Encounter with the Self: A Jungian Commentary on William Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job

Barry J. Martin taught in the Anthropology Department at the University of Toronto.

This book, by the eminent Jungian scholar Edward Edinger, adds to a growing collection of literature on William Blake, which includes Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry and June Singer’s The Unholy Bible. The framework for the discussion is Illustrations of the Book of Job, engraved when Blake was over 65, published in 1825. It is also a companion volume to Edinger’s The Creation of Consciousness: Jung’s Myth for Modern Man (No. 14 in the Inner City Books series).

Blake’s 21 illustrations (unfortunately not reproduced in colour) are a paradigm for the Job archetype, representing a certain encounter between the ego and the Self. When an individual ego communicates with the Self on Greater Personality, it becomes wounded, provoking a descent into the unconscious (the Dark Night of the Soul). Perseverance in questioning the meaning of the experience is rewarded with insight into the nature of the divine. To paraphrase Jung, we have become participants of the divine life and we have to assume a new responsibility, continuing the divine self-realization, which expresses itself in the task of our individuation.