Anima Mundi School

Anima Mundi School A place of learning & research for the Feminine and the World Soul, based on the psychology of Carl G. Jung.

Thank you to all that came last week to our Paradise Garden summer gathering on the Phoenix, Firebird, Simorgh in the be...
08/08/2026

Thank you to all that came last week to our Paradise Garden summer gathering on the Phoenix, Firebird, Simorgh in the beautiful city garden of Embassy of the Free Mind. We enjoyed weaving this fiery bird’s many colors for your across cultures, rooted in the Iranian imaginal as is the new tradition we are crafting together with Sepand Dadbeh | ســـپند دادبه .mirjalili; a garden as a sanctuary of culture, art and imagination for these difficult times. It has always been the creative imagination that preserved something essential in times of extreme crises and the many apocalyptic currents that swept over this ancient land and region, and it is from this deep well that we draw our roots, as threads of love and unity in a time of division, uncertainty and polarity.

Whomever would like to listen back to the the Phoenix/Simorgh weaving, it will be available to purchase as a recording until Aug 14th (link in bio). 🐦‍🔥

Our next Paradise Garden (theme tba) is on October 25th at Embassy of the Free Mind

A bird whose feathers or saliva heal the unhealable, make possible the impossible, bring hope where there is hopelessnes...
26/07/2026

A bird whose feathers or saliva heal the unhealable, make possible the impossible, bring hope where there is hopelessness and bring back life to that which has been deemed completely lost. The Phoenix, Firebird or Persian Simorgh — that magical, wise, majestic being larger than our imagination. What other companion could we seek out at this time of immense political confusion, disruption and uncertainty – not only as Iranians but as global citizens facing the poly-crises? Perhaps, invoking and listening to the fiery wisdom of this firebird and its tales from the East and the West is what will bring resilience and meaning –even if a droplet– in times of real need.

Join us in the magnificent city garden of Embassy of the Free Mind with wine from de filosoof | wijnbar | wijnhandel as multi-instrumentalist Sepand Dadbeh | ســـپند دادبه and Jungian analyst and storytellef .mirjalili take flight with this fiery bird.

When? Thursday July 30th, 18:00-21:00 (start 18:30)
Where? Keizersgracht 123, Amsterdam

Recordings available for those wanting to tune in online.

Tickets for online recordings (20,-) and in Amsterdam (25,-) are both in the link in bio.

When Jung was an old man, one of his students read him John Bunyan’s allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress and asked, “What ha...
19/07/2026

When Jung was an old man, one of his students read him John Bunyan’s allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress and asked, “What has your pilgrimage really been?” Jung answered: “In my case, Pilgrim’s Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.”

This quote found me at a timely moment, during one of my final seminars at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich, only a few weeks before graduation. It was quoted by none other than my mentor and teacher, Donald Kalsched, in his seminar on the unremembered child. His work has been invaluable in helping root the Anima Mundi School in the imaginal as a grounded practice, rather than a dissociative escape from the mundane and difficult realities of life and a troubled world. ➡️

The past years at the institute in Küsnacht have shaped me, my inner life, and my work in ways that will continue to ripple through the rest of my life. I have found not only a robust and complete training as a psychoanalyst, but also a community of colleagues, mentors, and friends, and a shared deep appreciation for the true labour of love that psychoanalysis is. ➡️

From here, as an analyst rooted in the Persian mystical traditions, with a multicultural and cross-cultural sensibility, and with lived experience of what it means to come from some of the world’s most troubled and underprivileged places, I hope to carry the tradition of psychoanalysis and the imaginal into what is most needed at a time when the world is spinning into painfully erratic, overlapping crises.

