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Post-Jungian · an archetype

Senex

Saturn’s cold eye: the order that holds, and the order that will not let go.

James Hillman’s name, from his 1967 Eranos lecture, for the archetype of the old man as a style of consciousness, Saturnine, ordered, cold and melancholy, open to any age. He held it to be one pole of a single archetype whose other pole is the puer, split apart in the ego.

The senex, Latin for “old man”, is in James Hillman’s usage the archetype behind whatever in psychic life orders, consolidates, endures and ends. Hillman found its mythological figure in Kronos–Saturn: the god of time, boundaries, harvest and melancholy, cold and distant, who looks at the world from below and sees its structure rather than its warmth. Its personifications include the old wise man, the king, the judge, the father, the hermit and the ogre; its emblems are the rock, the oak, the sickle, the clock and the skull; its moods are melancholy, obsession and the longing for superior knowledge. Hillman insisted that the senex is not old age. It is a structure of consciousness that can appear in the dreams of the young, and that shapes any complex as it matures.

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At the threshold

Deep in the shady sadness of a valeFar sunken from the healthy breath of morn,Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone,Still as the silence round about his lair;Forest on forest hung about his headLike cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,Not so much life as on a summer's dayRobs not one light seed from the feather'd grass,But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.

Public domain · Keats, Hyperion, Book I (1820)

Saturn himself, grey, stone-still and sunk below the light, where nothing moves and the fallen leaf stays where it fell, is the senex met at first sight.

Constellation

The figures who carry it

Hover a star. Jung’s own examples are marked; the rest are readings applied later, and the entry below says by whom.

All 6 figures as a list
  1. Jung’s example

    Kronos–Saturn

    Hillman, “On Senex Consciousness” (1970), in Moore, T. (Ed.). (1989). A Blue Fire: Selected Writings by James Hillman. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-016132-3, pp. 208–212, 1970

    Hillman’s governing image: the god of time, harvest and melancholy who swallowed his children.

  2. Jung’s example

    King Lear

    Hillman, “The ‘Negative’ Senex and a Renaissance Solution” (1975), in Moore, T. (Ed.). (1989). A Blue Fire: Selected Writings by James Hillman. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-016132-3, p. 215, 1606

    ‘Crazy old King Lear’: for Hillman the proof that senex order rests on senex madness.

  3. Jung’s example

    The old king and his pupil

    Hillman, “Senex and Puer” (1967), Puer Papers pp. 34–35, in Moore, T. (Ed.). (1989). A Blue Fire: Selected Writings by James Hillman. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-016132-3, p. 222, 1967

    The pupil slays the old king and becomes an old king in turn: the curse of the split archetype.

  4. Jung’s example

    The paedogeron

    Hillman, “Senex and Puer” (1967), Puer Papers pp. 34–35, in Moore, T. (Ed.). (1989). A Blue Fire: Selected Writings by James Hillman. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-016132-3, p. 222, 1967

    The Renaissance old-young figure of festina lente, Hillman’s image of senex and puer held together.

  5. Jung’s example

    Mr Scrooge

    Hillman, J. (1995). Kinds of Power. Currency Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-46964-7, p. 231, 1843

    Hillman’s face for old Saturn, keeper of the purse, when the forecast is all gloom and doom.

  6. a later reading

    Mercurius senex in the bath

    Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (1944), CW 12, fig. 134, 1582

    Jung’s alchemical image, before Hillman: Saturn cooked until the spirit rises from him.

The wider sky

Where the Senex has been seen

29 exemplars across 14 fields, from myth to this year. Each is marked as Jung’s own example, a scholar’s reading, a widely published reading, or ours.

Hover a field in the sky, or choose one above, to read its exemplars.

Interlude

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,The vapors weep their burthen to the ground,Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,And after many a summer dies the swan.Me only cruel immortalityConsumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,Here at the quiet limit of the world,A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dreamThe ever-silent spaces of the East,Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.

Public domain · Tennyson, Tithonus (1864)

The man granted endless age without endless youth, withering beside the dawn he loves, is the senex cut off from its puer, which is the cost Hillman describes.

An old king awake at midnight, alone with the ledger, the borders and the clock.

It comes at any age: the voice that says this is how it has always been done.

Kept in the company of its own youth, the same severity turns into patience.

The deep layer · what was written

Senex: the entry

Definition

The senex, Latin for “old man”, is in James Hillman’s usage the archetype behind whatever in psychic life orders, consolidates, endures and ends. Hillman found its mythological figure in Kronos–Saturn: the god of time, boundaries, harvest and melancholy, cold and distant, who looks at the world from below and sees its structure rather than its warmth. Its personifications include the old wise man, the king, the judge, the father, the hermit and the ogre; its emblems are the rock, the oak, the sickle, the clock and the skull; its moods are melancholy, obsession and the longing for superior knowledge. Hillman insisted that the senex is not old age. It is a structure of consciousness that can appear in the dreams of the young, and that shapes any complex as it matures.

