The first day with the anchorite centres on language, scripture and relearning. Ammonius tells Jung that the same passage can disclose new meaning when read repeatedly, and that a person may need to loosen what he already knows before he can approach life again. By nightfall, the anchorite appears to be a spiritual teacher who has moved beyond the closed system of his former intellectual life.
Chapter V of Liber Secundus, Dies II or “Day Two”, immediately tests how far that wisdom extends. Before dawn, Jung dreams of four white horses with golden wings drawing the chariot of Helios into the sky. On waking, he cannot find the morning prayer that modernity has lost. In the desert he must discover afresh how to respond to the sun, a scarab, the stones and the earth. Later, when he resumes his conversation with Ammonius, he discovers that the anchorite can affirm a common essence beneath religions and search the Gospels for meanings still to come, yet cannot tolerate the return of an ancient pagan image within his own consciousness. When the name Helios slips from his mouth, he recoils and identifies Jung as Satan.
The chapter is therefore not a simple continuation of the previous one. It reverses it. The question is no longer merely whether language can carry more than one meaning, but whether a person can allow that openness to touch the faith by which he defines himself. Ammonius can accept multiplicity as a principle of interpretation while refusing to be altered by it. Jung does not thereby become an uncomplicated victor. His own response to the sun, the scarab and the earth approaches ecstasy, and he repeatedly recognises his need for a human hand to hold him to the ground.
At its centre, Dies II concerns the relations between light and darkness, Christianity and ancient religion, inward life and the external world, spiritual height and the earth. It does not ask the reader to select the correct deity from Christ and Helios. It shows instead how a spiritual order that permits only light and excludes darkness, that accepts only authorised names and refuses the return of older forms of life, may finally be broken open by what it has denied.
1． Place in the Book: Day Two Tests What Day One Taught
Dies II is the fifth chapter of Liber Secundus and follows directly from the Dies I included in the title of “The Anchorite”. The first day is dominated by conversation. Jung follows footprints through the desert, finds Ammonius and listens to him discuss the Gospel of John, Philo, Logos, multiple meanings and the painful task of relearning. The second day begins with a dream and moves through bodily responses to sunrise and the desert before the relationship between the two men breaks apart.
The sequence matters because ideas spoken on the first day are subjected to experience on the second. Ammonius claims that words cannot be exhausted by one fixed meaning. Yet when Helios unexpectedly enters his own speech, he instantly classifies the name as pagan and the man who has evoked it as Satan. Abstract openness can disappear as soon as a concrete experience threatens the boundary of identity.
Jung undergoes a related test. On the first day he is impressed by the anchorite; on the following morning he quickly recovers his habit of criticism and superiority. He moves between wonder at the living desert and mockery of mythology as a fantasy humanity has supposedly outgrown. His attitude alternates between participation and withdrawal, reverence and irony. One night of instruction has not completed his relearning.
Day Two therefore does not add a further body of doctrine to Day One. It exposes doctrine to an experience it cannot control. This is a recurring movement in The Red Book. An inner figure first provides a necessary correction, then reveals the limits of that correction. Wisdom that cannot itself receive the next correction immediately becomes another enclosure.
2． Four White Horses and the Solar Chariot: An Ancient Image Regains Its Power
The chapter opens as Jung wakes from an intense dawn dream. Four white horses with golden wings draw the chariot of Helios, whose mane blazes like fire. As the sun ascends, black serpents in the gorge disappear into their holes. Jung kneels and asks for light, joining the solar image to the language of binding, crucifixion and revival.
The dream should first be allowed to remain a dream. The four horses need not immediately be equated with the four psychological functions of Jung’s later theory, and the black serpents need not at once be reduced to “the shadow”. At the level of the original experience, Jung encounters a composite image in which a Greek sun god, Christian language of suffering and resurrection, serpents, ascending light and the bodily gesture of kneeling appear together. It does not obey a single religious classification.
The dream also answers Ammonius’s reminder from the previous evening that Jung should pray when the sun rises. Yet Jung’s psyche does not pray in the Christian form intended by the anchorite. Prayer emerges through an older solar god while still bearing the imprint of Christianity. Jung has not consciously designed a synthesis of religions; synthesis has already taken place in the dream.
