Author: Simon Sheridan

“But the supreme meaning is the path, the way and the bridge to what is to come.”

Carl Jung – The Red Book

In the first post in this series, we talked about how the English word “learn” has its original meaning in path or way. It is no coincidence that the path or the way is a metaphor used in numerous religions to describe the spiritual experience. In fact, this use of the path metaphor might be a universal of human experience. The Chinese “Tao” also means way or path. In Australian Aboriginal society, as we’ll discuss later, there is the “walkabout”. This is not a random stroll through the bush but a fixed path retracing the steps of the ancestors.

Whatever path you are on, you are hopefully learning things. Sometimes you learn technical details and skills that allow you to get things done. Sometimes you learn things about yourself. Let’s take a common example. You decide to learn guitar. You take your first step onto the path of the guitarist. At the end of the path stand the mythic figures of the instrument, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Yngwie Malmsteen, to inspire your journey.

Normally what happens is you get a period at the start where everything seems to go incredibly well. Call it beginner’s luck. You’re a lot better at guitar than you were expecting. You can even play some famous songs competently well. You start to think that you’re a natural at the instrument. Others who overhear while you do a passable version of The House of the Rising Sun say things like “wow, you’ve got natural talent”. Life is good.

Then you hit the first bump in the road. You try to play something more advanced and your technique breaks down. It’s your first real failure and two things usually happen. Firstly, you get disappointed. Secondly, you start thinking about it. You try to use your conscious mind to fix the issue. You concentrate really hard on the notes and what kind of mistake you’re making. You become like the caterpillar who is trying to think which foot to put in front of the next. Like the caterpillar, you fall over. Not only can you not play the new, more difficult, song that you’d hoped to learn, you can no longer even play The House of the Rising Sun. Hell, you can’t even play a major scale any more without making several stupid errors and the more you concentrate on it the worse it gets. You feel completely useless. You start to think that you’ll never be able to play guitar. You start looking for excuses to quit. Clearly, you’re just not cut out for this guitar playing business. Maybe your fingers are not long enough. Yeah, that’s it. You’re physiologically incapable of playing guitar. Better stop wasting time and stick to what you’re good at.

What you are dealing with at this point is nothing to do with the external world. It’s not about your technique, even though that is the root cause of your problem. What you are facing is your desire or we might call it your will or we might even call it your soul. You are asked the question: do you really want to play guitar? Do you really want to keep walking the path of the guitar player? At this point you have learned just enough to see how long the road ahead of you is, how far is the distance between you and Jimi Hendrix, how improbable it is that you will ever get there.

If you happened to have an Elder present, somebody versed in the mythological lore of the guitar gods, that elder might tell you that however far you are from Hendrix, you are still closer than Hendrix himself was when he started out. Hendrix was born into a broken home. The family was so poor that he played a broomstick for years pretending it was a guitar. One day, he found a one string ukulele in the trash. He would sit on the couch with it and copy the music he heard on television using just a single string. Much later he would finally get the cash to buy an acoustic guitar with all six strings. After fruitless efforts to try and front a band playing an acoustic guitar, Hendrix finally secured an electric guitar but then got into trouble with the law and was forced to join the army. When he got out, he spent years playing in crappy bands in even crappier venues. The story goes on from there. The point is that there was nothing in Hendrix’s early life that could have possibly led anybody to know that he would become Jimi Hendrix. That’s how life is. To walk the path is to take a leap of faith and that leap of faith is absurd.

The confrontation with the absurd, what I have also been calling individuation in this series, can start anywhere and at any time in life. It can happen to a teenager who’s halfway through butchering a rendition of Wish You Were Here. It can happen in midlife. We’ve all heard of the midlife crisis where somebody, usually a man, jumps up from the dinner table, grabs the car keys off the bench and ends up three states away with a bellyful of whisky about to get into a fight for trying to chat up the local bikie gang leader’s girl in a dingy bar on the edge of a town in the middle of nowhere.

Existential crises can also manifest in other ways. Arguably, it was such a crisis that led the Buddha to go and sit under a tree and start a new religion. Great works of literature can come of it too among which count Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Augustine’s Confessions and, most importantly for this series of posts, Jung’s Red Book.

“If you take a step toward your soul, you will at first miss the meaning. You will believe that you have sunk into meaninglessness, into eternal disorder. You will be right! Nothing will deliver you from disorder and meaninglessness, since this is the other half of the world.”

Carl Jung – The Red Book

Although not much more than half a century apart, the society that Jung came of age in was in many respects the polar opposite of the society that the boomers would come of age in as described in the last post in this series. Stifling and suffocating are two adjectives which come to mind to describe the Victorian era. From what we know of Jung’s family situation, it resembled the plays of Henrik Ibsen where there are dark secrets hiding behind the monotonous domestic façade. Jung’s father was a priest. His mother had health problems that were almost certainly psychological at root. In some sense, it’s not a surprise that Jung would become first a doctor and then move on to psychiatry. He had the perfect upbringing for that and it was the treatment of those psychological side effects that were so common in Victorian society that would catapult him to fame.

The experiences that formed the Red Book came later after Jung’s reputation was established and while he himself had a family. He had, by his own description, achieved as much as he could have hoped for in the world. But then a series of visions, dreams and other psychological events threw him off balance. He thought he was going mad until the outbreak of World War One reassured him that what he had been experiencing were premonitions of the war. Obviously such an idea is completely contrary to the materialist dogma of our time, what Jung called “the spirit of this time”. In The Red Book, Jung talks of another spirit which is the one he was encountering in his visions. He called it The Spirit of the Depths.

Rather than bottle up the subconscious parts of the psyche like so many others of the era (and this era too), Jung seems to have been in contact with them from a young age. At 12 years old, there is a story of him feeling a connection with the divine while having a vision of God taking a dump on a church (I think it was in Zurich). He understood this to mean that the living God was objecting to the “dead” religion of which Jung’s father was a representative. Jung already understood the difference between the exoteric, as embodied by the church, and the esoteric as he himself was experiencing. Later at university, he would get involved with the burgeoning occult scene that was popular at that time in Europe as well as his psychological studies. It seems he was fated to undertake the task of individuation.

“Therefore the spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being. I had to become aware that I had lost my soul.”

Carl Jung – The Red Book

I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that this “spirit of the depths” matches the elder role in the story of The Orphan. Many of the experiences Jung had during this time involved conversations in his mind during sessions of what he called active imagination. For example, there are extended conversations with his “soul” who he represented as a woman (technically, the anima. For a woman, the soul would be male, the animus). Was Jung living out the story of The Orphan? In a society which was barren of esoteric spiritual content, Jung was what you could call a spiritual orphan. If that’s true, then it’s also true that we can think of the experiences that Jung describes in The Red Book as his initiation. Jung self-initiated because there were no other options available to him at the time. In the absence of a real world elder, he made one up in his mind and called him the “spirit of the depths”. The depths are, of course, the subconscious mind; the thing that Victorian society completely ignored.

Jung is very clear, and in this he and Stephen Jenkinson are in complete agreement, that the path down into the depths is not pleasant, it’s not fun, it’s not something anybody would do of their own choice. You must be called down into the depths and that call can come while you’re eating breakfast or it can come on the outbreak of a world war. Most people reject the call and, in the absence of anybody to guide them through the process, this is probably for the best. Just like it’s safer to experiment with psychedelic drugs in the presence of somebody who is experienced (Hendrix’s first album is called “Are you experienced?” and he also almost certainly died of a drug overdose, by coincidence), the confrontation with the soul is a risky proposition for the inexperienced. Jung noted that he could have easily ended up going crazy. He believed that is what happened to Nietzsche after the writing of Zarathustra.

The elder’s role is to be the guide on the journey to the depths. In The Matrix, Neo had already been called. He had an intuition about The Matrix but didn’t know what to do with it. It was for Morpheus to let him know that he was on the correct path and to safely guide him through the start of the journey. Jung didn’t have an elder. He had to guide himself through it, although his psychological studies and practice must have helped him substantially.

It was in the late 1800s that Europeans were starting to hear about other cultures and Jung realised that some of the practices he had discovered for himself were part of those cultures including the hunter gatherer societies of Australia and America. Although I’m not aware if Jung or anybody else has dealt with this idea in any detail, it seems to me that the initiation ceremonies of the hunter gatherer tribes were exactly the kind of spiritual initiation that Jung put himself through.

As noted earlier, the Australian Aboriginal culture has an initiation poorly translated into English as “walkabout”. This was a six month journey undertaken by young men around the time of puberty. They were not walking about randomly, rather they were retracing the “songlines” of their culture. Surviving by yourself in the Australian landscape requires real skill. For this reason, the young men were trained by the elders prior to the journey. They had to learn how to hunt and cook, how to find water, what plants could be used medicinally and other kinds of bushcraft. The songlines were there to help navigate the land which was another important part of the training.

Apart from the practical aspects of the walkabout, there was an explicit spiritual aspect that was tied into mythology and ancestor worship. As a young man, Jung had noted that he had no myth of his life and he felt this detached him from his ancestors. A number of the stories in The Red Book are about imagined experiences meeting with the elders of Western civilisation. While on walkabout, the young aboriginal man is retracing the steps of his ancestors encapsulated in a living myth, a myth which is renewed with each new generation. He is walking the same path as his ancestors in much the same way that people walk on religious pilgrimages. Australians to this day do something similar when they travel to Gallipoli on Anzac Day or retrace family histories in Europe or other countries.

The walkabout is a combination of spiritual and physical challenge. It represents the man’s coming of age in what we might call an economic sense. By proving that you are able to hunt and navigate in the bush, you are now ready to take up a role in the tribal economy. But that education could be done in numerous other ways. The solitary nature of the walkabout speaks to the spiritual journey of The Orphan. We see similar practices in American Indian tribes and even in monasteries and nunneries where the spiritual work is often done alone and the communal work is the economic work of growing food and carrying out other chores.

Jung undertook his spiritual journey in the evenings after his work and family obligations had been met. The experience took place entirely in his mind. Unlike the walkabout, which is combination of spiritual journey and also a test of physical strength and skill, those of us living in civilisation have our economic lives detached from the spiritual and both are detached from the land in a way that was impossible in Aboriginal society. The process of this division maps onto Spengler’s distinction between pre-culture, culture and civilisation. It’s the increasing separation and specialisation of activities. One’s spiritual life can even be “outsourced” to the local priest. When even the priest disappears, there is nothing much left. That is where we are in modern society.

It took a savant such as Jung to rediscover these things. Jung himself realised how completely improbable it was that a man in the staid Swiss society of the Victorian era would accidentally recreate spiritual practices that had been taking place for millennia on the other side of the world in a completely different kind of society. It was partly this that led him to the universal nature of the collective unconscious. That’s also why I think the story of The Orphan is a universal archetype. It is as valid in hunter gatherer societies as it is in big, modern cities even if the latter has no use of it.

“…the spirit of the depths from time immemorial and for all the future possesses a greater power than the spirit of this time, who changes with the generations.”

Carl Jung – The Red Book

The encounter with the spirit of the depths is the encounter with nonsense, absurdity, the inexplicable, the paradoxical, the shadow, the inglorious, the unheroic, the small, the insignificant, the mysterious and the ridiculous. Many of these are perfect descriptors of our society in the last two years. Perhaps the spirit of the depths is knocking on our door. And the knocking is getting louder.

All posts in this series:

The Age of The Orphan Part 1: The Path of Learning

The Age of The Orphan Part 2: Defining the Archetype

The Age of The Orphan Part 3: A Short Theoretical Introduction

The Age of The Orphan Part 4: Initiation, culture and civilisation

The Age of The Orphan Part 5: Ok, boomer

The Age of The Orphan Part 6: The Spirit of the Depths

The Age of The Orphan Part 7: The Metaphysics of Archetypes

The Age of The Orphan Part 8: The Current State of Play

The Age of The Orphan Part 9: How to learn to stop worrying and love The Matrix

The Age of The Orphan Part 10: Work is our religion

The Age of The Orphan Part 11: The Missing Link

The Age of The Orphan Part 12: Conclusion

Whenever I think of the baby boomers I think of The Beatles, The Stones and Jimi Hendrix. Pop music was definitely one thing the boomers did well. But, according to the people who decide on such important matters, none of these musicians actually qualify as baby boomers. The boomer generation officially began in 1945. So, Jimi, Mick, Paul and the boys missed out. Nevertheless, I’m going to include them when I refer to “boomers”. In fact, I’m going to include all of us when referring to boomers. For the purposes of our analysis here, all the important elements of boomer culture are shared by the generations that have followed. The boomers still dominate because we are all still boomers at heart.

The Beatles, The Stones and Hendrix were a massive influence on boomer culture. So too was a man who was born a whopping 42 years too early to technically qualify as a boomer. His most influential book, however, arrived on the scene with perfect timing; 1946 to be precise. The name of the book was “The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care” and the author in question was Dr Benjamin Spock.

Spock was a quintessential boomer. He would later get involved in the presidential campaign for JFK and take part in the numerous protest movements of the 60s and 70s. At 84 years old he was still competing in rowing competitions. If ever there was a man who epitomised the idea of being forever young, it was Spock. In the language of this series of posts, Spock was not an elder. Like the boomers in general, he refused to even consider elderhood as an option all the way until his death. But Spock was happy to play the role that came to replace the elder in boomer culture: the expert. Specifically, he was a doctor of paediatrics with a side qualification in Freudian psychoanalysis. Of course, it had to be Freud, another matter of symbolic importance for this series of posts where we are invoking Jung.

The post war years were the golden age of Freudian psychology. Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, had become as successful in the US advertising industry as Spock was in the parental advice industry. It was the age when having your own “shrink” was the thing to do. What the Freudians were primarily concerned with was the repression of base desires by society. This was reflected in Spock’s book.

The prevailing wisdom of the pre-war years, the mindset which raised “the great generation” that stormed the beaches of Normandy, was that children needed to be given “tough love”. Their desires were unimportant. Their crying should be ignored. Feeding should be done on a military-like schedule and affection should be kept to a minimum. All very repressive from a Freudian point of view. Spock broke with this prevailing wisdom and told parents to give their children regular affection, feed them whenever they were hungry and tell them they were special. Spock’s book sold 50 million copies and was apparently second only to the bible in the US book market in the post war decades. His advice was what the parents of the boomers wanted to hear.

As so often happens, the microcosmic and the macrocosmic align in this case. Just like the parents of the boomers were going to pay attention to what their children wanted, the society of the post war years was going to be geared to giving consumers what they wanted. For every desire, the consumer society had a product and, if the desire happened to be lacking, Edward Bernays and his team were there to create it. All this was made possible by the fact that the boomers were born into the richest society the world has ever known. The USA was swimming in oil, had suffered relatively little in the wars and had been handed the keys to what was left of the British Empire after WW2. America was so rich in the post war years that it could afford to rebuild Europe while also becoming the policeman of the world. Freud served as a useful ideology for a society that had wealth to burn. There was no longer any need for the miserliness that parents of children in the great depression needed to learn.

