Month: September 2024

I had just finished the outline of the most recent revision of my Archetypal Human framework, when I stumbled upon this short clip featuring a midwife giving advice to future mothers.

The midwife is a classic example of an Elder archetype. Given the absence of Elders in our culture, it is always refreshing to hear words of wisdom from those who have been there and done that. But the particular way this midwife framed the issue of motherhood fits exactly with my notion of archetypal transitions more generally.

Long-term readers might remember the way I like the frame the archetypal progression of life using the levels of being concept. More recently, I’ve been playing around with a modification on this using the concept of “identity”.

We can distinguish four main dimensions of identity throughout our lives and we can map each of these against the four main archetypes. This gives us the following table:-

	Child	Orphan	Adult	Elder
Spiritual	N/A	Initiate	Member	Elder
Political	N/A	N/A (in the modern West)	Citizen	Mentor
Economic	N/A	Student, apprentice	Practitioner	Mentor
Biological	Childhood	Puberty/Adolescence	Maturity	Senescence

I have left two major items off the above list since they are the two which are the focus of the midwife’s advice: marriage and parenthood.

Marriage doesn’t fit into the list easily is because it is actually a combination of all the other identities. Marriage is a political, economic, biological (sexual) and possibly spiritual (esoteric) relationship. Marriage is also directly related to the question of childbirth since marriage has traditionally been the institution for the raising of children.

For these reasons, marriage is usually undertaken by individuals who have already achieved maturity in at least the biological, economic, and political domains. The idea that marriage should be predicated on romantic love is a nice one, but not widely practiced throughout history since most societies do not have the level of wealth to be able to afford such luxuries, at least among the general population.

The question of marriage and the related issue of childbirth raises an important asymmetry between the sexes. Modern feminists have focused on the fact that, for most of history, women have been denied a political and economic role in society. More specifically, the Adult political and economic role for women has been marriage itself, and the associated rearing of children in the household.

Viewed in isolation, this does seem to be a limiting factor in the lives of women. However, when we examine the bigger picture including the biological domain, we find that there is another aspect to asymmetry, one that is almost never talked about.

For women, all four of the archetypal phases of life have a definitive biological metamorphosis associated with them. But this is not true for men. Focusing just on the biological level of being, we can map the phases for the two sexes as follows:-

	Men	Women
Child	Childhood	Childhood
Orphan	Puberty	Puberty
Adult		Pregnancy-Childbirth
Elder		Menopause

Not only are men missing the biological markers for the transitions into the Adult and Elder archetypes, a very strong case can be made that puberty is not as dramatic a transition for men as it is for women.

This asymmetry on the biological plane corresponds to the aforementioned asymmetry at the socio-political level that modern feminists have been keen to emphasise. In societies as radically different as aboriginal Australia and medieval Europe, men are initiated into the socio-political institutions of society at puberty, while women are not. Even in cultures where women do receive some form of initiation, the initiation given to men is universally more onerous and often involves significant tests of physical hardship.

When viewed this way, it does rather seem that most societies have intuited that men need a little extra help with the marking of the archetypal transitions of life precisely because they lack the biological “initiation” that women get for free. The extra socio-political emphasis placed on male initiation and marriage customs could actually be seen as a way to ensure men are properly inducted into the institutions of family and society and to prevent them from abdicating their responsibilities.

I suspect a big part of the difficulty facing men these days is due to the absence of socio-cultural initiation. This has become even more pronounced in the last few decades with the de-industrialisation of most western nations, since even old-fashioned factory or mining work was a form of physical initiation for young men. Meanwhile, the advent of no-fault divorce has meant that marriage has lost much of its sense of importance as well.

With the loss of socio-political initiation, many men never get to experience a genuine phase change between the Child – Orphan archetypes. This is surely one of the main reasons behind the emergence of the man-child phenomenon: the fully grown adult living in his parents’ basement playing computer games (or some variation on that). Women do not have this luxury since the biological metamorphoses associated with the archetypal phases of life happen for women whether they like it or not.

