The spiral is the age-old intuitive symbol of spiritual development and our identity with the universe. It is found in cultures the world over and reflected in shamanism, serpent cults, dragon lore, geomancy, magic, mysticism and ritual art and dance throughout history.
As ‘re-volution’ or ‘re-evolution’, the spiral progression is symbolic of the transpersonal route to that higher level of consciousness which is sought by all esoteric and occult systems. Paralleling these inner movements of the psyche which indicate the transformative and the integrative are movements in physical space: the vortex, or involution, representing an opening or re-awakening; the circumambulatory…
‘In finding out who my real parents were and that I had an extended family around the world, I realised I was having to re-enter my life as a different person’.
I had only two memories from the first decade of my life. A pair of extremely significant events, through the pressure of the powerful emotions they generated, caused a long eclipse of memory, or memories that were denied, of a time of innocence before I came to know the truth about myself, a time of which I was unconsciously resentful.
Shakespeare, whose characters seem to have become our mythology…
The day before 9/11, financial markets worldwide suddenly slumped — had they somehow sensed the imminent catastrophe? Was it ‘the most important crime of insider trading ever committed’?
The world’s stock markets ‘knew’ 9/11 was coming, says a global market researcher on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the disaster.
For 18 months prior to 9/11, the world’s financial markets were in continuous decline and then, on September 10, 2001, their values suddenly plummeted, recalls the Dutch global market analyst Herma Koornwinder.
As proof, she produced a dramatic sequence of graphs covering the downward trends of the world’s stock…
Two hundred years ago, the English essayist and painter William Hazlitt was in the middle of a tragi-comic love affair which led to a notorious literary confession that reverberated through the nineteenth century
In August 1820, William Hazlitt moved into rooms at 9 Southampton Buildings in Holborn, London. The Walker family’s lodging house was the stage on which the worst ordeal of the writer’s life was set over the next three years, as described in his notorious account of erotomania, the Liber Amoris (‘Book of Love’).
An irrational obsession with Sarah, the daughter of Maciah, a tailor, and Martha Walker…
A review of Farewell to Democracy? Lessons Past and Present, by Jack Luzkow (Zero Books, UK £9.99 / US $14.95, March 2021)
The first thing that came to mind when I received a copy of this book was: is there really a need for that question mark in the title?
I just wish history professor Jack Luzkow had delayed publication to add a chapter about the effects of the covid-19 catastrophe on his arguments. That question mark, for many readers, is already superfluous.
Jungian literary criticism can illuminate the deep structure of narrative fiction, as in a reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
In the classical Jungian method, literature is considered in relation to the collective and the personal unconscious and the archetypes which compose them.
As a branch of psychoanalytic criticism, the practice of Jungian literary criticism follows many paths, one of the most important being the discovery and explanation of recurring archetypal patterns of symbol, character, theme and genre, and also of myth which, Jung believed, could be regarded as a kind of projection of the unconscious.
It comprises a tradition which…
How visionary scientists have arrived at a vital new understanding of consciousness by repudiating the ‘metaphysics of materialism’
The nature of a ‘Copernican revolution’ is to change everything for everybody. The understanding that the Earth was not the centre of the universe, that, like the other planets, it was in orbit about the sun, resulted from the work of the Renaissance polymath Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543).
The second Copernican revolution was caused by the theory of evolution, proposed by Charles Darwin (1809–82), and the acceptance of deep time. …
‘What truly matters in Jung’s message is the understanding that we are ultimately grounded in something infinite and eternal, and that our lives as finite beings, illusory as they be, serve a divine purpose.’ Bernardo Kastrup
In the summer of 1940, despite the tribulations of the time, a meeting took place at Moscia, overlooking Lake Maggiore on the Swiss-Italian border, at which the depth psychologist Carl Gustav Jung gave a surprise extempore talk in response to the main speaker at the event, the Basel mathematician Andreas Speiser.
On this occasion, at the Eranos discussion group founded in 1933 for humanistic…
A review of Ghosts of Atlantis: How the Echoes of Lost Civilizations Influence Our Modern World by J Douglas Kenyon (US $25, April 2021, UK £19.99, May 2021)
A crucial and topical thread running through this new book is how many researchers seeking genuine scientific advancement are thwarted by the reductionist-materialist paradigm of the establishment.
In referring to catastrophist Immanuel Velikovsky’s theory of ‘cultural amnesia’, Kenyon says that only by overcoming its ‘Great Forgetting’ can humanity rediscover the heights of spiritual and technological advancement of our distant ancestors’ Atlantean civilization — destroyed, under Kenyon’s discussion, 12,000 years ago by comet…
A review of Forgotten Civilization: New Discoveries on the Solar-Induced Dark Age by Robert M Schoch with Catherine Ulissey (Inner Traditions, US $24.99, March 2021 / UK £18.99, April 2021)
With his 2012 book Forgotten Civilization, geologist Robert Schoch put forward his theory that the last ice age ended suddenly about 9700BCE due to coronal mass ejections from the Sun which wiped out the high culture of the time. Humanity was cast back into a ‘dark age’ lasting thousands of years, civilization reappearing only about 3500BCE with dim racial memories and latent faculties waiting to be rediscovered.
Now we have…
