Synopsis
While warmth, heat, and fire have plenty of archetypal representations, this book will, first of all, explore the area where cold and ice – and their representations – dwell: in the frosty regions of the North Pole and deep, deep below our feet. Science tells us that at the core of our planet, in its center, there is fire. In the inspired and poetical and religious vision of his Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri depicts a more abyssal icy core. I intend to follow his inspired hypothesis.During the exploration of the icy regions, the problem of a split Self will arise, that is of a Self that is partly hot and partly cold. This book will try and bridge the gap by assuming that the icy-Self and the fiery-Self are a syzygy. It will look into the very concept of syzygy, exploring it as a metaphysical and metapsychic image fundamental for the intuitions we can have about the paradoxical contents of the psyche. It will suggest that the Self-syzygy is the power station of a strongly polarized and paradoxical functioning of the mightiest contents of the psyche.The syzygy of the icy Self and the fiery Self could thus be numinously at the root of all those syzygies that fascinate the human mind like Sol-Luna, Hermes-Saturn, Puer-Senex, Animus-Anima, Dionysos-Hades, Wise Old Man-Chthonic Mother, and many others. But looking with a colder less passionate mind into the idea of syzygy, some syzygies will come under review. Some of them have become such warm and cuddled best-sellers among Jungians that they have lost much of their awe and have become a-critically taken for granted. The re-examination will particularly concern the syzygy Animus-Anima and its misleading strong gender characterization.All this will be tried for a wider awareness that the Self has to be ambivalent as all other archetypes. This book will connect one part of the Self, the cold part, with the universe of the soul, with the dark, and the other part, the hot part, with the light, with the realm of the spirit.The Ego is familiar with dealing with the light part. Most psycho-logical schools force the Ego to stay in the light and think of the Self in a spiritual way. This book will suggest that sometimes the Ego must betray the luminous Self and try and imagine It in the dark and the cold, in a soul-ual way.Betrayal is necessary to bring into life the cold parts of Psyche and religiously relate to them as barren yet vital components of the collective unconscious and the individuation process: no more and no less than to the hot spiritual parts.Betrayal may be one of the prices to pay for the success of the Opus, the individuation process.And a betrayal of the classic Jungian view of analytical psychology is necessary for its adapting to the challenges of the dramatic events of today.
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