Now, clearly, motherhood is an optional thing, especially since contraception and abortion are freely available these days. But, for women who do become mothers, the archetypal change is guaranteed, at least at the biological level. It’s perhaps for this reason that the advice of the midwife in the aforementioned video is so poignant because what she describes is the essence not just of the motherhood transition but of all archetypal transitions in life.

If we look at the main points the midwife makes, she begins with the statement that when a woman has a baby, her life will change in ways that she can’t know in advance. That is true of all the major transitions in life. You can read as much about them as you like, but the only way to truly experience the change is to go through it.

With the Adult initiations of life, it’s also well to remember that these traditionally came with significant risk. Rates of death for women during childbirth have been in double digit percentages for most of history. Meanwhile, initiation for young men inevitably entailed military training with the non-zero chance of having to put it into action on the battlefield. The archetypal transitions were not just psychological or theoretical challenges. They were very real.

None of that is true for a modern westerner, and that leads to the next point the midwife makes in the video that the attitude towards becoming a mother tends to be negative in the general culture. You may feel that you have “lost all the good things in life”, she says. But this same attitude can be applied to any archetypal transition because any transition means giving up whatever was good about the old archetype in order to embrace the new.

An argument can and has been made that it would be best to remain a child forever, since childhood is a time of wonder and joy where anything is possible. Similarly, you can argue that it would be better to remain an Adult and not have to become an Elder with the physical difficulties that inevitably come with old age. Some pessimists have even argued that it would be better never to be born in the first place, and thus the archetypal transformation of birth is a terrible thing for them.

The truth is that transitioning from one archetype to the next involves giving up the positive aspects of the old archetype. If you focus on those, the transition seems like a loss. But you can equally well focus on the good things about the archetype you are moving into. In fact, this is what the midwife does in the video. She calls motherhood a “promotion”, one that comes with more responsibility.

It’s for this reason that I like to refer to the archetypes as mini-lives. That means that each transition between them is a mini-death. This might sound like hyperbole, but it is the implication of what the midwife says. To become a mother is to “lose the goods things” about not being a mother. You lose them forever, too, since you can never go back to the state of not being a mother (or never having been one).

The final point that the midwife makes is the most surprising and what caught my attention when I first saw the video. She says that when you become a Parent, you cease to be a person and instead become a “role”. What is a “role” if not an archetype? I interpret her statement as saying that you become an archetype when you become a parent. However, once again, this point is equally true of every other archetypal phase of life.

To be born is to step into the archetype of the Child. To go through puberty and initiation into the institutions of society is to become the Orphan archetype. As Adults, we manifest several archetypes in line with the various features of our identity. If we become a Parent, then we are either a Mother or Father and we take on that role. We also have our economic, political, and spiritual identities and these are all archetypes too.

When people ask what job you do, they are asking for your economic archetype. You tell them butcher, baker, or candlestick maker, and they rightly feel that they know something about you. Similarly, in western nations, you become a Citizen with the right to vote and other political rights and responsibilities. If you are religious, you manifest the archetype of the Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Buddhist etc etc.

All these are the Exoteric aspects of the archetypes, and it is a curious feature of our society that to manifest an archetype is nowadays seen as limiting to the point of oppression. That is why the midwife’s advice is interesting, because it goes against the default assumptions of our culture. We want to be individuals. The midwife’s advice suggests that it’s perfectly okay, even desirable, just to be an archetype.

Is that true?

The one part of the midwife’s speech that I disagree with is the idea that we stop being a “person” when we become a “role”. The “person” part of the equation is what I call the Esoteric dimension, while the “role” part is the Exoteric. Once we understand that these are two sides of the same coin, we see that neither one nor the other is “correct”. Rather, there should be a balance.

It is possible to lose yourself in an archetypal role and cease to be an individual. I don’t see that as desirable any more than it’s desirable to assert your individuality by attempting to manifest no archetype at all. Somewhere between the extreme esotericism of modern western culture and the Exoteric emphasis of the midwife’s advice lies the right balance between fulfilling a role and being an individual.   

