Episode Details

So I took the idea of archetypes from — I’m a Buddhist — from Tibetan Buddhism, where the entire practice is about embedding archetypes in our minds, and very scary images of the Lord of Death, Yama. And what I noticed in Jung’s work — he says he took the idea of archetypes from St. Augustine. So again, it’s the similar idea of trying to embed these tropes. I use the term — so for me, the fundamental metaphor and archetype is the fundamental unit of information. That’s another term I use: units of information, or meme. So those three for me are synonymous and I use them interchangeably. So I’m very happy to use the word meme — visual, audible. It’s an informational unit of any size. It could be a whole book or it could be just a flash of a colour in my conception.

And archetypal identities can be attached, in my philosophical anthropology, for want of a grand term — but we’re among anthropologists here. In my philosophical anthropology, the archetypes can be identified with these memes. And so for Jung, he didn’t have access to the same, for instance, archaeology or linguistics and ancient DNA that we have. So when Jung was writing about Tibetan Buddhism, he wrote the introduction to the second edition of *The Tibetan Book of the Dead*, which was found by Evans-Wentz, who wrote his PhD thesis at Oxford on fairy tales in W.B. Yeats’s work, and who was a follower of Madame Blavatsky, who’s from Dnipro in eastern Ukraine. And Madame Blavatsky created the religion of Theosophy, which fused ancient Egypt and ancient Tibet and made up a lot of stuff. But she would have picked up a lot of the stuff there from Ukraine.

But what we know, but that Carl Jung couldn’t know, is that what he considered to be universal and part of the collective unconscious of humanity — in this way which has received a lot of criticism — actually, all the examples he gives are from Indo-European languages and religions. He did not know this then. He didn’t really understand, and many people still don’t understand, Tibetan Buddhism, for instance, because it was transmitted from the Vedic into the Sanskrit, into the Tibetan, and now it’s coming back preserved in Tibetan, a non-Indo-European language. But basically its content is an Indo-European religion.

So in all of my work, I am only ever talking about archetypes that work on Indo-European-structured minds: the minds of those whose native tongue is an Indo-European language. So that’s the only claim I’m making. I’m not talking about collective unconsciousness of humanity. But what I can say from my own experience of watching and observing and experiencing propaganda from the first moments on that archetypal bridge in eastern Ukraine, where I spent three years in a forest, is that I perceive the world through archetypes. And that when I read information that contains what I call archetypal identities — characters — so Ukraine can be archetyped as a weak woman. Putin does this. He did this when he spoke four days before the full-scale invasion. He said, “Like it or not, take it, my beauty.”

So what he was saying to Ukraine — as international lawyers, I’m also a lawyer by training — they interpreted this. They didn’t use the word archetyping, but they intuitively understood it as archetyping. They said what Putin was doing was representing Ukraine as a corpse. And Putin got this particular phrase, which means a lot to Russians, because it features as song lyrics. So songs are very much part of the beginning of folklore, which led to the foundation of nation states — the first unified German state, the first modern Irish state, the first modern Greek state. These are all the products of purposeful campaigns based around mythology and folklore to establish a unified identity that helped create community that resisted occupation.

When Herder in 1777 launched the German folksong movement and inspired Goethe and the Brothers Grimm — who all of us will remember as children — to coll