The Unlife of the Earth

Letter from Carl Gustav Jung to Echidna Stillwell.

Dated 27th February 1929. [Extract].

... your attachment to a Lemurian cultural-strain disturbs me intensely. From my own point of view – based on the three most dif icult cases I have encountered and their attendant abysmally archaic symbolism – it is no exaggeration to state that Lemuria condenses all that is most intrinsically horrific to the racial unconscious, and that the true Lemurians – who you seem intent upon rediscovering – are best left buried beneath the sea. I agree with the Theosophical writings at least this far it was in order that the darkest sorceries should be erased by deluge that this continent of cultural possibility has been placed under the unconscious sign of definitive submergence. I know little enough about the nature of those that populated that cursed zone, but there are things I suspect, and the line of your own researches confirms my most ominous intimations ...

There is no evidence of a reply to this letter.

Who were these three “difficult cases”? One at least seems – at least superficially – to be readily identifiable as Heidi Kurzweil. In September 1908 Kurzweil was detained in a secure psychiatric institution after the brutal murder of her twin brother in Geneva. She seemed to have lost the ability to use the first-person pronoun, and was diagnosed as suffering from Dementia Praecox, or schizophrenia. At her trial she repeatedly claimed:

We killed half to become one twin, but it wasn't enough ...

Jung took an early interest in the case, and began a series of analytical sessions. Kurzweil – in Jung’s journal and correspondence – became Heidi K., but after only five weeks he seems to have abandoned hope of progress and disengaged the analytic process.

After his third session with Heidi K., exactly twenty years prior to his Stillwell letter, on the 27th February 1909, Jung records the following words,

Dr Jung, we know you are old in your other body. 

It is as old as hell.

It has let you back, but it sends us away.

It feels itself becoming Lemurian,

and it is definite unlife [es ist bestimmt unleben]

There is nothing we would not do to escape.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

But it is fate.

It howls electric bliss beneath our cells.

It is nowhere in time and nothings us.

It is the body of nothing, and electric-hot.

An electric nothing-body instead of us.

In this instance, at least, there is little indication of the “abysmally archaic symbolism” Jung promises us. On the contrary, there is remarkable affinity with the hypermodern writings of K-Goth artificial death cultists documented elsewhere. The K-Goth Crypt-texts share a marked preference for anonymous pronouns, whether collective, second- or third-person, whilst spiralling about a nullifying electric-excruciation, traversed in the name of Lemuria.

In the words of one anonymous Crypt-posting

We burn each time but forget.

When we begin each time it comes back, and no one would do it then, but it is too late.

We cross over again into electric-burning, but forget that it hurts in the brain to die this way.

It takes so long to learn that it is grating-apart and burning, that dying is felt in the brain, and that it is horrible ...

It is so horrible to feel, but then we forget, so it can happen again.

Metal body-screaming to die in electricity.

Metallic microparticle sex that is of unlife and not the organism.

That is what the Zombie-maker brings, with the digital centipede bite.

And we are hooked on it, hooked up to it, because coming the other way it is Lemuria.

Incessant intolerable feeling, passing forever, approaching from the outside, and feeling nothing continuously.