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Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity
Catafalque offers a revolutionary new reading of the great psychologist Carl Jung as mystic, gnostic and prophet for our time.
This book is the first major re-imagining of both Jung and his work since the publication of the Red Book in 2009--and is the only serious assessment of them written by a classical scholar who understands the ancient Gnostic, Hermetic and alchemical foundations of his thought as well as Jung himself did. At the same time it skillfully tells the forgotten story of Jung's relationship with the great Sufi scholar, Henry Corbin, and with Persian Sufi tradition.
The strange reality of the Red Book, or "New Book" as Carl Jung called it, lies close to the heart of Catafalque. In meticulous detail Peter Kingsley uncovers its great secret, hidden in plain sight and still--as if by magic--unrecognized by all those who have been unable to understand this mysterious, incantatory text.
But the hard truth of who Jung was and what he did is only a small part of what this book uncovers. It also exposes the full extent of that great river of esoteric tradition that stretches all the way back to the beginnings of our civilization. It unveils the surprising realities behind western philosophy, literature, poetry, prophecy--both ancient and modern.
In short, Peter Kingsley shows us not only who Carl Jung was but who we in the West are as well. Much more than a brilliant spiritual biography, Catafalque holds the key to understanding why our western culture is dying. And, an incantatory text in its own right, it shows the way to discovering what we in these times of great crisis must do.
This book is the first major re-imagining of both Jung and his work since the publication of the Red Book in 2009--and is the only serious assessment of them written by a classical scholar who understands the ancient Gnostic, Hermetic and alchemical foundations of his thought as well as Jung himself did. At the same time it skillfully tells the forgotten story of Jung's relationship with the great Sufi scholar, Henry Corbin, and with Persian Sufi tradition.
The strange reality of the Red Book, or "New Book" as Carl Jung called it, lies close to the heart of Catafalque. In meticulous detail Peter Kingsley uncovers its great secret, hidden in plain sight and still--as if by magic--unrecognized by all those who have been unable to understand this mysterious, incantatory text.
But the hard truth of who Jung was and what he did is only a small part of what this book uncovers. It also exposes the full extent of that great river of esoteric tradition that stretches all the way back to the beginnings of our civilization. It unveils the surprising realities behind western philosophy, literature, poetry, prophecy--both ancient and modern.
In short, Peter Kingsley shows us not only who Carl Jung was but who we in the West are as well. Much more than a brilliant spiritual biography, Catafalque holds the key to understanding why our western culture is dying. And, an incantatory text in its own right, it shows the way to discovering what we in these times of great crisis must do.
844 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2018
62 people are currently reading
1229 people want to read
About the author
Peter Kingsley
11 books335 followersClassical scholar and spiritual teacher Peter Kingsley was born in the UK. He received his BA from the University of Lancaster, his Master of Letters from King's College, Cambridge University, and his PhD from the University of London. He is a former Fellow of the Warburg Institute in London and has held honorary professorships or fellowships at universities in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Kingsley's early writings are traditionally academic, and culminate in the 1995 Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition. His more recent works emphasize the lived experience and daily application of the ancient mystical tradition that helped give rise to the western world.
He continues to write and teach, working to make the spirituality and meditative disciplines of Empedocles, Parmenides, and those like them available to people today. His most recent book, Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity, is due to be published in November 2018 and for the first time it shifts the focus of his work directly onto our modern world.
Kingsley's early writings are traditionally academic, and culminate in the 1995 Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition. His more recent works emphasize the lived experience and daily application of the ancient mystical tradition that helped give rise to the western world.
He continues to write and teach, working to make the spirituality and meditative disciplines of Empedocles, Parmenides, and those like them available to people today. His most recent book, Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity, is due to be published in November 2018 and for the first time it shifts the focus of his work directly onto our modern world.
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March 7, 2019
The experience of reading Catafalque is a purgatory: the experience of being stripped naked. It forces us to set aside all our petty activities and rationalizations that we have used to avoid the depths and the aching reality of ourselves – all of the avoidances we employ for reasons that lie just below the surface of our consciousness, which is where we store them in denial so that we don’t have to engage with the emptiness of our lives or with the hollowness of all the ways we try to justify ourselves to ourselves. We are shown that we, even and especially those of us engaged in a committed spiritual path, have sold our birthright like Esau for a bowl of porridge.
Ultimately, this book is not just about how Jung has been misunderstood by his followers. It is about how all of us have ignored and neglected the sacred source at the root of Western civilization. Catafalque is a howl, a warning, an act of destruction, and a re-membering. It is the haunting and terrifying sound of a sacred horn heard in the night, summoning us to grieve the suffering of the divine and lament the death of our civilization. Peter Kingsley is calling us back to what is most important.
In a sense it could be said that what James Joyce did with fiction in Ulysses, T.S. Eliot did with poetry in the Four Quartets, J. S. Bach did with music in The Art of the Fugue and the Celtic monks did with art in The Book of Kells: this is what Peter Kingsley has done with non-fiction in Catafalque. Kingsley weaves and holds together in intricate complexity a book that not only guides the reader into the profoundest understanding of Carl Jung, Sufi mysticism, and western spiritual tradition, but also leads one into the very depths of her or himself.
Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity is, very simply, a must read for anyone interested in Jung and his psychology. Peter Kingsley, a noted classicist famous for revolutionizing the understanding of ancient Greek culture and civilization, has drawn on an extraordinary wealth of material – all of which he has read in the original languages – while creating this book.
But Catafalque is unique among the many books written about Jung because it’s not only the work of an accomplished scholar. It’s also the work of a mystic with a strong inner connection to the man who was Carl Jung. It’s a book about the true, beating heart of prophecy, about Jung the prophet, and is itself a book of prophecy.
Ultimately, this book is not just about how Jung has been misunderstood by his followers. It is about how all of us have ignored and neglected the sacred source at the root of Western civilization. Catafalque is a howl, a warning, an act of destruction, and a re-membering. It is the haunting and terrifying sound of a sacred horn heard in the night, summoning us to grieve the suffering of the divine and lament the death of our civilization. Peter Kingsley is calling us back to what is most important.
In a sense it could be said that what James Joyce did with fiction in Ulysses, T.S. Eliot did with poetry in the Four Quartets, J. S. Bach did with music in The Art of the Fugue and the Celtic monks did with art in The Book of Kells: this is what Peter Kingsley has done with non-fiction in Catafalque. Kingsley weaves and holds together in intricate complexity a book that not only guides the reader into the profoundest understanding of Carl Jung, Sufi mysticism, and western spiritual tradition, but also leads one into the very depths of her or himself.
Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity is, very simply, a must read for anyone interested in Jung and his psychology. Peter Kingsley, a noted classicist famous for revolutionizing the understanding of ancient Greek culture and civilization, has drawn on an extraordinary wealth of material – all of which he has read in the original languages – while creating this book.
But Catafalque is unique among the many books written about Jung because it’s not only the work of an accomplished scholar. It’s also the work of a mystic with a strong inner connection to the man who was Carl Jung. It’s a book about the true, beating heart of prophecy, about Jung the prophet, and is itself a book of prophecy.
January 3, 2019
“Make Western Culture Great Again!”
Peter Kingsley (hereafter “Peter,” since his publications are so personal, including his “howl” recently published as Catafalque) is a classicist who specializes in ancient Greek culture and philology. He is rightly renowned for a series of brilliant scholarly articles between 1990 and 2002 and a book, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic (1995) which offered a reinterpretation of Presocratic philosophers such as Empedocles and Parmenides as healer/seers, magicians and possible practitioners of trance incubation in caves and ecstatic journeys to the underworld rather than as the originators of the rational Greek philosophical tradition that came later. No novel creative contributions from Peter of this caliber have appeared in almost twenty years, and as a result he recycles the insights of his youth throughout his later mystical books. The respect of academics for his early career work on the Presocratics has mostly protected Peter from withering criticism of his later works: In the Dark Places of Wisdom (1999), Reality (2004), A Story Waiting to Pierce You (2010) and now Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity (2018).
These latter works are very personal books, written in a sideways style that Peter believes best suits a prophet, and each has two distinct (indeed, arguably unrelated) components:
(1) a primary text filled with flat, emotionless prose which is consciously aimed at the general reader as a parable-like confession of Peter’s very personal mystical interpretation of the divinely “seeded” origin of ancient Greek culture (and therefore Western culture – the two are identical in Peter’s mind, for the only true culture is ancient Greek culture to him – nothing else afterwards matters, and non-Western cultures are almost completely absent from his concerns because Western culture is THE superior culture, a spiritually elite culture that has lost its way); and
(2) his extensive, impressive sections of footnotes, which scholars love and which are the true contributions of all his works, including Catafalque. Peter is a master bibliographer and footnote wizard, but not an effective communicator of his own deeply personal mystical revelations. Without his footnotes, which he brandishes like a man pulling open his shirt to reveal a suicide vest of explosives as a warning to others that he should be taken seriously – VERY seriously, his idiosyncratic mystical musings would be ridiculed by the scholars he scorns. It is clear that he is conscious of this and he is very sensitive about it.
The two sides of each of Peter’s latter books really do stand apart and bear little relation to one another. The main text of each of these books, including Catafalque, is written by Peter the Prophet and the notes are written by Peter the Pedant.