The other half of the definition is the pairing. For Hillman senex and puer are not two archetypes but two faces of one, which he called senex-et-puer. In the archetype they belong together, as in the Renaissance emblems of the old-young figure. In ego-consciousness they split into opposed poles, and each, cut off from the other, turns negative: the senex into the cold tyrant, the puer into flight from time. Hillman called the result a split archetype. This entry records the senex side; the entry on the puer aeternus records the other.

History

The word had a long life before psychology. Jung himself pointed readers to Ernst Robert Curtius’s account of the puer–senex as a literary topos in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948), in a note to Mysterium Coniunctionis. In Jung’s own work the senex is an alchemical image, not an archetype in its own right. Psychology and Alchemy (1944) reproduces “Saturn, or Mercurius senex, being cooked in the bath” from the Splendor solis (fig. 134). Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955–56) describes Saturn as “the mysterious and sinister Senex (Old Man)” from whom Michael Maier’s journey climbs towards the Boy Mercurius (CW 14 ¶298), says that the contrast between senex and puer touches on the archetype of God’s renewal (¶377), and notes that the alchemist George Ripley called the senex-puer the “Ancient of Days” (¶436). Jung’s personified figure of counsel is the wise old man, which has its own entry; Hillman would treat it as one of the senex’s personifications.

Hillman made the senex an archetype in the Eranos lecture “Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present”, given at Ascona in August 1967 and printed in the Eranos-Jahrbuch for that year, whose Rhein-Verlag imprint is dated 1968 in library catalogues. He revised it for Puer Papers (1979), followed it with “On Senex Consciousness” (Spring, 1970) and “The ‘Negative’ Senex and a Renaissance Solution” (Spring, 1975), and later collected the essays as Senex & Puer (2005). The 1970 essay sets out the figure and its range:

Personifications of this principle appear in the holy or old wise man, the powerful father or grandfather, the great king, ruler, judge, ogre, counselor, elder, priest, hermit, outcast and cripple. — James Hillman, “On Senex Consciousness” (1970), as excerpted in A Blue Fire (1989), p. 208

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

The same essay calls the high god of Western culture a senex god, omniscient, bearded and ruling by abstract principle, and finds senex imagery in many accounts of the goal of individuation: isolation, stones, geometric diagrams, the mandala and the Wise Old Man. Even “wholeness through integration”, Hillman suggests, can reflect the Saturn who swallowed all his children. Senex consciousness, he adds, may be constellated at any age; it can appear as the dream mentor whose wisdom keeps the dreamer helplessly dependent.

The claim that senex and puer form one archetype is made in the 1967 lecture. Hillman traces through it the curse of generations, in which the pupil slays the old king only to become an old king in his turn, and puts the cause in one sentence:

Owing to the split archetype, a negative polarity is inevitably constellated. — James Hillman, “Senex and Puer” (1967), Puer Papers (1979), pp. 34–35, as excerpted in A Blue Fire (1989), p. 222

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

His image of the healed polarity is the Renaissance maxim festina lente, make haste slowly, and its old-young figure, the paedogeron, which he takes from Edgar Wind: history is the senex shadow that gives the puer substance. The phrase “split archetype” then travelled. Hillman credits Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig’s Power in the Helping Professions (1971) with working out its effects on therapy, where healer and patient each carry one pole (Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975, notes to part two, “Pathologizing”).

The debate

The first disagreement is with the classical wise old man. Where Jung treated the figure as the archetype of meaning, Hillman reads it as one personification of the senex and warns that its counsel can be bad advice, collective wisdom that keeps the ego young and dependent. Andrew Samuels (1985) draws a developmental point from the same essay: Hillman says the senex, the wise old man, is present at the beginning, as all archetypal dominants are, so that a small child’s curiosity and respect for knowledge are already senex. Samuels sets this beside the developmental school’s idea of a primary self.

Marie-Louise von Franz, whose own puer lectures had not used the word senex, rejected one extension of the idea. Answering Hillman’s essay “Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic” (Spring, 1971), she called its equation of monotheism with the self and the old king, and of polytheism with the son, historically unjustified: early Israelite monotheism was anything but senex psychology, late Roman state polytheism was a purely senex affair, and any religion can be at either stage (C. G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 1975, chapter 9, note 84).

Daryl Sharp’s Jung Lexicon (1991) takes up the pair in a different key, making the senex the puer’s shadow and associating it with Apollo, disciplined and rational, rather than with Hillman’s Saturn. The divergence shows how loosely the pairing has been carried beyond Hillman’s own texts. Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette (1992) cite the senex–puer as an example of the bipolar archetypal pairs that Jungians had described, and generalise the idea into the two-pole shadows of their own fourfold scheme.

Donald Kalsched (1996) brings the trauma reading. Hillman’s negative senex, the old king of cold, dry, tyrannical order, is close to the persecutory protector Kalsched finds in the inner world of early trauma; Kalsched quotes Hillman that “the negative senex is the senex split from its own puer aspect”. But he denies that the split is normal. In people raised with good-enough care, he argues, the archetype links affect and image as it should; splitting belongs to traumatising environments. The emergent school, finally, has no senex to split: for Jean Knox (2003) archetypes carry no built-in content, so Saturn’s consciousness can only be a cultural image of patterns that develop in each life.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested the senex as a psychological construct, and no instrument measures it. Its themes, ageing, authority and wisdom, have large mainstream literatures, including the work on wisdom of Baltes and Staudinger (2000), but none of it tests Hillman’s claim, which is explicitly about a style of consciousness available at any age, not about older people.

