Quantum physicist, Basarab Nicolescu says, transdisciplinarity means beyond disciplinary severing of being. Transdisciplinarity rejects any possibility of a hyperdiscipline, one capable of subsuming all human knowing into a system of perfect knowledge, or ultimate truth. Rather, he emphasizes that reality is currently fragmented.
Transdisciplinarity rejects any possibility of a hyperdiscipline, one capable of subsuming all human knowing into a system of perfect knowledge, or ultimate truth. Rather, in many disciplines, truth is itself multiple, without negating infinite other truths. In this sense, a single god-like vision for total knowledge gives way to a polyvalent polytheism of knowing. Dionysus arrives.
Transdisciplinarity rejects any possibility of a hyperdiscipline, one capable of subsuming all human knowing into a system of perfect knowledge, or ultimate truth. Rather, in many disciplines, truth is itself multiple, without negating infinite other truths. In this sense, a single god-like vision for total knowledge gives way to a polyvalent polytheism of knowing. Dionysus arrives.
Gilbert Williams
Psychological polytheism is not the same as new age polytheism;
psychological soul is not the same as religious soul.
Psychological polytheism is not the same as new age polytheism;
psychological soul is not the same as religious soul.
Israel Regardie describes the purpose of magic in his book
"Tree of Life":
"The object of Magic, then, is the return of man to the Gods, the uniting of the individual consciousness during life with the greater being of the universal Essences, the more embracing consciousness of the Gods who are the everlasting sources of light and life and love. Only thus, to the human being, may there come liberty and illumination, and the power to see the beauty and the majesty of life as it really is. By returning in spirit to the sources from which he came, only by re-opening himself to them as a golden flower opens and turns to the Sun to imbibe anxiously and eagerly of its sustenance and light, so to man may come illumination, and the lifting of the earthly bonds and chains. By the discovery of his own inner God in the first place and forming an indissoluble relationship with the Gods of the universal life, herein lies the solution to the problems of man and the world. In this nobler consciousness of illumination devolving from divine union, may be resolved the intricacies of world-chaos. The cords which bind man with a strength beyond all mortal chains and fetters may thus be severed."
"Tree of Life":
"The object of Magic, then, is the return of man to the Gods, the uniting of the individual consciousness during life with the greater being of the universal Essences, the more embracing consciousness of the Gods who are the everlasting sources of light and life and love. Only thus, to the human being, may there come liberty and illumination, and the power to see the beauty and the majesty of life as it really is. By returning in spirit to the sources from which he came, only by re-opening himself to them as a golden flower opens and turns to the Sun to imbibe anxiously and eagerly of its sustenance and light, so to man may come illumination, and the lifting of the earthly bonds and chains. By the discovery of his own inner God in the first place and forming an indissoluble relationship with the Gods of the universal life, herein lies the solution to the problems of man and the world. In this nobler consciousness of illumination devolving from divine union, may be resolved the intricacies of world-chaos. The cords which bind man with a strength beyond all mortal chains and fetters may thus be severed."
psychological POLYTHEISM
Psychologist James Hillman, and other archetypal and imaginal psychologists, such as Bolen, Miller, and Woolger suggest: In the conventional model of psyche proposed by modern psychology and medicine, human nature is described largely in terms of an all-important central ego. All other facets of psychic experience are considered subordinate and relative to it.
Hillman has argued for a psychology that acknowledges all the myriad facets of our nature as important and integral to our general psychic well-being. Whereas Western psychology has largely tended to be "monotheistic" in its emphasis upon rational ego-awareness, Hillman has suggested the need for a more "polytheistic" view of psyche, one that might draw fruitfully from the pantheons of ancient mythology for a more fitting representation of psyche's perspectives, diversity, and needs.
