What is an archetype?

I use the word "archetype" a lot in this blog, and most if not all of the posts will be tagged with the word.  So I thought I'd spend a post talking about what an archetype actually is. To put it simply, an archetype is a pattern.  It's a structure, or a form.  And it’s invisible.

How does this work?

If you take out a blank sheet of paper and draw a circle, you have drawn a pattern or a form we call "circle".  We all recognize circles.  We see them all over the place if we stop and look around the world.  We see circles in the shape of the Sun, in the shape of coins, the wheels on cars, the top of most drinking glasses, the shape of CDs or record albums, the shape of the pupil in your eye, or in a merry-go-round.  We recognize circles when we see them.  Before we even draw a circle, we automatically know what a circle is.  The same can be said for squares, triangles and rectangles.  The main difference between those shapes that you see, and an archetype, is that the archetype is invisible.  Wherever in your imagination you pulled the foundational image from which you drew your "circle" is the same place where all sorts of invisible patterns and shapes and forms reside.  Archetypes are the foundational patterns of everything.  If something exists, it originates in an archetypal form first.  From the archetype of "circle" come all other circles.  

Looking at this another way, to connect it more to our lives,  just like a blueprint consists of rectangles and squares and other shapes that combine to form the structure of a building, archetypes are the invisible structures of your life and of your soul.  Archetypes are the invisible architecture of your soul.  And these archetypes carry names that we resonate with in the same way we know what a circle is.  Common archetypes include the Mother, the Father and the Child.  When you hear those words you instantly recognize what they are.  Similarly, it's easy to recognize the Teacher, the Artist, the Storyteller or the Clown.  These are all archetypes.  And in the way that many buildings together create a city, a combination of different archetypes create your life.  You may be an Artist and a Teacher and a Mother.  Or you may be a Student and a Prince and a Hero.  If you are a Rebel and a Princess and a Hero (as seen, for example, in the movie “Whip It”), life gets very interesting and alive.  See, when we embody a particular archetype we personalize it.  If you are a Mother, you likely have a very nurturing nature, yet no two mothers nurture in exactly the same way.  You mother the way you mother.  Likewise, some teachers teach history, some teach math, and some teach theatre--and no two theatre teachers will teach theatre in the same way.  

An important piece in understanding archetypes is that they are not literal.  They are first and foremost invisible, which means you don’t need to dress in big shoes, a giant colorful curly wig and a round red nose in order to be a Clown.  You don’t need to stand up in front of a literal classroom to be a Teacher.  And you don’t need to be a particular age to be a Child.  You don’t need to have literal children to be a Mother, and not all mothers carry within them a strong sense of the Mother archetype.

In an even more complex way, archetypes combine to form larger patterns.  Together, the Mother and Father and Child form the archetype of Family.  A Teacher and Students combine to form the archetype of a Classroom, and Classrooms form a School.  A School and a City Hall and a Post Office, a Grocery Store, other Businesses and some Homes might form the archetype of a City.  A King and a Queen, a Prince and a Princess, a Knight, a Damsel, and a Fool create the archetype of the Court. 

In whichever manner you approach archetypes (on a personal level, a cultural level, or a historical level), essentially archetypes are recognizable because they are common to human experience.  They are timeless.  If you’ve ever learned something, you recognize the Teacher as well as the Student.  If you've ever saved somone, you know the Rescuer.  If you've ever birthed something, you know the Mother.  If you’ve ever had your heart swell with passion, you know the Lover archetype. 

To “see” archetypes is to see what is invisible within the visible, to see its essential makeup.  And to see yourself and the rest of the world this way is to see symbolically rather than literally.  Sometimes it can be like an upside-down reversal of how you typically see life, if you take the world in front of you literally.  Yet, the advantage of learning to de-literalize and see the archetypal nature contained within anything (including yourself) is to bring a sense of soul back into life--into your life--and to see the enchanting and magical and eternal essence at the heart and soul of life itself.

Tangled

Part 2 of 3. Back in the 1960’s, western culture was enamored with hair.  There were plenty of beehives and bouffants, but to be more specific I’m referring to the musical “Hair”:

“Gimme a head with hair, long beautiful hair.”

From the same musical came the anthem “Aquarius” with its visionary imaginings of the “dawning of the Age of Aquarius.”  Hints of the dawning of a new age took hold.  It’s true—this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.  We are living it.  But the dawning of one Age is also the twilight of another, just as sunrise in one part of our planet is sunset in another.  Now we are sitting, uneasily, in the twilight time between Ages, and it seems our long, beautiful hair has become... tangled.  Tangled in the twilight, tangled between the outgoing Age of Pisces and the incoming Age of Aquarius.

What does this mean?  What does the tangle look like?  To start, let’s look at the symbolism of Twilight itself.

Twilight is a fascinating time, when the sun dips just below the horizon.  The day’s light has just set, the evening’s darkness has begun to rise, and for a short while day and night live together in the same space.  (A charming depiction of this is the recent Pixar short “Day & Night”.)  No longer is it only day, not yet is it only night.  Most cultures view this time of day with trepidation, fear and uncertainty.  The light is disappearing, and who knows what the darkness holds?  Will the light ever return again?  The imagination can have a field day.  Mythology shows that Twilight is the dangerous time when Vampires emerge from their coffins and roam the world in search of pristine and pure Virgins (often with long, beautiful hair) on whom to feed.  The Virgin is the symbol of integrity.  Her purity intact, the “unmarried” Virgin has not yet become tangled in the world, has not yet been penetrated.  She is herself; she is one. 

