PSYCHOGENESIS ART GALLERY
All Works by Iona Miller, (c)1993/2017; All Rights Reserved
Art is the breaking-out of imagination, the physical manifestation of one’s internal world. All art,
in all cultures, is effectively the projection of an individual’s imagination as an external manifestation
so that others can also experience it.
ARCHETYPAL VORTEX
Gold on the Moon
The Philosopher's Stone is like a psychic lodestone (or vortex). It acts like an inner magnet, ordering the contents of our consciousness around it (through feedback loops) in chaotic, yet meaningful fashion. The Philosopher's Stone may thus be seen as a "strange attractor" in the life of anyone engaged in the quest for transformation. It is an instinctual attraction toward processes which dissolve the ego and liquify consciousness, leading to transpersonal experience after symbolic death/rebirth. Freedom in the exploration of imagery comes from the creative capacity to experience loss. Experientially, it's like being channeled into the swirling mass of interacting symbols, an overwhelming vortex of pure information. We are sucked inexorably into interaction with the self-symbol, sucked into ourselves, like flotsam is pulled into a whirlpool.
This is the vortex of the system, the vortex of self, where all levels cross. It overwhelms or tangles the mental processes, the self-imaging processes that maintain the illusion of stable personality and individual boundaries. In solutio, the body is joined with the soul and spirit. The skin-boundary dissolves into visceral as well as spiritual perception. Awareness of physical processes may be greatly amplified, appearing as impressions, intuitions, sensations, sounds, odors. The body is always speaking silently. Through this raw, physical expression, that which was solid becomes liquified, dissolved, deliteralized.
Gold on the Moon
The Philosopher's Stone is like a psychic lodestone (or vortex). It acts like an inner magnet, ordering the contents of our consciousness around it (through feedback loops) in chaotic, yet meaningful fashion. The Philosopher's Stone may thus be seen as a "strange attractor" in the life of anyone engaged in the quest for transformation. It is an instinctual attraction toward processes which dissolve the ego and liquify consciousness, leading to transpersonal experience after symbolic death/rebirth. Freedom in the exploration of imagery comes from the creative capacity to experience loss. Experientially, it's like being channeled into the swirling mass of interacting symbols, an overwhelming vortex of pure information. We are sucked inexorably into interaction with the self-symbol, sucked into ourselves, like flotsam is pulled into a whirlpool.
This is the vortex of the system, the vortex of self, where all levels cross. It overwhelms or tangles the mental processes, the self-imaging processes that maintain the illusion of stable personality and individual boundaries. In solutio, the body is joined with the soul and spirit. The skin-boundary dissolves into visceral as well as spiritual perception. Awareness of physical processes may be greatly amplified, appearing as impressions, intuitions, sensations, sounds, odors. The body is always speaking silently. Through this raw, physical expression, that which was solid becomes liquified, dissolved, deliteralized.
THE TREE OF LIFE
(from the book of ARI "The Tree Of Life" , part I)
Behold, that before the emanations were emanated and the creatures were created,
The upper simple light had filled the whole existence.
And there was no vacancy, such as an empty atmosphere, a hollow, or a pit,
But all was filled with simple, boundless light.
And there was no such part as head, or tail,
But everything was simple, smooth light, balanced evenly and equally,
And it was called the Endless Light.
And when upon His simple will, came the desire to create the world and emanate the emanations,
To bring to light the perfection of His deeds, His names, His appellations,
Which was the cause of the creation of the worlds,
He then restricted Himself, in the middle,
Precisely in the center,
He restricted the light.
And the light drew far off to the sides around that middle point.
And there remained an empty space, a vacuum
Circling the middle point.
And the restriction had been uniform
Around the empty point,
So that the space
Was evenly circled around it.
There, after the restriction,
Having formed a vacuum and a space
Precisely in the middle of the endless light,
A place was formed,
Where the emanated and the created might reside.