This is precisely what Ammonius later cannot bear. He can imagine that a later religion discloses the incomplete meaning of an earlier one, but the relation shown by the dream is not a one-way replacement of paganism by Christianity. Helios has not disappeared into Christ, while the Christian images of crucifixion and resurrection do not simply dissolve back into Greek myth. Both traditions remain active within one living image.
3． The Prayer Modernity Has Lost: The Need Remains After the Words Disappear
After waking, Jung remembers that he should say a morning prayer, only to discover that no prayer is available to him. He has not decided that prayer is unnecessary. He does not know whom to address or what language he can honestly use. Ammonius belongs to a world in which the form of prayer remains intact; Jung comes from the twentieth century, where inherited religious speech has lost its unconditional authority and no adequate new speech has taken its place.
Jung describes this modern condition as a kind of nakedness and poverty. Modern people may possess more information, more exact science and a more intricate urban life, while losing a gesture by which they place themselves within a larger order. The problem is not necessarily the disappearance of ultimate need. It is the failure of traditional forms to carry that need naturally.
The desert magnifies the absence. In a city, work, news, entertainment and social activity can fill the day before a person notices that prayer has vanished. The desert removes almost every distraction and turns sunrise into an unavoidable event. Confronted by it, Jung discovers that modern consciousness can explain the sun but no longer knows how to answer it.
The Red Book does not therefore instruct the modern reader simply to restore an old formula. A prayer repeated after its language has died does not become alive merely because it is ancient. Yet a life with no form in which awe, dependence and poverty can be expressed also leaves an important range of experience without a place.
4． The Scarab, the Stones, and the Earth Mother: Myth Has Left Modern Self-Understanding, Not Human Experience
In the dry riverbed Jung sees a small beetle rolling a ball. He knows that ancient Egyptians associated the scarab with the movement of the sun, becoming and renewal, and he addresses it with a mixture of seriousness and astonishment. Soon the red stones seem to preserve the heat of countless former suns. The sand once lay beneath primordial seas, and the remote animal ancestors of humanity rested upon the earth. Jung presses himself against the warm stone and addresses it as an ancient mother.
This is not a prepared lesson in comparative mythology. Jung enters the mythical response and then withdraws, asking what he is saying. Modern scepticism remains present; prayer to a beetle or a stone appears absurd to him. Yet the judgement of absurdity does not cancel the experience. Ancient images regain psychological reality precisely within this unstable state of neither literal belief nor easy dismissal.
Three levels should remain distinct. The original text records a sudden animation of natural things in the desert. Jung’s later theory can relate this experience to archetypes, projection, psychic energy and the world soul. Contemporary interpretation may add embodied cognition, environmental effects upon attention, and the role of cultural memory in shaping encounters with animals, sunlight and earth. None of these accounts replaces the primary fact that the face of Jung’s world changed that morning.
To say that myth remains alive is not to reinstate Egyptian cosmology as natural science. Here myth is first a form that organises experience. The scarab remains a beetle, yet it also gathers labour, recurrence, the sun and becoming into one felt configuration. Modern consciousness can reject the literal cosmology without easily eliminating this symbolic power.
5． Jung’s Suspicion of Himself: Superiority Prevents Relearning
While waiting to see Ammonius again, Jung notices that he has resumed criticising the anchorite. He doubts whether this life is anything more than fantasy and wonders how a person could endure the desert for years. Almost at once, he recognises the return of his habitual stance—critical, superior and ready to diminish the other before understanding him.
This self-observation matters. The Red Book does not portray Jung merely as the man who exposes the limitations of everyone he meets. He knows that rational criticism serves not only discrimination but defence. If he can first prove the other ridiculous, he need not permit the other to change him. The relearning described on Day One requires him to suspend that premature verdict.
Suspending criticism does not mean abandoning judgement. Jung later does identify the anchorite’s enclosure and confronts him. The important distinction concerns timing. Judgement should form after an experience has been allowed to unfold, not prevent the experience from taking place. To respect a person, text or tradition is not to agree with everything it contains, but to let it appear in its own form before evaluating it.
