ABSTRACT
This chapter examines structure of elements in the Book of the Dead and in Jung's Red Book. Jung's psychological commentary was appended to the translation of The Book of the Dead – so-called – as presented by W. Y. Evans-Wentz, a theosophist associated loosely with Madam Blavatsky and others in the theosophical movement. In the Great Liberation commentary Jung explicitly associates this preparatory process with his own notion of the transcendent function, the emergence of symbolism that acts to unite elements of the psyche. Among the commentaries on The Red Book that have appeared since its publication in 2009, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the illustrations or to its format as an illuminated manuscript. However, for Jung the visual is of central importance for his understanding of the archetypal, or, to use his expression from the commentary on the Book of the Dead, the categories of the imagination.
