CHAPTER 1

Choosing Freedom: The Guides

Let us then imagine archetypes as the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, the roots of the soul governing the perspectives we have of ourselves and the world…. They are similar to other axiomatic first principles, the models or paradigms that we find in other fields.

—James Hillman, Revisioning Psychology

Most of us are slaves of the stories we unconsciously tell ourselves about our lives. Freedom begins the moment we become conscious of the plot line we are living and, with this insight, recognize that we can step into another story altogether. Our experiences of life quite literally are defined by our assumptions. We make up stories about the world and to a great degree live out their plots. What our lives are like, then, depends on the scripts we consciously or, more likely, unconsciously have adopted.

Each of the six archetypal perspectives described in this book is like the central character in its own movie, which has its own plot structure.

Archetype	Plot Structure	Gift
Orphan	How I suffered or how I survived	Resilience
Wanderer	How I escaped or found my own way	Independence
Warrior	How I achieved my goals or defeated my enemies	Courage
Altruist	How I gave to others or how I sacrificed	Compassion
Innocent	How I found happiness or the promised land	Faith
Magician	How I changed my world	Power

To discover which archetypal plots dominate your life, pay attention to your conversation for a few days, noticing the stories you tell yourself and others about what happens to you. Then notice which archetypes dominate in these recurring story lines.

You might think what six different people, each with a different archetype dominant in their lives, might say about going for a job interview but not getting the job. For example:

“It was so unfair. I was the most qualified candidate. You just can’t win.” (Orphan)

“Soon after I got there I realized I wouldn’t like it there. It seemed so confining, I could hardly wait to escape.” (Wanderer)

“I was definitely the best qualified candidate. I’m going to convince them to hire me.” (Warrior)

“I felt really happy for the person who got the job.” (Altruist)

“I’m sure the right job for me will be there at the right time.” (Innocent)

“I didn’t get the job, but I learned something very important about landing the position that really is right for me.” (Magician)

As you can see, how you tell the stories about your life reflects your self-image and also predicts, to some extent, how much or how little you expect in the future.

The word “archetype” can seem intimidating to some. Actually, archetypes are nothing more than the deep structures in the psyche and in social systems. Scientists talk about the deep structures of nature as “fractals.” For example, every snowflake is unique. Yet there is something similar in the deep structure of snowflakes that allows us to recognize them as snowflakes. Archetypes are fractals of the psyche. For instance, every person who displays the Warrior attributes of courage and valor is different—yet we recognize the Warrior essence in each.

You can think of archetypes as inner potentialities, allies, or guides that always are available to you. There are many more than the six described here. In fact, I have written other books with other configurations of archetypes: Awakening the Heroes Within: Twelve Archetypes to Help Us Find Ourselves and Transform Our World and Magic at Work: Camelot, Creative Leadership, and Everyday Miracles. Those discussed in this book preside over stages in the heroic journey, that is, the journey of finding and expressing your true self in a way that makes a genuine contribution to the world. These also are archetypes that appear not simply in our dreams, but during the day, in our waking action. They help us become successful and fulfilled and contribute to our families, workplaces, and communities.

The story goes like this. We all begin in infancy and early childhood as Innocents, trusting that we will be cared for and still in awe of the beauty of the world. Soon we fall from this state of grace, as Adam and Eve fell from the Garden of Eden. Being Orphans, we are forced to face disappointment and pain. From these experiences, we learn realism and how to tell the difference between guides and tempters.

Growing older, we often experience our lives as confining and limiting, even oppressive. As Wanderers, we take off to find ourselves and seek our fortunes. Then, as Warriors, we gain the courage to face our dragons and to develop the discipline and skill necessary to succeed in the world. As Altruists, we discover that our existence is more meaningful if we commit to something greater than ourselves by, for example, giving back to others and to life itself.

As returned Innocents, we can find the treasure of true happiness, once again trusting in the process of being alive. Finally, as Magicians, we become capable of transforming our lives and our kingdoms.

These same archetypes also help us with the major developmental tasks of the maturation process:

Archetype	Task
Orphan	Survive difficulty
Wanderer	Find yourself
Warrior	Prove your worth
Altruist	Show generosity
Innocent	Achieve happiness
Magician	Transform your life

Although quite a large number of archetypal plots may be available to us, most do not influence our development as much as these six. For an archetype to have a major impact upon our lives, some external duplication or reinforcement of the pattern must take place: an actual event in one’s life and/or exposure to stories (books, movies, other people’s real life events) that embody the plot within us. Therefore, both our personal histories and our culture influence the archetypes that will be dominant in our lives. The archetypes included in this book are active in our culture today. They are important not only to our individual journey, but to the future of democracy because they prepare us for life in a free society, where each of us must be capable of making wise choices—as individuals, parents, workers, and citizens.

