It has a been a bit of a puzzle to me why I have been so consistently drawn to working on the Stone Sanctuary for the last three years. In the next few weeks, I hope to explore the symbolism of stones and the psychological process of working with stones. The work above is the…
[soliloquy id=”8195″] The urge to individuation gathers together what is scattered. Carl Jung Collected Works 11 All loose stone was at one time part of the living earth. In walling, I bring stone back together, even if artificially and only temporarily, and reunite it with the earth. Walling puts back what has come…
[soliloquy id=”8172″] The stone symbolized something permanent that can never be lost or dissolved, something eternal that some have compared to the mystical experience of God within one’s own soul. It symbolizes what is perhaps the simplest and deepest experience, the experience of something eternal that man can have in those moments when he feels…
[soliloquy id=”8143″] “Working the surface of a stone is an attempt to understand the internal energy of the stone.” “A stone is ingrained with geological and historical memories.” “The reason why the stone is red is its iron content, which is also why our blood is red.” Andy Goldsworthy
The Rosarium Philosophorum is a sixteenth century alchemical treatise, with a series of twenty woodcuts. Jung’s comments on the first image, the image with the fountain, include the following: This fluid substance, with all its paradoxical qualities, really signifies the unconscious which as been projected on to it. The “sea” is its…
My mother took me to the Thurgau to visit friends, who had a castle on Lake Constance. I could not be dragged away from the water, the waves from the steamer washed up on the shore, the sun glistened on the water, and the sand under the water had been curled into little ridges…
Consciousness, no matter how extensive it may be, must always remain the smaller circle within the greater circle of the unconscious, an island surrounded by the sea; and, like the sea itself, the unconscious yields an endless and self-replenishing abundance of living creatures, a wealth beyond our fathoming. Psychology of the…
Source of Image: Kayaking the Unconscious “The sea is the favorite symbol for the unconscious, the mother of all that lives.” Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious The Psychology of the Child Archetype Paragraph 298 Collected Works 9.1
Water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious. The lake in the valley is the unconscious, which lies, as it were, underneath consciousness, so that it is often referred to as the “subconscious,” usually with the pejorative connotation of an inferior consciousness. Water is the “valley spirit,” the water dragon of Tao, whose…