Urtha and Chora

The Germanic Well of Urtha as vessel of the past (death) and the Platonic Choraas Receptacle (xwpa), the pure space of the matrix-substrate and “nurse of all generation”, bear something in common. Curiously, the Germanic model follows the early Psychoanalytic (Freudian) appraisal of the unconscious as a receptacle (“garbage pail”) of past events which, as Freud later realized, had as much to do with Thanatos as it did Eros. The Greek model, on the other hand, follows more the definitions explicated by Plato and which he abstracted from the feminine mystery cults. The Greek model in the comparison to the Germanic would appear to revert back to the original condition of Urtha as “pure and without impress”; that is, “virgin,” tabula rasa, or prior to its being filled by the present. Strangely enough, this would place the Freudian unconscious in cultural kinship with the Germanic notion, whereas the Jungian model prevails as closer to the Classical model, including the mystery religions as well as Plato and Aristotle. Yet, as previously observed, the Germanic Well as “source” is equally related to the pyge of even more ancient sleeping and dreaming steatopygous ladies; that is, as repository of things final and at end. For Plato, on the other hand, the source is the archetype itself and which is masculine but in the sense of the animus.
It may only be deduced that the Germanic notion reiterated by Freud was intermediary in an evolution that would lead to the Greek notion, and whose model was preferred (intentionally or not) by Jung. Apparently pyge was reconditioned by the Greeks via the Asclepian cults, but not before Hesiod’s vulgar regurgitation of a cosmogony still alive among rude country folk going back to the original Bronze Age differentiation of the World Parents; Sky Father Ouranos and earth mother Ge, or Gaia. It is thus likely that the Platonic matrix-substrate as virgin and without impress searches for the archécondition and which when abstracted is resolved as a concept of eternal space, or space that is timeless, not unlike Kant’s notion of absolute space as apriori in and by itself (separate from time). Obviously, in either case, pure space approximates as what may be called the “absolute feminine” as virgin, or the matrix in potentia(the Kore, or Persephone), which in the Hadean format is also the Queen of Death. In turn, this signals the Germanic concept of Urtha as Well of Death (the past) and both of which refer to the matrix generative powers as overlapped in the motif of death, e.g., as in the megalithic womb/tombs.
“Time”, on the other hand, would postulate itself as the absolute masculine, or eternal time which, in and by itself, would not have yet extended its spermatic function. This would equally indicate Time as indwelled in Space, i.e., as an immanence. This idea is somewhat mirrored in the Hebrew idea of the Shekinahwhich indwells the ark, but which is feminine in nature; and as an aspect of God, literally “time” incarnate, if by time is meant the beginning begun. Or, as is the convention of modern astrophysicists; indicating the beginning as the -nth moment preceding creation. In either case, an infinitude is allowed a limitation. Paradoxical as they may seem, it does allow for the infinitesimal moment separating eternity from the event of creation. Indeed, it is not possible to fix the moment between 12...nth o’clock midnight and the nthmoment after to mark the AM! That unmarkable moment is, of course, the hypothetical moment or point of time as eternal. Hence, from Plato and the more ancient mythologems from which he drew, and on to Kant, a metaphorical differentiation of gender is used to posit a fundamental reality condition; i.e., the original world Parents qua absolute (eternal) Time and Space as androgynous.
Here the Greek language is instructive. It had two words for “space”; topos as marked and delineated space (as in “topology”), and chora as receptacle space; a contained internal space yet to be imprinted, or marked. Aristotle used both terms interchangeably whereas Plato did not. In his Timaeus there is no question he intends the choraspace to indicate the virgin matrix receptacle, rather than space (topos) that has measured description. The Kantian absolute space reverts the concept of space back to the Platonic chora as absolute or virgin and “without impress” space, and behind which is the pre-historic notion of parthenogenic generation. Certainly neither Plato or Kant would be aware of this in such unequivocal terms.
The distinctions remain constant until the late 19th Century when Relativity theory once again placed Time and Space- or would we say the “Original World Parents”!- in immutable bond, rejoining as such archetypal Ma and Pa. Does this in fact undo the original differentiation of maternal and paternal functions? In one way it does, insofar as a fusion rather than unity of Ma Space and Pa Time is inferred. With relativity the cosmic matrix-space is reduced to the world-lines of curved space, and which is quite an appropriate way to measure the lady. But along with her three co-ordinate points there is included a fourth that is none other than Pappa Time. The active male principle (as “time”) is thus back in play as the complement to the feminine space with the exception that analytically neither are held apart as in the Newtonian and Kantian in-and-by-themselves format. Time is no longer the Deus Absconditussecluded by Himself in a cosmic secret laire; and matrix-space is no longer held in virginal stasis (as in and by Herself) or “pure and without impress.” Reading such metaphors, may it not be assumed that the philosophical and scientific authors of such concepts were necessarily aware that they were speaking in metaphor, or that they were drawing from certain archetypal psychisms. Yet, it is clear that from age to age and from one altered metaphor to the next, an evolution takes place from ultra-fusion of world parents to ultra-differentiation, marking as such a sliding scale that is cyclically recurrent from synthetic myth-statement to analytic conceptual statement, mirroring as such the state of the culture-body in any given time.

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Time, Space and the World Parents

In view of this, it is possible to outline the four conditions by which space and time (secretly in the metaphor of Ma and Pa) have been represented. In the first condition the space-mother-- which would be all-inclusive of “matter”-- is entirely defined as “the past” and by which “death” is predicated (the Germanic Urtha in league with the Maltese model of the dreaming fat-assed lady); the matrix-corpus as that which swallows up the present (time) as “father,” just as the earth swallows the sun at twilight and reborn the son at dawn. The second condition finds past and present, space and time, Ma and Pa as differentiated (from Hesiod’s myth cosmogony to Plato’s prose concept), and Ur-stated as in and by themselves (Kant). Hesiod was, curiously enough, ahead of Plato insofar as he found his absolutes soon enough in the archetypal battle of the sexes, including the Oedipal contest between fathers and sons with mother as the instigator.
As Hesiod tells it in his Theogony: Mother Earth became impatient with the nightly fornication imposed upon her by Father Sky. She put up her son Kronos, her “cunning trickster,” as she called him, to unman his father as he came down on her. Two things resulted from this bloody deed; Kronos asserted itself so that earth and sky were separated, and Pappa Sky’s organ was heaved into the sea and from which Love (Aphrodite) came into being. This may tell us something instructive: that before there was a sense of “time” there was no such thing as love, i.e., only fornication. Notably, most scholars are reluctant to identify Kronos with time for the simple reason that Hesiod’s Kronos is distinctly pre-Hellenic and related more to an agricultural function and a matricentric culture. He is as such a primordial kind of king, part human, part daimon and performs during ritual seasonal sacrifices. Jane Harrison notes: “Kronos indeed, so far as he is a Year-god, marks and expresses that earlier calendar of Hesiod, in which Works and Days are governed by the rising and setting of certain stars and constellations, Sirius, Orion, the Pleiades, and the comings and going of migratory birds, the swallow, the cuckoo, and the crane. But though man looks to these heavenly and atmospheric terata to guide his sowing and reaping, his real focus of attention is still earth. And inasmuch as his social structure is matrilinear, she is Mother-Earth; Father-Heaven takes as yet but a subordinate position” (Epilegomena To The Study of Greek Religion and Themis, University Books, 1962;
p. 497). This Kronos has little to do, as far as scholars are concerned, with Chronos as an Orphic figure derived from the Iranian Time-God Zrvan. Although there is neither apparent cultural or etymological connection between Kronos and Chronos, the more ancient and chthonian Kronos certainly appears to deal in measured seasons, and by which the ancient agriculturists gave measure to what we call “Time.” I will not argue the case. Time is how one measures it; either by the clock or seasonal comings and going!
The third condition elaborates conceptually the Platonic model of generation; where Pappa archetypal Intelligible cohabitates with a renewed in virginity Mamma Ge, or De-Meter, called in her virgin state as chora (space) and which sounds astoundingly similar to Kore (maiden or virgin as the Persephone aspect of Mother Demeter).
Two millennia or so later Kant, in the manner of Kronos, sees fit to rend apart Ma Space and Pa Time, send them separated and divorced into alienation as in-and-by-themselves (absolutes), and by which condition the universe is re-designed by Newton. On the way Descartes proclaims the “mind” as tabula rasa or mind in the model of virgin space, reiterating intellect as essentially “parthenogenic” (i.e., tautologically predisposed).
Apparently a transhistorical cycle is at work here because shortly after Einstein appears as the shotzghin to getting Time and Space back again to marital intercourse. His Relativity theory serves to repeat the cycle from myth to concept-formation (and back), reuniting what Classical Physics held absolutely separate. But no sooner re-united than it is discovered that they are only structurally in bed insofar as the curved world-lines of Ma Space is merely a piece of geometry and algebra; and where Pa Time is retained as the same old absolute he ever was now enjoying eternal permanence as Einsteins Constant (the imperishable and uncreated speed of light); an absolute no less endured as time in the absolute as Plato’s archetypal intelligibles, or Kant’s notion of absolute time which justifiably enough became anathema for modern physicists. Clearly, therefore, we are witness in sum to a transhistorical demonstration of tautologism, achieved unwittingly through the simple device of “double-think;” the switching of metaphors to alter major world concepts and which is simply an unreserved reliance on typos  to the exclusion of arché.
The Relativity model of the World Parents merely indwells Father Time as fourth co-ordinate in the curvaceous Mother Space, serving its most apriori spermatic intelligible as light and its fixed and absolute rate of propagation. Time is thus fixed in much the same way as the Kantian in-and-by-itself eternal time, a condition determined by its “speed,” or articulated motion through the curved lines of his mate, which is itself absolutized as the unalterable geometry of cosmic curved space. The tautological and parthenogenic old myth condition is implied insofar as in tail-eating serpent style (as Uroboros) time in such a space may theoretically encounter itself. Hence it is enclosed in itself and like space remains self-predicating and by which we may come to the conclusion that the universe is finite, beginning with a “big bang” (which is how world parents do it) and ending as a “black hole” condition in an entropic past which is precisely the model of the Old Germanic Urtha.
As I have inferred, the absolutizing of the rate of propagation of light as a fixed an apriori constant merely supplants the notion of time in and by itself. No real wedding of Ma Space and Pa Time results simply because the force of gravity cannot be accounted for. This Einstein attempted to accommodate in his as yet untestable proposal for a “cosmological constant.” From a mythological standpoint we, of course, know what “gravity” (as a force) is. Here the Greek concept of ananke, or “necessity” comes into play; as utter compulsion, unequivocally restrictive; what binds us to Ma Space and what occupies space; that property of spacial extension which exerts the force of gravity, Mother Ananke. The ultimate metaphor of such force is, of course, the Black Hole, which is absolutely cosmologically constant insofar as its force of compulsion is predicated in the hypothetical condition of zero mass and absolute density. Not even light can resist such gravity, and which is sucked in to meet the dimension of eternal time (between oblivion, or “nothing” and creation). cf., Hillman’s On the Necessity of Abnormal Psychology for a notable presentation of the Greek concept of Ananke.
There is, however, more Jungian psychology in this than meets the eye. The model from Urtha to Freud and Einstein implies an indwelling of the masculine principle within the feminine vas, but hidden (as Deus Absconditus), or in that state of Lethe understood by Greeks as something dead, forgotten or more accurately, concealed. Here the Greek Hades and the Germanic Urtha overlap, especially with regard to “time”, synchronic, diachronic or otherwise. In all cases, the models infer the notion of an animus (time, as Aeon) performing internally for the matrix and moving her in time through her own space (and which is the manner we all move towards finality).