Archetypal psychology allows a recovery of perspectives that polytheism allows. In Archetypal Psychology, Hillman states that archetypal psychology benefits us and our wider culture by embracing the wisdom, which is present for him, in a polytheistic perspective. Polytheism and archetypal psychology, taken together, offer another method of undertaking religious studies and also of understanding religious perspectives. Hillman, cited David L. Miller, calling this a “new polytheism”.
“The Death of God gives rise to the rebirth of the gods. We are polytheists,” declares Miller. “Polytheism is the name given to a specific religious situation,” “characterized by plurality, a plurality that manifests itself in many forms.” There are various values, patterns of social organization, and principles by which we govern political life. These values, patterns, and principles sometimes mesh harmoniously, but more often they war with one another to be elevated as the single center of normal social order.”
Philosophically, Miller defines polytheism as “that reality experienced by men and women when Truth…. cannot be articulated reflectively according to a single grammar, a single logic, or a single symbol-system.” A philosophically polytheistic situation "will break forth with principles of relativism, indeterminacy, plural logic systems...” (David Miller)
Religiously, "polytheism is the worship of many Gods and Goddesses.” These are not worshiped all at the same time. Rather, only one god or goddess at a time can be worshiped. In this way polytheism (the worship of many gods) includes monotheism (the worship of one God). A polytheistic theology is a system of symbolizing reality in a plural way in order to account for all experience. But "religious practice is composed of consecutive monotheisms.” And this “implies that our experience of social, intellectual, and psychological worlds is religious.
Miller suggests we need to revive polytheism to help us deal with our pluralistic experience. This need “may be behind the recent interest in the occult, magic, extraterrestrial life, Eastern religions, and sorcery, including new forms of multiple family life, communes, ‘new religions,’ alternative life-styles and meaning-systems.
Polytheism frees us from the monotheistic idea that we must “get it all together.” It better accounts for the nature of human beings, and helps us keep in touch with the richness and diversity of life. We find “a new function for the old Gods and Goddesses” with a modern sensibility.
“Our contemporary society and roles are pluralistic; The Gods and Goddesses are reemerging in our lives.” It follows the ideas, concepts, and categories of Western Greek polytheism focusing on the images of Gods and Goddesses.” The new polytheism “is a discovery of the polytheism of the psyche” with “many potencies, many structures of meaning and being," in everyday reality. (Miller)
iMages
Soul is rooted in the main ground of the Western tradition, extending from the Greeks through the Renaissance, Romantics, depth psychology and non-interpretive archetypal psychology.
Archetypal psychology is a polytheistic, aesthetic, poetic, phenomenological approach. Grounded in myth and archetype, it is about the imaginative life, soul-not-ego, healing; active, reflective introspection; connection with the daemonic; purposeful communication.
Knowing oneself is essentially mythic and archetypal, a transition from the material to the psychical point of view.
Polytheistic Imagination is Reality; we are deepened and enlivened by tending to soul. Non-theological soul is another dimension grounded in cultivation of imagination and vision.
Psyche or Soul is Anima Mundi, Soul of the World;
Image is psyche; healing fiction.
The Goddess is The Feminine;
the Gods are Archetypes, multiple archetypal perspectives;
Soul Guide is our Daemon, Angel, or Genius;
There is an Ecology of Souls.
Narrative fiction is the tool to explore cultural wounding, and ground cultural futuristics as an imaginal methodology, rooted in soul governing the perspectives we have of ourselves in the world (1975).
Archetypal psychology is a move away from cure and toward the honoring of symptom, including cultural neurosis.
Hillman's archetypal psychology injects the voice of soul from past and present cultural events into future scenarios.
Soul is rooted in the main ground of the Western tradition, extending from the Greeks through the Renaissance, Romantics, depth psychology and non-interpretive archetypal psychology.
Archetypal psychology is a polytheistic, aesthetic, poetic, phenomenological approach. Grounded in myth and archetype, it is about the imaginative life, soul-not-ego, healing; active, reflective introspection; connection with the daemonic; purposeful communication.
Knowing oneself is essentially mythic and archetypal, a transition from the material to the psychical point of view.
