ARAS - Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism

05/18/2026

We are in the final week of our ARAS Education Kickstarter, ensuring that our summer arts program is free and accessible to all NYC teens! We are almost to our deadline and every dollar counts! If we do not meet our $6,000 goal by Monday, May 25th, all donations will be refunded!!

In addition to the great rewards that we are offering donors which you can see on our kickstarter page, we have a special announcement: Anyone who donates over $20 between now and 3:30pm EST on May 21st will be entered to win A LIFETIME MEMBERSHIP TO ARAS ONLINE! Memberships to our online archive are $100/year (or $25/year for students)

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aras/aras-teens-summer-art-program

05/14/2026

Our kickstarter campaign has only eleven more days left and we still have a ways to go before we reach our goal of $6,000. If you are looking for a pitch for why this program is so important and why it must be offered free of charge for the teens of New York City, consider these reasons to support. This program has mean so much to the teens who have participated over the past twelve years of its existence. It in fact has had such a profound effect on the teens who participate that the person writing this post and sharing all of ARAS's images with you all is himself a former participant from its first iteration back in 2014! Any amount you donate will be going directly into making sure this magical program will always be free for any teen who wants to participate. However much you are able to give will be making a huge difference in the lives of young people!

Here is a link to the kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aras/aras-teens-summer-art-program

Thank you!!

05/12/2026

ARAS is in the middle of our Kickstarter campaign to fund our Teen Summer Program. This program is free for NYC Teens, giving them the opportunity to learn about art and symbolism, to explore our archive and New York's many museums, and to find new ways of expressing themselves both verbally, in writing, and in artwork. By providing this free of charge, we can provide transformative experiences to our students regardless of income. The diversity of students that this free program serves is what makes the program so very special, so please consider contributing!

You can find the link to the Kickstarter here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aras/aras-teens-summer-art-program

05/11/2026

We only have 2 more weeks to make the ARAS Teens summer program a reality. Thank you so much for supporting our Kickstarter fundraising campaign! It is greatly appreciated by all of us here at ARAS!

Raffle Alert!! For the next 24 hours, anyone who donates over $20 will be entered to win a 60-minute Tarot Reading with Middle Sister Tarot! We are so excited to be able to offer this reward. Donate before Tuesday, May 12th at 3pm EST to enter.

Thank you!
ARAS

Welcome to ARAS The Archive for Research in Archetypal SymbolismA pictorial and written archive of mythological, ritualistic, and symbolic images from all over the world and from all epochs of human history. Archive Search Available to our members, The ARAS Archive contains about 18,000 photographic...

05/05/2026

Archetype in Focus: A Monthly ARAS Feature
Fairy

Evanescent creatures with butterfly wings; miniature figures gaudily dresses or garbed in simple homespun garments. Benevolent and miscreant, perverse and playful, fairies like Queen Mab, Titania, Oberon, Puck and Tinkerbell materialize out of psyche as some of our most whimsical imaginings.

The word ‘fairy’ is linked to fayre, meaning an illusion, reflecting not only the fairy’s effect on consciousness, but also one of the fairy’s primary powers—to fascinate, spellbind, or charm. ‘Fairy’ is actually derived from the Latin fata, or fate, alluding to the association of the fairy with good or ill, and the curses and blessings that hover about the newborn, as in the fairytale of the Sleeping Beauty.

Fairies are often portrayed as mediators to order and industry. A fairy might hide one’s keys or gloves if the house is messy, as if to remind one to tidy things up. In countless stories, fairies are serendipitous helpers to impoverished or overburdened humans or those faced with seemingly impossible tasks. Fairies are masters at tailoring, spinning, washing, sweeping, planting and mining. If treated well, they repay their human friends with magical gifts or powers. Nevertheless, as shapeshifters and tricksters, fairies are as capable of havoc as of help, administering love potions that foster unlikely matches, or souring milk or causing accidents.

Elves, brownies, pixies, fays, leprechauns, nymphs and sprites, fairies range in size (so it is said) from a thumbling to the height of a three-year old child. These tiny supernatural beings, a projection of those often amoral, luminous and highly generative impulses that are agents of the psyche’s non-rational energies and synchronistic happenstance. Associated especially with the uncanny transformations of twilight and night, fairies inhabit Fairyland, Dreamland, Never-Never Land and Middle Earth, evoking the unconscious dimension and psyche’s secret workings.

Images from the ARAS Archive:
1) William Blake, Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing, ca. 1786
2) 5Gb.147 - Richard Dadd, The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke (detail), ca. 1855-64. - Fairy woodman (Fairy Feller), wearing cap, brown leather coat and breeches, raising ax held in both hands to strike hazel nut.
3) Flora, Fauna and Merryweather, the fairies from Disney’s 1959 animated classic, Sleeping Beauty, descend on the castle.

05/04/2026

Invest in Imagination!

