Here are 100 books that Archetype of the Apocalypse fans have personally recommended if you like
Archetype of the Apocalypse.
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I started my career as a New York magazine editor and cynical journalist writing about art, celebrities, and show designers. Eventually I had an existential meltdown where I realized I was trapped in reductive materialism. I didn’t believe in a soul or a spirit or anything that wasn’t tangible. I decided to explore psychedelics and wrote my first book, Breaking Open the Head, after visiting indigenous cultures in Africa and South America where I took Iboga, ayahuasca, and mushrooms in initiation ceremonies. I learned we are facing an ecological and geo-political meta-crisis. I tried to find the roots of this, hoping to save humanity from extinction by unifying us around a mystical realization of oneness.
An Italian aristocrat who led a magical order in the 1920s, Evola is a fascinating and controversial figure who has become influential in the New Right. Even though I am a Leftist, I find many of his ideas important and helpful—along with his fellow “traditionalists.” Rene Guenon and Fritjof Schuon. Evola believes we are in a period of accelerating decline known as the Kali Yuga, the age of iron and materialism, where the true spiritual knowledge has been almost entirely lost. He argues there is no way to stop the destruction of this civilization and it is best to focus on self-transformation through alchemical and magical practices. His books on Buddhism, eroticism, tantra, and alchemy are also fascinating!
No idea is as absurd as the idea of progress, which together with its corollary notion of the superiority of modern civilization, has created its own "positive" alibis by falsifying history, by insinuating harmful myths in people's minds, and by proclaiming itself sovereign at the crossroads of the plebeian ideology from which it originated. In order to understand both the spirit of Tradition and its antithesis, modern civilization, it is necessary to begin with the fundamental doctrine of the two natures. According to this doctrine there is a physical order of things and a metaphysical one; there is a mortal…
I started my career as a New York magazine editor and cynical journalist writing about art, celebrities, and show designers. Eventually I had an existential meltdown where I realized I was trapped in reductive materialism. I didn’t believe in a soul or a spirit or anything that wasn’t tangible. I decided to explore psychedelics and wrote my first book, Breaking Open the Head, after visiting indigenous cultures in Africa and South America where I took Iboga, ayahuasca, and mushrooms in initiation ceremonies. I learned we are facing an ecological and geo-political meta-crisis. I tried to find the roots of this, hoping to save humanity from extinction by unifying us around a mystical realization of oneness.
This is a book that can change your way of understanding your life and your world, profoundly and permanently! Gebser demonstrates that human consciousness has evolved through a series of stages, from the archaic or aboriginal, through the magic and mythical to the current mental-rational structure. Surveying areas ranging from science to art, Gebser proposes that our current meta-crisis is actually necessary to force a mutational break to the next structure of consciousness, the integral-aperspectival, where we will be able to shift between different realizations of time and space, as our world transforms around us.
Born in Posen in 1905, Jean Gebser came from an old Franconian family domiciled in Thuringia since 1236. A nephew of German chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg, he was a descendant on his mother's side of Luther's friend Melanchthon. He was educated in Breslau, Konigsberg, Rossleben, and at the University of Berlin. In 1929 Gebser emigrated to Italy and subsequently lived in Spain where he was attached to the Ministry of Education of the Spanish Republic. From 1937-1939 he lived in Paris in the circle which included Picasso, Andre Malraux, Paul Eluard, and Louis Aragon. In 1939 he made his permanent home…
I started my career as a New York magazine editor and cynical journalist writing about art, celebrities, and show designers. Eventually I had an existential meltdown where I realized I was trapped in reductive materialism. I didn’t believe in a soul or a spirit or anything that wasn’t tangible. I decided to explore psychedelics and wrote my first book, Breaking Open the Head, after visiting indigenous cultures in Africa and South America where I took Iboga, ayahuasca, and mushrooms in initiation ceremonies. I learned we are facing an ecological and geo-political meta-crisis. I tried to find the roots of this, hoping to save humanity from extinction by unifying us around a mystical realization of oneness.
Founder of Waldorf Schools and Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner was the greatest occult seer and philosopher of the modern age. His ideas about spirituality changed my world when I discovered him while researching my first book on psychedelic shamanism. In this book, he takes us through our cosmic history. He reveals that we currently possess four “bodies” (the physical, astral, etheric, and the I), and we are developing a fifth (the “spirit self”). He explores reincarnation, both of each of us individually and of the Earth as a whole. He explains that there are different super-sensible beings that work upon us all of the time, and that one of them, Ahirman, is destined to incarnate in this century. A fantastic inquiry into the deepest mysteries with practical advice for today.
"Esoteric science is the science of what takes place esoterically, in the sense that it is perceived not outside in nature but where one’s soul turns when it directs its inner being toward the spirit. Esoteric science is the opposite and counterpart of natural science." ―Rudolf Steiner
This masterwork of esotericism places humankind at the very heart of the vast, invisible processes of cosmic evolution. When we use the term “natural science,” don’t we mean that we are dealing with human knowledge of nature?
