In this epidose, we explore the hidden bridge between psyche and matter through the extraordinary meeting of analytical psychology and quantum physics. At its center is the unlikely dialogue between Carl Jung and a Nobel Prize–winning physicist whose inner life, dreams, and obsessions revealed that the unconscious does not stop at the edges of the mind. Drawing on Marie-Louise von Franz’s work, we explore how numbers are not merely quantities but living patterns that structure both inner experience and physical reality. The deeper argument is a cultural one: modern life has privileged measurement over meaning, calculation over consciousness. What is being asked for here is not a rejection of science, but an integration--where individuation, symbolic awareness, and psychological depth become essential for living in a world that has forgotten how to see meaning.

Note: Just as we were discussing the Pauli effect [lab equipment of all kinds would stop working whenever Pauli was in the room], my power went off, the Internet crashed and kicked us both out of the recording. We were able to resume but had a good laugh about "Pauli being in the room."

Books Discussed

Conversations with Marie-Louise von Franz (Inner City Books)

Number and Time by Marie-Louise von Franz

137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession by Arthur I. Miller

Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 13

The Jung-Pauli Conjecture and Its Impact Today (anthology)

Valley of Diamonds, J. Gary Sparks

In this episode we explore ancient Babylonian star lore as a synchronistic “heavenly writing” that links sky and earth through meaning rather than physical causation, drawing on the work of scholars like Francesca Rochberg and Gavin White’s book Babylonian Star-lore. These works allow us to connect Babylonian ideas about constellations, portals of the dead, and ancestral sky myths with Jung’s notion of synchronicity, Marie-Louise von Franz’s insights into number and myth, and Rick Tarnas’s view of the living cosmos. The conversation ranges through cultural astronomy (including Bernadette Brady’s work), the misdating and later dismissal of the Corpus Hermeticum, and historical episodes such as George Smith’s discovery of the Babylonian flood tablets in Ashurbanipal’s library, which emerged alongside Darwin, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud in a period that shook religious certainties. We also discuss how indigenous and Babylonian sky stories encode seasonal tasks and ritual responses to planetary configurations, Along the way, we return repeatedly to the need for a living, metaphorical relationship with the cosmos, arguing that when astrology is treated as a qualitative language of time rather than a failed “science,” it restores a sense of dialogue with an ensouled universe.

In this episode, we trace how the Romantic era still shapes inner life and culture, moving from Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley to Frankenstein and Guillermo del Toro’s new film to ask what they reveal about technology, AI, and the rejected “other.” We follow the radical lives and charts of Wollstonecraft and Shelley, reading Frankenstein as a warning from a mechanistic worldview that exiles feeling, relationship, and the feminine. Along the way we track Saturn–Neptune cycles and Pluto in Aquarius from the French Revolution and the steam engine to today’s AI moment, draw on Liz Greene’s view of artists as Saturn–Neptune mediators of the imaginal, and weave in works that speak to this moment including del Toro’s Frankenstein, and Rosalía’s orchestral track Berghain. We consider whether we may again be at a threshold when any new renaissance of consciousness will hinge on bringing feeling, imagination, and the feminine principle back into both psyche and culture.

Books and other material mentioned in the episode:

1. Andrea Wulf, “Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self”

2. Charlotte Gordon, “Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley”

3. Thomas Elsner, “A Flash of Golden Fire: The Birth, Death, and Rebirth of the Modern Soul in Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’”

4. Liz Greene, “Neptune and the Quest for Redemption”

5. Neil Howe, “The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End”

Film and television 6) Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein”

1. Simon Schama, “The Romantics and Us” (BBC series on Romantic art, politics, and the modern self):

Music 8) Rosalía, “Berghain” (single with Björk and Yves Tumor, from the album Lux) Official video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TKYd-pHo1A

Podcasts and online resources

10) Chasing Consciousness podcast episode with Jungian analyst Monica Wikman on dreams of the dying and the death process [September 24, 2025]