I fight the seizures that shake me make me into another plume it takes all I have sometimes to free the lines that have been subdued ...placed in tomb below layers of rotten cocoon. I am squinting, the brightness of the lightness and the tightness of the room seems too much to bear today in my grey... I am born of flesh, enmeshed and torn from the silvery star that beckons me reckons with me it'd be better where we are if we could find that place that face, that sunny stream of shining lace that surrounds the space inhabited by you...
🔥 In contrast, archetypal psychology holds that the true iconoclast is the image itself which explodes its allegorical meanings, releasing startling new insights. Thus the most distressing images in dreams and fantasies, those we shy from for their disgusting distortion and perversion, are precisely the ones that break the allegorical frame of what we think we know about this person or that, this trait of ourselves or that. The “worst” images are thus the best, for they are the ones that restore a figure to its pristine power as a numinous person at work in the soul…
….A more general result of nominalism is “logophobia,” a dread of words especially of big words which might harbor irrealities. Our difficulty with the word archetype and with envisioning the reality of archetypal images and ideas is one of the effects of nominalism. We are in peculiar double bind with words; they fascinate and at the same time repel. For because of nominalism words have become both bloated in importance and dried in content. In the modern language-games of Wittgenstein, words are the very fundamentals of conscious existence, yet they are also severed from things and from truth. They exist in a world of their own. In modern structural linguistics, words have no inherent sense, for they can be reduced, every single one of them, to basic quasi-mathematical units. The fantasy of a basic number of irreducible elements out of which all speech can be constituted is a dissecting technique of the analytic mind which applies logical atomism to Logos itself–a suicide of the word.
Of course there is a credibility gap, since we no longer trust words of any sort as true carriers of meaning. Of course, in psychiatry, words have become schizogenic, themselves a cause and source of mental disease. Of course we live in a world of slogan, jargon, and press releases, approximating the “Newspeak” of Orwell’s 1984.
As one art and academic field after another falls into the paralyzing coils of obsession with language and communication, speech succumbs to a new semantic anxiety. Even psychotherapy, which began as a “talking cure” – ‘ the rediscovery of the oral tradition of telling one’s story- is abandoning language for touch, cry, and gesture. We dare not be eloquent. To be passionate, psychotherapy now says we must be physical or primitive. Such psychotherapy promotes a new barbarism. Our semantic anxiety has made us forget that words, too, burn and become flesh as we speak.
A new angelology of words is needed so that we may once again have faith in them. Without the inherence of the angel in the word- and angel means originally “’emissary, “‘message-bearer” -how can we utter anything but personal opinions, things made up in our subjective minds? How can anything of worth and soul be conveyed from one psyche to another, as in a conversation, a letter, or a book, if archetypal significances are not carried in the depths of our words?
We need to recall the angel aspect of the word, recognizing words as independent carriers of soul between people. We need to recall that we do not just make words up or learn them in school, or ever have them fully under control. Words, like angels, are powers which have Invisible power over us. They are personal presences which have whole mythologies: genders, genealogies (etymologies concerning origins and creations), histories, and vogues; and their own guarding, blaspheming, creating, and annihilating effects. For words are persons. This aspect of the word transcends their nominalistic definitions and contexts and evokes in our souls a universal resonance. Without the inherence of soul In words, speech would not move us, words would not provide forms for carrying our lives and giving sense to our deaths. “Death” itself, and “soul” “Gods,” “persons, would become, as Antiphon the Sophist said thousands of years ago, mere conventions and artifacts.’ Personifying would be simply a manner of nominalistic speech.
It is this person in the word, its angelic power, that nominalism dreads. Nominalism is not simply a philosophical position which would disembowel words, emptying them into windbags, fatus voci. It is a psychological defense against the psychic component of the word. The bigness it fears and would reduce refers to the complex nature of words which act upon us as complexes and release complexes in us. Philosophy works wholly with words, so it must bring their complexities into rational order. This is the job of rational speech whether in logic, theology, or science. In fact, rational use of words was what the word “sanity” originally meant in Latin. Therefore, nominalism refuses to recognize the person in the word or to personify them; to do so implies insanity.
