Our 2024 fall harvest in this issue of ARAS Connections is rich and varied. It is exciting for us at ARAS to see how an ARAS approach to symbolic imagery is taking root in creative projects in so many different forms that are deeply connected to our lives today.

The first offering came in response to the current United States Presidential elections. JD Vance, the Republican nominee to be vice-President, opened up a “can of wild cats” that was precipitated by his resurfaced 2021 interview with Fox News Host Tucker Carlson. In the interview, Vance complained that the U.S. was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and "a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too….It's just a basic fact — you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children…. And how does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it?"

In response to Vance’s statement, ARAS received an inquiry “out of the blue” from an Italian Jungian analyst, Alessandra di Montezemolo, who had heard of Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comments. Some years ago, as part of her training to be a Jungian analyst she had written a paper: “The Cat and its Relationship with the Feminine: From the Sacred Creature in Egypt to the embodiment of the Devil in the Middle Ages for the Catholic Church”.

Alessandra wondered if her paper might be relevant to what was going on in the United States following the resurfacing of Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies”.

Our response was immediate and positive. ARAS is all about connecting evolving symbolic imagery from different historical eras and regions of the world to our current experience in the world. Vance’s comments put us in direct communication with one of the more important shifting narratives in the human psyche over the past 5,000 years, although that may not have been what J.D. Vance was thinking about when his “childless cat ladies” notion was thrown into the cauldron of our contemporary psycho-political-cultural conflicts. But the origins of his misogyny have deep roots in the transition from matriarchal to patriarchal societies and from paganism and polytheism to monotheism. Freeing women and men from the shackles of misogyny and restoring the empowerment of women and the embrace of the feminine are among the great challenges and potential accomplishments of our era.

If the “childless cat ladies” conversation links the present to the past, Jo Fairfax’s contribution of “12 Sculptures inspired by Jungian Archetypes: History, Ideas, Process” links the timeless to the future in his exploration of primal psychological structures with the futuristic technology of 3D printing. Fairfax writes:

“The challenge for me was to keep all that I loved about nature and our primal psychological structures while using technology….My work was increasingly veering towards my fascination about how the brain works and Jung’s archetypes seemed like a perfect way to further explore the brain,… trying to dovetail the magic of technology with the human spirit.”

Each of us will have our own reaction to Fairfax’s creations. I find them whimsical and humorous while at the same time evoking something quite serious, sacred and ritualistic about the archetypal patterns that express themselves in human form and behavior.

Finally, nothing is more gratifying to us at ARAS than witnessing how young people take so naturally to exploring the world of symbolic reality in our Pioneer Teen Program. We have been running this program for a decade and seeing the spirit of ARAS come alive in young people inspires our hope and firm belief that future generations will be nourished and enriched through their exploration of ARAS. The ARAS Pioneer Teen Program is our bridge between past, present and future in linking the Spirit of the Depths with the Spirit of the Times. We hope you enjoy this harvest of ARAS Connections as much as we enjoy bringing it to you.

Preface

Exploring the different religions, their history, rituals and symbols, to understand who we are and what we carry from the past into today’s world, seems to be necessary and meaningful.

Certainly, for us in the West, the three main monotheist religlions, Judaism, Catholicism and Islam are the most relevant and influencial. But the influence of Buddhism and Induism have also developed significantly in our globalized western world.

Nevertheless, religion is not a simple matter that can be studied only in books without a presonal research for meaning. And to avoid getting lost in its complexity or having a very superficial approach it is necessary to limit the subject and choose a specific approach.

This is why I chose “The cat and its relationship with the feminine: from the sacred creature in Egypt to the embodiment of the Devil in the Middle Ages for the Catholic Church” as the subject of this paper:

1. I grew up in a Catholic family and environment as most Italians, but I knew very little about my own religion, except what I learnt when I was a young girl in a very superficial way, and later my refusal of Catholicism in my teens.

2. I see and feel the role of patriarchal/masculine one sidedness in our lives and in the world.

3. As for any very complex subject, although today I don’t “believe” as I was tought in my youth in Catholicism and in its embodiement in the Church. I nevertheless think I should also be opened to welcoming the positive aspects and results of Catholicism (just think of the amazing artistic realizations it has inspired in architecture, sculpture, paintings, music!) and understand more deeply what does not fit in today’s path of my specicific “Indiviuation process”.

Now that Cat Ladies have emerged powerfully into the US Presidential Campaign, after Vance treated Kamala Harris as a “Childless Cat Laty”, the meaning of this paper seams to come to life collectively and become relevant way beyond my intentions. I truly hope that learning a bit more about the symbolism of cats may bring a small contribution to the renewed energy in preparing for a presidential election, that will influence the future of the entire world.

-An Italian Cat Lady with a wonderful son, two cats and a dog.

Read The Cat and its Relationship with the Feminine in its entirety here.

I always wanted to be an artist/inventor. My father (poet) and mother (dancer) brought my brother (also an artist) and me up in a remote thatched cottage in rural Berkshire, England with no bathroom and very little money. My mother stole vegetables from the local farmers field, we had a homemade lavatory placed inside a wardrobe located outside of the house and we shared a tin bath one after the other in front of a log fire once a week. I was the last to enter the same warm tub of water.

My father used to read poetry to us and my mother taught us to be mischievous. The local gamekeeper would leave us dead pheasants by the shed hanging by their necks on a hook. My mother would pluck and cook them. In winter I couldn’t see out of my bedroom window because the beautiful frost patterns on the inside blocked the view. On the outside hung long magical icicles as longs as my arm from the freezing drips of water from the thatch. Living so close to nature gave me an understanding of how nature works, its beauty, its brutality and its rhythms. My mother was fascinated by how the brain works and encouraged me to explore the psychological side of life. 

My dancer grandmother was a Jewish German refugee (her father was killed in Auschwitz). She emigrated to England in 1938 and was fascinated by Carl Jung.

I went to art school as soon as I could and studied sculpture. I further developed my studies exploring light and in particular holography at the Royal College of Art, London. It was magical to be able to create forms that required no suspension or support where the interior can be visible. It was like studying at Hogwarts. I continued my fascination with light and gravity with a holographic residency at the Holocenter in New York where I made a holographic animation. I loved the psychological and emotional potential as the images were so elusive and the viewer had to move from side to side to make the animation work. A dialogue was created between viewer and artwork. This led me to want to explore virtual reality so that the viewer was not just looking at the light artwork from the outside but actually inhabiting the same space within the artwork.

I was awarded a NESTA Fellowship (National Endowment for Science Technology and Art) to explore, research and develop my art into virtual reality. I learnt how to program images to move and respond to a viewer’s roving in virtual space. I made a tall sculptural chair for the public to sit on while they explored the virtual reality artwork. Their feet would physically dangle and not touch the floor. I thought that if I could break the relationship between a person and the ground then the brain would receive the artwork differently, more openly because they no longer had a floor and its implied rules of gravity of this world.

The challenge for me was to keep all that I loved about nature and our primal psychological structures while using technology. This is a critical axis. After I made my virtual reality artwork, I realized that, while I loved the potential magic that technology could offer, I was missing the physicality of the real world. There is something primal about standing next to and trying to understand a physical object.

Read 12 sculptures inspired by Jungian archetypes: History. Ideas. Process. in its entirety here.

We’re thrilled to share a video showcasing our 2024 Pioneer Teens program! Watch to learn more about the program, this year's field trips, and the participants' final presentations.