Multivalence

Archetypal images (unlike symbols) do not represent anything other than themselves. In cosmological terms, they are not representations but presences of the macrocosm within microcosm. Éthe archetypal images which constitute these "worlds," are themselves image-worlds, infinite in number and unpredictable, mercurial in their behavior. The ontological structure of the psyche is radically imaginal: it is not single, unitary or monotheistic, but multiple, polycentric and polytheistic. By saying that images are mercurial, I am referring to their ambiguous character, their duplicity. In the language of alchemy, images are utriusque capax, capable of being both spiritual and material, good and evil, light and dark, conscious and unconscious.                                   --Robert Avens

[There are] multivalent symbolic images that [are]rooted in a particular mythological narration of the beginning (arche--creation of the world, man, and culture), middle-reversal-fall (peripeteia--the "dis-ease" of civilizational existence), and end (lysis--an end that is a return to the beginning).                                                            --N. J. Girardot

It is the experience of the human mind in its imaginative operation as itself radically ambiguous, essentially anomalous, inescapably multivalent--facing both out and in, linking above and below, animal-like and godlike, social cog and individual solitude, shaped and shaping, part of all that is but only as a subject knowing its own apartness.                                          --Robert D.  Pelton

I discovered that what I called dominant or pivotal symbols . . .were not only posesors of multiple meanings but also had the property of polarization. . . .[On one hand we have] the physiological or orectic pole of . . . meaning. 'Orectic' is a term used by philosophers, and was formerly popular among psychologists, meaning "of or characterized by appetite or desire." . . . [on the othe hand there is] the normative or ideological pole, since it refers to principles of social organization, social categories, and values. . . .the orectic pole. . . surely has something to do with the functions of the limbic system, the old mammalian brain. . . . It is interesting to me that a dominant [bipolar] symbol--every ritual system has several of them--should replicate in its structural and semantic make-up what are coming to be seen as key neurological features of the brain and central nervous system.                                                                                  --Victor Turner

mythopoia / liminality / epistrophe / bricolage / home