ΤЂЄ SHADOW OF ΤЂЄ ARCHETYPE

In my stupor
in my stunned recklessness
where nothing but addictions
ruled me
I saw the face of The Magician
but when I reached out
to touch it
it crumbled
grinning like burning leaves
on a summer garden fire

In my fragile clarity
that same face arose
but this time I recognised its power
and I asked for the magic of reality
in place of dreams
and it showed me
a single falling sunbeam
on a mystical spider’s web
that I’d seen as a child
and I felt again
God’s innocent wonder

In my life long quest for meaning, healing and wholeness I discovered that keeping a diary and revisiting my past, by writing about it, was therapeutic. It helped me to bring long forgotten memories to the surface.

Out of these recollections archetypes arose, unbidden, from my words and my dreams and I found myself describing the psychic characters that inhabited my subconscious: The Stranger, who drove my addiction to sex; The Angel of Death, who seduced me into dangerous and risky behaviors; The Joker of Denial who obscured reality and fudged my integrity; The Magician who spun dreams like silk spider webs to trap me; The Seducer; The Fool; The Slave and the list went on and on.

Out of the same origins of our inborn attraction toward mystery, risk, despair and self destruction on the one hand, and happiness, wholeness and meaning on the other; archetypes, or internal psychic characters, arose from the birth of mankind; from the cosmic and spiritual turmoil of creation.

They evolved form and substance through the tales of the ancients, the words imparted to man through ancestral storytelling and direct messages from God, or his appointed prophets. Archetypes have been further developed in literature, fairy tales, movies and the continually growing collection of fact and fiction that is to be found on the internet.

Archetypes are not merely imaginary or real characters that exist in some impersonal form; they live in the collective unconscious of mankind. They are not dead characters but living, breathing, psychic organs that act out their emotions and impulses through us. They are human patterns that have duplicated themselves and have been imprinted in our psyches and our genes throughout the unfolding millennia of history.

I discovered that these characters not only had a dark shadow side but also constructive, empowering positive attributes, and I entered into a dialogue with them. This familiarity with their positive characteristics helps me to recognize and minimize their destructive influences.

Caroline Myss, author, intuitive healer, Jung scholar and lecturer, advises that in order to do this, ‘you need to step away from your life, step up and back from the detailed brush-strokes that make up your energy self-portrait, to see the whole picture. Working with your archetypes involves seeing your life in symbols at the centre of a panoramic vista. From this vantage point you are able to take into account all parts of your life. You don’t just focus on the major events and the significant wounds.’

It was Carl Jung who introduced archetypes into modern psychoanalysis. He discovered the existence of the collective unconscious through his extensive study of comparative religion, mythology, and the folklore, legends and stories passed down within societies as diverse as the Greeks, Babylonians, Egyptians, North Africans to the American Indians.

Jung wrote that people ‘are not conscious of the fact that while they live a conscious life, all the time a myth is played in the unconscious, a myth that extends over centuries; namely, a stream of archetypal ideas that goes on through an individual (throughout) the centuries.’

(Mixed Media: Archetypal Images 2 by Carlton)
© Carlton Carr 2013
http://othervoices.blog.co.uk/