Wearing Jung's skin like a pelt
Rune Soup
Gordon White
4.7 • 861 Ratings
🗓️ 24 March 2026
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Is magic just a less sophisticated form of psychology? That is probably the cornerstone claim of what I am calling 'Modernity's Magic'.
And in the next instalment of our series 'Hospicing Modernity's Magic', I want to look at:
- How psychology diverged from magic and why.
- Jung's role during his lifetime.
- What the magicians of modernity did with the 'legitimacy umbrella' they received from Jungian thought.
- Which parts of this journey do we take with us into the magic of today?
Chapters
- 00:00 Introduction
- 01:11 Wearing Jung's Skin Like a Pelt
- 01:57 The 19th Century & Roads Not Taken
- 07:56 The Red Book 10:50 Active Imagination
- 15:26 Jung & Astrology
- 17:59 Is Magic Just Psychology?
- 22:09 Synchronicity
- 29:17 The Yi Qing & Moments in Time
- 33:08 Synchromysticism as Omen Logic
- 35:26 Psychoid Archetypes & the Unus Mundus
- 43:00 The Post-Jung Pelt-Wearers
- 49:27 What to Hospice, What to Keep
- 52:32 Use Magic to Legitimise Jung
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You know the meme of that guy who jams the stick into the spokes of his own bike and tumbles down? |
| 0:07.2 | Only one civilization invented psychology, and that was us. |
| 0:10.9 | And we did it on the ground, having jammed the stick of our thoughts and imaginings have no reality outside of our head into our bike. |
| 0:23.3 | Modernity broke our theory of mind and also sent us crazy, so that we essentially had to |
| 0:29.2 | make up a whole new metaphysics of magic and the imaginal, because the one that we already |
| 0:37.0 | had, we said didn't exist. |
| 0:39.3 | And in this video, I wanted to look at some of the things we learned on that curious little |
| 0:45.9 | detour out of thoughts and imaginings have no intrinsic value and on the way back in. |
| 0:54.1 | And look at the impact that this detour had |
| 0:57.6 | on magic and which aspects of that curious little adventure we should take with us into the magic |
| 1:05.5 | of the 21st century, where plot twist, they might even work better. So let's begin with the bold title, |
| 1:16.5 | wearing young skin like a pelt. What do I mean by that? Well, there's some comedic, |
| 1:24.1 | comic justice to what happened to a lot of magic in the late 20th century, the last three or so decades of it, wearing young skin like a pepelt |
| 1:34.3 | after he died, using Jungian psychology to permission the doing of a quirky and safe magic. And there's a curious comic justice to it because we might have worn his skin like a pelt, |
| 1:50.9 | but he did rob our graves for their various jewels. |
| 1:57.1 | Many of you probably know that Jung was initially interested in did his initial research into the mediumistic capacities of his cousin. |
| 2:08.1 | And he was very interested in the thought of Goethe and so on. |
| 2:11.0 | The 19th century was a curious time. |
| 2:14.9 | You had doctors rubbing mercury on the gums of teething babies and being surprised |
| 2:21.8 | that they died of, like, teething shock. And you had scientists electrocuting dogs' balls, |
| 2:28.8 | and you had people dressing up in turbans and talking using gramophones to the dead. |
| 2:35.0 | Like, it was a wacky, wacky time, awesome in many respects, but also wacky. |
... |
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