Archetypal Imagination PDF

^(yhe <B^lrchetypal
imagination
••
iBBB i
JAME S HOLLI S
Foreword by David H. Rosen
^he (B^vchet^al imagination
NUMBE R EIGH T
Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology

David H. Rosen, General Editor
imagination
JAME S HOLLI S
Foreword by David H. Rosen
TEXA S A& M UNIVERSIT Y PRES S
College Station
Copyright © 200 0
by James Holli s
Manufactured in
the United States of America
A l l rights reserved
Fourth printing, 2008
The paper used in this book

meets the minimu m requirements
of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, Z39.48-1984. Binding materials have been
chosen for durability.
For a complete list of books in print in this series, see the back of the book.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hollis , James, 1940-
The archetypal imagination / James Holli s ; foreword by David H . Rosen. —

1st ed. p. cm. — (Carolyn and Ernest Fay series in analytical psychology; no.
8)
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISB N 0-89096-932-9 (cloth : alk.

paper);
ISB N 13: 978-1-58544-268-3 (pbk.)

ISB N 10:1-58544-268-2 (pbk.)
1. Archetype (Psychology) 2 . Imagination 3. Jungian psychology. 4.
Psychoanalysis. I. Title. II. Series.
BF175.5.A72H6 5 200 0
153-3—dc2i 99-057388 C IP
NUMBE R EIGH T
Carolyn and
Ernest Fay
Series in
Analytical
Psychology
David H. Rosen,
General Editor
The Carolyn and Ernest Fay edited book series, based initially on the
annual Fay Lecture Series in Analytical Psychology, was established to
further the ideas of C. G. Jung among students, faculty, therapists, and
other citizens and to enhance scholarly activities related to analytical
psychology. The Book Series and Lecture Series address topics of im
portance to the individual and to society. Both series were generously
endowed by Carolyn Grant Fay, the founding president of the C. G. Jung
Educational Center in Houston, Texas. The series are in part a memorial to
her late husband, Ernest Bel Fay. Carolyn Fay has planted a Jungian tree
carrying both her name and that of her late husband, which will bear
fruitful ideas and stimulate creative works from this time forward. Texas
A& M University and all those who come in con
tact with the growing Fay Jungian tree are extremely grateful to Carolyn
Grant Fay for what she has done. The holder of the McMillan Profes sorship
in Analytical Psychology at Texas A& M functions as the gen eral editor of
the Fay Book Series.
Or
Contents
List of Illustrations / ix
Foreword by David H. Rosen / x i
Acknowledgments / xv
Introduction / 3
Archetypal
Imaginings: The Golden String Which
Leads to Heavens Gate
Chapter 1/1 3
Religious Imaginings: Divine Morphologies
Chapter 2/3 5
Literary Imaginings: Envisioned Logos
Chapter 3 / 59
Incarnational Imaginings: The Painters Eye on Eternity
Chapter 4/9 9
Therapeutic Imaginings: Psychopathology and Soul
Afterword / 119
Re-Imagining the Soul
Notes / 125
Bibliography / 131
Index / 135
lustrations
Paintings by Nancy Witt Opening I 66

Inside I 70
Capron I 72
Sue s Fan I 77
Chalice I 81
Windows I 82
Second Opening I 85 Rhyton I 87
Glass Darkly I 89 Painting (V) I 91 Bailey Won I 93
Cicatrice I 95
Ring of Fire I 97
"ovenwS
Imagination is more important than information.

—Albert Einstein
This book on archetypal imagination is critically needed

medicine in this world where information engulfs us. It also
serves as a dose of imaginative soul to help immunize us
against the overwhelming ex pansion of ego-based
information technology. In addition to writing this book,
James Hollis has done us a great service by emphasizing in
it the universal and ancient roots of imagination, which
represent a kind of natural health food available to us, at all
times, from within. Hollis challenges us to follow Anthony
Storr's prescription from Solitude: A Return to the
Se//because it fuels the creative imagination and its spiri
tual, artistic, and therapeutic manifestations. As Joan
1
Chodorow has written, "Jung's analytic method is based

upon the [innate] healing function of the imagination." 2
Jung's concept of active imagination (the same thing as

creative imagination) requires a meditative state in which
the ego is relaxed. This state of reverie allows access to the
vast inner world of ancient, but living, symbols. Once in this
state, a person can utilize wu wei (the Taoist concept of
"creative quietude") in order to begin the process of letting
things happen in the psyche, which culmi nates in a creative
product or work of art. 3
Imagination is the eye of the soul.

—Joseph Joubert
Being alone (all One) with nature is intricately tied to

human imagi nation and the divine, which is the focus of
chapter 1, "Religious Imaginings." Hollis amplifies Jung's
central archetype of the Self—the
numinous Mystery—which is often experienced as inner or
outer light in the abyss of darkness. The archetypal and
instinctual soul image is at the core of all religious
experiences that transform a life of neurotic suffering into
one of hope and meaning. Over and over Hollis reveals how
healing and wisdom (that is, spiritual knowledge) occur, and
he shows how these are related to symbols of
transformation and creative, active imagination.
An uncommon degree of imagination

constitutes poetical genius.
—Dugald Stewart
In chapter 2, "Literary Imaginings," Hollis utilizes two of

Rainer Maria Rilke's poems from the Duino Elegies to
illustrate how words create numinous images that provide
divine inspiration and celebrate the awesome mystery of
life, love, and death. Rilke writes creatively about
all things ordinary and extraordinary. Hollis underscores
Rilke's heal ing message to "praise this world to the angel."
Rilke knew that the spiritual realm alone is the source of
ultimate meaning, and his dis covery of that truth lives on
through his poetry.
Everything you can imagine is real.

—Pablo Picasso
In chapter 3, "Incarnational Imaginings," Hollis leads us to

an under standing of the painter's view of eternity. Hollis
singles out Nancy Witt, a contemporary artist whose
brilliant and imaginative work depicts a visionary world.
Through Hollis's descriptions, we view the active
imagination process of a gifted artist. It is clear that Witt
taps into the collective unconscious and our common
spiritual heritage. We see and learn about her growth and
development, and we are stimulated to develop pictures of
our own lives and myths and of what lies beyond our
coming deaths.
( XII ) FOREWOR D
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are
of imagination all compact.
—William Shakespeare
Shakespeare knew, as did Plato, that love and poetry are

kinds of mad ness all tied to soulful imagination. It follows
that psychotherapy and soul are "Therapeutic Imaginings,"
the subject of Hollis's fourth chap ter. One of Jung's greatest
gifts was to treasure the creative aspects of mental illness.
As Jung did, Hollis emphasizes that the creative spark of
soul, in the troubled imagination of the psychologically and
psychi atrically disturbed, contains healing qualities leading
to recovery and renewal of purpose and meaning. As Hollis
carefully outlines, the soul has left modern psychology and
psychiatry, and it must be retrieved and rekindled before
individual and collective healing can occur. Much of chapter
4 concerns the creative, soulful, and healing doctor-patient
relationship. The wounded healer knows how to engage the
patient's problem, honor sacred dreams, and activate
imagination and creativ ity, which all help the wounded
patient heal. An encouraging develop ment in psychology
and psychiatry is evident by the recent focus on joy,
inspiration, and hope and caring for the psyche or soul and
its unique, creative, and evolutionary nature. 4
Alice Walker has said:
Our shame is deep. For shame is the result of soul injury.

Mirrors, however, are sacred, not only because they permit
us to witness the body we are fortunate this time around to
be in, but because they permit us to ascertain the condition
of the eternal that rests behind the body, the soul. As an
ancient Japanese proverb states: when the mirror is dim,
the soul is not pure.
Art is the mirror, perhaps the only one, in which we can see
our true collective face. We must honor its sacred function.
We must let art help us. 5
FOREWOR D (xiii )
In response to Walker's profoundly true reflection of our
condition, Hollis shows us that the archetypal imagination
is the way to spiritual re-awakening, creative products (that
is, art), and soulful healing. This book is a lovely and timely
gift.
David H . Rosen
College Station, Texas
( XIV ) FOREWOR D
ments
I was asked to
deliver the Fay
Lectures at
Texas A& M
University long
before the
prospect of
living in Texas
ever occurred
to me. Since
mov ing to
Texas in 1998
and becoming
director of the
C. G. Jung
Educa tional
Center of
Houston, I have
gained David
Rosen and
Carolyn Grant
Fay as friends
and colleagues.
Carolyn's vision
and generosity
in creat ing and
sustaining the
beautiful Jung
Center of
Houston for over four decades, and the Fay Lecture and
Book Series in Analytical Psychol ogy, have been wondrous
gifts of Jung to several generations past and many more to
come. To both I am grateful for the invitation to speak at
the distinguished Fay Lectures, as I have enormous respect
for those who have spoken before me.
This book is dedicated to Jill, to our children, Taryn and
Timothy, Jonah and Seah, our grandchildren Rachel and
Nicholas, and to the people of the Jung Educational Center
of Houston with whom I am privileged to work. I also wish
to thank artist Nancy Witt for allowing me to discuss her
work, reproduced here in photographs courtesy of
Katherine Wetzel. And may I also thank Maureen Creamer
Bemko for her deft editing. Any book, even one written by a
solitary, is the work of many.
^he (j^zcketifpal imagination
INTRODUCTIO N
The Golden String Which Leads to Heaven's Gate

What we wish most to know, most desire, remains
unknowable and lies beyond our grasp. Each of the chapters
that follow begins with this same sentence, a reminder of
the central dilemma of our condition—the Sehnsuchtfiir
Ewigekeit or yearning for eternity, as the Romantics de fined
it—and our existential limitations, finitude, and impotence
be fore the immensity of the cosmos. Our endeavor here will
be heuristic. It will not solve any problem, for the human
dilemma is insoluble, but it may allow us to appreciate more
deeply the yearning which we em body, and the resources
which we have employed to mediate the un fathomable
abyss between longing and connection. In a letter the nine
teenth-century novelist Gustave Flaubert succinctly
expressed this para dox: "Human speech is like a cracked
kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to,
while we long to make music that would melt the stars."
Such images as cracked kettles and dancing bears hardly
ennoble humans, but the juxtaposition with the distant
longing, which the stars suggest, certainly creates an
affective bridge across that abyss which we all experience.
Or we think of Thomas Nashe, in his effort to conjure with
the inexplicable horrors of a sixteenth-century outbreak of
the Black Death in his "A Litany in Time of Plague."
Brightness falls from the air.

Queens have died, young and fair.
Dust hath closed Helen's eye. 1
It is not so much that death shocks or surprises us, Nashe suggests, but
that there are, finally, no exceptions, no exemptions. As Job found to his
dismay, we have no signed contract with the Party of the First Part, and all
things fall. Brightness itself falls. Even queens, young and comely, are no
exception. We are reminded by the death of Britain's Princess Diana that
the queenly may die as easily in a squalid Parisian tunnel as in state. But
the movement of the images from the abstract brightness to the more
particular queens to the individual Helen reminds us of the equality of
mortality, the democracy of dust. Here again, the utilization of imaginative
figures helps us cross the bridge from the knowable world to the
unknowable, just as dreams help us intimate a relationship with that
which, categorically, we can never know: the presence and inten
tion of the unconscious.
The thoughts now transformed into the chapters of this book were
influenced by the metaphors and inquiring spirits of two imaginative
sensibilities: Jung and Blake. Both were intuitives with a keen eye for the
suggestive detail, the reading of the surface to intimate the implicit
subtext or the layers of meaning which are embodied through the image
but which are indiscernible to the sensate eye. Just as any good therapist
is obliged to read the surface of presentations and discern the hidden
motives, the wounded permutations of eros, and the implicit strate
gies of healing, so the spiritually sensitive person remembers, in the words
of the Surrealist poet Paul Eluard, "There is another world, and it is this
one."
Humankind has developed resources to intimate the unfathomable, to
help us reach for the hem of the gods and goddesses, and to stand in the
presence of infinite values. We call these resources metaphor (some thing
that will "carry over" from one thing to another) and symbol (something
that will "project toward" convergence). With metaphor and symbol, we
are provisionally able to approximate, to apprehend, to appreciate that
which lies beyond our powers to understand or to control. Unfortunately,
our species is prone to fall in love with its own creations and to reify them,
converting them from intimations to con cepts. By encapsulating the
mystery, we lose it entirely. This is the ter rible temptation of literalist
fundamentalism of all kinds. When the temptation triumphs, the images
that arise out of primal experience,
( 4 ) INTRODUCTIO N
phenomenological in character, are subordinated to the needs of con
sciousness and thus become artifacts of ego rather than intimations of
eternity. Reifying Jung's rich metaphoric mosaic, which tracks the
mysterious movement of energies, similarly reduces such metaphors as
anima or shadow or complex to metaphysical concepts or the closed
systems of allegories. Whatever the gods and goddesses are, or what ever
the psyche intends through our dreams, is surely driven from those
images when we encapsulate them in concepts. We then lose the ten sion
of ambiguity that would allow images and dreams to suggest, in timate,
and point beyond themselves toward the precincts of mystery.
Perhaps life is inherently meaningless, the raw flux of molecules
forming, interacting, dissolving, and forming anew elsewhere. We have to
be intellectually honest and admit this possibility and restrain the ego's
nervous protest. Yet we find it difficult if not impossible to be
lieve that such a purposeless concatenation of subatomic particles could
have written the Ninth Symphony or the Declaration of Independence, or
even built the airplanes that destroyed a small town, thus inspiring
Picasso's cri de coeur, Guernica. But we do not have to answer this ques
tion here, or now, or ever; we can abide the tension of ambiguity in
respectful service to mystery. Jung's concept of the archetype is an
eminently useful tool for us to employ in service of meaning while still
respecting the ambiguous character of the cosmos.
The concept of the archetype has attained such celebrity as to suffer the
worst of two extremes—to be misinterpreted by otherwise intelli gent
persons, and to become a simplistic, popular term found at least monthly
in such venues as Time magazine. The former have accused Jung of
Lamarckism, a theory of organic evolution suggesting that what is learned
in one generation is biologically transmitted to the next. Rather, Jung
2
speaks of the archetype as a formative process, more prop erly understood

as a verb than a noun. The psyche has an apparent desire to render a raw
flux of atoms intelligible and meaningful by sorting them into patterns.
These patterns themselves form patterns, that is, arche types create primal
forms which are then filled with the contents unique to a particular
culture, a particular artist, or a particular dreamer.
O n the other hand, the popularization of the term archetype has so
reduced its radical significance that at best the word means something
ARCHETYPA L IMAGINING S (5)