The ARAS Teens Summer Art program is a FREE two-week summer intensive for teens that fosters innovation, collaboration and creativity through the study of art, myths and symbols, as well as art making. The participants create original art work in response to the rich history of a specific symbol of their choice. They deepen their understanding of their symbol by looking at it through the lenses of art, culture, mythology, history and their own personal experiences. The teens attend daily field trips to museums and galleries, go into working artists' studios, and conduct research in our vast archive. At the end of the program, the students are given the opportunity to present their work and the research behind it at a celebratory show and reception.

We started this program in 2014 and have seen the immense impact that it has on teens. They begin to see the world in a different way. In uncertain times, it is more important than ever to offer teens a safe place for them to express themselves and experience this kind of depth. With your help we can continue to offer this amazing program for free in 2026.

It is ARAS' mission is to bring the power of symbols to a younger audience! So, it is important to us to keep this program going! ARAS Teens is designed to attract a diverse group of participants from all different kinds of backgrounds. At ARAS, teens have the opportunity to explore and learn about their own heritage, as well as others', through research, collaboration and presentations. Learning about the rich history of creative human expression also inspires the teens to explore personal interpretations of universal symbols and how they may differ in various cultures. All of this has a profound and lasting effect on teens. We have seen these connections develop again and again and it is very moving. We hope you will join us in making this happen!

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT!

Your tax-deductible contributions will make a lasting impact on our teens and the ARAS Archive!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aras/aras-teens-summer-art-program

04/20/2026

Over on the ARAS Patreon you can read our newest Reading Room piece taken from the extensive ARAS Library. In this month's piece, Niki de Saint Phalle: a Psychological Approach to Her Artwork and the Symbolic Significance of the Tarot Garden, Paul Brutsche examines the work of Niki de Saint Phalle along Jungian lines.

Check out the ARAS Patreon through the link in our bio!

04/10/2026

It's Archetypal Friday and our symbol for this week is annihilation.

Annihilation was something once reserved for Gods, either in the form of apocalypse or natural disasters. Mankind and especially its most powerful nations have taken upon themselves the pursuit of creating and wielding weaponry that can truly annihilate in ways only previously known in the world of the imaginary. Whereas once we understood that annihilation came as divine punishment for sin or as a demonstration of the power of the divine, we see annihilation threatened as executed on the whims of powerful people for the purposes of accessing and hoarding resources, racist ideology, diversion from domestic strife, or jockeying for geopolitical dominance. Human beings have done terrible things to each other for time immemorial but where once the act of killing had to be done by a killer face to face with their victim, nations are now indiscriminately murdered by powerful technology by a faceless killer or an algorithm. Despite the increasing abstraction of the victim to the killer and the increasing abstraction of the reasons for that killing, the victims of this violence die the same terrible way that they always have. In our contemporary world, possessors of this enormous killing power have invented a new senselessness because, unlike the terrible floods, fires, and famine that have always beleaguered humanity, this mass death was caused by the choices of human beings.

Image: ARAS Record 7Ar.151
Chandi
ca. 18th century CE
Painting: pigment on paper?
Rajasthan, India

04/07/2026

Archetype in Focus: A Monthly ARAS Feature
Orange

Orange is a mixture of red and yellow and in the light spectrum of color stands between the two. Orange extends into the realm of gold, the incorruptible and everlasting, and into the realm of blood, vigorous, active and mutable.

In the Buddha’s time, prisoners wore orange and the Buddha was said to have adopted a robe of saffron as a sign of compassion for the dispossessed and condemned. Bold and visible, orange still signifies detention, warning and protection, from the jumpsuit of the American prisoner to the vivid markings of the monarch butterfly that tell potential predators its body has toxins that make it lethal prey.

Orange colors the ascent, descent and burning of the sun, associating its hues with processes of emergence, heat, growth and perfection, and the coagulating intensity of desire. The Roman bride wore the flammeum or flamelike veil of Aurora, the goddess of the dawn. Divine Jupiter was said to have presented an orange, round, seedy and fecund, to Juno on their wedding day. Sendivogius, a 17th century alchemist, intuited in the sun-ripened orange an emblem of psyche’s transmuting heat sufficient to bring forth its vital spirit and produce its seed. Orange is then maturation and harvest, the brilliance of the turning leaf, the russet, autumnal moon, ingathering and completion. But the warmth of orange also becomes emblematic of nature and psyche’s more searing transformations, sudden and drastic – the quality of forest fire, volcanic explosion and nuclear blast.

Images:
1) Untitled, Ellen Krüger, watercolor, 1997.
2) Buddhist and Hindu monks in saffron-colored garments.
3) Orange and Yellow, Mark Rothko, oil, 1956
4) New Stars, Meret Oppenheim, oil on canvas, 1977-82.

04/01/2026

ARAS's New York Library at 28 E 39th St is open every Tuesday 10am - 5pm. Come on by!

Image: "5Ac.008 Sculpture (detail)
Velletri: Mus. Civico Sarcophagus (relief)
Noah standing in chest-shaped ark with open top, stretching out both arms; UR dove bearing olive spray in beak.
First Christian centuries."