Spellbound Quotes

“In its very broadest sense, everything has a soul because everything has a form that makes prime matter a specific thing. It is spirit, or we might call it idea, that infuses prime matter with identity and meaning.
A narrower concept of soul was used to distinguish living things from inanimate objects. The soul was the thing that gave inanimate matter its spark and brought it to life. In modern chemical equations, the Greek letter delta signifies heat or fire. It’s the inciting factor that sets off a chemical reaction. In physics, delta signifies change of any type. It distinguishes a static environment from a dynamic one.”
― Daniel Z. Lieberman, Spellbound: Modern Science, Ancient Magic, and the Hidden Potential of the Unconscious Mind

“We’ll begin by looking at the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. The theory that all things are made from these four elements is thought to have originated with Empedocles. The elements roughly correspond to the four natural states of matter in modern chemistry: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Unlike the states of matter that modern chemists understand, however, each of the four elements had symbolic meaning derived from philosophical speculations - or, we might say, projections of unconscious contents.”
― Daniel Z. Lieberman, Spellbound: Modern Science, Ancient Magic, and the Hidden Potential of the Unconscious Mind

“The unconscious is powerful and dangerous. We shouldn’t ignore it, but we shouldn’t uncritically embrace it or surrender to it, either. The goal is to find balance, to bring unconscious contents into consciousness in a way that doesn’t overwhelm the ego. Becoming whole is perhaps the most important thing we do in life. It would be naive to think that it would be easy or free of danger.”
― Daniel Z. Lieberman, Spellbound: Modern Science, Ancient Magic, and the Hidden Potential of the Unconscious Mind

“The most important symbol of the primordial mother is the ouroboros, a snake with its tail in its mouth. It represents unconscious nature, which feeds on itself in a cyclical manner: consuming itself and producing itself from itself, undergoing perpetual destruction and renewal. Life and death are the same to the ouroboric mother. Death nourishes life until life becomes death, one of many cycles that return back upon themselves: the rising and setting of the sun, the seasons of the year, the sowing of seeds and the reaping of the harvest, the circle of life.”
― Daniel Z. Lieberman, Spellbound: Modern Science, Ancient Magic, and the Hidden Potential of the Unconscious Mind

“Life begins in the mother’s womb, a paradise where all our needs are fulfilled. The mother and child are one. Birth is the abrupt end of that perfect state of unity. Death is the return. It’s our final destination, in which our remains are restored to the earth and, once again, we become one with our origin. The archetypal mother is the vessel of life, but she is also the tomb and the darkness that engulfs.”
― Daniel Z. Lieberman, Spellbound: Modern Science, Ancient Magic, and the Hidden Potential of the Unconscious Mind