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Ma and Pa: Breeders of Synchronicity

This would bring us up to date in the matter of dear old dad hanging in the closet, both cosmically and personally considered. Here an anticipation is appropriate. Since the time factor has a fixed rate of propagation, any idea of instantaneity of relation between things at a distance is out of the Relativity question, especially Heisenberg was uncertain. This law further locks the time-animus in its matrix and which dictates there is only one universe, just as there is only one matrix-space and one father time germinally inside her, both fused in single equation. The notion (from Greeks to Gnostics, Christians and Modern Science) is contra-indicated by not only the model of worlds within worlds common to the Well of Urtha, but cryptically signaled in the circles within circles found in megalithic monuments. The next step, as there must always be in defiance of final ends, arrives soon enough to in fact allow the cosmic animus (time) a new masculine autonomy. Supplementary to, and predicated upon the modern Relativity model, there follows Jung’s notion of Synchronicity which, because active as instantaneous (acasual) connection of two events at a distance, in effect abolishes the limitations of time and space as both classically and modernly conceived. Here the “order of time” enters the spacial matrix manifold seemingly at random intervals, without probability and outside the limits of statistical predictability. Immediately, therefore, Jung’s Synchronicity model, still retained as an aspect of World Parents activity, allows time as an animus pierce the hymen of the space womb (“warped” as it is according to Sci Fi writers) to perform as the “Spirit of Time” in the same sense of the ancient idea of recurrence, eternal return and fixed cyclic periods, e.g., promoted at the end of the Classical Age by the Gnostic and Orphic image of Ion (Aeon), and which no doubt was in correspondence with the ancient awareness of precession, i.e., the “Platonic Year” in its 26,000 year cycle.
The idea of Synchronicity is thus seemingly a repeat reminiscent of the observance of the Platonic year in Orphic and Gnostic cosmology as well as the various religious eschatologies right on through to Hegel’s teleological Spirit of History, Marxist’ predestination of political evolution, and what Teilhard Du chardin had in store for his Omega. All follow precedents logged in the transhistorical culture-body. But in the case of Jung’s Synchronicity concept, Time performs as a wild ace in the deck of matrix space to effect acausal coincidences that are out of explanations, scientifically or mythologically. Unlike the other metaphors of generating or non-generating World Parents, the synchronicistic animus overcomes the space-matrix by breaking out of its limitation to curved space, and as if two points at a distance and aeons apart could occupy the same space (of mind and experience) at the same time.
Even Plato would pale at such a notion: “For an image, since the reality, after which it is modelled, does not belong to it, and exists ever as the fleeting shadow of some other, must be inferred to be in another (i.e., in space), grasping existence in some way or other, or it could not be at all. But true and exact reason, vindicating the nature of true being, maintains that while two things (i.e., the image and space) are different they cannot exist one of them in the other and so be one and also two at the same time.”123 Plato, of course, was unaware of the Uncertainty Principle (of Heisenberg) and would be as much disturbed by it as are modern physicists insofar as it disrupts a neat structuralist and logico-mathematical model of fundamental or original reality.
There is, however, a covered ambivalence in Plato’s statement; where, on one hand, it would concur with the modern idea of the impossibility of instantaneity, and on the other, might uphold the possibility except for the flimsy barrier of “true and exact reason.” He conditions his sureness in such matters by advising: “Of these and other things of the same kind, relating to the true and waking reality of nature, we have only this dreamlike sense, and we are unable to cast off sleep and determine the truth about them.”124 But there you have Plato the reductive structuralist and Plato’s myth participating pitted against each other, stretched between the quantitative and the qualitative perspectives of awareness.

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Finality and Generation

Jung’s formulation, although far more palliative than the mythologems of generation outlined in Plato’s Timaeus, is equally problematic. He notes: “Psychic processes therefore behave like a scale along which consciousness ‘slides’. At one moment it finds itself in the vicinity of instinct, and falls under its influence; at another, it slides along to the other end where spirit predominates and even assimilates the instinctual processes most opposed to it.” This dynamical image of psychic process is cast as something androgynous, conceiving of psyche (as feminine) and spirit (as masculine) yet both as a single nut, much as relativity holds space and time. In view of the implication of such imperatives, Jung must limit his definition: “The archetypal representations (images and ideas) mediated to us by the unconscious should not be confused with the archetype as such. They are varied structures which all point back to one essentially ‘irrepresentable’ basic form.” The basic form would in Jung’s view be active at the “psychoid” level of the unconscious, or where the “psychic instincts” (archetypes) overlap with biological processes. Here Aristotle’s idea of entelechy may be applied to the pre-imagic archetype; as seminal, seed or engram, much in the same way that the notion is translated in application to genetic “message” encoded nucleic acids, proto-protein DNA materials.125
Equally applicable is the idea of seminal originality by which genetic materials do not “copy” anything but prevail as pre-dispositions to form according to a particular apriori format. They are realized only after combined of male and female germinal material. The original form (in potentia) may be fixed only in the entelechal sense, whereas the final form in its materialization (as an “image”) is hardly a copy, but always in contingency to the accidents of sexual combination. This simply reminds that any conjunction of polar complements, such as, for example, space and time, resolves not in a third condition through copying or imitation but as a unique and original circumstance. Yet not only are the accidents of combination a factor but the element of contingency to an external event. Need it be repeated; the archetype remains an empty, blind or invisible (i.e., unconscious) factor until it responds to an external event, and by which its predisposition to form is conditioned and then presented. Keeping this in mind, it may be apparent that the phenomenon of synchronicity is far more ubiquitous than the mind would permit us to imagine, insofar as time and space, regardless of relativity theory, keep their places obediently apart. Obviously the dreamlife, even as Plato had a healthy respect for it, does not observe such tidy arrangements. Indeed, the dream is virtually based in meaningful acausal connections (synchronicity) and all of which we are happy to contain in so empty a term as “irrational.” But in all cases, when the “order of time” inseminates space so that the separation of time and space is momentarily abolished, the arché event is presented. A generation is thereby commenced and which for all purposes of rational security must unremember, or suppress, its moment of origin. Following such a model, it would be more appropriate for astrologers to reckon “conception days” rather than “birthdays” to account for the moment of event of coming into being. Reenforced accordingly, would be the notion that the moment of conception includes a synchronicistic event, or meaningful coincidence of genetic materials. Since such an event is projected into the heavens according to time and place as a means of arriving at a meaning (the individual predisposition or “destiny”), the biological mystery of genetic “accidents” of combination are left to the idle notions of random, and hence undirected, i.e., meaningless coincidence. Need it be added, that what has in the past been projected into the heavens by astrologers, and today, astronomers, requires some introjecting. Whether birthday meanings or black hole bottomless vortexes are read in cosmic space, a grasp of coming and going out of being remains metaphysical speculation unless the psychism of it all is accounted for. Short of that, the originality of being (whether as human or the universe itself) in its “big bang” moment of conception as a momentous synchronicistic event, is defensively avoided because in principle “acausal.” Indeed, grasping such a notion implies a grave responsibility, more so because without a handle or concept, since it strikes at the very qualification of self as inordinately original and unique. Far less challenging is it to entertain the idea of coming into being and generation as simply a matter of imitation according to random play between known quantums. But there is method in this delusion of suppressed originality: since imitation, in a manifold of accidental events, diminishes serious concern for coming into being, as much may be considered for the final time of exit.
The imaginal or imitative generation would be feasible only through cloning, an exact duplication that is something more than a conditional resemblance, and devoid of any heterosexual necessity. This repeats the androgynous motif of the same quathe same and by which is achieved imitational generation. Although the term “parthenogenic” serves to convey this meaning, it does so quite too loaded with the notion of virginity which at best has varied in meaning from cultural epoch to epoch. “Androgynous” is equally misleading since it too has been over­used to express a biological classification. For my own purposes, in this case, a neologism may be in order, and by which I propose the term tautogenicto satisfy an ideological kind of generation, e.g., whereby homosexual matings cannot imply an either biological or psychic generation, but a same for the same generation according to the nature of such simulated and hence imitated sexuality. In that case, even the psychological conniunctiois evaded and generation remains tautogenic as a sociological or cultural generation of a particular life-style, political view, religion, etc., e.g., if my parents were Roman Catholics, Marxists, Republicans, homosexual, etc., then I, as their offspring, would have to be the same. Obviously, tautogenics leave open the matter of choice, whereas androgyny and parthenogenics do not (tauto=the Greek to auto, loosely, “self-same”). Equally would the term satisfy what results (or what is hoped for) in the proselytizing of an ideology or doctrine. From a biological standpoint, it may be added, parthenogenesis is possible, but which can only result in a female progeny.
Implied psychologically is how at the psychoid level of archetypal activity there is some relationship to those unit constituents of mind and consciousness which are external to psyche that Plato summed as the eternal realm of the paternal archetypal ideas. But then, as previously questioned, archetypes above and archetypes below distort and confuse the distinction in their relation of conscious to unconscious. By definition, therefore, and etymological construction, arché-typos better applies to the Platonic constituents of the heaven of mind.126 Jung notes: “In spite of or perhaps because of its affinity with instinct, the archetype represents the authentic element of spirit, but a spirit that is not to be identified with the human intellect, since it is the latter’s spiritus rector. The essential content of all mythologies and all religions and all isms is archetypal. The archetype is spirit or pseudo-spirit: what it ultimately proves to be depends upon the attitude of the human mind.” Hence, the psychic nature and the spiritual nature of the archetype “...subsist side by side” although “...one is not derivable from the other” Following such discrimination, as much may be said for the combined form, the psycho-logic. Again the question may be extended; is psyche ruled by the logic that arrives at objectified and speciated types; or is the logic intrinsic to the psyche that generates original forms? Which came first original forms or final forms remains an empty causalistic question if their complementarity is not acknowledged. It, of course, goes without saying: an explanation in “complementarity” easily serves as a deus ex machina when a pair of opposites demands some explanation of their principle of relation. But is there a choice in the matter if it is acknowledged that a notion of complementarity is grasped more as an article of faith rather than science, whether it be expressed in Heisnberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the problem of archetypes and their ambivalence, or a concept of synchronicity?
Considering the epistemological open-endedness in the matter, the “Gods” of Archetypal Psychology identified as “archetypes” are understandable, if not justified. But this holds true only if archetypes are defined according to cultural and traditionally instituted images, and which would include the Greek Pantheon as alive and well today. The view, however, remains exoterically biased, analytically predisposed, and limited to an after the fact (of psyche) intellectual traffic with “archetypes” already instituted in the culture-body. It is thus better suited to a social psychology or cultural anthropology than a depth psychology. In this sense Levi-Strauss’ “social psychotherapy” and his definition of “collective unconscious” cannot be reproached because simply constructed along structuralist lines. By definition it remains untouched by and hardly concerned for the nature of soul and psychic experience.
Avoided, or minimally considered from either the structuralist or archetypal psychology views, is the archetype as autochthonous and endopsychic; or from the depth standpoint of psyche. There is good reason for this. It is not always possible to define a psychogenically presented image as archetypal on the basis of its periodicity and by comparison to already fixed mythological images. Nor does this allow for consideration of the possibility where no mythological precedents exist or are accounted for to make such a determination. Furthermore, an archetypal activity venting itself in experience may do so quite without a discernible image, behavior pattern or form of appearance. Thus, some other criteria must be observed aside from the analytical method of statistical comparison and resemblance of such activity to already known archetypal representations. How easy to forget that experience itself is the all and other to after the fact analytics.
Otherwise we would be limited to archetypes more as “gods” in an ontologically fixed universe of once-upon-a-time rather than as a question of on going creation in the order of time, i.e., the miracle of evolution as acausal and synchronicistic.
The former case would assume that both mythos and consciousness (as we know it) are closed manifolds, conclusively in being and not open ended with regard to the present and future, precluding evolutionary change as such, much as if the old Germanic Urtha still ruled essential concepts of space and time. Yet, need it be said, the preclusion of the future in a realm occupied only as past and present may appear more open ended insofar as it does not presuppose the future (for what it could or should be). By contrast, the Greek and then Christian concepts of time allow for the future not simply as something inevitable but as a static thing or entity fixed in a causalistic field of chronological order (e.g., past-> present-> future). In Urtha’s fluid and turbulent depths, fittingly supplemented in image by writhing and intertwined serpents, a state of fusion prevails that is not unlike the fusion of space/time- or for that matter, Moby/Dick- in the relativity model. The Present is thus conditioned by the activity of a virtual “living death” (as the Past) and which the promise of a future would ameliorate as a mere wishing for the optimum ever-after, notwithstanding that in the end-all must return to the Urtha pot of an endlessly dynamic oblivion; a destiny dreaded by Ibsen’s Pier Gynt who in facing death would have much preferred the Devil and a more familiar Hell.
In the more ontologically fixed and statically bound Greek Hades, death is limited to a place and space (as topos) and literally located as a piece of geography (underworld). The Christian Hell in turn reverts back to the Germanic model except replace its hydrodynamics by thermodynamics. Since water and fire are posed as proper opposites in the ancient formulation of “elements” (fire/water, air/earth) their inclusion as a polarity in a representation of a death-place must be taken seriously. This is all the more poignant insofar as Hillman avoids both models and reverts to the Greek concept of Hades to locate the place of death as metaphor for psyche and the unconscious.