But something more archetypal was going on. The appearance of The Child on the scene also matches with the broader historical developments at the time. The two world wars represented the end of the line for the archetype which had dominated Western culture for centuries. That archetype is The Warrior. Europeans had spent literally centuries slaughtering each other. They got pretty good at it. They got good at other things too. As Bucky Fuller noted, technological innovation occurs so rapidly during war because success actually matters (unless you give absolute power to megalomaniacs). In war, people’s lives are on the line and this creates an atmosphere of meritocracy. Whoever has the ideas that actually work will be rewarded. The same is not true for peace. Failure doesn’t matter so much during peacetime, especially when you live in the richest society the world has ever seen.

Discipline, determination and skill are the positive attributes of The Warrior and these were on ample display during what I have previously referred to as the era of Heroic Materialism, which includes the era of heroic science. The shadow side of The Warrior was also on display as seen in the pillaging and plundering of the colonial years. Another shadow attribute of The Warrior is that he brings wanton destruction. Is it a surprise that neither Hitler nor Mussolini were real military men? The latter was a journalist and political hack. The former was a failed artist, incredibly boring writer and equally unimpressive soldier. Neither displayed the positive traits of The Warrior but they sure as hell managed to embody the negative traits while they were play acting the roles that would lead to the destruction of their countries dressed as always in impeccable military outfits. In doing so, they brought the age of The Warrior to an end.

What this created was what we might call an archetypal vacuum. But before a new archetype can manifest, there is a process of development to go through and that is where The Child archetype enters the picture. In this series of posts we have differentiated between two subtypes of The Child: The Innocent and The Orphan. The qualities of The Innocent map exactly onto the consumer society that took place in the USA in the post war years. They map exactly onto the ideology of Dr Spock and Edward Bernays. We can rightfully call the post war years the years of The Innocent. It was this society that the boomers grew up in and would later come of age in. It was a society informed by Freud, driven by advertising and the needs of consumer capitalism. It was a society that promised to give the boomers whatever they wanted.

The fascinating thing about the boomer generation is that their archetypal development matches almost precisely with the demographic and historical facts. The end of world war two represented a hard break from the past. Everybody wanted to make sure something like that didn’t happen again and so everybody was happy to accept radical changes which, almost by definition, were a break with the past. The attitude of starting fresh was in the air and, combined with the enormous growth in the economy, it led to a feeling that anything was possible. The psychological traits on display were all exactly what we expect in The Innocent: optimism, faith and hope. But we also know that the child cannot stay innocent forever. Eventually, the child must become The Orphan and undertake the difficult transition to adulthood. The boomers had their own idea of what this meant. They dismissed the wisdom of elders and the expectations of society. They did not want to become soldiers or obedient workers in the economy. They wanted to be individuals. The ethos at play was one of self-creation. The boomers themselves took on the task of asking “what do I want to do with my life” and “what sort of society do we want to create”. They explicitly rejected any infringement on their right to answer these questions for themselves independently of societal expectations. The boomers wanted to create their own identity.

We are still living under this ethic today. The desire to choose your own gender or your own pronouns is the logical extension of the notion of self-creation. Of course, the other side of the coin is that you are expecting society to recognise whatever identity you choose. That was true of the boomers back in the 60s and 70s and it’s still true today. The boomers grew up in a world where their parents indulged them. Capitalist consumer society indulged them. Even the political class had to indulge them when they were old enough to vote. Demographics demanded it.

But we can already see the problem with this based on the analysis of The Orphan archetype in past posts. The boomer’s attitude was the rejection of The Orphan’s mission. The Orphan does not choose its own destiny. It is offered the chance to initiate into a metaphysics of meaning by an Elder. Everything about the boomers is a rejection of this archetypal scenario. The boomers were at war with the elders of western society. While partaking of their free college educations, they were introduced to Marxism, feminism, post modernism, post colonialism; a veritable smorgasbord of criticism. Another way to look at it was the “experts” (in this case, university professors) were stepping in to fill the role of the elder. Just like the boomer parents turned to Dr Spock for parenting advice rather than their own parents, so the boomers turned to their professors to fill the role of the elder.

Dr Spock and other experts made an awful lot of money out of the deal. That was one problem. Real elders work for free. Another big difference between an elder and an expert is that an elder is training you up with the notion that you will graduate into adulthood/selfhood and be self sufficient, at least in spiritual terms. The expert is doing no such thing. They will always be the expert and you will always be the consumer. There is no way to graduate from consumer to expert. The best you can hope for is to be an expert yourself in some other domain. By swapping out the elder for the expert, the boomers unwittingly ensured they could not fulfil the archetypal mission of The Orphan. They ensured they could not become independent even though it was independence, or at least individuality, that they sought.

Where the story gets even more interesting, however, is that the boomers were nevertheless confronted with a Call to Adventure to fulfil the role of The Orphan. The high point was the late 60s: the summer of love, Woodstock and the Moon Landing; the time when anything seemed possible. It was immediately followed by the oil shock of the early 70s at a time when, demographically, the boomers were coming of age. Archetypally, reality can no longer be ignored. The Orphan must face the real world. In this case, it was the reality that the consumer society, the years of endless growth and getting whatever you wanted appeared to had come to an end. The economy did not bounce back in the years after the initial oil shock. In fact, it did something the experts said could never happen: it went into stagflation. An endless period of expert-driven prosperity seemed to be over. The Orphan’s task presented to the boomers was clear. Deal with your pain. Learn to see reality for what it is rather than what you want it to be. Learn to grow up and find your way in the world. All that was missing was an Elder to provide counsel. And then Jimmy Carter got elected.

It’s a surreal experience to go back and watch or read some of Carter’s speeches in light of the fantasy world that modern politics has become. The Biden administration’s plan to solve the current oil problem is apparently to get everybody to just go and buy an electric car, as if the average American has a spare $50k lying around and as if there’s enough electric cars even if they did. By contrast, Jimmy Carter laid it all out in brutal detail. He told Americans there was not just an oil crisis, there was a crisis of confidence. He actually said it was a spiritual crisis (which fits perfectly with The Orphan’s story).

“We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose”.

Carter told Americans they had become dependent on foreign oil and the only way out was to live within their means. He advised sacrifice and thrift, conservation instead of consumption.

Carter’s diagnosis of the problem was spot on. Unfortunately for him, politicians do not make good elders for the simple reason that the elder’s job is to deliver what seems like bad news and that tends not to work in democratic politics where the public sells its vote to the highest bidder. Elderhood doesn’t scale. You need to have a personal relationship with an Elder. That’s why in Orphan stories the Elder and the group which The Orphan is invited to join are always a small number. Interestingly, this message was present in the culture of the US at the time of Carter; think Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful. The ideas were there. What was missing, according to our archetypal analysis, were the elders. The Orphan needs the stern voice of wisdom to guide them to the correct path. Jimmy Carter tried to provide it but he was voted out for a man who provided the exact opposite. The boomers had a choice to face reality and they voted for an actor instead.

So, the boomers didn’t accept the call to adventure. What happens when The Orphan refuses its archetypal mission to come of age? They lapse back into the negative traits of The Child: denial, obliviousness, instant gratification. The boom years of the 80s provided the illusion of a return to consumer society. But we just need to look to practically any indicator of (real) economic health to know it wasn’t true.

