The Archetypal Artist

Reimagining Creativity and the Call to Create

Mary Antonia Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780429614170
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this thoughtful and revelatory book, Wood explores enduring and powerful theories on art, creativity, and what Jung called the "creative spirit" in order to illuminate how artists can truly understand what it means to be a creator.

By bringing together insights on creativity from some of depth psychology's most iconic thinkers, such as C.G. Jung, James Hillman, and Joseph Campbell, as well as featuring a selection of creators who have been influenced by these ideas, such as Martha Graham, Mary Oliver, Stanley Kunitz, and Ursula K. Le Guin, this book explores archetypal thought and the role of the artist in society. This unique approach emphasizes the foundational need to understand and work with the unconscious forces that underpin a creative calling, deepening our understanding of the transformational power of creativity, and the vital role of the artist in the modern world.

Acting as a touchstone for inquiries into the nature of creativity, and of the soul, this enlightening book is perfect for artists and creators of all types, as well as Jungian analysts and therapists, and academics interested in the arts, humanities, and depth psychology.

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Chapter 1An Archaeology of Soul, Creativity, and Transformation

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DOI: 10.4324/9780429057724-2

The soul before psychology

“What is soul, and does it truly exist?” “How is soul revealed?” “Who can best understand and care for the soul?” For millennia, these have been essential questions in humanity’s search for meaning and truth. For answers to these questions. Western cultures have long looked to specialists - even when these specialists argue against the very idea of a “soul.” Nevertheless, the notion of a soul persists across numerous disciplines, including psychology, medicine, philosophy, spirituality, and creative expression. Today’s practitioners of soul have long been separated into distinct disciplines, yet modern-day artists, philosophers, spiritual teachers, and healers share a significant bond as the inheritors of the traditions and practices of a single unified figure - the ancient shaman.

The terms “shaman” and “shamanism” have been utilized to describe a type of medicine person appearing throughout history in a variety of traditions, cultures, and regions. The terms come to us from the Russian translation of the Tungusic samam, and in their strictest sense, they refer to a religious phenomenon which emerged in Siberia and Central Asia. Mircea Eliade described the shaman as a psychopomp, or guide of souls, who may also be a priest, mystic, poet, magician, or sorcerer. While a shaman may combine a variety of these roles, shamanism’s complexity led Eliade to underscore the element of ecstatic trance, during which the shaman's soul is believed to leave the physical body and journey into other realms of reality. Shamanism was. and still is, a technique of ecstasy utilizing artistic means to address various types of suffering or imbalances; the shaman is a practitioner devoted to the human soul.¹ In addition to the evidence of early shamanism in Central Asia and Siberia, traces of this type of practitioner can also be found at the roots of Western civilization.

In his brilliant study of the cross-cultural religious and philosophical influences of ancient Greek thought, Thomas McEvilley explained that a figure very much like the multidimensional shaman was still evident in Plato’s third century BCE contrary to the common notion that the Greeks had by that time supplanted older mystical, healing, and religious traditions with philosophies of rationality:

The specialized profession of “physician” had not yet separated itself out from the larger profession of shaman or “medicine man,” which included functions of magic, mythmaking, protophilosophy, and song or poetry; along with the healing. Some of those whom we now regard as Greek philosophers would have appeared to the Persian kings as “physicians.”²

For centuries prior to Plato’s era, Persia had been a meeting ground, an “intermediate culture” where Greeks and Indians made contact with each other, sharing their myths, art forms, and healing practices. Gathered in the Persian courts were “craftsmen of the sacred” from both Greece and India. These craftsmen could be described as philosophers, seers, physicians, and magicians, although their skills were not totally distinct.³ McEvilly noted that both Greek and Indian philosophical traditions of this era included mystical and transcendentalist schools, alongside those focused on empiricism and protoscientific rationalism.⁴ Both cultures had long been concerned with the most fundamental mysteries of existence, including the origin and nature of “soul.”

The soul, according to the early Greek philosopher Heraclitus (544-484 BCE) remains undiscovered, “though explored forever, to a depth beyond report.”⁵ Even with this recognition of the unknowable depths of the soul. Heraclitus urged his fellow Greeks to “inquire within” and seek wisdom in those depths. Taken as a whole, his aphorisms describe a cosmos in constant creative flux, where one thing necessitates its opposite, where opposites play and wrestle with each other, and where opposites ultimately exist as a unity that is beyond moral judgment: “The cosmos works by harmony of tensions, like the lyre and bow.” “therefore good and ill are one.”⁶

While Heraclitus has long been described as a philosopher, his writings also resemble poetry and prophecy. Indeed, as Brooks Haxton lias pointed out during Heraclitus’s lifetime the word “philosopher” or “lover of wisdom” had yet to be invented. However, even without a designated name for such activity, the human pursuit of wisdom, or sophos, predates even Heraclitus and stretches back into antiquity.⁷ The unified figure of the shaman comes to mind as sophos was and still is - the province of the artist, healer, and seer, as well as that of the philosopher.

Heraclitus’s visionary insights regarding soul, human nature, and the nature of existence itself exhibit striking parallels to earlier Indian and Orphic thought; particularly his enigmatic shaping of the idea of “soul.” or “the soul.” an entity or essence which undergoes a type of constant transformation or reincarnation⁸ These ideas were inspirational to early Christian thought, to later philosophers and artists, and to depth psychologists including both C.G. Jung and James Hillman. Philosopher Philip Wheelwright offered a sketch of the Heraclitean soul that prefigured Hillman’s bold assertion that soul is not so much a “thing” as it is a “perspective”:

“Soul” for Heraclitus is almost a noun; it is more of a noun that it is anything else. Yet by employing it without the article he avoids a full grammatical commitment, and the noun . . . hovers on the brink of being an adjective, perhaps also a verb. The phrase, “the soul.” is likely to carry, for a modem reader ... a suggestion of permanence - which, of course, is absent from Heraclitus’s conception. Soul, to Heraclitus, is quality, substance, and activity in one.⁹

Hillman counted Heraclitus among the primary ancestors of archetypal psychology and depth psychology as a whole. He traced this lineage back in time from Jung - Hillman’s most recent ancestor - to Freud. Dilthey, Coleridge, Schelling. Vico. Ficino, Plotinus, and finally from Plato to Heraclitus:

Heraclitus lies near the roots of this ancestral tree of thought, since he was the earliest to take psyche as his archetypal first principle, to imagine soul in terms of flux and to speak of its depth without measure. ‘Depth psychology,’ the modem field whose interest is in the unconscious levels of the psyche that is, the deeper meanings of the soul - is itself no modem term. . . . Ever since Heraclitus brought soul and depth together in one formulation, the dimension of soul is depth (not breadth or height) and the dimension of our soul travel is downward.¹⁰

In Heraclitus, Hillman found an elder brother and fellow “archetypal thinker.” According to Hillman, “archetypal thought transcends time and place.” This type of thought includes what he described as the “postmodern” and “deconstructive” Heraclitean aphorisms where whatever is stated brings out an equally valid opposing statement such as “The way up is the way back,” and “The beginning is the end.”¹¹ The emphasis on change, transformation, and the absence of stability as signified by “fire” points to what Hillman calls a “poetic dissonance.” or “tension in the heart of the mind.” which he witnessed in the work and lives of writers and artists, as well as psychologists.¹²

The earliest beginnings

Following Heraclitus’s lead, a move back in time is a way to move forward. We return then to the shaman and to the world’s first artists: the archaic cave painters. In the remote past, possibly as early as 30,000 to 50.000 years ago. our human ancestors created stunning and enigmatic images deep within the earth on the walls and ceilings of caves that began to be discovered only in the nineteenth century. Bison, horses, birds, and mammoths were etched and painted into the rock at sites like Altamira in Spain and Lascaux, Les Trois-Fréres and Chauvet in France. Among the glorious images of beasts at rest and in motion are human handprints and at least two puzzling human or human/animal hybrid images which have become known at Lascaux as “The Shaman,” and at Les Trois-Fréres as “The Sorcerer.”

These human-like figures, according to Michael Tucker, are two of the earliest images known to us of the shaman or seer - a figure who was charged with the responsibility of maintaining the health of the tribe. Tucker argued that the prehistoric shaman remains the archetype of all artists:

Image maker, dancer and drummer; actor and singer, healer and holy one. the shaman epitomizes the human need to bridge worlds - to fly beyond the everyday realm of the visual in order to conjure worlds of visionary presence and power.¹³

In a similar fashion. Germain Bazin described the Paleolithic artists as magicians, “whose drawing had all the virtue of a magic spell, an incantation.” Their underground creations were not meant to be “art” as we know it today; rather they were aimed at skillfully intervening in the play of natural forces in which the tribe was embedded.¹⁴

The first painters, according to John Berger, were also hunters, yet the “act of painting was not the same as the act of hunting.” the relationship between painter and animal was magical:

Painting was used to confirm a magical “companionship” between prey and hunter, or to put it more abstractly, between the existent and human ingenuity. Painting was a means of making this companionship explicit and therefore (hopefully) permanent. This may be worth thinking about, long after painting has lost its herds of animals and its ritual function. I believe it tells us something about the nature of the act.¹⁵

The strands of magic that Berger identified as a kinship between the ancient cave painter and the contemporary artist could also be described as strands of prayer - a yearning for blessing and a desire to bless in turn.

Of course, we cannot know with certainty whether any of these interpretations are correct. Interpretation has been troublesome for various scholars of prehistoric art, including for Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams who proposed that many cave paintings - particularly those found in the smaller, more remote portions of cave complexes - were made by tribal shamans who were reproducing visions experienced while in a state of magic trance, possibly enhanced by hallucinogens or plant medicines.¹⁶

In Shamanism: The Beginnings of Art, Andreas Lommel argued that

[S]hamanism came into being at a time when man could not help feeling inferior in r...