important, universal, or moving. The idea of the archetype deserves better
than this vague definition. Indeed, our capacity for symbol mak ing
differentiates us from all other natural species and makes our spiri tuality
possible. It is our imaginal capacity (our ability to form images which
carry energy) that constructs the requisite bridges to those infi nite worlds
which otherwise lie beyond our rational and emotional capacities.
Without the archetypal imagination, we would have neither culture nor
spirituality, and our condition would never have tran scended brutish
rutting in the dust en route to becoming dust itself.
We owe thanks to the Romantics for reminding us of the power of
imagination, the power to create dynamic images (Einbildungskraft). In his
Biographia Literaria, Samuel Taylor Coleridge differentiates "pri mary
imagination," "secondary imagination," and "fancy." The last is what today
we would call taste or, at best, aesthetics: the arrangement of form and
color in pleasing proportions. But primary imagination, Coleridge
suggests, was incarnated in Hebraic mythopoesis with Yah weh's primal "I
A m that I Am." That is, such metaphor symbolizes the primordial
constitutive act, the summoning up of something out of nothing, as in the
Genesis announcement, "and God said it was good." For the Hebrew
sensibility, then, the logos, or act of speech, symboli cally represented the
mystery of creation, especially the creatio ex nihilo, for to our limited
human condition, nothing exists until we summon it to consciousness.
Theretofore, creation may have existed indepen dently, but it was beyond
the sphere of human awareness and thus lay in the realm of non-being.
What Coleridge called the secondary imagination was what Jung means
by the archetypal power, the capacity to echo, perhaps replicate, the
original creatio through the generative power of an image. This generative
power redeems image from the vagaries of human fancy, the velleities or
inclinations of fashion, idiosyncrasy, and complex, and resonates with the
power of divine creativity. As the poet Rilke claims, all of creation itself
awaits this naming power to bring it into being.
Other so-called Romantics sought to redeem the worth of imagi nation
from the Aufkldrung where John Locke defined imagination as "decaying
sense." According to Locke, the power to summon up the
( 6 ) INTRODUCTIO N
image of a tree depended upon the fading sensate inscriptions of past
experience on the tabula rasa of the mind. However, for Goethe,
Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and such thinkers as Kant and Schleier
macher, the imagination was the door to divinity. No one spoke more
eloquently about the divine power of the imagination than the engraver
William Blake. In a letter written in 1799 he noted, "to the eyes of the man
of imagination Nature is imagination itself. As a man is so he sees . . . to
me this world is all one continued vision." For Blake and the Romantics,
3
imagination is our highest faculty, not our reason, which is delimited by its
own structures. Kant clearly proved that point in A Critique of Pure
Reason, and Blake wittily remarked upon reason's lim its in his lines "May
God us keep / from single vision and Newton's sleep." (While Blake 4
admired the imaginative power of Newton and his dynamic metaphor for
the cosmos, he despised the mechanistic mentality which it had begotten
in Newton's successors, much as we today may decry the banishment of
psyche from the practice of most psychology.) It is the archetypal
imagination which, through the agen
cies of symbol and metaphor and in its constitutive power of imaging, not
only creates the world and renders it meaningful but may also be a
paradigm of the work of divinity. On another occasion Blake wrote with
stunning emphasis: "The Eternal Body of Man is The Imagination / God
himself that is The Divine Body .. . In Eternity All is Vision." 5
Huston Smith, a historian of religion, once asked me this question:

Does the archetype originate in the human psyche alone or does it have a
function transcendent to individual experience? While we cannot know
6
the answer to that question definitively, I surmise that the ar

chetypal function (remember archetype as verb) does both. It is the
means by which the individual brings pattern and process to chaos, and it
is the means by which the individual participates in those ener gies of the
cosmos of which we are always a part. The archetypal imagi nation is, as
Wordsworth defined it in "Tintern Abbey,"
a motion and a spirit, that impels

all thinking things, all objects of all thought,
and rolls through all things.
ARCHETYPA L IMAGINING S
(7)
Our
intuition of
this power
fits what
Wordsworth described as
a sense sublime
of something far more deeply interfused,
whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.
7
A practical manifestation of this process of archetypal imagining and a

practical illustration of where our confusions arise can be seen in analysis.
I once worked with a Western physician who also practiced Eastern
healing arts, both in private practice and at a major East Coast hospi tal. He
knew Western surgery, pharmacology, nosology and diagnosis, emergency
procedures, and family practice well. But out of his own curiosity and
desire for a more balanced picture, he had undertaken formal study and
certification in herbology, Shiatsu, and acupuncture.
He felt that these two approaches to healing, while employing differ ent
root metaphors, were compatible and probably even more effica cious
when combined. One system, employing mostly surgery and
pharmacology, was allopathic, that is, invasive and counterposing cer tain
effects with opposing, more powerful effects. The other was more
homeopathic, operating from the view that health is the natural state and
that the restoration of the ordinary flow of energy, called ki, shi, or chi,
returned the person to that homeostasis we call health. While the
physician believed that both Western and Eastern medicine were help ful,
together they surely were even more powerful in activating the mystery of
healing. In this scenario, the physician was not the cause of healing but
rather the midwife of the organism's own intention.
But the physician faced continuing opposition from his frustrated
medical colleagues. They not only demanded empirical data but also
resisted the metaphors implicit in an alternative healing practice. While he
was no stranger to, nor opponent of, standard research methods, he knew
that what he had observed in his practice bespoke the efficacy of those
Eastern healing traditions of several millennia. What he was con
fronting is common: the limited acceptance of the archetypal imagi nation
and the anxiety with which the familiar picture is defended. As director of
the C. G. Jung Educational Center of Houston, I have
( 8 ) INTRODUCTIO N
had numerous opportunities to develop and find funding
for programs that use the expressive arts to help ordinary
individuals attain greater personal growth and
development. These programs reach out to spe cial
populations, such as the homeless, the chronically or
terminally ill, or disadvantaged children. Studies at Baylor
College of Medicine have indicated that when children are
traumatized, critical pathways of the brain are arrested,
leading to intellectual and emotional im pairment.
A growing body of evidence suggests that the expressive
arts seem to reactivate those portions of the brain and
reinstitute growth. More over, a study out of Stanford
University indicated that the expressive arts are more
efficacious than other interventions, be they after-school
programs, sports, community projects, or medication. In
working with an oncological facility, I learned that
expressive arts restore some au tonomy to an individual who
feels disempowered by a catastrophic ill ness. Patients who
engaged in artistic expression generally have greater
tolerance of chemotherapy and other treatment modalities.
Expressive arts may prolong life and palliate pain, but they
also undoubtedly en hance spiritual well-being in the face
of death. (Here again, the direc tor of the program felt
obliged to assemble hard data to justify these observed
results to colleagues, so wedded were they to the common
allopathic oncology treatments whose operative metaphors
are grossly called "slash, burn, and poison.")
The point about the expressive and healing arts is not that
they rep resent an exciting frontier for exploration, though
they do. Rather, both Eastern healing models and the
expressive arts are different ways of imagining. Why would
sticking pins in someone ease a chronic condi tion
elsewhere in the body? Why would painting or body
movement restore portions of the brain's work? Why would
imaging, sand tray, or other creative activities assist in the
tolerance of institutionalized forms of treatment?
As suggested before, perhaps life is meaningless, but we are
mean ing-seeking creatures who are driven to understand
it. Failing that, we attempt to form some meaningful
relationship to life. We learn from archetypal psychology,
from the core of primal religious experiences, from
quantum physics, and from the artist's eye that all is energy.
Matter
ARCHETYPA L IMAGINING S (9 )
is a dynamic, temporary arrangement of energy. Apparently,
a religious symbol or a prayer, a work of art, or an
expressive practice can so act on our psyche as to move that
energy when it has been blocked, dead ened, or split off.
The splitting of matter and spirit, which were last held
together by the medieval alchemists, must now be knit
together, and thoughtful theologians, imaginative
physicists, and pragmatic physicians know that. The split
between religion and science has been bigoted on both
sides, ignorant, and has blocked the development of new
healing modalities. The one-sidedness of organizing
metaphors of East and West led one to preeminence in
spirituality at the diminishment of the study of na ture, and
the other to prominence in the manipulation of the tangible
world at the cost of soul. A dematerialized spirituality leads
to the ne
glect of legitimate social issues, and the de-souling of nature
leads to a bland, banal, and bankrupt superficiality.
But what is real, what is common to both sides of these
dichoto mies is not ideology but energy. All of them are
energy systems. To be more specific, all of them are
systematized images of energy. It does not matter whether
the image is religious in character, purporting to embody
the encounter with a transcendent reality, or material in
char acter, purporting to describe the mystery of nature in
incarnational flux. Each image presents itself to
consciousness through what the philoso pher Hans
Vaihinger called a "useful fiction," an image whose purpose
is to point beyond itself toward the mystery. As the mystery
is by defi nition that which we cannot know, lest it no longer
be the Mystery, our images are tools, not ends in
themselves.
Underneath these cultural splits, the archetypal imagination
seeks, through affectively charged images, to connect us to
the flow of energy that is the heart and hum of the cosmos.
With such images we have provisional access to the
Mystery. Without them, we would remain locked forever
within our bestial beginnings. Surely only fools and lit
eralists would confuse the bridge toward the other shore
with the shore itself, or the arrow with the target, or the
desire with the object of desire. Though we begin and end
with the limits of our condition, an in expressible hope, a
yearning for connection, a desire for meaning, and a
movement of energy toward healing drives us forward.
Apparently,
( 10 ) INTRODUCTIO N
what is real and omnipresent is energy; what allows us to
stand in re lationship to that mystery is image; and what
generates the bridge is an autonomous part of our own
nature, the archetypal imagination. We are never more
profoundly human than when we express our yearn ing, nor
closer to the divine than when we imagine. This linkage
with the infinite has of course been the intent of the great
mythologies and religions, the healing creative and
expressive arts, and the dreams we dream each night.
This inexplicable linkage was well known to the visionaries,
the art ists, and the prophets. We too are obliged to wrestle
anew with the paradox that, while our condition remains
fragile and sometimes ter rible, we are nonetheless afforded
a means by which to participate in the deepest mysteries of
which we are a part and with which we long to connect.
Those who have tracked the history of Western thought
from Plato through Newton through Hume and Kant have
concluded that we can only know the answer to those
questions which our mind is capable of asking. Our
sciences are self-limiting imaginal systems, even when they
are open-ended. The matters we know conform to matters
which we can know, that is, which are within the confines of
our capacities to know. Our sciences ask only the questions
we are capable of knowing. When, however, we are visited
by images which come from another place, from mysterious
origin, we are opened to something larger than heretofore
possible.
Consciousness is transformed by the encounter with
mystery as invested in images theretofore foreign to it. In
the world of contempo rary deconstructionism, we believe
that all knowledge is interpretation and all interpretation is
subjective, prejudiced by unconscious deter minants such
class, gender, and Zeitgeist, and that no interpretation is
final or authoritative. Thus, when the cosmos reveals itself
to us, it is by way of the image foreign to consciousness.
And it is through this encounter with the numinous that
the power of the archetypal imagi nation makes growth
possible.
Many years ago, long before I was a therapist, I played a role
in the dream of a friend who was going through a terrible
life crisis, not the least of which included the death of his
child. In the dream I had placed
ARCHETYPA L IMAGINING S ( H )
a strip of masking tape on the end of his nose. He knew
that I had not done this bizarre act as a joke or to make
light of his Jobean dilemma. When we talked over the
dream and focused on what Jung called the "obscure
symbol," I spontaneously said, "Tom, what you are looking
for is as near as the end of your nose." He had an immediate
reaction— enlightenment—because his course was clear,
albeit painful. He knew what he had to do.
Despite what we know to be the infinity of our yearning and
the limits of our powers, we have been provided a means of
communica tion with the mysteries. This power is as near as
the end of one's nose. As Blake once expressed it:
I give you the end of a golden string,

Only wind it into a hall:
It will lead you in at Heavens gate,
Built in ferusalem's wall*
INTRODUCTIO N
(12 )
CHAPTE R 1
Divine Morphologies
// horses... had hands, or were able to draw with their
hands and do the work that man can do, horses would
draw the forms of gods like horses.
—Xenophanes

unknowable and lies beyond our grasp.
Houston poet Edward Hirsch's lines, "Stars are the white
tears of nothingness. / Nothingness grieves over the
disintegrating gods" stir in us a sense of wistfulness, pathos,
longing and loss, even though they are rationally
inexplicable. The personification of the stars, the evo
1
cation of "white tears," the grieving over lost certainties—all

intimate the inexplicable, which is the chief service of
symbol and metaphor. Compare the honesty of this feeling
state, and the respect for the mys tery which these lines
portray, with the maudlin, infantilizing, and hybristic
utterances of the televangelists. Hirsch honestly reflects the
modern dilemma of living between myths, while the
purveyors of one line theologies uphold the notion of the
patriarchal parent. His lines
are part cri de coeur, part protest, and part expression of
radical faith in the immensity which lies both within and
outside us. His is the hon esty of Robert Frost, who
observed,
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much
nearer home
To
scare myself with my own desert places.2
Frost's evocation of images which summon affect and point beyond their
conceptual husk toward the precincts of mystery testifies to the sincerity
of the soul's intent. His condition is ours, and it reminds one of a
comment made by the character Janie in a novel by Zora Neale Hurston.
Janie said that there are two things all people have to do in their lives:
"They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about living for
themselves." 3
The core condition of our time has been manifest as a collective spiri
tual wound, one perhaps as traumatic as an amputation. (The theme of
personal pathology or private wounding is discussed in chapter 4.) Jung
noted that psychology was the last of the so-called social sciences to be
invented because the insights which it seeks were previously in the do
main of tribal mythologies and institutionalized religions. When moderns
fell off the roof of the medieval cathedral, Jung wrote, they fell into the
abyss of the Self. Affective linkage to the cosmos, nature, and the
4
community was once available via tribal creation stories, heroic leg ends,
and transformative rituals. With the loss of those connective rites and
mythic images, the problem of identity and the task of cosmic loca tion, or
spiritual grounding, becomes an individual dilemma.
When the gods left Olympus, Jung suggested, they went into the
unconscious and reign now in the solar plexus of the individual, or are
projected into the world via the sundry sociopathies of a fragmented
civilization. Going back to Hirsch's lines, we see that they are ellipti
5
cal, as much modernist art is, because the mythic ground has shifted from
intimate relationship with nature, from stable social fabric, and from
certainty of belief. Hirsch's metaphors, like T. S. Eliot's "this is the broken
jaw of our lost kingdoms," communicate through their very "dis-location."
6
In this existential chasm depth psychology necessarily finds its work, for
spiritual dislocation is the chief wound which lies beneath the other
wounds we treat with work, drugs, ideologies, or desperate love.
In his memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung offers a perspec
tive which is very helpful to us:
(14) ARCHETYPA L IMAGINATIO N