I admit that the personifying path we are on is, indeed, deviant if not mad. But it is from this psychological perspective that we must look at all judgments against personifying. For these judgments come from a tradition that has progressively depotentiated both images and words in order to maintain a particular vision of man, reason, and reality. This vision divides the world into objects and egos, giving to the soul no more place than the pea-sized pineal gland, to which island in the middle of the brain Descartes banished the psyche at the beginning of our modern period….🔥
🌜✨🌟….Anthropomorphism, the attribution of human form and character …..ascription of a human attribute of personality to anything impersonal or 'irrational" enters the English language in 1793 via the French. Animism , the attribution of a living soul to inanimate objects and natural phenomena “, occurs a century later in the present sense made familiar by the anthropologist Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871). The first is an emissary into English of the French Enlightenment with its acute sensitiveness to the irrationality of religion and its investment in the Cartesian world of dead and impersonal objects. The second is a product of Victorian progressive scientism. Both are heritages of nominalism. Both deprive that mode of experience to which they purportedly refer of its native validity. So we shall not use the terms anthropomorphism and animism but rather the term personifying to signify the basic psychological activity- the spontaneous experiencing envisioning and speaking of the configurations of existence as psychic presences- and hopefully thereby save this authentic activity from being condemned as personification.
Personification is a psychologism. It implies a human being who creates Gods in human likeness much as an author creates characten out of his own personality. These Gods depict his own needs; they are his projections. Personification cannot imagine that these psychic presences (Gods, daemons, and other persons of the mythical realm) have autonomous substantial reality. It cannot imagine that an author, say, is driven to bear the messages of "his" characters, that it is their will that is done, that he is their scribe, and that they are creating him even while he creates them. An author's fictions are often more significant than his own reality, containing more psychic substance, which lasts long after their "creator" has gone. An author creates only by their authority. The notion that literary fictions have an inherent autonomy is itself visioned by means of a personified Muse, without whose aid the entire writing venture becomes precarious.
All three terms- anthropomorphism, animism, personification - contain one basic idea: there exists a “mode of thought” which takes an inside event and puts it outside, at the same time making this content alive, personal, and even divine. These three terms by saying that human beings tend to imagine things into souls, are actually describing a manner of soul-making. But by calling this activity a "mode of thought" it becomes an act we perform- conscious or unconscious- rather than something we immediately experience. Where these three terms assume thought makes soul, personifying recognizes soul as existent prior to reflection. Personifying is a way of being in the world and experiencing the world as a psychological field, where persons are given with events, so that events are experiences that touch us, move us, appeal to us.
But as Van der Leeuw has said we waste breath trying to disprove the theory of animism. It can, however, be seen through as a psychological statement saying less about the soul of primitives than about the primitive soul of those writing about them. Animism is an anthropological report about the soul of anthropology. “In its entire structure and tendency," says van der Leeuw, “this theory suits the second half of the nineteenth century far better than it does the primitive world."
The theory of animism represents a condition of soul (anima) which cannot find soul except as projected into infantile behavior, psychopathology of fetishism, the common people of the collective mind, or the dark places and peculiar behaviors of exotic peoples in distant islands or insane asylums. Through these concepts —personification, anthropomorphism, animism-- reason could indeed make stones live again and even create souls and Gods. The rational tradition, having lost its base in the psyche, was trying to Rediscover it through the anthropology of animism. “ 🌟✨🌛
🔥🃏🔥 But there was another tradition, which continued to regard personifying as a necessary mode of understanding the world and of being in it It began with the Greeks and Romans, who personified such psychic powers as Fame, Insolence, Night, Ugliness, Timing, Hope, to name but a few. These were regarded as “real daemons to be worshipped and propitiated and no mere figments of the imagination. And, as is well known, they were actually worshipped in every Greek city. To mention Athens alone, we find altars and sanctuaries of Victory, Fortune, Friendship, Forgetfulness, Modesty, Mercy, Peace, and many more.
