Jung’s symbolic attitude helps us understand Angels as symbols that carry messages, offer mediation, and demonstrate contact. They cross a boundary the ego cannot tolerate. Jung tells us that angels symbolize transmissions; he said that if angels “are anything at all,” they are “personified transmitters of unconscious contents.”
Santa Claus occupies a shared cultural role where consumer culture, family ritual, and childhood imagination intersect. In the current zeitgeist, he appears as a brand mascot, a mall employee, a streaming character, a meme template, and a seasonal workplace gaff. Many households treat Santa as an emblem to justify gift-exchange rules and attendance at holiday events. The “nice list” acts as a behavioral scoreboard that parents can deploy to maintain obedience with their kids, schools can echo the borrowed authority, and advertisers can amplify the promise of glorious rewards. Digital culture extends the influence of the myth through automated Santa trackers, package monitoring, and social feeds that stage evidence of Santa in real time. Santa also functions as a role model for adult generosity, charitable donations, toy drives, and anonymous giving. Contemporary debates cluster around parents propagating the myth with their children, equity in gift giving to keep status and power dynamics level, and the intrusion of capitalism and consumerism into a religious observance. The figure acts as a cultural symbol that combines desire, propriety, and communal ritual during the darkest weeks of the year.
Mortificatio is an alchemical term for the moments when your life-organizing identity collapses. We call it burnout, divorce devastation, depression, retirement shock, institutional betrayal, or a life-changing diagnosis. The alchemists called it death because the chemical content they were tracking suddenly became inert. Jung adopted the symbolic language because it perfectly captured a stage of psychological transformation that might lead to despair but placing it in a universal sequence provides confidence that this will eventually pass and new life will emerge.
Before the separatio cut, we may live in a state of participation mystique, a fused state that blurs the distinction between me and not-me. Separatio begins when we tease the strands apart. We learn self-inquiry that helps us differentiate what happened out there from what stirred in here. This alchemical axiom can help us distinguish between the concrete facts and our idiosyncratic meaning. Many practical dilemmas hide behind this confusion. A person determined to file for divorce may need an inner parting, not a legal filing. Once we sort the outer action from the inner psychospiritual task, our next steps become obvious. With each clean distinction, room opens for choice. This happens when we recall our projection and feel our own anger, envy, or longing. We need to place our issues inside ourselves and stop hammering on other people to make us feel better. Like skilled surgery, the perfect psychological cut is in service to the healing process. The Ego stops hiding inside self-service interpretations and meets the object as an autonomous other. That clarification can bring grief, because projections carry love and hope. The mourning that follows marks the withdrawal of fantasy from its host. What remains is smaller and truer, thus enduring. In this way, separatio builds a durable relationship to people and to reality.
The devil archetype carries three qualities: it promotes bestial violence of every kind, it tries to convince us that the material world is the only reality, and it fools us into thinking we can spiritually ascend through intellect alone. On a personal level, it gathers our disowned infernal traits—envy, rage, greed, and the wish to dominate —and seduces us into believing those qualities are virtues. Once we face our own devilishness and grant it a symbolic form, we can assume a choiceful stance. Lacking that, we try to evacuate our own evil by projecting it onto others and then punishing them. As Jungians, we understand that our inferior function will first present as an imp. Still, with kind concern and thoughtful opportunities, it can transform into an uncanny ally that rescues us from malignant innocence. In its subtle form, the demonic attitude tempts us into literalism as it attacks our capacity to reflect and hold a symbolic attitude. Join us as we circumambulate The Devil in honor of Halloween.
translation into eternity of that which has been created in time. Jung’s 1944 visions are a model for the greater form, an elevation to an objective form in which one’s entire history is transformed into a single accomplishment. In the end, we come to realize our lived experiences will abide in the collective unconscious. Lesser ascents stabilize a new perspective; the greater places are in the universal. This distinction clarifies the range of ascent imagery in dreams and visions. It also calibrates therapeutic goals against eschatological experiences.
