I give you this, my poor offering to you:

(No idea why it’s cutting off one side. You can see the full version in the deviantART link in the next paragraph.)

Here’s what I put in the deviantArt description, in case you were curious as to how the hell this even happened (apologies for redundancy):

(Note: I made this in GIMP 2.0. I know next to NOTHING about GIMP 2.0 beyond what’s needed to crop and resize photos of my artwork. Please be kind–when it comes to this sort of digital…uh…manipulation, I don’t know a damned thing. If you decide to make a better version, at least link to this so people have context for what the hell this is all about.)

Okay, so I spent a good bit of this evening chewing my way through Jungian psychology in conjunction with writing the Archetypal Model of Totemism chapter for my next book, Neopagan Totemism, the manuscript of which is due to be turned in to Llewellyn Publications by October 14. Part of the chapter involves detangling Jung’s original conception of what archetypes are from all the New Age….uh….”creative licensure” with his work. (Needless to say, a lot of the “spiritual” interpretations of Jung are a far cry from what the man was originally trying to explain.)

While I was discussing some of Jung’s original archetypes, I was thinking about how my mental image of the Wise Old Man is the Old Man from the original Legend of Zelda, who prepares Link for the tough journey ahead with a sword, and then other iterations of the same archetype that provide him with better swords, advice, and occasionally the opportunity to bust down a door for no good reason.

And then I was thinking about Jung as the Wise Old Man, and how I could have used his help trying to decipher the brain-hurty New Age misappropriations of archetypes and such…and…well…this had to happen. Really.

(If you’re wondering, the book is The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, which does what it says on the tin.)
(Background image from here: http://www.effektd.net/?p=28. Picture of Jung from here: http://www.nndb.com/people/910/000031817/. Picture of book from here; http://www.amazon.com/Archetypes-Collective-Unconscious-Collected-Works/dp/0691018332/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1318146366&sr=8-1.)