New Skin for the Old Ceremony

New Skin for the Old Ceremony is the fourth studio album by Leonard Cohen, released in 1974. On this album, he begins to evolve away from the rawer sound of his earlier albums, with violas, mandolins, banjos, guitars, percussion and other instruments giving the album a more orchestrated (but nevertheless spare) sound. The album is silver in the UK, but never entered the Billboard Top 200 in the US. A remastered CD was released in 1995, and in 2009 it was included in Hallelujah – The Essential Leonard Cohen Album Collection, an 8-CD box set issued by Sony Music in the Netherlands. Cover The original cover art for New Skin for the Old Ceremony was an image from the alchemical text Rosarium philosophorum. The two winged and crowned beings in sexual embrace caused his U.S. record label, Columbia Records, to print one early edition of the album minus the image substituting instead a photo of Cohen. Another early manifestation of the cover art saw an additional angel wing collage added to cover the depicted figures, presumably to render the image more "decent". The image originally came to public attention in C. G. Jung's essay The Psychology of the Transference, where it is held by Jung to depict the union of psychic opposites in the consciousness of the enlightened saint. The sexual embrace as a symbol for this condition of psychic unity is also found frequently in Tibetan thangkas (sacred paintings).