I once caught an interview with the inventor of the earthship concept, Michael Reynolds, where he talked about his method of learning by maximising the number of iterations you go through. This is not as easy as it sounds. Apart from the practical issues of trying to design iterations so that you can learn something from them, there seems to be a natural human inclination to think that working through things in our minds is the same as testing them in the real world.
This natural tendency is probably exacerbated when the thing you are working on is an intellectual artefact. Still, intellectual artefacts count as iterations if done correctly. You produce the artefact, observe what worked and what didn’t work, and then incorporate that into the new iteration.
I’ve been iterating on my archetype framework for about a year and a half now, although I must admit I probably haven’t correctly followed Reynolds’ idea of maximising the number of iterations. The first iteration was an entire book, The Universal State of America. At that time, I was calling the model the archetypal calculus.
While writing that book, I had the idea of splitting it out into four separate, smaller books. In hindsight, I should have done it that way. Most of the problems I had writing the Universal State were how to make the ideas work together, and, in reality, I probably rushed the explanation of the main concepts as a result.
One of the reasons to keep iterations small is because most of the learning comes between iterations when you have the time and space to reflect on the work. While I was spending a year writing the Universal State, I never got round to asking what the model really was about. What really was an archetypal calculus?
So, it wasn’t until I’d finished writing the book that I had the time and space to ask that question, and I realised I still didn’t have a good answer. I decided to do another iteration. It would be a series of posts on Substack under a new name: the archetypal human.
The question arose, What was should be the theme of the Substack? Since I’d just been reading Northrop Frye, and I could see the correspondences between my model and his archetypal literary criticism, I decided to take that angle. The archetypal human would be a model for understanding stories (literature, history, film).
Thus iteration 2 was born. It would be a Substack focused on how to analyse stories using archetypes.
It’s only because I had decided to focus on stories that the subject of Wagner’s opera Parsifal came into consideration. I’m not a huge Wagner fan, but I’ve seen several of his operas. The main reason I decided to even look at Parsifal was because it is notoriously difficult to understand. Many people believe it has no story at all and needs to be understood symbolically (whatever that means). Roger Scruton once wrote a book giving his interpretation of the opera. I’ve never read the book, but the summary didn’t strike me as particularly insightful.
Given this background of Parsifal‘s inscrutability, I was quite excited to find that my archetypal human model worked a treat in deciphering the meaning of the opera. What I found is that the plot is actually a complete inversion of what I call the Orphan Story, the archetypal story that features an Orphan hero whose mission is to find their place in the world. As a result, I decided to include a discussion of Parsifal in my new substack series.
But here’s where things took a crucial twist. Ever since university, I’ve been interested in the philosopher, Nietzsche. I’ve read pretty much everything Nietzsche wrote, mostly more than once. I knew that Wagner had played a big role in Nietzsche’s life, but I’d never bothered to find out more about their relationship, and Nietzsche’s writings about Wagner had always been of little interest to me. Nevertheless, I did remember that Nietzsche had particularly hated Parsifal and that it had been central to the falling out between the two men.
Out of interest, I decided to revisit Nietzsche’s objections to Parsifal. Here was the first big revelation because I realised that Nietzsche had come to almost the same conclusion that I had. Although he wasn’t using any kind of archetypal analysis, Nietzsche diagnosed Parsifal as an inversion. He considered two possibilities. The first was that the opera was meant as a satire (comedic inversion). The second was that Wagner had become senile and decadent in his old age. Nietzsche ended up concluding that the latter explanation was correct, and all of his later writings refer to Wagner as a decadent.
But that explanation did not fit the facts. Wagner had become no more decadent in old age than he had been earlier in life. To the end, he was writing operas, trying to steal other men’s wives, being in debt up to his eyeballs, and doing all the Wagnerian things. I decided to dig into the problem a bit more. This led to the second big revelation.
