Book Titles:

Divine Madness: Archetypes of Romantic Love. Boston: Shambhala, 1990.

Pilgrimage of the Heart: The Path of Romantic Love. Boston, Shambhala, 1992.

Heilige Verzauberung: Archetypen und Stadien der Romantischen Liebe. Ansata, 1991.

These are alternate titles for the same book. All three titles are out of print but widely available in libraries. A new printing is frequently promised but has not yet materialized. Therefore I have placed the entire book on this website.

 

Related articles:

1. General Introduction to the book
   Romantic Love as a mystical and learning experience, based on the poetry of Jalaluddin Rumi.
   
   
2. The Love Potion and the Sword of Eros
   This is the first of a four-lecture series given at the Pacific Graduate Institute, Spring, 1997. It describes romantic love as a tension between the drawing power of the "love potion" and the separating force of the "naked sword." Jung's experience plays a role, and there is some criticism of his theories.
   
   
3. Love's Two Insomnias
   The second Pacifica Lecture discusses the "mystical" and psychological discipline that romantic love requires of us. This leads into a discussion of the nature of the psyche and how it enables us to be in deep contact with another human being.
   
   
4. The Lens of the Anima What It Sees
   The third Pacifica Lecture criticizes the limitations of Jungian Psychology when it speaks of interpersonal events, and proposes a revision.
   
   
5. A version of the argument in the fourth Pacifica Lecture can be seen in my shamanism article, Taking Direction from the Spirit in Shamanism and Psychotherapy.

 

short description of Divine Madness/Pilgrimage of the Heart:

If puppy love is foolishness, a mature romantic love is full-blown madness. The lover has strayed from the highways and mainstreams of our placid and well-planned common life to build a solitary hut somewhere in the wilderness of disgraceful and deranged notions. There is no convincing the love-mad of their errors and delusions, they would rather disabuse us of ours.

This book sides with the madmen and explores their madness sympathetically: its rapture, its pain, its wisdom, its power to lead us astray, and its fiery pillar that leads us through the night of our ignorance toward a promised land that is glorious in ways we have not dreamed--but is generally not at all the way we had always imagined it would be.

 

topics

The Oneness of love, loss and separation, the demon lover, woundedness of heart, seduction and fidelity, love play, quarrelling, and the guiding spirit experienced as a Third presence between the lovers. Illustrations from everyday life, fiction, poetry, and the literature of mysticism--particularly Jalaluddin Rumi.