A Simple Example: Michael (Wordsworth)

    Wordsworth's Michael is a straightforward Yellow Square story: Michael is a Father-Magus who is married to a classic Mother. He had his only child in old age, he lives up in the mountains where he teaches his son the arts necessary to his simple life (shepherding and small-holding). He makes a little staff for the boy so that the child can play at being the shepherd that Michael expects him to one day become. His wife works in their cottage, spinning industriously and providing for all of the domestic needs of the family -- the standard Wordsworthian/Romantic ideal of the poor-but-industrious rural peasant. But now disaster strikes: the land, the patrimony which Michael intends to bequeath to his son, is threatened. The son must be sent off into the world to learn a trade and earn the money that will secure his inheritance. Michael bestows his paternal blessing on the boy and the Mother provides him with all that he will need for the journey, and he is sent off to the city. At this point, Michael's Magus-quest has basically come to an end; the Disciple has reached that point in his life where he must stand or fall on his own strength. What happens exactly? This is not clear: the big city is treated as a sort of non-anthropomorphic Wiseman within the text -- whether there is a specific Evil One under whose spell the Disciple falls is not clear because this action takes up approximately four to five lines of verse. In any case, the son becomes a Disgrace, sinks into vice and finally runs away, forsaking his parents and his inheritance. Michael is crushed by the loss of his son, the loss of the chance to pass on the heritage that he had worked all his life to preserve, uphold, and teach to his boy.

A Less Simple Example: Heidi (Film Version -- 1968)

    Heidi, an Orphan, comes into the care of her Grandfather, a sort of Magus in disgrace who lives in an alpine hut high in the mountains, cut off from the ordinary world. She befriends a goatherd -- a quite typical Fool-resonant Disciple who has an old blind grandmother (Crone resonant Mother). Heidi's fresh, optimistic outlook begins to soften the heart of her grandfather who takes on the task of teaching her his mountain ways; he passes on wisdom through his stories about the eagle, and he begins to teach her to read. The priest of the village plays second Magus -- technically he is a higher form of Magus because he doesn't have the mantle of sorrow weighing down his shoulders and he is not beset by fears and failures, but because this is a story of an Orphan who brings light and life back into the lives of those around her the priest, who is already in possession of all that he needs, serves as a supporting character. He does not perform the functions of an archetypal Priest; he does not heal, minister, forgive, and so forth, but rather takes on the Magisterial tasks of teaching lessons, tricking the grandfather into taking on the responsibilities of a father, and -- symbolically most telling -- he walks around with a very large and conspicuous staff. After some time of living in the mountains and learning from her grandfather, Heidi is taken away, into the care of her uncle Herr Sesemann, who has an invalid daughter, Clara, and a live-in governess, Frau Rottenmeier. In the book, there is a greater proponderance of evil characters, but the movie has lightened the situation: Frau Rottenmeier keeps her inauspicious name, but is cast as a Mother character who cares for and loves Heidi and Clara and who falls in love with Herr Sesemann. Clara is a fairly light Parasite of the lingering, tantrum-throwing, intellectually proud type. Herr Sesemann plays third Magus, taking on the role of one of the lowest forms of this archetype: the Widower. As in Sound of Music, he has become detached from his fatherly duties as a result of his widowhood, and he is ultimately too effeminate (i.e. "Motherly") to give Clara the sort of difficult lessons that she needs in order to level up to Orphan. Fortunately, Heidi is not happy in Frankfurt, where the Sesemann's live, and pines to return to her home in the Alps. She returns, Peter, the Disciple, is disgusted with her newly acquired ribbons and finery -- tokens typical of the Disgrace and Parasite who are much more concerned with foppery than the characters on the upper half of the square -- and he very quickly convinces Heidi to abandon them and return to her hard-working, cheerful Orphan lifestyle.
After a time, Herr Sesemann tries to reclaim Heidi but she does not want to go: she is herself in the Alps, she has found her true home. She is willing to relingquish it for Clara's sake, however, because she possesses that glimmer of deep caring for others that suggests a trajectory towards eventual Motherhood. Fortunately, grandfather provides a solution to the conundrum: Clara will come to the Alps. She does, and Heidi and Peter get to work trying to help her overcome her malingering and reassert her ability to walk. Their efforts are fruitless, however, until Grandgather carves for her a staff -- a symbol of his own strength, upon which she will be able to lean. He leaves her with it, sending away everyone who might help her, and forces her to confront her problems alone -- unlike her father, he does not lack the stern, Magus-style wisdom necessary to counter-act the sentimental over-mothering of Herr Sesemann and Frau Rottenmeier. Clara struggles and finally manages to pull herself up, beginning her ascent off of the bottom half of the square, her redemption into a proper Orphan.
This complete, the Grandfather is moved to relinquish his own pain and fears. He returns to the village, to the life of his community, and to the music at which he was so adept years ago. Frau Rottenmeier and Herr Sesemann are brought together, Heidi's quest to inspire and renew those around her is complete, she has a home that is her own, a new family has been formed, and everyone lives happily ever after.

