“The Castle in the Forest” forces Jung to acknowledge that contents dismissed as ordinary by his learning, taste and spiritual ambition still possess psychological reality. “One of the Lowly” carries this correction out of the fairy-tale castle and into a more immediate human situation. Jung no longer meets a scholar, a mysterious figure or a beautiful young woman. On a cold journey through snow, he encounters a poor, dirty, unemployed, one-eyed tramp who has spent time in prison.
The man possesses neither profound ideas nor sacred authority. He complains about cold and work, enjoys cheap cinema, holds crude political hopes, and has fought, wounded another man and gone to prison over a woman. He is also almost childishly optimistic about his illness and future. Jung initially measures him through education, professional status and moral judgement. He even worries that respectable people may see him talking to a former convict. By the end of the night, however, the man dies in Jung’s arms, leaving Jung’s hands covered in blood.
The death changes the meaning of the encounter. Jung can no longer treat the man as a social type available for analysis, nor summarise him as merely low, crude or unsuccessful. The stranger has worked, loved, offended, suffered and hoped for employment, marriage and recovery. Then he dies as everyone dies. His death brings Jung to the ground of common humanity. Lowliness is no longer only someone else’s social condition. It is the basis of life from which no knowledge, status or spiritual height can exempt anyone.
1. Place in the Book: From Despised Inner Contents to a Despised Human Life
“One of the Lowly” is the third chapter of Liber Secundus, following “The Red One” and “The Castle in the Forest”. The three chapters form a clear progression. The Red One confronts Jung with instinct, desire and worldly vitality excluded by his spiritualised self-image. The castle chapter confronts him with ordinary feeling and fairy-tale imagination excluded by intellectual and aesthetic superiority. The present chapter brings him face to face with a person who can readily be despised for social position, conduct and way of life.
The movement matters. The Red Book does not steadily reward Jung with experiences that are higher, purer or more sacred. It repeatedly leads him towards what he would prefer not to approach. The young woman of the previous chapter tells him that what consciousness calls stale, banal or childish may still have soul. The opening reflections of this chapter continue the point: whatever provokes intense contempt or rage deserves quiet attention, because the reaction may disclose something consciousness is urgently excluding.
This does not mean that every despised action should be praised or that moral responsibility disappears. The tramp is lazy in some respects, violent, politically crude and unrealistic. The issue is that error does not abolish a person’s full humanity. Jung must retain judgement while relinquishing the superiority that turns the person judged into an alien species.
2. Chapter Summary: Walking Through Snow, Talking at the Inn, and Sudden Death
The scene begins on a grey, damp and freezing evening in snow-covered country. A man who looks untrustworthy joins Jung on the road. He has one eye, scars on his face, dirty and impoverished clothing, and a black beard that has not been shaved for a long time. Jung carries a solid walking stick and is plainly prepared for trouble.
Both men are heading for the same village to spend the night. The tramp has no money and doubts that he can secure a bed. He had worked for a locksmith but lost his position when the work ran out. He is now travelling in search of employment. Jung suggests farm labour, since workers are always needed in the countryside. The man objects that farm work begins too early, is too hard and pays too little. He also finds rural life dull and lacking in mental stimulation. Jung is astonished. The man cannot secure his livelihood, yet still demands a life of the mind.
Asked what stimulation the city provides, the tramp answers that he likes the cinema. He enjoys spectacles in which a man runs up buildings, another carries his head under his arm, and another stands unburnt in the middle of fire. Jung initially regards these as cheap entertainments. Then he recalls that saints’ legends also contain cephalophores, levitation and survival in a fiery furnace. An uncomfortable relation appears between inherited sacred narrative and modern mass entertainment. The tramp does not live without myth. He receives it through cinema.
At the village inn, Jung buys him dinner. The man explains that he lost his eye in a fight and stabbed his opponent, for which he was imprisoned. The quarrel concerned a woman pregnant by another man whom he nevertheless wished to marry. After his imprisonment, she left him. He still believes that he will find proper work, find her again, marry her, and recover from the illness in his lungs.
During the night he begins to cough violently and haemorrhage. Jung enters the adjoining room and finds him lying fully clothed on a sack of straw, blood running from his mouth onto the floor. Jung supports him but cannot prevent his death. The man dies in his arms, and his blood covers Jung’s hands. The earlier conversation about work, films, prison, love and the future suddenly acquires another weight.
3. Suspicion and Shame: Jung’s Social Position Comes into View
Jung’s first response is recognisably human. He distrusts the stranger, grips his stick, studies his appearance and assesses possible danger. The caution is not wholly irrational. The man does have a history of violence and is unreliable in several ways. The chapter does not ask us to romanticise trust or discard practical judgement.