The need for mythic statements is satisfied when we frame
a view of the world which adequately explains the meaning
of human existence in the cosmos, a view which springs
from our psychic wholeness, from the cooperation between
the conscious and the un
conscious. Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is
therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great
many things endur able—perhaps everything. No science
will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of
any science. For it is not that "God" is a myth, but that myth
is the revelation of a divine life in man.
7
This paragraph is very rich and will reward us upon further

consi deration.
First, Jung suggests, our deepest need is for a sense of
spiritual, or psychic locus, by which he means a sense of
belonging to a super ordinate reality, a perspective on one's
place in the larger scheme of things, a confirmation of one's
role, task, and purpose in striding this planet. When Jung
visited the pueblo in Taos, he learned from Ochwiay Biano,
Chief Mountain Lakes, that his people, like the Elongyi tribe
of Kenya, rose in the morning and spit in their palms,
thereby presenting their soul-stuff to the sun to welcome it
in an expression of sympa thetic magic. Jung marveled that
the people of the pueblo knew why they were here. What
seems naive to the traveler offers most what that restless
traveler is seeking—a reason for being here.
Going beyond the fact of our desire to connect with the
cosmos, Jung argues that the desire itself rises from our
psychic wholeness. We are all the carriers of that energy
which fires the cosmos, what Dante called "The love that
moves the sun and the other stars." Or, as the ancient
8
smaragdine tablet(which explained the secret of the

cosmos) of Hermes Trismegistus (also known as Thoth, the
Egyptian god who invented writing) had it, "Things above
are copies of things below. Things below are copies of
things above." Thus, as carriers of the same energy which
animates the cosmos, we employ the archetypal imagi
nation as the power of constitutive ordering which makes
meaning possible. This "transcendent function," as Jung
called it, not only links us with ourselves, bridging the
conscious world with the unconscious through the venues
of somatic symptom, affect, vision, and dream
RELIGIOU S IMAGINING S
(15)
image, but also links us to superordinate reality through the symbolic
powers. 9
The loss of symbolic connection to self or cosmos, Jung suggests in the

excerpted paragraph, is the chief source of our illness. As he so of ten
asserted, neurosis is suffering without meaning and the flight from
authentic being. The loss of tribal symbols, and the linkage with the
10
transcendent which they provided, obliged the meaning task to invert as

personal neurosis.
The recovery of meaning not only relocates a person in a larger or der
of things but also supports a sense of personal identity and directs
energies in life-serving ways. (I can personally attest to encounters with
these transcendent energies through working on my own psyche, with the
psychic life of others, and in the mysterious, mythopoeic energies which
fashion our dreams. These encounters with transcendent ener gies are
fundamentally inexplicable, but they are undeniable and re quire an
honest person to witness with humility and awe.)
Jung further observed that science, for all its worthy powers of learn ing and
methodology, cannot create meaning. Meaning is the epi phenomenal
component of depth experience. When we recall that the Greek word
psyche means soul, then we are obliged to discern that the tragedy of most
modern psychologies, which divide the person into behaviors, cognitions,
and psychobiologies—each true, but each par tial—is that their
practitioners ignore the most immediate reality of all, namely, the suffering
of the soul, as manifest in the consulting room.
The bankruptcy of modern psychology is its flight from the soul, and
therefore from the transcendent task of meaning. Such a denial of depth is
a failure of nerve in the face of largeness. Similarly, most the ologies have
substituted the powers of institutions and clerical dogma for the
immediacy and idiosyncrasy of personal experience. We can not transfer
experience to each other; each of us has got to go to "God" and find out
about living for ourselves, as Hurston reminded us. Just as Jung reminded
us that "psychotherapy can be a mere makeshift for the avoidance with
the reality of the psyche," so we regretfully conclude that the chief motive
of many religious institutions is the avoidance of actual spiritual
experience.
Both psychology and institutional religion have fallen into the (l6 )
ARCHETYPA L IMAGINATIO N
shadow problem where fear of the living, dynamic, sometimes anar chic
psyche prevails. Worse, psychology and religion have addressed their fear
of the psyche by attempting to apply power and ego control, to promote
ideology rather than mythology. As understandable as these fear-based
stratagems may be, they will of course be overthrown by those powers we
call the gods and by the autonomy of the unconscious. As Jung asserts,
"The archetype behind a religious idea has, like every instinct, its specific
energy, which it does not lose even if the conscious mind ignores it." This11
is why the person who views the world in depth, who reads its ciphers, as
Karl Jaspers urged, sees the movement of soul everywhere, however
unconsciously processed.
Myth is not created; it is the phenomenological dramatization of our
encounter with depth. As Jung concludes, "myth is the revelation of a
divine life in man." This divine life is expressed through the psyche's
1 2
archetypal process, which lifts images up and out of the flux of nature to
serve as mediatory bridges to the cosmos. In speaking of the archetype
Jung means something elemental. Just as there are in
stincts for biological survival and social interaction, there are instincts for
spiritual connection as well. Just as our physical and social needs seek
satisfaction, so the spiritual instincts of this human animal are expressed
through the power of images to evoke affective response. Anyone who has
worked with dreams and encountered the powers tran
scendent to ego must have some inclination of the power such images
once held for our tribal ancestors. As Jung concludes, "Myths and
fairytales give expression to unconscious processes, and their retelling
causes these processes to come alive and be recollected, thereby rees
tablishing the connection between conscious and unconscious. What the
separation of the two psychic halves means, the psychiatrist knows only
too well. He knows it as dissociation of the personality, the root of all
neuroses."13
This dissociation of the individual personality we know by the ugly and

misleading term neurosis, just as T. S. Eliot observed its collective cultural
form in what he called "the dissociation of sensibility"—the chief spiritual
dilemma of society. 14
The archetypal imaging power represents an aspect of our partici pation

in the divine. Jung writes: "The archetypes are the numinous
RELIGIOU S IMAGINING S ( 17 )
structural elements of the psyche and possess a certain
autonomy and specific energy which enables them to
attract, out of the conscious mind, those contents which are
best suited to themselves. The sym bols act as transformers,
their function being to convert libido from a 'lower' to a
'higher' form." 15
These two rich sentences bear further attention. Note those

key words numinous and structural. The idea of the
numinous is buried in its etymology. The word of origin
means to nod, to summon, to inti mate; that is, the
numinous is autonomous and is seeking us, solicit ing the
attention of our consciousness. Secondly, the psyche brings
structure to this frenetic dance of atoms so that we might
stand in or dered relationship to that flux. This order makes
meaning possible; it is the requisite for consciousness.
Moreover, as the student of dreams knows well, the invisible
energy of the psyche scavenges the known and the
unknown worlds for im ages to become hosts for meaning.
Such image-husks are filled with energy and present
themselves dynamically for the possibility of con scious
discernment. In addition to creating consciousness alone,
these images activate, summon, and direct libido and
energy in service to the developmental and transcendent
needs of the organism. This effect is experienced in rites of
passage, in living religious symbols, and in affectively
charged life experiences which move and confound us.
Through the autonomous formation of symbols and
archetypal imagi nation, we move to ancient rhythms and
play out ancient dramas, whether we know it or not.
The deceptions of modern culture tempt the conscious mind
to serve immediate gratification, but Jung has noted that,
in the end, such ide ologies as materialism, hedonism, and
narcissism simply do not work, and they do not connect.
Meaning only comes "when people feel that they are living
the symbolic life, that they are actors in the divine drama.
That gives the only meaning to human life; everything else
is banal and you can dismiss it. A career, the producing of
children, all are maya [illusion] compared with that one
thing, that your life is meaningful." 16
We live in a spiritually impoverished time, and Jung argues

"that it would be far better stoutly to avow our spiritual
poverty, our symbol lessness, instead of feigning a legacy to
which we are not the legitimate
(l8 ) ARCHETYPA L IMAGINATIO N

heirs at all." Although we have lost our spiritual connection, we have not
17
lost our spiritual desire. In the same way, although we are without gods,
they have not disappeared. The problem is simply that the im ages
generally available to us have lost the power to point beyond them selves
and thus to connect us with the mystery, although we may cling to those
image-husks with fundamentalist fervor to mask our disqui etude. Even
Jesus noted this tendency when he said to his disciples, "My Kingdom is
spread all over the earth, and you do not see it."18
While a person who works in sincere dialogue with others, submits to

the urges of creative impulse within, and tracks the invisible world
through his or her dreams will have a living spirituality, this person is,
sadly, atypical in our time. For all of us, the symbolic world is as near as
tonight's dream, or even in a deepened understanding of our neu
rotic symptoms. We have, however, the opportunity to take a histori cal
trip to recollect how meaning is found, how the gods and goddesses rise
invisibly from the depths, and how we are part of a timeless drama.
The inescapable solipsism of our condition often imprisons us in the
limits of our narrow frame of conscious life and biographical ex posure.
When we approach the religion of others we find ourselves unmoved or
inclined to condescend to anything that seems foreign to our experience.
When we examine and compare the religious, spiri tual, or psychological
expressions of others to our own, however, we find that the same process
of archetypal imagination is at work. It be comes obvious that despite the
disparity of time, geography, and Zeit geist, we are all part of one psychic
family.
Consider, for example, how we conjure with the idea of God. By
definition we are constrained as finite beings before the infinite and are
constitutionally incapable of revealing much more than our own
psychology and prejudices in our theological utterances. Thus, the Wholly
Other, to use Karl Barth's phrase from Das Kirklichle Dogmatik, remains
wholly other. Nonetheless, how humans have searched for and formulated
their sense of transcendent reality provides clues, not only to the mystery
of Mystery but also to the capacity of the archetypal imagination to
provide figural access to the Divine. Let four quite dis
parate examples serve to illustrate this imaginative power at work in
bringing us into proximity with the Wholly Other.
(19)
The Name and Nature of Zeus
Western philosophy could be said to begin with the
exclamation of the pre-Socratic Thales: panta theonplere,
or "everything is full of gods!" In this formulation Thales
witnesses the depth and dynamism of all things; he
exercises the spiritual eye, the archetypal, figural imagina
tion. He says, in effect, "Look, look, see there; it is alive!" In
the post Newtonian universe, Blake lamented that without
wonder, atoms bumping up against other atoms leads only
to entropy, even death. The quantum physicist, working on
the edge of emerging models of mat ter, sees energy
disappear into something altogether different. The
physicist can then recover a sense of primal awe in the
recognition that, indeed, everything is full of gods. This use
of metaphor is simply the best way to be scientific, that is,
to pursue scientia or a deeper knowl
edge of things as they are and as they may be. "See there; it
lives" is the credo of the scientist, and his or her use of
metaphor is the resource used to build a bridge from
conscious life to the unknown depths. As Carl Kerenyi
notes, "The fundamental word of this theology is theos.
From a strictly methodological point of view it is consoling
that in order to understand theos, no known or unknown
god-concept, no 'idea of god,' need be introduced. All we
have to do is start from an experience in which this word is
spoken predicatively." In other words, the word god is not
19
a concept, nor a presumed metaphysical construct; it is an

encounter, an experience with the vitalistic cosmos.
In the same phenomenological state as Thales, the Jesuit
poet Gerard Manley Hopkins celebrated the variety and
flux of life. He concludes the poem "Pied Beauty" with
praise for the humming energy which lies beneath the
world of appearances:
All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him. 20
(20 ) ARCHETYPA L IMAGINATIO N
"Who knows how" indeed. The apprehension of the divine is found in the
spiritual reading of the mundane. To the spiritual eye, the quidditas of
things becomes an aperture into infinite mystery whereby energy
animates matter.
When one considers the name and nature of Zeus, one finds many
tracks which lead from Asia and Europe to the Indo-Germanic lan guage
which is the mother stream of our speech. All of those tracks together
constitute the etymology of light, both word and concept. How are we who
are finite to conjure with the infinite without resorting to the instrument
of metaphor? We might employ any concrete image to summon up this
unfathomable mystery of light, but most would fall short of the numinosity
to which it points. The ubiquity and necessity of the sun could not have
failed to impress our forebears as the source of life, the source of growth,
the light which holds back the terrifying dark, and so on. Such
associations point toward the mystery of the energy with which the world
is charged.
Kerenyi further discovered that the original metaphor, which is al ways
a radical, phenomenological encounter, meant not so much light as "the
moment of lighting up." Thus, light as a concept is only a noun, a husk;
21
the lightening is an experience. Day versus night, light versus dark, and
energy versus entropy is profound, but the dynamic encoun ter with the
lightening is even more powerful. Thus, the experience involves being
struck, seeing the bolt, or feeling its jolt.
This movement from concept to numinous experience is the differ ence
between the Job who was a good, pious boy, obedient to a code of ethics,
and the Job who discovered the living God in terror and wonder. He moves
from concept to experience. Many prattle on about psycho therapy,
whether to praise it or denigrate it. Unless one has encoun tered the
autonomous, disruptive power of the psyche, one is merely full of talk, full
of what Whitehead called the dance of bloodless cat egories. Jung was very
clear about such a difference. As he wrote in 1959 in an astounding letter
about his use of the word god, "It is an apt name given to all overpowering
emotions in my own psychic system, subdu ing my own conscious will and
usurping control over myself. It is the name by which I designate all things
which cross my willful path vio lently and recklessly, all things which upset
my subjective views, plans,
and intentions and change the course of my life for better or
worse." This is not a definition of the divine found in many
22
breviaries or catechisms, but it is a profoundly respectful

account of the author's
experience with the numinous, the autonomous Other
which lies out side the frame of conscious control and
occasions ever new possibili ties of depth encounter. When
Jung defines neurosis as a "neglected god," he means no
denigration of anyone's theology nor scandal to
behaviorists; rather, he wishes to accord the depth energies
within us a larger measure of respect than generally
afforded by the ego. He knows, as does every depth
psychologist, that such energies neglected, re pressed, split
off, or projected, will simply find their own autonomous
and often disruptive venues for expression. As nature will
not be mocked, so the dynamic energies which course
through us will nei ther be suppressed nor controlled
forever, lest they in time break forth as monsters.
Thus, Kerenyi is insisting that Zeus is the image which
arises out of the experience of the sun and is not the sun
itself. Zeus later became a sun god through the extension of
these natural associations, but he was originally the
experience of being suffused with light itself; he was not
the light but the experience of light.
Coming down a quite different path, the poet Wallace
Stevens wrote in his poem "Sunday Morning" of the
contemporary spiritual dilemma from a postmodern
perspective. Rather than seek the divine in insti tutional or
dogmatic form, he images himself as a savage, dancing in
adoration of the pagan sun: "Not as a god, but as a god
might be, / naked among them, like a savage source." 23
This urgency to personify the cosmos is the primal religious

need to connect with the Mystery. The etymology of the
word religion re veals two sources, one meaning "to bind
back to something" {re-ligare) and the other "to take into
careful account" (religere). The former im pulse is toward
reuniting with the source from which one has become
estranged, and the latter is to respect the gravitas of that
mystery. When Stevens writes "not as a god, but as a god
might be," he is both acknowl edging the postmodern
recognition of the husk which has lost its sa cred energy
and also affording an existential respect for the power of
the numinous. To dance about the sun as a savage
sensibility, Stevens

suggests, will perhaps bring one closer to re-evoking that numinous
mystery than would pious acts sanctified by dogma.
Jung, as usual, has anticipated this discussion and even uses the image
of the sun to explain:
Primitive man is not much interested in objective explanations of the

obvious, but he has an imperative need—or rather, his un conscious
psyche has an irresistible urge—to assimilate all outer sense
experiences to inner, psychic events. It is not enough for the primitive
to see the sun rise and set; this external observation must at the
same time be a psychic happening: the sun in its course must
represent the fate of a god or hero who, in the last analysis, dwells
nowhere except in the soul of man. 24
This need to assimilate, to internalize, is the need we all have to render