Then from Endless Light a single line hung down,
Lowered down into that space.
And through that line, He emanated, formed,
Created all the worlds.
Before these four worlds came to be
There was one infinite, one name, in wondrous, hidden unity,
That even for the closest of the angles
There is no attainment in the endless,
As there is no mind that can perceive it,
For He has no place, no boundary, no name.
(from the book of ARI "The Tree Of Life" , part I)
Behold, that before the emanations were emanated and the creatures were created,
The upper simple light had filled the whole existence.
And there was no vacancy, such as an empty atmosphere, a hollow, or a pit,
But all was filled with simple, boundless light.
And there was no such part as head, or tail,
But everything was simple, smooth light, balanced evenly and equally,
And it was called the Endless Light.
And when upon His simple will, came the desire to create the world and emanate the emanations,
To bring to light the perfection of His deeds, His names, His appellations,
Which was the cause of the creation of the worlds,
He then restricted Himself, in the middle,
Precisely in the center,
He restricted the light.
And the light drew far off to the sides around that middle point.
And there remained an empty space, a vacuum
Circling the middle point.
And the restriction had been uniform
Around the empty point,
So that the space
Was evenly circled around it.
There, after the restriction,
Having formed a vacuum and a space
Precisely in the middle of the endless light,
A place was formed,
Where the emanated and the created might reside.
Then from Endless Light a single line hung down,
Lowered down into that space.
And through that line, He emanated, formed,
Created all the worlds.
Before these four worlds came to be
There was one infinite, one name, in wondrous, hidden unity,
That even for the closest of the angles
There is no attainment in the endless,
As there is no mind that can perceive it,
For He has no place, no boundary, no name.
Ancestral Labyrinth
VITRIOL
Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem
["Visit the interior of the Earth; by rectification thou shalt find the hidden stone."].
Labyrinth Journey
The alchemist mining the earth. Mining or going inside the earth is the first step in the alchemical process. The earth is the body or oneself. Going inside the earth is equal to going into your inner self. Thus we are invited to descend into the earth, into the underworld, or the unconscious into the cosmic labyrinth of the mind.
It is a mystery to live and die. The earth is the symbol of physical humanity. Its ground is our existential ground. Another dimension beneath the ground is the cosmos because the Earth is suspended in the cosmos. We need to become conscious of this inner world. Once attention is directed inwards, a whole new world opens. In alchemy, the entrance into the unconscious is represented by the entrance into caves, by reports of travels to the underworld or strange parts of the world.
Caves were the primordial labyrinths. Cave, labyrinth and cosmic tree are primordial images. Ritual caves, rock womb-tombs were memorialized as megalithic monuments from the 11,000 year old labyrinth of the stars, Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, to the neolithic subterranean Hypogeum of Malta, and later the world navel Delphi, whose root is δελφύς delphys, "womb".
The labyrinth is the feminine face of the divine, the more dimly lit world of the divine. Linked to our inner world, they were considered homes of the ancestor spirits. The cosmic labyrinth is home of our mythic and archetypal ancestors. It is initiatory, .temporarily disturbs rational conscious, opening us to chaos.
The inner mind is aware of a new cosmic dimension, a pilgrimage through the flow of cosmic manifestation and absorption in the Absolute. The labyrinth is an opened form of the circle where knowledge (gnosis) resonates at a deep and often unconscious level. It metaphorically captures the mysteries of life and serves as a cosmic symbol.
VITRIOL
Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem
["Visit the interior of the Earth; by rectification thou shalt find the hidden stone."].
Labyrinth Journey
The alchemist mining the earth. Mining or going inside the earth is the first step in the alchemical process. The earth is the body or oneself. Going inside the earth is equal to going into your inner self. Thus we are invited to descend into the earth, into the underworld, or the unconscious into the cosmic labyrinth of the mind.
