Shadow Work Stack
“Shadow Work” stack for those who bristle at the recent hijacking of this term by New Age fundamentalists, fake witches, and spiritual coaches, if such a thing can even be ethically appropriate. While it is much needed to counter today’s “Wild Web 3.0”—this love affair with love, light, unconscious neo-Protestantism and toxic positivism—it is devastating to watch it decompose in a vat of disinformation and ego driven, self-mastery, ascension rhetoric driven by this unconscious attachment to the archetypal patriarchal framework. The trauma repeats. Shadow is not ‘bad.’ It is the making of the shadow that is more capable of this qualification and New Age Fundamentalism repeats this wound. Brighter the light, darker the shadow. None of these books are by your local teen psychic, TV channel, or your niece on youtube, suddenly a witch. They are by authors whose life’s work and research aim toward deep change and contribution to community by looking at things the culture fears, whether through philosophy, storytelling, spirituality, or psychoanalysis. It is also important to differentiate that shadow work for craft was a work that had to be done in the shadows, and different than work done on the shadow aspects of the person themselves. These can be conflated and have throughout time. Both a work of the daimon, but here we hold the tension of these opposites of literalism and psychic depths for something else that emerges, a deeper truth on the left-hand path. This is the aim of reclamation and redemption of the Other cast out, within and without.
“New Age Fundamentalism” by John Babbs from Meeting the Shadow: “If the New Age is to begin to offer anything substantial to the reordering of life on earth, we Peter Pans have to land on ‘terra firma’, come back to soul, and begin the hard work of transformation—first in our own lives, then in the world in front of us here and now, not in some (conspiratorial) distant past or uncertain future.”
Carl Jung, “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.”
Books Mentioned:
Courting the Wild Twin by Martin Shaw
Owning Your Own Shadow by Robert Johnson
Romancing the Shadow by Connie Zweig Ph.D. and Steve Wolf Ph.D.
Embrace of the Daimon by Sandra Lee Dennis
The Lover & The Serpent by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Goethe’s Faust by Edward F Edinger
Under Saturn’s Shadow by James Hollis
The Shadow’s Gift: Find Out Who You Really Are by Robin Robertson
Unconscious Wisdom by Daniel Merkur
Shadow and Self by Joseph L. Henderson
Unconscious Logic by Eric Rayner
The Shadow of the Object by Christopher Bollas
Does the Internet Have an Unconscious? by Clint Burnham
Meeting the Shadow of Spirituality by Connie Zweig, Ph.D.
Into the Darkest Places by Marcus West
The Flight into the Unconscious by Wolfgang Giegerich
Meeting the Shadow by Connie Zweig Ph.D. and Jeremiah Abrams
Holy Daimon by Frater Acher