Are Flying Boys Useless?

Painting by Rene Magritte

Poets get there first, and artists and musicians. Only later do the intellectuals and theologians follow suit. Philosophers come after the poets and before the theologians, who only ‘see’ once it has all been written down. Theologians spend a long time mourning the death of the old God and as such are not predisposed to welcoming the new.

David Tacey
Edge of the Sacred

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In our metaphysics we declare our fantasies about the physical and its transcendence. A metaphysical statement can be seen as a psychological fancy about the relationship between ‘matter and spirit’. […] The archetypal neuros is collective and affects all with the metaphysical affliction.” — James Hillman, Senex and Puer, Spring Publications, 2005

“The puer offers direct connection with the spirit. Break this vertical connection and it falls with broken wings. When it falls we lose the urgent burning purpose…if persuaded into the temporal world by the negative senex [consider Kamaswami], within or without, the puer loses connection with its own aspect of meaning and becomes the negative puer. Then, it goes dead, and there is passivity, withdrawal, and even physical death.” (JH “Senex”26–27) If we draw the puer personality down from detachment in spirit and into the twists and turns of human relationship, we come to reflect on our…