ARAS: Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism

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

 

Pacifica Graduate Institute – California

Pacifica Graduate Institute is an accredited graduate school offering masters and doctoral degree programs framed in the traditions in depth psychology. The Institute has established an educational environment that nourishes respect for cultural diversity and individual differences, and an academic community that fosters a spirit of free and open inquiry. Students have access to an impressive array of education resources on Pacifica’s two campuses, both of which are located between the coastal foothills and the Pacific Ocean, a few miles south of Santa Barbara, California.

The mission of Pacifica Graduate Institute is to foster creative learning and research in the fields of psychology and mythological studies, framed in the traditions of depth psychology.

By creating an educational environment with a spirit of free and open inquiry, consistent with the recognized values of academic freedom, Pacifica is dedicated to cultivating and harvesting the gifts of the human imagination. So that these insights may influence the personal, cultural, and planetary concerns of our era, this dedication is contained in the motto: animae mundi colendae gratia – for the sake of tending soul in and of the world.

Origins & Orientation
Pacifica traces many of its central ideas to the heritage of ancient story tellers, dramatists, and philosophers from all lands who recorded the workings of the imagination. The legacies of these early men and women have evolved in multiple cultural contexts including the systematic explorations of the unconscious by Freud, Jung, and other theorists of the psychologies of this century.

The concepts of depth psychology result from this long development and are at the core of Pacifica’s orientation. These ideas—such as the importance of symbol and metaphor in personal and cultural imagery or the recognition of the dynamic interplay between the natural world and the world of the human psyche—are articulated in all of the Institute’s programs. Pacifica students and faculty contribute further to this rich body of knowledge through the intricacies of the human imagination.

Extending the concepts of psychology and mythological studies beyond the personal, beyond the consulting room, and beyond the classroom, we see psychological life as an evolutionary development within nature, alive in all the phenomena and systems of our world. In studying and working with these multidimensional exchanges, we facilitate contributions to the contemporary concerns of our world through dialogues between the psyche of the individual, the mythologies of the culture, the collective human imagination, and the living planet.