Nothing Is As It Seems
Music, mysticism, and Peter Kingsley’s "Catafalque"
Praise God, nothing is as it seems.
The words above make up the final line “Keep Your Eyes Peeled,” a 2013 song by the desert-based rock band Queens of the Stone Age. It’s a sentiment that I find perfectly describes Peter Kingsley’s Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity. For Kingsley, when it comes to ourselves and to Carl Jung, nothing is as it seems.
But first, a story.
Reading Catafalque is like going on a trip. I don't mean an acid trip (at least, not so far as I have experienced) but a road trip. So I think it was fitting - or, maybe, an act of synchronicity as Kingsley would call it - that I would read Catafalque on not just a journey, per se, but during a major transitional event in my life. A journey from one point in my life to another, from one state to another - literally and figuratively.
I started reading Catafalque during a rainy Alaska autumn and finished it in Arizona, right before the winter solstice. While reading it on the road, I read by flashlight and scribbled notes in whatever notebook was around. I read chapters in a cabin in British Columbia; at our campsite in Bozeman, MT; and high in Grand Teton National Park. When I had access to the internet I would look up authors or titles Kingsley mentioned, so that I could play “catch-up” and appreciate more fully whatever allusion or reference he was making. Thinkers and writers like Gershom Scholem, Ibn Arabi, Martin Buber, and James Hillman were new to me; I had never heard of works like The Last of the Just, Quest for the Red Sulphur, or Gnostica, Judaica, Catholica.1
Reading Catafalque, then, was like reading an enchiridion2 of religious, mystic, and esoteric thought; it’s like taking a journey from one desert oracle to another.
Kingsley’s work is both textually and meta-textually concerned with journeys. It’s about Jung’s mystical journey into the underworld (as he writes in his Red Book); it’s about Kingsley’s own exploration of Jung’s work via speaking with his friends, visiting his home in Bollingen, and reading the actual, physical books Jung read and kept in his personal library. It’s about the reader of Catafalque themselves reading Kingsley’s book, making a journey from text to footnote and back again. It’s about, and for, anyone who has ever gone on a voyage of discovery into their own soul.
If it isn’t obvious by now, the book is both easy to ramble about, but hard to explain. But, as Kingsley will probably agree, that’s the point.
Another key element of the book is that it is, in essence, one of those works that is the quintessential “when the student is ready, the master will appear” type. That, of course, means that if someone is not ready, not in the right headspace, or doesn't have the bandwidth to process and scour such a weighty text, then reading it is just not going to work; it may as well be in a dead language for all the good it would do.
This kind of back and forth, yes and no, yin and yang experience reminds me of another Queens of the Stone Age lyric:
I am weightless, yet heaviness defines
That line is more recent, from a song on their 2023 album In Times New Roman. Catafalque and that line from “Negative Space” are about contradictions, but moreso about surviving and integrating those contradictions into a complete, if messy, whole.
It’s worth pausing to note that, for some reason, Queens of the Stone Age and Kingsley’s Catafalque are intimately (and oddly) connected within my mind; they’re lighting up similar neural pathways; showing up on the same radar as roughly the same size and shape. There’s that synchronicity again.
In a way that is both an insult and not an insult, Kingsley’s work is about everything and nothing. It’s about very little, but then it is about a great deal. On its surface it's a work that attempts to redefine who Carl Gustave Jung was and just what all of his life and works were really all about. It’s an unconventional biography in that it is as much a history of the man, Jung, as it is about the idea of Jung that his peers and students created. Oh, right, and then Catafalque is also a biography of ideas themselves.
These ideas, Kingsley writes, are not new. They are ancient. To paraphrase the Book of Ecclesiastes: There is nothing new under the sun. “No real truth can ever be destroyed, however desperately people try to wipe it out,” writes Kinglsey, paraphrasing Jung. Or, as Queens of the Stone Age sings in In Times New Roman’s “Carnavoyeur”:
There’s no end to life,
On and on, always life
My earlier citing of Ecclesiastes is not by accident. Catafalque is a work that, both by its very nature and in its structure and style, is almost scriptural. Kingsley, I think, would argue that it isn’t almost anything, but that it is scriptural both in style and intent.
It is a work that is also archaic in feel. The style, and overall vibe of Catafalque is “the choiceless rhythm of the winds and rain,” Kingsley writes. It feels like a book that one is supposed to find sealed in some earthenware jar - like the Dead Sea Scrolls. Though he never uses the word, Kingsley obviously sees his work (and Jung’s texts) as embodying the ideal of Ruinenwert (or “ruin value”). This, very obviously, German word “is the concept that a building be designed in such a way that, if it eventually collapsed, would leave behind an aesthetically pleasing ruin that would last far longer without any maintenance at all.”3
It’s this pervasive feeling of the archaic, the ruinous, and the primordial that gives Catafalque a shifting quality. It is something that you can read front to back. But, it’s also a work that you will come back to, something you’ll stop reading in order to read something else so that Kingsley’s book can make more sense. You’ll read a page and then double-back to re-read it. You’ll consult it like a handbook, or a piece of sacred literature. You’ll read the book linearly and then jump to a footnote far, far in the back. These footnotes are more like lengthy annotated bibliographic asides than simply extra thoughts that didn’t quite make the final cut. “The enormous notes are a joke, grotesque moments to a culture that abandoned itself,” he writes. However, he goes on, “if you ever care to dip into them, you might find some of them are like a miniature book offering an opening to another world.”
That is, ultimately, what Catafalque is about. It’s about opening a portal into another world - a world of journeys and discoveries, where each one of us dives deep and comes out better, more unique, and more whole. It’s not about developing a flashy, manufactured, or Instagrammable philosophy, instead it is about searching and scouring one's soul. Finding all the good and bad, the fine and loathsome, and figuring it all out - seizing it, and therefore yourself, by the nape of the neck. Integrating it all into a cohesive, if patchwork, whole.
As Queens of the Stone Age sings in “Straight Jacket Fitting”:
To face down your demons, you've got to free them
To seize all your demons, Carpe demon
[This is Part One in a series of articles exploring Peter Kingsley’s Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity.]
Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn Arabi is a text by French linguist and philosopher Claude Abbas that was translated into English by Peter Kingsley.
Enchiridion (en-kai-riddy-in) is a Greek word meaning “handbook” or “guide.” Using it is a little pompous of me, but it has such a great sound to it that I couldn’t help myself. It also fits the esoteric nature of both Catafalque and this article.
Worth noting, but difficult to place within the above text, is that the concept of Ruinenwert (rou-en-in-vert) comes from none other than Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect. To quote Wikipedia verbatim: “The idea was supported by Adolf Hitler, who planned for such ruins to be a symbol of the greatness of the Third Reich, just as Ancient Greek and Roman ruins were symbolic of those civilizations.” Fortunately for us, the only ruins still “ruining around” are those not from the Third Reich.