"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"-- Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882)
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This essay was originally published at Neo-Paganism.com.
...When I lean over the chasm of myself,
It seems my God is dark,
...Before proceeding to describe the nature of the archetypes, I want to return to the structure of the psyche which I discussed in a previous post. In that post, I depicted the structure of the psyche as an iceberg. Jung describes the psyche using other metaphors, including a building and a plant. Both of these analogies bring the discussion of archetypes down to earth, so to speak. The connection of the archetypes to the earth or to matter is of special interest to earth-centered Pagans.
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The deciduous trees stand, bare and apparently lifeless through the winter months. The popular take on this, is that they are sleeping. It is a perspective which depends on paying no attention or thought to what the trees are really doing. Those bare branches are a misleading focus.
...[Note: This is a revised version of an earlier essay that appeared on the Humanistic Paganism blog.]
A couple of posts ago, I wrote about ritual creation as a form of Jungian Pagan spiritual practice. I described ritual as a kind of dance between the conscious and unconscious, in which the conscious mind gives form to unconscious energy or potentialities. Jung often used the metaphor of water to describe the vivifying energies of the unconscious. This water, wrote Jung, “comes from deep down in the mountain [the unconscious] and runs along secret ways before it reaches daylight [consciousness].” The place where it springs forth is marked by a symbol. This symbol merely marks the experience of the archetype, and it should not be confused with the experience (the water) itself or the archetype (the source of the water).
...[Note: This is a revised version of an earlier essay that appeared on the Humanistic Paganism blog.]
"... creative imagination is the only primordial phenomenon accessible to us, the real Ground of the psyche."
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