Vladimir Petroci

Covid was biologically real, and for me it was also deeply personal: I ended up in hospital, came close to death, and spent months struggling to breathe. Years later, I return to the pandemic with a different question. Could it also have made visible a deeper illness of humanity, what Paul Levy calls wetiko?
The article explores the striking parallels between a biological virus and this ancient image of a parasitic disease of the mind. It looks at fear, isolation and social polarisation, Jung’s synchronicity, and Levy’s Buddhist image of the moon reflected on water. Finally, it asks whether the pandemic might be understood as a collective initiation, and whether we have understood what that experience was trying to show us.

Why do conspiracy theories hold such power over millions of people? Perhaps they respond to something real, yet misunderstand its nature. Across cultures, humanity has described wetiko as a mind virus or psychic force that enters through fear, hatred, trauma, and the unconscious shadow. It has no independent life of its own, yet it operates as if it were a living being, surviving by feeding on human fear and division. This article explores how projection turns genuine perceptions of evil into hostility towards particular people or groups, how opposing sides unconsciously sustain one another, and how awareness, creativity, inner work, and compassion can help us break the cycle without denying the reality of evil.

From the beginning of Quintessence Forum I have felt a tension in our community. Some of us say: see with the heart. Others hold that the vision must also be put into words, because without reason the heart wanders. This essay asks why language makes thought possible at all, and what artificial intelligence unexpectedly reveals about the limits of both reason and consciousness: a machine that has language without a heart vindicates both sides at once. Following Anselm’s faith seeking understanding and Bernardo Kastrup’s rational idealism, I argue that a paradigm is not a cage for God but the window through which some of us are able to see Him. The heart brings the image; reason gives it coordinates.

Iamblichus taught that the soul descends fully into matter and cannot return by thought alone. The divine has to act, and it acts through material tokens that carry a higher presence. This essay follows that idea from late Neoplatonism through Dionysius the Areopagite and the Christian sacrament to Ficino, Paracelsus, and finally Hahnemann. Across the whole Western tradition the same conviction holds: matter is a carrier of higher meaning, and the potentized remedy is its late form.

Alchemy did not die. It lives in spagyric medicines still made in Germany and in homeopathy itself. Paracelsus, the forerunner of Hahnemann, turned alchemy toward medicine and sought the quintessence: the refined essence of a substance freed from matter. What Paracelsus called the quintessence, Hahnemann approached through potentization. From Paracelsus through Mary Anne Atwood and Jung to Whitmont and Cicchetti runs one thread: the belief that every substance carries an inner nature, and that true healing also changes the healer.

Kyriacos Markides, a sociologist from Cyprus, spent years with the healer and mystic Daskalos. Fire in the Heart presents the human being as a layered structure of body, soul and Pneuma, and healing as a force that passes through the healer rather than from him. Its central claim is that Mind is the substance from which all dimensions of existence are woven, which places the book beside today’s return to idealism. For a homeopath it grounds the unity of mental, general and physical symptoms, and the sense that the deeper self does the healing.

The Gnostics held that truth is reached directly, through inner experience, and they rejected church hierarchy. That very stance weakened them. Orthodoxy won through the power of organization, and the emperor used it to hold the empire together. We trace this conflict from the Council of Nicaea through the Cathars to the present day, where scattered voices of a consciousness-first view stand against organized materialism. And we ask what it teaches us about the development of a new paradigm in our time.

Tolkien’s Middle-earth was not created merely as a setting for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but as a complete spiritual world with its own creation, fall, death, and final renewal. The article follows the motif of the Great Music, Melkor’s discord, the wounded Arda, and the Second Music, in which human beings are no longer only inhabitants of the world, but participants in its transformation. Tolkien’s myth appears here as an image of reality in which evil does not have the final word, and the wounded world moves toward a new creation.