ARAS - Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism

Last Friday we wrapped up our Pioneer Teen program for 2024. We will be sharing the teens' final projects over the next week along with their artist statements. We just want to share how proud we are of their journey over the past two weeks and also to thank our lead educator for this year Maria Del Carmen Rivas as well as Aurelie Athan for her leading our first day collaging workshop and Katie Yamasaki () for welcoming us into her studio. We also want to acknowledge the lovely experiences we had at the New York Public Library Picture , The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Rubin Museum of Art.

Here is a blog post from Pioneer Teen Jess about the final day of Pioneer Teens 2024 this past Friday!
"Being that this was the last day for the ARAS Pioneer teens before the final showcase, tension filled the air. Everyone was finishing their projects: adding final touches, giving more nuances to the piece. In these last few weeks, all of us have grown. We learnt more about symbols and of the different cultural centers in NYC. We've experiemented with different mediums and found which ones we like. We've gained new experiences and new friends. In short, we've grown so much in just 2 weeks, and it's exciting were else we will grow to "

From Pioneer Teen Jess:
"This Wednesday, Pioneer Teens continued working on the final project. It's weird to see the program coming to an end, but it's amazing to see how much research and symbolism we used to do our projects. Everyone used a different media- whether it be clay, or fabrics, or even photography- to create their own unique projects."

From Pioneer Melanie (7/15): "This Monday at ARAS we made the trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the Met we explored and did figure studies of Roman sculptures. Lastly we went to Central Park for a debrief of what we’re doing for our projects and what materials we’ll be using."

Introducing our community to ARAS Board President Thomas Singer's blog on substack.

Tom says:

"Welcome to my Substack blog where I intend to post shorter op-ed essays on current political events in a psychological context, longer essays on psyche, politics and cultural complexes, and finally announcements of upcoming events and publications. I was motivated to start this page as I found fully formed sentences and ideas popping into mind spontaneously as I have been trying to digest the mindboggling and numbing realities of our current cultural and political life."

You can find a link to his substack here: https://buff.ly/4bRHxxv

ANNOUNCEMENT: Starting next week, ARAS will not be open to visitors until at leas the beginning of September on account of a construction project at the CG Jung Center. The last day to visit ARAS will be July 23rd. We will announce our reopening time.

Image:
ARAS: 7As.036; BoS, Sun main (1st)
Artist: Deccan School
Date: Ca. 18th century CE
Medium: Painting: tempera and gold
Measurement: Unavailable
Provenance: Deccan, India
Repository site: Private collection

Pioneer Teen Jess says:
"This wednesday, Pioneer Teens continued working on the final project. It's weird to see the program coming to an end, but it's amazing to see how much research and symbolism we used to do our projects. Everyone used a different media- weither it be clay, or fabrics, or even photography- to create their-unqiely own projects.

Here are some sneak-peaks into the final projects."

From Pioneer Teen Leanna: "This Tuesday we got a start onto our final projects and layed out our designs so the Pioneer Teens can finish their projects hopefully by Thursday ! Towards the end of the day, we talked about how we can make our artist statements and have a clear understanding on what can be written for their projects."

Pioneer Teen Ruslan:
"This past Friday, Pioneer Teens had a creative and educational day. The day prior, we had made clay sculptures of various different symbols and subjects. Today, we painted them with acrylic paints and got amazing results. Later in the day, we made our commute to the Rubin Museum of art. There, before the day ended, we explored various Tibetan, Bhutanese , religious, and other cultural dioramas and artifacts."

From Pioneer Teen Sauda:
Day 2 at ARAS:

In the morning, we made drawings using both oil pastels and water colors. The idea is that since water and oil don't mix, watercolor can be used over the oil pastels without any risk of smudging. We all made different drawings using this method.

In the afternoon, we learned more about how to research and use the archive and the library to find out more about our symbols. We went to the New York Public Library afterwards where we learned about their picture collection. And how it can be useful for researching a specific topic since it presents us with more visuals. I really enjoyed the experience and I got to learn a lot of different things today.