It is not a surprise that from the late 70s onward we have seen the increasing worsening of the economic situation in the US. The consumer society was kept going by an input of oil from the North Sea and Alaskan fields. It was kept going by shipping jobs to foreign countries with no labour, safety or environmental standards. It was kept going by loading up the next generation with massive student debts and bailing out bankers after the GFC. All through this time the boomers kept believing in the myth of progress, kept believing that the expert-driven consumer society of their childhood was the sine qua non of civilisation.

Just before he died, Dr Spock released an updated version of his book where he recommended that all children take a vegan diet from age two onwards, something practically no pediatrician would recommend. Spock had also gotten himself into trouble a few decades earlier by recommending parents not put their children to sleep on their backs. It later was shown by research that Sudden Infant Death Syndrome was far more likely in children sleeping on their stomachs. The problem for Spock and other experts is the idea that there is a one size fits all approach to matters that are intrinsically complex. That was always the problem with the boomer’s notion of putting their faith in the experts. There is no single diet that is right for everybody just like there is no single right way to raise a child. There are only rules of thumb and the requirement to work out what’s best for yourself. A true elder knows that and it’s part of the reason why there must be a personal relationship between the elder and The Orphan.

For boomers like Dr Spock, it seems that success went to their heads and they felt confident to make claims that they should never have made. The desire to give every single person on the planet a vaccine for a respiratory virus is just another expression of this excessive pride. It’s the shadow side of boomer culture. On the one side, hubris. On the other side, obliviousness and denial. These traits have only gotten worse after the boomers failed The Orphan’s task in the late 70s.

The obliviousness and denial of The Child can be seen right now in the fact that 30 years after Jimmy Carter’s warnings about energy, we can no longer even admit the problem that faces us. As another oil shock appears on the horizon, the debate is no longer about a choice between dependence on oil and living within our means but between two equally invalid ways of keeping consumer society going. There is the camp that thinks solar panels and wind turbines will save the day and there’s the camp that thinks burning more fossil fuels will save the day. Both are delusional. In Carter’s words: “Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.”

The boomers, including all the generations since, will go down as the greatest squanderers in world history. But the archetypal failure of the boomers is the failure of The Orphan to individuate. In this case, the cause of the failure is very specific. It’s the rejection of elders. This is why I consider Stephen Jenkinson’s work to be highly relevant because he is a boomer who has self-identified as an elder. For boomer culture, that’s about as close as you can get to heresy. Jenkinson shares my love of etymology and right at the end of his book, fittingly titled Come of Age: the case for elderhood in a time of trouble, he gives a poetic reading of the old meaning of the word “catastrophe” as follows:

“That rope or road that was fashioned for you in the Time Before, by those you will not meet, to give you a way of going down against your plans and good sense, to give you a way down and into the Mysteries of this life, the Mysteries granted you would not choose for yourself, that would yet make of you a human worthy of those coming after.”

This could serve as a description of the task of The Orphan. But it’s also true of the task of the elder. Both are required to come of age. In the former case, you metamorphise from childhood into adulthood. In the latter case, you metamorphise from adulthood into elderhood. That’s why Elders and Orphans are natural allies. They both must accept a difficult pathway that is “against your plans and good sense”. It is a humbling experience but the alternative is worse: dissociation, denial, obliviousness.

Catastrophe and apocalypse. That seems to be right where we are headed at the moment. But this need not necessarily manifest in the material world. It may be that the catastrophe and apocalypse that we need to go through is spiritual. We could be facing a new beginning in a far deeper sense than just a generational passing of the baton. We’ll be exploring what that means in the next post.

All posts in this series:

The Age of The Orphan Part 1: The Path of Learning

The Age of The Orphan Part 2: Defining the Archetype

The Age of The Orphan Part 3: A Short Theoretical Introduction

The Age of The Orphan Part 4: Initiation, culture and civilisation

The Age of The Orphan Part 5: Ok, boomer

The Age of The Orphan Part 6: The Spirit of the Depths

The Age of The Orphan Part 7: The Metaphysics of Archetypes

The Age of The Orphan Part 8: The Current State of Play

The Age of The Orphan Part 9: How to learn to stop worrying and love The Matrix

The Age of The Orphan Part 10: Work is our religion

The Age of The Orphan Part 11: The Missing Link

The Age of The Orphan Part 12: Conclusion

In the second post of this series, I laid out the main attributes of The Orphan archetype with a focus on how it relates to the personal psychology of The Orphan. Given that the point of this series is to draw a parallel between the individual psychology and the social psychology of current Western society, this left an explanatory gap which I had been pondering how to resolve. Fortunately, a commenter in the last post (many thanks to Austin) put me on to Rene Guenon, a French intellectual who wrote on similar themes about a hundred years ago. While I was looking over Guenon’s Wikipedia page I saw he had written a book on initiation among numerous other writings on metaphysics and esoterism. I haven’t had a chance to read the book but the summary has given me the answer that I needed: initiation. Initiation is the bridge between individuation at the personal level and the larger social milieu.

In modern western society, the coming of age aspect to The Orphan story and the individuation or coming to selfhood aspect are separate. We all come to adulthood based on the arbitrary numerical value of being 18 years old which is nothing more than a bureaucratic convenience. Many religions at least mark the occasion with a coming of age ceremony. But in The Orphan story, the coming of age is neither an arbitrary bureaucratic rule nor a ceremony but a process and that process is initiation.

Consider the movie The Matrix. Morpheus offers Neo an initiation. He is going to show him “the real world”. This is an explicitly metaphysical proposition. As it happens, the metaphysics in question is the exact metaphysics of the Christian church which was inspired in large part by Plato. It says that the apparent world is not the real world. The real world is made up of perfect forms which sit behind the apparent world. In the movie, the apparent world is the Matrix and Morpheus is offering to show Neo the real one. It’s no coincidence that Neo is the saviour in the story. He is Jesus to Morpheus’ St Paul (the basic plot of The Matrix is just the story of Christianity repackaged in techno-gothic garb; although obviously the gratuitous violence is very un-Christ like).

Luke Skywalker receives similar training in the Star Wars movies, although the metaphysics of the Jedi is cheesy and underdeveloped. Ged’s magical training in A Wizard of Earthsea fulfils the same function. The key distinction here is the one that Guenon uses. It’s the difference between exoteric and esoteric. Exoteric relates to the outward symbols of meaning or metaphysics that are in use in the broader society. Esoteric relates to the active spiritual experience of meaning and metaphysics. Initiation is the process of learning the symbols of metaphysics; one might say of learning the true meaning behind them.

The Matrix provides a very useful example of this. When Neo is being trained (going through initiation), Morpheus is with him inside the computer simulation. He tells Neo the rules of the simulation and that these are just arbitrary rules; not reality. That’s the exoteric part. That’s the part anybody can nod along to without really understanding. It’s the part we can mimic an understanding of by parroting the right words. Throughout the ages, most critiques of religion have been that the followers were not practising what they preached. They knew the right words but they hadn’t grasped the meaning. They hadn’t been initiated properly.

In The Matrix, we see Neo go through the process of initiation which is learning the metaphysics.  He fails at the start (fails to beat Morpheus in fighting, fails the jump program) but gradually improves until he is master at the end of the movie. This is the esoteric component of metaphysical teaching and it is also what I have been calling individuation up until now. Individuation is the learning of the metaphysics of the culture in which you are initiated. It’s the personal inward experience of the initiation. Initiation differs from modern education precisely in the fact that the latter offers entirely exoteric teaching while the former offers esoteric. The entire problem of our modern education system is that it has no esoteric component. But that problem was already well established before the state took over and implemented universal education. The church had already lost its esoteric component centuries before modern education came along, especially among protestants.

