Before we start, I want to make sure you’re up to speed. Have you read parts 1 and 2:
Jung and Why He Matters
Archetypes 101
Tolle lege (take and read). Otherwise this diary won’t make much sense. Go ahead—I’ll wait.
Okay, now that we’re all on the same metaphorical page, we can get going.
Archetypes: slippery things. We can discuss them, or at least aspects of them, but in this endeavor we are rather like the early anatomists who went looking for the soul and searched fruitlessly among cadavers.
What makes an archetype powerful is its operation, the psychological power it leverages when it works. The danger in discussing archetypes is that they become too familiar, too easily rationalized. By definition archetypes dwell in the unconscious, and efforts to explain them draw them into consciousness, where they can be pinned down, dissected, drained of their power and authority, their vitality, their life. For a prime example of what happens when an archetype goes mainstream, we need look no farther than Joseph Campbell’s explanation of The Hero’s Journey, found in bookstores everywhere and in general a great reading experience and a good place to start with Campbell. My quarrel about the hero’s journey is not with Campbell—it’s with the people who turned the archetype into a bloody franchise.
If you’re a fantasy reader this particular archetype is painfully familiar. Just Google “the hero’s journey” and you’ll get more than two million hits. It’s kind of a Big Thing, so big that Campbell’s analysis of the hero’s journey has devolved into bullet points:
- from the known to the unknown and back again;
- extra points for mysterious/obscure parentage;
- the call to adventure, refusing the call, passing the first threshold;
- acquisition of a wise elder or helper who must die;
- crisis, and a passage through the “belly of the beast”
- full commitment to the quest, or the Hero Transformed
- atonement, fulfillment and triumphant return
- etc. etc. etc.
TV Tropes has a section on The Hero’s Journey, just to ensure that the life has been utterly bled out of the archetype. Joseph Campbell advised George Lucas during the writing and filming of the original Star Wars: Episode 4, and Lucas put Luke Skywalker through every step of the hero’s journey as Campbell understood it, to great effect. People groked Star Wars without really knowing why. For a somewhat campy and indifferently-acted space opera, it’s had such staying power that there are places where Jedi is recognized as a religion. And now, wherever you look, there’s a Hero’s Journey. It’s as reliable as the formula for Harlequin Romances. Writers’ guides offer checklists about just where in the story each element should happen: ex, 2/3’s of the way through the plot, the hero’s mentor has to die, leaving the hero on her own. The fact that it’s reached this level of granularity strongly suggest this form of the archetype is due for retirement as a plot device. It really needs a rest.
Which just goes to demonstrate that this stuff really can be overthought and, when overthought, drained of its arresting power.
Back to Jung, Who Started Most of This
Archetypes are structures of thought, buried deep in the collective unconscious. They’re not symbols (visual images that both represent a thought and go considerably beyond a given definition), but rather are the framework that makes symbolism possible.
Difficult, I know. And imprecise. But it’s what we have to work with.
Jung wrote his analyses and theories of the unconscious with an eye toward understanding the human mind through his patients. He believed that dreams are messages from the subconscious (and occasionally the unconscious) that prompt the dreamer to pay attention to things that are out of balance in the dreamer’s life. Because of his widespread approach and his interest in just about everything, Jung analyzed the dreams of not only his mentally-ill or psychotic patients, but “normal” people—his friends and acquaintances, their children, their parents, building up a theory of the mind and developing a vocabulary for making sense of the unconscious. Critical to his work is the working of the archetype.
Archetypes, structures of thought that occur across cultures, across time, across great distance, belong to that part of the human brain that was active before we were even human. And early in human history, of course. They’re structures of thinking, ways of visualization, that occur reliably in every human culture, which is how we know they predate the dissemination of humanity. The hero’s journey may be a tired literary device, but that makes it operation in archetypal thinking no less real.
