Hamnet and Tutankhamun
Shakespeare’s life is a great mystery but we do know that he had a son, Hamnet, who died at the age 11, possibly from the plague. Four years after his son’s death, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, maybe his...
View ArticleSymbolist Art: The Mysteriarch (The One Who Presides over Mysteries)
In volume V of Collected Works (Symbols of Transformation, par. 299) Jung quotes a passage from Goethe’s Faust, in which he hero must descend to the realm of the Mothers: “MEPHISTOPHELES: This lofty...
View ArticleWomen’s Wisdom: Hildegard of Bingen
Hildegard of Bingen, a twelfth-century German Benedictine abbess, was a mystic, a healer and an intellectual, whose achievements are hard to believe if we realize that she lived in the times, when...
View ArticleReading The Red Book (27)
The title of Chapter XIV of Liber Secundus, the second part of The Red Book, is Divine Folly. Jung* finds himself in a library, where he engages in a dialogue with a librarian. He summarizes the...
View ArticleReading The Red Book (28)
“I see behind you, behind the mirror of your eyes, the crush of dangerous shadows, the dead, who look greedily through the empty sockets of your eyes, who moan and hope to gather up through you all the...
View ArticleThe Nymphs
I. To Nereids “O lovely-faced and pure nymphs,daughters of Nereus, lord of the deep,at the bottom of the seayou frolic and dance,fifty maidens revel in the waves, maidens riding on the backs of...
View ArticleReading The Red Book (29)
I. “Your sun will rise from muddy swamps.” II. “The lowest in you is the source of mercy.” III. “But the lowest in you is also the eye of the evil that stares at you and looks at you coldly … Continue...
View ArticleSymbolism of Amber
Nicola Tesla once said that though we cannot understand the life of crystals, they are nevertheless living beings. When it comes to amber, this precious gem, which is not even a stone per se, seems to...
View ArticleReading The Red Book (30)
“I feel the things that were and that will be. Behind the ordinary the eternal abyss yawns. The earth gives me back what it hid.” Liber Secundus, chapter XVII Chapter XVII of Liber Secundus, the second...
View ArticleThe Doll as a Symbol
The doll is a curious and polyvalent symbol. On the one hand, there is no shortage of creepy dolls in horror movies. Furthermore, in his Dictionary of Symbols, Juan Eduardo Cirlot speaks of dolls...
View ArticleThe Power of Wildness in the Times of Dystopia
At least for me, it has been a season for dystopian novels. After finishing Handmaid’s Tale and its sequel The Testaments, I moved on to reread 1984. When a cruel new law was recently passed in Poland...
View ArticleReading The Red Book (31)
“Little good will come to you from outside. What will come to you lies within yourself. But what lies there!” C.G. Jung, The Red Book, chapter XVIII (Liber Secundus) Chapter XVIII of Liber Secundus is...
View ArticleMaster Arnold Böcklin
Arnold Böcklin (born in 1827) was a Swiss symbolist painter, whose work The Plague (1898) has recently emerged as the emblem of our moment in time. It seems that through his symbolist lens he managed...
View ArticleReading The Red Book (32)
Chapter XIX of Liber Secundus (part II of The Red Book) is called The Gift of Magic. The Soul wants Jung to accept the gift of magic represented by “a black rod, formed like a serpent-with two pearls...
View ArticleReading The Red Book (33)
“One can certainly gain outer freedom through powerful actions, but one creates inner freedom only through the symbol.” C.G. Jung, The Red Book, Liber Secundus, chapter XX Chapter XX of Liber Secundus,...
View ArticleGender and the Cosmic Shift
Natural History Museum of Bern, Switzerland is currently running an exhilarating, colourful exhibition called “Queer – Diversity is in our Nature.” The thesis of the curators seems to be that the...
View ArticleThe Sirens as Psychopomps and Muses of the Underworld
I came across this beautiful description of the Sirens in Karl Kerenyi’s Gods of the Greeks (first published in 1951). It seems that far form being the evil seductresses often portrayed in literature,...
View ArticleReading The Red Book (34)
“We need magic to be able to receive or invoke the messenger and the communication of the incomprehensible.” C.G. Jung, The Red Book, Liber Secundus, chapter XXI We have reached the final twenty-first...
View ArticleReading The Red Book (35)
“I have united with the serpent of the beyond. I have accepted everything beyond into myself.” C.G. Jung, The Red Book, Liber Secundus, chapter XXI This is a continuation of the discussion of the final...
View ArticleA Hymn to Plant Life
While listening to a talk of Alan Watts recently, I was struck by one of his observations. He said that in Daoist inspired landscape painting was a statement against anthropocentrism, which sees humans...
View Article