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Soul Flight Leftovers
Carl Jung appreciated the Divine Comedy as a visionary experience disguised on historical and mythical events --> reference - & revise this sentence!

> Jung's quote on Dante's commedia (psychological types, p. 207)

Quote from Jung's Collected Works, Volume 11, Psychology and Religion: "The three days' descent into hell during death describes the sinking of the vanished value into the unconscious, where, by conquering the power of the darkness, it establishes a new order, and then rises up to heaven again, that is, attains supreme clarity of consciousness." (p. 90 [5587/10844])

Writing as a means to express visionary experiences became more widespread from the Middle Ages onwards.

--> elaborate on this:

- from a shamanic practice with the purpose to influence tribe members through the shaman's animated presentation of a state of trance-like ecstacy

- to a philosophical way of transcending out of the everyday world into the real world

- to a spiritual path from hell to heaven in the Christian sense

- to the modern means for every individual towards self-transcendence

--> all different manifestations of the flight of one's soul, either shamanistically (experientially?), allegorically, religiously, or spiritually...

In Phaedrus, Plato writes about the soul's nature, as well as its origin and its destiny ...

According to Sextus Empiricus, Aristotle traced men's thoughts about the Gods back to two sources: phenomena of the soul and phenomena of the heavens. When the soul is seperated from the body in sleep, or at the moment of death, it assumes its true nature and envisions the future. As such, certain ancient Greek thinkers suspected that something divine existed which was like the soul, the source of our deepest knowledge. This train-of-thought has been evident at an early point in Greek thought, for instance in the epic poems of Homer, which postulates a certain kinship between man's soul and the divine.

Along these lines, Plato writes the following in one of his dialogues:

"

Plotinus
In Plotinus' treatise on the nature of beauty, the beauty of the soul consists in the emancipation from the passions. The neoplatonic philosopher argued that those who have the strength should turn away from material beauty, forego all that is known by the eyes, and search for their soul's beauty within themselves. We should aspire to behold the vision of our inner beauty, so our soul can become virtuous and beautiful, and then divine.

Plotinus further asked in what manner, or by what device, one may achieve such an inner vision. Referring to a passage from Homer's Odyssey ("Let us flee, then, be to our beloved homeland" ), Plotinus inquires into the manner of this flight:

"This is not a journey for the feet; the feet bring us only from land to land; nor need you think of coach or ship to carry you away; all this order of things you must set aside and refuse to see: you must close the eyes and call instead upon another vision which is to be waked within you, a vision, the birthright of all, which few turn to use".

Dreams
According to certain shamans, dreams are flights of the soul wherein one of two things could happen: either you are released from the limitations of physical reality and you journey, as it were, beyond your body; or you receive a visitation (cf. apparitional experience) from a spiritual being.

In the language of the Ye'kuana, a Cariban-speaking tribe who live in the Caura River and Orinoco River, the word for dream, adekato, literally means a "flight of the soul".

Fantasies
...

Visions
...

Magical flight in Ancient India
In Ancient India, too, the ascent of the Hindu shaman (or Brahmin) demonstrates a certain way of transcending the profane world and reaching the world of the Gods, or Being, or the Absolute. A state of trancelike ecstacy makes the ascension and magical flight of the Brahmin possible. Buddhist texts mention four different magical powers of going into a different state (or gamana), one of which being the ability to fly like a bird. Magical flight, as well as ascending to the sky by means of a ladder, are also frequent motifs in Tibetan Buddhism.

Tengrism
"The eagle and the first shaman" (p. 71, Eliade)

Birds
"Birds are psychopomps" (p. 98, Eliade)

Extra:Hero of a Thousand Faces - Magic Flight (Chapter 3, pp. 170 - 178)