Nietzsche's "Zarathustra": Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes Book

A night of excessive consciousness, due to caffein overdose during the day, would be idealistic for writing down this review.

First of all, a few objective remarks. This is not an interpretation of Zarathustra from a philosophical point of view. Although Jung made some fascinating clarifications and some crucial criticisms towards Nietzsche, the ever-morphing system of Nietzsche's ideas is almost never taken into account, let alone the readings that he preferred (except one, in the chapter of Zarathustra flying). Another commentary on Zarathustra I read is Nietzsche's Teaching: An Interpretation of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", which is in all respect a more faithful interpretation. I would not recommend this book to a fundamentalist of Nietzsche, but to anyone who would enjoy the tangling battle between two great minds.
Another important thing I would like to point out is that Jung did not deal with the idea of eternal return in this seminar, which is a turn-off for me personally ' that accounts for more than 50% of my motivation for reading this brick-thick book from top to toe which is not written in my mother language.
A third thing, and this is getting personal, is that, Jung had missed out the ancient Greek aspect of Nietzsche. Jung is way too Christian in too many paragraphs. How could anyone manage not to mention the second part of the cave allegory in the Republic, after reading the whole maxim in the Gay Science which clearly was not just talking about the Christian God, while they are interpreting the famous quote "God is dead"? It surprised me, throughout the whole book, that Plato was mentioned so scarcely.
For any serious person attempting to decipher Zarathustra, I would recommend Jung and Lampert for a balanced diet. Balanced, in a sense that Nietzsche's idea is defended with reverence by the latter, and refuted with wisdom by the former.

Now comes to the commentary on Jung and the content of the book. If I have to choose only one word for commenting on this book, it would be "beautiful". There are paragraphs everywhere illustrating a new point of view on old facts, shedding new light into what was once thought ordinary. Reading through the book is, in some sense, a hero's journey. As a hand-wavy intuitive person, I have learnt a lot from Jung's criticism towards Nietzsche, that one should always practice one's philosophy, and that down-to-earth living is the testing stone of truth. Nietzsche inflamed me with worship of the sublime; a sincere worship which is at times blind and arrogant. Jung pointed to the defect of such worship. For this I am eternally grateful.
Throughout the book, Jung made clear distinction between Nietzsche the person and his greatness. Time and time again, he talked about how Nietzsche should not claim to be the maker of the figure Zarathustra. It is bewildering at first to read his comment on this matter. Why, one would ask, should I see myself not as a hell of a fellow when I produced something marvelous? Later on I was reading John Cassian: The Institutes, and this question popped out (surprisingly) again in the chapter of Pride. Cassian defined pride to be forgetting where one is from, forgetting the fact that God's grace is the key for everything. I would imagine Jung nodding his head on this chapter, and says, in a more vivid way, that Nietzsche is possessed by the demon called Pride.
In some sense, Jung and Cassian are all very true and sharp. This is linked with another constant criticism Jung made, that one cannot create Fate, one could only test oneself out in one's fate. The fate is made by one's self, including one's ego consciousness, one's unconsciousness and so much beyond one's individualness. A concrete example would be Nietzsche's fate after his death. He would never have hoped for something loathing as Nazi, but look at what they made out of him! It would be a sheer arrogance if one should think one could exert influence on others, on the masses and charm them in the exact way one wished. That being said, you could never hope to control your fate totally by your consciousness plots; you could do so in some limited extend. When Cassian talked about God's grace, when Jung talked about knowing the burden of being only human, they might be referring to this same argument, whose validity is almost self-evident.
But here is the twilight zone. One is not one's greatness, one is not the maker of one's fate. Granted. However, one's greatness is still colored by one's character and one's past; one's fate is still partly built upon one's history and memory. Sometimes Jung overlooked that and painted everything with the all-mighty collective unconsciousness. It would be a profound truth that such thing should exist; but such truth should stand the harshest attack in order to acquire its profoundness. Jung fell short on this. An illustrating example would be his interpretation on the spider chapter. I really hoped to have a chance to challenge him with the following interpretation:

Nietzsche borrowed this image from Dostoevsky in his Crime and Punishment, where eternal life is described as a room full of spiders. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, made use of tarantula spider because he once had a very frightening episode with it during his stay in Italy. There is no latent femininity at work at all, they are just making very hidden references.
Moreover, when Nietzsche talked about loving the farthest man, he is deliberately challenging Dostoevsky, who claimed that we should love the nearest man instead of the farthest.
Alas! The dead is dead. It would be forever a mystery how much of Nietzsche the man contributed to the making of Zarathustra, or how much, in general, can one claim for one's greatness. In the case of Nietzsche, all is obscure, as Jung plainly admitted. Jung definitely felt the threat of such obscurity, which could rival or even overwhelm his clarity, as the Will to Power has shown. Sometimes I had the feeling that Jung is not the best person to interpret Zarathustra, because his constant urge of making a cosmos out of chaos is doing harm to the harmonic chaos that is Nietzsche. Jung is too normed; he must make rules and hoped to keep them long-lasting (as one can see from his Red Book). In my opinion, a better interpreter would be Freud.

So much for what has come to my mind. The caffein has worn out.