The Mysteryof Mercurius
Presented by
Charles Zeltzer, PhD
Sunday, 3:00PM- 6:00 PM, June 1st, 2014
From his historical roots in the Egyptian god Thoth and the Greek Hermes, to his expressions in alchemy, Goethe’s Faust and beyond, the morally ambiguous Mercurius is both the god of the current age and the god of the unconscious. Living and loving so far from consciousness, this god can cause great apprehension and wreak enormous havoc and destruction.
The experience of Mercurius can shake us to our core and open us to new life. In order to understand his uncanny relevance for current times, we will examine images, stories, dreams, and experiences of Mercurius, closely circling around what Jung calls, “the image of the spirit imprisoned in the darkness of the world.”
Charles T. Zeltzer, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and has been a certified Jungian analyst since 1992. He is currently in private practice, with offices in Ventura and Brentwood. He was the Director of Training at the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles. He is a long-time member of the editorial board of the Jungian journal, Psychological Perspectives, and has been the guest editor for special issues on Jung and the East, and fairy tales. He has spoken throughout the United States and Europe on the body in relation to the inner journey of encountering early trauma. He has also spoken on many aspects of the religious dimension of the psyche. These include alchemy, Kundalini Yoga, the Roman Catholic Mass as an alchemical process, and the role of the alchemical god Mercurius in our everyday lives. He has specialized in leading seminars on Jung’s alchemical works, and since 2003 he has conducted a line-by-line discussion of Jung’s magnum opus,Mysterium Coniunctionis.