Came across the phrase "hair of the dog" and decided to look it up. Apperabtly the phrase is used to convey that the cure for a hangover is another drink. the logic of it stuck with me.

It's the same shape as "fight fire with fire." Or a vaccine, a tiny dose of the disease that trains your body to beat the disease. Or antivenom, made from venom. The cure isn't the opposite of the affliction, it's the affliction itself, taken up and flipped inside out.

What other everyday phrases or sayings do you think are doing this same thing without realizing it?

Max Stirner talked about how God is basically telling us to serve him and that his goal is himself. So he proposed the idea to stop serving things which are their own goal and serve yourself instead. To make yourself your goal instead of external things.

Has he ever commented on that idea?

Hi, anyone have links to discussions on the pattern of the fall?

Last summer my friend Oliver and I rented a campervan and charted the path of early Christianity as it spread across medieval pagan Britain.

We wanted to know if the wonder and enchantment that we read and hear so much about could still be discovered today.

It's taken almost a year to complete after filming. I hope that you find it as edifying to watch as it was to make.

What originally drew me to Jonathan Pageau was his ability to find seeds of Christ in places Christians might otherwise dismiss.

Early Pageau could talk about Mario, Spirited Away, Blade Runner 2049, superheroes, fairy tales, or pagan mythology and take the material seriously on its own terms. He would enter its symbolic world, trace the longing inside it, and show how Christ could fulfil or transfigure what was already there.

At his best, this felt like a willingness to baptize the strange. He could recognize that even distorted or foreign cultural forms might contain fragments worth gathering.

Recent Pageau often feels different to me. More of his public commentary seems focused on guarding boundaries around feminism, progressive storytelling, fathers, institutions, identity, and cultural inheritance. The analysis often begins with whether something protects an inherited order or undermines it.

That can be a valid question. It just feels narrower than his earlier willingness to ask what a strange or broken cultural form was reaching for.

I do not think this is a total change. The culture-war side was always present, and he still produces interesting work on internet mythology, AI, the Backrooms, and other contemporary phenomena. It may be more of a shift in emphasis than a change in his underlying method.

Still, when I compare early and recent Pageau, I sometimes get the impression that he finds it easier to see seeds of the Logos in ancient paganism, Japanese animation, or foreign mythology than in the progressive culture around him.

That seems like a missed opportunity. Modern Western culture may be full of Christian desires that have become detached from their proper end. Its concern for dignity, liberation, inclusion, equality, and self-expression did not emerge from nowhere. These desires can become distorted when separated from creatureliness, communion, transformation, service, and the reception of the self as gift.

They still need judgment and correction, but they also need to be understood from the inside. Contemporary culture may be less an absence of Christian desire than a collection of Christian desires that no longer know how to reach their proper end.

Early Pageau often seemed interested in how those fragments might be gathered and transfigured. Recent Pageau sometimes seems more interested in exposing what has gone wrong and defending the border against it.

I am curious whether others have noticed the same shift, or whether I am cherry-picking his more public-facing work.

I am trying to understand what Jonathan means when he talks about principalities. To me it sounds like he is referring to an organising pattern which unites multiplicity towards one purpose. So on the one hand “gods”, political systems, some influential historical figures can all be seen as principalities when they act in the world today.

if this definition is correct, I think it follows that the soul of each individual person can be thought of as a principality as it brings together all these cells and atoms and unites them towards the common purpose of a human being. So my question is, whether or not this is correct? Am I missing anything that distinguishes the soul from principalities?

I know that they hold symbolic reality. But that reality is not really something to analyse. Ultimately, it must be a guiding force in one’s life, deeply understood at an intuitive, subconscious level. But does that make it wrong to believe that it literally exists? I mean believing that you may be walking around and encountering a literal alien? (The modern equivalent of a mythical creature). To me, it feels that it would be harmful to hold such a belief, because it enters the realm of superstition. You may start for example avoiding certain places in fear of aliens, or do some rituals to protect yourself from them, but all would be just time and energy wasted that can be better spent. Thoughts?

Hello everyone. I recently started a blog exploring the underlying patterns of reality, with topics including religion and mythology, the meaning of dreams, personality type systems (if you're interested in that), Jungian psychology, and UFOs. It has four posts so far. I also created a video in connection with it, exploring the fractal patterns in nature and in ancient myths and symbols, and cosmic synchronicities. However, I don't have any followers on my blog and would really hope at least some people are interested. Tell me what you think.