The same discipline is needed when reading The Red Book. If the sun, beetle and stones are instantly dismissed as superstition, the experience closes before it can be understood. If every image is accepted as literal cosmic truth, judgement is lost in the opposite direction. Jung’s unstable movement preserves two necessary capacities—to enter an experience and to step back from it.
6． How Ammonius Became a Christian: A New Religion Is Heard Through the Old
When the conversation resumes, Ammonius continues the story of his former life. He had been a successful lecturer who used wit, technical learning and rhetoric to impress his audience. A freed man whom he had known since childhood confronted him with a disturbing observation. Ammonius was not settled within himself; he depended upon his listeners’ approval and was always rushing to acquire more knowledge.
The old man then told him that God had become flesh in his son. Ammonius initially understood every part of this report through Egyptian religious imagery. A virgin birth recalled temple images of a divine mother; a son of God suggested Horus; suffering suggested Seth; death and resurrection on the third day suggested Osiris. He did not hear Christianity from an empty space. He could only approach it through the mythology he already possessed.
What finally took hold of him was the paradox of a human being who was also the Son of God. The phrase continued to echo within him and eventually led him to Christianity. His conversion therefore shows that a new religion does not simply erase an old system and begin from nothing. It enters because it resembles inherited images while introducing a difference those images cannot fully absorb.
This makes his later fear of Helios especially revealing. His Christian faith was originally reached by means of analogies with Osiris, Horus and Seth. Yet when the ancient sun god reappears in his own speech, he treats the return as an absolute threat. He allows the past to lead towards the present but refuses to allow the past to remain alive within it.
7． A Common Essence of Religion and a Direction of History: Openness with a Hierarchy
Ammonius argues that religions do not differ in their innermost essence. He had heard comparable religious ideas from a man who came from near the source of the Nile and knew nothing of the Egyptian gods. This persuaded him that different peoples express a common experience in different languages. Later religions then develop meanings that earlier forms expressed less adequately.
The view is open in one respect. It refuses to classify unfamiliar religions as pure error and looks for continuity beneath formal difference. Yet it preserves a hierarchy. Earlier religions remain incomplete expressions, while Christianity occupies the more developed position. The common essence does not place every form on equal ground; it arranges them along a history directed towards fulfilment.
Jung asks whether Ammonius has discovered the meaning of the Gospel that is still to come. He admits he has not. At times he senses that he needs the stimulation of other people, but he interprets this need as a temptation of Satan. The contradiction is decisive. He knows that meaning continues to develop and that he has not found its next form, yet excludes real others from the process by which meaning could change.
A person who searches for future meaning entirely in solitude can only bring the same self repeatedly to the same text. Without new relationships, interruption or unforeseen life, openness easily becomes circulation within an established structure. Jung’s suggestion that Ammonius return closer to human beings does not simply place society above solitude. It asks how meaning can remain oriented towards the future while refusing every unexpected messenger through whom the future might arrive.
8． The Slip of Helios: The Excluded God Returns from Within Language
Defending his life in the desert, Ammonius praises its sunlight, solitude and the face of the sun visible each day. He then spontaneously speaks the name of the glorious Helios. As soon as he hears himself, he recoils from the pagan word, falls into confusion, identifies Jung as Satan and rises to attack him.
This moment turns the chapter. Jung has not forced Helios upon him by argument. The name has emerged from Ammonius’s own praise. The ancient image he believed superseded remains active in the relation between language, feeling and the physical sun. The more he must preserve an exclusively Christian identity, the more urgently he must locate the disturbing element outside himself.
Jung therefore becomes the devil. From the anchorite’s perspective this is not wholly irrational. Jung has indeed unsettled the boundary of faith and reawakened a layer Ammonius believed he had overcome. Psychologically, however, the accusation also performs a defence. If the temptation comes from an external enemy, Ammonius need not acknowledge that Helios has spoken from within him.
The episode does not prove that Christianity is false and paganism true. Its question is structural. What happens to experiences excluded by a system? Any spiritual tradition that preserves purity only by naming parts of life as the enemy will accumulate an internal tension. The excluded does not necessarily return through the front door. It may emerge from the system’s own speech.
