To reiterate what I have noted in previous chapters, Jung portrayed the retorta distillatio as “a distillation that was in some way turned back upon itself,” and which “might have taken place in the vessel called the Pelican where the distillate runs back into the belly of the retort.”

Von Franz explains that the climactic phase of individuation is to be enacted by means of a radical transformation in which the erstwhile rule of the ego is surpassed in realization of the universal Self. But how, specifically, is the domination of the ego to be surmounted in a way that brings the Self to […]

In the terms of Jungian psychology, the meditation enabling the individual to consciously follow the retrograde movement of life energy entails the withdrawal of projection. This is what it means to “integrate autonomous psychic contents.” In the first stages of life, when the movement of energy is “forward,” myriad identifications are formed that serve the […]

The Klein bottle (left) and images of the Hermetic vessel (center and right)

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 […]

    Evidence confirming the ecstatic structure of the Hermetic vessel is found in its association with the symbol of the pelican. Read illustrates a form of the vessel called the “double pelican,” which “was mystically connected with the process of conjunction [the union of opposites].”   (back to Chapter 3)

The Klein bottle (left) and images of the Hermetic vessel (center and right) (Sources: The Klein bottle is from Martin Gardner’s Ambidextrous Universe; the vessel displayed in the center is adapted from an image given above; and the vessel on the right originally appeared in chapter 2.)    (back to chapter 3)

How can we effectively address the burgeoning chaos now shaking the foundations of our civilization and our very beings? It is because our ontologically entrenched habit system is coming undone that we have the freedom to move in a new direction. It is more possible now for us to “switch gears.” Into what gear do […]

I’m away on a trip somewhere with a group of people. For some reason, I must leave early, travel back. I really don’t want cut my stay short and go off alone at night, but I can’t stay with them. I must be on the train back by 8 o’clock that evening. It would be […]