Archetypes, Magic, and Fantasy

Shadowlands #7

Shakespeare in the Park is a series of plays performed in public green spaces around the world. The sets are usually minimal; sometimes they’re non-existent and the actors simply perform on a stretch of grass, encircled by an audience sitting on blankets, eating sandwiches they made themselves, while their children play tag amongst the trees.

Despite the non-existent sets; despite the fact that you can clearly see other members of the audience lounging around having picnics; despite the characters all speaking in ridiculously well-timed, perfectly crafted poetry; despite the plot revolving around a shipwreck, an island, a wizard, and the magical creatures that serve him, the audience attending these performances buys into the action in front of them and finds it compelling.

But why? How can they buy into it when it’s so unrealistic? There’s no such thing as wizards. Nobody, regardless of time period, speaks with such beauty and musicality. And the people performing in front of them are clearly not on an island.

We confuse ourselves when we think that the reason plays, novels, and films are compelling to us is because they reflect the ‘real world’, that we pursue our media because it adheres to the kind of ‘scientific’ or ‘material’ reality that supposedly exists around us. But that is clearly not the case.

All of our most popular film franchises—Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and so on—depict characters, plot lines, and universes that are absurdly unrealistic. You’re not fooling anyone into believing there’s a School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, or that Sauron and his Rings of Power are an important part of world history, or that a raccoon can speak English and fire a rocket launcher. And yet, people consume this media like crazy; they obsess over it; they can’t get enough of it.

The reason we enjoy these stories, these characters, and these universes, is not because they depict the ‘material world’ around us, but because they constellate the archetypal realm within us.

To understand archetypes, we must first consider the concept of instincts. The simplest way to think about instincts is that they are the psychological side of our biological nature. Humans are not blank slates. We are born with predetermined mental structures, proclivities, and tendencies. We come out of the womb with our minds already mostly hard-wired, well prepared for the ancient tribal environment of the Garden that’s supposed to await us.

If we consider the physical body, it should be obvious that it’s born with predetermined structures and growth patterns: every healthy human has a head, two eyes and two ears, ten fingers and ten toes, and a spine with 33 vertebrae. We can somewhat influence the shape of our bodies—for instance, giving ourselves an upside-down ‘triangular’ shape through extreme weight lifting, or a ‘pear’ shape through poor diet and lack of activity—but we cannot will ourselves into a tree or an octopus. Our physicality has a very specific blueprint that cannot be unwritten.

Our mind is the same: somewhat pliable—through learning, conditioning, experience—but overwhelmingly predetermined. These predetermined structures of the mind—the psychological analog to two eyes, ten fingers, and 33 vertebrae—are what we refer to as instincts.

Instincts are systems of readiness for action: they wait for a certain pattern to arise in the environment and, upon registering that pattern, activate a certain behavior. For example, upon smelling something rich with fat and sugar (pattern), we decide to eat it (behavior); upon grabbing a frying pan and feeling a burning sensation (pattern), we let go (behavior). These instincts are built into our bodies. We do not choose them or acquire them and we cannot dispense with them—they simply are. We can work with them—or we can exhaust ourselves trying to work around them—but we cannot remove these predetermined structures from our mind any more than we can remove our skeletal system from our body.

Instincts are ancient: they are our ‘lower’, more embodied psychological nature, whose wiring dates back before our ancestors were squirrel-like creatures living in trees. With the dawn of techne, when our ape ancestors first began projecting objects—embarking upon the evolutionary journey that would birth technology, language, and consciousness—those animal instincts were exapted up into a higher realm of images, ideas, and narratives. That ‘higher’ psychological nature—the intellectual analog to embodied instinct—is what we refer to as archetypes.

Where instincts work through lower animalistic pathways, archetypes work through object, image, and story, because that is the realm of techne—the thing that makes humans what they are. While instincts are systems of readiness for behavior, archetypes are systems of readiness for objectification. That is why—while instincts seem to manifest as behaviors—archetypes seem to manifest as image, concept, and narrative: like the ‘magic sword’ or the ‘great mother’ or the ‘hero’s journey’.

