b.e. mitchell

Carl Jung spent the years between 1913 and 1916 voluntarily locked in a cage fight with the unconscious, and the unconscious showed up with brass knuckles made of archetypes.He called it his “confrontation with the unconscious,” but that’s Swiss for “I opened the basement door and the entire abyss threw a house party in my skull.” Visions came nightly: blood-red suns, serpents eating prophets, a bearded old man named Philemon who had owl wings and better one-liners than most psychiatrists....

the landlord of this place is a middle-manager with delusions of grandeur, and last Tuesday he called in sick.They call him the Demiurge, but that’s just the name on his cosmic badge. In person he’s a nervous lion-headed bureaucrat who built the world from leftover scraps because the real Light got misplaced in shipping. Seven planets for filing cabinets, twelve zodiac signs for middle management, and us—tiny, noisy homunculi stamped out of mud and forgetfulness—to keep the forms in...

there are two uninvited tenants squatting in the basement of your psyche, and they’ve been subletting from you since puberty. He shows up wearing whatever costume your culture told you a man must never take off: steel jaw, desert boots, a pilot’s license for reality itself. She arrives in whatever perfume your culture forbade you to want: red shoes, forbidden laughter, the exact curve of hip that makes priests write new commandments at 3 a.m. They call him the Animus. They call her the Anima....