Steiner worked and reworked his Rosicrucian cosmology to make it increasingly…
Reduce stress, ease anxiety, and increase inner peace—one day at a time—with a year of easy-to-follow mindfulness meditation techniques. Certified mindfulness teacher, bestselling author, ultramarathoner, wife, and dog-mom Nita Sweeney shares mindfulness meditation practices to help anyone break free from worry and self-judgment.
I started my career as a New York magazine editor and cynical journalist writing about art, celebrities, and show designers. Eventually I had an existential meltdown where I realized I was trapped in reductive materialism. I didn’t believe in a soul or a spirit or anything that wasn’t tangible. I decided to explore psychedelics and wrote my first book, Breaking Open the Head, after visiting indigenous cultures in Africa and South America where I took Iboga, ayahuasca, and mushrooms in initiation ceremonies. I learned we are facing an ecological and geo-political meta-crisis. I tried to find the roots of this, hoping to save humanity from extinction by unifying us around a mystical realization of oneness.
The Mayan Factor had a huge influence on me when I read it after reading Jose’s other amazing books, Earth Ascending and Time and the Technosphere. He makes the case that the classic Maya civilization of the Yucatan was related to a galactic civilization that travels across the universe as patterns of information transduced into DNA so they can incarnate at particular junctures to perform a cosmic ritual of “synchronization.” The Mayan calendar is an artifact of this “Galactic Maya” who wanted us to understand we were starting to enter a new dimensional portal with the end of the 5,125 year Long Count on December 21, 2012. While reading this book, I had a crazy experience of the Galactic Maya entering into me and looking out through my eyes at our turbulent reality. Jose argues that a new calendar could shift us from chaos to harmony. A fabulous visionary excursion!
This is the extraordinary book that initiated the Harmonic Convergence in August 1987 and awakened the world to the Mayan Calendar. In it, Jose Arguelles revealed three revolutionary ideas: that a great moment of human transformation awaited us as we approached 2012: that there are galactic "seasons" and that the Maya accurately recorded them; and that each person had the capability to connect directly with the energy of a beam emanating from the galactic center that contains the power to awaken the higher mind.
I am a writer, a hypnotherapist, and a consciousness researcher. Ever since I was a baby, I had the memory and the sense that there was more to our existence than meets the eye. Even though I started my career as a lawyer in Vienna, Austria, after a transformative illness and a series of spiritually awakening experiences, I left for Mexico to pursue my calling as a metaphysical explorer and writer. Ever since, I’ve spent my life mapping out various dimensions of the psyche. When I’m not traveling, I like to retreat into my small highland cottage with Marius, the border collie, and Kasiopea, the black magic cat.
I read this wonderful coming-of-age tale when I was in my teens, but its magical mood remained with me ever since.
Reading the story of Emil Sinclair meeting the enigmatic Demian at school–who not only freed him from bullies but showed him that there was another world usually invisible to the common senses–set me on a life-long journey in search of the miraculous.
2011 Reprint of 1948 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. The main character of this classic novel, Emil Sinclair, is a young boy raised in a bourgeois home, amidst what is described as a Scheinwelt, a play on words that means "world of light" as well as "world of illusion". Emil's entire existence can be summarized as a struggle between two worlds: the show world of illusion (related to the Hindu concept of maya) and the real world, the world of spiritual truth. In the course of the novel, accompanied and prompted by…
By chance, just over 50 years ago, I became an art therapist in a state hospital on the Northshore of Boston where I have always lived. With support from Rudolf Arnheim at Harvard University and others, I committed myself to furthering personal and community well-being through art. In my mid-twenties I established a graduate program at Lesley University which spawned an international community of expressive arts therapy. I have worked worldwide in advancing art healing and art-based research. Now University Professor Emeritus, and for the first time without a full-time position, I am trying to embrace the unpredictable ways of creation, and as I wrote, Trust the Process.
C. G. Jung anticipated everything we do today, and more, with his practice of active imagination over 100 years ago. I have used this book as a primary reading in my courses. I also consider it to be among the best books dealing with the creative process, especially the emphasis on how the individual ego, or person of the artist, is a participant in a larger intelligence of creative imagination. We relax a grip on the controls to enable the expression to manifest itself, as Jung personally demonstrates in The Red Book, Liber Novus, just recently available to the public.
All the creative art psychotherapies (art, dance, music, drama, poetry) can trace their roots to C. G. Jung's early work on active imagination. Joan Chodorow here offers a collection of Jung's writings on active imagination, gathered together for the first time. Jung developed this concept between the years 1913 and 1916, following his break with Freud. During this time, he was disoriented and experienced intense inner turmoil --he suffered from lethargy and fears, and his moods threatened to overwhelm him. Jung searched for a method to heal himself from within, and finally decided to engage with the impulses and images…
A fresh take on the difference between trauma and hardship in order to help accurately spot the difference and avoid over-generalizations.