Many consider this practice as merely animistic, but it was really an act of ensouling; for there is no question that the personifying of the ancient Greeks and Romans provided altars for configurations of the soul. When these are not provided for, when these Gods and daemons are not given their proper place and recognition, they become diseases -a point Jung made often enough. The need to provide containers for the many configurations of the soul was formulated in the third century A.D. by the greatest of all Platonist philosophers, Plotinus. In a section of his Enneads called appropriately "The Problems of the Soul" we find this passage:
~”I think, therefore, that those ancient sages, who sought to secure the presence of divine beings by the erection of shrines and statues, showed insight into the nature of the All; they perceived that, though this soul is everywhere tractable, its presence will be secured all the more readilywhen an appropriate receptacie is elaborated, a place especially capable of receiving some portion or phase of it, something reproducing it, or representing it and serving like a mirror to catch an image of it.”~
When in the next passage (IV, 3, 12) he speaks of "the souls of men, seeing their images in the mirror of Dionysus," he seems again to be referring to the ability of the soul to divide into many parts, and that its portions and phases reflect the various images of divine persons. Personifying not only aids discrimination; it also offers another avenue of loving, of imagining things in a personal form so that we can find access to them with our hearts. Words with capital letters are charged with affect, they jump out of their sentences and become images. The tradition of depersonifying recognized full well that personified words tend to become cherished and sacred, affecting the reason of the heart. Hence nominalists disparage the personified style of expression, calling it rhetoric with emotive meaning only. But this very recognition, that personifying emotionalizes, shift the discussion from nominalism to imagination, from head to heart.
The image of the heart- “l'immagine del cuor"- was an important idea in the work of Michelangelo who was strongly influenced by the Platonist tradition. Imagining with the heart refers to a mode of perception that penetrates through names and physical appearances to a personified interior image, from the heart to the heart. When Michelangelo portrayed Lorenzo and Giuliano Medici in the Sacristy of Sen Lorenzo, the features which he depicted were unnatural, not as they appeared in life but rather transfigured to conform with the true image of their persons in the heart. While the scientific Renaissance (Bacon and Galileo) insisted on the primacy of sense perception, Michelangelo’s “imagine del cuor" implied that perception is secondary to imagination. By imagining through and beyond what the eye see, the imagination envisions primordial images. And these present themselves in personified forms.
Nearer our own times another Mediterranean, the Spaniard Miguel de Unamuno (b. 1864), returned to the relationship of heart and personified images and explained the necessary interdependence between love and personifying:
~”In order to love everything, in order to pity everything, human and extra-human, living and non-living, you must feel everything within yourself, you must personalize everything. For everything that it loves, everything that it pities, love personalizes. We only love--that which is like ourselves . . . it is love itself that reveals these resemblances to us. ... Love personalizes all that it loves. Only by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea.«”
He sums up, saying: "Our feeling of the world, upon which is based our understanding of it, is necessarily anthropomorphic and mythopeic. Loving is a way of knowing, and for loving to know, it must personify. Personifying is thus a way of knowing, especially knowing what is invisible, hidden in the heart. In this perspective personifying is not a lesser, primitive mode of apprehending but a finer one. It presents in psychological theory the attempt to integrate heart into method and to return abstract thoughts and dead matter to their human shapes. Because personifying is an epistemology of the heart, a thought mode of feeling, we do wrong to judge it as inferior, archaic thinking appropriate only to those allowed emotive speech and affective logic- children, madmen, poets, and primitives. Method in psychology must not hinder love from working and we are foolish to decry as inferior the very means by which love understands. If we have not understood personifying, it is because the main tradition has always tried to explain it rather than understand it.
🌀🌟To the mythic perspective the world appears personified, implying a passionate engagement with it. We do not ask: "Are things alive or dead?" or "Are Gods real or are they symbolic projections?" Questions of this sort “may be thought illegitimate," says the most psychological of all classicists, E. R. Dodds, “so long as myth-making is a living mode of thought to confront it with this sort of brutal either-or' is to force upon it a choice which destroys its being. Mythic consciousness answers with Cassirer: "There is nowhere an 'it' as a dead object, a mere thing.'* Subject and object, man and Gods, I and Thou, are not apart and isolated each with a different sort of being, one living or real, the other dead or imaginary. The world and the Gods are dead or alive according to the condition of our souls. A world view that perceives a dead world or declares the Gods to be symbolic projections derives from a perceiving subject who no longer experiences in a personified way, who has lost his ‘immagine del cuor.’
