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By Root 5298 0

Those who seek to further their ego-centred desires by way of fantasy, whether individual or collective, do unconsciously find themselves acting out that five-stage pattern leading to destruction, exactly as we see in a story. In this sense there is no difference between the pattern as represented in fiction and that we see unfolding in real life. But the point about Tragedy is that it is the only archetypal plot which is not concerned with showing how its central figure or figures can eventually transcend egotism. All the others are concerned with this, and therefore they are essentially concerned with what is going inside the hero or heroine. But where an archetype is projected externally, it inevitably becomes itself an expression of the ego. The result is that it misses the real underlying point of why that pattern is programmed into our unconscious in the first place.

We have already seen how this works in terms of the archetype of Overcoming the Monster. Whenever someone in real life becomes possessed by an extreme form of egotism, they will inevitably be seen as a `monster' by all those in the shadow cast by their egotism. Hitler, as merely one extreme example, was seen as a monster because he displayed all the psychological characteristics of the archetypal monster; and inevitably the colossal struggle required to defeat him came to be seen by all those involved as precisely like the acting out of a fictional Overcoming the Monster story, with the corresponding sense of cosmic liberation when the battle was finally over. But the fundamental purpose of the Overcoming the Monster archetype is to show that central internal conflict which exists inside each human individual, the potential battle between the power of the ego and the deeper Self. And this means that whenever the archetype is projected out onto the outside world, it ceases to be an idealised pattern and becomes prone to all the distortions which can arise when we see all the properties of the monster in someone else, without recognising that we may have the seeds of those same failings in ourselves.

We saw a vivid example of this in the contrast between the stories of Goliath and Samson, as they are presented in Jewish folklore in the Bible. Because we are shown the story of Goliath, the strong man of the Philistines, from a Jewish point of view, he is presented as an archetypal monster: immensely strong, boastful, heartless and stupid. Everything about him is dark, because he is the champion of the other side. But then we come to the story of Samson, Israel's own strong man. To his own people, Samson was seen as nothing but a shining hero, prepared to sacrifice his own life in slaying 3000 Philistines. To the Philistines, however, he would have seemed a heartless and murderous monster. They would have seen him exactly as the children of Israel saw the Philistines' own hero Goliath. And we saw a striking echo of this thousands of years later when, at the start of the twentyfirst century, the people of Israel faced a horrifying challenge from Palestinian suicide bombers. To the Israelis they were nothing but ruthless terrorists. To the Palestinians they were selfless heroes. But when the great Jewish hero Samson pulled down the pillars of the hall, to be crushed along with all those Philistines, what was he himself but the historical equivalent of a suicide bomber?

We can see the Overcoming the Monster archetype shaping human responses to real-life situations all through history. One example was the British response to the Argentinian seizure of the Falklands in 1982. The pattern of the drama which unfolded as the British task force set out to wrest the islands back from the sinister Buenos Aires junta was precisely that of an Overcoming the Monster story (although, as the British forces journeyed across half the world to face their worst ordeals as they finally secured their goal, it also included a strong element of the Quest). From the Argentinians' point of view, of course, the pattern of those two months exactly matched the five-stage cycle of a