the archetypal mythology of horses
Copyright
2004-2022 Beverley Kane, MD
Page 18 of 20
how the spontaneous excitement of life is killed, denied and rejected in
numerous ways until finally, the body becomes robotic and senseless. …
Touch therapists, body-centered psychotherapists and others who can read
the body will hear the recording of the rejected part of the self located in the
living tissue of the human body. It is the side too often denied or projected
onto others. …
As the 21st Century begins, the body, as shadow, becomes more
compelling. … The body becomes the repository of a lost mythology. This
mythology connects the living matter of my body to the earth and the spirit
world.
This concept is different from saying that the body itself projects unconscious material
outward onto, for example, horses.
4. There are several theories, none universally accepted, of how the Indo-Europeans and
their horses entered the historical record. There are mythic and counter-mythic academic
wars fought among cultural chauvinists (Indologists, Aryan supremacists, Marxists, etc),
feminist revisionists ("matrist historians" such as Marija Gimbutas) and their critics,
anthropologists, and linguists. The most cogent and agenda-inapparent meta-analyses of
the archeological and paleo-linguistic evidence as compiled by Mallory, Hayden, and
others suggest that the Indo-Europeans spread in several waves, by some combination of
invasion, slow migration with their own women and children, and diffusion with
acculturation, not necessarily in that order. Certainly if I had been a late Neolithic
farmer's daughter slopping pigs in the Pelasgians, I might have been quite attracted to the
dashing horsemen coming to trade in Corded Ware.
5. Modern man appears almost completely to have lost the ability to transmit
mental pictures, probably because this was the first skill he ceased to use
when he gained the ability to speak. If you could describe with your voice
what you were seeing, you did not need to transfer a mental picture. But
some primitive tribes still retain the skill and we have seen that Laurens
van der Post in his travels among the South African bushmen observed a
witch doctor gaze at the cave drawing of an antelope, throw himself into a
trance, and then so accurately describe the location where the antelope
was grazing that the hunters could go out and kill it.
Henry Blake, Talking With Horses
6.
Von Franz, presumably following Jung's convention, refers to the four stages of the
anima and animus, as if there is a developmental sequence for each facet of the
archetype. In this hierarchy, the physical is trumped by the romantically esthetic
(emotional), which in turn is superceded by spiritual love (intuitive), which ultimately
gives way to wisdom. Examples from von Franz are, respectively, Gauguin's bare-
breasted Tahitians, Helen of Troy, the Virgin Mary, and the goddess Athena.
Other Jungians describe the chief manifestations of anima and animus as four
egalitarian functions—thinking, sensation, intuition, and emotion. The best description
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