Polytheistic Imagination is Reality; we are deepened and enlivened by tending to soul. Non-theological soul is another dimension grounded in cultivation of imagination and vision.
Psyche or Soul is Anima Mundi, Soul of the World;
Image is psyche; healing fiction.
The Goddess is The Feminine;
the Gods are Archetypes, multiple archetypal perspectives;
Soul Guide is our Daemon, Angel, or Genius;
There is an Ecology of Souls.
Narrative fiction is the tool to explore cultural wounding, and ground cultural futuristics as an imaginal methodology, rooted in soul governing the perspectives we have of ourselves in the world (1975).
Archetypal psychology is a move away from cure and toward the honoring of symptom, including cultural neurosis.
Hillman's archetypal psychology injects the voice of soul from past and present cultural events into future scenarios.
Ontology is the philosophical investigation of existence, or being. It may be directed towards the concept of being, asking what ‘being’ means, or what it is for something to exist and/or what exists?’, or ‘what general sorts of thing are there?’ It is common to speak of a philosopher’s ontology, meaning the kinds of thing they take to exist, or the ontology of a theory, meaning the things that would have to exist for that theory to be true. All seekers have these basic assumptions about reality based on their experience and worldview.
Epistemology describes how we know what we know and what it is subjectively like, metaphorically. It is concerned with the nature, sources and limits of knowledge. There is a vast array of views about those topics, but one virtually universal presupposition is that knowledge is true belief, but not mere true belief. Our own personal epistemological metaphors are how we describe our subjective experiences to ourselves. They condition our experience, but they can be morphed in therapy, through trauma, by propaganda and enculturation.
Metaphysics is a broad area of philosophy marked out by two types of inquiry. The first aims to be the most general investigation possible into the nature of reality: are there principles applying to everything that is real, to all that is? We can abstract from the particular nature of existing things what distinguishes them from each other, and what can we know about them simply because they exist?
The second type of inquiry seeks to uncover what is ultimately real, frequently offering answers in sharp contrast to our everyday experience of the world. Understood in terms of these two questions, metaphysics is very closely related to ontology, which is usually taken to involve both ‘what is existence (being)?’ and ‘what (fundamentally distinct) types of thing exist?’
Epistemology describes how we know what we know and what it is subjectively like, metaphorically. It is concerned with the nature, sources and limits of knowledge. There is a vast array of views about those topics, but one virtually universal presupposition is that knowledge is true belief, but not mere true belief. Our own personal epistemological metaphors are how we describe our subjective experiences to ourselves. They condition our experience, but they can be morphed in therapy, through trauma, by propaganda and enculturation.
Metaphysics is a broad area of philosophy marked out by two types of inquiry. The first aims to be the most general investigation possible into the nature of reality: are there principles applying to everything that is real, to all that is? We can abstract from the particular nature of existing things what distinguishes them from each other, and what can we know about them simply because they exist?
The second type of inquiry seeks to uncover what is ultimately real, frequently offering answers in sharp contrast to our everyday experience of the world. Understood in terms of these two questions, metaphysics is very closely related to ontology, which is usually taken to involve both ‘what is existence (being)?’ and ‘what (fundamentally distinct) types of thing exist?’
"First of all, literalness can appear in highly abstract ways. We may take abstractions literally, as truths, rules, laws. Metaphysical thinking is one such example of abstract literalness; so too is theological thinking, where the most abstract notions about divinity are taken as literal dogmas. It is for this reason that metaphysics and theology so easily become ways of avoiding psychologizing. Even at the very moment they are talking of soul they may be escaping from it into a literalness about its problems, its truth, its redemption. Whenever we say "the soul is" this or that, we have entered upon a metaphysical venture and literalized an abstraction. These metaphysical assertions about the soul may produce psychology, but not psychologizing, and as avoidances of psychologizing they are an abstract acting-out. We act out not only by running away into concrete life; we act out equally in the flight upward into the abstractions of metaphysics, higher philosophies, theologies, even mysticism. The soul loses its psychological vision in the abstract literalisms of the spirit as well as in the concrete literalisms of the body."