Peter has publicly self-identified as a mystic for more than twenty years (see, for example, his Wikipedia entry and the numerous interviews with him over the years). He has also made it clear in his last four books that he is also a prophet (a “howler,” as he claims is the original meaning of the word). It is his mission to save us from ourselves. Indeed, like a true prophet, he repeatedly reminds us he is misunderstood by the world and is bitter about it (bitterness is the single most commented upon aspect of Peter’s prose by reviewers of his last four books). Peter’s divinely inspired work, which he claims is written in “the choiceless rhythm of the winds and the rain,” is beyond criticism by others: “And you can try your best to criticize it if you are an expert at judging how the weather should be assessed” (pp. 444-445). It is the prerogative of a mystic and prophet to grant himself a pardon and immunity from prosecution. These are not exaggerations. And they are not insults. This is how Peter perceives himself and how he wants others to perceive him. He has been very public about this.
However, as the classicist M. David Litwa wrote in the most detailed, insightful and blunt public criticism of Peter’s work (in a post on cultural historian Wouter Hanegraaff’s blog Western Culture and Counter Culture on 6 April 2017), Peter is “the self-appointed prophet of the obvious.” His interpretations “are almost always strained, eccentric and dogmatic.” This makes them unintentionally “humorous” because they are offered by a scold who asserts he has received, in an almost epiphanic divine flash of insight, the “immediate,” “obvious,” and “simple” Truth that is lost on all scholars (and all scholars are pedants, according to Peter). Litwa confesses with honesty: “Regarding Kingsley’s popular work, it is hard to get into. I have no problem with Kingsley constructing his authorial persona as a mystagogue, but he is a very curmudgeonly mystagogue. That amount of anti-intellectualist rhetoric in his book Reality (on Parmenides) exceeds analysis and exegesis of Parmenides poem itself!” As Litwa explained, his criticisms are not designed to “depreciate” Kingsley. In Hanegraaff’s blog post, entitled “Peter Kingsley,” his deep respect and appreciation of Peter’s wonderous gifts as a classicist and philologist (all true) are tempered by the observation about the book Reality that, “on many pages, Kingsley’s utter contempt for almost all his colleagues and their failure to see the Truth makes the reading embarrassing and painful.”
Any honest reader of Catafalque will immediately see how apt these observations are for the current book under review as well. But in this new book Peter’s contempt is repeatedly extended to Jungians and Jungian analysts. Peter masterfully marketed Catafalque as an “event” through You Tube promotional videos (including one with a rather tense dialogue with Jungian analyst Murray Stein in which Peter points out how Jungian analysts “who should know better” just seem to keep getting Jung wrong), and with glowing publicity blurbs from prominent scholars. He and they claim the book is a shocking new interpretation of C.G. Jung from a man who claims to be the only one who had a fluency of Greek and Latin that surpassed even Jung’s (yes, Peter says this in various places). This is not a book most Jungians or Jungian analysts will enjoy. Indeed, Jungians are charged with killing the spirit of everything that was alive and vital in Jung’s work.
In a departure from his previous books, Peter’s usual villains – those ignorant scholar-pedants – receive comparatively milder condemnation, though it is still abundant, particularly in Peter’s Trumpian attempts to humiliate other Jung scholars in the footnotes in volume 2. The intensity of the bitterness is several orders of magnitude above the unkind personal attacks found in the footnotes of his previous books, and one can only feel sorry for Peter, for it diminishes him. And I mean that sincerely. My sorrow is genuine. It will be especially difficult for Jungians (and I am not one) to give Peter an honest hearing of his howl due to his incessant belittling of them as an ignorant and sleeping herd. This is a shame, since Peter is a clever man and has many interesting insights into Jung.
But Peter is a Prophet of Strife, an Empedoclean prophet of division and exclusion, who argues for the rightness of a spiritual elite who are awake and more intelligent than anyone else and who must lead the rest of us to . . . what, exactly? The best I can gather is that, like his spiritual guru Empedocles, Peter wants all of us to follow him in an act of mass suicide by jumping into the krater of a volcanic lava pit. That is the kind of prophet Peter is. His vision is, in the end, a dark and hopeless one, as his readers will see if, given our obviously limited cognitive and spiritual abilities, they can stay awake long enough to read the final chapters of the book.
So let’s begin our direct assessment of Catafalque as a extension of Peter’s deeply personal concerns in his previous three books. Then let’s proceed directly to his deeply personal, hyper-hagiographic (to the point of slavish comedic heights) engagement with Jung.
As David Litwa pointed out in his commentary to Hanegraaff’s blog post, there is a metanarrative of decline in Peter’s books. Catafalque is indeed a howl, but the noise is one of lament, not joy or triumph. Peter argues in the final pages his book is a catafalque that he has built to support the remains of his beloved Western culture, which in his view is dead. There are many culprits, many murderers, and followers of Jung, who should know better, are prominent among them in this book. At the end of the book, as Peter stood all alone atop the catafalque he had built, I fully expected him to push the ignition button on his suicide vest and blow the whole damn carcass of Western culture into smithereens.
As a prophet, Peter offers a diagnosis and a pharmakon, a treatment. The book is a personal statement, elegiac and poignant in its way, and at times nostalgic in a bittersweet way, because his own early career insights into the true divine origins of Western culture via the Presocratic healers/seers are the central Truth of his personal history and of our culture. Peter the Prophet’s fate and our fate are linked. Those golden Glory Days, his and ours, are in the distant past. We must bring the past into the present and return to The Truth if we are to be saved. Western culture lost The Truth until Peter rediscovered it in the 1980s through mystical revelations. We are all doomed because of this fatal forgetfulness. Western culture, indeed the whole world, is dying and is about to be placed in a coffin on the catafalque Peter has built. Peter laments that no one understands prophets like him, so all is lost. But what this really comes down to is that we are all doomed for not being Peter.
Peter places himself and the truly brilliant insights of his early scholarly work at the center of this cosmic drama of Western cultural origins and redemption. Indeed he claims he extends and completes Jung’s work, connecting Jungian psychology with alchemy and Gnosticism and now Peter’s personal scholarly interpretation of the Presocratics. Peter claims the Presocratic founding fathers received direct divine gnosis in the underworld from “a goddess” or other spiritual beings. Western culture (which he never defines) was “seeded” by these divine entities and has been guided by a select few, a spiritual elite which includes Empedocles, Parmenides, Jung and Peter, who have established relations with these entities for more than two thousand years.
Like a mystical nativist wearing a red cap that shouts “Make Western Culture Great Again!” Peter frantically waves his arms to warn us that the antidote to our sickness is to return to a society of the romantic past of shamans and Presocratic healer/prophets and live our dull, semi-conscious lives while hanging on every word of their revelations and following the lead of the elite.
The lament is that Western culture is dying because only Peter has this insight, the only true pharmakon, and no one wants to hear his howl. My lament is that Peter only seems to care about Western culture in his mystical work (a colonialist mentality which he shares with Jung). If I were to follow a prophet I would personally prefer one who would show some awareness of the cultural diversity on our planet and maybe, just maybe, toss a little of that salvation stuff towards those billions of folks living in non-Western cultures. After all, they’re the ones slaving in sweat shops making those red caps for us.
And what about Jung? Catafalque is supposed to be about C.G. Jung, isn’t it? Not quite. And I mean this in several senses.
First, and most obviously, Peter’s books are about Peter. The is true for all authors, but in Peter’s case this is explicitly so. He shares with us his dreams, fantasies, mystical flashes of insight, synchronicities, personal experiences with others (including a memory of being in a girl's living room and hoping to get laid when he was 14 -- but Jung happened to be on TV and cockblocked him) and, of course, his prophecies. To a lesser extent than in his other three mystical books, but still present in this one, Peter shares his insights gained from his mystical encounter with The Goddess herself and the living entities of Empedocles and Parmenidies who have been informing his writings. In this book, he is in dialogue with Jung as a spiritual guru of sorts. Jung is Peter’s Philemon.
However, the Jung that Peter seems to be channeling in this book is not the biological or historical Jung the man. All that was ephemeral. Here it is: “In other words, there is no Jung. His life wasn’t the story of Jung realizing himself. It was a story of the unconscious realizing itself through the passing appearance of a conscious Jung” (p. 208). So Peter’s book is not about Carl Jung. It is Peter’s engagement with his imaginings of an eternal force that was only temporarily Carl Jung. Therefore, this book will be a great disappointment to anyone wanting a historical account or biography of Jung the man. But even Peter had to admit such a man did exist, at least briefly in his “Personality Number One” form. Peter channels Jung’s eternal “Personality Number Two” for us, indeed for our salvation (as least those of us in Western culture).
Since the first volume of the book is a 445-page, meandering, sidewinding meditation that never catches fire, there is nothing to be said about its correctness or incorrectness. It is Peter’s movie of an intellectually, morally and spiritually flawless C.G. Jung.
So here is how Jung #2 is portrayed in Peter’s movie:
• Jung was a mystic (and knew it and lied about it)
• Jung was a prophet (and knew it and lied about it)
• Jung was a Gnostic (and knew it and lied about it)
• Jung was a magician and performed magical rituals
• Jung was deified. Repeat: he became a god.
• Individuation is a path to deification
• Jung consciously and deliberately formed a religion (his psychology)
• Jung became the savior of the world, the servator mundi
• Jung is the Anthropos
• Jung is the Cosmic Christ
• Jung suffered for our salvation – why can’t his critics see this?