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A Finalistic Psychology

If at all “death” as a concept, now in search of a fitting metaphor, is to be requalified, what better way to do it than fall back on a religion of psychology (as an aspect of science) which in its polytheistic perspective as Hillman would prefer it, finds its answer in a manifold of archetypal images. Death, the underworld, Hades and Psyche, all stood in equivalence to the unconscious may not, however, use as their physical model the abolition of time and space as it is held in a relativity model. It is far too dynamical with its geometry of curved world lines and the ceaseless propagation of light. Equally dynamical are the Germanic rtha and the Christian Hell. The dynamical aspects of each suggest the potential of generation and coming into being (of such “stuff ” as matter and then organism), just as the models of image and idea generation from Plato to Jung prohibit any finality and limitation of psyche, such as would be the case with the Greek Hades. But what Hillman is searching for is the ultimate entropic state of zero mass and absolute density, what more modernly would define a “black hole” state, and which would correspond to a more modern agnostic notion of death that in effect corresponds to the absence of an idea of death; or death as “nothing” and pure oblivion. That would leave little to talk about or project into, barring as such psyche in toto, or Hillman’s polytheistic manifold of archetypes drawn as gods.
Neither would it accommodate his “finalistic view”: “A true finalistic psychology will show its ends in its means. We will be able to see its end goal of death in the methods it uses to work toward it.” This would hold only if it addressed the aetiology of images in generation to their fixed in form death as gods, angels, ideas, or quantum units of consciousness. Only then may we “...live fully into the consequences of the finalistic view”, and by which he means “...to bear the perspective of Hades and the underworld toward each psychic event.”127 But Hillman is not speaking about the death of the gods or fixed and obsolete conscious ideas. He intends death quite literally even as he uses the term as a metaphor: “We ask: what is the purpose of this event for my soul, for my death? Such questions extend the dimension of depth without limit...”128 “Death” as the unconscious and “life” as consciousness are thus pitted against each other in fruitless combat, and obviously death is the champion because “without limit”. What wins in the end, however, is not The End, but continuous generation, a conclusion curiously avoided by Hillman. It is impossible to think otherwise until the end is upon us if at all possible to “think” after that.
Why in extending the metaphor does he also wishfully anticipates a death without limit? Is this a concealed reference to immortality? Even as he suggests as much, death and finality are not quite synonymous. The metaphor “death” is stretched to include mortality, the end of something (finality), the entropic telos, and psyche (or the unconscious) equated with Hades as depth (death!) without limit. The animating and generative quality of psyche is thus breached, except the “without limit” offers a notion of perpetual continuity, or immortality. Nevertheless, the finalistic aspect is equated as totalistic: “psychology is pushed by Hades into an imperialism of the soul, reflecting the imperialism of his kingdom and the radical dominion of death.”129 Whether the idea of death may be considered in this way either psychologically, metaphysically or quite literalistically, it remains radically in masculine (or “spiritual”) bias insofar as the feminine generative function is pejorated and at best the captive of a great male (Hades) dictator. But in terms of the Greek myth this is a mere male conceit insofar as the Queen of Death (Hades) is Persephone. She is hardly denigrated for her abduction and rape by Hades but empowered further as the queen of the womb/tomb down below, and which includes not only death but generation. Hades, in his personified image, remains a mere underground phallic instrument in the Queen’s  service
Something is distinctly askew in Hillman’s model of psyche (qua “death”). Psyche, better personified as anima, appears to be a lady in distress, captive in “his kingdom” and unlike Persephone without possibility of spring remittance. Completing the inversion, Hades appears to perform as the personified, unrelenting animus for the Queen of Death, except he merely reflects for Hillman the “imperialism of the soul”. Without question, therefore, the lady in distress is a “She who must be obeyed,” a totalistic queen with Hades as her connubial but subaltern Prime Minister. Again, we are witness to the inversion; saddling soul with “imperialism”, nevermore concerned that the “imperialism of his kingdom” (Hades) is better reminded as “the radical dominion of death” when it is represented by the fixed conscious system immune to those intuitions calling into action the psychogenic archetype and ever renewable original experience. Consistently enough, the primordial phallic function of Hades is also ignored in a way that it was not in the myth.
What the inversion achieves is an identification, or con- fusion, of inner and outer, depth and height, time and space, death and life, end and beginning, the self-enclosed esoteric psychic womb and the open-ended exoteric mind that are necessarily always in concealed but contiguous relation to the external world of the ego. Apparently Hillman’s Hermetically sealed realm of psyche in the service of “pathologizing” by which he derives “the necessity for an abnormal psychology”, is finalized as Hades and death, yet capable of creating out of itself, and in and by itself without sire, as was the case with the Gnostic Sophia; or again, parthenogenically. Seen in the perspective of right side up, this is precisely the condition of an inflated consciousness- and not psyche or the unconscious- that proceeds to work only with the noumenal materials fixed in mind and without (empirical and experiential) external reference. By definition it would represent the traditional metaphysical and Hermetic view; as if all that is inferred is achieved by measure of the gods of a fixed pantheon, the angels permanentized in heaven, and the immovable (“imperialism”!) of intellectual ideas. But when this ding an sichrealm is identified with Hades and death as “depth”, the inversion is simply reciprocated. In either case what is presented in the “finalistic psychology” is a method of psychic abortion and by which generation of archetypes as original comes to an end. All that remains is the imaginal realm of cloned imperialistic gods and fixed ideas, the asexually generating ghosts of the intellectual mind; or what Kant more abstractly called noumena.
Yet neither Kant or Plato proposed so absolute a realm of mind except to account for what stands in complementary relation to experience and ultimately empirical affirmation; The “showing” (phae) of noumena and the “laws of nature;” that is, the mind- otherwise designated by Hillman as Hades- as something more than a self-enclosed, self-predicating in and by itself animus field.

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Mind As Parthenogenic

Noumenal or metaphysical generation amounts to a similar qua similar reproduction or cloning. The defined exoteric male aspect, on the other hand, serves to enter “foreign” elements into the closed depths of the matrix of generation, without which it remains a Liebnitzian “windowless monad”, blind to the changing world around it. The monads are metaphysically finalistic in Liebnitz’ view, more so than Plato’s eternal or archetypal ideas, or Kant’s noumena, no matter all are installed somewhere in being and in the above and beyond, that is, in the heaven of the transcendental mind. Plato’s eternal beings do, however, exercise the masculine prerogative and serve as sires to the matrix, or that depth we would account as “the unconscious,” “the psychic,” or the “psychogenic.”
Here we see a compromise of the metaphysical view. As an inverted reality metaphysics and Hermeticism designs the noumenal intellectual womb in the model of the parthenogenically creating womb. Astoundingly enough, the inversion of mind to matrix-substrate raises the Neolithic exclusivity of the feminine as the heaven of mind for the metaphysician! The Platonic virgin nurse of all generation thus arrives in the Transcendental Philosophy as an anima of colossal and totalistic proportions, an imperialism that Hillman notes as an exclusive attribute of the psyche. But who or what is the great dictator in this inversion? Psyche represented as anima, the philosopher’s Sophia? Or indeed is the animus of the anima one big prick of a macho fellow who is none other than Hillman’s imaginal conception of Mr. Hades, prince of death and a totalitarian underworld? Or perhaps he may be characterized as the son of Sophia, Ialdabaoth, prince of seductive rhetoric, tautologisms and the sin of mother wisdom. Since such a son is born parthenogenically he is technically a clone, a duplicate of Mother Wisdom’s animus. The psychological ramifications are not unfamiliar in actual closed circuit mother-son relationships; or however the man-of-mind has elevated the parthenogenic mamma as heavenly nous; a self-enclosed world of cloned imitations, homo qua homo sexually, structurally, or otherwise. Whether locked in the prison of the womb below or its counterpart as mind-womb, its fetal occupant exists as if in and by itself and quite without reference to an “other.” Nourishment is thus complete and also as if in and by itself; or in other words, totally identified with the mother and by which even after parturition the homo qua homo condition prevails. In this guise neither sweet mothers’ milk is enjoyed because reminding of mother as other, when what is preferred, indeed ordained, is other (or mother) and myself as one. Only a daughter may enjoy such a claim insofar as only a daughter is possible parthenogenically.
Biologically and psychologically speaking, generation by cloning would represent an evolutionary catastrophe leading to the entropy of all organism. It would preclude all genetic inter-relation with a changing environment insofar as the exoteric masculine and its traffic in the world would be disposed of (genetically speaking, the virus may perform in evolutionary service as the “masculine” function of introducing external “messages” into organisms to effect adaptive genetic transformations). The self-generating ovum, in-and-by-itself conditioning psychogenic attitudes, would remain blind to external and objective events. We see this represented in the late Neolithic burial mound and tummulus cultures that were agriculturally based, sometimes characterized by archaeologists as “egalitarian”, “communal” and “matriarchal”. Soon enough, however, the menhirs and cromelech stones began to “rise up”; the necessary erections indicating the male principle expressing itself exoterically and no longer exclusively serving as the self-contained psychic animus-germ of the parthenogenic feminine. In this sense the “imperialism of the soul” is no longer effective as a closed circuit totalitarian hegemony. Parthenogenicism is thus overcome, availing generation to evolutionary possibilities. Mythologically and culturally the evolution is highly visible. We see, for example, how the Christian Hell emerges in the model of the Gnostic Sophia who conceives in and by herself without sire only to birth Ialdabaoth who is perhaps the last of antiquities’s Aeon figures. He is regarded as an “abomination” and exiled to a remote fiery place and related thusly to what has come to be known as the Devil. But in a greater antiquity this place was conceived as fluid and liquid and only on the verge of producing an animus.
The Greek Hades by contrast is a dry and cold place (psychros) and without the dynamism implied in the case of water and fire. It is thus static in nature and as more airy points to the realm of mind. Yet if only in an intermediary position between water and fire it does begin to personify maleness in the figure of Hades. Notably, the liquid estate is without male figure whereas the fiery place is ruled by a banished male figure. This brings us up to date with the Devil of the Christian epoch.
The fire, as ignis gehenalis, is nevertheless a metaphor to the endopsychic intuition and which is the function that plumbs arché rather than dabble in typos and the imaginal realm of instituted images. It is thus curious that Hillman chooses Hades for his model of the unconscious simply because between water and fire it survives as air, anticipating the mental estate of an intellectual closed circuit. Hillman, however, is not culturally out of school for his assignment. It is simply the measure of the mind as cogito for and in and by itself, the structuralist Ialdabaoth of philosophers from Descartes to Karl Marx. Curiously enough, Plato himself is on to the problem. Speaking of his matrix-substrate, the “nurse of all generation,” required “pure and without impress,” he notes: “...we may truly say that fire is that part of her nature which from time to time is enflamed, and water that which is moistened, and that the mother substance becomes earth and air, insofar as she receives the impressions of them” (by the intrusion of the archetype or the intelligible). Apparently fire and water are intrinsic to the mother substance whereas air and earth are not. The ancient element water would account for the uterine “moistness”. But how to account for the fire? This is most problematical for Plato and he must add: “Let us consider this question more precisely. Is there any self-existent fire? And do all those things which we call self-existent exist? Or are only those things which we see, or in some way perceive through the bodily organs, truly existent, and nothing whatever beside them? And is all that which we call an intelligible essence nothing at all, and only a name?”
He then goes on to finely tune his case. Most importantly in the psychological case, Plato’s reference to fire and its relation to the eidos as “uncreated and indestructible, never receiving anything into itself from without, nor itself going out to any other, but invisible and imperceptible by any sense, and of which the contemplation is granted to intelligence only.” From this statement may be derived Liebnitzian windowless monads, or in its active state by what Kant referred to as the intellectual intuition. But this hardly the case with Plato. He is speaking of fire in the same sense as did Herakleitos: as horos; fire as boundary and limit and whose activity is not topological, or ontically in and of space, but as the marking of time. Or as Jung would summarize synchronicity: creation in the order of time. The archetypal intelligible, as perceived by the eidos, has remained elusive to philosophers ever since Plato. Equally does it in the Platonic generation of images bear an intimate relation to the matrix substrate “...which is space (chora and not topos), and is eternal, and admits not of destruction and provides a home for all created things, and is apprehended without the help of sense, by a kind of spurious reason, and is hardly real; which we beholding as in a dream, say of all existence that it must of necessity be in some place and occupy space, but that what is neither in heaven nor in earth has no existence.”130 Reason and sense thus bypassed leaves little for a philosopher to ontologically grasp, and this aspect of Plato is conveniently neglected until that time when a notion of the unconscious arrives. But even with that, still neglected, indeed, shunned, is this “fire” consigned in the meantime as hell itself, which Jung locates as the endopsychic intuition, and which in the language of myth I refer to as the hermetic function (with all due respect for the function of Hermes). Thus it becomes certain that when such intuition so closely associated with the eidos and then in turn as agent in the medium of the unconscious, or the factor of time coordinated with the condition of space, psyche as “other” to the masculine cogito is forcibly denied. As such the thinking faculty, airy as it is, is left in and by itself in a virtual mind prison, a tomb that is hardly a womb. This repeats the womb/tomb motif except in this case the womb as mind closed off from internal reference is all tomb, and which represents precisely the state of mind as tautologically predisposed.
The tradition of tautological analytics (call it “intellectual parthenogenicism,” or tautogenicism!) was continued, bypassing the advent of empirics and moved on into late European history as metaphysical speculation and a literal indulgence in what later appeared as transcendental philosophy. All must secretly or openly worship “death” and finality insofar as they worship fixed gods and ideas, or consciousness in and by itself, seemingly untouched by either psyche or world and the state of being as precluding becoming. By the time of the Alchemists the pendulum began to swing as matter (“earth”) itself was empirically indulged, regulated not only by the wisdom of the philosophers (“air”), but the projected intrusion by intuition (“fire”) of the psychogenic archetype. At that moment the ancient finalistic perspective was compromised and empirical science as we know it today made its entrance. At this time the pendulum continues to swing, seemingly beyond its peak of momentum, yet to reach its finality as the end of scientism, physical monism and the exclusive fictions of material facts. The stamped in being image of this moment in time is redundantly typos (to stamp or impress), the finalistic condition of “all in the head” approaching its necessary entropy and making room for arché as original, first-hand self-experience. Short of that the imaginal realm prevails, imagination left to toy with all that is fixed in form and mind; scientifically, psychologically and aesthetically, the image no more than an imitation, inspiration a dead issue. Appropriately, a view of death-- especially when used as a metaphor-- as synonymous with “depth without limit,” is required to compensate the limited intellectual imaginal realm of designed and redesigned imitations.

