Introduction:
In 1991, Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette wrote a seminal book for what would become known as the mythopoetic men’s movement: King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine.
What I’m about to write is, perhaps, another lens of looking at their material. And, it must be said, it is an honour and deep privilege to have something so well wrought upon which to work and reflect even if my conclusions might differ from the authors. What they have crafted in their book is a life’s work worthy of deep praise. It is the result of untold hours of scholarship and a lifetime of experience working with men in therapeutic contexts.
The book asserts that there are four core archetypes, the title of their book, in the psyches of men. It offers that each archetype has immature, toxic versions and mature, tonic versions.
King. Warrior. Magician. Lover.
The book offers a map of the interior world of men. If the inner masculine were a table, these would be its four legs.
And so, with all due deference to the authors and all those who contributed to the fruition of this fine book I hope to refer to for many years to come, I humbly submit to you a counter notion: We need less archetypes and more architecture.
Said another way: When important cultural roles vanish from the architecture, they appear as archetypes. When they vanish from the outside, this culture encourages us to find them on the inside.
In a culture without chiefs and leaders we can trust, we are told to find our inner Kings and Queens. In a culture with no real warriors, we are exhorted to cultivate the warrior inside ourselves. In a culture with too few beauty makers, we are told to find out inner Lover. In a culture with too few elders, shamans, and medicine people, we are told to find the Magician within.
This interiorization of the world, the promise of some internal self-sufficiency (and the assurance that this is a worthy goal), is one of the central poverties of our time, masquerading as psychology and spirituality. We are told that these are all inherent parts of ourselves and that the point of our spiritual lives is to get in touch with those, already fully developed archetypes, inside of ourselves. We are told that they are just waiting for us to show up. It is never said but it is implied that our neglect of them has had no consequences on them - that they wait there for us as whole, self-sufficient, eternal and intact as we are told that God is and that we, in our essence, are.
And it may be that there is truth in all of that.
But perhaps what is needed is a rebuilding of culture, not imagining that we can vanish our need for it. Perhaps what is needed is that we learn to need each other once more. Perhaps what is needed are fewer voices urging us to become the entire village and more voices imploring us to step into some real and meaningful role in what might, one day, become a village.
The ideal of the New Age scene seems to be all archetypes and no architecture. After all, this world isn’t real, it’s all energy and the point of it all is to just transcend this illusion and evolve into beings of pure energy.
What I’m suggesting is that archetypes are distilled and dead and that what’s needed is culture; these ideas incarnated, practiced and translated into our current place and time.
What I’m suggesting is that the ‘inner world’ our modern culture worships, and the pull to know it so deeply, is not innate in humans. It’s not born into us. What if our current obsession with cultivating a rich interior life is actually a response the the poverty of our shared outer lives? What if modern man’s inner enemies are the results of outer deficiencies?
An acquaintance of mine, pointed out the wealth that Carl Jung and the Buddha brought to the world by going deep inside themselves. I replied to him that, in both cases, they did so as a result of the immense spiritually and cultural impoverishment of their times.
Fewer archetypes. More architecture.
Disclaimer:
On Time and Place: It’s important to acknowledge that this book pulled largely from examples from civilized cultures (many of them Western, Indo-European). It pulled mostly from cultures who were settled. So, I would hesitate to say that these archetypes would apply as strongly to other cultures at other times (e.g. a nomadic, hunter-gatherer culture). I wouldn’t know anything about that. I am cautious when authors say things like what David Wagner said of these four archetypes in in his book Backbone, “The great thing about working with these energies is that they are universal. No matter what kind of man you are, or what culture you come from, you will have these four facets.”
On Sex and Gender: It’s also important to lift up that there isn’t anything particularly ‘male’ about these roles. We might say that a King is the sovereign, or a chief of community. And that could be a man or woman. Certainly, a Queen plays much the same role. There are many examples of women warriors of renown (e.g. Boudica, Scáthach, the Amazons etc.). For the magician, there have been countless female shamans, sorcerers, witches and wise women). And lovers? Well… say no more. These archetypes certainly appear in the lives of men, but not exclusively so.
On Other Functions: Certainly, a culture requires more functions than these four. Certainly there might be many that don’t fit so handily into the framework given but, as frameworks go, I think it’s a fine one that gives a sturdy foundation to explore.