• Jung and Peter are working together to save us all
Long ago I read much of the biographical literature on Jung, much of which could be termed hagiographic. I struggled to find a word for Catafalque. This is a slavish hyper-hagiography of a perfect divine being. There is so much Christ-talk in this book, so many assertions that Jung is the cosmic Christ, that Catafalque may indeed be Peter’s final mortal statement before throwing himself into the abyss.
Peter Kingsley (hereafter “Peter,” since his publications are so personal, including his “howl” recently published as Catafalque) is a classicist who specializes in ancient Greek culture and philology. He is rightly renowned for a series of brilliant scholarly articles between 1990 and 2002 and a book, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic (1995) which offered a reinterpretation of Presocratic philosophers such as Empedocles and Parmenides as healer/seers, magicians and possible practitioners of trance incubation in caves and ecstatic journeys to the underworld rather than as the originators of the rational Greek philosophical tradition that came later. No novel creative contributions from Peter of this caliber have appeared in almost twenty years, and as a result he recycles the insights of his youth throughout his later mystical books. The respect of academics for his early career work on the Presocratics has mostly protected Peter from withering criticism of his later works: In the Dark Places of Wisdom (1999), Reality (2004), A Story Waiting to Pierce You (2010) and now Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity (2018).
These latter works are very personal books, written in a sideways style that Peter believes best suits a prophet, and each has two distinct (indeed, arguably unrelated) components:
(1) a primary text filled with flat, emotionless prose which is consciously aimed at the general reader as a parable-like confession of Peter’s very personal mystical interpretation of the divinely “seeded” origin of ancient Greek culture (and therefore Western culture – the two are identical in Peter’s mind, for the only true culture is ancient Greek culture to him – nothing else afterwards matters, and non-Western cultures are almost completely absent from his concerns because Western culture is THE superior culture, a spiritually elite culture that has lost its way); and
(2) his extensive, impressive sections of footnotes, which scholars love and which are the true contributions of all his works, including Catafalque. Peter is a master bibliographer and footnote wizard, but not an effective communicator of his own deeply personal mystical revelations. Without his footnotes, which he brandishes like a man pulling open his shirt to reveal a suicide vest of explosives as a warning to others that he should be taken seriously – VERY seriously, his idiosyncratic mystical musings would be ridiculed by the scholars he scorns. It is clear that he is conscious of this and he is very sensitive about it.
The two sides of each of Peter’s latter books really do stand apart and bear little relation to one another. The main text of each of these books, including Catafalque, is written by Peter the Prophet and the notes are written by Peter the Pedant.
Peter has publicly self-identified as a mystic for more than twenty years (see, for example, his Wikipedia entry and the numerous interviews with him over the years). He has also made it clear in his last four books that he is also a prophet (a “howler,” as he claims is the original meaning of the word). It is his mission to save us from ourselves. Indeed, like a true prophet, he repeatedly reminds us he is misunderstood by the world and is bitter about it (bitterness is the single most commented upon aspect of Peter’s prose by reviewers of his last four books). Peter’s divinely inspired work, which he claims is written in “the choiceless rhythm of the winds and the rain,” is beyond criticism by others: “And you can try your best to criticize it if you are an expert at judging how the weather should be assessed” (pp. 444-445). It is the prerogative of a mystic and prophet to grant himself a pardon and immunity from prosecution. These are not exaggerations. And they are not insults. This is how Peter perceives himself and how he wants others to perceive him. He has been very public about this.
However, as the classicist M. David Litwa wrote in the most detailed, insightful and blunt public criticism of Peter’s work (in a post on cultural historian Wouter Hanegraaff’s blog Western Culture and Counter Culture on 6 April 2017), Peter is “the self-appointed prophet of the obvious.” His interpretations “are almost always strained, eccentric and dogmatic.” This makes them unintentionally “humorous” because they are offered by a scold who asserts he has received, in an almost epiphanic divine flash of insight, the “immediate,” “obvious,” and “simple” Truth that is lost on all scholars (and all scholars are pedants, according to Peter). Litwa confesses with honesty: “Regarding Kingsley’s popular work, it is hard to get into. I have no problem with Kingsley constructing his authorial persona as a mystagogue, but he is a very curmudgeonly mystagogue. That amount of anti-intellectualist rhetoric in his book Reality (on Parmenides) exceeds analysis and exegesis of Parmenides poem itself!” As Litwa explained, his criticisms are not designed to “depreciate” Kingsley. In Hanegraaff’s blog post, entitled “Peter Kingsley,” his deep respect and appreciation of Peter’s wonderous gifts as a classicist and philologist (all true) are tempered by the observation about the book Reality that, “on many pages, Kingsley’s utter contempt for almost all his colleagues and their failure to see the Truth makes the reading embarrassing and painful.”
Any honest reader of Catafalque will immediately see how apt these observations are for the current book under review as well. But in this new book Peter’s contempt is repeatedly extended to Jungians and Jungian analysts. Peter masterfully marketed Catafalque as an “event” through You Tube promotional videos (including one with a rather tense dialogue with Jungian analyst Murray Stein in which Peter points out how Jungian analysts “who should know better” just seem to keep getting Jung wrong), and with glowing publicity blurbs from prominent scholars. He and they claim the book is a shocking new interpretation of C.G. Jung from a man who claims to be the only one who had a fluency of Greek and Latin that surpassed even Jung’s (yes, Peter says this in various places). This is not a book most Jungians or Jungian analysts will enjoy. Indeed, Jungians are charged with killing the spirit of everything that was alive and vital in Jung’s work.
In a departure from his previous books, Peter’s usual villains – those ignorant scholar-pedants – receive comparatively milder condemnation, though it is still abundant, particularly in Peter’s Trumpian attempts to humiliate other Jung scholars in the footnotes in volume 2. The intensity of the bitterness is several orders of magnitude above the unkind personal attacks found in the footnotes of his previous books, and one can only feel sorry for Peter, for it diminishes him. And I mean that sincerely. My sorrow is genuine. It will be especially difficult for Jungians (and I am not one) to give Peter an honest hearing of his howl due to his incessant belittling of them as an ignorant and sleeping herd. This is a shame, since Peter is a clever man and has many interesting insights into Jung.
But Peter is a Prophet of Strife, an Empedoclean prophet of division and exclusion, who argues for the rightness of a spiritual elite who are awake and more intelligent than anyone else and who must lead the rest of us to . . . what, exactly? The best I can gather is that, like his spiritual guru Empedocles, Peter wants all of us to follow him in an act of mass suicide by jumping into the krater of a volcanic lava pit. That is the kind of prophet Peter is. His vision is, in the end, a dark and hopeless one, as his readers will see if, given our obviously limited cognitive and spiritual abilities, they can stay awake long enough to read the final chapters of the book.
So let’s begin our direct assessment of Catafalque as a extension of Peter’s deeply personal concerns in his previous three books. Then let’s proceed directly to his deeply personal, hyper-hagiographic (to the point of slavish comedic heights) engagement with Jung.
As David Litwa pointed out in his commentary to Hanegraaff’s blog post, there is a metanarrative of decline in Peter’s books. Catafalque is indeed a howl, but the noise is one of lament, not joy or triumph. Peter argues in the final pages his book is a catafalque that he has built to support the remains of his beloved Western culture, which in his view is dead. There are many culprits, many murderers, and followers of Jung, who should know better, are prominent among them in this book. At the end of the book, as Peter stood all alone atop the catafalque he had built, I fully expected him to push the ignition button on his suicide vest and blow the whole damn carcass of Western culture into smithereens.
As a prophet, Peter offers a diagnosis and a pharmakon, a treatment. The book is a personal statement, elegiac and poignant in its way, and at times nostalgic in a bittersweet way, because his own early career insights into the true divine origins of Western culture via the Presocratic healers/seers are the central Truth of his personal history and of our culture. Peter the Prophet’s fate and our fate are linked. Those golden Glory Days, his and ours, are in the distant past. We must bring the past into the present and return to The Truth if we are to be saved. Western culture lost The Truth until Peter rediscovered it in the 1980s through mystical revelations. We are all doomed because of this fatal forgetfulness. Western culture, indeed the whole world, is dying and is about to be placed in a coffin on the catafalque Peter has built. Peter laments that no one understands prophets like him, so all is lost. But what this really comes down to is that we are all doomed for not being Peter.
Peter places himself and the truly brilliant insights of his early scholarly work at the center of this cosmic drama of Western cultural origins and redemption. Indeed he claims he extends and completes Jung’s work, connecting Jungian psychology with alchemy and Gnosticism and now Peter’s personal scholarly interpretation of the Presocratics. Peter claims the Presocratic founding fathers received direct divine gnosis in the underworld from “a goddess” or other spiritual beings. Western culture (which he never defines) was “seeded” by these divine entities and has been guided by a select few, a spiritual elite which includes Empedocles, Parmenides, Jung and Peter, who have established relations with these entities for more than two thousand years.
Like a mystical nativist wearing a red cap that shouts “Make Western Culture Great Again!” Peter frantically waves his arms to warn us that the antidote to our sickness is to return to a society of the romantic past of shamans and Presocratic healer/prophets and live our dull, semi-conscious lives while hanging on every word of their revelations and following the lead of the elite.