-James Hillman, Revisioning Psychology, pp 136-137
-James Hillman, Revisioning Psychology, pp 136-137
Polytheistic Psychology & Neopaganism:
iMages
"So you want to learn about Archetypes."
by Iona Miller, ©2020
https://ionamiller2020.weebly.com/polytheism.html
Many find a deep connection with aspects of archetypal psychology outside of the therapeutic setting, applying them to their own lives and beliefs with great benefit. There is little question of it 'working or not', if they find it satisfying and enriching.
Archetypal Overview
"By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself." He describes five things about the nature of soul as the imaginative possibilities of nature: the soul (1) makes all meaning possible, (2) turns events into experiences, (3) involves a deepening of experience, (4) is communicated in love, and (5) has a special relation with death (Hillman, 1977, p. xvi; Hillman, 1976, pp. 44-47).
“...put it my way, what we are really, and the reality we live, is our psychic reality, which is nothing but...the poetic imagination going on day and night.” --James Hillman, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World Is Getting Worse, p. 62
What is reality, what can we know about it, and how do we attain that knowledge? Archetypal psychology answers Imagination (psyche, soul), Archetypes, and Images. This is a new image of the psyche with deep connections to Neo-Platonism, the Renaissance, and Romanticism.
Mythic archetypes are active and present in our lives and the world today. The term 'soul-making', coined by John Keats is applied by James Hillman referring to a practice through which we slow down and deepen our connectedness to ourselves, others, and the world. It emphasizes being over doing and the present moment over future aspirations.
It embraces and prioritizes woundedness, humanity, and limitations over a metaphysical quest for perfection, transcendence, and transformation. Psychic numbing is denial. In other words, soul-making occurs every time we look more closely, more feelingly at the individuals and ancestors peopling our lives and the ideas, afflictions, and ever-present prospect of death which together give substance and meaning to our hours and days.
Poiesis, as creative act, is the death and re-birth of the soul. We constantly to re-form ourselves with 'soul-making.' Poiesis is integrative affirmation always emerging into form. The naturally therapeutic process evokes the emotions and experiences that give life a deeper meaning.
Polytheistic myths can provide psychological insight. Archetypal psychology is an introduction to polytheism, Greek mythology, the soul-spirit distinction, anima mundi, psychopathology, soul-making, imagination, and therapeutic practice. We cannot escape myth, only live it consciously or unconsciously. The persons of the imagination are real to mythic consciousness.
The Soul & Imagination
Soul is a root metaphor for multiple perspectives: psychological, ethical, political, poetic. To find soul, we search for the images it is made of, through which psyche introduces itself. Soul is a meeting place, or connecting point between the spirit and physical world.
Hillman talks about the way the animus or spirit always appears alongside the anima or soul, and vice versa, whether we like it or not. We have the ascending position which moves consciousness from the world to the transcendental world.
The descending way moves consciousness towards deepening a greater relational connection with other people, nature and the dynamic ground. The anima--as soul, relatedness, immanence, the "thick of things"--always appears together with the transcendent animus. You can't separate them even if you tried.
"As a connecting link, or traditionally third position, between all opposites, the soul differs from the terms which it connects...It is not life that matters, but soul and how life is used to care for soul." (Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, pp. 174-175)
Rumi knew, "The soul has been given its own ears / To hear things that the mind doesn’t understand." Hillman has a special sort of metaphorical, mythic vision that generates universal meaning and insight. It opens “the questions of life to transpersonal and culturally imaginative reflection” (Hillman, 2013, p. 28).
Aldous Huxley said, "What you take in by visionary experience you must give out by love and intelligence in daily life." Soul communicates through a metaphorical and mythical language. Corbin insists we must restore complete integrity to the soul. Working with psychic images is the theoretical base of archetypal psychology.
