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| Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus, Elijah and Salome. |
Greene, L., 2018, The Astrological World of Jung's Liber Novus: Daimons, Gods and the Planetary Journey,75.
Like Elijah, the Scholar lives in isolation with his daughter, far from the world with its extraverted, banal life. Unlike Elijah, he is neither a prophet nor a magus; he is a grief-stricken recluse, echoing Ficino’s association of Saturn with grief as well as solitude. In the ‘small, old castle’, the hall is lined with ‘black chests and wardrobes’ – a colour Jung associated directly with Saturn – while the Old Scholar’s study reveals ‘bookshelves on all four walls and a large writing desk, at which an old man sits wearing a long black robe’. The sheets in the tiny chamber in which Jung is offered a bed are ‘uncommonly rough’, and the pillow is hard. Associations of the colour black with Saturn abound in antiquity as well as throughout the medieval and early modern periods, and today the association still lingers in the present-day attribution of black gemstones such as jet, obsidian, and black onyx to this planetary god.
The air in the room is heavy, and the Old Scholar seems ‘careworn’. He has given himself tirelessly ‘to the material of science and research, anxiously and equably appraising, as if he personally had to represent the working out of scientific truth’. In this description Jung seems to be recreating the portrayal of Saturn given by a long list of astrological authors over many centuries, but in an extreme and highly personalised form. Jung at first believes the Old Scholar leads ‘an ideal though solitary existence’. Although no image of him appears in Liber Novus – only his stone castle – his description mirrors Waite’s image of The Hermit in the Major Arcana of the Tarot, standing alone in a barren, mountainous landscape with a lantern and a staff.
But the Scholar, although he belongs to the same chain of senex images as Elijah, is a sad and self-destructive figure. His personality is lopsided, and he seems to personify what Jung experienced as his own rigidity of intellect – the same rigidity that ‘poisoned’ the giant Izdubar. The Scholar is ‘petrified in his books, protecting a costly treasure and enviously hiding it from all the world’. The old man keeps his daughter imprisoned, fearful of allowing her to confront the dangers of worldly life. (...)
Greene, L., 2018, The Astrological World of Jung's Liber Novus: Daimons, Gods and the Planetary Journey. Londres/ Nova Iorque: Routledge.
