and outer worldshe saw and carved a small gure, the cabiri Telesphoros.
His vestment is marked with the symbol of Hermes. In hand, he bares a light.
Around him in ancient Greek, the stone speaks this proclamation:

LANCE S. OWENS

Jungs Aion Lapis, completed in 1950 and located beside his Bollingen Tower.
Aion is a child playingWagering on draughtsKingship of a Child
Telesphoros traverses the dark regions of this Cosmos
A ashing Star from the Depths
Guiding way to the Gates of the Sun and to the Land of Dreams
85
There at the threshold of vision, where story and history wed, we meet the
nal mystery of Carl Gustav Jung and his tale twice told.
Lance S. Owens, M.D., is a physician in clinical practice and a frequent lecturer
on Jung, Tolkien, Gnosticism, and the visionary tradition in Western history.
He has also served for many years as a parish priest of the Ecclesia Gnostica.
Dr. Owens lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. Text and images reprinted from The
Red Book by C. G. Jung, edited by Sonu Shamdasani, translated by Sonu Sham-
dasani, John Peck, and Mark Kyburz. Copyright (c) 2009 by the Foundation of
the Works of C. G. Jung. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton &
Company, Inc.

284

NOTES
1. C. G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus, ed. Sonu Shamdasani, tr. John Peck,
Mark Kyburz, and Sonu Shamdasani (W.W. Norton & Co, 2009), 229 (here-
after, LN). Given the large size of the folio pages of LN, citations are to page
and page column; column given as i or ii.
2. C. G. Jung, Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (New York: Moffat
Yard and Co.), 1917, 4434 (hereafter, Collected Papers). Compare the
comment in Liber Novus: Jung says to Philemon, Your wisdom is invisible,
your truth is unknowable, entirely untrue in any given age, and yet true in all
eternity, but you pour out living water, from which the owers of your garden
bloom, a starry water, a dew of the night (LN 316 i).
3. Jung originally titled Liber Secundus in Liber Novus, The Adventures of
the Wandering, LN 259 n1.
4. For a detailed introduction to these events, see Lance S. Owens, The
Hermeneutics of Vision: C. G. Jung and Liber Novus, The Gnostic: A Jour-
nal of Gnosticism, Western Esotericism and Spirituality, Issue 3 (July
2010), 2346.
5. In late life, Jung described Liber Novus to Aniela Jaff e as an attempt at
an elaboration in terms of the revelation (LN 219 ii; also, LN 225 i). On 5
January 1922, Jung recorded in his journal a conversation with his soul, who
asks him: Why have you received the revelation? You should not hide it. You
concern yourself with the form? Is the form important, when it is a matter of
revelation? (LN 211 ii).
6. LN 225f.
7. At the end of Liber Secundus, Jung states the issue facing him: An opus
is needed, that one can squander decades on, and do it out of necessity. I
must catch up with a piece of the Middle Ageswithin myself. We have only
nished the Middle Ages ofothers. I must begin early, in that period when
the hermits died out (LN p 320 ii; see also, LN 330 n354).
8. LN 230 ii.
9. The prologue, which would include this rst preface page, is apparently not
in the handwritten draft manuscript or in the typescript of the draft, made
circa 1915 (LN 225 i).
10. LN vii. In Memories, Dreams, Reections the comment is rendered: I have
never lost touch with my initial experiences. All my works, all my creative
activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in
1912, almost fty years ago. Everything that I accomplished in later life was
already contained in them . . . C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reections,
ed. Aniela Jaff e (Rev. ed., Pantheon, 1993), 191 (hereafter, MDR).
11. LN 221.
12. There is no doubt that Jung addressed Liber Novus to a future readership;
LN 223 i.
13. The rst Swiss edition of Aion, completed by Jung in 1950, was published in
1951. The two Swiss editions had two different subtitles: Researches into the
History of Symbols and then Contributions to the Symbolism of the Self.
LANCE S. OWENS

