The Solar Myths and Opicinus de Canistris: Notes of the Seminar given at Eranos in 1943

In mid-2012, while sorting through some material in the former house of Carl Gustav and Emma Jung in Küsnacht/Zurich, we came across a set of handwritten notes by C.G. Jung. The six untitled, small slips of paper on the subject of ‘solar myths’ and an obscure manuscript of the Italian late medieval priest, Opicinus de Canistris, may have gone unnoticed, if it weren’t for Riccardo Bernardini, Gian Piero Quaglino, and Augusto Romano. At that time, Bernardini and his colleagues were just about to prepare an edition of Rivkah Schärf Kluger’s stenographic notes of Jung’s previously unpublished 1943 Eranos lecture on the very topic of the solar myths and Opicinus de Canistris. This coincidence allowed us to properly attribute Jung’s original notes and to further authenticate the transcript of the Schärf Kluger notes deposited at the C.G. Jung Papers Collection in the University Archives of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (eth) in Zurich.

Jung’s original notes—reproduced in this volume for the first time—in fact consist of two sets: three pages of what seems to be a first, crossed out draft and six pages with what must have served as keywords for Jung’s lecture. While little record was preserved in the eth Archives on the origins and context of that talk, Bernardini’s research in the Eranos Archives presented in the Introduction to this volume makes it clear that Jung initially did not plan to give a talk at the 1943 Eranos meeting. He only agreed at short notice to an impromptu presentation outside the framework of the regular program at the end of the conference. The re-discovered original notes confirm the rather spontaneous character of his lecture. It appears likely that he only drafted them in the course of the conference. Yet again, he must have had the idea to talk about the Opicinus de Canistris Codex beforehand, as he had some of the phantasmagorical cartographic drawings from it on display while presenting. He was obviously fascinated by the wealth of psychological material presented in the Opicinus manuscript. Jung was deeply engaged in the study of Eastern religions and philosophy in the early 1930s and turned to the subject of a psychological interpretation of alchemical literature in the second half of the decade, but sometime during this period the Opicinus manuscript, edited by Richard Salomon in 1936, must have come to his attention. It is likely that in the relative isolation of Switzerland during the years of World War ii Jung finally found the time to study the Opicinus Codex more closely, and now was eager to share this striking material with his audience at Eranos—irrespective of the general theme of the conference. It does not take much imagination to see why Jung must have been intrigued by the Opicinus manuscript, which is nowadays widely considered the first documented case of paraphrenia in the history of psychiatry.