Thea Euryphaessa
LightNews LightNews
banner
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
Thea Euryphaessa
@theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
790 followers 14 following 1.7K posts
Writer πŸ“š | Quotes | Depth/Jungian Psychology | Hero's Journey | Author of 'Running into Myself' and follow-up, 'Growing into MySelf'

Long press the hashtag #MyBookShelf on app/click on desktop to search my posts for books I've shared.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Pinned
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
Thea Euryphaessa @theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social Β· Nov 19
I've decided Bluesky is where I'll share my favourite books, starting with this: π˜›π˜©π˜¦ π˜”π˜Ίπ˜΅π˜©π˜ͺ𝘀 π˜›π˜’π˜³π˜°π˜΅ by Juliet Sharman-Burke and astrologer and Jungian, Liz Greene. This is actually a box set which includes cards with characters from Greek myth.

A rich, educative tarot deck.

#mybookshelf #booksky
Thea's hand holding up a copy of 'The Mythic Tarot' box set by Juliet Sharman-Burke and Liz Greene, in front of a bookshelf with flowers and fairy lights.
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
Thomas Moore on divine eros and human sexuality.
Lovemaking is a ritual that, like all religious rites of the world, tries to make present the spirit that will make the human activity magically effective. Like all ritual, too, sex requires art, attention to details, and a devoted imagination. It calls for the kind of humility proper to religious ritual, in which the devotee doesn't force but requests the presence of the god or spirit. We may go to dinner, dress attractively, have an intimate conversation, listen to musicβ€”all with the thought of invoking the spirits of sexuality. In the midst of lovemaking we may be guided by deep intuition and imagination to do those particular things that not only please ourselves and our partner but take us away from the cool world of the ego and place us in the warm, dreamlike cloud of sexual trance and charm. In this cloud of Aphroditic enchantmentβ€”scholars have translated the name Aphrodite as 'shining cloud'β€”the mystery that is sex takes place effectively and powerfully, as though it were a sacrament in the religion of this goddess whose task it is to deepen human sexuality, giving it a more than human level of meaning. β€” Thomas Moore, The Soul of Sex
February 10, 2026 at 2:50 PM
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
On the religious suppression of eros.
In the twelfth century, Hildegard of Bingen, a contemporary of Abelard and Heloise and a great Benedictine abbess, interpreted the myth of Adam's sin as a failure of eros. Adam was banished from Eden not because he discovered nudity and sex, but because he did not enjoy deeply enough the delights of the earth. Recently, Matthew Fox, a Dominican theologian, was silenced by Vatican celibates for his endorsement of Hildegard of Bingen's interpretation of the Eden myth and for his eros-positive creation spirituality. Fox argues that our failure to celebrate the pleasures of the Divine Presence in our loves creates a compulsion to conquer and achieve pleasure elsewhere. He sees a clear causal link between patriarchal religions that deny the nurturance we draw from erotic pleasures, the feminine, and mother earth, and the anti-pleasure, anti-sex value systems of fundamentalism and fascism. By Robert T. Francouer from, 'The Erotic Impulse' [edited by David Steinberg].
February 10, 2026 at 11:59 AM
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
The mystery of the psyche is that we are haunted not by we want out of life, but by what life wants out of us. We can never lay these unlived potentials to rest. Relentlessly they seek to be lived out, regardless of how deeply we bury them.

β€” D. Stephenson Bond, Living Myth
February 9, 2026 at 1:50 PM
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
You're welcome. And yesβ€”it really is.
February 8, 2026 at 5:46 PM
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
Iain McGilchrist bringing much needed balance.
We have been taught to regard ourselves as selfish, and the natural world out of which we emerge as essentially a field of ruthless competition. This has truth. But it is very much a half-truth. Its opposite is also true. We are moral beings, capable of selflessness, fulfilled through our interconnectedness with one another and the natural world at large. We are not atomistic. And the story of life on earth is not therefore one of competition only. It is at least as much, and arguably more . . . a story of co-operation and collaboration. In fact collaboration might be seen as, sensu stricto, 'one of the central characteristics of life'. β€” Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
February 8, 2026 at 1:56 PM
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
A sobering read from James Hollis on anger.
We must recognise that just as there is a pool of sadness in everyone, so there is a mountain of anger. Anger is a legitimate reaction of the soul to its wounding. We may keep it unconscious precisely because its expression today reactivates the peril its expression once risked. We may turn it upon ourselves by somatising, depressing or damaging ourselves through our contaminated decisions. Or we may transfer this anger to others, thereby wounding those who are the silent surrogates for those we could not confront in the past. Anger, then, is a reflexive response to the constriction of the soul. As such, it is not only part of the defence system of the psyche, it is a vital intimation which, when tracked, may lead to the soul's healing. When transformed by consciousness, anger becomes vital energy which is available not only for healing but also for furthering the desires of the soul. As long as we are wound-identified, we remain stuck in our victimage, up to our ears in the sour soup of wrath. James Hollis, Swamplands of the Soul
February 6, 2026 at 4:19 PM
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
'When I go toward you
it is with my whole life'.