In the 1958 edition for the Collected Works the subtitle was modied again
to Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. This shifting subtitle
well represents the problem of summarizing the theme of Aion. C.G. Jung,
Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self , 2nd ed., Collected
Works (hereafter, CW) 9 ii (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).
(All references to CW are to page number, not paragraph number.)
14. The Psychology of the Transference, published in 1946 (CW 16, 163323)
was largely completed prior to the visions, but published in their reection.
Early sections of Mysterium Coniunctionis were written before 1945, the
nal sections and conclusion came after; speaking of his early work on the
book, Jung said after the visions, All I have written is correct. . . . I only re-
alize its full reality now (Hannah, 279). Answer to Job was rst published
in 1952 (CW 11, 355470). Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Princi-
pal, also published in 1952 (CW 8, 816968), is a corollary work that reects
on the themes of this quartet, and the meaningful conjunctions of story and
history.
15. MDR, 295ff. Also see Barbara Hannahs account; Barbara Hannah, Jung: His
Life and Work (New York: G. Putnams Sons, 1976), 277ff.
16. MDR, 2956.
17. Ann Conrad Lammers & Adrian Cunnigham, eds., The JungWhite Letters
(New York: Routledge, 2007), 60. The editors of these letters have preserved
Jungs original spelling and punctuation; the letters are quoted as given, with-
out alteration. (I express gratitude to the editors for their work on this invalu-
able collection of letters, which I have utilized here extensively.)
18. MDR, 297.
19. Hannah, 284.
20. Hannah, 276.
21. Hannah, 282.
22. Phanes appears prominently in his later Black Book 6 and 7 journals; LN 301
n211, LN 354 n125.
23. LN 359 ii.
24. See the explanatory note, MDR, 294n.
25. MDR, 294.
26. LN 233 n49. The woman was certainly Toni (Antonia Anna) Wolff. However,
that is a complex corollary to the story.
27. Sanford L. Drob, Kabbalistic Visions: C. G. Jung and Jewish Mysticism
(New Orleans: Spring Books, 2010).
28. Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York:
Schocken Books, 1965), 97; Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jew-
ish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 75. Jung was intro-
duced to Kabbalah principally through Scholem, and probably understood
it in this context offered by Scholem. The Gnostic writings discovered at
Nag Hammadi contain texts evidencing source relationships within Jewish,
JewishChristian, and Hellenistic culture.
29. MDR, 297.
286

30. MDR, 297.
31. Ann Lammers relates that Jung gave his son these special letters in a
zippered leather case, with solemn instructions about future publication.
JungWhite, xxii.
32. JungWhite, 19 Dec 1947, 103.
33. Margaret Ostrowski-Sachs, From Conversations with C. G. Jung (Zurich:
Juris Druck & Verlag, 1971), 68, quoted in Edward Edinger, The Aion Lec-
tures (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1996), 13. In 1958 Jung explained further:
I am fully aware of the risk I am taking in proposing to communicate my
views concerning certain contemporary events, which seem to me important,
to those patient enough to hear me. . . . It is not presumption that drives me,
but my conscience as a psychiatrist that bids me fulll my duty and prepare
those few who will hear me for coming events which are in accord with the
end of an era. As we know from ancient Egyptian history, there are symp-
toms of psychic changes that always appear at the end of one Platonic month
and at the beginning of another. They are, it seems, changes in the constella-
tion of the psychic dominants, of the archetypes or Gods as they used to be
called, which bring about, or accompany, long-lasting transformations of the
collective psyche. This transformation started within the historical tradition
and left traces behind within it, rst in the transition of the Age of Taurus to
that of Aries, and then from Aries to Pisces, whose beginning coincides with
the rise of Christianity. We are now nearing that great change which may be
expected when the spring-point enters Aquarius. . . . I am, to be quite frank,
concerned for all those that are unprepared by the events in question and
disconcerted by their incomprehensible nature. . . . I undertake this thank-
less task in the expectation that my chisel will make no impression on the
hard stone it meets. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in
the Skies, CW 10, 311-2.
34. In September of 1950, and just four months after completing the foreword
for Aion, he wrote this introduction.
35. CW 5, xxii.
36. CW 5, xxiv.
37. CW 5, xxivxxv.
38. JungWhite, 30 Jan 1948, 117.
39. In 1929, Jung speaks of three past aeons of human history, reaching back to
beginnings of a recorded history in Egypt over 6,500 years ago; the month
referred to here is the platonic month or zodiacal age: We live in the age
of the decline of Christianity, when metaphysical premises of morality are
collapsing. . . . When the confusion is at its height a new revelation comes,
i.e., at the beginning of the fourth month of world history. Gerhard Adler,
ed., C. G. Jung: Letters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 12
Sept 1929, Vol. I, 69. He denes the three past ages of history again, Letters,
Vol. II, 229.
40. Transitions between the aeons always seem to have been melancholy and
despairing times, as for instance the collapse of the Old Kingdom in Egypt
LANCE S. OWENS

