This venture began with an image and then proceeded over a period of months of soul work, to an intellectual point where the associations could be understood as archetypal. I was caught by the powerful phrase "think like a mountain" (Leopold, 1949) and for a long time felt satisfied to simply stay with images of rocks and mountains. It happened that I was due to go to Israel on pilgrimage, and so, in an unplanned way, was brought face to face with rock and mountain at every sacred place there, sacred to each of the three religions. As well as the dome of the rock there was the western wall and the rock of the church of the holy sepulchre and the rock which marks the spot in Bethlehem and the mountain of the transfiguration and so on. There were numerous smaller examples of the use of stones at burial sites, and of caves at sites of discovery or transformation. It was as though the whole trip was confirmatory of the archetypal significance of the image. It connected with other recent experiences that I have had when I have been able to make spiritual contact with elements of a landscape so that the very topography could demand a response from the soul.

The history of the importance of water goes back longer in my consciousness. At about the age of seven I took part in a class recitation of the St Francis of Assisi Canticle of Brother Sun, and my part was to speak the words of ‘water’. It felt portentous and significant. I can still recall how the words sang:

Many years later I was struck by Hildegard of Bingen’s assertion that "the soul should be moist. The greatest sin is dryness". Matthew Fox contributed to my involvement with water by referring to the difference between living and stagnant water by saying "living water is in touch with its source - it flows". These watery moments have accumulated for me with other associations, in particular in poetry, so that Chief Seattle’s phrase "juices in the meadows" feels like a feature of my soul landscape with which I am very familiar.

‘The Dry Salvages’ - T S Eliot

The process which I have been describing illustrates one of the central characteristics of Archetypal Psychology, as developed by James Hillman and others, which is the primacy of "the image". It can "reach the depths before it reaches the surface" and if respected and attended to, will take the lead in a voyage of discovery during which the intellect is merely a contributor.

Archetypal Psychology rests on three assumptions. First that "images are the only reality we apprehend directly". (Hillman, 1975). With the centrality of the imagination goes the power of symbol: "only symbols are as potent as symptoms" (page 193). The second assumption is that the principle which organises imagery, the principle which gives psychic reality its specific patterns and habitual forms is what Jung calls the archetype (page 174). So the image comes first and is then structured and organised by te archetype. As a result we can follow the path indicated to us by an image to its mythological roots, gaining ground, perspective, culture and ennoblement as we go. Hillman points out that "the problems of the psyche were never solved in classical times through relationships and ‘humanising’ but through the reverse: connecting them to impersonal dominants" (page 143). The third assumption that I am making is that the return from the mythical level to the personal is intrinsically transpersonal, - that is man and woman in touch with the divine, - so that the soul is seen as the proper place of psychic work. This dimension confers what Hillman calls "awesome esteem" on the personal psyche (page 143). Jung saw personality as essentially "in relation to others and ‘The Other’ embodying and reflecting something more than itself" (page 172).

You can see that the three assumptions of Archetypal Psychology suggest the method which will be followed in this piece: beginning with the images, we can proceed to an examination of the mythological "dominants" of these images, and then to a psychology of personal meaning. Mountains, rocks, stone and water will be the images which will lead the way, and if we trust the process, they cannot fail to speak to the soul and in some way, to give it what it needs.

I have already outlined something of the impact on me of mountain, stone and water, and I suggest that before we proceed to the mythological, that you image them for yourself. You may find it helpful to engage some form of active imagination, so that you might picture yourself and simply rest there, allowing mountain and water to convey themselves to you. Stay with it. Try not to take flight into intellectualisation or self criticism or cynicism. You might like to dialogue with the image, or paint it. Relinquish your controlling habits and simply receive. Instead of "thinking about it", allow the image to "think me". "Think like a mountain!".

As I discovered in Israel, mountains and rocks are the most fundamental expression of what we mean by "sacred space". Sacred mountains and sacred stones can be found all over the world, venerated from earliest times, always experienced as places of awesome spiritual presence and power.

Sacred mountains are manifestations of the archetypal cosmic mountain at the centre of the world, an access-point to the upperworld of the gods (Pennick, 1996).

