Archetype

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Archetype

Archetype is a term used in religious and mythic studies to indicate regularly occurring universal patterns witnessed across world religions and cultures. An external expression of an archetype might bear unique qualities characteristic of that specific culture, yet the underlying skeletal form of the motif will be the same in all traditions.

The term is primarily associated with the work of the Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung (1875–1961). The theory of consciousness that he authored is, in fact, sometimes referred to as the archetypal theory. This term is absolutely central to Jung's entire oeuvre and to the work of those who follow in the Jungian tradition.

Jung self-consciously took the term from the original Greek philosophers of the sixth to fourth centuries b.c.e. These founders of the Western philosophical tradition, known as the pre-Socratics, were originally cosmologists who authored theories regarding the nature and origin of the cosmos. The pre-Socratics were searching for what is labeled in German scholarship the Urstoff, the "original stuff" of the universe. The first philosopher, Thales (ca. 625–547 b.c.e.), posited that the Urstoff was water, Anaximines (fl. 545 b.c.e.) thought it was air, and so on. Several terms were employed by these philosophers for this essential substratum of the cosmos, one of which was the term arche.

"Arche" is a Greek word that is the source of English words relating to "archaic." In Greek it means "old" but also something more: it signifies "original" or "first." The first words of the Bible, "In the beginning," were rendered in the Greek translation (the Septuagint) as "Arche." The arche is what was there "in the beginning" or "from the beginning."

Later philosophers developed highly complex theoretical systems, building upon the foundation the pre-Socratics had set. Plato (425–367 b.c.e.), in his famous theory of forms, states that the physical, or "phenomenal," world is only an imperfect copy of a higher, nonmaterial realm of perfection, where the forms exist as eternal, immutable, perfect ideas, such as beauty, truth, justice, and so on. One of the terms Plato used for these forms was archai.

As Plato's school continued to evolve, the middle-Platonists re-imaged the forms as pure, perfect thoughts in the mind of God, which can emanate out from Him into the physical world. This philosophy was then inherited by Augustine (354–425 c.e.) and other Christian theologians known as the church fathers. Augustine applied the term archetypes to these exemplary thoughts in the mind of God, one of which, the Logos, proceeds out from Him, takes on a human form and becomes the Christ in the theological formulation of the church. This is the philosophical legacy then that Jung purposely petitions in his use of the term archetype.

Types are "typical" patterns. This term also derives from a Greek word, typos, meaning an "imprint" or "impression," such as footprints will leave pressed into the wet sand along the sea coast. Archetypes are fundamentally understood, then, to mean "original impressions," or "imprints present from the beginning."

Though Jung borrows the term archetype from the Greek and early Christian philosophers, his concept of what it means is somewhat different. The locus of the archetypes in Jung's system is not some ethereal, transcendental realm of perfection or the mind of God. Jung places them as original impressions within collective consciousness—one of the key features of Jung's theoretical system.

In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961), Jung recounts an important dream he had in 1909, which first led him to his signature theory of the collective unconscious. In the dream he was in the upper story of a house and proceeded down the stairways to the lower level, then to the basement and subbasement. At each successive level the scene became darker and historically older, until the subbasement appeared as a prehistoric cave shared by animals. Jung felt that this dream represented the structure of the psyche. The ego consciousness is on top, but it is undergirded by successively older layers containing within them the entire history of life. This means that the archaic past is carried within all of us, allowing us to access ancient memory traces from out of the great repository of consciousness.

Onto this field of consciousness the ongoing experience of life has imprinted forms, typically expressed as images. These primal forms in consciousness include not only memory traces from the entire history of life's evolution but also potentialities for future developments. These forms Jung labels the "archetypes," calling them the "living contents of the unconscious," symbolized by the fish and other life (archetypes) which are the "living contents" of the vast, unfathomable ocean (unconscious), or the trees (archetypes), the "living contents" of the forest (unconscious). He describes the archetypes as a priori structures built into consciousness, and says they are equivalent to the "instincts."