Appearances

Hillman’s own figures are the best documented. Kronos–Saturn is the governing myth, from the castration of Uranus to the harvest sickle and the Saturnalia. King Lear is his “crazy old King Lear”, the senex order resting on senex madness. Marsilio Ficino, “child of Saturn”, supplies the melancholy method of going down into depression, and Boethius, imprisoned and visited by the figure of Wisdom who dictates The Consolation of Philosophy, is his case of depression bringing insight. Jung’s alchemical instances are Saturn cooked in the bath, Maier’s Saturn and Ripley’s Ancient of Days. Bettina Knapp (1981) read Väinämöinen of the Kalevala as a patriarchal senex figure. Apart from Hillman’s and Jung’s own readings, “senex” is in every case a reading applied after the fact.

Sources

  • Curtius, E. R. (1948). European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (W. R. Trask, Trans., 1953). Princeton University Press, 2013 edition. ISBN 978-0-691-15700-9. Pp. 98ff for the puer–senex topos, as cited by Jung in CW 14.
  • Jung, C. G. (1944). Psychology and Alchemy. CW 12, fig. 134. Princeton University Press.
  • Jung, C. G. (1955–56). Mysterium Coniunctionis. CW 14 ¶298, ¶377, ¶436. Princeton University Press.
  • Hillman, J. (1967). Senex and puer: an aspect of the historical and psychological present. Eranos-Jahrbuch 36, 301–360. Rhein-Verlag, 1968. Catalogue record: https://katalog.bibliothek.kit.edu/bib/722357
  • Hillman, J. (1979). Senex and puer (revised). In Puer Papers. Spring Publications. ISBN 978-0-88214-310-1. Pp. 3–53.
  • Hillman, J. (1970). On senex consciousness. Spring, 146–165. Collected in Senex & Puer (G. Slater, Ed.; Uniform Edition, vol. 3). Spring Publications, 2005. ISBN 978-0-88214-581-5.
  • Hillman, J. (1975). The “negative” senex and a Renaissance solution. Spring, 77–109. Collected in Senex & Puer (2005). ISBN 978-0-88214-581-5.
  • Hillman, J. (1975). Re-Visioning Psychology. Harper & Row (Harper Colophon edition 1977). ISBN 978-0-06-090563-7. Part two, “Pathologizing”, note 30.
  • Moore, T. (Ed.). (1989). A Blue Fire: Selected Writings by James Hillman. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-016132-3. Pp. 158–159 for Ficino; “Mythology as family”, pp. 194–195, 208–216, 221–223.
  • Guggenbühl-Craig, A. (1971). Power in the Helping Professions. Spring Publications. ISBN 978-0-88214-098-8.
  • Samuels, A. (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-05904-6. Chapter 5.
  • von Franz, M.-L. (1975). C. G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time (German 1972). Inner City Books edition 1998. ISBN 978-0-919123-78-6. Chapter 9, note 84.
  • Sharp, D. (1991). Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms and Concepts. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-48-9. Entry “Puer aeternus”. https://www.jungpage.org/learn/jung-lexicon
  • Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1992). The Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09592-5.
  • Kalsched, D. (1996). The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-12329-7. Chapter 5, section on Hillman and the senex/puer split.
  • Knox, J. (2003). Archetype, Attachment, Analysis: Jungian Psychology and the Emergent Mind. Brunner-Routledge. ISBN 978-1-58391-129-7. Chapter 3.
  • Baltes, P. B., & Staudinger, U. M. (2000). Wisdom: a metaheuristic (pragmatic) to orchestrate mind and virtue toward excellence. American Psychologist, 55(1), 122–136. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.122
  • Knapp, B. (1981). A Jungian reading of the Kalevala 500–1300? Finnish shamanism, the patriarchal senex figure, part 1. Mythlore, 8(3). https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol8/iss3/10
  • Shakespeare, W. (1608). King Lear. Project Gutenberg #1532.
  • Boethius (c. 524). The Consolation of Philosophy (H. R. James, Trans.). Project Gutenberg #14328.

Leaving

And may at last my weary ageFind out the peaceful hermitage,The hairy gown and mossy cell,Where I may sit and rightly spellOf every star that heaven doth shew,And every herb that sips the dew,Till old experience do attainTo something like prophetic strain.These pleasures, Melancholy, give;And I with thee will choose to live.

Public domain · Milton, Il Penseroso (1645)

Milton’s melancholy, whom the poem makes a daughter of Saturn, ends in the hermit’s cell where long experience turns into something like prophecy, the senex at its most generous.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

Next in the journey☿ Wise Old ManThe archetype of meaning.Return to the void