The lament is that Western culture is dying because only Peter has this insight, the only true pharmakon, and no one wants to hear his howl. My lament is that Peter only seems to care about Western culture in his mystical work (a colonialist mentality which he shares with Jung). If I were to follow a prophet I would personally prefer one who would show some awareness of the cultural diversity on our planet and maybe, just maybe, toss a little of that salvation stuff towards those billions of folks living in non-Western cultures. After all, they’re the ones slaving in sweat shops making those red caps for us.
And what about Jung? Catafalque is supposed to be about C.G. Jung, isn’t it? Not quite. And I mean this in several senses.
First, and most obviously, Peter’s books are about Peter. The is true for all authors, but in Peter’s case this is explicitly so. He shares with us his dreams, fantasies, mystical flashes of insight, synchronicities, personal experiences with others (including a memory of being in a girl's living room and hoping to get laid when he was 14 -- but Jung happened to be on TV and cockblocked him) and, of course, his prophecies. To a lesser extent than in his other three mystical books, but still present in this one, Peter shares his insights gained from his mystical encounter with The Goddess herself and the living entities of Empedocles and Parmenidies who have been informing his writings. In this book, he is in dialogue with Jung as a spiritual guru of sorts. Jung is Peter’s Philemon.
However, the Jung that Peter seems to be channeling in this book is not the biological or historical Jung the man. All that was ephemeral. Here it is: “In other words, there is no Jung. His life wasn’t the story of Jung realizing himself. It was a story of the unconscious realizing itself through the passing appearance of a conscious Jung” (p. 208). So Peter’s book is not about Carl Jung. It is Peter’s engagement with his imaginings of an eternal force that was only temporarily Carl Jung. Therefore, this book will be a great disappointment to anyone wanting a historical account or biography of Jung the man. But even Peter had to admit such a man did exist, at least briefly in his “Personality Number One” form. Peter channels Jung’s eternal “Personality Number Two” for us, indeed for our salvation (as least those of us in Western culture).
Since the first volume of the book is a 445-page, meandering, sidewinding meditation that never catches fire, there is nothing to be said about its correctness or incorrectness. It is Peter’s movie of an intellectually, morally and spiritually flawless C.G. Jung.
So here is how Jung #2 is portrayed in Peter’s movie:
• Jung was a mystic (and knew it and lied about it)
• Jung was a prophet (and knew it and lied about it)
• Jung was a Gnostic (and knew it and lied about it)
• Jung was a magician and performed magical rituals
• Jung was deified. Repeat: he became a god.
• Individuation is a path to deification
• Jung consciously and deliberately formed a religion (his psychology)
• Jung became the savior of the world, the servator mundi
• Jung is the Anthropos
• Jung is the Cosmic Christ
• Jung suffered for our salvation – why can’t his critics see this?
• Jung and Peter are working together to save us all
Long ago I read much of the biographical literature on Jung, much of which could be termed hagiographic. I struggled to find a word for Catafalque. This is a slavish hyper-hagiography of a perfect divine being. There is so much Christ-talk in this book, so many assertions that Jung is the cosmic Christ, that Catafalque may indeed be Peter’s final mortal statement before throwing himself into the abyss.
December 9, 2018
Catafalque, a book to be met will stillness and open hearted awareness.
To pick up and read Peter Kingsley’s book “Catafalque”, is to be willing to have a nuclear hammer applied to the Soul.
Whilst reading, one is at once inclined to rush, to gorge, to consume the wisdom within as quickly as possible. To attempt to bring to an end as quickly as possible the searing pain of the words written within, in the manner of a child ripping off a plaster.
Yet if one heeds the wisest part of one’s self, one takes time. Slows. Digests and allows, in sacred stillness, for the God’s to arise. And in doing so, one can allow the care that they require of us to be made know.
This is not a book for the faint hearted. Mr. Kingsley offers no salve to relieve the sting of the pain, rather he demand we witness without rushing to fix anything. This is a love letter of pure grief. That spans the trauma of modern civilisation, heading back through the eons. So far back that we have forgotten how traumatised we are, and continue to live as if “this” were normal.
The heartbreak and grief that arise when one opens to this is immense. And not to be ignored or denigrated.
This book is immense. In every plane. And if you love life, love this planet, love your fellow man with true compassion, then you will read it, and weep and laugh and learn to love all over again. You will allow it to change you, both when you dream and when you are awake. And you will never be quite the same again.
To pick up and read Peter Kingsley’s book “Catafalque”, is to be willing to have a nuclear hammer applied to the Soul.
Whilst reading, one is at once inclined to rush, to gorge, to consume the wisdom within as quickly as possible. To attempt to bring to an end as quickly as possible the searing pain of the words written within, in the manner of a child ripping off a plaster.
Yet if one heeds the wisest part of one’s self, one takes time. Slows. Digests and allows, in sacred stillness, for the God’s to arise. And in doing so, one can allow the care that they require of us to be made know.
This is not a book for the faint hearted. Mr. Kingsley offers no salve to relieve the sting of the pain, rather he demand we witness without rushing to fix anything. This is a love letter of pure grief. That spans the trauma of modern civilisation, heading back through the eons. So far back that we have forgotten how traumatised we are, and continue to live as if “this” were normal.
The heartbreak and grief that arise when one opens to this is immense. And not to be ignored or denigrated.
This book is immense. In every plane. And if you love life, love this planet, love your fellow man with true compassion, then you will read it, and weep and laugh and learn to love all over again. You will allow it to change you, both when you dream and when you are awake. And you will never be quite the same again.
December 15, 2018
In this book Peter Kingsley fearlessly and graciously provides the catafalque for our Western culture. We the unknowing dead are left to pay our last respects to a culture that has lost its way, forgotten its roots.
Peter Kingsley presents Carl Jung's life's work, in particular his writing of the Red Book and how it has been widely misinterpreted, misunderstood and largely ignored to illustrate a point. Jung's misrepresentation is a modern example of how we as a culture have treated our ancient forebears and prophets, those who sowed the seeds of Western culture guided by and in service to the sacred and the divine.
Jung was a prophet and as a true prophet brought at great personal cost messages direct from the eternal. Jung did so without identifying or contaminating what was received and in writing the Red Book shared these messages from the Spirit of The Depths. We would have gained much had we listened. I believe Peter Kingsley has done the same with his book Catafalque. We would be wise to read it carefully and to listen and to perhaps remember what we have forgotten.
In over identifying with a limited rationality, we as a culture and as individuals have lost our connection to the primordial source and to our ancestors. Instead of howling from the depths for what has been lost and forgotten we continue to resurrect or reinvent what already needs to be laid to rest.
Be brave enough to read Catafalque all the way to its conclusion it just may well bring you to your primordial knees and catapult you into an eternal reality. Surrender to this book so beautifully and painstakingly written by Peter Kingsley, surrender to your own depths and perhaps find the bravery to surrender it all. Catafalque is a worthy companion for the journey.
Peter Kingsley presents Carl Jung's life's work, in particular his writing of the Red Book and how it has been widely misinterpreted, misunderstood and largely ignored to illustrate a point. Jung's misrepresentation is a modern example of how we as a culture have treated our ancient forebears and prophets, those who sowed the seeds of Western culture guided by and in service to the sacred and the divine.
Jung was a prophet and as a true prophet brought at great personal cost messages direct from the eternal. Jung did so without identifying or contaminating what was received and in writing the Red Book shared these messages from the Spirit of The Depths. We would have gained much had we listened. I believe Peter Kingsley has done the same with his book Catafalque. We would be wise to read it carefully and to listen and to perhaps remember what we have forgotten.
In over identifying with a limited rationality, we as a culture and as individuals have lost our connection to the primordial source and to our ancestors. Instead of howling from the depths for what has been lost and forgotten we continue to resurrect or reinvent what already needs to be laid to rest.
Be brave enough to read Catafalque all the way to its conclusion it just may well bring you to your primordial knees and catapult you into an eternal reality. Surrender to this book so beautifully and painstakingly written by Peter Kingsley, surrender to your own depths and perhaps find the bravery to surrender it all. Catafalque is a worthy companion for the journey.
December 9, 2018
This is a stunning book. And so much more than a book, it's an experience of extraordinary power. Reading it is like reading myself, like reading the history of my world but also its future and its destiny. I will be reading it many, many times for its hard consolation and unsentimental companionship. I feel I have found a real friend for life.
December 9, 2018
Finding my way into Catafalque is a deeply compelling, almost unbelievably intense experience. Often disorienting to my well educated mind, I constantly have the feeling that this extraordinary book is speaking to and forcefully nudging into awareness the deepest part of my being. It feels like I am seeing, hearing, feeling, living with more clarity of authentic perception than ever dreamed possible. I cannot recommend it highly enough and already can’t wait to start reading it again.
July 13, 2019
A fabulous book, more shocking than Reality: written with and for the soul, by one who truly understands, and in homage to those intrepid folk who have gone before us.
April 5, 2021
Vėl norisi skaityti Jungą, tik jau kitoje šviesoje, jau kitaip.
January 17, 2019
This book is whole. It is complete. There is nothing more to add or anything to take away from it.
It’s just as it is. It’s the barren truth. It does the fullest justice not only to Carl Jung and Henry Corbin but also to the earliest Western philosophers, the so-called Presocratics – and to so many other great spirits who dared to stand as witnesses to the wisdom within.
It’s the spirit of the deep speaking to us through this book. It’s a prophecy. What an effort it must have been for Peter Kingsley to bring this message accurately into this world. I want to thank him for having had the courage to drink this cup to the bitter end.
