Our Shadow Predicament and the New Ethic of 21st Century Alchemy
Our Shadow Predicament and The New Ethic of 21st Century Alchemy
Colin E. Davis
October 13, 2026
Originally appearing on Substack:
https://shadowtechalchemy.substack.com/p/our-shadow-predicament-and-the-new
“The cave you fear to enter contains the treasure you seek.”
- Joseph Campbell (maybe)
Modern people are in so many ways like hard-core addicts surrounded by other addicts, unable to take the first steps to recovery. The Americans are probably the most degraded, and seen from afar, appear the most ridiculous in their attempts to deny their psycho-spiritual pathologies. But as we all know, the first step to recovery is to admit that you have an addiction. Next is to quit and do so in the company of other recovered addicts who can support you. But when you do this, your entire life changes. Your old friends go away. All the things inside of yourself that you were using the substance to distract from, and the wounds that were being soothed by that substance, come right to the fore. The entire reason for “using” was to avoid aspects of yourself that you don’t know how to handle, and perhaps to experience a taste of ecstasy that was otherwise out of reach.
After you walk through that door of recovery, you gain freedom from the addiction, but the trade-off is that you must take on the responsibility of coming to know yourself, including everything that you had shoved down into your shadow. The promise that is implied with this sacrifice is the boon of wholeness. It’s not the hope that you will be converted into a “happy person,” or that you won’t suffer anymore. It’s the promise that you will become undivided. You won’t need to shove part of your being into a closet or use substances to tolerate the moments when the demons you locked away come out and have their way with you.
Mature individuals (and a mature people) are those who choose wholeness over addiction and denial. They choose to “own their own shadows” instead of projecting them onto external enemies. They choose to live a life of self-honesty over a life of hiding from the side effects of denial and lies. And while living a life of self-awareness and commitment to inner development is not easy, it’s a life of tremendous integrity, meaning and purpose. And living a life of shadow denial is actually harder. It’s a “Faustian bargain” that never works out as we wished. Denying our darkness doesn’t eliminate it; it just converts it into disease and social evil.
What I have written here is known to those who are familiar with the world of AA and “recovery.” But these same ideas and principles apply to all people.
Everything I have just said here is also directly related to the Jungian Way, that practice of inner development that Carl Jung called “Individuation.” To individuate is to become indivisible or undivided. In psychological terms, it means to have a conscious relationship with your shadow and everything dark that is oppositional to your self-image and the way your society thinks you “should” be. The one who is engaged in this lifelong practice comes to terms with their wounds and their lower nature and works to relate to those parts and find symbiotic outlets for those repressed energies, so they don’t have to destroy themselves and the world around them.
Modern humans have high capacities for social good, order and collective generativity. Our Western and Christian values have established an optimum moral state that we are asked to live by. It’s one of charity, brotherly love, tolerance and sacrifice for the good of the community. But the fact of the matter is that Homo sapiens is built on an animal body. We have capacities, instincts and drives that are totally oppositional to our spiritual values, and we have not yet evolved a psyche that is capable of transmuting these darker energies without our conscious intention to do so.
After WWII, one of Jung’s colleagues, Erich Neumann, pointed out that Western society was consumed by a state of total demonic possession, and that our Western morality, or what he called the “old ethic” was part of the reason why. That old ethic aimed at moral perfection by pushing our dark side down and out of sight, but whatever we push down ultimately gets projected onto scapegoats.
Jung wrote the foreword to Neumann’s book, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, in which Neumann proposed a “new ethic” for our people. It is one that retains our Western morality, but aims at wholeness rather than perfection, and adds on top of it a mandate to take full responsibility for our shadow side and to work with it consciously as individuals and as a collective. His plea was largely ignored, even among Jung’s own students in Zurich, some of whom found the book too controversial. And in fact Jung’s entire psycho-spiritual platform, which holds many keys to our healing and maturation as Westerners, was ostracized from academia, and the Jungians themselves declined to press forward his proposition of a new shadow-aware ethic for our people.
To be clear, Jung used the term “shadow” to describe our darker, base drives, emotions and rejected remnants of old wounds. The shadow is everything that we wish we didn’t have inside of us but which we do have, and which is always down there looking for permission to come up. But to admit to the baseness and bestiality of what’s down there is to ruin our social image, and it is to open the door to an unknown domain that, outside of Jung and a few of his students, no one else in our modern society has mapped out and worked with in detail.
Even our Christian structure gives us so little in the way of inner shadow work. Catholic confession is clearly a shadow release practice, but in general, we project our shadows onto external “enemies” or “the Devil.” We see our own dark traits in others whom we use as scapegoats. We imagine that the Devil is “out there” somewhere rather than right inside of our own psyches. And because we see no one of stature leading the way and sharing their experiences and methods for engaging in shadow work, we don’t know how or where to start.
The bona fide addict is someone who has a certain maladaptive way of managing their shadows, but not all of us manage in this way. Besides scapegoating and shadow-possessed behavior, which is ubiquitous, we use every form of distraction including excessive work to avoid what collects in the closet or to physically displace our shadow energy. We use ideologies to convince ourselves that we are the good ones and that our life path is righteous. We non-addicts use substances too, including electronic substances, but we are more like maintenance-level addicts.
Our shadows leak out of us in countless subtle ways. Hannah Arendt famously called this the “banality of evil”. And our shadow energies also get dumped into our bodies leading to every kind of symptom, but they first show up as what is called “projection.” Projection is where we see in others the exact same dark traits that we ourselves have, but which we have pushed down into the darkness of the unconscious. “They” are the evil ones, the greedy ones, the lustful ones or the violent and controlling ones. That’s not us; it’s them. And then, when we get together in groups and take on some righteous ideology, whether religious or secular, we can all project our own demons onto others, together.