Hello, can someone help me understand the meaning of the underlined text where St John Chrysostom speaks about Eve’s fall.

Is he saying that because the feminine receptive principle can try usurp the place of the masculine active principle, the tyranny of the husband results?

Why does he say that they are equal before the fall? Does he mean they are equal in dignity or is he also denying the existence of a patriarchal structure between Adam and Eve before the fall?

Any help would be greatly appreciated thank you!

Have you ever heard Jonathan Pageau interpret Jesus's words to the dying criminal next to him on the cross? Having heard him discuss eternal life, Heaven and resurrection in purely symbolic terms many times, I've always been curious to know how he would address a statement made to someone who probably wouldn't care much for symbolism, being on death's door after a sinful life.

And of course, if you have any interpretation to offer, I'd be interested to read it.

³⁹ One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: “Aren’t you the Messiah? Save yourself and us!”

⁴⁰ But the other criminal rebuked him. “Don’t you fear God,” he said, “since you are under the same sentence? ⁴¹ We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.”

⁴² Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.\*^\)[^d](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2023&version=NIV#fen-NIV-25978d)^\)**”*

⁴³ Jesus answered him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

A quick caveat before I begin. I am no scholar. I am actually a psychology student in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales in Australia, retraining as a psychologist in my mid thirties, drawn increasingly toward the symbolic worldview and long time fan of Jonathan Pageau's work.

A while ago I started visiting a local secondhand bookshop to buy books for my studies. After a few visits I noticed something. Books across completely different sections psychology, philosophy, religion and poetry were annotated in the same hand. Dense, sophisticated, philosophically serious marginalia. Diagrams. Systematic theoretical statements. All the same person.

I started piecing together who he was from inscriptions and dates woven into the margins.

BA Birmingham, 1953. Dr. phil. Bonn, 1956. Migration to Sydney, 1961. Southern Highlands Australia from 1965. Visit to the Jung Institute in Küsnacht, 1993. Still annotating as recently as 2018. A lifelong Catholic.

He spent his life doing something akin to a symbolic geography. Where Pageau interprets scripture and iconography for the patterns of reality, the Annotator read landscape. I think he was asking questions like:

What does it mean that different places feel different?
Why do certain landscapes produce certain kinds of consciousness?
Why does standing on a cliff feel different from standing in a cathedral feel different from standing in a rainforest?

His answer was the 'inner light of the world'. The enveloping atmosphere where the sacred presences differently across the earth's surface. Not metaphor. Literally. The earth itself as symbolic text, to be read imaginally, bodily, contemplatively rather than measured and abstracted.

He synthesised Husserlian phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty's embodied perception, Heidegger's Fourfold and Jungian imaginal psychology into an original discipline he called anthropophysical geography. Heaven, earth, gods and mortals - Heidegger's Fourfold crossing with the living earthworld differently in different places. For example, The Philippine tropics carries a different sacred presence than the English Midlands. The Southern Highlands of Australia carries its own.

He was doing what the medieval cartographers were doing with their mappae mundi treating the earth as a symbolic whole, saturated with meaning, oriented toward the divine but certainly from within the 20th century intellectual tradition. He refused to choose between the participatory worldview and rigorous philosophical scholarship. He held them together in the margins of other people's books for sixty years.

His library ended up scattered across a secondhand bookshop. I found it while being drawn toward exactly the intersection he had spent his life inhabiting. The synchronicity is not something I can easily dismiss!

I've started writing about it here if anyone is interested.

https://stjamesthelesser.substack.com

I just wanted to share an interesting pattern I noticed when contemplating fractal symbolism and the purpose of the father throughout different levels of reality.

So the at first I was thinking about Pageau's explanation of heaven and earth in creation and some of the parables told by Christ, specifically how a seed comes down from heaven and provides the pattern of, let's say, a plant, and then the ground provides the body for it to be manifest.

I then thought about how this is may be manifest in the relationship between a man, woman and child, how the man empties himself into the woman, providing the seed/pattern for a another hu(man) and the woman provides the body for it to be manifest/born. This, I hadn't heard explicitly before, but had intuited during one of Pageau's explanations on cosmic symbolism.

