Quiz question for September 22nd

Identify X and Y.

X is one of the central and seminal figures of his field of study. His more well-known concepts — including the collective unconscious and the thought that personalities have both male and female components (animus and anima) — have their roots in Y. He worked on Y on and off for about 16 years, long after a personal crisis that led him to start it had passed, but he never managed to finish it.

Y is a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault . The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Between Y’s heavy covers, the story unfolds as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again.

From the time Y was begun to be written, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it. Of those who did see it, opinions of it vary from being a font of infinite wisdom to being deemed both fascinating and worrisome and as the work of a psychotic. An edition of Y with english translation is finally slated to be published in october 2009.

The first picture below is of X, taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson and the second picture shows some scanned pictures from Y.

Fig: 1

Fig: 2