Becca Tarnas: Did Jung and Tolkien Enter the Same World?

**Becca Tarnas** (0:00)
I was blown away. Jung said, You are symbols. And they say, We are real and we are not symbols.

**Curt Jaimungal** (0:06)
This is Becca Tarnas, Assistant Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Her dissertation was about the phenomenal connection between the Red Books of Carl Jung and the lesser known Red Books of JRR. Tolkien.

**Becca Tarnas** (0:19)
Tolkien is describing the Eye of Sauron, and Jung is describing what he calls the Eye of the Evil One.

**Curt Jaimungal** (0:25)
On this channel, Eye of Curt Jaimungal interview researchers regarding their theories of reality rigor and technical depth. I'm thrilled to bring you this master class in the intersection between Jung and Tolkien.

**Becca Tarnas** (0:35)
That sounds insane.

**Curt Jaimungal** (0:36)
We touch on archetypes, symbols, the shadow, and even psychedelic experiences, how they can feel real, but.

**Becca Tarnas** (0:43)
Then we dismiss it. It was just a fantasy. It was just something I made up. It's much more subtle.

**Curt Jaimungal** (0:49)
How do we know when to integrate something versus let something go?

**Becca Tarnas** (0:53)
Jung would say that one has to be careful because it can take you too far away from reality.

**Curt Jaimungal** (0:59)
Professor, what did you discover about Jung and Tolkien?

**Becca Tarnas** (1:03)
Well, in some ways, the story could begin when I was nine years old and first encountered Tolkien's work.
The Hobbit was read to me when I was in fourth grade and I was deeply captivated by this story.
I was having these experiences as a child where the names in the story were bringing forward this sense of memory, but a memory of something that I didn't actually have. I'd hear names like Rivendell or Dale or Mirkwood. I thought, this sounds so familiar. I feel like I've been here. I was completely fascinated with Tolkien's stories and several years later read The Lord Of The Rings and had just a fully immersive experience in reading Tolkien's work.
As a teenager, I actually was having these experiences where I felt like I was living my normal teenage life. At the same time, I felt overlaid in some ways with a kind of imaginal immersive experience in Middle Earth.
I didn't think too much about it at the time. I was young enough that this was just kind of how life was unfolding. And as I got older, I tried to set Tolkien aside, not in any kind of strict way, but just thinking it's time to grow up, it's time to move on. And then in 2009, Carl Jung's Red Book was published. And I think I first encountered it in the New York Times spread that was done on the Red Book. And I thought, this looks really familiar. And there were two reasons it felt familiar. One, the title, The Red Book, aligned with something in Tolkien's work. And in the context of Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings, the story is written down in a book that's passed on from generation to generation called The Red Book of Westmarch. And so I thought, oh, a red book, a red book, that's quite interesting. And the other thing was when I started, when I actually got my hands on a copy of The Red Book, I felt like these illustrations look a lot like Tolkien's style of illustrations. And so at first I just thought, those are some interesting parallels. There's a red book and a red book. The style of the illustrations are similar. But then I began to dive more deeply into it and realize that there were these parallels in timing between when Jung went through his Red Book period, started in 1913 where he began having these immersive visionary experiences, these fantasies that he started working with using the practice of active imagination. And then he started recording those experiences. And there was a parallel with the younger Tolkien's life. This was before he'd ever written any of his stories, but he had a sketchbook that he called The Book Of Ishness. And there's not much explanation with the drawings in The Book Of Ishness. They just have really kind of evocative titles like Silent, Enormous, and Immense or Beyond.

**Curt Jaimungal** (4:24)
We'll overlay some of those images on screen for the viewers to see.

**Becca Tarnas** (4:28)
Oh, perfect. That'll be wonderful.
Yeah, so with those images in The Book Of Ishness, he was doing them at the same time that Jung was recording his experiences. And it was out of doing those drawings. And then in the following few years, Tolkien began to write the first stories of Middle Earth. And these are precursors to what would become The Lord Of The Rings, but there were all these different tales that he wrote down. And what I began to find reading Jung's Red Book and Tolkien's Legendarium Of Middle Earth in tandem with each other was more and more of these parallels came forward. Parallels in not just timing and imagery, but in story pattern, in figures who were parallel between the two.