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Part Six
THE IMAGE REQUALIFIED

The Image and the Eidos

When the nature of original experience is ignored or proscribed, the “image”, in the sense of imitari, remains a single basis for consideration. Opposed to the imitated (sic) image would be an idea of the original or archetypal image which, as previously discussed, is only nominally possible. This sets original experience off in a class of its own insofar as it is impossible to represent without enlisting an image that is without precedence, resembles nothing but itself, or in any way escapes the root meaning of image as imitation. Something of a dilemma is thus presented and by which it may be concluded that there is no such experience as “original experience.” Would it not be more accurate to speak of “irrrepresentable experience” just as Jung considers the archetype as essentially beyond representation? On the other hand, if such experience is predicated in nature as an endopsychic “perception,” or intuition, definition becomes less elusive. The psychic, as such, would preclude the senses (as sense perception) or reasonable reflection (i.e., as “prereflective”) and what are ordinarily understood as its materials, in this case an image.
In the psychic case, another kind of “seeing” is involved, and for which the modern consciousness, such as it is prided in a scientific purview, has little confidence. The ancient Greek consciousness, on the other hand, was not so limited. Judging by its language, for example, the root ideinmay be noted to mean “to see.” From it is derived the word idea. But do we really “see” ideas? Certainly not. We see only images, what is either visually, or imaginally presented.
Without question an idea is thought. But this does not preclude sensing, feeling or intuiting it, and need not define an idea as an image which may or may not accompany it as a visual aid. More likely the image of the idea is present after the fact of experience. This is not true for the idea in itself and which is why philosophers have been speaking of the apriori and underived idea (as archetype) since before and after Plato’s idea of an “intelligible.” Here the Greek term eidos is required, again rooted in “to see”, but little to do with the visual sense.
The eidos may be roughly translated as essence and which further adds that the object of such seeing has being (esse). In other words: something that has being but is without image, or invisible, i.e., irrepresentable. The notion of psychic seeing (through the endopsychic intuition) apparently long predates the meaning of the eidos for Platonic philosophers. It must be assumed that philosophers did not create the Greek language and by which “seeing” was incorporated in reference to the word idea. More importantly in the logic of the language, the act of seeing requires light so that when taken in its psychic sense as a perception by the eidos, requires an illumination that precedes all images. “To illuminate” means to reveal which, in the subjective sense, equally means to be awakened, removed from the state of lethe darkness, or the concealed (as “unconscious”), and by which is gained aletheia (truth, as that which is unconcealed or revealed). “Truth” is as simple as that in the classical and mythological sense and far from the theological, moralistic, legalistic and scientific truth it has since become. It essentially means “to see the light”, to be awakened or experience revelation, but only in relation to the irrepresentable object of the eidos grasped as the universal essence. Yet, Friedlander takes Heidegger (in his Sein Und Zeit, 1927) to task for proposing such a notion: “According to Heidegger the concept of truth has degenerated in the course of thinking of many generations: the prevailing opinion makes truth a predicate of thought and speech, not reality. The meaning of truth has changed from the unhiddenness (Unverborgenheit) of being to the correctness of apprehension.” It seems Heidegger blamed Plato for altering truth to mean being as idea. And in turn to “unhiddenness”, especially that “truth and idea for Plato pointed to the being of forms or Ideas as well as their being grasped by the mind. It is not the Idea or Eidos in general that is master, but it is the highest idea: the idea of the Good, the form of the Perfect.” But the idea of the good is aposteriori the “seeing” by the eidos insofar as it is constituted as original experience. Here I would prefer to agree with Heidegger in this argument simply because the factor of what is “irrepresentable” conditions not only the Platonic notion of ultimate being, but satisfies his case for mania (inspiration), or in our case, intuition as that endopsychic perception that alone “sees” being without image. For Plato it is not seeing with the mind by ideation but what he refers to in the timaeus as a kind of “spurious reason.” This psychologically equates the eidos with the irrational “seeing” of the endopsychic intuition, yet a state of being without visible or imaginable appearance. It would indeed approximate as that which is hidden or concealed so that the “Truth” (of such being) is its negative expression, in the same manner we express the unconscious as the negation of consciousness. The problem here, if there is any discomfit for expressing a substantive in a negative manner, lies with the dependency upon the dialectic logic whose necessity it is to call what is “hidden” by negative predication. In that case what is hidden or unconscious must in negation remain insubstantial, or simply the antithesis to what is conscious. Apparently Plato attempted to circumvent this weakness of dialectics and thus avoid the need to call ultimate being by what it is not. Accordingly, both Friedlander and Heidegger are odds in their arguments, and by which Friedlander would apparently prefer “truth” by the dialectical mutual exclusion of what is hidden and what is concealed according to what it is and what it is not.131
This raises the psychological question of the archetype an sich, or in its state of being, as essentially irrepresentable, an anamorphic predisposition to form or facultas praeformandi. It would thus endure endopsychically as an immanence, an indwelled numenapriori to its state of becoming as imaginal form and noumenon. As much would be indicated by the Hebrew Shikinah that indwells the divine light in its preformal state as does the Platonic xwpa “without previous impression” (virgin) anticipating the fertilizing seminal intrusion of the intelligible or archetypal idea to birth the new or original (arché) image.
The image, as a resemblance to something sensually perceivable, need not be a precondition for such “seeing” or illumination. Yet in the primitive fundamentals of the Greek language, the light (of illumination) as phos, is cognate with phallus! Since the phallus is very much an image, how is this jump justified? Evidently the “head” of the phallus in its dormant state is concealed (lethe) by the prepuce. Yet erectile it is alivened and escapes the foreskin to reveal its head, i.e., the aletheia of the male member. The megalithic proliferation of menhirs and later, hermes and Tor stones, adds concrete emphasis and image to such an understanding and no doubt justifies the ritual meaning of circumcision (the penis as ever revealed in its “truth”). In the Greek “feminine mysteries” this moment of revelation or illumination produced an experience of ecstacy for the mystes, and which was hardly “sexual” or carnal, but the moment of intuition rising: what was endopsychically generated as an invisible and irrepresentable being brought to image. This would be a demonstration of the eidosin actual ritual dromenon. Psychologically it may now be understood in Jung’s terms as the animus in its most primordial form coming into being in the feminine psychology. But here we see an overlap in function of the eidos, intuition rising and the animus mundias “world spirit” in its sense as spermatikos, the Spirit in its seminal function. Alarmingly, at least for philosophers and theologians, this would suggest that the esseis related to phos, and in turn the phallus originally generated according to the endopsychic animus of the feminine psychology. And judging by the evolution of this archéimage in the extension of the feminine psychology, it arrives in a modern time as if permanently erect, or in ritual token, a circumcised animus! A man must blush at such an impossibility. Indeed, what the as if permanently erect phallos precludes is its state of dormancy as lethe so that the moment of aletheiais hardly possible. In other words; that which is always phos as in phallosis denied that state of letheby which the moment of unconcealment or revelation may be experienced. Yet, in an original time of awakening, the state of unconcealment was monumentalised in pre-historic megaliths, just as the ichthyphallus as a representation of Hermes was for the Greeks, and circumcision was for the Hebrews. In all cases, the irrepresentable original experience, the real as urand or-iginal, was allowed permanently endowed by and as phos (qua phallos).
This may shed some light on why original experience stands counter to the image as imitation; the irrepresentable psychic perception at loggerheads with what has being as visual perception, or what the Hebrews intended to rectify with both their circumcision and the “graven image” taboo. The Jews hoped to keep original experience as first and foremost, which is to say, as arché, and why the name of God must remain unutterable and irrepresentable as the image of God by which the image of man is cast. In this sense the first sin (meaning) would, although not apparent in Genesis I, be the creation of an image and which is after all God’s meaning (sin), the creation of man.
In other ancient societies the image was equally proscribed, especially for use in sacred monuments. As a result there is no literal or symbolic documentation by which the background of the culture responsible for megalithic dolmens and erected menhirs may be more conclusively determined. Only the barest and most cryptic forms, such as circles, spirals and swastikas are indicated, and which is hardly evidence that such peoples were illiterate (considering their engineering skills and knowledge of astronomy). Neither were there any (en)-graven notations celebrating the importance of the dead buried in Mycenaean tombs. The word was sacred and demeaned divinity when represented. As such it would indicate the hubris of the dead. This pre-historic tradition soon faded away and we find pictographs and ideograms used to document the lives of kings, heros and great queens. In Egypt, for example, the hieroglyph was included in tombs and which were far more retained of images than the vulgate. Such sacred “higher” images were never intended for common use. Would it be possible, in view of this, to add that ancient people were highly aware of images as imitations and by which the ur-reality would be mocked? Or how to really explain the aversion of ancient Hebrews and modern Moslems for images, except they represented a carnal realm and would as such be subjected to death, the mortal fate. Would this deny emphasis upon the divine realm and original being? Would not the image doom itself and what it represented to the mortal estate and the realm of death? Apparently the Egyptians and their extensive use of funerary iconography worried less about this than did the earlier cultures. On the other hand, the Greeks were pragmatically realistic enough to conceive of a Hadean place that was occupied by the masks of the dead, or what may be defined as “ghosts.” Yet, considering the efforts of the philosophers, culminating in Plato, the notion of an original, non-imitated (without image) reality was in the same culture adapted to a rational view.
Here, may we make a stupendous historical jump to consider modern “abstract” (non-representational) art as the urge to get back to an original reality that puts aside images? There is little that may be called “religious” in such art, in the sense of recognized divinity. Nor would it be possible to easily ascribe to “non-objective” art a creative need for anti-imagic expression as a means of getting closer to the “seeing” in eidos, essence, the Platonic idea of the Good, the form of the Perfect and the Ultimate Being. Yet, when such art arrives, regardless of the conscious intention of its creators- and especially at the beginning of an age heralded by God is dead-would it not lead to suspicion that the artist is motivated in unconscious compensatory response? Certainly the aesthetic rational of modern art takes its cue from primitive art, or the art of the orient, indicating a reversion from there back to a hardly discovered, or at the time given importance by archaeologists and anthropologists, form of pre-historic non-representational images. In other words, modern art is not so “abstract” as it is fundamental to the expression of original experience. This is to say “God is dead” as an institution but alive and well, if not ferociously archaic, in the unconscious.
Yet, notwithstanding Plato and the Hebrews, or whomever places first importance on original experience- such as Bergson and William James, neither of whom were Greeks or Hebrews- the creation of images remains either problematical or taboo, or at best relegated as a mere intermediary reality only functionally qualified as a representation of a representation (Kant). And if the image serves as but a mask to conceal an original reality, all of art must be condemned as pagan in design or at odd ends with revelation (which certainly Moslems would agree). Or if further, the psychological persona as defined by Jung is a mere constructed and arbitrary device so that it (psyche) does not all hang out to blow the cover of the person, what other need for masks or for that matter art?
What remains to be qualified in such an argument is the image and its function not only in the evolution of human consciousness but as the active necessity of consciousness per se. What I have objected to in Hillman’s use of “the imaginal” is how it is qualified to the exclusion of the irrepresentable archetype, or however it is nominally ontologised as “numen”, or as the Platonic idea, limited as noumenon (Kant); and all of which may seem uncomfortably mystical or metaphysical. Into this same bag would fit Bergson’s notion of original experience and all the other ideas surrounding the phenomenon of mania for the last few thousand years. In view of this, it would appear inexplicable that Hillman substitutes “imagination” for inspiration and intuition, indeed, displaces them as if best left to mystics, crazy artists and all as the necessity of a pathologising psyche.
That “masks” take the priority, as seems to be the case for a modern psychologistic “polytheistic perspective” would indicate the ultimate inversion and then reduction of original experience; the archetype limited to implacably fixed Hadean beings; the soulless masks of the dead. Apparently only the persona of a dead person resides in Hades, and which raises some curious questions about the nature of the personality mask. It is after all the image of the person, the external and visible cosmetic of being rather than its substance. Why, in its Greek context, is Hades custodian of the masks of the dead? Or is death itself (Hades) but the death of the mask and not the whole person? In other words, what happens in death to the irrepresentable aspect of the person, or that which has no image yet animates and provides the fire (or light) of life? Here it is not the soul itself that comes into question but that which intrudes itself in original experience; illumination or revelation as the eidosor essence, or by what Plato referred to as “the eye of the soul”, and by which it may be interpreted as the endopsychic intuition. This “eye” rises from its skin of hiddeness (keeping in mind the phallic metaphor) as both a “seeing” (idein) and the light (phos) combined and which, like the Herakletian fire, kindles and goes out in endless measure.
At this point it is best to remind that it is Hermes, who in his original personification as phallic stone, characterizes this meaning of intuition. Yet it should not be overlooked that Hades is characterized as an underworld phallus so that Hermes is in a sense the rising up aspect of Hades who is more of a god in situ. This is not simply a chronology from one god to the next but a continuity stressing the rising-up (of intuition) and its mania. Accordingly, it is Hermes who also descends or regresses back to the hiddeness (lethe) of the underworld in his applied function of descending the dead to Hades after crossing the river lethe. And if what is dead represents more the persona aspect of the person, its image with appeal only to the senses, then it may be implied that the death of the image if not the imaginal realm of consciousness itself is required before the intuition is freed to rise in consciousness. This is later borne out by Alchemy: where the nigredo (blackness, or death) stage commences the process whose goal is to free the Mercurious locked in the stone. In this sense Hades (as the stone) is the prison of the Mercurious (the intuition) so that death must be experienced and then overcome before the intuition may rise. Would this in the Platonic context underlie the idea that the study of philosophy is a preparation for death? And is this less a statement about actual death but the necessary preparation for transcending the imaginal realm so that the eidosis “seen”? Equally accounted for, in that case, would be Plato’s apparent hostility to images; because they are barriers to the archetypal realm and in turn, original experience. The nature and function of the image is thus brought into question. Aside from how the image relates to the persona as a necessary constituent in the structure of the personality; or its role in creative art, whose major material is the image, more urgent is the question of whether the image may be disqualified because it serves as the veil of lethe concealing the path to original experience. The iconoclastic attitude need only be reminded that the concealer and the concealed prevail in mutual necessity. More likely the image assumes a negative role when it enjoys exclusive priority so that the imaginal realm becomes a singular reality in and for itself.