“The darkness is out there, not in us”, and everyone else in our group will agree with us. So seeing our hypocrisy is even harder because everyone is avoiding and denying their shadows together. We use this same denial and projection trick as individuals, in relationships, families and through entire communities and nations. This is not a new phenomenon; it’s just that we are experiencing the most modern version of this ancient shadow play.
By the way, it must be said that the so-called “red-pilled” individual who sees shadow in the culture is a step ahead of the “blue-pilled” or naive citizen, but they are often heavily engaged in shadow projection and displacement themselves. It’s just that their target has shifted from the culturally approved scapegoats to the “Epstein class”, the “New World Order”, or the like. And this is not to say that this targeting of evil in such outside groups is totally misplaced. It’s not. But a population of shadow-denying projectors who don’t work with their own shadow material in themselves will just re-create a new outside target again and again.
In terms of where we are now in the post-modern West, of course none of this is going to last, and we are seeing the writing on the wall now. It’s all falling apart, and the cracks are showing up in literally every single wall and pillar of our civilization. And in this weakened state there will of course be a certain minority of privileged and psychologically deviant personality types who will see us in our weakened state and enjoy pulling the plug. They will enjoy rigging up the structure and taking it all down in a controlled demolition. Maybe some of them imagine an AI intelligence entity who will help them do the job. But that sadistic impulse in the so-called elites is only energized by many of us who are so deep into the shadow denial that we have built up an unconscious death wish that says “go ahead, pull the plug.”
The prognosis for the collective whole is not good. Chances are that the larger social structure will not endure in its current state. There is no way to know how exactly it will all play out, but entropy and what I call “the archetype of the virus” will have their way. Some humans will be catastrophically affected as it degrades. Others will protect themselves and probably be successful tucking into the rural environment, living essentially very traditional lives.
But for a small minority of humans, all of this inside-out destruction will be a tremendous catalyst for personal and social evolution. Apocalypse actually means revelation or revealing, and it is an archetype of transformation.
Out of the shedding of this skin, a new layer of mind, morality and social maturity will grow. We don’t know how long it will take or if it will even develop here in this place where we are now. In the past, civilizations would fall apart relatively separated from others. Many societies rose and fell without other societies knowing anything about them.
But today we have a global civilization, and we are so intimately connected. We also have weapons of mass destruction that can destroy all life on the planet. I tend to think that humanity has a built-in safety switch that will not let the entire species and the biosphere commit suicide, but this is a hunch.
I can tell you what I am doing, though. What I am doing is to engage in the project of Individuation in my own life and, by extension, my relationships. I am using my life as an alchemical laboratory for the clarification of my own psyche and the integration of my shadow. I have taken on Neumann and Jung’s offering and am using it to evolve myself from the inside out, and it’s working. I’ve been seriously engaged in this project for over two decades now. It’s not a quick fix, just as recovery is not a panacea. But as far as I can see, it is the most moral and evolutionary way of being. There is no way out but through.
Of course there is no reason to limit oneself to a single spiritual system, map or protocol for inner healing and development. And Jung’s map is different from those of Eastern systems. But Jung’s system is built out of the materials of the Western psyche. It’s a very appropriate form of Western yoga or, more accurately, alchemy. In fact, Jung’s system is in every way our most advanced and updated form of spiritual alchemy.
In the last thirty years of his life, Jung realized that his own system of inner development was totally aligned with the principles and images of Hermetic alchemy, and he spent much of his time showing how esoteric alchemy was, in his view, as much a proto-psychology as it was a proto-chemistry. He came to see Hermetic alchemy, which was practiced in secret and often at the margins of Church orthodoxy, as a compensatory function that was bringing balance to the Western psyche. What Christianity pushed into the shadow, alchemy worked with, and individuals used it to purify the soul.
This alchemical inner evolution was not a projected “faith” in Christ’s transmutation for all of us, but a personal transmutation that the individual took self-responsibility for in life. Christ’s example and image were essential to most European alchemists, but they had the intuition and, let’s say, gnostic or even shamanic impulse not to wait for perfection in the afterlife, but to do the purification work right here, right now, in place.
So this is the alchemical project today. This is the Magnum Opus. It’s the transmutation of the shadow, the prima materia. It’s the alchemical wedding, the conjunctio, the synthesis of opposites - dark and light, masculine and feminine, self and other. And it’s done inside the personal psyche and inside the container of relationship. When we engage with our inner opposites this way, we don’t need to project them out. They don’t need to turn into disease and addiction. This is the Great Work, and we are in the laboratory running our experiments, applying what works, discarding what doesn’t, sharing with our peers and passing on our successes for posterity.
Our work is just beginning. Jung was the first to bring this alchemical project into modern consciousness, and it has only barely been fathomed in the mass psyche. As individual alchemists we must also know that our work comes with dangers and that we must not fall into the grandiose fantasies of prior alchemists. We will not heal all of our wounds. Some of us will die in the process. We will make many mistakes and correct ourselves. But this Work is truly the Great Work, and for the few of us who are called to engage in this self-aware and real-time evolution of human consciousness, it’s all there is to do.
Colin E. Davis
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In the next installment, we will discuss actual shadow work itself and we will do so in a way that will of course be challenging, but simple and easy to understand. That’s what our job is - demystifying the shadow and shadow work practice.
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