With the exoteric-esoteric distinction, we combine The Orphan’s esoteric journey with the larger social context which is exoteric. Interestingly, the different Orphan stories we have already examined portray the exoteric component in ways that map exactly onto Spengler’s theory of history. A Wizard of Earthsea, for example, takes place in a world that is almost identical to the Mediterranean around the time Jesus was born. There are small communities everywhere interspersed by larger cities. There are also many different groups practising their own spirituality including Ged’s teacher who is a wandering mage. These groups could properly be called cults. The word cult is related to the word culture and had the meaning in the original Latin of “care”, “labour”, “cultivation”, “worship” and “reverence”. Part of the cult’s job is to cultivate new members which is to bring them onto the path of worship and reverence. This is the process of initiation. We see the same process in hunter gatherer tribes.  

In Spenglerian terms, the socio-cultural milieu of A Wizard of Earthsea is a pre-culture. There are diverse groups each pursuing their own metaphysic and culture. The esoteric is foregrounded while the exoteric is an incredibly diverse manifold lacking structure and order.

Structure and order belong to the concept of civilisation. The word civilisation arose, not by coincidence, during The Enlightenment. It’s related to the Latin for “city” and the city is its locus; the place where everything can be maximally ordered and structured. The Matrix provides possibly the ultimate metaphor of Spenglerian civilisation. The general public have no spiritual existence, no culture. They are just resources and pawns in the machine. There is no esoteric activity whatsoever. Everything is exoteric, robotic, machine-like.

Star Wars provides a middle ground. Like Ged in A Wizard of Earthsea, Luke Skywalker is a farm boy. The forces of The Empire are at work trying to weed out all that pesky culture and turn it into civilisation. The Matrix shows us the endpoint of that process. Neo, aka Mr Anderson, is an office drone working for the corporation. In his world, there are no more farms or even any agri-culture. All contact with the land is gone. The only culture that remains takes place in dark nightclubs with shadowy characters (shadowy also in the Jungian sense).

In this way, A Wizard of Earthsea, Star Wars and The Matrix provide us with Orphan stories against the Spenglerian backdrop of pre-culture, culture and civilisation respectively. From the point of view of The Orphan, the story is the same. They are invited to be initiated into a metaphysics. The difference is how the broader society views that metaphysics. In A Wizard of Earthsea, there is no civilisation and everybody is free to pursue their own spiritual journey (if that sounds a lot like the founding principle of the United States of America, it should). In Star Wars and The Matrix, civilisation is at war with culture and there is no tolerance for alternative metaphysics or culture. Some people have noted that Western governments now seem to be at war with their own citizens and this is the same dynamic at play.

As a brief aside, Freud got it all wrong in Civilisation and its Discontents. The problem with civilisation is not that it prevents us manifesting our lowest instincts as if humans were nothing more than zoo animals. Rather, it’s that civilisation prevents us manifesting our higher nature of genuine initiation into a metaphysics of meaning. That is what is implied by the Jungian reading. If I turn this series of posts into a book, I might call it Civilisation and its Jungian Discontents.

The exoteric-esoteric concept also allows us to make sense of another element in The Orphan story which is the extent to which it is a spiritual journey versus a journey into adulthood and becoming a full fledged member of society. Although it goes against all modern democratic, egalitarian sensibility, for most of history it was recognised that humans are born with differing capabilities, strengths and weaknesses. The archetype idea I have been using in these posts implies this. The primary archetypes are The Child (including The Innocent and The Orphan), The Mother (aka Caregiver), The Ruler, The Warrior, The Mage, The Lover and The Fool. Other archetypes have been identified but, in my opinion, they are sub-types of these main categories. Note also that there are shadow types for each archetype that we can identify by a different name (eg. The Devouring Mother). If we acknowledge that The Lover and The Fool are universals, what we are left with is the old distinction between the political class (The Ruler), the military class (The Warrior) and the spiritual class (Mage). The spiritual class also includes intellectuals (even though in the modern West intelligence has been severed from metaphysics).

There is no reason we cannot manifest multiple archetypes. For example, Socrates was a war hero and was widely known by his contemporaries for his astonishing physical endurance. Nevertheless, we would classify him in the Mage category. That was his primary strength. The same goes at the societal level. Sparta was clearly a culture of The Warrior but there were individuals in that society that manifested other archetypes. Our culture has people who manifest the Warrior and the Ruler etc. To say that we are an Orphan culture simply means that this is the predominant archetype in the same way that The Warrior was the predominant archetype for Sparta.

Because we each have different talents captured in the archetypal definitions, it follows that each of us is more or less suited for an esoteric, spiritual journey. This fact is also captured neatly in The Matrix. Neo joins the group who are all on the same path. Nevertheless, each has different esoteric capacities. The assumption is that Neo is the one with the greatest capability and he will be the saviour. The others in the group fulfill other functions eg.  Dozer is the Warrior, Mouse is The Fool. There is even the Judas character in Cypher who is going to betray the group (again reiterating that The Matrix story is just the story of Jesus retold).

In a healthy culture, the exoteric structures of the broader society are regenerated with each new generation by assigning people the roles to which they belong. Those who are on the spiritual path are the ones suitable for in-depth esoteric practice and they receive specific training for that purpose. They will dedicate their life to spiritual aims. Their primary role is to safeguard the metaphysical tradition of the culture. This is the role of elders in a well-functioning society. For most of the history of the Christian church, the esoteric dimension was almost non-existent. This is because the Church served an almost entirely exoteric function almost from the start. In Paul’s time and for centuries thereafter, the church was used to prop up the dying days of the Roman empire. Later on in the middle ages, the church regained some form of esoteric practice only to then become stale and hollow again until we arrive at today where the church is nothing more than an empty shell with neither exoteric nor esoteric influence (note: there may be individual churches and individual practitioners where genuine esoteric exercise still takes place but these are the exception to the rule).

It is no surprise that The Matrix has a millenarian vibe to it. It is the story of what happens at the end of the civilisation phase. The same millenarian vibe was there at the time of Jesus. The story of the Saviour had arisen spontaneously all over the place at that time. Jesus, apparently completely by accident (or should we say by synchronicity), lived out a version of that story in real life which was then used by Paul to set up a purely exoteric institution that took hold in the cities (civilisation) while the real esoteric practice of early Christianity was practiced by the smaller groups elsewhere. I think the popularity of The Matrix is evidence of a tacit understanding that we too are in the late stages of a civilisation and there needs to be a new start. Apocalypse means to reveal, to uncover. What is uncovered is that the Emperor has no clothes. The civilisation is devoid of esoteric life. The old epoch is ending and the new one beginning. The Saviour is the one who will crystallise the new metaphysics required to reinvigorate life.

What is particularly interesting about this is that Jesus was a prototypical Innocent. If that’s true and it’s true that we are reverting back to the Innocent archetype as a culture, this would all fit in with Spengler’s idea of a second religiosity (although, of course, we are now manifesting The Innocent not in its proper form of Jesus but in its shadow form). It may be that I have got the name of this series wrong and it should be The Age of The Innocent.

We’ll deal with that question towards the end. In the next post, we’ll apply these concepts to the post war years where I think a solid argument can be made that the baby boomers did follow The Orphan archetype.

