The creative urge lives and grows in him like a tree in the earth from which it draws its nourishment.
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
Spirit in Man, Art, & Literature
Analysis of artists consistently shows not only the strength of the creative impulse arising from the unconscious, but also its capricious and wilful character.
The biographies of great artists make it abundantly clear that the creative urge is often so imperious that it battens on their humanity and yokes everything to the service of the work, even at the cost of health and ordinary human happiness.
The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle.
The creative urge lives and grows in him like a tree in the earth from which it draws its nourishment.
We would do well, therefore, to think of the creative process as a living thing implanted in the human psyche.
In the language of analytical psychology this living thing is an autonomous complex.
It is a split-off portion of the psyche, which leads a life of its own outside the hierarchy of consciousness.
Depending on its energy charge, it may appear either as a mere disturbance of conscious activities or as a supraordinate authority which can harness the ego to its purpose.
Accordingly, the poet who identifies with the creative process would be one who acquiesces from the start when the unconscious imperative begins to function.
But the other poet, who feels the creative force as something alien, is one who for various reasons cannot acquiesce and is thus caught unawares. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 115
For you are a son of the earth
The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition (Philemon)
I know that you would like to hear the tidings of he whom things have not lived, but who lived and fulfilled himself.
For you are a son of the earth, sucked dry by the suckling earth, that can suck nothing out of itself, but suckles only from the sun.
Therefore you would like to have tidings of the son of the sun, which shines and does not suckle.
You would like to hear of the son of God, who shone and gave, who begot, and to whom life was born again, as the earth bears the sun green and colorful children.
You would like to hear of him, the radiating savior, who as a son of the sun cut through the webs of the earth, who sundered the magic threads and released those in bondage, who owned himself and was no one’s servant, who sucked no one dry, and whose treasure no one exhausted.
You would like to hear of him who was not darkened by the shadow of earth, but illuminated it, who saw the thoughts of all, and whose thoughts no one guessed, who possessed in himself the meaning of all things, and whose meaning no thing could express. ~Carl Jung; Red Book
She is the creative Earth, which not only brings forth and swallows life
As the Great Creatrix, the feminine is no vessel and passage for an alien, masculine Other that condescends towards her, enters into her, and favors her with the seed of living.
Life originates in her and issues from her, and the light that appears projected on the night sky, which she is herself, is rooted in her depths.
For she is not only the protomantis, the first and great Prophetess, but also she who gives birth to the Spirit-Light, which, like consciousness and the illumination that arises in transformation, is rooted in her creative efficacy.
She is the creative Earth, which not only brings forth and swallows life, but as that which transforms also lets the dead thing be resurrected and leads the lower to the higher.
All developments and transformations that lead from the simple and insignificant through all gradations of life to the complicated and intricately differentiated fall under her sovereignty.
This matriarchal world is geocentric; the stars and signs of the zodiac are the heavenly girdle of the Earth Goddess and are arranged around her as the true center around which everything revolves. ― Erich Neumann, The Fear of the Feminine, Page 204
