“Protect the riddles, bear them in your heart, warm them, be pregnant with them. Thus you carry the future.”
-C.G. Jung, The Red Book
March 9, 2023
I was recently interviewed for the Joseph Campbell Foundation podcast and am excited to be able to share the episode with you. In this conversation on “The Podcast With a Thousand Faces,” John Bucher and I spoke about a wide range of topics, from human development and Quarterlife (of course) to masculinity and the Hero’s Journey beyond the gender binary, and much more. I hope you enjoy it!
Meanwhile, The Red Book course is coming up soon! I sent out the welcome email to all registered students last night, with the reading assignments for our eight weeks of study together and an invitation to share what brought each person to this course at this time. I wrote some about my own journey with Jung’s magnum opus for the newsletter last week, and I’m loving hearing about other people’s experiences with this work—from those who have never opened its covers, to those for whom it has already played a big, leading role.
The value of this book is hard to grasp or convey concisely, which is why I keep coming back to it again and again. Over some 400 pages, Jung travels via active imagination into the inner reaches of his psyche and encounters characters fit for a Hollywood blockbuster. There’s the blind maiden, the black snake, the wise old philosopher, the anchorite, the portly cook, the trapped and lonely daughter, the wandering souls, the hanged man, the dead girl, the giant with an ax, the red man, the alchemist magician, and more. Amidst all of the characters and stories, there are also countless (countless) nourishing and mystifying quotes that you want to hold in your mouth and let roll around on your tongue.
“My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak. I call you—are you there? I have returned, I am here again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you, I am with you. After long years of long wandering, I have come to you again.”
“The task is to give birth to the old in a new time.”
“As a man you are part of mankind, and therefore you have a share in the whole of mankind, as if you were the whole of mankind.”
“It is unclear how great one’s humility must be to take it upon oneself to live one’s own life… since nothing matches the torment of one’s own way.”
Those morsels are just a tiny taste of the bounty contained in this book, selected at random as I flipped through the pages. It’s a wild journey, The Red Book, and one that is likely to illuminate your life or change your life when you step in to explore—especially with this incredible community of curious, loving, wise folks from all over the world, and all walks of life.
xo, Satya
Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies