Anima Mundi School

James Hillman, in one of the most evocative meditations on alchemical salt, deepens Jung’s understanding of salt as feeling and Eros by describing it as the very mineral ground of subjective experience itself, that mysterious substance without which life simply passes through us as event without embodiment, experience without the bite-marks of hard earned wisdom, or, to put it more in the spirit of our time: a ChatGPT word-salad without the substance of a human spirit: “No salt, no experiencing, merely a running on and running through of events without psychic body.”

In psychological alchemy, salt is not merely a material substance but the capacity to feel, to suffer, to remember, to be marked by life; it is what gives blood, tears, sweat, grief, longing, resentment, regret, remorse and the pungency of revenge. Without salt there is no opus, because there is no genuine participation in the reality of one’s own experience. Hence the striking alchemical statement from the Golden Tract: “He who works without salt will never raise dead bodies.”

As Hillman puts it poignantly, to mine and find the salt of life is not to seek healing for the sake of perfection or even wholeness, but for the sake of life itself:
“We may imagine our deep hurts not merely as wounds to be healed but as salt mines from which we gain a precious essence and without which the soul cannot live.”

— Faranak Mirjalili in Alchemy & the Poetics of Matter: Eco-Mysticism and the Practice of Alchemy for a Wounded World (Thesis publication for the CG Jung Institute Zürich, 2026)

“Finally, it should be remarked that emptiness is a great feminine secret. It is something absolutely alien to man; the chasm, the unplumbed depths, the yin. The pitifulness of this vacuous nonentity goes to his heart (I speak here as a man), and one is tempted to say that this constitutes the whole “mystery” of woman. Such a female is fate itself. A man may say what he likes about it; be for it or against it, or both at once; in the end he falls, absurdly happy, into this pit, or, if he doesn’t, he has missed and bungled his only chance of making a man of himself. In the first case one cannot disprove his foolish good luck to him, and in the second one cannot make his misfortune seem plausible. “The Mothers, the Mothers, how eerily it sounds!” [from Goethe’s Faust] — Carl Jung in CW 9i

“It is with reluctance that I disclose the higher mystery.”

(the Devil in Goethe’s Faust before he introduces him to the “realm of mothers” which he cannot enter himself)

Blessed Mothers, Mater, Prima Materia, Anima Mundi day to all of you and all of the created worlds.

What a perfect day to give our Prima Materia class for our Alchemy & Poetics of Matter course. 🐍⚗️🔥

worldsoul

“Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her: powerless to separate ourselves from her, and powerless to pe*****te beyond her.

Without asking, or warning, she snatches us up into her circling dance, and whirls us on until we are tired, and drop from her arms.

She is ever shaping new forms: what is, has never yet been; what has been, comes not again. Everything is new, and yet nought but the old.

We live in her midst and know her not. She is incessantly speaking to us, but betrays not her secret. We constantly act upon her, and yet have no power over her.

The one thing she seems to aim at is Individuality; yet she cares nothing for individuals. She is always building up and destroying; but her workshop is inaccessible.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 🌬️🍃

Today we start our Alchemy & The Poetics of Matter course in collaboration with with Jungian analyst .mirjalili and Spagyric (herbal alchemy) teacher Daniel Wiseman .arcadia as our guest teacher who will help guide us into some novice hands-on alchemical practices with plants in the tradition of Paracelsus.
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Alchemy always was, and remains the art and science of Nature, and we hope to be able to give a tangible, lived experience of this during our 6 weeks together.

The course is full, but if you would like to join a next cycle, let us know.

Art credits:
1) “Night Gardens” by Mary Mattingly
2) “Marseus in the Land of Snakes” by Otto Marseus van Schrieck
3) “Dragon of Dartmoor” by Jon Carraher

“There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as before an ancient friend.” — James Baldwin, with thanks to from our cohort Ecologies of the Imagination, where we opened the course with .space with a journey to the moon 🌕 as she grows fuller into her scorpionic sting. ♏️

Alchemy has long occupied a contested place at the crossroads of science, religion, psychology, spirituality and even pop-culture. For Carl Jung, it offered a bridge—linking his psychology of the unconscious to his beloved Gnosticism and to a spiritual lineage he sensed but could not fully articulate within modern thought. And yet, in making alchemy psychological only, something of its living practice fell away.

The laboratory—the slow work with plants, minerals, metals, with messy matter—was gradually left aside, sublimated into metaphor. What had once been a scientia naturae, a way of knowing nature as alive and ensouled, became something to interpret and symbolically relate to rather than to engage with materially.

But alchemy was never meant to be a practice of the imaginal only. It was a precise, demanding, sacred and scientific relationship to matter and its building blocks, in which transformation unfolds through materiality—through processes that ask for patience, attention, and a willingness to be changed alongside the substance itself.

This 6-week course emerges from that tension between psyche and matter. Not to add “practice” as a technique, but to question the split between psyche/matter, above/below, heaven/earth altogether. Through dreamwork, study, and—if desired—hands-on experimentation, it opens alchemy as a living process rather than a symbolic system or map of the psyche alone.

In a time marked by ecological rupture, political division and a growing estrangement from the materiality of life, alchemy may offer not a solution, but another way to view the world and our place in it.

Join Faranak Mirjalili with guest teacher Daniel Wiseman for this 6-week course in collaboration with for this first public course of Faranak’s 6 year long research conducted at the University of Amsterdam and the CG Jung Institute in Zurich. (Link in bio)

In the imagination of antiquity, the moon is not only a reflector of the sun, but something more ambiguous, more intimate to the conditions and life of soul. She belongs to the threshold, and that is why the alchemists place her precisely there; on the border between the eternal and the ephemeral, where “the realm of the perishable begins… [and] souls… become subject to time.” (Macrobius)

It is from her that the dew descends, and as Jung writes, in alchemical language this dew is no sweet and innocent condensation but the aqua mirifica (miraculous water)—that subtle, living moisture which “extracts the souls from the bodies or gives the bodies life and soul.” This is a formulation of paradox, because it rebels against being fixed. Does she animate, or does she draw the soul out? The answer is of course both; the same lunar movement that ensouls is also already involved in the processes of dissolution.

Her moisture gives life, but as moisture she is also bringer of decay. The poets of old praise the delicacy of the new moon, its luminous tenderness, yet this beauty “veils her dark side,” which is entangled as an inseparable condition to that same beauty.

What is perhaps most touching is her connection to the Earth and her suffering: because she is the nearest of the heavenly bodies, she cannot remain untouched by it. She partakes in its rhythms, and in its suffering, its cycles of death, and in what Jung calls its “daemonic darkness.” The moon, in this sense, is not a symbol of purity but one of participation—of the soul caught in the mixture of light and dark.

Perhaps this is why she has so often been imagined as mediator, as one that stands in-between and like any image that must hold together what does not easily glue. She does not deflate the tension between opposites, but holds and sustains it, quietly, cyclically like a snake shedding skin she shows us what it means to live on this Earth and let its darkness and pain touch us, shape us and transform us into the unknown and ultimately into the mysteries of life.

Quotes from Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis.

Next month we dive deeper into Alchemy in our collab with - link in bio

From the ancient sun god Mithra to the eternal flame of Zarathustra; from the fire of عشق (eshq) and longing carried in the hearts of Sufis to the brotherhoods of chivalry who bore the love of motherland into the battlefield. Fire has never been merely a symbol in Iranian culture. It has been a living force of continuity, a thread binding spirit, land, and people across time.

Across millennia—through the devastation of the Mongol invasions, through cycles of ruin and renewal, and into the suffocating shadows of the present—something has endured: a fiery center. A force that refuses extinction, persisting in the epic and the streets alike, its flames fanned in both the earthly and the unseen.

This is not only a historical talk, but an immersive experience through myth, poetry, dreams, and live music with the Oud and Tanbour, instruments that carry ancestral memory.

Art, myth, poetry, music, and the dream realm have long served as both refuge and arsenal within the Iranian imagination. They are vessels of resilience—ways in which memory survives, dignity is restored, and life insists on itself, even in the darkest times. It is from within this lineage that we gather, at a moment of particular sensitivity in the Middle East, to listen again for the many names of fire.

We will trace these flames—from the Zoroastrian light of Farr to the embodied fires of courage, honor, and devotion found in heroic and chivalric traditions—and trace how they continue to flicker these days on the streets.

An evening of remembrance, of tending the fire together in the presence of music, story, and wine.

Date: Thursday, April 2, Keizersgracht 123, Amsterdam
Time: 19.00 - 21.00
Ticket Price: € 20 // €15 for online attendance

At its root, the solar masculine’s heroic qualities are rooted in kindness, care, justice and the protection of the sacred. The hero’s journey has been distorted into a kind of Promethean myth, a fire stolen from the gods and given without instruction and care for its sacred dimension, vulnerable to both human folly and brilliance – an eerie consequence that is much echoed in where modernity is headed today. But the solar masculine born in the ancient Mithraic and Zoroastrian roots showed a different face of the solar hero; the lost face of the masculine that is a commitment to care, honesty and justice. Qualities that must be reborn in men and women alike if we are to not only survive but thrive through these apocalyptic times.

But how do we trace back the original instructions and myth of the solar hero, beyond the individualistic face of this hero we know so well in myth? For this, we stretch back and beyond into thousands of years of deep devotion to the fiery rays of the Sun in ancient Iran, into how those flames were forged in the Sufi mystics of this part of the world in the depths of the heart and back onto the everyday dust of the world through the heroic and chivalry traditions of Pahlevani, Javanmardi and the trickster heroes of the Ayyars, a lineage completely rooted in the oral tradition.

Come join us for an evening of live music with the oud and tanbour with .dadbeh , a historio-mythical talk woven through personal and collective dreams with Jungian analyst Faranak Mirjalili, in the company of wine and poetry, hosted kindly by

You can also join us online in case Amsterdam is too far from home.

🐦‍🔥 In-person: 20,- euro
✨ Online (includes recording): 15,- euro

Link for both in bio.

According to the Sufi tradition, longing is what draws us nearer to love itself. It is a magnetic and mysterious force that beckons us toward the inner essence of the Soul, into a sweet and maddening desire to unite with our ground of Being, God or what Sufis call the Beloved.

The West is well familiar with the love poetry of Rumi, but it is easy to forget that these poems of love and unity erupted out of a shattered heart and an annihilating journey into the mystical secrets of love. There is a ‘dark side’ to love that is only known to the mystic who dares to enter the realm of the heart and is prepared to be broken by it until all that remains is love itself. Sufis have been known as storytellers and these tales of love and longing are widely spread in Persian and Arab regions as well as India.

Shringara rasa - the rasa associated with erotic love is regarded as the primary rasa in Indian performance traditions. The relationship between the lover and their beloved is the fountain from which many other emotions emerge, and is also a metaphor for the relationship between the human and the divine. Love, in the Indian traditions, has been bound up with earthy eroticism and metaphysical longings, wherein the lover is a mortal, but the Beloved belongs to the realms of the metaphysical or the divine.

A persistent theme in the literature from the gangetic plains or the Sanskritic traditions is of longing depicted through ‘viraha’ rasa or the longings brought on by separation, symbolising the acute pain of the separation of the human from the divine.