I realised that Nietzsche and Wagner had themselves been in an Orphan Story. Wagner was the Elder to Nietzsche’s Orphan. The more I looked into it, the more I realised that it really was a beat-perfect Orphan Story that follows all the same themes you can find in fictional Orphan Stories such as Star Wars and The Matrix. But there was one big twist at the end, and that’s the twist that caused the falling out between Nietzsche and Wagner.
I realised I had hit pay dirt twice. Not only did the archetypal model account for Parsifal, a notoriously difficult opera to understand, it also accounted for the Nietzsche-Wagner relationship, which has been the subject of numerous books and theories. It was the latter of these that was more important. Only hardcore Wagnerians care about Parsifal these days. But Nietzsche is still one of the most important philosophers of our time. It turns out that his break with Wagner is a huge reason why, and that break is the result of the Elder-Orphan relationship between the two.
In terms of my archetypal model, this new breakthrough was even more important because it proved that the model has something to say about real people, and not just fictional ones. In the case of Nietzsche, I believe the model unlocks a new perspective on the philosopher’s life that nobody else has noticed. I’ve since reviewed all the major Nietzsche biographies and can’t find any evidence that others have understood the core meaning of the break with Wagner.
I realised that my focus on fictional stories was doing the archetypal model an injustice. It’s about real life. More specifically, it is a model of human nature and development that has a lot in common with the works of Maslow, Piaget, Freud, Sartre, Darwinism, and others.
With this new vision of what the model could be, I started to think of a new name for it. The word “archetypology” popped into my head. I decided to see whether anybody else had thought of that name.
Apart from a few random social media accounts that have taken the name, there was only one relevant search result I could find on the internet. It was from a meeting of something called the Eranos Foundation, which was a multidisciplinary group that met in Switzerland in the middle of the 20th century and that included luminaries of the calibre of Erwin Schrödinger. The quote from a publication summarising one of the group’s meetings begins as follows:-
There is no such word as archetypology, nor is there any one discipline which could fittingly be so named. But we might invent the word to cover all those very various studies which, in very different ways, contribute to our understanding of what the analytical psychologists call archetypes…
That this name should have arisen at that time and place is not surprising. We have to remember that European scholars were taking important steps towards integral and holistic ways of thinking in the first half of the 20th century. Jung’s well-known collaboration with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli is one of the better-known examples. Meanwhile, you had the work of Gebser, Toynbee, Spengler, van Gennep, Campbell, Smuts, and others all pointing in the same multi-disciplinary direction. All of it quickly disappeared from sight after WW2 as academia got taken over by Marxists, Foucaudians, and the like.
Since most of those writers are the ones that inspired my archetypal model in the first place, since the Eranos Foundation was dedicated to multi-disciplinary inquiry, and since nobody else seems to have done anything with the name, archetypology would seem to be perfect as the name for iteration 3 of the model.
So, that is what I am going to call it. Archetypology will be a model of human development which places the archetypes at the centre of analysis. It will be a unified model of the humanities, the study of what it is to be human.
It is this latter fact which should set it apart from the work of Ken Wilber, who is, as far as I know, the only major thinker in recent decades who has meaningfully added to the integral and holistic movement that began in the early 20th century. But Wilber has focused mostly on questions around the development of collective consciousness. Archetypology, by contrast, places the human individual at the centre of analysis, and works outwards from there.
With this new name and direction, a number of book ideas come to mind. I’m thinking I will write them as a series of volumes under the same title. Here’s the initial list:-
Archetypology Volume 1: Introduction to the Archetypal Study of Human Nature
Archetypology Volume 2: The Initiation of Nietzsche
Archetypology Volume 3: An Archetypal Analysis of Shakespeare
Archetypology Volume 4: An Archetypal Analysis of The Brothers Karamazov
Archetypology Volume 5: An Archetypal Analysis of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides
Archetypology Volume 6: History and Myth
Archetypology Volume 7: The Age of the Orphan, an Archetypal Analysis of the Modern West
That is the current plan, and even if it turns out to be not quite right, at least it is an iterative approach that should maximise learning. It should also keep me busy in 2025!