Abstract: The article investigates the Neoplatonic Self notion. In the historical record the ideal of personality and the psychological notion of Self have taken many forms. Also the modern ideals of Self are discussed and criticized, such as the 'puer aeternus' (eternal youth) and the 'primal' or 'uroboric' Self. The author argues that Carl Jung's Self archetype is one-sidedly immanent--there is also a transcendental aspect of Self. In the heated debate between Porphyry and Iamblichus, both were right in their own way.
Keywords: Plotinus, Neoplatonism, primary narcissism, grandiose self, ego-Self axis, Erich Neumann, Michael Fordham, psychoanalysis, puer aeternus, Romantic era.
Read the article here:
http://www.two-paths.com/iamblichus.htm
(http://mlwi.magix.net/iamblichus.htm)
Mats Winther
Replies
Critique of Archetypal Psychology Mats Winther and it came up first on the google list. I hate to admit it but I only learned that capitalizing names is very important when googling people.
as to grimoire alek ..very interesting...
This http://alannak.com/resources/blog/critique-of-archetypal-psychology is what I wanted to say about Hillman. It's nice to have more eloquent people on the Web.
Is Jung's Red Book a grimoire? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimoire
I don't deny the notion of a patriarchal order, which has supplanted the archaic age of the Titanic gods. This development would signify an augmentation of consciousness, which is indeed what Dionysos has contributed to. His fall means the augmentation of the conscious light in humanity, which arguably led to a new epoch.
The fall of Prometheus brought light to humanity, too. It is a similar theme as in the Book of Enoch where the angelic fall contributed to an enormous conscious increase in humanity. Humankind acquired knowledge of many things, such as metalworking. But it also led to temptations, power-madness and the spread of iniquity.
Remember that Dionysos is an ambivalent god, associated with madness and ecstasy. It is this very ambivalence that modern people came to experience as immoral, which is why they instead turned to a god that only points upwards, namely Jesus. The descending god was rejected as evil.
Dionysos, in a sense, is Christ and Lucifer in one person. This notion reappeared in medieval times, hidden in the abstruse symbolism of alchemy. The Mercurius is "duplex" and he is ambivalent. During the repeated process of "circular distillation" the spirit Mercurius will ascend and become wholly spiritual, and then he descends to materiality. Also Dionysos experiences death and rebirth more than once. His oeuvre is circular, too. It is not linear, is it?
/Mats
Sorry for the delayed response Mats. You raised some very interesting and relevant issues and opened up the road for my intuition to fly. Well I'm back and and ready to respond to your last post. Let's begin with something we might agree upon. Neoplatonic thought on evil.
They did not believe in an independent existence of evil. They compared it to darkness, which does not exist in itself but only as the absence of light...wikkipedia
The greek pantheon does not have anyone directly akin to the judiaic concept of satan/evil/lucifer in its ranks. I suspect this fact shaped platos thought on the matter as well as the neoplatonist's concept. This may explain why the heretic marcion tried to have the old testament excised from the Gospel according to christ. The god of the new testament is the total antithesis of the off times psychopathic destroyer of the Old testament. The god of the new testament and christ extend agape to mankind. The God of the new testament allowed his own son to be sacrificed for the love of man. Christ died for the love of mankind. The psychopathic/tyrannical god of the old testament who destroyed both jews and their enemies alike in his repeated fits of madness is not the god of the new testament. The god of the new testament emanates from the Greek world view that prevailed in the civilized world in the time of christ and also prevailed when the Greek minds hellenized the christian gospel in order to make it acceptable to the greek mind ...
Agape developed in Christian theology as the love of God or Christ for humankind....
Werner jaeger wrote book on this exact subject. i must have last read 40 plus years ago. It was called, Early Christianity and Greek Padeia.
It provides a superb overview of the vast historical process by which Christianity was Hellenized and Hellenic civilization became Christianized. ...from a synopsis of Jaegers book
The essence of it being the christian gospel was Hellenized so that it could become acceptable and adopted by the dominant Hellenic culture. This is why the god of the new testament is the antithesis of the psychopathic god of the old testament.. Our civilization and christianity would have been an entirely different one if marcion had been able to prevail. What is happening today is a large part of the christian community are all but abandoning christ and opting for an old testament credo. Think the dispensationalists or the you got to take the old testament literally crowd.
This is a long round about way to say Enoch is not relevant to the hellenic view of man. And more importantly your introduction of the concept of immorality into the dionysian mythologem is a projection. What blows this student of myth away is how the chicken pickers think they can pick and choose bits and pieces out of the whole Dionysian mythologem and use those particulars to project their idiocies over the myth. DIONYSOS IS NOT IMMORAL.... He is spirit and ultimately emasculate. He emasculated himself as part of his effort to raise his mother Semele up from the underworld. The Greeks made him look effeminate for a reason didn't they? The archetype has been associated with orgies... Well why wouldn't he and his followers be ecstatic. Dionysos brought the possibility for eternal life to his followers. He also brought Individuality to mankind. And the birth of individuality as accomplished through the unfolding Dionysian developmental mythologem filled his followers with such incredible feelings of ecstasy that are unimagineable to the jaded individual of today. Like a cigar can sometimes be only a cigar. The maenads meaning nurse maids are only nurse maids. Individuality was sponsored and created by the mothers. The dionysian mythologem is pretty straight forward and encompassed in the concept of twice mothered and thrice born. That is the myth and that is why nurse maids are so prominent in the Dionysian myth. Born from persephone shown his image in a mirror and initiated only to survive as spirit worshipped in the form of a phallus. The type phallus one can see as being built into the great churches of the world ..the minarets of the muslims as well...The archetype then begins rematerializing in the womb of his second mother. This is cut short by his fiery premature birth. Thereafter the prematurely embryonic manifestation of the archetype is transferred into thigh of his father Hades though this event was so vital for the ascension of the sky gods Zeus went back into his prehistory and usurped the function of becoming the paternal foundation for the prematurely born dionysos. I wonder why. So he is born from the paternal thigh and then a scapegoat is sacrificed in his place. lets not go there. So that is the entire Dionysian mythologem. There is nothing else to it. Oh this archetype may be developing within a dependent matrix but within that dependent matrix he has the capacity to manifest himself independently. Ergo all the other phenomenology we have inherited about Dionysos is essentially an emanation from within the basic developing paradigm.
Dionysos the god of wine.. He gifted mankind with wine.drunken orgies and debauchery say the chicken pickers. How about the Greeks projected the basic dionysian mythologem into the wine making process. The grape.. the dismemberment in crushing the grape. The clouded wine... but the spirit survives and has the potency to fill the imbiber with spirits aka its essence. It is a gift from the archetype because the spirit can wash the lifes burdens and cares away for while. And finally madness. Directly Oppose the unfolding of Dionysos or Athena or any god.archetype for that matter and you will get run over by the archetype. Anybody with a smidgeon of psychological insight would project hebephrenic on the dionysian denier Pentheus ... Hebephrenia is madness after all huh? Finally i looked over the neoplatonic credo for rising and ascending daimons/archetypes in wikkipedia and no reference immediately sprang forth...
So when we were mere animals our life expectancy was abysmal. Some anthropologists maintain that maintain men had a 1 in 4 chance of surviving to the age of 40. I would assume these men had been individuated from the self in the neoplatonic sense as well. As animals our life was just as miserable. There was no golden age before the fall. We were miserable animals subject to the vagaries of a very hostile environment. Our consciousness grew and evolved whether through the auspicies of natural selection or a genetic lamarkian adaptation to the exigencies of existence or both. This developing consciousness eventually attained such capacity that we were separated from the self. We didn't fall we evolved a form of consciousness that allowed men to make a semi independent contribution to our struggle to survive in the face of the challenge posed within the world/materiality. This is a great evolutionary leap. The transformed man is truly miserable because he has taken some part of the struggle to survive in the material world onto his own conscious shoulders. And that consciousness has came along way from its miserable beginnings as man has altered the material world make it a lot more comfortable than the kind of world we as animals experienced.
I am trying to adapt the neoplatonic version of the individuation of self described as a fall into a modern framework. The neoplatonists concept of individuation was an advanced one. I expect the consciousness that emerged from the self/whole animal was matriarchal if not prematriarchal form of consciousness. Individuation in terms of the development of the individual is light years past the time of neoplatonic fall. The birth of the individual made possible the birth of the patriarchy and civilization what a mere 10,000 years ago or less.
I guess i will have to google ascending and descending gods, as per the neoplatonic tradition..... I have already said the archetypes/gods did not fall as they were already extant when we were animals and they didn't go away when our consciousness evolved to the point where it emerged and became a new player in mankinds struggle for survival. If they were altered in any way after the evolution of an individuated ego consciousness it is only because we viewed them with our newly emergent consciousness which provided us with a different perspective of the archetypes.
Experience has taught me to let the symbols speak for themselves. Dionysos the son of amateriality/hades is going to have an amaterial heritage. His mother is the Queen of amateriality or the underworld... yeah for just part of the year i know... He looks at his himself in the mirror and realizes he is amaterial. Proof of which is immediately provided in his murder and dismemberment which he duly survives because of his amaterial nature. He then survives as an amaterial entity until he begins rematerializing in the womb of his second mother semele. That is another story.
Ascending descending daimons/archetypes... I assume those phenomenon are connected to the neoplatonists individuation from the self. If not directly we can bring some modernity that the intervening results of thousands of years of inquiry can add to/or modify the platonic opus. Not to destroy them but to modernize them and understand them... Let the symbols speak and have the faith to believe you can provide them with a context like Mr. dostoevsky did. There definitely is no falling and ascending daimons/gods that i can see anywhere else than in some kind of projective myth or theory. Just because the neoplatonists created some theory doesn't mean they proved it. We have the opportunity to look at thir thought after absorbing a whack of new knowledge.
Hello Mat,
I read your paper "the self in historical light" about a week ago. Utterly fascinating! I was looking forward to rereading it, I've finally after two or three years of mulling around the idea of your model" The complementary self" have started to come to some kind of workable conclusions for myself. But unfortunately none of your papers, or your website will load on Google, it's really weird! Mat did you piss off some government agency? is anyone else having problems downloading the website to the self and historical light or other Mat websites???
Les
You are right. Google suppresses my articles. I searched for Critique of Archetypal Psychology, together with my name, and it didn't show up at all(!) in the search results, although it's been on the net since 1999. However, in Bing, it is at the topmost position. So I'll go over to Bing, because Google's search engine is corrupt. /Mats
Thank you. I tested a link from Google's search engine and it works for me. Anyway, most of my articles are also in PDF on Academia.edu:
https://independent.academia.edu/MatsWinther
My website is here:
http://www.two-paths.com
/Mats
well he affected being a fool and a trickster whereas I saw a cheap and second hand manifestation of hermes the thief grasping at your adulation while secretly despising you for your cupidity at the same time. Well you shouldn't have brought the video forth on a depth psychology page. There are too many psychological analysts here. Are there any second opinions out there. Hillman's thoughts are in his written work and they deserve "critical respect" because they were fashioned by an above average mind....Being ecumenical doesn't and shouldn't prevent calling out a con.
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