In Japan Mount Fuji is worshipped as a god in its own right, perfect in its proportions, breathtaking in its beauty. It is, for Shintoists, the incarnation of the spirit of nature. Buddhists venerate Fuji as the gateway to another world (a characteristic of sacred mountains which will recur later in our focus of the naval of the world and the place of traffic between heaven and earth).

There are five mountains sacred to Taoists in China. The Tao way is the balance between humanity and nature and this can be experienced in mountains which are thought to diffuse "vital breath". They are the medium through which people communicate with the divine as well as with primaeval powers of earth. The mountain seems to breathe the divine breath. It is related-to as a living organism, and this sense of a sacred force is also reflected in the four Buddhist sacred mountains in China - representing the four quarters of the universe. Feng-shui, (or the science of wind and water) traces the dragon current of this sacred force as lines across the landscape, in the form of yin and yang (female and male). Mountains embody the masculine (yang) force. These are mountains of power, force, and majesty. Seas and rivers and low places represent the fluid, feminine, ‘yin’ force.

There is a mountain in Tibet (Mount Kailas) in the shape of a mandala; it has four distinct facades facing north, south, east and west. Buddhists see it as a sacred circle from which four sacred rivers (Indus, Sutlej, Bramaputra and Ganges) flow like the spokes of an eternal wheel. It is a mountainous celebration of symmetry and order.

Other mountains recall the moment of creation. Ayers Rock, in Australia, sacred to Aborigines as Uluru, is the sacred sit of the Dream time when the world was created, and the mountain is the unifying centre of the "dreaming tracks" of the ancestors. The dream time is still present at Uluru for the Aborigine people.

The sacred mountains I have described have mythic connotations of creation, of the energy of the life force, and of the point of transaction between heaven and earth.

The primitive use of sacred stones extends the significance of mountains into the realm of the ritualistic. We are often ignorant of how the stones reached their mysterious sites, or even exactly what was their use.

Stone circles were used for coronations until the 14th century. The king stood at the centre stone, known as the ambre, and his nobles, peers or barons ranged themselves around him, each standing at his own representative stone . . . Kingship could be conferred with a portable stone that was held to contain some special virtue. (Pennick).

Standing stones (such as Stonehenge and Carnac, and numerous sites in Scotland and Ireland) seem to have been connected both with charting the movements of the son.

And with the management of the souls of the dead so that their wandering spirits would enhance fertility rather than being a destructive influence on the life force.

The burial mound at Newgrange is precisely aligned so that the rising sun at the winter solstice shafts through the narrow passage and dramatically illuminates the whole chamber. Conversely the mid summer sun rises along the main avenue at Stonehenge, whereas the stone megaliths at Carnac seem to have been used to chart phases of the moon. Undoubtedly, standing stones partly owe their power as a place of sacred ritual to their positions at points of strong magnetic earth energy. They are memorials to mysterious forces deep within the earth.

As burial mounds these places often contain carvings of spirals and waves. We can only guess at their meaning, but it is suggested that the beautiful markings at Newgrange and at Avrinis (near Carnac) are representations of the soul’s journey through death to rebirth.

The labyrinth is the path that leads from the outer to the inner world. At the centre is the omphalos. It is a very rich symbol, containing within itself the mysteries of human consciousness, birth, transformation and death. Celtic folk practice perpetuates a tradition where labyrinths are carved on small stones - called Troy stones . . . used by Wise Woman to commune with the other world through states of altered consciousness. (Pennick, 1996).

In ancient times people perceived a relationship between death and birth which emerged in more recent fertility rituals in which barren women or newlyweds would circle or rub themselves on burial stones. It is thought that the stones were used near or at the place of burial in order to pin down the roving tendency of the dead spirit, restless in its path to rebirth. In this controlled way, rebirth could be achieved constructively through increased fertility and the stones could carry forward the symbolism of creation and of the breath of God which originated with the mountain.

Stones which had a hole in the centre had a very particular symbolic meaning. They were called "Thunder stones" because they were often fallen from the sky as meteorites. They were therefore used to symbolise rebirth through the divine womb. Babies were passed through the hole as a ritualised consecration of the birth passage. In India where such stones are emblematic of the sacred "yoni" (female genitalia) they also have a symbolism related to the sky and the sun. The hole in the stone is called the "gates of deliverance" through which the soul may pass and go beyond to the other world, symbolised by the sun. The stone was associated with the "tree of life" to form the primitive representation of the holy place in the form of an altar. This gives us the contemporary configuration of an altar as a horizontal slab placed on a pillar.

