Gods in disguise

 

We won't understand the archetypes if we reduce them to vague generalities, or fixed notions. They are patterns of psychic force that are constantly in motion and forever shapeshifting, something like the major arcana of tarot. Jung himself - as opposed to some Jungians - insisted on that last characteristic. "It [the archetype] persists throughout the ages and requires interpreting anew. The archetypes are imperishable elements of the unconscious, but they change their shape continually" [1]

Jung’s intellectual colleague, the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, suggested in his monograph on Kepler that archetypes are “instincts of imagination”.

He [Kepler] speaks in fact of ideas that are preexistent in the mind of God and were implanted in the soul, the image of God, at the time of creation. These primary images, which the soul can perceive with the aid of an innate ‘instinct’, are called by Kepler archetypal. Their agreement with the ‘primordial images’ or archetypes introduced into modern psychology by C.G. Jung and functioning as ‘instincts of imagination’ is very extensive.”[2].

Jung saw the play of the archetypes in synchronistic events. Aniela Jaffé observed that “one of the main points of Jung’s investigations on parapsychology is that synchronistic events are manifestations of an archetype. In other words, the archetype is their “organizer”.” [3]  

Jung cautioned that the archetypes, unrecognized and uncontained, have a raw, primal energy that can flood the narrow riverbed of ordinary consciousness.

The primordial image, or archetype, is a figure be it a daemon, a human being, or a process - that constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. When we examine these images more closely, we find that they give form to countless typical experiences of our ancestors. They are, so to speak the psychic residua of innumerable experiences of the same type… It is like a deeply graven river-bed in the psyche, in which the waters of life, instead of flowing along as before in a broad but shallow stream, suddenly swell into a mighty river. This happens whenever that particular set of circumstances is encountered which over long periods of time has helped to lay down the primordial image.  [4] 

Robert A. Johnson, in Inner Work, counseled that “Each of us has all the great archetypal themes hidden inside. We all have the seeds of the heroic quest within us; we must live it out sometime, on some level. Each of us has the journey and labors of Psyche, the encounter with Eros and Aphrodite, built somewhere into our inner structure. One can’t avoid these leitmotivs; one must express and experience them.” [5]

The archetypes are neverending stories that, like all great stories, have countless variants. They may also be gods in disguise, cloaked in language that makes them half-decent to the modern mind. Jung lifted the hem of his own robe when he wrote in Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious that “Only an unparalleled impoverishment of symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, that is, as archetypes of the unconscious.” [6]

 

References

C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Collected Works volume 9, part 1 trans R.F,C, Hull, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980) CW 9i, para 301).

2. C.A. Meier (ed) Atom and Archetype: The Pauli-Jung Letters 1932-1958 trans. David Roscoe, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 208) 204

3. Aniela Jaffé, Apparitions and Precognition (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1963) 192

4. C.G.Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry" (1922) in The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978)

5. Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth (New York: Harper & Row, 1989) 153

6. CW9.1 para 50

Art: "Eyebrows of Zeus" by Robert Moss