Cody Peterson is a trickster.
I got sober on a curb outside the Hard Rock in Las Vegas on March 4, 2013. I was thirty-four, homeless, with warrants in four states. I haven't had a drink or a drug since.
Five or six years into sobriety I went back to books. Campbell first, then Jung, then Homer, who turned out to have an older language for the things I had been living through: feeling, endurance, the soul. That is what I write about now.
I own a rain gutter company in Las Vegas and I still handle the sales. I study psychology at the University of Utah and start a master's at Adams State in January 2027. In between I build things: Seba.Health, a depth psychology library and directory, and Logoi, a workbench for reading Greek. My wife and I lived next to Zion for five years. I go back to the canyons whenever I can.
New
The Iron Thūmos and the Empty Vessel: A Homeric Response to “Answer to Job.” Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche 20(3), September 2026. Open access.
τέτλαθι δή, κραδίη· καὶ κύντερον ἄλλο ποτʼ ἔτλης.
Why does Odysseus turn down immortality? Homer's answer is in his grammar, and it turns out to be a reply to Jung's hardest book.
Read it at the journal, freeAbout the essay
Learning to Feel, on how I came to the essay.
Writing
- 2026
The Iron Thūmos and the Empty Vessel: A Homeric Response to “Answer to Job.” Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche 20(3), 103–117. Open access.
- 2025
Taming Wild Beasts. Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche 19(2), 235–239. On active imagination, dreams, the anima, and the archetype of the Alcoholic.
- 2024
The Shadow of a Figure of Light: The Archetype of the Alcoholic and the Journey to Enlightenment. Chiron Publications. Jung, Bill Wilson, and the Twelve Steps, written from inside recovery.
“It rests on the solid foundations of careful scholarship and personal experience.”
A follow-up essay is under review. A second book is underway.
What I'm working on
In Odyssey 20, Odysseus tells his own heart to endure. I count how Homer's words for suffering and enduring are shared out between gods and mortals, and I ask what that says about where value comes from. I use AI to search, sort, and check. The readings, and the mistakes, are mine.
Talks
I teach and talk about recovery, dreams, and Homer. In October 2025 I taught an online lecture for the C.G. Jung Institute Zürich on the archetype of the Alcoholic. Fourteen recordings are in the lecture archive.
