The Symbols Behind the Curtain
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Question of the Day — What do you feed a starving archetype?
I pulled another quote from Sallie Nichol’s Tarot and the Archetypal Journey that inspired this essay. In discussing the Empress and the Emperor, she observes that we can become like “puppets in an archetypal drama, manipulated by giant figures operating above and behind our conscious awareness.” These puppet-masters are conventionally assumed to be our stereotypical Mother and Father figures, but all of the archetypes play a similar part in the melodrama, whether comedic or tragic, where we often feel like we’re being pushed around the chessboard by an Invisible Hand, first one way and then another.
Nichols uses this observation as a preface to a deeper exploration of the psychological archetypes by which she refutes the idea that they convey the impingement of entirely external influences that we can’t escape. Personally, I’ve always felt that they are normative residents of an “inner landscape” that we all carry around with us; they regulate our behavior at an unconscious level, but they remain largely dormant in our waking existence, only poking their heads above ground when circumstances demand that we engage directly with them, if just to mollify them with our acquiescence. (Hmm, what do you feed a starving archetype?)
In truth, at that level of psychological abstraction we’re really doing it to ourselves as unwitting slaves to genetic preconditioning, a driver that we misconstrue as an impersonal, universal force that reaches into our lives and changes the game. Ultimately, while free will has its say, we are still bound by the larger psychic dimensions of our ancestral heritage. We can’t throw it off any more than we can deny our DNA (although science is making strides in that direction), but we can eventually transcend it through “consciousness expansion,” for lack of a better term.
Everyone embodies an innate expression of all 22 tarot trumps (summarizing the “human condition”) but we seldom acknowledge them on a daily basis unless we happen to be tarot readers. (We might well be emulating the Wizard of Oz in urging ourselves to “Pay no attention to those symbols behind the curtain!”) In theory, their qualities are imprinted upon us by “racial” memories welling up from the Collective Unconscious. One definition describes them as “posited memories, feelings and ideas inherited from our ancestors.” We can hardly recognize them amid the hubbub of cerebral traffic, much less come to grips with them, but we are all vulnerable to their idiosyncrasies.
In my own thinking, I stop short of the “We are all one” paradigm that this viewpoint encourages since we have become distanced from the primordial source and are no longer exemplars of its unifying power (that is, we’re not pack animals). Modern life has attenuated and frayed our connection, which is why so much mystical attention is paid to restoring it at the individual and collective levels. To be honest, I’m not all that keen on being empathically linked to some people.
At times these archetypal denizens can feel like we’re carrying the dysfunctional cast of Looney Toons around in our heads. It strikes me that clinical psychology is mostly conjecture based on observation; successful diagnosis and treatment (often through symptom suppression) are kind of like winning at bingo. But there is a branch of speculative physics which asserts that the act of observing any phenomenon alters its characteristics, so with psychology we can never be sure what we’re looking at; spotting our interior menagerie can be like trying to find a chameleon in the Painted Desert.
In thinking about it, the trump card that resonates most vibrantly with me is the Hermit. In fact, I’ve been told “You could be a hermit” because I live largely in my head and have a fertile, productive “internal dialogue” going on almost all the time. Consequently, I’m less outwardly motivated than I ought to be (perhaps the Chariot has shifted into reverse in my “golden years?”); I spend too much time immobile, deeply immersed in the contemplative pursuits of the Hanged Man and devoted to the rarefied “spiritual alchemy” of Temperance (which took me four decades to comprehend correctly). It’s a mode that has become second nature for me, and it’s the impetus behind my daily contributions to this blog.
In terms of metaphysical enlightenment, I’m not writing for you, dear reader, but for myself. One way to open a portal to the “other side” is to keep pounding on the door! I’d much rather do that than try to sneak in the back way through vicarious conceits like religion; since I can’t stand in for the cleric enacting the sacrament (nor would I want to since I think it’s all pompous posturing and “costume drama” anyway), his second-hand piety isn’t going to do me any good. I’m not Catholic, but I’ve been close enough to it to wonder why anyone would believe that exhortations of faith and a little “ritual cannibalism” are going to save their souls. (Not to belabor the point, but I think the only thing Karl Marx ever said that I fully agree with is “Religion is the opium of the people.” But of course he didn’t know about mobile phones.) If you can look beyond my irreligious attitude, you’re always welcome to join me on the journey.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on October 2, 2023.
