Facing Death: Dreams and Alchemical Meditations for Relationship with Death and the Hierosgamos Mysteries

Notice: Bookings will be open 26th May 2027

Date: Saturday 26th June 2027 Location: Online
Start time: 4:00pm End time: 6:00pm Type: Webinar

“Mysterious Boat” by Redon, 1897

“From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life. For in the secret hour of life’s midday the parabola is reversed, death is born. The second half of life does not signify ascent, unfolding, increase, exuberance, but death, since the end is its goal

(The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, “The Soul and Death,” CW 8, §800)

Jung’s psychology is an incarnational psychology, it is about the soul coming into life and the soul leaving life, and it is in this round of life, death and rebirth that we each find ourselves. Exploration of dreams, experiences and archetypal phenomena surrounding death potentially help open us ourselves beyond our fixed thought forms, to the living imagination where it is possible to get a better felt sense of the many dimensions of the psyche and psychoid that hold and inform our lives and our evolution of consciousness. This two hour seminar has this aim in mind.

This lecture and experiential seminar explores the psyche at the threshold between life and death, where dreams, imagination, and the subtle body open into encounters with the eternal. We discover participation in the archetypal round of death and rebirth that pertains to our lives now and what Jung called the unus mundus—where inner and outer, living and dead, imaginal and material interpenetrate.

Speaker: Monika Wikman

Monika Wikman, Ph.D, is a Jungian analyst, astrologer and cranial sacral practitioner. Author of Pregnant Darkness: Alchemy and the Rebirth of Consciousness. Editor and contributor to Living with Fire: The Alchemical Imagination of Nathan Schwartz Salant and his contributions to Depth Psychology, Chiron Publications, 2026. A graduate of the Jung–Von Franz Center for Depth Psychology in Zürich, she taught for many years in the graduate department at California State University, Los Angeles, and was a principal investigator of dream research at UCSD Medical Center on "Dreams of the Dying." She hosts a non-profit project under Earthways.com, The Center for Alchemical Studies. Podcasts with Monika on various topics can be found at chasingconsciousness.net/episodes, shrinkrapradio.com and speakingofjung.com.