Let’s explore an example of both instinct and archetype:

The infantile instinct to ensure one’s security through the protection of a mother-like guardian may result in behaviors like: wanting to constantly be held, crying when being put down, and getting anxious when mother leaves the room. The archetypal analog to that instinct may manifest as images or stories of an ideal mother and over time may be collectively, culturally distilled into shared daimons which embody that ideal mother: like the Virgin Mary or Demeter.

But it’s important to note that the Virgin Mary is not the archetype itself, rather she is the product of an archetype. And that’s where things get confusing. We cannot see instincts themselves, only the behaviors they produce; likewise we cannot see archetypes themselves, only the objects, images, and ideas they produce. It’s also important to note that many different instincts and archetypes interweave and fold upon each other to produce the complexity of human behavior. We can’t know precisely which ones are being constellated at any given time and to what degree.

For example, the behavior of ‘going out to a restaurant’—as many humans are driven to do—is almost certainly a combination of many instincts: craving food, craving novelty, craving human interaction, craving liveliness, and so on. It’s not clear where one instinct begins and another ends or how they influence one another.

Likewise, archetypes tend to blur together. The Hobbit clearly embodies a rich archetypal pattern—that’s what makes it so popular and compelling—but it cannot be reduced to a single archetype: Does the mountainous and forested setting convey the archetypal adventure environment? Does Bilbo convey the archetypal hero? Smaug the archetypal beast? Gandalf the archetypal mentor? Gollum the archetypal... slimy... wretch... thing? Is The Hobbit the archetypal hero’s journey due to all these nested archetypes within it? What happens if we remove Gandalf or Gollum—is it still the archetypal hero’s journey? Is The Matrix also the archetypal hero’s journey? How can it be, when its premise and setting are so different?

Archetypes, like instincts, are not that clear-cut; we cannot disentangle the phenomenological world into distinct, properly labeled containers. We simply see the products of these inner psychological structures in the world around us, and try our best to theorize about what those products might mean.

Consider that instincts function by scanning for patterns in the environment, which then activate the instinct and trigger an associated behavior. Or those patterns constellate an archetype and trigger an associated idea. That means we are constantly projecting a kind of instinctual or archetypal ideal onto the world around us, onto which patterns can match weakly or match strongly.

In other words, we can think of every pattern we encounter in the world as having a fidelity (a faithfulness) to an instinctual or archetypal ideal. A pattern with low fidelity to an archetype will not activate the associated idea; a pattern with high fidelity to an archetype will activate the associated idea.

For example, a root dug up in the wild and a can of Coca-Cola both have sugar in them (a pattern). If consumed, our sugar-craving instinct will be activated by both: the wild root has sugar, but very little, and therefore tastes bitter (low fidelity to the sugar ideal); the Coca-Cola has an extreme amount of sugar and therefore tastes very sweet (high fidelity to the sugar ideal). Therefore, upon tasting the root, we might not eat it; upon tasting the Coca-Cola, we might find ourselves happily guzzling it, because it has such a high fidelity to the instinctual sugar ideal; the pattern matches strongly.

In a different example, an ‘old man working in an office’ and an ‘immortal god-warrior with a magic sword’ could both serve as the hero of a story (a pattern). Our hero archetype will be constellated by both: the old office worker could fix the copy machine that’s been giving all his co-workers trouble and that would be kind of heroic I guess (low fidelity to the hero archetype). Contrastingly, the god-warrior could sacrifice his immortality to defeat Malkon, Devourer of Worlds, saving the entire universe and that would seem very heroic (high fidelity to the hero archetype). Two different patterns playing upon the same archetype, constellating it to different degrees. A movie about the office worker might get turned off after the first two minutes; a movie about the god-warrior might gross a billion dollars at the box office.

This potential for varying fidelities when activating an instinct or constellating an archetype is something that can be cleverly manipulated by human ingenuity, and we have been doing this ever since we became conscious. In fact, the experimentation, innovation, and manipulation of the potentiality of instincts and archetypes may be the core feature of consciousness.

To illustrate, the instinct for sugar guides us towards finding and consuming it, but is calibrated towards an ancient wilderness where food was scarce and the prevalence of sugar was extremely low: the sweetest thing you might find would have been a piece of fruit. With the advent of techne—and our human capacity for engineering our own products, environments, and stories—we began to craft artifacts like Coca-Cola—much, much sweeter than anything we would have encountered in the prehistoric world; much, much sweeter than our heuristic instinct for sugar was ever designed to interact with. Coca-Cola goes beyond what is natural for our instinctual and archetypal faculties.

