The Archetypal Tradition of Prague
© 2020 by Petr Lisý
Originally published in ARCHAI: THE JOURNAL OF ARCHETYPAL COSMOLOGY, Issue 7, 2020, Persistent Press, Nashville (TN). If you would like to see a spoken introduction first, accompanied with some visual material, go here.
At the end of September 2017, the city of Prague hosted the International Transpersonal Conference (ITC 2017), a major global gathering of scholars, researchers, practitioners, and supporters from the field of transpersonal psychology and studies.[i] The conference took place under the auspices of Stanislav Grof, one of the founders of transpersonal psychology, and followed the tradition of the similarly composed large International Transpersonal Association (ITA) conferences organized by Grof himself and his late wife Christina mostly during the 1980s and 1990s. Two of the keynote speakers, Christopher M. Bache and Richard Tarnas, reminded us in their lectures of the importance of Prague—the place of Grof’s birth, education, and early years of psychedelic research—to the history of depth and transpersonal psychology.[ii] Their presentations inspired me to enlarge the view and make this attempt to summarize briefly the essence of the remarkable role that the city of Prague has played in the historical development of Western spirituality and world views both in the medieval and modern era.
In the first part of the article, I touch on the topic of the sacred architecture and the crucial historical influences responsible for creating Prague’s specific genius loci. In the second part, I present several remarkable movements that took place in Prague during the twentieth century: modern Czech Hermeticism, Czechoslovakian psychedelic research, and new paradigm ideas among the Czech intellectual dissent. I decided to use the word “archetypal” in the title of the article in an attempt to encompass satisfactorily my extensive conception that draws together various intellectual and spiritual streams. The general theory of archetypes might serve as common ground shared by most of the recent thinkers presented in the last section of the article, while the older periods mentioned in Part I belong to the Hermetic tradition that constitutes the historical substrate of the Jungian world view. Given the vital position of astrology within the conception of archetypal cosmology, I gave extra attention to its issues whenever it seemed appropriate. Regarding textual resources, I tried to refer primarily to English books and articles whenever it was possible.
Part I – Genius Loci: Prague and Its Sacred Architecture
Historical and Legendary Origins of Prague
There are beautiful maps from the sixteenth century depicting Europe as a young empress, with the Czech lands as a necklace at her heart. The historical perception of our country as “the Heart of Europe” reflects its actual central geographic position between east and west and north and south. The current Czech Republic consists of three historical regions—Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. Bohemia forms a relatively regular round shape encircled by a ring of mountains that can be distinguished from its surroundings even when looking at a plain geological map, with Prague situated very close to the geometrical center. The famous Czech geologist and philosopher Václav Cílek points out that the round shape of the region was formerly an immense meteoric crater called Prague Impact Crater, one that is more than one billion years old. With reference to this fact, Cílek poetically says that life in Bohemia is like “living in a magic cauldron.”[iii] Contemplating this fact, we can see that even the geographical position of the city is quite remarkable. The place itself has continually served as a seat of human activity for at least seven thousand years. The remnants of Neolithic sacred geometry (temples, menhirs) can be found in Central Bohemia and Prague itself, including one of the world’s oldest temples with astronomical bearings.[iv]
The city itself came into being in the tenth century as a gradually growing agglomeration of former Slavic villages seated at the crossroads of trade paths in the valley of the Vltava river. A certain medieval manuscript contains the Slavic founding legend of the city and of the Přemyslid house, a dynasty of Czech princes and kings ruling over the country from the ninth century until the year 1306. According to this legend, the founding person of the dynasty was actually a prophetic woman (duchess Libuše) who had the vision of a great future city and founded the line of its rulers by marrying Přemysl the Plowman.
Originally published in ARCHAI: THE JOURNAL OF ARCHETYPAL COSMOLOGY, Issue 7, 2020, Persistent Press, Nashville (TN). If you would like to see a spoken introduction first, accompanied with some visual material, go here.
At the end of September 2017, the city of Prague hosted the International Transpersonal Conference (ITC 2017), a major global gathering of scholars, researchers, practitioners, and supporters from the field of transpersonal psychology and studies.[i] The conference took place under the auspices of Stanislav Grof, one of the founders of transpersonal psychology, and followed the tradition of the similarly composed large International Transpersonal Association (ITA) conferences organized by Grof himself and his late wife Christina mostly during the 1980s and 1990s. Two of the keynote speakers, Christopher M. Bache and Richard Tarnas, reminded us in their lectures of the importance of Prague—the place of Grof’s birth, education, and early years of psychedelic research—to the history of depth and transpersonal psychology.[ii] Their presentations inspired me to enlarge the view and make this attempt to summarize briefly the essence of the remarkable role that the city of Prague has played in the historical development of Western spirituality and world views both in the medieval and modern era.
In the first part of the article, I touch on the topic of the sacred architecture and the crucial historical influences responsible for creating Prague’s specific genius loci. In the second part, I present several remarkable movements that took place in Prague during the twentieth century: modern Czech Hermeticism, Czechoslovakian psychedelic research, and new paradigm ideas among the Czech intellectual dissent. I decided to use the word “archetypal” in the title of the article in an attempt to encompass satisfactorily my extensive conception that draws together various intellectual and spiritual streams. The general theory of archetypes might serve as common ground shared by most of the recent thinkers presented in the last section of the article, while the older periods mentioned in Part I belong to the Hermetic tradition that constitutes the historical substrate of the Jungian world view. Given the vital position of astrology within the conception of archetypal cosmology, I gave extra attention to its issues whenever it seemed appropriate. Regarding textual resources, I tried to refer primarily to English books and articles whenever it was possible.
Part I – Genius Loci: Prague and Its Sacred Architecture
Historical and Legendary Origins of Prague
There are beautiful maps from the sixteenth century depicting Europe as a young empress, with the Czech lands as a necklace at her heart. The historical perception of our country as “the Heart of Europe” reflects its actual central geographic position between east and west and north and south. The current Czech Republic consists of three historical regions—Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. Bohemia forms a relatively regular round shape encircled by a ring of mountains that can be distinguished from its surroundings even when looking at a plain geological map, with Prague situated very close to the geometrical center. The famous Czech geologist and philosopher Václav Cílek points out that the round shape of the region was formerly an immense meteoric crater called Prague Impact Crater, one that is more than one billion years old. With reference to this fact, Cílek poetically says that life in Bohemia is like “living in a magic cauldron.”[iii] Contemplating this fact, we can see that even the geographical position of the city is quite remarkable. The place itself has continually served as a seat of human activity for at least seven thousand years. The remnants of Neolithic sacred geometry (temples, menhirs) can be found in Central Bohemia and Prague itself, including one of the world’s oldest temples with astronomical bearings.[iv]
The city itself came into being in the tenth century as a gradually growing agglomeration of former Slavic villages seated at the crossroads of trade paths in the valley of the Vltava river. A certain medieval manuscript contains the Slavic founding legend of the city and of the Přemyslid house, a dynasty of Czech princes and kings ruling over the country from the ninth century until the year 1306. According to this legend, the founding person of the dynasty was actually a prophetic woman (duchess Libuše) who had the vision of a great future city and founded the line of its rulers by marrying Přemysl the Plowman.
Mikoláš Aleš (1852-1913) - "Libuše's Prophecy" from the cycle "Praha" (1904)
The Reign of Charles IV of Luxembourg (1346–1378)
The Czech kingdom consolidated and became the most powerful force in Central Europe in the thirteenth century, during the reign of the last Přemyslids. Their ascent to power brought about the rise of the capital, as well as the enhancement of the king’s court. The court attracted educated astrologers (such as Alvara de Oviedo) who came to Prague from Spain, a center of medieval astrology.[v] This was probably how the tradition of Western astrology, which is the basic source of archetypal cosmology, took root in Prague.
When Wenceslas III, the last king and male heir of the powerful Přemyslid dynasty, was murdered in 1306, the Czech noblemen elected as their new king John of Luxembourg, who married Wenceslas’ sister Elisabeth. Their son Charles IV, “the father of the homeland,” as he has been referred to by Czech historiographers, was born at the Prague Castle in 1316. Charles grew up at the civilized and sophisticated court of his uncle, the French king, where Charles established a friendship with his teacher who later became the Pope called Clement VI. When his father fell in the battle of Crécy in 1346, Charles IV became both the Czech and Roman king. In 1355 Charles became emperor, making him the most powerful ruler of that time.
Charles was an outstanding person—a skilled knight and warrior, an excellent diplomat, a highly educated and pious man who had mystical experiences, a visionary universalist and proto-humanist ruler who took his privileged role as a religious mission. For both emotional and pragmatic reasons, he decided to make the Czech lands the center of his large realm and the city of Prague its capital. To be able to serve his ambitious and magnificent plans and needs, the city needed development and elevation. Besides establishing a university and archbishopric, Charles ordered the construction of buildings that since his time became the trademark of Prague—the Charles bridge and the St. Vitus Cathedral. But most importantly, he arranged for new construction and a massive enlargement of the city based on the principles of sacred geometry. The southern part of the New Town was, for example, clearly built according to the same pattern as Jerusalem, the city that medieval people believed to be at the center of the world. The positions of several important newly built churches or chapels of that time also formed remarkably precise equilateral triangles.
In his spectacular bilingual Czech-English book Praga Mysteriosa (2nd edition, 2002), the astrologer Milan Špůrek describes many features of the religious geometry of King Charles’ Prague, using a plethora of visual material. He identifies two architectonical lines forming a rectangular cross, horizontal and vertical, which allowed him to develop the “Prague Zodiac,” dividing the city into twelve sections according to the astrological signs. Špůrek also describes in detail the rich and obvious astrological symbolism of the Old Town Bridge Tower. The iconography of its decoration combines the four elements, the seven planets of classical astrology, the zodiacal signs, starry constellations, and much more. Astrology was certainly an important part of the world view of Charles IV, as well as that of his son and successor, Wenceslas IV, who made his special interest in astrology a quite ostentatious feature of his court. It was also under the reign of Wenceslas IV that another trademark of Prague, its remarkable astronomical clock, came into being.
The Reign of Charles IV of Luxembourg (1346–1378)
The Czech kingdom consolidated and became the most powerful force in Central Europe in the thirteenth century, during the reign of the last Přemyslids. Their ascent to power brought about the rise of the capital, as well as the enhancement of the king’s court. The court attracted educated astrologers (such as Alvara de Oviedo) who came to Prague from Spain, a center of medieval astrology.[v] This was probably how the tradition of Western astrology, which is the basic source of archetypal cosmology, took root in Prague.
When Wenceslas III, the last king and male heir of the powerful Přemyslid dynasty, was murdered in 1306, the Czech noblemen elected as their new king John of Luxembourg, who married Wenceslas’ sister Elisabeth. Their son Charles IV, “the father of the homeland,” as he has been referred to by Czech historiographers, was born at the Prague Castle in 1316. Charles grew up at the civilized and sophisticated court of his uncle, the French king, where Charles established a friendship with his teacher who later became the Pope called Clement VI. When his father fell in the battle of Crécy in 1346, Charles IV became both the Czech and Roman king. In 1355 Charles became emperor, making him the most powerful ruler of that time.
