![]() |
---|

ANIMA-L — Living Your Animal
The lament of the dead and daemons and the sin of Christ was “they forgot only one thing: they did not live their animal” (Jung, 2009, p. 341). Living your animal is at the heart of Jung’s Red Book and it is critical to his art-based process which he described as a teaching of the heart. In this section we explore what it means to live our animal and how we can do this through art, since “animals were really excluded” in the bible where there was “no artistic appreciation of the animal till the ox and the ass came in” (Jung, 1923, p.21).
Here, we will reimagine what Jung referred to as the exclusion of animals and nature as “living being” and remember that “as a brother of man the animal is a function of man” and the “getting away from the respect for brother animal begets in us that animal,” since “a man is only human when he is accompanied by brother animal” (p. 27).
“These figures are the dead, not just your dead, that is, all the images of the shapes you took in the past, which your ongoing life ha s left behind, but also the thronging dead of human history, the ghostly procession of the past, which is an ocean compared to the drops of your own life span." C. G. Jung



An Individual and Collective Journey