Imagery evokes a perceptual response -- an aesthetic response, a participatory way of knowing, re-membering, and reconnecting with soul and identity. In the phenomenological aesthetic paradigm, Hillman asserts that images derive autonomy and operate according to their own will, similar to gods.
Mythical images, unseen worlds in this one, are the psyche, an intrinsic and undeniable reality where the divine appears. Spirit is incarnated in the glorious body and the body is spiritualized in the subtle body. Imagination mediates between the world and the divine as an agent that fills the space of soul with its own illuminations and visions.
"Psychological faith begins in the love of images, and it flows mainly through the shapes of persons in reveries, fantasies, reflections, and imaginations. Their increasing vivification gives one an increasing conviction of having, and then of being, and interior reality of deep significance transcending one’s personal life." (Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 50)
The butterfly is the universal symbol for Psyche. Like a butterfly struggling to get out of the chrysalis, each of us is struggling to emerge from the undivided into the individuated. In Greek mythology, Psyche is the deification of the human soul. She was portrayed in ancient mosaics as a goddess with butterfly wings.
Our psyche is reflected, portrayed in the world around us. Soul is at the heart of the world. “Psyche is the mother of all our attempts to understand Nature,” Jung wrote. "Psyche is image" as Jung says. Psyche, according to Hillman, is the spirit that has "afterlife, cosmic issues, idealistic values, hopes, and universal truths.
The Greek word psyche literally means "spirit, breath, life or animating force". A world without soul lacks intimacy, never returns any glance, never looks at us with appeal or with gratitude. We find intimacy in each particular event in a pluralistic cosmos, perceiving faces in the heart.
When we study the gods and goddesses, we are studying psyche itself, the life behind our personalities it uses as masks. As Hillman notes,
"It's only in the stories, our stories that the gods will still show." The gods and goddesses and the dramatic narratives of their lives thus portray the life of the psyche—its way of living (Rossi, 2019).
Psyche's mysterious and fathomless surrounding space is dynamic and alive with amorphous numinous entities. Psychological energy patterns— entanglement, uncertainty, gravitational waves -- pulsate rhythmically with life, cycles of creation, death, and rebirth.
Psychological polytheism is not identical with Neo-paganism. We cannot simply idealize the archetypes as all-knowing parents or ancestors. Any "advice" from them is usually predictable and stereotypical superego or primordial instinct.
Soul happens where spirit is embodied. Archetypes are soul's many autonomous voices, the thoughts that think themselves within us, that arise personified in our dreams, and invisibly inform ordinary life--our creative and destructive urges.
Hillman notes, "soul comes in fantasies, not in meanings." In psychological polytheism, the gods infuse personality, politics, economics, science, aesthetics, metaphysics, and other expressions of culture confirmed at an experiential and symbolic level.
Hillman said, “Aesthetics in this primordial sense involves sensing the things of the world in their particularity and being affected by the many ways things present themselves.”
Our aesthetic response, a psychic sensuality and sensitivity, to phenomena is the source of the immediate apprehension that Hillman describes as 'soul-making,' subjective interrelation. Reflection makes consciousness, but only love makes soul.
It means leaving our solid footing and carrying every question into deeper waters, rather than dragging 'the invisibles' out of the underworld and back into the daylight world. They may 'come up' spontaneously if we have no desire to control the outcome.
The gods remind us of our humanity; they help us tolerate uncertainty. The psychologist is a mythologist, revising life-story narratives or personal mythology. Psychologists are comparative mythologists unraveling the psychological and spiritual wisdom woven into ancient and traditional myths. As mythic researchers, we use Greek myths to study personal identity, incorporating mythologies and their meanings.
A preference for certain gods leaves others unconscious. The innumerable metaphorical possibilities of the soul are respected. Every archetype is a mode of perception. A polytheistic style of consciousness is a more deeply immersed and subjective experience of the world as animated and alive. Animation is the heart of soul tending.
