"Another scheme of time, another scheme of causality. Prefiguration is not preparation. 'When we speak of the relation between a new poetic image and an archetype asleep in the depths of the unconscious, we will have to understand that this relation is not, properly speaking, a causal one.' Archetype as cause, or
Ursachen: Erscheinungen können nicht Ursachen sein. Events are related to other events not by causality, but by analogy and correspondence. In the archetype is exemplary causality,
causa exemplaris. In the Medieval system of fourfold causes, that goes with the four-horsed chariot of meaning, events are actualizations of potentialities eternally there - 'their Forms Eternal Exist For-ever.' The potentialities are latent till made patent: asleep till wakened. The events sleep in their causes; the archetypal form is the hidden life of things; awaiting resurrection.
Bachelard,
La poétique de l'espace, 1. Nietzsche,
Aus dem Nachless, 456. Blake,
Milton, pl. 32, l. 38.
Cf Barfield,
Saving the Appearences, 88, 151. Daniélou,
Lord of History, 130. Smith,
J.G. Hamann, 97. Spengler,
Decline of the West, I, 3-6.
Norman O Brown Love's Body (1966) p.209