“Catafalque” is also a warning to all those scholars with all their supposed reasoning and all their pretensions, unaware of their poor little minds, who think they know it all. It’s a constant reminder of how life can turn against us if we think we can play around with things when we don’t even have the slightest clue what’s really involved. We would do far better to become very humble in the realization that, as Huxley said in his “Doors of Perception”, out of the other end of the reducing valve of our brains and nervous system only a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness comes which can help us to stay alive on the surface of this planet.
And perhaps even that will not be true for long. Maybe we should all turn back inside ourselves and prepare to dance the ‘danse macabre’ around the catafalque and coffin of this failed Western Civilization…
Willy Wauters, Belgium
It’s just as it is. It’s the barren truth. It does the fullest justice not only to Carl Jung and Henry Corbin but also to the earliest Western philosophers, the so-called Presocratics – and to so many other great spirits who dared to stand as witnesses to the wisdom within.
It’s the spirit of the deep speaking to us through this book. It’s a prophecy. What an effort it must have been for Peter Kingsley to bring this message accurately into this world. I want to thank him for having had the courage to drink this cup to the bitter end.
“Catafalque” is also a warning to all those scholars with all their supposed reasoning and all their pretensions, unaware of their poor little minds, who think they know it all. It’s a constant reminder of how life can turn against us if we think we can play around with things when we don’t even have the slightest clue what’s really involved. We would do far better to become very humble in the realization that, as Huxley said in his “Doors of Perception”, out of the other end of the reducing valve of our brains and nervous system only a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness comes which can help us to stay alive on the surface of this planet.
And perhaps even that will not be true for long. Maybe we should all turn back inside ourselves and prepare to dance the ‘danse macabre’ around the catafalque and coffin of this failed Western Civilization…
Willy Wauters, Belgium
March 23, 2019
I read Catafalque several months ago, and could not summon up this review any sooner. What can one say about such a book that isn't irrelevant noise? For a while after finishing it, I felt the only right response was silence as long as it still echoed in my head (as if that would ever stop). To say anything too soon would have been to stop listening, and this requires a deep listening. On the surface of it, it offers new and deeply interesting insights about Jung and his real work, and feels like several lines of inquiry brought together and wrapped into one volume. But to focus on that level would be to miss the point completely, like traveling halfway around the world only to never leave the hotel. The aspects of the book that stay with me most compellingly are nowhere to be found on the page. Filling the whole silent space behind the words is a sobering message, a power that cuts through all the anxiety, denial, false hopes, optimism, pessimism and other mind tricks that prevent us from being present with this moment in our history. It is so direct, there is no room for making up more fables for ourselves. It isn’t for the faint-hearted, and it does something to you – I experienced shocking, and permanent, changes within myself while reading and processing this book. As if the power of the Word, which is not a metaphor, was at work here once more, when we have forgotten all such things and are destroying ourselves in consequence. That this book exists at all is a tremendous gift.
January 8, 2019
I have to return to this book. It shock me. In fact, I am thinking in reading again all of Kingsley books. And now, reading the Red Book
January 7, 2019
I discovered Peter Kingsley's work about a year ago while finishing a degree in literature at UC Berkeley. At the time I was working at a library, deep in the textual catacombs, immersed in the endless volumes of dusty books that filled row upon row and shelf upon shelf of texts and papers by authors mostly long since departed. Surrounded by this monument to the 'thinking dead' I began to feel a profound and uncanny sense of chastening; a respect for all of the writers, poets, philosophers, who like us, were here for a short while, did their work, and then left.
Over the last year or so I read broadly and piratically, following the thread of a tradition that led back to the ancient world. I read Joseph Campbell who drew the threads of myth together. I read James Hillman, that rogue student of Jung's who often implored: "Study the Greeks." I read T.S. Eliot, whose Wasteland poem, exhorts the 'hypocrite lecteur' to repair their modern understanding which is but 'a heap of broken images'. I read Spengler and Sophocles. Homer and old Celtic myths. At some point along this tightrope walk I stumbled upon the work of Peter Kingsley. What initially struck me about Kingsley is his singularly refreshing quality of being so absolutely clear. When Kingsley speaks, as when he writes, he does so from a position of authority that is based not only in extensive and rigorous scholarship, but is also rooted in experience. For my own part, having emerged recently from the halls of literary academia, which is defined in large part by the speculative and decentralized associative hugger-mugger of postmodern 'thinking', Kingsley's work rang out over that intellectual wasteland like the clear toned cry of a bell.
Catafalque is a cry in the wilderness. It is a work of dedicated and tireless scholarship that include hundreds of pages of footnotes—which Kingsley nevertheless wryly refers to as: "grotesque monuments to a culture that abandoned itself."—a dig at the habitual academic ritual of displaying ‘proof’. Yes, this is a work magic, of paradox, and trickery, at once fecund and magisterial, it flows from the blinding dark twilight world between nightmare and waking, between reason and madness, between destiny and enthrallment. It is an idea whose time has not only come, but long since passed. It is an exegetic epistolary from the otherworld.
Kingsley's previous works also deal with the thousands of years long tradition of seers and mystics, and their cultivation and transmission of a now mostly hidden, but not lost, art of dreams and of journeying, of laying down in holy places and handing fate over to the Gods.
Those who are familiar with his work need no confirmation of its quality from me, but for those who are coming to it for the first time, be warned—this is no pleasant distraction or anodyne for the ailing psyche. It is an opportunity rather, a threshold, a one way night-train journey with no return, into the unknown. There is no 'good news' here. Only the revealed hard truth that Western civilization has been assiduously burying under layer upon layer of distracted thinking and aimless faustian hand wringing, for year after year, and for a very, very long time. There is only one direction left, and that is down. Towards the end of the book he reveals that the name 'Catafalque', came to him quite suddenly in a dream. 'Catafalque' it turns out, is the name for an ornately carved structure upon which a casket or body of the recently deceased is made to rest during a funeral service. Containing the Greek preposition (κατα-) as in ‘katabasis’. It is literally, a 'structure' for leading 'down'—and it will, it absolutely will, if you allow it.
Over the last year or so I read broadly and piratically, following the thread of a tradition that led back to the ancient world. I read Joseph Campbell who drew the threads of myth together. I read James Hillman, that rogue student of Jung's who often implored: "Study the Greeks." I read T.S. Eliot, whose Wasteland poem, exhorts the 'hypocrite lecteur' to repair their modern understanding which is but 'a heap of broken images'. I read Spengler and Sophocles. Homer and old Celtic myths. At some point along this tightrope walk I stumbled upon the work of Peter Kingsley. What initially struck me about Kingsley is his singularly refreshing quality of being so absolutely clear. When Kingsley speaks, as when he writes, he does so from a position of authority that is based not only in extensive and rigorous scholarship, but is also rooted in experience. For my own part, having emerged recently from the halls of literary academia, which is defined in large part by the speculative and decentralized associative hugger-mugger of postmodern 'thinking', Kingsley's work rang out over that intellectual wasteland like the clear toned cry of a bell.
Catafalque is a cry in the wilderness. It is a work of dedicated and tireless scholarship that include hundreds of pages of footnotes—which Kingsley nevertheless wryly refers to as: "grotesque monuments to a culture that abandoned itself."—a dig at the habitual academic ritual of displaying ‘proof’. Yes, this is a work magic, of paradox, and trickery, at once fecund and magisterial, it flows from the blinding dark twilight world between nightmare and waking, between reason and madness, between destiny and enthrallment. It is an idea whose time has not only come, but long since passed. It is an exegetic epistolary from the otherworld.
Kingsley's previous works also deal with the thousands of years long tradition of seers and mystics, and their cultivation and transmission of a now mostly hidden, but not lost, art of dreams and of journeying, of laying down in holy places and handing fate over to the Gods.
Those who are familiar with his work need no confirmation of its quality from me, but for those who are coming to it for the first time, be warned—this is no pleasant distraction or anodyne for the ailing psyche. It is an opportunity rather, a threshold, a one way night-train journey with no return, into the unknown. There is no 'good news' here. Only the revealed hard truth that Western civilization has been assiduously burying under layer upon layer of distracted thinking and aimless faustian hand wringing, for year after year, and for a very, very long time. There is only one direction left, and that is down. Towards the end of the book he reveals that the name 'Catafalque', came to him quite suddenly in a dream. 'Catafalque' it turns out, is the name for an ornately carved structure upon which a casket or body of the recently deceased is made to rest during a funeral service. Containing the Greek preposition (κατα-) as in ‘katabasis’. It is literally, a 'structure' for leading 'down'—and it will, it absolutely will, if you allow it.
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January 8, 2019Catafalque is a brilliant piece of writing about things that matter from the perspective of eternity – why we live and what it all means. I could heap superlatives upon it, tell you that it helped me understand my life’s journey and be done, but I owe you, my fellow reader more. This book is ostensibly about the real Carl Jung and what insights are to be mined from his voluminous writings after a professional life spent looking deeply into the human psyche, but it is also the distillation of much more and ties into the author’s other works. Kingsley's writing contains insights that are original enough, you'll need to take it slowly and return to certain passages. He uses language well and does not shy away from the difficult conundrums, which anybody's life presents. His insights are moreover comprehensible to a Native American medicine-man, or an illiterate village herbalist— to people whose readings are mostly from the stars, tree-rings, geology and weather patterns — gleaning meaning from the portents nearby and accessible to anybody who will suspend his egoic predilections long enough to quite simply pay attention to what feels right at the deepest of human levels. This is the real stuff about why our lives matter and why we are here — right as rain.