between Taurus and Aries, or the melancholy of the Augustinian age be-
tween Aries and Pisces. And now we are moving into Aquarius. . . . And we
are only at the beginning of this apocalyptic development! Already I am a
great-grandfather twice over and see those distant generations growing up
who long after we are gone will spend their lives in that darkness. Letters,
Vol II, 25 Feb 1955, 229.
41. LN 264 i.
42. LN 272 ii.
43. MDR, 192.
44. JungWhite, 23 Jan 1947, 71. In LN, Philemon tells Jung: You will be a river
that pours forth over the lands. It seeks every valley and streams toward
the depths. . . . You will hold the invisible realm in trembling hands; it lowers
its roots into the gray darknesses and mysteries of the earth and sends up
branches covered in leaves into the golden air (LN 355 ii).
45. Letters, Vol. I, 12 Sept. 1929, 69.
46. Letters, Vol. 1, 12 June 1911, 24.
47. William McGuire, ed., The Freud/Jung Letters (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1974), 29 Aug 1911, 439.
48. Collected Papers, 277.
49. In 1887, Blavatsky wrote: There are several remarkable cycles that come
to a close at the end of this century. . . . [One example] occurred 2410 and
255 B.C., or when the equinox entered into the sign of the Ram, and again
into that of Pisces. When it enters, in a few years, the sign of Aquarius, psy-
chologists will have some extra work to do, and the psychic idiosyncrasies of
humanity will enter on a great change. H. P. Blavatsky, Collected Writings
(Theosophical Publishing House, 19501991), 8:174n. Jung was well aware
of the theosophical movement, and had carefully read the writings of G. R. S.
Mead, the most important theosophical historian of the period.
50. Though Aion is the title of Jungs book, he did not address, dene, or use the
word aion directly anywhere within the text.
51. Discovery of the precession is attributed to Hipparchus, c. 190 B.C.E. c. 120
B.C.E, though Aristillus of Alexandria may have noted it 150 years earlier.
52. For a discussion of the precession of the equinox in Mithraic mythology, see:
David Ulansey, The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1989), 49ff.
53. Jung explains in Aion, Although no connection of any kind can be proved
between the gure of Christ and the inception of the astrological age of the
shes, the simultaneity of the sh symbolism of the Redeemer with the as-
trological symbol of the new aeon seems to me important enough to warrant
the emphasis we place upon it. If we try to follow up the complicated mytho-
logical ramications of this parallel, we do so with intent to throw light on the
multifarious aspects of an archetype that manifests itself on the one hand in
a personality, and on the other hand synchronistically, in a moment of time
determined in advance, before Christs birth. Indeed, long before that, the
archetype had been written in the heavens by projection, so as then, when
288

