Archetype

Archetype A term used by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung to indicate the psychological contents of a proposed collective unconscious.

For Jung the archetypes are inherited patterns encoded in the body, universally shared by mankind.

Not unlike the gods and goddesses of ancient times, archetypes apparently have a psychic life of their own.

In fact, Jung often likens the archetypes to ancient deities, saying that the word “archetype” is a scientific-sounding update for a very old idea.

When the conscious ego encounters the archetype, the individual is said to experience a sense of the numinous.

According to Jung, this encounter may be psychologically constructive or destructive, healing or disorienting. The effect of the numinous on consciousness depends on the psychological stability and maturity of the individual, as well as the character and intensity of the numinosity encountered.

The experience of the numinous is often mediated by a meaningful visual symbol (e.g. a mandala) or ecstatic activity (e.g. chanting, music-listening or dancing).

For Jung, the self is also an archetype–one of wholeness.

Visible manifestations of the archetypes appear as archetypal images. Jung distinguishes these recognizable images from the archetype proper, which Jung says can never be fully known.

This distinction between the unknowable archetype and its recognizable image is sometimes overlooked in casual commentaries about Jung. » Hero, Mandala, Otto (Rudolf), Psychoid, Trickster

Image Source:

• “Kohenet Archetype Wheel” by Carly & Art at http://www.flickr.com/photos/wiredwitch/365378131/, Creative Commons Share Alike License

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The Book of Job

William Blake’s illustration of Satan Smiting Job with Boils via Wikipedia

The Book of Job is part of the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament. Its main character is Job, a suffering and blameless servant of God.

Christian apologists say that Job’s suffering points to the mysterious ways of God and highlights the need for faithful obedience in the absence of human understanding. Critics say that it depicts God as an immature, cruel tyrant. For instance, the Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung and some Jungians say that God “makes a bet” with Satan. In the story, Satan contends that Job will not remain faithful if God allows Satan to torment him.

In Jung’s Answer to Job, a short commentary about the Job’s plight,  Jung says the Biblical story reveals a dark, non-integrated aspect of God. Why would a perfect God, Jung argues, allow a blameless servant to be persecuted by the devil? When Job challenges God, asking why he suffers, God answers not on Job’s terms but by completely overwhelming him. God asks if Job is able to create the stars, the oceans and a sea monster.

Deutsch: Carl Gustav Jung (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Jung sees this as indicating God’s immaturity. For Jung, God projects his own dark side onto Job. While this dynamic may occur in many people, to Jewish and Christian believers it’s misguided to suggest that God would behave this way (See Isaiah 55:8-9). As God implies to Job, could an allegedly immature consciousness create all of creation?

Biblical scholars debate whether the story of Job refers to an actual person or if it’s just a folktale outlining the general human problem of why do bad things happen to good people? The author of the book is not mentioned. Some traditional rabbis and early Christian theologians believed the author was Moses. Today, some scholars believe that parts of Job were written by at least one additional author.

But to return to Jung, he seems to overlook the folktale aspect by treating Job as a real person. Jung’s writings about Job have also been criticized by Fr. Victor White. White says that Jung confuses a narrative image of God with the actual God. In Jungian terms, White says Jung confuses the God-image (archetypal image) with God (archetype).

Indeed, it seems that Jung analyzes God from the perspective of his own, man-made psychological theories. In reducing God to Jung’s all too human ideas, might Jung, himself, exhibit the psychological mechanism of projection? Theological critics of Jung would certainly say that his commentary on Job suffers from presumption—that is, intellectual arrogance.

William Blake’s illustration of Job’s Sons and Daughters Overwhelmed by Satan via Wikipedia

Regarding the problem of evil, many theologians would maintain that God’s ways are usually way over our heads. Along these lines, we could hypothesize that God permits evil to torment Job for a greater good which, Job, Satan and Jung couldn’t hope to understand.

Jung’s (questionable) analysis aside, the story of Job has parallels in other cultures, most notably the ancient Egyptian Protests of the Eloquent Peasant.

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George Berkeley

George Berkeley is credited with the development of subjective idealism. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

George  Berkeley (1685-1753) was the Anglican Dean of Derry (1724), bishop of Cloyne (1734) and an important philosopher belonging to the school of idealism. Born in Ireland, Berkeley moved to Oxford in 1752 and became one of the so-called British empiricists.