This going beyond is what I will refer to in this series as magic.

Magic is supernatural—beyond the natural—beyond what our torchbearing heuristics were ever designed for. Magic is higher in fidelity to instinctual and archetypal ideals than what is standard or expected by the body.

Instinctual magic manifests as luxury: like cheeseburgers, hot tubs, and pop music—sensory experiences that go beyond what our instincts were designed for. Archetypal magic manifests as fantasy: like films, novels, and video games—narratives and imagery and ideas that go ‘beyond’ what our archetypes are designed for.

Dragons are not ‘real’, but they play powerfully upon an archetypal pattern of ‘the beast’ or ‘the avatar of nature as destroyer’. For this reason, dragons are magical creatures, something beyond what we find in the ‘real world’. Similarly, wizards are not ‘real’, but they play powerfully upon the archetypal pattern of ‘he who wields the logos’ or ‘he who creatively transmutes the chaotic wild into habitable order’. In this way wizards are magical; they can do things with their hands or minds that are beyond what we find in the ‘real world’.

So, early on in the human timeline of innovating with fantasy, of playing with archetypal magic, of increasing the fidelity of various narrative artifacts to the archetypal ideals at which they aim, we see the emergence of mythology.

Ancient mythology is a product of this capacity for going beyond, and it emerges in human populations as a captivating, powerful way to explain the world—how it works, how it came to be, and where it’s going—in a way that can easily be retained and transferred between minds from generation to generation. At this point in history, fantasy is an innovation in cosmology and cultural cohesion, and does this by way of archetypal magic.

Greek mythology, for example, is magical. Looking at it through a modern lens, it doesn’t seem to make much sense, be very logically consistent, or adhere to any kind of scientific worldview. But it emerges millennia ago as an early attempt to explain our world through archetypal patterns: ”Gaia gives birth to Uranus, who then mates with her, producing eighteen children, but Uranus hates them, so he hides them inside Gaia’s womb, but Gaia doesn’t like that very much, so she persuades the youngest child Cronus to castrate his father with a sickle, which makes Cronus the ruler of the cosmos, then he marries his sister, and they have children, but Cronus eats those children...”

Like Shakespeare in the Park, you could complain that Greek mythology doesn’t seem very ‘realistic’—so how could anyone possibly believe it?—but you would be missing the point: mythology is not an exercise in science, it is the product of collective, intergenerational experimentation with archetypal magic. It plays with the phenomenological potentialities afforded by our torchbearing instincts, which evolved for life in the Garden, and does so in service of creating a primitive—but useful—shared metaphysics.

We can think of it like this: Our instinct for a motherly presence within a tribal setting generates a Gaia-like figure, from which all life originates, from whom Uranus, the representation of the older generation in the tribe, is born, and he is perpetually rebelled against and eventually overthrown by the younger generation, represented by Cronus. It is the dramatization of a universal tribal pattern of intergenerational dynamics: the younger males must take on the bearing of the Torch from the older generation, through a power struggle from which the strongest (and therefore best suited) faction will emerge as leaders, all against the backdrop of subtle female mediation and guidance. This is perhaps a simplistic reduction of primitive tribal dynamics, but something kind of like this is still observed in tribes of chimpanzees today.

Chimps don’t have a ‘science’, they have instincts which drive optimal torchbearing, and the experience of those instincts is the ‘reality’ they live in. The push and pull of these drives are the walls of their subjectivity. Humans are those very same chimps, only that these instincts have sublimated into the realm of consciousness—into imagery, ideas, and stories—and our early mythologies reflect this sublimation; a direct bridge between instinct and archetype. While chimps directly act out the phenomena of torchbearing in the wild, humans additionally dramatize and mythologize it, producing all the imagistic and narrative artifacts of the ancient world.

As the collective consciousness and technological prowess of human society progressed over time, so did their innovations in archetypal magic. The fantasies of today do not resemble the mythologies of the ancient past. While the cosmogony of Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus may represent a primitive people grasping at archetypal patterns in order to explain the nature of their world, blockbuster franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe demonstrate the extreme distillation of archetypes for the purpose of recreation, entertainment, and generating capital.

