In this episode, we trace how the Romantic era still shapes inner life and culture, moving from Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley to Frankenstein and Guillermo del Toro’s new film to ask what they reveal about technology, AI, and the rejected “other.” We follow the radical lives and charts of Wollstonecraft and Shelley, reading Frankenstein as a warning from a mechanistic worldview that exiles feeling, relationship, and the feminine. Along the way we track Saturn–Neptune cycles and Pluto in Aquarius from the French Revolution and the steam engine to today’s AI moment, draw on Liz Greene’s view of artists as Saturn–Neptune mediators of the imaginal, and weave in works that speak to this moment including del Toro’s Frankenstein, and Rosalía’s orchestral track Berghain. We consider whether we may again be at a threshold when any new renaissance of consciousness will hinge on bringing feeling, imagination, and the feminine principle back into both psyche and culture.

Books and other material mentioned in the episode:

Andrea Wulf, “Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self” 

Charlotte Gordon, “Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley” 

Thomas Elsner, “A Flash of Golden Fire: The Birth, Death, and Rebirth of the Modern Soul in Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’”

Liz Greene, “Neptune and the Quest for Redemption”

Neil Howe, “The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End” 

Film and television

Simon Schama, “The Romantics and Us” (BBC series on Romantic art, politics, and the modern self):

Music

Podcasts and online resources