 |
Human Archetypes |
Carl Jung, the Great Swiss psychoanalyst, observed that when archetypes are repressed - whether within one person or an entire society - all kinds of alienation occur, and we are cut off from Nature, Self, society, and Spirit.
The consequences of this alienation can be seen wherever today’s mechanistic view of the world has infected modern life with what the American philosopher Lawrence Cahoone calls “the three pernicious dichotomies”: the split between subject and object (mind and body, inner and outer), the split between individuals and their relationships, and the split between the world of human culture and the natural realm of biophysical processes.
Archetypal structures are always available, but when they’re perceived through the lens of alienated cultures and consciousness, they appear as warped, even demonic versions of what they truly are, and their energy becomes brutalised. For example, we’ve seen how Hitler’s Germany refashioned Teutonic and Scandinavian myths and archetypes for its own alienated purposes. This certainly explains the valid fear throughout Europe and Russia today concerning a reunified and rearmed Germany Will the reunification of Germany activate the old archetypes?
Archetypes, in their finest sense, bridge Spirit and Nature, mind and Nature, and Self and Universe. They are always within us, the essential elements of the structure of our psyches. Without them, we would live in a grey, two-dimensional world. That is why, even when archetypes are repressed, they bleed through into other realms of human experience: into dreams, religious knowings, visions, artwork, ritual, love - and madness.
Sometimes the archetypes come in their archaic forms of gods, demons and rituals of earlier cultures. But always they ask to be seen in new and fresh ways. They ask to be regrown. Whenever they move into our awareness, both personally and collectively, mythic archetypes announce a time of change and deepening. This is what is now happening all over the globe today…
(Philosophia Naturalis by the Ancient Spiritual Manuscripts)…
All the Best, Noosphere Magazine…
 "Human Archetypes")