The Grandmother in His Mind
I’m sitting in a men’s group and a one of the men is sharing his struggle with a pattern he sees in himself in his relationships. He’ll meet a woman. He’ll feels wonderful about it and then he’ll begin to notice everything that’s not perfect and sabotage it. This had happened a few months before and he’d been regretting it ever since.
The man leading the workshop set up three chairs at the front of the room and invited him to sit in the center chair; the King chair. From that place, he identified two parts of himself that were at war. One of them had been running the show for years. The dialogue between those two ensued and, after it was done, I pointed out that his inner world has been a dictatorship and that the antidote to this might be more diversity. I pointed out that King Arthur had a round table with many knights and advisors.
“Who else might you want as an advisor at that table?”
He sat and thought about it, “Hrmm… A zen master would be nice…” he continued to think about it and named a few more and then his face broke into a beaming smile, “A grandmother, actually!”
We spoke later and he related how he imagined this inner grandmother being so incredibly loving to him and that had him realize that his patterns weren’t so heavy. They weren’t the end of the world. He looked like a new man.
And, I couldn’t help but think how much better an actual, real, live grandmother would be.
I recall years ago, a friend of mine, a young woman in her early twenties, was supporting an indigenous grandmother. Late one night, she’d tucked the grandmother into bed and the grandmother asked her how she was doing. She burst into tears. The grandmother lifted up her blanket and patted the bed. My friend crawled in, let herself be held and sobbed.
Of course, in many traditional cultures, grandparent wasn’t just a biologically signified term. It was also an honourific. Grandparent was a role in the community. But role doesn’t quite say it. Role implies static. Role implies fixed. Role implies no movement. It might be better said that Grandparent was a needed function played in the moving architecture of village life, not a particular person. Many people could play that function whether they were related to the little children or not. And, because it’s a function, anyone might play that function. Certain functions might tend to accrue along lines of sex and gender for all the reasons there might be, but a man could play a grandmother role if needed. A man might play the role of initiating young women if needed.
To put it another way, these are verbs, not nouns.
To put it another way, these are verbs, not nouns. They’re not owned by the one doing the motion, they are the motion. So the architecture is the incarnation not of a distilled essence, Platonic ‘ideal type’ or prime form but of a movement, of a relationship. They are a way that human culture is faithful and deeply obedient to the natural world.
“The family in Africa is always extended. You would never refer to your cousin as ‘cousin,’ because that would be an insult. So your cousins are your sisters and brothers. Your nieces are your children. Your uncles are your fathers. Your aunts are your mothers. Your sister’s husband is your husband, and your brother’s wife is your wife. Children are also encouraged to call other people outside the family mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers… The concept of the big family is really helpful. I remember when I was a kid, I had the choice of a different father every day, depending on my mood. So, if I wanted one of my uncles to be my father for the day, I would focus all my attention on that person and ignore the others. And the person wouldn’t take it personally, because they say it as an opportunity for me to decide what I wanted. This also allows a large number of people in the village to acknowledge the child and to see her or his spirit.” - Sobonfu Some, The Spirit of Intimacy
Archetypes are the poor man’s architecture.
It occurred to me a few years ago that the opposite of life was not death.
Death feeds life. Life counts on death for its food. No, the opposite of life isn’t death.
It’s abstraction. It’s theory.
That’s what archetypes and models run the risk of becoming. Dead.
They might be helpful maps but a map is drawn up, fundamentally, so that you don’t have to remember the land by traveling it. A story is written so you don’t have to remember by telling it. Literacy wasn’t created to help us remember but so that we could forget. Archetypes become this to: codified ways of thinking so that you never have to actually practice them. Our goal must be to look at the theories and maps and then translate them into our time and place and bring them alive in this way.
The risk of staying in the world of archetypes is that we talk them to death.
Archetypes must be practiced to be kept in the world; they must be lived into being.
“Tradition is not the worshipping of ashes. It is the preservation of fire.” - Gustav Mahler
The Prairie Noodle House
I’m talking with my friend Jennifer Summerfeldt at the Prairie Noodle on 124 Street in Edmonton. These days I can’t get enough of their Spicy Garlic Pork bowl.
She brings up the psychological term self-regulation. The idea is that, when our nervous systems are triggered, we have the capacity to return ourselves to a more calm and alert state. We can soothe ourselves. Another way of saying this is that we can learn to be more self-sufficient.
It’s a term I’ve only heard used in positive ways and not one that ever occurred to me to question.
