I have been a “Qabalististic artist” for over 50 years. That is to say, Qabalah is the primary thread that weaves through all my graphic and written work one way or another. The history of Hermetic philosophy in Visionary Art is very rich, an often unconscious esoteric current that pervades Western art from the Renaissance forward. Similar symbolic imagery always permeated Eastern art under different philosophies.
Even Botticelli, Michaelangelo, Titian, Ficino, Blake, Tchelechew, Grey, and others owe a debt to the Hermetic revolution and philosophical syncretism. The Renaissance was about developing a stereoscopic perspective, and the task of today’s visionary Digerati is to take that vision hyperdimensional. As ever, it is all about recontextualization and multisensory evocation of psychobiological states.
Great art has impact; it stops us in our tracks with aesthetic arrest, then leaves an aesthetic afterglow. It concentrates transformative insights in skillful, original forms. For the visionary, art becomes a literal description of extreme mindbody states. Mission is committed vision. With a perceptual acuity tuned to discovery, the artist beckons the viewer further, to share her vision, albeit, in silence.
(c) 2018 Iona Miller & Nate Drendel
Even Botticelli, Michaelangelo, Titian, Ficino, Blake, Tchelechew, Grey, and others owe a debt to the Hermetic revolution and philosophical syncretism. The Renaissance was about developing a stereoscopic perspective, and the task of today’s visionary Digerati is to take that vision hyperdimensional. As ever, it is all about recontextualization and multisensory evocation of psychobiological states.
Great art has impact; it stops us in our tracks with aesthetic arrest, then leaves an aesthetic afterglow. It concentrates transformative insights in skillful, original forms. For the visionary, art becomes a literal description of extreme mindbody states. Mission is committed vision. With a perceptual acuity tuned to discovery, the artist beckons the viewer further, to share her vision, albeit, in silence.
(c) 2018 Iona Miller & Nate Drendel
arcana videos
ARCANE CINEMA
Image, Film, & the Predictive Arts
THE 22 TROPES
Post-Jungian Video Collaborations of Iona Miller & Nate Drendel
Cryptoporticus Productions
by Iona Miller, (c)2018
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We are making our video series on the Major Arcana: Paths of Individuation & Soul-Making, available [below] for educational purposes. Our effort is to advance understanding of common themes in the collective art, heart, and soul of humanity.
We present a distilled visual alchemy of the The Fool's Journey in each encrypted card, each a retinal poem. A continuous narrative emerges through a discontinuous montage of film, documentary, and music video imagery and iconography.
Metaphors of the underlying order in chaos connect our departures from the ordinary world through impressionistic leaps of imagination with fiery hearts and luminous hair. The heart is the secret of the source of the perceptual eye. Names and latent symbols become omens. The characters of the soul help us see in the dark.
TEXT:
https://ionamiller2020.weebly.com/arcane-cinema.html
https://ionamiller2017.weebly.com/major-arcana.html
Archetypes as the core components of the human psyche. What does it mean if a soul is composed of archetypes as proposed by Hillman?
One more word we need to introduce is archetype. The curious difficulty of explaining just what archetypes are suggests something specific to them. That is, they tend to be metaphors rather than things. We find ourselves less able to say what an archetype is literally and more inclined to describe them in images. We can't seem to touch one or point to one, and rather speak of what they are like. Archetypes throw us into an imaginative style of discourse. In fact, it is precisely as metaphors that Jung—who reintroduced the ancient idea of archetype into modern psychology—writes of them, insisting upon their indefinability. To take an archetypal perspective in psychology leads us, therefore, to envision the basic nature and structure of the soul in an imaginative way and to approach the basic questions of psychology first of all by means of the imagination.
Let us then imagine archetypes as the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, the roots of the soul governing the perspectives we have of ourselves and the world. They are the axiomatic, self-evident images to which psychic life and our theories about it ever return. They are similar to other axiomatic first principles, the models or paradigms, that we find in other fields. For “matter,” “God,” “energy,” “life,” “health,” “society,” “art” are also fundamental metaphors, archetypes perhaps themselves, which hold whole worlds together and yet can never be pointed to, accounted for, or even adequately circumscribed. All ways of speaking of archetypes are translations from one metaphor to another.
