Heroes of old classically slayed the dragon as a means of achieving great feats. We can understand that, for an extended period of human evolution, such a metaphor may have represented a necessary attitude for achieving the human ego’s ascendance out of our primal origins. Of course, individually, we may still enact symbolic versions of this archetypal motif as we firm up our personal ego complex along our own developmental path. Could it be, however, that collectively we are on the verge of a more advanced attitude? In his book The Archetypal Cosmos, Keiron Le Grice, who addressed Charlotte Friends of Jung last year, suggests, “We are now perhaps starting to see the beginnings of a great reversal, an enantiodromia…when the rational ego must participate in the emergence of a deeper self, as a new mode of being is born.” If we are indeed on this cusp, we would expect it to be heralded by, or even incubated in, the realm of art and dreams, where the collective unconscious seems to make itself known. The 2012 film Beasts of the Southern Wild depicts such a shift. With its young, African-American female protagonist, this film presciently addresses a host of issues ranging from entrenched power differentials to impending global environmental catastrophe and, more deeply, imagines the classic hero’s journey forward.
On Friday night, we will discuss this film in depth with the expectation that attendees will have watched it prior to our program. (It is available through the Charlotte Mecklenburg library and for rental on Amazon Prime.) We will consider whether we are currently glimpsing “a great reversal” that is not a regression but another way forward as the film suggests. Our exploration of the film will echo themes not only from Keiron Le Grice’s work but also that of Richard Tarnas, another previous guest of our group and author of Cosmos and Psyche.