More revealing is Jung’s shame at the inn. After hearing about the prison sentence, he looks around to make sure that no one has noticed him talking with a former convict. His concern is no longer simply safety. It is his social image. The identity of physician, intellectual and respectable gentleman seems threatened by sharing a table with such a person.
Lowliness therefore points in two directions. Outwardly, the lowly man is ragged, penniless and without social standing. Yet Jung’s response discloses another poverty: respectable consciousness can preserve its height by reducing someone to appearance, criminal record and class. The tramp’s destitution is visible; Jung’s poverty is concealed in the structure of his judgement.
The chapter is consequently not a story about a wealthy man gaining virtue by pitying the poor. Jung does buy the man a meal and attends to his illness, but the decisive movement is not “I helped him”. It is “I need him to enter my soul”. Charity alone leaves the high and low positions intact. The encounter reaches Jung’s structure of life only when he admits that he needs the person he has despised.
4. Cinema and the Saints: Mass Fantasy Is Not Spiritually Empty
The tramp’s description of cinema as mental stimulation first sounds ridiculous. He values immediate spectacle rather than philosophy, literature or religion. Yet Jung notices that the traditions he respects contain closely related images. Religious stories name events beyond ordinary law as miracles; cinema uses technology to produce modern marvels. They are not identical, but both respond to fantasies of exceeding ordinary capacity, surviving injury and breaking the limits of reality.
The point is not the simple claim that cinema is modern religion. Jung experiences a suspension of judgement. He is ready to classify the man’s taste as inferior, then discovers that high culture preserves comparable wishes in another form. Differences remain, but they no longer sustain absolute contempt.
The tramp also mistakes a cinematic assassination for fact and hopes that rulers will be destroyed so that the people may be free. His understanding is crude and potentially dangerous. Jung nevertheless hears older themes of heroic rebellion, tyrannicide and national liberty. The man does not stand outside history. In a confused way he lives within collective narratives and, like others, uses stories to understand power, justice and freedom.
The chapter raises a question that remains current. Mass culture may be shallow, manipulative and false, yet it may also be a channel through which ordinary people encounter mythic patterns, social imagination and shared emotion. The intellectual task is not to abolish distinctions, but to understand why people require such stories and whether elevated forms answer similar psychological needs.
5. One Eye, Scars, and Violence: The Lowly Man Is Not a Pure Victim
The tramp is not a hidden saint waiting to be recognised. He has injured someone in a brawl, served time in prison, evaded labour he dislikes, held unrealistic expectations and spoken politically in violent terms. Turning him into an innocent victim of social structures would remove the chapter’s real difficulty.
Jung must admit not an easily lovable person but a concrete life in which suffering, desire, laziness, violence, humour and hope are mixed. To recognise his soul is not to declare every decision correct. It is to refuse to exclude him from common humanity because of his errors.
The missing eye has a literal history in the narrative: it was lost in a fight. It can certainly evoke symbolic associations—limited vision, a bodily price paid for love, or one-sided seeing—but these should not erase the plain event. His body bears the history of his actions, conflicts and social circumstances. The scar is not merely a symbol. It is life written upon the body.
Later analytical psychology can understand him as one of Jung’s shadow figures. He carries what Jung’s respectable personality does not wish to own: crudity, criminality, dependence, failure and bodily decay. Yet saying only that “he is the shadow” would flatten him again. He first appears as another person in active imagination. Precisely because he cannot be reduced immediately to a concept of Jung’s self, he can correct that self.
6. Love and Hope: A Failed Man Still Lives the Human Myth
The tramp’s story of love is neither orderly nor noble. He fought over a woman pregnant by another man, injured his rival, lost an eye and went to prison. The woman later refused to marry him and disappeared from his life. By Jung’s social standards, it resembles a chaotic failure rather than an elevating romance.
Jung nevertheless begins to see that the man has lived a common human story in his own fashion. He has loved, risked himself and paid with body and reputation. He still maintains an awkward but persistent expectation of the future. Even when his judgement is poor, his wishes are not inhuman. He wants to be needed, to work, to have a partner and to begin again.
The chapter does not affirm that his optimism will be vindicated. Jung already recognises the seriousness of his lung disease, and the reader soon learns the outcome. The distance between hope and reality makes him more memorable. As death approaches, he continues to speak the grammar of life: he will recover, obtain work and marry. Death leaves no time for these plans.
Jung can no longer remain in the position of a successful man interpreting a failure. Success, education and foresight do not alter the shared end. A person may possess better judgement, but this does not make him less subject to death. The tramp’s fate returns Jung from social comparison to the plane of existence.
7. Blood on the Hands: From Observer to Participant in Death
When the tramp dies, Jung’s hands are covered in blood. He looks at them as though he were a murderer and thinks of the blood of a brother. Jung has not literally killed the man. Rather, death destroys the position of unrelated observer. Someone has died in his arms, and he can no longer stand safely outside the event discussing the lower classes, disease or human fate.