Think of it this way: there are around 7.6 billion people alive today. Every single one of us is on our own journey. We are all Odysseus ; each one of us is the center, the protagonist, the triumphant hero of our own tale, each with our wise mentors, our catastrophic setbacks, our redoubled efforts and eventual triumphs. To me, the sheer volume and variety, the fact of individual experience, is harder to fathom, and more humbling, than trying to figure out eternity. Which is also part of the archetypal mix, because we can conceive of the concept of eternity, despite the fact that we will never personally experience it, and every culture in the world has its own version. Archetypes are among the qualities that make us human, that make it possible for us to look outside our own experience and find sympathetic parallels in others.
Jung’s purpose in all of his work is to understand the mind, and his agenda throughout his career was to help his patients achieve psychic wholeness, or health, aka a state of balance between the external world and the internal one. It’s a balance, he implies, that not many people achieve, or even attempt, because the desire to know the self is as perilous a journey as any vision-quest ever recorded. In fact, a great many vision-quests are externalized interpretations of the inner journey (and here we are, back to the hero’s journey — I promise we’ll get away from it, eventually), whether undertaken by Dante or Frodo. This inner journey, which Jung calls the process of individuation and believes ends with the individual in harmony with the self in all its aspects (conscious, subconscious, and unconscious) is the real work of humanity. It is the point of living fully and deliberately, and it prepares the individual to fully partake in all aspects of life in every one of life’s stages.
Jung’s archetypes are more than Postcards from the Unconscious — they’re guideposts for living. He writes about archetypes very much like Campbell does, through the lens of mythology and religion. Both, in Jung, are archetypes that became manifest in their symbols and entered history in a way that makes them generally accessible (2, p. 5). It’s not that a religious symbol is archetypal (for instance, the Christian cross); it’s that there’s an archetype behind the symbol that gives it power and resonance beyond its immediate context.
In fact, the cross is a useful symbol for the archetypal Tree of Life (and Death), the tree that appears often in Christian iconography as growing out of the skull of Adam, the first man. It is a scion of the great Tree of Life, made into the Tree of Death as the cross of Calvary and transfigured into a vehicle for immortality, the Rood of Christian tradition, Yggdrasil that accepted the sacrifice of Odin as he hung on the tree for nine days, turns up in Egyptian mythology and Sumerian and others as well. In fact, the Tree of Life and Death in all its aspects appears across the world in numerous incarnations and gets exhaustive treatment in its own chapter in Symbols of Transformation (3). It’s extremely useful to read this stuff in its entirely, but just to give you a taste:
It is clear...that the cross is a many-faceted symbol, and its chief meaning is that of the “tree of life” and the “mother.” Its symbolization in human form is therefore quite understandable. The various forms of the crux ansata have the meaning of “life” and “fruitfulness,” and also of “union,” which can be interpreted as the hieros gamos of the god with his mother for the purpose of conquering death and renewing life. This mythologem, it is plain, has passed into Christianity. For instance, St. Augustine says:
Like a bridegroom Christ went forth from his chamber, he went out with a presage of his nuptials into the field of the world….He came to the marriage-bed of the cross, and there, in mounting it, he consummated his marriage. And when he perceived the sighs of the creature [the cross, which often is given voice in laments in early Christian writings like the Anglo-Saxon The Dream of the Rood and “Dispute between Mary and the Cross”], he lovingly gave himself up to the torment in place of his bride and he joined himself to the woman for ever. (3, p. 269 — footnotes omitted).
We could go on at great length about this stuff. Any attempt at brief explanation risks trivializing it. And let’s face it, Augustine was not speaking of Christ as the chaste bridegroom of the Church any more than the Song of Solomon is a metaphor and not a celebration of carnal love. And this is only one archetype, one of many out there that occur and recur in a great many forms.
But if you’ve stuck with me this far, you deserve kudos for all your hard work (and make no mistake, this is hard work, foundational material, the building bricks of entire systems of beliefs, mythologies and religions). In that spirit, let’s finish with a little about archetype and belief—and remember, archetypes are the living forces that underlie symbols. When you think of the Protestant Cross you don’t think of the Eternal Mother, life-giver and life-taker, but it’s still the animating archetype.