To rekindle this life we start with soul, reimagining its internal processes anthropomorphically.This leads to the ultimate conclusion that we do not actually per sonify at all. Mythical consciousness is a mode of being in the world that brings with it imaginal persons. They are given with the imagination and are its data. Where imagination reigns, personifying happens. We experience it nightly, spontaneously, in dreams. Just as we do not create our dreams, but they happen to us, so we do not invent the persons of myth and religion; they, too, happen to us. The persons present themselves as existing prior to any effort of ours to personify. To mythic consciousness, the persons of the imagination are real. The late German classical scholar who had the deepest insight into the nature of mythical persons, Walter F. Otto, made this same point in an attack against his rationalist and reductive colleagues:
~There is no such thing as personification, only a depersonification--just as there is no mythologizing (in the authentic sense) only a demythologizing. Schelling said that the question how did man ever come to God is senseless; there is only the question, how did man ever come away from God. So-called abstract concepts and words would never have been raised into the personal had they not been from the very beginning personal, that is, divine forms."
Jung’s early work with word associations did not rest with quantifying results; he personified them. He discovered complexes which were invested with feeling, intention, autonomy, and fragments of consciousness. They were independent entities because they behaved as such. The same complex can alter the association of words, show itself as unwanted symptoms, and appear as a person in a dream. Dream persons are complexes walking around; symptoms are the irruption of these persons into our normal lives. Our personal complexities are indeed the persons of our complexes.
Where other psychologists might have used a so-called objective and neutral language of numbers, structures, or functions to account for the same disturbances, Jung reverted courageously to the direct mode of personifying which in his day was still considered a primitive formulation.” He stood firmly by his method of naming, explicitly comparing it with the spontaneous speech of the insane and the noncivilized. What was radically courageous then we now take for granted, so easily imagining ourselves to play roles, enter into games, and be composed of different characters.
James Hillman , are-Visioning Psychology pg.21/22
“Jung’s animism is tightly tied to his notion of anima,” which is the word he uses for one’s personal and personified soul-image. The Anima Is a person and anima is a conceptual notion and anima means soul. Jung calls her “she,” and she it is who creates conflicting confusions and attractions, who brings moods and desires and neurovegetative symptoms, who kindles the peculiar fascinations of fantasy that turn one’s head, and yet also conveys a vague sense of interiority, a sense of soul.” ~James HillmanA person may converse with her, as for example, when a poet talks With his muse, a philosopher with his daimon, a mystic with his tutelary angel, or a madman with his hallucination. We find her in mythology In countless forms, and expressly as the maiden Psyche. ~ James HillmanJung’s position here states that the fundamental facts of existence are the “fantasy-images” of the psyche. All consciousness depends on these images. Everything else–ideas of the mind, sensations of the body, perceptions of the world around us, beliefs, feelings, hungers–must present themselves as images in order to become experienced. ” ‘Experience’ is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images.”‘ Should we ask: just what is psyche? What do you mean by psychic experience and psychic reality? The answer is: fantasy- images. “Image is psyche, ” says Jung. “The psyche consists essentially of images . … a “picturing’ of vital activities.” In the beginning is the image; first imagination then perception; first fantasy then reality. Or as Jung puts it: “The psyche creates reality every day. The only expression I can use for this activity is fantasy. “ Man is primarily an imagemaker and our psychic substance consists of images; our being is imaginal being, an existence in imagination. We are indeed such stuff as dreams are made on. Since we can know only fantasy-images directly and immediately , and from these images create our worlds and call them realities, we live in a world that is neither “inner” nor “outer.” Rather the psychic world is an imaginal world, just as image is psyche. Paradoxically, at the same time these images are in us and we live in the midst of them. The psychic world is experienced empirically as inside us and yet it encompasses us with images. I dream and experience my dreams as inside me and yet at the same time I walk around in my dreams and am inside them. James HillmanBecause our psychic stuff is images, image-making is a via regia, a royal road to soul-making. The making of soul-stuff calls for dreaming, fantasying, imagining. To live psychologically means to imagine things; To be in touch with soul means to live in sensuous connection with fantasy. To be in soul is to experience the fantasy in all realities and the basic reality of fantasy. ~James Hillman
This vision cannot be enacted unless archetypal persons strike us as utterly real. To experience imaginal reality, a psychic function–the specific function of the imaginative soul–must be active. This soul person is the person of our moods, self-reflections, and reveries, of our sensuous longing beyond the sensately concrete, the spinner of fantasy who is the personification of all unknown psychic capacities that lie waiting, drawing us seductively, uncannily inward to the dark of the uncut forest and the deeps below the waves. Anima means both psyche and soul, and we meet her in her numerous embodiments as soul of waters without whom we dry, as soul of vegetation who greens our hope or blights with symptoms, as Lady of the Beasts riding our passions. She is father’s daughter and mother’s daughter, and my sister, my soul. She is also a worrying succubus drawing off our life’s juice, a harpy with talons, a cold white wraith with mad addictions–but a nurse as well, and a serving maid, a Cinderella nymphet, vague with no history, a tabula rasa waiting for the word. And she is also the Sophia of wisdom, the Maria of compassion, the Persephone of destruction, compelling Necessity and Fate, and the Muse.
