“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.”
Carl Jung, On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry, in CW 15, 127
“When, for instance, a highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim.”
Carl Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
The human psyche seems like a mushroom mycelium (root system) stretching for miles under the surface, a single organism from which individuals arise. But the metaphor extends further because the mycelium also acts as an underground “wood-wide web” (National Forest Foundation), The great communicators of the forest facilitate the transfer of information about the condition of the soil, the available moisture, pest infestations, and the transfer of nutrients from strong individuals to weaker ones. Species intelligence is encoded into them. The collective unconscious is like that. It holds the vast wisdom that sustains and connects us under the surface. In this regard, the ancient idea of an underworld is closer to the bone than the much more recent idea of a heaven in the sky.
Archetypes, the heightened and pure expression of all the psychological components that human beings contain, live in an underworld water table which we can draw up either consciously or without thinking. We are all capable of every human quality under the right circumstances – even the terrible ones. Gods are personifications of these aspects of human psyche, a full-strength concentration, a personification of an aspect – eternal and powerful. They work like the clothing which gives the invisible man a definable image – now you can see him. Then homo narativa, the great narrator animal, tells stories about their exploits. They operate in us as metaphors.
If you become belligerent, or go on crusades for causes, it can be said that you are possessed by Aries, the god of war. The archetype rises up from the collective unconscious like Jonah’s whale and swallows us whole. He is quite capable of possessing whole cultures. Before the United States invaded Iraq, there was enough unconscious support for the politicians in charge that no amount of arguing could prevent the invasion. The Civil War started this way too. The country wanted war. The gods are seductive. But once the conflict is over, people look at the devastation and blink. What were we thinking? Aires doesn’t care. He isn’t immoral; he’s amoral. Human consequences don’t matter to him; another reason the gods are terrible.
Archetypes are divine – superhuman in power because all of us who ever were or ever will be are contained in them. We die, but they do not, another reason they are so powerful. It’s ridiculous to imagine there is only one god, which is actually a trinity of three gods, who fights an equally powerful but opposing, immortal being called the Devil, whom one must also believe in. Even the world’s most monotheistic religion has at least four gods. Then there are saints to pray to, demons, archangels and a whole pantheon of other immortals who influence our lives. We have never really succeeded in becoming monotheistic, but then, why would we want to? To be whole, we need all of it.