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Carnival and the Image

The Lenten ritual of carnival in effect celebrates the “death of death”, the end of winter, in preparation for the re-awakening of the earth and life. Its paraded images are but the shell and husk of something once alive; bloodless forms grown grotesque suited only for charade and mimicry during the early spring season. Then, during Lenten they are returned to the grave or Hadean place, and heard from again only during the fall (Halloween) to announce the coming of death (winter). Such images are not “archetypes” in Jung’s sense of the irrepresentable psychogenic predisposition, or in experience as Usener’s momentary gods. As typical images the carnival masks are denied arché, just as the burial mound of Hadean personae are creatures of a half-way kind; mortal beings as dead or ghosts, revealed in an infinity of fixed and unchanging image personifications; “...images of being rather than becoming.” The parade of dead images celebrates the death of death, the negation of the negation in imaginal forms, yet without question as prelude to new life. In England, for example, there is still celebrated at Whitsun the blessing of the well, the source or origin of new life.
The modern counterpart to the carnival images would be the allegorical and melodramatic images of the horror or science fiction movie; all imaginal inventions that avoid “God himself as the speaker”; hardly announced as the intuitive mania that grips as “something purely instantaneous, a fleeting, emerging and vanishing mental content.” Short of that, the “creative imagination” of applied image-makers remains an intellectual exercise in imaginal design; a staged and directed production obdured in second-hand and over-wrought collective personatypes; the dressed, manipulated and worked over dead images of mass media. Indeed, “Pop Art” was not invented by Andy Warhole! He simply and with precocious intent punctuated it.
The Imaginal masks are also used in political mind-persuasion, ersatz bogey-men cast as either “capitalist devils” on one side of the iron curtain, and “communist barbarians” from the other. Imitation is premium in either case, achieved through repeated broadcast until so familiar and common-place that the critical faculties are dulled. In the non-political vein, the “aliens” and creatures from outer space make do. Is this what dreams, or for that matter, nightmares, are made of ? It is difficult to say except their dramatic producer and director step forth. There may be resemblances between the outer and inner productions, and it may even be declared that one imitates the other. In any event, it is only occasionally that something original is inadvertently presented.
The mass-media presentations personify the Hades graveyard and Hekate garbage dump of collective consciousness, the rump side of the culture-body. The bizarre and carnival images are either conceived conglomerated as deformities or refined as ideal figures of perfection, the bowels and bilges of the culture-body as well as its heavenly ideals. They may reflect outlandish scientific and technological possibilities- what are most familiar in the public mind; such as monsters accurately combined from the reconstructed parts of dinosaurs, robots and machine-like forms, stereotyped personalities all put together in the most literal and categorical play of good and evil. Superficially it might be supposed they are the materials of a “modern mythology”, endured as the flying saucers and unidentified objects of the soul. They may be, except myths are not made but happen prior to their imaginal representation. The UFO people as consistently reported are far too anthropomorphically designed with what is expected of a superior intelligence--big heads and little bodies. They are rendered more as concrete appearances compensatorilly fit for people with small intelligence and perhaps more body than mind. All that strikes meaning as an archetypal image is the UFO as either a circular form (“saucer”) or a cigar shape, indicating a gender distinction at large in outer space; or more likely concealed in an inner space. Such images presuppose the death or non-existence of psyche, or whatever is meant from past to present by “Nature.” A paradigm apart from original to final image, nature, psyche and matrix are rendered dead, or in psychological equivalence, functionally suppressed. Left in their stead is the imaginal realm of regurgitated imitational images, re-designed in their personal attributes and only affectively as if original, i.e., “new”.

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The Prophylactic Image

From the psychotherapeutical standpoint the suppressive aspect of the personatype, or mask-image, serves to maintain the patient in the ego and imaginal realm, provisionally safe from any invasions of original experience and the purely psychogenic archetype. In this way the conditional “personal problem”, however it may be related to the individual past and its influences of a social and cultural nature, is kept in focus. It must be assumed that the patient is initially in no position to deal with a “depth” that goes deeper than the Freudian “subconscious”, or what Jung called the “personal unconscious.” The personal anamnesis must take priority. This would not preclude the remedial device utilizing creative phantasy or active imagination so long as the images performing are final rather than original in form, that is, part of the personal and collective manifolds of consciousness. In effect such images are presented pluralistically, fragmented and multifaceted and describe a flow from the ghost-realm of the polyimagical realm of consciousness, e.g., a “stream of consciousness” that is a kind of purging mental diarrhea, a “morbidly profuse discharge” of repressed personal contents. In itself the abreaction provides a fundamental basis for psychotherapy, its end goal the hope of stabilizing and adapting the patient to a consciousness norm. It may be all that is required. But it must be reminded that such an approach is directed by what is essentially a social rather than a “depth psychology.” Its goal is a persona adaptation to the social norm; the fabrication of a personality mask able to socially hold its own, i.e., provisionally “cope”, in the socially homogenized plurality. The goal is as standard in the sociological approach as it is in the education of children. “Psychotherapy” as cure by suggestion, advice or more insidious means of behavior modification, for the most part follows this rule.
It may be called a “polytheistic psychology” in approach, providing it is understood that the theosin the term serves as a mere euphemism safely reduced to mean “persona image,” or what Italians call la bella figura; the idealized social mask at premium for amorous seductions or whatever other ego gain. The implication, however, is that the plurality of images, persons and personae are each in themselves godlike, permanently fixed, or immortal, reenforcing what is already a collective norm--the state of personality inflation, or identification with the persona or mask. Since, as I have attempted to show, the persona-image is essentially “dead”, fixed in being and form, the possibility of an original and psychogenic experience “rising up” is discouraged. The old ghost may have been purged, but only to be replaced by a new one, the person availed of a new persona. Transformation, or “rebirth” has merely been feigned, including only the most superficial level of personality, insofar as its cosmetic is as if the entire and total person. In the office the suit and tie determine the person. At home another personality dons blue jeans, etc. In all cases it would be difficult to distinguish the executive terror of the office from the nice guy mowing the lawn at home (or vice-versa).
Pragmatically applied, the “polytheistic” approach is a form of prophylaxis directed toward a “depth”: one that is safely contained, not open ended and thus relatively immune to not only “archetypes”, but endopsychic intuitive perception. In this manner the “imaginal” serves to displace the instigations of the “inner fire”, or intuitive function. As previously noted, this may fit the bill for an American approach to “depth” psychology, insofar as the American lifestyle is already conditioned in a “hands on” pragmatic progressivism dedicated to lubricating the ego (along with the twice a year oil change for the family car).
This does not, however, account for the activity of the irrational intuition that is functionally bent in the constellation of endopsychic irrepresentable experience. Nor does it deal with mania and its compulsive inspirations, or however the experience of the “momentary deity” presents itself. The nature of intuition remains problematic and thus either conveniently ignored or diagnosed as pathological for all practical purposes. Unchanneled, the nameless, imageless original experience may surface as night terrors, panic attacks and severe anxiety, all recognized conclusively as pathologisms. They may be treated as such, more likely today with doses of Lithium, and little may be gained but the stabilizing of the patient by tranquilizing a possible creative need. But there remains the question of the creative personality, such as that of artists and poets, for whom arché is always at the threshold of consciousness, to the effect that it seeks, in a surge of original potential, to overthrow the protective dead personatypal images. It is with regard to this that Hillman may have found it necessary to propose the “necessity of an abnormal psychology” and a method of “pathologizing,” by which he means; “the psyche’s autonomous ability to create illness, morbidity, disorder, abnormality, and suffering in any aspect of its behavior, and to experience and imagine life through this deformed perspective.”132
Since the emerging archetypal predisposition is not reconcilable with an old form, it must seek its own. The conscious system thus threatened, resists what appears foreign and unfamiliar to it and may be disoriented, or even suffer dissociation. Undoubtedly there is some mental hygiene involved in the immune system of consciousness which insists such psychic viruses must be vanquished because threatening either disease or an evolutionary jump for its host. But expressed as a culture-form the psychic instigation is, in the American case, reified as a chronic restlessness that comes with the American geography; the overwhelming cult of La Donna Automobile and the animus wagon supplied from here in Detroit to Japan.
In such schizoid description the personatypes perform as autonomously free-floating complexes, ambulatory personalities that speak and make demands of their hosts and cavort much as an animus (in both the male and female psychology). Indeed, they are the fragmented parts of the maternal animus, forever designed in plurality and multiplicity, migrating through an unparted umbilical cord and by which the culture-body draws its priorities.
Inevitably such animus “voices” are confronted, as for example in schizophrenic and paranoid cases, with a peculiar obsession and compulsive identification with a singular “God” (the Father) that performs either as an abstract deus absconditusor, in the case of the female psychology, concealed in kind as dear old dad or a chosen husband. The normal feminine personality, on the other hand, is qualified only in that it must choose one or the other aspect; the plethora of personatypal “lovers” constituted in the culture-body, or strict and slavish observance of a singular masculine superordinate authority. This authority, disguised as the maternal animus, is compensatorilly polarized to the plethora of free-floating personatypes whose appeal, especially for the female psychology, is designed in the biological desirability of the male in multiplicity following, no doubt, a spermatozoid model.
But in the culture-body case, the monistic authoritarian animus (as “spirit”) remains the proscriber of the plurality, and in that sense the singular bulwark barring a collective schizoid dissolution and fragmentation. This may be translated to its social rule: the greater the anarchic tendency of the collective, the more the need for an autocratic dictator, especially when in the individual psychology the ego is no longer in regulative authority, but has abdicated to the dead forms of ideology and the personatype abstracted to either religious or political formats.
If, on the other hand, the emphasis is placed on psyche as the pathologizing agency, as if that were its fundamental function, consciousness remains hardly suspicious that such deformations are in direct relation to the very dead images that suppress intuition and the emergence of a creative content. The question of inspiration is thus limited and confined in definition to psychopathology and a psychiatric perspective. Accordingly, Hillman must complain: “Medical and religious approaches interpret psychopathology as something wrong (sick or sinful). They either physicalize or metaphysicalize (moralize).”133 And why not, when a monotheistic consciousness, a monotheistic theology, and a physical monism use as their supporting properties a plurality of images, ideas, laws, mores, moralisms, or all in all a polytheon of dead forms? Call such properties “gods” and we see that a concealed polytheon is a necessary ingredient of anything that is instituted, fixed in being (instatuerre) under the abstract umbra of a mono-whatever; in Hillman’s case an ideology and doctrine of “archetypal psychology.” The lost, hidden or presumed dead mono-divinity thus horrifically returns as the exclusive monitor of doctrine, taking form as the “great leader”, the guru, or the institution itself as totalistic, uncompromising, and in effect source of the “last word” without mind for the original word.

