Awhile back, I was rummaging through some old belongings and happened upon a book of mine from childhood. It was a richly illustrated, colorful volume featuring a large centerfold map of the United States, showing logging in the Northwest, cotton farming in the South, and so on. I don’t believe the book had even entered […]

Philosophers David Lavery and Jean Gebser pointed to the fourteenth century introduction of perspective in art as indicating an underlying alteration of perception: the artist now stood completely apart from others and from nature, observing them at a distance from the fixed point of reference inside his head. Gebser’s recognition of the broad implications of […]

Reader, while I cannot directly gauge your reaction to what I am saying, if you have gotten this far in the book, I imagine you can more or less understand where I am coming from. If you are with me in what I am proposing, if you can see the need for us to put […]

Mathematicians are aware that a form that penetrates itself in a given number of dimensions can be produced without cutting a hole if an added dimension is available. The point is nicely illustrated by mathematician Rudolf Rucker. He asks us to imagine a species of “flatlanders” attempting to assemble a Moebius strip. Rucker shows that, […]

Cave paintings of animals – Chauvet Cave,  south-central France Needless to say, this two-dimensional rendering of animal life was produced by prehistoric human hands, not by animals themselves! Yet, as Berman notes, Paleolithic people were powerfully influenced by animal life. Could we not then speculate that the two-dimensionality of the artwork reflects the two-dimensionality of […]

I’m out with some friends in a northland region. Everything is frozen and icy, and we’re near the sea. There are wild animals around us—sharks or ferocious dogs, something like that. I realize that our lives are at risk. There is the terrifying feeling that at any second we’re going to be savagely attacked. My […]

In Jung’s view, [the story of “The Spirit in the Bottle”] “contains the quintessence and deepest meaning of the Hermetic mystery”: a powerful spirit is trapped in the earth beneath an oak tree, enclosed within “a well-sealed glass bottle.” Hearing the spirit cry “Let me out!” a passing youth opens the bottle, whereupon the spirit […]

  Above: Images of the anima mundi appearing in Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy: left-hand image from Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi, 1617; right-hand image from Leonhard Thurneysser’s, Quinta Essentia, 1574. Below: Less anthropocentric images of the anima mundi: Michael Michelitsch’s fractal image of the living earth (left) and Marina Radius’s bronze image of the owl, symbol […]

I and others had been warding off violent attacks in the dark. We were engaged in a desperate battle to save our lives. Then the lights went on and I could see many people who, in one way or another, were defending themselves against attacking snakes. There were several snakes that were being held off […]

Two images of woman with snake, from the Dream Art of Jungian analyst and artist Maria Taveras (These figures remind me of my own dream of snakes, reported in chapter 2, and make me wonder about my relationship to the anima.) (back to chapter 5)