A Glossary of Terms — The Thinking Press

53 terms

A

Adjurations: Formal commands addressed directly to a spirit, invoking a higher authority, rather than requests or prayers addressed to God on the spirit's behalf. — The Cudgel of Demons
Albedo: The whitening: the washing of what the black has broken down, a first clarity and purification, ruled by the moon. — Alchemy
Anima and Animus: The contrasexual figure within, the bridge between the conscious personality and the unconscious, and a chief carrier of projection. — C. G. Jung
Apollo and Dionysus: The two drives of Greek tragedy: the Apollonian gift of form, measure, and clarity, and the Dionysian torrent of life, ecstasy, and dissolution. — Friedrich Nietzsche
Appearance and Reality: Everyone sees what you appear to be; few touch what you are. Men judge more by the eye than by the hand. — Niccolò Machiavelli

C

Citrinitas: In some traditions a dawning between white and red, when the light of the sun first touches the purified matter. — Alchemy
The Collective Unconscious: A deeper layer shared by all people, whose archetypes surface again and again in myth, religion, and dream, in every age. — C. G. Jung
The Common Good: In the Discourses, it is not private advantage but the common good that makes cities great, and that is best kept by free republics. — Niccolò Machiavelli
Coniunctio: The sacred marriage of sun and moon, king and queen, sulfur and mercury, from which the new and whole thing is born. — Alchemy

D

The Death of God: Not a boast but a diagnosis: the faith that had held a civilization’s values together had died, and the consequences had not yet arrived. — Friedrich Nietzsche
The Dream-Work: Dreams disguise their meaning by condensation, displacement, and symbol; interpreted, they become the royal road to the unconscious. — Sigmund Freud

E

The Ego: The center of consciousness, the “I” that narrates and steers, yet only one complex among many, and never the whole of the psyche. — C. G. Jung
Enantiodromia: The tendency of anything driven to an extreme to turn into its opposite, because the opposite was never absent, only denied. — C. G. Jung
Eros and Thanatos: In his late work, a drive toward life and union set against a drive toward repetition, dissolution, and death. — Sigmund Freud
Eternal Recurrence: The heaviest thought: could you will this very life to return, again and again, without end? Only a life worth repeating is fully affirmed. — Friedrich Nietzsche
Eternal return: Nietzsche's thought experiment: imagine living this exact life over again, endlessly, and ask whether you could will it. The treatise asks the same of meaning itself. — The Wisdom of Catastrophe

F

Fortuna: Chance, which rules perhaps half of our affairs, like a river in flood; the other half is left to us, and to what we build in fair weather. — Niccolò Machiavelli
The Fox and the Lion: The ruler must learn two natures: the lion, to frighten the wolves, and the fox, to recognize the snares. Either alone is ruin. — Niccolò Machiavelli

H

Hermetic: Drawing on Hermeticism, a current of Western esoteric thought that reads the material and spiritual worlds as mirrors of one another, so that transforming one's own inner nature is treated as a real, not merely symbolic, act. — The Magical World of the Heroes

I

Id, Ego, and Superego: The drives, the reality-bound self that mediates, and the internalized conscience that judges: three powers contending within one person. — Sigmund Freud
Individuation: The lifelong process of becoming the whole person one already is in potential, as the oak is already present in the acorn. — C. G. Jung
The Institution: In An History Beside Time, the hidden order of one’s being, the inward law and rightful prince of the soul, a judge that speaks without anger and cannot be bribed. It corresponds to Jung’s Self. — An History Beside Time

M

The Mask: In An History Beside Time, the face worn for the marketplace: useful armor, ruinous when crowned. It corresponds to Jung’s persona. — An History Beside Time

N

Necessità: Necessity, which compels action and reveals character; the wise ruler does willingly, in time, what necessity would otherwise force. — Niccolò Machiavelli
Nigredo: The blackening: putrefaction, dissolution, melancholy. The old form must die before anything new can be made. — Alchemy
Nihilism: The view that no value or meaning is built into existence itself. The treatise takes this as a starting condition to think from, not a conclusion to argue against. — The Wisdom of Catastrophe
Nihilism: The condition in which the highest values devalue themselves, and nothing seems worth anything at all, unless new values are won. — Friedrich Nietzsche