HOW ARCHETYPES HELP YOU ON YOUR JOURNEY

Archetypes help us on our journey in eight major ways.

One: When an archetype is activated in your life, it provides a structure that makes immediate growth possible . When we feel frustrated and experience what is defined as failure, it is often because, without being aware of it, we are living a story in a way that is inappropriate to our current situation or untrue to who and how we are at heart. Tapping into other inner resources restores our ability to act effectively, even when faced with genuinely new challenges:

• Perhaps you have always been very independent and like to explore the world, but then you have a baby. Now you must sacrifice some of that desire for exploration in order to care for your child. To do it well, how can you access a more nurturing potential within yourself?

• Because of your technical competence and because you are a good team player, you have been very successful in your work—so much so that now you have risen to a major leadership position in your workplace. Your company is in a process of change, and everyone around you is in turmoil. You need to exercise power independently in order to lead them through the turmoil—and you must do so without much support or help from colleagues. How can you tap into that spirit of independence and leadership?

• You are accustomed to being successful and in charge, but suddenly you find yourself in a situation you cannot control: perhaps you develop a very serious illness, your spouse walks out, your child dies in an accident, your company takes a nose dive, or your job is eliminated. How do you connect with the part of you that knows how to be okay when faced with a problem that is not something you can fix just by working harder, or longer, or even smarter?

• You have a relationship problem in which you see the world very differently from your friend, spouse, boss, or colleague. This difference in perception might even threaten the relationship itself. How do you learn to understand where someone else is coming from?

Each of these circumstances can be seen as a call to awaken an archetype that has been dormant in your life so far.

I remember as a child playing a game called “Chutes and Ladders.” Players rolled the dice and then moved ahead slowly and incrementally, inching through the number of spaces thrown—except, of course, if you landed on a ladder or a chute. The ladder zoomed you toward the finish line with delightful speed, while the chute ruthlessly shot you back toward the starting line, undoing your former progress. Recently, I saw a science fiction film about wormholes in the universe, cosmic shortcuts through which a spaceship can move through space much faster than the speed of light.

Both of these examples can help us understand how archetypes work. If I want to develop courage, I can try persistently, gradually taking greater risks and incrementally becoming less afraid. Or I can call up the Warrior archetype within me (who offers me the power of the ladder or the wormhole). That Warrior, an inner ally, is in touch with the accumulated fighting power of all the warriors who ever have been. Put another way, that inner archetypal Warrior holds the full potential of the Warrior as evidenced in my time. Although I still may have to learn skill, practice discipline, and differentiate between courage and bravado, through the archetype I can gain the Warrior’s gifts much faster than if that archetype did not already exist within me. My task is simply to awaken that energy and find my expression of it.

It also is important to realize that under stress, any of us can be taken over temporarily by an archetype, since we have within us its entire negative as well as positive potential. We see this archetypal possession by the Warrior in those extreme cases in which a person “loses it,” gets a gun, and goes on a shooting spree. More typically, we see it in lawsuits or corporate competition in which people begin to act as if they are at war with their opponent. The only help for this archetypal possession is consciousness. Understanding archetypes and their positive manifestations operates as a kind of psychological inoculation against their sides (which are often called shadow sides); by being exposed to archetypes and becoming aware of how they operate in us, we can learn to balance, and sometimes even supplant, their more negative aspects. Anything we repress, including archetypes, forms a shadow that can possess us in its negative or even demonic form. Freedom comes with consciousness. I encourage you to think of archetypes as inner allies who can help you to grow and to develop in definable ways, as long as you remain awake and responsible for your actions as they influence you.

Another helpful way to view archetypes is to look at parallels between the ways archetypes work in the psyche and how software works on our computers. My word processing program can help me write a book, but it cannot help me do my taxes or design a house. For either of those, I need a different software package. Similarly, the Warrior archetype can help me fight a war or even close a deal, but it cannot help me learn to care for others or to be intimate with them. For that, I need to access my Altruist archetype.

