Chiron Publications Blog
Jung and the Epic of Transformation Volume 1
In Wolfram von Eschenbach’s “Parzival” and the Grail as Transformation, Paul Bishop considers the significance for Jung of a masterpiece of medieval German literature, and a major work in the tradition of the legendary Holy Grail. Wolfram’s Parzival epic depicts a three-fold quest: for the hero’s identity, for vröude (“joy”), and for the mysterious Grail. In the course of this quest, Parzival himself is transformed from a fool into the lord of the Grail, and the power of the Grail brings about a collective transformation as well.
This is the first volume in a series of books, examining key texts in German literature and thought that were, in Jung’s own estimation or by scholarly consent, highly influential on his thinking. The project of Jung and the Epic of Transformation consists of four titles, sequentially arranged to explore great works from a Jungian perspective and in turn to highlight their importance for interpreting The Red Book.
- List of Abbreviations
- Grail Studies (in chronological order)
- Parzival/Parsifal Studies (in chronological order)
- Editions cited
- Acknowledgements
- Preface: The Grail and Arthurian Legend
- Chapter 1 An Introduction to Epic
- Chapter 2 Wolfram’s Parzival
- Chapter 3 Jung and the Grail Myth: Analytical Psychology as a New Form of Quest for Transformation
- Bibliography
Sanctuary: The Inner Life of Home
May Book Spotlight
Map of the Soul : 7, a capstone of a 3-album project by the world-famous band BTS, is intended to reveal the inner landscape of the human soul that is packed with rich symbolism and woven together with BTS’s signature sound and moves. Starting with the lyrics, this book launches into a deep, engaging examination of the album in the light of the psychology of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. The many layers of meaning embedded in the number 7 are brought to light, along with several fundamental concepts of Jungian psychology.
Fans of BTS from around the world will marvel at the depth of meaning in the songs contained in Map of the Soul : 7. They take the listener into deep reflection upon the meaning of striving and ambition, the perils of worldly success, and the resiliency of the human spirit. These songs are landmarks on the soul’s map that offer guidance for living and for relating to others and the world at large.
Like Carl Jung whose dreams anticipated the dark period of world wars the 20th Century witnessed, Dr. Stein suggests that the song Black Swan may be a collective foretelling of the dark, deadly period of the pandemic that overtook the world in early 2020. For 21st Century people caught in the profound complexities of modern life, Map of the Soul 7: Persona, Shadow & Ego in the World of BTS is like a compass that helps the seeker to find their way.
This poignant collection, compiled from Maxine Hong Kingston’s healing workshops, contains the distilled wisdom of survivors of five wars, including combatants, war widows, spouses, children, conscientious objectors, and veterans of domestic abuse.
Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace includes accounts from people that grew up in military families, served as medics in the thick of war, or came home to homelessness. All struggle with trauma – PTSD, substance abuse, and other consequences of war and violence. Through their extraordinary writings, readers witness worlds coming apart and being put back together again through liberating insight, community, and the deep transformation that is possible only by coming to grips with the past.
Chiron Author Featured in New York Times
This poignant collection, compiled from Maxine Hong Kingston’s healing workshops, contains the distilled wisdom of survivors of five wars, including combatants, war widows, spouses, children, conscientious objectors, and veterans of domestic abuse.
Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace includes accounts from people that grew up in military families, served as medics in the thick of war, or came home to homelessness. All struggle with trauma – PTSD, substance abuse, and other consequences of war and violence. Through their extraordinary writings, readers witness worlds coming apart and being put back together again through liberating insight, community, and the deep transformation that is possible only by coming to grips with the past.
May Newsletter
July 12: Fully online
If you want to get to know someone, listen to their story of home. Intimacy builds as we ask: Where do you come from? What did you leave behind? Where do you feel safe? In Sanctuary, these questions are explored by Jungian analysts, architects and historians, scientists, and storytellers. Contributors also consider how climate change, Black Lives Matter, and an unprecedented wave of global refugees are impacting our notions of home and hospitality.
C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time: Volume 9 of the Collected Works of Marie-Louise von Franz
Marie-Louise von Franz believed fairytales to be the purest and simplest expressions of the collective unconscious. Too often the interpreter regresses to a personalized approach, however, heroes and heroines are abstractions that embody collective archetypes. The innumerable variations within the same fairytale told in different cultures are like a musical theme crisscrossing humanity. In Volume 8, von Franz establishes that there is only one psychic fact to which the fairytale addresses itself, namely, the SELF.