It is a mystery to live and die. The earth is the symbol of physical humanity. Its ground is our existential ground. Another dimension beneath the ground is the cosmos because the Earth is suspended in the cosmos. We need to become conscious of this inner world. Once attention is directed inwards, a whole new world opens. In alchemy, the entrance into the unconscious is represented by the entrance into caves, by reports of travels to the underworld or strange parts of the world.
Caves were the primordial labyrinths. Cave, labyrinth and cosmic tree are primordial images. Ritual caves, rock womb-tombs were memorialized as megalithic monuments from the 11,000 year old labyrinth of the stars, Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, to the neolithic subterranean Hypogeum of Malta, and later the world navel Delphi, whose root is δελφύς delphys, "womb".
The labyrinth is the feminine face of the divine, the more dimly lit world of the divine. Linked to our inner world, they were considered homes of the ancestor spirits. The cosmic labyrinth is home of our mythic and archetypal ancestors. It is initiatory, .temporarily disturbs rational conscious, opening us to chaos.
The inner mind is aware of a new cosmic dimension, a pilgrimage through the flow of cosmic manifestation and absorption in the Absolute. The labyrinth is an opened form of the circle where knowledge (gnosis) resonates at a deep and often unconscious level. It metaphorically captures the mysteries of life and serves as a cosmic symbol.
MYTHIC ANCESTORS / UNBURIED MEMORIES
These are the mythic ancestors of the Natufian culture,
the first farmers (pre-Gobekli Tepe), and first artifacts of ancestry worship, from Ain Ghazal, Jordan. Most of the statues are full statues or have two heads on one torso, perhaps of spouses, or mother-daughter, or unknown combinations or ritual reasons. Purportedly, these are mythical ancestors of the early farmers, not the remains of their own families, being made or reed armatures and plaster.
Dating to between the mid-7th millennium BC and the mid-8th millennium BC, the statues are among the earliest large-scale representations of the human form, and are regarded to be one of the most remarkable specimens of prehistoric art from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period. They are kept in the Jordan Museum in Amman.
Genealogy is a way of honoring the ancestors with a ritual from ancient times when lists of god-kings described the natural order of things rooted in mythic and 'divine' ancestors. The only way to revision and interact with it as a gestalt matrix includes the fictional, legendary, and mythological lines of this traditional World Tree. It is but one way to acknowledge our divinity, nobility, and humanity. Genealogy is a sure path to the heart. We can "gather our ancestors" before we are gathered unto them.
The mythology of our ancestors is as important as their cosmology. We can explore the mystic in ourselves and in our ancestors. Our worldview is the root of our identity and relationship to Nature and our own deep nature. Researching the cosmologies of our direct ancestors in the historical era provides a quick path into dream shamanism, as these ways are still half-remembered. Our common destiny lies beyond any worldview.
This is also a relationship to the collectivity of the dead; for the unconscious corresponds to the mythic land of the dead, the land of the ancestors. Jung was the first to link the concept of ancestors to unconscious thinking. Soul connects us through the anima mundi to the ancestral field of the ancient and archaic psyches. We learn to remember what our soul already knows. Our personality is literally expressed through our ancestors.
The gods and goddesses have 'gone to seed', and we are that -- their seed, their progeny. As James Hillman says, their minds and powers are living us in poetic moments of fantasy, insight and intuition. Nature, psyche and life are unfolding divinity. We are only cut off from the dead by what we have buried and forgotten but their primordial representations remain in the psyche as the mythical meaning of mankind's history. Working with our ancestral connection means connecting to everything around us and how we are placed in the world.
Jung said transpersonal psychic life "is the mind of our ancient ancestors, the way in which they thought and felt, the way in which they conceived of life and the world, of gods and humans beings. The existence of these historical layers is presumably the source of belief in reincarnation and in memories of past lives” (Jung, 1939, p.24).