9． Looking at Antiquity from the Twentieth Century: Presence and Historical Distance
When Ammonius lunges, Jung remarks that he is far away in the twentieth century. The scene suddenly reveals two temporal levels. In active imagination Jung has entered an ancient desert and speaks with an early Christian anchorite. At the same time, he remains a modern person with a historical perspective unavailable to the figure he meets.
That distance enables Jung to compare Christ, Helios, Osiris and Horus within a common field. Ammonius lives inside a religious transition and must decide where his faith belongs. Jung lives after many traditions have become historical material and can see relations across them. Yet historical distance may also produce its own superiority, as though the later observer had transcended antiquity simply by possessing more information.
The Red Book does not entirely free Jung from this danger. He sometimes presents himself as capable of carrying contradictions that overwhelm the anchorite. Yet he also admits that modernity has lost prayer and left him spiritually poor and naked. The modern person has comparative religion but may lack a living religious relation; the ancient person has an integrated faith but may be unable to receive experience beyond it.
Neither condition is sufficient. Jung is searching for a form that can retain modern reflection while recovering symbolic life. This would be neither a return to antiquity nor a continuation of detached modern scepticism, but a renewed relation between historical knowledge and inward experience.
10． Darkness Is Not the Enemy of Light: Why Descent Can Approach Illumination
After leaving Ammonius, Jung reflects on darkness and light. The person who comprehends his own darkness, he suggests, comes nearer to light; descent into darkness may become the stairway towards the force of the sun. The movement reverses a common moral image in which light can be reached only by fleeing darkness.
Darkness here is not permission to act destructively, nor a romantic celebration of every impulse. It refers to what consciousness refuses to recognise, cannot understand or has excluded. Ammonius places pagan imagery entirely within darkness, so darkness can return only as Satan and loss of control. Jung attempts to acknowledge such contents as part of his own psychological reality without simply obeying them.
Accepting darkness therefore means abandoning a false innocence, not approving everything found there. A person who insists he contains only light must treat aggression, desire, fear and ancient impulses as contamination brought by other people. Recognising them within makes responsibility possible and allows their energy to be transformed rather than enacted through projection.
Jung also approaches a dangerous limit. The sun and fire lift him towards an almost uncontrollable exaltation, and he asks for a human hand to hold him to the earth. Contact with intense inner energy does not automatically create balance; it can produce inflation. Transformation requires earth, body and relationship, not only a more powerful light.
11． The Secret Life of Things: World Soul Begins as a Change in Experience
Following the solar experience, stones, rivers, plants, animals, wind and stars no longer appear to Jung as wholly silent objects. Human life seems to flow into things, while things reflect inward life back to the person. Later readers often summarise this passage through the idea of anima mundi, the world soul.
The term is useful if the levels remain clear. The text first records a transformation in the appearance of the world. Jung is not proposing at a desk that every material object possesses consciousness, nor is he offering an empirical proof. He describes an experience in which the border between subject and environment becomes permeable and things acquire relation, intention and responsiveness.
Later analytical psychology can approach the event through projection, symbol, archetype and psychic reality. Contemporary readers may connect it with phenomenology, ecological psychology or panpsychism. To say that Jung has established a cosmic ontology here, however, goes beyond the text. Experience can suggest ontology without becoming an ontological demonstration.
The most secure insight is that the world does not enter every consciousness with an identical face. When attention, emotion, bodily environment and symbolic inheritance change, the same stone, animal or sky participates in a different network of meaning. Things are not thereby reduced to private fantasy, but the human world does emerge through relations formed between persons and things.
12． Is Meaning in Things or in Us? Jung Rejects a Static Model of Understanding
Jung concludes that multiple meanings do not sit simultaneously inside scripture or nature like stored objects waiting to be extracted. Meanings appear in succession because the interpreter changes. As a person participates in life, undergoes relationships and passes through time, the face of the world also alters.
This is not the assertion that the external world is entirely created by the subject. Stones, sunlight, texts and other people impose limits and resist arbitrary interpretation. Jung is correcting a different error—the static model in which meaning forms a completed inventory and a neutral subject need only retrieve it accurately.
Ammonius’s predicament becomes clear. He seeks future meaning in the same Gospel while making his own life as changeless as possible. He withdraws from people, reduces events and closes relationships in the hope of studying the object more purely. Yet if new meaning depends partly on transformation in the interpreter, someone who refuses to be altered by life is unlikely to reach it merely by staring longer at the same text.
