The Red Admiral’s Wing: Toward a Gaian Individuation

Here I explore an individuation process (my own), lived through the making of The Red Admiral’s Wing, a mandala emerging from an extended conversation between the Gaiascope (a physical device for fostering deep ecological experiences), the I Ching, and the Azoth mandala of the 17th century alchemist Basil Valentine. The elucidation and emergence of The Red Admiral’s Wing required combining a contemplative, soulful attitude with noticing and quantifying word overlaps amongst the three interlocutors. A statistical analysis of the resulting data produced a strikingly synchronistic outcome. For me, as a scientific ecologist, Gaia, our sacred Earth, has been my guiding myth throughout my life. Given the severity of the global ecological crisis and of our almost willful collective ignorance of it, perhaps it is not surprising that Gaia reappears, as yet far too rarely, as a transcendent function of science and myth, as in this paper. This research emerged out of my five-year transformational soul work with Jungian analyst Julian David in the ancient soulfulness of Luscombe, his beautiful home in South Devon, England. In doing this work I experienced powerful integrative forces in long moments of expansion of Gaian consciousness. Frequent visits to my sacred Gaia Places under Yarner Beacon—the Beacon of the Storyteller—at our home near Schumacher College, Dartington, Devon, were essential in this process. My hope is that The Red Admiral’s Wing will sweep readers along as it did me in a hugely enlivening process of psychological development that comes as a gift from Gaia—from the vast depths of the living mind of nature.