Category: Ideas

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

The modern economy, we are told, is a knowledge economy and in order to have a knowledge economy you need to have a learning society. Sounds nice. But it’s pretty clear that our society for the last little while has been incapable of learning. The last two years have been a useful case study of this larger trend. The powers that be doubled down and then tripled down on a series of public health measures that hadn’t worked the first time to stop the spread of a respiratory virus. That doesn’t sound like learning. It sounds like not learning.

Of course, we were told those ideas were based on “science”. But science in this context means “knowledge”; the end product of the scientific method which is a itself technique for learning. So, another way to look at the last two years was that we continued to rely on knowledge rather than learning. This is not really true, however, as we threw all the existing public health knowledge about how to deal with respiratory viral pandemics out the window in March 2020. But that was the party line and most people seemed to believe it. We ended up with the worst of both worlds; neither learning anything nor relying on past experience and knowledge. Now that corona appears to be coming to an end, there is no evidence that we will learn anything from it. Instead, we are stumbling straight into the next emergency. It’s a useful time, then, to reflect on the meaning of the concepts just to remind ourselves what learning and knowledge really are. In doing so, I will set the stage for a mini-series of posts that aim to deal with the archetype of The Orphan in more detail (see my post on The Orphan in my coronapocalypse series for more background).

Let’s begin by doing one of my favourite activities which is looking at the etymology of the words themselves. These gives us an insight into the evolution of language and meaning over time. The words learn, know and knowledge all have cognates in Old English and proto-Germanic. This fact is not trivial because the English language often uses Latin words for abstract concepts reflecting the history of both Roman and French domination as well as the fact that Latin was the lingua franca for much of European history. Learning and knowing are such core concepts of human life that the Latin words did not dislodge the folk forms at those historical junctures.

The word learn used to have the meaning of “follow a track”. We can still find this connotation in modern English phrases like “learning pathway” which gets used in the education sector. Similarly, you might go to a conference and join in the “economics track” or the “accounting track”. In Old English, learn could also be used in the sense of modern German “lehren”. Thus, you could say “I am learning you Spanish” meaning I am teaching it to you. The teacher is the one leading the student down the track which hopefully leads to a mastery of Spanish. Later came the meaning that we still have to this day which is to think about, read about, become cultured etc. In this way, the meaning of learn follows a very common pattern in the semantics of languages where a tangible, physical meaning like following a track is metaphorically extended into an abstract domain like coming to know about something. (You can take my word on this one. I wrote an honours thesis in linguistics on the subject. Trust the expert).  

The word know is from Old English cnawan which meant “to perceive”, “to distinguish” and “to identify”.  We are told that seeing is believing, but actually the phrase “seeing is knowing” is more faithful to the historical meaning of know. Like the old word for learn, cnawan had the meaning of seeing with your own eyes; experiencing for yourself. In this way, cnawan was equivalent to modern German “kennen” and “erkennen” but not “wissen” (the English word wit has its origin in the same word as modern German’s wissen). To know meant the ability to recognise, to distinguish, to identify by perception. It implied something directly experienced.

Translated into philosophical terms, we can see that both learn and know had a strong empirical bias in common language. This made perfect sense as there weren’t many philosophers around back then and most people couldn’t read and didn’t go to school. Most of things they knew, they knew by virtue of seeing it for themselves. For things that they were told, there was another word: believe.

The earliest meaning of believe was “to care”, “to desire” and “to hold dear” and those connotations are still present in modern religious and ideological belief. When somebody gets triggered, it’s because their beliefs have been violated; things they care about. Later, belief came to mean something like “be persuaded of” or “to be made to care”. You believed something somebody else told you but which you did not see for yourself. This distinction is very important and we start to see why so much of modern education and modern life in general is based on belief and not knowledge in the old meanings of the words. Most of what we refer to when we say we “know” something actually falls under belief. We did not see it with our own eyes. Somebody else told us. The distinction was described by Descartes at the beginning of his Meditations where he realises that most of what he thought he knew about the world was just stuff he had heard and a lot of that turned out to be wrong on closer inspection. He set about wondering how he could put his on understanding on firm ground (another metaphor).

What about the word “knowledge”? If cnawan was about seeing with your own eyes, shouldn’t knowledge be the result of that seeing? There doesn’t seem to be any record of that. The earliest meaning of knowledge had the connotation of honour. We distinguish a person from the crowd. We recognise them and thereby we honour them. It was later on that knowledge received its modern connotation as the awareness or remembrance of facts.

To reiterate, in learn, know and knowledge we see a semantic shift over time from concrete, empirical experience to abstract forms based on study of second hand materials, facts communicated by others, book learning etc.

The old idea of learning was to follow a track and this is still used in science (although less and less) in the concept of reproducibility. The great physicist, Richard Feynman, advised all scientists to reproduce the work of others rather than just believe it for themselves. In other words, to follow the track others had gone down. In science education we could, for example, take the student down the same pathway Aristotle took to show that the earth is round. This would require traveling to different longitudes to observe the night sky, seeing that the stars change and then reasoning about these observations. Another way would be take students to the shoreline and observe ships coming over the horizon via telescope. (Note: the Wolfram demonstrations project has an interesting version of this – https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ShipSailingOverTheHorizon/).

