This happened

We will watch a video of a talk given by Dick Russell at CIIS. It's introduction to, comments on, and extensive reading from Volume I of his biography of James Hillman, titled "The Life and Ideas of James Hillmann: The Making of a Psychologist."

he Tree of Life offers us a map and mandala for the soul's journey to consciousness, meaning, and purpose in our polarized, changing world. The Archetypal Images of the Tarot's Major Arcana serve as a guide through the alchemical changes that initiate us to reclaiming the Self. The Ancient Hermetic Tree of Life serves as a scaffolding and ladder for the archetypal Fool’s return journey to source along the winding and ascending Serpent Path. The Initiatory pathways of the twenty-two tarot cards of the major arcana symbolize and embody the masks we wear and the mirrors we encounter as we face the shadows in our changing and evolving selves. Exploring and dreaming into the archetypes represented by these "keys" reveals the alchemical processes that are embedded and alive in the Tree of Life and in our lives. The Fool is an apt symbol of the journeying Self in each of us. Our individual paths are unique, but we undergo initiations through the Collective that may lead us from folly to wisdom and transform the lead of unconsciousness into the Alchemical Gold of the Sage.

The Great Goddess is the incarnation of the Feminine Self. The archetypal psychical world which is encompassed in Her multiple forms is the underlying power which, even today, determines the psychic history of modern man and of modern woman (336). Our one-sided patriarchal development...no longer kept in balance by the matriarchal world of the psyche [prevents] the integration and synthesis necessary to develop psychic wholeness ... In our first session of the New Year we’ll explore the meaning of the Great Goddess as Lady of the Beasts who dominates and protects the animals. She is not in opposition to them as is the male hero and the male god in myth.  She appears as snake-headed or lion-headed, bird-headed, claw-footed, and as winged goddess, as swamp bird, ewe, fish, dolphin and bear. She sits enthroned upon her lions who provide support while she births the cosmos  and all life. “This divine principle, this woman, governs the animal world and dominates instincts and drives; she gathers the beasts beneath her spirit wings as beneath the branches of a tree.... In the matriarchal unconscious phase, a feminine self creates an inner hierarchy of powers. Her image in the human psyche manifests the unconscious and unwilled, but purposive, order of nature. Cruelty, death and caprice stand side by side with supreme planning, perfect purposiveness, and immortal life.” (277–278). Precisely where man is a creature of instinct living in the image of the beast or half-beast, i.e., where he is wholly or in large part dominated by the drives of the unconscious, the guiding purpose, the unconscious spiritual order of the whole, appears as a goddess in human form, as Lady of the Beasts. Join us for discussion of this animal-human-divine archetype which has exploded from the collective unconscious in the 20th century--from Tolkien to Star Wars, Picasso's Minotaurs to Wonderwoman, a cornucopia of otherworldly beings present themselves in science fiction, mythic fantasy, literature and cinema, poetry and drama, painting, sculpture, archeology and the multverses of our mythic imaginations.