knows nothing, compels him to do so.“ (CW 14 1954, 326). It was the prominent Jung scholar Sonu Shamdasani, author of Cult Fictions: C. G. Jung and the Founding of Analytical Psychology (Shamdasani 1998), who shed a new light on life and work of C. G. Jung. One of the Jung’s current critics focusing on religious contexts of his work is Richard Noll. In his books, The Jung Cult: The Origins of a Charismatic Movement and The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung, the American psychologist and historian interprets Jung’s psychological theories as “anti-orthodox Christian cult of redemption or a Nietzschean religion” or rather “pagan form of personal religion”. Jung was “waging war against Christianity and its distant, absolute, unreachable God and was training his disciples to listen to the voices of the dead, to worship the sun, and to become gods themselves” (Noll 1997, 224). In the conclusion of his book Noll suggests that we could be witnessing a birth of new religious movement arising from the merger of Jungian movement and the New Age spirituality of the late 20th century based on the apotheosis of Jung as a God-man (Noll 1994, 1997). When reading Liber Novus, one is normally so consternated by the religious imagery that it is quite easy to succumb to opinion that the imagery is not “merely” active imagination of an individual but a specific religious message, a prophecy. Noll especially pays attention to the images that prove Jung’s alleged conviction that he is the new Christ: a black serpent lying at his feet, Jung spreads his arms wide as he identifies with Christ. Salome approaches him, the serpent winds around Jung’s body and his face transforms into lion’s. Salome tells him that he is Christ. “Salome became very interested in me, and she assumed that I could cure her blindness. She began to worship me. I said, ‘Why do you worship me?’ She replied, ‘You are Christ’. In spite of my objections she maintained this. (…) While the snake was pressing me, I felt that my face had taken on the face of an animal of prey, a lion or a tiger.” (Jung 2010, 251). In his seminars (1925), Jung later offers his interpretation and says that his worshipping by Salome symbolized that side of the inferior function, which is surrounded by an aura of evil. This experience was for him a symbolic deification, he transformed into the Deus Leontocephalus of the Mithraic mysteries from the 1st to the 4th century (Jung 1989). Noll, however, insists that Jung believed he had literally become someone of a God, an Aryan Christ. Noll claims that the lion-headed god Aion became his secret image of God within, and Jung and his close followers realized this truth and concealed it from the world (Noll 1997). Noll is too concrete and too literal in his criticism. Anthony Stevens notes and points out that Noll writes as if Jung believed that it was an actual transformation into God, rather than a symbolic experience. He deals with it in more detail in his bookOn Jung (Stevens 1999, 275–290). Similarly, Sonu Shamdasani, translator of Liber Novus and arguably the most renowned Jung scholar, states that there is no evidence that the above mentioned active imagination shaped Jung’s selfunderstanding for the rest of his life or that he even took it literally. More in the bookCult Fictions (Shamdasani 1998, 49–55). 50 Ivana Ryška Vajdová
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