Hillman notes ..."[t]he plurality of archetypal forms reflects the pagan level of things and what might be called a polytheistic psychology." Transformation is psychic movement that awakens the potentials of the immobilized psyche. Healing emerges from dynamic living energies.
"The curative or salvational vision of archetypal psychology focuses upon the soul in the world which is also the soul of the world (anima mundi) [...] The artificial tension between soul and world, private and public, interior and exterior thus disappears when the soul as anima mundi, and its making, is located in the world." (Hillman)
This hybrid science-art form rejects scientific materialism, its mechanical universe, and conventional devaluation of nature. It finds hierarchical structures of power distasteful. Hillman clarifies his approach: "In our metaphysics we declare our fantasies about the physical and its transcendence. A metaphysical statement can be seen as a psychological fancy about the relationship between 'matter and spirit'."
This Metamodern view is deconstructive, aesthetic, poetic, and Romantic. This radical pluralism of a polytheistic metapsychology theorizes about the structure of psychological theorizing itself. Overlapping different identities only empowers all of them. Rilke admonishes us to "go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within..."
Hillman says, “To be sane, we must recognize our beliefs as fictions.” Mystery, as living presence and the movement toward favoring the irrational, becomes 'my story.' Narration is a root metaphor. The metaphor is superseded by the holographic blur of a possibilities of form--form overcome by formlessness--finally free from groping around using inadequate analogies.
Ginette Paris notes, "A myth is a fantasy, a preferred lie, a foundational story, a hypnotic trance, an identity game, a virtual reality, one that can be either inspirational or despairing. It is a story in which I cast myself; it is my inner cinema, the motion picture of my inner reality - one that moves all the time. No diagnosis can fix the myth, no cure can settle it, because our inner life is precisely what, in us, will not lie still." ("How Is Psychology A Mythology?")
Mythical figures are eternal metaphors of the imagination, the autonomous dynamics of psychic reality. Jung suggested myth is a revelation of the divine life in humanity, our unconscious grasp of the history of the world, the wild energies of creation, and our sense of embodiment.
We can bridge the gap between symbols and the world, learn to speak the language and see the sights with clarity. The psychological value and insights of polytheistic myth is a major theorem of archetypal psychology.
Polytheism is labyrinthine. Neopagan religions are usually polytheistic, nature-oriented, non-dogmatic. They facilitate relationship and direct engagement with the Gods and Goddesses. Pagans, poets and artists use mythic characters and tropes to express contemporary metaphors and images found in every dream, drama, ceremony, gesture, and passionate act.
"Humans are made in the images of the gods, and our abnormalities image the original abnormalities of the gods which come before ours, making possible ours. We can only do in time what gods do in eternity. Our infirmities will therefore have to have their ground in primordial infirmity, and their infirmities are enacted in our psychopathologies.” (Hillman, Mythic Figures)
Archetypal psychology moved us into metaphor, from concepts to engagement. Archetypes are universal prototypes. Soul makes fantasy images we embody. Soul-making means to be “in soul,” immersed in both an internal and external process of transmutation, developing the metaphoric quality of image into ontological ground.
Our nature is plural. The human psyche seems to be a collective of selves--a multimind in a multiverse. Independent and autonomous, they relate with one another mostly unknown to the outer awareness.
"there must be something unalterably necessary about images so that psychic reality, which first of all consists in images, cannot be mere afterimages of sense impressions. Images are primordial, archetypal, in themselves ultimate reals, the only direct reality that the psyche experiences. As such they are the shaped presences of necessity.” (Hillman, Mythic Images)
Based on a plurality of perspectives, a plurality of consciousness, a plurality of worlds, this notion means giving breath to many voices. We construct fictional virtual realities as imaginal conversations. There is no central belief system in a pluralistic society. We substitute "story" for Truth, reflecting that sense of movement, change, flow.
