miss them? only one of them is truly gone. wow... I thought they would be geeky old men even back then.
Senex & Puer:
Significantly, Hillman places these two archetypes on the same vertical axis of changeless ‘spirit’, in touch with transcendence and timelessness, out of touch with changeful soul, so there’s a senex element of resistance to change or development with the Puer, as is evident, for instance, in men who get stuck in a Don Juan mother complex, who refuse to progress toward mature relatedness based on harsh reality but instead hunt or wander (Pure trait again) ad infinitum for the youthful and idealized anima figure. In this sense, the Puer’s enemy is ‘possibility’ - always hoped for but never realised. Like all archetypes, the Puer has its positives: imaginative visions, flights of fancy, the freedom of homeless and endless adventure. No spouse awaits at home - it does not learn through repetition and fears the necessary crippling of its winged heels. The senex, too, is dual. Positively, his fixity presides over loyalty, friendship, honesty; over the inspired genius of the brooding melancholic, over responsibility and necessary limitation. In this same dual sense, the natal horoscope is potential waiting to be realized; the victim will earth it as unavoidable fate; the hero will try and overcome its limitations and conquer its necessary shadows. As always, the Middle Way lies between the two; the Heroic Victim as the victorious yet wounded acorn.
As Jung discusses, whenever we posit a particular belief, no matter how noble or well thought out, as somehow ‘right’, or superior to others, we are automatically opting for an imbalance, hence belittling, marginalizing, or leaving out of the picture the equally valid opposite pole of the duality. What ‘science’ regards as fact one year, may well be ‘proven’ to be fiction the next! As Einstein said, it is the theory which determines what we can observe in the first place.
