mythopoia / liminality /  multivalence / bricolage / home
Epistrophé
...epistrophe, reversion, the recall of phenomena to their imaginal background.... Reversion through likeness, resemblance... "to lead something back to its origin and principle, to its archetype".... By attempting the congruities between the imagination of the individual human soul with the imaginal patterns that myths call Gods, an archetypal therapy attempts... an epistrophe of the entire civilization to its root sources, its archai.

         --James Hillman
it is only through the "examination" ...of the past, leading back to a knowledge of the "Great Beginning, [the unnamed]" that one is able to understand the true meaning and destiny of human nature. As in both the Tao Te Ching and the Chuang Tzu, only by means of the Taoist arts of knowing the "Great Beginning" is one able to return ... to an experience of the undifferentiated condition..... The final point is not to slumber in the night of chaos: "Not to stay there, not to become beast or primeval matter but to start in a fresh direction, to discover new springs of development and action deep down in the roots of our being."

--N. J. Girardot