Gods are difficult to destroy or conceal. Fictitious lines of descent blend indistinguishably with medieval forgeries. Some divinities may originally have been historical persons or war-chiefs, now lost to the mists of pre-history. Seedlines codify ancient ethnic identity and empires. Later, royals added them to their lines to bolster their claims to divine rule and the founding of thrones. Though not factual, traditional genealogy was a geographical and spiritual compass.
The ancient mysteries were ancestor, death, and rebirth cults. At root, traditional genealogy is an archetypal activity, recapitulating and extending humanity's oldest activities, including the imaginal root. The aesthetic response is an ethical response -- a response of the heart -- that values the ancestors and the genealogical history.
Genealogy amplifies our ancestral channels. It is an archetypal order, an aesthetic construction, and a virtual map of the personal and collective unconscious, reflecting a principle of totality and primordial origins. We can engage the ancestors as living presences shaping our lives and identity, in nature, dreams, visions, and symptoms. We can establish dialogues with the ancestors working through personal wounds and generational trauma to heal ourselves and our ancestral lines.
The unconscious psyche is the ancestral "land of the dead," where we find meaning for our lives and understanding of our own personal myth. All our ancestors had mothers. We can acknowledge the changing of the seasons and life passages in the manner that our ancestors acknowledged it. Myth and symbolism are the imaginal language, a means of self-discovery, and a way of gaining access to the secrets of the psyche.
"To be an ancestor you do not need to be dead, but you do need to know the dead – that is, the invisible world and how and where it touches the living.” --James Hillman
"Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors -- the dreams of our old men, given them in the solemn hours of the night by the Great Spirit; and the visions of our sacred medicine men, and is written in the hearts of our people." --Chief Seattle
These are the mythic ancestors of the Natufian culture,
the first farmers (pre-Gobekli Tepe), and first artifacts of ancestry worship, from Ain Ghazal, Jordan. Most of the statues are full statues or have two heads on one torso, perhaps of spouses, or mother-daughter, or unknown combinations or ritual reasons. Purportedly, these are mythical ancestors of the early farmers, not the remains of their own families, being made or reed armatures and plaster.
Dating to between the mid-7th millennium BC and the mid-8th millennium BC, the statues are among the earliest large-scale representations of the human form, and are regarded to be one of the most remarkable specimens of prehistoric art from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period. They are kept in the Jordan Museum in Amman.
Genealogy is a way of honoring the ancestors with a ritual from ancient times when lists of god-kings described the natural order of things rooted in mythic and 'divine' ancestors. The only way to revision and interact with it as a gestalt matrix includes the fictional, legendary, and mythological lines of this traditional World Tree. It is but one way to acknowledge our divinity, nobility, and humanity. Genealogy is a sure path to the heart. We can "gather our ancestors" before we are gathered unto them.
The mythology of our ancestors is as important as their cosmology. We can explore the mystic in ourselves and in our ancestors. Our worldview is the root of our identity and relationship to Nature and our own deep nature. Researching the cosmologies of our direct ancestors in the historical era provides a quick path into dream shamanism, as these ways are still half-remembered. Our common destiny lies beyond any worldview.
This is also a relationship to the collectivity of the dead; for the unconscious corresponds to the mythic land of the dead, the land of the ancestors. Jung was the first to link the concept of ancestors to unconscious thinking. Soul connects us through the anima mundi to the ancestral field of the ancient and archaic psyches. We learn to remember what our soul already knows. Our personality is literally expressed through our ancestors.
The gods and goddesses have 'gone to seed', and we are that -- their seed, their progeny. As James Hillman says, their minds and powers are living us in poetic moments of fantasy, insight and intuition. Nature, psyche and life are unfolding divinity. We are only cut off from the dead by what we have buried and forgotten but their primordial representations remain in the psyche as the mythical meaning of mankind's history. Working with our ancestral connection means connecting to everything around us and how we are placed in the world.
Jung said transpersonal psychic life "is the mind of our ancient ancestors, the way in which they thought and felt, the way in which they conceived of life and the world, of gods and humans beings. The existence of these historical layers is presumably the source of belief in reincarnation and in memories of past lives” (Jung, 1939, p.24).
