Jung's Archetypes
The psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung, used the concept of archetype in his theory of the human psyche. He believed that universal, mythic characters—archetypes—reside within the collective unconscious of people the world over.
Strictly speaking, Jungian archetypes refer to unclear underlying forms or the archetypes-as-such from which emerge images and motifs such as the mother, the child, the trickster, and the flood among others. It is history, culture and personal context that shape these manifest representations thereby giving them their specific content. These images and motifs are more precisely called archetypal images. However it is common for the term archetype to be used interchangeably to refer to both archetypes-as-such and archetypal images.
Archetypes abound in contemporary films and literature as they have in creative works of the past, being unconscious projections of the collective unconscious that serve to embody central societal and developmental struggles in a media that entertain as well as instruct. Films are a contemporary form of mythmaking, reflecting our response to ourselves and the mysteries and wonders of our existence
(Wiki)
Jung: 4 archetypes book
Jung, C. (2003). Four archetypes. London: Routledge, pp. 14-15, 138.
The mother - pg 14 - 15: 156
‘Mythology offers many variations of the mother archetype…Many things arousing devotion or feelings of awe, as for instance the Church…heaven, earth, the woods, the sea or any till waters, matter even, the underworld and the moon, can be mother-symbols.’
‘Hollow objects such as ovens and cooking vessels are associated with the mother archetype…’
157
All these symbols can have a positive, favourable meaning or a negative, evil meaning…Evil symbols are the witch, the dragon, the grave…
158
On the negative side the mother archetype may connote anything secret, hidden, dark; the abyss, the world of the dead, anything that devours, seduces, and poisons, that is terrifying and inescapable like fate.
pg 138: 431
‘…like the devil who delights in disguising himself as an angel of lights…’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungian_archetypes
https://www.psychologistworld.com/cognitive/carl-jung-analytical-psychology.php
https://marygreer.wordpress.com/2008/03/31/carl-jung-and-tarot/
Joseph Campbell - Monomyth / Functions of Myth
https://fractalenlightenment.com/36315/life/joseph-campbells-four-basic-functions-of-mythology
http://billmoyers.com/content/ep-2-joseph-campbell-and-the-power-of-myth-the-message-of-the-myth/
Moyers, B. (2014). Ep. 2: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth -- 'The Message of Myth'. [online] www.billmoyers.com. Available at: http://billmoyers.com/content/ep-2-joseph-campbell-and-the-power-of-myth-the-message-of-the-myth/ [Accessed 10 Nov. 2016]
Myths
BILL MOYERS: So myths are stories of the search by men and women through the ages for meaning, for significance, to make life signify, to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are.
CAMPBELL: People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that the life experiences that we have on the purely physical plane will have resonances within that are those of our own innermost being and reality. And so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive, that’s what it’s all finally about, and that’s what these clues help us to find within ourselves.
BILL MOYERS: Myths are clues?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.
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JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The experience of life. The mind has to do with meaning; in here, what’s the meaning of a flower? That Zen story of the sermon of the Buddha when his whole company was gathered, and he simply lifted a flower. And there’s only one man, Kashyapa, who gave him a sign with his eye that he understood what was said.
What’s the meaning of the universe? What’s the meaning of a flea? It’s just there, that’s it, and your own meaning is that you’re there. Now we are so engaged in doing things, to achieve purposes of outer value, that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all about.
Now, we want to think about God. God is a thought, God is a name, God is an idea, but its reference is to something that transcends all thinking. The ultimate mystery of being is beyond all categories of thought. My friend Heinrich Zimmer of years ago used to say, “The best things can’t be told.” Because they transcend thought. The second best are misunderstood, because those are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which can’t be thought about, you know. And one gets stuck with the thoughts. The third best are what we talk about, you see. And myth is that field of reference, metaphors referring to what is absolutely transcendent.
BILL MOYERS: What can’t be known.
Nature & religion
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: ...Here’s a whole mythology based on the insight that transcends duality. Ours is a mythology that’s based on the insight of duality. And so our religion tends to be ethical in its accent, sin and atonement, right and wrong. It started with a sin, you see. In other words, moving out of the mythological zone, the garden of paradise where there is no time, and where men and women don’t even know that they’re different from each other, there the two are just creatures. And God and man are practically the same: “He walks in the cool of the evening in the garden where we are.” And then they eat the apple, the knowledge of the pairs of opposites, and man and woman then cover their shame, that they’re different; God and man, they’re different; man and nature, as against man.
Now, in the other mythologies, one puts oneself in accord with the world. If the world is a mixture of good and evil, you do not put yourself in accord with it. You identify with the good and you fight against the evil, and this is a religious system which belongs to the Near East, following Zarathustra’s time. It’s in the biblical tradition, all the way, in Christianity and in Islam as well. This business of not being with nature, and we speak with sort of derogation of “the nature religions.” You see, with that fall in the garden, nature was regarded as corrupt. There’s a myth for you that corrupts the whole world for us. And every spontaneous act is sinful, because nature is corrupt and has to be corrected, must not be yielded to. You get a totally different civilization, a totally different way of living according to your myth as to whether nature is fallen or whether nature is itself a manifestation of divinity, and the spirit being the revelation of the divinity that’s inherent in nature.