Amen.
February 5, 2026 at 3:54 PM
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
Rilkeβ€”forever sublime.
Only in our doing can we grasp you. Only with our hands can we illumine you. The mind is but a visitor: it thinks us out of our world. Each mind fabricates itself. We sense its limits, for we have made them. And just when we would flee them, you come and make of yourself an offering. I don't want to think a place for you. Speak to me from everywhere. Your Gospel can be comprehended without looking for its source. When I go toward you it is with my whole life. β€” Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, Book 1, 51
February 5, 2026 at 3:54 PM
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
Jacobi continues:
Those who have travelled this path know that it leads through experiences which cannot be described in words and which can only be likened to the great inner upheavals experienced by the mystics and initiates of all times. The individuation process leads not to the intellectual knowledge that is alien to faith, but to an experienced knowledge, the force and reality of which are really lived, so that it becomes an unshakeable certainty. What is both fundamentally new and infinitely promising is that this should be possible within the framework of a scientific doctrine built on strictly empirical, phenomenological foundations. β€” Jolande Jacobi, The Psychology of C.G. Jung
February 3, 2026 at 3:39 PM
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
Jolande Jacobi from, 'The Psychology of C. G. Jung'.
Jung knows too much about the harmful consequences of 'force-fed' doctrines accepted without reflection; he knows too well that only what has grown organically, not what has been tacked on, can be truly alive and effective, to exempt those who trust themselves to his guidance from the need for making their own decisions and accepting their own responsibilities. He refuses to facilitate the task by telling them what attitude to take. For in experiencing the profound symbolic contents of his psyche, the believer will encounter the eternal principles which confirm the workings of God within him and reinforce his belief that God created man in his own image, while the unbeliever, the man who does not want to believe or who yearns for faith but whom no effort of the will or intellect can help to achieve it, will be led at least to a true experience of the eternal foundations of his being and in this way perhaps will attain, at the end of his struggle, to the charisma of faith. β€” Jolande Jacobi, The Psychology of C.G. Jung
February 3, 2026 at 3:39 PM
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
Evergreen wisdom from Marie-Louise von Franz.
Every content of the unconscious with which one is not properly related tends to obsess one for it gets at us from behind. If you can talk to it you get into relationship with it. You can either be possessed by a content constellated in the unconscious, or you can have a relationship to it. The more one suppresses it, the more one is affected by it. If we don't actively offer the unconscious a means of expression, it comes out in destructive, undermining, involuntary fantasy material. People who are possessed and spun up in a cocoon about the people they ought to relate to are caught in the most amazing assumptions, which they neither doubt nor make quite clear to themselves because they seem to be completely evident. 1/2 They are sure of everything and never say, "Why do I assume such a thing?" The obsession becomes a complete semi-conscious conviction. That happens when fantasy material has found a wrong mode of expression, e.g., in accusations against neighbours and friends, and it is never checked. It skulks at the back of the mind of such a person and amplifies itself. Little irrelevant instances are picked up and built into a paranoic system and every item adds a bit more–e.g., the Swiss Government has decided so and so, or the postman's ring means this or thatβ€”everything is one more sign. Even the minds of so-called normal people are filled with unchecked assumptions which are not related to conscious reality. If you ask them about this you will meet a completely erratic block and discover a crazy idea. β€” Marie-Louise von Franz, The Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motifs in Fairytales 2/2
February 1, 2026 at 1:58 PM
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
πŸ˜‚
February 1, 2026 at 1:57 PM
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
Sorted
January 31, 2026 at 2:49 PM
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
I'll DM you over on the other site πŸ˜€
January 31, 2026 at 2:32 PM
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
Tretinoin and SPF 50 have been my besties for a decade now, Angela, so I totally get the lure. But it's the frozen, expressionless faces I find so Uncanny Valley. Since when did immobility equal youthfulness. There are actresses whose films I now refuse to watch as their faces are so damn rigid!
January 31, 2026 at 2:05 PM
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
The more I see the heavily Botoxed, animal-frozen-in-the-headlights look now so prevalent in our culture, the more I'm reminded of Jungian, Marion Woodman's words from her book, 'Addiction to Perfection'.
