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Archetypal Image

Archetypal Image

The figure through which an archetype becomes perceptible. For Kerényi, the god is the archetypal image taken at its own level of reality. He refuses the move that would reduce the god “to a concept, to a ‘power,’ nor to a ‘spirit’… not even to an idea that would not contain in a nutshell everything that Hermes’s ‘such-ness’ constitutes” (Kerényi 1944). The such-ness of the figure — Hermes as Hermes, Dionysos as Dionysos — is the archetypal image itself, irreducible.

Kerényi’s method follows the image rather than abstracting from it. “If a god is ‘idea’ and ‘world,’ he remains nonetheless in connection with the world that contains all such ‘worlds’; he can only be” (Kerényi 1944). The god is lived at the level at which a world is lived. This is why, for Kerényi, mythology “revealed in its original context as material sui generis and having its own laws” has the same effect as the most direct psychology — “the effect, indeed, of an activity of the psyche externalised in images” (Kerényi 1951, p. 3).

The concept is load-bearing for the bridge between Kerényi and Jung, and it is the seed Hillman takes up in archetypal psychology. Mythology and dream stand in the same relation to psyche: both are the psyche externalized as image. “Dreams and mythology are nearer to one another than dreams and poetry” (Kerényi 1951, p. 3).

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