Some fairytales emphasize the beginning phases of this experience by dwelling on the shadow, others draw attention to the anima and animus, while still others hint at the unobtainable treasure. This volume contains new and updated translations of The Interpretation of Fairytales along with Anima and Animus in Fairytales and combines them into a single volume, clarifying the Jungian approach to interpreting fairytales and offering a deep dive into anima and animus.
The anima and the animus deliver to consciousness the “life-affirming fruit.” Individuation requires engagement with these contra-sexual archetypes, but von Franz observes that “Anima and animus are not always happy to have this relationship—they lose part of their power when they are made conscious.” She further warns of the inflation resulting from possession by them and points out that the animus “loves to create an atmosphere of mist in which nobody can find orientation.” These are supra-personal elements of psychic life capable of breaking beyond the tendency of consciousness to become one-sided. This second section of Volume 8 provides an insightful explanation of a woman’s encounter with her animus and a man’s encounter with his anima.
Aurora Consurgens, the rising sun, is a vision forged in the pseudo-Aristotelian tradition that became a cornerstone of medieval Church doctrine and the centerpiece of the Dominican and Franciscan traditions. While its authorship has been shrouded in mystery and controversy, Marie Louise von Franz furnishes ample evidence that this was a final work of Thomas Aquinas, a Doctor of the Church. His vision begins with an anima figure of the Sapentia Dei.
This medieval alchemical text is rich in symbolism and offers a glimpse into how unconscious contents can be understood through their interactions with the material world. Marie Louise von Franz places Aurora Consurgens squarely in the tradition of visionary spiritual writings similar to the visions of Hildegard von Bingen or John of Patmos. Aquinas’s visions and his final commentary on the Song of Songs appear to have been the result of a state of ecstasy into which he fell just before his death. Marie Louise von Franz excavates a psychological treasure from his work.
Saint Niklaus von Flüe, the patron saint of Switzerland, was held in the highest esteem by both CG Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz. Jung even declared him the Patron Saint of Psychotherapy, due to the Saint’s deep inward reflections and profound experiences. His visions reportedly began while still in his mother’s womb and continued until his death. One of his later visions was a terrifying image of the face of God. Von Franz saw Niklaus as the shadow brother of Christ and wrote of him as the alchemical Anthropos, a universal man. His visions were an evolution of Christian mysticism.
Saint Perpetua was a young Christian woman put to death in 203 AD in the Roman arena at the age of 22. Her profound visions occurred days before her death. Von Franz penetrates these images, suggesting they were revelations of a new, Christian God-image breaking through from the collective unconscious into the animus of young Perpetua.
Marie-Louise von Franz is at her very best as she unravels the mysteries held within the visions of these two saints.
Volume 3 turns to the Maiden’s Quest within fairytales.
The maiden/heroine navigates a complicated maze of inner and outer relationships as she builds a bridge to the unconscious. The heroine contends with the animus in many forms like a devouring and incestuous father, demonic groom, the beautiful prince, an androgenous mother, a cold dark tower, and through conflict with the evil stepmother.
Dangers and pitfalls await her as the conscious feminine strives to make connections with the unconscious masculine. The maiden is the undeveloped feminine and the promised fruit of her struggle with the animus is the coniunctio. Volume 3 is a masterwork of cross-cultural scholarship, penetrating psychological insight, and a strikingly illuminating treatise. With her usual perspicacity and thoroughness, von Franz gathers countless fairytale motifs revealing a myriad of facets to the maiden’s quest.
Von Franz’s prodigious knowledge of fairytales from around the world demonstrates that the fairytale draws its root moisture from the collective realm. This volume continues where Volume 1 left off as von Franz describes the fairytale, “suspended between the divine and the secular worlds (…) creating a mysterious and pregnant tension that requires extreme power to withstand.” The resistance of the great mother against the hero and his humble origins, as well as the hero freeing the anima figure from the clutches of the unconscious are universal archetypal patterns. The spoils retrieved by the hero symbolize new levels of consciousness wrested from the unconscious.
Unveiling Sophia: Heart Wisdom in an Age of Technology – In the Spotlight!
