I want to explore “The Three Prophecies” from Jung’s Red Book together (see below), so I’ve added a last-minute event on the calendar for Sunday, June 8th, 10-11am PDT. I hope you’ll join me!

THIS Sunday: brilliant author and clinician Elinor Dickson will be with us to talk about Dancing in the Flames, her many decades of friendship with Marion Woodman, and what to make of these times we’re in.

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I’ve spent a lot of time in my garden lately and am feeling my middle-aged self in full bloom. I am extremely content to spend hours watering, trimming, or planting something, or simply staring at the plants as if to watch them grow. The lavender bushes are buzzing with bees. The echinacea is starting to flower. And I’ve let the lawn go to seed for reasons I couldn’t entirely explain until I was in a state of reverie seeing it extended to its full height.

Being in my own tiny bit of nature has reminded me many times of two pieces from Jung’s Red Book, with wisdom that feels poignant for these times.

The Red Book is a chronicle of Jung’s journey into the unconscious shortly before WWI. It was a time when, following unexpected visions, he still wondered if he might be losing his mind. Instead of waiting to find out, he stepped into the stories and allowed them to teach him whatever it was that they needed to teach. In a section titled “The Magician,” near the end of the book, Jung visits Philemon, a wise old man whom he depicts in paintings with a long white beard and a set of keys in his hand. While Philemon is out in his garden, his wife, Baucis, is in the kitchen looking on. The two appear in joyful harmony, separated from the world but not from each other. (She is in the background, but is part of an integrated whole.) Jung arrived at Philemon’s home uninvited, having climbed the hill in a village he didn’t know, desperate for guidance from a revered teacher. It is a scene that has played out countless times over millennia: an eager, energetic young person beseeching an older person to pass on their knowledge and experience. For the former, it’s life-giving nectar; for the latter, the information is more like table wine, common and familiar.

There’s some coy back and forth between them, some testing of intent. But Jung is adamant and pleading. He tells Philemon that he’s not able to learn what he’s been seeking from anyone else. Philemon pushes back: “You are impertinent and meddlesome.” Then, in extremely relatable and extraordinary lines quite reminiscent of Harry Potter, Jung further explains himself:

Please, don’t take my curiosity badly. Recently I heard something about magic that awakened my interest in this bygone practice. And then I came to you because I heard that you understand the black art. If magic were still taught today at university, I would have studied it there. But the last college of magic was closed long ago. Today no professor knows anything anymore about magic.

Philemon hears him but still does not give up anything easily. Ultimately, he expresses something that I find myself thinking about all the time.

Ph: [Magic] can always be rediscovered later. It will never be lost to humanity, since magic is reborn with each and every one of us.

J: What do you mean? Do you believe that magic is really inborn in man?

Ph: If I could, I would say yes, of course, it is. But you will find this laughable.

J: No, this time I will not laugh, because I have often wondered about the fact that all peoples in all times and in all places have the same magical customs. As you can see, I have already thought along similar lines.1

Jung is learning about the collective unconscious, archetypes, and the beginnings of alchemy through the figure of Philemon. Those teachings, with these three statements, are a comfort to me:

1. Magic can always be rediscovered later.

2. It will never be lost to humanity.

3. Magic is reborn in every one of us.

No matter how far we descend into madness, no matter how far the collective spirals into violence and war, access remains possible, always, through each of us. We each have a portal to the source, a point of connection. Through our own dreams and relationship with the unconscious, we each have a bucket that we can lower down into the well to access the timeless, unwavering depths. No matter how bad it gets.

About twenty pages before this is a short section called “The Three Prophecies.” In it, Jung is talking with his soul. She is telling him about war, magic, and the importance of tending to one’s own garden, a metaphor for self-limitation that is never far from my mind.

Despite having read these pages at least a dozen times, when I was called back to them again this week, they suddenly felt like they contained everything I needed to know. Written 110 years ago, I feel these lines resonating now as if they were the most relevant thing in the world.

I called my soul and asked her to dive down into the floods, whose distant roaring I could hear. …And thus she plunged into the darkness like a shot, and from the depths she called out: ‘Will you accept what I bring?’

Jung responds:

I will accept what you give. I do not have the right to judge or to reject.

