Magic and Melancholia: Recovering the Soul After Modernity

Magic and Melancholia argues that the soul was once understood as cosmic in nature and that what we now call therapy was correspondingly theurgic, magical, and theological. The loss of this earlier vision has had devastating consequences.Appealing to a profound vision of soul articulated through mood, the book proposes that the recovery of these lost dimensions offers a more adequate picture than contemporary psycho-therapeutic frameworks, which reduce the ontologically rich, cosmic reality of soul to mind and “self,” while neglecting the soul’s need to be harmonized with body, cosmos, and transcendence.Such a vision restores the vitally important aesthetic and ethical dimensions and situates the human being within a resonant, participatory realm that bears directly upon psychic health. That imaginative world must be regained, so that a more adequate account of the hidden relationship and correspondences between soul and body can be found, and with it a psyche-ology that avoids both over-rationalism and reductive materialism. Read more