The Two Fundamental Pairs

Archetype	Mission
Child	To develop motor skills and other instinctual traits; to learn basic socialisation skills via our relationships with our parents
Orphan	To deal with the changes brought by puberty; to enter the institutions of society as apprentices; to begin to develop our own identity independent of family
Adult	To take up full membership in the institutions of society; to start a family of our own
Elder	To pass on our knowledge to the next generation both at a societal and familial level

There is an important concept implied in this table and hinted at in the mission of the Child. We said that the Child learns basic socialisation skills from their parents. This is a statement of the obvious and a universal of human society. It is also a statement of the obvious to say that our relationship with our parents is the most important in early life and throughout our lives.

We can capture this by positing that the Child-Parent (Adult) relationship is a fundamental archetypal pairing. Later in life, as we become Parents (Adults) and have children of our own, we are on the other side of the pairing.

The Child-Parent pairing is so fundamental and uncontroversial that we need not spend any more time exploring it in this introduction. It is the second fundamental pairing that is worth investigating since it is less obvious, especially in the modern West.

The other pairing consists of the other two main archetypes: the Orphan-Elder. This relationship follows quite logically from the definition of those archetypes and their mission.

We have said that the Orphan’s mission is to enter the institutions of society as students or apprentices. It is the Elder archetype who will initiate the Orphan into the institution of society of which the Elder is a representative.

Tribal societies provide a poignant example of this since they usually have an extended initiation ceremony. Such rites of passage often feature an explicit break with the parents (especially the mother) at the beginning. The initiate goes into the ceremony with the status of child and comes out with the status of adult. In the aftermath of the ceremony, there are often taboos around the relationship they may have with their parents.

In these cultures, the Orphan-Elder relationship is very clearly demarcated and many tribes will literally have people referred to as “elders”. These are the ones who will carry out the ceremony. Since a separation from the parents is an explicit part of proceedings, we can also see the symbolic meaning of the use of the word Orphan to denote the archetype. It is almost not an exaggeration to say that parents become “dead” to their children (and vice versa) in some tribal initiations.

Although modern society does not have anything quite as explicit as the initiations of tribal society, we nevertheless have the Orphan-Elder relationship since we have societal institutions and people who have positions of authority within those institutions. Modern examples of Elders include school teachers/principals, priests and other religious leaders, heads of business, leaders of political parties, boot camp drill sergeants, and even sports coaches or other senior members of the various groups that make up civil society.

In general, we can define the Elder as the person who is responsible for inducting Orphans into an institution of society and who has an ongoing duty of care for the successful integration of the Orphan into that institution. This broad definition covers a variety of historical and cross-cultural Elders including tribal chiefs, Spartan warriors, Catholic priests, medieval lords, and their cultural equivalents.  

There are a number of reasons why the Orphan-Elder relationship has been deprecated in the modern West. One of them is our relative paucity of ceremonial rites of passage. Another is the rapid pace of change in society, especially caused by technology, which means that the practical wisdom of Elders is of less value. A third reason is the explicit rejection of Elders by the baby boomer generation.

Despite (or may even because of) this, the Orphan-Elder relationship is at the heart of some of the most successful stories and films of our time: Frodo Baggins and Gandalf, Harry Potter and Dumbledore, Luke Skywalker and Obi-wan (and later Yoda), Neo and Morpheus in the Matrix movies. It is not a coincidence that all these stories are either fantasy or science fiction. They present the Orphan-Elder relationship in a form that is distant from the modern world. In Jungian terms, the Orphan-Elder is still present in our collective unconscious, even if not in the ‘real world’.