Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism
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The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS) is an encyclopedic collection of archetypal images consisting of photographs of works of art, ritual images, and artifacts of sacred traditions and contemporary art from around the world. The archive is hosted by National ARAS with institutional members in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco.
Today, the ARAS archive contains about 17,000 photographic images, each cross-indexed, individually mounted, and accompanied by scholarly commentary. The commentary includes a description of the image with a cultural history that serves to place it in its unique historical and geographical setting. Often it also includes an archetypal commentary that brings the image into focus for its modern psychological and symbolic meaning, as well as a bibliography for related reading and a glossary of technical terms.
The ARAS commentaries honor both the universal patterns and specific cultural context associated with each image, something seldom found in other collections.
Keywords, extracted from approximately 46,000 catalogue subject cards, help users explore archetypal themes of interest to them.
The images and commentaries in ARAS have been collected over a 60-year period.
The physical ARAS locations are in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Fortunately, the archive is now also available, in its entirety, online. www.aras.org
All ARAS images are searchable and fully accessible over the Internet with a membership to ARAS.
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[edit] Who Uses ARAS?
The ARAS archive is designed for and used by a diverse range of people:
- Students and scholars from around the world in the humanities and other related disciplines, who use the archive as a research tool and educational resource
- Artists and designers, who seek motifs and iconographic forms for paintings, decorations, films, and dramatic productions
- Individuals who trace mythology, dream imagery, and vision in seeking deep common linkages, which transcend nation and ideology
- Analysts and psychotherapists who come from the full range of psychological perspectives and who use the archive to increase their own knowledge of archetypal symbolism.
Many scholars from around the world have visited ARAS. Erich Neumann, in his The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (Princeton, 1955) mined ARAS for images of ancient goddesses to explore the archetype of the feminine as it evolved over the centuries from ancient Sumeria and Egypt into the modern era. Two volumes have been published containing a small fraction of the images held by ARAS, entitled An Encyclopedia of Archetypal Symbolism.
[edit] What are Archetypes?
'Archetype' defies simple definition. The word derives from a Greek compound of arche and tupos. Arche or 'first principle' points to the creative source, which cannot be represented or seen directly. Tupos, or 'impression', refers to any one of the numerous manifestations of the 'first principle' (Joseph Henderson, from ARAS Vol.1: Archetypal Symbolism p.viii). Jung himself spoke of the "indefiniteness of the archetype, with its multiple meanings" (Collected Works of CG Jung, 16:497), and had many different thoughts about archetypes throughout his professional life.
[edit] History of ARAS
ARAS was begun — and built to over six thousand images — by spiritualist and scholar Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, who founded the Eranos conferences in 1933. Each conference had a theme, and Olga collected images to illustrate the topic of each year's meeting. In 1946 Olga Froebe-Kapteyn gave her collection of pictorial artifacts to the Warburg Institute in London, and photographic duplicates were given to the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich and to the Bollingen Foundation in New York. The collection in New York was edited and further developed, including collection, sorting, and classification of the material and the development of detailed study sheets for every image. This New York archive was eventually renamed the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism and was acquired by the C.G. Jung Foundation of New York (mirror collections exist at the C.G. Jung Institutes in San Francisco and Los Angeles). The close association of ARAS with the Jung Institutes is "not because a symbolic point of view is limited to Jungians, but because Jung was the particular proponent of a broadly archetypal point of view that insists upon transpersonal and symbolic connections transcending cultural and theological boundaries. This perspective lies at the heart of the archive."
ARAS contains more than 17,000 images from every era of human history, from the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras, from ancient India, Asia Minor, Egypt, and Mycenae, from small tribal societies to great empires. The study sheets that accompany each image provide a detailed description of the image, a cultural history to place it in context, an archetypal commentary which examines the image's modern psychological meaning and offers numerous cross-cultural references to related concepts/images, a bibliography for related reading, and a glossary of technical terms. This detailed documentation renders the library of images accessible to the lay person as well as the specialist scholar, although as the ARAS home page notes, "There is...no supposition among those working in this field that they have found the one and only way of interpreting archetypal symbolism. The symbol is forever recreating itself anew in the imaginations of those who experience it."
