ABSTRACT
When C. G. Jung was discussing The Tibetan Book of the Dead and the role of initiation in Oriental religious literature he said: ‘The only “initiation process” that is still alive and practised today in the West is the analysis of the unconscious as used by doctors for therapeutic purposes’. The overwhelming evidence in this study suggests that Jung could not have been more wrong. Moreover, it suggests that he appears to have been initiated himself, but in a manner that left him amnesic to the experience until his mid-life period. Jung’s Red Book, his ‘dark night of the soul’, could therefore be viewed as an encounter with a flood of memories associated with the abusive use of occult practices and a meditation on the nature of evil, a theme that preoccupied him throughout his life.