Image: sculpting with clay to help explore pioneer teens explore mediums for final projects by Pioneer Teen Intern Harper Curran

We just finished up our first week of Pioneer Teens 2024. This past Thursday the teens went to Coney Island for a photography activity where they looked for symbolism throughout the carnivalesque environment using disposable cameras. Here are some pictures of that the teens took during the activity!

Image: Buddha sitting in the open, on the fourth balustrade, south face.
From: Borobudur by Jürgen D. Wickert, Pt Intermasa, Publisher.

From the ARAS Library: Shamanism by Mircea Eliade, Translated from the French by Willard R. Irask. Bollingen
From the back: "In this masterly study, a sequel to Patterns of Comparative Religion and The Myth of the Eternal Return,
M. Eliade takes up the problem of shamanism; he succeeds in defining its bounds, so that, for the first time in the history of religions, a clear idea can be formed of what shamanism is and what it is not." Thus wrote Professor M. Leenhardt1 of the original French edition of the present work. And Professor R. A. Stein:?
"Eliade's works are never limited to a simple description of facts: they always contain a keen analysis followed by a synthesis. The present book has the same qualities. It is clearly the best work on shamanism published so far."
For the English translation of his book, Professor Eliade has freely revised, corrected, and augmented.
The work, which is addressed to the nonspecialist reader, is the first to treat shamanism in a comprehensive wav.
Shamanism is pre-eminently a religious phenomenon of Siberia and Central Asia; throughout this vast area, the magico-religious life of society centers on the figure of the shaman, at once magician and medicine man, healer and miracle-doer, psychopomp, priest, mystic, and poet. The same phenomena and techniques occur elsewhere in Asia, in Oceania, in the Americas, and among the ancient Indo-European peoples. Mircea Eliade, writing as a historian of religion, synthesizes the approaches of psychology, sociology, and ethnology.
He analyzes the ideology of shamanism and discusses its techniques, its symbolisms, its mythologies. For Eliade shamanism is, precisely, a technique of ecstasy."

From the ARAS Library: Ice-Age Hunters of the Ukraine by Richard G. Klein, University of Chicago Press.
From the back: "Richard G. Klein's Ice-Age Hunters of the Ukraine is an interdisciplinary study of early man in the Ukraine during the Last Glacial period, a crucial interval in human evolution. The many important early man sites in this region provide some of the most significant evidence for the periglacial way of life that has ever been recovered.
Based on data gathered from sites concentrated in the valleys of the Ukraine's major rivers, Klein's study abandons the traditional artifact-genealogy approach and focuses on the question of early man's cultural adaptation to his environment. It thus directly attacks the problem of the origins and development of our present place in nature.
After discussing the aims and limits of his field, Professor Klein studies the geology of the sites in question, describes early man's environment, and discusses the cultural remains in two periods of the Last Glacial- -the Mousterian and the Upper Paleolithic. In his concluding chapter he deals with the displacement of Neanderthals by completely modern Homo Sapiens and suggests that the cultural adaptations of the Upper Paleolithic Ukrainians were superior to those of the Mousterians.
Ice-Age Hunters of the Ukraine was written for undergraduate students and intelligent laymen as well as for Klein's own colleagues. Therefore, while it highlights those general problems in early man studies, such as the problem of climatic change, to which its data are especially relevant, it also represents a critical synthesis of hitherto undigested material and employs source materials which have previously been unavailable to many English-speaking scholars.
The present work is the inaugural volume of the University of Chicago Press's Prehistoric Archeology and Ecology series, designed to provide a new outlet for the publication of important interdisciplinary research on early man."

