ABSTRACT
Both Jung and Heidegger felt acutely the loss of the sense of the sacred in modern culture, and both spoke poetically of the status and meaning of “the gods” in what Heidegger called this “destitute time.” However, their approaches were different, as were their solutions. Jung found the gods in the unconscious psyche, Heidegger found them beneath western metaphysics but still present “in” the things with which we dwell. Rilke is an intriguing figure here as he forms something of a bridge between them. As Simms shows, he expresses in his poetry the suffering felt by both Heidegger and Jung-and indeed by all of us-and she shows how Rilke struggled to find an authentic way of speaking about and relating to the sacred that was psychologically astute yet ultimately beyond psychology.