This learning by repeating is precisely how apprenticeships work. It’s how martial arts get taught. It’s how musicians learn. The student joins the path and the pathway leads somewhere. Given that it is built into our scientific method, how can it be that we have seemingly dropped it altogether in our education methodology?

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that education systems once implied a larger pathway or track for the student. For example, there was a system that produced the English gentleman. That education wasn’t just about teaching maths or English, it included how to dress, how to speak and how to behave. You needed to be able to tell the difference between the soup spoon and the dessert spoon so you didn’t make a fool of yourself when the Duke and Duchess came over for dinner. You were on a pathway which was a life path: the path of the gentleman. Your education was the preparation for this pathway just like an apprenticeship is a preparation for a trade you will have.

In the old world, the pathway for each individual was more or less fixed at birth. You were born a gentleman or a peasant or what have you. Nowadays, we have the opposite problem. We have no idea what pathway you are on when you are in school and you don’t either. Thus, when you finish your schooling, you still don’t know what to do. We can’t educate students in the old-fashioned way so we throw a bunch of knowledge at them in the hope that some of it might come in useful at some point. This makes sense when you consider that the modern education system was developed as a response to youth unemployment in the late 1800s. Young people used to go to work but then the work dried up and we needed to find something for them to do. So, we sent them to school. Ever since then, school has been not much more than a glorified child care facility which plays up to the vanity of parents and the underlying need of humans to form by dominance hierarchies by ordering children according to numerical grading. (To be fair, the old reading, writing and rithmatic did serve a useful function but that was in place by the end of primary school).

There is an idea that is fashionable nowadays that you can learn how to learn. This is mostly used as a marketing gimmick by the higher education sector to try and encourage adults to continue to spend their money on education. Nevertheless, I think there is some merit in it but I would frame it in the old fashioned sense. Once you have walked the path of learning once, it’s easier the second time and you can start to see the patterns that exist in learning. One of the patterns is that learning comes when it wants and not when you want. While you are walking the path, learning jumps out from the bushes like a group of bandits with pistols drawn. Learning costs you something although it is rarely a financial cost. Learning isn’t something you plan and it’s almost never something you want, at least in the short term.

Let’s take a concrete example from my own experience. Some years ago I decided to start walking the path of the backyard fruit and vegetable gardener. Along the way, I have learned many things about insects, birds, fungal disease, bacterial disease, soil, sun, pH, rainfall etc. Almost all of this learning happened when something went wrong and that crop of tomatoes I was expecting never eventuated because I wasn’t watering them enough or the apple cider I planned to make in autumn got eaten off the tree by a gang of cockatoos three months beforehand. I hadn’t planned to learn any of these things, but I did. Mother nature learned me gardening and she continues to learn me on a daily basis.

There’s another kind of learning which comes out of walking the path. You start asking yourself whether or not you really want to keep going. You ask whether you are on the right track. You learn something about your real motivations and your real will as opposed to the thing you imagined in your mind. This learning also comes when it wants, usually when some random pest has wiped out yet another crop and you throw your hands up in despair and wonder whether it’s all worth it.

If learning is something that happens to you and will pop up when you least expect it, it follows that learning cannot be controlled. Sometimes you learn a small lesson. Sometimes you learn a lesson that will shake the foundations of your entire belief system. Not all learning is equal. Our education system glosses over all this and sets up elaborate systems of grading with exams and essays and multiple choice questionnaires and we assign numbers to the results so everything looks scientific and quantifiable. Of course, the numbers have as much to do with learning as the current stock market valuation has to do with the economy.

In the last two years, some of us have learned a lot. Some of us have had the foundations of our beliefs about the world shaken. Many others have not. Those people have clung to their “knowledge” like their life depended on it. Even as the content of the knowledge changed from one week to another they still declared it to be knowledge. Of course, we know from the old meanings of the words that they weren’t referring to knowledge but to belief; the belief that the world makes sense, that the experts know what they are doing, that the government is doing its best to help.

Real learning calls both knowledge and belief into question. It challenges both what you think you know and the emotional and probably even physiological substrate of your mind. Every time you learn you are learning that the knowledge in your head was wrong. Once you’ve had that experience enough, you learn to be sceptical of your own knowledge. So, yes, you can learn to learn and it gets easier with time.

We can deduce from all this that we don’t live in a learning society. We don’t live in a learning society precisely because our education system does not put people on the pathway of learning. Rather, it is a substitute for that pathway. Modern education is the pathway for people who don’t know where their path is; and that is most of us.

It follows that the most needed thing right now is for people to start finding a pathway. To find firm ground again. More on that in the next post.

Recently, Ugo Bardi wrote a fine review of my second novel, The Order of the Secret Chiefs. There was one criticism Ugo made that I thought was unjustified but in an interesting way. Ugo made the point that the characters in the novel do not evolve but remain static. This would normally be a valid criticism. Any story which follows the Hero’s Journey pattern should have a denouement at the end where the protagonist transcends their old self and transforms into something new. However, comedy is the one genre where this is not true. To understand why, let’s first define some terms. I define a comedy as follows:

A story where the protagonist wins in spite of, or even because of, their vices.

