Hidden Meaning amidst the Chaos of Life

Abstract This article addresses the presence in Jung’s writings of the archetypes of meaning (‘the wise old man’) and anima (‘life itself’), understood as personalized, yet also timeless, transformative ‘complexes of experience’. In this perspective, Elijah-Philemon, Salomé- anima , Ha, Ka, and Phanēs belong to a kinship that Jung endeavored to retrace to its furthest reaches, the Islamic and Gnostic layers soon giving way to their ancient Egyptian Hermetic roots. By engaging dialogically with these figures, hence by recognizing their transpersonal and transhistorical agency, Jung succeeded in reviving ‘that most ancient’, deeply feminine, form of thinking which understands intelligence as ‘an autonomous activity whose object [mankind] is’ (Jung, 1968a, § 79). The challenge of developing an embodied, feeling-based relationship with the archetypal figures of cosmic psyche remains sound advice today, besieged as we are by increasingly meaning-deprived and life-wanting approaches to ‘intelligence’, construed as an autonomous, hence artificially-reproducible, activity whose subject mankind purports to be.