Last month I did a long post about how to not rely on Google images to do your image research — for a lot of reasons, including originality, accuracy, and avoiding AI sludge filling up search engines. The short version of the post is to start using better/vetted databases. And one I forgot to add is worth a whole post in itself, for the kind of things we do in fantastic art. Let me introduce you to the Eranos Archive.

The Eranos Foundation was an archive started by a student/follower of Carl Jung, who I’ve talked about many times here. His body of work was the human subconscious and unconscious, and the archetypes that recur in human art, religion, dreams, and stories over and over again. I’ve talked about both him and Joseph Campbell, who continued his work, many times on this blog. Here’s one post, and here’s another. If you look at Merlin, Gandalf, and Obi-Wan Kenobi, they are all the same archetype — the wizard mentor — and if you start looking at everything we do in fantasy, you’ll quickly realize it’s all based on archetypes, whether written or painted.

So the Eranos Archive began in the 1930s and 40s when Carl Jung asked Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn to travel around to famous libraries and collect imagery relating to symbolism and archetypes in human history. His work showed that similar imagery came up in many people’s dreams and thought it would be helpful to have a database (way before the internet) of imagery that therapists and researchers could reference when their clients brought them dreams to analyze. Tons of famous works on anthropology, psychology, and theology have been published using the archive over the years. The archive was eventually moved to the Warburg Institute at the University of London and digitized so it was searchable online.

The Warburg Collection has a larger archive than just the Eranos Archive, and it’s been categorized by rough topics. The Eranos Archive is organized by categories and symbols that relate more directly to Jungian Archetypes.

 

 

There’s two ways to use an archive like this. First of all, you can search for something specific. If you, for example, get commissioned by Magic the Gathering to illustrate a unicorn and you want to do visual research on the history of unicorn art within a protected, vetted source, bingo:

Bam, oodles of unicorns!

The more fun way to use the archive is to let your unconscious guide you and see what comes up to inspire you. The gestures and expressions section is fabulous for this:

I would never have expected that I would find an ancient Green urn painting depicting cannibalism, but there it is.

Anyway, you get the picture (groan). Now go click around and have fun.