Of course, what many people call ‘self-regulating’ is a form avoiding, covering up, or bypassing the issues.
But then Jennifer points out that recent studies have been finding that even when people are self-regulating properly what goes hand in hand with that can be isolation.
She pointed to new studies being done in co-regulation. The idea that humans return to homeostasis faster and better in the presence of other humans; that touch, eye-contact, breathing and talking things through help restore us to a more balanced place inside. Mammals seem to be designed to return to emotional balance in the presence of other mammals.
If my nervous system and spirit is out of balance and yours in more strongly in balance, just by being in your presence, I will be soothed. If my nervous system and spirit is out of balance and I am surrounded by a community of people who are more strongly in balance, then, just by being in their presence, I will be soothed.
It looks like freedom but it feels like loneliness.
This culture is a monotheism.
Of course, the big three monotheisms of the modern world, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, grow and shrink and change as they do. But, in the background, a new one has been growing and silently taking its place on the throne of the modern world. A new palace, all sharp angles and big glass windows, has been constructed around it.
And the coronation has given us a new sovereign, a new God at whose altar we collectively worship in larger and larger numbers. On the throne sits, The Inner Self.
Village life collapsed to family life. Family life collapsed to the Self. And now we are left with only The Inner Self.
And so we are taught to be self-sufficient. We are taught that we have everything we need inside ourselves.
It looks like freedom but it feels like loneliness.
And it’s killing us.
"Because cultural myths no longer guide many people through predictable life stages, 'personal myths' increasingly organize their identity and reality." - Carl Jung
On The Bad Behaviour of Grown Men
Could it be that one of the central tragedies of modern culture is that young men are left alone to ‘figure it out on their own’? Could it be that too few boys have ever seen an incarnated version of a good man in their lives? Could it be that they have never seen in articulated before them in the way that a dancer articulates their body, a craftsman with their hands and a poet articulates with their words? Could it be that there is no consistent pattern or what is honoured and what is shamed or that this system is so skewed in this modern world that it distorts young men’s understanding of what’s appropriate in a way that is miles away from anything our ancestors might recognize as courteous or worthy? Could it be that the absence of the moving architecture of initiation has left young men utterly without interruption or instruction in what it might mean to be a man?
It’s All Inside You
The implication of this kind of archetype work is that we’ve all got this King, Warrior, Magician and Lover inside of us. We’re already complete.
But any approach to these archetypes that suggests that they are innate, inborn and that we are simple supposed to know how to embody these archetypes because they’re already inside of us is doomed to fail.
You might be able to reduce an archetype can be reduced to an inner image or feeling, but architecture is a crafted thing. To fulfill a function in a community takes apprenticeship. It takes hard learning. It takes time.
How do we translate these archetypes into the times and places in which we live? This takes learning too, a learning made much easier when taught by another human than trying to figure it out on our own.
Perhaps it is all there in our DNA, perhaps we have some deep, ancestral memory of these archetypes but how do we access that and differentiate our ancestral trauma from our ancestral wisdom? This can take apprenticeship too.
We need mature, well articulated examples of these in action to learn. Ideally this would be provided by the culture. When this doesn’t exist, and because those functions are still needed in our lives, we learn to cultivate them internally. This is a sign of the poverty of our times masquerading as being us being psychologically mature and culturally more savvy than our primitive ancestors were about their inner worlds. This kind of internal, self-learning is a response to the trauma that destroyed the architecture of our tribal life and, in its own way, is a traumatizing act that has us retreat further and further inside to the ‘rich, interior life’ the workshops keep promising will be our salvation.
The goal of so much inner work is self-sufficiency.
Stated differently: the goal of a man’s life is to perfectly cultivate all four of these archetypes.
Stated differently: if we do that then, maybe, we don’t need anyone else.
Self-sufficiency needs to be properly contextualized. It is not a goal but a limited capacity. It is sprinting, not a marathon. It is the anti-anxiety medication but it’s not a shift in lifestyle. It’s racking up money on the credit card rather than getting one’s financial house in order. It works but it is not sustainable. It’s got a shelf life and the side-effects of it are often worse than the original affliction. Self-sufficiency is the temporary triage approach that we have learned as a response to the sometimes slow and sometimes rapid ending of communal life. The fact that we have this capacity to tend to ourselves and our own wounds and to self-soothe in times of distress is a miracle. But we’ve deified this legitimate response to crisis. We have turned it into the God we worship and the ideal we aspire to.
