Jung's Aion laid the foundation for a whole new department of human knowledge, a scholarly discipline one might call archetypal psychohistory. It is based on the application of the insights of depth psychology to the data of cultural history. The historical process can now be seen as the self-manifestation of the archetypes of the collective unconscious as they emerge and develop in time and space through the actions and fantasies of humanity. In Aion Jung took the archetype of the God-image (the Self) as his subject and demonstrated how it has revealed itself progressively in the course of the Christian aeon. It is an awesome work that makes great demands on the reader. The present book is an attempt to mitigate this difficulty and to makeAion more accessible. The Aion Lectures is based on an edited transcript of lectures given at the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles, 1988-89. Besides being an in-depth study of Jung's Aion, it contains a wealth of material for understanding the
