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Admit The Angels
Both poetry and painting seek to bypass the logic of language.
— Matthew Wong
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According to the ancient Greek philosopher Thales, “the whole world is full of gods. “ The idea that the world itself in all its particulars has soul was reborn in the Renaissance and now it is taken up in archetypal psychology. In the writings of James Hillman, Robert Sardello, Ginette Paris, Wolfgang Giegerich, and other archetypalists, this is not just a philosophical and mystical notion. If psychology is by definition work with the soul, and if nature and culture have soul, then psychology must concern itself with this larger sphere.
Hillman argues strongly against reducing soul to personal subjectivity, naming personalism as one of the burdens of the modern era…
The soul is not of itself personal, of course, the psyche presents itself in images of persons and in personal feelings, but it is more than personal. Carl Jung used the phrase objective psyche, suggesting that when we look into the soul, we are looking at something with its own terrain, its own history and purposes, and its own principles of movement and stasis. The interested, noninterfering tone Hillman usually takes when dealing with manifestations of the soul derives in large measure from this conviction that the soul has its own reasons.