The chief sign of the pursuit of perfection is obsession. Obsession occurs when all the psychic energy, which ought to be distributed among the various parts of the personality in an attempt to harmonise them, is focused on one area of the personality to the exclusion of everything else. Obsession is always a fixationβ€”a freezing-over of the personality so that it becomes not a living being but something fixed, like a piece of sculpture, locked into a complex. There is always something catatonic about it, behind which is fear that can accelerate into blind terror so that the person may become like a wild animal caught in the glare of headlights, unable to move. 1/2 Perfection is something very like that when applied to human life. . . . Addiction to perfection is at root a suicidal addiction. The addict is simulating not life but death. Almost inevitably a woman addicted to perfection will view herself as a work of art, and her real terror is that the work of art, being so absolutely precious, may in one instant be destroyed. She has to treat herself as a rare piece of Ming porcelain or what Keats described as a "still unravished bride of quietness", a "foster-child of silence and slow time". β€” Marion Woodman, Addiction to Perfection 2/2
January 31, 2026 at 1:32 PM
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
Marie-Louise von Franz with some practical advice on how not to be overwhelmed by the unconscious.
If you are overwhelmed by an unconscious content and cannot speak of it, then do not try to talk about it in the outer world but let it first express itself to you. Then you are not overwhelmed by unknown emotion, which is always a dynamic fact flowing towards something. The primitive unconscious impulse would be to follow that secret tendency of the emotion where it wants to lead. If it is hate, it carries you involuntarily towards the hated object; if it is love, it is the same thing, to mention only two common emotions. If you try to express the emotion first toward its object, there is great danger of being overwhelmed. Say someone is furious but intends to express the fact decently, yet with one word comes the flow, and though one may have determined to say little, the whole avalanche descends! In the moment of affect one says much more and gets more and more involved, and in the end one believes what one doubted at the beginning. β€” Marie-Louise von Franz, The Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motifs in Fairytales
January 29, 2026 at 2:26 PM
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
Jungian, Marie-Louise von Franz with an excellent passage on the unconscious.
No one has seen what the unconscious is; it is a concept, not an ectoplasmic reality somewhere in space. If something comes into my mind from my unconscious, a moment later it can fall below the threshold of consciousness: I know the man is Mr. So-and-So, a minute later I have forgotten the name, and afterwards I may remember it again. Therefore, one can assume that what is unconscious is that which is not associated with ego consciousness. If you observe a content which then disappears for a short time into the unconscious, it is not altered when it comes up again, but if you forget something for a long time, it does not return in the same form; it autonomously evolves or regresses in the other sphere, and therefore one can speak of the unconscious as being a sphere, or entity, in itself. 1/2 It is really something like a liquid in which the contents are transformed; you can even see when a content comes up in bad shape and can tell how long it has been repressed and therefore become suspect. Severe repressions may appear in a dream as an evil-smelling corpse in a cemetery, one which has had to be dug up. Something has been repressed for so long that it has disintegrated and decayed in the earth. Indirectly, therefore, you can say that the unconscious psyche is a reality of its own. By Marie-Louise von Franz from, 'The Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motifs in Fairytales'. 2/2
January 27, 2026 at 9:10 PM
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
On why the intellect should sometimes take a back seat in our approach to relationships.
If I am constantly thinking about a relationship, I can inhibit the possibility of a feeling realisation, and therefore the intellect sometimes has to detach and to let other forms of life come up. For the divine mystery one has to give up the narrow wish of only intellectual understanding, and where other forms of realisation should come about in the soul the intellect should take a back place for a while and keep to its own realm of operation. By Marie-Louise von Franz from, 'The Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motifs in Fairytales'.
January 27, 2026 at 11:21 AM
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
On the importance, to personal transformation, of asking questions
Asking the proper question is the central action of transformationβ€”in fairy tales, in analysis, and in individuation. The key question causes germination of consciousness. The properly shaped question always emanates from an essential curiosity about what stands behind. Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open. . . . Those who would readily develop consciousness pursue all that stands behind the readily observable: the unseen chirping, the murked window, the lamenting door, the lip of light beneath a sill. They pursue these mysteries until the substance of the matter is laid open to them. β€” Clarissa Pinkola EstΓ©s, Women Who Run with the Wolves
January 25, 2026 at 11:35 AM
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing?