Kingsley's writings take us back into the mists of time and through history to our cultural origins, which he documents exceedingly well. His scholastic acumen is formidable, but this is also friendly, accessible scholarship whose intent is not to obfuscate or intimidate. You won't find any patronizing shortcuts and easy soporifics — promising money, vibrant health, salvation, longevity, love or any of those will-o-the-wisps the desperate tend to grasp at. We are mortal. We suffer. But that's not the whole story, making it all the more precious and indeed meaningful.
Kingsley's books include a wealth of author’s notes and bibliographic references. They can be dense, but he doesn’t use his indices and footnotes as bludgeons or to merely prove his credentials. They are an ongoing means of giving us access points to take one’s reading deeper and thus they are eminently worthwhile.
Catafalque has had the effect upon me to return to Kingsley’s earlier books in order to deepen the whole picture of what he is telling us about the perennial philosophy, about man and nature upon this green earth and what our ancestors knew that is still remembered and to be gleaned from the scattered remnants to be found in the many wisdom teachings worldwide. In this he is very much like Jung or Campbell and many others who mine the past for continuity and where today’s attitudes and beliefs have their origins. He does us a great service by showing how much of the perennial philosophy is still to be discerned within our own western traditions and not just in some inaccessible corner of the world barely surviving in nearly extinct tribal cultures. The signs are scattered far and wide and his writings, whether it is treating Jung or Reality or a Mongolian/Avar elder walking about ancient Greece, are all about showing us where the keys to the kingdom may be found. He has spent a lifetime as an independent and discerning scholar getting at truths that are not necessarily mainstream, but which also do not disregard prior scholars and writers. He is getting at the truths that undergird everything that is. He wants us to get it and presents it in ways which communicate that and which are also profoundly persuasive.
Ladislav R. Hanka
March 14, 2019
Real experience
Peter Kingsley’s voice is unfailing as he tells the remarkable truth about the world we live in and the reality behind it. He leaves us no way to escape, if we dare to listen to him and can stop the voice of the ego at least for a while. Peter Kingsley is one who knows, and what he has written leaves its trace.
Over the years, Jung’s books have opened the door for me to the world of the soul and the divine. And I still remember very well the first time I held Peter Kingsley’s book, "Ancient Philosophy Mystery and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition", in my hand. For years I had been searching, besides the books of Jung, for more pieces of truth to navigate through. Now I had found what I had been searching for: a voice I knew I could trust.
With "Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic", a book by an academic who clearly had been initiated into the mystery and magic he was writing about, I sensed I was on safe ground. No “new age” and no hocus pocus, but real things about our western world’s ancient sources.
For 10 years since then I have been reading and listening to Peter Kingsley and realizing that the ground, still just as reliable as then, is nowhere near as safe as I had thought. He doesn’t only write about our history: he writes about our lives, my life. He ploughs and sows seeds. And he turns everything I had thought was real upside down.
It felt like a small revelation to see that his new book was about Carl Jung. One of my teachers writing about the other: what could be better? But, at first, the title scared me. I know that Peter Kingsley’s books are strong medicine, that he somehow always hits the mark, and I wondered where Catafalque would take us. It took a couple of days before I could welcome it into my home and my life. Now I love the volumes: wise as everything he has written, strong but needing care. Sometimes, when reading Catafalque, I sense a strong vibration and get a feeling of being read while I am reading.
To read about Jung in this way, to meet the true Jung, was a kind of relief. But to realize that the worst enemies of the essence of his work were not his obvious enemies but his followers, to read about what has been done and still is being done: that really shakes the ground. Wasn’t it enough what Plato and Aristotle did to their ancestors thousands of years ago? Wasn’t it enough what has been done to Christ? To the gnostic teachings?
With Jung and his followers, everything about this came very close. Right into our time, right into us. Right in my own existence. I realized how easy it is to slip and fall. Not to stand up for what’s needed … to make compromises … in my daily life … To let the ego take over even when the intention is the exact opposite. To slip off course, drift away, find excuses.
What more to say? The way, if there is one, goes right through me and through us all. To read Catafalque, really read it and be with it this first time, has taken me four months. And that’s only the beginning. Really to read it is to taste true experience, true existence. This book "Catafalque: Carl Jung and The End of Humanity" has come into my home and life and will stay. And I will do my best to care for it.
Agneta Klingberg
Peter Kingsley’s voice is unfailing as he tells the remarkable truth about the world we live in and the reality behind it. He leaves us no way to escape, if we dare to listen to him and can stop the voice of the ego at least for a while. Peter Kingsley is one who knows, and what he has written leaves its trace.
Over the years, Jung’s books have opened the door for me to the world of the soul and the divine. And I still remember very well the first time I held Peter Kingsley’s book, "Ancient Philosophy Mystery and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition", in my hand. For years I had been searching, besides the books of Jung, for more pieces of truth to navigate through. Now I had found what I had been searching for: a voice I knew I could trust.
With "Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic", a book by an academic who clearly had been initiated into the mystery and magic he was writing about, I sensed I was on safe ground. No “new age” and no hocus pocus, but real things about our western world’s ancient sources.
For 10 years since then I have been reading and listening to Peter Kingsley and realizing that the ground, still just as reliable as then, is nowhere near as safe as I had thought. He doesn’t only write about our history: he writes about our lives, my life. He ploughs and sows seeds. And he turns everything I had thought was real upside down.
It felt like a small revelation to see that his new book was about Carl Jung. One of my teachers writing about the other: what could be better? But, at first, the title scared me. I know that Peter Kingsley’s books are strong medicine, that he somehow always hits the mark, and I wondered where Catafalque would take us. It took a couple of days before I could welcome it into my home and my life. Now I love the volumes: wise as everything he has written, strong but needing care. Sometimes, when reading Catafalque, I sense a strong vibration and get a feeling of being read while I am reading.
To read about Jung in this way, to meet the true Jung, was a kind of relief. But to realize that the worst enemies of the essence of his work were not his obvious enemies but his followers, to read about what has been done and still is being done: that really shakes the ground. Wasn’t it enough what Plato and Aristotle did to their ancestors thousands of years ago? Wasn’t it enough what has been done to Christ? To the gnostic teachings?
With Jung and his followers, everything about this came very close. Right into our time, right into us. Right in my own existence. I realized how easy it is to slip and fall. Not to stand up for what’s needed … to make compromises … in my daily life … To let the ego take over even when the intention is the exact opposite. To slip off course, drift away, find excuses.
What more to say? The way, if there is one, goes right through me and through us all. To read Catafalque, really read it and be with it this first time, has taken me four months. And that’s only the beginning. Really to read it is to taste true experience, true existence. This book "Catafalque: Carl Jung and The End of Humanity" has come into my home and life and will stay. And I will do my best to care for it.
Agneta Klingberg
January 7, 2019
Catafalque is raw, ruthless, daring, refreshing and hopeful in ways critical to a world spinning fast in madness.
I’ve written few book reviews, and never before for a book I haven’t finished. I was compelled to for this one, if for no other reason than to encourage others to avail themselves quickly of the rare opportunity this book is. The fact that I‘m only three quarters through after starting it two months ago is testimony to the depth of the material in these two volumes and to what a reader will encounter in pages so evocative and moving that it is essential to digest in small amounts to receive the greatest benefit.
I’m certain when I reach the end I will return to the beginning for further reads.
KIngsley’s exploration of Jung and his work, as well as what lies at the root of our forgotten western mystic origins, is clearly the product of an author who takes his research and related deep well of personal experience seriously. This book isn’t for everybody. It IS for those who are ready for a perspective that will topple much or perhaps all of what we’ve come to rely on with certainty in our modern world.
Catafalque, by literal definition and perhaps by inference in Kingsley choosing this title, is what supports death, returning us back home. Don’t let this chance for reunion pass you by.
I’ve written few book reviews, and never before for a book I haven’t finished. I was compelled to for this one, if for no other reason than to encourage others to avail themselves quickly of the rare opportunity this book is. The fact that I‘m only three quarters through after starting it two months ago is testimony to the depth of the material in these two volumes and to what a reader will encounter in pages so evocative and moving that it is essential to digest in small amounts to receive the greatest benefit.
I’m certain when I reach the end I will return to the beginning for further reads.
KIngsley’s exploration of Jung and his work, as well as what lies at the root of our forgotten western mystic origins, is clearly the product of an author who takes his research and related deep well of personal experience seriously. This book isn’t for everybody. It IS for those who are ready for a perspective that will topple much or perhaps all of what we’ve come to rely on with certainty in our modern world.
Catafalque, by literal definition and perhaps by inference in Kingsley choosing this title, is what supports death, returning us back home. Don’t let this chance for reunion pass you by.
January 29, 2020
I was blessed to encounter this magnanimous book through the university library of Rice University in Houston, Texas, through inter-library loan at Texas A&M University- Corpus Christi, at which I am employed. I must say that given a certain perspective, this book can seem a revelation, as key to what might be secondary revelation as in Jung's Red Book. Personal biography like Memories, Dreams, and Reflections also sheds similar light to both of them, but with much more concision and brevity. If you as thinker are one to scoff existentially at the mystical accounts of Jung, or William Blake, or anyone erring on the side of "woo woo"- this information will be hyper-woo. To any other (open to what these authors are saying) both of these, Catafalque and the Red Book, are certainly books to cling to and reread with scrutiny. These are essential for the knowledge/wisdom base of the future human spirit.