the time was fullled, to coincide with the symbols produced by the new era
(CW 9ii, 92).
54. CW 11, 157.
55. LN 338 ii.
56. LN 311 ii.
57. The aeon of Gemini, the Twins, which ended astronomically approximately
4500 B.C.E, around the beginning of human recorded history.
58. The month of the sh is the age of Pisces (LN 314 ii315 i).
59. Jung explained the origins of Answer to Job: The inner root of this book
is to be found in Aion. MDR, 216. Answer to Job (CW 11, 355470) was
published in 1952.
60. LN 234 n60; this statement, recorded in his Black Book, is not transcribed
into LN.
61. LN 241 i.
62. In 1917, Jung writes concerning early Christianity and its rejection of Gnos-
ticism: If the signs of the age are not deceptive, we are now in the great
nal settlement of the Christian epoch. We know that, evolution not be-
ing uniformly continuous, when one form of creation has been outlived,
the evolutionary tendency harks back to resume that form which, after
having made a beginning, was left behind in an undeveloped state. Col-
lected Papers, 406. In Aion Jung states: Gnosis is undoubtedly a psy-
chological knowledge whose contents derive from the unconscious.
. . . This would explain the astonishing parallelism between Gnostic symbol-
ism and the ndings of the psychology of the unconscious (CW 9ii, 223).
63. LN 311 ii.
64. LN 356 ii. The new month here is the aeon of Aquarius. In the Black Book
journal account of the event, Jung is himself speaking to Christ.
65. Jung began work on the manuscript in the fall of 1947, completing a rough
draft of his material by mid-December. Sections from what became Chapters
IV and V of Aion were presented at the 1948 Eranos meetings. The Swiss
rst edition was published in 1951. JungWhite Letters, 103 n144.
66. JungWhite, 21 May 1948, 119.
67. Hannah, 301
68. JungWhite, 19 Dec 1947, 103.
69. LN 284f.
70. Liber Secundus, folio pp. 3669, relates the story of Izdubar. The transcrip-
tion of text and images here in Liber Novus reects events recorded in his
journal in early January 1914. By Jungs notation, it appears that the image
of Izdubar on folio p. 36 was completed at Christmas 1915 (LN 277 n96).
The images on folio pp. 5463 were painted between January and February
1917 (LN 285 n129, LN 286 n132). Thus Jung spent over a year, Dec 1915 to
Feb 1917, reecting upon and then artistically imaging in Liber Novus the
story of this section: Izdubar, the boat of the Sun, and the reborn God. During
this same period he was intensely involved in the ongoing stream of visionary
experiences that formed the last section of Liber Novus, Scrutinies.
LANCE S. OWENS

71. Ichthys = sh.
72. The symbols indicate Pisces following Aries, and the precession of the
equinox.
73. JungWhite, 30 January 1948, 116.
74. Answer to Job concludes: Even the enlightened person remains what he is,
and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within
him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all
sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky (CW 11,
470).
75. Particularly see the section titled The Three Prophecies (LN 305 i) and the
journal entry in LN (306 n236).
76. Edinger, The Aion Lectures, op. cit.
77. C. G. Jung, William McGuire ed., Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Semi-
nar Given in 1925 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 478.
78. LN 245 ii.
79. Edinger, 192.
80. Quoted by permission; photocopy of original journal pages in my possession.
81. In Psychological Types, Jung touched on this theme: Signicantly, Im-
manuel (the redeeming symbol) means god with us, i.e., union with the
latent dynamis of the unconscious (CW 6, 265).
82. LN 306 n236. The eight hundred year period is associated with the coni-
unctiones maximae of Saturn and Jupiter, which recur in an 800-year cycle.
cf. Aion (CW 9ii, 82, 96ff). A SaturnJupiter conjunction is imaged occurring
in Gemini on the initial folio page of Liber Novus. It is also suggested on the
Aion Lapis (see n 84).
83. cf. Answer to Job (CW 11, 461ff).
84. He began work on the stone as he completed the manuscript of Aion. When
nished, be carved these words under the inscriptions upon the side: In re-
membrance of his seventy-fth birthday C. G. Jung made and placed this here
as a thanks offering, in the year 1950 (MDR, 228); for images of the stone,
see Aniela Jaff e, ed., C.G. Jung: Word and Image (Princeton University
Press, 1979), 196f.
85. This is my translation. The rst phrase references a fragment from Heraclitus
of Ephesus (c. 535 B.C.E.); in Jungs rendering on the stone it becomes a co-
herent statement. MDR translates Jungs amplied German rendition of the
inscription: Time is a childplaying like a childplaying a board gamethe
kingdom of the child. This is Telesphoros, who roams through the dark re-
gions of this cosmos and glows like a star out of the depths. He points the
way to the gates of the sun and to the land of dreams (MDR, 227).

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Jung and Aion: Time, Vision,

and a Wayfaring Man

ho hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of

voice of an objective fact. It was independent, ineffably ancient, and yet

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