Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (roughly translated as Strife of Love in a Dream). Part
fictional narrative and part scientific treatise, attributed to both Leon Battista Alberti
and to the monk Francesco Colonna, the book is an extreme case of erotic furore,
aimed at everything that the protagonist, Poliphilo, encounters in his quest for his
beloved, Polia. I t has been called the first stream-of-consciousness novel, and is
one of the most important documents of Renaissance imagination and fantasy
because it is a picture of the Middle Ages just beginning to evolve into modern
times by way of the Renaissance, a transition between two eras, and therefore
deeply interesting. I t is also interesting because this is one of the early incunabula,
a book printed in the first fifty years after the printing press and still surviving
today. From the uncertainty of its author and its difficult title to its baffling prose, it
is one of the most fascinating books ever created. The original text includes a
pandemonium of unruly sentences in Tuscan, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic,
Chaldean, and also hieroglyphs. On some pages, the text makes use of
technopaegnia, the artistic shaping of the text into images, in this case in the form
of goblets and drinking vessels. Jung said of it:
The book [ Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia] was rightly
regarded as a mystery text. With this anima, [ the Lady Polia?]
then, we plunge straight into the ancient world ... Hence, any
allusion to alchemy wafts one back to the ancient world and
makes one suspect regression to pagan levels (Jung, CW 12, par.
112).
The Renaissance in Europe also was a significant mark in the evolution of
mythopoeic consciousness. I t was not only the age of the voyages of the great
Portuguese-Spanish navigators; Columbus, da Gama and Magellan, whereby
humankind became aware of the limited purview of the world it had hitherto
entertained prior to the fifteenth century, for there followed an imaginatively fired
desire to explore both the outer and inner worlds; a new desire had awoken in
human consciousness, or rather, an old one had re-awoken.
2.8 The Disenchantment and the New Enchantment
From the time of Bacon and Descartes, Hobbes and Locke and with great
intensity following the Enlightenment, the modern world became, literally,
disenchanted, what once pervaded the world as anima mundi was now attributed to
human consciousness, and the relationship between the inner and the outer became