A Complicated Example: Twin Peaks

    This is quite the most difficult example that we have covered yet, so we are going to use a nifty, complicated diagram to show the character relationships. What we're looking at here is a multi-square story, with heavy duplication of many of the characters (first Disgrace, second Disgrace, Cripple-resonant-Disgrace, etc), multiple discreet plots and complicated interrelationships between the plots. The basic plot is Yellow Square, and the action spills out into the two resonant Squares (Blue and White). For the purposes of analysis, we're only dealing with the first season and the second season up to the point where Laura Palmer plot comes to a close -- after this point the series loses a lot of its narrative cohesion, and almost all of its inspiration.

Agent Cooper is a Magus detective who uses riddles, intuition, dreams, visions and, for lack of a better term, magic to solve the question of who killed Laura Palmer. Laura is a classic Victim (though there are strong suggestions, particularly in Fire Walk With Me -- which we are not analyzing here -- that she dies as a redeemed Virgin), who is found on the beach, wrapped in plastic. She has been raped and murdered. Her killer is a Wiseman named BOB; this took us a while to work out because at first glance BOB looks like a beast -- the visual representation of an animalistic killer is very striking, and it wasn't until the third or fourth viewing that we noticed all of the other archetypal and symbolic material surrounding him. Think "Wolf in Sheep's Clothing," "Big Bad Wolf," "False Father" and "Enchanter/Seducer" rather than "Evil Advisor" and you'll find the identification pretty straightforward. BOB puts his victims in his "death bag" -- the most sinister inverted form of the Mother's basket, where she hides her living children (the use of bags as a sinister symbol on the yellow square can also be seen, for example, in Beatrix Potter's "Tale of Peter Rabbit".) Cooper has a Disciple, Harry Truman, the local sherrif, who is exceedingly loyal to him and strangely willing to go along with Cooper's unusual methods of investigation. Coop is also involved in a Hapless Love plot with the Orphan Audrey Horne -- Audrey is not orphaned in the strict, physical sense, but is spiritually orphaned: she desperately wants to be loved by her father (Ben Horne, playing second Wiseman), but he is ashamed of her and, if we're going to be honest about it, she is also ashamed of him. (One of the scenes that did not make the final cut of the show reveals that she has also been rejected by her mother, who believes that Audrey is responsible for the mental illness of her favoured child, Audrey's brother Johnny.) Audrey latches on to Coop and incorporates him into her fantasy world, imagining a life for herself as his lover and partner; in order to make this a reality she takes up playing girl-detective (Nancy Drew style, but with more serious consequences). BOB also has another enemy, Michael Gerard, or MIKE, the One Armed Man. Mike is an exceedingly dark Magus who helps Cooper to discover BOB's identity: Mike used to be a killer like BOB, and they had the same tattoo, but Mike cut his arm off in order to rid himself of this evil and is now on a quest to find BOB and stop him from killing. He speaks in riddles, most famously, "In the darkness of future past/The Magician Longs to see/One chants out between two worlds/Fire Walk With Me." When he is not on the drugs that allow him to live a semblance of a normal life as a shoe salesman, Mike is able to sense where BOB has been, who has been near him, where he is now.
Mrs. Palmer is a dark, tragic Mother of the Sybilline variety: she is bereft of her daughter, and so she is left merely to weep and see visions. It is her visions that provide the image of BOB which fuels the rest of the investigation. The Log Lady serves in the same sort of role, but is obviously a Crone. Her log (a part of a Tree, and hence a Mother symbol) gives her access to Coop's Yellow Square plot, and it is the log itself that provides riddles for him to solve. Dianne has no character traits whatsoever, except to be a confidante -- the one who treasures Coop's revelations in her tape-recorder heart.
The entire series is saturated in classic Yellow square symbolism: the Owls, the wind, the trees, even the traffic lights (see the Disciple's lantern), indeed the original inspiration for the show was David Lynch's image of the wind blowing through the douglas firs. This is just scratching the surface -- we'll probably do an entire course on this later.

Some of the Subplots:

Lucy's baby: Lucy is a classic Simpleton character, transposed to the Orphan position in order to give her a place in the plot proper. She is noticeably dithering, but in the end does what she needs to do. Her plot centres on the classic Simpletonian problem of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy -- in this case, she does not know who the father is. Also, in classic Simpletonian style, you never feel that she is particularly responsible for this state of affairs and would never be inclined to describe her as promiscuous. Andy is an exceedingly foolish Disciple: clumsy, clutzy, but trying to get better. (It is particularly humourous to note that in the early part of the plot, Andy's fertility is non-existent, but after he has been trained in the manly art of firing a gun and being a cop by Coop, this situation changes.) Dick Tremaine, the other possible father, is a classic foppish Disgrace: he works in menswear at Horne's department store, smokes a cigarette in a long and ostentatious holder, and thinks that the proper response to Lucy's pregnancy is to offer her money for an abortion.