O

The Overman: Zarathustra’s image of the human being who has overcome the old values and creates new ones: a goal set beyond the present man. — Friedrich Nietzsche

P

Pastoral: Written from the tradition of care of souls: the practical, face-to-face guidance a priest gave a struggling parishioner, as distinct from formal theology written for other scholars. — On the Manner of Discerning and Healing the Bewitched
The Persona: The face worn for the world: a necessary adaptation to society, and a danger only when a person mistakes the mask for the face. — C. G. Jung
The Philosophers’ Stone: The end of the Work, able to perfect all it touches; for the philosophical alchemists, a transformed and incorruptible self. — Alchemy
Prima Materia: The formless, despised stuff from which the Work begins, found everywhere and valued by no one; in the soul, the raw and unredeemed material of a life. — Alchemy
Projection: The defense by which what one cannot admit in oneself is seen, instead, in someone else. — Sigmund Freud

R

Repression: The mind’s refusal to admit what it cannot bear. What is repressed does not disappear; it returns, disguised, in symptoms and in projection. — Sigmund Freud
Return to First Principles: States and institutions endure by being renewed, drawn back periodically toward the principles on which they were founded. — Niccolò Machiavelli
The Revaluation of All Values: The task left to the living: to test every inherited value, and to create values that can stand without borrowed authority. — Friedrich Nietzsche
Rubedo: The reddening: life re-entering what was purified, the completion of the Work in the stone, the sun, and the gold. — Alchemy

S

The Self: The ordering center of the whole psyche, conscious and unconscious together, the totality toward which a life can grow. — C. G. Jung
The Shadow: All that a person refuses to recognize in themselves. Unintegrated, it is projected onto others; made conscious, it returns as strength. — C. G. Jung
Solve et Coagula: The alchemist’s rhythm: dissolve what is fixed, and bind what is dissolved into a new and stronger form, again and again. — Alchemy
Soul: Scherner's technical term for the dreaming self: not a synonym for mind or ego, but the deeper, image-making layer of life that continues working once waking thought and its logic have been suspended by sleep. — Discoveries in the Realm of the Soul
Spirit: Scherner's term for the more ordered, reflective faculty that recedes in sleep, distinguished throughout the text from the freer, image-weaving Soul it leaves behind. — Discoveries in the Realm of the Soul
The Student: In An History Beside Time, the power that learns, counts, and builds; necessary, and narrow when enthroned. It corresponds to the ego and its one-sided function. — An History Beside Time
Sublimation: The redirecting of raw drive into work, art, and culture, so that energy is neither denied nor let run wild, but given a higher end. — Sigmund Freud

T

The Three Metamorphoses: The spirit becomes a camel bearing inherited burdens, then a lion that says “I will” against “Thou shalt,” and at last a child: a new beginning, a sacred Yes. — Friedrich Nietzsche

U

The Unconscious: Most of mental life happens out of sight, and what is hidden there still acts, shaping choices, symptoms, slips, and dreams. — Sigmund Freud

V

Verità Effettuale: The effectual truth: to study how people actually live and power actually moves, rather than imagined republics that never existed. — Niccolò Machiavelli
Virtù: Not moral virtue but capacity: the energy, foresight, and resolve with which a person meets circumstance and shapes it. — Niccolò Machiavelli

W

“Where Id Was”: His motto for the analytic cure: where the unconscious was, there the conscious self shall come to be. — Sigmund Freud
The Will to Power: The drive in all life to grow, to overcome, and to give form, deeper than the mere wish to survive or to be comfortable. — Friedrich Nietzsche
The Will Toward the Good: The press’s standard: an act is good only if it can still be called good now, in a week, in a year, and forever, and answers at once to the self, family, friends, nation, and world. Not a mood or a slogan, but a test. — The Will Toward the Good
The Witness: In An History Beside Time, the capacity to behold, born between the opposites, by which the world becomes symbol rather than mere weather; consciousness in its integrating work. — An History Beside Time
The Work: In An History Beside Time, the lifelong labor of wholeness, sealed with the command “Be whole”: Jung’s individuation, and the alchemists’ Great Work turned inward. — An History Beside Time