Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Initiatives for
practice-based Masters and Doctoral studies in the creative and performing arts and design enable
practitioners to present dissertations by project in which art-works are a major part of the
research, not adornments and extras (Frayling, 1997). The images are accompanied by texts, but
the words are not the...
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Fig 1. Arma Artis, first illumination of the Splendor Solis (MS Harley 3469, F2, by permission of
the British Library).
main focus, nor an interpretation, they are the stories about the story that set the art into its
context.
For the science-trained, even from the more relaxed atmosphere of the social sciences
and qualitative enquiry, the research methods developed to conduct such arts and practice-based
enquiries challenge conventional....
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that a thesis need not always be solely a long conceptual debate about art, devoid of images, or
with image simply as raw data to be processed.
in practice-based doctorates to be seen as a form of research in its own right as and such
equivalent to scientific research (Frayling, 1997, p21.)
At last images are being credited with some intelligence! But these are the fine images
of the recognised expressive arts; what if your art is to cultivate the inward eye of dream,
visualisation, and that visual, metaphorical mode of thinking named, rather tellingly, through its
negative attributes of being non-propositional or non-discursive? There seems much further
to go in order to bring together our psychology of images and our making of images.
If, as Jung
maintains, the psyche consists essentially of images and is a series of images in the truest
sense (Jung, 1926, par. 618) then image is the substance of our most direct, immediate
perceptions, and the characteristic moves of academic thinking; keeping a distance, interrogating,
translating or interpreting, need to be recognised as only one style of rhetoric; a particularly
iconoclastic, uninviting one.
between image and concept, imagination and cognition, this rhetorical mode will take us into
abstract definitions, but not into the imagistic deepening called for if we took Jungs claim
seriously.
Could Hillmans post-Jungian vision of a poetic basis of mind (eg Hillman, 1983, pp210) help dream the myth onward right into the academy itself?
the alchemical images I had grown to know and love, through many years of private study of the
Hermetic tradition, and through my doctoral research into active imagination as education
(Angelo, 1992). In the practice of hermetic imagination or visionary mysticism I felt I had
received a truly educational invitation, yet such transformative study seemed to be losing ground
to an all-embracing therapeutic imperialism.
imaginal, we became patients rather than prentices, humble students of Art. The metaphors
shifted from ignorance to pathology, and whilst depth therapy dealt in exiled images, education
dried out.
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After teaching privately for some years, I began an alchemical experiment in the
academy, persuading my university to run an MA programme with a Transformative Education
pathway (contained within the broader scope of Trans-personal Arts & Practice.) I wanted to
establish a practitioner vision, for which the method and grounds of knowledge, the
epistemology, would be as imagistic as the content.
receive the invitation I had received, and learn directly from the elders of the Liberal and
Hermetic Arts or what is sometimes historically called the Tradition, with a capital T.
Jung,
not known for innovation in educational methods, nevertheless gave the introductory key; it is
pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach
people the art of seeing. (Jung, 1944, par. 14).
Orpheus & the Art of Seeing reflects my critical studies of Hillman and the Renaissance school
of imagination. We begin with a day devoted to Arma Artis.
In an academic setting, focusing on a detailed particular rather than a general overview
feels risky at first, but moves us straight from conceptual abstractions into imagistic deepening.
By keeping the integrity of the master-work for the prentice alchemist, it sets the scene for a
Renaissance style of education through the imitatio.
(Bantock, 1989, p. 147), imitation did not mean mere copying, but the detailed absorption of
past models of excellence, so that excellence is known from within. It facilitates sprezzatura, the
effortlessness of mastery according to ones own genius.
By inviting this solemn and complex image to be the teacher, a model of greatness, I am released
from the burden of such a role to be alongside the students as a fellow student, modelling ways of
learning how to learn.
Together the image and I show how to hold together the essential and so often split
syzygy of senex and puer (Hillman, 1967). I explain simply that I have invited this particular
image to be our guest lecturer because I love it, because it is an elder, and because it is alive, a
living power with transformative abilities.
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no way to distinguish between the personal and the subjective, for these have become interiorised,
conflated. The empty space this leaves between us and the image out there fills with projected
stories that occlude rather than reveal the image (Oh its all about war, helmets and things;
Thats amazing, its just like my animus dream about the grail legend..)
The muses never argue with Apollo says Renaissance magus Marsilio Ficino, from the
wisdom of his counter-education, they sing (Ficino, 1494/1994, p. 126), so I simply tell a
different tale, filling the story-space with the image as a living presence, a great teacher. It might
go something like this (depending on the group):
Imagine, if you will, that you are invited to a rather special gathering where there
will be visitors from foreign lands, ambassadors from...
