"Carl Jung: Birth of the Shadow Man" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "A Witch's Shadow Magick Compendium"

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY

July 26

Carl Jung: Birth of the Shadow Man

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In late 1913, a thirty-eight-year-old Zurich psychiatrist sat down at his desk, deliberately quieted his rational mind, and let a waking vision take over. He watched what came. Then he wrote it down, word for word, image for image, and kept doing

it, night after night, for the better part of four years. Carl Gustav Jung, born on this date in 1875, is remembered in most tellings as a scientist: Freud's onetime heir, the man who gave the world introversion and extroversion, archetypes, the collective unconscious. We've already covered the shape of that life on the anniversary of his death. Today, on his birthday, we're going somewhere the standard biography usually skips past in a sentence: the locked cabinet where Jung kept the actual record of what he saw, and refused, for the rest of his life, to let anyone read.

Confrontation with the Unconscious

Jung called what happened next his “confrontation with the unconscious,” and the phrasing was deliberate. He was doing something that would look, from the outside, indistinguishable from psychosis: entering trance-like states on purpose, letting images and figures rise up unbidden, and treating what they said as genuinely worth listening to rather than symptoms to be suppressed. He kept a series of journals, later called the Black Books, as a dated, chronological ledger of the visions and the dialogues he was having inside them. What kept the whole enterprise from tipping into the breakdown it resembled was the fact that Jung never stopped functioning. He saw patients throughout the whole period, as well as kept his family, his practice, and his professional standing entirely intact, all while spending his evenings in deliberate, sustained contact with material most of his colleagues would have hospitalized a patient for reporting.

The most important figure to emerge from those sessions wasn't Jung's invention, or at least didn't feel like one to him: “Philemon” appeared as a winged old man with the horns of a bull and a bunch of keys at his belt, and he had opinions Jung hadn't consciously formed. Jung later described the distinction that made Philemon matter: thoughts, he came to understand through these encounters, aren't things you make, they're things that happen to you. He painted Philemon repeatedly and held extended conversations with him, treating him less as a fantasy than as an autonomous psychic reality, a being with his own coherent point of view. Salome and a figure identified as the biblical prophet Elijah appeared alongside him. Whatever these figures actually were, Jung's later theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious, ideas he would spend the rest of his career formalizing for a scientific audience, are the tamed, footnoted descendants of what he first met face to face in these sessions.

The Book of Psychic Secrets

Starting in 1914, Jung began transcribing the material from the Black Books into a large, folio-sized, leather-bound volume, illuminated and hand-lettered in a style deliberately reminiscent of a medieval manuscript, complete with his own elaborate paintings. He called it Liber Novus, the “New Book.” History, however, remembers it as the Red Book, for its binding. Jung himself was never entirely sure what he had made: art, prophecy, clinical data, or something closer to scripture.

Jung showed it to almost no one and, when he died in 1961, his family sealed it away entirely; it stayed that way for nearly fifty years, held in a Swiss bank vault while Jungian scholars debated its contents secondhand. It wasn't until October 2009 that the Jung heirs finally permitted publication, in a facsimile edition edited by the historian Sonu Shamdasani, letting the general public see for the first time the actual illuminated pages that had generated an entire school of psychology.

Only one piece of the Red Book’s material reached the public during Jung's own lifetime, and the circumstances under which he produced it are the strangest story in this whole account. In late January 1916, Jung's household began reporting genuinely eerie phenomena: his eldest daughter saw a white figure pass through the room, his son's blanket was pulled off him in the night, and the doorbell rang insistently with no one on the other side of the door. Jung wrote later that the house felt “crammed full of spirits,” the air thick enough that it was scarcely possible to breathe, and that a chorus of voices seemed to cry out, “We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought.” Over the following nine days, channeling the voice of Philemon, Jung wrote the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, the “Seven Sermons to the Dead,” a Gnostic text laying out a cosmology of the Pleroma and the Creatura, and attributing it, pseudonymously, to Basilides of Alexandria, an actual second-century Gnostic teacher. It was the only piece of this material Jung ever had printed, privately and in a small run, given occasionally to friends and students but never sold. It later appeared as an appendix to his 1962 memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, the closest thing the public had to the Red Book for the next forty-seven years.

“Shadow work” as a term doesn't appear in Jung's own writing; it's a later popularization built on top of a concept he did develop carefully, across works like Aion, describing the shadow as the sum of everything the conscious personality has rejected or refused to recognize as its own, from ordinary pettiness to disowned creativity. Jung's own method for engaging that material, active imagination, was the very technique that produced the Red Book, undertaken across years, under his own rigorous self-observation, by a trained psychiatrist. What circulates today as “shadow work,” journaling prompts, the identification of tidy archetypal categories like “the Victim” or “the Saboteur,” is a real and often genuinely useful simplification, but it is a simplification, several steps removed from a man alone in a room deliberately opening the door to a winged, horned stranger who talked back. Anyone drawn to try a gentler version might start smaller than Jung did: noticing a moment of outsized irritation at someone else's behavior, and asking, honestly, what part of that reaction might belong to you rather than them. That's the door. What's behind it is still, by Jung's own account, not entirely under your control.

 

OCCULT READS PRESENTS: DAILY OCCULT REVIEW

Modern Occultist is proud to present today’s “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... In honor of Jung, Philemon, and every reader ready to meet their own shadow on the page rather than just read about it...

A Witch's Shadow Magick Compendium

By Raven Digitalis | Crossed Crow Books

Given today's subject, it felt right to close with a book that names its debt to Jung openly rather than borrowing his ideas without credit. Digitalis draws explicitly on Jung's concept of individuation and the hero's journey to build a practical, witchcraft-flavored approach to shadow integration, filled with meditations, lore, and hands-on exercises for readers ready to embrace what they've spent a lifetime disowning. It makes no claim to be active imagination in the rigorous, Jungian, years-under-self-observation sense this piece just described, and it shouldn't be mistaken for it, but as an accessible starting point for a reader who wants guided structure rather than a blank notebook and an open door, it's a genuinely thoughtful entry in a crowded field.

Our thanks to Crossed Crow Books, a publisher doing real work supporting practicing witches, and for putting serious study into the Craft.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)

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