Shelley and Bobby: Bobby is a Disgrace; he could be the star of the football team, except that he never shows up to practice. His father is an extremely straight-laced, though wise and slightly otherworldly, Magus (Colonel Briggs), who Bobby largely ignored, sneers at, rolls his eyes at, etc. He was Laura Palmer's boyfriend, but the relationship does not seem to have had much content -- one gets the impression that they were each just status symbols to one another, a kind of human bling. The real love of Bobby's life (i.e. the woman for whom he is willing to make some sacrifices) is Shelley. Shelley is portrayed very sympathetically, but she is not actually heroic: she married a trucker named Leo because she liked his car, she lives in a fantasy world where Leo (a psychopathic Beast) will not find out about her affair with Bobby, and in which she is a powerful Amazon capable of standing up to Leo with her pistol (she does shoot him, but not very effectively). Leo beats his wife, is totally unpredictable, and quite stupid. He becomes a sleeping Beast after he is shot -- not by Shelley, that's just a flesh wound -- and there are a large number of very creepy scenes in which the viewer is terrified that he is going to wake up and kill Shelley and Bobby.

The Hardy Girls and Boy: Donna, Maddy and James undertake to investigate the death of Laura Palmer. Donna is the Orphan under her guise as Daughter -- i.e. she is what the Orphan becomes when she is in a plot where both the Mother and Magus are present in her life (Donna's parents are both in the correct archetypal spots, but neither of them does enough in the plot to be worth analyzing in detail.) She's a relatively thin character -- most of the good Orphan events go to Audrey, who is a much more exciting character -- and Donna is mostly left with the Disciple-romance-plot events: kissing under the stars, wrestling with the question of whether we are really made for one another, pretending to be something that she isn't in order to be what she thinks James wants her to be, etc. She becomes entangled with the Cripple Harold Smith -- in this relationship she borrows several Mother events (tries to force him out of his house, to make him face his fears and become whole again; tells him a story) but she is not archetypally able to actually help him, and the impurity of her motives ends up destroying him and wounding her (the Cripple, transposed into the Disgrace role to serve in a Yellow plot, stands in a nemesis relationship to the Orphan.) James is a standard mooning Disciple with no Magus (Ed occasionally take on the role, but not very effectively). He believes that he should be able to work everything out and save the world, but he can't, so instead he roams about on his bike searching for he-knows-not-what and sits on mountaintops contemplating his troubles. Maddy is playing a slightly Disgraceful form of Mother: she follows James and Donna around and tries to minister to their hurts, to watch over them and make sure that they don't get into too much trouble, and to provide whatever they need in the course of their investigation. She is in town to look after Leland and Mrs. Palmer following Laura's death, and like Mrs. Palmer she suffers from visions of BOB -- her nemesis, who eventually kills her.



The Exercises:

1. Practice forming the square from the perspective of different characters. The easiest, and most fun, way to learn this is to get yourself a set of toys that look like the archetypes and play around making the squares, but you can do it with the names of the characters written out on peices of card if you prefer. Start by building the square from the perspective of the Magus and then transform it into a Wiseman square, a Mother square, and an Orphan square. Once you've done these, you should have the hang of it and see how it works. If you don't, do the remaining three characters.

2. Choose an Archetype. Take a story that you are familiar with, either from one of our examples or one where you know the story well and are sure of your analysis. Add a shadow sub-plot to Lighten or Darken the main character.

3. For each of the Archetypes presented in this course, pick one of their symbols and try to discover as many different forms of it as you can by flipping boolean switches such as old/new, big/small, concrete/abstract, light/dark, ancient/modern, common/unique, masculine/feminine, or any other Yin-Yang type pair. The concrete/abstract switch is the most powerful and when used in combination with others will yield the most interesting varriants.

4. Find a work in one of the example lists that you are not familiar with. Obtain a copy and write an archetypal analysis such as the ones above (we recommend that you start with simple stories -- don't try to do War and Peace or Twin Peaks as your first analysis.) Or, better yet, find a work that isn't on our example list, do an analysis, write it up and send it in so that we can post it on the web-site.

5. Take a simple story and invent an alternative ending by adding additional characters to shift the tipping point.

6. For both of the Right Hand Heroic Archetypes in this course (Parts 2 & 4) choose an example character and create a story line about their decline and fall as they shift archetypes 3 times, first to the Sidekick position, then the Lietenant, and finally the Enemy.

7. Create the reverse (a redemption plot) using examples of the two Right Hand Vilainous Archetypes (Parts 6 & 8).

8. For each of the Archetypes presented, choose an example character with whom you are familiar and imagine them in each of the plots that are listed as common for their Archetype but do not occur in their own story.

9. Experiment with letting the Archetypes on this square borrow one another's symbols and observe how the symbols are transformed as they are passed between characters.

10. Try to think of people you know who resemble the Archetypes described in this course, keeping in mind that although there are many points of similarity between characters and people, humans tend to not be bound to a single Archetype but fluctuate between all four archetypes of their gender on the square their life's main plot line takes place.

[Back to Main]  [Back to Aereopagus]  [Back to University]  [Back to NP212]