The book integrates the latest findings in brain science, child development, psycho-social context, theory, and clinical experiences to make the case that trauma is much more than a cluster…
I have been using and research psychological type for 45 years in my various career roles—director of a university learning center, chief human resources officer, and independent consultant. I’ve yet to find a more practical and useful model for understanding human differences. The constructive use of differences is urgently needed in our age, as well as the goal of type development: making perceptions clearer and judgments more sound.
Myers brilliantly exposes the limitations of thinking about personality types as stereotypes. The book explores the nature of individuation and the steps to finding solutions for our one-sidedness.
In Myers-Briggs Typology vs Jungian Individuation: Overcoming One-Sidedness in Self and Society, Steve Myers unravels the century-long misinterpretation of Jung's seminal text, Psychological Types, to show how Jung's thinking offers solutions to the conflicts that have torn apart our societies. By challenging the popular interpretation of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (R) and similar instruments, Myers argues that we have not only missed Jung's main proposition, but our contemporary interpretation runs counter to it.
Myers aims to rediscover the overlooked argument of Jung's Psychological Types and make it of practical relevance to contemporary issues. He intends to refocus rather than discard…
I've always been fascinated by experiences that exist on the border of the ordinary. Growing up, my grandmother would tell us, in serious tones, of the fairies and ghosts she had encountered—how closely the natural and the “supernatural” are linked. In my twenties, I would read a lot about shamanism and the kinds of extraordinary experiences they would actively seek. Later, noticing similarities between those experiences and the spontaneous experiences of ordinary people, my interest continued to grow. Near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, but especially crisis apparitions—these experiences spoke strongly to me about how little we still know of the nature of the mind and how much there is yet to discover!
I find this to be one of the most overlooked and yet fascinating works dealing with, among other things, spontaneous encounters with the dead. The apparitions and visions in this work, which often coincide with deaths, are primarily drawn from Switzerland.
Each account, in letter form to the author, is as compelling as the last, and Jaffe offers a unique Jungian perspective that I personally found to be at least very novel and intriguing. The accounts themselves, however, are the star of the show, and Jaffe, like Virtanen earlier in this list, makes some interesting connections between her sample and those further afield. I believe anyone interested in experiences of spontaneous encounters with the dead should have this singular work on their bookshelves!
I have been using and research psychological type for 45 years in my various career roles—director of a university learning center, chief human resources officer, and independent consultant. I’ve yet to find a more practical and useful model for understanding human differences. The constructive use of differences is urgently needed in our age, as well as the goal of type development: making perceptions clearer and judgments more sound.
Shumate has masterfully integrated Jungian ideas, the history of psychological type, and recent evolutions in personality type. The book covers the depth of Jungian principles related to the psychological types and new evidence on the patterns of Jung’s eight functions.
Jung considered personality development critical for the survival of the human race, not just for personal fulfillment, but how can personality be developed? Carol Shumate shows how John Beebe's revolutionary eight-function/eight-archetype model of personality type can be applied to guide development for each of the sixteen Myers-Briggs types, making explicit the implications of Jung's eight-function model. Based on reports from participants at Beebe's workshops and using examples of historic figures like Abraham Lincoln, this is the first book to detail how the unconscious aspects of the functions tend to manifest for each type.
Projection and Personality Development via the Eight-Function…
I’m a writer and world-traveler. But in my previous life, I was a media executive. At thirty-five years old, at the height of my career in that world, I felt an emptiness – a lack of meaning in my life. I decided to quit and retreat to a family country house in order to figure out my next steps. I soon realized that I was experiencing a full-blown midlife crisis and started reading a lot of books in order to understand my predicament. I ended up reading for four years before finally deciding to travel around the world. The following books are the ones that helped me the most; I recommend them to others who are entering this crucial period of life.
Stein is yet another Jungian analyst who approaches the same subject from another angle. He sees the midlife crisis as pervaded by the spirit of the mischievous ancient Greek god Hermes, a renegade who suddenly appears to topple our established life before guiding us through a most important transition. The shift is from a persona-oriented to a Self-oriented life, where Self is the Jungian archetype denoting the unification of the Unconscious with the Conscious mind. To clarify his points, Stein uses a lot of Ancient Greek as well as modern literature, always returning to Jungian concepts and masterfully connecting the strands. It’s not an easy book: the language is idiosyncratic, often dense, and it may force you to check out some Jungian terms in order to understand what he is saying – but if you persevere, you will be greatly rewarded.
Midlife = crisis, anger, & change…So pervasive has the general awareness of this phenomenon of midlife crisis and transformation become that as we approach this time of life we almost automatically begin to brace for a psychological emergency. Drawing on analytic experience, dreams, and myths, Murray Stein, a well-known analyst, formulates the three main features of the middle passage. First an erosion of attachments. Then hints of a fresh spirit, renegade and mischievous, that scoffs at routines. This new spirit disrupts life and alarms family and friends. Finally, with luck, a transformation occurs; life begins again.
