The Green Knight and the Paradigm of De-souled Symbolism
This article is also featured on The Symbolic World blog In my last article, I presented the symbol of Joan of Arc as an antidote to the increasingly prevalent phenomenon of symbolic inversion, the technique of turning archetypal symbols upside-down. In doing so, I made brief reference to the use of this technique in the recent movie The Green Knight and traced the technique in its contemporary form back to the decoupling of signifier and signified that arose out of the methods of postmodern deconstruction. 1 What I’d like to do now is expand a little on one of the currently dominant artistic impulses resulting from this decoupling, using The Green Knight as a characteristic example. Eternal Patterns and Novel Vibes The old European masters painted the ancient archetypal stories in then-contemporary outward form, using the imagery of the times. In this approach, a deep understanding of the nature of archetype is revealed. They knew that the eternal patterns of reality are expressed