Lykos by Carol Spicuzza


So now, by submitting in the right way a mysterious scenario appears.

The Greek word psyche means "soul" and it also means "butterfly". The Greek for wolf is lykos which is related to the Latin for light, lux. The wolf has an amazingly developed intelligence. It is also the animal of Apollo, the sun god, the principle of consciousness. With its connection to consciousness on the one hand and representing animal nature on the other, the wolf is associated with the light of nature, Sophia. The wolf instinct is also the hunger for life. It is the fiery desire to reach ones goal.

In this painting the wolf appears to be earth. The sun is reflected in the water as many stars. Jung refers to these points of light within the Earth as scintillae and says they symbolize the archetypes in the process of manifestation. As stars they speak of Sophia because she is also the pattern or constellation of our fate and is often symbolized by starlight. These stars of the painting seem at the same time to be bubbles coming from the mouth of the wolf. The wolf appears to be exhaling star-breath. Remember Sophia is the breath of God. The butterfly seems to arise from this star-breath. These multiple stars are actually one star, the sun. In the same way Sophia, the one, was thought to have created the multiplicity of all things.

According to Jung there is a split between our instincts (e.g. hunger for life) and our spirituality that imprisons the soul. In this painting you could say that the wolf (instincts), having been given a place in conscious life and spirituality, releases the butterfly (soul). Our animal nature becomes the source of psychic renewal because the butterfly/soul is the factor in the psyche that is the mediator in any experience of the unconscious. Instinct/matter and spirit reveal their hidden unity in the symbolism of Sophia as a submission to instinct provides a glimpse of the pattern of our fate through a freeing of soul, the ability to receive meaning from the instinctual and archetypal world of the unconscious.