While the average person might have trouble making it through the Illiad, or the Book of Genesis, or the Codex Regius, modern audiences have no trouble watching hours and hours of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter. These mega-popular franchises are such money-making successes because they take archetypal patterns and distill them down into their purest forms. Like Coca-Cola—whose fidelity to the instinctual sugar ideal is very high—blockbuster fantasies distill archetypal patterns into such high-fidelity objects, that they become almost too compelling. Too sweet. Fans will wait hours and hours in line for the premiere of a movie, spend thousands of dollars on collectibles and memorabilia, and exert a great deal of effort basking in that archetypal glow with other fans on the internet.

When archetypal artifacts such as these become so isolated, so purified; when their fidelity to the archetypal ideal is so high; when they border so close to archetypal perfection—these artifacts have a tendency to possess us. To capture us. To control us. Like a junkie possessed by heroin, or a fly possessed by a floodlight, artifacts of such high archetypal purity can get inside of us and take control of the steering wheel.

I will refer to these possessive, high-fidelity, hyper-magical artifacts as omegas.

An omega has such high fidelity to an instinctual or archetypal ideal that it overwhelms the psyche and comes to possess it. The higher the fidelity of an artifact, the more transfixing it is, the more it pushes other archetypes out of the psychic spotlight, causing us to become imbalanced and experience neurosis. Like a drug, it’s too pure, and we become addicted, losing our agency and behaving in ways we do not wish to behave. An omega is an archetype exploited.

To illustrate, humans—like all living things—have strong drives towards reproduction. To achieve that aim of reproduction, these drives point us towards finding a partner and engaging in the sexual act. That means we crave sex (instinct), are attracted to anything resembling the ideal sexual partner (archetypal image), and frequently formulate sexual fantasies in our minds (archetypal narrative).

In the Garden, these drives would have served us well in our torchbearing journey: we’d seek out a mate with ‘good-enough’ fidelity to our archetypal ideal (“she resembles an intelligent, healthy, fertile female”), produce descendants, raise them well, and pass the Torch.

In the Shadowlands, however, we’ve cleverly invented pornography, which features humans and sequences and aesthetics so distilled, so perfect, so high in fidelity to the archetypal ideals underlying sexuality, that they have the power to hijack us. Pornography is an omega: an artifact too archetypally pure. Like a drug. That’s why porn is very addicting; why a large portion of men watch it daily; why they waste their money on webcam girls; why it can ruin their romantic relationships, even cause them to ignore real women in favor of the virtual goddesses of cyberspace (which may soon not even be real flesh and blood).

Similarly, the archetypes pointing us towards successful hunting of game and gathering of resources are distilled into the omega of video games, also very addictive. The archetypes pointing us towards tribal self-regulation, cohesion, and a natural wariness of competing tribes we would have encountered in the wild are distilled into sociocultural warfare in the omega of social media (also very addictive). The archetypes pointing us towards securing resources and agency in a harsh ancient wilderness where both were scarce are distilled into wasteful rat races for the omegas of money and status. Also. Very. Addictive.

In the Garden—the environment we evolved to inhabit—omegas didn’t exist. Without modern technology, it was not possible for any one archetype to be so radically distilled. And every archetypal pattern was always counter-balanced by a multiplicity of other patterns, always diluted by a complex and varied phenomenological landscape. You had meat, but not cheeseburgers. You had voices, but not pop music. You had stories, but not blockbusters. You had lovers, but not porn stars.

Whether the distillation of instincts and archetypes has brought on an evolution in consciousness, an ascent of the imagination, a wonderful wide world of art and beauty and wonder—or a phantom planet of obese zombies so absorbed in simulations of the ‘good life’ that they’ve forgotten to live their own—is hard to say. As with everything, civilization finds itself somewhere in the middle: both utopia and dystopia, enlightenment and idiocy.

There is a war in our minds between the archetypal truths we were born to believe, the scientific truths we must adopt to survive, and a darkness that wants us to dispense with the notion of truth altogether. How on earth did we get here?

And so ends Shadowlands Part One: Our Origins. We will begin to venture an answer the question above, as we journey from the ancient world all the way to the 21st century, in Shadowlands Part Two: Our Fall Into History…