Furthermore, I actually might have software packages on my hard drive but not know how to access them for specific use. In this case, they may be useful to me someday, but they are not at the moment. Similarly, the inner allies described here are in you right now—at least potentially. As you read through the book, you may recall times when you have lived out their stories. You also may notice an ally or two you have not expressed in your life thus far. Reading about your inner potential with an awareness of the dynamics of archetypes helps you to access one when you need it and to understand the behavior and motivations of others influenced by these patterns in humanity.

Two: Archetypes help you grow and develop . We all know that software packages are upgraded continually. The program on which I am writing this book, I have learned, is about to become outmoded; an even more advanced version is now available. Similarly, archetypes also develop, but in a somewhat different way. As archetypes are expressed in our lives, they evolve as we do. For example, Attila the Hun was once considered the epitome of the Warrior archetype. Today, given the level of his ruthlessness, he would have been charged with war crimes. Now, we are more likely to respect the martial arts teacher who knows how to block an assailant without unduly hurting him. In fact, the more common advanced form of the Warrior in our culture today—in the corporate world or on the playing field—replaces actual violence with competition. At this level, the Warrior substitutes a laser focus on the goal for any undue concern with a competitor. Thus, archetypes also help us to evolve as different inner allies awaken in us.

Three: Understanding the archetypes can help you make peace with your life . Many of us have ideas of who we should be that are at odds with how we are. Different archetypes dominate at different stages in our lives—and in different situations. Each gives a gift. When we stop beating ourselves up for not living up to how we think we should be, we can begin to notice what gifts we have developed.

For example, a woman complained to me about feeling like a failure. She kept exploring new options and never maintained any commitments. Thus, she had neither career success nor a husband and 2.4 children. As we discussed this, however, she began to realize that her true soul hunger always had been for adventure. She had sacrificed other possibilities for the Wanderer archetype’s emphasis on independence and the chance to try new things. She came to see that although she had not lived the kind of life she thought she should have, she actually had exactly the life she really wanted. Once she accepted her previous choices, of course, she also was able to make some new ones for her future.

Similarly, a young man regretted having his childhood cut short because of an abusive father. As he worked on these issues in therapy, he realized that he had gained the gifts of the Orphan archetype—realism, compassion, and empathy. As he put it, “I did not have the wrong life. It was my life, my movie. It produced who I am.”

Four: Recognizing archetypes can provide you with the freedom to choose the life you want . Perhaps your life has been defined by the Warrior archetype. You can appreciate that this archetype has given you courage, taught you to take big risks, and made you competitive and ambitious enough to become very successful in a worldly way. At the same time, you are beginning to feel burned out, too one-sided: every challenge is a mountain to be climbed, every business deal a chance to make it big. You start noticing that you are spending little time with your family—except the time you spend trying to shape them up so they will amount to something.

You can appreciate the gift of the Warrior without thinking that it defines who you are. Gaining an awareness of other archetypes helps you to awaken other possibilities within yourself. Perhaps you want to awaken the Wanderer and take some time to explore what you really want at this time in your life. Or perhaps it would be more satisfying to move to the Altruist and give up the focus on achievement for a time in favor of becoming more generous and caring.

In addition, the ability to determine which archetype is operating within you can save you from a bad job match, or it can help you to know whether to stay, leave, or try to change the situation. For example, Sally works as a nurse in a large hospital. The Altruist archetype is strong in her. She currently is suffering because managed care, with its Warrior focus on the bottom line, has undercut the quality of patient care. If she operates entirely out of her Altruist’s motivation, all she can do is give more and more of herself to compensate for the Altruist deficit in the organization, until she burns out. She realizes she can either awaken her Wanderer archetype to seek a more satisfying environment for her work or develop her own Warrior and organize the nurses to fight for change in the system. In this case, she decides that fighting would create an overload for her, so she opens up to the adventure of finding out what else she might do or how else she might be.

Roberta, on the other hand, dislikes her Warrior-archetype insurance company, but recognizes that her distaste comes from her own almost total lack of warrioring ability. She decides to stay in order to learn from this environment how to activate her inner Warrior.

