Welcome to ARAS — a world treasure with jewels from every culture since the beginning of time. ARAS has taken many steps from its tiny beginnings in Eranos, Switzerland seventy years ago to the world-reach of the Internet today. Long available to only a few researchers, the wondrous vision of how the collective unconscious expresses itself in all human societies is now available to many.

To fathom ARAS’s depth and richness, allow yourself to wander, to linger, and to ponder. Do not be afraid to get lost, as your meanderings may yield surprising delights of imagery and meaning.

What ARAS Contains

The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS) is a pictorial and written archive of mythological, ritualistic, and symbolic images from all over the world and from all epochs of human history. The collection probes the universality of archetypal themes and provides a testament to the deep and abiding connections that unite the disparate factions of the human family.

The ARAS archive contains about 17,000 photographic images, each cross-indexed, individually mounted, and accompanied by scholarly commentary. The commentary includes a description of the image with a cultural history that serves to place it in its unique historical and geographical setting. Often it also includes an archetypal commentary that brings the image into focus for its modern psychological and symbolic meaning, as well as a bibliography for related reading and a glossary of technical terms.

The ARAS commentaries honor both the universal patterns and specific cultural context associated with each image, something seldom found in other collections.

Keywords, extracted from approximately 46,000 catalogue subject cards, help users explore archetypal themes of interest to them.

The images and commentaries in ARAS have been collected over a 60-year period