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In this way
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swift-flowing greenish water casting up spray. Over the stream, three shallow,
broad steps lead across the picture, to the right, up to the heraldic arms and banner in
the foreground.
The title scroll at the top of the border bears the words, Arma Artis (Arms
for the Art) hand-written in gold against red. The lower portion of this border takes
up almost a third of the whole illumination. In the base are two apes; one on the left
holding out a fish to a heron, watched by another of the long-beaked birds behind;
one on the right playing the lute. Around the rest of the frame are five more birds,
including an owl and a hoopoe, and many red, purple and blue flowers such as sweet
peas, complete with seed pods, lilies, and roses.
Such a telling prepares a silence so each can take time to tell the image inwardly, seeing
it with the inner eye, to notice what you have noticed and what is missing.
In this way we
actually meet the image on its own ground and listen first to its own language.
Solis show the images stripped from the frames, making little or no comment about them. To the
re-spectful eye however, this rich, animate garb of shining gold-leaf, flowers, birds and animals is
an intentional setting, telling us that this is how to frame our approach, our way in.
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The frame offers a vessel for the inner image, a dream-like setting. If we then imagine
the image as if it is indeed, a dream, we may apply dream-work methods of metaphor and
imagistic sensitivity (eg Bosnak, 1986), and discover, for example, that when the apes are
kindly and artistic, then the arms for the Art are displayed.
but cultural achievements. Look at the lute-player, at the skill of the paws with their delicately
placed fingers knowingly playing music for our ears. Look at the expression on the face of the
giver of the fish. To modern thinking such actions cannot happen, but who are we to argue with
the dream and insist it follow what we consider natural? There is a lesson here. If we are to enter
the world of the Royal Art, we too need to be contained in such a vessel, framed by such a
context.
Hillmans Anima Mundi perspective marks the later stage of his work in which he
reworks the notion of psychic reality, reclaiming the pre-enlightenment Hermetic Tradition of
Soul wrapped round and through all things rather than interiorised. He invites us to let fall such
games as subject-object, inner-outer (Hillman, 1982, p. 129) in favour of a living cosmos
rather than an empty, dead universe (Hillman, 1989). The recent Western universe view that
matter is meaningless stuff, and ourselves isolated egos shut up inside our skin, is a picture of
alienation and neurotic despair, and, what stress, what effort it takes to live in a cemetery; what
terrible need for will-power (Hillman, 1982, p. 121).
None of the Hermetic Arts, such as Alchemy, can in any way be appreciated from this
universe perspective, since the seventeen centuries during which they flourished and had their
golden age all preceded this modern myth (Holmyard, 1957, Harpur, 2002). The tangible yet
metaphorical eye/I re-entering the animate, animating cosmos needs to be educated to know
what it is seeing. We discover something of this if we spend longer getting to know these apes
and their particular qualities, rather than treating them as apes-in-the-abstract.
For they are not just any apes, they are sixteenth century apes, pre-enlightenment, preDarwin. From commentators of the time, such as renowned Hermetic Philosopher Robert Fludd,
we learn...
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living images, in which each part carries information about all the other parts, like cells with their
DNA, the world in a grain of sand.
We can turn from the ground to the sky, to the seven birds, seven winged ones, who, like
angels, carry the message of the frame. Somehow, it is not the owl who has excited most
attention on the many occasions I have presented this illumination, it is the Hoopoe, up there on
the left, its lovely crest raised, who has most charmed us with song and story.
In Rumis poem, The Hoopoes Talent the Hoopoe tells Solomon, I can see where the
springs are/and where good wells may be dug. But she tells also of vulnerability to things that
have trapped me, and the knowledge of a will beyond my knowing that causes both my
blindness and my clairvoyance (Rumi, pp. 18-19). Guided by this image, we take time to read
the poem and we talk about Hoopoe moments in our studies, bright flashes of breakthrough and
swooping clarity.
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describing the arms in full heraldic language (called blazoning), necessitating a translators note
before the charges can be recognised as an azure cross and bunch of grapes, diagonally opposed
on a field of gold, and between them a gold star in a bar of azure. The symbolism of these arms
says Jung, is Masonic, or Rosicrucian cross and grapes are symbols of the heavenly and
chthonic spirit. The uniting symbol is the gold star, the aurum philosophorum. (Jung, 1961, p.
259).
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calling all these images sym-bolic seems merely a way of reassuring us that they are not, by
contrast, dia-bolic; a single vision (pace Blake) that challenges none of the image-prejudice
and ignor-ance of long-term cultural iconoclasm.
