When Jung asked the question, “Where did the gods go when they left Olympus,” he answered, they left Olympus and entered the unconscious of the modern and became “disturbances.” When Jung talks of “the gods” he sees them as the personification of archetypal energies. Those forces are timeless and course through all of us, so when a god “dies” it means the energy has left the concept, practice, ritual, dogma, gone underground, and, incognito, appears elsewhere. How do we, then, track those energies, and where do they reappear in such contemporary forms as consumerism, seduction by electronics, sociopathies, and personal symptoms?
This online course will explore how today’s culture copes with, or finds surrogates for the primal powers of nature, however disguised they are in contemporary cultural expressions.