The Mythopoetic Atlas

The forest tends to gather around the inner child's own ground of nature and freedom. It is the living green place she leads the participant into, dense with trees and animals and growing things, where she plays and forages and roams and is most herself, and it is where she goes to be safe. In the corpus the forest is a populated and curious world, full of creatures who are friends and guides, of berries and nuts to gather and trees whose stories can be asked, and it holds a teaching the practice returns to, that a place may seem dark and be the safest ground there is, hidden but not lost. The forest offers freedom and belonging together, the child's home range where she is free to wander and always able to return. In the corpus it stands most often as the ground of nature and play, entered from the open places and travelled deeper, where the paths make themselves and the way opens as she goes.

The recurring movement leads inward and onward: the inner child brings the participant from the open ground, the beach or the meadow, into the trees, and the forest becomes the country a chapter travels through and deeper into. She forages as she goes, showing which berries and nuts are safe, and she meets the forest's creatures, a bear, a deer, a wolf, ravens and birds who carry messages, fairies and sprites and the people who live close to the land, so the forest is where a chapter's encounters happen. She builds and keeps a place in it, the treehouse high among the branches, hidden and hers, a home to range out from and return to. The forest opens onto other things, a cave in its depths, a brook running through it, a clearing where someone waits, and at times it becomes a threshold in its own right, a dense dark treeline stepped through as a portal into a lighter wood beyond. Its mood shifts as a chapter needs, the rain-soft shimmering green of the magic wood, or the cold dark forest a harder passage goes through, and the same trees that hide can hold the dead and the ancestral, the grove where those who have gone before can be met.

In one chapter the inner child led the participant away from the open beach and into the woods, where she had built a treehouse high in the branches, hidden and enclosed and entirely her own. She showed the participant her world, foraged berries and named what was safe to eat, made friends with a bear, and roamed freely, easy among the animals and the dark. When the wood grew dense and still and might have frightened, she brought the participant to its very heart and taught, in her own words, that a place which seems dark and scary can be the safest place there is, that one can be hidden and still wholly exist, part of the living forest and held by it, hidden but not lost. The forest here was the child's home range and her sanctuary at once, the ground of her freedom and the place she went to know she was safe.

Jung. Jung reads the forest as one of the standing images of the unconscious. The wood is where the daylight mind loses its bearings and the autonomous life of the psyche comes forward, and he holds that the unconscious speaks most readily through wood and water, the two together marking its element. In the fairytales he gathered, the hero's road runs into the wood and the wood is where the decisive meetings happen, the wise old man rising from a tree stump, the helpful animal speaking from the thicket. To walk into the wood, in this reading, is to pass from the ordered clearing of consciousness into the ground where the archetypes live and act. The corpus draws on this same living and autonomous wood, entered from the open ground and full of the meetings Jung describes, and holds it as the inner child's own domain, safe even in its darkness.

The fairy-tale wood. The forest of the tales carries the same office in its own key. It is the wild country at the edge of the settled world where the ordinary rules loosen and the testing begins, the place children are sent into and heroes must cross to reach what they are after, and whoever enters is changed by the passage. The wood keeps its own inhabitants, the cottage in the trees, the talking beast, the helpful animal, the hidden path that shows itself to the one who is ready. The forest here is the ground of adventure and transformation, entered from the settled world and crossed toward whatever waits within, close to the corpus's own forest of encounter and following, where an animal leads and a path makes itself.

Spiritual symbolism. In the sacred imagination the forest is the wild place set apart from the cultivated ground, and the tradition reads it two ways. It is the dark wood of the soul astray, the selva oscura in which Dante finds himself lost at the midpoint of life, the tangled wilderness of error to be passed through toward the light. And it is the sacred grove, the stand of trees held holy and set apart, the place of the hermit's retreat and the god's presence, where the wild itself becomes a sanctuary. The forest here is the wilderness of the soul and the holy grove at once, the place of losing the way and the place of finding God apart from the world, which meets the corpus's own dark wood that proves the safest ground.

Scripture. Scripture holds the forest lightly, since its wild place of testing is the desert. Where the wood appears it tends to be the dense thicket at the margin, the forest of Ephraim that caught the fleeing Absalom in its branches, or the wooded heights whose trees are called to sing for joy. The forest stands at the edge of the biblical landscape, and the strand runs thin against the fuller scriptural wilderness of sand and stone.

Swedenborg. For Swedenborg, who reads the visible world as a legible shadow of an inner one, the wooded and growing land falls among the natural and outer reaches of that landscape, the green ground the cultivated garden of the understanding is won from. The thread is faint, the forest held as the natural country of the mind, dense and living, before the ordering hand.

