ARAS Connections: Image and Archetype - 2007 Issue 3

ARAS publications have their roots in the remarkable Eranos Conferences, which began in Switzerland in the 1930s and have lasted for more than 70 years. It was the magic of a particular theme that tied the participants at the Eranos conferences together across cultures and academic disciplines. To one kind of magic was added another--images were being collected and exhibited on the walls in the lecture hall, which gradually formed a remarkable archive. When asked to write an introduction to this archive, the Jungian analyst Erich Neumann became so fascinated by the material that he ended up writing a full monograph called The Great Mother, which was published by the Bollingen Foundation in New York City almost 50 years ago and is still in print. In time, a copy of the original archive was given to the Bollingen Foundation, which gradually grew into the present ARAS. In the 1980s ARAS received a major grant for expansion, which resulted in the publication of An Encyclopedia of Archetypal Symbolism, and a second volume called The Body, as subtitle. Each of these volumes contain about 100 records from ARAS, organized in themes (like the Eranos conferences), in order to demonstrate the eternal images as the underlying principle of ARAS. The first volume introduces the theme of the circle of life, beginning with "Creation" in the first chapter and ending with "Death" and "Rebirth." In the second volume each chapter highlights a particular body part, from "Head" to "Feet". All the entries from the two volumes of The Encyclopedia can be found on ARAS Online. In fact, they come up first during an Online search, if the subject in question is included in any of these volumes.
 
The working title of the current ARAS book project is The Book of Images: Reflections on Archetypal Symbols. The format differs somewhat from the way most ARAS records are organized. Rather than one image, several images are often included in one entry in order to show variations and contrasts of the particular symbol. The texts accompanying the images are written as if distilling the essence (almost like poetry) in order to evoke the symbol. One inspiration for this book has been images in dreams and how to understand them and in fact we believe that The Book of Images will be major tool for working with one's own dreams. Symbolic images are more than data: they are vital seeds, living carriers of possibility. Such images function as transformers, mediating change, inspiration and healing. The following entry on the Yoruban deity Oya as the "Queen of the Winds of Change" essentially embodies this experience. As it turned out, Oya is one of the many wonderful entries that we were not able to include in this book in order to keep its length within 500 pages. We hope to return to Oya in the future, in the making of additional exciting publications. Once published, the entries in The Book of Images will, in time, be included in the Archive and we also plan to make them available on ARAS Online.
 
We will keep you updated on the progress and publication of The Book of Images.
 

OYA

I am Queen of the Winds of Change...
I will sweep your mind clean of decay and debris...
I will cut away your stagnation, and teach you the courage to transform...
I will shake your soul from its foundations...
And set you on new ground...
 
Evocation of Oya, La Nuestra de la Candelaria, February 2, 2000, NYC

She walks with dignity. She dances up a storm. She lives in the sudden event. This is Oya, legendary Warrior Queen, mythical Water Buffalo Woman, mystical Goddess of the Niger River.

She is an Orisha, a divine container of primal patterns of existence as perceived by the Yoruban folk of West Africa (Gleason, 307). She traveled with West Africans on their forced crossing of the Atlantic. In this New World the Yoruban myths, legends, and rituals syncretized with those of the indigenous populations and the conquering Spanish Catholics. They evolved into Condomble' in Brazil where she is called "Yansan"; Voudun in Haiti where she is called "Aida Wedo"; Lacumi (Santeria) in Cuba and Puerto-Rico where she is called "Yansa" (Thompson, 161). Her Catholic namesakes are La Nuestra de la Candelaria, St. Catherine, and St. Theresa (Teish, 114).
 
Oya is the experience of the purifying power of Air, a domain to which belongs feminine intelligence, relationship and communication (Gleason, 1-2). Her priestesses dance in a twirling motion, fanning their skirts, wielding fan and whisk. She is the ever changing, unexpected Goddess of Wind and Weather. Her voice is in the rustling breeze. Her face is in the violence of the tornado. She is the emotional catharsis of a storm. Her winds can clear the atmosphere, and sweep our lives clean of clutter and confusion, ignorance and injustice. She speaks her mind and so she is patroness of strong women negotiating in the market place. Hers is the final power, for she is the first and the last breath.
 
