Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue Quotes

“While he believed that Catholicism, with its rich tradition of symbol and ritual, could still mediate the sacred to its devotees, he believed that Protestantism exalted the word (the literal), but devalued and distrusted images, symbols, and rituals, thus creating an overemphasis upon dogma, creed, and belief, and making it more difficult for its adherents to have experience of the numinosum, or live the symbolic life.”
― C. Michael Smith, Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue: Retrieving the Soul, Retrieving the Sacred

“Ours is, we believe, the age of the Magician, because it is a technological age. It is the age of the Magician at least in his materialistic concern with having power over nature. But in terms of the nonmaterialistic, psychological, or spiritual initiatory process, the Magician energy seems to be in short supply.”
― C. Michael Smith, Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue: Retrieving the Soul, Retrieving the Sacred

“The coercive power of ritual is necessary because of a natural resistance to such change. Stevens cites Whitmont’s law of psychic inertia, and compares it to Newton’s law of inertia in physics. Newton’s law of inertia, it will be recalled, holds that a body in motion or rest tends to remain in motion or rest unless an outside force propels it to change. According to Jungian analyst E. C. Whitmont, the psyche, being a part of nature, operates on a psychic law of inertia. Psychic inertia is a tendency towards habit and obsessive clinging: “Every pattern of adaptation, outer and inner, is maintained in essentially the same unaltered form and anxiously defended against change until an equally strong or stronger impulse is able to displace”
― C. Michael Smith, Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue: Retrieving the Soul, Retrieving the Sacred

“The shaman requires the shape-shifting subtlety of the trickster in order to expand the consciousness of his or her people within the terms of their ordinary linguistic and mythic conceptual equipment.”
― C. Michael Smith, Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue: Retrieving the Soul, Retrieving the Sacred

“In the trickster aspect, the shaman serves as a mediator between the non-ordinary reality of the sacred, and the ordinary reality of everyday life. As a mediator the shaman is able to shift epistemological boundaries through his or her illusive shape-shifting capacities, and place them elsewhere, thus expanding the consciousness of his or her people.”
― C. Michael Smith, Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue: Retrieving the Soul, Retrieving the Sacred

“SHAMAN AS SHAPE-SHIFTER/EPISTEMOLOGICAL MEDIATOR Another duality in the trickster archetype is the simultaneous appearance of wisdom and folly: the paradoxical image of the wise fool. On the surface level, the trickster appears to be ignorant, immature, and full of mischievous folly. On a deeper level, it can be a folly guided by the deeper wisdom of the unconscious, of the archetypal Self. It is the trickster which upsets the stale routine, the too certain rationality, the too familiar and rigid boundaries of ordinary everyday consciousness, and mocks them.”
― C. Michael Smith, Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue: Retrieving the Soul, Retrieving the Sacred

“Robert L. Moore has drawn upon the work of Mircea Eliade and Victor Turner in formulating a theory of ritual structure which contrasts with Eliade on this notion of a qualitatively different space which cannot be found in modernity except in laicized form. He finds sympathy with Turner’s belief that even under the conditions of modern industrial culture the human experience of space is anything but homogeneous.”
― C. Michael Smith, Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue: Retrieving the Soul, Retrieving the Sacred

“Shamanic amulets and talismans are believed to be saturated with power; they are storehouses of numen. The shaman, for example, may give his or her patient an amulet to restore power and/or keep the forces of danger and chaos at bay. Van der Leeuw informs us that modernity has accustomed us to look at things as “mere dead objects”. He notes that the poet is one who knows better, as well as does the animistic mind:”
― C. Michael Smith, Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue: Retrieving the Soul, Retrieving the Sacred

“Indirect means typically involve aesthetic and environmental conditions which arouse numinal feeling. Any atmosphere which can evoke a sense of extraordinary potency, beauty, awe, and elevation of mood or lofty aspiration, or perhaps a sense of the sublime, may become an indirect means for evoking a feeling of the numen. Places, events, or objects which seem strangely different, unique, miraculous, or powerful seem to hold a greater potential for numinal response. Otto draws attention to the ancient Stonehenge as having a power and grace which was numinal. He believed it may have originally been used to store up numen in a solid place by magical means.5 Natural objects, for example, stones, bodies of water, mountains, the sun and moon, all may arouse the feeling of the numen. Sacred art has typically been able to arouse the numen, often through the use of impersonal and austere looks (Byzantine Madonnas), blackness (black Madonnas), and destructive personae (Kali Durga) because they suggest not only the alluring aspect but the tremendum or horrific aspect of the holy. The use of negative space in Oriental art, as well as in Gothic architecture, as well as the use of light and shadow (Gothic vaults), also arouse similar responses. The shaman’s love of darkness, of graveyards, of the nocturnal, may be understood as a need for environmental contexts which are evocative of the ambivalent experience of the sacred.”
― C. Michael Smith, Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue: Retrieving the Soul, Retrieving the Sacred

“Since the numinous is experienced as wholly other, expressing it is problematic. Ordinary language and rational concepts fail to do it justice, as it eludes them with its mystery. It can be evoked or aroused through the symbolic use of language, but it requires a natural sense of the numinous to be able to be conscious of it. Indirect means are typically used invoke or evoke awareness of it, because it can not be taught or communicated through tradition.”
― C. Michael Smith, Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue: Retrieving the Soul, Retrieving the Sacred

“Since the numinous is experienced as wholly other, expressing it is problematic. Ordinary language and rational concepts fail to do it justice, as it eludes them with its mystery.”
― C. Michael Smith, Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue: Retrieving the Soul, Retrieving the Sacred