Treasure Hunting: A Hermeneutical Inquiry into the Final Painting of Liber Novus

Abstract

This dissertation employs a hermeneutic methodology via deductive and imaginal approaches which chiefly rely on Liber Novus and Jung’s Collected Works to examine image 169 and critically situate the work in a hermeneutic framework. The purpose of this study is to explore the likely relationship between image 169 and Jung’s personal myth and his individual cosmology. I also consider how image 169 may shed light on the meaning of Jung’s psychology and analyze the figures depicted in image 169. Jung did not realize his personal myth until around 1930, which coincides with the probable year he began painting image 169. From the earliest moments of Jung’s childhood, he experienced elaborate fantasies, which culminated in his confrontation with the unconscious. Between 1913 and 1916, Jung documented his fantasies in a series of black notebooks, which he later transcribed into Liber Novus: The Red Book. Jung’s experiences during this time period compelled him to consider the relationship between the living personality and the community of the dead. Image 169 suggests a pictorial formulation of Jung’s psychology and what I have termed as the apocatastasis of the dead. Both Western and Eastern sources seem to have influenced Jung’s rendering of the image, as evidenced by his study of the Artistic Form and Yoga in the Sacred Images of India, Shri-Chakra-Sambhara Tantra, and the fantasies of Kristine Mann.