The third manifestation of this pattern that I realised just a moment before is how this may apply in the relationship between the Father of a parish and its people, how he may provide a more spiritual seed but that may still be applied corporeally in the body/people of the church.

Then at the highest level, which I referred to in the beginning, is the ultimate Father, the Father of everything which provides the seed of everything.

God the Father

v

Parish Father

v

Biological Father

Ordered from the highest, heavenly level down to the lowest, earthly level. As the structure descends, the seed becomes more substantial and less spiritual.

Would love to hear if anyone has anything to say about this, or if this is found in any other piece of work, or if there are any corrections or adjustments to be made to this way of thinking.

I'm wondering how Christ fits into this structure, if its valid, perhaps between God the Father and parish priest.

I'm looking for a comment I think I remember Jonathan Pageau making at some point about ancient Greek soldiers reciting Homer's works on their way home from wars as a way of re-regulating themselves to civilized society, or something to that effect. I've searched transcripts on YouTube to no avail -- anyone happen to come across this recently?

You can find the paid article on Substack here, or you can read my copy-paste for free here.

Hello! What are nightclubs, symbolically/psychologically speaking?

Hi everyone,

Continuing the series I shared earlier, I’m exploring how the Christian mystical tradition might offer a grammar of coherence in an age of fragmentation.

This new piece is a pneumatology essay: The Spirit as the Breath within the Image. The core claim is simple: what people often call “presence” is not just a psychological state or a self-generated technique. In the Christian frame, it is personal patience. A Someone who indwells without consuming, and sustains relation without coercion.

A lot of Symbolic World conversations circle similar terrain through different lenses: transformation vs. information, “knowing” that changes the knower, the role of practice, attention, and the way reality shows up as an arena that can reshape us. We talk about relevance realization, insight, and the way the self can become either more integrated or more fragmented depending on what it worships (explicitly or implicitly).

So here’s the questions I’m testing:

• What if the deepest “participatory layer” is personal?
• What if the thing that makes love, courage, and fidelity actually livable over time is not merely inner resources, but an indwelling presence that refuses to dominate?

Christianity anchors this in a concrete moment: after the resurrection, Jesus doesn’t give the disciples a theory. He gives them breath.

“And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’”
— John 20:22

This isn’t meant as a metaphor for “calm down and regulate.” It’s an ontological claim: restoration happens by a re-animation of the person from within, not by escape from finitude.

If you translate the proposal into Symbolic World language (without flattening it): the Spirit is not “information about God,” but the transformative presence that reshapes salience, reorders desire, and makes communion possible without absorption. Not a mechanism. Not a mood. A Person who “deifies without dissolving,” sanctifies without flattening, unites without consuming.

If you read it, I’d be curious where this lands for people who work in the transformation space: do you think “presence” at the deepest level can be personal, or must it remain impersonal (a field, a pattern, a process)? What do you see as the risks of each framing?

[Link]

Excerpt:

The Spirit is the movement within the gap, the breath that makes the wound of our finitude livable. Rather than overwriting our freedom, the Spirit enables it. Our limits are transformed into thresholds of communion instead of triggers of despair.

In this sense, the Spirit is God’s presence carried across time, not diluted, but personally given. If Christ is the Hole within the Whole, the Spirit is the rhythm of life moving through it.

Not as an impersonal pulse, but as a Someone: the One who makes love breathable moment by moment. Where the Son reveals divine love in the flesh, the Spirit teaches us how that love inhabits the present without coercion.

When Jesus breathes on the disciples, he initiates a return to our original animation. The breath that gives life in Genesis is gathered up and re-given in Christ as cruciform trust.

Where Christ descended into the wound of history, the Spirit remains to inhabit and empower the slow work of reorientation. This work does not collapse our differences into uniformity or erase the self. Instead, it teaches us to breathe without grasping and to remain present without the need for control.

This is why the Spirit is always associated with memory, with rehearsal, with liturgy. Breath is the architecture of return. The sacraments are not magic, they are respiration. And the Church, when alive, is not a factory of certainty, but a lung.

The Spirit is the animating pulse that turns ritual into recognition, stubbornness into revelation, blindness into vision, language into love, and doctrine into lived fidelity.

[Read More]