The Loss and Recovery of the Sacred with Anne Baring

The Loss and Recovery of the Sacred with Anne Baring
From the series Recovering the Sacred

Jesus said that men do not put new wine in old bottles, lest the bottles break and the wine is lost. There is new wine pouring into our culture from different sources: new bottles are being created to hold it. This talk will explore aspects of the new wine and the new bottles. It will also explore when, where and how we lost a vital aspect of the sacred, together with visionary imagination and experience. In focussing so much on the rational mind, we have lost touch with the heart and the soul. For increasing numbers, religion has become meaningless. God has been pronounced dead—an outgrown superstition. But while the image of the sacred may die, the Sacred cannot die. After an interval marked by cultural and social disintegration, chaos and despair, a new image may appear, unheralded, from the depths of the human psyche. We are living at such a time, in the final stages of an old era and the birth of a new one.

Anne Baring b. 1931. MA Oxon. PhD (Hons) in Wisdom Studies Ubiquity University 2018. Jungian Analyst, author and co-author of 7 books including, with Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess; Evolution of an Image; with Andrew Harvey, The Mystic Vision and The Divine Feminine; with Dr Scilla Elworthy, Soul Power: An Agenda for a Conscious Humanity. Also a book for children, The Birds Who Flew Beyond Time. Her most recent book The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul (2013, updated and reprinted 2020) was awarded the Scientific and Medical Network Book Prize for 2013. The ground of all her work is a deep interest in the spiritual, mythological, shamanic and artistic traditions of different cultures. Her websites are devoted to the affirmation of a new vision of reality and the issues facing us at this crucial time of choice.

Recording on November 20, 2022.