The ‘descent’ or ‘inverse pilgrimage’ (katabasis) is fraught with anxiety, obstacles and difficulties. This experience assumes the character of an ordeal – an ascesis, even – realised through ‘rites of passage’ comprising three known stages: separation – initiation – return. During this process the subject will encounter or confront uncanny horrors and paranoid connections. These terrors may include resurgent atavisms (the phylogenetic inheritance), pathological forces, every form of self-violation (mortificatio) and shadowy, chthonic ‘elementals’ – all characterised by a ubiquitous undertow of archaic nostalgia. The subject is exposed to all the underworld horrors of personal and collective unconscious contents (the 'inferno') and other phantasmagoria – such as tutelary ‘threshold guardians’ – derived, in the final analysis, from psychic formations known as ‘archetypes’. (from the Unique Zero Manifesto 2002-2007)
The picture features a computer manipulated detail from an early collage called 'The Guardian of the Threshold' (1969)
There can be lttle doubt that this Guardian - in part a reification of the artist's Shadow - is also one of those Hungry Ghosts, or, perhaps, a sub-species of that class of entity named The Dweller On The Threshold by Victorian novelist Bulwer-Lytton.
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