When The Architecture Vanishes
What if having all four archetypes perfectly cultivated inside of ourselves wasn’t our work as men?
When missing these four functions in the culture, we internalize them as archetypes. But, they are all, primarily, real functions in a community. There were actual chiefs so that you didn’t have to make every decision. There were actual elders. Actual warriors. And actual beauty makers. You didn’t have to do them all to be fed by them all.
My friend Craig Martin put it in this way, “Every part of the body needs every other part of the body to survive, even though every part of the body already has the archetype (DNA) of the entire body within it. We as people need everyone else in the community - we need the architecture of the community - to play all the other roles that we cannot effectively play. I may have the archetype of teacher, healer, lover, warrior, king, etc in me, but if I try to be all those things to all people, I would be about as effective as trying to walk on my hands or "see" with my fingertips. We can learn to do those things, but never as effectively as using the parts of the body that do it best. I need everyone else to play their roles because I cannot do them as well as they can.”
And, of course, there are those who play those functions today. I think of those who stood at Standing Rock, or at Oka, or in the American Civil Rights movement. Actual warriors standing in defense of life.
And there are those who stand in the role of Chief, who bring order and generativity to communities. There are those around whom good things always seem to be happening.
There are those who are healers.
There are those who continue to make beauty.
Our modern culture mostly has toxic mimics of these things and we’re left to find the tonic version inside of ourselves as if it were inherently there in some pure and untouched way. Maybe it’s not there but the memory of it is there of times we didn’t live and people we never saw. We haven’t lived in times where these functions were incarnated in our midst but we might have a memory of them. A memory of a time that had not only a horizontal understanding of itself so familiar to modern culture (e.g. those people our age) but also a vertical axis (e.g. that there are those older than you and those younger than you, those who have come before you and those who might come after).
That men spend weekends trying to find them on the inside might be the surest sign we will ever get that they are no longer there on the outside.
When the architecture vanishes, the archetypes appear.
Our modern culture spins this as progress but it is a poverty so deep we can’t see out of it.
And so, what if the solution wasn’t to go out into the forest to get back in touch with these archetypes on the inside but, instead, was about re-fostering them in the world. What if the work before us wasn’t cultivating archetypes but constructing architecture?
What if what was being asked of us wasn’t to step into playing all four of these functions so that they might be there? After all, be there for whom? What if we’re not being asked to be heroes here, rescuing our community by providing all that it needs but, instead, something more akin to courting those in the community to begin to play these functions once again and to court the community to employ them?
If we want warriors again, give the young men something worthy of protection and court their help in the protecting of it. We must employ them. I think of my friend Brandon Bays who was on a subway late at night one night. She looked up from her book to realize she was all alone except from a group of young men who were leering at her. She felt the lurch of fear inside of her but decided to change the story. So she stood up and walked towards them, “Hi there. My name is Brandon. I’m really scared being on this subway alone. Will you protect me?” A confused look came over the men’s faces as the pattern they were used to was so thoroughly interrupted. “Yeah!” said one of them. “We’ll protect you.” And so she sat down next to them and they began to talk, each other man quickly falling in line with the new story. At the next stop, another group of young men got on, far more dangerous and unstable looking than the first. They eyed Brandon. A young man in the first group, seeing this, shouted, “Hey! The lady’s under our protection!” And the second group backed off and went about their business. In that moment, a small amount of the village architecture was rebuilt and young men found an old, trustworthy form of employment.
My friend Caroline Casey, told the story of a friend of hers travelling in South America who was kidnapped and, realizing the deep danger he was in, attempted to change the story and began profusely thanking his would be captors. “Thank God you’re here! You’ve rescued me. Thank you! Thank you!” he said, laying out a new scaffolding for them to build upon with his words. To his immense good fortune, his new story, strangely and magically, took root and they released him again shortly, agreeing with him that they had, indeed, protected him.
And, if we want warriors, then we must support the ones who are standing up. This means sending money for their legal fees when they’ve been arrested at a protest. It might mean offering them a massage. It might mean continuing to praise them in public for their important and brace work. If we don’t support the ones we have, why would anyone else step into such a dangerous function? If we don’t give them social status, why would young men want to be them? We live in a culture that gives status to predators but not protectors.
If we want more of the Magician, then we might ask young men for their wisdom and to share with us what they see. And we must support those elders, healers, and medicine people who live amongst us now.
