Between Esotericism and Psychology:
Runes, Magic and the Mysteries in Jung’s Liber Novus

Presented by Sonu Shamdasani, Ph.D.

From 1913 onwards, in the course of his self-experimentation, Jung crafted a self-styled practice of the imagination and engaged with magic and Hermeticism in a syncretic manner. He came to conceive of his experiences as an initiation into the mysteries, which he sought to generalize as the individuation process. This talk reconstructs the parallel genesis of this esoteric private cosmology and exoteric psychology and their interrelations.

Sonu Shamdasani, Ph.D., is a London-based author, editor, and Philemon Professor of Jung History at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College. Shamdasani’s writings focus on Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), and cover the history of psychiatry and psychology from the mid-nineteenth century to current times. He edited for its initial publication a major work of Jung: The Red Book. Although well known by its title, until 2009 its contents had remained hidden from the public and from practicing psychotherapists. In 2003 Shamdasani founded, along with Stephen Martin, the Philemon Foundation, which sought to publish all of Jung’s works. Although Jung’s Collected Works had been published in twenty volumes, there were manuscripts and other works by Jung that remained unpublished.