Charles was an outstanding person—a skilled knight and warrior, an excellent diplomat, a highly educated and pious man who had mystical experiences, a visionary universalist and proto-humanist ruler who took his privileged role as a religious mission. For both emotional and pragmatic reasons, he decided to make the Czech lands the center of his large realm and the city of Prague its capital. To be able to serve his ambitious and magnificent plans and needs, the city needed development and elevation. Besides establishing a university and archbishopric, Charles ordered the construction of buildings that since his time became the trademark of Prague—the Charles bridge and the St. Vitus Cathedral. But most importantly, he arranged for new construction and a massive enlargement of the city based on the principles of sacred geometry. The southern part of the New Town was, for example, clearly built according to the same pattern as Jerusalem, the city that medieval people believed to be at the center of the world. The positions of several important newly built churches or chapels of that time also formed remarkably precise equilateral triangles.
In his spectacular bilingual Czech-English book Praga Mysteriosa (2nd edition, 2002), the astrologer Milan Špůrek describes many features of the religious geometry of King Charles’ Prague, using a plethora of visual material. He identifies two architectonical lines forming a rectangular cross, horizontal and vertical, which allowed him to develop the “Prague Zodiac,” dividing the city into twelve sections according to the astrological signs. Špůrek also describes in detail the rich and obvious astrological symbolism of the Old Town Bridge Tower. The iconography of its decoration combines the four elements, the seven planets of classical astrology, the zodiacal signs, starry constellations, and much more. Astrology was certainly an important part of the world view of Charles IV, as well as that of his son and successor, Wenceslas IV, who made his special interest in astrology a quite ostentatious feature of his court. It was also under the reign of Wenceslas IV that another trademark of Prague, its remarkable astronomical clock, came into being.
The Reign of Rudolf II of Habsburg (1576–1612)
King Wenceslas IV did not inherit either the brilliance of his father nor the favorable geopolitical conditions of his time. During his reign, the Czech spokesman of religious pre-Reformation Jan Hus had been burned at the stake by the ecclesiastic Council of Constance, which led to the outbreak of the Hussite revolution and religious war. Even though the Hussites were able to assert their right to have their own religious confession (Confessio Bohemica) alongside Roman Catholicism, the wars disrupted the country and led it into cultural isolation that lasted a whole century. This changed when in 1526 the Czech noblemen elected the Austrian archduke Ferdinand I of Habsburg as their king; nonetheless, the country became subdued to the absolutist monarchy of the Austrian emperors, and was exposed to their attempts to re-Catholicize.
Prague flourished during the government of the Emperor’s son Ferdinand of Tyrol (1548–1567), a true Renaissance nobleman, strongly influenced by Neoplatonic and Hermetic philosophy, such as that of Marsilio Ficino. Ferdinand personally helped prepare the plans for the Hvězda summer residence (its name means “Star”), a beautiful and complex Renaissance building that later became one of the jewels of Prague’s cultural heritage. Its shape is that of six-pointed star, its four floors correspond to the four stages of the alchemical opus, and its architecture is full of alchemical, astrological, mythological, and hermetic symbolism.[vi]
Ferdinand’s nephew Rudolf II, who became the Czech king and Holy Roman Emperor in 1576, shared the spiritual and philosophical ideas of his uncle. Emperor Rudolf II made Prague his residential city in 1583 (it remained so until his death in 1612). The presence of the court made the city a center of international diplomacy, art, culture, and late Renaissance knowledge, full of outstanding personalities. The Emperor was an almost fanatic collector of art, as well as a patron of serious scholars—but also charlatans.[vii] He was an intelligent man with an authentic interest in the esoteric disciplines of alchemy, astrology, Kabbalah and Hermetic philosophy, but also a man of unbalanced nature, not gifted to rule over a great empire in difficult geopolitical conditions. In any case, Rudolf II made the Prague of his time an effusive cultural center of Europe, and his court was visited by many scholars currently counted as prominent figures in the development of the Western world view. One of them was Giordano Bruno, the Italian Hermetic philosopher who spent six months in Prague in 1588, who dedicated to the Emperor his book Articuli Adversus Mathematicos.[viii] John Dee, the great English mathematician, astronomer, geographer, alchemist, and Hermetic philosopher, and protégé of Queen Elizabeth I of England, came to Prague in 1584 accompanied by Edward Kelley, probably a man with real mediumistic dispositions, but at the same time a cunning swindler and manipulator. Dee presented to the emperor their communication with angels, using Kelley as a medium working with magical mirrors. The ambassador of the Pope found their activities heretical, which forced Rudolf to send them away from the court to stay in Southern Bohemia in 1587. While Dee returned back home after two years, Kelley remained in Prague, and was imprisoned by the Emperor for not fulfilling his promise to make the alchemical philosopher’s stone for him, and died in 1595 during his attempt to escape from the cell.[ix]
From the viewpoint of astrology, as well as that of the history of science, the most important stay in the Rudolfinian Prague was that of Johannes Kepler, the great German mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer who served as an imperial mathematician in 1601–1612.[x] Kepler came into Prague in 1600 to work as an assistant of Tycho Brahe, the brilliant Danish astronomer who entered the imperial service a year earlier. Tycho died in 1601, but Kepler was lucky to inherit his precise astronomical tables and observations collected over twenty-five years. These observations provided Kepler with exactly the empirical material he needed to formulate his astronomical theories. Kepler’s stay in Prague was the most fruitful and creative time of his life, during which he formulated two of his three laws of planetary motion and published more than thirty writings, including three large fundamental works of modern physics: The Optical Part of Astronomy, Astronomia Nova, and Dioptrice. In 1601, Kepler also released his writing Concerning the More Certain Fundamentals of Astrology, in which he enriches the classical set of five Ptolemaic aspects with three new ones: the quintile (72º), the bi-quintile (144º), and the sesquiquadrate (135º). In 1604, Kepler also published Tertius Interveniens, a polemical essay defending astrology.[xi]
All of the previously mentioned scholars—Dee, Bruno, Brahe, Kepler—were practicing astrologers, Kepler being the most active and successful of them. His excellent birth chart commentary of Albrecht von Wallenstein is well known, made in 1608 as a “blind” reading without knowing the identity of his client. Wallenstein was a Czech nobleman who later became an ambivalent hero of the Thirty Years’ War. Wallenstein was a highly successful and powerful commander-in-chief in the service of the Austrian Emperor, but in the end was betrayed and murdered by his own army officers. His remarkable life story inspired many artists, the most famous of them being Friedrich Schiller, the German poet of the early Romantic era. Wallenstein, who was obsessively devoted to astrology, built in Prague the monumental Wallenstein Palace and had one of its hallways painted with beautiful frescos depicting the allegorical procession of the seven classical planetary gods on the ceiling, as well as the twelve zodiacal signs at the sides. In the world of Mannerist and Baroque art and architecture, the astrological corridor of the Wallenstein Palace represents a unique piece of work.[xii]
Despite his genuine interest in esoteric sciences, Emperor Rudolf II was a devoted Roman Catholic who proclaimed his tolerance for the Bohemian confession only unwillingly, as he was forced by the Czech noblemen who were taking advantage of the weak political position of their ruler. Rudolf’s brother Mathias, who wore the crown after him, was more open to finding balance and understanding between Catholics and Protestants within his realm, but he was soon pushed aside by his successor Ferdinand II, a resolute exponent of the Counter-Reformation. The activities of Ferdinand II led to the Protestant rebellion in Bohemia in 1618, the outbreak of which marked the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). The Czech noblemen elected as their king the Protestant Frederick V, elector Palatine of the Rhine. As the scholar Frances A. Yates convincingly suggests in her book The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, if Frederick V had been able to defeat the Catholic forces, the people of the Czech lands might have hoped for better times under the leadership of this cultivated and spiritually oriented ruler.[xiii] But the course of history went otherwise, and the Czech Protestant forces lost their cause utterly in the disastrous Battle of White Mountain on the borders of Prague in 1620. The failure of the Bohemian Revolt led not only to the general destruction that European countries experienced during the Thirty Years’ War, but also to ruthless re-Catholicization, trampling into the ground the dearly bought tradition of the Bohemian Confession that had lasted for two centuries. For another two hundred years, Prague became the provincial capital of a second-class country, deeply embedded in and strongly grasped by the Austrian Empire ruled by the house of Habsburg. The majority of the Czech population had been violently cut off from their religious tradition, and the local Slavic language barely survived the expansion of the official German language. However, from the more positive viewpoint of the aesthetic of the city, the Baroque period that followed the Thirty Years War enriched Prague with many exquisitely beautiful churches, palaces, and other buildings.
Part II: The Archetypal Tradition of Prague in the Twentieth Century
Despite the Romantically inspired movement of the Czech National Revival, and Prague’s participation in the revolutions of 1848, the city had to wait for the end of World War I for a more dignified historical role as the capital of the newly established state of Czechoslovakia. But the architectonic splendor that recalls the eventful history of the city, together with the medieval legend of Doctor Faustus, and Rudolfinian story of Rabbi Löw and his mysterious artificial servant Golem from the Old Jewish Town, bestow upon Prague a specific and unique cultural atmosphere. During the turn of the twentieth century, which was marked by the world transit conjunction of the planets Neptune and Pluto, artists were the first to perceive the genius loci of Prague and depict it in their work. Gustav Meyrink, the Austrian occultist who lived in Prague in the years 1884–1904, contributed to the legend of the esoteric Prague by publishing his great initiatory novels taking place in the streets of the city, valued among others by C. G. Jung. Remarkably, Meyrink started to write about Prague only after he had left it, being forced to move away by his enemies; later Meyrink said he would have liked to live again in Prague, but “only in my memory,” while in reality “not for a single hour.”[xiv] Besides the romantic magic of Prague, Meyrink could feel its suffocating provincial atmosphere of Austrian absolutism, with its censorship, bureaucracy, and secret police; indeed, this austere face of the city was genuinely depicted by the most famous of its German-language citizens, Franz Kafka, in such novels as his Der Prozess (The Trial) and Das Schloss (The Castle).
Prague and Modern Czech Hermeticism in the 1930s
After establishing the new multi-ethnic democratic state of Czechoslovakia in 1918, with Prague as its capital, the combination of the old genius loci and the new geopolitical climate gave rise to the remarkable phenomenon of modern Czech Hermeticism.[xv] The movement had been inspired by the French occultists of the late nineteenth century, particularly Eliphas Levi, Papus, and Stanislas de Guaita. Through this historical channel, the Czech interest in the occult was enhanced by the influence of “Martinism,” a synthesis of Hermeticism and esoteric Christianity developed by the “unknown philosopher” Louise-Claude de Saint-Martin in the eighteenth century. The Czech movement had its pioneers already at the turn of the twentieth century and before World War I, but found its peak in the 1930s; in terms of world transits, this movement correlates with the Uranus-Pluto square of that time.
