The Archetypal Human

Just a decade earlier, another great scholar of myth and literature, Joseph Campbell, had also applied the Jungian lens to mythology and uncovered an underlying structure he called the Hero’s Journey. Campbell’s analysis was almost identical to an earlier work by anthropologist Arnold van Gennep who had studied ritual practices from around the world and discovered an identical structure that he called the rites of passage.

The cyclical structure of the Hero’s Journey and the rites of passage had already been invoked in the great works of comparative history. Two of them, Giambattista Vico and Oswald Spengler, had been a strong influence on Northrop Frye, while the work of Arnold Toynbee was very popular in both the pre and immediate post war years.

It was this common usage of the cyclical structure to make sense of what are normally considered independent domains of scholarship that had led Frye to speculate that it was the mythical cycle that could unify the humanities. Curiously, however, the work of almost all of these scholars would quickly go out of fashion not long after Frye had published Anatomy of Criticism .

Jung, and later even Freud, were pushed to the sidelines as neuro-chemical explanations of mental illness became dominant. Comparative history became very uncool. History, of course, was pronounced dead in the 1990s, an event that already been foreseen by Hegel and Marx. Literary criticism faded in importance as the Hollywood film took over from the novel as the most important storytelling medium in the culture. It is perhaps for this reason that Campbell’s Hero’s Journey is the one concept mentioned above that still has some level of resonance in the broader culture. Every blockbuster Hollywood film follows the Hero’s Journey structure, although these days interest in the Hero’s Journey comes less from film buffs and more from the self-help industry.

In short, Frye’s dream of a unification and integration of the humanities has not come to pass and the humanities departments of modern universities have seemingly pursued the complete opposite goals of disunity and dis-integration. It is for that reason that any theories aiming at integration and holism must come from outside of academia.

The Archetypal Calculus is the name I am giving to a framework that picks up where Frye left off in 1957 and which aims for an integrated view of the human. Just like Frye’s literary criticism and Campbell’s comparative mythology, the framework has a solid grounding in Jungian psychology with its use of the archetype concept. However, one thing we must clear up right from the start is that the Archetypal Calculus aims to take a higher level view than just the psychological.

The meaning of the word archetype goes back to the Greeks where it meant something like “original pattern”. When we ask, what is the original pattern of the type human, psychology no doubt plays a crucial role. But, as the Greeks well knew, humans are also social creatures and any framework that aims to account for the whole human must take that into consideration.

This is where the comparative anthropology of van Gennep and the comparative history of Vico, Spengler and Toynbee provides the counterbalance to the psychology of Freud and Jung. But, more importantly, what Frye had discovered was that it was the use of the mythical pattern that was common to all these scholars. That pattern is the one identified by Joseph Campbell: a cycle with transcendence.

The Archetypal Calculus posits that the cycle with transcendence is the pattern which can unify the study of the human. This is an idea that already has a solid grounding in common sense. We know that our lives are cycles of sorts. We even call it the human lifecycle. The cycle is made up of distinct phases that every culture acknowledges: childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. Thus, although it has a fancy-sounding name, the Archetypal Calculus is grounded in everyday reality (something that can’t be said for academic culture these days!)

It is also for this reason that stories and myths are powerful tools for analysing the archetypal nature of humanity since every culture has myths and stories and humans appear to be hardwired to think in terms of stories.

Almost all stories capture the dual aspects of the human; the psychological and the social. We will call the former the Esoteric and the latter Exoteric. The disciplines normally devoted to the Esoteric are psychology and theology, while the Exoteric is the usual domain of anthropology, sociology, politics and history.

The Archetypal Calculus aims to expand the concept of the archetype beyond the Esoteric to also include the Exoteric. The concept of the archetype then becomes a Janus-faced whole looking inwards or outwards as necessary. More importantly, it sees the inner and outer aspects of life as inextricably linked. Thus, any purely psychological or purely socio-cultural explanation can only ever be partially true.

The full human lifecycle is a Hero’s Journey; a cycle with transcendence that has both an Esoteric (inner-facing) and an Exoteric (outer-facing) dimension. We can call the archetype of the hero who lives this full lifecycle the Human.

But it is also true that the human lifecycle is made up of numerous smaller sub-cycles. Each of these is also a Hero’s Journey with specific Esoteric and Exoteric dimensions to it. For each of these segments of life, we invoke the familiar names used within Freudian and Jungian psychology: the Child, the Orphan, the Adult and the Elder.

	Archetype
Human	Child	Childhood
	Orphan	Adolescence
	Adult	Adulthood
	Elder	Old Age

From the anthropological literature, we see that each culture has specific rites of passage that mark the transition points between the archetypal phases of life. From psychology, we know that there are particular forms of psychic difficulties that come from the failure to make the transition between the archetypal phases. Freud and Jung were particularly concerned with the Child-Adult transition. Followers of their work, such as Erik Erikson, have since identified psychological dynamics specific to each archetypal phase. These form the Exoteric and Esoteric dimensions of the archetypes respectively.

The Archetypal Calculus is consonant with such scholarly research. But it is arguably in literature and myth where we find the fullest exploration of the Human archetype and its various sub-phases, since stories already combine the Esoteric and Exoteric aspects of life.

Almost every Hero’s Journey features a hero that is in one of the archetypal phases of life. If we limit ourselves to the works of Shakespeare, we find that all of his great stories are about a specific archetypal hero. Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet are Orphans who fail to make the transition to the Adult. Macbeth is the Warrior who fails to make the transition to Elder, while King Lear is about the Ruler who fails the same transition. While the tragedies are about the failure of the archetypal transition, the comedies show success. Thus, Much Ado About Nothing is about the successful transition from Orphan to Adult that Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet fail to make.

It is because myth, literature and (more recently) film are able to capture both the Exoteric and Esoteric dimensions of the archetypal dynamic of life while also capturing the cyclical nature of the phases of life that they represent the purest form of the model which the Archetypal Calculus builds up. For that reason, the Archetypal Calculus can best be seen as the extension and refinement of Northrop Frye’s archetypal literary criticism and the attempt at fulfilling his vision of a unified approach to the humanities based around the underlying cyclical pattern of story and myth.

Mythology, literature and film are not just descriptions of human life. Their underlying structure mirrors the structure of our lives and it is this deep resonance which allows these artforms to explore the fundamental truths of human existence. It is for that reason that the Archetypal Calculus makes extensive use of stories while also drawing from other scholarly disciplines where necessary to show that the truths uncovered by “fiction” are very much central to “the real world”.