The terrorist attacks of September 11 shocked the world's imagination. Barely past civilization's most bloody century, once again we are reminded of the depths of human potential for inhumanity.

The terrorist attacks of September 11 shocked the world's imagination. Barely past civilization's most bloody century, once again we are reminded of the depths of human potential for inhumanity. In contrast to recent horrors of genocide, it is the sudden, decentering terror of these images that particularly haunt our memories. Jennifer Reeser responds poetically in "September 11, 2001."

How can I ever put those scenes to bed —
the bodies tumbling from the upper floors,
imaginings of all the private wars
which must have marked the dying of the dead?

William Webster, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, states "What happened September 11 is not so much a failure of intelligence but a failure of imagination. We are going to have to think unthinkable things" (cicentre). James Hillman believes terrorism is the natural consequence of a fundamental flawed approach to consciousness that devalues imagination. Hillman's archetypal psychology views imagination as a neglected third cognitive function between intellect and sensation. A reality that only accepts sensation (body) and spirit (intellect) but denies soul (imagination) will repeatedly find itself terrorized by volcanic eruptions of myth into life.

We have to tie terrorism to its roots in our religious consciousness. A terrorist is the product of our education that say that fantasy is not real, that says aesthetics is just for artists, that says soul is only for priests, imagination is trivial or dangerous and for crazies, and that reality, what we must adapt to, is the external world, and that world is dead. A terrorist is a result of this whole long process of wiping out the psyche. Corbin said to me one time, 'What is wrong with the Islamic world is that it has destroyed its images, and without these images that are so rich and so full in its tradition, they are going crazy because they have no containers for their extraordinary imaginative power.'" (Hillman 187, 1989)