The "stone with a hole" in Delphi was called the Omphalos, meaning the "naval of the world". This sense of marking the spot which is the centre of the universe has always been extendable so that the sacred centre can be said to be anywhere in the world.

Although located in specific places, the naval of the world is within the individual: its existence in physical reality is the outward expression of an inward reality. (Pennick).

The symbolism of the centre of the world as a naval represents rebirth and the way in which consciousness proceeds towards integration along with the whole cosmos. Sacred space is conceived as a container powerful enough to hold the immense power of recreation, in participation with the divine. The Greeks used the word "temenos" to mean a sacred space in which "overwhelming problems can be placed - a centre of order and peace, where the soul can be protected while vital changes are taking place". (Hillman, 1975).

All of the worlds great religions use mountain and stone to make these sacred sites. There is a sacred meteorite at the heart of the Muslin shrine, the Ka’aba in Mecca.

In Tibet Buddhists mark prayer stones with their petitions and place them on the sacred site. In Israel people place an additional stone to contribute to making a little cairn above a burial site. Everybody who passes-by adds another stone in order to pay their respects to the deceased.

Because the stone is a symbol of the self, each passer-by thus leaves something of her or himself on the stone pile . . . Before the battle, each Scot put a stone on the pile; afterwards, all survivors took one away. The remainder serviced as a receptacle for the spirits of the dead, numbering the fallen, creating a place to be honoured in hero - and ancestor worship. (Pennick).

It almost seems that we are so accustomed to the sacred being indicated by the use of stone that the archetype is at the level of automatic reflex, and it is very difficult to stand back and become aware of it with any objectivity.

‘To the Traveller’ - Neruda

Jung uses the image of stone as a house for the power of the divine in one of his letters:

"God wants to be born in the flame of man’s consciousness, leaping ever higher. And what if this has no roots in the earth? If it is not a house of stone where the fire of God can dwell but a wretched straw hut that flares up and vanishes? Could God then be born?"

C G Jung - Letters. Volume 1

In the D H Lawrence poem already quoted, the poet reaches the pinnacle of his excitement as he imagines the way in which God is born with the creation of every human being:

‘God is Born’ - D H Lawrence

Biblical mythology gives the symbolism of mountain and rock a further richness. Jung’s reference to the need for God to have a house in order to be born harks back to the story of Jacob. The stone on which Jacob slept was the Bethel, the house of God, and the resulting dream linking earth and heaven by a ladder of two way traffic.

Tradition has it that Jacob’s dream took place on Mount Moriah, the place made sacred by Abraham’s call to sacrifice his son. Psychologically, Abraham symbolises the soul’s ability to listen to an inner voice as it gains maturity and integration. The mountain upon which God sealed his covenant with his people and hand over his generativity so that it could be transformed into descendants who would be made of "star stuff".

Gen. 22.17

There is a similar transformation in Jacob’s stay on the mountain: he begins his journey as the patriarch, in-touch with the Almighty and following a spiritual path towards personal integrity. The mountain is the place of spiritual initiation and the place where identity begins to take shape.

Just as Jacob exclaimed "the Lord is in this place", identifying spiritual force with the part of the landscape marked with stone, so Moses experienced the face-to-face power of God on Mount Sinai, having travelled there through psychological emptiness and disorientation in the wilderness. There is a topographical, geographical dimension to the soul’s passage through death to rebirth at the sacred place of the mountain, from a state of wandering in a lost and disillusioned frame of mind, to a new state of knowing who I am and where I’m going.

During the journey to the Promised Land the Ark of the Covenant was the mobile home for the stones which were testimony to the contract between God and humanity, (the Ten Commandments) until they and the ark could be housed in the temple built by Solomon on the site of Mount Moriah.

The sacred mountain of Abraham’s call and Jacob’s "house of God" Bethel Stone has now become the most sacred stone of all stones, the sacred rock in the Mosque of the Dome of the Rock. This same place is traditionally venerated as the site of the beginning of creation, the birth place of Adam, as well as the place of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. It unites and expresses our sense of mountain and rock as sacred sites of creation, the energy of the life force and the place of transaction between heaven and earth, adding a fourth theme of the housing or containment of the transpersonal process through death to life.