All posts in this series:

The Age of The Orphan Part 1: The Path of Learning

The Age of The Orphan Part 2: Defining the Archetype

The Age of The Orphan Part 3: A Short Theoretical Introduction

The Age of The Orphan Part 4: Initiation, culture and civilisation

The Age of The Orphan Part 5: Ok, boomer

The Age of The Orphan Part 6: The Spirit of the Depths

The Age of The Orphan Part 7: The Metaphysics of Archetypes

The Age of The Orphan Part 8: The Current State of Play

The Age of The Orphan Part 9: How to learn to stop worrying and love The Matrix

The Age of The Orphan Part 10: Work is our religion

The Age of The Orphan Part 11: The Missing Link

The Age of The Orphan Part 12: Conclusion

I wanted throw in a quick disclaimer. From this point onwards in this series of posts, we are moving firmly into speculation and guesswork. It may later turn out that I am in over my head having jumped in the deep end later to be found to have been swimming naked when the tide goes out. If so, I will take solace in having just won the gold medal for the most number of swimming metaphors in a single paragraph.

Here’s a lightning summary of how I got here. While trying to make sense of the corona hysteria, I found that Jungian archetypal analysis (The Devouring Mother – The Orphan) provided an elegant and effective explanation not just of the events of the last two years but going back at least to Trump – Brexit. Like most people, I had previously been looking for explanations using cause and effect analysis. However, my two main conclusions, The Plague Story and The Devouring Mother, are based on formal analysis. This is the kind of analysis used by Oswald Spengler and it goes back to Goethe. It’s no coincidence that this way of thinking is tied in with the German tradition. As Spengler noted back at the start of the twentieth century, it was a major difference between the English and German traditions at that time. After the Anglosphere won the wars and become the hegemon of the West, the error of analysing everything as cause and effect has come to predominate. I think this is partly what Gregory Bateson set out to rectify in some of his works. He was re-introducing Goetheian science to the Anglosphere and, by extension, the West.

Although I hadn’t thought about it before, this kind of analysis is exactly what I had been trained in during my linguistics degree. Linguistics looks for patterns. It is concerned primarily with morphological analysis i.e. form. So is Jungian psychology. So is Spenglerian history. I think this is why I was able to adapt to Jung’s thinking relatively easily.

The English language is not “causing” me to write these words. It is the form through which the thoughts express themselves. Given an energy source provided by a full pantry, a supply of leisure time and a “will-to-knowledge”, the form gets manifested. In the same way, the growth of a tree is formal. The branches and trunk grow in iterative units that form a pattern as long as there is enough input of resources and the constraints of the environment allow it. Jungian archetypes are forms manifested by the psychic energy of human beings. My analysis states that the forms of The Devouring Mother and The Orphan were already dominant in the West and became massively energised by the hysteria at the start of corona. That’s why all kinds of phenomena that were completely unrelated in terms of cause and effect fitted into the pattern. Most recently we saw the Australian and Canadian governments manifesting The Devouring Mother pattern at the same time that the pandemic is over in many countries. It had nothing to do with cause and effect or practical considerations (and sure as hell nothing to do with public health) and everything to do with the psychic energy, unleashed by Novak Djokovic and the Canadian truckers, channeled into the archetype.

Now that corona is wrapping up and governments around the world are dropping restrictions faster than the English cricket team drops catches, it’s tempting to say that this was another mass hysteria that followed the form of an archetype and that’s that. However, as part of my analysis, I realised that the pattern went back at least to Trump and Brexit. Since then I have been reading Stephen Jenkinson who has a program entitled Orphan Wisdom and who writes on the absence of elders in the modern West. This got me thinking more about the other half of The Devouring Mother dynamic: The Orphans. As I studied the archetype more closely I realised what Jenkinson had intuited which is that The Orphans and The Elders are key parts of the story. Within the archetype, the lack of elders prevents the form from manifesting. This is analogous to an electrical circuit where all the components are there but one is faulty or missing. In that case the circuit will not complete and energy cannot flow. That seems to me to be a good explanation of the current state of Western society and a quick survey of the post war years seems to bear this out.

In the next post, we’ll use the archetype of The Orphan to analyse the post war years with a particular focus on the generation that most explicitly rejected their elders: the baby boomers. We’ll see that the failure of the archetypal mission appears to be due to that rejection of elderhood. From there we can start to ponder what might happen if conditions arise to activate the archetype to achieve its mission and what might happen if they don’t. (As an interesting aside, this would imply that archetypes manifest their shadow forms when the components of the archetype are “faulty”).

Is any of this valid? I’m still not 100% sure. I consider this series of posts a bit like trying on a new suit. Maybe it’ll fit well. Maybe it’ll need some extra tailoring. Maybe it’ll need to be discarded. It may also be that Spengler had already anticipated this analysis. It looks as though the archetypal analysis will lead to the same conclusion as Spengler which that we are well into the “civilisational” phase of the lifecycle of our culture. It may be that the absence of elderhood and the subsequent failure of new generations to individuate is because of this. In that case, the archetypal analysis would be a way of framing the same notions but through a psychological lens. Even if that’s true, it will still make for an interesting journey.

All posts in this series:

The Age of The Orphan Part 1: The Path of Learning

The Age of The Orphan Part 2: Defining the Archetype

The Age of The Orphan Part 3: A Short Theoretical Introduction

The Age of The Orphan Part 4: Initiation, culture and civilisation

The Age of The Orphan Part 5: Ok, boomer

The Age of The Orphan Part 6: The Spirit of the Depths

The Age of The Orphan Part 7: The Metaphysics of Archetypes

The Age of The Orphan Part 8: The Current State of Play

The Age of The Orphan Part 9: How to learn to stop worrying and love The Matrix

The Age of The Orphan Part 10: Work is our religion

The Age of The Orphan Part 11: The Missing Link

The Age of The Orphan Part 12: Conclusion

In my book, The Devouring Mother, I differentiated between the acquiescent and the rebellious children of the mother and stated that the archetype of the acquiescent children was The Orphan. Having had more time to think about it since then, I’m going to slightly alter my analysis in this series of posts and make the claim that both the rebellious and acquiescent children are manifestations of The Orphan archetype and, in fact, modern western culture is a manifestation of The Orphan (technically both The Orphan and The Innocent but we’ll get to that in the next post).

Assuming we are an Orphan culture, it follows that the culture would be striving towards the archetypal mission of The Orphan and that The Devouring Mother is preventing the achievement of that mission. By analysing The Orphan in more detail, we can see what might happen if The Orphan can break free of the mother and achieve its archetypal mission. That would be the happy path scenario. Other scenarios are implied too and we will use the model of Jungian archetypes to explore them in later posts.

If all this sounds fanciful in light of the real world problems we face, that’s to be expected. We are still governed by an extremist materialist philosophy in the West. We’re still, with Karl Marx, historical materialists, although we’ve managed to airbrush out that unpleasant business about class. The economy drives everything. Technology drives everything. For any problem we have, therefore, there must be a technical solution that can be solved by a greedy capitalist seeking their own self-interest or a team of benevolent experts. That’s the default assumption of our public discourse. Culture is an epiphenomenon driven by material considerations.

What if we flip the whole thing around and put culture first? This would get us somewhere closer to Oswald Spengler who defined the West’s obsession with technology in cultural terms. What if we then posit that culture is at least as much driven by the subconscious as by the conscious mind. What if archetypes do not just blow up every now and then in mass hysterias such as the last two years but are a pervasive background force on the culture. These are the questions and assumptions we’ll be exploring in this series of posts. If they are true, then a cultural archetypal analysis can tell us something about the direction of the culture and therefore society.

In the next post, we’ll be fleshing out in more detail the specifics of how the archetype manifests in modern western culture. In order to do that, we need to know what the archetype is and that’s what we’ll be defining in this post using some prominent Orphan/Innocent stories from film and literature.