Bill Bryson once wrote that, for an American, travelling through country Australia was like going back in time by four or five decades. I always liked that idea because I spent my primary school years in a country town before moving to the big city and I very much remember the culture shock that came with the transition. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I had received a very old-fashioned education, one that would nowadays be considered not just inappropriate but probably illegal.

One of the aspects of that old-fashioned education was that, even though the school I attended was not an officially religious school, there was a fair amount of religion thrown in. For example, we used to always recite the Lord’s Prayer. To this day, I can still repeat it line-for-line from memory.

There’s a more personal reason that I remember the Lord’s Prayer, however. As a kid, I was puzzled by two lines in the prayer:

forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive those who trespass against us

I knew what trespassing was because many of the farms in the area where I lived had “No Trespassing” signs on the front gate. Combined with the lines from the Lord’s Prayer, I got the idea that trespassing must be a really bad thing to do. I remember even asking my teacher why God was so concerned with trespassing, but she seemed quite taken aback by the question and couldn’t produce any kind of meaningful answer.

Much later, I learnt that the word “trespass” in old English meant essentially the same as what we now mean by the word “sin”. Thus, the more accurate modern translation of the Lord’s Prayer would be, forgive us our sins/as we forgive those who sin against us. Nevertheless, in my mind, the prayer has always had the connotation of walking on another’s land without permission.

It’s for this reason that it recently occurred to me that there’s a connection between the Lord’s Prayer and another practice which has become popular these days: land acknowledgements. But the more I got thinking about it, the more I realised that this wasn’t just a figment of my imagination but that there are some fundamental issues at play.

Land acknowledgements have become far more common in the last decade or so, and this appears to be linked to the fact that they’ve gone international. Recently, Canada and even the USA have gotten in on the action.

Canadian and American readers might be interested to know that land acknowledgements began here in Australia in the 1970s as part of the indigenous rights movement. In those days, their use was limited. But the number of land acknowledgements has increased exponentially in the last decade or so. They are now recited at major sporting events, corporate shindigs, and, apparently, in some government departments, at the beginning of literally every meeting during the work day.

The American and Canadian versions of the land acknowledgement focus around mentioning the names of the tribes who belong to whatever geographical location the acknowledgement is taking place at. That’s also true of the original Australian version. But the Australian one has an extra line that has noticeably been left out of the Canadian and American versions: I pay my respects to Elders past, present, and future.

Long-term readers would know that I have written extensively about what I call the four primary archetypes, one of which is the Elder (the other three being Child, Orphan and Adult). The Elder archetype is conspicuously absent from modern Western culture, and I trace that development back to the Reformation. Perhaps the last vestige of elderhood in the West was the priest of the various Christian churches, but, of course, even those have all but disappeared in the post-war years and have almost no cultural significance for the average Australian these days. That is why only people like me who received a very old-fashioned education (or an explicitly religious one) would be able to recite the Lord’s Prayer nowadays.

It is perhaps because of the absence of Elders in the modern West that almost nobody seems to have realised how weird it must be for us to “pay our respects to the Elders”. We have no connotation of what that actually means or even what an Elder is. We don’t know it from our own culture, and we certainly don’t know what it means in indigenous culture.

In fact, the Elders of aboriginal tribes in Australia were always men and only a subset of men. Elders were both political and religious leaders. They were a combination of what we would call priest and politician. Among other things, Elders were responsible for administering the religious-magical rites around the land. These rites tie in with a worldview which modern westerners can barely comprehend.

Aboriginal people believe that their spirit is directly tied to a geographical location. There is no distinction between the political and the spiritual on the subject of land. Men are believed to be the carriers of spirit, and that is why Elders are always men and always tied to a specific geographical location.

Thus, to some degree, paying respects to Elders does fit with the theology and metaphysics of aboriginal culture in the same way that the Lord’s Prayer fits with the theology and metaphysics of Christianity. Of course, most people in modern Australia do not believe the metaphysics of Christianity any more than they believe, or even understand, the metaphysics of aboriginal culture. It’s perhaps for that reason that we could so easily substitute the land acknowledgement in the place where the Lord’s Prayer used to be recited.

