I invite you to consider your worldview as an operating system—one that can receive updates, patches, and enhancements and can also experience bugs. This operating system was not designed or compiled consciously, and like all operating systems, the operating system itself is invisible to the files that reside on it.
To decode that operating system, we need to appreciate the language it is written in, which is the language of the figurative. This is the language of metaphor, symbol, archetype and totem.
Both Jung and Joseph Campbell understood this well.
The myth does not point to fact; the myth points to something that informs the fact.
Joseph Campbell
In the tapestry of human consciousness, the threads of myth and archetype weave a fundamental pattern that is so much richer and more intricate than the sum of its parts.
We are navigating the currents of a profound and uncomfortable, but what is now a very necessary cultural evolution, which has to include a challenge to the Solar Father archetype, a shift that is happening on many levels, but tectonically and universally in our collective psyche—a death and rebirth cycle that is challenging us to redefine the pillars of authority, governance, aegis and sovereignty in our lives.
This cyclical process of death and renewal, observed through the lens of mythology, provides not only a mirror reflecting our past that we are struggling to disintegrate but also a map highlighting a possible path towards future integration. By learning to debug the archetypal language, we enable a deeper understanding of the forces that shape us both personally and collectively. If our social fabric is ever going to become both vibrant and resilient, we are going to need an upgrade and a managed transition.
THE UNSEEN FATHER If the earth is the bosom of the Mother whose shelter and fulsome grace are withheld from none, then the boundless sky is the great wheel of the Father under whose iron laws even the mighty sun and all the stars are ordered. And between them, a place for every life to come to a surrender: to either the steady heart beat and tides of the Mother, against whose gentle breast all are held as babes, a cradle for the innocent and a manger for the weary in their final rest. Or of the great music and oneness of the maker, the ocean in whom the infinite heaving of all tides are held, and measured, the endless heart of which into whom all rivers with the peaceful sigh of yielding to the great longing of returning home branch and spill at last, again, as once in their first source into the utter surrender of their last great release. but there is a Love which I alone have seen beyond these Two, which endures alone and unnoticed, a sturdy back to the dark and empty chaos, to the oblivion of the yawning void, to the devouring maw of a lightless eternity of nothing. And He, the Will, for whom there is no bosom no ocean, no wheel, no track. I want to sit, at times while I may, while my Will holds, beside Him. Rocco Jarman
Mythology helps us understand Archetypes. Archetypes form part of the base language by which our psychology is programmed.
Borrowing the context of Greek Mythos, Ouranos was the Sky Father, lusty, distant and removed from his children, he was deposed and castrated by his son Kronos, the Saturnian Father, a Tyrant who devoured his own children. The Ouranos Father archetype is disapproving, distant and unavailable. The Kronos Father archetype is overbearing and disapproving.
The Solar Father archetype is the one we enthrone, the one central to our solar system of context.
The Solar Father archetype is unrepresented in the Greek Mythos and idealised in the Egyptian and Christian Mythos. The Judeo-Christian examples included Abraham, David, Solomon and Jesus Christ.
As it happens, in the Greek Mythos the solar deity is the youthful Apollo. To the Ancient Greek psyche therefore we can assume that the Solar Father archetype was not matured as evidenced by the absence of shared example. Interestingly both their contemporaries the Persians and later their successors the Romans, conversely, did have working examples of the Solar Father archetype by way of their leonine Emperor figures.
The Ancient Greeks adopted that update to their Psyche via the exploits and example of Alexander the Great, who was called the Lion of Macedon and his flag featured a Sun emblem.
The Romans then had the shared example of Alexander by which they were inspired, which took root and eventually established the model of rulership which began with Caesar and lent its etymology and archetypal model to Czar and Kaizer which defined the European Age. This is how we got the patch update of ‘Emperor’ and ‘Empire’ to our collective psyche.
Now we are going through a death and rebirth of the Solar Father, from an archetypal perspective, which is not just a part of our psychology, it is foundational to our psychology, especially our social coherence.
We all have the activated psychological placeholders for this whether we realise it or not. These placeholders are not always occupied by an image of someone we know, they can be our intellectual and moral heroes and our leaders, even strong rulers we did not admire but who nevertheless upheld a centre of gravity around which the solar system of our psychology is organised.
I wrote this so that you might be more aware of what is happening right now. ‘The Devil is in the details’ means its own opposite. Usually, it means relevance and complications are often hidden in the minutiae, suggesting a need for careful attention when managing them. We are becoming socially deranged from being overwhelmed by too much noise.
Sometimes when the world seems to be unravelling into madness around you, you can only make sense of it from the zoomed-out perspective as contextualised by myth, metaphor, archetype and totem. You cannot so easily read a map where too much detail has been added, because this would make it too hard to ignore what is irrelevant. The cure for the overwhelm and deluge of the literal, is to find the thread of the figurative so that you can ‘figure’ out what filters to apply and how to isolate relevance in all the noise.
Archetypes and myths comprise the easiest ready-made framework in which to keep both that approach and its results coherent. Ancient people had such frameworks integrated, which was how they distilled complexity. If we manage to run that software over our current operating system we are already struggling with we lose nothing but stand to deepen our understanding, enabling a richer, more nuanced interaction with the world that simplifies its intricacies and our ability to navigate them sensibly.