Soul:

So listen.

I won’t quote every line that follows (although I’m tempted to do so). Jung’s soul (“S”) tells Jung (“I”) that what he needs to accept is, essentially, everything. Everything. She is asking him to hold it all at once. Can he do that? Will he accept it?

S: I find epidemics, natural catastrophes, sunken ships, razed cities, frightful feral savagery; famines, human meanness, and fear, whole mountains of fear.

I: So shall it be, since you give it.

S: I find the treasures of all past cultures, magnificent images of Gods, spacious temples, paintings, papyrus rolls, sheets of parchment with the characters of bygone languages, books full of lost wisdom, hymns and chants of ancient priests, stories told down the ages through thousands of generations.

I: That is an entire world—whose extent I cannot grasp. How can I accept it?

S: But you wanted to accept everything? You do not know your limits. Can you not limit yourself?

l: I must limit myself. Who could ever grasp such wealth?

This question of limits. How can we limit ourselves in this moment? How can we know everything there is to know and stay present in our own lives? How can we feel all the empathy and grief there is to feel, and still buy groceries, care for ourselves and others, be with our families, and survive?

S: Be content and cultivate your garden with modesty.

l: I will. I see that it is not worth conquering a larger piece of the immeasurable, but a smaller one instead. A well-tended small garden is better than an ill-tended large garden. Both gardens are equally small when faced with the immeasurable, but unequally cared for.

S: Take shears and prune your trees.

There is a paragraph break then, and Jung returns from dialogue into a narrative voice. He is telling his readers that his soul then provided him with three specific gifts from the depths. And we are left with the riddle of why they all belong together.

From the flooding darkness the son of the earth had brought, my soul gave me ancient things that pointed to the future. She gave me three things: The misery of war, the darkness of magic, and the gift of religion.

If you are clever, you will understand that these three things belong together. These three mean the unleashing of chaos and its power, just as they also mean the binding of chaos. War is obvious and everybody sees it. Magic is dark and no one sees it. Religion is still to come, but it will become evident. Did you think that the horrors of such atrocious warfare would come over us? Did you think that magic existed? Did you think about a new religion? I sat up for long nights and looked ahead at what was to come and I shuddered. Do you believe me? I am not too concerned. What should I believe? What should I disbelieve? I saw and I shuddered.

But my spirit could not grasp the monstrous, and could not conceive the extent of what was to come. The force of my longing languished, and powerless sank the harvesting hands. I felt the burden of the most terrible work of the times ahead. I saw where and how, but no word can grasp it, no will can conquer it. I could not do otherwise, I let it sink again into the depths.

I cannot give it to you, and I can speak only of the way of what is to come. Little good will come to you from outside. What will come to you lies within yourself. But what lies there! I would like to avert my eyes, close my ears and deny all my senses; I would like to be someone among you, who knows nothing and who never saw anything. It is too much and too unexpected. But I saw it and my memory will not leave me alone. Yet I curtail my longing, which would like to stretch out into the future, and I return to my small garden that presently blooms, and whose extent I can measure. It shall be well-tended.

The future should be left to those of the future. I return to the small and the real, for this is the great way, the way of what is to come. I return to my simple reality, to my undeniable and most minuscule being. And I take a knife and hold court over everything that has grown without measure and goal.2

Jung had this encounter with his soul before WWI broke out, and decades before the horrors of WWII. What he saw almost certainly still speaks to the times we are in now, with messages that ring with medicine. I feel that many of us, right now, are trying to carry these seemingly irreconcilable, incompatible things: the misery of war, the darkness of magic, and a new religion. It all seems to be happening at once.

Will you accept it?

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Join me to discuss this passage:

Sunday, June 8th, 10-11am PDT, 1-2pm EDT | A read aloud of “The Three Prophecies” from Jung’s Red Book, and discussion to follow. | Register here

I’m Satya Doyle Byock, psychotherapist, author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies, and co-host of a podcast on Jung’s Red Book. My work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Oprah Daily, NPR, The BBC, Literary Hub, The Tamron Hall Show, and on podcasts such as Apple News in Conversation and The Joseph Campbell Foundation Podcast.