Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism

The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS) is an encyclopedic collection of archetypal images consisting of photographs of works of art, ritual images, and artifacts of sacred traditions and contemporary art from around the world. The archive is hosted by National ARAS, with institutional members in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco. The ARAS archive contains about 17,000 photographic images collected over more than sixty years, each accompanied by scholarly commentary. The commentary includes a description of the image with a cultural history that places it in context historically and geographically, an important aspect for understanding and working with archetypal images. Where applicable, the commentary brings the image into focus for its modern psychological and symbolic meaning, as well as often including a bibliography for related reading and a glossary of technical terms. The archive has physical repositories in the cities of its institutional-member hosts; it is also available online (online access does require a subscription) and images are indexed with keywords, including historical, cultural, geographic and other useful terms. ARAS also publishes a quarterly online journal connecting art, culture and depth psychology from a multi-disciplinary perspective that can be subscribed to free of charge on their website, aras.org. The ARAS archive is designed for and used by students and scholars for research, by artists and designers as a sourcebook of motifs and iconographic forms, by individuals interested in commonalities in mythology, dream imagery, and vision which transcend nation and ideology, and by practitioners of depth psychology or other psychological perspectives wanting to enhance their knowledge of archetypal symbolism. Among the scholars who have visited or made use of ARAS' resources are Erich Neumann, who in his The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (Princeton, 1955) mined ARAS for images of ancient goddesses to explore the archetype of the feminine as it evolved over the centuries from ancient Sumeria and Egypt into the modern era.