A complete psychoanalytical training requires sacrifices that are both financial and personal, and at moments nearly impossible to make happen. Yet perhaps it is even more important today for people from underprivileged backgrounds to roll up our sleeves and take our place within a tradition that has spent more than a century deepening our understanding of the human psyche. ➡️

Beyond the scaffolding of a proper training, it has been the community and the inter-cultural ecology of this institute that grounded me into the dust of the ordinary. Without this element, any training (and any institute) can bec

James Hillman, in one of the most evocative meditations on alchemical salt, deepens Jung’s understanding of salt as feel...
22/05/2026

James Hillman, in one of the most evocative meditations on alchemical salt, deepens Jung’s understanding of salt as feeling and Eros by describing it as the very mineral ground of subjective experience itself, that mysterious substance without which life simply passes through us as event without embodiment, experience without the bite-marks of hard earned wisdom, or, to put it more in the spirit of our time: a ChatGPT word-salad without the substance of a human spirit: “No salt, no experiencing, merely a running on and running through of events without psychic body.”

In psychological alchemy, salt is not merely a material substance but the capacity to feel, to suffer, to remember, to be marked by life; it is what gives blood, tears, sweat, grief, longing, resentment, regret, remorse and the pungency of revenge. Without salt there is no opus, because there is no genuine participation in the reality of one’s own experience. Hence the striking alchemical statement from the Golden Tract: “He who works without salt will never raise dead bodies.”

As Hillman puts it poignantly, to mine and find the salt of life is not to seek healing for the sake of perfection or even wholeness, but for the sake of life itself:
“We may imagine our deep hurts not merely as wounds to be healed but as salt mines from which we gain a precious essence and without which the soul cannot live.”

— Faranak Mirjalili in Alchemy & the Poetics of Matter: Eco-Mysticism and the Practice of Alchemy for a Wounded World (Thesis publication for the CG Jung Institute Zürich, 2026)

“Finally, it should be remarked that emptiness is a great feminine secret. It is something absolutely alien to man; the ...
10/05/2026

“Finally, it should be remarked that emptiness is a great feminine secret. It is something absolutely alien to man; the chasm, the unplumbed depths, the yin. The pitifulness of this vacuous nonentity goes to his heart (I speak here as a man), and one is tempted to say that this constitutes the whole “mystery” of woman. Such a female is fate itself. A man may say what he likes about it; be for it or against it, or both at once; in the end he falls, absurdly happy, into this pit, or, if he doesn’t, he has missed and bungled his only chance of making a man of himself. In the first case one cannot disprove his foolish good luck to him, and in the second one cannot make his misfortune seem plausible. “The Mothers, the Mothers, how eerily it sounds!” [from Goethe’s Faust] — Carl Jung in CW 9i

“It is with reluctance that I disclose the higher mystery.”

(the Devil in Goethe’s Faust before he introduces him to the “realm of mothers” which he cannot enter himself)

Blessed Mothers, Mater, Prima Materia, Anima Mundi day to all of you and all of the created worlds.

What a perfect day to give our Prima Materia class for our Alchemy & Poetics of Matter course. 🐍⚗️🔥

worldsoul

“Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her: powerless to separate ourselves from her, and powerless to pe*****te bey...
03/05/2026

“Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her: powerless to separate ourselves from her, and powerless to pe*****te beyond her.

Without asking, or warning, she snatches us up into her circling dance, and whirls us on until we are tired, and drop from her arms.

She is ever shaping new forms: what is, has never yet been; what has been, comes not again. Everything is new, and yet nought but the old.

We live in her midst and know her not. She is incessantly speaking to us, but betrays not her secret. We constantly act upon her, and yet have no power over her.

The one thing she seems to aim at is Individuality; yet she cares nothing for individuals. She is always building up and destroying; but her workshop is inaccessible.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 🌬️🍃

Today we start our Alchemy & The Poetics of Matter course in collaboration with with Jungian analyst .mirjalili and Spagyric (herbal alchemy) teacher Daniel Wiseman .arcadia as our guest teacher who will help guide us into some novice hands-on alchemical practices with plants in the tradition of Paracelsus.
🌿⚗️🔥

Alchemy always was, and remains the art and science of Nature, and we hope to be able to give a tangible, lived experience of this during our 6 weeks together.

The course is full, but if you would like to join a next cycle, let us know.