The blood of the brother shifts their relation from accidental companionship to common life. Jung had regarded himself as respectable and the other as a suspicious tramp. Death suspends the final authority of these distinctions. Blood is not an abstract humanitarian slogan but a bodily connection. The dead man is not a social label; he shares Jung’s conditions of living and dying.
Moonlight is crucial in this scene. The moon is cold, distant and unmoved, as if it has witnessed death countless times. It offers a clarity capable of viewing the whole horror from afar, but such clarity can also become inner death. When the gaze remains lunar—calm, abstract and eternal—while no longer hearing human groans, the soul has departed from the world of the living.
Jung does not thereby reject distance, reflection or individuality. Without distance, common suffering may engulf consciousness entirely. But distance alone allows knowledge to watch everything without being wounded. Blood on the hands means that the death must enter Jung’s own life rather than remain material for explanation.
8. Common Life and Individual Height: Individuation Does Not Mean Leaving Humanity
After the tramp’s death, Jung reflects on his relation to the lowest place. He realises that he has thought earnestly about life while living it comparatively easily. Poverty, cold, illness, shame and hopelessness have largely remained distant objects. Now the destitute man seeks admission into his soul because Jung is not yet destitute enough and has not lived the ground of common life.
Jung then distinguishes two directions. One is individual height, where a person develops a singular path, capacity and consciousness. The other is the depth of common life, where achievement, status and ideals no longer separate one from others, because everyone remains subject to body, need, history, illness and death.
The two directions cannot be occupied completely at the same moment, but a path can connect them. One cannot stand on mountain and valley floor simultaneously, yet one can descend and then see the mountain from below. Permanent height turns individuality into arrogance, abstraction and torment. Permanent immersion in commonness dissolves distinctive responsibility, judgement and creativity.
The chapter does not ask Jung to renounce individuation or praise poverty. It demands that individuation not be built on a rupture with common humanity. A person must acknowledge what he or she is—a bodily, desiring, limited, dependent and mortal being—before the effort to become someone can avoid turning into an escape from life.
9. Being and Becoming: Development Requires an Existing Ground
The chapter’s distinction between being and becoming can sound highly abstract, but it grows directly from the encounter. Becoming points towards individual development, self-transcendence and the singular path. At the height, people perceive possibilities and strive towards fuller awareness and their best capacities.
If a person has never admitted what already exists, however, becoming can become the idealised self’s endless flight from the actual self. The more one speaks of improvement, growth and progress, the less one may wish to recognise ordinariness, weakness, dependence, envy, fear and bodily fate. Such development does not integrate. It sustains division.
The lowest reaches of common life return a person to self-knowledge. There one cannot display only the best features or hide one’s basic condition behind an ideal identity. One must acknowledge that the material of one’s life is shared with others. This descent is not permanent stagnation. It provides a ground for renewal. Only one who can first be may become without simply fleeing.
Jung later understood individuation as becoming a more whole and singular person without breaking relation to collective life. This chapter can be read as one experiential source of that view. The theory is not yet settled here. Jung first discovers before a particular death that spiritual height becomes lifeless when it cannot receive the lowly person.
10. Outer Death and Inner Death: Why the Chapter Ends by Seeking Inner Life
The ending may appear contradictory. Jung has emphasised common life, descent and relation to others, yet concludes by turning away to seek the place of inner life. This does not simply cancel what precedes it. It is the next judgement produced by death.
The tramp’s outer death reveals another, less visible death: a person’s body may remain alive while the soul withdraws into a remote, cold position that merely watches. One may possess clear thought and stable identity but cease to participate in life. Jung calls this inner death and regards it as worse than bodily death.
His decision to die outwardly and live inwardly must not be read as a wish for physical death or an escape from reality. It establishes a priority. External identity, social position and an old self-image can suffer loss and may need to die; the inward capacity to answer life and experience meaning must not be sacrificed. Jung seeks inner life because the encounter with common death shows him that his soul has drawn too close to the detached position of the cold moon.
Common life and inner life are therefore not opposed. Common life brings him into contact with death and the universal human condition. Inner life prevents him from enduring these through numbness. Without common life, the inward path becomes self-enchantment. Without inner life, common existence becomes mechanical repetition, collective sameness and spiritual death.
11. Relation to Later Theories of Shadow and Individuation
From the perspective of later analytical psychology, the lowly man clearly carries shadow qualities. He has traits Jung’s respectable persona does not wish to claim: dirt, unemployment, criminality, crudity, dependence, bodily decline and social failure. Jung’s suspicion, contempt and shame show that the figure presses against the edge of the persona.