The claim that the world’s appearance changes with us is therefore not cheap subjectivism. It recognises participation in knowledge. We are not transparent observers outside the world. We enter understanding with history, body, language, desire and relationship, while the object can also correct us. Meaning occurs through this interaction rather than belonging exclusively to either side.
13． Why the Desert Drains the Anchorite: Leaving the World Is Not the Same as Finding Oneself
Jung finally makes a severe judgement upon Ammonius. The anchorite entered the desert to find himself but devoted his attention to the limitless meanings of scripture. He avoided people and the relationships through which he might have changed. The desert, stones, cave and book occupied his inner life until he himself became increasingly empty.
This balances the affirmation of solitude on Day One. Solitude can reduce external noise and allow inward contents to be heard, but it can also become a refined avoidance. The distinction does not lie in whether a person is physically alone. It lies in whether solitude makes him more able to endure actual experience, recognise his contradictions and return to relationship.
Ammonius does not fail because he reads scripture too much. He fails because he continually seeks what he needs within an object. He draws meaning from the text without adequately seeing who reads, why a particular meaning is required, or what the reader has excluded. The richer the text becomes, the more the interpreter may remain unchanged.
This applies to any sustained intellectual life. A person may read extensively, build a large theoretical system and speak constantly of inwardness or subjectivity while still avoiding his own operative structure. Whether knowledge transforms does not depend upon its quantity. It depends upon whether knowledge enters life and allows relationship, body and fact to revise the self.
14． The Greening Tree: Earth and Sun Must Meet Within One Life
At the end of the chapter Jung distinguishes himself from Ammonius. The anchorite has been drained by the desert; Jung says that by accepting darkness he has eaten the earth and drunk the sun, becoming a solitary tree that grows and turns green. The tree is not simply an emblem of spiritual victory. It combines the forces encountered throughout the chapter.
The sun carries light, energy, ascent and spiritual height. The earth carries weight, embodiment, darkness, maternity and finite life. To drink only the sun risks being carried upward by fire until measure is lost. To belong only to the earth risks being emptied into surrounding things without generating one’s own light. The tree roots downward and grows upward, turning sunlight into earthly life.
Jung’s later alchemical studies and theory of the Self would give the tree a more developed symbolic role. Here it should first be read as the condensation of an experience in The Red Book. Jung is not declaring the completion of individuation. He has found an image more capable of carrying the present opposites than either pure illumination or pure withdrawal.
The tree also revises the meaning of solitude. It stands alone but is not sealed away. Its roots enter the earth, its leaves receive the sun, and water, air and season continually pass through it. Genuine individuality is not enclosure. It is the maintenance of a direction of growth within relation.
15． Original Experience, Later Jungian Theory, and Contemporary Interpretation
At the level of original experience, Dies II records a dream, a desert morning, spontaneous prayers to sun and nature, a second conversation with Ammonius, a rupture, and an extended reflection on darkness, meaning and life. This remains the first level of reading and should not be replaced by terminology.
From the standpoint of Jung’s later work, many developing themes are visible—the archetypal continuity among religious images, shadow and projection, the sun as an image of psychic energy, the world soul, the participation of subject and object, and the wholeness suggested by the tree. These connections are real, but they belong to concepts formed later and applied retrospectively to earlier material.
Contemporary interpretation can add the defences activated by threatened religious identity, cognitive dissonance, closed belief systems, environmental effects upon consciousness, and the participation of both subject and object in the formation of meaning. Philosophy may ask whether the chapter tends towards phenomenology, hermeneutics, panpsychism or participatory epistemology.
The three levels can illuminate one another but should not be collapsed. Helios is not a later theoretical category invented by Jung, and Ammonius is not merely a case constructed to demonstrate projection. Respecting the specificity of the experience allows us to see how theory grows from it and to judge what a modern interpretation genuinely explains.
16． Conclusion: An Open Thought Must Permit the Thinker to Change
The power of Dies II lies in its distinction between openness in thought and openness in life. Ammonius accepts multiple meanings, a common essence of religions and future interpretations of scripture. His language is open, but when new meaning enters his own consciousness in the name of Helios, he immediately expels it.
