REVIEWS
Light from the Darkness: The Paintings Of Peter Birkhäuser; with an introduction by Eva Wertanschlag and Kasper Birkhäuser; description of Plates by Marie-Louise von Franz, Birkhäuser, Boston, Cambridge, MA. 1980. 140 p. colour plates, $18.00.
All who are interested in the inner world will welcome this beautiful book where Birkhäuser’s paintings are set forth in living color with descriptions by Dr. Marie-Louise von Franz, Birkhäuser’s analyst and close associate of Dr. Jung. The volume includes also the painter’s own penetrating article on “Analytical Psychology and the Problems of Art,” and a rich account of his life by his daughter and son, Eva Wertenschlag and Kaspar Birkhäuser.
Light from the Darkness fulfills its name not only by showing in startling form and vibrant color the artist’s own experiences of the archetypal world, but as an impetus for exploring our own inner images. As Jung observed, “the collective unconscious is a function that always operates and man has to keep in touch with it. His psychical and spiritual health depends upon the cooperation of the impersonal images.”l
After seeing these paintings, Dr. Donald Sandner, Jungian analyst and author of Navaho Healing Symbols wrote for this review:
“The art of active imagination is an important component of the psychology of C. G. Jung. In general this requires a disregarding of artistic techniques, allowing unconscious images to be expressed in a crude form. Artists in fact are usually not good at active imagination because they allow techniques and style to stand in the way.
“But occasionally an artist appears for whom the unconscious images are so strong that artistic skills are compelled to serve them. Then we have pictures of compelling beauty carrying all the dark ambiguous power and many-faceted meaning that emanates from unconscious depths. Such are the pictures of Peter Birkhäuser. They are a stimulus and encouragement to our imaginal abilities and a marvelous revelation of their power.”
As Dr. von Franz observed: “The old forms of our culture have broken down but the need to relate to the living inner reality of the archetypal images remains and their pressure is felt by us all.”2
In one of his letters Peter wrote: “My paintings are an attempt to find an expression for the mystery of the soul.”3 That he succeeds is evidenced by the reaction even of people not having long association with Jung’s work. After an hour’s showing of slides, students even in introductory classes at the University, as well as in more advanced seminars are usually too moved to speak at first. Later their comments show they have been deeply touched.
The depth of Peter’s own pondering is shown in the following lines from another letter:
“Looking back over the way of my life I can discern in my dreams a consecutive action of an unknown thing, I don’t know who or what it is, pushing me on a path I didn’t see, but which makes tremendous sense to me now. I guess it must be something Divine as it knows things no man can know. Therefore its utterings are often very mysterious and hard to grasp, but always full of secret meaning.”4
Katharine Whiteside Taylor
San Francisco, CA
1. von Franz, Marie-Louise, "Peter Birkhäuser: A Modern Artist Who Strikes a New Path" Spring, 1964, p. 361.
2. Ibid, p. 34.
3. Letters from Peter Birkhäuser to the writer.
4. Ibid.
The Life Journey of a Quaker Artist, by Dorothea Blom, Pendle Hill Pamphlet #232, Pendle Hill, Wallingford, PA, 1980. 32 p., $1.25.
Dorothea Blom, who taught six years at Pendle Hill, authored previous pamphlets, and enriched several Haverford conferences with her programs on relating inwardly to paintings from various periods, now gives us a luminous biographical sketch of her own journey. She tells of an intensely introverted childhood, during which her parents were strangers; but how in later years she reached an understanding, a friendship, with both; and of her early marriage to a much older South African master craftsman (“two frightened people clinging to each other”), with whom she raised two children.
She describes her first encounter with a Friends Meeting and finding herself at home there; her work in the peace movement; her learnings from Fritz Kunkel and Gerald Heard. She tells of her first contacts with great art (“art at its best is a byproduct of religious experience, a non-verbal language which communicates with non-verbal parts of ourselves”); of her analysis with Martha Jaeger, known to some of us as one of the major creative spirits in the first two decades of the Haverford Conference.
She speaks of her own evolution as an artist, her painting in color, work in clay, stitchery in colored yarns, and finally her widely-appreciated watercolor meditations; also of her various teaching experiences and the move from Pendle Hill to Koinonia. Those of us who would like to have known her longer and better than we did, can be grateful for this rounding out of Dorothea Blom’s life-portrait.