the world personal and experiential in a spiritual and meaningful way.
Among the fifteen or so subject areas in which analysts are examined at
the Jung Institute in Zurich is the psychology of primitive cultures. As the
word primitive is out of fashion now, one might substitute the word
primordial. We were asked to demonstrate knowledge of many topics of
anthropological significance because the human psyche has not changed.
There are certain forms and motifs common to all cul
tures irrespective of cultural overlay, and the nature of primordial thinking
about profound experience remains common to us all. We see magical
thinking, projection, conversion, transference, projective identification,
spirit possession, and a host other psychic phenomena
manifest not only in psychotic process but in everyday life as well. Yet the
failure to internalize primary experience is why the light has gone out in so
many religious and academic institutions. It is not enough to have the
received image; it must retain the power to move one personally, direct
libido in service of personal development or cultural sublimation, and stir
the heart while persuading the brain. Moreover, such images must further
contribute to one's sense of par ticipation in that divine drama of which
Jung spoke. Hence the ascent, the pleroma, and the descent of that
brilliant gaseous mass in the sky is analogized so that we might
understand both the vital principle we
call gods and goddesses as well as something about the
life-transit of each of us.
In the death and rebirth of the sun, in the defeat of
darkness, in the oxymoronic "eternality of evanescence" are
found the essential and universal experiences of otherwise
individualized lives. Jung contin ues, "they are symbolic
expressions of the inner, unconscious drama of the psyche
which becomes accessible to man's consciousness byway of
projection—that is, mirrored in the events of nature. The
projec tion is so fundamental that it has taken several
thousand years of civi lization to detach it in some measure
from its outer object." 25
To read the cosmos, then, we need to read the psychic life of

indi viduals. Or, put another way, we read myth to learn
what is in the human soul; we read the human soul to learn
the dynamic laws and principles of the mythic cosmos.
Jung asks why psychology is the youngest of the empirical
sciences and why we did not long before discover the
unconscious and raise up its treasure-house of eternal
images. His answer? "Simply because we [previously] had a
religious formula for everything psychic." Because of this
26
progressive separa tion of psychic life from nature and the

result, a de-souled cosmos, we have been obliged to invent
psychology to inquire after the velleities of the soul turned
in upon itself. No wonder Eliot observed in The Waste Land
that we live amid "a heap of broken images."
How far removed this is from that time when the Greek
world could still experience the lighting up as both an inner
and an outer experi ence^—an experience which could once
be evoked in the utterance of the sacred word Zeus. Such
an experience is truly religious, in both senses of the word,
for there is a re-connective process and a deeply considered
event.
Added to this moment when inner and outer theophany are
one is the experience of the daimon, a most personal
encounter with the di vine. The daimon maybe seen as both
transpersonal and intrapersonal. The daimon is the
intermediary agency, as in the Christian mythologem of the
Holy Spirit, yet it was experienced in intensely personal
ways so that each of us might claim to have our particular
daimon.
Surely each of us has had from childhood on a deeply
intuited sense of an interior Other who was manifest in
sundry ways, who could not
be summoned at will but was one's familiar, and who knew
us, and knew other matters, more deeply than we could
comprehend. Most of us have lost contact with that
presence, and surely one of the greatest tasks of therapy is
to reintroduce a person to his or her daimon—the
individual yet transpersonal dimension which drives us,
wants something of us, and constitutes our linkage to
largeness. I recall one woman who called her daimon by
the anagram TWIHAT, standing for "that which I have
always thought." When it spoke, through dreams, sudden
insights, and openings to the world beneath this world, she
listened.
Hidden in the etymological recesses of the gods and
goddesses are radical (that is, fundamental) insights into
the nature of reality. In fact, we could define these divine
beings archetypally, symbolically speak ing, as the
affect-laden, highly charged, numinous images which arise
out of a depth experience. For this reason, they are present
in love and war, as we all know, and even in those
experiences that arise out of the psychopathology of
everyday life and which Jung dared call "god." We smile and
nod in recognition at the name Poseidon, whose eponymous
metaphor means earth-shaker. Whoever set out on Homer's
wine-dark sea, or stood close by while black sails sank
beneath the horizon, or trembled amid the great power
which shook beneath one's feet knows the metaphor of
earth-shaker well. Or one thinks of Ceres, the god dess of
grains, from whom we get our diurnal cereal. She sacrifices
her body, which is broken on the threshing floor,
alchemically transformed into bread, and then inexplicably
converted into sinew, brain matter, and the yearnings of the
soul. Who could account for these things? Who cannot but
stand and praise with the heart (and hopefully a ready
metaphor) what will forever confound the mind?
The development of modernism represents the
diminishment of the numinosity of these root metaphors
and their incremental replacement with artifacts of
intellect. As tools of the intellect, these root metaphors are
easily manipulated, but they are less and less able to stir the
heart or move the soul. Kerenyi delineates this declension:
Human experience does not always give rise immediately to

ideas. It can be reflected in images or words without the
mediation of ideas. Man reacted inwardly to his experience
before he became a
5
thinker. Prephilosophical insights and reactions to experience are
taken over and further developed by thought, and this process is
reflected in language. . . . Language itself can be wise and draw
distinctions through which experience is raised to consciousness and
made into a prephilosophic wisdom common to all those who speak
that language. 27
To summarize, a primal experience begets an image which is the car rier of

the mystery. For a time, a moment or a millennium, that image remains
suffused with energy and may be evoked to summon the pri mary
experience or a simulacrum of it. As time is the enemy of sym bol, and the
deities have their own agenda, the energy leaves the image, which remains
an artifact of mind, a husk which once the gods and goddesses inhabited.
The oldest of religious blasphemies is the literal ization of the husk and its
worship, when the energy has already gone elsewhere. This is idolatry, and
its servant is that reification which pro tects itself against the gods and
goddesses by worshiping their graves. When such vital linkage leaves the
individual, he or she suffers neuro sis; when it leaves the tribe, it occasions
a cultural crisis, with all of those sociopathies which beset us today. The
suffering occasioned by the loss of the light is what made analytic
psychology necessary. It is a means of helping the individual find his or
her own way back to the precincts of numinosity.
The Insect God of Dung
On my desk in Houston there is a four-inch-long alabaster carving of a

scarab. Those of us who were raised in the Western religious tradi tion,
which is to say, the dogmas, rituals, conventional art, and defin ing
institutions of the medieval and Renaissance eras, may find it hard to
conjure with the idea of a dung beetle as an image of divinity. Not only is it
lacking in grandeur, but it hardly seems to exalt or glorify the idea of the
eternal. Yet in this lowliest of creatures, we once again find the archetypal
imagination at work. Even Blake, in "The Songs of In nocence and
Experience," had to wonder if God had intended some

sort of private joke when he made "our places of joy
excrementitious." Taking a clue from the Egyptian
imagination, however, we find that the most religious of
ideas—the idea of death and resurrection— emerges out of
the humblest of matter.
The lowly but sacred beetle (Scarabaeus sacer) serves as
the object of imaginal exfoliation when it is found in
sarcophagi and when it seem ingly arises out of dung. What
idea could be more profound than this, that out of death
new life emerges? The sun, which is born over and over
again, similarly suggested death and rebirth and the natural
rhythm of things, and the great solar disk is central to
Egyptian ico nography. And these two symbols, scarab and
sun, are logically linked; the Egyptians observed that the
dung beetle laid its larvae in dung, rolled that dung into a
ball, and pushed it into holes which it had dug for this
purpose. After a period of gestation, the beetle pulls the
hard ened ball, reminiscent of the sun-disk, back out into
the sun. When the sun's rays dry and crack open this vas
hermeticum, new life emerges.
How powerfully these two images, of the dying and reborn
sun and the beetle who brings life out of dead matter, speak
to the primal imagi nation. The deity Kheperi, the god of
transformations, was frequently depicted with a scarab
beetle on his head or a scarab for his head. In modern
Sudan, the scarab beetle is still dried and mixed into fertility
potions for women. 28
Some individuals might think such imagery arose from

those with too much time on their hands, and they would
be right. But today we have too little time on our hands. So
distracted are we by the pace of modern life that we grow
separated from the natural world and our wonder before it.
As the pace of life accelerated in early modern Eu
rope four hundred years ago, the mathematician/theologian
Blaise Pascal wrote in his Pensees that the secret task of
civilization was to offer divertissement or "distraction," lest
we grow terrified of being wholly present to ourselves.
Before moving to Texas I had an office with a cathedral
ceiling and glass walls on three sides. As I sat for a decade
in the same chair, at the same hours, day in and day out, I
became aware of the transits of the sun. While such solar
progression would have been imperceptible to the
distracted person, I began to note how different objects
received a
7
unique angle of light and took on various textures every day, as the hours
and seasons passed. In a year, of course, we returned to the be ginning and
started anew. This simplest of observations, which any shepherd on any
hillside would have similarly experienced, filled me
with awe and stirred a sense of participation in the Mystery. Our time in
the changing lights of this cycling sun is so brief, but this cycle is eternal.
When we become present to such feeling-laden experience, we have
religious experience, that is, we are reconnected, and we observe with
gravitas. However conventional, or even obvious, my observation, it was a
moving reminder to me of both personal eva nescence and at the same
time participation in the archetypal rounds. So it must have been to the
Egyptian who observed the lowly beetle in its instinctual rounds and
became aware that we truly are, as Jung said, participants in a sacred
drama. Surely this is why we long to visit the ocean or stand before a
mountain range—to return to our small place before the large, to recover a
sense of cosmic proportion. It was from the French structural
anthropologists Lucien Levy-Bruhl and Claude Levi-Strauss that we gained
a new appreciation for the "primitive mind" (better termed "primal mind,"
which does not imply inferiority). In contrast to the primal mind, we as
moderns have fallen into ethnocentrism by valuing a particular form of
conceptualizing, most commonly a cause-effect thought process: A begets
B. The mean ing of A and B arises out of the predication of B by A and,
increasingly in America, the cost to produce B from A.
For the primal mind, however, the meaning of a concept is not de rived
from causality but from imaginative association. Thus, a mod ern mind
would hear a door slam and conclude that the sound meant the door was
now shut. But the primal imagination may associate the sound with the
event of passage through that door.
In this example of the door, the primal imagination saw life emerg ing
from the basest of matter and was stirred to grasp a dynamic truth.
Although the modern mind would label this idea illogical, it in fact follows
a logos of perhaps a higher order, the logic of imaginative as sociation. The
image is not itself the concept, as the modern mind would have it, but
rather what the image may stir in the unconscious, or what aperture it
may open to depth.
( 28 ) ARCHETYPA L IMAGINATIO N
While the modern mind can produce great wonders, and
great hor rors, it can just as easily sever itself from the
archetypal roots of our spiritual nature, which sustained
and nourished us through the cen turies. The power to
connect with the transpersonal will surely prove even
greater than the power to fractionate. The chief cause of our
psy chological distress, our spiritual malaise, is the
deracination of our archetypal rooting in nature and the
poverty of affective, imaginative association with the
passing wonders of the world.
The Latchkey to Eternal Life
Once while touring Ireland my wife and I visited a burial

site named New Grange, which had been unearthed
perhaps a hundred miles northwest of Dublin. What was
once thought simply to be a hill was found to be a domelike
structure measuring about three hundred feet across the
top. To enter the tomb, one walks down a narrow tunnel
perhaps fifty feet into the earth. Therein lies a chamber
which served as a burial place for an unknown civilization
that pre-dated the Celts and the Egyptian pyramids. The
guide turned off the one electric light in the chamber and
allowed us to be in total darkness in the three thou
sand-year-old tomb, after telling us that the entire structure
was com posed of cantilevered boulders with no
mortise-and-tenon, nail, or super-glue holding it together.
A single sneeze might do it, I thought;
after all, why would we expect any building to last three
millennia? As we stood in this place I had three thoughts in
this order. First, and most obviously, I was in awe of the
engineering which had created this marvel, a cantilevered
dome of stone upon stone that outlasted its engineers and
testified to the window on eternity. Next, there was a latch
key hole in the eastern quadrant of the ceiling. Between
December 21 and 25 light streams through that hole and
illuminates the entire cham ber for approximately fifteen
minutes. So, secondly, I marveled at the astronomical
sophistication of the builders of that place, to have dis
cerned so accurately the movement of the heavens that long
ago. But thirdly, I shuddered, not from being in a place of
death, but rather from being in a place of resurrection. I
knew that I was in the presence of
(29)
the archetypal imagination, the realm of the Great Mother
cycle of mythology.
Such archetypal imagery bespeaks the greatest of religious
ideas: birth, ascendance, death, and then rebirth. In the
place of the dead, at the time of the winter solstice, at the
time of the star of Bethlehem, at the time of the candles of
Chanukah, at the time when there is little light, when we
are in the dark realm, we are nonetheless reminded that the
planet is already spiraling back toward light, toward spring,
toward resurrection. To this moment I remain moved by the
power of that imaginative linkage. To see in the dark time
the rebirth of this scintilla of light, to bring one's dead to
the place where such a profound mythologem could be
ritualized and celebrated, is to be an actor in the sacred
drama. How could we not honor those who felt such a deep
connection to the fundamental rhythm of nature, to the
death and rebirth of divine nature, and to the wonder of our
own being which partakes of the same energy?
The theologian Paul Tillich once observed that the chief
curse of our time is not that we are evil, though often we
are, but that we are banal, superficial. The recovery of depth
will never come through an act of intellect, unless that
intellect is in service to wonder. We can re
cover depth, however, by opening ourselves to the numinous
which nods at us and invites us. We can also use our
imaginative power to seize such moments of beckoning and
the images which rise sponta neously from them.
Magic and Mistletoe
In the nineteenth century there was a substantial interest in

the explo ration of antique civilizations, Heinrich
Schliemann's explorations of what he believed to be
Agamemnon's palace at Troy being the most notable. The
brothers Grimm traversed the Germanic states and tran
scribed tales of the spinning wheel, the Marchen, which we
today call the fairy tales. Concurrent with the erosion of
literal Christian beliefs under the combined onslaught of
new methods of biblical scholarship and the epochal
discoveries of Darwin, an interest in folk wisdom in-

tensified as individuals sought to recover spiritual insights
from other traditions. From the founding of The
Theosophical Society in London in 1875 and the emergence
of analytical psychology at the end of that century,
alternative paths to spiritual insight opened.
Interest in the great mythological traditions culminated in
1890 with the publication of Sir James George Frazer's
magisterial The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and
Religion. While all mythological, alchemi cal, and folk
culture motifs are vast treasuries for those who would learn
the dynamics of psychological process, we will focus now on
the idea of the golden bough. What was it? Why was it
important? We know that the golden bough was carried by
Aeneas in his catabasis to the lower
world. But what was the play of imagination which
produced this im age, and what truths perseverate through
time?
Frazer was a scholar of his age. While his learning was
immense, his cultural bias seems dated today. Curious as he
was at the plethora of images available from antiquity, he
tended to consider the contempo rary religions superior,
and humanity more evolved. (This more evolved culture
would shortly slaughter itself at little villages like Verdun,
Ypres, and Passchendaele, and in the Argonne Forest, but
Frazer could not imagine such, though Dostoevski did. Nor
could he imagine that the land of Dichter und
Denker—poets and thinkers—would become the nation of
Morder und Henker—murderers and hangmen). Frazer is
led to anticipate the idea of the archetypal imagination
through the repli cation of mythologems from culture to
culture. He concluded, "recent researches into the early
history of man have revealed the essential simi larity with
which, under many superficial differences, the human mind
has elaborated its first crude philosophy of life... producing
in varied circumstances a variety of institutions specifically
different but generi cally alike." 29
Frazer's interest in magic arose out of his encounter with a

certain kind of thinking, which I would call the imaginative
power. He tended to consider such thinking primitive when
compared with cognitive, syllogistic thought. But his
delineation of sympathetic magic and con
tagious magic is still helpful to us.
The idea of sympathetic magic is based on the notion of
similarity. For example, couples might copulate in newly
planted fields to rouse
RELIGIOU S IMAGINING S (31)

