Jung, Tolkien and the Hermeneutics of Vision -- Dr. Lance S. Owens

A lecture by Lance S. Owens, delivered at the California Institute of Integral Studies (San Francisco, CA) on October 23, 2015.
(This is a repost of the lecture with a better audio track. The original post appears here: https://youtu.be/q2YrED9wP2k )

Abstract:
Beginning in the years around the First World War, two extraordinary
men were called to take an exceedingly difficult journey of exploration.
It was a voyage of discovery, a passage into the world of imagination.
For the rest of their lives both men – J. R. R. Tolkien and C. G. Jung –
affirmed that their mythopoetic fantasies had led them to something
intrinsically real. The figures they encountered in vision spoke with
autonomous voices, and the tales they told were entwined with history
and human destiny at the perilous threshold of a new age.

Jung
and Tolkien each struggled in solitude with the hermeneutic challenge of
recording their experiences. How does one recount in word and image
the tale of a venture into vision? And how does one then interpret this
record of an imaginal fact?

In this lecture, Dr. Owens examines
the private accounts that both Jung and Tolkien scribed about their
imaginative experiences – personal writings that remained mostly hidden
for several decades after their deaths. What did they "think" they were
doing? How did they understand “vision”? What was their “hermeneutics
of vision?” And what interpretive approach will we now take to the
strange tales of wayfarers who wander in the imaginal world?

The three lectures by Dr. Owens on "J.R.R. Tolkien - An Imaginative Life" are available at: http://www.gnosis.org/tolkien/

His central lecture from this above series, on Tolkien and Imagination, is available on YouTube, here: https://youtu.be/SuDJ2JzfBT8

Dr. Owens' lectures on "C. G. Jung and the Red Book" are available at: http://www.gnosis.org/redbook/