If we want more of the Lover then we might ask young men to help make more beauty in the world. We might ask them to help with a mural, or to write a song for an important moment, or to turn their pain into poetry. And we must support, visibly, those beauty makers who already walk in this world, making beauty where they go.
If we want to see more of this King archetype in the world then we must give young men responsibility in small doses. We must ask them to help us create order where there is chaos that doesn’t serve. We must ask their help in finding out how the people are doing and asking what they think might be needed there. We must give them jobs upon which many depend. We can ask them to pay attention to how nature works, how people seem to behave, to notice the reality of things. In the end, the chief is not the source of structure and order but obedient to the way things are. Said another way: successful cultures were modeled on nature. This is the poverty of the times we are in: the heavy lifting of this learning has been done in deep cultures over thousands of years. The structures, ceremonies, seasonal rituals and ways of being of a tribe or clan were deeply trusted. The culture did not need to reinvent itself with every generation. And so, if we want more young chiefs helping to foster some life-affirming order, then they must also be taught and instructed in this. And we must give status to those who are already stepping into this, often thankless job of leadership in their communities.
To say this all another way: none of these functions are self-made. It is rare that they will appear on their own in a fully mature way. They must be courted and fostered.
To say it another way still: all of these functions need some semblance of a village into which they might appear. Someone needs to be willing to be that village for them. Someone has to be willing to lean on them and depend on them to appear. Someone must be willing to instruct them.
My friend Tal Rachlief put it this way, “I've heard it said (by Jon Young) that we don't actually have a ‘culture' now in the West -- because a culture implies a deeper level of cohesion and connection than we have. In Jon's view, we are actually a ‘society' (and a 'sibling society' at that, as Robert Bly wrote in his book of that title) -- people organized in various ways to accomplish various tasks, but there is no healthy culture supporting our development into fully expressed human beings.”
Maybe Archetypes
Maybe archetypes are smoored coals and architecture is fire.
Maybe archetypes are seeds and architecture is the flower. Perhaps they are the seeds of needed food wanting to sprout into the human world, not be worshipped in jars until they rot. But, for them to grow, they need to be planted into the time and place where we live, fed and cultivated.
Maybe archetypes are our hunger. And maybe they are food. Or both. An indication to us that something in architecture is missing.
As my friend Matthew Stillman once said, “It seems as if we are left with using the archetypes to get to the architecture in the way that we use a thorn to take out a thorn in our foot.”
The Honour Code
We live in a day and age where men go to workshops and learn how to create their own honour code. That this needs to happen, that this isn’t handed to them explicitly in instruction and implicitly in stories and ritual and modelled all around them as they grow up is a sign of the poverty of our times. An honour code should be something we live inside of, not something that lives inside of us. In intact cultures, it would be articulated in how things were made, in how food and materials are gathered and how people spoke to and about one another.
The Mighty Untethered:
Of course, the opposite of all of this could be true. An acquaintance of mine commented on this topic saying, “The issue, I think, is that we have an architecture that does not stem from archetypes, but rather is super-impositional and therefore inauthentic. Yes, turn inward, cultivate your inner Love, inner Sovereignty, and then begin outward from that place of integrity. That is no ‘masquerading poverty.’ But without doing that self examination first, any subscription to or projection of external authority will be valueless. Unless you just want to build a cult, and not a culture. More archetypes. Less architecture.”
And it’s a fine consideration.
The challenge is that, when I look at the world, I see that the Self has become enthroned above all else. This is a very new development in the human world which would have understood, and in many corners of the world still understands, itself communally. There are many cultures have been and still are baffled with our obsession with our inner life and would understand it for the impoverished version of village life that it is. We try to make room for all the function of a village inside ourselves and it drives us mad. It’s too big. It’s too vast. It needs more room. Some try to shoehorn these archetypes into their nuclear family life where the father plays all four roles. But it’s just too big. These old gods of human culture need more room to breathe.
The second challenge is that we are asking the same Self that struggles with the sickness of modern culture to heal the Self afflicted by modern culture. It’s like asking a doctor with tuberculosis to cure themselves by putting themselves in an environment with no tuberculosis but, of course, they bring it with them everywhere they go.
The third challenge is, to whom is that all in service? There sits the Self, on the throne of the mighty temple of our modern attention. But to what is it tethered? Or, perhaps more precisely and practically stated, to where and when is it tethered? To what place and time is this Self obligated?
