A Primer on how to approach Jung's work
I don't think there is a way to share anything from a Kindle book. What's the name of the book? It's possible there's a PDF floating around online or if it's old enough it might be on Archive.org.
In order to gain a better understanding of Jung's ideas on Mercurius etc, I recommend reading through the abstract of the book I posted a few entries back (top of the page). I just made my way through it and it's got a lot of great nuggets. Many passages that relate directly to things we've been discussing on the last page coming from Hermeticism in particular. I've also now read through a Wiki page on Mercury, and it was incredibly revealing - turns out he's actually one of the more powerful Gods and does all kinds of things. All kinds of symbolism associated with him. I now think when it says he stands at the beginning and the end of the Individuation process (the Alchemical transmutation process) it means he is the Shadow (first thing you must encounter and work your way through) and then later he splits into the Szyzygy of Anima and Animus, for the final stage. He is represented by many symbols - the Unicorn, Phoenix, Dragon, and Lion among others.
I looked at Amazon for Psychology and Alchemy - both the Look Inside and the customer comments. The beginning of the book, the part visible in the Look Inside feature, is incredibly easy to understand - but it seems to be a simple introduction he wrote because whenever he presented this alchemical material people were confused by it. But if you just go in and read that (on Amazon) I think it's pretty amazing in itself. And some of the comments do say this is not a place to start with Jung - you need a pretty solid basis first in his Individuation process and just his general theories. I suspect if you would get a book that explains the Individuation process that might be a good enough basis. I would go with one written by a modern Jungian analyst/scholar, like maybe Ego and Archetype by Edward Edinger or Murray Stein's Jung's Map of the Soul. These both get rave reviews from readers and are said to lay out the ideas clearly and comprehensively. Then maybe just take the plunge and dive in to Psychology and Alchemy itself? It would be a long term project - you would probably slowly gain understanding of it over a period of time. Something for deep contemplation now and then. But those books that you have to grow in order to understand are the ones that end up meaning the most to you.
If you to decide to tackle something like this I would also recommend getting Darryl Sharp's Jung Lexicon. It can really help when you run into terms that make you scratch your head. Maybe also have a dictionary or encyclopedia of general psychological terms at hand as well, though for that Google and Wikipedia would probably work perfectly well. Pro tip - if a Google search doesn't turn up what you're looking for try adding the word psychology - that usually does the trick. And often I find it's very enlightening to look up Wiki entries on mythological figures or Gods when you run across them - a wealth of material comes up that adds depth and richness to your understanding.
Hmmm - I think I just wrote up some kind of primer on how to approach Jung's work. That's actually a goal I had for this thread, though I still want to add some more at some point.
The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead
I was just looking on Amazon (man, I'm spending a lot of time and money there lately! :mad:) and discovered a book by Stephan Hoeller called The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead - you might have guessed by the title of the post :chuckle:.
This one really strikes my fancy! I've been fascinated by Gnosticism ever since there was someone here on the board posting under the name Gnostic and talking about it. I've already bought a couple of books about Gnosticism in general and read well into them, but it was lacking any specific reference to Jung, and at the time I wasn't really aware that he was into it. Now with the 2 of them combined in this book I'm hooked - especially after reading through the (very lengthy!) Look Inside. Turns out Hoeller is a pretty excellent writer too - I had found his YouTube channel before and started listening to a couple of his podcasts, but I didn't like them - don't really remember why. Oh, it might have been his weird voice and accent, if I remember right - made him sound really sarcastic like a comedian and also hard to understand. Unless I'm mixing him up with somebody else, but I don't think I am.
Oh, and to belatedy answer a question you asked recently Rosanna - Gnosticism is a variant on Christianity that does not rely on Faith or Works but on Knowledge. Gnosis means Knowledge. It's the root word in Agnostic, which means a lack of knowledge - as in "I don't profess any knowledge concerning a God or Gods". So it's not a statement of belief, as Atheism is ("I do not believe in a God or Gods"), but rather one of knowledge. The Gnostics didn't have a strongly systematized set of doctrines or dogmas, though they did write a heck of a lot (most of which was hunted down and destroyed, as the Gnostics themselves were, by the Roman Catholic church under charges of Heresy). But rather they tried to gain understanding of the religious through firsthand experience. Jung felt a close kinship to them, in fact he was basically a modern-day Gnostic himself because this is exactly what he did as described in his Red Book. His Active Imagination sessions were in a sense journeys through the depths of his inner underworld, populated by gods and demons and all manner of strange mythical figures. So in reading the works of the ancient Gnostics he recognized that what they were describing were the same kind of experiences as he had - they discovered the same inner world and the same figures.
In other words - the Gnostics were early explorers and documenters of the Collective Unconscious and its resident Archetypes.
In many ways Christianity does the same thing, as all religions do, but they've all unfortunately been heavily dogmatized and distorted in order to gain the obedience of the adherents, plus Jung always maintained that the Biblical account was terribly flawed because they saw God and Satan as separate entities - one totally good and one totally bad, and that's a complete misrepresentation of how things really are inside the psyche. Really Satan should have been the shadow side of God. Being split the way they are is analogous to a psychic schism - a form of cosmic Schizophrenia or split personality disorder. And of course it's very damaging to have something like that at the center of your belief system - the God image needs to be whole. A religion that denies a dark side to the Almighty breeds adherents who are split themselves, and project evil onto the Other - so they tend to dehumanize their opponents and allow the darkness to grow within themselves. Anything you deny and project will grow to monstrous proportions and destroy you. So sayeth Jung. Understandably, the church of Jung's day was not happy with him... :shadewink:
Anyway - I was hooked right away - the intro to the book is amazing. Also, it mentions Mercurius and Hermeticism, though I don't know how extensively.