Some mothers attack life in their children. They crush appetite, joy, curiosity, and initiative. They call it love or duty. It is not love. It is domination dressed as care. She withholds warmth to make the child obedient. She intrudes when the child needs space and vanishes when the child needs help. She shames tears, punishes play, mocks ambition, and polices the body. She turns boundaries into punishments and favors into chains. The Death Mother archetype is ancient and modern, requiring careful confrontation to free the parent and the child from its destructive grip.
Think of myths as the dreams of an entire culture. Those stories reside in the collective unconscious and influence all of us throughout our lifespan. Mythic patterns shape our attitudes, and when we recognize them, we can link our personal experiences to the universal. When you’re panicking, you’re under the influence of Pan; when you’re sunk in gloom, you’re on a night-sea journey like Odysseus. Jungians’ call linking the personal to the universal, amplification: take a symptom, link it to a myth, and you’ve shifted it from “my private defect” to “a shared force,” which gives us objectivity. Jung noticed that when we lose awareness of the mythic, those patterns secretly affect us and tend to act themselves out, sometimes recklessly. Today, we’ll help you bring these grand narratives into awareness and understand how they help and, at times, hinder you.
Solutio is Psyche’s method to facilitate transformation: our rigid ego is softened in symbolic water, allowing outworn attitudes to unbind. We can see this reflected in dreams of oceans and baths, or a wall of our house dissolving. This can show up when we slough off our work persona or a creative depression brought on by retirement. Analysis itself—ana-lysis—a deliberate loosening, can deepen the process by offering a safe container to let go and yield to the process. The work is careful because the waters that purify (baptism or tears) can also drown us (psychosis or crowd contagion). We require a supportive relationship, a daily spiritual practice, or the analytic hour to hold us as our ego reorganizes like a butterfly in a chrysalis. Once our ego solidifies, we notice we’re more permeable to symbols or less defended against feelings. We’re more skilled at breaking problems into their component parts with a determination to resist regressing. The alchemical process was not created; it was noticed as a natural pattern of transformation. It leaves us with more of who we really are, but we couldn’t have claimed until we became soft enough to receive it.
The calcinatio stage in Jung’s alchemy is about being put through inner fire—it’s when the ego undergoes a kind of burning away of projections, illusions, and inflated ideas about itself. This stage often brings intense suffering, frustration, and confrontation with parts of yourself you’d rather avoid. It’s about staying awake in the heat long enough to discover the truths behind your defenses. Sometimes it’s like sitting in hell and roasting. This raw, honest suffering is necessary for individuation. It’s not punishment—it’s Psyche’s way of depotentiating false structures so that something new and more truthful can emerge from the ashes.
The Buddhabrot pattern springs from a simple algorithm: you take thousands of starting points, run each one through the same formula over and over, and chart only those whose values grow without limit—these “divergent” paths form the spectral Buddha-like silhouette. Once you recognize the pattern, you see it everywhere. It’s visible in the rosette stained glass windows of Notre-Dame de Paris and Chartres, numerous representations of the buddha, as well as in the Vāstu-Puruṣa-Maṇḍala used as blueprints for Indian temples, and in the ancient chakra symbols that are now so common—proof that numbers are universal symbols tying Psyche to the world. This is a newly identified archetype: an algorithmic icon born of computation that reveals an underlying cosmic unity that C.G. Jung called the Unus Mundus. Dr. Harry J. Shirley joins us and provides an amazing initiation into this uncanny discovery.
From depths ancient and obscure, the shark emerges, slicing effortlessly through the primal waters of Psyche. It is ancient, older than trees, a remnant from eons before humans carried consciousness. With sleek lines and unwavering purpose, it embodies life’s earliest impulse: to hunt, to feed, to survive. No morality softens its edges; no sentiment clouds its gaze. In encountering the shark, you encounter life stripped bare: existence distilled into a single, relentless will to continue, no matter the cost.