Are you willing to be made nothing? Dipped into oblivion?

If not, you will never really change.

β€” D. H. Lawrence, Phoenix
Illustration of the mythical phoenix bird rising from the ashes.
January 23, 2026 at 4:20 PM
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
On therapy.
Therapy has usurped the once-primary place of poetry. We need therapy when we cannot sing, dance, or make art an integral part of our everyday life. In earlier time it was poetry that was the terpnos logos, the healing speech. The sick called not the physicianβ€”known then as those of 'silent tongue'β€”but the poet, those of 'willing tongue'! The fact that art, song, movement, dance, and poetry have all become 'therapies' is a testament to the reversal that our culture of intellect and power has achieved. What was the source of the very binding together of culture has been so unravelled that it all must now be imported as therapy. So in therapy we are trying to sew back together huge tears in the fabric of the spontaneous life of psyche. And it is in principally these things that psyche now finds its nourishment. By Russell Lockhart from his book, 'Psyche Speaks: A Jungian Approach to Self and World'.
January 22, 2026 at 2:55 PM
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
Jungian, Marion Woodman on life's cycles.
It goes in cycles. You move into that new life, and it's tremendously exciting for years. Then all of a sudden it isn't the least bit interesting. I think a lot of people get burned out for this reason. They try to do the thing that was interesting to them twelve years ago. They start running faster and faster, thinking that surely it will be interesting but it's not. They're running like plastic dolls. I've seen dreams where the Great Mother comes in, holds up her hand, and the energy from her hand zaps the doll. The image disintegrates. Then the ego has to find out what the new life is. That can cost you your marriage, it can cost you your job, it can cost you your church. It's terrifying, but it's the only way to grow. Sometimes you have to give all to find all. It sounds simple. T.S. Eliot says it's "A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything)." By Jungian, Marion Woodman from her book, 'Conscious Femininity'.
January 19, 2026 at 3:01 PM
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
One of my favourite ever books, this [and one of the most impactful]. Was first alerted to it by a recommendation from Marion Woodman. I don't toss the term 'life-changing' around easily, but in this case it's well warranted.
January 18, 2026 at 12:57 PM
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
Jungian, John Perkins on what it means to seriously honour the feminine.
Taking the feminine principle seriously means acknowledging the dignity and integrity of nature, including our own. It means becoming spontaneously engaged in human relations but not lost in them. It means respecting and enjoying the body with its impulses, desires, needs, and limitations, but not selfishly or addictively. It means living one's life with patient compassion for oneself and others. It means allowing time to simply be as well as to do. Honouring the feminine means a certain amount of acceΡ€tance and toleration of things as they are, without incessantly demanding progress and perfection. It means experiencing and appreciating life in its small as well as its great moments. 1/2 It means elevating play to an equal footing with work. It means living incarnationally with one's best feeling and intuition, and not abstractly. Honouring the feminine means making self-reflective experience the acid test of authority and dogma, replacing fault by responsibility, and favouring innocence over sophistication. It means allowing our impulses for actionβ€”what we genuinely feel like doing or not doingβ€”to inform our thinking, and permitting the heart to advise the mind. It means practising love as acknowledgment, devotion, and celebration, and not as addictive codependence. Taking the feminine seriously means never trying to fathom the meaning of existence until we have tasted the bittersweet rapture of being alive. By Jungian psychotherapist, John Perkins from his book, 'The Forbidden Self'. 2/2
January 18, 2026 at 12:53 PM