the powers of nature or to evoke the gods to similarly
fructify. Or they might sacrifice a plant, an animal, or an
old king in order to simulate and stimulate the cycle of
sacrifice wherein new life arises out of death. Contagious
magic is based on the idea of contact. Things joined, or
which are contiguous, are forever influential on each other.
We know the truth of this when we observe the staying
power of parental com
plexes or the fact that divorce does not end a marriage.
What has been powerfully joined, for good or ill, continues
to influence one with the other in perpetuity.
What Frazer calls magic is the effort to conjure with the
invisible world, whether intentional or not. While magical
thinking—the as sumption that my thoughts or actions can
have an effect on the other— may strike us as naive and
misguided, we have to recall the power of complexes,
projections, scapegoating, psychic possession, and trans
ference phenomena, which Jung helped identify, to admit
that, indeed, there is such movement of invisible energy for
which the word magic was once used.
Jungians puzzle other schools of psychology with their
interest in such antique material, but part of Jung's genius
was to see the human psyche as a hologram. Wheresoever it
is at work, it leaves the imprint of its pervasive dynamics.
To learn of those fundamental psychic pro
cesses which we all embody, suffer, and are driven by, we
may steep ourselves in the Marchen. To study such material
is to uncover the re current paradigms of psychic process for
individual therapy. Frazer's magic is primary psychic
process, and what he considers amusing but interesting
mythic motifs, we see constituting the residue of that ar
chetypal imagination which renders the world meaningful.
Jung would not publish his theory of archetypes until 1912 in
Sym bols of Transformation. Those who deny the archetypal
imagination simply have not immersed themselves in the
thesaurus of images avail able, from East and West and from
the ancient world, nor have they sharpened the eye to see
those same motifs in modern dress. The magical thought
that "like heals like," what we call homeopathic medicine,
certainly occurred to our ancestors. The golden bough is one
example. Associated with the sacred groves of
Artemis/Diana, the hunter goddess of the woods, it derives
from the mistletoe which was

cut at the winter solstice. In time it turns yellow, that is, golden.
Mistletoe's presumed powers supposedly arose from the fact that it
seemed neither tree nor bush. It dwelt in the in-between, between heaven
and earth, and therefore partook of two worlds, possessing the power to
heal or destroy. (Buried in the idea of pharmakon, from which we derive
"pharmacology," is similarly the notion of killing or curing by ingesting
certain substances.) The green world mistletoe seemed feminine to the
antique imagination even as the tree around which it was circled seemed
masculine. Again, one sees the interaction of two worlds. That it was
green at the time of the winter solstice further stirred the association with
the death/rebirth theme already discussed. The yellowing of the green was
seen as a solar residue and thus, even more in the mixing of solar and
lunar, the carrier of the numinous. What better imago of healing and of
illumination of darkness, then, than magic and mistletoe? What better
guide, as Aeneas illustrated, through the dark descents into night?
What images do we have of healing that intimate for us contact with
the mysteries? Today we swallow the magical pill manufactured in New
Jersey and fervently hope that like will continue to cure like. It is still
magic, and as we know from the placebo effect, it works all the better the
more our heart and imagination embrace the treatment. As mod
ern medicine is coming to acknowledge, we would be better to embrace
the placebo effect as a clue to the power of psyche's healing intent than
dismiss it as a bizarre and idiosyncratic phenomenon. We know from
shamanism to the present that a key element in healing is belief in the
power of an agency to effect healing, whether that agency be a Tlingit
shaman, a Navajo sand painting, a person in a white coat at a high
tech medical center, or a pill created in a huge factory. In examining these
four motifs, the name and nature of Zeus, the insect god of dung, the
latchkey to eternity, and the link between magic and mistletoe, we are
visiting a place in the human psyche where noth ing has changed. We think
our age is advanced, and technologically it is, but at the cost of that fragile
linkage to the animistic powers of na ture. Our capacity to open our own
imagination to take in the images of other times and places, other human
beings like us, reconnects us with ourselves in the end, for we are they, and
they are us. We remem
RELIGIOU S IMAGINING S (33 )

ber that the symbolic life, as Jung called it, occurs wheresoever we en gage
in depth. We learn so much more about the actual functioning of the
human psyche—its employment of projection, magical thinking,
and the like—than modern textbooks of behavior, cognition, and phar
macology even attempt. We find that we are no more advanced where it
matters than were our ancestors who may have huddled in fear and cold
caves, in forests or tundras, but they had a connection to the tran scendent
powers which we ignore at our peril.
The archetypal imagination is the means by which we encounter the
divine and how it may be reborn in us. As Jung writes,
The mediatorial product [i.e., image or symbol] ... forms the raw
material for a process not of dissolution but of construction, in which
thesis and antithesis both play their part. In this way it be comes a new
content that governs the whole attitude, putting an end to the
division and forcing the energy of the opposites into a common
channel. The standstill is overcome and life can flow on with renewed
power towards new goals. 30
Out of the tension of opposites, the new thing, the third, is where the gods
and humans meet, where developmental healing occurs, and where
meaning will still be found. What our predecessors lived, we have now
rendered conscious. While consciousness can be a hindrance to
transformation, it may also enable us to recover a respect for the imagi
nal world and to confess a humbling need to track those images to see
what they may be asking of us.
CHAPTE R 2
Envisioned Logos
Poetry heals the wounds reason creates.

—Novalis
What we wish most to know, most desire, remains unknowable and lies
beyond our grasp. In this chapter we will celebrate the power of speech to
assist us in our task of articulating this deep longing.
To my mind, while I love the work of many poets from many lands, none
surpasses that of Prague-born Rainer Maria Rilke for depth of insight,
aesthetic achievement, and visionary ambition. If I had only two boxes of
books to take to the proverbial desert island, one of them would be the
Collected Works of Jung and the other would be the prose
and poetry of Rilke, born the same year as Jung, in 1875. Both would offer
inexhaustible explorations of the mystery of the psyche, no mat ter how
long one remained on that island.
In the previous chapter I did not intend to denigrate the power of
language or to privilege phenomenological experience over conscious ness.
Indeed, we recall the observation of Kerenyi that "Language itself can be
wise and draw distinctions through which experience is raised to
consciousness and made into a prephilosophic wisdom common to all
those who speak that language." We are using language even now to
1
activate enhanced awareness of, and the possibility of, enlarged en counter
with the divine.
Two great energies, or dynamic principles, drive the universe. The first
is Eros, whom the Greeks considered a god. Paradoxically, Eros was the
first of the gods and the last of the gods, perhaps because he is found
at the origin of all things and is ever renewing himself in
each new situ ation. Eros is the energy which seeks
connection. Freud was right in suggesting that the world is
erotic, for it is forever seeking to combine in new ways with
the Other, whether at the molecular level or through the
Sehnsucht fur Ewigekeit. The other great power is Logos,
the divid ing power, the principle of development through
differentiation. Its goal is clarity, or consciousness. When
eros and logos combine, there is a synergy which is
extraordinarily powerful. I often find such synergy in the
writing of Rilke. His themes are the universal themes: love
and death, what depth may be seen through simple things,
and why we may be here on this spinning globe. For all the
simplicity of subject, how ever, few writers have managed to
point beyond the subject toward the numinous as
profoundly as Rilke has.
For our purposes I need to restrict our consideration to two
of the Duino Elegies. The ten Duino Elegies are verbal
equivalents to Beetho ven's nine symphonies; they derive
their name from the Duino Castle on the Adriatic where, in
1912, Rilke was overtaken by a numinous voice which
dictated the first line of the first elegy. He wrote the Elegies
off and on for the next few years before publishing them
together in 1923. The last elegies were completed in a
paroxysm of creative spontaneity in 1922, and Rilke wrote a
friend of his, "though I can barely manage to hold the pen,
after several days of huge obedience to the spirit... I have
climbed the mountain! At last! The Elegies are here, they
exist."
2
"Huge obedience to the spirit"—those are Rilke's own words

for what is surely religious experience, the possession by the
daimon who is both personal and universal, terrible and
transformative. His obedi ence to this spirit is the necessary
humility before the numinous—"Not my will but
Thine"—and, like the mother's delivery of a child, occurs in
revelatory suffering. Without suffering nothing genuinely
new will come forth. Like Jacob wrestling with the angel,
the courageous artist says "unless you bless me, I will not let
go of you."
If we are honest with ourselves, we are obliged to admit that
there was no significant psychological or spiritual growth in
our life without the experience of suffering. This is why Jung
defined neurosis as suffering which has not yet found its
meaning, not that suffering could be elimi
nated. Moreover, in that form of religious expression which
we find in (36) ARCHETYPA L IMAGINATIO N

aesthetic achievement, we acknowledge Orpheus as the mythic para digm,
the singer who descends into the underworld even as we descend into the
unconscious to risk all—possibly to return with Euridice, or the golden
bough, the new insight, or possibly to perish. All of these
catabases and anabases require risk and suffering. The Danish theolo gian
Soren Kierkegaard spoke of this paradox of the aesthetics of suffering, and
the suffering of aesthetics, in a rather horrifying parable:
A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret suffer ings,

but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and cries
escape them, they sound like beautiful music. His fate is like that of
the unfortunate victims whom the tyrant Phalaris im prisoned in a
brazen bull, and slowly tortured over a steady fire; their cries could
not reach the tyrant's ears so as to strike terror into his heart: when
they reached his ears they sounded like sweet music. And men crowd
about the poet and say to him: "You must sing for us again soon."
Which is as much to say, "May fresh suffer ings torture your soul but
may your lips be formed as before; for the cries would only frighten
us, but the music is delicious." 3
The theme of Rilke's two elegies on which we will focus are, quite sim ply,
love and death, the old Liebestod, in whose grip Rilke strains to ex press
the inexpressible, as Wagner does in the music of Tristan und Isolde.
What Do We Love When We Love?
Rilke's third elegy, written in 1912-13, explores the multilevel of inti mate
relationship. In relationship we move not only with conscious intention
but in concert with deeper, more ancient motions, chthonic
motives, primal forces, and telluric patterns. Rilke invokes the long tra
dition of amor, that powerful energy rescued by the troubadours and
Minnesingers of the Middle Ages, that energy somewhere between eros
and agape—personal, intimate, and universal at once.
It is one thing to sing of the Beloved. And another, alas, to invoke the
secret, guilty River-God of the Blood. 4
LITERAR Y IMAGINING S
(37)
As we know more and more of the biological determinants in our lives,
such as those affecting longevity or proclivity to certain illnesses and
emotional states, so we recognize that our instinctual programming is
profound, urgent, and insistent. Beneath the conventions of the praise of
the beloved there are the older, darker forces—the wonderfully epi
thetic "River-God of the Blood." Such a force is personified and deified,
and rightly so, for our encounter with such power is always archetypal,
always capable of seizing us, possessing us, and carrying us along its
canalized course. If it is guilty, then of what? The River-God is guilty in the
sense that it secretly possesses us and obliges us to serve more than one
motive in any relationship. It is this same chthonic power which creates
Liebeswahn, or the love-madness in honor of the mad god who possesses
souls and makes them insane in turn. Like the inti
mation of "lightening" in the name and nature of Zeus, so this duplici tous,
hermetic god is always present.
Just as the inscription which Jung carved over the entrance to his home
in Kiisnacht reads, "Called or not called, God will be there," so Rilke
acknowledges that conscious or unconscious as the lovers may be, the
deeper and darker powers are immanent. Such an overpower
ing experience, which we characterize as love, is religious in character,
given its gravitas, its compelling power, and its autonomy. We recall also
Jung calling "god" that which crossed his path and overthrew his will for
good or ill. Each of us has been in the hands of this god and has been
swept along by its urgent flow.
What do these lovers know of "this lord of desire... embodying the
unknown" and "arousing the night to an endless clamor"? What can the
thin wafer of consciousness know of the vast sea upon which it tosses?
Each of us has a profound ambivalence toward the inner sea in which we
swim. When James Joyce brought his schizophrenic daugh
ter to Jung for a consultation, Jung replied, "She is drowning in that sea in
which you learned to swim." The sea of which he spoke was of course that
5
oceanic world that each of us carries within, in which even our

biographies toss in tumult.
Who of us has not been some latter-day Jonah, fleeing the summons to
witness, being swallowed by the darksome, devouring sea-monster, and
then being flung back upon an alien shore and obliged to reflect?

Like the "sinners in the hands of an angry God" of Jonathan
Edwards, lovers are but frail and fragile wafers, bravely but
naively set upon the sea. And what telluric powers await
6
such mariners? "O h the Neptune of the blood, with his

fearsome trident." We know the power of Posei
don/Neptune to shake us, drown us, wash us from the
shore. We reso nate to this archaic force with its terrible
trident, whose skewers, like Cupid's arrows, sweetly wound
and bring anguish into the world. "O h the dark wind from
his breast of spiraled shell." Thus the evocation not only of
that pagan power but also the dark wind which emanates
from him, the devouring pneuma, both wind and spirit,
which animates, moves, carries away, and sometimes
destroys. While the strategy of consciousness and of
convention is to appeal to the stars, "the primal
constellations," to some celestial setting to summon up the
image of the beloved, Rilke reminds us that we are in the
hands of the river-god, the nihilistic Neptune with his
terrible trident. Beware those who love passionately, then,
for they are taken and tossed, and often lost.
Rilke did not read Jung to the best of my knowledge, but as
a deeply perceptive and intuitive individual he mined the
same regions of the psyche. He knows that something
larger than consciousness is evoked, that the dark river god
courses from a chthonic place. Beyond and be
low the beloved, Rilke intuits the parental imago. The
beloved only stirs the memories, the paradigm, the
programmed imago of the Intimate Other. Speaking to the
beloved he says, "Truly you did shake his heart with older
terrors, rippled through him in deeper shocks. Call him, but
you cannot pull him away from a deeper intercourse."
The "deeper intercourse" to which Rilke alludes consists of
those first and primal relationships, the internalization of
which creates a pro found sense of Self and Other, and of
the transactions between them. A ll of our lives these primal
parental imagoes are transferred to ever new relationships,
and their tyranny is all the greater when they are
unconscious. As Shakespeare observed in The Tempest, no
prisons are more confining than the ones of which we are
unaware.
The child's internalization of his or her mother becomes the
tem plate which all other relationships replicate or struggle
to transcend. It sounds terribly reductionistic to us,
deterministic even, to speak of such profound and pervasive
influence, but if one looks long enough, and
LITERAR Y IMAGINING S (39 )

deeply enough, one finds always the trace of the parent-child dyad
informing the choice, strategies, and often outcomes of later relation ships.
Even the compensatory fantasy that one is choosing the opposite of one's
parental imago still shows one to be defined by the original experience.
How much of ourselves do we ever choose? Rilke raises the same
question.
But did he begin himself?

Mother, you made his small self;
For you he was new...
And you bestowed on him friendly eyes,
and protected him from things foreign.
One could offer an ad hominem analysis of Rilke's emphasis on the power

of this primal, maternal matrix, and indeed, he did suffer from a
powerfully negative mother complex. O n a separate occasion he wrote,
Ah, woe is me, my mother rends me.