‘House’ - Neruda

Through the process of allowing mountain to convey its sense of the sacred, we have familiarised ourselves with sacred space in a number of different ways. From the energy of the life-force at the moment of Creation, to the many ways in which human and divine connect with one another at a point of transformation, and symbolic containment for the sheer power and majesty of spiritual contact - all of these are conveyed by the archetype of mountain and stone as sacred space. It seems as though we can ask the most inanimate, static, heavy and enduring of the elemental forms to signify and hold all that spiritual power for us. In contrast, the most animate, flexible and life-giving element water, complements the static location of sacred space with archetypal images of process and movement.

Professor Eliade, who has made an immense contribution to our understanding of the anthropology of the sacred, describes the symbolism of water as "the whole of potentiality: the source of all possible existence". (Eliade, 1958). As the "principle of formlessness, container of all things", water is the primal source of life as well as its dissolution back into formlessness. This symbolism results in a marvellous conjunction of meaning when we come to consider ritual immersion: it is a return to dissolution and formlessness, in order to emerge reformed. Immersion is a ritual re-enactment of creation and rebirth.

Every time we use water in symbolic language we replay this central theme. It is the theme of the cycle of life.

"Living water, the fountains of youth, the water of life are all mythological formulae of the same spiritual reality: life strength and eternity are contained in water" (Eliade, page 193).

The ancient world abounded in oracular and miraculous springs.

"The well symbolises the inner light of life as contrasted with the outer light of the visible world. The abyss from which the waters issue represented the hidden source of wisdom in the unconscious, which we can tap if we relinquish our egoism. The well itself is the channel from the unconscious to the conscious" (Pennick)

In its very essence water flows, it "lives", moves, inspires, cleanses, heals, and prophesies.

The Greek gods of the sea personified the untamable fury of the sea, the chaos of the pre-creation "deep", and the dark unruly depths of the unconscious.

Many of the Celtic mythological stories tell of cauldrons at the bottom of the sea and how they are raised to the surface to be the container or chalice for the magic powers of water. They grant immortality or else the status of hero or god. In the far east, dragons, snakes and fish all symbolise the sacred power of the abyss.

"The dragon Ying gathers all the waters together and orders the rain, for he is himself the principle of moisture" (page 107).

"So if we go to the sacred waters in the right frame of mind, then we glimpse the fish - the unconscious opens itself up to us. In this altered, meditative state, the mysterious depths freely reveal those elements that were previously hidden from us. The archetype of the fully realised human being is Christ, who is symbolised by the fish" (Pennick).

Eliade suggests that all deluge mythologies symbolise humanity caught up in a cycle of return to the waters of creation in order to establish a new and better order, a new creation.

So Noah’s flood resulted in the new order of the covenant, represented by the linking image of a rainbow. Psychologically, the deluge can be seen as a metaphor for "inundation" by unconscious material, a psychological descent into formlessness which for those who survive precedes reformation into a new and stronger psychic entity.

"Such encounters with the activated unconscious commonly give one a glimpse of wholeness symbolised by the rainbow’s spectrum of colours". (Edinger, page 23).

Jung has given us a psychological interpretation of the Rosarium pictures which he called the Mysterium Coniunctionsis. It is a sequence of images which he saw as a representation of the process of individuation. The fourth picture in the sequence of ten, is The Descent into the Bath, and it focuses on the process of personal dissolution which occurs with a descent into unconscious material. The ordered, structured sense of the world is dissolved and the person returns to a regressed undifferentiated state as they were in the womb.

"It means getting wet with the unconscious . . . which is potentially auspicious and purifying . . . but which also has alarming implications" (Edinger, 1994).

There would be some value in returning now to your personal associations with the images of mountain, stone and water. Take note of those aspects of your experience which resonate with and are amplified by mythology. Allow your experience to be validated and deepened. Myth connects us to the experience of the human race. It speaks to our aloneness and elevates us so that we connect with the collective unconsciousness and the wisdom of the ancestors.

Are there some aspects of the psychological process which are illuminated by these images and myths? For each of us, our own experience of the image will relate to different and individual parts of our personal stories. It would be arrogant to suggest what these areas meaning might be, but I think it is valid to highlight some themes.