January 2, 2019
Catafalque is a biography where Peter Kingsley offers a view of Carl Jung as a mystic and prophet. Kingsley is a pleasure to read. His writing is like music, but after a couple of hundred pages I got tired of the single tune. Catafalque is a meticulous work about Jung, and as such it's impressive. It's also a book about Kingsley himself and his relation with Jung. Peter Kingsley writes that Jungians didn't understand Jung. Kingsley certainly provides an additional perspective.
March 5, 2020
If you decide to attempt Peter Kingsley's Catafalque Carl Jung and the End of Humanity be sure to clear your schedule and immerse yourself completely. Reading Catafalque is an initiatory experience which will require your complete attention. By the way, the second volume has wonderful glosses and flights of imagination which are not always tightly connected to the text of the first volume.
Although I have read most of Jung's oeuvre, I am not a Jungian. Still, I still found a lot to study and appreciate within Kingsley's explication. His exploration of the deep messages and symbolism within Jung's Red Book and other writings was invaluable. It is liberating to see Jung's thinking set free from apologists such as his secretary, Aniela Jaffé.
The title of the book itself, Catafalque came to Kingsley in a dream which he interprets with humor and irony. He councils us not to take ourselves too seriously and further that we should be aware that much of the somber notes, especially found within the second volume should be read as, "The enormous notes [which] are a joke, grotesque monuments to a culture that abandoned itself.
Although I have read most of Jung's oeuvre, I am not a Jungian. Still, I still found a lot to study and appreciate within Kingsley's explication. His exploration of the deep messages and symbolism within Jung's Red Book and other writings was invaluable. It is liberating to see Jung's thinking set free from apologists such as his secretary, Aniela Jaffé.
The title of the book itself, Catafalque came to Kingsley in a dream which he interprets with humor and irony. He councils us not to take ourselves too seriously and further that we should be aware that much of the somber notes, especially found within the second volume should be read as, "The enormous notes [which] are a joke, grotesque monuments to a culture that abandoned itself.
February 9, 2020
Reading these two volumes has been an extraordinary, life-changing experience. I have never read anything to compare with them in depth, power and meaning. Highly recommended if you want to understand yourself and the world we find ourselves living in today
February 2, 2020
PETER KINGSLEY Blind Prophet and Unconscious Platonist
Far from taking us back to an ancient pre-Socratic wisdom that precedes and surpasses (and thus revokes) the entire intellectual development of Western Thought from Plato onwards, Kingsley’s basic terminology is "Platonic" in the stereotypical sense of that term: dualism, absolute reality, our world is the cavern of illusions: https://www.academia.edu/41675454/Rev...
"Look at his language" as Kingsley is fond of saying of Jung. Kingsley’s own language is infused with Platonic dualisms.
Far from thinking outside Reason’s categories, Peter Kingsley has some very simplistic categories in place, even if he doesn’t give a damn about being "reasonable". He repeats the same old dualisms of Western Reason. Thus Kingsley is blind to the other thinkers around him who go further outside these categories than him: Derrida, Deleuze, Feyerabend, Hillman, Laruelle, Latour, Badiou.
Philosophy is not "Reason" in Kingsley's sense. These are not "reasonable" philosophers.
Those who do not notice this blind spot in Kingsley's views do not disagree with my analysis, they are merely repeating Kingsley’s own self-publicity, his own opinion of himself. Not everyone is called to disagree, to be a "contrary". Kingsley claims he is a contrary, a disagree-er. I situate him amongst his fellow disagree-ers.
Kingsley should read Karl Popper’s "Back to the Pre-Socratics". The West is based on disagreeing. Kingsley should disagree with someone interesting instead of with silly scientific Jungians. That battle is too easy, and I fully agree with him there. If he disagreed with Hillman, i.e. critically discussed his actual ideas, rather than just condemning him outright as "ungrounded" and trivialising", we might get a dialogue that deepens our understanding rather than polarising it.
The problem is that when Kingsley comes across someone more interesting than himself, a thinker not in the mould of Reason (like Nietzsche, Heidegger, Hillman), his critical arms fail him and he resorts to truncated quotations, trivialisation, and blatant misrepresentation.
So much for being "beyond" the categories.
My biggest problem with Kingsley lies in the opposition he establishes between reading and "direct experience". Kingsley is quite a scholar, and has spent far more time reading in libraries and in his study than "incubating". If by now he is not incubating while he is reading he is doing both wrong.
Another concern is the epistemological slippage in his writing, as Kingsley slides very easily from "Jung says it is so" to "it is so". He systematically seeks to conflate the subject of his discourse, the prophetic subject, with the meta-subject of his language of thought, to immunise his ideas from criticism. "Platonism" is his meta-language. This is what blinds him.
The epistemological slippage that Kingsley practices leads to the conflation of the subject of the act of enunciation with the subject of the enunciated content. This conflation of subjects creates the appearance of presenting an unmediated content, that is somehow self-enunciating and so self-validating (if you conflate yourself with the "right" subjects). The unmediated content is presented as raw experience. This form of naive empiricism becomes indistinguishable from solipsism.
Kingsley's CATAFALQUE should have been a good book, but his refusal of dialogue has stunted his thought it. Original scholarship, personal experience, and a contrary attitude can get you pretty far, but they are not enough, they are not proof. Instead of freeing your spirit and opening you to the world, they can hold you captive you inside a self-validating solipsistic circle.
Far from taking us back to an ancient pre-Socratic wisdom that precedes and surpasses (and thus revokes) the entire intellectual development of Western Thought from Plato onwards, Kingsley’s basic terminology is "Platonic" in the stereotypical sense of that term: dualism, absolute reality, our world is the cavern of illusions: https://www.academia.edu/41675454/Rev...
"Look at his language" as Kingsley is fond of saying of Jung. Kingsley’s own language is infused with Platonic dualisms.
Far from thinking outside Reason’s categories, Peter Kingsley has some very simplistic categories in place, even if he doesn’t give a damn about being "reasonable". He repeats the same old dualisms of Western Reason. Thus Kingsley is blind to the other thinkers around him who go further outside these categories than him: Derrida, Deleuze, Feyerabend, Hillman, Laruelle, Latour, Badiou.
Philosophy is not "Reason" in Kingsley's sense. These are not "reasonable" philosophers.
Those who do not notice this blind spot in Kingsley's views do not disagree with my analysis, they are merely repeating Kingsley’s own self-publicity, his own opinion of himself. Not everyone is called to disagree, to be a "contrary". Kingsley claims he is a contrary, a disagree-er. I situate him amongst his fellow disagree-ers.
Kingsley should read Karl Popper’s "Back to the Pre-Socratics". The West is based on disagreeing. Kingsley should disagree with someone interesting instead of with silly scientific Jungians. That battle is too easy, and I fully agree with him there. If he disagreed with Hillman, i.e. critically discussed his actual ideas, rather than just condemning him outright as "ungrounded" and trivialising", we might get a dialogue that deepens our understanding rather than polarising it.
The problem is that when Kingsley comes across someone more interesting than himself, a thinker not in the mould of Reason (like Nietzsche, Heidegger, Hillman), his critical arms fail him and he resorts to truncated quotations, trivialisation, and blatant misrepresentation.
So much for being "beyond" the categories.
My biggest problem with Kingsley lies in the opposition he establishes between reading and "direct experience". Kingsley is quite a scholar, and has spent far more time reading in libraries and in his study than "incubating". If by now he is not incubating while he is reading he is doing both wrong.
Another concern is the epistemological slippage in his writing, as Kingsley slides very easily from "Jung says it is so" to "it is so". He systematically seeks to conflate the subject of his discourse, the prophetic subject, with the meta-subject of his language of thought, to immunise his ideas from criticism. "Platonism" is his meta-language. This is what blinds him.
The epistemological slippage that Kingsley practices leads to the conflation of the subject of the act of enunciation with the subject of the enunciated content. This conflation of subjects creates the appearance of presenting an unmediated content, that is somehow self-enunciating and so self-validating (if you conflate yourself with the "right" subjects). The unmediated content is presented as raw experience. This form of naive empiricism becomes indistinguishable from solipsism.
Kingsley's CATAFALQUE should have been a good book, but his refusal of dialogue has stunted his thought it. Original scholarship, personal experience, and a contrary attitude can get you pretty far, but they are not enough, they are not proof. Instead of freeing your spirit and opening you to the world, they can hold you captive you inside a self-validating solipsistic circle.
March 28, 2021
I'm still reading this, it's my bedside book, I think I'll be reading it forever and there's a second part too. Key words: ancestors, sacred, Jung. It's about the seething heart of Jung's thinking, the outrage he feels but tries to shield, that the ancestors are being ignored, that we've forgotten how we're connected to the sacred, that we've lost our way in the tapestry of life. And his big fear - that humanity is just a mis-step, an aberration of nature, not the proper expression of it - at least the way we're doing it is wrong, so wrong, so malevolent, evil, ruinous, a long suicide note to beauty full of self-pity and neurosis at the expense of simplicity and humility. Every time I read even a couple of pages I get all these dreams, the illuminating sort that have you sit up with a start at the break of day, a traveller of lost worlds and timeless intrigues that thread through the fabric of life like clues, like siren calls, like alarm bells and warning signs, and you try and remember what you saw, and not just what you saw but what it meant, until you mind is transported and the details of your day-to-day life become minor hurdles as you navigate this raging torrent of ideas and possibilities. Recommended.