Only when alchemy and astro-logia magically complement each other in their
Traditional forms as terrestrial astronomy and celestial agriculture can our alchemy become
truly Hermetic, rather than pressed into modernist servitude. Then comes the true transformative
vision, for, as the Hermetic writers pointed out, long before cognitive psychology and
phenomenology came to the same realisation, since like is understood by like (Corpus
Hermeticum, Book 11, p. 57), in the practice of perceiving cosmos rather than universe,
gradually we become cosmos.
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Since we often invite the Muses to sing for Apollo, we speak of amusement and enjoy
a certain degree of Mercurial mischief in making new names for projects, such as imaginatio
enquiry and trans-personal poiesis, the art of making that marries the worlds. I have the odd
ability to speak the strange, dead language of formal academic documentation, so can carry and
interpret messages from universe to cosmos and back (a kind of psychopompous function, as
I was once prompted to describe it.)
It is suggested that the Trismosin literature, with its profound influence upon the
alchemical tradition, is the product of an esoteric school whose pupils created sets of the images
and treatises for their own contemplative and operative use (McLean, 1991, p. 9). Following this
educative lead, I introduce all 22 of the Splendor Solis illuminations in various course options,
enabling the hermetically-minded to practice a truly trans-personal Art in which they enter the
temple, to breathe an air of spiritus, and learn our subject directly from the images. However,
Arma Artis, like an initial dream, is frontispiece and key to all that will come later: a method of
enquiry into image through image. Daimonic, not demonic (Hillman, 1977), such enquiries
share certain characteristics which we are learning from the three faces of the sun in splendor.
The right eye, astro-logically Solar, speaks to us of metaphor not used as a mere
decorative device, but understood as imagistic epistemology, a way of seeing to be entered as
one enters the...
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REFERENCES
Abram, D. (1996). The Spell of the Sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human
world. New York: Vintage Books, Random House.
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Henderson, J. & Sherwood, D. (2003). Transformations of the Psyche: The Symbolic Alchemy of
the Splendor Solis. New York: Brunner-Routledge.
Hillman, J. (1967). Senex and Puer, in James Hillman (ed), Puer Papers: 3-53. Dallas, TX:
Spring 1979.
Hillman, J. (1972). The Myth of Analysis: three essays in archetypal psychology. New York:
Harper and Row.
Hillman, J. (1975). Re-Visioning Psychology. New York: Harper and Row.
Hillman, J. (1977). The Pandaemonium of Images Jungs Contribution to Know Thyself, in
James Hillman, Healing Fiction, 53-81. New York: Station Hill, 1983.
Hillman, J. (1981). The Thought of the Heart in James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and
the Soul of the World. 3-88. Woodstock, CT: Spring. 1995.
Hillman, J. (1982). Anima Mundi: The Return of the Soul of the World in James Hillman, The
Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 89-130. Woodstock, CT: Spring. 1995.
Hillman, J. (1980-81). Silver and the White Earth in Spring: an annual of Archetypal
Psychology and Jungian Thought, part 1, 1980, parts 2-5, 1981. Dallas, TX: Spring.
Hillman, J. (1983). Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account. Dallas, TX: Spring, 1990.
Hillman, J. (1983b). Inter Views. New York: Harper and Row.
Hillman, J. (1989). Cosmology for Soul: From Universe to Cosmos, in Sphinx 2: A Journal for
Archetypal Psychology and the Arts, 17-33. London: London Convivium for Archetypal
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Holmyard, E.J. (1957). Alchemy. London: Penguin.
Jung, C.G. (1934). The Practical Use of Dream-Analysis, CW16: 139-161, London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1966.
Jung, C.G. (1944). Introduction to the Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy,
CW14: 3-37. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968.
Jung, C.G. (1926). Spirit and Life, CW8: 319-337. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969.
Jung, C.G. (1961). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. London: Collins Fount 1977.
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Contributors note:
MARIE ANGELOs doctorate on active imagination followed art college, dance therapy
training and qualifying as a Chartered Psychologist, but was inspired by entering the
Western Hermetic Tradition through the practice of visionary mysticism. A passionate
advocate of transformative education, she designed and leads an MA in Transpersonal
Arts & Practice at the University of Chichester (West Sussex, UK), for which she runs a
specialist pathway enabling students to explore the alchemical-hermetic Kosmos of the
Splendor Solis master-work directly through imaginative memory theatres. Her
publications include, This thing of brightness: the feminine power of transcendent
imagination in Tessa Adams and Andrea Duncan (eds) The Feminine Case: Jung,
Aesthetics and Creative Process, London: Karnac, 2003.
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