Primordial Images
Primordial Image ‘I call the image primordial when it possesses an archaic character. I speak of its archaic character when the image is in striking accord with familiar mythological motifs. It then expresses material primarily derived from the collective unconscious, and indicates at the same time that the factors influencing the conscious situation of the moment are collective rather than personal’. Jung distinguishes the interest accorded by the conscious mind to these impersonal, universal problems between an illegitimate one, ‘when they are either mere intellectual curiosity or a flight from unpleasant reality’, and a legitimate one, ‘when they arise from the deepest and truest needs of the individual’ (Jung, 1990, The basic writings of Carl Gustav Jung. New York: Princeton University Press, p. 156). Jung defines a mythological motif as ‘a continually effective and recurrent expression that reawakens certain psychic experiences or else formulates them in an appropriate way’ (Jung, 1990, p. 263).
Absolute beginning Through Mircea Eliade’s vast record and analysis of patterns of images (Eliade, 1971, Patterns in Comparative Religion, London: Sheed and Ward), and their correspondent ‘existential situations’, it is possible to identify the more recurrent image in the work of these artists, that of the ‘conjunction of the opposites’ (or ‘union of the polarities’), as well as its correspondent existential situation, that of the ‘restoration of the original time’ (or ‘restoration of the creative time’, or simply ‘return to the origin’), within the pattern of ‘absolute beginning’. This seems to fit the endeavour of the artistic avant-garde, not only for its fundamental search for the new, but also for the radical means used to attain it: a creative process not merely to create the new but to establish a new order of creation.
'Religere' and the archetype With Eliade, and also with Jung, it is possible to argue that the primordial images and their array of renderings aim at reconnecting – ‘religere’ – man with the purposefulness of his experience, for they establish, empirically and immediately, the coherence between the deeper layers of unconscious knowledge and the awareness of the present. Jung and Eliade agree on the role of the archetype concerning what might be acknowledged as the religious attitude: ‘religious ideas do not, in psychological reality, rest solely upon tradition and faith, but originate with the archetypes, the “careful consideration” of which – religere – constitutes the essence of religion’ (Jung, 1990, The basic writings of Carl Gustav Jung. New York: Princeton University Press, p. 93); ‘religious life and all the creations that spring from it, are dominated by what one may call ‘the tendency toward the archetype’ however many and varied are the components that go to make up any religious creation (any divine form, rite, myth or cult) their expression tends constantly to revert to an archetype’ (Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, London: Sheed and Ward, p. 58). An archetype ‘can be conceived as a mnemic deposit, an imprint or engram, which has arisen through the condensation of countless processes of a similar kind’ (Jung, 1990, p. 263).