Living bones and the voices of the dead – exploring the unlived life of the ancestors

 

Black books, the diaries of Carl Jung, were published in 2021. In a significant scene in the Black books 4, Carl Jung encounters the dead, who have a message for him. One of the dead, Ezekiel, tells Jung that the dead are going on pilgrimage to all the holy places because they have no peace, although they died in true belief. Why is that, Jung asks, and Ezekiel says: “It always seems to me as if we had not come to a proper end with life. (…) It seems that we forgot something important that should also have been lived.” In the further dialogue it becomes clear that the dead don’t know what their unlived life is, but Jung points to suppression of the animal side as one possibility. (Black books 4 p. 208).

 What is the animal side? In the article “Encounters with the animal soul. A voice of hope for our precarious world” N. Furlotti points to different jungian aspects of the animal side: The ‘pleasure of the forest’, the pagan which resides outside the split of good and evil, possessing a natural undividedness which is impervious to logical and moral contradictions, therefore containing both energies as a dark nature deity. In this perspective the dead's unlived life which give them no peace is nature, the body, instincts, irrationality – everything which Jung felt was suppressed in the unconscious shadow of the Christian western culture.

But the really essential in the encounter with the dead is the function of the meeting – the dead confront Jung with the fact that we are part of family and tradition, that our biological and cultural ancestors live in us, and that we live in the world they created. And that its our responsibility and calling to search within ourselves for the unlived life which we have inherited from past generations. What are the aspects of our lives and society which we need to put a light on in order to change it, and create something new? Furlotti writes that the dead in Jung’s inner world represent the complexes and unlived life left behind by past generations, that become ours to carry and make conscious. The dead arrive to tell us that its our task to explore the possibilities of the unknown, live our own lives and create a society based on our chosen values, rather than succumb to the pressures from the past or the collective.