If planetary pictures coincide with archetypal shifts in human affairs, it suggests that the cosmos is saturated not just with intelligence, but also with consciousness. That consciousness speaks in an archetypal language intelligible to people.
One thing is absolutely essential to the notion of archetypes: their emotional possessive effect, their bedazzlement of consciousness. An archetype is best comparable with a god.
The earliest archetypal perspective was the primordial experience of the great gods and goddesses of ancient mythic imagination, including those associated with the known planets (Sun, Moon, Venus, Mars Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn).
Plato subsequently conceived of archetypes as Ideas or Forms that are absolute essences – timeless universals that serve as the fundamental reality informing every concrete particular, both human and cosmic.
Carl Jung further defined archetypes as the fundamental governing principles of the human psyche held universally in the “collective unconscious.” They are “self-portraits” of the instincts and render human experience meaningful according to certain timeless universal patterns or forms.
Jung and Joseph Campbell ultimately concluded that archetypes supersede a solely human “collective unconscious.” They appear to be embedded in a collective unconscious inherent in the cosmos itself.
This archetypal consciousness appears to be highly participatory by nature, a co-creative dance. The more we can be aware of these archetypal and unconscious forces, the less we become the object of them, and the more we can work with them. Our lives are not fate, but choice.