Archetypal psychology takes us beyond the conventional systematized cognitive categories. It invites us into the realm of the gods, living presences which shape and inform our behavior, feelings, thoughts, and aspirations.
It reconciles us with necessity, with Ananke, primordial mother of chaos. "To think of our greatest anxiety as an insignificant event, not only in the life of the universe but also in the life of our own soul, is the beginning of wisdom." (Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (426)
Any direct and immediate knowledge can only be acquired through the acknowledgment of the psychic images. Hillman suggests, “You know, people come to therapy really for a blessing. Not so much to fix what's broken, but to get what's broken blessed.” Let the angels touch youe hair and bless you.
Psyche is “a polycentric realm of nonverbal, nonspatial images” (Re-VisioningPsychology, p. 33). Soul is the dimension of psychological experience, much like the body is the seat of sensory and mental perception. Hillman notes, “man was created as an image, in an image and by means of his images” (Egalitarian Typologies versus the Perception of the Unique, p.44).
Soul is revealed in images, depth, genuineness, authenticity, attachment, love, embodiment, and community. In relationships with mythic dominants, articulation of images can be considered soul-making, advocating for the unheard voices of the psychic “many.” Jung thought, "For the alchemist, the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter."
Hillman says, "in soul-making the method is extended beyond the special circumstances of self-reflection, dreaming and active imagination into all aspects of life that generate imaginative sparks of a certain magnitude." Marion Woodman suggests, "Without the true masculine spirit and the true feminine love within, no inner life exists…. To be free is to break the stone images and allow life and love to flow.” (Addiction to Perfection)
Images are the self-referential phenomenon of psychic life; “image is psyche,” (CW 13, para. 75) “in the poetic sense, considering images to be the basic givens of psychic life, self-originating, inventive, spontaneous, complete, and organized in archetypal patterns...[they] are both raw materials and finished products of psyche” (Re-Visioning Psychology, p.xvii).
There is no predetermined code of meanings or concepts for the unlimited field of imaginative possibilities. Images are not signs, representations, symbols or allegories. The experience of the image and through the experience triggered by it is soul-making.
The absolute primacy of image allows Hillman to shift Jung’s emphasis from the archetype per se to the archetypal image. While he acknowledges that archetypes are the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, we can experience only images arranging themselves in these archetypal patterns, which we imagine as underlying universal principles, or envision in personified forms as gods. (ARAS)
An 'antidote to literalism,' psychological experience requires participation to registered the event as experientially meaningful. Psychical states and psychological experience, expressed through the mind, the body, or the private psychoid world, are analogous to the distinction between physical objects and sense data.
Images are the soul’s “native language.” Soul-tending is giving attention to the soul through each autonomous image in its unique specificity: “the soul is precisely the eachness of everywhere at any instant in anything in its display as a phenomenon. And only in this eachness does soul exist and cosmos show” (“Cosmology for the Soul”30).