From the ARAS Library: The Lost Books of the Bible compiled by William Hone, Testament/

From the back: "Lloyd M. Graham writes that The Bible is not "the word of God," but a steal from pagan sources. Its Eden, including Adam and Eve, were taken from the Babylonian account; its Flood and Deluge is but an epitome of some four hundred flood accounts; its Ark and Ararat have their equivalents in a score of Deluge myths; even the names of Noah's sons are copies, so also were Isaac's sacrifice, Solomon's judgment, and Samson's pillar act. Moses is fashioned after the Syrian Mises; the laws after Hammurabi's code. These are but a few of the myths he discusses. How then can the Bible be a revelation? The masses never read the sources of these myths, and the churchmen who did kept silent about them. In Lloyd Graham's study, he claims his uncovering these deceptions and myths will help everyone acquire sufficient enlightenment and knowledge to discover what is false. Mr. Graham believes it is time this scriptural tyranny was broken so that we may devote our time to man instead of God and to civilizing ourselves instead of saving our souls that were never lost. "

From the ARAS Library: Reenisioning Psychology by James Hillman, Perennial Library.

From the back: "Hillman has wrought a spell-binding, breath-taking tour de force. Without analyzing a single concrete human experience, he makes us know our soul by simply speaking soul-language-the language he has learned to speak with cadence and nuance from his intimate living with Greek gods and Florentine artists, alchemists and Romantics, dreams and pathologies. He gives particularly bold and persuasive voice to the longings of the soul for rescue from the tyranny of the modern mind, the confining structures and strictures of literalism in all its forms. He gives a powerfully fresh sense of what it would mean to find the soul by losing one's self-by loosing our souls from our exalted I-ness. Hillman's is a gentle, explosive crusade." -James E. Dittes
"James Hillman's book is about seeing, specifically about seeing everything twice, seeing through, doing a double-take, being sufficiently paranoid to look for hidden meanings. 'Paranoia would see through...would go beyond what is given. Hillman is paranoid about psychology. He wants to know what is behind it all, what is going on, what myth is being enacted, which God is at the root of it all. And in the process of seeing through psychology, Hillman demonstrates a way of experiencing everything psychologically...
"Hillman has written a book with poetry, passion, clarity, and a sense of immediacy. The book itself has soul. To the folklorist and theologian it offers a way into and behind myth and religion. To the psychologist it suggests a way out of egocentricity. For the individual and for the professional it is a remarkable, kaleidoscopic breaking up of psychology's density and life's literalness. And, a rarity, it is a book on psychology that sees through itself."-Parabola

Image: Tale of a Strange Marriage by Ukita Ikkei, Handscroll; ink and color on paper.
"During the first half of the nineteenth cen-tury, a circle of yamato-e painters in Kyoto turned their art to oppose the decaying Tokugawa sh**unate. Perhaps the most important of the works of this yamato-e revival is the picture scroll Tale of a Strange Marriage, an incomplete work of five episodes. It climaxes in the fourth scene, where a fox couple exchanges vows in the elaborate Shinto ritual of the Heian court. Despite the rich beauty of the brilliant mineral pigments, traditional for paintings of court nobility, the unnatural wedding has an eerie, prurient aura. Unmistakable visual references to one of the most treasured maki of the aristocratic tradition--Miracles of the Kasuga Shrine, completed in 1309 by the court painter Takashina Takakane-and to a later tradition of goblin tales would have intensified the horrific satire for the painter, Ukita Ikkei, and his circle. Ikkei, who earlier had copied the original Kasuga scroll, took scenes from that work as the setting for this vision of sacrilege inspired by deeply felt opposition to the proposed marriage of the sh**un lemochi into the imperial family. Supposedly intended to inspire the court faction to prevent the marriage, this scroll's text was never completed because of Ikkei's arrest, presumably for defamation, and his subsequent death in 1859. The same year a treaty forcing Japan to open her ports to the West took effect, precipitating the eventual collapse of the sh**unate and restoration of imperial rule after seven hundred years of military government."

From the ARAS Library: The Origins and History of Consciousness by Erich Neumann, Bollingen.

Pioneer Teens 2024 is underway! We are so excited to be joined by our newest group. This is also a reminder that we will be closed to the public for the next two weeks as we conduct the program!

