August 14, 2022
The Salome Institute was conceived in the Spring of 2016. Its clarity of purpose arrived while I walked in the sun one day and it came to form initially in whatever venue I could find: a church, a finished basement, or my then small condo living room. I knew I wanted to explore depth psychology with others and host conversations that I didn’t hear being had within the field, conversations around the psychological roots of war and tyranny, of racism and sexism, of violence and mass-mindedness, and how they could be prevented, acknowledged, or transformed. I wanted to engage with the core of Jung’s work and its modern value, not get lost in the disembodied esoterica that too often dominated lecture halls.
I named the institute after Salome from Jung’s Red Book and Black Books. Salome is core to Jung’s work—sensual, embodied, matter, and soul—and yet, in so many of the discussions, lectures, and conversations among scholars of his work at the time, she was barely acknowledged. We’d learn about Philemon, the Gnostic influences, and the symbolic references, but where was Salome, Jung’s teacher and soul, the feminine figure who transforms through his devoted attention and who transforms him in return? How could it be that after all of Jung’s work to find her again, to accept her as she was, she was just once again buried in the scholarship and forgotten?
The Salome Institute soon found a home in the living room of some now dear friends. For a couple of years, while hosting Carol Ferris’s feminist reimaginings of Lilith and Dr. Fanny Brewster’s work on The Racial Complex, I led conversations around various works and topics, from Edward Edinger on Alchemy to “The Integrated Masculine,” “The Multiplicity of the Feminine,” Red Book reading groups, the inferior function in Jung’s typology, the depth psychology of Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil, and instruction on The I Ching. Many of these classes were on Friday mornings with a core group of “Salomates,” as they came to be called, in that beautifully adorned living room with cut flowers on the table and lit candles everywhere.
As I now understand the evolution of The Salome Institute and where we’re going next, that initial phase is what I call—borrowing from the iterative language of tech speak—Salome 1.0.
Salome 2.0 began with the lockdown. A new phase was born, along with so many things, when a global pandemic changed our world.
I had just begun teaching a bit online, so when we were suddenly separated from one another and from our living room gathering space, I was prepared (more or less) to switch gears. I moved my classes online, and Carol Ferris and I began our Red Book Sunday gatherings: twenty-nine free morning meetings in which we traveled together through Jung’s magnum opus page by page, seeking to understand the depths of a work created 100 years prior amidst world war as we ventured into a global crisis of our own.
These last two and a half years have been a vibrant time for The Salome Institute. We’ve hosted many speakers, Gary Lachman, Fanny Brewster, Kwame Scruggs, Ayana Jamieson, Kayleen Asbo, Ann Carroll, and Daniel Baumann to name a handful. Carol Ferris has gifted us with monthly New Moon salons and deep dives into the astrology for the coming year. We created a podcast from The Red Book gatherings whose episodes have been downloaded 140,000 times. Things moved at a feverish pace and it was wonderful and invigorating.
I knew, as I listened to myself, that there was another shift coming. As we all began to get vaccinated, the world began to adapt to a less intense period of the pandemic, and as my book—long on the horizon—finally approached publication, I could feel a need to slow things down a bit, to host fewer speakers, and to begin teaching more myself again.
And so, Salome 3.0 is what we’ve been shifting into for the last several months at Salome and what we’ll be deepening into with more consistency going forward.
Salome 3.0 will have expanded opportunities for community, drawing upon what we’ve been building with our new community platform. I will also be offering more consistent seminars and salons, and coming back more clearly to our roots around “socially relevant psychology.” This phase of Salome will look something like this:
A new membership program that provides access to a regular online community for discussion and conversation, with weekly prompts
Monthly “socially relevant” salons in which I dive deeply into a particular topic around social justice or current events, sometimes in conversation with others
Regular seminars that I lead, drawing more on the ideas of depth psychology and how they apply to our own lives and to the world
Regular groups for dreamwork and/or divination that provide more live community engagement and direct work with the embodied psyche
Occasional hosting of brilliant thinkers as related to the intersection between depth psychology, social justice, and broadening access to these ideas
I am excited to share with you what we’ve been working on in the background. We hope to expand upon what we’ve created together over these years and will be announcing some new seminars and salons—and a new membership program!—very soon.
xo, Satya
Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies