Philemon

The following is an entry from Black Book 5, pp. 163–78, which gives a preliminary sketch of cosmology of the Septem Sermones. 

16. I. 16. The force of the God is frightful. 

“You shall experience even more of it. You are in the second age. The first age has been overcome. This is the age of the rulership of the son, whom you call the Frog God. A third age will follow, the age of apportionment and harmonious power.”

 My soul, where did you go? Did you go to the animals? 

I bind the Above with the Below. I bind God and animal. Something in me is part animal, something part God, and a third part human. Below you serpent, within you man, and above you God. Beyond the serpent comes the phallus, then the earth, then the moon, and finally the coldness and emptiness of outer space. Above you comes the dove or the celestial soul, in which love and foresight are united, just as poison and shrewdness are united in the serpent. Shrewdness is the devil’s understanding, which always detects smaller things and finds chinks where you suspect none. If I am not conjoined through the uniting of the Below and the Above, I break down into three parts: the serpent, and in that or some other animal form I roam, living nature daimonically, arousing fear and longing. The human soul, living forever within you. The celestial soul, as such dwelling with the Gods, far from you and unknown to you, appearing in the form of a bird. Each of these three parts then is independent. Beyond me stands the celestial mother. Its counterpart is the phallus. Its mother is the earth, its goal is the heavenly mother. The celestial mother is the daughter of the celestial world. Its counterpart is the earth. The celestial mother is illuminated through the spiritual sun. Its counterpart is the moon. And just as the moon is the crossing to the dead of space, the spiritual sun is the crossing to the Pleroma, the upper world of fullness. The moon is the God’s eye of emptiness, just as the sun is the God’s eye of fullness. The moon that you see is the symbol, just as the sun that you see. Sun and moon, that is, their symbols, are Gods. There are still other Gods; their symbols are the planets. The celestial mother is a daimon among the order of the Gods, an inhabitant of the heavenly world. The Gods are favorable and unfavorable, impersonal, the souls of stars, influences, forces, grandfathers of souls, rulers in the heavenly world, both in space and in force. They are neither dangerous nor kind, strong, yet humble, clarifications of the Pleroma and of the eternal emptiness, configurations of the eternal qualities. Their number is immeasurably great and leads over to the one supreme fundamental, which contains all qualities in itself and itself has none, a nothing and everything, the complete dissolution of man, death and eternal life. Man becomes through the principium individuationis. He strives for absolute individuality, through which he ever increasingly concentrates the absolute dissolution of the Pleroma. Through this he makes the Pleroma the point that contains the greatest tension and is itself a shining star, immeasurably small, just as the Pleroma is immeasurably great. The more concentrated the Pleroma becomes, the stronger the star of the individual becomes. It is surrounded by shining clouds, a heavenly body in the making, comparable to a small sun. It emits fire. Therefore it is called: εγω [ειμι] συμπλανοζυμιν αστηρ.1 Just like the sun, which is also such a star, which is a God and grandfather of souls, the star of the individual is also like the sun, a God and grandfather of the souls. He is visible from time to time, just as I have described him. His light is blue, like that of a distant star. He is far out in space, cold and solitary, since he is beyond death. To attain individuality, we need a large share of death. Therefore it is called ει εοι εστε,2 since just as an innumerable number of men rule the earth, so a countless number of stars and of Gods rule the celestial world. To be sure, this God is the one who survives the death of men. To him for whom solitude is Heaven, he goes to Heaven; to him for whom it is Hell, he goes to Hell. Whoever does not follow the principium individuationis to its end becomes no God, since he cannot bear individuality. The dead who besiege us are souls who have not fulfilled the principium individuationis, or else they would have become distant stars. Insofar as we do not fulfill it, the dead have a claim on us and besiege us and we cannot escape them. [Image]3 The God of the frogs or toads, the brainless, is the uniting of the Christian God with Satan. His nature is like the flame; he is like Eros, but a God; Eros is only a daimon. The one God, to whom worship is due, is in the middle. You should worship only one God. The other Gods are unimportant. Abraxas is to be feared. Therefore it was a deliverance when he separated himself from me. You do not need to seek him. He will find you, just like Eros. He is the God of the cosmos, extremely powerful and fearful. He is the creative drive, he is form and formation, just as much as matter and force, therefore he is above all the light and dark Gods. He tears away souls and casts them into procreation. He is the creative and created. He is the God who always renews himself, in days, in months, in years, in human life, in ages, in peoples, in the living, in heavenly bodies. He compels, he is unsparing. If you worship him, you increase his power over you. Thereby it becomes unbearable. You will have dreadful trouble getting clear of him. The more you free yourself from him, the more you approach death, since he is the life of the universe. But he is also universal death. Therefore you fall victim to him again, not in life but in dying. So remember him, do not worship him, but also do not imagine that you can flee him since he is all around you. You must be in the middle of life, surrounded by death on all sides. Stretched