Show Notes
In this episode of The Sacred Speaks, I sit down with Dr. Gregory Shaw—renowned scholar of Neoplatonism and author of Hellenic Tantra and Theurgy and the Soul—to explore a forgotten path of spiritual transformation: theurgy.
Together, we investigate:
What theurgy actually is—not as abstract philosophy, but as a living practice. How modern culture’s loss of a mythic worldview creates both psychological pathology and spiritual hunger. Why Iamblichus taught that the divine does not live “elsewhere” but is present within matter itself. How ancient rites and rituals can restore a sense of sacred participation in our lives today. Gregory Shaw’s work bridges ancient philosophy and contemporary spirituality, showing how ritual, sacred embodiment, and symbolic consciousness can help us recover the animistic worldview our culture has lost. This conversation moves beyond ideas—it’s a call to remember.
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Learn more about Gregory Shaw: • Hellenic Tantra: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CVN69KY7 • Theurgy and the Soul: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0271023228 • Interview on The SHWEP Podcast: https://shwep.net/podcast/gregory-shaw-on-the-phenomenology-of-iamblichean-theurgy/
Connect with me: • Website & offerings: https://www.drjohnwprice.com • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesacredspeaks/ • Podcast archive: https://www.youtube.com/c/thesacredspeaks
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In this In this episode of The Sacred Speaks, Dr. John W. Price sits down with Dr. Susan Schwartz, Jungian analyst and author, for a searching conversation about one of the most underaddressed wounds in contemporary psychology: the absent father. Susan is the author of The Absent Father Effect on Daughters and the forthcoming Absent Fathers, Yearning Sons. Her clinical work draws on decades of practice and deep immersion in Jungian theory, and what she brings to this conversation is not just scholarly precision but the kind of knowledge that only comes from sitting with this material in the consulting room across a lifetime. Father absence, she argues, is routinely minimized in both psychoanalytic literature and popular culture. John and Susan move through the specific ways absence shapes identity, relatedness, sexuality, and the gaze. They explore what it means when a father's eyes are never there to confirm a daughter's body, her mind, her worth, and how fathers model partnering, love, and respect for soul. Susan brings two clinical dreams into the conversation: one involving Vladimir Putin as a figure for the negative father complex, and one about cleaning a closet that opens into something unexpected and alive. These are not illustrations. They are the unconscious at work, showing what the personal father could not provide and what the psyche has done with that absence in the meantime. The conversation moves into territory that will matter to men as much as women: the relationship between absent fathers and male brutality, the failure of initiation when the father is not present to initiate, the ancestral and communal dimensions of the wound, and whether fathers can actually change. Susan's answer to that last question is honest and worth hearing slowly. The episode closes with the questions she believes everyone should be asking, and almost no one does.