Five: Recognizing archetypes can help you achieve balance and personal fulfillment . Anytime we feel our lives are out of balance, it means that the archetype or archetypes currently dominating our behavior no longer coincide with those active in our inner lives. To correct our course, we can go inward and observe the yearnings that are our first indication that some new aspect of consciousness wants to be expressed. For instance, perhaps the Altruist archetype has been dominant in your life for some time. At first, you gained great satisfaction from giving to others. Now, however, some part of you feels dissatisfied. You wonder when it will be your turn. Your Wanderer wants time for self-exploration, creative expression, and just hanging out. Listening to that inner voice allows you to adjust your behavior to more accurately reflect your inner truth.

When your outer behavior matches the archetypes active within, you will feel a sense of meaning and fulfillment and no longer experience your life as out of balance. People today tend to define the balance issue as a product of external factors. For example, we blame the boss who makes us work overtime. However, that person cannot really control us. He or she might be able to hire or fire us, but the boss cannot physically chain us to the desk and whip us into submission. Actually, we are being controlled by buying into the belief that we have to sacrifice essential parts of ourselves—or our children—to succeed upon accepted terms.

I vividly remember giving a speech to such a large group that questions from the audience had to be written down on cards and submitted. I opened one card that said: “I have been taking care of people all my life. When will it be my turn? I’m eighty years old.” My answer was: “Right now!”

After my speech, I counseled the man who submitted this question. As we talked, we realized that he thought it was the outside world that always made him be the responsible one. But that was not the whole truth. His dominant archetype for most of his life had been the Altruist. This inner Altruist sided with outside voices and helped him to keep his Wanderer shut down. In his eighties, he realized that he needed to take control of his life and embark upon that long awaited journey of self-discovery.

Six: Awareness of the archetypal plot lines that determine your life can give you the freedom to avoid making mistakes—or making the same mistakes over and over. Perhaps the Orphan archetype has been activated in your life many times. You have been abandoned, betrayed, and victimized. As a result, you have become very cautious. You enter a situation and get that old feeling. Quickly you recognize that you are about to get conned. Now you simply walk away and refuse to play! Or if you don’t, at least you notice more consciously than before the pattern of victimization that unfolds. Noticing this allows you to walk away the next time. At some point, when the cosmos offers us one more similar challenge, we can say no—refuse the date, the job, the friendship and move on down the road to learn a new lesson.

Many of us lose our center when we begin to reexperience a new version of the archetypal plot that was most difficult for us in our family of origin. For example, my family was dominated by the Altruist archetype, so we were always generous and nice to other people as well as to each other. This kind of upbringing often encourages compassionate behavior, but typically it also suppresses people’s awareness of what they want for themselves. So when I enter an environment in which altruism seems required, I immediately fear people will expect me to take care of them—at my expense.

We can reenter an archetypally similar situation as many times as it takes to move to a higher level of the archetype. The gift for me of taking several jobs in organizations with Altruist values is that I was forced to learn boundaries and to give no more than is suitable for me. I also had to learn not to care overly much if others held it against me when I refused to sacrifice myself unnecessarily for their benefit.

If you develop an understanding of your inner mythic landscape, you also can recognize the kinds of people who are likely to be able to manipulate you. For example, one woman realized that the Altruist archetype was very dominant in her life: she never met a person in need whom she did not yearn to help. A couple of years before, a younger woman preyed on this vulnerability and convinced her to sign over control of part of her business. The Altruist within her was so busy trying to save this younger woman, it took her a year or more before she even realized that she had been conned. However, now she is conscious of this weakness. She still helps people, but she has antennae that alert her when she is likely to be taken advantage of by them.

Seven: Archetypal recognition can help you better understand others and how they see the world . We can use archetypal insights to increase our ability to get along with our bosses, co-workers, spouses, partners, children, and parents. We can do this simply by recognizing the archetypes that dominate our cognitive maps. If I try to share with my husband and he always has to have the last word, it helps me to realize that the Warrior is present. Rather than trying to change him, I might remind him that we are on the same team—and we succeed or fail together. Thus, he has no reason to triumph at my expense.

If my child is feeling sorry for himself and (unfairly) blames me, I do not have to become defensive. I simply can empathize with his (Orphan) feelings of powerlessness and listen while he vents. If my boss expects me to pull rabbits out of hats every day, I can see the Magician at work and, if I need it, ask her to share her secrets for juggling so many balls in the air at one time.

Appreciating archetypal difference is extremely useful in dealing with very difficult people. For example, if your mother-in-law drives you crazy because she engages in nonstop complaining, you may see in her the negative aspects of the Orphan (self-pity) and the Altruist (giving beyond her means and then getting bitter about it). You may not be able to change her behavior completely, but you can do active listening to show her you hear her pain and also thank her profusely every time she does something for you. If she feels heard enough, she just might make small talk.