In Jung’s analysis, the past two centuries in Europe and America is the first time ever that it’s been possible not to be religious. Jung himself doesn’t argue for religion, but he advocates for spiritual awareness. Without a sense of spiritual awareness, a connection to the rhythms and cycles of life itself, life becomes flat and meaningless. We need the numinous, not because it’s religious or powerful or spiritually comforting, but because it connects us with life. Without that connection, we’re forced to make do with psychology.
The process of toppling icons and idols that began in Christianity with the Reformation has bled the numinosity out of them.
The fact is that archetypal images are so packed with meaning in themselves that people never think of asking what they really do mean. That the gods die from time to time is due to man’s sudden discovery that they do not mean anything, that they are made by human hands, useless idols of wood and stone. In reality, however, he has merely discovered that until then he has never thought about his images at all. And when he starts thinking about them, he does so with the help of what he calls “reason”—which is point of fact is nothing more than the sum total of all his prejudices and myopic views (2, p. 13)
One of the reasons, Jung writes often, for modern psychosis is the general loss of belief in the spiritual, and modern life’s over-reliance on reason to the neglect of the rest of the mind. Historically, people have come to individuation—that is, full personhood—within the rhythms and rituals of their faiths, since faith provides for initiation and sustenance in all phases of life. Religions, Jung argues, grow out of archetypal impulses and forces that achieve conscious representation and still allow for varied cultural expression.
For instance, in Christianity we see the archetypes work themselves out in regional patterns. Witness the differences between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, not so much in theology but in style. In the Roman Church, art is art; it’s instructive. In the Eastern Church, the icon is a mystic form, inherent in the production of the icon itself, with the preparation of the wooden board and the layering on of paints each having its own gnosis and ritual aspect. Both are Christian. Christianity can accommodate Irish Celtic tradition, Coptic ritual, Mennonite plainsong, the gloomy Germanic overtones of Anglo-Saxon wyrd, the silence of Quakers, the drumbeat of the South African church, the mix of indigenous gods and saints in Latin America, the ecstasy of Southern snake-handling and speaking in tongues, and all under the umbrella of the Resurrection and the Life. It’s not an external power that grew Christianity into its many manifest forms, any more than any worldly power was responsible for the spread of Islam, or Buddhism, or Hinduism, or any of the very many faiths in the world: the will to belief in the eternal is itself archetypal.
When you read Jung, you read a lot about religion. It’s where many archetypes dwell. But not all. Next week we’ll talk about dreams, since people seem to be interested. After that, and since we’ve covered what forces generate archetypes, we’ll talk some about particular archetypes, some singular like the animus/anima, the shadow, the hero, and some archetypal processes, which usually fall under the heading of becoming, and are described best in Psychology and Alchemy. Then, finally, we’ll come back to fantasy and how this all fits into the literature.
For now, it’s useful to remember that we carry worlds—whole universes—inside our heads, and under our own consciousness is layered the unconscious, that other universe we aren’t aware of, but we need, the one which speaks in its own images, steering us into our own individual, discreet but fundamentally connected futures, steers us toward psychological and spiritual wholeness that Jung calls individuation. The work of each person is to be fully human, aware of what that means, poised between inner and outer worlds and attentive to both, navigating all the stages of life by the fixed stars of archetypes and their varied incarnations.
References
1. Carl Gustav Jung, “Approaching the Unconscious,” in Man and His Symbols, ed. Jung, NY: Dell, 1968, pp. 1-94.
2. Carl Gustav Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, R.F.C. Hull, ed. and trans. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, Bollingen Series XX, Vol. 9, part 1,, 2nd ed, 1968.
3. Carl Gustav Jung, Symbols of Transformation, R.F.C. Hull, ed. and trans. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, Bollingen Series XX, Vol. 5, 2nd ed, 1967.