"In Buddhism there is a questing action called ‘nyubu’, which means to go into the mountains in order to understand oneself and to re-make one’s connections to the Gods. It is a very old ritual tied to the cycles of preparing the earth, sowing and harvesting. While it is good to go into the real mountains if possible, there are also mountains in the underworld, in one’s own unconscious, and luckily, we all carry the entrance to the underworld right in our own psyches, so we can go into the mountains for renewal with despatch".

‘Women who Run with the Wolves’ - Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

We are very accustomed to thinking about our personal psychology in developmental terms. James Hillman has challenged the historical and biographical basis of therapy, by suggesting that we are the only culture ever to have explained our problems in terms of our beginnings. I suggest that we might allow the images of "rocky crests and juices of the meadows" to reframe our beginnings as a personal creation   myth. We might retell our own story, in particular whatever we have heard or has been legendary in our family about conception and birth, as though we were describing the birth and early life of a god or goddess, or the creation of the world. By amplifying and elaborating in this way we raise our personal story to the level of the mythological.

By applying the archetype of sacred space to the psyche, we raise the flesh and blood of personal history to the status of an incarnation. How does that affect the way in which we see ourselves? I would suggest that it affects it very deeply. It adds a dimension of self definition, self validation and self valuing which transforms our shame-based complaints about how things "should have been better". As we enter a psychological sacred space the human condition is transcended through ritual.

By linking the images of sacred mountain with those of water, we have given ourselves the possibility of being positioned within a strong, containing, solid space in order to ritualise those aspects of life which dissolve and disorientate us.

In personal, experiential terms, what might his mean? Several schools within psychology propose the existence of a "core state" at the heart of the personality. It is conceptualised variously as a conflicted, dynamic core, or a core based upon the object relations of early relationships, reified into a blue print for "how the world works". This core state, this omphalos or centre of the world, this Bethel, this place of two way traffic with the divine - as the archetypal sacred space, is a focus of numinous intensity, the place where God seeks to reach consciousness.

We could further propose that by holding the human psyche in "awesome esteem" it (the psyche) forms its own sacred container as the unfolding personal story revolves through cycles of formless watery chaos and re-emergence anew, recreated and reformed. The evolving, transforming psyche develops a strong containing function, to house the periodic movements through fluidity to reorganisation. By bringing archetypal sacred space to a point of conjunction with the psyche, it becomes enthroned and ennobled far beyond the rational approach of traditional psychology. Perhaps the archetypal images of mountain and water signify this dual movement. Kelly referred to it as the "tightening and loosening of constructs" - each essential to the other in a complementary rhythm - each dangerous alone. (Kelly, 1963). I think we might recognise this on-going cycle as a feature of our personal story. Sometime we feel as though we are completely at sea, all our defences fallen apart, and overwhelmed by chaotic emotions. At other times we feel much more "together" , as though we have a good handle on reality and on our way of managing ourselves. This is what is meant by Kelly’s concept of the tightening and loosening of constructs and of the rhythm of life moving between those two experiences. Now perhaps we can see this rhythm between the ‘rocky crest and the juices of the meadow’ as a sacred place, and remove our shoes with reverence and respect as we draw near.

We have seen how Archetypal Psychology takes an image seriously, pays attention to the way in which the imagination is energised by a particular image, follows its direction through mythology and anthropology to the collective unconscious and back again to the personal and the transpersonal. 

Edinger, E - 1986 - the Bible and the Psyche

Edinger, E - 1994 - The Mystery of the Coniunctio

Eliade, M - 1958 - Patterns in Comparative Religion

Eliot, T S - 1963 - The Four Quarters. Collected Poems

Hillman, J - 1975 - Loose Ends

Jung, C G - 1973 - Letters Volume 1

Kelly, G - 1963 - A Theory of Personality

Lawrence, D H - 1992 - Selected Poems

Leopold, A - 1949 - A Sand Country Almanac, with Essays on Conservation from Round River

Mistral, G - 1993 - Birth Poetry

Neruda, P - 1986 - The Stones of Chile

Pennick, N - 1996 - Celtic Sacred Landscapes

Pinkola-Estes, C - 1992 - Women Who Run with the Wolves

Raine, K - 1988 - Selected Poems

Raine, K - 1992 - Living with Mystery

Rumi - 1993 - Magnificent One