The Lexicon
Symbols and the unseen
Archetypes
Archetypes are the primordial patterns that live beneath personal memory, the inherited forms through which the psyche shapes its images. Jung named them the structuring powers of the collective unconscious: the Mother, the Shadow, the Wise Old Man, the Self, recurring across every culture and dream because they belong to the deep architecture of the soul. They are not the images themselves but the riverbeds along which all images flow.
To meet an archetype is to feel a charge larger than one's own life pressing through a figure, a symbol, a fated encounter. Wherever a story repeats across the ages, wherever a dream-figure carries a weight beyond reason, an archetype is at work. The map of the inner world is drawn in their lines, and to know them is to read the grammar of the imagination.
In their words
In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
The archetype is essentially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived, and it takes its colour from the individual consciousness in which it happens to appear.
Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.