SHADOWS ON THE WALL: The Archetypes in Which We Trust
Some Indigenous traditions said the earth floated on the back of a thousand turtles. To me, those thousand turtles are the archetypes: the universal experiences that ground and inform our human experience. Without the turtles, we lack a stable ground where we can all stand.
Plato said the archetypes were never in plain sight. They were simply the shadows on the wall, intimations of a transcendent reality or truth. The shadows were symbols, human forms, and patterns in nature.
The archetypes evolved in the psyche as the human body did physically. The mental constructions and meanings of life experience continue to live on in our collective memory.
Our highly scientific and secularised world sees very little use for the archetypes, just as the perspective of the earth sitting on 1000 turtles would be tossed away as useless. But perhaps there’s a bigger purpose to these world views: that’s to understand the interconnectedness of all things.
Without an understanding of archetypal patterns, we are inherently lonely in our human experience. There is no universal kinds of suffering, love, or creativity: only unique, pathological, diagnosable, and novel forms of human behaviour. In a physical body, this is known as neurosis: when a part of us hasn’t been integrated to the homogenous body, it turns neurotic. Our world is neurotic. There is so much disintegration and hyper uniqueness that nothing of the past seems to matter anymore. Nothing of these thousand turtles seems to matter anymore.
Without a grounding universal language of archetypes, we can feel the lack of gravity beneath us. When there is no connective tissue, we feel ourselves, walking on a tightrope miles away from any stone, feeling as though we could fall and lose mortality at any moment. That is because mortality is found between the shadows of the archetypes. Without these shadows, there is no light, and thus no shape or definition in our lives. Without the archetypes, we may not even exist.