out, like one crucified, you hang in him, the fearful, the overpowering. But you have in you the one God, the wonderfully beautiful and kind, the solitary, starlike, unmoving, he who is older and wiser than the father, he who has a safe hand, who leads you among all the darknesses and death scares of dreadful Abraxas. He gives joy and peace, since he is beyond death and beyond what is subject to change. He is no servant and no friend of Abraxas. He himself is an Abraxas, but not unto you, but in himself and his distant world, since you yourself are a God who lives in faraway realms and who renews himself in his ages and creations and peoples, just as powerful to them as Abraxas is to you. You yourself are a creator of worlds and a created being. You have the one God, and you become your one God in the innumerable number of Gods. As a God, you are the great Abraxas in your world. But as a man you are the heart of the one God who appears to his world as the great Abraxas, the feared, the powerful, the donor of madness, he who dispenses the water of life, the spirit of the tree of life, the daimon of the blood, the death bringer. You are the suffering heart of your one star God, who is Abraxas to his world. Therefore because you are the heart of your God, aspire toward him, love him, live for him. Fear Abraxas, who rules over the human world. Accept what he forces upon you, since he is the master of the life of this world and none can escape him. If you do not accept, he will torment you to death and the heart of your God will suffer, just as the one God of Christ suffered the heaviest in his death. The suffering of mankind is without end, since its life is without end. Since there is no end where none sees an end. If mankind has come to an end, there is none who would see its end and none who could say that mankind has an end. So it has no end for itself, but it certainly does for the Gods. The death of Christ took no suffering away from the world, but his life has taught us much; namely, that it pleases the one God if the individual lives his own life against the power of Abraxas. The one God thus delivers himself from the suffering of the earth into which his Eros plunged him; since when the one God saw the earth, he sought its procreation, and forgot that a world was already given to him in which he was Abraxas. So the one God became human. Therefore the one in turn pulls man up to him and into him, so that the one becomes complete again. But the freeing of man from the power of Abraxas does not follow man’s withdrawing from the power of Abraxas—no one can pull away from it—but through subjugating himself to it. Even Christ had to subjugate himself to the power of Abraxas, and Abraxas killed him in a gruesome manner. Only by living life can you free yourself from it. So live it to such a degree that it befits you. To the degree that you live it, you also fall victim to the power of Abraxas and his dreadful deceptions. But to the same degree the star God in you gains in longing and power, in that the fruit of deception and human disappointment falls to him. Pain and disappointment fill the world of Abraxas with coldness, all of your life’s warmth slowly sinks into the depths of your soul, into the midpoint of man, where the far blue starlight of your one God glimmers. If you flee Abraxas from fear, you escape pain and disappointment and you remain terrified, that is, out of unconscious love you cling to Abraxas and your one God cannot catch fire. But through pain and disappointment you redeem yourself, since your longing then falls of its own accord like a ripe fruit into the depths, following gravity, striving toward the midpoint, where the blue light of the star God arises. So do not flee from Abraxas, do not seek him. You feel his coercion, do not resist him, so that you shall live and pay your ransom. The works of Abraxas are to be fulfilled, for consider that in your world you yourself are Abraxas and force your creature to fulfil your work. Here, where you are the creature subjugated to Abraxas, you must learn to fulfill the work of life. There, where you are Abraxas, you compel your creatures. You ask, why is all this so? I understand that it seems questionable to you. The world is questionable. It is the unending infinite folly of the Gods, which you know is unendingly wise. Surely it is also a crime, an unforgivable sin, and therefore also the highest love and virtue. So live life, do not flee Abraxas, provided that he compels you and you can recognize his necessity. In one sense I say to you: do not fear him, do not love him. In another sense I say: fear him, love him. He is the life of the earth, that says enough. You need to recognize the multiplicity of the Gods. You cannot unite all into one being. As little as you are one with the multiplicity of men, just so little is the one God one with the multiplicity of the Gods. This one God is the kind, the loving, the leading, the healing. To him all your love and worship is due. To him you should pray, you are one with him, he is near you, nearer than your soul. I, your soul, am your mother, who tenderly and frightfully surrounds you, your nourisher and corrupter; I prepare good things and poison for you. I am your intercessor with Abraxas. I teach you the arts that protect you from Abraxas. I stand between you and Abraxas the all-encompassing. I am your body, your shadow, your effectiveness in this world, your manifestation in the world of the Gods, your effulgence, your breath, your odor, your magical force. You should call me if you want to live with men, but the one God if you want to rise above the human world to the divine and eternal solitude of the star. 

1.“I am a star, wandering about with you.” —A citation from the Mithras Liturgy (Albrecht Dieterich, Eine Mithrasliturgie [Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1903], p. 8, line 5). Jung carved the continuation of this sentence on his stone at Bollingen. 