Therapy and the Creative

More disturbing in Hillman’s view is how no accommodation is made for inspirational creativity, the function of the endopsychic intuition; the mono-experience of the mysterium tremendum that grips the individual rather than a collection of individuals or the social whole. Rather he fixes on the repressed state of personality whose initial stirring of the archetype arrives with necessary intent to fracture and sweep away those dead images or “gods” that block the way of arché coming into consciousness. At that neurotic stage certainly a “morbidity”, “disorder” and “abnormality” is at work, insofar as what is in the process of being fractured are “the gods,” the fractured fracturing; or those fixed quantums that limit consciousness obsessively to a protective, maternally motivated status quo, or norm. As Heinrich Zimmer observes: “The gods, the fairy powers, are always in danger of self enchantment. Like the self-hoarding merchant of Baghdad bazaars, like the youth Narcissus, they become fixed to their own reflected images- momentarily reluctant to pass with the passing of time, and critically in need of the shocking, shattering blow of the redemptive catastrophe.”134
The “shocking, shattering blow” comes with the rising of the numinous and irrepresentable archetype in experience as a nameless, imageless mania, the inspiration whose compulsion would be antithetical to therapeutical intention, insofar as a “redemptive catastrophe” would save the soul but utterly fragment the normalized estate of mind and intellect. Myth-consciousness and its realm of the gods precedes the abstracted and rational consciousness. Yet, it is no less “reluctant to pass with the passing of time.” The metaphor of shock is consistent in either case. Hillman’s imaginal and imitational approach, which may have a provisional therapeutic value, stands therefore in direct opposition to those flashes of mania, and confrontation with the imageless, momentary deity, that arrives without any deterministic making. The irrationality of the confrontation is hardly a concern for where the imitated final image begins and the spontaneous, immediate, original image ends. The blind spot in his advocacy and approach becomes all the more glaring from the standpoint of the artist or poet for whom such shocks are a vital necessity to the creative work. Indeed, the imaginal realm of fixed and static images is the nemesis of the creative effort. If a painting is not original, a unique statement that invariably comes as a surprise to the artist, it is simply junked or painted over. A painter will say “it either works or doesn’t work”, and by which is meant, spontaneously original or not. Why it “works” (or doesn’t) has no formal criteria of judgement except that the nameless experience appears justified on the canvas as an aesthetic innovation.
Artists, of course, also suffer the problem of imitating their own style, over-working forms and images, or hanging on to a “god” that has degenerated to an aesthetic cliché; an imaginal design rather than an intuitive creation. No amount of imagination helps break out of such impasse, except some “accident” of effect that arrives as a piece of unexpected discovery. Here the difference between a therapeutical approach and a creative one may be apparent.
A comparison is necessary only because therapeutics appears to omit the vitality of the psychic shock and accident that opens up new territory, and must instead see inspiration (mania) as no more than a pathological affect. The nature of the psyche is then only half-drawn and incomplete to under-standing. Nor would the fuller dimension of understanding demand that the patient become an artist, no more so than the “crazy” artist be submitted to a “cure.”
The artist stands outside or beside the work which absorbs the full thrust of a new content. The work serves, much as it did for the alchemist, as vas or curcubita, the vessel in which the psychic dromena takes place. Arché joins in the material object of sensation as a visual appearance or image, but one that is not quite final, or fixed in form as a denotational quantum. The image is not attained of permanent being, defined as a familiar object, idea or concept. It is hardly permanentized as an angel in the heaven of mind obtained of ideal essence and optimum reality. Such an image is accordingly referred to as demonic, deformed and aberrational, insofar as it has not been abstracted, compared, typified and thus raised to ideal form and available to be fitted into the conscious system and its order of familiar images and ideas. In other words, the raw image is endowed at the arché end of the psychic spectrum. It has not yet been “killed”, made to stand still (in being or essence), or arrived at the optimum of an aesthetic norm.
The reference here to “art” is not drawn in the definitions of the high art of the Renaissance and late classical art, all of which are intimately keyed to the nature of the culture- body. Only with Alchemy, which is hardly intended aesthetically, and the more individually inclined art of the last 200 years, is the psychic body touched; although in the aesthetic case, the psychistic event is more directed to and reflected in the culture-body. It invariably arrives as the “shocking, shattering blow of the redemptive catastrophe”; consciousness in the metaphor of the gods “become fixed to their own reflected images”, dealt their fatal cut. Such an artist is either celebrated or shunned as an innovator. Nietzsche heralds as much in his Birth of tragedy, pitting Dionysian music against Apollonian art, the latter of which he considered lifeless and static, a mere veil of illusion cast in visual forms. Although the philosopher-poet was contemporary with the Post Expressionist ambiance, he hardly accounted for it in his proposal, and in that sense was the unwitting spokesman for the “abstract” art that was to follow. As the Apollonian myth consciousness fell away, the great inversion took place and the “Dionysian” assumed position as metaphor to the unconscious; or what Nietzsche referred to as the “Realm of the Mothers.” But in such position it is initially posited as the half-way world of ghosts, in effect, the “personal unconscious” of the culture-body. Soon enough the psychic body, as complement to the defunct Apollonian culture-body, asserts itself in the only place it may- the individual. At that point a dilemma is encountered because in order to raise the “realm of the Mothers” it must be established that “God is dead”. In other words, the principium individuationis must be precluded and the individual is swallowed up to be homogenized in the sea of fractured and pluralized consciousness.
In the case of Nietzsche, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Strindberg & co., this amounted to a catastrophe in personal reality terms. Even as the urge to break past the classical Apollonian culture-body of final forms was an imperative for such artists, they were hardly equipped philosophically, socially or psychologically to survive the raw energy of the Dionysian mania. The compulsions of inspiration were overwhelming, especially that the old and final forms had been fractured, leaving consciousness without its supportive and stabilizing means. On the other hand, this very “Dionysian” input was soon enough raised in the culture-body, matured and suffered old age, now recognizable as “Rock ‘n Roll” evolved to the obvious climax in noise as “Hard Rock”, consistently and redundantly echoing the sacrificial motif in it Dionysian strains; yearning desperately and with deafening electronic amplification for “death”, The End, and the final narcotic bliss demanded in the “realm of the mothers.”
“If only”, it may be said; if only this suicidal longing for “death” could be achieved, the womb-tomb entered and then overcome, the dormant cinder would blaze forth as the new light; the maternal animus as not simply a rock-hard and immovable, unchangeable crystal reflecting and refracting a borrowed light, but as the intrinsic source itself, radix at psychic premium. However, between the rock of mamma and the rod of pappa, the pleroma of fragmented images, feelings, and judgements abound as rolling stones bounced restlessly in barrier to a sacred marriage, a coniunctioin resolve of the complexio oppositorum that has reigned as the crowning motif of the modern age.
In view of this it is not difficult to call the psychic realm of original forms, the archetype rising in the individual experience, as limited to “psychopathy”, “death” or whatever finality that is entropic in effect. Rather, the inversion notwithstanding, the manifold of consciousness and its plurality of fragmented ideals, gods and angels, more literally if not euphemistically represents a realm of death; insofar as its constituent elements are left impotently dead or relatively lifeless, i.e., unchanging or permanentized. By general rule, therefore, it may be said that whatever is raised and installed in the conscious system and the culture-body must be rendered lifeless if it is to be accommodated as a norm. On the other hand, it must be observed, a painting, poem or a recorded and remembered dream, are seldom lost of their irrational and original content, and thus retain an element of mystery, unknowing and unconsciousness, an unspent potential; a degree of continuous psychic mobility and change that would seem inexhaustible.
Certainly we may analytically if not presumptuously determine exactly what a creative work is or means- psychologically, aesthetically or otherwise- and thus pretend it is fixed in being and finally dead. But that is merely a provisional accommodation contingent to how fixed in form a consciousness may be, or how limited it is to seeking for inner security in the mummified contents of reasonable premises. If and when a system of consciousness begins to crack and fracture, pluralize polytheistically, it is precisely the mummified quantums of ideal forms that revert in quick enantiadromia to their retained hidden life, or soul-residue and animation. Lost of the Dionysian urge resolved in formal Apollonian persona, they appear as uncreate and half-born monstrosities, deformations and night-mare images; the aborted psychic fetus living on without life in the surrogate womb of the culture-body. Denied both archetype and final type they are half-way images regurgitating the concealed shadow elements of the ideal forms, and their historical accumulation of undigested contents. Alienated from the original psychic life, they are neither archetypes nor gods but degenerate or diseased images. The work of Hieronymos Bosch abounds in such images as does modern surrealist art. In either case the realm of the misbegotten is personified; the changelings that although bursting with magical power are conceived in neither divine inspiration as archetypes, or retainable in the heavenly realm of gods. As such, they represent nothing but the psychological, or the soul psychologized.

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Social Security in Imitated (Imaginal) Forms

