Archetypes: Why the Old Stories Still Ring True
Strike a tuning fork and hold it near a second fork tuned to the same note. The second one starts to hum, even though nobody touched it. The sound found something already built to answer it.
Certain stories do that to people. A father’s voice telling his lost son to remember who he is. A man swallowed by the deep and given back. A miser who wakes up on Christmas morning as someone new. We hear them and something in us hums, whether we believe the story happened or not.
That raises a question I had to answer for myself. If I no longer think many of the scripture stories are historically accurate, why do they still move me? And is it honest to keep loving them?
I think it is. Here’s why, with a little help from Carl Jung, and an honest note about where his ideas can and can’t take us.
The worry, stated fairly
Let me put the believer’s concern in its strongest form first.
When someone like me says a scripture story is “myth,” it can sound like a polite way of calling it a lie. If Eden is a myth, what’s left of the Fall? And if there was no Fall, what was Christ saving us from? To many faithful people the whole structure hangs together, so pulling out one beam looks like pulling down the house.
That’s a serious objection, and I don’t want to wave it away. But I think it rests on a choice of words that makes everything harder than it has to be.
I’ve come to avoid the words real, true and literal in these conversations. They do too many jobs at once. I’d rather ask more careful questions. Is this story historically accurate? Is this person a credible historical figure? And separately: does the story carry something true about being human?
Those questions can have different answers. Achilles may well have been a great warrior, but his mother wasn’t a goddess. Not believing everything written about someone doesn’t mean they never existed or never changed the world.
What Jung meant
Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, noticed that the same images and characters keep showing up in myths, religions, dreams and stories across cultures that had no contact with each other: the great mother, the wise old man, the hero, the trickster, the shadow, death and rebirth. He called these recurring patterns archetypes, and he placed them in what he called the collective unconscious: a layer of the mind common to all humans, not formed by any one person’s life.
His student Erich Neumann described archetypes as psychic organs. That’s the explanation that clicked for me. Just as two people share the same body plan (two arms, two lungs, one heart), they share the same basic structures of the psyche. Nobody has to teach you to have lungs. Nobody has to teach you to be moved by a story of rebirth.
So the motifs in our oldest scriptures, our classic novels and our most popular films work like tuning forks. They set off something deep inside us. We can’t put these psychic organs under a microscope. But if we make room for the thoughts and feelings they draw out, we can learn things about ourselves that matter.
A forum for action
Jordan Peterson, building on Jung in Maps of Meaning, gave me another useful distinction. He puts it this way: “The world can be validly construed as a forum for action, as well as a place of things” (Goodreads).
Science describes the world as a place of things: what is. Myth describes the world as a place to act: what matters, and what we should do about it. They aren’t rival answers to the same question. Myth isn’t primitive science. It’s doing a different job.
Peterson also traces how that job gets done. Behavior, he says, “is imitated, then abstracted into play, formalized into drama and story, crystallized into myth and codified into religion – and only then criticized in philosophy, and provided, post-hoc, with rational underpinnings.”
That order explains a lot. We knew how to live long before we could explain why. The stories carry wisdom that’s older than our arguments about them. My notes on that book include an idea I keep coming back to: we are conscious enough to criticize our religious traditions, but not yet conscious enough to understand them. That’s a fair warning for those of us who’ve stepped away and are tempted to throw everything out.
Eden, read as myth
So let me go back to the believer’s hardest question. If Eden is a myth, is there still a need for a Savior?
I say yes. Read as myth, the Eden story still ends with a man and a woman cast out, ashamed, and unable to get back on their own. It still needs a resolution. A literal savior from a literal hell? Arguably not. But in a metaphorical sense, absolutely.
A soul drenched in wrongdoing, guilt and shame has to find humility, moral uprightness, a resolve to change, and gratitude for one more chance. Then it can be washed clean, like the earth after rain, and go on with joy. The Savior of the Eden myth is the embodiment of repentance, forgiveness and a peaceful conscience. To love him is to love what he stands for: growth, forgiveness, peace and joy.
To those who view Eden as a myth, a savior is indeed needed.
That’s not a watered-down gospel. For me, it’s the part that was always doing the real work.
What archetypes can’t do
Now for some honesty in the other direction.
A story ringing true in us is not evidence that it happened. I’ve written elsewhere that strong feelings don’t establish truth. That applies here, too. The fact that rebirth stories move people in every culture is a reason to think they reveal something about human nature. It’s not a reason to think any one of them is history, or that any one church owns them.
If anything, it points the other way. If every people tells a version of the same stories, then those stories belong to all of us, not to one faith.
That’s where I’ve landed. I accept that God or gods, spirits, heaven, hell, good, evil, chaos and order are all inseparable parts of the human experience. They are woven into how we think and what we fear and hope for. Whether any of them exists outside us is a question I hold open. That they exist in us, I don’t doubt at all.
The second fork
Back to the tuning forks. The second fork doesn’t hum because the first one is lying to it. It hums because it was built to that pitch.
That’s how I hold the old stories now. Remember who you are. Out of the belly of hell cried I. The old self dies and a new one wakes up. They still ring in me, maybe more than ever, because I’m no longer spending my energy defending them as history. I can just listen.
If you want to see one archetype followed all the way through, read From the Ashes. For the book that took Jung’s ideas furthest for me, see Unraveling Consciousness.