Then I put stone upon stone around me
And stood there like a little house,
Around which day moved magnificently,
Ever alone.
Now comes my mother, comes and rends me.
Although Rilke once confessed that he did not love his mother, his treat
ment of the mother in the third elegy is benign, even laudatory. And he is
not wrong in his assertion of this primal power of the mother, for she is
the immediate, immanent experience of life and of relationship, for good
or ill, and she is the mediator with the larger world outside. As an analyst, I
am obliged to agree with his conclusion that the power of the mother
experience, for men and for women, is, generally speak
ing, the single greatest psychological influence in our lives. The mother
depicted in this elegy is protective rather than devour ing. When the
child's room is full of shadows and sounds at night and his terror rises to
fill that vast space, which "you made harmless." He
writes that "there wasn't a night-noise your smile could not
assuage, as if your omniscience had already known such
sounds." As the mediatrix with the world, the mother's
fears, unlived life, and projected desires become part of the
internal mythology of the child. His or her conduct of adult
life, psychology, theology, and relationships will all seek
either to confirm, to compensate for, or to heal the myth
ologems implicit in this first, primal relationship. Jung
agreed that Freud's Oedipal complex was universal but had
as its motive not sexual congress but immersion in the
all-protective, all-nurturing source, against which only the
hero's journey could overthrow the seductive power of such
satiety. As Jung explains, the child "tears himself away from
the mother, from the domestic hearth, to rise through battle
to his destined heights. Always he imagines his worst
enemy in front of him, yet he carries the enemy within
himself—a deadly longing for the abyss, a longing to drown
in his own source, to be sucked down into the realm of the
Mothers." 7
No doubt Rilke used his transcendent aesthetic powers to

escape that devouring mother, but she was forever present
in his intimate relation ships. That wise American poet Walt
Whitman must have had a simi lar feeling when he wrote of
a "Dark Mother" that always followed him.
Rilke acknowledges this awesome mediatorial and directive
power: "So tenderly powerful your presence as you stood by
the bed, that his Fate slid behind the wardrobe, and his
stirring Future slipped into the folds of the curtains."
Rilke's testimony to the power of such primal experience
may seem overstated to some. In both men and women,
however, the deeply bur ied imprint of such experience
constitutes a de facto mythology, by which I mean a
Weltanschauung, a set of values, an assemblage of be
haviors and attitudes, and a propulsive power for
reenactment. All sub sequent relationships begin in
projection, move toward the transference of such implicit
mythologies, and unconsciously seek to replicate, com
pensate for, or heal the first relationship. Anyone who works
analyti cally will find this core truth in the heart of any
serious analysis.
The internalization of the personal mother constitutes the
personal dimension, or what Jung called the "mother
complex" of the child. The word complex here is entirely
neutral. It simply means the internaliza
(41)
tion of a powerful experience which, affectively charged, has the capacity to
act autonomously when activated and, given its origin in the past, tends to
create repetitions—patterns based on the dynamics of its ori gin. We know
how difficult it is simply to be in this moment, for this moment is
reflexively compared with other such moments, and the psychic history of
the person is dynamically present and invasive. Only when we respond
spontaneously or instinctually to an event are we in the moment; most of
the time, we are in history, for history is dynami cally within us. To think
otherwise is the insidious ploy of the ego to serve its fantasy of control.
Most women will testify that their male partners often engage with
them as they would their mother, seeking to please them, to control them,
or to avoid them. Men cannot help but have the mother imago activated
when in the presence of intimate relationship. And the power which the
mother held in his life floods him, unconsciously, and sets in motion the
protective motives which confound his partner. He does not think of her
as his mother, but the historically generated complex is blind to the
present and floods this moment with the mythologems of origins.
Yet even the personal mother is as a fragment floating on a vast sea.
Without knowing anything of Jung's conceptualization of the collec tive
unconscious, Rilke intuits that we all are moved by formative forces which
lie beneath personal history. Jung spoke of the longing to be sucked down
into "the realm of the Mothers." His capitalization of the maternal
bespeaks more an archetypal imago than personal complex. As the child
sleeps, under the embracing care of his Mother, Rilke con tinues, "he
seemed protected .. . but inside who could divert the an cestral floods
within him?"
Inside him, "the ancestral floods." What floods, what origin? What secret
sources antedate the personal mother who has been the perva sive
presence from the moment of his birth? Jung suggested that every
complex has its archetypal root reaching down into our prehistories. In
each affectively charged complex, which is a personal experience, there is a
substratum—our instinctual, animal nature, which is inher ited by the
species and is our grounding in the Great Mother arche type. In this most
transient condition of mortality there are webs of programmed tissues and
autonomous energies which move us to
rhythms not consciously ours. Who or what invents our
dreams, our religions, our patterned choices? What powers
move us to reproduce, to build civilization, to long for
meaning? These are the gods, namely, the archetypal
powers which are more ancient than we can imagine. These
powers shape us. As Rilke continues, "he was subsumed, en
meshed, in the spreading web of inner events, with
paradigms of veg etal and animal forms."
We all know those "vegetal and animal forms" and have
always known them. They were more immediate to us when
we were children. We knew they lived, for they stalked our
dreams and were glimpsed in our nursery rhymes and
bedtime stories. But we learned to distance them and build
the protective walls of ego to defend ourselves against
them. Occasionally the poet will remind us of these animal
forms, whether outer or inner, as Yeats does in his poem
"Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen": "Now days are
dragon-ridden, the nightmare / Rides upon sleep." 8
Still, these abysses are not just terrifying; they are also our
home. We come thence, and we carry such unconscious
chasms wherever we go. Rilke imagines as well that the
child can love this world within, embrace it, and be one with
his nature: "Oh how he gave himself over— loved his inner
wilderness, the primal wood, amid whose density his heart
stood light-green."
His heart is light and green, the color of the Great Mother,
and light green, for it rests lightly in the bosom of its true
home. Again, we see the personification of the archetypal
imagination which allows us momentary access to such
mysteries. These divine powers cannot be named or
contained, but they can be apprehended by virtue of the
mediating symbol.
When one is in the presence of this archetypal field, one is
full of terror like the biblical prophet who fears the Lord.
But this fear is more accurately awe. Existentialism reminds
us that the abyss is our home, and our freedom is found in
embracing that abyss which we also carry within. Rilke
imagines that the child, when one with his own nature,
leaves "his ancestral roots, and goes out into the primal
source where his tiny birth was already transcended."
The child we were, the child we carry still, is the carrier of
ancient (43 )
energies. Recall that it is the energy which is real, not the husk which
holds it for a time and then releases it to seek other incarnations. The
source to which Rilke alludes may be called God or nature or, more
adequately, the Mystery, but we are its carriers. This little incarnation we
call our lives is but the vehicle for a larger journey which divinity makes
through us. Jung's idea of individuation is not in service to the narcissistic
inflation of the ego; it is a humbling assumption of the task which fate has
assigned to us. We are asked to become the individual in order that our
small portion of the unfolding of the divine may be achieved. To flag or fail
in that task is to injure God.
So, in his natural, instinctual self, the child is comfortable with those
deep places where later ego will fear to tread. Rilke describes this de scent
into our own nature: "Lovingly, he descends into the ancestral blood, to
canyons where the Frightful may be found, turgid with Fa thers, where even
Terror knew him, winked at him."
Several matters of note are found here. Drawn by love, the unfet tered eros
of nature naturing, becoming itself, the child visits the places where,
according to my translation, he swims in the primal blood, where the
feared presence is faced and is no longer feared. Once in Zurich, just before
I spent my first internship on a locked psychiatric ward, I expressed my
beginner's apprehension. My analyst replied, "When you have faced your
terrors, the demons of others won't terrify you." Im mediately I knew the
wisdom of his remark and realized I feared less the violence there than the
loss of the tether to comfortable sanity. If I could let go of that tether, I
would be able to be present to those "ani mal forms" that haunted the
patients and treat them as familiar.
One puzzling note arises with Rilke's depiction of the primal ravine as
glutted with the fathers. This puzzle may be his acknowledgment of the
inaccessibility of the father energy to help him compensate for the power
of that devouring mother, or it may be that the "fathers" here represent
the telluric powers of old Chronos, generative but destruc
tive, and in time plowed under as well. Time is unkindly even to gods. We
take special note of how the Fearful seems to know the youth, and winks
at him. We recall that the etymology of numinous suggests something
which is nodding toward us—something that seeks us, knows us, solicits
our mindfulness, and invites our complicity. How

many times have we had dream figures whom we do not
know con sciously but feel we somehow know, or those
anonymous figures who seem to know us? We recall Jung's
subjective, synthetic approach to dreams and his idea that
the various parts of the dream, the personi fied energies, are
parts of us. We are led to conclude that there is some
superordinate reality, what Jung called the Self, which
knows us, cre ates the dream, and synthesizes so many
disparate elements into a dra matic whole. When we are in
the presence of that large wisdom, such as when we revere
and dialogue with our dreams, we are in the pres ence of the
transcendent whose name and nature are unknown but
whose reality is palpable. Who could doubt the presence of
the gods when one has been vouchsafed visions of eternity
through the linea ments of the literal? Or as Rilke muses,
"Why should he not love what looked lovingly at him?"
How could we not love that which nods at us and beckons
us to be restored to wholeness? Even before his mother, he
had loved this world, this cosmos from which he sprung,
"long before, while you carried him in the womb, that
dissolved the cosmos, which wafted the embryo so lightly."
Surely the deepest wound of this world we inhabit is to feel
uprooted from our divine beginning. It is one thing to
wander as a hungry spirit, as we do; it is something worse
to have forgotten that we carry the sa cred energy within us,
and are present to it, wheresoever we are. As transient
beings we are nonetheless the carriers of the eternal. How
powerful is Rilke's endorsement of this journey: "See, we do
not love as the flowers do, for a single year, for a timeless
liquor flows through our arms."
As hackneyed as the word love is, as jaded as the word God
or the phrase "have a nice day," we are still obliged to use
them. What Rilke is calling love is surely the toughest, most
resilient energy in the cosmos, the energy which survives
and is manifest in endlessly diverse ways to all the senses.
This love is the eros which seeks connection, the desire
which drives life in the face of the seductive terrors of the
abyss. We err to think such a force reserved for only one
person, our magical part ner, our erotic Doppelgdnger. It is
expended as well on "seething multi tudes" and "the fathers
lying in our depths." All of this ancient drama

has preceded the pas de deux we call love, which our culture
is driven to both venerate and narrow to mere venery or
sexual indulgence be cause it knows itself impoverished by
the loss of the gods.
Thus, the beloved is the recipient, certainly, of powerful
energies, but how would she have surmised "what archaic
hours you stir in your lover" or "what feelings arise out of
ancient being"? How deeply moved would we be if we were
to perceive such an ancient drama not only in us but in the
other as well? How much more could we love them if we
saw the invisible histories that moved in and through them?
How could we then lead them "nearer to Eden," that place
of beginnings, depar
tures, losses, and wistful reminiscences? What could we see
in the other, what mystery, what worthy history, would
open up the glottal stops of our hearts and allow us to
bestow on them that which "vanquishes the heavy nights"?
With Rilke we see the fine fusion of eros and logos, the deep
yearn ing to connect with the delicate differentiation of
language to summon, to intimate, but not to define or close
off. When we gloss this poem, as I have, we have not
understood it, or contained it, for it continues to own us
and remains elusive. One does not contain the divine. It
mani fests, abides a while, and departs, leaving but a trace,
through the arti facts of consciousness which sought to
retain and possess it.
In this third elegy Rilke has summoned the highest, most
mysteri ous energies, which we often subsume under the
appellation love. As Eros was a god, he was not to be
defined. He nods at us, moves through us, and then, at his
whim, leaves us. He is not to be restrained, for he is of the
godly ones. Rilke's gift is to bring us to a place where Eros is
glimpsed, along with all the declivities in which he abides.
We cannot remain, but it is a great gift to have been
afforded a moment there.
Why Are We Sojourners on This Earth?
In the ninth of his Duino Elegies, begun in 1912 but not

concluded un til 1922, the year of Eliot's "The Waste Land,"
Rilke asks another im mense question, namely, why are we
here on this spinning earth? The magnificent ninth elegy
begins with the question, "Why?" Why
in this interlude of grace which we call our lives are we
human? Human beings, doomed to die, are cursed and/or
blessed with consciousness, yet cling fervently to their
mortal fates. The word Frist often suggests the notion of
"grace," even in the ordinary sense of a grace period, a
moment of granted time. Grace we know is something
given, some
thing lent, not something earned. Dylan Thomas alluded to
the same gift of time in his famous poem "Fern Hill," where
he notes that Time allows us but "a few tuneful turnings /
before the children, green and golden, follow him out of
grace." So we are here only a fleeting mo
9
ment, graced by the gods, given consciousness (Promethean

burden as that is), yearning for love and for union, and
tasked with limited powers to transcend a certain fate. Why,
then, are we here?
Not for happiness, Rilke concludes, which itself is so
fleeting, so uncertain, so unretainable. Nor for simple
curiosity, though such has led us to the depths of the
oceans, to interstellar space, and to the ex ploration of our
own labyrinthian minds. Nor simply as discipline for the
heart, for we know that the heart may grow sated, break in
pain, and prove as much the agent of trickery as our
cunning and divided minds.
Rilke comes to a stunning conclusion. We are here because
"this fleet ing world" apparently needs us, we who are
paradoxically, "the most fleeting of all." Each of us is here to
observe, to bear witness to all things, if only once, and no
more. This, our condition, too, is our task.
And we, also, only once. And never again. But to have been
here once, if only for this once, to have been on this earth
once, seems immutable. 10
We are here, he suggests, to complete some purpose in the

cosmos, a purpose which has nothing to do with our own
will or hybris. We are here to help creation by being the
agent of its consciousness. This is an idea that Jung also
reached via a quite different route. In his controver
sial work Answer to Job, Jung argued that Yahweh needed
humans to carry the task of His consciousness, His
conscience, and His own evo lution." At first glance Jung's
argument sounds preposterous, certainly anthropocentric,
and hybristic. Moreover, Jung's argumentative acu
(47 )
men in Answer to Job would make a believer squirm. He shows the
contradictions in Yahweh's own statements; he demonstrates the lack of
moral development of those positions; and he cries out on behalf of
human suffering and injustice in questioning whether such a deity is
worthy of worship. Jung was no fool and later indicated that he wished he
had changed every reference to God to the god-imago. He knew well
enough to leave the arguments for God to the philosophers of religion and
the credos to persons of faith. He was more interested in showing the
evolution of human consciousness, which is what he meant by the
evolving god-imago. The imago Dei, he argued, tells us much about an
individual or a culture and very little about the Wholly Other.
Rilke is no fool either, and he asserts that our raison d'etre lies in our
capacity for growth as agents of consciousness. By each person becoming
more conscious, the cosmos gains consciousness.
But the capacity for consciousness is no sure thing. Of what, really, can
we become conscious? Isolated facts here and there, occasional patterns,
and rarely, deep intimations of the divine through dreams, visions, art,
and mythologies. We keep trying to catch and hold what seems so
fleeting, "we try to possess, to hold lightly in our simple hands, with our
stupefied gaze, our tongueless heart. Wishing to become it, yet to whom
may we pass it on? Though we long to hold on to it forever."
Our brains are feeble tools in the face of complexity and immen sity.
Our sight is sated, our hearts rendered dumb and inarticulate. We wish to
merge with the flow, to become it, and it passes by us. And what are we to
do with what we perceive, to whom do we give it, that which we can so
scarcely retain? Without the tools of metaphor and symbol we would have
precious little to say, for they allow us to talk about that about which we
cannot talk.
And what can be taken with us into the darker kingdom? What sur vives
us? We cannot, Rilke asserts, take with us what we saw. We can take
nothing which we have achieved here. What golden bough do we have to
allow us to visit that darker kingdom and return? We carry the long
lessons of love, the capacity to care about something or someone, but
even that may pass, and certainly the spinning planets and stately stars
are fixed in their orbits whether we raise a tumult or pass quietly into
nothingness. (Recall Edward Hirsch's lines cited earlier, "Stars are
the white tears of nothingness. / Nothingness grieves over
the disinte grating gods.")
Perhaps our place or vocation here is not unlike that of the
moun tain traveler who returns to the valley and speaks the
name of some new flower seen, some gentian to bring as a
souvenir and talisman of the ascent taken. But the key here,
Rilke says, is in the saying. Here he echoes the Hebrew
imagination in Genesis which analogizes the mys tery of
creativity in God's capacity to speak. With the word spoken,
the thing arises out of chaos into being: "perhaps we are
here in order to speak, to pronounce house, bridge,
fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window—at most column,
tower. But to speak, understand, oh to speak more
intensely than the things themselves could ever attain."
Our task is formidable and simple: to bear witness, to assist
into being, to help house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher,
and so on exist more intensely than they would without us.
In a letter written in 1925, Rilke noted, "Even for our
grandparents a 'house,' a 'well,' a familiar tower, their very
clothes, their coat, was infinitely more intimate; almost ev
erything was a vessel in which they found what is human
and added to the supply of what is human." To add to the
12
supply of what is human is our deepest destiny, which,