It isn’t hard to find the answer to those questions.
For many in this modern world, the Self, and thus all of these archetypes, King, Warrior, Magician and Lover have all been pressed into the service of Empire, modernity, progress and linear time.
“Men gave the world landing on the moon and roads, ancient Rome and Greece. Men have given this world capitalism and industry. Men have given this world the machine and the computer." the male, white nationalists boast.
The Self is no longer tethered to anything at all.
I see so many workshops on helping men to find their purpose.
But centering your life on ‘your purpose’ is so abstract. What is our purpose is in place to sustain? At what altar is our purpose laid?
I see so many marketing workshops about ‘starting a movement’ as if there weren’t already worthy movements to join.
In this culture, in my corner of the world, our purpose is tethered to the Self and nothing more. The Self is no longer tethered to anything at all. The Self is free.
I submit that there’s a core human purpose that’s been lost and replaced with ‘My Purpose TM’ in life. This function in the world might be understood as the heart of what was and is understood by indigenous peoples. This purpose, to large and unwieldly for an essay such as this, might have had something to do with being bound to Life and obligated to feed that which has sustained us all along.
Without the house of this larger human purpose, our personal purposes are homeless. There is no shelter for them or anything to shelter others from them. This homeless human is the most dangerous thing the modern world have ever seen.
Instead of Warriors defending land and people we see a rise of internet trolls and lifestyle entrepreneurs.
Instead of Magicians, we see online gurus dispensing the ghosted remnants of spiritual wisdom to people to help them succeed in their lives.
Instead of Lovers, we see workshops on seduction and manipulation.
Instead of Kings, we see cult leaders, narcissists holding the reigns of power, psychopaths in office and a child as President.
If these archetypes are not planted into the real world of time and place in service to the ground into which they’ve been planted, they end up housed in our ribcages, rotting.
It was not this way in traditional cultures.
The King, in order to create order in culture, had to learn the natural order and become married to the land.
The Warriors fundamental orientation was to protecting their people and the land.
The Magicians were those who discerned the natural order, the deep architecture of how it is and learned how to work and negotiate with it.
The Lover was the one with the deep capacity to appreciate and admire the natural world and to create the kind of beauty that might feed it.
Perhaps one doesn’t feed one’s heart by putting it in the centre of things and worshipping it. Perhaps the center is too much for it to bear. Perhaps we feed our hearts best by feeding all that feeds him so that he is strong, clear, open and full. Perhaps we make room for those sources of strength to appear and flourish.
Perhaps, one doesn’t learn how to build culture by looking at culture, but by looking at nature.
Poet and essayist Will Falk put it this way, “So many indigenous people have told me that the levels of sustainability their traditional cultures achieved prior to the arrival of colonizers were based on lessons learned from non-humans. Implicit in these lessons is the truth that humans depend on non-humans. This dependence is not limited to the air we breathe, the water we drink, or the food we eat. This dependence sinks into our very souls. For many indigenous people I have listened to, the basic reality of human dependence demands that humans regard non-humans, regard life, regard the universe with deep humility. If we simply learn to listen, we will hear non-humans demonstrating humility everywhere. Trees know they are nothing without soil, so they build forests as monuments to soil health – collecting, storing, and restoring nutrients to their life-giver. Salmon know they are nothing without forests to hold river banks together, so they swim deep into the cold oceans to feed, bring their bodies back upriver to die, and, in death, feed the forests. Phytoplankton know they are nothing without a climate that allows warm and cold ocean waters to mix, producing currents that bring them their food. So, phytoplankton feed the salmon that feed the forests that store carbon that has the potential to destroy the climate that feeds the phytoplankton. Approach non-humans with humility, and you may find them willing to teach you.”
The Source of Human Culture:
"As Jung suggested, when the declining myths of earlier generations begin to fade, the mythmaking process resides in individuals. The birth of a personal myth in the imagination of a single individual, or a group of individuals, may lead to the rebirth of new myths in the imagination of the culture." - Sharon Blackie
We sit by the fire at night, the backs of our neck chilled by the cooling evening air and our faces warmed by the fire. Something deep inside of us is satisfied. We know that sitting around a fire is a very human thing to do. It’s what we’ve done since we discovered fire many thousands of years ago.
Why is that?
Perhaps there is something archetypal about it.
