Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘pagan’ operates simultaneously as an etymological category, a cultural-psychological stance, and a polemical counter-position to monotheism. Hillman provides the most sustained theoretical elaboration: recovering the Latin paganus as denoting ‘the people of a place,’ he repositions paganism not as primitive religion but as a place-specific, animistic, polytheistic sensibility fundamentally opposed to the universalizing logic of monotheistic consciousness. This move licenses archetypal psychology’s ecological and imaginal commitments, aligning tree-huggers with tree-worshippers and reading environmentalism as paganism in contemporary dress. The deeper structural tension Hillman diagnoses is a ‘basic cleft’ in Western culture between the pagan (Greek, Roman, Etruscan, Celtic, Germanic) imagination and the biblical imagination — a cleft that generates the cultural pathology of image-sickness, since monotheism identifies images with idolatry. Von Franz approaches the same fault-line from a Jungian developmental perspective, noting that European fairy tales preserve a subterranean pagan stratum that the Christian overlay never fully suppressed, and that alchemy represents a deliberate attempt to suture the two. Miller extends this into a diagnostic concern: as Christian cult fades, a ‘psychic paganism’ — atomized, uncontained symbol-formation — risks degenerating into popular occultism unless met with adequate psychological theory. King provides the historical corrective, establishing ‘pagan’ as a Christian construct of the fourth century, a point that reinforces Hillman’s argument that the term is always already an instrument of the alieni.
The idea of place has given us the word ‘pagan.’ Paganus referred to native peoples mainly in the countryside in distinction to alieni – members of foreign militia, occupiers, administrators who came from elsewhere.
Hillman grounds ‘pagan’ etymologically in place-identity and community, positioning it as the foundational alternative to universalist, alienating monotheism and as the latent rationale for archetypal psychology’s ecological commitments.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis
The definition of pagan as the people of a place and defenders of this-place-here against the alienation brought by universalist science and religion necessitates archetypal psychology’s turn toward ecological and urban concerns.
This passage makes the structural argument that paganism’s place-centeredness is not archaic survivalism but the living rationale behind archetypal psychology’s contemporary ecological turn.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis
the basic cleft in the ground of Western culture and which Western culture straddles, the clash between pagan and Christian, that is, between the Greek, Roman, Etruscan, Carthaginian, Celtic and Germanic imagination and the imagination of the Bible
Hillman frames the pagan/Christian opposition as the foundational cultural wound of Western consciousness, one with direct clinical consequences in the historical prejudice against images as idolatry.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis
the long historical prejudice against images for their association with polytheistic paganism, or in monotheistic language: ‘idolatry and demonism.’ I urged the clinician to study not only the images of sickness but also this sickness of images.
Hillman diagnoses a cultural psychopathology — the suppression of imagistic thinking — that is traceable directly to monotheism’s condemnation of pagan image-worship.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis
Is the restoration of the pagan figures to their place as archetypal dominants of the psyche impossible in a monotheistic psychological world? If so, then we must abandon our attempts at an archetypal approach based on polycentricity
Hillman frames the restoration of pagan archetypal figures as the central existential question for archetypal psychology’s survival as a genuinely polycentric discipline.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis
Is the restoration of the pagan figures to their place as archetypal dominants of the psyche impossible in a monotheistic psychological world? If so, then we must abandon our attempts at an archetypal approach based on polycentricity
A near-identical formulation appearing in the separately published edition, confirming the centrality of the pagan-as-polycentric-archetype argument to Hillman’s theoretical program.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis
we are Christianized in the higher levels of the psyche, but down below we are still completely pagan. While fairy tales are for the most part entirely pagan, some of them… contain symbols which one can understand only as being an attempt of the unconscious to unite again the sunken pagan tradition with the Christian field of consciousness.
Von Franz, citing Jung, argues that the psyche retains an indelible pagan substrate beneath its Christianized surface, and that fairy tales — and alchemy — represent the unconscious’s ongoing effort to reconcile the two strata.
, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970thesis
It seems so clearly a prohibition of the pagan mode of worship, the pagan mode of thinking in images. The text reads: ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any manner of likeness, of anything that is in heaven above…’
Hillman reads the Second Commandment as the definitive legislative moment of pagan suppression, locating the prohibition of image-making as the crux of monotheism’s assault on polytheistic imaginal consciousness.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983supporting
But there could be a wider, more generous reading – a pagan reading. It would say that we can find a father and a mother in all things that prolong your days, wherever things go well with thee, and parenting may be discovered in the place, the land, the earth where we inhabit.
Hillman demonstrates hermeneutically what a pagan reading of scripture would look like — animistic, place-centered, and distributed rather than personal — contrasting it with monotheism’s anthropocentric literalism.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983supporting
Conceptually, paganism is a Christian construct in which Christians sometimes identified themselves as a ‘third race.’… If the term ‘pagan’ was used only colloquially and appeared relatively late (fourth century), how did Christians refer to pagans before that time?
