We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have…
Coping with the times we are in: The Dark Mountain Project “The Dark Mountain Project is a network of writers, artists and thinkers who have stopped believing the stories our civilization tells itself. We see that the world is entering an age of ecological collapse, material contraction and social and political unravelling, and we…
Image: Thanks-Giving Square, Dallas Joseph Campbell Reflects about Easter Symbolism What has always been basic to Easter, or resurrection, is crucifixion. If you want resurrection, you must have crucifixion. Too many interpretations of the Crucifixion have failed to emphasize that relationship and emphasize instead the calamity of the event. If you emphasize the…
William Blake: plate from the First Book of Urizen “I live in my deepest hell, and from there I cannot fall any further.” (Jung’s response when asked how he could live with the knowledge he had recorded in the Book of Job. In Marie Loise Von Franz, Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 174)…
The reality of evil and its incompatibility with good cleave the opposites asunder and lead inexorably to the crucifixion and suspension of everything that lives. Since ‘the soul is by nature Christian’ this result is bound to come as infallibly as it did in the life of Jesus: we all have to be ‘crucified…
The Tablet of Shamash, 900 B.C. Carl Jung, on the symbolism of the Cross It seems to have been one of the most original intuitions of man that the right form to express the source of mana would be the cross…. It is an absolute irrational fact to me that vital energy should have anything…
Theophanes the Cretan: Jesus in Golgotha The Symbolism of the Cross Edward Edinger suggests: “To take up one’s own cross would mean to accept and consciously realize one’s own particular pattern of wholeness.” This invariably involves being suspended between successive pairs of opposites (like a veritable crucifixion), with its attendant suffering, and repeated…
C.G. Jung, On the meaning of the crucifixion Nobody who finds himself on the road to wholeness can escape that characteristic suspension which is the meaning of crucifixion. For he will infallibly run into things that thwart and “cross” him: First, the thing he has no wish to be (the shadow): Second, the thing he…