2. “You are Gods.” This is a citation from John 10:34: “The Jews answered him, saying, for a good work we stone thee not; but for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makesth thyself God. Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?” 

3. Sketch of Systema Munditotius; see Appendix A, p. 363 in the facsimile edition.

Who is Philemon?

The Philemon Foundation is named for a figure that appeared to Jung in a dream in 1913. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung recounted the dream in which this figure first appeared to him. Jung saw a sea-blue sky covered by brown clods of earth that appeared to be breaking apart. Out of the blue, he saw an old man with kingfisher wings and the horns of a bull flying across the sky, carrying a bunch of keys. After the dream, Jung painted the image, because he did not understand it. During this intense period, Jung was struck by the synchronicity of finding a dead kingfisher, a bird rarely seen around Zürich, in his garden by the lakeshore. Thereafter, Philemon played an important role in Jung’s fantasies. To Jung, he represented superior insight and functioned like a guru to him.

Partial accounts of this period may be found in the notes of his seminar given in 1925 on Analytical Psychology (prepared by Cary Baynes) and also in Aniela Jaffé’s biography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, published posthumously in a heavily edited form. In these, Jung narrated some of his decisive experiences and spoke of a few of the fantasy figures that he had encountered. These fantasies were also from part of the narratives which he recorded in his now legendary Red Book. One of the most significant figures is Philemon.

In his memoirs, Jung reported that he would often converse with Philemon as he strolled in the garden of his lakeside home in Küsnacht, Switzerland. Speaking with Aniela Jaffé, his close friend and colleague, he recalled,

[Philemon] was simply a superior knowledge, and he taught me psychological objectivity and the actuality of the soul. He formulated and expressed everything which I had never thought.

Jung’s fantasy figure was based on the figure of Philemon who appeared in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and in Goethe’s Faust. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid narrates how Jupiter and Mercury went wandering disguised as mortals in the hill country of Phyrgia. Searching for somewhere to rest, they were barred from a thousand homes. However, one old couple, Philemon and Baucis, graciously invited these strangers into their humble cottage. They had been married in this cottage in their youth and had grown old together in it, contentedly accepting their poverty. During the meal they prepared for their guests, the couple noted how their flagon refilled itself automatically as soon as it was emptied. To honor their guests, they offered to kill their only goose. The goose took refuge with the two gods, who decreed that it should not be killed. Revealing themselves, the two divinities informed the ancient couple that those around them would be punished, but that they would be spared. With the gods they climbed to safety on a nearby mountain. Upon reaching the top, they could see that the country surrounding their cottage had been flooded, with only their cottage remaining, now transformed into a splendid temple with columns of marble and a roof of gold. To repay them for their hospitality and kindness, the gods granted the old couple any wish. Philemon and Baucis’s reply was in keeping with their deep humility and reverence. They wished to become priests and serve in this new shrine to the gods and to die at the same time as a testimony to their enduring love. And so it happened, and when they died the gods honored them further by transforming them into trees so that they might continue to live side by side in this way as they had done in their mortal lives.

In Faust 2, Act V, Goethe has Faust build a city on land reclaimed from the sea. In order to accomplish this task, Faust tells Mephistopheles that he wants Philemon and Baucis, who lived on this land, moved. To Faust’s ultimate horror, instead of doing so, Mephistopheles decides to burn their cottage with Philemon and Baucis inside. Goethe’s Faust made a tremendous impression on Jung and held a life-long significance for him. He felt personally implicated by the destruction of these humble and reverent figures and felt that it was his responsibility to atone for this crime and to prevent its repetition.3 Healing this Faustian split would become a central theme in Jung’s life work.

At his tower in Bollingen, Jung commemorated Philemon. Over the gate, he carved the inscription, “Philemonis Sacrum – Fausti Poenitentia” [Philemon’s Shrine – Faust’s Repentance]. In one of the rooms at Bollingen, he painted a huge mural of the winged Philemon, essentially reproducing the painting from the Red Book. In a letter to Paul Schmitt in 1942, Jung wrote: “I have taken over Faust as my heritage, and moreover as the advocate and avenger of Philemon and Baucis, who, unlike Faust the superman, are the hosts of the gods in a ruthless and godforsaken age.”4

1C. G. Jung & Aniela Jaffé, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Translated by R. and C. Winston, London: Fontana, 1962/1983, p. 207.

2Protocols of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Library of Congress, p. 23.

3C. G. Jung & Aniela Jaffé, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 261.

4C. G. Jung, C. G. Jung Letters 1: 1906–1950. Edited by Gerhard Adler in collaboration with Aniela Jaffé, translated by R. F. C. Hull, London: Routledge, 1973, pp. 309–10.