The Record
Colophon
An AI-guided shadow work practice. Not therapy nor entertainment. A tool for psychological self-inquiry.
House of Descent is a website structured as a house of nine rooms. Each room holds one shadow complex — a named psychological force, written in the tradition of Jungian depth psychology — and the visitor speaks with it directly, in text. The house lives at houseofdescent.co and is operated by Switchyard LLC. It is intended for adults.
The nine rooms
Nine rooms on four floors, in descent order from Attic to Basement. Each room corresponds to a named Jungian shadow complex.
- Dirt · the Basement
- The oldest layer: survival, unbelonging, the body’s brace against a world that never felt safe. What settled before language.
- Flesh · the Bathroom
- The body in private — shame, tending, the mirror. What it is like to live in a body when no one is watching.
- Hunger · the Kitchen
- Appetite in all its forms: swallowed rage, disowned desire, ambition kept on a leash.
- Longing · the Bedroom
- Love withheld, missed, or never risked. The need to be known rather than merely seen.
- Making · the Studio
- The work never finished and the work never started. The gift judged not good enough to give.
- Silence · the Library
- Everything unsaid — the sentence that stopped before it left the body, and what holding it has cost.
- Judgment · the Study
- The internal verdict: the standard applied to everything, and turned hardest inward.
- Inheritance · the Attic
- What was absorbed rather than chosen — patterns and weather that arrived before the person did.
- Performance · the Parlor
- The assembled self: every version constructed for an audience, and the fatigue of maintaining them.
How a session works
Entry begins in the Foyer, which is free and will remain free. A seven-question quiz, taken without an account, assigns the visitor one of the nine rooms; the result names the room and its complex. The remaining rooms are open by subscription.
Inside a room, the visitor reads a short staged entry, and then the dialogue opens. Two figures are present: the room’s complex, and the Companion — a steadier guide who travels with the visitor into any room. The visitor may address either. The complex reads only what is said to it; the Companion sees the whole exchange.
The complexes are written as psychological forces, not as therapists. They speak in the first person. They do not apologize, do not soften, and do not resolve neatly. A session has no timer; it lasts as long as the visitor stays in the room.
Leaving is deliberate. The Companion closes the session, the visitor may record a single intention, and names what surfaced. Sessions persist; the house remembers where the visitor left off.
Authorship
House of Descent is written and built by Lindsey Parker. The practice draws on Jungian depth psychology, on somatic and body-based work, and on esoteric training undertaken across three years of solitary practice in the high desert of New Mexico. The voices of the nine complexes are authored and maintained by hand.
Method & materials
The primary source is C. G. Jung’s Red Book, and the method is active imagination: engaging inner figures directly and letting them speak. The complexes follow Jung’s account of the complex as an autonomous, feeling-toned part of the psyche. The house itself — nine rooms on four floors — arrived in meditation; the writing came after. A somatic thread — where a thing sits in the body, and what it does there — runs through the quiz, the rooms, and the writing.
The site is built with Next.js. Dialogue is generated by Anthropic’s Claude models, one voice per complex. Text is set in Cormorant Garamond, Crimson Pro, and Lora. Records are held by Supabase; pages are served by Vercel.
This page is a colophon in the bookmaking sense: a statement of how the thing was made, by whom, and with what.