In general, modern Czech Hermeticism included several outstanding people who dedicated their lives to the genuine study and exploration of the traditional disciplines of magic, astrology, alchemy, Kabbalah, and Hermetic philosophy. In 1930, some of these individuals established in Prague an association called “Universalia: Society of Czech Hermeticians,” which defined itself as an “independent, non-dogmatic society functioning according to the principles of philosophical and Hermetic universalism.”[xvi] Its mission was the “promotion of Hermeticism and philosophy and the synthesized study of religious and occult teachings of all schools and ages, with the aim of supporting the idealistic and spiritual stream of the current culture.”[xvii] The society performed a rich spectrum of activities, including regular public lectures and a number of publications, including a journal called Logos: Revue pro esoterní chápání života a kultury (Logos: Revue for the Esoteric Understanding of the Life and Culture). Besides titles written by members of Universalia, the list of the books published by the association includes the translated classical works of Paracelsus, Agrippa von Nettesheim, and Eliphas Levi, as well as the Tibetan Bardo Thödol and the works of Krishnamurti. Universalia also began to release its Encyklopedie okultismu, filosofie a mytologie (Encyclopedia of Occultism, Philosophy, and Mythology), an enormous project with no match worldwide, but unfortunately never finished due to the outbreak of World War II. Topics of the lectures in the Free School of Hermetic Sciences, organized by Universalia, included parapsychology, mysticism, theosophy, and mediumship, as well as the other subjects mentioned previously. The quality of knowledge, writings, and lectures of the members of Universalia was extraordinary, and their activities made Prague one of the most important centers of Hermeticism in the world. In 1938, the Czech Hermetic movement reportedly included about seven hundred people. Tragically, the Nazi occupation was a great complication and obstacle, leading to the final ruthless abolition of Universalia in 1941 when the Gestapo arrested its chairman Jan Kefer.
Milan Nakonečný, a Czech psychologist and historian of modern Czech Hermeticism, states that the three principal figures of Universalia—Jan Kefer, Petr Kohout-Lasenic, and František Kabelák—formed the kind of team that comes into being only once in many centuries.[xviii] In this article, I would like to describe briefly the main features of their work, to give readers an idea of its flavor.
Jan Kefer (1906–1941) studied at Charles University in Prague and gained a doctorate in musical aesthetics and philosophy. He served as a chairman and devoted spiritus agens of Universalia, writing and translating books, editing its journal and encyclopedia, and being one of its main lecturers. His knowledge was extraordinary both in its width and depth; he followed Eliphas Levi in combining Catholicism with Hermeticism. Kefer dedicated his short and extremely busy life to evocative magic (theurgy), spagyria (Hermetic medicine), and astrology, all of which he practiced together with his wife Dagmar (1916–1942). His large synthetic book Praktická astrologie (Practical Astrology, 1939) is still highly regarded by Czech traditional astrologers up to this day. His main discipline was theurgy; his unfinished book Syntetická magie (Synthetic Magic, 1939) is, according to Nakonečný, a great and unique piece of work.[xix] Kefer, being of partly German origin, could have saved his life during the Nazi occupation, but as a proud Czech patriot he refused a German passport and was the main figure of a serious attempt to destroy Hitler by magically attacking his astral body in 1940. The Gestapo arrested him in 1941 and, several months later, he was tortured to death in Flossenbürg, one of the worst Nazi concentration camps.
Petr Kohout, also known as Pierre de Lasenic (1900–1944), was the most gifted and mysterious figure of the Prague Hermetic group. He lived an adventurous life, having spent many years abroad, particularly in France and its colonies (Algeria, Cambodia, and Madagascar). He became a member of several esoteric orders (such as New Eulis), having received the highest initiation of Societé egyptienne secrete in the very Pyramid of Giza. The mysteries of ancient Egypt became his main area of interest and he developed a deep understanding of them. During his stay in Egypt, he was caught by a sandstorm which killed the man who accompanied him; Lasenic survived, but the health consequences probably shortened his life. His most important book, Hermetická iniciace Universalismu na základě systému rhodostaurického (Hermeticist Initiation of Universalism on the Rhodostauric Basis, 1937) belongs, according to Nakonečný, to the best works ever written worldwide on the topic of Hermeticism and occult esotericism.[xx] Another masterpiece is his book Tarot: klíč k iniciaci (Tarot: The Key to Initiation, 1938), accompanied by a set of extremely beautiful tarot cards painted, according to Lasenic’s instructions, by Vladislav Kužel. In 1938, Lasenic also founded the Hermetic circle called Horev-Club, which never had more than twenty members, with the aim of studying ancient Egyptian esotericism. Resembling an esoteric lodge, its activities included practical alchemy, spagyria, and magical work, including the observation of elemental beings, all of which were performed during the most intense years of the Nazi occupation. Lasenic was appreciated for his practical experience in the field of theurgy, or evocative magic. He did not live to see the end of World War II, but despite being arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo for several weeks, Lasenic did not share Kefer’s fate and died of natural causes.
František Kabelák (1902–1969) was the only member of this eminent trio who survived World War II, only to see the rise of another tyrannical regime—this time the Communist regime. Accepting the everyday role of a common worker, he spent the last part of his life in the exile of the Czech countryside, dedicating his life to the secret performance of evocative magic and Hermetic medicine. Born in Vienna, where he was part of the Hermetic circle Magikon, and having travelled through Europe, Africa (where he got malaria), and the Middle East, Kabelák came to Prague in 1936 immediately to become one of the key figures of the Czech Hermetic movement. He excelled in the realms of Kabbalah and ceremonial magic, but mostly gravitated to Hermetic medicine with its doctrine of signatures, which brought his approach near to that of a Renaissance magician.[xxi] Based on his wide experience in the field, he wrote a unique work called Herbář hermetikův (Herbarium spirituale siderium, 1941). In the 1960s, Kabelák secretly visited Prague to give private lectures to a small circle of students interested in Hermeticism. Besides a number of other publications and manuscripts, he put his extensive knowledge of the field into the form of his magnum opus, Magia Divina (published posthumously in 2006).
The legacy of modern Czech Hermeticism lasts to the present day. Despite the oppression of both Nazi and Communist regimes, there were people who genuinely followed the tradition, who studied and practiced the classical Hermetic disciplines. The historical period of the 1990s, accompanied by the world-transit conjunction of Uranus and Neptune, brought about a renaissance of interest in esotericism worldwide. In the Czech Republic, this was a time of frenetic publication of formerly forbidden literature, including the works of the Hermetic circle from the 1930s. The main credit for this effort should be attributed to the publishing house Trigon and its founder Vladislav Zadrobílek (1932–2010), a great local expert in alchemy and Hermeticism. The high-quality yearly revue Logos, formerly published in the 1930s by Universalia, started to be published again by Trigon in 1990 and it has continued to do so up to this day. Trigon also published a highly informative text with the lengthy title Opus Magnum: kniha o sakrální geometrii, alchymii, magii, astrologii, kabale a tajných společnostech v Českých zemích (Opus Magnum: The Book of Sacred Geometry, Alchemy, Magic, Astrology, the Kabbala, and Secret Societies in Bohemia, 1997), a beautiful volume full of images, also containing a full English translation of its Czech contents. Opus Magnum is the only book I know which covers the whole range of topics mentioned in this article so far, and therefore it deserves particular attention to the interested reader.
I would also like to mention Milan Nakonečný (born 1932), another crucially important figure responsible for keeping the tradition of Czech Hermeticism alive up to this day. Despite repeated obstructions from the Communist regime, Nakonečný managed to finish his university studies in psychology, and worked as a school psychologist for many years. As the author of a great number of textbooks on general psychology, social psychology, and the history of psychology, he eventually gained a professorship, the highest achievement possible in the Czech academic system. Interestingly enough, Nakonečný became an expert in two seemingly contradictory fields—that of academic psychology, where he became one of the chief names in the country, and that of Hermeticism and magic. Combining his thorough and genuine knowledge of magic with a psychological perspective, Nakonečný wrote two monumental comprehensive volumes: Magie v historii, teorii a praxi (Magic in History, Theory and Practice, 1999) and Lexikon magie (Lexicon of Magic, 1995). In my estimation, these books belong to the best titles in the field worldwide; especially the large-scale Lexicon, containing a great number of carefully selected illustrations and paintings. It is a truly unique piece of work. In the context of this article, Nakonečný’s most important role is that of historian: it is thanks to his book Novodobý český hermetismus (Modern Czech Hermeticism, 1995) that I am able to report here about this phenomenon with a certain consistency. To my best knowledge, none of Nakonečný’s many writings has ever been published in English, with the exception of a short historical text “Universalia” (and two others) contained in Opus Magnum.[xxii] The only existing English-language resource on this topic is probably the online article “A Brief History of the Czech Esoteric Scene from the Late 19th Century to 1989,” written by Petr Kalač.[xxiii]
Czechoslovakian Psychedelic Research in the 1960s
We are now coming to the most radical part of our historical survey, which is the phenomenon of Czechoslovakian psychiatric research into psychedelics, taking place in the 1960s and in the beginning of the 1970s. Taking into account the current state of knowledge regarding the potential of psychedelic substances to induce mystical experiences and holotropic states, we can rightfully include this period in the historical context of Prague’s role in the field of consciousness studies. On the one hand, in contrast to the previously mentioned cases, Czechoslovakian psychedelic research took place in an era of extreme scientific materialism, in its Marxist version of “dialectic materialism,” which can be seen as a great paradox.[xxiv] On the other hand, LSD-25 was perceived at that time as just another chemical substance studied for its potential in the field of psychopharmacology. The theoretical assumptions behind LSD research in the late 1950s were purely materialistic; nonetheless, researchers had great hopes and expectations for the substance. These original hopes for LSD appeared to be quite unrealistic in retrospect: the therapeutic potential of LSD proved to be truly enormous, but in a completely different manner than its early researchers had expected.
Communist Czechoslovakia became one of the world centers for the psychedelic research taking place in the years 1952–1974. There were four main mental health centers in the country where experiments with LSD took place.[xxv] The first of them was the Psychiatric Department of the General University Hospital in Prague, under the leadership of Jiří Roubíček. With his team, he researched not only LSD, but also mescaline, psilocybin, DMT, and other psychoactive substances. They were administering LSD to mental health professionals, patients, and artists; the first experience of Stanislav Grof took place under their supervision. Roubíček emphasized the value of self-experimentation for mental health professionals, following the psychomimetic approach based on the later refuted theory that intoxication with LSD-25 temporally causes an “experimental psychosis.”[xxvi]
Milan Hausner, another prominent researcher, led the Psychiatric Clinic in Sadská near Prague, where he administered psycholytic (low dosage) use of LSD combined with psychoanalytically oriented therapy. Working this way during the years 1966–1974, the clinic supervised more than 3,000 therapeutic sessions with LSD, administered to more than 300 patients, both in the context of individual and group therapy. Hausner described his unique approach and summary of his theories in his posthumously published book LSD: The Highway to Mental Health (2009).
The Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague used to be the workplace of Stanislav Grof, who later became the most famous Czechoslovakian LSD researcher, in part due to his immigration to the United States in 1967. Before joining the Psychiatric Research Institute, Grof was part of a team under the leadership of Miloš Vojtěchovský at the Psychiatric Center in Kosmonosy, where they focused mainly on “model psychosis” and studied the effects of various psychedelics such as LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline. Prague’s LSD research provided Grof with a broad spectrum of experience and material, which enabled him later to become one of the leading theoreticians of transpersonal psychology. Grof preferred the psychedelic (high dosage) approach, which he pursued later in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. At the Psychiatry Research Institute, Grof and his colleagues administered psychedelic substances primarily to healthy volunteers, including scientists, artists, philosophers, theologians, students, and nurses. Grof summarized the results of his research in the book LSD Psychotherapy: The Healing Potential of Psychedelic Medicine (1980).
The fourth important center of Czechoslovakian psychedelic research, the Psychiatric Hospital in Kroměříž, was situated outside of Prague in the region of Moravia. It was led by the psychologist Stanislav Kratochvíl, who started to work there in 1958 and is currently one of the most significant psychotherapists and authors of books on psychotherapy in the country. In the 1960s, Kratochvíl founded and supervised a research group systematically studying the influence of high doses of LSD on healthy volunteers, mostly psychiatrists, psychologists, students in these disciplines, and psychiatric nurses. Kratochvíl was mainly interested in the noetic, philosophical, and mystical potential of LSD, and due to this focus, his approach might best be described as entheogenic, meaning “generating the God within.”