Jung chooses to acknowledge the return. He does not treat the ancient sun god as a faith that must be literally restored, nor as a meaningless survival. He allows the image to remain in relation with Christian language, modern poverty, bodily feeling and the desert. The price is greater uncertainty, together with the need to guard against being lifted by solar power out of ordinary reality.
The chapter is therefore neither a simple declaration of religious syncretism nor a story in which paganism defeats Christianity. It addresses a problem faced by every stable system of thought—how excluded experience returns, whether the subject can recognise its internal origin, and whether new understanding can alter an old structure without destroying every form of order.
From “The Anchorite” to Dies II, Jung makes a decisive movement. Day One teaches him not to turn words into gods. Day Two shows that even “multiple meaning” can become a beautiful idea that never touches the person who holds it. Relearning does not merely permit the world to have many interpretations. It permits some of those interpretations to change the interpreter.
Questions and Answers
1． Where does Dies II appear in The Red Book?
It is Chapter V of Liber Secundus and the direct continuation of “The Anchorite. Dies I”. Together the two chapters form Jung’s full encounter with Ammonius in the desert.
2． What does Jung dream at the beginning?
He dreams of four white horses with golden wings drawing the solar chariot of Helios into the sky. Black serpents withdraw, and Jung kneels to ask for light.
3． Do the four horses represent Jung’s four psychological functions?
That is a possible later association, but the chapter does not explicitly make the equation. The complete dream should be preserved before later theory is applied to it.
4． Why can Jung not find a morning prayer?
He comes from a modern world in which inherited religious speech no longer carries natural authority. The need to pray has not necessarily vanished, but he no longer knows whom to address or what words he can truthfully use.
5． What does the scarab mean in this chapter?
It connects an ordinary desert beetle with Egyptian images of the sun, becoming and renewal. It first marks a change in Jung’s experience of nature rather than a symbol exhausted by one definition.
6． Why does Jung address the stone and the earth?
The desert makes him feel the antiquity of matter and humanity’s biological roots. The stone becomes a carrier of sunlight, geological time and maternal earth rather than an inert object alone.
7． How did Ammonius initially understand Christianity?
He interpreted virgin birth, divine sonship, suffering and resurrection through Egyptian images associated with the divine mother, Horus, Seth and Osiris. The new religion was heard through the language of the old.
8． How does Ammonius understand the relation among religions?
He believes they share an innermost essence and that later religions unfold meanings incompletely expressed by earlier ones. His view is inclusive, but it still places Christianity in a more developed position.
9． Why does Jung suggest that Ammonius return nearer to people?
Ammonius seeks meanings still to come while excluding relationships capable of changing him. Without change in life, repeated interpretation of one text may remain trapped within an established structure.
10． Why does Ammonius suddenly call Jung Satan?
While praising the desert sun he spontaneously says the name Helios, then recoils from the pagan word. To preserve his religious boundary, he locates the internal conflict in Jung as an external tempter.
11． Is the chapter an attack on Christianity?
No. It criticises a closed form of faith unable to receive its own history or excluded experience. Relating Christianity to older solar myths is not the same as simply rejecting it.
12． Does accepting darkness mean approving evil?
No. It means recognising that rejected desire, fear, hostility and ancient imagery belong to one’s psychological reality, so that responsibility can replace projection.
13． Why does Jung need a human hand to hold him?
The power of the solar and fiery experience can also produce inflation. Body, earth and human relationship help contain inward intensity without allowing it to carry consciousness away.
14． Is the changing face of the world merely subjective idealism?
Not necessarily. The claim first recognises participation in meaning. History, feeling and attention affect how things appear, while things still impose limits and cannot be interpreted without constraint.
15． Why is the anchorite finally drained by the desert?
He seeks meaning continually in scripture and external objects while resisting relationships and experiences that might alter him. He studies the manifold meaning of things without fully studying the self that interprets them.
16． What is the central insight of Dies II?
True openness does not merely admit that many interpretations exist. It allows a new meaning to touch and change the interpreter. Light that excludes darkness and faith that denies its own sources become closed at the very point where transformation is required.
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