The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS) is an encyclopedic collection of archetypal images consisting of photographs of

works of art A work of art, artwork, art piece, piece of art or art object is an artistic creation of aesthetic value. Except for "work of art", which may be used of any work regarded as art in its widest sense, including works from literature ...

ritual A ritual is a repeated, structured sequence of actions or behaviors that alters the internal or external state of an individual, group, or environment, regardless of conscious understanding, emotional context, or symbolic meaning. Traditionally ...

images, and artifacts of sacred traditions and

contemporary art Contemporary art is a term used to describe the art of today, generally referring to art produced from the 1970s onwards. Contemporary artists work in a globally influenced, culturally diverse, and technologically advancing world. Their art is a ...

from around the world. The archive is hosted by National ARAS, with institutional members in

New York New York most commonly refers to: * New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States * New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York New York may also refer to: Places United Kingdom * ...

Los Angeles Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...

Chicago Chicago is the List of municipalities in Illinois, most populous city in the U.S. state of Illinois and in the Midwestern United States. With a population of 2,746,388, as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the List of Unite ...

, and

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

Overview

The ARAS archive contains about 18,000 photographic images collected over more than sixty years, each accompanied by scholarly commentary. The commentary includes a description of the image with a cultural history that places it in context historically and geographically, an important aspect for understanding and working with archetypal images. Where applicable, the commentary brings the image into focus for its modern psychological and

symbol A symbol is a mark, Sign (semiotics), sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, physical object, object, or wikt:relationship, relationship. Symbols allow people to go beyond what is known or seen by cr ...

ic meaning, as well as often including a bibliography for related reading and a glossary of technical terms. The archive has physical repositories in the cities of its institutional-member hosts; it is also available online (online access does require a subscription) and images are indexed with keywords, including historical, cultural, geographic and other useful terms. ARAS also publishes a quarterly online journal connecting art, culture and depth psychology from a multi-disciplinary perspective that can be subscribed to free of charge on their website, aras.org.

Usage

The ARAS archive is designed for and used by students and scholars for research, by artists and designers as a

sourcebook A sourcebook is a collection of texts on a particular subject intended for use as an introduction to the subject. The selected texts are typically edited, laid out, and typeset in a uniform format before binding, and the result is often a hardcov ...

of motifs and

iconographic Iconology is a method of interpretation in cultural history and the history of the visual arts used by Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky and their followers that uncovers the cultural, social, and historical background of themes and subjects in the visu ...

forms, by individuals interested in commonalities in mythology, dream imagery, and vision which transcend nation and

ideology An ideology is a set of beliefs or values attributed to a person or group of persons, especially those held for reasons that are not purely about belief in certain knowledge, in which "practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones". Form ...

, and by practitioners of

depth psychology Depth psychology (from the German term ''Tiefenpsychologie'') refers to the practice and research of the science of the unconscious, covering both psychoanalysis and psychology. It is also defined as the psychological theory that explores the rel ...

or other psychological perspectives wanting to enhance their knowledge of archetypal symbolism. Among the scholars who have visited or made use of ARAS' resources are Erich Neumann, who in his ''The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype'' (Princeton, 1955) mined ARAS for images of ancient

goddess A goddess is a female deity. In some faiths, a sacred female figure holds a central place in religious prayer and worship. For example, Shaktism (one of the three major Hinduism, Hindu sects), holds that the ultimate deity, the source of all re ...

es to explore the archetype of the feminine as it evolved over the centuries from ancient

Sumer Sumer () is the earliest known civilization, located in the historical region of southern Mesopotamia (now south-central Iraq), emerging during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age, early Bronze Ages between the sixth and fifth millennium BC. ...

ia and

Egypt Egypt ( , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a country spanning the Northeast Africa, northeast corner of Africa and Western Asia, southwest corner of Asia via the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to northe ...

into the modern era. Two volumes have been published containing a small fraction of the images held by ARAS, entitled ''An Encyclopedia of Archetypal Symbolism''.

History

ARAS was begun—and built to over six thousand images—by spiritualist and scholar Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, who founded the

Eranos Eranos is an intellectual discussion group dedicated to humanistic and religious studies, as well as to the natural sciences which has met annually in Moscia (Lago Maggiore), the Collegio Papio and on the Monte Verità in Ascona, Switzerland sin ...

conferences in 1933. Each conference had a theme, and Fröbe-Kapteyn collected images to illustrate the topic of each year's meeting. In 1946, Olga Froebe-Kapteyn gave her collection of pictorial artifacts to the

Warburg Institute The Warburg Institute is a research institution associated with the University of London in central London, England. A member of the School of Advanced Study, its focus is the study of cultural history and the role of images in culture – cros ...

