Jung's ‘Seven Sermons to the Dead' (1916)

Jung’s The Red Book is of great interest to cultural historians for many reasons, but even readers who are quite familiar with Jung may have an uncanny experience reading it. Very different from the rest of the author’s work, halfway between autobiography and poetry, The Red Book can be understood through the references it makes to various kinds of texts, for instance, to the visionary discourses of certain contemporary esotericists, such as Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), and to the fantastique genre of literature blooming in Europe in the 1910s and 1920s, which depicted processes of initiation. ¹