The LSD research in Czechoslovakia was banned in 1974, following the wider political trends of that time, even though LSD and other psychedelics were rarely misused in a public context in former Czechoslovakia due to the strict control of the totalitarian Communist regime, as well as the care of the psychiatric professionals handling the substance. In later decades, this research was almost forgotten; only recently have the researchers from the Czech National Institute of Mental Health started to study this rich period of their professional past, in part by interviewing the people who took part in the original experiments.[xxvii] The Czech National Institute, as the successor organization of the Psychiatric Research Institute where Stanislav Grof formerly did his pioneering work, renewed the psychedelic research by running a psilocybin study with healthy volunteers in 2012. From the point of view of archetypal cosmology, it is quite striking that the Prague research activities follow the larger historical trend of psychedelic research, peaking in the 1960s during the Uranus-Pluto conjunction and seeing its renaissance within the last decade, during the next crucial world transit (the square) of the same celestial bodies.
Czech psychedelic researchers Miloš Vojtěchovský, M.D, and Stanislav Grof, M.D. in 1960
(photo from the archives of Miloš Vojtěchovský, 1925-2019)
New Paradigm Ideas Among the Czech Intellectual Dissent
The next and last station on our journey through the history of consciousness studies in Prague is the grim era of the so-called “normalization,” taking place after the Soviet invasion in 1968. To suppress the “reformist communism” of the Prague Spring, the regime profoundly strengthened its censorship and control over academic and intellectual life; the French writer Louis Aragon called this period “Biafra of the soul” (meaning “intellectual famine”).[xxviii] The regime punished the members of the national intellectual elite who disagreed with its ideology and methods by forcing them to leave the academic world and earn a poor living by doing inferior manual jobs. Here are a few historical facts: not having a job was considered a serious criminal act by communist law, as was keeping and spreading “banned foreign literature.” This state of affairs created the “timeless fug” of the 1970s and 1980s, a period in which life seemed to lack meaning, offering almost no honest and dignified way for a creative and ambitious person to grow naturally and prosper.[xxix]
Under these dire circumstances, many gifted people decided to emigrate, which was always a difficult decision, because they were not allowed to take any personal property with them; besides the necessity to start abroad from scratch, they were also facing the awareness that this step was going to create problems for their loved ones whom they had left behind. Those who did not want to take such a radical step gradually formed the “parallel polis,” the underground network within which intellectual dissidents held open debate in the context of popular “home seminars.” My aim here is not to summarize the historical account of this heroic era; I only want to point out that the Czechoslovakian intellectual dissent existed in unusually challenging and specific conditions, with its members forced to deal with limited resources. Surprisingly enough, this strange environment produced several outstanding and extraordinary thinkers and researchers in the field of new paradigm studies. Perhaps the profoundly limiting conditions enabled them to go deeper than usual; on the other hand, they had plenty of time and were free of the pressures of the “academic capitalism” of Western society, resolutely searching for unconditioned truth. It should also be mentioned here that the Czechoslovakian intellectual dissent consisted of a “cocktail” of individuals and groups of widely different, sometimes even contradictory, belief systems or professional backgrounds, brought together by the aversion to the regime. Such a situation facilitated the possibility of lively non-ideological discussion, mutual exchange and inspiration, and multidisciplinary cross-over.
My purpose here is not to give any sort of list of the important thinkers who might deserve mention in the thematic context of this article, nor to speak of the Czechoslovakian intellectual dissent in general. I simply want to pay homage to several outstanding figures of this movement, most of them my teachers, whose intellectual focus belonged to the fields of consciousness studies, new paradigm sciences, or transpersonal thinking. My aim here is to bring some attention to their extraordinary work, of which there is little knowledge in the English-speaking world, mostly due to the fact that they published little or nothing in English, being forced to live the best part of their professional lives under communist oppression. It is rather a heterogeneous handful of people I am presenting here, but we can identify certain similarities in their general intellectual approach. Besides being significantly multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary, they are also profoundly original, independent, and unconventional, and are not beholden to any one school, dogma, or ideology. Despite being capable of a high standard of scientific and academic rigor, they all tend toward the more creative work of writing essays and publishing them in media beyond the horizon of current academia. And, most of all, they all respect the work of C. G. Jung and they value astrology.
Zdeněk Neubauer (1942–2016)
The biologist and philosopher Zdeněk Neubauer was probably one of the most important Czech public figures of the twentieth century, and certainly the most influential person mentioned in this summary; his effect on several generations of Czech intellectuals of new-paradigm orientation could be roughly compared to that of Václav Havel or Stanislav Grof. As a student of biology at Charles University in Prague, he was permitted to take a three-year post-graduate stay at the prestigious Laboratorio Internazionale di Genetica e Biofisica in Naples (1967–1970). There he made his most important discoveries in the field of mainstream molecular biology (regarding the bacterial virus lambda phage), which he developed further after his return to Prague. His work resulted in a number of scientific papers that gained more than 170 citations in the Web of Science database.[xxx] But the Communist regime did not allow him the appropriate career growth, forcing him to stay in the position of common laboratory assistant, so he decided to leave the field of science and work as an IT programmer for seven years, as many other dissent philosophers did. In 1990, Neubauer renewed the Department of Philosophy and History of Science in the Faculty of Science at Charles University, previously closed by the Nazis in 1939, and became its head (1990–1996). In 1992, he gained a professorship, the highest qualification possible in the Czech academic system.
The unique quality about Neubauer was that, besides being a top-class scientist, he was also a profound philosopher of science. He secretly started to study the philosophy of religion in 1965 and dedicated his dissertation to the topic: Zamyšlení nad vědou a filosofií (Reflections on Science and Philosophy, 1971). According to the author’s own report, he suggested quite independently a quite similar view to Thomas. S. Kuhn’s in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.[xxxi] Neubauer was truly a polyhistor: besides science, philosophy, and religion, he held profound knowledge in the fields of Hermeticism, mysticism, mathematics, mythology, cosmology, Jungian psychology, and many other disciplines. He was also fluent in several languages. He published over twenty-five books and anthologies and hundreds of articles. To mention just several of the many cultural figures to whose work he paid special attention, I can pick Nicholas of Cusa, Francis of Assisi, Hieronymus Bosch, Joachim of Fiore, Gregory Bateson, Rupert Sheldrake, David Bohm, Henri Bergson, Paul Ricoeur, René Descartes or J. R. R. Tolkien. Neubauer was a brilliant and inimitable essayist, laureate of the literary Tom Stoppard Award (2008) and the prestigious Vize 97 Price of the Dagmar and Václav Havel Foundation (2001).[xxxii] Furthermore, he was crucially important for the Czech intellectual life as a social person, one of the most lively and fascinating people within the informal circles of dissidents; among others, he had a considerable influence on Václav Havel.
It is vital to mention here Neubauer’s thoughts about the “denaturation” of Nature by means of the modern Western scientific world view, quite similar to the notion of “disenchantment” of the world as used by Richard Tarnas and other thinkers in the context of archetypal cosmology. According to Neubauer’s main idea, the aim of science actually lies not in the exploration of the living natural world, the world of phenomena, but in the “objective reality,” which is truly a rational construct. Scientific rationality is not logical, but logistic; it is syntactic, not semantic. Science does not lean on the rationality of notions, ideas, and contexts; it uses the rationality of calculations, sets, and texts. Neubauer finds the roots of the scientific world view in the works of medieval thinkers such as Ramon Lull and Roger Bacon, but most specifically in relation to the ideas of Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) in his Trialogus De Possest. In the light of these parallels, Neubauer states that the “objective reality” of modern science is remarkably similar to Cusanus’ term “possest” (meaning “Godly reality”), corresponding to the notion of “actual infinity.”[xxxiii] Opposed to the mechanistic model of the universe presented by modern science, Neubauer was a resolute exponent of “eidetic biology,” concerned with the shape of the organism emerging from within as a result of its lifelong, ever-changing effort. In this regard, he was a follower of the German or continental autonomistic school of biology, especially of the Swiss genius Adolf Portmann.[xxxiv] Advocating such ideas, Neubauer became one of the leading voices speaking against the Czech Skeptics Club Sisyfos, the self-styled local group of ostensible advocates of scientific knowledge and rational, critical ways of thinking. Unfortunately, instead of genuine efforts to fulfill their noble ideals, the biased members of the club engage in the dubious and misleading practice of giving their mocking “Erratic Boulder Awards,” for supposed deliberate deception of the public, to serious researchers and scholars such as Stanislav Grof.
Of all the people presented in this article, Zdeněk Neubauer was also one of the most enthusiastic supporters of transpersonal psychology; as one of a few local speakers on the subject, he lectured at the legendary 1992 International Transpersonal Conference in Prague, on the topic “The Tao of Biology.” He had a warm personal relationship to Stanislav Grof; I recall his wheelchair visit to Grof’s lecture in Prague in 2016, which turned out to be the last time I personally saw the professor alive. Of the great many works he wrote, one article was specifically dedicated to astrology: “Kosmologický rámec astrologie” (“The Cosmological Frame of Astrology,” 1995). It is virtually impossible to summarize here the complexity and originality of Neubauer’s vast work; I can only recommend its reading. Unfortunately, if we put aside the older scientific papers from the field of molecular biology research, there are only a few of his articles available in English. The text “Novelty Wherefrom?,” a chapter from the book Life as Its Own Designer: Darwin’s Origin and Western Thought, might serve an interested reader as a taste of Neubauer’s genius.[xxxv]
Ivan M. Havel (born 1938)
When speaking about Zdeněk Neubauer, I must at least briefly mention his close friend and colleague Ivan M. Havel, a highly-respected scientist and philosopher of non-conformist spirit and another extremely important figure of Czech intellectual life. As a graduate from the Czech Technical University in Prague, Havel attended the University of California at Berkeley in 1969–1971, where he earned his PhD in Computer Science. For several years he worked as a research scientist with the Czechoslovakian Academy of Sciences, with his fields of interest being: theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence, cognitive sciences, and related philosophical issues. Alongside the rather trickster-like figure of Neubauer, Havel played an important role of stable and efficient organizer of conferences, discussions, and other transdisciplinary events, both in the years of dissent and after the change of the regime. In 1992, Havel also gave a lecture called “Hidden Dimensions of Nature” at the International Transpersonal Conference in Prague, held under the auspices of his brother Václav Havel, at that time the president of Czechoslovakia. Presently, Ivan M. Havel is a docent (associate professor) at Charles University and director of the Center for Theoretical Study, an international cross-disciplinary institution that he founded, affiliated with Charles University and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. Last year, docent Havel was kind enough to accept our warm invitation to have a salutatory speech during the opening ceremony of the 2017 International Transpersonal Conference in Prague. Although his areas of professional focus are less associated with the core topics of archetypal cosmology, Havel’s connection with Neubauer and his work in general make him worthy of including in this survey.[xxxvi]
Stanislav Komárek (born 1958)
Stanislav Komárek is a Czech biologist, philosopher, anthropologist, and historian of science.[xxxvii] He studied zoology at Charles University in Prague, where he graduated in 1982 with a specialization in entomology. Soon afterwards he immigrated to Austria and spent seven years in exile in Vienna. After the Velvet Revolution Komárek returned to Prague and accepted Neubauer’s invitation to collaborate with him as assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and History of Science; in 1996, he changed places with Neubauer as the head of the department, where he stayed for six years. In 2001, Komárek gained the highest local academic degree of professorship in the field of Philosophy and History of Science. He wrote a number of academic books and papers, but also several anthologies consisting of his many essays published in various newspapers, magazines and other media, three novels and a collection of poems. Due to his extensive and charismatic essayistic writing, reflecting his unprecedented knowledge and traveling experience, Komárek became a relatively well-known and respected public figure in the Czech Republic, often asked to express his opinion on various general topics.