Art credits:
1) “Night Gardens” by Mary Mattingly
2) “Marseus in the Land of Snakes” by Otto Marseus van Schrieck
3) “Dragon of Dartmoor” by Jon Carraher

“There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as before an ancie...
01/05/2026

“There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as before an ancient friend.” — James Baldwin, with thanks to from our cohort Ecologies of the Imagination, where we opened the course with .space with a journey to the moon 🌕 as she grows fuller into her scorpionic sting. ♏️

Alchemy has long occupied a contested place at the crossroads of science, religion, psychology, spirituality and even po...
15/04/2026

Alchemy has long occupied a contested place at the crossroads of science, religion, psychology, spirituality and even pop-culture. For Carl Jung, it offered a bridge—linking his psychology of the unconscious to his beloved Gnosticism and to a spiritual lineage he sensed but could not fully articulate within modern thought. And yet, in making alchemy psychological only, something of its living practice fell away.

The laboratory—the slow work with plants, minerals, metals, with messy matter—was gradually left aside, sublimated into metaphor. What had once been a scientia naturae, a way of knowing nature as alive and ensouled, became something to interpret and symbolically relate to rather than to engage with materially.

But alchemy was never meant to be a practice of the imaginal only. It was a precise, demanding, sacred and scientific relationship to matter and its building blocks, in which transformation unfolds through materiality—through processes that ask for patience, attention, and a willingness to be changed alongside the substance itself.

This 6-week course emerges from that tension between psyche and matter. Not to add “practice” as a technique, but to question the split between psyche/matter, above/below, heaven/earth altogether. Through dreamwork, study, and—if desired—hands-on experimentation, it opens alchemy as a living process rather than a symbolic system or map of the psyche alone.

In a time marked by ecological rupture, political division and a growing estrangement from the materiality of life, alchemy may offer not a solution, but another way to view the world and our place in it.

Join Faranak Mirjalili with guest teacher Daniel Wiseman for this 6-week course in collaboration with for this first public course of Faranak’s 6 year long research conducted at the University of Amsterdam and the CG Jung Institute in Zurich. (Link in bio)

In the imagination of antiquity, the moon is not only a reflector of the sun, but something more ambiguous, more intimat...
08/04/2026

In the imagination of antiquity, the moon is not only a reflector of the sun, but something more ambiguous, more intimate to the conditions and life of soul. She belongs to the threshold, and that is why the alchemists place her precisely there; on the border between the eternal and the ephemeral, where “the realm of the perishable begins… [and] souls… become subject to time.” (Macrobius)

It is from her that the dew descends, and as Jung writes, in alchemical language this dew is no sweet and innocent condensation but the aqua mirifica (miraculous water)—that subtle, living moisture which “extracts the souls from the bodies or gives the bodies life and soul.” This is a formulation of paradox, because it rebels against being fixed. Does she animate, or does she draw the soul out? The answer is of course both; the same lunar movement that ensouls is also already involved in the processes of dissolution.

Her moisture gives life, but as moisture she is also bringer of decay. The poets of old praise the delicacy of the new moon, its luminous tenderness, yet this beauty “veils her dark side,” which is entangled as an inseparable condition to that same beauty.

What is perhaps most touching is her connection to the Earth and her suffering: because she is the nearest of the heavenly bodies, she cannot remain untouched by it. She partakes in its rhythms, and in its suffering, its cycles of death, and in what Jung calls its “daemonic darkness.” The moon, in this sense, is not a symbol of purity but one of participation—of the soul caught in the mixture of light and dark.

Perhaps this is why she has so often been imagined as mediator, as one that stands in-between and like any image that must hold together what does not easily glue. She does not deflate the tension between opposites, but holds and sustains it, quietly, cyclically like a snake shedding skin she shows us what it means to live on this Earth and let its darkness and pain touch us, shape us and transform us into the unknown and ultimately into the mysteries of life.

Quotes from Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis.

Next month we dive deeper into Alchemy in our collab with - link in bio

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