Berkeley believed that the material world exists as an idea created in our minds, ultimately by God. In his New theory of Vision (1709), he argued that our sense of distance isn’t directly perceived but inferred from the repeated association of visual and tactile cues. All of existence, itself, is a group of interacting minds, connecting with archetypes, which themselves derive from God.

He uttered the famous line, perhaps adapted from Shakespeare,

To be is to be perceived or a perceiver.

This means that existence is either a mind or stimuli in a mind.

One way that Berkeley tried to support his view was to note that the idea of heat – what the philosopher John Locke called  a “secondary quality” – is somewhat relative. If one of our hands is cold and the other hot, and we place them into warm water, the one hand feels hot and the other cold. Anyone can do this little experiment and see that it’s true. However, Berkeley added that Locke’s so-called “primary qualities” (e.g. shape, quantity) were also dependent on a perceiving mind. Berkeley, in fact, challenged the entire distinction between primary and secondary qualities, as elaborated upon at Wikipedia:

Portrait of John Locke, by Sir Godfrey Kneller. Oil on canvas. 76×64 cm. Britain, 1697. Source of Entry: Collection of Sir Robert Walpole, Houghton Hall, 1779. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Berkeley maintains that the ideas created by sensations are all that people can know for sure. As a result, what is perceived as real consists only of ideas in the mind. The crux of his argument is that once an object is stripped of all its secondary qualities, it becomes very problematic to assign any acceptable meaning to the idea that there is some object. Not that we can’t picture to ourselves (in our minds) that some object exists apart from any perceiver—we clearly think we can do this—but rather, can we give any content to this idea in any particular case?¹

A slightly different take on the belief that the material world doesn’t exist independent of the mind has been popularized in many books reporting recent discoveries in sub-atomic physics, such as Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters and Fritzoff Capra’s The Turning Point.

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¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary/secondary_quality_distinction#Berkeley.27s_Criticism

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Culture Hero

A modern day trickster via Tumblr

A culture hero is a prominent figure within a given society, often taking the form of a mythical person or animal with roots in ancient or proto-history.

In some instances the culture hero is a trickster, using wiles and well-intentioned disguises to save the community from some grave peril.

The culture hero may also be a real person inspiring a stagnant or perhaps ethically corrupted society, such as a rock star, a film star, an inventor, a discoverer, an admired politician or monarch, and so on.

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Collective Unconscious

collective unconscious (Photo credit: noneck via Flickr)

The idea of the collective unconscious refers to Carl Jung‘s belief that humanity shares an underlying, biologically inherited storehouse of collective experience and knowledge.

From his considerable study of world myth and religion, Jung came to the conclusion that this collective data is cross-cultural. In fact, he didn’t just see the collective unconscious in myth and religion. He saw universally recognizable motifs among dreams, myth, religion, the arts and architecture. One leading example he provides is the mandala. For Jung,  the circular shape of the mandala represents the potentially limitless self.

Jung calls these hypothesized patterns of human existence archetypes.¹ Existing in a larger time frame than most people’s daily awareness, the archetypes of the collective unconscious apparently connect the past, present and future.

Jung speaks to the arbitrary nature of the term collective unconscious. Towards the end of his career he writes that he rendered essentially spiritual ideas in scientific-sounding language for the sake of professional and societal legitimacy. So this, in a sense, makes him something of a postmodern thinker way before the term became popular.

Because he was, in part, doing a sell job, his insistence on the bio-genetic base of the collective unconscious seems confusing to some, especially when he says:

The unconscious has no time. There is no trouble about time in the unconscious. Part of our psyche is not in time and not in space. They are only an illusion, time and space, and so in a certain part of our psyche, time does not exist at all.²

Could a timeless psyche be entirely biological? Perhaps Jung was saying that, although grounded in the body, the archetypes exhibit or resonate with a spiritual component. That is, a bio-genetic ground is necessary for the interplay of body and spirit.

What About Sigmund Freud and the Unconscious?

Freud and Jung’s views about the unconscious differ, but not so much as many believe. Some pop psychologists and New Age gurus quickly dismiss Freud’s ideas, unaware that his model of the unconscious also contains collective elements.