Besides his own approach, and the influence of Neubauer, Komárek became a resolute exponent of two great intellectual figures of twentieth century: Adolf Portmann and C. G. Jung. Portmann (1897–1982) was an eminent Swiss zoologist and philosopher of biology, a leading figure in the continental, and specifically German, autonomistic school of biology, which tended to see living organisms as “free” units with self-immanent patterns and purpose. Following the tradition of Goethean biology, Portmann understands the living world as something analogous to a theatrical performance. He states that self-representation is one of the basic functions of living organisms, constituting the proper phenomenon as an externalized centricity, roughly corresponding to the ancient concept of psyche. Portmann was also a great friend of C. G. Jung and, in a somewhat simplified way, one could say that he unified many Jungian ideas with biological thinking. After Jung’s death, Portmann became the head of the Eranos Foundation and the main organizer of its famous conferences, keeping this position until 1978.[xxxviii]
In Komárek’s opinion, the Portmannian biology with its sense for the aesthetics of nature might lead to a more considerate relationship with non-human organisms than has been taken by industrial civilization. With his charismatic style of teaching, Komárek became the leading figure of the Prague School of Portmannian Biology.[xxxix] Regarding his books in English, there are two of them available: Mimicry, Aposematism and Related Phenomena: Mimetism in Nature and the History of Its Study (2003), and Nature and Culture: The World of Phenomena and World of Interpretations (2009). The more recent title, Nature and Culture, constitutes a highly representative and recommendable piece of Komárek’s remarkable approach, perhaps his best publication so far.
Zdeněk Kratochvíl (born 1952)
The third exceptional member of the Prague circle of “natural philosophers” is Zdeněk Kratochvíl, an important Czech philosopher of science and historian of philosophy. He originally studied Catholic theology but was expelled from school for his contacts with the underground dissent circles of clergy, and he was not allowed to study at any other school. He continued his studies secretly in Krakow, Poland, and dived into philosophy as an autodidact; he earned a living as an IT programmer, night watchman, and a stoker. After the political turnover in 1989, Kratochvíl was finally allowed officially to conclude his university studies, gaining the academic title of docent (associate professor) in 1996. He has been teaching in the Faculty of Philosophy at Charles University since 1990, as well as in the Department of Philosophy and History of Science in the Faculty of Science, having served as its head in 2008–2011.
Kratochvíl is particularly interested in the proto-philosophical thinking of archaic Greece—the pre-Socratics, especially Heraclitus—as well as current questions regarding the relationship between philosophy, science, and religion. Besides that, he also specializes in Clement of Alexandria and certain Gnostic authors. Kratochvíl has published about twenty books, among them the two-volume historical survey of Western thinking Mýtus, filosofie a věda (Myth, Philosophy, Science, 1992), a translation and commentary on the gnostic Gospel of Truth (of the Nag Hammadi codices), and his magnum opus, Délský potápéč k Hérakleitově řeči (The Delian Diver to the Speech of Heraclitus, 2006), a large volume including translation and commentary on all the preserved fragments of Heraclitus’s work. In 1991, he also published a minor but remarkable text from the field of astrology called Lesk a bída astrologie: poznámky k teoretické astrologii (Splendors and Miseries of Astrology: Notes on Theoretical Astrology).
Kratochvíl’s way of thinking and writing combines a high level of knowledge and academic rigor with quite the original and independent approach of a true philosopher, not just a professor of philosophy. Fortunately, his essential book The Philosophy of Living Nature (2016), that focuses on the Western philosophical approach to physics (or nature) and reveals the roots of today’s environmental crisis, has recently been published in English.
Rudolf Starý (born 1939)
To conclude this survey, I am giving pride of place to the person who, of all the outstanding men presented here, stands closest to the field of archetypal cosmology as such, in terms of the focus and content of his lifelong work. In his youth, Rudolf Starý used to teach as an assistant professor at the University of Economics, Prague, and later in the Institute for Technical and Scientific Information. In 1976, he was falsely accused of subversive activities and forced to earn a living as a stoker for the next fourteen years. Starý reports that it was the deep study of Jung, and a genuine effort to apply his psychological principles in daily life, that enabled him to survive this difficult period. He became an active member in the circles of the intellectual dissent, and a leading person of the underground editorials series of banned literature called Jungiana. Between 1980 and 1988, he released 32 publications in Jungiana, including translations and commentaries on Jung and related authors such as James Hillman, Erich Neumann, Fritjof Capra, and Liz Greene; some issues consisted of Starý’s own essays. In the same underground context, he also published his first book, Potíže s hlubinnou psychologií (The Uneasiness in Depth Psychology, 1985).
After the political change of 1989, Rudolf Starý served for several years as editor-in-chief of Revue Prostor, a formerly underground cultural journal of essays that, under his leadership, became profoundly Jungian but also open to the ideas of transpersonal psychology and new paradigm sciences. At this time, Starý published his first books officially, and also taught for some time as assistant professor in the Department of Humanities in the Czech Technical University in Prague. Furthermore, he used the newly granted freedom to travel abroad to attend the school of Psychological Astrology in Munich, led by the famous German astrologer Hermann Meyer. In the middle of the 1990s, Starý moved away from the previously mentioned positions and decisively bound his life to Jungian astrology. He founded his own publishing house, Sagittarius, where in the course of twenty years he published about thirty books, seven of them his own writings, the rest translated by himself from English and German, including Prometheus the Awakener by Richard Tarnas. Following a clear strategy to cover most of the basic topics of Jungian astrology in a high-quality manner, Starý translated into Czech titles by Liz Greene, Howard Sasportas, Erin Sullivan, Darby Costello, and several top-class German astrologers, but also books from such people as C. G. Jung, James Hillman, and Ernst Aepli.[xl] At the same time, Starý opened his own school of Psychological Astrology, offering two-year basic courses in the discipline, where he presented his original synthesized vision based on knowledge from the main schools of Jungian astrology both in the Anglo-American and continental world. Having taught four classes on his course, Starý educated many dozens of psychologically oriented astrologers, many of whom currently run their own consulting practices. It is solely thanks to Starý’s enormous enthusiasm, dedication, and effort that we can currently find a profound Jungian force within the circles of Czech astrology.
But, if we now move to Starý’s own writings, his importance and uniqueness does not lie in his considerable knowledge of astrological symbolism, methods, and techniques—it lies in his imperative that every practitioner should be consciously aware of their overall conception of astrology. In his own case, the conception is strongly, even radically based on the Jungian principle of individuation, with the idea that the integration principle, the Self, is our archetypal image of the Holy that naturally takes place in the (seemingly empty) center of the astrological chart or zodiac. Another crucial feature of his approach is the emphasis on the inner life, the life of the soul, and on cultivating our reflectivity, our ability to see correspondences between the outer and inner, according to Goethe’s note that “all transient things are mere parables.”[xli]
Starý has published ten books and dozens of articles so far. His first release, The Uneasiness in Depth Psychology (1990), served as a distinctive textbook of Jungian psychology and its related world view to a great number of Czech readers interested in Jung in the 1990s, since there was almost no officially published Jungian literature in the Czech language available at that time. The book made an impression on many of its readers due to the author’s idiosyncratic survey of Jung’s ideas, transcending profoundly the usual horizon of purely psychological introductions to the discipline. Moreover, it offered vivid examples of the application of Jungian principles in the specific conditions of the local culture, which was also true of two other anthologies of essays from that time: Medúsa v novější době kamenné (Medusa in the Newer Stone Age, 1994) and Sedm jungovských rozhovorů (Seven Jungian Interviews, 2004).
Absolutely original and fundamental is Starý’s book Filmová hermeneutika (Film Hermeneutics, 1999), containing his anthology of Jungian film reviews published in previous decades, but more importantly a large introductory study called “O hermeneutice” (“On Hermeneutics”), one of the peaks of the author’s lifelong work. In Starý’s view, film can be seen as an analogy to the cathartic ritual theater of the ancient Greeks. As Starý writes:
Film is undoubtedly the most characteristic and perhaps the most important art form of the twentieth century. The intrinsic need of the soul to create images, to recognize herself in them as if in a mirror and experience them in a cathartic way, found in film a perfect Gesamtkunstwerk of yet unprecedented impressiveness: all the four basic modes of the world according to the Kabbalist tradition—image, music, word, and shape—came together here and united into one great mode of artistic expression.[xlii]
Besides this unique perception, Starý's study offers a profound statement of the principles of “Hermetic hermeneutics” or analogical thinking, as opposed to the scientific-technological thinking of modernity.
With every new book, Starý’s style of writing gets deliberately more essayistic and less strictly aligned with the mainstream code of Jungian literature (and also less astrological). To give at least some idea of their nature, I would divide the most important of his works into two groups. The first group would consist of prevailingly astrological texts: essays regarding the overall conception, theoretical attempts to grasp certain astrological archetypes, and astrological case studies of all kinds. Speaking of the theoretical studies of astrological archetypes, Starý included some ideas for understanding the minor planet Chiron in his brilliant piece Cheirón, asklépiovská medicína a jungovská psychologie (Chiron, Asclepian Medicine and Jungian Psychology, 2000). In addition to that, he wrote a large conceptual text in an attempt to facilitate some understanding of the significant point of the Black Moon, which is in his book Podobnosti: astropsychologická hermeneutika (Correspondences: Astro-Psychological Hermeneutics, 2005). Starý also, partly in parallel, developed quite a profound understanding of the world transits similar to that of Richard Tarnas: for example, his commentary on the Saturn-Neptune square of 2015–2016, connecting the transit with the European migration crisis and the hybrid war on Ukraine, deserves particular attention.
The second group of major works by Rudolf Starý consists of the texts that put Jung’s ideas and world view into a larger philosophical, theological, and cultural context. He wrote several profound essays showing the essential similarity between the world views of Jung and Goethe, the latter coming to have the same importance to Starý as the former. Likewise, Starý connected Jungian principles with various exponents of Neoplatonism. In articles such as “Jungova psychologie jako srovnávací fenomenologie” (“Jung’s Psychology as Comparative Phenomenology,” 1987) and “Jungovo myšlenkové dědictví” (“The Legacy of Jung’s Ideas,” in Correspondences II, 2009), he shows the kinship between Jungian notions and the ideas of his historical predecessors. In texts such as “Vnitřní a vnější člověk” (“The Inner and the Outer Man,” in Correspondences III, 2012), Starý integrates his approach with esoteric and Neoplatonic forms of Christianity. In general, his main concern is about the possibility of renewing the vertical (numinous) axis of Western(ized) civilization that collapsed with the ascent of modernity.
