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Some years ago I was sent from London a typewritten copy of a strange publication by Jung. It was printed privately in 1925 by Neill & Co., Ltd., Edinburgh, and the title was VII Sermones ad Mortuos. The subtitle read in English: The Seven Sermons to the Dead written by Basilides in Alexandria, the City Where the East Touches the West.
I was puzzled. Why should Jung hide his identity and use an odd archaic typesetting? It made the script look like a piece of automatic writing of the mediumistic kind. But the Jungian script was meant for the instruction of the dead—in a highly rhetoric, bombastic language—by the living, whereas in mediumistic writings it is the spirit of someone dead who instructs the living. This was a strange reversal, and it seemed to make a living spirit-control out of Jung—a notion so absurd that, bewildered as I was, I laid the script and its teaching on the Pleroma and the Creatura, aside.
With the publication of Jung's Memories, Dreams and Reflections , I found an answer to the riddle. I was literally astonished, for there is nothing in occult literature to equal it. It not only reveals Jung's views on life after death—strange as they are-but it also tells us of his communication, through dreams and waking visions, with the dead.
As it appears from this posthumous book—to the confusion and utter bewilderment of the rank and file of analytic psychologists—in his loneliness and isolation after his break with Freud, Jung reached a momentous decision: If he could not teach the living, he would teach the dead. This is so fantastic, that Jung's own words have to be quoted in support: “Quite early I had learned that it was necessary