About the Ship of Fools
Liber Novus
We began our first expedition in 2018 as a study group of enthusiasts who wanted to explore C.G. Jung's Liber Novus (the Red Book). We thought that the best way to pay tribute to this astonishing work was to engage with it - not just intellectually, but also experientially. Coupled with our reading, we therefore arranged a series of "active imaginations" and saw it as our challenge to get in touch, ourselves, with the source from which Jung's experiences sprang - the symbolic world of the mythopoetic imagination. From this a seed of aspiration was planted; to help others recover and engage with the mythopoetic imagination in a way that is embodied, caring, playful and creative...
The alchemical imagination
When Jung closed the Red Book he opened the door to the world of alchemy, as it was in this strange and tantalizing tradition that he could substantiate his ideas and find their historical basis. After our venture into the Red Book the Ship of Fools therefore decided to follow the thread of Jung's journey and took a deep dive into the alchemical imagination, by reading several of Jung's key texts on this subject. We supplemented and mixed this up with essays from James Hillman's "Alchemical Psychology".
What came our of this alchemical endeavour was an eye and a toungue for working with images; not fixating them and interpreting, but by staying close to them and letting them become vessels in which our habitual ways of thinking can be dissolved; looking glasses through which we can see through the literalist and fundamentalists tendencies that haunt our way of speaking about the soul.
A Fool's Vision
From being primarily a study group the Ship of Fools has since evolved into being a platform for arranging and launching different workshops and events within the field of depth psychology. Our hope with this is to introduce and explore depth psychology in a way that is not only intellectual, but also experiential and embodied.
The symbolic world - the so called "mundus imaginalis" - is not merely one of abstract "ideas", but rather of forces and personified figures, which Jung also called " archetypal images". Recovering the connection with this realm does not only imply a new way of thinking, but a new way of inhabiting and of being in the world.