Rudolf Starý is a classic solitary self-made man who developed his remarkable approach without the support of any institutional system. Having retired from public life, he continues with his Goethean reflections of the collective psyche, published in his last two books: Pozdní sběr (Late Harvest, 2015) and Barevné odlesky (Colorful Glints, 2017). His style gets even more original and loose, while some of his reflections reach even deeper than before, thanks to a more distant perspective shaped by his living in seclusion. Given the width and depth of his wisdom and knowledge, I believe Starý belongs to the most brilliant Jungian astrologers and thinkers of our time. Unfortunately, to this day there is no text of him available in English, which might hopefully change in the future for the sake of the beneficial enrichment of the field of archetypal cosmology. The only exception is Starý’s essay “C. G. Jung and the Dichotomy of Knowledge and Belief,” published in 2019 by IAM – Infinity Astrological Magazine in two parts.
Conclusion
With its unprecedented freedom, the period of the 1990s—taking place between the fall of the Iron Curtain and before establishing the new bureaucratic structures of “academic capitalism”—was a time in Prague of extensive, even frenetic, public debate and book and journal publication. It is no wonder that this “starry hour” of the Czech intellectual history was connected with the names and ideas of the thinkers presented in the last part of this article. As one can easily gather from what I wrote about them, their work and approach finely resonated with the spiritual atmosphere of that time, described by the archetypal combination of Uranus and Neptune and their world-transit conjunction taking place at that period. Starý, Neubauer, Kratochvíl, Komárek, and others share the same roots of Prague’s genius loci, the continental tradition of Western esotericism, and participation in the underground circles of intellectual dissent. Yet we could not speak about any “school” or “movement” analogous to, for example, transpersonal psychology; the current representatives of the Prague archetypal tradition belong rather to the same broad intellectual stream. Its spirit is, quite logically, somewhat close to that of the Jungian Eranos circle with its universalism clearly rooted in the continental esoteric tradition of Western spirituality. The comparison to the spirit of Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California is, in my opinion, marked by general sympathies, but also certain cautiousness about accepting its features of “melting-pot” eclecticism and its emphasis rather on North American shamanism and Eastern teachings.
The enthusiasm of the 1990s brought many international activities to Prague, including the splendidly cast and highly successful International Transpersonal Conference “Science, Spirituality, and the Global Crisis” (1992). The Czech Astrological Society at that time organized two ambitious European Astrological Congresses in Prague (in 1994 and 1997), visited by lecturers such as Liz Greene, Louise and Bruno Huber, Marion March, Claude Weiss, Karen Hamaker-Zondag, and Alexander Ruperti. Czech president Václav Havel also actively supported the new paradigm ideas in many ways, for example by starting the project “Forum 2000,” which beginning in 1997 organized prestigious annual conferences in Prague aimed at supporting the values of democracy and respect for human rights, assisting the development of civil society, and encouraging religious, cultural, and ethnic tolerance. With the end of the Uranus-Neptune world transit in 2001, Prague has conformed into a provincial European metropolis and tourist attraction, lately troubled by political degradation—basically a Middle-European form of Trumpism. Yet, during the world-transit square of Uranus and Pluto, Prague has also developed some more progressive cultural phenomena during the last decade, such as the renewal of psychedelic research and interest in the transpersonal movement. This has also included the organization of such great events as the International Transpersonal Conference “Beyond Materialism: Towards Wholeness” (2017) and “Beyond Psychedelics” (2016 and 2018). Under the surface of our everyday reality, the Prague archetypal tradition is ever-present on more subtle levels, reminding us that there is more to this world than one can see at first glance.
(photo from the archives of Miloš Vojtěchovský, 1925-2019)
New Paradigm Ideas Among the Czech Intellectual Dissent
The next and last station on our journey through the history of consciousness studies in Prague is the grim era of the so-called “normalization,” taking place after the Soviet invasion in 1968. To suppress the “reformist communism” of the Prague Spring, the regime profoundly strengthened its censorship and control over academic and intellectual life; the French writer Louis Aragon called this period “Biafra of the soul” (meaning “intellectual famine”).[xxviii] The regime punished the members of the national intellectual elite who disagreed with its ideology and methods by forcing them to leave the academic world and earn a poor living by doing inferior manual jobs. Here are a few historical facts: not having a job was considered a serious criminal act by communist law, as was keeping and spreading “banned foreign literature.” This state of affairs created the “timeless fug” of the 1970s and 1980s, a period in which life seemed to lack meaning, offering almost no honest and dignified way for a creative and ambitious person to grow naturally and prosper.[xxix]
Under these dire circumstances, many gifted people decided to emigrate, which was always a difficult decision, because they were not allowed to take any personal property with them; besides the necessity to start abroad from scratch, they were also facing the awareness that this step was going to create problems for their loved ones whom they had left behind. Those who did not want to take such a radical step gradually formed the “parallel polis,” the underground network within which intellectual dissidents held open debate in the context of popular “home seminars.” My aim here is not to summarize the historical account of this heroic era; I only want to point out that the Czechoslovakian intellectual dissent existed in unusually challenging and specific conditions, with its members forced to deal with limited resources. Surprisingly enough, this strange environment produced several outstanding and extraordinary thinkers and researchers in the field of new paradigm studies. Perhaps the profoundly limiting conditions enabled them to go deeper than usual; on the other hand, they had plenty of time and were free of the pressures of the “academic capitalism” of Western society, resolutely searching for unconditioned truth. It should also be mentioned here that the Czechoslovakian intellectual dissent consisted of a “cocktail” of individuals and groups of widely different, sometimes even contradictory, belief systems or professional backgrounds, brought together by the aversion to the regime. Such a situation facilitated the possibility of lively non-ideological discussion, mutual exchange and inspiration, and multidisciplinary cross-over.
My purpose here is not to give any sort of list of the important thinkers who might deserve mention in the thematic context of this article, nor to speak of the Czechoslovakian intellectual dissent in general. I simply want to pay homage to several outstanding figures of this movement, most of them my teachers, whose intellectual focus belonged to the fields of consciousness studies, new paradigm sciences, or transpersonal thinking. My aim here is to bring some attention to their extraordinary work, of which there is little knowledge in the English-speaking world, mostly due to the fact that they published little or nothing in English, being forced to live the best part of their professional lives under communist oppression. It is rather a heterogeneous handful of people I am presenting here, but we can identify certain similarities in their general intellectual approach. Besides being significantly multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary, they are also profoundly original, independent, and unconventional, and are not beholden to any one school, dogma, or ideology. Despite being capable of a high standard of scientific and academic rigor, they all tend toward the more creative work of writing essays and publishing them in media beyond the horizon of current academia. And, most of all, they all respect the work of C. G. Jung and they value astrology.
Zdeněk Neubauer (1942–2016)
The biologist and philosopher Zdeněk Neubauer was probably one of the most important Czech public figures of the twentieth century, and certainly the most influential person mentioned in this summary; his effect on several generations of Czech intellectuals of new-paradigm orientation could be roughly compared to that of Václav Havel or Stanislav Grof. As a student of biology at Charles University in Prague, he was permitted to take a three-year post-graduate stay at the prestigious Laboratorio Internazionale di Genetica e Biofisica in Naples (1967–1970). There he made his most important discoveries in the field of mainstream molecular biology (regarding the bacterial virus lambda phage), which he developed further after his return to Prague. His work resulted in a number of scientific papers that gained more than 170 citations in the Web of Science database.[xxx] But the Communist regime did not allow him the appropriate career growth, forcing him to stay in the position of common laboratory assistant, so he decided to leave the field of science and work as an IT programmer for seven years, as many other dissent philosophers did. In 1990, Neubauer renewed the Department of Philosophy and History of Science in the Faculty of Science at Charles University, previously closed by the Nazis in 1939, and became its head (1990–1996). In 1992, he gained a professorship, the highest qualification possible in the Czech academic system.
The unique quality about Neubauer was that, besides being a top-class scientist, he was also a profound philosopher of science. He secretly started to study the philosophy of religion in 1965 and dedicated his dissertation to the topic: Zamyšlení nad vědou a filosofií (Reflections on Science and Philosophy, 1971). According to the author’s own report, he suggested quite independently a quite similar view to Thomas. S. Kuhn’s in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.[xxxi] Neubauer was truly a polyhistor: besides science, philosophy, and religion, he held profound knowledge in the fields of Hermeticism, mysticism, mathematics, mythology, cosmology, Jungian psychology, and many other disciplines. He was also fluent in several languages. He published over twenty-five books and anthologies and hundreds of articles. To mention just several of the many cultural figures to whose work he paid special attention, I can pick Nicholas of Cusa, Francis of Assisi, Hieronymus Bosch, Joachim of Fiore, Gregory Bateson, Rupert Sheldrake, David Bohm, Henri Bergson, Paul Ricoeur, René Descartes or J. R. R. Tolkien. Neubauer was a brilliant and inimitable essayist, laureate of the literary Tom Stoppard Award (2008) and the prestigious Vize 97 Price of the Dagmar and Václav Havel Foundation (2001).[xxxii] Furthermore, he was crucially important for the Czech intellectual life as a social person, one of the most lively and fascinating people within the informal circles of dissidents; among others, he had a considerable influence on Václav Havel.
It is vital to mention here Neubauer’s thoughts about the “denaturation” of Nature by means of the modern Western scientific world view, quite similar to the notion of “disenchantment” of the world as used by Richard Tarnas and other thinkers in the context of archetypal cosmology. According to Neubauer’s main idea, the aim of science actually lies not in the exploration of the living natural world, the world of phenomena, but in the “objective reality,” which is truly a rational construct. Scientific rationality is not logical, but logistic; it is syntactic, not semantic. Science does not lean on the rationality of notions, ideas, and contexts; it uses the rationality of calculations, sets, and texts. Neubauer finds the roots of the scientific world view in the works of medieval thinkers such as Ramon Lull and Roger Bacon, but most specifically in relation to the ideas of Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) in his Trialogus De Possest. In the light of these parallels, Neubauer states that the “objective reality” of modern science is remarkably similar to Cusanus’ term “possest” (meaning “Godly reality”), corresponding to the notion of “actual infinity.”[xxxiii] Opposed to the mechanistic model of the universe presented by modern science, Neubauer was a resolute exponent of “eidetic biology,” concerned with the shape of the organism emerging from within as a result of its lifelong, ever-changing effort. In this regard, he was a follower of the German or continental autonomistic school of biology, especially of the Swiss genius Adolf Portmann.[xxxiv] Advocating such ideas, Neubauer became one of the leading voices speaking against the Czech Skeptics Club Sisyfos, the self-styled local group of ostensible advocates of scientific knowledge and rational, critical ways of thinking. Unfortunately, instead of genuine efforts to fulfill their noble ideals, the biased members of the club engage in the dubious and misleading practice of giving their mocking “Erratic Boulder Awards,” for supposed deliberate deception of the public, to serious researchers and scholars such as Stanislav Grof.