Image: Death and Beauty, A beauteous courtesan is haunted by the specter of old age, death, and disease.
From: The Japanese Tattoo, Photographs and Text by Sandi Fellman, Introduction by D.M. Thomas. Abbeville Press.

From the ARAS Library: Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis by Robert Graves and Raphael Patai, McGraw-Hill Paperbacks.

From the back: The distinguished author of The Greek Myths and an eminent Jewish anthropologist and Biblical scholar have analyzed 61 stories of cosmic forces, deities, angels and demons, giants and heroes from Genesis and other ancient Hebrew and Aramaic sources in the light of modern anthropology and mythology.

"...at least 33,000 years older than Europe’s famed Paleolithic sites such as Lascaux."

A cave drawing of human figures and a pig is the world’s oldest known narrative art | CNN More than 50,000 years ago, humans painted a hunting scene in a cave in Indonesia that archaeologists say represents the oldest known example of storytelling in art history.

Image: Sketches of hands by Wangdrak.
From: Tibetan Thangka Painting Methods and Materials by David and Janice Jackson. Snow Lion Publications, 1988.

From the ARAS Library: Pagan Meditations Aphrodite Hestia Artemis by Ginette Paris. Spring Publications.

"Am I a feminist? Yes, for sure, and this book is my contribution to imaginative feminism. Each Goddess is an inspiration for a different feminism, and collectively they teach us about the polytheistic complexity we need to get out of the twentieth century: more complexity and fewer complexes.... As a social psychologist, I see archetypal psychology as the best way to prevent dogmatism and ideological violence. It addresses both the meditative interior of each person and the community of culture. From both these domains, the 'pagan' Goddesses - especially Aphrodite, Artemis, and Hestia - have been excluded for almost two thousand years."
From an interview with Ginette Paris, Professor at the University of Quebec, Montreal, and author of three books

Image: (Muhammad Tabadkani dancing in ecstasy, from ms. of Majalis al-'Ushshag, Turkey, 16th c.; darvishes dancing, Konya, Turkey, 20th c.)
From: Sufi Expressions of the Mystic Quest by Laleh Bakhtiar, Thames & Hudson.

From the ARAS Library: Tells, Tombs and Treasure a Pictorial Guide to Biblical Archaeology by Robert T. Boyd. Baker Book House.

Plate 10. Pond and pavilions at the Palace of Glorious Purity, located midway between the old imperial capital of Ch'ang-an (modern Sian) and the towering Mount Hua. The site has been a favorite of kings and emperors since the third century B.C. In A.D. 583 the buildings were renovated and the grounds elegantly planted; in the eighth century, the Tang emperor Hsuan-tsung dallied here with his mistress. This site, no glected later, has been restored many times and even served for a while as a Taoist monastery. (Photograph by J. Barry Ferguson)

From the ARAS Library: The Biology of Art by Desmond Morris A Study of the Picture-Making Behavior of the Great Apes and its Relationship to Human Art. Knopf, publisher.

It's Archetypal Friday and our symbol for this week is Clown.

The clown is a remnant of older theatrical traditions where masks and makeup were necessary to broadcast emotions across a theater or throughout a large tent. At times, we associate the clown with the role of a jester, bringing merriment to small functions or for the entertainment of a benefactor. In Native American cultures, such as the Lakota and the Kachina, clowns transgressed cultural norms of the tribe, serving the jester-like role of the privileged voice of dissent. Earlier in the Western tradition, the clown was once a persona not unlike that of Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot, or Mister Bean, who could play comedy but also explore other moods. The contemporary American relationship to the clown is related to their use in mass media as a comedic, child-friendly figure. Clown makeup was seen as a mask to disguise the human self with an illusion of unceasing jollity. This reduction of the role of a clown has led to the depictions of evil clowns like the Joker, the arch nemesis of Batman, and Pennywise from Stephen King’s “It,” both of whom reflect how a happy face can conceal an interior monstrousness.

Image: John with Drawing of a Clown, by Francesco Caroto, c. 1520.
From: Lapham's Quarterly Volume VII, Number 1 Winter 2014 Comedy