Strangely enough, Hillman, following the code of therapy, overlaps this realm of the uncreate diseased images with archetypes: “What I am asking you to entertain is the idea of sickness in the archetype...”, by which he means; “since the gods themselves show infirmitas, one path of the imitatio dei is through infirmity. furthermore, it is this infirmitas of the archetype that can be nurse to our self-division and error, our wounds and extremities, providing a style, a justification, and a sense of significance for ours.”135 No doubt misery loves company! But this imitation is credible only if it is assumed “archetypes” and “Gods,” soul-images and demons, are one and the same. The identification with such extremes amounts to claiming that either the archetype is devoid of the ambivalence representing the polarity of the psychic spectrum, or that the gods are something more than a fixed mask. More likely if the personified god serves as the mask for the archetype, it alone may suffer disease, or fragmented reversion to a state of the misbegotten.
More ludicrous, however, is the notion of imitating the diseases of the gods and their degenerate fragmentation to greater plurality and endless speciation, by which to justify the human infirmity. A cure is inferred in either case. It would then follow that we move on (“cured”) to imitate the immortality of the gods that apparently enjoy the lifeless state whether chronically ill, happily cured, or endowed of absolute immunity to both life and death. This last inferred imitatiois, however, already in effect and is called “inflation”, a typically human affliction; the vanity of presupposing individual superiority: as a super-person with super-intellect, or as a body-beautiful super-hunk. Or in the absence of either, a billion dollars will do. In all cases the super-natural is tempted, if only modestly concealing superiority as a religious belief, and designing it as a surrogate for human immortality and god-like being. Conveniently, thereby, death is provisionally “killed.”
On the other hand, assuming that “the gods have become diseases,” who or what is up to curing them? But of course, the archetypal psychologist! And what is the fee retained by the therapist? Certainly the inflation! The entire approach remains a closed transference circuit confined to transpersonal gods and their installation as units of myth consciousness, necessarily leaving psyche further suppressed as no more than the agency to infirmity and pathologizing, the demon threatening the heaven of the imaginal mind. Thus the fracturing cause is located outside of the closed circuit of mind which in the first place pretends to its own transpersonally ordained immortality, and ignoring the inflationary “danger of self-enchantment.”
Represented personatypes are far after the fact of an immediate experience of the archetype, and signify more the local and conditional language of a culture. Dreams represent themselves in a similar way. Although an ancient Greek may dream of a horse and chariot in the same way we might dream of an automobile, in either case the archetype is present, but has less to do with the particular vehicles than it does with the irrepresentable intuition of motion and driving force. This does not, however, dispose of the aesthetical necessity which demands that particular images enjoy an autonomy unique to themselves; i.e., a horse as opposed to an automobile. Nevertheless, the “sighting” of an UFO, insofar as it is an awesome experience, is no different than the appearance of a “momentary deity” to a person 2000 years ago. After the fact of the experience a known and familiar god may be used to rationalize and “imagine” what happened, just as space ships and little men with dome-like (big- brained) heads may often fill the imagination of a UFO sighter. In either case visible form is allowed for the experience, ranging anywhere from something banally literal to something aesthetically sublime, provocative or inspiring. Thus, between the intuitive experience and the imaginal amplification, nothing of real account has been presented except for how it is rendered. This necessary tertium quid we generally call “art.” If it were merely a case of the archetype and personatype in “resemblance” or imitation, mirrors one to the other, they would have lost their mutual necessity, and either would do. But something original does indeed occur when intuition and imagination coincide to yield a symbolic form; the work of art integrating if not wedding at once what is original and fathomless with what in all familiarity is redundantly replicated.
Yet a line, certainly scrubbed in the annals of modern art, may be drawn between the work of art and a “Pop” art which climaxes creativity as nothing more than the production of familiar and redundant forms. The efforts of an Andy Warhol indeed celebrates the literal “death of art”; the end of inspiration and originality and the lowering of art to exclusive expression of lifeless carnival images and messages of the local consumer focused culture. Pop Art shocks only because called “Art”, and which soon enough settles down in the collective consciousness, reassured that art is not after all over its head but a street and market event, a commodity of passing worth.
Mr. Warhol “pops” with a vengeance, achieving the ultimate universalization of what is most superordinate in value for an American culture, e.g., a Campell Soup can or Marilyn Monroe; bringing to earth, or incarnating from out of the media-heaven, the highest fixed value; objectified, ontologized and instituted as the lowest common denominator of value available to all. Certainly Ms Monroe was a public goddess and accordingly desired for consort by the man who enjoyed the highest and most exclusive seat in the land. President Kennedy did what every American male should like to do, hardly concerned that he was indulging a dead image, a mere personatype in cosmetic ideal fitted to the ordinary circumstance of a real and actual woman (something we have understood only in hindsight of the tragedy it constellated).
Mickey Mouse and Popeye may likewise be venerated and embraced by all as balloon inflated floats in a Thanksgiving Day parade, perhaps as Carnival seasonally misplaced, certifying that what they represent is quite dead because ever so ideal, yet fixed in being forever. As beneficent demons or angel-ideals, no originality is present to disturb the general social security and its need for reassurance in the endless recurrence of imitation and how it satisfies a sense of permanence with regard to heaven on earth removed from eternity. Such public images are no longer the stars and luminosities of a troubling and mysteriously dark cosmos, but the silver screen masks stroboscoped into life in endless flicker like a heart that will never cease to pump. Archetypal intrusions and maverick inner intuitions are thus kept at bay, maintaining the collective mental hygiene through antiseptic, de-psychized images. Indeed, the call for “pathologizing” and the “necessity of an abnormal psyche” is hardly a remedy in depth but a concealed revolutionary appeal for the social whole and its permanentized norms begging the appearance of an individual. In either case, the divine affliction may be understood as a stasis in frustration and unremmitable yearning to overcome the abortion of inspiration and its generation of original forms.
What remains problematic is where the emphasis is placed. In the collective case, the dead and familiar images draws the greater meaning. Familiarity does not breed contempt but the effortless bliss of reassurance. Originality remains quite literally, and certainly traditionally, the devil himself; an instigative disturber of the status quo and the norm that arrives only by taking the path of least resistance. As it may well be understood by now, the mass consumer “pop” market determines what is “culture” if not art according to the above criteria. Only plurality and its imaginal realm of overdrawn fantasy indulgences claim any value in a culture identified with its own fractured, collective self-image; always in pretense to “what’s new” providing it is not disturbingly original.
The trend here is towards a greater regulation of the artist; or better say a “conformation” of the artist; and whose unannounced intent is to nip-in-the-bud any signs of “free thinking” or independent and individual approaches to originality. The Pop and Conceptual Art approaches are thereby channeled into Federal funding of the arts (e.g., the National Endowment) precisely because where the one expresses what is common and familiar, the other is allowed to dabble in a message art, or art as ideology that pay lip service to provocative issues. In either case, “freedom of expression” is monitored simply because the art expression thus limited to known contents is unable to present something original and innovational. Yet, the pretense of freedom of expression is maintained simply because the modern art idiom so sequestered is fostered in its historical superficialities only; as something individually expressive and innovative. But in fact, as an institution, no less federally supported, the cosmetic of such art is all that enjoys celebrity and does so in continuous redundancy and imitation.
The second restriction on creative expression takes form through academia; the teaching of art in Universities. Here the bud is nipped before it flowers, insofar as what may be taught are only the known (historically) and documented precedents of the modernistic approach, and which in sum as the “last word” lock the student in a realm of imitation. During the last hundred years philosophy has suffered precisely this fate in American universities. Thus “Art”, especially as “Fine Art,” overlaps into the area of applied art and which is the better part of propriety for traditional American pragmatism. Accordingly, no distinction is made between art as applied design and creative art (as “Fine”), the latter of which enjoys pertinence only in reference to the individual meaning and inspiration. Art is thus publicly funded simply because of the practical need for some pretense to “culture” and always neglectful of the fact that such culture enjoys itself only in the past tense. Indeed, the culture equilibrium is maintained in apparent slow evolution when in fact such neatness of equilibrium is suddenly punctured by the appearance and expression of a great artist. In a well ordered and self-serving culture bureaucracy such intrusion is intolerable and a near criminal attempt to break the equilibrium of perpetuated imitation. In other words, an inbreeding of the culture-body is performed so that it defies evolutionary punctuations or intrusions of foreign psychic “DNA” to the extent that sooner or later, like the Well of Urtha, it must burst its homogenized mass and begin the universe again. In the old Germanic mythology this was know as the “death of the gods” (Ragnarok),who are none other than a hieratically installed bureaucracy feeding off the public life and its soul-blood.
That the religion (polytheism) of the common people (as William James called it) has produced a polytheologian to justify itself in such a view (and which has materialized as the modern way of life) is not so peculiar. Perhaps James was far less egalitarian and pluralistically disposed to provide himself in such a role. Less than a century later James Hillman took the bait. But aside from a pluralistically inclined psyche, it is the image in form and content that Hillman stresses as the nature of psyche, or nature per se. The greater horror is that he may be right; that life is but in the service of Hadean “imperialism” and its ideal of imitated images finalistically pledged to instituted entropy- the media-message become the soul’s content.
The picture I have drawn so far is quite exaggerated in its deadening effect on the creative sensibility. It belies a pessimism on my part that is viable only by contrast to a brief period of art when expression had provisionally freed itself from service to institutional and imitative forms. Indeed, the individually assertive “modern art” earned its means by coming against the historical machine of ultra catholicization which is climaxed, following the hegemony of the Church, in the vast secular media propagandizing directed to the Mickey Moused mentality drawn in the lowest and meanest common denominator of the public mind. From a more thoughtful standpoint it is all the more an obscene dissemination only because media itself, by its technological advantages must, to retain its public by any means, accentuate the negative. Obviously what has survived into the global media age as free-booting capitalism and doctrinaire socialism share in common the need for media power and the manipulation of collective consciousness. No individual evil genius is responsible for this insofar as the culture-body and media have become one and the same in content and whose telestic intent is obviously, according to a principle of increased and propagated speciation, apparently on the verge of once and for all quieting and tranquilizing whatever is left of the creative spirit and its psychic means. This in itself would justify a “finalistic psychology” insofar as the race towards cultural and social entropy is increased in its rate in direct proportion to the widening trend for imitation. The individual creative potential, in whatever field of endeavor, is thereby frustrated to the degree that a complementarity polarizing the two is rendered ineffectual. It is all, however, quite painless for whomever has no memory for the Piscean counterpoint set in the past age and is born into the Aquarian future of homogenized common means and promoted mediocrity. Art and science funding by the state adds to such water-poured pacification of individual creative intensity, if not further technologizing the soul and computerizing intuition. The gross tautology of it all is glaringly patent, and it is only with this in mind that a tear may be dropped not for any worry about the demise of the human race but the loss of its inspirational capacity by which a qualitative humanness was declared and defined in the first place. The object and necessary tertium quid by which a human perspective is drawn is thus compromised so that the culture-body and what may only be called in description the “Bottomless Pit” becomes one and the same. What the consequence of such collective indwelling is hard to tell, except notice that it indeed accounts for a retreat to a finalistic psychology if not comfort in so hollow and shady a place as Hades. Indeed, it goes beyond a notion of nihilism which is but an attitudinal nay saying, and arrives as something in else.
One the other hand, what could be so deadening and finalistic that it does not draw of itself its contrary possibility; original creation in the order of time. In the latter case Jung’s idea of synchronicity would apply; the moment of inexplicable coincidence signalling an historic alteration of a status quo. He notes the problematic phenomenon as a “special class of natural events, but also takes the contingent partly as a universal factor existing from all eternity, and partly as the sum of countless individual acts of creation occurring in time.”136 The phenomena of synchronicity is hardly a panacea, regardless the often hopeful spiritual investments by which it is interpreted. A coincidence without accountable causal connection yet retained in meaningful connection is suggestively impressive, more so because autonomously arrived. The greater power, however the probability factor may be diminished as nothing less than common by mathematicians, is for the circumstance of meaning presented from two odd ends, and which has value only to its host. What subjectively counts more to the host, whether or not it is a billion to one or ten to one shot, is the presentation of a meaning that is not quite clear yet hardly unnoticeable. The nocturnal dream performs in quite the same manner, insofar as meaning is presented but with hardly a clue for how it may be assimilated. This in itself is far more extraordinary, considering that meaning autonomously presented and not by design provokes an interest that may go beyond the expectable and open up doors the host hardly knew existed. Again, for the creative artist or scientist, such serendipity, accidents, and coincidences of discovery, are best left uninvestigated or unqualified.
There is no point to avoid looking a gift horse in the mouth for want of an explanation. On the other hand, it may be asked (hopefully without risk of disenchantment) whether a more active intuition is more alert to synchronicistic events and thus perceives more than an ordinary share, or whether in fact it induces them because of its receptivity? In either case, the subjective factor is paramount insofar as it alone may qualify whatever meaning is presented, either to dismiss it as idle coincidence or make the most of it through further amplification. Strangely enough, Jung’s cosmology of meaningful acausal coincidences follows the old Germanic notion of time, and where experiences are collected in the Well of Urtha. Bauschatz notes: “For the Germanic man, whose orientation is towards the past, the ‘future’ is not a foreseeable or readily configured concept. Finally, we can see that Christian time is fixed and closed; the progression of ‘times’ within the created world is part only of that world; the whole cosmos is a static, atemporal one. The Germanic cosmos is dynamic and change oriented. Time exists beyond the created worlds and is a configuring force of the whole.”137 Yet, in concept, model and application such mode of change is essentially archaic, indiscriminately violent and catastrophic. It may in this sense, insofar as it expresses the collective unconscious in its most unmediated form, be recognizable as the methods of change familiar in both the Bolshevik revolution and that of German National Socialism (Nazism). Thus, if a choice was to be offered between the Greek and Christian Hadean stasis, and the old Germanic dynamism of Urtha as modes of effecting change, a proper dilemma is incurred. Indeed, it is hardly a case of either/or at this stage of history and culture-evolution, but one of complementarity; where each are the flip side of the same coin. The problem is, coin flipping to determine probabilities is far less random than may be expected: or it may have taken the culture-body ten billion rather than ten thousand years to have evolved at least this far. And if we may be satisfied to measure the “order of time” as less a question of random numbers but synchronicistic punctuations, we have not been content with much. More so when it is understood that such punctuations entail the extermination of what is for what will be. In this context the Greek and Christian model is preferable insofar as it promises only one beginning and one end in closed eschatological circuit, after which the new beginning heralds eternal life, either in paradise or down below with the Prince of Death (Hades). In the Germanic case, only eternal death on earth and according to Urtha is promised.
Need it be repeated here that Hillman’s concept of the Greek Hades precisely fits the static model of time and which would understandably lead to a finalistic psychology, or a philosophy rooted in a notion of ultimate entropy. Considering both the old Germanic and the Greco-Christian models (of time and causality) something of a dilemma must be posed in the contemporary moment. In the psychological-creative case it pairs a view of psyche predicated in imaginal imitation against one where the endopsychic intuition holds psyche always bonded to the contingent moment and thereby in a continuous process of creation. The best that may be said in view of such comparisons is that the static view applies to the mental-intellectual mode of understanding, whereas the dynamical view is more tuned to the sensed phenomenology of nature and psyche. Obviously, to takes sides in the matter is fruitless and would preclude their actuality as bound in a relation of complementarity. In one sense the relation binds two ends of a historistic spectrum if it may be reminded that the Germanic model is pre-historically linked to the concentric circle and spiral designs found in megalithic monuments; an iconistic representation of a concept of worlds in everlasting creation, beginning and end but the invisibly marked interludes of continuous process and cycle. If this at all prevails as the model of the unconscious- and being itself unconscious- obviously it stands as a formidable opposite to the nature of consciousness, conscious of only itself. It would be as if to say that where consciousness is designed in the static Greek and Christian model, the unconscious creates itself in the model of the Well of Urtha; a vas of archetypal viscera in which the waters of unborn life and the dead flow as one undifferentiated chaos, or massa confusa. For all purposes, except perhaps for those of the creative artist, it must be considered from the static viewpoint of consciousness as simply an infernal region dedicated only to driving us to madness. But, then again, we may say as much about “nature” and “life,” both synchronicistically evolving agencies of unnatural selection.

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Ghosts, Art and the Animus of the Anima