But from whence do these archetypes come? What part of us remembers and is soothed by the architecture of this sitting around a fire?
The story of Buddha tells us that he went out alone and sat under the tree. The fallacy in this story is that he was alone. That, when humans go out into nature, they are the only living thing there. That there’s nothing there before they arrive. Buddha sits under a tree, but the tree is, often, forgotten.
It lifts up a question that I am sure we are not the first humans to contend with: if you don’t have wholeness in yourself and your culture is fractured as well… how do you find healing? How does the cycle get broken? Do we go deep inside or do we look outside for examples of intact cultures (even those of our own ancestors) and import their practices to where we live? Of course, while both approaches have merit and much to commend them, neither of those approaches work entirely because what’s needed is not so much a novel thing to approach but an entirely different manner of approaching the times and places in which we live. To go inside is to find solutions with no roots. To borrow wholesale from other cultures is to find solutions that do not have roots in the times and places we live.
Mohawk scholar, Taiaiake Alfred spent years advocating for the return of indigenous models of governance only to realize that you couldn’t put unhealthy people into healthy structures and have it work. He saw the deep need for healing and decolonizing of his people as an important first step and so wrote his book Wasáse to address this.
So, I'm not saying that internal healing isn’t needed. I’m not saying these archetypes, King, Warrior, Magician and Lover (and all the others that I hope will not be too offended that I couldn’t make space for them in this essay as is properly their due) are not inside us. Clearly, there are certain images that, when we see them, strike a deep chord in us. For men of European descent, and with deeper ancestry in the modern, civilized world, these four certainly seem to resonate. Are they in us? For many, it seems so.
What I am suggesting is that we are not the source of them. I am saying that we have been on the receiving end of it all.
Are archetypes a memory of a time we never lived or a dream implanted in us by those old ones of what we might be and a warning of what not to become? Are they recollection or are they simply DNA coding of what functions are needed to sustain a village and which ones threaten it because, for so long, those things did sustain and threaten us? Are they the source of human culture or is human culture the source of them? Are they, not so much inherent in us as the world’s dream for us around which we cohered? Are they a song we remember, though we were never there to hear it sung by those old timers who fashioned it or is is that we are constantly being sung into existence by life? Are archetypes our memory or are they the imagination of the gods? And does that need to be a choice?
Why is it that, if these four archetypes are indwelling in all men, that so many grown men behave so badly? Do these archetypes not give a shit? Are they unaware of what is happening in the outside world? Must they be invited to appear, and, if so, what form might that invitation take so that it would be recognized and responded to? What sort of structure must be built that might be worthy of their appearance? What manner of moving through the world and relating to each other might invoke their presence?
These may be some of the most precious mysteries with which humans have been entrusted.
Thanks Tad,
This is a great piece! I appreciate your writing it.
Marion Woodman said, "when an archetype doesn't evolve, it becomes a stereotype."
So much of what I've learned points towards a dynamic view of the world. As Tyson Yunkaporta is fond of reminding us, our main job (as a custodial species) is tending the relational space between us and everything we are in contact with. That relational space is the point of emergence of evolution. Another way I would say it is, that is what Peacemaking is really about. The tending of relational space, human, non-human, more than human.
What I glean from what you wrote is how right and acceptable it is to be in deep grief of the loss of our communities and culture. Jon is correct (he's a very old and dear friend of mine!!) in saying that modernity isn't a culture it's a society. Martin Prechtel adds that we don't have a culture, we have a syndrome.
We can "weekend warrior" ourselves to death, but unless we can come together and begin to grieve that loss, and limp forward together, we won't find what we need.
This is a great piece written by Tim Bennett. I can't find the original blog post, but this is it. Well worth the read....
https://annechlodestremau.medium.com/bambi-vs-the-collapse-of-civilization-by-tim-bennett-fb78e2639bdc
In my life, the interior and archetypes has in some cases been a help and a starting point to look for what is lost in the culture, and has expanded my imagination and sense of possibility. But I agree that it’s not fruitful or healthy to stay there, and I see it as a cycle that needs to be continued, in bringing the inspiration from the interior into the outer world, but not just on a surface level like you get the ”right queen attributes” and that solves it. We can allow our humanness to ”stain” what has been found in the interior and make the interior useful to humans too, not just to be adored or ”imitated”. That way archetypes maybe can evolve and not be so fixed and ”holy”, but serve as catalysts rather than aspirations.