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

, and photographic duplicates were given to the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich and to the

Bollingen Foundation The Bollingen Foundation was an educational foundation set up along the lines of a university press in 1945. It was named after Bollingen Tower, Carl Jung's country home in Bollingen, Switzerland. Funding was provided by Paul Mellon and his ...

in New York. The collection in New York was edited and further developed, including collection, sorting, and classification of the material and the development of detailed study sheets for every image. This New York archive was eventually renamed the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism and was acquired by the C.G. Jung Foundation of New York (mirror collections exist at the C.G. Jung Institutes in San Francisco and Los Angeles). The close association of ARAS with the Jung Institutes is "not because a symbolic point of view is limited to

Jungian Analytical psychology (, sometimes translated as analytic psychology; also Jungian analysis) is a term referring to the psychological practices of Carl Jung. It was designed to distinguish it from Freud's psychoanalytic theories as their s ...

s, but because Jung was the particular proponent of a broadly archetypal point of view that insists upon transpersonal and symbolic connections transcending cultural and theological boundaries. This perspective lies at the heart of the archive." ARAS contains more than 17,000 images from every era of human history, from the

Paleolithic The Paleolithic or Palaeolithic ( years ago) ( ), also called the Old Stone Age (), is a period in human prehistory that is distinguished by the original development of stone tools, and which represents almost the entire period of human prehist ...

and

Neolithic The Neolithic or New Stone Age (from Ancient Greek, Greek 'new' and 'stone') is an archaeological period, the final division of the Stone Age in Mesopotamia, Asia, Europe and Africa (c. 10,000 BCE to c. 2,000 BCE). It saw the Neolithic Revo ...

eras, from

ancient India Anatomically modern humans first arrived on the Indian subcontinent between 73,000 and 55,000 years ago. The earliest known human remains in South Asia date to 30,000 years ago. Sedentism, Sedentariness began in South Asia around 7000 BCE; ...

Asia Minor Anatolia (), also known as Asia Minor, is a peninsula in West Asia that makes up the majority of the land area of Turkey. It is the westernmost protrusion of Asia and is geographically bounded by the Mediterranean Sea to the south, the Aegean ...

, and

Mycenae Mycenae ( ; ; or , ''Mykē̂nai'' or ''Mykḗnē'') is an archaeological site near Mykines, Greece, Mykines in Argolis, north-eastern Peloponnese, Greece. It is located about south-west of Athens; north of Argos, Peloponnese, Argos; and sou ...

, from small tribal societies to great empires. The study sheets that accompany each image provide a detailed description of the image, a cultural history to place it in context, an archetypal commentary which examines the image's modern psychological meaning and offers numerous cross-cultural references to related concepts/images, a

bibliography Bibliography (from and ), as a discipline, is traditionally the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology (from ). English author and bibliographer John Carter describes ''bibliograph ...

for related reading, and a

glossary A glossary (from , ''glossa''; language, speech, wording), also known as a vocabulary or clavis, is an alphabetical list of Term (language), terms in a particular domain of knowledge with the definitions for those terms. Traditionally, a gloss ...

of technical terms. This detailed documentation renders the library of images accessible to the

lay person In religious organizations, the laity () — individually a layperson, layman or laywoman — consists of all members who are not part of the clergy, usually including any non-ordained members of religious orders, e.g. a nun or a lay brother. ...

as well as the specialist

scholar A scholar is a person who is a researcher or has expertise in an academic discipline. A scholar can also be an academic, who works as a professor, teacher, or researcher at a university. An academic usually holds an advanced degree or a termina ...

, although as the ARAS homepage notes, "There is...no supposition among those working in this field that they have found the one and only way of interpreting archetypal symbolism. The symbol is forever recreating itself anew in the imaginations of those who experience it."

ARAS online

While for many years the archive was accessible only by personal visit to one of the three locations,

, and

, the digitization of the archive has made it accessible to anyone with a computer connected through a web browser to the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

. ARAS online is built over a powerful search engine accessible through an intuitive user interface, and aided by reference features such as the ARAS cultural

timeline A timeline is a list of events displayed in chronological order. It is typically a graphic design showing a long bar labelled with dates paralleling it, and usually contemporaneous events. Timelines can use any suitable scale representing t ...

. This timeline shows the selected images placed in historical time, and a click on the "live" marker for a particular image opens that image and its descriptive content. ARAS online content is available only to members. Membership costs $25-$100 a year. ARAS also have a presence on social media and is a

non-profit organisation A nonprofit organization (NPO), also known as a nonbusiness entity, nonprofit institution, not-for-profit organization, or simply a nonprofit, is a non-governmental (private) legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public, or so ...

References

External links

*
Sample image with scholarly commentary: Hall of the Bulls at Lascaux
{{Authority control 1933 establishments in New York (state) Organizations established in 1933 Arts organizations based in New York City Non-profit organizations based in New York City Culture of Manhattan Photo archives in the United States Mythological archetypes

Overview

Usage

History

ARAS online

See also

References

External links