The Spellbinding Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao
“The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, looked like something out of an alien hallucination—a swirling collage of warped metallic forms that appeared to have been propped up against one another in an...
View ArticleReading The Red Book (42) – Seven Sermons to the Dead
“… what they rejected will be most valuable to them.” Philemon’s words uttered after the sixth sermon to the dead We have now reached the sixth Sermon to the Dead, which you will find in the third...
View ArticleMatar Kubileya (Cybele)
I. “Numinous sites of the preorganic life, which were experienced in participation mystique with the Great Mother, are mountain, cave, stone, pillar, and rock – including the childbearing rock – as...
View ArticlePainting the Sun
I. “Turner’s favourite colour was yellow. He spent hours studying its myriad iterations, using more yellow pigments than any other … … Turner admired yellow’s optical power. Bright and warm, it jumps...
View ArticleBetween Hermes and Mnemosyne: Jung and Warburg
In the part of Homeric Hymn to Hermes, in which Hermes and Apollo exchange gifts, Hermes sings about the origins of the gods: “And the first of the gods that he commemorated with his song was...
View ArticleReading The Red Book (43) – Seven Sermons to the Dead
We have now reached the seventh and final Sermon to the Dead, which you will find in the third section of The Red Book called Scrutinies. The dead come to Philemon and ask him to “teach us about men.”...
View ArticleLyon
You may have heard of two magical triangles, one of black, the other of white magic. The origins of that legend are impossible to fathom. The white magic triangle is said to include Lyon, Prague and...
View ArticleReading The Red Book (44)
“Don’t be afraid to suffer – take your heaviness and give it back to the earth’s own weight.” R.M.Rilke, “Sonnets to Orpheus” We have almost reached the end of our journey through The Red Book. This...
View ArticleNumber Three and Its Mysteries
Three is intimately connected with the myth of the goddess and with the three main phases of the moon – waxing, full and waning, corresponding to the three phases of a woman’s life – maiden, mother and...
View ArticleShiva and Parvati: the Birth of Kali
I have across a fascinating version of the birth of goddess Kali. In this myth she came to the world as a result of Parvati’s anger, which she shed and transformed during her spiritual practice. Lake...
View ArticleReading The Red Book (45)
“The one God, to whom worship is due, is in the middle.” C.G. Jung, Black Book 5 “I knew how frightfully inadequate this undertaking was, but despite much work and many distractions I remained true to...
View ArticleSymbolism of the Cave
A well-known passage from Plato’s Republic describes how a group of people, chained to the wall of a deep cavern, spend their entire lives looking at the shadows dancing on the cave wall in front of...
View ArticleHis Dark Materials
Philip Pullman finished his trilogy of fantasy novels His Dark Materials in 2000. But I feel his epic has a lot to say about the symbolic portents of our times and the near future. I tremendously...
View ArticlePrague: A Threshold
You may have heard of two magical triangles, one of black, the other of white magic. The origins of that legend are impossible to fathom. The white magic triangle is said to include Lyon, Prague and...
View ArticleChristiana Morgan: Her Invisible Life
This is a beautifully written biography of an extraordinary woman, who, as the author puts it, “remains at most a footnote in other people’s history.” She was a prominent patient of Jung’s, who used...
View ArticleGentleman Overboard: Existential Loneliness
“‘Where is it,’ thought Raskolnikov. ‘Where is it I’ve read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge...
View ArticleOdilon Redon: Master of Life
“Not only are we the products of multiple entangled ancestors, spanning vast ranges of the evolutionary field; we are not even individuals at all. Rather, we are walking assemblages: riotous...
View ArticleThe Eight Mountains
This post is an attempt at a symbolic reconstruction of a movie I have seen recently. After seeing it, I was so deeply moved that I immediately rewatched it and proceeded to jot down hurriedly ten...
View ArticleThe Symbolic Power of Mushrooms
The Symbolic Power of Mushrooms In the collective consciousness since the recent pandemic, two symbols of self-destruction have emerged, both connected to mushrooms. In the HBO series “The Last of Us,”...
View ArticleThe Veil of Isis and the Black Madonna: the Mysteries of Nature
I. “The mother is the first world of the child and the last world of the adult. We are all wrapped as her children in the mantle of this great Isis.” Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 9 (Part 1): …...
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