Jung and Tolkien Independently Drew the Same Evil Eye

Source: Theories of Everything | Published: 2026-08-03T15:53:39Z

The malevolent eye in Jung's Red Book and Tolkien's Eye of Sauron were conceived decades apart with striking similarity. Researcher Becca Tarnas argues the sheer volume of such parallels between the two men can no longer be dismissed as coincidence.

That feeling followed her into adolescence. Classes, dates, the ordinary rhythms of teenage life — and simultaneously, on another level of consciousness, she was living in Middle-earth. She assumed it was a childhood obsession she'd outgrow, and eventually made a deliberate effort to set it aside. Time to grow up.

Then in 2009, The New York Times ran a long piece on Jung's Red Book. Her eyes stopped on the page. The illustrations looked almost identical to Tolkien's paintings.

That moment became the starting point for Becca Tarnas's dissertation. She's now an assistant professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, specializing in Jungian psychology and mythology. Her doctoral work traced the phenomenological connections between Jung's Red Book and Tolkien's red book — two red books, two evil eyes, two authors, one scholarly puzzle spanning decades.

Two Red Books, Two Evil Eyes

Tolkien kept an early sketchbook called the Book of Ishness — drawings almost entirely without captions, save for a few poetic titles: "Silence, Immensity, Boundlessness" or "Beyond." These were made around 1913, the same period Jung began recording his visionary experiences.

The inner encounters Jung documented in his Red Book and the mythology Tolkien later built in Middle-earth share a striking number of parallels in imagery, character archetypes, and narrative structure. The hardest to explain away is their treatment of the evil eye: Tolkien's Eye of Sauron, and Jung's own named counterpart in the Red Book — his "wicked eye."

Becca notes that any single parallel can be explained. What's harder to dismiss as coincidence is the sheer volume of them. More telling still: when both men described their creative process, they said the same thing. These things weren't invented — they welled up from inside, as if they already existed somewhere. Tolkien almost never felt he was "creating" stories. He said they were given to him, and he simply wrote them down.

"We Are Real. We Are Not Symbols."

There's a famous dialogue in Jung's Red Book.

During a practice of active imagination, he encountered the prophet Elijah and his daughter Salome. Jung felt fear and anger, and tried to reassert rational control. "You are symbols," he told them.

Both figures replied: "You can call us symbols, just as you can call the people around you symbols. But that doesn't make us any less real. We are real. We are not symbols."

Jung ultimately psychologized the encounter — he interpreted Elijah as "prophetic thinking" and Salome as emotion or desire, and from this developed his famous theory of psychological functions: thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition, published formally in 1921.

Becca's reading is pointed: translating experience into concept made these ideas accessible to more people, but it also sanded down the mythic texture of the original encounter. The two figures told Jung they were real. He turned them into typological terms anyway.

Active Imagination: A Learnable Skill

Jung wrote extensively about active imagination, but his notes are scattered across letters, lectures, and various essays — gathered together, they'd fill maybe half an inch of shelf space. Becca worked from those fragments to develop a guided practice she uses in workshops.

The first time she led one, she was nervous. Thirty or forty people in the room, and she had no idea what would happen.

She began with a body scan — similar to yoga nidra — to help people relax. Then she guided them to notice whatever emotion was present and let it take shape internally. She prompted them with open questions: What colors do you see? Is there an outline? A landscape? A sound? A figure usually emerged. She then invited participants to enter into dialogue with that figure. The whole sequence ran fifteen to twenty minutes. Afterward: draw first, then write, then share in small groups, then reconvene as a whole.

When it ended, she was stunned. Thirty-five to forty people — every single one had an experience. Some wept, having found some form of release for something that had been troubling them for years.

Her explanation: if we simply hold enough space for the psyche to speak, it will. It's been waiting long enough.

Some People Go In and Can't Come Back

Jung held a measured caution about active imagination — it wasn't right for everyone. His greatest concern was for people who were too porous, too easily drawn into that state with no reliable way back.

Joseph Campbell captured the distinction in one line: "The schizophrenic drowns in the same waters the mystic swims in." Same water, different swimmers — the difference is whether you can swim, whether you can get out, whether you can bring the experience back into ordinary reality.

Jung himself wasn't always sure where the line was. He'd spent years working in psychiatric hospitals and had witnessed genuine psychotic breaks. When his own visionary experiences began, he asked himself seriously: am I releasing a latent psychosis?

What ultimately steadied him wasn't what most people would expect. Not theory. A person.