Even sober operational definitions in the language of science or logic are no less metaphorical than an image which presents the archetypes as root ideas, psychic organs, figures of myth, typical styles of existence, or dominant fantasies that govern consciousness. There are many other metaphors for describing them: immaterial potentials of structure, like invisible crystals in solution or form in plants that suddenly show forth under certain conditions; patterns of instinctual behavior like those in animals that direct actions along unswerving paths; the genres and topoi in literature; the recurring typicalities in history; the basic syndromes in psychiatry; the paradigmatic thought models in science; the worldwide figures, rituals, and relationships in anthropology.
Hillman, James. The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire (pp. 23-24). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.
"Archetypal psychology has pressed beyond the collection of objective data and the correlation of images as verbal or visual symbols. If archetypal images are the fundamentals of fantasy, they are the means by which the world is imagined, and therefore they are the models by which all knowledge, all experiences whatsoever become possible: “Every psychic process is an image and an ‘imagining,’ otherwise no consciousness could exist …” (CW 11: 889). An archetypal image operates like the original meaning of idea (from Greek eidos and eidolon): not only “that which” one sees but also that “by means of which” one sees. The demonstration of archetypal images is therefore as much in the act of seeing as in the object seen, since the archetypal image appears in consciousness itself as the governing fantasy by means of which consciousness is possible to begin with. Gathering of data does less to demonstrate objectively the existence of archetypes than it does to demonstrate the fantasy of “objective data.” -JH, Archetypal Psychology, 204-21
One more word we need to introduce is archetype. The curious difficulty of explaining just what archetypes are suggests something specific to them. That is, they tend to be metaphors rather than things. We find ourselves less able to say what an archetype is literally and more inclined to describe them in images. We can't seem to touch one or point to one, and rather speak of what they are like. Archetypes throw us into an imaginative style of discourse. In fact, it is precisely as metaphors that Jung—who reintroduced the ancient idea of archetype into modern psychology—writes of them, insisting upon their indefinability. To take an archetypal perspective in psychology leads us, therefore, to envision the basic nature and structure of the soul in an imaginative way and to approach the basic questions of psychology first of all by means of the imagination.
Let us then imagine archetypes as the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, the roots of the soul governing the perspectives we have of ourselves and the world. They are the axiomatic, self-evident images to which psychic life and our theories about it ever return. They are similar to other axiomatic first principles, the models or paradigms, that we find in other fields. For “matter,” “God,” “energy,” “life,” “health,” “society,” “art” are also fundamental metaphors, archetypes perhaps themselves, which hold whole worlds together and yet can never be pointed to, accounted for, or even adequately circumscribed. All ways of speaking of archetypes are translations from one metaphor to another.
Even sober operational definitions in the language of science or logic are no less metaphorical than an image which presents the archetypes as root ideas, psychic organs, figures of myth, typical styles of existence, or dominant fantasies that govern consciousness. There are many other metaphors for describing them: immaterial potentials of structure, like invisible crystals in solution or form in plants that suddenly show forth under certain conditions; patterns of instinctual behavior like those in animals that direct actions along unswerving paths; the genres and topoi in literature; the recurring typicalities in history; the basic syndromes in psychiatry; the paradigmatic thought models in science; the worldwide figures, rituals, and relationships in anthropology.
Hillman, James. The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire (pp. 23-24). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.
"Archetypal psychology has pressed beyond the collection of objective data and the correlation of images as verbal or visual symbols. If archetypal images are the fundamentals of fantasy, they are the means by which the world is imagined, and therefore they are the models by which all knowledge, all experiences whatsoever become possible: “Every psychic process is an image and an ‘imagining,’ otherwise no consciousness could exist …” (CW 11: 889). An archetypal image operates like the original meaning of idea (from Greek eidos and eidolon): not only “that which” one sees but also that “by means of which” one sees. The demonstration of archetypal images is therefore as much in the act of seeing as in the object seen, since the archetypal image appears in consciousness itself as the governing fantasy by means of which consciousness is possible to begin with. Gathering of data does less to demonstrate objectively the existence of archetypes than it does to demonstrate the fantasy of “objective data.” -JH, Archetypal Psychology, 204-21