This episode explores the striking parallels between Carl Jung’s Red Book (1913–1930) and J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium — especially his early Book of Ishness and the fictional Red Book of Westmarch — through the research of Becca Tarnis, who wrote her dissertation on the connection and now teaches on imagination and active imagination at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
The Discovery of Parallels
Tarnis first noticed the parallels when Jung’s Red Book was published in 2009: both works are titled “Red Book,” both feature similar illustration styles, and both men began their visionary work around 1913–1917.
Jung’s “confrontation with the unconscious” began in 1913 with immersive visions recorded via active imagination; Tolkien’s Book of Ishness drawings (titles like “Silent,” “Enormous,” “Beyond”) date to the same period, followed by his first Middle-earth tales.
The parallels extend beyond timing and imagery to story patterns and figures: Jung’s guide Philemon and Tolkien’s Gandalf both function as wise old man archetypes, but with specific correspondences in how they appear, speak, and relate to the protagonist.
Both men described their material as given rather than invented: Jung encountered figures who “knew things I never knew,” while Tolkien said he never felt he was making up stories — they arose within him as already existing somewhere, and he wrote them down.
Tarnis emphasizes that no single parallel is inexplicable on its own (shared cultural sources, archetypal patterns), but the sheer volume and the comparable phenomenology — both describing internal emergence, not external construction — make coincidence unlikely.
She frames this as a participatory epistemology: neither pure discovery (Platonism) nor pure creation, but a co-creative enactment where the imaginal reality is called forth by the seer’s engagement.
The Imaginal Realm and Active Imagination
The “imaginal” (via Henry Corbin) is distinguished from the “imaginary”: the imaginal is where something real emerges through imagination that exceeds the individual ego; the imaginary is mere fabrication.
Entering the imaginal: close eyes, relax the body, attend to emotion or a seed image (from a dream, a poster, a feeling), and allow it to transform — Jung noted that if you hold an inner image, it will move.
The practice unfolds in stages: (1) somatic grounding (yoga nidra–style), (2) inviting an image/emotion to emerge, (3) sensory elaboration (color, shape, landscape, sound, smell), (4) encountering a figure (humanoid, animal, other), (5) dialoguing with it — sometimes lending it voice at first.
Return and integration: draw the experience (oil pastels, large paper), write it down, share in small groups, then large group — this “multi-stage bringing back” anchors the material in consensus reality.
Tarnis developed this protocol from Jung’s scattered writings (compiled in Jung on Active Imagination, ed. Joan Chodorow); she calls it “preliminary” — a safe container for workshops, not the deep long-term work Jung did with patients.
Relationship to dreaming: ordinary dreaming = unconscious expresses, no conscious engagement; daydream/reverie = passive witnessing while awake; lucid dreaming = conscious in sleep; active imagination = conscious engagement while awake — the key variable is level of consciousness and active participation.
Ontology of Imaginal Figures
Jung’s figures repeatedly insisted on their reality: Philemon, Elijah, and Salome told him, “You can call us symbols… but that doesn’t make us any less real. We are real and we are not symbols.”
Jung psychologized them anyway — mapping Elijah to “thinking,” Salome to “feeling/pleasure” — which yielded his psychological types (1921) but flattened the mythic encounter.
Tolkien mythologized: Gollum/Sméagol embodies ego–shadow dynamics, but Tolkien left him as a living story-figure rather than reducing him to a psychological concept.
The figures resist reduction to “symbol” or “subpersonality” because they claim agency and otherness: “I’m not just a facet of you. I have my own being that you must relate to.”
Archetypes are not merely patterns or instincts; they are agencies or beings — multivalent, iridescent, transcending personified form (deities are embodiments, but the archetype exceeds them).
Tarnis identifies as a Platonist: archetypal principles (Beauty, Truth, Goodness) are real, world-structuring, and participatory — not just cognitive categories.
A Transformative Encounter with Planetary Archetypes
In a psychedelically mediated experience (after a year of conceptual study with Richard Tarnas’s The Passion of the Western Mind), all planetary archetypes tried to communicate at once — chaotic, multisensory, overwhelming.
She asked them to come one at a time; each presented as a unified symphony of sight, sound, feeling, scent — e.g., Venus as the living unity of love, beauty, sensuality, art, aesthetics.
