The tale of “The Spirit in the Bottle” has been embedded in my psyche for as long as I can remember. As a child, my favorite movie was “The Thief of Baghdad.” The 1940 version of this work seems to capture the mythic mood and magical quality of pre-Renaissance consciousness better than any film I […]

Bisecting this structure ….   (back to chapter 7)

This structure becomes contained….   (back to chapter 7)

This structure becomes enclosed within….   (back to Chapter 7)

Bisecting this structure yields ….   (back to Chapter 7)

  Above: Images of the anima mundi appearing in Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy: left-hand image from Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi, 1617; right-hand image from Leonhard Thurneysser’s, Quinta Essentia, 1574. Below: Less anthropocentric images of the anima mundi: Michael Michelitsch’s fractal image of the living earth (left) and Marina Radius’s bronze image of the owl, symbol […]

I and others had been warding off violent attacks in the dark. We were engaged in a desperate battle to save our lives. Then the lights went on and I could see many people who, in one way or another, were defending themselves against attacking snakes. There were several snakes that were being held off […]

Two images of woman with snake, from the Dream Art of Jungian analyst and artist Maria Taveras (These figures remind me of my own dream of snakes, reported in chapter 2, and make me wonder about my relationship to the anima.) (back to chapter 5)

Most essentially, modernism seeks to suppress the uroboros and preserve post-Renaissance order by moving to higher levels of abstraction. Therefore, when the classical order of continuous space and time was cast into doubt by the Michelson-Morley experiment, Einstein transformed physics by proposing a more abstract space-time continuum, yet one that still served as a field […]