amid death and transience, brings joy. Here Rilke's
exclamatory joy is contained in the O zu sagen, "O h to
speak!" What joy! Here Rilke echoes the secondary
imagination of which Coleridge wrote, the echo of the
primal "I A m that I Am " of Yahweh. Here we are
co-creators with the Creator—humble servants, but
partners in creation itself. What a vocatus!
We who are most fleeting are summoned, nonetheless, to
this call ing, a calling which transpires only in the passing
moment but exists for that moment. Perhaps the finest love
poem I have ever seen was written by Archibald MacLeish
and takes its title and its cue from one of Shakespeare's
sonnets, "Not Marble Nor Gilded Monuments."
Shakespeare, writing to his beloved, "the dark ladie" of the
sonnets, which were written at the time of plague in
London, expresses the hope that the immortality of his
writing will grant continued life for these two mortal lovers.
MacLeish denies that his writing will grant any im mortality
to himself or the beloved.
LITERAR Y IMAGINING S (49)
/
will
not
speak of the famous beauty of dead women. I will say
the shape of a leaf lay once on your hair.
Till the world ends and the eyes are out and the
mouths broken,
Look! it is there!' 3
For MacLeish the recognition utterance, more exclamation than descrip

tion, bestows meaning on that existential moment and grants it deep ened
being. For MacLeish, for Rilke, as for classical Buddhism, the past is past
and the future is not yet. Only this moment exists. As Rilke ex claims,
"Here is the speakable moment; here is its home. Speak and bear witness.
While the Things themselves are slipping away more than ever."
Rilke capitalizes Things, not just because all nouns are capitalized in
German but because he wants to accord the things of our world— the
house, bridge, fountain, gate—mutual being and to celebrate that being.
We know even more than Rilke did of how evanescent the things around
us are. We live in a plastic, throwaway culture, a culture based on
momentary sensation and transient tastes. How much more im
portant for us, then, than in 1920, to affirm, to render what is real amidst
the fleeting moments and disappearing things. Through this affirma tion
we come at last to Rilke's vision of why we are here. Put simply, through
the acts of consciousness, reverence, mindfulness, and speech, we are here
to praise. We, the most fleeting, bring meaning into the world through the
verbal venues of praise.
Between hammers, our heart persists, as does the tongue between

our teeth and still, persisting, praises.
Our vocatus is to praise and, by doing so, grant things deeper being and
bring consciousness to them. This is very consistent with Jung's idea of the
place of consciousness and our task here.
In Jung's view, humanity is a partner in the continuing incarnation of
Being. Being springs forth from the Mystery, from inexplicable cos mic
energies—who among us can understand the miraculous nature of
everyday life, or of a baby, or of the quantum dynamics of the atom? But
through the act of consciousness, mindfulness, or what Rilke calls
praise, we bring meaning to those transient moments. As
Jung writes, "As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of
human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere
being." He also writes of that partnership with the Divine
which brings our spiritual task: "The myth of the necessary
incarnation of God .. . can be understood as man's creative
confrontation with the opposites and their synthesis in the
self, the wholeness of his personality... That is the goal...
which fits man meaningfully into the scheme of creation
and at the same time confers meaning upon it." 14
Jung's use of the idea of myth is clear enough as an

expression of dramatically rendered values which activate
and direct the energies of the soul, but such a phrase as
"the necessary incarnation of God" may strike us as strange.
The name and nature of the Divine remain shrouded in
mystery, of course, and we may only glimpse the invisible
when it momentarily inhabits the visible world. What
passes unnoticed is not unreal, but it depends on human
consciousness to bring it full identity. To this partnership
with the invisible world we bring recogni
tion. The Mystery confers being, but the human saying
confers mean ing. The world does not mean; it is. We are
the organisms of meaning and make our contribution
through the gift of consciousness.
Rilke could have stopped the ninth elegy with this
superlative in sight, but he goes further. Throughout the
Duino Elegieshe invokes an angel, in the same way in which
Milton invoked the "heavenly muse" or Plato, the daimon.
Rilke asks us to "praise this world to the angel." We are
asked to bring praise to the cosmos. We cannot bring the
gift of understanding, for there is much which eludes our
petty intelligence, nor can we bring only large emotion, for
there is much which exceeds our capacity. Rather we are
asked to tell the angel of the simple places and sights we
have seen, to speak of "the rope-maker in Rome or the
potter along the Nile," to show "how blessed the Thing can
be, and how guileless." These unremarkable events are
most remarkable, for they summon mere Things up and out
of the flux into consciousness, wherein they take on
enlarged destiny. Remember, Rilke has argued that these
transient Things need us for deeper being than they are
otherwise ca
pable: "And these transient Things know you are praising
them. They, most fleeting, look to us, the most fleeting of
all, for redemption."
LITERAR Y IMAGINING S ( 51 )
In
this paradox of being, with the transience of all things, the soul longs for
permanence. However momentary this life we lead, Rilke and Jung suggest
that the vocation of naming, of praising, of becoming conscious plays an
immense role in the unfolding of the cosmos. These things around us look
to us for deliverance from obscurity, from oblo
quy, from oblivion.
Like the ascending tones of Wagner's "Liebestod," which stretch to ward
eternity, Rilke takes this task one step further in his conclusion. Our
sacred vocation is to redeem the earth: "Earth, is this not what you desire,
invisibly... ? Is not transformation your most urgent yearning?"
The transformation of the earth comes from the engagement with
consciousness whereby the mysterious stuff of life is given a spiritual
identity through the experience of meaning. Our participation in this
partnership is homeopathic, for underneath material appearances, the
same divine energies course through us. That energy brings life, to which
our consciousness brings meaning.
Yet we and the earth are part of a single reality. And speaking to this
ever-evolving earth, Rilke says: "O h believe me, you do not need your
Springtimes to vanquish me again, for one, only one surfeits the blood.
Namelessly, from the beginning, I have been yours. You are always right,
and your deepest truth is intimate Death."
We can imagine a springtime, with the thrust of life from the heavy
earth, but can we imagine no observant consciousness to praise it? We
know what it means to drive through the spring countryside and see the
red and blue bursts of wildflowers. They will be there with or with
out us, but it was our consciousness which named them Indian paint
brush and bluebonnets.
But Rilke turns the matter one step further in suggesting that death is a
holy inspiration and our most intimate companion. Precisely be cause our
moments are few and finite, precisely because consciousness is so easily
annihilated, the moments of meaning which we bring to this place are all
the more precious. It is death which makes meaning possible, for without
it there would be only endless repetition and meaningless choice. With
mortality, choice takes on significance and we are obliged to discern what
matters. In a letter written in 1923 Rilke clarifies,

I am not saying that we should love death; but we should love life so
generously, so without calculation and selection, that we invol untarily
come to include, and to love death too... . Only because we exclude
death, when it suddenly enters our thoughts, has it be come more and
more a stranger to us; and because we have kept it a stranger, it has
become our enemy.... [Death is] our friend pre cisely when we most
passionately, most vehemently, assent to be ing here, to living and
working on earth, to Nature, to love. 15
From Greek mythology we recall Tithonus, who was granted immor tality,
found it a boring burden, and went to the gods to plead that his mortality
might be restored. As a blessing, they granted him the power to die and,
with that power, the capacity, indeed, the necessity for, meaning. So
Death, which accompanies the baby's cry, which stands watching at our
side, and whose imperatives none can deny, requires
us to become conscious, to become creatures of choice. We have been
granted mortality that we might have meaning, and have it abundantly.
Rilke concludes this mighty ninth symphony of praise by affirming the
power of this moment, this radical experience of presence. "Look, I am
living!" he exclaims. Not out of the childhood past, nor the future which may
or may not be, but out of this moment. Just as MacLeish wrote that "the
shape of a leaf lay in your hair.. . Look! it is there!", so Rilke celebrates this
moment where "overwhelming Being floods my heart." This moment, this
fleeting moment, is so full, and the more so because it is fleeting. This fate
we have, to be mortal beings and to be conscious of that mortality, also
begets our destiny, which is to bring meaning into the world, to create a life
and a sensibility for which only the word praise may suffice.
On the Naming of the Gods 16
Unlike so much of modern psychology, which has abrogated its immense

responsibility to be present to the large issues of soul and meaning and
which has reduced humanity to behaviors, cognitions, and biochemical
drives, Rilke and Jung dared to address the large questions.

What can be larger for us than love, death, and the divine? We see that
Jung and Rilke approach such mysteries with reverence, a desire to know,
an awareness of limitations, and, fortunately, with a huge imaginative
power. To turn away from these large concerns is the failure of nerve; to
take them on is what restores us to our dignity and our destiny.
The task of the poet, and the depth psychologist, is to bring us into
proximity with the sacred. The sacred is only knowable through expe
rience and then made meaningful and communicated by the agencies of
metaphor and symbol. Sometimes the sacred is remarkable for its
absence, sometimes for its anarchic quality, sometimes for its presence
beneath the surface of ordinary experience. For Rilke the naming of
"house," "tree," and "fountain," was a holy event if sensibility was open to
depth. There are lines by the German poet Friedrich Holderlin, whom Jung
frequently cited: "God is near but difficult to grasp, but where danger lies,
from there, too, deliverance emerges." And it is that
17
paradox that St.
Augustine confessed where we, "unlovely," rush "heed
lessly among the things of beauty," where the divine is with us, but we are
not with the divine. It is the time of the Great In-Between, the space
18
between Words. As Heidegger describes this spiritual interreg num of

modernism: "It is the time of the gods that have fled and of the god that is
coming. It is the time of need, because it lies under a double lack and a
double Not: the No-more of the gods that have fled and the Not-yet of the
god that is coming." 19
Poetry is not affectation then, nor aesthetic sleight of hand, but a

mediation between humanity and the numinous. Jung makes the poet's
contribution clear: "Poets are the first in their time to divine the darkly
moving, mysterious currents, and to express them according to the lim
its of their capacity in more or less speaking symbols. They make known,
like true prophets, the deep motions of the collective uncon scious, 'the
will of God'.. . which, in the course of time, must inevita bly come to the
surface as a general phenomenon." 20
Just as the dream synthesizes materials unknown to consciousness, and

the intuitive function accesses dimensions of reality beyond thought and
sensation, so the poetic sensibility discerns the deepest need and brings
forth images to speak the unspeakable, and to render the invisible world
accessible.

Reference to a few of Rilke's shorter poems may illustrate
this ca pacity of the archetypal imagination to "name the
gods" by providing images which link us once again to the
numinous.
J Find You in All These Things
I find You in all these things,

to which I am a brother in all,
in which minuscule seed you minutely hide yourself
and in the Great, you greatly reveal yourself.
This wondrous game of power

which unfolds itself in submission:
stretching through the roots, thickening in the trunks, and
resurrecting through the treetops. '
2
In the original Rilke uses the lowercase dich (you rather

than You), and though one may translate that word as Lord,
Rilke may be even more subtle. He does not name this god
directly, though we sense the godly coursing through
nature. All things pulse with this life; in the dormant seed
the divine sleeps; and through the vastness the Vast reveals
itself. In this manifestation of power Rilke finds the paradox
of submission. The highest is found in the lowest root, and
he distantly alludes to the submission of Christ on the tree
of Golgotha, the humble servant who rises from the dead.
While Rilke could not personally express a Christian credo,
he could appeal to that tradition and certainly did evoke the
archetypal pattern of the vegetative god which runs through
Adonis to Tammuz to Osiris to Dionysus to Christ. Under
the weight of institutions, under the en
crustation of dogma and ritual, Rilke recovers wonder and
reinstitutes the wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus: that things
above are copies of things below and through the archetypal
image the gods bring the time less into our time.
Rilke lived in the time between the no-more and the not-yet.
As a poet he knew that we always live in the space between
words, but as a modern he also knew that we live in the
space between Words. His poem
(55 )
"Lament" expresses the sense of loss and the pathos of
longing which we all feel: "Everything is far and long gone
by. I think that the star glit tering above me has been dead
for a million years."22
The transient things of our lives have left us: places, friends,
loved ones. Upon what do we place our faith, from what
metaphysical bench mark may we find our place, chart our
course? Even the star above us has long ago blinked off and
the distance is so vast the news has not yet reached us. It is
noteworthy that our word desire refers to the mariner's star
by which a course is charted. The loss of the guiding star
means we are unable to find the shore we seek. Rilke says
that he would like to "step out of my heart," but he cannot
sacrifice his spiritual pain lest he lose who he is in the
process. He says he "would like to pray," but to whom? As
he looks through the vast night with all its dark holes wait
ing to suck us in, he nonetheless believes that one of those
stars still flames alive. He concludes: "I believe I know
which one alone endures, which one, at the end of its rays,
still stands like a White City." 23
What a wonderful rendering of the modernist

condition—the sense of a past unretrievable, a future
unimaginable, and the need to continue one's journey
without guidance. What a wonderful summons to the
existential risk and trust in the supportive cosmos in his
evocation of that white city which stands, still, at the end of
its infinitely long beam.
In the lyric "Autumn," Rilke nominates not only a season of
the soil but a season of the soul as well. This seems fitting,
since we live in the waning days of some large history but
cannot yet glimpse the rebirth which will spring forth later.
He analogizes the falling autumnal leaves with the fading of
distant gardens in the sky. The loss is Edenic, taking from
us not only the recent summer but also the fabled garden of
in
nocence. And through the cosmic night the earth, too, is
falling:
All of us are falling. See this hand now fall.