For us, such ceremonies are far more political than they are spiritual and have been for pretty much all the history of modern Australia. Australia was founded at a time when the elites of most of Europe, but certainly of Britain, were no longer really believers in Christianity. Already by that time, the Protestant churches fulfilled less of a spiritual and more of a political purpose. They had taken on the role of “moral policeman” on behalf of the state, and they continued to do so until the post-war collapse in religious observance.

With religion no longer able to fill the role of the moral police, the state has largely turned to academia and its “experts” to fill the void. The substitution of land acknowledgements for the Lord’s Prayer makes sense within this development.

That accounts for the politics of the issue. But, more recently, I saw a fascinating variation of a land acknowledgement that made me realise there was more to it than just politics.

As just mentioned, most land acknowledgements take place in public settings and are issued by public officials. But I recently saw a land acknowledgement written by a private individual in a setting where it was not required. In other words, it was not a political statement but, as far I could tell, a genuine expression of a personal belief.

The author mostly followed the now standard format but added a new line at the beginning. It went something like this: I stand here as an uninvited guest on the land of <name of aboriginal tribe>.

Now, what is an “uninvited guest” if not a trespasser, and what is a trespasser if not a sinner? Suddenly, I realised that the correspondences between the land acknowledgement and the Lord’s Prayer were not merely formal in nature. The land acknowledgement is actually a repetition of the Christian notion of trespass—sin. This person could very well have written “I stand here as a sinner” and captured the exact same meaning.

This is not just an arbitrary or accidental reading. It makes perfect sense when we consider the theology of Christianity.

Adam and Eve sinned and were thrown out of the garden of Eden to walk the earth as uninvited guests and, hopefully, to find their way back to salvation. The original sin of Christianity involves being thrown out of your home.

The founding of Australia was rather biblical in the sense that we had criminals (sinners) being kicked out of their home country and sent far away as punishment. They ran head first into a culture that had a metaphysics almost diametrically opposed to their own.

The aboriginal Australians had a belief system that has probably been shared, in a broad sense, by a majority of humanity for most of history. For them, their own spirit was directly tied to the land on which they lived. The reason why they were born in a specific geographical location was because their spirit belonged to that location and would return to it at the time of death.

A big part of what makes Jewish history unique is that they were a people who were kicked out of their native lands and forced to wander. They managed to do so while retaining a unique culture and religious belief. It is that background that gave rise to Christianity and which was then passed on to the northern barbarians of Europe.

Thus, for medieval European Christians, the “holy land” was not, like aboriginal Australians, the place where they lived but a location far away, and they were prepared to march thousands of kilometres to fight wars over the matter.

All that was possible because the theology of Christianity had already dissociated spirit from any particular geographical location. Spirit was in heaven, and heaven was accessible from anywhere on the mortal earth, whether it be northern Europe, the eastern Mediterranean, or Terra Australis.

Modern Europeans, and by extension modern Australians, inherited a theology where spirit was disconnected from land. In this they were diametrically opposed to the indigenous peoples. It was very much the same story that had played out in north and south America, and I think Jean Gebser was absolutely correct in noting that much of the damage done to the native populations was an unintentional by-product of a situation that was devastating to the spiritual beliefs of the indigenous populations.

The very first governor of Australia, Arthur Phillip, had been given explicit instructions not to engage in violence towards the native population except in self-defence. However, the arrival of settlers who had an insurmountable military advantage inevitably meant that the native population was going to be geographically displaced even without a bullet being fired.

This displacement was devastating to the aboriginals in ways that the settlers could never have begun to understand. Aboriginals believed their very spirit was tied to the land. To remove them from that land was to destroy their spirit and the basis for their magical worldview. That is what Gebser meant when he said that the damage done to the natives was existential not primarily in a military or mortal sense, although there was obviously that side to it, but in a theological and philosophical one.

To try and appreciate what it must have been like, imagine that aliens showed up on earth and all of our technology immediately stopped working. We’d have no idea why it wasn’t working, we’d just know that it stopped working when the aliens arrived. Even if the aliens didn’t actively attack us, it’s not hard to see how this would be catastrophic. Our worldview, our entire understanding of cause and effect, would have been rendered useless.

