Archetype/Myth/Metaphor/Symbol Record Type: Review   ID: 750
Rituals of the Imagination Moore, Tom
An archetypal psychologist develops the theme that "ritual is a moving act of imagination" (p. 1). To be in ritual is to be in myth. The second essay, "Is the Personal Myth a Myth?" starts by quoting Jung, who said he had reached the point at 83 when he could relate his personal myth: "I can only make direct statements, only 'tell stories.' Whether or not the stories are 'true' is not the problem. The only question is whether what I tell is my fable, my truth" (p. 19). (And so it should be with EHEs.) Moore answers affirmatively to the essay’s question. The third essay is about a dream of a green city, and he amplifies the imagery. He concludes: "to dream forward the city's green is to regain touch with our vegetative soul, our own soil and demands of climate and humidity" (p. 54). The final essay, "Ficinian Psychology," is about a mid-15th-century scholar who established a psychotherapy clinic in Florence. Moore describes his writings, noting that what is important is that "he made intimate connection between psychology, art and religion" and tied "psychopathology closely to the art of life as well as to the life of art" (p. 60). His psychology was based on astrology, and it suggests "a relationship between culture and the individual in which the individual's task is to make of culture a theater of images, while the psychological role of culture is to feed the soul with the spirit of those images. The psychotherapist, in this approach, is someone who, like Ficino, can read a person's life and environment for the images and varieties of spirit it contains" (pp. 66-67).
Publisher Information:	Dallas, TX: Pegasus Foundation, 1983. 68p. Chap. bibl

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