Erminie Lantero
New York City
Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, by Sallie Nichols, New York, Samuel Weiser, 1980. $24.80.
Over the past couple of years, readers of Psychological Perspectives have been intrigued by the articles written by Sallie Nichols on several of the figures found in the Tarot deck. Now she has joined these articles with others in a study of the entire Tarot major arcana in its role as a map for the journey of individuation.
Jung and Tarot looks at each of the twenty-two “Trumps” in the Tarot to see how its pictorial lessons can be applied in our lives. Because each card represents a universal situation or attitude, Sallie Nichols amplifies it with illustrations from literature, art, history and the present day. She has studied her subject well and writes about it in a straight-forward and natural manner, accessible even to those who may not be familiar with the Tarot deck and/or Jungian terminology.
The cards used in this study are not those of the Waite-Rider deck, that most of us know best, but those of the Marseilles deck, a much older version of the Tarot. The author has chosen them because this deck has come down to us unaccompanied by any traditional explanation of its meaning. Instead, Nichols says, “it offers us a simple picture story, a song without words …” We supply the meaning.
The Marseilles deck is colorful and evocative; I found its use particularly intriguing when compared to the Waite-Rider deck. There are, of course, many similarities. All of the Trumps are there, often in the same positions and accompanied by the same symbols. But there are thought-provoking differences as well. Take, for instance, card VI: the Lovers. In the Waite-Rider deck we see a young man and woman standing in Eden, a beneficent angel hovering above. But in the Marseilles deck, card VI is titled the Lover and a young man is pictured standing caught between two women; the angel has changed to Eros poised with his passion-provoking arrow. I do not think these two cards contradict one another, but the memory of the Marseilles image will make the image in the Waite-Rider version a little less innocent and more paradoxical.
In summary, let me say that I think this book is just what many of us who enjoy working with the Tarot have been waiting for. Though not the final word on any of the Tarot images, this is a rich source of information and provides us with many avenues for exploration.
Bobbie Kelly
Wallingford, PA
The Gnostic Gospels, by Elaine Pagels, New York, Random House, 1979. $10.00. Vintage Books edition, paper, 1981. 214 p. $2.95.
This book has been widely and variously reviewed. In general, reviews in secular publications have been positive, those in religious and scholarly ones negative. What both kinds of review agree on, however, is that the book makes a telling and important point: that early Christianity was nowhere nearly as uniform and monolithic as we have believed. The Gnostic trend in the early church offered wide variations from the traditional “norm” in its views on the resurrection, the place of women, church hierarchy, the inner life, and many other matters.
Such a book as this can have a freeing effect upon many modern seekers, and cannot fail to interest those who find their own search described in a sentence from its concluding chapter: “Convinced that the only answers were to be found within, the gnostic engaged on an intensely private interior journey.”
Mary Morrison
Swarthmore, PA.
The A.R.E. Journal, 1931 – Fiftieth Year of Service – 1981, Vol. XVI, Number 1, Association for Research and Enlightenment, Inc., Box 595, Virginia Beach, VA. 23451, July, 1981. 48 p., $2.00.
Although our conference has not dealt with topics related to parapsychology or life after death in recent years, interest in them persists. Inward Light enjoys an exchange with The A.R..E. Journal, and we want to take notice of their special 50th anniversary issue. The organization founded by Edgar Cayce in 1931 now has 30,000 members, and the Journal presented a retrospective of the founder’s work. It includes an article about him as “Christian mystic and Bible explorer” by Richard H. Drummond of the Dubuque Theological Seminary, in which he compares the philosophy of Cayce’s “readings” with traditional Christian mysticism. Thomas Sugrue, one of Cayce’s interpreters, describes the 1931 beginnings and A.R.E.’s future challenges.
Of interest to our readers is a reprint of an article by Dr. Harmon H. Bro, who was our conference speaker in 1961 and 1962. He concluded with a Cayce quote: “Study to show thyself approved, a workman not ashamed, rightly dividing the words of truth, keeping self unspotted from the world. For know, thy God hath given thee much; He doth expect from thee – much!”
The editor asks his readers to “reaffirm our ideal” to “make manifest the love of God and man.”
C. P.