“Normal comes from normaliter, meaning in a straight line, directly. The 16th and 17th century meaning of ‘normal’ was rectangular, perpendicular, standing at a right angle. The word in our usage today, however, connotes average, usual, regular, not deviant. Thus it has to do with statistical certainty, and with ideal standards. As Hillman says, “in our age, ordinary, regular, balanced, centered, predictable have become ideal norms and have set the standards for the soul. Abnormal is both a statistical definition and a moral condemnation. What is odd becomes wrong; what is unusual and irregular becomes reprehensible.” He says we have norms without enormity. “ James Hillman
“The greatest passions, truths, and images are not normal middles, not averages. Tongue-tied Moses who kills, has horns and a black desert wife; Christ turning miracles, lacerated on the Cross; ecstatic Mohammed; Hercules and the Heroes, even Ulysses; and the extraordinary awesome Goddesses–all these are unpredictable extremes that bespeak the soul in extremis. And these mythical figures show infirmitas; possessions, errors, wounds, pathologizings…The very ideality is partly expressed through pathologized enormities.” James Hilllman
“I am not pleading for a baroque Romanticism or Gothic horror, a new cult of the freakish to shock the bourgeois. Such is merely the other side of normalcy. Rather I wish us to remember Plato’s statement: reason alone does not rule the world or set the rules. Turning to the middle ground for norms, norms without enormity, refuses the errant cause of Ananke. Such norms are delusions, false beliefs, that do not take into account the full nature of things. …repressive idealizations which make us lose touch with our individual abnormalities. The normalcy fantasy becomes itself a distortion of the way things actually are.” James Hillman
“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” Joseph Campbell
“The goal of the hero trip down to the jewel point is to find those levels in the psyche that open, open, open, and finally open to the mystery of your Self being Buddha consciousness or the christ. That’s the journey.” Joseph Campbell
