The Winter Solstice – a day which held great spiritual and mythic significance for people down through the ages. All over the Northern Hemisphere, ancient festivals marked this, the shortest day of the year. The word in Irish –  Grianstad – means the stopping of the sun, a pause in the battle between darkness and light, where light eventually triumphs.

Jung realized that the problems of our time are rooted …above all in the loss of a living myth which would give meaning to our lives.

He saw that the dissociation of the conscious ego from what he called the primordial or instinctual soul presented a growing and unperceived danger to humanity. The more we emphasized reason and the supremacy of the rational mind, the greater the danger that instinct — whose power we have failed to acknowledge or understand — would drive, possess, delude and overwhelm us and the more we would fall victim to secular and religious ideologies and utopian goals which could ultimately lead us to destroy ourselves.

The paramount goal we need to focus on is reconnecting our conscious mind with the deeper dimension of the soul.

Anne Baring, The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul