“Death” teaches Jung that life requires endings if it is to mature and renew itself. Chapter VII of Liber Secundus, “The Remains of Earlier Temples”, brings that insight into the spiritual world. Bodies and life stages are not the only things that must die. Ideals that were once sacred, correct and genuinely useful must also end when their life has gone.
Jung encounters Ammonius and the Red One again. One formerly represented Christian withdrawal, language and spiritual discipline; the other represented desire, delight and a devilish counterforce. They now travel together, needing and ridiculing one another. Seeing Jung covered in green leaves, they make the sign of the cross in terror. Jung discovers that the powers he had placed at opposite poles of good and evil have become mutually dependent remnants of an old order.
Old Figures Return in Altered Form
Ammonius is no longer simply the wise anchorite, and the Red One is no longer a compelling rider of instinct. After their earlier encounters they have become almost comic companions. The Red One entered a monastery but developed a stronger aversion to Christianity. Ammonius concedes that the devil is practically useful because without him people would have less reason to fear the Church.
Their relationship reveals institutional dependence. Good requires evil to prove its purity, while evil requires prohibition to retain its attraction. Once they maintain fixed roles in this way, they no longer support discernment. They jointly administer an obsolete structure.
Why Jung Is Covered in Leaves
The leaves continue the greening tree of the preceding chapters. Having accepted darkness and death, Jung is no longer defined only by spiritual ideals. Body and natural life enter his image.
The foliage does not signify moral perfection. It makes him look like a pagan being of the forest—growing and wilting, laughing and changing, not fully obedient to human classifications. It signifies vitality rather than a new elevated identity.
The Green Daimon: Nature Beyond Fixed Moral Categories
Jung describes a forest being that grows through him: ancient and young, powerful and weak, deceiving and deceived, ridiculous and yet reaching towards the core of the world. The contradictions resist orderly moral classification.
This does not mean that Jung has abolished ethics. He rejects the attempt to turn a living person into an ideal model. Actual life is mixed, contingent and incomplete. When only morally approved parts of the person are permitted to appear, excluded life works more dangerously behind the image.
How an Ideal Becomes a Ruin
An ideal can resemble a torch on a dark path. It gives direction when direction is needed. To continue running with the torch in daylight, however, turns the useful instrument into an absurd burden. Jung denies ideals permanent sovereignty, not historical value.
An ideal may once have organised life effectively, while circumstances and the person later change. If the person continues performing the old ideal, it becomes costume. Life is replaced by the part of “the ideal person”.
Why the Death of an Ideal Wounds the Self
Human beings invest ideals with meaning, value and effective force, then forget that some of this force came from themselves. When an ideal breaks, the world seems to collapse because identity has been deposited within it.
Relinquishing an obsolete ideal therefore means more than revising an opinion. It means allowing an earlier self to end. The self that gained purity, direction and superiority through the ideal is injured with it.
The Secret Alliance of Good and Evil
Jung recognises that the lofty temple and the repressed devil had long formed a concealed alliance. The more completely spirit claimed crystalline purity, the more rejected desire accumulated in darkness. The more one glorified devilish rebellion, the more necessary religious prohibition became as its opponent.
Ammonius and the Red One therefore belong together. Fixed moral opposites fight visibly while producing one another structurally. Change requires more than the victory of one side. The entire opposition must cease governing life.
From Chameleon to Sun: No Longer Coloured Entirely by the Environment
Jung compares adaptation to external expectation with the colour changes of a chameleon. Social approval, religious rules and the gaze of others repeatedly recolour the person. Such adaptation has practical value but can destroy the ability to form direction from within.
He wants to resemble the sun, giving light from its own force rather than merely absorbing surrounding colours. This is not a fantasy of complete independence. It asks that value should not be borrowed wholly from external norms. Individuality remains relational without becoming a copy of the environment.
Alone towards the East: Freedom and Its New Risk
Jung pushes the remnants of earlier temples behind him and travels east. Ammonius and the Red One can no longer tell him what he should become. The freedom is also solitude: no established authority guarantees that the next step is correct.
The image of Izdubar appears at the chapter’s end. Jung believes he has escaped old authority, but will immediately meet an eastern god of overwhelming size and power. Removing former rulers does not make the conscious ego supreme. A more ancient force waits ahead.
Original Experience, Later Theory, Contemporary Interpretation
The original experience consists of Jung meeting Ammonius and the Red One again, recognising their dependence, and experiencing himself as a green forest being. Later theory can relate this to shadow integration, compensation of opposites and individuation.
Contemporary interpretation may examine moral identity, institutions that manufacture enemies, idealised selves and cognitive dissonance. Yet “neither good nor evil” cannot be used to cancel ethical responsibility. Jung is criticising ideals that petrify life, not excusing harmful action.
Conclusion: Ideals Must Serve Life Rather Than Replace It
The chapter does not demand a life without ideals. It requires us to remember that ideals are created structures that can be used and can die. When they illuminate darkness, they are valuable; when they become torches carried in daylight, they must be laid down.
As Jung travels east, neither good nor evil remains his master. This is only a beginning. In “First Day”, modern scientific knowledge will collide with Izdubar’s mythical world, showing that reason itself can become another temple.
Questions and Answers
1. What problem does this chapter continue?
It extends acceptance of death to the ending of ideals, identities and spiritual authorities.
2. Why do Ammonius and the Red One travel together?
Their fixed roles of good and evil require one another and have become structurally interdependent.
3. What do Jung’s green leaves signify?
Natural vitality has entered his self-image and no longer submits entirely to spiritual and moral classification.
4. Is the green daimon a new ideal?
No. Its contradictions and imperfections prevent it from becoming another model of perfection.
5. Does Jung abolish good and evil?
No. He rejects their rigid domination of life, not responsibility for action.
6. Why is an ideal compared with a torch?
It can illuminate a dark path but becomes foolish when used everywhere and forever.
7. How does an ideal become performance?
A person begins enacting an image of perfection instead of responding to actual life.
8. Why is relinquishing an ideal painful?
Identity, value and superiority have often been invested in it.
9. How do good and evil form a secret alliance?
Good uses evil to prove purity, while evil uses prohibition to preserve attraction.
10. What does the Red One’s monastery experience show?
External conversion does not automatically transform inward conflict and may intensify resistance.
11. Why does Ammonius need the devil?
The devil supplies an object of fear through which religious authority can be maintained.
12. What does the chameleon represent?
It represents a personality coloured entirely by environment, norms and other people’s expectations.
13. Does shining like the sun mean isolation?
No. It means that direction and value cannot be borrowed wholly from outside.
14. Why does Jung travel east?
He leaves the exhausted western opposition of fixed good and evil in search of renewed mythical life.
15. What does Izdubar’s appearance foreshadow?
It announces a confrontation between modern knowledge and an ancient eastern god.
16. What is the central judgement?
Ideals should serve life as instruments; when they replace life and demand permanent performance, they have become ruins.
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