The Senex

The Senex 

https://whatsitallmeanthen.blogspot.com/2013/11/james-hillman-on-archetypes-of-senex.html

The god Saturn-Kronos is image for both positive and negative senex. His temperament is cold. 

Coldness can also be expressed as distance; the lonely wanderer set apart, cast out. 

Coldness is also cold reality, things just as they are;

 and yet Saturn is at the far-out edge of reality. As lord of the nethermost, 

he views the world from the outside, from such depths of distance that he sees it, so to speak, all upside down, yet structurally and abstractly.

 The concern with structure and abstraction makes him the principle of order, 

whether through time, or

 hierarchy,

 or exact science and system, 

or limits and borders, 

or power, or 

inwardness and reflection, 

or earth and the forms it gives. 

The cold is also 

slow, 

heavy, 

leaden, and 

dry or moist,

 but always the coagulator through

denseness, 

slowness, 

and

 weight expressed by the mood of 

sadness, 

depression, or 

melancholia.

 Psychologically the senex is at the core of any complex or governs any attitude when these psychological processes pass to end-phase. 

We expect it to correspond to biological senescence, 

just as many of its images: 

dryness, 

night, 

coldness, 

winter, 

harvest, 

are taken from the processes of time and of nature. 

But to speak accurately the senex archetype transcends mere biological senescence and is given from the beginning as 

a potential of 

order, 

meaning, and 

teleological fulfillment –and 

death- 

within all the psyche and all its parts. 

So death which the senex brings is not only bio-physical. It is death that comes through perfection and order. 

The senex spirit appears most evidently when 

any function we use, 

attitude we have, or

 complex of the psyche begins to coagulate past its prime. 

It is the Saturn within the complex that makes it hard to shed, 

dense and 

slow, and 

maddeningly depressing 

–the madness of lead-poison- 

that feeling of the everlasting indestructibility of the complex. 

It cuts off the 

complex from life and the feminine,

 inhibiting it and introverting it into an isolation. 

We must further conclude that the negative senex is the senex split from its own puer aspect. He has lost his ‘child’.

And meanwhile all of this also leading me back to another later blog I posted titled *Fathering the Child Within' based on another talk by James Hillman, also including some notes on Saturn, the Senex archetype & Mercury, as the Puer from Liz Greene's book 'Mythic Astrology'.. at http://whatsitallmeanthen.blogspot.com.au/2015/07/fathering-child-within.html