archetypes, pop-culture, a beardman, and some lyrics. not quite in that order.

Well.  I took something of an unintentional sabbatical.  Oops.

Life has been kind of crazy lately– finalizing the move and a super busy work week grabbed my hands and carried me off to magical places which resulted in me doing little but busy-do-all-of-the-things and sleep.  I did actually try to write, but it was mediocre enough to gently slide into the never-see-the-light-of-day cabinet.

(I promised myself early on not to post anything that wasn’t actually at least a little bit good.)

But I have returned!  With grand thoughts and magnificent observations!  First, though, a picture of Samuel Beam.

Does has beard.
Warning: I'm pretty sure this opening has nothing to do with the rest of the post.

He’s the lead singer/ guitarist/ sole songwriter of my current favorite band, Iron & Wine.  I absolutely love his music.  It’s evocative– almost mysterious sounding.  Picture a woodsy folk man, who listens to jazz and blues records and reads postmodern poetry scribbled on subway walls… that’s Iron & Wine.  Sort of.

They kind of defy description.

And the lyrics.  Poetry.  Not ‘poetic’ or ‘Hey, that was a good line,’ but ‘Huh.  This dude’s a better writer than me.'  Check this bit out:

Some days her shape in the doorway will

speak to me, a bird's wing on the window

Sometimes I'll hear her when she's sleeping,

her fever dream a language on her face

I want your flowers like babies want God's love

or maybe as sure as tomorrow will come

(Taken out of Fever Dream, from the album Our Endless Numbered Days.)

Anyways.

I spent $100 worth of Amazon gift cards a few months ago.  All on books.  Well, mostly on books.  I did buy a Sonic Screwdriver, too.

I regret this purchase not.  It sits in an honored place on my dresser,
and frequently comes with me to the outside world.

But mostly books, one of which was The Archetypes and the Collective Unconcious, a volume that collects Carl Jung’s basic writings on, well, the archetypes and the collective unconscious.  In case you don’t know, Jung was an early psychologist– he studied under Freud, though he came to depart from his teacher on many issues.  Significantly, they disagreed on the factors defining the human psyche.  Freud, of course, was mostly concerned with the individual consciousness and the pathos that defined it.

Jung didn’t disagree that the individual’s personal consciousness and the personal subconscious– or, as they refer to it more often, unconscious– were factors in the human person.  Far from it.  But he didn’t consider those to be the only factors influencing human thought and behavior.

This is where things get cool.

He postulated that there is a collective unconscious.  Quick breakdown: we all have our personal conscious and unconscious, unique entirely to us.  Jung, though, believes that another level exists, a shared unconscious identical in every human being.  It’s a reservoir of archetypes that are essential to humanity.

 You’ve heard the word archetype, before, I’m guessing.  To be honest, it gets thrown around inaccurately a lot.  I’ve seen review blurbs that utilize the term as if it meant cliché or stereotype.  Reader, beware.  That’s not what archetypes are.

Rather, an archetype is an unconscious and primordial psychological presence common to all humans.  We make sense of the world through them, without realizing it.  They are to the collective unconscious what the pathos are to the individual unconscious.  Almost like instincts, but not exactly.  They’re like an enormous thought that everyone’s always thinking without realizing it.

Representations of them appear in every world culture.  The archetypes– which are in themselves formless, or at least beyond human comprehension if they actually have a true embodiment– find physical representations in human art and beliefs throughout human society.  One of the most recognizable is this:

The Ouroboros.  This image is from Wikipedia.  Totes authentic, y'all.
(Sarcasm about Wikipedia aside, I'm fairly certain this one's real.)

It’s crazy how much that one comes up.  The oldest example is Egyptian.

The Ouroboros symbol appears in Nordic mythology.  As a timeline, ancient Egyptian culture flourished over a thousand years before the birth of Christ (I know it’s more correct now to say BCE, but seriously, the CE is based off of a Christocentric timeline…).  The mythological life of Scandinavia barely began before the early Middle Age.

