Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

The second volume in the series, The Magician and the Analyst: The Archetype of the Magus in Occult Spirituality and Jungian Analysis (2002), makes available the original text of the pioneering research monograph entitled, “The Liminal and the Liminoid in Ritual Process and Analytical Practice,” first presented in 1986 to the C. G. Jung Institute o

In contrast to our modern clergy and psychotherapists, not to speak of our professors, the great tribal shamans knew that their roles as healers and spiritual leaders required them to be warriors as well.

Racism, classism, anti-Semitism, religious bigotry, and other misguided tribalisms have majored in this seductive but demonic attempt to locate and suppress or destroy the “toxins” that afflict us.

It is my hope that through an innovative partnership of spiritual wisdom and psychoanalytic science we may be able to initiate a new and effective “Fellowship of the True Ring” and a new kind of magi who, like Gandalf, do not retreat into despair in the face of radical evil.

You are most vulnerable to it when you are the most disconnected from your relationships and trying to cope with your life and problems alone.

Evil, therefore, has the capacity to clothe and disguise itself in forms that seem innocent, good, or at least justified, and have a seductive attractiveness.

Viewed cross-culturally, the traditional views support the existence of what we might call a “Lucifer complex” that threatens to seduce and possess the human ego consciousness. In some cultures, this toxic alien presence is conceptualized as demons, in others as idolatry, in others as the power of the temptations of illusion and desire.

dim before striking at the heart of humanity and civilization. Traditional mythologies often used the mythic image of the dragon to indicate an intuition of these great and dangerous forces that lurk within the human soul and turn satanic when left unconscious or treated with disrespect.

THOMAS BRUNNER (2000) RECENTLY COMPARED MY work with that of Thomas Moore and characterized it as follows: “While Thomas Moore's books may be sifted down into the maxim, ‘the sacred is closer than you think,’ Robert Moore's books exhibit the central idea that ‘the demonic is closer than you think.’”