Archetypes and Culture

The cards in the Empyrean deck are meant to represent the Archetypes. But what exactly are archetypes?

To understand the archetypes, you have to understand something about humans: how we work, and what we need to live and function well. The first thing about humans, and the most important, is that we are not essentially individuals.  Most of us grew up believing that to be a person means to be separate from others, to be autonomous, to take care of ourselves more or less independently.  This is not completely untrue, but it is deeply misleading.  There is a place for individuality, for finding our unique qualities and gifts.  But individuality is really best understood as being in service to a larger purpose, which is shared by all humans.  As a species, we are really like ants, designed to function as a collective intelligence.  And just as each individual ant is part of a distributed search engine for seeking out and retrieving food for the colony, each human is part of a system for seeking out and sharing information for the community. 

Humans are highly specialized for learning and sharing various facts about the world.  These include sources of food and shelter, but they also include information about relationships and social structure, illness and health, and generally anything about our natural environment that may affect our lives for good or for ill.  That information, the sum total of everything we have learned about our experiential world, is preserved and passed on in what we call culture.  Culture is the distributed storage mechanism for life’s wisdom.  It is materially embedded in narrative stories, graphic art, epic poetry, films and commercials.  Ultimately, it is stored in the minds of people who observe and interpret these cultural artifacts.

We think our thoughts are generated in our own brains.  This is not true.  The vast majority of our thoughts were originally thought by someone else first.  Thoughts about what music to listen to, what kinds of people are admirable or despicable, about how to earn a living or decorate your house, whether there is an afterlife and how to get there, all these thoughts exist is a sort of platonic sphere, which many people call the Noosphere.  Given the relevant stimulus, in the relevant context, we sort of just download a thought from the cultural repository. 

While our individual physical senses tell us what we are seeing and hearing in a given moment, culture is the mechanism by which we interpret what we experience: is it good or bad?  What are do we do about it, if anything?  Our awareness is sort of the middleman or union between physical, social, and environmental data, on the one hand, and the meanings of these things, on the other.  Culture is what gives the content of experience its direction, significance, and moral value.  If we are like computers, culture is like the operating system by which we function.

As you can imagine, it is incredibly important that our culture is a good one.  What counts a good culture?  One that provides answers to the kinds of questions we need to answer in order to live well.  While most organisms are naturally adapted to a specific environment, humans are specifically adapted to be able to learn and master new environments.  Since no one person can do this, culture is the mechanism by which information about the present environment is learned and incorporated.  This means, among other things, that culture has to be able to change when circumstances change.  These circumstances may be environmental, social, economic, or technological.  But it is not a perfect system: cultures are subject to bad information, like bad memes, which can spread and grow despite their toxicity.  If the culture becomes corrupted by bad data, people suffer unnecessarily and die early. 

Now, what are the archetypes?  Archetypes do not carry or represent specific data about the world.  If they did, they would be dependent upon particular environments and time periods.  Rather, the archetypes are those topics, issues, or problems that culture must provide wisdom for.  This is why it is so important to distinguish between archetypal images from the archetypes themselves.  For example.  For mammals like us, the role of the mother is hugely important for how we grow up, how we treat our young, and generally how we take care of each other in the community.  For this reason, we see many archetypal images of mothers and motherhood in our dreams, our culture and in cultures around the world.  These images crystalize specific feelings and ideas about what counts as a good or bad mother, their responsibilities and gifts, and who may take on that role and when.  But all these are images: they carry wisdom that is more or less specific to a particular time and place.  The archetype in itself is really just the question: what does it mean to be a mother for creatures like us (i.e., given the material, empirical facts of our biology) along with the psychic and emotional urgency that we feel in answering that question. 

Archetypes are not just images.  They are experienced as psychic forces or powers that draw our attention to, and organize our experience around, specific concrete elements of our lives.  To the extent that our culture provides helpful images, we take it as given that those images are accurate and objective portrayals of facts of the world.  But when there is tension or conflict between the public cultural images and our own experience, we feel that something is wrong. 

We have been raised to believe that if we are experiencing this kind of conflict, the problem lies with us.  Psychology as a discipline has been focused on ‘adjustment:’ that is, acclimating the disordered self to the social and economic environment, which is taken as given.  This is alright and necessary as far as it goes.  But what if it turns out that sometimes the problem lies not with the self, but with the culture?  What if our culture has been infected with bad ideas and images, so that instead of helping humans function in the way we are meant to, we become isolated, and therefor dependent upon economic and political engines that suck our energy like parasites, instead of providing the wisdom we need to thrive? 

The archetypes represent the internal structure of culture.  They are the focal points around which we live, and around which culture is organized.  Again, they do not in themselves provide the information we need to live.  But they do force our attention on those issues, problems, and questions that need to be addressed in some positive way.  If the culture provides good answers, then we live well.  If not, then we will need to find, create, or otherwise generate archetypal images that serve us better. 

A conflict, tension or disconnect between our experience and our cultural imaginary is often manifested in the language of the archetypes.  This is why archetypal psychology can be described as transpersonal.  We feel it as sadness, despair, frustration, or confusion in our lives, and so we assume that we are just depressed or whatever.  But actually, the problem is that the culture is not providing the images and ideas we need to correctly interpret our experience. 

If we encounter and notice images of the Mother, or other images that are archetypally associated with the Mother, it may be an indication that we are unconsciously struggling with a sense of nurture or care, or lack thereof.  We may need to focus some intentional energy on getting the care we need, or how we offer that care to others.  The image doesn’t tell us exactly what we should do or change, but our encounter with the image usually has a quality of projection, and so a thoughtful analysis of own intuitions about the images we encounter may give us the clue or insight we need.  Generally, this analysis involves teasing apart the ideas and images that are ‘given’ in the culture from those that are part of our own experience.  If the former are not helpful as interpretive framework, we may need to seek out or invent new images. 

Our culture suffers from a deep poverty of salutary images of human life.  In effect, we need to recreate for ourselves a new cultural repository.