The thread through them. Across Jung, the tales, the sacred imagination, scripture, and Swedenborg the forest gathers around a single recognition: the living wild set apart from the settled ground, entered to meet what lives away from the clearing, the place of encounter and transformation and of losing and finding the way. The corpus takes it as the inner child's own country, the ground of her nature and freedom and play, populated and curious, a threshold travelled deeper and deeper, and safe even where it is dark, hidden but not lost. These are resonances the practitioner may hold as the participant's forest comes into view. The participant's own forest remains the one that speaks.

When the forest appeared, what did the inner child do there, who did she meet among the trees, and where did the paths seem to lead?

The butterfly tends to gather around the self made beautiful and the sign that one is accompanied. In the corpus it comes most often as an image of the participant's own self, transformed and lovely, its very scars turned to beauty, and as a marker of freedom, completion, and joy that appears when the work of a chapter is gathered. The butterfly is a bright and delicate presence in the living world the inner child keeps, chased and played with among the flowers, and it comes too as a comforting sign, the small winged thing that alights to show a loving presence near and the participant held and watched over. The butterfly offers beauty and reassurance together, the self seen as lovely and the sign that one is not alone. In the corpus it stands most often as the transfigured self and the token of presence, the bright wings that mark freedom and carry the child's word that she is not alone.

The butterfly appears in the corpus in three main ways. It is part of the alive and joyful world the inner child inhabits, chased through the flowers and the forest, one of the bright creatures of her nature-world alongside the birds and the bunnies. It comes at the close of hard work as a sign of completion and freedom, the mud-and-butterflies of a chapter where the held parts are gathered, the blue butterflies of pure freedom, the one that flies from the window when a reconciliation is made. And it comes as the self and as a presence: the inner child gives the participant a butterfly and names it as her own transformed self, lovely for its scars; and a butterfly alights to mark a loving presence near, a butterfly on the rose that is there of course, the winged sign that says she is watched over. Its beauty is often made of contrast, the dark of the scars and the bright of the wings together, so the butterfly holds the wounds and the loveliness in one form.

In one chapter the inner child caught a large butterfly, its wings dark blue and yellow and marked with dark lines, and held it out to the participant and told her to have it, because it was her. The participant protested that it could not be her, that she was not as beautiful as the butterfly, and the child pressed her: how could she not see it. The dark lines, she said, were scars, and the butterfly was beautiful because of them, the contrast of the light and the dark. Then she drew a golden line in the air that became a glow over the participant's own skin, and told her that now she could see for herself that she shines and sparkles. The butterfly here was the participant's own self given back to her as lovely, the wounds themselves made part of the beauty.

Spiritual symbolism. In the sacred imagination the butterfly is the soul. The Greek word psyche means both soul and butterfly, and the soul was pictured with a butterfly's wings, the maiden Psyche who passes through her trials to be joined to Love. The early Christians took the butterfly for the resurrection, the creature that seems to die shut in its chrysalis and comes out winged and new, so it was carved on tombs and set in the hand of the Christ child for the soul that rises from the body. The butterfly here is the soul itself and the soul reborn, the winged life that comes out of the sealed and seeming death.

Jung. For Jung the butterfly is an image of the psyche and of rebirth, the soul in winged form and the self emerging transformed. He keeps the old meaning, that psyche is butterfly, and the creature stands for the new life that comes out of the long enclosure, the self that has been through the dark and comes out changed. The butterfly in this reading is the reborn psyche, close to the corpus's own butterfly of the self made beautiful and free.

The soul of the returning dead. Across many traditions the butterfly is the soul of the dead come back, the loved one who alights as a bright winged thing to show they are near. The butterfly at the grave or the window is the visitor from the other side, the sign that the dead keep watch. This meets the corpus's butterfly of presence directly, the winged sign that a loving one is close and the participant is accompanied.

Swedenborg. For Swedenborg, who reads the visible world as a legible shadow of an inner one, the caterpillar that shuts itself away and comes out a butterfly was a standing proof of the soul's immortality, the low creeping thing raised into a winged and heavenly life, the image in nature of the human spirit that survives the body. The thread is faint, the butterfly held as the pledge in nature of the risen soul.

The quiet strands. Scripture is silent, since the butterfly does not appear in it, and the Platonic winged soul is gathered already under the sacred imagination. Past these the butterfly draws a full reach, one of the oldest images of the soul across the traditions.

The thread through them. Across the sacred imagination, Jung, the myths, and Swedenborg the butterfly gathers around a single recognition: the soul in winged form, the life that comes out of the sealed dark made new and beautiful, and the bright visitor that shows a loving presence near. The corpus takes it as the self made lovely, its very scars turned to beauty, the sign of freedom and completion, and the winged token that says the participant is accompanied and not alone. These are resonances the practitioner may hold as the participant's butterfly comes into view. The participant's own butterfly remains the one that speaks.

When the butterfly appeared, did it come as a sign of freedom or of presence, and did the inner child give it a name or a meaning of its own?