Gods are difficult to destroy or conceal. Fictitious lines of descent blend indistinguishably with medieval forgeries. Some divinities may originally have been historical persons or war-chiefs, now lost to the mists of pre-history. Seedlines codify ancient ethnic identity and empires. Later, royals added them to their lines to bolster their claims to divine rule and the founding of thrones. Though not factual, traditional genealogy was a geographical and spiritual compass.
The ancient mysteries were ancestor, death, and rebirth cults. At root, traditional genealogy is an archetypal activity, recapitulating and extending humanity's oldest activities, including the imaginal root. The aesthetic response is an ethical response -- a response of the heart -- that values the ancestors and the genealogical history.
Genealogy amplifies our ancestral channels. It is an archetypal order, an aesthetic construction, and a virtual map of the personal and collective unconscious, reflecting a principle of totality and primordial origins. We can engage the ancestors as living presences shaping our lives and identity, in nature, dreams, visions, and symptoms. We can establish dialogues with the ancestors working through personal wounds and generational trauma to heal ourselves and our ancestral lines.
The unconscious psyche is the ancestral "land of the dead," where we find meaning for our lives and understanding of our own personal myth. All our ancestors had mothers. We can acknowledge the changing of the seasons and life passages in the manner that our ancestors acknowledged it. Myth and symbolism are the imaginal language, a means of self-discovery, and a way of gaining access to the secrets of the psyche.
"To be an ancestor you do not need to be dead, but you do need to know the dead – that is, the invisible world and how and where it touches the living.” --James Hillman
"Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors -- the dreams of our old men, given them in the solemn hours of the night by the Great Spirit; and the visions of our sacred medicine men, and is written in the hearts of our people." --Chief Seattle
Erich Neumann and C. G. Jung saw Western civilization at the threshold of an epochal transformation. Jung proclaimed in Answer to Job that the initiation of a new age demanded the “anamnesis” – the “remembering” – of the primordial feminine archetype of Sophia. Neumann recognized the task of remembrance as an awakening to call of the exiled Shekinah. Working from Christian and Jewish heritages, they sought to liberate feminine Wisdom from the exile inflicted by theological, patriarchal and primarily logocentric cultural paradigms. Jung and Neumann engaged this primal feminine image in their lives and their psychological writings.
oOo
You live inasmuch as these Mendelian units are living. They have souls, are endowed with psychic life, the psychic life of that ancestor; or you can call it part of an ancestral soul. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1401.
Thus we remain ignorant of whether our ancestral components find an elementary gratification in our lives, or whether they are repelled. Inner peace and contentment depend in large measure upon whether or not the historical family which is inherent in the individual can be harmonized with the ephemeral conditions of the present. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 237.
This image is fundamentally unconscious, an hereditary factor of primordial origin engraved in the living organic system of the man, an imprint or 'archetype' [q.v.] of all the ancestral experiences of the female, a deposit, as it were, of all the impressions ever made by woman . . . Since this image is unconscious, it is always unconsciously projected upon the person of the beloved, and is one of the chief reasons for passionate attraction or aversion." ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 391.
Psychologically this means that the souls of the ancestors (potential factors, qualities, talents, possibilities, and so on, which we have inherited from all the lines of our ancestry) are waiting in the unconscious, and are ready at any time to begin a new growth. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 230.
The ancestral part is given to us by our body, we take over the life of our ancestors in that way. It is the terrace of life because it is here that life renews itself. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 12July1935, Pages 240.
If we became aware of the ancestral lives in us, we might disintegrate. An ancestor might take possession of us and ride us to death. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 139
There is one ego in the conscious and another made up of unconscious ancestral elements, by the force of which a man who has been fairly himself over a period of years suddenly falls under the sway of an ancestor. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, page 38.