Oya is the experience of the dynamic power of Fire, a domain of feminine Eros. Her priestesses dance wildly, dressed in red, brandishing a saber. They sometimes wear the zigzag of the lightning bolt upon their hem or headdress, or thunderax upon their brow. She is wife-sister, Warrior Queen of Shango, God of Fire. Some say she stole Shango's fire magic (Courlander, 201-3). Truth be known, she is his vitality, the wind that feeds the flame, the lightening that precedes the thunder, (Gleason 60-3) the skirts behind which he rides into battle (Nunez, 53-4). She strikes us without warning in passion, in valor, in rage, in genius. She is the heroic surge of adrenaline, the electrical charge between lovers. She is the dangerous power of pure impulse.

Oya is the experience of the tumultuous power of Water, a domain that includes feminine feeling, psychic ability, and the female blood mysteries. Her priestesses trace her fluid spirals with their feet, her undulating currents with their bodies. Goddess of the Niger River, her raging floods may fecundate, ritually cleanse, protect against invasion, or wash life away. Just as the rushing river of our emotions might heal or drown us (Gleason, 47ff). She is "Yansan", Mother of the Nine. This refers both to her nine estuaries and to her nine children, all ancestral spirits. Because of her unusual progeny, she presides over the dead, funerary practices, and cemeteries (Thompson, 192-5).
 
This is Oya, Orisha of the uncontrollable feminine forces of nature; terrifying Goddess of the Edges, who guards the roads into life and death.
 
 

Gleason, Judith. Oya: In Praise of an African Goddess. San Francisco, 1992.
Thompson, Robert Farris. Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas. New York, 1993.
Teish, Luisa. Jambalay. San Francisco, 1985.
Courlander, Harold. A Treasury of African Folklore. New York, 1996.
Nunez, Luis Manuel. Santeria: A Practical Guide to Afro-Carribean Magic. Dallas, TX, 1992.

When a filmmaker needed inspiration for her award-winning animated film, she found it in the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism. When a theater director looked for ideas for sets and costumes, he consulted the archive, as did an artist developing a survey of masks throughout world history and a theologian looking for an androgynous figure of Christ. Numerous analytical psychologists and psychotherapists regularly consult the archive to explore their own and their clients' dreams by analyzing the symbolic imagery of these dreams in a process of self-discovery.
 
The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism, often just called ARAS, has a most interesting history, rooted in the Eranos meetings of the early 1930s, when world-renowned scholars from many fields gathered for discussions that touched on the history of religion, the history of art, anthropology, psychology, sociology and archaeology. Images to illustrate the topics of these cross-disciplinary meetings formed the beginning of the ARAS archive, and the Eranos heritage became the foundation for developing the nomenclature used in ARAS's image classification.
 
ARAS has since developed into a rich collection of 17,000 annotated photographic images of human creative expression, purposefully selected from every culture, spanning the 30,000 years of human history since the Ice Age. With its cultural, historical, anthropological and psychological commentary, ARAS has become over time a unique tool for academics, researchers, scholars, artists, writers, historians, anthropologists, analytical psychologists, psychotherapists, students, and the general public alike.
 
Early History of ARAS and Eranos
 
The conception of ARAS dates back to the 1930s and is intrinsically linked to the Eranos Society and its creator, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn . She was born in 1881 of Dutch parents in London where her father Albert Kapteyn, an avid photographer, was the director of the Westinghouse Brake and Signal Company. Her mother was a philosophical anarchist, a writer on social questions, and a friend of playwright George Bernard Shaw and anarchist Prince Kropotkin. Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn studied applied art in Zürich and helped in her father's darkroom. She became a young widow when her husband Iwan Fröbe, the Austrian musician, was killed in a plane crash in 1915 while testing an aerial camera for the Austrian army.
 
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