I found
this idea interesting, and spoke to my husband about it. He mentioned
that Coelho may have made up those particular archetypes, so I thought I would
do some research. I found the article Jung's Archetypes as Sources for
Female Leadership
by Lieutenant Colonel Prisco R. Hernández.
According
to Hernández, "Archetypes are, by their very nature, universal and
indestructible. The complementarily of opposites assures us that, even in
patriarchal cultures that are hostile to the feminine, feminine archetypes
cannot forever be suppressed. Archetypes are not irrational forms of thought;
rather they are supra-rational, beyond the parameters of logical thought and if
we accept the idea of the “collective unconscious” as an image for the deep
cultural substratum common to humanity, they are universally present—hence
their power to move, to affect, to influence" (Hernández 56).
The
concept of "the immortal" brings to mind The Sandlot. According
to Babe Ruth, "Remember kid, there's heroes
and there's legends. Heroes get remembered but legends never die" (The
Sandlot). There are degrees of awesomeness. To be remembered you
have to do something heroic, but to have your memory live on forever, you have
to do something truly epic.
This
notion also reminds me of Ducard (or Ra's al Ghul) speaking to Bruce Wayne,
"You must become more than just a man in the mind of your opponent",
"You have to become an idea!", and "A
vigilante is just a man lost in the scramble for his own gratification. He can
be destroyed, or locked up. But if you make yourself more than just a man, if
you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they can't stop you, then you become
something else entirely...A legend" (Batman Begins).
I periodically watch Batman Begins as it is one of my favorite
films. Every time I hear Ducard give his spiel, I get chills. It
could be because Ducard is played by Liam Neeson, (let's face it, I would
listen to him read the phonebook), but there is validity to the notion of
living forever in an ideal.
Many years ago my mother and I attended a lecture giving by Mitch
Albom, the author of Tuesdays With Morrie and The Five People You Meet in
Heaven.
He spoke about living forever through your good deeds to other people. Every
good deed is like a penny in a can of memories.
Moreover,
Albom asserts in Tuesdays with Morrie,“So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They
seem half-asleep, even when they're busy doing things they think are important.
This is because they're chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into
your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your
community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you
purpose and meaning” (Albom).
The
archetypes Coelho describes apply to multiple stages in a woman's life and
all lead to personal discovery, while the stages Hernández discusses are
directional and culminate to one archetype, the Queen. It is difficult to say
which archetypes of the two paradigms correspond with each other, if at all.
While the Queen doesn't seem to have a similar archetype,
the Faerie seems to be similar to the Virgin, "She places herself outside
any man’s power; thus, she has the power to inspire, to attract" and "The Faerie...
is the symbol of all that is fair, all that is beautiful, all that transcends
material existence" (Hernández 52).
The Wise
One is the other
archetype that eludes categorization. "Another alternative in the
path to Queenship leads through the archetype of the Wise One. If the Faerie inhabits ethereal regions where
all appears as bright and luminous, the Wise One inhabits the shadows. She is
at home near the earth, even inside the earth, inside the dark, moist,
primordial womb, the source of all fertility. The Wise One is no longer young. She is
mature, rooted. She is likely to be old and she is a Mother, or more likely, a
Grand-Mother" (Hernández 52).
I could
be having trouble placing this archetype becuase I'm slightly confused by the
phrase, "Inside the earth, inside the dark, moist, primordial womb". Where
is that? Underground somewhere?
The Witch finds her path through endlessly
seeking pleasure, which seems to most closely resemble the path of the Lover. According to Hernández,
"The fourth archetype of the mature feminine is the Lover...The Lover embodies the unrestrained embrace
of the life-force... of pleasure, of life itself" (Hernández 54).
By the end of his paper, I didn't come to
the same conclusion he did. I'm not sure which qualities I'm supposed to emulate. It
would have been nice if Hernández described the archetype attributes in
more tangible, attainable terms. Is it bad all I can think of after
reading Hernández's essay is an old lady trying to become a better
leader by curling up in a damp badger hole? Thank goodness for Shackleton's Way.
Works Cited
Albom, Mitch. Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old
Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson. New York: Doubleday, 1997. Print.
Batman Begins. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Perf. Liam Neeson,
Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Katie Holmes. DC Comics, 2005. DVD.
Coelho, Paulo. The Witch of Portobello: A Novel. New York:
HarperCollinsPublishers, 2007. Print.
Hernández, Prisco R. "Jung’s Archetypes as
Sources for Female Leadership." Jung’s Archetypes as Sources for
Female Leadership. Kravis Leadership Institute, 2009. Web. 6 Sept. 2012.
<http://www.leadershipreview.org/2009spring/article2.pdf>.
The Sandlot. Dir. David M. Evans. Perf. James Earl Jones, Tom
Guiry, Mike Vitar, Patrick Renna. 20th Century Fox, 1993. Videocassette.
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