We can contrast this with a tragedy:

A story where the protagonist loses in spite of, or even because of, their virtues.

The ur-novel of the modern West is also the ur-comedy of the modern West: Don Quixote. The protagonist, Alonso Quixano, is a fifty year old low level noble who is married and lives a comfortable life for the time. He decides to drop everything, call himself Don Quixote and go off on a grand adventure as a knight-errant. I hope it’s not a spoiler alert to say that Quixano “wins” in the end. Despite his vice – insanity – he makes it home safe and sound. What’s important to note is that Quixano has not evolved in any way. At the end of the story he is right back where he started and, although he renounces his previous actions, this is more of a social commentary on the part of Cervantes than a great revelation for the character.

Given that comedy is the genre where the protagonist wins in spite of their faults, it makes sense that the protagonist does not evolve. They have no need to. When things go well in life, we tend not to learn much. It’s mostly through pain and suffering that lessons get learned. This is one of the reasons why protagonists in comedy stories tend to finish where they started.

We see a similar pattern in what I consider to be the greatest comedic novels in the English language: the Jeeves books by P G Wodehouse. The protagonist, Bertie Wooster, is as clueless as Quixote. He is an inversion of the stereotypical English gentleman of the 1800s. Not for Bertie the gallant adventures of a Richard Francis Burton or squandering the family fortune on coke and hookers (I guess it was opium and hookers at that time) like many other young “gentlemen” of the age. Bertie is a wealthy man in his early twenties who could be playing the field, travelling or involved in affairs of state. Instead, he is wound up in trifling domestic disputes that get blown out of proportion through his own bungling. Fortunately, his trusty butler, Jeeves, is there to save the day. Jeeves must solve the problem while keeping the solution secret from Bertie who will only mess things up if he gets involved.

Like Quixote, what is going on in Bertie’s mind and what is actually happening in the real world are very different things and this drives the comedy in both books. There is nothing for Bertie to learn because he completely misunderstands what is going on. Because he doesn’t learn anything, he doesn’t evolve either. Again, we find that the protagonist in the comedy stays the same. The formula is neatly summed up in a line from another great comedy, The Big Lebowski: the Dude abides.

There is something else going on in Quixote and the Jeeves books that I think is interesting and relevant to larger social issues at the moment. Both Quixote and Bertie Wooster are anachronisms. Quixote has been reading too many old books and got himself riled up over a mythology about knights errant that was out of date even at that time. Wooster is an English gentleman of the old school at the time when that stereotype was fast going out of date and would be completely extinct after WW2. The fact that both characters are anachronisms is part of their charm. Both men are not just unwilling to conform to social expectations, they are completely unaware of them. The result is that they are not fitted for their world and must continually be rescued giving both of them an eternal childlike quality; two grown men who still believe in fairy tales. Another way to think about it is that they are out there in the real world acting as if the ideal in their mind were true and consistently ignoring all the feedback that it is not. This is in contrast to most of us who give up on whatever ideals we had in order to get by in society. There are strong parallels with Christ which Dostoevsky captured quite precisely in his fittingly-titled book, The Idiot.

What happens when we apply a standard comedic technique and invert this configuration? Instead of individuals who are running on an outdated social script, we make society the one which is running on an outdated social script. Then we change the individual from an idealist into a realist. Now it’s society forcing the individual to conform to an outdated, often absurd, social script. This is still a source for comedy. I’m reminded of the Seinfeld episode where George is forced to eat a poisoned pie by his co-workers: “If you’re one of us, you’ll take a bite.” It’s also an excellent description of where our society is at right now. On a daily basis, we are expected to believe all kinds of outright nonsense; to eat all kinds of poisoned pie. The process was in place before corona and has only gone into hyperdrive since.

As I’m sure Ugo would agree, we are coming to the end of the line of our current social arrangements. The story could be a tragedy and there are plenty of people who want to view it as such. That is the driver of many of the apocalypse fantasies that float around these days. There are a lot of people who want to heroically go down with the ship. However, societies, like most things in nature, operate in cycles. The end of one cycle is also the beginning of another. So, another way to think about where we are right now is the beginning of a new cycle. That is where the protagonist of the comedy, the Fool, comes into the picture.

It is not without good reason that the Fool card is the first in the tarot deck. It symbolises among other things the beginning of a journey. Quixote was a fool. So was Bertie Wooster. We are all now fools in that we belong to a society running on an outdated script. We must search for a new script but this mission is also foolish. We can expect many failures so we’ll need our Sancho Panza to keep our spirits up and our Jeeves to keep us from our worst mistakes. Like Quixote, we have to metaphorically leave our comfortable home where everything is still functioning more or less and go out into the world looking for adventure. We have to do that knowing full well that most of what we try won’t succeed but with the fool’s assurance that it will be alright in the end and if it’s not alright, it’s not the end.