In this episode we examine how translation influences meaning across psychological and spiritual traditions. We discuss examples from religious and historical texts, consider the work of Giordano Bruno and Frances Yates, and reflect on “masculine” and “feminine” as symbolic principles shaping human experience.

Books Mentioned:

James Hollis Under Saturn’s Shadow

Frances Yates Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition

S.J. Parris Heresy (Historical Fiction)

Demetra George Mysteries of the Dark Moon

Iamblichus On the Mysteries

Plato Timaeus

Richard Gotshalk The Classic of Way and Her Power (Lao Tzu translation)

Erich Neumann The Fear of the Feminine

Iain McGilchrist The Matter with Things

In this episode, we dive into the hidden mathematical and geometric architecture of the cosmos. Inspired by the work of John Addey, we look at "Harmonic Astrology," which moves away from static house divisions toward a dynamic, wave-based view of the birth chart. We also explore the wonderful book by John Martineau--A Little Book of Coincidence: In the Solar System. Is the universe a machine or a symphony? From the "Seal of Hermes" to the mystery of the number 108, find out why your birth chart might be more like a piece of music than a map.

Other books mentioned:

• The Inner Reaches of Outer Space by Joseph Campbell.
• Jesus Christ, Sun of God, by David Fideler.
• The Little Book of Coincidence (originally an academic thesis called The Big Book of Coincidence) by John Martineau.
• Harmonograph: A Visual Guide to the Mathematics of Music by Anthony, who is John Martineau's grandfather.
• In Love with Venus by Angela Moore.
• Elements by Euclid
• The Quadrivium by John Martineau.

In this episode, we break down the mythology, music, and philosophy of Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde ahead of the Metropolitan Opera’s production this month. We trace the myth to its 12th-century Celtic roots and examine its psychological meaning using the work of Joseph Campbell and Robert A. Johnson. We detail how Wagner applied Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy to create the "Tristan chord," a musical innovation built entirely around unfulfilled longing. This is the opera that changed the art form and influenced many other artists beyond the operatic world. The myth itself sparked a revival of the “feminine” in the West, introducing a wholly new concept of romantic love that led to a change in consciousness itself.

In this episode, we examine the approaching Saturn–Neptune conjunction in Aries as a way to ask how cultures shape their myths, maps and collective identities using Spain as an example. We begin with Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl moment reclaiming “the Americas,” then explore how recurring Saturn–Neptune cycles echo through history in the blurring of borders, the collapse of old narratives, and the struggle between idealism and hard reality. We look at visionary rulers, explorers who mistook one world for another, artists who turned confusion into beauty, and political figures who fused devotion with rigidity. Along the way we consider how countries develop archetypal signatures, how illusions can structure entire eras, and how the arts often preserve what official histories erase. We close with demographics, future maps, and what this conjunction might signal about collective imagination and the choices we make together.

In this episode, we pick up from where we left before, tracing the thread running through science, symbolism, and human meaning. We return to the Pauli-Jung connection, Kepler’s mathematics, Fludd’s rejected cosmology, and the ancient Goal-Year cycles that linked planetary motion to deep time. We revisit Jung's notion that number acts as an ordering principle across cultures and discuss how ideas emerge, why some are silenced, and why others return in new forms. We move from buried archives in Zurich to Babylonian astronomy to questions about how humans create myth. The conversation ends with a simple challenge: what are you attending to, and how does your attention shape the world you live in?

Books Mentioned:

• The Innermost Kernel by Suzanne Gieser

• Atom and Archetype (Correspondence between Wolfgang Pauli and C.G. Jung)

• Psychology and Religion by C.G. Jung

• Answer to Job by C.G. Jung

• Divination and Synchronicity by Marie-Louise von Franz

• A Portable Cosmos: Revealing the Antikythera Mechanism, Scientific Wonder of the Ancient World, Alexander Jones

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]