The Archetype of Rebirth and Resurrection — Introduction

This session opens with a direct acknowledgement of national grief after the downing of the Ukrainian passenger flight. Choosing “resurrection” in that setting is deliberately difficult: the subject of rebirth is introduced precisely when loss is fresh and rising again may feel implausible. The seminar does not define resurrection as denial of death or pressure to move quickly through mourning. It asks whether psychological and collective life can continue after rupture without erasing what has been lost.

The discussion returns to the previous work on the Orphan. In alchemical language, orphanhood had been associated with a dark and heavy stage, yet the same raw material becomes the starting point for transformation. Mythic and literary stories repeatedly place the orphan before a choice. Harry Potter and Tom Riddle are used as contrasting examples: related wounds and losses do not determine an identical moral destiny. Injury is not a sufficient cause of becoming destructive or generative; the form of response matters.

Rebirth therefore cannot mean simple restoration of the state that existed before crisis. Something in the old structure has died and cannot be recreated unchanged. What may emerge is a new order that includes the knowledge of loss. The seminar relates this to Jungian individuation: ego, shadow, unconscious material, and the Self enter a different relation as the person moves from reactive fragmentation toward greater coherence.

A spiral becomes the preferred image of development. An alchemical process may return to an “Orphan” position, but the Orphan at the end is not identical with the Orphan at the beginning. Two points can occupy a similar horizontal coordinate while standing at different heights. Human beings will encounter loss, solitude, and limitation again, yet after development they may have a different capacity to bear, interpret, and respond to them. Resurrection is not immunity from subsequent suffering; it is a transformation in the quality of encounter.

The same logic is tentatively extended to collective life. Iranian history is invoked as a history containing repeated breakdown and reconstruction, not in order to minimise present pain but to defend the possibility of continuity after catastrophe. The force of renewal is not imagined as an external rescuer descending from elsewhere. It must also arise through psychological and collective capacities for responsibility, meaning, and reconstruction. Resurrection, in this seminar, is the name given to a form of continuation that grows after an older form of life can no longer be restored.