Tag: Archetypes
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A Hand Shake across Thousands of Years
When caves are mentioned, some of us may still imagine unwashed, unshaven, grunting brutes lumbering about, dragging women behind them by the hair. These hand prints from the Cave of El Castillo, made at least 37 centuries ago, tell a different story. Let’s think about how movingly astounding they are. Early humans worshipped the Earth…
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Jonah – A Good-Fun Read (iii)
We lost sight of Jonah when, on our hero’s uncompromising insistence, the good-hearted sailors very reluctantly tossed him into the sea. At once the inestimable power of Jonah’s God was demonstrated, in the immediate and complete calming of what had been an overwhelmingly tempestuous sea. No great surprise then, that in the New Testament, Jesus…
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Unconditional Love (i)
There was a time when I was a conservative evangelical minister, fervently believing in the complete historicity and literal factuality of the Gospels, and accepting therefore the historical, traditional, orthodox, Christian interpretation of them. I don’t regret that, because it means that I know about this way of seeing things – I’ve been there –…
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Rethinking Jesus (04) The Hero’s Journey
After Jesus was baptised by John , what happened next? We’re told that he took himself off into the ‘wilderness’ for the standard biblical “forty days and forty nights”, (meaning a long, but indeterminate time), during which he was both menaced by “wild beasts” and also protected by “angels”. He was also subjected, by the…
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Jung, Archetypes, Arts, Religion
Arising from recent dialogue with a friend, I’m posting this one-off to try to clarify my thinking about Carl Jung, archetypes, the arts and religion. In Jung’s view, the human psyche has three different but interacting ‘levels’, which should not be thought of as separate ‘compartments’. There is consciousness, which enables us to perceive, and…
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The Gospels (1) ‘Jesus as Archetypal Hero’
Recently, I began to look at the Gospels – books that should be regularly read, but in the right way. What I share here are my current views, which are as fallible and changeable as anyone else’s. My aim is not to convince you that I’m right, but to invite you to check out your…