We all know that there are forces within the psyche that profoundly affect our experience of ourselves and the world. By coming to know these, we know ourselves at a deeper level and have access to the accumulated wisdom of human experience. Working with archetypes opens the way to the depths of the human psyche, personally and collectively.
What exactly is an archetype?
Jungian theory tells us that our personal experiences, both conscious and unconscious, rest upon an archetypal foundation in the collective unconscious. Jung beautifully describes an archetype as an inherited mode of functioning, corresponding to the inborn way that a chick emerges form the egg, the bird builds its nest, (click) a certain kind of wasp stings the motor ganglion of a caterpillar to ensure survival of its young, and eels find their way to the Bermudas.
I am reminded of the first visit to the bush with my granddaughter when she was only a few weeks old. A flight of birds, disturbed by our passing, suddenly lifted into the air and the image of their forms outlined against the sky was reflected in her eyes. It could imagine the timeless image activating response patterns in her system.
We all know that biological patterns of behaviour give us specific qualities – like the sucking reflex of a newborn baby. Archetypes can be understood as the psychological part of these instinctual patters, underlying our experience as fundamental templates of human experience.
While we can believe that our lives are uniquely personal, there are also qualities of our experience that we can trace back through generations in our families, or characteristics that can be described through systems like mythology or astrology, both of which recognise the archetypal or patterning energies at work in our lives.
Yet there is no definite, tangible way to describe an archetype. While some approaches are highly spiritualised, Jung located archetypes both within the body and psychically – in matter as well as psyche (recognising the inseparability of these). We can only fully experience archetypes in embodied experience.
Jung wrote about the objective reality of the collective unconscious – the literal reality of inner life. Spirit and matter, archetype and instinct, are polarities of the one continuum of experience – from infra-red to ultra-violet. An archetype is not just an abstraction or a philosophical idea – archetypes come present in the embodied experience of being human.
James Hillman and others have suggested that we ask what God or Goddess is calling for our attention in our disturbances, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual: there is a God or Goddess at the heart of every complex.
We can find archetypes as psychological realities in dreams and active imagination, and in the various symptoms and disturbances that call us to inner work. How can we recognise an archetypal experience?
There may be an archetype calling for attention when we are gripped by strong positive or negative emotions, fascinations, compulsions, projections, disturbing internal states such as anxiety and depression, and physical symptoms for which medical science can find no cause.
The one most of us recognise is falling in love, especially the intense infatuation that seems to strike from nowhere. Of course we know that Eros is shooting his arrows of desire, lighting up an aspect of ourselves we initially experience via the beloved. Or do we? It is sometimes easier to think that our emotions and fascinations are nothing but neurotic fantasies or unresolved problems form childhood.
Goddess archetypes have been present in all cultures across time – in images, myths, songs, and story. In fairytales we find the queen, the wicked stepmother, the witch, the fairy godmother etc. In the contemporary media these archetypal aspects are alive and well (or not so well).
In 1951, Toni Wolff wrote a short paper on the Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche. She described how the disappearance of the feminine principle, the loss of meaning in culture and myth, as well as the loss of meaning of the figure of Mary, has led to an exclusive reliance of “the word” as a fundamental principle. What was lost is the experience of the life-giving power of the feminine as central to all life, in the World and in our inner worlds.
Toni Wolff described four forms of the feminine archetype: Mother, Hetaira, Amazon, Medial woman. This model does not cover the complexity of Goddess in all Her forms, but it can be a useful starting point for differentiating aspects of archetypal experience.
The Mother is nurturing, tending, and teaching. Her instinct responds to all that is in the process of becoming or that is in need of protection or assistance. This archetypal energy supports what is unaccomplished and provides room for psychic development and greater security and finds fulfilment in relationship to this. The undeveloped aspect of this archetype involves anxious tending and teaching that is not needed, event to the pint of hindering development. The mother archetype was central to the Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece – the seasonal sacred re-enactment of Demeter’s grieving for her daughter Persephone, taken to the Underworld by Hades. This is a story of death and rebirth, the myth of the eternal return that guided humanity for millennia. In meeting Demeter, we also meet the Great Mother Goddess – as seen in the figurines of Great Mother from around 40,000 years ago.
The Hetaira is instinctively related to the personal in individual relationships. She conveys a sense of personal value apart from collective value. The function of the Hetaira is to awaken the individual psychic life. In this form, sexual engagement is secondary to the individual law of the relationship: if sexual expression is intrinsic to the relationship, then conventional morality is unlikely to stand in the way. But the Hetaira archetype is not just a sexual archetype as is often portrayed in images and stories – for the Hetaira, eroticism (Eros) permeates all aspects of intimate relationship whether or not it is explicitly sexual.
The Amazon is independent and self-contained in the positive meaning of the terms. She is independent of the male and her interest is directed towards objective achievements for her own accomplishment. The emphasis is on the individual’s own personality, and its development tends to be focused within the objective cultural values of the time, quite independent of others and of instinctive or other factors.
The Medial archetypal form perceives the unconscious background to life. This archetype calls for immersion in the psychic atmosphere of the environment and the spirit of the period, and above all the collective unconscious. This may involve being called to the service of the new or emerging spirit of the Age – via practices like astrology, healing, psychotherapy etc. The capacity for discrimination determines whether the expression will be of a true mediatrix rather than a less developed medium as can be seen in many New Age approaches. In pre-industrial cultures these were the seers, sybils, and medicine women. In its undeveloped form, this archetypal energy can trap a woman in the Kore – the maiden aspect of Persephone. This undeveloped form is considered especially attractive in contemporary culture as she is vulnerable to projections that fulfill undeveloped masculine fantasies and desires.
A Goddess is a particular form that a feminine archetype takes in the context of a mythological story or the cosmology of an era. The images and symbols of Goddess from our ancient past, from contemporary art, and from our inner life (dreams and active imagination), are all part of the collective unconscious and carry meaning and value for our lives today. In mythology across cultures, since the beginning of time, the commonality of images and practices is evidence that what we experience in our inner depths is real, as real as our waking reality.
Yet we need to go beyond considering just the symbols. Unless we engage the living reality of these archetypes, we perpetuate a disenfranchisement of the feminine principle that has been happening for millennia. We move closer to the sacred in our lives when we recognise Goddess as a manifestation of an autonomous presence that is calling for attention. Goddess is real and needs to be experienced in our bodies, our emotions, our day to day loves, not as figment of the imagination but as a living presence.
Meet Mago Contributor Kaalii Cargill