The Loss of Archetypes
So, I’m watching this Jordan Peterson video and a thought occurred to me. Professor Peterson is arguing that the “Woke” (he doesn’t call them by name, but we know who he is talking about) seek to create and instill guilt in white people (they are racist) and especially white men (they are toxic) so the “Woke” can then weaponize that guilt and use it against men to demoralize them (white men in particular) to become compliant to the wishes of the (self-proclaimed) female and black victimized oppressed.
This motive, he argues, is grounded in three basic accusations (according to Jordan Peterson):
- The West is an oppressive patriarchy that is motivated to use power to oppress and coercer others against their will, in order to attain selfish and self-serving ends that maintain their own dominance and privilege. Further, every relationship between people (at all levels of society, from family to the political state) manifests this kind of exploitation and selfishness, as well as, being the fundamental characteristic of all Western culture and history.
- All Western (white patriarchal) cultural and economic activity is a threat to the ecological safety of the planet, and this activity has destroyed the utopia that used to exist before Western culture destroyed it and the indigenous people that were its caretakers. Selfish white men are reducing the chances for the future survival of humanity because of their bio-degradation of the earth. Extreme measures must be taken to combat their threat to the earth by resisting Western culture, science, and capitalism.
- Toxic (white) male masculinity is the root cause of all the evils of western culture that destroy minority people and the earth itself with its desire to pillage, rape, and exploit. Its competitive and domineering ambitions structure all power relations in the West, which have to be mitigated, tamed, even unlearned, to recreate a new nontoxic man for the safety of society and the planet.
To save the world, maleness (and whiteness) have to be attacked and abolished. The drives and impulses that derive from maleness are essentially dangerous and even demonic.
So here is where my new thought starts. I started thinking about archetypes. That somehow the ancient archetypes of the past that simultaneously valorized yet balanced male and female energies have been destroyed in the modem world. The archetypal powers of the female have been rejected by feminists that create and nurture, the mother, the child bearer. Rather, women want to co-opt male energies while leaving actual males in a state of uselessness and as a constant threat. Males no longer have any meaningful value to these kinds of women. Men’s only real use is to “simp” for them.
Modern feminist women don’t value things traditionally associated with women. They see these traditions as oppressive and subordinating. They valued the male, but don’t want men to any longer possess those dangerous “energies” (that they now deem as unfair “privileges”) These feminists want to co-opt maleness for themselves and strip it away from actual men for their own feminist purposes.
In short, they want to simply rewrite the female as “good” and the male as “bad” and ignore the complicated interconnection between these archetypal powers. The bad male/good female axis of wokeness is simply a reversed projection of the feminist conception of the evils of male patriarchy where women get to be the dominant oppressors for once. It’s about time they say. What (patriarchal society) saw as good and the sustaining structure of society is now cursed as evil by the feminists, who want to take over and enforce their own sense of female virtue (at the expense of men of course-men are too dangerous to allow to exist unencumbered. To save the earth and the future from men. Femaleness must rein them in and bind them-by becoming more of the thing they say they despise in men: empowered).
The archetype of the female energy is rejected as a male imposition on them to take away their power as women. This is deeply anti-human and turns its back on thousands of years of human cultural and biological evolution. Why after millennia of human history is this only being discovered now?
Somehow feminists lost the archetype of the female. Her power in trying to take over his power. The male and the female have always been seen to exist in a profound generative and sustaining relationship with each other. They also existed in a deep conflict that destroyed and renewed the deep self of culture. The very relationship between the male and the female was also dangerous and destructive but also creative and generative, the coming together of the female blood and the male semen. Modernity is currently beating the hell out of these deep human truths.
In juxtaposing male against female, the modern world pitted creation (female) against male (destruction). This was not the way in which historical cultures experienced male and female energies in the human past. Ancient people divided the world into chaos (female) and structure (male), birth and death as female, preservation and stability as male. They were conceived as in both fruitful competition and balance. One cannot exist without the other. In the modern West, the male has been transformed into the archetype of death and destruction, that needs to be purged for the safety of life, the female (which is now left undefined). Men became Death/Evil. Women are to be protected, even if we no longer know what that is. Subsequently, we have also lost touch with the archetypal meaning of the male (female too).
Life and death in the West have become conceived as opposites. God brings life; evil brings death. In India, the god Shiva rules over both birth and death, while Vishnu presides over maintaining life between its birth and its passing. They contrast creation/destruction as the same act that is juxtaposed against preserving and sustaining.
In the Bible, that which possesses the power of life, the blood, must be given back to the soil, the earth, from which it originally came. The body is given back to the earth, which is both the source of life and the receiver of death. God rules over life in the interim with law and ritual to sustain his people and their purity (unpolluted by the uncleanness of birth and death, blood and sperm).
This makes me wonder if this is why there is such a big emphasis on Christ’s birth and death in Christian theology (drawing on the archetype of the female), with little consideration for his life and ministry (the domain of the archetype of the male). And why today, when we live in a very different metaphorical and symbolic world of modernity, we reject the birth/death narratives as superstition and silliness and focus more on the life of Jesus as a source of self and social preservation.
I know, this is not all that special of a thought, but I feel there is a story in there somewhere.
So, speaking of stories, I added some stories and blogs to my Substack. These are not new works. I brought them over from my webpage. I put them together into groups that I labeled:
My Stories
My Blogs
An Everlasting Name (A Novel)
The Likeness of Men: A Supernatural Fanfiction
Supernatural: the epilogue (fanfiction)
I hope you find something you like. Please share and comment.
Originally published at https://cehammock.substack.com on July 18, 2022.
