Dancing in the Flames
I’m excited to announce my first online reading workshop, starting 4/22/20 at 6pm PST, dedicated to Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson's Dancing In The Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness!
I look forward to sharing the work of some amazing depth psychologists, Jungian analysts, psychotherapists and scholars who will be joining us for each chapter.
This is an 8 week group that will meet every Wednesday evening via Zoom video conference, see 2nd image for lineup!
"The Age of the Black Virgin, the 12th and 13th centuries, was followed by the Black Death of the 14th century. In 1347 the Black Death devastated Europe and 1361 had killed up to one-half of the population. In today's terms, this would be the equivalent of a nuclear holocaust. It had enormous effect on the psyche and the future development of the world. Historian Barbara Tuchman writes, 'Survivors of the plague, finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved, could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they suffered. "God's purposes" were usually mysterious, but this scourge had been too terrible to be accepted without questioning. If a disaster of such magnitude, the most lethal ever known, was a mere wanton act of God or perhaps not God's work at all, then the absolutes of a fixed order were loosed from their moorings. Minds that opened to admit these questions could never again be shut. Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.' The fixed order Tuchman refers to is the hierarchical order of the feudal system. Not only was the rigid controlled patriarchal order questioned, but so was the Divine purpose of Death, which had hitherto been seen as part of the natural order. The plague was a catalyst for a major shift in human perception in many areas--in cosmology, in science, and medicine, in attitudes toward women, and in philosophy and religion. Unexplained and irrational, death was an insult to the created order of man.
The irrational elements that man so rigorously attempted to subdue after the 14th ce., and well into our own, are the very elements that we are now finally learning to creatively embrace in contemporary science, depth psychology, and the arts.
The underground, Dark Goddess is surfacing again to become the cathedra or the creative mind. This surfacing, first seen in its modern form in the visionary world in the first quarter of the 19th ce, is now finding its way into actual life, a life now experienced by most inhabitants of the planet as far more acausal than causal, far more inexplicable than explicable. Before we could arrive at this apparently chaotic state, however, rationalism had to bring us to the brink of extinction as a result of the mind's determination to enslave the body."
Excerpt from Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness by Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson
Books mentioned:
Dancing in the Flames by Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson
