It are not only intense events in our lives that shackle us. Transgenerational trauma, the baggage taken up by the Soul once incarnated into physical form at conception, shackles us just as much. If not more, for it is then that is in part decided what pain you have to endure in life. But I’ll write about this vast topic in a later post. today, I’m going to talk about another form of imprisonment of the Soul. One that is not very often spoken of, but might well be the most important in understanding our human condition: The archetypal shackles that keep us restricted into believing ourselves to be separate and finite beings, continuously seducing us to outsource our innate and limitless power to people or institutions outside of us. People and institutions that are governed and ruled by these same forces that seduce you to give up your own potentiality.
The human ego believes itself to be holding the reigns of the will. Every choice is ours, every mistake our own fault. But one who dares to look inside quickly realizes that our actions are often driven by forces we don’t recognize. They hide in the dark, waiting to be held in the light of consciousness. But until then, we simply are slaves of their vast powers.
The Egyptians, Greeks and Romans called these powers Gods. Nowadays, the Gods have long died, for they have no place in a world that believes the imaginal to be phantasy, and materialism to be the one and only truth. The entire notion of phantasy has become the exact opposite of the original meaning of the word, which only further fuels the dichotomy.
The term phantasia did not refer to mental delusions or creative inventions divorced from reality, as we usually assume: it meant simply “appearance” or “presentation,” from phainesthai (to appear). - Wouter Hanegraaff
Phantasy is the realm of the Soul, and it is there where the Gods live. No wonder that young children speak and dream of dragons, warriors, animals, witches and castles, for they are not yet bound by the stupidity of the rationalistic ego. The ego, which does everything it can to label that which is true to be false, does everything it can to keep us from investigating the imaginal realm of the unconsciousness. For it is there where the truth of our essence is to be found.
Hermes Trismegistus, the ancient sage making its appearance in many traditions that have come to pass, spoke of the current human situation a long time ago:
Darkness will be preferred to light, and death will be thought more profitable than life; no one will raise his eyes to heaven; the pious will be deemed insane, the impious wise; the madman will be thought a brave man, and the wicked will be esteemed as good.
As for the soul, and the belief that it is immortal by nature, or may hope to attain to immortality, as I have taught you; all this they will mock, and even persuade themselves that it is false. No word of reverence or piety, no utterance worthy of heaven, will be heard or believed.
And so the Gods will depart from mankind - a grievous thing and only evil angels will remain, who will mingle with men, and drive the poor wretches into all manner of reckless crime, into wars, and robberies, and frauds, and all things hostile to the nature of the soul.
Then will the earth tremble, and the sea bear no ships; heaven will not support the stars in their orbits, all voices of the Gods will be forced into silence; the fruits of the Earth will rot; the soil will turn barren, and the very air will sicken with sullen stagnation; all things will be disordered and awry, all good will disappear.
But when all this has befallen, then God the Creator of all things will look on that which has come to pass, and will stop the disorder by the counterforce of his will, which is the good. He will call back to the right path those who have gone astray; he will cleanse the world of evil, washing it away with floods, burning it out with the fiercest fire, and expelling it with war and pestilence.
What about the archetypes? The archetypes are those same Gods who have departed from mankind. But not entirely. Because the ones who dare to look will find their sanctuary and can restore them to their rightful place: Among us, but not as us. To recognize them as the governing principles of our waking reality, while realizing ourselves to be beyond all of those principles. Thereby escaping from their grasp and becoming as we essentially are:
An eternal, unborn soul as a unique fragment of the One Unknowable, living in this beautiful world to evolve both ourselves as the collective psyche as a whole.
How unconscious archetypes keep us restrained and traumatized
An archetype is a powerful thought form that rules our material reality and individual behaviour. Until it becomes conscious, it rules us from the shadows, subtly distorting the gift of free will. Although feeling as if choices are our own, they are often governed by strong assumptions forced upon us by these archetypes.
An example is death and the assumption that we will die one day. Fear for death is a strong behaviour-changing mechanism based on an assumption that seems utterly solid. And because it seems so solid, it rules our behaviour with every step we take. Only if we have experiences that question the assumption of death, the restrictive behaviour due to fear of death can transform into freedom from fear.
In ancient traditions such as Hermetism and Gnosticism, it are the planets that are pointed at as the archetypes/archons that keep us restricted in the material world and its physical boundaries. In the ancient Egyptian traditions, the human who died to their physical form had to know the names of the 42 Gods and their “sins” to be accepted in the eternal fields. Only by truly knowing and feeling these powers in themselves, could a person be freed from them.
To truly understand these archetypal powers, you have to imagine yourself as a microcosm of the entire universe. We are IN psyche, and psyche is the entire Universe as it appears to us. The planets, exactly because they are visible outside of us, have to be in us. To quote Jung:
“The world is the living psyche. Because the psyche is not separate from the farthest corners of the whole universe, the psyche reflects, and knows, the whole of existence”
Once you see it, you see it everywhere. The first of the guiding principles of Hermetism is: The All is Mind, the Universe is Mental. Or take the Buddhists, who like to say that “all is mind”. Our the Gnostics, who point at material reality being a creation of Yaldabaoth/Yahweh to keep us restricted, and that we should escape that construct by realizing what we truly are. Or Hinduism, which states that the world we perceive “is an illusion (Maya) created by the mind”.
It is only through travelling our inner universe, that we can confront the powers that keep us from realizing our innate potential. Even if they turn out to be imaginal in retrospect.
Archetypal Mars for example, is hot, fiery and red from a physical perspective, while symbolizing the god of war, the warrior, assertiveness and drive in ourselves. But it’s not all bright, as every “thing” split from the primordial source carries both the light and its shadow. Thus, Mars is also rude, potentially violent and a quick cutter of bonds. If you are unaware of this martian power in yourself, you’re essentially ruled by it. Only if the Martian power arises in consciousness without you being identified by it, is there room for “free” will. A will arising from Soul, instead of from the shackles of the Martian impulse.
It is only through introspection that these archetypes can pervade our personal consciousness. In that moment, the archetype is being born through you. To “free” yourself from its powers, you have to let both its light and shadow side play itself out in consciousness without ever identifying with it. A rather distressing process called personifying by the maverick psychologist James Hillman. It is this process of birth, that splits your Soul from the archetypes’ grasp, although your physical form is still bound by their powers. For material reality is their domain, and a physical body cannot escape their rules (although phenomena like rainbow body seem to oppose that view).
Fortunately for us humans, we are not only physical. We are in spirit too, meaning that we can escape the boundaries forced upon us by these archetypes and become free of them from a real personal experience. We assume the elder Lama does not want to die because we have a fear of death. But what if, seen from his perspective, death is the sacred marriage, the long awaited return to the One source. Reality is as it appears to us. And the more we become free of the governing principles such as time, space, birth, death above and below, the more infinite our potentiality becomes.
The birth of an archetype and how to become free from it
Identification is inflation, meaning that to believe you have become Christ, Satan, Yahweh, Mars, Hekate or Venus quickly leads you astray. By complete identification, you become enslaved by a specific archetype. A phenomenon that is all too often found in the village madman. It is only through maintaining the primordial source of consciousness as a vessel, that both the light and shadow side of an archetype can be integrated in the human psyche.
Over and over again in my therapy sessions, I meet wonderful souls who are completely identified with one particular archetype. These do not have to be the more collective powers, but can still be a real pain if not seen through. We all know the mother, who since giving birth to her son, can talk about nothing else than her son and children in particular. This person then has become identified with the archetypal mother while it awakened in her. Just as some people are still identified with their inner child.
The method is always the same: Separating the archetype from consciousness itself, thereby breaking the identification and giving room for the unsuppressed shadow of the archetype to be manifested in consciousness too. That is when the inner battle truly begins, for it the shadow part that we do not want to be part of us. Only through letting this battle ensue in consciousness, without identifying with either side, do we become free from their shackles.
How an archetype manifest itself in you is not of importance, as the form is only an appearance containing the characteristics. Some people encounter angels, other Buddhist Deities, Christ or Aliens. All are forms of Psyche, none are to be identified with.
Believing yourself to be an Atheist of course does not matter in the least, for the unconscious simply floods us with symbolism that has been “thought into being” for generations. An self-pronounced Atheist might therefore have recurring dreams of Christ appearing in a bright white cloak, calling him towards redemption. Ego is quick to neglect this dream as mere phantasy, but the archetype of Christ is a very real one in the human Psyche as a whole. It comes with all the heartfelt emotions and views that Christ himself had. But as every archetype, archetypal Christ has a shadow side too.