Coming of Age/Individuation

Although the focus of this series is on The Orphan archetype, we’ll need to talk about The Innocent too. All archetypes have fuzzy boundaries. The Orphan and The Innocent are both subtypes of The Child. There is no rule that says a writer or movie director cannot mix and match properties. In fact, that happens all the time. There are a number of well-known stories which feature orphan characters but which are actually manifestations of The Innocent archetype. The difference between them will be important in subsequent posts so we need to be clear about it.

The primary difference is that The Innocent wishes to remain or return to the safety of childhood while The Orphan’s archetypal mission is to transcend childhood. It’s for this reason that Orphan stories are always coming of age stories. They are about the protagonist’s journey into adulthood or, in a Jungian sense, selfhood via individuation and confronting the shadow.

This criterion distinguishes stories that seem to be about The Orphan but which are really about The Innocent. A classic example is Harry Potter who is an actual orphan in the story and fulfils a number of other traits of the archetype. However, at the end of the story (the first Potter book, at least), Harry has not come of age. He is still in school; still a child. Depictions of The Innocent are portrayals of what we might call the eternal child. Other examples of The Innocent who just happen to be orphans are Frodo Baggins, Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Heidi, Pollyanna and Oliver Twist. In all of these stories, the character is still a child at the end.

The Innocent is the child who needs to remain a child. The Orphan is the child who is ready to grow up. The Orphan seeks to transcend their childhood and come of age. But we must distinguish between coming of age as recognised by society and what we might call coming to selfhood in a Jungian sense. Most societies with formal coming of age ceremonies have them around the time of puberty for both boys and girls. For example, the Jewish Bar/Bat Mitzvah is at 12 or 13 years old. Tribal societies that had initiation rites also conducted them at this age. In modern western societies we don’t have formal coming of age ceremonies and so the age of consent, driving age and voting age have become de facto coming of age markers. We recognise you as an adult at age 18 no matter what your personal developmental stage happens to be.

Most of the best known Orphan archetypes from our film and literature are in their late teens. Neo in The Matrix and Luke Skywalker in Star Wars are two prime examples. Once the person is much beyond their teens, the story can no longer be a proper coming of age story. The movie The 40-year-old Virgin is one example which inverts the archetype for comedic effect by imagining a man in early middle age who has yet to make one of the more important transitions into adulthood.

The Orphan’s archetypal mission is not to be formally recognised by their society that they have come of age. That happens to everybody by default in the modern West. Rather, they must individuate or come to selfhood. In a Jungian sense, The Orphan story is the story of individuation.

Evil Step Parents/Adoptive Parents

An almost universal trope of Orphan stories is the orphan’s mistreatment at the hands of the parent figure who takes over after the orphan is separated from its natural parents. We see this in Rapunzel, Snow White and Cindarella, Heidi, Pollyanna and Pippi Longstocking, almost all the Roald Dahl children’s stories, Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist, Harry Potter and others.

The explicit cruelty of the parents in Orphan stories functions to force the child out of the house and begins the individuation process as the child is forced to deal with the real world by itself. As a narrative vehicle, this makes sense. The home is the place of love and safety and the child will not want to leave that environment. They need to be forced out through tough love. We see this elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Here in Australia, the sound of young magpies who have been kicked out of the nest can be heard all over the country in late spring. This is a “cruel” but necessary move by the parent magpies. In practice, the cruelty can come as much from neglect (perhaps deliberate neglect) as active abuse but Orphan stories typically represent this quite explicitly in the behaviour of the adoptive parents.

Processing Pain

Alongside the pain caused by the adoptive parents, The Orphan has the pain of the loss of their natural parents. This is symbolised quite precisely in Harry Potter, for example, by the mark on Harry’s forehead caused by Voldemort, the man who killed his parents.

The Orphan is a victim. They are a victim of the cruelty of fate having lost their parents. They are a victim of the abusive step parents and bullies. They are often a victim throughout the journey (Frodo is repeatedly injured in the Lord of the Rings, for example). This sets up one of the primary dynamics of the archetype. The orphan must overcome their victimhood and not use it as an excuse not to do the work required to transition into adulthood/selfhood. It is for this reason that playing the victim is the primary weakness of The Orphan.

Those who would derail The Orphan will offer them victimhood. The Evil Queen dressed up as a friendly old lady offering a poisoned apple to Snow White is perhaps the ultimate expression of The Devouring Mother seducing The Orphan and derailing its archetypal mission. Snow White’s suffering is caused by her naivete. She must transcend the naivete of the child by understanding the motivations of others, including and especially those who would do her harm. In processing their pain, The Orphan comes to understand something about human nature while also learning that much of their pain is caused by their own actions and mistakes. This sorting out of responsibility between self and other is a key part of the individuation process.

The Elder

Having been forced out of the home and into the big wide world, The Orphan will meet an Elder figure who becomes their mentor. Obi-wan Kenobi, Dumbledore, Gandalf, Morpheus and Heidi’s grandfather are just some examples. Stories featuring orphans where the elder is not present are explicitly not coming-of-age stories and hence not Orphan archetypes eg. Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Pippi Longstocking, Pollyanna.

The fairy tales Snow White, Rapunzel and Cinderella differ from the pattern in that the Orphan is not guided by a wise elder but saved by a handsome prince. These stories are symbolic of the old pathway of a young woman transitioning into the role of wife. Interestingly, they come closest to The Devouring Mother pattern by portraying the parent who does not want to allow the child to grow up thereby showing that the problem of parents stifling their child’s development is an old one.

Easily Influenced

The naivete of Snow White who repeatedly falls for the tricks of the Evil Queen is another prime attribute of The Orphan which is that they are easily influenced and therefore easily led astray. This makes sense as The Orphan is halfway between childhood and adulthood. Part of processing their pain is to understand the motivations for that pain in others.  In doing so, they must learn to break out of the childish perception of their parents as demigods and see them for the first time as real people. That implies a loss of innocence and is another thing which separates The Orphan from The Innocent.

Alongside the Elder, The Orphan will meet others and make friends and enemies in the world outside the home. Thus, Frodo Baggins has friends in the other hobbits, Harry Potter the other students at the wizard school, Huck Finn has Tom Sawyer, Neo has Trinity and the other members of the crew, Luke Skywalker has Princess Leia, Han Solo and Wookie and so on.

The Orphan can also be led off track if it comes into contact with the wrong crowd. Oliver Twist gets in with a group of criminals. The same thing happens to J in the movie Animal Kingdom. In The Lion King, Simba falls in with friends who, while not really criminals, do not challenge him to rise to full selfhood and hold him back from his archetypal mission.

Oliver Twist is also led astray by what we could call the shadow elder. This also happens to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars with the twist being that it’s his own father who is trying to lure him to the dark side. Part of The Orphan’s mission is to figure who are the good guys and the bad guys, another factor in their deepening understanding of what it is to be human.

The Need to go it Alone

Although The Orphan needs its mentor and its friends, the final journey into adulthood/selfhood can only be done alone. The denouement of The Orphan’s story is the fulfilment of this archetypal mission. Luke Skywalker faces Vader alone in The Empire Strikes Back and The Return of the Jedi. Neo faces Agent Smith alone at the end of The Matrix. J acts alone to free himself at the end of Animal Kingdom. In Batman, we have the vigilante orphan who alone battles the forces that killed his parents.

Along the journey, The Orphan first is estranged from its parents, then its adoptive parents, then from friends and finally even from the wise elder who can only show The Orphan the path of individuation but cannot do the work required. “I can only show you the door. You’re the one who has to walk through it,” says Morpheus to Neo in The Matrix.

