Seven Sermons to the Dead

In late 1913, Carl Jung set out on an exploration of his psyche, a quest he called his "confrontation with the unconscious". In doing so, he would enter an imaginative state of consciousness and experience visions, a process that continued with varying intensity for the next 10 years. He recorded his visions in six black-covered journals that he referred to as the “Black Books”, which provided a chronological record of his visions and dialogues with his soul. Along the way, he used this material to begin drafting the manuscript of his legendary Red Book, a red leather-bound illustrated volume that was the formal document of this journey and which he kept private during his lifetime. He maintained that the visions recorded in the Red Book represented the nucleus of all his later work. The Seven Sermons to the Dead, or "Septem Sermones ad Mortuos", is the only portion of the Red Book manuscript that Jung shared during his lifetime. He had the "Septem Sermones" privately printed as a smal