Toni Wolff: The Thread That Led Jung Out of the Labyrinth

Jung's wife Emma knew about Toni Wolff. The relationship was known at the time as a "left-handed marriage," and it was not easy for Emma. But Toni was indispensable to Jung during the Red Book years.

Each evening, Jung entered active imagination and recorded his experiences in writing. The following afternoon, Toni came to his house. They sat together and tried to make sense of what had happened.

Becca uses a mythological image to describe Toni's role: she was Jung's Ariadne, the one who held the thread so he could find his way back out of the labyrinth. What's striking is that Toni herself could not practice active imagination — she had deep trust in the unconscious, but could not enter that state. Her role was companion, mirror, and anchor for the return journey.

This detail rarely gets emphasis in Jung biographies. Becca raises it deliberately, because she thinks it points to an underappreciated truth: what sustains creative depth experience is often not more depth, but the person who pulls you back.

When the Planetary Archetypes Came to Introduce Themselves

In her early twenties, Becca had an experience that rewired her conceptual framework. By then she'd been studying archetypal theory for nearly a year, but it had remained cognitive — reading Jung, reading her father Richard Tarnas's history of archetypes in The Passion of the Western Mind, knowing what the ideas were without having felt what they were.

She offered a comparison: like someone who can't read, looking at text on a page. You can recognize letters but can't read. Once you learn to read, your eyes move across the line and meaning arrives.

In an expanded state of consciousness, she felt all the planetary archetypes — the divine principles corresponding to each planet — surge forward at once, each wanting to make itself known. Complete chaos. She asked: one at a time, please.

They came one at a time.

When the Venus archetype arrived, she suddenly understood why love, beauty, sensation, art, and desire all belong to the same category — it wasn't a vocabulary list. It was one thing, a single beam of light striking from different angles.

Years after that experience, she was walking through Prague, looking at the buildings, the flowers, the cobblestones, when a thought arrived: Plato was right. Beauty doesn't reside in particular things. The principle of beauty shines through all things simultaneously — and yet cannot be extracted from any one of them.

"Psyche" and "Mind" Are Two Different Things

Becca draws a careful distinction between psyche (soul, the inner life) and mind (intellect, rational cognition).

Mind is a cognitive faculty — the entire educational system is built to sharpen it: reading, writing, mathematics, logic. Psyche is a broader capacity: emotion, intuition, imagination, the inner movement that doesn't answer to reason.

The two are not in opposition. Many of the most important scientific discoveries began as intuitions or dreams, later verified through rational process. But in how we tell these stories, we tend to keep the verification and cut the part where someone first had a hunch.

The danger, she says, isn't psychological activity itself. The danger is believing you're making a rational decision while remaining unaware that a complex, a trauma, or an unconscious preference is actually driving it. Policymakers, executives, anyone with the power to affect others — if they don't examine their deeper psychological motivations, their "rational judgments" may be elaborate self-deception.

Shadow: The People Around You Know You Better Than You Do

Becca's way of explaining Jung's shadow concept: the ego is the part that says "I am this kind of person." The shadow is everything we possess but deny or refuse to see.

Two signals can help locate your own shadow. First, ask the people closest to you — they can see clearly what you cannot. Second, pay attention to the people who provoke a strong reaction in you. The quality you find intensely repellent or irritating usually connects to something suppressed within yourself.

Shadow isn't necessarily dark. It's simply whatever hasn't been incorporated into your self-concept. The problem comes when it operates outside consciousness — you do something, then deny it, say "that's not really me." But it is.

Imagination Is a Cosmic Endowment

Near the end of the conversation, Becca said that guiding people through active imagination — helping them enter their inner world, letting them discover they can get there — that is where the real gift of her work lies. She calls it a "cosmic endowment": everyone has the capacity. Most people have simply never been told they're allowed to use it.

She currently has a two-year-old son and is seven months pregnant with a second child. She says she enters expanded states less often now, but the images arrive more readily, at any moment. For example: her husband walks in early in the morning and starts talking about a war happening somewhere in the world. She immediately finds herself immersed in the full panoramic experience of that war — and has to ask him to wait until she's ready.

She says childbirth was the deepest expanded state she's ever experienced. All those years of practice had taught her how to remain present in that state, how to breathe, how to trust what was unfolding.

What she's working toward now is becoming a storyteller. Academic writing is where she currently lives. But what she ultimately wants to write is mythic narrative — just as Jung chose the language of psychology and Tolkien chose the language of myth, she wants to find her own language for the things that well up from inside.