The Growing Impoverishment of Symbols

I am convinced that the growing impoverishment of symbols has a meaning.

It is a development that has an inner consistency.

Everything that we have not thought about, and that has therefore been deprived of a meaningful connection with our developing consciousness, has got lost.

If we now try to cover our nakedness with the gorgeous trappings of the East, as the theosophists do, we would be playing our own history false.

A man does not sink down to beggary only to pose afterwards as an Indian potentate. It seems to me that it would be far better stoutly to avow our spiritual poverty, our symbol-lessness, instead of feigning a legacy to which we are not the legitimate heirs at all.

We are, surely, the rightful heirs of Christian symbolism, but somehow we have squandered this heritage. We have let the house our fathers built fall into decay, and now we try to break into Oriental palaces that our father never knew.

Anyone who has lost the historical symbols and cannot be satisfied with substitutes is certainly in a very difficult position today: before him there yawns the void, and he turns away from it in horror.

What is worse, the vacuum gets filled with absurd political and social ideas, which one and all are distinguished by their spiritual bleakness.

Just as in Christianity the vow of worldly poverty turned the mind away from the riches of this earth, so spiritual poverty seeks to renounce the false riches of the spirit in order to withdraw not only from the sorry remnants- which today call themselves the Protestant church- of a great past, but also from all the allurements of the odorous East; in order, finally, to dwell with itself alone, where, in the cold light of consciousness, the blank barrenness of the world reaches to the very stars.

We have inherited this poverty from our fathers.

Our intellect has achieved the most tremendous things, but in the meantime our spiritual dwelling has fallen into disrepair.

We are absolutely convinced that even with the aid of the latest and largest reflecting telescope, now being built in America, men will discover behind the farthest nebulae no fiery empyrean; and we know that our eyes will wander despairingly through the dead emptiness of interstellar space.

When our natural inheritance has been dissipated, then the spirit too, as Heraclitus says, has descended from its fiery heights.

But when spirit becomes heavy it turns to water, and with Luciferian presumption the intellect usurps the seat where once the spirit was enthroned.

The spirit may legitimately claim the patria potestas over the soul; not so the earth-born intellect, which is man’s sword or hammer, and not a creator of spiritual worlds, a father of the soul.

Therefore the way of the soul in search of its lost father – like Sophia seeking Bythos – leads to the water, to the dark mirror that reposes at its bottom.

Whoever has elected for the state of spiritual poverty, the true heritage of Protestantism carried to its logical conclusion, goes the way of the soul that leads to the water.

This water is no figure of speech, but a living symbol of the dark psyche.

Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious

Paragraph 33

Magritte…..The Key of Dreams…..1930