As we’ve seen in the above, Jung describes the archetype as a component of mankind’s psychological substratum—the collective unconscious. Freud similarly spoke of phylogenetic “schemata” and “prototypes.” And borrowing from ancient Greek and Jewish literature, Freud also devised the “Oedipus complex,” a “primal father” and likened the shadowy contents of the unconscious to archaeological ruins.

In addition, late in his career Freud revised his libido theory to include the general ideas of eros (life instinct) and thanatos (death instinct). Because Freud maintained that the fundamental aspects of the unconscious are universal, aspects of his model of the self, like Jung’s, point to a collective unconscious.³ And not only that. Freud, himself, said that Jung introduced nothing new with the idea of the collective unconscious.  He wrote that the “content of the unconscious is collective anyhow.”⁴

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¹ Jung’s notion of the archetypes borrows from ideas previously found in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, religion and theology. The term archetype is traceable to St. Augustine, 354-430 CE.

² C. G. Jung Collected Works vol. 18, para. 684, cited in  “Time and Space” at http://www.fundacion-jung.com.ar/ingles/citas.htm.

³ Michael V. Adams illustrates this point in The Cambridge Companion to Jung, (ed.) Polly Young-Eisendrath and Terence Dawson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 101.

⁴ Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 209, cited in R. J. Lifton with Eric Olson (eds.), Explorations in Psychohistory: The Wellfleet Papers, New York: Simon and Shuster, 1974 p. 90.

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Castor and Pollux

Castor and Pollux by tiseb via Flickr

Also known as the Dioscuri, the Greek Kastor and Polydeuces figure in classical myth. The Roman Castor and Pollux are believed to have intervened in the battle of Regillus in 484 BCE , and recent temple excavations support this claim.¹

As the twin sons of Leda, they are often honored among the pagan gods at Sparta and Rome,² and represented on horseback. As Zeus‘ child, Pollux was immortal and an outstanding boxer.

Castor was the offspring of Tyndareus, mortal and an excellent horseman. At Castor’s death, Pollux beseeched Zeus to grant Castor immortality as he could not bear the thought of separation.

Zeus transformed them both into the constellation Gemini (the Twins). They appear as St. Elmo’s Fire to aid seafarers, and appeared in the New Testament as the image on a grain ship that carried Paul from Malta to Puteoli ³ (Acts 28:11).

And after three months we departed in a ship of Alexandria, which had wintered in the isle, whose sign was Castor and Pollux.⁴

Perhaps because of the archetypal idea of the twins, Castor and Pollux appear through the arts and literature, as attested to here.

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¹ Oxford Classical Dictionary, 1999, p. 303.

² Maas, Georgia S.. “Castor and Pollux.” Oxford Reference. Oxford University Press. . n.d. Web. 23 Oct. 2012. http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195170726.001.0001/acref-9780195170726-e-217.

³ Eerdmans Bible Dictionary, 1987, p. 1024.

⁴ http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%2028:11;&version=KJV;

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Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell, late 1970 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) was an influential American scholar and educator in world religions and mythology.

Campbell’s books and PBS videos (hosted by Bill Moyers) have enjoyed worldwide acclaim. With other innovators like Mircea Eliade, Otto Rank, and Carl Jung, Campbell championed the syncretic study of psychology, myth and spirituality.

Campbell was ahead of many of his peers by seeing the film Star Wars as a contemporary variant, par excellence, of the age-old hero myth.¹ Campbell’s interest in the hero archetype can be traced to the works of Rank and Jung.

Campbell learned several original languages, and had an impressive knowledge of textual data from a wide variety of interconnected fields.

Pedantic and dogmatic critics, however, still entirely dismiss his pioneering attempts. His critics that say his opinions are simplistic. But it’s possible that he’s dumbing things down for a general audience not familiar with the specifics of world myth and religion.

A more serious charge could be that, and contrary to Campbell’s dictum of “follow your bliss,” every once in a while he seems a bit autocratic, particularly in reference to his beliefs about orthodox Catholicism. This isn’t just a problem with Campbell. Many Gnostic,  Fundamentalist, Protestant, New Age, Humanistic, scientific and even environmental thinkers arguably lump “The Church” into one big personal projection of The Big Bad Wolf (as if the Catholic Church is supposed to be perfect here on Earth, which is entirely unreasonable).

