'The Gods are dead' say secularists and monotheists alike - but Part 5 of Alchemy and the Imagination, by Dr Ian Irvine, uses Jungian foundations to discuss the surprising archetypal energy behind much that is otherwise inexplicable about contemporary society. The postmodern era emerges as 'The Age of Hermes' (from Bernie Neville's famous 1992 essay on the topic).

This piece belongs to Hermes and Sesheta: (Unheralded) Gods of the New Media Revolution, Vol. 2 of The Collected Works of Ian Irvine (Hobson). (Nonfiction)


Hermes Negatively Polarised is Part 5 of the series 'Alchemy and the Imagination'. (copyright Ian Irvine (Hobson) 2011, all rights reserved).This is the second essay in the series to examine the Hermesian substrata to contemporary existence in Western societies. In particular, the phenomenon of Neo-liberalism, (otherwise known as 'Hyper-Capitalism', 'Extreme Capitalism' or 'Casino Capitalism' ) emerges as a symptom of what Ian argues is an unacknowledged 'Hermes Inflation' at the very core of contemporary society. The foundations to the argument lie in the works of Carl Jung, James Hillman and Australian academic, Bernie Neville. Aspects of the Information Revolution are also examined from the perspective of archetypal psychology and some comment is made regarding the affect of neoliberalism and the information revolution on creative, critical and educational cultures in Australia.

* CURRENT PUBLISHER: The Zoetics Institute (2016) (formerly: Mercurious press). The article is a chapter from the upcoming book: Hermes, Sesheta and Thoth: (Unheralded) Gods of the Postmodern Transition, to be published by the Zoetics Institute.