You know, I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me. Why I didn’t jot down this paragraph back when I originally read this book, I will never know.

The book is The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology by James Hillman.

The quote is from page 264:

But another God is not merely another point of view. The Gods are not persons who each rule over a different area of human activity. As W.F. Otto says, they are ways the world reveals itself. Each archetype informs consciousness so that another kind of world shines through. Does the unified world-picture, that theme with which we begin this essay, therefore require one cosmos of one God? I do not think it does.

Each cosmos which each God brings does not exclude another; neither the archetypal structures of consciousness nor their ways of being in the world are mutually exclusive. Rather, they require one another, as the Gods call upon one another for help. They supplement and complement. Moreover, their interdependence is given with their nature. Jung said at Eranos in 1934: ‘The fact is that the single archetypes are not isolated… but are ina state of contamination, of the most complete mutual interpenetration and interfusion.’

And I think this is a superb re-interpretation of what Nietzsche may have been after when he said God is dead:

The abandonment of psychological monotheism is radical indeed. It not only collapses the rule of the old ego; it is a reflection in the psyche that in a certain sense God is dead - but not the Gods. When psychology takes the archetypes seriously, it is led necessarily to freeing consciousness from its bonds to one dominant mainly, and to reflecting in theory the empirical fact that consciousness moves like Hermes, the guide of souls, through a multiplicity of perspectives and ways of being.”