The Polyimagical Realm
A Critical Review of Polytheistic and Archetypal Psychology
by
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Excerpt 1
At the crest of the monotheistic cultural epoch William James wrestled with a two-fold problem; first, the historical trend moving from a polytheistic (pagan) religious format towards monotheism; and second, the nature of the psyche as valenced in its spontaneous expressions towards the production of a plurality of images. In either case "religious experience" was involved. Neither was it missed by James that this dichotomy of soul (psyche) and spirit must equally distinguish the collective or instituted expression of religion in disturbing polarity to what he investigated as the varieties of religious experience.
The psychically generated religious experience would as such appear to enjoy polytheistic proclivities and, because running counter to a monotheistic regime, be assignable as the work of the devil. This would place a 19th Century psychologist in a peculiar position, most dramatically for James who on one hand embraced a monotheistic view, and on the other was confronted with his own empirical evidence of pluralistic psychisms of a religious kind. His effort to present a variety of religious experience thus found him at task to reconcile its psychical predispositions with whatever had been traditionally superordinated as the spiritual. Indeed, where the spiritual aspirations of religion could only represent the lofty head, the psychical automotive propensity for variety must without approbation enjoy itself below the belt.
It was a disturbing truth to realize that the Spirit and its expression as the Logos, whether employed in the service of either theology or psychology, telestically aspires to a unified field; whereas Psyche defies any such limits and projects itself without respect for a defined field of conscious expression.
Excerpt 2
And I suppose that is one way of coming to terms with the intrinsic thanataphobia that we all share, whether consciously or unconsciously.
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The Polyimagical Realm
I must note that as primarily a painter at the time of composing this work (1986) I was also painting “angels.” They were in figure what I have called personatypes and simulated, imitated realities, yet arché and beyond typification (typos) in content. This ambiguity is in fact the subject of this book. The simultaneity of image and immanence is not a problem, except we have no credible concept for simultaneity, or complementarity, and by which ambivalence prevails as the earmark of reality. Now, in the year 2004 it is the least I can say for showing the differences that only analytically repose in mutually exclusive camps, that of C.G. Jung’s rigorous and extensive amplification of Freud’s Psychoanalytic and the new Post Modern wave of James Hillman’s Archetypal Psychology and its polytheistic trimmings. In that case the many gods earn a capital “G” and in contention with the One God. But speaking as both a painter and a poet I can only fall back on an experiential standpoint, something reminded by Plato 2500 years ago in his Ion dialogue: “and therefore God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know that they speak not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us.”
Bernard X. Bovasso
Spring, 2005
About the Author
He is essentially a painter of art he calls “The Abstract Sublime” and also a poet. Upon graduating from the