The shift was like learning to read: before, archetypes were word-lists; after, they were perceived directly in the world — “Plato was right” — Beauty (capital B) glowing through particulars in Prague, not separate from them but saturating them.
This made archetypal perception continuous in ordinary consciousness: she could recognize Mars in fire, athletics, anger, assertion all at once as one principle.
Participation, Not Just Discovery
Tarnis’s dissertation committee forced her to see that she was the third term: her own imaginal activation selected and shaped the parallels she saw between Jung and Tolkien.
Students in her courses now see parallels she missed — confirming the participatory nature: the connection is enacted in the encounter, not just found.
She uses “universal” not “objective”: objectivity implies observer-independent existence; universality implies intersubjective consensus — “Did you see that? Yes, I did too.”
Psychosis vs. Gnosis: Grounding the Visionary
Jung feared psychosis (he knew it from Burghölzli); the line is fluid: “The psychotic drowns in the waters the mystic swims through with delight” (Campbell).
Key differentiators: can you return? can you bring it back into embodied, relational, consensus reality? can you translate archetypal language into shared meaning?
Jung grounded via obligations (wife, family, military service) and crucially via Toni Wolff — his “spiritual wife,” the Ariadne thread who discussed his visions daily, trusted the unconscious, but could not do active imagination herself.
“Ghost words” in Tolkien’s invented languages: words that emerged with sound and meaning fused, unchangeable — a marker of gnosis: “you just know,” it cannot be manipulated.
Continuous doubt and skepticism are necessary to validate the experience; if an inner part keeps saying “yes, it’s real, keep listening,” that matters — but so does the part saying “I just want this to be true.”
Psychedelics and “Unearned Wisdom”
Jung declined psychedelics: “Beware of unearned wisdom” — he didn’t need them; his endogenous capacity was sufficient.
For those enculturated in materialism, psychedelics (material form) may be the only entry point that breaks the worldview barrier (Grof: “the avatar had to come in chemical form”).
Contemporary psychedelic research emphasizes integration — not just the peak experience but folding it into everyday life — echoing Jung’s caution about artists indulging in bacchanalia without bringing gifts back to the community.
Shadow Work
Shadow = everything the ego denies or won’t look at; others see it better than you do.
Two royal roads: (1) ask trusted intimates (spouse, close friends) what they see; (2) notice what triggers you in others — usually a repressed shadow element.
Psyche (Greek for soul): capacity to feel, imagine, dwell in archetypal principles; both rational and irrational; individual and collective (objective psyche = collective unconscious = anima mundi).
Mind: developed rational-cognitive faculty; narrower; honed by education (reading, math, science); operates in tandem with psyche but usually unconsciously.
Science advances when intuition/imagination/dream (psyche) proposes, and reason (mind) verifies — but the first half is erased from the story.
Danger: “rational” decisions made without accounting for psyche’s hidden motivations (trauma, complexes, greed, envy) — the two must work in tandem.
Meaning in Disconnection
The differences between Jung and Tolkien are as instructive as the parallels: two distinct beings, different choices of expression — psychologizing vs. mythologizing.
Disconnection/disagreement is essential to incarnated growth: can we meet difference with grace, understand without collapsing into false alignment?
Motherhood as Expanded State
Tarnis’s engagement with intense expanded states (psychedelics, holotropic breathwork, active imagination) has subtled over time — less catalytic, more integrated.
Pregnancy and birth: “the most profound expanded state of consciousness I’ve ever entered” — prior imaginal work let her trust the birthing process, breathe, navigate liminality.
Raising a toddler: “like sitting for someone on psychedelics” — the child’s porous, imaginal perception is native; her work helps her cultivate it.
Ultimate Orientation: Storytelling
Academic phase is provisional; her deepest aspiration is mythic storytelling — to tell archetypal stories as Tolkien did, as “cosmic birthright.”
Harry Potter shaped her childhood; later she saw “magic” not as wand-waving but as aligning with synchronicities — Rowling’s linguistic/mythic naming (Latin roots, hidden references) was formative.
On idealism: she is a “bothist” — affirms both oneness (divine unity) and manyness (embodied individuality, separateness, responsibility); neither reduces to the other.
A Closing Synchronicity
Kurt shares Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook passage on light and shade: “Shadow partakes of the nature of universal matter… Darkness then is the strongest degree of shadow and light is its least” — read on psychedelics, it yields endless insight.
