Kenneth Michael Florence

  This article was also published on The Symbolic World blog . “That which resumes all under a unity is a Principle in which all things exist together and the single thing is All. From this Principle, which remains internally unmoved, particular things push forth as from a single root which never itself emerges. They are a branching into part, into multiplicity, each single outgrowth bearing its trace of the common source. Thus, phase by phase, there is finally the production into this world; some things close still to the root, others widely separate in the continuous progression until we have, in our metaphor, bough and crest, foliage and fruit. At the one side all is one point of unbroken rest, on the other is the ceaseless process, leaf and fruit, all the things of process carrying ever within themselves the Reason-Principles of the Upper Sphere, and striving to become trees in their own minor order and producing, if at all, only what is in strict gradation from themselves.” 1 ...

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 expre...