Flint

it is only when Flint is cut off from his brother that he does wrong. So He Grasps The Sky With Both Hands rescinds the act of separating himself off from the evil, and returns to his brother

McGilchrist reads the Flint myth as demonstrating that the destructive principle becomes actively harmful only through severance from its complementary creative counterpart, making re-integration — not suppression — the redemptive move.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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Flint has created not birds, but flies and bats; not flowers, but thistles; not fruit, but thorns. Seeing this, the good brother embraces his brother's work, giving all that Flint has made their proper names

McGilchrist uses Flint's distorted imitative creations to illustrate how an isolated analytical faculty produces only degraded copies of organic reality, yet these products are redeemable when assigned their proper place within a relational whole.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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Among the Wichita, the saviour was the great star in the south, and he performed his work of salvation on earth as the 'flint man.' His son was called the 'Jung flint.' After completing their work, both of them went back into the sky.

Jung identifies the 'flint man' as a salvific figure whose stone-body motif aligns with the alchemical lapis and stellar symbolism, placing Flint within a cross-cultural archetype of hard, luminous, redemptive matter.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Alchemical Studies, 1967thesis

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the saviour was the great star in the south, and he performed his work of salvation on earth as the 'flint man.' His son was called the 'young flint.' After completing their work, both of them went back into the sky.

Jung's early Collected Works reading of the Wichita 'flint man' as saviour-figure parallels the lapis-Christ equation of alchemy, grounding Flint within a universal pattern of stone-born redemption.

Jung, C. G., Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907thesis

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the two eventually come together, and that we cannot know what good may flow from what we now call evil, or what evil may flow from what we now call good — Jung's enantiodromia

McGilchrist invokes enantiodromia to contextualize the Flint narrative theologically, arguing that the coincidentia oppositorum demands both union and separation of good and evil, not their premature dissolution.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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the coincidentia oppositorum involves both the union and separation of good and evil. It is not possible to get round that.

This passage provides the philosophical framework within which the Flint myth operates for McGilchrist, insisting that the tension between opposites cannot be short-circuited by a simple 'not two' resolution.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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lower left, flint; lower right, house; and upper right, lizard. To the left of each of these corner devices are the five day signs associated with the quarter in question.

Campbell's placement of flint among the Aztec directional day-signs positions it as a cosmological marker within a quaternary symbolic system, extending its range beyond the North American trickster context into Mesoamerican sacred geography.

Campbell, Joseph, The Mythic Image, 1974supporting

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the way to certainty lies through radical doubt; virtue signifies not innocence but the knowledge of sin and its overcoming; by obeying nature, we command her

This passage's catalogue of productive opposites constitutes the broader dialectical context in which McGilchrist's reading of Flint as a necessary evil finds its philosophical home.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside

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I have referred earlier to an innocence the other side of experience, a knowledge the other side of unknowing, a wisdom the other side of folly.

McGilchrist's meditation on second-order innocence and wisdom contextualizes Flint's redemption as requiring passage through, not avoidance of, the distortions the figure represents.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside

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