Confession: that’s the easiest one to point out.  Many others are more ambiguous, and I haven’t quite read enough Jung to adequately explain.  But I hope that gives you an idea of the whole archetype jam.

Importantly, the ways we represent archetypes are not the archetypes themselves.  As I mentioned a little bit ago, they don’t have an actual physical form.  They are primordial and permanent thoughts present in everyone, and find different expressions in different ways through the lens of human experience.  But, as with the ouroboros, they can also be strikingly similar across cultures.

~          ~          ~

Now, the modes of the expression, to be totally clear, are not the archetypes.  They’re almost like art– imitations, reflections, personal interpretations of something profound.  E.g., one of the most striking moments of my life was on a bus with my best friend on a trip we both attended to Niagara Falls.  I published a poem earlier this year that was about said experience, but if I hadn’t told you, you’d never know.  The poem’s language is about trolleys and Victorians and the road getting washed away.  Think of our representations of archetypes like that.  Distorted, though the distortion is actually a good thing.

For art, distortion is good because honestly, what actually happened on the bus wouldn’t be terribly interesting to anyone other than my friend and I.  But couched in the poetic language, it transcends and becomes something other people want to hear about.  At least I hope they’d want to hear about it.

But the reason the archetypes take forms, rather than manifest as themselves, is a bit more dire.  Just a bit.  On one hand, it’s fairly obvious why– they’re incorporeal mental nonentity entity-ish things.  But think about that for a moment– the concept becomes alarming when you realize that, if Jung is correct, the archetypes really define a lot of our basic behaviors, which in turn define a lot of the way we lead our lives.  Encountering one, in its pure, raw form, would be unbelievably unsettling.  The least cloaked versions of the archetypes are often the scariest.  Kind of like Cthulhu.

Come to think of it, it might be best not to think too hard about
which archetype Cthulhu falls under.  The implications are
probably unsettling.

Thus, even a relatively tamed version of an archetype (because, let's be honest, Cthulhu doesn't really fit the normal definition of 'tame') will contain tremendous power.  Jung theorizes that our mythologies, religions, stories, and the universal tenets and characters that appear, are all at least partially the archetypes’ manifestations.  Without those, we would encounter the archetypes in their raw– or at least very much closer– form, a dangerous proposition.  They’re too much for the human consciousness to handle.  Actually, Jung sees them as a root cause of mental illness and a catalyst for the development of the pathos in the personal psyche.  Don’t get too close, or they’ll get’cha, to be a little crude in expression.

So, we develop all sorts of ways to react.

He gives particular props to Roman Catholicism.  He regards the complex symbology of the Church and the intricate layers to those symbols as huge layers of safety netting over the archetypes.

He’s a little less enthusiastic about Protestantism, because, historically speaking, the movement within Christianity largely denied the ornate nature of the Church and focused on a de-mystification of the business of faith.

Skipping things so we don’t get boring, one thing leads to the next, the questioning of traditional authority brings on the Enlightenment, we jump back a bit and get more symbolic with the Romantic movement sans the authority of the Church bit, skip hop jump 20^th century and Modernism.  The Church remains an enormous institution, even in the historically anti-Catholic America (which is kind of weird, given America’s reputation for tolerance, but oh well…).  But the layers of imagery and symbolism have been divested of their power, at least where archetypes are concerned.  The Protestant and secular worlds have both questioned them and, resultantly, rendered them unable to form an adequate processing barrier between the archetypes and the human person.

~          ~          ~

I want to be clear– I’m Catholic.  Passionately so.  I believe in the cosmology of the Church.  The Triune God, Mary, the Mother of God, the saints, angels, demons, and the odd nephilim or two.  Jung’s theories are compatible with this belief.  Actually, I’ve toyed with the idea that the archetypes do, in fact, have their fundamental origin with the Catholic cosmology.

That’s another story, though.

Basically, I just wanted to reassure any concerned readers that I’m not, in any way, calling into question the truths of my faith.

