ABSTRACT
Before she was burnt in public by the Inquisition in Paris in 1310, Marguerite Porete wrote in her one extant work, ‘Now this Soul has fallen from love into nothingness, and without such nothingness she cannot be the all’ (Porete 1993: 193). Over six hundred years later, Carl Jung, citing Goethe, writes in a similar vein about the sole authentic spiritual option open to the contemporary:
Indeed, he is completely modern only when he has come to the very edge of the world, leaving behind him all that has been discarded and outgrown, and acknowledging that he stands before the Nothing out of which All may grow.
