If you’ve heard the term, but never understood it, you aren’t alone!
Although archetypes are fundamental to the way our minds work, they’re not that easy to explain. Carl Jung, who coined the term, didn’t make it particularly clear either. He said they are preformed patterns in the psyche, based on instinct – i.e. very basic, inherited thought-forms and ideas which have no specific content at first, but which gradually gain shape and substance as we grow. In other words, they are basic thought-forms we all, as humans, understand: like mother, father, balance, justice, the moon and sun. The archetypal aspect gives them a deeper, wider resonance – so the mother is the Great Mother: symbolically she becomes the earth mother, the Great Goddess, eternally fruitful and abundant, but also terrible and awesome in her power. The Hermit and the Hierophant are both aspects of the Old Wise Man, Jung’s Philemon, who exists in each one of us (he can also be an old wise woman). He gives wise guidance, information from the collective unconscious, and can sometimes be our inner critic.
(from Jung's Red Book)
The Sun is light, warmth, life; centre of our solar system, and symbolic of enlightenment, opening up, coming together…
As Jung says, the archetypes are ‘living psychic forces that demand to be taken seriously’, the ‘bringers of protection and salvation, and their violation has as its consequence the “perils of the soul” known to us from the psychology of the primitives’. (And not just the primitives: we ignore them or mess with them at our peril!)
The archetypes in the Tarot are real, but consisting of pure energy rather than flesh. They can affect us very powerfully. Our human interactions are often coloured by archetypal ‘projections’ – in other words, our unconscious takes something from within our selves and projects it onto another person. When we fall in love, we are usually in love with the contrasexual archetype within ourselves. The resonance this projected image has for us is potent in the extreme, which is why being in love is such an overwhelming experience. It also explains why, when we fall out of love, we realise that we never really knew the human we’ve been nuts about.
Jung identified various archetypes – the trickster, the mother, the father, and the old wise man. The Trickster – the Magician, of course. The Old Wise Man – the Hierophant. But think of Death, of Justice, the Devil, the Star, even the Tower, that shock of recognition that everything we’ve believed in has been a lie!
Jung wrote extensively about the I Ching and alchemy, but in all his work there is only one sentence about the Tarot. I find that really frustrating; he must have been swayed by its dubious reputation. Still, it is worth reading Jung – his book Memories, Dreams, Reflections, is a very accessible autobiography, and enables us to see a graphic description of how he made his discovery of the archetypal energies at work in his own life. His journal – The Red Book – has recently been published. At £120, it’s not cheap, but for anyone interested in his work it’s a must-have.
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