BECOMING OURSELVES

Christian with the Shield of Faith Taking Leave of His Companions

 

I grew up as a traditional Christian and had the whole pattern of imagery presented by the church. There was a time when there was a popular book ...it was about putting the ideas of Christianity into new wineskins ... to me this process that I'm undergoing is putting the same reality, the same archetypal reality into different form so that you have a different vocabulary to express these archetypes. These things are built-in processes that take place repeatedly and eternally-not necessarily repeated in the sense of "we're always doing the same thing over again," but they will be repeated in different forms.

 

"The primordial image, or archetype, is a figure—be it a daemon, a human being, or a process—that constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. (...) In each of these images there is a little piece of human psychology and human fate, a remnant of the joys and sorrows that have been repeated countless times in our ancestral history." 
Carl Jung, On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry, in Collected Works 15, 127

 

William Blake

Descriptive Catalogue, (E 532)
" NUMBER III.
Sir Jeffery Chaucer and the nine and twenty Pilgrims on
their journey to Canterbury.

 The characters of Chaucer's Pilgrims are the characters
which compose all ages and nations: as one age falls, another
rises, different to mortal sight, but to immortals only the same;
for we see the same characters repeated again and again, in
animals, vegetables, minerals, and in men; nothing new occurs in
identical existence; Accident ever varies, Substance can
never suffer change nor decay.

Frye  on Archetypes