![]() ’ These two episodes, however, reveal a more basic aspect of the god: his appearance in boundary or threshold situations. Hermes is indeed ‘the friendliest of the gods to man. In both instances the trickster bestows good fortune. As all of these roles suggest, he is the quintessential master of boundaries and transitions. He is the Guide of Souls to the underworld and messenger to the gods. ’ He is also known, in one of the many paradoxes that characterize Hermes and other trickster gods, as the patron of both travelers and thieves. Best known to most of us in the West is the god who represents the most comprehensive and sophisticated manifestation of the trickster, the Greek god Hermes. Known to the Native American peoples as Ictinike, Coyote, Rabbit and others, he is Mauito the Polynesian Islanders, Loki to the old Germanic tribes of Europe, and Krishna in the sacred mythology of India. It is he who steps godlike through cracks and flaws in the ordered world of ordinary reality, bringing good luck and bad, profit and loss. In the mythologies of many peoples, the embodiment of the unexpected is the trickster. They seem to create a conspicuous discontinuity in ordinary reality, an opening to the miraculous. At the same time, they violate our confidence in a world of events chronologically ordered and based on cause and effect. Synchronistic coincidences, such as the entry of the beetle into Jung’s study at just the right moment, stand out from the background of everyday events because of the sense of purpose or meaning that accompanies them. No realm of human experience is free from intrusions of the unexpected. This is synchronicity, the uncanny intrusion of the unexpected into the otherwise uneventful flow of commonplace happenstance, an intrusion that hints at an undisclosed realm of meaning, a disparate landscape of reality that momentarily intersects with our own. Of special interest is an aspect of nature that is seen both in the realms of myth and of objective reality, in the inner world of the psyche and the outer world of external events. Thus, the myth is a signpost pointing to actual features of the real world of mental and physical events. ![]() Both are as real today as they were to the Homeric Greeks. We also see that as myth, Zeus represents valid aspects of both inner human consciousness and outer atmospheric phenomena. Understanding Zeus we come to understand something of the Greek experience itself. ![]() Indeed, the other Greek gods can be seen as outward projections of the numerous aspects of his nature. It is mirrored in the art, poetry, and philosophy which characterized the Greek world. His illumination kindles the spirit of lucidity that permeates the other Gods, and indeed the entire ancient Greek culture. As the central figure in the religion of Homeric Greece, however, he symbolized the inner experience of light and illumination. Perhaps the most dramatic of such phenomena are lightning and thunder, which are unusually common in certain of the mountainous areas of Greece and with which Zeus was particularly affiliated. ’ In the world of nature, Zeus is associated with the bright sky and was seen as the source of atmospheric phenomena. ![]() Zeus, for example, literally means ‘light ’ or ‘shower of light. Indeed, many of the Greek gods represent aspects of reality that overarch both the inner worlds of human experience and the external worlds of nature and society. It follows that myths as expressions of archetypes might be expected to portray certain aspects of the objective world as well as depicting psychological realities. David Bohm ’s concept a holographic universe offers similar possibilities. This notion is supported by Jung’s idea that archetypes have their origins in the unus mundus, or ‘one world, ’ which is at the foundation of the psyche as well as the objective physical world. Moreover, they are neither wholly internal nor wholly objective, but are woven into the deepest fabric of the world. ![]() Themes carried by archetypes are universal. ![]()
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