“One” is actually the perfect entry point to look at the tangle of our times, between Pisces and Aquarius.  Part of the Virgin’s job is to allow things in, but to keep herself pure all the same.  This requires skills of discernment and differentiation, to let the "right" one in.  When Glinda descended in her bubble in Oz, the first thing she asked Dorothy was, “Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?”  It’s good to know the difference between things right from the start.

Both Pisces and Aquarius connect to "unity" and “one”, although from opposite perspectives.  They both agree that “we are all one,” but Pisces compassionately asks, “Aren’t we all the same, really?” while Aquarius answers, as in the U2 song, “We’re one, but we’re not the same.”

Pisces asks, “Did you get a haircut?”  Aquarius answers, “Actually, I got them all cut.”  What Pisces sees and experiences in gestalt and mystery, Aquarius sees in HD—high definition—clarity.  1 hour versus 3,600 seconds.  Pisces’ lack of boundaries opens it up to the whole ocean, while Aquarius is every drop of rain of the rainy season over which is resides.

In the world we’ve seen how the massive Piscean energies that swallowed humanity in large gulps of Christianity over the last 2,000 years, and then digested them into different bits called Catholics, Protestants, Episcopalians, Baptists, Lutherans, etc., is the same dynamic that took a once-unified group of people called “gays” and divided them up into gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, queers, and many, many more.  There’s a lot of in-fighting that leads to divisiveness, but division is not really the problem; it’s the solution.  “Divided” in the sense of “different”; differentiation (Aquarius) rather than diffusion (Pisces).  We are all united whether we are united in that or not.  It's time to split hairs.  Just as in the model of the United States,  where each individual state unites as one country, so too must we unite as different and unique individuals, each a unique part of the whole “one” of humanity.  This is why one of Aquarius’ key traits is the humanitarian.

So we’re back at one.  Not that we ever left it.  If you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot of talk about “the one” in these last couple of decades.  Mom and pop shops have been increasingly replaced with massive “one”-stops;  Neo in “The Matrix” had to accept that he was, in fact, “the one”; "Lord of the Rings" featured "the one" ring to rule them all; and all Elton John ever needed, as he sang, was “the one”.  While new agers joyfully squeal, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”, California has frequent wonderings of when “the big one” will hit.  Dating websites inspire you to find “the one” who completes you, while a recent movie says to let “the right one” in.  And, of course, all along the Christian religion has its hopes pinned on the return of the One, the Savior, the original Redeemer who is famous for dying, for sacrificing his self, and whose followers have molded themselves into that same shape ever since.

See, ultimately with Pisces the self is sacrificed—martyred—for the good of the whole, or at the very least the self is watered down, particularly by the word “selfish” (i.e., "Don't be selfish!").  With Aquarius, the self is not sacrificed at all.  With Aquarius, the self is celebrated, although not with celebrity.  All selves are celebrated.  But currently we are still tangled up.  We see “flash mobs” of unified individual behavior generated consciously (Aquarius), but acted out with the anonymity of a school of fish (Pisces).  We see people celebrating diversity mostly with mirror-people who are just like them.  Mash-ups (as in “Glee”) may be more truly Aquarian in nature, as two individual songs with their own identities merge and somehow manage to keep their identity within the whole.  Unity without anonymity.

The trouble these days is that the sacrificed self is everywhere (not least as a terrorist), paired with its equally strong opposite:  the narcissist.  They appear together, the two identical fishes swimming in opposite directions, always connected.  How do we let the right one in?  Is there a right one?  How do we know?  The result is nothing short of a fish fry, with people flip-flopping toward burnout at increasingly rapid rates.  Self-sacrifice doesn’t seem to be the solution; neither does vain narcissism.  And so we see the Vampire archetype emerge in the Twilight time, with its sacrificial victims, and we see the anemic walking dead, the consummate victims of a profound energy crisis.

What to do?

Fortunately, the stars offer this opportunity for us to look at this issue with some clarity while the Sun is in Aquarius, as well as the recent pileup of planets in the sign.

Part 3 will look at the upcoming pileup of planets in the sign of Aries, and how that fits into these dynamics.

Angry Birds and Black Swans

Part 1 of 3. With 6 planets in the sky in Aquarius this week, let me begin with a quote from James Hillman capturing the essence of Aquarius:

“Basic to collective consciousness today is global awareness, multi-culturalism, planetary thinking, multi-nationalism—the sense that all things private and personal and local are always being impinged upon by what others are doing everywhere.”

When six planets gather together in a sign, that particular dynamic of life is in focus under a huge magnifying glass.  Or it might be said that it’s so in-our-faces that we don’t need a magnifying glass at all.  With Aquarius, the notion of “collective consciousness” is what we’re looking at these days.  Not that we haven’t been looking at it for a while now, as the Internet has wired its way in and out of our lives, back and forth across the globe, weaving the invisible threads of its world wide web up and down from the satellites orbiting our planet to the pipelines underground, connecting us all together with a greater awareness of what goes on all across our tiny home called Earth and forming a virtual cocoon as we all wonder what kinds of transformations lie in wait, what kind of fate is in store.  It’s happening whether we like it or not, and it’s happening in ways that confound us every day.  When I was a teenager, the world new nothing of ADD, HD, ADHD, Inboxes, iPhones, apps, tweets, Angry Birds, Black Swans, Blu-rays, social networks, etc.

Somewhere in all of this “consciousness” reside billions of individuals, animals, trees, plants, insects, etc.  With Aquarius I always need an “etc.” because I can’t truly comprehend how huge the list really is.  It’s overwhelming.  How to live individual lives within a consciousness of collectivity is something none of us knows how to do.  None of us.  In a sense, this is the footing of Aquarius that brings us all together equally.  Our “collective consciousness” at this stage is, in fact, a collective ignorance.

Part 2 will take a closer look at the sign Aquarius by differentiating between Pisces and Aquarius.