Archetypes in Modern Culture
The figures Jung described did not retire when the gods did. A look at where they have continued to live.
Industrial modernity dispensed with most of the old container vocabulary — gods, saints, daimons — but it did not dispense with the psychic functions those figures named. The functions migrated.
Brand mythology, cinematic narrative, political iconography, sports, the cult of the founder — these are where archetypal energy now circulates, often without the awareness of the people most invested in them.
This is not a complaint. Archetypes were never the property of religion; religion was one of their oldest hosts. The question is whether the contemporary hosts can hold the energies as carefully as the older ones tried to.
An archetypal literacy — the ability to recognize which figure is animating a moment, a movement, or a market — is among the more useful interpretive skills of the present period.