Archetypes are latent potentialities, or pattern-forming elements, residing in the human psyche, the meaning-making part of our vast store of ancestral knowledge about the profound relations between the Creator, humanity, all of life, and the cosmos. They remain unconscious until our own real life experiences bring them forth into consciousness, making our individual experience part of the universal human experience.

When a latent archetype passes into consciousness it is felt as an illumination, or a revelation. An archetype is the original form of a type of experience from which all other forms of that experience follow and are copied, a recurring ‘mythological component,’ a type of a common situation, or a type of universal figure, what we would think of as a literary motif that is part of our inherited humanity.

Examples of such potentially transformational archetypal situations would be “the hero’s quest,” “the battle for deliverance from the mother,” or “the night sea journey.” Archetypal figures include the divine child, the trickster, or the wise old man. They all carry the power to influence, awaken, and therefore transform us.

Archetypes keep us in the nourishing riverbed through which the water of life has flowed for centuries by connecting us to the timelessness of human experience and digging a deep channel into the soul of our existence. The interplay of their inherent oppositions creates a moment of the merging of opposites, which is the act of transformation. The archetype thus carries a “healing” function and is felt as “numinous,” or as having a profound spiritual significance.