~          ~          ~

So.  Falling back on the Church’s cosmology as the safety net against the power of the archetypes no longer works, societally, because they’ve been called into question by so many people and have been deprived of their former power, as images.  Not as actual independent realities.  Just psychologically.

This was well in place by the time Jung was writing.  In the early 20^th century, he believed, the West was turning to the East and attempting to borrow their symbols and images, to re-clothe the increasingly naked and powerful archetypes.  Generally, he thought that was a pretty bad idea… “It seems to me that it would be far better stoutly to avow our spiritual poverty, our symbol-lessness, instead of feigning the legacy to which we are not legitimate heirs at all.  We are, surely, the rightful heirs of Christian symbolism, but somehow we have squandered this heritage.”

Borrowing those images, Jung believes, won’t work.  We don’t have a legitimate claim on them, because we haven’t built them up over centuries and made our delicate psyches dependents upon them.

It’s vaguely akin to current poets who try really hard to rhyme and maintain a stiff meter.  The schools of poetry that wrote like that did so because it was the mode of expression natural and appropriate to them, in their time and place.  Now, it– generally, not always– comes off as very stilted and awkward.

So, stealing other people’s coping methods, he thought, was basically ineffective, and maybe a little rude.  Making the archetypes conscious was important to him– recognizing them in whatever way they manifested, often in dreams or through neuroses– and then allowing them to go back safely into the unconscious.  This may be a good clinical way of coming to terms with the rawer archetypal presence in our lives.  I don’t really know, not being a psychologist.

Come to think of it, I’m fairly uncertain as to how seriously these aspects of Jung’s theories are taken in current psychology.  He was always adamant that he was a scientist, but his ideas seem, at least on the surface, fairly hard to empirically prove… to be fair, he saw hard line empiricism as a hindrance.  Hmmm…

Besides the point.  We are getting to the point, I promise.  My blog posts are the opposite of my academic papers.  In MLA format, you’re supposed to introduce the thesis at the beginning, but in my posts, I always throw it out somewhere towards the middle.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to switch back by September, when classes begin.  And stop writing so much in the passive voice.

The coming semester will be interesting.

Ok.  So.  Archetypes.  Layers of images and symbols.  Stripped of their power.  Whoah.  Now we’re way to close and, Jung thought, getting alarmingly neurotic as a result.  Enter therapy to help identify and thus allow the archetypes passage back into the slumbering realm of the unconscious.  Don’t bother bothering other cultures’ cosmologies.  Won’t work, man.  Sorry.

But.

~          ~          ~

Have you noticed how important pop-culture characters are to us?  They weren’t, not so long ago.  If you talk to people who were teenagers or twenty-somethings in the 70s, they had their heroes and things they thought were groovy. (I'm not being facetious by using groovy.  It's one of my favorite words.)

Robert Plant, the lead singer of Led Zeppelin.  He had some great hair going on.

But, by and large, Batman didn’t have the power he has today.  He was a character in comic books, and he had a really terrible TV show.  Think about Batman for a moment.  He’s now a symbol to the actual world, not just to the fictional Gotham City.  The Joker is too.  Within popular culture, they’ve taken on mythic proportions.

Star Wars.  My close friends know I’m a little obsessed where Star Wars is concerned.  But I’m not the only one.  It was popular in the 70s and 80s.  It’s a phenomenon now.  Crazy huge.  It doesn’t matter that they’re just movies.  The characters, phrases, and iconography of the story are endemic in us.

There are almost endless examples.  Head to Hot Topic sometime soon, which picked up on the trend and reflects our societal obsession with these pop-culture images.  I’ve been saying 70s and 80s, but it’s honestly only been in the past few years.  In 2006, Hot Topic was the super commercialized emo fashion store.  Now, it’s a little pop-culture shop.  This trend towards a boredline idolization of pop-culture figures is new.  It’s been building up for a while, certainly.  But to the level it’s at?  Very recent.

The one that’s biggest for me has been exploding lately– Dr. Who.  It’s hard to put into words what the story means to me.  Almost nothing has affected me as much in my life.  The experience borders on religious­– not in a worshipful sense, of course, but in its sheer import.  The Doctor himself is titanic in my imagination.

