Introduction to Archetypes

Who doesn’t love a system of personality typing? For as long as there has been philosophy, physiology, and psychology, we have developed ways of categorizing individuals. This is part of our desire to know ourselves and others, to find our place and to find meaning.

Archetype | noun ar·che·type: A symbol, theme, setting, or character type that recurs in different times and places in myth, literature, and rituals so frequently as to suggest that it embodies essential elements of ‘universal’ human experience.

Carl Jung: student of Sigmund Freud, became known for his ideas about the collective unconscious and the system of archetypes. What do we mean by archetypes? These are energetic blueprints, part of the collective unconscious or the morphic fields of what it is to be a human. The archetypes pop up over and over again throughout time, in various cultures; they are part of the stories that we tell ourselves about how the world is and how we are as people.

Jung believed that the human mind retains fundamental, unconscious, biological aspects of our ancestors. These “primordial images,” serve as a basic foundation of how to be human.

“An archetype is like the invisible pattern that determines what shape and structure a crystal will take when it does form.” ~ Jean Shinoda Bolen, MD

We see these manifest in myths and legends, in religion, songs, comics and movies. Well understood archetypes allow us to put ourselves into the story and the fantasy because we understand the role that is being enacted in that character. When we understand these, we understand ourselves and the world around us better. Myths provide the possibility of aha flashes of insight – something rings true and we intuitively grasp the meaning of our own nature more completely. The myths of a culture reveal its values and relationship patterns.

“All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes. This is particularly true of religious ideas, but the central concepts of science, philosophy, and ethics are no exception to this rule. In their present form, they are variants of archetypal ideas created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality. For it is the function of consciousness, not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses but to translate into visible reality the world within us.” ~ Carl Jung, “The Structure of the Psyche.”

Each archetype has within it a set of attitudes, feelings, thoughts and behaviours. In truth, we embody all of these at different times, and we move through them in cycles. While we don’t usually refer to them in this way, when we talk about the personality attributes of the 5-Elements we are using them in a very archetypal way.

If I say ‘She’s a Fire type’ you have an idea of who this person is, how they might react to things, what emotions they might be experiencing what season/taste/climate they might prefer, etc.

When we look at the trigams in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) it is the same – these are patterns that mean something to us. They have names that give us clues as to the nature of their energetic patterns.

In some ways, this can be seen almost as an extension of the epigenetics information found in the GEMS Dimensions class because archetypal structures reveal cultural influences that change us and the way that we behave, right down to our genetic expression. We might have a genetic inclination towards specific archetypes or elements and these tendencies might be suppressed or encouraged depending on the culture and family that we find ourselves in – turning up some characteristics and dialing others back. We all have predispositions towards certain types and traits and when we are allowed to develop and express those fully, we feel accepted, authentic, and genuine.

In this class then we will explore some classic Jungian archetypes as a way of looking at both masculine and feminine energy and the spectrum in between, correlating them with hormone cycles, reproductive life cycles, chakras, the sefirot, and 5-element theory. While each person might find that they strongly identify with one of the archetypes presented, we can also see this as a journey – stages that we change and move through as we age – the same way that we may identify with a specific Element of TCM but we also go through stages of dominance with each. We go through many stages in life and take on characteristics and traits associated with different archetypes as we go. A woman may identify the most strongly with the Mother archetype for instance when looking at the personality traits associated, even though she is now in the Wise Woman stage of life.

Remembering: gender is a spectrum – there are people who menstruate who do not identify as female and people who do not menstruate who do identify as female and some who identify as non-binary, and I am going to do my best to make sure that the information as presented in this course is usable by everyone. I will end up defaulting to male/female, masculine/feminine much of the time because that is the way the texts are written and (especially when we begin looking at the hormone cycles) this is the data that has been collected. But the aim is to be accessible to all and inclusive in this workshop.

Archetypes are ideas, and you may identify as typically ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ archetypes at different points in life depending on the situation. There is power in being able to access the best archetype for the issue at hand, regardless of the gender it has traditionally been associated with, so part of this is about helping women access their inner Warrior (for example) when they need it, and men to access their inner Maiden and the confidence to express ourselves in these ways.

Click here to learn more about the Archetypes, Elements and Energy class