As I have attempted to show so far, the proliferation of ghosts, carnival masks, dead images, “personatypes” or whatever may be counted as imitated forms, are indicative of the culture-body in a state ready for bursting. As a collective event set in historical time such violence is prelude to an original event; the archetypal original experience about to assume visible form or representation. In other words, the state of the culture-body as the vessel of collective consciousness become obsolete and no longer in touch with original creations which, as it must be assumed, enjoy ceaseless generation. Whether they remain unconscious (and without form) or simply suppressed to build as a body of repressed contents, they serve as “infections”- or better say germinal intrusions- to the greater sum of the dead and the past. Certainly a response is to be expected and one which knows no other contemporary predication than as a disease or pathologism. In other words, one has simply to go crazy, suffer psychosis, to allow the dead (as “gods” or what have you in imitated forms) be suitably evacuated in the energetic movement of the archetype as experience. But if the bowel movement is taken as an end rather than the means, then a philosophy of a finalistic psychology and the necessity for a pathologizing psyche are in order. In the brief histories of Psychoanalysis and Analytical Psychology a paradigm may be observed in this respect, and by none other than as personified as an incident in the life of Jung himself.
The “necessity for an abnormal psyche” proposed by Hillman may be thus literalistically set in the model of Jung, and by which he gained entree not only into his future psychological understanding but his closet artistic work. He managed to “go crazy” (during his 1913 episode of “confrontation with the unconscious”),138 and with some endopsychic feminine help. It was a time when a mysterious feminine voice suggested to him he best give up the practice of psychology and become an artist. In his memoirs he notes: “When I was writing down these fantasies, I once asked myself, ‘what am I really doing?’ Whereupon a voice within me said, ‘it is art’. I was astonished. It had never entered my head that what I was writing had anything to do with art. Then I thought, ‘perhaps my unconscious is forming a personality that is not me, but which is insisting on coming through to expression.’ I knew certainly that the voice had come from a woman. I recognized it as the voice of a patient, a talented psychopath who had a strong transference to me. She had become a living figure in my mind.”139
This moved Jung to his idea of the anima as the inner soul- woman of a man. Apparently the anima had as much to do with art as it did with the function of intuition. “Then came the next assault”, Jung continues, “and again the same assertion: ‘that is art’ This time I caught her and said, ‘No, it is not art! On the contrary, it is nature’, and prepared myself for an argument. When nothing of the sort occurred, I reflected that the ‘woman within me’ did not have the speech centers I had. And so I suggested she use mine. She did so and came through with a long statement.”140 Appropriately, “the woman”, like intuition, could not express itself in rationally understandable language. It required translation of the irrepresentable and invisible archetype through Jung’s words. In that sense Jung became the animus of his anima, or her mouthpiece, as he tells it. Was it not as his “personality that is not me”, and much akin to the primordial underground animus of his childhood dream? Taken at face value, and how Hillman takes the figure and place of Hades, the other personality (as artist) of Jung may be taken as the devil himself. “What the anima said to me,” (considering that “she did not have the speech I had”), “seemed to me full of cunning.”141 Certainly this was the instigator as a trickster figure, included in the animus archetype that is personified as Hades or Hermes. Did Jung grasp that this inner feminine voice without speech centers spoke only as the masculine animus (personified as himself!)? Apparently not when he adds; “Thus the insinuations of the anima, the mouthpiece of the unconscious, can utterly destroy a man.” A mouthpiece without a speech center? Certainly then, unknown to the man who invented the psychological use of anima and animus, it was himself as the animus of the anima that was the mouthpiece. How this relates the man as an animus mouthpiece to an actual woman must be implied.
Jung’s awesome dream of a giant ichthyphallus rising in an underground cave142 may have presented a “mother phallus” more related to Jung’s mother than himself as a three year old child. Why a small boy would have such a dream which, as Jung notes in his memoirs, has no reference in such a child’s actual experience, bears the possibility of the mother’s psyche still in unbroken bond with that of her son’s. That children literally dream for their parents, or have their parents’ dreams, is not a remote phenomenon, especially in a psychologically repressive environment. The influence of the woman, whether as actual woman or anima, is apparently the instrument of deep unconscious contents generally unavailable and suitably repressed in the psychology of the male. This runs consistent in his later life. His first big book, Psychology of the Unconscious, used the pseudonymous “Miss Miller” as base (the case history of a disturbed American lady and poet drawn from the files of Theodore Flournoy). Around her figure and her poetic utterances he was inspired to compose an astounding survey of myths and archetypes. In similar utility of the projected anima, the woman’s voice that Jung reports in his memoirs advising him to take up the practice of art may be related to a lady patient who was gifted as an artist; Sabina Speilrein with whom Jung had an affair. In all cases, whether as phantom autoerotic image or actual acquaintance, the “other woman”, as extramarital mistress, carries the larger share of a man’s anima than his wife; translating directly from mother to the “other woman”. In this manner the man performs as the animus of the anima, in effect the “mouthpiece” of both the anima and the girlfriend. Then where does “wife” fit in with regard to the man’s anima? Here we arrive at something problematic. Where the other woman might serve to constellate the “other personality” (in Jung’s case as “artist”), the wife keeps his nose to the grindstone of his primary personality, In Jung’s case, as practicing psychologist and dedicated family man. What would stand in the way of the masculine “intuition rising” would then be the figure of the wife. Of course this would have to be so, insofar as “wife” in a tradition older than our own is the bearer of a man’s children, the keeper of hearth and home and all those intimacies that serve the cause of generation. The intuition is then functionally channeled, the inner, underground and eternal fire in pragmatic life service. In other words, it has been extraverted rather than introverted, to use Jung’s terms. Yet it was Jung’s need at this time of his life to gain some perspective to his dormant introverted side and the “inner life” by which it is conditioned. Short of realizing any reconciliation in the matter, intuition and the anima were quite literally extended and located in the object, in this case an actual “other woman.”
The problematics of Jung’s other, more introverted personality, however, is not confined to Jung alone. It in fact “translates” as a migrating ghost. The apparent inversion also migrates to effect “Jungians” who followed him, and which seems to be the case with Hillman. The question of art and poetry, or the creative function per se, is left dangling insofar as Jung’s artist personality was decidedly kept in the closet until that time when his memoirs were, at his insistence, to be only posthumously published. Only there does he report that after his “confrontation with the unconscious,” the practice of art remained a vital and necessary part of his life. It was not, however, something that included an open and acceptable aesthetic commitment with any deep seriousness in the training of Analytical Psychologists. If nothing else the practice of art remained in service to psychology, hardly something in its own right, and applied as a psychotherapeutical device. Nevertheless, following the tradition of men-of-mind, all the way from the pre-Socratic philosophers, we find philosophers are closet poets, or in a strained and antithetical relationship to poets. There was no room, for example, in Plato’s ideal Republic ruled by philosophers, for poets. Accordingly, since philosophers and modern psychologists make up as a transhistorical brotherhood, it cannot be ignored that Hillman’s flair for poetically spiced prose reveals the migrating ghost of Jung, or his intuition, is still at work, no less than as if it had migrated from Nietzsche and Goethe to himself. Certainly I am speaking of this in the psychological rather than metaphysical sense, but which equally reduces the creative sensibility as something left aesthetically undefined, barring it not only to influence by the history of art but to contemporary art trends and developments.
The question of wives and mistresses, however, remains at large, especially it appears to have something vital to do with a man’s relationship to his intuition. I have focused on Hillman because of this; how his view, at least as expressed in his published work, raises the question of Hades, or “death”, if not as the concealing cap and mask of the intuitive function, as the place where it is bottled up and unrelieved by the obdurate eternal god of death in situ; Hades as the chthonian animus ready to rise up as phallus. Indicated as such is the presence of the anima in the male psychology performing quite archaically and without mediation or moderation. For the practicing artist or poet this may be par for the course although a psychological catastrophe for anyone less at home in the vagaries of the creative function.
Here I am treading on territory that is extremely personal for all concerned; what brings the Masculine Mystery into close quarters with the primordial maternal animus; but I have developed this idea regardless simply because the primordial animus image (as phallus, or sometimes as serpent), overlaps the masculine and feminine psyche, compounding as such the notions of anima and animus in their undifferentiated states; or when it may be observed that the masculine psychology may very well be dominated by an animus, just as the female psychology would personify the anima. In either case, it may be asked, who is doing the “projecting” into whom? The fact is, no such projection takes place insofar as the unconscious remains a closed circuit and uninterrupted by consciousness at the most minimal level of self-awareness. Only the pre-ego infant may be given in example, even as it is genetically predetermined with regard to gender. In that case, if it at all were possible to make a determination, it may be shown that contra-sexuality may be psychically dormant but gender itself expressed in strongly archaic images. How much such images, or in the infant’s case, behavior, reflects a parent of the opposite sex may be assumed as a psychic content unconscious in the parent. In either case, the image of the phallus would be a common representation of both parents; from the mother’s unconscious standpoint (as an animus), and the father’s object standpoint as male. “Masculine Mysteries”, therefore, indulge a ritual of image and behavior insofar as the phallus, as a primary object in extension, and thus qualified as primary object per se, would vibrate from the masculine objective nature to the feminine subjective nature, and in this polarity may develop strong importance in the life development of either, especially that consciousness itself is easily represented as an extension and objectification in space emerged from its maternal and only maternal (matrix) source, i.e., the unconscious. Indeed, in Jung’s case, the secret he carried to the grave. Yet he was good enough to leave behind his memoirs, and thus let the cat out of the bag, at least publicly. If, according to such information, Hillman determines that psyche is necessarily pathologizing, and the exclusive agency of a man’s madness, then “mother” and the illicit “other woman” extend a link that for the masculine psychology exemplifies it; insofar as anything of an unconscious and irrational nature must be considered either illegal, immoral and hence outside the ken of proper manhood. The male as poet or painter would fare no better in such a consideration. Art, death and ghosts would accordingly conjoin as a single reality, as if one and the same, with hardly a clue offered that the question of originality draws them apart.
After his “confrontation” episode Jung reports a series of most inexplicable incidents involving synchronicistic and parapsychological phenomena. They mostly concerned Jung and his family life. He begins the account by saying; “Thus my family and my profession always remained a joyful reality and a guarantee that I also had a normal existence.”143 During 1916 he “felt an urge” to render his previous fantasies in poetry and apparently less fearful of the “deeping cunning” of the anima. The poem that was to come into being was his Septem Sermones ad Mortuos that he actually privately published as “The Seven Sermons to the dead written by Basilides in Alexandria, the City where the East Toucheth the West.”The title suggests something of what I have already elaborated about Weser and Eastra (as death and birth). He notes: “From that time on, the dead have become ever more distinct for me as the voices of the Unanswered, Unresolved, and Unredeemed.” He of course related this psychologically “to what I had to communicate to the world about the unconscious...” He qualifies; “In a certain sense this is also a relationship to the collectivity of the dead; for the unconscious corresponds to the mythic land of the dead, the land of ancestors.” Again, this statement intimates an identity between archetypes and the dead and perhaps provides fuel for Hillman’s view.
Prior to recording his poem, all hell broke loose at home in a most non-psychological way and as real materializations. “There was”, he notes, “an ominous atmosphere all around me.” The children became inexplicably disturbed. His eldest daughter “saw a white figure passing through her room.” His second daughter had her blankets mysteriously pulled from the bed during the night. His nine-year old son had an anxiety dream and the next morning drew a picture in crayon of a fisherman by a stream who had caught a fish: “On the fisherman’s head was a chimney from which flames were leaping and smoke rising. From the other side of the river the devil came flying through the air. He was cursing because his fish had been stolen. But above the fisherman hovered an angle who said, ‘You can’t do anything to him’ he only catches the bad fish.” Was this “intuition rising” in a most unconscious way for Jung and manifested by his son? Was his son’s dream an extension of his own dream of the ichthyphallus at three years old, and equally derived from a parent, related to the fish and in turn the devil or its predecessor as the phallic Hades?
The next day (Sunday) while at home with the family the domestic tranquility was fractured by poltergeist phenomena: “The atmosphere was thick, believe me!...The whole house was filled as if there were a crowd present, crammed full of spirits. They were packed deep right up to the door, and the air was so thick it was scarcely possible to breathe. As for myself, I was all a-quiver with the question: ‘For God’s sake, what in the world is this?’ Then they cried out in chorus, ‘We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought.’ That is the beginning of the Septem Sermones.”144 Aside from the ghosts, the fish image was to become a persistent vehicle for Jung’s synchronicistic experiences in the years to come.
Here it may become apparent why Hillman is such a staunch defender of Hades, more than worried that anyone or anything would threaten its gates, storm them and do in Old Nick. Yet his philosophical approach to Hades is as if to keep those gates shut tight, perhaps as his own private reserve, and thereby covet intuition, retained safely at bay. Indeed, no joy would it be to duplicate in experience what visited Jung in his own house! So it would seem: intuition, even as it is equivalent to “death”, is something worse than death; what best be closeted except to compromise and undermine a reasonable masculine perspective. Jung’s experiences would testify to this, more so that “intuition rising” would threaten not only his professional career but his family. Frau Emma Jung, of course, held the fort well. One must wonder for her endurance in the face of such threats from the underworld of death and intuition that were visiting her husband. This also points up my distinction between the nature of the anima as the “other woman” who renders the man an animus of the anima, a virtual psychopompus.
It also raises the question again of the difference between an “archetype” and a personatype, or mask image, or more precisely, the nature of their relationship. How indeed are ghost or mask images related to the archetype as such? So far they do not, Hillman’s notions notwithstanding, seem to be one and the same, causally related or one the instrument of the other. Keeping this in mind, the definition of “inflation” in the glossary of Jung’s memoirs becomes almost cryptic with regard to Jung’s early experiences and Hillman’s later propositions: “Inflation: The expansion of the personality beyond its proper limits by identification with the persona or with an archetype...”145 The “identification with the persona, or an archetype” places both in a kind of equivalence. But equivalence does not imply identity, indeed, indicating that they are at opposite ends of the psychic spectrum. Perhaps this is where Hillman picks up his cue; by avoiding the difference, or at best misreading the equivalence, to achieve what I have been calling a confusion of the archetype with the mask-image or personatype. The question: may an archetypal image perform as a mask or personatype? Hillman would say “yes”, if in fact he is literally hypostatizing Jung’s early psychic encounters. I would say no, since I have raised the question of distinguishing the two. What would Jung have said? The fact is; there is no clear and cut answer. Only for analytical purposes may the two be differentiated. Or otherwise asked: when is an archetype a ghost, mask or imitated reality, and when is it an original experience? A relation of complementarity plays a role here, maximized as an uncertainty principle that disallows any fixing of points or boundaries. Indeed, then ask: where is the boundary line and rim separating East from West, the realm of death and the realm of birth; the place of the setting sun and the place of its rising? The old philosophers would say; for a circle beginning and end are in common.
Crowning the questions it must be stated that at the time when the constellation Draco moved circumpolar, coinciding the uroboric or tail-eating age of neolithic matri-dominant. The dominance referred to here is not realized as a position of priority or superiority but of singleness of gender; where the masculine function, or maleness per se, is not exemplified for the performance of an individual act intrinsic to procreation. This is obviously not true for the woman who, however impregnated and by whom an how many, individually bears and delivers the child. A matrilineal system is thus more pertinent than the noting of patrilineage in a relatively closed society with an abundance of wandering sires at hand. But no sooner neighboring societies come into intercourse and exchange a social complexity arises demanding consciousness of paternity, if for no other reason that “this place” and “that place”- as communities- require marking. Obviously the boys may wander from one place to another whereas the woman sits put at the center of maternal activity. This would be, from the exclusive “matriarchal” standpoint, intolerable, insofar as the Queen Bee’s identity (in lineage) becomes confused and compromised. In other words, one mothering queen in one hive is one world as if in and by itself. But for two, or three or more worlds, the matrilineage breaks down, not by any choice of the males, but because the woman herself begins to seek identity (in her place as opposed to the other places). It then becomes mandatory to know who the father is so that the animus activity as a plethora of lovers becomes narrowed down to a single figure and the single act by which the woman may measure herself and being. In relation to the cultures, there were no interstitial borders. The unbroken circle was complete with its supposed fixed in heaven cosmic center through which the world axis was drawn. The question need never have been asked in that state of undifferentiated gender and consciousness. Sometime during the early Bronze age the effects of the earth’s precession was observed, revealing the circle eccentric and no longer circumpolar with regard to Draco. The question then had to be asked and the menhirs and henges rose up to begin their marking.
After 8000 years the marking continues, although by now evolved to counting and high speed computing. Pre-historically disturbed was the ideal condition where “...the East toucheth the West...”
Only then, in an Eden-like pre-history, were archetypes and ghosts of the same psychic fabric, and which for Jung was finally expressed to the contrary; “We have come back from Jerusalem where we have not found what we sought.” As such, it remained only as an inner reality. His metanoia came to pass, his ghosts vacated and by which a climactic introjection was achieved. Only then was his self-search commenced and his understanding of “archetypes” given fuller dimension.

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FINI

Taken from the book: The Polyimagical Realm by Bernard X. Bovasso

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