PSYCHOLOGICAL POLYTHEISM
PSYCHOLOGICAL POLYTHEISM
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iMages
Soul is rooted in the main ground of the Western tradition, extending from the Greeks through the Renaissance, Romantics, depth psychology and non-interpretive archetypal psychology.
Archetypal psychology is a polytheistic, aesthetic, poetic, phenomenological approach. Grounded in myth and archetype, it is about the imaginative life, soul-not-ego, healing; active, reflective introspection; connection with the daemonic; purposeful communication.
Knowing oneself is essentially mythic and archetypal, a transition from the material to the psychical point of view.
Polytheistic Imagination is Reality; we are deepened and enlivened by tending to soul. Nontheological soul is another dimension grounded in cultivation of imagination and vision. Psyche or Soul is Anima Mundi, Soul of the World; Image is psyche; healing fiction.
The Goddess is The Feminine;
the Gods are Archetypes, multiple archetypal perspectives;
Soul Guide is our Daemon, Angel, or Genius;
There is an Ecology of Souls.
Narrative fiction is the tool to explore cultural wounding, and ground cultural futuristics as an imaginal methodology, rooted in soul governing the perspectives we have of ourselves in the world (1975).
Archetypal psychology is a move away from cure and toward the honoring of symptom, including cultural neurosis.
Hillman's archetypal psychology injects the voice of soul from past and present cultural events into future scenarios.
"So you want to learn about Archetypes."
by Iona Miller, ©2020
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Many find a deep connection with aspects of archetypal psychology outside of the therapeutic setting, applying them to their own lives and beliefs with great benefit. There is little question of it 'working or not', if they find it satisfying and enriching.
Archetypal Overview
"By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself." He describes five things about the nature of soul as the imaginative possibilities of nature: the soul (1) makes all meaning possible, (2) turns events into experiences, (3) involves a deepening of experience, (4) is communicated in love, and (5) has a special relation with death (Hillman, 1977, p. xvi; Hillman, 1976, pp. 44-47).
“...put it my way, what we are really, and the reality we live, is our psychic reality, which is nothing but...the poetic imagination going on day and night.” --James Hillman, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World Is Getting Worse, p. 62
What is reality, what can we know about it, and how do we attain that knowledge? Archetypal psychology answers Imagination (psyche, soul), Archetypes, and Images. This is a new image of the psyche with deep connections to Neo-Platonism, the Renaissance, and Romanticism.
Mythic archetypes are active and present in our lives and the world today. The term 'soul-making', coined by John Keats is applied by James Hillman referring to a practice through which we slow down and deepen our connectedness to ourselves, others, and the world. It emphasizes being over doing and the present moment over future aspirations.
It embraces and prioritizes woundedness, humanity, and limitations over a metaphysical quest for perfection, transcendence, and transformation. Psychic numbing is denial. In other words, soul-making occurs every time we look more closely, more feelingly at the individuals and ancestors peopling our lives and the ideas, afflictions, and ever-present prospect of death which together give substance and meaning to our hours and days.
Poiesis, as creative act, is the death and re-birth of the soul. We constantly to re-form ourselves with 'soul-making.' Poiesis is integrative affirmation always emerging into form. The naturally therapeutic process evokes the emotions and experiences that give life a deeper meaning.
Polytheistic myths can provide psychological insight. Archetypal psychology is an introduction to polytheism, Greek mythology, the soul-spirit distinction, anima mundi, psychopathology, soul-making, imagination, and therapeutic practice. We cannot escape myth, only live it consciously or unconsciously. The persons of the imagination are real to mythic consciousness.
The Soul & Imagination
Soul is a root metaphor for multiple perspectives: psychological, ethical, political, poetic. To find soul, we search for the images it is made of, through which psyche introduces itself. Soul is a meeting place, or connecting point between the spirit and physical world.
Hillman talks about the way the animus or spirit always appears alongside the anima or soul, and vice versa, whether we like it or not. We have the ascending position which moves consciousness from the world to the transcendental world.
The descending way moves consciousness towards deepening a greater relational connection with other people, nature and the dynamic ground. The anima--as soul, relatedness, immanence, the "thick of things"--always appears together with the transcendent animus. You can't separate them even if you tried.
"As a connecting link, or traditionally third position, between all opposites, the soul differs from the terms which it connects...It is not life that matters, but soul and how life is used to care for soul." (Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, pp. 174-175)
Rumi knew, "The soul has been given its own ears / To hear things that the mind doesn’t understand." Hillman has a special sort of metaphorical, mythic vision that generates universal meaning and insight. It opens “the questions of life to transpersonal and culturally imaginative reflection” (Hillman, 2013, p. 28).
Aldous Huxley said, "What you take in by visionary experience you must give out by love and intelligence in daily life." Soul communicates through a metaphorical and mythical language. Corbin insists we must restore complete integrity to the soul. Working with psychic images is the theoretical base of archetypal psychology.
Imagery evokes a perceptual response -- an aesthetic response, a participatory way of knowing, re-membering, and reconnecting with soul and identity. In the phenomenological aesthetic paradigm, Hillman asserts that images derive autonomy and operate according to their own will, similar to gods.
Mythical images, unseen worlds in this one, are the psyche, an intrinsic and undeniable reality where the divine appears. Spirit is incarnated in the glorious body and the body is spiritualized in the subtle body. Imagination mediates between the world and the divine as an agent that fills the space of soul with its own illuminations and visions.
"Psychological faith begins in the love of images, and it flows mainly through the shapes of persons in reveries, fantasies, reflections, and imaginations. Their increasing vivification gives one an increasing conviction of having, and then of being, and interior reality of deep significance transcending one’s personal life." (Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 50)
The butterfly is the universal symbol for Psyche. Like a butterfly struggling to get out of the chrysalis, each of us is struggling to emerge from the undivided into the individuated. In Greek mythology, Psyche is the deification of the human soul. She was portrayed in ancient mosaics as a goddess with butterfly wings.
Our psyche is reflected, portrayed in the world around us. Soul is at the heart of the world. “Psyche is the mother of all our attempts to understand Nature,” Jung wrote. "Psyche is image" as Jung says. Psyche, according to Hillman, is the spirit that has "afterlife, cosmic issues, idealistic values, hopes, and universal truths.
The Greek word psyche literally means "spirit, breath, life or animating force". A world without soul lacks intimacy, never returns any glance, never looks at us with appeal or with gratitude. We find intimacy in each particular event in a pluralistic cosmos, perceiving faces in the heart.
When we study the gods and goddesses, we are studying psyche itself, the life behind our personalities it uses as masks. As Hillman notes,
"It's only in the stories, our stories that the gods will still show." The gods and goddesses and the dramatic narratives of their lives thus portray the life of the psyche—its way of living (Rossi, 2019).
