SPIRIT & PSYCHE

This theme covers a vast terrain of topics connected to the identity of the human soul and its relationship with dimensions of reality we call spiritual, as well as its communion with intelligences we call divine or daimonic.  It embraces the imaginal world of Henry Corbin – the liminal space between the world and the spirit – and the far reaches of the human imagination which is able see beyond the material plane in a myriad of mysterious ways. It also includes the metaphysics of premodern and esoteric cosmology, the hermeneutics of divinatory practices (such as astrology, tarot and I Ching), many forms of magic and ritual, and contemporary practices of spiritualism, channelling and mediumship.  It embraces the rise of psychoanalysis in the 20th century which led to Jung’s analytical psychology and the archetypal and transpersonal perspectives which developed from his work, and addresses the nature of consciousness itself through the lens of philosophy, symbol, myth and dreamwork.  Overall, the theme provides an umbrella for exploring the spirit-mind-soul-body relationship and extraordinary experience – the miraculous, the psychedelic, the mystical, the ‘paranormal’, the prophetic and the plain weird!