My favorite Doctor is the Doctor, but I figured it'd be safest
to post a Tennant/ Smith duo pic, lest terrifying fandom people
come demanding which I like best and shunning me
when it's not the answer they wanted to hear....

I’ve cried more, been more moved by the Doctor than any other story, or particularly fictional character, in my life.  That in and of itself is a bit strange.  The writing for the show is brilliant, admittedly.  But it’s not the only brilliant thing ever written.  The characters are excellent, especially the Doctor himself, but they’re not the only amazing characters out there.  But I can’t escape the potency of what it means to me.  I can’t even tell you exactly what it means, but it’s beyond appreciating a work of art.  David Tennant, who portrayed the Doctor from 2006 to 2010, said recently, “The show has a particular place in people’s affections.”

I suspect that affection may be kind of archetypal.

~          ~          ~

Jung thought it best to recognize whatever weird way the archetypes made themselves apparent in the personal human mind, rather than trying to appropriate symbols devoid of such meaning when stripped of their true culture.  Yes, they’d manifest themselves in many ways throughout the broad spectrum of people; the psychologist’s duty, then, was to identify the symbols and associate them with an archetype.  But the old way, wherein a complex net of symbols usually prevented archetypes from manifesting in a rawer form at all, seemed obsolete.

What he didn’t predict, what he, from the perspective of the early 20^th century, probably couldn’t have predicted, was the ability of the human mind to create images and our weird proclivity for sharing.  We may live in a postmodern world that loves individual experience, but we’re pretty convicted about sharing stuff.  I might use post-post-pre-cyborgization criticism for Harry Potter and you might look at it from a modernistic new historicist viewpoint, but we’re both reading it.

Harry Potter.  Star Wars.  Doctor Who.  Death Note.  Let’s be fair– My Little Pony.  Even bands are taking on an almost mythic proportion.  They’re beacons of hope, huge beyond who the people in them actually are.  More examples.  The Lord of the Rings.  Game of Thrones.  Pokemon.  Avatar: the Last Airbender.  The Lovecraft mythos that I’m always vaguely referencing and posting depictions of.

All of these have a massive and maybe a tad bit irrational following.  Yet the irrationality, I think, might itself be essential– Jung actually warns against trying to rationalize the archetypes away or pretend as if we’ve developed beyond their influence.  He wrote, “I am far from wishing to belittle the divine gift of reason, man’s highest faculty.  But in the role of absolute tyrant it has no meaning– no more than light would in a world where its counterpart, darkness, was absent.”

Thus, I suspect that those being touched by these pop-cultural giants are in fact interacting with the archetypes that exist in our collective unconscious.  The fact that it’s collective might even explain the broad appeal of series that, less than twenty years ago, would have been (or were) regarded as a fringe element, of limited appeal to the masses.  Now, many of them are acclaimed and popular.  We love them with a fervor that’s honestly a little weird.  Not a criticism– as I write, I’m looking at one of my Doctor Who posters, and if I turn around, I’ll see a map of Middle-Earth flanked by Narnia and Westeros– but an observation.

We have entered the new archetypal age.

~          ~          ~

Sorry, I couldn’t resist the chance to make a dramatic statement.  I don’t know if we have or not, but I think it’s a compelling idea with enough evidence to make it credible and not just weird.  Ponder it.  I'm not 100% certain I believe it myself.  But I think it's interesting.  Maybe I’ve been reading too much old psychology and philosophy lately.

Let me know what you think, if you’d like, in the comments.  I’m heading into another week where busy will probably be the word of the day every day, but I promise I’ll read any thoughts you leave and try to respond soon!

Also, this might be the first in a cycle of related posts.  Ummm, I'll let you know at the beginning of a new post if it's one of the closely related ones.

(Also, many thanks to my friend Jacob.  He helped get me into archetypal theory.  We discussed this idea yesterday, and he thought it meritorious, so give him a mental high-five if you liked it!)