And now see the others; it is part of all.
And still there is one who in his hands gently

Holds this falling endlessly. 24
Notice that Rilke does not name this god. It is not Baal, or
Yahweh, or any of the million deities which have been
reified and have disappeared from this planet. He
anthropomorphizes this power through the im age of gentle
hands, hands which hold us eternally, even as we fall
through time and space. Naming the god is to define and
control it. Rilke is a most religious poet for he is able to
evoke the divine, inti mate the numinous, and yet allow it to
remain as it is—mysterious, elusive, Other.
And for the last example, I turn to the poem which
expresses its thesis in its first line: "Now is the time when
the Gods emerge / from occu pied Things." As we have
25
seen before, the Things of this world are not inanimate to

the poet; each throbs with life and carries the imprint of the
gods on its frail form. We recall Jung ascribing divinity to
those events which crossed his path and violently
overturned ego's intent, and Rilke asserts that they
"overthrew every wall in my house." It is often difficult to
26
accept that the Divine Will may not be concordant with our
own, that the path for which we are intended is not that
which we would have chosen. I recall an analyst in Zurich
asking which mem ber of our small group had chosen to be
there; no one replied. Who, he asked, had no choice but to
be there, and all nodded assent.
Not only do we flee the disruptive powers of the gods, we
tend to shun the invitation to enlargement which such
encounters invite. In every visitation to the swamplands of
the soul there is a task for the enlargement of
consciousness, whether we will it or not. And Jung re
minded us to flee these invitations at our peril. Oedipus,
who was the smartest man in Thebes, knew not himself,
and that of which he was unconscious led to the fulfillment
of the oracles. "When an inner situ ation is not made
conscious, it happens outside as fate," Jung writes.
Elsewhere he argues that genuine encounters with the Self,
or with the gods, as Rilke would have it, are usually suffered
as defeats by the ego. 27
Rilke evokes those gods, calls forth the unnameable ones:

"O h you Gods, who once came often, but now slumber in
Things." For the animistic world of our ancestors, nature
28
was charged with soul-stuff. The trees, the streams, the

animal life was divinity itself, in all its manifold
forms—fearful, joyous, always profound. In de-souling
nature, we gained greater manipulation of the material
world, but at
(57 )
the loss of meaningful relation to it. Rilke knows that the
gods have not left; they have gone underground and wait to
be resummoned from the world of Things: "Again it is your
rebirth, Gods. We only repeat things. But you are the primal
source. The world arises from you, and these beginnings
glisten through the crevices of all our failures." 29
The recovery of spirituality in our time will not likely come

from the revivication of someone else's experience, for
experience is seldom if ever transferred. It will come
through our capacity to open to radi cal experience (from
the word radix, or "root" experience), whether through our
encounters with nature, each other, or the insurgencies of
our own psyches. Rilke reminds us that the gods alone are
the source of the renewal of meaning. Recall that we are
using the word gods here to describe those images which
rise spontaneously out of depth en counters. Whatever
metaphysical status they may have is another ques tion, but
that they are psychologically compelling is irrefragable. Our
failure is the failure of the imagination. Racism or bigotry is
the failure of imagination, the power to image the world
which the Other em bodies. Our failure is to have traded
the experience of the divine for the fantasy of control.
This decision, made centuries ago, and reinformed by most
contem porary theologies and all ego-based psychologies,
required the gods to go underground and remain within our
unconscious, to emerge in projections, addictions, and
sociopathies. But the gods are not dead. Nietzsche was, like
Rilke, a man of radical faith when in the nineteenth century
he announced the death of God. He cared enough about the
questions of meaning to denounce the encapsulation of the
gods in sterile rite and dogma. But he knew that the vitality
of the divine was to be found elsewhere. He knew the truth
of those lines of Yeats: "What ever flames upon the night /
Man's own resinous heart has fed." 30
Through the powers of the archetypal imagination, allied

with logos, which brings consciousness, such philosophers
and poets have kept the gods alive by retaining a respectful
humility before the Mystery, and by finding images whose
power brings us into proximity with the numinous and
compels a new encounter with the divine.

CHAPTE R 3
c^ncamational (^maqinin^s
The Painter's Eye on Eternity
Primordial experiences rend from top to bottom the cur tain
upon which is painted the picture of an ordered
world and allows a glimpse into the unfathomable abyss of
the unborn and of things yet to be. Is it a vision of
other worlds, or of the darkness of the spirit, or of the
primal beginnings of the human psyche?
— C. G. Jung
A Critical Place to Stand

unknowable and lies beyond our grasp. The
late-nineteenth-century art critic Walter Pater once
observed that all art aspires to the condition of music. I
believe he meant by this that music is an inherent, natural
experience which has no content per se, that is, denotated
meaning, though it does have form, rhythm, and
progression. By aspiring to the condition of music, art then
transcends the tyranny of ideology, the popularity of an
idea, or the need to understand it. As that great American
philosopher Louis Armstrong once observed, if you have to
have jazz explained to you, you will never know what it
means.
Nonetheless, in aspiring to the condition of music, the arts
inevita bly employ "language" that is generally referential,
or connotative, and motifs that are identifiable by
consciousness. I should like to summa rize briefly the
perspectives and the pitfalls of any analysis of the arts.
ARTA
S IDE A
Many forms of art employ an idea, as we just saw in Rilke's
contempla tion of love and death. But we do not read a work
of art to get a new idea. The idea of a novel or play will
simply come down to a truism: "we love and are betrayed,"
or "we long for meaning," or "in the end we die." As
Hemingway once observed, if the hero does not die in the
end, the author simply did not finish the story. And what if
the idea that fuels a work of art is one with which we
disagree? Are we then to throw the entire work away? If
one is not moved to ideological and affective compliance
with medieval Catholicism, should Dante's Commedia be
discarded? Surely there is more to a work of art than the
idea which spawned it, an idea which may itself be
commonplace, even in an origi nal aesthetic expression.
A R T A S FOR M
I was educated in the era of the New Criticism, which argued

that the idea of a work of art was essentially irrelevant and
that the work manifests a series of structures, rhetorics,
and agencies such as metaphor, symbol, or irony. The
analysis of the work of art was essentially the analysis of the
craft of art, irrespective of its cultural Sitz im Leben or its
ideology. In these
later days of deconstructionism we are told that the work of
art is always a Rorschach reflection of its creator, inevitably
revealing class, gender, and other biases. In neither
approach to the arts do we find ourselves address ing why
we are moved by art or how it deepens our journey.
A R T A S RELATIONSHI P T O NATUR E
As one examines the history of the arts, visual, literary, and

musical, over the last two centuries, one sees a progressive
decline in the im portance of ideology for sure, but even
more of a shift in our relation ship to nature. Consider
painting, for example. In the early nineteenth century
Jacques Louis David might still be summoned to depict a his
toric event, such as the crowning of Napoleon. The Barbizon
school certainly depicted the richness of nature, but one
begins to see a loos ening of the line and a growing
fuzziness of color in those forests and
fields. In Joseph Turner we see the anticipation of
impressionism. For the impressionists, the object is no
longer paramount. Light is
their subject, light as it is reflected and refracted from
surfaces—water, lilies, colorful attire. Quickly they are
followed by the expressionists, whose painting celebrated
the emotions occasioned by their subjects; the pointillists,
who see even the light as a series of luminous points; the
cubists, who see constituent shapes only, interesting in and
for themselves; the vorticists, who celebrate energy itself;
and the abstract
ionists, in whose art the object disappears altogether. This
history of modern art shows that art progressively becomes
the subject of art. The object, whose representation may be
better approached by photog raphy, ceases to be the
subject. There has been, in addition, the disso lution of the
metaphysical grounding of objects from the combined
perspectives of Kant and quantum physics.
A R T A S PSYCHE' S CHIL D
My first exposure to the psychological criticism of art came

from the neo-Freudians, and I found their work to be
reductionistic and in ser vice to privileged ideologies. Much
Jungian criticism has suffered from the same reductionism.
Even when Jung himself ventured into the criti
cism of art, as in his essays on Joyce's Ulysses and Picasso,
he might better have not written at all.
When asked the question "On what critical ground are we to
stand?", I feel obliged to say that I value the partial truths
of virtually every criti cal approach there is. However, when I
reflect on why I have valued psy chology but loved art, why
I find the arts a more reliable guide to human history,
behavior, and hidden motive than may be found in books of
psychology, I am driven to confess a personal bias. I find
myself treasur ing that which stirs my imagination, moves
me deeply, and opens me to enlarged vision, no matter how
or in what fashion this may be done. When we are in the
presence of art that does all these things, we find, in James
Hillman's words, "There is no end to depth, and all things
become soul." 1 find myself treasuring that art which brings
1
me into proximity with the gods. Here again, Hillman

reminds us what is meant by that term gods: "In archetypal
psychology gods are imagined . . . They are formulated
ambiguously, as metaphors for modes of experience and as
numinous borderline persons. They are cosmic perspectives
in which the soul participates." 2
INCARNATIONA L IMAGINING S ( 6l )
So, what moves us is the encounter with the depths, with
the godly, whether consciously processed or not. And what
moves us most deeply is something which we are also,
otherwise we remain indifferent to it. The principle of
resonance is critical here, for resonance tells us what is true
for us, or what moves us. Resonance is not created by an act
of will; it is experienced autonomously, the stirring of "like
to like," the thrum of the tuning fork inside of us. Such
experience, as Plato noted long ago in his dialogue called
The Meno, is always re-cognition, the re-membering of
some lost wholeness as we encounter its numinous parts.
This critical place to stand, that all art is psyche's child, is
itself a metaphor, of course, but it acknowledges the power
of the arche
typal imagination to move us and to bring us into proximity
with our source. Once again, Hillman: "Within the
metaphorical perspective, within the imaginal field,
nothing is more sure than the soul's own activity.... Thus
the soul finds psyche everywhere, recognizes itself in all
things, all things providing psychological reflection. And
the soul accepts itself in the mythical enactments as one
more such metaphor. More real than itself, more ultimate
than its psychic metaphor, there is nothing." 3
In sum, our critical place on which to stand depends itself

on meta phor. To recall that all standpoints are metaphors is
to be saved from literalism, from ideological idolatry, and
from the fundamentalism of that psychosis which confuses
objects with their names. The stand point, then, is the
metaphor of soul which allows us to be moved by the gods,
those powers who are themselves metaphors. Retaining our
ability to reflect on metaphor allows us to accept the
autonomy of the mysteries and to remain open to their
unpredictable visitations. So, all we can say in the presence
of art which moves us is that we have been visited by the
gods, with metaphor as the tangible trace of the encounter.
The Metarealism of Meaning
In speaking on several occasions to the Richmond, Virginia,

Jungian society, I have had the privilege of staying in the
home of Nancy Witt, one of the group's founders, in
Ashland, Virginia. Nancy lives in a nine-
teenth-century mill, over a stream and a waterwheel, beside
a pond, in some of the most historic land of our nation.
When I first visited Richmond and walked into that mill, I
was stunned by the thirty-plus paintings that line the
spacious walls of two floors and create not only a museum
effect but also a sanctuary for meditation and reflection.
Nancy has created a body of work over the last twenty-some
years which incarnates a deeply religious and arche
typal vision of eternity. Her favorite critical review came
from an un lettered man who was helping unload her
paintings for display at a conference in New Hampshire.
This hotel worker went about and gath ered other
employees, and she overheard him say to them, "Come, you
have to see these paintings. They are religious!" So, I say to
you, come see these paintings; they are religious.
We are all familiar with the moment when painting
discovered psy choanalysis and produced surrealism. I have
always been drawn to the work of Rene Magritte and
Salvador Dali. Although we may not pro fess to understand
their work, the art speaks to that part of our souls whence
our dreams emanate. Within the painter's frame, familiar ob
jects are melted, dis-located, or distorted into affectively
charged states. We will be just as comfortable or
uncomfortable with their work as we are with our own
dream life. The capacity of the ego to accept ambi guity is
central to emotional maturity. In fact, how we can hold what
I call the triple A's—ambiguity, ambivalence, and
anxiety—in tension is a test of our psychic strength, which
can even be reflected in our aes thetic tastes. Those who say,
"I know what I like," are really saying, "I like what I know."
Thus, the surrealists are celebrated because we all intuit
that they are on to something, that they are reflecting
something very deep within our time and our psyches, even
as they are ridiculed, even reviled, as a means of keeping
their visitations to the underworld at a safe distance.
Nancy Witt describes herself as a "metarealist," however.
Perhaps the best way to understand this term is to think of
Kafka, that compatriot of Rilke, who, with his strange
parabolic stories, novels, and aphorisms, stood, according to
Auden, in relationship to our troubled times as Dante stood
as the chief visionary of his. When you think of Kafka's
stories, they are eminently ratiocinative and realistic, once
you accept
INCARNATIONA L IMAGINING S ( 63 )

Archetypal Imagination PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Archetypal Imagination PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Archetypal Imagination PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

^(yhe <B^lrchetypal

Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology

Foreword by David H. Rosen

TEXA S A& M UNIVERSIT Y PRES S

Fourth printing, 2008

The paper used in this book

chosen for durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hollis , James, 1940-

The archetypal imagination / James Holli s ; foreword by David H . Rosen. —

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISB N 0-89096-932-9 (cloth : alk.

ISB N 13: 978-1-58544-268-3 (pbk.)

Paintings by Nancy Witt Opening I 66

Second Opening I 85 Rhyton I 87

Glass Darkly I 89 Painting (V) I 91 Bailey Won I 93

Imagination is more important than information.

This book on archetypal imagination is critically needed

Chodorow has written, "Jung's analytic method is based

Jung's concept of active imagination (the same thing as

Imagination is the eye of the soul.

Being alone (all One) with nature is intricately tied to

An uncommon degree of imagination

In chapter 2, "Literary Imaginings," Hollis utilizes two of

Everything you can imagine is real.

In chapter 3, "Incarnational Imaginings," Hollis leads us to

Shakespeare knew, as did Plato, that love and poetry are

Alice Walker has said:

Our shame is deep. For shame is the result of soul injury.

The Golden String Which Leads to Heaven's Gate

Brightness falls from the air.

speaks of the archetype as a formative process, more prop erly understood

ARCHETYPA L IMAGINING S (5)

Huston Smith, a historian of religion, once asked me this question:

the answer to that question definitively, I surmise that the ar

a motion and a spirit, that impels

A practical manifestation of this process of archetypal imagining and a

I give you the end of a golden string,

What we wish most to know, most desire, remains

cation of "white tears," the grieving over lost certainties—all

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

(14) ARCHETYPA L IMAGINATIO N

This paragraph is very rich and will reward us upon further

smaragdine tablet(which explained the secret of the

The loss of symbolic connection to self or cosmos, Jung suggests in the

transcendent which they provided, obliged the meaning task to invert as

This dissociation of the individual personality we know by the ugly and

The archetypal imaging power represents an aspect of our partici pation

These two rich sentences bear further attention. Note those

We live in a spiritually impoverished time, and Jung argues

(l8 ) ARCHETYPA L IMAGINATIO N

While a person who works in sincere dialogue with others, submits to

a concept, nor a presumed metaphysical construct; it is an

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

breviaries or catechisms, but it is a profoundly respectful

This urgency to personify the cosmos is the primal religious

(22 ) ARCHETYPA L IMAGINATIO N

Primitive man is not much interested in objective explanations of the

This need to assimilate, to internalize, is the need we all have to render

To read the cosmos, then, we need to read the psychic life of