num_pages: 386
description: Readers today are especially thrilled by the prospect of good news. Drought and global warming civil war and famine poverty and economic inequityyes bad news abounds. This book by Dr. Stephen Wilkerson on the other hand is about hope and optimism for the future. The recorded history of our world is largely one of a sometimes worthy patriarchal striving. It has however all too often been tarnished marred and horribly disfigured by the hatreds intolerance and destruction that have accompanied it. And the good news? There is another way poignantly and persuasively outlined nearly two hundred years ago by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe involving the Divine Feminine. Goethes masterpiece Faust  involves an immensely intelligent but profoundly narcissistic man who cruelly and selfishly exploits and ultimately ruins the life of an innocent maiden. In the legend on which Goethes great work is based Faust understandably winds up in Hell just as he does in virtually every version of this well-known wager with the Devil. But in Goethes interpretation the deeply flawed protagonist is received into Heaven by the Mother of God Herself. How and why can this be? Mankinds long history of heroic accomplishment has never been sufficiently tempered by a sense of global community and cooperation that mitigate the horror and devastation that ever seem to march along beside a single-minded struggle to achieve and prevail. And how may this missing unity be brought about? Alchemy as understood in this book has nothing to do with an early and misguided chemistry and everything to do with the sort of individual transformation necessary for a better more gracious more inclusive world. The millennial patterns of blind violence and repression can only be ameliorated by a thoughtful and genuine embrace of open-minded reception of difference and heart-felt valuation of a larger borderless world in which all grow together rather than further apart. Such is the promise of the final words in Goethes Faust : The Divine Feminine leads us forward.
language: English
title: A Most Mysterious Union: The Role of Alchemy in Goethe's Faust
publisher: Chiron Publications