For an indigenous person, the statement “I am an uninvited guest” could never have been uttered except in a mode of almost spiritual terror. To tread upon another’s land was to tread upon the basis of their spiritual existence. Moreover, it implied that you had strayed from your own land which was the basis of your strength in both a magical and physical sense. In the normal course of events, such actions would require a series of rites and ceremonies, which made the act safe for everybody involved. It would certainly not be a casual statement; an acknowledgement.

At least at a theoretical level, the “Welcome to Country” and the land acknowledgement capture the fact that indigenous peoples carried out such ceremonies. But ceremonies are meaningless without the worldview that informs them. All of this business can go on precisely because nobody really believes in what is being said or done, just as my primary school teacher had never given a second thought to the meaning of trespass in the Lord’s Prayer. It was just words spoken because that was part of her job.

At least the Lord’s Prayer asks for forgiveness for our trespasses. A land acknowledgement is far more bloodless.

This week the Australian government introduced a so-called misinformation and disinformation bill into the parliament. I’ve heard of a number of other western nations introducing similar measures in recent times, so this is yet another example of seemingly independent countries magically operating in lockstep with each other, thereby fuelling the exact kinds of conspiracy theories that governments want to call disinformation in the first place. Maybe if governments could figure out how not to act as if they were in a conspiracy, people wouldn’t think they were. Just a thought.

As part of the initial debate on the bill, I learnt for the first time what the words misinformation and disinformation mean. Apparently, misinformation is incorrect information, while disinformation is incorrect information with intent to mislead.

The Ten Commandments has a clause against deception—thou shalt not bear false witness—but it does not have a clause against being wrong for the obvious reason that humans are often wrong, and making it illegal to be wrong makes everybody a criminal. So, we’re all going to be criminals shortly, or at least potentially criminals.

It reminds me the way that we were all potentially “asymptomatically infected” during the Corona hysteria. Thus, the misinformation and disinformation nonsense fits the recent pattern of western governments viewing the citizens of their own countries as the enemy. As we will see in this post, they have good reason to do so.

All of this debate revolves around the still relatively new technology of the internet. The paradigm of a new technology challenging the entrenched power structures of society is nothing new. In fact, we have an excellent template by which to judge the current goings-on in a historical event that was also precipitated by a revolutionary new technology: the Reformation.

The word heresy comes from the Greek and originally meant something similar to a philosophy or ideology. There were many religious sects in the ancient world and each of them had a theology that they believed in. That’s what a heresy was—a doctrine. Later, once the Catholic Church had taken upon itself the right to enforce the correct opinions about things, heresy came to mean quite literally a doctrine that differed from the Church’s doctrine.

This was the first step in a process that had very serious consequences. Failure to correct an unapproved opinion meant the charge was upgraded from misinformation to disinformation, and the end of the road for that was death at the hands of the Church authorities. Again, the Church had lots of practice at that. Many a heretic had been put to death over the centuries, and Martin Luther was all set to become just another statistic in the Church’s exquisitely kept record books.

But things had changed by Luther’s time, and what ultimately saved his life was his mastery of a new technology known as the printing press. Like all the early Protestants, Luther was a university man. Reading and writing were much more than just a profession for people like him; they were literally a religious practice. Luther was one of the best writers of his time. Far from apologising to the Church for his wrongthink, he decided to turn his skills towards writing screeds openly challenging the system.

Luther had an ability to capture the imagination of the people of his time in memorable phrases. The title of his later pamphlet, “Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants,” gives you an indication of his turn of phrase. He was bombastic, belligerent and very entertaining.

The political aspect of all of this was one that Luther clearly understood since he openly spoke to the nobility of Europe in terms of their self-interest. The Catholic Church was sucking enormous amounts of money out of the relatively poor lands of the north, and Luther pointed out the advantage that could be gained if that money remained where it was earned. This patriotic side to Luther is not that well remembered these days.

All of this was made possible by the printing press. The king of a small northern European province could not stand up alone against the might of the Church. If he did, the Church could instruct the local priesthood to defame him at the Sunday sermon and bring him back into line. The printing press broke the Church’s monopoly on communication. It was a brand new information technology that allowed the relatively decentralised spread of ideas, and Luther weaponised it to criticise the Church itself.