By the term a priori, Jung means that these structures are present prior to any personal experience the individual may have had. They are built in just as hands and other physical structures are built in by the genetic coding. In a parallel manner, the archetypes are innate structures built into consciousness that will then well up autonomously in dreams, fantasies, pathologies, mythologies, folklore, and religion.

Jung's theory of a priori structures inherent in consciousness would represent the polar opposite of John Locke (1632–1705), the British empiricist philosopher famous for the concept of the tabula rasa, the theory that each of us is a totally "blank slate" at birth, and everything in our consciousness is learned a posteriori, "after direct experience."

To call the archetypes instincts is a profound statement. Jung believes archetypal forms encompassing everything from geometric shapes to mythic and spiritual elements are instinctive to life forms, just as the drives to satisfy hunger and to reproduce are. We instinctively produce a vast range of archetypal potentialities, all of which press for expression; as Jung says in the opening statements of his autobiography, "Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation."

Owing to the presence of these archetypal forms, similar motifs show up across the world. The pyramid, a structure built in the ancient world by Sumerians, Egyptians, Indians, Chinese, Meso-Americans, and others is one prominent example. Jung believes this is not due to cultural diffusion, the hypothesis that one group invented the pyramid and travelers to that place learned of it there (a posteriori) and spread it to other places. Certain areas were completely isolated from others until centuries later. Jung believed that direct contact between cultures is not required to produce similar forms in art, architecture, religion, and other media. The pyramid shape has been produced across the world because the form preexists and is held in common by all within the collective unconscious. From there it can well up and be externally expressed at different times in different parts of the world.

This concept of archetypal forms in collective consciousness, according to Jung, is the explanatory mechanism accounting for synchronistic expressions all across the board. Where others might apply the word "coincidence," Jung rejects this concept as by far the more unlikely possibility and places in its stead the term "synchronicity."

Archetypal forms are virtually infinite in number. In the twenty volumes of his Collected Works, Jung provides examples and presents the evidence for his claims. A few prominent examples of archetypal forms include the ubiquitous shape of the circle, or mandala, which Jung thinks is symbolic of the key category of "wholeness." Mandalic forms show up in religious symbols and rituals, art forms, the dreams of individuals, and even as a fundamental shape produced by phenomena in nature, such as planets, stars and galaxies, and the structure of atoms, the building blocks of all physical reality.

Specific elements occurring in nature leave impressions upon consciousness as archetypal forms, such as the the snake, which appears in religious and mythic contexts all over the world. Each archetype is holistic, that is, opposite aspects are always represented, as in the fearsome, awful qualities of the snake, as well as its awesome, fascinating side. Other animal forms impress human consciousness and come to expression as the archetype of the wolf, the bear, the horse, the jackal, the bull, the whole range of different birds, and so on. Each such symbol represents qualities that are ultimately ineffable, beyond description, and numinous, or awe producing, as, for example, the wolf archetype represent the essentially untamable quality and the winged horse, the soaring of the imagination in unlimited freedom.

Mythographers and historians of religion are in an excellent position to document archetypal forms, as both religion and myth are considered by Jung to be veritable treasure-houses of archetypal symbolism. All the gods and heroes of mythic lore are precisely archetypal expressions, according to Jung, whether or not they are understood by specific religious adherents to be actually existent beings. Thus gods and goddesses appear in typical patterns in religious contexts all across the world.

We can easily take note of these types: the thunder/lightning/war god such as Zeus, Jupiter, Thor, Indra, and even Yahweh; the dying and rising gods who offer resurrection and eternal life, such as Osiris, Dionysus, Persephone, Attis, Adonis, Baal, and Jesus Christ; and triple-goddess traditions across the world representing variants of virgin, mother, and crone. Specific archetypal motifs will sometimes constellate to form a complex, such as the Oedipus complex, or an archetypal pattern, as in the hero myth found all over the world.

According to Jung, it is because there are underlying patterns in consciousness that are "alive" in the collective psyche that such common themes repeat themselves in religious and mythic traditions and in the lives of individuals as well. Jungians feel that the existence of such common patterns everywhere can not be understood if one does not posit the existence of something like archetypal forms in a collective consciousness.