Campbell, himself, was a fallen away Catholic, which may have had some bearing on his somewhat negative treatment of Catholicism. He does seem to highlight the Catholic Church’s past mistakes without fully appreciating its positive aspects—e.g. how the Eucharist enriches the lives of present-day believers.²

Another difficulty in Campbells’ analyses of world religions echoes difficulties found in Jung’s work. At times Campbell seems to say that the various paths in world mysticism evoke identical mystical experiences and lead to the same afterlife abode.

This may be a politically correct view and, for all we know, could be true. But ultimate claims about the afterlife cannot be made with any certainty (unless you believe you have a pipeline to God, as so many zealots do).

These shortcomings aside, Campbell’s contribution to the study of myth, religion and culture is noteworthy (some might say remarkable). His popular PBS lectures, taped just months before his unfortunate death due to cancer, reveal that, in his own dignified way he was just as heroic as a Heracles or Luke Skywalker.

It’s not surprising that his name has become almost archetypal among students of world myth and religion.

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¹ Star Wars creator George Lucas says Campbell’s work was influential for the mythic structure of the film. Lucas had the insight to realize that his sci-fi story would work better if it had an authentic mythic feel. By adapting Campbell’s ideas, Lucas hoped that the Star Wars epic would resonate with the masses, which, of course, it did.

² Creative thinkers like Campbell are rarely one-dimensional, however. He also says that one of his peak experiences came when entering Chartres Cathedral in France.

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Cain

Cain and Abel (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Cain is one of Adam and Eve‘s sons in the Biblical book of Genesis. From his treacherous behavior he’s come to symbolize evil.

The story goes like this: Cain and his brother Abel make sacrificial offerings but only Abel’s is acceptable to God. Cain then murders Abel, and the Lord casts him out of the land, placing a special mark on his forehead to protect him from those who might try to harm him for murdering his pious, peaceful brother.

Cain goes on to found a city, becoming materially prosperous but forever alienated from his Maker. He’s mentioned later in the Old Testament Song of Lamech (Gen. 4:24) as the epitome of revenge. He’s also alluded to in the New Testament as “of the evil one” (John 3:12).

In pop culture, Caine (Kwai Chang Caine) is the name of a TV character played by the late actor David Carradine in the 1970′s TV series, Kung Fu. This TV Cain, also known as “Grasshopper” is a wandering Shaolin monk in early America.

Master Po (left) and Kwai Chang Caine (right) in a flashback from the episode “Dark Angel”, written by Herman Miller (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Although Caine has killed the Emperor’s nephew in a act of rage back in China,¹ he becomes an advocate of peace in America. But this new mission in the New World doesn’t prevent him from kicking the daylights out of bad guys in acts of self defense.

The show became something of a cult classic and several spinoffs followed.

The idea of Cain as an archetype of evil is not limited to the Bible and TV. More examples in pop culture and literature can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cain_and_Abel#Popular_culture

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¹ From Wikipedia: “In the pilot episode Caine’s beloved mentor and elder, Master Po, is murdered by the Emperor’s nephew; outraged, Caine retaliates by killing the nephew. With a price on his head, Caine flees China to the western United States.”

Druids

18th-century engraving reproducing a bas-relief found at Autun, France, depicting “two druids” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Druids were Celtic pagan priests. Although much pseudo-history and quasi sacred lore can be found, in actual fact we don’t know too much about them because they were sworn to secrecy and not permitted to express their beliefs in writing. We do, however, have written accounts from indirect sources.

When in Gaul, the Roman leader Julius Caesar noted that the Druids worshipped gods, passed on their traditions to the young, practiced human sacrifice in oak groves and forbade certain people from attending sacrificial ceremonies. Because attendance at sacrificial ceremonies cemented one’s in-group status, those forbidden to attend were marginalized.

Caesar also says the Druids met annually at a location taken to be the center of Gaul. Like contemporary priests, they didn’t fight in wars nor pay taxes. The Roman writer Pliny (the Elder, 23-79 CE) wrote that, in addition to their priestly role, the Druids were seers, diviners and healers.

