A few weeks ago I started reading about Carl Jung’s Red Book, a 205-page manuscript that Jung wrote and illustrated between 1914 and 1930, which (until last year) had been locked in a Swiss bank vault since the psychiatrist’s passing in 1961. After its publication, the media responded with numerous articles and reviews. One of those articles showed a neat excerpt: an illustration (representative of a “mythic image”) that Jung had drawn. It’s of a man being pierced by a beam of light.
The instant I saw that, I thought back to sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dick, whose bizarre mystical experiences began in the early 70s. From his article in Wikipedia:
On February 20, 1974, Dick was recovering from the effects of sodium pentothal administered for the extraction of an impacted wisdom tooth. Answering the door to receive delivery of extra analgesic, he noticed that the delivery woman was wearing a pendant with a symbol that he called the “vesicle pisces.” This name seems to have been based on his confusion of two related symbols, the ichthys (two intersecting arcs delineating a fish in profile) that early Christians used as a secret symbol, and the vesica piscis. After the delivery woman’s departure, Dick began experiencing strange visions.
What the article doesn’t mention is the means by which these visions were triggered: namely, a beam of light emanating from the ichthys.
There are some really cool parallels between the Jung’s illustration and Dick’s encounter. In both cases, the beams involve women—though, strangely, the origin and target relationship of the two beams is inverted: in Jung’s illustration, the beam emanates from a woman’s head, hitting the man in the heart; in Dick’s vision, the beam emanates from the woman’s heart (beneath the ichthys), striking him in the head.
Even Jung’s caption to the image seems to fit Dick’s situation at the time, and prefigures the quasi-schizophrenia into which he subsequently descended. Regarding his image, Jung wrote:
“This material man has risen too high in the world of the spirits, so the spirit of the heart has pierced him with the golden beam. He fell into a state of ecstasy, and disassembled….”
In Dick’s case, this “disassembling” entailed a splintering of his own persona. Again, from Wikipedia:
As the visions increased in length and frequency, Dick claimed he began to live a double life, one as himself, “Philip K. Dick”, and one as “Thomas”, a Christian persecuted by Romans in the 1st century A.D. Despite his history of drug use and elevated stroke risk, Dick began seeking other rationalist and religious explanations for these experiences. He referred to the “transcendentally rational mind” as “Zebra”, “God” and “VALIS.” Dick wrote about the experiences, first in the semi-autobiographical novel Radio Free Albemuth and then in VALIS, The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, i.e., the VALIS trilogy. At one point Dick felt that he had been taken over by the spirit of the prophet Elijah.
Only adding to the weirdness of this seeming coincidence is my discovery that Dick was highly influenced by Jung’s writing—yet there’s no way that Dick could have seen that specific illustration, of course, given that the Red Book was, at that point in time, safely locked away in a vault. No one, save Jung, had yet seen it. (Though it’s possible Jung had drawn or discussed another similar event elsewhere. I’m not sure.)
Maybe both men shared similar cerebral disorders? Incredible that a beam of light would appear in both cases. Also uncanny, I think, in a Borgesian way—because it almost seems as if Jung, writing 100 years ago, had been influenced by Dick’s vision.
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