“Taylor’s Sophia is truly a book to be read by medics and psychotherapists as well as anybody with a heart condition. It offers a competent, intelligent, sensitive passage through the quarrels of our time by addressing the complexities of the multiple forms of connection between body and soul that is responsible for heart coherence. Taylor draws upon a wealth of scholarship and clinical experience to capture the essence of what heals, and what kills the human heart. She captures the transcendent dimension that has never been explored with such thought-provoking arguments and elegant style.
After reading this book, the healer as well as the patient will understand why the actual emphasis on diet, medicine, exercise, is radically insufficient to grasp why some hearts heal and some don’t. As many many wisdom traditions have repeatedly taught, the heart has intelligence unknown to the brain; it is urgent that we learn from it.”
-Ginette Paris, Ph.D. author of Depth Psychology after Neuroscience
- List of Figures
- List of Plates
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Why I Wrote This Book
- Why We Need Sophia Now
- Heart Rate Coherence: The Bridge between Logos and Sophia
- SECTION ONE: THE PHYSICAL HEART
- SECTION TWO: DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY AND THE HEART
- SECTION THREE: THE ARCHETYPAL HEART
- SECTION FOUR: SPIRITUAL TRADITIONS AND THE HEART
- APPENDIX A: CASE STUDIES
Psychology and Spirituality: Now Available!
While the Jungian approach to spirituality departs from specific religious beliefs and practices and does not privilege any in particular, it retains an attitude of respect for the variety of experiences of the numinous and for all God images. Spirituality is a central feature of the individuation process.
The essays in this volume of The Collected Writings of Murray Stein are dedicated to reflecting on and expanding this core principle.
-The Dream of Wholeness
-On Modern Initiation into the Spiritual
-“New Wine Needs New Skins”
-Intimacy and the Mystery of Transcendence
-Spirituality in the Psychoanalytic Context
-The Search for Meaning
-Synchronizing Time and Eternity: A Matter of Practice
-Light in the Shadow of Death
-A Lecture for the End of Time
-On the Emergence of Meaning
-The Mystery of Creativity – A Journey in Pictures
-The Mystery of Transcendence – A Dream For Our Time
-The Marriage of Anima and Animus in the Mystery of -Individuation
-Foreword for Jesus as Witnessed by the Disciple He Loved, by Alan Asay
Murray Stein, Ph.D. is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the International School of Analytical Psychology Zurich (ISAP-ZURICH). He is a founding member of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts (1977) and of the Chicago Society of Jungian Analysts (1980). He was president of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP) from 2001 to 2004 and President of ISAP-ZURICH from 2008 to 2012.
C.G. Jung as Artisan – Named a 2023 IAJS Book Award Winner!
C.G. Jung as Artisan –
Cross Connections with India: Considerations in
Times of Crisis
Named a 2023 IAJS
Book Award Winner
C.G. Jung as Artisan – Cross Connections with India: Considerations in Times of Crisis, by author Evangeline Rand, was recently named a 2023 International Association for Jungian Studies (IAJS) Book Award Winner in the Historical Category.
C.G. Jung as Artisan – Cross Connections with India: Considerations in Times of Crisis is a richly illustrated, carefully interwoven tapestry of cosmological cycles with depths of travelling, trade, and commercial significance through geographical history and politics, and the spread of philosophical, religious, and scientific ideas, personally engaged. The author’s life-long engagement with aspects of India started with her birth there in pre-Independence days. Jung’s short but extensive 1937–38 journey to India was on behalf of the Silver Jubilee of the Indian Science Congress Association in conjunction with the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Travel as alchemical and psychological exploration is epitomized in the difficult passage through the Isthmus of Suez and the later Suez Canal — ancient and contemporary mercurial transitional pivot between ‘East’ and ‘West’, with Alexandrian highlights. This was crucial to Jung’s transitioning opus, and the rebirth of the child of perpetual emergence, a potential harmony of unity and multiplicity, the core of the personality, the jewel in the lotus.
India’s fabulous cloth creations, coupled with thousands of years of flourishing skills of natural dyeing, have a complex place in ‘global’ trade. Loss of this pre-industrial natural alchemy leaves the world of ‘fashion’ and its fabrications as second only to the oil industry as global polluters. An archived business card indicted that Jung had visited “cloth merchants and manufacturers” in the South India city of Madurai when he and his travel companion had branched off on their own enquiries. Further tiny clues in Jung’s biography, freshly discovered, provide threads of fabric’s significance woven in the matrix of Jung’s life and depth psychology. They further thread us across time and space to a particular contemporary group of Indian and Canadian artisans, the “good ship Maiwa,” inspired by Gandhi’s Kadhi politics, living ancient skills engaging eco-ethics and economy — Sophia’s wisdom of the sensual, living a sustainable alchemy, an experiential knowing, a quick silver of the practice of healing and creating beauty.
