Archetypes

An archetype is the mold from which all other things of the same type are made.

It is a pattern in its original form, an original idea from which all other related ideas are

derived. The Greeks believed that original ideas where in the minds of the Gods and

therefore preceded experience. As time and experience expanded, each archetype took

on many new variations, depending on how people in different settings or circumstances

experience the idea. One archetype, therefore, acquired many forms. An example is the

archetype of birth, an experience common to all human beings, that has acquired

numerous variations based on the many possible social or cultural ways of experiencing

it.

An archetype is a major element of our common human experience. A motif is a

minor element, or smaller part, of our common experience. Both recur often in our lives

and are often predictable because they are the essence of the human experience. We can

be sure that what is essential and central to our existence will come around again and

again. The predictability of archetypes and motifs being repeated in our lives is what

gives them their power over us and makes them fascinating to us.

Archetypes express the inherited, or dormant, potentials of the human psyche.

They are the vast store of our ancestral knowledge about our relationship to God and the

world around us. When pieces of this knowledge come up to our conscious level of

awareness, weather from direct experience, a dream, or through a traditional story, and

we are able to integrate the meaning of the experience into our lives, we are drawn into

a universal and eternal process that connects us to the experience of all who have gone

before us and all who will come after us.

One of the most familiar archetypes is that of the hero. The first major element of

the hero story is the separation from the familiar, or the call to adventure, which is also

an archetype. Job, Odysseus, and even Sleeping Beauty are each archetypal heroes/

heroines. They each receive a call to adventure that ultimately transforms them into

someone they weren’t before they received the call.

Another familiar archetype is that of death and rebirth. Again, in quite different

ways, each of the three stories listed express this archetype. Through his extensive

suffering, Jobs faith is tested to its limit only to be renewed and emerge even stronger.

Not only do Odysseus’s rough edges die away through his extended ordeals, but he is

reborn inwardly to be a more fitting husband and father when he returns. Sleeping

Beauty is reborn from an extended sleep, ready to begin a new life. Transformation is

the central theme, or archetype of all three stories.

The stories we tell of our lives