Orientation
Actaeon enters the forest as the pursuer and meets, in Artemis, a power that surrounds and undoes him: for Wolfgang Giegerich this is not tragedy but logic. In The Soul’s Logical Life he argues that the hunter’s stance is neither closing in on the Other nor exposing oneself to it, but the contradictory unity of both at once, and that this coincidentia belongs only to the initiated hunter, who enters the forest already given over to dismemberment, never to the mere expert or technician. Because Actaeon’s essence is to be a hunter, Giegerich insists, he has no alternatives; his action and his being are tautologically one. Jung, working fairy-tale material in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, finds a cognate structure: hunter and hero are ultimately equated, the hero lying dormant in the hunter from the beginning and egging him on to capture the soul. Marie-Louise von Franz grounds the figure in Eskimo ritual, where a lonely hunter’s guilty kill of a beautiful eagle seeds communal ceremony, and David Abram describes indigenous hunters whose uncanny attunement to game rests on participatory perception rather than technique. The hunter thus names a pursuit that transforms the pursuer.