Physicist Wolfgang Pauli, deeply inspired by his travel to India, highlighted for Jung the significance of symbol laden primary number and its Euclidean geometry for what the “unknown woman” wants to say — ancient and contemporary, wholehearted and particular, scientific and religious, causal progress and acausal contexts — that Jung began to illuminate at the end of the Second World War. Here it is further embroidered through the tenfold geometric tetractys of the 2nd or 3rd century Axiom of Maria, — the prophetess, the Jewess, still a potential spirit guide towards non-denominational conversations. The overall direction of this book is to prepare ground for an expanded sense of Self through which to consider Depth Psychology in its grounded and dancing aesthetic contribution to global, practical, and political well-being, resonating in some of the earliest Indian art and design. Jung recognized that the future of psychology lies not so much in ‘therapy’ but in a unified knowledge of Nature’s ordering, and humankind’s place within it, a re- honouring of the Lord of the Dance who subdues ignorance.
Purchase the book, C.G. Jung as Artisan
What Others Are Saying
about C.G. Jung as Artisan
“It is the extraordinary achievement of Jung as Artisan to take up where Jung left off in his alchemical, astrological, dreaming, wood carving, stone carving, painting, sketching, expansive writing, etc., intimations of wholeness and interdependence. Going deeply into Jung’s actual voyages beyond Europe, Rand makes them into a relinquishment of Eurocentrism. She connects esoteric Jung to pragmatic theorist Jung to artisan Jung, he who offers the twenty-first century a practice and a way. Through Jung as Artisan, we make our painful way to a new cosmovision.”
—Susan Rowland, PhD, Author & Professor, Depth Psychology & Archetypal Studies,
Pacifica Graduate Institute, California
“Dr. Rand’s experience as a depth psychologist, traveller, teacher, and artisan come together in this masterpiece of trans-disciplinary connections that allow for the emergence of a unique perspective which is both profound and timely. Weaving together personal experiences, academic research and highly cultivated insights, the author creates detailed links between depth psychology, modern quantum physics, artisan-based activities and pressing social issues. The importance of creating art with our hands is emphasized as being a key factor to assist through times of darkness and disintegration in order to allow for the emergence of new attitudes that can re-enchant ourselves and the world that we want to create and contribute to. Dr Rand’s voice is an urgent call to personal responsibility as we enter an age of individuality.”
—Duanita G. Eleniak, PhD, Art Therapist, Social Worker, Philosopher of Consciousness Studies
“Dr. Rand’s masterpiece, Considerations in Times of Crisis, lets me, the reader, experience the excitement and terror of living life in interconnected worlds. Following threads of her own life, Dr. Rand lovingly weaves a rich tapestry and lets us feel the uncomfortable tensions between and amongst its layers. Her insights, filtered through a canopy of cultural diversity, richly nourish the reader throughout.”
—Eberhard Riedel, PhD, Author of Collective Trauma: A Human Ecosystems Perspective
“In C.G. Jung as Artisan, Evangeline Rand takes the reader on a remarkable tour through the psychology of C.G. Jung, on a route that runs from the spice trade and Indian textile art to quantum mechanics. Her command of such wide-ranging material is impressive, and she presents it with grace and style. A pleasure to read as well as to learn from. Highly recommended.”
—George Hogenson, PhD, Jungian Analyst
Table of Contents
-STEPPING FORWARD
-SECTION I. GROUNDING PSYCHOPHYSICAL THEORY: DREAMING, PLAYING, AND MATHEMATICAL VESICA ROOTS
-SECTION II. SUEZ CANAL AND ISTHMUS: HINTS OF A GEOGRAPHICAL AND HISTORICAL “VESICA” FOR TRANSITIONAL TRAVELLING IN TIME AND SPACE
-SECTION III. NEW BIRTH: HANDS-ON MAIWA ETHICS FOR DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY
-SECTION IV. WOMAN WARRIOR WISDOM: W.W.W
-EPILOGUE: A COW AT THE CAPITOL
-APPENDICES
-BIBLIOGRAPHY
-INDEX
-FIGURES
-ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Purchase the book, C.G. Jung as Artisan
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