Category: Soul, Psyche, and History

“In My Life,” written primarily by John Lennon and released on Rubber Soul by The Beatles, is a small song that behaves like a visitation. Not an apocalypse. Not Sinai. Not thunder. Something briefer. Almost embarrassed by its own clarity. Which is perhaps why the question presses: why does God manifest so briefly? If divinity…

4 If “Tomorrow Never Knows” dissolves the self into cosmic suspension, “Eleanor Rigby” anchors it to the ground. It does not float. It falls. And in that fall, it establishes a gravity that popular music had rarely dared to sustain. Released on Revolver and written primarily by Paul McCartney, “Eleanor Rigby” represents an astonishing pivot…

In 1966, at the close of Revolver, The Beatles placed a song that did not close an album so much as open a threshold. “Tomorrow Never Knows,” written primarily by John Lennon and shaped in the studio under the direction of George Martin, does not function like a pop composition. It behaves like an event….

The medieval Black Sabbath was not merely an episode in the history of superstition; it was a ritual condensation of a fully articulated theology of evil. In the Sabbath, the metaphysical adversary took liturgical form. The Devil was not only believed—he was enacted. The Black Mass, in particular, represented the inversion of sacrament, the parody…

The history of evil in Western thought is not the story of a superstition that modernity outgrew, but of a profound metaphysical relocation. What changes from antiquity through the Middle Ages into modernity is not the intensity of evil but its location, its grammar, and its visibility. Evil shifts from cosmic ambiguity to personal adversary,…

Postwar Consciousness, Metaphysical Disillusionment, and the Structure of Modern Suffering The differences between postwar Europe and postwar America are often described in political, economic, or institutional terms. Europe is said to be regulatory, cautious, and bureaucratic; America is described as dynamic, expansionary, and growth-driven. Such descriptions, while empirically accurate, remain superficial if they are not…

World War II and the Psychological Structure of Late Modernity The Second World War is typically narrated as geopolitical rupture, technological watershed, or moral catastrophe. Yet these descriptions, though accurate, fail to capture its deeper transformation: the war marked the irreversible reorganization of Western cultural psychology. It did not simply rearrange states; it altered the…

A historical bridge for speaking about “spirits” in the language of modernity—without reducing them to metaphors Modernity’s reflex is to translate spirit into “hallucination,” “projection,” or “symbol,” and then congratulate itself for maturity. But that move is less enlightenment than evasion. It tries to solve the problem of agency by denying agency. What we actually…

Modernity’s reflex response to experiences traditionally described as encounters with spirits is to dissolve them into metaphor. Spirits, we are told, are merely hallucinations, projections, or symbolic representations of unconscious material. This move appears sophisticated, but it fails both historically and clinically. It explains nothing about the autonomy of such experiences, nothing about their coercive…

Translating Possession into the Language of Modernity Modernity prides itself on having abolished spirits. Drugs, we are told, do not summon daemons; they merely alter neurochemistry. Visions are hallucinations, voices are symptoms, agency dissolves into mechanism. And yet the lived experience of intoxication—especially in its extreme or chronic forms—stubbornly refuses this demystification. Users do not…

One of the persistent difficulties in reading Jung with conceptual clarity is his use of the word soul. Jung never defines the term systematically, nor does he confine it to a single register of meaning. Yet this is not a failure of rigor. Rather, it reflects the structural position Jung occupies between philosophy, psychology, and…

Christ, Totality, and the Turn to Alchemy in Jung Jung’s engagement with Christianity begins neither as polemic nor as apology, but as diagnosis. Christianity, for Jung, represents the most complete symbolic articulation of psychic unity the Western world has produced. The figure of Christ functions psychologically as an image of wholeness, reconciliation, and meaning—what Jung…