In the redemption of the individual, the whole past will be redeemed, and that includes all the inferior things as well, the animals, and all the ancestral souls, everything that has not been completed; all creation will be redeemed in the apokatastasis [at the time of the Last Judgement], there will be a complete restoration of things as they have been. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1280
The deposit of man’s whole ancestral experience—so rich in emotional imagery—of father, mother, child, husband and wife, of the magic personality, of dangers to body and soul, has exalted this group of archetypes into the supreme regulating principles of religious and even of political life, in unconscious recognition of their tremendous psychic power. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 337
These constituents of the personality—which one may call functions, or Mendelian units, or the primitives would call them remnants of ancestral souls—these constituents don’t always fit. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Page 453
oOo
You live inasmuch as these Mendelian units are living. They have souls, are endowed with psychic life, the psychic life of that ancestor; or you can call it part of an ancestral soul. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1401.
Thus we remain ignorant of whether our ancestral components find an elementary gratification in our lives, or whether they are repelled. Inner peace and contentment depend in large measure upon whether or not the historical family which is inherent in the individual can be harmonized with the ephemeral conditions of the present. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 237.
This image is fundamentally unconscious, an hereditary factor of primordial origin engraved in the living organic system of the man, an imprint or 'archetype' [q.v.] of all the ancestral experiences of the female, a deposit, as it were, of all the impressions ever made by woman . . . Since this image is unconscious, it is always unconsciously projected upon the person of the beloved, and is one of the chief reasons for passionate attraction or aversion." ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 391.
Psychologically this means that the souls of the ancestors (potential factors, qualities, talents, possibilities, and so on, which we have inherited from all the lines of our ancestry) are waiting in the unconscious, and are ready at any time to begin a new growth. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 230.
The ancestral part is given to us by our body, we take over the life of our ancestors in that way. It is the terrace of life because it is here that life renews itself. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 12July1935, Pages 240.
If we became aware of the ancestral lives in us, we might disintegrate. An ancestor might take possession of us and ride us to death. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 139
There is one ego in the conscious and another made up of unconscious ancestral elements, by the force of which a man who has been fairly himself over a period of years suddenly falls under the sway of an ancestor. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, page 38.
In the redemption of the individual, the whole past will be redeemed, and that includes all the inferior things as well, the animals, and all the ancestral souls, everything that has not been completed; all creation will be redeemed in the apokatastasis [at the time of the Last Judgement], there will be a complete restoration of things as they have been. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1280
The deposit of man’s whole ancestral experience—so rich in emotional imagery—of father, mother, child, husband and wife, of the magic personality, of dangers to body and soul, has exalted this group of archetypes into the supreme regulating principles of religious and even of political life, in unconscious recognition of their tremendous psychic power. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 337
These constituents of the personality—which one may call functions, or Mendelian units, or the primitives would call them remnants of ancestral souls—these constituents don’t always fit. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Page 453
Filters & Reflections
Liiving Roots - Gaia, Io Miller, 2015
SOURCEress
Postmodern Baphomet
Prima Materia
Coagulatio
Homunculus
Peacock's Tail
Magical Child
Soma Sophia
Goddesses
Hierophant
Fertility Rites
Anima Mundi
Parthenogenesis
Illuminative Vortex
Universal Solvent 1
Universal Solvent 2
Demeter / Persephone
Bardo
Pitstop in Some Bardo
One Star Insight
Medusa
Dreamhealing
Graces
Resurrection
Salamander
Rebirth
Starseed
Clowns & Christs
Mysterium Coniunctionis
Anthropos
Sophia
Kether to Malkuth
As Above, So Below
Mystic Eye
Another Starry Night
Cosmic Egg
Witches Cradle
Nuit
Isis Unveiled
Jacob's Ladder
Complexity
Kabbalistic Cross
Zeus
Secretof the Golden Flower
Shiva Dancing
Ezekiel's Postmodern Vision
Biofields & Tulpas
Eros & Psyche