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Most readers’ initial response when confronted with these two volumes, bearing a stunning cover illustration by the artist Arik Brauer and an equally remarkable title and subtitle, probably will be to ask: just what sort of a work is this? And then: what does ‘catafalque’ mean? These two questions are related, and answering the second helps answer the first, inasmuch as Kingsley describes the purpose of his work as being ‘to provide a catafalque for our western world’ (p. 442). A catafalque is a raised platform used to support the coffin during a funeral service (some derive the term from the Italian catafalco = ‘scaffolding’, although the OED says the word is ‘of unknown derivation’). And the baroque feel and unusual nature of the word should alert us to the scope of the project undertaken by Peter Kingsley in the pages of volume 1, whose essential argument, that Jung was (or, in some sense, is) a mystic and a magician, is worked out as follows.
Part One, ‘Mystical Fool’, opens with a lament (repeated on later pages) for the ‘progessive domestication’ of Jung (p. 21) and the reduction of therapeia theôn, or the care of the gods, to mere therapy, or a series of techniques (p. 29). Against the intellectual-historical lineage of the alchemists, the Gnostics, and the Presocratics, Kingsley opposes as villains of the piece Aristotle and Plato, the latter the ‘murderer’ of the ‘divine logic’ of Parmenides. Further oppositions structure this argument: the spirit of the time and the spirit of the depths (in the Red Book), Jung's personality no. 1 and personality no. 2 (as set out in Memories, Dreams, Reflections), and ‘the paradox of darkness inside the light, of the sanity in madness’ (p. 61). The expression ‘mystical fool’ itself derives from a letter Jung wrote in 1926 (p. 71), and it serves as an example of his ‘ambiguity’, highlighted by Jung in his letter to Zwei Werblowsky of 17 June 1952 (p. 76). A lynch-pin for this argument is a famous passage in the Bollingen cha