A walk on the wild side: On pilgrimage in mythic landscape

This study applies archetypal psychology and phenomenology to unfold the ancient imaginal wisdom and applies it as a model to implace body-soul-world in modernity. This work seeks humanity's roots in the imaginal and mythic realms of psyche. A careful review of the myths of nature and wilderness in Western civilization implicates the confluence of the dominant epistemology of the time with the theological place of the Divine. These changes in mythic patterns of perception suggest a fluidity of belief systems and notions of wilderness that influence the development of the ideas about "reality" historically. How we know the natural world depends on our manner of knowing. When that manner shifts, material being explored shifts as well.; In addition, where we believe the Divine resides influences humanity's actions towards the wilderness. Historical research shows that the decline of the symbolic dimension coincides with the demystification of the wilderness. As the gods retreat into the ethers, the wild places of the embodied world become objectified. This study's focus is on the correlation between beliefs about wilderness and imagination. When a people celebrate nature, the imagination seems most often to be revered as a legitimate source of knowledge; conversely, when a culture or a people demonize or secularize nature, they also discredit deep imagination. As ego and scientific knowledge are attributed the highest forms of knowing, the ensuing colonization displaces and marginalizes the wilderness and the imaginal.; This study desires to resolve this fissure by revisioning several ideas to implace both the imaginal field as humanity's ground and soul as the webbing between person and world. The goal is to reanimate the relationship of psyche and world through a mythic understanding of the ecosystem of soul. Implacing humanity in the Wild is far less a regressive act of primitivism or animism, but rather an ecopostmodern and archetypal re-membering that dreams us as individuals and wilderness as conjoined to us, forward. Indeed, it is only the Wild that can re-story humanity beyond Oppressor or Stranger in the world.