Of all the people presented in this article, Zdeněk Neubauer was also one of the most enthusiastic supporters of transpersonal psychology; as one of a few local speakers on the subject, he lectured at the legendary 1992 International Transpersonal Conference in Prague, on the topic “The Tao of Biology.” He had a warm personal relationship to Stanislav Grof; I recall his wheelchair visit to Grof’s lecture in Prague in 2016, which turned out to be the last time I personally saw the professor alive. Of the great many works he wrote, one article was specifically dedicated to astrology: “Kosmologický rámec astrologie” (“The Cosmological Frame of Astrology,” 1995). It is virtually impossible to summarize here the complexity and originality of Neubauer’s vast work; I can only recommend its reading. Unfortunately, if we put aside the older scientific papers from the field of molecular biology research, there are only a few of his articles available in English. The text “Novelty Wherefrom?,” a chapter from the book Life as Its Own Designer: Darwin’s Origin and Western Thought, might serve an interested reader as a taste of Neubauer’s genius.[xxxv]
Ivan M. Havel (born 1938)
When speaking about Zdeněk Neubauer, I must at least briefly mention his close friend and colleague Ivan M. Havel, a highly-respected scientist and philosopher of non-conformist spirit and another extremely important figure of Czech intellectual life. As a graduate from the Czech Technical University in Prague, Havel attended the University of California at Berkeley in 1969–1971, where he earned his PhD in Computer Science. For several years he worked as a research scientist with the Czechoslovakian Academy of Sciences, with his fields of interest being: theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence, cognitive sciences, and related philosophical issues. Alongside the rather trickster-like figure of Neubauer, Havel played an important role of stable and efficient organizer of conferences, discussions, and other transdisciplinary events, both in the years of dissent and after the change of the regime. In 1992, Havel also gave a lecture called “Hidden Dimensions of Nature” at the International Transpersonal Conference in Prague, held under the auspices of his brother Václav Havel, at that time the president of Czechoslovakia. Presently, Ivan M. Havel is a docent (associate professor) at Charles University and director of the Center for Theoretical Study, an international cross-disciplinary institution that he founded, affiliated with Charles University and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. Last year, docent Havel was kind enough to accept our warm invitation to have a salutatory speech during the opening ceremony of the 2017 International Transpersonal Conference in Prague. Although his areas of professional focus are less associated with the core topics of archetypal cosmology, Havel’s connection with Neubauer and his work in general make him worthy of including in this survey.[xxxvi]
Stanislav Komárek (born 1958)
Stanislav Komárek is a Czech biologist, philosopher, anthropologist, and historian of science.[xxxvii] He studied zoology at Charles University in Prague, where he graduated in 1982 with a specialization in entomology. Soon afterwards he immigrated to Austria and spent seven years in exile in Vienna. After the Velvet Revolution Komárek returned to Prague and accepted Neubauer’s invitation to collaborate with him as assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and History of Science; in 1996, he changed places with Neubauer as the head of the department, where he stayed for six years. In 2001, Komárek gained the highest local academic degree of professorship in the field of Philosophy and History of Science. He wrote a number of academic books and papers, but also several anthologies consisting of his many essays published in various newspapers, magazines and other media, three novels and a collection of poems. Due to his extensive and charismatic essayistic writing, reflecting his unprecedented knowledge and traveling experience, Komárek became a relatively well-known and respected public figure in the Czech Republic, often asked to express his opinion on various general topics.
Besides his own approach, and the influence of Neubauer, Komárek became a resolute exponent of two great intellectual figures of twentieth century: Adolf Portmann and C. G. Jung. Portmann (1897–1982) was an eminent Swiss zoologist and philosopher of biology, a leading figure in the continental, and specifically German, autonomistic school of biology, which tended to see living organisms as “free” units with self-immanent patterns and purpose. Following the tradition of Goethean biology, Portmann understands the living world as something analogous to a theatrical performance. He states that self-representation is one of the basic functions of living organisms, constituting the proper phenomenon as an externalized centricity, roughly corresponding to the ancient concept of psyche. Portmann was also a great friend of C. G. Jung and, in a somewhat simplified way, one could say that he unified many Jungian ideas with biological thinking. After Jung’s death, Portmann became the head of the Eranos Foundation and the main organizer of its famous conferences, keeping this position until 1978.[xxxviii]
In Komárek’s opinion, the Portmannian biology with its sense for the aesthetics of nature might lead to a more considerate relationship with non-human organisms than has been taken by industrial civilization. With his charismatic style of teaching, Komárek became the leading figure of the Prague School of Portmannian Biology.[xxxix] Regarding his books in English, there are two of them available: Mimicry, Aposematism and Related Phenomena: Mimetism in Nature and the History of Its Study (2003), and Nature and Culture: The World of Phenomena and World of Interpretations (2009). The more recent title, Nature and Culture, constitutes a highly representative and recommendable piece of Komárek’s remarkable approach, perhaps his best publication so far.
Zdeněk Kratochvíl (born 1952)
The third exceptional member of the Prague circle of “natural philosophers” is Zdeněk Kratochvíl, an important Czech philosopher of science and historian of philosophy. He originally studied Catholic theology but was expelled from school for his contacts with the underground dissent circles of clergy, and he was not allowed to study at any other school. He continued his studies secretly in Krakow, Poland, and dived into philosophy as an autodidact; he earned a living as an IT programmer, night watchman, and a stoker. After the political turnover in 1989, Kratochvíl was finally allowed officially to conclude his university studies, gaining the academic title of docent (associate professor) in 1996. He has been teaching in the Faculty of Philosophy at Charles University since 1990, as well as in the Department of Philosophy and History of Science in the Faculty of Science, having served as its head in 2008–2011.
Kratochvíl is particularly interested in the proto-philosophical thinking of archaic Greece—the pre-Socratics, especially Heraclitus—as well as current questions regarding the relationship between philosophy, science, and religion. Besides that, he also specializes in Clement of Alexandria and certain Gnostic authors. Kratochvíl has published about twenty books, among them the two-volume historical survey of Western thinking Mýtus, filosofie a věda (Myth, Philosophy, Science, 1992), a translation and commentary on the gnostic Gospel of Truth (of the Nag Hammadi codices), and his magnum opus, Délský potápéč k Hérakleitově řeči (The Delian Diver to the Speech of Heraclitus, 2006), a large volume including translation and commentary on all the preserved fragments of Heraclitus’s work. In 1991, he also published a minor but remarkable text from the field of astrology called Lesk a bída astrologie: poznámky k teoretické astrologii (Splendors and Miseries of Astrology: Notes on Theoretical Astrology).
Kratochvíl’s way of thinking and writing combines a high level of knowledge and academic rigor with quite the original and independent approach of a true philosopher, not just a professor of philosophy. Fortunately, his essential book The Philosophy of Living Nature (2016), that focuses on the Western philosophical approach to physics (or nature) and reveals the roots of today’s environmental crisis, has recently been published in English.
Rudolf Starý (born 1939)
To conclude this survey, I am giving pride of place to the person who, of all the outstanding men presented here, stands closest to the field of archetypal cosmology as such, in terms of the focus and content of his lifelong work. In his youth, Rudolf Starý used to teach as an assistant professor at the University of Economics, Prague, and later in the Institute for Technical and Scientific Information. In 1976, he was falsely accused of subversive activities and forced to earn a living as a stoker for the next fourteen years. Starý reports that it was the deep study of Jung, and a genuine effort to apply his psychological principles in daily life, that enabled him to survive this difficult period. He became an active member in the circles of the intellectual dissent, and a leading person of the underground editorials series of banned literature called Jungiana. Between 1980 and 1988, he released 32 publications in Jungiana, including translations and commentaries on Jung and related authors such as James Hillman, Erich Neumann, Fritjof Capra, and Liz Greene; some issues consisted of Starý’s own essays. In the same underground context, he also published his first book, Potíže s hlubinnou psychologií (The Uneasiness in Depth Psychology, 1985).
After the political change of 1989, Rudolf Starý served for several years as editor-in-chief of Revue Prostor, a formerly underground cultural journal of essays that, under his leadership, became profoundly Jungian but also open to the ideas of transpersonal psychology and new paradigm sciences. At this time, Starý published his first books officially, and also taught for some time as assistant professor in the Department of Humanities in the Czech Technical University in Prague. Furthermore, he used the newly granted freedom to travel abroad to attend the school of Psychological Astrology in Munich, led by the famous German astrologer Hermann Meyer. In the middle of the 1990s, Starý moved away from the previously mentioned positions and decisively bound his life to Jungian astrology. He founded his own publishing house, Sagittarius, where in the course of twenty years he published about thirty books, seven of them his own writings, the rest translated by himself from English and German, including Prometheus the Awakener by Richard Tarnas. Following a clear strategy to cover most of the basic topics of Jungian astrology in a high-quality manner, Starý translated into Czech titles by Liz Greene, Howard Sasportas, Erin Sullivan, Darby Costello, and several top-class German astrologers, but also books from such people as C. G. Jung, James Hillman, and Ernst Aepli.[xl] At the same time, Starý opened his own school of Psychological Astrology, offering two-year basic courses in the discipline, where he presented his original synthesized vision based on knowledge from the main schools of Jungian astrology both in the Anglo-American and continental world. Having taught four classes on his course, Starý educated many dozens of psychologically oriented astrologers, many of whom currently run their own consulting practices. It is solely thanks to Starý’s enormous enthusiasm, dedication, and effort that we can currently find a profound Jungian force within the circles of Czech astrology.
But, if we now move to Starý’s own writings, his importance and uniqueness does not lie in his considerable knowledge of astrological symbolism, methods, and techniques—it lies in his imperative that every practitioner should be consciously aware of their overall conception of astrology. In his own case, the conception is strongly, even radically based on the Jungian principle of individuation, with the idea that the integration principle, the Self, is our archetypal image of the Holy that naturally takes place in the (seemingly empty) center of the astrological chart or zodiac. Another crucial feature of his approach is the emphasis on the inner life, the life of the soul, and on cultivating our reflectivity, our ability to see correspondences between the outer and inner, according to Goethe’s note that “all transient things are mere parables.”[xli]
Starý has published ten books and dozens of articles so far. His first release, The Uneasiness in Depth Psychology (1990), served as a distinctive textbook of Jungian psychology and its related world view to a great number of Czech readers interested in Jung in the 1990s, since there was almost no officially published Jungian literature in the Czech language available at that time. The book made an impression on many of its readers due to the author’s idiosyncratic survey of Jung’s ideas, transcending profoundly the usual horizon of purely psychological introductions to the discipline. Moreover, it offered vivid examples of the application of Jungian principles in the specific conditions of the local culture, which was also true of two other anthologies of essays from that time: Medúsa v novější době kamenné (Medusa in the Newer Stone Age, 1994) and Sedm jungovských rozhovorů (Seven Jungian Interviews, 2004).
Absolutely original and fundamental is Starý’s book Filmová hermeneutika (Film Hermeneutics, 1999), containing his anthology of Jungian film reviews published in previous decades, but more importantly a large introductory study called “O hermeneutice” (“On Hermeneutics”), one of the peaks of the author’s lifelong work. In Starý’s view, film can be seen as an analogy to the cathartic ritual theater of the ancient Greeks. As Starý writes:
Film is undoubtedly the most characteristic and perhaps the most important art form of the twentieth century. The intrinsic need of the soul to create images, to recognize herself in them as if in a mirror and experience them in a cathartic way, found in film a perfect Gesamtkunstwerk of yet unprecedented impressiveness: all the four basic modes of the world according to the Kabbalist tradition—image, music, word, and shape—came together here and united into one great mode of artistic expression.[xlii]
Besides this unique perception, Starý's study offers a profound statement of the principles of “Hermetic hermeneutics” or analogical thinking, as opposed to the scientific-technological thinking of modernity.
