Excerpts from James Hillman on Polytheism

“Jung used a polycentric description for the objective psyche. The light of nature was multiple. Following the traditional descriptions of the anima mundi. Jung wrote of the lumen naturae as a multiplicity of partial consciousness, like stars or sparks or luminous fishes’ eyes. A polytheistic psychology corresponds with this description and provides its imagistic formulation in the major traditional language of our civilization, i.e., classical mythology. By providing a divine background of personages and powers for each complex, polytheistic psychology would find place for each spark. It would aim less at gathering them into a unity and more at integrating each fragment according to its own principle, giving each God its due over that portion of consciousness, that symptom, complex, fantasy, which calls for an archetypal background. It would accept the multiplicity of voices, the Babel of the anima and animus, without insisting upon unifying them into one figure, and accept too the dissolution process into diversity as equal in value to the coagulation process into unity. The pagan gods and goddesses would be restored to their psychological domain.”