Yet the shadow does not contain only what is morally negative. The tramp also carries a directness of life that Jung lacks. He speaks without adornment about cold, hunger, cinema, love, prison, politics and hope. His thinking is confused, but he does not maintain Jung’s cultivated distance from life. Because he is both low and alive, he can compensate Jung’s one-sidedness.
Later theory helps to clarify this structure, but it cannot replace the original event. The original experience is the encounter with a stranger who walks, talks, coughs blood and dies. The theoretical layer concerns Jung’s later organisation of such encounters through shadow, persona, collective psyche and individuation. Modern readers may add perspectives drawn from class, stigma, poverty, projection and an ethics of care. These levels can converse, but they should not be collapsed.
It is especially important not to treat acceptance of the shadow as permission for violence, laziness or destructive conduct. Acceptance first means recognising that such possibilities belong to humanity and may belong to oneself in subtler forms. Only then do responsibility and limitation have a real object. Denial does not remove the shadow. It allows it to continue operating behind superiority.
12. Chapter Conclusion: Only from Below Does Height Become Real Again
“One of the Lowly” neither romanticises poverty, crime and illness nor grants Jung moral superiority for an act of charity. An accidental companionship becomes a judgement upon Jung’s self-structure. Beginning with suspicion, contempt and shame, he moves through conversation, a shared table and death, finally admitting that he needs the lowly man.
The stranger shows Jung that common human life is made not from ideals alone but from work, avoidance, hunger, entertainment, love, violence, hope, illness and death. When a person lives only at an individual height, the best gradually becomes a torment to self and others. Only by descending to the common ground can the height be known for what it is and desired again without illusion.
The demand is neither identification with the low nor escape upwards. It is to form a path between them. Individuality cannot deny common fate, and commonality cannot abolish singular responsibility. What Jung learns from the blood of the dead man is that thought must return to life, soul must leave the cold distance, and the individual path must begin with the fact that I, like everyone else, can suffer, fail and die.
Questions and Answers
1. Where does “One of the Lowly” stand in The Red Book?
It is the third chapter of Liber Secundus, following “The Red One” and “The Castle in the Forest”. It continues Jung’s confrontation with rejected instinct, ordinary life and despised human beings.
2. Who is the lowly man?
He is an impoverished tramp of about thirty-five, formerly employed by a locksmith, now out of work. He has one eye, facial scars, a prison record and severe lung disease.
3. Why does Jung keep his walking stick ready?
The stranger looks suspicious and practical caution is understandable. The text subsequently shows, however, that Jung’s reaction also contains class prejudice and protection of his social identity.
4. Does the chapter advocate unconditional trust in strangers?
No. It retains practical judgement but refuses to reduce a person to a danger label or use risk as a reason to deny full humanity.
5. Why will the tramp not take farm work?
He objects to the early hours, hard labour and low wages, and finds rural life boring and lacking in mental stimulation. This reveals both avoidance and a need beyond bare survival.
6. What does cinema signify in the chapter?
It shows ordinary people encountering ancient themes of miracle, heroism and freedom through mass entertainment. Cinema is not identical with religion, but both may carry related human imaginings.
7. Why does Jung think of saints’ legends?
The cinematic marvels admired by the tramp resemble miracles attributed to saints. The similarity interrupts Jung’s easy contempt for supposedly inferior entertainment.
8. Is the tramp an innocent victim to be idealised?
No. He is violent, avoidant and unrealistic in several respects. The challenge is that recognising a soul does not require approving every action.
9. How did he lose his eye and go to prison?
He fought over a woman he hoped to marry, lost his eye in the brawl, stabbed his opponent, and was sentenced to prison.
10. Why does Jung come to feel genuine compassion?
Conversation reveals a person rather than a label. The man has loved, suffered, hoped to work and marry, and remained hopeful despite serious illness.
11. Why is the tramp’s death decisive?
It breaks Jung’s detached position. Class, education and status become secondary as he confronts the bodily mortality shared by both men.
12. Does the “blood of a brother” mean Jung killed him?
No. It means Jung can no longer regard the dead man as unrelated. Blood on his hands marks his involvement in common life and death.
13. What are the lowest reaches of common life?
They are not poverty alone, but the human condition of body, need, failure, illness, history and death, where social identity cannot finally separate one person from another.
14. Why does Jung still need individual height?
Common life reveals what one is, while individual height concerns the responsibility of what one may become. Without height, distinctive judgement and creation are lost in collective existence.
15. How should “outer dying is better than inner death” be understood?
It does not recommend physical death. External identities and old self-images may need to collapse, but the inward capacity to respond to life and experience meaning must remain alive.
16. What is the chapter’s central challenge for a modern reader?
Notice the people and situations that provoke immediate contempt, shame or exclusion. Retain realistic judgement, but ask whether the reaction is protecting a superior identity from contact with common humanity.
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