This reveals a curious fact about The Orphan’s mission which is that everything is set up to prevent it from happening. For example, even though Morpheus shows Neo the door, afterwards he struggles to protect Neo from harm. In doing so, he is actually preventing The Orphan from fulfilling his destiny. The same goes for parents who are overprotective of their children. It’s perfectly understandable and almost nobody can hold it against you and yet it prevents The Orphan from growing up. I suspect that is why Orphan stories make the adoptive parents explicitly cruel; it makes it easier to tell the story.

Symbolically speaking, the parents of The Orphan are “dead” in that they can no longer protect the child from the real world. The adoptive parents, bullies, and false elders are the real world, the human society that inflicts pain upon the child who no longer has the option to run back to mommy and daddy but must confront it. In confronting it, the child learns that it too is capable of evil. It comes to understand itself as a fully-fledged human being capable of both good and evil with the ability to choose between the two.

The final scene of Return of the Jedi, where Luke forgives his father, works so well archetypally because that forgiveness is part of the fulfilment of The Orphan’s mission. It represents the new perspective The Orphan has on its parents. No longer are they demigods but real human beings with their own emotions, motivations, strengths and weaknesses. Rather than blame Vader for the evil in the world, Luke learns to forgive his father. We all must suffer at the hands of our parents and we must learn to see that suffering in its true light. Failure to do so is precisely failure to transcend the archetype and to live in eternal Orphanhood: playing the victim, blaming parents, friends and society for all the things wrong with our life. In Jungian terms, projecting the shadow.

Integrating the shadow

There is one book which captures the essence of The Orphan better than any others I have read: A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin.

The protagonist of the book, Sparrowhawk, is as good as an orphan. His mother died when he was young. His brothers have moved out and his father is missing in action. He lives in a village roaming around doing what he wants. He receives minimal care from his aunt who only begins to show real interest in him when his magical powers are revealed. After teaching him briefly, she introduces him to the elder magician, Ogion, who gives him his true name of Ged.

So far, so good. This is much like a fantasy version of Harry Potter. But A Wizard of Earthsea is not a children’s book and what happens next is far closer to the psychological reality of The Orphan. Ged’s magical powers are as much a burden as a blessing for both himself and his mentor. He unleashes a shadow into the world and Ogion must use all his magical strength to subdue it. We see a similar symbolism in The Matrix and we will talk about this more in later posts. The elder’s job is not easy. Keeping The Orphan on track takes work and personal risk.

As a side note, the use of the concept of the shadow in A Wizard of Earthsea draws an obvious parallel to Jung. Although, interestingly, Le Guin said she never read Jung before writing the book.

Ged, in the manner of most young people, shows little remorse for the pain he has caused and no desire to take responsibility. He goes off to wizard school where his great power will cause more trouble and even the death of one of the teachers. Eventually, he graduates from school and is nominally a fully certified wizard. But his shadow is now chasing him and Ged must leave his job and spend the second half of the book confronting it. The battle is done alone out on the open seas with civilisation nowhere to be found; quite literally beyond the edge of the Earthsea world. In this, Le Guin symbolises the fact that the confrontation with the shadow, the individuation process, does not happen in society or civilisation. It is a personal battle; a psychological one. Being a battle against one’s shadow, it is battle for the understanding the one is as capable of evil as anyone else in the world. It is the integration of the parts of oneself that one would rather not acknowledge.

In A Wizard of Earthsea, Ged had already achieved his status in society. He could have kept his day job and gone on being a wizard in the usual fashion helping out the villagers and enjoying their respect. The same can be said for Neo in The Matrix who could have kept his job at the corporation. Same for Luke Skywalker in Star Wars and Simba in The Lion King. But The Orphan is called for something higher and that something higher is to face their own shadow. To do so, they must turn their back on society as this is a battle that can only be done alone. A Wizard of Earthsea strips back the symbolism of The Orphan story and presents it in true psychological light. Ged’s pain is not just caused by others. In fact, it is mostly caused by himself. That’s what makes individuation so difficult. Jung himself noted that integrating the shadow is one of the more painful things anybody can do and most people will avoid the task at all costs because it involves understanding that you are at fault for most of your problems. The task of The Orphan is not one that society can help with. In fact, society’s very existence gives The Orphan an out clause. All you have to do is keep the job, show up to work, do what you’re told. You can live a whole life that way but your shadow will always be there in the dark. You either confront it or let it control you. The Orphan must choose. The Elder’s job is to present The Orphan with the choice. But, as Morpheus says to Neo, “I offer you the truth. Nothing more.”

Metamorphosis

At the end of story, The Orphan has metamorphised. They are no longer The Orphan but have transcended into adulthood/selfhood. This implies a transition to another archetype. It’s no coincidence that in many Orphan stories, the archetype the protagonist transcends into is The Magician. Thus, Neo at the end of The Matrix re-enters the matrix as a master understanding both the rules of the game and how to transcend them and then offering the promise of transcendence to others. Ged goes on in the subsequent Earthsea stories to become an Elder himself and to lead other Orphans down the pathway to individuation.

However, it is also possible for The Orphan to take on other archetypes. Jane Eyre gets married at the end of the book manifesting The Lover archetype. In Animal Kingdom, J transcends into The Warrior in shadow form, echoing his cousins and providing the final, chilling twist to the story. Batman is a character who has already gone through an implied metamorphosis to become The Warrior. Simba becomes The Ruler in The Lion King.

Conclusion

We will extrapolate the meaning of the archetype in detail in the next post. But for now it’s worthwhile to point out how little our society resembles the typical Orphan story. Of particular importance is our lack of elders and the lack of power elders have vis a vis parents. It is the elder who offers The Orphan their mission; who shows them the pathway to individuation. For all kinds of reasons, the parents cannot do that job. And yet in the post war years, western society has foregrounded the role of the parent to an absurd degree. Meanwhile, our would-be elders are shipped off to the nursing home or the retirement village where they are out of sight and out of mind. Multi-generational households have disappeared, the granny flat got turned into the teenager’s bedroom and old age became a sign of failure that even the elderly do everything they can to avoid.

There are examples of societies where this is not so although there’s not many left these days. In hunter gatherer tribes, the child was removed from its parents and taken away for initiation. It was the tribal elders who both decided when the child was ready and also gave them the training for the initiation. The elders were the teachers who put the child on the path to adulthood. The break between childhood and adulthood/selfhood was made explicit through ceremony and involved an explicit severing of the parental role. No coincidence that those tribes also set aside a special place for elders in the life of the community. Our society is in many ways the exact opposite and yet we continue to tell Orphan stories where the elder plays a pivotal role. We still have this in our cultural memory and therefore we can still use this to critique the problems we face. That’s what we’ll be doing in upcoming posts.

All posts in this series:

The Age of The Orphan Part 1: The Path of Learning

The Age of The Orphan Part 2: Defining the Archetype

The Age of The Orphan Part 3: A Short Theoretical Introduction

The Age of The Orphan Part 4: Initiation, culture and civilisation

The Age of The Orphan Part 5: Ok, boomer

The Age of The Orphan Part 6: The Spirit of the Depths

The Age of The Orphan Part 7: The Metaphysics of Archetypes

The Age of The Orphan Part 8: The Current State of Play

The Age of The Orphan Part 9: How to learn to stop worrying and love The Matrix

The Age of The Orphan Part 10: Work is our religion

The Age of The Orphan Part 11: The Missing Link

The Age of The Orphan Part 12: Conclusion