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Updated: June 26, 2025
Thirdly, it has been shown that these venerable tales may be grouped in a few pretty well defined classes; and that the archetypal myth of each class the primitive story in conformity to which countless subsequent tales have been generated was originally a mere description of physical phenomena, couched in the poetic diction of an age when everything was personified, because all natural phenomena were supposed to be due to the direct workings of a volition like that of which men were conscious within themselves.
It is a higher man within man, that man of which the personality is only an image. Within man is born a being who surpasses him, a primordial, archetypal man, and this is another secret of the Mysteries brought to expression in the Platonic philosophy. Hippolytus, one of the Early Fathers, alludes to this secret. But these latter speak in detail of Adam, as the primordial, archetypal man."
"Leaves of Grass," taken as a whole, aims to exhibit a modern, democratic, archetypal man, here in America, confronting and subduing our enormous materialism to his own purposes, putting it off and on as a garment; identifying himself with all forms of life and conditions of men; trying himself by cosmic laws and processes, exulting in the life of his body and the delights of his senses; and seeking to clinch, to develop, and to realize himself through the shows and events of the visible world.
They are not copied from things, but are archetypal for reality and need no confirmation from experience. Existence is not at all involved in universal propositions; "general knowledge lies only in our own thoughts, and consists barely in the contemplation of our own abstract ideas" and their relations.
In the Gnostic teaching, the Eons, corresponding to the archetypal ideas of Plato, are never single; each god has his feminine counterpart; and the Gnostic assemblies are composed of "perfected ones," male and female. The Valentinians give the mystic bride the name of Helen. The Gnostic rites and sacraments are complicated.
We may be images in a world of images; our thoughts shadows of archetypal ideas, our acts a shadow-play upon the luminous screen of material existence, revealing there, however imperfectly, the moods and movements of a higher self in a higher space. The saying, "All the world's a stage," may be true in a sense Shakespeare never intended.
Such at least is the conclusion of one who, studying certain families of plants, which indulge in the most fantastic varieties of shape and size, and yet through all their vagaries retain as do the Palms, the Orchids, the Euphorbiaceae one organ, or form of organs, peculiar and highly specialized, yet constant throughout the whole of each family, has been driven to the belief that each of these three families, at least, has "sported off" from one common ancestor one archetypal Palm, one archetypal Orchid, one archetypal Euphorbia, simple, it may be, in itself, but endowed with infinite possibilities of new and complex beauty, to be developed, not in it, but in its descendants.
Apart then from the incarnation, the Word was archetypal man as well as God. Thus we reach the still more solemn thought that the incarnation is not a mere expedient to get rid of sin, but the historic revelation of what was latent in the Word from all eternity. Had man not sinned, the Word must still have come among us, albeit not through shame and death. It was his nature that he should come.
The trend of his argument is clear; as its shadow is to a solid object, so is the object itself to its archetypal idea.
This conception has been elaborated by Plato in his doctrine of archetypal ideas, and by Swedenborg in his doctrine of correspondences; and a still greater teacher has said "All things whatsoever ye pray and ask for, believe that ye have received them, and ye shall receive them."
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