It is here that we see clearly the parallels to our own time. The promise of the internet was always that it could be as revolutionary as the printing press. That sounds nice in an abstract sense, but what we’re seeing now is the real-world political manifestation of that playing out. Whether the internet will break the status quo in the same way that the printing press broke the Catholic Church remains to be seen. But we can use the template of the Reformation to understand what is going on.

It is no small irony that we’ve ended up with a political structure that is very similar to the one that existed at the time of the Reformation. The Catholic Church was a transnational institution that levied taxes and could wield military force against the peoples it controlled. However, its power was exercised mostly through its monopoly on the flow of information. If we take a purely secular view, we would say that the Catholic Church governed psychologically through the threat of eternal damnation. The value of indulgences was directly proportional to the credibility of that threat in the minds of the general public.

The problem for the Church was that it was so rich and powerful that the people who represented it became corrupt. That was especially true in Rome, but even many of the local monks and priests scattered throughout Europe earned reputations for idleness, hypocrisy, and worse. This created the conditions by which the general public had become disillusioned with the system, and it was this underlying sentiment which Luther expertly tapped into.

The structure of the Reformation, then, was a heroic figure, Martin Luther, capturing the affection of the general public against the multinational institution of the Catholic Church, with the nobility of northern Europe subtly manipulating the dynamic to pursue their own agenda against the Church. The overall trend was towards decentralisation, facilitated by a technology that made that possible: the printing press.

How does this template apply to our time? Well, we clearly have multinational institutions now that do not just span western Europe but the entire globe. There are many of these, but I think the most important one for our purpose is one that is not official. Let’s call it the Liberal World Order. The Liberal World Order is the nations of the West, including close allies Japan and South Korea. The reason why the leaders of all western nations seem to act in lockstep is because they are all card-carrying members of the Liberal World Order.

If we compare our time to the Reformation, we can see that the Liberal World Order fills the same role as the Catholic Church. It is a multinational institution that has economic and military capability but which mostly operates through control of ideology, just like the Catholic Church did. The internet clearly maps to the printing press as the new technology which is a threat to the status quo.

That raises the big question: who is Luther? Who is the hero who will master the new technology in order to challenge the power of the multinational conglomerate which reserves to itself the right to determine the very nature of truth?

The obvious answer here is Trump since it was Trump’s victory in the 2015 presidential election that has precipitated the Liberal World Order’s crackdown on the internet.

It’s hard to think of two more different kinds of men than Trump and Luther, and yet their use of the new technology is almost identical. Remember that Luther was a master of memorable language and used the printing press to be able to get his message in front of the general public. That’s clearly what Trump also did, and he did it by making statements that were completely outside the acceptable range of opinions but which resonated with the general public. I don’t think it’s misinformation to say that Trump could never have been president without the internet.

Thus, Trump is the heroic figure who uses the new technology to bypass the gatekeepers and get his message directly in front of the general public, where he taps into the underlying resentment that the public has toward the established multinational power structure. But the parallels do not stop there.

Luther was not trying to overthrow the Church. He was a puritan who wanted the Church to weed out the corruption of the system and return to its roots.

There’s a very important point about puritan ideologies that we have to understand. The picture-perfect characterisation of the Church as it once was back in the glorious past is an illusion. It is an idealised vision that never really existed.

But therein lies the power of puritan movements which can actually present an optimistic vision for the future. This gives them an advantage against mature institutions which have become cynical. The Catholic Church was mostly definitely in a hyper-cynical state during Luther’s time, and our current political structure is the same.

The world-weary cynics who derided Trump’s Make America Great Again as childish or stupid thus missed the point. The puritan reformer is a Fool in the archetypal sense, and the Fool is kryptonite for corrupt and cynical institutions who no longer even pretend to offer anything in the way of idealism or the promise of something new and better (this is why, as I previously pointed out, the Trump story is a comedy).