The multiplicity of her forms in fictions and lives, and the intensely personified and intensely subjectified reality of her nature, bespeak a world into which she calls and over which she rules.
I am in a bedroom somewhere and I can feel my belly wriggling around very actively. IT is different and I think ‘this is it, baby is coming’. Then a small snake is born and crawls from my vagina and out the bottom of my shorts to the floor! I am in awe, and find it strange at first but then I try to catch it and it crawls under the bed. When I look under the bed to see it, I has changed into a cloth snake, made of white fabric, and it seems to have a bit of patchwork and is sewn with thread and the eyes are sewn on etc. But it is moving around like normal. Then I grab it and look at it closely trying to figure out what it means. Next thing I know, it is a robot, with metal wires, and what seems to be microchips on it, all pieced together but a bit crudely. I think to myself that ‘Mother” has been experimenting again?!
Clinically, this polycentricity would be condemned as schizoid fragmentation, demonstrating the ambivalence of a center that cannot hold. But mythically we might look for a God in the disease, perhaps Hermes-Mercury or the Trickster. For schizoid polycentricity is a style of consciousness and not only a disease; and this style thrives in plural meanings, in cryptic double-talk, in escaping definitions, in not taking heroic committed stances, in ambisexuality, in psychically detached and separated body parts.
Or this style of consciousness could be given another clinical name: hysteria.” Then we might look for Dionysus and his community, where self division, dismemberment, and a flowing multiplicity belong to a mythical pattern. Again, consciousness is not heroic and fixed to one point, but seeps as if through mystical participation in a processional of personifications, interfused, enthusiastic, suggestible, labilc. Whether schizoid and Mercurial, whether hysterical and Dionysian, there are archetypal patterns at work, Gods affecting our styles of consciousness.
As the latter, anima has a series of meanings." First. (a) she is the personification of our unconsciousness-our stupidities, follies, intractable problems. Then (b) she is a particular personification appearing in a particular moment- call girl, shopgirl, schoolgirl--who presents a precise image of the current emotions of the soul. She is also (c) the feeling of personal interiority. She brings the sense of having an interior life, changing events into experience that means “me." She makes possible the inner ground of faith in myself as a person, giving the conviction that what happens matters to the soul and that one's existence is personal and important." She thus (d) personalizes existence. Anima, moreover, is (e) that person by means of whom we are initiated into imaginal understanding, who makes possible experiencing through images, for she embodies the reflective, reactive, mirroring activity of consciousness. Functionally anima works as that complex which connects our usual consciousness with imagination by provoking desire or clouding us with fantasies and reveries, or deepening our reflection. She is both bridge to the imaginal and also the other side, personifying the imagination of the soul. Anima is psyche personified, as Psyche in the ancient story of her by Apuleius personified the soul.
So the movement into psychological existence proceeds through her in one form or another. The movement through the constructed world of concepts and dead things into an animistic, subjective, mythical consciousness, where fantasy is alive in a world alive and means follows anima. She teaches personifying, and the very first lesson of her teaching is the reality of her independent personality over and against the habitual modes of experiencing with which we are so identified that they are called ego, I. The second lesson is love; shé comes to life through love and insists on it, just as Psyche in the old tale is paired forever with Eros.
Perhaps the loving comes first. Perhaps only through love is it possible to recognize the person of the soul. And this connection between love and psyche means a love for everything psychological, every symptom or habit, finding place for it within the heart of imagination, finding a mythical person who is its supportive ground. The connection between love and psyche means as well bringing a psychological eye to all of love's manifestations-that all its mad and deviate cravings seek ultimately the connection with psyche.
Whether we conceive of this interior person as Anima or as an Angel, a Daemon, a Genius, or a Paredros, or one of the personified souls in the traditions of ancient China and Egypt, this figure is indispensable to the notion of human personality. Some traditions, in fact, have asserted that an individual without his soul figure is not a human being. Such a one has lost soul.
BlissNinja 