The Rilke Lectures – Philosophy – Religion – Myth – Poetry – Psychology: Windows into the Wisdom of the Sophianic Cross

Prepared for a Pacifica Graduate Institute course on The Poetic Basis of Mind, these lectures were written roughly six years after the publication of the author’s In the Image of Orpheus: Rilke—A Soul History (Chiron Publications 2011). This series of lectures can serve as an introduction to (or perhaps distillation of) the in-depth treatment of the convergence of archetypal psychology and poetry offered in the Soul History.

They are, however, also much more than that. These eight lectures stand on their own as a unique and cohesive treatment of many core concerns of the soul, and pursue diverse threads not taken up in the Soul History. As a unified whole, the lecture-essays focus upon dynamics internal to what the author (only now, years after their original composition) has come to call “the Sophianic Cross.” That aegis includes not only psychology and art, but myth, religion, and philosophy as well, all pictured in relation to one another in the form of the cross-like configuration visible on this book’s cover.