Rather than offer anything new, corrupt institutions can only govern through fear. The climate catastrophe or the once-in-a-generation pandemic of the Liberal World Order thus fills the same role as the eternal damnation of the Catholic Church, while vaccines have become modern-day indulgences both in the psycho-political sense and in the sense that they make enormous amounts of money at the expense of the general public.

As one final parallel between Trump and Luther, we saw earlier that unrepented heresy usually resulted in death at the hands of the Church authorities. Luther narrowly escaped that fate a couple of times in his life, and we all know that Trump recently had just such an incident himself.

In short, we might be living through a re-run of the Reformation.

What does all this portend for the future? Well, even if the Reformation pattern is correct (and it may not be), what comes next may not have much to do with the overt movement that is now underway. The Reformation did bring some changes that Luther would have supported, but it also brought in just as many that would have horrified him. It seems that the role of the Heroic Fool is simply to bring down a corrupt establishment. What follows in the wake of the Fool is more dependent on those who come next.

In Europe, that role belonged to the northern nobility and also to the newly-arrived capitalist class. Who will follow Trump? We’ll have to wait and see but we can get some idea of a possible direction by looking for those who have thrown their support behind him and what their vision for the future is.

One of the things I’ve been working on in the last couple of weeks was to write the most concise summary of my Archetypal Human concept that I could. I’m pleased to say the idea came together very smoothly. It still took almost ten thousand words to write, though. The result has ended being a synopsis for my next book project. Interested readers can check it out here – https://simonsheridan.me/the-archetypal-human/

Alongside the long-form prose version of the Archetypal Human concept, I’ve also been playing around with a diagram form that aims to capture all the main parts of the model. Previously, I had used fractal sine waves for this task and, while I think the fractal sine wave representation is a useful one, I wanted something more mnemonic.

I’m pleased to say that this idea also came to fruition quite easily and, if you’ll forgive my lack of graphic design skills, I’d like to present it here.

Most people would recognise the inner image as Da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man. I like the idea of re-using this since the Archetypal Human is very much in the broad stream of thought that flows back to Renaissance humanism. Vitruvian Man represents the highest level archetype that we call the Human. This represents the starting point of analysis; the unified view.

What I would like to do, although don’t have the skills to do it myself, is to split Vitruvian Man down the middle into male and female parts. Imagine the left side of Virtuvian Man in the above image having a female body. That would give us the first crucial distinction of the Archetypal Human: male and female.

The splitting of the circular background surrounding Vitruvian Man into two halves presents another crucial distinction. The dark background on the right represents the shadow, or unconscious, or disintegrative forces that affect us, while the light background on the left represents the integrative, conscious and positive forces. Within the Archetypal Human concept, these represent the struggle that the hero must go through i.e. the battle with the shadow forces that subvert the archetypal mission towards integration.

The inner circle then symbolises the full human lifecycle represented as a Hero’s Journey though the four main archetypal phases of Child, Orphan, Adult and Elder. This also captures the relation between the archetypes including the two fundamental archetypal pairings of Child-Adult (Parent) and Orphan-Elder.

The outer circle is the Hero’s Journey that belongs to the macrocosm of civilisation or society. I have used the terminology of Arnold Toynbee to mark the phases of this cycle. It makes sense that this cycle be on the outside of the Human cycle since it necessarily turns much slower.

Finally, we have the x and y axes. The y axis is the natural way to mark the levels of being concept with the biological (animal) at the bottom, the psychological/sociological in the middle and the spiritual at the top. The x-axis then becomes the symbol for the Exoteric-Esoteric distinction. Both of these hold for the microcosm and macrocosm. That is, we can analyse the collective of society at the biological, socio-psychological and spiritual levels of being.

With this, we have all the basic elements of the Archetypal Human framework represented graphically as follows:-

Let’s do a couple of quick examples of how to use this mnemonic. Although we’re going to use fictional characters, the point of the Archetypal Human framework is that it can be applied to any person.

We’ll start with Shakespeare’s King Lear.