December 27, 2020
It’s hard to know who this book is for, how to speak about it, without binding it to well-intentioned yet misleading statements.
In broad strokes, this is a book about Jung and the ways his devotees, family, et al, refused to hear what he said and accept who he truly was. To do so would shatter them, but to be shattered in such a way would lead to something truly real. Much realer than where we find ourselves in now, amidst coronavirus, amidst fake news, amidst the vacuity that comprises most of social media, amidst the misty-eyed spiritual types who swear that a global awakening is just around the corner and THAT being what will save our planet.
This is a book that is also about Henry Corbin, another figure whose teacher, like Jung and Kingsley himself, gripped him by the throat from the Imaginal realm and never let go. Not imaginary, mind you, but from the depths of time from which they can cross in an instant. Dead in a conventional sense, but very much alive.
Kingsley has referred to this book as anti-matter, which means it’ll be vomit-inducing to a great many. He’s polemic, takes no prisoners, and doesn’t hesitate to outright criticize errors in translation or examples of apparent illiteracy that so-called experts don’t realize they have. This may offend the sensibilities of certain readers, but the frankness is not only sobering but refreshingly truthful.
For this reader, this book articulates and resonates with feelings I’ve had for years but couldn’t put to words while embarking on the spiritual life, the mystical path, etc. And validates a solemn feeling.
Regardless of what I write here, you’ll know whether or not this is something for you. This is not a matter of convincing but, like the title articulates, a moment to honor that which has passed away yet few are willing to acknowledge.
Thank you, Peter.
In broad strokes, this is a book about Jung and the ways his devotees, family, et al, refused to hear what he said and accept who he truly was. To do so would shatter them, but to be shattered in such a way would lead to something truly real. Much realer than where we find ourselves in now, amidst coronavirus, amidst fake news, amidst the vacuity that comprises most of social media, amidst the misty-eyed spiritual types who swear that a global awakening is just around the corner and THAT being what will save our planet.
This is a book that is also about Henry Corbin, another figure whose teacher, like Jung and Kingsley himself, gripped him by the throat from the Imaginal realm and never let go. Not imaginary, mind you, but from the depths of time from which they can cross in an instant. Dead in a conventional sense, but very much alive.
Kingsley has referred to this book as anti-matter, which means it’ll be vomit-inducing to a great many. He’s polemic, takes no prisoners, and doesn’t hesitate to outright criticize errors in translation or examples of apparent illiteracy that so-called experts don’t realize they have. This may offend the sensibilities of certain readers, but the frankness is not only sobering but refreshingly truthful.
For this reader, this book articulates and resonates with feelings I’ve had for years but couldn’t put to words while embarking on the spiritual life, the mystical path, etc. And validates a solemn feeling.
Regardless of what I write here, you’ll know whether or not this is something for you. This is not a matter of convincing but, like the title articulates, a moment to honor that which has passed away yet few are willing to acknowledge.
Thank you, Peter.
May 5, 2020
'Who am I?'
Ask this seriously and 'Catafalque' may assist you in discovering just what such a simple question requires. This is not a book for the casual reader (although it does no harm to read it without preconceptions), nor is it one to approach without due consideration. Look at the peer reviews available elsewhere: you will find some very highly educated and respected academics, philosophers, psychologists, therapists etc. all treating this work as revelatory to them at the deepest levels. There are also those who simply don't 'get' it, that's okay too because 'Catafalque' grabs readers by their respective genitalia and in it they recognise something otherwise inexpressible.
There are no spoilers in this review and I suppose this isn't written in that manner anyway. Better to ask --
Have you ever fantasied about finding 'that' book in a dusty library or archetypal antiquarian bookstore? If so, Kingsley will delight, frighten and challenge you. It is REAL, even if its message takes years to work its way into the depths of your being. It gives what you offer in terms of understanding, as all the best sufi, hermetic or alchemical texts are said to. One reading, unless uncommonly fortunate, will never do -- this is a book that will stay with you, haunt you, goad you until you act on what turns out to be an irrationally simple message: look within.
Then the true work begins.
Ask this seriously and 'Catafalque' may assist you in discovering just what such a simple question requires. This is not a book for the casual reader (although it does no harm to read it without preconceptions), nor is it one to approach without due consideration. Look at the peer reviews available elsewhere: you will find some very highly educated and respected academics, philosophers, psychologists, therapists etc. all treating this work as revelatory to them at the deepest levels. There are also those who simply don't 'get' it, that's okay too because 'Catafalque' grabs readers by their respective genitalia and in it they recognise something otherwise inexpressible.
There are no spoilers in this review and I suppose this isn't written in that manner anyway. Better to ask --
Have you ever fantasied about finding 'that' book in a dusty library or archetypal antiquarian bookstore? If so, Kingsley will delight, frighten and challenge you. It is REAL, even if its message takes years to work its way into the depths of your being. It gives what you offer in terms of understanding, as all the best sufi, hermetic or alchemical texts are said to. One reading, unless uncommonly fortunate, will never do -- this is a book that will stay with you, haunt you, goad you until you act on what turns out to be an irrationally simple message: look within.
Then the true work begins.
Read
June 11, 2020“(It’s) the time to turn around and face our ancestors, to dance for the dead.” If you want to know why we (that is ’we’ in the West, in particular) should do such a thing, read this book.
If you have heard about Carl G. Jung, but have not reached any conclusions regarding him, read this book.
If you are "a Jungian,” read this book at your peril, for Jung often emphasized that he was not “a Jungian.”
If you feel that “the West,” or humanity in general, took a wrong turn somewhere, read this book.
If you feel you are carrying too many ideas around about the nature of things, read this book to allow some of them to drift away so you can identify others to be strengthened.
If you feel you carry some wisdom that others don’t hear or understand, you will be sympathetic to the Carl Gustav Jung you will find in presented to us in this book.
It’s important.
Ron Pavellas
Stockholm, Sweden
If you have heard about Carl G. Jung, but have not reached any conclusions regarding him, read this book.
If you are "a Jungian,” read this book at your peril, for Jung often emphasized that he was not “a Jungian.”
If you feel that “the West,” or humanity in general, took a wrong turn somewhere, read this book.
If you feel you are carrying too many ideas around about the nature of things, read this book to allow some of them to drift away so you can identify others to be strengthened.
If you feel you carry some wisdom that others don’t hear or understand, you will be sympathetic to the Carl Gustav Jung you will find in presented to us in this book.
It’s important.
Ron Pavellas
Stockholm, Sweden
January 7, 2020
Brilliant book about prophets and saviors and how none of them were able to save our culture, that gave up it's connection to the sacred. Carl Jung is the latest in a line of would be saviors, who nevertheless is seeding a rebirth of a better culture, after this one is swept away though. Sad, profound, and needed book. There is a relief that is felt when a deep splinter is pulled out, and the ache has a different quality to it, than when the splinter was still there. This book has that quality, it helps remove the splinter from your mind, and leaves the ache that portends possible healing.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 27, 2020
LIFE CHANGING!
May 27, 2020
An absolute masterpiece. If there's a "most important book I've read in years" kinda cliche that actually exists? This is it.
April 5, 2021
One of the most remarkable books on Carl Jung I've ever read. Gone are the accretions of almost a century of misinterpretation. Here is Jung, raw, alive and potent. Can't recommend this book enough.
December 11, 2023
Before discussing civilization, Kingsley spent the first part of the book outlining the downplaying of Jung’s mystical and spiritual side. This was partially done by Jung who viewed himself as a scientist, but has been heavily influenced by his subsequent followers. Kingsley points out differences in translation and discrepancies between unpublished and published texts, showing that Jung’s spiritual focus was diminished. Kingsley says Jung was a prophet, a messenger from the mystical unconscious to give humanity a message, in the same line as any Old Testament prophet was.
A “catafalque” is a platform used for a corpse during a funeral. According to Kingsley, what has died? Our civilization. Not going to die or might die. It is already dead and Jung already told us but nobody would listen. Kingsley says Western civilization is dead and we should mourn for it and then build anew.
Kinglsey also harshly attacks some of Jung’s followers by name, as purposefully misunderstanding Jung’s message. He paints Jung as having a disdain for his students, feeling an isolation that nobody understood him.
I agree with Kingsley in that Jung was not the rational scientist some paint him to be. However, it felt like Kingsley had a bone to pick with Jungians in general and this was more of a cathartic experience for him. Basic gist is: he’s the only one who really knows Jung, Jung was a prophet, Jung says stuff is going to get bad very soon.
A “catafalque” is a platform used for a corpse during a funeral. According to Kingsley, what has died? Our civilization. Not going to die or might die. It is already dead and Jung already told us but nobody would listen. Kingsley says Western civilization is dead and we should mourn for it and then build anew.
Kinglsey also harshly attacks some of Jung’s followers by name, as purposefully misunderstanding Jung’s message. He paints Jung as having a disdain for his students, feeling an isolation that nobody understood him.
I agree with Kingsley in that Jung was not the rational scientist some paint him to be. However, it felt like Kingsley had a bone to pick with Jungians in general and this was more of a cathartic experience for him. Basic gist is: he’s the only one who really knows Jung, Jung was a prophet, Jung says stuff is going to get bad very soon.
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