[UA] Archetypes

[Gregory Paul Stolze]

At 02:44 PM 12/21/1999 -0500, James Alan Gardner wrote:
>People seem to be talking as if archetypes are fixed at the moment
>that someone ascends.  I don't see it that way.  Long ago, for
>example, people ascended into slots like the Mother, the Warrior,
>the Trickster, and so on...but all those concepts have changed
>with time.  The collective unconscious's image of a Mother today
>is different from what it was in the 1950's and *very* different
>from what it was thousands of years ago.

I dunno.  That's a pretty hardcore example.  I'd think more recent
archetypes would be more vulnerable to replacement because they'd be the
ones that become culturally obsolete.  "The Knight" is pretty thin on the
ground in 1999.  "The Executioner" is everywhere.  But every culture on
every continent has a concept of the nurturing Mother.  

After all, the Mother archetype has been influencing society the longest of
any archetype.  There's some real chicken and egg dynamics there, but
that's a powerful case of an archetype and reality mirroring one another.

>Therefore, I suspect that a Godwalker Mother could have booted out
>the previous Mother archetype during the 1950's: a time when the
>nuclear family version of motherhood replaced whatever came before.
>The old Mother archetype simply didn't correspond to Motherhood as
>well as a Betty-Crocker-style Godwalker.  

Maybe if you're living in the US suburbs, but remember that most of the
world doesn't.  Actually, if UA was going to be more accurate, the IC would
mostly be Chinese.  (The dodge around this is that Hollywood has become
such a powerful force in world culture, it's tilted the IC into a warped
reflection of itself.) 

(Hey, that'd be a cute bit for "Towns Without Pity."  The IC has agreed
that Hollywood is off limits and has radically ramped down magick there to
keep the "dream factory" pure.)

-G.
If disaster strikes, it's God's wrath--quote the Old Testament.  If nothing
happens, God is merciful--quote the New Testament.
	-From "The Onion's Y2K Survival Tips"

http://www.thehungersite.com/index.html


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