I’ll never forget the experience I had when I was in Japan. To be in a place that never heard of the fall in the garden of Eden. To be in a place where I can read in one of the Shinto texts, “The processes of nature cannot be evil.” When every impulse, every natural impulse, is not to be corrected, but to be sublimated, you know, to be beautified. And the glorious interest in the beauty of nature and cooperation with nature, and coordination, so that in some of those gardens you don’t know where nature begins and art ends. This to me was a tremendous experience, and it’s another mythology.
In relation to the symbol of the snake through different cultures & discussing the Fall:
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The power of life, because the snake sheds its skin, just as the moon sheds its shadow. The snake in most cultures is positive. Even the most poisonous thing, in India, the cobra, is a sacred animal. And the serpent, Naga, the serpent king, Nagaraga, is the next thing to the Buddha, because the serpent represents the power of life in the field of time to throw off death, and the Buddha represents the power of life in the field of eternity to be eternally alive.
Now, I saw a fantastic thing of a Burmese priestess, a snake priestess, who had to bring rain to her people by calling a king cobra from his den and kissing him three times on the nose. There was the cobra, the giver of life, the giver of rain, which is of life, as the divine positive, not negative, figure.
BILL MOYERS: The Christian stories turn it around, because the serpent was the seducer.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, what that amounts to is a refusal to affirm life. Life is evil in this view. Every natural impulse is sinful unless you’ve been baptized or circumcised, in this tradition that we’ve inherited. For heaven’s sakes!
BILL MOYERS: By having been the tempter, women have paid a great price, because in mythology, some of this mythology, they are the ones who led to the downfall.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Of course they did. I mean, they represent life. Man doesn’t enter life except by woman, and so it is woman who brings us into the world of polarities and pair of opposites and suffering and all. But I think it’s a really childish attitude, to say “no” to life with all its pain, you know, to say this is something that should not have been.
Archetypes:
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes, well, there are only two ways to explain it, and one is by diffusion, that an influence came from there to here, and the other is by separate development. And when you have the idea of separate development, this speaks for certain powers in the psyche which are common to all mankind. Otherwise you couldn’t have — and to the detail the correspondences can be identified, it’s astonishing when one studies these things in depth, the degree to which the agreements go between totally separated cultures.
BILL MOYERS: Which says something about the commonality of the species, doesn’t it?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, yes, that was Carl Jung’s idea, which he calls the archetypes, archetypes of the collective unconscious.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean by archetypes?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: An archetype is a constant form, a basic fundamental form which appears in the works of that person over there, and this person over here, without connecting them. They are expressions of the structure of the human psyche.
BILL MOYERS: So if you find in a variety of cultures, each one telling the story of creation or the story of a virgin birth or the story of a savior who comes and dies and is resurrected, you’re saying something about what is inside us and the need to understand.
One can say that the images of myth are reflections of spiritual and depth potentialities of every one of us. And that through contemplating those, we evoke those powers in our own lives to operate through ourselves.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s right. One can say that the images of myth are reflections of spiritual and depth potentialities of every one of us. And that through contemplating those, we evoke those powers in our own lives to operate through ourselves. There was a very important anthropologist — he’s the one with whom my works begin, you might say, my studies — Bastian in Germany, end of the last century and first part of this. He was a world traveler and recognized very soon that there were certain motifs that appeared in all of the religions and all of the mythologies of the world. Such an idea, for example, as a spiritual power, that’s an archetypal image that appears everywhere. And he called these “elementary ideas.” But they appear in very different forms and different provinces and at different times, and those different forms are costumes he called ethnic or folk ideas. But within the ethnic idea is the elementary idea, and it is those elementary ideas that Carl Jung then began studying and called “archetypes of the unconscious.” When you say elementary idea, they seem to come from up here. When you say archetypes of the unconscious, they come from up here, and they appear in our dreams, as well as in myths.
BILL MOYERS: So when one scripture talked about being made in his image, in God’s image, it’s being, it’s being created with certain qualities that every human being possesses, no matter what that person’s religion or culture or geography or heritage.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: God would be the ultimate elementary idea of man.
BILL MOYERS: The primal need.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And we are all made in the image of God, okay? So that is the ultimate elementary idea or archetype of man.
Four functions
BILL MOYERS: How do we live without myths, then?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, we’re doing it.The individual has to find the aspect of myth that has to do with the conduct of his life. There are a number of services that myths serve. The basic one is opening the world to the dimension of mystery. If you lose that, you don’t have a mythology, to realize the mystery that underlies all forms. But then there comes the cosmological aspect of myth, seeing that mystery as manifest through all things, so that the universe becomes as it were a holy picture, you are always addressed to the transcendent mystery through that. But then there’s another function, and that’s the sociological one, of validating or maintaining a certain society. That is the side of the thing that has taken over in our world.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Ethical laws, the laws of life in the society, all of Yahweh’s pages and pages and pages of what kind of clothes to wear, how to behave to each other, and all that, do you see, in terms of the values of this particular society. But then there’s a fourth function of myth, and this is the one that I think today everyone must try to relate to, and that’s the pedagogical function. How to live a human lifetime under any circumstances. Myth can tell you that.
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