Archetypal Soup

 Delving into The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious by Carl Jung has been fascinating. The first chapter touches on ideas I have already been circling for a while. Jung focuses on the collective unconscious, which is shared psychic material we all carry. This material takes form as archetypes, and we see them everywhere in mythology, folklore, and religion. These symbolic systems are how humans have given shape to universal experience.

   There are obvious objections to this. The biggest one comes from the blank slate position, which claims we are born without any innate mental structures. Everything, according to this view, comes from experience. Nothing is inborn. This idea is most closely associated with John Locke, the seventeenth century empiricist philosopher. Similar ideas existed before him. Aristotle and medieval philosophy come to mind, but Locke really cemented it.

   From a grounded standpoint, this position makes sense. We are not born knowing how to operate in the world. Everything we do seems traceable to something that already happened. There is always a cause. I have seen many people go down this line of thinking, and honestly, it is understandable.

   But the collective unconscious is called unconscious for a reason. In day to day life, its influence sits behind a curtain. The blank slate argument comes from conscious grounding alone, but consciousness does not contain everything the mind holds. What we are aware of is not the full picture.

   Hear me out. We are all born with instincts. We move through the world in certain ways naturally, without having to think them through. Instinct is unconscious by definition. We do not have to explain it to ourselves. We just do it. This is where Jung locates the origin of the collective unconscious. We did not suddenly wake up one day with fully formed archetypes in our heads. They developed gradually, as adaptive instincts became more nuanced over time. As genomes were passed down, so were these instinctual patterns. That is simply how evolution works.

   I am not only talking about physical evolution. Sure, the bipedal hominid is obvious. But something similar was happening invisibly in the psyche.

   Take snakes, for example. Across cultures, snakes represent danger, deception, and poison. Eve is tempted by a serpent. Serpents show up as malicious seducers throughout folklore. This symbolism did not come purely from conscious cultural shaping. Humans became biologically wired to fear snakes because avoiding them was necessary for survival. That instinct mattered. Over time, it became symbolic.

   Other archetypes follow the same pattern. Even archetypes that seem far removed from instinct, like God, likely trace back to these primitive foundations. The original seed does not resemble the final form. Cherry blossoms do not look anything like the seed they came from, but they still came from it. That is the point.

   Jung did not dismiss biology at all. He acknowledged instinctual drives very clearly. What he did was take psychology in a direction that scared the absolute shit out of the Freudians.

   The story of Freud breaking with Jung deserves its own essay, but it is worth noting that they were not enemies across the board. Both believed in the personal unconscious, the layer shaped by individual experience. Complexes, defense mechanisms, and personal symbolism live there. No two people share the same personal unconscious.

   Freud stopped at this level. For him, everything ultimately reduced to personal wish fulfillment. Jung disagreed. He argued that beneath the personal unconscious lies another layer, the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious rests on top of it.

   Jung believed early tribal societies had the most direct access to this layer. Their relationship with nature was mediated almost entirely through symbols. Objects were imbued with divine meaning. This is how animism emerged. Symbolic representation was raw, unfiltered, and everywhere.

   As time went on, cognitive and social complexity increased. The cortex kept chugging along. New layers of interpretation formed. Personal experience began shaping the psyche more heavily. We became better at navigating environments, building concepts, and organizing meaning. Consciousness expanded. But the unconscious did not disappear. It simply became less accessible.

   Archetypes did not vanish either. They evolved alongside this growing sophistication. Organized religion emerged, systematizing symbolic life. We were still living through symbols, just in more regulated ways.

Then came Protestantism. Jung saw this as the beginning of symbolic deprivation.

   At first glance, this sounds odd. Jesus and God were still being worshipped. Those archetypes did not vanish. But Jung emphasized Protestant iconoclasm. Images used to surround people, and then they did not. Even though Catholicism and Orthodoxy retained imagery, Protestantism marked a massive shift in consciousness. Its influence spread far beyond its own adherents.

   Shortly after, the Enlightenment hit. Reason became central. Rational explanation became a way of life. Music shifted toward clarity and structure. Society moved away from faith based understanding toward analysis and categorization. Religion did not disappear, but the collective way of being changed.

   Was this all bad? No. Questioning corrupt institutions was necessary. Protestantism and the Enlightenment did real work there. The irony is that power simply re established itself in new forms. That is the pattern. Flip off one establishment and another shows up. Do not wander into a construct camp thinking you are immune. You will just get diluted. Still, the psychic shift was real.

   Jung believed our symbolic inheritance was stripped away too quickly. Spirituality became individualized. Personal conviction replaced communal symbolism. In many ways, this was good. The church was corrupt. But we swung so far in the other direction that we became estranged from the collective unconscious almost overnight. Since consciousness emerges from unconscious foundations, prolonged detachment leads to disintegration.

And the mess was not over.

   Christianity continued to lose authority through the Scientific Revolution, empiricism, deism, Romanticism, and eventually secularism. Nietzsche’s declaration that God is dead captured this moment perfectly. By the twentieth century, Christianity still existed institutionally, but symbolically it was hollowed out. People showed up just to show up. Ritual without resonance.

   What followed was the West’s infatuation with Eastern thought. And yes, a lot of it was embarrassing. The art was interesting, though. The West looked like buffoons trying to adopt Eastern practices, and honestly, we still do. Idiots. But beneath the cringe was a real psychic hunger.

   Eastern traditions offered something the West had lost, fluidity. Jung was particularly drawn to the mandala, which he saw as the ultimate symbol of individuation, the integration of the psyche into a whole. Individuation is not picking the parts of yourself you like and discarding the rest. It is integrating everything. There is much more to it, but that is the core.

   The East tends to unify where the West divides. Yin and yang bring together opposites. Masculine and feminine. Anima and animus. The mandala contains light and dark within one circle. Jung saw similar unifying symbolism in Christianity itself, especially in the Trinity. When Christianity withered, we went looking elsewhere. The psyche craves what it is not being fed.

   Ironically, the East started admiring Christianity too, though probably not as intensely. We always want what we do not have. Our psyches feen for what is missing. What a phenomenon.

   There is a lot to unpack here. One uncomfortable point Jung makes is that modern humans possess more consciousness than early tribal societies. That alone could start a fire today. I do not even know if primitive is acceptable language anymore. But Jung was not demeaning indigenous peoples. He was tracking shifts in psychic organization.

   After the Agricultural Revolution, human life became more structured. Larger, more stable societies formed. Conscious awareness of the environment and social roles became necessary. Spirituality did not vanish, but it became more regulated. Archetypes had designated times, places, and categories. Systematic spirituality replaced fluid animism.

   Jung saw this as an expansion of consciousness, but only up to a point. Increased complexity brought mobility, but it also created imbalance. Modern society suppresses instinctual and symbolic life. Indigenous cultures, by contrast, retain access to parts of the psyche we have locked away.

   This is not about superiority or inferiority. It is about imbalance. Modern hedonism, anxiety, and neurosis reflect a psyche cut off from its foundations. Jung argued that ignoring the unconscious leads to instability. Consciousness cannot survive if its roots rot.

   This does not mean rejecting science or modernity. Science gave us real insight. Protestantism encouraged individual responsibility. The problem is getting stuck in one lens. Reality is not singular. It is a kaleidoscope.

   Jung’s ideas are metaphors for that kaleidoscope. I am trying to create another one. I am not copying Jung, and I do not want to be copied either. Where Jung uses the mandala, I use the kaleidoscope. Both gesture toward integration and complexity, just from different angles.

   I do not have a singular purpose to state, and I do not want one. Language itself is limiting. Some things resist clean articulation. I know what I am doing, and I do not know at the same time. My answers sound confusing when people ask what I plan to do with my life because the truth is simple. I am letting it happen.

For now, I am enjoying the ride in this cosmic microwave.