King provides the historical-critical corrective that ‘pagan’ is not an indigenous self-designation but a fourth-century Christian polemical construct, substantiating Hillman’s claim that the term is always an instrument of the universalizing alieni.
, What Is Gnosticism?, 2003supporting
Can the atomism of our psychic paganism, that is, the rash of individual symbol-formation now breaking out as the Christian cult fades, be contained by a psychology of self-integration that echoes its expiring Christian model?
Miller diagnoses ‘psychic paganism’ as an uncontained, potentially dangerous proliferation of individual symbol-formation that erupts when monotheistic psychological structure collapses without an adequate polycentric alternative.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
That book… is actually an exemplary text of the pagan view. It claims the laugh is essential to meaning, the deepest meaning brings a smile, a laugh and is therefore closer to the nature of the Id and to redemption of personality from the oppression of a laughless biblical superego
Hillman extends the pagan sensibility into aesthetics and psychology, positioning laughter as the pagan counter to the humorless severity of monotheistic superego formation.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983supporting
is actually an exemplary text of the pagan view. It claims the laugh is essential to meaning, the deepest meaning brings a smile, a laugh and is therefore closer to the nature of the Id and to redemption of personality from the oppression of a laughless biblical superego
A parallel formulation identifying the pagan view with a comedic, redemptive, and imaginal mode of consciousness opposed to monotheism’s earnest literalism.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983supporting
the anima clings to the mountain spirit because she feels that he holds the promise of a richer life for her; this has to do with his being pagan and the fact that the pagan Weltanschauung, in certain respects, gave the anima in man a more abundant chance to live.
Von Franz argues that the pagan worldview offered the anima — the soul-image — greater vitality and relational richness than Christian spiritualization, explaining why the unconscious gravitates toward pagan figures in certain fairy tales.
, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970supporting
Even for medieval Christianity ‘the pagan gods were as truly existent as the Trinity or the Virgin Mary.’ They were of course generally evil because pagan.
Hillman notes the paradox that medieval Christianity acknowledged the ontological reality of pagan gods while condemning them as demonic, a position that inadvertently preserved their archetypal force.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting
A polytheistic vision differs from undifferentiated pantheism, holy vitalism, and naturalistic animism – which from the standpoint of monotheistic consciousness tend to be bunched together as ‘pagan’ and ‘primitive.’
Hillman distinguishes the sophisticated polytheistic vision of archetypal psychology from what monotheism reductively dismisses as ‘pagan’ — distinguishing precision of archetypal differentiation from undifferentiated nature-mysticism.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983supporting
That this invasion is authentic can be seen from the use of pagan mythological material, a most improbable procedure for a Christian of that time… Even though the consciousness of that age was exclusively filled with Christian ideas, earlier or contemporaneous pagan contents lay just below the surface
Jung demonstrates that pagan mythological material erupts into Christian visionary experience precisely because pagan contents persist as a living subliminal layer beneath Christianized consciousness.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting
The contrast between anima/animus and self appears in Aion as a contrast between pagan gods and the imago Dei.
Hillman draws on Jung’s Aion to establish a structural homology: the anima/animus figures correspond to pagan gods, while the self corresponds to the monotheistic imago Dei, making the theoretical choice between them a choice between psychological cosmologies.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983supporting
any insistence upon the contrary would amount to blasphemous paganism. Christianity has never been worldly nor has it ever looked with favour on good food and wine
Jung records Christianity’s own characterization of sensory, embodied enjoyment as ‘blasphemous paganism,’ illustrating the operative cultural logic that Hillman subsequently reclaims as an archetypal value.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting
As an example of the first or pagan-Oriental type, we may take the once powerful cult, derived from Iran, of the Mysteries of Mithra, which came to flower in the Near East during the Hellenistic age
Campbell uses ‘pagan-Oriental’ typologically to designate mystery religions premised on psychological transformation through symbolic participation rather than on deferred eschatological reward.
, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964aside
Although Yahweh’s cult was fundamentally different in its historical bias, it often expressed itself in terms of the old paganism… there were frequently pagan ceremonies.
Armstrong documents the historical interpenetration of Yahwist monotheism and Canaanite paganism, providing historical-religion context for depth psychology’s argument that pagan substrates persist beneath monotheistic overlays.
, A History of God, 1993aside
The Christian missionaries taking the one true word to tribes around the world found they had to compromise the universality of their creed to accord with ‘the people of the place.’
Hillman illustrates how the universalizing logic of monotheism is forced to reckon with pagan place-specificity even in the act of missionary conversion, revealing the structural tension between the two orientations.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983aside