Sampling from a wide range of mythic cultures—such as the Indian, Babylonian, Cretan, Canaanite, and, especially, the Egyptian—Neumann sets forth the basic pattern of development he called “centroversion,” the process through which consciousness achieves a well-formed and stable ego serving as the center of an individualized identity.

August 1. For the past four months, I have felt especially haunted. Almost every day I have been dogged by unexplained digestive symptoms that include abdominal pain, cramping, and nausea. In rereading Erich Neumann’s book the other day, I noticed that he refers several times to the “alimentary uroboros.” Neumann notes that “the uroboros is […]

Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz expresses a related idea in exploring ancient views on death and resurrection. Here von Franz focuses not on the uroboros but on the unus mundus, the One World, which, according to C. G. Jung, is “the potential world of the first day of creation, when nothing was yet ‘in actu,’ […]

In Mysterium Coniunctionis, Jung…portrays the alchemical opus as a series of conjunctions culminating in the realization of the Philosopher’s Stone. The final stage “of the opus alchymicum was indubitably the production of the lapis.” The Stone, says Jung, is a “symbolic prefiguration of the [S]elf,” and to prepare for the ultimate Self-consummation, one must realize […]

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Bisecting this structure….   (back to chapter 7)  

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

A theoretical question comes up about containment. This is a big problem for alchemy, since the heat generated in the Hermetic procedure is far too great for the process to be contained. But I think I have the answer and start writing it down on a large index card. Using both sides of the card, […]

The agricultural revolution also brought with it a momentous change: the animal realm was presently divided into the “Wild” and the “Tame.” Animals in the latter category, pressed into the service of human needs, were stripped of their Otherness, whereas those in the former category were now sometimes regarded more as alien beings to be […]

Above is an illustration of the Moebius strip as it given to the 3 + 1-dimensional human observer. It appears to us as a finite object in visual space, i.e., space that mediates light. But in its native 2 + 1-dimensional milieu, the Moebius structure would be experienced very differently. Here—as the lower-dimensional, sonorous counterpart […]