MJA Lecture: The Synchronicity of the Two Red Books...

The Minnesota Jung Association welcomes Rebecca Tarnas presenting "The Synchronicity of the Two Red Books: Jung, Tolkien, and the Imaginal Realm" on Saturday, February 8, 2025 from 2-4pm Central Time via Zoom.

Event Descritption: Beginning in the years leading up to the Great War, both C. G. Jung and J. R. R. Tolkien independently began to undergo profound imaginal experiences. They had
each stepped across a threshold and entered into another world, the realm of imagination, the world of fantasy. Jung recorded these initially spontaneous visionary
experiences, which he further developed using the practice of active imagination, in a large red manuscript that he named Liber Novus, although usually it is referred to
simply as The Red Book. The experiences narrated in The Red Book became the seeds from which nearly all of Jung’s subsequent work flowered. For Tolkien, this imaginal
journey revealed to him the world of Middle-earth, whose stories and myths eventually led to the writing of The Lord of the Rings, a book he named within its own
imaginal history The Red Book of Westmarch. There are many synchronistic parallels between Jung’s and Tolkien’s Red Books: the style and content of their works of art,
the narrative descriptions and scenes in their texts, the nature of their visions and dreams, and an underlying similarity in world view that emerged from their
experiences. The two men seem to have been simultaneously treading parallel paths through the imaginal realm.
The revelations of this research hold deep consequences for modernity’s assumptions of a disenchanted world, and bring to the surface implications concerning the nature
of imagination and its participatory relationship to the collective unconscious. In this presentation, I will point to the possibility that Tolkien and Jung are preliminary
guides on a journey to the depths of an ensouled cosmos in which imagination saturates the very foundations of reality.
Bio: Rebecca Tarnas, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Her doctoral
dissertation was titled The Back of Beyond: The Red Books of C.G. Jung and J.R.R. Tolkien, and her research interests include depth psychology, archetypal studies, literature,
philosophy, and the ecological imagination. Becca is an editor of Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology and author of the book Journey to the Imaginal Realm: A Reader’s
Guide to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. She is currently researching and writing a biography of Stanislav Grof, a co-founder of transpersonal psychology.

Event Venue

Online