Similarly, if your boss criticizes you nonstop, that may be evidence of the Warrior’s worry that someone may let the team down. He will stay on your case until he is satisfied that you are smart enough and tough enough to handle things on your own. This can be particularly annoying if you are a woman or a man of color and the boss is male and white. It will feel like racism or sexism (which to a lesser or greater degree it is). However, if you call it, he may see you as the enemy and go after you. Therefore, it is helpful to anticipate his concerns and let him know you are totally on top of the situation. Think of him as a coach and let him know when you’ve “got it,” so he can go on to worry about some other perceived threat to your organization’s success.

Eight: Understanding the archetypal basis for the ways in which people see the world cannot only make you smarter, but also help you see beyond the unconscious bias scholars and journalists often bring to their work . Until recently, historians wrote primarily about military and political events—events important to the Warrior archetype. We can see a similar Warrior bias in journalists who provide political coverage focusing on the “horse race” rather than the policy issues at stake. Some politicians seeking to communicate truths outside the Warrior paradigm have experienced such frustration that they try to circumvent the news media and go directly to the people by means of public events and Internet communications. Often, it seems as if scholars and journalists are consciously trying to suppress information. However, the truth is more banal. They are being true to what they see—and what they can see is controlled by the lens of the Warrior archetype. To the Warrior, the overarching questions are who is winning and what tactics are they employing to do so. It therefore makes perfect sense that the Warrior-possessed media focus on these questions.

The more archetypes that are activated in your life, the more truth you are able to understand. As you get better at decoding an archetypal bias, you can make inferences that move beyond scholarly and media biases to figure out what really is happening in the world. Scholars and journalists who expand their own archetypal horizons can create a force working against the regressive undertow that currently distorts events and holds back the expansion of consciousness evidenced in the population in general.

Experts in leadership development understand how important it is that our organizational leaders see the world clearly, so currently they counsel paradigm vigilance (that is, questioning our basic assumptions about how we see the world). A good practice to ensure that you are seeing all sides of an issue is to identify the archetypes that have been speaking through the arguments you have considered and discover the other archetypal positions that might be of help.

If we fail to understand the archetypal bases of many so-called truths, it is easy for any of us to mistake our projections for reality and, in the process, devalue people who see the realities we miss. Then, it is as if we are caught in a maze, moving in circles, while others forge ahead.

Archetypes exist in us whether we recognize them or not. If we do not notice them, they can take us over, substituting their own limited reality for the more infinitely variable and interesting possibilities that actually exist in the world. That historians wrote exclusively about politics and battles at one time does not mean that other rather colorful and exciting things didn’t happen. The relatively new focus on social history restores a record of what life was like for people who were neither in the government nor fighting wars. The results are exciting.

The same is true with our lives. One wonderful by-product of identifying the archetypes active in our lives is that we no longer mistake an archetypal perspective for reality. Thus, we are clearer in our thinking and more open in our understanding of the world as it is—beyond how we may be predisposed to see it. As Shakespeare’s Hamlet puts it, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

LAST THOUGHTS

The chapters that follow describe the archetypal stages and tasks essential to the hero’s journey. As you read them, you may notice which archetypes have been most active in your life up to now, where you see signs of these archetypes in the people and in the events around you, and which archetype or archetypes might help you to attain greater freedom and fulfillment than you now possess. Some readers might prefer to take a break at this point to complete the Heroic Myth Self-Tests (Appendix A). If you do so, you may wish to read first those chapters that describe the archetypes most active in your life and later pick up the chapters that are less relevant to your present situation.

However, some readers have shared with me that the chapters on archetypes they were at first disinterested in—or even averse to—proved to be most helpful in advancing their journeys. Especially for experienced journeyers, it often is the untried and even unloved aspects of ourselves that hold the greatest power to liberate us.

While this book serves as a map to help orient you to your journey and to recognize your commonality with heroes in all times and places, remember that each one of us also is unique. Because no map can show you the part of your journey that is most you, it is essential that you trust totally your own process. As Don Juan explains to Carlos Castaneda in A Separate Reality, whatever path you choose, it leads nowhere. It is no disgrace to try a single path as many times as you need, for there is only one test of a true path—that it brings you joy. The only way out is through, and the only person who knows what is right for you—is you.