Up: [[Image]] Created: 2025-03-22 There’s a fascinating episode on the *This Jungian Life* [podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ri4Bcea7eI) that I listened to for a second time today. It’s called *Two Red Books: The shared imaginal realms of Jung & Tolkien*. The guest on the show is Becca Tarnas who wrote her doctoral dissertation on this subject. Becca has found a couple of hundred parallels between Tolkien’s work and Jung’s, leading to her compelling argument that the imaginal world, the [[Mundus Imaginalis]], is every bit as real as the external world. This is huge and, as I said, compelling. These two men didn’t know each other but were working at the same time — beginning in 1913. Jung invited the active imaginations that would eventually be written and painted in [[Jung's Red Book]]. Tolkien was creating a book of symbolic illustrations he called *The Book of Ishness* and began writing the first stories of Middle Earth. Tolkien’s red book, *The Red Book of Westmarch* is the story of *The Hobbit* and *The Lord of the Rings* compiled in one volume. Both men were going on an inner adventure. Becca suggests that they may have found the same inner world, simply describing it from different entry points. There are marked similarities of landscapes, characters, calligraphy and style of art. The intentions of the work are different: Jung was more interested in the psychology of our vision-making capacity as humans than in the content of the imaginal world, while Tolkien was following his path of writer and artist to create a detailed world. However, both took the inner world very seriously and both saw their role as conduits for what was coming through them. At the time that Jung and Tolkien were doing their work, visionary experiences were seen as pathological. The gift they gave us was their consensus about the reality of the inner imaginal world, and the seriousness and effort they devoted to reworking and portraying their experiences so that we could share in them.