Lear is obviously the hero of the story. He is biologically male. Lear is in the Elder phase of life and that is his archetypal manifestation in the story. However, Lear has not achieved elderhood. That is the archetypal mission set for him. Of course, he will not achieve it and, thus, his story is a tragedy. Therefore, we can say that Lear is in the shadow form of the archetype; the Shadow Elder.

We can use the levels of being concept to be more specific about Lear’s failure. Lear has achieved elderhood at the biological level of being, but that is no great achievement since it happens by default. At the socio-political level, he is thrust into elderhood at the beginning of the story by retiring from his position of king and handing power over to his daughters and son-in-laws. Thus, Lear is biologically and socio-politically in the Elder phase of life. Where Lear is not ready for elderhood is at the higher levels of being: the psychological and spiritual. The story of Lear is his almighty struggle at the highest levels of being, which is what makes it such a profound work.

The last element in the mnemonic diagram is the macrocosmic cycle. Since the story of Lear ends with the death of the king, we can see that the macrocosm is at the end of the disintegration phase. This reading is reinforced by the fact that Edgar is the one who will take command after the death of Lear. Edgar represents the archetype of the Fool and the new beginning which must follow the death of the king.

That gives a quick overview of the character of Lear. But we can do the same analysis for all the other characters in the play. Doing so allows us to draw out the relations between them.

For example, Goneril and Regan are female, Adult characters in shadow form while Cordelia is female, Adult in positive form (tragically cut short). However, just as Lear is an Elder at the biological and socio-cultural but not at the spiritual, the same is true for Goneril and Regan. Thus, we can also say that they are shadow characters.

Each of these stands alone as a character but also relate back to the Lear as symbols of his feminine anima (conversely, Lear is a symbol of their masculine animus). This is where the masculine-feminine distinction resonates at the psychological and spiritual level of being as well as the biological.

Note also that it is the interaction between the characters which denotes the macrocosmic dynamic. Lear is not just a father to Goneril and Regan, he is (or was), their king and his downfall is the also the downfall of the kingdom.

Let’s do one more quick example, this time using a more modern story: the original Star Wars trilogy.

The hero of the story is Luke Skywalker. Skywalker is an Orphan archetype who is matched against positive Elder archetypes in Obi-wan and Yoda and shadow Elder arhetypes in Darth Vader and Palpatine. Star Wars provides one of the more perfect exemplars of the shadow archetypal energy since the two shadow Elders are literally trying to pull Luke to “the dark side”.

At the macrocosmic level, Luke is aligned with the rebels against the imperial forces. This implies a macrocosmic cycle that sits right at the turning point between Growth and Breakdown. The movement towards empire signals the turn of the cycle away from culture (Growth) and towards power (Breakdown).

The original Star Wars trilogy achieves a happy ending at both the microcosm and macrocosm. Luke transcends from the Orphan to the Adult and becomes a Jedi at the same time that the rebel forces defeat the empire. This double payoff works so well precisely because it unifies the microcosmic and macrocosmic Hero’s Journeys.

That is the gist of the idea. No doubt, there’s room for improvement, but I’m really liking this first draft of the mnemonic image as a representation of the Archetypal Human framework.

Some people might have seen the recent Tucker Carlson episode featuring the historian, Darryl Cooper. If not, it’s an interesting discussion and well worth a look – https://x.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1830652074746409246

The parts of the interview touching on WW2 have duly set off a storm of protest online. What’s interesting about that was that it was just two years ago that Kanye West set off similar outrage by going on Alex Jones and saying he “loved nazis”. He was duly cancelled with extreme prejudice.

Tucker Carlson’s approach is far less sensational than Kanye but has much the same aim of questioning the foundational mythology of the post war years. It will be fascinating to see what unfolds, but this fits with the general political trend right now as the American right is inching its way towards what might end up being the dismantling of the post-war status quo.

In any case, the response to the Carlson interview is entirely predictable as it has triggered what I like to call the Hitler Complex. I wrote about this a couple of years ago as part of my series of posts on the Unconscious Empire (i.e. the US empire).

I think it’s one of my best posts and those who haven’t read it might find it interesting in light of the debate set off by the Carlson interview.

The Unconscious Empire Pt 2: The Hitler Complex