"The unconscious is the matrix of all metaphysical statements, of all mythology, of all philosophy, and of all expressions of life that are based on psychological premises." -C. G. Jung, CW 11, Psychology and Religion
"In our metaphysics we declare our fantasies about the physical and its transcendence. A metaphysical statement can be seen as a psychological fancy about the relationship between 'matter and spirit'. [...] The archetypal neuros is collective and affects all with the metaphysical affliction." --James Hillman, Senex and Puer
"By providing a divine background of personages and powers for each complex, it [a polytheistic psychology] would aim less at gathering them into a unity and more at integrating each fragment according to its own principle, giving each God [and Goddess] its due over that proportion of consciousness, that symptom, complex, fantasy which calls for an archetypal background. It would accept the multiplicity of voices… without insisting upon unifying them into one figure, and accept too the dissociation process into diversity as equal in value to the coagulation process into unity. The pagan Gods and Goddesses would be restored to the psychological domain." (Hillman, 1981, p.197)
When we talk about the appearance of archetypes as people in dreams or in imaginative spaces, then the ~persons~ of archetypes emerge, the phantasmagoria, the mythical figures, the daimones, and gods. When discussed in terms of symptoms and affect, they are discussed as the styles of suffering (paranoid, borderline, phobic). When discussed as ideas, they express the intellectual psyche. That is, they express themselves as ideas important to soul. “ A God is a manner of existence, an attitude toward existence, and a set of ideas.” (Hillman, Re-Visioning, 103)
"The horizon of the psyche these days is shrunk to the personal, and the new psychology of humanism fosters the little self-important man at the great sea’s edge, turning to himself to ask how he feels today, filling in his questionnaire, counting his personal inventory. He has abandoned intellect and interpreted his imagination in order to become with his “gut experiences” and “emotional problems”; his soul has become equated with these. His fantasy of redemption has shrunk to “ways of coping”; his stubborn pathology, that via regia to the soul’s depths, is cast forth in Janovian screams like swine before Perls, disclosed in a closed Gestalt of group closeness, or dropped in an abyss of regression during the clamber up to Maslovian peaks. Feeling is all. Discover your feelings; trust your feelings. The human heart is the way to soul and what psychology is all about." (Hillman, Revisioning, 181)
"Myths do not tell us how. They simply give the invisible background that starts us imagining, questioning, going deeper. The very act of questioning is a step away from practical life, deviating from the highroad of continuity, seeing it from another perspective. . .when we begin to mythologize our plain lives they gain another dimension. We are more distanced because we are more richly involved." (Hillman, 1975, 158)
"In our metaphysics we declare our fantasies about the physical and its transcendence. A metaphysical statement can be seen as a psychological fancy about the relationship between 'matter and spirit'. [...] The archetypal neuros is collective and affects all with the metaphysical affliction." --James Hillman, Senex and Puer
"By providing a divine background of personages and powers for each complex, it [a polytheistic psychology] would aim less at gathering them into a unity and more at integrating each fragment according to its own principle, giving each God [and Goddess] its due over that proportion of consciousness, that symptom, complex, fantasy which calls for an archetypal background. It would accept the multiplicity of voices… without insisting upon unifying them into one figure, and accept too the dissociation process into diversity as equal in value to the coagulation process into unity. The pagan Gods and Goddesses would be restored to the psychological domain." (Hillman, 1981, p.197)
When we talk about the appearance of archetypes as people in dreams or in imaginative spaces, then the ~persons~ of archetypes emerge, the phantasmagoria, the mythical figures, the daimones, and gods. When discussed in terms of symptoms and affect, they are discussed as the styles of suffering (paranoid, borderline, phobic). When discussed as ideas, they express the intellectual psyche. That is, they express themselves as ideas important to soul. “ A God is a manner of existence, an attitude toward existence, and a set of ideas.” (Hillman, Re-Visioning, 103)
"The horizon of the psyche these days is shrunk to the personal, and the new psychology of humanism fosters the little self-important man at the great sea’s edge, turning to himself to ask how he feels today, filling in his questionnaire, counting his personal inventory. He has abandoned intellect and interpreted his imagination in order to become with his “gut experiences” and “emotional problems”; his soul has become equated with these. His fantasy of redemption has shrunk to “ways of coping”; his stubborn pathology, that via regia to the soul’s depths, is cast forth in Janovian screams like swine before Perls, disclosed in a closed Gestalt of group closeness, or dropped in an abyss of regression during the clamber up to Maslovian peaks. Feeling is all. Discover your feelings; trust your feelings. The human heart is the way to soul and what psychology is all about." (Hillman, Revisioning, 181)
"Myths do not tell us how. They simply give the invisible background that starts us imagining, questioning, going deeper. The very act of questioning is a step away from practical life, deviating from the highroad of continuity, seeing it from another perspective. . .when we begin to mythologize our plain lives they gain another dimension. We are more distanced because we are more richly involved." (Hillman, 1975, 158)