The ancient Roman senator and historian Tacitus (56–117 CE) mentions Druidic presence in Britain. The Druids served as officials at their allegedly bloody and frightening human sacrifices, the victims usually being criminals. Sometimes, however, innocent people were sacrificed in times of national calamity.

English: An 18th century engraving of a Celtic wicker man. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Caesar says that giant casings of intertwined branches held victims as they were burnt alive by the Druids. Humans and animals, alike, were used as burnt offerings for the gods. However, it’s been suggested that the Romans cited the Druidic practice of human sacrifice to undermine the Druid’s political power. The Romans, themselves, executed human beings for the apparent good of the State (in the form of scourging to the death or crucifixion) but human sacrifice to the gods was no longer practiced in the classical world.

Despite New Age philosophies based on the alleged teachings of the Druids, there is scant hard evidence that they possessed any detailed body of esoteric knowledge or, as S. G. F. Brandon puts it, “any subtle and sophisticated philosophy.” Brandon, in fact, suggests that the Druids were not unlike any other “barbarian priesthood.”¹  And there’s no visible evidence to link the Druids with Stonehenge, as suggested by the English writer John Aubrey in 1649 and by numerous TV specials and contemporary enthusiasts.

Through the fantasy literature of writers like J. J. R. Tolkien and Terry Brooks, the idea of the Druid-Sorcerer is firmly established as a kind of archetypal image depicting the powerful, brooding, wise and yet somewhat ambivalent magician. Not surprisingly,  Druids feature prominently in off- and online gaming.

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¹ S. G. F. Brandon ed., “Celtic (Pagan) Religion” in A Dictionary of Comparative Religion: New York: Scribner, 1970, p. 180-184. By way of contrast, Neo-Druidism is a movement that, among other things, venerates nature.

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Dreams

Salvador Dalí, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening, 1944 (Photo credit: Jameswy.Wang)

Dream interpretation is practiced in most cultures and dates back to ancient times. Dreams have been analyzed in Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, African, Australian, as well as North and South American Aboriginal cultures. The overall aim in dream interpretation is to predict, assist and inspire.

Sigmund Freud makes a distinction between the manifest and latent content of dreams. The manifest content is the symbol first remembered by the conscious dreamer. The latent content is what the dream truly signifies, deciphered through the process of psychoanalysis.

The manifest content is usually a distorted, incomplete version of the actual dream, having undergone a process of psychological censorship. And if the latent content strongly threatens the ego, the manifest content may be symbolized two or more symbolic steps away from the ‘true’ meaning of the dream.

Consider the following hypothetical example: If a student’s unconscious homosexual desires for her math teacher conflicted sharply with her conscious attitude, the remembered dream image would be highly abstract, such as two mathematical equations adding up to the same result. During analysis it would be revealed that the patient also enjoyed dreaming about her math class.

In the next dream the patient would be invited for dinner to her math teacher’s home. Further analysis would reveal that, in the second dream, patient and teacher exchanged compliments over dinner.

After continuing psychoanalysis in this manner, the dream censor is finally overcome and the patient would finally realize her lesbian desire for the math teacher. Freud’s idea of the censor was later replaced by his concept of the superego.

Freud’s pupil and psychology superstar in his own right, C. G. Jung, says there are “big” and “little” dreams. Big dreams are often prophetic and stem from the collective unconscious. Little dreams deal with the personal unconscious and usually compensate for a skewed or incomplete conscious attitude.

In some cases the interpretation of a collective, big dream content is distorted by an unexamined personal unconscious. A similar idea was expressed by the thirteenth-century Kabbalists who claimed that dreamers may communicate angels but divine knowledge is often distorted by “subjective wishes” within one’s own “emotional life.”

Jung believes that his approach incorporates and extends both Freud and Alfred Adler‘s ideas. While Freud and Alder recognize libidinal impulses originating from a common psychological storehouse (similar to Jung’s collective unconscious), Jung’s idea of the archetypes tries to spell out the collective psyche to a degree not found in either Freud’s (i.e. eros/thanatos) or Adler’s (i.e. drive for aggression) theories.

More recently, the ancient interest in dreams and their relation to what is now called paranormal and precognitive phenomena has been rekindled by developments in the New Age movement and within depth psychology.

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