With every new book, Starý’s style of writing gets deliberately more essayistic and less strictly aligned with the mainstream code of Jungian literature (and also less astrological). To give at least some idea of their nature, I would divide the most important of his works into two groups. The first group would consist of prevailingly astrological texts: essays regarding the overall conception, theoretical attempts to grasp certain astrological archetypes, and astrological case studies of all kinds. Speaking of the theoretical studies of astrological archetypes, Starý included some ideas for understanding the minor planet Chiron in his brilliant piece Cheirón, asklépiovská medicína a jungovská psychologie (Chiron, Asclepian Medicine and Jungian Psychology, 2000). In addition to that, he wrote a large conceptual text in an attempt to facilitate some understanding of the significant point of the Black Moon, which is in his book Podobnosti: astropsychologická hermeneutika (Correspondences: Astro-Psychological Hermeneutics, 2005). Starý also, partly in parallel, developed quite a profound understanding of the world transits similar to that of Richard Tarnas: for example, his commentary on the Saturn-Neptune square of 2015–2016, connecting the transit with the European migration crisis and the hybrid war on Ukraine, deserves particular attention.
The second group of major works by Rudolf Starý consists of the texts that put Jung’s ideas and world view into a larger philosophical, theological, and cultural context. He wrote several profound essays showing the essential similarity between the world views of Jung and Goethe, the latter coming to have the same importance to Starý as the former. Likewise, Starý connected Jungian principles with various exponents of Neoplatonism. In articles such as “Jungova psychologie jako srovnávací fenomenologie” (“Jung’s Psychology as Comparative Phenomenology,” 1987) and “Jungovo myšlenkové dědictví” (“The Legacy of Jung’s Ideas,” in Correspondences II, 2009), he shows the kinship between Jungian notions and the ideas of his historical predecessors. In texts such as “Vnitřní a vnější člověk” (“The Inner and the Outer Man,” in Correspondences III, 2012), Starý integrates his approach with esoteric and Neoplatonic forms of Christianity. In general, his main concern is about the possibility of renewing the vertical (numinous) axis of Western(ized) civilization that collapsed with the ascent of modernity.
Rudolf Starý is a classic solitary self-made man who developed his remarkable approach without the support of any institutional system. Having retired from public life, he continues with his Goethean reflections of the collective psyche, published in his last two books: Pozdní sběr (Late Harvest, 2015) and Barevné odlesky (Colorful Glints, 2017). His style gets even more original and loose, while some of his reflections reach even deeper than before, thanks to a more distant perspective shaped by his living in seclusion. Given the width and depth of his wisdom and knowledge, I believe Starý belongs to the most brilliant Jungian astrologers and thinkers of our time. Unfortunately, to this day there is no text of him available in English, which might hopefully change in the future for the sake of the beneficial enrichment of the field of archetypal cosmology. The only exception is Starý’s essay “C. G. Jung and the Dichotomy of Knowledge and Belief,” published in 2019 by IAM – Infinity Astrological Magazine in two parts.
Conclusion
With its unprecedented freedom, the period of the 1990s—taking place between the fall of the Iron Curtain and before establishing the new bureaucratic structures of “academic capitalism”—was a time in Prague of extensive, even frenetic, public debate and book and journal publication. It is no wonder that this “starry hour” of the Czech intellectual history was connected with the names and ideas of the thinkers presented in the last part of this article. As one can easily gather from what I wrote about them, their work and approach finely resonated with the spiritual atmosphere of that time, described by the archetypal combination of Uranus and Neptune and their world-transit conjunction taking place at that period. Starý, Neubauer, Kratochvíl, Komárek, and others share the same roots of Prague’s genius loci, the continental tradition of Western esotericism, and participation in the underground circles of intellectual dissent. Yet we could not speak about any “school” or “movement” analogous to, for example, transpersonal psychology; the current representatives of the Prague archetypal tradition belong rather to the same broad intellectual stream. Its spirit is, quite logically, somewhat close to that of the Jungian Eranos circle with its universalism clearly rooted in the continental esoteric tradition of Western spirituality. The comparison to the spirit of Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California is, in my opinion, marked by general sympathies, but also certain cautiousness about accepting its features of “melting-pot” eclecticism and its emphasis rather on North American shamanism and Eastern teachings.
The enthusiasm of the 1990s brought many international activities to Prague, including the splendidly cast and highly successful International Transpersonal Conference “Science, Spirituality, and the Global Crisis” (1992). The Czech Astrological Society at that time organized two ambitious European Astrological Congresses in Prague (in 1994 and 1997), visited by lecturers such as Liz Greene, Louise and Bruno Huber, Marion March, Claude Weiss, Karen Hamaker-Zondag, and Alexander Ruperti. Czech president Václav Havel also actively supported the new paradigm ideas in many ways, for example by starting the project “Forum 2000,” which beginning in 1997 organized prestigious annual conferences in Prague aimed at supporting the values of democracy and respect for human rights, assisting the development of civil society, and encouraging religious, cultural, and ethnic tolerance. With the end of the Uranus-Neptune world transit in 2001, Prague has conformed into a provincial European metropolis and tourist attraction, lately troubled by political degradation—basically a Middle-European form of Trumpism. Yet, during the world-transit square of Uranus and Pluto, Prague has also developed some more progressive cultural phenomena during the last decade, such as the renewal of psychedelic research and interest in the transpersonal movement. This has also included the organization of such great events as the International Transpersonal Conference “Beyond Materialism: Towards Wholeness” (2017) and “Beyond Psychedelics” (2016 and 2018). Under the surface of our everyday reality, the Prague archetypal tradition is ever-present on more subtle levels, reminding us that there is more to this world than one can see at first glance.
Notes
[i] To get general information about the ITC 2017 conference in Prague, see Eva Césarová, “Reflections on the International Transpersonal Conference 2017,” Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 49, no. 2 (2017): 82–95.
[ii] To get free access to the audiovisual records of the lectures by Bache and Tarnas, as well as all the other speakers of ITC 2017, visit the website: https://slideslive.com/itc/international-transpersonal-conference-prague-2017.
[iii] Václav Cílek, “Bohemia: Life in a Magic Cauldron,” in Opus Magnum, ed. Vladislav Zadrobílek (Prague: Trigon, 1997), 264–65.
[iv] Cílek, “Bohemia: Life in a Magic Cauldron,” 264–65.
[v] Svatopluk Svoboda, “The History of Astrology in Bohemia,” in Praha astrologická (Prague: Melantrich, 1994), 185–89.
[vi] Martin Stejskal, “The Hvězda Summer Residence,” in Opus Magnum, ed. Vladislav Zadrobílek (Prague: Trigon, 1997), 271–74.
[vii] See Ivo Purš, Vladimír Karpenko, and William Eamon, eds., Alchemy and Rudolf II: Exploring the Secrets of Nature in Central Europe in the 16th and 17th Centuries (Prague: Artefactum, 2016).
[viii] Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 313–16.
[ix] To enjoy a poetic novelist narration of the story of Dee and Kelly, see Gustav Meyrink, The Angel of the West Window (Sawtry, England: Dedalus, 1991).
[x] For more information on Kepler’s discoveries and their importance in the development of the modern Western world view, see Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind (London: Pimlico, 2010), 73–76.
[xi] Svoboda, Praha astrologická, 97–104.
[xii] To see some photos of the astrological corridor of the Wallenstein palace, visit “Science in Contact with Art: Astronomical Symbolics of the Wallenstein Palace in Prague,” accessed September 17, 2019, http://www.asu.cas.cz/~had/val/.
[xiii] Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 24–41.
[xiv] Václav Cílek, “Bohemia Life in a Magic Cauldron,” in Opus Magnum, ed. Václav Zadrobílek (Prague: Trigon, 1997), 264.
[xv] The title of the movement is my translation of the name of the monograph dedicated to its history: Milan Nakonečný, Novodobý český hermetismus (Prague: Vodnář, 1995). Regarding the survey presented in this chapter, this book has been my main source of information.
[xvi] Nakonečný, Novodobý český hermetismus, trans. Petr Lisý, 94.
[xvii] Nakonečný, Novodobý český hermetismus, trans. Petr Lisý, 94.
[xviii] Nakonečný, Novodobý český hermetismus, 58.
[xix] Nakonečný, Novodobý český hermetismus, 165.
[xx] Nakonečný, Novodobý český hermetismus, 151.
[xxi] As an integral part of the Renaissance world view, the doctrine of signatures describes the correspondence between certain astrological principles, parts of the human body, metals, minerals, herbs, and so forth. As such, it formed a basis of Hermetic medicine, for example that of Paracelsus.
[xxii] Milan Nakonečný, “The Universalia,” in Opus Magnum, ed. Vladislav Zadrobílek (Prague: Trigon, 1997), 315–16.
[xxiii] Petr Kalač, “A Brief History of the Czech Esoteric Scene from the Late 19th Century to 1989,” 2004, http://dcch.grimoar.cz/?Loc=onas&Lng=2.
[xxiv] To get more information on that matter, see Sarah Marks, “From Experimental Psychosis to Resolving Traumatic Pasts: Psychedelic Research in Communist Czechoslovakia, 1954–1974,” Cahiers du Monde russe 56, no.1 (January–March 2015): 53–75.
[xxv] Regarding the historical survey of Czechoslovakian psychedelic research, I drew substantial information from Petr Winkler, Ingmar Gorman, and Rita Kočárová, “Use of LSD by Mental Health Professionals,” in vol. 2, Neuropathology of Drug Addictions and Substance Misuse, ed. Victor R. Preedy (London: Academic Press, 2016), 773–81.
[xxvi] Winkler, Gorman, and Kočárová, “Use of LSD by Mental Health Professionals,” 776.
[xxvii] Petr Winkler and Ladislav Csémy, “Self-Experimentations with Psychedelics Among Mental Health Professionals: LSD in the Former Czechoslovakia,” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 46, no. 1 (2014): 11–19.
[xxviii] Louis Aragon, quoted in Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone, ed., Communism in Eastern Europe (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 125.
[xxix] Jan Havlíček, “The Prague School of Portmannian Biology,” in Acta Biotheoretica 59, no.1 (2011): 88.
[xxx] Tomáš Daněk, “Smrt prorokova,” in Zdeněk Neubauer, Hledání společného světa, (Prague: Malvern, 2017), 334.
[xxxi] Zdeněk Neubauer, Smysl a svět (Prague: Moraviapress, 2001), 205.
[xxxii] The Vize 97 Price had been awarded, among others, to Stanislav Grof (2007), Philip G. Zimbardo (2005), and Karl H. Pribram (1999).
[xxxiii] Zdeněk Neubauer, O čem je věda? (Prague: Malvern, 2009).
[xxxiv] Stanislav Komárek, Nature and Culture (Munich: Lincom Europa, 2009), 197.
[xxxv] See the Bibliography for selected English works of Zdeněk Neubauer.
[xxxvi] For more information about Ivan M. Havel and his work, see “Center for Theoretical Study,” accessed September 17, 2019, http://www.cts.cuni.cz/~havel/.
[xxxvii] For more about Stanislav Komárek, see “Curriculum Vitae,” accessed September 17, 2019, http://www.stanislav-komarek.cz/cv/curriclum-vitae-english/.
[xxxviii] Hans Thomas Hakl, Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the 20th Century (New York: Routledge, 2014), 138–40.
[xxxix] See Jan Havlíček, “The Prague School of Portmannian Biology,” Acta Biotheoretica 59, no.1 (2011): 87–92.
[xl] For a list of these translated works, see “Nakladatelství Sagittarius,” accessed September 17, 2019, http://www.sagittarius-rs.cz/.
[xli] This is a loose translation of the first sentence of the last stanza in the second part of Goethe’s Faust: “Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.”
[xlii] Rudolf Starý, Filmová hermeneutika, trans. Petr Lisý (Prague: Sagittarius, 1999), 17–18.
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