To divine something is to appeal to the gods for their power of knowing. To use that power to foretell the future is called "divination." In Giambattista Vico's classic book New Science, he associates the modern sense of God as divine, meaning "blessed" or "holy," back to the pre-Christian or pagan sense of having supernatural powers of …
Category: Archetypal Psychology
Polyphony
"Songbirds sing. That is fact, not metaphor. They sing, and in the forest every morning, when a dozen or a hundred or a thousand individuals of six or ten or twenty different species sing at once, that is polyphonic music." When I first read these words in Robert Bringhurst's book, Everywhere Being is Dancing, it reminded me …
Imaginal Love
[Although I never planned to take this long of a break from WordPress, I have been finding it difficult to make time for writing and reading here. I can't, not that you are asking, offer any good reason for my prolonged absence. If I don't find time to make the rounds, please know that you …
“My Soul is Dark” by Lord Byron
I love this poem and Jeff's thoughts on soul and creativity. It's timely for me, echoing hints that I have yet to fully understand. I hope you enjoy it too.
Alchemy Class Notes – Session Twelve
"Enter alchemy – thing-words, image-words, craft-words. The five supposed sources of alchemy are each a technology. Each is a handwork physically grappling with sensate materials: (1) Metallurgy and Jewelry: mining, heating, smelting, forging, annealing; (2) Cloth and Fiber Dyeing: dipping, coloring, drying; (3) Embalming the Dead: dismembering, evacuating, infusing, preserving; (4) Perfumery and Cosmetics: grinding, mixing, distilling, diluting, evaporating; …
Theoria 