Leaps of Consciousness

Anne Baring is a Jungian analyst and historian. Her life’s work, The Dream of the Cosmos, shows how the current crisis arose, and offers solutions for our own and Mother Earth’s healing.

“What is being born in the collapse and dissolution of the old mythologies — the old belief systems which have divided instead of uniting humanity — is the recognition that we do not live in a dead, meaningless universe but within a Sacred Cosmic Order.”

In The Myth of the Goddess - which took ten years to write with Jules Cashford - they were most “interested in the influence of the sacred image on Western civilisation and the need to integrate the masculine and feminine principles. The quest to explore this theme led us back to the Neolithic and Palaeolithic eras and the origins of the sacred image, tracing its development through the Bronze Age and beyond."

"We wanted to know why and how the image of deity changed from being feminine to masculine (Great Mother to Great Father) at a specific historical time (c.2000 B.C.) and how this change came to polarise spirit and nature, mind and soul, in human consciousness."

"We discovered that the polarisation originating so long ago has deeply influenced Judeo-Christian civilisation and the paradigm of reality which presently governs our culture, leading ultimately to the ecological and spiritual crisis we now face.”