ABSTRACT
This question follows from our previous discussion of Oedipus and the oracle. Oracles, such as the one which Oedipus visited at Delphi, were based upon images. When the supplicant approached the oracle with a pressing need for orientation
and truth, answers were given in the form of cryptic sayings concocted of loosely associated auditory, eidetic, and proprioceptive impressions. The presupposition at work in this process was that the images arising from what we would now call the medium’s syntonic countertransference shared points of comparison among themselves that were indicative of the supplicant and his situation. The same may be said of many other traditions. I Ching hexagrams, Norse runes, Navaho sand paintings, astrology and the tarot: however questionable these practices may be in our day, all testify to the importance images have had in the divining of truth in past ages. Drawing upon the same source (though in a less literally mantic way), legend and fable, fairy tale and myth have long done so as well. Contemporizing this legacy, poems, right down to our own time, have conveyed what is known as poetic truth, as have the arts generally, through the aptness of their images. And this is to say nothing of cave paintings, contemporary cinema, and, spanning both of these, that interior cave and inner cinema, the dream. In a passage that can be read as a summing up of all these sources and traditions, the Jesus of the Nag Hammadi collection’s, Gospel of Thomas declares,
When you see your image, you are glad. But when you see your images which came into being before you, which neither die nor are made, how much will you then endure!3
